Does your dog wait patiently at the door for you, ready to jump up and greet you with a welcoming bark? Has anyone in your house noticed if he goes to the door to wait well before your car approaches the house or your footsteps can be heard on the porch? Theory of Morphic Resonance
Sheldrake has written a fasincating book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, that is chock full of stories and experimental research into the paranormal abilities of animals. The book is entertaining, but also tries to present some theoretical underpinnings for this phenomenon. Sheldrake's theories go back to his earlier work. He postulates the existence of a field he calls morphic resonance, which exists for all living things and which somehow preserves the “memory” of the experiences of each living being and communicates it to other living beings. Morphic resonance makes possible inherited learning, so that tasks that millions of people already know how to do become easier for new learners who tap into the accumulated experience. Experiments With JayteeMorphic resonance also provides the means by which psychic communication over geographical distance can occur. Sheldrake has been collecting stories from pet owners about incidents where animals knew when their owners were coming home, or other anticipated events. He has conducted many experiments with a small dog named Jaytee by observing the dog with a video camera that recorded the movements of the dog at home, while the owner was told to go out and come back at random times. The dog would go to the door well before he could have heard the owner approach; his anticipation of the owner’s return seemed to coincide exactly with the time the owner decided to come home. Sheldrake’s conclusion is that the dog was able to read his owner’s mind. Other experiments concerned dogs being dropped off at random locations and finding their way back home. Everyone Has a Story, Including MeMy mother told me a variation of this she remembered from her childhood in rural Wisconsin. She said a dog they had would always have the chickens cleared off the driveway well before a family member was arriving in the car. And it's not just dogs that apparently know what their owners are thinking. Sheldrake has collected many stories about psychic cats. I was amazed to read about an experience that has been repeated in many homes where cats live, including my own! We once had a cat named Gloria who my young daughter had selected from a litter as a kitten, and my husband had observed that Gloria always went to the door when our daughter was due home from school. We thought that had to do with school letting out at the same time each day and Gloria having a great sense of timing. But one day we had to take Gloria to the vet and I told my daughter to be sure that Gloria did not see her carrier so she wouldn’t know she was going somewhere, but to fetch her. Well, the cat began frantically racing around our attic room upstairs and my daughter called for help. We must have been a comical sight -- three people trying to catch one overweight tabby! Gloria managed to elude us long enough for me to have to call the vet and say we would be late. I read in Sheldrake’s book that what we went through trying to catch Gloria is a common occurrence, so common that some vets in London have stopped making appointments for cats! How did Gloria know she was going to the vet? How do dogs know when their owners are coming home? If you think about your own pets and begin asking other people about their experiences, you'll quickly gather more anecdotes about psychic pets. Psychic connections between humans and animals have been reported before. I remembered reading about such an incident in a business book I’d read a few years ago. The incident was related in Art Kleiner’s book, The Age of Heretics (an excellent book about radical business ideas of the 1950s and 1960s). Two businessmen who have been out in the desert experimenting with LSD, along with a Pomeranian puppy are riding home in a car. As Kleiner relates, “Along the way, the engineer conceived the notion that he and the dog had a mental link, that they could sense each others’ ‘higher mind.’ All through the car trip home, the engineer kept trying to think up an experiment that could prove or disprove whether the mind link actually existed. Then at a restaurant where he and Hubbard stopped for coffee, he looked up and said, ‘Al, we’d better check the dog. He’s in pain.’ He persuaded Hubbard to step out to the car. From the outside the dog looked fine, but when they opened the car door, they could see the puppy had jammed its paw between the seats and had broken its leg.” What are we to make of a story like this? Was there a mind link? How Does it Work?Sheldrake theorizes that “morphic bonds” exist between people and animals they come to know and love (in the story above, though, the man had no long relationship with the dog). Interestingly, in Sheldrake's experiments, not all animals had psychic powers. Some of the dogs who were dropped off at a strange location could not find their way back home. Not all cats know when they are going to the vet or wait for family members by the door. Psychic ability in animals may be the very same mechanism as psychic ability in humans, not all of whom exhibit any such ability. Why is this extra sense only sporadically present in both humans and animals? If you think of the morphic field as being like a rubber band that stretches when the human and animal are separated, continuing a connection between them, then such a field can account for the psychic ability of animals to know what their owners are thinking. If that seems a bit too farfetched to accept, consider that no one else has presented a hypothesis to explain paranormal behavior in animals, and Sheldrake has been testing and refining his ideas for many years. I have also read a previous book of his, The Presence of the Past, which explains in greater detail his theory of morphic resonance. He believes it accounts for the group behavior of some animal species (fish that move together, birds that fly in formation, etc) as well as the pace of human learning. In that book, he talks about tests of learning involving a skill that is widespread versus one that is not. Morphic resonance postulates that people will learn faster a skill already mastered by millions of other people. One test involved Morse Code. One group of people were asked to learn real Morse Code while another was asked to learn phony Morse Code -- similar to the real thing, but with each signal having a newly-defined meaning. His tests showed people actually did learn the real Morse Code faster, even though the phony code was no more complicated. The theory here is that the knowledge of how to use Morse Code is somehow passed on through morphic resonance, so that learning can be inherited. This is a topic of hot debate among biologists, but there is evidence from the animal world to support such an idea. Visit Sheldrake's website (sheldrake.org) to learn about new research with animals, and Rupert Sheldrake's other projects. Buy Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: Fully Updated and Revised See other great
Books by Rupert Sheldrake |
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Pet owners have often claimed fantastic powers for their animals, and almost everyone knows that very close bonds can form between human and animal. But so far few scientists have chosen to study this phenomenon. One of the few (and the best) who has studied it is Rupert Sheldrake, an Englishman who has both a love for animals, and the education and the desire to pursue the nature of the human-animal bond.
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