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What the Hell is Morphic Resonance?
(excerpts from an interview with Rupert Sheldrake)
Rupert Sheldrake answers: The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels. And how that influence moves across time, the collective
The whole idea of morphic resonance is evolutionary...
squirrel-memory both for form and for instincts, is given by the process I call morphic resonance. It's a theory of collective memory throughout nature. What the memory is expressed through are the morphic fields, the fields within and around each organ ism. The memory processes are due to morphic resonance. That's the idea.
Interviewer: I'm interested in the way morphic fields might determine culture. For instance, repeating and idea with the intention of influencing overall human consciousness- if it's thought about many times, will it have an effect?
Rupert Sheldrake: You mean the more people think about something, the more it's likely to happen? Yes. Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. M ost of our culture is habitual, I mean, most of our personal life, and most of our cultural life is habitual. We don't invent the English language. We inherit the whole English language with all its habits, its turns of phrase, its usage of words, its s tructure, its grammar. Occasionally people invents new words, but basically, once we've assimilated it, it happens automatically. I don't have to think when I'm speaking, reaching for the next word. It just happens, and the same is true about physical skills, like riding a bicycle, or swimming, or skiing if you can ski, these kinds of things. So I think the more often these things happen the easier they become for people to learn. Things like learning language have happened over- well, we don't know how long human language has been around, at least 50,000 years, so there's a tremendously well-established morphic field for language-speaking. Each particular language has its own field which is usually established over centuries at least.
Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual, I mean, most of our personal life, and most of our cultural life is habitual.
Interviewer: So there is that which is habitual, perhaps the bulk of what happens, which is given through morphic fields set up through repetition, but then there are also events or acts which are novel, new events...
Rupert Sheldrake: Yes. The whole idea of morphic resonance is evolutionary, but morphic resonance only gives the repetitions. It doesn't give the creativity. So evolution must involve an interplay of creativity and repetition. Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it, in the human realm, or in the realm of biological evolution, or of cosmic evolution. We know creativity happens. And then what happens is a kind of Darwinian natural selection. Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is suc cessful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual.
Interviewer: Was there a primary idea which led you to the hypotheses of morphic resonance? Was there a moment of insight?
Rupert Sheldrake: Well, there were several. There was, first of all, the recognition that took quite a long time to dawn, that reductionistic science couldn't answer the questions. Mechanistic biology in particular is too limited. Then there was the idea the w e need a more holistic approach, and I got interested in holistic biologists and the idea morphogenetic fields, which was already around in biology.
Morphic fields organize self-organizing systems, things that organize themselves, like snowflakes, or molecules, or ecosystems, or animals, or plants, or societies, like flocks of birds
But the key insight really came by realizing that there were these connections through time, or that there could be these connections through time, and that came as a kind of tremendous flash of insight as a result of reading Bergson's book, Matter and Memory. Henri Bergson was a French philosopher who wrote Matter and Memory around 1896. It was published in English in 1911, but now it's terribly obscure. Most people haven't ever heard of Bergson, let alone read him. But he was an extrem ely influential and important philosopher at the time, and I think just years ahead of his time. Insights from his book gave me this idea. And then I realized that morphogenetic fields might also have a kind of memory. That was the basic insight into m orphogenetic resonance. This happened in 1973, when I was in Cambridge, teaching there.
Interviewer: I'm reading a book called A New Vision of Reality written by Bede Griffiths. I understand that you've had some contact with him and I was wondering what his influence had been.
Rupert Sheldrake: Bede Griffiths died a year ago. He was an English Benedictine monk who went and lived in India for 30 years. He was trying to find a way of bridging the Eastern and the Western spiritual traditions and philosophies. So he lived and wore orang e robes.
In the entire process of cosmic evolution you see a spiritual process as well as a material process. You can't separate the two.
He became a Hindu-type sanyasin. He lived in a simple ashram, vegetarian, sitting on the ground, and so on. In his ashram in south India people practice yoga and meditation and also follow a Christian style of life, so it's trying to find an Indian kin d of Christianity.
Interviewer: A kind of synthesis?
Rupert Sheldrake: A synthesis, yes. I spent seven years living in India. For five years I was working in an international agricultural research institute doing regular western-type science, trying to improve Indian crops, and I spent two years living with Bede Griffiths in his ashram. I wrote my first book, A New Science of Life, living in his ashram in south India, and it's dedicated to him. So I find him a most helpful bridge between traditions of East and West. It's one thing to study Eastern philo sophy and Western philosophy, it's another to try and go deeper into meditative techniques and the consciousness of both traditions.
Interviewer: Experientially. RS Yes. So that's what he was doing there, and the ashram he founded is still continuing.
Interviewer: In Bede Griffith's book he refers to the 'perennial philosophy', a set of ideas that all traditional people seem to share to some degree. This seems to be a type of understanding of the world to which your hypotheses would be sympathetic. It is interesting to me, the idea of someone going into these ancient beliefs as a contemporary scientist and connecting it to an empirical approach.
Rupert Sheldrake: Well you see, I think a lot of harm was done in the West by splitting apart science and religion in the 17th century. Science became very limited in its focus to mechanical, material things, and religion became very introverted; it became very concerned just with the human spirit and with morality and so forth, and so religion signed over the whole of the natural world including the cosmos to science and science signed over to religion human ethical questions and left this terribly limited dom ain as the sphere of religion. In most traditional cultures, these are not separated in that way. For an American Indian looking at the sky, he's not looking at just a material collection of bodies moving in accordance with inanimate laws. The sky is a living being, the abode of the spirit. The earth is a living mother; it's not just a collection of rocks with physical forces at work in them. So, if you look at any traditional world view there isn't a separation between nature and spirit, and religio n and science. The two go together. It's a much more holistic and integrated view of the world, and I think that, as science emerges from this narrow, mechanistic phase that it's been in and we move to a broader vision, a new kind of connection between the realms of science and spirituality becomes possible. They can converge again. They can relate to each other once more. This is something I spent years exploring with Bede Griffiths and more recently I've been having a whole series of discussions wi th Matthew Fox. Matthew Fox is a maverick theologian who was expelled from the Dominicans last year and who's working independently. He has written several well-known books. One is called Original Blessing. Another is called Coming of the Cosmic Christ. Essentially, he is trying to recover a sense or spirituality in nature, that it's not just something inside, or to do with morality and sin. It's to do with the whole of nature. The divine presence in the sky, in the earth, in our expe rience of nature all around us. In the entire process of cosmic evolution you see a spiritual process as well as a material process. You can't separate the two. They go together. And human evolution involves both a spiritual conscious and a cultural e volution, and the evolution of science and technology. You can't separate these things. He's been working along these lines for quite a long time, and he and I have been having a series of discussions, and we have a book coming out in spring called N atural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality, which is an attempt to explore these connections in this new context. He's also very much involved with innovative rituals, the rediscovery of ritual and the way in which art and multimedia, and ne w forms of expression including electronic means can be used in new forms of ritual. He's been working particularly with several groups in England where amazing new forms of experimental services have come out of the rave nightclub movement. In northern England, in cities like Sheffield and Leeds there's a whole flowering of new forms of religious ritual which have grown out of the psychedelic rave scene, where they've taken on a Christian form in a rave setting with multimedia, sampling, and music. Cosmic masses bringing together the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. One of these was held in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco a few months ago. Some people cam they've been done before, and by setting up a whole pattern of movements and activitie s in this similar way, you resonate with previous people who've performed the ritual. Traditional cultures believe that rituals are a way of connecting through time, of collapsing time. You could say that the patterns of rituals embody morphic fields- I would call them morphic fields, but you could also call them archetypes, because archetypes is another word, I think, for the same idea. So it's interesting what you say that people who try to invent new ones after a while find in fact they've resurrect ed old ones. There are, perhaps, certain very basic forms that occur again and again in rituals, and for ritual to be effective it has to link to these ancient patterns or morphic fields. If you make up something totally new with no background it won't have any resonant power, at least to start with.