I admire Rupert Sheldrake for being a bit of a heretic and a maverick but I am not entirely convinced by his theory of morphic fields and prefer my own Garden of Eden theory of shared consciousness.
Edgar Cayce said that fish, birds and bees share a species consciousness rather than the individual self awareness which we humans have. However I suspect that we humans also possess the latent ability to share other types of consciousnesses including a species consciousness, a "God" consciousness and those of other entities.
Like radio tranceivers our minds can receive material from various sources. This is accessed from the subconscious through dreams, art, poetry, drugs, religious and other altered states. Some of these states can be somewhat dangerous such as those accessed by Ouijja boards, drugs or seances. Thus we've got to be careful what we allow ourselves to be tuned into.
I suspect the Garden of Eden story symbolizes a moment in history when human beings evolved from this shared species consciousness into a state of self awareness with a separate individual consciousness. We began as animals in a state of paradise living fully in the present and with no knowledge of good and evil nor past and future. Animals are happy because they live in the now. They do not ruminate about the past nor worry about the future. They are only unhappy when they are directly experiencing pain. Once the pain stops they go right back to being content. I noticed this in Hampstead Heath as I watched a duck being chased by a swan. The duck was distressed only so long as he was being chased. Once the swan stopped chasing him he immediately went back to swimming as if nothing had happened. If he was human he would build fortresses and organise neighborhood watch groups. Then he would form armies. This ability to think abstractly is the source of our unhappiness.
When we developed the neocortex and pre-frontal lobes we became self conscious and no longer content to live in the moment. We left the state of ignorant bliss and began to fear for the future while ruminating over the past. The fall from grace represents this development of self awareness or what Freud would call the "Ego". Lucifer may have meant well in bringing humankind the light of knowledge but he condemned us to a lifetime of psychological torture... and we call animals dumb!
Freud revealed the existance of the subconscious. However he failed to explain the source of its material. I suspect the shared consciousnessto be this source with the Divine spark as the seat of creativity. I do not accept the atheist view of a purely mechanistic universe. The day Richard Dawkins builds a machine which can write good music, poetry and create art, is the day I will accept a view of a soul-less universe.