The Shattered Realm

Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance is a biological paradigm that postulates the existence of energy fields that collect, store and distribute patterns of learning, thought and behaviour in ‘banks’ generated by the psyches of living creatures. When the volume of certain thoughts and behaviours reach a certain critical mass they enter into a more mainstream field of consciousness amongst the species in question. Some examples of this include the effects of learning amongst rats as a species in general rather than as individual entities when learning to escape from a maze, the semi mythical ‘hundredth monkey phenomenon’ commented on by Lyall Watson in his book Lifetide, the spread of milk bottle top burglaries by blue tits in the 1920s, and the ease with which certain trends and thought patterns spread amongst specific cultural groups.

According to this concept, the morphic field can be set up by the repetition of similar acts and/or thoughts. Supposedly, the form belonging to a certain group with their already established (collective) morphic field, itself tunes into that morphic field, storing and reading the related information through morphic resonance.

In the 1920s Harvard University psychologist William McDougall did experiments for 15 years in which rats learned to escape from a tank. The first generation of rats averaged 200 mistakes before they learned the right way out; the last generation 20 mistakes. McDougall concluded that, contrary to accepted genetic science, such acquired knowledge could be inherited. In later efforts to duplicate McDougall's experiments in Australia, similar rats made fewer mistakes right from the start. Later generations of rats did better even when they were not descendents of the earlier rats.

In the 1920s in Southampton, a bird called the blue tit discovered it could tear the tops of milk bottles on doorsteps and drink the cream. Soon this skill showed up in blue tits over a hundred miles away, which is odd in that they seldom fly further than 15 miles. Amateur bird-watchers caught on and traced the expansion of the habit. It spread faster and faster until by 1947 it was universal throughout Britain. In a parallel development, the habit had spread to blue tits in Holland, Sweden and Denmark. German occupation cut off milk deliveries in Holland for eight years -- five years longer than the life of a blue tit. Then, in 1948 the milk started to be delivered. Within months blue tits all over Holland were drinking cream, a habit that had taken decades to take hold before the war. Where did they get this knowledge?

Regardless of whether such a theory can be objectively quantified, there’s an interesting correlation between the ideas of Morphic Fields, Archetypes, the Collective Unconscious and the creation of Thought Forms and Egregores. They are all fields in which memes can be deposited, stored and distributed.

The Morphic Resonance Theory postulates that the creation and maintenance of Morphic Fields is a relatively easy thing to do and only takes a small number of biological entities to create. Thought forms that are created unconsciously tend to be the result of a number of people working towards the same thing without realising exactly what they’re doing. For instance, if you take the growth of things like the ‘knife culture’ that has purportedly established itself in the UK over the last decade, it appears to point to a trend without any single direct causal connecting principle. Other trends and fashions spread and circulate in such a manner with no concrete medium acting as a binding principle.

Where there is evidence of a cohesive principle in the establishment of Morphic Fields, e.g. the Media, there seems to be an ease with which such ideas can spread amongst the targeted elements of the masses that seems to defy the simple effects of advertising and cultural contact. This is because a tangible vessel has been provided for the thought form within the Objective Universe.

If, as an example, you look at certain cultural trends, for instance the current popularity of the BlackBerry, you can see how their spread could be perceived as rooted in something deeper than popularity or convenience. Like Satellite Navigation systems in cars, the BlackBerry’s growth is not entirely centred on its genuine usefulness, but rather due to it being a status symbol of sorts that keys in on the ego of a specific types of people. Once a critical number of people with overlapping psychic traits begin to see the BlackBerry as their ultimate accessory it is only a matter of time before the virus spreads through that network. This is in effect the same kind of Morphic Field that was created with the popularity of the Filofax in the 1980s.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that technological, cultural and egoistic trends spread on the creation of a Morphic Field alone. There are many other factors involved such as necessity, price and marketing. However when a trend reaches a critical mass of some sort and becomes a ‘phenomena’ you must wonder whether the theory of Morphic Resonance or some other form of jostling of the Collective Unconsciousness comes into play. The physical aspects of a spread in a trend, such as the media, provide magnification and an objective, conscious, tangible element to the invisible processes that underpin the unseen psychic processes on a mass level. Cultural phenomena such as the fashion habits of different socio-economic groups, the rush for certain toys at Christmas, reality TV, intellectual preferences and religious trends can be categorised as Morphic Trends that are strongly influenced by external agendas based on the repetition of a message designed to manipulate a need or void in the target’s personal identity.