Rupert Sheldrake and the Physics of Angels—Friday Feature

Back when I was at the bar at Vcon and Boba Fett had staggered off to bed in a drunken stupor, poet extraordinaire, Rhea Rose (e.g., Tesseracts anthologies) joined me and after a few more drinks, we were having a very lively conversation. That’s when the name Rupert Sheldrake came up. Not that this botanist and follower of Goethe should be construed with heavy drinking...however, some of his ideas DO resonate with what some scientists would disregard as science fiction....Let me explain...

In an interview with Rupert Sheldrake, interviewer John David Ebert of Quest Magazine asked the same question that Immanuel Kant asked in 1781: Can there be a science of metaphysics? Kant’s answer was: there can never be science of metaphysics because science, by its very nature, is concerned with a recondite analysis of tangible things within the world of space and time…Metaphysics, on the contrary, is concerned with transcendent intangibles, such as God, the soul, freedom, and immortality. Sheldrake’s answer was quite different. Ebert added that “Metaphysics…has always looked askance at the earthly plane as a place for confirmation of the validity of its ‘truths’.”

And yet, some of our most creative scientists are already trespassing into the territory of metaphysics, which Kant had insisted should remain separate from science.

One of these is Rupert Sheldrake, who is my guest today on my Friday Feature. A British botanist and author, Sheldrake explores the existence of the soul, reincarnation, or the soul of the world. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson to develop the theory of morphic resonance, which makes use of the older notion of morphogenetic fields, Sheldrake’s 1981 controversial book A New Science of Life introduced the concept of morphogenetic fields. For Sheldrake, the laws of the universe appear not to be laws at all, but rather deeply ingrained habits of action, built up over the eons…like ancient riverbeds on the surface of Mars. Sheldrake calls the habitual tendency of nature “morphic resonance”, in which present forms are influenced by past forms. According to Sheldrake, morphic resonance is transmitted through “morphogenetic fields”, which are analogous to electromagnetic fields in that they transmit information, but differ in that they do so without using energy and are therefore not diminished by transmission through time or space.

Take our physical forms, for instance. Sheldrake proposes that the physical forms we take on are not necessarily contained inside our genes, which he suggests may in fact be more analogous to transistors tuned in to the proper frequencies for translating invisible information into visible form. In other words, any form always looks alike because it ‘remembers’ its form through repetition and that any new form having similar characteristics will use the pattern of already existing forms as a guide for its appearance. According to Sheldrake, morphogenetic fields are located invisibly in and around organisms and may account for the regeneration of severed limbs in worms and salamanders, the holographic properties of memory, telepathy, and the increasing ease with which new skills are learned as greater quantities of a population acquire them. In his subsequent books, The Presence of the Past (1988) and The Rebirth of Nature (1991), Sheldrake traced the birth, rise, and inevitable death of the materialistic world view currently under siege by revolutionary concepts and paradigms such as chaos theory, the Gaia hypothesis, cellular symbiosis, and morphic resonance.

I invited Dr. Sheldrake aboard Vinny, my sentient ship, to interroga—er interview him. Being the curious scientist he was and intrigued by my sentient ship (I’ve lured many an unsuspecting scholar aboard this way), Dr. Sheldrake readily agreed. I cheerfully offered him my crystal beam transporter and he gladly complied. Sheldrake, like Karen Mason, that being of light who also rode the beam with uncanny ease in a previous interview, gave me the impression that he was also indulging me to keep me company and he could have easily transported himself aboard Vinny by his own brand of magic. Join me below as this incredible scientist fields (okay, bad pun...) my questions in a lively intellectual dance that explores topics such as reincarnation, creative evolution, and…yes, the place in the universe for country music…

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When we arrive aboard my ship, I shakily lead Sheldrake, who shuffles down the corridor with eyes trained from side to side in curiosity. We end up in the aft lounge and we get comfortable in some soft upholstered chairs as Harry, my robot, serves Sheldrake a Traglet wine. Sheldrake sips the dreadful wine as though he likes it and gazes through almost hooded eyes at the magnificent view of Earth. I strike fast with my first question:

SF Girl: Leaning forward, “You’ve suggested that memories may not be stored in the brain so much as it acts as a tuning device and picks up memories like a television tunes in to certain frequencies. So, what are your thoughts on memory and reincarnation?”

RS: Nonplussed by my intensity, he locks eyes with mine and matches my stance with an intense deep stare: “Well…through morphic resonance we may all tune in to a kind of collective memory—”

SF Girl: “A Jungian thing…”

RS: He smiles at me…indulgently, I think: “Memories from many people in the past. It’s theoretically possible that we could tune into the memories of specific people. That might be explained subjectively as a memory of a past life. But this way of thinking about it doesn’t necessarily mean this has to be reincarnation. In fact that you can tune into somebody else’s memories doesn’t prove that you are that person.”

SF Girl: I strike with another challenge, pointing my finger rudely, “You pointed out that the expectations of experimenters may have a great deal to do with the outcome of their experiments, whether intentionally or not. You’ve suggested that experimenters may affect their results through involuntary psychokinesis…”

RS: He calmly takes a sip of his drink and I admire his composure under fire: “Studies…[have shown] that people can influence random number generators…even at a distance…mind over matter.”

SF Girl: Thinking I might finally stump him, I press on, “Along with Matthew Fox, you explore the interface between science and spirituality…crossbreeding these two into cultural hybrids. Don’t you see a mess arising from this fusion? A kind of explosion that cancels both out and leaves only the void of country music…”

RS: Now he is really smiling, in amusement, but more like a man to a pet beagle: “There are many areas of potential intersection. One is cosmological, because when science is talking about creation, it’s getting into a realm that has been very much the preserve of religion for a long time…The evolutionary process must have an inherent creativity, and we know that our universe is creative at all levels, physical, biological, or mental, cultural, and so on. So, what is the source of this creativity? Well, it’s really a metaphysical question and materialist science has no other suggestion than chance, which really means that it’s unintelligible—we can’t think about it…Another is the nature of the soul, the psyche, consciousness, which science until very recently has had almost nothing to say about…I think that as science breaks out of …its straitjacket…and [approaches] a more holistic view of nature, then much more possibility of fruitful interaction occurs between science and the spiritual.”

SF Girl: “So, where do angels fit into all this?” He’s written a book called the Physics of Angels, after all…Fair game, I think.

RS: He gazes at me with knowing deep ocean blue eyes; he’s anticipated me again: “Einstein’s photons of light have remarkable parallels to [St. Thomas] Aquinas’s discussions of the movements of angels [being without mass or body].

SF Girl: I burst out with sudden enlightenment, “Like our modern view of science that particles of light-photons also have neither mass nor body!”

RS: He smiles like a teacher to a bright pupil and I beam; he’s the first guest who hasn’t abandoned me in mid-interview… Or have I simply tapped into a holographic memory...a stable morphic field?…

Recommended Reading:
Campbell, Joseph. 1988. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. Harper & Row, New York.
Fox, Matthew, and Rupert Sheldrake. 1996. Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science. Doubleday, New York.
Sheldrake, Rupert. 1981. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation. Tarcher, Los Angeles.
Sheldrake, Rupert. 1988. The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. Random House, New York.
Sheldrake, Rupert. 1991. The Rebirth of Nature: the Greening of Science and God. Bantam, New York.

Aspects of this interview were respectfully excerpted from an interview conducted by John David Ebert of Quest Magazine. For the complete interview go here.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.