Rupert Sheldrake: Morphic Resonance, Ritual and the Memory of Nature

I'm talking about morphic resonance and it's a hypothesis about memory in nature the basic idea is is a memory inherent in nature and this shines forth in various ways one of them is through the so-called laws of nature which I think of me like habits I think the habit of nature evolved along with the universe rather than or being fixed laws that were there at the beginning it's the hypothesis also says that each species has a kind of collective memory a bit like what Jung called the collective unconscious and that each member of the species draws on the collective memory of the species and in turn contributes to the hypothesis also leads to a completely new interpretation of inheritance it's not all in the teens or even in the genetics and perhaps the most radical aspect is that it leads to a reinterpretation with the nature of memory memory is not stored inside our brains I'm sure you've all been brought up with even bitter tears but I'm going to suggest is not the brains of all that tuning systems are tuned into memory through morphic resonance rather than memory stores that have it all stored in so this is obviously controversial because it goes against the standard assumption in Western science that nature's governed by fixed roles that were all at the moment of the Big Bang the normal assumption is that at the moment of the Big Bang all the matter and energy in the universe appeared from nowhere and all the laws that govern it suddenly appeared and have governed it ever since in exactly the same way as my friend Terence Mckenna used to say modern science is based on the principle give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest and the one free miracle is the assumption that all the laws of nature suddenly appeared together with all the matter and energy in the universe I just don't think that's the case and I think one of the reasons why we have to consider the idea of memory in nature whether we like it or not is because we now have a radit radically evolutionary cosmology the idea that nature is fixed comes to us from Greek philosophy and it's now a headlong conflict with the idea that everything you pause which is rooted in the Jewish part of our cultural heritage the ancient Greeks thought that ultimate reality was eternal and changeless they probably got this idea through mystical experience where many mystics find that through mystical insight they arrive at a realm which is beyond space and time the Greeks tried to turn it into of nature and different philosophers came up with different theories about what the ultimate ephemeral reality was Pythagoras and his school of thought said the ultimate reality was mathematics which are outside space and time that give rise to a university living and mathematics is essentially changements numbers proportions ratios we need to change those truths Plato generalized Pythagoras's idea to the idea of the ultimate reality is a realm of forms or ideas beyond space and time the platonic realm of forms and ideas included mathematics but it went further it had the archetypes and all species for example an ideal form of the horse or a horse essence before individual horses reflect of participation but which remains outside space and time the atomists school of thought in ancient Greece the predator pick materialists said that ultimate reality was matter matter was made of lots of little bits atoms that never changed but they moved around and Riaan are mutated in different pounds and they and the changes in the world very different theories of federal reality all of these were resurrected in the 17th century at the beginning of long science and the idea was that the laws of nature and mathematical ideas and the mind of a mathematical God mathematicians and physicists very much like the idea of God in a petition because it makes them the most godlike being here and also it creates a kind of high priest to it they're the only ones who can really understand reality the rest of us who don't know so much about mathematics just have to take their word for it so they also revived the idea of nationals changeless particles of matter of course we now know that atoms can change but this was built into the foundations of modern science and right up until 1966 scientists took it for granted that the universe was made up of a fixed amount of matter and energy and that the laws of nature were technically text but this came into conflict with the other great idea and Western thought from the Jewish heritage the Jews were the only ancient people who had the idea of history as a progressive development and the prototype for this was the journey of the Jewish people out of bondage in Egypt through the world I was to promise them it was a journey with a goal and the goal was something like the recreation of Edom in the land milk and honey of course when they arrived there then as now it was full of Palestinians so it turned out not to be a paradise and there was nothing but trouble and so the idea of this end of history was projected into the future coming of the Messiah the Christians Jesus was the Messiah but then history will come to an end so it was an objection to the second coming of Jesus when ordinary history would come to an end well this basic idea of an end to ordinary history became the basis of a whole lot of millenarian movements during the Middle Ages one of the most important was in in late 1980 when everyone thought that at the coming of the Millennium the 1,000 everything would transform at this led to the y1k problem but it didn't ensue there were serious bother millenarian movements and this whole way of thinking was secularized in the 17th century here in England by Francis Bacon who came up with the idea that that would indeed be a transformation of humanity and the planet but it wouldn't happen through divine intervention and through Bobby narco science and technology humans would require a supported ember over the universe that we would be able to dominate and control nature through science and technology which would lead to economic growth and progress this is not the ideology of every government in the world and it needs to an extremely progressive this view of history by the end of the 18th century it was the standard philosophy of Enlightenment intellectuals all over Europe and North America but if any applied to humans the rest of nature was seen to be ecstatic with Darwin's theory of evolution in 1859 this progressiva stimulation review was extended to all life but the physicists said it doesn't apply to the universe that's just a big machine that's running out of steam according to the second law of thermodynamics and it will find they freeze up and just last forever in a final heat death and physicists clung to the idea of the eternal universe until 1966 when the Big Bang cosmology became the orthodoxy of physics and that says the universe began about fourteen billion years ago it's been growing and expanding include ever since and new things have been appearing within it throughout the whole of this evolutionary process so now the whole of reality is evolutionary not just humans not just life but the whole universe now if the whole universe is evolutionary what about the laws of nature how can we really say that all the laws of nature were they're fixed at the moment of the Big Bang it made sense when people thought the universe was eternal but if the universe is here additionally why can't the laws evolved in fact as soon as you think about it you realize that the idea of laws of nature is a metaphor it's based on the idea of human laws and only humans have laws they don't occur anywhere else in nature but it's based on the other laws human laws governing nature being eternal it's a rather shaky metaphor very anthropocentric I think a much better conception of the universe would be evolutionary laws because human laws do of course involves the laws of Britain they're not the same today as they were a hundred years ago but even better is the metaphor of habit did humans have habits animals have habits Nature has habits I think the whole universe is governed by habit now this is very shocking idea in Western philosophy because we're so steeped in Greek assumptions but in Eastern philosophy in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy the idea of a memory in nature is completely standard I first thought of this idea of Norfolk residents when I was a Donald in Cambridge and it was very hard to get the idea across from my fellow scientists in Cambridge I then worked in India I lived there for seven years I worked in an agricultural Institute and the International crops Research Institute in Hyderabad and when I discussed this with my Indian colleagues I've got a completely different reaction what they said is oh there is nothing new in this idea ancient Rishi's have said thousands of years ago and so basically their attitude was well memory in nature you know tell us something new that's what we've always thought so and Buddhists have something rather similar and so it's a worldview I found no resistance at all in India to this idea the resistance came in when I said well why not actually test it scientifically and they didn't want to rock the boat of conventional science but the idea there was a memory in nature so you've made a lot of sense from that bunch of you anyway this is a hypothesis and it's a scientifically tested and how I formulate the idea of damages in terms of the idea of what I call morphic resonance the word Norfolk comes from the Greek word multi which means form or shape and resonance is the automatic influence of a particular pattern of vibration on another pattern of vibration we're used to it from the idea of acoustic resonance stretch strings in the piano if you put the sustaining pedal on in your charge into a piano you go into a panic it will echo back and of resonance if you come e collected back even the different overtones resonate with different strings on the piano we also have resonance in radio when you tune in a particular frequency on the radio it's a resonant phenomena we have resonance in magnetic spin resonance as in fMRI machines we have it in electron spin resonance there's many kinds of resonance in nature what I'm proposing is something that's similar to them in the sense it's about feminine vibration everything in nature is vibrating even atoms and electrons or vibrations happen in fountains it's different in the sense that the resonance occurs across space and time and doesn't involve a transfer of energy to me today that's the hypothesis in the nutshell it's written up in detail in my books the presence of the past and a new science of life so if you want the details you can find them there plus material on my website children not all what I need to do now is just talk about some of the ways you can test this I can be tested scientifically one way of testing it is with crystals if you make a new chemical compound for the first time and chemical companies and universities make thousands of new chemicals every year the first time you try to crystallize it there won't be a more fit for that crystallization because it's never happened before but when once you've got crystals the second time anyone makes it anywhere on the earth Oh or perhaps throughout the whole universe it should Christianize easier because that's already been a patent established there's already a kind of memory in nature the third time you make it you'll have an influence from the first and second crystals it should happen easier and quicker the fourth time even quicker because the first second and third lot of crystals acting at a distance across space and time but from the blast no does this actually happen we answer is yes that it's well known to chemists that when you make new compounds they're difficult to crystallize they take a long time before you can get a new crystal but once you've fallen crystals in one lab it seems to get easier everywhere else and as time goes on it gets easier and easier now chemists don't usually explain this in terms of morphic resonance they explain it in terms of stories or anecdotes they assume that this happens because fragments of previous crystals get carried from them to them as sieves or dust and it's known that bits of previous crystals can make crystallization happen quicker they act as nuclei for new crystallization processes so they just assume this happens because of micro tree chemists carrying them from now to that especially bearded chemists or else invisible dust particles have walked it through the atmosphere in that settled out all over the world without causing things to crystallize faster but I'm suggesting this should happen even if you exclude migratory chemists and filter dust out of the atmosphere it should still have them quickly and I haven't been able to persuade any of you to do that actual test but there's another way you can test it with crystals as the crystal habit becomes better established as things become easier to crystallize and as the crystal cabbage is stronger it should be harder to break things up and that means you need a higher temperature to break up crystals and also functioning so the melting points a new compound should actually increase over time whereas the melting points of compounds that crystallize in nature and have done for millions of years have so much more tech resonance from the past they behave as if they're governed by eternal laws that millions and millions of pass crystals you don't notice the difference of a few dozen more there's already evidence which I summarized in my books that melting points that new compounds do in fact increase these are not tiny effects sometimes it's 10 50 and 20 degrees centigrade and so I think there's this is another way the theory is testable and foolish through which there's already evidence the hypothesis can be tested in biology as well and I won't go into those details today but again you can read about them it can also be tested in the same applies to the activity of brains particular patterns of activity in brains and in movement and muscle movement in body movements but also having more people if you train rats to learn a new trick in London rats all around the world should be able to learn the same trick quicker just because the rats have landed here and again there's already evidence that this actually happens dramatic increases in grapes learning in rats in laboratories were observed in a series of experiments started at Harvard and carried on in Edinburgh and in Melbourne Australia now more than about 15 fold increases in the rate of learning enormous increase in already learning and it turned out that this was not just in rats whose parents have been trained but in any rats of that breed so it was something that was mysterious when it was discovered and because it couldn't be explained it was more less Scheldt and forgotten about and so there's already evidence this happens in the human realm it should be getting easier to learn snowboarding skaters as skateboarding skydiving all these new skills that have appeared since the beginning of the 20th century allâh new physical and mental skills computer programming they all of them should be getting museum and they are but it's not there's other things that work not just morphic resonance --is better designs better training methods videos on YouTube etc so to test the hypothesis you need to look at something where the actual tests are quantitative and haven't changed over long periods and this applies to intelligence tests in the 1980's I predicted that because of morphic resonance the average scores on intelligence test should be getting better not because people are getting smarter but because the tests are getting easier because so many people have already done them and indeed there in the 1990s it turned out that exactly this has been happening average IQs have gone up in Britain America Germany in fact all over the world by about 30 percent since 1920 and there's no independent evidence that people are 30% smarter I think it's just cuz the tester getting easier it was discovered by a psychologist called James then is called the Flynn effect and this is something which is extremely baffling to psychologists but fits very well with morphic resonance there's many other tests that can be done and have been done in the realm of human learning I summarized them in the appendix to the new edition of my book a new science of life and one of them I mentioned because there's an idea my older son thought our friendship when he was doing GCSE with his perhaps he came up to me and said my friends and I have thought of a way of getting extra marks then on exam without doing extra work so I thought that how are you going to do that and I said he said by morphic resonance how do you do that he said well say in the physics paper it would be 15 questions he said we'll do questions 14 and 15 first then we'll go back to 1 2 3 4 10 so we'll be about 10 minutes but I never get a boost by morphic resonance so I said to him but some of your friends must have been morphic resonance skeptics what did they say and he said well yes he said some of them where they said what if Norfolk residents doesn't really happen he said we worked out if it doesn't really happen we wouldn't lose anything but if it did we'd gain extra points and extra scores but they will have actually did it in their exam and they all got a stars prize anyway so it turned out a friend of mine from Cambridge was in charge of the OCR science examinations panel and so I talked to him and I said we could turn the whole of these science exams into a giant morphic resonance experiment by having a minority of the questions put in a different order in the sarandon sampling of the paper if people who did those later got higher scores if they were they were doing those questions later in the exam because of course everyone doesn't synchronize to avoid people reading out and telling their friends the questions if they did them later them got higher scores a very fantastic test of morphic resonance first he was interested he rang a few days before he said groupid he said I'm due to retire soon I want to make sure I get a full pension and he said I turn the whole school science exam system into a giant morphic resonance experiment that's not so unfortunately it didn't happen but it's still a good idea and that would be another possible test there are many possible simple tests but that would have cost almost nothing just printing a few papers and exam questions in a different order anyway it's a testable hypothesis there's already quite a lot of evidence that supports it and so what I want to do now is to discuss some of the implications one of them is in the realm of heredity we've all been brought up to believe that heredity is coded in the genes so many people use the words to read a tree and genetic as if they're synonyms as if everything you inherit is somehow inherited in the chemical genes or possibly in epigenetic vacations of the teens well I've always thought that jeans are overrated and when in the 1980s I went around saying jeans are overrated most people thought I was joking but I was quite sincere because what teams do is code for the sequence of amino acids in proteins we know what they do they enable the body to make certain proteins but they don't code for the shape of your nail or the shape of your arms or the instinctive web-spinning behavior of a spider or the migratory behavioral cuckoo these things are not proteins they're things that are very much higher level of organization and there's no simple one-to-one relationship between proteins and gene and these characteristics where genetics works best is where there's a simple relationship with the gene to a single protein for example sickle-cell anemia if you have a defective hemoglobin molecule because of a defect in the hemoglobin gene then you have sickle cell anemia in cystic fibrosis a single gene mutation will give this hereditary disease but for most of our inheritance there's no such simple relationship at all and I think most of the impairments of the form instinctive behavior works by morphic resonance not bad genes well this was actually put to the test and the human genome project was initiated in the 1980s and it was initiated partly because biologists were suffered from then as nerve from physics Envy and they were very envious of physicists who have very big projects like Star Wars and giant collide and atom smashers and hydrogen bombs and things whereas biology was a kind of content industry and they didn't have multibillion-dollar programs so they wanted to think of something that could make biology have what they call big science but they had to have an idea that was simple enough to explain to President Reagan they came up with the human genome project that we can read the book of life as it's written in our genes and this will be a historic accomplishment in the whole of human nature but will be revealed at the genetic level that was the promise and people said it will lead to individualized medicine it will lead to a whole new kinds of biotechnology and so on they got billions of dollars in funding than the two gene projects the public one and the private one run by a firm called seller economics which was run by a highly competitive alpha male type scientist craig Venter and he saw this as a competition to beat the could beat the human project by the primaries the public genome project at a private one in fact they both sequence the genome around the same time in the year 2000 they expected about a hundred thousand genes and cherry Fanta was planning to get into all the key ones and their own that the rights to these genes well it didn't quite work out as planned it turned out there any about 23,000 fuze only a few more than the fruit fly and less than the sea urchin only about half as many as a rice plant so that was the first shock and then they turned out these teams didn't explain anything like what they thought they would try about five years ago tens of thousands of genomes have been sequenced and they did have a series of studies called genome-wide national studies they took 30,000 females and they looked at characteristics the people whose genes have been analyzed and one of the things they looked at was height it's very easy to measure height you only as a tape measure and it was already known that talk parents tend to have to all children small short parents short children if you knew the parents height you can predict the children's height with an accuracy of about 80% in other words to use the technical word height is about 80% heritable so they looked at the genes for height and they found that there were about 50 genes involved in influencing height then they made the best models they could some teams more important than others using these very best novels they predicted the height of people on the basis of their genes they were able to predict it with an accuracy of 5% well just by using a tape measure you could have predicted with an accuracy of 80% that the trillions of dollars cheaper so and the gap between the 5% he could actually predict and the 80% was known to be heritable inherited it's called the missing heritability problem this now turns out that this applies to many things the prediction of breast cancer for example they can get an accuracy of about 5 to 10% and with most diseases it's five to ten percent with most characteristics the only ones where you've got a really high accuracy as with single gene rare inherited diseases like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia so this led to a great deal of soul-searching in the realm biology Steve Jones the geneticist at University College said well if the genes aren't explaining inheritance then what does then be if some people thought that the the whole thing had been saved by epigenetics those of you who studied biology were not many people here studied biology in the 20th century but until about the year 2000 the biggest taboo in biology was the inheritance of acquired characters you can't inherit what parents learn or acquire you can only inherit the genes that they inherited so there was no mark Ian's inheritance or the inheritance of acquired characters was a massive Daboo in biology and people who advocated it we usually drummed out of their positions and him it was serious heresy persecuted quite mercilessly in the West in the Soviet Union on the other hand it was the orthodoxy and Mendelian genetics were persecuted mercilessly so that made it even more polarized or difficult however since the year 2000 the inheritance of acquired characteristics is really back in fashion in a big way it's been rebranded epigenetic inheritance and it's now one of the hot topics within biological research people are now doing experiments that would have been unthinkable a few years ago for example there was an experiment on the inheritance of fear in rats a paper published in Nature the most prestigious of all scientific journals it was called inheriting the fears of fathers no rats were made afraid of the smell of a synthetic chemical called acetophenone it smells a bit like cherries whenever they smelt it they were given an electric shock it's weather is classic old-style conditioning type experiments say laughter a few times whenever they smelt acetophenone but they were paralyzed with fear they then took spam through these male mice inseminated female mice the mothers never met these farmers and looked at their children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren were paralyzed with fear when they spelled acetophenone they'd inherited this fear from their fathers in a way that couldn't possibly be explained by genetic mutations as in neo-darwinism but which could be an epigenetic effect it was clearly an inheritance that wasn't to do with changing the teens it could have been due to changing the way the genes are expressed but even then it's a big stretch because how could learn to avoid this spell actually affect the epigenetics the packaging of the genes in the sperm of the mice there's no known mechanism whereby that could happen morphic resonance would provide a much easier explanation for this kind of result right now within biology people are doing the experiments of this kind coming up with really surprising hereditary effects and they get permission to do that they wouldn't have permission to do it if it was morphic resonance which is still treated as heretical but by saying as epigenetic even though they can't explain how it actually happens then it's okay to do this research so we're in a very interesting situation some people think that epigenetics will explain the missing heritability problem well epigenetic gene modifications may explain some of it but certainly not all of it and I think it's morphic resonance is largely what's responsible for this unexplained inheritance one of the reasons that people thought that genes were exceptionally important in inheritance was through Studies on identical twin was separated sooner but as you all know there's been a long-standing debate going back at least 200 years about the relative importance of nature and nurture genes and environment on the whole people on the right of the political spectrum prefer the idea of genes or nature because it means people are born unequal and there's not much you can do about it but people on the left of the political spectrum like the idea that genes don't code for as much as inherit that as the environment so if you can reform education and social institutions you can improve human nature and and overcome these genetic problems if human nature's malleable through the environment so studies on identical twins separated soon after birth became the key line of research for this because they have identical Queens being identical and different environments because they're adopted by different families and this provides a good way of looking for relative importance of nature and nurture it turns out that identical twins raised in quite separate families who've never met each other are extraordinarily similar in many ways in ways that no one expected for example calling their children by the same names in some cases things you would never expect to be inside genomes the result of these identical twin studies have led to people saying we'll look there's a very high degree of genetic determinism and this is the edifice on which Selfish Gene theory sociobiology is built the idea that if there's a very high level of genetic determinism and this is now the orthodoxy of biology or near Darwinism and so on but you see there's another possible explanation if identical twins are similar which they are then even if they're separated at birth they'll resonate with each other by morphing resin which depends on similarity they're more similar than any other people to each other so they influence each other continuously as they develop in life and all sorts of things they learn or require will become easier for the other one to learn or require or habits they have and so the similarities could largely reflect Norfolk residents rather than teams but that's not something that's ever taken into account in these debates it's either genes or environment and the fact they say similar police people proves it must be largely genes that's why the missing heritability problem was such an enormous shock and it's provoked a kind of crisis some people in biology say we must have missed something out which I'm sure they have others say well it just could we haven't looked at enough minor modifier genes just give us another 10 billion dollars a few more years and 10 20 more years we'll figure this one out that's majority approach but it's very much an open question now I discussed this in detail in my book the science delusion if any of you want further references on this so if morphic resonance depends on similarity as I'm suggesting it does then you can ask another question who in the past was most similar to me and if you think about it the person in the past he was made similar to you is you we're most similar to ourselves in the past and therefore the most specific resonance working upon us from the pastures from our own past we have some resonance less specific from people who are similar to us past limbs our family people who are similar in inheritance and in culture and environment and ultimately to all human beings but there's difference of degrees of similarity Young's idea of the collective unconscious is the human unconscious on which we draw we draw more on that which is people more similar to us less on those that are less similar but the most similar of all is yourself and I think that our ordinary memory depends on what resonance that collective memory and individual memory in a different in degree not in kind so I think that the memories you have of where you went for your holidays this year things that happened as a child and so are not all stored inside your brain the conventional view is that somewhere there inside your head in modified nerve endings or phosphorylated proteins people have spent a hundred years looking for these memory traces that haven't found them so instead of assuming that they may not be there people just say oh we've got to look harder they must be stored holographically over large regions of the brain or they are very elusive or something like that I think there's a much simpler explanation for the fact people have been so unsuccessful in finding them they're not there and it's like me coming to your house and trying to find out what you watched on TV last night by analyzing wires and transistors it wouldn't tell me what you've watched they don't leave traces these programs so I think our brains are more like TV receivers tuning in by morphic resonance to the past than like video recorders or solid disc recorders and storing it all in a physical form inside the brain there's good evidence that there are specific changes in brains while memories are being laid done from opto genetic methods and other sophisticated mom techniques and specific changes when memories are being retrieved but in between they just disappear so I think what's happening is that when they lay down there's a pattern of activity and when they retrieved as a resonance with that pattern of activity but in between they're not inside the brain now this has a lot of implications many of these ideas have implications in philosophy and in the realm of religion as well for example if memories are all stored inside your brain then when you die all your memories will be wiped out because your brain decays and if they're all in the brain total wipe out of every memory but all religions presuppose that something of us survives the death of the body and is carried over in a non material form for example in theories of reincarnation in is traditionals there's a transfer of memory or of habits or dispositions from one life to another through reincarnation or rebirth if there was no transfer the whole doctrine would become meaningless and if all the memories and all the things that Victor people have learned or all their dispositions decay when they die then this whole doctrine this whole philosophy it would not be meaningful at all in theories of survival in as spirits on or in an ancestral realm again there has to be some kind of memory in the catholic theory of survival or possibly death in purgatory which i understand as a kind of dreamlike state that you go into after you die you go on dreaming but you can't wake up anymore the kinds of dreams you have depend on the kind of person you are you open these expectations eric spears and so on and again those presuppose memories in extreme Protestant after death scenarios where you go to sleep when you die and then you're woken up the last trunk for the final judgment if you appear before your maker forgetting who you are and what you're done it wouldn't be a very meaningful experience take all of these hypotheses of life after death presuppose the survival of memory now if memories are not stored in the brain then they're not going to be eliminated at death it doesn't show how they're going to be retrieved but it leaves the door open for hypotheses about survival at bonteri death whereas the materialist theory slams the door shut not because there's firm scientific evidence for it but simply because for a materialist everything is cheerio therefore memories must be material whether you can find them in the brain or not there's no alternative they've got to be sex just an assumption really it's one of the 10 dogmas of contemporary science which I discuss in my little science division now coming to I've been talking about memory inheritance in nature because the same applies to inheritance of pattern and form in plants it's the same applies to the structure of planets and galaxies and I want to come to rituals all cultures have rituals and all rituals have a particularly conservative character people do in the same way they've been done before often using the same language that's being used before in the Brahmanic rituals of India they use Sanskrit which no one speaks in normal life in the Russian Orthodox Church they use oval Slavonic again it's not a living language in the Coptic Church of Egypt in the literature they use ancient Egyptian language which is not spoken anywhere else's the aim is survival of the ancient Egyptian tongue in the Coptic Christian liturgy and so there's a conservatism with language also of gestures and forms so rituals are highly conservative why should that be well I think morphic resonance provides some kind of explanation for this because if people do things are similarly as possible so the way they've done been done before then they'll enter into robotic resonance with all those who've done in the past there'll be a presence the past through performing the ritual right back to the first time the ritual was done and this is exactly what people who do rituals think is happened for example the Passover ritual at the Jewish Passover ritual involves reenacting every era Passover the Passover dinner of a curious people just before they left Egypt to start on the journey through the wilderness to the promised land it involved killing and LAN smearing the blood of the lamb on the lint all of us had to avoid this plague on the rest of Egypt which killed the firstborn of people in their cattle as well the Jewish people were passed over because of this ritual of having this killing the slurm which was like a sacrificial victim eating the lamb in a special way with bitter herbs and so on ever since then Jewish people that re-enacted this every year at Passover and by doing so explicitly connect with the very first time it happened all those have done it in the years that passed these rituals are about incorporating people within social groups and connecting with the ancestors they could perform a very important social role for social cohesion identity and connection with the past a Christian holy communion is itself a Passover meal the last meal shared between Jesus and His disciples and its reenacted in every Holy Communion and those who take part are connected with the first time it happened and all those who've done it ever since which in Christian terminology is called the communion of saints the idea that what's called the Blessed company of all faithful people all those who participated ever since the first last summer till now you're linked by participating in it with them secular rituals have the same format the American Thanksgiving dinner which happens later this month is a reenactment of the first Thanksgiving dinner of the first settlers in New England gave thanks for their survival through the first year in the new world and so a dinner of thanksgiving week by taking part in it people come marital as the way in which they affirm their American identity and their connection with the first settlers in New England so rituals all have this kind of character of linking the present participants with those who've done it before they make great deal of sense in terms of morphic resonance but from the point of rec rationalistic materialist point of view they're just mumbo-jumbo but I think this is something that people most cultures depend on these rituals to give a sense of meaning and continuity to the culture if you take them away there's a kind of vacuuming up rootlessness I think these things also apply to places if you're in a place where many people have prayed or worshiped or like a Cathedral for example one of the ancient cathedrals or places of pilgrimage or a temple in India for example then I think when you're there you're tuned in by morphic resonance to other people who've been in the same place before you tuned into a kind of collective memory conversely if you're in a place where bad things have happened you may pick up a rather odd Pleasant kind of memory uneasy memory it's interesting that most stories of hauntings or ghosts are associated with stories of bad things that have happened in that place I think pilgrimages are one way of connecting with these sacred places and I very interested that the entire group actually went on a pilgrimage to build villages early this year and there's been a revival of pilgrimage here in Britain it's open to everyone I've connected to these ancient sacred places as a novelist we're connecting to the history of the place and being present in nature being present to the environment being present to other people because when you were a pilgrim all distinctions of social status and rank are abolished I know that guy who is here today who needs some of these pilgrimages has been doing with people from all walks and backgrounds including some in this room but also with that you can Duchess of Norfolk for example say they too have been pilgrims this year walking just like ordinary people anonymously through the countryside it's a marvelous way of reconnecting so there are many other ways in which I have many other implications of morphic residues but it's basically a theory of habit in nature it explains why things remain the same why things that continue while there are influences across the time stabilizing things doesn't explain creativity because creative things are not the same as what's happened before by definition I think he evolution involves an interplay between habit and creativity as our end lives do we can think of all sorts of new ideas in when animals or plants mutate or produce new varieties but not all of them the successful novel and new ideas are good ideas there's a natural selection that selects some rather than others and the ones that pass natural selection ones that are selected for by natural selection are repeated they repeat it more and more often they become virtually so I think there's an interplay of habit and creativity within the evolutionary process and in terms of innovations cultural innovations Norfolk residents on the one hand it might seem pessimistic old habits die hard on the other hand is optimistic new patterns or innovations can spread quicker than they might otherwise so it has a mixed message in terms of human affairs [Music] you

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Keywords: rupert sheldrake, Morphic Resonance, ritual, memory of nature, morphogenetic fields, philosophy, parapsychology, religion, spirituality, nature, ecology, botany, biology

Id: HwB4WQF7PQk

Length: 47min 33sec (2853 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 16 2019