(Asangoham) 5 unexplained mass spiritual awakenings: Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance?
Morphic resonance
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| We think individual, but we're collective |
Reading Kuhn's work, Sheldrake says, focused his mind on how scientific paradigms can change [16]. Sheldrake says that although there are similarities between morphic resonance and Hinduism's akashic records [31], he first conceived of the idea while at Cambridge U, before his travels to India, where he later developed it.
He attributes the origin of his idea to two influences, his studies of the holistic tradition in biology, and French philosopher Henri Bergson's 1896 book Matter and Memory. He says he took Bergson's concept of memories not being materially embedded in the brain and generalized it to morphic resonance, where memories are not only immaterial but also under the influence of the collective memories of similar organisms.
While his colleagues at Cambridge were not receptive to the idea, Sheldrake found the opposite to be true in India.
He recounts his Indian colleagues saying, "There's nothing new in this; it was all known millennia ago to the ancient rishis [seers]." Sheldrake thus characterizes morphic resonance as a convergence between Western and Eastern thought yet found by himself first in Western philosophy [15, 151].
Sheldrake has also noted similarities between morphic resonance and Carl Jung's collective unconscious, with regard to collective memories being shared across individuals and the coalescing of particular behaviors through repetition, which Jung called archetypes [15].
But whereas Jung assumed that archetypal forms were transmitted through physical inheritance, Sheldrake attributes collective memories to morphic resonance and rejects any explanation of them involving what he terms "mechanistic biology."
Lewis Wolpert, one of Sheldrake's critics, has described morphic resonance as an updated Drieschian vitalism [28, 152]. More
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