Eywa Has Heard You-Are we all part of a collective consciousness?
By: Sam Nash
Tags: Neuroscience, Consciousness, Biology, Lifestyle, Science

Why is it when scientific studies buck the current trends and paradigms, they are relegated to the backwaters and entitled Pseudoscience?

Long have I followed the studies and notices from the IONs website. For those who are unaware of this incredible establishment, IONs is the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded forty-four years ago by the Apollo Fourteen astronaut, Edgar Mitchell.

Their mission statement is to discover how consciousness interacts with our environment. It allows a massive multidisciplinary team to work together on profound consciousness questions. They aim to apply standardised experimental protocols and rigorous testing methodologies to questions regarding the human psyche.

Despite years of unquestionable evidence in support of their findings, they have met with a barrage of criticism and resistance from the scientific community at large. Many highly regarded and lauded individuals who support the findings, seem to get sidelined in their attempts to obtain validation for their evidence. Mainstream scientists seem to wrongly label much of their work as crazy hippy hypotheses.

Take Dr Rupert Sheldrake, for example. With a double first from Clare College, Cambridge, a distinguished Botany prize in 1963, a spell as a fellow at Harvard, before returning to complete his doctorate in biochemistry at Cambridge University, this man could hardly be called a hippy. He then became a fellow at Clare college, rising to Director of Studies in Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Later he became a fellow of the Royal Society and carried out research into cell aging in plants back at Cambridge. Suffice to say, this is a man of impeccable scientific and academic credentials, with more than eighty-five scientific papers and thirteen books to his name.

His work took him to more exotic places too, such as Kuala Lumpur and Hyderbad in India. It was in India, he became involved at the ashram of Fr. Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu. While living at the ashram, he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

At last, an academic with strict experimental ethics, was investigating natural phenomenon which defy conventional explanations, such as how pigeons always find their way home. Other areas, such as how birds and animals can detect and anticipate natural disasters or how domesticated dogs can predict their owner’s homecoming even when it is not part of a routine, piqued his interest. Anecdotal evidence can persuade most of us to agree with these observations, but it is much harder to convince conventional scientists that events are not simply coincidence, even with overwhelming statistical support.

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The most exciting, and probably most unconventional, Sheldrake theory is called Morphic Resonance. This is where self-organising systems inherit memories from a previous system. It’s a posh way of saying that all species are linked on their own specific wavelength, whether they are aware of it or not. He says that further to genetic and epigenetic transfer of information through the generations, there is also an ever-present consciousness collective.

To illustrate this point, Sheldrake refers to a collaborative global experiment. Rodents were exposed to the same maze at the same time, but in separate locations around the world. Statistics showed that as soon as one rat solved the maze, within a short time, unrelated rats went on to solve the maze in other locations at a much faster rate. It’s as though one rat’s memory of the solution was accessed by all other rats from then on.

This Morphic Resonance, or species entanglement, is an enticing prospect. I often see fictional stories on television that mirror my current work in progress, and yet I have not had access to their scripts or even a synopsis of the story before hand. I hear of literary agents tweeting about how tired they are of reading such similar novels submitted to them, and yet the authors have no connection to one another.

What if Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance is not pseudoscience, but the dawn of a startling new revelation? Are we all one collective consciousness, separated by varying degrees? As yet, we can neither test nor prove this hypothesis conclusively, but I sincerely hope that this will become mainstream science and studied alongside biochemistry and neurology, soon.

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It puts me in mind of the James Cameron film, Avatar, where the inhabitants of the planet were perfectly in tune with nature. How prophetic that would be, if we are all capable of achieving the same thing. I wonder whether it would lead to greater harmony or greater conflict between mankind? Only time will tell.