Science & Ritual: Sheldrake and Fox in Dialogue

We are meditating today on a conversation I shared with biologist Rupert Sheldrake in our book Natural Grace.

Sheldrake: The essence of the idea of morphic resonance is that the regularities of Nature are more like habits than laws, that they’re not fixed for all times from the beginning.  They’re habits which have grown up within Nature.  Nature has a kind of inherent memory rather than an eternal mathematical mind.  Salt crystallizes the way it does because salt has crystallized that way before so often.  The more often it happens, the deeper the habit becomes until it behaves as if it is governed by eternal laws.

Each kind of thing has a collective memory of previous things of that kind….This memory depends on the process I call morphic resonance, the influence of like upon like through space and time.  Similar patterns of activity or vibration pick up what’s happened to similar patterns before.

This means, for example, that if you make a new chemical compound, the first time you make it the substance may be very hard to crystallize because there isn’t a habit for that kind of crystal to form.  But the more often you make it, the easier it should get all around the world.  In fact, it is well known that the more often you make crystals the easier they crystallize all around the world.  Chemists explain this away in terms of the rich folklore of chemistry such as because fragments of previous crystals are carried from lab to lab on the beards of migrant chemists.  It’s assumed that microscopic dust particles of the previous crystals have been wafted around the world in the atmosphere.

In nature and in human affairs, morphic resonance makes things happen in an increasingly habitual way through repetition.  The key to morphic resonance is similarity, and its usual effect is to reinforce similarities as habits build up.  Usually habits become increasingly unconscious.  But sometimes, in the human realm, things are deliberately and consciously done the same way they were done before.  This is especially true of rituals.

Fox: Ritual, it seems to be, can be a remembrance not just of the past but of the future.  Aquinas has a beautiful poem about the Eucharist where he talks about tasting the eschatological food, the experiences of heaven and so forth.  There’s an eschatological dimension to ritual.  Eschatology means the future and its coming to bear on the present.  

In ritual we’re remembering what hasn’t happened yet.  We’re projecting ourselves forward to experience the justice we haven’t experienced yet, to experience the joy that isn’t visible, yet, to experience the celebration that hasn’t broken through in our personal lives or in our social lives yet.

That’s very important, that ritual is forward-looking as well as backward-looking.  Eckhart says, “In the depths of the soul God creates the entire cosmos, past, present and future.”  If ritual and the entrance into the morphic fields is an entrance into our depths, then all time—past, present, and future—is going to come together there and some amazing things can happen as a result.  

Adapted from Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science, pp. 163-165.

Banner Image: Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake. Thumbnail from YouTube dialogue series of Matthew and Rupert posted by TheHallOfRecords.

Does memory play an important role for you in creating and experiencing rituals?  Is that memory aimed toward the future as well as the past?

Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science 
by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake

Natural Grace, a 208 page inspired dialogue between theologian Matthew Fox and scientist Rupert Sheldrake, unites wisdom and knowledge from unconventional angles. Considering themselves heretics in their own fields, Matthew and Rupert engage the conversation from postmodern and post-postmodern perspectives, deconstructing both religion and science—while setting the foundation for a new emerging worldview. Having outgrown the paradigms in which they were raised, both Fox and Sheldrake see it as part of their life missions to share the natural synthesis of spirituality and science rooted in a paradigm of evolutionary cosmology.