Full transcript: Rupert Sheldrake on London Real
8:59 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. This is Nick Gabriel, and joining us today is Dr Rupert Sheldrake, who is a biologist and writer. His titles include A New Science of Life, The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance, which is from 1981, and this year he’s published The Science Delusion, Freeing the Spirit of Inquiry, and in the States that’s also known as Science Set Free. Welcome.
9:23 Thank you. Thank you for coming. I was wondering if you could describe your theory of morphic f and morphic resonance for those that don’t know much about your work. It’s a theory of memory and nature. It says that the so-called laws of nature, more like habits, that each species has a kind of collective memory, a bit like what Jung called the collective unconscious.
9:45 He was talking about human collective memory. I’m talking about everything. So a giraffe has a collective memory of previous giraffes. Its instincts are a kind of habit of the species. Even crystals have a kind of collective memory.
10:00 If you make a new chemical that’s never existed before and you crystallize it, it takes a long time to make the crystals. Next time you do it anywhere in the world it forms a bit easier, and the third time a bit easier still. And that’s because a habit builds up. And the theory also says, for which there’s experimental evidence, that if you train rats to learn a new trick in London, then rats all over the world will learn it quicker thereafter, just because the rats have learned it here.
10:29 Yeah, so it’s a theory of memory. I think the whole of nature has a kind of memory. Compared with the conventional scientific view, which is that nature is governed by eternal laws that were all there at the time of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic Code, instead I think that there’s this memory in nature, and the memory works by the process I call morphic resonance, which is a resonance of similar patterns of activity with subsequent similar patterns across space and time.
10:57 Wow. So is this something different from memories being encoded in DNA? Totally different. Yes, I mean the conventional view is that memories are stored materially. There’s two ways in which people think that happens.
11:13 The first is the memories that animals inherit, instincts are supposed to be stored in the DNA as chemicals, and then there’s the theory that regular memory, our own regular memories, are stored materially inside our brains as material traces. Okay. Now, I think both those theories, although most scientists take them for granted, I think both of them are wrong. I think they’re profoundly mistaken. What DNA actually does is code for proteins.
11:41 This is what molecular biology has shown us. It doesn’t program the entire organism and all its instincts. It just codes for the sequence of amino acids in proteins. It’s quite a limited role. And memories, the idea they’re stored in the brain, people have tried to find memories in the brain for for more than 100 years, they’ve failed again and again, and that’s because I don’t think they’re there.
12:04 I don’t think they’re there any more than when you listen to a radio program, what you’re hearing is coming into it by a form of resonance, in this case electromagnetic resonance. It’s not being stored in it. And so if I came and looked at your radio and tried to work out what things you’d listen to the previous day, I wouldn’t find any traces of what you’d listen to the previous day, because that’s not how radio works. This is similar to Graham Hancock’s theory that the brain is a receiver of consciousness as opposed to generator of consciousness.
12:36 Is that correct? Well, I think it’s both a generator and a receiver, but I don’t think that consciousness and memory is all stored in the brain. I think that our minds extend much further than our brains. That’s another part of my theory and my work. The theory of the extended mind.
12:57 Okay. So just an example, from my own questioning. I remember once when I was growing up, we had a, my mom found a kitten that had been abandoned by its mother, and this little kitten I remember one day when it was a few months old, it picked up this little stuffed toy that we had given it, and picked it up by the back of its neck, and it shook its head. My understanding is that that was the natural instinct to snap the prey’s neck and incapacitate. And I got to thinking, where did this come from?
13:25 Where did it get that? How did it know how to do that? And so what would you say, or your theory proposes that, there’s a kind of cosmic bank that stores that memory that the kitten was downloading, or how would you, well, I don’t think it’s in a cosmic bank. You see, the point about memory is that it’s a relationship in time, not in space, and if we think there’s a cosmic bank, then that presupposes a kind of hard disk in the sky or something where it’s all stored.
13:56 The point about my resonance theory is the resonance comes across time, so it’s as if the whole of the past is potentially present everywhere, and as soon as anything’s similar it just resonates with something in the past. In between, it’s not stored anywhere. It’s not in a place. Because memory is a theory that memory is in a place, and that’s where you get the idea of memory storage in DNA or in brains. And of course some of our memory devices are technological memory devices, they do store it in places, they store it on hard drives or magnetic tape or whatever.
14:30 But I don’t think memory works like that, and so the cosmic memory bank would be the wrong metaphor. I would say it’s a direct resonance across time. Interesting. You know, I come from a classically trained background, have an engineering degree, and all my, you know, classic alarm bells are going off and saying, okay, where is this stored, or how can it resonate? And while it’s probably very difficult to disprove, but how can you prove something like this?
14:58 This theory. Well, you can prove it by the kinds of experiments I already mentioned. If you train rats to learn a new trick in London, you can test rats. Well, I mean, here’s an ideal experiment. You’d invent five new tricks that rats can do.
15:16 You get people in labs in New York and in Melbourne, Australia, to test rats on those five tricks, and you’d see how long they take to learn them. Then in London you’d pick one of those five tricks at random, train a few thousand rats to learn it here, and then you’d ask the people in New York and Melbourne, Australia, to test the rats on all five tricks again. You wouldn’t tell them which one you’ve trained to do here, and if they get better in both those places on that trick but not on the others, this would be evidence for morphic resonance.
15:50 Okay, but so there, the kind of, I haven’t done that exact experiment, but an experiment training rats to learn new tricks was done in New, in Harvard, actually. Okay. And then it was repeated in Scotland, in Edinburgh, and in Melbourne, Australia, and the rats there started learning 10 times faster than the rats had originally in Harvard. They more or less took up where the Harvard rats had left off. And once more they went on getting better, and they did a control experiment in Melbourne where they had one line of rats where in each generation they tested rats whose parents had been trained on this trick, which was swimming out of a water maze.
16:31 They had another line of rats where the parents had never been trained, so it was like the control line. This was to see if this information was passed through the genes. Wow. And it turned out both lots got better, showing it wasn’t going through the genes. Something much more mysterious was happening, which I think is morphic resonance.
16:51 Amazing. I’m still skeptical. Okay. I mean, there’s been some of your critics have said that some of the human tests, I don’t know if these were ESP tests, and I could be wrong, that have said it was not a statistical error, but it was due to non-randomness of guessing and things like that. I mean, what do you say to those critics that say some of those are just kind of statistical improbabilities?
17:11 That well, the whole point of statistics is you’re looking for what’s probable and what’s improbable. Okay. Um, the point about diard skeptics is that there are groups of people, organized groups of skeptics, there’s organized skepticism and organized skeptics, people who, it’s not that they’re true skeptics at all, they’re true believers in conventional materialist science. They think that memories are stored in the brain, things like telepathy are impossible, because the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain inside the head.
17:44 That’s their belief, therefore any evidence for morphic resonance or for telepathy or anything like that must be fraudulent or flawed or wrong, because it goes against what they believe. So skeptics like that will niggle away trying to think of objections: flawed statistics, wrong randomization, defective methods, etc. They often say this stuff without even reading the papers or the evidence. I’ve had debates with skeptics, so-called skeptics, and they’re utterly ignorant.
18:14 So I could write their script in advance. You know, I could easily write the skeptic script, and it’s completely independent of the actual evidence. The point is that the experiments I’m talking about are published in peer-reviewed journals, where in science you have anonymous peer reviewers checking the statistics, making sure there aren’t any flaws of that kind. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t. Um, you know, they’ll try and make up flaws, but the vast majority of these experiments I’m talking about are peer-reviewed, flaw-free.
18:50 You seem a man that’s more interested in your theory as opposed to someone who’s really trying to go out there and prove everyone wrong. It seems like you’re really trying to Vel more and put more ideas out there, more than anything, which I think is a good thing. Well, I mean, there’s no point just trying to prove people wrong. I mean, that’s the skeptics. I’d have to say they’re interested in their theory, which is the materialist theory.
19:13 They’re trying to prove anyone that goes against it wrong. So they’re basically ideologically based. I’m what I’m trying to do is explore new possibilities in science, which you have to have some theory, otherwise you just kind of randomly pile up facts. You can’t do science without some kind of theory, hypothesis. I mean, according to the philosopher of science Karl Popper, science is about putting forward a hypothesis, a guess about the way things might be, and then testing it, and that’s what I do.
19:42 Right now we’re 30 years later, and you’ve got your new book out, which is The Science Delusion, also known as Science Set Free. What, what is the latest book about? Is it continuing some of these ideas over your career? What it does is takes the 10 basic dogmas of conventional science and subjects them to scientific examination. You see, I think what I call the science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in.
20:13 You know, we’ve already figured out the way the world is. That’s the science delusion. I don’t think we have. I think, I think there’s a huge amount we don’t know, and I think that if we flatter ourselves into thinking we already know the way things really are, we fill in the detail. Tes a few more game sequences and that kind of thing.
20:32 I just think that’s profoundly mistaken, and I think the reason that the sciences are getting into, they’re stuck at the moment. They’re stuck, and they’re obeying the law of diminishing return. More and more expensive research brings fewer and fewer real discoveries, because I think they’re hemmed in by dogmas, which are assumptions people take for granted. And there are 10 dogmas that contemporary science takes for granted, almost everyone within it takes for granted, and there are scientists who question individual dogmas.
21:04 And indeed my point is that science has grown out of this 19th century worldview, materialism that science is based on, was a 19th century worldview that’s got sort of embedded in the foundations of science, so much so that people don’t realize it’s a worldview or a belief system. A lot of people just think it’s the truth and the dogma. I mean, I can go through all 10 dogmas. Do you want me to do that? An example of one would be great, or an example of a couple would be interesting.
21:31 Well, I’ve already dealt with two. One is that memories are stored within the brain as material traces. Another is that all inheritance depends on genetic material or other material inheritance. Another dogma is that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same. I mean, this is something you must have learned as part of your engineering training, and it’s something everybody learns at school: the law of conservation of matter and energy.
21:58 Pretty convincing, and it works in practice. It’s a kind of accountancy principle, you know, you add up how much matter and energy goes in and how much comes out, and it should be the same. In practice it works pretty well. Most people never question the fact. It may not be a kind of cosmic truth.
22:17 And what I say about that is, first of all, if you look at the history of this doctrine, it doesn’t come from careful measurements to many places of decimals. It comes from 17th-century theology, the assumption was that God created all the atoms in the universe in the first place, at the creation, and because atoms by definition can’t be destroyed, the total amount is always the same. Therefore there’s a god-given amount of matter that can’t change unless it turns into energy.
22:46 Of course, I guess. Well, yes, but then, in relation to energy, there’s a god-given amount of energy that was there in the beginning. In the 17th century in their theory, and that’s the same, and of course, we can convert into each other, according to Einstein. But still, the total amount of matter and energy is supposed to be the same, because it’s god-given. That’s the reason for the assumption.
23:08 Historically, if you look at what physicists have actually done, then it turns out that they don’t believe these laws with the same kind of OD respect that most other people do. In the late ’80s, when they discovered that galaxies were attracting each other too much, if you add up all the matter and energy in the galaxies, from the stars, the galactic gas clouds, make a generous allowance for black holes and stuff, it turns out the galaxies are attracting each other, being pulled towards each other far more than they should be. And also stars within galaxies are rotating around the centre much faster than they should if the total amount of energy matter and energy was what you can work out using regular physics and astronomy.
23:58 So how do you explain that, either? The theory of galaxies and stars is wrong, or there’s much more matter in the galaxies than anyone had ever thought before. So they opted for that. They said, okay, there’s a great deal more matter than anyone ever thought was there before, but we can’t see it and we can’t detect it, so we’ll call it dark matter, because it’s undetectable. So then you say, well, how much dark matter is there?
24:26 They say, well, let’s, here’s the error in the they’re attracting each other too much. How much extra matter do we need to explain the facts? Okay. The epitome of your theories, you’re saying people are just putting patch. Yes, they put in, they put in, they’ve put in about five times more energy into the universe, matter.
24:44 Five times more dark matter to make the theory work. The problem is, having added five times more matter into the universe, the equations for the universe then showed that, instead of expanding forever, which they previously thought, with all that extra matter, it should stop expanding and begin to contract with all this extra gravity. And in the late ’90s, that’s what they thought the universe would do. It would slow down from its expansion and then contract until it finally imploded in a reverse of the Big Bang, called the Big Crunch.
25:18 You know, speaking of the Big Bang, there’s a video called Metamorphosis online where Dr Sheldrake is sitting next to Terence McKenna, and yeah, that’s a wow right away, and then McKenna says, if you’re willing to believe in the Big Bang theory, he’s like, there’s not much that you’re not willing to believe, and Rupert busts out laughing when he says that. I just wonder if you could tell us why you laughed, and what was going on? Well, what Terence was saying, basically, was that he said, you know, modern science is based on the principle of, give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.
25:52 And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy and all the laws that govern it, from nothing, in a single instant. And I could never, I could never quite get my head around that. That’s because they just plow through it, you know. Terence called it a singularity. It’s like something we assume and then build on, on top.
26:08 That’s right. Well, that’s it, his one free miracle. You see, anyway, the thing is, back to just briefly on the expansion thing, when when it turned it, when in the late ’90s they discovered that the universe is not slowing down in its expansion, it’s speeding up, the reverse of what it should have been doing. So how do you explain that? Well, answer, there must be some other kind of energy that no one had ever known about before, called dark energy, because you can’t see it or detect it in any normal way, and you add in just the right amount to explain the facts.
26:41 And so they’ve now arrived at the position where 96% of the universe is made of dark matter and dark energy, whose nature is totally unknown to us. The matter and energy you learned about at school, and that I learned about at school, is less than 4% of reality. So how do we know whether the total amount of dark matter and energy is conserved, always the same? Can it be converted to regular matter and energy? Can regular matter and energy disappear and turn into dark matter and energy?
27:08 Nobody has a clue. Therefore this fixed law, you know, the assumption, it’s all the same, sounds really solid, unquestionable, but when you think about it, it turns out to be really flaky, and just a kind of illusion. What does Dr Stephen Hawking say to you when you say something like that? You cannot prove the Big Bang, or you can’t justify it. What do they say?
27:29 Well, I think there, well, I haven’t actually personally discussed it with Hawking, but I have talked about it to various… you guys hang out together? Well, no, I do hang out with some cosmologists, and I do ask them this kind of thing, and I asked them, you know, how why have you got all this dark energy and dark matter, and how can you just invent it? Well, they said, well, it’s not an invention, it’s a hypothesis. And so, well, I mean, that’s just a quibbling over words.
27:55 But then, you know, how do you know the Big Bang really happened? Well, the answer is it fits their equations if you assume all the laws of nature are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they haven’t changed. You take the expanding universe as we can observe it today and you just crank it back in time. Obviously it’s getting bigger and bigger now, so if you crank it back in time it gets smaller and smaller until you reach a point where it’s vanishingly small and that’s the Big Bang.
28:24 The whole thing is a tissue of assumption and speculation. It’s not a fact. It’s a theory, and it’s not very well supported by facts. There aren’t that many facts involved. And the dark matter and dark energy are theories.
28:38 There’s no independent evidence for them, and nobody knows what they are. You know, Brian, we always come back to the same thing, you and I. I think Brian is inherently skeptic, and I’m inherently perhaps naive, or a little bit more. I’ve sided with you on several of these ideas. You know, Brian, I always come back to the ayahuasca thing, because Brian and I, we took this sacred vine plant that gives you an entheogenic trip, or trip deep into your own mind, and for me, it’s, I always ask the question in my mind: Brian, surely, having done ayahuasca and having seen everything you saw and been given these crazy lessons by a plant, doesn’t that fly in the face of everything that you were taught in the materialist scientific school background which you come from?
29:29 Doesn’t it, like, don’t you think? Well, maybe if a plant can give me messages, maybe the law of gravity is not so set in stone. It’s an interesting question, and I’ll probably have to quote Terence McKenna, as he would say, you know, perturbing consciousness is the only way that we can figure out that consciousness exists, or to quote another Terence quote: he’s like, I don’t know who discovered water, but it sure certainly wasn’t a fish. Is Terence in the Daniel Craig fast bender?
29:58 Yes, I have a crush now on parents. We’ll talk more about him later, but no, it’s a good point. I consider the ayahuasca to be more of a consciousness issue with me, but I have to be open-minded, and also open-minded to what Rupert says. I’ve been trained in this classical scientific way, where yeah, I don’t even debate the law of conservation of momentum or conservation of energy, because that’s what I was taught when I was eight, and this, and it all makes sense.
30:22 You know, the atom turns into energy via Einstein’s principles, and it all makes kind of a perfect world, just like Newtonian science made until Einstein came around. So I’m trying to make myself open-minded to new ideas. So if anything, that’s taught me that, as opposed to be so closed, which I’m sure most of the scientific community is very closed to your ideas. Well, it’s a livelihood to a certain… well, if you, it depends if you talk to them in public or in private.
30:48 In private, you know, there’s plenty of people in the scientific community who’ve taken the psychedelics, who’ve had psychic experiences, who meditate, who have spiritual practice practices, who’ve been to alternative practitioners and so on. In fact, a majority: recent surveys of the top 10 universities in America showed that a majority of people had spiritual or psychic experiences, but when they’re at work they’re all in the closet. They don’t talk to their colleagues about it, because they assume that all their colleagues are completely straight, dogmatic Dawkins-type skeptics.
31:25 Whereas in fact, the Dawkins-type skeptics are a minority in science, and yet most people within and outside science have been persuaded that they speak for the majority. To what do you attribute that? Why do you think that’s the case? Well, for a variety of historical reasons, the materialist worldview took over the sciences in the late 19th century. It became established as the, like, the official philosophy of science, and since then any deviation from it has been treated as heresy.
31:59 Okay. You know, in most areas of human endeavor, like literature, the arts, politics, and courts of law, we’re used to hearing different sides of the story. In a court of law you hear the prosecution and the defense, or the plaintiff and the defendant. In politics, you know, if Mr Cameron says something, then you hear from what you know Mr Miliband thinks, and you, so we’re used to hearing different points of view. But in science it doesn’t work that way.
32:26 It’s based on the idea that science knows the absolute truth, or at least aspires to it. Of course, at any given time everyone would admit we don’t know all of it, but then any deviation from that established view is treated as heresy. It’s like a one-party state, and of course scientific revolutions occur from time to time, and a different worldview gets installed, but then that becomes a one-party state. A scientific revolution is more like a South American military junta.
32:56 You know, one lot’s overthrown and another lot moves in, but it doesn’t necessarily imply liberalization and democracy and pluralism. So I think in the 19th century there was a kind of rejection of it. It was partly ideologically driven, because there was a strong atheist movement in the 19th century, and that was based, of course, on the 18th-century atheist movement, the French Revolution, which said it was the Enlightenment worldview. Basically, we’re going to have science and reason, and we’re going to reject religion and superstition, and in the French Revolution they turned the Cathedral of Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason and abolished, you know, Christianity, or tried to abolish Christianity.
33:45 So science and reason became allied with anti-Christian or anti-religious views, atheist views, effectively, and it became very hard for scientists by the end of the 19th century to adopt religious, spiritual, or even talk about telepathy or psychic phenomena, because these had all been classified as sort of superstition, and science and reason marched into the vanguard, and of course the Soviet Union was based on those principles. Marxism was supposed to be a supremely scientific system, and so this kind of ideology, which is really 19th century, became part of the culture of science, and it’s very hard for scientists to break out of it. I mean, my hope is that the time will come when scientists feel free to talk about what really interests them, and come out of the closet, and then the whole scientific world would look completely different.
34:41 I think it’s their business at the end of the day. It’s also their livelihood. I mean, if you have tenure as a professor somewhere, you can’t come out and trash. Well, you don’t necessarily trash it. You see, you could say, well, you, yes, but why say you’re professor of chemistry and you come out of the closet?
34:57 I’ve taken ayahuasca and my whole view of the universe has changed, and my consciousness has expanded, and these plant substances have shown me something I never knew before. Why do it? Wouldn’t trash chemistry. I mean, ayahuasca after all contains chemicals, so there’s no reason it should be assumed to trash science. The fear is that it would be trashing science, so you can’t say it, but the reality is quite different.
35:22 It means the dogmatic materialism that in science restricts discussion in a really harmful way, because if you have these experiences with ayahuasca or LSD or any other psychedelic, why not feel free to talk about them? Apart from the fact they’re illegal, but I mean, apart from a few, that’s not the reason people don’t talk about them. It’s the reason they don’t talk about them, is because they want to appear straight in some kind of boringly 19th-century materialist way, so that their funding isn’t withdrawn or they aren’t ostracized, as Brian said, basically, but that’s only because other people have the same prejudices.
35:58 You see, if everyone came out of the closet, I mean, in the 1950s if you were gay you might get ostracized and might not get promoted, and that kind of thing. You might lose your job. No, you don’t. The reason, don’t people in the 1950s as there are today, the difference is they’ve came out of the closet, and within I just know that in science this is the case, you know, because whenever I give quite a lot of talks in scientific institutions universities and scientific institutes.
36:27 Usually I get a very open-minded fair hearing. There’s sometimes one or two extreme skeptic types who try to get me disinvited before I arrive there, and then they boycott the lecture, but 95% of the other people go to it. And when I give these talks afterwards, during the tea break, it happens over and over and over again. People come up to me, and you can see them looking over their shoulders, and when they’re sure that nobody else is listening, they say, you know, I’ve had this kind of experience.
36:58 I know who’s calling me on the phone, or my dog knows when I’m coming home from the lab. It’s waiting for me at the door, and, you know, I, I’m very interested in this kind of thing. I think consciousness is much more than just the brain, and that kind of thing, but, and I say to them, can you talk to your colleagues about this? And they said, no, no, they’re all so straight. And every time this has ever happened to me, I’ve had several people in each of these institutions say the same thing.
37:26 And I said, well, did you know that so-and-so over there was interested in these things? Oh no, no, I’m sure they’re not. I went to a scientific conference in Ireland just last week and it was about, the Society for Scientific Exploration. It’s a society for open-minded science. It’s a great organization, investigating scientifically what most scientists would prefer not to talk about.
37:50 There was a guy there from the University of Helsinki in Finland, a professor of mathematics, mhm, and he told me that he was very interested in psychic experiences. He’d mean documenting these experiences, and so I said, well, can you talk to your research and your findings? Can you talk about it to any of your colleagues? He said, oh no, no, I don’t tell anybody. He said, I said, well, is there anyone else in the University who has interests like yours?
38:17 He said, well, until yesterday I thought there wasn’t. He said, but he said there’s a couple of people here, and he pointed to a married couple across the room. He said they both work in the physics department, 100 m down the corridor from me, and he said I’ve just met them at this conference, and it turns out they’re very interested in this kind of thing, and he had to go to Ireland to a scientific conference to meet neighbors from down the corridor who he would never talk to about it.
38:44 So I think this, the world of science is full of this kind of underground discussions. There’s lots of people who listen to Terence McKenna in the scientific world who take psychedelics, but they wouldn’t ever So here’s the real question, Rupert. Did you drink ayahuasca with Terence McKenna? No, I didn’t, actually. I’ve done other things with Terence McKenna, but not ayahuasca.
39:10 I did visit Terence McKenna’s ayahuasca plantation in Hawaii. In Hawaii he was growing it. Yes. Okay, he grew everything in his… he did. He was.
39:20 I had a wonderful time there, staying in his Botanic Garden in a remote… it was like half a mile on a four-wheel drive, the side of a volcano in Hawaii. It was called Botanical Dimensions. Is that your, is that your mechanic? Yes. But here’s the real question, I want to hear more about Terence.
39:45 After that, to you. All right, can you tell us more about Terence, and what it was like meeting him, and how long you spent with him? Oh, I knew him very well. I first met Terence in 1982, and I was in San Francisco. My book, A New Science of Life, had just come out in California.
40:02 My publisher was on, in, in Los Angeles, Tarta, and so I’d gone to the West Coast. I’d never been to California before. I’d been living in India for years before that, doing research in agriculture. Wow. I wrote my book in India.
40:18 Anyway, I’d never been to California. I was in San Francisco. I’d given a lot of lectures there. There was a lot of interest in morphic resonance, and so on. And I met somebody who said, there’s a guy you’ve got to meet.
40:31 He lives near. He lives in Occidental, California. And I said, where’s that? And he said, well, just… he said, I’ve arranged it all. He said you get on the Greyhound bus at, you get off at Santa Rosa, California, and he’ll meet you.
40:44 Stand by the road in this place and he’ll meet you. So I thought, okay. And he said, and here’s a tape with him talking, so I listened on a Walkman on the bus journey, on the Greyhound bus journey to Santa Rosa, to a Terence McKenna tape where he’s talking about DMT, dimethyltryptamine, and its effects on consciousness. So I’d never heard anything like this before, and I thought, this is really amazing stuff. And so I stood in the appointed place, and after a couple of minutes this battered Golden Cadillac drew up, with sort of peeling tail fins, and the windows scrolled down, and there’s this guy with curly hair and dark glasses who leaned out of the window and said, Dr Sheldrake, I presume?
41:39 So he took me to his… A-frame in Occidental. You had to go up a sort of path, and you had to pass a hut. I wondered what was in the hut. He showed me later.
41:50 It was full of mushrooms. He had to go and vaporize them every few hours, you know, humidify the atmosphere. Anyway, Ralph Abraham, his friend, was staying there, and Ralph’s a chaos mathematician at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He’s still there, and these two guys were just talking. They met, you know, to talk to each other, and I just sort of parachuted in to this discussion.
42:14 Ralph was there anyway, and we started talking, and 48 hours later we were still talking, you know. We had a little bit of sleep, and at a little bit, but I mean this was the most interesting conversation I ever had. And the wall, and that was just such… so then after that every year Terence, Ralph, and I met together and spent several days just talking all through the ’80s, and then I think it must have been around Terence was staying at the Esalen Institute, and Ralph and I met him there, and we were hanging out there, and the woman in charge of programs there, Nancy Lny, dropped in, and she had some of this conversation.
42:53 She said, you know, this stuff’s incredible. You know, why didn’t you do this as a public program? Workshop… the original podcast, really. So yeah, so the next, the next year we did a, a, a three-day program, you know, public.
43:08 We, you know, people could come, and then it was recorded. None of the previous ones recorded. From then on we recorded these discussions, whether they were in public or private, and some of them were transcribed and turned into books. One book’s called Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness, and the other one’s called The Evolutionary Mind. But then about four years ago Ralph was clearing out his garage in Santa Cruz, and he found this box in the garage, covered with dust, and it was all these cassette tapes of these trialogues that we’d forgotten about.
43:43 And there was someone he knew who was keen on Terence’s work, who digitized them and put them online, and they’re now all online on my website and on other websites where people can listen to these conversations. But the first 10 years were totally unrecorded, and then the next 10 years most of them were recorded, and those are now in the public domain on the internet. So ’85 to ’95 wasn’t recorded. No. And then no, from ’82 to about ’90 or ’91 wasn’t recorded.
44:15 Okay, so maybe nine or 10 years was totally unrecorded, but these were, some of the highlights of my year. I mean these three-way conversations, and we thought that three-way conversations are much better than just two-way or four-way. We thought three-way is a really good way to go. So I mean one of the things I like about your show here is you’ve got this trialogue format, which I find a really good one. If you have a dialogue you can sometimes get stuck, and if you have three people it can sort of move on in a way that’s much more interesting.
44:49 And you and Terence, Ralph, each had different specialties, right? Ralph was the chaos guy. Ralph is a chaos mathematician, mathematics, right? Terence was a shaman. He was an anthropologist who studied ethnobotany and the shamanic use of psychedelics.
45:05 I’m a biologist. I think what really got us together in the first place was what we had in common, a way to start with, we’d all spent quite a lot of time in India and were very influenced by Indian philosophy and theories of consciousness. Terence had been in India for quite a long time, and then he traveled through Southeast Asia. I lived in Southeast Asia. I was at the University of Malaya at one time, and then I spent seven years in India doing research on plants.
45:33 Wow. And Ralph had been in India for quite extended periods. He was a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, and lived up in the Himalayas, in, you know, um, and spent a lot of time in Benares, and so all of us had this kind of Indian background. Well, I mean, I guess the real question at the end of the show is who would win in a fistfight between you and Richard Dawkins? Well, I didn’t think, kid, just a little background.
46:03 So, some people say your more recent book is a direct rebuttal to Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. I was wondering if you could talk about that and answer, you know. I, I really would like to hear that, but just before he goes into that I have a slightly more serious question which I just don’t want to forget. You know, there’s a skeptic who’s put up a $1 million prize for any incontrovertible evidence or proof of the metaphysical. I can’t remember what his name was, or what the prize is called.
46:31 Do you know him? Oh yes, yes, James Randi. He’s a conjurer. Okay, and so my question, Brian, is if there’s guys like this out there, right, and Terence McKenna and the chaos mathematician and countless others of his intelligence who have such incredible brains, and they’re unable to prove or unable to win this prize. That is my main concern.
46:57 What can you say about that? Is anything you well, first of all, the guy who’s put this prize up, James Randi, is an extreme skeptic. He’s a debunker. His aim is not really to find out if it exists, but to debunk claims that it might exist. Okay, second point is is very questionable.
47:14 If he’s got a million dollars, this is a tremendous, you know, stunt. He’s lived off this promise of a million dollars for 30 years. It’s his stock in trade. He’s a tremendous self-publicist. Third, I don’t think he’s sincere.
47:28 There’s a chap who runs a webcast, called a podcast, called Alex Tsakiris. The podcast is called Skeptiko, and it’s, I think, the best thing on the internet for looking at skeptics and evidence for psychic phenomena, and so on. He replicated my dog experiments. So I had, I did these psychic dog experiments, dogs that know when their owners are coming home. He got a skeptical professor involved to criticize, you know, to critique the methods.
48:00 He then applied to Randi and said, look, I’d like to apply for this prize with this dog research. And Randi simply didn’t reply. Then he asked him again, and Randi didn’t reply, so he asked him again, and then Randi wrote back very, very rudely, and said, you know, you do, you think I’ve got, your claim is at the bottom of a list of 30 or 40 others. Do you think I can waste time on a stupid dog claim? Okay, you know, so I mean, is this a sincere attempt to look into something?
48:27 No, it’s a propaganda stunt. Okay, so And he has no scientific credentials whatever. He doesn’t understand statistics and so forth, and he’s a proven liar, so I don’t think that this is a serious claim. And the second point is that in science what counts is not a one-off showman-type demonstration on TV. That wouldn’t count as science.
48:54 What counts is replication, building up evidence published in peer-reviewed journals, where it’s been carefully checked and then replicated by other people. So even if someone won the Randi prize, it wouldn’t change science, because science doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work in terms of, you know, one-off demonstrations on TV. So it’s not very relevant. Do you think the world will be a do you think one day, in maybe 50 or 100 years, the world will be incredibly different when it comes to science, and that we will pretty much take things like ESP and telekinesis for granted and consider them an everyday aspect of life?
49:28 Well, I would say most people think that right now. The only people who think they’re totally impossible are people who’ve been, I think, brainwashed by too much scientific education. Me, no, I think they’re highly improbable, but we’ll just throw that out there. Well, we can, we probably haven’t time to discuss the evidence, but I have now an automated telephone telepathy test that’s working online. Anyone can do it, so perhaps we could encourage listeners and viewers to try it out for themselves on sheldrake.org, your website.
49:58 Yes, it’s called the Mobile Telephone Telepathy Test. Okay, this is interesting. Can you give us a brief description of what it is? Okay, well, I’ve done tons of experiments on this, but basically what we do is to find out the telephone telepathy is when people think they know who’s calling. You think of someone, then they call you.
50:15 You say, it’s funny, I was just thinking about you. 80% of people have had that experience. So it’s common. It’s not paranormal, it’s normal. But the skeptics would say, well, it’s just coincidence.
50:25 You think about people all the time. Someone rings you, you imagine it’s telepathy, and you forget all the times you’re wrong. Every scientifically educated person has been trained to… that hypothesis, I would say. But you see, then I would say, where’s your evidence? And when I first got interested in this, I said to skeptics, where’s your evidence?
50:44 There wasn’t a shred of it. No one had ever done any studies whatever on this. How often do people think of other people? It’s pure armchair speculation. It’s fine to have a hypothesis, but you have to test it in science.
50:55 So I’ve tested it. In my basic experiment, the subjects have four callers. They sit at home being videotaped. They name people they might be telepathic with, friends or family members. These people are miles away.
51:10 Say you were the subject. You’d be videotaped sitting at home with a landline phone, no caller ID display. We pick one of the four callers at random, we call them up and say, now phone Brian now. And they phone. The phone rings.
51:27 Before you pick it up, you have to say who you think it is. I think it’s John. You pick it up. Hi John, you’re right, or you’re wrong. By chance you’d be right 25% of the time.
51:38 In these trials, more than 600 of them, people were right 45% of the time on average. The probability value is 1 x 10^-12. This is more likely than the existence of the Higgs boson. According to the statistics, it’s now been… it’s now been replicated. It’s been independently replicated at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Fribourg, with positive, significant results.
52:03 The version I know, we have it online. It’s something anyone can do, and lots and lots of people have results are coming in very positive. All right, I’ll check it out. And in that one you only have two callers, but it runs automatically, and you put in two names, mobile phone numbers, the computer picks one of them, sends them a text message asking them to call you at a landline, which is the computer. And you, you call, you put on hold, you get a thing that says who’s calling, press one or two to guess who it is.
52:35 You guess, you’re right or you’re wrong. The line opens up. You see if you’re right or wrong immediately. It should be 50% by chance. It’s around 60% in fact.
52:44 Anyone can do this. All right, that’s interesting. I like that you’re putting it out there. You know, direct science. All right, so then what is the beef with Richard Dawkins?
52:51 Can you address that, and his book, and what this rivalry is? Well, Dawkins is a credulous materialist. He just takes the entire materialist worldview for granted, you know, he just assumes the whole lot is true. He doesn’t discuss any of these 10 assumptions. He just takes it for granted that they’re true.
53:12 Now if they’re true, then everything he says is right, you know, that where selfish genes, or all there is to inheritance. There’s no God, because the whole universe is basically totally unconscious, consciousness nothing but the activity of the brain, therefore all psychic phenomena are illusory. All his views follow from this belief system. But so I think his belief system is what needs to be questioned, and in The Science Delusion I question every one of those 10 dogmas, and show that each one of them, if you look at it scientifically, just collapses, that these dogmas hold back science, and if you look at them scientifically, what’s the evidence?
53:52 They don’t hold up, and the kind of science we’d have if we question these dogmas is so much more interesting, so much more fun, and so much more liberating. That’s why in America my book’s called Science Set Free. It’s still, I’m, I’m hugely pro-science, but I think what’s holding science back is dogma, scientific dogma, and, you know, science doesn’t have to be atheistic either. I mean, it’s got linked in Dawkins’ mind to a kind of atheist, to gender and ideology.
54:22 I think, you know, the question of whether God exists or not is a separate question, and I think we should leave it out of a scientific discussion, be neutral. Okay, I think, I think we should have Mr Richard Dawkins on London Real, wherever you are out there. Mr Dawkins, we should have you on, and have a debate between the two of you. We’ll have it live and moderated by Nick, and I’m up for it. You are, all right, well, the proposal’s out there.
54:49 Well, that might a hole in the fabric of space-time. It might well. We’ll have it controlled. You, it’ll be, it’ll be all by the book, so I’ll throw that out there. That sounds good.
54:56 Um, I was curious, if you look back at the 25-year-old Rupert Sheldrake, the 30-year-old, and if you, if you had to give him some advice, you know, about what you might do differently, or what, what you see now that you’ve been in this field for so long, what would you tell him? Well, I think I’d probably say be bolder. You know, that the, this entire edifice of science, and at least its foundations, are just rotten. That the whole thing, it took me a long time to realize just how rotten they are.
55:30 You know, because you don’t get told this when you’re studying science. It’s treated as if it’s all true and totally solid. If I’d realized just how shaky the whole thing is earlier, I would have been actually more, I would have come on even stronger at an earlier age. That’s very interesting. Why is it that India has been such a huge influence on people like you, and McKenna, and Ralph?
55:57 I just, I’ve never been there, and I just wonder what you’ve obviously immersed yourself in there. What does it do to you, as far as make you question things and think differently? Well, part of it’s being in a culture with a totally different worldview. I mean, you have such a different view of things in India. There’s hardly any sort of materialist, atheist types in India.
56:20 You know, everyone believes in larger conscious realities of one kind or another. The Hindus do, the Muslims do, the Jains do, the Buddhists do, the Christians do, and there’s a general consensus that we live in a conscious, living world, that we live in a world that’s alive, a universe that’s alive, that there’s forms of consciousness out there beyond the human level, that animals and plants have, are not just machines that we can use as we wish, but have a kind of sacred or spiritual dimension to them. That’s why all those sacred animals and sacred trees and things.
56:58 So it’s a world, with, was so different from our secularized, mechanistic world, and one which in some ways is much more attractive. I mean, people seem to have deeper thoughts, and they seem to, poor people in India who now have almost nothing are much less miserable than you might expect, you know, because they have a sense of cohesion, a sense of belonging to their social group, and a sense of living in a living universe where this life is just part of something much bigger. That’s very interesting, that you spoke about them, even regarding their personal circumstances, they’re still reasonably happy.
57:39 I watched a show on the web the other day called Welcome to India, BBC documentary, and it was following several Indian families and Indian individuals who are maybe starting businesses or struggling, and I realized they are incredibly happy in spite of the circumstances, not because of them, and by the way, I’ve put a link to that on the London Real forums if anyone wants to watch the video. I highly recommend it. Excellent. And that just blew my mind. These people are living in filth in the streets, and they’re all smiling, and then we come to London and you see a guy walking out of the Goldman building.
58:18 He’s probably got a net worth of like 50 million quid, and the guy’s scowling. You know, it’s not always the case, generalize a little bit. I do get your point, but you understand what I’m saying. It’s, I find that interesting. Would you move back there ever, or have you spent the time?
58:30 Well, I’ve, I’ve visited India, you know, quite a few times since I worked there and lived there. I’m not very keen on the modern India, the India of sort of huge cities, incredible pollution, traffic jams. I much prefer, yes. I think that’s a disaster, and, you know, they’re trying to convert as fast as they can to being like us, which I think is a terribly bad role model. So I’m much more interested in the traditional India and rural India than I am in sort of modern call center, traffic jam, polluted air India.
59:07 Okay. Do you miss Terence McKenna, and what do you think he would be talking about today if he were alive? Today is All Souls’ Day, I mean, while we’re talking, and it’s where you remember the dead, so it’s quite a good time to think about him. And I think Terence had an extremely liberated mind. He had an incredibly free-flowing consciousness.
59:32 He had an astonishing gift of the gab, which came from his joint, and on his father’s side he was Irish, on his mother’s side he was Welsh. Okay, so, you know, he had this kind of Celtic bardic gift, and remarkable ability to explore freely, to put things in highly witty and amusing way. He was a one-off, completely unrepeatable. Ralph Abraham and I, who had so many wonderful conversations with him, have tried having trialogues with a whole series of other people since then, but there’s nobody who comes close to being as lively and as much fun as Terence.
1:00:17 Yeah, I was just immediately drawn. I play tapes of him to people who have no interest in psychedelics, and they can’t stop listening to him, so, because he has, and he has that, like, you said, that big way of drawing you in, just because he’s humble and yeah, open-minded and self-deprecating and everything, all in one, which for an American is quite rare. He is such a complete mastery of the English language as well. It’s a phenomenal human being. Yeah, so what do you think he would be speaking about today, Rupert?
1:00:48 Ah, I think he’d speak about almost anything we asked him to speak about. You know, he didn’t. I never felt with Terence that, you know, the shutters clang down or anything. I mean, he was open to most topics, okay, and that made him different from most intellectuals who have you know, strict barriers to taboos. I mean, the materialist worldview is a set of taboos.
1:01:14 Well, Terence didn’t have that. I mean, he was quite open, and he’d run with anything. It didn’t mean to say he’d take it necessarily very seriously. I mean, he I mean, he saw the funny side of everything. Such a brave man as well, you know.
1:01:31 Brian, when he speaks about taking the heroic dose of mushrooms, that I mean, here I am, like, freaking out about a little ayahuasca trip, and he was like, I want to take as much as I can to get as far out there as possible. Such a brave guy. I mean, who does that, you know? Well, others may do it, but they don’t necessarily survive in such a good way. He did.
1:01:51 I mean, some people, I think, can go off the rails, but somehow he managed to stay very sane until he died tragically in 2000 of this aggressive brain tumor. Right, and he always wondered whether his brain tumor was caused by, I’ve always, the kind of drugs he took. But none of the doctors and neurologists he talked to thought that was the case. Well, you, so you met him in ’82 when he really wasn’t that well known. Or was he?
1:02:22 He was a kind of underground figure in ’82. He had a following in Southern California. Okay, he was on a radio show, KPFK, which he was on the all-night slot on this kind of alternative radio program. In fact, once I arrived in Los Angeles, Terence said, I’ll pick you up at the airport, and I my plane gets in really late, at 11:00. He said, well, we’ll just be in time for the show then, and so we go to the studio, and we start talking, and we go on talking for a couple of hours, and I said, you know, Terence, I said, how long’s this show go on?
1:02:55 He said, till 4:00 a.m. I love, say, four hours of… four hours of conversation in the middle of the night, and I said, but who listens to this? He said, my fan base are all insomniacs. He said, can you imagine some redneck hill-like driving back from his night shift at McDonald’s, and, like, accidentally tuning into that and changing the course of his whole life? Could, yeah, yeah, what a great medium.
1:03:27 So that was his platform at the time. Okay, plus a few talks at the Esalen Institute, but at that time he had a pretty low profile. Before his books came out, he was media savvy to a certain degree, to be able to have these outlets, right? Oh yes. I don’t think he himself organized them.
1:03:42 I think people who knew him got him onto these shows. I mean, I don’t think he had a sort of PR publicist-type person calling up and saying, you’ve got to have Terence on your show. It wasn’t like that at all. Rupert, what’s next for you? I mean, what do you see when you see 2013?
1:04:01 What more things do you want to do with your life? Well, I, the, the, the program I set out in my book, The Science Delusion, Science Set Free, is a program for radical reform in science, which involves not just changing the way science is done and the way scientists think, but also the way science is funded, because the conservatism of it is a lot to do with the funding system. So I’m interested in exploring a lot of the ideas I set forth in the book, you know, following through on some of the proposals I make in the book, and continuing with my existing research on telepathy and other psychic phenomena.
1:04:44 What I’m doing at the moment is developing tests that work on mobile phones and smart phones and apps, because I want this research to be widely available, to get it out of the ghetto of science, of universities, and into the wider world where anyone can take part who’s interested. The ghetto of universities, is that what you said? Can you explain that? Well, universities are a small enclosed world, where people have quite tight constraints on what they can think.
1:05:14 It’s a kind of culture of a rather narrow, old-fashioned kind, where lots of thoughts are not allowed. For example, you couldn’t sit in a university and discuss your experiences, except perhaps in a neurology department, where, you know, the question would be which bits of your nerve endings were being activated by DMT or something, but it wouldn’t be a very interesting discussion. It would be about molecular mechanisms. But so there’s a lot of topics that are simply not permitted in universities because of this narrow, dogmatic view.
1:05:49 And it’s a shame that so many young people have been forced through them, in like a sausage machine, and, you know, standardizing people’s thinking. I think a lot of people are better off to just spend three years traveling around the world or something instead of going to university. And would, and would probably end up with broader and more interesting views, and probably be more creative and employable as well. Well, that’s interesting theory. So you just want to push the science forward and get the funding out of the universities and out of the non-traditional ways?
1:06:22 Well, I don’t want to, I mean, universities do a useful job, and I, you know, I spent part of my life in them. I was at Cambridge for quite a long time, and Harvard, and I think they have a useful role to play, but I think that at the moment they have too much power and influence over educated people, and over intelligent people, and I think that there’s a lot of things that can be discussed more fruitfully. So I want to open up the scientific world, open up the whole realm of discussion, that’s why my book in America is called Science Set Free.
1:06:55 I’m interested in setting science free or helping to set it free. No one can do this. There’s lots of people trying to do it, you see, and it’s a movement, and it’s a movement I want to be part of, and to help along. It’s an incredibly mobile agenda. I really like that.
1:07:12 How do people get a hold of your book? What’s the best way in the States and in the UK? Well, in the UK it’s called The Science Delusion. In the US it’s called Science Set Free. It’s available in bookstores, on Amazon, as a Kindle, as an ebook, and also as an audiobook, so if people like listening to books they can listen to me reading it.
1:07:31 You read it. I love that. Myself, yeah, that makes all the difference. When I spent three days in a studio here in London reading that, it was a strange experience. I’ve never done it before, because it’s kind of a bit, it’s almost acting to a certain extent, right?
1:07:44 Or you try not to. Well, I couldn’t. I, I had the person who was my editor sitting in a soundproof booth while I did this, and sometimes as I was reading I’d think, oh, that sentence, I could improve it a bit, and I changed the way that sentence… she’d stopped me and said, you can’t say that, and I said, yes I can. She said, no you can’t, it’s written here in the book. I said, but I wrote the book, and I just thought of a better way of saying it.
1:08:05 She says it’s got to be exactly the same as on the page. It’s Brian and I have been Brian, I’ve been listening to quite a few audiobooks through Audible. I’m already getting into that. Brian, yeah, no, I’m enjoying Audible.com. I’m listening to Schwarz Sager’s book right now, so I would definitely check that out.
1:08:24 With Dr Sheldrake’s book. Excellent. Well, the other thing I should say is my website. There’s tons of material there, including a link to all the trialogues that are in streaming audio, and so that’s www.sheldrake.org, and that has all those old conversations you mentioned. All those conversations are there in audio format.
1:08:43 And also there’s the link in the online experiments portal. There’s a link to my telephone telepathy test that I’ve been talking about, the Mobile Telephone Telepathy Test. Oh, I think all the London Real should download that, send us your stats, and I mean, 60% is quite an anomaly, as they would say. So I’ll try it too, I promise. And you’re on Twitter.
1:09:03 I know you tweet occasionally, and that’s it: Rupert Sheldrake on Twitter as well, and the website again was sheldrake.org. Sounds good. Yeah, our hour is up. That was fantastic. Unbelievable.
1:09:18 Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much, please. Very, very fantastic. Yeah, pure wisdom. Yeah, fantastic.
1:09:24 All right, good, until then. It’s about the journey. All right, thank you, guys.
