A New Science of Life

Both authors write that life is a non-material influence. They eschew political correctness, putting the search for truth above personal acclaim, and paid the price – ridicule and marginalisation. Sheldrake's book in 1981 got scathing reviews: 'A Book for Burning?' …'This infuriating tract' …: 'magic and heresy instead of science.' Despite working at the University of Oregon for 35 years, Prof Goswami was never allowed to present his views there. Both books expose the empty promises of materialist science and its sterile, depressing philosophy of genetic determinism. 'Can you really believe that all your thoughts and meanings, your feelings and struggles with values, and indeed your consciousness itself, are just the result of a random dance of elementary particles?'(p. 14) The authors develop a theoretical mechanism by which life and evolution works, namely by morphic resonance, in which genes play no part. Creatures are tuned like radios, or ships guided by radar by what Sheldrake calls 'formative causation', and Goswami calls 'downward causation from consciousness'. According to Sheldrake, morphic fields are subtle energy beaming down on us from the universe. They contain intelligent in-form-ation, and create life, form, behaviour, and memory. 'Morphic' fields determine the form of the creature. 'Morpho-genetic' fields create the evolution of form. 'Behavioural' fields determine behaviour. Morphic resonance recalls memory when tuned to the right frequency. Like electromotive and gravitational fields, morphic fields cannot be observed directly. They traverse empty space, (or may even actually constitute it) and are capable of influencing physical changes to create order at a distance without any material connection between them, (called non-locality in quantum physics) They apply at all levels of complexity, influencing such things as protons, nitrogen atoms, water molecules, sodium chloride crystals, muscle cells of earthworms, kidneys of sheep, elephants, beech trees, etc. Cosmic evolution involves an interplay of habit and creativity, as manifestations of an eternal, timeless set of archetypes. Morphic fields evolved causally (upward causation) from what habitually happened before. All animals and plants draw upon and contribute to a collective memory of their species. This is learned telepathically, (by downward causation) so it becomes easier for others to learn, no matter where they are in the world. Crystals and molecules also follow the habits of their kind in a similar way. Sheldrake posits the following four alternative metaphysical theories of creation, but leaves the choice between them open to the reader to decide for himself:

a) Modified materialism, in which consciousness is either an aspect of, or runs parallel to the morphic fields acting on the brain. All human creativity must ultimately ascribed to chance…Human life has no purpose beyond the satisfaction of biological and social needs; nor has the evolution of life, nor the universe as a whole, any purpose or direction.

b) The conscious self, which acts on the morphic fields, remaining over and above them, as the formative cause of formative causes.

c) The creative universe, which is capable of giving rise to new forms, and new patterns of behaviour, imminent in life as a whole (what Bergson called 'elan vital') .It could be imminent in the planet as a whole, the solar system, or the entire universe. There could indeed be a hierarchy of imminent creativities at all these levels.

d) Transcendent reality, in which the universe as a whole could have a cause and a purpose only if it were itself created by a conscious agent or being that transcended it as its source. All created things would then in some sense participate in its nature. The more or less limited 'wholeness' of organisations at all levels of complexity could then be seen as a reflection of the transcendent unity on which they depended, and from which they were ultimately derived. (p237)

Goswami goes further, opting for d) above in his use of 'God' as synonymous with consciousness. His mission is to integrate science and spirituality within consciousness, and in this latest book he integrates biology with evolution by intelligent design, created by a purposive designer. The following abyss of unexplained phenomena in biology can only be bridged by introducing the organising principles of vitalism and consciousness:

Biologists know much about the molecules and their attendant processes, but next to nothing about the blueprints for how life places them in the right place at the right time. It does so, not by genes, but by downloaded memory in morphic resonance, tuned to the right frequency. The fast tempo of macro-evolution in the fossil gaps. These are acts of creation by the quantum leaps of downward causation which operates alongside upward causation (linear development). What we experience inside us – feeling, thinking, intuition, qualia, self. These are explained by non-material consciousness in the vital body of the aura and charka system. Mind cannot be an epiphenomenon of the brain because matter cannot process meaning. Brain is matter substance and mind is meaning-giver substance. Both need a mediator - consciousness - to mediate their interaction. They both consist of quantum possibilities of consciousness, brain being matter-possibility and mind being meaning-possibility. Quantum consciousness collapses the possibility waves of both brain and mind to create an experience of mental meaning, (called a thought), and at the same time create a memory of that meaning. The evidence for this is our everyday experience, such as triggering memory to replay meaning, creativity, synchronicity, dreams in which meaning unfolds, wrongness in meaning producing illness (such as cancer) which can be healed by a quantum leap in meaning that unblocks the vital energy (pp. 252-5)

What should we do about the new meaning from these books? 'Our destructive tendency comes from our psycho-social conditioning. When we rise above this even temporarily, we can change. We can be harmonious with our ecosystem, with our whole planet, with Gaia, not by wishing, nor by philosophy, but only through intention and the creative process, that is by taking a discontinuous quantum leap. We then realise one astounding thing. I choose, therefore I am, and my world is. The world is not separate from us. When we do this en masse, we leap into a truly Gaia consciousness.' (p. 295)