The Joe Rogan Experience - #550 - Rupert Sheldrake

Episode Date: September 16, 2014

Rupert Sheldrake is an author, lecturer, and researcher in the field of parapsychology, known for his proposed theory of morphic resonance.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Alright, well, thank you for your patience, Rupert. Rupert Sheldrake, ladies and gentlemen. I came to know of you through the trialogues that you did with Terrence McKenna, who I'm a huge fan of, and Ralph Abraham. And I thought they were some really fascinating conversations. And all of Terrence's MP3s are very thought-inspiring

and made you really look at things from a very different and peculiar angle that he had. He had a very unique way of looking at the world. But I came to know of you from that, and I came to know of your ideas of morphic resonance, which I found to be really fascinating. And if you don't mind, just explain to folks at home listening what the concept of morphic resonance is. It's the idea of memory and nature, the idea that the whole universe has a kind of memory, the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. Each individual in a species draws on a collective memory and contributes to it.

It works on the basis of similarity. Any pattern of activity that's similar to a later pattern of activity in a self-organizing system influences it across space and time. So what it means in effect is that if you train rats to learn a new trick in Los Angeles, then rats in New York and Sydney and London will learn the same thing quicker straight away. There's actually evidence that this surprising effect happens. If you crystallize a new chemical that's never existed before, then after you've made it in one place, it should get easier to crystallize

all over the world. So it's really a theory of habit and memory. And it enables new patterns of learning to spread quicker than they might otherwise do. And it means that it should get easier to learn things that other people have already learned. So this has been proven, this concept of rats being able to learn one thing in New York quicker because they learned it already in San Francisco? Yes. I mean, it wasn't done to test morphic resonance, which is still very controversial. It was done to test something else. It was done years ago, before the Second World War. A professor at Harvard called William McDougall wanted to find out if rats could learn quicker what their parents had learned.

So he trained these rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim. If they went out the wrong exit, they got an electric shock. And if they went out the right exit, which the wrong one was lit up with a light, the other one was dim. If they went out the right exit, they just escaped from the maze. And he tested them to see how many trials they made before they learned always go out of the dim exit. And the first generation took about 250 trials before they cottoned on to what was happening. The next generation, it was about 180 trials. The next generation, about 150. They got better and better.

And he thought at first this was because there was something being passed on to the children, maybe through modifying the genes or something like that, an inheritance for quiet characters. That was a kind of taboo in 20th century science. And so people questioned his work, but because he was at Harvard and because he was a famous professor, they couldn't just dismiss it. He showed a huge effect. So people tried repeating his work in the University of Edinburgh,

Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia. And they found that their rats started more or less where the Harvard rats had left off. And in Melbourne, they did an experiment that was particularly interesting. They went on getting better, the ones that were descended from the trained parents in each generation. But they found that all rats of that breed, even if their parents had never been trained, were getting better too. So whatever it was, it wasn't something to do with modifying the genes or what people would now call epigenetics. There was something else much more mysterious going on. And since no one knew what it was it was just ignored and forgotten that is really fascinating so that would kind of make sense that if if somehow or another the genes or whatever that is in the rat

is able to communicate with other of the same species over the of the similar genetics of whatever it is that they're doing, whatever undefined thing that they're doing, connecting with them even across continents, across the other side of the planet. Yes. Wow. That's right. And so the same would,

I think the same happens in evolution naturally in nature. There was a famous case with birds called blue tits in England, in America you call them chickadees, that in the 1920s started raiding milk bottles. In Britain we had then and we still have a system where you get fresh milk delivered to your doorstep every day in a bottle and then they wash the bottles and use them again. It's a great system. We have it right now in London. So in the 1920s, they had cardboard tops on these bottles, and someone noticed in Southampton that the cream at the top of their bottle had disappeared. The top had been torn open, the cream had disappeared, and when

they watched, they saw that every morning these blue tits in Southampton had figured out they could tear off this cardboard strip and get free cream every morning. Then everyone was sort of interested in this. Then it turned up many, many miles away in another part of Britain. Then it turned up somewhere else. Blue tits don't fly very far. They're home-loving birds. And they don't fly very far, they're home-loving birds, and they don't migrate. So scientists got interested, and they set up a network all over Britain of people to observe this habit, and they got reports. It was coordinated from Cambridge University,

and they mapped the spread of the habit, and it became clear that it was spreading faster and faster, and it was being independently invented in other parts of Britain. So much so that the professor of biology at Oxford, Sir Alistair Hardy, suggested it must be happening by telepathy, that it was spreading too quickly. And the most interesting records are from Holland, because this started happening in Holland as well. And during the war, Holland was occupied by the Germans, and milk deliveries stopped. are from Holland because this started happening in Holland as well and during the war Holland was occupied by the Germans and milk deliveries stopped they didn't start again till about 1948 about seven or eight years after they stopped blue tits only lived three or four years so there would have been no blue tits after the war that remembered the golden age of free cream. So when the milk deliveries began

again in Holland, they started drinking the cream almost straight away all over Holland. So I would say this is a kind of collective memory that spread by morphic resonance and was remembered by morphic resonance. And that's another example of this going on in the real world. Incidentally, they've now stopped doing it. They used to steal our cream in London until about 10 years ago when we switched to semi-skimmed milk. There isn't any cream in bottles of semi-skimmed milk and blue tits have more or less given up in Britain now because so many people have switched to semi-skimmed milk. They don't get any cream. It's not worth the effort. So the habits died out. That's pretty fascinating. The idea that human beings start off as a blank slate has really been

questioned quite a bit over the last generation. And genetics in particular, they're starting to understand that there's certain particular traits and memories that you can actually learn from your parents. Like there was one study they did with mice where they had taken mice and they had given them an electric shock and coincided that electric shock with the smell of citrus. There was electric shock in their feet. Are you aware of this test? Yes, I am. shock with the smell of citrus like there's electric shock in their feet are you aware of this test yes i am it it was published in nature and that with the provocative title inheriting the fears of fathers it's a very very fascinating study yeah amazing stuff i mean that i think

could be partly due to morphic resonance i mean have you explained it to people before no please do i mean i think i might have but please Well, what they did was they used a chemical, a synthetic chemical called acetophenone that smells sort of vaguely fruity, but it's something that mice would never have encountered in nature because it's a synthetic chemical. And they took male mice and exposed them to the smell of acetophenone, and they gave them a mild electric shock on their paw when they smelt this stuff. And the result is classical Pavlovian conditioning. You know, a few times of that happening and as soon as they smelt acetophenone they were terrified. It's perfectly standard stuff in science. What wasn't standard was they then bred from these mice and they did

some of the experiments using artificial insemination so that the mothers never even met the fathers of the next generation. And then they tested their children and their grandchildren. And whenever they smelt acetophenone, they were just paralyzed with fear. So they inherited the fear of this chemical in a single generation in a way that regular science simply can't explain. And this went far beyond anything anyone would have expected. There's evidence from the details of the experiments that it involves some changes in the sperm, some change in the genes or the epigenetics,

which is the packaging of the genes. But no one can conceive how a mouse learning to avoid the smell and being frightened by it, no one knows how all that information could be transferred into genes and the sperm. So I think at least part of the explanation of this is morphic resonance, that if you make some animals averse to something, then other animals of the same kind will be frightened of it. I did a very similar experiment actually years ago with a skeptical scientist in Britain called Stephen Rose. We had a controversy in the Guardian newspaper. I used to write a column in the Guardian,

and I wrote a thing about the nature of memory and how morphic resonance helps to explain it. We could discuss that later if you like. But Rose was outraged by this. He'd spent his whole career working on memory, saying it must be inside the brain. And he worked with day-old chicks. And in The Guardian, he wrote a response to my article and challenged me to do an experiment in his laboratory under his supervision to test what he called the seemingly absurd hypothesis.

Well, the experiment we did, we had day-old chicks, and day-old chicks peck at anything bright. So we had them peck at a silvery bead, and after the silver bead, they were injected with saline solution. It was just a control. They didn't feel ill. It was just a control. They didn't feel ill. Everything was fine. We also had them peck at a yellow light-emitting diode. And after they'd pecked at that, the chicks that had pecked at the yellow light-emitting diode were injected with something that made them feel sick. Lithium chloride, I think

it was. It made them feel sick. It didn't kill them. It just made them feel sick. Lithium chloride, I think it was. It made them feel sick. It didn't kill them. It just made them feel ill. And you know, if you ever eat anything and you feel sick after it, you never want to eat that thing again. It's called conditioned aversion. So these chicks, when you tested them a day or two later, they would avoid yellow lights, but they'd peck at the chrome bead, the silver bead, which hadn't made them sick. And that's straightforward. They learned to avoid it. But what I predicted was that if we did the experiment over and over again, every day we get a new batch of fresh chicks and test them with the yellow

light-emitting diode and the chrome bead. I predicted that they'd start avoiding the yellow light-emitting diode, but not the chrome bead, because of the influence of bimorphic resonance from previous chicks. They'd start avoiding it even before they'd been made averse to it. For the first time, they were exposed to it. They wouldn't go for it. they'd be more wary of it and that's exactly what happened in this experiment so this is actually something that's well known in the rat poison industry I mean most people haven't spent much time looking

into the rat poison industry and how it works. But one thing that happens to people who try to poison rats for a living is that if you try some new kind of bait with a particular flavor, rats eat it and they get sick and they die. But it works for a while. But after a while, rats start avoiding it. They become what's called in the trade bait shy. And not just in one place, but the bait stops working, you know, miles and miles away. So they have to keep inventing new baits. That's why most rat poison now is based on warfarin, which causes bleeding, thins the blood and causes bleeding,

and it doesn't usually affect the rats for days after they've eaten it. They don't associate it with any particular flavor because it's slow acting. That's why people have had to switch to warfarin as the main rat poison because this aversion to things that poison them became so strong. And there's something that actually some people who are listening to us might know about, which I heard about from a guy in America who fishes for bass. And he was telling me there's a constant development of new lures for bass fishing. Do you do bass fishing? Yes, I have fished quite a bit.

Yes. Well, apparently, people are always inventing new lures that work very well for a while and apparently they stop working and not just in one place but elsewhere. So, there's a constant development of new lures. Now, if that could be documented, that might be another very interesting case of morphic resonance. If bass keep getting caught and they're in pain when they're caught by being fished with a particular kind of lure, then other bass later, even in different rivers or lakes, when they see that lure would be more averse to biting it, so it stops working. So I think there could be many examples of this out there in the real world. When did you come up with this concept? Is this your concept, the concept of morphic

resonance? Yes, yes. I came up with this in 1973, a long time ago. I was doing research at Cambridge University on plant development, how plants grow. And I became convinced for a variety of reasons that the attempt to explain the whole thing just in terms of genes and molecules and proteins wouldn't work. I was at the very leading edge of this. I mean, the main plant hormone is called auxin, A-U-X-I-N. edge of this. I mean, the main plant hormone is called auxin, A-U-X-I-N. And I figured out how it's made, and then I figured out how it's transported around the plant. And this was a massive advance, and this is kind of textbook stuff now in university textbooks,

the mechanism of polar auxin transport. So having figured all that out, I then realized this wasn't enough to explain plants, because all plants have the same hormone, and it's moved in the same way in every plant, and it's moved the same way in petals and leaves and stems and roots, and it's moved the same way in palms and cabbages and roses and yet they're all different. So I got interested in something in biology called morphogenetic fields, the idea of invisible fields that shape living organisms. So there's like an invisible mold. As a flower grows, it's kind of an invisible mold that shapes the way the petals develop and the flower develops.

Or as a leaf grows, there's a kind of invisible mold for that leaf called a morphogenetic field, like a kind of invisible plan. This idea was not invented by me. It had been around in biology since the 1920s. But the key thing was to understand how these fields could be inherited. And I was sure it wouldn't go through the genes. The genes just code for proteins. So there had to be some other kind of inheritance. How could it work? And I was wrestling with this idea in Cambridge. And then the idea of morphic resonance came to me. If you have a resonance across time between similar things, you could explain this inheritance of form and of instincts in animals in a non-genetic way, which would give a completely new way of understanding biology and inheritance.

I then realized that this would apply to learning and memory and many aspects of human behavior. So I wrote this up in a book called A New Science of Life, which was published in 1981. It took me years to think this through. I realized that it would be controversial. So I had to be very sure of myself before I could write about it. Then I wrote another book called The Presence of the Past, which puts the theory forward in its fullest form, and that's my main theoretical book.

And since then, I've really been trying to develop these ideas test them do experiments and so on anyway It was my idea in the first place and since then it's become widely discussed in many areas now when you say that you Had to be sure of it. What did you do that made you sure of it? I mean, what is what what kind of testing have you you done to sort of hammer out this concept of morphic resonance? Well, there were two aspects to being sure about it. The main objection that I got from my colleagues in the scientific world, especially in biology, was not what's the evidence.

They didn't say what's the evidence. They didn't say what's the evidence. They just said this idea is unnecessary because we're going to figure everything out in terms of genes and molecular biology. So one line of research I had to do was to see whether the conventional approach in biology was likely to work or not. And so I had to think really deep

about standard science. Is this going to work? They just said, give us time, we'll figure it all out. We don't need new ideas. We basically, everything's fine the way it is. And that's what led in the 1980s to people formulating the Human Genome Project, which culminated in the year 2000 with the publication of the human genome. So they thought that that was adequate to explain. Once they got into the human genome, once they mapped it out, they were going to be able to explain pretty much everything about human beings. That's right. They actually thought that. And that's why there was a huge investment.

Hundreds of billions of dollars were invested in genomics and biotechnology on the grounds that genes explain everything. One gene, one characteristic, there's a gene for everything. If you can figure out the genes and manipulate the genes, basically you can control life. And if you can own the genes or own patents on the genes, you can make billions of dollars. That was the thinking and that was almost everybody was into that. But I was convinced that genes were grossly overrated, that they couldn't do most of these things that people thought they could. Because what genes do is code for the sequence of amino acids in proteins, protein molecules, which make up our muscles and, you know, the blood cells and the enzymes and so on, a major part of life, are coded for by genes. But there's a huge difference between making the right proteins

and the shape of your nose, for example, or the instincts of a spider to spin a web. I mean, it's like saying you could explain the structure of a building by knowing the chemistry of the bricks. I mean, you have to have bricks and you have to have cement and timber and stuff to make a building. And if you have defective bricks, you get a defective building. But it doesn't explain the plan of the building, the shape of the building. So I was convinced that these things would never be explained by genes, that we needed something like morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance to explain them. So part of thinking about

this was thinking hard about what regular science could and could not achieve. And incidentally, I'll come to the evidence in a minute, but one of my predictions that this biotechnology thing would be a disaster. It would mean people would lose huge amounts of money. I advised my friends, if they're investors, just don't bother. The only way you make money in this is by getting in on the bubble and selling out in time because it's not really going to lead to that many useful products. Why were you so convinced? Because I thought that the role of genes was totally overrated. And this is in fact what's happened.

Were you alone in this or were there other scientists? No, there were a few people. There were a few people, but most people went along with this. It's interesting you see that the Human Genome Project, they expected they'd have about 100,000 genes. It turned out when they finally announced it that there were only about 20,000 genes. We have less genes than a sea urchin, and about half as many as a rice plant. That was a huge surprise to people. And it soon became clear that it wasn't going to deliver on most of these promises. Craig Venter, who had the private genome project,

which was a rival of the publicly funded one, he's a very, very competitive guy, he got there first. He saw it as a race and he was going to win, and he did. And even though he was technically very successful and the publicly funded genome project was technically successful, once they'd done it, it became immediately apparent this information was almost useless. And Craig Venter's, his company, Cellular Genomics, the shares collapsed in a few days from about $60 a share to about

12 cents a share. And when he was interviewed after that, he said he's got a great sense of humor. He said, I'm a guy who's made a million the hard way by working my way down from a billion. So the thing is, it didn't work. And around four or five years ago, there was a development in science that most people haven't heard of yet outside science, but it's really big within the scientific journals called the missing heritability problem. And what they did is they took the genomes of 30,000 different people because it's quite cheap now to sequence genomes. Sequenced about 30,000 genomes of 30,000 different people because it's quite cheap now to sequence genomes. Sequenced about 30,000 genomes and to figure out what genes do what, you know, they looked at the people, 30,000 people, they knew everything about them, their height, their diseases, history and so forth. They started with height because height's easy to measure, you just need a tape

measure and it's already known that tall parents tend to have tall children and short parents They started with height because height's easy to measure. You just need a tape measure. And it's already known that tall parents tend to have tall children and short parents tend to have short children. You can predict the height of children when they're grown on the basis of the parent's height with an accuracy of about 80%. And in the technical language, they say height is 80% heritable. technical language, they say height is 80% heritable. Well, they'd figured out the gene's complete genome of 30,000 different people. They knew their height. So they then ran all these correlations and statistics to figure out which genes were involved in height. And they found about 50 genes were involved in controlling height. Then they found some were more important than others,

so they made their best models, weighting some more than others and coming out with predictions. And then they picked some people at random, the genomes. They did all their sums, they'd identified the genes, they ran the computer simulations, and they predicted these people's height on the basis of their genome.

And then they looked up the height to see how good this method was. It turned out they could predict height with an accuracy of 5%. Now, you can do it with an accuracy of 80% just by using tape measures in a way that's billions of dollars cheaper. So the gap between the 5% and the 80%, the 75% that's not explained by the genes, is called the missing heritability problem. And it turned out that the same was true of most diseases.

There's a few diseases where a defective gene gives a defective protein and you get a clear predictive value. Cystic fibrosis is one of them. Sickle cell anemia is another. clear predictive values. Cystic fibrosis is one of them. Sickle cell anemia is another. So there's a few rare genetic diseases where this method works very well. But for most diseases, breast cancer, cardiac problems, the predictive value of the genome turned out to be only 5% to 10%. And all these companies sprang up that would offer to sequence people's genomes and predict their diseases. And the last one, 23andMe, was put out of business by the FDA just a few months ago because their advertising was misleading.

more than about 10% accuracy, the likelihood that you'll get a particular disease on the basis of the genome, except for these rare genetic disorders. So this company, their entire business model was predicting people's vulnerability to certain diseases? I think that was their main business model. I mean, there are certain things where genome sequencing is still valuable and used.

If you want to find out what your racial background is, where did your ancestors come from, it's really good for that. It has very useful information. I'm not saying this is useless. I'm saying it has limited uses, but nothing like the bonanza of profits that people were expecting. There was a report by the Harvard Business School on this a few years ago on the biotech business and they said no one had ever invented such a massive money

losing scheme in the history of humanity. So I think that's because it was based on a false assumption of what genes do, you see. That's fascinating. When people hear about the experiment with the mice and the smell, what's the smell called again? The acetophenone. Acetophenone. What's the conventional explanation for this memory being passed down into these animals that have never experienced that before through breeding? Well, there isn't really one, you see, because it's something that people are rightly surprised about.

Because the idea that you could actually give off the brain or the nose or could actually give off influences that travel through the blood and selectively modify sperm, changing genes or the packaging of genes, nothing like that had been contemplated before. And this suggests something is going on that regular science doesn't know about. And that's fine from the point of view of science. I mean, if you discover something new, then you have to try and figure out how it works. But no one really knows.

And this sort of pushes molecular biology beyond its limits, really. People are working on this now and trying to figure out how it could happen. What are the conventional theories? Well, there aren't really. I mean, no one knows how smelling something could affect genes or the packaging of genes. And even if they could, even if you could say there would be a modification of the sperm to make people more, the offspring, the mice that descend from those sperm, more sensitive to acetophenone, that doesn't necessarily explain why they'd be afraid of it. I mean, if they trained them in a different way, acetophenone, they could have licked their lips and thought, oh, this means food. could have licked their lips and thought, oh, this means food.

So you've got quite a lot of explaining to do. And how these genes or the packaging of them could influence the brain is way beyond anything we can understand at present. So I think most people would say we just haven't figured it out yet. And this is a fairly recent experiment, too. Oh, this was only a few months ago. A few months ago, really? Yes. It was published a few months ago.

How long did they work on this for, though? Well, I suppose they must have been working on it for several years before they published it. But, I mean, what's exciting in biology at the moment is that the standard off-the-shelf explanations that people used to have, it's all genetically programmed and that kind of thing. This is falling apart. and that kind of thing. This is falling apart. Until the year 2000, there was a huge taboo in biology against the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which means, say, a father builds up his muscles

and becomes stronger or learns particular skills. The idea that the children could inherit that was considered impossible. They said, no, all inheritance is just genetic. Of course, you get environmental influences. If a dad takes his boys to weightlifting classes and stuff, then obviously they'll become more muscular. But the idea that anything could be passed through the genes that had been learned or acquired was absolutely taboo. It was a heresy in

20th century biology in the West. Interestingly, in the Soviet Union, they went the other way. Stalin liked the idea that if people got better at things, their kids would be better at them automatically. They'd inherit it. And geneticists in the Soviet Union were persecuted. And people who did research on the inheritance of acquired characteristics were well-funded and prestigious. And this polarized things even more. There was a kind of Cold War in biology as well as in everything else. But around the year 2000, it became clear that there really is an inheritance of acquired characteristics, and it's been rebranded epigenetic inheritance. And it's now a really hot topic in biology,

and these mice inheriting the fear of their father's experiments are part of this new wave of research on epigenetics. And it turns out that a lot of the things these Soviet biologists were claiming are actually true. One of the things I think ought to happen is that somebody who knows Russian, preferably someone who's in Russia, goes back through these archives of Soviet biology from the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s when tens of thousands of biologists in the Soviet Union were working on what we now call epigenetic inheritance. And it's a goldmine of information that could be dusted off and could be really helpful to science.

But nobody's done that yet because it's usually assumed the whole of that's been discredited and even Russians don't want to talk about it. That's so fascinating. even Russians don't want to talk about it. That's so fascinating. It's so fascinating that scientists are just now piecing together this new information, just start putting it together. Yes. And it's purely anecdotal evidence.

I have young daughters and they wrestle around together. They play in the bed and laugh and joke. And I've been doing jujitsu since the 1990s. And my daughters assume jujitsu positions. I see them do it before i've taught them now yes but when they were little like three and four years old my my my my youngest would do what's called an over under control she would grab her back and grip like a certain way that you teach people to do and then she would throw her legs over it's called taking the back it's a it's a position a standard position in jiu-jitsu but it's not a normal position for people but she would automatically

go to it pull my older daughter on top of her and take her back and it was the craziest thing to watch as a martial arts commentator someone who understands you know the correct way to do positions i would watch her do it i was like she knows what she's doing like i don't think she knows why she knows what she's doing but don't think she knows why she knows what she's doing, but she assumed a position that I've done Countless times thousands of times in my life it automatically came to her and I'm like that has to be somehow or another in her Code somehow or another it's gone from my body into her Well exactly well, that's a really really interesting case and you see I would call that morphic resonance, that she's resonating with you. She's got your genes, she's got your proteins and those of her mother as well, of course.

But this similarity to you means she'd be in a particularly strong resonance with you and would pick up things that you've acquired. I think it's interesting, you see, in many traditional societies, children would follow in the footsteps of their parents you know blacksmiths sons have become blacksmiths and in India the caste system you know if someone's a potter their kids have become potters and if they're a weaver their kids have become weavers

and I think this is partly because people would have a special aptitude for doing things their parents had done, for skills their parents had acquired, not through the genes but by a kind of resonance. Obviously, training and growing up in a household where people know these things plays an important part. But even before the regular training begins, you'd expect them to show these tendencies. And so that's a particularly interesting example because you're able to observe these positions most people wouldn't notice. But that's the kind of thing that I think is likely to be going on all the time.

Yeah, there's been several of those positions. I mean, sometimes it's just play and I see them just rolling around, but then there's like these clear patterns. Like one of them is uh knee to the belly to the mount there's this position that you do when you're in what's called side control you put your knee on someone's stomach you slide it across and you get on top of them mounting them with your hips above their hips and she does it instinctively and it's not an instinctive move for most kids and i try to i try to be objective when i watch it like how much of this is just natural human movement and how much of this is like her actually having some information

and there's clear blips where i go look at that like that that is normal like in jujitsu class but it's not normal for kids like there's there are things that they've learned and then there's also like when i've taught them stuff they pick things up like they already knew it it's like i used to teach martial arts so i've taught quite a few people and i know children are a little easier to teach than than other folks but there's children of people who are martial artists and then there's children of people who have never studied martial arts and the children of people who are martial artists were almost universally easier to teach. And it sort of backs up that idea. Yes. I mean, one could even do experiments on this. You know, actually, one could quantify it. My own approach to science is that you have to start

from what people have noticed, like your observations with kids of martial arts people, including your own. And then if you want to take it further, you could do more rigorous observations. And the standard explanation people say, oh, well, they've seen their parents do it, or they've seen videos or pictures of it around the house and that sort of thing. That might play some part in it. But I think there's likely to be much more than that to this. And one would obviously have to do special likely to be much more than that to this and one would obviously have to do special experiments to check it out but i imagine i think in many areas it should be easier to teach kids whose parents have done something like my own kids my two sons are extremely musical um brilliantly musical. One's a professional musician now. Well, I play the piano. My grandfather was a church organist. My uncle was a church organist. My father was very musical. My mother played the

piano and was very musical. My wife's family were musical. Her mother was a concert pianist. Her father was a pianist and a singer. And right from the age of four, they wanted to play the piano, they wanted to learn music, and they showed a tremendous amount of ability to assimilate it. There are sometimes people who are very musical who come from non-musical families, but some of the greatest musical geniuses come out of musical dynasties like Bach. I mean, he came from a dynasty of musicians. And so I think that these things are probably easier to learn if parents have learned them.

It's so fascinating, just the concept of learning things and learning things from some really unknown source. One of the things that you brought up in the trial logs i thought was particularly interesting and really resonated with me was you were talking about how children in new york city are afraid of monsters like it's a natural inclination for children to be afraid of things in the dark with large teeth that are going to eat you and that this goes back to the time where we were you know regularly predators took babies they like big cats or you know monsters as it were in the night would steal people would eat people would preyed on human beings that it makes sense that these

children have this intuitive instinct built into their genetics or whatever it is. Well, exactly. I mean, the standard sort of picture of the human prehistoric past is man the hunter striding out onto the savannas of Africa and stuff. But it was much more, I think, the case man the hunted. I mean, humans are particularly defenseless against big predators. And until recent times were very vulnerable to them, like tigers. In India, during the, under the British rule, even as late as the 1940s, there were thousands of people a year killed by man-eating tigers. And they usually go for the most vulnerable. I mean when predators are working in Africa when lions are attacking herds of antelope or something, they go for

the old and the sick or they go for the young because they are the ones that are the most vulnerable. So probably over huge amounts of human history, young children had indeed been eaten by predators. And still were, and probably today in some parts of the world maybe still are. These were the most realistic fears for huge periods of human history. And so I think it's fascinating that young children have these nightmares. This study in New York looked at the nightmares of young children. Nearly all of them were about being chased by monsters or scary animals. And, of course, we feed this imagination in children through fairy tales. Think of Grimm's fairy tales, you know, like Little Red Riding Hood,

where there's the big bad wolf, you know, that is going to eat up Little Red Riding Hood where there's the big bad wolf that is going to eat up Little Red Riding Hood. There's so many stories in fairy tales of wolves that could eat children. And although nowadays the image of wolves has been sanitized and we're told they're basically fairy loving creatures, et cetera, they are predators. and if they get the chance in the past, I think they did eat children sometimes. Not just in the past, it's in the present, if they have the right numbers. We've talked about this in the podcast,

but there was an instance in the 1400s in France where wolves killed 40 people in France. It's just a matter of them reaching the right numbers. World War II, there was an instance where the Germans and the Russians had a ceasefire because so many of their troops were getting killed by wolves. They united together to take out a giant super pack of wolves in Russia because there was hundreds of wolves that were just slaughtering soldiers. Wolves are dangerous.

They're very tricky animals. We eradicated them to very low numbers, and then when the numbers start to build up again, they start getting more and more dangerous again. the wolves came back they swam from other islands and and at first most people there are sort of liberal kind of people they thought it's great wildlife returns etc but these wolves became increasingly bold and our family and some land up there we have a forest we don't have a house we just have forest land and my sons were there on our land they'd been sleeping out when a big wolf suddenly appeared and looked very very threatening and they'd been told don't run if you see a wolf so they they stood there and they faced it and then this wolf sort of puffed up its fur and charged them and it stopped a few yards away and they backed off slowly and they ran when they got around the corner. But this wolf was clearly threatening, very, very scary.

Then they started eating people's dogs. And there's nothing, I've never seen a faster transition from someone who is a kind of wolf-loving liberal. Once a dog got eaten. They wanted the guys with guns to come out and teach these wolves a lesson. Yeah. And they did. Some of them were shot. And now they're much more frightened of people.

They keep their distance. They're still there. But if there hadn't been a pushback from the people on the island, they would have got increasingly bold. Yeah, there's an issue that's going on right now where people are resisting the idea of hunting wolves because they've reintroduced wolves to a lot of the western United States. And in some places they've reached very large numbers, thousands of wolves in Idaho and a couple of these areas where they've decimated elk and moose populations or elk and deer populations rather. And, you know, there's a lot of people that are animal rights folks that aren't there. They're not there. And they resist it very strongly.

Like the idea of killing wolves is barbaric and evil. But to the folks that live there, they're like, no, we love animals, but you have to deal with this. You've got a real problem here. Especially when they form large packs. They get very dangerous. In Russia, they had these super packs of wolves in Siberia that were taking out horses. They were showing up 100 wolves at a time. They were showing up these horse stables and slaughtering a horse.

And, you know, there's not much you could do about 100 wolves. No. Well, given all this background, I think it's so fascinating that for young children, especially urban young children who've actually never seen they would never see a wolf in their life or any other scary animal these are the things that haunt their nightmares and i think this is part of a kind of collective memory um i mean the more realistic dangers for young children being run over by cars or sexual predators or sexual predators but that's not what their dreams are about it may be what their parents' nightmares are about, but not the children themselves. There was a television show in America that I hosted called Fear Factor, and it was

a game show. They had to do these stunts, and different stunts had different things they had to do. One of the things that I found incredibly fascinating was some people had irrational fears about certain animals, whether it's spiders, snakes, snakes arachnophobia aphidiophobia and those those fears were undeniable they weren't just like people are nervous of heights like i'm nervous of heights i look over the side of a building or whoo but it's not an irrational fear it's a it's a normal natural fear of i don't want to fall yes but there are some people you would show them a snake and they would they would black out

They couldn't stay conscious. They would they would hyperventilate and they would faint and I Couldn't believe there were normal folks when I would talk to them There would be nothing that it would indicate in any way that they were Psychologically deranged or there was something missing in there, you know Whatever developmental period that they'd gone through something that got screwed up and they were just missing a giant chunk of what makes a person a normal person no they seem completely normal but you show them a spider and they would and i always wondered like what is is that maybe some someone down the line in

their history was bitten by a spider someone down the line was poisoned by a snake and survived. Or they saw someone poisoned by a snake. I mean, whatever it is, it's real. And these are real psychological issues that people have to deal with. Arachnophobia and aphidiophobia in particular. They're very strong. Yes. Well, I think these could easily be inherited phobias.

I mean, it's well known in animals that you can have instinctive fear. And, of course, it makes sense for animals. You probably know those experiments they do with day-old chicks or with ducklings. You have them out in an enclosure outdoors. And then they do these experiments. They have cardboard cutouts with silhouettes of birds. And you pull them across on wires. And if you pull across things with a silhouette of a hawk, these ducklings just freeze.

You know, the fear response is to just freeze. They freeze. Whereas if you pull across something that looks like a silhouette of a pigeon or you know red wing black work bird or something they don't so they have an inherited fear of things that could in fact be dangerous and it's perfectly in terms of evolution it makes perfect sense to see why that would work these baby ducklings don't have time to learn which birds are harmful and which are not, but an instinctive response of fear to something that is actually scary may sometimes lead them to respond to something that isn't like a cardboard cutout. But I think these things make complete sense biologically. you stop and think about it if you really take into consideration all the things you have to learn to survive as any animal as just this idea that these mice would learn somehow another through

their their parents to avoid that that certain smell because that smell was associated with electrical shock it only makes sense that somehow or another biological life would transmit information in as many ways as possible. Yes, absolutely. Your idea is so fascinating because you're not even talking about biological life transferring information through genetics. You're talking about it through some unseen force that has yet to be defined. And that's when things get really squirrely. And that must be when you experience the most resistance to these ideas.

Because the resistance to these ideas, I'm sure before they proposed this idea that genetics or that these mice would somehow or another inherit the fear of the smell from their parents, that was probably not very well received before it was proven. But then it was proven, so now it sort of has to be accepted and has to be taken into consideration. But your idea is still very fringe. Oh, yes. The interesting thing is, you see, the response I get to this from some scientists is actually extremely emotional and irrational. When my first book, A New Science of Life came out, there was a very famous editorial in Nature after the

leading science magazine a few months after the book appeared. To start with, Nature ignored it, but then a lot of people got interested. I was doing programs on the radio in Britain. There was an article editorial in The Guardian saying what an interesting idea. And there's a lot of serious discussion going on. New Scientist magazine launched a competition for the best ideas for experiments to test morphic resonance. And it was beginning to be widely discussed. The editor of Nature, who was a reactionary figure in science, old-style, materialist, mechanistic, hardcore scientist, wrote a famous editorial called A Book for Burning on the front page of Nature, comparing my book unfavorably with Mein Kampf, Hitler's book, saying that this was a profoundly dangerous book. Wow. And he said this is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.

And it was completely irrational, this attack on my book. It was emotional, irrational, polemical. He didn't do it as a joke. He didn't do it as a joke. And this, of course, produced a backlash because quite a few scientists thought this was the wrong way to respond to a scientific hypothesis. So a lot of letters in Nature for months afterwards were backing me up and saying, you know, this is something that should be seriously discussed, not simply denounced. But the fact is that this started a kind of controversy which has been going on ever since. But until the year 2000, most biologists thought genes did everything. Now, the epigenetic thing has taken over and the missing heritability problem. There's much more openness than there was because it's clear we haven't figured it all out.

Interestingly, Charles Darwin was not a neo-Darwinian. Neo-Darwinian evolution theory says it's all done by the genes. Evolution is just about random mutation and natural selection of gene frequencies. This is the basis of Richard Dawkins' work, for example. His book, The Selfish Gene, is based on that model. Darwin actually believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He thought that animals could inherit the fears of their fathers

and that most of adaptation could actually be passed on to animals and plants descended from parents. He thought that was how evolution worked. He even proposed that when something had been learned, there could be movement of something through the bloodstream that could affect the sperm and the eggs. Exactly the kind of things that's now being considered in this fear of the father's case. So movement through the bloodstream. So if you learn something, like say, if you touch something, it's electric fence, and it shocks you, there's movement through the bloodstream that teaches your sperm? Well, that's what Darwin thought. He wrote a book called The Variation of Animals and

Plants Under Domestication. It's less well-known than his most famous book, The Origin of Species. But in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, he was so convinced that plants and animals could inherit what their parents had learned, he tried to figure out how it might work. And the last chapter is called The Hypothesis of Pangenesis. It's the name he gave to his theory that somehow little bits were detached from the brain and went through the blood and affected the sperm. Now, that's more or less what people are saying, trying to explain the mice inheriting the fear of their fathers. That aspect of Darwin's work has been airbrushed out of scientific history.

That aspect of Darwin's work has been airbrushed out of scientific history. Darwin also wrote a paper in Nature about a dog that he came across, that whenever this dog got near to a butcher's shop, the dog was completely terrified of butchers. And Darwin figured out that one of its parents had been kicked or badly mistreated by a butcher, and this dog had inherited a phobia of butchers. Now, Darwin published that in Nature. It shows you how very different Darwin's ideas on evolution were from his 20th century successors. And the reason that modern evolutionary theory is called neo-Darwinism is to distinguish it from Darwinism, theories called neo-Darwinism is to distinguish it from Darwinism, which included the inheritance of habits, very similar to what I'm saying. What I'm saying in terms of the inheritance

of habits through morphic resonance is actually really close to what Darwin himself said. But it's not what neo-Darwinians say, because they've tried to say all inheritances in genes, and you can't have these other things. But now they have to change their tune, because as I say, in the last few years, epigenetic inheritance, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, is back in fashion. Well, there's many people that haven't studied Darwin's ideas at all that aren't familiar with the amount of resistance that Darwin received when he was proposing these ideas. Like these weren't accepted ideas at all. In fact, the majority of scientists at the time were, they were more of a Christian faith, weren't they? Yes, but it was the response to Darwin

was particularly interesting, you see, because many, many Christians in England, many Christians in England, after being surprised by his ideas, actually said, well, that's fine. If God's the creator of life, then why on earth can't God create through evolution, create life that can evolve under its own steam? And his ideas were quite rapidly accepted by the Roman Catholic and the Anglican, the Episcopal churches, and the Methodists and so on. This fundamentalist creationist thing is a peculiar American phenomenon. It didn't originate until the 20th century, and it was started in America. And it's virtually unknown in Britain. I'm actually

a practicing Christian. I'm an Anglican. And I never meet creationists in England. I've never heard anyone deny. What exactly is an Anglican? A Church of England. The Church of England is sort of halfway between Protestant and Catholic. What happened in England under King Henry VIII in the 16th century was that he nationalized the church. And he said, OK, the pope's not head of the church anymore.

I am. And the priests can marry. We'll have the services in English and bishops can be married. And so but the services remain much the same. But the services remain much the same. And the Church of England, if you go to an Anglican service, it's very like a Roman Catholic service, except that we have married priests,

we have women bishops and women priests. Outrageous. Outrageous from a Catholic point of view. But anyway, the Church of England is... So it's never had the sort of extreme Protestant doctrines like Southern Baptists and so on. It's very similar to the Catholic Church. It's now one of the most liberal churches. But Anglicans on the whole had no problem with evolution. They still don't.

I've just been doing a workshop last weekend at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, which I was co-leading with the Bishop of California, whose cathedral is Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a very beautiful cathedral on Knob Hill. We were discussing the kinds of things you and I are discussing. He was completely open to all this. It was absolutely no problem discussing this with an Anglican and Episcopalian bishop. It's a very far cry from what many people's image of Christians is opposing evolution. The general view that many Christians have, and I'm one, is that the evolution of nature,

if there's a creative power in nature, it may be God-given in the first place, but what God did was to endow nature with a power to create new forms of life, that there's a kind of intelligent creativity in nature. You don't have to have a kind of intelligent designing engineer outside nature tinkering with the machinery and manipulating genes, as the intelligent design people think and you don't have to deny evolution altogether to say god's involved in nature in some way it's perfectly possible to have a view where god is in nature and works through nature and there's a creativity in nature which doesn't require the universe

to have been created in 6,000 years ago that completely accept the evolutionary history of the universe in cosmology and in evolution and just say, well, if there's a God, then that's the way that God works through this evolutionary process and through the creativity of evolution. way that God works through this evolutionary process and through the creativity of evolution. So the fundamentalist Christians and the New Earth Christians, that's a uniquely American thing, you think? Yes. I mean, they do have followers, a few followers in Britain, but they take their lead entirely from America. And they've got a new batch of converts, their point of view,

in the Islamic world. Creationism, by American creationists is big in Turkey and many other Arab countries and stuff. But it's a peculiarly American phenomenon. Well, you know how it all came about in America, right? Where it really took off. Well, it became a part of the political system, the Reagan administration. They started recruiting the radical Christians and that became a part of his electoral base. Yes. It's a very, very interesting history. It had always been, for most foreigners, American politics is completely impossible to understand. It's impossible to understand how people can be so polarized and so extreme in their views.

And I read a book recently which made it much clearer to me. It's called The Sword of the Lord. It's written by a guy called Andrew Himes who was raised Southern Baptist. Seven of his cousins are Southern Baptist ministers. His grandfather, who was called Rice, was one of the inventors of American fundamentalism. And it's a fascinating historical study of this phenomenon and why they were like that. And it made a lot more sense to me. I mean, it's still very bizarre and very American.

Yeah, we're very weird. We're hard to understand even for us. Everyone's constantly trying to refocus our political system or sort of redefine it, calm it down, reach more. I mean, everyone's looking for a more moderate conservative or someone who is a more conservative moderate. You know, we're always looking for someone who meets the bridge, someone to join the two sides so we don't have these radical polarizing opposing forces, the left and the right. It seems so childish to me. opposing forces, the left and the right. It seems so childish to me.

But what this book made clear and what was for me a huge revelation was that how all of this is rooted in the American Civil War. And there's a sense in which in some people's minds, the Civil War is still going on. It's just that the sides have switched. In the Civil War, the South was Democrat, the slave-owning South. Their political party after the Civil War was the Democrats. And the Republicans were the liberals who wanted to free the slaves. And one of the most interesting switches that's happened is this switch. So now it's gone the other way around. The Democrats are now the liberals and stuff. And the Republicans have become the more right-wing forces and powerful in the South, which was

exactly the opposite. Very bizarre. So what this book does is trace the history of this fascinating movement. But what's so interesting is that in the Civil War, both sides were using biblical texts to justify their position. But the Southern Baptists and the religious people in the South actually had a much stronger biblical basis for slavery because the Bible's full of slaves. The Old Testament's full of slaves. The Israelites were slaves themselves. They owned slaves. In the New Testament, everyone

owned slaves. It was taken for granted. There were no abolitionists in the Bible. So if you base your faith on the Bible, you can make a much stronger case for slavery than you can for abolitionism. But you have to take the Bible as literally true. And that gave a strong incentive for people in the South to make the Bible literally true, because you could justify slavery much better than if you interpret it in a liberal way. saying, well, actually, the spirit of Jesus was to liberate people from bondage. They say, okay, where's the text? Jesus doesn't say anything about liberating slaves. So fundamentalism gave a kind of impetus to this, and it was very, very fascinating to see how that played out because on both sides in the Civil War, they were both invoking the Bible. Both sides were Protestant. Both sides had ministers

preaching to inspire the troops and get them to fight. And after the Civil War, the way in which this tradition of fundamentalism that had developed in the American South to justify slavery gave a kind of ready-made way to use biblical texts to argue against all sorts of other things, including evolutionary theory. Whereas in Europe, in the traditional Catholic and in the more liberal Protestant churches, people hadn't taken the view of the Bible as the literal truth. They'd taken the view that the Bible's a guide to what might happen, that a lot of its meaning is allegorical or symbolic. But the kind of so-called liberal interpretation of the Bible

goes back to, you know, the second century A.D. or something. It's been the mainstream view for a long time. You're a scientist. What leads you to be a practicing Christian as a scientist? Well, I spent years as an atheist. I mean, when I was educated as a scientist, part of the package deal is atheism. You know, I grew up with all the standard. By the time I was 14, I was at a religious boarding school, a Christian boarding school. I was the only boy in my year who refused to get confirmed because even at 14, I identified as an atheist. And I thought science means science and reason, religion and superstition are things of the past, scientists are the vanguard of human

progress, all that kind of thing. I believed that. But what made me begin to doubt it was I began to doubt that this was the right way forward in science. I began to think that this mechanistic molecular approach, treating animals and plants as just machines, was an inadequate view of life. I'd gone into biology because I was fascinated by animals and plants. I kept lots of pets as a child. My father was a herbalist. I collected plants and he taught me about plants. He had a microscope laboratory. And so I was sort of really got into science as a child. And when I started studying science at school and university, the first thing we did with living organisms was to kill them and grind them up and then look at the enzymes in their liver or whatever. It became clear to me we were not really studying life.

We were studying death. And when I was a child, I kept homing pigeons. And I was fascinated with how do they find their home. I asked everybody. I knew men who kept homing pigeons. It was a popular sport in Britain. It still is. I had some myself

and I used to put them in a box and cycle as far as I could on my bicycle and release them and then cycle home and they always got home before I did, however far I took them. So this completely intrigued me. And I thought we're never going to understand this by just grinding up their livers or looking at their genes. So I began to doubt the mechanistic worldview. Then I encountered psychedelics. And that was a

huge change. I mean, nothing in my scientific education prepared me for the kind of mind-opening effects of LSD. This was in the 70s, early 70s. And, you know, I'd studied nerve impulses and hormones and that kind of thing, which is what we got in our science course at Cambridge about the brain. I knew about the anatomy of the brain and nerve impulses, but these visionary experiences that psychedelics opened up showed me there was far more to the mind and indeed far more to reality than this very, very limited model.

Then I got interested in meditation because I thought, well, it'd be good to be able to explore the mind without drugs. I mean, I'm not anti-psychedelic at all, but I think it'd be good to have different methods, not just drugs. Then I took up transcendental meditation and yoga. Then I got a job in India. I lived in India for seven years. And when I was in India, I was really into yoga and meditation. And at first, I thought this is just changing my brain physiology. You don't need to

believe there's God out there or anything mysterious out there. It's just inside the body. The chemicals affect the brain. The yoga and meditation affect blood flow, etc. So I saw it in a rather materialistic way. But then I got more and more interest in Hindu philosophy and Hindu ideas and the idea that there's a greater consciousness within which our consciousness is embedded through some psychedelic experiences. We contact other realms of consciousness that aren't just inside our brains through meditation and through prayer that one can actually contact other forms of consciousness that aren't just inside our brains through meditation and

through prayer that one can actually contact other forms of consciousness bigger than our own. I did all that within a kind of Hindu context and then I had a Sufi teacher in India as well and so I did a sort of Islamic mysticism for a while. But after doing this for several years I found that actually some of it didn't make sense to me. The part that didn't make sense to me, well, the Islamic part, to be a Sufi in India, basically you had to be a Muslim. And I didn't really want to get into being a Muslim and sort of fasting in Ramadan and all that. fasting in Ramadan and all that. And Hindus, their basic worldview was, and for most of them still is,

the idea that we're just trapped in a world where things go on and on, rebirth and cycles of life and death, and we're trapped in this world of suffering and delusion. And the way out is through a kind of spiritual vertical takeoff, which you do individually through meditation. You liberate yourself from reincarnation and delusion and so forth into absorption in the one, the absolute. But it's an individual vertical takeoff. And I was working in an agricultural institute, the main international institute in India, for trying to improve crops for poor farmers. And sometimes my Indian colleagues would say to me after work, you know, they'd say, why do you do this?

And I'd say, because, you know, I want to help these poor people. And, you know, they haven't got enough to eat. It'd be great if they had better farming methods and improved varieties, and science can help, and I believe in trying to apply my knowledge to help these people. He said, it is none of your business. If they are poor, if they are suffering, it is their karma. It is not your business. It is their problem, not your problem.

Your problem is to liberate yourself from this world of illusion. So then I realized, actually, they have a completely different view. That the poor are suffering because, in a sense, they deserve to suffer. It's because of what they've done in past lives. Nothing I can do about it. Then I realized, actually, I do care about other people. I do think that a spiritual life is not just about individual liberation. It's to do with collective things, it affects community and how can other people be helped. And as I argued with my Hindu friends, I realized the reason I was

saying this is because I'm so deeply embedded in the Christian tradition, even secular humanism is a kind of secularized Christianity because it's about helping others, that actually I was much more Christian than I actually had ever admitted. So I was confirmed in the Church of South India. And I then found a fantastic ashram where I lived for two years, Father Bede Griffiths, who was an English Benedictine who had a Christian ashram in South India, which was exactly to my taste. It was very simple.

We did yoga. We did meditation. We had Christian services, but we sang Indian chants and kirtans and things. It didn't try and deny any of this. And when I first went there, we started the mass with the Gayatri mantra, which is a Hindu mantra asking the sun to bless our meditation, the divine splendor of the sun to illuminate our meditation. So I said to Father Bede, when I first went there, you know, how can you have

the Gayatri mantra at the beginning of a Catholic service? And he said precisely because it's Catholic. He said Catholic means universal. If it excludes anything which is a path to God, then it's just sectarian. The word Catholic means universal? Yes, that's what it means. That's fascinating. Yes. So I found a way of being Christian,

which didn't deny yoga, meditation, Buddhism. My wife is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. She follows a Dzogchen tradition in Tibetan Buddhism. So I found a way of reconnecting with the Christian tradition, which didn't violate my sense of reason. It didn't conflict with the kind of science that I'm interested in but I found it liberating to reconnect and so when I went back to England from India I was able to go to those great cathedrals that we have in England built in the Middle Ages there's fantastic

buildings stained glass wonderful music playing, amazing choirs singing the most beautiful music, and feel that this is not just beautiful, but meaningful and is a path to God, which I had not seen before. That's fascinating. So in India, the concept of karma being that someone has done something in their past life, that's led them to where they are right now. Yes. being that someone has done something in their past life that's led them to where they are right now. Yes.

Boy, that seems real convenient for someone passing by homeless people or someone who's poor or suffering. It's almost like the numbers of people that they have in India, because the numbers are so great, a billion people. How much bigger is India than North America? Oh, the size of the land is much smaller. The population is now almost a billion. How much smaller is the size of the land? I don't know. But it's crazy how overpopulated it is. It's really densely populated, yes.

I wonder if that came about as just a way of just mitigating the pressure of helping people, like just the idea of karma, like you can't help that guy, that's his problem, you've got to deal with yourself. Just the sheer numbers. Well, I don't know. I mean, at the time the British were ruling India, there were only about 200 million. You know, when I was born, there were about 250 million. What? When you were born?

Yes, I was born in 1942. Damn, they did a lot of having sex. It's a huge, huge increase. That's a lot of banging. It's a vast increase. Wow. Anyway, the thing is about the convenient, the karma thing in India, you see, it is convenient. For centuries, India's had a caste system.

You know, the untouchables are treated like dirt. I mean, they're considered to be polluting and dirty. are treated like dirt. I mean, they're considered to be polluting and dirty. Even if the shadow of an untouchable fell on a Brahmin's house, this person could be punished very, very severely. Wow. And there was no move within India until the 19th century to reform that. What happened is Christian missionaries went there.

They were nice to untouchables and to lower castes and gave them food, education, health care, etc. And some of them became Christians. I mean, why not? If you're at the bottom of the pile, you've not got anything to lose and you've got a lot to gain by becoming a Christian. So Hindu reformers felt that they had to counteract this. And so things like the Ramakrishna mission and Sri Aurobindo and various Hindu philosophers and Gandhi himself, who was a big influence in India, assimilated many of these ideas from Christianity and said, look, we've got to reform Hinduism. And they created a new

kind of Hindu attitude, much influenced by Christianity. And so there are now Indian movements to try and help the poor and provide health care for the sick and that kind of thing. But it's not been part of their traditional way of doing things. And it came about under Western influence. That's really fascinating. So your desire to sort of help these people, help them grow more food and help them live better lives is what led you to become a Christian. You realize that these are Christian ideas? Yes.

That they're Christian, they're deeply embedded in our culture, even for secular humanists. You see, secular humanists are usually atheists who believe in a philosophy of equal rights, equal opportunities, helping the poor and the sick, education for everyone, and uplifting people who are suffering, helping third world countries have running water and all that kind of thing. Well, these are things that Christian missionaries have done as well, but you don't have to be

a Christian to believe in those things. But the fact that they're so deeply embedded in our culture, in our secular culture, is because of the influence, historical influence of Christianity. So secular humanists are basically people who still have Christian ethics, but without a belief in God. But that ethical system doesn't just come about automatically. A much more default mode is to say, you know, the strong might is right. You know, the strongest guy gets the girls and, you know, runs a kind of harem and then conquer people and have slaves. And that's how humanities worked for much of human history. Yeah, yeah, it most certainly has. So, it sounds like you found a very cool sect of

Christianity while you were in India. I mean, that sounds very unique that you were doing yoga and meditation and then these Indian chants along with this concept of Christianity being like the generosity and helping your brothers and sisters. helping your brothers and sisters. That seems to be, like, that must have been very convenient to find that sect of Christianity while you were sort of exploring these ideas. It wasn't even a sect. Father B. Griffiths was a Benedictine monk, and he was a Roman Catholic.

Now, it's true that some people in the Catholic Church didn't approve of what he was doing, but... So it was really just him. Well, him and a group of other people. I mean, there was a whole movement in India of Catholics to, it was called inculturation. It was the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s said that what people should do in the Catholic Church is put the Christian faith into the terms of that culture. So in India, Catholics who'd been converted by Catholic missionaries from Ireland and places bought pairs of shoes so they could put them on to go to church on Sundays because the missionaries dressed up in Western clothes

and wore shoes in church. These Indians would never wear shoes in a temple or a mosque or even in their house, but they wore shoes in church because that's what the Catholic missionaries wore. So that kind of thing is ridiculous. And so the simplest level, the inculturation movement, we say, well, it's the tradition of Indians to take your shoes off in homes and in temples and in mosques. So take them off in churches too. And it was the tradition of holy men and women in India to be vegetarian, whereas Catholics and Protestants there were all eating lots of beef and stuff because that's what American and British missionaries ate. And so he said, no, it's much more natural to be vegetarian. You don't have to be, but it's more natural. So this idea of yoga as a way of learning how to breathe and to chant and to

be more healthy, why shouldn't Indian Christians do yoga? So this is part of a movement. Father Bede was part of a wider movement. The last two popes have been rather reactionary and have tried to roll back that movement, but there are still people in India and South America and so on who are following this Vatican, Second Vatican Council reform movement. The new Pope is fairly unique, isn't he? He is, yes. He seems to be a much less polarizing figure.

He seems to be much more generous, much more open-minded to the idea of homosexuality, to a lot of the things that have been criticized in the past. And he also, like, he's eschewing the ideas of monetary wealth. He doesn't have that crazy throne anymore. He has a reasonable chair. He's a unique guy. I think it's partly because he comes from South America, you see. And this kind of radical Catholic movement, the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology,

which was about the church should be there not to serve the rich but to help the poor and this became a huge movement in South America but the the previous Pope John Paul II was against it because he they were teaming up with communists and people who were also trying to help the poor for secular reasons not and political reasons not for Christian reasons so he said this is wrong because it's communistic. But actually, that movement, this radical Catholic movement, has had a huge influence in South America. And I think the present pope is somebody who's come out of that world,

who's been very much influenced by it. It's so problematic, though, the suppressing of sexuality. The number one thing that people associate Catholicism with is sexual assault, is sexually molesting children. That's like a huge aspect. I grew up a Catholic. I was only in, I was only a practicing Catholic when I was very young. I went to a Catholic school in New Jersey for first grade, and it was a very bad school. It was like really dark and suppressing

and just very nasty and mean, and the nuns were just horrific people. And it essentially shied me away from all religion at a very young age. Yeah, I can see why. Yeah, it was terrible. It was terrible. But I have other friends that were also raised Catholic that literally had to fight off the priest's sexual attempts. And this is like a standard thing.

It's a joke. It's an on-running joke in America about priests being sexual predators. It's a constant thing. That seems to me like one of the number one issues with that particular brand of religion. It's like this idea that you're going to take what is essentially just a natural part of being a human being. You're not doing anything with the reproductive cycle. You're just telling them to ignore it.

You have this consistent, constant bodily function. Your body's reproducing fluids on a regular basis and you're living backed up all the time and also you're not experiencing any romantic interaction with human beings yes no no affection no sexual affection no nothing no you're missing out on a huge part of what it it is to be a person and these people grow up and they live cradle to the grave in this sort of weird uh non-developed state you know they're not like the rest of the people they can barely even understand like i had a friend that went to marriage counseling with a catholic priest i'm like that's hilarious that's's like going to Hitler and asking how to

have world peace. Like, it doesn't make any sense. Like, how are you going to a guy who not only does not have any sex, has never had a relationship, but is drunk all the time, he had gin blossoms all over his face, and kids run away from him because they're afraid he's going to touch them. And you're going to go to that guy, and he's going to give you marriage advice. I agree. I think that's a, you know, it's a terrible thing. And I mean, there are a lot of good priests who don't do this. And I met quite a few when I was in India and I have Roman Catholic priests as friends. And so I think it's a minority. It may have been quite a big minority in Ireland and in some countries. But I think it

was a, some people are called to a celibate life, and I think that's fine for people to become monks or nuns if that's what they're called to. But for regular priests, I think it's a serious mistake. And in the Church of England, ever since 1540 or something, and in the Protestant churches in Europe, priests have been able to marry, and rabbis marry in Judaism and I think it's much much healthier to have priests as regular guys with love lives and kids and things so I think that side of Catholicism is a serious mistake and I

think they should sooner or later it'll have to be reformed because repression of sexuality leads to all these extremely unhealthy and negative consequences um no i agree with you about it but you know there are reformed movements within catholicism and uh there in america there are breakaway catholic churches with women priests for example there's one in santa bar Santa Barbara. Of course it's in Santa Barbara. A bunch of freaks up there getting loaded. So this, anyway, I agree with you. I think that's a very negative thing. But you see, I think that to reject the entire, some people reject the entire world of religion because of personal bad experiences with one particular brand. I think

it's rather like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It would be like saying, I'm against science because it gave us gas that Hitler used to kill people and it gave us the atomic bomb that killed people in Hiroshima. So I'm against science. I mean, science, everything human, there are really bad things that have been done by humans in the name of almost anything you care to mention. Nationalism, science, religion, politics, ideology. So when you decided to join this particular group of Christians and become a Christian officially, like to identify, was there resistance from your colleagues? Was there resistance from your colleagues was there resistance from other scientists like how old were you at the time oh I was

the nice 33 something like that um well not among I was working in India at the time and there's hardly any atheists in India there's a few but among my scientific colleagues I was working with Indian scientists, almost all Indians are Hindu or Muslim. You know, when they went home from work, they'd be regular Hindus or Muslims. Very few of them were atheists. So among my Indian colleagues, being a practicing Christian, when I came from a Christian family in a Christian country, seemed totally normal. No one thought that was at all weird or strange. When I got back to England, among many of my scientific friends, they thought this was completely weird and just couldn't understand it because they assumed that any Christian believes the world's made in 6,000 years ago and that God

intervenes through suspending the laws of nature and miracles that are totally incredible. I mean, they don't believe in the kind of God I don't believe in. But they never actually, very few ever asked, what do you actually think or believe? They just sort of treated it at best as some kind of personal eccentricity or mental feebleness or something. And while retaining a rather narrow dogmatically atheist view. A lot of my friends are atheists or agnostics but the problem I have with atheists and materialists is that most of them are much more dogmatic than the people I know within the religious world. Well, I have a problem with anybody that's sure.

So do I, yes. When I speak to some atheists, I have this issue where they're aggressively atheist, where I've talked to people who, they're not just atheists, but they get upset at anyone who's not. And my question to them is always, have you ever had a psychedelic experience? Whenever I speak with someone who's aggressively atheist.

And if they say no, I'm always like, well, what are you waiting for? Because if you really want to question your whole idea of reality, there's no better method than a breakthrough psychedelic experience. If you have a breakthrough psychedelic experience and you're like, pah, that was nothing, well, then you're a unique person. Because everybody I've ever met that has a breakthrough psychedelic experience, like a DMT trip, they have to step back and go, okay, I didn't even know that was possible.

I've lived my whole life with this one worldview that, well, I see these people that are religious, and it seems to me that they're following this ridiculous ideology that is based on some ancient information that people wrote down on animal skins. It's all preposterous. And what they're doing is they're just a bunch of scared children that are afraid of the light. And what I'm doing is basing my life on science and rational thinking and logic. But then you have a psychedelic trip and you're like, there's nothing rational about that. There's nothing logical about that.

And how is that so close? It's so nearby. It's like someone telling you, a DMT trip is like someone telling you, hey, I want to show you something. Let's go into this room real quick. And you open that door and there's a new universe there, a completely different that's filled with life it's fractal it's never-ending and it it it occupies a very small space but yet it's infinite and it's filled with conscious beings that can see through you recognize all your bullshit recognize all your insecurities and all your incorrect thinking and

ego and and and they try to and then you shut the door and you go back to regular life you're like what the fuck is that room like oh that room that's the god room it's right there like if you don't go into that experience like your whole like i think we live our lives based on we sort of calculate our worldview based on the experiences that we've accumulated, what we've learned from these experiences, and what we've learned from other people's experiences, what we've read, what we've seen in documentaries and films.

But when you have a really intense psychedelic experience, particularly, and then for some people yoga and meditation, some people are able to achieve some pretty deep states, but the psychedelic experience in particular is shocking because it's so easy to get to. It's just right there. Four hits of the DMT

and boom, blast off. And then 15 minutes later, you're left with this new experience that you have to assimilate and figure out a way to make sense of it. The atheists that I talk to that are like super aggressive, they're just like religious people in a lot of ways.

It's a kind of scientific fundamentalism. Yeah. And it's also morphing. Now, I don't know if you're aware of this in America. It's morphing. There's atheism and then there's an even more aggressive group called Atheism Plus. Oh, I didn't know about that. Yeah.

an even more aggressive group called atheism plus oh i don't know about that yeah and what they're doing is they're attaching a bunch of moral and ethical values to religion essentially creating almost like another religion and i think with good intentions i think a lot of it is good intentions a lot of it is based on um a lot of it is based on feminism a lot of it's based on the idea of uh avoiding harassment avoiding sexual harassment, avoiding like that. They their ethics are to completely define what's acceptable behavior, like no, no racism, no sexual harassment, no undeniable acceptance of women's rights, undeniable acceptance of, you know, it's interesting. But then, of course, once you define that, then you have aggressive members of that group that are attacking people that disagree with any of their propositions or anyone that supports men's rights, of course, now hates women, and you get a lot of weirdness in that area because it can only be feminism. There can't be men's rights as well. Men's

rights are toxic, whereas women's rights, once they have achieved total equality, then there's no need for men's rights because once feminism has been established, which is a pretty illogical assumption, especially when you consider divorce laws. Well, exactly. No, I agree with you. No, I couldn't agree more about DMT and the opening that it can give. I mean, I had the great advantage of taking it for the first time with Terence McKenna. And he said, do you want to check this out? And I said, okay.

That's pretty cool on the resume, by the way. First time you did DMT, did it with Terrence McKenna. Yes. I won't say where or when because it could be put down on some record somewhere. It's probably already there. Don't worry about it. But for me, it corresponded in many ways with what people talk about near-death experiences because I went out through light into a realm of great bliss and beauty. And then I came back, and it was like coming back from a million miles away

and just coming back into my body and, as it were, being born again. So it was very much like a death and rebirth experience for me and it was very, very transformative. Incidentally, I think, you know, I've been trying to understand this American phenomenon of Southern Baptists. And one of the things that I think is the key to this is that I think when they talk about being born again, originally, baptism was just that. I mean, now you can get this through DMT in five minutes. But at the time of John the Baptist, you could get it in five minutes through being drowned. People were lining up on the bank of the Jordan, they go in, he holds them under. If he held them under just long enough, you could actually induce a near-death experience, you know, life review, the drowning man sees his life pass before him, you know, hold them under

just long enough, and they'd have a near-death experience, almost guaranteed. I mean, occasionally, he might have done it too long, but that was before litigation. You know, he might have lost a few. Before litigation. Yeah, that's a good theory, actually. And then, you see, they come back and they say, I've died. I've seen the light. I've been born again.

I'm no longer afraid of death. My life has been transformed in five minutes. And the Baptists were the people who revived baptism by total immersion in the 16th century. And probably now in America, they don't hold them under that long because this is post-litigation now. But when the Baptists first got going, this idea of holding people under long enough, all their language is the language that relates to near death experiences. And I don't think that to start with, baptism by total immersion was just symbolic. I think it was

drowning. Wow, that is quite fascinating. And it makes sense if you think about ordeal poisoning, ordeal poisoning being the substitute for psychedelics in certain cultures where they don't have access to psychedelic plants. They would take essentially a poison that didn't kill you. It got you right to the door where you wish you were dead almost. You were in horrible pain. And even in some cultures, they use ant venom, like those bullet ants. They use that for these ritualistic coming-of-age rituals, these coming-of-age rituals where you take people through these intensely painful moments where they almost want to be dead just to end the suffering. And then when they come through on the other side, they're a better person because of it. They're more reflective.

They appreciate just the very breath that they're allowed to take. They appreciate the sky seems bluer. The grass seems greener. The life has more vibrancy to it because they've gone through this ordeal poison or this toxic venom or what have you. Yes, a rite of passage. Almost all rites of passage for adolescents in traditional cultures involve something like a death and rebirth experience.

And I think you're right. I think that's what's going on. And actually, I think why the Baptists became so powerful and why for them the conversion experience was so real and why they talk about it so much is that because for many of them it was real. It wasn't just a symbolic thing. It wasn't signing up to some set of beliefs. And I think that at the core of all religions is this direct experience of the divine.

And I think that's what they all come from. They come from experience, not theories. Well, it's quite shocking too that Jerusalem scholars, like mainstream scholars now, are considering that Moses was probably under the influence of DMT. They believe that the burning bush, there's, you know, the guys are not like psychedelically based at all, was quite probably the acacia bush, which was a very rich in DMT plant. And that's the whole idea of the burning bush. He sees God through a burning bush.

I mean, how much clearer does it have to be? There's acacia trees all over that part of the world. It's a very rich plant as far as the content of DMT in it. And if you experience that, it's very much like, I mean, I don't know if you're experiencing God, but it seems like, it seems very divine when you have a DMT trip. Yes. Well, I mean, why not be experiencing God? I mean, it seems an uneconomical theory to say that there's divine bliss as experienced by mystics, that part of the nature of God's mind is bliss.

by mystics that part of the nature of God's mind is bliss. I mean the Hindu name, one of the names is Satchitananda, being, knowledge, bliss, as the four in the nature of God. If God's consciousness is a kind of bliss consciousness, then if you have this experience that seems like God and is blissful, why have a hypothesis that there's some other bliss consciousness that isn't divine, that's some kind of duplicate? Why not it be the real thing? I think it makes so much more sense. Yeah, it totally makes sense. I mean, it makes as much sense as anything else.

These plants are real. I've always wondered if that, and, you know, many other people speculate as well, if that's the reason why Hindus don't participate in eating cows, too, because of the psilocybin mushrooms growing on cows on a regular basis, and that being, for a lot of people, believe the basis of Soma. I don't know. Terence's theory about Stropharia and these mushrooms growing on cow dung is okay as far as it goes. But in England, growing on cow dung is okay as far as it goes. But in England, for example, the magic mushroom, the liberty cap,

doesn't grow on cow dung. It grows in sort of meadows and usually no cows in them. If anything, there's sheep. But I've seen them. They grow wild in Wales and I've encountered them on location and it's nothing to do with piles of dung. I mean there's many different environments in which psychoactive mushrooms grow. Some kinds rely on the cow dung, but I think he rather overemphasized the cow dung theory. That's fascinating.

What do you think was the source of cattle worship, like Choctaw, Hiok, and all these ancient civilizations that worship cattle, and this connection that McKenna made with those people worshiping the cattle because the cattle didn't just provide life and food because they had milk and meat, but also that there was this connection with psychedelic mushrooms. I don't know. I find that a bit far-fetched, personally. Really? I mean, in some cultures, like in England, there was a horse worship.

In the Vedic age, there was a kind of horse worship, sacred horses, too. And there are many different kinds of sacred animals. Even in India, it's not just cows that are sacred. Elephants are sacred. Ganesh is the elephant god. But elephants are sacred. Even rats are sacred in India, and monkeys. So there's lots of sacred animals. And I think that probably

come, I think with the ones that are wild, basically wild, like elephants and rats and monkeys, this probably comes out of kind of shamanic roots. But I think when people started domesticating animals, then, you know, how do you relate to domesticated animals? Are they like slaves? Or are they... The cow is seen by most Hindus as the divine mother, the provider of milk. Do you regard them as sacred or do you just regard them as cogs in a factory farming machine? Well, that's the way they're regarded now in feedlots and so on in the United States and in Europe. But I think in a religious culture, when you domesticate animals, there's a sense in which they take on a religious significance. And, you know, for the Jewish people, then goats and sheep were the main ones that took on a religious significance.

You know, Jesus, Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, the Agnes Day. This is a sacrificial lamb, which is a sort of sacred lamb. And so there's a sacralization of sheep in the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic tradition. It completely makes sense that people would worship cows and even horses because they need the horses for transportation um you know in a lot of cultures they even used horses to stay alive like they drank the blood of the horses that was a big thing with the mongols it's one of the reasons why they they brought like you know each each man had many horses that they would carry with them yes and they would mix it with milk and it would be a way to stay alive mare milk they would take the the blood of uh certain horses the milk of other ones and all that makes sense what i've always wondered though was how did they how did they lose

the meaning of soma like how did how is that such a an open thing open to interpretation i mean what what happened a lot if it was such an amazing thing i mean to interpretation? I mean, what happened a lot, if it was such an amazing thing, I mean, you read the descriptions of Soma, you know, how fantastic it is and how huge a part of it was in their culture and their connection to the divine, how did they lose what it means? Well, I agree. I think it's a mystery and it's similar in Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries, this cave where they went in for these psychedelic rites of passage that Plato and people did.

It was a big part of life in ancient Greece. What was that? And the most common theories are ones where people see it as Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric. I've never found those particularly plausible because whenever I've taken fly agaric, only once or twice, all it did was give me a headache and um it's maybe they had different varieties of it but I don't know anyone who's had a totally amazing fly agaric trip I've only spoken to people online that have I've I've only had it once and I felt the same way it didn't do anything for me I I I

don't know if it enhanced but I did it and And then we did it for a couple hours and it didn't seem to have any effect. And then we took psilocybin after that and it had a huge effect. It was just a monster trip. And I wonder if it was some sort of a combinatory experience. Possibly. But that was another thing that McKenna speculated about, whether it was variable genetically, variable seasonally, variable as far as like geographically. Yes. And whether it's transformed like reindeer and transformed by the reindeer and then where they drink the urine of reindeer after the reindeer have eaten it and stuff.

Right. And the laps and people. Well, it's also all the different connections to the Siberian shamans and that the whole Christmas thing, the whole connection to Christmas and the Amanita muscaria mushroom. It's very, very bizarre that elves are connected with this particular mushroom, which

is connected with Christmas and gifts and the symbiotic relationship to carniferous trees, like the whole deal. It is. It's mysterious. But I've never found that area of speculation particularly satisfying. I mean, if the evidence pointed towards Stropharia cubensis or Psilocybe semilansilata, you know, the liberty cap or our native psychedelic mushroom in England, then it might be more convincing. Right. I mean, the fact is we don't know. And it might be more convincing. Right. I mean, the fact is we don't know, and it's really a matter of speculation.

Yeah, I wonder if it's like, you know, like heirloom tomatoes. You know, you eat an heirloom tomato, they're so delicious. They're fantastic. They're sweet. They're so rich and dark. Or you can get one of these creepy tomatoes that they grow that live like, they last like a month on a shelf. And they're pale and they're hard and they just taste like shit.

I mean, there's nothing to them. Like, they look different. They taste different. I wonder if that somehow or another happened to the Amanita where it lost its psychedelic properties. Unlikely, because it's never been cultivated. And, you know, it grows in the wild. because it's never been cultivated and it grows in the wild. Could it be maybe just the temperature variations,

like that maybe you have to have it in that incredibly cold environment of Siberia for it to be that it's geographically genetically variable? Or what you said makes the most sense to me that it was mixed with something else. It's like in ayahuasca, if you just took one of the components of the brew, if the historical data pointed towards this being there, you'd say, okay, this is what it was. But actually, neither of the components would work on their own. So it may well have been that it was part of a mixture. That does kind of make sense for Soma, right?

Because wasn't Soma actually, it was described as some sort of a mixture. Yeah, and so was the Eleusinian Mysteries. You still don't know what the Eleusinian mysteries are, huh? Is there any speculation as to what that was? Well, Graham Hancock has speculations, of course, but I don't know. The ones I've seen would include opium and cannabis as part of the mix. I mean, cannabis was widely known in the ancient world, and after all, hemp ropes were used for thousands of years. People were growing hemp. Opium has been known for an awfully long time.

So what else might have been in there? We don't know. Well, that's the other thing too, the consumption, the eating of cannabis. Eating of hash has produced incredible psychedelic experiences for people. They've eaten large enough quantities where it's been very mushroom-like. Much more psychedelic when eaten, yes. And it's traditional to take it by mouth in India as well as to smoke it. I mean, it's a normal thing, the festival of Holi, H-O-L-I.

It's a major Hindu festival. When I was living in India, I was renting a wing of a crumbling palace in Hyderabad from a family of impoverished Rajas. And they were very respectable, although impoverished. And on Holi, this festival day, the Raja's wife, the Rani, came to me and she said dr. Saab you must take our special drink she said this is our special drink for holy and stuff and I said what is it she said oh I will tell you later she said she's like the Joey Diaz of India dosed you up so I took drank this this bang and she said have some more and so and I was very stoned with this bhang, this drink, this cannabis-containing drink. And then everyone was sort of rushing around throwing colored water at each other.

But, I mean, this was a highly respectable conservative Brahmin family. And this was just part of their traditional way of life. And in the non-smoke, in the drunk form. Wow. As a liquid. The edible form. That's quite amazing. I mean, I often wonder how much different our worldview would be

if we had those sort of traditions here in America because that's traditions and just sort of these cultural norms that we accept. They shape so much of our behavior. They shape so much of how we view the world. And so much of it is just based on momentum. It's just based on what did your grandparents do? What did they teach your parents? And what did your parents teach you? And what's the collective culture of your neighborhood, your community? Yes, exactly. One thing that's just occurred to me, well, there's two things I'd like to ask you. Well, one thing, let me ask you something. Please. someone staring at you, or you can stare at someone and make them turn around. This is

something which is very widespread in the population. There's been a kind of scientific taboo for years about it, because it ought not to happen. If your mind's nothing but your brain, looking at someone shouldn't affect them, because everything's all inside your head. Whereas if when you look at somebody, the image that you're seeing is projected out, as I suggest it is, when I look at you now, I don't think my image of you in three dimensions and full color is inside my head. I think it's where you are. I think I'm projecting out my image of you. Everything I'm seeing in this room is where it seems to be projected out. My mind's extended beyond my brain.

Anyway, that is how we experience it. The official theory is it's all inside the head. And because the official theory says this is just a superstition, people can't really tell when they're being looked at. There's been almost no scientific investigation till I took it up in the 1980s. And now quite a number of people have done this research on the sense of being stared at to find out if people really can tell when they're being stared at from behind I've done lots of experiments in schools kids are particularly sensitive to this more so than grown-ups really yes and I then to find out about I thought well look I've done the experiments but who are the

professionals so I and my research assistant interviewed security guards, store detectives, the drug squad at Heathrow, police, and private detectives. You know, have you ever had this experience? Do people know when they're being watched? Almost everyone who watches others for a living said, sure, of course they do. And, you know, if you're being trained to be a private detective, trained how to follow somebody, you don't stare at their back because they're likely to turn around and catch your eye. So anyway, I wrote about this in my book, The Sense of Being

Stared At, about this research and about its implications for the nature of our minds. But I had recently, somebody came to me from a British defense research laboratory. And he said to me they've got very interested in this in the army because there's some generals are worried that British troops in Afghanistan are now so laden down with kit, you know, GPS systems. I mean, their whole body is covered with electronic kit. And they've found that when they're so top-heavy carrying all this kit, they have to look down at the ground all the time to avoid stumbling

because it's harder to walk with all this stuff. And they can easily be picked off by guerrilla fighters behind rocks with rifles. And so what they said is, do you think we could train people in threat awareness so they could actually become more sensitive? could train people in threat awareness so they could actually become more sensitive. Now, in the martial arts, I know some martial arts do have threat awareness training so that people, when blindfolded, have to become more aware of when somebody is looking at them or going to attack them from behind. So my question to you, since this is your world, not mine, is how easy do you think

it would be to train people in threat awareness to become more sensitive to knowing when they're being looked at? That's very interesting. I have never been a part of any martial art that teaches people threat awareness. The martial arts that I've been involved in have all been about acquiring very specific skills

for hand-to-hand combat against other trained adversaries. There's a bunch of different types of martial arts that emphasize what you call self-defense type martial arts. Yes. My issue with those guys and the practices of self-defense type martial arts is that almost everything that they're teaching would only work against a non-trained opponent um they they have all these ideas like if a guy comes at you and throws a punch you grab his wrist you do this you do that all that stuff only works on someone who doesn't know how to fight and my thinking is always learn what works on trained killers learn things that

are undeniable against the most skilled martial artists those are the things you want to learn and through this practice of very very difficult um to pull off techniques very difficult training pushing yourself expanding the boundaries of your your your your willingness to push your body and your mind that's how you truly learn about yourself and Miyamoto Musashi had this expression that he wrote in the book of five rings that once you understand the way broadly you will see it in all things and that that way being in his world was the way of sword fighting and that you would understand this and it's most incredible and intense way and you would see the same sort of

path of of the the true path in calligraphy in carpentry in all sorts of expressive art forms and that this is in my opinion um what is the great benefit of martial arts it's the developing of your human potential through this incredibly difficult endeavor and i've always found that these guys who like blindfold and look out for it's all bullshit there's a tremendous amount of bullshit in martial arts it's one of the worst oh is it yeah much less so now because of the new movement from 1993 on has been the movement of mixed martial arts and that's because of these things called uh ultimate fighting championship and mixed martial arts competitions and what mixed martial arts competitions have done is there was always these ideas that different people had like

death touches and this guy could just he could hit you in a certain place and use his chi and knock you back all those guys failed miserably in competition not a single one was successful not one every single one was beaten down and it just showed there's no mysticism when it comes to martial arts the true mysticism is the conquering of your fears the ability to understand how to remain calm during these incredibly stressful moments of competition and through repetition and intelligent development of technique that's what what real martial arts training teaches people and that any divine feeling you get from a true master you would get from a pianist as well you would get from a true uh a brilliant painter you know you've you've met alex gray right yes brilliant painter but you

know how that feeling you get when you're around him like he's a master you know what i mean like he has this this sense of this like very you like you know you're in the presence of a very unique person and i have experienced that same feeling when i've been around martial artists and that same feeling when i've been around you know just great minds great thinkers there's what you do is you you recognize you're recognizing greatness you're recognizing what musashi said you're recognizing someone who understands the way broadly and um i don't i don't believe in a lot of these ideas of uh of self-defense training you know i think there's there's certain techniques that are very effective for soldiers like disarmament techniques like how to take someone's pistol away how to uh how to defend

against a knife attack where it's very technique oriented uh krav maga incorporates a lot of those which is an israeli martial art that takes a lot of the best aspects of many different martial arts and they uh they train that um there are definitely real techniques involved that have been taught to soldiers and by soldiers when it comes to disarmament when it comes to how to deal with hand-to-hand combat in certain situations but i think overall a lot of the quote-unquote self-defense styles are bullshit and a lot of the uh you know we're going to blindfold you and people are going to kick you if i blindfold you you're going to get fucked up all right if i blindfold you there's not a person alive that's going to stop me from punching them in the face if i

blindfold them you're not going to know what's coming no the only thing that you can help is if you have control of a body like if you're blindfolded you can grapple very well but i could i've grappled with my eyes closed before. But the reason being is that if I am holding on to your waist, if I have a hold of you, I know where everything else is. It's just a pattern thing. It's a pattern recognition. I've been in that position so many times that I know where your neck is going to be.

I know where your arm is going to be. If I isolate your shoulder, I know where your neck is going to be. I know where your arm is going to be. If I isolate your shoulder, I know where your wrist is going to be. I know how to isolate those joints without having to look at them. So in that sense, you could do some things blindfolded, but not striking, not distance. No. Well, I think the threat awareness stuff was not so much that you could fight blindfolded, but training people to feel from which direction

someone was looking at them from behind. Now, it seems to me plausible that you could train that, but, you know, it's not my world. And so, really, I mean, this is an issue. If they asked my advice on experimental design, what I'd do for threat awareness is this. I'd have, say, take a five-story building. do for threat awareness is this. I'd have, say, take a five-story building. On one of the five stories selected at random, you'd do it at night, have guys hidden behind in offices that can look at people walking along corridors. You'd have CCTV cameras and people watching them on that floor. But on the other four floors, you'd switch off the TV cameras and there'd be nobody there. And

you'd have somebody walk through each floor of this building. And then they'd have to say which one they were being watched in. And one out of five, if they got it right, you know, lots of times, there's a one in five chance of getting it right just by guessing. But if you find results above score, above chance, you could then say, well, these people are actually detecting potential threats, and you might be able to train people to get better at it. What you did, your study, correct me if I'm wrong, you had people sit down, and then they hit a button when they felt someone looking at them? No.

What happened was this. Well, there's two methods. One, the method I've mainly used is the simplest one that you can do with kids. Was there someone looking at them? No. What happened was this. Well, there's two methods. The method I've mainly used is the simplest one that you can do with kids in schools. One person's blindfolded with an airline-style blindfold to cut out peripheral vision. The other person sits behind them. And then in a random series of trials, the simplest method is tossing a coin. But I have random sheets of instructions. You'd look or you don't look. So if it's a looking trial, the person behind

stares at the back of their neck and thinks about them. And then after 10 seconds, there's a click. And so they hear a click or a beep. They know the trial's begun. And within 10 seconds, they have to say looking or not looking. Are you being looked at or not? Yes or no. It's right or wrong. And then the next trial at random would be looking or not looking. And if it's not looking, they look away and think of something else. And people have to guess. We usually do 20 of these. They're only 10 seconds each, so it doesn't take long. And this gives results where most people score above chance, 50% chance, but many, if you take an average, it comes out around 55 to 60%. So it's not a big

effect, but over hundreds of thousands of trials, it shows something's going on. Statistically significant. Yes, very significant. And if you do it through windows to eliminate smell or sound or one-way mirrors, it still works. And in Amsterdam, this has been running in the Science Museum for 20 years. And it's one of the biggest experiments ever conducted. The interesting thing there is the overall results are extremely positive, highly significant statistically. But what they've shown is what I've already found in my own experiments. The most sensitive subjects are children under the age of nine. And I think most of us, when

we're older, we go out into the world, there's crowded streets, lots of people. Look, we desensitize ourselves, but children are much more sensitive. I wonder if that case, I wonder if a really attractive woman would be the worst at it, because really attractive women are used to putting on blindfolds and walking past people staring at them all the time. Yes. Well, there is a slight difference in those who've experienced this. More women than men have experienced being stared at when you do surveys,

and more men than women have experienced turning at others and looking at others and making them turn around. Men are leers. Yes. So attractive women do have to, as you say, they have to learn to avoid meeting people's gaze. I have this photograph, American Girl in Italy. It's from 1951.

It's a fascinating photograph. It's a famous photograph. This American woman is walking down the street next to these animals, these men that are grabbing their crotch. And she has this look on her face like she's not looking at anyone in particular she's just going straightforward and um like that woman would be like a perfect candidate someone who's like used to blocking off yes all these leering yes freaks they're staring at her when you um Was there anyone that you'd ever done that study on that was like really good at it? Like 75%, 80%?

Oh, 100%. Yes. 100%? Yes. Someone got 100%? Yes. And that was my older son, Merlin. Whoa, Merlin.

He's a wizard. Got a son named Merlin? Yes. That's ridiculous. He's a scientist. I bet. He's doing a PhD at the moment in tropical ecology. Dr. Merlin. Wow. Dr. Merlin. My younger son, who's 24, is a scientist. I bet. He's doing a PhD at the moment in tropical ecology. Dr. Merlin.

Wow. Dr. Merlin. My younger son, who's 24, is a musician. He gets 100%. Yes. When Merlin was four years old, I did this experiment with him. You know, blindfold him. He's sitting there.

I said, look, I'm going to look at you some of the time. The rest of the time, not. And each time you hear this click, you have to say if you think you're being looked at. He got it right 100% of the time. So I couldn't believe this click you have to say if you think you're being looked at he got it right 100 of the time so i couldn't believe this he wasn't cheating i mean he didn't know about cheating he was four he's four wow and so i did it again and he was brilliant and he said daddy you've done can we do it the other way around can you tell when i'm looking at you so i said okay we'll try that and we did it the other way around. And I, you know, out of 20 trials, I got sort of 11 out of 20. It was above chance, but I was wrong quite a lot of the time. Then he got the idea, well, you can be wrong. And I was wrong and sort of doubt entered

his mind. And after that, when I tested him, it was still fairly high, 75%, but he never got 100% again after the first two times. That's interesting. And what were the numbers? Like how many times did you do it? Well, the first two times were 20 times each. 20 times. So normally I do these trials with 20 trials, and most people would get, say, 11 out of 20.

And he was getting 20 out of 20. That's insane. Which is hugely significant, of course. Anyway, the thing is that young children are very, very sensitive to this. And how old are yours? Four and six are the youngest ones. Oh, well, you see, check it out. I'm going to.

I've already got my plans for tonight. I'm going to go on the way home. I'm going to pick up some blindfolds. Yeah, that's brilliant. It's really interesting, the idea that you introduce the possibility of failure, and then he was like, oh, and then doubt crept in. Exactly. And the problem with the kinds of tests,

I do tests on the sense of being stared at, telepathy. I'm doing a lot on telephone telepathy. Can you tell who's calling? The problem with these kinds of experiments is that you have to set them up so that people can be right or wrong. And very few people are right all the time. But as soon as doubt creeps in, the mind interferes. People think, oh, maybe I guessed one way last time. It's statistical.

It should be the other way this time. And they start, as soon as that kind of thing goes on, people lose it. Boy, that is life in a nutshell, isn't it? Like, as soon as you have doubt, your whole world is just a mess. And unfortunately, these experiments that I do introduce doubt into the, because I have to do statistical experiments that will be credible to skeptics. So there's a kind of skepticism built into the experiments. I haven't yet found a way of doing these I'm always look the Holy Grail would be to find ways of doing these tests where

people don't realize that they're being tested and there could be there's doubt how could that be done though well I'm thinking of one kind of test that would be incorporated in a video game where, say, you have to choose between going through one door or another door. And one door you go through, it's absolutely awful. And the other door you escape and you're on to sort of next stage. You could have it where when people choose, it hasn't been decided. You'd have a random event thing that would determine which door you go through after you've made the choice to go through it.

This is then called pre-sentiment or precognition. It's like knowing the future. And so if people were right more often than they were wrong, you'd know, because it purely chances should be 50-50. If some people were coming out 60-40, you wouldn't say this is a psychological test. You would say, you know, how lucky are you? And can you be consistently lucky in this? And it would be more like luck. It would still involve an element of doubt

because you might start thinking, oh, I'm not very lucky today. But it wouldn't be framed as a scientific experiment. It would be framed as a way of training your ability to be lucky. Whoa. Training your ability to be lucky. Intuition is a very strange thing. And some people believe in it and some people don't. Some people believe that you choices like you know you'll hear people that are successful that are confident and again hey I've always been lucky I've got great instincts but that there is something to instincts there's something to trusting certain folks and not trusting certain folks based on just immediately the feeling that you get

when you meet them some things just don't seem right and I think a lot of it's probably pattern recognition a lot of it is know, I've been around guys like this before. I know what they're about. This guy's just got a little bit of bullshit in him. I've got to get out of here, you know? Well, I think intuition just means direct knowing. And some of it can be telepathic. Some of it can be unconscious pattern recognition.

There's lots of components. But some of them, I think, are what you could call parapsychological, you know, feeling the future or picking up things telepathically. And, you know, these recent experiments of Darrell Bem at Cornell on feeling the future. I don't know if you've looked into those. Let me just keep an eye on the time. It's one o'clock. Okay, well. You have a pocket watch, old school, look at you, with a chain on it. Yes. Wow. I don't like wearing wristwatches. Let me

check that out. How do you, would you have it connected to your belt or something? Yes, yes, it's over the trousers. Wow, pretty slick. Who wears a pocket watch? Well, you know, you need to know the time sometimes. Do you not like watches? No, you know, you need to know the time sometimes. Do you not like watches? No, I don't like being manacled to time. Ah, manacled. Yeah. But do you carry a cell phone?

No. Ooh, you're one of those guys. Yeah. How come? I hate being interrupted. And, you know, I don't like the phone at home. I don't use phones much. I may use email. That's fine. You can always just shut your phone off. I know, but don't like the phone at home. I don't use phones much. I may use email.

That's fine. You can always just shut your phone off. I know, but I'd rather not have it. I do have one because I'm doing experiments on cell phones, on telephone telepathy. My friend Steve, who I was talking about from London, same thing. He hates having a phone. Drives his wife crazy. Yes.

Well, that's a good reason for not having one. I don't want to be interrupted all the time. And if I go for a walk or if I'm working or something, I find it really annoying if the phone rings. Anyway, the pocket watch means I can know the time when I need to know. I'm going to have to go fairly soon, but not quite yet. Where were we? Telepathy tests and intuition. Sometimes it's Darrell Bem's experiments

are very simple and it's called Feeling the Future. And there's this phenomenon that Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences has done a lot of research on where it turns out that we can respond a few seconds before an emotionally arousing event. Our body starts preparing for it before it happens. This would be very relevant to fast sports, ping pong, tennis, cricket, downhill skiing, and probably martial arts as well.

And this research seems to me pretty convincing. I've been a subject in some of these experiments myself. And the Dean Radin version of it is this. You sit there in front of a computer screen. You're wearing electrodes that measure emotional arousal. You know, adrenaline causes sweating and emotional arousal, like a lie detector. So it's a standard way of measuring emotional arousal. You know, adrenaline causes sweating and emotional arousal, like a lie detector. So it's a standard way of measuring emotional arousal. When you're ready, you press a button, and 10 seconds later, a picture appears on the screen. Most of the pictures are neutral,

you know, landscapes, you know, bowl of flowers or something like that, vaguely pleasant. Some of them are scenes that are emotionally arousing, hardcore pornography or scenes of extreme violence. Now, almost everybody when they see hardcore pornography or scenes of violence is emotionally aroused, even if they don't want to be, they are. And the lie detector thing shows a huge emotional arousal. The interesting thing in these experiments is the emotional arousal begins about five seconds before the picture appears on the screen. Five seconds? Five seconds.

That's a long time. It's a long time. For people ready, here's five seconds. Go. Five seconds. That's a long time. A long time. And so the body, the heart beats beating faster, the fight or flight response, you know, the adrenaline kind of response kicks in. So when the stimulus occurs, the body's already sort of revved up with this emotional response. Now, this is work that Dean Radin's done. He's repeated it and it's been replicated elsewhere. It's called pre-sentiment, feeling

in advance. And the decision as to which picture appears on the screen is made by the computer a millisecond before it actually appears. There's no one in the world knows what picture's going to appear. Now this is really interesting you see, because it shows there's a kind of

feeding back of emotion. Now Daryl Bem at Cornell, who is a very respected professor of psychology, has been doing a different kind of experiment which doesn't involve the lie detector. His experiments, you sit in front of a computer screen and there's two curtains there. Behind one of those curtains, there's a blank wall, an image of a blank wall. Behind the other one, there's a pornographic image. Now, most people, even if they don't normally watch pornography, are more interested in seeing a pornographic image than a blank wall. And before you do the test, you do, there's a simple questionnaire, are you gay, straight, etc.

So people who are gay get gay pornographic images. So those are emotionally arousing. So what happens, you sit down at the computer, and you click on one of those two curtains, which one you want to click on, you choose which of the two. It's random, whether you'll get the wall or the pornographic image. So you click on one, and most people would hope that they're going to see the pornographic image, a different one each time. And the computer makes the decision which one to roll back, which curtain to roll back after you've made the click.

People don't know that this decision is only made by the computer after they've decided. They think it's already there. So most people don't know that they're doing a pre-sentiment test. So what happens is in these experiments, about 53% or 54% of the time, people get the pornographic image, whereas by pure chance, it would be 50%. And if instead of a pornographic image, you have a sort of

mildly pleasant landscape or something that's not emotionally arousing, it's down to 50%. Whoa. So this is telling us that something about emotional arousal can work back in time. And when you think about fast sports, imagine, you know, tennis. People are serving at 90 miles an hour. There's not time for the eye to take in the angle of the ball, to process it in the brain through clunky brain processing, to send messages along nerves to muscles to get the whole body ready, or in a penalty shootout. The goalie has to, in a football-soccer match, they have to react very quickly. And in ping- soccer match, they have to react very quickly.

And in ping pong, you have to react quickly. In cricket, people, Australian fast bowlers bowl at 100 miles an hour in cricket. There's not long enough. And in downhill skiing, you come around a corner. It's too fast. So I think that part of the way we're reacting, and I think this comes out most in sports, and it would also come out driving a car. If you got the five-second in advance warning some accident's about to happen, you could concentrate and perhaps avoid it better.

This is a fascinating field of research, which is not yet being picked up by sports psychologists or by I've told several people in the military about it because I think it would be really interesting I don't think it's going to do any harm if they know this but say for example you had your physiology being monitored you're in a flight simulator or a driving simulator and say you had it so that when you got an otherwise inexplicable emotional arousal going on, you'd be unconscious of it to start with. Say it was wired up so a red light went on in the cockpit of the flight simulator. It might sometimes be a false alarm. But every time that light went on, the message would be concentrate how something bad might happen.

This could be a useful technological gadget. And so I think this is, you know, there's a lot of potential in this kind of research, which is only just being begun to be explored. And the reason I've encouraged people in the British defense research establishment to do this is because they're more likely to take it up than people in universities. Because in universities, you know, there's this kind of dogmatic skepticism that means people say, oh, it's rubbish, it's woo, it's pseudoscience, etc. I mean, stupid reactions, really. The most interesting, yes, this is really interesting. Can we find out more and can we apply it that's incredibly fascinating do you think that these things

like this uh this pre precognition ability or this uh instincts or these ability to recognize these patterns do you think this is possibly some emerging thing in in human beings emerging aspect of the development of humans i mean obviously if you believe in evolution we were one thing now we are this we are what we are now which is radically different from the pre-human hominids of two million plus years ago we're very very different if you just extrapolate a million years now, we're going to be very different from what we are now. Do you think that this aspect of human beings, of human life, is a developing thing, this precognition ability, this ability to communicate with each other? Do you think maybe that's what's manifesting itself when you think about someone and all of a sudden the phone rings

and it's them, like instantaneously? Well, I think that it's something in traditional societies that's actually better developed than in modern ones where people don't talk about it on the whole. There's no training for it and stuff. In traditional societies, people take these things for granted and they rely on them. Now, the phone is an interesting case because this is a modern technology. But I think that telepathy as a means of communication

between people who know each other well is actually, it's always been going on. Animals have it. I've been doing research on telepathy in dogs. I wrote a book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. I did lots of experiments on, are dogs picking it up just by routine or car sounds?

The answer is no. We film them. We have people come at random times in unfamiliar vehicles. The dogs still know. But why have people had such a hard time replicating those experiments? Well, they haven't. The dog one's been replicated. It was replicated by a skeptic who then pretended he hadn't replicated it. But it's now generally agreed that his results agreed perfectly with my own. And millions of people have dogs that do this. So I don't think it's hard to replicate.

It's just that if you do this in a university, it's likely to end your career. Yeah, well, is that what it is? Because I've read online people that have disagreed with you saying that no one has ever replicated your results. Oh, yes. Well, that's the skeptics' disinformation. Well, that's the skeptics' disinformation. It's been replicated by one of the leading skeptics in Britain who then pretended falsely that he hadn't replicated it. And who is that? Richard Wiseman. And online on my website, you can see his data plotted on graphs showing exactly the same effect as I found.

Is it statistically significant or is it 100%? Oh, no, it's statistically significant. His data and significant or is it 100%? It's statistically significant, his data and mine. What is your data? How often do they know and how often were they unaware? About 80% of the time. We did a series of 100 trials with one dog and on 80 of those occasions, the dog started waiting when the person was about to come home. It was actually before she got in the car to come home or the taxi. It picked up her intention. And this was at random times. On 20 occasions out of 100, it didn't.

On three or four of those, the dog was sick. And on the other occasions, it was when there was a bitch on heat in the next apartment, which showed this dog could be distracted. But even if you include all 100 events, including the ones where the dog was, and do the statistics, it's still massively significant. That's fascinating. So you think that much like what you were talking about with your son,

who was able to recognize 100% of the time when someone was staring at him, that dogs, because they don't have like a cultural context, they don't have all this doubt in their head. That's they do it and they have an emotional investment too it's not like a boring parapsychology experiment you know for a dog it's immensely emotionally exciting when the owner comes home right that there's an emotional charge they do it over and over again they never get bored of their owners coming home. So this is the telephone phenomenon, which I can briefly summarize is one I do in my tests. People who say this happens to them in real life, give me the names and numbers of four people it might happen with.

We pick they sit at home being filmed. So we know they're not getting other phone calls or text messages or something. And they are on a landline phone with no caller ID display. We pick one of the four callers at random and call them up and say, if you were doing it, we'd say, please ring Joe now. And they think about you for a bit. They ring you. Your phone rings. And before you pick it up, you have to say who you for a bit. They ring you. Your phone rings. And before you pick it up, you have to say who you think it is. You know, I think it's John.

And you pick it up, say, hi, John. You're right or you're wrong. You can't know from the normal patterns of life because it's randomly chosen. And so by chance, you'd be right one time in four, 25%. In these experiments, the average score in our film test is 45%, massively significant statistically. And this has now been replicated in other universities.

Even one of Britain's leading skeptics checked this out, and he's getting positive results, much to his dismay. And so this is a... I've now got an automated test. I'm about to launch it in the US, but it's already launched in Britain where people can do this on cell phones with their friends. You don't have to be in a lab. I think telephone telepathy is real. And I think what's happening is that when you want to call someone, if I wanted to call you, I'd form the intention to call you. I've got a motive to call you. I'd be thinking about Joe. And then I'd get my phone out. I'd dial a number or press the memory thing for you. When I form the intention to call you, I think you could,

in some cases, pick up that intention. You might start thinking about me for no apparent reason. And then the call comes through. And you say, it's funny, I was just thinking about me for no apparent reason and then the call comes through and you say it's funny I was just talking thinking about you and so I think this is a genuinely telepathic phenomenon in many cases sometimes it can be coincidence but on average it seems to be a real effect and I think this is an example of where telepathy really is evolving along with technology. It happens with emails and text messages as well. Until recently, the only way you could get in touch with someone at a distance was telepathically, if you wanted a quick response.

Now you can do it by phone. I've also done research on what I think is one of the basic biological forms of this, which are mothers and babies. I think it's one of the basic biological forms of this, which are mothers and babies. Many nursing mothers find that when they're away from their baby, for no apparent reason, their milk lets down, their breasts start squeezing out milk. Normally that happens when the baby cries and they feel their breasts tinkle. Say there was a nursing mother here now and there was no baby crying here and she felt her milk let down. Most nursing mothers think my baby needs me and until recently they just went

home to the baby. Now they call home on a cell phone but I've done studies on nursing mothers in London, 20 of them over a two-month period each and we found that it was very, very highly significant. It wasn't just synchronized rhythms. They were responding when their baby needed them. And before telephones were invented, any mother that could pick up when her baby needed her and went to the baby would have a baby that survived better than a mother that didn't pick it up. So I think telephones, in a way, give us a technological way of doing something that in the past happened more unreliably by telepathy. So do you think that these telephones connecting to telepathy is somehow or another related to this morphic field that is seemingly undefined?

We know, or rather you believe, that this is a real phenomenon, that it exists, but we don't know exactly what the mechanism is. Yeah, I think what happens with social groups, any social group, is that the field as a whole, the group as a whole has a field. Like a magnetic field will arrange iron filings, which are within its field of influence. If you have a flock of birds, like starlings that are flying together, there's a kind of field that coordinates their movement, so they can change direction rapidly without bumping into each other. If you have a school of fish, you've got the same kind of thing.

If you have a pack of wolves and they leave the young, the cubs are left behind in the den with a babysitter while the adults go out hunting to bring food back for the young. The field that links them isn't broken, it stretches like an invisible elastic band. I think that's the basis of telepathy. I think it's to do with social bonds through social fields. And a mother and the baby are very closely linked and it's as if there's this invisible elastic band between them. And so when you look at telephone telepathy, it typically only happens with people you know well. It happens between mothers and children, husbands and wives, lovers, partners, therapists and clients if there's a kind of emotional charge, best friends. It doesn't happen with insurance

salesmen and people to whom you're not emotionally connected. It depends on social bonds. And so I think the morphic field of the social group is something that applies to any social group. A family has a morphic field. A football team has one. Michael Murphy, who founded the Esalen Institute, did a fascinating book called The Psychic Side of Sports. And he describes these interviews with football players. And many of them turned quite mystical when they were interviewed in private. They wouldn't talk about it in the locker room for fear of being thought weird.

But many of them, like soccer players, they said when the game's going well, it's as if they can just feel where other people are on the field. It was like an instinct. They just somehow, they were working like a single organism. I think that's an example of a morphic field of a social group. And I think that's why team sports are so interesting to watch because it's not just about guys being brilliant. It's about guys working together and in a way that's highly coordinated. And the more effectively the team works together, the more effective it is. That's fascinating stuff.

It's really interesting to consider how much of a factor that does play, what exactly it is, too. Yes. It's amazing. You're out of time. Rupert Sheldrake. RupertSheldrake.org is your website. No, Sheld, too. Yes. It's amazing. You're out of time. Rupert Sheldrake. RupertSheldrake.org is your website. No, Sheldrake.org.

Oh, Sheldrake.org. I'm sorry. Just Sheldrake.org. And Rupert Sheldrake is your Twitter handle, correct? Do you handle all that stuff yourself? No, actually, I don't really use Twitter. No? Forget that.

Really? I do have one, but I don't use it. Someone set it up for me, and I never learned how. Your last tweet was September 13th. I posted a new photo to Facebook. Oh, so you use Facebook. Is that what it is? I use Facebook, yes.

And it automatically posts to Twitter? Yes, that's right. It works onto that, yes. Okay. Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate this. It was really cool to have a conversation with you after listening to you and the trial logs. I really appreciated it. And we could do this any time you're in town.

Okay. Well, it's fun for me, too. I've really enjoyed it. And we could do this any time you're in town. Okay. Well, it's fun for me too. I've really enjoyed it, Jay. How often are you in L.A.? The last time was 27 years ago. That's a long time. Wow, I got lucky. I got lucky.

All right. Thank you very much. I really, really appreciate it. Rupert Sheldrake, ladies and gentlemen. We'll see you Thursday with Graham Hancock. Until then, much love.

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