I think your teacher was promoting a belief rather than TEACHING! There are no studies for such a thing at NASA or anywhere that I am aware of. Please provide that NASA indeed did such a study and the results of this fictional study. These are questions you should have asked your teacher who is as Nyar said, full of shit!

Troll, has to be. There's a level of stupidity that can be negated by a single Google search, so when someone who has a computer and can access the internet displays it I am immediately suspicious.

@RussianTank
It's bad form to pass on hearsay.

Mark that teacher well RT and do not believe anything she tells you again, unless you can confirm the truth via independent sources.
I really think she is making stuff up and adding to the overall total global ignorance.

In fact don't take the word of anyone who tells you anything, face to face, or on you tube, without doing what you did, check out the information. That's the first step in critical thinking, good work.

If something does not sound right, it probably isn't, and the person telling you probably makes a habit of telling stories about all sorts of things they know nothing about for the single purpose of enhancing their ego.

Hello RT,

I've been busy at school myself but now I finally have a bit of a break, so I will give you what I think may answer your question:

The topic you are inquiring about is commonly referred to as "Global Consciousness".

If you visit this site, you will see that experiments were conducted in an attempt to prove that we are all universally connected.

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

what they claim:

"Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world."

They used number generators for this:

"Random number generators (RNGs) based on quantum tunneling produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured." (taken from the site).

They also say:
"The Global Consciousness Project is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists and engineers."

Because of course-- saying something is scientific makes it fact, right?

Some of their findings are enticing, such as 9/11 like you mentioned, US air strikes, Princess Diana's death, etc. However, there is also a critique of this concept. As you have taken the time to think about the position advocating for Universal Consciousness, it's only fair that you have a look at the view of the skeptics, right?

Here is a skeptical analysis of the idea, and the experiments conducted:

http://www.skepticnews.com/2005/04/terry_schiavo_a.html

It begins with the methodology:
"To attempt to do so, they have created a "black box" that randomly generates zeros and ones. If there are no outside influences, the random pattern of zeros and ones should be just that—random. However, if the global consciousness of the population of the planet effects the random number generator, then the pattern would no longer be random. There might be a "spike" of an increased number of ones, indicating a change in the global consciousness of the planet, such as a major news event."

The Skeptic News site then looks at some of the results and the flaws, accordingly:

while there were some interesting "hits", Skeptic News points out the very fact that there were misses too:

"The U.S. invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003. The data showed no sign of it. The space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry on February 1, 2003, but had no effect on the random number generators. An earthquake in Turkey on August 17, 1999 killed nearly 4,000 people, but you wouldn’t know it from examining the pattern of random numbers."

These are quite a few examples, don't you think? You can read the whole response if you want, but in a nutshell, the write-up reminds us that humans are made to look for patterns--count hits, ignore missing, and sometimes even change information after the fact, subconsciously or not. What always surprises me is how biased people can be.

That's not all though. Suppose it were actually true that humans could somehow predict world events before they occur, or somehow share some feelings/emotions, etc, how could you ever assert that it's because we have souls? Just because you, your prof, or even the most intellectually gifted people cannot explain it, does not truthfully give you the authority to proclaim that it's because "we all have souls". That was the bulk of your question from the looks of it, and all I can say is, there is absolutely not enough evidence to even begin to entertain such a conclusive and fallacious claim. If there were any truth to it, like David Killens said, there would definitely be some sort of Nobel Prize to go around. Why do you think that these experiments show up in "fringe" journals and books? Perhaps because they have not been proven. Many in the religious/spiritual community would argue that science is biased and closed off to the supernatural. Wrong again-- the goal of science is not to disprove the supposed "supernatural", it is to assert that until we can actually prove that something is "supernatural", that we would be fools to accept it. Plain and simple. Therefore, the simple answer to your question: I think it's more wishful thinking than anything else.

Ratburn

>Yesterday in class, my teacher was talking about different forms of energy in the universe,

Energy is what you learn about in physics. There's thermal energy, kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy, electric potential energy, nuclear energy, chemical energy, elastic energy, light energy, all that stuff.

>I can't remember what kind of energy, but she was saying that we can measure energy and see that it goes up on down depending on world events.

Energy in what?

The entire planet? No, world events don't cause changes in the amount of energy in the world. Energy is never created or destroyed, it can only move and change form. The only way for the planet's energy to go up or down is for it to leave into space, or for it to come from space. Both of those do happen, from light from the sun and radiation from the earth, but they're always happening and world events don't affect them. The only world event that would affect the planet's energy would be an asteroid impact or a solar flare. Anyways, we can't really measure "global energy".

Energy in a localized place? Sure. If a nuke goes off, the nuclear energy in the bomb gets converted to kinetic energy, so kinetic energy goes up in the place where it blew up.

>She said that for example, 4 or 5 days before September 11, NASA was able to detect that the overall energy was negative,

No. I don't know exactly what the "overall energy" is, but we can't measure it, so it can't really be negative. NASA may have made some measurement vaguely related to this description, but I doubt it. Either way, changes happen after an event, not before it.

>and when people perform drumming rituals, that the amount of negative energy decreases, and positive increases, and people feel more of a sense of calmness.

Energy doesn't contribute to calmness. In a person, energy comes from food and it lets you move and live. Drumming rituals convert the energy from your food into heat and motion, which is then converted into sound and more heat. A drum ritual can still calm you, but it's purely mental and has nothing to do with energy.

>According to her, NASA has proven this.

No.

>Then she went on to say that many Buddhist monks can get together, and meditate/pray and fill the area with energy.They take a few seeds and by the end of the day, those seeds turn to roses.

Meditation can conserve energy, it doesn't create it. And anyways, the energy stays in your body, it doesn't "fill the area". Prayer doesn't create energy either. Growing roses in a day with prayer energy is bullshit. Plants need energy, but also time, to grow.

>I cannot remember all of the terminology she used, but she seemed to imply that we all have souls, and some sort of universal energy (can't remember what word she used to describe the energy) can be tested for.

No, there is no way to test for souls, and we probably don't have any. There is no reason to believe we do. In any case, souls have nothing to do with energy, because if they did we could measure them.

Russian-Tank, you need to understand how science and learning institutions work. Just because a study is in progress at Princeton, that does not automatically guarantee that it is fact or even true. Many research projects wind up complete flops. An idea is put forth, and someone investigates it. Only when the results are published and peer reviewed can any idea be taken seriously. And with large learning and/or research institutions, they take on almost any kind of idea, from very sane to pretty whacko.

Learning institutions are open to pursuing almost any theories because they promote discussion and learning. Even if a project is labelled a complete flop, it is not entirely a failure because one belief has been proven invalid, and people are learning how to learn.

Did you investigate beyond just that one link to Kilger's blog. Remember, this is a blog, a collection of thoughts, not facts. And pursuing this story further, the people involved in this "project" have strong beliefs in spirituality and "life force" stuff. They did not begin this project with open minds, they already had a belief system.

So ask yourself, when a group of researchers have a project and it has run this long without serious acceptance by the scientific community, are their results actually valid for a critical mind?

Oh wow man! I'm feelin such negative energy now. Let's all relax and have a brewski. I'll buy the first round: (~)0 (~)0 (~)0 (~)0 (~)0 (~)0 (~)0