Now that I’ve finished Sheldrake’s book, I want to continue the comments I made in the last post about his work. What he has compiled is a very interesting and readable summary of a whole area of behaviors that are remarkable and unexplained. Some are even uninvestigated. Here’s a summary list of the major phenomena covered:
- Animal-human telepathy (coming home and other intentions)
- Animals that comfort and heal
- Animal awareness of distant death and accidents
- Telepathic calls and commands
- Premonitions of fits and seizures
- Premonitions of earthquakes and disasters
- Sense of direction (place) including migrations and pets finding their people
- Swarm and flock coordination
Much of this behavior has been noted by humans for quite a while, but interestingly enough, only a small part of it has ever been seriously investigated by qualified scientists. And they didn’t find the answers.
The one area with a lot of research is in migrations. How do a wide variety of birds and insects migrate thousands of miles to a place that they’ve never been before? I always thought that they just followed the older and more experienced on the route, but that shows how little I knew. The research shows that birds that have never made the trip can do so without any help.
The most extreme example is the Monarch butterflies that travel from the Great Lakes in the midwestern USA to Mexico. None of these butterflies makes the whole trip, as their lifespan is too short. The ones that arrive at the end of the journey are 3 to 5 generations away from the ones that started it! How do they do it? No one knows.
Turtles can go from their birthplace on tiny Ascension Island in the middle of the ocean to the coast of Brazil, and months later return to the island. Radio tagging them shows that they go in a straight line, compensating for wind and ocean currents without reference to any known source of information.
Sheldrake documents the testing of all the common hypotheses for the amazing sense of place and direction that many creatures show and notes that it all has failed to explain it.
Much of the book is devoted to animal/human interactions, on which there is distressingly little good research. As I mentioned in Part 1, Sheldrake has done some good experimentation on his own, and has done analysis of a lot of data reported to him over several years. In addition to dogs, he has data on cats, horses and parrots. Note that these are all intelligent and known to bond with humans.
One interesting fact that was new to me is that some dogs are so good at predicting a seizure in their epileptic owners that an industry has sprung up to train and provide these animals to patients. The dogs can alert 5 to 30 minutes before the seizure in time for the patient to lie down and prepare. This industry developed because so many patients were reporting that their dogs were warning them, and someone finally paid attention to them. This kind of precognition is similar to the well documented behavior of some animals to predict earthquakes.
Sheldrake also notes that not all animals exhibit these kinds of behaviors. Many dogs, cats, horses, and parrots seem oblivious to any such information. But so many do that it can’t be dismissed as just weird coincidences.
Sheldrake has suggested that a new kind of field, which he calls a morphic field, contains the information that animals and some primitive people use for navigation. That idea has some similarity with physicist David Bohm’s concept of the Implicate Order as an information field beyond time and space, although Sheldrake doesn’t mention it.
At the end of the book he notes that, as I said in Part 1 of this post, many of the telepathic phenomena between bonded animals and humans look suspiciously like a quantum entanglement. He even credits Dean Radin and the Institute of Noetic Sciences for their work in that area with human telepathy. In any event, it’s 300 pages of questions that current mainstream science can’t answer.
The good news is that if you have a dog or cat, you can do research yourself. And after you read this book, you’ll probably want to.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
David Bohm’s concept of the Implicate Order as an information field beyond time and space … although Sheldrake doesn’t mention it …
True, there exist so many different concepts and words for what we sometimes perceive as the “Oneness” or “undivided Whole”.
For example the “Scalar Waves” have so many things in common with the morphic fields, that I really believe that it is the same phenomenon. Or “fractals” and “holograms” … I believe we should reconsider our world view.
Though there is a huge problem, which impede a global paradigm shift: Egoism, Materialism, Ignorance
The mainstream love materialism and their world view is not “heliocentric”, not even “geocentric”, no Sir, it is indeed “egocentric”. Not able to see the whole picture many concentrate on themselves and miss the opportunity to dive into the collective field and serve others in order that the collective consciousness gets the necessary momentum to exit the stationary low level orbit of awareness.
My friend in Italy has a daughter subject to seizures. I’ll pass on the ino about the dogs that anticipate seizures.