Memories Are Made of This

The following link provides good background for some of the ideas in this blog post:

https://www.sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/interviews/quest-magazine-interview


And here is one of my blog posts from October 9 2018:

"Consciousness is either the greatest miracle in the universe, or the most commonplace thing in it. Perhaps the whole universe is made of consciousness."

I've been thinking about consciousness, telepathy, and "reincarnation" for much of my life, partly due to experiences I've had, and these ideas inform the body of my poetic work. A couple of days ago it occurred to me that Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Resonance and Morphogenetic Fields might provide some clues to these mysteries. Indeed I think it is so, although I have serious questions about his claims, which do not seem to me to be very testable. That, however, does not make his claims unimportant.

Sheldrake and I are the same age. Many of the authors that he mentions, I have also read. Some of his major influences are also mine, notably the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and Hinduism. Also, we have both experienced psychedelics.

I was particularly pleased to learn that Bergson had played a role in his thinking. Bergson, though, inspired us in different ways. Sheldrake was especially impressed by Bergson's claim (in MATTER AND MEMORY) that memories are stored somewhere outside the brain. There may, somehow, be such external storage, but it is clear to me that the brain also plays a decisive role.

As an illustration, I would give the case of a young man, eighteen years old, who suffered head trauma that caused him to lose, not his ability to speak, but only his ability to speak his native English. After the accident that caused the head injury, he could only speak the Chinese that he had learned in school as a second language. Deprived of English, his Chinese rapidly improved, and he became the co-host of a Chinese-language television program for young people. He eventually married the young Chinese woman who was the other host of the program. This strange story is explained by the fact that the learning of one's native language uses one part of the brain, while the learning of second languages uses another. Much of language-learning is dependent on memory, which is why Alzheimer's patients tend to lose secondary languages, while retaining greater proficiency in their native language. QED. This is not to say, though, that there may not also be some kind of external storage. The young man did, in fact, eventually slowly regain the ability to speak his native English. Perhaps he was using the "backup copy" of it.

I, though, was impressed by a different Bergson teaching: that reason by itself is not sufficient to make sense of the world: we also need intuition. This teaching was echoed by another Bergsonian, Maria de Naglowska, when she said that there are two ways of knowing, that of the brain and that of the heart, and of the two, that of the heart is the more important.

On the subject of "reincarnation," Sheldrake said (in the interview linked above): "I'm suggesting that it's possible to accept the evidence [presented by writers such as Ian Stephenson] and accept the phenomenon, but without jumping to the conclusion that it has to be reincarnation." (Because morphic resonance and morphic fields may make it possible to tune into others' memories.) This, it seems to me, is a kind of corollary of telepathy.

All of this is of great interest to me, because I have had, and still have, very strong "reincarnational" impressions, and have had (and am still having) amazing telepathic experiences. The great thing about Sheldrake's "morphic field" is that it could potentially fulfill the functions of a "soul," without requiring the persistence of an immortal principle. Exactly as I intuited a couple of days ago, which moved me to take another look at Sheldrake's claims.

I do not know whether I am accessing my own memories of past lives, or the memories of others. Perhaps it doesn't matter. I don't know the "how" of telepathy; I just know it works. One thing that I do know, for sure, is that the past lives on in the present, and we are all connected.