The Return of Divination

I was too young for the "Global Consciousness" craze in the 70s, but a lot of that filtered into the science fiction, fantasy, and comic books that I read as a youth. The idea is that separate human minds are merely an illusion and that every human is part of a borg-like superconsciousness that links all minds together. It was very popular during the rise of Eastern Mysticism in the west, and now appears to be making a comeback based on a little-known experiment involving random-number generators.

One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper. The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' as it were - could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve. During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails...Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'...But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reason, too.For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey.

The results are interesting, but this sounds more to me like an attmpted return of numerology and divination - the modern equivilent of reading meaning into randomly-scattered tea leaves or chicken entrails. Humankind has always looked to see beyond the small and vulnerable bags of flesh that contain us. This is just one new way. It was a bad idea then, and it is a bad idea now. For a primer in reading signs and the bad results, check out Saul's consulting with Samuel's ghost in the Bible or check out Troy's obsession with signs in the new-on-dvd film TROY.