Extended Mind, Power, & Prayer- Morphic Resonance And The Collective Unconscious Part Iii Rupert Sheldrake 9.pdf

Extended Mind, Power, & Prayer: Morphic Resonance and the Collective

Unconscious Part III

Rupert Sheldrake

Psychological Perspectives 1997

____________________________________________________________

Rupert Sheldrake is a theoretical biologist whose book, A New Science of Life: The

Hypothesis of Formative Causation, continues to evoke a storm of controversy.

Following is the second in a series of articles wherein Sheldrake presents his ideas

for amplifying Jung's concept of the collective unconscious and archetypal

psychology. He concluded his first article with these words:

The approach I am putting forward is very similar to Jung's idea of the

collective unconscious. The main difference is that Jung's idea was applied

primarily to human experience and human collective memory. What I am

suggesting is that a very similar principle operates throughout the entire

universe, not just in human beings. If the kind of radical paradigm shift I am

talking about goes on within biology - if the hypothesis of morphic resonance

is even approximately correct - then Jung's idea of the collective unconscious

would become a mainstream idea: Morphogenic fields and the concept of the

collective unconscious would completely change the context of modern

psychology.

SOCIETY AS SUPERORGANISM

In Part II of this essay, I want to explore some ideas about the social and cultural

aspects of morphic fields and morphic resonance. A familiar comparison might be

that of a hive of bees or a nest of termites: each is like a giant organism, and the

insects within it are like cells in a superorganism. Although comprised of hundreds

and hundreds of individual insect cells, the hive or nest functions and responds as a

unified whole.

My hypothesis is that societies have social and cultural morphic fields which embrace

and organize all that resides within them. Although comprised of thousands and

thousands of individual human beings, the society can function and respond as a

unified whole via the characteristics of its morphic field. To visualize this, it is helpful

to remember that fields by their very nature are both within and around the things to

which they refer. A magnetic field is both within a magnet and around it; a

gravitational field is both within the earth and around it. Field theories thus take us

beyond the traditional rigid definition of "inside" and "outside."

A superorganism concept of animal societies dominated behavioral biology until

about the early 1960s. Then, as Edward O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, notes

in his book, The Insect Societies (1971), there was a general shift in paradigm in

favor of mechanistic reductionism, which explained animal societies purely in terms

of interactions among genetically-programmed individuals. The superorganism

concept has not been forgotten, however, and forces itself again and again upon

people who think about animal societies.

There is an inherent problem in the concept: if one says that the animal society is a

kind of organism, then what kind of organism is it? What is it that can possibly

organize all the individual animals within it? I am suggesting that there is a morphic

field which embraces all the animals, a field which literally extends around all the

animals within it. This field coordinates their movements just as the morphic field of

the human body coordinates the activities and movements of the cells and tissues

and organs. This concept better describes the characteristic phenomena of animal

societies than the idea that they are all individually interacting yet separate things.

MARAIS AND THE WHITE ANTS

For example, it explains how termites building columns which are adjacent yet

separate know how to build arc hes so that the two sides meet at exactly the right

place in the middle. Termites are blind, and the inside of the nest is dark, so they

can't do it by vision. Edward O. Wilson considers it unlikely that they do it by hearing

or acoustic methods, because of the constant background of sound caused by the

movement of termites within the mound. The only hypothesis that Wilson, who

represents the most hard-nosed reductionist school of thought, considers likely is

that they do it by smell. And even he agrees that that seems farfetched.

If, in fact, the column construction is going on within a social morphic field which

embraces the whole nest and which contains a "mold" of the future arch, then the

termites' movements are coordinated by this field and it's much easier to understand

how the columns can meet. If that is the case, it should be possible to investigate it

experimentally.

In the 1920s, South African biologist Eugene Marais wrote The Soul of The White

Ant, in which he described experiments investigating the effect of damaging South

African termite mounds. Marais took a large steel plate several feet across and

several feet deep and hammered it into the center of a termite mound. The termites

repaired the mound on both sides of the steel plate, building columns and arches.

Their movements were coordinated even though they approached the wall from

different sides. Amazingly, the termites on opposite sides of the steel plate built

arches that met at the steel plate at exactly the right positio n to join if the plate had

not blocked their way. This seemed to demonstrate that there was some kind of

coordinating influence which was not blocked by a steel plate. Obviously, this would

be impossible to do by smell, as Wilson suggests, since even termites can't smell

subtle odors through a steel plate.

Unfortunately, no one has ever repeated these experiments, even though it would

not be difficult to repeat them in a country where termites are common. If Marais'

result was replicated, it would strongly suggest that there was a field coordinating

the actions of the individuals.

WAYNE POTTS AND THE MANEUVER WAVES OF BIRDS

As another familiar example of the superorganism concept, consider schools of fish:

when predators swim into a school, the fish dart quickly to the side in a coordinated

way in order to clear a path through the middle. They move very fast in response to

quite unexpected stimuli, yet they do not bump into each other. The same is true of

flocks of birds. A whole flock can bank as one without the birds bumping into each

other.

Recently, studies investigating the banking of large flocks of dunlins by American

researcher Wayne Potts have been conducted. He filmed their maneuvers at a very

rapid rate of exposure, so that he could later slow the process down and examine it

frame by frame. When he did so, he found that the rate of propagation of what he

calls the "maneuver wave" is extremely fast: about 20 milliseconds from bird to bird.

This is much faster than the birds' minimum reaction time to stimuli. He measured

their startle reaction time using dunlins in the laboratory in dark or dim light. He set

off photographic flashbulbs and measured how long it took the birds to react. He

found that it took the individual birds about 80-100 milliseconds; that is, they

reacted as individuals four to five times more slowly than the rate at which the

maneuver wave moved from bird to bird. The banking maneuver could begin

anywhere within the flock - at the front or back or at the side. It was usually initiated

by a single bird or a small group of birds, and then propagated outwards much faster

than could be explained by any simple system of visual cuing and response to

stimuli.

THE COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR OF HUMAN GROUPS

If one thinks of the flock as being coordinated by a morphic field and the "maneuver

wave" as a wave in the morphic field, then this phenomenon is much easier to

understand than it is when explained in terms of ordinary sensory physiology. The

above examples illustrate a few of the areas in which actual empirical studies are

possible areas which suggest the existence of group minds or group fields in the

coordination of collective animal behavior. It has often been suggested that a similar

phenome non may be at work in human groups, especially in the behavior of crowds.

A number of studies has been conducted by social psychologists on what they call

"collective behavior," which includes the behavior of crowds, football hooligans,

rioting mobs, and lynching mobs, as well as rapidly spreading social phenomena

such as fashions, fads, rumors, crazes, and jokes. All such phenomenon would fit

readily into the concept of group morphic fields.

In interviews, athletes on successful teams commonly compare their teams to a

composite organism where everybody fits in and knows where their teammates are

going to be. The team behaves more like a single organism than like a composite of

separate individuals. Through practice together, teams build up this response to each

other; words such as empathy or sixth sense are often used to describe the feeling

they share.

If we think of societies and social groups as being coordinated by morphic fields,

then we realize that the groups themselves come together and dissolve as teams do

- but their fields are more enduring. We are in these fields virtually all the time:

family fields, or national fields, or local fields, the fields of various groups to which

we belong. We are contained within these larger collective patterns of organization

much of the time but because they are always present, we cease to be aware of

them. We take them for granted, just as we take the air we breathe for granted,

because the air is also always present. However, if we are held under water for a

while, we no longer take the air for granted; we quickly become conscious of our

need for it! Similarly, people placed in solitary confinement quickly become aware of

the importance of social interaction.

Many anthropologists have comme nted on an almost indefinable "something" which

holds the members of the society together. French sociologist Emile Durkheim spoke

of this as the "conscience collective" (in French, the word conscience means both

conscience and consciousness). He believed that one of the major functions of the

"conscience collective" was to maintain the cohesion of the social group. It behaved

similarly to a group field, and many of the activities of the group consciousness were

concerned with maintaining and stabilizing the continued existence of the group field

itself.

MCDOUGALL'S GROUP MIND AND THE SHADOW

In the 1930s William McDougall, who wrote The Group Mind (1920/ 1972) and

several other books on social psychology, theorized that a group mind existed which

included all members of a society and which had its own thoughts, its own traditions,

and its own memories. If we think of such a group mind as an aspect of the morphic

field of the society, it would indeed have its own memory since all morphic fields

have in-built memory through morphic resonance.

The problem with ideas like this one is that it is not possible yet to define t what the

group mind is or how it could be measured. Given the positivistic mood of sociology

which prevailed then (and now), McDougal's concept of the group mind was not

developed further. Traumatic social conditions then dampened any remaining

receptivity to notions involving group forces. By the 1930s, the shadow side of

collective consciousness had taken tangible form in Nazi Germany. Because this

shadow side was all too real, most people were frightened of any concept suggesting

group minds or group consciousness. Certainly we have all seen the shadow side of

group consciousness only too clearly in the last few decades. What we need to

realize, however, is that there is much to be learned from thinking about the more

positive side of group fields or group consciousness.

In more recent sociological and anthropological theory, a holistic approach to society

has become quite common. In fact, compared with the biological and physical

sciences which have been based on reductionist principles, a great deal of

sociological and anthropological theory has taken a consistently holistic perspective.

It was within this broader intellectual environment, characterized by Durkheim's

conscience collective and McDougall's group mind, that Jung formulated his concept

of the collective unconscious.

IS SOCIETY AN ORGANISM?

The idea that human society is an organism is extremely widespread; it is perhaps

one of the most common metaphors extending throughout the history of Western

thought. It exists in our language in phrases such as the body politic, head of state,

arm of the law. These are organic metaphors which imply the unified, organic nature

of society. The same notion is also common in religious metaphors, and is expressed

in such descriptions of the Christian church as the mystical body of Christ. More

specifically, Christ compared himself to the vine of which the people were the

branches, again connoting an organic unity. Even in 17 th century political thought,

which was far more atomistic in tone, philosopher Thomas Hobbes compared society

to a leviathan, a great monster, using still another organic metaphor.

Although many of us still think of society as a form of collective, living organism, the

earth is now considered to be dead. This wasn't always so; in Latin, mater means

mother and materia means matter. Thus, in the Indo-European languages, matter

comes from the same root as mother. Unfortunately, since the 17th century, Mother

Nature in Western consciousness has been turned into dead matter; the mother has

become unconscious, only preserved as a dim memory in the word matter. Instead,

it is the economy that has become alive. We speak of a growing economy which can

be sick or healthy, and which goes through cycles. Economies have all the attributes

of giant living organisms, with an autonomy which even politicians, businessmen and

bankers cannot control. The economy has become a self-regulating, self organizing

system, very much alive in a supposedly dead world. Thus the economy has come to

life at the expense of the earth, and that is one of the problems with which many

people are currently grappling.

The concept of morphic fields containing in-built memory helps to explain many

features of society: for example, there are traditions, customs, and manners which

enable societies to retain their organizing principles - their autonomy, pattern,

structure, and organization - even though there is a continuous turnover of

individuals through the cycles of birth and death. This is similar to the way in which

the morphogenetic field of the human being coordinates the entire body even though

the cells and tissues within the body are continuously changing.

RITUALS: SPIRITUAL AND SECULAR

There are certain contexts in which social memory not only becomes conscious but is

actually invoked in all societies; this is through ritual. Rituals are found in all

societies all over the world, both in cultural and religious contexts. For example, in

our own society the Jewish feast of Passover recalls the dreadful visitation of death

throughout Egypt when all the first-born were killed, except the first born of the Jews

who were protected by the ritual blood of sacrificial lambs smeared on the doorways

of Jewish houses. In the Christian Mass, the ritual of Holy Communion, in which

Christians drink the blood and eat the body of Jesus, refers back to the primal Last

Supper when the Passover feast was transformed and Jesus himself became the

sacrificial victim.

In every society there are also hundreds of social and cultural rituals. In America,

there is the national custom of the Thanksgiving dinner which commemorates the

first Thanksgiving dinner offered by Pilgrims upon their safe settlement in New

England. We also have many minor rituals of everyday life, such as the rituals of

greeting and parting. Saying good-bye, for example, originally meant "God be with

you." When we say good-bye, we give a ritualized blessing which retains some of the

power of the original ritual, even though most people are no longer conscious of its

original meaning. Similar ritual acts on large and small scales permeate even our

modern "enlightened" societies.

What do people think they're doing in rituals? In majo r rituals, the ritual is usually

associated with a story which refers back to a frequently forgotten primal event. For

example, Guy Fawkes night is a secular ritual in England: every November 5th,

bonfires are lit all over England, fireworks are set off, and effigies are burned over

the bonfires. In this case, the ostensible story concerns a man named Guy Fawkes,

one of the Roman Catholic conspirators in the so-called "Gunpowder Plot" who tried

to blow up the House of Parliament in the 17th century.

However, lying behind that supposed explanation is a much older ritual: the Celtic

festival of the dead. On November 1st, the ancient Celtic pre-Christian festival of the

dead was celebrated whereby the old year was burned in effigy, as effigies are

burned on Guy Fawkes day. During this period, it was believed that there was a

"crack in time" when the living and the dead, the past, the present, and the future all

came together. The eve of the festival of the dead was Halloween, when the spirits

and ghosts came out and the dead walked again. Similarly, in the Christian calendar,

November 1st is "All Saints Day" and November 2nd is "All Souls Day," when the

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