What seems to be at work is a form of communal consciousness, spiritus mundi, or as Hawkins calls it, following Jung, a “database of consciousness.” The phenomenon seen so commonly in other social animals—whereby a fish swimming at one edge of a school will turn instantaneously when its fellows a quarter mile away flee a predator—pertains in some subconscious way to our species also. There are simply too many documented instances of individuals having intimate acquaintance with information experienced firsthand by remote strangers for us to deny that there are forms of shared knowledge other
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