From : "the Presence of the Past", by Rupert Sheldrake
Chapter 18 :
CREATIVITY WITHIN A LIVING WORLD
last subchapters:
The appearance of a new kind of field involves a creative jump or synthesis. A new morphic attractor comes into being, and with it a new pattern of relationships and connections. Consider a new kind of molecule, for example, or a new kind of instinct, or a new theory.
One way of thinking about these creative syntheses involves looking from below, from the bottom up: we then see the ‘emergence’ of ever more complex forms at higher levels of organization. The progressive appearance of new syntheses is elevated to a general principle in dialectical materialism and in other philosophies of emergent evolution. Evolution then becomes more than a word describing a process; it involves a creative principle inherent in matter, or energy, nature, life, or process itself. New patterns of organization, new morphic fields, come into being as a result of this intrinsic creativity. But why should matter, energy, nature, life, or process be creative? This is inevitably mysterious. Not much more can be said than that it is their nature to be so.
Another approach is to start from above, from the top down, and to consider how new fields may have originated from pre-existing fields at a higher and more inclusive level of organization. Fields arise within fields. For example, a new habit of behaviour, such as the opening of milk bottles by tits , involves the appearance of a new morphic field. From the ‘bottom up’ point of view, this must have emerged by the synthesis of pre-existing behavioural patterns, such as the tearing of strips of bark from twigs, in a new, higher-level whole. From the ‘top down’ point of view, this new field arose in the higher-level, more inclusive morphic field that organizes the searching for food and all the activities involved in feeding. This higher-level field may somehow have formed within itself a new lower-level field, that of milk-bottle opening.
This creative process is interactive in the sense that the higher-level fields within which new fields come into being are modified by these new patterns of organization within them. They have a greater internal complexity, which is the context in which the further creation of new fields within them is expressed.
These principles may well apply at all levels of organization, from new kinds of protein molecules that have arisen within the fields of cells to galaxies within the field of the growing universe. In every case, the higher-level fields are influenced by what has happened in the past and what is happening within them now; their creativity is evolutionary.
Ultimately this way of thinking leads us back to the primal morphic field of the universe as the ultimate source and ground of all the fields within it. In the context of modern evolutionary cosmology, this is the original unified field from which all the fields of nature were derived as the universe grew and developed.
In summary, we can either think of the creation of new fields as an ascending process, with new syntheses emerging at progressively higher levels of organization, or we can think of it as a descending process, with new fields arising within higher-level fields, which are their creative source. Or, of course, we can think of evolutionary creativity as a combination of these processes.
What could the idea of a primal, unified, universal field possibly mean?
The sceptic in all of us is inclined to think that it doesn’t mean much. It is just another speculative theory that takes us beyond anything that we can directly observe. We are leaving empirical science behind us and entering the realm of metaphysics. There is no point in going further, for we will only enmesh ourselves in tangled webs of speculation.
If we do want to go further, we have to recognize that we are indeed in the field of metaphysics. For more than two and a half millennia, philosophers have discussed the source of pattern and order in the world, the nature of flux and change, the nature of space and time, and the relation of the changing world of our experience to eternity and changelessness. In one major tradition, rooted in the cosmology of Plato, these questions have been answered in terms of the anima mundi, the world soul. The cosmos was contained within the world soul, which in turn was contained within the mind of God, the realm of Ideas beyond both time and space. The world soul differed from the realm of Ideas in that it had within it time, space, and becoming. It was the creative source of all of the souls within it, just as in modern theoretical physics the ten- or eleven-dimensional primal unified field is the source of all the fields of evolutionary nature.
Just as the notion of the primal field raises the question of its relationship to eternal laws, so the notion of the world soul raised the question of its relationship to eternal
Ideas. For the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus, these Ideas dwelt within what he called the Intelligence. The Intelligence differed from the Soul in possessing perfect self-awareness, and in contemplating the Forms themselves rather than images of the Forms. Just as the Intelligence ‘like some huge organism contains potentially all other intelligences,’ so the Soul contains potentially all other souls:
From the one Soul proceed a multiplicity of different souls … The function of the Soul as intellective is intellection. But it is not limited to intellection. If it were, there would be no distinction between it and the Intelligence. It has functions besides the intellectual, and these, by which it is not simply intelligence, determine its distinctive existence. In directing itself to what is above, it thinks. In directing itself to itself, it preserves itself. In directing itself to what is lower, it orders, administers, and governs.14
Below the influence of the Soul ‘we can find nothing but the indeterminateness of Matter’.15 But at all levels of existence the contents of the world are organized by souls; none are entirely indeterminate or inanimate:
The whole constitutes a harmony, in which each inferior grade is ‘in’ the next above … The bond of unity between the higher and lower products of Soul is the aspiration, the activity, the life, which is the reality of the world of becoming.16
However we interpret the similarities and differences between the old idea of the world soul and the new idea of the primal unified field, both inevitably raise the further question of their own origin and the source of the activity within them. The world soul was traditionally believed to arise from and to be contained within the being of God. Most contemporary physicists believe that the primal field is in some sense contained within or arises from eternal, transcendent laws. But then what is the source of these laws? How could transcendent, non-physical laws have given rise to the physical reality of the universe?
We may, of course, simply regard the origin of the universe and the creativity within it as an impenetrable mystery and leave it at that. If we choose to look further, we find ourselves in the presence of several long-established traditions of thought about the ultimate creative source, whether this is conceived of as the One, Brahma, the Void, the Tao, the eternal embrace of Shiva and Shakti, or the Holy Trinity.
In all these traditions, we sooner or later arrive at the limits of conceptual thought, and also at a recognition of these limits. Only mystical insight, contemplation or enlightenment can take us beyond them."
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Footnotes:
14: Plotinus (1964), p. 65.
15. Inge (1929), p. 221.
16. Ibid., p. 221
