Rupert Sheldrake: The Mind beyond the Brain

I'm very used to be Garrett and admire event I think what they're doing is quite wonderful and inspirational I'm talking about the mind beyond the brain and might extend beyond brains in a range of different ways so I have to cover a lot of ground in half an hour but what I can suggest is that our minds are extending beyond our brains right now they're filling this room in measurable ways and I'll explain how they extend far beyond our brains in linking us to other people and to animals and to others with whom we have emotional bonds extending onto our brains in time as well as in space through memory and through connections with the future and they extend far beyond our brains through mystical experiences and connections with higher forms of consciousness now the conventional view of minds is very different from all their the conventional view put forward by the materialist belief system which still dominates our universities and educational institutions is that the mind is nothing about the brain the minds are what brains do minds are nothing about brain activity and all our mental life is encased inside our heads we're insulated from everybody else in the privacy of our skulls now that is the standard view and it's dominated the sciences since the late 19th it's the basis of contemporary medical thinking biological thinking the brain is just a computer inside the head the trouble with this is that it doesn't first of all they explain consciousness itself if we live in materialist universe which is made out of inanimate unconscious matter and everything is made of inanimate unconscious stuff then how come we're conscious at all we ought not to be so some materialist philosophers of mind try to pretend that we're not and trying to explain away consciousness as a kind of illusion the trouble is that doesn't really explain it away because illusion is itself a mode of consciousness and in fact the very existence of consciousness is called the hard problem in the philosophy of mind now the first point I want to make is that if we think about something as simple as vision we arrive at the idea of the extended mind of the mind beyond the brain if you think of what's happening when you see me standing here now the standard view says that lights reflected from me goes through the electromagnetic field inverted images on your retinas changes in the cone cells impulses up the optic nerve changes in different regions of the brain and all that certainly happens but then that's supposed to explain vision well first of all it doesn't explain the fact you're conscious of what you're seeing that's an aspect of the hard problem but secondly it doesn't explain your actual subjective sensation you're experiencing a 3-dimensional world in full color all of that is supposed to be inside your head yes nobody's ever seen a full color 3d virtual reality display inside some so that is profoundly mysterious where is your experience it's meant to be inside your head well the hypothesis I'm suggesting is says simple it's hard to understand and that means that your image with me is in your mind but not in your brain in fact it's right here it's outside your head everything you see involves I'm suggesting a projection of mental images of perceptual images to where they seem to be sometimes they're projected to whether something is not like in an illusion or a hallucination but generally speaking they're projected to where things are which is why we get around in the world without something into things normally this works very well so in other words I'm suggesting that the mind is extended in every act of visual perception and that our minds stretch out if you look at a star your mind projects out those images it's the various types are favored literally astronomical distances so our minds are extended in every act of perception right now they're filling this room now that is something that I think happens with animals as well it's not special to people this is the way vision works it's a two-way theory of vision the light comes in and the visual images are projected out it's not an original theory of mind in fact it's a theory believed in by people all over the world it was developed in ancient Greece in some detail you said the great geometers explained for the first time clearly how mirrors work by pointing out that when you look at something in a mirror your mind projects out these images they go straight through the mirror because their virtual projections their aspects of the mind they're not blocked by glass or mercury and that's why every time we look in the mirror what you're seeing is the projections of your mind so this theory is actually explained it's a common everyday experience that's projected out even in viola physics textbooks it says that the virtual images of behind the mirror and they're projected there's little dotted lines in physics textbook showing this projection but it doesn't really think through those implications now this is not just a philosophical theory it's a testable hypothesis and it means that if your mind reaches out to touch to tutu's when you see things your minds reaching out to touch what humility act so you should be able to affect things by looking at them and the easiest tests of this in the realm of looking at other people if you look at someone from behind and they don't know you're there and they can't see you or smell you or touch you you might be hidden you might be looking through a car window for example or a window a building if this theory is correct they should be able to feel you looking at them or at least sometimes that would become aware of it so the first question is does the sense of being stared at actually exist as soon as you ask that question you realize this is a very common everyday phenomena 95% of the population according to surveys that actually experienced feeling being looked at Wednesday and there's also a phenomenal way you could look at somebody from behind turn around those people have had that experience too so I'm guessing most of you will have done but there's a complete boo on the subject within the academic world even though everyone knows how children know about this phenomenon and it's known all over the world in the academic world it's not at the sky you can't discuss this because it's just dismissed as a superstition or make-believe however it's testable I've done a lot of research on this first by interviewing people whose job it is to watch others security guards surveillance personnel the drug squad aqui through the store detectives of Harrah's and so on and all of them say yes of course I just take it for granted this is such a well-known phenomenon to practical people in martial arts you can train to become more sensitive and there's nothing hundreds of thousands of trials experimental tennis since the 1980s which shares is indeed a real measurable phenomenon if you works through closed-circuit television and people can tell them they're being watched through CCTV I summarize all this evidence in a lot of published papers there was a whole special issue of the journal of consciousness studies on this and it's all brought together in my book the sense of being extended out and other aspects of the extended mind so not going to go into the scientific evidence but all the peer-reviewed papers are on my website if you won't see the details of these experiments so firstly our minds are extended in every act of perception and so are the minds and other animals the world is full of visual projections just as it's full of the translation cellphones and radio TV waves there this room is full of them you can't see them but they're there and in the same ways for the physical projections of everyone here the second way in which minds are extended is through our connections with other members of social groups in flocks of birds like murmuration of starlings an entire flock can turn almost simultaneously without the birds bumping into each other now there's been a lot of attempts to understand this scientifically not only do they need to know where the other birds are but they need to know where they're going to go this is a simple everyday observation these flocks of birds turn and I've never seen them bump into each other and I've never seen any records of them doing that Justin there where the others are going and how do they do it in the 1980s people trying to produce computer models supposing that they just looked at their nearest neighbors and and adjusted their flight according to some kind of algorithm that doesn't work it turns out those models simply don't account for this at the speed at which this can happen it works too fast from just what calculate things then adjust their muscular movements it has much too fast Tibet the best models today computer models are in terms of fields the whole thing is a bit like a magnetic field you move a magnet and all the iron filings change their positions it's as if the whole flock has a field that links together the members of it and adjusts behave they're tuned into the whole flock as it were the mind of the whole group but the same is true of the schools of fish and herds of animals and these social fields which link together members of groups continue to link together members of social groups even when they have apart for example in packs of wolves the ant alcohol's leaves the Cubs in the den with a babysitter and go out hunting ranging over tens or even hundreds of miles and yet naturalist have shown that they seem to remain in touch at a great distance which can only be by telepathy as beyond the range of centaurs earned and I think that these abilities these connections between members of group are indeed the basis of what we call telepathy telepathy literally means distant feeling telling distant paths a feeling and I think this is a normal not paranormal natural not supernatural aspect of the way social animals coordinate their movements and behaviour even at a distance again I'm suggesting this is not some special human ability it's a common animal ability when I started investigating this I thought well it's best to start with animals they're less controversial in human psychic abilities and their antennas beating better at it than people so I started with domestic animals dogs cats parents and horses and collected stories I now have a database of more than 5,000 case histories are stories that show people's animals can pick up their intentions when they're in the same room which commonly hands they come to pick up people tensions it could be self use body language and so forth but when people are miles away you can't explain it in those terms which is why I focused my research on dogs and cats that they're when their owners are coming home this work is summarized in my book dogs that they were in their ends and the papers again all these papers are on peer-reviewed have in journals they're all on my website you want to read the details in these experiments basically we had people here at least five miles away we filmed the place the dog waited we had them come home with random times they didn't know in advance certain routine we had them come in unfamiliar vehicles usually taxis different tanks a huge time so there was no familiar concerns and people at home didn't know when they were coming but in sometimes we're near people at home and over and over again these dogs would go and start waiting at the door 20 minutes or so before the person came home in fact they started when two persons formed the intention to come home and this is a repeatable phenomenon in fact it's easier to repeat these experiments with dogs and people because we're psychic research tests a rather boring that human ones and people scores tend to fall off they get bored dogs never get a very [Music] the most common form of telepathy in the modern world is with telephones survey showed more than 80 percent of the population have had the experience of thinking of someone - shortly afterwards and rings they say as funny or a stinky battery all people know about is when they before they look at the caller ID or answer the phone again so-called skeptics and materialists of dismiss this evidence for over a century by just saying it's make-believe its superstition it's just coincidence you forget all the times you're wrong when you remember when it seems to be telepathy well we tested that and again some of you would have read about these experiments there summarized in the sense of being standard and again in peer-reviewed journal papers and in the basic test we have four corners we pay you if you were the subject you give us the names of four people you might be telepathic with we pick one of them at random asked them to renew when the phone rings or being filmed you have to guess before you answer it who is on the ferry by transceiver right twenty-five percent of the time and in fact in hundreds of trials the average was about forty five percent at the time massively significant statistically now I have an automated test of this kind on my website which works on mobile phones so any of you have a go and do have a go because I've just launched this it's only being online in its new improved version for the last few days go to my website show Drake dot org and look at the tape part section you'll find that today yes today if he also occurs very commonly between mothers and babies and I've done a study on telepathy between babies and lactating mothers many women find that when they start going back to work after them babies a few months old when they're still breastfeeding that they can have milk that times their breasts start squeezing out milk for no apparent reason and it turns out this coincides with their baby waking up and kneading them and I've done detailed studies on those that show this is not just a coincidence it's way beyond comas the odds against chance without a billion to 1 for this phenomenon in Maine the studies I did in North London so telepathy is another way in which our minds we can't we're influenced by other people's intentions and but the training really works with people you know well with whom you have emotional bonds and it works with dogs you know well or cats know where it doesn't work with random people so it has to do with the social group so our minds are extended socially in the sense that through our emotional and social plans we remain connected with people even if they're literally on the other side of the world I've done these genetically tests with people in Australia from England and they were adjust as well the other side of the world as they do nearby in England so those are two ways in which the minds our minds are extended in space now I want to look at the ways they extended in time and everybody knows that our minds are extended in time through of memory our minds connect with our pasts through our memories that's why we can recognize people remember things we've done remember facts and remember the habits and the things we've learned remembering how to drive a car or ride a bike or play tennis or whatever these all depend on our memories no we also have a connection of the future through our plans and our desires and our fantasies and our intentions so our minds very extended in time subjectively but they again the conventional view within institutional service is that all these memories are inside the brain all our memories are stored as physical traces somewhere inside our brains 100 years of research we failed to reveal these supposed memory traces and people then just say we need even more money and even more time and we'll look harder and soon we'll find them but they prove very very elusive and I think the reason that memories have proved that these supposed physical memory traces that proved elusive is that they're not there I don't think the brain works like a video recorders storing everything you remember inside the nervous tissue instead I think it works like a tuning system more like a TV and picks up transmissions from your past which came across time by the process I call morphic resonance morphic resonance is a scientific hypothesis that suggests as an inherent memory in nature that the so-called laws of nature are more like Hanus the issue species has a kind of collective memory we tune into innumerable people in the past and each species has a memory derived from us members of the species instincts like habits of the species morphic resonance works by a resonance process across time I summarized this in my book the science delusion and the most detailed heretical treatment is in my book the presence of the past I don't have time this evening to explain that apostasy if you've not heard of it before appallingly very baffling and surprising but it is testable it has been tested one prediction is that if you train last learn a new trick in London rats all around the world are learning quicker thereafter and there's already evidence this happens so it's a testable hypothesis more presidents depends on similarity the more similar something is in the present to something in the past the stronger the resonance we all turn into other people in the past especially people who are more likely passed members of our family because of similarity part of our collective memory but the person in the past who's most like you and me is you and me and you're more like you in the past and like anybody else I'm more like me in the past and then and that's by self resonance is the most predominant form of morphic resonance working upon us which is why we have our own memories first and foremost against a background of collective memory so I'm suggesting collective memory and individual memory are two aspects of the same phenomenon different in degree but not in kind sir our minds are expending in space by morphic resonance from the past and the occasionally seem to be connected with the future in a very mysterious way I don't have a theory of precognition month of resonances a theory of large influences from the past but I think there's no doubt that precognition can happen particularly in dreams most of us have precognitive dreams are there we easily forget them just as we forget most of our dreams but if you write your dreams down and do a particular exercise that I discuss in my book the sense of being stared at you'll soon find at least I soon found the times having precognitive dreams that had not been aware of before usually dreaming of things that happened in the next two or three days vivid imagery of specific things that happen that couldn't possibly have gotten to my mind any other way except through some mysterious influence from the future working back in time of course it raises all sorts of paradoxes and but what we're doing in precognition is essentially contacting our own minds in the future just as we contact them in the past through memory and some people suggest that instead of precognition you should call it pre call because it's like the future version of recall no these are ways in which our minds are extended in space and time and ways our minds are similar to their all other creatures and not specific to humans any of these phenomena but I wanted to turn mystical experiences experiences in which people feel that their own mind is part of the faster greater mind these experiences occur spontaneously many people have had mystical experiences at some stage in their life it used to be thought this because of something has only happened to medieval mystics and saints in the hundreds of years ago but there are nothing many surveys that showed such phenomena are quite common at ten twenty even thirty percent of the population seem to have had feelings of being part of a greater presence part of of consciousness coverage in their own sometimes this comes about through near-death experiences sometimes spontaneously in nature sometimes through psychedelic experiences sometimes during meditation or through other spiritual practices and as I share in my most recent book sun's and spiritual practices these practices which are found in all religions are ways of establishing connections between the very basis of our own consciousness and greater minds or forms of consciousness after more than human so for example in meditation the there's not many studies many scientific studies of spiritual practices and the studies on meditation showed that there's a whole range of measurable effects of meditating there's a calming down of the whole physiology deactivation of the sympathetic nervous system which is about being afraid activation in comparison metric system which is about being relaxed and not in a state of fear people who regularly meditate and to sleep better and they have a greater well-being in fact spiritual practices as a whole if you take the overview of religious and spiritual practices there's not a vast amount of evidence that shows that people who've had regular practices spiritual religious practices a happier healthier and live longer than those that don't this is where I think atheism should come with a health warning in meditation there are many effects on the physiology well-being and now millions of people meditate so when I was at school I never heard of meditation no one told me about it it was very little known in England now it's known all over the world like you know millions of people do it usually in a secular spirit not for the same reason that people traditionally did it in the contemplative traditions of Christianity but suta zone Hinduism and settle on bet they do because it has these measurable and easily understandable effects on our wealthy agent health for lots of popular books on meditation like Ruby Wax book frazzled about how they can help you deal with the stresses and strains of the government as well as but that's not why people meditated in these traditional contexts they meditated for quite different reasons the clearest explanations are those provided by the Hindu tradition and in the group an assurance there's a very clear statement about the way that our minds apart the fractal versions again use the word fractal but they're like versions of derivative from the ultimate consciousness that underlies the whole universe Brahman the name often given in the Indian tradition to this ultimate consciousness is the same as our own in a conscious spirit and the point of meditation in those traditions is to reach the ground of consciousness itself at which point we become one with this greater consciousness and there's greater consciousness on the end Hindu traditions is threefold in its nature sat-chit-ananda Sat is the ground of consciousness the ground of all conscious being that which enables consciousness to happen it is knowledge all the realm of names and forms is to do with the contents of consciousness you couldn't have contents of consciousness without consciousness itself but there's a succinctly between the changing contents of consciousness and the ground of all consciousness and then there's the dynamical principle which in some Hindu traditions is called Shakti averages the energy principle the principle movement and change which is also the principle of joy and Ananda means dry and the idea is the ultimate consciousness is not trying to get anywhere or go anywhere it doesn't like anything and it's intrinsically joyful which is why mystical experiences when people have them extraordinarily joyful of this for sometimes an experience in this kind which made asked any a minute or two is enough to change the course of someone's life as often happens to people who've had near-death experiences so the the ultimate ground of being is something we contact through spiritual practices and that's a mine very far beyond the brain in the art of mind on withdrawal forms of consciousness within the universe depend the models of ultimate consciousness in different religious traditions are surprisingly similar they're nearly always Trinitarian threefold and so it's not the the the garment or the ultimate reality is not just an undifferentiated consciousness a consciousness a consciousness with an internal physiology in differentiation the Christian model is the holy trinity and the holy trinity has as the ground of being God the Father and plays the same role as such in Santa and and the basic revelation have gone to Moses in the Old Testament the first statement by God about his alien nature at the burning bush is I am that I am a statement of conscious being in the present I mean isn't it just not with him no context just simply I am the conscious being in the present the law goes in the Christian Trinity the second person of the Trinity the second aspect is the lagos means word but it's not just spoken words it's about forms what the Hindus called names and forms and they underlies all the forms and structures and meanings and patterns in the whole universe and then the Holy Spirit in the Trinity is the dynamical principle of movement and change breath wind the flow of air the principle model of consciousness in principle metaphor and the Christian model of speed the like I'm speaking now I am the speaker was as unified source the words you're hearing are the words I'm speaking and they have I heard meaning pattern form and they're carried on the breath if I wasn't breathing out while I speak the room when the works would be silent in my mind if I only move out you don't hear the words just just the flow of breath so the three go together the ground of being the the forms meanings words pattern the structures and the energy and actually in the whole universe this is what we find according to my own science that explains matter is now exchanged in terms of fields which give shape or form and energy which gives the flow or activity of nature so we actually have a source of energy on the one hand and form on the other now for all religious traditions this ultimate reality is conscious what makes materialism different is not the basic idea of fields and energy they have the idea that the fields in energy are there but they assume they're totally unconscious and Lawrence Krauss for example the leading atheist great friend of Richard Dawkins at read a book called a universe from nothing two or three years ago to prove you don't need God but actually his universe from nothing is not from nothing it turns out it depends on the laws of nature which he doesn't explain at all mathematical principles of reason and order on one hand which priestly presupposes without explaining how they got there on the other hand an infinite source of energy a quantum vacuum field from which fluctuations can give rise to whole universes so he's got the log-off's principle he's got the spirits principle and a common source of both the only difference is that his ultimate reality is unconscious and join us whereas conscious and joyful so it's not as if the Atheist worldview has gone away from these fundamental principles they've just produced a kind of downgraded version of them which has nothing you know the mystical experience can't explain these two experiences they try to explain them all just by changes in refraining or flooding bits of the brain with dopamine or other neurotransmitters and say they have to try and reduce all these things to the inside of the head in the end we all have a choice whether we prefer to understand our consciousness in terms of a theory the materialists theory which itself cannot actually explain consciousness if we want to put that belief system first as materialist do and deny our inexperience we have their choice but for most of us I think our inexperience has to be the ultimate test of reality and our own experience of our minds being extended in every act of perception are any experiences than being being interconnected through telepathic links with other people and with animals our own experiences of a sense of unity with a reality greater than our own and are any experiences of mystical States if we have them or states we arrived at through spiritual practices and tell us that our minds are vastly more extensive than our brains our brains have a role obviously they enabled us to coordinate our activities and movements but I think they're more like filters than generators of consciousness yet as soon as you go out into the modern world as soon as you enter an educational institution you'll find that you're back in the materialist world where it's nothing about the body in the brain and the still while most of our universities are teaching is what our schools are teaching us what our medical official medical systems based upon and yet most people in their private lives don't really experience things that way and I think we're on the threshold with major shift in consciousness and I think the FI initiatives is part of that actually in opening up a new way of expanding area seeing our minds as vastly greater than our brains our brains are wonderful and they play a vastly important role as anyone has brain damage quickly realizes I'm not saying the brain doesn't count it does but consciousness is vastly greater from the brain and that's why the size of this evening I'm talking about the mind beyond the brain thank you you

Channel: advaya

Views: 42,662

Keywords: Rupert Sheldrake, the mind, the brain, consciousness, spirituality, david luke, biology, quantum, mystical experience, telepathy

Id: O-5gnp5l2kc

Length: 35min 41sec (2141 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020