Yesterday, I came across a guy named Rupert Sheldrake, who is all about uncovering the scientific basis of telepathy among humans and animals and whatever. He talks about morphic fields, and I inadvertently came across this again today looking for something else, so I figured it was probably important, and wanted to notate it to come back and learn more about it and “morphic resonance”.

Wow. I just found some pretty cool stuff about Sheldrake and his ideas about morphic fields and shit. Apparently, his ideas really wig out hard-nosed scientists, and I like that a lot. So, what I understand of it is that morphic resonance is “a kind of memory in things determined not by their inherent natures, but by repetition.” So basically, like you have a dog, right, which is a specific kind of pattern of energy. Then, the dog dies, and another dog ultimately gets formed or takes its place or something, because there is some sort of energy pattern in the universe that wants to create a dog, and knows how, based on the morphic fields of previous dogs? Something weird like that. He also describes the possibility that DNA doesn’t contain the characteristics for an organism, but instead acts as a sort of chemical transistor system, which tunes into the appropriate morphic fields, which actually contains the characteristics for “dog”. Wow, I really mangled that description of it I think, but I am just starting to decode what they are saying with this, so my understanding is naturally kind of screwed up. More to follow as I unravel what they mean.

Here’s a nice concise definition: “a nonmaterial organizing collective memory field that affects all biological systems.” And a quote from that site, sort of like what I said about the dog thing:

“The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.

And how that influence moves across time, the collective squirrel-memory both for form and for instincts, is given by the process I call morphic resonance. It’s a theory of collective memory throughout nature. What the memory is expressed through are the morphic fields, the fields within and around each organism. The memory processes are due to morphic resonance.”