Morphic Resonance

Have you ever visited a place for the first time, yet surprisingly found your new surroundings so familiar that you could swear you've been there before? Have you met someone new that you felt like you've known forever? Have you taken up a skill or hobby with such ease that its almost like you've been doing it for years? If so, you may be experiencing what proponents of reincarnation call "Morphic Resonance."

In her book, Past Lives of the Rich and Famous, the controversial psychic, Sylvia Browne, defines Morphic Resonance as what happens when "the spirit mind finds itself in a place so profoundly familiar from a past life that it experiences almost total recall and infuses the conscious mind with that same, seemingly inexplicable sense of familiarity." It is a result of cell memory, and is not necessarily limited to geographical locations. A place, a person, or even a circumstance from a past life can lead to the infusion of the conscious mind with a sense of familiarity.

I'm sure at one point or another in our lives, whether or not we really believe in reincarnation or not, we've all experienced a similar feeling. I know several years ago when I visited the town of Grafton, WV for the first time, I instantaneously knew my way around without even needing to read the street signs. I knew where to find specific buildings, and what other buildings were used for. When visiting Charleston, S.C. for the first time, I lacked a real clear familiarity in regards to finding my way around....but I felt such a connection for the area and the locals, that I actually felt stabs of homesickness when we had to leave. For the week we were there, I felt comfortable and at home. I've also met many people throughout my life that I had an instant bond with...and a few who I knew from the first time meeting them that they were not good people.

The term Morphic Resonance isn't, however, a product of Sylvia Browne herself. It was actually coined by Rupert Sheldrake in his 1981 book, A New Science of Life. According to the Skeptic's Dictionary, Sheldrake uses the term to '"refer to what he thinks is "the basis of memory in nature...the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and the collective memories within species."' He further clarifies that "natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind."

There seem to be some stark contrasts between Browne's definition and Sheldrake's. Browne uses the term to explain how the memories from our past lives can leak through to our current incarnations. Sheldrake tends to take a more practical approach, albeit it still extremely controversial and unproven in the scientific community, by using morphic resonance to explain why living organisms act the way they do...why they seemingly are created with the collective knowledge of their species built in. If you're interested in learning more about Rupert Sheldrake's theories of morphic resonance, I've included an hour-long lecture on the subject below.