"Walking Our Talk"

Painting by Wassily Kandinsky

by Sue TORDOFF

Rupert Sheldrake has some revolutionary theories about the way we as humans communicate.  One is the theory of Morphic Fields, which he links with Jung's work on the collective unconscious.  Basically he states that each individual, each animal, each group has a field around them.  The field you are born into – ethnically, geographically and so on – is readily accessible to you instinctively, intuitively.  If you move into other fields, you have to get to know how that field works, in other words you have to 'tune in' to the wavelength of that field.

I was born in Yorkshire in the North of England, so you might say two fields I am in touch with are those concerned with Yorkshire-ness and Englishness.  But I have also lived in many other counties in England, one county in Scotland and in one other country.  Each time I had to get to know how those areas work, but now I have ready access to the fields around these places.  So much so, that in some cases I 'know' more than I could factually know about that place and its history.  I have a feeling about historical events and suffering there.  Jung would have called this racial memory; Sheldrake would say I am tuning in to the morphic fields, and calls this morphic resonance.  Add to this that I am part of many other social, professional and family groups, and I have the potential to tune in to – and to make a contribution to – many diverse morphic fields.

Experiments and work done (over a period of 50 years) around the theory of morphic fields show that learning passes very quickly between animals of the same species.  In laboratory training, rats were taught ways of learning new behaviour.  The experiments began in Harvard and continued in Scotland and Australia, three separate locations with identical learning situations.  It was found that rats increased their rate of learning more than tenfold in all these locations, including rats not descended from trained parent-rats.  There are many other examples of this, including instances observed in nature, not just in laboratory testing.  Observations were made watching flocks of birds reacting as a whole to stimuli.  Measurements of reaction times showed that the flock reacted faster than a single bird.  The conclusion is that this reaction was much faster than could be explained by visual cueing or as a response to stimuli.

What significance does this have to our understanding of global problems today?  Sheldrake extends his thinking about group morphic resonance to the behaviour of groups such as football crowds or mobs of rioters.  This might be said, in Jungian terms, to be the shadow or darker side of human collective consciousness.

Sheldrake suggests that in the 1930's the shadow side of the collective consciousness took tangible form in Nazi German.  The rapid spread of fascism took most European countries by surprise.

Is something similar happening today with the enormous groundswell in the terrorist activities of some fundamentalist groups?   We see many outbreaks of violence in different countries, perpetrated by co-ordinated groups as well as by small cells of activists, suicide bombers etc.  To extend the comparison between the escalation of fascism then and fundamentalist terrorism now conjures up a picture too horrifying to contemplate.

There appears to be a the minimum number – sometimes called the critical mass or creative minority – of individuals required before balance in the morphic field is changed.  In the case of rats, this was reached when enough rats in similar learning conditions in three different locations began learning at ten times their usual rates of learning.  The learning of all rats in all the groups speeded up.  If we apply this to our present conditions, the more individuals who stand for peace and unity, the sooner we will reach the kind of numbers which will swing the balance in favour of peace and unity, and away from terrorism and division.

Bircan asked " how to unite and create a synergy between all people".  We can't all be shakers and movers in a wider context, nor is that necessary for more than a handful of humanity.  Many of us become apathetic, feeling that our lone voice won't make any impact.  I suggest that if Rupert Sheldrake's theories are accurate, we can make a difference in favour of peace and unity simply by stating our allegiance to it, by speaking of unity rather than disunity, by promoting less division in word and action, by concentrating our efforts in our own communities, by being ourselves and being counted as part of the critical mass wherever possible.  When communities have sufficient people speaking, singing, making music, writing and acting positively in the cause of unity, then anyone coming into that field of resonance will potentially be affected.  They in turn will be members of other fields, and the spread of unity will increase exponentially.  What is more, each individual as I have shown is a member of many fields, all of which will be affected by his/her efforts to stand for unity.  Fields within fields mean that the network of connections is already in place.  What we can do is, as Native Americans say, "Walk our Talk", and unity will come to prevail.

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Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and writer who published his first book in 1981.  His work gives us the opportunity to see important philosophical and scientific issues together in a new light.  He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, San Francisco.

Sue Tordoff was a therapist and counsellor for 20 years, now a writer and editor with interests in poetry, good stories, healing in its broadest sense, and unity.

Noetic = pertaining to the science of perception and thought

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Sue Tordoff
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