Implications of Shared Memory
Heredity and Genetics
This hypothesis has a great many implications. In the realm of heredity it suggests that inheritance depends not only on the chemical genes coded in DNA but also on morphic resonance from past members of the species. In fact, I think that chemical genes have been grossly overrated and that what they actually do is what we know they do, that is, code for the sequence of minor acids in protein. They give organisms their chemical heredity. They are able to make particular chemicals. But the way those chemicals are organized, the form they take up, and the way organisms behave—all that I believe is primarily controlled through morphic fields and morphic resonance.
So heredity involves both genetic changes and morphic resonance. If you think of the rat example I mentioned—rats learning things quicker in London after rats have learned them in Prague—there is no need of change in the DNA of the rats here or the rats there. The rats tune in on the basis of their chemical similarity, but what they pick up doesn't depend on genetic change.
Evolution
This also gives us a new view of evolution, because it allows new patterns of form and behavior to spread much more quickly than they could on the basis of conventional, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory based on random genetic mutation followed by generations of natural selection. Rats learning a new trick in one place could enable rats elsewhere to learn it much quicker, within days; it would not take many generations of natural selection.
In the human realm this, of course, has many interesting implications for change. It suggests that new ideas and new attitudes spread much more quickly than they might otherwise. Over and above the influence of the media and so on, morphic resonance enables these new things to spread much more quickly and effectively.
In the realm of evolution there are some examples that suggest this really happens. The best known of them concerns the behavior of certain birds, blue tits, in stealing cream from milk bottles. In England at the beginning of this century a system of milk delivery began where people had bottles of milk delivered to their doorsteps. After about twenty years in one city, Southhampton, blue tits started tearing off the tops of the milk bottles and drinking the cream from the bottle. This was a very successful habit. It spread by imitation throughout the whole city, and usually it worked very well. There were a few tragic cases where blue tits were found drowned, headfirst, in people's milk bottles, but most of these birds got a free breakfast. After a while this turned up in another city far away. The rate at which the habit spread throughout Britain was carefully monitored by observers all over the country.
Now, blue tits are home-loving birds. They move very short distances from their homes, so at the time it was concluded that the habit was being independently discovered again and again in different parts of the country. Yet the rate of discovery was accelerating. The professor of Zoology at Oxford, Sir Alistair Hardy, suggested this was so remarkable that it perhaps depended on telepathy. I would say, however, this is exactly the kind of effect you would expect with morphic resonance in evolution.
The most interesting developments actually came from Holland. After British blue tits had started stealing milk, Continental ones began doing it, too. And in Holland the habit spread as it had in England, until by the time of the Second World War, all over Holland blue tits were stealing milk. Then unfortunately for the Dutch blue tits, the Germans invaded and milk delivery stopped. It was not until 1948 that deliveries began again. But blue tits do not live more than three or four years, so there could have been no blue tits around in 1948 that remembered the golden age of free cream before the war. Nevertheless the habit reestablished itself all over Holland within two or three years.
So this is the kind of effect we would expect with morphic resonance. There are not many examples where people have studied behavioral evolution in animals; but this is one of the few well-documented cases, and it fits very well with the ideas I am suggesting here.
Memory
Another area where this hypothesis has many implications is in the realm of memory. Morphic resonance depends on similarity. The more similar something is to something that has happened before, the more effective, the stronger the resonance will be. It is a general principle that organisms in general are most like themselves in the past. I am more like me half an hour ago than like you. I am more like me ten years ago than like you ten years ago. In general the most specific morphic resonance acting on an organism from the past will be from its own past states. Thus, self-resonance is the predominant kind of morphic resonance.
In the realm of form, this self-resonance enables organisms to retain their form through the stabilizing of the morphic field even though the chemicals and the cells within the body may be changing over time. In the realm of behavior it enables organisms to tune in to their own past patterns of activity. If I get into a car, for example, and start driving it, then I come into morphic resonance, through similarity of the condition and of my activities, with all the previous times I have driven cars. There is a kind of habit memory that is transmitted through morphic resonance.
I think the same also applies to remembering events or acts. If I remember the last time I came to Prague, which was in 1971, that memory is also accessed in the same way, suggesting that these memories depend on morphic resonance, on tuning-in to ourselves in the past. We are the transmitters in the past. Morphic resonance moves through time; the tuning-in involves a resonance through time with ourselves in the past.
In other words I am suggesting it is not necessary for memories to be stored inside the brain. I am not ruling out the possibility that this can happen. Tony Soipler from Saint Petersburg, for example, has developed a kind of hybrid theory of memory bringing together a conventional molecular basis of memory and morphic resonance. That is possible. But what I am suggesting at the moment for purposes of clarity is the most extreme form of morphic resonance: that memory depends on morphic resonance through tuning-in to the activities of the brain in the past, but it is not necessary for your brains to store memories as traces.
This may be difficult to imagine because we have all been brought up with the idea that memories are stored inside the brain as memory traces. This just shows how much we are influenced by the dominant paradigms of science. This is very much part of the materialistic, mechanistic theory of the mind. From this outmoded view, the mind is just an aspect of the brain. We have memories, therefore they must be in the brain. This is taken for granted by a great many people. Many people, who have never studied science at all, take it for granted as an act of faith.
Yet it is not something borne out by a great deal of evidence. In fact throughout this century many scientists have looked at brains to try to find memories in them, to find localized memory traces, and they have failed repeatedly to find them. The evidence for memory storage in the brain is, if anything, weaker than it was fifty years ago, through repeated failures where millions of animals were sacrificed on the altar of science and vast amounts of money spent in research.
This failure to find localized memory traces is what led Karl Lashley, the great investigator of memory, at the end of his career to despair of finding it. He said, "Memory ought to be impossible, yet it happens." Someone else who worked in this field, Boycott, said, "Memory seems to be both everywhere and nowhere in particular in the brain." And this is the context in which Karl Pribram (1971) put forward his well known holographic theory of memory storage to account for the failure to find localized memory traces.
Well, I am suggesting that memory may well be holographic in the general sense of David Bohm's (1980) implicate order theory. It may not be present in the brain as memory traces at all. If I came to your house and analyzed the wires and transistors of your television set to try to find out what programs you had been watching last week, I would not be able to find any traces of them. That is because the television does not leave traces. What you tune into goes through the set. It is not stored within it. And I am suggesting the brain might be more like a TV receiver than like a video recorder.
Now, you may wonder, why is it then if we have accidents, brain damage, there can be loss of memory. This is not difficult to understand. Think again of the TV set. If I came and cut out bits of your TV set in the sound circuit, the TV set could no longer produce sound, but it could still give pictures. In other words you would have an aphasic TV set. This would not prove that all the sounds, the music, or the voices rose inside the bit of the set that was damaged. It would merely show that part was important for the reception of the information that was coming from somewhere else. Likewise, brain damage leading to loss of memory does not prove that memories are stored inside the damaged brain. It simply shows that those bits of the brain play some role in the recovery or the tuning-in to the memories.
Collective Memory
If we tune into our own memories, why do we not tune-in to other people's? Well of course, I think we do. The whole basis of this theory is that we tune into the memories of many other people, that there is a collective memory on which we all draw. This is something that many people are already familiar with from Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. From the point of view of morphic resonance, if the collective unconscious did not exist as a theory it would have to be invented, because it fits very well with this way of thinking.
However, Jung was suggesting the collective unconscious only in the human realm. I am suggesting that this is part of a much more general process throughout all Nature.
From a conventional, scientific point of view, a mechanistic point of view, Jung's theory does not make sense. And it is not taken seriously by most scientists. It is regarded as a flaky, marginal theory, which might appeal to people with literary educations but not to anyone with a proper scientific way of thinking. Of course it is of great value in many forms of psychotherapy and is one of the important ingredients in transpersonal psychology. However, from the point of view of morphic resonance Jung's theory becomes absolutely central, no longer on the margins of scientific psychology. It becomes absolutely central to an understanding of the human mind. Collective memory is an important ingredient of what we are.
Past-Life Memories
This also leads to several other rather surprising implications. One is that if we tune into lots of people in the past, occasionally we could tune into particular people in the past who are now dead and through morphic resonance pick up memories of past lives.
On this note, there is quite good evidence from the work of Professor Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia that some young children remember incidents from previous lives. They have memories which can not be explained normally and which seem to be valid when checked up on. There is also some evidence, which I think is less reliable, from hypnotic regression of past-life memories.
Usually this evidence produces a polarized response: on one side, a lot of people, usually dogmatic mechanists, say this is impossible therefore the evidence is wrong. We can not explain it, therefore it can not happen. That is one reaction I am sure everyone is familiar with. On the other side are people who say this is reincarnation, which is exactly what we believe anyway. But I am suggesting a middle path. It is possible to accept this evidence for past-life memories in terms of people tuning-in to people in the past, but it does not necessarily prove that you were that person. That is another question. It leaves that question open.
Survival After Death
This question of memory has many other implications. It has a great relevance to all religious theories of survival. All religions that I know of suggest that there is some form of bodily survival of death, some kind of personal survival—either in some shadowy ancestor realm or underworld; or through reincarnation or rebirth; or as in the Judaic, Christian, or Islamic traditions, through some kind of after-life. None of these theories would make sense if memories are stored in the brain, because obviously when the brain decays, all memories would be obliterated. Materialists like the idea of memory storage in the brain—not because it is strongly supported by evidence, it is not—but because it is such a simple and convenient argument which can be used to refute almost all religions. If memory is in the brain, the brain decays at death and that is the end. It would not make much sense if you arrive at the Last Judgment, for example, and you have totally forgotten who you are and what you have done.
However, if memories are not stored inside the brain, then the question of survival of bodily death is left open. This is one of those areas where changing the boundaries of science changes the boundaries between science and religion.
Telepathy
Indeed this change in perspective shifts the boundaries between the so-called normal and the paranormal as well. In a world in which morphic resonance occurs, telepathy also ceases to be shocking. You could even see where some people could say to me, "Well what's so new about morphic resonance? Isn't this just telepathy?" However, from a scientific point of view that would not be quite accurate. I think morphic resonance may be very akin to telepathy, but morphic resonance is a more general principle. We would not, for example, speak of a crystal influencing another crystal by telepathy, which means thought transference. Still, in a world with morphic resonance, telepathy would cease to be a shocking, paranormal phenomenon. It would seem quite normal. This is another one of the reasons why my hypothesis is so controversial.
Ritual
This hypothesis has many other implications. We can think of societies as governed by morphic fields, and I go into this in some detail in my book, The Presence of the Past. Here I will simply mention one implication, which has to do with ritual. All societies have rituals, and rituals are patterns of activity which are done usually in order to recall or relate to some previous event. The Jewish Passover Festival, for example, is a re-creation of the original Passover dinner, which Jewish people have celebrated every year since then. The Christian Holy Communion is another example like this, and so is the American national ritual of the Thanksgiving dinner.
In rituals people deliberately do things in as similar a way as possible to the way they were done before: the same words, the same language. In Hindu ceremonies, for example, the Sanskrit language, their ancient language, is used. There exists a great conservatism of ritual language; the same smells, the same places, the same gestures, the same food, and so on, are employed. I think that through ritual people are deliberately re-creating a particular pattern of activity, consciously re-creating this pattern of activity, in order to connect with those who have done it before. Through ritual, people claim there is a presence of the past, that the past becomes present to those participating in the ritual, that there is a kind of collapse in time. In the Christian Holy Communion, for example, it is believed there is a presence of the original Last Supper in the spirit of Christ and also of all those who have partaken of this ritual since—the Communion of Saints.
These kinds of ideas are found all around the world in all societies. From the point of view of conventional rationalism, this is just another example of meaningless mumbo-jumbo and superstition; but from the point of view of morphic resonance, these ideas make perfect sense because the conservatism of rituals creates exactly the right conditions for a morphic resonance between the present participants and those who have done it before. There really would be some kind of influence through time brought about by the ritual, which is exactly what those who do the rituals believe they are doing.
Nature As Alive
This hypothesis is part of a wider change in paradigm that is going on, which I summarized in my most recent book, The Rebirth of Nature, the idea of Nature as alive. This idea is not only that of the Earth being alive, as Gaia, but of the entire cosmos as alive, akin to a developing organism. Through science the mechanistic theory of Nature is being transcended. Science is returning us, I believe, to a new sense of the life of Nature.
Memory of Place, Field
To summarize one way where this new sense of the life of Nature connects with the morphic resonance idea, I wish to introduce the idea of the memory of places. All traditions have ways of thinking about the quality of place. Each place has its own kind of quality or character. The Romans spoke of the genius loci (spirit of the place). We all know that different places have different feelings or atmospheres; but there is nothing in mechanistic science, with its universalistic laws, that enables us to understand this very well. In terms of morphic resonance theory, however, I think it is possible to think of places as having fields. Places can have morphic fields, and morphic fields can have an inherent memory through self-resonance.
Upon my first thinking of morphic fields this way I thought, thinking of the fields of places is going too far. It is taking the concept beyond its legitimate limits. Then I realized that the concept of fields in the first place comes from placed bits of land in the countryside with hedges around them. The field concept was introduced into science by Farraday who borrowed it from the ordinary English usage of the word field—the primary use of which is agricultural. It has to do with a region of land. The most general definition of field is a region of influence, a region of activity.
So thinking of the fields of places on the one hand makes it easy to understand traditions of geomancy, which are ways of understanding the relations of different parts of a place in terms of its field. It also enables us to think in terms of the memory of places. The place itself can have a memory. There can also be a memory through going to a place. You are in the same environment other people have been in before so you can tune into the collective memory of other people in that place. Therefore there are two senses in which places can have memories: through the human collective experience in that place and through the memory in the place itself.
Now, this concept makes a lot of sense of beliefs found all over the world. For example, it is believed in most parts of the world that certain places are haunted, that there are ghosts or spirits in those places because of bad things that have happened there in the past. Ghosts are a kind of memory, if you like, of what has happened there. It is also believed that certain places can have a positive effect through what has happened there. These are holy places, where great men or women have been born or enlightened, or where many people have prayed, as in the great cathedrals of Europe, the great temples of Asia, and so on.
Pilgrimage
And these sacred places are traditionally, all around the world, places of pilgrimage. The Australian Aborigines with their song lines, the American Indians with their power places, the medieval Europeans with their great networks of pilgrimage all over Europe—all were relating to the spirit of places through a basic human tendency, this tendency to go on pilgrimage to places of power because of the memory and the power in that place.
Almost the only societies where pilgrimage has not happened are the Protestant societies of northern Europe. Pilgrimage was suppressed in the Protestant Reformation in England and elsewhere because it was identified as being essentially pagan by the reformers. I think they were right to see it as pagan in its roots. However, they were wrong to see it as something contrary to the spirit of religion. And I think that this suppression of pilgrimage has a great relevance to us today. Pilgrimage is such a basic instinct, it could not be suppressed for long. And within a few generations the English had invented tourism.
Tourism
Tourism is best understood as a form of secularized pilgrimage. Tourists, you see, go to the great sacred places of the past, the cathedrals, the temples, the holy mountain, the pyramids, Stonehenge, and so on. But because they are modern people who think they have risen above superstition and that kind of thing—because they are rational, educated and modern—they are alienated from the places they go to. They can not kneel down and say a prayer, or light a candle in a cathedral. They can not do a puja in a Hindu temple. They can not invoke the gods or the goddesses, or the patron saints of the place, because that would be superstitious. So instead they have to pretend they are going to these places for educational reasons and are primarily interested in some figures about the place.
Well, this is a profoundly ambiguous activity. If they really did not feel anything about the power of the place, they would stay at home. Yet people are drawn to these places. In fact in England we call them "tourist attractions," and people come there because of the power of the place. When they arrive, they can not relate to the place adequately because the mechanistic theory of Nature first of all treats Nature as entirely lacking in any sacred power. There is nothing sacred in a mechanical world. Second, there is nothing animate. It is seen as some primitive animism to relate to places in this way.
If we recover instead a sense of the life of Nature, the life of the Earth, we can see that we can recover this sense not only theoretically, as I have been describing in this article, we can also recover it through a variety of actual practices. What follows is just one of the ways that we can recover a sense of the sacredness of the Earth. I suggest that one of the paradigm shifts that could make a big difference in the way we relate to the Earth is a very simple one—the shift from tourism to pilgrimage. If only a small percentage of the tourists would go as pilgrims, then the whole world would be linked up by networks of pilgrimage encompassing the sacred places of each country in the world. Already people are going there; already the infrastructure is in place to get people there. I believe that this would be one of the ways that this new paradigm, this new spirit, could be expressed in practice in our own lives.
Recovering Nature's Aliveness Essential For Our Survival
These ideas, you see, are part of a more general move, as I mentioned, towards a recovery of the sense of our life in a living world—Nature as alive. The morphic resonance idea as a scientific hypothesis has to be tested by the methods of science, but it is part of a more general movement of the recovery of the sense of the life of Nature. Regardless of whether morphic resonance turns out to be right or wrong, I believe that this sense of the life of Nature is absolutely essential for coming into a better relationship with the environment, on which we depend. In fact I think these changes in ideas are probably essential for our very survival.
References
Bohm, David. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Pribram, Karl. (1971). Languages of the Brain. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Sheldrake, Rupert. (1981). A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.
Sheldrake, Rupert. (1988). The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. London: Collins.
Sheldrake, Rupert. (1991). The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God. New York: Bantam.
