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[Music] and welcome everyone my brother-in-law aliser murter once wrote a short story where he said the boys got up earlier than anyone has ever got up before and
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and that seems to apply to some of our um dedicated attenders from the US I'm going to light a candle uh first before I say anything else and I've got a map that works
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today hopefully yes there we are good so um a warm welcome to this dialogue with um Rupert sheldrake and
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Ian mcgilchrist uh I've known Ian and Rupert for over 40 years and so our connection goes back a long way and I'd like to um start with just a remark or
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two on reading uh and this comes from the obituary this week in the telegraph of John Thorne um who was Headmaster of Winchester when I was teaching there and
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when Ian was a pupil and in 1981 he was chairman of the headmaster's conference and he said um uh I do see a cloud bigger than a
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man's hand in the decline of reading he told HMC if it is not done at school it may never be done and I think this is a prophetic remark um and at Winchester
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there's something called the div system which is a a General Studies where the the dawn the teacher has a lot of latitude in in what is read and while um
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Ian was at Winchester one of the books he read at the recommendation of his hous was William James's varieties religious experience which is a seminal book of
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gford lectures from Edinburgh univers 1901 1902 and so Ian read this when he was probably about 16 and Rupert didn't get around reading it until quite a bit
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later and and just yesterday I've been corresponding with a former pupil who's also a scholar at Winchester Professor Ben Morrison and Ben is now the chair of philosophy at Princeton and my first
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encounter with him um was that Simon Elliot one of my friends who is a dawn as well he sent him round with a six-page essay aged 14 entitled does God
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exist and and he went through the the usual arguments and so I pointed him in the direction of William James and lent him a copy of variety's religious experience which he proceeded to read
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and then we we discussed it and then uh rert appeared uh first in my um Horizon as it were at Mystics and scientists 1983 when I was teaching at Winchester
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and he was lecturing on his then new book or newish book a new science of Life uh and I gave him I gave him a spare copy of this book here which is called talks to teacher on psychology
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and to students on some of life's ideals by William James and which I'm sure is still somewhere in Rupert's library and then finally this book here is incredibly important it's called human
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immortality and and um it's the ingol lecture on um immortality 1898 at Harvard University and just to start um Ian and
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Rupert off I'm going to read a couple of short passages from the inclusion of variety's religious experience and and this is my paperback
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copy I read it when I was 26 and I remember remember um Reading part of it in the beautiful gardens in marur so he says summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the religious
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Life as we have found them it includes the following beliefs one that the visible world is part of a more spiritual Universe from which it draws its Chief significance two that Union or
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harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end three that prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof be that Spirit God or law
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is a process wherein work is really done and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects psychological or material uh within the phenomenal world
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and then another very short piece on the self um uh we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self
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through which saving experiences come a positive content religious experience which it seems to me is literally and objectively true as far as it goes and the other thing I just wanted to observe
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about um rert and Ian is that they are both voracious readers and they have read widely and deeply all their lives um and their libraries are pretty
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impressive uh I have a fairly impressive Library as well so between us I think we we we span a considerable range and so I'm going to hand over um to you Ian and
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rert and I think Ian you were going to um open the batting as it were okay yes yes that's good I I should um refer to schopenhauer's view that never read
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books reading books is for people who got no ideas of their own but anyway um can we Spotlight Ian please and and
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rert just wait till rert appears on the screen there we are it thank you is I'm speaking from the bedroom of the daughter of a friend in a flat in London
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um and um yes it it's hard to get my my I I feel so um so much that I belong where I live that it's quite hard to sort of
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reconstitute my mental World here for the moment but I think what I want to say is that I've become more and more convinced that none of the things that we
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desperately need to do to solve the various problems that we we we we uh face and that we talk about a great deal none of this in the
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end will matter unless we are able to get back to the spiritual ground of our being and in other words we could by some sort of a miracle we
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could we could reverse the pollution of the Seas we could perhaps um do something to at least slow climate change we could um make it harder for people to carry on faing ancient forests
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all all this I believe in powerfully but I also think that none of it will add up to a hill of beans unless we re-engage AG with the spiritual basis of a human
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life I don't think we any longer know what it is to be a human being I think people haven't the foggiest idea what they're doing here what the the cosmos in which they come into being is like um
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and what their relationship with the earth that is their home uh is like um and and I'm just going to say a few things for you but then ask you to to respond
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to them really in the new book I wrote um the matter with things it I I suggest first of all that many of the ways in which we look
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at the the constitution of the cosmos are upside down or back to front so in other words we we we tend to think for example that the first of all there are things and then there are relations between them some of which we make in
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our minds and that's the way it is whereas I argue throughout a very long book that in fact relation are absolutely primary there is nothing that truly exists that is not a relation and
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is not in fact in process as whad um pointed out um so in other words relations and processes are primary not States and things and I also believe that for
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example it's not that there's literal truth and that's really important thing and metaphorical truths are are just some kind of semi imaginary extension of of literal truth
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in fact I believe that all fundamental truths are metaphorical in nature and that literal truth is just a very special kind that we've invented to describe a small subset of things that
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occur at a very um everyday level but I for the purposes of what we're talking about now I want to suggest that it's not that somehow there is inan animacy
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and then there is life and then there is Consciousness and then there is a sense of the great values goodness Beauty truth and the
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sacred I think it's the other way around that what actually exists fundamentally is a Consciousness which is a field of Consciousness which is divine
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which which has the qualities of attending to and drawing us towards goodness Beauty and truth and and the sense of the Holy and sacred and
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that it's for this that we've developed our complexity as human beings since we are not better than animals but we are in this sense above them that we can we
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can hope to respond to to receive to resonate with and to give a full and fulfilling response to those leading values that draw us forward
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so that's the way I would like to think of it rert um what would you say to that well I think of it in a very similar way and so do most people in the world for that matter um if you actually
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look at and we live in a particularly Godless part of the world Western Europe um but it's not quite the same if you go to Africa or India um or many other
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parts of the world or the or or Iraq or you know Iran or mean the Middle East um most people are religious in the world um and you know this kind of secularist
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secular humanist atheist tinted culture that we have um is is a historical anomaly most people were religious in Europe in in as Charles Taylor in his
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wonderful book of a secular age points out in the year 1500 in Europe um every everyone believed in God everyone believed in the kind of vision you've just put forward it was almost
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impossible not to not because people were coerced into believing that but because there was just no credible alternative and um what's happened is through the growth of first through the
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Protestant Reformation and the disenchantment of the world that happened in part through the Protestant Reformation um a a lack of emphasis on nature a focus entirely on human
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Consciousness and then through the Scientific Revolution the mechanistic materialist worldview um that's grown out of it um we now have this very secular world where people think that
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Evolution and Life Starts from the bottom up you know from genes and molecules and cells and um everything builds up until you've got big enough brains where the light of Consciousness
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mysteriously comes on and um then we not thinking about bigger things like God but they're all just inventions inside our own minds and hence inside our own brains and you'd be able to tell us
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exactly where no I wouldn't no um that I mean this this what both you and I are discussing and what in fact the whole scientific medical
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network has been concerned with right from the start is you know trying to find a way way back to a world view that is in is still consonant with science because science isn't going to go away
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and we've learned a great many things about nature through the scientific process uh but to recover a sense of this connection which is actually there in all Traditions I mean shamanic
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Traditions all admit that there's or all just assume that there's some realm they have different views of it but there are Realms beyond our own that what we see is not all the is and as my main teacher
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father beid Griffith uh used to point out that you know the center of all religious and spiritual culture is um a direct experience of our minds our
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Consciousness being part of something vastly greater than ourselves and as he pointed out all religions start from that experience it's not a Dogma it's an experience and
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then they interpret it and his favorite metaphor was the hand and you know that sort of central experience of unity is like the palm of the hand and then it's interpreted in different cultures in
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different Traditions different languages they like the fingers of the hand all the different interpretations of this primary unitive experience this sense of ultimate unity which are interpreted in all these
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different cultural ways but that is the Central Foundation of all these religious traditions and as as far as we know this intuition that we're part of something greater than ourselves is very
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ancient I mean all these cave paintings from 20 30 40,000 years ago um the practice of burying the dead and so on all the or dealing with the dead in a ritual way all these things suggest that
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this has been part of human consciousness for a very very long time no doubt the forms have changed and the development of the great religions has sort of put him more unifying aspect on
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these insights but it seems to me that it's been foundational to human life for throughout almost all human history with the brief anomaly of Western Europe and
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parts of North America in the last 150 years yes of course and it is worth reflecting on the fact that it would be entirely irrational to suppose that we
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were aware of everything in the cosmos why on Earth would we I mean we know in the very simplest level that there are sounds that we can't hear but that bears and bats can hear so what we know is
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limited by our our senses and by um the relative unsophistication of our brains I say relative because relative to what there is for us to approach
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ifone has any kind of um sense of imagination one can see that um things we sense are there and that as you say throughout the world people have believed are there this is not irrational this is a very reasonable
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supposition and there are people in for example Australia the native people there who who say they can hear and see things at a distance they can hear people ancestors speaking to them and
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who are we frankly to say that they don't hear those things I like the I think I'm sure you would agree the very important idea of gter that we develop
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senses to perceive things in response to the in the the bits of experience that we we are able to to to get um and that
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therefore if we don't actually allow ourselves to experience certain things then an organ that we might have will atrophy and I suggest that we've allowed
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organs that would help us to see the these things and hear these things and know these things we've allowed them to atrophy and that people that we consider more primitive than us and indeed our
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own children up to an age before they're um they're told that it's not it's not wise or intelligent to say that you see these things you're fantasizing I the
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these people have the organs of perception that we need in order to to to reach the Divine or or have any inklings of it and I suppose that we all have enough of an inkling of that that
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unless we shut it down we can follow it and one hopes to grow it you know Keat called this world a veil of Soul making and in other words we are we are
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nourishing or or stunting the Soul by the way in which we live yes well I think the um the one way of looking at it is um Charles Taylor
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suggests that in in Europe in say until 1500 or later people had the idea that minds of porous porosity is a word he uses and the Anthropologist Tanya lurman
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who's at Stanford um is I think one of the most interesting anthropologists of religion writing at the moment and in her latest paper she talks about porosity in all religions it's assumed
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that our minds are porous to influences from each other influences from Spirits gods angels other beings that um Minds a porous and what Charles Taylor shows is
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that since the 17th century there there's been this shutting down uh so the idea we've end up ended up with is our minds are completely insulated with inside the privacy of our skulls they're
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nothing but the electrical activity of our brains or other activities of the brains inside our heads and they're all separated off from everything else they're completely
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privatized um and what Tanya lurman shows is that she wrote her most recent book is called how God becomes real and and the previous one was called how
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God talks back um and she's done anthropological studies of charismatic Christians you know Evangelical groups women grow women praying in tyan Muslim
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women praying in tran shamanic cultures and so forth she's done and she shows that in all these uh Traditions there's the idea that we're open to Spirits or beings of other kinds but she also
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points out that this um is actually something requires a cultural reinforcement and effort on our on our part you know if you believe in God it's not just a kind of passive belief that
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people who believe in God pray they go to temples churches Services they meet with others they pray together they have C annual ceremonies rituals practices
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Etc there's a lot of work goes into um making these beliefs more apparent and more de directly experienced and I think something similar happens with uh
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people have to put in quite a lot of work to maintain the secular world viw to maintain a secular atheist worldview denying all these things involves quite a lot of hard work on denial you first
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of all have to deny uh all your own telepathic experiences and 85% of people have these experiences with telepathic telephone calls you have to deny that you can really tell when someone's
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staring at you from behind and 95% of people have experienced that you have to deny that you have flashes of insight or mystical experience that appear to connect you with a Consciousness greater
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than your own if you take psychedelics which give a wonderful sense of connection with something greater than yourself you have to deny that that's real um but you just have to say well
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that's just because chemical disturbances inside the brain um so even atheism and and secularism require quite a lot of effort they do in in denial
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and and the motive for the denial I suppose is fitting in with the secular world and what the The only positive side of it all is a self- congratulatory feeling you're smarter than everyone
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else because you've seen through all these false beliefs and childish attitudes that children have and so-called primitive people do and when when you were reading the varieties of
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religious experience at school I had a house Mar master who uh he was you know tried to show me the limitations of the Orthodox Christianity in which the the school
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Chapel we we all had to go there every day and um and I was reading bits of um JG frasers the golden bow and Robert White goddess oh yes indeed his aim was
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to prove to me that Christianity was no better than these primitive superstitious beliefs found all over World um and um and since we were quite happy to dismiss all of them as mumbo
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jumbo the same applied to Christianity it was no better than them and and the first I was persuaded I thought this was an appalling weakness because it presumed to be superior to these other beliefs and I've later come to see this
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a tremendous strength that it has so much in common with and archetype or patterns found all over the world um but the the the the idea that we're smarter than others I
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mean Fraser and all those late 19th century figures early 20th century figures had the view that we've risen above the sort of animistic superstition and then you get religion which is a bit
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better not much better and then you go beyond that to science and then you realize all that stuff basically childish rubbish we've drove grown out of um so I think that that's how we've
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got here and I think it does take quite a lot of effort as I for people to maintain that belief and I suppose that um you would map some of this I'm just
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guessing uh onto activities of different parts of the brain um yes maybe I mean before we go there though you rais a number of we we we you
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you rais a number a number of interesting points um I I argue also in my chapter um 28 of the matter with things
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of the sense of the Sacred um from evidence uh given by psychological studies that actually it takes more effort to deny is
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it's not true that as Dawkins suggests that we are indoctrinated into religion in fact it's the opposite that it takes um more cognitive effort to to inhibit these these ideas that doesn't mean that
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they're wrong of course um but it is interesting that if you have people and maybe that is to do with the uh the brain that that some people especially
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people with Autism um and uh who are something like a 10 times more likely to be atheistic um the normal brain is
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actually allowing us to if we will not suppress it to experience the sort of things that you're talking about and you know going back to my idea that the the things that we think are primary
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are not and the things that we think are secondary are are not so in the case of Oneness you were talking about how we have to you know go back to an idea of
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being poorest but this is this is a as you as you suggesting I think this is the natural state to see ourselves as in connection with the world um and you get in pan psychism a very
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interesting phenomenon which is that people people say okay so how do we okay maybe The Logical position since we can't see how to get um Consciousness
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out of M lump and matter maybe the answer is everything's got Consciousness in it but then how do we recompose it you know how do we put this together it's actually called the combination problem this is typical of the left hem spere which having first of all ruptured
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the unity then doesn't know how to quote recreate the unity but the unity is there the unity is primary um not not a secondary phenomenon that has to be put together and
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achieved um so I think that that kind of pan psychism is is somewhat irrational and and left hemisphere dominated now you I you've brought me to the position where of course I've mentioned
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hemispheres and uh I should say to anybody listening that my position is not that the brain um creates our experience at all um I say that logically there are three possibilities
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the brain either imits experience or it um transmits experience or it permits experience and and I I believe that in fact the brain is a peritter of
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experience that shapes it much as the vocal cords as William James pointed out or what shape his voice a restriction a constriction an inhibition a negation some kind of
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molding or um no saying to the breath that would come through if there was no such um molding or permitting then there would be no voice at all but coming to
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the boring stuff about brain correlates we do know that um I'm afraid it just is a matter of of fact and I give I think it's a endex 7 or something in in in the
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matter with things I I do go over the science on hemisphere difference in spirituality in relation to um mindfulness uh meditation in general um
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and Shamanism uh religious experiences of certain kinds and the overwhelming evidence is that this requires a shift of balance away from the normal
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slight uh bias towards the left hemisphere um in these experiences one finds that this imbalance if you like is redressed and not only redressed but
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that the centers um that are subtending these kinds of experience are um very clearly um right hemisphere related so in a culture which I believe promotes
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the values of the left hem sees the world as particulate made up of isolated things that are fixed um that are unchanging uh inanimate abstracted
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explicit uh there is no room for this kind of um this kind of experience indeed I was talking yesterday to clergy in Canter um and I don't know what they thought of it but I was trying to
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explain that all the sort of things that you need in order to open your mind to these existence of a Divine being are militated against by the natural mode of the left hemisphere which is to pin
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things down to look for certainty um to focus on the explicit rather than the implicit to see things as naturally inanimate rather than animate and to be
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all the time cataloging and charting experience as on a map or having a theory about it rather than actually allowing experience to come to you to do that you've got to have an opposite cast
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of mind which is in fact the cast of mind that the right hemisphere enables for us in daily life which is the the voice of a um a way of seeing things which in which there is no final
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certainty there are things that are probable and there are things that are more likely than others but there's no final certainty nothing is finally separated from anything else uh nothing
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is ever completely fixed it's always uh moving changing and flowing um all the really important stuff cannot be put into language uh anybody who's been in love knows how incredibly feeble the
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language is to deal with this extraordinary experience um and of course any of you who are listening who are um um persuaded that there is a spiritual realm a Divine realm that you
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can um have in intimations of this again is beyond conceptual um redu in language um the right hemisphere enables us to be
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more willing to accept Paradox um to accept things that are not certain and this is the realm where we um where we find the spiritual
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life yes the the sense of not certainty I mean there is a sense a sense though in some spiritual experiences where there is a great certainty I I mean for example people whove had near-death
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experiences or mytical experiences spontaneously or as a result of spiritual practices or as a lot of psychedelics um there I mean I myself and I've had some of these types of
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experiences one of the things that people say about them is that you know that it's real that it's it's more real than nor nor normal reality sure sure near-death experiences which change
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which last a few minutes um people's lives because they feel they've contacted a realm a reality which is more real more certain in a way than the ordinary world we live in and they don't
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have any doubt that there's this spiritual reality because they've directly experienced it now I don't know whether that where to what extent that depends on one or both hemispheres or
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whether it goes beyond the brain Al together but it's it from what's so convincing for many people about these experiences is precisely that they seem
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unquestionably real yes I raises two points really one is this um I would make a distinction between the absolutely certain and an as asymptotic
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approach to certainty and the left hemisphere has a category of things that are yes and no and I don't think that experience well not in my experience is
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ever this I'm not lucky enough to have had one of these experiences but I imagine if I'd had one I'd say I'm almost as certain of this as I can be of anything which is different from um claiming absolute certainty or absolute
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truth but the other thing about it is something that my housemaster Martin Scott the man who really modeled for me the the wonderful relation between a man who was profoundly sane very funny um
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hyper alert to the ridicul ulous was also a deeply spiritual and and in that sense a very serious person and he he modeled and conveyed to me that that way of looking at things and and one of the
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things he emphasized to me was that the true religious experience is not really about these moments of certainty or about you know levitating or seeing the future or any of these things nice as
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they may be they are not the center of it and that in fact they're not particular L prized by the mystics who had these experiences and not particularly prized actually by the um
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Buddhist Masters um they they don't think that these amazing transformative experiences are really what it's about um but it's typical of our society that we would imagine that there is an
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experience of this kind and it's not about a more humble application uh of a kind of disposition towards the world which is one of awe and and um
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humility uh and compassion uh which I believe is at the center of it so I'm not disrespecting extraordinary experiences I I'm just saying that I'm I'm a skeptic amongst Believers and
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I'm a Believer amongst Skeptics I've always been like this and and I I and when people do this I find myself suddenly R running to the other um part of the balance here to sort of keep
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things properly in perspective well speaking from my own experience I've had these moments of insight where I've just known that there's a a greater Consciousness than
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than that we normally experience but on a dayto day but I mean those days are quite rare those experiences not like every day and that's where spiritual practices come in um and I myself
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meditate in the mornings and I pray in the evenings um and I see these as different daily ways of relating um I see the meditation I think of was more like breathing in and I close my eyes
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I'm try not to be occupied with the things in in in my room or wherever I'm doing it then of course I have Mantra so concentrate on the Mantra um and sit
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quietly and thoughts go through my mind and so on and and so it's a way of withdrawing not only from the world but also from the inner world of the default mode network of constant inner chatter
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well it still goes on but you detach from it and just let it pass and so so that's like I think like breathing in whereas prayer I experience in as almost the opposite direction petitionary
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prayer U you start with an invocation all prayers start with an invocation Our Father Who Art in Heaven Hail Mary full of grace om namaya oh Allah you start with an
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invocation to a a being Grace in yourself a form of Consciousness Grace in yourself and then in petitionary prayer where you're asking for things which is the most common or common or
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garden form of prayer I mean basic found all over the world in all different Traditions um you then direct intention towards things that in the outer world you know someone who's sick a problem U
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that you're worried about you know some threat you want to pray for protection or defense and so it's very practical about the Affairs of everyday life and and the immediate problems in one's life
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so in that sense it's like breathing out it's going from a spiritual center towards the outer world uh towards actual particular problems and so I see these as both ways I see them as
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complimentary to each other breathing in and breathing out metaphor um is it shows I mean we can only breathe out because we breathe in and vice versa so
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we have the flow in both directions but these meditations a way of coming to A Center within oneself where one's Consciousness is connected to or one can sometimes experience this connection to
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a greater ground of being or Consciousness and then praying just connecting that Center to U the Affairs of the world both both of these increase the sense of porosity the idea that
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one's Consciousness is related to something greater and also that the everyday Affairs that one's concerned with and the problems in the world and hopes and fears and all that are related to something greater than oneself as
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well and I think that everyone who prays and it's in if you take the whole world most people pray even if you take Britain far more people pray than uh than actually go to church or have
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regular religious practices um I think these are ways in which on an everyday basis we have a greater sense of this connection well I like I like very much that image of breathing in and breathing out
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naturally um and I don't I don't in any way deny your experience but I'm also immediately reminded of St francis's admonition that when you pray
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you should ask for nothing nothing he's very IC about it I think Mother Teresa said much of the same thing and I remember the words of the infant Samuel
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was it speak Lord for thy servant heareth when the one's praying it's more about listening than talking but it doesn't mean that one doesn't remember people that one cares for and cares
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about it would be odd and and counterintuitive uh to do that so I think one bears them in one's in one's mind in one's care and one commends that
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to God if one asks for anything one has to after all couch that with the words you know if if it so be your world you know
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that I I I do ask for things I suppose but I'm I'm slightly conflicted about it I think that the greater part of praying is actually creating a space in which something can come to you indeed I think
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all creation and Imagination is not about going out and doing something but about creating a space for something to to happen um as I often say a gardener
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can't make a plant all the gardener can do is create create a space for the plant to flourish or stifle the plant but the plant has its own existence and I think that whatever the spirit the
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Divine spirit is trying to bring to us we crowd out with our own um our own desires our own wishes our own formulations and that um
00:40:09
being being open is about creating a space for things to happen I'm going to just mention here this extraordinary notion of the creation that comes from
00:40:21
the lanic cabala the prime being the ground of being ends off um being relational as God is and as love is needs a creation um to return that love to be
00:40:35
the object of that love and to and to realize a relationship with a loved one which must be free and so what is the First Act of ANS off in creation it's something called simum which means
00:40:47
withdrawal and that is a withdrawal to make a space in which there can be something other than this creature this ground of being not a creature um and
00:41:00
then there are earns that are there are 12 of them that are in this space to catch whatever it is that comes out of ANS off and a single spark of fire comes out of ANS off and lands on these vessels and and
00:41:12
shatters most of them um and the third Act of Creation is is called um tun which means repair and this is the particular honor Duty
00:41:27
um purpose indeed of humanity is to repair these shattered vessels and to make them more beautiful than they were before and in that image I I think of
00:41:39
this Japanese art of Ceramics called kin sui in which you repair a shattered vessel but it's more beautiful than it was before often repaired with lines of guilt uh of gold that come into the
00:41:53
Ceramics so this idea of creating a space for things to happen drawing back and being unknowing and undoing is is I think very important well I personally I see that
00:42:06
as more the role of meditation I mean there are various forms of prayer um contemplative prayer or meditation is creating a space and when I'm meditating um quite often I mean I'm not meditating
00:42:19
in order to have sort of ideas but quite often ideas pop into my mind about that work I'm doing ideas scientific experiments and so forth um but
00:42:31
petitionary prayer I mean there's an amazing range of opinions I used to belong to a group called The Epiphany philosophers in Cambridge and we had Retreats together we had Easter vils and
00:42:42
we had masses at at various times of the year which the the priests who celebrated them for us at one stage was Ronan Williams um who is a member of this group um and once I was thinking
00:42:57
about prayer and I we prayed together we did mattin and even song every day together when we were on Retreats um and I then said well could we go around the circle we all knew each other very well
00:43:11
and just say something about how we ourselves prayed and it was astonishing I I had just no idea these people I'd prayed with many times saw it so differently some thought that we
00:43:23
shouldn't ever pray for anything specific a bit like you and you could hold people before God and or hold them in the light of God but not tell God what to do CU God already knew everything that so absolutely not right
00:43:37
to do that um others prayed very very specifically um as Jesus does in in the New Testament and Jesus is not just holding people specifically caring specific people he didn't cure everybody
00:43:50
when he walked into the room he'd cure one person at a time and with a particular personal uh sort of Act of healing or um so it was much it
00:44:01
was really quite specific and so there was a wide range of opinion about how specific we should be and those who believed in the specificity would say it's not telling God what to do it's
00:44:14
being co-creators with the Divine that God works through us an idea similar to what you just said God works through us and exactly we ask for God's guidance in our prayers we not just coming up with
00:44:26
ideas I I want to have a new car or I'd like to have more money or something like that it's so it's not like God In Prayer is like Celestial Amazon
00:44:38
with next day um yes I remember um a joke about that um I prayed for a new bicycle but then I realized God doesn't work like that so I stole a bicycle and prayed for
00:44:52
forgiveness but um um I I do um you see I'm trying to hold together two UNC is which is always my problem I
00:45:06
I I I I really respect what you're saying and of course whether you call it prayer that that caused Christ to heal people or something else I don't know but as CS Lewis pointed out the idea
00:45:19
that prayer will produce the outcome we desire can be completely dispensed with because the holiest of all petitioners uh in the garden at Gethsemane prayed three times for this cup to be taken
00:45:32
from him and it simply wasn't so we can we can assume that this is not the way that prayer does work having said that I I I believe that disposing one's mind
00:45:44
towards an outcome and disposing many people's minds towards an outcome may help that outcome come about I don't know quite how and it may be by modes
00:45:56
that you're more articulate about that we call Par psychological but are um probably entirely natural yes I think forming the the
00:46:08
intention you see is is part of this co-creation and I think the power of praying together I I'm a regular Church go because I like praying together I like singing together and I like being
00:46:20
in a holy place with members of community who pray together so I go wherever I am on Sundays in small village churches on local Parish Church here in Hampstead or wherever I am yes I
00:46:33
think that creating of an intention together is very very important um and of course the the secularized version of prayer and intention is positive
00:46:44
thinking which is huge in America I know for a hundred years or more there have been all these books on the power of positive thinking where you form an intent you know and then to sell more vacuum
00:46:58
cleaners or encyclopedias and then you so you sell more because you form the intention and one of the most uh perverse examples of positive thinking is of course the former president Donald
00:47:12
Trump who was raised in the Church of positive thinking um the the um the chap who was the profet of positive thinking what's he called Norman um I've
00:47:25
forgotten the the name for the moment but the the power of positive thinking I don't have anything to do with these pop psychologist Norman Vincent Peele yes Norman Vincent Peele that's right who you know the power of positive thinking
00:47:38
he was the minister of something called the marble Church in Manhattan where Trump's family went and as a teenager Trump imbibed all this Norman Vincent peel married him to his first wife so he
00:47:51
was absolutely raised inative on positive thinking and the idea is you say something and you can make it come true through Power of intention so he loses the election so he says he's won it um you know this is pure positive
00:48:04
thinking taken to its most extreme in my terms it's pure left hemisphere thinking because the left hemisphere believes that it has power to create the outcome at once and there's always an optimism Optimist and if something doesn't work
00:48:17
out the way it believes it will deny that black is is black it will it will say um a paralyzed limb is such that they can use it freely and and so its
00:48:30
power to deny reality in order to fit in with its theory about reality is the defining feature of it and I would say that you know trumpism is is just an expression of this mentality and not one
00:48:43
that I particularly want to take as my guide oh I certainly don't point about it is you see that it's it's a kind of debased or secularized form yes I I know what what you're saying
00:48:56
it's it's about getting what you want um through positive thinking you have success in love and business through positive thinking that's why these books sell so well you know they're all about selling more of the product and getting
00:49:09
ahead and so forth and they're Bas principle that forming intentions can actually have effects in the world but the point about proper prayer positive things about me getting what I want through the power of my mind
00:49:24
and is where the hemisphere goes magical as it were all attempts to um whereas the normal prayer I mean I myself being Christian always start my prayers with
00:49:37
the Lord's Prayer and part of that he right at the beginning is thy will be done so in a much as you were mentioning into a much larger context of God's Will and the larger purposes of which I'm a part
00:49:51
and and I I play a part within that larger pattern but um if you and I suppose that would be more like a right hemisphere thing because it's part of a global vision of what's happening in the world but then you could say the
00:50:04
secularization of prayer um but it as removes the right hemisphere aspect until it becomes left hemisphere activity but I think positive thinking can't be understood as a movement or a
00:50:16
practice without its background in petitionary prayer from which it's kind of truncated D derivative yes no I think that's fine I don't think we need to to disagree too much about this
00:50:31
um I mean I suppose the Touchstone for me is the is the Holocaust I mean all these innocent people and innocent children treated with utmost barbarity
00:50:44
and do you suppose that the decent people Jews Christians and others did not pray that they should be spared this but they weren't so you know that that is a I I can I can
00:50:58
there is a theodicy I think which is simply that whatever God is God has to allow his creation Freedom otherwise it's simply an extension of himself and it's not another that he can love it is not a
00:51:11
creation so and that that creation must have the the freedom to do um good or ill um and unfortunately a lot of the time we do
00:51:23
evil anyway let's talk about about many other things as the war said and what should we should we move to pan psychism or would you like to talk about Consciousness and matter or or the
00:51:36
nature of time or or where should we go well I think while we're on Consciousness and I think one The View that you started with you know our present bottom up view I mean the
00:51:49
traditional view is the opposite that starts with Consciousness that consciousness underlies all things and then the whole of nature is
00:52:01
produced through Consciousness um you know in the Christian version in the Creed it says the cosmic Christ you know through him all things were made um there's a part of the Divine the second
00:52:14
person of the Holy Trinity the logos which is the realm of names and forms and is it's through all creation is divinely or comes forth from an ultimate source of form and
00:52:28
structure that everything in that sense shares within the Divine Consciousness God is in nature nature is in God um and that is not pan psychism panentheism
00:52:40
that the idea that God is everywhere in nature and that nature is in God so God is the mind of God transcends nature it's not just nature because that's pantheism pantheism yes yes and so I
00:52:54
think what we've got moment now coming to psychism is the this the main driver for modern pan psychism is to try and as you said to solve the hard problem because the hard problem is that if you
00:53:07
have a materialist view that the whole world is made up of unconscious matter and nothing else um there's no consciousness out there um the only Consciousness there is is inside brains
00:53:18
and um moreover the maximum amounts inside human brains and maybe lesser amounts in dog brains and elephant brains and perhaps tiny amounts in worm brains or ant brains um that that um
00:53:33
that Consciousness is confined to brains the entire universe is unconscious except on this planet and it's unconscious on on the entire planet except for the inside of human and animal heads that's the standard view
00:53:47
but it has the problem then of saying well if the whole universe is unconscious mass is unconscious how come we're conscious everything ought to be unconscious and then as you know a lot of philosophers of Mind of materialist
00:53:59
persuasion try to pretend we're not conscious it's an illusion it doesn't do anything happy phenomenon um ridiculous yes try and get rid of Consciousness no so the panych so you know the bright boy
00:54:12
at the back of the class and and among materialist philosophers of Mind said well what if have we say electrons and atoms are a bit conscious then then we can explain our Consciousness as a difference of degree not of kind but
00:54:25
they usually end there once they get to the human brain um they they think they they've made their point and that's where psychism ends but as you know I've tried to carry this argument further in in my paper in the Journal of
00:54:38
Consciousness studies is the sun conscious I tried to go with this pan psychist move and say okay well let's say that there really is this kind of pan psychism then why stop at the human
00:54:50
brain the sun is self-organizing system vastly larger than our brains with vastly more complex electromagnetic patterns why can't the Sun be conscious why can't other stars be conscious and indeed whole galaxies with higher levels
00:55:05
of consciousness um and then clusters of galaxies and then the entire Cosmos and of course this is not a new idea Plato and platinus and many others talked
00:55:17
about the world Soul um the the whole universe having a kind of soul mind or organizing principle um and that would be a kind of pantheistic U Global Consciousness but
00:55:30
then the traditional view is that that itself is embedded within a larger more inclusive source of Consciousness which is in the end the source of nature but so psychism as we
00:55:42
currently have it is a fairly limited form of pan psychism it's a kind of materialist pan psychism Which just attributes kind of epiphenomenal Consciousness to material structures up
00:55:54
to and including the human brain yes yes well as you possibly know I'm a panentheist and is a very different thing from being a pantheist um but there is a way in fact
00:56:09
of um approaching what is meant by pan psychism further towards panentheism and almost making it um
00:56:20
making them a union um if you start from the idea that there is separate stuff in the realm of matter and that you've got to find a union to it um then you have this famous combination problem but if
00:56:34
you start from the view as I do that the promply the ontological Primitive is consciousness there is nothing you can get Beyond or
00:56:47
behind you can't go beyond or behind Consciousness Consciousness is the Ultimate Reality I was asked Yesterday by clergy will is consciousness God and I
00:57:00
suppose yes but no because I don't want to sort of limit what God is rather in the panentheistic way Consciousness is a Divine creation um but what I see is that
00:57:12
matter is a mode of manifestation of Consciousness so at times it is um it is something that is immaterial or appears
00:57:26
to be but we only know what we call material things because we have Consciousness we don't know that we have Consciousness because of material things such as brains but we do know the one thing we
00:57:39
can be certain of is consciousness which is why it's so particularly annoying that um people are sitting on well-paid and prestigious chairs in American universities claiming that Consciousness
00:57:52
is an illusion but anyway um consciousness is the basic reality and people say well matter doesn't look like Consciousness but then I suggest that we think about it as a phase of it in the
00:58:04
way that um ice is a phase of water you know water is translucent and flowing and so forth but ice is is static and opaque and extremely hard um so hard it can split your head open where and in
00:58:17
this room there is a a ton or more of of water in the atmosphere otherwise I couldn't breathe so they don't look like one another but which is real water they're all real water and I think that the there are all these ways in which
00:58:31
Consciousness can manifest and one of them is in what we call matter and why should there be matter well I suggest as matter because it provides two important
00:58:43
things for creation it provides importantly an element of resistance nothing can come into existence without
00:58:55
there being some element of resistance or something that moves against that that trend of of creation I mean you know everything has this dual aspect you
00:59:09
what is friction friction stops movement certainly but it also starts movement without friction you can't move and without there being some definition which means literally the the limits to things there can't be
00:59:23
the whole world that we experience with all its magical Beauty and complexity so it brings that degree of of resistance and it brings a degree of um temporary
00:59:34
permanence in other words um the things I'm saying disappear um as soon as I say them may linger in somebody's mind somewhere for a few seconds but you know the desk at which I'm sitting will be
00:59:45
here tomorrow I'm absent of world war so um those are the ways I I would see it and that is completely con with what you were saying about the Divine being what you were
00:59:58
really saying is the Divine is imminent and the Divine is transcendent and is holding those two together which we can in the form of the Trinity Trinity the Trinity is the best explanation of panentheism that there you know it's
01:00:11
like the image of um a book what is a book is it the thing in the mind of the Creator or is it the the volume here on the table or is it what happens when that volume is taken up and read by somebody the book is three of those but
01:00:25
in different senses and this is what roomie said in one of his meditations that um that the spirit is the Well Spring it is the cup that conveys the
01:00:39
water and it is the water that quenches The Thirst of those who are thirsty so I just thought I'd throw that in because I think it's one way of making pan psychism a much more interesting
01:00:52
phenomenon a much closer to panentheism I agree I I think that the best model of ultimate reality is trinitarian and we find it in many different Traditions as my favorite book on this is David
01:01:06
Bentley Hart's book the experience of God being Bliss where he shows that the Indian model sat chit Ananda is is one way of looking at this I mean sat is the
01:01:18
ground of all being that which sustains all things all being and chit is consciousness which is uh contains names and forms Namar Rupa names and forms that the contents of Consciousness has
01:01:31
is consciousness about things and these names and forms it's roughly what Plato called you know the platonic realm of ideas uh in the Christian Trinity is the logos and then aanda Joy or Bliss that
01:01:44
the Divine Consciousness is blissful which is why mystical experiences of Union with God are usually Blissful because the Divine Consciousness is blissful now in the Christian model
01:01:55
where we have God the father as the ground of being and the logos as the the second person of Trinity the names and forms which give form shape structure coherence to everything which
01:02:09
underly the order and form of the world and also the order and form of our minds which is why we can the traditional view is why we can understand nature is because they have a common source the minds and the natural world and then the
01:02:23
Holy Spirit which is the dynamical moving principle wind energy breath air Flames uh flying birds you it's the dynamical principle I find that the when
01:02:35
we understand matter as a combination of form and energy which energy according to physics matter like an electron or a proton or an atom are organized by
01:02:49
Quantum fields which give them their form the energy within them is the same energy we see in light and light can turn into matter and matter can turn into light energy is promiscuous and can
01:03:00
take any form um so what we have in nature is universal energy this is a scientific view as well as a religious view um and uh we have a whole range of
01:03:12
possible forms that energy can take um and the source of both energy is is the ultimate being and the source of both and the primary metaphor is of course
01:03:25
speaking because when I speak I'm the speaker um the words I'm saying have formed structure shape connection with each other meaning and but in order to say them I have to be breathing out there has to be
01:03:38
a flow of air if I have just the words they're silent in my mind if I have just the flow of air it's a kind of white noise of under
01:03:50
undifferentiated energy but the two together make the world Words which can then relate and communicate and give structure and meaning so I think that this metaphor I find this particular metaphor of the Holy Trinity
01:04:04
particularly helpful yes well I'm glad I I I would endorse every word of that but I thought that we might segue from there to the relationship between energy and matter we know that they're
01:04:16
interchangeable and equals mc² is a the most famous expression of this idea um and I'm I'm very interested in your idea
01:04:29
um which I believe will be adopted by mainstream science eventually when they catch up which is that there are form fields of energy possibly
01:04:41
electromagnetic energy which govern the shapes of things and are also the ca of memory so there are memories that are
01:04:53
stored in form Fields I I believe this this is something that you would you might want to Demmer but I think this is my understanding um because of course I
01:05:07
mean I'm sure people are aware but when we we've done this heroic task of decoding The genome you know which I don't want to diminish in any way it was a staggeringly um clever um and and and
01:05:20
um brilliant piece of work but at the end of the today what we discovered there's almost nothing there I mean there's absolutely there not just not quite enough information as it were but by many many orders of magnitude far far
01:05:34
too little most things are just simply not there and it reminds me slightly of that episode of Faulty Towers I think it's number five of the first series where um the chef gets drunk and um
01:05:47
basil faulty has to go off to a restaurant and and get a duck for the for the garet evening and unfortunately somebody switches the the plates around and so he takes away what he believes is
01:05:58
a duct but is in fact a blon and he walks into the dining room with this sort of I've got it here now and then goes voila takes off the LD and there's a BL and he
01:06:10
goes there's nothing there and I I sort of see this as the state we're in now that we we thought we've got it but actually it's not there so on a more serious note
01:06:24
you you sent me a couple of papers that I very much enjoyed um one of them was fairly technical but it explained itself at the end and what it was really saying is at the lowest level of neurons and uh
01:06:36
transmitters and so on there is no stability or there is little stability not enough stability to say that any kind of memory is stored in this pattern of neurons or whatever because it shifts
01:06:49
it shifts in the brain after a very short while it may go somewhere else so but what is stable is not the manifestation in the brain substance but some kind of electromagnetic field now
01:07:02
expand on that rer please well um I think both genes and uh brains have long been overrated um and in in the in the 1970s and
01:07:15
80s jeans would explain everything which is why literally billions of dollars were pulled into the Human Genome Project as you say it came when it finished you know they thought there'd be 100,000 genes that you'd be able to
01:07:28
patent them and make fortune and stuff there're only 20,000 and you know rice plants have about 45,000 and SE have a few more than us so it's not it's not it
01:07:40
wasn't at all what was expected and then all these attempts to explain hereditary in genomewide association studies where compare tens of thousands of people's genomes and they look at their height
01:07:52
where they get breast can cancer where the schizophrenic Etc what do the genes actually explain well they explain about 2.5% of the inheritance of schizophrenia less than 10% of the inheritance of
01:08:06
breast cancer less than 20% of the inheritance of height and yet these things are known to be heritable and um so the genes don't explain it so that's called The Missing heritability problem
01:08:19
in the trade um and um they tried people have tried to fill that Gap with epigenetics the inheritance acquired characters which was as you know Taboo in the 20th century absolutely I think
01:08:32
it depends on morphic resonance the connection of the kind of memory across time knows one of my favorite theories um and the same goes for memories in the
01:08:45
brain that morphic resonance depends on similarity any organism is more similar to itself in the past than to any other organism therefore the most specific resonance is from its own past and I
01:08:58
think this maintains the form of organisms even though the cells and the molecules turn over and our own molecules are changing all the time and cells coming and going um um but the
01:09:10
form remains more or less the same and in the realm of uh memory I think that we resonate with ourselves in the past and that's how memory works that it's not in stored as the materialists believe they what they have to believe
01:09:24
that it's material in the brain because they've got nothing but material to explain things and so it has to be material traces and people have tried over and over and over again for more than a 100 years to find these memory
01:09:36
traces storing memories in brains and they've proved ever more Elusive and the paper you were referring to is where people have looked in Mouse brains inserting extremely detailed electrodes
01:09:49
so you can get tremendously fine grain picture of what's happening in the in the brain bra and we know that brains have waves going through them it's not just granular nerve cell activity it's we've known from electron graphs for
01:10:02
years that they're Global wave patterns what this new study shows is that these wave patterns are highly specific and very particular patterns of waves when a mass learns something and when it
01:10:15
remembers it and when they first discovered the characteristic wave patterns they said oh we've TR located the memory here they are these waves in this bit of the brain that in between when learning and remembering they must
01:10:27
have been stored in the cells in material traces that somehow then come to life in the form of waves again but then they found that the wave patterns remain the same when they remember it it's the same pattern but the pattern
01:10:40
can move to different bits of the brain it it's it's not in particular cells it's it's the ability of the nervous tissue to produce wave patterns that underlies the memory and this is called
01:10:53
rep representational drift um so um the the standard theory of memory just doesn't work and I think memory and the memory of form and the inheritance of form and Instinct I think instincts like
01:11:07
habits of the species inherited by morphic resonance um so I think that the the the standard materialist view trying to build it all up from granular genes
01:11:18
You're simply falling apart through you know the um The Inheritance problem um the Miss inheritability problem and through things like representational drift and
01:11:31
the failure to find memories in the brain this of course has huge implications for Consciousness because the materialist view is that when we die if memories are all stored in the brain
01:11:45
and the Brain decays then every Oblivion is the only possible outcome of death whereas all traditional belief systems have had some sort of life after death whether it's a
01:11:57
shadowy ancestral realm in Hades or whether it's you know life after death or whether it's reincarnation all of them involve a transfer or survival of memory beyond
01:12:09
the surviv beyond the death of the brain all of those possibilities are ruled out by the materialist Theory which is why it so fits well with a kind of atheist world view um because it rules out a lot
01:12:22
of religion is about thinking about Consciousness in the big picture including the possibility of life after death or whether it's our Consciousness is resorbed into the
01:12:34
ultimate Consciousness or whatever um it they all assume most religions assume that it doesn't just stop when we die whereas the materialist theory of memory says that's the only possible
01:12:47
option great great but am I right in understanding I mean I know you like myself have had conversations with Michael Levan who is an evolutionary biologist at TS
01:13:02
um I think you've had conversations with him am I right yes yes I went to visit him actually I I admire him and a few years ago when I was giving a talk at Harvard I I I went to um to visit him um
01:13:16
and and we we spent some time together in his lab and that was a purely private conversation but but did did you find that there was um that he had moved towards I I my sense is that he doesn't
01:13:29
actually want to embrace it fully or publicly but that he basically is deeply sympathetic to this way of thinking yes he is his his whole way of thinking is about holistic organizing
01:13:42
principles which one call morphogenetic Fields it's starting point um he's the great thrust of his work is that biology is organ organized by field
01:13:54
sort of top down organization of the develop form and regeneration rather than building it up from the bottom from genes which simply doesn't work no that there's a form of thology or purposive
01:14:07
behavior in all living things that there's Global organizing principles that are hierarchically organized you you've got cells within tissues the cell has its own form of organization its own
01:14:20
intelligence and the tissue containing milons of cells as a higher level of organization and the organ a higher level still in the organism and the society uh this view is is almost it's
01:14:34
very similar to what I I think and the one thing he doesn't have is morphic resonance you see and um I he certainly knows about it because when I went to visit him he pulled out a very well thumb copy of my book in new science of
01:14:48
life my first book Black morph resonance he asked me to sign it and and I I know he's read it with great attention and he's very widely read I don't claim some special privilege particularly for me
01:15:01
but or my book but um he's very widely read but he's certainly very aware of the holistic tradition in biology very rooted in it and very well aware of its history um you know going back to the
01:15:15
early 20th century people like Dre and and the vitalist school I mean he's very aware of that in a way that most aren't no and I think that he's hovering I think he'd love moric resonance to be
01:15:29
true but he doesn't mention it he doesn't talk about it he doesn't do research on it because he knows that this would mean he's at present has a very wonderfully influential position
01:15:43
within biology he's very rare it's very rare for someone who has a holistic perspective to have such wide influence in where molecular biology has dominated
01:15:55
things for so long if he started coming out in favor of morphic resonance he'd be proclaimed a heretic like me and and this would fall apart so if somebody
01:16:07
else got good evidence for morphic resonance I think he'd be pleased and I think he'd start doing work on it but I think he's in a position where he could take the lead
01:16:20
yes while you were talking about this intelligence of cells you know which is something I'm very interested in I've written about in the matter with things um even a single cell can inventively
01:16:33
repair its own form although it's not programmed anywhere in its genome to do so and has no experience itself of such a repair being needed and in in many
01:16:46
ways that's the small element in the picture which is much bigger which is you know good point that I think was made by um FC Schiller
01:16:58
or FCS Schiller uh which is that when somebody's had a a brain injury um how is it that other parts of the brain sort of know that they need to reconstitute this element it's it's
01:17:12
entirely different from anything that a machine can do because it involves a conceptional pattern of the whole where it recognizes there something that needs to be brought into being rather like the
01:17:23
idea of representational drift that another part although on a much bigger scale and more dramatically that one another area of the brain must be recruited to do this job and that suggests that there is a form of what is
01:17:35
going on at a higher level which is exactly what they're finding in in the brain science of um memory that you are talking about so I think that's that's
01:17:46
wonderful yeah that's why in the 1920s when the idea of more genetic Fields was first put forward U people like the field idea because if there's a field organizing the development of a an
01:18:01
organism or a cell and if you damage it the field is still there which contains Hess and can account for regeneration and the analogy was um with magnetic
01:18:14
fields because fields are intrinsically holistic even the fields of physics yeah and after all Fields were only introduced into science by farad in the 19th century in the 1850s um before that it was just purely
01:18:28
me mechanistic you know pushing and pulling billiard balls things um although Newton's gravitational Theory implied interconnectedness of the entire universe but the emphasis In classical
01:18:41
mechanics was on pushing and pulling and Fields in a way are still involved in pushing and pulling but um that through pulling than pushing I make a distinction I think the things that push
01:18:53
from behind are very mechanistic and hydraulic but that actually what we need to be thinking about are those things both spiritually morally intellectually and biologically that draw us from in front well yes of course magnetic fields
01:19:07
push or pull if you put the same poles together that's true but it's not symmetrical because if you shake up a whole lot of magnets I sometimes do this for fun um they they automatically line
01:19:19
up they repel each other until they pull and so it's not that repuls attraction comes out above repulsion because you end up with into connected magnet you don't end
01:19:32
up with lots of repelled separate ones so oh God I love that although repulsion and attraction are symmetrical and in an maget the is the domination of
01:19:43
Attraction and that sounds a very good point which to have a break I have to sort of cut you off somewhere
01:19:58
um because the the conversation has been so wide ranging and fascinating that you brought things out of each other um which is probably you know new and fresh and that's what I think is so exciting about a dialogue where you have a
01:20:11
creative [Music] interchange
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