Episode 172 – Consciousness, Science and Metaphysics – w/ Dr. Rupert Sheldrake

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one my guest for today is Dr Rupert sheldrake he is a biologist and author of more than 85 scientific papers and nine books many of his books have gone bestseller worldwide he was ranked among the top 100 Global thought leaders in the world for 2013. he studied Natural

Sciences at Cambridge University philosophy and history of science at Harvard University and then returned to Cambridge to achieve his PhD in Biochemistry his most recent book is science and spiritual practices transformative experiences and their

effects on our bodies brains and health which delves into a variety of spiritual practices the scientific research that has studied them and the possible benefits that they may bring to our modern lives Dr sheldrick it's a pleasure welcome to hxp

good to be with you Dr Dr sheldrick I've been trying to get you on the show for how long it's been how many emails have I sent you I think it's been five years I've been sending you emails probably once a month I can't remember actually anyway here I am yes we've got you here

I'm very excited I've got the book in my hand I I really want to bring sort of people into the framework of what you talk about so I like to I like to talk about morphic resonance that seems to be the a body of work that people recognize the most in association with your name

so you're in India when you were coming up with morphic resonance right no it wasn't actually I came up with the idea in Cambridge I was working in Cambridge um on the development of plants plant form how do leaves and flowers and and Roots take up their shape

um and I worked on plant hormones and chemical controls of plant form but I got interested in the idea of morphogenetic fields form shaping fields which is a well-established idea in developmental biology and I came up with the idea of morphic

resonance a kind of memory in nature in Cambridge um I went on developing the idea in India it was there was eight years between thinking of it and Publishing my first book on it a new science of life um so some of the maturation of the idea

occurred in India but basically it grew out of scientific problems in Cambridge um out of Western Suns and Western philosophy rather than Eastern science and Eastern philosophy hmm okay and so tell us tell us about the theory this idea that things are

connected well it's really the idea there's a kind of memory in nature you see the standard idea that we've all grown up with and take for granted is that nature is governed by the laws of nature Eternal laws that were all there at the moment of the big bang that never change

um this I think is a hangover from a platonic philosophy in ancient Greece the idea there's a completely changeless realm we live in fact in a radically evolutionary Universe uh the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago took place when the world was very very

small very hot the universe has been expanding ever since and the idea that all the laws of nature were all fixed at the moment of the Big Bang the standard view seems to me well first of all it's unprovable and secondly it seems improbable what I'm

suggesting instead is that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits that they evolve as the universe evolves um and that there's a kind of memory in nature and what that works out as in each species each kind of animal or plant it means that there's a kind of

collective memory each individual draws on it and contributes to it and this is a testable hypothesis if you train rats to learn a new trick in New York then rats all around the world should be able to learn it quicker just because those rights have lended in New

York similar kinds of rats are similar tricks the same trick they should get it quicker because it's now part of the collective memory of rats and the transfer of information based on similarity across space and time is the process I call morphic

resonance it's a resonance on the base of similarity and the word morphic means form or shape it's on the basis of similar patterns of organization or activity so that's basically the hypothesis there's a kind of memory in nature instead of nature being amnesic and

governed by Eternal laws so so this memory that we can can connect to it and all things are connected to it animals plants nature and other humans as well oh yes what I'm saying is that you know when you inherit say a hedgehog grows up or a squirrel as it's an embryo it's

inheriting the form of its species bimorphic resonance from previous hedgehogs or squirrels um it's it's the usual view is it's all coded in the genes um but actually I don't think genes do most of the things that many people assume they do what they do do is code

for the sequence of amino acids and proteins it's rather restricted role and I think the shape of animals and plants and the instincts of animals are inherited primarily by morphic resonance through a kind of collective memory of form and behavior within each species

the genes play a part they play a part in enabling the organism to make the right proteins but from this point of view genes have been grossly overrated and a lot of inheritance depends on active memory okay so I mean you say you say in your

work that the the Paranormal is more normal than we think I mean more people are experiencing telepathy than we kind of acknowledge why I mean do you agree that this this paraphrase oh yes I mean well I don't think of the Paranormal is Paranormal I think if it's just normal

um our in telepathy for example um occurs most commonly in the modern world among humans in connection with telephone calls people think of someone who then rings and they say oh that's funny I was just thinking about you or they know who's calling before they look

at the caller ID or pick up the phone and the usual explanation for that it's a very common experience more than 80 percent of the population have had it according to surveys in Britain Europe and Germany um the United States Argentina and other

countries very common uh the usual um explanation is to say oh well that's just because people think about other people all the time and if one of them Rings they falsely imagine it's telepathy and they just forget all the times they're wrong that's the standard

way of explaining it away but the um people who say that haven't got any evidence there's been no scientific tests um and when I discovered that this so-called skeptical argument was untested I devised a test so it could be tested um in my tests on Telephone telepathy

um somebody gives me or my assistant the names of four people they might be telepathic with usually people they know well um and their phone numbers they sit at home with a mobile so it was a landline phone being filmed no caller ID display

and we pick one of the four callers at random and ask them to call um they call the phone rings they can't know who it is by knowing that the people's patterns of activity because we've picked the corner at random um and before they answer the phone they

have to say to the camera who's calling I think it's John they may sail and they pick it up hi John they're right or they're wrong and if it was just guessing they'd be right 25 of the time in fact in these experiments in hundreds of Trials they're right about 45 of the

time it's a very significant effect statistically and these tests have now been widely replicated and I think the evidence for telepathy is very good it happens to most people it's very common it happens all around the world um I think what's paranormal really is

the way that some kind of skeptic groups um are so passionately against it and simply won't believe the evidence of their own senses and their inexperience and of scientific tests and persist in believing it's make-believe it's non-existence and so forth that's

puzzling Until you realize they're motivated to say what they say by a kind of belief system that says telepathy is impossible but if we take the normal as what really happens in the world it's perfectly normal most people have had this experience uh and it happens quite

frequently for some people on a daily basis I mean do you that people are get becoming more paranormal more paranormal thinking do you think that telekinesis is on the rise do you think that anything is changing in this regard I mean because I

can I can pick up the phone and give you a call for example whereas maybe before or before the invention of telephones we were communicating telepathically more readily well yes I think it is on the rise actually the um this phenomenon of telephone telepathy obviously couldn't

exist till telephones appeared um and now more people have more telephones and use them more often than ever before so I think it's increasing along with the use of telephones and a very similar phenomenon occurs in connection with SMS messages

text messages and also in connection with emails and and my colleagues have done experiments on these as well and shown that people can telepathically anticipate who is sending them an email out of four people or who's sending a text message it's not just guessing they

can they can pick this up well above the chance level I was just going to say if if I mean if this is happening more than we think then why why is your work so challenged in the mainstream and why is this regarded as pseudoscience well the thing is that

well a lot of people don't realize is how ideal logical a lot of science is um at the moment the institutional science is working on a paradigm a model of reality which is basically the philosophy of mechanistic materialism that means the belief that nature is

mechanical machine like that matter is unconscious that human brains are just made up of unconscious matter that Consciousness is just a kind of byproduct of the physical activity of the brain and the minds are therefore all inside heads so the idea that a thought in your mind

or mind could influence somebody a hundred miles away from this point of view is completely impossible it's make-believe it's woo-woo it's pseudoscience it's it's Superstition it's credulity you know you name it the the pejorative word um it's a taboo this shouldn't happen

because it doesn't fit with that particular materialist philosophy therefore there's an attempt by so-called Skeptics who are not real Skeptics they're really Defenders of a kind of world view advocacy groups really um to say that there's no evidence for

this anyone who believes it is a pseudoscientist or they're foolish or they're superstitious or they're stupid or they can't think critically or something like that an attempt to demean and dismiss this because it doesn't fit in with their world view

now that's exactly what happens in the history of science when Thomas Kuhn wrote his book about the structure of scientific revolutions he showed that at any given time in science there's usually a dominant model or Paradigm that is the word he used

um anything that doesn't fit in with that model is simply dismissed ignored ridiculed and that's exactly the kind of behavior we see in Defenders of this worldview in relation to phenomena like to apathy their branded paranormal Supernatural woo-woo and people who do

research on them often attacks um from their point of view you see and when I do experiments and get positive results for the telepathy they truly believe these phenomena are impossible and that means in their eyes I must be a fraud and say must other people who get

these results either I'm a fool or a fraud and they therefore feel justified in attacking through editing Wikipedia or through attacks in the media me and other people who do research on this kind of thing because it just doesn't fit their world

view and they sincerely believe most of them that it's therefore completely impossible but that is the problem you see that they're victims of a dogmatic framework of thinking and as I've shown in my book Sunset free the the the the the whole of science has

got sort of boxed in with this kind of dogmatism at the moment and many people outside the scientific world view are well aware of how dogmatic scientists can be many people within that dogmatic framework of belief don't see it that way at all they think of themselves as

as being open to evidence even though they actually dismiss evidence that goes against what they believe in so it's really a sociological question and it's uh it's very much to do with the Dynamics of scientific paradigms and the sociology of science

I mean it's really interesting and you know in in your book science and spiritual practices there's there's a portion in the introduction of your book where you you call you sort of call out these atheists and these materialists and I mean they they're you even say

that they are teaching their own sort of method of spirituality but do you regard this as ironic or uh sort of hypocritical well that's been a very interesting shift most atheists materialists not all of them I mean but most of the kind of common or garden atheists that you and I

are likely to meet uh is usually a believer in scientific materialism they believe that nature is autonomous the whole universe is like a machine made of unconscious matter governed by Eternal laws mathematical laws functioning uh through a purposelessly

um Evolutions happening as a result of chance there's no design no purpose near Consciousness in nature and therefore no God the idea that there's a God out there is simply doesn't there's no place for God in this materialistic world view so they're

atheists and they think that this is a scientific View until recently um old school atheists just rejected everything to do with religion and spirituality is rubbish and we were a nonsense and make believe and Superstition and so forth what's interesting is there's now been a

lot of scientific research on spiritual and religious practices and what this research shows is that these practices are generally speaking good for people they make people happier healthier and live longer so the converse must also be true people who don't do these practices

are likely to be unhappier unhealthier and live shorter so um it's precisely because spiritual practices have such benefits that a number of atheists have now taken them up themselves I mean Sam Harris for example who's an iconic atheist in the

United States you know one of the so-called new atheists is now giving online meditation courses and here in Britain Susan Blackmore who is of a prominent public atheist skeptic and materialist has written a book about Zen meditation which she practices herself

so what's interesting is that the uh the ground the debate has shifted it used to be atheists against everything spiritual and religious now um the new generation of atheists um are taking up a range of spiritual practices themselves I mean principally

meditation um and now what they're saying is oh yes well spiritual practices are good for you yes there is some point in them yes there is evidence that they work and can help people make them happier and healthier and less stressed and and and

so on all that's true but the experience people are getting through these practices is not about connecting with some kind of Consciousness out there it's all just happening inside their brains it's all a matter of changes in the patterns of nervous activity uh

release of dopamine or other neurotransmitters and so forth so it's all inside the head now I suspect that a lot of atheists who take up meditation and probably Millions have done I mean this is big I mean this is not just a tiny minority it's quite

common um I think that many of them take up meditation starting off with that kind of belief and I rather suspect that through the experiences they have they may change their view about reality and based on their own experience um I know some people have done it I did

myself I mean I myself was an atheist and a materialist um as I described in the introduction to my book science and spiritual practices um and you know it's education as a scientist I did research and taught at Cambridge University and uh and at

Harvard um I adopted the standard sort of atheist scientific worldview my own view of reality was very much opened up um first by um traveling in India which gave me a completely new perspective on the world being in a completely different culture

secondly through taking NSD which in around 1971 which gave me a completely different view of the nature of Consciousness and of the Mind and as a result of that um I got interested in exploring Consciousness without drugs and started doing Transcendental Meditation this was

around 1971.

um while I was still an atheist I didn't I liked the fact you didn't have to believe in anything to do this you just did it and it was based on experience but my experiences through meditation and yoga which I also took out um it led me gradually to move to a very

different view of Consciousness and and to move Beyond this kind of atheist rather dogmatic atheist world view that I had and I think for many people direct experiences spiritual experiences through spiritual practices can and and do lead them into a

different kind of world view after all spiritual World Views and all religions are based on the idea they're all about Consciousness they're about the idea of the reforms of Consciousness beyond the human level with which we can consciously connect

that's what spiritual and religious practices are about and these practices um like meditation are ways of entering into these different Realms of experience and not reading about them not thinking about them but actually experiencing them directly and it's

experience that really has the most effect on us and that of course is something we can study scientifically and in fact the word experience in Greek is in Empire us at the word empirical is dealing with experience science is empirical because it's based on

experience and so spiritual practices they're empirical because they're based on um experience and in fact in French the word experience means both experience and experiment um so that's why I think there's a kind of convergence of science uh when we

look at spiritual practices a convergence of Science and spirituality and that's one reason I wrote this book science and spiritual practices hmm yeah so I mean was there a single experience for you that converted you from atheism into believing in something

higher I think there was a single experience I mean I've had a number of mystical type experiences where I felt myself connected with something higher and I think probably one of the first of those was in India in 1968 when I was up in the Himalayas I was

staying with a friend in an anthropologist in a remote Village we were what went for a walk we ran into the local holy man who was sitting in his cave near a flow rapidly flowing river in the foothills of the Himalayas who invited us to Saturn with him in his cave so he joined

him he produced something he called a Chillum and invited me to smoke out of it I didn't really know what it was and it turned out to be a very strong form of cannabis which he described as shiva's highly plant because in India it's taken as a

spiritual devotional practice by some of these sadhus these holy men in Orange robes so I I hadn't taken cannabis before um and this was it was very powerful and it had a huge effect on me and I I just felt completely open to this presence of

the Divine and I stepped out of the cave into the sunlight lit a light and there were all these snow-capped Himalayan Mountains the Sun the river The Greenery of the vegetation I I just felt I was in a totally blessed world I was in paradise and I had this feeling of

complete connection and I would say that was one of the first kind of epiphany senses of the something more than just what's happening in my brain now of course the Cannabis had caused changes in the brain it's after all a drug that affects cannabinoid receptors and

biochemical mechanisms inside the brain so obviously the brain's involved but the experience went so much beyond that and you know I tried to persuade myself as nothing but chemical changes in the brain but the experience with the experience was so powerful that it made

me think well why would I just believe that it seems that I am in contact with a greater form of Consciousness it really is a greater form of Consciousness in the universe and um then I thought well why not I mean that's what most people throughout most

of human history have believed on the basis of experiencing it not on the basis of dogma and in fact I thought it was more dogmatic to deny my own experience than to accept it it's a very interesting story and I mean the link to the usage of these compounds these plant

medicines plant teachers you would call them um there seems to be a strong link here between the the entry point of Consciousness and these other experiences and these plant compounds I mean we just had just had Graham Hancock on the show and he was making a link

between between Ayahuasca DMT and the the origins of the spread of these types of ancient civilizations so I mean would you record regard a link here as well with your work and and what you're doing well yes I I've got a new book out it's not out yet in the US but it will be

soon called ways to go beyond and why they work it's a sequel to science and spiritual practices and in it I have a chapter on cannabis and psychedelics um and I mean I agree with graham that he'd simply a fact that in in a number of cultures in the world psychedelics have

played a very important part in their uh religious and ritual uh lives Ayahuasca in the regions in wide regions of the Amazon in Boca in West Africa mushrooms in Mexico psychedelics have played an important part in many cultures I won't I don't go

so far as to claim all cultures and all religions are based on psychedelics I mean I not suggesting that Jesus was taking DMT he might have done but or mushrooms or anything like that all that Muhammad was stoned when he channeled the Quran I mean not saying that

um I'm I think that the other the whole point of my books is that there are lots of different spiritual practices I think psychedelics are one of them but there are other ways of entering Altered States Of Consciousness including fasting meditation

and a number of other spiritual practices prayer sat in some cultures people spend long times in darkness in tibetan in Tibet there are some of the Tibetan yogis then weeks months in dark caves and if you're in complete sensory deprivation in the absence of light you

have Visionary States almost psychedelic type Visionary States according to those who've done it so again you don't need actual drugs to have Visionary States you can enter them from a variety of other through a variety of other practices so I'm just saying that drugs may have

played a part in some cultures and they certainly play a part in the spiritual explorations of of quite a lot of people today but not everybody and it's certainly not the only way so I mean one of the things that you bring up in this book is meditation and the importance of

it I mean it seems like we live such stressful lives I mean it's a it's an impact that we sort of go through every day that everything seems so busy that we take this moment out to just sort of quiet the Mind silence the thoughts or at least slow them down why is

meditation so important to this connection do something greater larger than us well I think there's there's several answers to that I mean I personally do it every day I find it very helpful I do it in the mornings um usually um you know before I start work

um soon after getting up um well the the scientific studies on meditation and there have now been literally thousands of scientific papers on meditation in scientific journals uh they show first of all that sitting quietly and meditating either by using a

mantra which is one way of meditating or by paying attention to breathing and Sensations in the body so-called mindfulness techniques another way of meditating that's without a mantra both these forms of meditation um have the effect of leading to

reduction in blood pressure lower levels of stress hormones a feeling of relaxation activation of the parasympathetic nervous system which is to do with feeling relaxed and open as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system which is not about sympathy but

about fight or flight you know fear and responding to emergencies and danger the parasympathetic nervous system is more about feeling relaxed and and calming down and meditation helps in all those ways um it helps calm down the chatter of the

mind which in terms of brain scans is associated with the activity of the default mode Network a series of brain regions that are linked up together that are active when you're ruminating or worrying or thinking or engaging in internal dialogue and what happens in

meditation I'm sure many people listening to us have meditated and won't need me to tell them but what happens is is through having a focus for concentration on the Mantra or on the breathing or Sensations in the body um it sort of pulls the attention away

from this chattering this thought that's going on the activity of the default mode Network the ruminations the worries and the fantasies and so on it provides another Focus for attention and it sort of drains energy away from the um the chattering mind

and in instead of being completely immersed in that that activity of the Mind once more detached from it and and that activity can slow down become less uh intrusive less encompassing and where and so there are moments when one can be free of it and those are often moments

of great peace calm joy and people often feel connected to a greater Consciousness than their own now I think that's why people develop meditation techniques in the first place within India within the Buddhist tradition within the Sufi tradition

within the Christian contemplative tradition in monasteries starting around 450 A.D there were people withdrawing to monasteries or hermitages spending hours a day in spiritual practices various forms of meditation um and what they were doing was going into

the very basis of Consciousness itself the basis of one's own mind the the Consciousness within which thoughts move the thoughts as it were passed through the Consciousness that we all have a bit like clouds going through the sky the thoughts are not the mind they're in

the mind just like the clouds are not the sky they're in the sky um and the more one becomes aware of one's connection with the ground of Consciousness like the sky as opposed to the clouds the more ones part of something much bigger than oneself

and the Hindus who were the people who were probably some of the first to develop a deep understanding of meditation the rishis the Hindu seers who spent years in caves in the Himalayas and elsewhere in India meditating um realized that the basis of our own

Consciousness is none other than the basis of the consciousness of the whole universe each of our minds is like a kind of fractal of the Divine Consciousness that underlies everything um every Consciousness in the universe is a reflection of that one of their

favorite illustrations is thinking of buckets of water um which at night are reflecting the moon and if you look in all these buckets of water you see in each of them the moon it's a reflection of the Moon hundreds of different reflections of the

Moon they all look as if they're separate things but actually they're all reflections of the one Moon and their idea is that all of us all our minds all our Consciousness is and the consciousnesses of all other conscious beings in the universe are reflections

of the ultimate Consciousness the one Consciousness that underlies all things um so the purpose of meditation is to link to that Consciousness and because one of the properties of the ultimate Consciousness in all religious Traditions is Joy the more ones

connected to it the more joyful one is which is why very often mystical or spiritual experiences are experienced as intensely joyful hmm I want to go back to a little bit to your experiences in India and the Hindu concept of the Brahman um can you talk a little bit more about

the connection to the mystical and how ancient people were using meditation as a way to connect into the Divine and how the Hindu concept of the Brahman relates to the Holy Trinity in Christianity please yes well this is a a very important point you see that the the

in many religions there's the idea there's a Divine Consciousness and ultimate Consciousness underlying the universe and everything within it and the but it's not just seen as kind of some fuzzy uh one Consciousness that it has a structure there's a pattern to the

nature of the ultimate mind and it's basically threefold um and the Hindus think of it in all sorts of different Trinity models um one of them is in terms of three different gods there's Brahma the Creator um there's Shiva the destroyer and uh

the and who creates through destroying the Brahm is the source of everything and then Vishnu is the preserver keeping things going um so Vishnu is more Dynamic uh more preserving and and Yeshiva is more about change and creativity um but the probably the deepest model in

the advice tradition in Hindu thought and uh in most Hindu philosophy is that the ultimate Consciousness has this threefold nature which they call sat chit Ananda and sat is the ground of being the ground of Consciousness itself conscious being

the ability to have ideas thoughts it's the ground of all things uh the conscious ground of all things now Chet is to do with the contents of Consciousness that which can be known names and forms with the Hindus called Nama Rupa names and forms

so that with your mind the the I mean our minds of fractile versions of the ultimate mind I mean right now I can look around me and I can see plants trees out of the window depends on ask um chairs books all sorts of things pictures on the wall all of those are

names and forms they're in my Consciousness but the Consciousness is greater than all the things that are within it so chit is about what can be known all the many forms in nature animals plants everything that can be known words can be known they have forms

and structures and then the Ananda is means Joy and the third principle of the ultimate mind is on the one hand a principle of movement or change or flow and on the other hand it's one of joyous of Joyful flow and so the idea is that within the

ultimate Consciousness there's a noer there's that which is known and there's the connection between them a kind of love joy or flow now there's a very similar um model of Ultimate Reality in the Christian conception of God um I mean a lot of atheists imagine that

Christians think God's an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud whereas I mean a few children may think that um but that's certainly not the traditional view the traditional view of Guardian Christianity is as the Holy Trinity which is the official doctrine

of the nature of gods in almost all churches and the Holy Trinity means God has three aspects and the father is the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit the father is the ground of being or Consciousness and in the Old Testament uh first revealed When God says to Moses

who encounters him in the burning bush and says who are you God says I am who I am so that's really a statement of God as conscious being the ground of being I am conscious being in the present um the logos the the Sun or the logos the the word the Greek word for word is

in in this context is logos is all the things that forms the patterns the names it's namaroopa it's like the Indians call uh name and form and in Greek philosophy that was um in Plato's philosophy it was the world of ideas the world of forms the contents of

Consciousness that which can be known that's the second person of the Trinity and the third person the holy spirit is breath or wind or the flow of things pictured in terms of breathing the flare of the wind the flow of water the flow of fire the flight of birds it's a

dynamical principle and the the the Christian model of God is primarily based on the metaphor of speech um so when I'm speaking now I'm the speaker but my speech has two aspects on the one hand there's The Words which is what you're hearing now

um which have formed shape structures meanings interconnections and so forth each word has a different form or shape or structure you can reveal it on us sonograph you can see the different vibratory patterns of each word each has a form and this the flow of words and the

connection of the words has meaning and at least I hope it does and um but those are words but for them to be heard for them to be manifested in the world there has to be the output fear of my breath so as I'm speaking now I'm breathing out

sure and the breath the flow of the breath outwards is a central part of the speech so you could you can say you can have the words without the the breath I can think the words in my mind and it's silent when I do that there's no manifestation of the words I can

breathe out without the words there's a flow of air which has a kind of white noise to it but no structure of formal meaning um but when I'm speaking when you're speaking or when anyone's speaking um you have both the flow and the structural pattern of the flow and the

Christian model is that the ultimate nature of divine reality is like that there's a ground of being a source of both words and of the flow um and then there's the words and the flow which go together and these three aspects of the Ultimate Reality or of

our own reality as as beings in the image of God it doesn't mean God looks like a a giant man it means we share in the Divine conscious nature and our Consciousness is a kind of fractile version of the Divine and the same would go for you know birds and animals and

plants that each of them has form uh the form of a plant shapes of the leaves the petals the you know they do and so on that's a form um but they have a flow of energy through them through the sunlight that they photosynthesize through the metabolism goes on within them

um and these have a common source so the traditional Christian theological view which was taught in all the medieval universities in Europe um it was very similar in those ways to the Hindu view of the threefold nature of the Divine and even completely different thought

systems like terrorism in China again have a kind of three-fold model you have the polarity of the Polar interplay of the Yen and the Yang the masculine the feminine the light and the dark but it's not a duality it's not just two things it's two things within a higher

Unity the Dao in those diagrams of the yin yang the daised the circle that includes them both the wholeness within which this polarity exists so that's a kind of trinitarian model as well um anyway I think what happens is that when we look at these the deeper meaning

of these theological doctrines we see models of consciousness and when we look at spiritual practices like meditation we see practices that tap into the nature of Consciousness reveal more about our own Consciousness and our connection with the Divine Consciousness

through doing the practices I mean would you say would you say that ancient religions I mean there you talk about ritual and I mean would you say that it's a type of Passage or Rite of Passage to incorporate ritual into this sort of practice

well yes I think that the the um rituals and occur in all religions um and in all secular societies too um and what rituals do there's several kinds there's rights of Passage which are about passing from one state of being to another and there's rituals of

remembrance which are about going back to the original Foundation story of a social group and reenacting it the American Thanksgiving dinner is an example of that um you know it's a national ritual that reenacts the Thanksgiving dinner of the

first settlers in New England the first European settlers in New England the Jewish Passover is a ritual reenactment of the Passover dinner in Egypt when the Jewish people escaped from slavery in Egypt and started on their Journey Through the Wilderness to the promised

land and the Christian holy communion is a reenactment of the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples so these are all reenactment rituals and there are also rituals which are rights of Passage the reenactment rituals are usually conservative and use ritual languages

ritual forms that are done the same way as before and I think that's they're done because they're consciously trying to connect with all those who've done them before and I think those are exactly the conditions that would mean they would as it were resonate with

those who've done them before biomorphic resonance which we talked about earlier and which I think happens on the basis of similarity and that's why rituals are done in a similar way every time because that creates this connection across time

a presence of the past but rights of Passage are about entering different states of being social being or consciousness and some rights of initiation um particularly those that happen on the threshold of manhood or Womanhood and maturity writes a passage from

adolescence or people becoming um inducted into a more mature or adult state of being often have uh imagery of dying to your old self and being born again in a new way um American Native American Vision quests often had that form people went into the

Wilderness fasting in conditions of great danger um and you know they could die some did die but they went through a kind of trial by ordeal and came back having faced death and being born in a new way and I think that some rights of Passage

actually involve near-death experiences and we know as I shown my book science and spiritual practices we know more today about near-death experiences than anyone's ever known before because they're more common than they've ever been before and they've been studied

scientifically in the past somebody had a heart attack or a major medical emergency would usually have just died now they're often resuscitated thanks to modern medicine so far larger numbers of people in the modern world have nearly died than ever

in the past in the past they actually died for the most part um so in some people who've nearly died who've died and come back to life again um have had what are called near-death experiences very often these involve traveling out of the body going through

a kind of tunnel coming into the light uh feeling a state of great connection blessedness love um sometimes meeting deceased relatives or beings of light Christ Angels or other beings of light and then because it's a near-death experience they had to go back into the

body but for many people these spontaneous near-death experiences change their lives even though they only last a few minutes um they change people's lives completely often making them more spiritual they often say they've lost the fear of death

they often become more caring and considerate to others their behavior changes for the better um and I think that some rights of Passage uh actually uh are based on inducing near-death experiences and I think the one that's most common in the

hiding in plain sight in European and American culture is baptism in the according to the New Testament we read that John the Baptist was baptizing people on an almost industrial scale in the River Jordan they were flocking to the Jordan to be baptized by John and

what he did was held them under um it by total immersion held them under the water and then brought them up again and people who'd had that experience were transformed by it the first realization Jesus had of his Direction with God where it came about through a

deep mystical experience induced by baptism by John as he came up from the River Jordan after being held under now what I think is probably going on there is that John was inducing near-death experiences by drowning if he held people under long enough they

would have a near-death experience through drowning the usual view is that this was just symbolic of death by drowning and um then coming back to life again um but you know why have something just symbolic when you can have the real thing and you know they only take a

minute or two longer um and it's very quick the whole thing um so I my uh how I think of it is that people would have lined up on the bank of the Jordan John would have stood there in the Jordan baptized them by holding them under getting there you

know he would obviously have to have experience he could have got it wrong perhaps when he started out he might have lost a few but um he obviously was very experienced and if he got it just right what would happen is he could reliably induce

near-death experiences in people and when people came up and then they were resuscitated from this experience many of them would have had the experience of dying and being born again which is exactly what people say about baptism by total immersion yeah

and so I think that in the early church it has soon turned into infant baptism sprinkling water on their head and it did become just symbolic but at the Reformation in the 16th century in Europe the most radical Reformation people reinstated baptism by total

immersion they were called anabaptists meaning baptism again and they gave rise to the Baptist and the Mennonite churches that you know still say strong in the United States and they were all based on an experience of being immersed held under and feeling they died and

being born again and it's the Baptists who go around saying they've been born again and in the 16th century this made them very unpopular regular churches were more about having everything properly ordered with priests and so on whereas Baptists were going around

filled with this kind of mystical vision and sense of direct personal revelation they'd had through dying and being born again and makes total sense if what was happening is that they were having near-death experiences there really would have been transformed they really

would have felt they'd seen the light died and been born again and when we hear these phrases from Southern Baptists and others today most people just dismiss them contemptuously as if these are foolishly deluded people but I think that behind

these phrases are deep mystical experiences and I think that the whole of that movement and the whole of what was going on in the John the Baptist time makes sense if we see these as Rites of Passage that involve near-death experiences I never connected to the dots with

baptism that makes so much sense now that you put it that way it seems like there's an interconnectedness to these mystical States you know through religion through the usage of plants and I mean it seems to be everywhere well I think so I mean it's true in all

religions you see I mean all religions have had a range of mystical and spiritual practices and another one I discuss in my book science and spiritual practices is singing Counting and that and and the ritual use of music like dancing well this again you see can give

tremendously Altered States Of Consciousness in shamanic cultures it's always used I mean they all have singing dancing chanting and if you look at the sort of raves and modern forms of collective ecstasy which we have in in the modern world uh many people in in

the world today achieve Altered States Of Consciousness through uh singing music dancing um and these are all about opening the Mind from beyond our narrow personal concerns to a sense of Greater connection with other people and with greater forms of Consciousness that

exist out there in the universe um so I think that when we see religions as being rooted in that and mostly being about inducing those experiences it's a very very different picture from the standard atheist model of religious people being people who've been

brainwashed or indoctrinated with with dogmas and which are completely irrational and unscientific religions are all rooted primarily in experience and they all still have them I mean they all still have singing and chanting and rituals and many have fasting I mean

right now it's Ramadan and um Muslims are fasting during daylight I as many Christians cast during Lent and some traditional religious and shamanic practices involve Altered States Of Consciousness through psychedelics as we've just discussed so there's a whole

range of ways in which spiritual practices both within and outside religions because you can also of course do these things outside a religious context as many people do today people who are spiritual but not religious are all ways of connecting with this

these greater forms of consciousness yeah a really good question popped up uh from Christian over at project mindfulness he asks do does that mean that every introspective Journey will lead to the same the quote-unquote same experience of divinity

well that's a I wouldn't say every introspective journey and I wouldn't say that they all leads the same experience um you see as we were just discussing I think that the the the Consciousness ultimate Consciousness according to you know Hinduism Christianity the Sufi

tradition in Islam and so on these are conscious and in Buddhism too ultimate the Ultimate Reality is a conscious reality it's not unconscious um so these different spiritual practices I think can connect as with different aspects so meditation I

think primarily connects us with the SAT of sachet and Endo you know the the um experience of the ground of Consciousness itself but one of the chapters in my book science and spiritual practices is on plants and the beauty of flowers and appreciating the beauty of flowers and

how relating to plants can be a kind of spiritual practice again in all religions flowers uh seen as emblems of divine Beauty and you know in Hindu temples and Buddhist temples people make offerings of flowers in Christian churches they always have vases of

flowers or there is like a kind of flower offering that people just take it for granted but flowers are a key part and when we're appreciating flowers and the beauty of flowers or the beauty of buildings or the beauty of art that can have a spiritual Dimension and what

we're dealing there with is more with the realm of the spirit which is of the chat aspect of statutanda to do with names and forms it's the beauty of the form it's not going beyond all form it's appreciating the nature of forms themselves and the beauty of forms and

their relationships that underlies the spiritual aspect of appreciating flowers or or any other kind of visual Beauty and when we have spiritual experiences which involve music song dance um again I have a chapter on that uh singing chanting in the power of music

uh in my book then I think we're connecting more with the aspect of the spirit which is the moving principle the dynamical principle of the Divine being so I wouldn't say that all spiritual experiences lead to the same experience of the Divine

um it's possible that people meditating in Hindu Buddhist Christian Sufi traditions have similar experiences of the ultimate ground of being but not all spiritual practices lead to the same kinds of experience and all religions combine different kinds of of

spiritual practice they all have their own selection of them and none of them based on just one okay I mean we've talked about a number of different things here Dr sheldrake I know your time is limited you know how would you wrap this up for people who

are listening I mean what were your conclusions when you were writing this book I mean realizing what what you discovered I mean this connection between religion meditation plant medicine and all these things ndes they all seem to be connected so how can we

wrap this up for the people listening well I think that what uh the important thing for me was because I'm both a scientist and interested in spiritual practices and practice them myself um is first of all it's very liberating to find that science and these practices

are not like at war with each other they're not contradictory they're not Polar Opposites in fact through the scientific study of spiritual practices science can help illuminate spiritual practices and spiritual practices can help illuminate science because they it

can illuminate the nature of Consciousness which is one of the things that science is least good at understanding at the moment although Consciousness studies is now a major part of science one of the more interesting Parts I think secondly I think that looking at these

practices um and especially looking through a scientific lens enables us to see that um they have a lot in common between different Traditions that all different religious Traditions have their spiritual practices and they're primarily based on experience and on

practice um and the these practices from all different traditions in the world enable us to be more tolerant and open to these different traditions and also more appreciative of them because after all there are millions of people about 18 million people in the United States

alone who now meditate on a regular basis and probably at least 10 million who do yoga on a regular basis well these are things that have mainly been learned from Eastern cultures within the last generation or two I mean go back 200 years and most people in the US and

in Europe would never have heard of yoga um and certainly wouldn't have known about mantra-based meditation unless they happen to be Christian Mystics living in monasteries um uh so or Russians there was a stronger mystical tradition in Russia

among lay people um but the and of course in the Kabbalah tradition among Jewish people have always been mystical undercurrents but what we have now is a situation where practices from all the whole world from all the different cultural and spiritual

traditions of the world are now available to us so this is a new situation uh beginning of a new phase of spiritual Evolution I think and um so I think these practices can help us all um and they they as soon as you think in terms of practice and experience you go

beyond the sterile arguments based on during it religious beliefs or sort of attacking scientific dogmatism and stuff I mean you can have polemical attacks one way or the other but this is about not being about polemics or trying to score points it's actually trying to

deepen our own experience and understanding through experience and that's the reason at the end of every one of the seven uh chapters about practices in in my books and spiritual practices I suggest two simple ways in which anyone can try these practices for

themselves and so it's a book um that's not just about thinking about it or studying the history or The evolutionary significance or uh and so on or the comparative religion but actually adopting these practices or if one already has the practices like singing

and chanting or meditation um understanding them more deeply and seeing how they fit in with a wider pattern of cultures um so it's a practical book as well as the theoretical one and one which I hope will actually help people to explore these practices for themselves

yeah I think so and you know I really wanted to bring up the the flow of gratitude and and your chapter that you dedicated to the idea of gratitude and being grateful for things that we have in our lives what's what's happening in as a practice what's what's happening in

our our brains when we practice gratitude well I'm not sure there have been that many studies on the the brain effects of gratitude but um they've certainly been a lot of studies by positive psychologists on the effects of gratitude um in experiments where people do gratitude

exercises um they turn out to be measurably happier for example in one of the experiments that's now been done widely um by positive psychologists that means psychologists studying the nature of happiness and how to be happy rather than most of psychologists about what

makes people miserable this is about what makes people happy they find that in in an experiment a typical experiment they divide a group of people into three subgroups at random one of those subgroups is asked to write a short story about something that's

happened in the previous week another group of people are asked to make a list of the hassles they've experienced in the previous week things that have upset them and the third group is asked to make a list of things in the previous week for which they feel grateful and

which they appreciate and it turns out that the people who just spend 10 15 minutes making a list of things they're grateful for measurably happier for several days afterwards um being grateful makes people happier um and I think it does so because it

makes them more part of a flow being grateful is acknowledging that a lot of what we have is given to us I mean our very life is given to us and we didn't ask our father another to have us we they had us and they or other people cared for us when we were babies and

brought us up and there are other people who make our clothes and the whole earth provides the fuels that power are cars and planes and you know as people make computers and factories and other people look after the electricity Supply and other people make sure we have regular

Food Supplies people cook our meals we looked after by people in our families there are so many things that our lives depend upon and when we instead of taking it for granted which is the opposite of gratitude is just taking things for granted or feeling entitled

um as soon as we recognize that we're part of a flow we're part of a process and we're connected to many many other people we're all connected to Gaia the earth and the Earth's connected to the solar system and the Galaxy and the universe we're part of something vastly

greater than ourselves and when we recognize that when we become consciously aware of it when we give thanks for that we become part of a process of flow and connection and being happy is all about being part of a connector being part of the flow and

part of a sense of connection with something grace than ourselves being miserable is about feeling disconnected alienated cut off separated um just in dis Enchanted disgruntled complaining and gratitude has people who practice it um happier and not just happier but more

popular they it's nicer to hang out with somebody who's grateful and happy than somebody who's feels entitled and spends most of their time complaining um and that in turn of course may people who are appreciated and more popular because they're grateful and and they're happier

that makes them happier still so um it's a virtuous circle the opposite of a vicious circle it's by being grateful and appreciative life gets better and of course all religions encourage that um Christian Services start with thanks and prayers of Thanksgiving and hymns of

Thanksgiving and so on and you know all Traditions have ways of giving thanks and one of the practices well I suggest two practices in my chapter one is to practice gratitude daily or weekly think about or make a list of things for which you feel great for

another is to do something very very traditional which is to give thanks before meals and in all traditional societies people give thanks before they eat and 100 years ago probably every family in America would have given thanks before they act together

um and nowadays a great many don't because they're sort of modern and secular and they've just stopped doing it or they don't even sit down together because they're all sort of grazing at different times from food counters um so but that sense of giving thanks

together um all traditional societies do it in my college in Cambridge founded in 1326 before every meal in the evenings a Gong Rings everyone stands up eating in the Great Hall and is along that in Grace this happens to be happening in in a few minutes time

this is every day and this is a traditional practice it's the way things always were and people may not have paid that much attention to it but it provided a space where you give thanks before meals in my own family um we always have a pause for giving

thanks before we eat we if it's just the family we usually sit hold hands around the table and have a period of Silence when we give thanks in our own way or if it's more people than someone says a Grace or when we have a larger Gathering like at Christmas or in past days or in

other groups of friends around we sing a Grace Together We Sing it as a as a round and and doing that just that simple thing brings everyone together changes the atmosphere and makes the meal more enjoyable and and just and we all feel more connected such a simple

thing and it costs nothing and it was always used to be done and um you know doing that even if one's on one's own just having a pause to give thanks before meals makes a big difference Dr sheldrake I know your time is short I think I could sit here and talk to you

listen to you talk all day I have a lot of gratitude for you for making the time to do this interview um where can I mean you've influenced uh my own learning for many many years as I mentioned at the beginning of the show I I've been emailing you for a long time

just to appear on the on on the show here um where can people find your book science and spiritual practices well it's obviously available online on Amazon Barnes and Noble and other online bookstores it's also available as an audio book read by me in audible on

Amazon and through other audiobook Outlets and as an e-book and in fact all my books were they not all available in audio format they're all available we're in print and and ebook formats and there's also a lot of information about my work um lots of YouTubes lots of podcasts and

so on on my website which is sheldrake.org there are also some experiments people can take part in which will help my research and if anyone's interested in knowing more there's a newsletter they can sign up for which talks about my workshops and

lectures giving one in July 2019 in California Institute of neurotic Sciences conference and I give a workshop every summer at hollyhock on cortisone in British Columbia Canada with my two sons Merlin and Cosmo on science and spiritual practices the very

themes we've been talking about today and that is at the end of July beginning of August at hollyhock and their website is hollyhock.com a in Canada so anyone who wants to find out more can easily do so guys you heard it here my guest's name

is Dr Rupert sheldrake the book is called science and spiritual practices transformative experiences and their effects on our bodies brains and health we are going to get out of here you will hear from us next week thank you so much for tuning in if you like the show

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