Morphic fields are structures within the faster-than-the-speed-of-light spiritual realm that impact and are impacted by the slower-than-the-speed-of-light physical realm. That means that they are manifestations of the “coupled state” – to use the concept formulated by William Tiller – connecting the physical and the spiritual realms. (For more information about this formulation, see my essay, Spiritual Realism II – Faster-Than-The-Speed-Of-Light.)
Morphic theory addresses how to understand morphic fields and how to utilize them. After reviewing the basics of morphic theory, I’m going to explore a variety of different ways it can be applied it to understand aspects of reality and to accomplish intentions in the physical world.
Review of Morphic Theory
As I indicated in an earlier essay Planetary Consciousness (Revisited), Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist who has embraced an approach to embryology that holds that an embryo divides and produces a differentiated and integrated structure too rapidly to be accounted for solely through the chemical interactions that are governed by the embryo’s genes and chromosomes.
Rather, this branch of embryology posits that the embryo serves as a seed form that generates an energy field called a “morphogenic field.” The embryo’s morphogenic field provides an energy scaffolding that the embryo uses to guide the rapid growth of its structure. (This is a little bit analogous to the way a magnetic field provides the energy scaffolding that gives form to iron filings scattered onto a piece of paper above a magnet.) However, with morphogenic fields, the fields are trans-physical and cannot be directly observed using the technology of traditional science. They are more like acupuncture meridians.
Sheldrake has expanded this theory to include the impact of the past on embryo development and to extend the theory beyond embryology. In his expanded usage, he refers to the generalized concept as ‘morphic fields.”
According to his formulation, each embryo not only taps into its own morphic field but also the overarching morphic field that has evolved over millennia guiding the growth of all the embryos of a given species through a process that he calls ‘morphic resonance.’ Through morphic resonance, the individuals in a species engage a kind of species memory that builds over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, evolving the energy scaffolding that guides growth of the embryos.
Sheldrake has generalized his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance to provide an explanation for many different phenomena. For example, the rituals of traditional societies can be seen as generating and maintaining morphic fields.
Every time the members of a traditional community perform a ritual, through morphic resonance, their performance contributes to and strengthens the morphic field for that ritual, which provides the energy template for events in the material world. This analysis explains the process whereby a hunting ritual helps lead to a successful hunt, a planting ritual helps ensure a successful harvest, and a rain dance aids in producing needed rainstorms.
Morphic Theory and Psychology
I believe that morphic theory can be applied to our psychologies as well, though here I am going beyond what I learned from Sheldrake. Given that our consciousnesses are structured as successions of relatively brief presents, where we have freedom to choose within or among paths of action, it’s important to have evolved personas that we can use in choosing among paths of action and then that we can utilize to guide our actions along the chosen path. We can’t be jumping from one totally different path to another every instant. We need to be able to identify a situation, choose an appropriate persona path, and then follow it – changing paths only if we get in trouble or come to the end of that particular situation.
A persona exists as a particular morphic field in the Spiritual Domain (vibrating faster than the speed of light). (See my essay Mindfulness Is Essential, But It’s Not Enough (Revisited) for a discussion of self-fragments and personas.) As we build personas and feed them with our intentions and our actions within them, the morphic field becomes stronger and stronger by morphic resonance. The stronger the morphic fields become, the more powerful their impact on the alternative futures available to us. (See my essay Transformation for a discussion of alternate futures.)
Ultimately, every experience we have and every action we take happens within the context of one self-fragment or another or, if we have developed to a certain extent, within the context of one persona or another. This means that every experience we have and every action we take happens within the context of one morphic field or another.
Every moment we choose which morphic field to feed. Every thought we have, every experience we have, every action we take feeds some morphic field. It may be a morphic field that we want to feed, or it may be a morphic field we definitely do not want to feed. Through morphic resonance, every time we feed a particular morphic field we tap into all the past instances of feeding that morphic field.
At any given instance we chose (consciously or unconsciously) which morphic field (self-fragment or persona) to feed. All of them exist as alternative futures that we can access. Developing a coherent, healthy self gives us the possibility of consistently accessing the optimal alternative future, the optimal morphic field, the optimal persona for each of our successive instants.
There is no escape from this reality. We are always feeding a morphic field and, through morphic resonance, strengthening it. It can be a positive morphic field that is a persona that we want to strengthen. Or it can be a negative self-fragment that we ought to weaken. Those are our only two choices.
One way to understand addiction is to recognize that, in addiction, a negative self-fragment becomes drawn into strengthening a destructive morphic field that ought to be weakened. The longer the addiction continues, the stronger the destructive morphic field becomes, and the more difficult it becomes to break the addiction.
According to morphic theory as I’m evolving it, one of the most effective ways to escape addiction is to establish an alternative positive persona with an attendant positive morphic field and then to feed as much energy into that system as possible. As the I Ching says in the Hexagram of Breakthrough, “We should not combat our own faults directly. As long as we wrestle with them, they continue victorious…the best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good.”
Within the spiritual domain there are all the potentialities available to us as morphic fields including the perfect choices manifesting the best personas in each moment. Perfection exists. The Absolute reigns in the spiritual domain. Each moment that we live is an incarnation from the spiritual domain into the physical domain. Our intentions and our choices determine which spiritual potential manifests. That is our fate. That is our blessing. The result of these choices – that is our life.
Morphic Fields and Rituals
As I said above, rituals in traditional cultures constitute morphic fields. I have been helping lead and participating in a particular contemporary ritual for more than 40 years. With the Planetary Dance, we have been connecting the physical dimension across the-speed-of-light boundary with the spiritual dimension. Like with many rituals, the Planetary Dance begins when the dancers cross a boundary and enter ritual space and form a circle.
Next, each dancer calls out their intention, enters the circle and begins the dance. The dancers move through three concentric circles, which form a moving mandala, and wind up in the center. Once everyone has reached the center, the whole community touches the Earth, touches their hearts, and then releases their intentions. (For a longer discussion of the Planetary Dance and a video, see the Planetary Dance section of this website.)
In a ritual, when the participants cross into ritual space, they establish what Tiller calls the “Coupled State” making a connection between the physical and the spiritual realms and, according to my formulation, constituting a morphic field.
The morphic field constituted by a particular enactment of a ritual taps into the morphic fields of all the past enactments of that ritual through morphic resonance, thereby strengthening the morphic field constituted by the current enactment of it.
When an intention is carried into a ritual, the intention gets embedded in the morphic field created by the enactment of the ritual and then that intention will tend to happen in the physical realm outside of the ritual space, provided that the participants in the ritual act in the physical world to realize the intention (thereby maintaining a version of the coupled state).
Morphic Organizing
Rituals work with the spiritual dimension (across-the-speed-of-light boundary) but not as a part of building organizations or undertaking campaigns. Community Organizing – which Saul Alinsky developed by applying the theory and practice of union organizing to communities – is an approach to political, economic, and social transformation that I have used throughout my life. Morphic Organizing could bring the morphic perspective to Community Organizing and take the craft one step further by working in both the spiritual dimension and the physical dimension together in ways that mutually reinforce one another
Looking into the future, I believe that working explicitly in the spiritual dimension and the physical dimension together to evoke the potency of coupled reality can be remarkably powerful. The implications tumble through my mind right now.
Looking back on my experience, I recognize that all organizing and mobilizing involves the emergence of morphic fields. Movements definitely tap into morphic resonance. This was true of the Experimental College. (For a more extensive version of the story of the Experimental College, see my essay on this website.) We clearly created a morphic field. That was a big part of what attracted people to us. The students at 100s of colleges and universities across the U.S. who undertook to build their own Experimental Colleges clearly tapped into the morphic resonance of our first such morphic field.
The Movement of the 1960s and 1970s itself created a large morphic field made up of smaller ones in the form of the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the Student Movement, the Women’s Movement, the LGBTQ Movement, the Environmental Movement, the Hippy Movement, etc. But all the sub-movements connected with each other through morphic resonance and shared a vibratory signature in the spiritual realm.
Berkeley Citizens Action (BCA) in the 1980s used the morphic field of the Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to create an organization that developed and implanted a program for the transformation of a city. It’s useful to note, in passing, that the smallest unit of civilization, it’s cell, so to speak, is the city. The first civilizations emerged from cities and city states. In Berkeley, when we sought to make a revolution in one city, we were attempting to make a revolution in one of units of civilization. The model we created in Berkeley never took off the way the Experimental College did. It never engaged morphic resonance in the same way. Writing this now, I am led to wonder why. Perhaps the reason was that the larger movement with its morphic field had dissipated by the mid 80s.
In any case, explicitly incorporating morphic organizing into the process of building organizations, undertaking campaigns, and transforming institutions offers the possibility of greatly enhanced power. However, it also carries risks and dangers as well.
Spiritual Democracy
At the most basic level I recognize that we need to apply the Philosophy of Spiritual Democracy (see my essay, Spiritual Democracy) to this type of undertaking. Morphic organizing requires that there be a democratic leadership group at the center of the process. Morphic resonance is very powerful. In a certain sense, it is the force in the spiritual domain that is comparable to gravity in the physical domain. When an individual forms a strong morphic field around him or herself and begins to generate morphic resonance, there can be danger that they will form a cult around them.
In this era, when someone forms a morphic field with morphic resonance, whether implicitly or explicitly, with him or herself at the center making all the important decisions for everyone in the field and touched by the morphic resonance, they have indeed formed a cult.
We are emerging out of an era of spiritual aristocracy, where individual prophets penetrated into the spiritual domain, brought back insights, and proclaimed them generating powerful morphic fields and morphic resonance around themselves leading to the great religions. That was the best that could be hoped for in the era that we are leaving. The truly great prophets – Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad – knew the nature of the time and that it couldn’t be helped that religions would emerge from them, so they embedded the seeds of Spiritual Democracy in their teachings.
But now we are entering the next great era, an era of Spiritual Democracy, when everyone comes to realize that the Creator (or God, or the Absolute, or that which is beyond names and forms, or whatever you want to call the Ultimate) creates its Creations and this Universe out of itself, such that we are each made up of the body of God and are divine. We each have physical senses and spiritual senses and we each participate in both the physical realm and the spiritual realm.
By joining together in democratic leadership groups, we can join physical organizing and morphic organizing to tap into the best alternative futures available to us to build examples of the next generation of socio/spiritual politico/economic transformation on the road to the great Planetary Transformation that is in its early stages now.
