Morphing My Genetic Fields in Montreal

Last May (2004), I was a speaker at the Awakening to Spirit Conference in Montreal. I have already written about this in a previous issue of Atlantis Rising, in connection with my meeting Stephan Schwartz, an expert in remote viewing and psychic archeology. This time, I will talk about my encounter with Rupert Sheldrake. It is one of the things I most like about attending conferences—the chance to hear and speak with researchers whose works I have read and appreciated, but whom I have never met personally. 

Rupert Sheldrake is well-known as the originator of the concept of morphogenetic fields, which he says provide a key to the understanding of biological form. These ideas were put forward in his book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. In his lecture on May 17, Rupert laid out his ideas.  

In his talk, Rupert explained how the generation of the complete form of an organism from a fertilized egg is still unexplained by modern science. The fertilized egg splits into two cells, and those two split into four, and the process goes on millions of times. But in the course of those cell divisions, we find some cells becoming parts of specific organs and tissues, which continue to develop through the cell-division process in very complex ways, until the whole organism is complete. The problem is that each cell contains the exact-same genetic information. So how does a particular cell know to become a certain kind of cell in a certain kind of tissue in a certain organ or limb of a body that is structured in a particular way? Scientists have observed that certain genes are “turned on” at certain stages of the cell-division process. How that happens is not very well explained, but even if it were explained it would not solve the whole problem. All that a gene does is tell the cell how to string amino acids together to form particular kinds of proteins. And that in itself does not really explain how millions of cells pattern themselves into the ultimate form of the organism. In Sheldrake’s words, this genetic determinism is “grotesquely inadequate” as an explanation for the biological form of the organism. 

Sheldrake appeals to the existence of morphogenetic fields to explain biological form. (The term morphogenesis is a combination of morph, which refers to form, and genesis, which refers to origin.) Morphogenetic fields would explain not only the generation of the structure of an organism, but also such extraordinary phenomena as the regeneration of limbs, or even complete halves of bodies. If you cut a flatworm in half, either lengthwise or crosswise, both halves will again develop into complete flatworms. The morphogenetic field has something in common with the idea of a subtle form-giving seed (bija), an idea derived from the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, and which I have included in my latest book, Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory, as an explanation for biological form. 

In his talk, Sheldrake specifically connected morphogenetic fields with Aristotle’s idea that a formal element associated with matter produces the specific form of an organism. This formal element does not exist apart from matter, and matter does not organize itself in the absence of the formal element. They exist only together. Sheldrake says that the morphogenetic field can change through time, and is thus harmonious with the Darwinian theory of human evolution. During the questions after Sheldrake’s talk, I asked if the concept of morphogenetic fields might not also be compatible with a Platonic conception of a formal element existing apart from matter. He said it could be, but that he preferred the Aristotelean metaphysics. The concept of a form-giving seed that I derive from the Vedic cosmology is more Platonic. There are actually two seeds: conscious selves (atmas, or souls) that animate the bodies of organisms, and also the form-giving seeds, which are given by a supreme intelligence and which are eternally existing, and thus are not harmonious with Darwinian evolution. 

Sheldrake identifies morphic fields with mind. Mind, he said, extends beyond the brain, just like the magnetic field of a magnet extends beyond the magnet itself. This extension of the mind- field beyond the body can help explain extrasensory perception and  telepathic communication. My own ideas on this topic, drawn from the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, are similar to those of Sheldrake. In addition to the gross physical body (sthula sharira), there is a subtle mental body, endowed with subtle senses. This subtle body (linga sharira) is responsible for various yogic siddhis, or perfections, such as durdarshan (seeing at a distance). 

Sheldrake explained that many people have the sensation that someone behind them is staring at them. When they look behind them, they see that someone is in fact looking at them. This can be the basis for some experimental work. During a workshop that followed his talk, Sheldrake asked the participants, including me, to organize themselves into pairs. One member of the pair was the subject of the test, and the other conducted the test. The subject sat in a chair, and the experimenter sat behind the subject. The experimenter was given a sheet of paper giving instructions for twenty trials. For each trial, the instruction gave the experimenter one of two choices. Stare at the back of the neck of the subject, or stare somewhere else. For each trial, the subject had to say whether or not the the experimenter was in fact staring. The results of each trial were recorded on the paper. 

There are two possibilities. One possibility is that the subjects have no paranormal ability that informs them of the actual truth. In that case, one should expect that the subjects will simply be guessing, and because there are two choices, the expectation is that they will guess correctly 50 percent of the time, over a sufficiently great number of trials. The second possibility is that the subjects do have some degree of paranormal ability that lets them actually “perceive” whether or not the experimenters are actually staring at the backs of their necks. In that case, one would expect the subjects’ scores for correct choices would be significantly higher than the chance expectation (50 percent correct). According to Sheldrake, the results of a large number of such experiments do in fact show that the subjects’ results are significantly greater than 50 percent, amounting to about 60 percent. It would thus appear that we do have eyes in the backs of our heads. In the experiment in which I participated, I scored 60 percent correct. 

Sheldrake pointed out that such apparently simple experi-ments have the power to make important contributions to our understanding of reality, and challenge the current understanding, which is based on a strict materialism. Sheldrake has outlined more such experiments, which anyone can carry out, in his book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. 

Remarkably, Sheldrake has done experiments that show telepathic connections between humans and animals. For example, it seems that dogs appear to know when their masters are coming home. Sheldrake tested this by having coordinated time-coded filming of the dog at home and the master away from home. The master was given an instruction to return home, at a time different from the normal time. At the same time the master started to return home, the dog went to the window of the home to await the master’s return. 

Both Sheldrake and I wound up sitting next to each other at Stephan Schwartz’s workshop on remote viewing, and we both participated in the experiment I outlined in a previous column. A “sending” team was sent out to go to a place of their choice in 

 Montreal and “send” imagery back to the rest of us. Both Sheldrake and I were able to identify the place to which they went, giving many correct details. We then compared notes about our respective experiences with what I have called the “knowledge filter.” Actually, I think I am a little more of a victim than Sheldrake, and I think he would agree. He was therefore surprised that I had once been invited by Royal Institution director Baroness Susan Greenfield to lecture there on Forbidden Archeology. 

Sheldrake has never been invited to the Royal Institution, which, after the Royal Society, is England’s top scientific society. I told Sheldrake that after my talk, I had been hosted for dinner by Peter Atkins, a well-known Oxford atheist and husband of Baroness Greenfield, who was abroad when I came. “They’re not married anymore,” said Sheldrake. True enough, I found by checking the web. I also found out that Baroness Greenfield is having her own problems with the knowledge filter. Apparently, some members of the Royal Society threatened to resign if she were elected as a fellow, objecting, among other things, to her high public profile and engagement with the media.

The Forbidden Archeologist 

Michael Cremo

On precognition

 Warnings of air raids

Teddy Pugh of Birmingham wrote that “During the war, when the German bombing raids were going on, we had a black mongrel dog who used to go to our back door and bark to go out, and you could bet that around ten minutes later the sirens would sound for an air raid. We got so used to the dog doing it that I would run up and down both sides of the street and knock on all the doors to warn of an impending raid. She was never wrong once.”

I have received thirty-five other accounts of dogs that gave warnings of air raids before the sirens sounded the official alarm. Some of them let their owners know by whining, some barked, some hid, and others led the way to the air-raid shelter or cellar where the family took refuge. British dogs gave warnings of German air raids during the Second World War, and German dogs gave warnings of British air raids.

Some dogs were said to alert their owners just a few minutes before the sirens went off, but most reacted ten to thirty minutes beforehand. In three cases the dogs gave their warnings more than an hour in advance.

One little dog called Dee sometimes stayed curled up in her basket when the siren went off, and invariably no planes came over. Sometimes when there was no warning siren, she would become very agitated and urge everyone to take cover, and sure enough a raid would take place. 25 As a bonus, some families were able to get back to bed before the all clear sounded: “The dog would suddenly get up, leave the shelter, and settle into its basket with a contented sigh. Five minutes later the all clear would sound.” 26

During the Second World War, cats also anticipated bombing attacks,  usually by showing obvious signs of agitation or by hiding. Some were said to give warning more than an hour in advance. Birds too seemed to know when bombers were on their way: seagulls flew off, cock pheasants gave warning calls, and ducks and geese raised the alarm. Here is how a German parrot did it, according to Dagmar Kessel:

During the wartime year of 1943 I stayed with acquaintances in Leipzig. They had an old parrot. Suddenly, about 9:00 P.M., it was extremely upset in its cage, lifted its left wing and called, “Da oben! Da oben!” (“Up there!”) It even looked up and nobody could get it quiet. I was surprised and asked my hosts what all this meant. “He always does this before an air alert,” the lady said, “usually two hours in advance.” That same night the Tommies really came. They destroyed the Crystal Palace.

Warnings given by German pigeons were a source of trouble to an unfortunate Austrian sculptor, Heinz Peteri, who was arrested during the war for his “undiplomatic” words and deported to Bochum, in the Ruhr, to defuse unexploded bombs. He lived in a small room in the tower of the police administration building. From his window he used to watch the pigeons that lived on the roofs, and he noticed that “the birds often flew away suddenly, all of them, and half an hour later (at the most) the bombers came. Afterward the birds came back. This was repeated many times.” He used this knowledge to warn his comrades and superiors of impending raids, and his predictions repeatedly proved to be accurate. When the Gestapo heard about it, he was arrested once again under suspicion of being a spy “in contact with the enemy.” 27During the Kosovo Conflict in 1999, when NATO was bombing Serbia, the animals in Belgrade Zoo provided an early warning about half an hour before the bombs fell. “It’s one of the strangest and most disturbing concerts you can hear anywhere,” said Vuk Bojovic, the director of the zoo. “It builds up in intensity as the planes approach … and when the bombs start falling it’s like a choir of the insane. Peacocks screaming, wolves howling, dogs barking, chimpanzees rattling their cages.” 28How did all these animals know when air raids were imminent? The most obvious possibility is that they heard the enemy planes when they  were still too far away for humans to hear. But a few moments’ reflection shows that this is not a very plausible suggestion, for at least four reasons. First, as we have seen, the hearing of dogs and other domestic animals is not much more sensitive than our own, although dogs can hear higher-pitched sounds than we can. The bombers used in the Second World War flew at about 250 miles per hour when loaded; hence an animal that responded half an hour before an air raid would have to have heard them when they were about 125 miles away. Some animals were said to respond even earlier, when the bombers would have been more than 200 miles away. Even animals that responded only a few minutes before the sirens went off would have to have heard the planes when they were more than 30 miles away, assuming that the siren gave about five minutes’ warning. It is very unlikely that they could have heard the enemy aircraft at such distances.

Second, hearing distant sounds depends on the wind direction, and there is no evidence that the regular warnings given by animals occurred only when the enemy aircraft were upwind. Rather, the evidence suggests that animal warnings were remarkably reliable and not dependent on the wind direction. Moreover, since the prevailing winds in Britain are southwesterly and the German bombers approached from the east, in most raids they would not have been upwind, and hence the sounds would have been blown away from, rather than toward, the animals that sensed their approach.

Third, there were many other aircraft in the skies, including the country’s own bombers heading toward enemy territory. Apparently the animals did not warn of the approach of friendly bombers. Therefore the hearing theory would require the animals to distinguish between the sounds of different kinds of bombers at great distances, irrespective of the wind direction. There is no evidence that this is possible.

Finally, during the last year of the Second World War, the Germans were firing supersonic V2 rockets at London. These missiles were launched from Holland and headed upward at about 45 degrees. Their engines cut out after a minute or so, and they followed a ballistic trajectory, reaching speeds of more than 2,000 miles per hour as they plunged downward, arriving unseen and unheard. They took only five minutes to reach their targets in England, some 200 miles away, carrying a ton  of high explosives. 29 They were particularly terrifying because their explosion was preceded by no warning and they could strike anywhere in southeast England at any time of day or night.

Dr. Roy Willis, who was seventeen at the time, was living in Essex, just east of London. “I noticed that our dog [a German Shepherd–Norwegian Elkhound cross] was seemingly able to sense the imminent arrival of a V2 rocket. The dog, called Smoke, would go to the window and stare out, hackles raised, as if in anger and fear. After about two minutes, during which time he remained in the same aggressive posture at the window, I would hear the ominous crump of an exploded rocket.” At least one other dog owner had a very similar experience, his animal reacting shortly before the explosions. Assuming that these accounts are reliable, and I have no reason to doubt that they are, the dogs could not have heard these missiles coming, however acute their hearing, precisely because they were both silent and supersonic.

If animals were not anticipating air raids by hearing the approaching bombers or rockets, how did they know the attacks were coming?

No explanation is possible in terms of electrical charges in the earth and the atmosphere, such as those that may serve as warning signs before earthquakes. As far as I can see, only two possibilities remain: telepathy and precognition.

Telepathy. The animals picked up influences telepathically from people or animals along the flight path of the bombers. A wave of alertness and alarm spread through the human and animal populations as the bombers flew by, and this alarm spread telepathically. The trouble is that this telepathic alerting might have taken place in all directions and hence caused false alarms in places to which the planes were not flying.

Alternatively the animals might have picked up the hostile intentions of the German bomber crews as they moved toward their targets with their attention focused on the places they were planning to attack.

These possibilities are obviously highly speculative, and although telepathy may account for some of the available facts, it cannot account for all of them. In particular, no telepathy theory could explain how dogs could anticipate the arrival of the supersonic V2 missiles: no one was aware of their flight path, and they were unmanned. Even  the Germans who launched them did not know exactly where they would land.

Precognition. Perhaps the animals somehow intuited what was going to happen in the near future, or at least had an apprehension that something was going to happen, without knowing what. This theory would account for the dogs that anticipated the V2 attacks, as well as many other premonitions. One trouble here is that this is a very vague theory. Another is that it raises terrible logical problems and mind-twisting paradoxes, since it implies that something in the future can have an effect backward in time. There is a further logical problem with precognition. It is not possible to know if a precognition is valid until the foreseen event has actually happened. Only in retrospect can precognition be identified as such.

I would prefer to avoid this theory, if possible. I find telepathy easier to accept than precognition. And the two V2 cases are the only evidence so far that seem to necessitate a theory of this kind. However, we must now turn to the many other examples that make the idea of precognition or presentiment almost unavoidable.

Other kinds of premonitions

In addition to all these examples of warnings that animals gave before air raids, earthquakes, avalanches, and tsunamis, I have received dozens of accounts of apprehensive behavior prior to accidents, catastrophes, and danger.

Some dogs refused to walk along paths when shortly afterward branches or trees fell where the person and the dog would have been. Other dogs, horses, and cats delayed or prevented their owners from setting off on foot or by car when road accidents happened soon afterward, in which they might well have been injured or killed. When one dog adamantly refused to enter a pedestrian underpass, the person with it had no option but to turn back: “We had barely turned around when there was a great bang and the concrete ceiling came down!” Another dog prevented its owner from getting onto a boat that exploded shortly afterward. Another dog pulled its owner away from the roadside just  before a van hurtled around the corner and crashed into the place they would have been.

In some of these cases, it is possible, though implausible, that the animals heard something unusual that caused their alarm. In others that is impossible, because the animal’s apprehension began long before it could possibly have heard anything that might have given any clue. For example, a woman who was driving with her cat on the back seat of the car, where it normally slept, found that the animal became more and more disturbed. She tried to calm it, but it eventually jumped into the front seat, then went so far as to touch her arm and to slightly bite the hand that held the steering wheel. “So I finally stopped,” Adele Holzer reported. “Right at that moment a big tree fell onto the road a few meters in front of the car. Had I continued as before, it would have fallen on the car.”

Some of the dangers to which animals alert people are silent, so hearing could have played no part in arousing their apprehension. An Austrian couple were traveling along a steep mountain road with rocks on one side and an abyss on the other when their Poodle, Susi, suddenly started to howl. Friedel Ehlenbeck wrote that “She even put her paws on my husband’s shoulders to stop him. My attempts to keep her quiet failed. Her behavior became mad. Startled, my husband slowed down, and when we turned around the next bend we were shocked: the road was gone. Only a few meters in front of us there was a precipice. A landslide had taken the road with it. Susi had saved our lives.”

In most cases I have heard of, the behavior of the animals helped protect their people from danger. But not everyone heeded the warnings the animals tried to give. This report came from Elizabeth Powell of Powys, Wales:

One morning my dog, Toby, tried to stop me going out of the front door. He barged against me, leaned on the door, jumped up at me, and pushed me. He is normally a quiet, loving dog and knows my routine; I would have been back within four hours. I had to lock him in the kitchen and left him howling, something he has never done before or since. I set off at 7:30 A.M. and by 9:40 A.M. I was involved in a horrific traffic accident resulting in a fractured neck and right arm, and many other injuries. When I was in hospital an image of Toby kept  appearing to me through the drugs, and I could feel his anguish. I sent a mental “Okay, I’ll be back soon” and the images disappeared.… My husband said Toby was very agitated for twenty-four hours and then suddenly became quiet. I am slowly recovering. In the future I’ll listen to Toby.

Sometimes the animal’s reactions are not specific warnings about which the person can do anything, but seem to be presentiments of something alarming about to happen. In 1992, Natalie Polinario was living in North London near Staples Corner, where IRA terrorists detonated a large bomb on April 11. Her white German Shepherd, Foxy, was outside in the garden. “I was lying on the bed watching TV. About one minute or two minutes before the bomb went off she came in running and literally crying, in a really weird mood. She got on the bed and just lay there next to me, really stiff as if something had really scared her, but there was nothing out there. And then I heard this almighty bang, which was the bomb at Staples Corner. The minute it went off she was fine again. She has never done anything like it since then, or before.”

One night Kerry Greenwood of Footscray, Australia, was suddenly awakened by her cats at 3:05 A.M. “They were terrified, clawing to get under any cover, and shivering and crying. We got up to look around for an invading predator or gas leak, but the house was quiet, so we went back to bed to hug the cats and try to get back to sleep. The cats would not settle but kept burrowing and scratching. They had never done this before or since. At 3:35 A.M. a bomb went off in the Serbian travel agency at the end of the street and blew a huge crater in the road, sending a shock wave that belted through the house, shook all the windows, and scared the hell out of all of us. We got up to look at the fire trucks coming and were so shaken that we sat for the rest of the night in the kitchen.… The cats, however, went calmly to sleep as though nothing had happened. I admit I found this comforting; clearly the bomber had done his stuff.”

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that some of these warnings must indeed have been precognitive. What other explanation could there be? And if premonitions of disasters, accidents, and air raids can be precognitive, then so might some premonitions of storms and earthquakes, avalanches, and tsunamis, even though others might be explicable in terms  of a sensitivity to electrical changes or other physical causes. Some of the forewarnings of epileptic fits, comas, and sudden deaths discussed in the previous chapter might also include an element of precognition.

Human precognition

All around the world we find people who believe in the ability of some human beings to foresee the future. Shamans, seers, prophets, oracles, or soothsayers are found in most, if not all, traditional societies, and even in modern industrial societies, fortune-tellers and clairvoyants still flourish. No doubt some of them are fraudulent. But there are far too many convincing examples of human premonition to dismiss this entire area of experience out of hand.

Many people who are not professional fortune-tellers have had premonitions that have turned out to be true, and there are many stories of people whose lives have been saved by dreams, presentiments, or forebodings that led them not to take planes that later crashed and to avoid places that would have exposed them to grave but otherwise unexpected dangers. Sometimes they do not or cannot act on these premonitions, either because they are not specific enough or because they do not take them seriously. But sometimes they do.

These different reactions were illustrated in a dramatic way prior to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. A week before he was shot in the Ford Theater in Washington, he told his wife and his friend Ward H. Lamon of a dream in which he heard sounds of mourning in the White House. Anxious to discover the cause, he went from room to room until in the East Room, with “sickening surprise” he saw a catafalque on which rested a corpse in funeral vestments, guarded by soldiers and surrounded by a throng of mournful people. As the face of the corpse was covered, he asked who it was. “The president,” he was told, who had been killed by an assassin. 30

Less well known is the fact that General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, were supposed to accompany President Lincoln to the theater and sit in his box. That morning Mrs. Grant felt a great sense of urgency that she, her husband, and their child should leave Washington and return to their home in New Jersey. The general could not leave because he had  appointments throughout the day, but as Mrs. Grant’s sense of urgency increased, she kept sending him messages begging him to leave. So great was her insistence that he finally agreed to go with her, even though they were scheduled to accompany the president to the theater. When they reached Philadelphia, they heard about the assassination, and later they learned that they were on the assassin’s list of intended victims. 31Of course, not all premonitions are as dramatic as this, nor do they necessarily involve danger. And many pass unnoticed, especially when they occur in dreams. Precognitive dreams are surprisingly common. A classic book on this subject, An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne, contains simple instructions for investigating one’s own dreams. 32

From: Dogs that know when their owners are coming home : and other unexplained powers of animals / Rupert Sheldrake

Dr. Sheldrake and Wikipedia "credibility"

 Why are so many articles on these phenomena (such as Wikipedia articles) so negative?

A number of organizations are openly hostile to claims of the paranormal. One has to wonder if their sentiments have played a role on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

One such organization is the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). CSI’s Lee Nisbet, who holds a PhD in philosophy, said of paranormal phenomena: “We feel it is the duty of the scientific community to show that these beliefs are utterly screwball.” One of CSI’s former co-chairs of its “Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal” resigned because he felt that “they sought to debunk rather than scientifically examine.”18

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has been a target of criticism from skeptics and speculates that a group called “Guerilla Skepticism” is contributing to negativity around the paranormal on Wikipedia. As Dr. Sheldrake states in his blog post Wikipedia Under Threat:

Wikipedia is a wonderful invention. But precisely because it’s so trusted and convenient, people with their own agendas keep  trying to take it over. Editing wars are common.…Everyone knows that there are opposing views on politics and religion, and many people recognise a biased account when they see it. But in the realm of science, things are different. Most people have no scientific expertise and believe that science is objective. Their trust is now being abused systematically by a highly motivated group of activists called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia.

Skepticism is a normal, healthy attitude of doubt. Unfortunately it can also be used as a weapon to attack opponents. In scientific and medical contexts, organized skepticism is a crusade to propagate scientific materialism.…Most materialists believe that the mind is nothing more than the physical activity of the brain, psychic phenomena are illusory, and complementary and alternative medical systems are fraudulent, or at best produce placebo effects. . . . Several advocacy organizations promote this materialist ideology in the media and in educational institutions. The largest and best-funded is the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which publishes The Skeptical Inquirer magazine. The Guerrilla Skeptics have carried the crusading zeal of organized skepticism into the realm of Wikipedia, and use it as a soapbox to propagate their beliefs.

This summer…a commando squad of skeptics captured the Wikipedia page about me. They have occupied and controlled it ever since, rewriting my biography with as much negative bias as possible, to the point of defamation.…The Guerrilla Skeptics are well trained, highly motivated, have an ideological agenda, and operate in teams, contrary to Wikipedia rules. The mastermind behind this organization is Susan Gerbik. She explains how her teams work in a training video. She now has over 90 guerrillas operating in 17 different languages. The teams are coordinated through secret Facebook pages. They check the credentials of new recruits to avoid infiltration. Their aim is to control information, and Ms. Gerbik glories in the power that she and her warriors wield. They have already seized control of many Wikipedia pages, deleted entries on subjects they disapprove of, and boosted the biographies of atheists.

 As the Guerrilla Skeptics have demonstrated, Wikipedia can easily be subverted by determined groups of activists, despite its well-intentioned policies and mediation procedures. Perhaps one solution would be for experienced editors to visit the talk pages of sites where editing wars are taking place, rather like UN Peacekeeping Forces, and try to re-establish a neutral point of view. But this would not help in cases where there are no editors to oppose the Guerrilla Skeptics, or where they have been silenced.

If nothing is done, Wikipedia will lose its credibility, and its financial backers will withdraw their support. I hope the noble aims of Wikipedia will prevail.19

If what Dr. Sheldrake describes is truly happening, then we might (in part) understand why the reality of the “paranormal” has struggled to gain momentum. The casual researcher doesn’t have time to dig into the details. If you Google a topic and the first thing that comes up is a Wikipedia article saying it’s fraudulent, you might stop your search then and there.

An End to Upside Down Thinking

Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life

Mark Gober

To brush aside what people have actually experienced is not to be scientific

 Rupert Sheldrake’s Seven Senses

A Candid Conversation with a Scientific Iconoclast

Cynthia Logan

Ever looked up at a gaggle of geese and marveled at their exquisite, coordinated unity? Ever felt the urge to turn around and find that when you do, someone’s eyes have been fixed on you? Both are common experiences that illustrate what cutting-edge biologist Rupert Sheldrake considers the “seventh sense.” Unlike the sixth sense—which he says has already been laid claim to by biologists working on the electrical and magnetic senses of animals and is rooted in time and space—the term seventh sense “expresses the idea that telepathy, the sense of being stared at, and premonition seem to be in a different category both from the five normal senses and from so-called sixth senses based on known physical principles.” Though the geese we gaze at have a built-in biological compass that enables them to respond to the earth’s magnetic field, Sheldrake thinks there’s more than magnetism afoot to keep them aloft and aligned.

The Cambridge-educated “heretical” scientist has, besides a love of plants and animals, a way with words, and has authored a number of award-winning books with subjects as intriguing as their titles. Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) won the British Scientific and Medical Network Book of the Year Award, and Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994) was voted Book of the Year by the British Institute for Social Inventions. Sheldrake is also the author of The Presence of the Past (1988), The Rebirth of Nature (1990), and, with Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna, Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992) and The Evolutionary Mind (1998). His latest book, The Sense of Being Stared At (Crown, 2003), delves into just such senses—phenomena he asserts are worthy of investigation. “I argue that unexplained human abilities such as telepathy, the sense of being stared at, and premonition are not paranormal, but a normal part of our biological nature,” he writes.

Sheldrake feels that prejudices rooted in the thinking of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers have inhibited research and inquiry: “If we only open our minds and make an effort to understand, we will be vastly rewarded with our new knowledge.”

Not only does Sheldrake think we should be looking at heretofore unexamined phenomena but—and he feels strongly about this—we should bring science back to the people, to amateurs like you and me. Explaining that science is founded on the empirical method (on experience and observation), he turns to words again: “Billions of personal experiences of seemingly unexplained phenomena are conventionally dismissed within institutional science as ‘anecdotal.’ What does this actually mean? The word anecdote comes from the Greek roots an and ekdotos, meaning ‘not published.’ Thus an anecdote is an unpublished story.” He points out that courts of law take anecdotal evidence seriously, often convicting or acquitting defendants because of it. He also cites its role in medical research, stating that “when patients’ stories are published they are then elevated to the status of ‘case histories.’ To brush aside what people have actually experienced is not to be scientific, but to be unscientific.”

For the past fifteen years, Sheldrake has focused his scientific interest on how systems are organized, pioneering what he calls the “Hypothesis of Formative Causation,” consisting of “morphic fields” and “morphic resonance.” Thanks to the Power Rangers and other kids toys, most of us casually use the word morph to mean “change into” or evolve. Precisely, says Sheldrake, whose work takes off from where the now widely adopted biological concept of “morphogenetic fields” (used to explain, for example, how arms and legs can have different shapes even though they contain the same genes and proteins) left off.

Sheldrake surmises that the fields evolve along with the systems they organize and coordinate. Since a field is a “sphere of influence,” morphic fields would be those that can change or evolve their spheres of influence. He says there are morphic fields within and around individual cells, tissues, organs, organisms, societies, ecosystems, and so on—fields that are shaped by past events and patterns through an in-built memory called “morphic resonance.” This is how, he reasons, instincts and “species specific” abilities develop; the enviable coherence of birds in flight is due to the morphic field that links them and the resonant memory that has evolved through millennia.

“‘Instinct’ is a vague term for an inherited pattern of behavior—conventional biology holds that instincts are programmed into the genes—I argue that genes are grossly overrated and don’t do half the things they’re cracked up to do,” he quips. “What they do is code for the sequence of amino acids and proteins—they make the right chemicals.” In Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Sheldrake examines how termites structure their colonies and build arches, noting: “Of course the insects have genetic coding that prompts them to behave in certain ways, but the actual forming of the nest and the coordinating of the colony is accomplished with morphic fields.” For those who find the concept hard to fathom, he offers an analogy: “Just as a magnetic field can influence the pattern of iron filings within it, so a morphic field can influence the behavior and movements of cells within a body or members within a group.” He also maintains that such fields underlie the bonds that form between pets and their owners. And here is his love: pets and people learning from and helping each other.

With research assistants posted in a number of places around the world (London, Zurich, California, New York, Moscow, and Athens among them), Sheldrake maintains a large database of pet owners who have participated in “do-it-yourself” experiments that are simple but rigorous enough to produce evidence he can support. “Hundreds of videotaped experiments have shown that dogs are indeed able to anticipate their owners’ return in a way that seems telepathic,” he claims. Other results indicate that cats, parrots, homing pigeons, and horses are also highly telepathic.

Though some dismiss his views and conclusions as nonsense, Sheldrake certainly has the academic credentials to command serious consideration of his theories. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. Having earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967, he was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and was director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology there until 1973. As a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied the development of plants (with an emphasis on the hormones within them) and the aging of cells, while enjoying seven years of stimulating academic conversation and luxurious accommodations.

“I lived in seventeenth-century rooms in a beautiful courtyard. At the ring of a bell, I would walk across the courtyard, put on my academic gown, and sit down at a table furnished with a delicious meal and vintage wine. After dinner we drank port in a paneled ‘common’ room and talked for hours,” he recalls, adding that “since the fellows of the colleges are from different subjects, I had many valuable opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion.”

The blend of academics and conviviality has served Sheldrake well: As the author of more than fifty papers published in scientific journals, he accepts criticism without defensiveness, stating that “healthy skepticism plays an important part in science, and stimulates research and creative thinking.” He differentiates an open-minded, healthy skeptic who is interested in evidence from a “skeptic,” whom he defines as someone committed to the belief that paranormal phenomena are impossible. His extensive website (www.sheldrake.org) addresses specific comments from several skeptics. “Click on their names if you want to know what they said about my research on the unexplained powers of animals and to read my replies,” he suggests. Though he’s been ridiculed by some and teased by others (“some of my peers have suggested using telepathy instead of a telephone when I mention I’m going to make a call”), many other scientists find his conclusions fascinating and plausible. Quantum physicist David Bohm sees similarities in Sheldrake’s “Formative Causation” and his own theory of an invisible “Implicate Order” behind the “explicate” material world.

From the book: Forbidden Science 

Rupert Sheldrake on science

 Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first-century science has left it behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation. 

I am convinced that the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. These beliefs protect the citadel of establi shed science, but act as barriers against open-minded thinking.

*

The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out but, in principle, the fundamental questions are settled.

Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads. 

These beliefs are powerful, not because most scientists think about them critically but because they don’t. The facts of science are real enough; so are the techniques that scientists use, and the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth-century ideology. This book is pro-science. I want the sciences to be less dogmatic and more scientific. I believe that the sciences will be regenerated when they are liberated from the dogmas that constrict them.

The scientific creed 

Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted. 

 1.        Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, ‘lumbering robots’, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers. 2.        All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains. 

 3.        The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared). 

 4.        The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same for ever.

 5.        Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction. 6.        All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

 7.        Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not ‘out there’, where it seems to be, but inside your brain. 

 8.        Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death. 

 9.        Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory. 

 10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works. 

Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief-system became dominant within science in the late nineteenth century, and is now taken for granted. Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption: they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview. They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.

In everyday usage, materialism refers to a way of life >In the spirit of radical scepticism, I turn each of these ten doctrines into a question. Entirely new vistas open up when a widely accepted assumption is taken as the beginning of an enquiry, rather than as an unquestionable truth. For example, the assumption that nature is machine-like or mechanical becomes a question: ‘Is nature mechanical?’ The assumption that matter is unconscious becomes ‘Is matter unconscious?’ And so on. 

In the Prologue I look at the interactions of science, religion and power, and then in Chapters 1 to 10, I examine each of the ten dogmas. At the end of each chapter, I discuss what difference this topic makes and how it affects the way we live our lives. I also pose several further questions, so that any readers who want to discuss these subjects with friends or colleagues will have some useful starting points. Each chapter is followed by a summary. 

The credibility crunch for the ‘scientific worldview’

For more than two hundred years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, minds are nothing but brain activity and nature is purposeless. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance ‘promissory materialism’ because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. 1 Despite all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now facing a credibility crunch that was unimaginable in the twentieth century.In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge University, I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner’s rooms in King’s College, along with a few of my classmates. Crick and Brenner had recently helped to ‘crack’ the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist. They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness. They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists – or very bright. Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within ten years, or maybe twenty. Brenner would take developmental biology, and Crick consciousness. They invited us to join them.

Both tried their best. Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of a tiny worcovf a tinm, Caenorhabdytis elegans. Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but ‘to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism’. (Vitalism is the theory that living organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.) 

Crick and Brenner failed. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone (see Chapters 1, 4 and 8).