Rupert Sheldrake Quotes

All research scientists know that writing in the passive voice is artificial; they are not disembodied observers, but people doing research.

Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual ...

Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult.

The biggest bursts of speciation that we know about in the history of the earth are soon after great cataclysms, like the extinction of the dinosaurs, which create new opportunities, and all sorts of new forms spring up ... So, quite often, the reasons for creativity depend on accidents or disasters that prevent the normal habits being carried out.

Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual.

Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.

Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.

The morphic fields include all kinds of organizing fields ... : The organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.

The sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. I believe that the sciences will be regenerated when they are set free.

The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.

[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.

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.

There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty.

Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it ...

When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.

Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough.

Unfortunately, at present, practically no one under thirty goes to workshops. It's a system of education entirely for the middle aged.

Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It's not rigidly determined in the old sense. It's not rigidly predictable.

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?

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.

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

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.

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.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but there's a kind of cumulative quality ...

To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.

The Science Delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving only the details to be filled in.

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.

If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?

I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14. I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism.

Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at.

In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.

I learnt about plants from my father, who was a herbalist and an amateur microscopist.

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.

The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.

The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.

I still say the 'Lord's Prayer' every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world.

What you do, what you say and what you think can influence other people by morphic resonance. There is no immoral filter in morphic resonance, which means that we have to be more careful about what we are thinking if we are concerned about the affect we have on others.

I do vote but I don't think that any political party represents my point of view.

A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those ... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art.