An introduction to the wonderful works of
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D.
with artwork by Ming
(courtesy of Mr Sheldrake & Ming)
I
Video: Science & Spirit
Video: The Extended Mind - Telepathy
II
Excerpt from the paper The Sense of Being Stared At
Part 1: Is it Real or Illusory?
I: The Sense of Being Stared At in People and Other Animals
Most people have had the experience of turning round feeling that someone is looking at them from behind, and finding that this is the case. Most people have also had the converse experience. They can sometimes make people turn around by staring at them. In surveys in Europe and North America, between 70% and 97% of the people questioned said they had had personal experiences of these kinds (Braud et al., 1990; Sheldrake, 1994; Cottrell et al., 1996).
The sense of being stared at is often alluded to in fiction, as in stories or novels by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Anatole France, Victor Hugo, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Thomas Mann, J.B. Priestley and many other writers (Poortman, 1959). Here is an example from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes:
The man interests me as a psychological study. At breakfast this morning I suddenly
had that vague feeling of uneasiness which overcomes some people when closely
stared at, and, quickly looking up, I met his eyes bent upon me with an intensity
which amounted to ferocity, though their expression instantly softened as he made
some conventional remark upon the weather (Conan Doyle, 1884).
In questionnaire surveys about the details of these experiences I carried in Britain, Sweden and the United States, more women (81%) than men (74%) said they had felt they were being stared at. This experience occurred most commonly with strangers in public places, such as streets and bars. Also, significantly more women (88%) than men (71%) said they had found they could stare at others and make them turn around (Sheldrake, 2003a).
What emotions were involved when people turned round? For both men and women, curiosity was the most frequent reason for staring at others when they turned around, followed by a desire to attract the other person’s attention. Less frequently, the motives were sexual attraction, or anger. Some people found that looking with distress, or affection, or good wishes could cause a person to turn (Sheldrake, 2003a).
In short, this sense seems to be associated with a wide range of motives and emotions. Most people take these experiences for granted and pay little attention to them. But some people observe others for a living. The sense of being stared at is well known to many police officers, surveillance personnel and soldiers, as I have found through an extensive series of interviews. Most were convinced of the reality of this sense, and told stories about times when people they were watching seemed to know they were being observed, however well the observers were hidden (Sheldrake, 2003a).
When detectives are trained to follow people, they are told not to stare at their backs any more than necessary, because otherwise the person might turn around, catch their eye and blow their cover. According to experienced detectives, this sense also seems to work at a distance when the observers look through binoculars. Several celebrity photographers and army snipers told me that they were convinced that some people could tell when they were being looked at through telephoto lenses or telescopic sights.
In some of the oriental martial arts, students are trained to increase their sensitivity to being looked at from behind (Sheldrake, 2003a). Many species of non-human animals also seem able to detect looks. Some pet owners claim that they can wake their sleeping dogs or cats by staring at them. Some hunters and wildlife photographers are convinced that animals can detect their gaze even when they are hidden and looking at animals through telescopic lenses or sights (Sheldrake, 2003a).
Read the entire paper
More about the book “The Sense of Being Stared At”
III
Video: The Extended Mind - Recent Experimental Evidence
IV
“From Cellular Ageing to the Physics of Angels - a conversation with Rupert Sheldrake“
Excerpt from interview with John David Ebert
JE: Joseph Campbell once suggested that the idea of morphogenetic fields reminded him of the Hindu concept of maya — the field of space-time that gives birth to the forms of the world. You wrote your first book, A New Science of Life, while living in an ashram in India. Do you think that the content of your book was influenced at all by a resonance with the traditions of Indian thought?
RS: Well, I think it probably was, but the basic idea of morphic resonance and morphic fields came to me while I was in Cambridge, before I went to live in India. The main influence on my thinking about morphogenetic fields came from the holistic tradition in developmental biology, where these fields are fairly widely accepted.
The main influence on my idea of an influence through time—the morphic resonance idea—in fact came through Henri Bergson in his book Matter and Memory, where he argues that memory is not stored in a material form in the brain. I realized that Bergson’s ideas on memory, which were to me completely new and incredibly exciting, could be generalized, and it was really through reflecting on Bergson’s thought that I came to this idea.
However, when I went to work in India in an agricultural institute, I went on thinking about these ideas, and indeed they had much in common with Indian thought. I discovered, when I was first thinking about these things in Cambridge, that many people there simply couldn’t understand what I was going on about—particularly scientists—and thought the idea was too ridiculous to be worth taking seriously. When I arrived in India and discussed it with Hindu friends and colleagues, they took the opposite approach; they said, “There’s nothing new in this, it was all known millennia ago to the ancient rishis.” So, they found the ideas perfectly acceptable; the only thing was, they weren’t particularly interested in extending them into a scientific hypothesis.
I worked for five years in an agricultural institute before I went to live in the ashram to write my book. And I dare say, the climate of Indian thought was a very fertile one for me. It enabled me to go on thinking about these ideas in a much more favorable environment than if I’d been doing it in Cambridge. But the germs of these ideas, the roots of my own thought, are in Western philosophy and science rather than Oriental philosophy. So, it’s a kind of convergence.
JE: You see evolutionary history as a tension between the two forces of habit—or morphic resonance—and creativity, which involves the appearance of new morphic fields. But in the case of mass extinctions you suggested once that the ghosts of dead species would still be haunting the world, that the fields of the dinosaurs would still be potentially present if you could tune into them. Would you mind commenting on how it might be possible for extinct species to reappear?
RS: Well, I haven’t in mind some kind of Jurassic Park scenario. What I was thinking of was that the fields would remain present, but the conditions for tuning into them are no longer there if the species is extinct, so they’re not expressed. However, it’s a well known fact in evolutionary studies that some of the features of extinct species can reappear again and again. Sometimes this happens in occasional mutations, sometimes it turns up in the fossil record. And when these features of extinct species reappear, they’re usually given the name, “atavism,” which implies a kind of throwback to an ancestral form. Atavisms were well known to Darwin, and he was very interested in them for the same reasons I am, that they seem to imply a kind of memory of what went before.
JE: Do you think that morphic fields could account for the existence of ghosts in any way?
RS: Well, the fields represent a kind of memory. If places have memories, then I suppose it’s possible for ghostly-type phenomena to be built into their fields. This is a very hazy area of speculation and not one I’ve thought through rigorously. And I’ve had no incentive to think it through rigorously because it’s so hard to think of repeatable experiments with ghosts. But ghosts do seem to be a kind of memory thing, and morphic fields have to do with memory, so there may well be a connection.
V
Video: A New Science of Life
VI
Video: The Rise of Shamanism
Excerpt from the article Listen to the Animals:
…
No one knows how some animals sense earthquakes coming. Perhaps they pick up subtle sounds or vibrations in the earth; maybe they respond to subterranean gases released prior to earthquakes, or react to changes in the Earth’s electrical field. They may also sense in advance what is about to happen in a way that lies beyond current scientific understanding, through some kind of presentiment.
Animals can also anticipate man-made catastrophes such as air raids. In my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, I describe how during the Second World War, many families in Britain and Germany relied on their pets’ behaviour to warn them of impending air raids, before official warnings were given. These warnings occurred when enemy planes were still hundreds of miles away, long before the animals could have heard them coming. Some dogs in London even anticipated the explosion of German V-2 rockets. These missiles were supersonic and hence could not have been heard in advance.
Unusual animal behaviour also occurs before avalanches. On February 23, 1999, an avalanche devastated the Austrian village of Galtur in the Tyrol, killing dozens of people. The previous day, the chamois (small goat-like antelopes) came down from the mountains into the valleys, something they never usually do. Through surveys in alpine villages in Austria and Switzerland, I found that the animals most likely to anticipate avalanches are chamois and ibexes, and also dogs. Although it is still unexplained, this ability would obviously be of survival value in mountain animals, and would be favoured by natural selection.
With very few exceptions, the ability of animals to anticipate disasters has been ignored by Western scientists, who dismiss stories of animal anticipations as anecdotal or superstitious. By contrast, since the 1970s, in earthquake-prone areas of China, the authorities have encouraged people to report unusual animal behaviour, and Chinese scientists have an impressive track record in predicting earthquakes. In several cases they issued warnings that enabled cities to be evacuated hours before devastating earthquakes struck, saving tens of thousands of lives.
VII
Video: Rupert Sheldrake & Bruce Lipton - A quest beyond the limits of the ordinary
VIII
Articles about Morphic Resonance and the Collective Consciousness:
1. Prayer and Mental Fields
Since ancient times, a strong and pervasive belief in the efficacy of prayer–for the living and the dead–reinforces the notion that consciousness is not limited to the physical body.
Not only do traditions throughout the world share a belief that prayers may in some way help (or invoke help from) deceased ancestors, many cultures throughout history have believed that prayer can bring about changes in the physical circumstances of the living.
If prayer affects things in the physical world, its effects should be measurable, and science should be able to investigate it. There is a very scattered literature on this, but when you bring it all together as Larry Dossey has done in his recent book, Healing Words (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), you see there is quite a large number of interesting experiments with challenging results. Out of 131 controlled experiments on prayer-based healing, more than half showed statistically significant benefits. One of the best known is a double blind study of 393 patients in the coronary unit at San Francisco General Hospital. In this experiment, 192 patients, chosen at random, were prayed for by home prayer groups, the others were not. The prayed-for patients recovered better than the controls, and fewer died.
In order to make sense of these data on the efficacy of prayer, science will have to change its underlying assumptions about the nature of causality. Currently, the standard view is still purely mechanistic–notwithstanding all the recent talk about chaos and complexity theory. When applied to the life sciences, chaos and complexity theory–even with the help of highly sophisticated computer modeling–still explain the world in terms of mechanical causes involving known physical and chemical processes.
The data from empirical studies of prayer, as well as from the large literature reporting psi research in telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, seriously challenge the mechanistic view. Some other causal agent besides the mechanics of electrochemical interactions is required to make sense of the observed phenomena.
Holistic thinkers generally divide into two main categories. The majority want to have holism on the cheap. They want a holism which doesn’t conflict with science as we know it. Instead of exploring the possibility of new causal factors, they prefer to explain holism in terms of complexity and self-organization of conventional mechanical forces, modeled with sophisticated mathematics and the latest computer techniques. Nothing essentially different from physical and chemical interactions is considered to account for the properties of living systems.
The other group of holists, a minority among which I include myself and Larry Dossey, think that there is more to it than just what we know about chemistry and physics and clever mathematical models. My view is that there are other causal factors in nature, processes that make actual differences–causes in nature which bring about new kinds of effects that we have to take into account in order to understand our experience and the world. These new causal factors are involved in things like paranormal phenomena, prayer and healing.
The whole thrust of my morphic resonance theory is to say there is more to nature than just the standard forces in physics. And what’s more these other agents are at the very heart of the way things are organized in chemistry, in life, and in consciousness.
How might prayer fit in with the scientific view of things? I shall focus on two broad categories of prayer: petitionary and intercessory. In petitionary prayer we ask for something for ourselves; in intercessory prayer we pray to a higher power for the benefit of other people (either living or dead).
In praying for other people and for ourselves we ask a higher power to bring about a particular result. For me, this is what distinguishes prayer from positive thinking. Positive thinking involves nothing more than one’s own mind, one’s own desires and wishes, but petitionary and intercessory prayer are put in the context of a higher power. For this reason positive thinking does not fit into the category of prayer–even though it is often confused with it.
Whether petitionary or intercessory, prayer clearly poses a challenge to the mechanistic view of the world. According to this view, there is no way that thoughts going on in your head, which at most create small electrochemical disturbances barely detectable a few inches from your head even by highly sensitive apparatus, could affect someone or something at a remote distance.
If you were practicing positive thinking or some of the more specifically directed forms of petitionary prayer, you could resort to explanations in terms of telepathy, or if it were a prayer affecting physical objects, you might say it was psychokinesis. But such explanations serve only to replace one set of explanations which lie outside the scope of modern mechanistic science with another set. There is nothing in mechanistic science that could allow mere thoughts inside my mind, whether cast in the form of prayer or as positive thinking, to affect things at a distance. It just can’t happen.
The key to understanding prayer as a scientific phenomenon requires, in my view, getting away from the idea of the mind as somehow inside the brain. If we think our minds are confined to our brains–the standard view–then since what goes on in our brain occurs in the privacy and isolation of our own skull it can’t affect anyone else. However, I see minds being field-like in nature (part of my general view of morphic fields), and I see mental fields as the basis for habitual patterns of thought. Mental fields go beyond, through, and interface with the electromagnetic patterns in the brain. In this way mental fields can affect our bodies through our brains. However, they are much more extensive than our brains, reaching out to great distances in some cases.
As soon as we have the idea that the mind can be extended through these mental fields, and over large distances, we have a medium of connection through which the power of prayer could work. We are no longer dealing with a purely mechanical system in the brain, with absolutely no way of connecting the brain and the observed effect–for if that were the case the phenomenon of effective prayer would have to be dismissed as delusion or coincidence. With a mental field, however, we have a medium for a whole series of connections between us and the people, animals and places we know and care about–with the rest of the world, in fact. When we pray, those extended mental fields would be the context in which prayer could work non-locally.
Read the second part about Prayer and Mental Fields: “Non-Local Mind in Nested Fields“
2. Morphic Resonance & Morphic Fields
Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough. Morphogenesis also depends on organizing fields. The same arguments apply to the development of animals. Since the 1920s many developmental biologists have proposed that biological organization depends on fields, variously called biological fields, or developmental fields, or positional fields, or morphogenetic fields.
All cells come from other cells, and all cells inherit fields of organization. Genes are part of this organization. They play an essential role. But they do not explain the organization itself. Why not?
Thanks to molecular biology, we know what genes do. They enable organisms to make particular proteins. Other genes are involved in the control of protein synthesis. Identifiable genes are switched on and particular proteins made at the beginning of new developmental processes. Some of these developmental switch genes, like the Hox genes in fruit flies, worms, fish and mammals, are very similar. In evolutionary terms, they are highly conserved. But switching on genes such as these cannot in itself determine form, otherwise fruit flies would not look different from us.
Many organisms live as free cells, including many yeasts, bacteria and amoebas. Some form complex mineral skeletons, as in diatoms and radiolarians, spectacularly pictured in the nineteenth century by Ernst Haeckel. Just making the right proteins at the right times cannot explain the complex skeletons of such structures without many other forces coming into play, including the organizing activity of cell membranes and microtubules.
In the face of heroic efforts needed to save our own lives, what chance do we have to save the world? Confronted with current global crises, we understandably shrink back, overwhelmed with a feeling of insignificance and paralysis-unable to influence the affairs of the world. It is far easier to be entertained by reality TV than to actually participate in our own reality.
Most developmental biologists accept the need for a holistic or integrative conception of living organization. Otherwise biology will go on floundering, even drowning, in oceans of data, as yet more genomes are sequenced, genes are cloned and proteins are characterized.
I suggest that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity. For example they cause microtubules to crystallize in one part of the cell rather than another, even though the subunits from which they are made are present throughout the cell.
Morphogenetic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I propose that that they are transmitted from past members of the species through a kind of non-local resonance, called morphic resonance.
The fields organizing the activity of the nervous system are likewise inherited through morphic resonance, conveying a collective, instinctive memory. Each individual both draws upon and contributes to the collective memory of the species. This means that new patterns of behaviour can spread more rapidly than would otherwise be possible. For example, if rats of a particular breed learn a new trick in Harvard, then rats of that breed should be able to learn the same trick faster all over the world, say in Edinburgh and Melbourne. There is already evidence from laboratory experiments (discussed in A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE) that this actually happens.
The resonance of a brain with its own past states also helps to explain the memories of individual animals and humans. There is no need for all memories to be “stored” inside the brain.
Social groups are likewise organized by fields, as in schools of fish and flocks of birds. Human societies have memories that are transmitted through the culture of the group, and are most explicitly communicated through the ritual re-enactment of a founding story or myth, as in the Jewish Passover celebration, the Christian Holy Communion and the American thanksgiving dinner, through which the past become present through a kind of resonance with those who have performed the same rituals before.
3. Mind, Memory & Archetype - Part 1:
Morphic Fields, the Collective Unconscious
In this essay, I am going to discuss the concept of collective memory as a background for understanding Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious only makes sense in the context of some notion of collective memory. This then takes us into a very wide-ranging examination of the nature and principle of memory-not just in human beings and not just in the animal kingdom; not even just in the realm of life-but in the universe as a whole. Such an encompassing perspective is part of a very profound paradigm shift that is taking place in science: the shift from the mechanistic to an evolutionary and wholistic world view.
The Cartesian mechanistic view is, in many ways, still the predominant paradigm today, especially in biology and medicine. Ninety percent of biologists would be proud to tell you that they are mechanistic biologists. Although physics has moved beyond the mechanistic view, much of our thinking about physical reality is still shaped by it-even in those of us who would like to believe that we have moved beyond this frame of thought. Therefore, I will briefly examine some of the fundamental assumptions of the mechanistic world view in order to show how it is still deeply embedded in the way that most of us think.
MECHANISM’S ROOTS IN NEO-PLATONIC MYSTICISM
It is interesting that the roots of the 17th-century mechanistic world view can be found in ancient mystical religion. Indeed, the mechanistic view was a synthesis of two traditions of thought, both of which were based on the mystical insight that reality is timeless and changeless. One of these traditions stems from Pythagoras and Plato, who were both fascinated by the eternal truths of mathematics. In the 17th century, this evolved into a view that nature was governed by timeless ideas, proportions, principles, or laws that existed within the mind of God. This world view became dominant and, through philosophers and scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo and Newton, it was incorporated into the foundations of modern physics.
Basically, they expressed the idea that numbers, proportions, equations, and mathematical principles are more real than the physical world we experience. Even today, many mathematicians incline toward this kind of Pythagorean or Platonic mysticism. They think of the physical world as a reification of mathematical principles, as a reflection of eternal numerical mathematical laws. This view is alien to the thinking of most of us, who the physical world as the “real” world and consider mathematical equations a man-made, and possibly inaccurate, description of that “real” world. Nevertheless, this mystical view has evolved into the currently predominant scientific viewpoint that nature is governed by eternal, changeless, immutable, omnipresent laws. The laws of nature are everywhere and always.
MATERIALISM’S ROOTS IN ATOMISM
The second view of changelessness which emerged in the 17th century stemmed from the atomistic tradition of materialism, which addressed an issue which, even then, was already deep-rooted in Greek thought: namely, the concept of a changeless reality. Parmenides, a pre-Socratic philosopher, had the idea that only being is; not-being is not. If something is, it can’t change because, in order to change, it would have to combine being and not-being, which was impossible. Therefore,. he concluded that reality is a homogenous, changeless sphere. Unfortunately for Parmenides, the world we experience is not homogenous, changeless, or spherical. In order to preserve his theory, Parmenides claimed that the world we experience is a delusion. This wasn’t a very satisfactory solution, and thinkers of the time tried to find a way to resolve this dilemma.
IX
Video: Lecture - Morphic Resonance, Collective Memory and the Habits of Nature
X
Excerpt from Research Paper on Telepathy:
“Sensing the Sending of SMS messages - an automated test“
INTRODUCTION
Most people believe they have experienced telepathy or other forms of “extrasensory perception” (ESP) or psi (e.g. Gallup & Newport, 1991; Blackmore, 1997; Sheldrake, 2003). On the other hand, some scientists believe that such claims are erroneous or illusory, or impossible in principle (e.g. Humphrey, 1995). Starting from an assumption of impossibility or extreme improbability, several organizations, such as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), are dedicated to promoting a very critical attitude to telepathy and other psi phenomena (Carter, 2007). Organizations such as the Society for Psychical Research and the Parapsychological Association also promote a critical, scientific attitude, but in a more open-minded spirit.
A small minority of scientists have been investigating telepathy experimentally for more than 125 years (Radin, 2007). From the 1880s to the 1940s, the most popular experimental method involved card-guessing tests. During this period, 142 published articles described 3.6 million such trials, with positive hit rates that were statistically significant, even though the average effect was small, less than 2% above the level expected by chance (Pratt, et al., 1966).
In the 1960s and 1970s, controlled studies of dreams provided a new approach. Could people pick up images telepathically when dreaming in a laboratory, while a “sender” in another room concentrated on a randomly chosen image? In a meta-analysis of the 25 published studies on dream telepathy, covering a total of 450 trials, the overall hit rate was significantly above chance expectation (Radin, 1997).
Since the 1970s, the principal method used by parapsychologists for investigating telepathy was called the Ganzfeld, and involved a mild form of sensory deprivation. Participants sat in a relaxed state in dim red light with halved ping-pong balls over their eyes. In another room, a “sender” concentrated on a picture or video clip, selected at random from a pool of possible targets. After the session, the participant was shown four pictures or video clips, and asked to pick which one most closely corresponded to impressions he or she may have received during the test session. By chance, participants would select the target picture roughly one time in four, with a hit rate of 25%. In 1985, a meta-analysis covering 28 studies showed a hit rate of 37% (Honorton, 1985). A leading member of CSICOP published a metaanalysis of the same data (Hyman, 1985), and also found that the odds against chance were astronomical.
Read more:
Rupert Sheldrake’s official website
Logicality - linguistically dissecting the notion of “truth”
Writers of the Universe - an essay about the power of the written word
Go back: