Who is pulling your chain? Or Morphic Resonance for beginners

A scientist called Rupert Sheldrake posited that not only is Nature alive, but it is connected at a fundamental level, so that what is done to one member of a group affects every member of that group. This is obviously a very big and complicated theory, and I won’t attempt to reproduce it here. However, it is an attempt to demonstrate these fundamental connections by examining a number of examples of new adaptive behaviour observed in animals such as:-

< In the 1920s in Southampton, 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, but 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. Other examples are monkeys using water to sort dirt from rice (they throw it in a puddle and the rice floats and the dirt sinks) or sheep learning to roll across cattle grids. There are many fascinating examples out there.

The point is, if we are all connected, then what is the impact of some of the dreadful things that are going on in the world on us? We usually are pretty overwhelmed coping with our day-to-day issues and few of us spare the time to think about these ‘distant others’, let alone act to help them. But if it is us being damaged too, what then? I guess the link works both ways too, so if what you are putting into the collective pool of experience is positive and nourishing then that benefit flows too.

Half the misery in the world comes from our sense of separation and ‘otherness’. If we are fundamentally one, and utterly connected then couldn’t we somehow tap into that?

“A person experiences life as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this self-imposed prison, and through compassion, to find the reality of Oneness.” Albert Einstein

“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” Ryunosuke Satoro

 

Resources:

• Rupert Sheldrake
  
• Wikipedia
  
• Nature is Alive – article

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 10:44 and is filed under General, Mini-Articles, Values & Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.