Akasha, the Morphogenetic Field, and Quantum Physics
Modern science lives with a split mind, and the split keeps widening. Its paradigm now spans an unusually broad spectrum — from hard-edged materialism at one end to something close to mysticism at the other, wherever quantum physics is being discussed. Before quantum theory arrived, science enjoyed a beautiful materialist idyll: matter was the only real thing — only matter mattered. Elementary particles were the smallest possible objects, indivisible little spheres, and everything meshed together like the gears of a clock. Scientists looked at existence itself in exactly that mechanical way. Then something went wrong with the picture.
When matter stopped being solid
Good old solid matter turned out to be astonishingly empty. The familiar illustration says that if you removed the empty space from every human body on Earth, the remaining matter of all of humanity would compress into roughly the volume of a sugar cube. And as if that weren’t enough, elementary particles turned out not to be material spheres at all, but something in between matter and energy — and something we can apparently keep breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, with no guarantee the process ever ends.
And as I read lately in one discussion — matter cannot truly matter unless a mind is here to give it value. So without that strange and hard to explain consciousness, matter cannot really matter… I love English language.
Practical science doesn’t lose much sleep over this. Engineering, chemistry and medicine carry on treating the world as reassuringly solid, and they get results. But scientists working on consciousness found themselves at a genuine crossroads, and some of them took heretical turns. They began to entertain the possibility that consciousness is a cosmic phenomenon rather than a product of the matter in our skulls — and that if that’s true, something like a consciousness of the universe as a whole might exist. More than a few of them noticed, at that point, that various spiritual traditions have been saying something along these lines since time out of mind.
An old idea in new vocabulary
Those older teachings described a unified consciousness underlying all of existence, in whose memory every thought, event and destiny is stored. In ancient India, this Great Consciousness was called the Akashic record.
In modern times we’ve started using a different phrase for a strikingly similar idea: the morphogenetic field. The term belongs to Rupert Sheldrake, the British biologist who has spent four decades as science’s most articulate heretic. In his account, the field holds the memories and imprints of everything and everyone. His central and most provocative claim is that there are no fixed, eternal, unchanging laws of nature at all. What we call laws are better understood as habits — imprints of forms and procedures, something like stored programs or instructions, held in the field. Once established, these habits shape events that correspond to them, events that share the same morphic resonance.
The status of the idea is worth stating plainly: morphic resonance is not established science, and mainstream biology has been unimpressed by it for forty years. What makes it interesting isn’t that it’s proven. It’s that it’s a genuinely different way of framing questions that orthodox biology has not yet answered well.
The promises that didn’t quite land
When Sheldrake first published the hypothesis in the early 1980s, the mood in the sciences was one of enormous confidence — the final resolution of everything felt close. The genetic code was being cracked, and the expectation was that decoding it would demonstrate once and for all that genes could explain absolutely anything. Similar confidence prevailed in other fields. It rhymed oddly with the late nineteenth century, when many scientists were equally certain that physics had discovered essentially everything, and all that remained was refining the decimal places.
Those great expectations weren’t met either. As Sheldrake points out, the genetic code turned out to be badly insufficient as an explanation for everything in the field of heredity — and much the same happened with the other eagerly awaited results. His specific objection is that genes direct the synthesis of particular proteins, but cannot account for how those proteins subsequently assemble into the entire complex architecture of a body.
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Which is why comparable hopes are now pinned on epigenetics: the study of how influences like stress, diet and lifestyle determine which parts of the genetic code actually express themselves in our lives. Once again you can attend enthusiastic lectures announcing that now we’ll finally be able to explain everything. The enthusiasm is real. Whether the hopes are fulfilled is something we’ll have to wait a while to find out.
Memory without an address
Something similar happened with memory. Decades of searching have failed to locate a definite memory centre in the brain; if anything, the results point away from the idea that memories are stored as physical traces in a specific place. Some of the experiments involved were genuinely brutal: laboratory animals had various parts of their brains removed, and still remembered what they had learned. Sheldrake’s reading is that memory is not a stored object at all but an event of resonance — our brain resonating with the imprint of a lived situation held in the morphogenetic field.
Meanwhile, the picture of an eternal, unchanging, purely mechanical universe governed by fixed laws has collapsed on its own terms. We now view the cosmos as a system of fields and energies that is itself evolving and has a history. In a universe like that, a universal morphogenetic field suddenly looks a good deal less absurd than it did.
Resonance in ordinary life
Sheldrake offers various examples of morphic resonance in action. Experiments have suggested that when laboratory animals learn to solve a problem, animals in entirely unconnected laboratories elsewhere subsequently learn the same problem faster.
We have an everyday version of the same experience: the more people who master some new skill, the more easily the next person picks it up. Standardized IQ tests, for instance, are being solved better and better over the decades — while we find little independent evidence that overall human intelligence is actually rising. Through the lens of morphic resonance this is exactly what you’d expect: the more people fill out these tests, the easier it becomes for everyone after them. Mainstream psychology has its own explanations for the effect, and they may well be sufficient. But the alternative reading is at least worth sitting with.
Nothing begun is ever wasted
Follow the implications a little further and we arrive at something quietly consoling. Whenever we begin to create something — anything, at any time — the effort we invest is never lost. Even if our work didn’t succeed in its own moment, we or someone else will later be able to pick it up and carry it forward, precisely because of the imprint that earlier effort left in the field. It would explain why each generation masters what the generations before it achieved so much more easily, and can then push further.
From this angle, the work of the psychedelic researchers of the 1950s and 60s isn’t lost either. On the contrary — thanks to morphic resonance, scientists are now picking up exactly where that generation was forced to stop. The same goes for the artists working from psychedelic experience in those years. We are still building on their work, even where we no longer know their names or have never seen a single piece they made.
McKenna and the thousand-year database
Terence McKenna used to say that in his experience, psychedelics allow us to make the morphogenetic field visible — to explore it, and to work with it deliberately. He argued that natural psychedelics, the ones people have been using for thousands of years, carry an unusually rich morphogenetic field, because they hold the imprints of all the thousands upon thousands of people who used them before. On his account, traditional plant psychedelics can therefore connect us to a database of millennia of accumulated human experience.
Which leads to a thought worth ending on. In criminalizing these substances, we may have cut ourselves off from something larger than a class of chemicals. We may have severed a connection — one that morphic resonance would have carried — to the whole prior history of our own species.
(please read also my article “Noeticpunk & Shamanicpunk — warning and disclaimer”)
