Welcome to Science and Spirituality. On today’s episode, we continue a lecture on the topic of morphic resonance with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a British developmental biologist and biochemist.

Currently he is the director of the Perrott-Warrick project, which is administered by Trinity College in Cambridge, England. The project’s purpose is to research unexplained human and animal abilities. He is the author of more than 75 scientific papers and ten books, with some of the most renowned being “A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation,” “Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home,” and “Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.”

According to Dr. Sheldrake, every being draws from morphic fields, which he understands as the collective memory of nature. They are like a set of blueprints of all possible forms, which over time add to each other. The morphic fields do not diminish with time and space, because they carry no energy, just information alone.

This theory intersects with many concepts found in spirituality, thus our Supreme Master Television correspondent asked Dr. Sheldrake about this fascinating crossing point.

The kind of science that we have at the moment, a very materialistic science, creates a very sharp barrier against spirituality because it’s really saying that the mind is nothing but the brain and it’s all just inside the head. But with morphic fields and morphic resonance, there are more areas of discourse with spirituality. It means that the ancestors, the people who have gone before, influence us in the present, not just through genes but through morphic resonance.

So it means in one way that there is an influence from the past, and all spiritual traditions accept that there’s an influence from those who have gone before. Also that we can influence those who come afterwards, not just through ordinary cultural transmission, but in a more invisible way. That’s one aspect. Another is that what you do, what you say and what you think can influence other people by morphic resonance. So we’re more responsible for our actions and words and thoughts on this principle than we would otherwise be.

There is no moral filter in morphic resonance, which means that we have to be more careful about what we are thinking if we are concerned about the effect that we have on others.

To provide further insight into Dr. Sheldrake’s ideas, we now present excerpts from the lecture entitled “Morphic Resonance, Collective Memory and Habits of Nature,” by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, presented at Goldsmiths College in London, UK, on January 20, 2009.

First of all, fields. Fields were first introduced into science by Michael Faraday in London. And the idea was that there are regions of influence in space outside material objects. Here is a magnetic field, you’ve all seen this many times before, but there is a region of influence that extends beyond the material surface. Fields are not made of matter. They extend beyond matter, and indeed in modern physics, matter is now thought to be made of fields, energy bound within fields.

Now, in embryology, a number of embryologists came up with the idea that embryos are shaped by fields. Why is it that the arm and the leg have different shapes when they have the same DNA and the same proteins? It is like buildings with different architectural plans. (They proposed) that there were fields shaping developing organisms called morphogenetic fields. “Morphe” form, “genesis” coming into being. This is a bat embryo, and it is just to remind you of what embryos look like.

And the way that these fields, which I call morphic fields as the general word for them, which includes morphogenetic and other forms of fields, they’re organized in nested hierarchies. The field of the whole bat, like the outer circle, these would be the fields of the organs, like the limbs or the eyes, these are the tissues within and these are the cells within those. All of nature is in fact organized in this nested hierarchy. These could be subatomic particles in atoms, in molecules, in crystals. These could be organisms in a society of organisms, like a flock of birds.

The larger field could represent this larger organized unit. At every level, the whole is more than sum of the parts. And the question is, “What is this mysterious wholeness?” Well, I’m suggesting it’s the morphic fields of each system, which have an inbuilt memory given by morphic resonance. Morphic resonance automatically averages what’s happened before, and to get an idea of how it might work, this is an analogy.

These are average scientists. An average female and an average male scientist at the John Innes Research Institute in Norwich, made by superimposing photographs. They’re composite photos, and what you get is a kind of probability structure of a face.

It’s a probability structure very like the probability structures in quantum physics. Morphogenetic fields where introduced into biology for two reasons. Firstly, to understand what it is that shapes the form of organisms, which is impossible to understand just in terms of genes and gene products, because they don’t have any particular form. Even if you switch on genes in the right place in your arm or your leg, making the right proteins does not give you an arm or a leg. Something else is shaping them. That is one reason.

The other is that fields have an automatic holistic property; you can’t have a part of a field. If you cut a magnet in half, you don’t get one North Pole and one South Pole, you get two smaller magnets each with a complete field. The same applies to behavior, and here we’re getting closer to psychology. This theory says that the organization of the nervous system is also organized by morphic fields, and this should apply to learning.

We will bring you more excerpts of Dr. Sheldrake’s lecture right after these short messages. You are watching Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Science and Spirituality. We are exploring morphic fields and resonance, an idea introduced by the British biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. The idea theorizes that nature has a collective memory, which influences subsequent things on the basis of similarity of forms. If Dr. Sheldrake is correct, this means that the so- called “laws of nature” are not fixed and that our memory is not localized in our brain.

We now provide further portions of a lecture entitled “Morphic Resonance, Collective Memory and Habits of Nature,” by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake presented at Goldsmiths College in London, UK, on January 20, 2009. Here, Dr. Sheldrake describes how learning is influenced by morphic fields.

There are a lot of ways in which you can test morphic resonance in the human realm. There are areas of existing data where we can look at the possible effects of morphic resonance, and one is with IQ tests. This is one of the very few areas where the same tests have been done year after year.

I would predict that the average score in IQ tests should be going up year by year, not because people are getting smarter, but because so many people have already done the test, they’re getting easier to do by morphic resonance.

When I first predicted this in the 1980’s, I couldn’t get my hands on IQ test data and I didn’t know how to test this. I was therefore fascinated when it turned out that a psychologist called James Flynn looked at data from Japan and America to start with, and then in many other countries, and found what is now called, “the Flynn effect,” which shows a large increase in average IQ test scores over the twentieth century.

This is from 1918-1989; this is a big effect. It’s been found in many other countries as well. It’s not because people are getting smarter. What’s going on? There’s been a huge debate among psychologists to try and explain this; there are no satisfactory explanations that satisfy everyone, Flynn himself has confessed to be baffled by it. But it’s just what you’d expect on the basis of morphic resonance.

In psychology, Jung among others has proposed that all human beings draw upon a collective memory. And morphic resonance would mean that if the idea didn’t already exist, you’d have to invent it. The greatest collective memory would come from those who are most similar to you in the past, members of your family or people of similar cultural background, because this would apply to the transmission of cultural forms.

Finally, if I ask the question, “Which organism in the past is most similar to you now?” The answer is going to be yourself. You’re more similar to yourself in the past than to anybody else; therefore the most specific morphic resonance working on you from the past would be from your own past. That means that you’ll have a kind of memory system based on morphic resonance that doesn’t depend on storing the memories inside the body. If you get into a similar state to one you’ve been in before, you’ll resonate with yourself from the past by morphic resonance and pick up those memories.

That, I think, is how memory works. Everybody here has been brought up to believe that memories are stored inside the brain, in modified synapses or DNA or RNA or phosphorylated proteins. There’s many, many theories of memory storage. But one of the most interesting facts about memory research is how unsuccessful it’s been.

For more than 100 years, people have tried to find memories in the brain. They’ve tried desperately hard; billions of dollars have been spent on this attempt. Vast numbers of people have spent their careers trying to do it. And of course they’ve found some interesting and important things about memory. But the attempt to find the memory traces has been frustrated over and over again. They’ve proved elusive; they’ve never been able to pin them down.

I’m a skeptic of standard memory theories and I think given that they’ve had such a poor track record in explaining the phenomenon for more than 100 years, it’s worth trying an alternative approach. Now there are some people who’d say “No, we should never try alternative approaches because they must be stored in the brain. Everybody knows they’ve got to be stored in there.” That’s a paradigmatic assumption. That’s just the kind of thing we should be skeptical about. So I’m saying it’s an open question.

Finally, this view of habits of nature, which has so many implications for so many branches of science, doesn’t explain evolution by itself. It explains how things get repeated. Evolution has to be an interplay of habit and creativity, just like our own lives are an interplay of habit and creativity.

If we just had creativity nothing would ever stabilize. If we just had habit nothing new would ever happen. I think morphic resonance helps explain the question of habit; it leaves the source of creativity open.

But it does give a completely different view of the entire evolutionary process, one which is more naturalistic than the conventional scientific theory with these mysterious laws of nature beyond space and time. This is more naturalistic and more radically evolutionary. Whether it’s right or not, time will tell.

We appreciate Dr. Sheldrake’s unique perspectives and innovative thinking, which provides a very fascinating explanation of the evolution of life and the Universe through the idea of morphic resonance. We wish him much success in his further exploration of this area as we enter into a new age of scientific understanding. Thank you for your company today on Science and Spirituality. Coming up next is Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. May you have a blessed week ahead.