Fascinating Parallels

Those who read very obscure books and have the stomach for extraordinarily outlandish ideas—such people sometimes stumble across fascinating parallels.

To maintain, for instance, that there are choirs of angels that concern themselves exclusively with kidney functions most people would dismiss as beyond—and I mean way beyond—the pale. Yet Emanuel Swedenborg offers this idea in all seriousness not only in his Heaven and Hell, which he intended for the general public, but also in his Arcana coelestia (Heavenly Secrets) intended for the learned. Swedenborg arrives at this idea because he learned, in his contacts with the heavenly realm that—

It is an arcanum still unknown in the world that heaven reflects a single person if it is fully grasped, but in the heavens this is most common knowledge. Knowing this even in specifics and details is a specialty of the understanding of angels there. Many things follow from it, things which cannot be crisply and clearly conceptualized without this as their pervasive first principle. Since angles know that all of the heavens—even all of their communities—reflect a single person, they actually call heaven “the Greatest and Divine Man.” The term “Divine” is used because the Lord’s Divine makes heaven. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, VIII, §59]

Such ideas are jarring unless you get used to them—gradually. John von Neumann once said, and his quip applies elsewhere too, “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” So let’s get used to the idea, for the moment, anyway. You can discard this, if you like, after you’ve absorbed the message here, namely that the heavens are organized “organically” into communities of angels that relate to Swedenborg’s “Grand Man,” the higher reality—and that what is in heaven has direct correspondences down here on earth. As above, so below, we might say, echoing Hermes.

With that, let me go on to the archangels of Mazdaism. In the theology of that religion we encounter, first of all, heavenly counterparts to every living individual here on earth; they are the fravartis—and if you’re reading this, Zoroastrians would say that you have a fravarti too. We also have, above them, holy beings, spentas, archangels, who have charge over—and importantly also act as guides for—humanity, animals, plants, fire and light (we might say energy), minerals, earth, and water. I learned of these matters in Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. That book contains a summary of the cosmology of Mazdaism. The formulation is much more ancient than Swedenborg’s, to be sure; Mazdaism, indeed, has been classified as the oldest known higher religion of humanity. Old it is, but the structure of this cosmology is functionally very similar to Swedenborg’s—and like Swedenborg’s correspondences between a material and a heavenly reality, we also find, in Mazdaism, the notion of interacting realms or dimensions a higher one above guiding and constituting the lower. The difference is that Mazdaism conceives of the upper realm as an infinite column of light rather than as a “Grand Man.” The column of light enfolds the heavens—and their mountains, rivers, waterfalls, plains, cities, and habitations. There too, as above, so below—but in the lower realm another column, of infinite darkness, is mixing with the light. And we, engaged in the work of the creation, will either succeed individually or descend into the darkness if we’re tempted by its allurements.

Now to complete this picture, I would offer the proposals of Rupert Sheldrake, a modern, living scientist. Sheldrake is a biologist. Sheldrake suggests that undetectable morphic fields exist and correspond to all material phenomena. They contain the forms and patterns of the material, not simply statically but dynamically as well, thus they also hold patterns of motion and behavior. And these fields are alive in the sense that they can and do change over time. They are a cosmic memory. And all things are in active contact with these fields at all times. We thus have a scheme that parallels Mazdaism: not only living entities but inorganic stuff also takes its guidance, as it were, from vast accumulations of highly organized banks of memory, the morphic fields. Fields exist at all levels and are hierarchically arranged. There would thus be a morphic field specific to mammals as well as for, say, rabbits and people, the latter fields hierarchically beneath the field for mammals. And above the field for mammals would be a more general field for all living entities. The interesting parallel here is that this undetectable but physical reality is proposed as a naturalistic explanation forced on us by looking at matter. We infer these fields from what we see on the ground—and we need the fields as a hypothesis in order to explain certain categories of events that, thus far, we cannot reduce to a chemical or a mechanical sets of causes. The embryo’s development is usually cited as an example. Our science has not been able, thus far, to offer what might be a hard chemico-mechanical explanation for the changes we actually behold.

Sheldrake’s most relevant works here are A New Science of Life. The Hypothesis of Formative Causation and Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature.

Swedenborg’s proposals, and Mazdaism, too, for that matter, are dismissed as outdated religious mumbo-jumbo. We’re beyond such things today. Sheldrake is dismissed on the grounds of parsimony, chopped away by Occam’s razor. Modern science says it doesn’t need yet another level of explanation. Just wait until we’ve figured things out the hard way, by patient experiment. All right. But that view—alongside the earlier mumbo-jumbo dismissal—depends on a hard commitment to the notion of materialism and its consequent affirmation of the meaninglessness of existence.

People like me don’t wish to make that commitment. And for those who don’t, the ideas sketched in here—just enough to become visible—can take on a certain level of interest. To delve deeper, of course, means to endure trials and tribulations not unlike those that science is condemned to accept. But these may lead to insight; those of science promise more of the same old, same old until the sun burns out.

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.

A Modern Platonist

It is an odd characteristics of human behavior that labels give us comfort even when we don’t properly understand a thing. We give it name. We get used to the name. And after a while we feel as if we understand something just because we’ve classified it. Miraculous healings are a case in point. We assign them to a higher order; we endow this order with limitless powers; doing so we escape the burden of explanation; we can avoid specifying exactly how the higher order achieves a miraculous healing. Some people—those who won’t buy the “higher order” explanation—also adopt magical tactics of explanation. They speak of spontaneous healing without explaining how it could possibly have worked—how this particular very rapid spontaneous healing differs from the ordinary slow kind. Alternatively they deny the health condition: there was nothing wrong in the first place, the ailment was imagined. And so it goes.

While this is a characteristic human approach, good theories are also formulated by careful observation, the discovery of where the limits of knowledge are, by naming or circumscribing the unknown element, and then trying to penetrate that region in some new way. An example of this approach, which might have some relevance to miraculous healings, is the concept of morphic fields proposed most recently by Rupert Sheldrake (1942-), a British biologist. You pursue this idea in detail in Sheldrake’s two books on the subject: 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).

Morphic field theory has (in my opinion, anyway) a close kinship to the Platonic concept of eternal forms, but in a modern variant. The term itself is taken from the Greek for “form.” The idea is that any organized aggregate or any kind has a field associated with it; this field may be likened to a memory of how something is organized, thus as a deposit or a record. The field and the organized entity are linked one to the other, as we are to our memories. Thus we continuously add to our memories and, when needed, we retrieve them and they guide us in our activities. Substitute morphic field for memory, and you have a reasonable grasp of Sheldrake’s theory. In Sheldrake’s scheme our own personal memories, however, are just one instance of a morphic field. Our bodies have their own field; the bodies of humanity as a whole have another. In this theory, morphic fields are associated with all organized entities. The fields hold the patterns that describe each—individual or collective. Actual events are taken up into the field and stored there, modifying the pattern.

An interesting idea. It is structurally much the same as hylomorphism, suggesting that everything is a duality of matter (hyle) and form (morphē), an Aristotelian proposal. We’re already used to that idea, therefore it doesn’t strike us as outlandish—whereas Sheldrake’s much more detailed concept of “fields” out there, somewhere, holding a more dynamic sort of form—and zillions of them, for individuals as well as whole species and subspecies—strikes us as weird. But the idea produces less and less resistance as you ponder it over time. At least that is what happened in my case. My reflexive reaction was to say: “We don’t need another whole order of things out there.” Then, later, it occurred to me that I did not object to the Platonic/Aristotelian form-matter conceptualization when I first heard it, although the same “doubling” of everything is also implied there. Why didn’t I object to that? Because I was younger? But enough. Let me continue and sketch in how this idea first surfaced.

The idea was first proposed, not using the same phraseology, by a very important biologist and thinker, Hans Driesch (1867-1941); he is considered the father of embryology. Driesch discovered something rather astonishing. He was experimenting with sea urchin embryos. He cut them in half and then waited to see what would happen. To his astonishment, the embryos developed despite having been halved. They developed into real, living sea urchins, but much smaller ones than those that nature normally produces. This work became the foundation of modern embryology. Driesch, however, came to be classified as a vitalist, thus placed outside scientific orthodoxy in retrospect. Why? He could not explain the phenomena he was observing without recourse to what he called “a unifying non-material mind-like something…an ordering principle which does not add either energy or matter” to the process. This “something” is what Sheldrake later called the morphic field. The term itself is actually a generalization of a more narrow descriptor introduced around 1907 by another biologist, the Russian Alexander Gurwitsch. Gurwitsch spoke of “morphogenetic fields”; he offered it as a suggestive hypothesis, little more than that; his use of the “genetic” suffix limits the concept of biological development, whereas Sheldrake enlarges it to any organized phenomenon. Ross Granville Harrison and others went on to explore this “field” phenomenon in experiments, but their work was marginalized later by emerging mechanistic theories. What this shows is that Sheldrake has a lineage in scientific exploration and speculation, all arising from the puzzle that embryonic development produced—and still does. To this day we do not know with any kind of precision what guides embryonic development. The modern view that chemical feedback loops do the whole job would have to be proved by detailed mapping of all the chemical reactions, showing that they take place by rigid determination, each step necessarily forcing the next. We have no such proof.

* * *

Now it might be objected that “morphic field” is also nothing but a label, nothing more useful than “miraculous.” But here I would point out that a theory of morphic fields—separate from the actual organism—is a much more useful concept for understanding phenomena like miraculous cures. Let’s take it seriously for a moment. Let’s say that every body is formed from a pattern stored “off-line” as it were, thus in a field at least analogous to electromagnetic fields; those also exist, mysteriously, “out there.” Sheldrake describes the interaction between a morphic field and the organism as taking place by what he calls a resonance. He largely leaves it at that, but the suggestion is something akin to a frequency or a vibration; the frequency to be sure, would have to be of a much more complex sort than we associate with electromagnetic waves. Here I would use the example of a memory which has multiple modalities: image, sound, emotion, even smell: a complex experience retrieved as a packet. A morphic resonance related to the body, would similarly have chemical, structural, and dynamic aspects, including electromagnetic states, temperature, and so forth.

Now let us assume that states of disease or malformation come about, in part at least, because something interferes with the proper communication between the organism and its field. Let us assume, further, that a powerful flow of psychic energy, such as a healer is able to generate, stimulates the body of the sick person once more to “tune in” to its field. If that actually happens, rapid healing may take place. It would, indeed, be spontaneous—in the sense that processes that would have taken place slowly and naturally anyway now take place rapidly, possibly helped by the excess energy also present.

This sketch represents a somewhat more thinkable alternative to the concept of a miraculous healing—but that’s all it is, a thinkable hypothesis. This field has not been developed. The reason for that is simply that current theories have no room for non-material mind-like somethings. Sheldrake appears intent in persuading his fellow scientists to engage in meaningful experiments that will definitely establish the reality of morphic fields. His aim has not been to commit cosmology, to echo George Will. Therefore he has avoided speculations of the sort that arises as corollaries to his ideas: What comes first? The field or the organism? Is this a purely naturalistic phenomenology? If yes, pure materialism is better, is more parsimonious. Morphic fields are obviously less than perfect—else we’d never have deformed embryos and malformed babies. I regret, to be sure, that orthodox science is as hostile to metaphysics as it is to theories that wander across the borderzone in search of explanations—which may be the right ones, once fully fleshed out. Not in the current form, to be sure. But the direction may be the right one.