The Technology

CommonPassion.org is developing a Global Coherence Feedback System (GCFS), which unites collective human intention and technology to promote social harmony. It is based on seventy-five years of scientifically controlled empirical studies and millennia of teachings from venerated traditions in the East and West. The GCFS employs a well-documented phenomenon related to how groups of people interact and relate at a primary level, and how a special form of human group coherence can produce a calming or harmonizing effect on others in the community. This is similar to the good feeling you may have when in the company of friends, compared to the uncomfortable feeling in the presence of antagonists.

The GCFS will be a real-time, local and global social-coherence-engendering technology that will bring social harmony to humanity at a primary level. The GCFS will instruct and organize individuals and groups around positively-intentioned, non-ideologically based foci (consciousness-based practices, meditations, prayers, etc) while simultaneously monitoring indicators of social harmony (crime, emergency calls, socially responsible investing, etc). This data will be analyzed on the fly, providing the ability to assess change in the indicators as a result of the peace-creating activities. This Social Harmony Index will then be fed to cell phones, desktop computers with always-on Internet connections, radio stations, televisions stations and other media sources. In this way, a very large group of coherence-engendering “activists” can be maintained around the globe, 24/7, with no need for physical proximity, and with minimal disruption to the participant’s normal meditation or prayer patterns.

The coherence feedback signal for the GCFS is analogous to the signal provided by biofeedback devices, but on a global scale. In biofeedback, indirect but correlated indicators of internal coherence and homeostasis (skin impedance, skin temperature, heart-rate variability, EEG coherence, etc) are used to give a person an audible, kinesthetic or visual feedback signal that corresponds to their present inner state. With this feedback signal they can comprehend and adjust how their perceived inner state corresponds real-time to physiological correlates of health, relaxation or mental stability and coherence. Without this biofeedback signal, they are virtually guessing, assuming or "having faith" that what they are doing to foster the inner state is actually having the positive, intended effect. When people are taught biofeedback, then allowed to practice on their own, their capacity to regulate and improve key physiological functions – previously thought not to be under voluntary control – is greatly enhanced.

In the same way, providing individuals and groups a real-time feedback signal that is correlated to social coherence, along with non-ideologically, non-theologically based meditation-prayer themes, will engender massive levels of human coherence, a broader sense of empowerment and skill in enhancing the effect and a powerful agent for positive social change.