Morphogenetic Fields And Beyond
New research is undermining old ideas of separation
by Robert Gilman, including an interview with Rupert Sheldrake
WHAT'S MISSING? Is there some way in which our description of the New Story is incomplete?
I hope so! To fulfill its role, the New Story needs to be a living thing, not a fixed dogma. New developments, discoveries and understandings will likely keep it incomplete for a long time to come.
"Yes, of course, details will continue to change," you may say, "but might there also be some really major aspect that we should be able to see now, yet have overlooked? After all, looking back over the past 45,000 years suggests a tremendous amount of cultural continuity within long cultural epochs. The major elements of the Empire Story were already visible near the start of that epoch. If, as you claim, we are close to the beginning of the Planetary Era, after 500 years of transition, we should be able to see at least the broad outline of the Planetary Story. What assurance is there that we have the whole picture?"
To explore this question, we need to pull back from the details, and look at some of the fundamental differences between the Old and New Stories. That comparison should help to clarify the essential vision of each story, and may also help to reveal any major blind spots.
At the heart of the New Story, as I see it, are two testable (and thus contestable) understandings. The first has to do with our relationship with time. The New Story characterizes this relationship as fundamentally one of unfolding, evolution, and the creation of increasingly complex and conscious systems. The second has to do with our relationship to each other and the world around us, and is characterized by interconnection, interdependence, and interaction - neither total unity nor total separation.
The Old Story of the Empire Era also, of course, deals with these issues. It begins by seeing time as characterized by cycles (as in the seasons) but beyond these, the world is seen as fundamentally unchanging. As an absolute vision, it is deeply disempowering, for it sees a tragic zero-sum world in which death is always cancelling out life, no lasting new creation is possible, and life is a perpetual uphill battle to try to beat the averages.
The cyclic perceptions of the Old Story can be placed within the evolutionary framework of the New Story, where they can carry great wisdom and add to our understanding of interconnection. The New Story's view of time also includes other refinements, like the role of entropy. Indeed, our relationship to time is one of the best developed aspects of the New Story, and I don't see any major missing pieces in this area. While the mechanisms and purposes of evolution are still hotly debated, even Fundamentalists acknowledge the existence of large-scale change.
snip
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC12/Sheldrak.htm
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