Rupert Sheldrake’s “Parting The Veil” is the second excerpt we’ve reprinted from a wonderful book called The Schumacher Lectures, Volume II. The first was Colin Wilson’s “Peak Experience” in Issue 108, about controlling the brain, one of the most talked-about articles we’ve published.
What Sheldrake says is no less important and provocative.
A biologist, Sheldrake has aroused often bitter controversy, been hailed by some as the new Darwin and just as vigorously denounced.
Yet his theory of morphic resonance, originally set forth in his book, A New Science of Life, not only explains many long-regarded mysteries, but also turns out to be highly testable — easily and cheaply.
Sheldrake spends half the year writing, lecturing, and traveling and the other half working for the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, South India.
His book is available from the Schumacher Book Service, Ford House, Harland, Bideford, Devon, where you can also order Resurgence, the best English magazine I know, which originally printed this talk.
The Schumacher Lectures honors the work of Dr. Ernst Schumacher, an economist and author of Small Is Beautiful. It also includes talks by the poet Gary Snyder, author Wendell Berry, and Russell Means of the American Indian Movement.
To order The Schumacher Lectures, Volume II, write Blond and Briggs, 55/57 Great Ormond Street, London WC1N 3HZ, England.
— Ed.
Today, October 22, 1983, with several million people throughout Europe taking part in demonstrations in support of United Nations Disarmament Week and protesting against plans to deploy yet more nuclear weapons in Europe, it is impossible not to be aware of the increasing danger with which we are faced. It seems to me that unless we change the way we think and feel, the chances of our own survival and the survival of countless other living organisms on this planet are remote. I hope that we can reflect a little more about this question of our attitudes and the influence they have.
Before going on to this I would like to consider briefly some of the problems of biology, and in particular a new way of thinking about these problems provided by the hypothesis of formative causation. This has many wide-ranging implications and I think some of them are relevant to the question of our attitude to nuclear armaments.
The hypothesis starts with some of the central problems of biology. It is not something that has been conjured out of thin air, but which has grown out of a whole tradition of biological thought and research which has been going on for well over a century. One of the central problems of biology is to understand how animals and plants grow and develop. Some of the most simple and obvious things about living organisms that we see every day are the least understood: plants grow from seeds, embryos develop, mothers give birth, and so on. In these processes, living forms appear. They only appear from something that is already living, a fertilized egg for example, but what they grow from is usually far simpler than what they become. As organisms develop, a tremendous complexity of structure and form appears, and then in the case of animals a great richness of behavior unfolds. Think of the instincts of insects like bees or ants, or how young spiders can spin webs without ever learning it from their parents, or the way in which birds migrate instinctively to distant parts of this planet. All these very obvious things about plants and animals, as well as a great deal about ourselves, are not at all understood in terms of existing science.
The mechanistic theory of life, which forms the basis of conventional biology, says that living organisms are nothing but complicated machines, and that the whole is nothing but the sum of the parts. Therefore the aim of mechanistic biology is to reduce the organisms to the parts and their interactions, and finally to reduce the whole of biology to physics. This program has been quite successful in some areas, and the reason why it is so influential is because of its success. Some parts of the body are indeed like machines — the heart is like a pump, the lungs are like bellows, the eyes a bit like a camera, the brain in some ways resembles a telephone exchange with wires coming in and going out, the arms work like levers, and much of the chemistry of living organisms follows standard kinds of chemical pathways. We have amino acids, ketones, aldehydes, sugars and many other identifiable chemicals in our bodies. We now know the chemical constitution of the genetic material, DNA; we know a lot about the way in which proteins are made and about their structure. Moreover, there have been great successes in medicine and of course modern mechanistic medicine is based on mechanistic biology.
But there are other areas where this approach has been unsuccessful. Many people assume that the basic problems of life are already solved. But they are not. For example, as I have just mentioned, there is the mystery of the coming-into-being of form. We can see the problem a little more clearly if we just think of our own bodies. Consider the arms and legs. The chemicals inside them are identical; the muscles, the bones, the proteins are chemically the same in both, and so is the DNA — indeed the genetic material is identical in all the cells in our bodies. Yet in spite of their chemical identity the arms and the legs have a different shape. Their shape is not explained by the chemicals they contain, just as the buildings we see out of the window are not entirely explained in terms of the stone they are made out of. The form depends both on the materials and on the way the materials are organized. The organization of the material, the formal structure, is not reducible to the things it is made out of. With the same stones and the same wood and the same tiles one could make buildings of different form, just as with the same chemicals the arms and the legs have different shapes.
What is it that gives organisms their form? When we walk in the countryside we see dozens of different kinds of plants. All of them are living in the same earth, getting the same sunlight, with the same carbon dioxide in the air and using the same water from the soil. Yet their forms are different, and each species has its own kind of form and organization. What is this due to?
Because attempts to explain form and structural organization in terms of chemistry have been so unsuccessful, mechanistic biology has for years retreated into a rather obscurantist position. Living shapes and patterns are said to come about through complex patterns of chemical and physical interaction which are not yet fully understood. It is simply assumed that all these things will be understood in terms of ordinary physics and chemistry at some unspecified time in the future. So the reigning paradigm is not one of rigorous mechanistic explanation, but rather what Sir Karl Popper has described as “of promissory materialism.” It involves issuing promissory notes against future explanations which don’t yet exist. In my opinion they never will, because I don’t think these problems can be solved by mechanistic methods. This is where I differ from many of my biological colleagues. They admit that these are open questions, that the problems are unsolved, but they think that, given more research along conventional lines, completely mechanistic answers will be found in the end.
However, there has been a long dissident tradition within biology of scientists who have felt that the phenomena of life can’t be adequately explained simply in terms of physics and chemistry. One reason for thinking this is because organisms have a curious kind of wholeness, which is more than the sum of their parts. This can be shown most easily by taking parts away. For example if a leg is cut off a newt, a part has gone. But then the rest of the newt regenerates the leg and you get a whole back again. Or if the lens is cut out of a newt’s eye, the eye grows a new lens. The lens in this case forms from the edge of the iris, whereas normally, in the embryo, it forms in a different way by a folding in of the outside skin. If you cut a flatworm into small pieces, each piece can become a new worm; and of course if you cut a plant into bits, you can grow many new plants. From one tree you can produce thousands of trees — each part that you took off as a cutting can become a new tree. The parts can become wholes.
We are often deluded by people telling us that with computers and cybernetics, living processes such as these can be modeled. But we have to think not of some abstract computer model, but of the actual thing. The actual thing that people are talking about in the computer analogy is the computer and its activities. And you can see that if you cut a computer into small pieces you don’t get lots of small wholes which will regenerate. You simply get a broken computer.
A concept which has been developed over the last sixty years forms the starting point for my hypothesis. This is the idea of morphogenetic fields. Morphe means form and genesis means coming into being; so morphogenesis is the coming-into-being of form. These fields were assumed to be involved in the coming-into-being of form in animals and plants. The idea was that as an organism developed it would be shaped or molded by these morphogenetic fields, which are invisible structures around it. These fields were thought of by analogy with the known fields of physics, which are all invisible structures. None of us has ever seen, touched, tasted, smelled or heard one. We forget, because they are part of ordinary science, that they are really very extraordinary. The idea of morphogenetic fields takes the idea of invisible structures one step further in proposing a new kind of field that works in living organisms. The idea has the great advantage of helping to explain where the form and structure of the organism comes from — from the field. It also helps to account for the holistic properties of organisms, because fields have a holistic quality. Think of a magnet surrounded by a magnetic field. You can’t cut a slice out of that field: the field is a whole. If you cut a magnet into two, you get two whole magnets, small ones. You don’t get a north pole and a south pole isolated from each other. And each fragment of the magnet is a magnet itself with a full magnetic field around it. So this property of fields could also help to account for regeneration and the wholeness of organisms.
A very attractive idea. But it is open to the obvious objection that if we explain all these things in terms of fields, then how do we explain the fields themselves? Where do they themselves get their structure from? One way of answering this is to say that they have always had it, that they are in effect Platonic archetypes, or eternally given forms. Some biologists have indeed adopted this point of view. I myself prefer to think more in terms of causal explanations which can be tested. The basis of the hypothesis I am putting forward is that morphogenetic fields derive their structure from the actual structure or forms of previous members of a species. A cat morphogenetic field, for example, which shapes the embryonic kitten as it grows, is derived from the actual forms of previous cats. This involves a kind of causal influence of like upon like through space and time, direct connections by a process which I call morphic resonance. The morphogenetic fields therefore act as a kind of collective memory of the species in which the forms, patterns and structures of the species are carried. All organisms within the species are shaped by these fields, and in turn through their actions and activities contribute to them.
The hypothesis also applies to forms of non-living things such as crystals; I am suggesting that crystals are also molded and shaped by morphogenetic fields. At the other end of the scale, not only the organization of form and structure but also the behavior and instincts of animals depend on these fields.
This hypothesis leads to a range of startling predictions. This is what makes it scientific, because a scientific hypothesis must be able to be tested empirically. And this hypothesis can be tested in many different ways, and is indeed being tested at present.
In the realm of crystals, the hypothesis predicts that if you make a new chemical compound that has never existed before, there will not already be a morphogenetic field for its crystals, because those crystals have never yet formed. In order to crystallize it, you may just have to wait for a morphogenetic field to come along, and sooner or later the compound crystallizes. After this, the next time the compound is crystallized anywhere in the world, it should happen somewhat more easily because of an influence from the first crystals. The third time it is easier still, and so on. In this way, there will be a cumulative influence from previous crystals, and this means, according to the hypothesis, that it should get easier to crystallize the same compound all over the world as time goes on.
Is this true? In fact, it is well known to chemists that new compounds are generally very difficult to crystallize, and as time goes on they get easier and easier to crystallize all over the world. One possible reason is that people get to know how to do it, but the most popular explanation is that this happens because fragments of previous crystals which act as seeds for further crystallization are carried around the world on the clothing and beards of migrant chemists! These stories don’t appear in chemistry text books, but they are very much part of the folklore of chemistry. When one speaks to chemists one is often told these kinds of anecdotes. In cases where there haven’t been any migrant chemists, it is simply assumed that microscopic fragments of crystals go into the air, were wafted around the world in the atmosphere and have then settled in laboratories in remote parts of the globe. Well, this hypothesis, the conventional one, has never been tested. It could be; and so I simply propose experiments under standard conditions in dust-free rooms from which bearded chemists are excluded. Then one would be able to see whether in the absence of these known kinds of influence crystallization still occurs more readily. If it does, it will provide good evidence for the hypothesis I am proposing. These experiments can be done quite cheaply, quite simply, in ordinary chemistry laboratories.
What is it that gives organisms their form? When we walk in the countryside we see dozens of different kinds of plants. All of them are living in the same earth, getting the same sunlight. . . . Yet their forms are different, and each species has its own kind of form and organization. What is this due to?
The hypothesis makes many predictions in relation to the form of animals and plants, but the easiest to understand concern behavior. Here I come to the well-known example of rats. The hypothesis predicts that if animals, such as rats, learn a new trick in one place, rats of the same breed should be able to learn the same trick more quickly everywhere else in the world, even in the absence of any known kind of connection or communication. The more rats that learn it in one place, say Bristol, the easier it should become everywhere else. You may think, if this is true, why haven’t people noticed it? The answer is that they have. The copious literature on rat psychology that has been built up over the last few decades contains several examples. I describe in my book, A New Science of Life, a particularly interesting series of experiments carried out in America, Scotland and Australia. In these experiments, rats were put in a water maze from which they had to escape in a particular way. At first, the rats learned only slowly to do this, but as time went on the rate of learning increased all over the world. This happened not only in rats descended from parents which had learned the task, but in all the rats of that breed. By the end of this series of tests, rats were learning on average about ten times faster than their predecessors.
One of the advantages of experiments of this kind, involving whole organisms, is that they are actually quite cheap to do. Some of the experiments I am proposing with fruit flies, for example, could be done on a budget of about fifty pounds, with simple equipment that could be found in most school laboratories. I just add this as an aside, because in the context of a Schumacher Lecture I think the fact that testing this hypothesis could be done so cheaply is an interesting point. It seems to be a general rule that in biology if you study whole organisms, it is usually rather inexpensive. It is only when you start breaking them down into small bits that it becomes more complicated and costly. To study the behavior of rats, for example, all you need are rats and cages, and maybe some simple gadgets for them to learn to operate. You also need a notebook and a pencil, and of course food for the rats and all that sort of thing, but nothing very expensive. If you want to study the cell of a rat, then you need to have a microscope and equipment costing maybe a few thousand pounds. But if you want to study the molecules within them, then you need much more the sophisticated apparatus of biochemistry and molecular biology, which costs a great deal. To study the atoms, you need all the panoply of a modern physics laboratory; and to study bits of the atoms, the sub-atomic particles, you need particle accelerators miles long that cost hundreds of millions of pounds. So as a general rule the smaller and the more fragmented the things you study, the more expensive and specialized the process becomes.
To study animals and plants as wholes is usually not only quite cheap, but it is also within the capacity of people who need not be qualified specialists. It turns out that many of the tests on the hypothesis of formative causation could in fact be done quite cheaply and simply, and this means that the process of testing the theory need not be confined to professional scientists. In fact, a prize of $10,000 is being offered by the Tarrytown Group of New York for the beta test of the theory, and this competition is open to everyone.
One way of thinking about the influence of morphogenetic fields is by analogy with a television set. This is important in that it helps us to understand that both physical and chemical components and morphogenetic fields are involved in living organisms. Consider the form of the organism to be like the pictures on the screen of the set. To understand these pictures you have to take into account the set itself, with all the right wires and components connected up in the right way, and you also need to consider the energy which comes from the plug or from batteries. But in addition there are the invisible fields to which the set is tuned, through which the transmissions come. You have a tuning system, and you have the fields to which it is tuned. I think in living organisms the DNA, proteins, and other chemicals are rather like the wires and transistors of the TV set. They are the components. The way they are organized and what happens with the organization depend on the morphogenetic fields to which they are tuned. This concept leads to a very different view of heredity from the conventional one. Not only do we inherit chemicals from our forebears, such as DNA, the genetic material, but we also inherit morphogenetic fields which mold our form and influence our patterns of behavior. These are given directly by morphic resonance from past members of the species, not by chemical inheritance. Change the chemical inheritance and you can change the tuning system, rather like a TV set being switched to another channel. So genetic changes can and do indeed affect heredity, but this does not mean that everything is coded inside the genes, any more than the people you see on the screen are coded inside the wires and components of the television set.
This hypothesis also leads to a reinterpretation of evolutionary theory, which is based at present on the chemical theory of inheritance. Morphic resonance would allow for an inheritance of acquired characteristics, not only in the descendants of organisms which have acquired them, but in other members of the species as well, maybe in quite different parts of the world.
One of the most intriguing implications of the idea of morphic resonance concerns memory. It is conventionally assumed that memories are stored inside the brain, and of course most of us have been brought up with that assumption. The way in which they are stored is very much a matter of dispute. Some people think memories are stored in chemicals, such as RNA; others think they are stored by means of complicated electrical echoes or reverberations within the brain; and a perennial favorite is the idea of modifications of the nerve endings. However, attempts to locate memory traces within the brain have failed and it is now usually assumed that their position cannot be pinned down; they seem to be both everywhere and nowhere in particular. These puzzling findings have led to the holographic theory of memory storage, which tries to explain why you can’t find localized memory traces.
Loss of memory can of course result from brain damage, but this doesn’t prove that memories are stored inside the parts of the brain that are damaged. Think of the television again. If you damaged a television tuning circuit, you might lose the ability to tune into one channel — say, ITV. But that doesn’t prove that all the ITV programs are stored inside the components that are damaged; it merely proves that they are necessary for the tuning process. There is in fact no convincing evidence that memories are stored inside the brain; the main reason why most people do not question this assumption is that there does not seem to be any other way memory could work.
However, once one begins to take seriously the idea of morphic resonance, then the possibility arises that memories may not be stored inside the brain at all. Morphic resonance works on the basis of similarity. The specificity of tuning to past similar organisms depends on how similar they are. If you think which organism in the past, perhaps an hour or a year ago, was most similar to yourself, the answer has to be yourself. We are more similar to ourselves in the past than we are to any other organism, and I believe this means that we are tuned in specifically to our own pasts, and why our own pasts have a predominant influence upon us.
But if we tune directly to our own past stories, and if our memories are not stored inside our brains, then why don’t we tune in to other people’s pasts as well? I think the answer is that we do. According to this theory, it would be only natural to assume that we tune into the memories of innumerable past members of our species, and that there is a kind of pooled or collective memory that we draw upon. This would consist of the basic structures of experience and thought. It would, in a word, contain archetypal patterns. And here we arrive at a concept very similar to that of Jung’s idea of the archetypes in the collective unconscious. Jung thought of the collective unconscious as a memory of the species, based on an interconnection of all human consciousness. This idea makes no sense at all in terms of mechanistic biology, but in terms of the ideas I am putting forward, it fits quite naturally.
It is also possible that we might tune in to the recent memories of a particular person, somewhere else, maybe only a second ago. In this case we would have something like thought-transference or telepathy. Again, such phenomena have no place in the mechanistic view of the world, but some of them would fit in with the kind of view I am putting forward. This would open up the possibility of building a bridge between science and some of the phenomena of parapsychology.
If there is a collective human consciousness and if these principles apply to people in the way that I believe they apply to animals and plants, then it should mean that we ourselves are continually exposed to these kinds of influences from other people. For example, these principles should be operative in the learning of skills. I think it should be easier to learn to ride a bicycle today than it was one hundred years ago, and indeed it does seem to be the case that most children learn more easily than they used to. Of course, bicycle designs have improved, teaching methods and motivation have changed, and it is very difficult to know what balance of factors is responsible. The same would apply to new sports like windsurfing, where people seem to be learning more quickly than they did even ten years ago, and similarly to learning to play video games and to children learning to program computers. However, to obtain more rigorous evidence, it is necessary to design tests where one can actually exclude other factors, and see whether morphic resonance, or something like it, really does apply to human behavior.
The hypothesis predicts that if animals, such as rats, learn a new trick in one place, rats of the same breed should be able to learn the same trick more quickly everywhere in the world, even in the absence of any known kind of connection or communication.
I have recently conducted an experiment, with the help of Thames Television, which was designed to shed light on just this question. The experiment involved pictures containing hidden images. Once you have seen the hidden image in such a picture, it is very clear. There is a kind of gestalt effect; you suddenly get it, and once you’ve got it you can’t not see it. This is a very rapid kind of learning. In this experiment we had two pictures, both of them new ones, both containing hidden images. These were sent to various places in the world where they were shown to groups of people under standard conditions. The number of people who could spot the hidden image within one minute in each of these pictures was recorded. One of the pictures was then shown on ITV on the afternoon of August 31 to about two million viewers who were asked to look at it, and then the answer was given. Did this change that took place in the minds of nearly two million people when they saw what the picture was meant to be affect other people? Apparently it did.
People in different parts of the world were tested with both pictures after the TV broadcast, not knowing which had been shown on television; nor did the people testing them know. There was no significant change in the percentage of those seeing the control picture, which had not been shown on television; but there was a definite and statistically significant increase in those who saw the picture that had been seen on television. (For a fuller account of this experiment, see the New Scientist, October 27, 1983.) I wouldn’t claim too much for this preliminary test, except to say that it does suggest that it would be worth doing again. Plans are now afoot to repeat an experiment of this type in Britain, Sweden and in other countries during the course of the coming year.
This illustrates that the question of the interconnectedness of human consciousness is susceptible to scientific investigation. I think that if such experiments can be repeated, and give clear, positive results, it could be proved that some kind of influence like this is actually taking place. It may take several years before this can be established, but it is very possible that it could be.
One of the implications of this possibility is the idea that our thoughts and our attitudes can have an influence upon other people at a distance, without our knowing it. This kind of idea has been brought up in connection with the nuclear debate in a book called The Hundredth Monkey by Ken Keyes. This is based on a story about monkeys on an island off the coast of Japan which learned to wash sweet potatoes supplied to them by scientists. At first one monkey started doing it, then it spread through the colony. Then, the story goes, once the number doing it had reached a particular threshold, say a hundred, monkeys on other islands in other places started doing the same kind of thing. The hundredth monkey story is a powerful modern myth. As evidence for an unseen interconnectedness, it is not as impressive as it seems at first, because the spread of this behavior to other islands would have depended on the scientists going there first and throwing sweet potatoes to the monkeys. Nevertheless, it is a story which has had a tremendous influence in the last few years. Many of you are familiar with it, I am sure, and it illustrates graphically the kind of principle I am talking about.
I think the fact that this story has become so popular shows that many people are receptive to this kind of idea. This is not really surprising, because many traditional systems of thought have emphasized the interconnectedness of consciousness. In St. Thomas Aquinas, the leading theologian of the Middle Ages, the idea that all humanity is, in a sense, one person was a central concept; and indeed, in Christian theology in general, individual human consciousness is not regarded as separate. This is also a central feature of the teachings of many present-day teachers, for example Krishnamurti, who often says, “I am humanity,” meaning his consciousness is not separate from the rest of human kind. And it is not just within spiritual traditions that views of this kind have been held. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Existentialism and Humanism as follows: “When we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. . . . Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole.”
I think this is very relevant to us at the present time, because all of us are responsible for the nuclear arms race. We may not like it. We may not actively endorse it, but all of us are responsible. We live in a society where these weapons are being made and prepared for use. We are all helping to pay for them. Even if we don’t pay income tax, every time we make a telephone call we are paying Value Added Tax, and all taxes in however small a way help to finance the construction of these bombs and missiles.
Some people think that the best way to maintain peace is to prepare for war. Some people sincerely believe that. Others don’t. I am among those who don’t believe it, but insofar as we allow the process of nuclear armament to continue, we are implicitly supporting it. This process is not just maintaining a balance of terror. We have reached a point where the destructive power of Western and Soviet nuclear weapons is totally beyond imagination. We now have more than 6,000 times as much destructive power as that used in the entire Second World War. And the United States, NATO and the Soviet Union are still hurrying to increase their nuclear arsenals. This, of course, is done in the name of security, but we can hardly say that it makes us more secure. Pershing IIs take three to eight minutes to reach Russia from Germany. The minimum time in which Russian computers can be checked to see where they are giving a false alarm is ten minutes. So the chances of nuclear war by accident are enormously increased, and will be further increased by the continuing deployment of yet more missiles over the next few years.
The whole thing can easily seem hopeless, as if we are helplessly heading toward a collective suicide. It seems obvious to me, as it does to many others, that the only real hope is a change in the way we think and feel. We now have a choice between a positive transformation of humanity, or a sudden and unintended transformation through death and destruction. We cannot postpone this choice much longer.
Fear and suspicion have brought out the worst in the Western world — a vast build-up of the power to kill, and the willingness to use it. And this feeds the fear and suspicion of the other side, who react in a similar way. Both sides bring out and encourage the evil in the other. Surely no positive change can possibly come about through more fear, suspicion and hatred. How could this happen but through faith, hope and love?
We all have a responsibility not only for what we do, or don’t do, not only as citizens of states which are making and preparing to use these weapons, not only as people who have the privilege to live in democracies where we have some control over what our governments do — but we are also responsible for our innermost thoughts. If we despair, feeling that there is nothing we can do, that it is all utterly hopeless and inevitable, this attitude itself may spread and influence others. And despair and hopelessness can only help to bring about what we most fear. But if we have hope and faith in the possibility of a new order of things, not only will our actions be more positive, but our hope and faith themselves may spread. Our responsibility may indeed be even greater than we had supposed.
© Copyright 1984 by Rupert Sheldrake.
Reprinted by permission of Blond & Briggs, London, England
