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morphogenesis means Morpheus form Genesis is coming into being morphogenetic fields are fields that shape developing organisms the form I mean the area that concerns me most is
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the habitual thinking in science the Paradigm of mechanistic materialism is the dominant worldview for more than a hundred years in the sciences and that says that Nature's mechanical that
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matters unconscious the whole universe is like a great machine what is this ever accelerating expansion of the universe doing what it's doing is speeding up Evolution because the whole
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evolution of the cosmos depends on the expansion which gives an arrow to time the ultimate error of time in the universe is the expansion of the cosmos and it literally creates more space for
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new things to happen that everything was fixed at the moment of the Big Bang that's the standard assumption within science which is really a relic of this platonic world you yeah and the point I make there is that if we live in a
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radically evolutionary Universe which we do then why should the laws of nature all be fixed in advance why can't they evolve like everything else I think horizontal time is not illusory I think
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the universe is expanding which is creating more time as it does there there's also this vertical aspect which comes about through mystical experiences most powerfully
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where people feel that their mind is part of something much greater than themselves yeah which gives the impression of being Timeless or not in time as we normally know it
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[Music] welcome dear viewers to another episode of the tight book lumens podcast I don't know how to translate that into English but you might wonder why I'm talking in English and that's because Joey and I
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took the train to London from Amsterdam yesterday to meet up with a very special man he got his Ted Talk bent and the Sunday Times even called him a prophet of our
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times now Tada we've entered the library of the one and only Rupert sheldrick thank you very much for having us here Rupert good deal yeah yeah I am very
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excited because last year we did an interview with a friend of yours pin volumo and the two of you made a really big difference in my personal life and
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I'll explain later but we have a few households things to to mention first before we start if you like this video if you think it's valuable please give it a like or leave
00:02:59
a comment below the video you can also do that on our website dietbook lumens dot NL um you can subscribe to this channel you can subscribe to our newsletter and if
00:03:11
you want to give us a Rewards or a donation we would be very happy to receive that that is what's keeping us going all right yeah so
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uh what's your work has meant to me personally like for instance your work on telepathy to prove that opened up a whole new world for me like
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a whole new dimension of reality and I studied I did a technical studies in delves mechanical engineering very solid I was raised as a Christian until I was 16 I left it behind so because of your
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work and of pen volumo I finally could open up that there's more than just a three-dimensional world and I think I owe my whole life path after
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that the words were from people like you so I'm super excited to be here and I'm also not surprised that a platform as such as the Sunday Times calls you a profit
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because yeah to me that's what a prophet does to bring people into bigger realities towards truth but how do you feel to be called a prophet
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I don't really know I don't think about it actually I'd forgotten I'd been called a prophet um well what I'm trying to do is see the way things might go within science and in other areas and
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um do my best to change things in the direction that I think is better than the way we're going at the moment excellent yeah I think that's what we're all trying to do but so much confusion
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about what is the right direction so many opinions in our world um you know we don't have a lot of time for this interview I understand so I've been thinking about what to address
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because we can go into so many directions with you so the telepathy or the morphogenetic fields and morphogenetic resonance the memory of of space
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but I think what would be most interesting to start with is your views on the collective consciousness how do people organisms influence each
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other how does it work and what are your findings like how did you come to such a conclusion well the idea of morphic resonance suggests that every species has a collective memory
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um and that's more I suppose about Collective unconsciousness and Consciousness because um habits um are reinforced by morphic resonance and habits are usually unconscious
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um so we're all influenced by unconscious habits um We're All Creatures of habit most of our behavior is Habitual most of our mental life is unconscious
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and there I think morphic resonance plays a very large role it's similar to what the psychologist young called the collective unconscious with the collective memory so we're influenced by all sorts of
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habits um cultural habits linguistic habits um habits of thought within science paradigms models of reality are really habits of thinking
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um so all of that is very much influenced by morphic resonance then of course there's the conscious part of our Lives which is influenced by not just morphic
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resonance by media social media you know all the normal things newspapers the weather I mean lots of things influence Collective Consciousness and far too complicated to enumerate them
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all yeah yeah but my emphasis is mainly on the the role of morphic resonance in our habits of thought yeah could you give uh an example of where you found this
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Collective Consciousness to be super clear well I mean it's clear in any area where there are habitual thinking for example I mean the area that concerns me most is
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the habitual thinking in science um the Paradigm of mechanistic materialism is the dominant worldview for more than a hundred years in the Sciences and and that says that Nature's
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mechanical um that matters unconscious the whole universe is like a great machine living organisms are mechanisms so this is a very deep-seated habit of
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thought yeah and it impinges on the way people responded say take telepathy which you mentioned earlier there's most people have experienced telepathy in connection with telephone
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calls yeah um many people have experienced it with their pets their dogs or cats as you know I wrote a book called dogs that know when their owners are coming home about telepathy and animals
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so here's massive experience and uh of this millions of people in the Netherlands and everywhere else uh experience this on a daily basis um yet as soon as you step into a
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scientific institution or an academic institution there's a taboo against this being real because the the mechanistic worldview says that the mind is nothing but the activity of
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the brain and it's all inside the head therefore my thoughts can't possibly influence you hundreds of kilometers away because at most there's some weak electrical impulse that you could just
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about detect with electrodes on the scalp but there's no possible way I could influence you hundreds of miles away therefore all this evidence all this experience which people have is
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illusory so now many people in the scientific well just immediately assume its illusory and refused to look at the evidence or dismiss it as fraudulent or
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yeah statistical errors or something like that now why do they do that it's not because they've carefully studied the evidence or they've thought about their own experience it's because there's a standard pattern of thought
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that says this doesn't fit in to the existing worldview therefore it can't be true so this is uh I mean another word is Prejudice um but this is deeply entrenched in the
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thinking of many scientists not because they've really thought about it but because they haven't thought about it because it's a kind of cultural or social habit yeah so I mean that's just one of countless possible examples of
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where habitual thinking shapes yeah the way people react and it's very recognizable um but how can you like do you need to reach a certain Tipping Point to flip
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over the the habit and then like what's the percentage of people you need to switch or what is your view on that well I mean the if you take the population as a whole if you took a poll
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of everyone in the Netherlands or everyone in Britain um and so do you think telepathy is possible have you experienced it the great majority of people would say yes yeah yeah so if if it requires like a
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majority very we've already got a majority vote um but within the academic world uh then the opinion is is very negative about these things it's mainly it's not just
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people who are professional scientists or professional academics is people who want to be seen as educated you see the normal view is that uneducated people believe all these stupid things but
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educated people are so smart they've seen through it yeah and so it's mostly people who want to preserve their credentials as being educated yeah so um I think one thing that would change it is
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um a change in a changing world view if if instead of being something that seems to violate rational sounds um we have a model of the mind or of
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nature where this is this this becomes perfectly normal then most people would be would relax and they'd be able to accept yeah something that basically they
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already know yeah yeah because I think in this particular case people have something at stake to switch over to a different point of view because they're if they they've built their whole
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identity Upon A Certain yeah Dogma yes and that's the threshold but in like in nature like with animals like there are so many stories like the hundreds monkey effect or a certain
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Birds which which discovers to break open and not and then all of a sudden all around the world the same type of bird starts to break open nuts in the same way like well can you give an example of how
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this how that how that works well this is any spread of behavior that um I mean the the best example from the 20th century is blue tits small birds
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which steal cream from the top of milk bottles yeah um I mean here in Britain we have deliveries of milk bottles to the doorstep I mean it still happens I mean we have them here at our house in London
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um and when I first started living here about 35 years ago we had full fat milk who delivered to the doorstep and most mornings when I go there I'd find that
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the aluminum top had been broken open and some of the cream had disappeared and these small birds were stealing the cream yeah well this habit started around the year 1920 in Southampton in
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the south of England and at the time um amateur bird spotters all over the country took part in the National experiment organized by Cambridge University to track this new behavior
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and they found that the it spread locally um but then it showed up 70 or 80 kilometers away and these boats don't move more than a few kilometers from home so they thought these must be
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independent discoveries and they tracked the independent Discovery and the rate of independent Discovery accelerated so it was accelerating in a way that couldn't just be explained by the birds
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flying and telling other boats about it yeah and the people who were doing this were not trying to prove morphic resonance so they were just interested in bird Behavior so they had no it was purely empirical they had no Theory to
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explain this yeah um and then um during the second world war the delivery of milk stopped because of the war and um blue tits only lived for a few years
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so after the war there wouldn't have been any blue tits that still remembered the Golden Age of free cream before um and yet the habits started again all over Britain and the same happened in
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the Netherlands um it after the war it started again very rapidly in the Netherlands so here we have a the spread of habit that could have been because of morphic
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resonance the collective memory um in in these Birds um uh incidentally the it's now stopped because so many people including us who
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switched over to semi-skimmed milk that it's not worth them um opening the bottles to to get there's no cream anymore at the time the Habit has more or less died out because of the change in people's
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dietary habits of semi-skilled milk I never find our milk bottles have been attacked but there are plenty of blue tits who are still around so I see them in our garden so um here we've got an evolution of a
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habit and then it's gone away because the conditions have changed it's so funny so yeah I just wondered and like how like how does reality work in this way
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like can you can you give a description on on what the mechanism is or now I use the word mechanism but but there you are that's a habit yeah mechanical engineer yes
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well I think morphic resonance is the influence of similar patterns of activity on subsequent similar patterns across time and space and it works in self-organizing systems which include
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molecules crystals cells plants animals societies of animals doesn't include machines computers tables chairs bicycles cars which are not
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self-organizing they're made in factories you don't grow a computer in a garden you you make it in a factory so machines which have been taken by the
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mechanistic worldview to be the Principal model for all of nature at the very worst examples because they they're fully determinate systems in which morphe resonance doesn't happen but in
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self-organizing systems there's an influence on the basis of similarity across time and space now you might say well um well you did say what's the mechanism
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well nobody knows uh the there's a variety of suggestions as to how this could happen the quantum physicist David bowm thought this had happened through what he calls the implicate order
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um the implicate order was uh invisible realm that underlies Quantum phenomena and he thought the implicate order had a kind of memory so what's happened in one place can influence what happens in another
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some physicists think that this might happen through some of the extra dimensions in super string theory and in the 1920s some people suggested telepathy and it's nominal like that
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happened because there might be an extra Dimension and then people say oh it's rubbish there can't be any extra Dimensions but no extra Dimensions come cheap there are 11 dimensions in M
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Theory 10 and super String Theory so there's all these extra dimensions and so some physicists say well we've got all these extra Dimensions they might be doing something they might be doing something that wouldn't happen with just
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three dimensions of space and one of time and one thing that they think they might be doing is connecting things up across space and time leading to morphic Resonance so that's possible
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um I'm I mean I don't understand superstring Theory and not to most people because it's based on complex mathematics Beyond most of us so you know if somebody says oh and then there
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are other physical theories of morphic resonance I mean people send them to me by email and I get you know several a year that physicists come up with and on about the second page line of the papers
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start into the equations and it'd probably be fine for you with your mechanical engineering upbringing but um for most people they don't follow it so when people say what's the mechanism if
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there was an agreed maxence and I handed them a paper full of mathematical equations they wouldn't understand a word of it so in a sense they don't really want to know what the mechanism is they want to know where it's approved
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of by scientific authorities or something like that right so the reason I don't think it matters very much strangely it may sound strange is that I
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think what really matters is whether this happens or not that's what I preoccupies me is what's the evidence is it does it really happen does morphic resonance really happen
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and you see if you take the analogy with Magnetic and electric phenomena in the 1840s here in London Michael Faraday was doing experiments on electricity and magnetism he developed the idea of the
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electromagnetic field um and he showed how electricity and magnetism are related and which we get from which we get the electric motor and so many aspects of modern life
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but he couldn't explain these fields he didn't know how to explain them and then Maxwell came along 20 years later and with his equations of electromagnetism
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which were based on the idea that electromagnetic waves light and other electromagnetic waves propagate through a tenuous form of matter called The Ether so the theory was all based on The Ether
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then in 1905 Einstein came along and said there's no such thing as The Ether you just have electromagnetic fields which are free-floating they're not based on anything else they're just themselves
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and and then people say well how can that be they must be based on something and then in Quantum electrodynamics people come along and say well actually there's a Quantum vacuum field and all
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electromagnetic interactions depend on Virtual photons but you can't actually see them because all detect them because they're virtual so we now have a theory that's totally different from anything
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that Faraday could have conceived of the theories of electromagnetism have changed over the years but electric motors go on working irrespective of the theory yeah so with morphic resonance I
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think they'll probably be many possible theories to explain it but the most important thing is to find find out empirically what's happening whether it really does happen and what its
00:21:25
implications are yeah yeah yeah the reason I ask is because it meant so much for me to add a understanding with the mind so it could relax and to surrender to bigger realities oh yeah well I'm all
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in favor of understanding that I mean I spend lots of time thinking about these things and I'd be very happy if there is a a credible model I mean there already are several incredible models but
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um at the moment when you have different models of morphic resonance like implicate order or multiple dimensions in M Theory it's hard to know which one's the better model because they don't make different
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predictions if if there are models that make different experimental predictions you could then test between the models and find out which is the best one we haven't got to that stage yet
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yeah what we've gotten to with our podcast series until now was quite a few times that by diving deep in we found God to be able to be behind all of it
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and from that point of view all other things come into such another light so it helps so much in my case at least to have this understanding of at least the deepest truth
00:22:42
to use that view on different areas of life so there's so much Distortion in the world and confusion and we believe or we know that by going to the source of
00:22:56
everything we can become one again you know so you're a scientist and we travel here and to have your view on reality but in the end what we're striving
00:23:08
towards is yeah Unity to to leave behind this Duality we live in and it's is created it's where we can play but it's also where we can drown in in suffering and in war and fighting
00:23:23
against each other so that's why we want to Deep dive in to understand and because we're still separated from other groups and we believe that if we have an understanding
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and a support of what we believe then people can relax more and then we can listen more to each other so that's why I like to ask about well that's fine I'm perfectly happy with you
00:23:48
asking about it yeah yeah and earlier you mentioned about the the habits and also in your band Ted Talk you talk about this habits instead of
00:24:00
the constants of the universe now while I did the technical studies in yeah the constants are constant they're a given and everything is deduced from debt given and
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but it's a wonder if it's really constant all the time and and it's so specifically accurately that life can exist and if the cultures would be a little bit different everything
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would implode or explode and your view on the habits makes such more sense also from our view from God you know God created the universe and is learning by
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doing and is growing and evolving but also from a scientific point of view like from The Big Bang of course it had to evolve but how did you come to
00:24:48
yeah that view because it's to to from a scientific point of view to come to that conclusion that's quite a long road I think well I came to it through um working at
00:25:01
Cambridge on the development of plants I was a botanist I was working on developmental biology in plants and um technically I was working on the way in which the plant hormone auction which
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chemically is endolocetic acid it's the main plant hormone I was working on how it's produced in plants and how it moves around the plant and I worked hard how it's produced it's produced by dying cells as a breakdown
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product of cells as they die and inside plants there are many dying cells all the wood cells for example in a tree trunk or in the veins of leaves a dead these are tubes little tubes that
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conduct water and to become a dead empty tube the cell has to thicken up the wall and then it commits suicide as it commits suicide it dissolves its own proteins it dissolves
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itself as it dissolves the proteins all the amino acids are released then they're broken down and one of the breakdown products of the amino acid tryptophan is endocetic acid so it's
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made by dying cells I work that out then it's moved around the plant always towards the roots it moves down towards the root temps it doesn't move in the other direction and it's called The Polar auxin transport system and with a
00:26:21
College Cambridge I worked out how that happens um I won't go into all the technical details but um anyway here we were in this was in the 1970s um
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that people working on animal development didn't know what the chemicals were that were involved in the development they didn't we knew much more in Plants than people did in animals at that time um
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and this was a big Triumph and it was you know a major Discovery and all that but then when I thought about it I thought well actually all plants Ferns and palms and fox gloves and cabbages
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all make auxin in the same way they all move it around with the same transport system and yet they all have different shapes and the leaves have different shapes from the flowers and within the flowers the petals have different shapes
00:27:13
from the staymans and so on so this isn't going to explain how all these shapes are different because it's the same thing in all cases you know it's a bit like saying you can understand the economy of the
00:27:26
Netherlands by analyzing euro coins and notes and things well every economic transaction involves Euros at least virtual Euros but it won't tell you all the different
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economic activities it won't give you any details that you know steel businesses car businesses flower growing businesses they're all different get it so the um the the chemistry of the of
00:27:51
the notes or the the nature of the era won't explain it so something else is going on and then I discovered in the 1920s biologists had working on development had proposed that
00:28:04
there are invisible Fields morphogenetic Fields form shaping fields that shape organisms as they develop as a kind of mold or blueprint like an architecture for those who don't know what
00:28:16
morphogenetic field is can you explain that morphogenesis means Morpheus form Genesis is coming into being morphogenetic fields are fields that
00:28:27
shape developing organisms the form so the morphogenetic field of a leaf would be a kind of shaping or mold of a leaf where the leaf grows into yeah it grows into a kind of
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plan of the reef and the more genetic field of a petal or of a liver or of an eye would be like a plan into which the system grows that the
00:28:51
so the fields are regions of influence in space a magnetic field is inside a magnet but it's also around it it gives a shape to the space around the magnet a
00:29:04
shape to the magnetic influence around the magnet so the gravitational fields of the earth is in the Earth but invisibly stretches out Beyond it keeping the moon in its orbit so fields
00:29:16
are a important Concept in science that are not made of matter um instead matters made of fields according to modern science yeah so you know an electron is a vibratory pattern
00:29:30
of activity in an electron field so I mean this is in itself somewhat counter-intuitive because most people think of mattress solid-hearted stuff yeah but actually um within modern physics matter is sort
00:29:45
of vibratory as vibratory patterns within Fields yeah so the idea is in addition to the nuclear Fields the quantum matter Fields the electromagnetic fields and the
00:29:57
gravitational fields that are already part of standard physics there are other kinds of fields which shape form in self-organizing systems morphogenetic Fields so this idea I
00:30:09
didn't invent this idea it was already part of biology but a very much a minority view because it's a holistic view of a top-down causation the field shapes the organ whereas the spirit of
00:30:23
Modern Biology since the 1950s and 60s has been strongly reductionist to explain everything in terms of the smallest Parts genes molecules and try and explain life from the bottom up and
00:30:36
the smaller molecular biology has become the most dominant part of biology trying to explain things from the bottom up it's like trying to explain a building by analyzing the bricks and the cement
00:30:48
and the the and the steel beams and that kind of thing I mean it's important you need to know about that but it doesn't tell you the building plan the architectural plan
00:31:00
which is a top-down cause yeah so anyway I realized that we needed something like that but then the question is how could these fields be inherited because they're not genes they're not proteins
00:31:14
genes code for the structure of proteins the sequence of amino acids there's no way they could be inherited like that and yet they had to evolve most of my colleagues who were
00:31:27
interested in morphogenetic fields um like the biologist Brian Goodwin for example here in Britain thought that the key Way Forward was to find mathematical
00:31:39
equations that describe them taking the standard physics view that what's really real is mathematical equations and the world is just a kind of instantiation of equations now most theoretical
00:31:52
physicists and mathematicians believe that maths is more real than reality as we experience it they're basically crypto platonists they believe that there's a kind of Eternal where our
00:32:04
realm is more true and more real than the world we actually inhabit well I'm not a crypto platonist and I'm not a mathematician so I thought there's and in biology everything evolves there's no
00:32:16
use having Eternal equations for dinosaurs that were all there at the moment of the Big Bang or for rose leaves uh you know it just doesn't seem to be a plausible explanation
00:32:28
so then I'd been reading a book about memory by the French philosopher oribergson um where his postulates that memory involves causation across time across gaps in
00:32:42
time and then I had a sudden moment of insight that if these fields were inherited directly across time on the basis of similarity then large
00:32:55
amounts of biology would become much easier to understand inheritance and evolution and that really led to the idea of morphic resonance so it came about through thinking about plant form
00:33:08
in answer to your question and it doesn't come from reading but sort of Oriental philosophy or esoteric studies or anything like that so it came from Western philosophy
00:33:22
particularly bugs and I later discovered that the idea fitted very well with Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and I later worked in India and I spent seven years in India and I
00:33:37
found that in Indian philosophy and in Buddhist philosophy the idea of a kind of memory in nature is completely standard most people think that it's perfectly normal yeah whereas in the west they don't it's a big cultural
00:33:50
difference yeah exactly people claim that science is objective but so subjective you know it's very relative towards the local culture yes when our cultures use very strong
00:34:03
our scientific cultures very strongly shaped by the platonic or Pythagorean tradition which is what gives rise to the idea that all the laws of nature must have been there at the moment of the Big Bang because they're Eternal and
00:34:17
that the constants are constant and that everything was fixed at the moment of the Big Bang that's the standard assumption within sounds which is really a relic of this platonic worldview yeah and my my the point I make there is that
00:34:32
if we live in a radically evolutionary Universe which we do then why should the laws of nature all be fixed in advance why can't they evolve like everything else and actually
00:34:44
the whole idea of laws of nature is anthropocentric and only humans have laws in fact Only You civilized humans have laws tribal societies have Customs
00:34:56
so the idea and human laws do evolve the laws of Britain today are not the same as the laws a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago yeah um but to avoid the extremely anthropocentric nature of laws which
00:35:10
implies A legislature imposing laws on the country or the citizens um habit is a much more natural metaphor and so I think actually we have habits
00:35:23
dependent on memory within nature and it's a good thing we have that memory because everything would go into every direction so we need to have some glue
00:35:36
yes it stabilizes things habits is a stabilizing influence yeah exactly exactly and so you believe and that's our view as well that the universe is evolving in all sorts of ways but
00:35:49
where do you think it's growing towards like what is the end purpose or what where is going to well that's difficult to know isn't it because if you take the universe as a
00:36:01
whole it's expanding and its rate of expansion seems to be increasing until about the year 2000 people thought that the expansion was slowing down and that the Universe would stop expanding and
00:36:14
then begin to contract under the influence of gravity and then contract faster and faster until it ended in the opposite of the Big Bang called the Big Crunch yeah um like a black hole so that view said
00:36:28
everything will end in darkness in a black hole Yeah if it's expanding and expanding some physicists like Roger Penrose in Britain think that it would expand so much that it's it's so tenuous
00:36:42
the amount of matter is so diluted that matter will evaporate and everything will end up as light so we've got two rival theories one says everything ends in darkness the other says everything
00:36:54
ends in light but um fortunately we're poised between these two at the moment and it's not going to end all in light or all in darkness
00:37:06
um at least within our lifetimes so um in terms of the biggest picture what is this ever accelerating expansion of the universe doing what it's doing is
00:37:19
speeding up Evolution because the whole evolution of the cosmos depends on the expansion which gives an arrow to time the ultimate error of time in the universe is the expansion of the cosmos
00:37:33
and it literally creates more space for new things to happen if everything was remained at the Big Bang less than the size of the head of a pin billions of degrees Centigrade
00:37:46
nothing much would happen it as it expands it cools down and more possible forms of organization come about now how that applies to our future here
00:37:59
on Earth is is another question um it seems clear that Evolution on Earth at least from the human point of view is very closely bound up with
00:38:12
Consciousness and the evolution of Consciousness human consciousness is different from that of other animals um partly because we have language
00:38:24
and the cumulative building up of knowledge within culture um partly because we now have machines which speed up and increase our impact on the environment
00:38:36
um so clearly human consciousness has taken on an important role in the evolution of Life on this planet it may not affect other galaxies or other stars within our
00:38:49
own Galaxy but at least locally human consciousness is a clearly a very important factor in our evolution and where is that leading I mean there
00:39:02
have been many theories and you know the traditional theories in eastern societies and in ancient Greece a cyclic series they say the history moves in Cycles you get the rise of
00:39:15
civilizations and therefore you get the right and the Hindu view you get the rise of entire universes and then their dissolution and then a new universe begins a cyclic model yeah and this is
00:39:29
tied him with reincarnation a cyclic model of life life who just is replaceable goes on and on in Cycles but the judeo-christian model of history is different it differs from all the
00:39:42
other traditional models of history in that it sees the historical process itself as having meaning or significance and moving in a particular direction beautiful so for the Jewish people what
00:39:55
history was moving towards the coming of the Messiah and a whole new order of political organization for Jewish people I learned for Christians Jesus was the
00:40:08
Messiah but when he died then the idea was that it would move towards the kingdom of heaven and and the second coming of Jesus so in the Middle Ages there were many millinarian movements all over Europe
00:40:22
with people proclaiming the coming of a new order of history and then in the 17th century This was secularized um Sir Francis Bacon here in England
00:40:35
um and thinkers elsewhere in Europe had the idea that through human science technology and economic growth they didn't use those words but that's what they were talking about
00:40:48
um you the whole Earth would be transformed through human activity and creativity and scientific and Technical invention and economic growth would transform the planet well they were
00:41:00
right and this is now the ideology of every government in the world economic growth through science and technology so it's progress It's called progress and progress means moving forward but it
00:41:12
means moving forward towards a goal and no one any longer has any idea what the goal is because it's just more progress you know what's the goal of economic growth it's more economic growth yeah um
00:41:25
what's the growth of what's the goal of scientific and Technical Innovation is more scientific and Technical Innovation yeah um so we're now caught in a kind of a accelerating process that's hurtling
00:41:38
towards some goal which we don't know what it is um so and now more and more people think that actually what will happen is some kind of disaster or series of disasters
00:41:51
so um we haven't really got you say when when people removed the ideal the secularization of European society which is much more advanced than any other
00:42:03
part of the world I mean secularization the removal of traditional religious goals and aims and objectives being replaced by these secular scientific and technological ones which are just more
00:42:17
of the same and and more rational and scientific and Technical understanding yeah now insofar as we have a goal of moving to a fairer just a more
00:42:30
equal Society this really comes from a kind of secularization of Christian ethics the you mean if you think where does all this the movement for
00:42:41
all in minorities must be included all sexual preferences must be included within a larger harmonious whole um this is really I think a
00:42:54
secularization of the Christian idea of the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven is taken a kind of social political form you don't get anything like that in the Islamic world and in the Hindu world and in the Buddhist
00:43:08
world I mean you don't have people marching through the streets of in most parts of the world um you know with this very strongly motivated desire to bring about a kind
00:43:20
of equality and inclusiveness within Society so I think that's an ethical goal at the moment which is derived from the Christian tradition yeah it's very interesting and it's also yeah brings me back to the
00:43:33
vision of this podcast you know to bring people back towards the true essence and with secularizing these things yeah in the end it eats up everything
00:43:44
you know I saw a map of the North Sea uh with plant windmill parks because yeah we need more green power and I look at the map and I I think are
00:43:57
you serious like where do you think this is going and this is just just a drop on a hot plate this is not even fulfilling the current needs and where is it growing towards like yeah this is going
00:44:09
to eat eat up everything unless yeah we turn and realize what life is really about so yeah I'm fascinated about your conclusions where you well what your
00:44:22
research has brought you well I myself think that what what that we this is a very important part of our nature is the spiritual side of our nature and that in a secular society where spiritual
00:44:36
goals are suppressed or marginalized or at least privatized so religion and spirituality become at best a kind of private Hobby a bit like breeding gerbils or something as long as it's harmless and doesn't
00:44:49
affect anyone you can believe what you like and practice any religion you like um however exotic um but the idea of any coherent spiritual vision for the society seems
00:45:02
to have disappeared um and except for this agenda of of equality of Rights and you know the sort of tremendous which inspires a lot of
00:45:15
people the idea of fighting for these rights and um so I think that the leader um a satisfying life the spiritual Dimension is extremely important and I
00:45:28
think it needs to be recovered yeah and I think if we were more spiritually satisfied we'd be less greedy about material needs and feel yeah yeah I feel that we need less and and
00:45:41
um instead of always wanting more yeah I think you're uh very valuable bridge builder in in that regard and your last book is about science and spiritual practices
00:45:54
and it yeah so it mentions or it describes seven spiritual practices and to bring that towards people who don't really want to go into spiritual
00:46:05
yeah stuff because it's too yeah scary but to give them the benefits of spiritual practice but does it bring them back towards yeah the true essence of it
00:46:18
well I think spiritual practices all of them um bring us into connection with a reality greater than ourselves as the point of spiritual practices I'm the ones I discussed in my book
00:46:31
include meditation um which is very well known known very widely practiced and which has physiological effects all these practices have measurable scientific
00:46:43
effects um and gratitude the practice of gratitude makes people measurably happier and and and and and healthier
00:46:56
um connecting with nature is you know now there are people running Forest bathing courses and stuff I mean a lot of people just like going for walks in the woods but now you can have a go on an actual course as far as bathing yeah
00:47:10
um and connecting with nature is very very important part of people's lives um uh through parks and Countryside and so on um
00:47:23
pilgrimage is one of the practices I'm very keen on I think that this the Revival of pilgrimage all over Europe um is a really important way of reconnecting with nature and with holy
00:47:36
places and with tradition um and you know the pilgrimage to Santiago to compostelo which has grown from a
00:47:47
thousand pilgrims on foot in 1987 to 350 000 in 2019. wow a massive growth of pilgrimage yeah not all devout Roman Catholics in fact I imagine a new minority we've had we know that a new
00:48:01
minority of the people doing it to devote Roman Catholics all sorts of people including atheists like going on exactly it's an expression yeah of a spiritual Quest and literal expression
00:48:15
of it um yeah and then it can be as a stepping stone towards deeper Inside Yes and for many people it is it's a way of reconnecting with our own
00:48:27
traditional and Heritage because these holy places have been venerated for centuries yeah in Europe and so I think pilgrimages it's very satisfying too I mean I go on I've been
00:48:40
on quite a number of pilgrimages longer ones and shorter ones I mean even one day pilgrimages can be very helpful yeah very inspiring so if I look back on my
00:48:52
own path like I needed these things to become more stable in receiving yeah deeper insights and then I did a planned ceremonies and and
00:49:04
I could receive it and I think otherwise I might have been in total resistance against it and then I would call it a bad experience or so so it's very valuable I think and another thing you
00:49:17
mentioned was the coming back of the Messiah recording the Christian tradition and so that makes me curious you being such an open-minded researcher what is your
00:49:29
view on predictions and prophecies like what is your view on the construct of time like is it already in place is it already there and with I like I had my own
00:49:43
Revelations which meant the world to me and I could see into the future but what is your view from a scientific point of view like how is it possible to look into the future if it's not already here
00:49:55
yet like um well I mean there are several possible answers to this so one is that the the there are short-term ways in which we can feel the future I mean this is
00:50:07
studied scientifically by parapsychologists that you can feel what's going to happen with some degree of accuracy over a period of seconds or minutes some people have precognitive
00:50:20
dreams you dream of things that are going to happen two or three days in the future um animals can feel when an earthquake or a tsunami is about to happen and
00:50:31
there are many examples of animals behaving unusually hours or days before an earthquake or tsunami so they have a premonition a feeling of the future I've
00:50:43
written about this in my book dogs that know when their owns are coming home because I've been studying animal responses to earthquakes for 25 years um so all of these are fairly short term
00:50:57
when we come to longer term visions of the future then I don't think it's out there already fixed I think that the future is radically open um uh I think the whole evolutionary
00:51:09
process is about the openness of the future um and an evolution those creativity as well as habit and um there are all sorts of new forms of organisms appear all the
00:51:22
time just as in the human realm there are all sorts of new inventions new Tunes new books also all sorts of novelty not all of them are successful I mean there's at least a million books
00:51:35
published every year and very few become best sellers most of them disappear into total obscurity um you know those composers and musicians plugging new songs and very
00:51:48
few of them make it into the charts and and every week there are new patents filed for new inventions and the vast majority you never hear of again so there's a kind of natural selection
00:52:01
there's more creativity than is actually taken up by all right through natural selection or economic selection in human societies so there's
00:52:13
always creativity that could go in various directions some of it is which fits in with what's happening now is selected and becomes habitual new habits develop but when we look at the future
00:52:27
of Human Society or indeed since we now influence the whole planet then I don't think it's fixed and I think we're co-creators um
00:52:38
I think that we we're part of a process of evolving Consciousness um but what we think and what we hope for and what we pray for I think can
00:52:50
actually influence what happens yeah and therefore I think it's important for us to think of what kind of future we would actually want um and it's not very easy to come up with that answer
00:53:03
um you know I believe in the power of prayer I think that when we form um intentions or visions that there's more chance that those will come about and if we don't form them but what kind
00:53:16
of vision we form is important and many years ago during Cold War um some people I knew were organizing a project of praying for peace during the
00:53:28
Cold War um and the instead of the vague nebulous idea peace it seems so so vague and it was specifically focused on nuclear
00:53:39
bases and each person who is doing adopted nuclear base in in the Soviet Empire and one in the west so you had two nuclear bases you
00:53:51
prayed for yeah and uh to because the idea is if peace breaks aren't those bases would be cease to be nuclear bases yeah yeah so um then when we were thinking about how
00:54:04
to pray for it some people said well I'm just envisaging you know these bases pervaded by lights you know really bright light filling the places you said then we thought well actually if you envisage that and it's envisaging a
00:54:17
nuclear war because all of these um bases would be primary nuclear targets and what would happen in the event of nuclear Wars they would indeed be engulfed by a bright light namely of a nuclear explosion yeah
00:54:32
so some of us thought it'd be better to pray for imagining these places with long grass there and sort of imagine the barbed wire around them sort of rusting as the fences fell down and that kind of
00:54:45
see and that's actually more what has happened to many of these nuclear bases yeah um so if we think what do we actually want many people when they think of the future think humans living in harmony
00:54:58
with the Earth in small communities growing their own potatoes and things well the only way that could happen is through billions of people dying off because there's no way the present population of the Earth could spread out
00:55:12
and live in small Farming Farming communities and if you take the population of Britain there's no way that 60 million people could disperse into the countryside and each have enough land to have a small farm living
00:55:24
in harmony with nature it's not going to happen you did calculations on that because I I've heard that it's very possible to live like more imbalance with nature with 8 million people on the
00:55:36
8 billion people on the planet well I'm sure it's more possible to live more in balance with nature if we reduce our demands but not for everyone to have enough land to grow their own food
00:55:48
I mean if you take the 60 million people doing in Britain or more and there's something like eight or ten million people in London and if each of
00:56:01
them had you know a hectare or two to grow their own food well you know there isn't enough land oh yeah so so that we can certainly live more in harmony with the planet if we reduce our demands and
00:56:13
if we instead of throwing everything away and you know having to extract things use them and throw them away even so-called recycling programs don't recycle that much most of it is burned
00:56:27
here in Britain and incinerators um so we all lead enormously wasteful lives with far more than we actually need but no government's going to get elected by saying we're offering you the chance of
00:56:41
reducing your consumption and reducing your economic potential that's what's actually happening of course in Europe I mean incomes are going down at least in
00:56:53
Britain incomes are going down people are getting poorer yeah and for the first time generations of children realize they're never going to live as well as their parents whereas for we've got used to
00:57:05
the idea that children would do better than their parents be richer have yeah better outcomes and so forth yeah so we've already we're already at a point of inflection where the tide is turning
00:57:18
but the whole of our political system is geared towards more and more economic growth than more products and stuff that we haven't really got access to him at the moment which
00:57:30
is designed to reduce our impact by reducing our consumption yeah what are your expectations for the coming years well I mean I think that the the
00:57:43
obviously there's millions of Doom scenarios around I mean we've all had them you know there's so many things that could go wrong and are going wrong [Music] um I prefer to think of things that
00:57:55
might go right you know and which would include more people discovering life-led more living more simply with more spiritual goals can be
00:58:07
more satisfying and happier than the life of ever increasing consumption so I think a move towards a more spiritual way of thinking and living is one of my Great Hopes
00:58:21
yeah we shared that hope and that's also what we're supporting um and and we get it back from our audience you know that they're also in their own environments and
00:58:34
it's also more attractive because um yeah the happiness happiness is more clear in that way and people feel it instead of that it's a promise a story yes yeah maybe people are also a little
00:58:48
bit tired of those false promises and they know they discovered it that's not what life is about so I think there's also like a natural correcting
00:59:00
mechanism in place like yeah we learn by doing and we discover okay this is a dead end Street and we take a side here and we grow towards something else so I can also feel like a sacredness of
00:59:14
everything here yeah and it's also coming back to yeah our our view on time do you mind if I if I pose a like a philosophy on that and please do I have
00:59:28
a Bible verse on that because you go to church right yes and I think there are so many undeniable statements in the Bible which have have been very confusing like
00:59:40
strange but now with new eyes with with the fresh look it may be very insightful so I don't know if I pronounce this correctly
00:59:52
Ecclesiastes the Bible book Ecclesiastes yes Ecclesiastes number in 3 verse 15. that goes about time and it states that which has been is now
01:00:07
and that which is to be has already been and God shall seek that which is past yeah this is quite a puzzle if you believe in linear time or in cyclic time
01:00:20
I think it's spiraling but yeah um a few months ago I got this inside of about what time really is and it's also coming back about what Einstein for
01:00:32
instance said about time the time is an illusion it's just a perception but a very stubborn one and I share that stubbornness because you know right before this talk we were outside and we're moving to her so we
01:00:46
have a clear yeah experience of time but what they now came to see is that it's constructed in this way it's created in this way from beginning to
01:00:58
end so the beginning of time and the end of time has already been in place the whole universe and that's growing into words a vertical time I don't know if you've heard these
01:01:10
terms before like horizontal time and vertical time and I believe that we live we experience life in horizontal time which is already there but our soul goes
01:01:22
through man this experience but when you step outside of it like where God is or where angels are they can see the whole picture already so they can see for instance hey a
01:01:35
messiah is coming and you know Jesus came 2000 years ago so this time and Jesus talked a lot about the completion of this world
01:01:47
and so the way I look at it now is not it's not completing in horizontal way but it's completing in a vertical way so we're growing and we learn by doing and we have traumas and we heal our traumas
01:02:01
to have a nicer life so this horizontal timeline is growing towards a completion and I don't believe in a big crunch that you mentioned
01:02:14
and yeah if I would say where it's all going to what comes to mind is what the Tibetan Monks what they make with the sand they call it chain they make these mandelas or mandalas I don't know how to
01:02:27
pronounce but beautiful and once it's ready it's all crystallized and it's perfect then they begin all over so that's that's a little bit my my
01:02:40
understanding of time and so it's not one-dimensional it's two-dimensional we have an experience in one dimension but God lives in another dimension and that's also what a lot of spiritual practices state that God can
01:02:53
be found in the moment that's where true life is and yeah like a time is an illusion so yeah everything starts to make sense when I look at it in that way
01:03:06
and you know I've been really looking forward to this talk to to post this with you and yeah just to pick your brain on on yeah what do you feel like where do you feel like reluctance or or
01:03:19
uh what do you think yeah what do you think about this right the idea of the horizontal and vertical makes sense to me um I think horizontal time is not illusory I think the universe is expanding which
01:03:34
is creating more time as well as it does say I think that time is asymmetric Einstein's block Universe was completely symmetric and the reason for that is that Einstein was a platonist and he
01:03:48
believed that the mathematical laws the mathematical reality these abstract ideas of mass are Timeless platonic forms of Timeless so I think one of the confusions in Western science
01:04:02
is precisely that there's vertical time the Timeless or Eternal Dimension has been incorporated into our model of nature through Timeless mathematical laws and constant constants and the
01:04:15
block universe and stuff there's been a kind of introduction of Eternity in inappropriately into horizontal time that I think that the actual process of expansion of the
01:04:29
universe versus asymmetric it's expanding not Contracting the growth of an embryo from a fertilized egg into an adult organism is a one-way process you don't see it going the other way old
01:04:42
people don't grow down and become embryos yeah embryos grow up and become old yeah eventually um the the there's a kind of
01:04:53
irreversibility in many processes that nature is a process and and process um has a difference between the past and the future we have memories of the past and anticipations or hopes or desires or
01:05:07
intentions for the future but they're different and so I think time horizontal time is not an illusion I think it's it's very real I think it's the way nature Works
01:05:20
um and this asymmetry in time which is reflected in quantum theory too the the the the shredding a wave equation that describes what will happen to an electron or any other particle describes
01:05:33
all the possible things that could happen as soon as it interacts with something or is measured all these possibilities collapsed and to a defined fact that you can measure um it's called the collapse of the wave
01:05:46
function and then new possibilities open up and those then collapse done so you have got a kind of opening possibilities in the future which then become facts which are then in the past the
01:05:59
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was very keen on this point of view that the the mental poll is the future pole and the physical poll is the past poll the relation of mind and body is not spatial
01:06:12
the inner and the outer the usual way we think of it but rather the mental pole is the future pole and the physical poll is the past pole they're related in time
01:06:24
um and so the he thought the mind was pre-concerned with future and choices among future actions in other words embedded in future possibilities and the main function of Consciousness is to
01:06:38
choose among these possibilities as soon as you've chosen then it becomes a measurable physical fact like it's a measurable physical fact that you and I are sitting here now but you know we
01:06:50
could have chosen to do other things this morning um we didn't to it's a measurable physical fact who is being measured and recorded on cameras and things so um
01:07:02
uh but the we're also at the same time our minds are opening to new future possibilities and so the mental poll is always about the future and possibility but it's to do with possible actions
01:07:15
it's all to be embedded it's all about being embedded in time and process but as you said there's also this vertical aspect which comes about through mystical experiences most
01:07:26
powerfully where people feel that their mind is part of something much greater than themselves yeah um sharing in some kind of divine or more than human consciousness which goes
01:07:41
way beyond our normal consciousness and which gives the impression of being Timeless or not in time as we normally know it and people can arrive at mystical experiences spontaneously I
01:07:54
mean lots of people have them spontaneously even as children or they can arrive at them through spiritual practices all through psychedelic experiences um all through near-death experiences
01:08:07
there are people have these experiences of being part of a much larger Consciousness which is not in the kind of time we normally know and that I would I think that's what gave rise to
01:08:20
the platonic I think the platonic philosophy I think arose from mystical experience the intuition there's something Beyond time but then it was turned into a philosophy in maths and
01:08:32
then applied to Nature in in a way that's not to do with experience the direct experience but as a kind of formula for the way Nature's governed by its own laws so I think originally Plato
01:08:46
probably arrived at this idea of an eternal reality in fact all the ancient Greek philosophers were preoccupied with the idea that there's an internal reality Beyond this world which doesn't
01:08:57
change and I think that original Insight must have come from mystical experience I mean after all they had the ellucinian Mysteries that many of the leading Greeks went to in the cave in eluses the
01:09:10
temple in the Lucius where they took a psychedelic Brew some people think contained ergart or a purified forms of our God a bit like LSD um
01:09:23
which is derived from the Fungus Our God and that there was a strong mystical element in in Greek thought and um so anyway I think that this vertical
01:09:35
Dimension is which is experienced through mystical experience which is the ground of all religion all religions start from this experience of connection with something greater than the human
01:09:47
level and the Buddha became enlightened not by doing a PhD but by sitting meditating under trees and um you know the ancient rishias of India the seers
01:09:58
who wrote the upanishads or dictated them they were sitting in caves meditating for years like Tibetan Monks do now Jesus didn't get his vision of being the
01:10:12
Son of God through studying in a rabbinical Seminary he got it through a direct mystical experience at the moment of his baptism according to the New Testament yeah um and so the this sense
01:10:25
of direct connection is what underlies all religions and which ultimately they're about yeah yeah and then we start to to give Verge to it and then we start to misunderstand each other
01:10:38
yes oh yes but within all religions there's the possibility of you know going connecting with with that original Vision as well I mean
01:10:52
you know in medieval Europe was full of monasteries and in them some were Trappist monasteries and people spent hours and hours praying every day and meditating contemplative prayer yeah um
01:11:04
as in you know in the Orthodox Church that all these monks on Mount Asos and um so there's always been a strong and Tibetan Monks in monasteries and in caves Tibetan refugees they've always
01:11:16
been some people who within all religions who are Mystics and who keep that tradition alive yeah and lots of ordinary people who do as well yeah and I'm very grateful for it it's
01:11:29
it's like a time capsule for wisdom and beautiful insights you know about what you said earlier that we co-create our own world our own future like I have
01:11:43
um yeah this view on money but what money does to society it's so such a such a conditional aspect of life or our society and in one of your books I read about
01:11:58
gratitude that gratitude it's it sucked out of society because we use money we feel entitled to something we buy and we don't really feel the Gratitude to it
01:12:13
um yeah that was very insightful yeah what is your view on on the concept of money so not about the monetary system because that's already enough said about inflation and and all these things but
01:12:26
just a simple aspect of money or trade um yeah like what's what future are we co-creating if we don't really see this whole thing of
01:12:40
money through like what is it what does it do what is your view on that I haven't told that much about it um but I managed started off as being
01:12:52
sacred you know Juno was the goddess of money in Rome and um money was you know the money was a kind of sacred thing it was a often made of
01:13:06
gold I mean of precious metals which themselves were associated with the sacred um because they were precious um but money's become
01:13:20
increasingly secularized and has lost any trace of uh the sacred and now of course it's simply made up I mean the very fact people could make up cryptocurrencies yeah and the fact that
01:13:32
quantitative easing can happen Banks just press a button and and billions of Euros or Pounds or dollars have just created as if by Magic yeah um it's quite clearly become something that's
01:13:46
basically in our minds it's no longer you know bags of coins of actual precious metal it's it's abstract things in computers and computer systems
01:14:00
um personally I'm I use cash whenever possible and I don't particularly want our whole economic system to be virtualized um apart from anything else it would
01:14:12
make us very vulnerable in the event of any conflict the first thing hostile hackers would do is bring down the internet and then the entire economic system would be paralyzed and only be able to buy
01:14:24
vegetables and install in the street or food or anything because their credit cards or phones wouldn't work and and so whereas cash is much more resilient so actually I take a solstice like I think
01:14:38
if we had more cash then people would have a great sense of it having some kind of physical reality or anchoring in the physical which gold coins anchor
01:14:49
magnitude and even plastic Euro or pound notes who Anchorage something physical even if it's the value of the note has got nice to do with the fraction of a
01:15:02
cent worth of plastic initudes it so it's something again is completely in our minds yeah um well I mean I I don't know enough about economics and the financial system to
01:15:16
speculate on the future of it but um I don't think we're going to get rid of money because it's been a means of exchange for such a long time it's so deeply embedded into our system
01:15:28
well it calls upon a mission for me then because I I really feel that what you say is true like we we are the ones who are creating this society and the future
01:15:42
and it's up to us like it's our gift this whole creation and we can steer and there's so much to say about money the conditional aspect of it it's an
01:15:54
eccentric motivation instead of an intrinsical one and there's so many things to say about it so thank you for giving your your views on that and uh I also really appreciated that you are
01:16:09
like a true researcher you know you stick to your own subjects that you know about and like with the money yeah it's not your area of expertise and I think we live in a time where so so many like
01:16:21
gurus they get a stage and yeah they get a lot of respect and people start to ask all sorts of questions to them and then they also start to give answers to all sorts of questions and I see that yeah
01:16:36
that that's just another trap that we want to avoid so yeah I really appreciate your being so like a true researcher um yeah I don't want to thank you uh in
01:16:49
general for this for having us and and for this conversation and I like to ask um if you have something to add so it's a last statement that you want to give
01:17:01
um well I suppose that I think the the since I've written two books actually on science and spiritual practices first is called science and spiritual practices which you mentioned the second is called
01:17:14
ways to go beyond and why they work which is about seven more spiritual practices um since I think these are very helpful I I suppose one thing I would say is you
01:17:26
know that it's worth anyone who doesn't have spiritual practice who's Contin taking one or more practices up and for people who do say
01:17:39
people who meditate then to look into the possibility of other ones because it's not either or you can have many different practices and one of the ones that I find is most transformative
01:17:51
simplest and most fun is pilgrimage and so um I don't know what the situation is in the Netherlands because I've never been on a pilgrimage there but there are holy places everywhere in Europe and there
01:18:05
are plenty in the Netherlands and um the key thing that we in the British pilgrimage Trust of which I'm a patron is that they should be on foot and you
01:18:17
know one should go to the holy place with an intention to give thanks or to ask for something or um and this is is very different from just
01:18:29
going for a walk because you're going with an intention um so I think and the pilgrimage can just be a few hours it can easily take place in a single day so it doesn't involve having to buy lots of heavy
01:18:41
camping equipment and yeah yeah booking tickets to go somewhere near Santiago to start on the Camino um it can be something much simpler and
01:18:53
I think it's a way of re-sacralizing the landscape and re-synchronizing our lives and so uh something I'm very keen on and and I recommend to anyone who's interested in
01:19:06
do you try something new if they haven't already tried it absolutely well I was reading your book and I noticed that I'm doing all all of all all of the spiritual practices except this one
01:19:17
so it's a good reminder for me to yeah to try it so by foot you go towards like a cathedral or a church yes or a sacred place in nature or Ley lines or yeah
01:19:30
whatever you feel attraction towards and you go there with a clear intention yes and traditionally you'd make an offering of some kind I mean if it's a cathedral then you know making some offering if
01:19:43
you go to a Hindu temple you take flowers or coconuts or something um to make some offering to give thanks for the place and then you know with an intention of
01:19:56
linking to the place and our pilgrimage roots in Britain which are on a website called britishpilgrimage.org um include Cathedrals churches holy Wells
01:20:09
the sources of rivers um mountain tops um I mean traditionally people have always found some mountaintops or sources of rivers or Springs important
01:20:22
holy places yeah and some cathedrals are built on Ancient holy places here in Britain Wells Cathedral for example is next to seven wonderful Springs that come out of the ground they're right at
01:20:34
the East End of the cathedral yeah and it's called Wells because these are wells and so many of these Cathedrals and chartreuse built over a sacred well it's
01:20:46
in the crept of the cathedral so many of them are actually built on the player on yeah traditional sacred places so it's a matter of rediscovering those places when in Protestant countries
01:21:00
pilgrimage was suppressed at the Reformation and so um in Catholic countries it wasn't so um in Protestant countries like Britain
01:21:11
um pilgrimage was made illegal in 1538 oh wow and it's only recently in the 20th century began again I think that the uh the reason the British invented tourism was because they couldn't be
01:21:24
pilgrims anymore and I think tourism was a form of secularized pilgrimage um and um I think when you see tourism as secularized or even more frustrated pilgrimage because people go to the
01:21:37
great sacred places the temples of Egypt the temples of India the cathedrals of Europe Etc as tourists yeah but then they have to pretend they're there because they're interested in art history or architectural history and
01:21:51
most people aren't very interested in they don't really care what year it was built in um they they're going because it's a great sacred place but because they've secularized people they think they've
01:22:03
got to go there and pretend to be Enlightenment rationalists intellectuals they have to pretend they're interested in all these facts um and they can't sort of kneel down and say a prayer or light a candle but if
01:22:17
one can go in the spirit of a pilgrim and light a candle and say a prayer and just be in that space and be open to the space and the tradition it's completely different and much more
01:22:29
satisfying experience so I think the Revival of pilgrimage in particularly in countries that have been traditionally Protestant is is like a paradigm shift and and is
01:22:41
is very transformative in the way we relate to the place as well as our own lives yeah well well thank you very much for that last addition yeah all right so well I hope you've enjoyed
01:22:54
this episode although it was in English but hopefully the subtitles have helped um if so please give it a like and leave a comment that way it goes up in the
01:23:07
reading so new people can discover the podcast and gain benefits from it you can subscribe to this channel visit our website book lumens dot NL and below the video
01:23:20
you can also find a few links towards um the britishpilgrimage.org which was mentioned also a link to the video of the band Ted Talk which is really interesting
01:23:33
um and towards a few books of Rupert sheldrake alright thank you very much and see you next time to fly away away
01:23:47
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