Testing The Theory Of Collective Consciousness

Have you ever had an epic idea or came up with a joke or something that you believed was truly original, only to find out later that someone else had already thought of it?

I'd like to hear your stories no matter how big or small they may be, because I think there might be more to it than just coincidence or social impact.

I'll start with a few of my own stories:

When I was about 12 (I'm 37 now), I was really big into skateboarding. Well I came up with this stupid little thing that I wouldn't even call a trick; I would do a wheelie on my front wheels for about 10 ft. then I would do this little spin thing at the end. I considered it goofing off more than a trick. Then about a month after I started doing this, I went to spend the day skating at the fire station my uncle worked at, and one of my skater friends lived across the street. Now I hadn't seen this guy in months because I lived 2 hours away, so imagine my surprise when he showed me this "trick" that he had just come up with. It was the exact same thing.

When I was in high school, some little rich kid made an insulting comment about a shirt I was wearing, so using my quick-witted sense of humor, I responded with "Well you're ugly... and I can just change shirts." Up until then, I had never heard that before, but it didn't take long before I started noticing my joke being used in various sitcoms.

Another one of "my" jokes is when I'm talking to a girl and she tells me she broke a nail, or started her cycle early, etc. My response: "I hate when that happens!" Of course I'm a guy and these things don't happen to me, hence the humor. Well as dumb and trivial as this might sound, I'll have you know that shortly thereafter, an episode of Friends incorporated the exact same thing into one of their skits.

Now when it comes to epic ideas, I had a pretty extraordinary one, and as a matter of fact, the reason I joined ATS in the first place was to spread this idea. I envisioned a society in which we do away with currency, yet everyone is rich. Sounds crazy huh? You can check it out here if you like.

Well I was very disappointed to see just how little discussion this topic generated, but I felt so compelled to spread this message, that I decided to take my idea somewhere else. I searched for forums similar to this one and came across a thread that blew me away. It was posted just 2 weeks before I posted my thread here and the similarities are undeniably more than just coincidence. See for yourself here.

I'm sure at least a few of the skeptics here are going to view those links and conclude that I simply ripped off her idea, but I can assure you that is not the case. I am an honest person who's just tying to make sense of things in this world. Adding to the confusion by making false claims is counter productive to me. Just saying.

So in closing, the purpose of this thread is to share these kinds of stories to see if maybe we can expose a pattern. I'd love to see if some of us claim to be the originators of some of the same things.


Have fun!

Great minds think alike

But yes, there is a collective conscious. We are all in relation with one another, we are all similar and we all experience consciousness the same way.... look at birds, or schools of fish, or any animal in nature - look at how they move together.

We're no different, we just think we are.

Western society has dug its evil grips into the souls of millions across the planet and made them want to believe they're bigger then themselves, and everyone else.

The fact is, we're all great - so we choose to be.... we might as well be great together.

Might I add that you are no-the-less You just because you thought your funny saying led to someone else benefiting from it on a larger stage or whatever. It was perfect in your situation, and it came genuinely from you. And because you were in that moment, you were connected to the collective consciousness rather than the expectations and hidden desires of the ego.

Which kinda makes you more like Joey or Ross or whoever said that, which gets you laid.

Great analogies guys. I also believe in a collective consciousness, but the reason for this thread is to share stories that might support the theory. So what's your story? Please share.

"There's nothing new under the sun."

You really think that in the thousands of years that comprise human history and even taking it to a galactic and interdimensional level, your little comebacks and wheelies are somehow unique? I used to think that way when I was a teenager as well, but then grew up.

The last day of high school in 1964 I was walking down the hall when from the other end came a guy I had been friends with in middle school. We had been friends but in high school he had become one of the ruling clique , him being a jock and me a musician as in the out crowd.
As we approached each other I almost said to him " how's it going" but as it was the last day of term I also tried to say " hang in there, " that being a recent surfer phrase in vogue. The two together, jumbled in my mouth and came out" how's it hanging" he looked at me oddly , smiled and replied " loose.

Well the next fall back at school this had become the prefered greeting among the in crowd of jocks at our school, and over the next few weeks, spread to the rest of the schools in the Bay Area.

My wife tells me it is much older then this but who knows.

There is a collective conscience however it will only ever become evident when we live within The Universal Laws which have been hidden from us for centuries in order that we don't realise our own powers and how life is meant to be.

Nothing exists without 'Thought' and In the Beginning There was Thought and Conscious Awareness.

Thought was able to Think which lead to an expansive creation.

We are indoctrinated to believe either in a Big Bang and Soup or In the beginning was 'The Word' No

It was Thought - thought leads to words and thought and words lead to action. Higher beings don't need words.

Thought and it's power is a Universal Law and cannot be changed.

Many truths have been hidden however, people are beginning to wake up.

reply to post by Bone75


This is really kind of weird because I swear, I was just thinking about the same thing. I had heard it mentioned on a YouTube video I was watching a couple days ago, and I was just watching TV and it kind of popped into my mind again.

I've had similar experiences as well, where I'll think of something and it seems as if other people do too, without any prior knowledge of it, it's like we all think of the same thing at the same time.

The YouTube video I watched was pretty long, and only briefly mentions it, but I found the study that they were talking about.

Other, prospective experiments have been performed, with suggestive support for inter-member access to learning within a species. For instance, several visual puzzles were shown to people in the UK. The average time it took for them to solve these puzzles was recorded. The puzzles were then shown on TV to several million viewers. Following the program, another group of people (who had not seen the TV program) was shown the same puzzles, and they were able to solve them much more quickly (Sheldrake 1989). Sheldrake proposes that the collective experience of the viewers was stored in a morphogenetic field and thus became available to those who were subsequently challenged with the same puzzle.

Source:www.wholistichealingresearch.com...

Here's the Wiki on Rupert Sheldrake, the guy who did the study:

en.wikipedia.org...

Kind of a controversial guy, he's been going toe to toe with skeptics over this stuff and more, and arguably he's been holding his own.

Regardless of what anyone says I know this is something I've experienced myself.

It gives me a little hope to think that if enough of us start waking up, maybe it will reach a tipping point where we all start waking up.

Originally posted by TerryMcGuire
The last day of high school in 1964 I was walking down the hall when from the other end came a guy I had been friends with in middle school. We had been friends but in high school he had become one of the ruling clique , him being a jock and me a musician as in the out crowd.
As we approached each other I almost said to him " how's it going" but as it was the last day of term I also tried to say " hang in there, " that being a recent surfer phrase in vogue. The two together, jumbled in my mouth and came out" how's it hanging" he looked at me oddly , smiled and replied " loose.

Well the next fall back at school this had become the prefered greeting among the in crowd of jocks at our school, and over the next few weeks, spread to the rest of the schools in the Bay Area.

My wife tells me it is much older then this but who knows.

Hahaha! That is awesome and exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for. Thanks for sharing!

First, i wanna say this happens all the time with me I feel aswell with my little jokes and random scenarios I make up for a laugh. However, the most like easy on the spot I feel I can nail is hthis. Some friends and I were talking about heroes and what'd it'd take to kill em etc... and I was like if I had to kill Superman i'd just stab him with a piece of kryptonite in the heart and break it off and push him in the ocean with something tied around his ankles. Now what movie Superman Returns comes out almost 6months later with almost that exact scene minus something tied to his ankles .I was like ha and my friends were actually really tripped out as I was when the scene came on because then thatcwould have been the end for him if it went how I said, ... as everyone knows the sun is his source of power and kryptonite is his weakness you sink him in the ocean and thats all she wrote... Anyways there ya go now you know you're not alone.

For a different approach to this question--and maybe some answers, you may want to look into the studies done in Transendental Meditation about three decades ago. That approach may be a bit more generic than what you are suggesting, but it all goes back to the same thing of a cosmic or collectiveconsciousness which can explain that phenomena.

Originally posted by Snoopy1978
"There's nothing new under the sun."

You really think that in the thousands of years that comprise human history and even taking it to a galactic and interdimensional level, your little comebacks and wheelies are somehow unique? I used to think that way when I was a teenager as well, but then grew up.

Well you got older anyway. As for being grown up, think again. Cheap jabs like this do not show maturity.

I tend to think there is something kind of like a collective consciousness...my personal thoughts are hard to pen down on the subject as I can see the idea in some ways and then where I would expect to see it, I don't.

Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung wholeheartedly accepted the idea of a "collective unconscious" which is different but there are some interesting things in his ideas. Look into it sometime.

I'm replying for the sake of putting in a word for the late Dr. Lyall Watson (1938-2008).

Dr. Watson wrote the 1979 book "Lifetide", wherein the idea of "The 100th Monkey Effect" was originally explained. The 100th Monkey Effect is a theory of “Collective Conscious” in Nature. The theory was based upon Dr. Watson’s observation of a certain species of monkeys and how they observed Dr. Watson and other humans washing their food. The monkeys began washing their food afterward and soon all the monkeys on a number of islands were observed doing the same.

The theory says that ideas will spread across a species, allegedly at a planetary level after some number (a critical mass) of the original species has been exposed to the original idea.

Originally posted by Snoopy1978
"There's nothing new under the sun."

You really think that in the thousands of years that comprise human history and even taking it to a galactic and interdimensional level, your little comebacks and wheelies are somehow unique? I used to think that way when I was a teenager as well, but then grew up.

They are unique Now, regardless how many times they've been said in the past.

Sew just because it happens Now, doesn't mean it doesn't happen Now Infinitely.

Ribbit

Noosphere

Also, someone mentioned Jung. I think you should dig this guy too.

Interesting topic!

I started snowboarding back in 1989, at the time it was not very well known sport, and when you met another snowboarder in a skiing region it was like a big thing.

In the summer i spent a lot of time waterskiing with a friend. since i found snowboarding much more fun than snowboarding, i thought, i use my shredded snowboard and try to do something on the water. So we kludged some waterski bindings on the snowboard and tried it. But it kept sinking and it was hard to get out of the water.

So next try was to put a fender on the board, which worked better, it floated and we could drive. But it was difficult to steer, so we had the plan to mount some fin to for a stable forward direction. Unfortunately winter approached and our project was laid on ice.

Next summer wakeboarding was the big thing and new trend sport. severel guys had the same idea at the same time. Their approach to start with a surfboard was a bit cleverer.

another story which happens to me nearly weekly: i think, i should call my sister ( or any other person)' grab for the phone, and in that exact moment it rings, my sister (or other person i was thinking about) calling me.

Ecclesiastes 1:9
New International Version (NIV)

9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

People have been mulling this question for thousands of years evidently.

reply to post by ANOMALY502


exactly, it is amazing how far the limits of freedom are abused, this insistance to say anything from the condition of knowing that another cant mean but his free space reality so his limited life

while it is wrong all a lie, free sense dont know anything but what is infront of him as being fact reality of whole existence objective, that is how anyone expression is through objective knowledge use wether for true free sense out means or evil free sense out wills

evil has the weakness intelligence drive of not believing truth being existing too

while if conscious individually are sharing same realities ways expressions, it simply mean that truth of all and any individual expressions is totally free now, so that info share is not true, doesnt matter, only free senses behind are truth reference of what exist

truth is always the superior reference of what is real

I experienced a lot of 'synchronicities' similar to the OP back in 2008. Those experiences had such an impact on me that I was inspired me to take another look at the nature of time. Our current 1D understanding of time simply could not account for what I was experiencing.

It's like once we become internally aware of certain (novel) information, it manifests externally and we can see it, offering us a confirmation that there is indeed a connection. Problem is, this 'information connection' makes a mockery of the speed of light as our 'new' (better to say 'newly realized') information propagates throughout the relativistic timeline, even rippling into the past seemingly before the initial creation or discovery.

This suggest to me that we can be aware of information that somehow goes between or beyond the normal 'channels' that light rides. As I understand it, light follows a curved path. Perhaps we can become entangled with information that travels along a straight path (gravity?) that allows it to bypass certain relativistic limitations.