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Rupert Sheldrake and Memory

Abstract: This paper attempts to provide a brief overview of Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of fields of memory and consciousness and show how it might apply in the following circumstances. The Pakeha New Zealander, usually of English, Irish or Scots descent, is profoundly shaped by interaction with Maori, the Polynesian first people of the land. This gives rise to important questions concerning cultural identity and memory. Some of the sharpest points of dialogue occur around competing currents of spirituality and secularism. Insights into identity are generated through story and collective memory. A radical and creative new world view (Pasifika) emerges, based on memory as revelation.

In a deep psychological sense our individual identity is totally bound up with our memories. As Oliver Sacks succinctly put it, we are our memories. As memory is destroyed, personality diminishes, and a cohesive sense of identity disintegrates. Yet we are also more than our memories. In ordinary speech we use phrases like body and soul, heart and mind, mind and spirit. Yet these are terms that are not often used in scientific literature, because they often carry religious connotations and are not easily analysed by conventional scientific methods.

So we can say that we are our memories plus, but what the plus is remains a scientific mystery. It includes at least body and emotions and an awareness of our awareness, that is, consciousness or the reflective mind. Yet even this terminology worries the strict scientific literalist: mind cannot be directly measured by any empirical measures, and was virtually eliminated from ordinary conversation by the school of behavioural scientists and other advocates of a materialistic philosophy. Of course it was bad science to have excluded the phenomenon of mind merely because it defied analysis. Even so that materialist-reductionist paradigm remains powerfully influential.

The alleged neutrality of science is treated with caution today. In a profound physical sense the observer and the observed cannot be treated as entirely separate entities. To do so, at least at the subatomic level, can only give rise to faulty measurement and hence faulty knowledge. But the case applies also at the human level. We cannot see love nor weigh it nor measure its spatial dimensions. We cannot measure the coefficient of friction for the quality of hope rubbing up against despair. We cannot determine the velocity of grace in a graceless world. Yet it would be an absurd way of life which denied the effects of grace, hope and love making their way in the world. Similarly, the phenomenon of mind is as real as the phenomenon of memory, and every scientist would be mindful of their memories. Perhaps then we would be as well to say we are our memories plus, and the plus includes mind and mindfulness and that mindfulness may work in terms of qualities that hitherto have been excluded from the domain of science.

Rupert Sheldrake has suggested that what we call mind is something that is “stretched out” beyond an individual’s brain and indeed beyond the boundary of that individual’s body. Minds “extend through fields that link organisms to their environment and to each other.” He takes that hypothesis a step or two further when considering memory. Sheldrake argues that memory is an activity within the individual’s brain as well as an activity that stretches out into memory fields, through memory fields, and is done by memory fields.

We can understand why all of this is disturbing to conventional scientific thought. It shakes the very foundations of reductionism and individualism. It is easier to reduce biological phenomena to component parts and then to reduce those components to even smaller iterative processes, than it is to consider the living entity within its environment and context. The latter presents an impossibly large picture to comprehend. Yet, no matter what scientists say, humans stubbornly display human characteristics, where the whole is invariably greater than the sum of the parts. As a result of the way we use language, we are incorrigibly tellers of large tales, drawers of big pictures, and listeners to a music which comes from we know not where. Sheldrake’s science is truly scientia meant in the old-fashioned Baconian sense, that is, knowledge of every kind of human experience.

Even hard science must concede at least one fact about memory. Memory cannot possibly be reduced to the activity of one isolated individual brain. All human memory is communal, even an individual’s private reminiscences. Without communal reference points, individual memory is severely diminished, exactly as if being overwhelmed by the progress of disease and degeneration. The act of memory is not merely shared. It is actively supported by multiple communal frameworks, although none of these may be recognised by hard science at all. “Memory is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.” (Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry, Nobel Lecture, 1980.)

Memory itself is a re-creation of things past, but it also nurtures insight into both the present and the future. To borrow St Augustine’s phrase from the fourth century AD (The City of God), memory is a “window in the walls of time”. This contains a profound clue about how cultural memory works. Equally it indicates that memory and the phenomenon of time are finely woven together. The question arises whether or not we can ever find and see through such windows, as well as what we might see when we look through them. I suspect scientists orientated to materialism and its reductionist methods are blissfully unaware of their ideological blind spots and hence cannot see what they will never look for.

Windows in the walls of time are to be found but are often missed, precisely because of so-called “western” or enlightenment cultural conditioning and the triumph of secularism over spirituality. We need to show firsthand examples of such windows. Fortunately, in my country, such windows in the walls of time abound. Increasing numbers of Pakeha New Zealanders (that is, non-Maori), who are usually of English, Irish or Scots descent, are profoundly shaped by interaction with Maori, the Polynesian first people of the land. The Maori renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s, resulted in renewed Pakeha interest in te reo (language) and taonga (treasures) and mana Maori (pride in identity). From the earliest European contact, however, there have been those who would grind the taonga into the mud and deny the right of Maori to their own reo, and those who sought to preserve and enrich the encounter of the two cultures. Social Darwinism played a crucial role underpinning overt racism from the 1960s through to the 1950s. Yet significant change has occurred.

At a popular level today, international rugby matches are invariably preceded by the haka (formal challenge). The very English sport from Rugby School finds itself enhanced by the very Maori taonga of formal challenge. It is exceedingly rare to find this kind of cultural encounter at international sporting events. In a real sense, England has accommodated itself to te taha Maori (the Maori side).

At a deeper structural level in New Zealand, government policies on the status of the nation’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, have resulted in genuine attempts to settle past grievances on colonial land grabs and positively promote Maori as tangata whenua, that is, the first people occupying the land. As historian Michael King has noted “Pakeha culture continues to borrow and to learn from Maori. This was one of the features that made it different from its European cultures of origin.” Likewise Te Taha Maori is undergoing constant modification. The two Treaty partners are in a relationship of mutual modifying change. Many visitors from the United Kingdom are astonished to learn that the other Treaty partner to Taha Maori is the British Crown, an extraordinary constitutional agreement in the twenty-first century.

Three key elements of cultural memory prior to European contact must be noted. First there was family lineage traced back to the great canoe journeys of the far past. These great voyages of exploration and migration occurred almost certainly between 750 and 1,300 AD. The second was a sense of place for the tribal families. What makes both of these factors particularly relevant to Sheldrake’s argument is the formalization of these elements of memory. Third was the continously felt presence of the ancestors.

This takes place primarily on the tribal meeting ground, the marae. On the marae, welcome is formalized and hospitality is extended. Yet hospitality is much more than a duty within Maori values, it is an expression of love, aroha. The dynamics of the welcome (the powhiri) include a recital of family lineage (whakapapa) and much more. The speakers recall the genealogy of the tribes: the mythic voyages of the waka (sailing ships) that eventually made various landfalls in specific geographic areas. The prow of waka are superbly carved and decorated. The ships are canoe like, holding up to 140 rowers, but could be sailed as well.

The powhiri may well include “a warts and all appraisal” of the relationships to the people being welcomed onto the particular meeting ground. It is high drama, sacred song (waiata), prayer (karakia), chants, and speeches and songs in reply: it is the establishment of relationship. Arising from the powhiri ritual, a powerful memory is constellated across and between and among individuals. So much so, in fact, that the distinction of personal identity dissolves into tribal unity. The many have become one. Yet, it would be incorrect to assume that the recital of whakapapa means history in a western sense. As historian Michael King notes, “Maori whakapapa offers names without remains - that is, stories without evidence - while archaeology offers remains without names - evidence without stories.” In other words, the recital of whakapapa constructs a mythic world.

Having sat on both sides of the fence in terms of powhiri on the marae - as tangata whenua, the tribe in this place, and as the strangers (tauiwi) being welcomed onto this new meeting ground - one becomes more and more aware of what is being called upon in the ritual. The living and the dead are being summonsed, in Christian terms what we might well call the cloud of witnesses, to be present in the gathering. No one individual holds all the memory: the speeches and the songs and the chants from many different persons are all necessary adjuncts to confer identity.

This gives rise to what to some Pakeha, and I would think to virtually all strict scientists, do not want to know about, which for want of a better term might be called an altered state of consciousness. The entire gathering - which may be small or large, varying from a few people to many thousands - becomes orientated to one of the walls of time, and it is the wall of time past.

Every willing participant now begins the business of the marae, that is discussions, dialogue, decision making, with a tremendous awareness of what Sheldrake correctly and most perceptively called the presence of the past. On the marae of Aotearoa New Zealand it could not be any other way. A powerful sense of the past is unleashed as the supreme act of collective memory. The marae will now move into the present, but not as isolated individuals but rather exhibiting the unity of the whole tribe incorporating even the strangers (tauiwi), no longer divided as strangers and tangata whenua (those who occupy the land) but instead as one people together.

They will examine all issues through the window in the wall of time past. They will move into the future looking exclusively at the past, informed by the past, given strength by the past, given gift, wisdom and insight by the past. Thus Maori meet the future not by looking towards it, but by looking to the past. In essence they walk backwards into the future, embracing the cloud of witnesses. Consequently change happens only very slowly, only when deep and meaningful consensus is achieved. That will happen perhaps over the passage of years or decades. The rate of progress is measured by the one person who moves most slowly.

The indisputable scientific fact is that Maori claim identity by looking through a window in the wall of time past. What they see may not, or cannot, be seen by western scientists. It was perhaps in such a scientific spirit that the 1907 Suppression of Tohunga Act was passed by Parliament. This not only forbade traditional priestly and shamanistic activities, thereby forcing the tohunga (priests) into an underground existence, but also forbade the use of moko, traditional Maori tattooing which adorned the face and buttocks. Moko are the external signs of sacred identity, sacred memory. So this was cruel and unusual and unnecessary legislation, not repealed until 1962. Parallels spring readily to mind: legislating that Jews at prayer not wear phylacteries, Sikhs not wear turbans or, as has recently happened in France legislating that Muslim schoolgirls not be permitted to wear head scarves. In New Zealand the pendulum has swung so far towards the secular as to permit schoolgirls to wear traditional Maori jewellery but not Christian icons such as a crucifix on a chain.

In fact, there is considerable debate about moko today. Traditional experts in tattoo have given tauiwi the moko, including rock stars such as Robbie Williams. This has enraged many Maori who cannot comprehend moko being abused in this way. To some the publication of moko amounts to identity theft and cultural plundering, for what is revealed in the moko reveals the personality in that total sense of tribally conferred identity.

At this level the dialogue is contentious and it is highly unlikely that any kind of consensus could emerge. Yet what remains factually correct is that Maori cannot live fully without the establishment of shared cultural memory. In this way, Sheldrake’s proposal of causative formation through morphic resonance of memory fields seems culturally true and relevant. And what those fields create is a window into times past. The powhiri at a marae constellate the collective memory, form the group identity, and reveal truths which do not constitute scientific facts. For example, to be Maori is to appreciate that rain or ua is the fall of tears from Rangi to Papa, who were pushed apart by one of their sons Tane at the creation. Sky and earth, father and mother, male and female, cry in the pain of their separation. Thus rainfall reveals love’s yearning. This revealing is, in fact, a profound learning. It is surely similar to the physicist who in his own personal analysis came to the conclusion that gravity was love. It is a quite powerful observation.

This now leads me to ask what is revelation? In my professional life as a Methodist presbyter I have often asked this question in small Bible study groups. It has been disappointing to discover that few people have an appreciation for what is essentially most basic to Christian thought patterns. And non-religious people are usually skeptical, oftentimes quite certain that it is all unscientific nonsense - even when they are totally ignorant of what revelation is all about and equally ignorant of what science is all about.

Revelation is certainly a difficult subject. So much hinges upon it. I am convinced that some things are given to us that do not spring up only from sheer human inventiveness. Rangi’s tears might well be derided as a scientific explanation of rain, yet they evoke a deeper, emotional response that cannot be factually ignored. They are pointers to facts just as much as humidity, barometric pressures and temperature gradients. In the ideal scientific world view Rangi’s tears must give way to the weight of facts. Yet both the science and the myth reveal truths. Moreover, if the science is pressed to its limits, reduced to its contradictions and paradoxes, it too reveals itself as a powerful mythology. Science itself is a myth which confers memory and identity on a tribe called the scientists. Their moko is mathematics.

As Roger Penrose explained in The Emperor’s New Mind, “whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato’s world of mathematical concepts.” He goes on to say that Plato thought all discovery was just a form of remembering. This includes the very precise truths of mathematics. They too are discovered. The prophet Ezekiel seemed to experience something akin to apprehending the power of mathematics in his peculiarly expansive vision. “As I looked at the living creatures, I saw wheels on the ground ... The wheels sparkled like topaz, and they were all alike; in form and working like a wheel within a wheel ... the spirit of the living creatures was within the wheels ... Above their heads was a vault glittering like a sheet of ice, awe-inspiring.”

All of this leads me to wonder whether revelation is a better overall description of the acts of feeling and remembering and psychologically claiming identity. Is it possible that the notion of revelation, which once was so clearly articulated within the Judeo-Christian tradition and is now almost lost, still has something important to say to contemporary society?

For revelation and mystic insight permeate and resonate in all cultures, all religions, even to the very core of hard science.

Martin Buber and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel are among the most convincing witnesses in the twentieth century for the truths of timeless revelation. Prophetic inspiration is the awareness of God’s presence within the boundaries of our particular circumstances, within the human condition. The prophet does not apprehend or see or even seek a vision of God. Rather, God apprehends and sees and seeks the prophet, and the human knows that he is apprehended, seen, sought. He is deeply distressed to be found by the living God in this way.

Whereas Martin Buber placed the emphasis on I and thou, which implies encounter, dialogue and relationship between the human and God, I understand Heschel to mean by revelation something beyond relationship. “The prophets did not intend to afford man a view of heaven, to report about secret things they saw and heard, but to disclose what was happening in God in reference to Israel.” He goes on to say, “Prophetic revelation is primarily an event in the life of God. This is the outstanding difference between prophetic revelation and all other types of inspiration as reported by many mystics and poets. To the prophet it is not a psychic event but first of all a transcendent act, something that happens to God. The actual reality of revelation takes place outside the consciousness of the prophet. He experiences revelation, so to speak, as an ecstasy of God, who comes out of his imperceptible distance to reveal his will to man.”

Let me put this process Heschel envisages into my own words. The prophet having being seen by God, having been found by God, now knows that he must now communicate the human condition, the particular circumstances, to the divine presence. He must address God and tell God what God has done wrong in the circumstances. If that sounds foreign, strange, even absurd to you: read the psalms. If it still sounds odd read the Gospels: my God, my God, cries Jesus in his agony, why have you forsaken me? Then consider the parallel between what the individual prophet must do with what is constellated by collective memory on the marae. All the wrongs of the past and present are articulated - whether to God or to our fellows may not amount to much difference.

For it is this very condition, of being forsaken, forgotten, expelled, that the prophet will be required to address when he speaks the word to the people: God knows! Only when the prophet has learned to speak to God about our condition, our circumstances, can he go out and prophesy. And when he does this, when he speaks in God’s name, it will have to be in speech, thought and action forged in the divine fires of what we can only describe as ultimate reality. For, says Heschel, “the act of revelation takes place in the Beyond; it is merely directed upon the prophet.”

No wonder some of the Biblical prophets cowered and grovelled on the ground. No wonder they did not want to be prophets at all. Of course, there is no honour in being a prophet, and a prophet hardly ever has honour in his own land. God wants more than just a voice crying in the wilderness. He wants the crying voice to address him, the living God. God has sought the prophet for that very reason. Then in God’s ecstasy of love for his Creation the prophet sees into the heart of God, glimpses the mind of God, experiences the reality of a revelation that occurs outside of himself. Which is why God says, to Ezekiel, stop grovelling before me, get up, stand up straight, look me in the eye: address me, God, not as if you were a worm but as you really are, a man. For I have sought you as a man. Stand up!

Thus God called his prophets down the centuries, from Noah to Daniel. Have others subsequently been prophets in this sense? I am not sure. Consider Marx and Freud as possible contenders. Yet they could not enter into the universe of God’s ecstasy. They rejected it. It is certainly true they were great prophets in a secular sense. Marx and Freud laid some of the horrors of the human condition before the world. Yet unlike, Noah, for example, they could not experience the certain knowledge of a prophet. God called them, but they could not bring themselves to address God himself. Religion was primitive nonsense, according to Freud, and, of course, the opiate of the masses, according to Marx. Thus God's truth, anger, justice, mercy, compassion were just words to them, rather than the “surging, sweeping inwardness of divine reality”. Thus Heschel concluded that, “The idea of revelation remains an absurdity as long as we are unable to comprehend the impact with which the reality of God is pursuing man.” Myth is the vehicle of chase.

Roy Campbell’s The Flaming Terrapin (1924), blends African creation myths with the Genesis account of the Flood. The terrapin pulls Noah’s Ark through the waters of the deluge, until finally the Ark grounds on Mt Ararat. It was horrific business, drowning humanity.

He was the axle of the wheel, the pole
Round which the galaxies and systems roll,
And from his being, making months and years,
Issued the vast momentum of the spheres.

Noah, triumphant prophet, survivor extraordinary, plants a vineyard, makes wine, gets drunk, and is seen naked by his son Ham, whom he then curses. But the burden of the curse will fall on Ham’s son, Canaan. Thus does even the righteous man, called by God, stumble and fall. And it is in fact God who repents his deeds, not Noah.

The ecstasy of being at one with the world and with God was not somehow enough for Noah. It may not be enough for us. He needed a window into the walls of time to see simultaneously the folly and the wisdom of the past, the present and the future. An isolated human being, one brain, and an isolated family, a gaggle of brains, is never enough. In this way Sheldrake’s hypothesis of connectedness is both a factual and a commonsensical model. The myth of the Deluge had already hinted at it. Even some Churches follow the principle. Methodists world- wide have used a similar model to a gaggle of brains and hearts in what they call the Connexion, an old-fashioned spelling dating from the time of John Wesley. Connexion means churches and faith communities remaining linked: unity at the heart of church diversity and diversity at the heart of church unity. We can say this is a theological example of the same principles embedded in Treaty of Waitangi. Whether in science or in ordinary human relationships, from families to wider communities, we find we need memory distributed among many brains to create the fields of human wisdom. How can it possibly be that what is commonly observed instinctual memory in a many species is denied to the human species by ideologically driven science? The migratory patterns of kotuku (white herons) of the South Island are no less voyages of exploration than the journeys of great waka bringing humankind to the Pacific thousands of years ago.

Noah thought he was alone, the prototype after Adam. That mythic struggle to understand the place of humanity, and indeed all living things upon the earth, finds its counterpart today. The search for extra-terrestrial life is a commitment on the part of the community of scientists. As Paul Davies tellingly observes, this search is “a testing ground for diametrically opposed world views. On the one hand is orthodox science, with its nihilistic philosophy of the pointless universe ... On the other hand, there is an alternative view, undeniably romantic but perhaps true nevertheless. It is the vision of a self-organizing and self-complexifying universe, governed by ingenious laws that encourage matter to evolve toward life and consciousness.” I think I would want to add that that alternative view is not so far removed from what has been the timeless message of the prophets of a revelation and memory not of their own making. Wisdom is attained not by the mere recital of facts, which periodically transpose into new scientific insights, but rather is achieved by creating fields of human compassion, predicated upon the religious myths by which we truly come to life.

Thus far I have argued that the prophets were shown by God something of the mind of God, a window in the wall of future time. Having interpreted the human condition to God, their prophetic task was to interpret God’s answer to our pleas for justice, mercy and the imparting of significant meaning in the cruel ambiguities of biological existence. In their time, they partially succeeded. How are we to succeed in ours?

It seems to me that there is emerging a new world view which I want to name as Pasifika, and it is based upon the myriad of cultures and races that face the great South Pacific Ocean across a multitude of shorelines. It is a view that respects traditions and authority by way of the iconic powhiri, valuing the past and welcoming and incorporating the newcomers primarily in terms of right relationships. At the same time Pasifika is in itself a pointer to a way that sees with prophetic consciousness into the windows of future time.

Pasifika is already a memory, already a reality, already a revelation but it is only as yet a flicker. It is a weak field of consciousness, but like all prophetic revelation it is not to be measured in any scientific sense but rather in the quality of changed, transformed lives. In some respects the Anglican, Roman Catholic and Methodist Churches in Aotearoa New Zealand were embryonic models for Pasifika from the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Sheldrake would perhaps see the emergence of today’s Pasifika from certain resonances of cultural and religious memory building up over time past. Moreover Pasifika is in itself only a resonance of something greater, what I would call a revelation of God.