Body and Mind


The most important area of knowledge where scientists are ignoring ideas and research is that of the nature of our bodies and minds. There is an historical reason for this, but we are now 150 years on from the 19th century debates about evolution. This was when science started to win the argument against religious views of the origins of humans and our spiritual nature. I suppose it is not surprising, that as scientific thought had been repressed by religious authorities for so long, often so brutally, scientists had no desire to accommodate any views that suggested humans have souls.

Since that time the materialist view of humans has prevailed. The view that everything we experience is based in the material substance of human bodies, including memory and consciousness. Now the argument rages as to how memory is encoded in the chemicals of the brain. Any human experience that suggests we are more than just atoms and molecules is marginalised and derided.

Throughout the 20th century there have been pioneering researchers such as J B Rhine who set up his parapsychology lab in the 1930s. But in my view the person who will be seen to have made the most important contribution, when we start to realise the true nature of humans - indeed of everything - will be Rupert Sheldrake. Because he has proposed a theory that provides a way of looking at our nature that potentially can explain so much. I now find myself factoring morphic fields and resonance into many of my attempts to make sense of human experiences.

It is certainly true that morphic resonance is an extremely radical theory. This is not just because Sheldrake envisions everything living in, and responding to morphic fields. It is because a morphic field must transcend time. As morphic fields guide the growth and life habits of everything, everything is reading a field that still exists from a moment ago. And as the field is influenced and changed by what everything does, everything we do feeds back into the morphic field the moment after we do it. Hence the field that influences the next moment is changed. The accumulated habits of millennia are slowly altered by decisions living things make, and by random changes that occur in inanimate things. The morphic fields persist through time, independently of the material things that are guided by the habits encoded in morphic fields.

You may not appreciate how radical an idea persistence through time is for physicists unless you know that time is irrelevant in the physical equations we use to model the world around us. As far as these mathematical equations are concerned, time could just as easily run backwards as forwards. Though time is used to measure things like speed, and physicists try to calculate the age of the universes from the ‘Big Bang’, at the level of fundamental particle physics time is not in the equations.

Current physics has no way to understand what time is. If you wish to explore this read some of Lee Smolin’s books, particularly Time Re-Born. His over-riding conclusion, apart from that there is a fallacy in trying to use the rules our universe appears to create to understand the nature of the universe itself, is that we will have to radically alter our views of what time is in order to understand our world fully. And to realise that whatever time is, it is real.

The ideas that we are immersed in morphic fields and that time does not work as we currently think it does provide new ways of thinking about the hardest questions we face, such as those about life and death, reincarnation and ghosts, memory, consciousness and extra-sensory perception (ESP).