| Rupert |
 n
my book, Seven Experiments That Could Change The World,' I focus
on areas of research that have been neglected by orthodox institutional
science because they don't fit into its present view of the world. As we
have already discussed (Chapter 1), this research can be done on very low
budgets.
The experiment I propose with homing pigeons is one of the most expensive
in the book, but even so need cost no more than about $600. In spite of
over a century of research, we really haven't a clue how homing pigeons
find their way home. You can take a homing pigeon 500 miles from its loft
and release it, and it will be home that evening if it's a good racing
bird. Pigeon racing enthusiasts do this regularly. The birds are taken
away from the homes in baskets on trains or on lorrie. Then the baskets
are opened, the pigeons circle around and fly home. It's a very competitive
sport. Pigfeon fanciers win cups and cash prizes, and good racing birds
can sell for as much as $5,000.
Pigeon homing is a phenomenon that everyone agrees is real. Moreover,
many other species of birds and animals can home, including dogs and cats,
and even cows. But no one knows how they do it. Charles Darwin was one
of the first to put forward a theory. He proposed that they do it by remembering
all the twists and turns of the outward journey. This theory was tested
by putting pigeons in rotating drums, and driving them in sealed vehicles
by devious routes to the point of release. They flew straight home. They
could even do this if they were anesthetized for the duration of the journey.
The birds could still fly straight home. So these experiments eliminate
theory number one.
Another theory is that they do it by smell. This is not intrinsically
very plausible, since, for example, pigeons released in Spain can home
to their loft in England downwind from the point of release. There is no
way the smells could blow from its loft in England, to Spain, against the
wind, but the birds get home. Experimenters have blocked up pigeons'nostrils
with wax, and they get home. They've severed their olfactory nerves, poor
birds; they still get home. They've anesthetized their nasal mucosa with
xylocaine or other local anesthetics, and they get home just the same.
So smell cannot explain their homing abilities.
The next theory is that they do it by the sun, somehow calculating latitude
and longitude from the sun's position. To do this they would need a very
accurate internal clock. Well, pigeons can home on cloudy days, and they
can also be trained to home at night. They don't have to see the sun, or
even the stars. If they can see the sun, then they use it as a kind of
rough compass, but it is not necessary for homing. You can shift their
time sense by switching on lights early in the morning, and covering their
loft before sunset. For example you can shift their sense of time by six
hours. Now if you take such birds away from home and release them on a
sunny day, they set off roughly 90 degrees from the homeward direction,
using the sun as a compass. However, after a few miles they realize they're
going the wrong way. They change course and go home.
Then there is the landmark theory. The use of landmarks is inherently
unfeasible, because if you release the birds hundreds of miles from where
they've been before, landmarks can't possibly explain their finding their
home, although they undoubtedly use landmarks when they're close to home,
in familiar territory. In any case, this theory has been tested to destruction,
by equipping the pigeons with frosted glass contact lenses, which mean
they can't see anything at all, more than a few feet away. Pigeons with
frosted glass contact lenses can't fly normally, and indeed many refuse
to fly at all. Those that will fly do so in a rather awkward way. Nevertheless,
such birds can be released up to 100 miles away or more, and although some
of them get picked off by hawks, others can get within a few hundred yards
of the loft. They crash into trees or telegraph wires, or flop down onto
the ground, showing that they need to see the loft in order to land on
it. But the amazing thing is that they can get so close when they are effectively
blinded. Sometimes they overfly the loft, and then within a mile or two,
realize they've gone too far, turn around and come back.
This leaves only the magnetic theory. Until the 1970s, most scientists
were very reluctant to consider this possibility, because magnetism sounded
too like "animal magnetism," mesmerism, and a whole range of fringe subjects
they didn't want to mess with. It also seemed unlikely that pigeons could
detect a field as weak as the earth's. However, it has been shown that
some migratory birds can indeed detect the earth's magnetic field; they
do seem to have a kind of compass. However, even in principle, a compass
sense cannot explain homing. If you had a magnetic compass in your pocket,
and you were parachuted into a strange place, you'd know where north and
south were, but you wouldn't know where home was. You would need a map
as well as a compass, and you would need to know where you were on the
map.
But perhaps the pigeons have an extraordinarily sensitive magnetic sense,
by which they can measure the dip of the compass needle. A compass needle
points straight down at the north pole and is horizontal at the equator;
the angle of dip depends on the latitude. So if pigeons not only have a
compass but can measure the dip of the needle, they might be able to work
out their latitude. This could, in theory, enable them to know how far
north or south they had been displaced. But if they are taken due east
or west of their home, the angle of the field is exactly the same as at
home, and pigeons can home equally well from all points of the compass.
In spite of these inherent theoretical difficulties, the magnetic theory
has been taken seriously by many scientists, not because it is particularly
convincing, but because they think there must be some mechanistic explanation,
and this is all that's left. Nevertheless, this theory too has been refuted
by experiment. To disrupt the magnetic sense, pigeons have been treated
experimentally in two ways. Firstly, they've had magnets strapped to their
wings or their heads, in order to disrupt any possible magnetic sense.
Secondly, they've been degaussed by being put in extremely strong magnetic
fields that will disrupt any magnetically sensitive parts within them.
These demagnetized pigeons and pigeons with magnets strapped to them can
still get home. (The first experiments of this kind in the late 1970s seemed
to show that magnets could reduce their ability to home on cloudy days;
however,'these initial results turned out to be unrepeatable, and many
experiments have now shown that pigeons can home, even on cloudy days,
when any possible magnetic sense is disrupted).
That's the current state of play. Every hypothesis has been tested,
and tested to destruction. They've all failed. The one remaining that you
occasionally hear is, "They can hear their home from hundreds of miles
away, because of extremely sensitive hearing." Even this won't work, because
pigeons that can't hear can still get home. All the theories have failed.
Nobody has a clue how they do it, although this ignorance is often covered
up by vague statements about "subtle combinations of sensory modalities,"
without giving any details as to what this might mean.
Pigeon homing is the tip of the iceberg. There are many other phenomena
to do with migratory and homing behavior in animals which are unexplained,
including the migration of cuckoos, Monarch butterflies, salmon, and so
on. Human beings may also have a directional sense, probably best developed
in nomadic people like Australian Aborigines, South African bushmen, and
Polynesian navigators, and least developed in modern urban people. In summary,
pigeons, like many other animal species, seem to have navigational powers
which are inexplicable in terms of known senses and physical forces.
The experiment that I'm proposing is very simple, and I can outline
it briefly. The evidence suggests there is an unknown sense, force or power,
connecting the pigeons to their home. I think of it as a kind of invisible
elastic band, stretched when the birds are taken away from their homes,
pulling them back and giving them a directional sense. I'm not bothering
at the moment to theorize about the possible physical basis of this, whether
it's part of existing physics, an extension of nonlocal quantum physics,
or whether it requires a new kind of field. That question is open.
Using this simple model of an invisible connection, the experiment I'm
proposing is the converse of those done so far. The usual experiments involve
taking the pigeons from the home, and watching them return. By contrast,
my experiment involves taking the home from the pigeons, using a mobile
pigeon loft, which is essentially a shed mounted on a farm trailer.
I've actually done this experiment, first in Ireland and secondly in
eastern England. So far, I haven't been able to carry it past the first
training phase. I found, however, that it is possible to train pigeons
to home to a mobile loft. They don't expect their home to move any more
than we do, and the first time you take them out, you move their home just
a hundred yards. When you release them they can see perfectly well that
it's not where it was before. They go on for hours flying round the place
where it was before, until they go into the loft in its new position. That's
just how we'd behave if we went home found our house a hundred yards down
the street. Most of us wouldn't just go straight in; we'd probably go round
and round in circles, around the place where it was before, looking awfully
puzzled. That's what pigeons do. If you keep doing this, after three or
four times, they just get used to it, realizing they're nomads or gypsies
now. After this kind of training, they can find their home up to 2-3 miles
away within ten minutes and go straight in.
During the First World War the British Army Pigeon Corps had 200 mobile
lofts in converted London buses. There's still one army that uses mobile
pigeon lofts, the Swiss army, and they are doing some fascinating research.
Unfortunately some of it is classified, being a military secret.
To go forward with the experiment, after you've trained the birds, you
move the mobile loft 50 miles downwind from the point of release, so they
can't smell it. If the pigeons find it quite quickly, flying straight there,
this would suggest there's an invisible connection between them and their
home. The next question would be, is it between the loft itself, or the
other pigeons? To test this you leave some of their nearest and dearest
in the loft, or you take the nearest and dearest somewhere else, to seeing
whether they find the nearest and dearest, or whether they find the physical
structure of the loft.
How the experiment will turn out, I don't know. If there's a new power
force or sense involved, what might it imply? What might it tell us? Where
would we go from there? This is the question I want to raise with you. |
| Ralph |
Let me ask you for a couple of details. When
they race the pigeons and these home lofts are all in different cities,
different streets, and so on, how does it work? Does the wife of the pigeon
racer sit at home and when the mate comes, pull out the cellular telephone
and call headquarters? |
| Rupert |
The racing pigeon has a little ring on its leg
for the race, with its number and the race number. When it enters the loft,
the pigeon fancier captures the bird, takes this ring off, and using a
sealed time clock issued by the local racing pigeon federation, stamps
the ring with the time it comes home. When they send in these tags with
the time stamps they calculate from the point of release, the straight-line
distance to each loft, divide the distance by the time, and get the average
speed. |
| Ralph |
Do they account for difficulties
and anomalous obstacles encountered along the way? |
| Rupert |
No. If they're killed by a sparrow
hawk, they don't win the race. |
| Ralph |
Does the home loft that they're racing
to contain family members? |
| Ralph |
There's a whole bunch of pigeons
in the loft, and only one or two of them are racing? |
| Rupert |
There are several racing systems. The birds need
a motive to go home fast. In the winter, they don't home very well. Races
are usually held in the spring or the summer when they've got mates, eggs
and young, so they have an incentive to get back to their family. One widely
practiced method is called the jealousy system, dependent on the fact that
pigeons are monogamous, forming pairs that last at least for a year. The
pigeon owners wait until the birds have paired up, then they take away
the bird that they're racing, and let another bird approach its mate. Then
the racing bird is taken away. When released it returns home reallly fast. |
| Ralph |
The stronger the motivation, the
tighter the morphogenetic elastic band. |
| Ralph |
Now that I'm getting the elastic band theory
down I'm ready to risk speculating on the question. This is my fantasy:
First of all, accepting the premise that ordinary fields won't do as
an explanation, let's assume it's a kind of ESP. I'm thinking of bats,
which have been studied in a room just like this one, with wires strung
through it. In the daytime the bat will fly around missing the wires and
avoiding the wall, using vision primarily, we suppose. At night they do
the same thing without vision, using sonar. Suppose, based on bats, that
the brain and the mind are able to image the results of sonar experiments,
in the same kind of image that the eyes form. In other words, instead of
only hearing the sound and trying to compute where the echo's coming from,
,the bat actually sees the room with its ears, in the same kind of representation
as the visual. Then if somebody suddenly turns the lights on, the bat wouldn't
hesitate and fall to the ground because it has to switch from system A
to system B. The visual representation of the room would exactly overlay
the sonar image. Similarly, dolphins have this huge melon-shaped sensory
organ that receives sonar waves. Both in the case of bats and dolphins,
the visual/sonar representation is more three- dimensional than ours. This
would give them, in a way, a kind of a higher IQ. Dolphins and whales,
who also use sonar, may sense almost the entire planet as a three-dimensional
object, with its curvature and so on.
If there were a sixth sense that homing pigeons and monarch butterflies
have, and maybe us to a degree, then I'd suppose it would work like that.
Going back to our pigeons, after they're rotated, doped, transported 500
miles and released, with this sixth sense it would consult a very detailed
three-dimensional road map of the entire planet, orienting the holographic
three-dimensional image with the visual world, rotating things around to
get them aligned, and then flying in the map. Things like smells, the sun,
the magnetic field, are factors, and they'll act as a kind of label on
the map.
This still doesn't explain how they get home. They would have to know
where home is marked on the map. Given a sixth sense with a complete road
map of the world as a three-dimensional object containing smells, trees,
magnetic fields, the sun and the celestial polar constellations and so
on, there must be some kind of beacon where home is supposed to be. Even
in this sixth sense theory, that remains a mystery. The pull of some sort
of morphogenetic rubber band is one idea, if there's an obstacle between
pigeon and loft, there would have to be some way to find the way around
it.
I think the rubber band theory is too simple. Considering jealousy and
so on, the longer the rubber band is pulled, the tighter it gets, which
is the opposite of most fields that we know, where the farther you get
away from home, the weaker is the pull. I would think that the rubber band
is more like a beacon that's a part of this whole field. Then the question
is how is the physical information of a location, especially a recently
moved location, inserted into the field. This would be the final mystery
to fill in the picture. |
| Terence |
It seems to me, if I can download this into language,
that the problem is not with the pigeon, but with the experimenter. We
know from studying quantum mechanics that things are not simply located
in space and time. This error is what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced
concreteness. I've always felt that biology is a chemical strategy for
amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy into macrophysical systems
called living organisms. Living organisms somehow work their magic by opening
a doorway to the quantum realm through which indeterminacy can come. I
imagine that all of nature works like this, with the single exception of
human beings, who have been poisoned by language. Language has inculcated
in us the very strong illusion of an unknown future. In fact the future
is not unknowable, if you can decondition yourself from the assumption
of spatial concreteness.
The answer to how the pigeon finds its way home is that a portion of
the pigeon's mind is already home, and never left home. We, gazing at this,
assume that pigeons, monarch butterflies, and so forth, are simpler systems
than ourselves, when in fact, our assumption of the unknowability of the
future creates a problem where there is no problem. It's only in the domain
of language, and perhaps only the domain of certain languages, that this
becomes a problem.
To put it simply, if you had the consciousness of a pigeon, you would
not have a diminutive form of human consciousness, you would have a consciousness
that we can barely conceive of. The consciousness of the pigeon is a continual
awareness extending from birth to death, and the particular moment in space
and time in which an English-speaking person confronts a pigeon is, for
the pigeon, not noticeably distinct from all the other serial moments of
its life. The problem is in the way the question is asked, and in the way
human beings interpret the data that is deployed in front of them. After
all, in the animal world, the future is always rather like the past, because
novelty tends to be suppressed. Most things that happen have happened before
and will happen again. My expectation would be that what we're seeing when
we confront these kinds of edge phenomenon in biology, is a set of phenomenon,
which when correctly interpreted will bring the idea of quantum mechanical
biology out from the realm of charge transfer, intracellular and subcellular
activity, and into the the domain of the whole organism. I'm not sure this
is the solution, but it does cause the problem to disappear. |
| Ralph |
Are you saying that the entire life history of
the pigeon is more or less determined at the outset, including the trip
away from the loft and the trip back? |
| Terence |
It never went anywhere. It's only when you've
laid over this a three-dimensional grid imposed by language that there
appears to be a problem. In other words, there's some kind of a totality
involved, but we section and deny it, and then come up with a dilemma. |
| Rupert |
What about the pigeons that get picked
off by sparrow hawks on the way home? |
| Terence |
They doubtless see that as well.
The real question I'm raising is to what degree does language create
the assumption of an unknown future? To what degree does it dampen a sense
of the future that I imagine to be very highly evolved in the absence of
language? |
| Rupert |
It's hard for me to grasp. Do you mean that when
a pigeon is released, part of its mind is still at home, in the future,
and this in some sense helps it to get back to the loft? |
| Terence |
You and I have talked about this before. You've
always implied that the morphogenetic fields drive, push from behind. |
| Rupert |
No, I've always said they pulled
from in front. |
| Terence |
Then they're attractors. This is partly saying
that, and partly that the consciousness of the organism is distributed
in time in a way that makes it capable of doing miracles from our point
of view. From its own point of view, there's nothing unusual going on at
all. |
| Ralph |
You wouldn't be at all surprised if, as a matter
of fact, the race was won by a clever pigeon that actually vanished at
the point of release and simultaneously appeared back in the loft. |
| Terence |
You're seeing it as some kind of virtual tunneling,
as an amplified quantum mechanical effect. Perhaps this is the solution
to the spontaneous combustion mystery. We pay great lip service to the
idea that quantum mechanics is very important for life and so forth. Well,
the mechanical nature of things at a quantum physical level suggests that
if life is an application of those processes, then our apparent entrapment
in three-dimensional space with an unknown temporal dimension is almost,
you would say, habitual, not intrinsic. This seems very reasonable to me. |
| Ralph |
I think your idea is good. I like it. If consciousness
extends over a certain span of time, even a few days, it would explain
a lot of things in the pigeon world. I still think it's important to know
whether the future is totally determined or if the consciousness of the
future includes several alternatives. In the case of several alternatives,
sooner or later the pigeon is presented by a fork in the road and has to
decide which way to go. I think we're still missing here some kind of mechanism
for the pigeon to follow the stretched rubber band of its own consciousness,
occupying an extended region of space and time, so that its ordinary physical
body ends up back where its consciousness ends. How does it do it? |
| Terence |
An analogy would be when you run a cartoon or
a film backwards, and there's a spectacle of wild confusion, but miraculously,
everything manages to end up in the right place. It isn't that there really
aren't choices for a pigeon when it comes into awareness, but that it comes
into all the awareness it will ever have. It's like having your deathbed
memories handed to you at the moment of birth. Essentially, for the pigeon,
it's a kind of play. it knows what's going to happen, its life unfolds
as anticipated, but it doesn't even know that it knows. The pigeon doesn't
have the concept "anticipated." It's we who are observing that have that
concept, and we alone are tormented by an anxiety of the unknowable future,
an artifact of culture and language. Things like monarch butterflies, pigeon
homing, and some of these other phenomena are clues to us that imputing
our consciousness into nature creates problems in our understanding. |
| Ralph |
That means that except for ignorance caused by
the power of language, we would have the consciousness of a pigeon and
therefore see our entire lifetime. According to this view, the baby pigeon
chick, upon pecking out the shell, is waking from a dream, looking around
and realizing that, "Oh damn, I'm the one that's going to have to race
three years from now and they're going to put this other jerk in there
with my mate." |
| Terence |
You use language to portray the state of mind
of the pigeon. That immediately collapses its four-dimensional vector into
three dimensions and it becomes no longer a pigeon, but a person talking
like a pigeon. |
| Ralph |
Is the pigeon then aware or unaware
of its entire history from birth until death? |
| Terence |
It's aware, but it's not aware that
it's a history. |
| Ralph |
Experienced as one timeless moment. |
| Terence |
We could go further with this and say this explains
our own curious relationship to the prophetic and anticipated. Instead
of, like the pigeon, having a 95% clear view of the full spectrum of our
existence, by opting into language we have perhaps a 5% view of the future.
We're tormented by messiahs and prophecies, and we lean toward astrology
and computer modeling and all of these advanced tools that give us a very
weak and wavering map of the future which we pay great credence to and
worry a great deal about. I'm suggesting that if we could step away from
language that we'd fall into a timeless realm where darkness holds no threat
and all things are seen with a kind of great leveling and all anxiety leaves
the circuits. Perhaps this is what Zen masters do and teach.
I'm suggesting one more version of The Fall. From the fourth dimensional
world of nature, complete in time, we fell into the limited world of language
and an unclear future and hence into great anxiety and conundrums like
how do the pigeons find their way home. |
| Ralph |
This suggests that we should stop
talking and writing books and just hum. |
| Terence |
I've always felt that. Rather like
a pigeon. |
| Ralph |
Is this a polite way of saying that Rupert's
current book and homing pigeon experiment is a total waste of time even
if it only costs $10? |
Terence
|
I think all experiments as currently understood
are futile, because all, including I assume the experiments in Rupert's
book, make the assumption that time is unvarying, and I don't believe that
time is unvarying. I didn't intend to open this up on a general frontal
attack of the epistemic methods of modern science, but in fact the idea
that time is invariant is entirely contradicted by our own experience and
is merely an assumption science makes in order to do its business. |
| Ralph |
I believe that we have a case here of multiple
personality in action and now I'm going to undertake to prove it. You are
now suffering from hay fever. Suppose that Rupert had in his book an eighth
chapter on an experiment with homeopathic medicine, and the outcome of
it was that a flower power was discovered which absolutely and instantly
cures hay fever. Would you then be interested in the result? |
| Terence |
Sure, but as a practical matter, I don't think
we should confuse our ideologies with our sinuses. You see, I would like
to redefine science as the study of phenomena so crude that the time in
which they are imbedded is without consequence. I suppose ball bearings
rolling down slopes fall into this category. The things which really interest
us; love affairs, the fall of empires, the formation of political movements,
happen on a different scale, and there's no theory for much of what happens
in the human world. In the human world the invariance of time forces itself
upon us, so we create categories of human knowledge outside of time, like
psychology or advertising or political theory, that address the variable
time that we experience. Then we hypothesize a theoretical kind of time,
which is invariant, and that is where we do all the science that leads
us into these incredibly alienating abstractions.
This goes back to Newton, who said time is pure duration. He visualized
time as an absolutely featureless surface. Now take note that Plato's effort
to describe nature with perfect mathematical solids was abandoned long
ago, because nowhere do we meet perfect mathematical forms in nature. The
only perfect mathematical form that has been retained in modem scientific
theory is the utterly unsupported belief that time, no matter at what scale
you magnify it, will be found to be utterly featureless. There is absolutely
no reason to assume this is true, since all experiential evidence is to
the contrary. The problem is, if we ever admit that time is a variable
medium, a thousand years of scientific experiments will be swept away in
an instant. It's simply a house of cards that's better left where it stands. |
| Rupert |
This seems to go a little bit beyond
the problem of pigeon homing. |
| Terence |
It addresses the problem of experiments
as a notion. |
| Rupert |
If we take what you are saying down to the level
of pigeons again, it turns out to be an elaborate version of the rubber
band theory; "the rubber filigree," or something like that. Let's say we
perform the experiment of moving the loft; it could show us something that
goes beyond anything contemporary science would expect. It might or might
not fit with your all-time theory. |
| Rupert |
Nevertheless, here we have an experiment, crude
though it is, which would show that the existing scientific model is very
inadequate. The rubber band theory involves a kind of attraction to the
home and in that sense involves a pull in time, so it does raise all these
questions about the nature of time. |
| Terence |
Do you have a theory about how it works? I don't
see how morphogenetic fields are particularly helpful here. |
| Rupert |
Yes. I think the morphogenetic field would include
both the pigeon and its loft. You can separate them by moving the loft
or by moving the pigeon. Either way, they're part of a single system. The
pigeon's world includes its loft, its home, its mate, and all the rest
of it.
When you move them, they're now separated parts of a single system,
linked by a field. The pigeon is attracted within this field, back toward
the home which functions as an attractor. This is where Ralph and I have
a different view of attractors. The pigeon is pulled back toward the field,
not needing a road map of the whole of Britain. A road map is irrelevant.
It just feels a pull in a particular direction. |
| Ralph |
It's like the angel theory; that when I come
to a fork in the road, a guiding angel appears from behind a tree and tells
me which way to go. |
| Rupert |
Roughly speaking, it is. You just feel a pull
in a particular direction. You don't even think about it. I think that's
how the pigeon does it, subjectively. I don't think it necessarily needs
to see the whole of its future from egg to grave. I think it feels a pull
towards home by this kind of invisible rubber band, which is actually like
a gradient within the field towards an attractor which is its home. That's
how you'd model it mathematically. You wouldn't have to bring in the whole
of the rest of Britain and a road map. If it did, however, need a road
map to the whole of Britain or Europe, we'd have to ask the question how
would it get it? It might tune into the collective memory of all the other
pigeons that have ever gone on homing races. If a pigeon could access the
collective pigeon psyche, or the collective memory of other species; if
all birds could link up to what all other birds could see, then they would
indeed have access to a global map of the world. I think that's probably
going further than we need in this rather limited case.
In the case of young cuckoos migrating in the autumn from Britain to
South Africa, independent of the parents that they leave a month earlier,
they must be tuning in at least to a kind of collective cuckoo memory that
includes features of the landscape over which they fly. The rubber band
theory wouldn't necessitate even that. |
| Ralph |
There still seems to be a mathematical or cognitive
problem, when the loft is moved. The dynamical system, which extends essentially
over the whole of the planet, wherever the pigeon may be released, has
to receive the feeling of which direction to go. The question arises, how
does the attractor, the loft, extend its field and directional instructions
all over the planet? I don't think that the idea of morphic resonance helps
here, because in the case of the moving loft, no other pigeon has flown
to it. |
| Rupert |
I'm not talking about morphic resonance, I'm
talking about the field itself. Morphic resonance is a memory. Say you
have a pile of iron filings and a magnet. The filings are drawn toward
the magnet and you see lines of force between them. When you move the magnet,
you see an immediate response. |
| Ralph |
The loft itself simply functions as a magnet
in another field which is not an electromagnetic field; a sort of emotional
field. |
| Rupert |
When you move the loft and it's just like moving
a magnet. Automatically the iron filings or whatever respond. That's basically
the model I'm suggesting. |
| Ralph |
And the reason that I can't find my car in the
parking garage is because I'm not emotionally attached to it and I've never
been in love with it. I should get an Italian car. |
| Rupert |
In the human realm it could apply to finding
people. My wife Jill does an experiment in her workshop where people form
pairs and they first find each other by humming with their eyes closed.
After they've got that, they find their partner just by feeling where they
are and heading in that direction. I've tried doing this experiment with
our children on the assumption that with children this effect might be
very strong, and it turned out one of them was extremely good at finding
me. Then I discovered he was peeping.
Maybe bonds between pigeons and their homes are comparable to the bonds
between people and other people. Indeed, they may be related to the kind
of social bonds that hold society together. When we say the bonds between
people, we may mean something more than a mere metaphor. Perhaps there
is an actual connection. We have many examples from the human realm, as
when a child falls ill miles away and its mother immediately starts worrying
and rings up to find out what's happening. This may be another manifestation
of the same kind of rubber band effect. it may be an aspect of social bonding.
The motive of pigeons to go home is social, not merely geographical. If
it hasn't got mates, it doesn't bother. In the case of migratory birds,
bees that have to forage out from their hives and then come back, there
must be some way in which the social bonds extend into a geographical dimension
and then become spatial, directional bonds to find the home group.
There are cases reported by naturalists that when packs of wolves go
out hunting, a wolf may be injured, and stay behind in a kind of lair.
The pack goes on and kills an animal, quite silently, no baying. Then the
wounded wolf take the shortest line from where it was to the place of the
kill and joins the rest of the pack for its meal. The tracks show that
it goes in a straight line without following scents, because it can do
this when the wind is blowing the wrong way. This kind of social bond and
linkage may be fundamental. |
| Ralph |
There's a kind of agreement here that there is
a sixth sense that's a field phenomenon, like the quantum field. It's a
social field, involved with the flocking of birds, the schooling of fish,
and with herds of animals and packs of wolves. To answer the question you
posed when you started us off-, what would this teach us, or mean to us
in terms of our future? it could be that humans are somehow divorced from
the significance of this field, so whenever their guardian angel speaks,
they always do the opposite. If we want to understand the population explosion,
the demise of the planet, all these wars, the manifestation of hatred and
sources of evil, a candidate for the disharmony in the human species would
be its disconnection with this field. Here's where Terence's idea comes
in, that somehow to submit to language is to lose our connection with the
field. We've all done experiments in not speaking, for example meditation
and dreaming, where the antitheses of language has an opportunity to come
forward and re-connect us to this field. For people like Americans, who
watch television seven hours a day, there may somehow not be enough time
away from language. |
| Terence |
Notice that most prophetic episodes are dreams.
This supports my point, that we've lost connection with a kind of fourth-
dimensional perception that for the rest of nature is absolutely a given. |
| Rupert |
Why do you think it's a given in
the rest of nature? |
| Terence |
Because there are many, many cases of this kind
of thing. Animals that are put in the pound by the owners who are moving,
and then the owners move seven hundred miles and the animal escapes from
the pound and it doesn't return to the ancestral home; it returns to the
new apartment in a different city. The monarch butterflies, the homing
pigeons, a whole host of mysterious phenomena become utterly transparent
and trivial if you simply hypothesize that for them, the future doesn't
have this occluded character that it has for us as a result of our acquiescence
in language behavior. |
| Rupert |
It's not just a problem in time,
it's a problem in space. |
| Terence |
They see themselves at every point
in their life, not just the high or low points. |
| Ralph |
They're a minute ahead of where they
are, so they just go that way. |
| Terence |
In other words they can always see their goal
from where they are. They navigate through time in the same way that we
navigate through space. I mean, if you were a two-dimensional creature,
the things that we do, navigating in three-dimensional space, would be
absolutely mysterious and generate all kinds of metaphysical speculation
and hypotheses. Why should nature imprison itself within a temporal domain?
Clearly, for us it's an artifact of language. We talk about future tenses,
past tenses that aren't descriptive of the future and the past; they create
it. That's why I put in the possible exception of human languages where
this is not happening and therefore they are much closer to animal perception.
The "mysterious" behavior of Australian aborigines, or Hopi. These people
seem capable of things that to us are like magic, but the magic is all
done by knowing what's going to happen. if they simply imbibe the animal's
understanding, then to them it's trivial. This is the most elegant explanation,
not requiring new, undetected fields, or any of these other somewhat cobbled-together
mechanisms. |
| Rupert |
Just another dimension. |
| Terence |
We know it's there. There's no debate about that.
I've always noticed that all the magic done by shamans in aboriginal society,
especially the ones that are using psychoactive plants, suddenly becomes
not so mysterious if you simply assume that, by perturbing the ordinary
brain states and ordinary language states, they let in this hyper- dimensional
understanding. Look at what shamans do; they predict weather and they tell
the tribe where the game has gone, both requiring a knowledge of the future.
They rarely lose a patient, meaning they know who's going to make it and
who isn't, so they can refuse all cases destined to be fatal. All these
examples of shamanic magic can easily be explained by the simple assumption
that they can to some degree perceive the future.
Animals opertate from this place to begin with. What is the shaman's
strategy for attaining his special knowledge? He becomes like an animal,
he is master of animals, he dresses in skins, he growls. |
| Ralph |
He talks to pigeons. |
| Terence |
He talks to the animals, perturbing his brain
state with ordeals or drugs or other techniques. The very close association
of the shaman to the animal mind suggests that it's the clue to entering
this atemporal or fourth dimensional perceptual sphere. |
| Rupert |
In the Christian tradition the principle symbol
of the holy spirit-that which gives inspired prophecy, shamanic-type gifts
of healing, all the gifts of the spirit, including speaking in tongues,
prophecy, healing, and intuitions of various kinds-is the pigeon. The first
Biblical story of the pigeon is in the story of Noah's ark, where the pigeon
was sent off and came back with the olive twig. Right from the beginning
the pigeon is a messenger who can find out things in distant places and
return, bringing back the information. You could say that central to the
whole Western tradition, this shamanic thing of becoming like an animal,
in this case somehow entering the mind of a pigeon, or in some way assimilating
to the state of the pigeon, is the basis of the gift of knowledge, prophecy,
and spiritual power. |
Notes
Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments that Could Change the World
(London: Fourth Estate, 1994).
|
