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 arches
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 position 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 phenomenon 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 commented 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 17th?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 major
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 souls of the departed are commemorated
and requiem masses are said in churches even today. So,
behind our present?day celebrations lay a much older ritual
background: a pattern behind a pattern. Many of these ancient
rituals are alive and well in the modern world.
RITUALS AS MORPHIC RESONANCE WITH ANCESTORS
In general, rituals are highly conservative in nature
and must be performed in the right way, which is the same
way they have been performed in their past. If rituals involve
language, the most important of them use sacred languages.
For example, Brahmanic rituals in India use Sanskrit, a
language which is no longer spoken except by Brahmins, and
the Sanskrit phrases must be pronounced the correct way
in order for the rituals to be effective. We find a similar
practice in a Christian context. The Coptic church in Egypt
dates back to ancient times when Coptic was the spoken language;
so in modern Cairo, you can attend a Coptic service and
the language you hear is the otherwise dead language of
ancient Egypt. The survival of ancient Egyptian in the Coptic
liturgy was one of the important clues that enabled the
unraveling of the language of ancient Egypt with the help
of the Rosetta Stone. Similarly, the Russian Orthodox church
uses Old Slavic, and, until recently, the Roman Catholic
church used Latin. There are hundreds of such examples.
Ritual acts must be performed with the correct movements,
gestures, words, and music throughout the world. The same
pattern is found from one country to another as participants
perform the ritual in the same way it has been performed
countless times in the past. When people are asked why they
do this, they frequently say that this enables them to participate
with their ancestors or predecessors. So rituals have a
kind of deliberate and conscious evocation of memory, right
back to the first act. If morphic resonance occurs as I
think it does, this conservatism of ritual would create
exactly the right conditions for morphic resonance to occur
between those performing the ritual now and all those who
performed it previously. The ritualized commemorations and
participatory re-linking with the ancestors of all cultures
might involve just that; it might, in fact, be literally
true that these rituals enable the current participants
to reconnect with their ancestors (in some sense) through
morphic resonance.
MANTRAS AS SPIRITUAL TRANSMISSION
In light of this idea, various aspects of religious ritual
can be viewed with a new significance. For example, consider
the use of mantras in the Eastern traditions. Mantras are
sacred sounds or words which often have no explicit meaning.
The best known of the Indian mantras is OM. A Christian
mantra (and, in fact, it is also a Jewish and Muslim mantra)
is AMEN. Although it translates literally as, "So be it,"
it has a much deeper significance as a mantric phrase. When
chanted in its original form of AMEN, it was an extremely
powerful mantra. It survives at the end of Christian prayers
and hymns even though most people are unaware of why it
is there.
In Tibetan and Hindu tradition, the mantra is communicated
to the disciple by the guru (or master) as part of an initiation.
Using the mantra, the disciple is able to connect with the
guru as well as with the entire tradition that transmitted
the mantra through the guru.? In Tibetan Buddhism there
is often an actual visualization during the chanting of
the mantra. The acolytes visualize the guru who has given
it to them floating above their heads, and then visualize
the entire lineage of masters and gurus behind him, right
back to the Buddha himself. There are Tibetan pictures of
people sitting and meditating with a tree growing out of
their heads ? a tree filled with faces and figures. These
are called "lineage trees," and they represent the spiritual
lineage through which the transmission comes to the disciple.
Just as morphic resonance provides a more comprehensible
explanation of the power of mantras, it also helps explain
certain prohibitions that might not otherwise make sense.
All religions have prohibitions on blasphemy (the wrong
use of sacred words), such as the Judeo?Christian admonition
not to take the Lord's name in vain. People are often instructed
to use mantras only in the appropriate context and not to
bandy the word around in casual conversation. I myself have
heard Hindu gurus caution that inappropriate use will weaken
the mantra. This makes impressive sense when explained in
terms of morphic resonance: Instead of acting as a key tuning
one into the meditative states of one's own past and of
the past of the guru or lineage of gurus, the mantra would
also tune one into all the casual conversations at which
the word had been bandied around. Thus, extraneous influences
which would dilute or weaken the intended effect of the
mantra would be brought in via the phenomenon of morphic
resonance.
RELIGIOUS "PATHS" AND ARTISTIC "SCHOOLS"
Other aspects and characteristics of religious traditions
become clear when viewed in terms of morphic fields. Many
religious teachers compare their way to a path, as in Christianity
when Jesus says, "I am the Way," or as in Buddhism where
there is the eight?fold path of the Buddha. The notion is
that through a religious initiation, the individual is set
on a path which the initiator of the path? Buddha or Christ?has
trod before them, and on which many other people since then
have also trod. The people who have gone along that path
create a morphic field ? and not only those who established
the initial path, such as Buddha or Christ, but all those
who followed after them contribute to the morphic field,
making the pathway easier to traverse. In Christianity the
concept is explicitly stated in the Apostles' Creed through
the doctrine of the "Communion of Saints." Those who follow
the path of Jesus are not only aided by Jesus himself but
also by the communion of saints ? all those who have trodden
the path before.
If we take the notion of "schools of thought" or "schools
of art," we have another area of traditions in which groups
of people share in a common ideal and a common pattern of
activity. Here again, artistic and philosophical traditions
make more sense when considered in terms of organizing and
enduring morphic fields. Art historians write about the
flow of influence from the Venetian school to the Flemish
school, for example. This mysterious flow of influence could
be understood as the result of the process of successive
schools of art tuning into the morphic fields of the earlier
schools. (I am indebted to Susan Gablik, 1977, for this
idea.) If we think of paintings as having morphic fields
for their actual structures, we can then see how a kind
of "building up" occurs through morphic resonance. A painting
in a given school is created; other people see it. Every
time a new painting in that school is made, it alters the
field of the school. There is a kind of cumulative effect.
Just as an animal within a species draws upon the morphic
fields of the species and, in turn, contributes to those
same fields, a work of art produced within a school draws
upon the morphic field of the style of the school and contributes
to it, so that the style evolves.
KUHN'S SCIENTIFIC "PARADIGMS" AS MORPHIC FIELDS
A very similar analysis applies to the history of science.
We can think of different schools of thought and different
areas of inquiry in science as having their own morphic
fields. In fact, we speak about the field of physics, the
field of biology, the field of geophysics, the field of
metallurgy, and so on. It is my opinion that we could take
literally the very use of the word field in this context.
Within each field of science there are sub?groups: in physics,
for example, there are astrophysicists, quantum theorists,
and so on, and sub?schools within those sub?groups. Entrants
to each must go through the proper initiations; they must
study and pass the right exams; and all have their own folklore,
mythology, and founding fathers. This is essentially the
insight of Thomas S. Kuhn in his great book, The Structure
Of Scientific, Revolutions (1970). He says that science
is a social activity, and that scientists are initiated
into the professional group by the practicing group of scientists.
These social groups are self?regulating and self?organizing,
just like any other field structure. Scientists strongly
resent it if outsiders come along and tell them how to run
their outfit. Physicists, for example, feel that they are
the best people to judge what should go on in physics. Even
if governments want to regulate the science of physics to
their own ends, then they do it with the help of physicists.
They have to set up committees and grant?giving agencies
on which physicists sit for peer group reviews.
We see the same pattern in other professional groups:
in trade unions, in the American Medical Association, in
groups of engineers, and so on. Kuhn pointed out that at
any given time, there is a consensus within each group about
the way reality operates and the way that problems should
be solved. This is what he called a paradigm. In his book,
Kuhn uses the word paradigm in two senses, as he makes clear
in his second edition. The paradigm is not just a conceptual
way of looking at things, a model; rather, it is a shared
consensual view of reality upon which the professional group
depends. In each group, the members recognize those they
consider proper co?members of the professional group, and
those whom they recognize as outsiders ? as not being within
their group. This is the social aspect of paradigm.
But a paradigm also includes a model of the way problems
can and should be solved. The Newtonian paradigm has a model
of the way to solve physical problems; Newton's gravitational
equations are an example of such a model. As students progress
through the stages undergraduate, graduate, and post?doctoral
work, they are given increasingly difficult problems to
solve. But they are always given examples of how these problems
should be solved ? a "style" of doing the solving ? which
is acceptable within the paradigm.
A shift in paradigm involves both a new way of solving
problems (because there is a new way of thinking about the
problems involved), and also the building up of a new social
consensus among practitioners. Both Gablik and Kuhn have
pointed out that the concept of paradigm in the sciences
is similar to the notion of style in art: paradigms have
the kind of cumulative, developmental, evolutionary quality
that characterizes styles in artistic traditions. Indeed,
Kuhn went so far as to model his theory of scientific development
on art history. Previously, science had been treated as
if it were a purely rational activity based on the cumulative
building?up of knowledge, completely independent of the
social and professional dimensions taking place within the
scientific process. Kuhn demonstrated that the same kind
of patterns which were accepted by many historians of art
were also at work within the sciences.
A view of paradigms as morphic fields helps us to understand
why they are so strongly conservative in nature, for once
the paradigms are established, there is a large social group
contributing to the consensual reality of the paradigm.
A very powerful morphic resonance is evolved by this way
of doing things; and that is why paradigm changes tend to
be rather rare, and why they meet with strong resistance.