TM: I think people should drive out and take a look at the Eschaton at the end of the road of history. What that means is psychedelic self-experimentation. I don’t know of any other way to do it. If you drive out to the end of the road and you take a look at the Eschaton and kick the tires and so forth, then you will be able to come back here and take your place in this society and be a source of moral support and exemplary behavior for other people. I think that as we approach the Eschaton you will find that history is, as I said, a white-knuckle ride. There is an outlandish amount of vibration. It’s going to look good, then bad, then worse, then good, then bad. If you haven’t driven out to the end of the road and taken a look at what’s waiting the next few years are going to drive you nuts, because the resonance of all past time is now in the close packing phase as the thing is squeezed down. The contradictions are rubbing up against each other. Boundaries are dissolving all around us. The Soviet Union, gone! Yugoslavia, gone! America as a great power, gone! Good taste, gone! This is going to happen faster and faster and faster. Governments are all managing a spreading wildfire of uncontrolled catastrophes, and trying to keep us in the dark about how bad things really are. It’s good to go out and take a look and reassure yourself that the transcendental object is still there.
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
CHAPTER 4
HOW DO PIGEONS FIND THEIR WAY HOME?
Rupert Sheldrake: In 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, 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 if it’s a good racing bird, it will be home that evening. Pigeon racing enthusiasts do this regularly. The birds are taken away from the homes in baskets on trains or on lorries. Then the baskets are opened, and the pigeons circle around and fly home. It’s a very competitive sport. Pigeon 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 firsts 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 through 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 that 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, but 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 also 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 test
ed, 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 that 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 that 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 two to three miles away within ten minutes. The only problem is that they are usually frightened of the unfamiliar surrounding and are reluctant to enter it.
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, it would be best to do it at sea, with the mobile loft on a ship. After training 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 Abraham: 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?
RS: 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.
RA: Do they account for difficulties and anomalous obstacles encountered along the way?
RS: No. If they’re killed by a sparrow hawk, they don’t win the race.
RA: Does the home loft that they’re racing to contain family members?
RS: Yes.
RA: There’s a whole bunch of pigeons in the loft, and only one or two of them are racing?
RS: 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 those 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 really fast.
RA: The stronger the motivation, the tighter the morphogenetic elastic band.
RS: Yes.
RA: 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 rooms with wires strung through them. At night, the bat will fly around missing the wires and avoiding the wall, 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 is. This would give them, in a way, a kind of a higher IQ. Dolphins and whales, which 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 they would consult a very detailed three-dimensional road map of the entire planet. Then they would orient the holographic three-dimensional image with the visual world; rotating things around to get them aligned, and then to fly 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 celesti
al 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 a 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 McKenna: 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 Evolutionary Mind Page 7
