It was around 1989 that I read Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Presence of the Past, and it immediately went on my list of top ten books that permanently changed my view of the world. In it, Sheldrake lays out his theory of “morphic fields” that act as information gateways, informing consciousness of new and unique ideas.

Sheldrake cited scientific studies from 1953 of Macaque monkeys living on certain Japanese islands. It was discovered that one of the monkeys, after digging up potatoes to eat, washed off the dirt and grit in the tidal beach waters. Shortly it was observed that all the other members of the troop began washing their potatoes. But the breakthrough observation was on a different island, monkeys began washing their potatoes, thus demonstrating a type of informational energy was being exchanged among all potato-washing monkeys, unrelated to their location.

Sheldrake hypothesized that when a new idea gains more and more acceptance, it creates an informational field, and as it expands, at some juncture a “tipping point” emerges, where all sentience can access this field of information non-locally. He called it the “Hundredth Monkey Theory”, metaphorically postulating that when the hundredth monkey entered the morphic field and adopted the information, it caused a cascade of information into the overall field of consciousness allowing access by all sentience.

This was fascinating to me because I saw how I entered the morphic field that Sheldrake’s theory created, and was now changed forever. It explained so much for me about synchronicity, telepathy and human understanding in general. This also explained how ideas spread, starting out as a single point of creation, and then radiating out, as that broadcast is picked up and adopted by other sentience, and then, at a point, suddenly becomes ubiquitous.

We’ve all had the experience of “getting an idea”, and then noticing other people with no apparent connections having the same idea.

I believe this is related to the quantum physics phenomenon of “quantum non-locality”, where information “travels” instantaneously from one point to another point irrespective of distance. This is also explained by “quantum entanglement” where two particle/waves seem to be connected together and responding identically and simultaneously despite a vast distance between them. If we expand this idea to include all of the physical universe, it could be seen as an infinite sea of interconnected information portals much like the neurons of the brain, and suggests that the Universe is conscious.

Applied to the individual self as a portal in this universal informational field, it could be said that we “travel” from one informational field to another by our innate power of choice. And that it’s more about choosing which field we desire rather than our creation of it. In fact, it is more likely that all possibilities have already been created across hundreds of billions of years, and so for us denizens in the sea of consciousness, we are simply touring all of Creation in our ships powered by choice.

Down here where the rubber meets the road, however, there have been nefarious vested interests with a lust for power and control, that have worked tirelessly to convince us that we have no choice but to be and do what these Controllers want, slavishly ignoring our own powers of choice in favor of being victims, where things happen to us instead of as the result of us.

Why do we give up our powers of choice? I suspect it is the cultural indoctrination we all go through because as human children, we were strenuously taught to obey “for our own safety”, the dictates of well-meaning, but brainwashed parents. We virtue signaled our parents and “certified” schoolteachers by complying with all the rules and laws demanded by The State, and felt “safe and secure” doing so.

Later, as we awakened to this chicanery, we started to discover our powers of choice, and at some point made the decision to either “go along to get along”, or become captains of our own ship navigating the universal sea of Creation, where all possibilities are available to us within that infinite morphic field.

We can then become the hundredth monkey as we explore and adopt ideas new to us within the overall morphic field of consciousness, and as we find these new dimensions of being, doing, and having, we may at some point trigger one of those cascades of information leading to higher ways of being, doing and having for all beings.

We all have that repository of “good ideas” we’ve collected along our tour of consciousness. It is time to find the best of the best of these ideas and ACT upon them, thus expanding that morphic field. It just could be that we tip the scales, opening the floodgates of that morphic field of a great idea to inform and inspire all beings everywhere to “wash the potato”, and in no time at all create Paradise on our fair world.