just how much are we capable of affecting the world around us?

I read this article on world events “affecting random number generators”:http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649#121 with a sense of awe because I’ve grown up in a time when the most true facts are those proven by science. Reading that people can affect a random number generator – the transistor generation’s version of the coin toss – with only their minds, and that significant deviations occurred just four hours before September 11th, I couldn’t help but smile.

After all, in Buddhism we commonly hear that we create the world just as much as it creates us. Why shouldn’t mental activity, collective or singular, affect the workings of the world around us?

If only because our thoughts are (or create in our brain) electrical impulses, and those impulses generate fields that could affect anything else that depends on electromagnetic forces — such as a computer, or another brain — it makes sense.

I find the “predictive” abberations the most interesting part of this phenomena. As a much younger thinker, I explained clairvoyance as hyper-perception: an ability to perceive patterns in the thoughts and actions of other people in ways that illuminate likely future events. This research seems to support my theory, considering a machine picked up on September 11th and last winter’s tsunami, hours before those earth-shattering events occurred. How much more sensitive is a trained human mind?

And more interesting – just how much are we capable of affecting the world around us? On Maui, I’ve heard a lot of talk about ‘manifestation’ as if it were another way of man-handling the universe into giving us what we want. Just how much of getting what we want is due to our mental processes? How much do our thoughts alone exert force on the environment around us, attracting or repulsing what we want and don’t want?

I’ll have to check up on the “Global Consciousness Project”:http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ every now and then…