Rupert Sheldrake
Biologist · Researcher · Author
What if nature is not a machine, but a living process of memory and relationship?
WATCH
Rupert Sheldrake in conversation with Great Mystery
READ
Morphic Fields and Morphic Resonance
Descartes believed the only kind of mind was the conscious mind. Then Freud reinvented the unconscious. Then Jung said it’s not just a personal unconscious but a collective unconscious. Morphic resonance shows us that our very souls are connected with those of others and bound up with the world around us.
Just as the electromagnetic field is an interface between the matter fields and the mental, psychic, and morphic aspects of ourselves as human beings, so the electromagnetic field could be playing a similar role in the mental structure of the soul of the world.
There are a lot of people who think the universe is conscious or that the soul of the world in some sense is perceiving what’s going on. There are many theological traditions of divine omniscience. By definition, any theology of divine omniscience requires the divine mind to know everything. Knowing everything would include knowing all the properties and states of the electromagnetic and gravitational fields, so these would be essential aspects of divine omniscience.
I’ve found that when people think about divine omniscience, they treat it as an entirely miraculous process, totally disconnected from any kind of physical reality. However, divine omniscience must involve knowing from within—being within all things. Therefore, cosmic omniscience must pervade the electromagnetic field and all the fields of nature. This is like Newton’s notion that the medium of divine omniscience was Absolute Space, which he called the sensorium of God.
ABOUT
Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than eighty technical papers and ten books, including A New Science of Life. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in cell biology, and was also a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 2005 to 2010, he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project for research on unexplained human abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. He is married, has two sons, and lives in London.