The Science of Consciousness & the Soul with Rupert Sheldrake

Alex Ferrari 0:00
Now, what is the message that you would like to give out to humanity for our for the sake of our own future? What would you like to say?

Rupert Sheldrake 0:08
We are connected, but we're not connected all the time in the same way we're connected when we come into resonance through similarity, there's a direct resonance across time, like a TV program when it's broadcast from a TV transmitter and picked up by a TV set or TV aerial, and then a TV set is invisible and it's crossing space. It's not stored somewhere in space. It's just a resonance across space. You need something like an inherent memory in nature if you're going to explain any form of life after death. I think a spiritual revival is actually happening and is very welcome. I think more people will open up to the spiritual dimension that has been denied by that system.

Alex Ferrari 1:12
Now, before we jump into this episode, if this conversation resonates with you, please like subscribe and share this with whoever you feel that needs to hear it. Your support helps us keep bringing this information out into the world and helps us awaken this planet. Thank you. I like to welcome to the show Rupert Sheldrake, how you doing Rupert?

Rupert Sheldrake 1:35
Pretty well thanks, Alex.

Alex Ferrari 1:37
Thank you so much for being here, my friend. I am fascinated by your work, it is endless rabbit holes left and right that you can go down with your work. So I'm just going to start you. I'm going to start off with my first question in regarding the your theory of morphic resonance, and what it suggests about the nature, that nature has its own memory, that habits not fixed laws shapes of the universe. Can you explain this, this theory that you have?

Rupert Sheldrake 2:06
It's basically, as you say, the idea that there's a kind of memory inherent in nature. The so called laws of nature are more like habits. They've been evolving along with the universe and along with life, that memory is basically built into everything, into self organizing systems. I mean, it's not everything, but anything that's self organizing, which includes atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, ecosystems, planets, galaxies, solar systems, anything that's self organizing, I think, has a kind of inherent memory, a collective memory, through morphic resonance, each kind of thing has a collective memory. So each species has a collective memory, and each individual draws upon it and contributes to it. So that's the basic idea, and its most radical implication is probably that our own memories work by morphic resonance, the principle that similar things influence subsequent similar things. You and I are most similar to ourselves in the past, and I think that that similarity means that we resonate with ourselves in the past most specifically and basically, then it says that our memories are not stored inside our brains, which is the usual assumption, but rather we tune into them. Our brains are more like TV receivers than like video recorders,

Alex Ferrari 3:38
The versions of ourselves that in the past, quote, unquote, that we're out, that we're accessing, would it be kind of like in the more metaphysical term, the Akashic records, or the Akashic field, or a field that we're able to kind of tap into? And that's kind of the is it like the cloud, all of our memories in the cloud, and we're just able to kind of pull from them?

Rupert Sheldrake 4:00
Well, that's a kind of metaphor. Yes, and the Akashic records are kind of metaphor. I think the problem with them as metaphors is the Akashic Record gives the impression of being somewhere up in the sky, some kind of series of filing cabinets or hard drives or something, and and so does the idea of the cloud, because the cloud depends on data processing centers using huge amounts of energy with lots of hard drives and flash storage systems or whatever they have. But what I'm suggesting with morphic resonance is not that it's stored out there somewhere and we then retrieve it, but rather there's a direct resonance across time, like a TV program when it's broadcast from a TV transmitter and picked up by a TV set or TV aerial, and then a TV set is invisible and it's crossing space. It's not stored somewhere in space, it's just a resonance across space. And morphic resonance is a kind of resonance across time. And so what I'm suggesting the whole of the past is potentially present everywhere, and you tune into it, but it's not when you're not tuning into it, sort of stored out somewhere. The idea of memory, storage, you see, is spatial. A store is something in space. An Akashic Record is something in Akasha, which is space. But memory is, by its very nature, a relation in time, not space. And although we store things in written, writing, I suppose the first storage of memories was through clay tablets and carving things on stone and so on, or writing on papyrus or something. So we have various forms of storing information now, flash drives and hard drives and so on, but the way our actual memory works. You know, when I meet someone that I recognize, that I met some years ago, there's nothing about that feeling of recognition that depends in my experience on memory stores inside the brain, retrieval systems, etc. I just recognize them. And I think it's a kind of direct resonance,

Alex Ferrari 6:19
Interesting. And you were mentioning in the in the morphic residence theory, that all all things are kind of connected in one way, shape or form, so by species. So like all the dogs in the world kind of feed into this collective of all dog experience and so on. Well, then that would also obviously implicate human consciousness, human ability. So are you saying that everything that well, basically, it's a very deep, spiritual idea that we're all connected. We are all one, and this is just an illusion that you and I are separate from each other. Does that make Does that make sense?

Rupert Sheldrake 6:55
Well, we are connected, but we're not connected all the time in the same way we're connected when we come into resonance through similarity, it's similarity that connects us. And so if you're doing a particular crossword puzzle, for example, and I'm doing the same puzzle, if you've done it first, I might pick up the answers quicker because you've already solved the problem. But if you're doing a different crossword puzzle, there wouldn't be that same kind of resonance. And if you're looking at a particular kind of picture, and I look at the same picture, there might be a kind of resonance, but that wouldn't be the case with a different picture. So it's specific. Resonance depends on things being similar, the situation being similar. We're all similar, to some extent, being human. But in a say, in a way, this is rather like the psychologist Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, where we all tap into a collective memory, a collective human memory, but we tap in more specifically to the memory of people who are more like us, predominantly members of our own family in the present and the past. They're the people who are most similar to us, and with identical twins, then you know, they're very similar, and so I think they'd have a great deal of morphic resonance, which is one reason their lives are so similar.

Alex Ferrari 8:22
So what you're talking about almost sounds like that the monkey, that monkey, it's an experiment or a phenomenon where there was three different islands with the monkeys that that were on these islands, and then one of them figured out how to do something on one island, and the other two islands full of monkeys did the same thing, but there was no way they ever connected or had a phone call with each other, essentially. Is that kind of what you're talking about?

Rupert Sheldrake 8:48
Yes. I mean, that's sometimes called the 100th Monkey, monkey effect.

Alex Ferrari 8:52
That's it. Yes.

Rupert Sheldrake 8:53
I don't myself use that example, because it's not exactly clear what really happened with these monkeys off Japanese islands. And and when the theory was first popularized by Lyle Watson, who was a popular British science writer, he when he told the story, said, Let us imagine, for the purpose of argument, that when one more monkey, did it say the 100th monkey, then it spread to all the others, so he made it clear he was sort of embroidering on the story. I don't use that example myself, but it's that kind of thing. I prefer the 1,000th rat to the 100th monkey because there have been experiments with rats learning a new trick escaping from a water maze. And what the data show is not that nothing happened until you got up to a certain number and then they all did it, but rather, the more that did it, the bigger the effect elsewhere. So it's not all or none. It's a kind of gradual effect. It depends on the numbers,

Alex Ferrari 9:56
On a kind of scientific standpoint, or at least on a. Materialistic standpoint is this, or even maybe a metaphysical standpoint, is this mean that, like with 1000 rats that you were talking about, if you know rat one, rat two, rat three, does it then that that signals, or that sends some sort of information to the collective. And I'm trying to wrap my head around it, it's kind of like, it's like we're sending messages back in an invisible field that other rats are not picking up because some other words, and the more of the rats that are in this group are doing it, the stronger the signal to more rats does that is that what you're going to say?

Rupert Sheldrake 10:34
Well, that's it, but they're not necessarily sending it to a collective right? A rat that's doing it now, when it's confronted with this particular puzzle or problem, comes into resonance with all the previous rats that solved it. So it will resonate with all of them at the same time, and there'll be a kind of combined influence of all these different rats. So it's, it's, the more there are, the stronger the influence will be.

Alex Ferrari 10:59
So, but so then, so, then what I'm trying to wrap my head around is, what is the when you say resonance, is that frequency? Is that vibration? Is that what is that thing that they're tapping into? Is my question,

Rupert Sheldrake 11:13
Everything in nature is vibratory, of course. I mean, in the 19th century, people thought atoms were little bits of stuff, like solid billiard balls. But we now know that they're not we know that they're vibratory. Patterns of electrons resonant, standing waves of electrons around a nucleus, which itself is vibratory. You know, medical techniques like nuclear magnetic resonance tell you this, that the nucleus has frequencies vibrations. Molecules are vibratory. Crystals have lattice vibrations. Our own cells, all the proteins have vibratory rhythms. The cell as a whole has rhythms. Our whole body has rhythms, daily rhythms of sleeping and waking women have monthly rhythms, then we have the heartbeat, the brain waves of various frequencies, breathing rates, and everything in nature is essentially rhythmic or vibratory or oscillatory. So what I'm suggesting is that the entire vibratory pattern is what resonates. It's not like you, Alex, have been reduced to a single frequency, 445, hertz or something. You've got 1000s of different frequencies all arranged in spatial patterns. And that's what's doing the vibrating, not some kind of reduction to to a single frequency. So it's a complex pattern of vibration that's involved, and morphic resonance depends on the similarity of that pattern, vibrating, resonating across time, picking up these memory influences from the past. That's the hypothesis. So, you know, this is a scientific hypothesis. It can be tested. You know, it may not be the best way of thinking about it, but anyway, that's how it stands at the moment.

Alex Ferrari 13:06
As you're explaining this, the thing that pops into my mind is from my studies in the spiritual space, especially the Eastern religions like Hinduism, yogic philosophies and so on. There are stories of yogis who are able to vibrate themselves at such a high frequency that people can feel their resonance just by being in the room. There's magical stories of biolocation or levitation or things like that, which can seem more fantastical, but it's still part of their history, 1000s and 1000s of years old, is that, what's your take on, on those ideas, on these kind of more spiritual ideas, but it's connected to what you're talking about in many ways.

Rupert Sheldrake 13:52
Yeah, you're right. It is connected. I mean, the the Hindu philosophy of nature and the Buddhist philosophy of nature takes memory in nature for granted. You know, the ideas I'm putting forward of memory in nature are unfamiliar in the Western world, but in the Eastern world, they've been sort of standard way of looking at things for 1000s of years. I mean, so the idea of an inherent memory is built into their idea of karma, for example, and you need something like an inherent memory in nature if you're going to explain any form of life after death, for example, the standard mechanistic materialist theory of memory, which is the dominant Orthodoxy in the West, taught in all universities, the dominant orthodoxy 99.9% of neuroscientists and brain scanning departments and that kind of thing. That model says all memories are stored inside the brain. As physical traces, modified nerve endings, changes in proteins, maybe changes in DNA or RNA, those are all the standard assumptions that our science is based on. Now, people have spent 100 years trying to find these traces in the brain without success so far, and I think the reason they haven't succeeded is because they're not there. But you see what that standard Western theory means. It's a materialist theory. It says that everything's made of matter, even memories. What that means is that if your memories are stored inside your brain, then when you die, your brain decays, and all your memories will be wiped out, and therefore there is no possibility of any kind of survival, of bodily death, in heaven, hell, Purgatory, rebirth, reincarnation, Last Judgment, any of these theories of survival are automatically refuted by the materialist theory of memory, Which is why most materialists are atheists and think that all religions are based on pure fantasy thinking, because they're so sure they're right, they're sure they're right, not because the evidence is overwhelming. It's very underwhelming. The evidence for memory storage in the brain is barely any at all, but it's because it's an assumption of their worldview. Now, if you have the idea that memories are not stored inside the brain, that the brain tunes into them when the brain decays, it doesn't mean the memories are all eliminated. They're still potentially there they go on contributing to the collective memory, to the ancestral fields of each family, and also in the case of Hindu and Buddhist theories of reincarnation or rebirth, those memories could then carry over and shape a subsequent life of somebody else. So they you see, you can't have reincarnation or rebirth, if memories are embedded in brains because they're all wiped out at death. Nor can you have heaven, hell, Purgatory or last judgment, because if you appeared before your maker at the Last Judgment for that final moment, and you've forgotten who you were and what you'd done, it wouldn't be a very meaningful experience. So even you know, all theories, all religious theories of survival, presuppose the survival of memory in some form or another. I don't know how it works, exactly how it survives. I wish I did, but all I'm saying is that the theory of morphic resonance that memory is tuned into, rather than stored in the brain, leaves open the question of survival, whereas the standard materialist theory shuts the door, slams the door in the face of any theory of survival.

Alex Ferrari 17:54
Rupert, I have to ask you, you have been a troublemaker in the world for a long time with these wonderful theories that go against the Orthodox views of life. How do you personally, for people out there listening who might you know might want to be a little bit of a trouble, and I say troublemaker with all the love in the world, because I also am a troublemaker as well. How do you How did you continue to move forward against the grain all your career like this? Because there's so many people in the scientific community, and they're more and more of them waking up every day that are going, this doesn't make sense. This, this. Quantum physicists are starting to discover things that are just like, No, no, no, no. That what you guys are saying is wrong. Darwin wasn't all the way, right, you know, and all these kind of ideas, how would you what advice would you give them, and how did you keep going against the grain for all these years?

Rupert Sheldrake 18:51
Well, first of all, I didn't start off as a troublemaker. I started off being very successful in the regular scientific world. You know, I was a scholar at Clare college Cambridge. I studied at Harvard, where I did history and philosophy of science. I had Cambridge PhD. I was an academic at Cambridge University, now a fellow of Clare college. I was a research fellow of the Royal Society, the most prestigious scientific institution in Britain is bit like the National Academy of Sciences. You know, I won prizes and that kind of thing. So I didn't start off like trying to cause trouble. I was at Cambridge, I was doing research on plant form, how plant form develops, and I came to the conclusion that that genes couldn't explain the inheritance of form, because genes only code for proteins, and that form must depend on fields, morphogenetic fields, which a concept I didn't invent. It was invented in the 1920s but I. Trying to think how the fields are inherited. And I then realized the only way that this could work, that I could see, would be through some kind of memory, moving directly across time, something that simply wasn't in the standard scientific repertoire in the West. And so when I came up with this idea, which was a very, very long time ago, in 1973 I of course, knew this was heretical, and when I discussed it with colleagues in Cambridge, among my scientific colleagues, it just they thought I was joking, or they couldn't see the point, or people just said was completely unnecessary, because we're going to figure everything out in terms of molecular biology within 10 or 20 years. And I said, Well, I don't think you are, and I think we need something else. Anyway. It was clear it was going to be controversial, so I didn't publish it because I wanted to be sure, more sure anyway. So I took a job in India. I worked in an International Agricultural Institute on crop improvement, trying to do something useful. I think we did do something useful. And I was in India for seven years altogether. And when I went to India and started telling people, Indian colleagues and people about morphic resonance, I got the exact opposite of the shock horror response familiar with from Cambridge. Most Indians said, oh, there is nothing new in this idea. Ancient Rishis have said this 1000s of years ago. And what was frustrating there was that I couldn't get them to do anything about it. I said, Well, look, you're a scientist. If the whole of science as we know it is missing something major, why not change what you're doing research on? And, you know, actually prove the ancient rishis right? But none of them were willing to do that because they wanted to keep their jobs and their careers and so on. So I spent five years thinking about this in India where the atmosphere was more favorable, because hardly anyone I met there thought this was crazy. They just thought it was sort of they'd heard it all before. They had this kind of blase attitude to it. Anyway, it was more. It was less frustrating than the Cambridge attitude. But I read and I thought and I read more, and I discussed it more, until I felt fairly sure that not that the theory is right, but that there wasn't anything actually wrong with it, that it was a possibility. There was no evidence that went against it, that it was a real possibility. So I wrote my book, first book, which is called a new science of life on morphic resonance, which was published in 1981 in 82 in the United States. And I knew it would be controversial. And indeed it was, I mean, I hadn't deliberately set out to provoke people, but the editor of nature journal really took against this, and he wrote a famous editorial on the front page of nature, the leading International Journal of Science, called a book for burning and the so it was savagely attacked by quite a lot of people. But the point is, I wasn't too upset, because I was expecting that it would cause I didn't expect how furious and emotional the opposition would be. I expected a more gentlemanly debate. I hadn't expected kind of a blistering attack with ad hominem attacks and invectives the editor of nature comparing my book unfavorably to Mein Kampf by Hitler. I hadn't expected that kind of thing. But the thing is, though some people were terribly against it, a lot of people weren't. A lot of people were curious and interested, and some people actually like the idea, particularly Jungian psychotherapist, because it fits very well with the work of Jung and then when I was in the US, and I gave some seminars in universities, but then people in other places, like the Esalen Institute in California, got very interested In it, and I found then I met people who I had a great time discussing it with, like Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, and they became very close friends. And we had conversations every year, trying out this and other ideas. So it wasn't as if life totally collapsed. I mean, some doors closed, other doors opened, and doing research in these more unconventional areas of science turned out to be fun. It was so I can't say that I suffered horribly and and I don't really take part. Personally these attacks I've had because these are people who believe they know the truth. I mean most materialists, especially militant materialists, are convinced they understand the way nature is on the basis of materialist assumptions. And they think that is science and that they know the truth. Any attack on this is an attack on science and reason, and they get terribly emotional about that, but they're not evil people. They're people who believe that they're fighting for the truth. I just think they've got an unfortunately narrow view of what science is and what science could be.

Alex Ferrari 25:38
Let me ask you, with all the research you've done, and specifically the time you spent in India, which I'm sure was pretty eye opening, because you were exposed to probably a lot of philosophies and ideas and Hinduism and yogic ideas as well. What is your take, or what is your understanding of the soul, or the concept of the soul, and is this a carrier of the memories that you're talking about, because it's from my understanding, from the the the mystics that I've spoken to, the soul is not only within you. It actually expands outside of you a bit more than your own, their own human shape, and is actually outside of you a little bit more, sometimes even above you, according to the mystics. So what is your take on the soul?

Rupert Sheldrake 26:24
It's important to back up a bit and look at the history of the concept, because what most people today think of the soul is, is a kind of truncated view that's been short there's been shaped by 400 years of scientific materialism or the narrow mechanistic worldview, and so you know if, if I could have three minutes or so to explain that, I get back to your question, please. In Greek thought, the most important philosopher of life was Aristotle, who was a student of Plato and Plato and Aristotle said that all living things have souls. That's what makes them alive. They're animate. They have a soul. And the Greek word for soul is, of course, psyche. So by living things. He didn't just mean animals and plants. He meant the earth. The earth was a living thing. The planets were alive. For Aristotle and the whole universe, you know, Plato thought of the whole universe as having a soul, the world soul, the animal Mundi. So a soul was not something confined to living organisms that excrete and reproduce and that sort of thing it was, it was the feature of life, but life was much bigger than biology, from their point of view. So when Aristotle came to biology, he said, there's three levels of soul in biology. There's the vegetative soul which shapes the body. And this plants have vegetative souls. The reason that a palm tree grows the way it does, or an oak tree grows the way it does, is because it has a palm soul, or an oak soul. And when an acorn germinates and starts growing, it's attracted towards the mature form of the oak tree by the soul. The soul works by attraction. It's it has what he called entelechy, the end within itself. It, it pulls the developing organism towards its goal, which is the mature, reproducing form of the oak tree. So animals have vegetative souls true too, which shape their embryology and shape their growth and maintain the body after injury, help underlie regeneration. New salamander can regenerate a limb. If you cut a limb off, we can regenerate skin and liver and the gut lining and so on. Our blood cells are regenerated all the time. So this regenerative, formative and regenerative aspect of the body is the vegetative soul. Then in addition to that, animals have an animal soul which underlies their animal nature, their instincts, their sensations, their movements, their behavior, and that's why we call them animals. The word anima means soul in Latin. So all animals have souls, on that view, and then human beings have in addition to the vegetative soul that shapes our body and underlies its health and recovery from disease, and our animal soul that gives us our animal instincts and animal nature and animal senses, which we share with many other animals, particularly mammals, we have what he called the intellectual soul, which is to do with thought, language, reason, meaning things that we have that animals don't have. And. Um. So all this was incorporated into Christian theology in the Middle Ages. And St Thomas Aquinas family in the 13th century, famously based his whole system, which became the main orthodoxy of the universities and the church in Western Europe. He based his whole theory on Aristotle, and he produced a kind of Christian version of this philosophy. So plants had souls, animals had souls, and humans had the intellectual soul based on the animal soul. And the whole universe was alive. For the medieval Christians, the stars were alive. The planets were alive. The earth was alive, Mother Earth and animal. It was a living world. It was kind of Christian animism, and that's the world that gave rise to the great Gothic cathedrals like charter and Lincoln, and they were a product of a world view that saw all of nature as existing within God and God within nature in which animals and plants were all animate and had souls, and that shaped the entire worldview up until the 17th century, the scientific revolution, and the scientific revolution was particularly a vision that came to Galileo in 1619, he had a dream, a vision, in which he saw the whole universe as a machine. The universe was like a kind of Clockwork machine. Actually, in his version, it was not with cogs, but with vortices, it was a more interesting view. And and all animals and plants were nothing but machines. But human beings had a special soul that was to do with reason. So basically, he drained the soul out of the whole of nature. Planets and stars all became just dead mechanical matter, and so did human bodies and all animals and plants, and all that was left was human reason, which was the only thing that was not material in nature and that shared a spiritual nature with God and the angels, but that created the famous Cartesian Dualism, the divide between the realm of spirit and the realm of matter. And the realm of spirit was not material, not in space and time. The world of matter was unconscious and material and in space and time. Then, in the 17th century, in the 19th century, increasing numbers of atheists and materialist people who became atheist because they wanted to attack the church because it was allied with reactionary governments in France and Russia and so on. Well, like in the French Revolution, the French revolutionaries were deeply anti Christian during the reign of terror. Not only did they turn the Cathedral of Notre Dame into a temple of reason, but they guillotined priests, monks and bishops on an industrial scale, and tried to stamp out Christianity in favor of science and reason and progress. And by the 19th century, this became part of the standard materialist intellectual system. The materialists said, Well, why do we need this invisible spirit, that God? You can't see God, angels. You can't see them. The human spirit is nothing but a fantasy of the imagination. You can't measure it, weigh it. All there is, is matter. There's no such thing as spirit. Everything's matter, and the soul is just the way the brain works. It's just a subjective experience of the brain, and the brain is nothing but a physical organ inside a mechanistic body. So that's what happened. Then you see is that religious people said, Oh well, no, it's not just that. There is this other thing. Nature is just a machine. Nature is just mechanical, just like science says, But God exists beyond nature, supernatural. Angels exist beyond nature, and the human spirit is basically supernatural as well, but and can't be measured and has nothing to do with science.

Rupert Sheldrake 34:14
And so the thing is that the atheists then said, Well, you know, all of this is just make believe and dogma and stuff nothing to do with what we can see and measure and gives real progress in the world. And they became more and more confident, and plenty of them around today. I mean, this is the default position of the academic world and the business and the secular world that we live in. And so the realm of religion was driven to a kind of margin of supernatural realm where the soul became, at best, an idea inside human brains, and therefore inside human in the physical activity of the brain. So this just tells us where we are today. So if. We now want to think about the soul. You know what it is to come back to your question, I would say that the what I call the morphogenetic field, the form shaping field that underlies the body of plants, animals, microbes, crystals. It's not just living things. Crystals have morphogenetic fields that shape the growing crystal. Molecules have molecular fields that shape the three dimensional structure of a protein. For example, morphogenetic fields are form shaping fields. Morphogenesis means the coming into being of form, Morphe, form, Genesis, coming into being, so that more or less corresponds to what Aristotle called the vegetative soul, and that these fields are not just inside the body. They're in and around it, like a magnetic field is not just inside a magnet. It's in and around the magnet. And so when some people say they can see auras, and it's the soul, and so I can't see auras, so I don't have any personal experience, but I think of the morphogenetic field as being within and around the body, and that's what shapes the body and maintains its health, and that's one way of thinking of the soul, but it's only the most basic way which we share with plants and other animals. Then there's the animal soul, which Aristotle talked about, which I think has to do with the fields of behavior and learning, that animals have fields which organize the movements and the activity of their brains and their muscles that underlie their instincts. And you know, when a kitten learns just or instinctively starts to play and and to chase things and to swipe things with its paws, and when a spider knows how to spin its web without having to go to spine as a spider school or get a spider degree or anything, it just does it even doesn't need to see other spiders. These instincts, which are so deeply built into animals, I think, are part of their the morphic field of their behavior, the fields of behavior that they inherit by morphic resonance from their ancestors. And we also have instinctive fields of behavior. We inherit babies naturally learn to crawl and to walk, and have an instinct to learn language, to pick it up. And then we have our conscious minds, most of that is unconscious, the habits of growth, the habits of our bodies, heartbeat, breathing, all the eye, blink, reflex, all these things are unconscious. Most morphic fields are unconscious. Their habits and habits are unconscious. But our conscious minds are also shaped by habitual fields, mental fields. We inherit a whole culture with metaphors, language, words. Now you and I didn't make up the English language. We inherited it with all the concepts and metaphors that are built into it. We inherit a whole culture. Every culture inherits a culture, and human cultures are different. They obviously have some overlap, but different languages, different cultures, those I think, are inherited by morphic resonance, and they shape our conscious minds. So then, when we come to what is the soul, I would say it's all these things, but it takes on a particular relevance in a religious context, when we consider to what degree is the soul separable from the body? In other words, is it possible that the soul could survive the death of the body, which is a primary religious question, and it's one that atheists and materialists just simply deny. Like that, they say, of course, it's impossible. It's ridiculous. What a silly idea. They don't even need to discuss it. It's just a priority. They deny it, because everything's material, and whatever survives the body is not material, because you don't see anything material leaving the body that's shaped like a soul or anything. So I think that we actually experience an aspect of our soul every night in our dreams. Because when you and I dream, we have a body in our dreams, the dream body when I when I'm dreaming, my physical body is lying asleep in bed, but my dream body is going around, talking to people, meeting people, running, walking, sometimes even flying, doing all sorts of things. And that body in my dreams, I'm not spending my whole time looking down to see if I've got a body, but it's implicit. Because I have a center of consciousness, I'm moving around. Around in my dreams and seeing things from a point of view in that dream world. Now, what is that dream body? Well, you know, materialism doesn't have much to say on the subject. It just says, well, it must be an illusion produced inside the brain. But that doesn't really tell us why it should produce this kind of illusion, why the illusion should take the form it does, why it should be body like, why we should have the dreams we do. None of that's explained anyway, the so the dream body we have every night in our dreams, we don't remember all our dreams. We forget most of them, but we know, remember enough to know that we have a dream body. And I know I've had a dream body ever since I was a child, because when I was a child, I had wonderful flying dreams. Very rarely have them now, but I found dreams quite thrilling when I could fly. And sometimes they're very scary. We have nightmares and so on. So when people say, Well, could there be something that lives on after we die? I think the best bet my for me, the easiest way of conceiving of this is to think that when we die, we can go on dreaming, but we can't any longer wake up because we haven't got a physical body to wake up in. It's dead. So we're trapped in a dream world when we're dead. And the kind of dream world we're trapped in depends on what kind of person we are and what we believe and what we expect and what our theories are and what our memories are. You know, if you're an atheist and you believe, everything goes blank when you die, perhaps it will if you're you know, if you believe in, if you're a Tibetan Buddhist, and you think you're going to a Bardo, a kind of intermediate realm Dream like, they, the Tibetan Buddhists, think of it as dream like. That's why Tibetan monks practice what they call Dream Yoga, which is lucid dreaming, learning to practice being aware during your dreams, because they think this will help them in the afterlife, in the Bardo, they see it as a you're better off with a lucid dream where you know what you're doing than with a confused dream where you're just assaulted by all sorts of images and events and things that you're just tossed by the turmoil of this dream world out of control they practice. And then in the Tibetan view and in the Hindu view, after a certain time in an intermediate dream like state, then your most people would be reincarnated. The whole aim of Hindu and Buddhist spirituality is not to be reincarnated. It's to get off the whole wheel of reincarnation. Because, you know, life is a veil of suffering, according to the Buddha so most western enthusiasts for reincarnation think is a good thing. But, you know, I've lived in India among people who take it for granted. They think is a bad thing. They don't, they're not delighted by the idea of reincarnation. You know, they rather put off by it. I mean, the whole point of Hindu spiritual practice is moksha, is liberation from the wheels of reincarnation. And so the aim of most Hindu spirituality is a kind of vertical takeoff where you can just leave this endless cycles of life behind. So I think that the and in Christian view would one Christian view would be that we have a dream like afterlife in Purgatory, and that this is like a continued, ongoing development. Some Christian views are that you go to sleep when you die, and you stay asleep till you're woken up by the last trump, and then you have the Last Judgment with no continued development. You know, there's a variety of theories.

Alex Ferrari 43:56
What do you because we're talking about the afterlife and the other side in Purgatory and these things, I've had the pleasure of probably speaking to at least 150 different near death experiencers from various backgrounds, from a Harvard neuroscientist all the way to a drug addict and everything in between. But what they see on the other side is shaped a lot of times. It's shaped by what they believe, meaning that, if I've had only a few that had hellish experiences, most of them are overwhelmingly positive, very loving. I'm sure you've heard all the things that happen on the other side, but meant but the ones that have hellish experiences is because David, when they came back, they said, I went through it because I was raised Catholic and I believed that I didn't do good, and I had to go through I had to go to hell. But in that hellish experience, the second they ask for help, an angel or Jesus or some or a light comes in and rescues them. What is your take on the whole near death experience phenomenon, which has now been. Documented 10s, if not hundreds of 1000s of times, and has been studied intensely, and is becoming more and more people are becoming much more aware of it. From the 1970s when Dr Raymond Moody coined the phrase near death experience. Now it's part of our Zeitgeist. It's don't go towards the light. You know, that kind of thing. What is your take on it?

Rupert Sheldrake 45:24
Well, I think that the fact that so many people have had them, and they have such similar components, shows this is something very common. Really happens, and probably does happen when we're dying. I mean, of course, by definition, all near death experiences were not of people who actually stayed dead. There are people who went through a kind of dying process and came back. So they may tell us something about the first moments of death, but they don't necessarily tell us what happens, you know, an hour later or a day later, or a year later or 10 years later, they give us a taste of the first stages. So Well, first of all, the idea that you float out of your body and you see yourself from above is very similar to out of the body experiences. And out of the body experiences are things that many people can have almost on demand. You know some people, they happen rarely, but some people can actually do it on purpose, to deliberately travel out of their body. And out of the body experiences are very similar to lucid dreams, which is where I've already talked about how in your dream, you have another body, and in lucid dreams, you can go where you like, and do what you will, because you realize you're dreaming, it puts you in control to some degree. So I think the floating out of the body and seeing yourself from outside is on a continuum with near death experiences and out of the body experiences and and lucid and lucid dreams same kind of thing. And I think the body you're floating out with is the same kind of thing as your dream body that you experience in your dreams every night. So it's not as if something totally new happens, that you find yourself seeing things from a different point of view from your physical body. It's something that happens to us every night in our dreams. But in this case, the you then you're actually the people often see what's happening in offering operating theater or an accident scene or something. Then they go through a kind of tunnel often, and then they enter a realm of light and joy and with Luminous beings. So it's a very common kind of description. Well, I think this couple of ways of thinking about that. One is a kind of psychological way which you probably know the theory of Stan Grof. On this you probably discuss.

Alex Ferrari 47:59
I know Stan Grof very well. I know his work very well.

Rupert Sheldrake 48:01
Yes, well, you know that he found a lot of people when he was doing his LSD research. A lot of people on LSD trips had the experience of going through a tunnel, coming into the light, very like a near death experience. And many people on DMT or other psychedelics have things very similar to a near death experience. And standard graphs. Argument, as you know, is that, at one level, this is an archetype, and it's like being born again. And the you know, in the birth process, if we're born in normal vaginal birth, we're in the womb. It gets pretty hellish. It's contractions. It's dark. We feel unwelcome. It's really horrible. After floating blissfully in amniotic fluid for nine months, suddenly it turns hostile and and you don't want to be there anymore. And it's sort of really horrible being squashed all the time by all these contractions and then a tube presents itself. You go through the tube, you emerge through this dark tube into the light, and everything is completely different. Well, that's being born. And his argument that these near death experiences as a like rebirth or an archetypal being born again is seems to me very plausible. And in this connection, I myself think that the this archetype of rebirth is very deeply embedded in our religious traditions, particularly the Christian tradition, because the central feature of that is John the Baptist. He baptized Jesus, and Jesus's first experience of himself as a son of God. The Son of God was at his baptism, he had, you know, voice from heaven said, This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. He. Had this blissful experience as he came up out of the water. Well, my theory is probably one you discussed on the program before, because other people say this too, is that John the Baptist was essentially a drowner, and that he was holding people under total immersion in the River Jordan just long enough to induce a near death experience by drowning, and if he did that, then what they'd experience is their past life flashing before them, going through a tunnel, coming out into the light, having a near death experience, being in light and joy, then coming back and saying they'd died. They'd seen the light, and they've been born again. And that experience which Jesus had, I think the early Christians were having, and people who've had near death experiences often lose the fear of death and become more spiritual. People who were baptized in the early Church lost the fear of death and became more spiritual. And when in the time of the Reformation, in the 16th century, the most radical Protestant group were the Anabaptists, who went round saying, the Bible doesn't say you should baptize infants by sprinkling water over them. It says you should be baptized by total immersion, like Jesus was and like John the Baptist, they reinstated baptism by total immersion. It became their signature thing, and that's still the signature theme of Baptist Mennonites and all other Anabaptist derived forms of Christianity. And their key thing is the conversion experience, where you die, you see the light and you're born again. It makes total sense. You see of the Baptist message, if the early Baptists were indeed inducing near death experiences, and maybe some of them still do, but they'd probably be a bit more careful now, because we live in an age of litigation and health and safety, and John the Baptist didn't have to contend with that, you know, he might have lost a few but so

Alex Ferrari 52:13
It's very true. That's very, very true.

Rupert Sheldrake 52:16
So I think that these the reason for Jesus is it's the first spiritual experience we hear about. It was followed immediately by him going into the wilderness on his vision quest for 40 days and 40 nights, which we celebrate in the season of Lent. But the key thing there was this experience of something beyond death, going through death, and then having to come back. And so I think that near death experiences are very important because they're a kind of rite of passage. They give us a view of a world beyond this, this physical body, and beyond death, which we can experience in another kind of body. And most people who've had them have this very different view to dying from people who haven't had them. And so I think they're very important as a rite of passage, and because they actually change the way we see things, and our culture lacks rites of passage, as many people have pointed out, and I think that's why for so many people, taking psychedelics has become a kind of rite of passage, often very done under very unsuitable conditions and chaotic surroundings and stuff, but done properly, I think, can serve that kind of role in our culture as the same kind of near death experience. And of course, if baptism could be reinstated as a rite of passage, which doesn't involve any drugs at all, but involves nothing more than water, there's plenty of that around pools, lakes, rivers, it was virtually free, life transforming free, available on demand. You know, John the Baptist was doing it on an industrial scale. People, I'm sure, were lining up on the bank of the Jordan, put one under, hold them under, just long enough, then there'd probably be support workers, you know, to help resuscitate them. Probably next please. And you could, this could be done on an industrial scale and again, and if I were in a Baptist church, which I'm not, but if I were, I think I'd really try and get things moving in terms of, you probably have to do it with heart monitors and sort of, You know, medical equipment and stuff, waterproof ECGs and stuff to be able to do it in a way that could be deemed safe. But they could reinstate this, I think they'd have plenty of people queuing up to become Baptists, or people from other Christian denominations going to the Baptist for this rite of passage, then going back to their regular practice.

Alex Ferrari 55:00
Regularly, schedule a program, of course. Rupert, I have to ask you, with all the experience you have and all the research you've done over the years, and you're just your own personal point of view, what is your vision for humanity and humanity's future? Where do you think are we on the verge of higher consciousness? There seems to be an awakening happening spiritually with a lot of people. Hence, why are a lot of these systems around us are starting to crumble and crack around us. Things that have been rock solid for hundreds of years are now starting to crack. I come from the world of Hollywood, in that kind of world, and that whole system is just falling apart in a way that it's unprecedented, and so many other industries are doing the same thing. But where do you see humanity in this future? Do you are we going to go to a higher consciousness civilization, or are we just going to boom? That was technical, by the way.

Rupert Sheldrake 56:00
You know, I, of course, I don't know obvious that the a lot of things are cracking up. And you know, if, if our systems break down, you know, if suddenly our water supply doesn't work, electricity supply doesn't work, the internet's crashed because of sabotage from opposing world powers and that kind of thing. I'm not sure that most people would go to higher consciousness in those conditions. I think lower consciousness, you know, I think sort of sheer survivalism would kick in for a lot of people. And, you know, being nice to other people, it seemed like a needless luxury. You know, when it's pure survival that's at stake. And you know, when we look at the world political scene, it doesn't show many manifestations of higher consciousness, or the world's business scene for that matter. You know, it's about profit and corporate profit, and that's not higher consciousness, that's just greed. So I think it's possible that the fact more people are coming to be disillusioned with the mechanistic, materialist worldview and the kind of social and economic systems that have grown out of late stage capitalism. You know, a lot of people would like alternatives. It's not obvious that there are that many alternatives politically and economically at the moment, but I think one thing that will change is is, you know, as we come out of the dogmatic, materialist secularism that's dominated at least the life of educated people in so called advanced countries, I think more people will open up to the spiritual dimension that's been denied by that system. And so I think a spiritual revival is actually happening and is very welcome. And you know, it starts from a pretty low base here in Europe. I mean, Europe's much more godless and non spiritual than the US. For all its faults, the US is much more spiritual place than most of the rest of other Western countries, like Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Europe. So I think that if that can happen, I think that it could. It may not be happen soon enough or but it could lead to a different set way of setting goals right now, all governments want economic growth because everybody who votes for them, or almost everyone who votes, wants more money and more stuff all the time, and more disposable income and bigger houses and more foreign holidays and all those kinds of things, all of which, if you if more people were spiritually minded, More people will probably be content with what they've got and be prepared to live more simply, because, if you feel happier and more satisfied with your life, just grateful for being alive and the beautiful things around one and plants and animals and other people, everyday acts of kindness that we all encounter. You. So if one's grateful for those kinds of things, doesn't feel such a pressing need to spend the whole time whizzing around the world in jet planes or buying new products or watching advertising channels or infomercials and stuff. It's it could have knock on effects for the economy, but there's not much sign of that happening yet. I have to say, I hope it will. I hope it will probably have to happen through necessity. And I hope, because economic growth is faltering, it's, you know, in most so called. Advanced countries, you know, people are happy with a naught point 5% growth rate. Here in Britain, you know, the argument is, could it be nought point 2% or nought point 5% and even China, where and India, where they're used to these high growth rates, will reach a point where that stops happening, as it has in Japan, which was a bit ahead of the curve of other Asian countries. So when we reach the point where, not because idealists say we shouldn't consume so much, and the economy should slow down, it's slowing down anyway, and we're going to be able to consume less, we'll have to consume less simply because we're not as rich as we were in economies aren't expanding as they were. Hopefully this will go in hand in hand with a spiritual transition, and won't necessarily lead to mass misery. If we have less, if we have enough, and we have a spiritual life, then we can be really happy. If we have no spiritual life, then nothing is going to satisfy us, no amount of material possessions or greed or money. If you've got 20 billion, if you're unsatisfied with that, you want 40 billion, and then you want a trillion. And there's a few people who are actually aspiring to have a trillion dollars. You can't possibly spend that kind of money, so it's insane. Anyway, that's those are rambling versions of my take on the future,

Alex Ferrari 1:01:31
The experiments or the findings you had about dogs knowing when their owners were coming home. I am fascinated with that, because I had a dog. I have cats now, and when I saw I've seen some videos of it, I think somewhere in a news article, I saw a news program I saw like they filmed the dog and then they filmed the owner, and the second he got into his car and started to drive home, the dog got up and waited for him at the door. What are your findings with that? Because it's it's fascinating. What do you what do you believe the connection is? Because now we're talking about inner species. We're not talking about the morphic field of humans and the morphic resonance of dogs. These are two separate species, if you will, but yet connected. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Rupert Sheldrake 1:02:18
I've done a lot of research on telepathy, which is the connection between people or animals who are closely bonded. Telepathy, interestingly, happens when people are part of a social group share a morphic field. I think social groups have morphic fields, and telepathy typically doesn't occur with strangers. It happens between husbands and wives, lovers, parents and children, especially mothers and babies. It's very common in the human world with telephone calls. I've done a lot of research on telephone telepathy, but it also happens when we're bonded to animals and they're bonded to us, and so one reason I started this research with dogs was because I first got interested in telepathy through a spectacular case in Cambridge when I was doing research there of an autistic child who was highly telepathic with his mother, similar to this. These recent cases on the telepathy tapes I go years later, when I got back from India and I was, I was working, I was doing various other research projects on morphic resonance. I got interested in returning to telepathy, and I couldn't work with autistic children because I'm not a child psychiatrist, and so on. So I thought the next best thing would be dogs, because, like autistic children, non speaking, autistic children, they don't speak, which inhibits telepathy, I think, to some degree, and they haven't had a college education, which makes them think telepathy doesn't exist. Dogs, you know, can just come at this naturally, and they haven't been put off it by smart guys who say it's an illusion and so on, too. I thought dogs would be ideal, and I heard so many cases of this that I did quite a lot of experimental research along the lines you suggest, you know, we film the dog the whole time the person's out, have the person go at least five miles away and come back at a random time. We select they don't know in advance when they're going to come home, call them up on a mobile phone, and to avoid familiar car sounds, they come in an unfamiliar vehicle or a taxi, a different taxi each time. And the film then shows that you know when they form the intention to go home, before they've even got into the vehicle, the dog becomes alert and goes and starts waiting from a door or window. And the other thing is, you can do this over and over again in human telepathy tests. When you keep repeating them, most people get bored, and the scores fall off with time, because, you know, the subject is just bored of doing these repetitive tests. But dogs never get bored of their owners coming home. So you can do this over and over again. Anyway, I've published papers on this in peer reviewed journals. They're all on my website, sheldrake.org, and anyone who's interested can look there. And also a film of one of these experiments with a split screen, where you can see the dog and the owner at the same time. That's also on my website, sheldrake.org and so this, I think it's, it's it's very clear this really happens. What I'm planning as a new phase of this research. I'm going to do it with cats, because cats do it as well as dogs. About 50% of dogs do it, according to random surveys of dog owners, and about 30% of cats. And I don't think it's cats are less sensitive. I think a lot of them are just less interested. I'm afraid that was the case with my own cats. We've had cats, but when I arrive home, even if I've been away on a long journey, I walk in, it barely lifts its head in acknowledgement. So I've been sadly disappointed with my own cats, but some people have cats that are really excited when they come home. And I'm planning a new phase of research on this with cats. And nowadays, when I first did this research, you know how to use old style video cameras with film, but now there's all these pet tracking things you can put on animals. You can track them. The technology and webcams and things are also on smartphones. The technology is so much better, it should be possible to do this in a whole new way, and I'm shortly having a new research assistant start work with me, and we're going to launch a program on cats. So if anyone watching this has a cat that regularly knows when they're coming home and would like to take part in this research, get in touch with me through my website, where there's a contact address.

Alex Ferrari 1:07:18
Rupert, it's been so fascinating talking to you. And I could, I could talk to you for days and days and days, but I know you're a very, very busy man. You have this cat research you have to go do. So I completely understand my final my final question to you is, is there anything that you feel that humanity needs to hear right now? What is the message that you would like to give out to humanity for our for the sake of our own future. What would you like to say?

Rupert Sheldrake 1:07:45
I think we have to connect with the spiritual world that and pray as well for guidance in what we're doing. Because I don't think we're completely in charge of what happens. We're at the mercy of all sorts of you know, cyclones, hurricanes, solar flares. There's all sorts of things that affect our lives over which we have no control, including a lot of modern politics. I mean, even in democracies, you don't feel you've got that much control over what governments are doing. So we're shaped by all sorts of forces that can go one way or another. Can make on the whole the lives of ourselves, our families and our communities, better or worse. And obviously, the things that make them worst of all are wars. And I think too, we can do a certain amount through normal, rational means, you know, voting, thinking, you know, discussing coming up with rational plans and all that, but I think we need to pray and ask for God's help and guidance in what's happening in our own lives and in our collective life. So I think prayer is one thing, and I think that becoming aware of that spiritual dimension which is so important for our own health and happiness. My two most recent books, science and spiritual practices and ways to go beyond and why they work, are about scientific evidence that spiritual practices have measurable effects and the most measurable effects they have but in the broadest sense, they make people happier, healthier and live longer, which means if you don't have spiritual practices or religious practices, you'll be unhappier, unhealthier, and live shorter, on average. So that's why I think militant atheism should come with a health warning. I think so. I think that finding the more spiritual dimension of our own lives is really important. And it's it's one thing to be spiritual, but not religious. And I know many people are and but I think it's helpful to be spiritual. Well and religious, because reconnecting with a religious tradition, tradition links in with other people as well. It's not just an individual path. We need to have a collective sense of what's happening and a collective sense of we're in this together. And I think that Religions can help with that. They can also be divisive, of course, but I think if they're understood properly, they can be helpful, and one aspect of them is connecting with our ancestors and honoring our ancestors. Everyone knows about Halloween, but not everyone realizes that All Hallows Eve. Halloween is the eve of the Festival of the Dead. You know, All Saints Day November, the first is, is the blessed dead, the saints and all those who've blessed us in our lives, and then all souls. Day November, the second, the Day of the Dead, celebrated in Mexico, so spectacularly, and in many Catholic countries, is where good opportunity to remember our ancestors, those who've gone before, all those to whom we're still connected, although they're dead, to honor them, to connect with them and to form those to acknowledge these connections. Again, in most cultures like China, traditional cultures like China and Japan and Africa, the fact the ancestors are part of our lives today, and we're bound to them, whether we like it or not, is taken for granted. Most modern people don't acknowledge that. And I think reconnecting in all these ways to our ancestors to holy places through pilgrimage. I'm a patron of the British pilgrimage trust, and we're helping to reopen the ancient pilgrimage routes to the holy places of England and and connecting with festivals. Each tradition has its holy days and festivals. I'm a Christian, so I like to observe the major festivals. Of course, Christmas, Easter, all saints and all souls, St Michael and all angels. Pentecost, the great festivals of the year give a shape and a structure to our lives. And every religion has its festivals that structure personal and collective lives. So I think all these things can help us, and if we try and get on without them, without them, to amputate these traditions, to live in a purely secular world where it's just under human control, then look at the world we've got today, that's a pretty good representation of what happens. It has some advantages, but it has many disadvantages, and it's not going to be business as usual, whether we like it or not. So I think the best way forward is to try and reconnect in all these ways, in a way that will make us more healthy, that will heal our civilization, heal ourselves, and heal our relationship with the world around us.

Alex Ferrari 1:13:11
Rupert it is that was so beautiful. Thank you so much for this conversation. It has been such a pleasure talking to you and thank you for doing the work that you have been doing all your life and hoping and helping all of us awaken to hopefully, a higher consciousness. So I appreciate you, my friend. Thank you again for being here.

Rupert Sheldrake 1:13:31
Well, thanks very much, Alex, and thanks for the work you're doing too to help bring about a raising of consciousness.