Anatheism: Rediscovering God in a Secular Age

March 20th, 2024
St. James’s Church, London

In this talk, Rupert Sheldrake explores the theme of finding God again, in an increasingly secular society. Drawing from personal experiences in India and his journey through various spiritual traditions, Rupert provides insights into anatheism, or returning to God, and how this process is unfolding in a post-Christian world. He touches on the connections between science and spirituality, the value of pilgrimage and sacred places, and the emerging concept of panpsychism, which considers consciousness as a fundamental quality in nature. An engaging Q&A session with the audience dives deeper into perennial philosophy, the role of feminine energy in Christianity, and the impact of psychedelics on spiritual practices.

Chapters:
00:00:00 – Introduction and Rupert Sheldrake’s Early Life
00:00:28 – Anatheism and Rediscovering God
00:01:38 – Secular Society and Belief Systems
00:02:29 – Diverse Spiritual Traditions and Modern Challenges
00:04:12 – Sheldrake’s Childhood, Boarding School, and Methodism
00:08:14 – Transition to Atheism and Science Education
00:12:59 – Morphic Resonance and Intellectual Crisis
00:15:24 – Scholarship at Harvard and Intellectual Shift
00:16:20 – Thomas Kuhn and Scientific Paradigms
00:20:15 – Epiphany Philosophers and New Directions
00:24:08 – Discovering Morphic Resonance and New Research Paths
00:26:01 – Time in India and Influence on Research
00:32:10 – Work in Plant Development and Spiritual Awakening
00:34:09 – Immersed in Indian and Tibetan Traditions
00:38:17 – Spiritual Advice from a Hindu Guru
00:41:25 – Father Bede Griffiths and Catholic Mysticism
00:46:12 – The Trinity and Sacred Mysticism
00:48:35 – Logos and Holy Spirit
00:52:07 – Panpsychism and Cosmic Mind
00:57:06 – Scientific Research and Spiritual Practices
01:00:07 – Revival of Pilgrimage and Urban Spiritual Centers
01:03:40 – Audience Question 1: Perennial Philosophy and Interfaith Dialog
01:07:51 – Audience Question 2: Role of Feminine Energy in Christianity
01:12:25 – Audience Question 3: Philosophy, Technology, and Connection with the Divine
01:19:20 – Audience Question 4: Encounters with Krishnamurti and David Bohm

Alternatives is a UK-based organization offering spiritual and personal growth events. For over 30 years they’ve hosted talks, workshops, and resources focused on spirituality, well-being, and conscious business at St James’ Church in Piccadilly.

https://www.alternatives.org.uk

Dr Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biology as a Fellow of Clare College. He was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics and From 2005 to 2010 was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project, Cambridge.

https://www.sheldrake.org

Well, thank you, Richard. and it’s wonderful to be here again. As Richard said. I’ve given talks here for 42 years. Not every year, of course, but, it is like a home base in London for me. And I’m very pleased that it’s here. It’s a great program. Alternatives. And this is a wonderful place for it to happen. I’m speaking about, rediscovering God. there’s actually a word for it which you may or may not know. Anatheism. You know what theism is? Belief in God. You know what atheism is? Disbelief in God. Anatheism is returning to God or back to God. and it’s something that is happening much more now than it ever has before because we live in basically a post-Christian, secular society. Recent surveys show that 51% of the British population describe themselves as having no religion. I mean, this is almost unprecedented in human history. as the philosopher Charles Taylor said, in the year 1500, no one in Europe would have been an atheist. It was simply impossible, not because people were simply, oppressed or forced to believe in God, but simply you couldn’t conceive of a world without God and a world in which nature was not permeated by the divine spirit. it was just an inconceivable thought, except perhaps for a tiny number of people. But over, the subsequent centuries, the secular option has become more and more standard, and it’s now the default option of most educated people, a kind of secular atheism. In that context. there are many people who find their way back to a belief in God, but it’s not quite the same kind of belief as you would have if you just always believed in God. There are still some people in Britain who are raised Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever, and continue with, ancestral belief. But most people, especially those from Christian backgrounds, are not in that position. and in, in rediscovering God, it’s a completely different experience from just taking it for granted to taking it for granted. from childhood onwards. Moreover, in our modern secular society, it’s not a simple, straightforward path because there are so many options. a few generations ago, people just didn’t know about other religious traditions. and if most people in Britain were either Christian or Jewish. And, there were no options. But we now have Buddhist centers, Hindu centers, Hindu temples, Sufi centers, shamanic drumming centers. Ayahuasca trips to Peru, magic mushroom retreats in the Netherlands. there’s so much happening. it’s not as if it’s just one option. There’s a bewildering variety. And actually, this program here at Saint James’s is one of the places where you can learn about this variety. I mean, the program here is very varied and gives a lot of perspectives on, what one could call a spiritual view of life. so what I’m going to be talking about is my own particular journey. with some reflections on the bigger picture. My in my own case, I was born and brought up in Newark on Trent in Nottinghamshire. My family were Methodists and Methodists on both sides of the family for at least 2 or 3 generations. So I was brought up in a essentially Methodist world and Methodist, on the whole, very religious. I mean, we had a chapel, went to chapel every Sunday. My grandfather was the organist and choirmaster and and my uncle, became the organist and choirmaster. hymns was sung very vigorously. much more so than in the Anglican church, in the in the parish church. Methodist had a kind of independent spirit. They helped each other. It was a quite fairly tight knit community. And my experience of it was loving, helpful, supportive and people supported each other. I then went to an Anglican, boarding school. and that was a completely different take on religion. It was very high church. and I was a chorister, so I became part of the Anglican church music tradition, which I loved. I learned the organ in accordance with my family tradition. I played for services in the school chapel. and, became very familiar with that. The Anglican tradition. But I was also studying science at, school. I’d been inspired to do biology by my father, who was a herbalist and a pharmacist and an amateur microscopist. He had a microscope laboratory next to my bedroom with brass microscopes, with big glass domes over them, and showed me slides of kind of wonders of the microscopic world and drops of pond water, little creatures swimming around in them. it was a he opened my eyes to a whole world I would never have known about, at least until much later, through his microscopes and through his interest in plants. He collected some of the herbs that he sold, and I learned the names of most common plants and trees from my father and helped collect things. and I had a collection of pressed flowers. so I was very keen on, Oh, sorry about that. I was very keen on, plants and also animals. I kept lots and lots of pets. I had two rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, hamsters. We had two dog, goldfish. about a week, I kept a jackdaw and pigeons. And I tested out their homing abilities. by taking them on my bicycle miles from home and then releasing them, then cycling home. They always got back before me. so I was really keen on biology, and I loved animals and plants. So I did biology at school, and as I studied science more, I soon realized that for my science teachers, the world of science was not an enchanted world at all. It was a world of a mechanical nature, of unconscious matter. There was no God in science. There were no spirits. There were no angels. There were no nature spirits. Animals were just machines. we learned how to act and dissect animals in A-level biology. and the the attitude was, this is just completely mechanical. Nature’s dead. Mechanical. Inanimate. the mechanistic materialist theory, it was completely taken for granted. People didn’t spell it out explicitly, but I absorbed it. And I realized, if this is true, then religion at best is just a kind of personal belief system. and as a personal belief, it must be located inside your brain. Since the mind’s nothing but the activity of the brain. And moreover, choosing to believe it was not a real choice because we don’t have free will. It was just the way we’d been indoctrinated. So I became, quite early on, a kind of an atheist about age 14. I was the only boy in my year that refused to get confirmed. and I had a housemaster who was a scientist who fueled this, intellectual progress. He saw it as liberating me from the restrictions of religion, and he gave me books to read, like parts of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bow. the point of that was he was fairly sophisticated atheist. The point of that was to show that Christianity was really not much better than primitive animistic religions that we’ve been educated to look down on. it was actually just another version of the same kind of thing with Kings that die and rituals of rebirth and so on. he also gave me The White Goddess by Robert Graves to read, which was fairly heavy going. but it was really the aim of it was to show that Christianity is no better than these animistic superstitions that we were all. Everyone agreed, even the chaplain. We’re all things we should reject. I later came to see that as a great strength of Christianity. It wasn’t a weakness, but at the time it seemed pretty convincing. I read Freud, which showed me that God was nothing but a projection of father figures, and a kind of neurotic obsession. and it was all about power. and then when I got to Cambridge, where I was a science scholar in my college, I read Marx, and learned that religion was nothing but the opium of the people. I also got very involved. I joined the Cambridge Humanist Association. The atheist society. I didn’t go to many meetings because I found it terribly dull. so I sort of fell away rather from, from that. So I became a lapsed humanist fairly quickly. and then, my main political activities, I was a very active member of the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I went on those big peace marches, and, I was in the big committee of 100 Parliament Square demonstration with Bertrand Russell, where 5000 people stood, sat down and blocked the streets. I was arrested. My unit caught appearing, so I had to plead guilty to obstructing the highway. I was found found, actually, shillings with 2 pounds costs at those street notes and Marylebone Magistrates Court. but during this period, I the atheist view, just predominate. I took it for granted. It was part of the package of being a scientist. however, I began to have terrible doubts about the science itself. I’d gone into biology because I loved animals and plants, and very soon I found that the first thing we did with animals and plants to study them was to kill them. so I tend to dissect them and or grind them up and isolate enzymes and that kind of thing, look at molecules within them. And molecular biology was just getting going then in a big way. And I did biochemistry at Cambridge. So my part two, the my last year was doing biochem history and that involved grinding everything up. so I began to feel that this was missing out. Most of the really interesting things about life. I came, I realized that you’d never find out how a pigeon Holmes, which I really wanted to know by grinding it up and looking at the enzymes in its liver. or even by analyzing its DNA. And, so I just began to feel less and less satisfied with this kind of biology. More and more doubtful about it. So. So, I discovered the work of Gerta, the great German poet and and botanist, with his holistic ideas about science. And this made me see this. Another kind of science was possible. This happened when I was a second year undergraduate. I think, but I couldn’t find anyone in the scientific world who could wanted to discuss this as far as they were concerned. You know, the discovery of the structure of DNA, the growth of molecular biology was the way forward. I came to know Francis Crick quite well because he, he and his colleague Sidney Brenner, both of whom later got Nobel prizes, had a special seminar for third year biochemists. They picked about six people from the third year who they thought were the most promising. And we had evenings with them in Brenner’s rooms and kings. Every week we’d spend an evening together, and it was quite amazing just being with these very, very brilliant men. But what they were doing was basically grooming us to become molecular biologists, and all the others did become molecular biologists. It didn’t work with me because I wasn’t completely convinced by it. But basically they said, you know, do with the structure of the gene is understood. The the basic code of life is now known. the only two outstanding problems in biology, consciousness and development. They have organisms developed. And then Francis Crick said, they haven’t been solved because the people working on them, frankly, aren’t very bright and they don’t know any molecular biology, but we’re going to work on them, he said. I’m taking consciousness. Sydney is taking development, and we expect to solve them within 10 to 20 years. We invite you to join us. well, most people did, I didn’t. and they both got Nobel prizes. And of course, they didn’t solve the problems of development or consciousness. and, but they really believed they would, and so did a lot of people. At that time, Crick was himself a militant atheist, absolutely militant. And his driving goal, as his son Michael said at his funeral, was to not get rich or famous, but to hammer the last nails into the coffin of vitalism, namely the doctrine that living organisms are alive. as opposed to machines. So, there was a lot of this kind of militant materialism and atheism in the scientific world. It was taken for granted. It was just assumed. that that’s your attitude. That’s what you’d be. And there were a few people who were Christians. but they kept it quiet and just didn’t want to bear the brunt of the attacks that would come their way. anyway, I became more and more doubtful about this approach, and then, it was a sin. I got a double first, and everyone’s assumed I go on to do research, which I then thought, well, do I really want to do this? Do I won’t spend my life doing research on molecules and reducing life to molecular machinery. so I had a real crisis, of in my side, know, not knowing what would happen. and then I saw this, advertisement for a scholarship every year from Cambridge to Harvard, to a year in the graduate school. And I applied for and I got it. It was called the Frank Knox Fellowship. And I spent a year at Harvard doing history and philosophy of science, because I wanted to step back and look at the bigger picture. This was in 1963. that I went to Harvard. Thomas Kuhn spoke. The structure of Scientific Revolutions came out in 1962, and it was all the rage among historians of science at Harvard. It was incredibly exciting. Why it was exciting to me was this it showed this at any given time, science is dominated by a paradigm or a model of reality. and in a scientific revolution, a new model comes in. Before that, everything that doesn’t fit is rejected, ignored, dismissed. People work within what he called normal science to the standard kind of thing within the permitted framework, but anything outside it can’t be admitted. and I was quite sure a lot of things were being kept out of this mechanistic framework. and it was encouraging to me because it looked as if there could be an alternative, a new view. And the kind of view I wanted was a more holistic view of nature. Nature alive. organisms really? Organisms rather than machines. and a much greater understanding of consciousness. anyway, at Harvard, I did help me enormously in getting this bigger picture. And I went back to Cambridge United to a PhD in plant development. I worked on plants. I didn’t want to spend my career killing animals and guillotines and rats and things, which is what you had to do if you were working on animal enzymes. and I really enjoyed working on plants. but I did. I still wanted to find a way of working more holistically. And I came across a group called the Epiphany Philosophers in Cambridge, which was a rather eccentric group of people, consisted of a, several philosophers, the professor of philosophy of science, Richard Braithwaite, a fellow of King’s, professor Dorothy Emmett, who is professor at Manchester of Philosophy, who studied with Alfred North Whitehead, and Margaret Masterman, who was Richard Braithwaite’s wife and a pioneer of artificial intelligence. Some of the very first steps to artificial intelligence were done in her Cambridge Language Research Laboratory. there was a quantum, a couple of quantum physicists. there were several hippies. there were, people doing tai chi. There were several, a few mystical monks, both Christian and, Indian. and this group used to meet we had weekend retreats, not week long retreats four times a year in a windmill in Norfolk at Burnham Overy. Stays on the north Norfolk coast. We lived as a community and every morning we had seminars where people would present ideas and it didn’t matter how outrageous the idea. You could present anything you liked, but you had to be able to defend it. So we could we were talking about alternative medicine and parapsychology. quantum nonlocality. eastern philosophy. but we were very hard hitting these seminars. People were quite often reduced to tears. They they were they no nonsense was tolerated. But but there was a tremendous broad, scope. I found this immensely stimulating environment. and Margaret Masterman, was a Christian mystic, and she was they introduced me to the Christian mystical tradition. And this group had a magazine, a journal called Chorea to theory. Chorea is the Greek word for mystical intuition or experience theory, as in scientific theory and to to you. And the idea was to find a bridge between mystical intuition and theory, philosophy and science. Margaret Masterman took the view that the conflict between science and religion, insofar as science denied mystical experience, meant that there must be something wrong with science. Now, almost everybody else who dealt with the conflicts between science and religion thought there must be something wrong with religion. So at that time, there were a lot of Anglican theologians trying to mythologize religion and cut it down so fit it onto the Procrustean bed of mechanistic science. But she was a fire raising radical who, believed that it was completely the other way around and that there was something radically wrong with science, radically limited. And we desperately needed a major paradigm change. And that’s why we were discussing all these things that were excluded from regular science, like telepathy, parapsychology, acupuncture, mystical experiences, altered states of consciousness, and psychedelics. so this, for me was an enormously stimulating group to be with. In our retreats, we had a rather unusual format that we lived as a community every morning and evening at the top of the windmill, it was the top room became the chapel, and everyone dressed up in white elves long white robes. And we said the Anglican, Matins and Evensong, morning and evening prayer every day recounted the Psalms in plainsong. So I learned Gregorian chanting, and we I loved the chanting. I at that stage was still an atheist, so I didn’t really go with the along with the social religious part of it. But I enjoyed the community, the chanting, and it was also had terrifying moments. Every morning, at sea, in the mountains, there was a thing called the Chapter of Faults, where you had to confess your faults for the previous day, and it wasn’t like deep existential faults. It was like not doing your fair share of washing up, that kind of thing. And, and at the end of your confession, you had to kneel and confess to the group. at the end of the confession, you had to say, if anyone has anything to remind me of, I’d be grateful to be told. And I dreaded that, that because Margaret Masterman was never slow in reminding people of faults. she was a formidable woman and and quite terrifying at times. and so the chapter faults often went on quite a long time. And, but it did form a way of letting off steam every day and, and and kept the community functioning fairly smoothly. Anyway, this period, Cambridge, was for me, very encouraging because I was thinking about new ways of doing biology, how biology could be done more holistically. And I got interested in the idea of morphogenetic fields, form shaping fields kind to top down causation as opposed to bottom up causation. I was really grappling with how plants grow, why leaves are shaped like leaves, why flowers petals have the shape they do, and so on. All the genes in in every cent of the plant are the same, and yet the petals are different from the sepals and and different from the stem and no different from the roots and the shoots and the different tissues of the leaves and so on. so when thinking about this, the idea of organizing fields was already established in biology, a more holistic tradition of biology, but no one knew how they could be inherited. And at this stage, and I was reading about I was reading philosophy by particularly the philosopher Henri Bergson, the French philosopher. His book Matter and Memory, which gave the idea of memory being transmitted directly across time, not having to be carried in molecules or material structures as a kind of causal influence that could leap across time. And I realized that if that happened in biology, it could lead to a completely new interpretation of inheritance. And that led to the idea of morphic resonance. The idea of similar things in French, subsequent similar things in self-organizing systems across time and space. So this idea came to me in a flash around 1973. I was a fellow of Clare College at that stage and director of studies in Cell biology. and this idea obviously was way off the map of what was going on in the biochemistry department where I was working. and I went when I, I was terribly excited for several days. I mean, the whole world was suddenly looking completely different ideas, which I was pouring in. So I tried to communicate some of this excitement to my colleagues in the biochemistry department. Went over like a lead balloon. and, I did better on high table at Clare, where some of the philosophers and historians were open to talking about this and in fact, were enormously helpful. but it became clear to me that this I couldn’t, go on doing biochemistry and pursue these ideas. So I resigned my fellowship in 1974, and I took a job in a research agricultural research institute in India. The reason I did that was, because earlier in 1968, soon after I’d been elected to a research fellowship at Clare College, I was very interested in tropical plants and tropical biology. I’d been enthused by a professor of botany at Cambridge when I was studying botany called Edge Corners. SEO. any. who had spent many years working in Malaya and had worked at the Singapore Botanic Garden. In fact, during the Japanese occupation, he was interned in the Singapore Botanic Garden, which for him proved to be a godsend. the occupying Japanese officer was a keen botanist and and so, was quite happy for Cornell to spend the whole of the war interned in the herbarium and in the botanic garden, which enormously deepened his understanding of tropical plants. and he used to say, you can’t really understand biology unless you’ve lived and worked in the tropics, because there’s such a greater diversity. Hundreds of species per acre. Whereas here in Britain, you know, of trees, here in Britain you might have five species in an acre of woodland. But as corner pointed out, it’s the diversity is huge in the tropics. And as you go north and south, it gets less and less and less until when you get to northern, really northern or southern latitude says you know, just a very few species. So anyway, I got this, Royal Society traveling award to go and work in the botany department at the University of Malaya in 1968, and the Royal Society gave me one of those old style airline tickets that I discovered. You could change it. Well, so I changed it. Instead of going straight to Kuala Lumpur, I changed it. I got off at Delhi planning to spend a few days, say, sampling India, just seeing what India was like. And I was bowled over by India. in Delhi, I ran into the only person I knew in India. I was a research student, a friend of mine from Cambridge doing anthropology research, and we just bumped into each other in Delhi by chance. He was just there for a few days. It was remarkable. And he said, look, I’m just going back to my village in the Himalayan foothills. Would you like to come? So I said, wow, yes, I’ve been to India 2 or 3 days. And he said, well, we have to take the train and overnight trains. Patong called. Then we have to get a bus and we have to change another bus, and then we have to walk about four hours to get to the village. I said, well, that sounds all right. So that’s it. So off we went. And when we got to the village, he’d been there two years. He spoke the local language, Pali, which is a bit like Hindi. he was living in a family of a very tall, herbal doctor. There was no electricity, no radio, no television. and the. I was he told him I was his cousin. So he accepted me as a member of the family. I was living in this herbal doctor’s house. It was very simple. They were quite poor, the people they knew and. But wonderful atmosphere and, you know, the holy fire, they the wife of the daughter was cooking things one at one stage I had some wastepaper in my pocket, and I was just about to throw it on the fire. And he said, oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t this is the holy fire. It’s the center of the house. You can’t justify it by throwing rubbish on it. I soon learned there are rules and and and it was quite unlike anything I’d expected. I was completely enchanted by this rural Indian life. Pretty television and pretty. And electricity was life as it had gone on for centuries. and one day we were taking a walk along the valley. It was a fast flowing mountain stream, and there was a cliff by the venue’s a cave, and then it was this orange clad figure, who shouted out to him, who knew him? My friend Johnny, he said, Johnny’s. So he said, oh, let’s go and talk to the sadhu, the local holy man. So I said, okay. So we went sat with a sadhu in his cave. He then produced a small clay contraption which he called a chillum, and started putting things in it and smoking it, and asked if I’d like to try it. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it might be cannabis, but I wasn’t quite sure. I’d never had cannabis before. and anyway, he showed me how to smoke dirty cloth wrapped around the bottom, and I just sat there so I had a few puffs on this thing, and, I had most extraordinary experience. I mind opened up the whole the mountains, the snow capped Himalayan dives became supremely beautiful. The grass seemed vastly greener than I felt the presence of God. I felt this divine presence. I felt that he invoked Shiva before he took it. Said, This is Shiva’s holy plant. and for me, it was a completely transformative experience. Suddenly, the world looked totally different and when I came to leave the village, the wife of the Brahmin herbal doctor did a little ceremony. Leave about 4 a.m. to walk, to get the first bus, and walk in the dark to start with. And she gave me, put kumkum on my forehead and gave me a blessing and sprinkled holy water on me and said this was a blessing, that I would return to India, where it came true. Six years later. but for me, this was a tremendous opening, and I couldn’t leave India straightaway. So I managed to extend my ticket for another two months. So I then traveled through Banaras of Varanasi and, visiting temples. I found I could by giving lectures at botany departments around India from one professor to another. I got introductions, I got put up for free at Banaras, Calcutta, Madurai, Madras. That’s a whole range of universities. and it just blew my mind. And Benaras, for example, I was taken around by a graduate student delegation to show me around. we went into a temple that was absolutely full of rats, and I said, why are there so many rats in this temple? He said, because it is a rat temple. And. oh. I said, he said, the rat is sacred animal, the vehicle of Lord Ganesh. He said, this is the rat temple. So. And the people feeding the rats, you know, there were devout Hindus coming in and sort of shoveling food on his, his rat and the hundreds and hundreds of rats sacred rats. Well, I mean, as I traveled through India, there were many, many things that surprised me. And that was one of them. then I had two months in Sri Lanka. I thought, why rush to Malaysia so soon? I, so and there I came across Buddhists, and I spent a while in a Buddhist monastery. Monk explained to me about meditation. I didn’t know about meditation. so fascinated by that. Then I had a, nine months in Malaya at the University of Malaya, at weekends, a group of us, mostly expatriates, mainly Australians, we went to visit to desert islands. We had fishermen leave us on. Costa’s away on desert islands and pick us up on Sunday night. And we went into the forest, the jungles. I went on forest expeditions. It was amazing experience and living among Muslims, most Malays and Muslim Hindus, Indians and Chinese going to Chinese temples. it was a most exotic period. After that, I traveled on the way back to Cambridge, who lives in Cambodia, in Thailand, and I got back to Cambridge. It was I still during term time and I had this unbelievable year. It was. And I put on my went to dinner on my table, put on my gown. Everything looked exactly the same and everyone looked exactly the same. 1 or 2 of the older fellow said, I haven’t seen you for a while and we’ve been somewhere. I said, well, yes, aware. Malaya? oh yes, yes. Have you heard that so-and-so has done so? I mean, it was just straight back into Cambridge gossip and so, you know, as if it had never happened. Anyway, in 1962, 74, I took this job in this agricultural institute in Hyderabad. and, I was working on crops, crop improvement of chickpeas and pigeon peas. I had to work in farmer’s fields. I had to travel all over India. some of my experiments with chickpeas I did on the border of Tibet. You can’t grow them in the plains of India in the winter. In the summer months, you can grow them right up in the mountains. I was up in the specially district on Tibetan frontier. it was closed to foreigners at the time, but I could go there because it was a special project, living with a Tibetan family in their house of polyandrous household. one wife, six husbands. that’s the system there. The land goes through women, and, they don’t want to split it up. So, one woman inherits all the land of the family, and then, she has to marry to have men to work the land. And the more the better. So they they marry a whole clutch of brothers as a package deal. She got six, six brothers as her husbands. And I asked discreetly whether they took it in turns and so on. Apparently, more or less. Yes. and so I was living in this polyamorous household with everyone dressed in Tibetan robes. The Tibetan temple, there were Tibetan monks, immersed in this Tibetan world. It was astonishing. Unchanged. and in Hyderabad itself, I was, I didn’t want to live in a suburban style home like most of my expatriate colleagues. but I rented a wing of a crumbling palace from one of the ranches, and and, that was much more spectacular. The trouble is, the roof leaked during the monsoon, and, there were rats, and, there was a cobra. I lived in the garden, and I sometimes found it in my lavatory. And I tried it first. I tried to get my cook to get rid of it. My Hindu cook. he said we couldn’t get rid of the cobra. Okay, so you’re just a sacred snake. Cobra is not analogous. We have Nagpur puja next week and they invited all the servants. And the Rajah went to the cobras nest and and a termite hill in, in the garden. They knew it was burnt. Incense stinks. Offered it sources of milk and the, Cobra. I was honored, when a rat ran out of my face one night when I was asleep, I was paralyzed saying I had sleep paralysis. I asked my cook to get rid of it, and, when I went to work the next day, and when I got back, he’d caught it in one of those live traps, a kind of cage with the live ration. So I said, well, what are you going to do with it? No, I said, I won’t. I don’t want it here. Can you kill it? He said, no, sir, I cannot kill the rats is a sacred animal. So you say vehicle of Ganesh? I knew that already. So I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. So I said, well, can you just take it away? And he said yes, sir. So he put it on his bicycle and pedaled off and came back after a while, and he. He said, I’ve taken you two miles away. So I say, very good, I so after that I noticed as I went round hunchbacked all over, hunchbacked, with people on bicycles, with rats in these traps at the back, taking them somewhere else. But the total number of rats remained the same. and we just redistributed. so, anyway, I got really interested in going to Hindu temples discourses. I was doing meditation. I was doing yoga at Cambridge. After my Milan trip, I encountered LSD for the first time in 1971, which had had a huge effect on me in terms of opening my view of consciousness. In my case, it was all too true that cannabis proved to be a gateway drug to, psychedelics. and this experience made me very interested in exploring consciousness without drugs. So I started transcendental meditation, and took up yoga and as well as I continued dancing into, I became very friendly with a muslim family. And the grandfather of my friend, was, a Sufi saint. so I got to know the Sufi saint, who became very friendly with, and I used to go who was a poet, and I loved visiting him because he’d sit there in his wonderful brocade Shivani, running his hands through bowls of jasmine flowers. And so I wasn’t used to this, I thought. Also, religious people ought to be austere. The message out lesson I learned from him was to know all these pleasures are a gift from God and the so. And he had wonderful perfumes. He had beautiful clothes. He had lovely poetry. He’d recite to me, translated from the Urdu and he he taught me a form of Sufi meditation. So for a year or so I did. It was ether, which is like a Sufi mantra. and had this Sufi teacher, he died, and I was one of those honored to carry his body to the burial ground. so all of this was going on in Heidelberg? and I went to see a Hindu guru at an ashram and asked his spiritual advice. And he said, rather unexpectedly, you come from a Christian family, from a Christian country. He said, all religions have paths to God. He said, you should take a Christian path. I said, oh, that’s a new idea. hadn’t occurred to me. and, and so and I then I thought, actually, I had this huge blind spot. The whole the only thing I’d never really thought of was Christianity, because the atheist propaganda I’d absorbed is really principally anti-Christian. It grew up in reaction against Christianity, and its primary target is Christianity. so, I started saying the Lord’s Prayer as part of my after my meditation, and I started going to the local Anglican church, Saint John’s, Secunderabad, built by Royal Engineers in the colonial period. and really enjoyed doing that. I found, you know, I really enjoyed being back and with familiar words. The Book of Common Prayer. and I was confirmed in the Church of South India at the age of 34, but it still seemed to me a little bit lacking in some of the deeper aspects of spirituality. and then a friend who traveled around various ashrams told me about someone called Father Bede Griffiths, who lived in a small Christian ashram in Tamil known to Russian in the south of India, and said you should go and visit him. So I did, and I was absolutely amazed. He was this marvelous man. tall, looked a bit like Gandalf. he was wearing orange robes, living in this Christian ashram. being at Oxford, he was he was taught by C.S. Lewis. He was became a great friend of C.S. Lewis, who’d been a monk, Benedictine monk in England, but had spent 25 years in India. integrating the Christian and the Hindu tradition. He was extremely well versed in the Upanishads, the Hindu mystical tradition in the ashram, there’s two hours meditation a day, an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening. I used to sit on the bank of the sacred river Cauvery, to do to do my meditation was yoga. the midday service of mass began with the chanting of the Gayatri Mantra, which is one of the great Hindu mantras. And I said, Father Bede, how can you, chant a the giant tree mantra in a Catholic ashram? And he said, precisely because it’s Catholic. He said, Catholic means universal. And anything that excludes a path to truth is merely a sect. so I loved his view of Catholicism as a universal approach. anyway, I met him. I was very taken by him, and I said, I want to write a book about morphic resonance. I can’t do it. Well, I’m doing my agricultural research. I have to take a year or two off, but I’d love to be able to do it in India. So he said, well, come and live here and you can do it here. So after working in my job for for over four years, I took time off and went and lived in his ashram, which was lovely. It was a small community. It was very friendly. there was chanting every day. There was meditation and yoga found to be. It was enormously stimulating to talk to. I had two palms thatched hut where I wrote my book, and with a fountain pen and school exercise books I bought from the village shop. and I lived very, very simply, I lived for a year and a half, and at the end of it, I talked to the monk who ran the finances, and I said, look, I’ve been contributing to help various village schemes the ashram has. But just to know how much would it cost for my being here for a year and a half? I what would the actual cost be? because I certainly want to give more than that, he said. Well, the actual cost of living here for a year and a half, the food and all the services and everything here is he said it’s about $150. So $150. I thought, I’ve got enough in the bank to last for the rest of my life. so it really freed me from money worries. because I realized that I could live simply. It was one of the happiest times of my life. I was living with absolute minimal carbon footprint or any other kind of footprint. in the simplest way possible. anyway, finally, Bede was a huge help to me in, rediscovering the Christian tradition and seeing how it could link to the insights of the Hindu tradition, particularly through, the idea of the Holy Trinity. The ashram was called in English, the ashram of the Holy Trinity in, in Sanskrit it was called, SAT chit Ananda Ashram. And as many of you probably know, the Hindu conception of ultimate consciousness or reality, especially in ad fighting for down to is that the ultimate consciousness on which all else depends. Almost the whole universe depends on in which all individual consciousness is yours and mine depend is quote sat chit and under its three fold that means being, its conscious being. it means consciousness, the contents of consciousness, what you can know. And Ananda is bliss or joy. So the idea is the ultimate consciousness is the knower and also the known, because both have to be part of consciousness. No. And Rupert Sheldrake. It’s not an undifferentiated blob, as it were. It’s it’s as a structure within ultimate consciousness. And part of its very nature is bliss or joy, which is why mystical experiences of connection with the divine are usually supremely joyful or blissful, because that’s the divine conscious nature. And the Hindu view is that all forms of consciousness, including yours and mine, are part of that ultimate consciousness bit like sparks of the divine. Or, if you like, fractals, they don’t use the word fractal, but like fractal derivatives. one of the very familiar similes that they use in India is saying, imagine seeing the moon reflected in hundreds of buckets of water at night. Every bucket looks as if it’s got a separate moon in it, but it’s the same moon just reflected in all these different buckets, and each one set differently. and so our consciousness is part of the divine consciousness. And that’s why through meditation, through going to the ground of our own consciousness, we connect with the divine consciousness. That’s why, meditation is such an important part of Hindu and Buddhist practice. And indeed of Christian contemplation practice in monasteries and convents throughout the centuries. so there are many forms of this trinity. Another Hindu version is with the three main gods Brahma, Vishnu and and Shiva. Brahma is the ultimate source or creator. the ground of all things. Vishnu is the god who preserves order and form. The preserver keeps things in order and form. and Shiva is the creator and the destroyer, portrayed as in dancing or in flames of fire, or in the erect, lingam or phallus as the kind of energetic principle. And as Father Bede pointed out to me, the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity is very similar. The ultimate understanding of God in the Christian tradition, is the Holy Trinity. That’s why all Orthodox churches, including Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist chant, practically all have the Holy Trinity is the central conception of God. and what this is saying is that ultimate reality, God’s consciousness is not undifferentiated. It has this division, but it differentiable aspects within it. God the father is equivalent to such. And the Hindus as to conscious being in the present. And when God announces himself to Moses in the Old Testament and Moses says, what’s your name? at the burning bush, he says, I am who I am, or I am that I am so conscious. Being in the presence is the very definition of that aspect of God. Then the second person of the Holy Trinity is the logos. The word in the beginning was the word The word was with God. The word was God. So the logos is very similar to the platonic idea. The idea is in Plato’s philosophy, in a Christianized form, it’s the ideas, forms, patterns, structures of everything. It’s what gives form, pattern or structure to everything in the universe. Through him all things were made. the logos, the second person of the Trinity, is not the same as Jesus of Nazareth. Obviously, the whole universe wasn’t made through Jesus of Nazareth, born in 18 zero, in Nazareth, or in Bethlehem. but the divine aspect of Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the logos, is this ultimate formative principle. And then the Holy Spirit is the principle of movement, change, dynamism, and underlies all things through activity. And the principal metaphor is speech as it comes in spirit means breath or wind. and logos means word. Even at the very beginning of the book of Genesis, you get this. And God said, well, the first verse to the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters. Spirit is wind, wind moving on the face of the deep creates waves. So it’s kind of vibratory pattern of activity. And then verse three, and God said, let there be light. A word is a pattern, a form, a structure, a pattern of vibration. And in order to speak words you have to have the flow of breath. Like when I’m speaking now, you wouldn’t hear any of the words I’m speaking unless my breath was flowing out and carrying the words with it. If I had just the words in my mind. They’d be silent and they wouldn’t manifest into the world. If I have just the breath. It has no structure. It’s kind of white noise. and it doesn’t. It doesn’t have any formal pattern. But the two together, make up, this, the spoken word. So there has to be the speaker, the breath and the logos and this model of the. That’s the fundamental metaphor of the Holy Trinity is, I think, a model for the whole of nature. If God is the source of all nature and sustainer all nature, I mean, the traditional Christian view is not that God make made the universe in the first place like a machine, designed it like an engineer. fine. Tuned the laws and constants and then press the stop button to give the big bang and then step back. And the whole of nature then went on automatically just by itself. That’s the the kind of god, the tastiest. Like Richard Dawkins don’t believe in is that kind of God. And I don’t believe in that kind of God either. the kind of god the traditional Christian theology, believes in God is sustains the entire universe the entire time and underlies everything that happens. So the ultimate source of all form and nature, the form of words, the structure of words, the form of our bodies, the forms of flowers, of crystals, of planets, of galaxies, the ultimate source of form is the logos. The formative principle, the ultimate source of energy is the spirit, and everything in nature is propelled by energy. and everything depends on energy for its actuality. Even the simplest atoms of matter. energetic vibrations, energy bound within fields, within the quantum fields of quantum field theory, giving protons, neutrons and nuclei, electrons. These things are shaped by fields which are part of quantum field theory. But they wouldn’t have any reality without the energy that those fields bind. So everything in nature is a kind of reflection of these ultimate principles when seen through this lens. And certainly the way I see it myself. So as I now see it, I see God in nature and nature in God, rather than a remote God who’s a kind of optional extra, who made a machine universe and press the start button, and then all of it goes on automatically with that unconscious matter, as in mechanistic science. and this view also enables us to see how there can be various forms of consciousness all through nature, not just in brains. it’s an interesting development in modern intellectual life that panpsychism, the idea of consciousness, is very widely distributed in nature, is now becoming very fashionable in the academic world. it’s somewhat surprising that this is happening, but it is. And the reason is happening is because mechanistic materialism has one very, very, very big problem. In fact, it’s called the hard problem, which is that mechanistic materialism says the whole universe consists of unconscious matter and or unconscious physical reality, and there’s nothing but unconscious matter. Then, of course, the problem arises how come we are conscious? We ought not to be. and a number of eminent philosophers in materialist philosophers have spent their entire careers trying to prove we’re not conscious, which, and it’s only just neural activity. to talk of consciousness is just a kind of folk superstition that will finally be got rid of when neuroscience is advanced far enough. There’s also, of course, in that world, you know, free will. But of course, it’s self-contradictory. I mean, to try and persuade people that they’ve got no free will by reasoned argument, on the basis of mechanistic science, presupposes they’re conscious. And also they have a freedom to choose your point of view. Other philosophers have taken a different line. They’ve said, well, consciousness is nothing but the activity of the brain, but the brain produces consciousness as a kind of illusion inside the head. But as the critics have pointed out, illusion is itself a mode of consciousness. So it doesn’t explain consciousness, it presupposes it. That’s why it’s called the hard problem. the very existence of consciousness is not explained by mechanistic science, even though you have to be conscious to do mechanistic science, presupposed by the very act of science itself. So, what’s happened is that some philosophers node, notably Galen Strawson and Philip Gough here in Britain and philosophers all over the world in recent decades or two, have started saying, well, if you say there’s just a tiny little bit of consciousness and electron a little bit more, an atom a bit more in the molecule, then by the time, by the time you get to a brain, which is very complicated, then you can have full scale consciousness, and it just emerges. It’s different in degree, but not in kind. Now, they don’t let this consciousness of the electron or proton make the slightest difference to physics. what they want is to say, well, we’ll just say it’s, but then it will be business as usual within science. they’re trying to solve the hard problem the easy way. the problem is that, you don’t need to start with the human brain. I wrote a paper a couple of years ago called Is The Sun Conscious? Which is published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. taking them at their word. If you think panpsychism means consciousness in all self-organized systems, then what about the sun? you can make good arguments for the sun being conscious. I try to do this in my paper, which you can read on my website. and if the sun’s conscious, then what about the stars? And if the stars are conscious? And what about the whole galaxy? Could it be a galactic mind? And if the galaxy is conscious, what about the whole cosmos? And then we get back to a familiar view of the whole cosmic mind. Watch. Dionysius. What Plato and the neo pervasiveness and many of the Neoplatonism theologians, the Middle Ages believed that the whole universe has a soul or mind, the animal mundi that God is reflected in the second person of the Trinity, the logos, the cosmic Christ, is the incarnation of God in the whole universe. with this cosmic mind underlying all things, this view is called pantheism, called in nature and nature and God. So, Let me just see. Why, I shall end by just saying that to some of my recent work, has been looking at the science behind spiritual practices. all religions have spiritual practices like meditation, prayer, fasting, connecting with nature, singing and chanting. rituals and pilgrimage. And in my book, Science and Spiritual Practices, I show how, these practices common to all religions, are now supported by science. Thousands of scientific studies have shown that people who have spiritual or religious practices are, on the whole, healthier, happier, and live longer than those who don’t. the converse must be true that those who don’t have some are unhappier and healthier and live shorter. Which is why I often say meditators here. Some should come with a health warning. because it puts people off their traditional religious practices and doesn’t give them anything else. And instead, however, a number of modern atheists like Sam Harris have now taken up spiritual practices precisely because they recognize they have value. He’s not giving online meditation courses. so, spiritual practices, there’s there’s no doubt they work. They have measurable scientific effects. I just kind of seven in my books where science and spiritual practices and seven more in my most recent book, Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work. And one of them is pilgrimage. And, one of the things I’m very keen on is pilgrimage, the revival of pilgrimage that’s happening here in Britain. And elsewhere in Europe at the moment. And my colleague, Guy Hayward, doctor Guy, who would perhaps be here in the front row, is the director of the British Pilgrimage Trust. And, it’s which is reopening ancient footpaths, pilgrimages all over Britain, so that people can once again walk to the great holy places. Pilgrimage was suppressed at the Protestant Reformation in 1538, was banned by Henry the Eighth and Thomas Cromwell. It was made illegal. The shrines were destroyed. pilgrims were stopped from going on pilgrimages. The infrastructure, which was the monasteries, were dissolved. but now there’s a revival of pilgrimage happening here and all over Europe. And there are wonderful pilgrimages right here in London. I’ve been on several with Guy here in London. and when you do that, you realize that London is full of holy places and it becomes, instead of just a secular city with lots of traffic and business and commerce, you suddenly see it through a completely new lens. And indeed, all cities traditionally have sacred centers to them. Temples in Sumeria and Babylon were at the center of the city, as they are in the center of many Hindu cities like Madurai. So sacred places are not just in the country, are there? There are some wonderful ones in the country, they’re in cities. And in fact, in England, our great cathedrals define a city. Traditionally, Wells and Southall or Southwell are cities, even though they’re very small towns because they have cathedrals, whereas a lot of very big towns are not cities because they don’t have cathedrals. So holy places are part of urban and rural life, and rediscovering them and walking between them is a fantastic way of reconnecting with this tradition. Well, I think that’s enough from me, really. but I think that the that this revival of pilgrimage and of spiritual practices and, the anarchism, the rediscovery of God that’s going on, in, in an increasing it’s increasing speed at the moment is one of the most interesting and hopeful things in the modern world. And heaven knows, there aren’t many hopeful and interesting things in the modern world. This is one of them. And for me, I think it’s probably the most important of them all, because I think it helps reconnect us with ourselves with each other, with that which is beyond the human level, with the natural world, and gives us hope and vision for doing something about the many crises which are unfolding around us. Thank you. Hello. Would you like to take some questions from the audience? Yes, yes. Could you find the people who are asked? And I don’t want to choose the people. If you can find people who want to ask them and give them. Well, the first hand I see right now was this one. So if you could kindly please put your hand up and I’ll try and get round some of you. I can’t take all of them, but I’ll actually just come round and, Yeah, but you asked questions. Thank you. Hello, Rupert. thank you so much. Your, real gift to us. really appreciate you sharing so much, about your life. I come from the, Sufi tradition. And, like you, I have a connection with India and has been spending time, with Buddhist monks in many monasteries and Hindu monks in ashrams. And I’ve been actually doing a same kind of synthesis between the Islamic traditions and learning from, as you described yourself. and, I’ve seen the beauty across those two different traditions. So today I’m a practicing Muslim, just as you are a practicing Christian. But I consider myself a perennial, lost in the sense of seeing the ability of all traditions to take us to the same ultimate, destination. I was wondering if you would identify similarly, or do you, look at perennial ism differently? Thank you. Yes. Well, I, I definitely think that there’s a common ground to all religious traditions, which is really that state of, that we can directly experience through mystical experience. All religions come from that mystical insight. without it, the it’s not people don’t believe in God, the great founders of religions because they read about God in books. They believe because they’ve had a direct experience. And of course, the way we interpret that experience depends on our language and culture and so on. Father Bede used to say that it’s as if that central experience of being part of this things grow vaster grace in ourselves and vastly beyond human conceptual thought. It’s like the palm of the hand, and then the fingers of the hand are like the different religious traditions that come out of it and lead back into it. and each finger is different, and each religious tradition is different, is language and is stories and is sacred writings and it’s rituals are different. But, there’s some way in which they point to something that they have in common. and sometimes this is called the perennial philosophy, but I think perennial philosophy is a bit misleading because it’s not really a philosophy as a which might imply some you read in books or study in seminar rooms. It’s more a kind of experience that people share. And one of Father Bede’s, he was my main teacher, which is why I keep referring to him. one of the things he found in interreligious dialog was that if you try talking to people about, you know, the doctrines and the traditions, then you easily get bogged down in what’s right and what’s wrong. Even within each religion, the people who quarrel with each other Protestants, Catholics, Sunnis, Shias, and so on, what he found worked and what I found really works too, when I’ve done this is it’s not asked people what the theory is, but what they actually do. So like, how do you actually pray? How do you actually meditate, you know, how do you go on pilgrimage and stuff and then share the experience and then it becomes I do a lot more in common emerges from that. So, you know, I take, I take although I’m a practicing Christian, I find myself at home and Hindu ashrams if, well, most of the ones I’ve been to among Sufis. I recently visited a Sufi group in Amman, Jordan. I spent several very happy days with this group of Sufis and found so much in common. so I’ve had this experience over and over again of of no, it’s a the sense that we, we differ. But the, the ultimate thing is most important is not different. How can it be if there’s an ultimate unity underlying all things, it can’t be divided up into little bits or segments where we interpret it all, speak about it can. But the ultimate unity by definition, is an ultimate unity. Hello, Rupa, thank you so much for that talk. It’s wonderful to be here and listen to you. I have a question, which I need to preface that by explaining where I’m coming from with it, which is that, I was raised Catholic in Ireland. then swiftly bounced away from it, as I got older and had a similar, similar realizations to you. And now, I’ve just found myself, in the world of shamanism, in the Mongolian tradition, my teacher is a shaman from Mongolia. and I was what really struck me with that was the role of feminine energy in shamanism and animism generally. it’s got a much more pronounced role that’s, equally celebrated as the role of masculine energy. And, I wanted to get your thoughts on that within Christianity and, what? Yeah. The role of the feminine is there. I know there’s the Virgin Mary. And I left all of this when I was quite young, so, Yeah. similarly. Yeah, maybe having a bit of an a theism going on as well. but yeah, it seems seemed to me that there was a big lack. There was kind of fallacies. so yeah, well, I first of all about shamanism. I think we have a lot to learn from shamanic traditions, because they’re often very much connected with the natural world, more so than, mainstream religions, which have become a bit more disconnected from it. I think that the roots of all these religions are very shamanic. if you look at the Hebrew prophets, like Elijah, they lived in caves in the wilderness. They were they were fed by ravens. It says, the account of Elijah. There was a kind of strong shamanic element in the Hebrew prophets. no. I think that the, and shamanic traditions around the world have retained this sense of connection with the animal and vegetative worlds, and that’s why I think there’s a lot to learn from them. in terms of, female energy, I think it’s certainly true that most religions have been pretty patriarchal for quite a long time, not just religions. as governments, states, universities, Jews, you mean everything you can think of? every institution. but I think one of the interesting features of Christianity is that women played such a very important part in it right from the beginning. the Blessed Virgin Mary is a key figure. The, the the person, the first witness of Jesus’s resurrection is Mary Magdalene, a woman, and the person who anointed Christ means the Anointed One, and the only time he was ever anointed by anyone was not by a high priest, but by a woman who was usually identified with Mary Magdalene anointing his feet and, and and him with oil. so I think, in a sense, in Mary Magdalene is the kind of archetype or priestess. And it’s I think I’m a member of the Church of England, and in the Church of England, of course, we’ve had married priests since the Reformation, and we now have women priests and bishops. And the vicar of this church has a woman and one of the assistant vicar, Ellen Lapin, was a curator non parish church in Hampstead before. so who did I think this is a very one of the things that’s changing. You see religions are not static. They evolve. And one of the things that’s evolving along with, changing conceptions of roles of women in society, is a recognition within the religious sphere. And it’s happening more in some religions than others and seen more in some churches than others. but I think it’s a very important development. And personally, I’m happy that it’s happening in the Church of England and the way it is. I myself, pray to the Blessed Virgin, may I say the Hail Mary every night as part of my prayers. And I also regard Saint Mary Magdalene as my patron saint. So, or matron saint. so it’s a very important part of my own practice. Rupert, I want to say, how inspiring you are to me. So thank you very much for that. I wanted to ask you, what combination of philosophy, science and technology do you think has the greatest potential to, deepen and increase, connection with the divine? And what do you think its potential is? What connection of philosophy, technology and science would help us most? Well, I you know, I’ve written these two books on spiritual practices because I think there are several, you know, range of practices that can really help us. I think that sometimes you could say the technology of holy places. If you think of cathedrals, it’s not exactly modern technology. It’s medieval technology. But, when you look at what they achieved in the Middle Ages with great cathedrals like Lincoln or Canterbury or Wells or Salisbury, is completely staggering. And and there we have buildings designed to expand and open the mind. They’re designed they’re not functional spaces, just to fulfill most basic functions of people meeting together. The height, the stained glass windows and stuff. We already have an example of a technology that’s been deployed in the service of the divine. And and so we do in sacred architecture, in all traditions, I mean, wonderful mosques and tombs in the Islamic world and temples and Hindu wells and, you know, some of the great Buddhist statue, Jews and stupas and temples, inspire us through beauty. I think one kind of possible technology or traditional use as well, that plays and can play a big part is psychedelics, because I think for people who’ve been raised in the world of mechanistic materialism, as I was, who’ve been completely pervaded by that way of thinking, it may take a rather stronger shock to the system, to get you out of it. And psychedelics have that role for a lot of young people, including me. When I was first took LSD can be a kind of rite of passage, into an expanded view of consciousness. And there are ways in which they can be used in a religious context. I mean, there are some people who, a small underground movement called cathedrals on cannabis, of people who visit cathedrals in altered states of consciousness and find it a most moving and powerful way of experiencing them. there’s also psychedelic churches, I’m thinking particularly of Santo Domingo, Brazilian psychedelic church that emerged from the jungles of the Amazon when rubber tappers meant shamanic shama shamans who took ayahuasca, in the 1970s. It began and now has branches all over the world. And it’s a church which integrates, Christianity with the psychedelic experience. And I think that’s a most interesting evolutionary development. The ceremonies start with the father and the Hail Mary. and they see Jesus as one of the guides through and the angels as guides through this psychedelic realm. The psychedelic realm is a vast realm of imagination. I think it’s, as it were, and more intense version of the dream world, which has limitless possibilities. And, it’s easy to get lost. And some people, can encounter malevolent spirits and it can be dangerous. So you need guides in that world and the world of, the ayahuasca based center domain. has spirit guides in that world. And one reason I think it’s important is because when you die or in that world, a lot of people think when you die, I see myself. When you die, it’s like dreaming, but you can’t wake up anymore because you haven’t got a physical body to wake up in. so you’re in a dream state and the dream state can be horrible, like in Dante’s Inferno. In a sense, Dante’s Divine Comedy is like a description of an imaginary world after death. That’s a bit like a kind of intensive five dream world or an intensified psychedelic world. and then there’s purgatory, where people in in the inferno, in Dante’s Inferno, people are trapped in their obsessions. They just can’t get out of their obsessive greed or their obsessive lust or whatever their obsessions are. They’re trapped in them in purgatory. They’re able to move on, but gradually by. And then when they reach the final book of Dante’s Inferno, Paradiso. it’s a bit like a tiny sound trip to in DMT. Trip in slow motion. It’s sort of a disembodied ascent into realms of life, encountering beings and angels of light and guides who help people through that process. And so I think that the, the so I think psychedelics are one possibility, that would perhaps fit into your, your question. And then in terms of philosophy, then I think the philosophies that help us most, holistic philosophies whereby we can and sciences whereby we can see nature as alive, organic, and, the whole universe as a kind of organism as opposed to mechanistic series. and I think when those are applied to medicine as opposed to the currently orthodox mechanistic medicine, then we’ll have better healing systems that work better because that would be more inclusive, include more healing methods and modalities, which again, would be kinds of technologies anyway. Anyways, the big question, and I was just sketching in a few possible answers. Thank you very much for your talk. And this might provoke the shortest answer. It’s possible for one to give. Do you have any recollections of Krishnamurti? And did you meet David Byrne? the answer is yes and yes. when I, when my first book, A New Science of Life, came out, with a book I wrote in Father Bede’s Ashram, it’s my first book on morphic resonance. It’s now available in new, up to the third fully updated edition. when that book came out in 1981, I was invited by someone in London to meet Krishnamurti, because he’d heard about my book and was very interested in it because Krishnamurti, the Indian teacher who was. For those of you who don’t know about due to Krishnamurti, he was promoted at first by the Esophageal Society and then he broke away and became a teacher, without any particular religious affiliation. And he often said, I am not a guru, actually, I think he was, but he said he wasn’t. but he was a teacher, and many people followed him. and one of his doctrines was that if I undergo transformation of consciousness, it makes it easier for everyone else to undergo it. He often said, I am humanity, that we are all connected. So he very much like my idea of morphic resonance, where we’re all connected through a collective consciousness and unconscious. And so we had, a dialog in Britain. And then in 1982, I went to California for the first time in my book, A New Science Life came out in America. It was published in California, where I encountered, all sorts of new people. I went to the Ashland Institute. I met Stan Groff, who was doing LSD research. I met some Terence McKenna, who became a great friend of mine, and Ralph Abraham. We did. We had many dialogs together. He was a a kind of shamanic psychic Alec explorer. but one of the things that happened. So I was invited to Krishnamurti, his center in Ohio, California, where David Bowen was staying with him. And the person who invited me arranged for a series of dialogs between me and David Bowman. Krishnamurti two of them were filmed with a psychiatrist, an American psychiatrist called The Nature of the mind. And they’re online on the internet. I also had a whole series of meetings with David Bowen. We got on extremely well. He was a quantum physicist, and he thought that my ideas about morphic resonance fitted very well with his ideas about quantum physics. In my book, A New Science of Life. there’s an appendix of a dialog between me and David Bowen about quantum physics and what and morphic resonance. And I met Krishnamurti, many times because we got on very well. And for several years after our first meeting, I was spending the winters in India doing my old job in crop, development in, Hyderabad. Then I spent, the May or June I spent in California, and in the autumn I was here in England. So for several years that happened to be Krishnamurti, his pattern of movement. So we used to meet up in Adyar, in Madras in India and have some dialogs there. Then we did some when he was in California and then, in England in the autumn. So I probably did about 10, 12, maybe 15 dialogs with Krishnamurti, all of which were recorded and some of which are online in audio form. At least one of them is video. I didn’t by the time I met Krishnamurti, I’d already published my book on morphic resonance. I’d lived in Father B’s ashram. I studied a lot about Hindu, Buddhist and other thought. so I wasn’t like a disciple and I wasn’t afraid of him. And one of the reasons his, followers wanted me to have these dialogs with him was because they were afraid of him and didn’t read. He always had let us discuss it, in a dialog together. But actually, as soon as people started trying to discuss it, he sort of took over. And but when he did it with me, he said, let us discuss it. And I said, okay. So then he said, well, he said, I am humanity. So if one person is enlightened, all humanity is enlightened. That was one of his teachings. So I said, well, you’ve just been telling us what a sorry state the world is in. So obviously no one’s been enlightened yet. And, so, he said, well, maybe more than one. I said, okay, well how many? 1020, 100, 20, 10,000. Just a rough figure. And so anyway, it was fun. We teased each other and, and, we had fun. He liked it because I sort of we played with ideas and, and he, he had a sense of humor and, and we had a lot of fun talking to each other. So I really appreciated that. And I also tried to understand what his real teaching was. And, because he wouldn’t put it in an easy to understand way. and I think I got some inkling of what he was really trying to say, but he wouldn’t give people a method. They all wanted a method, and he wouldn’t give them a method. And he just said, you just become enlightened. Think that it may have happened for him, but it didn’t happen for most of his followers. or for most people, so it was kind of paradoxical. He was a teacher, but he refused to teach a method and so anyway, we became we, I would say we became friends. And, and so I became friends with David Boehm as well. And, we, we saw eye to eye and a lot of questions within science. But the key dialog is that one in, in in a new sense, I’ve. I think we’ll have to finish there. thank you so much for recounting your experiences in such vivid detail. and it’s been a very rich and inspiring evening. Thank you so much. Thank you.