Modern Wisdom - #379 - Rupert Sheldrake - Does Nature Have A Hidden Memory?

Episode Date: October 2, 2021

Rupert Sheldrake PhD is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. Morphic Resonance is the idea of mysterious telepathy-type connections between organisms and of collective memories within species. Rupert has spent 30 years investigating and researching this phenomenon, much to the annoyance of the scientific community. Expect to learn why it is that rats who are taught to escape from a maze have children who are able to escape it more quickly and why rats in other areas of the world learn to escape more quickly as well, why are dogs able to predict when their owner is coming home 15 minutes before they arrive at the house, how blue tits drowning in milk can be explained by Morphic Resonance and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Rupert's book - https://amzn.to/3B4IZuI Check out Rupert's website - https://www.sheldrake.org/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show, my guest today is Rupert Sheldrake, he's a biologist and an author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. Morphic resonance is the idea of a mysterious telepathy type connection between organisms and a collective memory within species. Rupert has spent 30 years investigating and researching this phenomenon much to the annoyance of the scientific community. Today, expect to learn why it is that rats who are taught to escape from a maze have children who are able to escape it more quickly and why rats in other areas of the world

learn to escape more quickly as well. Why dogs are able to predict when their owner is coming home 15 minutes before they arrive at the house, how blutits drowning in milk can be explained by morphic resonance and much more. To be honest, I have no idea what's going on with this. It feels so unlikely that all of these experiments could be coincidences and there doesn't seem to be a way that they could be explained using traditional scientific methods. So has Rupert stumbled upon something that no other scientist apart from small other fields that follow in his footsteps have actually worked out? I don't know, but it's pretty interesting stuff.

But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Rupert Sheldrake. Rupert Sheldrick. show. Could to be with you. How do you describe what you do for work? I'm a biologist and I do scientific research. I write about it in books and in papers in peer-reviewed journals. I do experiments. I make observations. I go to scientific meetings. So that's probably my main day job. It's diverged a little bit from some of the more typical areas of study in those fields, though. Yes, I investigate things which most scientists don't either because they want to stay within the fairly narrow confines of institutional orthodoxy. Or because these are new areas of research for which it's hard to get funding. And I like exploring areas where there's been very little exploration before. So that's my particular thing.

I mean, for many scientists, they prefer working in crowded areas of science, where there's lots of other people doing similar things, where it's easy to get publications and grants and so on. But I explore lesser known areas of the natural and the psychological worlds. Morphic resonance, which is one area of research in particular that you've come up with, how many of the people are working within that field? Well, in terms of actual experimental research, I think approximate is zero. There are a lot of people who are interested in the idea. The idea is that there's a kind of memory in nature and that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. But when it comes to actually testing it, there have been

quite a number of experiments over the years which are summarized in the new addition of my book A New Science of Life. But right now there are two or three people who are planning some experiments in biology labs and with animal behaviour but no one's actually doing them as we speak. However, there will be some happening quite soon I hope. What do you mean by memory and habits? Well, the usual view of nature is that it's governed by eternal laws, that at the moment of the Big Bang all the laws of nature were supposed to be fixed, like a kind of Napoleonic code, a cosmic Napoleonic code. That's the normal assumption in science, and they've assumed

to be the same everywhere ever since. I suggest that the so-called laws of nature evolve along with nature. They weren't all there at the beginning. I mean, after all, it's only an assumption no one was around at the big bang taking scientific measurements. And if they had, by a time machine managed to get to the big bang, they would have evaporated instantly.ated instantly, billions of degrees centigrade. So it's just an assumption.

And in fact, when you think about it, the idea of laws of nature is very metaphorical, it's based on human laws, and only humans have laws, and in fact only civilized humans have laws, tribes have customs. So what I'm suggesting is a better metaphor is habits. And if nature has habits, then nature has to have a memory. And so what I'm suggesting is that nature's full of habits, crystals crystallize the way they do because they've crystallised that way before. And when a new crystal appears, when chemists make a new compound and it crystallises for the first time,

there won't be a habit because it hasn't happened before. You may have to wait years for a crystal to form, but once it's formed in one place, it gets easier everywhere else. Likewise, if you train rats to learn a new trick in Newcastle, then rats all over the world should be able to learn the trick quicker just because they've learned it here in England first, and the more that learn it, the easier it should get. And the influence of morphic resonance is an influence of similar things upon subsequent similar things across time and space from the past to the present. So that's roughly what I'm trying to say in this hypothesis.

It leads to the idea that every species has a collective memory on which individuals draw and to which they contribute. And also that humans, of course, have a collective memory, which is very similar to the psychologist Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. How do you separate out habits and laws? Well, if you assume that a law is an eternal, changeless thing, then crystals should crystallize exactly the same way the first time, all the millennia's time, all the billions time because the so-called laws of nature haven't changed. But if the rate of crystallization depends on what's happened before, then that looks much more like a habit. So you can

actually test it experimentally. Most scientists don't bother because they just take it for granted that there are eternal laws. They believe in eternal laws, not because they've thought about them, but because they haven't. It's just a kind of default assumption within science. How hard is it to test this stuff experimentally? It's not that difficult. I mean, there are a variety of tests with humans, for example. It should get easier.

It should be easier to do today's times where it times cross-wend puzzle tomorrow than it is today because 70 people have solved it today. And actually people have done experiments with cross-wend puzzles that suggest that this really does happen. So, and there are lots of lab tests with animal behavior with cell cultures, with crystallisation. The problem isn't that the experiments are difficult to do, is that morphic resonance is seen as deeply heretical within the scientific world. And most scientists are afraid that if they do anything heretical, they'll get drummed

out of town and lose their grants and their jobs. And actually, since that actually happened to me, it's not a totally irrational fear. So the... So most scientists are actually very afraid of doing anything that violates these taboos. And I have had one or two scientists working in reputable labs who've been working on morphic resonance experiments over the years. But even in one case, he was the principal investigator at leading institution in the United States. And he told me that to do the

morphic resonance experiments, he had to go in at night when there wouldn't be any technicians around to ask what he was doing and do these experiments undercover of the night in a clandestine manner. So it's a ridiculous thing, but that's I'm afraid the situation. What's the taboo that it's crossing? It's crossing the taboo of eternal laws of nature, which was built into science in the 17th century. In the 17th century, ironically it was a theological proposition. The idea was that God made nature, God's the supreme law giver and God's eternal,

so God's laws are eternal. So it was a theological assumption and it's now sort of hardened into an assumption of materialist science, even though the theological reasons for it have long since disappeared, many scientists are now atheists, but they still hold this kind of theological view of laws outside space and time present at the moment of the big bang. What are some of the most compelling experiments that you went through? Let's say someone hasn't heard of this before. What are some of the most convincing experiments that you went through. Let's say someone hasn't heard of this before. What is some of the most convincing experiments that you've done? Well, they're not just so that ones I've done myself, but they're ones that other people have done. In a way that makes them more convincing. I mean,

some people who are very prejudiced against this, if I come up with positive results, they say, what do you expect? He's just getting, seeing what he wants to see. There was a very long series of experiments with rats that were started at Harvard a very long time ago and for years they were trying to see if rats could learn more quickly something that their parents had learned escaping from a water maze. And they did, they got much faster to the first generation made about 250 errors before they learned, and after 30 generations they were down to about 20 errors. This was a very big effect. And they thought at first it was the inheritance of acquired characters, or what's now called epigenetic inheritance. But then when people took up this experiment in Australia to check it, they had a control

line where they had in every generation rats that had parents that had not been trained and they got better too. So you breed a set that does the experiment then one generation that doesn't, then you breed another generation that does? No, not quite that. You have one set of rats where in every generation the parents have been trained and you test those rats. You have another set where in every generation the parents haven't been trained, you test the rats and then you breed from the untrained

parents and the next generation you test some of the rats but you don't breed from the tested rats. So that's the control line and they got better too. So it clearly wasn't passing on anything through the eggs or sperm. It was something much more mysterious. And I think that's a very good example of morphic resonance. What happened with the was there something to do with milk bottle tops? Yes. Well this was something that happened as spontaneous example. In about 1920 people in Southampton noticed that when they had milk delivered to their doorsteps they used to have cardboard tops on the milk bottles. They

found that when they picked up the milk in the morning, the top in sure-save cream disappeared from the bottle. So people were upset about this and they kept watch. They discovered the offenders were blue tits. Blue tits had discovered how to peel off the top and then drink the cream. One thing that clinched it was when people started finding drowned blutits headfirst in not bottles. So you've got your milk bottle delivered on a morning and you've got a free blutit sticking out at the top of it.

Exactly. And so this aroused a lot of interest in England and blutits are home loving birds. They don't migrate or move very far. And the scientists at Cambridge who were studying this got people from all over Britain through the radio newspapers. They got birdwatches all over Britain to watch out for this and report when they saw it happen. And so there's an unusually well-documented data on the spread of this habit. And what they found was that the habits gradually spread and then as an accelerating rate throughout Britain. And the

the blutes, they found that when it happened more than 60 miles from where it had previously been observed, they assumed it was an independent discovery. And they found the rate of independent discovery accelerated as time went on. They thought it might be something like telepathy. They thought it was not simply birds moving around and telling other birds. And so it was a mysterious effect and it's just what you'd expect with morphic resonance. And more ever in Holland where they also had milk bottled deliveries, milk deliveries stopped during the war. And after the war when they began again, Dutch blue tits were doing this as well. And after the war when

they began again in Holland, blue tits all over Holland immediately started doing it, even though they only lived three or four years and none of the ones after the war would have been alive in the golden age of free cream before the war. Interestingly enough, this habits now dying out. I live in Hampstead, London and we have melt deliveries to our doorsteps still today. It's a much better system than throwing away plastic containers because they collect the bottles, wash them and use them again, And they deliver them, always have done in electric vehicles. So it's very eco-friendly system. Anyway, when we first started getting milk delivered, we had regular milk and we had blutits stealing the cream on a regular basis. Then, like lots of other people we switch to semi-skim milk and I noticed

almost immediately the blue tint stopped raiding the milk bottles, it just wasn't worth their while because there's no cream on semi-skim milk. So, so many people now have semi-skim milk that there's habits dying out. Bloody food pyramid. Yeah, food pyramid, ruining these blue tits habits. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, what about birds in swarms? When you see starlings moving together, is that something similar? Well, it's on very interested in when you see birds moving together in flocks Like stilings, memorations of stilings They not only know where the neighboring birds are, but they know where they're going to go I mean you could say well, they know where the others are by keeping unblinking attention on all their neighbors

Although of course they can't see the ones behind them But they don't, even by knowing where the others are, they don't know which way they're going to turn, because they can turn in all different directions. So the whole thing is like, as if they're all within a field, you know, like when you have ion filings and a magnetic field, you move the magnet and all the ion filings change their relation to each other. They're responding to a greater field of which they're apart. Well, I think the birds are like that.

I think there's a field of the whole flock and the individual birds respond to the field of the, like a group mind kind of thing. I think that actually animal groups, as in general, have a field linking the members together. And in fact, I think that's the basis for telepathy because they remain linked even if they move apart, like in a wolf pack, the adults usually leave the young in the den with a babysitter and they go hunting, ranging over many miles, and then catching, getting food to bring back to feed the young. I think the bonds between the members of the group are stretched, I don't think they break, I think they remain in connection at a distance. And naturalists have found that wolves seem to communicate at a distance

way beyond the range of sound or smell, and in a way that seems telepathic. How do they communicate or what do they do? Well, they know when the others are in distress, for example, and they behave differently. And if they've got left behind sometimes through injury, they can find where the others are without the others howling to send out sound signals. And I think this is normal, you see, and I, the reason I got interested in telephathy because it seemed to me a normal natural consequence of animals living in groups.

And so I started my own investigations with the animals we know best, dogs and cats. So I started my own investigations with the annals we know best dogs and cats. And I started asking people with dogs and cats and horses and parrots and other domestic animals. If they have ever noticed their animals pick up their intentions, especially at a distance. And lots and lots of people said yes. And the most testable of these was the I was people saying that their dog knew when they were coming home. The dog again waged to the door or a window and the people at home would know when that person was coming back. And of course the obvious explanation would be, well, it's just routine or it's hearing familiar car sounds. But so a lot of people were convinced that wasn't the case

because they said they had non-routine jobs. More than 20 women told me that their husbands worked non-routine jobs as taxi drivers, journalists, lawyers, policemen, etc. And would come home at non-routine times. But they always knew when their partner was on the way because the dog would go and start waiting for them sometimes 20 minutes in advance. So they'd know when to get on the meals so it was hot on the table when their partner arrived. And a lot of people who were doing this

were just took it completely for granted. And I did a survey and found about 50% of dogs do this. So we're not talking something very, very unusual. I'm quite sure a lot of people listening to us know, we'll have dogs that do this. Millions of dogs are doing it on a daily basis, all over Britain and, indeed, all over the world. So I set up experiments, because telepathy is a taboo topic in science.

It's not supposed to happen, according to the materialist theory of the mind, which is still dominant. The mind's supposed to be nothing but the brain or brain activity all inside the head. So your thoughts or intentions couldn't possibly influence a dog, 20 miles away. So materialists simply dismiss it as superstition, ignorance, stupidity, etc. on the part of dog owners, and credulity, etc. So they just dismiss it out of hand, but no evidence, they don't need evidence because they know they're right, just on the basis of armchair arguments.

Anyway, because I have to deal with people like that all the time within the scientific world, I have to do particularly rigorous experiments. So with the dogs, I found people whose dogs do this, all they said they do it. I had them go at least five miles from home. We filmed the place the dog waited the whole time they were out. Told them when to come home at a random release and time they didn't know in advance by mobile phone. And then they traveled by unfamiliar vehicles. Taxes, a different taxi each time. The most expensive aspect of this research was the taxi bills.

most expensive aspect of this research was the taxi bills. And then from the cameras we could actually see when the dog started waiting, and sure enough, they were waiting much more when people were on the way home than, sometimes the occasion visited the window to look at passing cats and things, but the waiting behavior was really clear and literally did it over and over again and they didn't do it every time, sometimes if they were sick or very tired or if there was a bit on heat in the next department, they didn't do it. That doesn't prove they can't do it, it just proves they can be distracted, but in our tests about 85% of the time, the dogs accurately picked up when the animal was coming home over 15 minutes in advance and it's all on film. So I think there's actually one online

on my website, if you can see anyone can see in one of these experiments. So I published a whole book about unexplained behavior in animals called dogs that know where their own as a coming home. And I've published these experiments in peer-reviewed scientific journals as well. For most people, they don't have any problem with this because they've seen dogs do it or they know people who have dogs that do it. And most people are curious and interested. But within the scientific world world this is intensely controversial because it's not supposed to be possible. So anyway that's one of the areas I investigate and it really in the end the dispute comes down as what do you think science is? Is it a belief system

which is what some of my colleagues seem to think, or is it an open-minded method of inquiry, which is what I'd like to think? And I think we can investigate a lot more about nature than scientists usually do by breaking out of these debuts and limitations. How many dogs did you look at? Well, I collected stories on over a thousand dogs with regular observations and I did detailed filmed experiments with three or four dogs and those are written up on in peer-reviewed journals. Would scientists say that that is too small of a sample size to be able to extrapolate

out? I don't think so because with each dog there were dozens of tests. You know, if you were trying to find out whether perfect pitch is possible in humans and you tested a few people and you showed over and over again that they really could identify a particular note, you wouldn't need to test thousands of people to prove it's true. And you know, it gets repetitive. I mean, I spent three or four years doing these experiments. And if somebody's okay, it's not enough. You've got to spend the rest of your life doing them. Well, not much incentive, because the people who don't want to believe it,

don't believe it anyway. And even if you pile up more and more evidence as I have done in many other areas of research, it doesn't make the slightest difference, they still say it's impossible. But still, I think it was a reasonable, a very good convincing body of evidence already. What is the difference between morphic resonance and telepathy? Well, morphic resonance is a memory principle that underlies animal instincts, the inheritance of form, collective memory, influence from the past. Whereas telepathy is about connections in the present.

It's usually to do with need, social needs, individual needs to another member of the group. For example, in the human realm, one of the commonest kinds among women is with nursing mothers. Many nursing mothers have the experience that, you know, when they're with their baby and the baby cries their milk, let's down. It's called the milk let down reflex and their breast starts squeezing out milk for obvious reasons to feed the baby. But some women when they start going back to work or start leaving the baby after a few months of breast feeding and they're still breastfeeding but they now leave the baby with baby sitters. Sometimes they find they're shopping or they're working somewhere and they're

milked, let's down, there's no baby crying nearby. And so they just assume they need a baby, needs some of their breasts, somehow picked it up. And they used to just go home and they were usually right. Now they ring home on a mobile. And then I've done natural surveys and studies on this. And they're very often right. I mean, way beyond chance, I mean, it's like billion to one against chance, the odds of them doing this just by coincidence. So that's one example.

And another example I've investigated of human telepathy is telephone telepathy. About 85% of the population, according to surveys that I and others have done, have had the experience of thinking of someone who then rings. And obviously, if you know someone's going to ring at six o'clock, they ring, you're not surprised by that.

But if you think of someone you haven't thought of for a while, for no apparent reason. And then they ring, you like to say something nice, funny, I was just thinking about you. Or sometimes when the phone rings people know who it is before they look at the caller ID or answer it. This is really common. And the armchair skeptics who say this is impossible. First of all, the claim it doesn't happen, and then when you show 85% of the population say it's happened to them, then they say, well, it must just be coincidence, and people just remember the times they're right and forget the millions of times they're wrong. But they've never done any research. This is just an armchair

a way of explaining it away. And they got away with this for a hundred years after the invention of the telephone. But I got rather sick of so-called skeptics just getting that they're having a get out of jail free card. I've just said, oh, well, it must be superstition or ignorance or stupidity or people missing out of false memory or whatever. So I decided to test their theory of his random coincidence. And in my experiments, I've not done hundreds and hundreds of, well, thousands.

The caller say, you, Chris, if you're the subject, you'd give me the names of four people you know well, friends or family members, and you'd sit at home with a landline phone, no caller ID, being filmed. Then I or my assistant would pick one of your four people at random from a random number generator or throwing a die, and then call them up and say, think about Chris from minutes or two and then ring him. So your phone would ring. You'd know it was part of this experiment. You wouldn't be able to predict who was ringing on the base of knowing their habits because they've been picked at random. And you'd

have say, I think it's Mary. Hello Mary and you're on camera, you'd be right or wrong. And if you were just guessing, you'd be right 25% of the time, one in four. In fact, in these experiments, the average hit rate in hundreds of film trials is about 45%. So it's way above chance expectation. People aren't right every time. It's a very artificial situation, and people get a bit stressed by being put on the spot in these artificial tests.

But nevertheless, this is immensely significant statistically. And now this has been replicated by other people in universities in Holland and Germany. And I know I have a thing that you can do on your own mobile phone on my website as a take part button and you can log on and do it on your mobile phone. You have two callers, you can nominate two people to call you and it picks random times and the whole experiment happens automatically. So you can actually try it yourself. Anyone listening, as long as they're in Britain, US or Canada can try it themselves. What's the website?

What's the website? My website is called shieldreg.org, simple to remember, O-R-G-Aug. So anyway, this is one of the areas of research I'm engaged in. This is one of the areas of research I'm engaged in. And I summarized the, some of this research in my book The Science Delusion, where I look at the 10 dogmas of contemporary science

and how science could become much more interesting and informative if people went beyond these dogmas instead of being imprisoned in a kind of straight jacket of dogmatic thinking. So, very pro science is just I'm not pro dogmatic science, I'm pro free inquiry in science and I think there could be a lot more of it. The obvious question is what's the mechanism that's making all of this work? Is that What's the mechanism that's making all of this work? Is that a question that can even be answered? Well, I mean, what I'm postulating is that there's an influence of similarity across time in morphic resonance, and between members of social groups, between bonded members of the groups,

does it kind of resonance between the individuals based on their past history and they resonate with each other. Now, I'm sure there will be changes in brains that go on when this is happening, and you could probably detect them by brain scans, but that wouldn't necessarily tell you exactly how Morphic resonance works. But if you ask the question, well, how does gravity work? Well, accepted scientific phenomenon. Some scientists say, well, gravity works by gravity waves, and they've spent 50 years trying to detect them. People with gravity wave detectors in deep underground mines, so very expensive, long-term experiments. Some people think they've found them, some people think they haven't yet found them. And if you say, well, how does electromagnetism work? Then it works through magnetic and electric fields. Well, how do they work? Well, they work through quantum fields,

through virtual particles, which are supposed to, which appear after the quantum vacuum field and disappear so fast you can't actually detect them. So, even conventional fields in science, when you press it, how do they really work? It turns out, it's surprisingly elusive, the answer is virtual particles that by definition are undetectable, or gravitational waves that may or may not have been detected, but are certainly not obvious. So, and then people have in M theory and super string theory, which are the leading theories in theoretical physics today. They have 10 or 11 dimensions instead of the three dimensions of space and the one of time that we're used to. And so they say, well, we'll be able to explain gravitational electromagnetic fields in terms of some 10-dimensional superfield, but we haven't been able to find it yet, and the problem with the theory is

it has 10 to the power of 500 solutions. It could apply to 10 to the power of 500 universes. So it's just a little bit too prolific in terms of its predictions to actually deliver anything very concrete. So it's not as if a hard-knosed science has got a hard-knosed simple 19th century type mechanical explanations for all these things. It doesn't. And the explanations in modern physics are all about explaining the visible in terms of the invisible.

And what you can actually experience with your senses in terms of abstract mathematical spaces with inconceivably inconceivable extra dimensions. So anyone who wants plain down to our simplicity, isn't going to get it from modern science in anything. It's funny to think when you put it like that, the fact that there's a lack of an obvious mechanism, undermining a theory itself, you're actually, there's, there's a lot of different people that should be lined up to be shot if that was the case.

There's a few other theories that should go out with the bathwater. Well, absolutely. I mean, one of the dominant theories in current contemporary cosmology is that this universe is one of trillions, quadrillions of other universes, the multiverse theory, there's not a shred of evidence that any of them actually exist. And yet, you can hold down a job as a professor of physics in a respectable university, and you can say that, and no one's going to be too upset about it. In fact, it's the orthodoxy. And you know physicists can't explain most aspects of the universe, so they've invented unobserved forms of matter and energy called dark matter and dark energy, which are put in precisely to explain to make the equations balanced. They give the completely

wrong answers. So you can add in as much as you like of dark matter or dark energy to get the right answer. And then you say why it's worked. But then if you say, well, what is this dark matter and dark energy? So we don't yet fully understand their nature, in fact, having to clue what they are. So you know, this is a modern physics is very far from being what naive, scientific people who think science has got all the answers. People like that really don't know much about science, and if they do, they might be a little bit more humble about what they claim for it. It really does seem like, yeah, people are not, the theories that we have,

they're not as substantiated as they look when you stress test them a little bit more Going back to the human side of this ancestral trauma is something that I'm seeing being spoken about a lot on the internet at the moment Do you think this plays any part in it? Well, there's very good evidence that there's an epigenetic effect of ancestral trauma. This evidence came from famines in Sweden and Holland in the late 19th century or in the Second World War. And children born to mothers who went through the famine were different size, they had different pronaries to diabetes and etc. And epigenetics, since the beginning of the 21st century,

has become a mainstream subject in biology. In the 19th, only 20th century, the inheritance of acquired characters inheriting what your parents have learned or adaptations they've made to the environment was completely taboo. You couldn't believe it. It was a heresy and people would drummed out of labs and things. Since it was rebranded, epigenetic inheritance around 2000s, it's become a major field of inquiry. So there's no doubt that there can be an inheritance of what animals or parents in general have learned. But there's also ways in which there's a kind of family memory of inherited traumas. I don't know if you've done any podcasts

on family constellation therapy. No, what's that? Well, it's a form of therapy for families, which for people about their family, dealing with negative patterns in the past generations of the family. One of the people who does it is my wife, Jill Pess, who is now doing Zoom workshops on this. There are quite a number of people doing it. I know about Jill's work most because, you you know obviously I see this at home all the time

Well, how it works is you have a workshop Say you went to a workshop if it's an in-person workshop it might be 20 or 30 people if you're doing it online it might be 60 or 70 in a zoom workshop and if you're doing it online, it might be 60 or 70 in the Zoom workshop. And you want to work with your family, I'm assuming, for the purpose of this argument, so you'd pick somebody there to represent your father, your mother, brothers and sisters if you have any. And then you put them in, like, a stand there standing in the room in a kind of tablo. So if the parents were close to each other, you put them close together. If the father left, when you young, you'd put him far away going out the door

or something. So there's a kind of tablo of the family dynamics. And the people representing members of the family often feel things in emotions, which aren't their own personal emotions, but which are very much to do with that family. Now, that's it, never understands quite how that happens. But it often turns out that people who have problems of being suicidal, excluding themselves from the family, grossly dysfunctional behaviour, it often turns out that these pick up on patterns from previous generations when someone was excluded from the family, either by suicide or because they were sent away or they were imprisoned or they did something shameful and were never talked about again or something like that. what happens then is the person running the workshop would pick people to represent the past generation,

the mother, father, brother, sister, say the parents generation or the grandparents generation. And then they'd pick someone to represent the excluded person and they bring them back in. And the rest of the family sort of welcomed them back in, they include them instead of excluding them. This often has a remarkable healing effect on people in the present. Sometimes you see people who are suicidal or who have this dysfunctional behavior separating themselves from the family don't really know why they're doing it. An individual psychotherapy doesn't help very much because it's not really about them as individuals. It's about a family pattern that they're picking up on by a kind of morphic resonance.

That's what most people who do this work think that it works through morphic resonance because there's no other explanation that seems to fit the facts. So, anyway, that's one of the areas in which trauma is inherited and that would be more behavioral trauma rather than metabolic trauma like starvation. And systemic family constellation work is a very fascinating field of therapy. It's a growing importance and significance at the moment. It's amazing how it's taking off. And it's taking off because it actually helps a lot of people.

In Brazil, it's even been included in the legal system when they have family disputes and the courts. Instead of waiting three or four years for an adversarial process in the court, they offer them an option to have mediated family therapy. The court actually pays for this and so people and they find that works much better than having family disputes played out in with adversarial lawyers in courtrooms and has a much more healing effect as cheaper and also unclogs the court system a bit. So, these things are taken quite seriously in some parts of the world, including here. How does this relate to behavioral genetics

and heritability? Does it mesh quite nicely or is there some conflict? irritability? Does it mesh quite nicely or is there some conflict? Well, irritability is pretty low for most things. I mean, the human genome project has now enabled the genomes of tens of thousands of people to be sequenced. And you can then look, say, schizophrenia, you can see, is there a schizophrenia gene? You look at the genomes of people with schizophrenia and you see what they've got in common. It turns out there's many genes that play a small part. And if you make complex mathematical models and predict the hairosability of schizophrenia on the basis of genes, it's less than 5%. You can't predict, I mean, it's

hardly, it's almost useless, the predictive power of genomics. And that's truth for things like breast cancer, even things like height, genomics don't predict very well. And what's the difference between genomics being able to predict and heritability with parents because Robert Plowman's been on the show and he's highlighted height is correlated.9 with your parents. BMI is correlated.3. He's done the biggest twin in adoption studies in history. 20,000 pairs of twins.

He seemed to say that a lot of heritability did exist for both behaviour and for physicality. Well, Plomins are very interesting case. He wrote a book called The Orb blueprint, or some of what I've got what it's called. The book read it anyway, and I've been to talks about Plomins. So he's an interesting case, because if you look at heritability by comparing parents and children, there's very high heritability for a lot of things. If you look at the genome, he originally, when he was doing this work originally,

he just assumed, well, if it's heritable, it must be genetic, it's all in the genome because he took the assumption that heritability equals genetic. And in his earlier papers, he just saw that proves it's genetic, the fact it's heritable. However, in his book, The Blueprint of Life, or whatever it's called, he starts with all these bold claims. And then when you get into it, you find that he said, well, actually, you know, there'd been a better problem with actually working us out with multiple genome-wide association studies, and

although schizophrenia is highly heritable by looking at parents and children, when you look at the genes as any 5% or something. Oh, so what we're saying here is that although there's not much of a dispute between the heritability from parent to child, the mechanism by which that heritability occurs is a little bit more up for debate. Oh, absolutely. And in fact within biology, it's only been in the last to say 10 years that it's become clear that heritability, which is high for many things, the attempt to explain in terms of genes? Most people thought it was an open and shut case

of course it's genetic. What else could it be? What else could it be? It turns out it's not. It turns out that what it's called in biology is the missing heritability problem. So height, for example, is about 80% heritable. You can predict children's height,

taking to account nutritional differences on the base of the parent's height, with about 80% accuracy. If you do it on the basis of genes, there's about 50 genes involved in heights, and you make the best mathematical models, you can only do it with an accuracy of about 10%. So that means 70% of the hair in heredins of height is not explained by the genes. And yes, we haven't got the technology perhaps to be able to see it with sufficient new ones. I'm sure that these are common arguments. Oh, yes.

And they've got more, down more and more genes, and more and more models, and more and more things. And they've got it up from about 10% to about 15%. And they hope with yet more expense billions of dollars more, they might get it up to 20%. But the fact is that a large chunk, the majority of the heritability, is not explained. They're attempt, I mean, ploming with sudden, they say, well, it's just a matter of yet more detail, and we need, it's more elusive than we thought, and we need, I would say, that's because most inheritance is not based on genes, it's based onusive than we thought and we need. I would say that's because most inheritance

is not based on genes, it's based on morphic resonance. Morphic resonance is highly heritable, you're more similar to your parents than anyone else, you have more morphic resonance from them than anyone else. But a lot of inheritance depends on morphic resonance. We know what genes do. They code for the sequence for amino acids and proteins, and they enable you to make the right proteins. And some genes switch on and off other genes. That's what they do. I mean, this is molecular biology, in 50 years of molecular biology, is revealed very clearly

what they do. What they don't do is program the migratory behavior of a cookoo, the shape of your face, the, you know, the color patterns on the wings of a feather and the color patterns on feathers in peacocks, tails and things. They enable them to make the right pigments for the right colors, but the patterns, the shape, the form, the instincts, I think, depend on Morphic resonance, which organises forms and patterns. The genes are essential for making the right proteins, but they don't explain most aspects of heredity.

I've discussed this in my book, The Science Delusion, there's a whole chapter there on heredity and genes. It seems like Morphic resonance can occur across species, so we talked about dogs with owners, and it can happen through family, whether it be parents to children or grandparents, ancestral trauma, and stuff like that. And it can happen socially. You can choose the friends that are going to ring you, but it can't happen universally. We can't all just be absorbing all of the morphic resonance from

penguins that are in zoos and from a line that was killed three hours ago. So there has to be some sort of selection mechanism for you and it seems like it's social, it's intent somehow. It's like some sort of connection. Have you thought about how that works? Well, the basic thing about morphic resonance is similarity. There's a difference between morphic resonance, which is about memory from the past, and morphic fields, which are what link members of social groups together, dogs and their owners. Dogs make us members of their packs, as it were, with their social animals, and they

adopt us as members of their packs, as it were, with our social animals and they adopt us as members of their packs. We've become part of their group. Now, when it comes to what it residents from the past, it depends on similarity. The field of a whole family is similar to previous generations of that family, because there have been members of the previous generation in this field. The parents were brought out in a previous family with their same field. Each of them had their own family field, or if the parents were separated and remarried, and more than one, making it more complicated. So the reason we don't come under influence from penguins is because we are not very similar

to penguins. We are very similar to other people, and therefore the primary morphic resonance working on us is from the collective memory of humans in general, and more specifically from people more like us, members of our families and cultural and social groups that are most similar to us. So, then if you ask the question, well, who in the past was most similar to me? Then the answer is me.

You're more similar to you in the past, and I'm more similar to me in the past, so you'd have more crests, more thick resonance, and I'd have more roof at more thick resonance from the past, because we're more similar to ourselves. And we're similar to other people too, so we have collective memory, but individual memory, I'm suggesting, depends on morphic resonance because of the high specificity. In other words, I'm suggesting that our memories are not normally stored in our brains. In fact, they're not stored in the brain. The brains, more like a TV receiver than a video recorder, tunes into its own past. Now, let me get, again, I have a chapter on this in my book, The Science Delusion, because

one of the assumptions of conventional sciences that memories are all stored inside the brain, where else could they be? That's based on the assumption memories must be material things, and that's because contemporary sciences heavily rooted in the materialist world view, which says everything's material. They haven't proved everything's material, just assume it from the start. Therefore, memories must be material, where are they, and the brain? People have spent a hundred years trying to find them and pin them down unsuccessfully. But for a moment, most of them stop to ask, well, are they really in the brain at all? They must be there, they must just be somewhere else.

So these elusive memory traces are still being sought for, but I don't think they're there. are still being sought for, but I don't think they're there. Just like if I came to your house and looked at your TV set and analysed the wires and transistors and tried to work out what you've been watching last night on TV, if you were watching something on TV, I wouldn't find any traces of the programs in the wires and transistors because that's not how the TV set works. Now of course, brain damage can lead to loss of memory. Just as if I came and damaged your TV set, I could make it lose the sound or lose the color or lose the pictures or make it you are unable to tune into channel 4 or something like that. But that wouldn't prove that all those

programs and all the people you see on the TV screen are actually originating inside the TV set. It would merely prove the TV set is necessary for the reception and processing of the signals. And the same is true of the brain. If you have brain damage, you can lose memory, but it doesn't prove you've destroyed the memory's stores. Would it not be simpler, a simpler solution to presume that memories are laid down in the brain somewhere, as opposed to them being outside of it? Well of course it's simpler, I mean it's everyone's how are you? Of course, you know, like

hard drives or tape recorders or pages of a book or we've got many or things etched in stone. We've got many easy parallels for memories being material. Of course it's simpler and that's why in the early 20th century people said memories are stored in the brain where else could they be. So simple everyone just accept it was true. The trouble is in science, the simplest, easiest answer that a child of 10 can understand isn't always the correct answer. So people have actually tried to find these traces that this very simple theory predicts. And they failed, that's what I, the point of what I was saying, they failed over and over again. And that means that either the memory traces are very, very complicated and stored holographically over large regions of the brain, so you can't pin

them down in any particular place. That's one theory today. So we can explain the fact we can't actually find that by saying there must be everywhere and nowhere in particular. The other theory which they haven't on the whole considered is the one I'm putting for, they're not stored in the brain at all. But they're transmitted by invisible transmissions. 19th century, early 19th century, you know, when people were thinking of simple brain theories, the idea of invisible transmissions was inconceivable, but we now live in the middle of them in front of me and you at this very moment. So as full of invisible transmissions of mobile phones and radio and television signals and so on. And we don't say a TV can't work because we can't see material things coming into it.

So when it comes to the brain, a lot of people revert to kind of 19th century thinking, whereas all our modern technology is about invisible influences working through resonance here at a distance. I'm just suggesting that some of these might help us understand some of the harder mysteries of biology. How does this relate to psychedelics? Well, that's a rather

different topic. I think there is a connection to emorphic resonance and psychedelics. I think psychedelics obviously are chemicals that influence neurotransmitter binding sites and the brain. The triptomine family of psychedelics, which include dimethyl triptomine DMT, bind to receptors for serotonin, which is 5 hydroxy-triptamine, which is a neurotransmitter. And then the phenethylamine, a group of psychedelics, which include masculine and ecstasy. Oh, well, it's not really a psychedelic, ecstasy, but those psychoactive compounds, bind to dopamine receptors in the brain. So we know that these molecules bind to receptors, but what they do is disrupt normal brain function. But somehow they then open people's minds up to much more-connectivity of different regions of the brain and often highly visual

experiences. Now, then again you see there's the question of are these experiences generated inside the brain or is the disruption of normal brain function allowing influences to come in to the mind which are normally blocked out by the everyday work of the brain function, allowing influences to come into the mind, which are normally blocked out by the everyday work of the brain. Is it creating an opening for something to come in from beyond the brain or beyond the individual person's psyche? Many people who take in psychedelics feel that it's opening them to something coming in, not just generated within the brain. Now, that takes us into the whole question of the nature of consciousness and the mind,

which we're not going to solve in the remaining few minutes. But the morphic resonance aspect of psychedelics is this. If you take a particular psychedelic, like Ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew that's been used in the Amazon for millennia, probably, a particular psychedelic like ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew that's been used in the Amazon for millennia, probably. Then your brain is put into a similar state to the previous people who've taken ayahuasca,

most of them, Amazonian shamanic cultures. And by morphic resonance, you then resonate to have a kind of collective ayahuasca experience memory from those who take it in that context. And you might then expect that people who know nothing about the cultural context of ayahuasca who take it in a modern city, for example, without knowing much about, if anything, about Amazonian culture. It might then have experiences that are based on the mythic structures of those Amazonian tribes, like seeing jaguars and serpents. And actually they do, but this experiment's been done. And I didn't think it's because I wasca activates jaguar cells inside the brain.

I think it's because people are tuning into a kind of collective memory of people who take that same psychedelic in the past. And so I think there's a component of morphic resonance in psychedelic experience. It doesn't explain it all, of course, but it does explain some of the cultural inheritance that goes with it. I had a shaman on the show called Hamilton Souter, who runs a retreats in South America, and he was talking about the resonance that occurs within groups when people go and have a ceremony together and take something like Iowasca, and that they can come out of that and then discuss shared experiences that all of them went through

and I saw you do this and you saw me go over there and then this thing arrived. And I suppose that ties in. Well, that would be a kind of telepathic connection. They're all in a similar state. They're in a group, they're bonded in a group, they're probably chanted together, which has a strongly bonding effect. And so there'd be a telepathic component as well to their visions. We've already discussed telephathy based on being part of a group. And you know, any ceremony run by a Shaman would typically involve some group building process and chanting is the most common and universal. So that would all fit perfectly well with this approach.

What was taking DMT with Terence McKenna like? Well, the actual experience of taking DMT, it involved Terence giving it to me, but then Terence disappeared from the field of view and I was in another realm altogether. In my experience, what happened to me was that it was like an art of the body or an earth experience. I felt myself getting out of my body. I went through the centre of a flower, a chrysanthemum flower, and then I found myself in a room of incredible beauty of shimmering colours and changing forms. And then after a blissful, very bright coloured and wonderfully happy realm, sublime and beautiful. Then I find myself coming back into my body and stuff and probably only ten minutes later. And then when I

describe what had happened to Terence, Terence, you've been to the flower heaven. And since I'm very interested in flowers and love flowers, I mean, I love the idea of going to the flower heaven. So, anyway, that was, Terence was, when he took DMT, he often described machine elves or little people with chattering voices. Fortunately or unfortunately, I've never encountered machine elves. I have a bunch of buddies all of whom talk about the machine elves, yes. Yes, well I'm quite sure many people do and in fact Rick Strassman who wrote a book on DMT called DMT the Spirit Molecule where he had a legal research program on DMT. I found a question number of people did indeed encounter these figures, but not everyone. It's not a universal aspect of the experience. Everyone's trying to get to flower

heaven. Well, not everyone's as keen on flowers as I am and some of them may prefer some other... I'll see, the 11th, 7th. So yes or possibly I don't know. There's I mean there's many ways of experiencing this but most of them have in common this idea of kind of out of the body and going into another realm. And I think there are similar to near death experiences myself and a lot of people have near death experiences which change their lives. And of course those are involved, don't involve any drugs at all. Probably more dangerous than DMT because you have to have a near-fatal accident or heart attack to have one. In my book Science and Spiritual Practices, I actually talk about near death experiences in the context of rights of passage or initiation.

I myself think that John the Baptist was doing this and in the New Testament, John the Baptist was, people were flocking from all over the Holy Land to the River Jordan, where John the Baptist was, had his simple procedure, he'd hold them under. And I think he held them under just long enough to induce a near-death experience by drowning. And then he brought them up, and their lives were changed. And all in a matter of minutes, no drugs involved. And he might have lost a few. The problem was an element of danger. But And he might have lost a few. The problem was an element of danger. But I think that in the 16th century,

when there was a religious ferment in England, and baptism was started again by anabaptists and Baptists. You know, people who founded Baptist churches, their big thing was reinstating baptism by total immersion. And what happened to those with them, what they went around saying after they'd had this ceremony, was their lives had changed, they'd died and they'd been born again and they'd seen the light. Well, these are literal descriptions of near-death experiences. And so the only criticism of this hypothesis is to say, well, what they were doing was

just symbolic. But why do something that's just symbolic if you can have the real thing? It takes a minute longer. John the Drowner doesn't have the same ring as John the Baptist though. No, John the Baptist. Well, if one thinks of Baptism as involving this, then of course it all makes total sense. Are you coming to church on Sunday? We're going to forcibly drown little Timmy because it's his first birthday and this is what we're all going to go and watch. We're all going to cheer him on as he gets forcibly

drowned by the priest. Well the point about Baptists is that they didn't have rejected infant Baptism and they said you you got to do it as a conscious choice, you know, when you're 14 or 15-year-old or an adult. And they do actually watch. I mean, one of the very few Southern Baptists I actually know is Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger's ex. And she's from Texas. And I said to Jerry, you know, what was your baptism like? You said, well, I said in my church that it was like a giant aquarium, so everyone could watch. And and and they said, well, when you were held under, you know, was it her, what was that like? She said, it was a lot longer than was comfortable, she said. You know, in a special dress and everyone watching. So this is, I think probably today, you know, in the era of litigation and health and

safety. They may not actually go for the full thing, but I'm pretty sure that in the past they were doing because how else can one explain the way that Baptist, their whole thing was dying and being born again. And people who've had near-death experiences who've died and been born again, most of them say, it's totally changed their lives. They've lost the fear of death, they've become much more spiritual people and so on.

And so all this makes sense to me. Anyway, we seem to be running out of time, Chris. Good. Rupert Sheldrick, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out more of your stuff, your website and you've just released two new books as well recently. Oh, yes, well, nice one. Well, let me talk about the about the ones I've talked about today, the main ones, the science delusion, which is the one where I look at the 10 dogmas of science, including about inheritance and a psychic phenomena and the laws of nature. Science and spiritual practice

about seven different spiritual practices, including meditation, singing and chanting and pilgrimage, which have measurable beneficial effects. And the most recent one, ways to go beyond and why they work, where there were seven more spiritual practices, including spiritual effects of sports, learning from animals, spiritual openings through psychedelics, and fasting. So all of these cover a wide, well they cover seven different practices in each book. And if anyone's interest in following up, I have a YouTube channel as well as my website and many podcasts and YouTube's which are all available free. Amazing thanks Rupert. Good to talk Chris. you