Science Vs God - Is There A Life Force That Transcends Matter? | Under The Skin with Russell Brand

you are listening to under the skin with Russell Brand today I'll be speaking to Rupert Sheldrake Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist who's been called the most controversial scientist on earth his research strongly challenges the paradigms of conventional science and he's the author of multiple scientific papers and ten science books many of which have been bestsellers worldwide which develop his hypotheses that traditional science has difficulty explaining such as his popular theory morphic resonance he lives in London with his wife Jill and they have two sons he's latest book science and spiritual practice is out now I'm holding a copy of it in my hands I'm looking at Rupert Sheldrake who's been we've been in the studio a matter of minutes you've challenged the set up of the studio many ways the positioning of the microphone the positioning of the camera it seems to me that you're a man who continually flies in the face of convention have you always been like this Rupert well not completely no but I have always had a kind of contrarians streak I suppose how was your your early experience your early professional life was conventional academia it's that right you would like a Oxford researcher or Thorne I was a Don at Cambridge I did a PhD at Cambridge and I was a Don there yes and I suppose a conventional biologist well I was doing unconventional science under the guise of a conventional academic appointment as a research fellow so I was actually when I was at Cambridge I was trying to see how we could expand the frontiers of biology go beyond the framework of thinking but at that stage I hadn't published my ideas or morphic resonance and what I did was relatively within the limits of acceptable science it's interesting the dogma and doctrine that exists within the scientific and academic communities and yours is an interview that I feel at the front of obligated to say but your controversy is that I think the people like on their opposing side of the argument kind of regard you as like because I'm interested in spirituality I'm very interested in science but what you've already said about challenging frameworks is where my particular academic interest lies I know there's much about convention that I've have to learn of course I do that most people but I'm very interested in pushing frontiers and boundaries but like the the some of the criticism I yeah that's like but what you're accused of he's like pseudoscience and stuff that's not backed up by proper evidence and I feel like that if we had Neil deGrasse Tyson on and I hope we do one day or when I've had people I had honest of a the head of philosophy once from Oxford who's like a Christian theologian and it's interesting isn't it because once you're dealing with mysticism which Christianity you know must be referred to as to a degree but there's a kind of there's a hierarchy and this hegemony within those fields why are you controversial what is it they have said that makes people think of you is that a phrase that I particularly hate in them sometimes if anyway woowoo frou-frou band TED talk you've got a band TED talk that elite Club which i think is somewhat admirable tell me like what your detractors say of you if you don't mind well first I have to say why they think it's heretical hmm what I'm doing fundamentally is challenging the materialist model of reality which science is based on has been for more than a hundred years which is the doctrine that all matters unconscious the whole universe is made of unconscious matter which then leaves the problem how come we're conscious and that's called the hard problem the most scientists assumed that consciousness exists only in human brains and possibly in animal brains too you know the liberal one so maybe as far down as worms or something but anyway it's all only in brains and the rest of the universe is unconscious purposeless going nowhere evolution is just a matter of blind chance there's no God out there there's no spirit heart there there's no creativity out there is no it's just chance and that because they believe our minds are nothing but our brains then anything that suggests the mind extends further than the brain must be pseudo scientific so for example I've done a lot of research on telepathy where people and indeed dogs I wrote a book on dog to lay an animal telepathy called dogs that know when their owners are coming home based on evidence that dogs can tell when they're in a circling home millions of people have had this experience I've done experiments and sure enough at least some dogs really can there when people come at random times in unfamiliar vehicles hmm and we film it all we have all this objective evidence but the very the very fact that I'm suggesting telepathy might be real is something that provokes this kind of hysterical response that it must be woo woo pseudoscience because my opponents believe it's impossible so they don't think they need to look at the evidence they think it's impossible therefore this stuff must be fake or phony or fraudulent and what I do is start from the position that these things seem to happen millions of people with dogs have noticed their dogs or cats pick up their thoughts millions of people have had the experience of thinking of someone who then rings on the phone telephone telepathy I've done experiments that show it's not just chance it's not just guessing so anyway these are things that let's say here cuz you know like listen me I'm all about God and consciousness and changing the world and a model that expands beyond materialism this is where my particular fascination lies but wouldn't they say that those firstly those examples about you know cats and dogs they seem sort of somehow humdrum and everyday they seem anecdotal and wouldn't they say members of the mainstream scientific community no we've done tests around that it's down to random chance dogs don't know when their owners a coming home we've can demonstrate this in scientific laboratory conditions double-blind testing except I wouldn't isn't that what they would say no no they don't say that well first of all they say it's anecdotal but what I say to that is well if lots of people I have more than a thousand a database I've got more than a thousand studies in case studies of dogs that do this and 600 of cats well I would say the plural of anecdote is data if lots of people notice something then to say this is rubbish because lots of people say they've noticed it isn't the right starting point for science it's meant to be empirical which means based on experience so my response to this is say okay well let's test it well it wasn't that they done the tests and showing it didn't happen no one had ever done a test before because they assumed it's rubbish say when I do the tests then with the dogs then you involves filming the dog of the place the dog Waits having people come at random times come in unfamiliar vehicles so there's no possibility that it's a routine response they can't smell people from many miles away they can't identify the sign of an unfamiliar taxi or other vehicle and these dogs still do it in it's all on film so I would say this is evidence for something which lots of people believe exists and the reason that I'd concentrate on a lot in a lot of my work on what I call the mysteries of everyday life what you call humdrum is precisely because these phenomena are classified by most scientists as paranormal or para means beyond they're saying they're paranormal which means they're sort of spooky or we were my point is they're not paranormal at all they're normal everyday experiences for most people what's paranormal is the claim that these things don't exist a claim made without evidence on purely ideological grounds near the beginning Rupert you said the the basic model of mainstream science is a materialistic one the material the matter is not conscious you know and consciousnesses at some point in a way that we don't understand emerged from matter what do you think is the motivation for the defense of dogma why is it so why is rationalism and materialism so rigorously defended and alternative views so familiar opposed well it's kind of political originally it was political in the 19th century beginning of the 19th century materialism was quite a small minority view within biology a lot of people were vitalist they thought there was a lifeforce or some life and support it wasn't just matter organisms weren't just machines but the materialists wanted to believe that because they wanted a universe that's just matter because such a universe would have no God in it why did they want that because particularly in France where atheism got going in a big way much more than in England the old regime that was overthrown in the French Revolution was very closely allied with the Church the Roman Church and they thought that to get rid of the king you got to get rid of chat the church - and the best way to get rid of the power of the church was to say God doesn't exist so the whole thing's a ridiculous sham and pretends so in the French Revolution in 1793 they abolished the Catholic Church in France they closed the monasteries they guillotine tens of thousands of priests and they proclaimed the cult of Reason as the state religion not Redang Cathedral was turned into a temple of Reason now in Russia you had a similar massive growth of atheism in the late 19th century the Bolsheviks in whose revolution occurred almost a hundred years ago in 1917 wanted to get rid of religion because they thought religion supported the Tsar and under state and they wanted to destroy this religious underpinnings so science was an ally for them in this militant atheism and in Russia in the nineteenth century they had about five million people belong to an organization called the League of the militant godless that went round life terrifying terrifying bit like the other League of the militant godless they went round trying to stamp out everything to do with religion in Russia a bit like the Red Guards in China and so atheism was essentially political in in the 19th century and for much of the 20th century and many people who were atheists wanted materialist science to back up their views because it meant they could reject organized religion particularly Christianity in favor of other ideologies so it was a necessary tool in challenging hegemony that religion and the idea of God and man's relationship with God was tied up in power structures those power structures were corrupt and oppressive needed to be overthrown I mean there's no one saying the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution were bad things necessary but necessary revolutions but in order to underwrite those revolutions you had to attack the idea of God which was the mainstay of the hegemony or the sort of the basis of that power earlier you mentioned this idea within biology of vitalism that in a hundred years ago in biology the idea that there was a sort of a super mechanical component an element that couldn't be tracked was present I'm learning much about Vedic philosophy where they talk about the idea of brahman prana Atma the idea that there are essential non mechanical energies now is this what is this connected to your idea of morphic resonance how does it relate to it when you talk about what do you mean by morphic resonance what do you mean by non mechanical energy even though it wasn't you said that it was me well morphic resonance is the idea there's a kind of memory in nature you see contemporary science one of the dogmas which was established in the 17th century at the Scientific Revolution is the idea that nature's governed by fixed laws and the idea was in the 17th century God is the maker and ruler of the universe and God is eternal so God's laws are eternal and then the idea was that everything in nature had followed these laws because God is omnipotent so God was the universal law enforcement agency that was the metaphor so it was a theological conception and they didn't have the idea of evolution then and it's very anthropocentric metaphor the idea of the universal that nature is governed by laws and only humans have laws yes so when you think about it it's not a very appropriate metaphor to start with no there are just patterns and I like this idea of metaphor and it's the fact that we are necessarily dealing with metaphor when we're dealing with science that it even the Meccan stick model was contrived at a time when industry and mechanization was happening in human culture so it would have been an attractive model an accessible model when mechanization was happening socially Oh humans are a bit like a machine nature's a bit like a machine that was in the language it was in the ether it became an appropriate metaphor for understanding is that correct it is yes so they thought of nature as a kind of mechanical system made up of unconscious matter based on forces that work by pushing and pulling mechanical forces and the idea that the laws are fixed at the beginning you see was it made sense when they thought the universe didn't basically change but when the idea of evolution came along first in biology with Darwin in 1859 but then with the Big Bang Theory in the whole of nature in as late as 1966 we got a radically evolutionary cosmology if everything is evolving then why not the laws of nature and in fact laws of nature as I've said isn't a very good metaphor why not habits why can't universe have regularities that our habits and then as a kind of memory in nature that sustains them instead of some kind of external transcendent mind with fixed laws in it which is the eternal idea eternal God idea no I've nothing against God but I've got a lot against the idea of God making laws of nature that are totally fixed yes it's almost like the requirement for fixed laws is a requirement in order to conduct study if there are no fixed laws it's impossible to conduct study so you need fixed laws there must be fixed laws but in a way it doesn't make sense if you're moving through limitless space which is continually evolving it's more likely that there are patterns that seem like laws when observed from a particular perspective but are going to be subject to the continual evolution and changed that all other phenomena appear to be subjected to absolutely it puts it very well and you see things that have been going on a very long time like the crystallization of salt or the formation of hydrogen atoms are such deep habits they behave as if they're changeless but when you look at new things new forms of learning new forms of behavior new chemical compounds then you see the habits build up and the evidence for morphic resonance comes from looking at new phenomena and seeing new habits build up for example if you crystallize a new compound a new chemical compound for the first time it takes months or even years before crystals form but then once you've got it going all around the world they form more easily if you train rats to learn a new trick in London and rats all around the world learn the same thing quicker according to actual evidence is that is this disputed evidence or is that stuff that's like we're down with that well the evidence was done years ago Harvard and in Edinburgh and Melbourne universities no-one's disputed the evidence the disputation is about how you interpret it and most people thought at the time well this just shows some weird effect that we don't fully understand so let's forget about it I think the evidence for morphic resonance you see there's a lot of phenomena already there that people agree about fit with morphic resonance for example IQ scores have gone up more than 30% since IQ tests were invented in 1918 I predicted this would happen myself not in 1918 obviously but in the 1980s because the tests have remained more or less the same millions of people have done them millions of people have solved these problems it should be getting easier to do the tests those scores would be going up the average scores not because people are getting smarter there's no independent evidence they're getting smarter but the scores are going up because so many people have already done the tests I see it's like there's a shared iCloud of consciousness that we were all uploading our results into that we all have access to access to the consciousness is not wholly housed in the brain but consciousness has some other component that's one aspect of the theory of morphic resonance is it it is it's a kind of collective memory and that idea already existed in the psychologist Jung yeah with his idea of the collective unconscious had the idea that we all tap into a kind of collective memory but he was thinking just in terms of human psychology and I'm saying that's the way that all nature works is not just us when Jung talks of this he's saying because of patterns in dreams that people dream in a kind of consistent language in certain cases that motifs appear across cases across continents that have a continuum to them Joseph Campbell's work in comparative mythology suggests that indigenous cultures produce patterns within their myths that are identifiable the the an African myth or an Icelandic myth can have templates but comparable which suggests that consciousness communicates or at least has some essential quality that is not determined by material reality or geography but has some other form of connection I mean my personally don't have a problem with this idea because I see that the sensory realm is accessible by the instruments we have if we didn't have a sense of smell I wouldn't be able to understand conceptually what you meant by a sense of smell I know that different animals have different ranges of hearing have different ranges of sights so it seems to me possible that energy can communicate and travel in means too subtle for my limited instruments to ascertain and receive so for me it's never been a problem but it is necessarily difficult to demonstrate when it's transferred back into the language of mechanics material and identifiable evidence isn't it well I mean not in principle I mean you can do experiments to test this on chemicals on crystals on rats on humans so in principle you can test this with the scientific method I mean I'm totally Pro the scientific method I spend a lot of my life doing experiments so in principle there's no reason you can't test it and in fact it has been tested it's just an unfamiliar idea for most Westerners now you're studying Eastern philosophy and in Eastern philosophy the idea of a memory in nature is completely standard I lived in India for seven years I worked in an agricultural Institute there and the sigh I got fairly familiar with Indian philosophy I wasn't much influenced by it I had this idea before I went there but when I talked about this idea in Cambridge on high table of my college Clare College you know there were looks of blanking comprehension or in the tea room at the biochemistry department where I worked when I got to India I would explain this idea to Indian friends and colleagues even people I met on trains and they test well they they are and they asked me first I didn't you know in India if you sit on the train you know this is what is your name where are you from etcetera and then let me some of your theories yes about three questions in after what is your salary they they ask you what is your view of the world I said so I really won't say I explained this and and the general response I got from Indian friends colleagues and even strangers was there is nothing new in this idea ancient Rishi's have said this thousands of years ago how is it termed what's the what's the how is that vedic lee understood the idea that there is a memory in nature well it's basically part of the philosophy of karma which in in its limited form is about reincarnation carrying over memories from one life to another but in its more general form can be seen as a theory of cosmic memory and in some forms of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy they have this idea of a cosmic memory hmm the theosophist took this up with their idea of the Akashic records which is a kind of cosmic memory bank so I didn't know all that when I thought of these ideas in Cambridge I came to them through thinking about biology and implants and you know it was how did you come to it but I was working on plants how do plants grow plant morphogenesis the development of form how does a leaf become a leaf how does a rose flower become a rose flower why is an oak leaf different from an ash leaf and I worked hard I was working on a plan hormone auxin it's a plant a hormone that makes cells grow and makes roots form and makes wood cells form and I worked out how it was made and how it was transported around the plant but the thing is its transported round to all plants and the similar way and it's made in a similar way in all plants and yet they have different shapes and so everyone was trying to say we can explain form in terms of chemicals and this was the main chemical everyone thought was the important influence but I realized actually it won't explain it they've all got the same one as and it's like trying to explain what goes on in different shops and factories and schools because they all have the same kind of money and it's it's the something that's part of the system take it away in the system would collapse but it doesn't explain why they're different or why they have that form and an idea that came up in the 1920s in developmental biology was the idea of more fair genetic fields fields that shape form I got interests in this but then I realized these fields have to be inherited somehow they can't be inherited through genes were chaining code for proteins they had to be inherited by some kind of direct link and then I realized there was a kind of memory across time a great deal of biology would make sense not just biology but a lot of nature so I had this kind of flash of insight and for 3 or 4 days I was in kind of manic state when I first came up with the idea of morphic resonance because more and more things made sense and then I got worried you know it's a kind of theory of everything and you know I ought to be worried about this so I didn't publish it for another eight years I thought I've really got to think about this hard and look at the evidence and when I finally worked through a long process it made it really did make sense after thinking it through and that's when I published my first book a new science of life the idea being that there is a memory that is beyond material things traveling through time can you give us some examples of that well the one example would be the the thing I mentioned with rats if animals learn a new trick then rats similar rats faced with the same trick somewhere else on the basis of similarity resonate with those rats before morphic resonance is about similarity and patterns of vibration or patterns of activity so what I'm suggesting is there's a kind of resonance across time that just go man it goes across time without falling off with time or enter crawl space I mean this is a difficult idea perhaps but the alternative is laws of nature that are outside time in space altogether and yet somehow present everywhere it's not as if the conventional alternative is absolutely mind-boggling mount the mind bottle factor fries just were used to it that's right you're quite right but to suggest there are objective laws that exist outside time that isn't unusual and as you have said already it's it's analogous to the idea of God anyway yeah there is an absolute template a southern of a monolith on truth that stands beyond the rule that's in a sense as a paradigm that is the same as saying God there's the rules they're in charge except for materialist scientists the rules are supposed to have come about spontaneously by themselves they're like things in a mind but they say there is no mind so they're completely paradoxical to have laws that are immaterial that are rational that have no material being and yet no non material substrate is an incoherent belief and yet that's what most scientists believe how and why does it mean what more obvious example I thought of is that you know that famous example of the four-minute mile as in the film Chariots of Fire that you know that no one can break the four-minute mile someone breaks the four minute mile then people break the four-minute mile took a very public identifiable idea that once it's identified that something is achievable it becomes achievable it comes sanctioned accessible somehow what I'm interested in Rupert is how Dogma behaves and how heresy is regarded and controlled now one of the things I enjoyed in your let's call it like I like to have a band TEDTalk it's a cool thing I think like that in your band TED talk is when you were talking about how mainstream science protects its dogmas through denial of variation for example what's the the speed of light yeah well I gave an example of the speed of light that between I got interested in this because the idea that the speed of light is totally constant and all the constants are constant is part of the fixed law of dogma so I thought well I'll just check out I had no particular I don't work on physical constants so I wasn't a particular thing we're ahead of personal interest but I just thought I'd look at the data and when I did as amazed to find it varied quite a lot between 1928 and 1950 or so the speed of light dropped by 20 kilometres per second or around the world and then it went up again and they were all screaming that they're accurate they have little error bars on the graph so who's showing very small errors that the error was like plus or minus 0.1 of her killer meter per second and yet there was 20 kilometres per second difference and I just couldn't understand what was going on so I went to see the head of the National Physics Laboratory at Eddington the man in charge of measuring constants and I asked him and and he said well if it really was constant don't even need him he's always the same so he said don't well he said I know it's a very embarrassing incident in the history of our science and I said well does that mean that everyone was fudging their results in in in during the whole of that period all around the world to get the expected result he said we don't like to use the word fudging he said I said well what do you call it and he said we prefer to call it intellectual phase-locking so near a they then it went up again and then they resolved this problem they just defined it they by Fiat they invented the speed of light they declare it's value and they said that's it from now on it's defined and then they defined the meter in terms of the speed of light so that even if the speed of light did change you'd never notice cuz the meter who had changed in length the same the unit of measurement would also alter yes I'm reminded of the Melville quote all human science but passing fables as we learn more everything that we think of as being absolute will necessarily evolve because we are only looking at a small portion of all of the available evidence what do revelations in quantum physics in your opinion mean about the nature of consciousness I know that the double-slit theory is an area that people like myself who are of a spiritual bent leap all over as evidence that consciousness impacts matter and the behavior of waves and particles and a physicists say no no no you're misinterpreting this in you're drawing conclusions that are erroneous but what does it tell us without us being too sort of quick to leap on our you know our chariots of fire and start blasting out the silver trumpets and proclaiming the Lord well I I think the main most important thing about quantum theory is it tells us that nature is probabilistic that there's there's no rigid determinism you can't predict things exactly and there's a kind of inherent freedom right even at the most fundamental part in the most fundamental particles of matter I think the star and freedom yes do you mean that the just because the behavior of particles and waves apparently altering under observation and under observation know that there if if you measure the take a single photon going through a double slit for example you can't predict which way it where it will end up which bit of the film that you're filming it with it'll land on but if you send thousands of single photons one after another you get a kind of average pattern which is like a wave pattern so it follows a kind of probability distribution but you can't predict any individual one if you've got a radioactive uranium atom you can't you can say what it's half-life is you've got millions of them by how many years will be before half of them have decayed but this individual atom you can't tell if it's going to decay in a million years or in the next second there's nothing that enables you to say that so there's an inherent freedom at the very foundation of matter and what chaos theory has shown is that even bigger things like the weather systems have a kind of inherent in determinism or freedom and the same is true of the way the nerve cells in our brain work and many of them are on a knife edge they could go one way or another so all through nature's is this kind of in determinism that means there's a kind of inherent freedom at all levels in nature there's certain strong habits but when you get things that are changing and they're on cusp points there's this kind of in determinism now I don't think the observer stuff in quantum think is overrated Lee you know the consciousness thing well basically what it says is that the kind of observation you make in quantum theory depends on what you're observing in other words the observations depend on the observer but the philosopher shop in her pointed out exactly that in around 1800 you know the whole of science he said all observations depend on observers it's not as if nature's out there just sort of passively observing itself when we observe nature we come to it with our frameworks of thought preconceptions measuring apparatus etc whenever we ask a question of nature in an experiment the answer we get depends on the question we make so that's a perfectly general point about all science it only came to sort of popular consciousness through quantum theory but it's not specific to quantum theory yes I see now what do you think on a more practical level the the imposition of dogma normally protects the interests of the powerful is it important that much of what is regarded as a sanctioned and valorized science is corporately funded at that point I don't think that's important actually not not the most important things sake the dogmas of science got established before corporate funding became very important I mean this dogmatic materialism was already well established by the late 19th century when you know the refuge Ehrman companies making aniline dyes and things mmm early chemical companies making aspirin and stuff but it long before this sort of massive corporate involvement it was an ideological movement people like T H Huxley here in England were a basic materialists and that they wanted to spread the message about materialism because they wanted to destroy the power of religion and make scientists as it were the new priesthood if you have a culture where you destroy the old priesthood and where science reason and progress of your ideology and every governments are being converted to it economic progress through Science and Technology every government in the world is a dominant paradigm then who are the priests of this new culture obviously the scientists and T H Huxley wanted the scientists to become a kind of priestly caste professional scientists who would then be the go-to people for governments and in many countries there's a separation between church and state but in no country as the separation between science and state so I would say the power base of science is much more state than corporations they've come long later what is their gospel well their gospel is heirs will save the world through science and technology you know we're the saviors of humanity hmm religions have screwed it up people just fight each other but we come along and we'll cure diseases reduce infant mortality provide abundant consumer goods and prolong life and many of these promises have come true after all is not just ideology it's very powerful much less lyrical what is not empirical what's not empirical as the metaphysical belief system that nature's totally mechanical that it's all unconscious that the laws are fixed all these in my book the science delusion I have these ten dogmas of science memories are stored in the brain that's another one they believe that because they're materialists everything must be matter so all our memories must be inside our heads in some way a memory must have a material component it must on some level be measurable exactly and therefore when you die and your brain decays all your memories are wiped out so every religion that believes in reincarnation or an afterlife or purgatory or whatever any form of transmigration any form of transmigration any kind of ancestor connections or anything like that must be rubbish because memories and the brain is impossible for any aspect of them to survive it seems to me they're rational conclusion of rationalism is that we are individuals there is no meaning there for consume yes and that's why the word materialism has two meanings in in science and philosophy it means this worldview I've been talking about and we've been discussing in ordinary everyday language it means people who go to shopping mouths all the time and are constantly consuming things that connection is telling that you think I think so yes very much so I think that it's not a coincidence we used the same word for those can we talk a bit about psychedelics and you taking psychedelics I don't want to talk too much about it since most of them are still illegal but why I'm very interested in Terence Mckenna and you were friends with Terence Mckenna when you in fact I've heard him talk about you with and stuff we were great friends and in fact we had with our friend Ralph Abraham who's a chaos theory mathematician at the University of California we had about 40 or 50 three-way trial logs and we produced two books together and there's about 20 or 30 of these trial logs are on my website in streaming audio so you know for 20 years nearly we met every year we spent several days just talking to each other because that's what we most enjoy doing and one of the things we were interested in was indeed psychedelics and one is Terence had many interests psychedelics is what he's best known for but he had an extraordinary wide-ranging mind and he was also incredibly funny hmm well for me I'm just oh I suppose it was a long time ago I can talk about it for me a great revelation was in about 1971 when I took LSD for the first time and everything I'd been taught about the nature of minds you know I studied the stuff at Cambridge as an undergraduate you know nerve impulses neurotransmitters hormones affecting centra sexual characteristics all that kind of thing suddenly and the immediacy and incredible power of this visionary experience but I just felt something very very important to just being left out from this worldview so for me it really was what the term means psychedelic means psyche revealing mind revealing it revealed whole realms of mind that I had no experience of before and no one had told me about and opened up an interest in the nature of consciousness so for me it was a transformative experience what did you experience during this period long time ago that was so transformative describe it please well the first thing that happened was that I took it with a friend he only taken it once or twice before we thought it took an hour to come on that's what he thought so we took it a rapper site that we can hear his police sirens so we took it we thought we'd have a meal while we came on so we're in a restaurant it came on during inlets restaurant food started looking distorted the whole thing became so I wanted to get back to my rooms in college I was a fellow of Clare College at the time so that suddenly this journey became a kind of it went on forever going through streets and everything distorted and when I got back I thought I must have taken a massive overdose and I thought because I felt how completely out of control my whole ego was dissolved I didn't know what was happening it had come on sooner than we thought so I thought this must be a huge overdose our being sane forever etc in fact I thought I must be in hell and then neon signs saying hell that I've all around me which proved it then a friend my friend sort of talked to me I sort of came to my senses as it were all he's not really senses but and suddenly I felt survice floating up towards I saw the light above me and I broke through like the surface of the ocean and suddenly I was in a realm of transcendent beauty music turned into forms and patterns I had the sense of connection with the one and all and everything a kind of mystical experience mm-hmm and I later came to know that stan grof and other people described us as a kind of death and rebirth experience like that going up through the darkness to the light is like being born from the womb coming out through the birth canal into the light is kind of like a birth or rebirth experience so for me it was a kind of transformative moment of a whole new way of understanding consciousness and my connection with the greater consciousness yes the very idea that one's conscious experience can be chemically altered that one's perceptions are not rigid for me it demonstrates the plasticity of reality and our relationship with reality Terence Mckenna were one of the things that fascinates me about him is the conclusions he draws from these experiences with regard to the way that power what operates the control of substances of this nature and me as a person that's in recovery from drugs you know I don't take drugs I'm not taking drugs for a long time but what I what I personally Intuit is that there are so many vested interest this in keeping behavior people behaving in an orderly manner and if you have access to mysticism it one tends towards challenging structures and like we said at the beginning of our interview Rupert looking at frameworks and asking simply why why does my life have to exist within this framework why must I behave in this way why is this convention being observed I think it's interesting and I well when what you said about revolutions earlier and then this sot4 to challenge the idea of God because of the way that God was operating in power structures prior to the two revolutions that you mentioned used to underwrite those power structures I can see the necessity for challenging hegemony in that form but the removal of God to gonna give you a professor the full niche and quote either God is dead and we have killed him and there's not enough war in the world to wash the blood from our hands the idea that when we lose God when we lose a way of accessing and understanding the mystery we prevent ourselves we are prohibited from being fully human continually evolving and connected we begin to regard ourselves in a material model as components that have to have a mechanical function to be valuable we become a tool of consumerism we become either an asset or a deficit we don't have inherent value so I can see that politically why these power structures are perpetuated and even if as you say they existed prior to corporatization I would say the power behind corporatization is mutated and was present in some other form prior to that and that is about the preservation of power structure moon always has been and that's why it's so vehemently opposed whenever anyone says hey there's another world their love is real we're all connected whenever that message starts to come out people don't like it gets dampened down pretty quick right green I think that the suppression of the there's a reason why these revolutions occurred and but what it what it leaves you the materialist worldview work from which God's been removed relentlessly secular society believes people alone isolated in the privacy of their skulls and and is a world that's meaningless and depressing and that's why depression is the endemic disease of modern societies but that's exactly why I think that in the secular age when many people have lost contact with traditional religions spiritual practices are so important and that's why I've my most recent books called science spiritual practices because the the paradoxical thing is the sort of ironic that people think of Sciences against spirituality but if you actually use science correctly and you use look in an open-minded way you study spiritual practices scientifically like meditation for example then it turns out the evidence is overwhelming this is very good for people people who dirt are happier healthier live longer you know people have figured out which bits of the brain are changed during meditation lowering stress levels sleep better the scientific evidence suggests these are very these practices are very good for you in my book I deal with a number of other ones like connecting with nature which is very important practice for a lot of people including me and pilgrimage there's an amazing revival of pilgrimage going on in Europe at the moment and I think this is probably the one that most clearly expresses the fact that so many people feel they're on a journey they want to go somewhere there somewhere that connects them with something bigger than themselves isn't the physical journey of a pilgrimage is an expression of that search for teleology yes there's a purpose to the the journey and the if you're going on a pilgrimage to a holy place then you're going to a place which holy and healing come from the same route so you're going to a place that can have a healing effect on you do you think then that we live our lives extracted from these kind of principles until they are somehow scientifically verified that what you said about meditation is something that I've thought about quite a lot that you know mindfulness and meditation and now spoken off from a perspective of well-being but it has been necessarily secularized is something that I find kind of irritating I suppose because meditation is it was being present and suggested and proposed through religious ideologies for millennia and was and these conclusions were reached not by empirical in world perhaps by empirical means but more not by scientific means mm I wonder what other notions found in theology would be similarly beneficial I don't query the need for change as in the examples that you've already given the revolutionary changes and nor do I dispute how religion has been used to support power to engine bigotry and oppression those are like but but like in my belief system there is a a line be quick to see where religious people are right and let this mindfulness example and possibly what you're saying about pilgrimage about purpose and when anecdotally my experience of the world is when I'm talking to people they feel lost unhappy disconnected and you could arrive at these conclusions through Marxist theory that capitalism would lead to alienation and people feeling that their only function is an economic one or a productive one so you're saying that these group these traditional ideas such as pilgrimage is a new way of reengage in with aspects of our consciousness that will be neglected absolutely yes and well I think it's reengage it's going on a journey to something that is bigger than you you know for example every year I've been doing this I have a godson who's a teenager and you know I feel as a godfather I should do something of his birthday and you know stop giving stuff to people because I think everyone's got too much stuff so I give experiences and when he was 14 I offered him I said you my offer is a pilgrimage to Canterbury we walked the last eight miles through fields on footpaths and woods we go to the Cathedral we light candles at the shrine of some Thomas go to choral evensong which this beautiful service and have a cream tea among the high speed train and I said would you like to do that and slice my surprise he said yes and we had a blissful day and we do that every year no two different cathedrals how beautiful how do you you need to other than in the context of this question align your Anglicanism with what you're saying about morphic resonance you know like a very what would people would regard as a conventional faith well I mean it's not very conventional to be a Christian in modern Britain only about 5% of people go to church regularly now so it's definitely not the power structure and no one's in it for the money so Norfolk residents actually fits very well particularly in my book on science and spiritual practices one of them I discuss is rituals and all religions have rituals and secular cultures do as well what are some rituals of secular culture well the American Thanksgiving festival for example it's a national ritual rituals reenact an original seminal moment in the history of a group so Jewish people for example reenact the Passover dinner that happened in Egypt when they first there's a form of ancestor worship and connection and to demonstrate that we exist beyond our individual selves and are connected to our lineage yes back to an original event that sets the lineage in motion and so Christian Holy Communion is a ritual celebration of Jesus's Last Supper with his disciples itself a Passover dinner and so it it's a kind of ancestral connection across time and the point about morphic resonance it depends on similarity now if you have a ritual where you use the same language the same words the same gestures the same incense the same whatever you deliberately create things as similar as possible and you set up perfect conditions for morphic resonance so in all cultures people believe that by doing these rituals they connect with their ancestors who've done them before right back to the first time it's done and it means the individual individuals much more than just me I'm part of a whole long tradition that went on long before me and will go on long after me and this whole tradition in any case is about something bigger than us because Jesus's Last Supper the Passover was about more than just those people it was a in their own terms of an intervention of God into history well I like that so my individual consciousness is just temporal but my consciousness has existed before me and my consciousness will exist after me my consciousness is part of a vital energy a continual pranic flow existing through all forms existing beyond and through time and space time and space themselves being just referential points from this biological organism or this species of biological organisms that would be entirely different if we had different senses the consciousness is somehow reflecting onto the screen of reality rules that are apparent to its own understanding and its own interaction with the external and through these rituals we can demonstrate it recreate it connect with it in a different way and see how we have existed like waves passing through time I like that but somehow stripped of mystery these things can seem like I imagined that somehow out there rather more radical listeners might think you know the whole because to me it sounds bloody delightful going for the cream tea in the pilgrimage to Canterbury so something I might do actually but like a lot of people think I'm doing that I'm gonna do ayahuasca with a full ik night by a would so like you know so like it doesn't it seem it seems conventional whilst you said it's like five to a day seems like I don't know what does it seem doesn't seem radical it seems what is it that thing that I'm feeling it seems some house I don't know safe but he's not going to change the world like it's had its moment that it's nostalgic is that what it is well I think there's an element of that connection well anything that connects I don't consider it nostalgia connect with tradition in the past I mean here in Britain for example we have incredible cathedrals and those were produced in the Middle Ages when virtually everybody believed that they were part of something bigger than themselves and the whole society I mean 3 million people with ox carts and ropes and pulleys created all these incredible cathedrals Cantabria Dharam wells Salisbury etc and Westminster Abbey and they thought they were part of something much much bigger than themselves and they're still here today and I find them incredibly powerful and I don't think it's just nostalgia I think they have a living presence and anyone who goes into them especially if you can listen to this evening service even song where everybody's chant it is this beautiful music it's an extraordinarily beautiful and transforming experience no I'm nothing against ayahuasca and okay I wouldn't like to say this is it's either/or you see for me it's not either/or I think all these spiritual practices are part of what we can do and there's many many spiritual practice which we can take part in meditations one rituals or another and ayahuasca is done as a kind of ritual as a kind of sacrament or communion where the participants especially in these psychedelic churches like Santo die may this is a Brazilian there's a very big psychedelic Church in Brazil as to actually more than two but the main ones are called Santo died May and when you alter a vegetal which means union of plants and these are churches I I have been I suppose I suppose I should add a long time again to services of these churches and in Canada hmm the so the when they like these psychedelic churches I'm fascinated well they've got good murals in them well it's not they don't have buildings I mean they well least they may be better in Brazil but this is sort of in a room where they rent rooms and things so what they're in the santo die may men are all dressed in white on one side of the room women on the other and you see it started to my surprise with everyone reciting the Our Father and the Hail Mary and and then there's a kind of communion where you all go up one after other and drink from this chalice of ayahuasca alright and then the whole group is traveling together and the person leading it says you know this isn't just personal tripping you know where are in this together and we're traveling like in a boat together and as periods when you sing together extraordinary beautiful songs and then periods when everyone sits in silence and has kind of visionary experiences in my case the first time I did and I sort of zoom out of the earth into the cosmos or through the Stars home is astonishing experience and then you come back and there's another song and and there's a kind of a very strong sense of group solidarity but I don't see that that is is now I see that as a perfectly compatible with lots of other religious members you sat around having your cream tea it sounds much more radical to me I went to this church group in Ladbroke Grove quite by mistake as a matter of fact I like I wandered in and it was I later discovered Eritrean Christian folk they had like like a screen at the front they were listen a pretty crazy keyboard music everyone else set me was Eritrean as a little kid at the back in a tiny plastic chair she was seem to be there in some sort of administrative role at the front though pastor and a couple of other guys it was pretty intense you know like um like they it was like fuel Jesus type levels of stuff and a guy like you know everyone was going up the front and having like proper it looked to me like speaking in tongues out-of-body kind of experiencing while I was watching this will happen from from the midst from the congregation which was only about 30 or 40 people in this church you know I was thinking how how are we gonna go home afterwards you know how are we gonna pick up our coats and our car keys and be normal again like after we've letting ourselves go after we have dispensed temporarily with our identity as hello there CNN this is what I mean while you're having a cream tea or you're walking in a field you're still essentially you but while you're shooting through the cosmos on ayahuasca you are physically experiencing that you are not just your identity is Rupert or Russell or whoever you happen to be listening to this thing right now watching these Eritrean people in congregation and watch them having a group experience that was clearly transcendent that was clearly outside the accepted social rules I thought how will this cease how will it come to cessation I went to the front myself and that the pastor did some ritual on me and where my secular mechanical conditioned mind would say that it was all brouhaha and nonsense except for when like he offered me the healing the place in my stomach that he grabbed is exactly where I feel the pain when a in anxious and full of doubt the place that he grabbed that was the place where I feel the pain you know and then at the end things did resolve quite perfectly and beautifully and people just chatted afterwards and went back to their jobs in these cases I'm thinking a lot of these people were cab drivers and doing pretty low paid minimum paid or jobs but they had their a communal experience and a transcendent experience certainly it was beyond the accepted social norms of how are you what you're gonna be doing next Wednesday did you see spurs the other night like people work and and I feel that if you exclude that experience from your life if your life does not include that then what are you doing what are you doing hmm I agree I think that without that kind of experience we lead very impoverished lives and that's why I think like you do that spiritual practices and and an awareness of that dimension is so important what science how can science which you know no one disputes that without science and no technology without science and no medicine all the things that you listed you know the experiment or method absolutely vital but is they're all what do you what would your biggest hope be for science I think first of all going beyond these narrow dogmas that hold it back my book the science delusion in America is called science set free and it's really the idea that if we escape from this dogmatic prison that it's in at the moment it could become much more positive and life-affirming and I think that if we switch from a view of nature as being dared inanimate and mechanical to a view of nature as a living cosmos that's evolving with habits and they're everything in nature is being alive Gaia the earth the Sun the solar system the galaxy plants and animals not machines but truly alive we'll find ourselves in a living world which has a kind of purpose it's not clear what it is but we'd feel much more connected if we filled ourselves part of a living world and then the kind of spiritual principles that give rise to that world or the creative forces that under I would become we'd feel they were more relevant and closer to us and we'd see Guardian nature and guarding us and and I think then when that happens our lives become much more connected much more meaningful and much happier - yes that's very very beautiful I can't see why that would be controversial at all to regard the world in those terms Rupert Sheldrake your book I'm telling you this but really you know it your book just going to let you know your book science and spiritual practices is available now I uh I thank you very much I really enjoyed talking to you I really enjoyed listening to you I find it incredibly valuable and beautiful and to invest the world around us with love and not to feel that we are just components in a mindless and purposeless machine for me this is not just all this cheers me up on you know on my road to the boneyard no it also feels like as truth when I think of nature when I think of my experience with psychedelics it seems to confirm that there are forces beyond that which can be understood for the limited senses that there is information available than can't be understood within the existing template it seems to be bloody obvious and as a matter of fact and that nature does seem like an emotion a living beautiful thing rather than a mechanical resource but if you start looking at nature as something other than a resource a lot of economic interests and political interests would be strongly challenged yes anyway it's a great pleasure to wrestle don't try and wrap it up I'm the host of the thing well alright but I think you're getting signals you're meant to be wrapping it up I want to go a bloody Cathedral with you you'd take us in awe I bet one yeah I would yes I'd love to go with you guys what Cathedral would walk for a field and like we'd like them we just have a cream tea and then we'd go what a Cathedral which one's the best ones Durham can - well we could with Westminster Abbey which is quite spectacular and amazing really yeah and they do choral evensong practically every day even song you mention it all the time well it's the best it's the best I mean I've done this empirically you know what what works for people if people are committed Christians Holy Communion is the best way and but if people are not used to that then choral evensong if something can include everybody and it's extremely beautiful any last 45 minutes and it happens everyday in all our cathedrals okay now and what's more there's a website that I helped set up called choral evensong org where you can find out when the next one is what they're singing and what kind of choir it is I'm gonna investigate what it was like for those people with ropes and pulleys and awesome cart building them Cathedral up it's a right ball-like erecting them dragging great stones around Norwich exactly but what they did has endured to this day whereas what people do by buying things and throwaway culture Eleni enduring rubbish heaps for the for centuries to come thank you more cathedrals few less iPhones though you're probably not listening to this on the Cathedral thanks very much for showcase well thank you that show was sponsored by recovery which you can buy now on Amazon or you can get it as an audiobook or you can buy it on your device and you can see me read most of it basically on my facebook feed I'm always reading out great chunks of it I can't shut up about the damn thing also come see me on my rebirth - we had to reschedule - some dates so I'm in Coventry eight for November Lester for infant November Stoke 14 for November is a great show it's live fill in the survey you'll have a wild wild time there I signed books in the interval I come right out I'm very very available go to Russell Brand calm for your tickets finally if you liked this show please subscribe to it and review it and get your friends listening to form little groups where people gather and perhaps build churches to it why not are you listen the future after I've passed on right why not canonize me and make me a saint and a prophet all rise - maestro just give me five stars you'd have to start religion I know how difficult that can be I'm trying to start my own one right now it's knackering violent violent

Channel: Russell Brand

Views: 857,417

Rating: 4.8232327 out of 5

Keywords: Russell Brand, Brand Russell, Brand, Brand X, The Trews, Trews, Russell Brand Trews, Russell Brand video, Russell Brand news, Russell Brand politics, Russell Brand Fox News, News, Science Vs God, God, Spirituality, Morphic Resonance, Rupert Sheldrake, Russell Brand Podcast, Under The Skin

Id: dAS-QzWvj8g

Length: 64min 26sec (3866 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Kingofqueenanne]

SUBMISSION STATEMENT: Dubbed “the most controversial scientist on Earth” Rupert Sheldrake joined Russell Brand on the podcast called Under the Skin. These two discussed dogmas within conventional science, the evolving laws of physics, memory in nature, and how science validates and improves spiritual practices.

Russell brings up Vedic teachings and asks Rupert how his idea of Morphogenetic fields and how it would relate or conflict with the current materialist paradigm of scientific dogma. It is a long conversation but it is fascinating.

[u/Joe_DeGrasse_Sagan]

Funny, this just showed up on my YouTube as well, after stumbling on a hilarious 5 minute video of Russel teach kundalini yoga.

[u/tinytealgiraffe]

That was interesting. I never used to like Brand, but he has grown on me in recent years. Then I watched Rupert's banned Ted talk. IDK why it was banned. Then the next one on youtube was another banned Ted Talk on ESP and remote viewing by Varg (?). All very interesting.