Raise your hand if you've ever felt it—that sense of being caught in a pattern you can't quite name. Maybe it’s a family dynamic that repeats through generations, or a societal mood that seems to have a life of its own. We often feel like we're moving through unseen currents, guided by rhythms we don't fully understand. It's a theme I'm exploring in a book I'm currently writing, Ride the Tide, where I look at life through the metaphor of water, learning when to flow and when to row. But what if those currents have a memory? What if the universe itself learns and evolves through habit?
This is the captivating idea at the heart of biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s hypothesis of morphic resonance. It’s a concept that doesn't just complement an astrological worldview; it provides a stunning new language for understanding the very essence of how astrology might work, shifting us from a rigid framework of prediction into a living, breathing dance with a cosmos that remembers.
The Current Under the Waves: What is Morphic Resonance?
At its core, Sheldrake’s hypothesis is simple and revolutionary. He suggests that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits that evolve within the universe. Morphic resonance, he explains, is the idea that "similar vibratory systems influence subsequent similar systems across space and time from the past to the present". In other words, nature has a memory.
Think of it this way: when a new chemical crystallizes for the first time, it might be difficult. But once it has happened, subsequent crystals of the same chemical form more easily all over the world, not because of physical contamination, but because a "habit" has been established in nature. Sheldrake points out that this is a well-documented, if baffling, phenomenon for chemists.
This memory extends to living beings as well. He suggests that each species has a kind of collective memory, similar to Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, which every individual can both draw from and contribute to. Experiments have shown this effect in startling ways. In one classic study, after generations of rats at Harvard learned to escape a water maze, new rats of the same breed in Scotland and Australia learned the same maze much faster, starting where the Harvard rats had left off. Even more telling, the control group rats—whose parents had not been trained—also got better. The memory wasn't just in the genes; it was in the field.
This radical idea suggests that memory isn’t stored in our brains as physical traces. Instead, the brain acts more like a TV set, tuning into memories that exist in a field of resonance. As Sheldrake says, "you wouldn't find a memory in the wires and transistors, because that's not how TV works". Our brains tune into ourselves in the past, and to the collective habits of our species, our culture, and even our families.
The Ancient Echo: Astrology, Sympathy, and Cosmic Habit
For those of us who work with astrology, this should sound incredibly familiar. Sheldrake’s idea of an evolving, habit-forming cosmos provides a powerful lens for understanding the foundational principles of traditional astrology.
The founding fathers of modern science saw the universe as a grand machine governed by fixed, eternal mathematical laws—an idea rooted in the philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras. But this was a departure from an even older idea, central to Hellenistic and Hermetic thought: sympathy (sympatheia). This is the principle of correspondence—"As above, so below. As within, so without". It suggests that the cosmos is not a machine of cause-and-effect, but a living, interconnected organism where all parts resonate with each other.
The planets don't cause things to happen on Earth like billiard balls striking one another. Instead, the patterns they form in the sky resonate with the patterns unfolding in our lives. A Mars transit doesn't force you into conflict; rather, the archetypal "habit" of Mars—its morphic field of assertion, severance, and action—is resonating strongly, and you are participating in that field. The universe is having a "Mars moment," and so are you. Sheldrake’s hypothesis gives us a modern, scientific language for this ancient, intuitive wisdom. The archetypes of the planets and signs are not static, Platonic forms; they are the accumulated habits of the cosmos, fields of memory that have been built up over eons, and to which we are all contributing.
Tuning the Compass: Morphic Resonance and Divinatory Astrology
This is where Sheldrake’s idea becomes truly electrifying for the modern astrologer, especially for those who follow the work of Geoffrey Cornelius and his view of astrology as a divinatory art. Cornelius argues that the astrological chart is not a scientific map of celestial mechanics but a tool for divination—a way of opening a meaningful dialogue with the cosmos in the present moment.
If, as Sheldrake suggests, memory is not stored but is tuned into, then the birth chart can be seen as our personal tuning fork. It isn’t a rigid script of fate, but a unique resonant signature that attunes us to the cosmic habits—the morphic fields—of the planets at the moment of our birth.
When an astrologer interprets a chart, they are not predicting a fixed future. They are, in a sense, helping a client tune into their own resonant patterns. The chart becomes the compass that allows us to navigate the tides. The act of divination is an act of resonance. We are using the chart to listen to the universal memory and see how it reflects the patterns present in our lives right now.
This frees us from the trap of predictive fatalism and invites us into a dance of participation. The tides will shift, the cosmic habits will continue to evolve, and we have the choice to engage with them consciously. We are not merely passengers being carried by the waves; we are learning to surf them.
Returning to the Harbor: Living in a Remembering Universe
Sheldrake’s work provides a powerful bridge between the spiritual and the scientific, the ancient and the modern. It reminds us that we are not isolated beings moving through a dead, mechanical universe. We are participants in a living, breathing cosmos that is constantly learning, remembering, and evolving.
This perspective shifts us from a state of resistance to one of alignment. We stop asking, "Why is this happening to me?" and start asking, "What cosmic habit is being activated right now, and how can I move with it?". We recognize that the repeating patterns in our lives are not curses, but echoes of a memory field inviting us to engage, heal, and contribute our own unique vibration to the flow.
The tides are always moving, and the ocean is always remembering. The question is: Are you listening?