Review essay: Life field

Abstract

This review essay will touch upon themes from the books A New Science of Life by Rupert Sheldrake, and Shuflebrain by Paul Pietsche. In both cases we are looking at a shift in the conception of the nature of life and brain, body and mind. Nature and our apparent external world extend and project the body, and at the same time they illustrate and replay the play of mind. The metaphor of world as world-body, body of man, body of Christ, body of God, body is so familiar as to require little comment. Yet world as world-mind, dance of larger thought, projected thoughts, is less familiar to the Western sense. It is in this area that our astonishment rises to levels of disbelief and to the possibility of a new vision. Can it be that the pattern of nature is more akin to a large thought than to the mechanism of an older physical view? The answer from modern physics is a resounding yes as the information pours in. Again and again physical law becomes the consequence of the very condition of observation. The properties of what can be observed lift back to reveal the properties of what could be observed, if anything could be observed at all. These are the lessons of relativity and quantum mechanics. And light, the very possibility of communication itself, gives powerful lessons through its nature as particle/wave. Light as particle proceeds through series of discrete quantum bursts, flashes of illumination in the darkness of space. Spaces of comprehension in the darkness of mind. And light as wave proceeds outwards as ripples of vibratory dance of opposite fields called magnetic and electric. From the turning tension of this dance flow waves of illumination on the landscape without. Just so does a brilliant idea flood the mind with light, life, tension, energy. In the outer world and through our technology of the photograph and the laser, light tells a more detailed tale. For laser produces coherent light, light of synchronized amplitude and frequency. Light to shine, reflect and capture on a photographic plate, to produce a record and a code. This plate when illuminated once more unleashes its memory and reproduces for the viewer a remarkable simulacrum of the original threedimensional scene. It is the holograph. The holograph is a direct record of the wave-pattern of light. It is a freeze of the pattern passing through a window-pane that looks upon the scene. And just as the scene can be glimpsed through any tiny portion of the window so does the holograph house all its information within any small portion of itself. Thus the holographic memory of light is all in one (part) and one in all.