Rupert Sheldrake Quotes

It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”’17 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it.

As Terence McKenna observed, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.”4

First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists

The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.

I am all in favour of science and reason if they are scientific and reasonable. But I am against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and sceptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment.17

[M]odern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or – in Plato’s sense – Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.

I am more interested in dogs than in dogmas. Obviously,

Rupert Sheldrake puts it, “The evangelists of science and technology have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the missionaries of Christianity.

The sudden appearance of all the Laws of Nature is as untestable as Platonic metaphysics or theology. Why should we assume that all the Laws of Nature were already present at the instant of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic code? Perhaps some of them, such as those that govern protein crystals, or brains, came into being when protein crystals or brains first arose. The preexistence of these laws cannot possibly be tested before the emergence of the phenomena they govern.

Extended minds are implicit in our language. The words “attention” and “intention” come from the Latin root tendere, to stretch, as in “tense” and “tension.” “Attention” is ad + tendere, “to stretch toward”; “intention,” in + tendere, “to stretch into.

In any case, however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their parts by killing them and analysing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them organisms.

For instance, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake’s work with dogs? He puts a time-recording camera on both the dog at home and the human companion at work. He has discovered that even if people come home from work at a different time each day, at the moment the person leaves work, the dog at home heads for the door. “Even mainstream scientists are stumbling all over this biocommunication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it’s the result of ‘loose wires.’ We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there.

We must become aware of the astonishing fact that as a species we are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood. As human beings, we once had a symbiotic relationship with the world-girdling intelligence of the planet that was mediated through shamanic plant use. This relationship was disrupted and eventually lost by the progressive climatic drying of the Eurasian and African land masses.

Strategic thinking requires the ability to contemplate possibilities that are not immediately present.

The commonest kinds of seemingly telepathic response are the anticipation by dogs and cats of their owners coming home; the anticipation of owners going away; the anticipation of being fed; cats disappearing when their owners intend to take them to the vet; dogs knowing when their owners are planning to take them for a walk; and animals that get excited when their owner is on the telephone, even before the telephone is answered.

Traditional theories of human creativity ascribe it to inspiration from a higher source working through the creative individual, who acts as a channel. The same conception underlies the notion of genius; originally the genius was not the person himself but his presiding god or spirit.

I cannot pretend that I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return . . . Above all, I have been a sentient being on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

If memory within nature sounds mysterious, we should bear in mind that mathematical laws transcending nature are more rather than less so; they are metaphysical rather than physical. The way mathematical laws can exist independently of the evolving universe and at the same time act upon it remains a profound mystery. For those who accept God, this mystery is an aspect of God's relation to the realm of nature; for those who deny God, the mystery is even more obscure: A quasi-mental realm of mathematical laws somehow exists independently of nature, yet not in God, and governs the evolving physical world without itself being physical.

cosmologists have come to the conclusion that known kinds of matter and energy constitute only about 4 per cent of the universe. The rest consists of dark matter and dark energy. The nature of 96 per cent of physical reality is literally obscure.8

Our human dependence on the living processes of the earth was largely forgotten with the growth of industrial civilization. Now we are being forced to remember that Gaia is greater than we are and that the human economy is embedded within the ecology of the biosphere. So, in what sense is Gaia alive? And what difference does it make if we think of her as a living organism, as opposed to an inanimate physical system?

Why are rituals so conservative? And why do people all over the world believe that through ritual activities they are participating in a process that takes them out of ordinary secular time and somehow brings the past into the present? The idea of morphic resonance provides a natural answer to these questions. Through morphic resonance, ritual really can bring the past into the present. The present performers of the ritual indeed connect with those in the past. The greater the similarity between the way the ritual is performed now and the way it was performed before, the stronger the resonant connection between the past and present participants.

In ancient Rome, money was minted in the temple of Juno Moneta, the Great Mother in her aspect of adviser and admonisher. She is the source of our words money and monetary.

Mathematically, morphogenetic fields can be modified in terms of attractors within basins of attraction.

The further the distance, the stronger the illusion.

The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out but, in principle, the fundamental questions are settled.

The sunlike energy released by the fusion of atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, is detonated by the fission of one of the heaviest, plutonium, named after the god of the underworld.

the very word for matter is derived from the same root as mother-in Latin, the corresponding words are materia and matet-and (as discussed in Chapter 3), the whole ethos of materialism is permeated with maternal metaphors.

All creation or destruction of forms, or morphogenesis, can be described by the disappearance of the attractors representing the initial forms, and their replacement by capture by the attractors representing the final forms.

The difference between the Platonic theory and the morphic-resonance hypothesis can be illustrated by analogy with a television set. The pictures on the screen depend on the material components of the set and the energy that powers it, and also on the invisible transmissions it receives through the electromagnetic field. A sceptic who rejected the idea of invisible influences might try to explain everything about the pictures and sounds in terms of the components of the set – the wires, transistors, and so on – and the electrical interactions between them. Through careful research he would find that damaging or removing some of these components affected the pictures or sounds the set produced, and did so in a repeatable, predictable way. This discovery would reinforce his materialist belief. He would be unable to explain exactly how the set produced the pictures and sounds, but he would hope that a more detailed analysis of the components and more complex mathematical models of their interactions would eventually provide the answer. Some mutations in the components – for example, by a defect in some of the transistors – affect the pictures by changing their colours or distorting their shapes; while mutations of components in the tuning circuit cause the set to jump from one channel to another, leading to a completely different set of sounds and pictures. But this does not prove that the evening news report is produced by interactions among the TV set’s components. Likewise, genetic mutations may affect an animal’s form and behaviour, but this does not prove that form and behaviour are programmed in the genes. They are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism coming from outside it, just as TV sets are resonantly tuned to transmissions that originate elsewhere.

morphic resonance points to new ways forward: If the regularities of nature are evolving habits rather than eternal laws, there is no need to assume that all these regularities were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang. Hence there is no need to suppose that all laws of nature were intelligently designed at the moment of creation, or else that there are an infinite number of unobserved universes. These hypotheses are unnecessary if nature is radically evolutionary, as the hypothesis of formative causation proposes.

It is not anti-scientific to question established beliefs, but central to science itself. At the creative heart of science is the spirit of open minded inquiry. Ideally, science is a process and not a position or a belief system. Innovative science happens when scientists feel free to ask questions and build new theories.

But the cosmonaut Aleksandr Aleksandrov summed up the principal message for millions of people. Looking down on America and then in Russia, he saw the first snow and imagined people in both countries getting ready for winter. "And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth. It does not matter what country you look at. We are all Earth's children, and we should treat her as our Mother.

Dark matter is currently thought to make up about 23 percent of the mass and energy of the universe, whereas normal matter and energy make up only about 4 percent. Worse still, most contemporary cosmologists think that the continuing expansion of the universe is driven by “dark energy,” whose nature is again obscure. According to the Standard Model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for about 73 percent of the matter and energy of the universe. How do dark matter and energy relate to regular matter and energy? And what is the zero-point energy field, also known as the quantum vacuum? Can any of this zero-point energy be tapped? The law of conservation of matter and energy was formulated before these questions arose, and has no ready answer for them. It is based on philosophical and theological theories. Historically, it is rooted in the atomistic school of philosophy in ancient Greece. From the outset it was an assumption. In its modern form, it combines a series of “laws” that have developed since the seventeenth century—the laws of conservation of matter, mass, motion, force and energy. In this chapter I look at the history of these ideas, and show how modern physics throws up questions that the old theories cannot answer. As faith in conservation comes into question, astonishing new possibilities open up in realms ranging from the generation of energy to human nutrition.

Consider your arms and legs. They contain exactly the same kinds of muscle cells, nerve cells, and so on. They contain the same proteins and other chemicals; the bones are made of identical substance. Yet they have different shapes, just as houses of different design can be made from the same building materials. The chemicals alone do not determine the form. Nor does the DNA. The DNA is the same in all the cells of the arms and the legs, and indeed everywhere else in the body. All the cells are genetically programmed identically. Yet somehow they behave differently and form tissues and organs of different structures. Clearly some formative influence other than DNA must be shaping the developing arms and legs. All developmental biologists acknowledge this fact. But at this stage their mechanistic explanations peter out into vague statements about "complex spatio-temporal patterns of physico-chemical interaction not yet fully understood." Obviously this is not a solution but just another way of stating the problem.

We need to respond to our present ecological crisis practically, by making appropriate social, political, economic, and technological changes. We need to look at the attitudes that have led to such devastation of the earth and to find a more harmonious way of living. And those of us who believe in the power of prayer need to pray for forgiveness and guidance. If a wiser and juster human order comes about, if a new harmony develops between humanity and the living world, this would indeed seem like an answer to prayer.

On the cosmological level, the primary polarity is between the expansive impulse that underlies the growth of the universe and the contractive field of gravitation that holds everything together. If the centrifigual force is predominant, the universe will expand indefinitely; if the centripetal, the universe will sooner or later stop growing and begin to contract until everything is annihilated in the Big Crunch. No one knows what will happen. But in the meantime, the interplay between these expansive and contractive principles underlies the processes of cosmic evolution.

If behavior is indeed governed by morphic fields, when some members of a species acquire a new pattern of behavior and hence a new behavioral field, for example, by learning a new trick, then others should tend to learn the same thing more quickly, even in the absence of any known means of connection or communication. The more members of the species that learn it, the greater should this effect become all over the world. Thus, for example, if laboratory rats learn a new trick in America, rats in laboratories elsewhwere should show a tendency to learn it faster. There is experimental evidemce that this effect actually occurs.

Everywhere we look in the realm of nature we find polarities, such as electrical and magnetic polarities. These can, if we like, be modeled in terms of gender; for example, positive electrical charge is associated with dense, relative immobile atomic nuclei, a bit like eggs; negative charge is associated with the smaller electrons, moving in swarms, a bit like sperm. But sexual gender is only one of many kinds of natural polarity and only one of the ways we experience polarity in our own lives. Others include the polarities of up and down, in and out, front and back, right and left, past and future, sleeping and waking, friend and foe, sweet and sour, hot and cold, pleasure and pain, good and bad.

Even single cells have astonishing regenerative abilities. Acetabularia, the mermaid’s wineglass, is a single-celled green alga about five centimeters long, with three main parts: root-like structures called rhizoids that attach it to a rock, a stem and a cap about a centimeter wide (Figure 5.2). This very large cell has a single nucleus in one of the rhizoids. As the plant grows, its stem lengthens, it forms a series of whorls of hairs that later drop off, and finally forms the cap. If the cap is cut off by snipping the stem in two, after the cut has healed, a new tip grows and the stem forms a series of whorls of hairs and then a new cap, in a similar way to the normal pattern of growth. This can happen over and over again if the cap is cut off repeatedly.2 As discussed in the following chapter, the usual assumption is that genes somehow control or “program” the development of form, as if the nucleus, containing the genes, is a kind of brain controlling the cell. But Acetabularia shows that morphogenesis can take place without genes. If the rhizoid containing the nucleus is cut off, the alga can stay alive for months, and if the cap is cut off, it can regenerate a new one. Even more remarkable, if a piece is cut out of the stem, after the cuts have healed, a new tip grows from the end where the cap used to be and makes a new cap (Figure 5.2).3 Morphogenesis is goal-directed, and moves toward a morphic attractor even in the absence of genes. FIGURE 5.2. Regeneration of the alga Acetabularia mediterranea, an unusually large single-celled organism, up to 5cm tall, containing a green cap at the top of a long stalk, anchored at the base by root-like rhizoids. There is a large nucleus (shown as a black oval) in the basal part of the cell. When the stalk is cut off near the bottom, the basal part of the cell regenerates a new stalk and cap (shown on the right). When a part of the upper stalk is cut out, it grows a new cap and more stalk, even though it contains no nucleus.

The downside is that by recognizing our total dependence on powers beyond ourselves, we can be filled with an overwhelming sense of religious obligation and guilt at not fulfilling it. One way out of this sense of inadequacy is to become an atheist. If everything happens automatically and unconsciously, if there is no purpose or providence in the world, then there is nothing to feel grateful for. But this liberation comes at a high price. Being ungrateful is often accompanied by unhappiness.

who refers to memes as “units of cultural transmission.” This quote comes from a 2012 article penned by Rupert Sheldrake, a scientist I’ve

cognitive dissonance is

The first scientific model of this system appeared in Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life. Where Leary and Grof, like Jung and Freud, assumed the non-ego information, not known to the brain, must come from the genes, Sheldrake, a biologist, knew that genes cannot carry such information. He therefore posited a non-local field, like those in quantum theory, which he named the morphogenetic field. This field communicates between genes but cannot be found "in" the genes — just as Johnny Carson "travels" between TV sets but cannot be found "in" any of the TV sets that receive him.

What is emerging in its place is an evolutionary vision of reality at every level: subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, social, ecological, cultural, mental, economic, astronomical and cosmic.

The development of quantum mechanics in the late 1920s expanded the classical notion of fields in a way that would have shocked Newtonian physicists. Quantum fields do not exist physically in space-time like the classically inferred gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Instead, quantum fields specify only probabilities for strange, ghostlike particles as they manifest in space-time. Although quantum fields are mathematically similar to classical fields, they are more difficult to understand because, unlike classical fields, they exist outside the usual boundaries of space-time. This gives the quantum field a peculiar nonlocal character, meaning the field is not located in a given region of space and time. With a nonlocal phenomenon, what happens in region A instantaneously influences what occurs in region B, and vice versa, without any energy being exchanged between the two regions. Such a phenomenon would be impossible according to classical physics, and yet nonlocality has been dramatically and convincingly revealed in modern physics experiments. In fact, those experiments are independent of the present formulation of quantum mechanics, which means that any future theory of nature must also embody the principle of nonlocality. We’ll return to nonlocality again in chapter 16. Consciousness Fields Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. —Claude Levi-Strauss The idea that consciousness may be fieldlike is not new.2 William James wrote about this idea in 1898, and more recently the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed a similar idea with his concept of morphogenetic fields.3 The conceptual roots of field consciousness can be traced back to Eastern philosophy, especially the Upanishads, the mystical scriptures of Hinduism, which express the idea of a single underlying reality embodied in “Brahman,” the absolute Self. The idea of field consciousness suggests a continuum of nonlocal intelligence, permeating space and time. This is in contrast with the neuroscience-inspired, Newtonian view of a perceptive tissue locked inside the skull.

A New Science of Life, Rupert Sheldrake

Zoological physiology is the doctrine of the functions or actions of animals. It regards animal bodies as machines impelled by various forces, and performing a certain amount of work which can be expressed in terms of the ordinary forces of nature. The final object of physiology is to deduce the facts of morphology on the one hand, and those of ecology on the other, from the laws of the molecular forces of matter.

The genetic program as a vital factor is not the same as the DNA molecules in the genes, for these are just molecules, not mindlike entities. The fact that qualities of mind are commonly projected onto the genes, especially the qualities of selfish, competitive people within capitalist societies, makes it easy to forget that they are just chemicals. As such, they play a chemical role, and their activity is confined to the chemical level. The genetic code in the DNA molecules determines the sequence of amino-acid building blocks in protein molecules , the so-called primary structure of the proteins. The genes dictate the primary stucture of proteins, not the specific shape of a duck's foot or a lamb's kidney or an orchid. The way the proteins are arranged in cells, the ways cells are arranged in tissues, and tissues in organs, and organs in organisms are not programmed in the genetic code , which can only program protein molecules. Given the right genes and hence the right proteins, and the right systems by which protein synthesis is controlled, the organism is somehow supposed to assemble itself automatically. This is rather like delivering the right materials to a building site at the right times and expecting a house to grow spontaneously.

The idea of morphogenetic fields has been widely adopted in developmental biology. But the nature of these fields has remained obscure. Some biologists think of them as useful turns of phrase but in reality consisting of no more than "complex spatio-temporal patterns of physico-chemical interaction not yet fully understood." Others think of these fields as governed by morphogenetic field equations that exist in a Platonic realm of eternal mathematical forms. Thus the morphogentic field equations for the dinosaurs, for example, always existed, even before the Big Bang. The equations were not affected by the evolution of the dinosaurs or by their extinction. The morphogenetic field equations for all past, present, and future species, and indeed for all possible species (many of which may never actually exist), somehow dwell eternally in a transcendant mathematical realm. These mathematical truths are beyond time; they cannot evolve and are not affected by anything that actually happens in the physical world. They are like ideal designs for all possible organisms in the mind of a mathematical God.

The way past hemoglobin molecules, penicillin crystals, or giraffes influence the morphic fields of present ones depends on a process called morphic resonance, the influence of like upon like through space and time. Morphic resonance does not fall off with distance. It does not involve a transfer of energy, but of information. In effect, this hypothesis enables the regularities of nature to be understood as governed by habits inherited by morphic resonance, rather than by eternal, nonmaterial, and non-energetic laws.

This hypothesis is inevitably controversial, but it is testable by experiment, and there is already considerable circumstantial evidence in its favor. For example, when a newly synthesized organic chemical is crystallized for the first time (say a new drug), there will be no morphic resonance from previous crystals of this type. A new morphic field has to come into existence; of the many energetically possible ways the substance could crystallize, one actually happens. The next time the substance is crystallized anywhere in the world, morphic resonance from the first crystals will make this same pattern of crystallization more probable, and so on. A cumulative memory will build up as the pattern becomes more and more habitual. As a consequence, the crystals should tend to form more readily all over the world. Such a tendency is in fact well known; new compounds are generally difficult to crystallize, sometimes taking weeks or even months to form from supersaturated solutions. As time goes on, they tend to appear more readily all over the world.

The organization of insect colonies involves several mysterious features quite apart from the prodigious complexity of the social organization itself. For example, in his studies of South African termites, the naturalist Eugene Marais found that they could speedily repair damage to the mounds, rebuilding tunnels and arches, working from both sides of the breach he had made, and meeting up perfectly in the middle, even though the individual insects are blind. He then carried out a simple but fascinating experiment. He took a large steel plate several feet wider and higher than the termitary and drove it right through the center of the breach so that it divided the mound, and indeed the entire termitary, into two separate parts: The builders on one side of the breach know nothing of those on the other side. In spite of this the termites build a similar arch or tower on both sides of the plate. When eventually you withdraw the plate, the two halves match perfectly after the dividing cut has been repaired. We cannot escape the ultimate conclusion that somewhere there exists a preconceived plan which the termites merely execute. From the present point of view, such a plan would exist within the morphic field of the colony as a whole. By morphic resonance, this would contain a collective memory of all similar termite colonies in the past, as well as a memory of the colony's own past, by self-resonance.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic, and intolerant. So is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, science fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.