Rupert Sheldrake - Ways To Go Beyond

Full transcript: Rupert Sheldrake on London Real

4:51 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 14 books who has 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 at the Royal Society here in London. Your controversial TED Talk to Science delusion was banned and then re-uploaded by TED and now has over one and a half million views.

5:15 And your new book, Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work, considers seven spiritual practices that are personally transformative which have scientifically measurable effects. Rupert, welcome back to London Real. Good to be here. It’s always a huge pleasure and honor to have you here. I feel some kind of kinship with you, Rupert.

5:34 I don’t know if it’s just me or if you have that effect on all sorts of people. And I really appreciate your invitation to the Oriental Club last week for your book launch. So thank you, I appreciate it. And also, I realize now that when you accepted my invitation for Thanksgiving dinner at my house, it was just a research project for you. And that hurt me, Rupert.

5:54 It wasn’t a research project. I had been to ones in America, actually. Okay. But it is one of the things I write about, observing festivals and rituals and thank goodness it happens and it actually was an honor to go to one in Hampstead. Yeah it was a real pleasure having you there and once I read you know science and spiritual practices I looked I’m looking at my holidays and rituals in a different lens and I know that’s what you’re trying to do here and I want to talk about that but you know we went around the table and everyone talked about what they were thankful for and you know these things that we kind of take for granted they they have a real important place in our lives, don’t they?

6:30 Yes, they do. Yeah. One thing, the very beginning of this book, I was almost shocked to hear you talking about sports. And I remember last time you were here, I tried to give you a London Real t-shirt and you said, I don’t wear t-shirts. And you said, my son doesn’t wear t-shirts.

6:46 And so I thought a scholar like you would never talk about sports, because it almost seems like the opposite of what you are. But I was obviously completely wrong. And so tell me about sports and why they made kind of top billing in this book. Well, I didn’t write about sports because it’s the dominant part of my own life. But, you know, everyone plays sports to some extent.

7:12 And I don’t think of myself as a very high level sports person. But I enjoy sports and the ones I’ve played most are tennis and squash. And what I mainly do in terms of exercise is walking, and that doesn’t really count as a sport. But the reason it’s there is because sports are such an important part of the modern world. I mean, if you think of the role they play in many people’s lives.

7:41 And I think they’re the main way in which people in the modern world actually achieve altered states of consciousness. And it’s all totally below the radar. I mean, sports are totally above the radar in the sense it’s prime time television, there’s sports pages, sports newspapers. Jersey’s t-shirts, all that. All that kind of thing.

8:00 Right. Billions of dollars and all that. But this experiential dimension, which is why a lot of people do them, I mean, some of it’s competitive, some of it’s professional, but sports include both amateur team games professional team games. Also ones that are not about competition, primarily about experience, skiing. For example, most people are not skiing because they’re trying to win something or make money.

8:31 In fact, it costs them a lot of money. And then there’s all these extreme sports where people are doing things that are really dangerous, the exact opposite of the health and safety culture we live in. I was just intrigued by all this, and martial arts, I at one time did martial arts, and that brings out the spirit of Aikido. Oh really, okay, at Cambridge, or what is it? At Cambridge, yes, when I was a graduate student.

9:00 Okay. And that’s where the spiritual dimension’s most explicit in the Oriental martial arts. But I’m a friend of Michael Murphy, who founded the Esalen Institute in California in 1962. And Michael Murphy is somebody who’s, in a sense, the pioneer of the human potential movement. He himself is a very keen sportsman.

9:27 He wrote a famous book called Golf in the Kingdom about the mystical side of golf, which has sold over a million copies. And he takes the view that sports are the yoga of the West, that in the West, the way in which people experience the greatest discipline in their lives, training, altered states of consciousness. All these are coming about through sports. He also thinks that, and I agree with him, that they’re at one of the leading edges of human evolution, because if you think about it in the 20th and 21st centuries, there’s has been the invention of a whole new range of sports.

10:10 Hang gliding, snowboarding, skateboarding, paragliding, all sorts of sports. Some of them involve diving in the skydiving, jumping out of planes, plummeting through the air, base jumping, and then, of course, the ones that go with fast machines like motorcycle racing, sports car racing, and so on. All of these have taken human beings into realms of experience that no human’s ever been in before. All of them involve the development of new skills. All of them involve the development of new forms of coordination, new muscle groups are brought together, new skills.

10:53 And of course, with the ones that involve technologies like skateboards and snowboards, there’s been an evolution of the technology as well. So this is in fact one of the most rapidly evolving areas of human experience and human skill. And yet, because most people who write books are academics and it’s completely underneath the radar, when people talk of human evolution they think usually of technologies like iPhones and the internet or sort of scientific breakthroughs quantum theory and that kind of thing. But all these physical skills are usually left out of the picture.

11:34 That’s very interesting. If you looked at the game of football, and especially the way that it’s consumed here in this country, like you said, it’s kind of above the radar, but the whole experiential, spiritual side is so below the radar. And again, usually the people writing books aren’t the ones necessarily that are chanting at the games, but that’s a massive spiritual practice, isn’t it? Well, I think what it is is the experience of bonding. I mean, any team game has, as one of its components, obviously working as a team.

12:05 And when people work really well as a team, those levels of intuition come into play, which it’s very hard to express in normal language. But one of the things Michael Murphy did, he wrote a book called The Psychic Side of Sports. He interviewed American football players and people in other team games and when he got them on their own Many of them when they felt secure and at ease with him would talk about how they had these altered states of consciousness How they felt kind of telepathic. They just knew where other people were They know some of it could have been subliminal perception But they thought it was much more than that going on that the team functioning like a single organism When when the game was going well, yeah And the other thing they said is that they never discussed this with their team mates in the locker room, you know, because they’d be thought weird.

12:57 And yet, most of the members of the team were having these experiences but couldn’t talk to other people about it because of the kind of taboo. Interesting. And that would make sense if you see the coordination of a British football team or an American football team. I mean, you know, so many moving components, you know, balls flying here and there and and people are moving, I mean, it would make sense there’s some type of connection that’s happening that’s not visual.

13:23 Yes, there’s something going on that’s more than visual. And you see this, I think there’s a tonnepatic component. Some, I mean, Pele, the famous Brazilian footballer, used to talk about this as if it was a kind of telepathy. He had no problem with saying that kind of thing. Torville and Dean, the great ice skating duo, classic duo of ice skaters, used to say, we’re telepathic on the ice.

13:53 They just knew how the other would move. I mean, similar things occur in other physical activities like dancing. But I think what we’re dealing with in team games is a kind of telepathic element which people feel, and that sense of strong bonding and connection with others It takes you out of yourself, literally. You’re part of something bigger than yourself. And I think watching football games or other sports, if you’re part of the crowd and you’re supporting your team, especially in a home match, there’s this sense of bonding, connection.

14:30 And when people sing together, like when Liverpool sing, you’ll never walk alone, there’s a kind of group experience which I think people need and want. I mean, we’re social animals, and a lot about modern life separates people and individualizes and atomizes the society, but sports are a way in which people can feel that bonding. Which used to be provided by religion, and then football replaced it to a certain extent. In some sense, it is a kind of substitute for a kind of bonding, but it’s more immediate than religion in the sense that it’s to do with being in the present and in the flow.

15:10 In a greater way perhaps than most religious rituals achieve. And one of the things about it is the experience of being in the flow, you have to be in the present. And the aim of many spiritual practices is to come into the present, to switch off the chattering mind. The areas of the brain that are involved in that is the default mode network. These are linked areas of the brain which are to do with ruminations and worries fears and fantasies and so on, the chattering mind.

15:45 Now one reason for meditating is to try and reduce that activity and if you meditate regularly you can reach the point where this stops, usually for a fairly brief period. But as I learned from one of my friends who’s an American businessman, he said when he was at his busiest, his mind was going all the time, he could hardly sleep, his mind was so over excited and he tried meditating didn’t work but he’s also a rock climber he said by the time he was 50 feet half a rock face he was completely in the present yeah and if you’re in the middle of a football game you know everything depends on the slight you know who’s gonna got the ball how’d you where’d you go next you can’t be worrying about things you bills you haven’t paid or insults that someone’s annoyed you with or what you ought to have said to someone, oh, what are you going to do tomorrow?

16:40 You have to be in the present. And I think it’s the easiest, fastest, and commonest way in which people in the modern world get into the present and into the flow. Yeah, I think you’re right. I had Stephen Kotler in here, who was the founder of the Flow Genome Project, and he said, you can see the athletes in flow when you watch a live sport events. But he said, watching them in flow can also get the viewers in flow.

17:04 And that’s why we treasure those live events where it’s happening and we see the Olympic athlete or the goal scoring or the UFC fight or Conor McGregor knocks someone out because we’re all, you know, the visualization is almost a substitute for being the athlete, he argued. Yes, well I think it’s, there’s a kind of what are known as mirror neurons. It’s a kind of resonant thing. If we see other people doing something, we get into that state. I mean, the most obvious case of this is pornography.

17:34 I mean, the reason people watch pornography just because they find it exciting, it’s actually exciting, it sort of. And you know, in psychology, there was a lot of research on mirror neurons showing how if people watch an action, it affects them in a way that they sort of somehow enter into it. Well, they spent years proving this in psychology laboratories, but I mean, the mere fact of the existence of pornography tells you that you don’t really need to spend years proving it in labs, it’s obvious.

18:03 And I want to talk about sex as a spiritual practice Maybe when we’re done with a few of these things because I’m sure you have some thoughts on that I just had Jimmy Chin in here who directed the movie free solo Which is this climber Alex Honnold who climbed the 3,000 foot face of Yosemite el capitan with no ropes It’s just been nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary film and he is an avid climber He filmed it and he helped direct the movie and that’s what he said. He said when I’m up there on that face I feel ultimately Present that’s it because he has no choice, but to think about everything he’s doing there or it’s death And there’s a calmness in that yes well, I think that being in the present is a Necessary condition for a spiritual experience it may not be a sufficient one Otherwise everyone who plays football should be spiritually enlightened and that’s clearly not the case They may have this sense of being in the flow but then it passes off again and may not connect to something bigger.

19:07 But for some people, this presence opens the way to a greater presence, a sense that there really is a greater presence, a greater consciousness with which they’re connecting. So I think it’s kind of gateway to that, a more mystical experience. Right. So if people are listening and they can observe the spiritual practice that they do engage and maybe say, oh, okay, I’m going to that football match, I’m playing in this sport, what I’m really doing is transcending myself, and maybe I can even explore that further, and in other ways.

19:37 Is that what you’re trying to do, kind of call attention to some of these practices? Yes, and also to the why I think sports are so interesting, along with dancing and music, which are also dynamic, is that these certainly have a spiritual dimension for a lot of people who do them. A lot of people who do sports say they’ve had spiritual experiences while they’re doing them. So it’s not just sort of projecting this onto them. I mean, these are what people actually say. Why that’s interesting to me, if we look at the theoretical side, is here are practices which are all about movement and activity, which seem to have a spiritual dimension. They do have a spiritual dimension. But other spiritual practices like meditation are the opposite. They’re not about movement or activity. They’re about stillness.

20:37 So we have a range of different spiritual practices, all of which have a spiritual dimension. And that’s why towards the end of the last chapter of this book, Ways to Go Beyond and and why they work is where I discuss why they work. How is it that such different things can have a spiritual dimension? But we should leave that till later. Good, I wanna cover that.

20:59 You know, I did my first Ironman triathlon last year and I’d never really competed in endurance sports in my life. One of my guests on London Real challenged me to do it on a plant-based diet, we could talk about that later. But I found myself on these long runs through the heath, long swims, I actually swam in the pond, and also these long cycling rides. And I’m telling you Rupert, when I was on kilometer 23 on these runs, sometimes the tears would start streaming down my face and I would be reliving things from the past and getting really emotional.

21:32 And it surprised and shocked me that a sport could get me to levels that had previously only been reserved for my psychedelic experiences. Yes, well, I mean, I’ve never done anything like that myself, so I’m very interested to hear that. And presumably it’s pushing you through, I mean, it’s pretty extreme what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? I mean, this is not like just going for a jog on the heath. I like pushing yourself beyond normal limits.

21:58 And that is obviously putting you in an altered state of consciousness. Yeah, but I’m kind of doing it in pursuit of this sport and everyone else is gonna do it on the day and we’re all gonna try to finish. And actually, the spirit of Iron Man Racing is we’re all gonna finish. They have times, but it’s more about everyone finishes. So I’m pushing myself to be something greater, but the sport is, and the competitors are kind of pushing me to show up my best.

22:23 So it’s, and then also it just makes me so present. You know, when you just have to get through the next 10 steps without stopping, you know, when you can think of all the reasons in your mind why you should stop and you keep going, it’s very spiritual. Yes. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that in this sort of Comfort-based health and safety culture that we live in that Actually, so many people are drawn to do things that take you literally outside your comfort zone. I mean, this is very uncomfortable. I’m sure And you know some sports are obviously especially extreme sports are very dangerous. Mmm. Yeah I mean in this latest movie I can mention free solo I mean Alex Honnold is up on this rock face and a lot like you said developing really new technology I mean, he’s holding at one point, you’ve got to see this movie report, I think it’s at the IMAX theater, but he’s 2,000 feet up, a granite rock face, and his thumb, his two thumbs are holding him on there with just a grip of one foot, and he has to do a kung fu kick, which is almost like a jump to another rock face.

23:29 And, you know, this move with this amount of fear, with no ropes, I mean, that’s new technology, right? It’s never been done before. And like you said, the sports are kind of the cutting edge, whether that’s base jumping or this, It’s just the human mind has never had to deal with all these things. It’s fascinating, it’s also very interesting to live through that experience as a viewer. Even though I know he’s gonna make it, it’s still very captivating and I find myself very present when I watch that.

23:56 Yeah, no surprise. It’s very interesting. Let me continue with some of these other practices because there’s quite a few here. Talk to me about this idea of fasting because I was surprised to hear that you actually do some pretty serious fast. I had a guest here recently named Timothy sheaf who had experimented with fasting and then did a 35 day Water fast which was very controversial He claimed to get a lot of healing and a lot of clarity caused me to do a 36 hour water fast Which was small, but I appreciated what was going on there. Why should people think about fasting? What’s your experience with fasting?

24:33 Well, I’ve been doing it for more than 30 years and I do it every year for between three and seven days. It’s a water fast. It’s long. And I do it during Lent, because that’s the traditional fasting period in the Christian tradition. I usually do it in Holy Week leading up to Easter, which is the most traditional time.

24:55 Is this a nice way of reminding us that all of these practices have been around before in religions? Yes, absolutely. I mean, every religion has fasting. Obviously, Muslims do in Ramadan. at food and drink during daylight hours.

25:12 Jewish people have it at Yom Kippur. Hindus have numerous fasts during the course of the year. So these religions have given us all of this historic collective knowledge, probably built up over five, 10, 20,000 years, even before they were established religions and took all of our pagan ways. And yet we throw them out the window in this century because religion’s not cool anymore. and we throw out all of our practices as well.

25:37 Yes, well I think it’s a great shame that people, because these practices, as you say, have been developed over a very long period. And if we look back at the history of fasting, our ancestors, who were hunter-gatherers, didn’t get three big meals a day. No, there were periods in the year when there wasn’t much food. And wild animals have periods when they don’t get much food. So we’ve evolved to live without food for periods of time and then have food at other times.

26:09 The idea of regular food supplies every single day is completely unnatural and very modern. I mean, even in the Middle Ages, even in the 19th century, there were a lot of people who didn’t get regular meals every day or through the year. Even in parts of the world today, in agricultural societies, there are. And all living organisms have developed with this intermittent food supply. If you take bacteria, E. coli, the famous bacterium, or yeast cells, and you starve them, they live much longer than if they have constant food.

26:46 If you take mice and you feed them on alternate days, they live 30% longer than mice that get food every day. There’s something about the physiology of our bodies where fasting is a way of detoxifying the system and it’s almost necessary to detoxify our systems. So fasting is the simplest, cheapest and most easily available way in which we can all improve our health. When I say all, I mean, there are some people who shouldn’t fast, I mean, if you’re suffering from terminal anorexia is not a good recommendation, or if you’re very ill, or if you’re a child, a growing child.

27:29 But for most normal adults, I think fasting is enormously beneficial. And what’s happening spiritually when you’re fasting? What are the kind of things that’s going on in your brain and your energy? Well, the first day of fasting, you feel hungry, and what goes on for me during the the first day is mostly feeling hungry and trying to forget about the hunger pangs. It’s not very spiritual the first day.

27:58 And if you’ve not fasted before, by the end of the first day you’d like to get a headache because as the fat is flushed out of your fat cells, a lot of toxins that you’ve built up over the years are flushed out with it. Yeah, I remember my my day the first day Yeah, I was I reminded myself that I ate mostly for the wrong reasons. It wasn’t for nutrition or hunger It was just for pleasure and have it and have it. Yeah, yeah so By the second day the hunger pangs get less and the headache wears off if you get one I mean, I haven’t had the headache thing except the first time I did it most people get it the first time by the third day you just don’t feel very hungry and what I find then is that there’s a tremendous spaciousness opens up I mean the day is much longer because you don’t have all those meal times so there’s just more time to do things I find it easier to concentrate I don’t I usually do these fast when I haven’t got lots of traveling or meetings and things. I try and keep the period fairly free so it can be fairly restful time. I pray and I find it easier to pray when I’m fasting and that’s one reason all religions have included fasting because it makes it easier to pray. How so? Easier to concentrate. Okay. Prayer meditation and reading. I mean just concentration becomes easier. Okay and you pray every day. I pray every day but I notice the difference when I’m fasting.

29:38 Okay. And there’s also a lightness and a kind of clarity. When you fast, after the first 12 hours, you’re breaking down fat. We’ve all got huge amounts of fat in our bodies, even people who aren’t very fat. Calculations have shown that the average American could walk from New York to Florida on the basis of fat stored in their body without eating anything.

30:06 The average American doesn’t actually test this theory out, but that’s what theoretically should happen. And in one clinical study in Britain, a very fat person in the north of England was put on a clinical fasting diet to try and reduce weight, but also as a research project, and went without food for 342 days and emerged perfectly healthy, in fact much healthier because it lost a lot of weight. Now, when you’re metabolizing fat, the breakdown of the fat gives rise to what are called ketone bodies and the blood ketosis, acetone, beta hydroxybutyric acid and acetoacetic acid. And beta hydroxybutyric acid is very closely related to gamma-riminobutyric acid, GABA, which is the most important neurotransmitter in the brain.

31:00 And also closely related to gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, GHB, which is a street drug, sometimes a used as a date rape drug, gives feelings of euphoria. The point is that fasting is actually changing your blood chemistry and your brain chemistry, changing the amount of neurotransmitters in your brain and actually inducing altered states of consciousness. Okay. Wow, a lot going on when you just stop eating. When you stop eating, and most people are terrified of doing it.

31:36 Most doctors don’t know much about fasting. It’s not part of their curriculum in medical school. And I’ve talked to doctors about it who have been completely ignorant about the benefits and advantages of fasting. They say, oh, everyone needs a good breakfast or something like that. The people who’ve really worked on this are the naturopaths.

31:57 They pioneered the medical use of fasting. And again, a lot of doctors and a lot of ordinary people think that, oh, I can’t do this, it’s dangerous, it’s extreme. But the fact is, in the past, most people did it. And the Muslims are the people who show us the best example of this. The entire Muslim community does it except for people who are sick or traveling or children or pregnant women or whatever But it’s considered normal for everyone. It’s not considered something just a tiny minority of Extremely religious people do it’s just a normal thing What do you recommend people try if they want to do a fast more than one day because that way you get into that?

32:40 Oh, yes, I mean the worst of the first day is the worst It wasn’t the nicest day. I mean, you did the 36-hour one, which is where you get all the pain with none of the pleasure. I mean, it’s worth going for more than 36 hours. I’d say two to three days is a good way to start. And just fix the time in advance when you’ve got the day, there’s that period of time when you can do it and so put it in the diary so that you haven’t got a busy time.

33:10 Right. Because that can be a little hectic. your blood sugar is low and dealing with a lot of people. You don’t want to have to do that. So setting aside a period, that’s why Holy Week, which is a period of devotional practice before Easter, is a good time to do it.

33:26 In fact, in Christianity and in practically all other religions, feasts like Easter and Christmas are preceded by fasts. And in fact, the Lenten fast is preceded by a feast as well, Shrave Tuesday or Carnival is a feast before a fast and the fast is a fast before a feast because Easter is a feast and so doing it and I find in the lead up to Easter is works best for me because I observe Easter and festival of Easter okay and so having a period block out a period of time then have water plenty of water, tea, I drink tea as well. I also take psyllium husks, which are a form of fiber, because I found by experience that if you don’t take any fiber, then you can get constipation.

34:24 When you stop fasting, it’s hard to get the whole intestines going again. So psyllium husks, P-S-I-L-L-I-U-M, as you can get at health food shops in capsules, just a convenient way of taking pure fiber, no nutrition, but it’s kind of bulk that keeps the intestinal system working. I usually take multivitamin pills as well, just so I’m not going to – that’s probably not necessary. But no food. And then when you break the fast, it’s best to break it gradually rather than with some vast meal.

34:59 I mean, your stomach contracts, you feel less hungry, and just eating small meals is a a good way to get back into eating again. But basically, it’s simple, it’s free. Anyone can do it with, say, accepting those people who’d be at danger from doing it. Right, and there are some places that’ll charge you a lot of money. You can pay thousands of pounds to go to a health farm and eat nothing, but you can do it at home for free.

35:26 Right, you know, you just said that a lot of these feasts and famines are kind of prescribed in religious teachings, and it just gave me a flashback to when I had Dr. Jordan Peterson here. And he is obviously a big scholar of the Bible and of those stories in the Bible. And at some point he even asserts that those stories are somehow in our DNA and that they’re not just a collection of things that are in this one religious text, that they actually reflect who we are as humans.

35:56 And when you say that, that these feasts and famines are built into our religious studies, it’s almost like there’s that medical advice that’s built into our religion. And I just wondered what your take was on that and kind of even some of Jordan’s views on religious texts. Because it seems like there’s a lot of knowledge there we, again, throw out the window. Well, it’s clear that most religions start from altered states of consciousness, mystical experiences of one kind or another.

36:26 That’s one reason I’ve written this book about spiritual practices, because practices are about experience. And I think experience is where religions start from. If you look at Moses, he had a vision in the desert of the burning bush, a kind of altered state of consciousness. Things looked very different from normal for him. There are some scholars speculate that he was actually taking a kind of, he may have been taking a kind of ayahuasca type mixture.

36:57 Or DMT or something. Well, the Acacia tree in the Middle East contains DMT, and Sirian Roux, a Pergamon harmela, from which harmeline comes, contains the other component of ayahuasca, and Sirian Roux still used as a herb. And after the revelation of the tablets of the law, Moses gave instructions for the building of the Ark of the Covenant, out of the very kind of Acacia, which contains DMT. So, you know, I think there are some people get carried away, but this theory is put forward by a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Benny Shannon, who’s a Jewish, he lives in Israel.

37:39 He’s taken a lot of ayahuasca. He’s done a psychological study of it. Anyway, he takes this seriously. Okay, have they recreated that potential brew, though, that Moses could have taken, or is this still? I don’t know if he’s done that or not.

37:51 I mean, it would be an obvious thing to do, wouldn’t it? Yes. But the, so whether or not it was based on taking ayahuasca-like substance, he had this altered state of consciousness for the burning bush. Then before Moses had the revelation of the Ten Commandments, he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. So he was in an advanced state of fasting, which gives an altered state of consciousness.

38:18 The prophet Elijah fasted for 40 days and fasted for 40 nights, and again, had a kind of visionary qualities. Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness after his baptism. Do you think it was the fasting or do you think there were also some psychedelic components in some of these things? Because you look at the prophet and how he envisioned Islam and came out of the desert, it looks, a lot of these religions look like some type of psychedelic revelation.

38:49 Well, they may or may not have, I think it’s unlikely that the prophet, there’s no evidence that they were actually taking psychedelics at that period. I mean, the one mind-altering substance that was well known in the Middle East and elsewhere was cannabis. But I wouldn’t suggest the prophet was taking cannabis, but the thing is that fasting itself leads to altered states of consciousness, and we know that that’s a traditional practice in not just in organized religions, but in many shamanic cultures, they have periods of fasting before undergoing rituals or ceremonies, yeah.

39:28 Rites of passage and initiations, the American vision quest, the Native American vision quest for young men involved fasting and being alone in the wilderness. So it’s, Jordan Peterson, I think, is right in saying that these practices like that, which we find all over the world in different religious contexts, are deeply embedded in human nature. And originally, they probably happened through periods of famine that people would have, whether they liked it or not, had periods of fasting.

40:00 But they would have noticed the effects and then built it into these practices. So I think these are very deeply rooted in our evolutionary history. As I said earlier, the health benefits of fasting apply to all sorts of animals, even to microbes. So it’s just part of animal and biological nature to have these periods of deprivation. Right, so just, you go back to psychedelics and cannabis.

40:29 Talk to me about that as far as spiritual practices. I mean, you’ve had your own experience at Cambridge, I think originally with LSD. I recently had some ayahuasca ceremonies last year that I could talk about that were very revelatory, to say the least. How do they play out in this book when you talk about those? Well, what I’m interested here is the use of psychedelics as a spiritual gateway or portal or rite of passage.

40:58 I think for many people they actually have that role. I think cannabis does as well. Sometimes they are purely recreational. I mean, a lot of people who smoke cannabis at parties are not doing it for a spiritual experience. But traditionally it has been used in the spiritual context, and as I say in this book, the first time I actually took cannabis, I was in India.

41:23 I was traveling through India from Cambridge on my way to Malaysia, where I spent a year studying rainforest plants. It was in 1968, an exciting time to be in India. Why was it exciting? Well, it was the very height of the flower power, the Beatles had been to see the Maharishi. The war hadn’t happened in Afghanistan and places.

41:48 There were hippies traveling over land through Afghanistan to India. India was full of hippies and groups of people in VW buses and stuff. I mean, this was like a discovery by the counterculture of India. And it was when people were very starry-eyed, you know. Here were all the mysteries of the East and if you go to explore them and so on.

42:11 I hadn’t gone, I was stopped off on my way to Malaysia to do a Royal Society funded project on rainforest ferns. You weren’t on the flower power trip. I wasn’t on the flower power trip. I hadn’t driven across Afghanistan in a battered VW bus. And when I was in Delhi, I ran into the only person I knew in India by chance, a graduate a student friend from Cambridge who was doing an anthropological fieldwork project in a village in the Himalayas.

42:46 And he said, I’m going to my village, do you want to come? So I said, yes. And I delayed my flight and my arrival in Malaysia and went with him up to the village. It was several miles from the nearest roadhead. I mean, several hours walk, actually, and no electricity.

43:04 It was a simple, old-style Indian life. He spoke the local language. He knew most people. We went for a walk one afternoon. We walked along a river, a mountain river.

43:18 There was a cave beside it, and there was this figure in orange robes sitting there with a beard and long hair, the local holy man, Sadhu. He beckoned to us, and he said to my friend, you know, come, he knew him, and he spoke language. My friend spoke the language. He invited to sit down and he brought out a chilim. He said to me, have you smoked chivas holy plant before? And I said, no. I didn’t really know what he meant. So he did an invocation to the gone chiva and then gave it to show me how to smoke it and pass it with his clay chilim. It was an incredibly strong cannabis.

43:54 So I was suddenly blasted into this altered state of consciousness, which in the midst the Himalayas were a stream flowing down, the sadhu in orange robes. I’d only been in India four or five days. It was all utterly exotic. And I had this incredible experience of mind opening, open to the sky, the earth, the mountains, I mean part of nature connected with everything. It was a real revelatory experience for me.

44:25 And that was my first experience of cannabis. So the idea that cannabis could have a spiritual dimension right from the beginning of my experience with it has been a very important part of it. I didn’t spoke it to a sort of drunken party or something like that for the first time. It was in a sacralized experience. And do you think that’s the way that we should consider using it?

44:51 Well, I certainly think that if it’s used as a form of spiritual practice, then it’s good to do it like that, and it’s good to do it in a way that it can have a spiritual benefit. The Rastafari’s, it’s very spiritual. Oh, very spiritual, I mean, many Hindu sadhus, some Muslim fakirs, it’s smoking as part of their practice, and in some Muslim shrines, like the one of Hazrat Bal in Srinagar Kashmir, when I went there, there was a whole room full of holy men with beards smoking cannabis, a kind of hall where they gathered.

45:24 So, but of course, it can also be some, I mean, in Asia, in general, it has a pretty low social status because it’s the drug of dropout, so it’s the kind of people that in the West are kind of whinos and, you know, street alcoholics in the East are more likely to be habitual cannabis smokers, so it’s not usually seen as glamorous, it’s usually seen as a kind of social dropout. How is that, that like the same drug can be consumed in different ways by different people? Is that a gun down to a practice, do you think?

46:04 Well I think it can, you know, all drugs can have different effects. I mean alcohol can have a spiritual dimension as it does in the Holy Communion service or in Jewish ritual meals, it’s actually a sacralized part of a sacrament. It can also be purely social or a drug of abuse. But in the case of cannabis, I think that it can be used as a spiritual practice. And the form that I talk about in my book, Science and Spiritual, this book, Ways to Go Beyond, is in relation to visiting holy places.

46:44 I mean, some people find that if they visit a wood, a place in nature, a mountaintop, beautiful outdoor place, and smoke cannabis or take cannabis before going there. It can greatly enhance that sense of connection. There’s even a small underground movement called cathedrals on cannabis, where people smoke cannabis before going to the great cathedrals. And these cathedrals are designed to induce altered states of consciousness. You know, all those stained glass windows are the kind of medieval version of psychedelic light shows.

47:21 It’s incredible spaces and acoustics and music. Yeah. When I went into the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, I mean, I had it, I definitely had some type of psychedelic experience. I mean, just being in there, I mean, I was blown away, the visuals, the lights, everything. I mean, I felt like I was, you know, on something.

47:43 Well, exactly. I mean, you feel that anyway. And these are places where there’s chanting and singing and prayers and rituals. I mean, the spaces are living, sacralized space. And again, it’s been designed that way because we’ve developed this technology over 10, 20, 30,000 years, right, with our gatherings and our spaces.

48:03 And yet now, for some reason, we seem to ignore a lot of this stuff. Well, I think people who miss out on cathedrals are missing out a big thing because these These are far better than things like Disney World, and most of them are free as well. So you go into them, there are these incredible spaces, wonderful music going on every day in all our English cathedrals, core and even song, usually around 5, 5.30 PM, where a choir sings amazing music echoing around these spaces free of charge.

48:37 And they already have this effect, but it can be enhanced for many people through smoking cannabis before going. And doing it intentionally, forming an intention to enter a sacred place in a way that will make it more sacred and make the experience intensified through doing this. So I think it can be part of a sacred practice. And what is this secret society, the cathedral? on cannabis. That’s going to go viral, Rupert. And while we’re on this subject, can we talk about the psychedelics? Again, I was down in Costa Rica last year for three ayahuasca ceremonies and we’re making a new movie called Dissolution Beyond the Ego where we’re examining the human ego and some of the tribalism and environmental concerns that might be as a result of some egoism and I had the most profound experience of my life on my second ayahuasca ceremony.

49:38 It was really, really intense for me and very emotional and very painful but also very revealing and it was a really important thing for me to do and to actually take that kind of pilgrimage down there and do it in a perfect setting with the shamans and the shippebo traditions. What do you see when you hear me talk about that or when you look at the psychedelic experience. I think traditionally I mean psychedelics have been used for a very long time and my friend Terrence McKenna used to point out that when people first discovered them it may well have played a major part in the evolution of human consciousness. I mean in a tribal society hunter-gatherer society thousands of years ago we don’t know when they were first discovered. Do you believe in the stone dape theory by Terrence McKenna? Well I don’t think it’s the only form of spiritual evolution that humans have been through.

50:32 But I think that the stone dape theory has a lot going for it. In some parts of the world where psychedelics are relatively easy to come by, I think people did take them and traditional tribal societies today still do. I think they must have played a role in their spiritual evolution. I don’t think it’s the only way to achieve altered states of consciousness because as we were discussing, fasting, prolonged fasting, which may have been something people had to do in times of famine, could have led to major changes in consciousness and then deliberate fastness.

51:11 And also, extreme physical endurance of the kind that today occurs in sports events like your extreme triathlon. That is something which in the past people would have had to go through just through the way they lived, they would have had periods of physical extreme experience. So I think there’s lots of ways that people could alter their consciousness and did alter it, but psychedelics are certainly one of them in some cultures. What have been your experiences with psychedelics?

51:45 Did you and Terrence engage in psychedelics? Well, yes. I mean, Terrence and I, quite often, You know, Terrence used to smoke cannabis from the moment he got up in the morning, and he’d smoke most people under the table. Right. He used to give it to all of his followers and listeners as well, right?

52:04 Yes. And so that was part of my time with Terrence, was that was my kind of normal baseline type thing. And it was very engaging to get into these wonderful conversations with Terrence, and the cannabis there did definitely facilitate the flow of thoughts and ideas. I think with Terrence, one thing he helped with me, he was very keen on DMT, and so he said to me, you know, I suggest you try DMT, and I said, well, how would I do that? And he said, well, you could do it right now.

52:46 I said, how? And he said, well, I’ve got some right here. So he gave it to me, and I had this astonishing experience which took me beyond anywhere I’d been before. It was actually, for me, like a near-death experience. I felt that I was just where I was was sort of dissolving, and I felt myself going through a kind of tube.

53:16 In fact, I had the image of a huge chrysanthemum flower, and I just went through the middle of the flower. The image on the cover of my book, Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work, is partly an echo of this DMT experience. I was wondering what that was all about. Yes, it’s like that. It’s a portal. Flowers are portals. I find that they are portals to another realm, and not all the time, of course, but they can be, and certainly was in this experience. Then I find myself in a realm of extraordinary light, joy, bliss, shimmering and ever-changing forms that looked like endless flower petals and it was just like being a realm of plant form of the greatest beauty and it seemed to last a long time in fact it was probably only a few minutes and when I described it Terrence afterwards he said aha you’ve been till the flower And so I’ve been to the flower heaven and through a flower.

54:20 And since I, you know, my whole scientific background was embossing me to start with and I’m very keen on flowers and that all seemed quite appropriate. Different people have different experiences, but it takes one into, I think that DMT is something that can induce something a bit like a near-death experience. Stan Groff in his study of LSD in the 1960s, where he studied over 2,000 people who had taken it, found it was quite common for people to have near-death type experiences, to experience being drowned or drowning or being compressed or imprisoned or in a horrible state of contraction and compression and being trapped, and then breaking up through a kind of tunnel or tube and emerging into the light.

55:14 And my first LSD trip, which was in 1970 or 1971 in Cambridge, was actually just like that. I hadn’t read Stan, we didn’t know about Stan Groff and his research at the time. It was like dying, it was like drowning and being trapped and then coming out into the light and in a state of total bliss, joy, and beauty. And I think near-death experiences have that kind of quality. Stan Groff interprets these death and rebirth experiences through psychedelics in terms of the archetype of birth.

55:53 He points out that every single one of us was compressed and trapped. When we were in our mother’s womb, when the contractions began just before our birth, we’re in an enclosed space, we’re being squeezed, we’re trapped, we’re being suffocated, we want to get out, we can’t. And then if it’s a normal birth, we go through the birth canal through a tube and we come out into the light and it’s a totally different realm. And he thought that this archetypal experience deep in our human unconscious, our collective unconscious, is something that we re-enact or tap into or re-experience in some kinds of psychedelic experience.

56:36 And that was certainly the case for me with both LSD and DMT. And ayahuasca? With ayahuasca, every time I’ve taken it, which isn’t very often, I’ve had quite different experiences. The first time was completely cosmic. It was just zooming out into the sky, into the heavens.

56:56 I was sort of travelling in a kind of outer body experience among the stars. I mean, it was a literally cosmic experience, and then coming back into my body. The second time I took it, I was amidst sort of rising serpents and snakes and so on, not in a scary way. And I realized it was actually, it was like being inside my own intestines. It was a very internal experience of tubes and immersion in the earth and in biological being.

57:33 So as I say, every time I’ve taken it, it’s been different. So there’s no standard experience at least in my, as far as I know. Yeah, I was, I had a very profound experience and I took a very big dose on my second ceremony and again, I was kind of, my whole body was dissolved into nothingness and particles and I was kind of being laughed at by Gaia and the human race was just kind of being shown to me as being so insignificant in the greater scheme of things and the death was just a non-event, such a big deal for us humans But in nature, it was just, that’s what happens.

58:13 It wasn’t an emotional event. And I really got shown a lot of things about humanity, Rupert. I really got shown that we were just this life force that just needs to survive for the sake of survival. And at one point, I almost kind of thumbed my nose back at the plant medicine and said, well, you know what, we’re still going to survive and we still have a point, even though our emotions are kind of meaningless in the greater form of nature. There’s not much room for emotions in the wilderness.

58:42 And I came back with a lot of real lessons about why we’re here and how we need to pass on knowledge to each other and look after each other. It was really powerful. And it felt like I was tapping into this knowledge base that’s always there that I could just never see before. And other people seem to have tapped in this as well. And it makes me think a little bit about your collective consciousness idea.

59:09 And ever since I’ve come back, Rupert, a lot of the guests that have sat in that chair have echoed these similar things back to me. And they haven’t necessarily had ayahuasca experiences, but they’ve usually done a lot of deep thought on their own, a lot of connection to themselves. And I keep hearing these same kind of things right back to me as far as us taking care of the planet and the environment of nature or taking care of each other. And I was curious what you think of all that.

59:36 Well, it sounds like a transformative journey that you went on and and and in a way in its traditional setting You see I was because used for healing and for initiation and it sounds like a kind of initiatory journey into a visionary experience that I mean these things are Things that can change our lives and and I think if they help us lead better lives and help other people and help the planet then And they’re doing a great job. If it’s just tripping and it’s just personal pleasure, then it’s a selfish activity like lots of other selfish activities. But I think the spiritual dimension comes through this ability to the transformative power of these experiences.

1:00:23 I think that when we think about traditional psychedelics like Ayahuasca in the Amazon region or Iboga in West Africa or mushrooms in Mexico where they’ve been taken traditionally. Then they’ve been used in shamanic visions, shamanic journeyings in rites of passage, in healing ceremonies, and in initiatory ceremonies. My ideas about morphic resonance, as you know, are the idea that is a kind of collective memory that all species have not just humans with a collective unconscious, but I think all species have a kind of collective memory.

1:01:10 Morphic resonance is the process whereby the past becomes present through a kind of resonance with similarities in the past. So if people say a thousand years ago took ayahuasca and had these experiences, and And if you or I take it today, assuming it’s a similar kind of brew, it will have similar effects on our brains and nervous system that it did to them in those conditions then. There’ll be a similarity between us and them, a similarity of the changes in consciousness which would tune us into their experience.

1:01:44 And I think these drugs probably tune us into a kind of collective experience of those who’ve taken them before. And in the case of shamanic cultures, it’s interesting that in the early days of Ayahuasca researcher, Chilean psychologist Claudio Narenjo gave Ayahuasca to people in Santiago in Chile, middle class people who didn’t know anything about its tribal background, who had visions of black jaguars and serpents, the kinds of things that occur in Amazonian mythologies. It was as if they were tapping into these archetypes, into these experiences.

1:02:23 So I think that your experiences are trans-person in the sense that they’re taking you into a realm where others have been before, and which in fact, in a shamanic culture, goes beyond the human realm of experience and connects us with nature, with animals and plants. Yeah, I go very tribal in those ceremonies. I really, I feel like I’m back to a hunter-gatherer clan where we’re literally humans looking out for each other And yeah, it’s very an interconnected society and we’re passing on the knowledge so we can survive and we’re battling the elements.

1:02:57 And again, I’ve seen serpents and panthers on ayahuasca and there’s no explanation for that. Really, if you wanna be scientific and independent about it, you could take someone who’s never seen a serpent or a panther and then give them the medicine and yet they see those things. I don’t know, it makes sense with your theory of what’s going on there. Let me ask you something else, because Rupert, both of us are trained scientists. I went to MIT, and therefore I guess I probably suffer from the science delusion more than I realize.

1:03:31 And in the halls of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all the hallmarks are there to the great scientists, the great engineers, everything that was proven on paper. There’s nothing talked about when it comes to spirituality or human energy or any of that stuff. And so I was brought up that everything has to be E equals MC squared and this is this and this is that. And yet when I have one of these ayahuasca ceremonies, I am just seen in plain sight that there’s much, much, much more going on.

1:04:01 But if you had told me at 22 years old, Rupert, that there was telepathy going on between football players, you know, I would have said that’s ridiculous because I’m here at MIT and they tell me that’s impossible because it’s not measurable. How can I resolve my science delusion? Is that what I have? Well, I think that the materialist ideology which science is currently based on, I would say enslaved by, is the doctrine that matters the only reality and matters basically unconscious.

1:04:34 So the whole universe, stars, galaxies, exoplanets, other planets in our solar system, and our own planet itself are just unconscious mechanisms made of unconscious matter. And then for some mysterious reason, consciousness has evolved inside human brains and maybe other animal brains as well. But according to the materialist theory, it doesn’t actually do anything. It’s a kind of illusion. It has no role.

1:05:07 Simply like a phosphorescence around the nerve endings of the mechanistic workings of the computer brain. That’s the kind of official view. So psychedelics would, in inducing these states, would do so just by changing neurotransmitters. We know they do that in nervous activity, but it’s all inside the brain. And yet, when we have these experiences, they seem to relate to realms of consciousness beyond the brain, and so do all mystical and spiritual experiences, which is why all religions in all parts of the world and all tribal cultures take it for granted that there are forms of consciousness beyond the human level, whereas materialism and materialistic atheism take it for granted there’s no forms of consciousness out there, there’s just our brains.

1:06:00 But since matter is supposed to be unconscious, we ought not to be conscious at all, which is why the very existence of human consciousness is called the hard problem in the philosophy of mind. And some philosophers spend their time trying to prove that we’re not really conscious. Are you referring to your friend, Mr. Dawkins? Yes, that it’s a kind of epiphenomenon of brain activity, or Daniel Dennett, the materialist philosopher, that is a kind of illusion.

1:06:27 The trouble is, calling it an illusion doesn’t solve the problem because illusion itself is a mode of consciousness, so it presupposes consciousness to call it an illusion. Materialists simply can’t explain the fact we’re conscious, which is why it’s called the hard problem. It’s not as if they’ve got a brilliant theory of consciousness that explains it all. They haven’t got one at all, and therefore, I think it’s much more reasonable to take Take the traditional view that there are many forms of consciousness beyond the human level.

1:06:58 Maybe the whole of Gaia, the planet has a consciousness. I think the sun is conscious and that is like the mind of the center of the mind of the whole solar system. I think the galaxy may have a galactic mind that we’re within and the whole cosmos and beyond the cosmos there may be a transcendent mind that includes the whole cosmos. So there’s maybe many, many levels of consciousness beyond our level. And spiritual and mystical experiences are ways of connecting with them.

1:07:30 And when people have these, they feel that they’re part of something bigger than themselves. They’re part of a presence, a conscious presence greater than themselves. And that conscious presence is usually experienced as blissful. And in fact, theories of divine consciousness in all different religious traditions assume that the ultimate divine consciousness is in a state of utter bliss. The Hindus call it sat, chit, ananda, being, consciousness, bliss.

1:08:07 That’s our default. That’s the default mode of ultimate consciousness, is bliss. And when we have mystical experiences, they’re often blissful, because insofar as we connect with that greater consciousness, we have a taste of that bliss or joy, which is its permanent state. When we’re not in those experiences, we’re not usually in a state of bliss. We’re in a state of worry, concern, fear.

1:08:32 We’ve got to get on with things, work to do, jobs to carry out, being busy, answering social phone calls, doing social media, all the things, watching TV, all the things we have to distract us. And then if we’re doing nothing, we have the default mode network, the chatter, which shuts all that out. But the point is when all that, when our normal mental activity shuts out all that is stilled, either through meditation or sports or mind-altering drugs or through many other kinds of spiritual practice connecting with nature, taking part in rituals, there’s many ways of doing it.

1:09:15 Then there’s a kind of opening and we can experience our own mind as being part of something much greater than ourselves. You mentioned the materialist and the atheist. Do you ever worry that the world is kind of going more that way and that sometimes that results in a lot of fighting and tribalism and sometimes neglect of the environment and a lack of you know spirituality do you ever think that we’re not going to be able to come back from that does that concern you is that why you’re writing books like this well I think that the the fact that we live in the modern world which is very secular and and the default position of most universities and the educational system is atheism. It’s the assumption God doesn’t exist or if God does exist then it’s only as an idea in people’s minds and belief in in God and religion should at best be kind of private hobbies that have no effect on the wider world which is about getting on with economic growth making products, selling products, consuming products. That’s the general modern model of the economy that the educational system reinforces.

1:10:34 And it wasn’t like that in the Middle Ages. I mean, all educational institutions were based on God. They were religious institutions. But they’ve been progressively secularized, and now the default position of anyone who’s got a university degree is to emerge from a university with a kind of secularist, if not atheist, and at least agnostic view. So I think that the problem with that is, first of all, it misses out a vast dimension of reality, which I think is really there, this realms of consciousness beyond the human level.

1:11:08 Secondly, I think by cutting people off from what all human beings have had to hunt together as societies, shamanic societies, religions, there’s never been a situation where the majority of people, which is now the case in Britain, have no religion. It’s been a part of people’s lives all through history. And it’s given people in moments of challenge and sorrow and joy the sense that they’re part of something bigger than themselves, which has enabled them to cope with life better.

1:11:42 It’s also provided moral codes that have helped people. It’s also provided a sense of meaning and connection with society and with nature through seasonal festivals and through collective celebrations and through rituals. Now in the modern world as a result of secularization, atheist propaganda, proselytizing atheism and so on, the relentless attack on all religion has meant it shrunk down to a very small activity and about five percent of people in Britain regularly have religious practices. 51% say they have of new religion.

1:12:23 That’s last year’s surveys. Is that dangerous? Well, I think it’s a deprivation. I think it means that people have cut themselves off from a vital spiritual and conscious link which is necessary for our wellbeing. And there’s now been many studies on spiritual practices that show that those who have religious and spiritual practices, generally speaking, happier, healthier, and live longer than those that don’t.

1:12:54 And if you don’t have them, you feel more isolated, disconnected, that life’s more meaningless, purposeless, and it’s depressing. And that’s, I think, why depression is the endemic disease of modern industrial societies. So I think it’s bad for health. I think it’s, just to take the most basic level, It’s bad for social cohesion because if everyone thinks there’s no nothing that really links us together. It’s just everyone from themselves That’s not a good model for any society. Right? So I think that it’s so In the past Almost everyone had a religion. I mean England in AD 1500 there would have been virtually no atheists. Everyone would have had a religion predominantly Christian, and then there was a Jewish minority, or Jewish, and there might have been the odd Muslim trader or visitor or something, but virtually everyone had a religion. And that gave a framework for life and the structure of life, and it told a story about the meaning of life. And it wasn’t always good because it could also be a badger tribal thing that motivated wars like Crusades. So it had its downsides as well as its upsides but virtually everyone was religious. And then some people took up spiritual practices, you know, some people became monks and nuns and spent hours a day praying or in contemplative prayer kind of meditation, or took up serious other spiritual pursuits like service to others caring for the sick and so forth.

1:14:42 So that was, spiritual practices grew out of religious background. Now, I think we’re in almost the opposite situation. We have the default situation for most people is to have no religion and no spiritual practices. And then many people have found that they actually help. So that’s why millions of people now do yoga, millions of people now meditate, millions of people have taken up other spiritual practices, some of which I discuss in my books.

1:15:13 And sports is one of them which isn’t even seen as a spiritual practice, but I think is done often with a kind of unconscious spiritual motivation. And so religion used to lead to spirituality. I think we’re now in a position where spirituality can lead to religion, because spirituality against a non-spiritual secular background can lead to the experience of the forms of consciousness greater than our own. And that’s where all religions start from. Powerful stuff, Rupert.

1:15:54 How do I say that concept of ego and dissolution of the ego? You say self-transcending in here. When you hear those words, what do you think? I think of it, I don’t actually use the word dissolution of the ego because I’m not quite sure what it means and it sounds scary to a lot of people. I think there are moments when, say, one’s carried along by incredibly beautiful music and one’s absorbed in the music, one’s not thinking about oneself and, you know, one’s own concerns and, you know, one’s monetary concerns or social worries or financial concerns or worrying about what people think about you, you’re just absorbed in the music.

1:16:47 Or if you’re in a kind of state in the natural world where you’re just absorbed in the beauty Again, you’re going beyond your own self. If you’re having a psychedelic experience where you’re feeling yourself part of a vast degree of consciousness, again, you’re going way beyond your normal limited concerns. So I think you could call that ego dissolution. The brain correlate of this is the measurable thing in fMRI scans is reduction in the activity of the default mode network, which is always reinforcing our sense of ego, our worries, and taking us out of the present because we’re either worrying about things that have happened in the past or worrying about what we might be doing next.

1:17:38 But it’s always taking us somewhere else. I once saw on the underground there was some new computer game being advertised. And it had this picture of someone playing this game, and it said, wherever you are, somewhere else. You see, a lot of modern technology is the exact opposite of the spiritual principle of be here now. And smartphones and apps and searches and all that kind of thing are taking people out of where they are in the present and sit on the underground and everyone’s looking at something, they’re all somewhere else. And in some other time, a historical or film, what they’re planning to do next.

1:18:22 You can only be present in the present. And so I think that insofar as the ego is bound up with all these ruminations and the activity of the default mode network, it is a kind of ego dissolution these spiritual practices can lead to. But as I say, I think a lot of people find that phrase worrying, and then they’ll say, oh, you need the ego, you’ve got to function in the modern world, you’ve got to earn a living, It’s no no no one’s saying that you not going to do all those things But as soon as you say that it presses buttons for people you get all sorts of rather boring reactions, right?

1:18:59 Is there gonna be a third book with another seven practices and are you gonna be talking about sexual practices at some point? No, I think two books enough I mean I do seven practice in my first book science and spiritual practices seven more in this book There are still many I haven’t discussed including sexual tantric sex, for example, this mode, tai chi, yoga, I mean, it’s a whole range of practices, caring for others, service for others, looking after the dying. I mean, there’s a lot of spiritual practices which are to do with being, serving others needs. I mean, when I was in India, in South India, I knew a group of nuns nuns who looked after the dying, a bit like Mother Teresa. This was in South India. It was a different order of nuns. But their whole life was about looking after destitute people who were dying in the streets. And they gave them something to die in the sense of love and being cared for in their last hours. And when I walked into that place, and here were these dying destitute people, and these nuns who were working for them, there was incredible atmosphere. It was a kind of, you could, it felt completely blessed. I mean the whole place felt full of grace. It was an astonishing. So that’s a spiritual practice. Don’t discuss that. But I think 14 is enough for me. I mean there’s plenty more. Fourteen books is enough for you? Fourteen practices.

1:20:30 And 14 books. So yes, so it’s not an exhaustive catalogue but the ones I’ve written about are ones that I know about from personal experience, where there have been scientific studies that show something about their effects. And the important thing really is, for me, as a scientist and as a spiritual explorer, this is where science and spirituality are actually coming together in the modern world because you can actually study these practices and they have measurable effects on well-being, on physiology, on brain activity, and so on.

1:21:08 There’s no conflict of science and spirituality when you’re looking at actual practices. The conflict only comes about if you’re talking about ideologies, if you have a kind of Christian fundamentalist with the idea that everything was created in 4004 B.C. and a materialist-atheist ideologue like Richard Dawkins put them together and there’s just sparks fly and they dismiss each other with contempt and so on. But in this where science is actually being science rather than ideology, looking at facts, exploring things, then there’s no conflict and I think they’re actually mutually complementary and are actually helping in a new phase of spiritual evolution.

1:21:54 Tell me about you and what’s next for you. If you look back at your whole career, is it something you’re happy with and are there things that you have that you really want to do next? Well, I have a huge list of things I want to do next. One of the problems I have is that I keep thinking of new ideas, and in terms of science, I’m always thinking of ideas for new experiments. And so I have a list of experiments I’d like to do, and now I’ve finished writing this book, not going to write another one for a while.

1:22:30 I’m going to concentrate on more empirical research. Well, I should mention one further book project. My book, The Science Delusion, which is called Science Set Free in the United States, as you know, is about the ten dogmas of science, came out in 2012. There have been many changes in science since then. Nearly all of them have gone in the direction that I was predicting.

1:22:56 So I’m going to do an updated version of that book, a new edition updated, but that shouldn’t take more than a few months. After that, I plan to get down to some more empirical research on things where I feel that there are big open questions where relatively simple experiments could shed light on whole new potential realms of science. That’s what I think I’d most like to do. Okay. You wrote this in just over a year. I mean, it was fast. When I heard you had another book I was shocked and I know how hard it is to write a book. What’s your practice? What is it like a day in your life when you’re writing something like this? Well I mean something like this is based on years of background research. I mean it’s not suddenly out of nowhere. I mean for example the chapter on psychedelics is based on years of interest in the subject through Terrence McKenna. In the 1980s, at the Esselstyn Institute, there were a series of conferences on psychedelics with Sasha Shogan, one of the great drug designers of the chemist, leading figures. It’s quite a small world. Stan Graff, people like that. Twenty or thirty people.

1:24:15 Everyone in the room, really, was someone who was a leader in this field of research. These were annual conferences. So I learned about the latest things. I got to know all the people in the field and had my own personal experiences. I’ve kept up with the literature since then.

1:24:31 So when I wrote that chapter, it wasn’t as if I had to start from scratch. The sports thing I’ve been interested in for a long time too, and partly through the influence of Michael Murphy and the Esselin Institute. So there’s a background to all this. But in terms of my own personal practice, I actually, most of my own writing happens at night because during the daytime, there’s the interruption of emails, things happening in the house, people around. I find it hard to concentrate with interruptions, Amazon deliveries, most of the things sent off for by my sons. So after dinner, it’s sort of about 9 o’clock or something, I find I can work, I sometimes work from 9 till 2 in the morning. The phone doesn’t ring, no one calls, there’s no Amazon deliveries, and I find I can concentrate in the night, there’s no noise, no distraction. So I’m basically, I become rather nocturnal when I’m writing books, my wife doesn’t particularly like that, but it’s what works for me.

1:25:47 And so I also find that it’s easier for me to speak than to write, partly because I’m very bad at typing. So I fumble so much with I ought to learn and get it better, but it’s easier to speak. And I have, for 25 years, I had a wonderful assistant and research assistant and secretary called Pam Smart, and I just dictate quite a lot of stuff. And she types it up for me and sends it back on a file, a Word file by email. And I find it flows much better if I dictate.

1:26:27 So part of my books are dictated, and then I have to modify and put in the references. There’s a lot of editing work. For me to get the flow. It works much better through talking than writing If someone looks at your career Rupert, it’s it’s pretty impressive all the things you’ve done and the places you’ve been and the books You’ve written and the people you’ve met If you had to give someone advice on how to have such an incredible life What would you tell them like what it how come how do you become Rupert Sheldrake? What is it? Are you curious?

1:27:02 You obviously don’t seem to be too preoccupied with what other people think. Is that a big component of how you are you? Well, I think in my own case From a fairly early age I had a sort of fairly strong motivation I mean when I I wanted to do science and I was quite motivated to become a scientist I worked quite hard and you know got a good degree from Cambridge PhD and all that But then when I found that science was dogmatic, limited, and was just missing out as to what I thought life was about as a biologist, I wanted to find a better way of doing science.

1:27:45 And that then became a kind of big dominating thing in my life, and I realized that actually you can come up with new theories, you can come up with new experiments, and very few people were doing that, because most people work within established areas. If you want to have a successful scientific career, don’t do anything too original, because the best way is to be a bit ahead of the pack, but in a mainstream area. In my case, I came up with this idea of morphic resonance when I was at Cambridge, which is radical in scientific terms, and there’s no one else doing research on it, and there were no grants for it, and it didn’t fit into any existing science departments.

1:28:31 So it was hard to see how that could fit, and some of my- They wanted to burn your book. Well, one of my advisors, my mentors, said, you know, don’t do this, said you’re doing really well, you know, research fellows at Royal Society, you double first from Cambridge, You could, within a relative short time, be a professor, head of a department, head of an institute, on Royal Commissions, master of a college in Cambridge, and a brilliant career ahead of you. And he said, but I said, I’m really interested in this idea of morphic resonance and a whole new approach to science.

1:29:07 He said, well, my advice is forget about it. I said, well, I don’t want to forget about it. It’s really important and interesting. He said, well, in that case, wait until you’re retired. I said, well, I’m 25, and that would be 65.

1:29:20 I mean, wait 40 years. I said, I might even die before then. And he said, mark my words. If you do that, he said, you’ll ruin your scientific career. He said, stick to the normal, straight and narrow.

1:29:32 Don’t go off the rails. It was good advice, because when I actually published my book on morphic resonance in 1981, when it was denounced in this famous editorial in Nature, the journal Nature, as a book for burning, There was this furious backlash that meant I was proclaimed a heretic in the Church of Science. And it meant I couldn’t follow a normal scientific career. I had to do it differently. I couldn’t recommend that to anyone.

1:30:02 I didn’t at that time have a wife and kids to support. If I had done, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it. And since then, I’ve never had a regular scientific job, But I’ve been fortunate that I’ve found plenty of people who are happy to work with me and to help. I’ve had quite a number of scientific friends who helped me, you know, under the radar of regular science. I’ve had a series of generous people who’ve funded my research and asked for nothing in return.

1:30:38 I mean, I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate. But all of this is from year to year, still today. I mean, if you want a regular career with a regular pension plan, this is not the way to go. Well, I mean, you know that. You’re not in a regular career with a regular pension plan working for mega-corporation.

1:30:59 No, but it’s much more fun doing it this way, right? It’s more fun, if it works. I mean, some people try it and it doesn’t work, and then it’s much less fun, I suppose. That’s true. And what scares you, Rupert?

1:31:13 What scares me? I suppose normal things like physical pain, loss of people I love. I mean, I would say that those are things that would scare practically everybody. I’m scared by the possibility of humanity just degrading the environment, destroying the world we live in, and destroying the wonderful heritage that we have from past generations. The destructiveness of modern civilization is cancerous growth, is rapacious.

1:31:51 Destruction of the environment is very, very scary. And then, of course, climate change and so on. I don’t think climate change will abolish nature. I think nature will go on just fine. It survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and massive cataclysmic events in the past.

1:32:12 But I think the survival of humanity, or at least civilization as we know it, is very much at stake. And that’s a frightening thought. It’s a frightening thought, not particularly personally for me, because I’m in my 70s. You know, probably the existing world order will see me up, but I, you know, I have sons and you know, I know a lot of younger people and I know a lot of friends of my sons and relatives who know with babies. Then it’s scary if you think about what the world would be like for them.

1:32:49 They find it scary too. Yeah. What is old age, Tarnia? Well I don’t really feel very old. And that’s the one thing it’s taught me, is that it’s partly in the mind.

1:33:01 I mean, I’m fortunately am blessed with good health, and I think that fasting regularly plays a part in that, and eating moderately, and so on. So diet and fasting and exercise. So I’m just very fortunate that I’m in good health. I don’t have to spend my time worrying about health problems, so it leaves a lot of time and energy for doing other things. Right.

1:33:29 And what keeps you awake at night? Actually, very little keeps me awake at night. I sleep quite well, and I think it’s partly because I pray just before I go to bed, and in my prayers, I sort of try and deal with all the things that might be worrying me or might keep me awake at night. And I find it a way of just letting go. So by the time I go to bed, I’m usually, especially if I’ve been staying up till two o’clock writing books, I’m quite tired and I just fairly rapidly go to sleep, thank goodness.

1:34:03 And how do you pray? Are you kind of asking for good things to happen to people you love? Yes, I am. I start with the Lord’s Prayer. And that’s the most basic prayer in the whole Christian tradition.

1:34:20 And I do it slowly. I mean, I dwell on different bits of it. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, for example. Basically that says that if you want to feel all right with yourself and the world and with the greater reality in which you live, feeling forgiven, innocent, not guilty, then you’ve got to let go of resentments and anger about other people. The feeling of being forgiven, in other words, feeling okay and not worried and not, I mean, for me, Christianity is not about feeling guilty, it’s about feeling not guilty.

1:35:00 And so this feeling of just being able to let go and feel okay and at ease with the world is dependent on letting go of resentments you may have against other people. So every day when I’m doing that bit of the prayer, if there are people who piss me off or maybe angry or really annoyed me or I feel hard done by. I try to let go of that. I ask for the grace to forgive them. Sometimes it’s hard to forgive people but then I pray for the grace to be able to forgive them and usually that happens.

1:35:34 And then, so by the time I go to bed, my mind’s not seething with resentments and anger and stuff. And so then I move on to the other parts of the Lord’s Prayer. deliver us from evil if I feel threatened or there’s something I’m afraid of, it’s a prayer for protection. And then after the Lord’s Prayer I say the Hail Mary, which is a way of praying to the feminine principles, and in the Our Father is a kind of prayer to the divine masculine. And Hail Mary is a prayer to the divine feminine, and obviously both are necessary. And the bottom line of the Hail Mary is pray for us now and at the hour of our death. And so one’s asking Mary to the Blessed Mother, the Holy Mother, the ultimate mother, the Holy Mary, Mother of God. I mean the title of Mary in the Catholic and Anglican tradition is Mother of God. It doesn’t get more I mean, the ultimate mother principle or feminine principle, to look after us now and to be a kind of midwife of the death process when we die, if every day the bottom line of the Hail Mary is pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

1:37:03 So the idea that when we die, and however we die, however I die, you know, totally unpredictable, that you need some help and assistance through that dying process, which is a transition. And the idea that this feminine principle, which is the principle of birth, but also the birth into another realm, is on your side and is prepared, and you can relax into feeling cared for. That’s a very comforting thought as well. Then I pray about, I give thanks for the things that have happened in the day that I feel blessed by.

1:37:47 I mean, just being alive, living in a beautiful place, having enough food, good health, having a wife and family, having a home, you know, all those things. I pray for my nearest and dearest, my family and my friends. I pray for people who I come across during the day and people I know who are in need. And then I pray about the wider problems in the world. So it sort of goes over the whole spectrum of things that I’m concerned about or feel a need to relate to in some way and to bring into the context of a wider, more inclusive purpose and consciousness.

1:38:34 I think you sold me. I’m going to start praying. Well, it’s free. It’s easy. It’s different from meditation, which I’ve done for years as well.

1:38:45 I meditate in the mornings, which is more about withdrawing from the world, from worries, concerns, just coming into a space of not being concerned or linked to outer concerns. It’s like meditation, I find, like breathing in. It’s sort of and prayer is more like breathing out and I think they’re both No, petition repair. I mean some people call Meditation contemplative prayer so you can call it prayer as well, but they’re two different kinds of activity I find them complementary, so I meditate in the morning and I pray at night, okay Wow And and what’s gonna happen when you die what happens to the entity of Rupert Sheldrake?

1:39:29 Well, I think that when we, just not me, but everybody, I suspect, enters into a kind of dream realm that, you know, when we dream, we have another body. When you dream, I’m quite sure that the Brian of your dreams is sort of walking around and talking to people and doing things, perhaps running ultra marathons or something, but it’s not just your physical body asleep in bed. We’ve got this alternate reality in our dreams, an alternative world, a world of possibilities and another body.

1:40:05 And I think that we continue in that state after we’re dead, like in a dream world, but we can no longer wake up because there’s no physical body to wake up in anymore. So I think we’re kind of trapped in a dream world. And the kind of dream world you’re trapped in depends on what kind of person you are, kind of fantasies you have, what kind of fears you have, what kind of beliefs. And it may be that atheists who believe that when they die it’ll all go blank.

1:40:37 Maybe that’s what will happen for them. If you spend your life being afraid of monsters and spend all your life fueling these fears by horror movies and fantasies, it may be that when you die you’ll be in some kind of hell realm of devouring beasts and things that are all out to get you. If you spend a lot of time praying and believe that you’ll be looked after and there’s other beings out there who will guide you and help you, maybe you’ll feel guided and helped. Until you can go on beyond into a realm, I mean just as in meditation and in spiritual practices, you can go beyond the default mode network, as it were, into a state of absorption into higher consciousness, that I think through this continued existence, we may more or less permanently enter such a state, but not straight away.

1:41:31 I think there’s a kind of intermediate zone that the Tibetans call a bardo, you know, an intermediate realm. Of course, they believe in reincarnation, and I think that may sometimes happen, But personally, I think it’s an exception rather than the rule. Okay, all right. Interesting. I’m gonna have to ponder that a little bit later.

1:41:53 Rupert, I always ask everyone a few questions at the end. I’ll ask you, if you could make a phone call to that 20-year-old Rupert, I guess he’s at Cambridge at this point, studying, and give him some advice based on everything you know now, what would you tell him? I think I’d just say keep going. And I think I’d say, because the 20-year-old Rupert at Cambridge was already having grave doubts about the direction of science, and the possibility it might be possible to have a new kind of science, that’s why my first book’s called A New Science of Life.

1:42:38 I think I’d say, yes, it is possible and, you know, don’t doubt it and just go for it. On that same note, best advice you’ve ever received? Could be from a professor, maybe not the one that told you not to publish. Could be from Terrence McKenna, could be from anyone. Oh, gosh, I think my main spiritual teacher who, from whom I had a lot of spiritual advice This was Father Bede Griffiths, whose ashram I lived in in South India, Benedictine Monk, who was in orange robes.

1:43:14 It was a Hindu-style ashram. And it wasn’t so much advice that he gave me. He didn’t say, here’s some advice for you. It was the way he lived, and the way he lived was a kind of integrative. It integrated the spirit, the normal life.

1:43:32 These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more. Now back to the rest of the show. Last part of that, to the 20-year-old that’s watching us or listening to us right now, Advice to them, they’ve grown up in this new world where religion is what 5% of their friends do, or maybe less, and now they hear you talking about these spiritual practices based on religions that were from the past.

1:44:17 What advice can you give to them about things they should consider in their lives? Well, first of all, check out some of these spiritual practices, that’s what these books are about. And at the end of each chapter I have two simple practices that anyone can try for themselves. Free, easy, to get a taste. So I would say first of all, try out some of these spiritual practices if you’re not already doing them.

1:44:43 Secondly, take seriously your own religious tradition. You know, if you come from a Jewish background, try and see the best side in Judaism. If you come from a Christian background, see the best side in Christianity. If you come from a Muslim background or a Hindu background or a seat background, see the best in that tradition, because anyone who’s at university now has only told the worst about these traditions. They lead to war, they’re dogmatic, they’re narrow, they’re fundamentalist and all that kind of thing, they’re anti-sex, all that.

1:45:17 So instead of this kind of patriarchal, instead of these normal prejudices that you might have been filled up with look for the best and save from a Christian tradition I think visiting a cathedral going to a core even song service where it’s hearing this beautiful music filling an amazing building without any need to commit to a belief system or dogmas you can just go it’s free and everyone’s welcome I’d say check it out and one of the other things that I talk about in in this book which we haven’t discussed today is taking a technological Sabbath, just having one day a week when you don’t do constant social media, iPhones, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, looking things up, watching snippets of things. Turn off the phone or the screens for a day and just spend a day at analog day, being with people, walking in nature, listening to music, making love, doing things which are normal, which creates the space for that.

1:46:34 And that is a fundamental practice of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition. I mean, the Sabbath, keeping the Sabbath holy as a time when you have space for family and friends of feasting and making up is fundamental to the Jewish tradition, and it’s still absurd. I mean, the Jews set a great example about this, I think. Yeah, in Israel, everything shuts down. Yes, well, I live in North London, so do you.

1:47:00 I mean, lots of people’s normal sort of activities shut down in North London. And many Jewish families, even liberal ones, join together for a family meal on the eve of the Sabbath on Friday evenings, which is a great tradition. And many Christian families used to have Sunday lunch together, but now most of them don’t. So I think for people from Jewish backgrounds really taking seriously the Sabbath, not to the extent of Orthodox Jews and all the many, many prohibitions taking the principle the Sabbath is made for people and not people for the Sabbath.

1:47:39 For Christians, Sunday is the obvious day to do that for Muslims Friday. But if, for one reason or another, people can’t do it on Sunday then, or Saturday or Friday, then another day in the week. But I think having a technological Sabbath is extremely important, and it just creates a space in one’s life. It’s traditional, but it can be done in a non-traditional way. But there’s a very good reason for it being traditional.

1:48:07 There has to be a space in which other things can happen. Otherwise, it’s 24-7. And I think it’s just terrible, 24-7 culture and bad for health bad for mental health bad for the planet bad for environment bad for our culture and society and you actually don’t have to be part of it or at least most of us don’t have to be part of it I did a bit of a fast a technology fast last year over the holidays and it was brilliant three or four days of unplugged it was a real game changer so the book is ways to go beyond and why they work with an incredible DMT slash flower experience on the front.

1:48:46 I’m guessing people could find this online, Amazon, all the usual sources. Or actually Hive. There’s this new website in England called Hive, which does exactly what Amazon does. It’s as cheap as Amazon, at least for this book. But it’s run by regular bookshops.

1:49:04 And so you can buy books online now at HIVE, H-I-V-E, without having to be part of the Amazon global monopoly or near monopoly. And I’d rather like the idea that there’s now an alternative. Excellent. So HIVE, stay away from Amazon. Well, I mean, buy the book, but I don’t really care how you buy it.

1:49:27 But it’s good to know there’s an alternative to Amazon. Yeah. Rupert, always a massive pleasure having you here. I’m a massive fan of who you are, you’re one of my favorite people around. And just, yeah, you’ve been there and done that.

1:49:42 You’re always super honest with your stories and I love hearing your old stories of India and Terrence and everything you’ve done. And I love always revisiting your CV and seeing that young man who protested and said, no, I’m not gonna go this route. And that was a big move for you and it’s created your whole life and it’s very inspirational for me and for everybody out there. And your work rate is also really inspiring. So thank you for putting this stuff on paper.

1:50:06 Thank you for reminding us that these religious practices really have a base in our entire human evolution. And it’s almost an echoing back of what we need to put in our lives. It’s technology, really, that’s been developed over tens of thousands of years that we shouldn’t just ignore. And it’s stuff I’m thinking a lot about lately. So thank you for that.

1:50:27 Thank you for being you. It’s always a pleasure to have you here. Well, thank you, Brian, for what you do. My pleasure, Rupert. All right, thank you so much.

1:50:36 As we say, it’s about the journey. I will see you on the heath sometime. Good. All right, Rupert, thank you.