In many cases, it turns out that the pets are responding to the time when the owner sets out from the place that they’re leaving from to go home. In some cases, at my request, people have left at randomly selected times. And pets can still respond when the person comes home in an unusual way, for example by bicycle or in a taxi.
The experiments have shown that this is a real phenomenon, that it’s common, and that research on it can be done very cheaply. What I would like to explore with you are the implications of this pet behavior.
Ralph Abraham: I agree with you that this is a sphere in which experiments could be very rewarding, and let’s suppose that this effect is established convincingly. Then the question is how could this evoke a transformation of science?
I think that—this is just a pessimistic view from an optimist—this could be established and become commonplace but not significantly change the paradigm of culture at large, because there is already a huge space for what’s called superstition. People accept an incredible variety of things that are denied by science, such as astrology. But the scientific community, I think, would resist the proof, no matter how rigorous, because the scientific system is so inflexible, so closed to novelty, that it’s essentially a dead end.
This is pretty pessimistic, because science can’t change and people don’t need to change and no matter what is achieved in this most exemplary and promising of all possible experiments and domains, there wouldn’t be any change in the world at large. However, for me personally, if I become convinced, or even without being convinced if I take seriously that pets and owners are able to exchange messages over distances, then this is really phenomenal. It moves along all my ideas. I mean, what this signifies is that everything is interconnected to a much stronger degree than anyone has been willing to admit.
RS: Except most people, when they are talking about their pets.
RA: Well, even if they have convincing experiences with their own pets, they probably cannot stretch to consider the possibility that all pets and people are connected.
Terence McKenna: Ralph, I think you make a good point about flexibility of the mass mind and the margin of superstition, but I think you’re making the point too strongly. In other words, science is rigid, yes, but it isn’t the Kabala. In other words, presented with sufficiently overwhelming evidence, scientists have no choice but to retreat. The word proved is tossed around—the thing is proved when one’s enemy retires bloody and whimpering. Then it’s proved. And we’re not yet at the point where we should be so pessimistic. In other words, if 5 out of 30 ordinary people are reporting this, and then it turns out that it’s actually real for 1 in 300, it could become an overwhelming argument. Quantum physics had to accept electron tunneling because the electrons kept coming through the energy barrier even though the equation said they didn’t have enough oomph to get through. And so science had to make a place in theory for the utterly miraculous fact that apparently particles can sometimes move through energy barriers with impunity.
But I am skeptical. There are a number of things that went through my mind listening to this. It is certainly true that human beings and the two species that were mentioned, dogs and cats, have been in association for a very long time, in the case of dogs maybe half a million years. Not domesticated, but in the same environment, predating the same animals, and so on. In the case of dogs and humans, I would wager dogs are better candidates for this ability than cats. Many cats barely lift their heads when you walk in the front door. But dogs do seem to have this ability. Dogs and cats are social creatures that have evolved complex signals; so are human beings. They were very similar to us for a long time, but then the signal producing capacity of human beings evolved and the dogs were not really able to follow. It seems to me that behind shamanism is the idea that human and animal consciousness can be very closely intertwined and traded off. It’s unproven, but certainly a commonplace of fringe speculation, that in the prehistoric human past, human beings were telepathic with each other. This suggests that early human beings may have been telepathic with their animals, that they may have had a relationship with their animals that precedes what we view as rational.
Having said all that, then I take a different position. When Rupert described the phenomenon and you responded to it, there was a kind of implicit assumption that we understand how this works. We think we’ve arrived at the new paradigm, that this phenomenon between pets and their friends is telepathy, that this is the proof of the existence of an invisible field, an influence that links everything together, that in fact if this could be proven it could be the centerpiece of our model for wholeness. And yet all of that rests on the utterly unproven assumption that we know how the phenomenon works. It could very well be that we have a misapprehension of causality—I’ve argued this in other trialogues. And that the reason the dog knows when you’re going to be home is because the dog doesn’t exactly live in the same “now” that has been created by culturally-defined human language. Nature does not exist in the Newtonian now that we exist in. It’s much more a wave-mechanical field of consciousness. The past is the trailing edge of the wave; the future is the leading edge of the wave. Plasticity is in the moment. So that what we might be doing is not proving that telepathy is an invisible connecting web between everything, rather what we might be uncovering is but one more example of how language and cultural boundaries prevent us from correctly appreciating how nature works.
RA: We try to map experience into language, but we must admit that in mapping it into language, into a popular process, we strip it of 90 percent of its meaning.
TM: For example, when I suggested that this phenomenon might be based on field theory I was suggesting that it would be found to be subject to the inverse square law. These are predictions we can make about this phenomenon if we accept a certain type of describable mechanism. So that’s the way to proceed, hypothesize the mechanism, see what cases it mimics, see if those cases apply, further refine, so forth and so on. Then you’ll have the outline of a model.
RS: My model is that these connections between pets and their owners depend on a morphic field similar to the morphic fields around flocks of birds or around packs of wolves, the fields of social groups. Dogs adopt human beings as honorary members of the pack and form social bonds with them just as wolves do with each other. That’s the biological background. These morphic fields connect things together in the present and are sustained by their memory from the past. Morphic fields also contain attractors, which draw organisms towards future states. When people are going home, the home is the attractor in their field. Getting home is their goal, their intention, and the dog somehow picks up this change in the field, and knows they are on the way.
TM: The leading edge of the probabilistic waves of happenstance.
RS: Something like that would be my model. But there are already phenomena that this model can’t cope with—for example the precognitive powers of pets, apparently foreseeing disasters, giving warnings of earthquakes, and so on. Many pets living in London during the Second World War gave warnings of air raids 20 minutes or more before the warning sirens went off, so their owners were always first into the air raid shelters. Some dogs even responded in advance to the approach of the supersonic V2 rockets the Germans were shooting at London. Since these were supersonic, it doesn’t seem likely that dogs could have heard them, does it?
TM: Well these things have a relationship to time, as I’m suggesting.
RS: They do. That’s why I mention them. They fit your model better than mine.
RA: No, no. Terence’s model is very compatible with yours. At least if you take the word resonance seriously, thinking of wave motion. The wave motion doesn’t happen in instantaneous time. It requires an extended field in space and time. There’s a minimum extent where wave motion could even be recognized by another wave motion, so an interlocking of little space-time patterns over a significant region of space and time is implied the minute you use the word resonance, and that’
s exactly what Terrence is talking about. All these phenomena have extension in time, that the early part of one extension in time is a wave packet that could interlock with the latter part of another wave and then together construct a kind of a model, and this is probably the simplest way to encompass precognition in the context of morphogenetic fields or morphic resonance.
RS: Thank you. This is a breakthrough. But a lot would depend on the frequency of the rhythm. One is a daily rhythm. Daily cycles of sleeping and waking are the basis of a day-today resonance, and this could lead to precognitive effects a few hours in advance, maybe a few days in advance. And indeed, most human premonitions, as in dramatic warning dreams about impending plane crashes or other disasters, appear to relate to events minutes, hours or at most a few days in advance. The same is true of premonitions by pets. But the more distant the premonition, the longer the underlying resonant wavelet, with wavelets of human generations, or of the rise and fall of empires, and even of vast Gaian cycles like the ice ages. And I suppose these long-term resonances usually claim less attention than the short term.
TM: That’s why you only get one Nostradamus, and every dog or cat can tell you what’s going on ten minutes in the future.
RA: Well this brings up the whole question of morphic wavelets. I don’t know if we’ve discussed morphic wavelets.
RS: Not yet, no.
RA: Wavelets are a wonderful new way of looking at vibratory phenomena in general and a way that’s very compatible with the ideas of fractal geometry. Because you have a basic wavelet that you add together to make big waves, and they differ not just in frequency but also as a matter of scale, sort of an amplitude of scale and so on. This very way of looking gives a mother morphic wavelet which, through changing its scale only, you reproduce smaller and larger morphic wavelets. The addition of these together with different amplitudes as it were makes a big wave pattern.
RS: A fractal wave pattern.
RA: Well, the very fact that vibrations might be made of wavelets in this way gives a reason why you might expect there to be similarities across scales when you look from the perspective of fractal geometry. So if we have a wave, let’s say, a morphic space-time pattern characterizing a thought such as a historical event like a bomber coming, and that wave has a resonance with the mind wave of a pet, and these waves are in a resonance process. This would probably involve one or two favorite wavelets that are components of the big waves of history. A favorite wave more or less compatible and more resonant, as it were, with the mental vibratory fields of that pet. Therefore there could be some specialist of two-day precognition and another specialist of two-year precognition and so on, that has to do with your wavelet spectrum. Morphic wavelets.
RS: But how can there be resonance with waves yet to come?
RA: Well, think of a wave packet that’s traveling along and it has a certain extension in time and some of them have a bigger extension in time.
RS: Like day waves.
RA: For example, today’s frequency. A day wavelet would be one that an insect that lives for a day would have a great deal of difficulty in making resonance with. They would specialize in the higher frequencies.
TM: This is essentially exactly how the time wave works.
RA: Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. I see an overlap in your views here under which I’m now going to fan the flame.
TM: But Rupert, I wanted to ask you, what does this say about communication between animals and their owners?
RS: Well, morphic resonance cannot in itself explain how a pet anticipates its owner’s return. Pets can respond by going to wait for their owner at the time they set off to come home from many miles away, even at a completely nonroutine time. Morphic resonance is primarily an influence from the past, and would play a general role in stabilizing the field or bond between the pet and the owner. But most of my current experiments are to do with the spatial aspects of morphic fields. I now see from the nice way Ralph has put them together that I had been separating too much in my own mind the temporal and the spatial aspects of morphic fields
TM: Well, all traditions of transcendence and asceticism put a great deal of stock on silence, isolation, contemplation, meditation, and the payoff is supposed to be the ability to access some vast, more complete and spiritually holistic level of nature. Perhaps we have literally fallen out of time and into history. History is a kind of damming of animal time that exists underneath the aegis of language, spoken language, while the rest of nature abides in a very different dimension, and all the things that are so mysterious to us, that appear to violate causality or action at a distance, these things have to do with the fact that, far more than we realize, we are the victims of a false perception of time created by our languages, our alphabet. I don’t know exactly what is causing it, but it is obvious that in nature we are uniquely the prisoners of language.
RA: Do you mean that the rest of nature has more time?
TM: The rest of nature can see its termination in the Eschaton.
RS: How so?
TM: Well, Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. Let’s change two words and say history is the moving image of biology. We are in history. It’s all about process; it’s all about where we’ve been, where we’re going, where we are. It’s this sector that’s moving through space/time. Meanwhile, we access hyperspace through psychedelics and assume that nature abides outside of history. Don’t we?
RS: No we don’t. We think of nature in evolutionary development, and as having a history revealed by the fossil record.
TM: Well by our scale it’s static. Ultimately you’re right. You can’t feel the Earth move and yet we know it moves, and I don’t think you can feel biology’s historicity, even though evolution teachers us it has historicity. But what language reveals is the frantic inner dynamic of ourselves, and immersion in it has caused us to have a profound bifurcation from our interior and exterior experience of time.
RA: Well why should language have a function of separating us from history and eternity?
TM: Because it lies.
RA: It has tenses, past, present and future.
TM: But it’s particular. And nature is not particular. You can never understand nature as long as you particularize it, and language cannot do otherwise.
RS: But nature is particulate. For example flowers of the lily family have petals arranged in groups of three. The petals, sepals and other parts of flowers are quantized.
RA: They’re very particulate.
TM: Now what we’re doing here is we’re talking fractals.
RA: I think this language should somehow be capable of imaging the extension and interconnection of all and everything, but maybe language as it evolves in our context has somehow become impoverished in those metaphors while emphasizing others.
TM: It has. This is why we’re all so attracted to visual technology. Language is an impoverished metaphor. I think we sense that the way out of the language trap is through the image.
RA: What about musical experience? It’s an antithesis of all this language restriction. Most people listen to music on the radio or on recordings for quite a bit of time every day. And this experience transcends language. We don’t have any words for the musical experience and yet we have no trouble. We can recognize songs that we’ve heard before and so on. And a song can’t be recognized from a single note. You need the entire sequence. And that is not an eternity, but a fairly long temporal extension of a song that fits into our cognitive apparatus.
TM: I think outside of our linguistic programming, sound is light, and light is sound. Somehow inside our linguistic and neurological programming there’d been a bifurcation of this processing.
RA: Maybe language was originally like music. You have the song and the lyrics, and then after the song was dropped off by accident you had the lyrics standing by themselves. The Vedas were chanted rather than read. I’ve been reading about the pronunciation of ancient Greek, as reconstructed by classical scholars. It so
unds like singing. Greek poetry was orated. Nobody read a poem. It was later on that people got in the habit of silent reading, reading a book without saying anything. So this degeneration of musical language into dumb speech is something very recent in our evolution. There is so much we’ve forgotten, so difficult to recover.
TM: That’s why an archaic revival is indicated.
RA: The song is actually prelinguistic language. A prelinguistic history that is actually linguistic in the sense of communicative music goes way back into Homo Erectus prehistory. And when we’re talking about the communication between dogs and their owners, then maybe this is about a rediscovery in the deep unconscious of these prelinguistic modes, which are the natural modes of the mental field.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 13
