Time & Perspective Quote by Rupert Sheldrake

Sheldrake is pitching a heresy with the casualness of a sidewalk analogy. The New York squirrel isn’t just a cute example; it’s a rhetorical decoy. By choosing an animal we treat as instinct-driven, he slips past the usual objections about consciousness and culture and lands the claim where it can’t be dismissed as “just human psychology.” The move is strategic: if even a squirrel’s behavior is partly outsourced to a species-wide archive, then the boundary between biology and something stranger gets porous fast.

The intent is to re-enchant explanation without sounding mystical. “Memory in nature” borrows the authority of a familiar concept (memory) and applies it to an unfamiliar subject (nature itself), smuggling an expansive metaphysics into an everyday word. The phrase “collective memory” echoes Jungian and Durkheimian overtones, but Sheldrake frames it as a scientist’s hypothesis rather than a poet’s metaphor. He’s asking you to consider heredity and learning as incomplete accounts, then offering a third term: influence without direct contact.

Context matters because Sheldrake’s broader project, morphic resonance, sits in the long shadow of scientific gatekeeping. Mainstream biology largely rejects it as untestable or unnecessary. That’s why the subtext here is less “here’s a fact” than “notice how narrow our definition of causation has become.” Past squirrels “influencing” present squirrels is an invitation to think of nature as history-rich, not just law-bound - a universe where repetition accumulates, patterns remember, and novelty carries a lineage you can’t find in genes alone.