Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake: Beyond the Brain — The Mystery of Consciousness

so i've got a story of three dates for you uh the first date is today and that's a date in january 2022 when i'm recording this message for you the second date is nine years earlier in january 2013 and in january 2013 i was invited to give a tedx talk and at the same event was the controversial biologist rupert sheldrick who also gave a talk rupert and i a month later both had our talks taken offline by ted because the talks challenged the orthodox narrative about consciousness and that brings you to the third date which is the date that uh the dialogue between rupert and myself that you're going to be seeing shortly was recorded and that dialogue was recorded in november 2021 and it was recorded for the beyond the brain conference series and i highly recommend the beyond the brain conference series to anybody who gets a chance to tune into their future events what we've done with uh with this recording is that we've added quite a number of uh images particularly images from the great visionary artist pablo amaringo who kindly gave me permission to use his images in connection with my book supernatural which is soon going to be re-released in america under the title visionary with new material added so let's go straight to the dialogue between myself and rupert sheldrick and i'd like to say at the beginning that i have huge admiration for rupert sheldrick he's a serious scientist who has brought the tools of scientific investigation to the mystery of consciousness perhaps the greatest mystery of science say very warm welcome everybody to beyond the brain 16 um in 2021 online both of these speakers are very well known to you all they have the privilege of being both being banned both at ted talks being banned and and they're going to be talking about the nature of consciousness and the limits of scientific paradigm which is essentially the central theme to beyond the brain so graham i'm going to hand right over to you um for your sign of opening statement okay well first of all i want to say i'm not a scientist uh i am a journalist uh so i find myself in esteemed company here that i cannot claim any scientific credentials myself um i am an author and a journalist i write books about ancient civilizations and i can honestly say that i had apart from one incident i had very little interest in consciousness until i encountered the ancient egyptian books of the dead perhaps i should say what that one incident was that one incident happened to me when i was 18 or 19 years old and it was a massive electric shock a near fatal electric shock and uh i distinctly remember i was very aware of it at the time that i left my body and i found myself up around the light in the in the kitchen where i was looking down at my body and i thought um how strange and how interesting what's going on here and it didn't go further than that i was back into my body and uh i got up and and uh i was i was kind of okay but that that memory of being outside my body and looking down on my body i think planted in my mind the notion that whatever i am i am not my body i'm something else uh i'm connected to the body definitely but that isn't me that that doesn't define me and that happened at an early age in my in my teens um and uh subsequently i put it out of my mind for many years until i encountered the ancient egyptian funerary texts and i encountered those in the course of of my my main focus of my work is is the possibility of a lost civilization and whether some of the most ancient civilizations provide us with clues to the nature of that lost civilization and indeed to its spirituality and this required me to read the ancient egyptian pyramid texts and the derivative versions thereof which uh include the ancient egyptian coffin texts uh the book of what is in the duat and the famous book of the dead and these texts all describe in detail a journey that the soul makes after death where the soul is confronted in complete transparency and openness with the nature of his or her life and how it was and how it was lived and is required to account for it and um initially my reaction was why does this why does this matter and then when i thought about it more i thought well actually hang on the ancient egyptians put their best minds at work for 3 000 years to try to understand the mystery of death and perhaps we should listen to what they are saying as part of this this process this inquiry into the ancient text by the way the hermetic texts are also stunningly significant and and really reach deep into the the nature of reality and the nature of consciousness and their kind of derivative from the ancient egyptian text but as part of this and beyond this i then researching another book uh found it necessary to take psychedelics um i was the book purported or began life as as explaining cave art uh and i came across a very powerful theory by professor david lewis williams at the university of wood waters around in south africa uh that cave art and the universal features of cave art all around the world were best explained if the artists had experienced altered states of consciousness and were depicting what they saw in their visions so i'm a kind of boots on the ground researcher and i i needed to go have those have those visions i've had one lsd trip in 1975 um but it wasn't um until the the mid 19 second half of the 1990s that i began this research with psychedelics particularly with ayahuasca the vine of the divine of the dead or the vine of souls from from south america and i i just had such extraordinary experiences of a seamlessly convincing parallel realm filled with intelligent entities who seem to want to communicate with me in certain ways and who seem to convey moral teachings and ask me to examine the nature of my life and the impact that i had on other people this is a very powerful transformative experience and it solidified that notion that i am that i am not my body that i am that i am not my brain but that that but somehow the body and the brain provide an interface to other levels of reality in short reality is much more complex than it at first appears to be it goes deeper and deeper into layer upon layer and i'm not sure if we'll ever get to the bottom of it over to you well thank you graeme that's a very amazing introduction um there's a lot i'd like to discuss with that but i first of all i'll just give a kind of general pitch about my own interests in the mind beyond the brain um there's three senses in which i think our minds are beyond our brains the first is what i call the extended mind uh the mind extended in space beyond the brain and here i'm talking about just ordinary everyday consciousness not altered states of consciousness not out of the body experiences not electric shocks not ancient egypt but just like now um i think that our minds extend beyond our brains uh all the time um and i think they do so through fields fields of the mind mental fields um we're used to the idea of fields extending beyond material objects from magnets where there's a magnetic field in and around the magnet from the earth where this gravitational field in and around the earth from mobile phones where there's a electromagnetic field within and around the mobile phone invisibly there's rooms full of mobile phone transmissions and tv and radio transmissions everywhere is um and i think our minds extend too and though particularly through vision when we look at something i'm looking out of the window at a tree for example um i think my image of the tree is where it seems to be where the tree actually is i'm projecting out a two-dimensional three-dimensional full-color virtual reality display onto the world around me and so is every animal with image forming eyes that our minds extend outwards in every act of perception um and that's the word attention uh means to stretch towards and tendery i think our minds stretch towards things in every act of attention i think they also stretch into things through intention which means to stretch into and i think phenomena like telepathy uh exhibit that ability if i think about somebody who i want to get in touch with i intend to get in touch with them i go to my telephone look up their number thinking about them they may start thinking about me they pick up my intention so when i ring them they say as funny as just thinking about you and this i think underlies the very common experience of telephone telepathy and the extension of the mind through vision i think underlies the well-known phenomenon of the sense of being stared at uh people feeling when they're being looked at from behind they turn around someone's looking at them so that's the first sense in which i think minds extend beyond the brain and these are revealed testably in phenomena like the sense of being stared at and telepathy secondly i think minds extend beyond brains in time we all know that they do this is not controversial through memory and also through thinking about the future much of our consciousness is concerned with planning about the future deciding among possibilities um and there's are future possibilities uh we also have memories of the past and i think our memories are not stored inside our brains which is the conventional materialist view but rather that we resonate with ourselves in the past by morphic resonance and as a transfer of memories across space and time um through self-resonance we resonate with ourselves in the past we also resonate with lots of other people and that i think is the basis of collective memory what young called the collective unconscious individual memory and collective memory differ in degree but not in kind both depend on resonance from the past on the basis of similarity so our minds are extended in time as well as in space and the third way in which they're extended is that i think they enable us to contact uh spiritual realms beyond the normal physical uh realm and and that this happens most spectacularly in mystical experiences when sometimes spontaneously sometimes through a near-death experience sometimes through spiritual practices sometimes through psychedelics people feel themselves in contact with a greater or certainly different kind of consciousness in mystical experiences people often feel themselves in the presence of a consciousness greater than their own and part of a vastly larger uh consciousness or mind i think this is the underlying insight behind all religions uh they all start from a direct experience of contact with a much greater realm of consciousness the buddha didn't become enlightened through doing a phd but by meditating under trees for many years jesus didn't become aware of his deep affinity in connection with god who he thought of his father um through going to a rabbinical seminary it came to him in a great moment of insight at the moment of his baptism when he was held underwater by john the baptist and the river jordan and came up again through a rite of passage which i think was a kind of near-death experience induced by drowning i think john the baptist was carrying out mass scale rites of passage through inducing near-death experiences through near-drowning holding people under long enough and jesus his first moment that's recorded in the bible of deep insight and spiritual awareness happened then was followed by his going on retreat 40 day fast in the wilderness um so i think that this greater consciousness that we uh become aware of through mystical experiences uh also is a way the mind can also be extended to many other forms of consciousness in dreams and in altered states of consciousness and under the influence of psychedelics we can encounter many other kinds of consciousness not just the all-embracing consciousness of ultimate reality which we can call god or the ultimate reality or the all or whatever name we choose um but also many other conscious intelligent entities in the judeo-christian tradition these are called angels and there are countless angels supposedly in this tradition there are also demons or devils or spirit entities of questionable nature um the hindus have devas countless shining beings muslims have jinns so monotheistic religions although they think of a single supreme ultimate source of consciousness are also very heavily populated by many other kinds of spirit beings to whom we can be open both --- ls and geometry morphing constantly and changing changing shape and then sometimes entities come through now i know that mainstream material is science would like to convince us that those entities are simply brain candy they're just figments of our their their epi phenomena of our brain activity as indeed mainstream science defines our consciousness also and that there's no reality to them but but my experience in the in a visionary state is that there is a reality to them that there is some some reality beyond this reality uh and and i find it hard to convince myself that these uh entities that i encountered which have from time to time included things like elves and fairies i find it hard to convince myself that they're not in some way real and in fact they seem they seem more real than real i suppose this is where the where the fundamental divide with with mainstream science materialist science comes is is when we have these visionary experiences what actually is it that we are experiencing is the is this is the uh the psychedelic in question or i mean psychedelics are not the only way to get into deeply altered states of consciousness as rupert mentioned you know sitting under a tree and meditating for weeks on end will will certainly do the trick uh so will so will hunger so will austerities of of various kinds there's lots of ways to get into altered states of consciousness but the question is once we get into that deeply altered state which is not the alert problem-solving state that our society values so highly once we get into that deeply altered state and encounter entities are they entirely figments of our imagination um or are they real in some sense and if i look at the sort of evolutionary notion uh we i think everybody understands we have we have certain i can only call them modules in the brain we have a we have a module for intuitive physics uh uh the example i i often give is that if somebody throws a a book at me uh i probably would be able to dodge that book or to bat it aside with my hand before it hit me actually underlying that dodging or batting the book aside is is a very complex series of of calculations which involve the object the strength of the thrower the trajectory of the throat all of that is being done in an instant by the brain the brain clearly has a shortcut to work to work all of this out and i can understand that in evolutionary terms because if you didn't have the ability to dodge objects being thrown at you then you might be less likely to pass on your genes to future generations than somebody who did have that ability but what i don't understand is why the brain would invest in seamlessly convincing parallel worlds filled with intelligent entities that seek to teach us i don't see i don't see why uh why that would evolve in human beings all around the world it seems to me that there's something else going on here so so the question is what are these parallel realms that we encounter and what are the entities that inhabit them and how can we inquire into this further i know at the moment there's some very exciting work being done at imperial college with dimethyltryptamine and it's called dmtx the volunteers are subjecting themselves to extended dmt journeys normally dmt smoked uh is a 10 to 12 minute rocket trip to the other side of reality uh but these volunteers are effectively getting bmt on a drip and are being kept in that deeply altered state for hours or certainly an hour or more which i have to say i would find a formidable and terrifying experience and kudos to them for their for their courage but perhaps this is some way to engage in a deep investigation of whatever it is these parallel realms and entities are um as a scientist rupert do you do you think there is a scientific way to to approach this and to and to establish actually what we're dealing with in visionary realms well i'm i think there's there are ways to begin an inquiry anyway actually i didn't know about the dmt experi experiments at imperial college it's interesting that that's another case of life imitating art in bernardo castrat's book beyond allegory i think it's called he has a kind of science fictiony um second half to the book in which um heroic explorers undergo experiments with dmt infused in into their bloodstream to extend the dmt experience to extend to explore consciousness more than can be done on these very short-lived dmt trips so um it sounds as if that project is actually um bringing into reality something that was part of a kind of science fiction only a few years ago um i think myself that the starting point for thinking about these phenomena is dreams because dreams are altered states of consciousness um which all of us have every night even though we forget most of them and dreams begin according to rapid eye movement detection even before we're born in babies uh many animals have dreams uh at least they have rapid eye movement and when you watch a dog sleeping and um it looks if it's trying to run in its dream chase a rabbit or something um obviously dogs will have dog dreams and and cats will have cat dreams um and we have human dreams and in our human dreams there are other entities i mean in most of my dreams i encounter other people and they're not the real actual people some of them are now dead um like my parents um and i encounter uh people in my dreams and beings and animals um that aren't really there and so in the sense of normal everyday well at the normal everyday world so actually i think that the starting point for the all these inquiries for me at least is dreams then there's the question of can we have shared dreams um well many people who've lived together in close quarters or who've taken part in dream groups where they share their dreams on a regular basis and become quite bonded with each other find that they can have shared dreams they can meet each other in their dreams and things can happen to them in the dream which they later remember when they wake up and their over their experiences were indeed overlapping so there's a kind of shared reality within dreams and then there's another there just for one one one question why does the why does the materialist um reductionist faction in science um not not not embrace that as just another faculty of the of the mind uh but they do they they admit the reality of dreams of course they find it impossible to deny them shed share dreams that's that that shared dreams um they well they just don't look at the evidence because shared dreams would imply something telepathic and for materialist telepathy is one of the really big taboos let's pause there explain why it's a big taboo why is telepathy such a big taboo for for mainstream materialist science well because of their belief system um their belief system is that the materials belief system is that matter is the only reality that matters unconscious the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter our brains are made up of unconscious matter except embarrassingly for materialism we appear to be conscious that's why the the very existence of human consciousness is called the hard problem for materialists the mind is supposed to be nothing but the activity of the brain as materialists say minds are what brains do therefore the mind according to materialism is either an aspect of brain physical brain activity or it's an epiphenomenon of physical brain activity that does nothing or it's an illusion produced by brain activity and the illusion is doesn't do do anything either in any case although these are different schools of materialist philosophy of mind they all agree that the mind is confined to the inside of the head the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain now and the brains have electrical and chemical activity but it's the electrical effects don't stretch far you can detect them just by putting electrodes on the skull but they don't reach out very far therefore for the materialist the existence of phenomena like the sense of being stared at or telepathy is they're impossible because they couldn't possibly happen the minds couldn't possibly have an influence on other minds at a distance in some mysterious way because they're all confined to the inside of the head therefore it's absolutely essential for materialists to deny these phenomena which is why they have organizations like the committee for skeptical inquiry magazines like the skeptical enquirer and why they materialist hit men patrol wikipedia to make sure that biographers of people like you and me are suitably edited to portray us as flakes or pseudoscientists or whatever it's all to maintain this belief that the mind is nothing but the brain therefore to admit that telepathy could happen in dreams would be a violation of this belief system and therefore it's taboo so anyway the thing is the fact is that telepathy does happen despite uh materialists belief system and telepathic contact in dreams happens and in fact telepathy quite often happens through dreams it's you know many telepathic communications occur in dreams particularly from people who are dying or have had accidents many people have dreams about somebody or when when awake feel the presence of somebody or get some impression of somebody at the moment that person dies um even though they don't know they're dying and even if they're dying a long way away this was one of the kinds of episodes that so intrigued the founders of the society for psychical research in the 1880s so anyway back to the dreams the the um one of the things that interested me when i was trying to think about these problems was well what about entities that are collectively recognized yet can't possibly exist in reality and yet have a real realm in real existence in the realm of dreams or the imagination or altered states of consciousness so what i thought i was a test case was the indian god ganesh ganesh appears in in temples in countless statues in india as paintings of ganesh appear on calendars you see them all the time i lived in india for seven years and was very aware of ganesh all the time ganesh is an elephant-headed god who couldn't possibly have existed in any normal physical sense he's considered to be the remover of obstacles and to be a son of shiva and a channel of the energy of the god shiva well does ganesh appear to hindus in their dreams um well i i did a google search on ganesh in dreams and i found in india numerous dream groups uh where people online are discussing their gannish dreams yes lots of indians have dreams of ganesh and they share their experiences with others in online forums um so now when ganesh appears in dreams in india he seems real to the people who are dreaming him he's a he's a god and he appears and he can intervene in in what's going on um yet um is he real what if he's just a product of the imagination um then if lots of people have a shared imagination and shared experiences of ganesh then isn't there some kind of reality so that's the the approach i've been taking towards these questions i what do you think of that as a general line of inquiry oh it sounds uh it sounds very very worthwhile to very worthwhile to me um i'd like to come back to this issue of of the mainstream materialist science and and consciousness it seems that you speak of it as a belief system those those scientists would say it's not a belief system it's a fact and because you and i both know that it's not a fact it's not an established fact it's not it's not established or confirmed any form of experimentation we really just don't understand what is uh what what is going what is going on here but uh it looks to me like that particular faction of science wants to exert control over human consciousness uh and to limit the scope of what of what we may explore and discuss about consciousness and as you rightly say that faction is extremely active and has and has its uh um expeditionaries out there on the internet doing doing their best to slur and scorn the names of anyone who considers anything other than the materialist view of of consciousness um and then secondly i find that we live in a society where actually the state claims to own our consciousness um of course it doesn't make that claim overtly uh or directly but the very fact that a person may be arrested for possessing or using uh drugs that alter co --- al at the moment i have a rather ambiguous attitude to that i um because i actually quite like the fact they're illegal and first of all the law is not very often enforced i don't know anyone who's been arrested for taking lsd or ayahuasca in pain we should make the distinction it doesn't really matter whether it's psychedelic or whether it's heroin actually uh adults should be sovereign over their own bodies and consciousness while doing no harm to others in my view there's something really wrong with society if that's not the case no i i'm my reason for thinking the slightly perverse reason for actually not being as worried about as you is that as soon as these things are legalized as we've seen with cannabis in canada huge corporations silicon valley billionaires poor billions into this so peter thiel who is not everyone's favorite billionaire is getting into the psychedelic business you know huge investments trying to patient silo siberian and or at least methods of preparing it um and vast corporations the government might try to control our consciousness but what if vast corporations control psychedelics and then advertise them on tv you know um that was that's an alternative scenario unfortunately in the present world scenario and you're right there is there is a huge commercialization in the cannabis industry and um and in the psychedelics industry and hedge funds are getting into this and it's becoming a big investment uh opportunity all around i still like to believe that the plants the plant medicines uh would subvert that uh that our society does seek to restrict uh explorations in altered states of consciousness because those explorations are subversive they they pull the rug out from from underneath the entire structure of the way our society works and i think they continue to do that whether whether legal or not actually yes well i think that um the legal thing isn't you know right now and at least in york show where i was recently the meadows are full of silo scybee mushrooms liberty caps growing in abundance all over our green and pleasant land um and so you know the ability of the state to suppress these things is somewhat limited um all it can do is generate fear and yes and a sense of oppression yeah yeah anyway um rupert and graham just just come in here because there's an interesting point in the chat related to this theme which is all this is jeremy young all dominant groups slash governments see to control consciousness and alternative ways of viewing reality look at the materialist education system which is designed to induct children into materialist orthodoxy what do you think of that point absolutely correct point uh we we we are from childhood school to think and function in particular ways uh and and increasingly we are we are i accept that the mainstream religions have a different view but increasingly in society we are the the forces of communication work to say that there is no spirit there is no soul there is no meaning there is no purpose to life we are just material objects this material agenda materialist agenda seems to infuse the society we live in in every way and i think ultimately it may be the downfall of of our society we do need to open up to these to these other realms and other experiences and i do think that people who've had psychedelic experiences tend to become more questioning of the established framework of quote-unquote reality than than if if we'd not have those experiences yeah well i also agree the the the system we have at the moment is designed to inculcate a kind of materialist worldview um it's highly secular it's it's anti-spiritual anti-religious on the other hand we do have in britain as in every country traditional religions as well and you know i myself am a practicing christian i'm an anglican i go to church um and there um and it is still the established church so there's a peculiar ambiguity about our state because uh part of it that deals with the monarchy in the established church is dealing with ancient archetypes uh not just modern materialist world views and for anyone who's practitioner of christianity or any other traditional religion there's no doubt about the existence of entities you know angels saints the souls of the departed these are all just part of it i mean just a few days ago on tuesday was all souls day and all over britain all over europe all over the world on the day of the dead there were requiems for the departed i went to one at westminster abbey it was absolutely beautiful marvellous music and um and lighting candles i was lighting candles for people i know who died and this is huge in mexico so the idea of the departed a relationship with the departed a continued existence departed realms of angels and saints who who exist in some other realm um all these things are not just flaky new age views etc they're they're part of the mainstream of all religious traditions and shamanic traditions too strongly acknowledge the existence of other entities like animal spirits the ancestors and so on so we do have here in britain and in every parish we have churches with statues of saints and people praying uh and celebration of michael and all angels on september the 29th and so on it's a minority current in british life now but it's still there and it's um it reminds us that our ancestors and still many people today have not bought into the materialist worldview as the only way of looking at things let's then let's then take this a little further and and your position as i understand it and my position i think is the same in this respect is that the um our consciousness is not our brains and somehow the brain is certainly connected to consciousness but it isn't it is not the essence of our consciousness and when you speak of telepathy and the mind extending beyond the brain and you can support that with experimental evidence it it then raises the question what what happens what happens to us when we die uh what is what is death and actually what is what is life what are we what are we doing here is there is there any is there any purpose to it is there any function to this to this level of existence and when physical death comes does it just all go out like a light or does our consciousness continue on a journey have you given thoughts to these questions and what do you feel about it well i have given thought to it yes um well my own view is is is in a sense quite simple i think when we die we go on dreaming but we can't wake up anymore because we haven't got a physical body to wake up in so in a sense we've spent our whole lives preparing for this through our dreams and we know from our dreams um that you know what we dream about depends on our fears our expectations our experiences our memories our hopes our desires that our dreams are very much influenced by us and and what we believe what we think what we experience um but they're also uh influenced by factors beyond ourselves because most of us have dreams that are surprising that we couldn't actually have made up if we just wanted to make them up for such surprising things can happen in dreams um so i think that our dreams uh are the way in which the the natural biological basis for this other kind of consciousness that we're preparing all our lives through having dreams for um just being in a confined to the dream state after we die and it's interesting to me that tibetans practice lucid dreaming tibetan llamas and one of the practices they have in tibetan buddhism is the practice so they cultivate lucid dreaming well there are many people in our own society who do too um who they cultivate this awareness of dreaming while they're dreaming so a lucid dream as you know is when you become aware within a dream that you're dreaming and that gives people a much greater control over their dreams and the reason that tibetans practice lucid dreaming is that when they die they think they go into a bardo a kind of intermediate realm and the ability to know what's going on in the dream realm and to know how to deal with it which they've practiced through lucid dreams serves them uh well in the otherwise confusing circumstances of being trapped in the dream world when they die i think exactly what the ancient egyptians were doing with their exploration of death and and and their their focus on on that it wasn't morbid it was it was preparation uh for want of a better word a journey uh that comes after death and that afterlife realm in ancient egypt is very similar to the bordeaux of the tibetans actually well i think you see i think that the the christian concept of purgatory is very similar too i mean i the um the roman catholic doctrine of purgatory as an intermediate realm that when you die you go into a realm of continued development which is somewhat dreamlike where you work through various issues that are unresolved in this life that makes complete sense to me and i think it's very similar to the egyptian and the tibetan views and the the the other thing about [ __ ] is that there's a continued interrelation between the dead and the living that the the the the traditional roman catholic and to some degree anglican practice of praying for the dead is that you can help them through your prayers and they can also help you through their prayers so there's this interrelation with the ancestors and this is taken for granted in most cultures in traditional chinese households um there's an ancestor shrine as there is in japanese households where people recognize and acknowledge their ancestors in african societies it's absolutely taken for granted uh that ancestors are part of the society even though they're invisible they're very much interacting with it um and i think that was a very common sense all over europe the protestant reformation attempted to stop that uh break that link with the ancestors and confined the ancestors to a kind of state of immobility and sleep uh until the last judgment when they woke up judged they tried to get rid of purgatory um in in in their view but it sort of come back within the anglican church uh to some degree and it's still there in the roman catholic church so i think this is part of our own cultural heritage as well it's interesting that that the deep psychedelic experiences almost always involve uh this life review actually uh you you you're put in a place where you can review your life almost from outside and and look at the effect of your behavior upon others and and experience how your behavior affected them it's a fascinating process something very mysterious is is going on here i think it's just an incredibly mysterious thing to be alive at all and i'm not sure if we'll ever get to the bottom of the mystery but i'm i'm glad that people are at least looking into it oh i think it's more or less as you're saying about the these ayahuasca journeys it's i think we get an intensified experience of the dream realm through psychedelics i don't think it's a totally different realm i think it's the same kind of thing as dreams but the more aware of it is much more intense as an experience we're more conscious of it and i think that the in the dream route is not just solipsistic i think even in ordinary dreams the fact people can have shared dreams the fact people can have um precognitive dreams about things that haven't yet happened the the fact people have teleport telepathic dreams and the fact that dreams can involve shared archetypal forms like ganesh in the dreams of hindus i think suggests to me that the dream real our dream realms overlap with each other and possibly with those of animals as well you know dogs dream and maybe we overlap with the dreams of our pets and um so i think that this the postmortal dream state that i'm suggesting we might be in would include not only other people including our ancestors and friends and those who've gone before us who died before us but also um the traditional christian view is that this would also include saints who are the blessed dead who've um people who've been particularly saintly during this life who after death are able to help others in the dream state in the christian belief then christ himself through having gone through death is a major figure in that post mortal realm who can help and guide us in our onward journey and that's one of the points of what christians --- that seems to be part of reality that doesn't seem to be we're not necessarily on a single journey to achieve a single goal and um so that i think is part of the meaning of life and part of the reason we're here um it may not be do you believe that reincarnation is possible i mean you should do if if consciousness is separate from the brain i'm not a dualist exactly in the sense that i don't see the body the the traditional deer is views constant is totally separate from the brain comes into a body goes out and goes into another body um i have a slightly different view i think that all our bodies and all the sleeping people in the world and while we're awake here in in europe you know people are sleeping in australia and new zealand there's constant millions of people at any given time who are asleep and who are dreaming who are maintaining a kind of collective human dream world which contains this collective human imagination which contains dream bodies including dream bodies of the departed but you could argue it's sustained by physical bodies of those who are currently dreaming from this point of view if all human beings became extinct the human dream world might stop but that hasn't happened so it's just a different way of thinking about it from you know a soul leaving a body going through a body and re-entering another body totally detached um i've i mean for me the the reincarnation is not an act of faith in the sense i don't believe in it um or feel i need to believe in it um i think the evidence that of children who remember previous lives as in in stevenson's studies is very convincing that some children who when they begin to speak start talking about another life they had before they name people they say what they did they give lots of facts that can be checked up on and they often turn out to be true what this shows to me is that they're tapping into memories of the previous person does it prove that they are that person well then that's a whole question almost a theological question that the hindus and the buddhists have different answers to and have had for more than 2 000 years sorry to interrupt but does this connect to your morphic resonance work and and can you explain exactly what you mean by that well yes i think that the morphic resonance thing is a transfer of memory based on the base of similarity and i think we tap into the memories of lots of people in the past uh through collective memory but if we collect tapped into one particular person in the past we had a sort of amplified memories from one person rather than diluted they less diluted than usual in this collective memory then you could have the transfer of individual memories um the buddhists would say that rebirth involves a transfer of memories but it doesn't involve a transfer of the core personality because there's no such thing as an endearing self anata is one their doctrine hindus think there is an enduring so the difference between hindus and buddhists is both agree about the transfer of memories but hindus have a straightforward reincarnation theory and buddhists don't um even though they both agree about reincarnational rebirth it's interesting i i'm lucky enough to be a grandfather i have six grandchildren and a seventh on the way and when i when i see these these young beings these newborn beings come into the world they already have personalities right from the beginning they they have personalities their life experiences will shape and develop those personalities but they come in already with a personality and that's one of one of the reasons i'm i'm really quite attracted to the idea of reincarnation it makes a lot of it makes a lot of sense to me the universe invests in this huge project of physical life why why just use it once you know there are lessons to learn here i i suppose what i'm coming to is a personal philosophy i i think of i think of physical life as a theater of experience that we're in some way that i don't understand i don't go for god i don't i don't believe in a individual creator god but in some ways we're we're here to learn lessons to learn and to grow and to develop and in some way to perfect and uh and improve ourselves and it may take more than one lifetime to do that i think that the uh question of individual identity is rather an ambiguous one because you know we live in a highly individualist society that emphasizes individual differences and individual development in traditional societies there's much less emphasis on individual characteristics um more on kind of archetypal roles that people play but it's also interesting that if you look at the traditional beliefs about life after death they're really about letting go of our individuality you know the absorption into the one uh or into nirvana in in in a buddhist um when people are liberated from the karmic bonds or in hinduism when people are limited uh liberated become a free spirit liberated from the bonds of habit and karma and memory um that liberation involves letting go of all the things that make us an individual and characterize our particular personal memories and characteristics and in the christian tradition too the idea is that through purgatory through the ongoing development we lose our many of the features that make us ourselves and as saint paul said this is a name even in this life when he said not i but christ within me the idea is that we are filled with the spirit of christ and uh who becomes a more dominant feature of our personality and our actions than our own idiosyncratic selves although those are still there so there's a sense in which most religions involve going beyond our individuality and many people who take psychedelics particularly powerful ones like dmt um talk about an ego loss as part of the process the the very details the details of their own quirky individuality uh become less and less important as they become part of the much of this altered state of consciousness which is transpersonal in many ways i've just i realized we're coming to the to the end of this this discussion but um i'm just recalling the um ancient egyptian judgment scene which um very graphically and symbolically portrayed the the soul enters into the hall of mart goddess marth is the goddess of harmony and cosmic justice um izashiden is confronted by a set of scales on the scales his weight an object that symbolizes the heart of the soul of the individual and on the other scale is the feather of mark the feather of truth and honor and honesty and cosmic justice and you don't want your heart to be heavy in the scales against the feather sitting around the room are the 42 negative assessors who will ask you questions about the life you've lived and those questions actually do include the 10 christian commandments have you killed have you stolen cetera et cetera they're all there you need to be able to answer no to them uh preferably moral behavior seemingly is important in the afterlife destiny of the soul but then there's something beyond that and the bigger question that lies beyond it is you were given the precious gift of life what did you what did you do with it did you did you use it well uh or did you squander it and to come back to the political point it seems to me we live in a society that's designed to encourage us to squander this incredible gift that uh that we've been given and i'm not sure what the long term costs of that will will be but i i do think that death is a moment of reckoning uh when when we must come to terms with the lives we've lived uh and that hopefully we emerge from life a more grown and uh slightly more perfected person than we than we entered it that seems to me the egyptian view and i i kind of like it well as you say it's it's similar in many ways to the christian view and i think that the um actually i myself think the christian view was strongly influenced by the egyptian view um i mean in egypt this afterlife particularly the aspect of projection of this of of the pharaohs i mean the huge technology of death the pyramids the tombs and so on yeah but that was for the few i mean the average egyptian slave who built the pyramids and stuff was not i suppose i have to correct you there there there's like the pyramids are not built by slaves that's uh that's that's a myth there were no slaves in the old kingdom uh and and i've i've climbed the great pyramid five times it's a work of genius every single person who worked on that was a master craftsman they knew exactly what they were doing they were not they were not slaves but i understand your point they were there that the egyptian system was focused on the elite and didn't pay much attention to the to the masses yeah you're right yes so whether or not they were saying there were slaves later certainly period yes yes anyway the point is for most people the this afterlife that was this whole technology of tombs and the texts and all that kind of thing was not for everyone and i see one of the points of christianity is that that um it will kind of democratize this um you know jesus was believed to have ascended into heaven and and sort of opened the way for others to follow so it made it instead of all the instead of needing pyramids tombs etc uh it was made much simpler and much more widely accessible but i think some of the underlying pattern was the same um and so i i think that was one of the the points of early christianity that it offered away into a journey after death uh that previously was accessible only to a small elite um is that just better marketing on the part of the christians or or is there a fundamental truth there well i think it's both i think it was obviously good marketing but it spread and and was very popular and i mean the alternatives weren't very attractive you know the jewish vision of sheol you go down into a kind of shadowy underworld all the greek hades you know these are shadowy underworlds much less attractive than ascensions journeys upwards after death rather than journeys downwards um so yes i these are all different models uh of of the afterlife but i think all of them actually would take place in various different dream realms and there are many countless realms in in dreams there are nightmares and some people have nightmares on a recurrent basis and personally i think that the christian descriptions of hell are really descriptions of nightmares of being trapped and and and i would understand those as nightmare-like realms and controversial questions here but christianity itself created nightmare worlds uh physical worlds for for for hundreds and hundreds of years i i mean the the the burning of the burning at the stake of giordano bruno for for example um i'm i'm wondering what what moral strength christianity has to teach us about anything when it's when it's principal officials at certain periods of time behaved in this just utterly cruel and obnoxious and vicious and evil friendly well i agree there were there were various officials who behaved in a terrible and evil way but there were officials of the british government who behaved in an evil way torture and execution were normal um does that mean we don't want to be british and there were atheists who behaved in a terrible way stalin nazi pol pot i mean they make the inquisition look like a vicar's tea party so you're saying this isn't christianity and such this is a general human proclivity to to wicked and cruel behavior yes well i don't religion should be allowed to cut itself that slack if a religion has been implicated in centuries of cruelty and wickedness it has to take some responsibility for that it can't just pass it off to your human nature i i think it's i think it's time actually religions took responsibility for their behavior towards others as well as preaching about how we should live in the world so i hope you found this discussion between rupert sheldrick and myself of interest and of use i'm intending in the long term uh to start a podcast uh in which i will have encounters with many interesting people from many lines of work all around the world but the central theme as was the theme in our discussion just now will be challenging the mainstream narrative there are narratives that control our lives and that seek to control the way we think and my project is to challenge those controlling narratives you