Over breakfast the other day, a friend and I were discussing the ways in which perceptions create reality: "If this is how I see things, this is how they are." Her workplace is full of gossips heavily invested in the world their perceptions create for themselves and others.

Our conversation brought me back to reading Benjamin Hoff's The Te of Piglet in which Hoff addresses this idea by citing Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of Stalinist Russia, Hope Against Hope.

Mandelstam points out that the realist literature of the late 19th century was a response to the pretense and dishonesty of people who pretended to be good. "The unexpected result of this kind of critical writing was that kind people disappeared. Kindess...has to e cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. Everything we have seen in our times--the class...warfare, the constant 'unmasking' of people, the search for an ulterior motive behding every action--all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind."

The potential we have to make or break each other by our thoughts and intentions also returned me to the research of Masaru Emoto. This, in turn, brought me to a look at the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University. Here are 13 of my notes.

Water
1. Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto has gained worldwide acclaim through his groundbreaking research and discovery that water is deeply connected to our individual and collective consciousness.

2. Emoto's research grew out of his curiosity about the molecular structure of water. He wanted to see if it would respond to non-physical events such as mental stimuli.

3. He attached labels bearing words to bottles of distilled water. He found those bottles bearing words such as love and thank you and hope created beautiful crystals. Those bearing unkind emotions created ugly crystals.

4. The correlation indicated that thoughts and intention can affect the molecular composition of water.

5. This raises the question of the effects of our thoughts and intentions on each other or on whole groups of people. Since our bodies are 90 percent water, it would follow that we have the power to help or harm each other simply through our thoughts and intentions.

6. Following the 2005 tsunami in Indonesia, the world focused its prayers and good intentions in the form of relief to the people of that region. For this reason, there was no outbreak of infectious disease there, according to Emoto.

7. The scientist says this should teach us that our intentions shape our world. What we give to the world comes back to us; therefore, we create, and we can solve, our own problems.

Consciousness
8. The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is is an international collaboration created in 1998 to study the subtle reach of human consciousness in the physical world.

9. The GCP is a global network of electronic devices in more than 50 locations on all continents and in nearly every time zone that produces continuous random data sequences. Subtle patterns in the data are linked with events that cause shared thoughts and emotions in millions of people.

10. The results challenge common ideas about the world as independent analyses confirm the unexpected patterns and also indicate that they cannot be attributed to ordinary physical forces or electromagnetic fields.

11. Scientists do not yet know how to explain the subtle correlations between events of importance to humans and the GCP data, but they indicate that the physical world and our mental world of information and meaning are linked in ways that we don't yet understand.

Old News
12. The wisdom has been available to us for ages, though the science is new. From the Navajo: "When you put a thing in order, and give it a name, and you are all in accord, it becomes."

13. Putting a thing in order and giving it a name could involve revising the past with good intentions in the present and thus transforming the role of history in the present. It is not about changing or eliminating facts but in changing perceptions.

Thursday Thirteen