Rupert Sheldrake > Quotes

“The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.”
― Rupert Sheldrake

“It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”’17 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

“As Terence McKenna observed, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.”4”
― Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation

“First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

“I am all in favour of science and reason if they are scientific and reasonable. But I am against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and sceptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment.17”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

“The sudden appearance of all the Laws of Nature is as untestable as Platonic metaphysics or theology. Why should we assume that all the Laws of Nature were already present at the instant of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic code? Perhaps some of them, such as those that govern protein crystals, or brains, came into being when protein crystals or brains first arose. The preexistence of these laws cannot possibly be tested before the emergence of the phenomena they govern.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation

“[M]odern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or – in Plato’s sense – Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

“The difference between the Platonic theory and the morphic-resonance hypothesis can be illustrated by analogy with a television set. The pictures on the screen depend on the material components of the set and the energy that powers it, and also on the invisible transmissions it receives through the electromagnetic field. A sceptic who rejected the idea of invisible influences might try to explain everything about the pictures and sounds in terms of the components of the set – the wires, transistors, and so on – and the electrical interactions between them. Through careful research he would find that damaging or removing some of these components affected the pictures or sounds the set produced, and did so in a repeatable, predictable way. This discovery would reinforce his materialist belief. He would be unable to explain exactly how the set produced the pictures and sounds, but he would hope that a more detailed analysis of the components and more complex mathematical models of their interactions would eventually provide the answer. Some mutations in the components – for example, by a defect in some of the transistors – affect the pictures by changing their colours or distorting their shapes; while mutations of components in the tuning circuit cause the set to jump from one channel to another, leading to a completely different set of sounds and pictures. But this does not prove that the evening news report is produced by interactions among the TV set’s components. Likewise, genetic mutations may affect an animal’s form and behaviour, but this does not prove that form and behaviour are programmed in the genes. They are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism coming from outside it, just as TV sets are resonantly tuned to transmissions that originate elsewhere.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

“We must become aware of the astonishing fact that as a species we are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood. As human beings, we once had a symbiotic relationship with the world-girdling intelligence of the planet that was mediated through shamanic plant use. This relationship was disrupted and eventually lost by the progressive climatic drying of the Eurasian and African land masses.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness

“Extended minds are implicit in our language. The words “attention” and “intention” come from the Latin root tendere, to stretch, as in “tense” and “tension.” “Attention” is ad + tendere, “to stretch toward”; “intention,” in + tendere, “to stretch into.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery

“The commonest kinds of seemingly telepathic response are the anticipation by dogs and cats of their owners coming home; the anticipation of owners going away; the anticipation of being fed; cats disappearing when their owners intend to take them to the vet; dogs knowing when their owners are planning to take them for a walk; and animals that get excited when their owner is on the telephone, even before the telephone is answered.”
― Rupert Sheldrake

“If memory within nature sounds mysterious, we should bear in mind that mathematical laws transcending nature are more rather than less so; they are metaphysical rather than physical. The way mathematical laws can exist independently of the evolving universe and at the same time act upon it remains a profound mystery. For those who accept God, this mystery is an aspect of God's relation to the realm of nature; for those who deny God, the mystery is even more obscure: A quasi-mental realm of mathematical laws somehow exists independently of nature, yet not in God, and governs the evolving physical world without itself being physical.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“I am more interested in dogs than in dogmas. Obviously,”
― Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home & Other Unexplained Powers of Animals

“Why are rituals so conservative? And why do people all over the world believe that through ritual activities they are participating in a process that takes them out of ordinary secular time and somehow brings the past into the present? The idea of morphic resonance provides a natural answer to these questions. Through morphic resonance, ritual really can bring the past into the present. The present performers of the ritual indeed connect with those in the past. The greater the similarity between the way the ritual is performed now and the way it was performed before, the stronger the resonant connection between the past and present participants.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“In any case, however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their parts by killing them and analysing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them organisms.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

“Our human dependence on the living processes of the earth was largely forgotten with the growth of industrial civilization. Now we are being forced to remember that Gaia is greater than we are and that the human economy is embedded within the ecology of the biosphere. So, in what sense is Gaia alive? And what difference does it make if we think of her as a living organism, as opposed to an inanimate physical system?”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“Strategic thinking requires the ability to contemplate possibilities that are not immediately present.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination & Spirit

“I cannot pretend that I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return . . . Above all, I have been a sentient being on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative Experiences and Their Effects on Our Bodies, Brains, and Health

“Traditional theories of human creativity ascribe it to inspiration from a higher source working through the creative individual, who acts as a channel. The same conception underlies the notion of genius; originally the genius was not the person himself but his presiding god or spirit.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“Dark matter is currently thought to make up about 23 percent of the mass and energy of the universe, whereas normal matter and energy make up only about 4 percent. Worse still, most contemporary cosmologists think that the continuing expansion of the universe is driven by “dark energy,” whose nature is again obscure. According to the Standard Model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for about 73 percent of the matter and energy of the universe. How do dark matter and energy relate to regular matter and energy? And what is the zero-point energy field, also known as the quantum vacuum? Can any of this zero-point energy be tapped? The law of conservation of matter and energy was formulated before these questions arose, and has no ready answer for them. It is based on philosophical and theological theories. Historically, it is rooted in the atomistic school of philosophy in ancient Greece. From the outset it was an assumption. In its modern form, it combines a series of “laws” that have developed since the seventeenth century—the laws of conservation of matter, mass, motion, force and energy. In this chapter I look at the history of these ideas, and show how modern physics throws up questions that the old theories cannot answer. As faith in conservation comes into question, astonishing new possibilities open up in realms ranging from the generation of energy to human nutrition.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery

“The further the distance, the stronger the illusion.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

“Consider your arms and legs. They contain exactly the same kinds of muscle cells, nerve cells, and so on. They contain the same proteins and other chemicals; the bones are made of identical substance. Yet they have different shapes, just as houses of different design can be made from the same building materials. The chemicals alone do not determine the form. Nor does the DNA. The DNA is the same in all the cells of the arms and the legs, and indeed everywhere else in the body. All the cells are genetically programmed identically. Yet somehow they behave differently and form tissues and organs of different structures. Clearly some formative influence other than DNA must be shaping the developing arms and legs. All developmental biologists acknowledge this fact. But at this stage their mechanistic explanations peter out into vague statements about "complex spatio-temporal patterns of physico-chemical interaction not yet fully understood." Obviously this is not a solution but just another way of stating the problem.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“cosmologists have come to the conclusion that known kinds of matter and energy constitute only about 4 per cent of the universe. The rest consists of dark matter and dark energy. The nature of 96 per cent of physical reality is literally obscure.8”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature

“morphic resonance points to new ways forward: If the regularities of nature are evolving habits rather than eternal laws, there is no need to assume that all these regularities were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang. Hence there is no need to suppose that all laws of nature were intelligently designed at the moment of creation, or else that there are an infinite number of unobserved universes. These hypotheses are unnecessary if nature is radically evolutionary, as the hypothesis of formative causation proposes.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature

“The sunlike energy released by the fusion of atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, is detonated by the fission of one of the heaviest, plutonium, named after the god of the underworld.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“the very word for matter is derived from the same root as mother-in Latin, the corresponding words are materia and matet-and (as discussed in Chapter 3), the whole ethos of materialism is permeated with maternal metaphors.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“But the cosmonaut Aleksandr Aleksandrov summed up the principal message for millions of people. Looking down on America and then in Russia, he saw the first snow and imagined people in both countries getting ready for winter. "And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth. It does not matter what country you look at. We are all Earth's children, and we should treat her as our Mother.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“If behavior is indeed governed by morphic fields, when some members of a species acquire a new pattern of behavior and hence a new behavioral field, for example, by learning a new trick, then others should tend to learn the same thing more quickly, even in the absence of any known means of connection or communication. The more members of the species that learn it, the greater should this effect become all over the world. Thus, for example, if laboratory rats learn a new trick in America, rats in laboratories elsewhwere should show a tendency to learn it faster. There is experimental evidemce that this effect actually occurs.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“In ancient Rome, money was minted in the temple of Juno Moneta, the Great Mother in her aspect of adviser and admonisher. She is the source of our words money and monetary.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“It is not anti-scientific to question established beliefs, but central to science itself. At the creative heart of science is the spirit of open minded inquiry. Ideally, science is a process and not a position or a belief system. Innovative science happens when scientists feel free to ask questions and build new theories.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry