Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Rupert Sheldrake on Exposing the deliberate lies of certain scientists, and peer reviewed telepathy

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoriesOfEverythingPatreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44All the data Rupert Sheldrake references is here: https://www.sheldrake.org/research A mini-doc about the affair is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkrLJhBC3X40:00 Introduction    1:00 Why is it that scientists tend to not take Rupert's ideas seriously? (polemics on materialism and dogmatic atheists) 2:40 Will "science" come to an end? What will cause this? 5:10 On the false divide between the natural and the supernatural 11:10 Rupert's opinion on Daniel Dennett's theory of consciousness 13:10 On the benign or deleterious nature of "reason" 15:25 Does our unconscious have an unconscious? How far down does this go? 18:05 Do we have free will, if we're infinitely influenced by what lies outside our control? 22:05 Is the "bedrock" of consciousness ordered or random? 28:15 What's the reality to the picture psychedelics give you access to? 28:25 What's the ontological reason for the difference between LSD from DMT trips? 35:10 In what ways is religion ahead of science? 37:50 On Rupert's famous dog telepathy experiment and the mendacity of certain scientists 44:25 On Richard Wiseman's supposed lies / distortion (of Rupert's experiment) to the media 48:08 Wikipedia has been overtaken and distorted by guerrilla skeptics 50:00 What is the role of myth in "truth"? 53:40 Are we living in a simulation? 56:00 What religion and myth say about the creation of world 57:10 The New Atheists have a false view of God (a bearded man in the sky reprimanding you) 1:04:10 What do you like / dislike about Jordan Peterson (with regards to making religion more admissible)? 1:06:10 Where you can find out more about Rupert Sheldrake, and what he's working on next* * *Subscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.* * *I'm producing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (in 2020) and seeing more conversations like this.

Rupert Sheldrake needs no introduction. He's an author and a researcher in the field of parapsychology with a PhD from Cambridge in biochemistry. This channel is dedicated to conversations around theories of everything, consciousness, free will, God, and topics that are cognate to that. It's also about putting a spotlight on those who I don't think get as much credit as they should. And you can see my John Moffat interview as an example of that. as they should. And you can see my John Moffat interview as an example of that. Now, Rupert has plenty of credit. He's done many TED Talks. But there is one aspect which I find a significant shame. It's unfair that Rupert has been mischaracterized and that even I have had false views about him because of what I read online that I thought was legitimate but wasn't. We get to this specific

issue toward the latter half of the conversation. However, unfortunately, my video nor Peter Glynos, who's my colleague, neither his video, recorded. Either way, this is an important issue. Enjoy. Why do you think physicists, particularly theoretical physicists, don't listen to you? What's going on? Why aren't these ideas taken seriously, your ideas? Well, I'm primarily a biologist. So, I mean, the question would be better directed to biologists than physicists. Well, the fact is that what I'm putting forward are views which are considered by some to be heretical. I'm trying to find models and ways of doing science that go beyond the dogmas of mechanistic materialism.

Now, that is inevitably controversial because that is still the dominant orthodoxy or paradigm. And there are a lot of people who have a heavy investment in it particularly militant atheists and this is their world view their belief system and I'm trying to show the way to a broader and more inclusive and I think more interesting kind of science which is the point of my relatively recent book Science Set Free which has just come out in a new edition in Britain called The Science Delusion in Britain. So it's not true that everyone has a problem with it. I have a lot of friends within the scientific world. It's just that most of them keep their heads beneath the parapet because anyone who advocates uncontroversial views in science is worried about endangering their career, losing their grants, etc., etc.

But in the scientific world, there are lots of people who have much more open-minded views than you'd gather from listening to science popularizers. that this paradigm of this mechanism, the universe as a mechanism, this materialism, is a cultural phenomena, sort of a scientific paradigm that will have maybe an expiration date, something along the lines of Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolutions, and that we are maybe seeing an era that might come to an end. I'm curious what you think will cause that era to come to an end. And if we could, throughout the interview, could we touch on whether or not this universal view of the universe as a machine is historically grounded?

What was the view that peoples had before this sort of mechanism to the universe, this mechanistic view of the universe? Well, I mean the history of science, the subject I've studied, and it helps a lot in thinking about this, shows that in medieval Europe, I mean science grew up in Europe, so we're looking primarily at European history if we're looking at modern science. And of course it grew up in the Islamic world and in India and China in different ways, but science as we now know it grew out of its European roots, primarily. And in medieval Europe the general worldview was a kind of Christian animism. The nature was alive,

living organisms were truly alive, the earth was a living of Christian animism. The nature was alive, living organisms were truly alive, the earth was a living being, mother earth, the stars and the planets were intelligences, there was living beings with souls and intelligence, the whole cosmos had a soul and animals and plants had souls, even magnets had souls. We lived in an animated world and the reason we call animals animals is because the Latin word for soul is anima, beings with souls. So what the mechanistic revolution in the 17th century did was to say no this is completely wrong, this is just superstitious stuff, the world isn't made up of living beings, it's made up of inanimate matter that works in a machine-like way, and the stars and planets

are not alive in any way, they're just inanimate, and animals and plants are just machines and so are we. That was the mechanistic revolution, and that has given us modern science as we know it. But this was built in from the beginning, the idea that nature is dead, inanimate, and mechanical. So you mentioned this idea of the superstitious. In the Western European context, there's this divide between the supernatural and the natural. And this divide sort of comes along with the evolution of Western theology. But there's a professor by the name of Howell who writes on the supernatural as understood by members of the Ojibwe, a native group in North America. And he writes that the appellation of

supernatural persons, if applied to characters in the midst of northern Ojibwe people, is completely misleading, if no other reason than the fact that the concept of the supernatural presupposes the concept of the natural, the latter is not present in Ojibwe thought. Because an understanding of the supernatural is predicated on an understanding of the natural the very ancient hellenic concept more primitive societies if you would primitive in quotes lack this natural supernatural divide considering that our science grew out of this divide between oh here's the natural where you know we have turnips and mycorrhizal

fungi and forests and things, and then there's the supernatural, demons, angels, consciousness. Do you feel that this is a sort of false divide and that the time will come where this natural and supernatural will collapse, the material and the conscious? Oh, absolutely. I think it's a false divide, and I think we're already coming out of it. The divide occurred essentially in the 17th century, and before that, in the Middle Ages in Europe, the form of theology that was dominant, for example, in St. Thomas Aquinas, didn't have the supernatural as a separate category. God was in nature, the whole of nature was animated by the divine, and the whole

of nature was motivated to move towards the divine. God was in nature, nature was in God, and there just wasn't that division. But the mechanistic theory of Descartes created that division quite explicitly. I mean, that's why it's called Cartesian dualism. And what Descartes said is the whole of nature is a mechanical machine like inanimate. But there's also consciousness. And consciousness consists, it has three categories, God, angels, and demons, and things, and spirits, and human minds. And human minds are the only conscious things in the natural world, mysteriously interacting

with brains, he thought in the pineal gland. And all of the rest, God, angels, and demons, and spirits are supernatural, they're outside or beyond nature. So that created this dualistic split, which has underlain Western thought since the 17th century. And in the 19th century, there was a kind of rebellion against it from two sides by idealist philosophers on the one hand, who said, no, we don't want two things, consciousness and matter. We just want one thing, consciousness, and matter sort of dumbed down mind. That's the idealist philosophy. But the other side became predominant, the materialists, who said there aren't two things, matter and consciousness. There's only one thing, matter. That's what materialism is,

the doctrine that matters, the only reality. Therefore, God and angels and spirits and demons simply don't exist, as the whole supernatural realm is pure mumbo-jumbo imagination and superstition. And the only thing left of that realm in this view of nature was the human mind. Then the human mind has to become simply an emergent phenomenon from human brains created by physical processes inside the head. So materialism creates, it has a view of the universe as being completely non-conscious and mechanical. And the very existence of human consciousness is a terrible embarrassment for materialism. We ought not to be conscious. And in fact, materialist philosophers have spent the later part of the 20th century,

and they're still trying to do it now, trying to prove that we're not conscious, or that if we are, the consciousness doesn't actually do anything. We don't really have free will. It's just a kind of epiphenomenon or another way of talking about the physical activity of the brain. So I think that this worldview, which is what we've all been brought up with, and which we've exported to the rest of the world, the same worldview is taught in schools in China, India, South America, Africa, everywhere nowadays, because of the prestige and the successes of science and technology. I think we're emerging out of it, and that's the whole point of my book, Science Set Free.

I take the ten dogmas of contemporary science and show how actually science itself is growing out of them, is showing us the way out of them. And, for example, the dogma that our minds are nothing but our brains, the activity of our brains, that's being challenged in several ways even today within the academic and scientific world. Partly through the implausibility of the materialist worldview, partly through the intractability of the hard problem. And what it's led to is the emergence of a new kind of panpsychism, the idea that there's a difference of degree between our

consciousness and the rest of nature, not of kind, that even electrons, atoms, and so on, have some degree of consciousness, and therefore consciousness can emerge in brains not from totally non-conscious matter, but from less conscious matter. And that's surprisingly popular at the moment within the academic world. Do you have any opinion on Daniel Dennett's Explaining Consciousness book? Yes. I mean, obviously what he's trying to do is explain consciousness away. His book's called Consciousness Explained, but as many people have said it, it's better called Consciousness Explained Away. Dennett is

a true believing hardcore materialist who makes it clear that his total opposition is to Cartesian dualism, which I just mentioned, the idea there's a supernatural realm out there. But he thinks the only alternative to that is hardcore materialism. And I think he's wrong. I think there are several alternatives, including panpsychism. But he then goes to enormous lengths to try and explain consciousness away, that he wants to get rid of any kind of magic. The problem is of course that you know it's very hard to be a consistent materialist if you believe that you're a machine yourself, your mind's just about nothing but a complex computer, then your belief in materialism

is just something that your mind makes you believe, or your brain makes you believe. Materialists like to think they're an exception to their own philosophy, that they adopt their own views on the basis of reason, science, and evidence. But actually, their own philosophy says that they have no choice in doing that. They're simply programmed to believe in materialism. A meme or a meme complex has captured their brain and forces them to believe in it and they're not aware that they're being compelled to believe in it because their consciousness is a kind of

illusion. Anyway I think the problem with Dennett and other materialist philosophers is that basically they're self-refuting. Are you opposed to reason or do you see the limitations in reason? First of all we'd have to define reason for the audience. Of course I'm not opposed to reason. I spent my whole career as a research scientist publishing papers in peer- journals and doing experiments and writing books which I hope are rational. I think what reason is, is simply a function of the human mind to do with looking at evidence, evaluating things in terms of probability and so forth. I don't think it's some mysterious property with a capital R that makes us semi-divine and separate from the rest of nature.

And, you know, militant materialists go around saying they believe in science and reason. I mean, Richard Dawkins, for example, has the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and reason. I mean, Richard Dawkins, for example, has the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. But what they mean by reason is their worldview. And I find the best way of testing how serious they are about reason and science is to bring up the subject of telepathy, for example. There's a lot of evidence for it.

There's lots of experiments that suggest it really happens. It drives materialists crazy because it doesn't fit their world view, so they think it ought not to happen, therefore all the evidence must be flawed. But if you try and have a debate with a materialist about telepathy, they just get angry because they can't look at the evidence scientifically or reasonably, even though they claim to believe in reason and science, which if you have any materialist friends, this is a very good test. Bring up the subject of telepathy and see how reasonable and scientific they are in discussing it. Most of them are certainly not very reasonable or scientific,

even though they claim to believe in reason with a capital R. So I see reason with a capital R as a kind of slogan for a materialist worldview, rather than a genuine devotion to the principles of rationality. You mentioned panpsychism. Does that have a role in relation to your belief in a telepathy

between organisms, between life? And to expound on this idea of panpsychism, there's a certain sense that our conscious has an unconscious. But I think if we go deeper, is it fair to say that our unconscious has an unconscious

and that this might act as a bedrock for the emergent consciencies that we see? That is to say, if we go further, if we go down this iceberg, is there a point where my unconscious is unconscious, overlaps with yours, and that we are actually not really individuals, but emergent beings from a sort of bedrock, as the Hindus would say, that we are both dreams in this larger dream of Vishnu, or as Christians might say, that we are within the mind of God. or as Proust might say, that we are within the mind of God. Well, I think that's ultimately the case, yes.

And I think that the idea that our own personal unconscious is part of a larger unconscious is, I mean, after all, quite a well-known idea. I mean, this is the basis of Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. And Jung, the psychologist C.J. Jung, had this idea that we all draw upon this collective unconscious, which is a kind of collective memory, a collective human memory. And this underlies our dreams,

the archetypal patterns we experience in our lives and so forth. And this is very similar to my own ideas about morphic resonance. I mean my own main hypothesis about memory is that it works by a kind of resonance from the past, morphic resonance I call it, which means that each species has a kind of collective memory, not just humans. All have a collective memory and most of our habits are unconscious. I mean nature, but the general theory that I'm putting forward is that the so-called laws

of nature are more like habits. The whole of the universe has a kind of memory. And the habits of nature underlie all the regularities within the physical and chemical and biological and psychological realms. They're all habitual, and habits are generally unconscious in us as well. Therefore, the role of consciousness is always taking place against the background of habits and unconscious habits and collective memory. That's the view that I myself adopt. So do we have free will? I understand what you're saying implies that we're influenced by previous arrangements like matter has been arranged in a certain conglomeration. I think that's Lee Smolin's principle of precedence, which reminds me of

the morphic resonance theory, just in physics form. Is there room for free will? Do you personally believe in free will? Oh, of course. I think everybody does. I mean, there are people who pretend they don't or argue in seminar rooms that it doesn't exist. But I haven't met anyone who actually really believes that they're an automaton with no free choice. And our entire legal and educational system is based on belief in free will. If your brain makes you do it and you have no free will, then that would be a perfect defense in any law court for being convicted of any crime. So I think everyone believes in it, and I think rightly so.

And of course, we don't have infinite freedom of choice in all matters we're influenced by our environment our background our conditioning our habits our frameworks of thought like paradigms we're influenced by all these habits but there's a certain measure of choice we have all of us I, we all chose to be talking together right now. I don't believe I was programmed by my genes or by anything else to be talking to Kurt and Peter at this exact moment. And I don't suppose you were programmed to do it either. So I personally, I see it as a non-issue and a kind of artificial debate that I'm not very interested in. of artificial debate that I'm not very interested in.

So how do you respond to the reductionist attitude of causation? Just why did you make the decision you made because your neurons did so-and-so? And you just keep asking why, why, why, because, because, because, until you get to some wall that you could not have possibly caused. It's your mother gave birth to you or the Big Bang initial conditions. What's your response to that line of argumentation? Well, I think even reductionists would agree that chance plays a large role in what happens in nature. I mean, the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, which is their preferred theory of evolution, puts all the creativity ultimately in chance mutations. So none of them

are saying that nature is totally determined. Sorry, just to quickly interject, I'm not talking about Laplace's demon where it's completely fixed, but even if we allow for quantum fluctuations, the materialist might still say that the randomness is not dependent on you either. So whether you're determined or it's random on top of determinism, it's still not within your control. So what would you say to that? Well, then I'd say to them, well, how come you believe in materialism? What's the reason for them believing themselves? I'd turn the tables in this argument and say, what's the reason, if you're a materialist, for you believing in materialism? What's caused you to believe in that and they

probably they'd say well you know they'd have to say trans events in the brain conditioning etc they'd probably say i've been convinced of it by evidence by reason by the scientific method i believe in reason and science and then you say well okay well can you explain those in terms of materialism um because they imply free choice they imply choosing a worldview on the basis of evidence and that's why i was saying earlier i think the materialist position is self-refuting their own belief in materialism um depends on the assumption that they're free to choose on the basis of evidence and reason um and so if they're going to say everybody else's choices are totally conditioned by nerve impulses, neurotransmitters and random events in the brain, then again, in the end, or at least quite quickly, I think one will find

that they're making an exception for themselves. There is a brilliant comic, Calvin and Hobbes, where Calvin and Hobbes are going through monster land, and they're being led by a monster tour guide. And the monster tour guide and Calvin and Hobbes run across a monster who's repeating the number nine. So he's saying nine, nine, nine, nine, nine. And Calvin asks the monster tour guide,

what is he doing? He says, the monster tour guide says, oh, he's just repeating nine in a very deterministic, sequential order. He says, oh. They keep walking. And they come across another monster. And the monster's repeating

nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine. Same number over and over and across another monster. And the monster's repeating, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, same number over and over and over again. Just like the monster beforehand. They're identical. And he says, okay, is this monster, what's this monster doing? And the monster tour guide says, oh, he's saying numbers at random.

Totally undeterministically. They all happen to be There's a great sense that we couldn't tell whether or not an ordered sequence was truly chaotic or truly ordered and whether or not the phenomena of nature that we see in the conscious mind is ordered or Some you know random pattern that seems to be ordered Would you say that this applies to whatever you find as the bedrock of consciousness? Furthermore, you mentioned how you don't believe consciousness is purely material and therefore explained away, but at the same time too you recognize that the divide between sort of supernatural substance, something closer to Sartre's radical freedom,

that consciousness is this sort of free agent, isn't necessarily real, because it still recognizes that divide. What is the bedrock of consciousness, if it's neither material nor this sort of substance that transcends all material? And is it ordered, or is it random? Or can we never tell? Well, I think in the end, it's a choice of worldview, isn't it? And I think that the worldviews we have depend on our experience as well as on reason.

Most people who have a religious worldview, I mean, the great mystics in all religious traditions, believe there's a form of consciousness beyond the human level of which our consciousness is a small part, not on the basis of reason, logic, calculations or mathematics, but on the basis of mystical experiences where they feel themselves to be part of a vastly greater consciousness. And this is what the great Indian rishis were experiencing in their retreats in the Himalayas and still do and what the Buddha experienced in his moment of enlightenment. And it's what the great Christian mystics have experienced and what the Sufi mystics experience. It's in all traditions and shamanic traditions too. People don't go

to classrooms and learn about spirits. They have experiences of experiencing forms of consciousness other than our own and ultimately of a kind of ground of all consciousness itself, which we can experience through mystical experience. Meditation and other spiritual practices can help us to, makes it more likely that we'll have these kinds of experiences. These tell us, if we listen to our and pay attention to our own experience, if we have these experiences, there's a greater form of consciousness of which our own minds are part. And anyone who has that worldview, which is the worldview of all the world's religions,

and almost everyone who's got a kind of spiritual worldview takes the view that consciousness underlies the universe. And our own consciousness is part of that, a kind of fractal version of that ultimate consciousness. Then anyone who takes that view would see the universe in a different way from someone who starts from a materialist assumption. Materialism, after all, isn't based on experience who starts from a materialist assumption. Materialism,

after all, isn't based on experience. It's a purely intellectual theory that denies other forms of consciousness. That's its first step. Its first move is to say, by definition, there are no forms of consciousness outside the universe or within the universe. Everything is made of unconscious matter. And insofar as we are conscious conscious then it's just a product of our brain material brain activity that's their worldview and it's a belief system and people who are deeply embedded in it are resistant to any evidence that would take them beyond it however when you look at the actual life history of people who used to be materialists and who aren't anymore, including me, then what you find is that what's persuaded people that

consciousness is more pervasive than just a product of the brain is personal experience. Mystical experiences, for example, in near-death experiences, often for many modern people through psychedelic illuminations, and through other experiences which convince them that their mind is more than just the activity of their brain. The materialist would then counter by saying, well, that's just an illusion. But then you have the situation, what do you trust most? Do you trust an intellectual theory originating basically in its present form in the 19th century, as an attempt to get rid of dualism, religion, and so forth, as part of an atheistic crusade, a theory about science, or do you accept your own experience? your own experience. And personally, I think it's more scientific to accept experience because the very word empirical on which science is based means to base it on experience. And the Greek word empirical means experience. And in French, the word experience means experience and experiment.

So it's not as if our own experience is irrelevant to understanding consciousness. It is consciousness. What the heck are psychedelics doing beside a neurochemical reaction? How are they doing what they do? And something else I've been interested in, that's part one, something else I've been interested in is the difference between LSD as a psychedelic, and then there's DMT. It's almost like in a class of its own, but they're both psychedelics. What the heck is going on with DMT?

And is there any reality to the entities that people see? So that is, what are psychedelics doing besides the reaction in your brain? And then furthermore, what separates LSD from DMT? Well, I think, you know, what the answer you give depends on your worldview. If you start from a materialist worldview, then what they're doing is changing, they're interfering with neurotransmitter receptor sites in the brain and so forth, and leading to distorted brain activity. And on fMRI scans of people on LSD or on other psychedelics, you can actually see differences in brain activity, different areas connect up together. All that, for a materialist,

would be all you need to say. And the conscious changes in consciousness they produce are just illusions like everything else produced by the brain they're just producing a different set of illusions and there are there are materialists who take psychedelics who would explain their own experience in those terms however the experiences themselves don't seem like just something happening in the brain. People feel they're getting a true insight into some much more profound aspects of the mind. That's why they're called psychedelics, means psyche revealing, mind revealers. That's what they are. Aldous Huxley coined the term to give this idea that what they're doing is revealing something about the nature of the mind.

One thing they do is shut down the default mode network, the chattering mind that goes on all the time when we're ruminating or worrying or being anxious or just thinking. They shut down the default mode network. So does meditation and you know when people are in deep meditative states that also shuts down the default mode network. And when you shut down the chatter that's going on inside the mind then some people would argue, I would argue, that the mind then becomes more open to connecting with deeper or further or other forms of consciousness that are around us and of which we're part. But we're not normally aware because they're shut out by all this chatter.

Just like you can see people in beautiful landscapes who just are completely unaware of the landscape because they're busy doing Facebook on their smartphone or something. Their mind is completely occupied by this foreground of chatter and distraction. And some would argue that psychedelics shut out this distraction, which other methods can do too, like near-death experiences through trauma and meditation and so forth, other spiritual practices, and opens up to seeing things that are there all the time but which we don't normally see or experience. So that's the worldview of people who take a more spiritual interpretation of these. But, you know, again, you're going to come back to what people's worldviews are, the way they interpret.

What about you on your worldview? How do you see it? Well, I see it in terms of wider forms of consciousness to which we can gain access. And I think that with visionary substances like LSD and ayahuasca, where many people have visual experiences. I think what they do is open up the realm of the imagination. We have this imaginal realm anyway. Every night when we dream, we're creating scenes that aren't the same as reality, that are in some sense illusory. I think it's the same kind of faculty we have when we're dreaming,

but we enter it from the waking state in a much more vivid and enhanced state through certain kinds of psychedelics. Now, I think DMT produces something for some people more like a near-death experience. It takes you beyond that realm into some further realm of the mind or greater realm of consciousness, which is sort of beyond the realms that LSD would normally take you into, which are more like enhanced versions of the dream state, more into a kind of mystical state of unitive consciousness. So anyway, different psychedelics work differently for different people, it's hard to generalize,

but from what I've learned from talking to people and reading about these things and partly through my own experience, I think they're opening us up to these wider realms of experience. And I think that actually one of the things that is causing the cultural shift that we're all talking about at the moment is psychedelics. And if you read that book that came out last year by Michael Pollan on psychedelics called How to Change Your Mind. It was a New York Times bestseller for months. You may well have seen it. Michael Pollan is a scientific journalist and his other books on things like food, the omnivores dilemma,

his book on plants, the botany of desire. He did a book on the new science of psychedelics, the research that's going on now into the effects of psilocybin, magic mushrooms, in reducing depression, in curing people who've got various mental illnesses. These have therapeutic uses, these psychedelics. And as part of the book, he says that he started the book

as a materialist and an atheist. But he took psychedelics, he felt as an investigative journalist, he should experience what he's writing about. And by the end of the book, he's become a kind of panpsychist. You know, he thinks consciousness is much more widely distributed in nature. It's not just in human brains, it's in trees, in plants, in animals, in the earth, in the natural world. And I think many people who've taken psychedelics undergo that kind of conversion experience, where they realize it's not all just about us and about human brains. And that then leads to a wider questioning of the materialist worldview and the scientific paradigm. So my point is that most people change their minds, as he did,

through experience rather than through argument. He then becomes much more interested in panpsychist philosophy as a result of his own experience. And his book, after all, is called How to Change Your Mind. There is a sense, when you were talking about meditation, given that this is an ancient practice, that sort of the practices we have in society that we do for reasons we know not of tend to be ahead of, in some very serious sense the sciences. So for example we would wash our hands before we understood germ theory, we would take

the bark off of the aspirin tree to cure our headaches before we understood its chemical composition. These practices predate many of the scientific reasons and rationalizations as to why we do that. Do you believe that for this reason, the mystic practitioner will always be, in some sense, ahead of the scientist, ahead of the rationalist? Yes, I think when it comes to understanding consciousness, the people who understand it best are the ones who've experienced it most systematically. And if you have a Tibetan monk that's spent hours a day meditating for years,

they're basically studying the nature of their own minds from within. They're going to understand more about it than someone who's done Psychology 101 at a university and as an undergraduate, even though the graduate's going to emerge with a degree that says they've got a degree in psychology, the Tibetan monk who may have no degree is going to have a vastly deeper understanding, may not have a deeper understanding of how to measure brain waves with encephalographs and the technologies of measuring nerve impulses and that kind of thing. But in terms of the study of consciousness itself, then they've gone far further. I mean, what modern science is,

mechanistic science is really good at making machines. It's about, its metaphor is machinery. It's really good at machines. We're talking through a computer now and through the internet, and science is unrivaled no tibetan monk could possibly come up with a smartphone or you know an internet system you need engineering science and technology for that but when we come to consciousness then i think they're far in advance of anything that's come out of any science lab that I've seen in terms of understanding the true nature of the mind. I read this critique of the dog experiment

and I want to know what your response to this is. This is from Richard Wiseman. Someone said, he is not convinced. He argues, he as in Richard Wiseman. Have we told people what the dog experiment is? No. Let us please. Why don't you us please. Please.

Well, we should explain this because no one will know what we're talking about otherwise. Sure, absolutely. Well, I've been interested in telepathy for a long time, partly because I think if you have a field theory of minds and a field theory of social groups, which I do, then I would actually predict telepathy as a form of communication between bonded members of social groups. And when I thought about this first, I realized it would apply to animals. Animal groups like packs of wolves or flocks of birds or schools of fish, should be related through a field that relates the individual members of the group. And

they'd remain connected by this field even at a distance, which would mean a change in one could affect the others. Similar, analogous to quantum non-locality, where particles have been part of the same system when they move apart. If one changes, the other instantaneously takes up a different position, like one polarized photon, the other one will immediately adopt the opposite polarity. Quantum non-locality or entanglement. So something like that, I predicted, would be going on with animals. So then I thought, well, no one's looked at telepathy in animals.

In the human realm, it gets sort of associated in some people's minds with sort of spooky green light, woo woo, imaginary stuff, superstition and so forth. Treat it scientifically. If it exists, it should have evolved. If animals, if it exists, it should be there in animals. Then I asked people who have animals, dogs, cats, parrots, horses, and other animals, if they'd ever experienced their animals picking up their thoughts or intentions. And overwhelmingly, I've got more than 6,000 case histories on my database. Yes, lots of people have noticed it. And one of the most common phenomena and one of the most testable is dogs that know when their owners are coming home. About 50% of dogs go and wait at a door or window while the person they're most bonded to is on the way home from work or from holiday or whatever. Members of the household know when they're coming because the dog goes and waits

for them. This happens even if they come at non-routine times, even if they come in non-familiar vehicles. So the skeptics said to me, oh that can't be true, it's impossible, it's just make-believe, people dote on their pets and they imagine it's just a coincidence, they forget all the times they're wrong and so forth. They hadn't done any experiments but they confidently dismissed it. So I set up an experiment where we filmed the place a dog waited, this is a dog that regularly did it, we filmed the place the whole time the owner was out so we could see objectively when the dog went to the door or window. They only went at least five miles away. Dogs, even the most sensitive dogs, can't smell things for

more than about half a mile away and then the wind has to be in the right direction. They didn't know when they were coming home. I told them by mobile phone at a randomly chosen time, go home now. And they didn't travel in a familiar vehicle. They took public transport or traveled on borrowed bicycles or in taxis, different taxi each time. So there were no familiar sounds, no routine. The people at home didn't know when they were coming. They didn't know in advance when they were coming home. And in these experiments over and over again in hundreds of trials, the dog went and waited at the door for 10, 15 minutes before the person came home. There were a few times they didn't do it when the dog was sick,

or mostly the few exceptions were when there was a bitch on heat in the next apartment, so it proved the dog could be distracted. But most of the time, highly significant statistically. I then appeared on a TV program in Britain that described this research and they showed one of these experiments. Richard Wiseman is a hardcore materialist, atheist, skeptic type.

He's a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a militant campaigning skeptic. So he criticized it saying, oh, it's just routine and they hear the car sounds. And I'd already explained, that's the first thing we thought of. We spent a year doing hundreds of experiments showing it's not. It's still on TV. So it's obviously just routine. So I invited him to do experiments with the dog himself. He did with his own car, his own randomizing system. I lent him one of my

cameras. He did three experiments with the dog in the same place I'd done it. In every one of them the dog was waiting when she came home, the owner came home. It was at the window 78% of the time when she was on the way home of that period, 78% was at window. When she wasn't coming home% was at the window. When she wasn't coming home, it was at the window an average of 4% of the time. It occasionally went to look at passing cats, as it did in my experiments. And to my astonishment, Wiseman then appeared on television and in the media saying he'd refuted the psychic dog phenomenon, and that the dog had gone to the window before she came home, and therefore it had failed the test.

When I pointed out to him that actually after his supposed failing of the test, when it had gone to the window for some other reason, not waiting, just going for a brief visit, that look at the rest of his own data and they showed this massive effect, statistically significant. look at the rest of his own data and they show this massive effect, statistically significant. He said, oh, you can't look at that data. That's reading patterns into the data after the dog's already failed the test. And now everyone who's looked at Richard Wiseman's analysis of the data and who's looked at his data has now been discussed in several books. There's a book called Randy's Prize about materialists and skeptics.

There's a book called Heretics by somebody who interviewed Wiseman and went into this whole story. It's become a classic case of skeptical treatment of evidence and distortion of what went on. So, I mean, read me what he said, and I'll tell you in this context what it's about. Sure. I'll paraphrase for brevity. He essentially said that it's not surprising that the dog would be on the porch before it comes home because the longer the owner is away, the more likely the dog is to wait on the porch. And it's more evidence of the dog anticipating the arrival of the owner instead of knowing through psychic abilities. And then he goes on further to criticize that your work hasn't been in peer-reviewed journals, but only in books, and that this means that your methodology has

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And his PhD thesis was on deception, the psychology of deception. He's a magician. He's a skilled deceiver. And let me explain why that's deceptive. First of all, the dog doesn't go to the window more and more as time goes on. We did control experiments where the owner didn't come home at all during the whole experimental period of more than four hours and it doesn't go. It's just more or less a flat line. He knows that. He's seen the graphs. I've shown him the data. Secondly, all the data from these

experiments is published in peer-reviewed journals, and it's all on my website. You can actually see PDFs of the papers in peer-reviewed journals, website scheldrake.org, research section, unexplained animal powers, telepathy with dogs, all the data, quantitative data there. There was a film done from an Austrian television company which you can also see on my website, a skeptical science unit where they showed this phenomenon very clearly. So it is in peer-reviewed journals, it has been

subjected to scientific scrutiny, it has been done in the correct way um i have taken into account you know the dog going to the window more and more uh weisman's own data show this and yet you see like you reading the kind if you read wikipedia which has been captured by skeptics um all the areas to do with me psychic research alternative medicine um they're all full of this kind of misinformation so you're i mean you're an open-minded chap you want to find out about psychic research, alternative medicine, they're all full of this kind of misinformation. So, you're an open-minded chap, you want to find out about this, you go and look it up online, and that's what you find. The reality is completely different. And what we're seeing, particularly with Wikipedia, is the defense of a materialist paradigm by the systematic and deliberate distortion of evidence, filtering

out positive evidence, putting in snide, incorrect results, like sneering remarks like that, it's not in peer-reviewed journals, only in books, absolutely untrue. And he knows it's untrue. I mean, he's seen my peer-reviewed papers. I mean, in private, when I talk to Richard Wiseman, he's a perfectly reasonable person. He's quite funny. But as soon as he gets onto his sort of podium as the media skeptic, it's astonishing that he can say things like that and get away with it. Well, he doesn't get away with it, actually. Look at a website called Skeptical About Skeptics, and you'll find a dossier on his

deceptions in this and other areas. And there's also a video online, which shows how he distorted the evidence about the dog experiment. There's clips from TV shows where he claims the dog just goes to the door over and over again, and showing the same footage twice in one case to create the illusion. This has all been exposed over and over again, but you won't get to realize the expose, and if you look at things like Wikipedia, which, as I say, has been captured by groups of skeptical activists called guerrilla skeptics on Wikipedia

and other activist groups. I mean, I'm not making this up. They have a website, guerrilla skeptics on Wikipedia. I'm not paranoid. But when I exposed the guerrilla skeptics on Wikipedia in the blog, three days later, they just took down my own biography page and they've controlled it ever since. They stripped me of a PhD. They said I was a pseudoscientist. They removed all my academic qualifications. They stated I had no papers in peer-reviewed journals. A few people fought back and managed to get some of the most gross distortions corrected, but they're still in control of this biography page. And so when people, students and others who are trying to get a sense of what's going on, the kind of area you two are exploring, consciousness, worldviews, paradigms,

the view you get through the regular orthodox scientific educational system and through media like Wikipedia is subject to systematic distortion. And I mean, that's just what happens when you have a paradigm. A paradigm is a worldview. People who believe in it think it's true. Anything that doesn't fit in with it is marginalized, treated as heresy, excluded. And that's what's happening. And that's just the way things are.

It's what happened to the theory of continental drift, it's what happens to all sorts of theories in science. Some of them are false, but this kind of doctrinaire dogmatism is something that, in my view, holds back true scientific inquiry. There is a sense, after talking about all this dogs waiting for their owners to come home, I'm reminded of Argos, Odysseus' dog, who waited for him after 20 years, or so the myth goes, and then finally passed after seeing his master. Do you believe, and just because we do have to wrap up, so very briefly, what do you believe is the role of myth in exposing these

truths or highlighting these truths? Is there any validity to myth? Well, myths are stories that make sense of the world for us. And they try and explain the way things are in terms of stories about what happened in the past. And I think they're absolutely essential. We make sense of the world through stories. And, you know, there'll be people who'll tell you, well, science is different. Science is the truth. But actually, the Big Bang theory is our modern creation myth. You know there's lots of archaic creation myths that say the world grew from the hatching of a

cosmic egg and the cosmic egg gave rise to the organism of the cosmos that grew from this hatching of the cosmic egg. Hiranyagāva is the Hindu myth of the hatching of the cosmic egg. Hiranyagaba is the Hindu myth of the hatching of the cosmic egg, the golden egg from which the cosmos comes. Well, the Big Bang theory is a modern scientific version of that cosmogonic myth. And nobody was around at the time of the Big Bang to see it. It's not as if it was carefully observed and written up in full-color photos for Scientific American by on-the-spot observers. The whole thing is a theoretical projection of the way we see the world now. Basically the universe is expanding so if you scroll it back you get to a point ultimately where it all collapses in to the Big Bang, the original point. That worldview assumes that the laws of nature

have always been exactly the same. I don't think they are. But anyway, I'm perfectly happy to go along with the Big Bang as a creation myth, but I don't think it's just literal truth. I think it's the best story we've got at the moment. And, you know, there's a lot in science which has this storytelling aspect i mean

the selfish gene story tells us that dna controls life and and everything depends on this selfish gene which is ruthless and competitive and when you read richard dawkins on the subject he's making up myths about dna it's not scientific language to say DNA is selfish and ruthless and competitive and we are survival machines that genes have built to live in and stuff. This is all storytelling. It's happened in that case. It's very bad storytelling because genes have been grossly overrated. And we now know through the study of epigenetic inheritance

that a lot of inheritance is not based simply on genes there are other factors involved so I would say we have to have stories and some stories are better than others and but it's not as if on one hand you've got ancient myths which are sort of superstitions and on the other hand you've got ancient myths, which are sort of superstitions. And on the other hand, you've got science, which is true. That's an incredibly naive view. And most scientists who believe science is true are incredibly naive. You know, they think they have a superior belief system to everybody else. In fact, they don't even recognize they have a belief system.

They think they know the truth. Everyone else has beliefs. There's something called Lobb's theorem, which says that if you believe in your own consistency, you automatically become inconsistent, which is related to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. So… And also what I was saying earlier about the belief system of materialists, because their own belief system actually makes their end belief in materialism highly problematic. There is something to be said about scientists having their own, in a sense, dogmatism against religion and what they consider to be supernatural. So if you say, is there a creator? No.

No. Is there someone pretty much watching us? No. Are we in the mind of God? No. Is it possible we're in a simulation? Yes. Well, we were created by that simulation, and in a sense, that simulation is watching. Well, what's the difference between they're willing to believe one because it's more palatable to the scientists? And furthermore, how do you decipher between evidence that is credible and evidence that is not credible? What is your epistemology in all of this?

Okay, well, first the worldview thing. You see, I mean, I personally find the simulation theory pretty implausible because it implies the universe is a gigantic computer with some kind of programmers simulating things. I think that's such an anthropocentric metaphor. The whole mechanistic theory is anthropocentric. Only humans make machines, and only modern industrial civilizations are so obsessed with machinery that they can assume that the whole of the universe is nothing but machinery. It's unbelievably provincial, even though they think of it supremely objective.

And so this worldview of the simulation, it's plausible to people who believe in the mechanistic theory because it sounds technological and computer-based and they're in favor of that. But basically it's saying the same thing as one of the ancient Hindu myths, the idea that Vishnu lies down, the god Vishnu lies down to sleep, he has a dream, and that dream is this universe, and we're within Vishnu's dream. And then eventually Vishnu wakes up, this universe disappears, and he lies down and dreams another universe. I mean, I much prefer that myth to the simulation myth. In the Vedas, sorry to interrupt, but in the Vedas it

is written that that thing breathless breathed by its own nature, right, and that the idea that the gods came after this world's creation, that they themselves not even know this world's creation. Would you say that this ties? Well, what I'd say is that the deepest views in Hindu and Christian and Islamic and other traditions and Jewish traditions and Buddhist traditions are that there's a kind of consciousness underlying all things from which things come. And we connect with that through meditation, through altered states of consciousness, through mystical experiences, we can have a direct connection with that realm. And that our models of reality,

if you then say, well, the sun is a god, or the moon's a goddess, or something like that, these are human ways of modeling this reality, explaining it in terms of stories and myths. And in that sense, the gods in a polytheistic system where you have gods of weather and gods of wind and gods of sea and gods of sky and gods or goddesses of earth and so on, these are all sort of projections and creations in our own mind. But in all these systems, the idea is that underlying all these is a realm of consciousness, which you can call it God if you like, or you can call it

ultimate emptiness or nirvana or whatever, or bliss or joy. Or I think the best way of thinking of it in the Hindu tradition is through this threefold devotion, sat, chit, ananda, being consciousness, bliss. I think Joseph Campbell speaks about this. Yes. Well, Campbell speaks about a whole range of different myths. But sat, chit, ananda is And what Sat Chaitananda is a way of having a model of this ultimate consciousness, without saying God's a creator, a sort of man with a white beard who makes machinery. That's obviously a naive conception of God. Most atheists assume that people who believe in God have incredibly naive views.

Most of them don't have such naive views. To add on to your point, in Orthodox iconography, normally the father, i.e. God, is represented by a blue light, right? There's this understanding that you would never depict God as a man with a white beard. This comes much later in the Western tradition, around the time of the Renaissance, this anthropomorphization of God. Yes. So I couldn't agree more, but please continue.

And of course in Judaism there's a prohibition on making any images of God or the divine because God's beyond all images, and in Islam as well. And so I think that if we actually take seriously what serious theologians and mystics within the world's religious traditions think about God, then it's nothing like what atheists portray them as thinking about God. You know, the God atheist, I'm a Christian, I'm rooted in the mystical traditions of Christianity in my own thinking and worldview. But when I meet atheists and they tell me what they think I think, there's no relation at all. They've got some kind of something they heard at Sunday school when they were 10 and they think that's what serious people think about God. It's like sort of dismissing science on the basis of a misunderstanding of something you heard in primary school.

It's not even... So it doesn't even start as a serious discussion. When you look... Oh, sorry, very quickly. When you look at the new atheist movement and their critiques of the divine, their critiques of God, would you say that the misleading or the misunderstanding is based on this natural versus supernatural

divide, i.e. we're in the material world where there's toast and mycorrhizal fungi and people and then there's this supernatural place with God and demons and angels and werewolves and vampires and all the ludicrous nonsense that we can just sort of shove away, and that there is a fundamentally true reality. Yeah, I think it's partly based on that disastrous division of the natural and supernatural. It's partly based on that. It's partly based on historical arguments. You know, religions have caused war and conflict, like the Inquisition and that sort of thing. But they conveniently ignore the fact that in the 20th century, states that had atheist governments as their official policy and believed

in science and reason, Soviet, Russia, Maoist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, were responsible for sort of death on an industrial scale unimaginable to the Inquisition. Or the fact that the Inquisition... They omit that aspect of the historical argument. It's a polemical, one-sided, rather shallow polemical arguments which are easy to refute and which are spoken with the fervor of kind of evangelical preachers. I just can't take that kind of atheism seriously. There is a kind that I can take seriously. There are some atheists who say that God is beyond, that ultimate reality is beyond all human conception

because we have limited minds, live on a small planet in one galaxy, etc. Therefore, ultimate reality has to be beyond our conceptions. Therefore, any of our ideas we may form of God or ultimate reality are ultimately misleading, and the truth goes far beyond them. That's a kind of mystical atheism, which actually is very similar to mystical theology and in the Orthodox tradition the mainstream

theology there, as you probably know, is called apophatic theology and it's about not saying what God is. It says we can't say what God is, we can only say what God is not, because God's so far beyond our conception that we can't form a clear image. And so there's a certain kind of atheist which is very close to apathetic theology. John Gray, the English atheist writer, I would say was in that category. He wrote an excellent book called Seven Types of Atheism, which makes it much easier to understand where the different kinds of atheists are coming from. And the most superficial and trivial kind is the kind of Richard Dawkins' New Atheist type.

But there are more serious atheist arguments, and his book is a wonderful introduction to them. Before I pass to Kirk, I just have one quick thing to say. This type of atheism does have ancient roots, right? Like Protagoras said, as for the gods, I cannot say either that they are or that they are not, nor how they are constituted in shape. There is so much that prevents knowledge of this kind, and clarity of the subject, and the shortness of human life. So, before that... That would be more like the kind of mystical type of atheist, that those limits of our own minds mean that we can't form an adequate conception of the ultimate.

Yes. Yes, and that has ancient roots, and as I say, in Buddhism, the Buddha makes it... the Buddhist refuse to talk about cosmology and stuff. The idea is the ultimate reality is beyond all our conceptions. And therefore the only thing to do is to meditate and experience it directly, rather than just talk about it, that won't get you anywhere. So some people call Buddhism atheistic. But it's not atheistic in the new atheist sense. It's atheistic

in the sense that goes beyond the limitations of human thought. One of the most interesting aspects that I find about Jordan Peterson is that he's made religion sapid and intelligible to people who were formerly or even current atheists. What do you see as, how do you view that? What do you like about the Petersonian approach, and what do you not like? I'm curious to know your thoughts. I think Peterson's done a great job in bringing up questions, serious, important questions,

and making them things that a lot of people see as questions and want to talk about and discuss. And he's also done a great job in reaching out to people who identify as atheists and even materialists. I think that's a tremendous triumph, making intellectual arguments, intellectual discussions part of popular culture, rather than just being confined to university

seminar rooms, because he makes the questions real and relevant. I think when it comes to his views on God, and it's, I find it rather hard to know what he's actually saying. I mean, he's talking about Jung and about archetypes, all very clever. But, you know, I'd like to know whether he goes to church, whether he prays and that sort of thing. I mean, I go to church, I pray, I'm a practicing Anglican. So, you know, I don't try to pretend I'm not. And he may want not to say that. Maybe he doesn't go to church, doesn't pray.

Maybe he doesn't have any personal religious faith or practice. Maybe he just thinks religion is a good thing in the abstract or good for people's psyche or fits with the right archetypes. It's awfully hard. I mean, I know there are people who've watched hundreds of hours of Jordan Peterson. I've only watched much less than that. So it may be he clarifies this somewhere, but the ones I've seen I found a bit frustrating. Well, what's next for you? And where can our audience find out more about you? Well, anyone can find out more about me on my website, sheldrake.org, which links to my YouTube channel, website, sheldrake.org, which links to my YouTube channel, where there are many videos and dialogues and discussions. So there's plenty of information there. My book, Science

Set Free, summarizes my views about the need to go beyond materialistic science into a wider, more inclusive and holistic paradigm. My two most recent books are where I try to bring together my scientific understanding of the world with spiritual practices. One is called Science and Spiritual Practices, deals with seven different spiritual practices including meditation, gratitude, connecting with nature and pilgrimage. And the most recent book Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work is about seven more spiritual practices including sports, learning from animals, fasting and spiritual openings through psychedelics and the celebration of holy days and festivals. All of these are

practices which can be done within or outside the framework of any particular religion. And now all of them are being studied scientifically in a way that brings science and spirituality into a complementary and mutually helpful relationship rather than some kind of antagonistic slanging match. And that's much more constructive and helpful. Anyway, that's the theme of my most recent books. And as for what comes next, I'm using this period of enforced grounding in my home in London.

Actually, I see it as a wonderful blessing because I'm writing scientific papers now. I've got about seven or eight papers based on data from my experiments and other ideas which I've wanted to write up for years and have never had the time and now I have. So talking of peer-reviewed journals, I'm now in full peer-reviewed journal mode. I'm writing, I finished one last week, I'm writing another right now. So that's what I'm up to at the moment. Rupert, you're a pleasure to talk to, a pleasure to listen to. Thank you so much. Right, well, good luck to both of you with your project and your inquiry.

It's really important.