Rupert Sheldrake Quotes

The universe is not in a steady state; there's an ongoing creative principle in nature, which is driving things onwards.

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.

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 science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

The assumption that the laws of nature are eternal is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving. Or perhaps they are not laws at all, but more like habits.

Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.

In no other field of scientific endeavor do otherwise intelligent people feel free to make public claims based on prejudice and ignorance. Yet in relation to psychic phenomena, committed materialists feel free to disregard the evidence and behave irrationally and unscientifically, while claiming to speak in the name of science and reason. They abuse the authority of science and bring rationalism into disrepute.

At the moment of insight, a potential pattern of organized behavior comes into being.

In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief.

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

I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it.

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.

I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws.

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

The Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock [and Lynn Margulis] puts forward a scientific view of the living Earth, which in one respect is modern, empherical, scientific, in another respect re-awakens an ancient archetype, which in fact is so clearly suggested by the very name of the hypothesis, Gaia, the Greek name for Mother Earth.

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

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.

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

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.

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.