Paradigmatic Parallels - part 3 - Morphic Resonance
A morphogenetic description of reality
As we move forward into the techno society of the future, it is important to realize that the rights of the individual are paramount. We should not be swept away into the mind dulling sheepish attitude that crowd psychology promotes, and allow ourselves to be entranced by the thought contagion of little minds and dogmatic institutions. This thought contagion can be shown in the silence that spreads across a crowded room instantaneously and is the result of the morphic resonance of the group mind. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake delineates the theory of morphogenetic resonance as, “a nonmaterial organizing collective memory field that affects all biological systems. This field can be envisioned as a hyper spatial information reservoir that brims and spills over into a much larger region of influence when critical mass is reached - a point referred to as morphic resonance.”
The theory stipulates that all forms of biology are the result of habitual chreodes of chaotic behavior. Simply put, an entity is a product of the fields of organized information which surround it. These non-local fields are comprised of age long habits and patterns in which the new entity is embedded. According to this theory, an acorn contains all of the information and experiences of all prior oak trees. This is the genetic archives, the collective unconscious, the phylogenic records, and the Akasha of the Hindus. people, species, cultures, planets, and galaxies all have morphic fields that influence them and organize the basic components of which they are comprised. These fields apparently interface with the Bell space of Non-Locality and can communicate across space and time. We are locked into many different resonant collective fields, of which sub-cultures are an example. Because the collective mind is so powerful, artists and occult researchers enjoy the middle of the night, known as the hours of CHI. The collective mind sleeps during these hours and does not exert as much morphic resonance. The hive mind is only concerned with the first four terrestrial circuits, and it usually imprints the morphic fields with this habitual influence. These domestic circuits are concerned with terrestrial survival and gene pool propagation and include the biosurvival, the emotional, the rational, and the sexual-moral circuits. While the domestic mind sleeps, the artist or philosopher is free to tap into our future four evolutionary circuits, the extra-terrestrial over-mind. These higher evolutionary circuits, or brains, include; hedonic rapture, meta programming, archetypal-phyleogenic records, and atomic consciousness.
In countries such as India and Tibet, where the populace is more familiar and comfortable with ideas like ESP, Telepathy, and Telekinesis, we find that the morphogenetic fields are more resonant. In the Oriental world the morphic fields are known as Akasha and are part of the conscious landscape, while in the occident it remains hidden and buried in the unconscious mind. Ormond McGill, psychic researcher and Hindu scholar, describes in his, “Hypnotism and Mysticism of India”, the phenomena of the psychic telegraph. The psychic telegraph is demonstrated when an event occurs in a remote location of India and it is mysteriously realized by natives in another part of the country, without the use of modern telecommunications. Similarly, Tibetan monks utilize this morphogenetic field when choosing a new Lama from amongst the masses. A congregation of monks will travel throughout the countryside with visions of landscapes and houses in their mind’s eye, and they tune into the geography and locate the new reincarnated lama. Once they have narrowed this process down to a single candidate, they then present the child with a table full of choices. Upon this table lies the personal property of the now passed lama intermixed with similar items. Success is had when the child chooses correctly, reaching back into the morphic fields of the akashic records and recognizing that the old lamas property is actually his own.
When groups of people gather together for an event, such as a football game or a New Years celebration they start out as individuals. As they gather together they create a group mind, the morphic resonance of
a crowd psychology. This homogenous entity has its own autonomous will. At the end of the event, the group is dispersed again into individual units, which seek to separate from the group. Due to the overt control of the dominator group mind, one must assert themselves as an individual and must demand the right to interpret art and religion in a manner deemed beneficial. All religious controversy stems from a lack of interpretational freedom, and this can actually be extended to the arena of academic science, which has its own list of martyrs, like Copernicus and Bruno, and more recently Reich and Leary. These are men who dared to share their dreams and innovations with a neophobic herd, which was all too ready to burn them for their genius. It must be stated, the morphic fields are only concerned with habit and pattern. Novelty, evolution and innovation stem from a separate creative process that lies in the non-local realm. The individual free thinker is feared and loathed by the herd mind, but he is ultimately important for the pioneering of new paths and the course of evolution. This individual thinker is symbolized through out myth and culture by the archetype of the Trickster God or the shaman. He is the bearer of the promethean fire taken asunder from the heavenly worlds. He ultimately transforms the group view and brings about a bifurcation point in the community. This is the shamanic mercurial teacher of technologies. This shamanic archetype is reflected throughout modern culture in many individuals, such as Jim Morrison, Tim Leary, Terence McKenna, and the creators of the apple computer, Steve Wozniac and Steve Jobs. The string of commonality among these people is the visionary experience and their expression of novelty.
The morphogenetic fields discussed in the preceding examples can be best exemplified by the 100th Monkey effect. This effect occurred in 1952 when a group of Japanese monkeys, the Macaca fuscata, created the critical mass needed for the species to learn a new behavior. The incident involved the washing of sweet potatoes by the children of the monkey tribe. These monkey children then proceeded to affect the older generation with this habit. In the beginning this knowledge spread slowly and the effects were nominal. However, when a certain critical mass was reached, the 100th monkey, then the phenomena reached out in a non-local and exponential pattern and became a species-wide behavior. Culture wide trends and fads utilize the same mechanisms and principles. It is interesting to note that after the Beatles visit to the Maharishi yogi in 1967 and their consequent LSD exploration, they released the Sgt Pepper’s Album, and the morpic fields of society were transformed from the alcohol based Baccnalian culture of the past into the hedonistic Dionysian culture of the future.
With the advent of Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, the esoteric occult keys of the past are brought into a clearer more illuminated focus and find new relevancy. Due to the holographic nature of information and Boehm’s non-locality, it becomes the path of the seeker to search for the hidden thread of meaning that the divine mind has woven throughout every aspect of our universe. Language is the inherited morphic code of the ancients that we use to label and categorize our experiences. Sheldrake describes the morphic field of language these terms, “Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual, I mean most of our personal life, and most of our cultural life is habitual. We don't invent the English language. We inherit the whole English language with all its habits, its turns of phrase, its usage of words, its structure, its grammar.” It has long been a tradition of the kabbalists to search in sacred languages for hidden divine meanings utilizing a numerical cipher. This procedure in kabbala is called gematria and was an integral part of the works of McGregor Mather’s Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley’s Argentum Astrum.
About the Author
Jonathan Bethel and Michael McDaniel are both writers and lecturers in the areas of esoterica, philosophy, psychology, science, history and futurism.
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