ASM169 Talking with Rupert Sheldrake and Mike Morrell

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this week we've got an interview with notable and controversial biologist rupert sheldrake on a special episode of ask science mike [Music] science faith well here we are in a brand new gear and it turns out that my podcast microphone still works hello everyone i am mike mccarg the host of ask science mike and we are coming back from a bit of a break over the holidays and uh and trauma therapy and all kinds of things uh friends it is so good to talk with you again and uh from this week forward uh we'll have regular episodes coming again patrons watch out we'll start the polls up again uh in the next week or two and and get back to more of our normal format for the program i wanted to give you an update kind of on what's going on with science mike um first thing i am in the final stretch of working on my second book which is called you wondrous you why you're a miracle and a pain in your ass and it's going to be i hope a wonderful book but i'm in that terrible stage where it's a slog i am in my office for eight or ten hours a day writing and writing and every day i walk out and i feel like the book is no closer to being finished i think there's parts of it that i love and parts of it that my good friend and editor derek reed is going to really really really have to give me extensive notes on so um that's that's one reason i haven't been doing the podcast is writing the book the other thing if you listen to my christmas show if you could call it that uh is that i've been dealing with um just some mental health stuff honestly uh i want to talk about it unself-consciously because there shouldn't be any stigma around people uh seeking to improve their mental health and and deal with changes in life and that that is what has been happening to me uh several factors have kind of converged one is the you know explosive growth of the liturgist podcast and ask science mike over the last two years that is wonderful i'm so excited to talk to all of you if you follow my work you know that i have a genuine affection and affinity for all of you but the scale of uh the communication i received from the public started to take a toll on me because i'm a very sensitive person i think part of uh why this relationship we have in a podcast together works is because i'm a very sensitive and empathetic person and i i haven't learned how to modulate that sensitivity and that empathy that makes me take your questions so seriously uh i haven't learned how to separate that from dealing with uh you know constructive critique from the public or even worse you know actual trolling and that's kind of run into um some other things in my life where i've i've become aware that uh you know i have some some trauma that i needed to process childhood trauma and uh i'll talk more about that later i think it's probably too raw right now for me to go into but the the combination of those things was leading me to have really frequent panic attacks and uh would have difficulty you know working on the podcasts and um doing basic day-to-day tasks i was you know we had a retreat uh called ken which i'll talk to you about in just a second and i had a really severe panic attack during an exercise at one of those and under the advice of my friend and colleague hillary mcbride i went i started seeing a trauma therapist and honestly it's helping finally it is helping i feel a lot better i hope you can hear my voice kind of a renewed enthusiasm uh to be talking with you and that's that's where the show's been so i'm i'm sorry uh that we've been off the air now for a couple of months and inconsistent before that but i'm back i can't promise it's going to be an every single week thing again but i feel confident saying we'll get two a month going for the foreseeable future the next couple of months while my travel schedule is heavy and while i am working on finishing book two so that'll be great but then um then we'll start moving back towards a weekly format and i've got all kinds of ideas i want to do a lot more interviews and conversations on ask science mike you know i get kind of lonely doing this podcast because i love that you send me your questions and i get to interact with your questions i don't love that as i respond to your question it's just me talking into this microphone by myself i just i find that really lonely uh so i've got some ideas for that you'll see this episode it won't just be me uh before we get to the meat of today's show though i do want to as always let you know a few opportunities that we have to be together in the coming days and weeks okay so the first thing is going to be february 1st and 2nd in chapel hill north carolina for the cosmic campfire now that's actually something we're going to unpack in this episode uh the interview i have coming up with rupert sheldrake is actually from the cosmic campfire online book club that we did uh and i think is very representative of the kinds of conversations that are going to be at the cosmic campfire uh it's it's me and it's mike morell from we uh rewilder podcast and he also worked on the divine dance with richard rohr and it's trip fuller from homebrewed christianity so kind of a triple podcast lineup we're going to be your host but then we've got some really great uh scientists and theologians lined up to come to that event and talk about really deep and significant weighty topics cosmic origins deep ecology human evolution real transformation plus we're going to drink beer together we're literally going to cook s'mores around a campfire i'm so excited about this event and i would simply love to to be with you in chapel hill north carolina february first and second you can learn more by going to cosmic campfire dot party i i it's got to be the event i'm most looking forward to in the first part of the year just just because of the the lineup although that's tough to say because another event coming up is really really exciting and that's theo ed in atlanta now what is theo edward let's put it on by the first presbyterian church of atlanta and it's a speaker series that brings together leading thinkers in the church in the academy that seek to spark conversations about god religion and the power of faith to shape lives and communities okay well that's great it's kind of ted style format 20 minute talks but uh coming up when i'm at theo ed which i will be there on february 10th is an incredible lineup of people i want to see diana butler bass uh author of of grounded one of my favorite books the last couple of years uh peter ends who you know is like my jam and patrick reyes so um that's a really killer line of people people you can see all in one day in atlanta i think the room only seats like 400 people so if you're interested uh definitely definitely grab your ticket uh i don't want to run out and then not see you and then uh we're doing another can actually this weekend ken min our men's retreat that's all about embodiment confronting toxic masculinity and that one's sold out like in no time so we've got a handful and i mean literally a handful of tickets left for ken men in ohio may 24th through 26th and there's just a few tickets left again that's hosted by me michael gunger and hillary mcbride and it's an embodiment retreat designed to confront toxic masculinity and it's intense i'm not gonna lie that is one intense weekend but uh at the end of it it is quite beautiful and i hope will lead to deeper relationships among men um and a healthier society with healthier people in it so uh all of those if you go to ask sciencemike.com click on the events button you'll get links to any of those events that you're interested in back to the cosmic campfire so uh this is a thing that at mike morell and trip fuller and i kind of just schemed up we all like each other we like talking we like shooting the [ \_\_ ] with each other and um we feel like all of our audiences have kind of a a common weirdness and so we had this idea to do the cosmic campfire which was going to be an event and then we just couldn't get the logistics worked out so we did this online uh book club instead that was super fun and now it's becoming an event again and as part of the online book club mike morrell and i had a conversation with rupert sheldrick who i knew his work i was familiar with he's a biologist who is kind of controversial um and i don't know if i like uh agree who i'm with here like i i don't i think there's good reasons that he's controversial uh but i also think some of his points uh critiquing mainstream science are interesting um and i don't really arrive at a conclusion in this conversation at all um so so what i'll follow here will be an interview that mike and i did with rupert sheldrick if you aren't familiar uh gosh it's hard to even talk about uh like what he's written 12 books he's authored 85 scientific papers he was listed among the top 100 global thought leaders for 2013 by the dutweiler institute in switzerland he was a fellow of claire college and cambridge university all that stuff super legit vast body of work he lives in london and how i became familiar with him was a concept of morphic resonance the idea that life produced a physical field which is both fascinating and uh makes me think it might be woo so i just wanted to give you this conversation this week and let you hear it because i think this kind of open-ended we don't end at resolution conversation is typical of what will be happening at the cosmic campfire uh in in chapel hill and i just thought it was a really interesting conversation i've listened back to it a couple of times and caught things i didn't catch the first time and uh i just thought this would be a great great conversation for all of you to hear uh so without further ado i'll move into the conversation and when it's over that'll be the end of this episode and i will talk to you next week welcome so so everyone uh this is dr rupert sheldrake if you are not familiar with with him he is a an english author he's a researcher into pan psychism he's developed the field of morphic resonance within biology and he's worked as a biochemist and cell biologist at cambridge in the 60s and 70s and he was a plant physiologist at the international crop research institute for semi-arid tropics in india until 1978. if you've read his his essay and how i found god and everyone and everywhere you'll know that he has been on an incredible journey through i would say sort of a default uh dead materialist view of the world to a re-enchantment vis-a-vis india to a recovery of his own anglican christian tradition and he's had a lot of interesting stops on the way so we are really happy to have you here i i really enjoyed your interview with our collaborator in this group trip fuller and uh i'd love to kind of hit the ground running from there so and for those of you who for those here who maybe aren't as familiar with your story could you share a little slice of who you are and how you got to be who you are today well i have to keep it brief of course but um yes i'm um i studied biology because i love plants and animals uh i did so as a child i was raised in a fairly conventional way a methodist family an anglican boarding school high church anglican boarding school but as part of my scientific education i got the message from my science teachers that science equals atheism and religion sort of out of date and being superseded by science and i wanted to be a scientist that's a fairly normal thing to happen in england as part of scientific education so i became a rather unthinking atheist and an enthusiast for science but my enthusiasm for science began to get it was dimmed when i realized how this reductionist mechanistic view of nature gives such a very poor view of living organisms it just didn't work very well for the kind of biology i was interested in namely living animals and plants it was mainly about dead animals and plants cut up into little bits um and then reduced to molecules so i began to doubt that and by the time i was an undergraduate at cambridge i was really quite disenchanted with mechanistic science um i then studied history and philosophy of science at harvard um and coon's book on paradigms the structure of scientific revolutions have just appeared and i realized the mechanistic theory in biology was just a paradigm it wasn't the truth which is what i believed before that it was an inevitable truth um that made me realize things could change and i started looking for more holistic ways of doing science and that led i was working on developmental biology in cambridge um and that led to the idea of morphic resonance after some seven eight nine ten years of reflection in research um i then went to india to work in agriculture institute because i didn't feel ready to publish this radical idea and i realized as soon as i published it it would probably lead to career difficulties in within science so i want to be really sure of my ground and so i worked in a different field agriculture trying to do something useful and i think we did do something useful um until i was ready to write about morphic resonance and i wrote my first book uh a new science of life uh living in the ashram of father b griffiths in tamil nadu in south india christian ashram he was a benedictine monk and for me this was a wonderfully integrated experience because when i was in india to start with i was into hindu meditation and yoga i went to ashrams hindu ashrams temples and so forth then i had a sufi teacher i finally found myself drawn back to a christian path i was confirmed in the church of south india which is a ecumenical church of methodists and anglicans um i lived in the catholic ashram and when i got back to england i i was sort of very excited to rediscover the um anglican and the christian tradition in europe and they're thrilled to visit great cathedrals and see them as sacred places that are re-inspired by the anglican choral music tradition um really i'm finding it really helpful to make make you to practice to be a regular church go which i do know i go every sunday wherever i am which means that i get to see a wide range of different churches um and observing the festivals and you know many of the things i learned from the hindu tradition i found were also there in the anglican tradition including what for me is the most important part of all the mystical tradition okay so you have said a lot just now i want to uh to back us up just a tad for those um to go back to your research for a moment for those who are unfamiliar which i think might safely assume most of us what are morphogenetic fields and and what is your idea of morphic resonance morphogenetic fields were proposed first in the 1920s to try and explain how organisms develop if you think about an embryo as it develops the dna in all the cells is the same and the proteins and and so on are very similar for example in your arms and your legs the dna is the same the muscle proteins the same the bone chemistry is the same yet they have different shapes um how come they have different shapes and in the plant um all the cells have the same dna the same genes and yet some of them become petals some become sapples some become leaves stems roots how come they're different and why does each plant have different kind of shape um these are problems that biology still hasn't solved and the standard assumption is that by knowing about the genes and proteins they code for somehow all this will eventually be explained in a way that's not quite clear um i don't think that will ever work it's like trying to explain the architecture of the building the shape of a building say a cathedral by understanding the chemistry of stone and cement and mortar and so on you need to have an overall plan as well as knowing about the material components and the idea in the 1920s was that the animals and plants have an invisible form-shaping field called the morphogenetic field morpho means form genetic genetic comes from genesis which means coming into being a fields that shape the coming into being in form like an invisible mold um fields in science are extended regions in space like a magnetic field is in a magnet and around it the gravitational field of the earth is in the earth but stretches far beyond it invisibly the field of your cell phone is inside the cell phone the electromagnetic activity but it also stretches invisibly for a long distance wave beyond the cell phone and so the idea is that there are invisible fields within and around living organisms that shape them morphogenetic fields um so that idea already existed um but nobody knew what they were or how they were inherited um because people used to think all inheritances in the genes and there's no way you could put a field like that in a gene it's like saying you could put an architectural plan in a brick or in a stone building block of a cathedral um it's not that kind of thing um so when i came up with the idea of morphic resonance this provided a possible explanation for the inheritance of these fields morphic resonance is the influence of similar patterns of activity across space and time from the past to the present so what it means is that each species tunes into a kind of collective memory every giraffe baby giraffe or giraffe embryo tunes in to the morphogenetic fields of all previous giraffes so those shape its forms a kind of memory of form and the same goes for instincts and behavior similar fields organize the activity of the brain and so a baby giraffe tunes into the behavioral habits of the giraffe species and that underlies its instincts so we too have a collective memory on this view which is similar to jung's idea of the collective unconscious and this theory makes predictions testable predictions if you train rats to land a new trek in london then rats in new york and san francisco and melbourne australia should all be able to learn it quicker just because the rats have learned it here and surprisingly there's already evidence that that happens so it's a theory of memory in nature and in its most general sense it says that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits and the uh each individual draws on a collected memory and in turn contributes to it so the normal western view is that nature has no memory that if memories exist they have to be stored in special physical spatial structures like hard drives or vinyl records or something i'm suggesting instead that there's a built-in memory in all nature this is not unlike the hindu and buddhist view which says there's a kind of memory in nature um so in the eastern traditions um it's taken for granted this kind of memory in nature in in the west it's deeply shocking both to scientists and indeed to most christians as well because they just haven't thought that way it has not been part of the western way of thinking but in an evolutionary universe it makes much better sense of things it gives us the idea of the whole universe being like an organism that's developing and evolving and forming new habits and instead of thinking of the so-called laws of nature as being like a cosmic napoleonic code that we're all there at the moment of the big bang we can have habits that evolve along with nature wow so i'm i'm sure that uh my other mike here has some really nerdy science questions and i want him to ask them but the the question that i have coming up is how is this similar to or distinct from the idea that richard dawkins has advocated and advanced the idea of the meme or mimetics well the meme is a unit of cultural transmission so it's it's like as he defines it it's like a tune or an idea or a fashion in clothes or or um a phrase or something like that it's only about cultural transmission he thinks that all other forms of inheritance are in genes so i'm saying that organisms inherit three kinds of inheritance in fact in genes enable organisms to make the right proteins we know that's what genes do but they don't code for the shape of your face or the instincts of a spider being able to spin a web without learning um those are inherited all that's inherited by morphic resonance but then in the cultural realm morphic resonance would enable you to learn things quicker than other people have already learned so in that in that area it's similar to the idea of the meme but dawkins is very opposed to the idea of morphic resonance um he thinks memes can be explained simply in terms of people reading things or seeing them online and so on and obviously that's part of the drug cultural transmission that i'm suggesting there's more to it than that i'm a uh college dropout and total uneducated person so if any of my questions uh seem uninformed they are so understand i'm even open to correction in the way questions are phrased or function uh but i've i've actually been familiar with your work for some time uh i lost my faith a number of years ago and then had a mystical experience um i actually found a lot of resonance and your story is laid out in this book uh but i actually saw uh saw you on a program called through the wormhole i mean first time i was i encountered your work and i was blown away with the concept of morphic fields and morphic resonance um really really really really moved and then i decided to learn more about it and encountered just the the outrage of the scientific community in many parts of scientific community to your ideas and theories and i was curious from your perspective why say the multiverse model or string theory which are speculative such open discussion in the scientific community whereas morphic resonance tends to be i actually think i just heard it described once as scientific heresy which is a very very strong wording and uh uniquely hysterical from my perspective where do you think that where the deep discomfort comes here uh when physics we can talk about you know multiverses without anyone laughing at us well i think it comes from the fact that since the 19th century science has been dominated by mechanistic materialism as its dominant theoretical base and mechanistic materialism says that minds are nothing but brains the activity of brains and that the whole of nature is made up of unconscious matter governed by physical laws with no uh with no purpose anywhere now morphic resonance upsets that world view by first of all saying there's memory secondly by saying that all organisms are organized by morphic fields which are rather mind-like in their nature their purposes they shape things holistically um so that goes against the general mechanistic materialism morphic resonance also allows for transmission of information at a distance and in social groups allows for phenomena like telepathy and psychic phenomena are a big taboo within mechanistic materialist science you know the reason they're a taboo is because if the mind is nothing but the activity of your brain your thinking is insulated in the privacy of your skull and if i think of somebody i shouldn't be able to influence them hundreds of miles away just by thinking about them or by my intentions but telepathy shows that that happens if i think of calling you you might start thinking about me even though you're thousands of miles away and then if i when i do call you you may say as funny i was just thinking about you this is a very common form of telepathy in the modern world in connection with phone calls yet institutional science based on materialism is based on a culture of denial saying that is impossible can't happen anyone who believes it happens is stupid or uneducated or uninformed i'm saying this is normal natural not paranormal not supernatural so this upsets a lot of dogmatic materialists one reason that the multiverse appeals to them is because they imagine that it helps them to get rid of god many of them are deeply committed to an atheist worldview some of them are militant atheists like richard dawkins or lawrence krauss um and the reason they um they like the multiverses um it fits in with their prejudices rather than goes against them you see they they think that all the laws of nature were fixed at the moment of the big bang that's a conventional scientific assumption as i just said i don't think it's a necessary assumption at all i think they evolved there's no reason to assume that i think they're more like regular the idea of laws of nature is based on the metaphor of human laws and human laws do in fact evolve the laws of the us today are very different from the u.s 200 years ago and go back a thousand years and there wasn't a constitution in the u.s there were tribal customs and those evolved too um so if we really take that metaphor seriously there's no reason to assume it was all fixed at the beginning however if it's all fixed at the beginning which is what they believe it was fixed in such a way that out of all the very millions of possible sets of laws and constants the right ones were there to give rise to a universe in which we could exist they were fine-tuned it seems to give make it possible for humans so then that that then led to a kind of resurgence of neo-deism where people would say oh well if all the laws are fixed and they're fixed exactly right so that we exist then it proves there must be some supreme designer who's fine-tuning all these laws a kind of god of the scientific laws so to get rid of that kind of god which is not the kind of god that christians or anyone else actually worships but it's the kind of their kind of intellectual conception of a designer god to get rid of that kind of god they then say well there must be billions trillions quadrillions of universes all the different laws and constants and the only one we can actually experience is the one that's suitable for us but that's just like chance that we happen to be in just one of these many other ones and they all actually exist so there's no need for god you as i point out to some of the believers in that you know the principle of occam's razor is that you should have the most economical hypothesis and william of ockham in the middle ages said you shouldn't multiply entities unnecessarily well proliferating universes told us quadrillions of unobserved universes is the ultimate violation of occam's razor um i think it's absurd but like you i find it baffling this is passes without comment almost because it fits the material as prejudice the thing is they haven't really even thought it through because if they do think it through as some philosophers have pointed out um an infinite god could be the god of an infinite number of universes so they don't even get rid of god they've just proliferated universes unnecessarily i think it's much more scientific much less speculative to acknowledge that things like telepathy which the great majority of the population have actually experienced do in fact exist there's already good scientific evidence for them so we have here a clash of world views and people who are committed to dogmatic atheism and materialism um are prepared to tolerate you know 95 percent of the universe being completely unobserved and unexplored dark matter and dark energy about which we know nothing they believe they constitute 95 of reality um unobserved universes extra dimensions for which there's no evidence and they're prepared to believe all that kind of thing uh in fact to be uh a materialist today involves an enormous leap of faith and indeed credulity i i noticed that uh i really enjoyed i think of all the of all the stories in this book i think i enjoyed yours the most uh simply because i'm fascinated with the way that a pretty varied diet of spiritual experiences and indeed world views kind of led you along the way to where you are now and i find that fascinating in the context of god and pantheism and trying to understand how the world works and how we fit in it um i'm trying to think kind of biographically where i'd like to go um it's hard to take any piece out um i do know that you yourself uh have been a pretty committed atheist and thought um which i can relate to i'm no longer an atheist but i do think i'm epistemologically thinking more a materialist than anything else i have that as you described a private subjective experience understanding of god if i think about it if i open my heart through mysticism it's different that you seem to be more unitive so you you you've able to not just entertain god as an experience uh but but put some put some life on those phones and through ideas like morphic resonance uh understand god is as a more active component of our cosmology um i just wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that journey was like for you what experiences you had and how you were able to start to hold that with perhaps more conviction than i'm able to i think the key element here is mystical experience and i've had a range of kinds of mystical experience i mean including spontaneous ones in nature where i feel the sense that i'm part of something vastly greater than myself um through psychedelics i first took nsd around 1970 and and that for me was blasted me out of a kind of the materialist view that my mind's nothing but my brain it's all explained by regular science i mean the experience of having went way beyond anything i'd learned in regular science and showed the world consciousness was much bigger and more mysterious than the narrow theories uh within science um and then through meditation and through other spiritual experiences you know through art through music um all of these through love all of these uh giving the sense that there are greater forms of consciousness than our own that our own consciousness is not the ultimate consciousness in the universe and otherwise unconscious universe but that um we're embedded within many other forms of consciousness and in a mystical experience we become aware of them um so spiritual practices in general lead to this sense of connection with something greater than ourselves and that's the theme of my most recent book which i'll show you if you haven't seen [Music] science and spiritual practices um in which i discuss seven different spiritual practices all of which can lead to this sense of connection with something greater than ourselves so my argument here is not based on abstract reason it's based on experience and i think that all religions start from this direct in in mystical holistic experience and the buddha didn't become enlightened by doing a phd he became enlightened through spending years meditating sitting under trees and through exploring consciousness from within and you know the hindu rishis the seers the sages who gave us the upanishads and spent years meditating in caves in the himalayas and so on um and that's how they came to their insight that by going into the finding out the very basis of our own consciousness um by not being distracted by the thoughts that normally run through our minds through stepping back getting behind those in meditation we can contact the ground of consciousness itself which is none other than the consciousness of god you know the hindu idea that atman is brahman our individual spirit or conscious being is part of the ultimate divine um i found their metaphor very helpful they they think in terms of buckets of water um outdoors and at night reflecting the moon and each bucket you see what looks like a separate moon but actually they're all reflections of the one moon um and so in each of our minds there seems to be a separate consciousness but they're all reflections of the ultimate one consciousness um so i see that as a much more rational way of understanding consciousness um because after all materialism says the whole universe is made of unconscious matter and um then it has a big problem explaining why we're conscious at all in fact that's called the hard problem in the philosophy of mind because we ought not to be conscious and some philosophers of mind try to pretend that we actually aren't unbelievably enough um so materialism doesn't have a good theory of consciousness it doesn't have any theory of consciousness so if we want to understand it we have to explore it from within and once we go deeper into the nature of the mind through altered states of consciousness and through things that happen spontaneously like near-death experiences where people find themselves in a completely different realm of consciousness um we have to broaden our picture and when we do that we realize our own minds are part of a vastly greater mind and the upanishads put it clearly they say not that which is seen by the eyes but that by which the eyes can see know that to be brahman the lord or not that which is known by the mind but that whereby the mind can know so the idea is that god the ultimate being of god is consciousness which is what the judeo-christian tradition says too the first revelation of god to moses by the burning bush when god moses says who are you he says i am that i am it's a statement that i am consciousness in the present i mean it couldn't be more basic or or straightforward it's the ultimate grand oppressed present consciousness that is that's what god's nature is god is not of course a humanoid figure with a beard or anything like god is the ultimate ground of consciousness underlying the whole universe and reflected in every conscious being within it like you and me so if i'm understanding um your approach to this question rupert you're saying that spiritual practices and experiences can function in in religious inquiry like experiment ought to function in scientific inquiry and that we should take the results of those experiments seriously rather than trying to be reductive about them is that absolutely absolutely just what i'm saying yes i in fact you see the word experience in spiritual experience is the key thing though in science it's based on experience the word greek word for experience is imperas empirical means based on experience so science is empirical because it's based on experience and religious experiences are empirical because they're based on experience and you know when when you look at the the basic life of jesus for example i'm jesus's first sense of his connection with god his deep intimate connection with god his father-son relationship with god came at the moment of his baptism where john the baptist immersed him in the river jordan and he then came up and had this vision of his holy spirit descending upon him an altered state of consciousness a sense of divine presence in his life this was an experience which completely changed him and and it was the beginning of his public he then went into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights on his vision quest um and thereafter he began his public ministry but it started with this direct mystical revelation and i myself um as i discuss in my book science and spiritual practices think that what john the baptist was doing was creating near-death experiences through drowning and i think he held people under just long enough to induce a near-death experience and as a result people their lives were changed like people's lives are changed by near-death experiences in medical emergencies people who feel themselves getting out of their body entering a realm of peace joined by love and blessing and then coming back knowing that something beyond their limited consciousness a greater realm of consciousness it's transformative and uh that baptism by uh near death experience through drowning would be you know people who line up on the bank of the jordan john the baptist holds them under just long enough um he may have lost a few but um you know that was before uh liability litigation um but you know i'm sure he's experienced by the time jesus came along and um it's he then induces this and people's lives are changed and you know within two or three generations the early christians had abandoned this form of baptism they were baptizing babies by sprinkling water on them and then it was symbolic but you know i don't think john the baptist was doing something just symbolic and why do something just symbolic when you can have the real thing and you don't need to read lots of books about other people's near-death experiences or endless arguments about the nature of consciousness if you have this experience you have this experience you know there's something else beyond this normal realm of limited consciousness we're in and at the reformation the most radical protestant groups were precisely people who reinstated this transformative experience through near-death experience namely the anabaptists who were the most radical of the protestants who reinstated baptism by total immersion they're the ancestors of the present day mennonite baptist amish and other churches and it's the characteristic feature of those churches that they talk about dying and being born again and seeing the light and that's literally what happens if you have a near-death experience through drugging in baptism by total emotion so i think that that is one example of a spiritual experience that jesus had and then we look at uh these other experiences of jesus you know his visions in the when he's fasting in the wilderness um he used to spend long periods praying in the hills and alone and um you know he was clear that jesus was a mystic he was not somebody who just sort of studied biblical texts he knew the texts of course but the the whole of his ministry depended on going beyond all that and through this power and connection that he had having this healing presence and and transforming the lives of those who met him all that is based on experience and the whole effect of jesus on people and the early church was based on experience and the the after death sightings of of jesus the resurrection appearances were based on experience not on theories or studying books they were based on the experience paul's conversion on the road to damascus was based on experience so i think really religions all come out of experience and i think that all of them include spiritual practices which induce experiences like singing which is a very basic spiritual practice and you know most churches i go to have singing as an integral part of the service and and just by singing with other people you come into tune with them and you you come into a kind of resonance with people you're part of something bigger than yourself if only a group of people singing and because you're singing praises to god and hymns to god and about the holy spirit about jesus about prayer and so forth about thanksgiving you're connecting with something greater than yourself through the song so that's a spiritual practice um and that's we take it for granted that it's just part of the church so it's not about logic science reason words primarily about words it's about the direct experience of being immersed in music and of course in black churches this experience is even more intense than in those white churches and is obviously a major part of why people go to them so what you're sharing here is really compelling to me before you came on this afternoon mike and i were sharing a little bit about even how co-hosting this group has impacted us how it's impacted me is you know hearing from folks like you and eliadelio and john cobb who are genuinely scientifically literate in a way that uh i i have not been up to this point in my life um challenges some of my my default materialist assumptions that even though i is more or less a lifelong believer have come to think you know probably those materialist world views are fundamentally correct in a certain way and i can make peace with that because part of why i'm in a faith expression is because of experience is because of metaphor i'm a humanities guy you know and sometimes i feel like folks who drop out of faith it's because they're trying to be overly concretized overly literal so so i've navigated things in those ways but but listening to y'all really challenges me to take experience seriously take my experiences my own mystical experiences more seriously and be willing to draw risky conclusions from them in terms of how i live my life at the same time i i have an inner skeptic that i think is in dialogue with actual skeptics who say that the metaphor uh the analogy of experiments to science and experiments to religion might break down here that in science experiments that are not repeatable or duplicatable are considered falsified and they're not included in the evidence typically of of what is a testable hypothesis but in religion it's almost the exact opposite that i could meditate here and experience christ and someone can meditate in the far east and experience buddha nature and someone could you know have a spiritual experience on another place and experience vishnu and so that at best um the outcome of um of religious experimentation and experience is an enriching of our private subjective world at worst it causes wars of religion and people saying absolutizing their experiences and saying no i'm my way is the highway and and on the other hand what some people consider insufferable are people perhaps like the three of us who might be inclined to create a perennial meta philosophy that explains all of these as phenomenological aspects of the one reality which some folks these days consider to be colonizing by nature and and disrespecting the particularity of different experiences so in hearing you i'm still left with this dilemma of um yeah how how do i take my experiences um seriously without falling into those pitfalls what would you say about that well i think first of all there's no need to pay such great respect to dogmatic materialism um in my previous book sounds set free which i may have here um the english version is called the science delusion the american version is called sunset free what i do is take the ten dogmas of conventional science and examine them scientifically using standard scientific skeptical arguments how do they fit with the evidence the 10 dogmas i won't go through them all but things like nature is mechanical matter is unconscious the laws of nature are fixed total amount of matter and energy is always the same um memories are stored in the brain um inheritance is mainly through dna um psychic phenomena are illusory um mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works these are the kind of default assumptions of most educated people because that's the official orthodoxy today it turns out every single one of these assumptions is flawed and in fact deeply unscientific um for example the idea of the total amount of matter and energy is always the same the law of conservation of natural energy which most people think must be true you know physicists have invented sort of five times more matter than anyone's ever call it dark matter just to make their astronomical equations work and so whenever it doesn't work this oh it must be a bit more dark matter let's add sun in oh it's all it's perfect now well no one's ever observed dark matter you you can just indent as much as you like to make the equations balance and then they added so much dark matter into the universe that it meant there's so much extra gravity that the universe should be slowing down and stop expanding and then begin to contract again and that's what people thought until about 1999. then it turned out by observation the universe instead of slowing down and its expansion is speeding up so he said okay well we can fix that uh how well there must be another form of energy dark energy so they add in dark energy uh to make the universe expand how much dark energy well just the right amount to explain the facts and if the facts change you can change the amount of dark energy we've now got 95 of the universe made of dark energy and dark matter for which there's no independent evidence um just to make the equations balance so is the total amount of match and energy in nature always the same well it's gone up 20 folds in the last 20 years on paper at least um and nobody sort of got too upset about that and can these mysterious forms of energy be transformed into regular matter and energy and vice versa could regular matter and energy just disappear by turning into dark energy or dark matter no one knows because no one knows the properties of these things so you know is that a solid assumption most people take it well obviously it isn't um at the end of each chapter in that book i have several questions for materialists that most materials simply can't answer and um they are genuine questions so first of all the idea that material is default assumptions are ones that we have to take really seriously and and they they sort of should cause us to doubt and be skeptical about our own experience is simply not true if we want to be really skeptical then we need to be skeptical about these foundational assumptions or dogmas in science itself that's why my book in america is called science set free because i think that science becomes more scientific more fun and a whole new era of scientific discovery will be unleashed when we get beyond the straight jacket of these assumptions then when we come to the um if we trust our own experience how come christians experience christ's nature and buddhist experience buddha nature and so forth um well there's there's a whole range of experiences that occur within um the mystical experience it's not just one thing you can have some people have visions of saints and angels and those are culturally specific you know if you believe in blessed virgin mary as a major factor in your prayer life for example you may have a vision of the blessed virgin mary but a hindu may have a vision of khali or of durga or the hindu goddess um um does that prove that these are nothing but cultural artifacts i don't think so i think it shows that there's a kind of archetypal mother or goddess figure that can take on different cultural clothing in different cultures but there may be some more unity of principle underlying that of a kind of female or goddess or nurturing archetype and i think that the um the idea that there's a form of consciousness beyond the human level that links us to the ultimate consciousness is found in buddhism and christianity um you know the christ nature is a human consciousness in contact with the divine or whether consciousness is human consciousness in contact with the ultimate state of bliss or joy nirvana um well when we get to the idea of this ultimate state i mean it's clearly any reasonable description of an ultimate consciousness on which the entire universe depends all human cultures all forms of life in the universe it's clear that this ultimate consciousness is going to be a great deal faster than our own minds and it's very likely to escape being able to be pinned down in terms of human languages and cultural concepts so any human reflection of this ultimate reality is going to be limited and each religion i think draws upon an experience of ultimate consciousness beyond our normal far beyond our normal experience that has to be experienced directly but then close it in its own cultural forms and languages and traditions and imagery and so we have different religions but um i'm not saying at the end all of them are exactly the same but i'm saying that they point to realms of experience beyond human conception and language um and human conceptions and languages and religions are always inadequate and all religions admit this they all admit that you know ultimately god is a mystery beyond our comprehension i think it's really important uh in both theology and science to embody a great deal of humility uh sir john templeton talked about humility and theology is something that has really influenced me and that's precisely because the human perspective is so limited i i hear often uh in theological camps a critique of materialism uh in things like dark matter and dark energy and the incompleteness of scientific models uh but i think materialism done well which i i probably call a weak materialism comes out as some form of empiricism or evidentialism where we understand all knowledge to be provisional and we do the best with what we've got and in that in that mind the newtonian physics was the best model with the data we had but ultimately was found to be incomplete einstein comes along shows a little bit more uh and and in that way sure dark matter dark energy uh could be viewed cynically as uh as a failure to explain or a stop gap to make a a unified theory work that ultimately shouldn't but if one views those theories as a provisional means of explanation and you view as i do and many physicists do dark matter and dark energy as an upfront admission that there are parts of this model that are incomplete and don't work and these are things to explore in an ongoing way that we may or may not ever get to the bottom of to me that lends strength and credence and credibility to the claims of materialists and doesn't take it down and so often i also see in the theological realm of critique that science can't yet and may never describe what dark matter and dark energy are for example and yet will then speak of the divine as i do of an ultimately unexplainable unknowable something you can't possibly articulate into words and i i'm struck over and over that in many ways the two groups accuse each other of having a problem that they both have and that's a an extremely limited capacity to describe the universe to describe cosmology to even describe the human experience uh and so i really admire uh your capacity to build a bridge between your your physical epistemology and your theological view in a way that i'm not able to uh but i just it's so important to me most of my work uh i'm the only person i know whose platform is pretty evenly divided between believers and unbelievers and even atheists and evangelical christians i just have such a profound respect for science and indeed materialism's capacity to solve practical problems we face in the reality we can touch and see and feel however much abstraction that may be and also uh for theology and spirituality to awaken something within us that is profound and beautiful and life-giving now whether that is as i most likely believe an enrichening of something that happens in my brain or indeed as you're suggesting and providing evidence for represents some kind of divine invitation or draw into creativity and unity and beauty i don't know and i'm not sure if we will ever know but i will say i'm very grateful for you illuminating ways that that those paths which seem to diverge may ultimately converge yes well thanks for saying that i myself think that what you're saying the strength of sciences you don't need to call it materialism you could call it empiricism if you like i mean materialism is a specific theory that says the matter is the ultimate reality and that matter is unconscious um now that is a completely unnecessary assumption for science and in fact the rise of pan psychism which is now increasingly influential in philosophy of mind and neuroscience is precisely an attempt to go beyond that assumption um so science can be empirical but without being locked into a materialist ideology and the reason it got locked into it was a kind of historical accident really i mean descartes in the 17th century as you know separated matter and spirit um matters unconscious and constitutes all nature spirit is conscious but is outside nature is immaterial god angels and human minds so he creates this radical dualism separating god and spirit from nature and my spirit from mind from body um with the whole of nature as mechanical unconscious and material then in the 19th century the materialists um say well we don't want two things spirit and matter we'll just have mata get rid of god and angels at one stroke so you can get to instant atheism you're then left with the problem of human consciousness which is why they have the hard problem um but the thing is descartes in making the assumption matters unconscious the whole universe is inanimate and mechanical this was just it was a clever idea in the 17th century but he never proved it he never tested it and so my problem with um materialism you see is that it's ideological not empirical and um the the question of whether there's forms of consciousness um in all nature uh is an open question for example i think the sun is conscious or maybe conscious it's a self-organizing system um materialists would say of course that's absolutely rubbish you can't even say that there's nothing he's totally upset the sun's nothing but a nuclear bomb um you know that's hydrogen bomb giving out energy it can't possibly be conscious well why not most traditional religions have thought so syria the sun god and hinduism you know apollo and you know in christian imagery it's often an image of christ and the light of god shining through the sun why can't the sun be divine and conscious um well materialism just closes off that discussion it just says out of you know against the rules it's absurd now to me that then leads on to the question you see if the sun is conscious all the stars could be conscious and if the stars are conscious they could be like living cells in the body of the galaxy the galaxy could be a living organism with a great conscious mind organizing the whole galaxy and the reason the galaxy is organized the way it is should depend could depend on the fact it's a living organism that's self-organizing the reason they have dark matter is they can't explain the way galaxies behave um just in terms of gravitation so they add in extra gravitation to explain the galaxy it's like saying um i can't explain why a flock of birds flies together so coherently um so let's add in extra mass in each uh bird imagine they're all surrounded by dark matter that makes the flock hang together well it's hanging together for a different reason than gravity and so the entire basis of dark matter um may be completely unnecessary if we think of the universe as live organic and with different levels of organization within it um a pan antheistic view and so i've no problem with materials saying well dark matter's provisional we don't know the the exact details of it yet but normally that's associated with closing down any alternative discussion of the nature of cosmos they may say well we might discover a bit more about it we'll tinker with the details and stuff but it may be that the entire basis of the assumption is wrong and the fact that it got no evidence for dark matter maybe because it's completely misconceived way of thinking of galaxies that's why they introduce it to explain the structure of galaxies um so what i'm arguing for really is is much more pluralism in science you see what i did i think one of the biggest problems with natural sciences at the moment is the fact that their creation myth their foundational myth galileo and the inquisition is the idea that this here's this powerful church that says they know all the truth the scientists come along say that they they rebel against it and they come up with this different truth and they take over at least in in realm of science but they scientists have the idea there's one truth and they know it at any given time whereas no one in religion thinks there's one religion i mean there is a manifest fact as buddhism hinduism seekers and christianity and within each religion there's different branches orthodox baptist methodist anglican catholic etc so but in science there's nothing like that doesn't there isn't this pluralism that we have in every other area of human activity because it's based on the idea there's one truth and and at any given time that's what's known so i think what we need in science is much more pluralism like we have in every other area of human activity so that it should be possible to have a university chair in which you can argue that galaxies are living organisms right now you can't and you know when i gave my ted talk i gave a tedx talk on my book sunset free questioning the dogmas of science the response of some of the most militant materialists in the u.s was to attack ted saying that they'd allowed their platform to be used for pseudoscience and told them they should ban this talk immediately which they foolishly did or tried to um so you see this what is there's an endemic problem within science of intolerance of other points of view um admitting they all have met it's not complete but there's this terrible problem of dogmatism that's much much worse in science than i encounter it in any religious circles i move in um and they've then most people outside science feel they've got to go along with these dogmas because all these scientists seem to agree on them it must be true and so and i think this is really harmful because although they're good at fixing problems as you say and you know there's an admirable ability to produce better smartphones or more effective washing machines and that kind of thing um and better surgical techniques where the whole scientific endeavor falls down most is in our in relationships when we look at things holistically i mean the relation of humanity as a whole and human economies to the planet earth is a complete disaster i mean we're causing sixth great extinction and we set up a system that's actually suicidal um not smart at all and when we look at medicine which is one of the areas where science has been very successful in some ways surgery antibiotics life extension and so forth um we find there are persistent areas of failure um i mean depression is an endemic problem medically because people feel life has no meaning purpose and they feel separated and isolated that's exactly what the materialist philosophy tells them and that's the official world view and if you take it seriously you're bound to be depressed and so when we come to the question of how the mind and the body interact which materialist science can't handle um because the mind is considered entirely passive and not doing anything um we then have a whole area where the effect of prayer and healing through prayer it becomes you know that's one area a lot of people are religious pray and that they pray for people who are sick and people are sick pray for themselves does people who pray tend to be healthier and happier than those that don't pray and the scientific answer to that would be say well that's just the placebo effect um but the fact is placebo effects are real and if you have a placebo effect through prayer it's better than having no placebo effect through no prayer you're likely to get better with the placebo effect whereas if you don't have the placebo effect you're not likely it's so likely to get better so i think there's a whole set of areas here where keeping the scientific and the religious areas separate saying well scientists are great at doing what they're doing fixing problems and they're doing their best and so and religion's about subjective sensations and we can enhance our lives through it i think that separation of something has been that's quite harmful really i mean of course it leads to um a division of labor and major you know made us with nd of not conflicting too much and stuff but i think if we're unified beings if the universe is a unified being if we live in a pan-enthusiastic universe where god is in nature and nature's in god we can't keep these realms so separate so if i'm i'm hearing you you know early on you said that one of the foundational texts in your scientific life was uh kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions yeah for you increasing the amounts of dark matter and dark energy needed to make certain equations work might be the sign that a particular paradigm while useful for a certain period of time is now ready to shift that when things require more and more effort to prop up that it's time for something new to be birthed yes and i'm i'm wondering um and also you said you've experienced more uh contentiousness and censorship in the scientific community than the religious community i just have to say you don't live in america you must be around some really cool uh religious folks because i think a lot of folks might have the opposite uh experience but um i'm wondering in our closing moments if if you might speak to a little bit more to the paradigm shift that you see coming specifically for people of faith who want to have an experimental approach to our science and to our spirituality maybe i'm asking you um even for a practice i know you've written an entire book on practices you just said a minute ago about one of the maybe the shortfallings of modern science and modern religion is that it hasn't helped us live better with our planet and the pan psychism you speak to reminds me of a project that i'm working on with a friend right now called rewilder where we're wanting to look at indigenous wisdom of our immediate return forager forbearers and their societies and the way that they structured their their habits of being and among other things they did have what we now call an animist world view where everything is animated where there is no dead material so i'm wondering if there's a practice in your book or one that you have otherwise practiced that can help us modern somewhat disembodied creatures to reconnect with the animated uh reality of of our natural world well there are several that i i suggest i think one of them is thinking of the sun as alive i already mentioned this if we think of the sun as alive and conscious instead of just an atom bomb and a hydrogen bomb and if we think of the stars as alive then and possibly intelligent conscious beings then when we look at the sky at night with the stars or look at the sun at sunrise or sunset when you can actually look at it without banding your retina um giving thanks to the sun for the light and the the way all our life depends on it or the whole solar system depends on it and recognizing that the light that shines through the sun is not just physical light it's the actual light of god i mean the light of god is not just metaphor uh to realize the actual real light that the sun is a real source of divine light and god's light shines through all the stars that's one way to try and reconnect with the sky and the heavens another way is to um if one's related to emily fran finds trees powerful well then to find a tree that one can get to know well and sit under at different times of year and and just feel this being that one can relate to that's bigger than oneself and longer lived than oneself and just sitting in nature in the same spot having a sit spot um under a tree ideally um and just being aware of just listening and watching and 20 minutes or so at a time is good because by within five or ten minutes the animals get used to you and you carry on their normal their alarm calls subside and they they just accept you there you can just absorbed and become present in in a world that's not the human world and and feel the connection with it um and one of the practices i think is very important is pilgrimage and restoration of pilgrimages there's a huge revival of pilgrimage going on in europe at the moment um it's a bit more difficult in north america because the native american sacred places were not valued by the white settlers um and then the native americans probably wouldn't want thousands of uh white immigrant type people taking over their so they're taking over everything else so that wouldn't that would be tricky there are of course wonderful cathedrals when i'm in new york for example or san francisco i walk to the cathedrals and john the divine or host patrick's in new york or grace cathedral in san francisco and there are these wonderful holy buildings which i find powerful and inspirational but in america the thing that has become the main focus i think of nunes are the sacred groves of america those places in all societies used to have sacred groves where the spirits of the land could still have a sanctuary and those have been rebranded national parks in the united states or state parks and these are like gigantic sacred groves on a scale that's not hardly exists in most other countries and visiting or walking through or two well within uh these parks in the spirit of pilgrimage to particularly powerful points or places within them is i think one of the best ways of restoring the pilgrimage principle in america and um it's it's different from just going on a hike on a pilgrimage you go with an intention you go to make an offering to a place if any of singing something or offering a prayer um you go with asking to give thanks or to ask for healing or for inspiration um and so i think pilgrimage is actually a wonderful way of expressing the fact we're on a spiritual journey and we're trying looking for holy places which connect us that connect the heavens and the earth as all traditional holy places do thank you i love that uh mike do you have any any closing thoughts or comments uh just thankfully you take the time to be with us today um it's been an honor and i feel like i've learned a lot and i have a lot to think about and thank you and thank you to all of you joining us watching uh on your computers as well um i like having a slower deeper more informed conversation that maybe is typical in media and uh i hope that this this time of thought would lead you to a time of reflection that ultimately grows into practice in your life and uh and we hope to see uh as many of you as can come to our cosmic campfire gathering february first and second thank you so much uh dr rupert sheldrake for joining us here we we hope to uh to be in touch some more thank you a pleasure being with you