Does Nature Have A Hidden Memory? - Rupert Sheldrake | Modern Wisdom Podcast 379

1. 0:00 – 0:38

   Intro

   1. RSRupert Sheldrake0:00

      So I started my own investigations with the animals we know best, dogs and cats. And I started asking people if they've ever noticed their animals pick up their intentions. And lots and lots of people said yes. And the most testable of these was people saying that their dog knew when they were coming home. The dog would go and wait at a door or a window, and the people at home would know when that person was coming back. I did a survey and found about 50% of dogs do this. So we're not talking something very, very unusual. I'm quite sure a lot of people listening to us now will have dogs that do this. (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:34

      Rupert Sheldrake, welcome to the show.

   3. RSRupert Sheldrake0:37

      Good to be with you.

2. 0:38 – 8:33

   Studying Nature’s Memory

   1. RSRupert Sheldrake0:38

   2. CWChris Williamson0:38

      How do you describe what you do for work?

   3. RSRupert Sheldrake0:42

      I'm a biologist, and I do scientific research. I write about it in books and in papers in peer-reviewed journals. I do experiments. I make observations. Um, I go to scientific meetings. So that's probably my main day job.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:00

      It's diverged a little bit from some of the more typical areas of study in those fields though.

   5. RSRupert Sheldrake1:06

      Yes. I've, um, you know, I, I investigate things which most scientists don't, either because they want to stay within the fairly narrow confines of institutional orthodoxy, or, um, because they, these are new areas of research for which it's hard to get funding. And I like exploring areas where there's been very little exploration before. So that, that, that's my particular, um, thing. I mean, for many scientists, they prefer working in crowded areas of science where there's lots of other people doing similar things, where it's easy to get publications and grants and so on. Um, but I, I explore lesser-known areas of the natural and the psychological worlds.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:56

      Morphic resonance, which is one area of research in particular that you've come up with, how many other people are working within that field?

   7. RSRupert Sheldrake2:06

      Well, in terms of actual experimental research, I think approximately zero. Um, um, the, uh, there are a lot of people who are interested in the idea. The idea is that there's a kind of memory in nature and that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. Um, but when it comes to actually testing it, there have been quite a number of experiments over the years which are summarized in the new edition of my book, A New Science of Life. Um, but right now, um, there are two or three people who are planning some experiments in biology labs and, um, with animal behavior, but no one's actually doing them as we speak. However, there will be some happening quite soon, I hope.

   8. CWChris Williamson2:53

      What do you mean by memory and habits?

   9. RSRupert Sheldrake2:58

      Well, the usual view of nature is that it's governed by eternal laws, uh, that at the moment of the Big Bang, all the laws of nature were supposed to be fixed, like a kind of Napoleonic, uh, code, a cosmic Napoleonic code. Um, that's the, the normal assumption in science. And they've assumed to be the same everywhere ever since. Uh, I suggest that the so-called laws of nature, um, evolve along with nature. They weren't all there at the beginning. I mean, after all, it's only an assumption. No one was around at the begin- Big Bang, uh, takering, taking scientific measurements. And if they had, by a time machine, managed to get to the Big Bang, they would have a- evaporated instantly. You know, billions of degrees centigrade. Um, so it's just an assumption. Um, and, uh, in fact, when you think about it, the idea of laws of nature is very metaphorical. It's based on human laws, and only humans have laws. And in fact, only civilized humans have laws. Tribes have customs. So what I'm suggesting is a better metaphor, is habits. And if nature has habits, then nature has to have a memory. Um, and so what I'm suggesting is that, uh, nature's full of habits. Crystals crystallize the way they do because they've crystallized that way before. Um, and when a new crystal appears, when chemists make a new compound and it crystallizes for the first time, there won't be a habit because it hasn't happened before. You may have to wait years for a crystal to form. But once it's formed in one place, it gets easier everywhere else. Likewise, if you train rats to learn a new trick in Newcastle, then rats all over the world should be able to learn the trick quicker just because they've learned it here in England first. Uh, and the more that learn it, the easier it should get. And the influence of morphic resonance is an influence of similar things upon subsequent similar things across time and space from the past to the present. So that's roughly what I'm trying to say in this hypothesis. And it leads to the idea that every species has a collective memory, uh, on which individuals draw and to which they contribute. And also that humans, of course, have a collective memory, which is very similar to the psychologist Jung, Jung's idea of the collective unconscious.

   10. CWChris Williamson5:23

       How do you separate out habits and laws?

   11. RSRupert Sheldrake5:29

       Well, if you assume that a law is an eternal, changeless thing, then crystals should crystallize exactly the same way the first time or the millionth time or the billionth time because the so-called laws of nature haven't changed. Um, uh, but if the rate of crystallization depends on what's happened before, then that looks much more like a habit. So you can actually test it experimentally. Most scientists don't bother because they just take it for granted that there are eternal laws. They, they believe in eternal laws not because they've thought about them, but because they haven't. It's just a kind of default assumption within science.

   12. CWChris Williamson6:07

       How hard is it to test this stuff experimentally?

   13. RSRupert Sheldrake6:11

       It's not that difficult. I mean, there are a variety of tests with humans, for example. Um, uh, it should get easier, it should be easier to do today's Times word cross, Times crossword puzzle tomorrow than it is today because so many people have solved it today. Um, and actually people have done experiments with crossword puzzles that suggests that this really does happen. Um, so, uh, and there are lots of lab tests with animal behavior, with cell cultures, with crystallization. Uh, the problem isn't that the experiments are difficult to do, it's that morphic resonance is seen as deeply heretical within the scientific world. And most scientists are afraid that if they do anything heretical, they'll get drummed out of town and lose their grants and their jobs. And actually, since that actually happened to me, uh, there, it's not a totally irrational fear. Um, so, uh, the, um, the, so most scientists are actually very afraid of doing anything that violates these taboos. And I have had one or two scientists working in reputable labs who've been working on morphic resonance experiments over the years. But even in one case, he was the principal investigator at a leading institution in the United States, and he told me that to do the morphic resonance experiments he had to go in at night when there wouldn't be any technicians around to ask what he was doing, and do these experiments under cover of the night, uh, in a clandestine manner. So it's a ridiculous thing, but that's, I'm afraid, the situation.

   14. CWChris Williamson7:48

       What's the taboo that it's crossing?

   15. RSRupert Sheldrake7:51

       It's crossing the taboo of eternal laws of nature, uh, which is, was built into science in the 17th century. And in the 17th century, uh, uh, ironically it was a theological proposition. The idea was that God made nature, God's the supreme law-giver, and God's eternal, so God's laws are eternal. Um, so it was a theological assumption, and it's now sort of hardened into an assumption of materialist science, even though the theological reasons for it have long since disappeared. Many scientists are now atheists, but, uh, they still hold to this kind of theological view of laws outside space and time, present at the moment of the Big Bang.

3. 8:33 – 22:51

   Rupert’s Compelling Experiments

   1. RSRupert Sheldrake8:33

   2. CWChris Williamson8:34

      What are some of the most compelling experiments that you went through? Let's say someone hasn't heard of this before, what are some of the most convincing experiments that you've done?

   3. RSRupert Sheldrake8:44

      Well, they're not necessarily the ones I've done myself, but they're ones that other people have done. I've, in a way that makes them more convincing. I mean, some people who are very prejudiced against this would, if I come up with positive results, they'd say, "Well, what do you expect? He's just getting, seeing what he wants to see." Um, there was a very long series of experiments with rats that were started at Harvard a very long time ago. And for years they were trying to see if rats could learn more quickly something that their, uh, parents had learned, escaping from a water maze. And they did. They got much faster to, the first generation made about 250 errors before they learned, and after 30 generations, they were down to about 20 errors. This was a very big effect. Um, and they thought at first it was the inheritance of acquired characters, or what's now called epigenetic inheritance. Um, but then when people took up this experiment in Australia to check it, um, they had a control line where they had in every generation rats that had, had parents that had not been trained, and they got better too.

   4. CWChris Williamson9:50

      So you breed a set that does the experiment, then one generation that doesn't, then you breed another generation that does?

   5. RSRupert Sheldrake9:56

      No, not quite that. You have one, uh, one set of rats where in every generation the parents have been trained, and you test those rats. You have another set where in every generation the parents haven't been trained. You test the rats, and then you breed from the untrained parents and, and the next generation you test some of the rats. But you don't, uh, breed from the tested rats. So that's the control line. And they got better too. So it clearly wasn't passing on anything through the eggs or sperm. It was something much more mysterious. Um, and I think that's a, a very good example of morphic resonance.

   6. CWChris Williamson10:32

      What happened with the... was this something to do with milk bottle tops?

   7. RSRupert Sheldrake10:38

      Yes. Um, well, this was something that happened, a spontaneous, uh, example in, in about 1920. Um, people in Southampton noticed that when they had milk delivered to their doorsteps, they used to have cardboard tops on the milk bottles, um, they found that when they picked up the milk in the morning that the top inch or so of cream had disappeared from the, the bottle. And so people were upset about this, and they kept watch, and they discovered the offenders were blue tits. Blue tits had discovered how to peel off the top and then drink the cream. Um, and one thing that clinched it was when people started finding drowned blue tits headfirst in milk bottles. Um, so, uh-

   8. CWChris Williamson11:25

      You've got your milk bottle delivered on a morning and you've got a free blue tit sticking out of the top of it.

   9. RSRupert Sheldrake11:29

      (laughs) Exactly.

   10. CWChris Williamson11:31

       (laughs)

   11. RSRupert Sheldrake11:31

       And so this aroused a lot of interest in England. And, um, blue tits are home loving birds. They don't migrate or move very far. And, uh, the scientists at Cambridge who were studying this got people from all over Britain, through the radio and newspapers, they got birdwatchers all over Britain to watch out for this and report when they saw it happen. And so there's a, uh, unusually well-documented data on the spread of this habit. And what they found was that the habit gradually spread and then at an accelerating rate throughout Britain. And the, the blue tits, um-... they, they found that when it happened more than 60 miles from where it had previously been observed, they assumed it was an independent discovery. And they found the rate of independent discovery accelerated as time went on. They thought it might be something like telepathy. They thought it was not simply birds moving around and telling other birds. Um, and, uh, so it was a mysterious effect, um, and it's just what you'd expect with morphic resonance. And moreover, in Holland, where they also had milk bottle deliveries, milk deliveries stopped during the war. And after the war, when they began again, uh, Dutch blue tits were doing this as well. And after the war, when they began again in Holland, um, uh, blue tits all over Holland immediately started doing it, even though, um, they only lived three or four years, and none of the ones after the war would have been alive in the golden age of free cream before the war. Um, uh, interesting enough, this habit's now dying out. I, I live in Hampstead, London, and we have milk deliveries to our doorsteps still today. It's a much better system than throwing away plastic containers 'cause they collect the bottles, wash them, and use them again. Um, and they deliver them, always have done, in electric vehicles. So it's a very eco-friendly system. Anyway, when we first started getting milk delivered, we had regular milk and we had blue tits stealing the cream on a regular basis. Then, like lots of other people, we switched to semi-skimmed milk, and I noticed almost immediately the blue tits stopped, uh, raiding the milk bottles. Uh, it just wasn't worth their while 'cause there's no cream on, uh, semi-skimmed milk. So, so many people now have semi-skimmed milk that this habit's dying out.

   12. NANarrator13:57

       Bloody food pyramid.

   13. RSRupert Sheldrake13:59

       (laughs) Yeah.

   14. NANarrator13:59

       The food pyramid ruining these blue tits' habits.

   15. RSRupert Sheldrake14:02

       Exactly.

   16. NANarrator14:04

       Yeah, I mean... What about, what about birds in swarms? When you see starlings moving together, is that something similar?

   17. RSRupert Sheldrake14:16

       Well, it's, it's something I'm very interested in. When you see birds moving together in flocks, um, like starlings, murmurations of starlings, they not only know where the neighboring birds are, but they know where they're going to go. I mean, you could say, "Well, they know where the others are by keeping unblinking attention on all their neighbors," although of course they can't see the ones behind them. Um, uh, but they don't... Even by knowing where the others are, they don't know which way they're going to turn 'cause they can turn in all different directions. Uh, so the ho- the whole thing is like as if they're all within a field. You know, like, when you have iron filings in a magnetic field, you move the magnet and all the iron filings change their relation to each other. They're responding to a greater field of which they're a part. Well, I think the birds are like that. I think there's a field of the whole flock and the individual birds respond to the, um, to the field of the... Like a group mind kind of thing. Um, I think that actually animal groups as a, in general have a field linking the members together. Um, and in fact, I think that's the basis for telepathy because they remain linked even if they move apart. Like in a wolf pack, the adults usually leave the young in the den with a babysitter and they go hunting, ranging over many miles, um, and then catching, getting food to bring back to feed the young. Um, I think the bonds between the members of the group are stretched. I don't think they break. I think they remain in connection at a distance. And naturalists have found that wolves seem to communicate at a distance way beyond the range of sound or smell. Um, um, and in a way that seems telepathic.

   18. NANarrator16:04

       How do they communicate? Or what, what do they do?

   19. RSRupert Sheldrake16:07

       Well, they know when the others are in distress, for example, um, and they behave differently. And if they've got left behind, sometimes through injury, they can find where the others are without the others howling to send out sound signals. And I think this is normal, you see. You know, the reason, um, I got interested in telepathy because it seemed to me a normal natural consequence of animals living in groups. And so I started my own investigations with the animals we know best, dogs and cats. Um, and I started asking people with dogs and cats and horses and parrots and other domestic animals, um, if they've ever noticed their animals pick up their intentions, especially at a distance. And lots and lots of people said yes. Uh, and, and the most testable of these was the i- uh, was people saying that their dog knew when they were coming home, the dog would go and wait at the door or a window and the people at home would know when that person was coming back. And of course, the obvious explanation would be, well, it's just routine or it's hearing familiar car sounds. But, um, so a lot of people were convinced that wasn't the case 'cause they said they had non-routine jobs, and more than 20 women told me that they- their husbands worked, uh, non-routine jobs as taxi drivers, journalists, lawyers, policemen, et cetera, um, and would come home at non-routine times. Um, but they always knew when their partner was on the way because the dog would go and start waiting for them, sometimes 20 minutes in advance. So they'd know when to get on the meal so that it was hot on the table when their partner arrived. And a lot of people who were doing this were, just took it completely for granted. Um, and I did a survey and found about 50% of dogs do this. So we're not talking something very, very unusual. I'm quite sure a lot of people listening to us know, will have dogs that do this. Millions of dogs are doing it on a daily basis all over Britain and indeed all over the world.So, I set up experiments to, because telepathy is a taboo topic in science. It's not supposed to happen according to the materialist theory of the mind, which is still dominant. The mind's supposed to be nothing but the brain or brain activity, all inside the head, so your thoughts or intentions couldn't possibly influence a dog 20 miles away. Um, so, uh, materialists simply dismiss it as superstition, uh, you know, ignorance, stupidity, uh, et cetera, on the part of dog owners, so credulity, et cetera. Um, so they just dismiss it out of hand with no evidence. They don't need evidence 'cause they know they're right, um, uh, just on the basis of armchair arguments. Um, anyway, because I have to deal with people like that all the time, uh, within the scientific world, um, I have to do particularly rigorous experiments. So with the dogs, um, I found people whose dogs do this, or they said they do it. Um, I had them go at least five miles from home. We filmed the place the dog waited the whole time they were out, told them when to come home at a randomly chosen time they didn't know in advance by mobile phone. And then they traveled by unfamiliar vehicles, um, taxis, uh, a different taxi each time. Um, uh, the most expensive aspect of this research was the taxi bills. Um, and, uh, then with, from the cameras, we could actually see when the dogs started waiting. And sure enough, uh, they were waiting much more when people were on the way home than ... Uh, sometimes they occasionally visited the window to look at passing cats and things, but they, the waiting behavior was really clear. Um, and they did it over and over again. And, um, they didn't, didn't do it every time. Uh, sometimes if they were sick or very tired almost, uh, or if there was a bitch on heat in the next apartment, they didn't do it. Uh, that doesn't prove they can't do it, it just proves they can be distracted. But in our tests, about 85% of the time, the dogs accurately, um, picked up when the owner was coming home over 15 minutes in advance. Mm-hmm. And it's all on film, so I think, and there's actually, there's one online on my website. Be, anyone can see in, uh, one of these experiments. Um, so, uh, I published a whole book about unexplained behavior of animals called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Um, and I've published these experiments in peer-reviewed scientific journals as well. For most people, there's, they don't have any problem with this because they've seen dogs do it, or they know people who have dogs that do it. And, um, and most people are curious and interested. But within the scientific world, this is intensely controversial because it's not supposed to be possible. Um, so anyway, that's one of the areas I investigate. And, um, it really, uh, uh, in the end, the dispute comes down as to what do you think science is? Is it a belief system, which is what some of my colleagues seem to think? Or is it an open-minded method of inquiry, which is what I'd like to think? Um, and I think we can investigate a lot more about nature than scientists usually do, uh, by breaking out of these taboos and limitations. How many dogs did you look at? Well, I, I collected stories on over 1,000 dogs with regular observations, and I did detailed filmed experiments with three or four dogs. Um, and those are written up on, in peer-reviewed journals. Would scientists say that that is too small of a sample size to be able to extrapolate out? I don't think so, because with each dog, there were dozens of tests. Um, you know, if you were trying to find out whether perfect pitch is possible in humans, and you tested a few people and you showed over and over again that they really could identify a particular note, uh, you wouldn't need to test thousands of people to prove it's true. And, you know, it gets repetitive. I mean, uh, I spent three or four years doing these experiments. And if somebody says, "Okay, it's not enough. Uh, you've got to spend the rest of your life doing them," well, uh, not much incentive 'cause the people who don't want to believe it don't believe it anyway. And even if you pile up more and more evidence, as I have done in many other areas of research, it doesn't make the slightest difference. They still say it's impossible. Um, but still, I think there's a reasonable, a very good and convincing body of evidence already.

4. 22:51 – 28:51

   Morphic Resonance & Telepathy

   1. RSRupert Sheldrake22:51

      Mm-hmm. What is the difference between morphic resonance and telepathy? Well, morphic resonance is a memory principle that underlies animal instincts, the inheritance of form, collective memory, um, influence from the past; whereas telepathy is about connections in the present. It's about, uh, it's usually to do with need, um, b- uh, uh, social needs, uh, individual needs, um, to another member of the group. For example, in the human realm, uh, one of the commonest kinds, uh, among women is with nursing mothers. Many nursing mothers have the experience that, you know, when they're with their baby and the baby cries, their milk lets down. It's called the milk let-down reflex. And their breasts start squeezing out milk for obvious reasons, to feed the baby. But some women, when they start going back to work or start leaving the baby after a few months o- of breastfeeding, and they're still breastfeeding but they now leave the baby with babysitters, um, sometimes they find that they're shopping or they're working somewhere and their milk lets down. There's no baby crying nearby. Um, and so, uh, they just assume they need, uh, the baby needs some, and their breasts have somehow picked it up. And they used to just go home, and they were usually right. Now they ring home on a mobile phone. And then, I've done actual surveys and studies on this, and, uh, they, they're-... are very often right. I mean, way beyond chance. I mean, it's like billion to one against chance, the odds of them doing this just by coincidence. Um, so that's one example. And another example I've investigated of human telepathy, um, is telephone telepathy. About 85% of the population, according to surveys that I and others have done, have had the experience of thinking of someone who then rings. And obviously, if you know someone's going to ring at six o'clock, they ring, you're not surprised by that. But if you think of someone you haven't thought of for a while, for no apparent reason, and then they ring, you're likely to say something like, "It's funny, I was just thinking about you." Um, or sometimes when the phone rings, people know who it is before they look at caller- the caller ID or answer it. This is really common. And the armchair skeptics who say this is impossible, um, first of all, they claim it doesn't happen. And then when you show 85% of the population say it's happened to them, then they say, "Well, it must just be coincidence and people just remember the times they're right and forget the millions of times they're wrong." Um, but they've never done any research. This is just an armchair way of explaining it away. And they got away with this for 100 years after the invention of the telephone. Um, but I got rather sick of so-called skeptics just getting the- having a get- get out of jail free card of just saying, "Oh, well, it must be superstition or ignorance or stupidity or people misinter- or false memory or whatever." So I decided to test their theory, um, that it's random coincidence. And in my experiments, um, I've now done hundreds and hundreds, well, thousands. Um, the, uh, the caller, say you, Chris, if you're the, if you're the subject, you'd give me the names of four people, you know well, friends or family members, and you'd sit at home with a landline phone, no caller ID, being filmed. Then I or my assistant would pick one of your four people at random from a random number generator or throwing a die, um, and then call them up and say, "Think about Chris for a minute or two and then ring him." Um, so your phone would ring, you'd know it was part of this experiment. You wouldn't be able to predict who was ringing on the basis of knowing their habits because they've been picked at random. Um, and you'd have to say, "Oh, I think it's Mary. Hello, Mary." And, um, you're on camera, you'd be right or wrong. And if you were just guessing, you'd be right 25% of the time, one in four. In fact, in these experiments, the average hit rate in hundreds of filmed trials is about 45%. So it's way above chance expectation. And people aren't right every time. Um, it's a very artificial situation and people get a bit stressed by being put on the spot in these artificial tests. Uh, but nevertheless, this is a, you know, immensely significant statistically. And, um, now this has been replicated by other people in universities in Holland and Germany. And, um, I now have a, a thing that you can do on your own mobile phone. On my website, there's a take part button, and you can, um, log on and do it on your mobile phone. You have two callers, you nominate two people to call you and it picks random times and the whole experiment happens automatically. So you can actually try it yourself. Anyone listening, as long as they're in Britain, the US or Canada can try it themselves. It doesn't-

   2. CWChris Williamson28:04

      What's the website?

   3. RSRupert Sheldrake28:05

      Hmm?

   4. CWChris Williamson28:06

      What's the website?

   5. RSRupert Sheldrake28:07

      My website is called sheldrake.org. Simple to remember. O-R-G, org. Um, so anyway, this is one of the areas of research, uh, I'm engaged in. Um, and I, I summarized the, um, some of this research in, in my book, The Science Delusion, where I look at the 10 dogmas of contemporary science and how science could become much more interesting and, um, informative if people went beyond these dogmas instead of being imprisoned in a kind of straitjacket of dogmatic thinking. Um, so I'm very pro-science, it's just I'm not pro-dogmatic science, I'm pro-free

5. 28:51 – 33:53

   Stress-Testing Accepted Theories

   1. RSRupert Sheldrake28:51

      inquiry in science, and I think there could be a lot more of it.

   2. CWChris Williamson28:55

      The obvious question is, what's the mechanism that's making all of this work? Is that a question that can even be answered?

   3. RSRupert Sheldrake29:04

      Well, I mean, what I'm postulating is that there's an influence of similarity across time in morphic resonance and between members of social groups, between bonded members of the groups, that there's a kind of resonance between the individuals, uh, based on their, you know, past history, and they resonate with each other. Now, I'm sure there'll be changes in brains that go on when this is happening, and you could probably detect them by brain scans, but that wouldn't necessarily tell you exactly how morphic resonance works. But if you, um, ask the question, "Well, how does gravity work?" A well-accepted scientific phenomenon. Um, you know, some scientists say, "Well, gravity works by gravity waves," and they've spent 50 years trying to detect them. You know, people with gravity wave detectors in deep underground mines. So, very expensive, long-term experiments. Some people think they've found them, some people think they haven't yet found them. Uh, so, and if you say, "Well, how does electromagnetism work?" You know, the, the, "How did..." you know, then it works through magnetic and electric fields. Well, how do they work? Well, they work through quantum fields, through virtual particles, uh, which are supposed to... which appear out of the quantum vacuum field and disappear so fast you can't actually detect them. So, uh, even conventional fields in science, when you press it, how do they really work? Um-... it turns out to be surprisingly elusive. The answer is virtual particles that, by definition, are undetectable, or gravitational waves, um, that, uh, may or may not have been detected, but are certainly not obvious. Um, so, uh, and in ... And then people have an M theory and superstring theory, which are the leading theories in theoretical physics today. Um, they have 10 or 11 dimensions instead of the three dimensions of space and the one of time that we're used to. Um, and so they say, "Well, the ... We would, uh, we'll be able to explain gravitational electromagnetic fields in terms of some 10-dimensional super field." Uh, but we haven't been able to find it yet. And the problem with the theory is it has 10 to the power of 500 solutions. It could apply to 10 to the power of 500 universes. So it's just a little bit too prolific in terms of its, um, uh, uh, predictions to, to actually deliver anything very concrete. So, it's not as if hard-nosed science has got hard-nosed, simple, 19th century type mechanical explanations for, for all these things; it doesn't. Um, and the explanations in modern physics are all about explaining the visible in terms of the invisible, and what you can actually experience with your senses in terms of abstract mathematical spaces with inconceivably ... inconceivable extra dimensions. So, anyone who wants plain, down-to-earth simplicity isn't going to get it from modern science in anything. (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson32:11

      It's funny to think, when you put it like that, the, the fact that there's a lack of an obvious mechanism undermining a theory itself, uh, you're actually ... There's, there's a lot of different people that should be lined up to be shot if that was the case. There's a few of the theories that should go out with the bathwater.

   5. RSRupert Sheldrake32:29

      Well, absolutely. I mean, one of the dominant theories in current contemporary cosmology is that this universe is one of trillions, quadrillions of other universes; the multiverse theory. Well, there's not a shred of evidence that any of them actually exist. And yet, you can hold down a job as a professor of physics in a respectable university and you can say that and no one's going to be too upset about it. In fact, it's the orthodoxy. And, you know, physicists can't explain most aspects of the universe, so they've invented, um, unobserved forms of matter and energy called dark matter and dark energy, which were put in precisely to explain, uh, to make the equations balance. They give the completely wrong answers. So, uh, you can add in as much as you like of dark matter or dark energy till you get the right answer, and then you say, "Wow, it's worked." Um, but then if you say, "Well, what is this dark matter and dark energy?" They say, "We d- we don't yet fully understand their nature." In fact, they haven't a clue what they are. Um, so, you know, this is, um ... Modern physics is, is by f- is very far from being what naïve, scientistic people who think science has got all the answers ... People like that, uh, really don't know much about science. And if they do, they might be a little bit more humble about what they claim for it.

6. 33:53 – 52:48

   Genetics or Morphic Resonance?

   1. RSRupert Sheldrake33:53

   2. CWChris Williamson33:53

      It really does seem like, yeah, people are not ... The theories that we have, they're not as substantiated as they look when you stress test them a little bit more. Going back to the human side of this, ancestral trauma is something that I'm seeing being spoken about a lot on the internet at the moment. Do you think this plays any part in it?

   3. RSRupert Sheldrake34:15

      Well, there's very good evidence that there's an epigenetic effect of ancestral taunt- trauma. You know, this evidence came from famines in Sweden and Holland in the late 19th century or in the Second World War. And children born to mothers who went through the famine, um, uh, you know, were different size, they had different proneness to diabetes, et cetera. Um, and epigenetics is, since the beginning of the 21st century, has become a mainstream subject in biology. In the 19th c- ... Only 20th century, the inheritance of acquired characters, inheriting what your parents have learned or adaptations they've made to the environment was completely taboo. You couldn't believe it. It was a heresy, and people were drummed out of labs and things. Since it was rebranded epigenetic inheritance around 2000, um, it's become a major field of inquiry. So, there's now no doubt that there can be an inheritance of what animals or our parents in general have learned. Um, but there's also ways in which there's a kind of family memory of inherited traumas. I don't know if you've done any podcasts on family constellation therapy?

   4. CWChris Williamson35:33

      No. What's that?

   5. RSRupert Sheldrake35:35

      Um, well, it's a, it's a form of, um, therapy for families which ... Well, for people, uh, about their family, um, dealing with negative patterns in past generations of the family. Um, one of the people who does it is my wife, Jill Perse, who is a- uh, now doing Zoom workshops on this. And there are quite a number of people doing it. I know about Jill's work most because, you know, obviously I see this at home all the time. Um, well, how it works is you have a workshop. Um, say you went to a workshop. Uh, if it's an in-person workshop, there might be 20 or 30 people. If you're doing it online, there might be 60 or 70 in a Zoom workshop. And you want to work with your family, I'm assuming, uh, for the purpose of this argument. So you'd pick somebody there to represent your father, your mother, brothers and sisters, if you have any. And then you put them in like a sta- ... They're standing in the room in a kind of tableau. So, if the parents were close to each other, you'd put them close together. If the father left...... when you're young, you'd push him far away, going out the door or something. So there's a kind of tableau of the family dynamics. And the people representing members of the family often feel things and emotions which aren't their own personal emotions, but which are very much to do with that family. Now, that's ... no one understands quite how that happens. But it often turns out that people who have problems of being suicidal, excluding themselves from the family, grossly dysfunctional behavior, um, it often turns out that these pick up on patterns from previous generations when someone was excluded from the family, either by suicide, or because they were sent away, or they were imprisoned, or they did something shameful and were never talked about again, or something like that. And it turns out that, uh, w- what happens then is the person running the workshop would pick people to represent the past generation, the mother, the father, the brothers, sisters, as they say, the parents' generation or the grandparents' generation. And then they pick someone to represent the excluded person, and they bring them back in, and the rest of the family sort of welcome them back in. They include them instead of excluding them. This often has a remarkable healing effect on people in the present. Um, sometimes you see people who are suicidal or who have this dysfunctional behavior of separating themselves from the family, don't really know why they're doing it. And individual psychotherapy doesn't help very much, because it's not really about them as individuals. It's about a family pattern that they're picking up on by a kind of morphic resonance. That's what most people who do this work think, that it works through morphic resonance, because there's no other explanation that seems to fit the facts. So, um, anyway, that's one of the areas in which trauma, uh, is inherited, and that would be more behavioral trauma rather than metabolic trauma like starvation. Um, and systemic family constellation work is, um, you know, it's a very fascinating field of therapy. It's a growing importance and significance at the moment. Um, it's amazing how it's taking off. And it's taking off because, uh, it actually helps a lot of people. In Brazil, um, it's even been included in the legal system, um, when they have family disputes in the courts. Instead of waiting three or four years for an adversarial process in the, in the court, um, they offer them an option to have mediated, uh, family therapy. Uh, the court actually pays for this, and, and, uh, so people ... And they find that works much better than having family disputes played out in- with adversarial lawyers in courtrooms, and has a much more healing effect, and it's cheaper, and it also unclogs the court system a bit. So, um, so these things are taken quite seriously in some parts of the world, including here.

   6. CWChris Williamson39:52

      How does this relate to behavioral genetics and heritability? Does it mesh quite nicely or is there some conflict?

   7. RSRupert Sheldrake40:01

      Well, heritability is pretty low for most things. I mean, the, the human genome project, um, has now enabled the, um, the genomes of tens of thousands of people to be sequenced. And you can then look, say, at schizophrenia. You can see, is there a schizophrenia gene? You look at the genomes of people with schizophrenia, and you see what they've got in common. It turns out there's many genes that play a small part. And if you make complex mathematical models and predict the heritability of schizophrenia on the basis of genes, it's less than 5%. You can't predict, I mean, it's hardly ... it, it, it's almost useless, the predictive power of genomics. Um, and that's true for things like breast cancer. Even things like height, um, ge- geno- genomics don't predict very well. And the-

   8. CWChris Williamson40:57

      What is- Sorry, just to drop in there, what's the difference between genomics being able to predict and heritability with parents, because Robert Plomin's been on the show, and he's highlighted height is correlated 0.9 with your parents. BMI is correlated 0.3. He's done the biggest twin and adoption studies in history, 20,000 pairs of twins.

   9. RSRupert Sheldrake41:18

      Oh, yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson41:18

       He seemed to say that a lot of heritability did exist for both behavior and for, and for physicality.

   11. RSRupert Sheldrake41:23

       Well, Plomin's a very interesting case. He wrote a book called The All Blueprint, or something, I forgot what it's called.

   12. CWChris Williamson41:29

       Blueprint, yeah.

   13. RSRupert Sheldrake41:30

       But read it, anyway. And, and I've been to talks by Plomin. So, um, he's an interesting case, 'cause if you look at heritability by comparing parents and children, there's very high heritability for a lot of things. If you look at the genome, uh, see, he originally, when he was o- doing this work originally, he just assumed, well, if it's heritable, it must be genetic. It's all in the genome, 'cause he took the assumption that heritability equals genetic. Um, and in his earlier papers, he just said, "Well, that proves it's genetic. The fact is heritable." However, in his book, The Blueprint of Life, or whatever it's called, um, uh, he starts with all these bold claims, and then when you get into it, um, you find that he said, "Well, actually, you know, there've been a bit of problem with actually working this out with multiple genome-wide association studies, and although schizophrenia is highly heritable by looking at parents and children, when you look at the genes, there's only 5% or something." Um, so-

   14. CWChris Williamson42:36

       Oh. So what, what we're saying here is that, although there's not much of a dispute between the heritability from parent to child, the mechanism by which that heritability occurs is a little bit more up for debate?

   15. RSRupert Sheldrake42:48

       Oh, absolutely. And in fact, within biology, it's only been in the last, say, 10 years that it's become clear that heritability, which is high for many things, can, um, the, the attempt to explain in terms of genes, most people thought it was an open-and-shut case, of course it's genetic. It turns out-

   16. CWChris Williamson43:06

       What else could it be?

   17. RSRupert Sheldrake43:07

       What else could it be? It turns out it's not. It turns out that, uh, what is called in biology as the missing heritability problem. So height, for example, is about 80% heritable. You can predict ch- children's height taking into account nutritional differences on the basis of the parents' height with about 80% accuracy. But if you do it on the basis of genes, there's about 50 genes involved in heights, and you make the best mathematical models, you can only do it with an accuracy of about 10%. So that means 70% of the heri- inheritance of height is not explained by the genes. And that's what-

   18. CWChris Williamson43:43

       Not yet. We haven't got the technology perhaps to be able to see it with sufficient nuance. I'm sure that these are common arguments.

   19. RSRupert Sheldrake43:48

       Oh, yes. And, and they've got more, done more and more genes and more and more models and more and more things. And they've got it up from about 10% to about 15%. And they hope with yet more expense, billions of dollars more, they might get it up to 20%. Uh, but the fact is that a large chunk, the majority of the heritability is not explained. Their attempt, I mean, Plomin would certainly say, "Well, it's just a matter of yet more detail, and we need... It's more elusive than we thought, and we need..." I would say, um, that's because most inheritance is not based on genes. It's based on morphic resonance. Morphic resonance is, uh, highly heritable. It, it is, you're more similar to your parents than anyone else. You have more morphic resonance from them than anyone else. Um, but a lot of inheritance depends on morphic resonance. Genes, we know what genes do. They code for the sequence for amino acids and proteins, and they enable you to make the right proteins. And some genes switch on and off other genes. That's what they do. I mean, this is molecular biology has, uh, 50 years of molecular biology has revealed very clearly what they do. What they don't do is program the migratory behavior of a cuckoo, the shape of your face, the, you know, the color patterns on the wings of a feather, and, uh, uh, the fea- uh, the color patterns on feathers in peacocks' tails and things. They, they enable them to make the right pigments for the right colors, but the patterns, the shape, the form, the instincts, I think depend on morphic resonance, which organizes forms and patterns. The genes are essential for making the right proteins, but they don't explain most aspects of heredity. I discuss this in my book, The Science Delusion. There's a whole chapter there on heredity and genes.

   20. CWChris Williamson45:36

       It seems like morphic resonance can occur across species.

   21. RSRupert Sheldrake45:41

       Mm-hmm.

   22. CWChris Williamson45:41

       So we talked about dogs with owners, and it can happen f- uh, th- through family, whether it be parents to children or grandparents, ancestral trauma, stuff like that. And it can happen socially. You can choose the friends that are going to ring you. But it can't happen universally. We can't all just be absorbing all of the morphic resonance from penguins that are in zoos and from a lion that was killed s- three hours ago. So, there has to be some sort of selection mechanism for you. And it seems like it's social, it's intent somehow. It's like some sort of connection. Have you thought about how that works?

   23. RSRupert Sheldrake46:19

       Well, the basic thing about morphic resonance is similarity. Um, there's a difference between morphic resonance, which is about memory from the past, and morphic fields, which are what link members of social groups together, dogs and their owners. Um, um, dogs make us members of their packs, as it were. Well, they're social animals, and they adopt us as members of their packs, and we become part of their group. Um, now, when it comes to morphic resonance from the past, it depends on similarity. The field of a whole family is similar to previous generations of that family because there have been members of the previous generation in this field. The parents were brought up in a previous family with its own field. Each of them had their own family field. Or if the parents were separated and remarried, then more than one, making it more complicated. Um, so the reason we don't, uh, uh, co- come under influence from penguins is because we're not very similar to penguins. We are very similar to other people, and therefore the primary morphic resonance working on us is from the collective memory of humans in general. And more specifically, from people more like us, members of our families and cultural and social groups that are most similar to us. Um, so, um, then if you ask the question, well, um, who in the past was most similar to me? Um, then the answer is me. You're more similar to you in the past, and I'm more similar to me in the past. So you'd have more Chris morphic resonance, uh, and I'd have more Rupert morphic resonance from the past, um, because we're more similar to ourselves. And we're similar to other people too, so we have collective memory, but individual memory, I'm suggesting, depends on morphic resonance because of the high specificity. In other words, I'm suggesting that our memories are not normally stored in our brains. In fact, they're not stored in the brain. The brain's more like a TV receiver than a video recorder. Uh, it tunes into, uh, its own past. Um, now that again, again, I have a chapter on this in my book, The Science Delusion, because one of the assumptions of conventional science is that memories are all stored inside the brain. Where else could they be? Um, uh, that's based on the assumption memories must be material things. And that's because contemporary science is heavily rooted in a materialist worldview, which says everything's material.... they, they haven't proved everything's material, just assume it from the start. Therefore, memories must be material. Where are they in the brain? People have spent 100 years trying to find them and pin them down, unsuccessfully. Um, but, uh, but they haven't, for a moment, stopped, most of them have stopped to ask, "Well, are they really in the brain at all? They must be there. Uh, they must just be somewhere else." Um, so these elusive memory traces are still being sought for, but I don't think they're there. Um, just like if I came to your house and looked at your TV set and analyzed the wires and transistors and tried to work out what you'd been watching last night on TV, if you were watching something on TV. Uh, I wouldn't find any traces of the programs in the wires and transistors, 'cause that's not how the TV set works. Um, and of course, brain damage can lead to loss of memory. Um, uh, just as if I came and damaged your TV set, I could make it lose the sound or lose the color or lose the pictures, or make it you're unable to tune into channel four or something like that. But that wouldn't prove that all those programs and all the people you see on the TV screen are actually originating inside the TV set. It would merely prove the TV set's necessary for the reception and processing of the signals. And the same is true of the brain, uh, term. With an, uh, with, if you have brain damage, you can lose memory, but it doesn't prove you've destroyed the memory stores.

   24. CWChris Williamson50:21

       Would it not be simpler, a simpler solution to presume that memories are laid down in the brain somewhere as opposed to them being outside of it?

   25. RSRupert Sheldrake50:31

       Well, of course, it's simpler. I mean, uh, take, so everyone will say, "Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Of course." You know, like hard drives or tape recorders or pages of a book, or, um, we've got many, uh, or things etched in stone. Um, we've got many, um, easy parallels for memories being material. Of course, it's simpler. And that's why in the early, uh, 20th century, people said, "Memories are stored in the brain. Uh, where else could they be?" So simple, everyone just accepted it was true. But the trouble is, is in science, the simplest, easiest answer that a child of ten can understand isn't always the correct answer. And so, uh, people have actually tried to find these traces that this very simple theory predicts, and they've failed. That's what I, the point of what I was saying, that they've failed over and over again. And, and that means that either the memory traces are very, very complicated and stored holographically over large regions of the brain, so you can't pin them down in any particular place. That's one theory today. They say, "We can explain the fact we can't actually find it by saying they must be everywhere and nowhere in particular." Uh, the other theory, which they haven't, on the whole, considered is the one I'm putting forward. They're not stored in the brain at all. Um, and, um, uh, but they're transmitted by invisible transmissions. Now, in the 19th century, uh, early 19th century when, you know, when people were thinking of simple brain theories, the idea of invisible transmissions was inconceivable, but we now live in the middle of them in, in front of me and you at this very moment. The air is full of invisible transmissions of mobile phones and radio and television signals and, and so on. Um, and we don't say, "Oh, TV can't work," because we can't see material things coming into it. Um, uh, so the, the, the ... When it comes to the brain, a lot of people revert to kind of 19th century thinking. Uh, whereas all our modern technology is about invisible influences working through resonancers at a distance. Um, I'm just suggesting that some of these, uh, might help us understand some of the harder mysteries of biology.

   26. CWChris Williamson52:47

       How does this

7. 52:48 – 1:03:51

   How This Relates to Psychedelics

   1. CWChris Williamson52:48

      relate to psychedelics?

   2. RSRupert Sheldrake52:51

      Well, that's a rather different topic. Um, the, um, I think there is a connection between morphic resonance and psychedelics. I think psychedelics obviously are chemicals that influence neurotransmitter binding sites in the brain. Um, the, the, um, tryptamine family of psychedelics, which include dimethyltryptamine, DMT, um, bind to receptors for serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine, which is a transmitter, neurotransmitter. And then the phenethylamine, um, g- group of psychedelics, which include mescaline, um, and ecstasy. Well, it's not really a psychedelic, e- ecstasy, but th- those psychoactive compounds bind to, um, dopamine receptors in the brain. Uh, so we know that these molecules bind to receptors, but, and what they do is disrupt normal brain function. But somehow, they then open people's minds up to much more interconnectivity of different regions of the brain, and often highly visual experiences. Now, the, then, then again, you see there's the question, are these experiences generated inside the brain or is the disruption of normal brain function allowing influences to come into the mind, which are normally blocked out by the everyday work of the brain? Um, is it creating an opening for something to come in from beyond the brain or beyond the individual person's psyche? Um, many people who've taken psychedelics feel that it's opening them to something coming in, not just generated within the brain. Now, um, that takes us into the whole question of the nature of consciousness and the mind, which we're not going to solve in the remaining few minutes. Um, uh, but, um, the morphic resonance aspect of psychedelics is this. If you take a particular psychedelic, like ayahuasca or psychedelic brew, uh-... that's been used in the Amazon for millennia, probably. Um, then your brain is put into a similar state to previous people who've taken ayahuasca, most of them Amazonian shamanic cultures. Um, and by morphic resonance, you would then resonate, have a kind of collective ayahuasca experience memory from those who've taken it in that context. And you might then expect that people who know nothing about the cultural context of ayahuasca, who take it in a modern city, for example, without knowing much about, if anything, about Amazonian culture, uh, they might then have experiences that are based on the mythic structures of those Amazonian tribes, like seeing jaguars and serpents. And actually, they do. This experiment's been done and, um, um, and I don't think it's because ayahuasca activates jaguar cells inside the brain. Um, I think it's because people are tuning into a kind of collective memory of people who've taken that same psychedelic in the past. And so I think there's a component of morphic resonance in psychedelic experience. Doesn't explain it all, of course, but it does explain some of the cultural inheritance that goes with it.

   3. CWChris Williamson56:20

      I had a shaman on the show called Hamilton Souther, who runs a retreat in South America, and he was talking about the resonance that occurs within groups when people go and take, uh, have a ceremony together and take something like ayahuasca, and that they can come out of that and then discuss shared experiences that all of them went through. "And I saw you do this, and you saw me go over there, and then this thing arrived." And I suppose that ties in.

   4. RSRupert Sheldrake56:49

      Well, that would be a kind of telepathic connection. They're all in a similar state. They're, they're in a group. They're bonded in a group. They've probably chanted together, um, which has a strongly bonding effect. Um, and so there'd be a, a telepathic component as well to their visions. Uh, we've already discussed telepathy based on being part of a group. Um, and, you know, any ceremony run by a shaman would, would typically involve some group-building process, and chanting is the most common and, and, and universal. So that would all fit perfectly well with this approach.

   5. CWChris Williamson57:27

      What was taking DMT with Terence McKenna like?

   6. RSRupert Sheldrake57:33

      Well, um, the actual experience of taking DMT, uh, d- d- it involved Terence giving it to me, but then Terence disappeared from the field of view, and, and I was in another realm altogether. Um, in my exper- What happened to me was that it was like an out of the body or a near-death experience. I, I, I went, felt myself going out of my body. I went through the center of a, a flower, a chrysanthemum flower, and then I found myself in a r- realm of in- incredible beauty, of shimmering colors and changing forms. And then, after a while, k- kind of blissful, uh, very bright-colored and, and, uh, wonderfully happy realm, uh, sublimely beautiful. Then I found myself coming back into my body and, and stuff, and probably only 10 minutes later. And then when I described what had happened to Terence, Terence said, "You've been to the flower heaven." And since I'm very interested in flowers and love flowers, I mean, I love the idea of having, going to the flower heaven. Um, so, uh, anyway, that was, um, Terence was, uh, when he took DMT, he often described machine elves or little people with chattering voices. And fortunately or unfortunately, I d- I've never encountered machine elves.

   7. CWChris Williamson59:00

      I have a bunch of buddies, all of whom talk about the machine elves, yes.

   8. RSRupert Sheldrake59:04

      Yes. Well, I'm quite sure many people do. And in fact, Rick Strassman, who, uh, w- wrote a book on DMT called DMT: The Spirit Molecule, um, w- where he g- had a legal research program on DMT, uh, found that quite a number of people did indeed encounter these figures, but not everyone. It's not a universal aspect of the experience.

   9. CWChris Williamson59:26

      Everyone's trying to get to flower heaven.

   10. RSRupert Sheldrake59:29

       Uh, well, not everyone's as keen on flowers as I am, and some of them may prefer some other k-

   11. CWChris Williamson59:34

       Machine elf heaven.

   12. RSRupert Sheldrake59:35

       -heaven, so yes, or possibly, I, I don't know. Um, there's, I mean, there's many ways of, uh, uh, experiencing this, but, uh, most of them have in common the, this idea of kind of out of the body and going into another realm. Um, and I think they're similar to near-death experiences myself, and a lot of people have near-death experiences, um, which change their lives. And of course, those who are involved don't involve any drugs at all. Probably more dangerous than DMT because you have to have a near fatal accident or heart attack to have one. Um, in my book, Science and Spiritual Practices, I actually talk about, um, near-death experiences in the context of rites of passage or initiation, um, um. I myself think that, um, John the Baptist was, um, doing this in, in the New Testament. John the Baptist was, people were flocking from all over the Holy Land to the River Jordan, where John the Baptist was, had his simple procedure. He'd hold them under. And I think he held them under just long enough to induce a near-death experience by drowning, and then he brought them up, and their lives were changed, and, uh, uh, all in a matter of minutes. No drugs involved. I mean, he might have lost a few. I, uh, there probably was an element of danger, but, um...I think that in the 16th century when there was a religious ferment in England and, um, baptism was started again by Anabaptists and Baptists, you know, people who founded Baptist churches, their big thing was reinstating baptism by total immersion. And what happened to those ... with them, what they went round saying after they'd had the ceremony was their lives had changed, they'd died and they'd been born again, and they'd seen the light. Well, these are literal descriptions of near death experiences. And so the only criticism of this hypothesis is to say, well, what they were doing was just symbolic. But why do something that's just symbolic if you can have the real thing? It only takes a minute longer. Um, and-

   13. CWChris Williamson1:01:48

       John, John the Drowner doesn't have the same ring as John the Baptist though.

   14. RSRupert Sheldrake1:01:52

       No, John the Baptist ... Well, if one thinks of baptism, baptism as involving this, um, then of course it, it, it's, um, it all makes total sense.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:02:02

       Are you coming to church on Sunday? We're going to forcibly drown little Timmy because it's his first birthday and this is what we're all gonna go and watch, we're all gonna cheer him on as he gets forcibly drowned by the, by the priest.

   16. RSRupert Sheldrake1:02:13

       Well, the point about Baptists is that they, they didn't have in- they rejected infant baptism and they said you've got to do it as a conscious choice, you know, when you're a 14 or 15 teenager or an adult. And, um, they, and they do actually watch. I mean, uh, one of the very few Southern Baptists I actually know is Jeri Hall, Mick Jagger's ex, um, and, uh, she's from Texas. And I said to Jeri, you know, "What was your baptism like?" She said, "Well," she said, "In my church," she said, "it was like a giant aquarium so everyone could watch." And, and, and I said, "Well, when you were held under, um, you know, w- was it, uh ... What was that like?" She said, "It was a lot longer than was comfortable," she said. Um, uh, you know, and in special dress and everyone watching. So, um, this is, um, I think probably today, you know, in the era of litigation and health and safety, um, they may not actually go for the, the full thing. But I'm pretty sure that in the past they were doing 'cause how else can one explain the way that Baptists would ... Their whole thing was dying and being born again. And, and people who've had near death experiences who've died and been born again, uh, most of them say it's totally changed their lives. They've lost the fear of death, they've become much more spiritual people, and so on. Um, and so, uh, all this makes, uh, sense to me. Anyway, we seem to be, um, running out of time, uh, Chris. Um-

   17. CWChris Williamson1:03:47

       All good. Rupert Sheldrake, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to check out

8. 1:03:51 – 1:05:25

   Where to Find Rupert

   1. CWChris Williamson1:03:51

      more of your stuff, your website, and you've just released two new books as well recently?

   2. RSRupert Sheldrake1:03:56

      Oh, yes. Well, might as well. Well, let me talk about ... The one, the three I've talked about today are the main ones, so The Science Delusion, which is the one where I look at the 10 dogmas of science, including about inheritance and, uh, and, uh, psychic phenomena and the laws of nature. Science and Spiritual Practices is about seven different spiritual practices, including meditation, singing and chanting, and pilgrimage, uh, which have measurable beneficial effects. And the most recent one, Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work, where I deal with seven more spiritual practices, including spiritual effects of sports, learning from animals, um, spiritual openings through psychedelics, um, and fasting. Um, so all of these cover a wide ... Well, they cover seven different practices in each book. And if anyone's interested in following up, I have a YouTube channel as well, as well as my website and many podcasts and YouTubes, uh, which are all available free.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:05:03

      Amazing. Thanks, Rupert.

   4. RSRupert Sheldrake1:05:05

      Good to talk, Chris.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:05:07

      Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months. And don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy indeed. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:05:25