Rupert Sheldrake with musical performance by Cosmo and Merlin Shekldrake

[Applause] and I'm very pleased we're all here you know we again start off with Bernie and Kosmo who came same to us I just like to say one word first about the orchard it's one of my favorite parts of volleyball continent launcher very well known to everyone not everyone seems to me and it's never look better than it does at the moment lightening trees it's going to be messy productive in a few years time it's already productive some of the older trees are looking great so it's a very good cause of åland ones I feel so strongly about parabolic arcs okay dad this is dedication mmm no I gave you hand over to man in Kosovo at our game sponsors for the song [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] to say [Music] the story under mountain gold and silver [Music] mine so fool see to the Queen of Hearts is here today and is gone too young [Music] well thank you so much this is a presenter evening because about 10 days ago Merlin Cosmo and I were giving a workshop here at hollyhock called science and spiritual practices so the presenter evenings got a bit displaced from our actual workshop and that anyway that's the theme of what I'm talking about this evening though there's been a decline in organized religion in the West there's been a tremendous increase in an interest in spiritual practices and the there are no more spiritual praxis available than ever before we have access to practically all the world's religious traditions this is a unique situation it's also it's also the case that for the first time these practices are being investigated scientifically so personally I'm very interested in this because I'm a scientist and I also do these various spiritual practices they're part of my life and this is the theme of my two most recent books which are really the same book it's just in two parts the first part which was published in North America last year is called science and spiritual practices and the second part which is coming out in North America in print form next month already in eBook and audio book is called way to go beyond and why they work a title that my wife Joe purse suggested I think is a really good title because what it's about and what all these practices are about about game beyond our normal everyday states of consciousness into experiences which connect us they connect us with each other and they connect us with the more than human world to use David Abraham's phrase and they connect us with realms of consciousness beyond the human level and usually when we feel connected in this way we feel happy when we're disconnected we usually feel miserable alienated unit depressed these Studies on science and spiritual practices over the last 30 or 40 years have increased in number and there are now literally thousands of papers on these subjects in peer-reviewed scientific journals they were summarized in two huge handbooks called the hand books of religion and health and what these handbook shows basically that these practices religious and spiritual practices make people happier healthier and live longer and this is a surprising fact in a sense in a modern scientific secular world they've been these practices have been dismissed by many secularists for a long time as a waste of time but it turns out that they're a key to happiness and health highly relevant both individually and collectively it also means presumably that the opposite is true if you don't do these practices you'll be unhappier 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 their traditional religious practices they they give up these a whole range of spiritual practices as well and they're left with none of these practices if they take militant atheism seriously this is something hey theists themselves now recognize and the new generation of atheists is actually taking up spiritual practices Sam Harris one of the so called new atheists is now giving online meditation courses Alain de Botton one of our most prominent atheist philosophers in Britain has written a book called religion for atheists recommending reinventing religious practices for atheists and in Britain we now have an atheist church called the Sunday Assembly where people gather on Sunday mornings to sing happy songs and tell uplifting stories and in fact after a few years of it being called the Atheist church they now want to rebrand it as mystical humanism so there's a very interesting move going on here and people who do spiritual practices are no longer necessarily religious there are many people who are spiritual but not religious who do spiritual practices and there are even atheists who are doing a range of spiritual practices so the dividing line used to be between religious people and non-religious people and now there's a whole spectrum of all all the ways in between in my first book science and spiritual practices I discussed seven different practices which are meditation on which have now been many studies on the physiology the brain scans the effects on health and well-being gratitude which is one of the great central themes of positive psychology the the form of psychology that studies what makes people happy as opposed to the forms of psychology most of them that study what make people miserable and positive psychologists have found that grateful people are generally speaking happy people they're also better liked by others they're more fun to be with I'm in a sense it's obvious but it's now been scientifically proved and they've actually shown that they're they're not they're not grateful because they're happy they're happy because they're grateful and if you do grateful doneck gratefulness exercises then you feel happier and they've shown us through many simple experiments which have a remarkable effect is the simplest of all the spiritual practices anyone can do it any day a lot of people do it before meals traditionally giving thanks before meals in our end family we usually do it holding hands silently or saying a grace or senior grace but many families have given up that the regular traditional practices of gratitude but bringing them back in a new form is actually very transformative and cost nothing of course in North America does anything gets monetized and you can I buy now buy very expensive gratitude journals in gift shops but you don't actually need to spend that money any bit of paper will do if you want to make less so you can do it on your computer or fame but gratitude is a spiritual practice as part of all religions and is available to anyone whether within or outside a religious context then the third practice in science and spiritual practice is connecting with the more than human world relating to the natural world which for many people including me as a sense gives a great sense of connection and why it's important is because it we're normally encased in a very human world and when we relate to the natural world and a lot of people on Cortez Island do that I know that's why many of us are here there's a much greater sense of connection than you get with just within the sphere of human because there's so much more in the more than human world than there is in the human the next chapter in their book is on relating to plants and there I discussed primarily trees and flowers which were very important part of my own life I started out as a botanist and I spend time with plants every day and so do many other people in Britain gardening is the most popular hobby and here in hollyhock we're always reminded of the importance of flowers and plants by walking in every day through this beautiful garden and being surrounded by these magnificent trees then singing and chanting a very basic spiritual practice again in all traditions this is something I've learned most about from my wife Jill purse who's pioneered the reestablishing new forms of group chanting based on traditions found all over the world and singing and chanting is a way that of connecting with each other because when we sing we literally come into resonance with each other and also with the more than human world search chants especially a spiritual chants including mantras a way of connecting with each other and with a spiritual dimension then rituals are found in all religions and in secular cultures like the American Thanksgiving dinner well the Jewish Passover the Christian holy communion the rituals of India in the brown Minik rituals and the Indian temples all cultures have their rituals I think these are important because they bring people together and they connect those who do them in the present with those who've done them before this is my own theory of morphic resonance the if you do things in a similar way to the way they've done before they're done before there's a kind of resonance across time giving connections between members of the present group and also there were those who've gone before and the final practice in my first book is pilgrimage and there's a tremendous resurgence of pilgrimage going on in Europe at the moment the most famous is the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain but there's a resurgence in all parts of England and Europe and in Britain there's a an organization called British pilgrimage trust which is reopening the old foot path pilgrimage routes to the holy places of England and the rest of the British Isles so those are the seven practices I talk about in science and spiritual practices now in this new book about to appear in print form ways to go beyond and why they work I talk about seven more and I'll speak about some of them in detail but how first give you just a summary of the main themes the first is on sports and for many people this seems surprising most people think of sports as supremely secular yet I think this is the most common way in which people in the modern world enter altered states of consciousness and I shall come back to that in a minute because I think it's a really important aspect who re-evaluated reappraise what's going on through sports the second chapter is on learning from animals and again most people don't think of this as a spiritual practice but I think that for many people including me animals can have very valuable lessons for us and of both about our own nature and about the wider nature of things and again come back to that then the next chapter in this book is on fasting I shall come back to that again in a few minutes fasting is found in all religious traditions it's a very simple practice to do and like most the other ones is free actually this one's more than free you actually save money then I have a chapter on spiritual openings through cannabis and psychedelics many people have had the experience of opening to the spiritual realm through mind-altering drugs I'm one such person myself which is why I included this chapter in the book and again I'll return to that theme soon there's a chapter on prayer petitionary prayer asking for things probably the most common practice all around the world in all religious traditions and even among many people are not religious prayer is different from meditation in meditation you're letting go of concerns about the world you're closing your eyes you're becoming sit still you're not doing anything you're letting thoughts keep going through your mind but you don't attach to them and it's some kind of withdrawal from engagement with thoughts without to action practice and intention petitionary prayer is the opposite it goes in the opposite direction you start with an invocation to a spiritual being to whom you're praying our Father who art in heaven hail Mary full of grace Oh namashivaya with the being to whom you're praying you invoke at the beginning of the prayer and then connect that spiritual being with your concerns worries and intentions for healing for inspiration for protection people pray about all sorts of things that are very much part of the mundane everyday world but giving a spiritual dimension to those aspects of the world I see prayer meditation is a bit like breathing in and breathing out both are necessary and I think they're complimentary I myself meditate every morning and I pray every evening before I go to bed and the so I see these is not one or the other in fact my whole point in these books and the whole point that I'm trying to get across this evening is there's many practices and it's not that you do one and not the others you can do them all and some sue some people better than others some workers better at some times of life than others but they're complementary they're not exclusive then holy days and festivals all traditions have holy days and festivals and holy days are literally holidays is the same word you can't have a holy day where you celebrate together and as it's a holiday you can't do it if you're all at work so holy days and holidays are the same thing read again if I have time I'll come back to that theme and finally their final practice is being kind because if you don't have a sort of framework of helping others and helping the world then you might have a great time meditating you might feel your contact in great spiritual realms you might have an amazing acid trip where you feel you've had incredible revelations but unless this helps other people unless it helps the wider world then it's basically somewhat selfish even though it may give you a great spiritual buzz so I think it's very important to have this wider context so that's an overview and this is course not an exhaustive list of all spiritual practices there are many more including yoga Qigong service to others art making and appreciating art and and and others still beyond that you but I'm going to come back now to sports one of the purposes of meditation is to come into the present and one of the things that brain scans show is that when people are meditating those are closing down of the default mode network which is a series of regions in the brain which are concerned with ruminations worries fantasies fears anxieties the internal dialogue the chatter of the mind that goes on when we're not doing anything else that's why it's called the default mode network is what kicks in when you're not doing something else and one of the aims of meditation is to let go of that they're deceased less chatter and help it to have some gaps in it I had concentrating on the breathing or on a mantra and brain scan show that indeed the default mode Network becomes much less active when you're meditating and then you come much more into the present but sports provide an extremely effective way of doing that very much quicker than meditation and I first realized how powerful that was through a conversation with Gifford Pinchot who's here this evening on this island who told me that when he was at his busiest and his mind was most active meditation was hard to do it was hard to still the mind but when he was 50 feet up a rock face he felt completely in the present and I I think this is true of sports in general if you're skiing downhill at 60 miles an hour and you go around a corner and there's a cliff on one side you have to be completely in the present if we're in the middle of a football match and someone's passing the ball to you and crowds are cheering you're totally in the present if you're riding a motorbike in a motor bicycle race at 100 bar over a hundred miles an hour you're completely in the present a second or two have elapsed attention and you're dead and I think that's one reason why in the modern world the thrill of speed is so popular with a lot of people because sports that involve traveling fast jet skiing and lots of other sports and involved very rapid movement are ones in which you have to be completely present you immediately snap out of the default mode Network you're totally present and I think the rise of dangerous sports and extreme sports is partly a reaction to a world in which every once obsessed with liability litigation minimization of risk health and safety and extreme sports are the exact opposite of all that their sports picture a gratuitously dangerous someone I know in England was one of the founders of the dangerous Sports Club in in England and their club tie involves a man in a wheelchair on it so I mean they say you know these are dangerous sports I'd say he was a pioneer of long-distance bungee jumping but you know jumping out of airplanes skydiving free diving to 200 feet you know these dangerous sports those are free climbing up skyscrapers with their ropes or up elcapitan and these are their sports which force people to be totally in the present they therefore give the sense of presence which is can give to many people as spiritual opening many people have experiences doing sports they don't often talk about you to fellow sports people but there are now many accounts on records and I've been collecting such stories myself so in team gay there's also the feeling of connection and relationship with others that sense of immense commitment to emotion in the group and again the sense of connection is a key feature of spiritual practice and team games give that so there are other sports where this is more explicit in the martial arts and they eat in the Orient it's always been taken for granted that there's a spiritual dimension of sports and the flow of Chi being part of that flow of energy that works through the whole of nature which is flowing through you and through your opponent in the martial arts the martial arts of but being in the flow and and and being in mastery of that flow in that famous book zen and the art of archery published in the 1950s the german author Harry gaol wrote about how he'd studied for years with the Zen master in Japan to learn archery and it was a matter of learning it so skillfully that when you actually fired the arrow you weren't fired it was just as it were firing itself and just going to the target and he talks in a row in a very mystical way about this practice which said the spiritual dimension has been much more appreciated in the East than in the West Michael Murphy who founded the Esalen Institute in 1962 is one of the people whose pointed out the spiritual side of sports and indeed he thinks of sports as the yoga of the West and he thinks it's one of the areas in which human capacities and potentials are involved are evolving most rapidly at the present time we normally think of technological innovation intellectual innovation but actually in sports think of all the new sports snowboarding skydiving hang gliding skateboarding all these many many new sports all of which involve new technologies new groups of muscles new skills new abilities and this is a field of human evolution which is pushing very boundaries of humanity and which takes those who do these things into altered states of consciousness which are very important for them so so one of the points I want to end this thing on sports about by saying is what is it makes a sport and what philosophers have sports have come up with is the common factor is physical skill there are games that are not sports like chess there are sports that are not games like mountain climbing but what sports have in common including blood sports hunting stalking deer and that kind of thing and and field sports and you know the solitary sports like things you do on your own and team sport well they all have in common is physical skill and in order to get into that state of being in the flow in the present then you have to have enough skill to do it so they involve discipline like other spiritual practices do and when you've achieved a sufficient level then you can enter that state of flow and which for many people I think is the principal way in which they escape from the mundane consciousness of the modern world social media commercials advertising worries for them from for millions of people hundreds of millions of people sports of the principal way they do it no fasting fasting again is present in all religious traditions Jewish people fast on Yom Kippur Christians fast during Lent Muslims in Ramadan during the daylight hours Hindus have various fast days in shamanic cultures people often fast before rites of passage or rituals or on vision quests so fasting is very widely practiced it's also something very deep in our physiology it's extraordinarily unusual for people to have three big meals a day our ancestors and our pre-human ancestors didn't get fed all the time there were days they went without food whether they likes it or not all hunter-gatherers have times of Plenty when there's lots of fruit or there's plenty of game to hunt but they also have times of scarcity when there's not much food and where they have to fast or starve days weeks on end and this is true of the entire animal kingdom and the whole of the animal kingdom and the vet and the magg microbial and the fungal world have evolved in conditions of intermittent food supply and the whole physiology is geared to that if you deprive the bacterium ecoli of food it lives much longer than similar cells that have had all the time if you deprive yeast a fungus of food it lives much longer if you deprive myself ood by feeding them every other day instead of every day they live 30% longer a whole year longer than mice that eat every day we've evolved like these other living organisms with intermittent food supplies and when people are fasting several things happened the physiology of the body changes first of all you go over to burning fats and most of us have enough fat in our body to last us a very long time calculations showed that the average American could walk from New York to Florida just using the available fat reserves in their bodies so and and so we we burn fats instead of carbohydrates we use up the liver glycogen as supply of carbohydrates and the liver is used up within about 12 hours then you move over to metabolizing fats when you're in this mode that the body burns up not just fats but also senescence cells which cause information some people think that these persistent senescence cells are one of the root causes of Alzheimer's and other inflammatory diseases though in fasting those cells are removed their body is detoxified growth hormone is released and as a kind of rejuvenating effect on the cells of the body it's extremely good for most people to fast it's the cheapest and simplest life enhancing health enhancing and life-extending thing you could do that's not advisable for everybody I'm not saying that people who got terrible diseases who are on lots of medications who are suffering from anorexia and so on should fast but for most people in this room it would be one of the simplest and most effective ways of improving health and in fact I think that if national health services and health insurance companies promoted fasting they'd greatly increase the health at the general health and greatly reduce medical expenditure I think is something which can be done by anybody who can if you don't feel confident you can have guides from natural paths or Ayurvedic practitioners or others who specialize in fasting but there are now some very good books on fasting the best I know is by Canadian doctor Jason Fong it's called the complete guide to fasting there are plenty of other books and guides to this I myself fast every year during Lent I'm a practicing Christian in Anglican so I fast during holy week just before Easter this year I did four days some days a week some days three days it's several days anyway and I'm sure how many people here have tried fasting for more than two days well that's a lot of people that's at least harm in half well then you'll probably find what I found which is the laughs the first day you don't really feel very hungry anymore it's the first days the worst and then it gets easier and I myself find it when I do this the day seems much longer there's more time to do things my mind is clearer I have enough energy to go about normal activities I do it when I've got a space in my diary I keep free from social engagements obviously it's not much fun to go to a dinner party when you're fasting so it's best to have a gap in your diary when you don't have to do things like that but it's I find that a clarity of mind I find it easy to meditate and pray and I have more vivid dreams and I think it's because of this mind-altering effect of fasting that it's been done in so many traditions the chemical changes in the blood involved ketosis the formation of ketone bodies acetoacetic acid beta hydroxy butyrate acid and acetone beta hydroxy butyrate acid is very closely related to the neurotransmitter gamma amino butyric acid and also to gamma hydroxybutyrate acid GHB which is a street drug because it's a euphoric these are neurotransmitters and when you're fasting the ketone bodies and the blood shift the neurotransmitter levels in the brain in fasting as psychoactive so anyway it's a spiritual practice it it I think what it does is doesn't in itself cause a spiritual experience but it creates a way in which you can more easily carry out other spiritual practices like prayer and meditation now talking of altered states of consciousness through changes in the brain I come to psychedelics and cannabis I myself found I was went through a phase of BIA being a scientific materialist at atheist this went along with the package deal of my scientific education and I thought as atheists and materialists do that my mind was nothing but the brain everything could eventually be explained by science and most already was explained by science I thought I thought we lived in a material universe which was largely unconscious and and had no purpose well when I first took cannabis my Adair's changed in almost an instant I was traveling in India in 1968 on my way to Malaysia where I was working in tropical on tropical rainforest plants and in Delhi I met a friend of mine from Cambridge an anthropologist who was doing fieldwork in a village in the Himalayas and I met we met by chance he was the only person I knew in India and he said would you like to come back to my village and so I said yes and I went to his village it took two days to get there we had to walk the last 10 or 12 miles and he'd been there for two years he knew all the people in the village he spoke the local language Pahadi and we went for going for a walk and chatting to people and we walked along a beautiful valley with a rushing stream and there was a cave biotin a man in orange robes sitting in the cave and I said who's that he said oh he's the local holy man the Sardu and he greet he show she waved her ass and beckoned to her so he went and joined him in his cave and then he produced a little clay thing which I said what's that he said it's called a Chilam and he filled it with material invited me to smoke it I not smoked cannabis for I didn't know what this was I smoked it and it was obviously a very powerful blend and I had this tremendously altered state of consciousness I felt utterly blissful I went out of the cave and over the mountains to him as snow on the top of them this beautiful valley this amazing seat I just felt my life had been transformed a sense of connection I hadn't had before so for me this was a kind of gateway experience to spiritual practices a couple of years later in Cambridge I took LSD for the first time and this again was a completely revelatory experience no one in my scientific education had told me anything about this sort of thing I mean I was thinking in terms of neurotransmitters dopamine serotonin in the brain I'd studied brain physiology but nothing had prepared me for this LSD experienced and I realized there was vastly more to the mind than I'd ever thought before so both of these experiences for me were like rites of passage or spiritual openings and I think for many people today psychedelics play that kind of role and actually this is the first I've been in a room where I've felt free to ask this question but how many people here have felt they've had a kind of spiritual opening through cannabis quite a few how many through psychedelics Oh maturity thank you yes well I think that this is a major feature of the modern world and I think the fact that psychedelic research is now legal again that the whole discussion has become mainstream partly through Michael Pollan's book how to change your mind which I think's a very good introduction to the subject I think means that the possibility of psychedelics playing a really catalytic role in consciousness change in our culture's is growing I mean they've had that role for decades but it's been driven underground and I think there could be proper rites of passage they're already psychedelic churches like Santo de Mer the Brazilian ayahuasca taking Church and I think we're going to see a lot of evolution in this area of as psychedelics are incorporated into religious and spiritual practices rather than just being things people take illegally at parties under ill-advised conditions I think there's there's a really positive possibilities here of course the question then arises as what are they actually doing if you're an atheist and many atheists and materialists take psychedelics and and get a lot from doing that there's no reality outside your brain no conscious reality outside your brain so it's all just inside the head but for many people who take psychedelics does the experience that our conscience is opening up to a greater form of consciousness than our own certainly that's what I experienced a materialists would say that's just an illusion there is no greater form of consciousness than our own but I think for many people who take psychedelics the experience itself suggests something like that we're part of a larger conscious reality there are many calm forms of consciousness beyond our own and psychedelics provide direct evidence of that now if you take them a continue of the materialist point of view basically you're putting theory before experience you're putting a theory that the world consists of inanimate matter before your end direct experience and it's a choice everyone has to make do you trust a theory which is notoriously bad at explaining consciousness over the direct experience of consciousness itself I for one would opt for the direct experience now learning from animals I myself have learned a lot from animals and I think one of the things that we can learn from animals is a kind of humility because although we like to think for ourselves as humans more important than any other being in the world that we're totally in charge of everything else we have the right of life and death over any other forms of life we don't over other humans but we do over animals you can buy animals you can kill them if you want you can care and hunting them you can you can they can be produced too by the billions as chickens are in battery farms for human consumption in factory farms I mean we have a very bad relationship with a lot of animals on this earth including driving many species to extinction but one of the things that we can learn from them is that they have abilities that far exceed our own some are much more sensitive in the realm of smell some can move much more gracefully like Gibbons jumping from tree to tree no human could do that even a skilled Acrobat can't do as gracefully as these Gibbons some have senses we don't have like the electric senses of yields and own some sharks and some have other sensory abilities that we we don't have like echolocation in bats animals can do all sorts things we can't do and I think that's a lesson in humility they can also they also have the ability to be in the present we have to go to a lot of trouble to have spiritual practices to bring us into the present but most animals are right there already you know a cat sitting on your lap pairing is purring because it's feeling happy and purring - it's not in the background I imagine worrying about where its food tomorrow's going to come from or worrying about whether it's paid the bills or an out sort of thing it's not worrying about the kinds of things we worry about and I think one of the reasons that so many people keep pets cats dogs parrots and other animals and why so many people like riding horses is that those animals bring us straight into the present we have to be present with them if we're going to be with them because they're completely in the present so again they shut down the default mode Network we come into the present with them and they draw us into the present if a dog is wanting you to throw a stick for it to retrieve is looking so completely present take completely engaged in this activity unless you're very childish it's very hard not to get engaged with it and and and brought into the present by it so I think animals do that for us and I think one of the other things they do is raise the question of what is the nature of spiritual experience can animals have spiritual experiences themselves well personally I don't see why not I think if we take the view which I do that there's an underlying consciousness underlying the entire universe that shines through all conscious beings including non-human animals and and that the ultimate nature of that consciousness is joyful or blissful then why shouldn't animals it contact it just as we can in certain states of mind I think of a lizard basking in the Sun that may be in a state of Samadhi like bliss in a dolphin jumping through the bow waves of a boat an obvious sense of pleasure at the freedom of movement and play and I think is completely in the present just as many people are when doing sports like skiing and and birds singing beautiful songs are clearly enjoying the beauty of their songs and other birds that listen to them are enjoying this beauty they're in the present and they're experiencing something takes them beyond themselves and so I see no reason at all for supposing that animals are completely deprived of spiritual experiences in fact I think they motivate all beings ultimately some more consciously than others but I see no reason to suppose that we are unique in this regard animals also teaches that about psychic abilities because most of the much more psychic than humans I wrote a whole book called dogs that know when their owners are coming home about dogs that know when their owners are coming home and also about cats that know in there in succumbing homeand are many other intuitive powers of animals including sensing earthquakes in advance and the amazing sense of direction of migratory animals and homing pigeons have and these psychic abilities we have as well but human telepathy is much less well developed and among most animals and I've done surveys of dog and cat owners asking about their animals psychic abilities or what they think of us their psychic abilities and most pet owners are convinced that their pets are much more psychic than they are themselves and I think they're right I think that the animals are much more attuned to the psychic level that we are I think this is a distinction between the psychic and the spiritual the psychic is about connections with other members of the group it's no human telepathy occurs most commonly between mothers and babies telephone telepathy between family members and friends you think of someone who's planning to call you it happens between people are closely bonded socially so it's about horizontal connections as it were and warnings of earthquakes and sense of direction about finding homes knowing about bad things that are going to happen in the future premonition of some disaster or sense of warning they're not really about a spiritual realm but they're there they take us beyond ourselves they interconnect us a bit so I think there's a distinct between the psychic realm which is more horizontal and the spiritual realm which is more vertical or perhaps not just vertical but connecting us with realms all around us that are beyond our social groups and beyond our immediate concerns finally I won't say something about holy days and festivals all cultures have holy days and the earliest cultures we know about are those that left cave paintings in those caves in Spain and France and elsewhere in Europe 30 40 thousand years ago people went deep into caves and made paintings on the wall that looked like shamanic scenes of people turning into animals and they and pictures of animals and and of other beings now in order to do it seems likely that these were at ceremonial centers and many of the places with the paintings have acoustics which would reflect it would give a tremendous echo resonance to drumming or chanting in those places and for people to gather in those places they must have had holidays they couldn't just nip in for a few minutes when they're not working hunting hunting or gathering they would have had to have whole days off in the whole community had a day to celebrate together and holy days are about times to celebrate together where the whole community families and other members of the community can come together and these happening seasonal festivals in all cultures the most obvious and our in culture festivals like Christmas and to some degree Easter but in all cultures there are seasonal festivals which bring the whole community together but there's also in the judeo-christian tradition the regular weekly holy day is the Sabbath Jewish people are much better than most others at remembering the importance of this holy day when you don't work sacred time and sacred time creates a space in which people the purpose is to celebrate together to carry out spiritual practices to sing to dance to make love to have fun to be together as a community and and then Christians have Sunday in this tradition it was at the same role in Christian cultures and Muslims have Friday but 24/7 modern secular culture hates Sabbath's and Sundays and things because it means their days when people aren't buying and selling and on Facebook all the time so we're now in a world where these traditional holy days which bring us together are being eroded by secular commercial forces which create a 24/7 culture which is extremely harmful for people there have now been Studies on the importance of a day of rest or tea or two days of rest the weekend on people's lifestyle quality of life and health and not surprisingly they show that this is very important for people's sanity well-being and reducing as feeling of extreme stress that people get into through 24/7 culture so now people are calling for a scientifically proven need for a 24-6 world or technological Sabbath's where you don't go on your devices for 24 hours but I think all of us need to recover this sense of holy days creating a space for collective celebration and in some ways it's being reinvented in a secular context through summer music festivals the love fest here on Quartus Island on Saturday it was a very good example of that people gathering together with no other purpose than to have fun and to be together and to be happy and to hear music and to celebrate just being together the the celebration a summer festival and in Europe there are many traditional festivals summer festivals said John's Day Midsummer's dad Lana's August the second a two of the main summer festivals where people celebrate together and they've been reinvented in these summer music festivals and I think a very important thing it is as well I want to end by just discussing how it is that such very different spiritual practices can bring about the sense of connection or linkage what do meditation and sports have in common for example it's not immediately obvious why such very different practices should have a spiritual dimension why they should work as spiritual practices and I think to discuss this one has to think about the nature of consciousness itself again if you're a materialist and you think that consciousness is confined to brains primarily to human brains then you can still do spiritual practices like meditation or take drugs psychedelics and you can believe it's all just inside your head but all traditional religions and traditional cultures take it for granted the reforms of consciousness beyond the human level our consciousness is not the ultimate consciousness of the universe and and there in fact there are many forms of consciousness spirits nature spirits the spirits of ancestors angels demons all sorts of spirits in in most cosmologies Saints so and and then an ultimate spirit many many cultures have the idea of an ultimate consciousness including all these many forms both visible and invisible and if we look at the the general understanding of ultimate consciousness what emerges is that there's much more similarity between different cultures accounts and there are differences in my favorite book in modern theology a book called the experience of God being consciousness bliss by a David Bentley heart of an American theologian HAART he shows that in many cultures a similar model of ultimate consciousness or reality which underlies the whole universe and underlies all our own individual consciousnesses which are like Frank Terra versions of this ultimate consciousness and it has three aspects in Kashmir Shaivism they summarize it by saying these three aspects of the knower the the consciousness that can know things the cart that contains all things that are known the known that which is known within consciousness and the means of knowledge that which links them together in the Hindu normal more normal Hindu version it's the ultimate consciousness is sat-chit-ananda Sat is the ground of being in consciousness conscious ground of being the ground of all being is conscious and it has its intrinsic quality of being it gives beings to things and is what is known what is in consciousness the contents of consciousness names and forms nama Rupa as the Hindus put it so all the things that can be known - shapes animals and plants they have forms names all the forms of our language all the contents of consciousness are within this ultimate divine consciousness as well and then Ananda is bliss or joy and an aspect of ultimate divine consciousness is that is blissful it doesn't lack anything it's completely full and full of joy whereas if you'd like something you know who you're always trying to get what you lack but divine consciousness is complete and joyful and in all these models the joy aspect is also dynamic the Hindus call it Shakti the feminine principle of energy the Christian model is based on a Jewish model and the in the Jewish model has sees God the ground of all things with to manifest aspects you have God the Father in the Christian Holy Trinity in as God in the Old Testament announced himself to Moses he says I am the or I am Who I am I am me a conscious subjective consciousness in the present conscious being is the ultimate you couldn't put it more simply than their conscious being as the ground of all things but this conscious being has two manifestations the first appears right at the very beginning of the book of Genesis the earth was without form and void and the Spirit of God moved on the face of the deep or the face of the waters the Spirit is the same word work in Hebrew Newmar in Greek means wind and breath and the wind moves on the face of the deep basically like the wind playing on the sea here creates waves save vibrations or waves caused by the movement of the Spirit on the first manifestation of creation and then immediately after that and God said let there be light so the Word of God the the spoken word the formation of words for which themselves have forms it is this the second as a second these two manifestations of God the spirit and the word and this is the basis of the Christian Holy Trinity the Holy Trinity is God the Father is the ground of all being the Spirit is the moving principle the breath the wind the energy in the universe and the log-off's the second person of the Trinity is the principle of word form name and it's the it's the way in which the Greek idea from Plato of the world of ideas or forms was included in Christian theology so you have this idea of the names and forms you have the idea of the moving principle of the Spirit and the ground of being as these are the ground of being gives rise to the spirit and the names and forms but they are not separate from each other the principle metaphor is speaking in the jurors and Christian tradition and Islamic tradition - and Hindu tradition that when you speak there's a flow of breath when I speak now as a flow of breath but there's also the words which have formed shape and structure into connection each has a definite form which is why it's speech recognition software can work each word has a different particular form even when any one of us saying same word we recognized by an artificial intelligence system and because the words have forms so if I just have the breath there's a flow of energy but no form if I just have the ideas or the words they're silent in my mind they don't manifest but when I'm speaking now the two go together I'm the speaker the breath is the spirit the words of the word or the logos and that's the principle metaphor on on which the judeo-christian model of ultimate consciousness is based and so the when we look at the whole of nature in that light we found what science shows us this as a ground of all being there's a energetic principle called energy which analyzed everything in the universe the principle of activity movement and change and as a formative principle called fields at which shape everything in nature the gravitational field shapes the Sun and the moon the electric magnetic fields shape light energy and they shape many other things deformative fields of living organisms shape the living organisms the quantum matter fields of quantum theory shape electronic particles nuclear particles atoms molecules and so fields give form and energy gives activity or actuality or the potential to make changes in things so that's reflected also in our scientific understanding of nature there's basic pattern and say when we look at spiritual practices we find that actually they relate to different aspects of this Trinitarian model meditation is primarily about reaching the ground of consciousness itself sat deep ground of being or the knower it's everything we know is encompassed within the no it's rather like the screen of your computer everything you can read or see on the computer depends on that screen but the screen itself doesn't have a particular content it's the ground of all the things you can see and experience and the ground of our consciousness is that it's that which enables us to know and through meditation through letting go of the contents of consciousness that we can become aware of that ground of consciousness itself so that context was this basic a ground of being then the I think that dynamic spiritual practices like sports dancing and singing and connectors with that principle of flow the spirit which is all about movement and change it's the dynamical principle and I think that spiritual practices involves the appreciation of beauty for example the beauty of flowers when you contemplate the beautiful flower you're contemplating your beauty reform and that and its interconnections and inter relations with things and when you look at beautiful architecture or beautiful works of visual art painting or sculpture you're primarily relating to the log our suspect or the chat aspect of ultimate consciousness the contents of consciousness that which is known and and then some some spiritual practices involved they all involve all three but some emphasize some more than others a visionary psychedelic experience weathers are continually changing a series of forms you have both the aspect of spirit of flow and change and also the aspect of form and say you do with poetry and with the flow of words in spoken language as we're singing so I think that it's possible to see a kind of common map behind these different practices and I think these different practices connect us with this ultimate consciousness in different ways and again to come back to my original point it's not that one works that meditation is the answer for example and sports are not or see in dancing or or not I think they all work and I think that some of them more easily done alone meditation for example is most easily done alone but others require other people chanting rituals singing celebration of holy days and festivals are collective and I think I myself think for myself as both spiritual and religious because I don't see those as alternatives either some people think that religions all just about dogma and spirituality is about experience actually I think that the the greats I think religion ultimately is about experience it starts from experience the Buddha didn't become enlightened through doing a PhD he became enlightened through meditating under a tree you know Jesus didn't become aware of his connection with God his intimate relationship with God through studying in a rabbinical seminary he it was through his near-death experience of baptism and his visionary experiences in the desert that he became aware of it so I think that's the ultimate basis of religion but I think the strength of the religious traditions is that their collective they bring out the collective dimension which we all need and some of these spiritual practices emphasize community group and interrelationship of families and communities others emphasize individual experience more but again it's not one or the other it's I think both end anyway this is just a brief overview of some of the themes and my final point really is that I think at the moment we stand on the threshold of a completely new phase of spiritual evolution which is a very exciting place to be because we now have access to all these different spiritual traditions religions themselves are rapidly evolving at the moment spiritual traditions themselves are evolving I'm yoga for example which when I was a child I'd never heard of it you know it was more or less confined to India into a few Theosophists but it's now everywhere and that itself is evolving and I was astonished a couple of weeks ago at hollyhock to find the yoga on paddleboard workshop going on where people are now doing yoga on paddle boards and it's a completely new way of doing yoga and experiencing balance that's it that evolutionary press is happening right here at hollyhock in fact I think hollyhock is one of the places which is catalyzing this process of spiritual evolution and I think we're all part of that and I think it's a great time to be alive thank you good to us if we started half an hour late so it's getting a bit late if you have to leave feel free but there's time for about 25 minutes of questions and Q&A and discussion and there's a microphone so if you'd like to say anything please make yourself known and you'll get the mic you you [Music] any questions okay thanks hi um Thank You Rupert I'm really curious to go back to your sort of chapter and rap on psychedelics and I'm wondering like agreed that through psychedelics and through marijuana you can have beautiful spiritual experiences and we're sort of living in a time and in a society that you know ritualizing something you know drugs is like completely frowned upon and no one talks about it and many people take these things simply to have fun or because they're bored or to be numbed to what's going on in the world and come to rely on them for a peace of mind and so I'm just sort of curious what you think about that and how these really magical and potent plants can be used in a good and healthy way well it's a really important question you see you know that Karl Marx famously said that religion is the opium of the people well in fact we know nurses live in a society where opioids of the opium of the people and drugs can certainly be abused and and a lot of people are hooked on antidepressants painkillers and all sorts of other drugs whether our prescription drugs or not many people are hooked on tobacco and other addictive substances so there are many which started out as a sacred drive a sacred substance in Native American culture so there are many ways in which they can be work in a negative way I think the challenge is to find ways in which they can take on this positive role I think this recent surge of research on psychedelics is very important because now there's legal search it's possible to find out more about what's happening it's also become clear that for many people with addiction problems psychedelics can actually help them psilocybin iboga and other plants are actually proven worth much greater proven worth than many other ways of dealing with addictions in Britain as a trial now going on with psilocybin for people with chronic depression the people are only admitted into this trial if they've had 15 years of depression which hasn't been relieved by standard medical treatments including antidepressants visits to psychiatrists and so on chronic depressive people and the results are showing remarkable improvements people are seeing a whole new way of relating to the world and to consciousness so I think part of the change is happening through this legal psychedelic research which is partly about therapeutic uses of psychedelics MDMA is now being used in trials with people with post-traumatic stress disorder with impressive results I think the main challenge is to find ways of having these psychedelics done within a framework I mean it's been recognized from the beginning that certain setting are really important the mindset and where you take them really affect what happens so even if psilocybin is approved for treatment of depression it's not going to work very well if people just go to see a psychiatrist who writes a prescription for psilocybin says okay take this once a week and it's not going to work very well if it's done that way of treated just like any other drug so I think it's so partly a matter of finding ways in which they can be done supportively and appropriately does in one model that's occurring in Europe at the moment is with in Holland the magic mushroom the underground part the sclera tío are legal in Holland truly a loophole in the law whereas the above-ground part are not so they have the same effect so now the British psychedelic society is now organizing weekend retreats you sign up you have like a workshop group at places like hollyhock in Holland where you have 20 people in the group you have two three facilitators who are experienced with this people gave for the weekend from England it's legal you you have a day getting to know people you set your intentions what you hope to experience and so forth then everyone takes a fairly high dose and then the next day is debriefing you know journaling tour small group discussions talking about it and sort of relating it to the rest of your life and then you go home this is a weekend workshop with psilocybin in safe retreats with experienced people this is a new model and and people in the in the capitalist world and investors are now hovering they think this is going to be a huge opportunity now cannabis is legal in countries like Canada Canada in the car and there are companies worth billions of dollars they think psilocybin is the next and they're thinking of retreat centers you know set chains of retreat centers and now personally I'm not very keen on you know big scale capitalism getting involved with these things I think is better for them to be at least semi illegal decriminalized if they're fully legal then then you have mass capitalism moving in you know in California five or six years ago cannabis was a cottage industry but now it's sort of industrial scale production but they're also you see these tranches like the sign a site of the ayahuasca church in the Santa timeI that I mentioned another one uno de vegetal union of plants that is now legal in the United States under the same conditions of the Native American church is legal it's a religious ritual involving a psychedelic I think that way is is a much better way to go to have ceremonial legalization with responsible people running these ceremonies and I look forward to the day when regular churches will have sort of psychedelic rites of passage for young people and stuff but which they could hope they'd have to outsource it to the center who died may people to start with and but I don't see any reason why these things shouldn't be incorporated into rites of passage for those who are interested and done properly rather than people doing them under very you know in parties when there are lots of drunk people around and no one knows what to do someone freaks out unit Ora festivals where people can take doses overdoses or doses of dubious substances they don't know what it is you know the present situation is not very good but I think it's possible to envisage something much better hi I'm Stephanie from Santa Monica I was wondering if you've done any work with flower essences or with peril andr which is the nature center out of Virginia the answer is short answer is no I haven't I mean I love fly essential oils and flower scents but I've never worked with flower essences so I'm sorry I can't answer that I heard you talk about the psychic being a horizontal level and the spiritual being outside or above and I'm wondering what you've encountered in your research about a lower level or about openings to new levels of consciousness that one is not experienced before being negative or traumatic well I think that in all traditions is acknowledge that there are negative spirits out there you know Devils demons jinns and so not all beings that one might be open to through is particularly psychedelic spiritual experiences are necessarily good and I think some people take a lot of people who take DMT or ayahuasca or mushrooms encounter entities you know beings that seem to be autonomous beings and it's not clear whether they're figments of their imagination whether they're autonomous entities whether they're products of the collective unconscious it's not I mean there's been so little research on this it's not clear what they are but in all cultures and traditions there's the belief that there are there are negative forces there so I think one of the things that I'm you certainly when I take psychedelics one of the things I do is pray first to ask for protection and guidance when this is happening I think if people go into these experiences completely unprotected then they may be very vulnerable now if not myself tried to work out a taxonomy of these spirit beings but I'm pretty sure I mean I know they exist there's also the way in which there are collective creation zeusian in India for example you know the god Ganesh is a very important part of Hindu tradition Ganesh is an elephant headed god well Ganesh couldn't have existed in any normal physical form he's the kind of animal he human hybrid and you find animal-human hybrids in these ancient cave paintings as very ancient theme a kind of shamanic theme people pray to garnish and lots of Hindus see garnish in their dreams and I discovered online Hindu dream forums where people discuss their Ganesh screams now Ganesh is a product of the collective consciousness of Hinduism you know you see again ash picked statues calendars we can hear shun them and stuff very much part and part of their folklore and mythology it becomes part of their collective life so does Ganesh really exist well he exists in since he's not my personal fantasy if I have a dream of Ganesh he's much he's much more transpersonal than me but is Ganesh nothing but a kind of part of the collective consciousness or unconsciousness of Hindus or could Ganesh also be that and a channel through which the divine can really flow into people's lives when awake or asleep again identities either or I think you can be both hand we'll say it again now have another shot but then we should move on someone else I'll do it briefly you you mean other people's traumatic experience most traumatic experiences oh well people certainly have experiences that are traumatic yes spiritual emergencies with one name for them yes and not all spiritual experiences are pleasant I mean a central image in the Christian faith is Jesus being crucified on a cross well that's pretty traumatic and it's also spiritual so yes and some people experience spiritual experiences through extreme pain and suffering in fact some people deliberately inflict it like those people who you know lash themselves with whips and flagellate themselves and so so yes pain and suffering are also a gateway to the spiritual realm okay well obviously or we are here we have to move on anyone else yes yes sir I have a question about you said that animals are capable of psychic experience but not about spirit whole experience is that correct animals yes no I said they may have both there I said that they have a lot of psychic powers they're very often more than ours but I think they may also have a spiritual dimension like lizards basking in the Sun okay I would I would totally agree with that because I believe that they do have because otherwise we would not have them because we had to be developed from them yes and then I saw my cat dying and I'm sure she prepares for it I think that you know when people in near-death experiences show that for many people the drying process can be blissful and I so rather suspect just like that for animals as well and that many animals die without fear and when they die it may well be they go through a blissful state similar to a human near-death experience of course we can't prove that but it seems to me quite likely I don't see why it shouldn't be the case anyway I thought that on a lot of the dynamic that you're presenting is maybe between worldview and an integration of these spiritual practices I appreciate the work you've done in the breadth of the spiritual practice but a lot of work that continues or it begins with that is the integration of that into your life and it just I'm asking as someone who sees things from a very different point of view but from my experience my point of view the Western model is completely intolerant of spirit and you know LSD in particular cause just until Earth the reaction to it caused it brought out amazing hatred in direction in this culture and most of the well that how to change your mind and work you've done is uh it just seems to be apologies you know the the fact that these the science now will admit that these things even happened that's about as far as it goes and so I'm just asking as sort of an elder in this culture how how you can see it ever being able to integrate into you know the fabric of the the rhetoric the of what is known you know and not just put off somewhere well I think that the I think we're moving towards that I mean I think there's the fact that we now have legal research on LSD that does a much more rational discussion of it is a step in the right direction I mean it's not going to happen instantly and I think they have to be social frameworks in within which people can take it which you know where they can integrate it with the rest of their lives because there's no doubt that some people have psychotic experiences as a result of taking drugs and they can't integrate them so I mean I think this is a project that we're and you're just seeing the beginning of I don't know where it will all go but certainly Damian we've arrived at the end of this road I think we just the beginning of it just one more I hope so I have a question one more I think yes here um where it worry don't worry thank you I asked this question from a humble place of the unknown in my lifetime I was born into a culture that is a consumeristic culture and our capacity to step outside of that and be non destructive to our environment is fairly minimal and I just I'm wondering if you from your research or experience believe that we have the capacity to turn this planet around and that the mass extinction may or may not take us all out with it or yeah just your thoughts on that subject well obviously I don't know but I mean I'm hopeful I mean I hope for because that's my nature and Constitution and also I think if we become hopeless if we despair then that's disempowering you know it's just so impossible to foresee what will happen I mean if things go on with business as usual model obviously is going to be fairly disastrous but there could be a lot of things that disrupt business as usual totally unexpected events of every kind so you know if you look at futuristic projections from the past I mean they nearly all turn out to be wrong because things happen so unexpectedly so I just think we don't know I I hope and pray that we'll be all right but I think it's one of the things we have to pray about as well as hope about as well as being as activist as we can about doing what we think will help to save us I don't think that life on the planet is in danger I think human civilizations in danger and certainly luxurious consumers lifestyle styles are in danger and many other species but you know we have to hope because what else can we do so I think that has to be the end because we've run over the normal ending time and it's late so thank you all for coming

Channel: Hollyhock Life

Views: 3,368

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Rupert Sheldrake, philosophy, Hollyhock, Cosmo Sheldrake, spiritualism, science and spirit

Id: lpFBgPGa9Js

Length: 84min 37sec (5077 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019