The Rebirth of Nature Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“We need to respond to our present ecological crisis practically, by making appropriate social, political, economic, and technological changes. We need to look at the attitudes that have led to such devastation of the earth and to find a more harmonious way of living. And those of us who believe in the power of prayer need to pray for forgiveness and guidance. If a wiser and juster human order comes about, if a new harmony develops between humanity and the living world, this would indeed seem like an answer to prayer.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“On the cosmological level, the primary polarity is between the expansive impulse that underlies the growth of the universe and the contractive field of gravitation that holds everything together. If the centrifigual force is predominant, the universe will expand indefinitely; if the centripetal, the universe will sooner or later stop growing and begin to contract until everything is annihilated in the Big Crunch. No one knows what will happen. But in the meantime, the interplay between these expansive and contractive principles underlies the processes of cosmic evolution.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“Everywhere we look in the realm of nature we find polarities, such as electrical and magnetic polarities. These can, if we like, be modeled in terms of gender; for example, positive electrical charge is associated with dense, relative immobile atomic nuclei, a bit like eggs; negative charge is associated with the smaller electrons, moving in swarms, a bit like sperm. But sexual gender is only one of many kinds of natural polarity and only one of the ways we experience polarity in our own lives. Others include the polarities of up and down, in and out, front and back, right and left, past and future, sleeping and waking, friend and foe, sweet and sour, hot and cold, pleasure and pain, good and bad.”
― 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

“All creation or destruction of forms, or morphogenesis, can be described by the disappearance of the attractors representing the initial forms, and their replacement by capture by the attractors representing the final forms.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“Mathematically, morphogenetic fields can be modified in terms of attractors within basins of attraction.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“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

“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

“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

“The organization of insect colonies involves several mysterious features quite apart from the prodigious complexity of the social organization itself. For example, in his studies of South African termites, the naturalist Eugene Marais found that they could speedily repair damage to the mounds, rebuilding tunnels and arches, working from both sides of the breach he had made, and meeting up perfectly in the middle, even though the individual insects are blind. He then carried out a simple but fascinating experiment. He took a large steel plate several feet wider and higher than the termitary and drove it right through the center of the breach so that it divided the mound, and indeed the entire termitary, into two separate parts:

The builders on one side of the breach know nothing of those on the other side. In spite of this the termites build a similar arch or tower on both sides of the plate. When eventually you withdraw the plate, the two halves match perfectly after the dividing cut has been repaired. We cannot escape the ultimate conclusion that somewhere there exists a preconceived plan which the termites merely execute.

From the present point of view, such a plan would exist within the morphic field of the colony as a whole. By morphic resonance, this would contain a collective memory of all similar termite colonies in the past, as well as a memory of the colony's own past, by self-resonance.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“This hypothesis is inevitably controversial, but it is testable by experiment, and there is already considerable circumstantial evidence in its favor. For example, when a newly synthesized organic chemical is crystallized for the first time (say a new drug), there will be no morphic resonance from previous crystals of this type. A new morphic field has to come into existence; of the many energetically possible ways the substance could crystallize, one actually happens. The next time the substance is crystallized anywhere in the world, morphic resonance from the first crystals will make this same pattern of crystallization more probable, and so on. A cumulative memory will build up as the pattern becomes more and more habitual. As a consequence, the crystals should tend to form more readily all over the world.

Such a tendency is in fact well known; new compounds are generally difficult to crystallize, sometimes taking weeks or even months to form from supersaturated solutions. As time goes on, they tend to appear more readily all over the world.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“The way past hemoglobin molecules, penicillin crystals, or giraffes influence the morphic fields of present ones depends on a process called morphic resonance, the influence of like upon like through space and time. Morphic resonance does not fall off with distance. It does not involve a transfer of energy, but of information. In effect, this hypothesis enables the regularities of nature to be understood as governed by habits inherited by morphic resonance, rather than by eternal, nonmaterial, and non-energetic laws.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“The idea of morphogenetic fields has been widely adopted in developmental biology. But the nature of these fields has remained obscure. Some biologists think of them as useful turns of phrase but in reality consisting of no more than "complex spatio-temporal patterns of physico-chemical interaction not yet fully understood." Others think of these fields as governed by morphogenetic field equations that exist in a Platonic realm of eternal mathematical forms. Thus the morphogentic field equations for the dinosaurs, for example, always existed, even before the Big Bang. The equations were not affected by the evolution of the dinosaurs or by their extinction. The morphogenetic field equations for all past, present, and future species, and indeed for all possible species (many of which may never actually exist), somehow dwell eternally in a transcendant mathematical realm. These mathematical truths are beyond time; they cannot evolve and are not affected by anything that actually happens in the physical world. They are like ideal designs for all possible organisms in the mind of a mathematical God.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God

“The genetic program as a vital factor is not the same as the DNA molecules in the genes, for these are just molecules, not mindlike entities. The fact that qualities of mind are commonly projected onto the genes, especially the qualities of selfish, competitive people within capitalist societies, makes it easy to forget that they are just chemicals. As such, they play a chemical role, and their activity is confined to the chemical level. The genetic code in the DNA molecules determines the sequence of amino-acid building blocks in protein molecules , the so-called primary structure of the proteins. The genes dictate the primary stucture of proteins, not the specific shape of a duck's foot or a lamb's kidney or an orchid. The way the proteins are arranged in cells, the ways cells are arranged in tissues, and tissues in organs, and organs in organisms are not programmed in the genetic code , which can only program protein molecules. Given the right genes and hence the right proteins, and the right systems by which protein synthesis is controlled, the organism is somehow supposed to assemble itself automatically. This is rather like delivering the right materials to a building site at the right times and expecting a house to grow spontaneously.”
― Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God