JRE 550 - Rupert Sheldrake

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:I am more interested in dogs than in dogmas. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

2:I think hard work is what gets most people to the top. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

3:Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

4:There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

5:If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos? ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

6:Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

7:I do vote but I don't think that any political party represents my point of view. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

8:At the moment of insight, a potential pattern of organized behavior comes into being. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

9:I learnt about plants from my father, who was a herbalist and an amateur microscopist. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

10:At the moment of insight, a potential pattern of organized behavior comes into being. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

11:Physics is based on the assumption that certain fundamental features of nature are constant. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

12:I still say the Lord's Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

13:Strategic thinking requires the ability to contemplate possibilities that are not immediately present. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

14:The fact that you can forge a twenty dollar bill doesn't prove that all twenty dollar bills are forgeries. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

15:I think that the &

16:Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It's not rigidly determined in the old sense. It's not rigidly predictable. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

17:I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

18:In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

19:Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

20:The universe is not in a steady state; there's an ongoing creative principle in nature, which is driving things onwards. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

21:Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

22:I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14. I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

23:Unfortunately, at present, practically no one under thirty goes to workshops. It's a system of education entirely for the middle aged. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

24:Well, natural selection was an idea that Darwin developed by analogy with conscious human selection. That's where he got the idea from. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

25:The mechanistic theory of nature is a theory of nature, and one that I think is wrong, or at least too limited. It's not an eternal truth. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

26:Well, I'm always hoping to hear from interested chemists and protein chemists, because I'd love for these experiments to be done properly. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

27:All research scientists know that writing in the passive voice is artificial; they are not disembodied observers, but people doing research. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

28:The Science Delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving only the details to be filled in. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

29:The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

30:The point of what I'm doing is to talk not about science backed up by hundreds of committees, thousands of professors, and many tons of textbooks. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

31:To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

32:I'm talking about science on the leading edge, where it's not clear which way things are going be cause we don't know, and I'm dealing with areas which we don't know about. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

33:Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

34:The sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. I believe that the sciences will be regenerated when they are set free. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

35:Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

36:Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual... ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

37:Machines are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

38:Right now, any opinion anyone has about whether dogs can or cannot really tell when their owner is coming home by some unknown means... nobody knows. The weight of evi dence suggests they can. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

39:The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

40:Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

41:The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but there's a kind of cumulative quality. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

42:In any case, however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their parts by killing them and analysing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them organisms. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

43:The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

44:Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

45:For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

46:First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

47:Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

48:Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

49:The morphic fields include all kinds of organizing fields... : The organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

50:Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

51:I am all in favour of science and reason if they are scientific and reasonable. But I am against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and sceptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

52:It’s almost as if science said, Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.’17 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

53:What you do, what you say and what you think can influence other people by morphic resonance. There is no immoral filter in morphic resonance, which means that we have to be more careful about what we are thinking if we are concerned about the affect we have on others. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

54:I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

55:As Terence McKenna observed, Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.4 ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

56:Modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or – in Plato’s sense – Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

57:A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

58:When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

59:The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

60:The assumption that the laws of nature are eternal is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving. Or perhaps they are not laws at all, but more like habits. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

61:The biggest bursts of speciation that we know about in the history of the earth are soon after great cataclysms, like the extinction of the dinosaurs, which create new opportunities, and all sorts of new forms spring up... So, quite often, the reasons for creativity depend on accidents or disasters that prevent the normal habits being carried out. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

62:In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

63:So there’s a kind of resurgence of the sense of freedom and spontaneity in nature. From nature being bound into a rigid, deterministic model, freedom, spontaneity and openness are emerging once again. It’s now recognized the future is open, not determined by the past. And this is true in many realms, the astronomical realm, the human realm, the meteorological realm in many ways. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

64:In no other field of scientific endeavor do otherwise intelligent people feel free to make public claims based on prejudice and ignorance. Yet in relation to psychic phenomena, committed materialists feel free to disregard the evidence and behave irrationally and unscientifically, while claiming to speak in the name of science and reason. They abuse the authority of science and bring rationalism into disrepute. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

65:The way mathematical laws can exist independently of the evolving universe and at the same time act upon it remains a profound mystery. For those who accept God, this mystery is an aspect of God's relation to the realm of nature; for those who deny God, the mystery is even more obscure: A quasi-mental realm of mathematical laws somehow exists independently of nature, yet not in God, and governs the evolving physical world without itself being physical. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

66:The sudden appearance of all the Laws of Nature is as untestable as Platonic metaphysics or theology. Why should we assume that all the Laws of Nature were already present at the instant of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic code? Perhaps some of them, such as those that govern protein crystals, or brains, came into being when protein crystals or brains first arose. The preexistence of these laws cannot possibly be tested before the emergence of the phenomena they govern. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:cognitive dissonance is ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

2:I am more interested in dogs than in dogmas. Obviously, ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

3:Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

4:There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

5:If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos? ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

6:Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

7:At the moment of insight, a potential pattern of organized behavior comes into being. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

8:I still say the Lord's Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

9:Strategic thinking requires the ability to contemplate possibilities that are not immediately present. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

10:I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

11:The fact that you can forge a twenty dollar bill doesn't prove that all twenty dollar bills are forgeries. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

12:Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It's not rigidly determined in the old sense. It's not rigidly predictable. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

13:I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

14:In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

15:Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

16:The universe is not in a steady state; there's an ongoing creative principle in nature, which is driving things onwards. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

17:Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

18:I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14. I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

19:Unfortunately, at present, practically no one under thirty goes to workshops. It's a system of education entirely for the middle aged. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

20:The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

21:Rupert Sheldrake puts it, “The evangelists of science and technology have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the missionaries of Christianity. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,

22:To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

23:I'm talking about science on the leading edge, where it's not clear which way things are going be cause we don't know, and I'm dealing with areas which we don't know about. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

24:In ancient Rome, money was minted in the temple of Juno Moneta, the Great Mother in her aspect of adviser and admonisher. She is the source of our words money and monetary. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

25:Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

26:The sunlike energy released by the fusion of atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, is detonated by the fission of one of the heaviest, plutonium, named after the god of the underworld. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

27:Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

28:Machines are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

29:Right now, any opinion anyone has about whether dogs can or cannot really tell when their owner is coming home by some unknown means... nobody knows. The weight of evi dence suggests they can. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

30:The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

31:Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

32:The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but there's a kind of cumulative quality. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

33:In any case, however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their parts by killing them and analysing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them organisms. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

34:The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

35:the very word for matter is derived from the same root as mother-in Latin, the corresponding words are materia and matet-and (as discussed in Chapter 3), the whole ethos of materialism is permeated with maternal metaphors. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

36:For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

37:First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

38:Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

39:Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

40:The morphic fields include all kinds of organizing fields...: The organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

41:Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

42:Extended minds are implicit in our language. The words “attention” and “intention” come from the Latin root tendere, to stretch, as in “tense” and “tension.” “Attention” is ad + tendere, “to stretch toward”; “intention,” in + tendere, “to stretch into. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

43:I am all in favour of science and reason if they are scientific and reasonable. But I am against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and sceptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment.17 ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

44:What you do, what you say and what you think can influence other people by morphic resonance. There is no immoral filter in morphic resonance, which means that we have to be more careful about what we are thinking if we are concerned about the affect we have on others. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

45:I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

46:It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”’17 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

47:As Terence McKenna observed, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.”4 ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

48:[M]odern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or – in Plato’s sense – Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

49:A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

50:The quantum hologram is a mechanism to explain this concept of the ancients of the Akashic Records. It also explains Rupert Sheldrake's work among animals [his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, leading to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory]. ~ Edgar Mitchell,

51:When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

52:The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

53:The assumption that the laws of nature are eternal is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving. Or perhaps they are not laws at all, but more like habits. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

54:The biggest bursts of speciation that we know about in the history of the earth are soon after great cataclysms, like the extinction of the dinosaurs, which create new opportunities, and all sorts of new forms spring up... So, quite often, the reasons for creativity depend on accidents or disasters that prevent the normal habits being carried out. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

55:In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

56:So there’s a kind of resurgence of the sense of freedom and spontaneity in nature. From nature being bound into a rigid, deterministic model, freedom, spontaneity and openness are emerging once again. It’s now recognized the future is open, not determined by the past. And this is true in many realms, the astronomical realm, the human realm, the meteorological realm in many ways. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

57:But the cosmonaut Aleksandr Aleksandrov summed up the principal message for millions of people. Looking down on America and then in Russia, he saw the first snow and imagined people in both countries getting ready for winter. "And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth. It does not matter what country you look at. We are all Earth's children, and we should treat her as our Mother. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

58:We must become aware of the astonishing fact that as a species we are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood. As human beings, we once had a symbiotic relationship with the world-girdling intelligence of the planet that was mediated through shamanic plant use. This relationship was disrupted and eventually lost by the progressive climatic drying of the Eurasian and African land masses. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

59:In no other field of scientific endeavor do otherwise intelligent people feel free to make public claims based on prejudice and ignorance. Yet in relation to psychic phenomena, committed materialists feel free to disregard the evidence and behave irrationally and unscientifically, while claiming to speak in the name of science and reason. They abuse the authority of science and bring rationalism into disrepute. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

60:Zoological physiology is the doctrine of the functions or actions of animals. It regards animal bodies as machines impelled by various forces, and performing a certain amount of work which can be expressed in terms of the ordinary forces of nature. The final object of physiology is to deduce the facts of morphology on the one hand, and those of ecology on the other, from the laws of the molecular forces of matter. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

61:Our human dependence on the living processes of the earth was largely forgotten with the growth of industrial civilization. Now we are being forced to remember that Gaia is greater than we are and that the human economy is embedded within the ecology of the biosphere. So, in what sense is Gaia alive? And what difference does it make if we think of her as a living organism, as opposed to an inanimate physical system? ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

62:The commonest kinds of seemingly telepathic response are the anticipation by dogs and cats of their owners coming home; the anticipation of owners going away; the anticipation of being fed; cats disappearing when their owners intend to take them to the vet; dogs knowing when their owners are planning to take them for a walk; and animals that get excited when their owner is on the telephone, even before the telephone is answered. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

63:The sudden appearance of all the Laws of Nature is as untestable as Platonic metaphysics or theology. Why should we assume that all the Laws of Nature were already present at the instant of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic code? Perhaps some of them, such as those that govern protein crystals, or brains, came into being when protein crystals or brains first arose. The preexistence of these laws cannot possibly be tested before the emergence of the phenomena they govern. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

64:morphic resonance points to new ways forward: If the regularities of nature are evolving habits rather than eternal laws, there is no need to assume that all these regularities were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang. Hence there is no need to suppose that all laws of nature were intelligently designed at the moment of creation, or else that there are an infinite number of unobserved universes. These hypotheses are unnecessary if nature is radically evolutionary, as the hypothesis of formative causation proposes. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

65:We need to respond to our present ecological crisis practically, by making appropriate social, political, economic, and technological changes. We need to look at the attitudes that have led to such devastation of the earth and to find a more harmonious way of living. And those of us who believe in the power of prayer need to pray for forgiveness and guidance. If a wiser and juster human order comes about, if a new harmony develops between humanity and the living world, this would indeed seem like an answer to prayer. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

66:The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

67:If memory within nature sounds mysterious, we should bear in mind that mathematical laws transcending nature are more rather than less so; they are metaphysical rather than physical. The way mathematical laws can exist independently of the evolving universe and at the same time act upon it remains a profound mystery. For those who accept God, this mystery is an aspect of God's relation to the realm of nature; for those who deny God, the mystery is even more obscure: A quasi-mental realm of mathematical laws somehow exists independently of nature, yet not in God, and governs the evolving physical world without itself being physical. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

68:Why are rituals so conservative? And why do people all over the world believe that through ritual activities they are participating in a process that takes them out of ordinary secular time and somehow brings the past into the present? The idea of morphic resonance provides a natural answer to these questions. Through morphic resonance, ritual really can bring the past into the present. The present performers of the ritual indeed connect with those in the past. The greater the similarity between the way the ritual is performed now and the way it was performed before, the stronger the resonant connection between the past and present participants. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

69:Consider your arms and legs. They contain exactly the same kinds of muscle cells, nerve cells, and so on. They contain the same proteins and other chemicals; the bones are made of identical substance. Yet they have different shapes, just as houses of different design can be made from the same building materials. The chemicals alone do not determine the form. Nor does the DNA. The DNA is the same in all the cells of the arms and the legs, and indeed everywhere else in the body. All the cells are genetically programmed identically. Yet somehow they behave differently and form tissues and organs of different structures. Clearly some formative influence other than DNA must be shaping the developing arms and legs. All developmental biologists acknowledge this fact. But at this stage their mechanistic explanations peter out into vague statements about "complex spatio-temporal patterns of physico-chemical interaction not yet fully understood." Obviously this is not a solution but just another way of stating the problem. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

70:The genetic program as a vital factor is not the same as the DNA molecules in the genes, for these are just molecules, not mindlike entities. The fact that qualities of mind are commonly projected onto the genes, especially the qualities of selfish, competitive people within capitalist societies, makes it easy to forget that they are just chemicals. As such, they play a chemical role, and their activity is confined to the chemical level. The genetic code in the DNA molecules determines the sequence of amino-acid building blocks in protein molecules , the so-called primary structure of the proteins. The genes dictate the primary stucture of proteins, not the specific shape of a duck's foot or a lamb's kidney or an orchid. The way the proteins are arranged in cells, the ways cells are arranged in tissues, and tissues in organs, and organs in organisms are not programmed in the genetic code , which can only program protein molecules. Given the right genes and hence the right proteins, and the right systems by which protein synthesis is controlled, the organism is somehow supposed to assemble itself automatically. This is rather like delivering the right materials to a building site at the right times and expecting a house to grow spontaneously. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

71:Dark matter is currently thought to make up about 23 percent of the mass and energy of the universe, whereas normal matter and energy make up only about 4 percent. Worse still, most contemporary cosmologists think that the continuing expansion of the universe is driven by “dark energy,” whose nature is again obscure. According to the Standard Model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for about 73 percent of the matter and energy of the universe. How do dark matter and energy relate to regular matter and energy? And what is the zero-point energy field, also known as the quantum vacuum? Can any of this zero-point energy be tapped? The law of conservation of matter and energy was formulated before these questions arose, and has no ready answer for them. It is based on philosophical and theological theories. Historically, it is rooted in the atomistic school of philosophy in ancient Greece. From the outset it was an assumption. In its modern form, it combines a series of “laws” that have developed since the seventeenth century—the laws of conservation of matter, mass, motion, force and energy. In this chapter I look at the history of these ideas, and show how modern physics throws up questions that the old theories cannot answer. As faith in conservation comes into question, astonishing new possibilities open up in realms ranging from the generation of energy to human nutrition. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

72:The organization of insect colonies involves several mysterious features quite apart from the prodigious complexity of the social organization itself. For example, in his studies of South African termites, the naturalist Eugene Marais found that they could speedily repair damage to the mounds, rebuilding tunnels and arches, working from both sides of the breach he had made, and meeting up perfectly in the middle, even though the individual insects are blind. He then carried out a simple but fascinating experiment. He took a large steel plate several feet wider and higher than the termitary and drove it right through the center of the breach so that it divided the mound, and indeed the entire termitary, into two separate parts:

The builders on one side of the breach know nothing of those on the other side. In spite of this the termites build a similar arch or tower on both sides of the plate. When eventually you withdraw the plate, the two halves match perfectly after the dividing cut has been repaired. We cannot escape the ultimate conclusion that somewhere there exists a preconceived plan which the termites merely execute.

From the present point of view, such a plan would exist within the morphic field of the colony as a whole. By morphic resonance, this would contain a collective memory of all similar termite colonies in the past, as well as a memory of the colony's own past, by self-resonance. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

73:The difference between the Platonic theory and the morphic-resonance hypothesis can be illustrated by analogy with a television set. The pictures on the screen depend on the material components of the set and the energy that powers it, and also on the invisible transmissions it receives through the electromagnetic field. A sceptic who rejected the idea of invisible influences might try to explain everything about the pictures and sounds in terms of the components of the set – the wires, transistors, and so on – and the electrical interactions between them. Through careful research he would find that damaging or removing some of these components affected the pictures or sounds the set produced, and did so in a repeatable, predictable way. This discovery would reinforce his materialist belief. He would be unable to explain exactly how the set produced the pictures and sounds, but he would hope that a more detailed analysis of the components and more complex mathematical models of their interactions would eventually provide the answer. Some mutations in the components – for example, by a defect in some of the transistors – affect the pictures by changing their colours or distorting their shapes; while mutations of components in the tuning circuit cause the set to jump from one channel to another, leading to a completely different set of sounds and pictures. But this does not prove that the evening news report is produced by interactions among the TV set’s components. Likewise, genetic mutations may affect an animal’s form and behaviour, but this does not prove that form and behaviour are programmed in the genes. They are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism coming from outside it, just as TV sets are resonantly tuned to transmissions that originate elsewhere. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

74:Even single cells have astonishing regenerative abilities. Acetabularia, the mermaid’s wineglass, is a single-celled green alga about five centimeters long, with three main parts: root-like structures called rhizoids that attach it to a rock, a stem and a cap about a centimeter wide (Figure 5.2). This very large cell has a single nucleus in one of the rhizoids. As the plant grows, its stem lengthens, it forms a series of whorls of hairs that later drop off, and finally forms the cap. If the cap is cut off by snipping the stem in two, after the cut has healed, a new tip grows and the stem forms a series of whorls of hairs and then a new cap, in a similar way to the normal pattern of growth. This can happen over and over again if the cap is cut off repeatedly.2 As discussed in the following chapter, the usual assumption is that genes somehow control or “program” the development of form, as if the nucleus, containing the genes, is a kind of brain controlling the cell. But Acetabularia shows that morphogenesis can take place without genes. If the rhizoid containing the nucleus is cut off, the alga can stay alive for months, and if the cap is cut off, it can regenerate a new one. Even more remarkable, if a piece is cut out of the stem, after the cuts have healed, a new tip grows from the end where the cap used to be and makes a new cap (Figure 5.2).3 Morphogenesis is goal-directed, and moves toward a morphic attractor even in the absence of genes. FIGURE 5.2. Regeneration of the alga Acetabularia mediterranea, an unusually large single-celled organism, up to 5cm tall, containing a green cap at the top of a long stalk, anchored at the base by root-like rhizoids. There is a large nucleus (shown as a black oval) in the basal part of the cell. When the stalk is cut off near the bottom, the basal part of the cell regenerates a new stalk and cap (shown on the right). When a part of the upper stalk is cut out, it grows a new cap and more stalk, even though it contains no nucleus. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

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