Science and Spiritual Practices - Dr Rupert Sheldrake

I'm speaking on science and spiritual practices today and we're in a very unusual situation at the moment probably unprecedented although there's been a considerable decline in traditional religion there's been a tremendous upsurge of interest in spiritual practices in the modern world and there's also been a whole lot of scientific studies of the effects of these practices what these studies show basically is that religious and spiritual practices make people happier healthier and live longer and these are a very substantial body of work that's been carried out the in 2012 the second edition of the handbook of religion and health was published it's about that thick it costs about 150 pounds and it reviews more than 2,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals studying the effects of a range of spiritual and religious practices so the these practices are good for people people who do them are happier and healthier presumably the converse is also true not doing these practices is bad for you presumably it makes you unhappy and down healthier and we have a situation today when religious practices were used to be a pretty universal most people took part in regular religious ceremonies and practices and those always included spiritual practices each religion has its own selection but singing together for example pilgrimage fasting there's a whole range of spiritual practices that are just part of a normal religious life so when people stop being religious then often all these practices cease then of course they can easily claim practices there are many people who are spiritual but not religious who take up spiritual practices but there are many people who stop their normal of ancestral religion and don't take up any and I think that leads to a sense of defect or deficiency this is the theme of a book by Alain de Botton who's a popular philosopher also an atheist in his book religion for atheists he points out how many things practicing atheists miss out on and he then says what we need is atheism to point naught where we can recover some of these practices that traditional religious people do one of his ideas is an atheist temple in London he hasn't built it yet but he's a very rich man so he could but he's already instituted atheist sermons on Sunday mornings in London and his book is a serious attempt to grapple with his problem of lack of religion yet accepting the value of spiritual practices the the new generation of militant atheists have actually taken up spiritual practices old-style a theist like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett just rejected the whole lot but the new style like Sam Harris one of the so called new atheists accept the importance of spiritual practices and Sam Harris is now giving online meditation courses as also as some of you will know a non-religious Church in England the Sunday assembly which where people meet together to sing together and to tell uplifting stories which again is a response to the need for spiritual practices which many people feel if they've given up traditional religious ones so the situation we're in is where these practices are being widely adopted whether people are or not and that's the context in which I read my book and in it I discuss 7 different practices meditation gratitude connecting with nature relating to plants singing and chanting rituals and pilgrimage and I'm going to be talking about some of those today I won't to have time to talk about them all again start with gratitude the study of gratitude has come about largely through the work of the school of positive psychology as many of you will know this was a new branch of psychology within the academic world starting around 2000 it became established as a kind of official branch of psychology and positive psychologists tried to find out what makes people happy as opposed to more traditional psychology which is more about what makes people miserable the traditional role of psychology has been to study what's wrong with people I mean and that's probably because two people ago to see psychotherapists psychoanalysts and so on people who've got problems at the positive psychologists were trying to find out what makes people happy what enhances well-being one of the preliminary series of studies in in the 1980s and 90s it was looking at the conditions under which given people are happy and to do that research they had volunteers who were equipped with pages which went off at random times during the day and they had to write down what they were doing and also how happy they felt on a one to nine scale and of course during the day people's happiness fluctuated as did the things they were doing but what this revealed was that the occasions on which people felt happiest where they were doing all sorts of different things which at first seemed to have nothing in common they people often reported being happy when they were engaged in their work when they were having a good conversation when they were dancing or singing when they were playing games and and other things too but what was in common between between all these things was they felt they in a state of flow they were part of something greater than themselves and that seemed to be one of the ingredients for happiness what made people unhappy was feeling bored frustrated alienated separated and not engaged when they were studying happy people to find out what characteristics happy people had one of the things they found was that happy people tend to be people who are grateful and grateful people who are happier people also are more popular this was a widespread finding that they established but then the critic said well of course these people thought feel more grateful they've more grateful because they're happier so they wanted to find out they wanted to find out whether they were happy because they were grateful or grateful because they were happy so he did actual experiments in which they took groups of volunteers divided them into three groups one of the three groups was asked to write a list of all the things that had upset them in the previous week which had been hassles and problems another group wrote a story about something that happened in a previous week and the third group wrote a list of the things for which they've helped most grateful that had made them happy in the previous week for which they felt grateful and the group that simply made a list of things that had made them happy for which they felt grateful were measurably happier four days afterwards compared with the other groups the most effective of their experiments involved what they called the gratitude letter they asked people to write a letter to acknowledge and thank someone who'd helped them in their lives who they hadn't properly thank to acknowledge reform could be a teacher family member a friend say read this letter and then they went to that person read it to them and this had a huge effect they were measurably happier for two months afterwards as a result of doing that something as simple and as brief was that had an enormous effect well the the idea of counting your blessings and being grateful for what you have is not of course a new idea it's part of all religious traditions all of them involve Thanksgiving of one kind or another and many tradition many religious traditions have traditional ways of giving thanks but there are now all sorts of ways you can do it there are health self-help books on gratitude and they suggest a variety of exercises one of them that works best for men for example is to have some beans dry beans you put in one pocket and every time in the day you have something happens which you feel grateful you take out a bean and think about the thing you're grateful put is in the other pocket until they've all moved from one pockets the other you put them back the next morning so you get the idea and of course since America in America everything every new idea is turned into a product you can now buy expensive gratitude journals to write down what you're grateful for but of course to put this into practice you don't need to buy the self-help book or to buy an expensive gratitude journal you can just make a list either writing it down or mentally every day that's the simplest way to do this practice and there are other ways in which you can put into practice gratitude it used to be traditional in most cultures for people to give thanks before meals by saying grace or singing grace and it still happens in some families and it happens in traditional institutions like my college at Cambridge Clare College every evening at 7:30 everyone's in the dining hall a gong goes everyone stands up and the senior fellow reads a long Latin grace no best people probably don't understand the Latin a lot don't pay much attention but it does provide a kind of break a pause where those who want to give thanks can and that's a very traditional way of doing it when the TV series Downton Abbey was going on someone asked why they were never shown beginning a meal and the answer was that around the time that film portrayed around the time of the first world war when a family sat down to dinner someone would have said grace and they couldn't show them starting a meal because that would you involved showing them saying grace and they didn't want to do that because it might offend atheists so and they couldn't show grace so any but the point is they would have done it and it's a very simple way to bring this back into one's life to give thanks before a meal at the moment in most families there's a kind of awkward pause before dinner you know there's a kind of empty space now in question is what to do and in England usually people say something like oh do start it'll get cold [Laughter] but it's possible to seize that opportunity and what I do with my own families we always hold hands before we encircle and if it's just a few of us we just hold hands silently if it's more than someone says a grace usually me or anyone who wants to lead and saying thank you in one way or another and or if there are more of us we sing a grace as around and it's it's a with a lot of people run the table singing together before you each is it very effective the whole atmosphere changes everyone sort of glowing even it's even though the song only lasts about a minute so this is one of the very simple ways in which one can bring back a practice of gratitude as a spiritual practice in everyday life in my book science and spiritual practices I suggest two simple practices at the end of each chapter and this is one of the ones at the end of the chapter on gratitude now how far you go in your gratitude depends on your worldview if you're a materialist and you think that the universe is basically unconscious and evolution is happened by chance then you may not feel you can give thanks to a conscious source of all nature or even nature itself if it's unconscious and mechanical but you can certainly give thanks to other people someone's prepared the food people have grown it they've they've produced it many people have gone into providing the food that we eat if you take a more pen psychist view and you think of nature as a live rather than inanimate you can give thanks to the earth and to the Sun and to all the factors in nature that make the eating and our life possible you can give thanks to the earth you can give thanks to the Sun that who enables plants to grow in life to exist on earth you can give thanks for being alive in the first place because none of us are alive as a result of our own choice decision or effort we're all here because of billions of years of evil and cosmic evolution and ancestral lines and ancestors who survived every one of us has ancestors who survived through natural selection through hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and before that our animal ancestors they all survived and they lived under conditions that enabled them to survive and if you believe that behind the universe there's a source of all things a conscious source from which all things come God or whatever you choose to call the ultimate source of of conscious being then you can give thanks to that too but you could it doesn't matter how far you go there's always something you can give thanks for and as I say one's worldview affects how far one might be inclined to go but there's plenty to do even if one has the most extreme kind of materialist view there's still a great deal to be thankful for service everyone has some reason to be thankful well the second practice I want to mention is meditation now I know that you had a session this morning those of you who were here this morning on meditation so I'm not going to go into that in enormous detail because you've already gone into it in some detail today all traditions have meditation in one form or another and we're most familiar today with Hindu and Buddhist forms of meditation but something very similar I was going on in the Christian context from at least the fourth century when monasticism began monks and nuns were living in contemplative communities where they spent a lot of their time in contemplative prayer which is the Christian name for meditation it's it's not the word meditation was only really introduced in the late 19th century to cover this activity the traditional contemplative prayer which is using often using a repetitive phrase or mantra and then in in many in the Eastern Orthodox and in the realm Catholic tradition many people use repetitive prayers with prayer beads or rosaries which is again like a kind of mantra type of meditation in the Sufi tradition in Islam there are various forms of meditation including a mantra type of meditation using one of the names of God called a wazifa it was very similar to Hindu mantras and Sikhs have meditation and Jane said meditation is present in many traditions there are two main kinds there's the kind that involves mantras where you use a phrase or a word or something you repeat silently to yourself or chant out loud and as the mindfulness type which involves observing the breath or sensations in the body but without a mantra and many people do probably about half and half split or both of them are very common in the modern world how many people here meditate or have meditated oh well it's almost everybody so I don't need to tell you what it feels like because you already know from your own experience well as you know there have been many studies on the effects of meditation the first set of studies in the 1970s by Herbert Benson at Harvard and John Cabot soon in Massachusetts also in Massachusetts there were looking at the physiological responses and Herbert Benson concentrated to start with on the ad relaxation response the way in which meditation reduces stress I don't know whether this morning you dealt with the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system aspect of this No well the the Benson was concentrating not so much on the brain but on the physiological response of the body as you know we all have an unconscious body based nervous system the autonomic nervous system which has two sides the parasympathetic and the sympathetic the sympathetic nervous system is not in to do with sympathy misleadingly enough it's mostly to do with fear when you're afraid of something your sympathetic nervous system is activated adrenaline goes through your bloodstream your heart beats faster your blood pressure goes up and you're in a state where you're ready to fight or run away the fight-or-flight reaction the opposite is the parasympathetic nervous system which is about not being afraid and it's only when that system is activated that you can carry out activities that require a relaxation of the body and lack of fear making love for example eating a meal even going to the lavatory you can't do these things if you're hyper activated with your drove with the adrenalin system if you're being chased across a field by an angry bull your parasympathetic nervous system is fully activated and good thing it is it helps you run faster but the last thing you think of is making love or sitting down to dinner and or going to the lavatory these of things are inhibited by the sympathetic nervous system now it's very necessary for us to have that response but in the modern world a lot of people spend their time in a state of chronic anxiety they're afraid almost all the time they're worried about things or they're fearful of things that might go wrong or anxious and this activates through chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system which is very bad for health because it leads to elevated blood pressure and stress reactions stress high stress hormone levels and so on and what Herbert Benson found was that when people meditated basically for those who were suffering from stress and anxiety it greatly reduced the activity of the sympathetic nervous system and activated the parasympathetic nervous system that's called the relaxation response and as a result of that one of the effects of meditation is feeling more relaxed being able to sleep better and being able to more effective in your life and that's why many people do it but sorry yes so the the the parasympathetic nervous system did that's a very important part of it but the it also protects against depression and as I didn't if you discuss that this morning but is is now well-established that people who meditate regularly are less depressed and less prone to depression than those who don't and the you can now get a prescription to depression on the National Health Service in some parts of Britain psychiatrists can actually prescribe a course of meditation for people who have mild or moderate depression because clinical trials have shown that it works better than antidepressant drugs and of course has fewer side effects and from the point of view of the National Health Service has the additional advantage of being cheaper so it's it has a protective effect against depression so meditation has many benefits and as I do know you talked about this morning can lead to changes in brain activity the main one when you're meditating is a reduction in the activity of the default mode Network the part of the connection of areas in the brain that are concerned with worries and ruminations and it can also lead to long-term anatomical changes not very surprising really if you're doing particular things with your mind and hence with your brain particular regions again to become more active and the connections get better established between them the brain is much more plastic than people used to think we're not surprised if people who do weightlifting develop bigger muscles in their arms and so it's not that surprising if people who meditate develop new connections and their brains or stronger connections between particular regions of the brain now all this is established by science the benefits are well known there now you can learn meditation all over the world and lots of people do it including practically everybody here I do it myself I I was first did it in 1971 when I was a practicing atheist and was attracted to Transcendental Meditation because you didn't have to believe anything you just did it and you could see what it did and that's the whole point about these spiritual practices they're all based on experience you don't have to start off with a belief system what most people you won't we all need belief systems everyone has belief systems but you don't necessarily have to have a spiritual or religious belief system to do these practices they're about experience and through learnings through your own experience but the reason people meditated traditionally was not so they could be more successful in love and business or sleep better or not it wasn't these secular worldly benefits that people we people were primarily meditating for they were meditating because they thought it provided a way of connecting with the ultimate source of consciousness the Hindus explain this most clearly in in one of the main schools of Hindu philosophy the idea is that the everything in the universe depends ultimately on conscious being the mind of God Brahman and that this ultimate consciousness is the source of everything in the universe and the ultimate source is conscious as the whole point the ultimate being is a being and the characteristics of Brahmin are threefold sat-chit-ananda sat means being it's conscious being Chet means consciousness knowledge it's to do with names and forms the contents of consciousness and Ananda is joy or bliss and the idea is that the ultimate mind of the universe is complete not going anywhere not trying to go anywhere else and it's utterly blissful it's in a permanent state of bliss so the purpose of meditation is to connect our minds with the ultimate mind of the universe Hindu see all conscious beings as as it were fractal reflections of the divine mind one of their principal metaphors is of buckets of water lots of buckets of water just standing there and at night reflecting the moon and in each bucket you see a reflection of the moon it looks like hundreds or thousands of different moons but each of those is a reflection of the one moon which is the source of all these reflections and in the same way all our minds are reflections of the ultimate mind and participate in its nature because they're derived from it so our conscious being is part of the ultimate conscious being Atman our individual consciousness is Brahman it's a it's linked hurts and is part of it in the Kano who've been assured it talks about the nature of this ultimate reality there's a series of verses which show get over this point quite clearly one of them is not that which is seen by the eyes but that whereby the eyes can see no that'll learn to be Brahman the Lord so it's the ability to see not what seen God is not a thing out there that you can study by space probes or scientific observations and quantitative measurements it's the very ground of consciousness and knowledge itself another verses not that which is known by the mind but that whereby the mind can know know that alone to be Brahman or the not that which is heard by the years but that whereby the ears can hear it's the ground of consciousness itself that links us to the ultimate reality and sometimes teachers of meditation compare the strain the the stream of thoughts that goes through our minds when we're meditating to the clouds passing through the sky and normally you're completely involved in your thoughts you're involved in your ruminations you've totally gripped by this these fears anxieties ruminations resentments internal dialogue and so on but the meditation by concentrating on your breathing your sensations in the body as in mindfulness or on your mantra sort of splits your mind and detaches you partially from these thoughts and then you become aware that your mind is more like the blue sky through which the clouds are passing the ground of all these thoughts and ideas and the more you become aware and present in that ground of consciousness the more you become linked to the ultimate consciousness to the being on which all consciousness depends and the more you'll link to that the more blissful or joyful it is because the more linked you are to this ultimate source of joy or bliss so that's the the way in which roughly speaking and very abbreviated in which this is understood in by many people in India the Christian understanding is rather similar because all the Christians like Hindus have the idea that God is ultimate consciousness and has three principal aspects the ground of being in Christian is called the Father is essentially a conscious being and when Moses first met God in the desert in the burning bush and said who are you God said I am Who I am it's a statement of the divine conscious being it's defining God as conscious being and presence and but God's mind contains thoughts ideas forms shapes logic meaning contents and that's the log-off's the second person of the Trinity is rather like a Christian assimilation of the platonic realm of ideas into the divine being names and forms as the Hindus call it and the third aspect is the spirit which is the dynamic principle of God which is the breath the wind the flow of life and is also joy or bliss st. Augustine one of the early theologians thought of the Holy Trinity is the knower the known and the joy of knowing again it's sort of the the ground of being on knowing as the Father the Son all that Lagos as the known or the second person defined in forms shapes connections meanings and the joy of the Spirit so these spiritual practices actually traditionally have been designed to connect us with the ultimate reality and different practices connect us with different aspects of it you can find similar parallels to this threefold division in Sufism and you can find in Buddhism - there's a three-fold classification of the levels of being or consciousness so the idea is that these practices connect us with the ultimate but different practices connect us with different aspects of the ultimate and meditation connects us more with the ground of being such that state of pure consciousness or the ground of consciousness itself rather than the contents of consciousness if you're looking at the beauty of flowers for example new you're absorbed in the contemplation of the beauty of these forms then this is more connecting with Chet names and forms the the the contents of consciousness of divine consciousness because the idea is that all these forms ultimately are reflections of the divine mind and then if you're engaged in some activity which is very active which has a spiritual dimension as many sports do then it's more to do with the spirit and principle of flow movement and change and and also we're dancing and music becomes spiritual practices it's more dealing with this dynamical aspect of the spirit the meditation is more to do with the ground of it now you don't have to believe all this or even take it seriously to meditate and most people who meditate don't and Sam Harris for example is goes on being a militant atheist even though he's a experienced meditator and teaches meditation he can believe that it's all inside the brain that there's nothing going on beyond his own brain that's generating these sensations of a connection with a greater being but there isn't really a greater being it's just something that's happening as a result of dopamine release and connections inside the brain and all of us have the choice really what to believe do we trust our own direct experience and when we have the experience of our mind being connected with something far greater than ourselves or do we trust a theory the materialists theory that says the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain therefore it's all inside the head a theory which is notoriously poor on understanding consciousness the very existence of consciousness is the hard problem from the materialist theory that's a question we all have to make whether we put that theory first or our inexperience first we may start as I did when I started meditating with a materialist theory of the mind I thought it was all inside my head but partly as a result of my own experiences I came to the conclusion that was too narrow a view and it was better to trust my own direct experience of consciousness and this is again a point where science and spiritual practices come into a fairly close connection because science after all is based on the experimental method experience experiments mean good empirical means an experience experiments are about experience and spiritual experience is about experience too science is ultimately based on experience and in French the same word experience means experiment and experience so when we are exploring consciousness is it better to explore it externally through studying the brain or internally through the actual experience of consciousness itself and meditation enables us to explore the nature of consciousness directly well and ideally I think we need both and that's what the scientific study of spiritual practices is giving us it doesn't necessarily commit us to a reductionist view that is nothing but the activity of the brain it's true that when people have mystical experiences particular parts of the brain become active but that doesn't prove is nothing about the brain you're having a non mystical experience right now seeing me standing here and if someone measured your brain activity there will be changes in your brain associated with the image of me and hearing my words and which would be changes measurable changes in your brain but the fact there are measurable changes in your brain when you see and hear me doesn't prove prove and nothing but your brain and fortunately I for me I have an independent existence and and it's a new kind of interaction and so it may well be that when our consciousness connects with higher forms of consciousness if such forms exist that the brain changes in particular ways but it doesn't prove that it's nothing but those changes in the brain so no I I just want to say something about rituals all traditions have rituals and I want to focus first before we have our short break on rites of passage all societies have rites of passage which are when somebody moves from one social role to another the most fundamental rights of passage are concerned with birth and death which are the ultimate passages when you become alive and the other you stop being alive other rites of passage include marriage where you stop being a single person and become a founder of a new family and all societies have their ways of celebrating this and there are many societies have rites of passage when people pass from adolescence to maturity and become a mature man or woman adult member of the society in some Native American tribes for example they have vision quests where young men go out into the wilderness fasting confronting great dangers and then find a vision for what their role is in society and then come back and have welcomed into the circle of men and a circle in adults as members of that and mature members of that society many rights of passage involve a theme of death and rebirth that you died your old role and you're born again in a new way and I think that some of them actually involve near-death experiences they involve trials by ordeal or pushing people to extreme limits where they basically nearly died now we know more about near-death experiences today than people have ever known before largely because more people than ever before actually have them thanks to the advances of modern medicine many people who would have died fifty years ago or a hundred years ago of heart attacks or medical emergencies now survived and many of those who've been who they've actually been dead for a minute or two or as near dead as can be and come back to life report what are now called near-death experiences and some of you probably in this room have had them because relatively common I should guess at least 10 or 20 people here have had them and they've now been described scientifically partly through subjective reports and partly through actually measuring the brain states of people during heart operations when their heart has stopped and they actually have near-death experiences on the operating table while they're being monitored basically what happens to people and they have these experiences that they find themselves floating onto the body usually looking down on their body with nurses and doctors doing things to them then they often go through a tunnel a dark tunnel and emerge into a realm of bliss light and joy and when they're in that realm they feel immensely welcomed loved they sometimes meet people deceased relatives or friends who welcome them they feel utterly blissful joyful loved and ever having a wonderful time being there but it doesn't last long because it's only a near-death experience and they have to go back and very often when people have had these experiences they say it's completely changed their life they've lost the fear of death they often become more spiritual people and members of their family often notice their behavior has changed and it usually in better they usually behave better to other people so these have a very transformative effect even though the whole experience may only last a few minutes it changes people's lives and these don't depend on spiritual practice they come unbidden as a result of medical emergencies so not all spiritual experiences come as a result of spiritual practices some of them happen spontaneously like spontaneous mystical experiences and near-death experiences no no of course the exact status of near-death experiences is heavily disputed for people who are committed materialists then all this has to be a kind of hallucination inside the brain they can't prove it's inside the brain but they assume all experiences nothing about the brain therefore it must be inside the brain even if the brain shows no measurable activity but for those who are not committed to the materialist point of view and it's David they take them at their face value that there's some consciousness can under certain conditions separate from the body and enter realms of experience that seemed to be disembodied outside the physical body which is still lying there on a bed with nurses and doctors resuscitating it but we don't need to discuss the theoretical basis of this to look at the anthropological significance if people found practices which could actually induce near-death experiences they would be very powerful initiatory practices because they could take people into a near-death state which would as we know from modern near-death experiences transform their person now is it possible this has happened or does happen and the answer is yes I think the most obvious example it's not obvious at first sight but well in reflection it has been hiding in plain sight his baptism we read in the New Testament that John the Baptist was baptizing large numbers of people in the River Jordan by holding them under the water and people were flocking from all over the Holy Land to the Jordan to be baptized by John one of them was Jesus and we have a subjective report of Jesus's experience where he felt for the first time his direct connection with God his direct bondage Banta his bonds to guard his the fact he was deeply and closely related to God and this was immediately followed by him going on a Vision Quest 40 days fasting in the wilderness which happened before he began any of his public work so his right of passage was baptism by John the Baptist and this is very clear from the Bible now the usual interpretation of John the Baptist's activities is that he was creating a symbolic right or ritual of death and rebirth by drowning holding them under so they symbolically drown and then bringing them up as symbolic birth again after a symbolic death by drowning but why settle for something symbolic when you can have the real thing it would only take a couple of minutes longer and - what I'm suggesting is that John the Baptist was a drummer and I think he held him under just long enough to induce a near-death experience I imagined that he would have had a team of helpers on the bank of the Jordan resuscitating people afterwards and debriefing them and and that would have been a line of people waiting in it whether it would have been next please and the next one would have come and he was doing this on a large scale and it was quick it's a very quick way of inducing a near-death experience now after a few generations in the early church people had stopped doing this they started baptizing babies by sprinkling water over them or even by immersing them very briefly in water but then it really was symbolic of death and rebirth by drowning but in to start with I don't think it was symbolic at all and I think that the fact these people said their life was completely changed as a result of it makes much more sense if it was a real experience anyway it died out in in most Christian churches and bitterly in that intense religious ferment of the process of Revelation some of the reformers read the Bible in English or German or other European languages and realized this was clearly what had been going on then originally and it wasn't happening anymore so what they said is we should reintroduce this practice and those who did were some of the most radical religious groups of the Reformation they were called Anabaptists ana means again they were baptizing people again by total immersion and I think inducing a death and rebirth experience now of course they and John the Baptist might have lost a few but and I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be baptized by a novice I mean I you'd want someone who'd had plenty of experience but that was before a liability litigation so I think that's what John the Baptist and the Anabaptists might well have been doing and the Anabaptists of all the people at the Reformation were the ones who went round saying they died they'd been born again and they'd seen the light now that would have been a literal statement of their experience if they'd had near-death experiences through partial or drowning and it would have been literally true and they were filled with a fervor and a sense of illumination and direct connection with God and of course that made them very unpopular with Protestants and Catholics as sort of regular church authorities because it meant these people were claiming in direct connection with God and not just doing it through rituals and ceremonies and so on but through a ritual that actually totally transformed them and they were persecuted in Europe they were mainly in England Germany Holland and Switzerland and in 17th century when the trance arose most them went to America and in subsequent centuries to escape persecution where they became the ancestors of current Baptists in America the Southern Baptists are the Baptist's the Mennonite and the Amish churches who still practice baptism by total immersion as do English Baptists well I don't know how many contemporary Southern Baptists in Texas and places still hold people long enough to induce a near-death experience I suspect they don't because health and safety regulation isn't something I would make them very conscious of the dangers but I think when we look at what happened the anabaptists and this sense of being a dying being born again and seeing the light it makes total sense in the light of this ritual now just one further point on this I think the lack of rites of passage today is one reason why so many people enjoy or you or take psychedelic drugs so so many teenagers take them I think because they're looking for a kind of rite of passage and these drugs actually induce near-death types of rites of passage in some cases DMT dimethyltryptamine the most intense of psychedelics only lasts about 10 minutes but it gives many people the feeling of dying traveling out of their body going through a tunnel into a realm of light bliss and joy and then coming back again and it's a transformative effect for most people who've done it LSD often has this effect too when Stan Grof the Czech psychiatrist was studying LSD in the 1960s in Prague and later in America before it became illegal he found he started 2500 people who'd taken it he found it was relatively common for people to have an experience where they found themselves extremely uncomfortable constricted being crushed or trapped and then escaped by going through a tunnel and emerged into the light where is blissful and joyful and everything was completely different and again it was like a near-death experience I have to say I had one myself when I first took LSD in 1970 and it was more or less as Stan Grof describes it had a huge effect on on me and so Wellcome will come to questions later and so anyway this was something that for me was very significant and I think that for many people who take these drugs it does have this rite of passage effects in fact one of the things that changing the consciousness of our whole culture is psychedelics and Michael Pollan's recent book how to change your mind the new science of psychedelics has made this more or less mainstream now of course it's still illegal here in England and lots of people take psychedelics under very bad conditions when they may induce psychosis they're not supported by experienced people they do them in highly unsuitable circumstances so the indiscriminate use of psychedelics is definitely not a good thing but there are no psychedelic churches where you can actually take them as part of a ceremony and of course shamanic psychedelic ceremonies in Brazil the Santo Daime Church is a church which uses ayahuasca which is a psychedelic brew from the Amazon as a kind of communion and members of this church actually take this together in in a special kind of communion service and so they're no they're a result of Catholic missionaries going to the areas of the Amazon where traditional shamanic cultures took ayahuasca as a psychedelic healing compare a mixture and so we've now got this hybrid we're which is spreading rapidly in Europe there are hundreds of site underground psychedelic churches now in London and elsewhere in Britain and Europe where people are doing these ceremonies is sometimes called a reverse missionary movement and so what we're dealing with here is rites of passage which are rituals which give this particular transformative experience there are many other kinds of ritual and and I'm going to come back to those after the break but Neil told me it's your custom and need to have a break so we're going to have a short five-minute break and then we'll start again before the break I was talking about rites of passage now I want to say something about rituals of remembrance all societies have stories of their origins which account for why the social group is as it is and all of them have ways of reenacting these origins in rituals for example Jewish people every year celebrate the ritual of the Passover it's a major Jewish festival and what this does is reenact the original story of the Passover Jewish people were slaves in Egypt Moses was trying to lead them to freedom and the Pharaoh wouldn't let them go so there were a series of 10 plagues visited on Egypt to persuade the Pharaoh to let them go and the last plague was the killing of the firstborn of all the Egyptians and of their cattle and the Jewish people were immune from this slaughter because Moses told them to kill a sheep instead and smeared the blood on the doorway of their house and so they were passed over and the next morning then they at the lamb with bitter herbs in haste ready to leave and sure enough the next morning the fairies had go just get out I don't want you here anymore and they set off an their journey through the wilderness to the promised land an epic event in Jewish history so every year this Feast of the Passover is reenacted with lamb and bitter herbs and the story is told and by taking part in it Jewish people become Jewish they affirm their identity as Jewish by participating and they connect with all those who've done it before them through all the generations back to the first Passover the Christian Holy Communion is very similar was itself originally a Passover dinner with Jesus and His disciples and Christians all over the world re-enacts him ritually that Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples in the Holy Communion with bread and wine by taking part in this communion they become part of the Christian community and connect with all those who have done it right back to the very first holy communion the American Thanksgiving dinner is a secular national ritual happens in November every November Americans gather with friends and family to do this Thanksgiving dinner which reenact the original Thanksgiving dinner of the first settlers in New England in 1619 they had a dinner to give thanks after their first year surviving there with turkey and American bird unknown in Europe and until then and this reenactment of the original Thanksgiving dinner makes Americans American and connects them to those first settlers so we find in all cultures these kinds of rituals and many other kinds of ritual as well and in these rituals people have to do things in a similar way to the way it's done before rituals are repetitive in their structure and they often use archaic languages the brahmana creatures of India used Sanskrit the rituals of the coptic church in egypt use ancient egyptian the only form in which it survives the rituals and the russian orthodox church use old Slavonic and so on why is it that rituals are so conservative and why is it the people think that by doing things in such a similar way as the way it's been done before that they'll reconnect across time with all this that who've done it before them it they'll be connected to those who in the present who are doing it but also those who've done it in the past well one possible explanation is provided by the idea of morphic resonance this is my own hypothesis and unfortunately I didn't have time to explain the hypothesis but it's basically the idea of that memory has a there's a kind of memory in nature the laws of nature are more like habits each species has a kind of collective memory a bit like what Jung called the collective unconscious and morphic resonance is the process whereby patterns of activity in the past resonate across time with patterns in the present on the basis of similarity now what rituals do is create the very conditions for morphic resonance by doing things in a similar way as possible to the way they've been done before they create the conditions whereby present participants will enter into a kind of resonance with all those who've done them before they will in fact be connected to those who've done before that will in fact be a presence of the past through taking part in this ritual which is exactly what people think they're doing in rituals so I think this gives a new interpretation of these rituals and makes much more sense of them and then they might otherwise seem to make they're certainly very powerful to take part in effective rituals and that's why all cultures have them and if they've lost them they usually reinvent them because they're very important for our sense of belonging and connection finally I want to say a few words about pilgrimage all our ancestors were hunter-gatherers I mean all of us in this room had hunter-gatherer ancestors settled agriculture didn't begin in in europe till about five thousand years ago and any nowhere in the world did it begin until about ten thousand years ago and before that people lived by hunting and gathering and hunter-gatherers had to move around they couldn't just sit in one place and wait for animals to come to them and fruit to drop into their labs they moved around the landscape and when they in the cyclin annual cycle and each place significant place on the way they told the story or sang the story as in the American Aboriginal song lines so moving and gauge sacred places was part of our deep heritage when people settled down they still continued to go to holy places for example in England when agriculture first began people built great ceremonial centers like Stonehenge they were not temples in the middle of a city they people were scattered all over the countryside but people converged on these holy places for the main festivals at the solstices for example and then they went home again and this became a kind of pilgrimage to a holy place and all religions have pilgrimage Muslims go to Mecca and the other holy places like the Dome of the rock in Jerusalem Buddhists go to the birthplace of the Buddha and the place he was enlightened Hindus go to Mount Kailash in Tibet to the source of the Ganges to the holy city of Varanasi it says an Aryan person is quite true and so I don't if oh it's gone and so and there are many other holy places in India India's criss crossed with pilgrimage routes and medieval Europe was like that too there were many pilgrimage sites in medieval Europe places where Saints relics were kept holy mountains like croak Patrick in our Ireland ancient holy places all the cavers scent balm in Provence which were marjoram or ancient holy places that were Christianized and Europe was full of these roots here in England the two most important were the pilgrimage to Canterbury to the relics of son Thomas Becket who was martyred in the cathedral and the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham the black madonna of Walsingham in Norfolk and there were many others all over England at the process of reformation pilgrimage was simply abolished in 1538 Thomas Cromwell here in England issued an injunction against pilgrimage making it illegal and the infrastructure for pilgrimage was the monasteries which provided food and shelter to traveling pilgrims and those were dissolved so the infrastructure was destroyed the shrines were destroyed the image of Our Lady of Walsingham at the black madonna was taken from it the shrine and burned in a public bonfire and there was this kind of total wiping out of this tradition in Britain and in northern Germany and in Scandinavia in the process of countries this left a great void in the soul of the English and I think that's why after a few generations the English invented tourism I think tourism is best seen as a form of secularized pilgrimage and tourists still go to the great holy places the ancient temples of Egypt the temples of India the great cathedrals of Europe but when they get there they can't say a prayer or make an offering because they have to pretend they're modern enlightenment type educated people who've risen above all this kind of superstition so they have to pretend their primary their because of an interest in art history so guides spring up to fill their minds with facts when the building was built by which King how many tons of stone it contains etcetera etcetera and facts that go in one area and come out the other because they have to pretend that they're primarily there for facts but they're not and in fact I think is best seen as a form of frustrated pilgrimage and real pilgrims go with an intention they make an offering in India and in many other places they walk round the place they're visiting first before going in circumambulating making at the center and they make offerings they ask for blessings or healing or give thanks and then they bring something back to share with their friends and family in India people bring that blessed food called Prasad at which they share with people and this is much much more satisfying than going as a tourist and it's very interesting that in modern secular Europe there's an astonishing revival of pilgrimage going on right now starting in the 1980s a group of people in Spain re-established the infrastructure to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and a thousand people walk there in 1987 three hundred thousand walk there last year and this has helped to trigger off a revival of pilgrimage elsewhere in Europe there's now the old pilgrimage route to trondheim Cathedral the shrine of Saint Olaf in Norway has been revived and is now a major place of pilgrimage in northern Europe in the last ten years and in Britain there's an organization called the British pilgrimage trust which is reopening the ancient footpath pilgrimage routes to the great holy places of England including cathedrals holy trees sacred wells ancient stone monuments and so on and you can find it as more than 30 of them routes there on the website British pilgrimage org I've been doing this for the last few years every year with my teenage godson when he was 14 I didn't know what to give him for his birthday which is in June and I've stopped giving people's stuff because most people have got too much stuff and I now give experiences and so I thought what can I give this 14 year old boy as an experience I'm his Godfather so I thought a bit and then I suddenly can't really a pilgrimage so I said to him I said you may or may not want to do this but my offer is we take the train from London we get off at a little village station called charter near Canterbury about eight or nine miles from Canterbury we walk through the ancient North John's pilgrim way to Canterbury through fields Meadows orchards and woods we visit the black Prince's well a medieval healing well with clear water in pentagons Tomasi arch mossy steps going down to it we walk into Canterbury we circumambulate the cathedral we light candles of the shrine we gave an intention something we're asking for and then we have a cream tea and then we go to choral evensong which is this very beautiful song service that happens in all our cathedrals every single day again you can find about about that on another website called choral evensong dot org so I said we go to choral evensong and then we take the train home I said would you like to do that and without hesitation he said yes and we had a very blissful day it was utterly wonderful day and then when he was 15 we went to Ely Cathedral we took the train to water beach I walked along the towpath of the cam and Ely Cathedral rises above the fens and this hugely impressive great medieval building when he was 16 we walked to Lincoln along the Lincoln Ridge on a footpath on the Lincoln Ridge to what I think is one of our finest cathedrals Lincoln again lit candles at the shrine had tea and went choral evensong and came home then he was 17 we went to Wells Cathedral and this year we went to Winchester we took the train to a village near Winchester we walked from Twyford a beautiful village along the River Edge in fast-flowing beautiful River ups and Catherine's Hill whereas an ancient turf labyrinth which so we walked the labyrinth then we went on the outskirts of Whistler Winchester to st. cross which is a medieval Hospital for old people for old men and because it was not for monks it was not dissolved at the Reformation it looks a bit like an offset college courtyard with the chapel and under their medieval statutes they have to provide the pilgrims Dahl to any pilgrim who requests it and a mug of beer and a slice of bread so we went to the porters Lodge and I requested the pilgrims Dole I said where pilgrims were on our way to Winchester Cathedral and the porter said all right she said I did you've asked for it you'll get it said but you have to ask and I'm glad you asked and she brought us the beer and bread and then she looked at my godsister is he over 18 I said well actually yes he was 18 last week that's why we're doing this pilgrimage it's for his birthday and cersei okay well you can have it and she said and she gave it to him said but it won't be so much fun now it's legal she said anyway we had a blissful day this year and since they're something like 45 cathedrals in England this is a formula that can go on and on so this is a in fact I was doing one just yesterday we're developing a series of one-day routes the British film which Cranston I'm helping with this I was helping you know with a group of us in Nottingham Shara developing a new route and a new old route to a Savile Cathedral which is the Cathedral of Nottingham sure I had absolutely when I got I just got off the train to come here I got mad I'm afraid on my from the the pilgrimage but it's a wonderful practice and it's something you could do with friends or families or on your own or you can do it in a group the British program is a trust arranges groups doing it and one of the slogans of the British pilgrimage trust for groups during pilgrimages is bring your own beliefs so it's not about again it's not about you've got to sign up to a belief system first many people who go to Santiago and not practicing Christians many some of them even atheists but it's an expression of a spiritual quest which anyone can take part in so this is another spiritual practice which is open to everybody and I strongly recommend it if any of you feel inclined and to do this you can do either long ones there's an 18-day route to pick Canterbury from Winchester or does these one-day pilgrimages with five or six miles or if you do the whole day seven or eight miles to cathedrals or other holy places here in Britain well that's a summary of some of the spiritual practices I discuss in my book and it gives you a flavor there are only seven spiritual practices in this book and writing a same book as sequel with us another seven I'm not going to go on beyond their four teams enough as examples but there are many other spiritual practices too and these are all practical things you can actually do and they're all things which you had have measurable effects which can be studied scientifically so there's no conflict here between science and spiritual practice in fact I think that they mutually reinforce each other because the scientific studies illuminate these practices and also share as statistically what benefits they can have and the practices themselves can be helped through the science and you could meditate more effectively if you know more about the science behind it so and and particularly in spiritual practices associated with psychedelic drugs they're extremely science dependent especially the ones that depend on modern synthetic drugs as opposed to herb or brews so I think we're entering an era where science and spiritual practices can be seen as complementary rather than in any sense contradictory and personally I find that very helpful because I myself do all the spiritual practices I discuss in this book I'm also a practicing scientist and spend most of my time in research and I personally don't experience a conflict between them at all and I think that they provide illuminate a way for words for many of us who've grown up in a very secular society an unprecedentedly secular society in fact but not one that is spiritually inert at all there's a kind of ferment of spirituality going on at the moment and I think we're actually on the threshold of a new phase of spiritual evolution thank you [Applause] yes so if you'd like to ask a question or make a point I'll steal not me he's going to choose who does it I'm just going to talk he's going to have the hard decisions yes yeah well thank you that those were for those who haven't seen I did a long series of trial Logs with two very good friends Terence Mckenna who was a explorers psychedelic use of psychedelic shamanism and Ralph Abraham who is a Kaos mathematician from the University of California in Santa Cruz Terence sadly died in the year 2000 Ralph still alive and we still meet on a regular basis but these were some of the most exciting conversations I've ever had and we used to spend several days together every year just talking in the first ten years we just talked the next ten years before Terence died various friends said oh you must record these and and so they were recorded was about thirty of these online on my website and the three or four on YouTube that were also filmed but our aim in those conversations was to go where without a particular agenda just seeing where it would lead and because they were both such exciting people to talk to they they were immensely stimulating in it it's wonderful that people can still listen to them now years later and they trigger off conversations for many other people too which is I'm sure what Terence would have been really pleased to know if he were still with us right reset because oh well I do actually already I have a series of podcasts with mark Vernon who's a very good friend we've done over 30 then we we're meeting next week to do the next couple I've done this whole series with Matthew Fox who some of you may know of and again those are on my website and several with Mark Andrews who's the anglican bishop of california at grace cathedral who's a great friend of mine and those conversations are particularly helpful because he's very open to the idea of you know using cathedrals in a new and more adventurous way and i'm we're discussing all sorts of ways in which this could happen since they are places which are designed to induce experiences that take you beyond yourself yes well I think the some people in the state of meditation when most of the time when I meditate there's a constant stream of thoughts and I go back to my mantra but there are periods when the thoughts stop and and even the mantra stops and then it's just a sense of being in a state for awareness and in my case doesn't happen very often but when it does it's a wonderful experience and I think many people achieve that state of being through meditation some people have spontaneous mystical experiences I mean I've had quite a few myself which just come on unbidden and again there's a sense of this conscious presence that one's in some vastly greater consciousness than one's own and again there's a sense that it's it's conscious this ultimate ground of being is essentially conscious so I think that that again is an experience and I think actually all religions start from that experience of conscious presence and the Buddha didn't become enlightened through doing a PhD at so as he became enlightened through spending years meditating learning from Yogi's and sitting under trees and meditating Jesus didn't have his sense of being part of the divine nature through studying at a rabbinical sera sera a seminary I mean it came to him through this near-death experience at baptism and through other prayer and meditation and other mystical experiences so I think that all religions start from this sense of connection with a direct a greater form of consciousness than our own but we're not always in that state of illuminated awareness and I think many of the religious and spiritual practices are about connecting to it worshipping or paying homage to or praying to a state of consciousness which is there all the time and in all of us but which we normally separated from by mundane concerns so yes I think the ultimate reality is awareness or consciousness and indeed that's what or traditions tell us well you see I think it's something more if it depends on your worldview you see if you're a materialist and you believe that consciousness is brain activity or as the materials often say minds are what brains do if you think that consciousness is nothing but brain activity then you have to say it's nothing but chemical changes in the brain neurotransmitters are blocks or enhanced or levels of dopamine increase or something like that and there are these chemical changes in the brain after all psychedelics or chemicals and they do have chemical effects that's why they work but again you get this question of is it nothing but that like is it nothing but your brain that enables you to hear me now and and see me now or is there something else really there and the answer is yes there is there's me but again with psychedelics if people have an experience of a visionary realm then they may be connecting with forms of consciousness beyond their own one of the things my friend Terrence McKenna said of the psychedelic experiences of psychedelic experience he said they're made of mind but they're not made of my mind in other words he was saying that they connect us with other forms of consciousness in some greater than our own and some forms of psychedelic experience you could say that there were just visual displays being like games a very exciting film or something but some give a sense of much greater connectedness to rums beyond the human so not all the psychedelic experience is the same and but and I wouldn't say it's just in the brain in fact I don't think any of our normal consciousness even just normal vision I gently gives in the brain I think our minds uruk's and beyond our brain all the time bringing into existence to bringing back sorry I didn't catch the quite the exact question yes oh yes I think morphic resonance can tune us into things that happened in the past and recover memories but we need something to do the tuning and now when you go to a holy place example on pilgrimage if you go to a holy place like one of the temples in Banaras or Lincoln Cathedral or you know the friday mosque in in delhi or something and any holy place or craig Patrick in Ireland you come into resonance with those that have been there before because you're exposed to the same stimuli you're getting the same pattern of influences on your nervous system that bring you into morphic resonance with people in that place in the past and that's one reason I think that holy places have the power they do because there's a kind of memory that you tap into of previous peoples spiritual experiences in that place the converse is true if you go to a place where terrible things have happened you may get a feeling of something awful having happened there and through taking part in rituals especially if it's ritual we've never done before or even once that have almost died out and have been revived as you can through morphic resonance connect with those who've done it before across time so I think morphic resonance helps to understand both the power of holy places and the power of rituals through this connection is the past that's very very interesting I mean it's it's unlikely you'd have a state bless through just the discomfort of being in water unless you had had some kind of near-death type experience so perhaps that's indeed exactly what happened may have been like a spontaneous baptism experience and I think that you know for people who have had mystical experiences many too many people have them spontaneously in childhood there's a lot of people remember these experiences from childhood and actually influences all their later life because they know that there's a state of connection with something much greater than ourselves as possible so they've actually experienced it well in any way I've never heard of anyone having it an experience of nearly drowning as a child like that but it makes total sense in the light of what we've been talking about today [Music] well that's a really difficult question and you know it's partly a question of one I mean obviously one can focus on anything one wants to focus on and some people focus on tragedies and it's good they do if they help people who've had these tragedies if one only looks at tragedies one could easily get very very depressed I tried myself to think of when there are tragedies if there's something I can do about it I try to do something about it if it's not something I can do something about then I pray for people involved in the tragedy and you know I do what I can to prevent tragedies happening but I think if we're going to be effective in dealing with all the many bad things that happen in life we do better if we come from a position of connection with realms of greater consciousness or bliss then if we're just thinking about the tragedies a lot of people in aid agencies and in the green movement undergo kind of spiritual burnout because they're spending their whole time relieving disasters and floods and tsunamis and catastrophes and epidemics and stuff and unless they're able to reconnect with that source of joy and love within themselves they rapidly burn out so I don't see it as either/or and I think people who've been who are most effective at dealing in healing and in helping often have this very strong spiritual connection I mean it's it's fairly built into most religions they have different ways of doing dealing with it in Buddhism it's more aware of removing the causes of suffering in oneself no suffering comes old-age suffering and death come from desire and if you can abolish desire you can undergo a kind of permanent ontological suicide of just ceasing to be and that is an ultimate goal at least of terrabona Buddhism the Tibetan type but the idea is you reach the level of body safe you come back and to help all sentient beings so your enlightenment is actually to help you help others in the model of Jesus which is after all the central model for Christians Jesus was certainly not immune to suffering in fact he suffered a great deal himself and he spent much of his time going around healing people and curing people who were suffering from mental and physical diseases he was also operating at a time when the Jewish people were oppressed by the Roman occupation but all his activity was continually informed by his spiritual life in his sense of connection so I myself don't see them as Isis areas in conflict and I don't see that spiritual practices necessarily blind people to the suffering in the world in fact they may make them more able to deal with it and do something about it [Music] [Music] well I've never I mean I've had people do tarot readings for me but I don't practice tarot cards so I can't claim any expert knowledge of this I mean they're obviously an irregular system in the sense that they reflect people archetypal patterns which may help them and there's only a limited number of archetypes and a particular tarot card focuses on an archetype which may or not may or may not be relevant to a person at the time but they can often help people because they do give a connection to this kind of archetypal realm of experience and wisdom whether or not the process of divination whereby you picked the right card or when you're doing the II Ching get the right hexagram how you explain that I don't know so I haven't spent much time on it as I say but I do feel that the anything that tunes into archetypal patterns or situations is going to help us because it's going to help us see things in a bigger context than our own personal distress or concern I mean all these spiritual practices are really about connecting us with something greater than ourselves if we're just isolated separated we're generally speaking unhappy and unsatisfied and these practices are all about making us feel part of a greater flow part of a greater conscious state part of a greater tradition and all part of a greater archetypal Penn well this is a good question and it's a very relevant one because our entire educational system is really steep in the materialist worldview as is government and and business I think there's two levels to this the first level is the level which to recognize that one's mind is not just one's brain even in ordinary everyday consciousness this is now nothing to do with the spiritual level it's just to do with the way vision works and say for example I mean this is a long theme I won't have time to go into it but let me just give one example how does vision work this relates to how the mind works now you're seeing me now the usual view is that lights reflected from me goes through the electromagnetic field enters your eyes through the lenses inverted images on the retinas changes in the cone cells impulses up the optic nerve and changes in various regions of the brain which could be studied through brain scanning that's very good as far as it goes but does it explain vision well no it doesn't explain the subjective experience of vision it explains changes in your brain now the first problem is how is it that you're aware of what you're seeing and that's the so-called hard problem of consciousness because materialism has no theory of consciousness it has the idea that it must be somehow arising from the brain but can't say how so that's the first problem the second question is where is this vision that the normal view is that somehow your brain generates inside your head a 3d colored dis Virtual Reality Display which includes me standing here in the rest of this room and all that is supposed to be inside your head that's the official view when you look at the stars at night the stars and the sky you're seeing are inside your brain your experiences all inside your brain so your skull is beyond the sky that's the official view now the view I'm suggesting is the much more traditional one found all over the world and believed by children until they're 10 or 11 without question which is that light comes into the ayah changes happen in the brain and you then project out your images so your image of me is projected it's in your mind but not in your brain is projected to where I am everything you're seeing is a projection of your mind and that's why when you look in mirrors that the projection goes straight through the glass because it's not physical in the same way light is which is bent by the glass reflected by it that's why you see things in mirrors your parade you're seeing your own projections in the mirror no if this is just if this is just a philosophical point then you might search just one of many views it's not scientific but because I'm a scientist I try to find ways of testing this so in this case if something is projected out from your eyes a field of vision let's call it I call it a morphic field a perceptual field which is a kind of a morphing field doesn't matter what you call it some things my image review is projected to where you are so my mind in a sense is reaching out to touch you now if you've got your back to me and you didn't know I was here could my projection onto you the reaching out of my mind touching you a factor in such where you could feel I was looking at you as soon as you asked that question you realize the sense of being stared out from behind it's very common over 95% of people including children have had it all over the world why why does this happen the materialist answer to that is one that's moderated through act sceptic groups who are designed to contract any suggestion is materials is not the TrueView the materialist answer is that's just a superstition it doesn't really happen or if it does it's because you turn around all the time and you see someone behind you you remember it but you forget all the times you're wrong as the standard view now you can actually do experiments you can do test randomized trials people or blindfolded someone's behind them through a mirror or one-way mirror can they tell them they're being looked at the answer is yes above chance there's no overwhelming evidence that this can happen above chance and even when people who watch through closed-circuit television there are physiological responses when they're being watched unconscious physiological responses the activation of the sympathetic nervous system when someone's watching them animals have this - they can tell when they're being stared at by someone who's hidden and I think it's evolved through predator prey relations it's a basic animal sense the feeling of being stared at but because it doesn't fit the materialist view that is all inside the brain this is not mentioned in psychology courses it's completely airbrushed out of normal university discussions and those of us who do research on it are attacked for being superstitious and skeptic groups sort of a attack in know I mean my Wikipedia page has been completely taken over by a skeptic activist groups who think that I'm spreading misinformation and pseudoscience by investigating these questions so in my book the sense of being stared at and other aspects of the extended mind I discuss ways in which in our ordinary everyday being our minds are far extended far beyond our brains just through walking around hearing things seeing things we're also connected with others at a distance as in telepathy and I've done lots of experiments on telephone telepathy which show that the common experience of thinking of someone who then rings is not just a coincidence or a superstition there's very good evidence now it's real you can do an online test on my web on mobile phones to test your own abilities so I think that these kinds of phenomenon show our minds are normally rooted in our brains but extend far beyond them just like the field of a magnet is rooted in the magnet and extends beyond it in the field of your mobile phone is rooted in the phone and extends invisibly beyond it all the gravitational fields of the ass rooted in the earth but it extends beyond it say our minds are rooted in our brains but extend beyond them so that's the first step that our minds are extended even in ordinary everyday consciousness and that takes you way beyond standard materialism and is still completely scientific and the idea of fields invisible fields is the basis of the whole of modern science is not as if that's some woowoo idea and then when it comes to conscious experience the experience of contact with a greater form of consciousness then I think we just have to let experience guide us you can call it subjective but actually all experience is subjective all science is subjective I mean if there are no people around there just be dead text books and journals in the in libraries with no one to understand them science is about ideas hypotheses understanding connection it depends on human minds take away the minds the be no science so I think that when it comes to these spiritual experiences of connection with a consciousness greater than our own then if we have these experiences we just have to say which is more scientific to trust experience which science is meant to be about or to trust a theory which actually isn't very good at explaining these kinds of experiences and so then I think it becomes a personal choice a decision and I think that it's possible to be you see a lot of people feel if they abandon materialism they abandon science and reason I take the opposite view I think that sticking to materialism involves denying a whole range of phenomena like the sense of being stared at Leppa the-- you know spiritual experiences which are actually much more correctly included within the realm of science and reason on the ground they exist and the evidence for them is it plain to see so I think that my whole book the science delusion is an argument against the ten dollars of materialism and by is in America it's called science set free because what I'm saying is we don't abandon science by banning materials and we liberate science and I think you become more scientific and much more fun when we move beyond the materialist worldview that's all I've got time for today let's give rubric you you

Channel: The Weekend University

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Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, Rupert Sheldrake, Science and Spirituality, Science and Spiritual Practices Rupert Sheldrake, Science and spirit, Science meditation, Science and christianity, Psychology spirituality

Id: fiUE9jCTnOQ

Length: 101min 14sec (6074 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 21 2019