Rupert Sheldrake - Science & Spiritual Practices

Full transcript: Rupert Sheldrake on London Real

3:04 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, the biologist and author of more than 85 scientific papers and 10 books, who’s been ranked as one of the top 100 global thought leaders. You’ve studied at both Harvard and Cambridge University and been a research fellow for the Royal Society here in London.

4:16 You’re well known for your theory of morphic resonance, which states that memory is inherent in nature and that telepathic interconnections exist between organisms. Your new book, Science and Spiritual Practices, shows how science helps validate the seven practices on which all religions are built and which are a part of our common human heritage. Rupert, welcome back to London Real. Good to be here again, Brian. It’s a pleasure having you. It’s been probably five years.

4:43 We had an amazing conversation last time. I bumped into you probably three or four months ago in Hampstead Heath. I was out there running through the Heath after I jumped in the lake. I do this every weekend, every Saturday. I saw you on a Sunday and you walked by and you said hello.

5:01 I don’t think you knew who I was. I said, hi, Rupert. We started talking about nature and some of these pilgrimage walks that you’ve been making to different churches. I was really fascinated with what you were talking about, but we were both in the Heath. I kind of wanted to start there because I’ve been drawn to that lately and I don’t know why.

5:22 You spend a lot of time there as well. I was wondering, why do you spend time there and maybe you can tell me why I’m drawn to that place. Well, both of us are lucky enough to live near Hampstead Heath. Most people don’t have the chance to live near a thousand acres of basically wild countryside in the middle of a city. I love going there because I find it very relaxing.

5:48 It takes me completely away from my normal concerns. I walk a few yards onto the Heath and there’s grass, there’s trees, it changes of course throughout the seasons. There’s hawthorn blossom in the spring. It’s just different every day and the weather’s different every day. It’s a reminder of a connection with nature, which I think is actually fundamental to all human beings.

6:12 Making that connection on a regular basis, I think is, I find it relaxing. I think life would be very claustrophobic without it. I come from a science background and I know you have as well. I want to talk a little bit about your journey, which you talk about in the book. I never knew all the details of it.

6:33 I’d love to walk us through that and then talk about some of these seven practices. I was the kid in high school that did the science fair projects and I never liked English or history. Then when I got to MIT, it was just more science and more engineering. For me, I kind of rejected anything else. I’ll be honest, along with that, probably went some atheism as well.

6:57 With London Real, I’ve been introduced to some other ideas. When you first came here five years ago and talked about morphic resonance, I was like, I don’t know what this guy’s on about. But in the past five years, I’ve tried to open my mind to lots of things because I’m drawn to the Heath. I’ve opened my mind to some psychedelic medicines. I’ve opened my mind to work of Mantec Chia and some things which I can’t explain, I can’t understand, but they feel right.

7:27 I was wondering if you could tell me about your journey with some of that. Does this sound strange coming from me? Well, no, it doesn’t sound strange, Brian. Well, I don’t mean how long. I mean how much of the journey.

7:44 I did science at school. I was very drawn to science. Because I was very drawn to animals and plants, I think you were an engineer. Well, I was drawn to biology more than engineering. I kept a lot of pets as a child.

8:00 My father was a herbalist and a pharmacist, so I learned a lot of plants from him, and he had a microscope laboratory at home. I had immersion really in the kind of natural history type of biology. So I did biology at school, and I liked it, but I did notice that the first thing we did in our biology classes was kill what we were studying. So biology is meant to be the science of life, but I soon realized it’s actually the science of death because you kill everything and cut it up.

8:34 And those days we did a lot of dissection. I think nowadays they do less in schools. And then I wanted to read science at Cambridge, so I did more biology at Cambridge. But I began to feel it was all too limited. I mean, it seemed to leave out all the things that most interested me, which is why when I had a chance to go to Harvard and do history and philosophy of science, I welcomed this chance to step back a bit and look at the bigger picture, which I did.

9:07 And when I did that, it was soon after Thomas Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had come out. And what Kuhn shows in that book is that at any given time in the world of science, there’s a shared model of reality, a paradigm, he called it. And then there are periods of revolutionary change when the paradigm shifts. And that will move to a completely different model of reality. The best known example, of course, is the move in the 16th and 17th century from the idea that the Earth is at the center of the universe to the idea that the Sun is at the center of the solar system, the Copernican Revolution.

9:45 And Darwin’s theory of evolution is another one. Quantum physics is another one. But the biology is based on the mechanistic theory of life, the idea that living organisms are machines, they’re inanimate mechanisms. They don’t have feelings, they don’t really have intelligence, they don’t have consciousness. All this seemed to me completely implausible, having kept dogs and cats and birds and looking at animals, spending a lot of time with them.

10:20 The idea they were just automata seemed to me completely implausible. And so when I discovered that this paradigm, this model, this mechanistic theory of nature, might just be a temporary model rather than ultimate truth, which is the way it was taught to me, I got quite excited. Science could change, it could be telling us something different. So actually a lot of my scientific career has been trying to find a bigger picture of reality, which treats living organisms as organisms when nature is alive.

10:56 Is that called scienceism when you believe so much in the science you’ve been taught that you refuse to believe something else and it becomes your religion in a way? Yes. Scientificism is where people turn science into a kind of religion. It becomes a kind of dogmatic belief system. The irony is that a lot of people think that religion is dogmatic and science is free thinking.

11:19 But actually in my experience, some of the most dogmatic people I know are people who’ve made science into a kind of religion. Not Richard Dawkins. Well, he can’t, yes. And so your journey continued and I believe that India played a big part in the evolution of your consciousness and spirituality. Can you talk about that?

11:42 Because I was kind of fascinated to learn about the time you spent there. Well, in 1968 I was traveling through India to Malaysia. I had a Royal Society research appointment at the University of Malaya to study rainforest plants. And on the way there I just thought I’d stop for a few days in India. I didn’t know anyone there, but I ran into, well, I didn’t know one person there, but I didn’t know where he was and I happened to run into him a few days after I arrived in Delhi.

12:15 And he was an anthropologist living in a remote village in the Himalayas and he said, would you like to come to my village? So I said, yes. And so just within a few days of being in India, I was walking several miles from the nearest road head through paths, through fields, to this remote village, no electricity, there was no radio, no television, of course, in those days, where people were living a very simple kind of life, but sophisticated, very sophisticated, the life of an Indian village.

12:47 And I was staying with the family he lived with, the herbal doctor in the village. They made me really at home. I felt tremendously at home in India and I felt, wow, this is the country that I really, it’s like coming home. I just felt this was the right place for me. You said sophisticated, how?

13:08 Well, philosophically sophisticated, for example. I mean, there was a great respect for the Hindu scriptures and Hindu philosophy. And I went one day for a walk with my friend along a valley and there was a stream and a waterfall, and by the waterfall was a cave, and sitting in the cave was this orange clad holy man. So he invited us to go and talk to him and sit with him. So he did.

13:37 Then he produced this little chillum, a pipe, a clay pipe. I had not seen one before. And said, would I like to smoke Shiva’s holy plant? And I didn’t know what that was, so I thought, okay, well, I’ll try it. Here I am.

13:50 It was a particularly strong form of cannabis, which I hadn’t had before. And he did an invocation to the god Shiva. This is like a kind of sacrament for sadhus. And so I smoked this and I had this really strong cannabis experience, the first one I’d had. And I went outside from the cave and I stood in the sunlight and there were the Himalayas and there was this beautiful valley.

14:16 And I just felt completely blissful. It was like the high point of my life up to that point, a complete blissful feeling of connection and being at one with nature and the spirit and so on. So that for me was an enormous opening and I realized that this kind of thing is normal in India. This holy man sitting there next to a village, talking about the nature of consciousness, the nature of the mind, simple villagers bringing him food every day because they like to feed these holy men and appreciating his teachings.

14:54 And instead of taking this drug, you know something you feel guilty about and smoking behind a bush because it’s illegal and stuff. Which would happen in the UK. Whereas what happened there was that this was an accepted part of the culture and it had a spiritual dimension. Well all of this was completely new to me and as I traveled through India for the next two months, I realized that here was this vast civilization with this tremendous history, very different from anything I’d experienced in England, where people took seriously the idea of higher levels of consciousness.

15:31 At that stage, through my scientific education, I’d become pretty atheistic. I wasn’t particularly open to any kind of religion, but in India it all seemed so attractive and so interesting. And when they were talking about the nature of the mind and consciousness, I realized that I didn’t have any better theory from my scientific education. All I could say was that it must be something to do with nerve impulses and chemicals in the brain, but not a very sophisticated understanding.

16:03 Talk to me about meditation and yoga and the journey that you went on with those practices from India. Well after I’d been in India and Malaysia, I went back to Cambridge. I was a fellow of Clare College and I was doing research in science. And at that stage, the next thing that happened was discovering LSD, which I hadn’t had before. A friend of mine had taken some.

16:31 And in those days… Probably legal then, in the late sixties. It was illegal, yes. Illegal. Illegal.

16:36 No, it had recently become illegal. It was only fairly recently because until then it had been legal. And I had friends when I was in my hometown in Nottinghamshire, New York. One of my friends there was a young doctor and he was friendly with several psychiatrists. And at that stage, psychiatrists and young doctors were taking it at weekends and it was legal and it was like a scientific experiment.

17:02 They were having a fantastic time. It had become illegal by the time I took it. But it was a kind of revelatory experience. I had a kind of death and rebirth experience. I felt I thought I’d taken a massive overdose.

17:19 I was going to be insane for the rest of my life. I was scared. I thought I was in hell. And then I, as it were, came up to the surface, broke out into light and I was in a state of complete bliss. And so this was a revelation that showed that it was far more to consciousness than I’d ever experienced.

17:40 And that led me to take up meditation around 1971, transcendental meditation. And they explained it to the teaching centre in Cambridge, just do it, here’s how you do it. You don’t need to believe anything. It’ll affect the physiology of your body, your blood pressure, your heartbeat, etc. Just do it and see what happens.

18:09 So I did and I felt much calmer. I felt it very helpful practice. I did it twice a day for years. I only gave up when I had young children and I found it was very hard to meditate in the morning with young children around. And you were remarked that the transcendental meditation, it worked for you even though there wasn’t scientific proof of how it would work for you.

18:32 Yes. And there wasn’t a religion based with it, so it was quite unique. Well, that was how they marketed it. I mean, of course it was a derivative of the Hindu religion. I mean, the Maharishi, Mahish Yogi who taught it was a Hindu holy man.

18:46 I trained in TM as well. Yes. Well, they marketed it very skillfully. They marketed it as if you didn’t need to believe in anything. You just do it and learn by experience.

18:57 That was fine by me. I wanted to learn by experience. Of course, since then, there’s now been a huge amount of research on meditation, which I summarize in my new book. Now, you do the transcendental meditation. How do you get back in touch with religion?

19:20 And why do you need religion? You’re a scientist or you were a scientist. Well, I am a scientist. I mean, I spend most of my time doing experiments. I’ve been doing one today.

19:30 So, no, scientist, well, again, it’s a long story. When I got back to Cambridge, the accommodation of meditation and psychedelics had this transformative effect on the way I saw the world. And the way of thinking that made most sense to me came from Hindu philosophy, the nature of consciousness being our consciousness being part of a greater consciousness, which underlies the whole universe. That made sense to me, made sense of the experiences I was having.

20:10 More sense than the idea it’s just inside my brain. The idea there’s a larger consciousness of which we’re all part. So, I was so interested in Indian philosophy that when a chance came up several years later to have a job in India at a newly formed international agricultural institute, I applied for the job and got it. My title was Principal Plant Physiologist. So, I spent seven years in India working on crop improvement.

20:41 I was doing, hopefully, I think it was useful work, helping to breed better varieties, helping to develop better cropping systems, helping poor farmers grow more food. So, I was doing useful work as part of a scientific institute. And I was also exploring India and going to temples and hearing gurus and visiting ashrams and so on. And I was very drawn to this. I was very drawn to the fact that the Hindu religion brings together people in these festivals.

21:14 They go on pilgrimages to holy places all over India. It engages the whole community in a way that brings people together, gives them a sense of purpose, connection and meaning. I think religion does that. I think atheism doesn’t do it. I think it gives a sense of separation.

21:32 Your mind’s nothing but your brain. You’re in a purposeless universe. It’s just mindless matter. There’s no purpose, no particular meaning. When you die, it just goes blank.

21:43 It’s a pretty depressing philosophy. And I thought, well, I shouldn’t question it because it’s depressing. If it’s true, then you’ve got to put up the depressing aspect. But I came to the conclusion it wasn’t true because it just didn’t have a good theory of consciousness. So, anyway, the Hindu thing was very attractive to me.

22:04 And then I had some Muslim friends too. I learned Urdu, which is the Muslim language in Hyderabad where I was living. Then I had a Sufi teacher, a very elegant elderly Sufi with a beard and wonderful robes and tremendous style and a great poet. And so I did Sufi meditation for a year, which I liked very much. And I liked going to the Sufi shrines in Hyderabad where they chanted songs called Qawali every Thursday evening.

22:40 There’d be groups of people singing this kind of ecstatic singing. So I loved that. And so that made sense. But then I realized I was drawn to these religions, but I’m English. I couldn’t really become a Hindu.

22:56 You really have to be an Indian to be a Hindu. Is that true? No, you can. You can sort of convert to be a Hindu. It’s a bit artificial.

23:05 You know the holy places of Hinduism are all in India. And I’m English and more natural for me to relate to my own tradition. And becoming a Sufi in India, you’ve become a Muslim as well if you want to be a Sufi. I didn’t really want to become a Muslim. So I realized that actually the best path for me to explore might be to re-explore my Christian path.

23:35 So I did that, and I found it very easy to get back into it, because I’d been raised Christian. Okay. And I still had… I wasn’t particularly committed at first. I just thought I’d explore this as another path.

23:53 I explored so many others, Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam. It seemed a bit discriminatory not to include Christianity. And I then met this wonderful English Benedictine monk who lived in an ashram in South India, who, where there was yoga, meditation every morning and evening, I used to sit on the bank of the sacred river, Khovri. It was a kind of hybrid of Indian and Western. And we chanted the Gayatri Mantra and other Sanskrit mantras, and it was vegetarian, sat on the floor, ate off banana leaves.

24:36 It was in a small village, very much integrated with the local village life. Sounds like a wonderful experience. Do you miss it? It was a wonderful experience. Well, I do rather.

24:46 I spent two years there, and I wrote my first book there, A New Science of Life. So that was the book where I first put forward the idea of morphic resonance. Okay. Which was a… Now that I listened to it, that was because of all these experiences, right?

25:00 Well, it was… I had the idea of a memory in nature when I was in Cambridge before I went to India to live there. I arrived at it through working on how plants grow, how form arises. That was what I was doing research on. And I realized that there had to be some kind of form-shaping influence in plants.

25:24 What makes an oak leaf an oak leaf and a beech leaf a beech leaf? They have the same kinds of chemicals, the same hormones, yet they’re different shapes. The same in our bodies, what makes an arm an arm and a leg a leg? They’ve got the same DNA, the same proteins, the same chemistry. I mean, they’re chemically identical, yet they have different shapes.

25:45 So it’s a bit like buildings. You can build out of bricks and cement and timber. You can build different shaped buildings, go down a suburban street, and there’ll be lots of houses. They look different, but they’re built out of the same materials. So it’s not the materials, the molecules that shape it, it’s something else.

26:05 So within biology was the idea of morphogenetic fields, which are form-shaping fields. I got very interested in that. I didn’t invent that idea. It had been around for 50 years or more. But I had the idea that these fields must be inherited, not through DNA, which is to do with the inheritance of proteins, but in some other way.

26:31 Then I realized if there was a kind of memory in nature, a huge number of phenomena would become much easier to understand. And that was really the germ of the idea of morphic resonance, which I had in Cambridge. But it was obvious it was going to be very controversial scientifically. And when I discussed it with friends in my college and in the biochemistry laboratory where I worked, it was clear that most people didn’t take it seriously and treated it as a kind of joke.

27:03 How do you deal with that? Because you’ve never been afraid to put these controversial ideas out there. Well, I realized that if I was going to put out an idea as controversial as this, I had to be much better prepared than just having the idea. I had to think about it for a long time to see if it really held up. I had to look at the evidence and see whether there was already evidence for this.

27:26 I had to see how it fitted in with physics and chemistry. And I had to think it through. I was doing that while I was working in India in the Agricultural Institute. In my spare time, I was thinking about this and reading and discussing it with people. And the funny thing is you see that whereas in Cambridge, most people thought this was a kind of incredibly shocking new idea, when I discussed it with my Hindu friends, most of them said, oh, there is nothing new in this idea.

27:58 They said, ancient rishis have said this thousands of years ago. The idea of a memory in nature is pretty standard in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. So I was living, suddenly, I found myself living in a culture where people didn’t find the idea shocking at all. They thought the basic idea must be right. But they weren’t very interested in trying to prove it scientifically because they would just say, sure, it must be right.

28:23 What’s the point proving it? So I had the exact opposite problem in India from the one I had in Cambridge. In India, I just couldn’t persuade people that it was worth doing experiments or testing it. Whereas people in Cambridge said, you know, there’s such crazy idea. Where’s the evidence?

28:43 Anyway, when I finally got to write this book in Father Bede’s ashram in South India, for me, it was a perfect combination living in a contemplative community where it was a very happy community. And here was this marvelously radiant holy man who was just a totally good person, incredibly bright and intelligent and yet radiated this kind of mystical holiness. I mean, in a very open way, he could talk to anyone. So here was this marvelous person, here was this happy community, here was sort of regular meals.

29:27 I was living simply. I had plenty of time to think and to write. I lived in a palm-thatched hut under a banyan tree. So I was living extremely simply. It cost me, by contributing my keep to the ashram, about $250 to live for a year and a half.

29:45 That was my first day there. And then I stopped worrying about money. I thought, I’ve already got enough in the bank to live here for the rest of my life if I want to. So that dissolved any money worries. And I discovered I could live very happily on very, very little money.

30:02 So a combination of a community, regular meditation, chanting and singing, which is a very important spiritual practice, prayer, thinking, writing. It was a very good mixture for me. And at no stage did I feel there was a conflict between science and religion or spirituality. Something we haven’t talked about yet is materialism. And where does this come in?

30:31 Because it seems like it might kind of go alongside of this scientism, atheism. Does materialism come next? Because there’s a lot of that going on in the world, at least there is on the media channels that I look at on the internet. There seems to be a lot of this. What is your take on that?

30:49 Well, materialism has two meanings. Firstly, it’s a philosophical theory that became predominant among intellectuals in the late 19th century. And as a philosophical theory, it says the ultimate reality is matter. That’s why it’s called materialism. Matter-ism.

31:08 Matter is the only reality, the ultimate reality. The whole universe is made of matter, and nothing but matter. And matter is unconscious. It works mechanically. It follows mathematical laws.

31:23 It’s completely impersonal. Insofar as evolution takes place, it happens by blind chance and natural selection. There’s no purpose in a materialist universe. No God, no guiding principles that are conscious. Simply unconscious laws and forces.

31:44 Well, that’s the doctrine, and that became predominant within science in the late 19th century. And as a doctrine, it works quite well for technological civilization. You know, if you’ve got a civilization that’s all about engineering and machines, and progress through gadgets and technology, jet planes and the internet and smartphones and things. As a philosophy, it works pretty well. But it doesn’t work very well if you ask the question, well, why are humans conscious?

32:17 Why is there any consciousness in the universe? Because if nature is made of nothing but unconscious matter, how come we’re conscious? And in the philosophy of mind, that is called the hard problem. The very existence of consciousness is a problem for materialism. It gets rid of God and angels and other forms of consciousness from the world view.

32:40 But it hasn’t got rid of human consciousness. And some materialists pretend that we’re not really conscious. Some pretend our consciousness is just an illusion. But that doesn’t explain it, because illusion is a mode of consciousness. It’s a really big problem in the very heart of science.

32:57 And there’s a lot of thinking about this going on at the moment. Consciousness studies are now a very big part of science. Yeah, where is that right now? How do you explain consciousness or define consciousness or prove it? Well, I’ll come back to that, but I’ll just deal with the second meaning of materialism.

33:12 The second meaning in, like, everyday speech is where people say, oh, people are very materialistic if they just want to buy things and go to shopping malls and have stuff and are concerned about money and things. Well, that’s the everyday thing, and most people use it in that sense aren’t aware that it’s a whole philosophy of nature. But the two are related, because if you think matters the only reality, then buying stuff seems like the best kind of thing to do, the old morality.

33:43 So anyway, to come back to consciousness, the traditional opponent of materialism in Western philosophy is called dualism, and that’s what science started out with in the 17th century, modern science. The whole of nature is mechanical, unconscious matter. But there is also in nature something which is non-material, which is conscious spirit, which is completely immaterial and not in space and time. And there’s three kinds of conscious spirit, firstly God, secondly angels, and thirdly human minds.

34:21 And so that view, which is called dualism or Cartesian dualism after Descartes, who was the first person to put it forward, a 17th century philosopher in France. This philosophy says that the whole of nature works exactly mechanically, just like science says it does, but then there’s this kind of add-on of God and angels and human minds, which are based on reason that aren’t really in space and time. But it doesn’t explain how God or angels can possibly relate to a mechanical natural world.

34:57 So in the 19th century, the materialist said, oh, well, let’s just get rid of this realm of spirit, get rid of gods and angels, and that means all religions are ridiculous. And that meant that revolutionaries like the French revolutionaries and later the Russian revolutionaries could undermine the power of the church, which they thought was propping up reactionary states, by saying the whole thing is a sham and a pretense, and there’s no God, there’s no meaning in any of this. So it became a materialism led to a kind of political atheism, which was liberating in many ways, but which created this hard problem.

35:36 If you get rid of all forms of consciousness from the universe, except human consciousness, you’re then left with the problem of how do you explain it. So we get to the hard problem. I myself don’t like the materialist theory because, I mean, I don’t like that. I don’t like the dualist theory either because it has kind of separate consciousness. So what’s happening at the moment is an interesting development of a lot of materialists who are getting, feel they’re stuck with this materialist view.

36:13 They can’t explain human consciousness. Some of them, after all, meditate and carry over. Spiritual practices are becoming quite common among atheists. Is that like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or their closeted life of meditation?

36:28 How do they explain it if they’re materialists? Well, they think it’s all happening inside the brain. You see, a typical example is Sam Harris, who’s one of the so-called new atheists. He’s an ardent meditator who spent two years in India visiting gurus and being initiated into meditation. And you disagree with him by him saying it’s only mental and he’s ignoring the spiritual.

36:50 Yes. He and I would agree about its value. The point is, in my book, one of the practices I discuss is meditation. And there’s now a great deal of scientific evidence that it’s good for you. It helps people. It acts against depression. It lowers blood pressure.

37:10 It helps deal with insomnia. People who meditate are happier and healthier on the whole, and people who don’t, if they’re comparable kinds of people. It’s a beneficial practice, which is why you can now get a prescription for it on the British National Health Service, people who have mild and moderate depression. So quite a lot of atheists now meditate, and Sam Harris is one of them. And you think he needs to look at it differently.

37:41 Well, the thing is that we don’t quarrel about the experience, but meditation grew out of Buddhist and Hindu and Christian and Sufi traditions, where it was about going to the ground of your mind, letting go of the passing thoughts, and getting to the place in your mind from which these thoughts are going through. It’s like the arena of consciousness in which you’re thinking through which these thoughts are passing. It’s like stepping back. And then you realize there’s something in your mind which is the basis of your consciousness.

38:15 And that, in all traditional systems, is an aspect of God’s consciousness. You’re actually directly contacting the divine consciousness. Now, for atheists who meditate, they’d say, no, it’s not that at all. It’s just inside the brain. It’s nothing but changes in nerve cells and nerve endings.

38:35 Gemma waves. Nervous waves, neurotransmitters, dopamine levels, and so on. All these things do change in the brain. And it’s obviously hard to decide whether it’s more or less than a greater consciousness or whether it’s just the brain on the basis of meditation itself, because a lot of meditators are atheists. A lot of meditators do have a religious or spiritual view.

39:02 I think there are other ways of looking at this picture, where I think the difference becomes greatest is with prayer. Practically no atheists pray, according to recent surveys, which makes sense, because if you believe there’s no consciousness beyond your brain, then there’s nothing to pray to. Whereas all religions have prayer as part of them. The idea that our consciousness can relate to a greater consciousness than our own. And there are lots, in Britain, about a third of the population pray quite regularly, far more than actually go to church.

39:44 I mean, it’s a much more common practice than meditation as well. But there’s where you get a real difference between prayer and meditation, because prayer can’t just be inside your brain if it’s going to be what it seems to be, namely a relationship with a greater form of consciousness. Let’s talk about this word, religion, because in the last 50 years, at least when I’ve been alive, when you mention it, there’s a phobia to it, there’s a rejection of it.

40:14 And kids these days, I’m starting to sound old when I say that, when you mention it to them, I don’t know, because of bad press or because of materialism or scientism or atheism, people a lot of times have a knee-jerk reaction of, no, I don’t believe in that, that’s an old way of thinking, that’s something I don’t like, my parents try to get me there, I don’t relate. I’m sure you know this. Oh, yes, of course. Why does that happen? And obviously, I think your book is a way of telling people that that’s not necessary to reject it, since there’s all of these amazing benefits in these thousands of years of religion, and I want to get into these other practices, but why is that reaction there?

40:52 You must have thought long about it, and how can we get around that? Well, I had that reaction myself, so I’m very familiar with it. Yeah. I think for me, when I had that reaction, it was the idea that science represents sort of reason, progress, moving forward, and religion just sort of holds us back in a sort of ancient way of thinking, which we’ve grown out of as humans. That was the kind of progressivist, materialist, atheist view.

41:24 And then there’s a lot of atheist propaganda against religion, which a lot of people just absorb by a kind of osmosis, causes wars and conflicts, dogmatic, people are manipulated, et cetera. Well, I mean, those is true. There have been religious wars and conflicts, but often people say that as if that’s, you know, religion’s particularly bad, but actually, when you look at atheism, when it becomes a political force, you know, in Stalin’s Russia, how many people died, except outside the wars, 20 or 30 million died in the Second World War, but 20 million, 30 million people perished as a result of Stalin’s policies.

42:09 In Mao’s China, again, atheist, about 40 million perished. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, 2 million out of the population of 6 million. So atheism itself has a pretty murderous history when it’s achieved political power, and in the French Revolution, when it was first burst onto the scene, it was, you know, they closed all the churches, persecuted religion, guillotined priests, abolished monasteries. So it’s not as if atheism’s track record is free of blemish. What I think this shows is that all human institutions and religions and philosophies and governments and nations of all human institutions are fallible and can be taken over by people who can exploit the power in a bad way.

43:01 So personally, I didn’t think that the historical arguments are conclusive against religion. I mean, religions have also brought about a lot of very good things, closer communities, the tradition of helping others. In the Christian case, the church started schools and universities and hospitals and hospices. I mean, all these things were started first by religious people, not by atheists. So there’s been a tremendous legacy of good works and people who help others.

43:34 Even today, when there’s a big call on people’s charity when there are disasters, religious people make much bigger contributions than atheists. And so the purpose of this book is to outline seven of the practices that most religions are drawn to, or most people that are in religions that you looked at them and use. And that’s meditation, gratitude, connecting with nature, relating to plants, rituals, singing and chanting, and of course pilgrimage. Yeah.

44:05 Is that why you wrote the book? I wrote the book because I think a lot of people in the modern world who’ve given up religion, and in Britain, for example, the percentage of people who regularly go to church is now about 5%. Wow. In a survey last year, no, this year, for the first time more than 50% of the population said they had no religion. Now, there’s never been a situation in the whole history of the world before where the majority of the population have left or abandoned religion.

44:37 It just hasn’t happened. It didn’t happen in Europe in the past. It doesn’t apply in the Middle East. It doesn’t apply in India. It doesn’t apply in most places.

44:47 In America? In America, America is much more religious. About 40% or 50% of people go to church on a regular basis there, compared with 5% here. Okay. This shows you what?

45:00 This alarmed you? No. That a lot of people who, if you stop going to church and abandon religion, then you stop joining with other people and singing with them on a regular basis. You stop having a center of your community where you all meet up and try and help others. You stop celebrating the festivals which give a kind of meaning and structure.

45:23 So, yeah. You start praying, which for many people is a great source of strength and helps them. You stop meditating if that’s part of religious tradition. You stop going on pilgrimages because you know there’s no point in going on sacred journeys if you don’t believe in the sacred or the holy. You stop a whole range of things.

45:46 You stop giving thanks before meals or expressing gratitude because there’s no one to express it to if you don’t believe in anything greater than yourself. So, people who stop all those things and accept a worldview that their mind is nothing but their brain. We live in a pointless, unconscious universe. There’s no particular meaning in anything. There’s no purpose in evolution.

46:12 It’s a depressing worldview. And I think it’s no coincidence that modern societies, the endemic disease of modern industrial societies is depression. There are millions of people on antidepressants. Kids are being given antidepressants. Suicide is growing among school children.

46:29 I mean, if you think your mind is nothing but your brain, it’s separative. You’re separated from others. You have no connection with the greater world. So, I think we’re in a situation of an unprecedented situation of separation, depression, and spiritual practices can actually help with all this. And it’s not just my personal opinion.

46:53 There’s now been a lot of scientific research on the spiritual practices I discuss in my book, Science and Spiritual Practices, which shows that people who do these are generally speaking happier, healthier, and live longer. And most of them don’t cost anything. That’s the other thing. So, I just feel it’s very important for, in the modern world, in this situation, for people to know that these are available, and also that these have had a scientific investigation which has shown their value.

47:26 So, it’s not just personal opinion. It’s not something to say, take this on faith. No, it’s try it and see what happens. And probably, if you’re like most people who’ve tried it, you’ll find a benefit coming from this. I’m not in my book saying that to do these practices, you have to become religious because you don’t.

47:45 A lot of people who meditate are not religious. A lot of people who connect with nature are not religious. In fact, for many atheists, it’s the main spiritual practice that they have. And thank goodness they do because it’s a very helpful one. You don’t have to be religious even to go on a pilgrimage.

48:03 A lot of the people who go on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain are atheists or agnostics. The British pilgrimage trust, which I’m a patron of, runs pilgrimages in England on foot through the fields and woods and meadows. And again, many people who go on those are atheists. They’re not religious. So, I’m not saying become religious.

48:29 What I am saying is try these spiritual practices and your life will probably improve. That’s what I’m trying to say. If people then, I mean, I myself am religious and I find that doing them in the context of the Church of England, I mean Anglican, for me it makes sense. It relates me to my ancestors, my own tradition. It relates me to the traditions of England, the holy places of England, the cathedrals, the churches, and so on.

48:59 But I’m not saying that’s a necessary part of it. And for people who come from Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Sikh backgrounds, then the Christian path isn’t going to seem a particularly natural or helpful one. Probably better to connect with their own ancestral backgrounds. Can you give us some practical guides for each one of these seven pieces and a way that people could just try this out? Because I think they’re all very important, but some people don’t know how to connect with nature.

49:28 Some people don’t know how to express gratitude. So, would you mind doing that? All right. Meditation, do we cover? You talk a little bit about it.

49:36 We both do Transcendental for a while, which is 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening, of a fairly standard practice and a regular practice. What do you say about the meditation or prayer practice as far as something anybody can do? Well, the meditation practice that anyone can do is sitting quietly, and there’s two ways. Either you do it with a mantra, which is a word or phrase that you say over and over again silently, or pay attention to breathing.

50:06 And probably, for people who’ve never done it before, just sitting quietly and feeling the breath going in and out of the nose is a very simple way of doing it. It means people don’t have to decide what mantra they’re going to use and get into a whole kind of in-eternal discussion about, you know, what phrase or what tradition they want to link to. Everyone breathes. So, mindfulness meditation is mostly based on observing sensations in the body or the breathing.

50:35 So, sitting quietly for 20 minutes, focusing on the feeling of breath coming out of the nose. And what will happen, inevitably, is that all sorts of thoughts and worries and concerns will come into the mind, flow through one’s mind. Forget all about the breath or the mantra. But the point is to come back to it when you realize you’ve forgotten, and keep coming back to it. And that sort of relativizes all these thoughts, which are otherwise all-consuming.

51:06 You’re trapped inside them. But it’s a way of stepping outside them and seeing what’s happening in your mind. You learn more about how your mind’s working. Now, anyone can do that. In relation to gratitude…

51:21 Just with transcendental meditation, I always tell people with meditation practice, just don’t judge yourself. A lot of people think, oh, I failed again. I failed on the Buddha on your practice. And if your mind wanders, as you said, just remind yourself to kind of get back to a focal point. And the fact that you did it, the fact that you made it even 10 minutes or 20 minutes, in any form, is a win.

51:42 And the next day, go in again and go in again. And I’ll say one more thing. Neither one of us would be sitting here right now if it wasn’t for transcendental meditation. It’s why I left the banking industry. And it was the one thing that broke my dogma, which made no sense and didn’t make sense for years and years and years.

52:00 And it was that practice of me stepping back 20 minutes twice a day that finally allowed me to say, what the hell are you doing here? This is not making you happy. This is horrible. Leave. And without it, there would be no London Real.

52:14 So it’s… Well, that’s really interesting, Brian. I didn’t know that part of your history, yes. Yeah. No, it can be transformative, as it was for you and as it was for me.

52:24 And it’s very simple. But it’s a matter of making it a practice because if you don’t have the discipline of making it a practice, then you’ll read the paper, listen to the news, get up late, rush to work. It gets squeezed out. And the point about these spiritual practices is you have to make them a practice, otherwise they’re not going to happen. It’s the same with physical practices.

52:49 Having the intention of going to the gym or going for a run is not enough. You have to actually do it. And very often you don’t feel like doing it. So it’s a kind of discipline. Yeah, the discipline is very important.

53:02 Yes. And I find… So I meditated this morning. I do it every morning after I wake up. I have a routine.

53:08 I brush my teeth. I get back in bed and I sit in bed and I meditate. And the reason I do it is because I don’t like Brian when he stops doing it and nobody likes him. And he goes back to bad behaviors. So for me, it’s just my insurance policy.

53:20 I make sure I do it, and now everybody leaves me alone in the morning. Because they don’t like him either. So… You’re right. This takes discipline as do these other practices as well.

53:29 Yes. But if you put them in, it can literally change your life. Yes. It can connect you back to humanity. Yes.

53:35 Right? Yes. And to the bigger picture beyond humanity. Okay. Yeah.

53:42 All right. Gratitude. What are the ways you practice gratitude and what are some of the ways that we can do that or people listening? Well, I think, again, it’s very, very simple. One of the simplest ways is counting your blessings, thinking of all the things you’re grateful for, and preferably doing it every day at the end of the day.

54:01 What are the great things that have happened today? Well, first of all, I’m alive and I’m well. I’m in good health. I’ve had enough to eat. I mean, we take these things for granted.

54:12 So the opposite of gratitude is entitlement or taking for granted. I’m grateful for my wife, my family. I’m grateful for the fact I do work, I enjoy doing. I’m grateful that I can go for walks on Hampstead Heath and indeed that I can go for walks at all. I’m grateful that I have flowers around me and plants and trees.

54:38 So I can think of grateful for all the things people have done in the course of the day that have helped me. And I have the same practice. I actually use an app. I know you don’t carry a phone, and I respect that very much, Dr. Chiljak.

54:54 But on my phone it’s called the Five Minute Journal and it was actually created by some guests, former guests, Alex and Mimi Icon, who I think you might have met at one of our Thanksgiving ceremonies. We’ll talk about that ceremony soon. And every day, every morning, I say, what are the three things I’m grateful for? And I write them out every morning. And at the end of the day, there are three great things that happen today.

55:14 And sometimes it’s hard to think of things and it forces you to get back and reframe your existence. Like you said, amazing to be able to walk on Hampstead Heath. Amazing to be able to walk. Yes. And there are so many people who can’t.

55:27 But it’s a daily discipline. Yes. You need to go to the practice. And the science of this shows that people who are grateful are much happier than people who feel entitled and complain all the time. There are even scientific studies that show that people who, as part of an experiment, do gratefulness practices, like making a list, writing down things they feel grateful for, are measurably happier.

55:52 Yes. So it works. So one practice is what both you and I do on a daily basis. Another one, which we do in our family, is we say grace before meals. And this is something that all traditional cultures have always done.

56:11 If you’re sitting down with friends or a family, you give thanks before the meal. It’s a form of daily thanksgiving. And when people say, oh, religion’s old fashioned, you know, we left all that, they stop doing it. So most people in Britain today don’t give thanks before meals. They look a little bit awkward at the beginning of the meal.

56:31 You know, they sort of shuffle around and say, oh, and someone sometimes says bon appétit or something, or do start. Whereas what we do at home is we hold hands, forming a circle. If it’s just the family or if it’s just a few friends, we do it silently so we can each give thanks in their own way. If it’s a big event, I or someone else says grace, or if they’re more of us, like Christmas and special events, we sing a grace. And so everyone sings a grace together.

57:02 And it makes a huge difference just to have that pause before the meal and to say a grace. Very traditional practice. Again, it costs absolutely nothing. And I find that most people who visit us are perfectly happy to join in with this. They’re not.

57:22 Because it feels right, that’s why. It’s a human thing. It’s a human thing. All cultures have done it. Right.

57:28 And people who don’t do it, feel awkward not doing it. And you see, it’s such a taboo now. It’s this taboo against religion. When Downton Abbey, the series was being made, someone asked the question, why didn’t they ever show them starting a meal in Downton Abbey? The answer is, because when at the period Downton Abbey was set, they would have all said grace before a meal.

57:51 They would have said grace before they ate. It’s just a traditional thing. So they never show the beginning of a meal because if they said grace, the TV producers were worried that it would upset atheists because it would be religion. That’s why they always cut in the middle of the meal. That’s right.

58:10 You’re right. All right, so that’s a gratitude practice. What is next? Talk to me about connecting with nature. And again, I’ve found myself just drawn to the heath.

58:21 And now I actually, I can’t go a week without spending at least a couple of hours. I turn all my media devices off. I jump in the lake now in the men’s pond, even when it’s cold. Again, I feel like I need to be there. And sometimes I have some kind of a weird spiritual experience there.

58:38 I don’t know what it is, Rupert. I’m looking at those trees, especially the place where I met you up there, kind of on that high hilly northern side. And something’s happening here. Now, maybe that’s a plant connection and we’re getting ahead of ourselves. But what is this nature connection?

58:51 I think partly it goes back to a deep ancestral thing. Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. They lived outdoors practically all the time. And in order to survive as hunter-gatherers, they had to understand animals and plants. They had to know about plants, to recognize them, to know when they were fruiting, where they could find food.

59:10 They had to know what animals did, what their habits were, how to hunt them. It’s very, very deep in our nature. And I think when people were, then there was farming and people became farmers, and all farmings about animals and plants too, domesticated animals and domesticated plants, but working outdoors. So it’s actually very recent. It’s only since the Industrial Revolution that most people have lived in towns and cities and work indoors.

59:39 And, you know, it’s only in the last 50 or 60 years that we’ve reached this highly urbanized indoor working thing. And one result has been an explosion of obesity. I mean, lots of people used to work in agriculture before the Second World War. Now it’s only about 3% of the population. And in many countries like India still, hundreds of millions are working in agriculture.

1:00:01 So this is part of our nature. In fact, when you stop doing that, you lose something, this connection with the greater world of biology and life. And the fact is most people feel the lack of the connection and they make up for it. The commonest hobby in Britain is gardening. And so I think that through gardening, people still retain that connection with plants.

1:00:25 And through keeping pets, no one has to keep dogs because they have to have a guard dog or to round out sheep or something. The vast majority of pets are kept as a kind of luxury. They’re not necessary. They’re not utilitarian, like farm animals are. But none of this can be explained scientifically.

1:00:45 Well, it can be explained scientifically in the sense that people who keep pets or do gardening, have lower blood pressure, tend to recover better from diseases and heart attacks and things. These have great benefits. But the practices, one of the practices I suggest in my book is a simple nature practice, is to find a sit spot somewhere outdoors that you can sit for about 20 minutes. It’s a bit like meditation, except in meditation, you’re withdrawing from the world.

1:01:17 You’re closing your eyes usually and not trying to pay attention to what’s happening outside you. In the sit spot, you have a place that’s familiar where you feel safe and secure. It could be in your garden. It could be on a rooftop. It could be a spot on the Hampstead Heath or in a wood or something.

1:01:34 The idea is to have it near home so it’s easy to go there on a regular basis. And then just to spend ideally 20 minutes a day sitting there and listening to the birds and noticing how the trees are with their own blossom when the leaves are coming out. Now the leaves are falling off the trees, observing and tuning into the seasons. If it’s in the same place and if you’re sitting, you get to know it well and you get to see the changes and to become familiar with it.

1:02:05 And that place gets familiar with you in the sense that the animals there get used to you. By the time you’ve been sitting quietly for about 10, 15 minutes, birds and other animals stop paying much attention to you. They just get used to you. Then you can tune into them. And if you’re sitting in a wood, for example, you’ll hear the alarm calls of blackbirds and you get to know there’s something happening.

1:02:30 There’s somebody coming and they’re warning other forms of life in the wood. Or there’s a cat moving through the garden. The blackbirds all give warning signs. So you can actually tune into what’s happening and what the animals are telling each other and you if you have ears to listen to it. So it’s a very simple practice.

1:02:48 I do it myself on Hempstead Heath. You’ve got your spot? I’ve got my spot. And you try to do it daily? I don’t manage that every day.

1:02:57 If I can’t go into the heath, I do it in our garden, outside. Okay. Next is plants, relating to plants. And again, I’ve had these inexplicable moments and there’s a few trees in the heath where I just stare at them. I’ve been doing this a lot lately, Rupert.

1:03:16 I’m a little worried about myself or maybe I should be happy with myself. But sometimes when these grow up in trees, I’m just staring up at them and I’m looking at them and I’m getting some message and people walk by me and I don’t know what I’m doing. But maybe you can tell me what I’m doing or how people can connect with the plants. Well, the two aspects I talk about in my book are flowers and trees. And trees, I think most people have the sense that trees are important.

1:03:46 I mean, they’re older and bigger than us, for a start. They have forms of life. Most trees on Hempstead Heath, the big ones, are older than you and me. Some of them have been there for three or four hundred years. Yeah, they’re massive.

1:03:57 Yes. I had this vision the other day that the tree was looking down on us and we’re all super busy in Hempstead, running around, trying to do our lives and make our money and post on the social media. And the trees are sitting there thinking like, okay, you’re a bunch of ants and I’ll still be here and I’ll still be here in a hundred years doing my thing, which is being a plant, being a tree, maybe communicating with you. I don’t know, I just had this observation.

1:04:24 Well, I think that’s right. I mean, most of them will still be there when we’re long dead and gone. And by the fact they’re bigger than us and longer lived than us, they put our lives into perspective. Yeah. And they’re all, because they’re rooted in the ground and their leaves go up into the sky, they’re literally linking heaven and earth.

1:04:47 They’re linking the sky and the light to the darkness of underground in a basic polarity of light and dark and down and up. So these very, very fundamental natural principles are embodied in the tree in a way that’s totally unmistakable, immediately obvious in your face. I feel wisdom in there as well. Yes, and they form this kind of, you can form this connection, which is very healing for a lot of people, it is for me. I took my daughter to Yosemite a few years ago and I really wanted to take her there and also show her the redwood trees and the sequoias.

1:05:26 And I read something that, the reason a lot of people go to these places is to feel that humility, you know, they’re just drawn to this representation and they want to show their children that these things are here and it’s our subtle way of saying things that maybe we can’t articulate or maybe we don’t even know in our brains. These are symbols that teach us to be grateful, to be human, to be humble. Yes, well I agree. I think, I think, I spent, I mean I took my kids out to be with trees when they were little.

1:06:02 I don’t know whether you’ve taken your daughter to the Hollow Tree on Hempstead Heath, do you know that tree when you climb inside? Yeah, I know that tree. That’s a fantastic tree to take children to because they can get inside it, it’s a beech tree and the sense of being inside a big old tree is quite a wonderful experience for children. Well, for grown-ups too. Yeah, I’m going to do that.

1:06:25 So connecting with the trees, what’s the best way to do that or with the flowers? Because you have some good practices for that. Well, with trees, I think it’s just being with a tree, you know, standing with a tree or sitting under a tree and just being there with the tree. I mean, it’s as simple as that. And making friends with a particular tree is important because it means that you can get to know it.

1:06:47 You get to know it through the different seasons of the year. You see it in flower, you see it when it’s dropping its leaves, you see it in winter, you see it in spring. And again, that helps build up the sense of relationship. Now, the scientists are going to call us right now on this report and they’re going to say you can’t be friends with a tree. Well, you can feel that you’re friends with a tree and they may say you can’t be, but then, you know, maybe they define friendship as something you can only be with people, but there are quite a lot of people who are friends with dogs.

1:07:18 So any scientist who called me on that, I asked, well, can you be friends with a dog? And they may say, no, they’re just machines, but most scientists are normal people. And they say, well, yes. And actually, a lot of scientists are normal people when they’re off duty or when they’re not propagating an ideology or anything. I mean, scientists are just humans, like everyone else.

1:07:44 And many of them have their own ways of relating to nature and to trees. Yeah, and the issue with a lot of scientists is that in academia, and I’m sure you can relate to this, sometimes we look at these academic institutes and think, oh, what a wonderful place for open thinking and open ideas, but sometimes they are in these institutions where they can’t talk about psychedelics, about spirituality, about religion, or they’ll be tossed out. I mean, they are difficult places to be in a certain extent.

1:08:12 Well, yes. I mean, that’s why in my previous book, The Science Delusion, I mean, one of the things I was trying to promote there was the idea of scientists within scientific institutions coming out of the closet. Because there are a lot of scientists within scientific institutions who take psychedelics, who have telepathic relationships with their dogs, they have psychic telephone calls, they think of someone who then rings and they know who it is before they answer the phone.

1:08:40 They, quite a lot, meditate, quite a few pray, quite a lot have connections with nature. I mean, they have favorite trees, but most of them don’t feel they can talk about this to their colleagues. They’re meant to pretend to be completely lacking in emotion and interested in the irrational inquiry. But come on, I mean, they’re people. And so I think if scientists start behaving, talking freely to their colleagues, I think life in labs would be much more fun and it would lighten up science too.

1:09:13 Yeah, it is like coming out of the closet since so many people are thinking and feeling this way. We were at the Royal Society for the publishing of the paper by Professor Nutz and the funding that was done by the Institute. I don’t remember the name. The Beckley Foundation. Beckley Foundation, yeah, we’ve had Amanda Fielding in here.

1:09:30 And, you know, even Professor Nutz and Carhart Harris will tell you that, you know, very few people in their field will talk about these things. And there are some of the few that will come out there and really talk very seriously and run these studies on these incredible psychedelic medicines. Whereas everyone else just has to kind of pretend to ignore it. Yes. And it’s fascinating and sad.

1:09:52 It’s a shame, it’s sad. And it hurts. Yes. Yeah. The religious basis of relating to plants and being in nature, I didn’t ask about that.

1:10:02 What are some of those, you know, those traditions from a religious standpoint? Well, I don’t think there are any specific religious traditions. It’s just that all religions have taken our relationship with plants. Into them. And, you know, the idea that God likes flowers, for example, and we like flowers, flowers are beautiful.

1:10:23 Bees like flowers. I mean, flowers evolved 100 million years ago for the first time. And there were no people around until 100,000 years ago. So how come all these flowers of extraordinary beauty are there? It’s because insects like looking at them.

1:10:40 They’re a kind of dialogue between animal minds and plant minds. Darwin pointed this out. There could have been no flower until there was an eye to see it. They’re a dialogue between the animal and the plant kingdoms. But bees have brains 100 millionths the size of eyes.

1:10:57 Tiny, tiny brains. How come they’re enough to cause this evolution of incredible beauty in the flower kingdom? I think it goes way beyond the call of duty. I think there’s something in nature which just calls forth beauty. I gave a talk recently, it’s on my website, called Why Is There So Much Beauty in the World?

1:11:19 It’s a real mystery. Why flowers should be so beautiful? You don’t need all that beauty. You can make cardboard cutout model flowers that are really simple and you can get bees to go to them in experiments. So much beauty of smell and taste and colour and stuff.

1:11:36 And the assumption in all religions is that gods or ultimate consciousness likes beauty and particularly likes flowers. In Buddhist temples people take lotus flowers as offerings. Hindu temples people offer garlands of marigolds and all sorts of other flowers to gods and goddesses. All around Hindu temples there are flower sellers selling these garlands. In Christian churches, in every village in Britain, in the village church porch, you’ll see a native there that says flower raiter.

1:12:09 And there’s a list of the people who are doing the flower arranging for the Sundays. Somebody in the village collects flowers and puts avars of flowers on the altar or in the church every Sunday. Why? The implicit assumption is that God likes flowers and God appreciates beauty. And we can enjoy beauty and animals can enjoy beauty because there’s something about the ultimate consciousness of the universe that loves beauty.

1:12:38 Indeed, that’s a source of beauty. Very well said. Rituals. Talk to me about rituals, rites of passage, that kind of thing. Why are they important and why do we need to get back to some of them?

1:12:49 Well, rituals are reenactments of key events in the history of a group. For example, the Jewish Passover feast is a reenactment of the original Passover. The Holy Communion in the Christian churches, a reenactment of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, the American Thanksgiving dinner, a reenactment of the original Thanksgiving in America. By taking part in rituals, people become part of the group. And they, by Americans, by having the Thanksgiving dinner, become American.

1:13:21 Jewish people, by taking part in the Passover, become Jewish. They’re part of a group, a Jewish group that’s doing this. That identifies with Jewish groups every year, right back to the first Passover. It’s a connection across time with ancestors, with predecessors. A presence of the past through the ritual which connects people.

1:13:42 Otherwise, we’re just sort of cut off, isolated, afloat. But all traditional cultures have this sense that the culture must be connected with those who’ve gone before, rooted in the ancestral lineage. And that’s what rituals do. Everyone loves when I invite them to Thanksgiving in this country. The English more than anyone.

1:14:04 They think it’s just this exciting thing they get to be a part of, and they’ve heard all about it. Exactly. Well, I’ve only been to two Thanksgiving dinners. One was when I was in America, and the other was yours. And I was really pleased to come because it’s a great ceremony.

1:14:18 It’s a kind of inclusive ritual. And it wouldn’t work. It is a kind of ritual. It has to happen at the right time of year. You have to have the right kind of food, the turkey, and so on.

1:14:31 It is a very good example of a ritual. And another thing it shows is that rituals don’t have to be religious because Thanksgiving is kind of religious because it’s about giving thanks to God for food and survival in the new world. I’m sure the Pilgrim Fathers who did the first Thanksgiving dinner weren’t just thanking each other. They were very religious people. They were giving thanks to God and providence that had helped them so much.

1:14:58 Yeah, and we had a practice last year where each person went around the table and said what they’re thankful about. But I actually didn’t do that four years ago, but it just kind of came as something that seemed really obvious for everyone to state it. And now I think everyone loves that part of it. Exactly. Well, this is a ritual of Thanksgiving.

1:15:16 It takes all these boxes, and it’s simple. Again, it’s free. I mean, these are things that make people happier, life more fulfilling and richer. And they don’t cost you something because you put on a delicious meal with nice wine. But in principle, everyone can do this at home.

1:15:36 I always tell people, because it’s a month away from Christmas, almost exactly this year, and I always tell people it’s just such a different holiday because we’re all coming together to be thankful. We’re not coming together to get stuff or worry about what someone got me. It’s ultimate anti-materialism in a way. It’s almost the opposite, the yin to the yang. The crazy thing is that quote-unquote Black Friday happens the next day where everyone sheds that mindset and goes into this consumer mindset.

1:16:07 Yes, that’s such a shame. Yes, are you coming this year for Thanksgiving? I don’t know if we had the invitation. I’m not sure that we have yet. Come on, I’ll have to check your email, but it’s in two weeks.

1:16:16 Singing and chanting. I’ve met your wife Jill. I know she does some very serious work when it comes to this, so I’m sure you have some inside knowledge. I still haven’t been to one of those, and I really need to go, and this makes me even more intrigued, and maybe I’m now ready to open my mind to some of these other things. What, maybe you can tell me a little bit about your experience with singing and chanting originally, what Jill does, and then a practice that we could all do.

1:16:45 Well, I think that my own practice with singing and chanting, I mean, I sang a lot as a child. I was in the school choir. I was a chorister. It was an Anglican school, so I learned the English church music tradition very well. My grandfather and my uncle were organists and choir masters.

1:17:03 I’m an organist myself, so I’ve been raised in a kind of musical tradition. I sang in choirs at school and at Cambridge. I’ve sung all my life in one way or another. When I was in India, I learned different kinds of chanting, Hindu chanting, and in the ashram we did chanting every day, five times a day, a big part of my life. My wife Jill Pears teaches singing and chanting as a form of meditation, and it’s in every single religious tradition.

1:17:41 I mean, Buddhist chant, Hindu’s chant, Muslim’s chant, Christian’s chant, Jew’s chant. I mean, it’s just everywhere. Except for Nachism or Nachism. Yes. Except for football matches.

1:17:55 Well, except for football matches, you still get kind of tribal chants, but they’re not as elaborate as they used to be. They used to sing. A football match you used to end with everyone singing, and singing abide with me, a great Welsh hymn. Okay. And so singing and chanting, what Jill’s done is found that there’s common factors in all these different traditions.

1:18:18 Different vowels that all sing and chanting depends on the vowel sounds, and different vowels affect different parts of the body, and they literally vibrate different parts of the body. When we’re singing together, we’re breathing together, because you sing a verse, and then everyone takes a breath together. So the whole group comes into resonance with each other. And when you’re singing a sacred chant or a mantra, then all the people singing it now will resonate with those who’ve done it before by morphic resonance, according to my ideas on morphic resonance, which apply to rituals, of course, by doing things in as similar way as possible.

1:18:59 There’s this kind of resonant connection across time. So I’m connecting with my pilgrim ancestors in America when I’m doing the Thanksgiving ritual? Yes. Okay. It’s resonating with what they’ve done.

1:19:11 Yes. You’re resonating with them, and not just with them, but with all the Americans who’ve done it every year since then. It’s the entire continuity over the generations that you’re connecting with. That’s what rituals do, you see. They root us.

1:19:26 They connect us through time. And they give us an identity with a tradition and connect us with it. And so does singing and chanting. And what are some ways that people can try chanting? Because to be honest, I’ve been wanting to incorporate a chanting routine in my day, but I’m doing my TM in the morning, and sometimes I hum a little bit, but I don’t know where to start.

1:19:47 I don’t know where to start it. I think most people are uncomfortable chanting because they think that they’ve gone off the deep end, or they’re part of a cult, or, you know… Well, I think the simplest one is to do just a simple mantra out loud. And the most basic Eastern mantra is, Aum. Aum.

1:20:07 And the Western version… And now you’re hearing lots of different frequencies there. And different frequencies, different… Aum. And the most basic Jewish, Muslim, and Christian mantra is usually translated Amen, but the original form, as used by Jews, Muslims, and Greek Orthodox, Eastern Christians, is Aumine.

1:20:32 It’s a bit like Aum, you see. It’s a very similar kind of mantra. And if you chant Aumine, which you can do… Sometimes if I’m out on the heath and I’m in my sit spot and I want to feel I’m in an enchanted place, the way to make someone enchanted is to chant. That’s what it means.

1:20:56 Disenchanted means you stop chanting. And so just on a single note, we could do it together. Aum. Just on a single breath. Did you just tune your voice up there?

1:21:10 Aum. Are you just kind of… Well, there’s a kind of piece that comes after it. Which we can do. Do you want to do it again?

1:21:37 Yeah, I want to do it again. Let’s do it once more. We can do it twice more. It’s best done in threes. Okay.

1:21:43 Aum. So it has an instant effect, at least on me. And it’s very, very simple. And for anyone who comes from a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim background, this will also connect with the whole of that tradition. And for anyone who comes from that background who doesn’t want to connect with their tradition, then they’re usually okay doing Aum, the Hindu or the Buddhist version, Aum.

1:22:56 Which, as I say, is very similar. It’s a very similar mantra with similar kinds of effects. Okay. So try doing that… Three times.

1:23:05 Just three times. Just three times. Okay. Pick up the part of your day where you do it. Yes. I mean, if you’re worried about what people will think…

1:23:14 You should be worried about… Do it at home, or you can do it in a quiet place on Homestead Heath. I mean, people think you were older if you did it in Old Street Underground Station or something. Those may need to embarrass yourself and others in doing these things. But it’s also something you can do with other people, because these things are more powerful, or they’re done in groups.

1:23:37 And when my wife, Jill, leads these chanting workshops, when everyone chants together, then it has a greater power. Because it links you to other people, it becomes a kind of collective experience. But it is very powerful just to do on one’s own. Okay. Very good.

1:23:53 Let me finish with the pilgrimage and going to holy places. When I met you in the Heath many months ago, you mentioned these pilgrimages, and I know you as Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, of the band Ted Talk, of Morphic Resonance, and you’re telling me how you’re going on these church pilgrimages, and you went from this place to this place and this place, and they were connected and there were wells, I believe, in them. Yes. And see, I actually pay attention.

1:24:17 And I was like, ah, this is part of Rupert I didn’t know about. What’s happening here with these pilgrimages? Well, pilgrimages are a very basic practice that’s found in all cultures and religions. You know, the Australian aborigines have song lines where they move through the landscape singing as they go to the different holy places and the landscape as they move every year through a cycle of places nomadically. Muslims have pilgrimages to Mecca and other holy places.

1:24:48 Jews have pilgrimages to Jerusalem, to the Wailing Wall. Christians have pilgrimages to many holy places, including the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico and the shrine of Santiago to Compostena. And in England in the Middle Ages, the whole country was crisscrossed by pilgrimage routes. The most important was the shrine of St. Thomas Beckett at Canterbury Cathedral.

1:25:16 And Chaucer’s book, The Canterbury Tales, is about pilgrims going to Canterbury. That was set around 1380. At the Protestant Reformation, pilgrimage was suppressed in England for a variety of reasons. The Protestants didn’t like it. They thought it was Catholic, and they couldn’t find anything about Canterbury in the Bible.

1:25:36 So they thought there must be something wrong with it, because they thought it’s all got to be in the Bible. But there’s been a revival of pilgrimage in the last few decades. It’s happened all over Europe. Santiago to Compostela, the Camino, the Way, to Santiago. In 1987, it had 1,000 pilgrims.

1:25:58 Last year it had 280,000 walking there, some of them walking for a week or more. And what a group of us are doing here in Britain, in the British Pilgrimage Trust, which has a website, britishpilgrimage.org, is reopening the old footpath pilgrimage routes in England to Canterbury and other places. The flagship route is from Southampton or Winchester to Canterbury, about 18 days. That’s the one that goes through dozens of village churches, holy trees, sacred wells, and ends at Canterbury Cathedral.

1:26:34 There are many others. There are pilgrimages to the Linders Farm, the Holy Island in the northeast of England, where St. Cuthbert lived. There are pilgrimages to our other great cathedrals, to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham in Norfolk. All these pilgrimages are now functioning again, and people have started going there on foot once more.

1:26:58 And this is a transformative experience to do this. It ticks a lot of boxes of scientifically proven benefits. Walking’s good for you. Being outdoors is good for you. Being in fresh air is good for you.

1:27:10 Doing something with a goal or a destination, sharing a common purpose with other people. Pilgrimage does all those things. We have people that make pilgrimages to London Real. Well, you could do that, but they’d have to have some sense that they’re arriving at a transformative place. Well, I suppose they are.

1:27:32 I mean, you do have a transformative role. But the ones in London, there’s one at the beginning of October this year. It happens every year to Westminster Abbey. I went on it from Hampstead. A group of about 30 people walked on this particular day.

1:27:49 It was October the 14th, to the Shrine of St. Edward the Confessor, which is this saint buried in a tomb behind the high altar of Westminster Abbey. It’s an ancient, sacred place. He died in 1066. So we’re talking a very long period of history, and this was the only major tomb that wasn’t desecrated at the Reformation.

1:28:10 So it’s a continuity again way back. Resonance. Yes. It’s a very powerful place. You can go in there to the shrine on this day of pilgrimage.

1:28:20 It’s in the Abbey. It’s inside the Abbey. Inside the Abbey, behind the high altar. Okay. It’s the holiest place.

1:28:27 The Abbey was built around it. Okay. I think I’ve been there. And I went on this group, about 25, 30 of us, from Hampstead. We walked about six miles to Westminster Abbey.

1:28:39 So we set off in the morning. We walked on a pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey. And it was tremendous doing a pilgrimage in London. You don’t have to go to exotic places. You can do it in London itself.

1:28:50 We walked through Primrose Hill, Regent’s Park, the last bit through Green Park and St. James’s Park. So probably half of it was walking through green spaces. Nice walk. A lovely walk.

1:29:02 And it was just a very inspiring experience. So pilgrimage is something, especially one-day pilgrimages, is something that anyone can do. That’s a powerful practice that is inspiring and helpful. Again, you don’t have to sign up for a religion to do it. A lot of people who do it are not signed up to religion.

1:29:25 In fact, the slogan of the British Pilgrimage Trust for these pilgrimages is, bring your own beliefs. B-Y-O-B. I love it. I love it. So we’ve gone through each one of these practices and given some people some practical guides.

1:29:40 Final thoughts on the message from this book. And if someone’s on the fence about whether they want to adopt some of these things, what would you say to them? I’d just say try it. You’ve got nothing to lose, and you’ve got a lot to gain. And if you feel that your life’s perfect the way it is, that you have no problems, no insecurities, no fears, no anxiety, you feel happy, your relationships are in good shape, you may not need any of these practices.

1:30:11 Is that a trick? On the other hand, you might be like that because you’re already doing them. But if you feel that there’s something missing and life could be better, you could have greater sense of meaning and connection with the greater world and with yourself and with other people, then try them. And you don’t have to sign up to a belief system first. You don’t even have to sign up to a belief system at the end of doing them.

1:30:39 You might want to, but it’s completely open and up to you. So I would say you’ve got nothing to lose, you’ve got a lot to gain, and these things have been tested scientifically. And it’s not just my personal opinion or other people’s personal opinion that they’re helpful and good for you. They do actually bring measurable benefits in physical and mental health. Well, and you seem to be a good example of that.

1:31:04 You’re sharp as a tack and in very good shape. Well, it works for me. I mean, at least I feel reasonably, most days, I feel quite happy and I feel very happy to be alive. I think everyone would admit that these days, we might be going in the wrong direction. There’s a lot of sickness out there, whether that means obesity and epidemics in America or heart disease or diabetes or addiction to smartphones and information and instant gratification, that most people agree that whatever we’re doing, something’s not right.

1:31:39 Something doesn’t feel right. And sometimes we make up these things that you’ve listed here. Sometimes we make up reasons to get back to them. Even we have to trick our scientific brains into why we’re doing them. And you see all these movements, people that do underground fight clubs that do this and do that and form cultures within companies to have a group of people doing similar things.

1:32:04 So there’s all this evidence that this stuff is really practical and now it’s backed up with a lot of religion too. So thank you for the book. Well, thank you, Brian. The last time we were here, you noted that we were having a trial log and it was you and me and we had a co-host at the time. And you knew that term because you used to be part of an infamous trial log.

1:32:28 And before we go, I was wondering if you could tell people about this trial log that you used to have, probably usually happened in California, and when was that and how did that shape you as a man, as a researcher, as a spiritual being? Well, the trial logs were these three-way conversations that started for me in 1982 when I was in California. A friend said to me, you’ve got to meet this person called Terrence McKenna. And they told me how to get there.

1:32:58 They arranged a meeting. And he was, at the time, had a friend of his, Ralph Abraham, staying with him. Terrence was someone who was interested in psychedelics and shamanic use of psychedelics, particularly magic mushrooms. Ralph Abraham was one of the pioneers of chaos mathematics and was and still is a professor of mathematics at UC, the University of California in Santa Cruz. We met at Terrence’s house in Sonoma County, California.

1:33:32 Every so often, he had to go out and sort of spray mist over mushrooms that were growing in a garden shed. And we just talked. When we first met, we talked almost nonstop for two days. We just had so many things to say. It’s such an exciting conversation.

1:33:52 I’d never had an experience like this before. But we then met up at least once a year, sometimes in, usually in California, sometimes at the Esalen Institute, once at Hawaii where Terrence had his botanical garden called Botanical Dimensions. What was that like? That was pretty amazing. I mean, I arrived there.

1:34:15 You had to go half an hour up a kind of lava track in a four-wheel drive to get to this remote thing in the jungle on the slopes of a volcano. And when I got there, there were all these sort of palm trees, and there was this kind of vine growing over everything. I said, Terrence, there’s an awful lot of that vine. What’s that doing? He said, that’s Banisteriopsis, which is the vine in Ayahuasca.

1:34:42 I said, it seems to be going wild here, and it seems to be spreading through the jungle. He said, it likes Hawaii. So… You have a good Terrence impression. So then we went through the botanical dimensions, and every little glade, there were different psychoactive plants growing there.

1:35:02 It was a collection of tropical psychoactive plants. So that was a really good place to hang out with Terrence, and of course we sampled some of them. And Terrence, Ralph, and I had conversations there. We did some here in England, in London, and in Devon. We met together every year, at least once, sometimes twice, for several days, until about 1998, 1999, when Terrence fell ill with a brain tumor.

1:35:32 He died in 2000. The first ten years, these conversations were simply private conversations. Then someone asked us to do one in public at the Esalen Institute, and that was recorded and filmed, and those are online, those. And thereafter, we usually had a tape recorder on during these conversations. Most of them were still private, but we recorded them.

1:35:58 And about seven or eight years ago, Ralph Abraham discovered in his garage a box of cassettes, covered in dust, and realized that when he listened to some of them, these were these trilogues we’d forgotten about the tapes. And so one of Terrence’s fans digitalized them. And there’s now 20 or 30 trilogues online in audio format. They’re accessible through my website and through Terrence’s website. And there are a lot of people who still listen to these, through these three-way conversations, which are some of the most exciting conversations I’ve ever had.

1:36:33 And what we hoped when we started doing them in public, and we turned some of them into books, too. We had two books, The Evolutionary Mind, and Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness, was that other people would find that they could, as it were, join in. And actually, quite a lot of people do. I meet people all the time who tell me they listen to them with their friends, and then they talk together, and it kind of catalyzes discussions. So this was a wonderful thing to happen, and I’m so pleased that they go on because of the Internet.

1:37:08 That’s what makes it possible that people still find them interesting to listen to, as indeed I do myself. What was Terrence like, and what did he mean to you? Well, Terrence was kind, funny, and brilliant. And his mind was able to work in such a quick way. He was extraordinarily witty, very, very funny, and he had a bardic gift.

1:37:35 He was half Irish and half Welsh. And it was the gift of the gab. I mean, he could talk about any subject, and it would just pour out of him, sentence out of perfect sentence, poetic, amusing, original. It was an unbelievable gift that Terrence had. I’m sure this was just part of his very nature, but he also made psychedelics as one of his main subjects.

1:38:04 He’s probably the leading exponent of psychedelic experiences in terms of putting what’s so hard to put into language, into words, being able to give some kind of description of what’s going on there, and making sense of what, for many people, is a bewildering experience. And I think that’s one reason he’s listened to so much today, because he’s still one of the primary people who talk about psychedelics in a way that’s funny, it’s not just dry science, it’s extremely funny and indeed inspiring. Yeah, he’s now almost…

1:38:42 He lives on, on the internet now, in a fascinating and scary way. I know. He’s got this astonishing afterlife. I mean, this life after death turns on the internet everywhere. Yeah, the audio tapes, I constantly listen to them, and they always give me new insights.

1:39:00 How important was the psychedelic experience for you on your life, on your research, on your career, or continues to be? I would say very important, at least in waking me up. I mean, it was a kind of rite of passage for me to take psychedelics. I mentioned earlier that my experience in India with cannabis was a kind of waking up a rite of passage, and then LSD became like that too. I later took other ones like mushrooms, DMT, ayahuasca.

1:39:34 But for me, these were portals into other realms of consciousness that I wouldn’t really have reached in any other way, except perhaps through dreams and lucid dreaming, and some of these states perhaps through meditation. But the psychedelics have this particularly mind-opening effect, after all, the very word means mind-revealing. So, I mean, there’s not something I do all the time, obviously. I mean, they’re not the kind of things that most people want to do all the time.

1:40:09 Very occasionally is enough for me. It’s like a rare experience. And I think it’s… But it can be a constant renewal of one’s sense of wonder at the world and at the mind and the way that our minds are so much bigger than we usually think they are and how they’re connected with other minds and indeed the source of all minds. Terrence used to say very large doses very infrequently was the way to go.

1:40:40 Yes. He was the opposite of the current fashion for microdosing. Yes. I guess you’re not a fan of that. Finally, can you tell me about the first time you met Terrence?

1:40:52 Didn’t I tell you when you first met? It’s one of my favorite stories. Oh, all right. Well, if you think it bears repeating… Yes, I think so.

1:40:59 Well, this friend had… A mutual friend in San Francisco, I was staying in San Francisco, had given me… They made the introduction to Terrence, told me to get on a Greyhound bus that was going to Santa Rosa, California. And I’d got a little tape recorder thing and he said, well, here’s one of Terrence’s tapes. So I listened to it on the bus.

1:41:21 I hadn’t time to hear it before that. On the bus up there, I heard Terrence McKenna talking about DMT, dimethal tryptamine, and DMT experiences and machine elves and all sorts of things that were completely unfamiliar to me, but it was completely entrancing. So I got off the bus at the bus stand in Santa Rosa and I was told to wait in a particular place. And after I’d been there for a few minutes, this gold-painted battered Cadillac with tail fins, a battered up old Cadillac, it glid to a halt beside me, and the window scrolled down and there was this bearded figure with dark glasses and he looked out the window at me and said, Dr. Sheldrake, I presume.

1:42:13 And that was Terrence. So I got in and went to his house, an A-frame, in Occidental, California, where Ralph was. And that’s where I just described. We started this conversation that basically went on for 18 years. Wow. So two days started a trial log.

1:42:33 And the reason you love that trial log is because when a conversation between two people can run its course or become stale, that third person injects a new idea that gives it life. Exactly. And it sort of works very well that way, at least it did with us. After Terrence died, Ralph and I felt rather orphaned. And we tried trial logs with, we thought, well, Ralph’s a mathematician, so he thought the magic formula of three was the reason for it.

1:43:01 And we tried with a whole range of other people to see if we could reconstitute this thrilling trial log. It never worked. So it wasn’t just the three. It was Terrence that seemed to be this key ingredient. And Ralph and I have great conversations, but there was a particular magic to Terrence and this threefold thing.

1:43:21 And Ralph and I both had conversations alone with him as well, which worked very well. But for some reason, the three worked particularly well. And Ralph has the gift of putting things very briefly, as it were, diagrammatically, and injects a kind of somewhat skeptical note sometimes into these discussions, particularly when Terrence was talking about his theories of the end of time and some of his more speculative ideas. He used to call him on those, or challenge him on the time wave theory.

1:43:53 Exactly. Well, so did I as well in a different way. But anyway, it just worked in a particularly amazing way. And I haven’t had an experience quite like that before or since. We had his brother Dennis McKenna here in the studio about a year and a half ago.

1:44:10 And then, funny enough, go figure. We spent three hours walking through Hampstead Heath having one of our moving conversations, talking about everything from plant intelligence to global warming to the state of human consciousness. And that’ll be coming out soon. Very good. Yeah, it’s kind of a nice tie-in to that.

1:44:33 Let me ask you about you just to finish off. What are your plans? What’s important to you for the next five years that you do with your life, with your family, with your work, with your own spirituality and consciousness? Well, one project I’m doing is a sequel to this book, which just has seven spiritual practices in it. I’m doing a second book with a further seven, which I don’t cover in this book.

1:45:03 So that’s one of the projects I’m working on right now. Okay. It’s my writing work. I have a research project that I’m, in biology, looking for morphic resonance in living organisms, which I’m doing with some scientific colleagues in the laboratory in Sweden, and we’re just doing the grant proposal for that. I don’t know if we’ll get the grant or not, but if we do, then we’ll have three years of, the first time really, a dedicated grant for morphic resonance research in living organisms.

1:45:43 I have other research projects which I’m engaged in. I mean, I mostly do research and write. I travel very little. I get lots of invitations to speak in conferences and workshops, seminars, lectures, and things all over the world. But if I do that, that’s one thing.

1:46:00 If I do that, I do that. I just don’t have, it doesn’t leave time for all these other things. So the last year or two, I’ve traveled almost not at all. I mean, I go to Canada every summer for two months to a remote island in British Columbia, but apart from that, I’ve mainly been at home because that’s the only way I can really get on with this other work.

1:46:25 So these are some of the things I’m doing, and I’m engaged also in some activist-type campaigns. One is the British pilgrimage trust, which I help with, and we’ve managed to raise funding to help with this work to build up these pilgrimage routes. And another one I do, which is a website called coralevensong.org, because one of the most beautiful things in the whole of English culture is this evening sun, evening service that happens in our cathedrals on weekdays as well as Sundays.

1:47:08 Most people don’t realize that every weekday in Oxford and Cambridge colleges and all our great cathedrals like Durham, Wells, Lincoln, Salisbury, et cetera, and in London and Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s. There’s this evening sun service in 16th-century English language with incredibly well-trained choirs singing different music every day, completely free. And you go into one of these great cathedrals, free of charge, huge, vast buildings by candlelight in the evening with this sacred chant echoing through these great spaces.

1:47:43 It’s one of the best experiences in England, I think. And most people don’t know it happens and they don’t know it’s free and they just don’t know it’s going on. And again, it’s something anyone can do. No one’s going to ask you, are you a paid-up Christian, et cetera? And most of them, they don’t even have a collection.

1:48:00 You have to go out of your way to give money if you want to. And so that’s another thing that I think deserves to be better known. So again, that’s a kind of activist campaign that with a colleague, Dr. Guy Heywood, we set up a website called coralevensong.org, which enables you to find where this is every day, where one is near you, a coral even song, when’s the next one, anywhere in Britain or Ireland. So we’re hoping to make this wonderful tradition better known.

1:48:33 And this involves going to sacred places, being in amidst great beauty, being lifted up through this beautiful song and chant and connecting with tradition. It’s a ritual which is available to anyone, any day, anywhere in Britain or Ireland. I didn’t even know that, and I’m going to go see that. And you got me really thinking about that stuff. When I look at your life, I see a man that, it’s no coincidence that you’re in all these incredible situations.

1:49:02 There’s no coincidence that you’re in India and you’re at this place and you’re doing work for the Royal Society, or you’re in Cambridge, or you’re in Harvard, or you’re hanging out with Terrence McKenna. What is it about how you live your life that puts you in these places? I mean, do you have a code or a mantra, or do you like to try things, or is it a discipline about yourself? Like, what is it? I just can’t, I don’t know that there’s any particular formula.

1:49:26 I mean, I just feel I’ve been very blessed in the things that have happened and opened up in my life. And I couldn’t, you know, like meeting Terrence McKenna, I couldn’t have planned that. I try to stay open. I pray every day, and I give thanks to what’s happened and pray that I’m guided by the Spirit in what happens in my life. And I feel I am actually guided.

1:49:53 I mean, some might say it’s just good luck. Well, some of what happens isn’t good luck, some of it’s bad luck, but you know, bad luck too. But on the whole, I’ve found that through being really interested in what I’m interested in, which is a kind of spiritual journey, the nature of reality, trying to find out what’s really going on, exploring the scientific realm, trying to see where the boundaries of science are and how one can go beyond them to explore new areas.

1:50:26 It’s a kind of ongoing quest, both in the realms of spirituality and science. And the two in my mind go together, which is why this book, Science and Spiritual Practices, in a way is a kind of synthesis for me, because it’s bringing together two of the sides of my life which can often, at least to the external observer, they might seem separate. Yeah, I’m so glad you did. Well, when you think of this word success, who comes to mind? Is it someone in the scientific community or in the spiritual community, or is it someone that’s close to you?

1:50:58 You have two sons, Cosmo and Merlin, and besides having the coolest names I’ve ever heard, how do you parent them? And do you parent them the same way your parents parented you?

1:51:32 Do you make conscious decisions to do this or that? I think I’ve met maybe one of them or them both, and they seem like fine young men, and I’m just wondering how you do it. Well, they’re both. I mean, they don’t need that much parenting now. They’re aged 30 and 27, so they’re pretty autonomous in their lives.

1:51:53 When they were young, I spent a lot of time with them. And, you know, on Hampstead Heath, and reading to them and telling them stories and helping them make things. We raised them both without television videos or video games. So when they were young, it was quite demanding, because, you know, a lot of people use television as a kind of babysitter, turn it on, and keeps them quiet. Well, we didn’t do that.

1:52:24 So when they woke up in the morning, I used to go to them, and I had to do something with them. But after a while, when they got the hang of doing things themselves, making things and playing together, they could actually amuse themselves for hours, just like kids always have done, and didn’t require endless stimulation from outside. And they’re still like that. Right now, they’re making, they’re very interested in brewing things. So our garden shed’s now full of kombucha, sauerkraut with nettles and ginger, kimchi.

1:53:01 I mean, every time, I can barely get at my garden spade now for all these brewing things that they’re doing. So they’re still making things and spend a lot of their time doing that, amusing themselves. That’s good advice, parenting. You made them very self-reliant in that way. Rupert, I always ask everyone here just a couple questions at the end.

1:53:21 I’m going to ask you, if you could take my mobile device, because I know you don’t have one, and make a phone call to the 20-year-old Rupert Sheldrick. I guess he would be in Cambridge, maybe. I’m not sure. I’d be in, yes, Cambridge. Cambridge.

1:53:35 If you could give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Just carry on, because, I mean, I wouldn’t have liked to give myself advice that would have made me avoid some of my mistakes, because I learned from them. So I think I would have just said carry on. Very English, and very true. The second part of that question, what’s the advice that you can give to that 20-year-old that’s out there now, watching us, listening to us?

1:54:06 Could be from any country in the world, religious, atheist, maybe that have questioned religion their whole lives and a lot of these practices, because it seemed like that’s what those people do, and this is the new age, and I don’t do that. I’ve got my phone and my this and my that. What advice do you give to them? Well, what I’d do in this book, I’d advise them to try some of these spiritual practices. If they’re part of a religion and been raised religious and are still religious, to take more seriously the practices they’ve grown up with, to find a way of actually really appreciating them, rather than just going through the forms, the motions.

1:54:49 And if they’ve grown up non-religious, which most people in Britain have, they’ve grown up with no religious teachings or background, then I’d suggest that they actually try some of these practices and just see what happens in their lives, give them a chance. And like the sit-spot thing is sitting quietly outdoors with no mobile phone on. I mean, it’s very important to have kind of radio silence for part of the time. I think one of the things that’s a problem for a lot of young people now is endless distractions through social media and there’s total information overload coming from every side all the time.

1:55:26 So having some time with these devices turned off in quietness is probably the advice that I think would be most useful, at least to get started on some of these other practices. Yeah. The last part of that is, what is the best advice you ever received? And it could have come from an ashram in India or someone in Cambridge or a Royal Society or Terrence himself. What is that piece of advice that you remember as the best one?

1:55:53 Oh, gosh. Again, this is so much advice over my life. The idea, the one, I’m just not prepared for this, Brian. If I’d named this question in advance, I could have thought about it. It’s always the hardest question.

1:56:06 I’m sorry. I can’t give you an answer. You’ve given us plenty. Rupert, it’s a real honor to have you here. It was also wonderful having you at Thanksgiving last year, and I expect to see you and Jill this year.

1:56:17 This book is incredible. I am just so happy to read it. I’m so happy it has the practical advice. I’ve found myself doing these things anyways. So I’m obviously drawn to it.

1:56:28 And as soon as I can allow myself to engage in something that doesn’t scientifically make sense to me, it makes me happy, and it frees me up to be drawn to these things. And to maybe even admit that my scientific mind will never figure out why some of these things were important to me has been a big transformation for me. And so thank you for contributing those ideas even when they’re not always popular, and even when they’re controversial, or you’ve been doing your whole career.

1:56:59 And with this, I think it’s amazing. And I hope people really take this stuff in, but it does require the discipline. You can’t think about meditating or chanting or doing pilgrimages. You have to do it. And so thank you.

1:57:13 It’s always a pleasure. It’s been four and a half years since next time. Let’s not make it so many years. But again, I just feel like we need to honor you because of all the great work you’ve done, and you’re just such a great figure in the scientific and spiritual community. So on behalf of everyone at London Real, thank you for being you.

1:57:31 And I’m very lucky to have you as a neighbor, and thanks for all of your great ideas. Well, thank you for doing what you do, Brian. It’s very important. Thank you. I think so too.

1:57:43 On London Real, we say it’s about the journey. I wish you well on your continued one, and thank you so much. Thank you.