Sue Tordoff
Rupert
Sheldrake has some revolutionary theories about the way we as humans
communicate. One is the
theory of Morphic Fields, which he links with Jung's work on the
collective unconscious. Basically
he states that each individual, each animal, each group has a field around
them. The field you are born
into – ethnically,
geographically and so on –
is readily accessible to you instinctively, intuitively.
If you move into other fields, you have to get to know how that
field works, in other words you have to 'tune in' to the wavelength of
that field. I
was born in Experiments
and work done (over a period of 50 years) around the theory of morphic
fields show that learning passes very quickly between animals of the same
species. In laboratory
training, rats were taught ways of learning new behaviour.
The experiments began in Harvard
and continued in What
significance does this have to our understanding of global problems today?
Sheldrake extends his thinking about group morphic resonance to the
behaviour of groups such as football crowds or mobs of rioters.
This might be said, in Jungian terms, to be the shadow or darker
side of human collective consciousness.
Sheldrake
suggests that in the 1930's the shadow side of the collective
consciousness took tangible form in Nazi German.
The rapid spread of fascism took most European countries by
surprise. Is
something similar happening today with the enormous groundswell in the
terrorist activities of some fundamentalist groups?
We see many outbreaks of violence in different countries,
perpetrated by co-ordinated groups as well as by small cells of activists,
suicide bombers etc. To extend
the comparison between the escalation of fascism then and fundamentalist
terrorism now conjures up a picture too horrifying to contemplate. There
appears to be a minimum number –
sometimes called the critical mass or creative minority –
of individuals required before balance in the morphic field is changed.
In the case of rats, this was reached when enough rats in similar
learning conditions in three different locations began learning at ten
times their usual rates of learning.
The learning of all rats in all the groups speeded up.
If we apply this to our present conditions, the more individuals
who stand for peace and unity, the sooner we will reach the kind of
numbers which will swing the balance in favour of peace and unity, and
away from terrorism and division.
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