Bodhi 心The #research journey continues to see if Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of #morphic #resonance and #formative #causation might support an argument that we can influence the #evolution of a more-compassionate society by training our own heart-mind in #compassion using practices such as #metta-bhavana and the Four Immeasurables of #Buddhism. 1/n 🧵
This article on Sheldrake’s Substack acknowledges the theory’s limitation in explaining the origins of #form, but the form of compassionate thought already exists and I am not interested in understanding how form came to exist, just that we can influence our #mental #formations (sankhara) to be more wholesome and thereby influence the #collective #unconscious toward more-spontaneous compassion through morphic fields. 2/n 🧵
Such an argument (if it can be scientifically validated) would be pivotal in helping Westerners in particular understand why even bother with meditation, which is seen by some as nothing more than navel-gazing but may actually be a genuine means for changing the world from within our own heart-mind. 3/n 🧵
Importantly, such an argument doesn’t mean we can divorce cultivation from social engagement. We can’t just sit on a mountain meditating and hope for the best. Social engagement is the outward model of compassion, but such engagement is not possible without internal cultivation first. 4/n 🧵