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July 23, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:09:03
Edition 355 - Rupert Sheldrake

An extended conversation with world-famous scientist and author Rupert Sheldrake...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for your emails, as ever.
Please keep those coming, send me guest suggestions, thoughts about the direction of travel that we're going in the show, anything you want to say.
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And if you can make a donation to the show, then that would be fantastic too.
Theunexplained.tv is my website.
Now, we're going to do on this edition something that we haven't done before, and I'll explain what it is.
And it's because of who we're speaking with.
The man we'll be speaking with is called Rupert Sheldrake.
He is a scientist and thinker and very famous around the world.
If you just check him out online, if you haven't heard of him before, you will soon understand why this man is so well known and so often discussed.
He's based in London.
And what we've decided to do with this one is I'm recording this in my usual place for recording the Unexplained podcast, which I've been doing for all of these years.
And we're doing two versions of it.
So if you are listening on the radio, you'll be hearing a shorter version.
And what you're hearing here on my podcast at theunexplained.tv is an extended version of the conversation with Rupert Sheldrick, which I think you will enjoy and I think will make you contemplate more perhaps than the average interview.
So Rupert Sheldrick on this edition of The Unexplained, an extended version online that you'll be hearing now.
We've never done this before.
It's not something that I intend to do a lot of at all.
But just because it's him and because I've had people listening to the radio show asking to hear him and people listening to the podcast around the world also asking to hear him, I thought it would be kind of neat to do the interview in this way.
So you'll hear a chunk of it on the radio and you're going to hear all of it now on the podcast of theunexplained.tv.
Please keep your emails coming.
We have some great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
And yes, for those of you who've asked, the new website is still in beta form.
And as soon as I can get a meeting with Adam and we can thrash out some details, it will be coming your way very soon.
But let's get to the special guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
It is my pleasure to say thank you very much for coming on my show to Rupert Sheldrake.
Pleasure.
You are a man, Rupert, and I think this is a good thing because everybody is pigeonholed these days.
You are a man who, it seems to me, is pretty impossible to pigeonhole because the work that you've done and the thinking that you've been acclaimed and acknowledged for covers so many different spheres.
Did you set out to be somebody who could not be categorized?
No, I didn't.
No, I started out just doing what I thought was relatively straightforward science.
But I've always had other interests.
I mean, for example, I've always played the piano since I was an early age.
And so music's always been one of my interests.
So I've never been just a scientist, but very few people are just scientists, I suppose.
And it also seems to me that over the years, with ideas like Morphic Resonance, that is perhaps your flagship idea that we will talk about, you have not been afraid to, not exactly court, but you haven't been afraid to face controversy.
There were people over the years who've accused you of pseudoscience and not forwarding the cause of science by what you've done.
You know, you've had to face a certain amount of criticism.
Yes, I have.
That's the price of thinking and working independently, really.
And I suppose from an early age, I've actually been prepared to do that.
I think it's partly because my father was a very independent-minded man, and one of his slogans was, be independent.
So I suppose I was brought up to take the line that it's better to say what you think and do what you think is right rather than just try and toe the line.
You have a tremendous academic record.
I've looked at a few biographies of yours, including the one on Wikipedia, which may or may not be correct as these things sometimes are or aren't.
You are a biologist primarily, but it seems to me that you reached a turning point at some stage in your career where you came to the view that the biology that you were being taught really didn't fit the world as you saw it.
Yes, I did, I did.
Actually, that happened fairly early on.
I mean, I think it even happened when I was at school because I did biology because I loved animals.
I kept lots of pets when I was a child, and I collected plants and had pressed plant collection.
And one of the things that soon became apparent to me was that the first thing you do with the animals you're studying is to kill them.
So mainly we were working on dead animals, dissecting them, and then later doing vivisection experiments.
And all this seemed to me that something had gone horribly wrong.
And then in my gap year, I had a scholarship to Cambridge, and I wanted to do scientific research.
So I wrote round a whole variety of drug companies asking if any had a vacancy for a temporary lab technician.
And one of them did, a company called Park Davis, which was then in Hounslow.
And I found myself working as the most junior technician in a vivisection laboratory, which was a kind of death camp for animals.
And that made me think, what's going on here?
I love animals.
I'm doing biology because I love animals.
And yet, here I am in a facility where every week thousands of animals are tormented and put to death.
And, you know, it was a serious crisis for me.
And it really made me start questioning the foundations of science as we know it.
But of course, that was the way that science was taught, even to children.
I can remember my sister coming home from Brutal Grammar School in Liverpool when I was a kid.
And, you know, she was older than me, and she said, I've been dissecting a mouse today.
And, you know, she had sketches of what she'd done.
And I thought it was quite horrendous.
But that is the way that science was carried out, wasn't it?
Oh, yes, that was completely standard, and probably still is.
I mean, indeed, one could argue one needs to know about the anatomy of organisms and so on.
And you could argue, and many people do, and I did myself, I still would, I suppose, that you need animals for medical research, because otherwise you've got to test out untested drugs on people.
So there are justifications for all this, but in my own case, it made me think that I'd really love to see if there was a different way of doing biology.
And when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, I came across the work of Goethe, the German poet and scientist, who at the beginning of the 19th century had the vision of a more holistic kind of science.
I had no idea whether that was possible in the 20th century, but it inspired me with a vision that science could perhaps be different.
And that thought has stayed with me ever since, really.
And when you talk of a more holistic view of science, do you mean that this would be a science that would actually embrace the commonalities, the similarities between ourselves and the animals?
And of course, you know, hundreds of years of science put us at the very top of a chain.
In fact, put the animals nowhere beneath us.
Well, yes.
I mean, in a sense, evolutionary theory tells us that we are very closely related to the animals, but most people have assumed that, I mean, in mechanistic biology, that animals are just machines and so are plants, and for that matter, so are we.
You know, the brain's a computer, the heart's a pump, and so on.
So it was really the machine theory that I thought was what was wrong with it.
Not so much the, I mean, evolutionary theory does emphasize our links and continuities with other animals.
But it was the idea that we're machines instead of living organisms.
So I much preferred the idea that animals and plants are truly living, and indeed that nature's alive and not just mechanical.
And had you started to come to the view at that point that animals were perhaps, I'm looking for a word, but the only word I can come up with is cleverer, had more abilities than we gave them credit for.
Had you started to think that way?
Not particularly, not when I was an undergraduate.
Actually, well, yes, I actually think I had, if I come to think of it.
One of the things that really made me interested in biology in the first place was the fact that as a child, when I was about eight or nine, I kept pigeons.
And I was very fascinated with homing pigeons.
And I met various pigeon fanciers in my hometown, Newark, in Nottinghamshire.
And I also, at the railway station, every Saturday in the season, there were a whole lot of wicker baskets full of pigeons came from all over Britain.
And the porters released them.
These were for pigeon races, and I used to go and help them release the pigeons.
So I was completely fascinated by it.
And I took these pigeons of mine on my bicycle as far as five or six miles away and released them.
And then I cycled home, and they were always there before I got back.
So I'd always been fascinated with homing pigeons.
And so that was one of the things that really got me interested again in animal research later in my career, because I didn't want to spend my career killing animals.
So I worked on plants, and my PhD was in plant sciences, in botany.
And much of my professional scientific career has been concerned with plants rather than animals.
But then I returned to homing pigeons later when I was in my 20s and when I was a fellow of a college in Cambridge and started doing research again because I thought here's a way of doing research with animals that's truly interesting and doesn't involve killing them or tormenting them.
So that was pigeons really that reawakened my interest.
And we didn't understand, certainly when I was a child, and that's around the time I think you would have been doing this research, we didn't really understand what it was about pigeons that allowed them to be sent out from one place, go on a flight, do whatever they had to do, and then find their way back precisely home.
We didn't quite get that, but now we have a clearer understanding of these things.
We think it's to do with magnetism, don't we?
Well, that's what people would like you to think.
But actually, I think it's clutching at straws, this magnetic theory.
The thing is that they do have a magnetic sense.
Many animals have a magnetic sense.
There's no problem with that.
But the magnetic sense won't explain homing.
I mean, if you imagine being parachuted into somewhere you've never been before and given a perfectly accurate compass, which would give you a magnetic sense through this instrument, and someone said, well, now get home.
Well, you wouldn't be able to because the magnet would tell you where north and south are, but it wouldn't tell you where home is.
And the same goes for pigeons.
Having a magnetic sense cannot explain how they find their way home.
It might help explain how they stay on course once they know which way to go.
I think there's a much deeper mystery than that, I think, in homing pigeons, and indeed in animal navigation in general, including bird migrations.
And, you know, these creatures have, it is a clichéd phrase, but bird brains, of course they do.
They're small.
What we're implying here then, if it isn't only about magnetism and how can it be, is that they have the ability to rationalize, to work out a route to know much more than the size of that brain would indicate they would be capable of doing.
Well, I don't think they do it by calculation.
I mean, after all, mollic butterflies can migrate over hundreds, if not thousands of miles in North America, and they've got even smaller brains than birds.
There are quite a number of migratory insects.
I think my own particular theory, I mean, this is controversial, of course, Is that there's a sense of direction, that there's a kind of a field connecting pigeons or other animals to their home, a bit like an invisible elastic band.
And I think what happens is when they circle around, when they're released, they just feel a pull towards their home and they go in the direction of that pull.
They just feel that home's in that direction.
And this field is one that's not yet recognized by science.
I think it's part of what I call a morphic field.
And so I think there's an inherent unexplained factor in all navigation and homing behavior, which covers a huge range of animals, including fish, of course, and turtles that find their way to remote islands across thousands of miles of ocean.
I think that this sense of direction is deeply embedded in animals, and I think that's what's going on in pigeon homing.
They use other clues as well, the sun's direction, magnetism, and so on.
But I think the basis of the sense of direction is this kind of pull towards the home.
And is it genetic?
Is it inherited?
No, because, I mean, well, I mean, the ability to do it is inherited, but the actual place that they go to isn't, because after all, you can take pigeon eggs from one loft and take them hundreds of miles, put them in another, and the young pigeons will go to their home where they're born or where they've grown up, not where their ancestors lived.
And moreover, if you take migrating birds like starlings, you can displace them from where they normally would be flying.
You can kidnap them, as it were, en route and take them to different places.
And sometimes, if they're young birds, they'll go to the wrong destination when they migrate.
And then they'll keep going there in subsequent years.
A whole new migratory route can build up, you know, just in a single generation.
So I don't think that the roots themselves are in the genes.
You've also done research from what I read into something that a lot of us, anybody who's had a dog or a cat, will understand, the apparent telepathy that exists.
You know, I had a dog when I was a kid who knew when I would be coming home from school, but also appreciated when there were changes in my routine.
Somehow she would understand that.
And we all used to laugh about it as a family, as many families do, but we didn't really understand it.
This is something that you've looked into.
Yes, well, I mean, this is quite a common form of behavior among dogs, cats, and a number of other animals, including parrots and occasionally rabbits and guinea pigs and so on.
But it is mainly shown by dogs and cats.
And we did surveys.
About 50% of dogs anticipate the arrival of a member of the family and about 30% of cats.
I don't think cats are less sensitive.
I think they're usually just a bit less interested.
So this is quite common.
Many families like yours have found this.
And I've got hundreds of stories on my database about this.
And then I found my scientific colleagues were very scornful.
And they said, oh, these are just anecdotes.
And I said, well, you know, if lots of people are saying this and observing this, it suggests something's going on.
You can't just dismiss the whole thing.
I mean, at what stage does something cease to be an anecdote?
And at what stage does it become an observable fact?
Well, I mean, personally, I think the plural of anecdote is data.
You know, if lots of people tell you the same kind of story, it suggests something's going on.
And many people find that dogs or cats anticipate when a member of the family is coming home.
And then I asked my colleagues, well, how do you think it works?
And they always came up with the same armchair explanations.
It's just routine, or they hear familiar car sounds, they've got better hearing than us, or they pick up anticipation from people at home.
So to test these theories, I set up a whole lot of experiments where we videotaped the place where the dog waited the whole time the person was out, so we had a complete record.
We had people come home at random times they didn't know in advance.
We'd tell them by telephone when to come home and they didn't know in advance when they were going to come home.
No one at home knew when they were coming and sometimes there were no people at home.
And to avoid familiar car sounds we had them come in taxis or other unfamiliar vehicles.
And the result was that the dogs we studied still knew when they were coming home 20 minutes or more in advance.
They came from at least five miles away in a way that couldn't be explained by hearing or smelling or routine or anticipation or people at home and suggest that in fact it's a kind of telepathic phenomenon.
They're picking up the person's intentions.
And in fact, I think telepathy is very common among animals.
I think it's part of the way they communicate with each other in the wild.
And most pet owners have noticed that their animals seem to pick up their intentions in an uncanny way.
And I think that this is because telepathy for dogs and cats is a normal means of communication.
It's not paranormal.
It's not supernatural.
It's just natural.
And I think it is in people as well, although it's usually not as well developed in people as it is in animals.
Would this explain those instances in my life where I've apparently been able to rationalize with a dog or a cat, you know, explain to it why we were doing what we were doing.
And on some occasions, I mean, maybe this is more about me than the animal, who knows, but I've certainly got the impression that they have understood.
Now, whether it's the tone of my voice, whether it's just me thinking that way, or whether there really is something at play is an interesting thing to debate, isn't it?
An interesting topic to think about.
Well, yes.
I mean, I think that the, obviously they're influenced by body language and tones of voice.
They're very good at Picking up emotions and that kind of thing.
So, those are all involved as well.
I know that the formidable dog trainer, Barbara Woodhouse, used to say that when you're training a dog, you have to form a clear picture in your mind because that's what the dog's going to respond to.
She took telepathy for granted.
So, because within the scientific world, there are a lot of people who don't believe in telepathy.
It's not usually because they've looked at the evidence, it's usually because they haven't looked at the evidence, but there's a very strong prejudice against it.
And many scientists feel they have to pretend it doesn't exist or can't exist.
So that's why if you have any possibility of subtle cues from tone of voice or bodily movements, they'll say, oh, well, it's just bodily movements or subtle cues.
That's the beauty of doing research with dogs that know when their owners are coming home.
I wrote a book with that title about this research, because the person is miles away and the dog can't possibly be observing subtle cues or tone of voice or anything.
And even under those circumstances, there's very clear evidence of a telepathic link.
You suggested that scientists in general, and this is not all of them, and opinions are changing now, of course, because this is the modern world, felt that they had to take one particular view of this phenomenon, a more rational view of this phenomenon, a more traditional view of this phenomenon, because that's essentially what was expected.
Why do you think that is?
Well, I don't think that the view that they take, this extreme scepticism about these phenomena, is a more rational view.
I think it's actually an irrational view, because I think a rational view is based on evidence, and I think the evidence is very strong that these things actually happen.
Most dog owners and cat owners have noticed this kind of thing.
The people who've investigated them experimentally have found evidence for it.
And the people who deny them are usually people who know nothing whatever about it.
So I would say it's an irrational view.
So I think the reason that they take this view is that the sciences are in the grip of an ideology of what I'd call dogmatic materialism.
This is the theme of my book, The Science Delusion.
And it's a belief system, not a scientific fact.
And it's a belief system that says the only reality in the universe is matter.
That's why it's called materialism.
Consciousness has no independent existence.
It's just nothing but the activity of matter.
So minds are nothing but the activity of brains.
Therefore, minds are confined to the insides of heads.
And therefore, your intentions to go home, for example, could not possibly affect a dog or anyone else or anything else many miles away because all that's happening is fairly weak electrical activities and chemical activities inside your brain.
Therefore, it's impossible for your intention to go home to affect a dog miles away.
And because it's impossible from the point of view of this theory, then any evidence for it must be fraudulent or people who believe in it must be foolish.
And so it leads to this dogmatic denial, which everyone's encountered at some stage or other.
So it's a kind of prejudice and a denialism, really.
And the same goes for human telepathy.
The same kind of people deny that humans can be telepathic, and yet there's very good evidence that telepathy is common in the human realm as well, although most humans aren't as good at it as dogs.
And some people seem to be more attuned than others.
I've mentioned my friend Katie, who was a former BBC and LBC radio producer in London.
We've been friends for almost 30 years, 29 years now.
And I only need to think about Katie, and Katie will contact me.
The very strange thing is that we worked together, and we don't see each other now for sometimes six months.
Sometimes a year will go by.
Maybe more.
We won't see each other.
But we will always know what the other one is thinking.
And we've never quite...
We just know that it exists, but we've never quite worked out why that is.
Well, I agree.
This is a very interesting case, because, you know, it happens, telephony happens most between people who have some kind of bond.
It doesn't happen with sort of random insurance salesmen and so on.
It happens with people who are closely bonded.
Good friends, colleagues, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, twins, lovers, and so on.
I mean, I'm not suggesting that anything of that kind is involved with Katie.
But as long as there's a kind of bond, you know someone well, then this can happen.
And it happens most commonly in the modern world in connection with phone calls or text messages or emails.
And in fact, telephone telepathy, thinking of someone who then rings, or thinking of somebody who you ring them and they say, oh, it's funny, I was just thinking about you.
Terribly common.
About 80% of people have had this experience.
And again, the armchair sceptics say, well, it's impossible.
It's just a coincidence.
You think of people all the time and then if one of them rings, you imagine it's telepathy and you just forget all the times you're wrong.
Well, again, this is something that, you know, I try to investigate these things rather than confine it to theoretical arguments.
Most people think it happens.
Does it happen?
Are most people wrong?
Or are these dogmatic sceptics wrong?
And the way to find out is by experiment.
And how I do these experiments is I find people it happened to quite often.
They sit at home with a landline telephone being filmed on video.
They give us the names of four people they know well.
And we then pick one of the four people at random with a throw of a die or a random number generator.
We then ring up that person.
Say you were the subject Heard.
Then one would say, please think of Hurd and ring him in a few minutes' time.
So that person's thinking about you.
They ring you.
The phone rings.
There's no caller ID.
It's a landline.
Before you pick it up, you have to guess which of those four people it is, and you say so to the camera.
Then you pick it up and you say, hello, Mary, and you may or may not be right, but you get instant feedback.
By chance, you'd be right one time in four, 25% of the time.
In our filmed experiments, people were right about 45% of the time.
It was very significant statistically.
I mean, we did hundreds of trials.
They weren't right every time, but they were right much more than they should have been by chance.
So is that one of the first examples in history, do we think, of something that you might describe as a psychic phenomenon being actually repeatable and provable in a recorded way?
Well, parapsychologists have been doing experiments on telepathy for years and generally speaking have got very positive results.
But they've usually started from very artificial laboratory situations and they often use people who are strangers where the telepathy is quite weak.
Although they run thousands of trials and therefore get statistical significant results, the effects are much weaker than you get with telephone telepathy, where it's much closer to real life and much more natural way to experience this.
I would say that my own telepathy experiments are probably some of the first that start from real-life situations like telephone telepathy.
I've done similar ones with text message telepathy and email telepathy.
These are all published in peer-reviewed journals and people can read the data in detail on my website if they're interested.
So these are all scientifically published, statistically analyzed effects.
And I'm currently working on developing an online and mobile telephone telepathy experiment so anyone can take part on their mobile phone within a week or two.
It should be possible for anyone to do this by going to my website and just registering and doing the experiment themselves.
If we get closer to proving that this exists, and in my life I've seen countless examples of the fact that it does exist, I don't know what it is, what use is that to science?
What do we prove by that?
Well, I think what we prove is, in a sense, people are using telepathy already.
I mean, until the invention of telephones, it was the only way people could send instant messages to people far away.
And in fact, it happens a lot between mothers and babies.
That's another area I've investigated.
So I think this is something that's already been used.
And in a sense, modern technology has rendered it less necessary than it was before.
And it also happens, I'm sorry to interrupt, but it also happens in crises, doesn't it?
I can remember I've told this story to my listeners before.
But back in the 1980s, I was working on a radio ship in the Middle East.
It was off Tel Aviv, and the idea was to promote the cause of peace by playing pop records for all communities there.
And it was a nice place to be.
It was quite famous at the time.
But I joined this ship just as a tidal wave, the first one I think in 100 years, had swept up the Mediterranean and was rocking the boat, which was quite rusty and old, the ship, in a way that I thought was going to sink it.
And I thought very hard at my mother, believe it or not, back in the northwest of England.
She later told me when I returned home that on that night she heard me shout to her.
Now that something was going on there, and neither of us, and my mother's not here now to talk about it, neither of us ever knew what it was.
Well, I would say that would be a fairly classic case of crisis telepathy.
I mean, often when people are in need or in danger, or indeed when they're dying, people they're close to start thinking about them and are aware that there's something happening.
Of course, it's hard to do experiments on that because you can't put someone in a life-threatening crisis just to do an experiment.
But there's a great deal of evidence that happens.
So telepathy is really, again, depends on the kind of bond between people, like an invisible elastic band, like I was talking about between pigeons and their loft.
And a change in one can affect the other, however far away they are.
It doesn't depend on distance, funnily enough.
And we've actually done experiments to test this using telephone telepathy.
We recruited young people in London who'd recently arrived from Australia or New Zealand.
And we did our telephone telepathy tests with two of the callers in Britain and the other two down under, as far away as you can get on the Earth.
And the experiments actually worked better with the people far away because they were emotionally closer than their new acquaintances here in Britain who were physically closer.
There is a parallel for this in physics.
In quantum physics, there's a phenomenon called entanglement or non-locality where two particles that have been part of the same system remain connected at a distance so that a change in one affects the other.
And it doesn't matter how far away they are.
I'm not saying this is the same as quantum physics, but I'm saying there's a clear analogy in quantum physics for this kind of effect.
Some people say, well, if it doesn't fall off with distance, it can't be real because everything in the physical world falls off with distance.
The fact is, the thing that's most similar to this, quantum entanglement, does not fall off with distance.
So that argument doesn't cut much ice, really.
And of course, as we're talking these days about developing quantum computers, those computers will react instantaneously.
There won't be that kind of same effect to do with that same kind of degradation to do with distance and that sort of thing.
So the fact that a quantum realm may exist already Is not that big a stretch of the imagination, really, is it?
Oh, no.
Well, quantum computers already use this phenomenon of quantum entanglement or non-locality.
So it's already being technically applied.
I mean, there's no question that it really happens.
Yes, so I think that you asked about what would be the implications.
Well, I think the main implication is that I think there's already plenty of evidence to left that it happens.
I think the main problem is in the dogmatic belief system of many scientists that say the mind is nothing but the brain.
It's all inside the head.
I think actually we need to move to a view of minds as being composed of fields rather than just solid objects.
We're used in physics to the idea of fields.
Magnetic fields are inside magnets and stretch out beyond them.
The Earth's magnetic field's inside the Earth.
It stretches out far beyond it, which is why you can get out a compass when you're flying in a plane at 35,000 feet and it will still work.
And the Earth's gravitational field's inside the Earth, but it stretches out far, far beyond the Earth invisibly, keeps the Moon in its orbit.
And the field of your mobile telephone is inside the phone.
It's an electromagnetic field, but it stretches out invisibly, far beyond it, through radio waves.
And I think our minds are like that.
I think they're rooted in our brains normally, but I think they stretch out far beyond them in every act of attention and intention.
So I think they're like invisible fields stretching far beyond our brains.
So the idea to say that they're nothing but the brain inside the head seems to me a very old-fashioned and very limited view.
Everything else in physics is based on fields that stretch out invisibly, including many of our modern technologies.
So it's not too big a stretch to suggest that minds may work like that, too.
So does this all connect with and tie into and anchor your idea of the morphic field being the sort of world wide web before there was a world wide web?
Well, what I think morphic fields are, they're fields.
Morphic means form in Greek.
So they're fields that shape things.
And the morphic field of a plant shapes the plant.
So in a rose, the rose leaves are shaped by leaf fields that are, as it were, leaf-shaped.
They're like invisible molds.
And the flowers are shaped by flower fields, which are flower-shaped and like invisible molds for flowers.
And giraffe is shaped by a giraffe field, which is giraffe-shaped.
So I think there's lots of these kinds of fields that shape things in nature.
And I think they also link together members of social groups like birds in flocks, which is why flocks of starlings can change direction very rapidly without bumping into each other.
I think there's a kind of group mind or group field that they're all within.
And I think they connect together members of social groups even at a distance.
So that's one aspect of morphic fields, which helps to account for telepathy and the sense of direction, as we've discussed.
Another aspect is that they have a built-in memory.
I think that they're shaped by what's happened before, and each species tunes into a kind of collective memory.
So the morphic field of a giraffe, which is giraffe-shaped, is a kind of memory of previous giraffes, which were, of course, giraffe-shaped.
So each species has a kind of collective memory.
Each individual draws on it and contributes to it.
And this theory makes a lot of predictions.
One of them is that if you train rats to learn a new trick in one place, like London, rats all over the world should be able to learn it quicker immediately afterwards.
And there's already evidence from scientific experiments and laboratories that that surprising phenomenon really happens.
Now, this is controversial material, of course it is.
But if it was to be embraced by science, then not only could we understand it, I suppose, but we could also could we tap into it for good.
Yes.
I think that in fact we tap into it every time we learn something.
I think that if lots of people have learned something already, it makes it easier for other people to learn it later.
And indeed, there's a lot of evidence that learning things like skateboarding or computer programming is getting easier.
Now, of course, there are many other factors involved, and this, as you say, is a very controversial theory.
So one has to do careful controls to find out whether it's morphic resonance that's involved, this memory principle, or whether it's just conventional physical factors.
So this is a question for research, again, rather than for dogma.
So yes, I think that there is a kind of inherent memory in nature, and I think that the so-called laws of nature are in fact more like habits.
We live in an evolutionary universe, and I don't think all the laws of nature were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code.
I think that they're habits that evolve along with nature.
So this leads to a very different view of the universe, one which is much more organic and evolutionary than the standard scientific view.
30 years ago, of course, and I was reading some of the criticisms or certainly some of the repeated criticisms of you that I found online from 30 years or more ago.
These were very controversial thoughts.
Some orthodox scientists, so-called, accused you of pseudoscience, accused you of doing nothing to forward the cause of science with this material.
Is it easier to propound your ideas now than it was then?
Well, I would say that people are opening up a bit more, but within the scientific world, it depends on whether you talk to people during working hours in the lab or in the evening.
People are much more open-minded in private than they are in public in science because there's a terribly conformist atmosphere and people are afraid of stepping out of line because they're afraid they won't get their grants renewed or it'll Affect their reputation.
Very fearful.
But I have a lot of scientists come and talk to me because I'm, as it were, out of the closet.
I've got nothing to lose, so I just say what I think.
But there are quite a lot of scientists working within scientific institutions who feel they can't tell their colleagues about their own telepathic experiences or their own ideas about nature or a more holistic approach to things or an interest in alternative medicine because they feel they'll be condemned or rejected or ridiculed.
But actually, some recent surveys that have been carried out by the British Scientific and Medical Network through a professional polling organization, UGov, have shown that actually within among scientists and professionals, there's a much greater interest in holistic and spiritual things.
About 45% of scientists in Britain and engineers and mathematicians and technical people and medical professionals, about 45% classify themselves as non-religious and most of them would classify themselves as skeptic of psychical phenomena.
But about 45% classify themselves as religious or spiritual and many of them are open to the idea of psychic phenomena and many of them are open to alternative and complementary medicine.
So it's not as if it's 99% dogmatic Richard Dawkins type attitudes within science.
There are people like that, but they're actually quite a small minority.
The number of card-carrying militant atheists within science is less than 25%.
I think that may surprise some people.
Does your work give us any insight or any possible route to follow on the whole question of this life that we live and what happens when this life, as it inevitably will for each and every one of us, ends?
Well, I don't think it's possible to say definitely what happens when we die.
I mean, I think, obviously, the view of consciousness that you have is very important.
If you think consciousness is nothing but the brain, or nothing but the activity of the brain, which is what materialists believe, then when your brain stops working when you die, then your consciousness must just go out, like switching off a light bulb.
So for people who believe that, the question of survival of bodily death is a non-question, it's just impossible, and there's nothing further to discuss.
If you think, as I do, that the mind interacts with the brain, that it's a series of fields that connect with the brain, that our memories depend on a resonance process, they're not stored inside the brain, then it's possible that something of our conscious life could survive bodily death.
It doesn't prove it.
It just says it's possible.
I myself think that when we die, it's as if we go on dreaming, but we can't wake up anymore because we haven't got a physical body to wake up in.
So I think we're, as it were, trapped in a dream world when we die.
And the kind of dreams we have, the kind of experiences we have, depend exactly on the kind of person we are, our memories, what we've done in this life, what we believe, and so on.
We'll each get the kind of afterlife perfectly right for us in accordance with our dreams and beliefs.
And perhaps atheists and dogmatic materialists who think that it will just go blank when they die, maybe they'll get just what they expect.
Maybe suicide bombers who think they'll end up in a kind of paradise-like state in an oasis with almond-eyed dancing girls giving them dates might actually experience that at least for a while.
So I find that this dream theory of the afterlife is the one that is the most satisfying in the sense it is not dogmatic, it's a possibility, and it means that all of us have been, in a sense, preparing throughout our lives through our dreams.
Every night when we dream, and we may forget the dreams, but we all dream, we have another world in our dreams.
We have another body in our dreams, the dream body.
When I dream, I can walk around, I can run, I can talk, I can sometimes fly.
And I have a body that does these things in my dream, my dream body, but my physical body is lying fast asleep in bed.
So we're all used to the idea of another body and another realm of experience.
We experience it in our dreams ever since we're children.
So I think this gives us some clues as to what might happen later.
Does any of this tie into the modern notion?
And it is something that is very new to a lot of people, that what we see and experience in this world is a matrix, and it is not real.
It is an illusion into which we buy.
Well, I mean, I think that I don't personally like the idea of us living inside a computer simulation because that seems, that puts a kind of gigantic computer as the ultimate basis of reality.
And I think that's another of these machine projections.
The idea that we live in a kind of virtual world is an old idea, actually, long before the matrix or the computer model.
In India, for example, many Hindus believe that the world we're in is a dream of Vishnu.
The god Vishnu lies down, goes to sleep, has a dream, a very long-lasting dream, and that dream is this world, and we're inside Vishnu's dream.
That to me is a more attractive way of putting across the simulation idea.
But I think that there are realms of consciousness beyond our own.
In my most recent book, Science and Spiritual Practices, I talk about seven different spiritual practices where we can actually practically do exercises like meditation, connecting with nature, rituals, singing and chanting, going on pilgrimage, a variety of traditional practices found in all religions which help to connect us with Realms of consciousness beyond the human level.
And at the beginning of the book, you say something really interesting that I think is absolutely true.
You say that we live in this age of materialism where people poo-poo a lot of spiritual ideas.
On the surface, they do, and they live for what they can see and buy and experience right now.
But actually, underneath that, there is a kind of substratum of the fact that more and more people are dissatisfied with that, even if they don't consciously say so.
And they are beginning to try and find other ways to connect with alternative realities or whatever you might consider spirituality to be.
So we're in a dual age, in a way, according to your book, I think.
That is an age of materialism, but on the other hand, there is an awakening of spirituality or understanding of the paranormal, whatever it may be.
What do you say?
Yes, well, I think that that's exactly what's going on, you see.
I think that the hardcore materialist view is deeply depressing and unsatisfying.
It tells us that we're nothing but, our minds are nothing but our brains, universe is pointless, purposeless, evolution has no purpose or meaning, life has no purpose or meaning except perhaps temporary pleasures.
It's a very dispiriting view, and I think it's no surprise that the endemic disease of modern secular societies is depression, because it's a very depressing worldview.
It alienates us from each other and from nature.
So I think as a result, there's a tremendous hunger for more connecting practices, spiritualities about connection.
And that's why millions of people in Britain meditate.
It's why large numbers of people have joined community choirs or church choirs, and they sing and chant, because they found that singing together is a way of connecting with others.
And you also say in the book, if you deprive somebody of music, if you deprive somebody of that, and I've had whole periods where I love music, I've worked on music radio at times in my life.
But there have been whole years where I just haven't had time for music.
And I have felt spiritually and in my soul, and this might sound ridiculous to some people, but I've felt less of a person because I don't have music in my life.
Well, I agree.
I mean, I think that's And of course, some forms of music do it more effectively than others.
But there are many people, including Charles Darwin, who think that singing came before talking, that singing and music are part of our very most ancient human heritage.
And of course, even in the modern world, even though many people don't actually sing, a lot of them do listen to music.
I mean, there's hundreds of radio stations playing music.
There's the whole music industry.
You know, there's background music in lots of places.
Music is still very much part of modern life.
But it's more meaningful and connecting when you actually sing or take part in it personally rather than just passively.
You talk a lot, and you've mentioned it already, about meditation.
There have been so many people in my life who've said to me, look, the way to beat the stress of this media life that you're living and, you know, you're not going to be able to sustain this forever and all the rest of it, which people have said to me over the years and said to many other people too.
So many of them have suggested meditation to me.
I've never really been able to understand it or get into it.
But you say in the book, and I quote, meditative practices can lead to an enhanced state of consciousness that is experienced as ineffable, too powerful or beautiful to be described.
Sounds wonderful, I've just never been able to quite do it.
Well, it doesn't always come straight away.
And most meditation doesn't get to that point most of the time.
But it definitely has a calming effect on a lot of people, including me.
I mean, it doesn't work for everybody.
I think there are other ways that people can go beyond the chattering mind and the internal dialogue.
For many people, sports do that.
I had a friend who ran a business in America, and he was a rock climber.
And he said to me that he reached the point he was working so hard he couldn't sleep at night, he couldn't relax, his mind was racing all the time.
Tried meditating, didn't work for him.
He said by the time he was 25 feet up a rock face, he was completely in the present.
There was no worries in his mind at all.
It was just where his fingers and toes were going to find a grip next.
And so I think in modern world, those sports are seen as a supremely spectacular activity.
For many people, they do actually play a role similar to that of meditation.
And that's why you talk with some people who've climbed Everest or been to the Antarctic or done things that involve a certain amount of endurance and tenacity.
They sometimes say, I really felt like I was connecting with, and they might say, I was connected with God or I was connecting with nature or I was connecting with my inner self.
Those things give them a kind of purpose.
Exactly.
And so, you see, I think there's many ways in the modern world where we can form these kinds of connections.
And one reason I wrote this book is to show that in that book there are seven, many more spiritual practices, but in science and spiritual practices I talk about just seven.
But each of them is a completely different way of forming these connections.
And some work better for some people than others.
Some people meditation works very well for, others it doesn't work very well for, but other things do work.
So it's not a one-size-fits-all situation.
There's many ways of connecting and all of them can enhance and enrich our lives.
Rupert Sheldrake, fascinating to speak with you.
If you're hearing this, I'm addressing my listener now.
If you're hearing this on the radio, that's where this conversation finishes.
But I'm pleased to say that this conversation continues for a little while longer now On my podcast at theunexplained.tv.
We're speaking with Rupert Sheldrake.
And Rupert, one of the things you say in this book, and I'm glad we're on to it now, is the fact that we need to connect more with nature.
We need to be in harmony with it.
Now, that sounds very new age-y, a little airy-fairy.
What does it mean?
Well, I think many, first of all, as I usually start from what people have actually experienced.
And, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, Alastair Hardy at Oxford, the zoologist, started collecting people's experiences of mystical connection, asking people to write about experiences they'd had where they felt they were in connection with something greater than themselves.
Lots of people wrote in about experiences of connection with nature, often when they were children, at all ages actually.
So the fact is that a great many people at some stage or other in their lives have felt, you know, when looking at a sunset, when being up a mountain, when watching an animal, when hearing a bird sing, when being up at dawn, there's all sorts of situations that can happen in this sense that they're part of something greater than themselves, that they're a kind of presence that's more than just their own mind.
That is a very basic experience and a very moving one for many people.
And I think that all of us feel some, or at least not all perhaps, but many of us feel some sort of urge to do that, which is why so many people like going into the countryside or visiting parks or gardens or being in the woods.
And, you know, if you think about it, one of the most popular pursuits is going to the countryside and going for walks and things or walking in parks.
And lots of people, if they get rich enough, at least here in Britain, try and buy a place in the country so they can get away from it all and have a country cottage or something.
What's all this about?
It's something to do with a desire to connect with the natural world.
And the romantic poets like William Wordsworth wrote marvellous poetry about exactly this kind of thing.
So I think that emburied in the psyche of most of us is this kind of romantic connection with nature that many of us would like to re-establish and many people do re-establish.
And you say in the books in the book you say, and I quote, in a recent study at Stanford, California, randomly assigned participants went on a 50-minute walk, either in an urban or a natural environment.
They were given a series of psychological tests to do before and after the walk.
Those who went on the nature walk were less anxious and had fewer negative ruminations than before the walk.
Those who went on an urban walk showed no change.
That's telling us something, I think.
Well, it is.
That's one of many studies which show the benefits of being outdoors and in the natural world.
The Japanese call it going into the woods, they call it forest bathing.
And there's tremendous cult of it in Japan.
And again, there's evidence from Japan that this is de-stressing for people.
It makes them less stressed than they were before.
So I think there's plenty of evidence for this.
And I think, in fact, the people who campaigned for nature reserves and for national parks and for parks in our cities have, in a sense, already always known this.
Otherwise, why bother?
If there was no benefit to having Hyde Park in London or Hampstead Heath or any of these great open spaces or in all our cities, thank goodness in Britain we have parks and in many other countries too.
I think it's that some people have always realized how important this is for our well-being, health and psychological balance and indeed spiritual connection.
I once interviewed and met a man in London who believed very firmly.
Sadly, I think he may have died tragically in the pursuit of his beliefs with this, but he had this firm belief in the power of trees.
Do you think the trees which...
They look as if they are moving.
They don't look as if they're particularly dynamic.
But maybe I'm wrong.
If we believe that all things have a presence and all things share this common bond, then, you know, trees have power.
Well, I think they do.
And I think that's one reason that in many cultures there have been sacred groves and sacred trees.
I used to live and work in India, and in most Indian villages there are sacred trees, banyan trees or peepal trees, that people treat with great respect and reverence.
And although here in Britain they're not actually officially classified as sacred, many people feel a strong connection with trees.
And that becomes very obvious.
I live in Hampstead, near Hampstead Heath, and I'm on the Hampstead Heath Committee.
And whenever anyone tries to cut down a tree on Hampstead Heath, it arises enormous passions.
Even if it's a sort of diseased sycamore that's endangering the public who walk underneath it, you know, there's tremendous passions that this arise.
There's a strong sense of connection with trees among many people, even urban people.
And I think this is very basic.
I think it's partly because trees are bigger than we are and they're usually older than we are and they're forms of life that will go on after we're dead.
They live longer than people, generally speaking.
So there's a sense of a connection with life that goes beyond our own lives.
In a literal sense, they live longer than us.
Of course, insofar as they're alive, and I don't know what they think about, if they think at all, but whatever they think about is going to be very different from what we think about.
But there's no doubt that many people, including me, feel that you can form a bond with a tree and form a connection with it.
Which, you know, 40 years ago would have sounded crazy to a lot of people, but now is an idea that would be entertained by many more people.
And the fact of the matter is, and I wonder what you think about this, this modern world of ours, and I do a lot of interviews with people who are on the cutting edge of technology, who are very enthused about the idea of us harmonizing with technology and this becoming a highly technological world, which will go, which will even influence the physical conditions and how long we live and all the rest of it, which all sounds jolly good, I suppose, on one level.
But on the other level, there is this thing that you've talked about, and I think you're right, that somewhere deep down within us is this desire to break away from some of that and reconnect with nature before it's too late.
So it seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong, and you will understand it better than I will, that we're being torn, pulled in two different directions in this world.
Oh, I think we are, yes.
I think there's definitely a pull towards ever greater involvement with technologies, and a lot of people are spending huge amounts of time on screens.
Even children as young as two are spending many of their waking hours on screens.
Now, some people think that's great, it's the way forward for humanity.
Personally, I think it's really bad.
I think it's much more natural for children and adults to be engaged with the three-dimensional world instead of a two-dimensional representation of it.
But I think that if we don't retain that connection with nature, we're likely to plunge into a kind of bubble that may be destructive.
I mean, we depend on the natural world for our survival.
Climate change and destruction of the environment and destruction of other species are going on apace all around us.
And we can't just take the world for granted.
We have to relate to it because sooner or later it'll hit back if we don't behave in an appropriate way.
And what do you think, Rupert, of the idea?
And again, I'm sorry to interrupt with this, but this idea has just dawned in my brain, so I must get it out before it disappears.
If we are connected in the ways that we've discussed, do you think that we can also be connected with civilizations, possibly creatures on other planets, in other places, of which we know nothing at the moment?
Well, I don't see why not.
I mean, the usual scenario involves spaceships or aliens coming here in flying saucers or even abducting people and so on.
I'm not very keen on all those rather technological science fiction-y fantasies.
I mean, personally, I don't take very seriously the idea of us going to other planets which are inhabited in rockets, like in Star Wars, because, you know, it's very unlikely there's any planets that are inhabited in our own solar system, and it would take so many years to get there to any other ones.
That doesn't seem to me a very feasible way forward.
I think if there are such beings on other planets, we might do much better by trying to develop our telepathic powers and communicate with them telepathically.
It wouldn't involve anything like the investment in all this hardware of rockets and things, and it might be a more productive way of actually establishing contact.
Which is not so outlandish as some may say, because in many accounts of so-called alien contact, if such things happen, a lot of people say that the communication that happens is not verbal, it happens through thought.
Well, exactly.
It already implies some kind of telepathic connection.
And if telepathy exists, it may well be that intelligent beings on other planets have developed it to a far higher degree than we have, where, in fact, our whole technological civilization is associated with a science that denies telepathy, pretends it doesn't exist, instead of investigating it, training it, and trying to develop it more.
A lot of effort goes into pretending it's impossible.
So we could easily be lagging far behind other civilizations in this way.
I'm afraid, Howard, I'm going to have to go in a moment because I've got to something I have to do.
That's absolutely fine.
If you can just give me two minutes to wrap this up, that would be wonderful.
You talk in the book about there being an attitude of ingratitude in this world, which is something I've heard a lot of people in the New Age community talk about, how people are not grateful for the world and the life that they lead, and they need to practice an attitude of gratitude.
I was surprised to see it in your book.
Well, I think this is the most fundamental and simple of all the spiritual practices.
I have a whole chapter on it, because there's now a lot of research on gratitude that shows that grateful people are happier than ungrateful people.
And it's not just because they're not just grateful because they're happy, they're happy because they're grateful.
And you can do exercises, gratitude exercises, that actually make you measurably happier and healthier.
I discuss some in my book.
And if you think about it, all religions promote gratitude.
Lots of Christian hymns and prayers are praise and thanksgiving.
Traditionally, people say grace before meals in many different cultures, giving thanks for the food.
But do we have to be thanking some kind of supreme being, or are we thanking something else?
Well, that, I think, is a question that depends on our worldview.
If we take the view there are no supreme beings, then we wouldn't thank a supreme being.
But we could certainly thank all the people who've helped prepare our food and who sustain our lives.
And without any belief in supreme beings, it's an undeniable fact that our lives depend on the plants that give us our food and the animals that give us our food and the climate of the earth that makes all these things possible and the solar system that allows the earth to exist as a fertile living planet.
So there's a lot to be grateful for, even if we don't believe in anything beyond the natural world.
If we do, then we'd give thanks to the source of nature and that which underlies nature as well.
So, with gratitude, it's not all or nothing.
You can go as far as feels comfortable for your belief system.
But even people with the most limited belief system, which has nothing beyond the material world, there's still enough to keep one busy giving thanks for hours a day if one takes it seriously.
Rupert, I know your time is limited, so I'll wrap it up with this.
And it's an astonishing gear change, forgive me for it.
How would you like to be remembered?
Oh, that's out of left field, isn't it?
I suppose as a scientist who believes in scientific inquiry where curiosity comes ahead of dogma.
So I think, and I'm not unique in this, I mean it's one of the underlying spirits of science, but it's often suppressed in the modern world where dogma supersedes and overcomes curiosity.
But there's always been people within science who are fundamentally very curious, which is why science has advanced.
And it will continue to do so through curiosity.
So I'd like to be thought of as a curious scientist.
And how does it feel very, very finely now, according to this is according to Wikipedia, so it may be wrong, to be among the top 100 global thought leaders for actually it was for the year 2013, but to be among that elite.
How does that feel?
Well, it doesn't feel as if...
Well, it depends who's making the list, of course.
Yes, well, I mean, I mean, it's nice to think that some of my ideas do have an influence.
It's also a humbling thought because it means, you know, I have to be responsible about what I say and do.
But it's mainly I basically am not doing what I do because I particularly want to be famous or I'm doing what I do because I actually believe in it.
And I just hope that science will become richer and deeper and also that our civilization will become more connected with the spiritual realm than it is at present.
And those are some of my underlying motivations.
Well, I'm glad that there are still people in the world like you, Rupert, who think about things, because without people who think about things, I think we are probably lost on our journey.
Rupert Sheldrake, thank you for giving me this time.
It's a great pleasure, Howard.
Thank you.
The remarkable and thought-provoking Rupert Sheldrake.
If you want to know more about him, I'll put a link to his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
Please keep your suggestions and your thoughts on the show coming.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv.
You can do that from there.
And thank you very much for being part of my life and this venture that I started all those years ago.
In this long, hot summer, I'm thinking back on all of the people I've spoken with over what is nearly, well, it's coming up to 400 editions of The Unexplained.
It will be as we get to the end of this year, beginning of next year, 400, it's more than 400 hours of material.
I would never have thought when I hit record on the first edition in 2006 that we would be here now.
And it's just humbling and amazing that I've got a worldwide family.
Thank you for being part of it.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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