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Sheldrake has also collaborated on several published dialogues and trialogues with the likes of chaos theorist Ralph Abraham, the late philosopher of consciousness Terence McKenna, and theologian Matthew Fox. That tradition continues in his chat with Ebert, a former editor with the Joseph Campbell Foundation whose book contains interviews with a number of thinkers, all sharing an openness to the idea that the cosmos is less a machine than a living organism. Ebert concludes that both science and religion must confront this growing awareness, each in its own way. He and Sheldrake discuss the existence of souls, ghosts, reincarnation, telepathy, and angels—subjects certainly worthy of speculation if indeed we are the children of a universe that can be playful, when it needs to be.

—Jeremiah Creedon

Ebert:Joseph Campbell once suggested that the early idea of morphogenetic fields reminded him of the Hindu concept of maya—the field of space-time that gives birth to the forms of the world. You wrote your first book while living in an ashram in India. Do you think its content was influenced at all by a resonance with the traditions of Indian thought?

Sheldrake: I think it probably was, but the basic idea of morphic resonance and morphic fields came to me in Cambridge, before I went to live in India. My thinking about morphogenetic fields was influenced by the holistic tradition in developmental biology, where these fields are fairly widely accepted. The idea of an influence through time—what I call morphic resonance—was inspired by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his book Matter and Memory, where he argues that memory is not stored in a material form in the brain. I realized that Bergson’s ideas on memory, which were completely new and incredibly exciting to me, could be generalized, and it was really through reflecting on his thought that I came to my ideas.

When I went to work in India I kept thinking about those ideas, which indeed had much in common with Indian thought. In Cambridge, I found that many people simply couldn’t understand what I was going on about—particularly scientists. They thought the idea was too ridiculous to take seriously. When I arrived in India and discussed it with Hindu friends and colleagues, they had the opposite view: "There’s nothing new in this," they said, "it was all known millennia ago to the ancient rishis." So they found the ideas perfectly acceptable; the only thing was, they weren’t particularly interested in extending them into a scientific hypothesis.

After five years at the agricultural institute, I went to the ashram to write my book. The climate of Indian thought was a very fertile one for me, and it enabled me to go on thinking about these ideas in a much more favorable environment than I would have had in Cambridge. But the germs of these ideas, the roots of my own thought, are in Western philosophy and science rather than Oriental philosophy. So, it’s a kind of convergence.

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