Across the broad span of wisdom traditions, one encounter is of key significance: some direct access or contact with the ground of being.
Even in this secular age, dominated as we are by the materialistic, reductionist paradigm of western science, these transcendent experiences still occur, even amongst members of the scientific community.
The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is a long-term experiment using a world-spanning network of physical random number generators to collect data continuously, 24/7, since 1998. We have recorded parallel sequences of data from the network, consisting of trials of 200 bits recorded each second at each node and sent to archiving servers in Princeton, NJ. A formal experiment ran for 17 years and comprised 500 replications of fully specified and pre-registered event analyses. These tested a general hypothesis that engaging events of deep interest to large numbers of people around the world would correspond to departures of the random data from expectation.