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In reply to the discussion: Is anyone here familiar with "quantum consciousness"? [View all]Mossfern
(4,627 posts)33. Morphic Fields
Sheldrake begins his book with a provocative hypothesis: Why are we so sure about the existence of the so-called laws of nature, especially in their current incarnation as immutable and eternal? Given that most scientists share a materialist worldview, belief in something so intangible, eternal, and almost deified seems like a contradiction, or a paradox. At the very least, it leaves an enormous opening for questions about cosmology that most scientists forcefully ignore, beyond a general belief in the Big Bang Theory. As an alternative, Sheldrake suggests that perhaps these laws of nature are simply habits of nature that have developed gradually over long periods of time so as to seem like immutable laws. Perhaps they were not inherent in the cosmic period that preceded the Big Bang but emerged out of that evolutionary process over billions of years. If the universe was born in a primordial explosion fourteen billion years ago, could the laws of the universe also have evolved over time? After all, as Sheldrake points out, this idea of natural laws arose from the minds of men obsessed with the laws of man.
Although many people no longer believe in [. . .] God, his changeless laws have survived him to this day. But when we pause to consider the nature of these laws, they rapidly become mysterious. They govern matter and motion, but they are not themselves material nor do they move. They cannot be seen or weighed or touched; they lie beyond the realm of sense experience. They are potentially present everywhere and always. They have no physical source or origin. Indeed, even in the absence of God, they still share many of his traditional attributes. They are omnipresent, immutable, universal, and self-subsistent. Nothing can be hidden from them, nor lie beyond their power. (p. 18)
This idea that the entire universe is a nested, self-organizing system powered by habit rather than laws is our entry point into the broader theory of morphic fields, or what Sheldrake calls formative causation. This memory that nature appears to exhibit at both the micro and macro levels might be a feature of manifest reality as much as gravitational or electromagnetic fields. And, as we will see, ancient yogis shared this view that reality is a series of nested, self-organizing systems with infinite intelligence embedded at every layer.
Although many people no longer believe in [. . .] God, his changeless laws have survived him to this day. But when we pause to consider the nature of these laws, they rapidly become mysterious. They govern matter and motion, but they are not themselves material nor do they move. They cannot be seen or weighed or touched; they lie beyond the realm of sense experience. They are potentially present everywhere and always. They have no physical source or origin. Indeed, even in the absence of God, they still share many of his traditional attributes. They are omnipresent, immutable, universal, and self-subsistent. Nothing can be hidden from them, nor lie beyond their power. (p. 18)
This idea that the entire universe is a nested, self-organizing system powered by habit rather than laws is our entry point into the broader theory of morphic fields, or what Sheldrake calls formative causation. This memory that nature appears to exhibit at both the micro and macro levels might be a feature of manifest reality as much as gravitational or electromagnetic fields. And, as we will see, ancient yogis shared this view that reality is a series of nested, self-organizing systems with infinite intelligence embedded at every layer.
https://medium.com/the-wisdom-revolution/a-brief-introduction-to-morphic-fields-88fe09d2661d
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It's not so much that, but increasing occurrences of "the Mandela effect..."
W_HAMILTON
May 2025
#40