KW I’m interested in the way morphic fields might determine culture. For instance, repeating and idea with the intention of influencing overall human consciousness- if it’s thought about many times, will it have an effect?

RS You mean the more people think about something, the more it’s likely to happen? Yes. Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they’ve been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual, I mean, most of our personal life, and most of our cultural life is habitual. We don’t invent the English language. We inherit the whole English language with all its habits, its turns of phrase, its usage of words, its s tructure, its grammar. Occasionally people invents new words, but basically, once we’ve assimilated it, it happens automatically. I don’t have to think when I’m speaking, reaching for the next word. It just happens, and the same is true about physical skills, like riding a bicycle, or swimming, or skiing if you can ski, these kinds of things. So I think the more often these things happen the easier they become for people to learn. Things like learning language have happened over- well, we don’t know how long human language has been around, at least 50,000 years, so there’s a tremendously well-established morphic field for language-speaking. Each particular language has its own field which is usually established over centuries at least.

Rupert Sheldrake in conversation with Ken Weathersby