NLS 642: BANNED Harvard SCIENTIST Proves What CONSCIOUSNESS & The SOUL REALLY Are! INSANE! with Rupert Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake discusses his theory of morphic resonance, suggesting that nature has inherent memory and self-organizing systems resonate across time. He argues that memories are not stored in the brain but tuned into through morphic resonance.

Rupert also explores the concept of the soul, linking it to the morphogenetic fields that shape bodies and behaviors. He discusses the spiritual implications of his work, including the potential for life after death and the importance of spiritual practices for human well-being. Rupert also shares his research on telepathy in dogs and cats, suggesting a deeper interconnectedness between species.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to the Next Level Soul podcast, where we ask
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Speaker 2 (00:09):
Is?

Speaker 1 (00:10):
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(01:20):
your awakening. Now let's begin today's episode. Disclaimer. The views
and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the
guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions
of this show, its host, or any of the companies
they represent. I like to welcome to the show, Rupert Sheldrake.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Hey, you doan Rupert pretty well? Thanks Ilex, Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
So much for being here, my friend. I am fascinated
by your work. It is endless rabbit holes left and
right that you can go down with your work. So
I'm just gonna start you. I'm gonna start off with
my first question and regarding the more your theory of
morphic resonance and what it suggests about the nature, that

(02:03):
nature has its own memory, that habits, not fixed laws
shapes of the universe. Can you explain this theory that
you have.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
It's basically, as you say, the idea that there's a
kind of memory inherent in nature. The so called laws
of nature are more like habits. They've been evolving along
with the universe and along with life. That memory is
basically built into everything. Into self organizing systems. I mean

(02:33):
it's not everything, but anything that's self organizing, which includes atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, ecosystems, planets, galaxies,
solar systems. Anything that's self organizing, I think has a
kind of inherent memory, a collective memory through morphic resonance.
Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So each

(02:57):
species has a collective memory, and wich individual draws upon
it and contributes to it. So that's the basic idea,
and its most radical implication is probably that our own
memories work bio morphic resonance, the principle that similar things
influence subsequent similar things. You and I are most similar

(03:20):
to ourselves in the past, and I think that that
similarity means that we resonate with ourselves in the past.
Most specifically and basically, then it says that our memories
are not stalled inside our brains, which is the usual assumption,
but rather we tune into them. Brains are more like
TV receivers than like video recorders.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
The versions of ourselves that in the past quote unquote
that we're accessing. Would it be kind of like, in
the more metaphysical term, the Akacak records or the acacic
field or a field that we're able to kind of
tap into. And that's kind of the Is it like
the cloud? Is that all of our memories in the
cloud and we're just able to kind of pull from them.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Well, that's the kind of metaphor. Yes, and the Akashak
records a kind of metaphor. I think the problem with
them as metaphors is the Acashak record gives the impression
of being somewhere up in the sky, some kind of
series of filing cabinets or hard drives or something, and
so does the idea of the cloud, because the cloud

(04:26):
depends on data processing centers using huge amounts of energy
with lots of hard drives and flash storage systems or
whatever they have. But what I'm suggesting with morphic resonance
is not that it's stored out there somewhere and we
then retrieve it, but rather there's a direct resonance across time,

(04:48):
like a TV program when it's broadcast from a TV
transmitter and picked up by a TV set or TV aerial,
and then a TV set is invisible and it's crossing space.
It's not stored somewhere in space. It's just a resonance
across space, and morphic resonance is a kind of resonance
across time. And so what I'm suggesting the whole of

(05:10):
the past is potentially present everywhere, and you tune into it,
but it's not when you're not tuning into it, sort
of stored out somewhere. The idea of memory storage, you see,
is spatial. A store is something in space, and akash record
is something in akasha, which is space. But memory is

(05:35):
by its very nature relation in time, not space. And
although we store things in written writing, I suppose the
first storage of memories was through clay tablets and in
carving things on stone and so on, or writing on
papyrus or something. So we have various forms of storing

(05:57):
information now flash drives and hard drives and so on.
But the way our actual memory works. You know, when
I meet someone that I recognized that I met some
years ago, there's nothing about that feeling of recognition that
depends in my experience on memory stores inside the brain

(06:19):
retrieval systems, et cetera. I just recognize them, and I
think it's a kind of direct resonance.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Interesting, and you were mentioning in the morphic residence theory
that all things are kind of connected in one way,
shape or form, so by species. So like all the
dogs in the world kind of feed into this collective
of all dog experience and so on. Well, then that
would also obviously implicate human consciousness, human ability. So are

(06:47):
you saying that everything that Well, basically it's a very
deep spiritual idea that we're all connected. We are all one,
and this is just an illusion that you and I
are separate from each other. Does does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Well, we are connected, but we're not connected all the
time in the same way. We're connected when we come
into resonance through similarity. It's similarity that connects us. And
so if you're doing a particular crossword puzzle, for example,
and I'm doing the same puzzle, and if you've done
it first, I might pick up the answers quicker because

(07:22):
you've already solved the problem. But if you're doing a
different crossword puzzle, there wouldn't be that same kind of resonance.
And you know, if you're looking at a particular kind
of picture and I look at the same picture, there
might be a kind of resonance, but that wouldn't be
the case with a different picture. So it's specific resonance

(07:44):
depends on things being similar, the situation being similar. We're
all similar to some extent, being human. But in a
way this is rather like the psychologist Jung's idea of
the collective unconscious, where we all to have into a
collective memory, a collective human memory, but we tap in

(08:04):
more specifically to the memory of people who are more
like us, predominantly members of our own family in the
presence in the past. They're the people who are most
similar to us, and with identical twins, then you know
they're very similar, and so I think they'd have a
great deal of morphic resonance, which is one reason their

(08:25):
lives are so similar.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
So what you're talking about almost sounds like that the monkey.
That monkey. It's an experiment or a phenomenon where there
was three different islands with the monkeys that were on
these islands, and then one of them figured out how
to do something on one island, and the other two
islands full of monkeys did the same thing, but there

(08:48):
was no way they ever connected or had a phone
call with each other. Essentially, is that kind of what
you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
Yes, I mean that's sometimes called the hundredth monkey effect.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yes, I don't myself use that example, but because it's
not exactly clear what really happened with these monkeys off
Japanese islands. And when the theory was first popularized by
Lyle Watson, who was a popular British science writer, he
when he told the story, said, let us imagine for

(09:19):
the purpose of argument, that when one more monkey did
it save the hundredth monkey, then it spread to all
the others. So he made it clear he was sort
of embroidering on the story. I don't use that example myself,
but it's that kind of thing. I prefer the thousandth
rat to the hundredth monkey because there have been experiments
with rats learning a new trick escaping from a water maze,

(09:44):
and what the data show is not that nothing happened
until you got up to a certain number and then
they all did it, but rather the more that did it,
the bigger the effect elsewhere. So it's not all or none.
It's a kind of gradual effect. It depends on the numbers.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
On a kind of scientific standpoint, or at least on
a materialistic standpoint. Is this or even maybe a metaphysical standpoint,
Does this mean that, like with a thousand rats that
you were talking about, if you know rat one, Rat two,
Rat three, does it then that that signals or that
sends some sort of information to the collective. And I'm

(10:23):
trying to wrap my head around it. It's kind of
like it's like we're sending messages back in an invisible
field that other rats are not picking up because some
other words, and the more of the rats that are
in this group are doing it, the stronger the signal
to more rats is that what you're going to say,
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor

(10:46):
and now back to the show.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
Well, that's it, but they're not necessarily sending it to
a collective. A rat that's doing it now, when it's
confronted with this particular puzzle or problem, comes into resonance
with all the previous rats that solved it, So it
will resonate with all of them at the same time,
and there'll be a kind of combined influence of all
these different rats. So it's the more there are, the

(11:13):
stronger the influence will be.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
So so then what I'm trying to wrap my head
around is what is the When you say resonance, is
that frequency? Is that vibration? Is that What is that
thing that they're tapping into? Is my question.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
Everything in nature is vibratory. I mean, in the nineteenth
century people thought atoms were little bits of stuff like
solid billiard balls. But we now know that they're not.
We know that they're vibratory patterns of electrons, resonant standing
waves of electrons around the nucleus, which itself is vibratory.

(11:50):
You know, medical techniques like nuclear magnetic resonance tell you
this that the nucleus has frequencies, vibrations, molecule of vibratory,
crystals have lattice vibrations. Our own cells, all the proteins
have vibratory rhythms. The cell as a whole has rhythms.

(12:11):
You know, our whole body has rhythms, daily rhythms of
sleeping and waking. Women have monthly rhythms. Then we have
the heartbeat, the brain waves of various frequencies, breathing rates,
and everything in nature is essentially rhythmic or vibratory or oscillatory.
So what I'm suggesting is that the entire vibratory pattern

(12:35):
is what resonates. It's not like you alex that be
reduced to a single frequency four four or five hurts
or something. You've got thousands of different frequencies all arranged
in spatial patterns, and that's what's doing the vibrating, not
some kind of reduction to a single frequency. So it's
a complex pattern of vibration that's involved, and morphic resonance

(12:59):
depends on the similimilarity of that pattern of vibrating resonating
across time, picking up these memory influences from the past.
That's the hypothesis. So you know, this is a scientific
hypothesis that can be tested. You know, it may not
be the best way of thinking about it, but anyway,

(13:20):
that's how it stands at the moment.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
As you're explaining this. The thing that pops into my
mind is from my studies in the spiritual space, especially
the Eastern religions like Hinduism, Yogic philosophies and so on.
There are stories of yogis who are able to vibrate
themselves at such a high frequency that people can feel

(13:44):
their resonance just by being in the room. There's magical
stories of biolocation or levitation or things like that, which
can seem more fantastical, but it's still part of their
history thousands and thousands of years old. Is that. Well,
what's your take on those ideas, on these kind of
more spiritual ideas. But it's connected to what you're talking

(14:06):
about in many ways.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, you're right, it is connected. I mean, the Hindu
philosophy of nature and the Buddhist philosophy of nature takes
memory in nature. For granted. You know, the ideas I'm
putting forward of memory and nature are unfamiliar in the
Western world, but in the Eastern world they've been sort

(14:29):
of standard way of looking at things for thousands of years.
I mean, so the idea of an inherent memory is
built into their idea of karma, for example, and you
need something like an inherent memory in nature if you're
going to explain any form of life outter death, for example.

(14:55):
The standard mechanistic materialist theory of memory, which is the
dominant orthodoxy in the West, taught in all universities, the
dominant orthodoxy ninety nine point nine percent of neuroscientists and
brain scanning departments, and that kind of thing. That model
says all memories are stored inside the brain as physical traces,

(15:17):
modified nerve endings, changes in proteins, maybe changes in DNA
or RNA. Those are all the standard assumptions that our
science is based on. Now people have spent one hundred
years trying to find these traces in the brain without
success so far, and I think the reason they haven't
succeeded is because they're not there. But you see what

(15:40):
that standard Western theory means. It's a materialist theory. It
says that everything's made of matter, even memories. What that
means is that if your memories are stored inside your brain,
then when you die, your brain decays and all your
memories will be wiped out, and therefore there's no possibility
of any kind survival of bodily death in heaven, hell, purgatory, rebirth, reincarnation,

(16:07):
last judgment, any of these theories of survival are automatically
refuted by the materialist theory of memory, which is why
most materialists are atheists and think that all religions are
based on pure fantasy thinking because they're so sure they're right.
They're sure they're right, not because the evidence is overwhelming.

(16:28):
It's very underwhelming. There's the evidence for memory storage and
the brain is barely at all. But it's because it's
an assumption of their worldview. Now, if you have the
idea that memories are not stalled inside the brain, that
the brain tunes into them when the brain decays, it
doesn't mean the memories are all eliminated. They're still potentially there.

(16:51):
They go on, contributing to the collective memory, to the
ancestral field of each family. And also in the case
of Hindu and Buddhist theories of reincarnational rebirth, those memories
could then carry over and shape a subsequent life of
somebody else. Though, So you see, you can't have reincarnational

(17:16):
rebirth if memories are embedded in brains, because they're all
wiped out at death. Nor can you have heaven, hell, purgatory,
or a last judgment, because if you appeared before your
maker at the last judgment for that final moment and
you've forgotten who you were and what you'd done, it
wouldn't be a very meaningful experience. So even you know,

(17:40):
all theories, all religious theories of survival, presuppose the survival
of memory in some form or another. Now I don't
know how it works exactly, how it survives. I wish
I did. But all I'm saying is that the theory
of morphic resonance that memory is tuned into rather than
stored in the brain, leaves open the question of survival,

(18:02):
whereas the standard materialist theory shuts the door, slams the
door in the face of any theory of survival.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
Rupert, I have to ask you, you have been a
trouble maker in the world for a long time with
these wonderful theories that go against the orthodox views of life.
How do you personally for people out there listening who
might you know, might want to be a little bit
of a trouble And I say troublemaker with all the

(18:31):
love in the world, because I also am a trouble
maker as well. How did you continue to move forward
against the grain all your career like this? Because there's
so many people in the scientific community, and there are
more of them waking up every day that are going
this doesn't make sense. This quantum physicists are starting to

(18:52):
discover things that are just like no, no, no, no,
that what you guys are saying is wrong. Darwin wasn't
all the way right, you know, and all these kind
of ideas is how would you, what advice would you
give them and how did you keep going against the
grain for all these years?

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Well, first of all, I didn't start off as a troublemaker.
I started off being very successful in the regular scientific world.
You know. I was a scholar at Claire College, Cambridge.
I studied at Harvard where I did history and philosophy
of science. I have Cambridge PhD. I was an academic
at Cambridge University, you know, a fellow of Clare College.

(19:28):
I was a research fellow of the Royal Society, the
most prestigious scientific institution in Britain, is a bit like
the National Academy of Sciences, you know. I won prizes
and that kind of thing. So it didn't start off
like trying to cause trouble. I was at Cambridge. I

(19:50):
was doing research on plant form, how plant form develops,
and I came to the conclusion that genes couldn't exp
playing the inheritance of form because genes only code for proteins,
and that the form must depend on fields. Morphogenetic fields,
which a concept I didn't invent. It was invented in

(20:12):
the nineteen twenties. But I was trying to think how
the fields are inherited, and I then realized the only
way that this could work that I could see, would
be through some kind of memory moving directly across time,
something that simply wasn't in the standard scientific repertoire in
the West.

Speaker 1 (20:33):
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Speaker 2 (20:44):
And so when I came up with this idea, which
is a very very long time ago in nineteen seventy three,
I of course knew this was heretical. And when I
discussed it with colleagues in Cambridge, among my scientific colleagues,
it just they thought I was joking, or they couldn't

(21:04):
see the point, or people just said it was completely
unnecessary because we're going to figure everything out in terms
of molecular biology within ten or twenty years. And I said, well,
I don't think you are, and I think we need
something else. Anyway, it was clear it was going to
be controversial, so I didn't publish it because I wanted
to be sure more shore anyway, so I took a

(21:27):
job in India. I worked in an international agricultural institute
on crop improvement, trying to do something useful. I think
we did do something useful and I was in India
for seven years altogether. And when I went to India
and started telling people, Indian colleagues and people about morphic resonance,

(21:48):
I got the exact opposite of the shock horror response
nearliar with from Cambridge. You know, most Indians said, oh,
there is nothing new in this idea. Ancient Rishies have
said this of years ago. And what was frustrating there
was that I couldn't get them to do anything about it.
I said, but look, you're a scientist. If the whole

(22:10):
of science as we know it is missing something major,
why not change what you're doing research on and you know,
actually prove the ancient Brish is right. But none of
them were willing to do that because they wanted to
keep their jobs and their careers and so on. So
I spent five years thinking about this in India, where

(22:33):
the atmosphere was more favorable, because hardly anyone I met
there thought this was crazy. They just thought it was
sort of they'd heard it all before. They had this
kind of blase attitude to it. Anyway, it was more
it was less frustrating than the Cambridge attitude. But I
read and I thought, and I read more and I

(22:56):
discussed it more until I felt fairly sure that that
the theory is right, but that there wasn't anything actually
wrong with it, that it was a possibility, there was
no evidence that went against it, that it was a
real possibility. So I wrote my book, the first book,
which is art called A New Science of Life on

(23:17):
Morphic Resnors, which published in nineteen eighty one in eighty
two in the United States, and I knew it would
be controversial, and indeed it was. I mean, I hadn't
deliberately set out to provoke people, but the editor of
Nature journal really took against it, and he wrote a
famous editorial on the front page of Nature, the leading

(23:40):
international journal of science, called a book for burning, and
it was savagely attacked by quite a lot of people.
But the point is I wasn't too upset because I
was expecting that it would call I didn't expect how
furious and emotional the opposition would be. I expected a
more gentle and their debate. I hadn't expected kind of

(24:04):
a blistering attack, with ad hominem attacks and invectives. The
editor of Nature, comparing my book unfavorably to mind camp
By Hitler. I hadn't expected that kind of thing. But
the thing is, though some people were terribly against it,
a lot of people weren't a lot of people were

(24:24):
curious and interested, and some people actually liked the idea,
particularly Jungian psychotherapists, because it fits very well with the
work of Young. And then when I was in the
US and I gave some seminars in universities, but then
people in other places, like the Esslen Institute in California

(24:45):
got very interested in it, and I found when I
met people who I had a great time discussing it with,
like Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, and they became very
close friends, and we had conversations every year trying out
this and other ideas. So it wasn't as if life
totally collapsed. I mean, some doors closed, other doors opened,

(25:10):
and doing research in these more unconventional areas of science
turned out to be fun. So I can't say that
I suffered horribly. And I don't really take personally these
attacks I've had, because these are people who believe they

(25:30):
know the truth. I mean, most materialists, especially militant materialists,
are convinced they understand the way nature is on the
basis of materialist assumptions, and they think that is science
and that they know the truth. Any attack on this
is an attack on science and reason, and they get

(25:50):
terribly emotional about that. But they're not evil people. They're
people who believe that they're fighting for the truth. I
just think they've got an unfortunate a narrow view of
what science is and what science could be.

Speaker 1 (26:05):
Let me ask you, with all the research you've done,
and specifically the time you spent in India, which I'm sure
was pretty eye opening because you were exposed to probably
a lot of philosophies and ideas and Hinduism and Yogic
ideas as well, what is your take or what is
your understanding of the soul or the concept of the soul?
And is this a carrier of the memories that you're

(26:28):
talking about, Because it's from my understanding from the mystics
that I've spoken to, the soul is not only within you,
it actually expands outside of you a bit more than
their own human shape and is actually outside of you
a little bit more, sometimes even above you, according to
the mystics. So what is your take on the soul?

Speaker 2 (26:51):
It's important to back up a bit and look at
the history of the concept, because what most people today
think of it the soul is a kind of try
catered view that's been short, that's been shaped by four
hundred years of scientific materialism or the narrow mechanistic worldview.

(27:11):
And so you know, if if I could have three
minutes or so to explain that, I get back to
your question. In Greek thought, the most important philosopher of
life was Aristotle, who was a student of Plato. And
Plato and Aristotle said that all living things have souls.

(27:35):
That's what makes them alive. They're animate, they have a soul,
And the Greek word for soul is of course psyche.
So by living things he didn't just mean animals and plants.
He meant the earth. The earth was a living thing,
the planets were alive for Aristotle, and the whole universe.

(27:56):
You know, Plato thought of the whole universe as having
a soul, the world soul, the anima mundi. So a
soul was not something confined to living organisms that excrete
and reproduce and that sort of thing. It was the
feature of life. But life was much bigger than biology
from their point of view. So when Aristotle came to biology.

(28:23):
He said, there's three levels of soul. In biology, there's
the vegetative soul, which shapes the body, and the plants
have vegetative souls. The reason that a palm tree grows
the way it does, or an oak tree grows the
way it does, is because it has a palm soul
or an oak sol And when an acorn germinates and

(28:45):
starts growing, it's attracted towards the mature form of the
oak tree by the soul. The soul works by attraction.
It has what he called enteloche, the end within itself.
It pulls the developing organist and towards its goal, which
is the mature, reproducing form of the oak tree. So

(29:06):
animals have vegetative souls true too, which shape their embryology
and shape their growth and maintain the body after injury,
help underlie regeneration. Newt salamander can regenerate limb. If you
cut a limb off, we can regenerate skin and liver
and the gut lining and so on. Our blood cells

(29:29):
are regenerated all the time. So this regenerative, formative and
regenerative aspect of the body is the vegetative soul. Then,
in addition to that, animals have an animal soul which
underlies their animal nature, their instincts, their sensations, their movements,
their behavior, and that's why we call them animals. The

(29:51):
word animal means soul in Latin, so all animals have
souls on that view, and then human beings have in
a day to the vegetative soul that shapes our body
and underlies its health and recovery from disease, and our
animal soul that gives us our animal instincts, in animal
nature and animal senses, which we share with many other animals,

(30:14):
particularly mammals.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
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Speaker 2 (30:26):
We have what he called the intellectual soul, which is
to do with fort, language, reason, meaning things that we
have that animals don't have. So all this was incorporated
into Christian theology in the Middle Ages, and Saint Thomas
Aquinas Family in the thirteenth century famously based his whole system,

(30:51):
which became the main orthodoxy of the universities and the
Church in Western Europe. He based his whole theory on Aristotle,
and he produced a kind of Christian version of this philosophy.
So plants had souls, animals had souls, and humans had
the intellectual soul based on the animal soul, and the

(31:14):
whole universe was alive. For the medieval Christians. The stars
were alive, the planets were alive, the Earth was alive.
Mother Earth an animal. It was a living world. It
was kind of Christian animism. And that's the world that
gave rise to the great Gothic cathedrals like Chatra and Lincoln.
And they were a product of a worldview that saw

(31:37):
all of nature is existing within God and God within nature,
in which animals and plants were all animates and had souls,
and that shaped the entire worldview up until the seventeenth century,
the scientific revolution and the scientific revolution with a vision

(32:01):
that came to Galileo in sixteen nineteen. He had a dream,
a vision in which he saw the whole universe as
a machine. The universe was like as kind of clockwork machine. Actually,
in his version it was not with cogs, but with vortices.
It was a more interesting view, and all animals and

(32:23):
plants were nothing but machines. But human beings had a
special soul that was to do with reason. So Basically,
he drained the soul out of the whole of nature,
or planets and stars all became just dead mechanical matter,
and so did human bodies and all animals and plants,

(32:43):
and all that was left was human reason, which was
the only thing that was not material in nature and
that shared a spiritual nature with God and the angels.
But that created the famous Cartesian dualism, the divide between
the realm of spirit and the realm of matter. And
the realm of spirit was not material, not in space

(33:04):
and time. The world of matter was unconscious and material
and in space and time. Then in the nineteenth century,
increasing numbers of atheists and materialists, people who became atheists
because they wanted to attack the Church because it was
allied with reactionary governments in France and Russia and so on,

(33:26):
were like in the French Revolution. The French Revolutionaries were
deeply anti Christian. During the Reign of Terror. Not only
did they turn the cathedral of Notre Dame into a
temple of reason, but their guillotine priests, monks and bishops
on an industrial scale and tried to stamp out Christianity

(33:47):
in favor of science and reason and progress. But by
the nineteenth century this became part of the standard materialist
intellectual system. The materialists said, well, why do we need
invisible spirit? That God? You can't see God, Angels you
can't see them, the human spirit, it's nothing but a
fantasy of the imagination. You can't measure it, weigh it.

(34:09):
All there is is matter. There's no such thing as spirit.
Everything's matter, and the soul is just the way the
brain works. It's just a subjective experience of the brain.
And the brain is nothing but a physical organ inside
a mechanistic body. So that's what happened then, you see,
is that religious people said, oh, well no, it's not

(34:32):
just that there is this other thing. Nature is just
a machine. Nature is just mechanical, just like science says.
But God exists beyond nature, supernatural angels exist beyond nature,
and the human spirit is basically supernatural as well, but
it can't be measured and has nothing to do with science,
and so the thing is that the atheist then said, well,

(34:55):
you know, all of this is just make believe and
dogma and stuff and nothing to do with what we
can see and measuring gives real progress in the world,
and they became more and more confident, and the plenty
of them around today. I mean, this is the default
possession of the academic world and the business and the
secular world that we live in. And so the realm

(35:17):
of religion was driven to a kind of margin of
supernatural realm where the soul became at best an idea
inside human brains and therefore inside human in the physical
activity of the brain. So this just calls us where
we are today. So if we now want to think

(35:37):
about the soul, you know what it is. To come
back to your question, I would say that what I
call the morphogenetic field, the form shaping field that underlies
the body of plants, animals, microbes, crystals, It's not just
living things. Crystals have morphogenetic fields that shape the growing

(36:01):
Molecules have molecular fields that shape the three dimensional structure
of a protein. For example. Morphogenetic fields are form shaping fields.
Morphogenesis means the coming into being a form morphi form genesis,
coming into being, so that more or less corresponds to

(36:21):
what Aristotle called the vegetative soul, and that these fields
are not just inside the body, they are in and
around it, like a magnetic field is not just inside
a magnet, it's in and around the magnet. And so
when some people say they can see auros, and it's
the soul, and so I can't see auros, so I

(36:43):
don't have any personal experience. But I think of the
morphogenetic field as being within and around the body, and
that's what shapes the body and maintains its health. And
that's one way of thinking of the soul, but it's
only the most basic way, which we share with plants
and other animals. Then there's the animal soul, which Aristotle

(37:04):
talked about, which I think is to do with the
fields of behavior and learning. That animals have fields which
organize their movements and their activity of their brains and
their muscles that underlie their instincts. And you know, when
a kitten learns, it just or instinctively starts to play

(37:27):
and to chase things and to swipe things with its pores.
And when a spider knows how to spin its web
without having to go to Spiner's a spider school, or
get a spider degree or anything, it just does. It
even doesn't need to see other spiders. These instincts which
are so deeply built into animals. I think a part

(37:48):
of the morphic field of their behavior, the fields of
behavior that they inherit by morphic resonance from their ancestors.
And we also have instinctive fields of behavior. We inherit.
Babies naturally learn to crawl and to walk, and have
an instinct to learn language, to pick it up. And

(38:10):
then we have our conscious minds. Most of that is unconscious,
the habits of growth, the habits of our bodies, heartbeat, breathing,
although eyeblink, reflex, all these things are unconscious. Most morphic
fields are unconscious. Their habits and habits are unconscious. But

(38:30):
our conscious minds are also shaped by habitual fields, mental fields.
You know, we inherit a whole culture with metaphors, language words. No,
you and I didn't make up the English language. We
inherited it with all the concepts and metaphors that are
built into it. We inherit a whole culture. Every culture

(38:52):
inherits a culture, and human cultures are different. They obviously
have some overlap, but different languages, different cultures, I think,
are inherited by morphic resonance, and they shape our conscious minds.
So then when we come to what is the soul,
I would say it's all these things, but it takes

(39:12):
on a particular relevance in a religious context when we
consider to what degree is the soul separable from the body.
In other words, is it possible that the soul could
survive the death of the body, which is a primary
religious question. It's one that atheist and material is just

(39:33):
simply deny like that, they say, of course, it's impossible.
It's ridiculous, what a silly idea. They don't even need
to discuss it. It's just a priori They deny it
because everything's material, and whatever survives the body is not material,
because you don't see anything material leaving the body that's
shaped like a soul or anything. So I think that

(39:57):
we actually experience an aspect of our soul every night
in our dreams, because when you and I dream, we
have a body in our dreams, the dream body. When
I'm dreaming, my physical body is lying asleep in bed,
but my dream body is going around, talking to people,

(40:18):
meeting people, running, walking, sometimes even flying.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
Will be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
And doing all sorts of things. And that body in
my dreams. I'm not spending my whole time looking down
to see if I've got a body. But it's implicit
because I have a center of consciousness. I'm moving around
in my dreams and seeing things from a point of
view in that dream world. Now what is that dream body? Well,

(40:55):
you know, materialism doesn't have much to say on the subject.
It just says, well, it must be an illusion produced
inside the brain. But that doesn't really tell us why
it should produce this kind of illusion, why the illusion
should take the form it does, why it should be
body like, why we should have the dreams we do.
None of that's explained anyway. So the dream body we

(41:16):
have every night in our dreams. We don't remember all
our dreams, We forget most of them, but we know
remember enough to know that we have a dream body.
And I know I've had a dream body ever since
I was a child, because when I was a child,
I had wonderful flying dreams. Very rarely have them, no,
But I've found dreams quite thrilling when I could fly,

(41:36):
and sometimes they're very scary. We have nightmares and so on.
So when people say, well, could there be something that
lives on after we die? I think the best bet
for me the easiest way of conceiving of this is
to think that when we die, we can go on dreaming,

(41:57):
but we can't any longer wake up because we haven't
got physical body to wake up in it's dead. So
we're trapped in a dream world when we're dead. And
the kind of dream world we're trapped in depends on
what kind of person we are and what we believe
and what we expect, and what our theories are and
what our memories are. You know, if you're an atheist

(42:20):
and you believe that everything goes blank when you die,
perhaps it will if you're a you know, if you
believe in If you're a Tibetan Buddhist and you think
you're going to a bardo, a kind of intermediate realm
dream like, the Tibetan Buddhists think of it as dream like,
and that's why Tibetan monks practice what they call dream Yogo,

(42:43):
which is lucid dreaming, learning to practice being aware during
your dreams, because they think this will help them in
the afterlife in the bardo. They see it as a
you're better off with a lucid dream where you know
what you're doing than with a confused dream where you're
just assaulted by all sorts of images and events and

(43:04):
things that you're just tossed by the turmoil of this
dream world out of control. They practice. And then in
the Tibetan view and in the Hindu view, after a
certain time in an intermediate dream like state, then your
most people would be reincarnated. The whole aim of Hinduing

(43:25):
Buddhist spirituality is not to be reincarnated. It's to get
off the whole wheel of reincarnation, because you know, life
is available suffering according to the Buddha. So most Western
enthusiasts for reincarnation think is a good thing. But you know,
I've lived in India among people who take it for granted.

(43:46):
They think is a bad thing. They don't they're not
delighted by the idea of reincarnation, you know, they're rather
put off by it. I mean, the whole point of
Hindu spiritual practice is mockshire, is liberation from the wheels
of reincarnation. And so the aim of most Hindu spirituality
is a kind of vertical takeoff where you can just

(44:10):
leave this endless cycles of life behind. So I think
that the and a Christian view with one Christian view
would be that we have a dream like after life
in purgatory and that this is like a continued ongoing development.

(44:30):
Some Christian views are that you go to sleep when
you die, and you stay asleep till you're woken up
by the last trump and then you have the last
judgment with no continued development. You know, there's a variety
of theories.

Speaker 1 (44:44):
What do you because we're talking about the afterlife and
the other side in purgatory. In these things, I've had
the pleasure of probably speaking to at least one hundred
and fifty different near death experiencers from various backgrounds, from
a Harvard neuroscientists all the way to a drug addict
and everything in between. But what they see on the

(45:07):
other side is shaped a lot of times, it's shaped
by what they believe, meaning that if I've had only
a few that've had hellish experiences, most of them are
overwhelmingly positive, very loving. I'm sure you've heard all the
things that happen on the other side meant, but the
ones that have hellish experiences is because Daveman, when they

(45:28):
came back to said I went through it because I
was raised Catholic, and I believe that I didn't do
good and I had to go through I had to
go to hell. But in that hellish experience, the second
they ask for help, an angel or Jesus or some
or a light comes in and rescues them. What is
your take on the whole near death experience phenomenon, which
has now been documented tens, if not hundreds of thousands

(45:51):
of times, and has been studied intensely, and is becoming
more and more people are becoming much more aware of it.
From the ninth seventies when doctor Raymond Moody coined the
phrase near death experience. Now it's part of our zeitgeist.
You don't go towards the light, you know, that kind
of thing. What is your take on it?

Speaker 2 (46:12):
Well, I think that the fact that so many people
have had them and they have such similar components shows
this is something very common, really happens and probably does
happen when we're dying. I mean, of course, by definition,
all near death experiences were not a people who actually
stayed dead. There are people who went through a kind
of dying process and came back, so they may tell

(46:35):
us something about the first moments of death, but they
don't necessarily tell us what happens you know, now later
or a day later, or a year later or ten
years later. They give us a taste of the first
stages so well. First of all, the idea that you
float out of your body and you see yourself from

(46:56):
above is very similar to out of the body experience,
and out of the body experiences are things that many
people can have almost on demand. You know, some people,
they happen rarely, but some people can actually do it
on purpose, to deliberately travel out of their body. And

(47:16):
out of the body experiences are very similar to lucid dreams,
which is where I've already talked about how in your
dream you have another body, and in lucid dreams you
can go where you like and do what you will
because you realize you're dreaming. It puts you in control
to some degree. So I think the floating out of

(47:37):
the body and seeing yourself from outside is on a
continuum with near death experiences and out of the body
experiences and lud and lucid dreams the same kind of thing.
And I think the body you're floating out with is
the same kind of thing as your dream body that
you experience in your dreams every night, So it's not

(47:59):
as if something totally new happens that you find yourself
seeing things from a different point of view from your
physical body. It's something that happens to us every night
in our dreams. But in this case, you then you
are actually that people often see what's happening in operating
theater or in an accident scene or something. Then they

(48:22):
go through a kind of tunnel often and then they
enter a realm of lights and joy and with luminous beings.
So it's a very common kind of description. Well, I
think there are a couple of ways of thinking about that.
One is a kind of psychological way, which you probably
know the theory of stan Graf on this you probably discuss.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
I know Stang very well. I know it's worked very well.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
Yes, Well, you know that he found a lot of
people when he was doing his LSD research. A lot
of people on LSD trips had the experience of going
through a tunnel coming into the light, very like a
near death experience. And many people on DMT or other
psychedelics have things very similar to a near death experience.

(49:10):
And Standargraft's argument, as you know, is that at one level,
this is an archetype, and it's like being born again.
And you know, in the birth process, if we're born
in normal vaginal birth, we're in the womb, it gets
pretty hellish. It's contractions, it's dark, we feel unwelcome. It's

(49:32):
really horrible. After floating blissfully and amniotic fluid for nine months,
suddenly it turns hostile and you don't want to be
there anymore. And it's sort of really horrible being squashed
all the time by all these contractions. And then a
tube presents itself. You go through the tube, you emerge

(49:55):
through this dark tube into the light, and everything's completely different. Well,
that's being born. And his argument that these near death
experiences as a like rebirth or an archetype of being
born again, seems to me very plausible.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
In this connection, I myself think that this archetype of
rebirth is very deeply embedded in our religious traditions, particularly
the Christian tradition, because the central feature of that is
John the Baptist who baptized Jesus, and Jesus' first experience

(50:47):
of himself as a son of God. The sign of
God was at his baptism, he had a voice from
heaven said, this is my beloved son, in whom I
am well pleased. He had this blissful experience as he
came up out of the water. Well, my theory is
probably one you discussed on the program before, because other
people say this too, is that John the Baptist was

(51:11):
essentially a drowner, and that he was holding people under
total immersion in the River Jordan just long enough to
induce the near death experience by drowning. And if he
did that, then what they'd experience is they passed life
flashing before them, going through a tunnel, coming out into
the light, having a near death experience, being enlightened, joy

(51:34):
then coming back and saying they'd died, they'd seen the
light and they'd been born again. And that experience which
Jesus had, I think the early Christians were having. And
people who've had near death experiences often lose the fear
of death and become more spiritual. People who were baptized

(51:55):
in the early Church lost the fear of death and
became more spiritual. And when at the time of the
Reformation in the sixteenth century, The most radical Protestant group
were the Anabaptists, who went around saying the Bible doesn't
say you should baptize infants by sprinkling water over them.

(52:15):
It says you should be baptized by total immersion, like
Jesus was, and like John the Baptist, they reinstated baptism
by total immersion. It became their signature thing, and that's
still the signature theme of Baptists, Mennonites, and all other
Anabaptist derived forms of Christianity. And their key thing is

(52:38):
the conversion experience, where you die, you see the light,
and you're born again. It makes total sense, you see,
of the Baptist message. If the early Baptists were indeed
inducing near death experiences, and maybe some of them still do,
but they'd probably be a bit more careful now because
we live in an age of litterleation and health and safety,

(53:04):
and John the Baptist didn't have to contend with that.
You know, you might have lost a few.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
But so that's very true, that's very very true.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
So I think that these the reason for Jesus' is
that it's the first spiritual experience we hear about, and
it was followed immediately by him going into the wilderness
on his vision quest for forty days and forty nights,
which we celebrate in the season of Lent. But the
key thing there was this experience of something beyond death,

(53:39):
going through death, and then having to come back. And
so I think that near death experiences are very important
because they're a kind of right of passage. They give
us a view of a world beyond this physical body
and beyond death, which we can experience in another kind
of body. And most people who've had them have a

(54:03):
very different view to dying from people who haven't had them,
And so I think they're very important as a right
of passage, and because they actually change the way we
see things. And our culture lacks rights of passage, as
many people have pointed out, and I think that's why
for so many people, taking psychedelics has become a kind

(54:25):
of right of passage, often very done under very unsuitable
conditions and chaotic surroundings and stuff, but done properly, I
think can serve that kind of role in our culture,
as in the same kind of near death experience. And
of course, if baptism could be reinstated as a right

(54:49):
of passage which doesn't involve any drugs at all, but
involves nothing more than water. There's plenty of that around pools, lakes, rivers.
It was virtually free, life transforming, free, available on demand.
You know, John the Baptist was doing it on an
industrial scale. People I'm sure were lining up on the
bank of the Jordan. Put one under, hold them under

(55:11):
just long enough. Then there'd probably be support workers, you know,
to help resuscitate them, probably next please, and you could
this could be done on an industrial scale. And again,
and if I were in a Baptist church, which I'm not,
but if I were, I think i'd really try and
get things moving in terms of you'd probably have to

(55:33):
do it with heart monitors and sort of medical equipment
and stuff, water proof ECGs and stuff to be able
to do it in a way that could be deemed safe.
But they could reinstate this. I think they'd have plenty
of people queuing up to become Baptists or people from
other question denominations going to the Baptists for this right

(55:56):
of passage, then going back to their regular.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
Practice scales program. Of course, Rubert, I have to ask you,
with all the experience you have and all the research
you've done over the years, and you're just your own
personal point of view. What is your vision for humanity
humanity's future? Where do you think are we on the

(56:19):
verge of higher consciousness? There seems to be an awakening
happening spiritually with a lot of people. Hence, why are
a lot of these systems around us are starting to
crumble and crack around us? Things that have been rock
solid for hundreds of years that are now starting to crack.
I come from the world of Hollywood, in that kind
of world, that whole system is just falling apart in

(56:40):
a way that it's unprecedented, and so many other industries
are doing the same thing. But where do you see
humanity in this future? Are we going to go to
a higher consciousness civilization or are we just going to boom?
That was technical by the way.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
You know, of course I don't know. It's obvious that
a lot of things are cracking up. And you know,
if fire systems break down, you know, if suddenly our
water supply doesn't work, electricity supply doesn't work, the Internet's
crashed because of sabotage from opposing world powers, and that

(57:19):
kind of thing. I'm not sure that most people would
go to higher consciousness in those conditions. I think go
to lower consciousness. You know, I think sort of share
survivalism would kick in for a lot of people, and
you know, being nice to other people that seem like
a needless luxury, you know, when it's pure survival that's
at stake. And you know, when we look at the

(57:43):
world political scene, it doesn't show many manifestations of higher consciousness,
or the world's business scene for that matter. You know,
it's about profit and corporate profit and that's not higher sciousness.
That's us greed. So I think it's possible that the

(58:08):
fact more people are coming to be disillusion with the
mechanistic materialists worldview and the kind of social and economic
systems that have grown out of late stage capitalism, you know,
a lot of people would like alternatives. It's not obvious
that there are that many alternatives politically and economically at

(58:29):
the moment. But I think one thing that will change is,
you know, as we come out of the dogmatic materialist
secularism that's dominated at least the life of educated people
in so called advanced countries, I think more people will
open up to the spiritual dimension that's been denied by

(58:52):
that system. And so I think of spiritual revival is
actually happening and is very welcome. And you know, it
starts from a pretty low base here in Europe. I mean,
Europe's much more godless and non spiritual than the US.
For all his faults, the US is a much more

(59:13):
spiritual place than most of the rest of other Western
countries like Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Europe. So I
think that if that can happen, I think that it could.
It may not be happened soon enough for but it

(59:35):
could lead to a different way of setting goals. Right now,
all governments want economic growth, because everybody who votes for them,
or almost everyone who votes from wants more money and
more stuff all the time, and more disposable income and
bigger houses and more foreign holidays and all those kinds
of things, all of which if more people were spiritually minded,

(59:58):
more people probably can with what they've got and be
prepared to live more simply.

Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Because if you feel happier and more satisfied with your life,
just grateful for being alive and beautiful things around one,
and plants and animals and other people everyday acts of
kindness that we all encounter. If one's grateful for those
kinds of things, doesn't feel such a pressing need to

(01:00:39):
spend the whole time whizzing around the world in jet
planes or buying new products, or watching advertising channels or
infomercials and stuff. It could have knock on effects for
the economy, but there's not much sign of that happening yet.
I have to say, I hope it will. I hope

(01:01:00):
it will probably have to happen through necessity, and I
hope because economic growth is faltering. It's you know, in
most so called advanced countries, you know, people are happy
with a zero point five percent growth rate. Here in Britain,
you know, the argument is could it be a zero
point two percent or zero point five percent? And even

(01:01:21):
China where and India where they're used to these high
growth rates, will reach a point where that stops happening,
as it has in Japan, which was a bit ahead
of the curve of valeration countries. So when we reach
the point where not because idealists say we shouldn't consume
so much and the economy should slow down. It's slowing

(01:01:42):
down anyway, and we're going to be able to consume less.
We'll have to consume less simply because when as rich
as we were in economies aren't expanding as they were.
Hopefully this will go in hand in hand with a
spiritual transition and won't necessarily lead to mass miss if
we have less. If we have enough and we have

(01:02:03):
a spiritual life, then we can be really happy. If
we have no spiritual life, then nothing is going to
satisfy us, no amount of material possessions or greed or money.
You know, if you've got twenty billion, if you're unsatisfied
with that, you want forty billion, and then you want

(01:02:25):
a trillion. And there's a few people who are actually
aspiring to have a trillion dollar. You can't possibly spend
that kind of money, so it's insane anyway. That's those
rambling versions of my take on the future.

Speaker 1 (01:02:41):
The experiments or the findings you had about dogs knowing
when their owners were coming home. I am fascinated with
that because I had a dog, I have cats now,
and when I saw I've seen some videos of it.
I think somewhere in a news article I saw a
news program. I saw like they the dog and then

(01:03:01):
they filmed the owner and the second he got into
his car and started to drive home, the dog got
up and waited for them at the door. What are
your findings with that, because it's fascinating. What do you
believe the connection is? Because now we're talking about inner species,
We're not talking abut the morphic field of humans and
the morphic resonance of dogs. These are two separate species,

(01:03:24):
if you will, but yet connected. I'd love to hear
your thoughts on it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
I've done a lot of research on telepathy, which is
the connection between people or animals who are closely bonded. Telepathy,
interestingly happens when people are part of a social group
share a morphic field. I think social groups have morphic
fields and telepathy. Typically it doesn't occur with strangers. It

(01:03:48):
happens between husbands and wives, lovers, parents and children, especially
mothers and babies. It's very common in the human world
with telephone calls. I've done a lot of research on
telephone telepathy. But it also happens when we're bonded to
animals and they're bonded to us, and so one reason

(01:04:10):
I started this research with dogs was because I first
got interested in telepathy through a spectacular case in Cambridge
when I was doing research there of an autistic child
who was highly telepathic with his mother, similar to these
recent cases on the telepathy tapes I go. Years later,

(01:04:34):
when I got back from India and I was working,
I was doing various other research projects on morphic resonance.
I got interested in returning to telepathy, and I couldn't
work with autistic children because I'm not a child psychiatrist,
and so I thought the next best thing would be dogs,
because like autistic children on speaking autistic children, they don't speak,

(01:04:59):
which inhibit telepathy I think to some degree, and they
haven't had a college education, which makes them think telefty
doesn't exist. Dogs, you know, can just come at this naturally,
and they haven't been put off it by smart guys
who say it's an illusion and so on. I thought
dogs would be ideal, and I heard so many cases

(01:05:22):
of this that I did quite a lot of experimental
research along the lines you suggest. You know, we filmed
the dog the whole time the person's out, have the
person go at least five miles away and come back
at a random time. We select they don't know in
advance when they're going to come home, call them up
on a mobile phone, and to avoid familiar car sounds,

(01:05:45):
they come in an unfamiliar vehicle or a taxi, a
different taxi each time. And the film then shows that
you know when they form the intention to go home,
before they've even got into the vehicle, the dog becomes
a LW and goes and starts waiting from the door
or window. And the other thing is you can do
this over and over again. In human telefty tests, when

(01:06:09):
you keep repeating them, most people get bored and the
scores fall off of time because you know the subject
is just bored of doing these repetitive tests. But dogs
never get bored of their owners coming home, So you
can do this over and over again. Anyway, I published
papers on this in peer reviewed journals. They're all on
my website childrake dot org and anyone who's interested can

(01:06:33):
look there. And also a film of one of these
experiments with a split screen where you can see the
dog and the owner at the same time. That's also
on my website childrake dot org. And so this I
think it's very clear that as really happens. What I'm
planning as a new phase of this research. I'm going

(01:06:57):
to do it with cats, because cats do it as
well as dogs. About fifty percent of dogs do it,
according to random surveys of dog owners, and about thirty
percent of cats. And I don't think it's cats are
less sensitive. I think a lot of them are just
less interested. I'm afraid that was the case with my

(01:07:18):
own cats. We had cats, But you know, when I
arrive home, even if I've been away on the long
journey and I walk in, it barely lifts its head
in acknowledgement. So I've been sadly disappointed with my own cats.
But some people have cats that are really excited when

(01:07:38):
they come home. And I'm planning a new phase of
research on this with cats. And nowadays, when I first
did this research, you know, I had to use old
style video cameras with film. But now there's all these
pet tracking things you can put on animals. You can
track them the technology and webcams and things are also

(01:08:01):
on smartphones. The technology is so much better. It should
be possible to do this in a whole new way.
And I'm shortly having a new research assistant start work
with me, and we're going to launch a program on cats.
So if anyone watching this has a cat that regularly
knows when they're coming home and would like to take

(01:08:23):
part in this research, get in touch with me through
my website where there's a contact address.

Speaker 1 (01:08:28):
Rupert. It's been so fascinating talking to you, and I
could talk to you for days and days and days,
but I know you're a very very busy man. You
have this cat research you have to go do, so
I completely understand. My final question to you is is
there anything that you feel that humanity needs to hear
right now? What is the message that you would like
to give out to humanity for our for the sake

(01:08:51):
of our own future. What would you like to say?

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
I think we have to connect with the spiritual world
that and pray as well for guidance in what we're doing,
because I don't think we're completely in charge of what happens.
We're at the mercy of all sorts of you know, cyclones, hurricanes,
solar flares, there's all sorts of things that affect our
lives over which we have no control, including a lot

(01:09:18):
of modern politics. I mean, even in democracies, you don't
feel you've got that much control over what governments are doing.
So we're shaped by all sorts of forces that can
go one way or another, that can make on the
whole the lives of ourselves, our families, and our communities
better or worse, and obviously the things that make them

(01:09:38):
worst of all the wars. And I think too, we
can do a certain amount through normal rational means, you know, voting, thinking,
you know, discussing, coming up with rational plans and all that.
But I think we need to pray and ask for
God's help and guidance in what's happening in our own

(01:10:00):
lives and in our collective lives. I think prayer is
one thing.

Speaker 1 (01:10:07):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now back to the show.

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
And I think that becoming aware of that spiritual dimension
which is so important for our own health and happiness.
My two most recent books, Science and Spiritual Practices and
Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work, are about
scientific evidence that spiritual practices have measurable effects, and the

(01:10:39):
most measurable effects they have, but in the broadest sense,
they make people happier, healthier, and live longer, which means
if you don't have spiritual practices or religious practices, you'll
be unhappier, unhealthier, and live shorter on average. So that's
why I think militant atheism should come with health warning.

(01:11:02):
I think so. I think that finding the more spiritual
dimension of our own lives is really important. And it's
one thing to be spiritual but not religious, and I
know many people are, but I think it's helpful to
be spiritual and religious because reconnecting with a religious tradition,

(01:11:25):
tradition links in with other people as where it's not
just an individual path. We need to have a collective
sense of what's happening, in a collective sense of we're
in this together. And I think that religions can help
with that. They can also be divisive, of course, but
I think if they're understood properly, they can be helpful.

(01:11:48):
And one aspect of them is connecting with our ancestors
and honoring our ancestors. I mean, everyone knows about Halloween,
but not everyone realizes that all Hallow's Eve, Halloween is
the eve of the Festival of the Dead, you know,
all Saints Day, November the first is is the Blessed Dead,

(01:12:09):
the saints and all those who've blessed us in our lives,
and then all souls. Day November, the day of the Dead,
celebrated in Mexico so spectacularly and in many Catholic countries,
is where a good opportunity to remember our ancestors, those
who've gone before, or those to whom we're still connected

(01:12:31):
though they're dead, to honor them, to connect with them,
and to form those to acknowledge these connections. Again. In
most cultures, like traditional cultures like China and Japan and Africa,
the fact the ancestors are part of our lives today
and we're bound to them whether we like it or not,
is taken for granted. Most modern people don't acknowledge that,

(01:12:56):
and I think reconnecting in all these ways to our
ancest to holy places through pilgrimage. I'm a patron of
the British Pilgrimage Trust and we're helping to reopen the
ancient pilgrimage routes to the holy places of England and
connecting with festivals. Each tradition has its holy days and festivals.

(01:13:20):
I'm a Christian, so I'm like to observe the major festivals.
Of course, Christmas, Easter, all saints and all souls, Saint
Michael and all angels, Pentecost, the great festivals of the
year give a shape and a structure to our lives,
and every religion has its festivals that structure personal and

(01:13:43):
collective lives. So I think all these things can help us.
And if we try and get on without them, without
them to amputate these traditions, to live in a purely
secular world where it's just under human control, then look
at the world we've got today. That's a pretty good
representation of what happens. It has some advantages, but it

(01:14:06):
has many disadvantages, and it's not going to be business
as usual whether we like it or not. So I
think the best way forward is to try and reconnect
in all these ways in a way that will make
us more healthy, that will heal our civilization, heal ourselves,

(01:14:28):
and heal our relationship with the world around us.

Speaker 1 (01:14:31):
Robert, it is that was so beautiful. Thank you so
much for this conversation. It has been such a pleasure
talking to you, and thank you for doing the work
that you have been doing all your life and hoping
and helping all of us awaken to a hopefully a
higher consciousness. So I appreciate you, my friend. Thank you
again for being here.

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
Well, thanks very much, Alex, and thanks for what you're
doing too to help bring about raising of consciousness.

Speaker 1 (01:14:59):
Do you want to get links to any thing we
spoke about in this episode, head over into the show
notes at Next levelsoul dot com Forward slash six four two.

Speaker 2 (01:15:06):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:15:06):
If this conversation stirred something in you, there's more waiting.
You can listen to this episode completely commercial free on
Next level Soul TV's app where Soul meets streaming. Watch
and listen on Appleios, Android, Apple TV, Ruku, Android TV,
Buyer tv LG, and Samsung apps anytime anywhere. Begin your

(01:15:28):
awakening at Next levelsoul dot tv. Thank you so much
for listening. As I always say, trust the journey. It's
there to teach you. I'll see you next time.