An Evening with Rupert Sheldrake on Science and Spirituality

now I have the great privilege to introduce our next speaker Rupert Sheldrake dr. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author probably known to many of you otherwise you wouldn't be here he was ranked among the top 100 global thought leaders for 2013 by the dirt velar Institute which is Switzerland's leading think-tank he studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and went on to study philosophy and the history of science at Harvard University before returning to Cambridge where he gained a PhD in biochemistry from 1974 to 1985 he was principal plant physiologist at the International crops Research Institute for the semi-arid tropics a Chrisette in Hyderabad India and while he was in India he lived for a year and a half at the ashram of father beed Griffith in Tamil Nadu where he wrote his first book entitled a new science of life which was published in 1981 there's also a new addition out now I think 2009 he's perhaps best known for investigating unexplained aspects of animal behavior for example how pigeons find their way home the telepathic abilities of dogs cats and other animals and the apparent abilities of animals to anticipate earthquakes and tsunamis he subsequently studied similar phenomena in people including the sense of being stared at telepathy and premonitions although some of these areas overlap with the field of parapsychology he approaches them as a biologist and scientist and bases his research on Natural History and experiments carried out under natural conditions and he's written several books on the subject many of which will be on sale after the talk his recent book the science delusion examines the tender as of modern science and shows how they can be turned into questions that open up new scientific possibilities and his latest books science and spiritual practices and recently published ways to go beyond and why they work are about ways of connecting with the more than human world through direct experience and he's going to be talking about some of the ideas from these books tonight over his career he has won numerous scholarships and awards for his work which nevertheless is still seen as controversial by many in the so-called mainstream scientific community he's currently a fellow of the Institute of noetic Sciences in California of Schumacher College in Devon and of the Temenos Academy in London please give a very warm welcome to our keynote speaker dr. Rupert Sheldrake [Applause] well thank you and thank you Sally for setting the context I'm afraid I've had a cold and so my voice is a bit ropey I'm hoping it'll hold out for the evening anyway I'm very pleased to be here I think that we're in an extraordinarily unusual time I suppose every times an unusual time but in relation to science and spiritual practices it's particularly unusual because we're in the stage at which the pursuit of organized religion has declined to a remarkable degree only about 5% of the population in Britain regularly attend church services for example yet at the same time there's a tremendous growth of interest in spiritual practices and we now have access to spiritual practices from practically all the world's traditions millions of people practice yoga and meditation for example and when I was a child most people had never heard of yoga and meditation outside India or outside Theosophists and and and possibly at the Finn tree trust but no very common every small town has yoga studios and and so on at the same time that these practices are being investigated scientifically which had not happened before and in 2001 a huge handbook was published called the handbook of religion and health a second edition appeared in 2012 reviewing more than 2,500 papers in peer-reviewed journals studying the effects of spiritual and scientific practices the overwhelming conclusion was that these practices make people happier healthier and live longer they have very beneficial Thanks presumably the opposite must also be true people who don't have these practices are unhappier elf unhealthier and live shorter which is why I think militant atheism should come with a health warning because insofar as militant atheists persuade people to give up religious practices they leave them with a kind of void devoid of spiritual or religious practices and because of that a new generation of atheists are in fact advocating spiritual practices we now have this strange situation in which for example Sam Harris one of the so called new atheists is now giving online meditation courses and Alain de Botton one of our leading atheist philosophers in Britain recently wrote a book called religion for atheists in which he points out that when people lose their traditional religious practices and faith then they lose out on a whole range of things which are helpful for religious people gathering together regularly having a sense of community singing together having rites of passage praying being supported by that community in times of adversity celebrating festivals if people give up traditional practices they usually give up all these things as well and Alain de Botton recognizes that these are very important for human health well-being in flourishing which is why he's trying to reinvent atheist versions of these various practices in my recent two books I look at seven different spiritual practices in each book which have been studied scientifically and which are available to everybody whether they're religious or not religious they're all practices I do myself so I chose practices that I have some personal experience of there are many more these 14 practices as seven in each book by no means an exhaustive list there are many more and it's not a question of either-or all religions combine a range of spiritual practices and all of us can combine a range in our own lives I try to do that myself in the first book science and spiritual practices I discuss first meditation which I'll come back to in a minute then gratitude again I'll return to that in a moment connecting with nature or with the more than human world this is a very important part of many people's lives including my own and through being outdoors in in the natural world and for many people it's a source of mystical experiences even in childhood 50 years ago sir Alistair Hardy the Oxford zoologist set up the religious experience Research Unit in Oxford to look at the natural history of mystical experiences and what this unit showed is the mystical experiences are far more common than anyone had assumed most people had assumed till then they occurred to sort of rare medieval saints centuries ago and far away it turns out they're happening all the time in modern Britain in fact some surveys suggest more than half the population have had mystical experiences at some time in their life by that I mean experiences of a presence far greater than their own a greater consciousness than they're in a greater sense of love or connection things which give us a sense of being part of something far greater than ourselves so many people have these in connection with nature and many people find being in the natural world enormous Lee regenerative I do myself the next practice is relating to plants and that's really an extension of relating to nature for me is particularly important one because a lot of my work has been with plants my scientific work then singing and chanting they're part of all religious traditions and they can be done outside these traditions too my wife Jill purse has been leading singing and chanting workshops for more than 30 years and I've seen over and over again how people can come together and out for a couple of days chanting together they emerge sort of cluck bushy tails and you know she were bright-eyed and regenerated because these practices bring one into resonance with one's own body with other people and also with the consciousness beyond the human level insofar as their sacred chants or mantras so that's again something that is very very widespread then rituals present in all traditions and I'll come back to rituals later finally a pilgrimage and again I'll come back to that later this evening so that's the first book science and spiritual practices the second and most recent book has 7,000 spiritual practices and it starts with sports now most people don't think of sports as a spiritual practice but in the modern world I think it's the principal way in which many people enter altered states of consciousness one of the points of meditation is to bring you into the present it's a matter of letting go of that discursive my these anxieties the thoughts which are produced in the brain by the default mode Network that's the rep region of brain of brain actor regions which are involved in the internal dialog and during meditation this realm these parts of the brain have become less active well it become less active much quicker in sports in sports you have to be in the present if you're skiing downhill at 60 miles an hour and you start worrying or ruminating or fantasizing you might go over a cliff and you'll be dead I think that's one reason that dangerous sports and fast sports are so popular in the modern world if you're in the middle of a football match someone's passing you the ball you can't sort of start worrying about what you should have said to your girlfriend yesterday and that kind of thing you've just got to be there in the present and a friend of mine who has had a very busy stage in his life found he couldn't calm down his mind even by meditation and he was insomniac and mind was racing all the time he's also a mountaineer and he found by the time he was 50 feet up a rock face he was completely present I think this is one reason that extreme sports are so popular today a month ago I met in London the world champion freeze so there Highliner highlining is like tightrope walking except on the kind of tape and this chap a young man called Freedia german did there's over a thousand foot drops his most recent one was over a thousand foot waterfall in British Columbia between two cliffs and I asked him why he did it when it was so manifestly dangerous and he said that it forced him to be so completely in the present that it was completely blissful he said it was addictive because it was so blissful feeling of being totally in the present nothing else mattered he said it wasn't for him a spiritual experience and that's why he keeps doing it I think it's interesting that in the modern world which was preoccupied with health and safety and liability litigation that the other side of the coin is the growth of extreme and dangerous sports I nee one of the founders of the dangerous Sports Club in Britain and their club tie shows someone in a wheelchair on it why is it that people are so drawn to these I think it's because it provides this extreme what's extreme medicine as it were for this modern age of distraction now people in traditional societies where life itself is very dangerous don't need extreme sports but people in our culture seem to ever sports also provide a way in which people go beyond themselves through team or group activity as in football teams or even vicariously through supporting football teams people are taken out of themselves and put in something much bigger than themselves the second practice I discuss in ways to go beyond and why they work is learning from animals and again this may seem surprising but animals don't have internal dialogues in the same way we do they don't spend their time worrying about tomorrow or what they should have done yesterday and so on they can be completely in the present if a cat's lying on your lap purring contentedly while you stroke it it's completely in the present and in the way it's inviting you to be in the present - if a dog is eagerly putting a stick at your feet wanting you to throw it and it's looking at you excitedly it's completely immersed in this present moment and you can become so - I think this is one reason so many people keep pants they're inconvenient they're expensive dogs it's very annoying to have to pick up dog poo in little plastic bags that bills are excessive lots and lots of their and tie you down when you want to go away from home lots of reasons why pets are inconvenient but I think many people have them because they bring us into the present and there are many studies which show that people who keep pets often recover better from illnesses diseases suffer less from loneliness in fact they have healing benefits for for many people the third practice I discuss is fasting all religions have a change in consciousness usually a greater clarity of mind which is why many religions advocated it facilitates prayer and meditation so fasting is a spiritual practice that anyone can do you can do it you can do it if you feel you need help and advice you can have a naturopath iranai Vedic practitioner or someone else who's experienced in it guide you but if you feel reasonably healthy you can do it at home and it's free it's not any free it actually saves money then I have a chapter called spiritual openings through cannabis and psychedelics again many people may find this surprising but I think for many people today psychedelics and cannabis one of the principal ways in which they open to the spiritual realm again I shall come back to that later and discuss that in more detail then I just got a prayer petitionary prayer the kind of prayer where you ask for things again I'll come back to that later and in comes in contrasting it with meditation I then discuss Holy Days and festivals which were very important part of all religious and indeed secular collective traditions holy days are holidays and it's the same word and their days when people stop working and can celebrate and be together in the judeo-christian tradition is extremely important through the Sabbath one of the Ten Commandments is about observing the Sabbath not working not making your servants work not making animals were having a day which is free for worshipping God celebrating with your family making love having fun it's the Sabbath is a time to be free and together and the Christians change this to Sundays and Muslims to Fridays but the basic principle is similar but the trouble is in the modern world this very fundamental principle of a seven a seven day cycle is being lost for many people through the 24/7 culture now many people have no relief on Sundays it's just a day for more commercial activities more Facebook more shopping online even Amazon now delivers on Sundays shops are open it's a 24/7 culture and this is very destructive of people's health and well-being scientific studies have now shown that people do much better if they have one day off and these scientific studies are now recommending a 24-6 culture instead and so the Sabbath is being reinvented on a scientific basis finally I have a chapter on being kind because unless these spiritual practices enable us to be kinder to other people and do good to respond better to the world and help the world around us then they can become purely selfish indulgences so I think it's very important for this broader context well now I'm going to talk first about gratitude in a bit more detail gratitude is present in all religious practices giving thanks is very important part of all religions and is now being studied scientifically by the school of psychology called positive psychology positive psychologists people who study what makes people happy what enhances well-being it's a new branch of psychology at any became officially established about the year 2000 until then the principal name of many psychologists was to understand what made people miserable but what makes people happy is indeed an important source of study and one of the things that positive psychologists found was by studying happy people that happy people tend to be grateful people well the critics said well of course they're grateful they're grateful because they're happy but the positive psychologists then wanted to find out are they happy because they are grateful so they did experiments and one of them involved dividing groups of people into 3 one subgroup wrote a list of things they had been annoyed by in the previous week hassles and problems another group registered story based on the previous week and the third group regi list of things for which they felt grateful in the previous week good things that happened and the group that made the gratefulness list were measurably happier four days afterwards the most effective gratitude exercise they found was writing a gratitude letter letter thanking somebody who'd helped you in your life through another friend of him remember a teacher someone who had been a great help but who'd not been properly acknowledged so people wrote a letter giving thanks to that person saying why they were grateful and then went to that person and read it to them people who did that were happier for at least two months afterwards gratitude is very very effective it changes people's mood attitude outlook and makes them happier positive psychologists have also found that grateful people and not any happier but more popular than people who are ungrateful people the opposite of gratitude is feeling entitled or taking for granted people who take for granted earned entitled and complain not surprisingly on the whole less popular than theirs grateful and appreciative so in America where any new trend becomes a commercial opportunity gift shops there now have expensive beautifully produced gratitude journals that you can buy to write down what you're grateful for in but of course you don't need to spend money on a gratitude journal you can do it in any other notebook or you can just do it under your everyday or every week just thinking about it what you're grateful for and it's very simple practice is very easy to do counting your blessings not original another variant of this I suggest two simple practices at the end of each chapter is giving thanks before meals everyone used to do this say grace before meals very few families do it it's considered old-fashioned fuddy-duddy out-of-date and in any case that may be atheist present who be offended by it so people just don't do it was kind of awkward pause when people sit down to dinner and then someone says oh do start it'll get cold or something like that utterly banal it's very easy to Rhys a critize meals or in our end family we hold hands renders just a few of us before we silently so we can each give thanks in our own way or someone says a grace or when there's larger number of people we sing a grace together as around and it completely changes the atmosphere of the meal becomes happier more we feel more connected it costs nothing it doesn't take very long less than a minute and it makes a difference now meditation is the spiritual practice has been studied most and in the 1970s when a meditation was popularized partly through the Maharishi is Transcendental Meditation movement partly through mindfulness meditation from the Buddhist tradition scientific studies of meditation began and what these showed was the people who are meditating first of all become more relaxed it damps down the sympathetic nervous system which was about flight and fight fear and anxiety and activates the parasympathetic nervous system or the relaxation response people's blood pressure goes down they become more relaxed people sleep better there are many physiological benefits from meditation and it enhances people's well-being and protects against depression which is why in some parts of Britain you can now get a prescription for meditation from a psychiatrist instead of an antidepressant drug if you've got mild depression this is because it's been found to work as well or better than antidepressant drugs with far fewer side effects and of course is cheaper which is one reason the NHS is keen on it and for very good reasons studies of people's brains when they're meditating have shown that the default mode network becomes less active other regions of the brain become more active and for people who meditate for long periods like Tibetan monks there are actual changes in brain anatomy there been many of these studies on meditators brains and I think is partly because meditators are literally sitting targets for brain researchers much harder to study the brain of someone when they're skiing downhill at 60 miles an hour so there's no doubt they have all these effects now what is the deeper reason for this well most people in the modern world are perfectly happy to meditate because it leads to happier leads so helps them be more relaxed and enhances their life and meditations are very common how many people here meditate there's definitely a large majority so the reasons for it though in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions and in the Sufi tradition where there's also meditation and in the Christian tradition where contemplative prayer has been carried out in monasteries and convents for at least 1500 years and in the Eastern Orthodox Church where the way of the pilgrim is a famous book which describes the the Jesus Prayer which is a common meditative magic to sin Eastern Orthodoxy people are not doing it in these traditions primarily so they can be more successful in love and business and they're doing it because they see meditation as a way of getting stood a ground of consciousness itself in the Hindu tradition the idea is that the source of everything the whole universe is conscious God is a conscious being that the Supreme Being is conscious that's the primary attribute and that all consciousness within the universe is a manifestation or reflection of this divine consciousness a familiar analogy that the Hindus uses a buckets of water at night you can have hundreds of buckets of water outside on a moonlit night and if you look in those buckets in each bucket you can see a reflection of the moon and it looks as if there are lots and lots of different moons but actually there's just one moon reflected in each bucket and so they say the one consciousness is reflected in each of us and in all those other conscious beings in the universe and through meditation by coming to the ground of consciousness itself you can come into contact with the ultimate divine consciousness which is inherently blissful which is why mystical states are usually blissful supremely joyful and enormous ly powerful now of course most people when they meditate including me don't reach those states all the time in fact I'm for me they're rather rare most of the time I still have thoughts going through my mind and I try and not to I pay attention to my mantra and don't become to them they float through the mind the attachment can go down its I see it as kind of composting there's in a dialogue and these thoughts but they're amendments when it can be her when they can be moments when there's a sense of great peace connection and joy so for atheists who meditate it's all just about changing the way the brains working for those of us who are not atheist it's about opening our consciousness to a greater consciousness and I think that some atheists who meditate through their own experiences may actually change their view of consciousness after all the idea that consciousness is nothing but the brain is something those people except on blind faith no ones have approved it it's simply part of the materialist worldview and when Sally referred to blind faith in in religions though I myself for practicing Anglican I meet very few Anglicans who have black blind faith but the minute I enter a scientific institution I find lots of people with blind faith particularly blind faith in the materialist assumption that the minds nothing but the brain well we have a choice in interpreting our own experience of connecting with the greater consciousness than our own we can either trust our own experience which is direct and is direct evidence or we can put our faith in an intellectual theory making the materialist worldview which has as its weakest point the its inability to understand the nature of consciousness consciousness is the hard problem for materialism as philosophers of mind described it so in meditation although it can be a helpful practice without even thinking about is wider meaning if you do think about it it can be a portal to a much greater worldview if you're coming out of a materia s12 you I myself was converted to the materialists an atheist worldview through my scientific education it took quite a while to come out of it and meditation has been one of the things that's helped for many years now I want to contrast meditation with petitionary prayer petitionary prayer is asking for things and petitionary prayer is present in all religious traditions but in the modern world is probably rarer than meditation and how many people here pray as opposed to meditation that's interesting you see is probably about 20 percent or maybe 30 percent compared with 90 percent meditating I do both myself and I think meditation is now much more common 50 years ago it would have been exactly the other way around and I don't think once right and the others wrong I think they're both important in fact I compare them to breathing in and breathing out breathe meditation I see as a bit like breathing in you let go of your concern with the outer world many forms of meditation you close your eyes and then the thoughts that are going through your mind you detach from those by focusing either on your breathing or sensations in the body as in mindfulness meditation or a mantra as in mantra based meditation and then you try to let go of those thoughts till you come to the basis the ground of consciousness itself so that's like breathing in now in petitionary prayer is working in the opposite direction you start by connecting with a form of consciousness greater than your own by invoking a greater being our Father who art in heaven hail Mary full of grace om namashivaya you start with an invocation of a greater being and then you focus your intention in the context of that to being on the things don't want to ask that you may want to ask for protection you may want to ask for guidance may want to ask for healing for people you know and love off yourself you may want to ask for help in examinations or in interviews or in giving a talk or whatever people have many many things they want to pray about and ask for of your pet animals to get better or for safe journeys so in prayer what you're doing is connecting a spiritual source with everyday concerns many of the things that you're praying about quite mundane and but they're practical and they're important and I think that we actually need both I think if you only meditate and without any sense of prayer then it can become a bit detached from ordinary life and all those problems go on unresolved if you only pray and don't meditate then you're really involved all the time with outer problems and you don't have that retreat into the calmness which is so refreshing so I personally I think it's important to do both and I myself meditate in the mornings and prayer and evenings before I go to bed and because I pray about all the things that are worrying me by the time I finish praying I'm not worried anymore I leave the problems to God so you could think of this as a naive coping mechanism but it actually works and it means that I usually go to sleep quite quickly and don't worry in and and find that it helps me in my life a great deal there's also scientific studies that show that people who pray regularly tend to be happier and healthier in one study in America of 65 year olds they found two groups of people who regularly they've tube two groups of people matched for age occupation health status etc half of them prayed regularly the other half didn't and six years later the ones who prayed regularly had a 60% better survival rate and were less prone to depression a substance abuse alcoholism etc so there are not any health benefits to meditation but health benefits to prayer and as I say I think both of them are important and if you're religious then you have a chance to pray with other people in churches or synagogues or mosques or temples if you're not religious and don't go to church or synagogue or mosque or temple then you can pray at home but I find it I do both I find it helpful to pray with other people it's difficult to do that without embarrassment outside the religious context but I find it very helpful to do both and again I'd only gives either or I think is both and now I want to turn to rituals and there are many kinds of rituals but there's one major category of rituals which are rituals of remembrance and these are rituals which help people to belong to a social group by taking part in these rituals you affirm your membership of a social group you become connected to others not just now but to all those who've done it before for example in America shortly they have the Thanksgiving rituals national ritual rather than the religious one although it is Thanksgiving to God so but it's not in a specific church as a national ritual by taking part in this Thanksgiving dinner Americans affirm their identity as Americans and they connect with those who've done it before them right back to the first Thanksgiving dinner of the first settlers in the new world who gave thanks for surviving a year at that first year in the new world against many adversities and this is part of their national ritual without doing it they wouldn't feel as American and for new immigrants to America through taking part in this it helps to integrate them into the tradition of being American and affirms their American identity for Jewish people taking part in the Passover ritual is again a way of affirming their identity as Jews by taking part in this they affirm their identity as part of a Jewish culture and tradition and in the Passover dinner there's always the telling of the story of the first Passover on that fateful night in Egypt when the Jewish people under Moses instructions killed a lamb and smeared its blood on the threat of the lintels and the doorways of their houses to protect them and then at it in haste with bitter herbs because that night the firstborn of the Egyptians and of their cattle were killed and they were spared be they were passed over and then the Pharaoh said go I don't want you here anymore and it was the beginning of their journey to freedom through the wilderness to the promised land and that stories re-enacted every year in the Passover dinner with lamb and bitter herbs under telling of the story the Christian Holy Communion itself a Passover dinner reenact the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples and those who take part in it enter into communion with those who that meal with them is a shared meal a sign of communion or eating together and are also connected with all those who have done it before them right back to the First Holy Communion and with those who'll do it afterwards so rituals connect us across time with the myth the founding story of the group with other members of the group and with all those who've done it before in every culture we find rituals and rituals have a conservative character the ritual has to be done in the right way and the ritual languages are very often very conservative the rituals of brahmin ik india are in sanskrit the rituals of the russian orthodox church are in old Slavonic Jewish rituals are in Hebrew the rituals of the Coptic Church in Egypt in ancient Egyptian in the only form in which that still survives today and the ritual gestures are also conservative in the format of the ritual why should this be so well I think there's a scientific basis for this it in my own hypothesis of morphic resonance I don't have time this evening to go into the nature of this hypothesis I'll just very briefly summarize it I know it's provocative and so on and if you're not familiar with it it's going far too fast but for those who aren't familiar I just want to give a flavor it's basically the idea is a memory in nature nature is governed by habits which build up as the cosmos evolves the conventional scientific theory is that all the so-called laws of nature were there at the very moment of the Big Bang like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic Code and they've never changed since then what I'm suggesting is that they actually evolved along with nature and the word law is intensely anthropocentric any humans have laws modern science is deeply answerable centric obsess with human metaphors laws and machines and humans make machines habit is a much more general metaphor lots of creatures have habits not just us and so I think there's a kind of memory in nature each species has a kind of collective memory a bit like Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and when Sally reminded us about Jungian archetypes I would see those as examples of this collective memory in our collective unconscious so the process by which this memory works is according to my own hypothesis called morphic resonance morphic means shape or form resonance means an automatic connection with similar patters of vibratory activity it's anything similar in the present will resonate with previous similar things in the past so a baby giraffe as it grows up will resonate with previous giraffes in when it's an embryo it resonates with the form of previous giraffes and takes up its shape its form and then later it takes up the instincts of giraffes by a kind of collective memory the genes enable it to make the right proteins but they don't explain this form or behavior this is obviously a controversial theory but it sheds a lot of light on rituals because by doing rituals is similarly as possible to the way they've been done before then I think the people who are doing them come into morphic resonance with those who've done them before and there's literally a presence of the past through the ritual which is just what people think they're doing when they're caring and so I think this makes very good sense in the light of morphic resonance now there's a particular class of rituals that I want to mention which it rites of passage which when you pass from one state to another from not being born to being born as the most primal rite of passage from being singled getting married from being alive to being dead these are the most fundamental rights of passage and since we're in a cemetery in a cemetery child chapel which is also used for weddings it seems appropriate to reflect on them right here there are also rites of passage about passing from adolescence to adulthood and in many cultures these are associated with the imagery of death and rebirth you died your old social role you're born in a new form many rights of passage have this format dying to your old self going through a liminal region a region of transition and a danger and then coming to a new integration in your new social role well in things like north american vision quests and in trials by ordeal in Africa and elsewhere the is not just an imagery of near-death experiences people do get very close to death some people actually died during rites of passage so they are about near-death experiences so we actually know a lot more about near-death experiences now than people did before thanks to scientific studies near-death experiences are much more common than they ever were before thanks to modern medicine many people who would have died of coronary failure of Acts don't die now they resuscitated thanks to modern medicine accidents and emergency rooms and coronary resuscitation and many people who've been resuscitated say they've had near-death experiences typically as many of you will know they find themselves floating out to their body looking down as an operating table or the scene of the accident and then in a second phase going through a tube or a tunnel and emerging into a realm where they feel blissful joyful it feels filled with love they often meet beings of light sometimes deceased relatives and they feel utterly blissful but it doesn't last because it's only a near-death experience so sooner or later are usually sooner they have to go back into their body and then they talk and talk about it afterwards now many people have had these experiences and most people who've had them say that has changed their life study follow-up studies of people who've had near-death experiences show that many of them say that they've lost the fear of death they've become much more spiritual much keener on helping other people and many of the people in their families said they've noticed this big change that's come about through a near-death experience so near-death experiences can be transformative they are transformative for many people now what I'm going to suggest now is that some rites of passage deliberately induce near-death experiences precisely because they are so spiritually transformative and the one that I think is most familiar at least in name to us in our Western culture is baptism st. John the Baptist as the New Testament tells us was baptizing people on an almost industrial scale people were flocking to the River Jordan where he was baptizing them by holding the Mount of the ward bringing him up again and their lives were transformed it was the first great spiritual awakening for Jesus himself according to the New Testament that was the moment when he first became aware of his intimate connection and with God it was that person his spiritually spiritual rite-of-passage baptism no this is usually interpreted as symbolic death and rebirth death by drowning and rebirth symbolically but why settle for something that's merely symbolic if you can have the real thing and it takes a couple of minutes longer and what I'm suggesting is that John the Baptist was a drona and that he held people under just long enough to induce a near-death experience and then their lives were totally changed really changed not just imagining a change but changed through an experience now of course he may have lost a few and and but by the time Jesus came along he was very experienced and really knew what he was doing but that was before liability litigation and so I think that when we see it in the light of a near-death experience that was induced deliberately induced as a rite of passage it makes complete sense within a few generations the early Christians had stopped this form the baptism they went in for infant baptism and sprinkling water on babies or in the Orthodox Church immersing the baby but very briefly so this was lost this particular rite of passage but in the ferment of religious fervor in the Reformation one group of people the Anabaptists reinstituted this they read the New Testament they saw that this was something that had been done and they wanted to do it again and they started baptizing by total immersion and the Anabaptists were unique among Christian groups of the Reformation and that they went around most members of their group had undergone a personal transformation a deep mystical experience what they said was that they died they'd seen the light and they'd been born again I think they really had and I think for them this was a really powerful experience didn't go down well with Orthodox churches either process Central Catholic and they were persecuted all over Europe which is why as soon as they could and the opportunity arose many of them emigrated to America where they've founded the Baptist churches that still exist including the Mennonites and the Amish and these are the groups of Christians which still to this day talk about dying and being born again and seeing the light very rarely here Anglicans or Catholics talking like that but Baptists talk like that's all the time because for them this conversion experience as a rite of passage is a living tradition how many today so go to the point of nearly dying in Baptism I don't know it would be a very interesting study I rather suspect that health and safety regulations fear of litigation etc probably greatly diluted this but I think that the history of Anabaptists and Baptists in the past suggest this was something that really was going on we've now lost that sense of rites of passage and I think that's one reason that they've been reinvented or have come back through psychedelics many young people today take psychedelics often in very ill-advised circumstances because they want to experience a change transformation of their minds when I was at Cambridge I was a doll in Cambridge in 1970 I took LSD at that time I was an atheist and a materialist and I had an experience which was completely mind-blowing it was it totally expanded my mind and nothing in my scientific education had prepared me for this and it made me think about the nature of consciousness as never before and it's one reason I took out Transcendental Meditation I wanted to explore consciousness without the need for drugs I had a kind of near-death experience I felt I was dying then I felt myself coming up through water breaking out of the surface everything was blissful joyful beautiful serene unbelievably wonderful and in the in his study of LSD experiences in the 1960s and 70s Stan Grof a Czech psychiatrist now in California it studied more than 2,500 people who'd taken LSD and found that many people had had near-death type experiences with it that had been profoundly transformative in their lives so I didn't know anything about Stan Grof at the time but has certainly happened to me the psychoactive compound DMT dimethyltryptamine is faster and more intense in its action than LSD and many people who take LSD DMT have near-death type experiences so to some who take ketamine in high doses under proper controlled conditions so I think that what's going on today is that quite a lot of people are actually having conscious rites of passage that a shocking amount of a kind of materialist worldview and their blind faith in materialism through psychedelics and of course they have dangers and of course they're often done in very bad condition it would be much better if people did them under proper supervision like a real rite of passage with a ceremony of reintegration at the end of it but this is actually now happening there are now legal psilocybin retreats in Holland where magic mushroom sclerotia underground part of magic mushrooms are legal and British psychedelic society organizes weekend retreats you go to nice rural retreat centers and experienced leader you meet members of the group you prepare for it you take the the mushroom then you have a time to join all to write down what's happened to small group discussions reintegration and then you're back at work on Monday morning in England and these translate these in a more religious context ceremonies involving psychedelics are probably most common in the context of ayahuasca a shamanic brew from the Amazon that contains DMT and an inhibitor of monoamine oxidase that makes DMT affected by mouths which normally it isn't thousands of people Gary at Peru and elsewhere in Latin America for shamanic Allah guided our well story experiences and there's also interestingly and surprisingly perhaps ayahuasca churches which have emerged in Brazil Catholics sent missionaries into the Amazonian region where the indigenous people traditionally took ayahuasca as a psychoactive shamanic substance for healing and for visions and for rites of passage and within a few generations what evolved is psychedelic churches Santo domain is the best known of them there's another one who know to have as you tell but there are other ones too the center diamond church is explicitly Christian and in its ceremonies which I have been to myself it starts with you know prayers then as a communion die kind of chalice with the brew and people go up one by one and take the ayahuasca ritually within the ceremony then the whole group sings together and stays together it's not individual tripping there are periods of quiet and concentration but it's a collective celebration which is very bonding for those who are present it makes this psychoactive substance part of a religious ritual where the kind of visionary quality and in this case it's specifically in a Christian framework since I'm a Christian and I'm interested in psychedelics and I'm interested in an animist worldview Santo Jamie takes all the boxes I think I think of these churches is a bit more like a sort of Franciscans all the Benedictines all the Dominicans orders religious orders which have the ability to help people from it go on retreats with them to have experiences but not something you'd want to do every week or anything like that as much too intense so finally I just want to mention pilgrimage as a spiritual practice pilgrimage occurs in all religious traditions in India there are many pilgrimages to the source of the Ganges - holy caves to the river Ganges in Varanasi to temples to sacred trees the whole of India is crisscrossed by pilgrim routes and when you're in India as I was for seven years you often see pilgrims on their way to one of these holy places Muslims of course famously go to Mecca at least once in their life they can and also go on pilgrimages to shrines of Sufi Saints daggers and other holy places Buddhists go to the birthplace of the Buddha his place of enlightenment and so on and Christians in the Middle Ages especially had many holy places here in England which like modern india who was criss crossed with pilgrimage routes the most important was at Canterbury - Shriners and Thomas Becket and Chaucer's famous book The Canterbury Tales written around 1390 is about pilgrims telling stories to each other on the way to Canterbury Our Lady of Walsingham the shrine in Norfolk of the Black Madonna was another of the great centers in Britain and there were many other holy places that were centers of pilgrimage as well but all this came to an end in 1538 when the government of Henry the eighth's as it were formed broke away from Rome abolished pilgrimage Thomas Cromwell issued an injunction against pilgrimage making it illegal the shrines were desecrated the monasteries that provided the infrastructure for pilgrims places to sleep and get food were dissolved or privatized and pilgrimage was stamped out in Britain as it was in other Protestant countries in North Germany in Scandinavia and elsewhere I think the result was that it left a great void in the soul of the English and I think that's why within a few generations the English invented tourism I think tourism is best seen as a form of secularized pilgrimage tourists still go to the great temples and holy places the temples of Egypt the temples of India the great cathedrals of England and of Europe today still go to these great holy places the ancient temples of Stonehenge in Avebury but when they get to these temples to these holy places they can't say a prayer or kneel down or ask for blessings or inspiration because they're tourists their secular their modern secular people they have to pretend that they're primarily there out of an interest in art history and most of them of course are not but they have to pretend they are and they can't take anything away from they can't take a blessing from the place and they can't share it with people back home if they don't receive it in the first place all they can take a photographs or buy souvenirs so I think tourism is actually a form of frustrated pilgrimage and I think one of the simplest paradigm shifts for the modern world just to stop being a tourist and become a pilgrim again and that means going to a holy place with an intention something you want to pray for or give thanks for or or ask or ask for inspiration to go with an intention and make an offering so that it's a sacred journey not just a trip and it's very fascinating feature of modern Europe that pilgrimage is undergoing an astonishing revival at the moment in the 1980s the great pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain was revived by a group of enthusiasts who got the infrastructure in place for this pilgrimage in 1987 1000 people walked on the Camino last year there was 300,000 and lots of people get on these pilgrimages who are not devout Catholics in fact many people who go on them are agnostic or spiritual but not religious they're going because it's a physical expression of a spiritual journey and it's something that makes sense for many people and Santiago has triggered off a revival of pilgrimage all over Europe in Scandinavia the great pilgrimage from Oslo to Trondheim the shrine of st. Olaf in Trondheim Cathedral has been reopened over the mountains and many people are now walking out from all over Scandinavia here in Britain the British pilgrimage trust of which I'm a patron is reopening the ancient footpath route to canterbury from winchester or southampton the old way in nineteen days and getting in place at the moment the infrastructure so there are places to sleep at night preferably low-cost places many medieval churches along the route have already agreed that pilgrims can sleep there in these medieval churches they're called sanctuary churches you have to take your own sleeping bag and pad of course but it's very very much cheaper option and a B&B or a local inn best comfortable of course but it is a pilgrimage they also just last week the British film Asia trust released details on the British pilgrimage website British pilgrimage org have one day pilgrimage routes to all the cathedrals in Britain and these are this is a very accessible and easy way to do a pilgrimage I myself do it every year with her teenage godson when he was 14 I didn't know what to give him for his birthday which is in June and I didn't want to give him stuff I stopped giving stuff because most people have got too much stuff I know try and have experiences instead and I thought what might be suitable so I said to him look my offer is this we take the train from London to village called Chatham we get off at a small request stop in this village we then walk the last eight miles of the North Downs pilgrims way to Canterbury through Meadows orchards and woods on footpaths we visit the healing well of the black prints about two miles from Canterbury we then go to the walk in to Canterbury we walk round the Cathedral circumambulating yet before going in which is what you do in India you always walk around a temple first to make it the center I said then we go in you know we go with an intention we like candles of the shrine we say our prayers don't ask make our requests then we have a cream tea then we go to choral evensong this beautiful evening service sung by the choir and all our English cathedrals every day or practically every day weekdays included and then we go home I said would you like to do that without hesitation he said yes and we had a most blissful day and then he was 15 we walked to Ely Cathedral from water beach getting off the train at water beach along the towpath of the kam the river cam when he was 60 in Lincoln 17 Wells 80 in Winchester in this year 19 Chichester in each case following a similar same walking seven or eight miles on footpaths blissful connection of the countryside is just works much better than just a stroll or a ramble in nature because somehow feel much more connected to the place and then these marvellous cathedrals which are kind of portals for the divine I like all sacred places in all traditions their joint meeting places of heaven and earth so if any of you feel inclined to do this I strongly recommend a one day pilgrimage as an easy way into this pilgrimage experience if you go to British pilgrimage dot-org you can find a mouth-watering selection of routes and here near Bristol I mean as one to Bristol itself to Bristol Cathedral there are also wonderful pilgrimages there's one two baths a water pilgrimage two baths that takes in holy Wells and all the way to pass there are there's a pilgrimage to Wells and blast there indeed does one that goes from Glastonbury to Wells or vice-versa and I must say the Wells pilgrimage is particularly powerful because in the Bishop's Palace garden there are these seven holy Wells that come out of the ground welling out of the ground that's why it's called Wells and just by the East End of the cathedral the cathedral was built in this place of sacred Springs of sacred waters and to visit those first before going into the cathedral is is well worth doing if you do go to Wells you have to go into the Bishop's Palace Gardens to find them but there's a tea room there as well so you kill two birds with one stone and so anyway I these are all different practices that any of us can do and you don't have to sign up to a belief system through these pilgrimages or indeed any of these practices exactly explicitly religious rituals and even choral evensong which is a ritual you don't need to sign up to a belief system many people go to choral evensong just because it's so beautiful to be in a sacred space beautiful music echoing through it well trained choir lovely organ music free of charge and even Richard Dawkins says that choral evensong his favorite service so hmm and with the British public trust in the guided pilgrimages that are organized by the trust one of the slogans is bring your own beliefs so this is very open to anyone so I think I've said enough to give a sense that there's a tremendous range of spiritual practices and because these scientific studies have shown illuminated them and shown their benefits on the whole and also more about how they're actually working physiologically we're in a state here where and spirituality are not in conflict at all they're complementary they're converging in a way that's so much more interesting and mutually beneficial than old-style atheist versus believe our type arguments each side accusing the other of dogma this is not about dogma it's about experience experience is much less controversial than dogma and all religions are primarily rooted in experience Jesus didn't get to where he was by doing a PhD nor did the Buddha these are about their precision experience and I think we're at the beginning of a whole new phase of spiritual evolution right now precisely because of the accessibility of so many spiritual practices and the scientific study of them and there's convergence of science and spirituality that's going on around us is quite recent but its gathering pace all the time so that was the message I wanted to bring to you this evening thank you [Applause] so a big thank you to Rupert for coming all the way down from London to the Wild West to talk to us this evening and I also want to take a couple of other people just before we take some questions I want to thank David Glowacki who we were struggling to find somewhere that would actually host treatment because neither the scientific community nor the religious community were terribly keen on him so he got several rejections they all know he's not Cristiano oh he's not scientific enough but luckily David Glowacki suggested that we try the honours fails and lastly I wanted to thank Jeff snowball and Alexis urano for their art work and for the poster they put together all free of charge so that we can advertise this event the scene and so a big thank you to everyone who's contributed to this and now if people have questions I'm sure Rupert would be happy to - you happy - oh so put your hand up if you have a question through or for Sally so my name is Jeff Webber and the question is well first of all thank you very much for it for your dazzling talk and as you said it seems it could well be that we're on the threshold of perhaps a future so I didn't quite get the question if there's Suns very hard oh sorry can you hear now yes yeah and it was about do you have a vision for the future of our sort of spiritual development well yes I mean the reason I wrote these two books is precisely because mmm I think there is a future for our spiritual development know exactly what form it takes I don't know I mean I myself well then let's say where we start from the position where a lot of people are not religious but there is this great interest in spirituality so I think the question I think there's no doubt that we'll see an evolution of spiritual interests of every kind but I think one of the questions is to what degree they'll be expressed collectively or whether they're just individual now the point about New Age spirituality is it's very individualistic you know each person has a kind of smorgasbord selection of a bit of Native American shamanism statue of the Buddha you know possibly a Blessed Virgin Mary you know incense shamanic drumming a mixture of a dreamcatcher you know crystals they say it's an individual pick-and-mix selection which is fine I mean I I'm sort of slightly guilty of some of that myself but the the trouble is is very individual and obviously many practices are individual meditation you do on your own primarily it's I find connecting with nature is much better on my own if I'm with someone else and we start chatting the whole natural environment sort of fades into the background I it's much more present if I'm there on my own in the natural world so some of them are best done on one's own but others are best done collectively singing and chanting together is best done in groups the celebration of festivals and holy days is best done in groups prayer can be very powerful when done in groups and so then that means either relating to existing religious traditions or inventing new ones and there is an attempt Alain de Botton is trying to create an atheist church and the sunday assembly is an atheist church should now has about 70 branches in Britain people who don't want God but do want to sing together and tell uplifting stories and have a sense of community so there's various ways in which it can be done I mean I myself having been through an atheist phase a Hindu phase a Sufi phase while I was living in India found myself drawn back to a Christian path to my surprise and to everyone else's surprise because I find it very helpful to relate to my own ancestral tradition and to the holy places of England which are primarily Christian and many of them are built on pre-christian holy places but I feel the connection with the holiness of the place more strongly in saying cathedrals built on pre-christian holy places they're non purely pre-christian holy places that looked after by English heritage and you know like Stonehenge where it's primarily a tourist site and there isn't a kind of living tradition of ritual prayer chanting and so on the Druids thought that England should be mounted through the perpetual choirs that should be choirs chanting every day to keep our land enchanted and actually it is enchanted through the perpetual choirs of choral evensong in all our cathedrals so I think even if one's been put off the Christian tradition irreversibly or if one comes from other traditions I think myself think it's important to come to terms with one's own tradition even if one doesn't become part of it again because otherwise there's a kind of break with ancestors break with tradition which if not healed isn't is not necessary very good for us it's better to heal it and I think that people who come from Jewish backgrounds would do best to connect with the deeper and more spiritual aspects of Judaism from Muslim backgrounds with the sort of Sufi mystical tradition the Hindu traditions are plenty of mystical strands and in the Christian tradition reconnecting with the you know the Christian mystical tradition and the mystical theology of the pre-modern era which is much closer to a sense of living nature and is very integrative philosophy that's my own view and it may be that there'll be other ways of integrating all these things pilgrimage is one good way of doing it actually because it connects to holy places that connects to nature and some pilgrimages for example in Leicester to Leicester Cathedral also include Hindu temples and mosques so they can also be integrative of different religious traditions on the same pilgrimage my name is Maria and thank you very much for your talk my question is is there anyone for whom meditation or spiritual practice might not be the most beneficial option and this is from an article I read where for some people meditation might exacerbate feelings of anxiety by forcing them to look within I can't is very hard to hear I'm going to come closer is there anyone for whom meditation or spiritual practices might not be beneficial yeah okay well I think that some spiritual practices suit some people better than others I mean fasting for example would not be a good idea for an anorexic aged 18 who's you know on life support and I think that you know some spiritual practices could be I mean psychedelics definitely it could be dangerous for people who are psychotic to be inclined so I think certain ones of them could be particularly dangerous for certain groups of people I don't think I've not heard of many dangers of meditation except that for some people are rather isolated it might make them more isolated socially so I don't think it's one-size-fits-all and in fact the whole point of having 14 different spiritual practices is to say there's lots of different ones and some suits some people better than others I mean skiing downhill at 60 miles an hour probably not a good idea for someone who's 90 years old and arthritic but it might have been a very good idea at age 20 and so some things work better at some stages of life than others as well so I'm definitely not saying they're all good for everybody all the time I think some are good for some people much of the time and most of them were good for most people most time actually hi my name is Jorge thank you for a really interesting speech another question about the future are pause any mm not the question about the future and it seems mean there's a self-selected audience here that susceptible and opens these ideas yeah and it does seem the momentum is in our favor of higher consciousness but the the first speaker talked about the kind of crisis and the urgency that we have around this and many young people feel that so I was wondering if you could speak a bit about how we could accelerate that increasing of consciousness and in particular is there a language that we can use that can touch the masses rather than just people who are already inclined to believe in this stuff yes mm-hmm well I think that's very important question I think there are certain things about existing traditions that do touch lots of people for example in Middle Ages every parish in England had a patronal Festival on the day of its patron saint when the whole village would celebrate it was a holiday and a celebration you still see this in Italy in Spain with their patron saints with the Puritans in particular in the processes in general were rather against these celebrations they thought they were occasions for immorality no doubt they were and they suppressed many of the festivals they even tried to suppress Christmas and failed with Christmas but even in the 19th century there was an attempt to suppress Christmas Charles Dickens is famous Christmas carol was part of a Christmas revival movement there it wasn't a foregone conclusion at all that this would become the festival we know today and what we've seen is a revival of popular support festivals Halloween is a case in point Halloween is the eve of the feast of All Hallows All Saints November the 1st and All Souls November the 2nd and those of course are major festivals in Catholic countries we have All Saints as a public holiday and All Souls days the Day of the Dead which in Mexico is that and in other Catholic countries is a massively popular festival involving young people old people everybody Halloween which has undergone a remarkable revival in Britain they were suppressed in in after the Reformation it survived in Scotland and Ireland whence it went to America Knights come back here from America Halloween is now a popular children's festival but it's the eve of the festival of the Dead which the festival itself has been hollowed out and I think one way is to recover a sense of these festivals the importance of the Day of the Dead is to remember our ancestors remember those who've gone before and and celebrate the memory of them in Catholic countries there goes graveyards like candles and I think there's a great scope for reviving that everybody as members of the family who have died everyone knows who people who have died and I think making much more of the real festival not just the eve of it would be one way and the other thing is through and other ways through summer festivals and if you take the Glastonbury Festival for example what's happened is that after these great festivals are suppressed in the Reformation and by the Puritans we've now had a huge resurgence of popular festivals which appeal primarily to younger people the Gaston berry festival which has what 250,000 people going to happens at midsummer the traditional maximum festival time in England and all over Europe was Midsummer's day June the 24th displaced a bit from the equinox just like Christmas is displaced a bit from the winter assault solstice from the winter solstice I went I have a nephew who lives in Pilsen is where the Glastonbury Festival happens and a few years ago he invited me to the festival and said I could stay in his house and made it a much more attractive proposition than a mud filled tent so I went to the festival with my wellington boots which turned out to be very very necessary and I was able to sleep in his house and on Sunday morning as is my custom I go to church wherever I am on Sunday morning which means I get to visit all sorts of interesting and unusual churches in this case I just went to the parish church of builtin and it was when I wore it was June the 24th it was the Feast of sin John the Baptist the Glastonbury Festival was in full swing and when I walked into the parish church on the noticeboard I was amazed to see it said the parish church of st. John the Baptist Hilton and so I said to the vicar after the service you've got the biggest patronal Festival in England you know 250,000 people celebrating in your parish and he looked a bit blank he hadn't really thought it through but I think is true that what's happened is we've reinvented these festivals in another form so I think that's one way in which people are already engaging in in a very popular way through festivals pilgrimage is also quite attractive a lot of young people and a new initiative that's starting this coming year is that in some schools particularly in year six in primary schools some primary schools are trying something new this year when children leave primary school they're starting a whole new phase of their life they're going to ascend through school everything is going to be different they need a kind of rite of passage and some schools this year and now I'm going to take their year six on pilgrimages to a local holy place walking for several miles as far as the children can I mean it has to be calibrated to the abilities of the children of that age but having pilgrimage as a kind of rite of passage for year six I think is a very very good idea that could catch on it hasn't happened yet but if it's successful in the schools that's going to happen in this coming summer it could catch on in a big way and then there could be rites of passage of a similar kind for people in the upper six after a-levels when they're about to start a whole new phase of life so I think that introducing rites of passage that can be inclusive for people of all backgrounds of course they can't be compulsory but introducing rites of passage of this kind could help to change our culture very quickly and also that almost no cost since walking is free so I think there are quite a range of ways in which this could happen and I think one of the challenges is to think of ways of helping the spiritual transformation to happen more widely one of the points of recognising sports as a spiritual practice is I think that that already has a massive popular following and it might help people to see that there's actually more going on than which team wins and actually recognizing their own experience something that's taking them beyond their own limited personal narrow concerns so simply reframing sports and reframing what happens when you keep a dog or a cat could affect millions of families in Britain even if they're completely detached from any religious tradition because these are meaningful things people so I think it's partly a question of reframing and reinterpreting and by doing that I think that what people are doing anyway will become much more satisfying and enhance their well-being and also help any kind of social transition connecting with nature is another one of course and now many well in some parts of the world in Northern Ireland in parts of England are now major initiatives for forests schools and outdoor learning learning without walls where children are taught outdoors much more experientially than everything just being in classrooms and again that could help to reconnect with the natural world which many children are very detached from because they spend most of their time on screens so I think there's all sorts of possibilities and initiatives here hi my name is aria thank you so much so my question is another futuristic question just to keep it on the line is how do you see the future interphase fusion or possible collision of you talk about the morphic resonance and how I've always seen it that we we have a native Wi-Fi which field that as you say animals have an ourselves through an accomplice navigating this is a part of intuition yeah and now that obviously we're progressively moving into a more kind of maybe weren't going to transhumanism but into a field of you know high high pace Wi-Fi which for me you know many contend including myself could and does interfere with our native Wi-Fi and I personally even though this you know high-speed train of technology you know species accent direction I'm extremely concerned being you know knowing I'm quite sensitive to it although it doesn't really affect my my biological you know health but I know many hyper sensitive people and so you know as as a virtual partition as a magician myself I'm also really wondering you know how much that's going to affect our native electromagnetic field our native Wi-Fi and potentially are our sole sovereign potentiality our cities however one you can't call it yeah yes hmm well I mean there are several levels to this on the one is the possibility of actual physical damage caused by especially five key when it comes in no against have no 30,000 satellites there's already a 20,000 new it's been put up beaming down everyone earth masks every hundred yards much stronger signals what will this do to people and mobile phones beaming things into your brain I mean or men carrying them in their pockets and we're the rise in infertility I mean personally I don't have a mobile phone I do you know I just don't want to be irradiated all the time and I also don't want people to ring me up all the time so it's partly selfish and so does that level the seed and who knows I'm not an expert on these and I didn't think anyone is I think the whole human race is being subjected to a massive experiment without any control conditions and driven simply by a blind faith in the advance of Technology and progress I think the use of all these social media and instant interconnection is I mean it can have good effects but I think the main effect for most people is constant distraction and that is is definitely a downside for any kind of spiritual or mental balance I think one of the things that in in my discussion of holy days and festivals I think one of the important things is is to have a kind of technological Sabbath I myself on Sundays try not to do emails or spend time with my computer or or work or interact with with electronic media just be present with my family and walking outdoors or going to services singing music I think that having a technological Sabbath is important for everyone's health and sanity and that's something over which we all have some control but there's no reason any of us have to be available every single date wants to get in touch I mean and that's or a doctor on call or something like that but they even doctors on call if holidays when they don't have to be on call so I think all these things are potential problems but one of the things that I find most interesting is that as a matter of fact some intuitive skills are actually evolving alongside technology and the one that's interests me most is telephone telepathy ever since telephones were invented people have had the experience of thinking of someone who then rings up and they say that's funny I was just thinking about you or knowing who it is before they answer the phone most people have had to have that experience how many people here had that kind of experience with phones well that's almost everybody well you see before the telephone was invented no one would have had that experience because there weren't any phones what they had in the 19th century was letters crossing in the post where people would sit down to write to someone they knew and then two or three days later they'd each get a letter from the other and it turned out they had written them at almost the same time and it was called letters crossing in the post now it's much more speeded up and now practically everyone has phones all the time when I was a child growing up in a small town in the Midlands I really worked 20,000 people in the town new account rent I think they were about two or three hundred people had telephones telephone numbers didn't go beyond a thousand they were all in the hundreds so very few people had them now country everyone has a mobile phone and so this experience of feeling you can call anyone anytime you like and have the intention to call them means that lots of people are sending out these intentions to other people all over the world to call them and people are responding to these intentions by thinking about them or just knowing who's called and so we've now reached the stage where virtually everyone's having telepathic experiences in connection with phone calls similar things happen with text messages and emails I've done a lot of experiments on this to fight I have shown is not just coincidence and in fact anyone who wants to can take part in one of my experiments in fact I encourage you to do so the I have online telephone telepathy test you register through my website Sheldrake dot org you put in the names of two people you know well and their numbers and then the computer picks one of those two corners say I'm the subject and I've got two callers Jill and Joe then we'll pick Jarrell Joe and ring them up and say Joe gets it she'll answer it so this is Rupert's telephone telepathy test please think about rumors and when you're ready press one so she presses one my phone rings it says this is your telephone telepathy test the caller ID says telephone telepathy test says one of your two callers is on the right line right now wishing to talk to you press one for Jill press two for Joe so I guess if I guess Jill I'm right if I guess Joe and wrong fifty percent chance of being right by chance the scores are coming in very significantly above chance and then the line opens up and you get instant feedback as to whether you're right or wrong then you talk to each other then after a minute it counts off because I'm paying for the call and hmm so actually these technologies in some ways have led to some people becoming more intuitive than they were before because there's telephone telepathy thing is by far the communist kind I've done surveys that showed that no over 90 percent of people have had this experience with phone calls but you know with other forms of telepathy it's more like 60 or 70 percent so it's by far the communist kind so I find it's encouraging that these technologies are actually bringing up these latent powers which are coming out in connection with them I think some other latent powers are being suppressed for example the sense of direction no one really knows how it works subject I'm very interested in but most people are never going to develop a good sense of direction if they go everywhere with GPS systems because there'd be no need to do it so you know it's a mixed picture some things will get better and others might get worse hi I'm thanks so much oh good thing that's me yes you come out near me I can hear thanks so much for really expensive and insightful talk there's a pretty compelling argument in the moment we're about to enter or our generation ones after us are going to enter a time of change scarcity potentially conflict it's not totally proved not like to believe otherwise and I appreciate it if we all individually enter into more spiritual practice and that will be nice to people and we're less likely to sort of war of each other but beyond that on practical terms of a certain areas of adopting spiritual practice or psychedelics or any Vieira's you've talked about which offer Humanity in the planets and the greatest potential benefit in their challenges that we face and also what will bring that positive change about well I wish I knew the answer to that question and because obviously it's something most of us think about most of the time or least some of the time I think that the I think one step is to recognize that we're interconnected with each other and interconnected with the planet and that after all is a realization which is dawning on a lot of people now I mean when I was growing up there everyone just believed in progress and when I first became a scientist I believed in progress to science and reason and technology you need humanity to a brighter and better future the only cloud on the landscape was sort of DDT and toxic chemicals but most people didn't give a thought to the pollution caused by jet travel car travel emissions burning coal burning gas all these things and then single use plastic came in it was just convenient and most people just used it and thoughtlessly threw away tons of plastic every year while we still do all these things but now people are becoming much more aware of the negative effects of these I myself you know I now think twice about going on planes in Scandinavia thanks to crash a ton Berg they now have this thing called plane shame and I think we should all have plane shame it's one of the worst things I and everyone I know does because you're emitting carbon fumes right into the atmosphere planes are extremely wasteful of energy and right now people are rewarded for flying more frequently frequent flyer benefits in fact it should be exactly the other way around if we can't fly out taxes or TV people should be penalized for frequent flying and you know I think that this changing awareness and where people are becoming more and more aware of single-use plastics I mean still far too many of them but supermarkets are feeling they should at least show some signs of shifting towards on wasteful use of plastics so I think part of it is coming about through these changes in attitude extinction rebellions done a great deal to raise awareness of them now of course that's not going to stop the Indians and the Chinese building more and more coal-fired power stations and the Chinese are building lots of them in their belt and Road initiative in dozens of different countries and it's very hard for us to go around the rest of the world and say well look we've had all the benefits of reckless use of fossil fuels and reckless use of the world's resources but you can't do it because now and for the planet I think all of us have some we all of us have to make differences in our own lives traveling less wasting less consuming less changing our diets because eating lots of meat is one of the things that is highly destructive in the whole planet people have to change their diets and lots of people are I mean the rise of the vegan movement in Britain is astonishing and lots of people eat far less meat than they used to so all of these things I think changes in individual behavior but also have to be changes in economic and political behavior and legislation and you know things like something signs are good I mean the fact that when offshore wind power is now cheaper than fossil fuels as of a few months ago is extraordinary good news I think and right now these offshore wind farms produce so much electricity when it's windy and they have to shut them down because it would burn out the National Grid but actually the next stage they're already talking about and should be doing something about soon is to have hydrogen making plants where the electricity comes on shore when there's too much it's easy to make hydrogen you put electrodes into water salt water and hydrogen and knots and gas come off and this could then be burned when does not wind or use to fuel jet planes or cars in a way that's not environmentally destructive so there are technological possibilities I'm hopeful about those budget you know it's not hopeful when you look at some people in the political world like the President of the United States who continue to deny there's a problem and who are in fact trying to unravel environmental legislation it's obviously an enormous struggle and I think all of us have to take part in it our ability Rubert can you hear me no I'll come here hmm the loudspeakers all pointless way and I can't hear from if you come up here Trevor yes my name's Trevor I had a question we're clearly interested in God I just wondered if he thought God was interested in us oh well I I think that you know it depends what view you have of God I see God is sustaining or being from amendment amendment to ground of being and also the root and source of all forms and patterns in nature and also the source of all the energy in nature breath wind energy sunlight I see God is in nature and has also beyond nature and we're part of nature we're within God and I think I think that God is inevitably interest in us and indeed in everything else because we're within the divine being now you see this is a different view from our view that sees God as external to nature and only intervening occasionally a view that came about in the 17th century in the medieval theology most people in the Christian world and in every other religious world assumed that God was in nature as well as beyond nature review that's called pan and theism God is everywhere and everything's in God so the idea was that we live in the living world and the Middle Ages plants had souls animals had souls the earth had sold the planets were alive the stars were alive every star had its own intelligence an angel that God edition versus creative intelligence when medieval people in England looked up into the sky they didn't see lots of stars that were just hydrogen bombs are bearing natural laws they saw a living heavens filled with the presence and being of God with every star a kind of intelligence and in the 17th century with the Scientific Revolution all of nature became a machine mechanical made up of dead inanimate matter just working mechanistically and then what role had God in this kind of world where he didn't have much his main role was to do with human morality because the only thing that was open to God in the whole of nature were human minds according to Descartes Cartesian dualism split god from nature so the whole of nature was anonymous and mechanical including human bodies and God angels and human rational minds were the only things that were non material and the only thing in the material world that wasn't material and it was open to God was the human mind and so and God himself was supernatural or beyond nature so there was an automatic nature going on automatically according to natural laws God was outside nature removed from it accessible only through human minds and acting only through human minds occasionally it was believed in the past he intervened through miracles by suspending the laws of nature and interfering with the course of nature but it was generally thought by India by the 18th century that was all in the past and that left very little room for God God was extremely remote and had no particular reason to care for us and then with the rise of deism in the late 18th century people said well the universe needs a God to design the machinery and to fix the laws but then once he's pressed the start button he just retired so you had a God who had nothing to do with nature or human and then Along Came atheists and said well why bother with such God in the first place let's just say the universe is eternal then you don't need a god to start it off all to make up the laws of nature just get rid of God altogether and that's what happened for many people so I think if one has a view of God that's a day a stick or theistic in the mechanistic sense of theism 17th 18th century theology God's outside nature and it's not obvious why God will be concerned with what happens in nature but if you have a view of God as imminent in all nature and in all minds and in all forms of consciousness then it's a completely different view of being possible for God not to know what's happening and you know they say I don't see any reason to assume that the divine that that bad things can't happen because obviously bad things do happen the universe was formed in a catastrophic explosion that disrupted its initial unity before the Big Bang and there's been disruptive forces at work in nature ever since there's part of evolution they include collisions explosions suffering decay death senescence disease all these things are part of the natural order so I don't expect God is I don't think of God as a defective designer who didn't think design nature properly so why is there all this suffering in the world so the view one takes very much depends on the kind of theology one has and as I say my own view is is that yes that within the divine mind are in mind so within that mind and indeed they're part of the divine mind I mean the whole point of meditation as I mentioned earlier within the traditions that is rooted in is precisely to bring us into more direct conscious contact with that conscious ground of all things Rupert can you hear me thank you very much it's Sam yeah I've yes I think we've seen each other for at least 10 years and I think you're looking you're looking very well on your combination of faith and science so it gives me faith in your in your exposition I I wonder about in relation to the last two questions about denial and belief it seems that belief is problematic because we can believe things that are just obviously not true and we can believe them without much religious faith as does Trump it seems he refuses to believe all kinds of things perhaps even the impeachment can you say a little bit about the human mind in relation to denial and belief yes nice to see you again Sam we used to be neighbors in Hampstead so well obviously belief can be false there are lots of false beliefs and I think one of those false beliefs is scientism you know belief in the mechanistic materialist worldview I think is a particularly harmful belief so what the reason that I am I wrote these books about spiritual practices is because these practices are not primarily about belief they're about experience and I think that beliefs can mislead us but experiences are much more reliable you know if you have an experience of love and you know connection then you're feeling loving and connected and often behave accordingly so I think the experiences of what it's primarily about and I think that all religions really start from experience not belief the beliefs in an attempt to understand the experiences you know the Jewish prophets had this experience of something speaking through them which was more than them it wasn't just them there was some some greater presence speaking through them when Moses encountered God in the burning bush he was in the presence of a being of consciousness that was not his own and which spoke to him about it his own nature I am that I am conscious being a greater conscious being than his own so I think all these things are formulations of experience and you know Jesus's experience of his direct connection with God which came about first in his baptism again was experienced and he wasn't telling people to believe a set of doctrines he was telling them that to have trust and faith and I think that's where belief is much more powerful and meaningful if you believe you're going to get better when you're ill you're more likely to get better then if you believe you're going to get worse that's the placebo effect and it's opposite the nocebo effect so I think that the there are some kinds of belief belief in propositions which don't really affect our behavior that much I mean the scientific worldview is mostly about propositions you know that we're descended from apes that apes you know were descended from other mammals and that kind of thing and it drives a lot of scientists crazy when they find a lot of Americans don't believe that they think it's really important that they should believe that and that it should be taught in every school and children should be told it's true I didn't even matter as much what people believe about distant evolution I think it matters a lot about what people believe about our relationship to the universe no and and also what we what we can put our trust in and the whole point about trust in God is that if one has a trust in God or if one doesn't like word God the all or the absolute or that which is beyond then one basically feels that one's living in a friendly universe if one distrust God one feels one's living in a hostile unfriendly universe that's likely to produce the kind of paranoid worldview and paranoia is very health damaging so I think these beliefs are important when the influence our behavior and some false beliefs have very negative effects on behavior but in the end what changes people is experience and that's why I think these spiritual experiences are so important I mean I believed in the Atheist materialist worldview and what changed me was not logical argument by Christians or Hindus or Buddhists and I wasn't very impressed by their arguments what changed me was experiences experiences of travelling in India the experience of meditation experience of psychedelics and other experiences so again I think it really comes back to experience being the key and Trust being a key as well because unless you trust other people and Trust in the future and Trust you're going to get better or trust that you live in a basically friendly world then you won't have such a happy successful or healthy life but I think the point is that this trust is actually borne out by actually what happens there are obvious cases where it's not as in the book of Job in the Old Testament a job a good man suffered the most appalling misfortunes so this is a very old question anyway I think I'm not advocating blind belief in anything so we have time for maybe one more short question and short answer anybody yep okay hi Robert my name's Richard in your career as a scientist investigating latent beliefs have you ever been asked to work secretly for example for the military have you been offered a job in the military ever in the military in the military with with your research and secondly do you think research into latent beliefs is being done in secrets I'm being used to keep everyone else down and keep that knowledge away from the from the population as a whole well I know that him the during the theories of the Cold War there was quite a lot of military research on telepathy and clairvoyance both in America and in the Soviet Union but and I know some of the people who did that research you know I know parapsychologists and psychic researchers there's not very many only 20 or 30 active researchers in the world because there's so little funding for it it's marginalized in most universities or actually excluded so I know the people who ran the Stargate program and since the Cold War ended has been almost no research in these areas according to them and you know you might think in Britain since I'm a well known researcher in these areas that I might have been contacted by the defense and in fact I have about ten years ago a trap I met at a kind of there's a conference of the Society for scientific exploration which is the kind of open-minded science group there was a chap there who was very keen on knowing what was going on and he bit shadowy when you asked him what he actually did I was convinced he was working for mi5 or something like that you know monitoring the leading edges of science and then a year or two later asked if he could come and see me with a colleague of his from the Ministry of Defence and so I invited them to lunch a house in Hampstead and they arrived wearing suits and ties with leather briefcases and so I said to them well gentlemen what can I do for you and the man from the Ministry of Defence said well let me come straight to the point he said if terrorists learn to communicate by telepathy could we intercept it and I thought there's a good question and so I said no because telepathy works only between people who know each other very well you couldn't just listen me and you wouldn't I said and for that reason I think to let the terrorists be well advised to set up telepathy training camps then as you know I wrote a book called the sense of being stared at about the sense of being stared at and telepathy and premonitions and then he said do you think terrorists could train themselves they had a conversation between themselves and one and said you know this would be a great development you know we could we could have this developed as a commercial project you know and one the other one said you have to be a huge market with homeland security in the US and so you can see their minds racing with the possibility of this new improved surveillance equipment the terrorists couldn't detect and you know they got in touch with me afterwards and said would I help with these experiments or help them set up experiments and I mentioned it one or two of my colleagues insightful research and they said you know you could probably get quite a lot done by working with them but they said they said we advise you not to do it because if you do they could classify all your research under the Official Secrets Act and you'd then just be completely silenced so I said no I said to them you know I wish you well if you do this research but I don't feel I can take part in it with you but I haven't heard much more and I very much doubt it as much going on because what I discovered about military organisations is that there are people who are very open to this in the military world perhaps more so than in much more so than in the academic world on the other hand there are also lots of skeptics and materialists in the military world who say it's all rubbish and a waste of public money so even in the Cold War there was a big debate went on in the Pentagon about this and the skeptics almost won so it's not as if they all think the same way they don't just like in regular life everywhere else there's a variety of opinions so anyway I myself as far as I know don't think as much if anything going on in the military world along these lines I may be wrong but I know almost everyone who does research in this field and are their friends I know them well and I'm pretty sure there's if there's anything going on it's not very much reassuring me we'll call it a day Rupert will be prepared to sell his books to you and to sign his books if you buy one there are also some Finn tree trust books shrine of wisdom books on sale so if you would like to avail yourself of the opportunity to purchase them do this at the end so I just like to say a big thank you again to Rupert and to Sally and to the other speakers I think we've had a tremendously rich and interesting and engaging evening and so I ask you to put your hands together [Applause]

Channel: Fintry Trust

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Id: D6sHRzph3Vg

Length: 125min 4sec (7504 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020