We are a non-profit organization Humanity Integrated that is comprised of people who find themselves in the most interesting yet trying times of human evolution – the time of global crisis, which is the first stage of a profound change.
What you do, what you say and what you think can influence other people by morphic resonance. So we’re more responsible for our actions, words and thoughts on this principle than we would otherwise be. There is no immoral filter in morphic resonance, which means that we have to be more careful about what we are thinking if we are concerned about the affect we have on others.”
Morphic resonance is a memory principle in nature. Anything similar in a self-organizing system will be influenced by anything that has happened in the past, and anything in the future that happens in a similar system will be influenced by what happens now. So it is a memory in nature based on similarity, and it applies to atoms, molecules, crystals, living organisms, animals, plants, brains, societies, and indeed, planets and galaxies. So it is a principle of memory and habit in nature.”
Interconnectedness Of People & Nature Explained Through Morphic Resonance
An important aspect of morphic resonance is that we’re interconnected with other members of social groups. Social groups also have morphic fields, for example a flock of birds, or a school of fish, or an ant colony. The individuals within the larger social groups and the larger social groups themselves have their own morphic fields, their own organizing patterns. The same is true of humans.
People form all sorts of social groups within modern society, such as a football team, for example. Each player in the team is working as part of a larger whole — the team — and the team works together to score goals. The connections between members of social groups link them together through the morphic field. They’re interconnected through this field and the field is an invisible interconnection that links them. It continues to do so even when they’re far away.
The next time you are far away from somebody you know well, think about them and form the intention to telephone them. They may just pick up on that thought and start thinking about you. Then all of a sudden the phone rings and it’s that person. I call that telephone telepathy, and it is the most common kind of telepathy in the modern world. It’s just another way in which we are all interconnected.”
The More People That Learn Something, The Easier It Becomes
If somebody learns a new skill, say windsurfing, then the more people that learn it, the easier it becomes for everyone else because of morphic resonance. However, if you train rats to learn a new trick in one place, like Los Angeles, then rats all over the world should be able to learn the trick more quickly because the first group of rats learned it.
That’s what I’m saying morphic resonance does. It’s the kind of interconnection between all similar organisms across space and time. It works from the past and connects like a kind of collective memory, and it interconnects all the members of a species.”
Watch Dr. Rupert Sheldrake Discussing Morphic Resonance
Further Reading:
The Science of Interconnectedness – Interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Many of the quotes in this post were taken from this interview
Sheldrake.org – The official website of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake
We Are All Connected, a song made up of sampling scientists’ quotes on the interconnectedness of the person, humanity, nature and the universe, is part of the Symphony of Science musical project of John D Boswell, a project that aims to raise awareness of scientific and philosophical knowledge in musical form.
Watch ‘We Are All Connected’
Lyrics Of ‘We Are All Connected’
[Neil deGrasse Tyson]
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically
[Richard Feynman]
I think nature’s imagination
Is so much greater than man’s
She’s never going to let us relax
[Carl Sagan]
We live in an in-between universe
Where things change all right
But according to patterns, rules,
Or as we call them, laws of nature
[Bill Nye]
I’m this guy standing on a planet
Really I’m just a speck
Compared with a star, the planet is just another speck
To think about all of this
To think about the vast emptiness of space
There’s billions and billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks
[Carl Sagan]
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself
Across the sea of space
The stars are other suns
We have traveled this way before
And there is much to be learned
I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we
[Neil deGrasse Tyson]
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??
(Richard Feynman on hand drums and chanting)
[Richard Feynman]
There’s this tremendous mess
Of waves all over in space
Which is the light bouncing around the room
And going from one thing to the other
And it’s all really there
But you gotta stop and think about it
About the complexity to really get the pleasure
And it’s all really there
The inconceivable nature of nature
The Neil deGrasse Tyson ‘We Are All Connected’ Quote In Full
Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
Watch Neil deGrasse Tyson Pumping Out The ‘We Are All Connected’ Quote
With the current globalization of our problems, we need to extend our circle of empathy and view humanity as a worldwide extended human family. As long as we refrain from facing that challenge, divisiveness and unsolvable conflicts will persist.”
Professor Rodrigue Tremblay is an author and Emeritus professor of economics at Université de Montréal. In addition to his writings on economics, he has also written extensively on the subject of ethics; and most recently, on the urgent need for a new level of universal ethics, morality, and empathy to be developed and maintained in the world.
The Super Golden Rule
[In a more universal civilization], first and foremost, the scope of human empathy would be more universal and more comprehensive, and would not merely apply to some chosen people, to members of a particular religion or to persons belonging to a particular civilization. In practice, this would require that we establish a higher threshold of human morality, beyond the traditional norm of the Golden Rule (‘Treat others as you would have others treat you.’)
It would require that we adopt what I call a Super Golden Rule of humanist morality that incorporates the humanist rule of empathy: ‘Not only do to others as you would have them do to you, but also, do to others what you would wish to be done to you, if you were in their place.’ — Of course, the corollary also follows: ‘Don’t do to others what you would not like to be done to you, if you were in their place.’”
Three Interrelated Moral Imperatives
Three interrelated moral imperatives that have always been sound moral values, but which I feel will become increasingly required for humanity to go forward and survive. And I refer to:
More human EMPATHY.
More interpersonal TOLERANCE.
More interpersonal SHARING (altruism and generosity) as a foundation for a more harmonious, for a freer and for a more prosperous world.”
The Empathy Principle
According to the empathy principle, one must aim at treating others as if one were in their place, and not necessarily expecting reciprocity as is the case in the traditional Golden rule of morality that one finds in virtually all moral systems (‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’).
The empathy principle can thus be framed this way: “Do to others what you would wish to be done to you, if you were in their place.
That is why I say that empathy can be the solid foundation of a more civilized global society based on the solidarity of all human beings. It is the awareness that other people can suffer, be happy and flourish just as one does, and that one should treat others accordingly.”
Ten Commandments For A Global Humanism
Lastly, here is Tremblay’s ten commandments for the creation of global humanism, a foundation for the building of a global extended family:
Proclaim the natural dignity and inherent worth of all human beings.
Respect the life and property of others.
Practice tolerance and open-mindedness towards the choices and life styles of others.
Share with those who are less fortunate and mutually assist those who are in need of help.
Use neither lies, nor spiritual doctrine, nor temporal power to dominate and exploit others.
Rely on reason, logic and science to understand the Universe and to solve life’s problems.
Conserve and improve the Earth’s natural environment—land, soil, water, air and space—as humankind’s common heritage.
Resolve differences and conflicts cooperatively without resorting to violence or to wars.
Organize public affairs according to individual freedom and responsibility, through political and economic democracy.
Develop one’s intelligence and talents through education and effort.
Here is Professor Tremblay speaking further on the necessity for the development of universal global ethics:
[seeing as the video is an extended interview, many topics are covered throughout—fast-forward-to (20min. 53seconds) for content of the Professor speaking specifically on the topic of global humanism]
My very radical suggestion is realism where we try to figure out what is actually happening in the world, and see what we can do about those parts of it that are threatening or hurtful.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, journalist, author and political activist
began to see a pattern and found it in more and more aspects of American life: this mandatory optimism and cheerfulness.”
Ignoring Problems Doesn’t Solve Them
One area where it is strongly concentrated now and has been for some time now is the corporate world.
The biggest evidence is the financial meltdown of 2007. People who tried to raise problems would be shut up or fired:
You couldn’t be inside Countrywide Mortgage Company and say ‘I’m worried about our sub-prime mortgage exposure’ or you’d be out.
People within Lehman Brothers who tried to point out that the housing prices could not last forever were fired. It was willful ignorance.”
To Solve Problems, They Need To Be Raised & Worked On
We are hard-wired to be vigilant…and on guard, that is how our ancestors survived, not by saying everything’s probably okay.
My very radical suggestion is realism where we try to figure out what is actually happening in the world, and see what we can do about those parts of it that are threatening or hurtful.”
What we’re finding is it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.”
Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, founder of Good Think Inc. and frequently on-demand speaker for a variety of audiences, discusses problems with the workplace’s current formula for happiness and success, proposes a new formula based on his research and some techniques for its implementation.
The Current Formula For Happiness & Success Is Broken
If I work harder, I’ll be more successful. And if I’m more successful, then I’ll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.”
What’s The Problem With This Formula?
First, every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better school, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we’re going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we’ve done is we’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. And that’s because we think we have to be successful, then we’ll be happier…”
“But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order.”
If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise.
In fact, what we’ve found is that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You’re 37 percent better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we’re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.
What we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you’re positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.”
The Solution – Train Your Brain By Creating New Positivity-Inducing Habits
We’ve found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully.
We’ve done these things in research now in every single company that I’ve worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they’re grateful for, for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first.”
By training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we’ve found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but create a real revolution.”
Watch The Happy Secret To Better Work TEDx Talk With Shawn Achor
What the people really needed was just some basic common-sense information and advice, somebody to tell them the truth – that their way of life was coming to an end – and to offer them some sensible collective survival strategies.”
– Richard Heinberg
Now, You Face A Bleak Future
“A Letter from the Future” is an imaginary letter written in the year 2101 to by a 100 year old Richard Heinberg – senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and author of 10 books on issues of energy, the economy and ecology – to people of the world living in our times, about the tough future expected according to tendencies scientists and economists foresee humanity experiencing in the coming century.
It portrays a picture of a humanity struggling to make its way when the life it created for itself throughout the 20th century faces its depletion:
depletion of energy resources,
devaluing of money and products above the level of necessity,
scarcity of food and water, and
political motions toward fascism and war.
After painting a bleak picture of a suffering humanity dealing with all of the above during the 21st century, Heinberg raises the question…
Can You Change The Future?
Possibly, as a result of reading this letter, you might do something that would change my world [the world of the person living in the year 2101]. … Then, I suppose this letter would change, as would your experience of reading it. And as a result of that, you’d take different actions. We would have set up some kind of cosmic feedback loop between past and future. It’s pretty interesting to think about.
Maybe I should mention that I’ve come to accept a view of history based on what I’ve read about chaos theory. According to the theory, in chaotic systems small changes in initial conditions can lead to big changes in outcomes. Well, human society and history are chaotic systems. Even though most of what people do is determined by material circumstances, they still have some wiggle room, and what they do with that can make a significant difference down the line.”
Read ‘A Letter From The Future’ By Richard Heinberg
Many scientific researches have shown an obvious fact, that the behavior of a human being is created by the environment. If genes predispose a certain behavior but the environment doesn’t support it, then that behavior won’t manifest, so in this case, genes aren’t important.”
– TROM Narrator
The section ENVIRONMENT in the documentary TROM (The Reality Of Me) shows how the environment shapes human beings’ behaviors via:
Scientists’ explanations of their research,
Scenes of how certain behaviors become accepted as norms in different cultures and situations.
Watch ENVIRONMENT From TROM
How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 1:
Your Experiences Can Change Your Neural Connections
Dr. Gregory Forbes, recorded at TEDGlobal 2010:
We live in a remarkable time the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That’s why we look different. I’ve got brown eyes you might have blue, or gray; but it’s not just skin-deep.
The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies, and yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes.
Likewise, every connectome changes over time.
What kind of changes happen?
Neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and then can lose old ones.
Synapses can be created, and then can be eliminated; And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller.
2nd question: What causes these changes?
It’s true; to some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that’s not the whole story, because there are signals: electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons, and chemical signals, that jump across from branch to branch. These signals are called neural activity. And there’s a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there’s a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change.
If you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. And that’s why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. And it might be true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome; an idea that you may find empowering.
Think about the way you act, your facial expression, the values accepted by you, the way you talk, everything, and remember that they are a result of your environment.”
– TROM Narrator
How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 2:
Male & Female Behaviors That Result From Environmental Conditioning
Louann Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist and author of The Female Brain (2006) and The Male Brain (2010), recorded at Dominican University of California, March 31, 2010
The nature nurture debate … is dead … for the following reason: the brain is very, very malleable.
We’re all born with male or female predispositions, and then we’ll have hormones that increase that circuitry for behavior, which is what a hormone is supposed to do. A hormone’s job is to make us predisposed to certain behaviors.
However, the way we’re raised, for example, little boys: Studies have shown that little boys who were told they’re not supposed to touch something, they often will grab it and touch it, whereas a little girl can be given a verbal demand not to touch it.
Little boys worldwide are punished more frequently for transgressions. Little boys are told not to cry, that they’re supposed to “man-up,” right? Even at a young age, dads sometimes are very, very scared if their little boy is showing any version of effeminate behaviors.
For example, I remember flying coast to coast with a guy who sat next to me. He said his 18 month old son, when he saw his 4 year old sister open a present earlier that week, which was a purse, he said, ‘Oh, can I have a purse too?’ And he said he found himself, like someone had kicked him in the stomach, and he just yelled at his eighteen month old son, ‘No, boys don’t have purses!’ He was reporting to me this event, and he felt so ashamed and embarrassed afterwards, because he realized that his little boy wasn’t expressing anything about being effeminate or not.
So the way we raise little boys, and we raise little girls, our brain circuits are so malleable. For example, we weren’t born learning to play the piano, right? You do practice, practice, practice.
You can retrain brain circuits, to do a variety of things. All of our life, we are trained, gender trained, to be more one way or the other.
Males: facial expressions for example, when they measure them and put electrodes on them, and show them a grizzly photograph that is supposed to make you cringe and emotional, their facial expressions, versus females, actually showed more emotional response in the time before it becomes conscious. Then right after the one second level when it becomes conscious, their facial muscles start to freeze down for frowning or smiling. In females, facial muscles actually amplify, and the males’ go down. Scientists believe, the hypothesis is, that the males have been trained to suppress an emotional feeling.
There is no such thing as: bad, criminal, lazy, brilliant people, thieves or racists. Only people predisposed to such behavior. But if the environment doesn’t trigger them, the behavior never manifests.”
– TROM Narrator
How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 3:
Children Who Lived Isolated From Human Contact From A Very Young Age
The most extreme case is represented by feral children. A feral child is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no (or little) experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language.
Feral children lack the basic social skills which are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright and display a complete lack of interest in human activity around them.
Oxana Malaya began her life living with dogs, rejected by her mother and father. She somehow survived for six years, living wild, before being taken into care. There are few cases of feral children who’ve been able to fully compensate for the neglect they’ve suffered.
Oxana is now 22, but her future still hangs in the balance. Have scientists learned enough from previous cases to rehabilitate?
For six years, Oxana Malaya spent her life, living in a kennel, with dogs. Totally abandoned by her mother and father, she was discovered, behaving more like an animal, than a human child.
For two centuries, wild children have been the object of fascinating study. Raised without love, or social interaction, wild (or feral) children pose the question: What is it that makes us human?”
“The credit and debt system … is a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.”
Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the ESRC Research Group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment (RESOLVE), Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and author of Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, in his TED talk Economic Reality Check explains the paradox of living in crisis times, the paradox between people’s needs to “save, save, save” and the continuation of an socio-economic influence to “spend, spend, spend,” and suggests a solution of redefining prosperity: for meaningful, altruistic values to spread throughout society in order to achieve a “we” vision of prosperity.
Graph: The dramatic rise in personal debt and the plummeting of personal savings in the U.K. the last 15 years before the 2008 financial crash [taken from the TED talk]
The Crisis’ Paradox – The Need To Save & The Social Influence To Spend
“In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? … They want to spend less and save more.
But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view … saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even further, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It’s an anomaly, it’s a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people.”
The Crisis’ Solution – To Build Social Influence Of Meaningful, Altruistic Values That Allows People The Freedom To Become Fully Human
“It is about opening up. It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the depth and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect [the] fragile altruist within.
[It’s about] … redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations, a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth-based model.
This is not just a Western post-materialist fantasy. In fact, an African philosopher wrote to me, when Prosperity Without Growth was published, pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional African concept of ubuntu. Ubuntu says, “I am because we are.” Prosperity is a shared endeavor. Its roots are long and deep – its foundations, I’ve tried to show, exist already, inside each of us.
This is not about standing in the way of development. It’s not about overthrowing capitalism. It’s not about trying to change human nature. What we’re doing here is we’re taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose. And at the heart of that economics, we’re placing a more credible, more robust, and more realistic vision of what it means to be human.”
Watch Tim Jackson’s ‘Economic Reality Check’ TED Talk
“How we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on the ties that bind us. Social networks spread happiness, generosity, and love. They are always there, exerting both subtle and dramatic influence over our choices, actions, thoughts, feelings, even our desires. And our connections do not end with the people we know. Beyond our own social horizons, friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us, like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.”
Watch Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler Discuss The Book
Their book shows many examples of how the social networks people are in profoundly impact all areas of life: health, marriage, economy, politics and more. This post contains a few examples:
Examples Of Social Networks In Health
Have you ever wondered how your social environment can affect your health?
Back Pain – A Culture-Bound Syndrome
“The rate of lower back pain among working-age people is 10 percent in the United States, 36 percent in the United Kingdom, 62 percent in Germany, 45 percent in Denmark, and 22 percent in Hong Kong. In some ways, this varying prevalence, and the culturally specific ways in which back pain is experienced, suggest that back pain can be seen as a culture-bound syndrome – a disease recognized in one society but not others, such that people can experience the disease only if they inhabit a particular social milieu.”
Eating Disorders – Also A Culture-Bound Syndrome
“Eating disorders resemble other culture-bound syndromes in that they can ripple through a social network in waves, reflecting the possibility of person-to-person transmission of (admittedly severe) weight-loss behavior. High-school girls may compete with one another to lose weight and college dormmates can copy one another’s binge eating. In fact, these behaviors may affect a person’s network location, and in one study of sororities, women who were binge eaters actually became more popular and moved to the center of the social network, just as nonsmokers did in our study.”
Example Of Social Networks In The Economy
Economists Morgan Kelly and Cormac O’Grada studied two panics that were in the 1850s at a New York Bank (Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank), in which they observed how people’s interdependence affects their actions.
“Kelly and O’Grada found that social networks were the single most important factor in explaining the closure of accounts during both panics, even more so than the size of the accounts or the length of time they had been opened. Thus, financial panics may result from the spread of emotions or information from person to person.”
Example Of Social Networks In Politics
How did Obama succeed in his election campaign? He made people feel connected.
“Obama’s campaign was described as a perfectly run operation that made few, if any, mistakes. But how did he get people on board before the public perception that things were going well? How did he persuade so many previously uninvolved people to donate money to him and to vote for him, especially those who in the past believed their vote did not count? In no small measure, Obama succeeded because these ‘working men and women’ felt connected. Obama’s campaign was a historical milestone in all kinds of ways, but the most revolutionary may not have been its fund-raising. Many have commented on Obama’s remarkable ability to connect with voters, but even more impressive was his ability to connect voters to each other.”
influenced by anything that has happened in the past, and anything in the future that happens in a similar system will be influenced by what happens now. So it is a memory in nature based on similarity, and it applies to atoms, molecules, crystals, living organisms, animals, plants, brains, societies, and indeed, planets and galaxies. So it is a principle of memory and habit in nature.”
![Forced Positive Thinking Doesn't Solve Problems [RSA Video]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/smile-or-die.jpg "Forced Positive Thinking Doesn't Solve Problems [RSA Video]")
