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this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Blue Apron Blue Apron is a really interesting new podcast sponsor that I really enjoy because I like cooking uh but I've always been pretty caveman likee in my cooking I don't really use recipes I don't I don't buy cookbooks I mean I've read some recipes online for certain things like I've smoked a ham before and things along those lines it's kind of fun but I never uh really sat out and cooked meals um under very specific or rigid instructions you know buying certain amount of recipe uh ingredients and measuring it out and I've never done that before blue apron and Blue Apron is a really unique program where they send you the food every week with detailed photographic directions they send you the recipe it's really easy to follow and it's delicious food it's like it's like eating out at an interesting restaurant and you get to do it yourself so you get this cool sense of satisfaction after it's done here's how it works for $9.99 per meal they'll send you the right ingredients in the exact right proportions with simple recipe instructions right to your door meals are between 500 and 700 calories per serving uh although you really wouldn't guess it because they're very delicious uh you would think that you're cheating uh Blue Apron includes stepbystep directions excuse me Blue Apron includes step-by-step instructions with pictures so it's really idiot proof uh I've done it uh I've made quite a few things now and uh I get new things that are delivered to me uh every week new lists like this week uh they have also have vegetarian options as well um the vegetarian ones are like fresh noi with uh I don't even know how do you say this kind of mushrooms m a i t k e t a k e my Aki Miaki mushrooms Noki and Miaki mushrooms with sweet corn and brown butter thyme uh pepper AR Aras a r e p see it's it's all complicated crafty food uh chicken with candied pistachios and snow pea radish sauté uh Indian style salmon with tomato chutney and cranberry bean stew M BLTs uh Hayashi chuku cold ramen chicken breast with shrimp and grits Mexican style beef stuffed red bell peppers really yummy stuff really interesting
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really like look things from a very different and peculiar angle that he had uh he had a very unique way of looking at the world but I I I came to know of you from that and I came to know of your ideas of morphic resonance which I I found to be really fascinating and uh if you don't mind just explain to Folks at home listening what the concept of morphic resonance is it's the idea of memory and nature the idea that the whole universe has a kind of memory the so-called laws of nature are more like habits um each individual in his species draws on a collective memory and contributes to it um it works on the basis of similarity any pattern of activity um that's similar to a later pattern of activity in a self-organizing system influences it across space and time so what it means in effect is that if you train rats to learn a new trick in Los Angeles then rats in New York and Sydney and London will learn the same thing quicker straight away um there's actually evidence that this surprising effect happens if you crystallize a new chemical that's never existed before um then after you've made it in one place it should get easier to crystallize all all over the world so it's really a theory of habit and memory and um it enables new patterns of learning to spread quicker than they might otherwise do and it means that it should get easier to learn things that other people have already learned so this has been proven this this concept of rats being able to learn one thing in New York uh ju quicker because they learned it already in San Francisco yes I mean it wasn't done to test morphic resonance which is still very controversial it was done to test something else it was done in in years ago before the second world war a professor at Harvard called William McDougall wanted to find out if rats could learn quicker what their parents had learn learned so he trained these rats to escape from a water maze they had to swim if they went out the wrong exit they got an electric shock and if they went out the right exit which uh the wrong one was lit up with a light the other one was dim if they went out the right exit they just escaped from The Maze and he tested them to see how many trials they made before they learned always go out of the dim exit and the first generation took about 250
trials before they coton beond what was happening the Next Generation it was about 180 trials the Next Generation about 150 they got better and better and and he thought at first this was because there was something being passed on to the children maybe through modifying the genes or something like that an inheritance of acquired characters that was a kind of Taboo in 20th century science um and so people questioned his work but because he was at Harvard and because he was a famous Professor um they couldn't just dismiss it he showed a huge effect um so people tried repeating his work in the University of Edinburgh Scotland and Melbourne Australia and they found that their rats started more or less where the Harvard rats had left off wow and in Melbourne they did an experiment that was particularly interesting they went on getting better the ones that were descended from the trained parents in each generation but they found that all Rats of that breed even if their parents had never been trained were getting better too so whatever it was it wasn't something to do with modifying the genes or what people would Now call epigenetics there was something else much more mysterious going on and since no one knew what it was uh it was just ignored and forgotten that is really fascinating so that would kind of make sense that if if some how or another the genes or whatever that is in the rat is able to communicate with other of the same species other the of the similar genetics of whatever it is that they're doing whatever undefined thing that they're doing connecting with them even across continents across the other side of the planet yes wow that's right and so the same would I think the same happens in evolution naturally in in nature um there was a famous case with um birds called Blue tits in England in America you call them chickes um that in the 1920s um started raiding milk bottles in Britain we had then and we still have a system where you get fresh milk delivered to your doorstep every day in a bottle and then they wash the bottles and use them it's a great system we have it right now in London um so in the 1920s they had cardboard Tops on these bottles and someone noticed in Southampton that the cream at the top of
their bottle had disappeared the top had been torn open the cream had disappeared and when they watched they saw that every morning these blue tits in Southampton had figured out they could tear off this cardboard strip and get free cream every morning um then uh everyone was sort of interested in this then it turned up many many miles away in another part of Britain then it turned up somewhere else blue tits don't fly very far they're home loving Birds um and they don't migrate so um scientists got interested and they set up a network all over Britain of people to observe this habit and they got reports it was coordinated from Cambridge University um and they mapped the spread of the habit and it became clear that it was spreading faster and faster and it was being independently invest invented in other parts of Britain um so much so that the professor of biology at Oxford sir alist Hardy suggested it must be happening by apathy um that it was spreading too quickly and the most interesting records are from Holland because this started happening in Holland as well and during the war Holland was occupied by the Germans and milk deliveries stopped um they didn't start again till about 1948 about seven or eight years after they stopped blue tits only live three or four years so there would have been no blue tits after the war that remembered the Golden Age of free cream uh um so um when the milk deliveries began again in Holland um they started drinking the cream almost straight away all over Holland so I would say this is a kind of collective memory that spread by morphic resonance and was remembered by morphic resonance um and that's another example of this going on in the real world incidentally um they've now stopped doing it they used to steal our cream in London until about 10 years ago when we switched to semis skinned milk there isn't any cream on bottles of semi skinned milk and blue tits have more or less given up in Britain now because so many people have switched to semi skinn milk they don't get any cream it's not worth the effort so um the habits died out that's pretty fascinating um the the idea that human beings start off as a blank slate has uh really been uh questioned quite a bit over the last generation and uh gen in particular
they're starting to understand that there's certain particular traits and and memories that you can actually learn from your parents like there was one study they did with mice where they had taken mice and they had given them uh an electric shock and coincided that electric shock with a smell of citrus like there was electric shock in their feet do you aware this test yes I am it it was published in nature and with the provocative title inheriting the fears of fathers it's a very very fascinating study yeah yeah amazing stuff I mean that I think could be partly due to morphic Resonance I have you explained it to people before pleas think I might have but please do well what they did was they used a chemical a synthetic chemical called acetophenone that smells sort of vaguely fruity but it's something that mice would never have encountered in nature because it's a synthetic chemical and they took male mice and Expos them to smell of acetophenone and they gave them a mild electric shock on their pore when they smelt this stuff um and the result is classical pavlovian conditioning you know a few times of that happening and as soon as they smelled acetophenone they were terrified um It's Perfectly standard stuff in in science what wasn't standard was they then bred from these mice and they did some of the experiments using artificial insemination so that the mothers never even met the fathers of the Next Generation and then they tested their children and their grandchildren and whenever they smelled aceto for known they were just paralyzed with fear so they inherited the fear of this chemical in a single Generation Um in a way that regular science simply can't explain um and this went far beyond anything anyone would have expected um there's evidence from the details of the experiments that it involves some changes in the sperm some change in the the genes or the epigenetics which is the packaging of the genes um but no one can conceive how um a Mouse learning to avoid the smell and being frightened by it all that no one knows how all that information could be transferred into genes in the sperm so I think at least part of the explanation of this is morphic resonance that um if you make some animals averse
to something then they descend well other animals of the same kind will be frightened of it I did a very similar experiment actually years ago um with a skeptical scientist in Britain called Steven Rose um we had a controversy in the Guardian newspaper I wrote a I used to write a column in the guardian um and I wrote a thing about the nature of memory and how morphic resonance helps to explain it we could discuss that later if you like but um Rose was outraged by this spent his whole career working on memory saying it must be inside the brain and he worked with day old chicks um and in the guardian he wrote a response to my article and challenged me to do an experiment in his laboratory under his supervision to test what he called the seemingly absurd hypothesis um well uh what the the experiment we did we had day old chicks and day chicks Peck at anything bright so we had them peack at silvery bead and after the silver bead they were injected with sine solution it was just a control they they didn't feel ill everything was fine we also had them Peck at a yellow light emitting diode and after they' pecked at that the chicks that had pecked at the yellow light emitting diode were injected with something that made them feel sick lithium chloride I think it was it made them feel sick it didn't kill them it just made them feel ill and you know if you ever eat anything and you feel sick after it you you never want to eat that thing again it's it's a it's called conditioned aversion um so these chicks um when you tested them a day or two later they would avoid yellow lights but they'd Peck at the Chrome bead the silver bead which hadn't made them sick and that's straightforward they learned to avoid it but what I predicted was that in we if we did the experiment over and over again every day we get a new batch of fresh chicks and test them with the yellow uh light emitting diode and the Chrome bead um I predicted that they'd start avoiding the yellow light emitting diode um but not the Chrome bead uh because of the influence by morphic resonance from previous chicks they'd start avoiding it even before they'd been made averse to it for the first time they were exposed to it they they wouldn't go for it they they'd be more wary of it and that's exactly what
happened in this experiment um so this is actually something that's well known in the rat poison industry um I mean most people haven't spent much time looking into the rat poison industry and how it works but one thing that um happens to people who try to poison rats for a living is that if you try some new kind of bait with a particular flavor um rats eat it and they get sick and they die um but it works for a while but after a while Rats start avoiding it they become what's called in the trade bait shy um and not just in one place but the bait stops working um you know miles and miles away so they have to keep inventing new baits um that's why most rat poison now is based on warfare in which causes um bleeding um thins the blood and causes bleeding and it doesn't usually affect the rats for days uh after they've eaten it they don't associate it with any particular flavor because it's slow slow acting that's why people have had to switch to warfaring as the main rat poison because this aversion to things that poison them became so strong and there's something that actually some people who are listening to us might know about which um I heard about from a guy in amer America who fishes for Bass and he was telling me there's a constant uh development of new lures for bass fishing do you do you do yes yeah I have fish quite a bit yeah yes well apparently uh people are always inventing new lures that work very well for a while and apparently they they sto working and not just in one place but elsewhere so there's a constant development of new lures now if that could be documented um that might be another very interesting case of morphic resonance if bass keep getting caught and they're in pain when they're caught by being fished with a particular kind of lure then um other bass later even in different rivers or or lakes um uh when they see that LE would be more averse to biting it so it stops working so I think there could be many examples of this um out there in the real world when did you come up with this concept is this your concept the concept of morphic re resonance yes yes um I came up with this in 1973 long time ago I was doing research at Cambridge University on plant development how plants grow and I became convinced for a variety of
reasons that um the attempt to explain the whole thing just in terms of genes and molecules and proteins wouldn't work um I was at the very Leading Edge of this I mean the main plant hormone is called oxin aux i n and I figured out how it's made and then I figured out how it's transplanted transported around the plant um and this was a massive advance and this is kind of textbook stuff now in in in scho in University textbooks the the mechanism of polar oxen transport so having figured all that out I then realized this wasn't enough to explain plants because all plants have the same same hormone and it's moved in the same way in every plant and it's moved the same way in petals and leaves and stems and roots and it's moved the same way in Palms and cabbages and roses and yet they're all different so I got interested in something in biology called morphogenetic Fields the idea of invisible fields that shape living organisms so there's like an invisible mold as a flower grows it's kind of an invisible mold that shap shapes the way the petals develop and the flower develops or as a leaf grows as a kind of invisible mold for that leaf called a morphogenetic field like a kind of invisible plan this idea was not invented by me it had been around in biology since the 1920s but the key thing was to understand how these fields could be inherited and I was sure it wouldn't go through the genes the genes just code for proteins so they had to be some other kind of inheritance how could it work and I was wrestling with this idea in cas Cambridge and then the idea of morphic resonance came to me if you have a resonance across time between similar things you could explain this inheritance of form and of instincts in animals uh in a non- gentic way which would give a completely new way of understanding biology and inheritance I then realized that this would apply to learning and memory and many aspects of human behavior so I wrote this up in a book called a new science of Life which was published in 1981 it took me years to think this through I realized that it would be controversial um so I had to be very sure of myself before I could write about it then I wrote another book called the present of the past um which
puts the theory forward in its fullest form and that's my main theoretical book and since then I've really been trying to develop these ideas test them do experiments and so on anyway it was my idea in the first place and since then it's become widely discussed in many areas now when you say that you um had to be sure of it what did you do that made you sure of it I mean what is uh what what kind of testing have you done to to sort of uh hammer out this concept of morphic residence well there were two aspects to being sure about it the the main objection that I got from my colleagues in in the scientific World especially in biology um was not that they not what's the evidence they didn't say what's the evidence they just said this idea is unnecessary because we're going to figure everything out in terms of genes and molecular biology um so one line of research I had to do was to see whether the conventional approach in biology was likely to work or not um and so I had to think really deep about standard science um is this going to work they they just said give us time we'll figure it all out we don't need new ideas we basically everything's fine the way it is and that's what led in the 1980s to people formulating the Human Genome Project and um which culminated in the year 2000 with the publication of the human genome so they thought that that was adequate to expl once they got into the human genome once they mapped it out there was going to they were going to be able to explain pretty much everything about human beings that's right they actually thought that and that's why there was a huge investment hundreds of billions of dollars were invested in genomics and biotechnology on the grounds that genes explain everything one gene one characteristic there's a gene for everything if you can figure out the genes and manipulate the genes basically you can control life and if you can own the genes or own patents on the genes you can make billions of dollars that was the thinking and that was almost everybody was into that but I was convinced that genes were grossly overrated that they couldn't do most of these things that people thought they could um because what genes do is codee for the sequence of amino acids in proteins
protein molecules which make up our muscles and you know the blood cells and the enzymes and so on a major part of life um um are coded for by genes but there's a huge difference between making the right proteins and the shape of your nose for example or the instincts of a spider to spin a web I mean it's it's it's like saying you could explain uh uh the the structure of a building by knowing the chemistry of the bricks I mean you have to have bricks and you have to have cement and Timber and stuff to make a building um and if you have defective bricks you get a defective building but it doesn't explain the plan of the building the shape of the building so I was convinced that these things would never be explained by genes that we needed something like morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance to explain them um so part of thinking about this was thinking hard about what regular science could and could not achieve and incidentally I'll come to the evidence in a minute but the um one of my predictions that this biotechnology thing would be a disaster it would mean people would lose huge amounts of money I advise my friends if they're investors just don't bother you know you know the only way you make money in this is by getting in on the bubble and selling out in time because it's not really going to lead to that many useful products why are you so convinced because I thought that the role of genes was totally overrated and um this is in fact what's happened were you alone in this or were there no there were a few people there were a few people but most people went along with this you know and um it's interesting you see that the Human Genome Project they expected they'd have about 100,000 genes it turned out when they finally announced it that there were only about 20,000 genes uh we have less genes than a sein and about half as many as a rice plant um that was a huge surprise to people and it soon became clear that it wasn't going to deliver on most of these promises Craig Venter who had the um private Genome Project which was a rival of the publicly funded one um he's an very very competitive guy um got he got there first you know he saw it as a race and he was going to win and he did um and uh
even though he was technically very successful and the publicly funded Genome Project was technically successful once they'd done it it became immediately apparent this information was almost useless and Craig venters his company seller a genomic the shares collapsed in a few days from about $60 a share to about 12 cents a share and when he was interviewed after that he said he's got a great sense of humor he said he said I'm a guy who's made a million the hard way by working my way down from a billion and so the thing is it didn't work and in around four or five years ago um there was a development in science that most people haven't heard of yet outside science but it's really big within the scientific journals called The Missing heritability problem and what they did is they took the genomes of 30,000 different people CU it's quite cheap now to sequence genomes um sequenced about 30,000 genomes and to figure out what genes do what you know they looked at the people 30,000 people they knew everything about them their height their diseases history and so forth they started with height because Height's easy to measure you just need a tape measure and it's already known that tall parents tend to have tall children and short parents tend to have short Children You can predict the height of children when they're grown on the basis of the parents height with an accuracy of about 80% and in the technical language they say height is 80% heritable well they'd figured out the the genes complete Genome of 30,000 different people they knew their height so they then ran all these correlations and statistics to figure out which genes were involved in height they found about 50 genes were involved in controlling height then they s they found some were more important than others so they made their best models waiting some more than others and coming out with predictions and then they picked some people at random the genomes they' did all their sums they'd identified the genes they ran the computer simulations and they predicted these people's height on the base of their genome and then they looked up the height to see how good this method was it turned out they could predict height with an accuracy of 5%
now you can do it with an accuracy of 80% % just by using tape measures in a way that's billions of dollars cheaper um so um they they um the gap between the 5% and the 80% the 75% that's not explained by the genes is called the missing heritability problem and it turned out that the same was true of most diseases for there's a few diseases where a defective Gene gives a defective protein and you get a clear predictive value cystic fibrosis is one of them CLE cell anemia is another so there's a few rare genetic diseases where this method works very well but for most diseases breast cancer cardiac problems the predictive value of the genome turned out to be only 5 to 10% and all these companies sprang up that um would offer to sequence people's genomes and predict their diseases and the last one 23 and me uh was put out of business by the FDA uh just a few months ago because uh their advertising was misleading they they you cannot predict with more than about 10% accuracy um the likelihood that you'll get a particular G disease on the basis of the genome except for these rare genetic disorders so this company their their entire business model was predicting people's vulnerability to certain diseases I think that was their main business model I mean there are certain things where genome sequencing is still valuable and used you know if you want to find out what your racial background is you know where did your ancestors come from it's really good for that and it has very useful information I'm not saying this is useless I'm saying it's it has limited uses but nothing like the Bonanza of profits that people were expecting I mean there was a report by the Harvard Business School on this a few years ago on the biotech business and they said no one had ever invented such a massive money losing scheme in the history of humanity so I think that's because it was based on a false Assumption of what genes do you see that's fascinating what is the when when people hear about the experiment with the uh the mice and the smell what's the smell called again the acetophenone acetophenone what what's the conventional explanation for this this memory being passed down into these animals that have never experienced that before through through breeding well
there isn't really one you see because the the it's something that people are rightly surprised about because the idea that you could actually that you could give off the brain or or the nose or could actually give off influences that travel through the blood and selectively modify sperm changing genes or the packaging of genes nothing like that had been contemplated before and this suggests something going is going on that regular science doesn't know about and that's fine from the point of view of science I mean if you discover something new then you have to try and figure out how it works but no one really knows and this sort of pushes molecular biology Beyond its limits really um people are working on this now and trying to figure out how it could happen what are the conventional theories is are there any well there aren't really I mean no one knows how um smelling something uh could affect genes or the packaging of genes um and even if they could even if you could say there would be a modification of the sperm to make people more the The Offspring the mice that descend from those sperm more sensitive to acetophenone that doesn't necessarily explain why they'd be afraid of it I mean it if they train them in a different way acetophenone could have they could have licked their lips and thought Oh this means food um so you've got quite a lot of explaining to do and how these genes or the packaging of them could influence the brain is Way Beyond anything we can understand at present so I think most people would say we just don't haven't figured it out yet and this is a fairly recent experiment too only a few months ago yes few few months ago really yes it was published a few months ago how long did they work on this for though well I suppose they must have been working on it for several years before they published it but um I mean what's exciting in biology at the moment is that the standard off-the-shelf explanations that people used to have it's all genetically programmed and that kind of thing this is falling apart um until the year 2000 there was a huge Taboo in biology against the the inheritance of acquired characteristics which means say a father um builds up his muscles and becomes stronger or learns particular skills the idea that
the children could inherit that was considered impossible um they said no it's all inheritance is just genetic of course you get environmental influences if if a dad takes his boys to weightlifting classes and stuff then obviously they'll become more muscular um but the idea that it could be anything could be passed through the genes that had been learned or acquired was absolutely taboo it was a heresy in 20th century biology in the west interestingly in the Soviet Union they went the other way Stalin liked the idea that um if people got better at things their kids would be better at them automatically they'd inherit it and geneticists in the Soviet Union were pass excuted and people who uh did research on the inheritance of acquired characteristics were well funded and prestigious and this polarized things even more there was a kind of cold war in biology as well as in everything else um but around the year 2000 it became clear that there really is an inheritance of acquired characteristics and there been rebranded epigenetic inheritance um and it's now a really hot topic in biology and these my inheriting the fear of their father's experiments are part of this new wave of research on epigenetics um and it turns out that a lot of things these Soviet biologists were claiming are actually true um one of the things I think ought to happen is uh that somebody who knows Russian preferably someone who's in Russia uh goes back through these archives of Soviet biology from the 1920s 30s 40s and 50s when tens of thousands of biologists in the Soviet Union Union we working on what we now call epigenetic inheritance and um it's a gold mine of information that could be dusted off and could be really helpful to science um but nobody's done that yet because it's usually assumed the whole of that been discredited and and even Russians don't want to talk about it that's so fascinating it's so fascinating that that scientists are just now piecing together this new information just start putting it together and P it's purely anecdotal evidence uh I have young daughters and they wrestle around together they know they play in the bed and laugh and joke and uh I've been doing Jiu-Jitsu since the 1990s and my
daughters assume Jiu-Jitsu positions I see them do it before I've taught them now so when they were little like three and four years old my my my my youngest would do what's called an over under contr control she would grab her back and grip like a certain way that you teach people to do and then she would throw her legs over it's called taking the back it's a it's a position a standard position in Jiu-Jitsu but it's not a normal position for people but she would automatically go to it pull my older daughter on top of her and take her back and it was the craziest thing to watch as a martial arts commentator someone who understands you know the correct way to do positions I would watch her do it I was like she knows what she's doing like I don't think she knows why she knows what she's doing but she assumed a position that I've done countless times thousands of times in my life it automatically came to her and I'm like that has to be somehow or another in her code somehow or another it's gone from my body into hers well exactly well that's a really really interesting case and you see I would call that morphic resonance that she's resonating with you she's got your genes she's got your proteins and those of her mother as well of course um but this similarity to you means she'd be in a particularly strong resonance with you and would pick up things that you've acquired um I think it's interesting interesting you see in many traditional societies children would follow in the footsteps of their parents you know blacksmith's sons have become blacksmiths and in India the cast system you know if someone's a Potter their kids have become potters and if they're a weaver their kids have become Weavers and um I think this is partly because people would have a special aptitude for doing things their parents had done for skills their parents had acquired not through the genes but by a kind of resonance obviously training and growing up in a household where people know these things plays an important part but even before the regular training begins you'd expect them to show these Tendencies and so that's a particularly interesting example because you're able to observe these positions most people wouldn't notice um but um that's the kind of thing that I think is
likely to be going on all the time yeah there's been several of those positions I mean sometimes it's just play and I see them just rolling around but then there's like these clear patterns like one of them is uh knee to the belly to the Mount there's this position that you do when you're in what's called side control you put your knee on someone's stomach you slide it across and you get on top of them mounting them with your hips above their hips and she does it instinctively and it's not an instinctive move for most kids and I try to I try to be objective when I watch it like how much of this is just natural human movement and how much of this is like her actually having some information and there's clear lips where I go look at that like that that is normal like in Jiu-Jitsu class but it's not normal for kids like there's there are things that they've learned and then there's also like when I've taught them stuff they pick things up like they already knew it it's like I used to teach martial arts so I've taught quite a few people and I know children are a little easier to teach than than other folks but there's children of people who are martial artists and then there's children of people who have never studied martial arts and the children of people who are artists were almost universally easier to teach MH and it sort of backs up that idea yes I mean one could even do experiments on this you know actually one could quantify it um my own approach to science is that you have to start from what people have noticed like your observations with kids of martial arts people including your own and then if you want to take it further you could do more rigorous observations and the standard explanation people say oh they've seen their parents do it or they've seen videos or pictures of it around the house and that sort of thing that might play some part in it but um I think there's likely to be much more than that to this and one would obviously have to do special experiments to check it out um but I imagine I think in many areas um it should be easier to teach kids whose parents have done something like my own kids my two sons are extremely musical um brilliantly musical one's a professional musician now um well I play
the piano um my grandfather was a church organist my uncle was a church organist my father was very musical my mother was played the piano and was very musical my wife's family were musical her mother was a concert pianist her father was a Pianist and a singer and right from the age of four um they wanted to play the piano they wanted to learn music and they showed a tremendous amount ability to assimilate it there are sometimes people who are very musical who come from non-musical families but some of the greatest musical Geniuses come out of musical dynasties like Bach I mean he came from a dynasty of musicians and so I think that these uh these things are probably easier to learn if parents have learned them it's so fascinating just the the the concept of learning things and learning things from some really unknown source one of the things that you brought up in the trialogues I thought was particularly interesting and really resonated with me was you were talking about how children in New York City are afraid of monsters like it's a natural inclination for children to be afraid of things in the dark with large teeth that are going to eat you and that this goes back to the time where we were you know regularly Predators took babies they like big cats or you know monsters as it were in the night would steal people would eat People Prayed on human beings that it makes sense that these children have this intuitive Instinct built into their genetics or Whatever It Is Well exactly I mean the the the the standard sort of picture of the human prehistoric past as man the hunter striding out onto the savanas of Africa and stuff but um it was much more I think the case man the hunted I mean humans are particularly defenseless against big predators and until recent times were very vulnerable to them like tigers in India during the under the British rule even as late as the 1940s um there were thousands of people a year killed by man-eating tigers and they usually go for the most vulnerable I mean when predators are working in Africa when lions are attacking herds of antelope or something they go for the old and the sick or they go for the young because they're the ones that are the most vulnerable so probably over huge months of human history young
children had indeed been eaten by predators and um and still were and and probably today in some parts of the world maybe still are these were the most realistic fears for huge periods of human history and so I think it's fascinating that um young children have these nightmares um this study in New York looked at the nightmares of young children nearly all of them were about being chased by monsters or scary animals um and of course we feed this imagination in children through fairy tales think of Grim's fairy tales you know like Little Red Riding Hood where there's the big bad wolf um you know that is going to eat up Little Red Riding Hood um there's so many stories in fairy tales of wolves that could eat children and although nowadays the image of wolves has being sanitized and we're told they're basically fa loving creatures Etc they are predators and if they get the chance in the past I think they they did eat children some in the past it's in the present if they have the the right numbers um we know we've talked about this on the podcast but there was an instance in the 1400s in France where wolves killed 40 people in France it's just a matter of them reaching the right numbers um World War II there was an instance where the Germans and the Russians had a ceasefire because so many of their troops were getting killed by wolves they United together to take out a giant super pack of wolves in Russia because you know there was hundreds of wolves that were just slaughtering soldiers wolves are dangerous they're they're very tricky animals it just we eradicated them to very low numbers and then when the numbers start to build up again they start getting more and more dangerous again well I've seen this myself we spend our summers on a remote island in British Columbia corz Island BC and about 10 years ago the Wolves came back they swam from other islands and and at first most people there are sort of liberal kind of people they thought it's great Wildlife returns Etc um but these wolves became increasingly bold and um our family owns some land up there we have a forest we don't have a house we just have Forest land and my son were there on our land they've been sleeping out when a big wolf suddenly appeared and looked very very
threatening and they'd been told don't run if you see a wolf so they they stood there and they faced it and then this wolf sort of puffed up its F and charged them and it stopped a few yards away and uh they backed off slowly and they ran when they got around the corner um but this wolf was clearly threatening very very scary then they started eating people's dogs um and there's nothing I've never seen a faster transition from uh someone who is a kind of wolf loving liberal once that dog got eaten they they wanted the guys with guns to come out and teach these wolves a lesson yeah and they did some of them were shot and now they're much more frightened of people they keep their distance they're still there but um if they if there hadn't been a pushback from the people on the island they would have got increasingly bold yeah there's an issue that's going on right now now where people are resisting the uh idea of hunting wolves because they've reintroduced wolves to a lot of the western United States and uh in in some places they've reached very large numbers thousands of woles in Idaho and a couple of these areas where they've decimated elk and moo moose populations or uh elk and deer populations rather and uh you know there's a lot of people that are animor rites folks that aren't there they're not there and they resisted very strongly like the idea of killing wolves is barbaric and evil but to the folks that live there they're like no we love animals but you have to deal with this you got a real problem here especially when they form large packs they get very dangerous in Russia they had uh these super packs of wolves in Siberia that were taking out horses they were showing up hundred Wolves at a time they were showing up these horse stables and slaughtering a horse and you know there's not much you could do about a 100 wolves no well given all this background I think that's it's so fascinating that for young children especially Urban Young children who've actually never see they would never see a wolf in their life or any other scary animal these are the things that haunt their nightmares and I think this is part of a kind of collective memory um I mean the more realistic dangers for young children are being R run over by cars or sexual predators or sexual
predators but that's not what their dreams are about it may be what their parents' nightmares are about but not the children themselves there was a television show in America that I hosted called Fear Factor and it was uh game show they had to do these stunts and different stunts had you know different things they had to do one of the things that I found incredibly fascinating was some people had irrational fears about certain animals whether it's spiders snakes Arachnophobia aphobia and those those fears were undeniable they weren't just like people are nervous of heights like I'm nervous of heights I look over the side of a building I go wo but it's not an irrational fear it's a it's a normal natural fear of I don't want to fall yes but there are some people you would show them a snake and they would they would black out they couldn't stay conscious they would they would hyperventilate and they would faint and I I couldn't believe they were normal folks when I would talk to them there would be nothing that it would indicate in any way that they were psychologically deranged or there was something missing in their you know whatever developmental period that they had gone through something got screwed up and they were just missing a giant chunk of what makes a person a normal person no they completely normal but you show them a spider and they would and I always wondered like what is is that maybe some someone down the line in their history was bitten by a spider someone down the line was poisoned by a snake and survived or they saw someone poisoned by a snake I mean whatever it is it's real and it's a there these are real psychological issues that people have to deal with Arachnophobia and aidia in in in particular they're very strong yes well I I I think these could easily be inherited phobias I mean it's well known in animals that you can have instinctive fear and of course it makes sense for Animals you probably know those experiments they do with day old chicks or with ducklings you have them out in an enclosure outdoors and then they do these experiments they have cardboard cutouts and with silhouettes of birds and you pull them across on wires and if you pull across things with a silhouette of a hawk these these ducklings just
freeze you know the fear responses to just freeze um they freeze whereas if you pull across something looks like silhouette of a pigeon or you know redwing black bird or something um they don't um so they have an inherited fear of things that could in fact be dangerous and it's perfectly in terms of evolution it makes perfect sense to see why that would work these baby ducklings don't have time to learn which birds are harmful and which are not but an instinctive response of fear to something that is actually scary may sometimes lead them to respond something that isn't like a cardboard cutout but um it's I think these things make complete sense biologically yeah it does make sense if you stop and think about it if you really take into consideration all the things you have to learn to survive as any animal as a just this aide that these mice would learn somehow or another through their their parents to avoid that that certain smell because that smell was associated with electrical shock it only makes sense that somehow or another biological life would transmit information in as many ways as possible yes absolutely your idea is so fascinating because you're not even talking about biological life transferring information through genetics you're talking about it through some unseen force that has yet to be defined and that's when things get really squirely and is that when you that's must be when you experience the most resistance to these ideas cuz the the resistance to these ideas I'm sure before they propos this idea that genetics uh or that these mice would somehow or another inherit the fear of this smell from their parents that was probably not very well received before it was proven but then it was proven so now it sort of has to be accepted and has to be taken into consideration um but your idea is still very Fringe oh yes it's it's the the interesting thing is you see the response I get to this from from some scientists is is actually extremely emotional and irrational when my first book a new science of Life came out there was a very famous editorial in nature after the the leading Science magazine a few months after the book appeared to start with nature ignored it but then then a lot of people got interested I was doing programs on the
radio in Britain there was a an article editorial in the guardian you know saying what an interesting idea and there's a lot of serious discussion going on New Scientist magazine um launched a competition for the best ideas for experiments to test morphic resonance and um and it was beginning to be widely discussed the editor of nature who was a reactionary figure in science so you know old style materialist mechanis um hardcore uh scientist wrote a famous editorial called a book for burning on the front page of nature um comparing my book unfavorably with mine Camp Hitler's book saying that this was a profoundly dangerous book wow and he said this is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years and it was completely irrational this attack on my book it was emotional irrational pical he didn't do it as a joke um and this of course produced a backlash because quite a few scientists thought this was the wrong way to respond to a scientific hypothesis um so a lot of letters in nature for months afterwards were backing me up and saying you know this is something that should be seriously discussed not simply denounced um but the fact is that this started a kind of controversy which has been going on ever since um but until the year 2000 most biologists thought genes did everything um now um the epigenetic thing has taken over and the missing heritability problem um there's much more openness than there was because it's clear we haven't figured it all that interestingly Charles Darwin um was not a Neo darwinian Neo darwinian Evolution Theory says it's all done by the genes evolution is just about random mutation and natural selection of Gene frequencies this is the basis of Richard Dawkins work for example his book The Selfish Gene is based on that model Darwin um actually believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics he thought that animals could inherit the fears of their fathers and that uh most of adaptation uh could actually be passed on to animals and plants descended from parents he thought that was how Evolution worked he even proposed that um when something had been learned there could be movement of something through the bloodstream
that could affect the sperm and the eggs exactly the kind of things that's now being considered um in this feere of the father's case so movement through the bloodstream so if you learn something like say if you touch something it's electric fence and it shocks you there's movement through the bloodstream that teaches your sperm this well that what Darwin thought he put for he wrote a book called the variation of animals and plants under domestication it's less well known than his most famous book The Origin of Species um but in in the variation of animals and plants under domestication he was so convinced that plants and animals could inherit what their parents had learned he tried to figure out how it might work and his the last chapter is called the hypothesis of pan Genesis it's the name he gave to his theory that somehow little bits were detached from the brain went through the blood and affected the sperm now that's more or less what people are saying trying to explain the mice inheriting the fear of their fathers that aspect of Darwin's work has been airbrushed out of scientific history um Darwin also wrote a paper in nature um about a dog that he came across that whenever this dog uh got near to a butcher shop the the the dog was completely terrified of butchers and Darwin figured out that it's parents one of its parents had been kicked or badly mistreated by a butcher and this dog had inherited a phobia of butchers now Darwin published that in nature that shows you how very different Darwin's ideas on Evolution were from his 20th century successors and the reason that modern evolutionary theories called Neo Darwinism is to distinguish it from Darwinism which included the inheritance of habits um very similar to what I'm saying what I'm saying in in in terms of the inheritance of habits through morphic resonance is actually really close to what Darwin himself said um but it's not what Neo darwinian say because they've tried to say all inheritances in genes and you can't have these other things but now they have to change their tune because as I say in the last few years epigenetic inheritance the inheritance of acquired characteristics is back in fashion well there's many people that haven't studied uh Darwin's ideas at all that aren't familiar with the amount resistance that Darwin
received when he was proposing these ideas like these weren't accepted ideas at all in fact the majority of scientists at the time were uh they were more of a Christian faith weren't they yes but it was the response to Darwin was particularly interesting you see because many um many Christians in England um after being surprised by his ideas um actually said well that's fine if God's the creator of life then why on Earth can't God create through Evolution create life that can evolve by under its own Steam and his ideas were quite rapidly accepted by the Roman Catholic and the Anglican the Episcopal churches and the methodists and so on um this fundamentalist creationist thing is a peculiar American phenomenon it didn't originate until the 20th century and it was started in America and it's virtually unknown in Britain um I'm actually a practicing Christian I'm an Anglican and I never meet creationists in England um I've never heard anyone what exactly is an Anglican a church of England the Church of England is the it's sort of halfway between Protestant and Catholic um what happened in England under King Henry VII in the 16th century was that he nationalized the church and he said okay the Pope's not head of the church anymore I am and um the priests can marry we'll have the services in English and Bishops can be married and um so but the services remain much the same and the church of England if you go to Anglican service it's very like a Roman Catholic service except that we have married priests we have women Bishops and women women priests as outrageous outrageous from a Catholic point of view um but uh anyway the Church of England is so so it's it's it's never had the sort of extreme Protestant doctrines like Southern Baptists and and so on um it's it's it's very similar to the Catholic church it's it's now one of the most liberal churches um but anglicans on the whole had no problem with Evolution they still don't um I've just been doing a workshop last weekend at The eselin Institute in big S which I was co-leading with the bishop of California whose Cathedral is Grace Cathedral in San Francisco that very beautiful cathedral on Knob Hill uh we were discussing the kinds of things you and I are discussing he was
completely open to all this there was it was absolutely no problem discussing this with an Anglican and Episcopalian Bishop um it's a very far cry from what many people's image of Christians is opposing Evolution the general view that many Christians have and I'm one um is that the evolution of nature if there's a creative power in nature it may be god-given in the first place but what God did was to endow nature with the power to create new forms of life that there's a kind of intelligent creativity in nature you don't have to have a kind of intelligent designing engineer outside nature tinkering with the machinery and manipulating genes U as the intelligent design people think um and uh you don't have to deny Evolution altogether to say God's involved in nature in some way it's perfectly possible to have a view where God is in nature and works through nature and there's a creativity in nature which doesn't require the universe to have been created in 6,000 6,000 years ago that completely accept the evolutionary history of the universe in cosmology and in evolution um and just say well if there's a God then that's the way that God works through this evolutionary process and through the creativity of evolution so the fundamentalist Christians and the new Earth Christians that's that's a uniquely American thing you think yes I mean they do have followers a few followers in Britain but they they take their lead entirely from America and they've got a new batch of converts their point of view in the Islamic World creationism inspired by American creationist is big in turkey and many other and Arab countries and stuff um but it's a peculiarly American phenomenon well you know how it all came about in America right where where it really took off it became a part of the political system the Reagan Administration they they started recruiting the radical Christians and that that became a part of his electoral base yes it it's a very very interesting history it had always been for most foreigners American politics is completely impossible to understand it's impossible to understand how people can be so polarized and and so extreme in their views and I read a book recently which made it much clearer to me it's called The Sword of the lord it's
written by a guy called Andrew heims who was raised Southern Baptist seven of his cousins are southern baptist ministers his father his grandfather his grandfather who was called rice was one of the inventors of American fundamentalism and it's a fascinating historical study of this phenomenon and why they were like that and um it made a lot more sense to me I mean it's still very bizarre and very American yeah we're we're very weird we're hard to understand even for us we we you know everyone's constantly trying to uh refocus our political system or sort of re redefine it calm it down reach more I mean everyone's looking for a more moderate conservative or uh someone who is uh a more conservative moderate you know we're always looking for someone who meets the bridge someone to to join the two sides so we don't have these radical polarizing oppos forces the left and the right it's just it seems so childish to me but what this book made clear and what was for me huge Revelation was that how all of this is rooted in the American Civil War and there's a sense in which in some people's minds the Civil War is still going on it's just that the sides have switched in the Civil War The South was Democrat the slave owning South they their political party after the Civil War was the Democrats and the Republicans were the liberals who wanted to free the slaves and one of the most interesting switches that's happened is is this switch so now it's gone the other way around the Democrats and now the Liberals and stuff and and and the Republicans have become the more right-wing um forces and Powerful in the South which was exactly the opposite very bizarre so what this book does is trace the history of this fascinating movement but what's so interesting is that in the Civil War both sides were using biblical texts to justify uh their position but the the the the southern Baptists and the religious people in the South actually had a much stronger biblical basis for slavery because the Bible's full of slaves the old testament's full of slaves the the Israelites were slaves themselves they owned slaves in the New Testament everyone owned slaves it was taken for granted there were no abolitionists in the Bible so if you
base your faith on the Bible you can make a much stronger case for for slavery than you can for abolitionism and so and but you have to take the Bible as literally true and that gave a strong incentive for people in the South to make the Bible literally true because you could justify slavery much better than if you interpret it in a liberal way saying well actually the spirit of Jesus was to liberate people from bondage they say okay where's the text Jesus doesn't say anything about liberating slaves um so um fundamentalism gave a kind of impetus to this and and and um it was very very fascinating to see how that played out because on both sides in the Civil War they were both invoking the Bible the both sides were Protestant both sides were had ministers preaching to inspire the troops and get them to fight and um after the Civil War the way in which this tradition of fundamentalism that had developed in the American South to justify slavery um gave a kind of readymade way to use biblical texts to um argue against all all sorts of other things including evolutionary theory whereas in Europe in the traditional catholic and and and and in the more liberal Protestant churches people hadn't taken the view the Bible is the literal truth they' taken the view the Bible is a guide to what might happen that a lot of its meaning is allegorical or symbolic but the kind of so-called liberal interpretation of the Bible goes back to you know the second century ad or something it's it's it's been the mainstream view for a long time you're a scientist what what leads you to be uh a practicing Christian as a scientist well I spent years as an atheist I mean when I was educated as a scientist part of the package deal is atheism you know I grew up with all the standard by the time I was 14 I was at a religious boarding school uh Christian boarding school I was the only boy in my year who refused to get confirmed because even at 14 I identified as an atheist um and I thought science means science and reason a religion and Superstition of things of the past scientists of the Vanguard of human progress all that kind of thing I believe that but what made me begin to doubt it was I began to doubt that this was the right way forward in
science um I began to think that this mechanistic molecular approach treating animals and plants as just machines um was an inadequate view of life I'd gone into biology because I was fascinated by animals and plants I kept lots of pets as a child my father was a herbalist I collected plants and he taught me about plants he had a microscope laboratory and so I was sort of really got into science as a child um and uh when I started studying uh science at school and University the first thing we did with living organ organisms was to kill them and grind them up and then look at the enzymes their liver or whatever um it became clear to me we were not really studying life we were studying death um and when I was a child I kept homing pigeons and I I was fascinated with how do they find their home I asked everybody I knew men who kept homing pigeons it was a popular sport in Britain it still is um I had some myself and I used to put them in a box and cycle as far as I could on my bicycle and release them and then cycle home and they always got home before I did uh however far I took them U so this completely intrigued me and I thought we're never going to understand this by just grinding up their livers or looking at their genes so I began to doubt the mechanistic worldview um then um I encountered psychedelics and that was a huge change I mean nothing in my scientific education had prepared me for the kind of mind opening effects of LSD uh this was in the 70s early '70s um and um you know i' studied nerve impulses and hormones and that kind of thing which is what we got in our science course at Cambridge about the brain um and I knew about the anatomy of the brain and nerve impulses but these Visionary experiences that psychedelics opened up showed me there was far more to the mind and indeed far more to reality than this very very limited model then I got interested in meditation CU I thought well it'd be good to be able to explore the mind without drugs I mean I'm not anti psychedelic at all but I it would be good to have different methods not just drugs um then I took up Transcendental Meditation and yoga and then I got a job
in India I lived in India for seven years and when I was in India I was really into yoga and meditation and and um at first I thought this is just changing my brain physiology you don't need to believe there's God out there or anything mysterious out there it's just inside the body the chemicals affect the brain the yoga and meditation affect blood flow Etc so I saw it in a rather materialistic way but then I got more and more interest in Hindu philosophy and Hindu ideas and the idea that there's a greater Consciousness within which our Consciousness is embedded through some through some psychedelic experiences we we contct other Realms of Consciousness that aren't just inside our brains through meditation and through prayer that one can actually contact other forms of Consciousness bigger than our own I did all that within a kind of Hindu context and then I had a Sufi teacher in India as well so I did sort of Islamic mysticism for a while but after doing this for several years I found that actually some of it didn't make sense to me the part that doesn't didn't make sense to me uh well the Islamic part to be a Sufi in India basically you had to be a Muslim and I didn't really want to get into being a Muslim and sort of fasting in Ramadan and all that um to be and Hindus their basic worldview um was and for most of them still is uh the idea that we're just trapped in a world where things go on and on rebirth and cycles of life and death and uh we're trapped in this world of suffering and illusion and the way out is through a kind of spiritual vertical takeoff which you do individually through meditation you can liberate yourself from reincarnation and illusion and so forth into absorption in the one the absolute but it's an individual vertical takeoff and I was working in an agricultural Institute the main International Institute in India um for trying to improve crops for poor farmers and sometimes my Indian colleagues would say to me after work we you they say why do you do this and I'd say because you know I want to help these poor people and you know they haven't got enough to eat it' be great if they had better farming methods and improved varieties and science can help and I believe in trying to apply my knowledge to help
these people he said it is none of your business if they are poor if they are suffering it is their karma it is not your business it is their problem not your problem your problem is to liberate yourself from this world of Illusion so then I realized actually they have a completely different view that it's it's the poor are suffering because in a sense they deserve to suffer it's because of what they've done in past lives nothing I can do about it then I realize actually I do care about other PE I do think that a spiritual life is not just about individual Liberation it's to do with Collective things is to do it affects community and how can other people be helped and as I argued with my Hindu friends I realized the reason I was saying this is because I'm so deeply embedded in the Christian tradition even secular humanism is a kind of secularized Christianity because it's about helping others uh that actually um I was much more Christian than I actually had ever admitted so I was confirmed in the Church of South India and I then found a fantastic ashram where I lived for two years father beid Griffith who was an English Benedict who had a Christian ashram in South India um which was exactly to my taste it was very simple we did yoga we did meditation um we uh we had Christian Services and but we had sang Indian chants and K turn and things it didn't try and deny any of this and when I first went there we started the mass with the gy Mantra which is a Hindu Mantra asking the son to bless our meditation the Divine Splendor of the sun to illuminate our meditation so I said to father beid when I first went there um you know how can you have the gatri Mantra at the beginning of a Catholic service and he said precisely because it's Catholic he said Catholic means Universal if it excludes anything which is a path to God then it's just sectarian the word Catholic means Universal yes that's what it me fascinating yes so um um so I found a way of being Christian which didn't deny yoga meditation Buddhism my wife is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist she follows a z Chen tradition in Tibetan Buddhism um so I found a way of reconnecting with the Christian tradition which didn't violate my sense of reason it didn't conflict with the kind of science that
I'm interested in but I found it liberating to reconnect and so when I went back to England from India um I was able to go to those great Cathedrals that we have in England built in the Middle Ages those fantastic buildings stained glass wonderful music organs playing Amazing choirs singing the most beautiful music and and feel that this is not just beautiful but meaningful and is a is a path to God which I'd not seen before that's fascinating so in India the concept of Karma being that someone has done something in their past life that's LED them to where they are right now yes that boy um that seems real convenient for someone passing by homeless people or someone who's poor or suffering it's almost like the numbers of people that they have in India because the numbers are so great a billion people how much bigger is India than North America oh the size of the land is much smaller the population is now almost a billion how much smaller is the size of the land I don't know but it's crazy how populated I wonder if that came about as just a way of uh just mitigating the pressure of helping people like just the the idea of karma like you can't help that guy that's his problem you got to deal with yourself just the the sheer numbers well I don't know I mean at the time the British were ruling India there only about 200 million you know when I was born there were about 250 million I mean when you were born yes I was born in 1942 damn they did a lot it's a huge huge increase it's a fast increase wow anyway the thing is about the convenient the karma thing in India you see it is convenient for for centuries indias had a cast system you know the Untouchables are treated like dirt I mean they're considered to be polluting and dirty even if the shadow of an Untouchable fell on a brahmin's house this person could be punished very very severely wow um and there was no move within India until the 19th century to reform that what happened is Christian missionaries went there they were nice to Untouchables and to lower costs and and you know gave them food education healthc care Etc and some of them became Christians I mean why not if you're at the bottom of the pile you've not got anything to lose and you've got a lot to
gain by becoming a Christian so Hindu reformers felt that they had counteract this and so things like the ramak Krishna Mission and and Shri orindo and various Hindu philosophers and Gandhi himself uh who was a big influence in India assimilated many of these ideas from Christianity and said look we've got to reform Hinduism and they created a new kind of Hindu attitude much influenced by Christianity and so there are now Indian movements to try and help the poor and you know provide health care for the sick and that kind of thing but that's not been part of their tradition way of doing things and it came about under Western influence that's really fascinating so your desire to sort of help help these people help them grow more food and help help them live better lives is what led you to become a Christian you realize that these are Christian ideas yes that they're Christian they're deeply embedded in our culture even for secular humanists you see secular humanists so usually atheists um who believe in a philosophy of equal rights equal opportunities helping the poor and the sick education for those who need know for for for everyone and um uplifting people who are suffering helping third world countries have running water and all that kind of thing well these are things that Christian missionaries have done as well but you don't have to be a Christian to believe in those things but the fact that they're so deeply embedded in our culture uh in our secular culture is because of the influence historical influence of Christianity so sec humanists are basically people who still have Christian ethics but without a belief in God um but that ethical system doesn't just come about automatically a much more default mode is to say you know the strong might is right the you know the strongest guy gets the girls and and you know runs a kind of harim and and and then conquer people and have slaves that's how Humanity has worked for much of human history yeah yeah it most certainly has so this this it sounds like you found a very cool sect of Christianity while you were in India I mean that sounds very unique that you were doing yoga and meditation and then these Indian chants along with this concept of
Christianity being like the the generosity and the helping your brothers and sisters like along that seems to be like that that must have been very convenient to find that sect of Christianity while you were sort of exploring these ideas well it wasn't even a sect father be griffi was a Benedictine Monk and he was a Roman Catholic um now it's true that some people in the Catholic Church didn't approve of what he was doing but but um him it was well him and a group of other people I mean there was a whole movement in in India of Catholics to it was called inculturation it was the second Vatican Council in the 1960s uh said that what people should do in the Catholic Church is put the fa the Christian faith into the terms of that culture so in India Catholics who've been converted by Catholic missionaries from Ireland and places um bought pairs of shoes so they could put them on to go to church on Sundays because the missionaries dressed up in western clothes and wore shoes in church these Indians would never wear shoes in a temple or a mask or even in their house but they wore shoes in church because that's what the Catholic missionaries wore so that kind of thing is ridiculous and so the at the simplest level the incarceration Movement we say well it's the tradition of India to take your shoes off in homes and in temples and in marks so take them off in churches too and it was the tradition of holy men and women in India to be vegetarian whereas Catholics and and Protestants there were all eating lots of beef and stuff because that's what American and British missionaries at um and so he said no it's much more natural to be vegetarian you don't have to be but it's more natural so this idea and yoga is a way of learning how to breathe and to chant and to be more healthy why shouldn't Indian Christians do yoga right so this is part of a movement father beid was part of a wider movement the last two popes have been rather reactionary and they've tried to roll back that movement but there are still people in India and South America and so on who are following this Vatican second Vatican Council Reform movement well the new pope is fairly unique isn't he and he's seems to be a much less polarizing
figure he seems to be much more generous much more open-minded to the idea of homosexuality to a lot of the things that have been criticized in the past and he also like is he's issuing the ideas of monetary wealth he doesn't have that crazy Throne anymore he has a reasonable chair he's a he's a unique guy I think it's partly because he comes from South America you see and this kind of radical Catholic movement second Vatican Council Liberation theology which was about the church should be there not to serve the rich but to help the poor and this became a huge movement in South America um but the the previous Pope John Paul II was against it because they were teaming up with Communists and people who were also trying to help the poor for secular reasons not and political reasons not for Christian reasons so he said this is wrong because it's communistic but actually uh that movement this this radical Catholic movement's had a huge influence in South America and I think the present Pope is somebody who's come out of that world who's been very much influenced by it it's so problematic though the suppressing of sexuality like that the number one thing that people associate Catholicism with is sexual assault is sexually molesting children that's like a huge aspect I grew up a Catholic um I was only in I was only practicing Catholic when I was very young I went to a Catholic School in New Jersey uh for first grade and it was a very bad school was like really dark and suppressing and just very nasty and mean and the nuns were just horrific people and it essentially shied me away from all religion at a very young age before then see why yeah it was terrible it was terrible but I have other friends that were also raised Catholic that literally had to fight off the priests sexual attempts and that this is like a standard thing it's a joke it's an on-running joke in America about P priests being sexual predators it's a constant thing um that that seems to me like one of the number one issues with that particular brand of religion it's like this idea that you're going to take what is essentially just a natural part of being a human being you're not doing anything with the reproductive cycle you're just telling them to ignore it you have this consistent
bodily function this your body is reproducing fluids on a regular basis and you're living backed up all the time and also you're not experiencing any romantic interaction with human beings no no affection no sexual affection no nothing no you're missing out on a huge part of what it it is to be a person and these people grow up and they live Cradle to the Grave in this sort of weird uh non-developed State you know they're not like the rest of the people they can barely even understand like I had a friend that went to marriage counseling with a Catholic priest I'm like that's hilarious that's like going to Hitler and asking how to have World Peace like it doesn't make any sense like what do you how are you going to a guy who not only does not have any sex has never had a relationship but is drunk all the time he had Gin Blossoms all over his face and kids run away from him because they're afraid he's going to touch them and you're going to go to that guy and he's going to give you marriage advice I agree I think that's a you know it's a terrible thing and I mean there are a lot of good priests who don't do this and I met quite a few when I was in India and I have Roman Catholic priests as friends and so I think it's a minority it may have been quite a big minority in Ireland and in some countries but I think it was a some people are called to a celibate life and and I think that's fine for people to go become monks or nuns if that's what they're called to but for regular priests I think it's a serious mistake and um in the Church of England ever since 1540 or something and in the Protestant churches in Europe priests have been able to marry and rabbis marry in Judaism and I think it's much much healthier to have priests as regular guys with love lives and kids and things so I think that side of Catholicism is is a serious mistake and I think they should sooner or later it'll have to be reformed because repression of sexuality leads to all these extremely unhealthy and negative consequences um no I agree with you about it and but you know there are reform movements within Catholicism and U there in America there are Breakaway Catholic churches with women priests for example there's one in Santa Barbara um of course it's in Santa Barbara of freaks up there getting
loaded so um this um anyway I agree with you I think that's a very negative thing but you see I think that to reject the entire some people reject the entire world of religion because of personal bad experiences with one particular brand I think it's rather like throwing out the baby with the bath waterer it would be like saying I'm against science because it gave us gas that Hitler used to kill people and it gave us the atomic bomb that killed people in hoshima so I'm against science I mean science everything human uh there are really bad things that have been done by humans in the name of almost anything you care to mention nationalism science religion politics ideology so when you decided to uh join this particular uh group of Christians and become a Christian officially like the identify was there resistance from uh your colleagues was there resistance from other scientists like how old were you at the time oh I was 33 something like that um well not among I was working in India at the time um there's hardly any atheists in India there's a few but among my scientific colleagues I was working with Indian scientists almost all Indians are Hindu are Hindu or Muslim you know when they went home from work they'd be regular Hindus or Muslims that very few of them were atheists so um among my Indian colleagues being a prct iing Christian when I came from a Christian family in a Christian country seemed totally normal no one thought that was at all weird or strange when I got back to England um among many of my scientific friends um they thought this was completely weird and um and just couldn't understand it because they assume that any Christian believes The Worlds made in 6,000 years ago and that God intervenes through suspending the laws of nature and miracles that are totally incredible I they don't believe in the kind of God I don't believe in um but they never actually very few ever asked what do you actually think or believe they just sort of treated it at best as some kind of personal eccentricity or mental feebleness or something um and while retaining a rather narrow dogmatically atheist view a lot of my friends are atheists or agnostics but the problem I have with atheists and materialists is that most of them are much more dogmatic
than the people I know within the religious World well I have a problem with anybody that's sure so do I yes when when I speak to some atheists I I have this issue where they're aggressively atheist you know where you know uh I've I've talked to people who they're not just atheists but they uh get upset at anyone who's not and uh my my question to them is always like have you ever had a psychedelic experience whenever I speak with someone who's aggressively atheist and uh if they say no I I'm I'm always like well what are you waiting for because if you if you really want to question your your whole idea of reality there's no better method than a a breakthrough psychedelic experience if you have a breakthrough psychedelic experience and you're like P that was nothing well then you're a unique person because everybody I've ever met that has a breakthrough psychedelic experience like a DMT trip they have to step back and go okay I didn't even know that was possible I've lived my whole life with this one world view that well I see these people that are religious and it seems to me that they're following this ridiculous ideology that is based on some ancient information that people wrote down on animal skins it's all Preposterous and what they're doing is they're just a bunch of scared children that are afraid of the light and what I'm doing is basing my life on science and and rational thinking and logic but then you have a psychedelic trip and you're like there's nothing rational about that there's nothing logic about that and how is that so close it's so nearby it's like someone telling you a DMT trip is like someone telling you hey uh I want to show you something let's let's go into this room real quick and you open that door and there's a new universe there a completely different universe that's filled with life it's fractal it's never ending and it it it it occupies a very small space but yet it's infinite and it's filled with conscious beings that can see through you recognize all your [ __ ] recognize all your insecurities and all your incorrect thinking and ego and and and they try to and then you shut the door and you go back to regular life you're like what the [ __ ] is that room like oh that room that's the God room it's right
there like if you don't go into that experience like your whole like I think we live our lives based on we sort of calculate our worldview based on the experiences that we've accumulated what we've learned from these experiences and what we've learned from other people's experien what we've read what we've seen in documentaries and films but when you have a a really intense psychedelic experience particularly and then for some people yoga and meditation some people are able to achieve some pretty deep States but the Psychedelic experience in particular is is shocking because it's so easy to get to it's just right there four hits of the DMT and boom blast off and then 15 minutes later you're left with this new experience that you have to assimilate and figure out a way to to make sense of it the the atheists that I talked to that are like super aggressive they're just like religious PE people in a lot of ways it's a kind of scientific fundamentalism yeah and it's it's also morphing now I don't know if you're aware of this in America it's morphing there's atheism and then there's an even more aggressive group called atheism plus oh I don't know about that yeah and what they're doing is they're attaching a bunch of moral and eth ethical values to religion essentially creating almost like another religion and I think with good intentions I think a lot of it is good intentions a lot of it is based on um a lot of it is based on feminism a lot of is based on uh the idea of uh avoiding harassment avoiding uh sexual harassment avoiding like that they their ethics are to completely define what's acceptable behavior like no uh no racism no sexual harassment no undeniable acceptance of uh women's rights undeniable acceptance of you know it's interesting but then of course once you define that then you have aggressive members of that group that are attacking people that disagree with any of their propositions or anyone that supports men's rights of course now hates women and you get a lot of weirdness in that area because there can only be feminism there can't be men's rights as well men's rights are toxic whereas women's rights once there is ACH once they have achieved total equality then there will there's no need for
men's rights because once feminism has been established which is a pretty illogical assumption especially when you consider like divorce laws and well exactly no I agree with you no I couldn't agree more about DMT and and the the opening that it can give I mean I had the great advantage of taking it for the first time with Terrence McKenna and he was sort of he said do you want to check this out okay um and that's pretty cool on the resume by the way first time you did DMT did it with Terence McKenna yes I won't say where or when because it could be put down on some record somewhere that's probably already there don't worry about it um but um for me it corresponded in many ways with what people talk about near-death experiences because I went out through light into a realm of great Bliss and beauty and then I came back and it was like coming back from a million miles away and just coming back into my body and and as it were being born again um so I it was it was very much like a death and rebirth experience for me and and and was very very transformative um incidentally I think you know I've been trying to understand this American phenomen of Southern Baptists and one of the things that I think is the key to this is that I think when they talk about being born again originally baptism was just that I mean now you can get this through DMT in 5 minutes but at the time of John the Baptist you could get it in 5 minutes through being drowned people were lining up on the bank of the Jordan they go in he holds them under if he held them under just long enough you could actually induce a near-death experience you know Life review the drowning man sees his life pass before him you hold them under just long enough and they'd have a near-death experience almost guaranteed I mean occasionally they might he might have done it too long but that was before litigation you know he might have lost before litigation yeah that's a good Theory actually and then you see they come back and they say I've died I've seen the light I've been born again I'm no longer afraid of death my life has been transformed in 5 minutes and and the Baptists were the people who rived baptism by total immersion in the 16th
century and probably now in in America they don't hold them under that long because this is post litigation now but you know when when the Baptist first got going this idea of holding people under long enough all their language is the language that relates to near-death experiences and I don't think that to start with baptism by total immersion was just symbolic I think it was drowning wow that is quite fascinating and it makes sense if you think about ordeal poisoning uh ordeal poisoning being the substitute for psychedelics in certain cultures where they don't have access to psychedelic plants they would take essentially a poison that didn't kill you it got you right to the door where you wish you were dead almost you were in horrible pain and even In some cultures they use ant venom like those bullet ants they they they use that for these ritualistic uh Coming of Age rituals these Coming of Age rituals where you take people through these intensely painful moments where they almost want to be dead just to end the suffering and then when they come through on the other side they're a better person because of it yes they're more reflective they're sort of they're they appreciate the just the very breath that they're allowed to take they appreciate the sky seems Bluer the grass seems Greener the life has more vibrancy to it because they've gone through this ordeal poison or these toxic venom or what have you yes a right of passage yeah almost all rights of Passage for adoles in in in traditional cultures involves something like a death and rebirth experience and I think you're right I think that's what's going on and actually I think the the why the Baptist became so powerful and why for them the conversion experience was so real and why they talk about it so much is that because for many of them it was real it wasn't just a symbolic thing it wasn't signing up to some set of beliefs and I think that at the core of all religions is this direct experience of the Divine and you know I that's what they all come from they come from experience not theories Well's quite shocking too that Jerusalem Scholars like M like mainstream Scholars now are considering that Moses was probably under the influence of DMT they believe that the burning bush there's you know the guys
are not like psychedelically based at all was quite probably the ACAA Bush which was a very rich in DMT plant and that that's the whole idea of the burning bush he sees God through a burning bush I mean how much clear does it have to be there's acacia trees all over that that part of the world it's a very rich plant as far as the content of DMT in it and if you experience that it's very much like I mean I don't know if you're experiencing God but it seems like it seems very Divine when you have a DMT trip yes well I I mean why not uh be Experiencing God I mean it seems unlike it seems an uneconomical Theory to say that there Divine Bliss as experienced by Mystics that part of the nature of God's mind is bliss I mean the Hindu name one of the names satchet anander being knowledge Bliss as as the for and the nature of God if God's Consciousness is kind of bliss Consciousness then if you have this experience that seems like God and is blissful um why have a hypothesis that there's some other Bliss Consciousness that isn't Divine that's some kind of duplicate why not it be the real thing I think it makes so much more sense yeah it totally makes sense I mean it it it makes as much sense as anything else um these plants are real they I've always wondered if that and you know it's many other people speculated as well if that's the reason why Hindus don't participate in eating cows too because of the psilocybin mushrooms growing on cows on a regular basis and that being uh for a lot of people believe the basis of s I don't know it's it's I'm don't terrence's theory about staria and these mushrooms growing on cang is okay as far as it goes but in England for example the the magic mushroom the liberty cap doesn't grow on cow dong it grows in sort of Meadows and usually no cows in them if anything there's sheep um but I've seen them they grow wild in Wales and you know I've encountered them on location and and there's it's nothing to do with piles of dung I mean there there's many different environments in which psychoactive mushrooms grow some kinds rely on Kang but I I think he rather overemphasized the Kang that's fascinating what do you think was the source of cattle worship like chakal hiok and all these ancient civilizations
that worship cattle and this connection that McKenna made with uh those those people worshiping the cattle because the cattle Didn't just provide life and food because they had milk and meat but also that there was this connection with psychedelic mushrooms know I find a bit far-fetched personally I mean in some cultures like in England oh there was a horse Worship in the viic age there was a kind of horse worship sacred horses too and um they there there are many different kinds of sacred animal even in India it's not just cows that are sacred elephants are sacred ganes is you know the elephant god but elephants are sacred Even Rats are sacred um in India and monkeys so lots there's lots of sacred animals um and I think that probably come I think with the ones that are wild basically wild like elephants and and rats and and monkeys there's probably comes out of kind of shamanic Roots but I think when people started domesticating animals um then you know how do you relate to domesticated animals are they like slaves or are they the cow is seen by most Hindus as the Divine mother the provider of milk and do you regard them as sacred or do you just regard them as COG in a factory farming machine well that's the way they're regarded now in feed lots and so on in the United States and and Europe um but I think in a religious culture when you domesticate animals there's a sense in which they take on a religious significance and um you know in for for the Jewish people then goats and sheep were the main ones that took on the religious significance you know Jesus Lamb of God that take us Away The Sins Of The World the Agnes Day um this is a sacrificial lamb which is a sort of sacred lamb and so there's a sacralization of sheep in the Judea Christian and the Islamic tradition it completely makes sense that people would worship cows and even horses because they need the horses for transportation um you know in a lot of cultures they even used horses to stay alive like they drank the blood of the horses that was a big thing with the Mongols it's one of the reasons why they they brought like you know each each man had many horses that they would carry with them yeah and they would mix it with milk and it would be a way to stay
alive May milk they would take the the blood of uh certain horses the milk of other ones and all that makes sense what I've always wondered though is how did they how did they lose the meaning of Som like how do how is that such a an open thing open to interpretation I mean what what happened along if it was such an amazing thing I mean you read the descriptions of Som you know how how fantastic it is and how huge a part of it it was in their culture and their connection to the Divine how do they lose what it means well I agree I think it's a mystery and it's similar in Greece the eleusinian Mysteries this cave where they went in for these psychedelic rights of Passage that Plato and people did it was a big part of life in ancient Greece what was that and the the the most common theor is the ones where people see it as Amon to muscaria the flyer Garrick I've never found those particularly plausible cuz whenever I've taken flyer Garrick only once or twice all it did was give me a headache and um it's maybe they had different varieties of it but I don't know anyone who's had a totally amazing fly garic trip I've only spoken to people online that have I've I've only had it once and I felt the same way it didn't do anything for me I I I don't know if it enhanced but I did it and then we we did it for a couple hours and it didn't seem to have any effect and then we took psilocybin after that and it had a huge effect it was just a monster trip and I wonder if it was some sort of a combinatory experience possibly but that was another thing that McKenna speculated about whether it was variable genetically variable seasonally variable as far as like geographically yes and whether it's transformed like reindeer and transformed by the reindeer and then where they drink the urine of reindeer after the reindeer have eaten it and stuff in the laps and people well it's also the all the the different connections to the Siberian Shaman and that the the whole Christmas thing the whole connection to Christmas and the the the amonita muscaria mushroom it's very very bizarre that elves are connected with this particular mushroom which is connected with Christmas and gifts and symbiotic relationship to carniverous trees like the whole deal it is it's mysterious but I've never found
that as of speculation particularly satisfying I mean if they if if the evidence pointed towards staria cubensis or silos cybe semi lanat you know the liberty cap or our native psychedelic mushroom in England um then it might be more convincing right I mean the fact is we don't know and and it's really a matter of speculation yeah I wonder if it's like you know like heirloom tomatoes you know you eat an heirloom tomato they're so delicious they're fantastic they're sweet they're they they they're so rich and dark or you can get one of these creepy tomatoes that they they grow that live like a they last like a month on a shelf and they're pale and they're hard and they just taste like [ __ ] I mean there's nothing to them like you see they they look different they taste different I wonder if that somehow or another happened to the amonita where it lost its psychedelic properties unlikely because it's never been cultivated and it you know it grows in the wild could it be maybe just the temperature variations like that maybe you have to have it in that incredibly cold environment of Siberia for it to be that it's geographically genetically variable oh your what you said makes the most sense to me that it was mixed with something else it's like in iasa if you just took one of the components of the Brew if the historical data pointed towards this being there you'd say okay this is what it was but actually neither of the components would work on their own so it may well have been that it was part of a mixture that does kind of make sense for Soma right cuz wasn't s actually it was described as some sort of a mixture yeah and so was the alinan Mysteries do you still know what the alinan Mysteries are huh there is there any speculation as to what that was well Graham Hancock has speculations of course but I I don't know that the ones I've seen would would include opium and cannabis as part of the mix I mean cannabis was widely known in the ancient world and after all hemp ropes were used for thousands of years people were growing hemp um opium's been known for an awfully long time um so I what else might have been in there we don't know well that's the other thing too the uh the consumption the eating of uh cannabis eating of hash has uh produced incredible psychedelic
experiences for people they've eaten large enough quantities where it's it's been very mushroom like much more psychedelic when eaten yes um and it's traditional to take it by mouth in India as well as to smoke it I mean it's a normal thing that the Festival of holy H lii um it's a major Hindu festival and when I was living in India I was renting a wing of a crumbling Palace in Hyderabad from a family of impoverished Rogers um and they were very respectable though impoverished and and um on holy this Festival day the the raja's wife the Rani came to me and she said Dr Sab you must take our special drink she said this is our special drink for Holy and stuff I said what is it she said oh I will tell you later she said she's like the Joey deers of India dosed you up so I drank this this BNG and she said have some more and so and I soon very stoned with this bung this drink this cannabis containing drink and then everyone was sort of rushing around throwing colored water at each other other but I mean this was a highly respectable conservative Brahman family and this was just part of of their traditional way of life and and in in in the nons smok in the drunk form wow is a liquid the edible form that's a that's quite amazing I mean I I I often wonder how much different our world view would be if we had those sort of traditions here in America because that's traditions and just sort of these cultural norms that we accept they shape so much of our Behavior they shape so much of how we view the world and so much of it is just based on momentum it's just based on what did your grandparents do what did they teach your parents and what did your parents teach you and what is what's the collective culture of your your your neighborhood your community what yes exactly one thing that's just occurred to me well there's two things I'd like to ask you well one thing let me ask you something there's you know I've done a lot of research on the sense of being stared at MH um I think that this feeling that almost everyone's experienced of feeling you're being looked at you turn around someone staring at you or you can stare at someone and make them turn around um this is something which um is very widespread in the population there's
been a kind of scientific taboo for years about it because it ought not to happen if your mind's nothing but your brain looking at someone shouldn't affect them because everything's all inside your head whereas if when you look at somebody the image that you're seeing is projected out as I suggest it is that when I look at you now I don't think your my image of you in three dimensions and full color is inside my head I think it's where you are I think I'm projecting out my image of you everything I'm seeing in this room is where it seems to be projected out my mind's extended beyond my brain anyway that is how we experience it the official theory is it's all inside the head um and because the official Theory says this is just a Superstition people can't really tell when they're being looked at there being almost no scientific investigation till I took it up in the 1980s and now quite a number of people have done this research on the sense of being stared at to find out if people really can tell when they're being stared at from behind um I've done lots of experiments in schools kids are particularly sensitive to this more so than grown-ups really yes and I then to find out about I thought well look I've done the experiments but who are the professionals so I and my research assistant interviewed security guards St detectives The Drug Squad at Heath row uh police uh and private detectives you know um have you ever had this experience do people know when they're being watched almost everyone who watches others for a living said of sure of course they do and you know if you're being trained to be a private detective trained how to follow somebody you don't stare at their back because they're likely to turn around and catch your eye so anyway I I wrote about this in my book the sense of being stared at about this research and about its implication for the nature of our minds but I had recently somebody came to me from a British defense research laboratory um and he said to me they've got very interest in this uh in the Army because there some generals are worried that British troops in Afghanistan are now so Laden down with kit you know GPS systems I mean their whole bodies covered with electronic kit and they found that when they're so topheavy
carrying all this kit they have to look down at the ground all the time to avoid stumbling because it's harder to walk with all this stuff and they can easily be picked off by Gorilla Fighters behind rocks with rifles and so what they said is do you think we could train people in threat awareness so they could actually become more sensitive now in the martial arts I know some martial arts do have threat awareness training so that people when blindfolded have to become more aware of when somebody's looking at them or going to attack them from behind so my question to you since this is your world not mine is is how easy do you think it would be part to train people in threat awareness to become more sensitive to knowing when they're being looked at that's very interesting um I have never been a part of any martial art that teaches people threat awareness what the martial arts that I've been involved in have all been about acquiring very specific skills for hand-to-hand combat against other trained uh adversaries mhm um there's a bunch of different types of martial arts that emphasize what you call self-defense type martial arts my issue with those guys and the the practices of self-defense type martial arts is that almost everything that they're teaching would only work against a non-trained opponent um they they have all these ideas like if a guy comes at you and throws a punch you grab his wrist you do this you do that all that stuff only works on someone who doesn't know how to fight and my thinking is always learn what works on trained Killers learn things that are undeniable against the most skilled martial artist those are the things you want to learn and through this practice of very very difficult um to pull off techniques very difficult training pushing yourself expanding the boundaries of your your your your willingness to push your body in your mind that's how you truly Lear learn about yourself and uh M to Musashi uh had this expression um that he wrote In the book of five rings that once you understand the way broadly you will see it in all things and that that way being in his world was the way of sword fighting and that you would understand this and this most incredible and intense way and you would see the same sort of path of of the the true path in
calligraphy in carpentry in all sorts of expressive art forms and that th this is in my opinion um what is the great benefit of martial arts it's the developing of your human potential through this incredibly difficult Endeavor and I've always found that these guys who like blindfold and look out for it's all [ __ ] there's a tremendous amount of [ __ ] in martial arts it's one of the worst oh is it yeah much less so now because of the New Movement from 1993 on has been the movement of mixed martial arts and that's because of these things called uh Ultimate Fighting Championship and mixed martial arts competitions and what mixed martial arts competitions have done is there was always these ideas that different people had like death touches and this guy could just he could hit you in a certain place and use his Chi and knock you back all those guys failed miserably in competition not a single one was successful not one every single one was beaten down and it just showed there's no mysticism when it comes to martial arts the true mysticism is the Conquering of your fears the ability to understand how to remain calm during these incredibly stressful moments of competition and through repetition and intelligent development of technique that's what what real martial arts training teaches people and that any Divine feeling you get from a true Master you would get from a Pianist as well you would get from a true uh a brilliant painter you know you you've met Alex Gray right yes brilliant painter but you know how that feeling you get when you're around him like he's a master you know what I mean like he has this this sense of this like very you like you know you're in the presence of a very unique person and I have experienced that same feeling when I've been around martial artists and that same feeling when I've been around you know just great minds great thinkers there's what you do is you you recognize you're recognizing greatness you're recognizing what moushi said you're recognizing someone who understands the way broadly MH and um I don't I don't believe in a lot of these ideas of uh of self-defense training you know I think there's there's certain techniques that are very effective for soldiers like disarmament techniques like how to take
someone's pistol away how to uh how to defend against a knife attack where it's very technique oriented uh Krav Mah incorporates a lot of those which is an Israeli martial art that takes a lot of the best aspects of many different martial arts and they uh they train that um there are definitely Real Techniques involved that have been taught to soldiers and by soldiers when it comes to disarmament when it comes to how to deal with hand-to-hand combat in certain situations but I think overall a lot of the quote unquote self-defense styles are [ __ ] and a lot of the uh you know we're going to blindfold you and people going to kick you if I blindfold you you're going to get [ __ ] up all right if I blindfold you there's not a person alive that's going to stop me from punching them in the face if I blindfold them you're not going to know what's coming no the only thing that you can help is is if you have control of a body like if you're blindfolded you can grapple very well but I could I've grappled with my eyes closed before but the reason being is that if I am holding on to your waist if I have a hold of you I know where everything else is it's a just a a pattern thing it's a it's a a pattern recognition I've just I've been in that position so many times that I could I I know where your neck is going to be I know where your arm is going to be if I isolate your shoulder I know where your wrist is going to be I know how to isolate those joints without having to look at them so in that sense you could do some things blindfolded but not striking not distance no well I think the threat Awareness stuff was not so much that you could fight blindfolded but training people to feel from which direction uh someone was looking at them from behind now it seems to me plausible that you could train that um but you know it's not my world and so really I mean this is an issue if if they asked my advice on experimental design what I'd do for threat awareness is this I'd have say take a five-story building um on one of the five stories selected at random you'd have You' do it at night have guys hidden behind in offices that can look at people walking along corridors you'd have CCTV cameras and people watching them on that floor um but on the other four floors you'd switch off the TV
cameras and there'd be nobody there and you'd have somebody walk through each floor of the this building and then they'd have to say which one they were being watched in and one out of five if they got it right you know lots of times there's a one in five chance of getting right just by guessing but if you find results above score above chance you could then say well these people are actually detecting when they potential threats and you might be able to train people to get better at it what you did um your study correct me if I'm wrong you you had people sit down and then they they would they hit a button when they felt someone looking at them no what happened was this well there's two there's two methods one one the the method I've mainly used is the simplest one that you can do with kids in schools um one person's blindfolded with an airline style blindfold to cut out peripheral vision the other person sits behind them and then in a random series of Trials the simplest method is tossing a coin but I have random sheets of instruction you it you look or you don't look so if it's a look looking trial the person behind stares at the back of their neck and thinks about them if it's a not and then after 10 second there's a click and so they hear a click or a beep they know the trial's begun and within 10 seconds they have to say looking or not looking are you being looked at or not yes or no it's right or wrong and then the next trial at random would be looking or not looking and if it's not looking they look away and think of something else and people have to guess we usually do 20 of these they're only 10 seconds each so it doesn't take long and this gives results where most people score above chance 50% chance but many if you take an average it comes out around 55 to 60% so it's not a big effect but over hundreds of thousands of Trials it shows something's going on statistically significant yes very significant and if you do it through Windows whe to eliminate smell or sound or one-way mirrors it still works and in Amsterdam this has been running in the science museum for 20 years and it's one of the biggest experiments ever conducted U the interesting thing there is the overall results are extremely positive highly significant statistically but what they've shown is
what I've already found in my own experience the most sensitive subjects are children under the age of nine and I think most of us when we're older we go out into the world there's crowded streets lots of people look at we desensitize ourselves but children are much more sensitive I wonder if that case I wonder if really attractive women would be the worst at it because really attractive women are used to putting on blindfolds and walking past people staring at them all the time yes well there is a slight difference in those who've experienced this more women than men have experience being stared at you do servies and more men than women have experienced turning at others and looking at others and making them turn around men are leers yes so attractive women do have to as you say they have to um they have to learn to avoid meeting people's gaze this Photograph American Girl in Italy it's from 1951 it's a fascinating photograph it's a famous photograph this American woman is walking down this street next to these animals these men that are grabbing their crotch and they're they're St and she has this look on her face like she's not looking at anyone in particular she's just going straightforward and um like that woman would be like a perfect candidate someone who's like used to blocking off yes all these learing yes freaks they're staring at her when you um was there anyone that you'd ever done that study on that was like really good at it like 75% 80% oh 100% yes 100% yes someone got 100% yes and that was my older son Merlin when he was Merlin he's a wizard got a son named Merlin that's ridiculous and he's a scientist and he's doing PhD at the moment in in tropical ecolog Dr Merlin wow Dr Merlin younger my younger son who's 24 is a musician cos he gets 100% yes when Merlin was four years old I did this experiment with him you know blindfold him he's sitting there I said look I'm going to look at you some of the time at the rest of the time not and each time you hear this click you have to say if you think you're being looked at he got it right 100% of the time so I couldn't believe this he wasn't cheating I mean he didn't know about cheating he was four he was four wow and so I did it again and he was brilliant and he said Daddy you've done can we do it the other way around
can you tell when I'm looking at you so I said okay we'll try that and we did it the other way around and I you know out of 20 trials I got sort of 11 out of 20 it was above chance but I was wrong quite a lot of the time then he got the idea wow you can be wrong and I was wrong and sort of Doubt entered his mind and after that when I tested him it was still fairly High 75% but he never got 100% again after the first two times that's interesting and what were the numbers like how many times did you do it well the first two times were 20 times each so normally I do these trials with 20 trials and most people would get say 11 out of 20 and he was getting 20 out of 20 that's insane which is hugely significant of course and and um anyway the thing is that young children are very very sensitive to this and how old do yours four and six are the youngest well you see check it out with I'm going to I'm going I've already got my plans for tonight I'm going to go on the way home I'm going to pick up some blindfolds yeah that's uh that's brilliant that's it's really interesting the idea that you introduced the possibility of failure and then he was like oh and then he doubt crept in exactly and the problem with the kinds of tests I I do tests on the sense of being stared at telepathy I've doing a lot on Telephone telepathy can you tell who's calling um the problem with these kinds of experiments is that you have to set them up up so that people could be right or wrong and no very few people are right all the time but as soon as doubt Creeps in the mind interferes people think oh maybe I I guessed one way last time it's statistical it should be the other way this time and and they start as soon as that kind of thing goes on people lose it boy that is life in a nutshell isn't it like as soon as you have doubt your whole world is just a mess and unfortunately these experiments that I do introduce doubt into the V because I have to do statistical experiments that will be credible to Skeptics so there's a kind of skepticism built into the experiments I haven't yet found a way of doing these I'm always the Holy Grail would be to find ways of doing these tests where people don't realize that
they're being tested and that there could be there's doubt how could that be done though well I'm thinking of one kind of test that would be incorporated in a video game um where say you have to choose between going through one door or another door and one door you go through it's absolutely awful and the other door you escape and you're on to sort of next stage um you could have it where when people choose it hasn't been decided you'd have a random event thing that would determine which door you go through after you've made the choice to go through it this is then called presentiment or precognition it's like knowing the future and so if people were right more often than they were wrong uh you'd know because it purely chance it should be 50/50 if some people were coming out 60 40 you wouldn't say this is a psychological test you would say you know how lucky are you and can you be consistently lucky um in this um and it would be more like luck it would still involve an element of Doubt because you might start thinking oh I'm not very lucky today um but it would be wouldn't be framed as as a a scientific experiment it would be framed as a way of training your ability to be lucky whoa H training your ability to be lucky that intuition is a very strange thing and some people believe in it and some people don't some people believe that you make good choices like you know you you'll hear people that are successful that are confident and okay hey I've always been lucky I've got great instincts but that there is something to instincts there's something to trusting certain folks and not trusting certain folks Bas on just immediately the feeling that you get when you meet them some things just don't seem right and I think a lot of it probably pattern recognition a lot of it is you know I've been around guys like this before I know what they're about this guy's just got a little bit of [ __ ] in them I got to get out of here you know well I think intuition just means direct knowing and and some of it can be telepathic some of it can be unconscious pattern recognition there's lots of components um but some of them I think are what you could call parapsychological you know feeling the future or um picking up things
telepathically um and you know these recent experiments of Daryl B at Cornell on feeling the future I don't know if you've looked into those um let me just keep an eye on the time talking about it's 1:00 okay well you have a pocket watch old school look at you with a chain on it yes wow I don't like wearing wrist watches let me check that out how what do you have it connected to your belt or something yes well yes it's over the trousers there's a kind of wow pretty slick who wear's a pocket watch well you know you need to know the time sometimes like not like watches no I don't like being manacled to time oh manacled yeah but you carry a cell phone no oo you're one of those guys yeah how come I hate being interrupted and you know I don't like the phone at home I don't use phones much I may use email that's fine you can always just shut your phone off I know but I'd rather not have it I do have one because I I I'm doing experiments on cell phones on Telephone telepathy my friend Steve who I was talking about from London same thing hates hates having a phone drives his wife crazy yes well that's a good reason for not having one I don't want to be interrupted all the time and um I if I go for a walk or if I'm working or some I find it really annoying if the phone rings I um anyway the pocket watch means I can never know the time when I need to I'm going to have to go fairly soon but not quite yet um um where were we um telepathy telepathy tests um and intuition um sometimes it's in darl Bam's experiments um are very simple and there it's called feeling the future and there's this phenomenon that Dean Raiden at The Institute of netic Sciences has done a lot of research on where it turns that we can respond a few seconds before an emotionally arousing event our body starts preparing for it before it happens this would be very relevant to fast Sports ping pong tennis Cricket downhill skiing and probably martial arts as well um and this research seems to me pretty convincing uh I've been a subject in some of these experiments myself um and the the the dean Raiden version of it is this you sit there in front of a computer screen you're wearing electrodes that measure
emotional arousal you know adrenaline causes sweating and emotional arousal like a lie detector so it's a standard way of measuring emotional arousal when you're ready you press a button and 10 seconds later a picture appears on the screen most of the pictures are neutral you know Landscapes you know bowl of flowers or something like that um vaguely Pleasant some of them are scenes that are emotionally arousing hardcore pornography or scenes of extreme violence now almost everybody when they see hardcore pornography or scenes of violence is emotionally aroused even if they don't want to be they they are and you the LI detector thing shows a huge emotional arousal the interesting thing in these experiments is the emotional arousal begins about 5 seconds before the picture appears on the screen 5 Seconds 5 long time it's a long time for for for people ready here's 5 Seconds go five seconds that's a long time and so the body the the heart seats beating faster the the fight ORF flight response you know the adrenaline kind of response kicks in so when the when the stimulus occurs the body's already sort of revved up with this emotional response now this is work that that um Dean Raiden's done he's repeated it and it's been replicated elsewhere it's called presentiment feeling the feeling in advance um and the decision as to which picture appears on the screen is made by the computer a millisecond before it actually appears there's no one in the world knows what picture is going to appear now this is really interesting you see because it shows there's a kind of feeding back of emotion now Daryl bam at Cornell who is a very respected professor of psychology um has been doing a different kind of experiment which doesn't involve the lie detector um his experiments you sit in front of a computer screen and there's two curtains there behind one of those curtains there's a blank wall an image of a blank wall behind the other one there's a pornographic image now most people even if they don't normally watch pornography are more interested in seeing a pornographic image than a blank wall and before you do the test you do there's a simple question there you gay straight Etc so people who are gay get gay pornographic images um so those are emotionally arousing so
what happens you sit down at the computer and you click on one of those two cuts which the which one you want to click on you choose which of the two it's random whether you'll get the wall or the pornographic image um so you click on one and most people would hope that they're going to see the pornographic image a different one each time and um um and the computer makes the decision which one to roll back which curtain to roll back after you've made the click people don't know that this decision is only made by the computer after they've decided they think it's already there um um so most people don't know that they're doing a pre sentiment test um oh so what happens is in these experiments about 53 or 54% of the time people get the pornographic image whereas by pure chance um they would it would be 50% and if instead of a pornographic image you have a sort of mildly Pleasant landscape or something that's not emotionally arousing it's down to 50% whoa so this is telling us that something about emotional arousal can work back in time and when you think about fast Sports imagine you know tennis people are serving at 90 M an hour there's not time for the eye to take in the angle of the ball to process it in the brain through clunky brain processing to send messages along nerves to muscles to get the whole body ready or in a penalty shootout the goalie has to in a foot B soccer match you they have to react very quickly and in in pingpong you have to react quickly in cricket people Australian fast Bowlers bowl at 100 Mil an hour in cricket um there's not long enough and in downhill skiing you come around a corner um it's it's too fast so um I think that part of our the way we're reacting and I think this comes most in sports is it and it would also come out driving a car if you got the 5-second and advanced warning some accident's about to happen you could concentrate and perhaps avoid it better um this is a fascinating field of research which um is is not yet been picked up by Sports psychologists or by I've told several people in the military about it because I think it would be really interesting I don't think it's going to do any harm if they know know this but but say for example you had your physiology being
monitored you're in a flight simulator or a driving simulator um and say you had it so that when you got an otherwise inexplicable emotional arousal going on you'd be unconscious of it to start with say it was wired up so a red light went on in the cockpit of the drive flight simulator it might sometimes be a false alarm but every time that light went on you the the message would be concentrated hard something bad might happen um this could be a useful technological Gadget and um so I think this is you know there's a lot of potential in this kind of research which is only just being begun to be explored um and the reason I've encourage people in the British defense research establishment to do this is because they're more likely to take it up than people in universities because in universities you know there's this kind of dogmatic skepticism that means people say oh it's rubbish it's woo it's it's it's pseudo science Etc I mean stupid reactions really the real the most interesting yes this is really interesting can we find out more and can we apply it that's incredibly fascinating do you think that these things like this this pre precognition ability or this uh instincts or these ability to recognize these patterns do you think this is possibly some emerging thing in in human beings emerging aspect of the development of humans I mean obviously if you believe in evolution we were one thing now we are this we what are what we are now which is radically different from the prehuman hominids of 2 million plus years ago we're very very different if you just extrapolate a million years from now we're going to be very different from what we are now do you think that this aspect of human beings of human life is as a is a developing thing this precognition ability this ability to communicate with each other do you think maybe that's what's manifesting itself when you when you think about someone and all sudden the phone rings and it's them like instantaneously well I think that it's something in traditional societies that's actually better developed than in modern ones where there's people don't talk about it on the whole there's no training for it and stuff in traditional
societies people take these things for granted and they rely on them now the phone is an interesting case because this is a modern technology um but I think that telepathy as a means of communication between people who know each other well is actually is always been going on animals have it I've been doing research on telepathy and dogs I wrote a book called dogs that know when their owners are coming home I did lots of experiments on are dogs picking it up just by routine or car sounds the answer is no we film them we have people come at random times in unfamiliar Vehicles the dogs still know but why have people had such a hard time replicating those those the dog one's been replicated it was replicated by a skeptic who then pretended he hadn't replicated it um but it's now generally agreed that his results agreed perfectly with my own and millions of people have dogs that do this so I don't think it's hard to replicate it's just that if you do this in a university it's likely to end your career yeah well is that what it is because I've read online people that have disagreed with you saying that no one has ever replicated your your results oh yes well there that's the Skeptics disinformation it's been replicated by one of the leading Skeptics in Britain who then pretended falsely that he hadn't reput that Richard wisman and online on my website you can see his data plotted on graphs showing exactly the same effect as I found is it statistically significant or is it 100% sign it's statistically significant his data and mine well what is your data like how how how often did they know and how often were they unaware about 80% of the time we did a series of 100 trials with one dog and on 80 of those occasions the dog started waiting when the person was in about to come home it was actually before she got in the car to come home or the taxi it picked up her intention and this was at random times on 20 occasions out of 100 it didn't on three or four of those the dog was sick and on the other occasions it was when there was a [ __ ] on heat in the next apartment which showed this dog could be distracted but even if you include all 100 events including the ones where the dog was and do the statistics it's still
massively significant that's fascinating so you think that much like what you were talking about with your son who was able to recognize 100% of the time when someone was staring at him that dogs because they don't have like a cultural context they don't have all this doubt in their head that's right they do it and they have an emotional investment too it's not like a boring parapsychology experiment you know for a dog it's immensely emotionally exciting when the owner comes home that there's an emotional charge they do it over and over again they never get bored of their owners coming home so this is the telephone phenomenon which I can Briefly summarize is one I do in my tests people who say this happens to them in real life give me the names and numbers of four people it might happen with uh we pick they sit at home being filmed so we know they're not getting other phone calls or text messages or something and they were a landline on a landline phone with no caller ID display we picked one of the four callers at random and um call them out and say if you were doing say please ring Joe now and um they think about you for a bit they ring you your phone rings and before you pick it up you have to say who you think it is you know I think it's John and you pick it up say hi John you're right or you're wrong you can't know from the normal patterns of life because they're um it's randomly Chosen and so by chance you'd be right one time in four 25% in these experiments the average score in our film tests is 45% and massively significant statistically and this has now been replicated in other universities even one of Britain's leading Skeptics checked this out and he's getting positive results much to his dismay um and so this is a I've now got an automated test I'm about to launch it in the US but it's already launched in Britain where people can do this on cell phones with their friends you don't have to be in a lab um I think telephone telepathy is real and I think what's happening is that when you want to call someone if I wanted to call you I'd form the intention to call you I've got a motive to call you I'd be thinking about Joe and then I'd get my phone out i'
dial the number or press your the memory thing for you but when I form the intention to call you I think you could in some cases pick up that intention you might start thinking about me for no apparent reason and then the call comes through and you say it's funny I was just talk thinking about you so I think this is a genuinely telepathic phenomenon in many cases sometimes it can be coincidence but on average uh it seems to be a real effect and um I think this is an example of where telepathy really is evolving along with technology it happens with emails and text messages as well until recently the only way you could get in touch with someone at a distance was telepathically if you wanted a quick response now you can do it by phone and U I've also done research on what I think is one of the basic biological forms of this which mothers and babies many me nursing mothers find that when they're away from their baby um for no apparent reason their milk lets down their breast start squeezing out milk normally that happens when the baby cries and they feel their breast tinkle say there was a nursing mother here now and there's no baby crying here and she felt her Milt let down most nursing mothers think my baby needs me and until recently they just went home to the baby now they call home on a cell phone but I've done studies on nursing mothers in London 20 of them over a 2mon period each and we found that there was it was very very highly significant it wasn't just ized rhythms they were responding when their baby needed them and before telephones were invented any mother that could pick up when her baby needed her and went to the baby would have a mother a baby that survived better than a mother that didn't pick it up so I think telephones in a way give us a technological way of doing something that in the past happened more unreliably by telepathy so do you think that these telephones connecting to telepathy is somehow or another related to this this morphic field that is seemingly undefined we don't we know or you rather you believe that this is a real phenomenon that it exists but we don't know exactly what the mechanism is yeah I think what happens with social groups any social group is that the field as a whole has a the group as a
whole Has a Field like a magnetic field will arrange iron filings which are within its field of influence if you have a flock of birds like starlings that are flying together there's a kind of field that coordinates their movement so they can change direction rapidly without bumping into each other right if you have a school of fish you've got the same kind of thing if you have a pack of wolves and they leave the young the Cubs are left behind in the den with a babysitter while the adults go out hunting to bring food back for the young the field that links them isn't broken it stretches like an invisible elastic band I think that's the basis of telepathy I think it's to do with social bonds through social fields and a mother and the baby are very closely linked and it's as if there's this invisible elastic band between them and so um when you look at telephone telepathy it typically only happens with people you know well it happens between mothers and children husbands and wives lovers Partners um therapists and clients if there's a kind of emotional charge best friends it doesn't happen with insurance salesmen and and people to whom you're not emotionally connected um it's uh it depends on social bonds and so I think morphic field of the social group is something that applies to any social group a family is a kind of Has a morphic Field um a football team has one and Michael Murphy who founded the esin Institute did a fascinating book called the psychic side of sports and um he describes these interviews with football players and um many of them turned quite mystical when they were interviewed in private they wouldn't talk about it in the locker room for fear of being thought weird um but many of them like soccer players they said when the game's going well it's as if they can just feel where other people are on the field it was like an instinct even they didn't they just somehow they were working like a single organism I think that's an example of a morphic field of a social group and I think that's why team sports um are so interesting to watch because it's not just about guys being brilliant it's about guys working together and in a way that's highly coordinated and the more effectively the team works together the more effective it is that's fascinating stuff it's really
interesting to consider how much of a factor that does play what what it what exactly it is too you know it's amazing uh you're out of time Rupert sheldrake Rupert sheld dr.org is your website uh rert shra.org oh sheld dr.org I'm sorry just sheld dr.org and Rupert sheldrake is your uh Twitter handle correct do you handle all that stuff yourself I don't no actually I don't really use Twitter so no let forget that I do have one but I don't use it someone set it up for me and I've never learned how your last tweet was September 13th I posted a new photo to Facebook oh so you used Facebook is that what it is and automatically post to Twitter okay uh thank you very much man really appreciate this it was really cool to have a conversation with you after listening to you in the trialogues uh I really appreciate it and we could do this anytime you're in town okay well it's it's fun for me too I've really enjoyed it J how often are you in La the last time was 27 years ago so it's not very often time wow I got lucky I got lucky all right thank you very much I really really appreciate it rber Shel ladies and gentlemen uh we'll see you Thursday with uh Graham Hancock until then much love big kiss mwah this podcast was brought to you by Blue Apron go to blueapron.com SL Rogan for your first two meals for free that's blueapron.com for / Rogan we're also brought to you by stamps.com go to stamps.com enter the code word JRE and get your $110 bonus offer which includes a digital scale and up to $55 in free postage and last but not least we are brought to you by on it.com that is o nnit t use the code word Rogan and you will save 10% off any and all supplements [Music]