Here is a recent TED talk that I find amazingly insightful: Ted Talk

 

In much the same way that Rupert Sheldrake characterizes the morphic field and the 100th monkey phenomena, it seems that the bird behavior demonstrated in this video is a kind of mass consciousness evolution.  As more birds 'figure out' how to do X or Y, it spreads thru the bird population as a whole. And, as in the case of the monkey's washing their food, further research would likely show that the learned behaviors are being demonstrated in bird populations a great distance from each other.

Since our brain and nervous system are essentially transceivers, sending and receiving information to and from our soul or greater conscious awareness, it seems that the greater awareness or mass consciousness of various animal species is simply distributing the learned behavior of individuals within the species to others.  We humans are also learning and evolving quickly these days, indicating that perhaps we too are benefiting from the same type of mechanism at work within our own species.

There is a phenomena refered to as "Multiple Simultaneous Invention" which appears to be an example of this phenomena in humans. The following is reposted from thelongnose.com:

We know this because at least 23 other people built prototype light bulbs before Edison1, including two groups who fought legal battles with him over the patent rights (Sawyer and Mann in the U.S. and Swan in England)2....  This is not a strange coincidence that happened with electric lighting, it is the norm in both technological invention and scientific discovery. Newton and Leibniz independently invented calculus, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed a patent for the telephone on the same day — within three hours of each other — and sunspots were simultaneously discovered by four scientists living in four different countries. The list of simultaneous independent inventions includes the airplane (2 people), the steamboat (5 people), the telegraph (5 people), and the telescope (9 people). In science and math it includes decimal fractions (2 people), the theory of natural selection (2 people), the discovery of oxygen (2 people), and the conservation of energy (4 people)3.

So, in the same way schools of fish and flocks of birds act in unison without having to "think" about it, due to the greater conscious awareness that is informing the species as a whole, the same type of phenomena seems to be happening with the human species as well. That idea becomes more plausible when watching the movie Koyaanisqatsi, and seeing how from a much larger perspective our collective actions are not unlike the routine of ants.

Reincarnation implies that it is our soul or greater conscious awareness that is learning with each successive life experience, growing and evolving as we have more exposure to life. And, it seems that same idea also applies to the larger awareness that is the collective consciousness of each species, where each life form contributes to the growth and evolution of the whole species.

We are human beings, but more than that we are soul consciousness having a human experience. And, thru our life experience we are not only contributing to the learning and growth of our own soul, we are also contributing to the growth and expansion of the human species as a whole. When looking at things from this perspective, we as individuals aren't nearly as important as we would like to believe; but then again we are more important than we can comprehend. We are one of many, but we also contribute to the greater whole.

From a metaphysical perspective, it could be said that separation is an illusion, but it is an illusion that enables the expansion of consciousness...and in that regard, separation seems to be an experiment that is destined to illustrate that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts.