A Vast Network of Souls

     Twenty-year-old Willis had been away from his Pennsylvania home for several years, but he returned for frequent visits, especially after his grandfather’s stroke. The two had always been close…. One night, soon after his return from a visit, Willis struggled awake at his grandfather’s call. “Willis, Willis.” The room, ordinarily very dark, was lit up brightly and, momentarily, he saw his grandfather smiling at him. Startled, uncomprehending at first, Willis lay motionless for a bit, but he then put on the light. It was 1:10 A.M. He could sleep no more. At 6:00 A.M. a phone call from his brother came, but Willis spoke first: “Grand-pop died last night!”
     “Yes, but how did you know?”
     “He came to see me—it was about one-ten.”
     “Yes, that was when he died.”
[L.E. Rhine, The Invisible Picture: Experiences. McFarland. 1981, p. 20, quoted in Rupert Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared At, Three Rivers Press, 2003.]

This quote by way of introducing Rupert Sheldrake’s fascinating book, The Sense of Being Stared At. You will find five other posts on Borderzone where Sheldrake is being mentioned, principally for his theories of morphic fields. Those theories are presented in The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) and A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (2005). I strongly recommend these works to any serious student of the paranormal. In Sheldrake’s hands, the paranormal becomes normal, and many puzzling phenomena receive a theoretical foundation. You will find summary of this theory on this blog here. I don’t want to repeat it. Suffice it to say, the theory suggests that all life-forms are able to communicate. And Sense of Being Stared At is a narrower and, in many ways much more accessible analysis of this contention, relating to humans as well as animals (and presumably plants), in ways that link to our everyday experience. A very succinct summation of the content of this book is presented by Sheldrake in two sentences on page 9. It runs as follows:

If the seventh sense is real, it points to a wider view of minds—a literally wider view, in which minds stretch out into the world around bodies. And not just human bodies, but bodies of nonhuman animals, too.

Worth reading. The book is available on Amazon here.