 There's one aspect of formation which is repetition and morphic resonance is really a theory of repetition and habit. It says that once new forms have appeared, the more often they appear, the more likely they are to appear again. So that helps to explain form, the appearance of repetitive forms, and after all most things we see are repetitive. It doesn't explain the first time an oak tree appears, the first time there's a feather, the first time there's an eye, the first time there's a star or galaxy or a zinc atom or a hemoglobin molecule. So there has to be in evolution as well a principle of creativity, a creative principle whereby new forms, new patterns can appear. We know they do appear. Now how we explain creativity is a big metaphysical question and there are several alternative answers to it. I leave it open because it depends very much on people's worldview. Yes I think that there are fields that organize social groups and I've looked at these in animals because all social animals have social fields. They all have to coordinate members of the group and when you look at flocks of starlings for example which we have here in England and the winter huge flocks up to a million birds, they fly around before dusk and the whole flock can change direction almost immediately without the individuals bumping into each other. They know not only where the others are but where they're going to go and the same is true of schools of fish and so there's something about animal groups they can be coordinated by some kind of invisible connection and the best computer models of these flock behaviors treat them as as fields as if they're a bit like iron filings in a magnetic field. I think this would be a brilliant way of testing morphic resonance and I'm not a gamer myself and I don't know people who program games but I can help. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Allen? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Allen Sokian. I'm so excited to be talking about morphic resonance. We have Dr. Rupert Sheldrick joining us on the show. Hi Rupert. Hello Allen. Thanks so much for coming on the program. I am very pumped for those who don't know Rupert's background. Rupert is a biologist and 16 time author slash co-author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance which posits that natural systems inherit collective memory. He has studied developmental biology and plant physiology from Cambridge to Hyderabad. Most recently fascinated with unexplained human and animal abilities. You can find his links in the bio below Sheldrick.org as well as his YouTube and Facebook pages. Check those out. Rupert, I have absolutely loved where you've been coming from these last couple of decades. I think that what you're putting out into our world is extremely necessary for this big picture synthesis of science and spirituality and also for it to give us a more clear metaphysical picture of what the true nature of reality really is. That is the ultimate first principle question. You're really putting energy towards unleashing that at its fullest. Let's just jump right into morphic resonance because I messaged you about this. It seems to be one of the most pressing questions around the question of metaphysics in the sense of how is it possible that a pattern of activity like a seed contains all of the trunk, the branches, the leaves, the fruits and then it is also recursive as it has more seeds. How does a zygote contain the embryo, the baby, the child, the adult and the potential for more humans, recursion? How does the big bang contain all the matter, stars, planets, civilizations and the potential for more big bangs, recursion? There's no DNA during cosmogenesis that dictates this morphological development. The question we ask is what is the information? What is the pattern, the underlying habits unfolding across these examples? How does it work, Rupert? How does it relate to more thick resonance? Well, there are many forms in nature. Atoms are forms, molecules are forms, crystals are forms, plants and animals, planets, stars, galaxies. All of these are forms in the sense that they're self-organizing structures of activity. Clearly, at the moment of the big bang, there were no forms. The universe was totally amorphous. So all these forms have come into being as the universe has evolved. And the same is true of an egg. I mean, the big bang's like the hatching of cosmic egg in ancient times. It's kind of mythic, the modern scientific myth. But if you think of an embryo as a zygote, a fertilized egg, that doesn't contain much form either, and yet you and I have eyes and legs and arms and spleens and levers and so on, none of those are in the fertilized egg. More forms appear. So both in individual development, ontogeny and in phylogeny, the evolution of life and indeed of the entire cosmos, more forms appear from less. Now, in the case of living organisms like us, then the forms that appear are repetitions of what's happened before. Every time an oak tree grows, it's like previous oak trees. You and I are like previous humans in many respects. Every time a new star forms, it's like lots of other stars. So there's one aspect of formation, which is repetition. And morphic resonance is really a theory of repetition and habit. It says that once new forms have appeared, the more often they appear, the more likely they are to appear again. So that helps to explain form, the appearance of repetitive forms. And after all, most things we see are repetitive. It doesn't explain the first time an oak tree appears, the first time there's a feather, the first time there's an eye, the first time there's a star or galaxy or a zinc atom or a hemoglobin molecule. So there has to be in evolution as well a principle of creativity, a creative principle whereby new forms, new patterns can appear. We know they do appear. Now, how we explain creativity is a big metaphysical question and there are several alternative answers to it. I leave it open because it depends very much on people's worldview. If you're a materialist and you think there's nothing but matter and chance giving rise to the universe, then there's no higher purpose in anything. It's just chance. But if you think there's a guiding consciousness underlying the whole of nature, the whole of the universe, then there could be creative mind or minds at work in this process. I'm not talking about a kind of intelligent design where it's all done in a kind of like an engineer on a drawing board. I'm thinking more of a creativity that spontaneously takes place that makes things up as it goes along. Anyway, that's another theory of creativity. But basically, morphic resonance is a way of explaining the repetition of forms. And what I'm suggesting is that the DNA that's inherited in the zygote has a limited role in inheritance. It doesn't do everything. Most people assume that genetic is synonymous with hereditary. It isn't. What the DNA does is enables organisms to make particular proteins. It specifies the sequence for amino acids and proteins, like in your hemoglobin or in the keratin in your skin and so on. You need proteins and all the enzymes we have. DNA explains that kind of inheritance, or at least the primary structure of these proteins. There's also epigenetic inheritance, the inheritance of acquired characters, which affects the expression of DNA of genes. But most of the inheritance of form and of instincts, I think, is working through morphic resonance through this kind of collective memory principle. Excellent. Okay, so let's play off of where we, in a sense, it feels as though it's a little bit like Plato's theory of forms and ideas to a certain extent. And also, it feels as though there is a deep connection between that and what you were mentioning regarding creativity and imagination, and also the, as John von Neumann called the universal constructor. And so there's something that is inherent in the cosmogenesis that then downstream creates these mutations in the tape that then, which we, as co-creators, we influence those mutations. At one moment, the imaginative idea of seeing birds and then thinking we should fly across oceans too. And then all of a sudden, every generation after that has access to flying across an ocean in half a day. So we make these mutations along the way. And it's almost as though it's a forms and ideas and imagination and creativity that cause that. Yes. Okay. Well, you see, I think what Plato was saying is that there's a realm of forms or ideas that gives rise to everything in this world. They're a reflection of ideal archetypes or forms. However, he thought those archetypes were totally transcendent in a kind of mind beyond the universe. What I'm saying is closer to what his student Aristotle thought. Aristotle thought that the forms were actually within nature. They were the souls of living things. So for Plato, every horse is a reflection of an eternal horse idea beyond space and time. For Aristotle, every horse has an invisible horse soul which shapes its body as it grows as an embryo and underlies its instincts. And so all the, so it's not outside nature, it's in nature. And for him, soul was a natural causal organizing principle. Every living thing had a soul and he thought that many things were alive, including magnets and the earth and the stars. So what Aristotle was saying is closer to what I'm saying is within nature. But he, like Plato, didn't think in terms of evolution. This is a much more recent idea. So the idea that they didn't think in terms of a memory in nature, they didn't need a memory in nature. If you've got an eternal forms outside nature or inside nature that are fixed already, you don't need a memory. You just take that for granted. But if things are changing as time goes along, as the evolutionary model suggests, indeed it's basic to it, then the idea of memory becomes much more important because these forms are not just manifestations of eternal ready made forms. They're based on adaptations to what actually happens. Organisms are shaped by their environment and they can inherit adaptations. And so it's not just an eternal principle. Now, Rupert, let's touch on, you said earlier, epigenetics. I think this is very important. I think it's also very important to see where we can go beyond epigenetics with morphic resonance. So in terms of science and understanding epigenetics, this was a profound advancement. Actually, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, James Watson, I think that since 1951-23, I think that since then it's only been about 70 years and we've had now a profound transition into what is now going to be the biotechnology age in this next decade and beyond, where we'll have things like a constant stream of our body's biometrics and we'll be able to make tweaks like jets that have hundreds of sensors on them and we'll be able to also increase our longevity and retain youthful homeostatic capacity. And that's all to the thanks of understanding this code of life and also to how to augment it. So this is very profound. And I want to explain briefly that the idea of epigenetics that these newly acquired behaviors leave things like DNA methylation and affect histone tails and that's passed down to future generations. And that's not just behaviors, but that's also things like traumatic instances as well. And if you do things like heal what has been a trauma in your lineage, you can actually butterfly effect that downward and outward. And I think that's very profoundly important. Cells also have very interesting processes like this with their cell cycles and their checkpoints and where they also have if they have a certain amount of protein that's built up that it may be indicating that it was harder to have mitosis happen. So there is a memory mechanism even at the cellular level. And you were mentioning this earlier as well that a lot of what the the was a very profound enrichment that happened from Carl Jung's work with the collective unconscious and archetypes and dating back to what we were talking about with Plato and Aristotle and their mentality around this. This is this is this has been now triangulated on from so many different angles in terms of what is truly underlying in a maybe a sort of implicate as like a David Bohm would say or some sort of a source code or or an or an animistic essence of sorts. And what what is that Rupert that is beyond epigenetics? Well epigenetics as is currently understood epigenetic inheritance is the way in which genes can be switched on or switched off by methylation or changes in histones or whatever. It's conceived of in molecular terms that's one reason it's the taboo against the inheritance of quiet characters was lifted around the year 2000. In the 20th century it was one of the most taboo topics in biology you could lose your job and you suffer serious career damage if you said you believed in the inheritance of quiet characters. Now it's okay. It's a major shift. So that's a welcome change but it things can go further. You see now let's take an example. If you train rats to learn a new trick this is one of the experiments for morphic resonance. It's this experiment's actually been done. It was started at Harvard decades ago. You train them to learn a new trick. It turns out that their children learn it quicker and their children even quicker and it went on over 30 generations them getting quicker and quicker. And this was interpreted as the inheritance for quiet characters because it was from the parents to the children and this became very controversial research because of the taboo against inheritance for quiet characters. Then someone did a control experiment. They tested rats that had whose parents had never been trained in this trick and they found they were getting better too. They were all getting better. Say it wasn't just something passed on through the genes or modification of the genes. There was something else going on and that's I think where morphic resonance comes in. So I think in inheritance we've got several different aspects to inheritance. We've got DNA which explains the structure of proteins and some of its concerned with switching on and off other genes. We've got epigenetic inheritance that can silence or activate genes and that can be passed on in some cases. We've also got morphic resonance and then of course we've got cultural inheritance and that too can involve morphic resonance. When a baby learns a new language for example I think that it's not just a stimulus response psychological process. I think that that learning is accelerated by morphic resonance. So it underlies cultural inheritance as well. Now would it be fair then to say that it is potentially both like you just indicated? There is a tremendous amount of the current scientific paradigm that you just described unlocked the next level of understanding genetics and epigenetics and so we have this general understanding now and the way that that process is part of this inheritance of memory and then we have something else that is at play which you've cited the example with learning with rats but there's also many other you give so many other examples with dogs knowing when their owners come home with nursing mothers and them being able to feel when they have their breast milk and their babies and the need to feed. There's many of these sorts of examples. This kind of is also a little bit leading us into the science and dogma section a little bit but I wanted to just ask especially on I want to know if there's both if both these both coexist you kind of gave the indication that you have on a body level you have the genetics and epigenetics and the further understandings of science and then there's also some sort of an implicate or an ethereal or a spirit or soul or animistic source code-esque contribution and those two things can coexist. Well yes I think that I don't think it's sort of ethereal exactly at least it depends what you mean by ethereal but I think it's a field I think these things work through what I call morphic fields yes and morphic fields are fields and in science we have quite a number of fields and as the magnetic field around the magnet it's you can't see the magnetic field it's in the magnet and it's around it the gravitational field around the earth it's an invisible organizing structure that keeps the moon in its orbit and keeps us down on the ground then there's the electromagnetic field of your cell phone which is active inside the cell phone but extends invisibly beyond it and now all of these are fields and the point fields were first introduced into science in the 1840s they're not part of the original Newtonian mechanistic picture and most of our modern technologies are field-based technologies I mean you know right now we're talking on zoom the whole of this works on electromagnetic fields and transmissions and so on so I think morph genetic fields probably the form shaping fields and morphic fields which is the generic term to cover form shaping fields and behavioral fields and social fields I think these are actual organizing fields invisible organizing structures their patterns or regions of activity in space and time and so it may sound the fact they're invisible and they organize things invisibly some people would say oh wow this must be pseudo science is woo woo and so on but actually that's the basis of the whole of modern science the whole of modern science is explaining the visible in terms of the invisible and once you get into quantum matter fields and the quant zero point energy field and the Higgs boson field we're dealing with a whole range of fields which under my reality they're invisible they give structure and order informed things morphic fields is another kind of field we've already got several kinds within science but I don't think it's yet an exhaustive list yeah you give these though those are very important examples in the not only earth's magnetic field the gravitational poles the all the technology in the last 150 years is now functioning off of these invisible fields to to the human eye this is very important but also even furthermore when you look at even just something as simple as a tree the tree is not just a static tree there's a massive field around the tree that is constantly doing the the O2 and CO2 exchange that is it's just happening all over but from the leaf sections all the time and if you're next to it you're inhaling that and exhaling seriously like you're there's so that's also a big funny thing with the whole identity thing if you identify yourself as just your ego or if you identify yourself as also that tree that's a little bit of a separate thing but you you give also this really important point about social groups I think is very important like you just listed there's just there's something else happening so we're gonna coexist these concepts of genetics epigenetics and the way science is understanding the collective inheritances of of memory but we're also going to add to that picture we're gonna add to that something else that is that that's occurring across a morphic field for humans and there's gotta be ways to do this better I mean we'll give this brief example in sports and then I'll make the the question here but just it's so true that in social groups there's almost some sort of a a morphic field that happens if you've ever been around especially in like northern California what happens is you have an extremely homogenized perspective about a specific topic and you basically can't you can't really enter a new idea into like a social group if there have a homogenized idea and with athletes there's something going on with athletes myself and one have played for so long different sports especially in team sports where there's some sort of a collective intelligence that's happening that is it's it's in a sense it's it's some sort of an extra sensory perception and that there's something going on between the teammates where they're able to be in complete surrendered flow to communication and sharing so ultimately Rupert what we can have science do to further prove this is more randomized control trials around how our capacity to quickly learn around the world new ideas and so this can be a way for science to further probe and understand that with all these examples um yes well looking at social fields um yes I think that there are fields that organize social groups and I've looked at these in animals because all social animals have social fields they all have to coordinate members of the group and when you look at flocks of starlings for example which we have here in England in winter huge flocks of up to a million birds they fly around before dusk um and the whole flock can change direction almost immediately without the individuals bumping into each other they know not only where the others are but where they're going to go and the same is true of schools of fish and so there's something about animal groups that they can be coordinated by some kind of invisible connection and the best computer models of these flock behaviors treat them as as fields as if they're a bit like iron filings in a magnetic field each individual iron filing is not doing the organizing itself it's within a larger structure of which it's part and I think members of social groups are like that I think that's why you were talking about a kind of consensus views that you get in societies I mean scientific paradigms are like that Thomas Kuhn that with it at any given time the scientists share a common model of reality a paradigm um and anything that doesn't fit in is dismissed or ignored or treated as heretical but then there's a scientific revolution and another paradigm takes over another model of reality um and then the same thing happens again I mean his model of scientific revolution was rather like sort of old-style Latin American military dictatorships where you have a kind of dictatorship that's replaced by a different dictatorship it wasn't scientific revolutions have involved replacing one dictatorship of ideas with another they haven't none of them's yet been like the declaration of independence where there's sort of democracy hit science we're still in the old model of you know at any given time and right now the dominant worldview is mechanistic materialism it's coming apart at the edges and it's as I show in my book science set free called the science delusion in the UK and these dogmas of materialism are actually being outgrown by science itself we're going beyond them so there's there's a sense in which social fields constrain our thoughts they also link us together and in team sports um they can lead to this coordination that's sort of unconscious and almost automotive sort of automatic and Michael Murphy looked into this you know the founder of the Esselen Institute who's very keen on on looking at sports as an evolutionary phenomenon and in his book the psychic side of sports um co-authored with real white he um talks about how interviewing he interviewed American football players and a lot of them felt they were sort of telepathic with other members of the team but none of them dared say so in the locker room because they thought the others would think they were weird um but this is going on all the time I think in in sports activities and it's this connection between members of groups within the social field that underlies telepathic phenomena like dogs knowing when their owners are coming home and mothers knowing when their baby needs them when they're miles away from the baby um so I think we're linked together with our members of our families and members with other social groups through these social fields ultimately this is our responsibility to create randomized control trials to probe this in it we can let's okay let's jump into um the the dogma of of science so you you've said this so well in the science delusion and also in uh you know in science set free that the we need to free the spirit of inquiry and that's an just a superb way to put it and another way to put it that I've really enjoyed is the idea of of of of being able to parse and identify where the baby is in the bathwater take the baby out and and drain the bathwater and and the same thing's true for spirituality in the sense of we got to drop the dogmas and fundamentalism in both science and spirituality and we have to and we have to prop up this spirit of free inquiry and and also the idea of polymaths or heretics or just people that are trying to plant a flag beyond like here's an idea of morphic resonance okay great it's beyond the edge of science like we've planted this flag beyond the edge of what we know the here's the perimeter and so the idea is now we have to make randomized control trials we have to make it's a hypothesis it's a theory and now we have to test it and and the idea is that if you just say no no no it's not possible then all you're never actually that that's dogma that's not pursuing science that pursuing science is making actual steps towards that flag and there's many of these flags that we can plant outside of the edge of what's known and so this is really the idea of propping up the baby and draining the the the bathwater and I also really liked a lot how you put the idea of habits rather than laws in a sense because we just in a in a sense we don't know if things like the gravitational force the gravitational constant or the the constant of the speed of light or rupert if we're orbiting the center the black hole in the center of the milkyway every 225 million years and we're going through patches of dark matter or dark energy or if there's different solar flares happening from our sun or the gravitational pull from jupiter or satin or there's a biochemical change that's happening in the center of the magma of the earth or if there's one species on the planet that's causing another species to to to cause us to feel differently when we eat honey or something there's so many things that that we don't know that nature you gave this really good example like imagine if the journal nature or cell or science or whatever if if they just had a like a yearly section or monthly section where they reported like the weather or like the sports scores they reported the scientific habits that have been changing because of what's going on in in the the field of existence so I really thought that that was so eloquently given a visual but do you really do you really feel just one more example here and then I'll I'll hit it back to you with artificial intelligence rupert there's a very interesting way to understand there's a great analogy here where we have now artificial intelligence perception we're talking about a lot we're talking about the second Cambrian explosion in in in perception and what's so interesting is that when when like a fleet of teslas is driving and then the tesla one of them goes through a very specific pattern of activity that they that the collective intelligence that had not experienced before what happens is as soon as that tesla goes through that process of learning from that unique novel experience what it does immediately is it updates the collective database of all teslas knowledge so I love that analogy in a sense of how fast a collective intelligence of artificial intelligence perception can learn and there's some sort of analogy there with humans especially that we can scientifically test how is it that if somebody learns something across the planet that somebody else in a different country across the planet can learn that faster yeah yes well um yeah I agree the this artificial intelligence thing which has this built in learning which is shared um is a bit like morphe resonance and collective memory and that's why it's so powerful of course if you just rely on a programmer programming things with no learning then you know they get it right they get it wrong it works some of the time but this one actually learns and adapts as new situations arise and that's much more like evolution and much more like the collective memory in morphe resonance in terms of what you were saying earlier about controlled experiments to put out a flag to some new hypothesis and they do experience this is of course what I actually try to do is spend doing experiments and um um to try and explore these new areas and let me just describe two experiments which I'm doing at the moment because they're ones that anyone who's listening to this can actually do and I'm always trying to recruit new subjects and since we have a captive audience at least I don't know how big the captive audience is I this is an opportunity I don't want to miss um I've got two experiments online on my website sheldrake.org at the moment um one of them is a joint attention test and here I'm exploring something that I don't think anyone else has ever explored it's it's um the question is if you have two people concentrating on the same thing at the same time or nowadays with mass media we can have millions of people concentrating watching the same tv show for example watching the same football match um millions at the same time is there a kind of resonance between minds when people you're watching the same thing as someone else this hasn't got a standard scientific word I I call it joint attention we know we know that joint attention actually joint attention is established because when babies reach the age of about one they become capable of joint attention and it's a very important part of normal development that that's why with people with babies and toddlers they go around and they'd say doggie and they say oh yes doggie and and you it's joint attention on the same thing is essential for human development uh proper if people who don't have this turn out to be autistic very often uh so it's part of our shared uh world anyway in my joint attention test um you log on online and with another person um in a separate place and then there's a series of trials where in each trial you're sharing a picture you're just watching the screen a picture appears and at random your partner may be showing the same picture or a different picture there's a different pair of pictures for each test um each car lasts any 10 seconds the whole whole test lasts three minutes so um then uh what you're asked after 10 seconds one of the people is asked was your partner looking at the same picture okay and you click saying different you're right or you're wrong by chance you'd be right 50 percent of the time yeah in these experiments it's coming out significantly above chance it's not a very big effect but it's very significant are we talking 55 60 what are we talking we're talking in this case only about 53 54 with thousands of trials it's okay it's very significant yeah and anyway i'm doing a new test at the moment comparing different kinds of pictures it seems to be working better when you're looking at pictures of faces than landscapes for example perhaps because it's more interesting so that's one of my experiments looking at a new phenomenon and then of course i want to scale it up what happens if you've got 10 people looking at the same thing yeah 50 or 100 and of course you could do this live on tv as well where you could do it with millions yes yes this would have an enormous effect in interpreting what's happening in modern culture which involves huge amounts of joint attention yet this is completely unexplored because the standard materialist assumption in science is that minds are nothing but brains and they're insulated inside heads so what you're thinking and looking at has no effect on me at a distance because that's impossible your mind's nothing but the physical activity of your brain the second experiment that i'm running which i invite people to take part in is an experimental test of telephone telepathy more than 80 percent of the population say that they've had the experience of thinking of someone who then rings and they say that's funny i was just thinking about you or they just know who it is when the phone rings before they've looked at the corner id or answered it the phone it's very very common experience and it works especially well with people who know each other well telepathy is about people who are bonded socially now for 100 years or more since the invention of the telephone people have observed this but the so-called skeptics the dogmatic skeptics have said oh well it's impossible that it's really telepathy that can't happen because minds are just inside brains it's impossible for them to have an influence at a distance it's nothing but coincidence and selective memory you remember when you're right you forget when you're wrong and so on anyway i've developed a test to test that and how the test works is you register on my website shellgate.org you put in the names of two friends or family members people you know well and their telephone numbers the computer then at a randomized time picks one of these two people at random calls them up so say i was doing the test and you were one of my callers yeah say my wife jill was the other one and you get a call saying this is rupert's telepathy test please think about rupert when you're ready press one you press one my phone in rings the corner id says telepathy test it says one of your two callers is on the line right now waiting to speak to you press one for alan press two for jill so i then say who i think it is out of these two people and as soon as i guess that's recorded on a database the line opens up and i get instant feedback as to whether i'm right or wrong and then i can talk for up to a minute it cuts off after a minute because i'm paying for the call and this test is giving you know very significant positive results in in my earlier versions of the test i had four callers and they're the chance rates 95 percent and we were getting rates average rates of about 45 percent you know with hundreds of massively significant statistically yeah and this so this what i'm trying to do at the moment is to find out people can get better at this by practice and if so how they practice how they can develop their intuition so what i'd like to say to anyone listening to this is that if you're in the us can draw uk or is the test doesn't work anywhere else at the moment um then check it out try it with your friends it doesn't take very long about 10 minutes for your time to do one of these tests spray spaced over an hour in the mouth or a couple of hours and um this um if i'm inviting people to try and find how to train their intuition i don't know how to train they are not that good at these things i score above chance because i'm not brilliantly intuitive so i'm asking other people to help with this and and in fact it could turn into a competition who's got the best intuition yeah yeah a global competition and well it could end up with it could even end up if people find they can practice and get better at it it could even end up with a telepathy olympics olympics who's the most retell person in the world yeah and then i think when we get to that stage all these boring old skeptics who just saw it possibly the evidence isn't there it doesn't exist this way i mean they'd still exist but they'd become like the flat earth society yeah fringe group they are a fringe group anyway but they pretend they speak for the the science establishment they don't really but they pretend to anyway here's a wow wow yeah yeah this yeah that that you're what you just summarized there with the joint attention the study in the telephonic telepathy study was basically the essence of what i was getting at with actually when you plant a flag beyond the edge and then further as you actually you yourself create the tests to further prove the hypothesis and then try and inspire other people around the world to not only create not only participate in your test but also create their own tests to try and prove these hypotheses and also i actually really appreciated the i think the structure of the two that you spoke about it's very important first of all the joint attention study i i really like how for both of them that you can crowdsource people from around the world well us uk and uh australia and it in italy it's really that's the telephone one the joint attention test works everywhere so anyone's everywhere so so this is this is a big deal because if you can get people from india and brazil and russia and all these other countries around the world that are that can that can do the uh you know joint attention one and beyond let's see if we can get people around the world doing these i appreciate how i think the structure rupert that you were describing as somebody that is also a fellow science scientist science advocate science communicator it's just for me to for me to view the the style of your experiments it sounds quite robust and in the sense of even getting even getting small incremental differences of training and tuition you can't you can't pick up a basketball and just walk on to a court and start shooting three-pointers you can't pick up a violin and just start playing Mozart you you you have to train your intuition you have to train these telepathic abilities in order for you to bump up like in that example where there's you know four in telephone telepathy if there's four options of my four friends and if on my rate is only supposed to be 25 but if i'm hitting 45 that's significant and that's also a big deal if i'm slowly trying to compete if i'm becoming the united states's best most intuitive telephone telepathist and then i'm competing against the united kingdoms and germany's and and china's and i think that's a very interesting style of of trying to you know if rupert if we can take that flag beyond the edge of what's known if we can incentivize people to partake through a sports style olympic style process like what you're teaching i think that's also very fun and it's engaging and also the joint attention thing has a lot to do with the modern day we're approaching all eight billion people soon to be connected on the planet and if you can release a piece of content and then watch how people watch the content and if they can tell if there if other people that they're engaging with if this person if if rupert is also watching the um the advancement that's been made in biotech or if rupert's watching the advancement that's being made in blockchain and cryptocurrency and then i pick which one rupert's you know watching and i think that's very interesting given the fact that all eight billion people are now we can there's a collective zeitgeist that's happening all the time with this pacer of the cycle of media absolutely well i think this is that's why i think it's so topical at the moment the whole question of joint attention there's never been a capacity for so many people to have so much joint attention and now everyone agrees of course that we're interlinked through the internet and through news media and through radio and television and so forth um but the big blockage to these inquiries within institutional science is this materialist assumption the mind's nothing but the brain and that's why no one's doing research on this and it's also one reason why i've i like doing research in the public domain and i like doing it outside universities and where anyone can take part but it's also i'm forced to work that way because these subjects are so taboo there's almost no university where you could actually do this research and hold down a job and you know because the the opposition to these things is is very very strong from dogmatic materialists i mean most ordinary people are not opposed most ordinary people are interested in these phenomena but within the academic world there is this problem of dogmatic materialism anyway i tried just to get a go go on doing research and get on with these experiments yes there's enough people who participate for the results to come in and of course uh morphic resonance experiments are also possible in the human realm um it's it's hard to set up morphic resonance experiments online because what you're trying to do in morphic resonance is seeing if a skill gets easier as time goes on is it getting easier to learn skateboarding windsurfing snowboarding skydiving etc the problem is in real world grouper could it be something like teaching a brand could it be like a brand new sport because skateboarding and all these other sports are already they're known but if we made up a new sport in some random location across the planet and then the general idea is that if i picked people of approximately same cognitive capacity and in in one part of the planet and we taught them a brand new never been thought of before sport and then we picked other people of the general similar cognitive capacity and we and we measured the time that it took them to learn this brand new sport that no one's ever heard of and that's the idea of how we could do that absolutely they should be able to learn it quicker but the problem is you know i spend a lot of time thinking about experiments and the the problem with this particular one is that now everything is so interconnected with the internet that if you train a group of people and you say look we're training you this really new sport no one else has ever done in the world within seconds one of them is going to have it on instagram hey guys i'm learning this sport and it's going to go all over the world so um the only way of actually doing this would be to have a group of people who really are cut off from the rest of the world you know prisoners for example or have it done right away like if you if you take and just and you ask them hey guys just for the rest of the day don't post about this on on the internet quite yet even though that is like our extended phenotype in a sense but just don't post about it on the internet yet and then have the group and you know if we're doing this in texas and then we have somebody in oxford and somebody in melbourne that that are that are also going to do it just literally 15 minutes after the one in texas completes yes yeah that's good a good idea and actually where this would probably be it would probably be easiest to do using some kind of new video game which involves some kind of new skill that you have to learn to do the video game so this could be built into some kind of new gaming platform um where you could have a completely new thing in a video game whether you have to solve particular problems um that um no one solved before and then it might be possible to get people doing it you know 15 minutes later in melbourne australia and that sort of thing um and see if they do it quicker okay like like a sort of in in a sense it would be like if i'm entering into a game because i'm a huge i'm a huge gamer it um and have been and i think a lot of people around the world are because it kind of creates a an idea of a deeper idea about who we truly are and how this is already virtual reality but we'll get there in a moment the idea is that it could be the immersion into a game where i have to do a never before done puzzle of sorts and i and i do that never before done puzzle and then immediately as soon as i'm done they're triggered in a different country around the world the next person begins doing the puzzle then the next person and these are gamers that have generally the same cognitive capacity and generally the same dexterity and video game um uh capacities their their abilities have been trained so it's not like somebody that has never held a game controller before versus somebody that has yeah that's right well maybe there'd be a people who do this might have to do some kind of preliminary test to show that they're up to a certain level of skill yes um or there are certain games have levels anyway pick people who are at a certain level um anyway the point is with large samples it doesn't really matter about matching them too much you can do things with you know if you've got thousands of people taking part yeah the individual differences tend to cancel out with very large samples as long as they're not a systematic bias in favor of smart people doing it first and less smart people doing later that's so rupert would would you say that um i see where i see where you're going there that's that's beautiful so the idea is that if we could recruit just uh a thousand people around the world to to do the same puzzle that's never been done before but that we make this we design this puzzle and then we kind of have a domino effect of the 1000 people in different countries around the world as soon as the first person's done it's a brief puzzle maybe it only takes a minute um to get it done or two minutes or whatever and then the next person starts the next person starts as soon as the other one finishes and the idea would be that generally speaking it should be if the first person takes four minutes to get it done by the end of the 1000 the last person should be getting it done in one minute or something like that there should be a significant increase well it would be the points would be scattered you know it'd be like drawing a graph through scattered points and you know statistical techniques tell you if you can see a significant trend would there be a significant trend towards it getting easier you can statistics enables you to deal with individual differences when you're looking for trends so you've been looking for a trend and uh then i mean the more people the better actually yeah the trend i mean there is i i think this would be a brilliant way of testing morphic resonance and i'm not a gamer myself and i don't know people who program games but i can help i can help yeah i rupert the reason why we you know we have these conversations also is not only for people to get um inspired about pushing beyond the edge of what's known like what you're doing and and signing up at shell drake.org for the joint attention study and the telephone telepathy study but also you know for them to design the games and then for them to do these new studies around the world that can begin proving this rupert we're gonna carry the flag very strong moving forward and and and i agree that i think through games especially i mean there's so many uh even in the last five years there's so many i know that um you know stanford and and harvard and ucsf and so many places around the world have started doing where you just take your your device you you take you take your device and it's something as simple as just getting that that uh that notification that there's a new game that a new puzzle where we're doing a test of morphic resonance and and you know you get the notification and and you and you do the you do the puzzle and you're part of the study and you might get paid you know uh five bucks for participating it because we got a grant from an ultra high net worth family around the planet that is very interested in this exact phenomenon and so this is the future that we're ushering and this is a big central part of of this project and so it's totally available today to do things like that oh great well i mean anything you can do to help this along allen would be very very welcome that would be great um i think this would be astonishingly interesting yes we have the tools now to do so um rupert i have a guys a call to action get something like this out into the world faster um and and uh and let's find out these these what's beyond the edge of what's currently known and let's test it scientifically and in a fun and engaging way like through like through solving puzzles and games and things like that this is a really fun part of of the conversation rupert rupert i have a i have a couple more um quick questions that i would like to ask you um all okay okay cool um if our nature of reality is truly the one indivisible um indescribable hole that we are and that the nature of reality is truly that consciousness that is experiencing itself across these eight billion dissociative boundaries and that the the idea then would be i'm curious what you think would it be fair to use an analogy like a dreamed symphony been playing around with this i'm curious what you think that we are that that that unity that unity of a symphony and that each one of us in the symphony is playing a different instrument i'm playing the cello you're playing the clarinet someone else is playing the sax someone else the drums and that we're even people that are playing the same instrument are playing different melodies or harmonies and that actually your son right cosmos a musician right yes yeah okay and so the the the idea is that if i'm if and by the way the conductor is like a is an attractor so there's like a you know the the mathematical system is we're comp the there's a mathematical attraction for our complex system to evolve towards this attractor which which could be like a oral boros or something like a you know an automata orthogenesis to a recursive function or something but the point is that like is the dream symphony analogy a good way for us to understand like if i'm playing more out of tune let's say my cello i'm playing more out of tune that because i'm serving to myself but if you're playing your clarinet and you're playing it in tune that's because you're playing service to other and so the other so the idea is that we are going through some sort of a a dreamed symphonic artistic oneness evolution and that we can both integrate into the symphony and differentiate like in calculus of our unique contribution how do you how does that dream symphony analogy for the nature of reality resonate well it does rather assume that everything is working together to start with i mean a symphony orchestra they have to have a shared agenda to play to have a symphony together and excuse me and it's it's not um immediately obvious that there is at least as far as a whole of humanity is concerned a shared symphony i mean the president of the united states and you know the various figures in islamic fundamentalist movements etc i mean the there's so many different points of view the you know hindu nationalists in india you know chinese ascending power etc it's not clear that everyone sees themselves as part of a coordinated symphony of humanity and for the dream symphony to i think people would have to sign up to be part of a dream symphony orchestra for this particular metaphor to work it's not obvious that's the case you could argue that there are underlying creative forces that i mean i myself think there are working through history and that conflict is part of it and that the conflict plays its part in the creative evolution of things i mean a personal example when my book uh science set free came out my ted talk my ted x talk in 2013 the called the science delusion uh was taken down by ten from their main website because of protests from militant materialists pz admires and jerry coin who are both militant richard dorkin's type materialists and ted tried to suppress this talk or at least hide it completely unsuccessfully and but this attack from these people who wanted to stop me having a platform uh led to an enormous controversy on the internet the result is that at least six million people have seen this talk now whereas before their protests any about 30 000 had seen it so um they were playing their part and you know i don't have a kind of personal hostility to people like jerry coin and stuff i mean they're playing their part in this drama but dream symphonies also include dissonances i mean music's not all harmony and you know the dissonance is a part of it so it may be that the jerry coin is part of this dream symphony without realizing it um so i okay okay so it could also be fair to say that not only is it that we may have different national agendas across the planet uh in parts of this symphony but also just that in general um within the symphony the playing out of tune is not only when you're trying to like hoard things in service to self-mentality but it's also when you are um being militant in one specific dogma and yeah i i think that's very interesting thank you for pointing that out yeah okay and of course people may also play out of tune out of sheer incompetence so um rupert um i want to ask you on a on a on a telos perspective um given the fact that artificial intelligence is now significantly for deeper emergence so are virtual realities which are kind of in a sense when you when you immerse yourself in one for an extended period of time you in a sense could say that holy cow how am i not already in one how is this not already one so we have ai we have vr we have simulation technology simulation theory could be that where these technologies are triangulating on the same thing in the sense that the eastern spirituality has been saying for the longest time that the dreamer the ultimate dreamer of infinite consciousness ends up uh in this dream that we're in now wakes up and then goes right back into another dream as in the oroboros continues so is the west what is the telos is the west focus on ai vr simulation tech could that be what john smart calls the transcension hypothesis when we go inward into these substrates and that we uh continue the oroboros and that we keep going through more and more big bangs and that that is our in that is our uh that that's our attractor is that the telos what do you think about that well i think that there's there's a sense in which artificial intelligence virtual reality you know are expanding the realm certainly of what machines can do and also of things like games and whatnot and i think there's a parallel exploration going on which is non technological through this the renewed research on psychedelics because psychedelics after all a way of opening up the imaginal world um particularly the visionary ones i mean i wasca lsd mushrooms and so on which have an enormously liberating effect on the imagination for many people um i mean they're not for everyone and i'm not advocating indiscriminate use of psychedelics and especially not encouraging people to do anything illegal i mean i have to say these disclaimers um but the fact is that um there's as well as this exploration um we've also got a parallel exploration going on and in fact in places like silicon valley the exploration through psychedelics um is often happening in the same people who are engaged in in the especially in computer graphics um and visualizing things and virtual reality so i think here we've got this expanded range of explorations that aren't based on technology i mean personally i think they're more fun when they're not based on technology i mean i'm not very technological myself um but i think there's exploration of consciousness um which after all has happened in the east through meditative techniques it's happened in the west through meditative techniques i mean a contemplative christianity in the middle ages and since then in the catholic and the orthodox tradition monks and nuns living in enclosed orders some of them spend hours a day in meditation and prayer and they're exploring realms of consciousness and they're not just exploring their own consciousness the whole point is that through meditation and these spiritual practices you come into contact with other forms of consciousness that's the whole point of my recent books and the most recent one being ways to go beyond and why they work seven different spiritual practices which have been scientifically investigated and are about exploring these realms of consciousness beyond our normal everyday consciousness so i think what's exciting at the moment is there's a new phase of spiritual evolution beginning through the widespread availability of spiritual practices and scientific studies of them and also all these amazing technological adventures and i think they're complementary i don't think it's one or the other yeah there's a big convergence that is happening there and whatever the telos ends up being wherever the attractor of the complex system is heading it's inevitably in order to be happy and have great well-being and have good amounts of peace and collective prosperity and individual flourishing one needs to embody what you write about in ways to go beyond where you where you talk about specifically also the practices of doing things like meditation i think people also forgot that even the word yoga means union in sanskrit it's not holding stretching positions and it means union with the divine whatever your unique combinatoric is with the divine and also gratitude is such a prominent one that is so important and it's the way that science and spirituality are converging which you've written about so much going out in nature um very very very last thought is um you are the fifth person now including let's see here dr obrida gray um dr robert a jimian dr kirill piaz kevich uh and jonathan keiths and now dr rupert shell drake um i'm trying to keep a list of these people because you guys are the only people that i know that do not own cell phones and what what you have you have said well i'll i'll say what you know obrida gray has called it the ultimate destroyer of personal solitude you have said i do not want to be interrupted all the time and for example with me this device has been off now for quite a long period of time so that i can finish this project and it's going to be off so that i can continue finishing this project so will you please briefly speak to especially the millennial and generation z that is now using the devices nonstop we use them 150 times a day um we speak to the importance and cal newport talks a lot about the idea of deep work and we've been talking about this for so long but just the the focus and neurobiologists are talking about it now the importance of that focus for achieving big goals in your life will you just briefly mention um talk about that for a moment well yes i mean cell phones are obviously highly convenient and they're essential for many people's work life and and so they obviously have their uses um but they can easily become a means of constant distraction and the whole point of um deeper work is being able to be focused and concentrate and constant distraction of drip feed of news and social trivia on facebook and other social media and so um is just ultimately distracting and so i think that one of the things i suggest actually in ways to go beyond i have a chapter there on the importance of holy days and festivals and it was always a tradition i mean in the in the judaic tradition having the sabbath a day when you don't work the whole point of the sabbath is that you it's a day it's a holy day a holy day is a holiday it's the same word yeah you you it's a holy day because you don't work and then the purpose of it is to give thanks to god to make love to be with your family to play music to have fun and then for christians it's sunday for muslims it's friday but decide this pattern of a sabbath a day in the week when you we now have a weekend two days but the trouble is these have now gotten golfed by 24 seven culture so shopping malls are open or at least they were until the covid lockdowns and you know constant amazon deliveries online shopping 24 seven and this is completely abolished this necessary time it's part of human nature to have time off together and for people who are forced to work on sundays because they work in a shop in a shopping mall for example then the employer says oh you can have tuesday off instead that's not the point because everyone else is working on tuesday it's it's being together being alone altogether as one wishes to have a time away from all this work life and the the workaholic culture which america has spread to the rest of the world with seven procedures uh i mean america is the place where it's worst i think workaholism um is it really does need something doing about it for our own sanity and so i think that the minimum thing i'd suggest is having a technological sabbath i mean ideally on if you're jewish on saturday if you're christian from a christian background sunday if you're muslim background on friday um but have a have a day when you don't work when you don't when you do just have time to read books listen walk in nature do some gardening hang out with friends make love uh play music uh you know and and not be distracted the whole time so i think that for people who need these devices for their work who've become dependent on them earning a living i mean and many people have um obviously you can't just give them up but having a technological sabbath and actually ideally combining it with a real sabbath a real holy day once a week and then observing the festivals i think it's very important to most people observe in america thanksgiving and christmas um but there are other festivals throughout the year which are important and for me an important one is september the 29th the feast of saint michael and all angels which is a time to become aware of all those forms of consciousness beyond the human level and the ancients thought that every star and planet had its own intelligence which was an angel i mean they weren't humanoid beings with wings they were the intelligences of the celestial bodies the whole heavens is full of intelligence in that world for you and for me the feast of saint michael and all angels is a way to connect with all those forms of non-human intelligence beyond our own the feast of the day of the dead november the second which is a very big deal in mexico and in many catholic countries is the feast when we acknowledge and remember the ancestors those who've gone before november the first all saints day all halos day um is when we remember the blessed dead and the famous dead and november the second everyone else and for most people they've just forgotten about these festivals instead children remember the eve of these festivals halloween that's become a sort of orgy of dressing up as witches and and eating candies and stuff but the festival itself has been hollowed out and for me again november the second is a day when i i was going to a requiem mass i remember my dead parents and ancestors my dead friends and all those i know and who will give thanks for who've gone before on november the first i give thanks to all those who've been my teachers who are now departed and who've influenced me so i think having throughout the year you see there are these special days the festivals each with its own purpose and their holidays traditionally um so that there's time to give attention to these other things so i think recovering a sense of sacred time yes is very important and switching off cell phones uh when one's doing that is is a very important part of it so i would say that starting the special days holy days and festivals um and then maybe extending it out further to only having it on set and as a day it would be a good way to go it's not a good way to go to have one's entire life engulfed by 24 seven workaholic culture so well said these technological sabbaths also these rituals that have been passed on for so long to have like you talk about the brief moment before you dig into your dinner and with your family just hold each other's hands and close your eyes and reflect on the beauty of the fact that you are sharing a meal there's so many different ways there's all these days that are celebratory days to just take a sabbath away from technology and workaholism and just tune more inward and music make love um go play be in nature do art um this is so beautiful and i'm really happy that that you listed i it's going to be really important potentially even moving forward to do things like just have a have date have more days where we just say okay turn down the economic machinery today and turn up the spiritual machinery today we're gonna have to have more days like that in the future that was beautifully said rooper thank you so much for coming on to the program and for teaching us everything that you have today this has been an honor and a pleasure we're very grateful thank you well fun to be with you alan thank you thank you thanks everybody for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode with rooper please let us know what you're thinking about all the different things that rooper was teaching about and talking about we would love to hear your thoughts on those things you can also find all the links in the bio below to shell drake.org also um on shell drake.org you can find all of his different books that he's authored and co-authored go check those out rooper it also has the the joint attention study as well as the telephone telepathy study for you to go and participate in go and participate in those and actually go and share those around the world get more people participating in them and then also make your own studies like we were talking about regarding like things like puzzle video games guys let's go do that around the world those are going to be important check out rooper's youtube channel he's constantly uploading more and more great content on there um did you have something you wanted uh to briefly say about the studies or yeah no i think that's so fine you you come and branch to the other thank you okay okay excellent excellent yeah good um and that's that's it support the artists the entrepreneurs the spiritual leaders the scientists in your communities that you believe in support them and help them flourish you can support rooper you can support ourselves and and the simulation in our show all of our links are in the bio below go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much thank you for tuning in we will see you soon