‘I have a dream,’ Martin Luther King Jr. famously declared. In doing so he captured his hopes and aspirations for a more equal, just and racially tolerant society. We all have dreams – a place where we can try out ideas and play out what will and won’t work for us. We all have some level of consciousness. This consciousness can become a powerful tool. While its survival value for individuals is clear, arguably the real power, the human superpower if you will, is not our individual consciousness but our shared consciousness. For the purposes of this article, I’ll define ‘shared consciousness’ as the accumulated body of knowledge, practices and beliefs that each of us continually draws upon to help live our life.

Michael Muthukrishna, in his book A Theory of Everyone (MIT Press, 2023), sets out why he considers that humans ascended so dramatically as a species. He argues it’s because of their ability to pass on information and hence collaborate – not because of their intelligence, as is often assumed. Humans are undoubtedly smart, but other animals are too, including chimpanzees. We are told that chimps and humans share around 98% of their DNA. It turns out however that the 2% of DNA that is different is important. Muthukrishna cites a classic experiment conducted by researchers from The University of St Andrew’s (Horner et al (2005) Animal Cognition, 8, 164-181). A group of 3 – 4-year-old children and a group of young chimpanzees were shown two actions that they were required to perform on a box in order to get a small reward – a grape for the chimps and a sticker for the humans. Although the demonstration included two actions, the researchers arranged that only one of the actions was required to get the reward. Initially this wasn’t obvious, so both humans and chimps duly copied both actions to receive the reward. The interesting part came when the researchers changed the experiment slightly so that both chimps and humans could look into the box and see that one of the actions was superfluous – it was irrelevant to obtaining the reward. Stop for a moment and try and guess what happened next, because the result is perhaps counterintuitive. The chimps quickly dropped the unnecessary task to get the reward more quickly. The human kids however, by and large, continued to perform both actions, despite knowing that one was not required to obtain the prize. When asked why, they replied along the lines ‘there must have been some reason why they showed me both actions, so I kept on doing it’. This feature of human behaviour, sometimes dubbed ‘over-imitation’, has profound implications for our society. It speaks to our innate and strong drive to copy from others, thereby transmitting what’s in one mind, one consciousness, to others. It’s this drive that leads to our shared consciousness.

When combined with rigorous fact-checking and the Socratic method, we call one version of this shared consciousness ‘science’. Sir Isaac Newton famously stated ‘If I have seen further … it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’. He was of course right. Everything we do today depends on vast numbers of scientific and technological inventions that preceded us, carefully recorded and published for future generations. As we know, this has produced modern medicines, the motor car and put footprints on the moon while our chimp cousins remain in the jungle.

In his opening address to the 2026 World Meditation Day Council (https://youtu.be/XcKQ7SZGsGw), Fr Cyprian Consiglio, a Benedictine meditator and Secretary General of Inter-monastic Dialogue, quoted Albert Einstein, who in 1946 wrote:

‘Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has profoundly altered the nature of the world as we knew it and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking’.

Einstein was calling for what we’ve been discussing – an evolved shared consciousness. He had witnessed two world wars which culminated in the development of a technology so destructive it is capable of eliminating the species that developed it. Since 1946 the world has arguably enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity. Post-war anti-fascist sentiment echoed through the following decades and, coupled with the threat of MAD (mutually assured destruction), has so far prevented the further wartime use of nuclear weapons. But our shared consciousness can drift. It takes two or three generations to forget about the horrors of war. It is possible therefore that we will repeat the mistakes of the early 20^th century and again plunge ourselves into global conflict. According to the Nuclear Materials Security Index (NTIindex.org), in 2023 over 20 nations had 1 Kg or more of weapons-grade uranium, including Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. A third world war really could be our last.

But there is hope. Humans also share about 98% of DNA with bonobos – the famously cohesive and egalitarian members of the primate family who split from chimps about 1.7 million years ago and evolved south of the Congo River, while their chimp cousins stayed on the north. Bonobos provide an example of how, through this powerful tool of shared consciousness, we can choose a peaceful society rather than a more aggressive, chimp-like one. It seems then that our shared consciousness can evolve in different directions. Sadly, our leaders often seem to believe confrontation is rewarded politically more than reconciliation. What then can we, as individual citizens, do to promote the peaceful path?

We all respond to a calling differently. One approach, sometimes used by Quakers, is to take to the streets. While there is arguably a place for ‘protests for peace’, in these volatile times there is a risk they can reinforce the very type of behaviour they seek to avoid. Later in his address, Fr Consiglio sets out how he believes a peaceful ‘evolved consciousness’ can come about. He quotes St Paul (Romans 12:2) who says ‘Be transformed by the renewal of your consciousness[Gk nous]’. Fr Consiglio later goes on to say ‘What the spiritual traditions have claimed and shown is that, provoked by [a] deep work of spiritual practice, an actual transformation of consciousness takes place at this deepest level of human consciousness… This transformation brings about an experience of the unity of all being. And that in turn carries with it an aspiration for peace among people and peoples as an obvious and logical consequence’. He concludes ‘And I believe that the deep work of mindfulness and meditation is the surest, time-tested engine of that transformation’.

We can’t all have Martin Luther King Jr’s ability to dream and to share that dream so effectively. We can however lean into the mindful and meditative aspects of our spiritual traditions. The Christian meditator Fr Laurence Freeman teaches a practice of meditating on a word such as the Aramaic ‘maranatha’ (sometimes translated as ‘Come, Oh Lord’ 1 Corinthians 16:22). In consciousness terminology it might be described as ‘unassociated attention’ – a deliberately non-English, soft-syllabled word with sacred overtones which gently gathers the wandering mind. Buddhist practice often uses breath awareness in a similar way. For me, the Quaker practice of ‘waiting in the silence’ is another variation on this theme. I have come to realise only recently that when I attend a Meeting for Worship I do so not just for myself but for the world’s shared consciousness. I may not have King’s rhetorical skills, but I do (usually) leave a Meeting for Worship feeling more peaceful and kind than I went in. Hopefully that makes everyone I meet a little kinder, and everyone they meet, and so on.