I was at a talk by Rupert Sheldrake (www.sheldrake.org) recently at the Theosophical center in London. This was a great moment of Cambridge science and Esoteric science coming together. The theosophical society has had a big part to play in the advent of abstraction through Kandinsky and Mondrian who were both theosophists (see previous article by John Algeo on the societies contributions to the arts).
Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist at Cambridge University and he had put forward the theory of Morphic Resonance. He suggests that there is a database of information that is created and stored by the working of social groups. This is not stored in the brain but outside of it. In the ether. And the field develops according to the feedback it gets from the participants by morphic resonance. The field strengthens with time as the group grows according to the information it gets from this field. One can see why cultural patterns emerge in different parts of the world as groups. It feeds off the same data or morphic field that is created and it exists because of the group. Like a group of artist.
Artists around the world (with the help of the internet) will be part of an elaborate field, both locally and universally. As the field expands and changes from feedback due to improved communications, you will find that the world of art in China say, will start to take on more western forms. Its old forms that characterises the Chinese look will metamorphise into new forms. The important think to realize about a mophogenic field is that it is a template. If you cannot work yourself out of that template you can become predictable without knowing it, as you constantly, unknowingly, feed of this field. So finding the new, the truly new, will be difficult to come by, both because you are ‘stuck’ with this data of information but more importantly, the groups that live off these fields, will not recognized what is truly new. The ‘new’ will always be, that little bit that is different plus a lot of what already exists. Or more like, the work will always be the same, feeding off the same data over and over again without knowing it. So progress is this predictable ‘frontline’ of forms, concepts, colors, dragging the past along its path.
Morphic field” is a term introduced by Sheldrake. He proposes that there is a field within and around a morphic unit which organizes its characteristic structure and pattern of activity.[12] According to this concept, the morphic field underlies the formation and behaviour of holons and morphic units, and can be set up by the repetition of similar acts or thoughts. The hypothesis is that a particular form belonging to a certain group which has already established its (collective) morphic field, will tune into that morphic field. The particular form will read the collective information through the process of morphic resonance, using it to guide its own development. This development of the particular form will then provide, again through morphic resonance, a feedback to the morphic field of that group, thus strengthening it with its own experience resulting in new information being added (i.e. stored in the database). Sheldrake regards the morphic fields as a universal database for both organic (living) and abstract (mental) forms. (wiki)
If you cannot break off that loop you will wonder why, in art, new radical form and ideas are difficult to come by. A little bit of this and a little bit of that from the past, from the Morphic field, that database of past ideas that you feed off but don’t know it is there and going nowhere in your work. The MORPHIC FIELD is the home of GROUPTHINK. The NEW transforms, and I like to suggest is the main purpose of art. An experience, an idea, which lifts you into a new space, instantly. You see it and you have it. You will never be the same again after such an experience. The excitement of the New will not come from feeding off the Morphic field or Groupthink. Increasingly we are beginning to discover, or the mystics have always known, that we are ‘shackled’ to a universe that insists in maintaining its balance and one that also makes us function in specific ways.
Unknowingly we create ourselves off a template.
This concept of the Morphic Field has been around in India via the Vedas.
‘Also, he (Sheldrake) agrees that the concept of Akashic Records, term from Vedas representing the “library” of all the experiences and memories of human minds (souls) through their physical lifetime, can be related to morphic fields,[13] since one’s past (an Akashic Record) is a mental form, consisting of thoughts as simpler mental forms (all processed by the same brain), and a group of similar or related mental forms also have their associated (collective) morphic field.’
In his talk, Sheldrake did mention in fleeting that it is possible that Creativity might function outside the morphic field. This mechanism of finding, creating, as it turns via the mind of the artist might stand apart from the ‘field’ and outside it. It does not have to work with the ‘field’. He also did mention that we still did not understand how consciousness worked. The mystics of yesterday and the scientists of today are starting to come together. They are in partnership today to show us what New is. And the Artists were always in the thick of it, through form, colour and composition, to show us how the process functions, how the mind turns and to find for us, what is means to experience something truly New.
(Sheldrake has spent time in India. From 1974 to 1985, he worked in Hyderabad, India, where he was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. For a year-and-a-half he lived in the ashram of Bede Griffiths, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.[4])