"At 28, 000 feet, you don't have an awful lot of useful consciousness without the support of oxygen or being in a pressurized aircraft, " said O'Brien, a former CNN correspondent.

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But the television coverage of fire hoses and police dogs being turned on peaceful civil rights demonstrators, which changed the nation's consciousness, followed by the trauma of President Kennedy's assassination, and Lyndon Johnson's extraordinary leadership, transformed the Senate.

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Chopra explains that being in touch with the this kind of consciousness is what sports players, ballet dancers, and musicians experience when they enter a moment of utter connectedness with their art: the mind is clear, the world appears in slow motion, and all internal dialogue fades away.

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This change in buying habits will be swift as our mass consciousness is being rapidly influenced by the game changers such as social media and the Groupons of the world.

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In some quarters, it seems 1991, which also saw the release of Pearl Jam's multiplatinum debut album "Ten" and Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger, " is being treated as year 0 of grunge, because that's when the music exploded into the mainstream consciousness.

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"I've never quite seen anything that has shocked the consciousness of the American people like 6- and 7-year-old kids being riddled with bullets in a classroom, ... in an area that was considered to be immune to this kind of behavior and had done everything that seemed logical ... to protect children in that school, " Biden said Friday.

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