RMN: When a system hits an evolutionary dead end, an organism becomes extinct or an object obsolete. What happens to its field? Does it kind of just breakup and merge with other similar fields?
RUPERT: Well, I think in a sense the ghosts of dead species would still be haunting the world, that the fields of the dinosaurs would still be potentially present ... if you could tune into them. If a dinosaur egg could be reconstituted, you could get them back again. I think that in the course of evolution these past forms do indeed reappear. They're known in the biological literature as atavisms, the process by which the forms, or patterns, or behaviors of extinct species reappear in living ones. Like babies being born with tails.
DJB: Or parallel evolution?
RUPERT: Well, parallel evolution would involve a similar process, but what I'm talking about is the influence of extinct species traveling across time and these features reappearing. Parallel evolution would be where you have the features of some species traveling across space, and similar patterns evolving somewhere else like, for example, the evolution of forms among marsupials in Australia that parallel those of placental mammals elsewhere.
DJB: You said before that there could be a sort of collective memory, and you said that was analogous to Jung's notion of the collective unconscious. Do you think it's possible then that morphic fields are, or can be, actually conscious?
RUPERT: I don't think that morphic fields are conscious. I think that some aspects of morphic fields could become conscious in human beings. I think that the underlying patterns of mental activity that are ideas, thoughts, etc., depend on our morphic fields. I think they become conscious in us. But most of the collective unconscious, most of our habits, and most of the habits of nature, I think, are unconscious, and most of nature, I think, works much more like our unconscious minds than like our conscious minds. And after all, 90%, maybe 99%, of our own activity is unconscious. We don't need to assume that the kind of unconscious memories that we ourselves have are any different from the rest of nature.
We needn't assume that just because we have some conscious memories, all of the memory of nature must be conscious. In fact, most of our memories are unconscious, as are most of our habits, like the habit of speaking English, for example, the way one speaks, one's mannerisms, one's accent, or the habit of driving a car. When you drive a car, you don't have to be conscious of every muscular movement, or everything you're doing. Those habits unfold spontaneously. And the more deep-seated biological habits, like the functioning of our bodies, and our heartbeat, and the way our guts our working are completely unconscious to most of us.
DJB: In your book The Presence of the Past you offer the suggestion that memories are not actually stored in the brain, but rather they may be stored in an information field that can be accessed by the brain. If this should prove to be true, do you believe then that human consciousness, our personal memories and sense of self, may survive biological death in some form?
RUPERT: Well, certainly the idea that memories aren't stored in the brain opens the way for a new debate or new perspective on the question of survival of death. Most people assume memories are stored in the brain, simply because this is the mechanistic paradigm that's very rarely challenged. There's hardly any evidence for memory storage in the brain, as I show in my book, and what evidence there is could be interpreted better in terms of the brain as a tuning system, tuning into its own past. So that we can gain access to our own memories by tuning into our own past states. The brain is more like a TV receiver than like a tape recorder or a video recorder.
If memories are stored in the brain then there's no possibility of conscious, or even unconscious survival of bodily death, because if memories are in the brain, the brain decays at death, and your memories must be wiped out through the decay of the brain. No form of survival in any shape or form, even through reincarnation, would be possible in such a scenario. That's one reason why materialists are so attached to the idea of memory storage in the brain, because it refutes all religions in a two line argument. But, in fact, there's very little evidence they're stored in the brain.
So if they're not stored in the brain then the memories won't decay at death, but there'll still have to be something that can tune into them, or gain access to them. So could some tuning system, could some non-physical aspect of the self survive death and still gain access to the memories? That's the big question. I regard it as an open question. I myself think that we do survive bodily death in some form, and that some aspect of the self does survive with access to memories. And that's a personal opinion. The theory as such leaves this question quite open.
DJB: Do you think there is a morphic field for dreams, mystical experiences, and other states of consciousness?
RUPERT: I think that any organized structure of activity--which includes dreams and some mystical experiences, and altered states of consciousness--any pattern of activity has a structure, and in so far as these mental activities or states have structures, then these structures could indeed move from person to person by morphic resonance. And indeed, in many mystical traditions, it's thought that people through initiation are brought into that particular tradition and resonate, or in some sense enter into communion with, or connection with, other people who followed in the tradition before.
So, in Hindu and Buddhist lineages, you often get the idea that through initiation and the transmission of the right mantras, and so on, the initiate comes into contact with the guru, the teacher, and the whole line of those who'd gone before. There is a similar idea in Christianity, the idea of the communion of saints. Those who participate in the Christian sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, are in contact, not just with other people doing it now, or other people who happen to be around, but somehow in some kind of resonant connection with all those who've done the same thing before.
RMN: What have your ideas been on the hierarchical systems of morphic fields, of the fundamental fields of nature or life, and the basic morphic fields that have influenced that, or the morphic fields of morphic fields? I've been wondering about that.
RUPERT: I think all such fields are organized holorarchically or hierarchically. They're hierarchical in the sense of nested hierarchies. Cells are within tissues, and tissues are within organs, and organs are within your body. There's a sense in which the whole, the body and the mind, the whole of you, is greater than the organs in your body, and those in turn are greater than tissues, those in turn greater than cells, those in turn greater than molecules. The greater is a spatial context, the more embracing field.
If you think about the way nature is organized, you can see the same pattern at every level. Our earth, Gaia, is included in the solar system, the solar system is in the galaxy, the galaxy within a cluster of galaxies, and ultimately everything is included within the cosmos. So you could say the most primal basic field of nature is the cosmic field, and then the galactic fields, and solar system fields, planetary fields, continental fields, and so on in this nested hierarchy. At each level the whole organizes the parts within it, and the parts affect the whole; there's a two-way influence.
DJB: Do you think it's possible that morphic fields from the future may be influencing us, as well as those from the past? If not, why?
RUPERT: Well, I think that is related to the question of creativity; how do new patterns come into being? There may possibly be some influence from the future. But the habitual fields, which I'm mainly talking about, are not influenced by the future, at least as far as this theory is concerned. It would be possible to have a theory that said the future and the past exerted equal influences, but that theory would be different from the one I'm suggesting, which is that the past is influencing the present through morphic resonance. If future and past influenced it equally, the theory would be virtually untestable, because we don't know what will happen in the future, so we wouldn't know what influences we'd be testing for.
If the future influenced things as much as the past, then the experiments I'm sug
gesting, like rats getting better at learning something all around the world, shouldn't work. Rats should start off just as good as they continue, because they'll always be limitless numbers in the future, which would be influencing them. So this is actually a testable possibility.
I think that habits and memories come from the past. This is just common sense. We have memories of the past, and we don't have memories of the future in the same way. Occasionally some people have pre-cognitive flashes. But we don't have memories of the future. We may have hopes, plans, desires, inspirations, insights, etc., but they're not memories in the same sense that memories from the past are memories. We don't get habits from the future, we get them from the past.
RMN: Could the presence of the future be described as the potential state of the system, the virtual state, as it moves along the pathways or access routes towards it?
RUPERT: Yes, I think so. I think there are two ways of thinking about it. One is there's a kind of aura around the present stretching out into the future, which is the realm of hopes, fears, possibilities, dreams, imaginings about what can happen. But then there's a further question, and a more fundamental one, as to whether the whole evolutionary process is being pulled from the future, rather than being pushed from the past. And the idea that it's all being pulled from the future is a very traditional view, and so is the idea it's being pushed from the past.
The traditional Judeo-Christian view of history is that history is being pulled from the future, there's something in the future--which Terence McKenna calls the transcendental object, Teilhard de Chardin calls the omega point, what the Book of Revelation calls the new creation, what metanarians have thought of as the millennium. That some future state of perfection is drawing the whole cosmic evolutionary process towards itself in some mysterious way. And that, therefore, the whole cosmic evolutionary process has a kind of goal or purpose. Well that's a view which many people subscribe to, and it's a view that lies at the root of the doctrine of progress, which dominates our whole society.
So this view isn't just a philosophical view; in a secularized form, it dominates both capitalist and communist societies--the dream of a better future. Most traditional societies haven't had that dream, they haven't been motivated by that, they looked to the past for a model of the way things should be, how it used to be in the golden age. They haven't tried to create a new kind of future golden age. And our society represents an ambitious global attempt to do just that through conquering nature by means of science and technology. The inspirational basis for the destruction of the environment, the development of the tropical forests, etc., is this dream of a future state on earth that progress will lead us towards, where there's peace, prosperity, and plenty through man's conquest of nature.
And many of us now think that dream is a kind of chimera, a vision that is utterly destructive in its consequences. But the fact is that it still comes from that same dream of a future pulling things along. I think all forms of western thought are under the influence of this particular attractor, as one could call it. The idea of a future goal attracting things towards it is utterly dominant in almost every area of western thought I know. The New Age communists with their millenarian vision--it's just part of our culture.
RMN: Yeah, that leads on to the next question I have about how to use the concept of attractors, as expressed in the current research of dynamical systems, in the theory of formative causation.
RUPERT: Well, the idea of attractors, which is developed in modern mathematical dynamics, is a way of modeling the way systems develop, by modeling the end states toward which they tend. This is an attempt to understand systems by understanding where they're headed to in the future, rather than just where they've been pushed from in the past. So, the attractor, as the name implies, pulls the system towards itself. A very simple, easy-to-understand, example is throwing marbles, or round balls into a pudding basin. The balls will roll round and round, and they'll finally come to rest at the bottom of the basin. The bottom of the basin is the attractor, in what mathematicians call the basin of attraction.
The basin is, in fact, their principal metaphor. So the ball rolls down to the bottom. It doesn't matter where you throw it in, or at what speed you throw it in, or by what route it takes--what this model does is tell you where it's going to end up. This kind of mathematical modeling is extremely appropriate, I think, to the understanding of biological morphogenesis, or the formation of crystals or molecules, or the formation of galaxies, or the formation of ideas, or human behavior, or the behavior of entire societies. Because all of them seem to have this kind of tendency to move towards attractors, which we think of consciously as goals and purposes. But, throughout the natural world these attractors exist, I think, largely unconsciously. The oak tree is the attractor of the acorn. So the growing oak seedling is drawn towards its formal attractor, its morphic attractor, which is the mature oak tree.
RMN: So, it is like the future in some sense.
RUPERT: It's like the future pulling, but it's not the future. It's a hard concept to grasp, because what we think of as the future pulling is not necessary what will happen in the future. You can cut the acorn down before it ever reaches the oak tree. So, it's not as if its future as oak tree is pulling it. It's some kind of potentiality to reach an end state, which is inherent in its nature. The attractor in traditional language is the entelechy, in Aristotle's language, and in the language of the medieval scholastics. Entelechy is the aspect of the soul, which is the end which draws everything towards it. So all people would have their own entelechy, which would be like their own destiny or purpose. Each organism, like an acorn, would have the entelechy of an oak tree, which means this end state--entelechy means the end which is within it--it has its own end, purpose, or goal. And that's what draws it. But that end, purpose, or goal is somehow not necessarily in the future. It is in a sense in the future. In another sense it's not the actual future of that system, although it becomes so.
RMN: Perhaps the most compelling implication of your hypothesis is that nature is not governed by eternally fixed laws but more by habits that are able to evolve as conditions change. In what ways do you think the human experience of reality could be affected as a result of this awareness?
RUPERT: Well, I think first of all the idea of habits developing along with nature gives us a much more evolutionary sense of nature herself. I think that nature-the entire cosmos, the natural world we live in--is in some sense alive, and that it's more like a developing organism, with developing habits, than like a fixed machine governed by fixed laws, which is the old image of the cosmos, the old world view.
Second, I think the notion of natural habits enables us to see how there's a kind of presence of the past in the world around us. The past isn't just something that happens and is gone. It's something which is continually influencing the present, and is in some sense present in the present.
Thirdly, it gives us a completely different understanding of ourselves, our own memories, our own collective memories, and the influence of our ancestors, and the past of our society. And it also gives an important new insight into the importance of rituals, and forms through which we connect ourselves with the past, forms in which past members of our society become present through ritual activity. I think it also enables us to understand how new patterns of activity can spread far more quickly than would be possible under standard mechanistic theories, or even under standard psychological theories. Because if many people start doing, thinking, or practicing something, it'll make it easier for others to do the same thing.
RMN: And the way different discoveries are found simultaneously.
RUPERT: Yes. I mean, that's another aspect. It will also mean things that some people do-will resonate with others, as in independent discoveries, parallel cultural development, etc.
RMN: When you were talking about the individuals' destinies being ruled by some kind of morphic field of their own. Individuality--does that resonate through their ancestral heri
tage and their environment?
RUPERT: Well, it was in a quite limited sense that I was using the term. When you're an embryo there's a sense in which the destiny of the embryo is to be an adult human being. There's a sense in which the growth and development of an embryo and a child are headed toward the adult state. That's a relation to time, of heading towards an adult or mature state that we share in common with animals and plants. This is a basic biological feature of our life.
Then there's a sense in which there is a kind of biological destiny that's common to all animals--you know, having children and reproducing. Not everybody does it, but it's obviously pretty fundamental. Most people do it. If they didn't we wouldn't have a population problem, and that's something that's pretty fundamental to the human species today. Then there's the more psychic, or personal, or spiritual kinds of destinies. Here one gets a whole variety of opinions as to what these are.
Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… Page 24