Rupert Sheldrake’s theories

Part 2: Creativity and the Habits of Nature

• The operations of nature are characterized by order and harmony. For instance, the planets move in regular orbits around the sun; water always boils at 100°C at sea level; apple seeds always grow into apple trees rather than some other kind of tree; and electrons always carry the same electric charge. In a world where regularity and order did not prevail, everything would be completely unpredictable and life as we know it could not exist. 
• These regularities are generally attributed to laws of nature, which are considered to be eternal and transcendent, and to have existed in some sense before the birth of the physical universe. According to Christian theology, these laws were designed by God and exist in His mind. Although materialist science rejects the idea of God, it still accepts the existence of immutable laws. How these laws can exist independent of the evolving universe and at the same time act upon it is something of a mystery. As Rupert Sheldrake says: 
• They govern matter and motion, but they are not themselves material nor do they move.... Indeed, even in the absence of God, they still share many of his traditional attributes. They are omnipresent, immutable, universal, and self-subsistent. Nothing can be hidden from them, nor lie beyond their power. -- The Presence of the Past, p. 12 
• A variation on the theme of nonmaterial laws is that rather than being eternal, new laws come into being as nature evolves and thereafter apply universally. In other words, the creation of the first atom, sun, crystal, protein, etc., involved the spontaneous appearance of the relevant laws and rules. 
• A very different point of view is that the regularities of nature are more like universal habits which have grown up within the evolving universe and that a kind of memory is inherent in nature. According to Sheldrake's hypothesis of formative causation, the physical world is organized and coordinated by morphic fields, which contain a built-in memory, and past patterns of activity influence those in the present by morphic resonance.

• Sheldrake states that morphic fields are neither a form of matter nor of energy. He rejects the idea that nonmaterial laws could act upon the material world, but then proposes that nonmaterial morphic fields in some way can. If morphic fields are anything, they must surely be a nonphysical, more ethereal form of energy-substance, a possibility which Sheldrake does not altogether rule out. 
• Sheldrake writes:
  The habits of most kinds of physical, chemical, and biological systems have been established for millions, even billions of years. Hence most of the systems that physicists, chemists, and biologists study are running in such deep grooves of habit that they are effectively changeless. The systems behave as if they were governed by eternal laws because the habits are so well established. -- The Rebirth of Nature, pp. 128-9 
• How have galaxies, stars, planets, and the incredible diversity of life-forms that we find on earth managed to evolve? Sheldrake suggests three different ways of viewing the creativity of nature. It could be described (a) to blind and purposeless chance, (b) to a creative agency pervading and transcending nature, or (c) to a creative impetus immanent in nature. He says that a decision between these alternatives can be made only on metaphysical grounds and on the basis of intuition. 
• From a theosophical viewpoint, the first hypothesis is unacceptable since chance does not play any role in nature; chance is merely a word that conceals our ignorance. As physicist D. Bohm and science writer F. D. Peat remark: "What is randomness in one context may reveal itself as simple orders of necessity in another broader context." (Science, Order & Creativity, p. 133.) 
• According to the second hypothesis, creativity descends into the physical world of space and time from a higher, transcendent level that is mindlike. While theosophy accepts that there are superior, causal, mindlike planes behind the physical world, it questions Sheldrake's assumption that such realms would have to be completely changeless and "beyond time altogether" (The Rebirth of Nature, p. 194). All the planes interact and evolve, though the higher planes are relatively more enduring than the lower. 
• The third hypothesis states that creativity depends on chance, conflict, and necessity... It is rooted in the ongoing processes of nature. But at the same time it occurs within the framework of higher systems of order. For example, new species arise within ecosystems; new ecosystems within Gaia; Gaia within the solar system; the solar system within the galaxy; the galaxy within the growing cosmos. -- The Rebirth of Nature, p. 194

• Sheldrake does not recognize the existence of superior, causal worlds, though he does recognize the existence of a nonmaterial realm of morphic fields of various types. But what exactly is the relationship between this realm and the physical world? A new morphic field is said to come into being with the first appearance of a new system, whether it be a molecule, galaxy, crystal, or plant. These new patterns of organization arise through a spontaneous, creative jump and thereafter guide the development of subsequent similar systems and become increasingly habitual through repetition. However, at every level of organization, new morphic fields may arise within and from higher-level fields. Creativity occurs not just upward from the bottom, with new forms arising from less complex systems by spontaneous jumps; it also proceeds downward from the top, through the creative activity of higher-level fields. -- The Rebirth of Nature, p. 195 
• Sheldrake suggests that all morphic fields may ultimately be derived from the primal field of the universe, and considers the possibility that this universal field could be connected with previous universes. 
• Fields play a fundamental role in modern science: matter is said to consist of energy organized by fields. "Fields," says Sheldrake, "have replaced souls as invisible organizing principles" (The Rebirth of Nature, p. 83). He even goes so far as to liken the universal field of gravity to the Neoplatonic conception of the world soul. Although clearly an exaggeration, since the world soul is something far higher and more spiritual than the fields known to physics, the behavioral and mental morphic fields postulated by Sheldrake may be regarded as higher-level fields and bear some resemblance to what in theosophic thought are called the animal soul and human soul. Virtually all religious and mystical traditions teach that our physical body is merely the lowest level of our constitution, and that there is a higher part of us that survives physical death. Although Sheldrake does not explicitly consider the possibility of survival and reincarnation, there is nothing in his theory that rules them out. 
• Interestingly, he argues that morphic fields never completely vanish when the species or entity they organize dies:
  When any particular organized system ceases to exist, as when an atom splits, a snowflake melts, an animal dies, it’s organizing field disappears from that place. But in another sense, morphic fields do not disappear: they are potential organizing patterns of influence, and can appear again physically in other times and places, wherever and whenever the physical conditions are appropriate. When they do so they contain within themselves a memory of their previous physical existences. -- The Presence of the Past, pp. xviii-xix 
• This would explain how the characteristics of ancestral species, even those extinct for millions of years, can suddenly reappear, a phenomenon known as reversion, atavism, or throwing back. There are also many examples from the fossil record that suggest that particular evolutionary pathways are repeated: organisms with features almost identical to previous species appear again and again. Taking this idea a step further, is it not conceivable that the same individualized higher-level "fields" could manifest repeatedly in physical form and provide a thread of continuity between one life or embodiment and the next?

• On the subject of God, Sheldrake writes:
  A view of nature without God must include a creative unitary principle that includes the entire cosmos and unites the polarities and dualities found throughout the natural realm. But this is not far removed from views of nature with God. -- The Rebirth of Nature, p. 196 
• He points out that instead of the theistic notion that God is remote and separate from nature, God could also be considered as immanent in nature, and yet at the same time as the unity that transcends nature. He quotes fifteenth-century mystic Nicholas of Cusa: "Divinity is the enfolding and unfolding of everything that is. Divinity is in all things in such a way that all things are in divinity" (quoted ibid., 198). St. Paul put forward a similar pantheistic idea, saying that Deity is that in which "we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). 
• Certainly the divine cannot be anything less than our grandest conception, and must therefore be infinitude itself. But if divinity is infinite, it cannot be outside nature, for otherwise there would be no room left for the universe! Divinity is the universe -- not just the physical universe but all the endless hierarchies of worlds and planes which infill and in fact compose the boundless All. Divinity, then, is immanent, omnipresent, and the root of all things. Since it is greater than any of its individual expressions, it may also be regarded as transcendent. This pantheism recognizes a universal life infilling and inspiriting everything without exception, containing everything, contained in all. Sheldrake calls this panentheism, since he defines pantheism as the view that divinity is immanent in all things, but not transcendent. 
• Infinitude is composed of an infinite number of world systems, and within any particular hierarchy of worlds all the entities that have passed beyond the human stage may be termed spiritual beings or gods, meaning beings who are relatively perfected in relation to ourselves. And the aggregate of the most advanced beings in any system of worlds may be regarded as divinity for that hierarchy. But this is not God in the traditional sense, for there is no god so high that there is none higher. 
• Everything in our hierarchy of worlds derives from the same divine source and is destined in the fullness of time to return to it, to rest for untold aeons before issuing forth again on an evolutionary pilgrimage as part of even higher worlds. Evolution is a fundamental habit of nature and proceeds in cyclic periods of activity and rest, in a never-ending, ever-ascending spiral of progress in which there are always new and vaster fields of experience in which to become self-conscious masters of life.