"The Present of the Past"

I have written some interesting quotes from book "The Presence of the Past - Morphic Resonance and habits of nature" by Rupert Sheldrake

"The say that habit is second to nature. Who knows but nature is only first habit?"

"Hypothesis of formative causation: The nature of things depends on field, called morphic fields. Each kind of natural system has its own kind of field: there is an insulin field, a swallow field and so on. Such field shape all the different kinds of atom, molecules, crystals, living organism, societies, customers and habits of mind."

"Even a vacuum has ceased to be an empty void; it has become a seething ocean of energy, producing countless vibrating particles all the time and taking them back again. A vacuum is not inert and featureless, but alive with throbbing energy and vitality."

"Static solutions were impossible -- Eistein discovered."

"We experience the evolutionary process directly in  our own lives: the world around us is changing as it have never changed before. Stretching back behind the changes that we ourselves have seen is the evolution of modern civilization, itself rooted in earlier civilization and more primitive forms of society. Beyond these is along mysterious period of pre- historic humanity; further back still, are apelike ancestors ; beyond them, more primitive mammals, then reptiles, then fish, then primitive vertebrates, then perhaps some sort of worm, right back to single cells, to microbes and ultimately to the first living cells on the earth. Beyond these we go back into a chemical realm of molecules and crystals, and finally to atoms and sub atomic particles. This is evolutionary lineage."

"Organism inherit only the inherited characteristics of their ancestors; they cannot inherit any characteristics that their adaptation to the environment or through the development of new habits."

He quotes Bertrand Russell, " Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that this origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collisions of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labor of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-- all these things if not quite beyond dispute are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only with the scaffolding of these truth, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be built. 

"Man must at  last wake out of his millennial dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that like a gypsy  he live on the boundary of an alien world that is deaf to his music and as indifferent to his opes as it is to his suffering and his crimes."

"Intelligent information processing must come into existence in the Universe, and once it comes into existence, it will never die out."

"Memory in life and habit is the fundamental characteristic of life. Life is that property of matter where by it can remember -- matter which can remember is living, matter which cannot remember is dead. Matter is absolute being"

"Reason came to be regarded as he highest aspect of the soul, that which is not only closest to the divine, but actually participates in the divine nature."

"Souls contain within themselves the goals of the development and the behavior of living organism; they give them their forms and purpose, and are the source of their purpose activity."

"The changeable qualities that we actually experience are at a lower level reality; they do not so truly exist. God created the world in accordance with numerical harmonies and that is why he made the human mind in such a way that it could truly know only by means of quantity. mathematical knowledge was certain and true.

In mathematical sciences, geometry was the science of resting bodies, and physics the science of moving bodies in mathematical space. Mathematical relationships seem to express strangely timeless truth, valid everywhere and forever."

"The majority of men do not think of GOD as an infinite and incomprehensible being and the sole author from whom all being flow; they go not further than the letters of his name."

"GOD is eternal and infinite , omnipotent and omniscient; that is his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things and knows all things that are and can be done....... He endures for ever and is everywhere present; and by existing always and everywhere , he constitutes duration and space.......he is all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power  to perceive, to understand, to act; but in a manner not at all human,........... in a manner utterly unknown to us."