Their apostles all believe in some kind of blood consciousness, some kind of shared pre-rational identity, and appeal to a population enraged at being reduced to the hamster wheel of meaningless work and material reward.
But it's that last, tragically knowing glance between Proctor and Elizabeth -- eloquent with the consciousness of a shared future that will never be -- that most fully measures the damage of the nightmare that was Salem in 1692.
It is a key element in literature ranging from science fiction to literary theory that as the barriers of individual consciousness degrade we absorb a kind of shared cultural consciousness full of corporate junk.
The problems facing our world today obviously won't be solved by that kind of shared consciousness.
This is an astonishing, disconcerting, delightful thing: the crowd in the cloud becoming a stream of shared consciousness.
HENDRIK HERTZBERG: In Avatar's case, what makes it worse is that the strengths of the Na'vi are painstakingly noted: oneness with nature, a sort of shared consciousness, Zen virtues etc., and then there's a straight-out military battle which they win using ordinary earthbound methods, like shooting and stabbing.
It is this sense of shared consciousness, this promise of intimacy that is also the promise of finding home, that creates devotees of Murakami's readers (far more than his rock-star literary status).
Nolan unashamedly takes his lead from The Matrix, with its idea that consciousness, like cinema, is a form of shared hallucination.
We can choose to see the discomfort as an experience in awareness; we can see our discomfort as a modulation of consciousness shared by billions from whom we're not actually separated.
For kids the web has become a continuous stream of consciousness, shared in living color with their "friends" - all 2,000 of them.
