Rupert Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At: Unexplained Powers of the Human Mind, Crown Publishers, New York, 2003.
For over twenty years, English biochemist Rupert Sheldrake has been at the forefront of documenting types of sensing that occur outside of our usual sensory abilities using sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. According to Sheldrake’s staggering extent of investigation, these types of “telepathic” experiences are far more widespread and variegated than most of us have realized. The Sense of Being Stared At combines many dozens of detailed accounts of such occurrences with the results of Sheldrake’s own research experiments in this area.
Sheldrake launched the publication of his findings with his ground-breaking Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. That work established that a surprisingly large percentage of dogs do seem to possess and express a kind of “ESP” that alerts them well in advance to the arrival of their owners, even at unexpected and random times. Many dogs were somehow able to sense their owner’s intentions even over great distances. Sheldrake records innumerable other such examples of animal and human telepathy, including the blue parrot that appears able to “read” its owner’s thoughts. This discovery, Sheldrake informs us, is really nothing new. As far back as 1930, prominent author Upton Sinclair published an entire volume devoted to this kind of telepathy between humans that he called Mental Radio.
Sheldrake’s abundance of stories and description of relevant laboratory experiments do seem to support that thought can be transmitted between minds, even over great distances, outside of our usual sense organs. Such direct contact between human minds may, in fact, exist at all times. Reading through Sheldrake’s recounting seems, in fact, to leave little doubt of this possibility. He finds human-to-human telepathy to be strongest between people who already have close emotional ties that are aroused especially when one of them is in distress or sometimes after one of them has died. The question of how exactly this happens, however, remains. Is there some kind of underlying electromagnetic “fabric”, “web”, or etheric “net” connecting all of our minds together? Are animal minds encompassed also within this same interlinked grid?
In The Sense of Being Stared At, Sheldrake examines especially this specific kind of extra-sensory perception. It is, he tells us, distinctive because not dependent on a prior emotional link between the unknown “stare-er” and the person being stared at. As many of us have encountered, the person being looked at frequently knows not only that they are being watched but also the exact direction from which the watching gaze is coming. Often they respond by turning around 90 degrees or even 180 degrees and looking straight back at the one watching them. According to Sheldrake, hunters, wildlife photographers, and military snipers have all learned not to focus for too long on their targets before snapping their pictures or pulling the trigger. If they do, their prey seems to know they are being watched and quickly bolt away.
This can occur, Sheldrake has found, even across considerable distances when the viewing is through binoculars, rifle sight, or telescope. One Army sniper recounted how, if he looked at his target for just a few seconds too long even from far away, he often saw that other soldier gazing right back down his scope at him. Some people seem to have a more penetrating gaze than others, leading those they are looking at, even from behind, to react more dramatically. So what, Sheldrake asks, is going on here? Is the watching mind, or watching eye, somehow “touching” the recipient of that viewing? How does the recipient so often know this is happening?
There are, in addition, even greater well-documented mysteries including clairvoyance, being able to see clearly someplace far away, and pre-sentience, knowing, or seeing sharply in the mind, events that have not yet occurred. Does some kind of unitary fabric of mind know not only what exists in the present beyond the use of the usual bodily senses, but what will come to exist in the future as well? The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in 2001 were both, Sheldrake tells us, preceded by a surprising number of precise forebodings. This raises, in turn, questions about what “time” is exactly and whether time, as we experience it subjectively, even really exists in more “ultimate” reality. Continuing advances in quantum physics, Sheldrake notes, may enable us to delve deeper into such questions.
Sheldrake is a distinguished British writer on the sciences, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Cambridge, a former Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. His studies, findings, and writing are bold, intrepid, and path-breaking. He refrains, however, from resulting hypotheses that would place him far outside the bounds of what is currently regarded as “respectable” academic science. He holds back from digging into whether the underlying basis for this interconnection is that all of our individual minds, usually still perceived as confined within our physical brains, are in fact emanations of a unitary mind of which our “separate” minds are expressions. Are what still seem to most to be transmissions of thought between our separate minds in fact activity taking place within one single far vaster “mind” that links us all together?
Sheldrake, however, does not venture quite this far and his own work has led him in a somewhat different direction. In his Morphic Resonance, published in 1981 and updated three times since, he explores how subtle but crucial energy fields, which he calls “morphic fields”, permeate and surround all living things and determine their pattern of growth. These can, he believes, also extend outward from living creatures and inter-connect with the “morphic field” of other living beings. Cell phone communication that we now take for granted, he reminds us, occurs via increasingly pervasive electromagnetic fields.
Central to Sheldrake’s probing of the roles of such morphic fields is the subjective sensation of animated, active “phantom limbs” after actual fully functional limbs have become paralyzed or amputated, a phenomenon still only beginning to be fully investigated. Rather than speculating on the possibility of a single unifying field, Sheldrake chooses to write of a potential multiplicity of them forming a kind of interwoven web of subtle energies. How different this actually is from one unitary fabric of energy from which all of life emerges and within which all of life exists, may, however, be largely a matter of semantics and word choices.
Next: The Field