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 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.
REFERENCES
-
Gablik, S. (1977) Progress in Art. New York: Rizzoli.
-
Kuhn, Thomas (1970). The Structure of Revolutions. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
-
McDougall, William. (I 920/ I 972). The Group Mind. (2nd Edition).
Salem, New Hampshire: Ayer Publications.
-
Wilson, Edward. (1971). The Insect Societies. Boston: Harvard
University Press.
Go Back
|