Is the natural path forwards towards group consciousness?

"Evolution" is a loaded word around these parts. There are plenty of debates along those lines all over the Internet and I have no desire to start another. But just think of this: many atoms come together to make organic molecules. The molecules make cells. Think, then, how much more amazing and complex a liver or a kidney is from the millions of cells that make them up. The next level up is the individual, a collection of organs.

Would the next level up be a collection of humans? A group mind or conscousness of some sort?

Although nature is characterized by competition for survival, it is also characterized by complex forms of cooperation, the way many cells come together to make an organ. This process just gets more and more complex, deeper and deeper.

Now, the idea of collectivism being somehow a natural direction is scary and it can lead to ideas like the "NWO," the "one world govt," "communism," "fascism," "groupthink," etc....aren't all of these evil things the product of attempts to move beyond the individual? Shouldn't the individual be sacrosanct? I've struggled a lot with this connundrum, and in the end I think the natural order is to higher levels of complexity, which will involve fused minds/consciousness and something bigger than the individual. Things like communism or the NWO can be viewed as a kind of perversion of this natural order, perhaps. Or perhaps they represent a kind of last-ditch effort to subvert a natural group human cooperativeness/merging because it would involve the melting away of the power that the "powers that be" crave so much. Perhaps they hate and fear a natural collective consciousness and are trying to prevent us from reaching it by creating a kind of counterfit "unified world" they can control.

Anyway, lots of directions to go with this...the spiritual tension between my instinct that a group consciousness would represent a "next level" and my love and respect of the sovereign rights of the individual and loathing of collective politics creates some strange frictions...

Communism may have been one of the first attempted manifestation of group consciousness. Things seem to come in waves over many years.

I had a conversation with my mother where she was blasting text messaging and instant communication. Personally, I have considered that those things are a sort of "training wheels" for when we can think with each other without any devices. A sort of school before telekinesis really begins. Personally, I have had many "oh glad you called, just thinking about you" and "I knew you would be here" sort of experiences lately. I like to think it was always happening but I am just starting to recognize them. Don't know...