Rupert Sheldrake in Oslo 23.10.18 — Science and spiritual practices

thank you and it is a great pleasure to be in your beautiful city here and first I'd like to say thank you all for going to the trouble of learning English making my life so much easier you've done all the hard work all I've got to do is talk in my own language well my theme this evening is science and spiritual practices we're in a completely new situation today which is extremely interesting both from the scientific and the spiritual point of view although there's been a large scale decline in traditional religion in Europe there's been a great increase in recent years in an in interest in spirituality and at the same time we have access to spiritual traditions from all over the world when I was a boy at school I'd never heard of yoga or meditation and today millions of people are doing them all over Europe even in small towns and villages practices that have spread very far from their native land in India and you can now do Qi Gong and Chinese practices and you can do Tai Chi you can go on shamanic psychedelic tourist journeys to Peru and take ayahuasca you can do Native American shamanic drumming and there's so many things you can do now that most people had never heard of a couple of generations ago here in Europe and at the same time there's been a tremendous increase in recent years in scientific studies of these practices people used to think that science and spirituality were completely separate or opposite or even in opposition but there have now been many scientific studies of the effects of religious and spiritual practices and they were brought together recently in a handbook called the handbook of religion and health which is about that thick and it costs about 200 pounds I mean it's and it brings together the results from more than 2000 scientific papers published in scientific journals and what these studies show on average is that for most people scientist pyrrha chul and religious practices make them happier healthier and live longer and the effects are really pronounced the extension of life can be up to 10 years or more so there's an enormous effect of these practices which is scientifically measurable presumably the opposite is also true not doing these practices makes you unhappy er unhealthier and live shorter so the these findings have not been lost on a new generation of atheists because old-style atheists practicing atheists don't do any of these things and therefore run the risk of being on happier and healthier but the new generation of atheists have have accepted this message these findings and and are now taking up spiritual practices themselves sam harris for example one of the so called new atheists in the united states who wrote a book called the end of faith is now giving online meditation courses the British popular philosopher Alain de Botton who was raised atheist in his book his recent book he tells us that his parents who were Jewish and lived in Zurich where militant atheists if anyone visited their house and showed the slightest interest in religion his parents treated them as if they were suffering from a terminal degenerative disease and never took them seriously thereafter and he was raised like and he said he's never challenged the beliefs he was raised with but he does wonder what happens what you do next what is as he puts it atheism to point naught and he's written a book to explain what he thinks it is the book is called religion for atheists and and he thinks that atheists miss may miss out because they no longer have the chance to go and sing together with members of their community to visit sacred places to celebrate festivals to go on pilgrimages to hear sermons which are about how to lead a better life rather than just about facts so he's trying to do something about this he's planning to build an atheist temple in London and he's a very rich man so he can easily make that happen but rather easier to organise he's already started a series of atheist sermons on Sunday mornings in London and meanwhile in in England we now have an atheist church called the Sunday assembly with about 70 different branches and the members of this gathered together on Sunday mornings to sing songs together and to tell uplifting stories and they started by calling his an atheist Church they've now changed the name they prefer to be called mystical humanism so these are movements that are going on because the spiritual practices are actually really helpful in people's lives make them feel happier healthier more connected and they have all sorts of effects on people's well-being which I shall deal with in more detail in a moment well this is the context in which I've written this book science and spiritual practices and in it I discuss seven different spiritual practices this is not the only seven there are plenty of spiritual practices in fact I've just completed a second book with seven more but there are even more after that I'm not going to write any more on the subject for teens enough but there are many different kinds of spiritual and the reason I've chosen these particular seven is because they share a wide range of kinds of practice and they're also ones I do myself because I've been a scientist my entire working career I still spend most of my time in research but I also do these spiritual practices and have always been interested in them at least for many years so the seven practices I discuss in my book our first meditation secondly gratitude thirdly connecting with nature fourthly relating to plants particularly trees and flowers in a sense that's a can extension of connecting with nature fifthly singing and chanting this is something I've learned a lot about from my wife Joe Pass who pioneered in England the revival of group chanting and teaches the fundamental principles of chanting and it was through her experience in these workshops that I realized that many people can take part in spiritual practices whatever their religious beliefs whether they have religious beliefs or not seeing how effective Joe's workshops are with people whatever their belief it's really what convinced me that this approach of spiritual practices is a really important one so anyway there's a whole chapter about singing and chanting which are part of every traditional culture and religion and then rituals again rituals are found in every religion and in many secular context as well and finally pilgrimage so these are the seven practices I discuss in my book and all of them have been investigated scientifically to varying degrees I don't have time this evening to speak about all of them but I'm going to start with gratitude because in a sense this is the most fundamental and simplest of all spiritual practices all religions encourage attitude all of them have prayers and songs and hymns of Thanksgiving all of them recognize this fundamental principle the starting point for modern discussions of gratitude though comes from a branch of psychology around the year 2000 a new school of psychology began starting in the United States called positive psychology and positive psychology differs from the older style of psychology which was mostly about what makes people miserable positive psychology is about what makes people happy so the positive psychologists wanted to find out what enables people to be happier and have a greater sense of well-being they started off by getting volunteers to wear the pagers which would go off at random times during the day and when they got a signal they had to write down what they were doing and how happy they felt on a one to nine scale 9 meant very happy one meant very unhappy and it turned out that people were happy when they were doing all sorts of different things people were sometimes very happy when they were engaged in their work when they were dancing when they were singing when they were playing sports when they were having a very good conversation the common factor of all these kinds activities that made people happy was that they felt in the state of flow they felt connected to something bigger than themselves in a state of flow and one of the things they found in these studies on happiness is they then started looking at people who are unusually happy to find out what are their characteristics and they found that people who are unusually happy are usually people who are very grateful and that happy people are grateful and when they first discovered this is very strong correlation between gratitude and happiness and not only happiness but also being popular and being other people enjoying the company of these people the critics when they first discovered this said well of course these people are grateful they're grateful because they're happy so they wanted to find out whether they were grateful because they were happy or happy because they were grateful so they did experiments being scientists the first experiment involved dividing a group of volunteers into three at random one group were asked to write down a list of things that made them miserable during the previous week things that annoyed them the second group read a story about things from the previous week and the third group wrote a list of things for which they felt particularly grateful and it turned out the people who wrote the list of things for which they were grateful were measurably happier four days afterwards it had a really striking effect even though it was quite a brief exercise they found that the most effective of all their experiments involved what they called the gratitude letter they asked people to write a letter of thanks to someone who'd helped them in their life who they'd never properly thanked it could be a teacher a family member a friend they read the letter thanking them acknowledging what they'd done for them and then they went to that person and read them the letter and when they did that people were happier for more up to two months afterwards just from doing this simple thing partly as a result of these discoveries there's now a whole host of self-help books on how to be more grateful have sprung up in America and of course since it's a highly commercial culture you can now buy gratitude journals where you write daily what you're grateful for but of course you don't need to buy a special gratitude journal you can just use scraps of paper or no note paper or do it on your computer but many people have found by having a regular practice of writing down what they're grateful for bringing it to mind that it changes their lives and many people have found that by doing this exercise by writing down in the evening what they're grateful for in that day as they go through the day they notice things for which they're grateful as they're actually happening and feel the gratitude not just in the evening reflecting on the day but as it's actually going along people who do that and not only happier but they sleep better they're less depressed and they they're just their lives change for the better as simple as simple and exercises that I think one reason for this working is that it is indeed a kind of flow that all of us receive so much the first role the gift of life itself we none of us caused our own life we're here because of the whole history of evolution on earth and our parents and our ancestors we have a huge amount we're grateful for that we had no control over before we were born and we are part of a flow and we're also part of a flow of the food and the drink and all the clothing and everything we need comes to us through a flow of people's activities all of us receive care and love and attention from other people and that helps sustain us and by being grateful it's giving something back knowledge learned we continue the flow the officers have being grateful is taking things for granted or feeling entitled and people who feel entitled to everything they get and complain if they don't get it a January speaking much more unhappy than people who are grateful they're also less popular so I mean it's obvious really isn't it but now it this is one of the cases where science is proving the obvious but it brings to people's attention something you may not have thought much about the well in my book at the end of each chapter I suggest two simple practices that anyone can do to try out these principles for themselves and with gratitude one of the most traditional practices and one of the simplest is giving thanks before meals a hundred years ago most people in Europe would have said thanks before sitting down eating together as they sat down they would have said a grace given thanks as a family or as a group of friends and that still happens in traditional institutions for example in my college in Cambridge Clare College every evening at the beginning of dinner 7:30 in the evening everyone's in the dining hall a gong goes everyone stands up and the senior person present reads a long Latin grace most people probably don't know what it means but it does provide a kind of gap of pause in which people can give thanks in their own way and but in many families in the modern secular world where a lot of people have rejected the religion of their ancestors they usually reject all the practices that go with it including giving thanks before meals so in many families now at least in England people don't do this but it's very easy to reinstate it and in my own family when it's just members of the family we all hold hands together silently to create a pause before we eat when we can give thanks when there's more people one of us says er grace and when we have a bigger gathering we sing a grace we have several graces we sing together and we sing them as round so that they it's in harmony and after singing a grace together the whole room is completely different the atmosphere is different everyone looks happy they're smiling it's a wonderful thing to do that costs nothing takes only a minute or less in England at the moment in most families because they don't say grace there's a kind of awkward pause and embarrass silence before he usually somebody says something like oh do start it'll get cold and so instead of Thanksgiving we have a kind of apologetic banality and it's so easy to turn that around now the second kind of practice I want to talk about is meditation and this is probably the spiritual practices that's been most investigated scientifically all religious traditions have meditation they don't always call it meditation sometimes in the Christian tradition is called contemplative prayer it's something that's gone on in the Christian world since at least the fourth century when monasticism began people in monasteries and convents often spend many hours a day in contemplative prayer which is a kind of meditation and the kinds we know about most today are the Hindu and Buddhist kinds but it also happens among chains and among Sikhs and among Sufis within Islam and in other religions there are two main kinds of meditation there's the kind that involves a word or a phrase or a mantra repeated silently and that would include the use of prayer beads or rosaries the this repetitive use of phrases or words or banters the other kind is called mindfulness meditation and involves just observing the breath or sensations in the body and both those kinds are very widespread in the modern world and let me just ask how many people here meditate or have meditated well that's amazing that must be certainly I can't see very well but it's must be at least 80 or 90 percent I myself first started meditating about 1971 when I started with Transcendental Meditation I was an atheist at the time and it appealed because when they taught it they said you don't have to believe anything just do it and see how you feel and that was very sound advice I'm spiritual practices are about experience and I think in these areas experience comes first the fourth theory or doctrine and for me that I did it and it it changed my way of being completely I did give it up four years when I had young children it proved difficult to meditate and morning when getting young children ready to go to school but when they finished school I took it up again and so as part of my own daily practice well the scientific studies of meditation began in the 1970s both of in at Harvard and in Massachusetts Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School started looking at mantra based meditation and John kabat-zinn another medical man looked at mindfulness meditation and both of these types of meditation are now extremely widespread what Herbert Benson did to start with first look at the physiological effects of meditation and he soon found repetitive and readily observable pattern to understand it you you have to know little about the autonomic nervous system which as you all know has two sides the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system they're like two sides of the coin the sympathetic nervous system of course has nothing to do with sympathy it's basically about fear the sympathetic nervous system is what happens when adrenaline is released into your blood and your heart beats faster your blood pressure goes up it prepares you to fight or to run away it's often called in English the fight-or-flight reaction and this is very necessary if you're being attacked or threatened by a predator or a robber or something like that but in the modern world a lot of people even when they're not being exposed to any danger create an internal dangers for anxiety and worry there was imagining bad things that could happen and and worrying and this creates a chronic state of activation of the sympathetic nervous system which leads to ill health it's really bad to be stressed out unnecessarily the parasympathetic nervous system is about not being afraid and you need to be in a parasympathetic lee activated state in order to do things that require a lack of fear making love for example eating a meal even going to the lavatory you can't do any of these things if you're in a state of fight-or-flight if you're being chased by a bull across a field for example the last thing you think of is making love or sitting down to dinner and a much more urgent priority takes over and but what Herbert Benson found was that when people are meditating the the what he called the relaxation response occurs basically it plays down the sympathetic nervous system activates the parasympathetic nervous system and people enter a much more relaxed state with lower blood pressure lower blood rate lower heartbeat and this relaxation response for many people is a tremendous relief from the anxiety that reflects their life the comedian Ruby Wax wrote a book called frazzled about how to meditate to relieve the stresses of modern life and that's why many people do it and people who meditate are measurably they sleep better on average and they're less depressed than people who don't in fact in Britain you can now get a prescription for meditation from a psychiatrist on the National Health Service because it's been found in clinical trials that people who may in to try and treat mild or moderate depression do better than people who take antidepressant drugs and of course they don't have the side effects that the antidepressant drugs cause and from the point of view of the National Health Service this is good because it's also cheaper so this is now being actually officially advocated within Health System which on the whole is rather conservative in skeptical so people have now done brain scans to study what happens in the brains of people who are meditating and as you probably have heard there's a set of areas in the brain called the default mode Network which when you're not doing anything in particular this is the network of activity that usually gets going and it's concerned with ruminations worries anxieties thoughts about things you should have done or might have forgotten to do it's a kind of internal dialogue that internal mental chatter that we all have at least some of the time and not surprising though there are regions of the brain connected with this called the default mode Network during meditation the activity of the default mode Network decreases and other regions of the brain become more active that's one of the findings not surprising really because many people find that the chatter in their mind decreases in meditation the whole point of the mantra or the mindfulness is to provide another focus for your attention so you're not fully absorbed in all these thoughts that go through your mind all the time and in long term meditators like Tibetan monks there are even quite striking anatomical changes in brains so meditation has measurable effects both on physiology eye and on brain function and on brain structure and again this is not very surprising and if you lift weights then muscles get bigger in your arms and if you do particular kinds of mental activity then nervous connections get stronger in the regions involved people used to think that brains could had no plastic ability to change but it's now become clear they do and meditation can actually affect the wiring in your brain well though meditation is now practiced mainly by most people in a secular context for wellness to feel karma to lead a more fulfilling life to reduce stress and so forth that's not why it was originally carried out by Hindus or Buddhists or Christians or Sikhs or Sufis they were doing it for quite different reasons and they were doing it because they thought that it gave them a direct contact with the very source of consciousness itself I think the Hindus explain this most clearly in the Hindu view the ultimate being the ultimate ground of the whole universe of everything in nature and of all consciousness within nature is the ultimate consciousness which they have a variety of names for but Brahman is one of the commonest ones and Brahman has three aspects this ultimate consciousness sat-chit-ananda Sat is being the ground of being of conscious being the container a conscious container of the mind as it were chit is what the mind is conscious of names and forms and the knowledge the contents of consciousness and Ananda is joy or bliss it's also the moving principle of the minds at which causes change and the idea is the ultimate mind of the universe the mind of God is blissful is intrinsically joyful a blissful so whenever our minds come into contact with a divine mind we experience bliss and that's why most mystical state involved this sense of joy or bliss or being part of something great much greater than ourselves well the Hindus think that the all our minds and all the minds of every other conscious being in the universe are reflections of this ultimate mind they're like fractal versions of it one metaphor they often use is like buckets of water imagine hundreds and hundreds of buckets of water and the moon is shining and you see the reflection of the moon in each bucket of water it looks like thousands of different moons but actually they're all reflections of the one moon which is reflected separately in each bucket and in the same way all our minds the reflections of the ultimate mind but their Heat have a sort of scaled-down version of it normally within our minds were absorbed in the thoughts they're the the chat aspect of the mind but through meditation we stand back we can see the thoughts going through our minds like clouds through the sky and then we realize our mind is more like the sky than like the clouds that are going through it is that through which the thoughts can pass and as we come more to the ground of our being to the very ground of our consciousness we connect more with that ultimate basis of consciousness Sat leaders the conscious being which is at the heart of the divine mind according to the traditional Hindu understanding God is not a thing there God is the very basis of consciousness itself in the caner open assured one of the holy books of the Indians it says it it said not that which is seen by the eye but that whereby the eye can see know that alone to be Brahman the Lord and not that which is known by the mind but that by which the mind can know know that alone to be Brahman the Lord not that which is heard by the air but by which the ear can hear know that to be brahman the Lord it's our capacity to know it's our capacity to be conscious itself that connects us with the ultimate mind and therefore the role of this spiritual practicies through consciousness itself to go to the roof or ground of consciousness in the Christian understanding of the ultimate mind it's rather similar the the Christian understanding is that God is ultimately conscious being the very first announcement of the god of the judeo-christian tradition occurs to Moses in the desert in the burning bush when he asked God his name God says I am that I am it's a statement of conscious being subjective conscious being the ultimate subjective conscious being and in the Christian model like the Hindu ones a three-fold division of God's nature all three aspects to God's nature the second person of the Holy Trinity is the law gasps the mind the form names and forms rather like the realm of platonic forms the formative principle in all nature and the third principle the holy spirit is joy bliss and the dynamical principle of the divine so different traditions have their different models but they all agree that the ultimate basis of reality is consciousness itself and that consciousness underlies all nature and underlies all consciousness within it is not something out there and separate from nature or separate from us well for materialists who meditate then there's a there's a problem how do they interpret what they're doing materialists believed that the whole world is unconscious that all matter lacks any consciousness or mind it lacks any purpose or meaning the whole universe is unconscious all made of unconscious matter but for some unknown reason that matter becomes conscious inside brains especially our brains and that's why the very existence of human consciousness is called the hard problem in the philosophy of mind in a materialist context now for a materialist who meditates they have the same experiences as I often a sense of unity or connection with something greater than themselves but they believe that it's all happening inside the brain is nothing more than what's going on in the brain a release of dopamine neurotransmitter linking up of circuits of electrical activity it's inside the head and nothing more well that's only a theory about consciousness and each of us has a choice do we put more faith in the theory which is notoriously bad at explaining consciousness itself or do we put more of our faith in our own direct experience all religions are based on direct experience rather than theory and it may be that we change when I first started meditating in in the early 70s and I was an atheist I thought it was all inside my head but partly because of my own experiences through meditation and other spiritual experiences I came to the conclusion it's more reasonable to think that this is what it seems to be namely aware of connecting with a greater form of consciousness than our own but as I say that's a decision everyone has to make for themselves and meditation may actually help move the understanding towards putting more weight on experience and less weight on a theory which for other reasons I think is is very questionable theory last time I spoke here in this building on my book the science delusion I was talking about the limitations of the materialist theory of nature I'm not going to go into that this evening but it becomes a personal matter for all of us when we're trying to interpret mystical or spiritual experiences that we may have the next term topic I want to touch on is rituals all cultures have rituals and there are several kinds of ritual but the one I want to discuss first a rites of passage rites of passage are ceremonies which take somebody from one social role to another the most fundamental are dying and being born when you're born then you take on a social role you become a person and when you die you stop being a living personal and you enter some other realm and also some other social realm where you're an ancestor or you've passed on and there are also rites of passage about changes in our social role like marriage where you stop being a single person and become one of the founders of a new family and there are also rights a passage in adolescence for people to become mature men and women rights the passage of growing up the symbolism of many rites of passages of death and rebirth you died your old role you're born in a new way and some of them actually involve life-threatening experiences like the North American Vision Quest where Native American boys went out into the wilderness fasting for days are alone in great danger some died but they were they faced death and then they came back with a sense of their new role as a man in Society and they were integrated by being welcomed back in their new role well hmm I think that some of these traditional rites of passage do actually involve death and rebirth experiences and we know more about death and rebirth experiences today than any time in the past because so many people have had them near-death experiences commoner today than they've ever been before thanks to the advances of modern medicine many people who - three generations ago would have died of a heart attack or medical emergency now survived thanks to coronary resuscitation and modern medical techniques and many people who survived having been on the very edge of death in fact having died and and come back to life again say that they've had experiences which are now called near-death experiences ever very remarkable kind very often people have had these experiences say they experienced themselves floating out of their body looking down on their body from above seeing nurses and doctors doing things to their body they often then find themselves going through a tube a tunnel and emerging into a realm of light and joy and and bliss where they feel tremendous love they're welcomed they're often welcomed by people they know who've died they feel welcomed joyful peaceful in a state of extraordinary joy but it doesn't last long because it's only a near-death experience so they have to go back into their body most people who've had these experiences say that it's changed their life they often say they've lost the fear of death and they've become much more spiritual people more loving and caring and family and friends often notice these changes - so these are transformative experiences that come to people in the modern world not because of spiritual practices often these happen to people who've never done in his spiritual practices they come spontaneously as a result of nearly dying and and coming back to life again but I think some rites of passage actually induce near-death experiences which as we know from these Maltese modern scientific studies of near-death experiences are life-changing and the one I think that's a particular interest in in the context of our own cultural history is baptism in the New Testament we read that John the Baptist and was baptizing people in the River Jordan and people were flocking to the Jordan from all over whose it was happening on an industrial scale and lots and lots of people were coming and he was baptizing by immersing them in the River Jordan and then bringing them up and their lives were changed the only a subjective account we have is of of Jesus himself who was initiated by John the Baptist in this rite of passage and it was the first moment when he felt this complete connection with God when he felt this unity with God and the direct deep relationship it was immediately followed in his case by a 40-day Vision Quest in the wilderness fasting for after which he came back knowing his role and starting his public ministry and healing work and well normally people interpret the activity of John the Baptist as symbolic of death and rebirth by drowning but why settle for something symbolic when you can have the real thing it only takes about two minutes longer and in other words I'm suggesting John the Baptist was a drowner I think he held them under just long enough to induce a near-death experience by drowning and I imagine there was a team of helpers resuscitating people on the bank of the Jordan and probably a line of people waiting for the next one you say next please and I people would have been prepared for this I'm sure and there would have been helpers and cants but the whole thing makes complete sense if he was actually inducing life-changing near-death experiences now of course it would require fine judgment on his part to get it just right and when he started out he might have lost a few and but that was long before the days of liability litigation and so I I certainly wouldn't want to be baptized in that way by someone who just starting you know you'd want to go to someone who was really experienced as he was so I think that this experience which was certainly transformative for Jesus and probably for many other people that's why people were going they were having a life-changing experience at the hands of John the Baptist but within a few generations the early church had stopped doing this and went over to baptizing children babies with water when I think it was just symbolic and so this experience was lost at least for the great majority of Christians but at the Reformation there was a ferment of activity and religious radicalism at the process of Reformation in the 16th century and what happened is that people translated the Bible into European languages and then people read the Bible and when they read the Bible they read about John the Baptist and how this was the form of baptism which was the original form and what they said was this catholic or protestant method of just pouring water over babies isn't the real thing at all what we should do is go back to the original kind of baptism by total immersion and these people were called anabaptists ana means again in greek they believed in baptizing people again when they were mature at least adolescent or mature by total immersion in rivers or in lakes they were the most radical people in the Reformation they were mainly in England Germany Holland and Switzerland but they were extraordinarily unpopular with both the Protestants and the Catholic authorities because they went round filled with divine light what they said was we died we've been born again and we've seen the light and they behaved as if they had seen the light and they thought they'd got this direct connection to God through this rite of passage that they'd undergone I think they probably did have and I think that's what made them so radical and so convinced of their own role they were persecuted mercilessly and in in in some parts of Europe they were executed if they didn't give up being Anabaptists and the form of execution in some parts of Europe was to die to execute them by drowning and so this was considered an appropriate punishment and when the possibility of moving to America began in the 17th century many of them went to America most of the religious radicals in Europe who were persecuted by processes and Catholics went there because it was a safe haven there they founded the American branches of the Mennonite Church the Army's church and the Baptist churches that still exist in America and are still very influential and of all Christian groups as the Baptist's who talk about dying and being born again and seeing the light and I don't know how many modern ones actually have near-death experiences but I think that at least some of their ancestors did and I think that it makes a lot of sense to see what that end in this light it makes sense of what they were saying most modern people don't have rites of passage of this kind and I think there's one reason that so many young people take psychedelic drugs because psychedelic drugs can give and often do give a feeling of dying and being born again the most powerful and intense of all psychedelics is DMT dimethyltryptamine the effects of which lasts only about 10 or 15 minutes but they produce something very like a near-death experience people who've had who've taken DMT who've experienced getting out of their body through a kind of tunnel into a realm of grace and joy and light and love and then having to come back some people experience this with LSD in the 1960s the the Czech psychiatrist Stan Grof did a lot of research in Prague and then later in America on the effects of LSD he studied more than 2,000 people who taken fairly high doses of LSD and he found that many of them had an experience which involved being in a place of great discomfort they felt they were constricted confined trapped often being compressed and then they managed to escape from that and went for a kind of tunnel and emerged into the light where it was blissful and joyful I first took LSD myself in 1970 and I had exactly that kind of experience I'd never heard of Stan Grof or didn't know about his research but for me it was a completely transformative experience and the this sense of bliss and joy coming out of this position of being trapped and utterly miserable and trapped and in care encased in in a small container while stan grof and interprets this in terms of an archetypal pattern Jungian archetype all of us had the experience of being trapped and compressed when we were in our mother's wombs just before we were born we were in the womb with the womb walls contracting and compressing us there was a horrible place to be we wanted to get out and and then sooner or later we did get out and through the birth canal a dark tunnel emerging into the light and Stan Grof thinks that both these near-death experiences which happened the sort of death type experiences and birth experiences are tapping into the same archetype he thinks it's so kind of collective archetypal memory so even people who are born by cesarean sanction may still tap into this collective archetype it's not just an individual memory under these rites of passage ones which give people a sense of this transition now there are many rituals of commemoration which involve people re-enacting some original story of their social group all societies have myths or stories about their origins and many of them have rituals which reenact the foundational myths one example is the Jewish feast of Passover when the Jewish people were slaves in Egypt and Moses was trying to lead them out of slavery to freedom there were whole a series of 10 plagues or curses that fell upon the Egyptians the last of them was the killing of the firstborn sons of the Egyptians and the firstborn of their cattle and Moses told the Jewish people to kill a sheep and put the blood of the sheep on the household of the door of their household they would be passed over and they would survive well this affliction hit everyone else in Egypt and they did that and then they ate the lamb with bitter herbs and got ready to leave in the morning and in the morning the Pharaoh said go and they started their journey through the wilderness to the promised land a foundational story in the history of Jewish people this is reenacted every year at the Passover festival where they learn with better herbs and tell the story of the original Passover by doing that they become part of the Jewish community and connect with all those who've done it before them right back to the first the same is true of the Christian holy communion we're all practicing Christians who take communion reenact the ritual of the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples through eating and sharing the bread and wine that was itself a Passover dinner and by doing so affirm their identity as Christians part of the Christian community linking back right to the first time it happened all those who've done it in the past and secular rituals have the same form in America they have the Thanksgiving dinner in November when Americans gathering with friends and family to celebrate Thanksgiving which reenacts the first Thanksgiving dinner in New England of the first settlers from England in the new world in 1619 their first year when they survived they gave thanks in this Thanksgiving dinner for surviving in the new land and every year Americans reenact the ceremony with turkey an American bird as the the main food by doing so they become American in identity and connect with those who've done it before people who do these ceremonies think they're connecting back through time to those who did them originally and rituals are highly conservative they often use conservative languages archaic languages for example the Brahmanic rituals of India involves Sanskrit no longer was spoken in normal life the coptic church in egypt has its liturgy in ancient egyptian no longer spoken anywhere except within this liturgy the Russian Orthodox liturgy is in old Slavonic again not the concurrently spoken form and mantras are often in ancient ancient words or phrases and why are rituals so conservative well I think a scientific explanation is suggested by my own hypothesis of morphic resonance I don't have time to explain this as evening I'm afraid but just very briefly to summarize it it's the idea there's a kind of memory in nature that the so called laws of nature are more like habits each species draws upon a kind of collective memory each individual draws on the collective memory of the species and in turn contributes to it and this is not just a memory of behavior it's also a memory of form so each plant species each oak tree for example draws on a collective memory of oak forms of past oak trees which help shape its growth each spider draws on a collective memory of web-spinning by its ancestors it doesn't have to learn how to spin a web it just it's instinct in Evolet or as it won't remember through this process of memory which I call morphic resonance morphic resonance is resonance of similar forms or shapes or patterns of activity the word morphic means form across time now when we turn to rituals what we find there is that people are deliberately doing things in a similar way as possible to the way it's been done before which creates the very conditions for morphic resonance and would set up a resonance with those who've done it before right back to the first time which is exactly what people taking part in rituals say they're doing they think they're bringing about a presence of the past connecting through time with those who've done it before and connecting forward to those who do it after them in the future they're part of a chain a connection through history and most spiritual practices in fact I would say all are about connection they're about making us feel instead of being isolated individuals we come into connection with a larger group with history with ancestors with forms of consciousness beyond our own and rituals connect us both with those who've gone before and with the original source of these rituals which is a divine inspiration of one kind or another finally I want to talk a bit about the last practice I discuss in my book pilgrimage all our ancestors were hunter-gatherers agriculture came quite late to northern Europe not more than 5,000 years ago and before that our ancestors lived by hunting and gathering as indeed until the very present a few residual hunter-gatherer tribes still exist on earth but probably not for much longer they all have smartphones now so their culture is rapidly disappearing but hunters and gatherers had to move around the landscape they couldn't just sit there and wait for animals to come to them or fruit to drop into their laps they had to move they were nomadic as the reindeer herders the Sami are still so they had to move around they were nomadic and they usually went in an annual cycle and the places they visited they told the story of these became sacred places on the route the Australian Aborigines call these song lines they sing the story when they reached these sacred places on their annual cycle of journeying when agriculture first began then people created ceremonial centers Stonehenge in England is an obvious example where they would gather for festivals mainly at the Solstice so particularly the summer solstice so people would leave their villages and walk to these ceremonial centers where they'd have ceremonies and rituals then they'd go back again so this became a kind of pilgrimage to a sacred place and all religions have pilgrimage Muslims go to Mecca on the Hajj they also go to Jerusalem to the Dome of the rock and to other holy places Buddhists go to the birthplace of the Buddha into the place he was enlightened Sikhs go to the Golden Temple in Amritsar Hindus go to Mount Kailash in Tibet the source of the Ganges the holy city of Varanasi and many of the temples of India many pilgrimage places in India and in medieval Europe there were many many places of pilgrimage some of them were ancient sacred places that were Christianized like Krogh patrick in ireland the holy mountain or lockberg the holy lake which were almost certainly great pilgrimage places before christianity some of them were sacred caves like the santa Boehm in the South of France which is the place where some Mary Magdalene is supposed to have lived but it's obviously an older sacred place and surrounded by a sacred grove and some of the sacred places were where the relics of saints were kept who were believed to connect pilgrims with the heavenly realms and they usually these were in cathedrals which were the grave shrines for to which pilgrims went well everything changed in Northern Europe with the Protestant Reformation the processes didn't like pilgrimage they couldn't find anything about Canterbury or Trondheim in the Bible so they decided that these must be not valid forms of activity probably rooted in ancient pagan practices well they were right but they decided they should stamp them out whereas the Catholics were much more tolerant and so in in England for example in 1538 Thomas Cromwell working on behalf of King Henry the Eighth issued an injunction against pilgrimage pilgrimage became illegal you just couldn't go on a pilgrimage the shrines were destroyed the shrine of the Black Madonna at Walsingham the most important female saint in England was burned in a public bonfire the monasteries were destroyed which provided the infrastructure for pilgrims they were places where the pilgrims slept and got food on their journeys and similar things happened in other Protestant countries pilgrimage was suppressed in Scandinavia and in Lutheran Germany and in the process and parts of Protestants in Switzerland it was suppressed in France by the French Revolution and in Russia by the Communist revolution so there been pits oppressions of pilgrimage at different stages in European history but I think it's such a basic human urge so deeply rooted in our nature that it left a great vacuum in the souls of Protestants and I think there's one reason why within a few generations of the suppression of pilgrimage the English had invented tourism I think tourism is I think best understood as a form of secularized pilgrimage and tourists still go to the great sacred places the ancient temples of Egypt the temples of India the great cathedrals of Europe but when they get there they can't kneel down and say a prayer or light a candle and be a pilgrim or make offerings or because they have to pretend to be modern educated rational people and they have to pretend they're primary there because of an interest in art history so guides spring up to fill their minds with facts that go in one ear and come out the other and it's in fact from the frustrated pilgrimage because they can't seek a blessing in that place or go and ask for a blessing for healing or for inspiration or for blessing or to give thanks if they're just going as tourists all they can bring back with them as souvenirs and photographs they can't bring back a blessing to share with people at home I worked in India for seven years and when I was in charge of a scientific unit in an agricultural Institute I had a hundred people working on to me I had to sign their forms when they went on leave quite often they come and asked to have several days leave so they could go on a pilgrimage with their family and when they came back from the pilgrimage from Hindu temples usually they brought with them blessed food a special kind of food that you can have blessed called Prasad which you take back to share with people to share in the blessings of the pilgrimage and I loved the fact that they came back and they came and offered me some of the Prasad so I could share in the blessing was so much more inclusive than just trying to show you the family snaps the holiday photos when I went on pilgrimages in India myself and when Hindus go to a holy place they don't walk straight in they walk round at first they circumambulated to make at the centre Hindus walk round clockwise Muslims walk anti-clockwise around the Kaaba in Mecca Mecca so there are different cultural traditions but circumambulation is a key thing know one of the most fascinating aspects of modern Europe is this extraordinary revival of pilgrimage that's going on what led the way was the revival of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain it had almost died out and in the 1980s a group of enthusiasts in Spain recreated the infrastructure so there were places for people to sleep you can't walk for days and days with nowhere to sleep or eat so you have to have the infrastructure and when they got that in place in 1987 1000 people walked to Santiago de Compostela last year 300,000 people walked there and by no means all of them devout Catholics all sorts of people go on this pilgrimage including many atheists or agnostics who find it a meaningful expression and many people are spiritual but not religious and pilgrimage is undergoing an astonishing revival all over Europe in Northern Europe is Norway that leads the way with the the the centre Olaf pilgrimages to Trondheim which is a beacon for many people in northern Europe not just in Norway but Sweden and Germany I keep meeting people from Germany who've been to Norway for this pilgrimage in Britain there's an organisation called the British pilgrimage trust of which I'm one of the patrons I helped start it in fact it's mainly started by two men who set themselves the mission of reopening the ancient footpath tell gamage's in England and we now have about 30 different routes and a website and we're trying to create the infrastructure for an 18 day walk from Winchester to Canterbury which was the main pilgrimage destination in the Middle Ages st. Thomas Becket who was martyred in Canterbury Cathedral and I myself have been doing pilgrimages in in England in the last few years what was a stimulus for me was the fact I have a fourteen-year-old godson he was 14 when I thought of this and I've stopped giving people presents stuff for presents because most people have too much stuff and so I now try and give experiences and when my godson was 14 I was interested in this revival of pilgrimage I said to him my offer for your 14th birthday is this we take the train from London we go to a small village called Chatham we get off the train we walk the last 12 kilometers of the old pilgrim route into Cantabria through fields and meadows and through orchards we go to an ancient healing well the Black Prince as well we go to Canterbury Cathedral you walk around it first we go in we light candles we say prayers we go with an intention things to give thanks for and things to ask for then we have a cream tea and then we go to choral evensong in in our English cathedrals every single day they have a very beautiful evening service sung by very well trained choirs it's amazing every day and I say we go to choral evensong then we go home and I said would you like to do that without hesitation he said yes and we had an extraordinary wonderful day it was extraordinarily happy day and blessed and so the next year he wanted to do another one and so we went to Ely Cathedral the year after that Lincoln Cathedral then last year we went to Wells Cathedral this year too Winchester Cathedral and on the route to Winchester is an old Hill with an ancient labyrinth on the top so we walked the labyrinth and on the outskirts of Winchester is a medieval hospital called sin cross that looks after old men it's called the house of noble poverty and because it wasn't a monastery it survived the Reformation and the ancient medieval statutes say they have to provide beer and bread for pilgrims so when we went there I asked the porter I said where pilgrims were on our way to Winchester Cathedral could we have the beer in the bread and she said yeah yes she said we have a supply and she went Lee was rather good beer and and and bread and so we gods called the pilgrims dull and so this is a it's a remarkable movement because what's happening is that a lot of people are going on these pilgrimages again a kind of physical expression of a spiritual quest and it involves connecting with nature but also with ancient places and I think these ancient holy places have a kind of inherent memory by morphic resonance I don't think the memories inside the stones as it were but I think when we enter those sacred places we come into resonance with those who've been there before because we're it's the same stimuli the same sight the same smells the same play of light and so on and if there's chanting or rituals going on there then that or even strong more strongly connects us for this resonance with the experience of those who've been there before memories and places can of course be bad as well as good and many battlegrounds or places where horrible murders have happened are often regarded as having a bad atmosphere or being even haunted but places where there's been worship prayer meditation and spiritual experiences often have a very uplifting atmosphere and I think that morphic resonance can help to explain that and I think that's part of the appeal of these holy places that are the destinations of pilgrimages well that just gives you a brief overview of some of these practices but I hope enough to see that this revival of spiritual practice that's happening in the modern world is actually a rather remarkable phenomenon it's sort of underneath the radar of the kind of secular media for the most part but it's very widespread it involves a at least in Britain a lot of young people on a new kind of spiritual quest and I think we're entering in fact a new phase of human evolution and that's really what I wanted to say to you here this evening thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Flux Forlag

Views: 31,672

Keywords: Rupert Sheldrake, Science and spiritual practises

Id: NWtWSkU6Puo

Length: 68min 34sec (4114 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018