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• Personal Growth

January 2003

By Prabhat P

While most meditation techniques help the practitioner reach within, Morphic Resonation focuses on understanding another human being in spiritual intimacy

Morphic Resonation turns the traditional meditative approach of exploring one’s own inner space on its head. This unconventional method discovers the self through intense silent communion with another person. It is a pair meditation based on sustained silent eye contact between two persons, creating a mutually induced hypnotic trance. This facilitates a kind of direct soul-to-soul communication.

Peter Wilburg, a British-born philosopher, evolved this method over 25 years in an attempt to rediscover the soul through the body. He draws on terminology and insights from several sources such as Rupert Sheldrake’s biological theory of Morphic Resonance, David Boadella’s understanding of body-oriented psychotherapy, Winnicott’s psychoanalytic account of early infant-mother communication, and the aspect psychology of Jane Roberts, channel for the teachings of the spiritual entity Seth.

Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance explains the emergence of latent biogenetic potential of an individual organism through its resonance with the morphogenetic fields of already established biological forms. Wilburg’s Morphic Resonation creatively extends Sheldrake’s theory to the spiritual realm by exploring how an individual’s latent ‘spiritual genes’—potential of being—can find physical expression through a process of resonation with the morphic fields of other beings, present or past, including those of their own present and past body and past-life embodiments or ‘incarnations’. Wilburg highlights the healing value of Morphic Resonation as a way of helping people to give physical form to hitherto unformulated dimensions of their subjective experience and unmanifested aspects of their individuality.

Morphic Resonation is simple to practise:

Two persons sit facing eath other and maintain silent eye contact for about 20 minutes to an hour.
Each partner communicates within and uses facial expressions to convey his or her innermost feelings.
Each partner then engages in resonant attunement to the feeling tones communicated through the partner’s face and eyes.

Morphic Resonation is a shared journey, which depends on the individuals’ ability to shed the ‘persona’, to communicate with the partner through subtle modulation of facial expressions, to ‘resonate’ with inner feelings and to explore new dimensions of their own being. What the individuals perceive and feel transforms their entire bodily sense of who they are. What is central to the experience of Morphic Resonation is an intense experience of other selves looking out through one’s eyes or partner. Every person is multidimensional rather than a personality type. Unknown aspects of ourselves, whose existence we never suspected, manifest in intense Morphic Resonation sessions.

Morphic Resonation induces a complex set of experiences. Messaging is a feeling of communicating silently intimate dimensions of one’s being, including feelings or highly complex subjective states. Morphic aspects involve the perception of particular expressions on the partner’s face as distinct visages quite different in character from their ordinary face, not only in expression but in age, gender and ethnicity.

Each Morphic experience gives form to a particular aspect of a person’s inner being. The concept of an aspect has two sides. It may denote both an objective facet of something we perceive, and the viewpoint of the perceiving subject in relation to the object perceived. Each aspect we perceive in the face of our partner is not merely an objective face of that person but a way of seeing us. The resonant attunement of one person to another in the mutual gaze thus leads them beyond the subject-object division. Making these aspects manifest through the language of facial expressions allows us to feel the inner qualities and personify these qualities in everyday life and relationships.

John Heron, author and founder of the human potential research project at the University of Surrey, says that Morphic Resonation fulfils the optimum conditions of interpersonal encounter under which “the gaze of the other may be experienced as streaming into my whole being—I am filled out and irradiated by it”, and “it is the interaction of the two-fold gazing which is a necessary condition of the irradiation of each by each being”. Morphic Resonation removes the veil of objectivity that blinds us from perceiving metaphysically and seeing with the Third Eye—perceiving more aspects of another’s being than our physical eyes can normally behold.

Most meditations guide us towards our inner being, but they may not immediately help us contact the inner beings of others.

The basis of Morphic Resonation is the establishment of resonant contact and communication with the silent spiritual core of another person. It goes beyond empathy to a telepathic melding in a shared psychic space through an inner vibration touch like the ‘relational wholes’ in quantum entanglement. It is unique not only because it is a genuinely shared, mutual meditation requiring a partner, but because its whole essence consists in taking time to be a body and be with others unconditionally and non-judgmentally in a fully embodied way and learning to reveal our being to others through our bodies. It is a physical experience of spiritual intimacy.