Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

Kelly Howell: Hey everybody. Welcome to Theatre of the Mind. Your host: Kelly Howell. We've got a really exciting show today. Biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is going to speak with us about morphic resonance, collective memory, telephone telepathy, and more.

Sheldrake has written some of my favorite books. He wrote "The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature," "Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals," and "Seven Experiments That Could Change the World." He's also coauthored numerous books with luminaries such as Terence McKenna, Jean Houston, and Matthew Fox.

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So let's go to the interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. It's fascinating. Here we go.
Kelly: Welcome to Theatre of the Mind, Rupert, it's great to have you here.
Rupert Sheldrake: Good to be there.
Kelly: So I thought we could talk about morphic fields today. What exactly are morphic fields and how do they work?
Rupert: The word morphic comes from the Greek word "morphy" which means, "form." Morphic fields are fields that give form, shape, structure, or organization to things. We often hear people say that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. When you're looking at an organism, the whole is more than the sum of the organs. When you're looking at a society, the whole is more than just the individuals in it.

So what does this wholeness that's more than the sum of its parts mean? Well, it's the morphic field that makes a whole more than the sum of its parts. The whole system has a field. So a flock of birds for example, which can turn almost like a single organismthe individual parts can turn almost at the same time without bumping into each other. That's an example of the morphic field of a flock, that organizes the whole system.

The morphic field of a developing embryo organizes the embryo as it grows. It helps the organs to know where to develop; it helps the fingers to form in the right place, and the bones, and the muscles, and the arms, and the legs, and so forth. So they are organizing fields that bring together and coordinate all the different parts that lie within them.
Kelly: So is it like an energetic blueprint?
Rupert: Yes it is. It's like a blueprint. What they do is organize the way these energetic systems relate to each other. It is a kind of blueprint of the organizing. The morphic that organize developing organisms are called morphogenetic fields. They are fields to do with the coming in to being as form. So the morphogenteic field of the arm is like an arm blueprint, and the morphogenetic field of the leg is like a leg blueprint, that organize the developing tissues.
Kelly: I have a friend who has an amputated limb, and he always has that "phantom limb" experience. Is that because of the morphic field?
Rupert: I think it is, yes. All of us have a field for our limbs. If you lose the actual limb, as people do when it's amputated, the field still remains there. In some animals, like newts for exampleif you cut the leg off a newt or a salamander it can grow a whole new leg. That's because it has a field for the leg. We have the field, but for some reason human beings don't regenerate entire legs or arms. Nevertheless, the field of the limb is there. That's what people with phantom limbs are actually feeling. The field is where the arm seems to be, in an amputee. Almost everyone who has an amputated arm or leg has a phantom limb. So I think that's what the field is, yes.
Kelly: How do you measure the fields? That might be a little far out.
Rupert: You can measure these fields through their effects. You measure gravitational fields through gravitational effect, electric fields through electric effects, and you measure morphic fields through morphic effects. There are a variety of ways you can do this.

But since we're talking about phantom limbs, I'll mention one of the experiments I use for that. Phantom limbs, being phantoms, go through solid objects. When people have a phantom arm or a phantom leg, they can push it through a wall, or a chair, or a desk, or whatever. Because, being a phantom, it's not blocked by normal material substances.
Kelly: Mmhmm.
Rupert: So in one of my... I did some very, very simple experiments to test for these fields. There's one of them that I've been doing recently with people with phantom arms. They stand outside a door, a normal wood door. We mark out six panels on the door, one, two, three, four, five, six. The person behind the door, with the door shut, with one of my colleagues, puts their arm through a randomly selected panel. They throw a dice. If the dice says four, then they push their phantom arm through panel number four.

Then, on the other side, we have people who are skilled in energentic medicine of various kinds, chee, and so forth, theraputic touch. We ask them to feel where the phantom limb is, which of these six positions can they feel the phantom sticking through, if they can. If they were just guessing, they'd be right one time in six. Well, some of our more skilled practitioners are doing much better than that. Instead of a success rate of one sixth, they're getting success rates of closer to a half, or over a half.
Kelly: Wow.
Rupert: Which is very significant statistically. They're not getting it right every time, but, of course, nobody's used to doing this kind of experiment. We're asking people to do something very unusual.
Kelly: Wow. That's amazing. This brings me to the next question. You wrote that morphic resonance involves a kind of action at a distance in both time and space. How does that work?
Rupert: Well, one aspect of the morphic fields I haven't mentioned yet is that they evolve. So the morphic fields that govern human arms and legs haven't always been that way because human beings haven't always been the way they are. So, the fields themselves must change in time. They develop, they evolve, and I think they're inherited through a process I call morphic resonance. Morphic resonance involves similar things influencing subsequent similar things across time and space.

That's what I meant by action at a distance in time or space. It's probably easier to illustrate this by talking of behavioral examples. For example, if a rat learns a new trick in Santa Fe, then, just because that rat's learned it, it should be easier by morphic resonance for rats of a similar breed to learn the same trick all over the world.
Kelly: Right, like that hundredth monkey thing, right?
Rupert: Yes, it's a kind of collective memory thing. The hundredth monkey example isn't terribly well documented, and I don't usually use that. But the thousandth rat is well documented, by no proper scientific papers, but with experiments done at Harvard, and in Edinburgh, and in Australia. There's now good evidence that rats do in fact learn more quickly what rats have learned elsewhere, in a way that can't be explained by any normal conventional scientific means. So it's just a kind of collective memory that each species has. Each member of the species draws on it and in turn contributes to it.
Kelly: And there's a point of critical mass?
Rupert: Well, I don't think critical mass is probably the right concept. What that implies is some kind of step function. Up to a certain point nothing happens, then everything happens. It's more a gradual process. If a hundred rats have learned it in Santa Fe, it'll be that bit easier. If a thousand rats have learned it, it'll be much easier still. So it's not as if you get up to 999 and nothing happens, and then suddenly every rat in the world is doing it.

The hundredth monkey story sometimes gives people the impression that there's a critical mass. But in that story, which was originally put forth by Lyle Watson in his book "Lifetide," he makes it clear, in the original version of the hundredth monkey story, that's not what he meant. He said, let us imagine that at a particular moment another monkey, say the hundredth, learns it, then it starts happening everywhere else. All the evidence was that monkeys on some islands learned to wash sweet potatoes after monkeys on another island near Japan had done so. The behavior spread, that's all we know.
Kelly: Right.
Rupert: Not that it suddenly spread at a particular moment. So I think the critical mass idea is a bit misleading. I never use that. I think it's a much more gradual process.
Kelly: I know I read somewhere that you wrote that when something happens it's most likely it will happen again. So it's more just once the pattern has been created, it will occur again.
Rupert: Yes, well, not necessarily. The more often it happens, the more likely it is to occur again. If it just happened once, it may still be pretty unlikely, but if it's happened millions of times, it gets more likely. It's really a principle of habit. Morphic resonance is like habits of nature.

In fact, the subtitle of my main book on this, which is called the Presence of the Past, is subtitled Morphic Resonance in the Habits of Nature. What this principle means is that nature builds up habits. Through repetition, things become more probable, more likely to happen again. So it really is just the same as habits that we actually experience in our own lives and see in the animals that we know.
Kelly: So morphic fields have a memory, right?
Rupert: Yes.
Kelly: Is there a connection between morphic fields and precognition or past life recall? How do you explain that?
Rupert: Well, not with precognition. I think precognition can happen, but morphic resonance doesn't explain it because it comes from the past, according to my hypothesis. So, precognition is still a mystery from this point of view.
Kelly: OK.
Rupert: What morphic resonance does help to explain is memory. It explains collective memory. It even explains individual memory because I think our individual memories depend on resonating with ourselves in the past, they don't need to be stored inside the brain. So in terms of past life recall, yes, it means that we're all influenced by lots of past lives. There's a kind of collective memory a bit like what Young called the collective unconscious.

But in terms of memories of past lives, there are sometimes children who remember previous lives, and the memories turn out to be true. Something's going on. It could be that they're picking up memories from previous lives by morphic resonance. This wouldn't necessarily prove that it's reincarnation.

Memory transfer needn't necessarily be the same thing as total personality transfer. So you may be able to pick up someone's memories who's not dead, but it wouldn't necessarily prove, from this point of view, that you are that person. So it provides a different way of thinking about, an alternative way of thinking about past life memories. It doesn't necessarily imply reincarnation.
Kelly: I like that. So we have access to a bank of the collective.
Rupert: We have access to a bank of the collective. Sometimes people may get a particular lot of memories from one particular person in the past, rather than having them all averaged out. That might look like past life memories.
Kelly: Right, or they get too identified with it, and start wearing a crown. OK, what's the difference between a behavioral field and a mental field?
Rupert: Well, morphic fields come in various kinds, according to what they do. I think they all have morphic resonance. Morphogenetic fields organize the development of plants and animals as they grow, as seedlings grow, as embryos grow. And they underly the form and help maintain the health of the body. So that's the morphogenetic field, to do with the formation of form.

Then behavioral fields underly the behavior of animals, like the insticts of spiders. A young spider knows how to spin a web without ever being shown or taught by another spider. That's completely instinctive. It's an inherited habit. I think it's inherited by morphic resonance. I'd call the field that organizes that behavior the behavioral field of web spinning in that spider.

Now when we come to human activity, we have behavioral fields too, like when I ride a bicycle, drive a car. All the behavior involved, or when I speak English. The organization of the movements of my body, it depends on these fields, which work through the nervous sytem.

But then, I can have mental activities as well just thinking about things. There are morphic fields for mental activity too. You know, for things like theories, and what we call in science "paradigms." Models of reality.

These are really habits of thinking about the world. And a scientific paradigm, like the mechanistic theory of life, for example, the idea that all living things are machines. It's still the dominant paradigm in biology. This is really a kind of habit of thinking. It's not so much behavioral field, it's not like driving a car or riding a bicycle, it's about the way you actually think about the world and react to the world. It's a kind of recipe for thinking about nature.

And there are, of course, alternative recipes. But, that would be an example of a mental field.
Kelly: Right. And it's taking a lot of work to change that.
Rupert: Well, any habit's a lot of work to change, you see. You have the same problem with personal habits you want to change. It's very hard to change habits. And the same is true of habits of thought. So, once you get people locked in to particular habits of thinking and this is true in science as in every other activity these habits are very hard to change.

But on the other hand, we know that the whole history of science and the whole history of culture and civilization shows that old habits do get changed. Once we had a feudal system in Europe and now we don't. Once people thought that the Earth moved round the sun and we recognized... Most people thought the sun moved round the Earth and now we recognize the Earth moves round the sun.
Kelly: Right. And they also thought the Earth was flat.
Rupert: Long ago, in the Middle Ages actually, they thought it was round and it moved round the sun. I think there may have been people much longer ago that thought it was flat. But the usual medieval view was that it was round.
Kelly: OK. I have another question for you that might be a little out there. When we change lets say we undergo a deep personal transformation and it causes us to behave differently, how does that kind of scenario fit in with morphic fields?
Rupert: Usually, when we adopt a new way of behaving, it's not usually a completely original way of behaving. It's often something someone's done before. The most normal forms of change which occur in peoples' life are the sort of life changes. Like getting married. That's where you undergo so many of those kinds of "rite of passage." When you're a married man or woman and you're in a different state, a different kind of morphic field.

When you're married, then you have a kind of family field. And you may have kids, and you're in a different kind of social field from being a bachelor or just an unmarried person.
Kelly: Right.
Rupert: Also, say an alcoholic decided to give up drinking; usually they change by adopting an alternative pattern. The reason why groups like Alcoholics Anonymous are so successful is they provide an alternative framework. Not just an individual but a social framework.

So, it's like changing channels on television. If you're in one pattern, it's like being on one channel, if you switch to a new pattern, it's like tuning into another channel and another morphic field of behavior.
Kelly: Right. So, these are already imprinted, or part of the blueprint.
Rupert: Well, sometimes people are original and do something that's never been done before. But most of us adopt changes that lots of people have done before. And it is like switching a channel.

For example, at a particular time about 25 years ago, I decided to give up eating meat and I became a vegetarian. I wasn't the first person to be a vegetarian. I was living in India at the time and it was easy, there were lots of vegetarians there. Here in England there are loads of vegetarian restaurants. There's vegetarian shops and magazines and stuff. So, it's a whole field. There are vegetarian cookbooks.

So, most of our life changes are not totally original, there are things other people have done. And, in fact, it's easier to change into doing something that other people have done, because there's a stronger morphic field for it. And, also, there's a kind of social support group.
Kelly: Now, is there a way, are there any technologies that help us tap in to those morphic fields? So people could change more easily, or something like what you were talking about.
Rupert: Change can go in any direction. Not all changes are good. Right now, all over the world especially in China and India millions of people are being converted to modern, Westernstyle consumerism and the Western lifestyle, largely through the medium of TV ads and international corporate culture.
Kelly: Right.
Rupert: So, probably the biggest conversion and lifestyle change is going on today in the world on a massive scale and there's this mass conversion of most of the population of the world to consumerism.

So, we have to acknowledge that these changes can go in way that we may not necessarily think are a good thing.
Kelly: So the media has a profound impact.
Rupert: The media has a huge impact, and the advertising industry and the media industry in general, are designed... They employ psychologists to find out what will influence people. They have focus groups studying how to bring adverts for junk food to two year olds in the most effective way. Trying to switch kids onto junk food diets, trying to get people to adopt lifestyles that fit with selling products from those corporations, this is already going on, on a massive level, a massive scale.

People who want to switch to healthier lifestyles, again, it's usually an existing field. There are people who have regular exercise, yoga, healthy foods, organic foods and that kind of thing. But I think what makes it easier for people to change is, first of all, tuning in to this new morphic field, which could involve all sorts of things: pictures, patterns, music, all the things that make you aware you're part of this new way of life.

And, secondly, a social group that shares those values, because that makes it easier to get social reinforcement. See, I think social groups have fields as well.

These are wellknown principles. If people get converted to a religion and they're going to a church or going to a synagogue or that religion, singing the songs, chanting the chants, being part of that prayerful community, having a peer group of people who follow some of the paths all these things reinforce the change.

It's much easier to do it as part of a social group than totally on your own, with no support.
Kelly: Because of the collective field.
Rupert: Because of these collective fields, yes. And I think all societies and all social groups traditionally have collective fields. And all tribal societies have these collective fields. They all sing together and dance together and have ceremonies and have community activities together, which bring them in tune with each other and reinforce the field. Singing and dancing are probably some of the most powerful ways of doing it, particularly chanting.
Kelly: Hmm, beautiful. OK, I'm going to switch gears here a little bit. What do you think about Dr. Emoto's photography experiments, where a mental field is influencing the structure of water crystals?
Rupert: Well, I don't know what to think of them, frankly because a lot depends, really, on how the experiments are done. And this is where my somewhat skeptical, scientific side comes out.

We all know that water crystals are different from each other. If you look at snowflakes, every snowflake even if you collect it on the same day in the same snow storm every snowflake is different. Even though they're grown under the same conditions.

No, in Emoto's experiments, he takes samples of water and he then crystallizes them, puts them in a deep freeze. He gets hundreds and hundreds of crystals, and then he takes a picture of one of them and puts it in his book. Now, if he knows what he's looking for... Say someone says, "Here's a sample that's had loving thoughts," and you look for it under the microscope and you find a beautiful crystal. Snap. You've got a picture of it.

And then someone says, "This is from a polluted thing." You see an ugly looking one and you take a picture of that. It could easily be based on kind of biased observation, you see.
Kelly: Right.
Rupert: The only way to do this work reliably is to have a blind evaluation method, where people evaluate the crystals without knowing which sample is which. I don't think Emoto usually does that. He's not a scientist; he started as a journalist.

But Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sceinces in California has recently done a blind evaluation of some crystal samples and he found that there was a significant effect. So this for the first time is evidence that perhaps there's something in it. Until now, until Dean Radin did that experiment on just two lots of crystals, I just didn't know whether this was a real effect or whether it was simply a question of the dangers of nonbiased observation.
Kelly: Right. Picking the prettiest crystal.
Rupert: If you're starting out with 2, 500 crystals and you know it's meant to be a sample with beautiful loving vibrations in it, you're not going to pick the ugliest. Doing it blind is the only way in this kind of research to get reliable results.
Kelly: You've been building a massive database of the mysteries of everyday life. What are the most common phenomena that you've observed?
Rupert: I've got two databases actually. One is to do with pets, and the other is to do with people. There are plenty of mysteries in everyday life about our pets. The commonest one, or at least the one I've studied most and where I have the most cases with animals, is with dogs and cats that know when their owners are coming home.

Many people have dogs or cats that go and wait at the door when a member of the household is on the way home. Sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes a halfhour in advance. For years this has been dismissed by people saying it's just coincidence, or people only remember it when the dog's right they forget all the times it's wrong, or it's just a biological clock and they do it at a routine time, and so forth.

But I did a whole series of experiments on this, videotaping the dogs, having people come at random times, traveling in taxis, nobody at home knew when they were coming home. Lots of these experiments were published in scientific journals and are summarized in my book "Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home." There are a lot of these mysteries of everyday life with dogs, cats, and other very familiar household animals.

My most recent research has been on unexplained human abilities. I have a large database of those. Two of the commonest form the basis of what I've written about in my most recent book "The Sense of Being Stared At." Obviously about the sense of being stared at, the felling that you can tell when you're being looked at from behind. You turn around and someone is looking at you, or you stare at someone and they turn around. Have you had that, Kelly?
Kelly: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, I've stared at my dog when he was asleep and he woke up.
Rupert: Ah, well that's a really interesting one. I'm actually doing research on that right now.
Kelly: Are you?
Rupert: Basically, lots of animals have this staring thing. I think it's basically a predator/prey thing. Sleeping animals are extremely vulnerable, and if they could wake up when they're being looked at it would be a major survival advantage. In my surveys of this sense of being stared at, the most common times of experience have occurred with male strangers in public places, like streets.
Kelly: The predator...
Rupert: Most people who we'd find potentially threatening.
Kelly: The predator and the prey.
Rupert: Yes. Essentially that. It comes out in an extreme form. During wartime situations, or when people are being sniped at by terrorists, or something like that. It has saved lots of people's lives. So I think it's basic function is in sort of a predator/prey situation.

Then the commoneston our database there are hundreds of casestelephone telepathy. Where people think of someone who then rings, then they say, "You know it's amazing I was just thinking about you." Again, you may have had that yourself.
Kelly: What happens to me is that I will think to myself, "Gee, I've got to call my computer consultant," and then two seconds later he calls me.
Rupert: Yes, exactly that. That's just the kind of situation. Now some of the things I've done a lot of work on recently are experimental research on telephone telepathy and email telepathy.
Kelly: Oh, email telepathy. I haven't heard about that. What's that?
Rupert: The same thing. You think of someone thenpingand email comes from them shortly afterwards. When it's most impressive is when it's somebody you haven't heard from in awhile. It happened to me just a few days ago. Somebody asked me about an African that I'd been doing some research with in Londonhe and I had done some workshops together more than a year ago. Someone asked me his name and what we had done, and I hadn't thought about it much for weeks. Anyway, I was replying to this email from someone about him, and thinking about him it reminded me to look up things we'd done together and stuff. A couple of hours later there's an email from him saying: "I haven't heard from you in a long time. How are you?" that kind of thing. I'd been thinking about him, he must have picked up that I was thinking about him and then sent me an email.

We've done actual controlled experiments to see if people can tell whether they are about to get a phone call or an email from someone. How we do it is we have four callers. We pick the caller at random. People then know that one of these four people is about to call them or about to email them, and they have to guess which one. The success rates in these trials are much above what you would expect by chance. You would expect by chance a 25 percent success rate, one in four. Actually the success rate is much higher than that, more like 45 percent.
Kelly: Wow. So do you think that the Internet and the speed with which we can all communicate with each other is kind of like another morphic field connecting the collective so that we do become more psychic, or we do become more telepathic, or we acknowledge it more?
Rupert: Yes. These modern efforts of communication like emails and telephones have made it possible to contact anyone at any time. They've actually led to an increase in telepathy, which precedes them and sort of surrounds, these technologies. They haven't themselves directly given rise to it, it's just sort of unleashed the latent potential in us to know when people are thinking about us or calling us.

I now have some online telepathy tests on my website.
Kelly: I saw that.
Rupert: So I hope that some people who are listening now might want to try it for themselves.
Kelly: Yes, that would be great.
Rupert: It's free, it's fun, it takes 10 minutes; and you get to find out how telepathic you are with your friends or family members.
Kelly: How wonderful. So what is your website address, Rupert?
Rupert: www.sheldrake.org. It's easy to remember www.sheldrake.org.
Kelly: You've got some of your lectures up there, and interviews?
Rupert: That's right. I'm giving a workshop at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
Kelly: Wonderful. Great.
Rupert: It's called: "Intuition Telepathy and the Extended Mind." Then I'm giving a talk at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. Then the workshop at Hollyhock, Cortes Island, BC.
Kelly: Oh, that's beautiful. Well, Rupert, thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope you come back again sometime.
Rupert: I'd be happy to, Kelly.

[music]
Kelly: OK. That was Dr. Rupert Sheldrake speaking to us from the UK. Check out his website it's really fascinating. It's www.sheldrake.org. I hope you had a great time today. Until next time, be well.