Morphic Resonance

A few odd connections as to how I got to this introduction to Morphic Fields by Rupert Sheldrake. First, I bought a couple gifts for my wife's birthday: DVDs of I Heart Huckabees and West Side Story. On Friday night, after watching West Side Story, I sauntered into the middle room and sat by the stereo. From sheer idleness I turned on the stereo beside the Lazy-boy and on NPR at the very moment was the music of Leonard Bernstein from West Side Story. Weird, huh? The next night we screened the Huckabees movie, and afterwards listened to some of the director's running commentary, in which he mentioned the fact that he is friends with Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, studied under him, and had many philosophical discussions with him that wound up in the film. Today, while thinking about how I'm going to get my teaching arms around The Picture of Dorian Gray this week, and wondering a lot about self image, identity, shadow selves, doppelgangers, and other suggestive themes, not to mention the conviction I had before, after watching Huckabees, that the actor Jude Law would make a perfect Dorian Gray should a remake ever be undertaken, until I realized that Jude Law had already starred as Bosie in Wilde, the film bio of Oscar Wilde -- a role for which he was well cast, and in which Lord Alfred Douglas the real man, in many respects, imitated his artistic forerunner, Dorian Gray -- while these meaningful connections sprouted in my mind as I reclined on the bed, my gaze was directed to the bookshelf, where the book Inner Revolutions by Robert Thurman caught my attention. I began reading it, and in the first chapter, Thurman mentions the concept "morphic resonance," which is an attempt to explain such phenomena as how your dog can sense you're coming home before you ever get near the house, and how we sometimes think of a person right before they phone us, and other potential epiphenomena of the collective unconscious. I don't know if Sheldrake's a good scientist or not. He's clearly in the alternative/holistic spectrum, and for some wielders of Occam's razor, that's not where a real scientist should be shaving. But for what it's worth, the chain reaction of coincidences (cf. the protagonist of Huckabees and the Dustin Hoffman character's blanket metaphor) led to this point of light in the Internet galaxy.