When I got into macrobiotic food the American Medical Association warned it could ‘lead to death’ and Dr. Frederick Stare of Harvard University called it the ‘hippie diet that’s killing our kids.’ That’s when I was sure I was on the right track. 45 macrobiotic years later I have the last laugh, just by being alive and well.
At Cambridge in the 1970s, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a research scientist, discovered auxin, the hormone that regulates plant growth. He also developed a hypothesis of why and how cells age and die, which led to our understanding of apoptosis, subsequently a key to understanding cancer and to stem cell research. But then he goofed. Big time. He described what he could see. When Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life came out in 1981 Sir John Maddox, the editor of Nature, the world’s leading science magazine wrote an editorial entitled ‘A Book For Burning?’ writing: ‘his book is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years’ Later he said “…Sheldrake…can be condemned in exactly the same language that the popes used to condemn Galileo: it is heresy.” That’s probably when Sheldrake realised he was on the right track.
What was so radical about Sheldrake’s book?
He suggested that DNA was not the be all and end all of development. He proposed the idea of ‘morphic resonance,’ of a memory of form that guides us and that can change as we evolve.
Since then we’ve discovered that DNA is not the be all and end all of development. DNA controls protein synthesis but most of our genes are found in mosquitoes. We don’t look like mosquitoes.
Morphic resonance is about patterns, about energy fields, about invisible forces that create the framework around which life evolves. It also helps explain the inexplicable: why homing pigeons fly unerringly homne; why dogs know when their owner is coming back why people can sense when someone is staring at them.
The Gaia theory proposed that the Earth is a living conscious organism and that all who live on her are parts of that consciousness This is called ‘holistic theory.’ Everywhere you look the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, on every level of existence.
My brother Gregory's book, published last year, is called Sun of God. He shows how early religion took God everyone could see, the Sun, and made it an invisible God that could only be accessed via intermediary priests. Anyone who questioned the existence of invisible God got burned at the stake. Gregory's book also shows that recent discoveries in physics confirm that the Sun must be a conscious entity, as the ancients believed. There is no other way to explain what it does. It is Gaia’s mother. The Universe itself could be alive.
So why are morphic resonance and energy fields important to health? They explain the ‘placebo effect’ and the ‘bedside manner.’ When a sense of how things should be in a healthy organism is shared and experienced, it is easier to get there. Acupuncture, reiki, yoga, homeopathy, massage, chakra balancing, breathwork, chanting, Chi Gong, healing sounds and many other alternative ways to health use invisible forces that embody a universal memory or resonance.
Sheldrake’s new book, The Science Delusion, shows how science has painted itself into a corner by insisting on a mechanistic and materialistic worldview. His best selling book (which I strongly recommend) throws down the gauntlet to the people who called him ‘heretic’ 30 years ago. By taking 10 fundamental doctrines of science and gently but penetratingly questioning them in a spirit of reason, Sheldrake takes the reader on a journey to a new understanding that understands but transcends the self-imposed restrictions on thought of establishment science. This book could change the world. If they don’t burn it (or him) first.
