The Mystery

Imagination. The word has a range of meanings. It may conjure up a state of mind like daydreaming in which thoughts flow freely and particularly vivid or novel ideas occur. This kind of imagining can be purely private. It can take place unobserved inside a person’s head. Imagination also invokes the intense creativity, which goes into producing works of art. In this case there is an outward expression. A product which communicates to others and may find a place within culture. Imagination may play a role in many thought processes and creativity is part and parcel of many day-to-day activities. While imaginative activity is frequently individual, the idea of the artist working away isolated in the Garrett, it also strong links to social interaction. For many adults a major source of imaginative participation may be as the audience of a film, TV program, or drama production, but the process of engagement is no less important. A first step in understanding imagination is to consider what

A long debate about the nature and causes of forms has been going on at least since the time of ancient Greece, and within the sciences has been most hotly contested in relation to the morphogenesis of plants and animals. Since the seventeenth century, mechanists – still the dominant orthodoxy – have tried to explain morphogenesis in terms of material causes present in eggs, whereas vitalists and holistic biologists have suggested explanations in terms of formative forces and, more recently, morphogenetic fields. This debate continues, and could well help to revolutionize not only biology, but also chemistry and physics. Alfred Rupert Sheldrake is an English author and parapsychology researcher who proposed the concept of morphic resonance, a conjecture which lacks mainstream acceptance and has been criticized as pseudoscience. He has worked as a biochemist at Cambridge University, Harvard scholar, researcher at the Royal Society, and plant physiologist for ICRISAT in India. Morphic re

Morphic fields underlie our mental activity and our perceptions, and lead to a new theory of vision, as discussed in 'The Sense of Being Stared At'. The existence of these fields is experimentally testable through the sense of being stared at itself. There is already much evidence that this sense really exists. The morphic fields of social groups connect together members of the group even when they are many miles apart, and provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance. They help provide an explanation for telepathy. There is now good evidence that many species of animals are telepathic, and telepathy seems to be a normal means of animal communication, as discussed in the book 'Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home'. Telepathy is normal not paranormal, natural not supernatural, and is also common between people, especially people who know each other well. In the modern world, the commonest kind of human telepathy oc

Morphic resonance is a process whereby self-organizing systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species. Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future. When 'A New Science of Life' was first published the British journal Nature called 'Morphic Reson