Morphic Resonance: The Universe is a Giant Network of Memory

I’ve always been drawn to the strange, the peculiar, the stuff that doesn’t really make sense until you stare at it for a long time, half-drunk at 3 a.m., and suddenly it all clicks.

Mysticism, the occult, ancient wisdom—that stuff speaks to me more than most of the dry, dusty philosophy I’ve had shoved in my face over the years.

It’s not because I don’t appreciate Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. But let’s be real: have you ever tried to read Being and Nothingness after a six-hour shift as a copywriter?

It’s enough to make you want to tear your hair out and drown your thoughts in whiskey.

No, I’m not here for that. I’m here for the weird stuff. And that’s what we’re diving into today: Morphic Resonance.

The idea is simple enough—well, on the surface, anyway.

The universe is like one big network of memory. Every thought, every action, every tiny little detail, gets absorbed and stored in some cosmic archive. And once it’s in the system, it starts to influence the next wave of thoughts and actions.

It’s like we’re all connected by an invisible web, a kind of morphic field. A big cosmic Google Drive that stores everything humanity has ever thought, done, or dreamed.

It’s a messy, chaotic, unpredictable thing. But there’s a pattern in it, a resonance, a vibration, that we might be able to tune into, if we’re paying attention.

The man who coined the term morphic resonance is Rupert Sheldrake. A controversial figure, to say the least. He’s one of those guys who probably didn’t make many friends at the academic dinner parties, and you can’t blame him.

His theories, which question the fundamental nature of reality, piss off all the right people.

But I like that. A guy who’s willing to get his hands dirty with ideas that rattle the cage? That’s my kind of thinker.

The Theory

Let’s break it down. Morphic resonance isn’t just some hippy-dippy nonsense about vibes and energy fields. It’s a theory about memory.

Not the kind of memory that you store in your brain, but a kind of universal memory, one that exists beyond time and space.

Sheldrake proposes that habits and behaviors of organisms—from humans to ants to bacteria—are stored in a sort of collective consciousness.

The more something is done, the easier it gets for the next thing to do it.

Imagine that every time a rat learns how to navigate a maze, that knowledge doesn’t just disappear. It gets passed on, somehow, to the next rat, even if the new rat has never seen the maze before.

The more rats that learn the maze, the easier it is for future rats to learn it. The pattern, the memory, lingers in the environment like some kind of invisible influence.

If you’re still skeptical, I don’t blame you. But the more I read, the more I consider, maybe it’s not all just random. Maybe there’s something to this morphic resonance business.

Maybe everything that’s ever happened is still hanging around, influencing the future in ways we can’t see.

I’m not suggesting that we’ve got some cosmic librarian keeping track of every fart and every bad decision.

But I am suggesting that the universe isn’t as disconnected as it seems. The more you understand that, the easier it is to see how one small change can ripple out and affect everything else.

Explaining to a Kid

Alright, kid, imagine you’re playing a game of telephone. You say something to your friend, and they whisper it to the next kid, and it keeps going until the message is completely different.

But here’s the catch—every time a message gets passed, it gets a little bit easier for the next person to pass it along. It’s like the message leaves a little footprint in the air, and after a while, the message gets clearer and clearer.

Now imagine that this game of telephone isn’t just about words—it’s about everything.

Every time someone does something, the universe remembers it. The more it happens, the easier it is for the next person to do it. That’s what morphic resonance is.

It’s like the universe has a big memory book, and every time something happens, it gets added to the pages.

And the more something happens, the stronger that memory gets.

The Dark Side of Morphic Resonance

I can’t ignore it. I’ve spent enough time battling with nihilism, staring down the dark abyss of meaninglessness, to know that the universe doesn’t always play nice.

This idea of a universal memory? It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. If the universe is just storing memories, then it’s storing everything. The good. The bad. The ugly.

The more I think about it, the more it feels like the universe is one big hoarder, crammed with all our mistakes, all our failures, all the bullshit.

Every murder. Every war. Every betrayal. It’s all in there, buried somewhere in the fabric of reality. And we’re all just swimming through it, hoping to find a scrap of peace in the chaos.

It’s like a drug. The more we try to escape it, the more we feed into it. Every generation leaves a little more garbage in the system. Every new thought, every new action, only adds to the pile. There’s no escaping it, no way to clean the ocean.

The Opposing View

Now, let’s look at the other side. The critics. The people who are still caught in the vacuum of nihilism and determinism.

Take Camus, for example. The man who stared at the absurdity of life and laughed.

The idea that we’re all just trapped in a meaningless void, forever disconnected, forever isolated. He argued that the universe is indifferent, and that’s the only truth we can rely on.

In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, he makes a compelling case that life is absurd, and there’s no real point to anything. What we think of as meaning is just a trick we play on ourselves to survive.

Then there’s Nietzsche, who talked about the death of God and the rise of the Übermensch. He believed that we’re all condemned to live in a world without inherent meaning, and it’s up to us to create our own purpose.

But the catch? It’s an impossible task. No matter how hard we try to escape the void, we’re always staring at it.

And let’s not forget Schopenhauer, the guy who thought life was nothing but a pit of suffering.

According to him, human beings are driven by an insatiable will, and this drive leads to pain, frustration, and, ultimately, death.

No morphic resonance for him. No cosmic memory. Just the eternal cycle of want and suffering, and nothing more.

The Scientific Angle

Alright, let’s try to make this a little more digestible for those of us who still cling to some semblance of science.

Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance suggests that there is an unseen field of memory, which is shaped by the habits and actions of organisms.

Think of it as a kind of cosmic Internet that stores the patterns of behavior for all life on Earth. It’s not a physical substance, but it affects the way life operates. The more something happens, the stronger the resonance becomes.

From a scientific perspective, this is where things get tricky.

There’s no direct evidence for morphic fields. It’s a hypothesis that stretches the boundaries of what we know about biology and physics.

But the more you dive into Sheldrake’s work, the more you start to see how it could explain a lot of things. It’s a compelling alternative to the standard view of evolutionary biology and memory.

Instead of relying solely on DNA or neural connections, Sheldrake suggests that memory is stored in a much larger, more diffuse way.


While Sheldrake’s theory has its supporters, it’s not without fierce opposition. Many scientists and thinkers dismiss morphic resonance.

Books & Articles:

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn – Explores the nature of scientific paradigms and how new ideas challenge old ones. Kuhn’s work suggests that while Sheldrake’s ideas are provocative, they might not be enough to overthrow the established scientific paradigm.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins – Advocates for the gene-centered view of evolution, where behavior and memory are driven by genetic imperatives, not some collective consciousness.

And?

So, where does that leave us? In the end, the universe is still a cruel and indifferent place.

Whether it’s the weight of our collective memories or the crushing reality of nihilism, there’s no escaping the truth: everything we do is a drop in an ocean of meaninglessness.

Maybe the real question is not whether the universe is a giant memory bank, but how we choose to live in it.

Because in the end, the one thing we can control is our choices. at least sometimes it seem that way.

Whether we choose to live as though we’re part of a greater pattern or as though we’re just stumbling through a void, that’s up to us.

And that, in itself, might just be the only meaning that matters.

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