@Zigford – I teased a novella back in the Dimensional Pocket thread and here it is.
This is a sort-of hard thing to work your way around in conversation because language is kind-of a clumsy and imprecise tool, but we’ll do our best. I want to stress that that this isn’t the only way to think about this, but it’s a way.
I want to break up your original question into two chunks.
Two metaphors I like to use to describe this are Electrical Outlets and Water Pipes.
Imagine your standard electrical outlet – like the kind your phone or computer gets plugged into. By default, the Outlet only has room for so many plugs, right? Say, your phone and computer, but if you also wanted to plug in your hair dryer, there’s no room.
But there are many ways to change that. A surge protector might add LOTS of plugs for you, an extension cord lets you plug stuff in on the other side of the room, there are smaller adapters that change a 1 plug into a 3 plug, there are batteries you can plug in case of a power outage…
And in this metaphor, you can think about how there are different ‘standards’ of plugs and electric-line voltage in different parts of the world, right? Your US style phone charger might not work in Tahiti! Maybe some devices are ‘incompatible’ with your power system without the right adapter.
But there’s an additional limit besides just the number of things you can plug in, right? If you have too many things plugged in – say, a portable AC, a mini-fridge, your computer – and then you turn on your hair dryer, you’re probably going to flip the breaker. Only so much power is allowed to come down the line and if you exceed that threshold, the breaker flips so that you don’t burn down the house.
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If you imagine a water pipe instead, the same thing is fundamentally true. If you pour six fluids down the drain, the pipe can only move so much fluid at once. If you need to move more fluid, you can get a bigger drain which lets the water get out of the sink faster, but you’re still fundamentally limited by the size of your pipe. You can increase the flow by both increasing the size of your pipe or sharpening the angle the pipe is draining towards (up to a point, anyway!).
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So what we’re thinking about in these metaphors really are these ideas about ‘capacity’ and ‘throughput’ (or ‘flow’).
Fundamentally, your nervous system is a structure for transmitting information. It sends ‘signals’ to the farthest reaches of our bodies and the farthest reaches of our bodies send ‘signals’ right back. Our nervous systems are not just physical structures in the same way our bodies generally are not just physical structures. They extend outwards into ‘other dimensions’. As our ‘nervous system’ ‘extends’ into ‘energetic’ spaces, it is also a key conveyer (or constrainer!) of energetic information which is why building up our nervous system enhances both capacity and flow.
In historical context, if you think about things like the Chakras, you’ll note that they’re all the biggest ones are sitting on the spine – the densest cluster of nerves in the body. Meridians run alongside the nervous system. If you put a map of the meridians and the nervous systems, you’ll see we’re fundamentally talking about almost the exact same thing.
Great question! How much do you know about Morphic fields and the ‘theories’ that underpin them?
Generally speaking, we live in a Materialist World and ‘Materialism’ means ‘Only Matter Matters’. 
In our reductionist way of viewing the world, we’ve tried to render the world as wholly explainable in the form of mathematics, physics and fields like molecular biology. This is a very useful paradigm for many things, but not everything.
You can kill a frog, stick it in a blender, analyze the biochemical soup that comes out and still have no idea about what constitutes frogness, right?
DNA defines protein composition, but can’t even necessarily define protein structure – as there are a staggeringly huge number of ways a protein can fold in, but it prefers to fold in a particular way. DNA’s simple definitions of Protein composition cannot and does not describe the ultimate outcome of a living being. An elephant doesn’t have a ‘trunk’ gene, a Camel doesn’t have a ‘hump’ gene. There are absolutely genes that impact the structures and shapes of these things, but what DNA is missing is an organizing principle.
Chimpanzees and humans share nearly their entire genome but obviously we are wildly different creatures. Sea Urchins have ‘more’ DNA than we do! So we know DNA can’t be the whole story (not to downplay it’s importance or anything).
Morphogenetic fields are this organizing principle and they don’t just apply to things like DNA, but to Societies, Crystals, Molecules, even Atoms and Subatomic Particles.
The way Rupert Sheldrake describes this uses a couple of fun, domain specific words.
‘Holons’ are unique, discrete structures that exist within other structures. So you’re a @Zigford Holon and inside of you is a Heart Holon and a Lung Holon and a Brain Holon. Your Brain Holon has Neuron Holons and so on. Your Neuron Holons have Cell Holons and those Cells have Cell Wall Holons and Mitochondria Holons and Nucleus Holons and so forth.
What this is describing is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A frog is more than just a bunch of cells pumping squishy molecular goo around, right? This seems conceptually ‘obvious’ but it flies directly in the face of a lot of Materialist ideas.
Each Holon has its own organizing principle, it’s own morphogentic field, but as these organizing structures collect, each one becomes more than the sum of its parts.
A @Zigford Holon in turn belongs to other organizational structures, like households (in turn inside of a country, inside of a global community) or the forum (in turn inside of the internet) or whatever else. Eventually, everything belongs to the Universe which might be described as the the ‘ultimate’ organizing principle.
Of course, we see that not everything is identical, even if it seems composed of the same general ‘Holons’.
The organizing principle (that is a morphogentic field) is described (by Sheldrake, at least) as a ‘chreode’. These are almost always described ‘topologically’ with a little topographic map showing a canyon like structure. The morphic field is pulling you towards the bottom of the canyon which might be described as the ‘archetype’ of the thing. The ‘deeper’ the chreode, the faster and harder things are pulled, but because the walls of the chreode are never really vertical, things are always degrees or a spectrum.
Another (less domain specific) way to describe this is a habit.
Things are affected by morphic fields by resonance. The more like something something is, the more strongly it resonates and is drawn into those ‘habits’ or ‘chreodes’. As each thing ‘traverses’ the chreodes, it leaves its own imprint, it’s own mark on the overall morphic field, affecting all those things that are resonating with it.
We see these sorts of effects in the ‘Hundredth Monkey’ effect, where after a certain threshold of a number of monkeys learning a skill occurs, other (unrelated) monkeys suddenly develop the skill. We see it in the Flynn effect, where people get better at IQ tests over time even though we’re (obviously) not getting any smarter. We see it in how new Elements are really hard to build in super colliders the first time, but get increasingly easier to produce afterwards. We see it in new crystal formations which sometimes ‘erupt’ spontaneously and then spread effortlessly across the world without physical contact.
Morphic fields aren’t located ‘physically’ or ‘materially’ – or at least we don’t have the capacity to ‘detect’ them with any ‘tools’ we have today. One idea is that they’re part of the zero-point field itself – the quantum sea foam on which all reality we experience floats and bobs.
Which is just to say that interactions between us and the morphic fields underpinning reality are not primarily physical, even if they have physical effects.
There’s a lot more to talk about here, but I don’t want to get too far off into the weeds.
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So what’s happening here when a morphic field is telling you to ‘get smarter’ or ‘change the way you look’ or ‘burn more fat’?
The Cap’n has specifically and with great skill and metaphysical weight changed the definition of a musical track or an image so that it resonates like something else. By coming into contact with this resonance, you (or very often the lower level Holons that compose the ‘you’ that you conventionally identify as…) begin to vibrate and resonate like that too.
It changes your organizing principles.
The Cap’n is so skilled that he can target even the tiniest components that make up ‘you’. He can vibrate the very molecules of water to split it into hydrogen! Triggering brain chemicals to reorganize or release or causing massive resonant cascades to ripple through your brain to trigger literal neurons to light up is no big deal. Convincing body systems they’ve received the effect of strange substances and having them act ‘as if’ they had? If you can already work at a molecular level, stuff like that is easily within reach.
The morphic fields in the songs, in the tags, in the NFTs, they’re like tuning forks, vibrating. The longer they’re nearby, the more you vibrate too and the more your vibrations ‘sound’ like the tuning fork.
As the organizing principles of the thing change, the ‘children’ holons that compose them are rearranged to fit the new pattern. They must – their definition has changed!
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So a dense, expansive, strong and resilient nervous system (…particularly it’s extradimensional aspect that connects into the organizing principle of reality itself…) is valuable because it allows you to carry (…through expanded capacity and flow…) larger quantities of these ‘changes to your definition’.
Until the changes become ‘permanent’ or ‘completely’ integrated, they’re ‘like’ signals being received that need to be processed and ‘answered’. Some fields are designed to become ‘part of you’ while others act on molecular or biological processes for the short term and provide their long-term benefits on ‘lower levels’.
In either case, you’re somewhat limited by the quantity (capacity) of how many of these changes you can handle at once. The greater your ability to ‘process’ or ‘integrate’ these changes (flow), the faster you’ll ‘notice’ the results. Both of these things are grown by developing your nervous system, though you can ‘train’ them independently if you ever had any desire or drive to do that.
While you might think ‘theoretically’ that because morphic fields are non-physical there should be no limit to how many you can ‘consume’, this is a principle you can test for yourself. You can encounter this ‘circuit breaker’ effect yourself (it sucks) or see that ‘If I use 1 field, it works really well, but if I use 3 fields, the 1 field doesn’t work quite as well’.
This is imminently testable. You don’t have to take anybody else’s word for it! You can scale up your field use until no fields work and then scale it back down until everything starts working again. Similarly, you can track and measure how your ability to process and integrate more fields improves over time, just like working a muscle.
The fact that we are somewhat constrained but those constraints can be grown and developed suggests (strongly) that this ‘receipt and process’ feedback loop is ‘real’ or at least an artifact of how we perceive the world in which we seem to live.
‘Spiritual’ fields or ‘Energetic fields’ also seem to require less ‘processing’ time, which also seems to suggest that this ‘processing’ loop is dependent to some degree on the ‘density’ of the layer that’s being affected. Again, this is something you can experiment with and test for yourself!
Try it and find out.
Or like the angels say:
“Come and see.”
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Again, I want to stress that this is not a definitive, all consuming explanation. It’s a way to explain the kinds of phenomenon we encounter and it holds sufficient water, but it leaves a lot to be discovered and learned. Like all good answers.