The Most Controversial Biologist Alive Breaks Down Telepathy

Our American Alchemist this week is Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist, author, and former Cambridge University research fellow best known for his groundbreaking and controversial theories on morphic resonance, consciousness, and the extended mind. --------------------- You can support American Alchemy by signing up with our incredible sponsors below! “Ahead of All Parting: On Learning to Live with an Open Heart” by Barry Michels is the inspiring story of Michels's spiritual, emotional, and creative transformation. It offers lessons on living a more meaningful life, written with the exquisite clarity conferred as the end comes into focus. https://www.porchlightbooks.com/products/ahead-of-all-parting-barry-michels-9781966302179 Ketone-IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/ALCHEMY for 30% OFF your first subscription order! Venice AI: Experience private, unrestricted AI at https://venice.ai/americanalchemy and use code americanalchemy for an exclusive discount! Grab your American Alchemy merchandise here! https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ --------------------- Sheldrake has spent decades investigating phenomena that challenge conventional scientific explanations, from telepathic connections between humans and animals to the possibility that nature itself has a collective memory. In this conversation, we explore his theory of morphic fields, whether our minds extend beyond our brains, and how invisible forces might influence seemingly random events. We also dive into precognitive dreams, animals predicting earthquakes, the possibility of a conscious sun, and whether AI can ever replicate the full capabilities of the human mind. Finally, Sheldrake shares his thoughts on the physics of angels, the limitations of modern science, and the spiritual practices that can make our lives happier and more meaningful. Follow Rupert Sheldrake and explore his current work: Substack — Essays, research reports, exclusive videos, and discussions on consciousness, telepathy, science, and spirituality. https://rupertsheldrake.substack.com/ Website: https://www.sheldrake.org/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RupertSheldrakePhD Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rupertsheldrake/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RupertSheldrake--------------------- Support Our Other Projects Below! Grab Your American Alchemy Merch Here ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Join The American Alchemy Magazine Here ➤ https://americanalchemymagazine.substack.com/ Subscribe To Our Clips Channel (10 Minute Highlights!) ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8ZKTXN9trt5dhixz6b6l6w Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@jessemichelsclips Apply For Jobs ➤ https://jobs.gusto.com/boards/american-alchemy-3758eda5-237b-45f1-b043-da80a300714e Sponsor Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] --------------------- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Introduction 3:24 - Sovereignty, AI and the Turing Test 5:10 - The Stabbing and What AI Can't Do 7:21 - Turing's Interest in ESP 9:05 - Nursing Mothers and Telepathy 10:36 - Dogs That Know When Owners Return 12:03 - Debating Michael Shermer 12:56 - PEAR, Double Slit and Remote Viewing 14:10 - Who Telepathy Works Between 17:55 - The Sense of Being Stared At 18:48 - Do Images Exist Outside the Head? 22:22 - Transactional Interpretation of Light 24:56 - Bioelectric Fields and Michael Levin 30:09 - What Are Morphic Fields? 33:36 - Extramission, Hoffman and Perception 39:59 - Faraday and the Nature of Fields 43:02 - Ether, Einstein and Superstrings 46:43 - Morphic Fields Meet Quantum Fields 48:50 - Maxwell's Equations and Hal Puthoff 49:55 - Sponsors (Ketone-IQ) 51:21 - Hal Puthoff and David Bohm 54:53 - Oppenheimer, Copenhagen and What Is Real? 56:55 - Fields Act Without Energy 58:37 - Aristotle's Four Causes 1:00:42 - Galton Board Demonstration 1:05:59 - Rats, Spiders and Nature's Habits 1:09:19 - Darwin, Epigenetics and Inherited Fear 1:14:45 - The Bannister Effect 1:16:29 - Resonance Across Space and Time 1:19:49 - A New Physics of Time? 1:23:08 - Waking Before the Alarm 1:27:05 - Precognitive Dreams and 9/11 1:29:28 - Animals Predicting Earthquakes 1:32:44 - Explaining Synchronicities 1:35:31 - Entropy, Re-enchantment and AI 1:44:58 - Parapsychology, China and Bob Jahn 1:51:52 - Presentiment on the Trading Floor 1:54:02 - Is the Sun Conscious? 1:55:36 - Electric Universe and Dark Matter 1:57:06 - Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud 1:59:31 - Long-Delayed Echoes and Contact 2:01:16 - Ball Lightning and Land of Chem 2:02:31 - The Physics of Angels 2:07:57 - Angels, Demons and UFOs 2:10:22 - Spiritual Practices and Gratitude 2:15:55 - Sponsors (Venice) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  There are many mysteries in biology. The shaping of animals and plants as they grow and the shaping of self-organizing systems depends on a new kind of field of physics, which I call morphic fields.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  These morphic fields have a kind of memory given by morphic resonance, fields that enable telepathy from the past to the present, a handshake across space and time.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Fields are structures in space, but it's not made of matter.

• 0:59Jesse Michels?

  Rupert Sheldrake, if you're doing experiments that show learned behaviors moving between totally unrelated animals within the same species, that shows that there's something more at play than even epigenetics. And fields influencing us in larger minds operating smaller minds.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  I think our minds extend beyond our brains through fields. And the idea that consciousness has to be in brains, that's much more counterintuitive. It's a conscious world out there that we tap into.

• 1:26Jesse Michels?

  Can we say how morphic fields actually interact with the everyday fields we work with in science?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  The idea of morphic resonance is that there's a memory in each species, each kind of thing. When a baby spider starts spinning a web, it doesn't have to go to spider school. It's tuning into the experience of spiders in the past. So you can test this. Starting at Harvard, they trained rats to escape from a water maze. One exit was lit up and the other one wasn't. And they had to learn to go out of the dim exit or they got an electric shock. And the first generation of rats took about 250 trials. Until after 20 or 30 generations, they got down to about 25 trials. People tried replicating it at Melbourne University in Australia. In every generation, they had rats that had descended from a control line whose parents had never been trained.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  They compared them with rats whose parents had been trained. They all got better. And I think that was morphic resonance.

• 2:21Jesse Michels?

  You wrote a book about the physics of angels. What do you think their physics are?

• 2:25Speaker 01

  When they move from one place to another, from the point of view of the angel, no time elapses. But from external observer, there would be a finite time between it leaving one place where it was acting and reaching the next place, like photons of light.

• 2:40Jesse Michels?

  You famously wrote a great paper about how the sun might be conscious.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Not every random bit of plasma is going to be alive, but organized plasma structures like the sun and the stars, I think, could well be conscious. All lightning, of course, is a form of plasma and behaves in very anomalous ways. It's on the fringe between UFOs and regular physics because regular physicists agree that it happens.

• 3:02Jesse Michels?

  There's even a video, actually, of somebody walking up to a plasmoid and the plasmoids seem to cohere to the heartbeat. You have people often receiving sort of telepathic messages. And Robert Temple talks about Moses's burning bush as just being this plasmoid ball.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  We've got it basically completely wrong, thinking the whole universe is primarily organized by gravity.

• 3:50Jesse Michels?

  Rupert Sheldrake, you are a rare, very heterodox thinker. I think you are a polymath in today's age of hyper-specialization. And you've been somewhat shunned or kicked out by academia, but I think you are far ahead of them when it comes to the true nature of reality. And so it's an honor to be back with you. I feel like I visit you every few years in your beautiful Hampstead Heath abode. And it's an honor to be with you. Thank you.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Good to see you again, Jesse.

• 4:19Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely. I want to start with what a human being is. It feels like our sovereignty is being sort of flanked by, I'd say, two things. One is AI passing the sort of Turing test. It seems like even if it's not necessarily thinking, it's like as-if thinking. And then simultaneously, you have all this stuff that you're studying around self-organizing systems and fields influencing us in larger minds operating smaller, you know, influencing smaller minds. And so what's left for a single human being? And is there something sacred about the individual?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Well, it's a big question, isn't it? I think AI is based on the idea that the brain's a computer. And it, I think, can do very well the kinds of things that computers can do very well. But there's lots of things computers can't do very well. I mean, if I fell and broke my leg, I don't think AI would help me very much. I'd want somebody who could pick me up and an ambulance that could take me to the hospital. And AI might be able to coordinate dispatch times for ambulances, but it's not going to help my leg get treated.

• 5:36Jesse Michels?

  We should note to the audience, that's not a full hypothetical, right? You were stabbed in the leg while you were giving a speech by a man who said that he thought you were telepathically controlling him or something?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Yes, he was a paranoid schizophrenic and unfortunately, you know, delusional.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  But there, there was a case where I actually did need people to carry me on the stretcher to an ambulance. And I'm very grateful they did. And I had a surgeon who knew what to do. I was incredibly grateful for all that. And so AI can help with kind of left-brain things, but it can't help with activities of, you know, doing things. If my plumbing system fails, AI might tell me what's wrong, but it's not going to fix it.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  So obviously, it's got those limitations. But it has another limitation really, which is that because it's based on the model of the brain as a computer, it leaves out all aspects of minds which are not just inside brains.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  For example, well, embodied existence. The fact we're embodied existent. We have sensory systems. I think our minds extend beyond our brains. You know, this is one of the, it's not just me. A lot of people think the mind is extended beyond the brain through fields.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  One manifestation would be in telepathy. Well, AI is not telepathic because it doesn't work that way. Electromagnetic systems don't work that way. And it's not spiritual either. I mean, you and I can have mystical experiences. And I've had them, probably you have, many people have. And that's not something that's in AI. It's to do with the spiritual dimension of minds, which are not captured by a computing system modeled on left-brain type computation. So I think there's many limitations of AI. And I think if one wanted to have a new Turing test,

• 7:44Speaker 01

  it would probably be best to use telepathy. Turing himself was very interested in ESP and in the question of survival of bodily death. And when he put forward what's usually called the Turing test, if you talk to a computer and it gave answers that were just like a person's, you could hardly tell them apart, then that clearly has been passed by AI. AI certainly can do that. But he then had this idea of telepathy as a kind of test, ESP. A computer can't do that because that's not the way they're built. It's not the way they function.

• 8:24Jesse Michels?

  I think the ESP conversation is one that's very hard to have in the sort of scientific model or framework. Because if you show up to an experiment and you're a priori skeptical as the scientific method teaches you that you're supposed to be, all the way back to Francis Bacon, then you're sort of negatively influencing the experiment in this sort of ESP model. If you have this sort of belief underlies reality, you know, kind of ultimate idealism, then you end up with all sorts of fractured realities. It's sort of hard to have a conversation at all. So like, how do we even sort of talk about these things? And do we, do we have a paradigm shift around them? Or do they remain these sort of weak effects in these sort of random event generators or sense of being stared at experiments

• 9:09Jesse Michels?

  or that's in that sort of thing?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Well, when they're tested experimentally, they're usually fairly weak effects. But that's, I think, because telepathic phenomena happen most ordinarily, naturally, under real-life conditions when there's a big emotional charge involved. I'm currently doing research, for example, on telepathy between nursing mothers and their babies. And many nursing mothers have found that when they're breastfeeding, when they leave the baby to go back to work or something like that, they find their milk lets down, which means their breasts start squeezing out milk and their breasts often tingle. That normally happens when they hear the baby cry. But when they go back to work

• 9:57Speaker 01

  and they're miles away from the baby, and that happens, most mothers assume their baby needs them. And I've done experiments which show actually they're right. This coincides with the baby showing signs of distress. And this is not a normal feeding time. It wouldn't be very interesting if they always feed at 2 o'clock and this happens at 2 o'clock. It's when it's not expected.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Anyway, this is something you can do research on. You can film babies, you can film mothers, you can see whether the coincidence is there. But in the nature of this particular case, you can't usually wake the baby at random times to do a randomized experiment because most mothers, quite rightly, don't want that to happen. So in real-life situations like that, it's a bit hard to do randomized tests. But where you can do randomized tests that do work very repeatedly is with dogs and cats, which are much more telepathic than humans on the whole. And as you know, I've done a lot of research on dogs that know when their owners are coming home. Many people have dogs that go and wait by a door

• 11:05Speaker 01

  or window when they're on the way home. And this happens at non-routine times. And in our experiments where we film the dog, we have people come home at randomized times in unfamiliar vehicles.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  11 seconds after our distant departure, JT walks to the window. When the taxi arrives, he sits at the window, full of expectation.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  So we rule out routine, we rule out vehicle sounds and smells. We rule out people at home knowing when it's happening because we do it when there's no one at home or when the people at home don't know. And there, over and over again, these dogs go and start waiting at the door in a highly significantly statistical way. So, I mean, I think there's very good evidence for telepathy. The reason it's not accepted by many people in the scientific world is not because they've looked at the evidence and think it's lacking, it's usually because they haven't looked at the evidence at all. And they usually say there's no point looking at the evidence because these things are simply impossible.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Therefore, we know in advance the evidence is flawed or fraudulent. So that's the biggest difficulty I encounter. When I encounter skeptics like Michael Shermer, for example, who, as you know, is head of the Skeptic Society, writes skeptic columns, he's a professional skeptic. I had a public debate with him and I suggested, you know, here's this evidence. And he hadn't read the evidence, he wasn't interested in it at all. When it came to dogs that know, you know, I've done, I've published three or four papers in peer-reviewed journals based on two years of research, hundreds of experiments. And he said, well, my dog doesn't do it, you know, as if that's a refutation of the whole

• 12:55Speaker 01

  thing, you know, it's, it's the kind of inane level of argument that I've got used to from skeptics, not very sophisticated guys who carefully evaluate all the evidence. It's childish.

• 13:08Jesse Michels?

  So I, I fully agree with you. I think there is no arguing with your method and with the results that you're getting and with the real effects that are happening. And yet, and I think in other cases too, I have a friend, you know, who, who you've met as well, who, who helped run the Princeton, you know, engineering and anomalous research center under Bob John. And he's really high conviction in these random event generator experiments where the human mind seems to be able to affect something that is conventionally thought of as random in quantum mechanics, so radioactive isotope decay or double slit experiment with the 50/50, you know, distribution between the right slit and the left slit. And then somebody's intention seems to be able to, you know, do more right slits or

• 13:53Jesse Michels?

  more left slits. And that is fascinating and I think it is very real. And yet, when it comes to humans' ability to harness these sorts of effects, that feels somewhat limited. You know, the CIA obviously had this psychic remote viewing program that it, you know, ran for, for 23 years. Some version of it is probably still going today. And yet, you know, when it comes to creating a, you know, billion dollar hedge fund or something, if we were able to instrumentalize and harness this with what human beings care about now, which is, you know, often status, money, materialism, why wouldn't they employ telepathy for those aims, you know, at a higher hit rate?

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, telepathy only works between people who are closely bonded emotionally. If you look at the natural history of telepathy, it typically happens between parents and children, lovers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, identical twins, therapists and clients, where there's been transference and counter-transference, best friends. It doesn't happen with random people. And the same with dogs. I mean, they know when their owner's coming home, but they don't know when random people are coming. It's usually confined to one or possibly two people, this phenomenon. So that would mean if you were going to try and spy on some, someone telepathically,

• 15:18Speaker 01

  you'd have to know them so well that you'd hardly need to spy. So telepathy by its nature is not very well adapted to sort of commercial applications. I think that people do use it all the time. I mean, mothers, there are millions of mothers who are breastfeeding right now, who know when their baby needs them, when they're away from the baby. Until the invention of the telephone, that's the only way they could have known. Now, they, they've got smartphones, they perhaps don't need it so much, but nevertheless, there's countless stories of people who've come, mothers who've gone to their baby when it needs them, parents who know when their child's had an accident and are sometimes

• 16:01Speaker 01

  able to go there and help them without having to be told by normal means. So it is actually in use. And I think in animal societies, it's the main way they communicate with each other at a distance. Wolf packs, for example, I think are able to communicate telepathically over miles when they can't hear each other or see each other.

• 16:21Jesse Michels?

  Why do you think animals might be better? Is it because when one sense goes, another gets stronger? And so we've developed these sort of prefrontal cortex reasoning abilities and we can, we can override or short circuit this sort of primordial telepathic sense? And so we sort of rely on it or, or use it less?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think some humans are really good at it. I mean, when you hear stories from people who lived in Africa or in India, I mean, I lived in India myself. In some cultures, these things are simply taken for granted and people actually cultivate these abilities. In our culture, the educational system, the academic world pretends they don't exist and treats them with scorn and derision. And so when people do have these abilities, they either don't talk about them because they, they're afraid they'll be thought of as stupid, or if it happens to them, they think of someone who then rings on the phone. Instead of saying, that's interesting, let's see if I can improve this ability to intuit

• 17:24Speaker 01

  when someone's ringing, they say, oh, it's just a coincidence. So there's, any educated person in a Western country has been educated to dismiss these phenomena rather than cultivate them. Whereas in shamanic societies, the cultivation of these kinds of abilities is very important and very important for survival as well. So I don't think it's all humans who've lost these abilities so much. I think it's educated, Western, secularized humans. And moreover, even though we've been educated to believe they don't exist, still about 85% of people say they've had these experiences with telephone calls, they've thought of

• 18:08Speaker 01

  someone who then rings, or they know who it is when they hear the phone ring before they look at caller ID. Even so, the majority of people, even in modern secular societies, have these experiences quite regularly. And when it comes to the sense of being stared at, knowing when you're being looked from, at from behind, you turn around, someone's looking at you. About 95% of people claim to have had these experiences. So these are not just minority niche experiences of a tiny handful of, of professional psychics or something like that. These are part of our nature.

• 18:43Jesse Michels?

  Everybody has that feeling they get when they, you know, sort of cross the street and they almost like look off a car that, you know, might be coming towards them. And you talk very eloquently about this idea of, you know, we, we believe that perception occurs through intermission, when in fact it might be extramission. We might be actually sort of emitting the images that we see and, and you exist out there and I exist out here. It's not you exist as a little figment, you know, in my mind.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:10Jesse Michels?

  Do you want to sort of lay that out for us?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, this is an ancient debate about the nature of vision. It goes back to ancient Greece and probably further. And astonishingly, you know, in the 21st century with AI and all our amazing technological capacities, we still don't know how vision works, even though we use it every day and take it for granted. And the official theory, as everyone knows, is that light comes into the eyes, inverted images on the retinas, impasses up the optic nerves, changes inside the brain, particularly the visual cortex. And then, all that's well documented certainly happens. Then the assumption is, and it's only an assumption, that you generate inside your

• 19:55Speaker 01

  head, an artificial, a kind of virtual reality display of the external world, which is in 3D in full color, but it's all supposed to be inside your head as a kind of controlled hallucination. But no one's ever seen these images inside heads. But it's assumed that, that's just an assumption, not a shred of evidence. Whereas I think that the traditional view found all over the world in all cultures and believed in by almost all children under the age of 10 till they've been educated, is the traditional view is that when I look at you, all that happens, changes happen in my brain, and then the image of you that I form, you can call it a controlled hallucination

• 20:40Speaker 01

  if you like, as some neuroscientists do. But where is the hallucination? I think my image of you is right where you are. It's in my mind, but it's not inside my head. Therefore, I think in vision, I'm projecting out the images. It's called extramission, sending out. Sending out the images of everything I look at. And now I look at a tree behind you through a window, I think my image of the tree coincides with that tree. And because I think we're emitting these images, emitting an influence from our minds, that's, I think, why when I look at somebody from behind, if they feel this sort of touch

• 21:22Speaker 01

  of my mind, they may respond by detecting it unconsciously and turning around. Interestingly, when they turn around, we've done studies on this, it's directional. They don't just feel uneasy and gaze vaguely in all directions. They swivel around and look exactly at where the look's coming from. And this happens with animals too. It's a basic animal sense.

• 21:45Jesse Michels?

  What's actually coming out of the eyes? Is it some sort of, you know, unobtanium particle that we're going to figure out in the future?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Well, that's the big question, isn't it? That's why, you see, there's nothing in existing physics that would deal with this. Therefore, from the point of view of most scientists, it doesn't exist if it's not in physics textbooks. And, and it doesn't exist because they believe the materialist theory, the mind's all inside the head.

• 22:13Jesse Michels?

  Well, you being at the frontier of the phenomenon, what would be your top candidate for the causal mechanism?

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I mean, that's it. I, I just don't know. If I had an answer, it would be a massive breakthrough because this would expand the frontiers of science enormously to understand what the nature of the extended mind.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  What I think might be underlying it is it depends on an interpretation of quantum theory that you may be familiar with, Kramer's transactional interpretation. And it's been further developed since John Kramer put it forward. But basically, what he's saying is that when light comes into the eye, a photon or photo, a stream of photons comes into the eye. When they're absorbed by the eye, the normal view is that this is a one-way process. Photons come in and they're absorbed and that's it. His view is that there's what he calls a handshake across space and time, that when

• 23:14Speaker 01

  it's absorbed by the eye, there's, as it were, the reverse of a photon goes in the opposite direction, backwards in time, and resonates with the atoms that have emitted the light. So the light, instead of it being one-way like that, it's a two-way process. When it's absorbed there, it goes the other way, back to the source of the light. And this is called the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's been developed further by a physicist called Ruth Kastner, who published a book on this, published by Cambridge University Press. We're not talking some totally fringe thing that's just in alternative media. We're talking books on this published by leading university presses.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  So if there's a reverse effect, when I look at you, if there are things that are coming out of my eyes, that there's the transactional interpretation, if my mind's coupled to those, then that would provide a means already established within physics as an interpretation of how light works, that would enable an influence to reach you if I'm looking at your back. But that leaves a further question unanswered, which I think about this a lot. How would you detect it? Why? Because we've got two mysteries. First, what's the influence that comes and affects your back?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  And secondly, the question of how you detect that influence? Now, it's not detected by the skin, because people who are fully clothed on a winter's day, you know, with long hair and gloves on, and you're looking from behind, all you can see is their clothing and their gloves and their hair. You would not, any of skin is visible, yet people respond to this. And furry animals that are completely covered with fur respond to this. So whatever the detection system, it's something that goes through fur and goes through clothing. And I think it has to be some kind of field around the body. And there's already lots of evidence for fields around the body.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  We know the body has an electromagnetic field, the brain has one, you can detect it with EEG, it's a pretty weak field. The heart has a much stronger electromagnetic field, you can detect it from feet away. And this is not, again, this is not dowsing with dowsing rods, it's using standard electrical apparatus. So we do have a bioelectric field, and I think it may be something to do with that. That's just a guess, a hypothesis.

• 25:54Jesse Michels?

  Well, Michael Levin at Tufts has done all sorts of amazing work about, you know, the bioelectric field of the body and how it dictates our limbs and morphology in a, you know, a more fundamental way than DNA in some ways. The DNA is sort of the hardware and this is sort of the software, you know, sort of writing the hardware.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  The genetics sets the hardware. It tells you what are the protein, the channels and everything else that's going to be there. I'm saying something, something much more disruptive than that.

• 26:20Jesse Michels?

  I believe in your experiments of scope esthia, you know, the sense of being stared at, it also applies to people looking through security cameras, right?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Well, that's a question that I'm not sure about that. There's evidence from, I've interviewed security guards, you know, surveillance personnel and so on, people in the drug squad at Heathrow Airport, store detectives at Harrods, people like that. And they do say that some people can detect when they're being looked at by hidden cameras. They turn and look at the camera. One store detective, for example, told me that he saw some people shoplifting shoes in the shoe department at Harrods. He told some colleagues and they came and watched them shoplifting shoes. And while they were doing it, suddenly, one of the shoplifters suddenly turned, looked

• 27:10Speaker 01

  up at the camera, they put the shoes back and walked out of the store. So there's some anecdotal evidence that's the case. Now, most people don't detect it. And I've done an actual experiment where I have people do randomized trials using FaceTime or Zoom-type cameras. Can you tell when someone's looking at you on camera on your computer? So in these experiments, if you were the subject, you'd have a camera that pointed at you. And I'd be on my computer miles away, and there'd be a series of 10-second trials where either I would see you or I wouldn't. I'd see a picture of somebody else or a distracting picture of some kind.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  And at each trial, you have to guess whether you're being looked at or not, and it's a randomized sequence. In these experiments with thousands of trials, it comes out exactly at chance level that certainly most people can't detect when they're being looked at on a screen.

• 28:10Jesse Michels?

  They cannot?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Cannot.

• 28:12Jesse Michels?

  Interesting.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  But some people may have an unusually well-developed ability, because most store detectives and surveillance officers say, most people just don't know. But they also, there's a few people who do. And I once had a visit from someone from the Ministry of Defence here in Britain, with someone from MI5, our anti-spy agency. And they wanted to know whether, they said, could terrorists train themselves to know when they're being watched on CCTV? To which I answered, well, probably they could. You know, there's some evidence, anecdotal evidence, that people can tell. My own experimental evidence shows that most people can't tell.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  But that doesn't mean you couldn't train it, and some people may be much better at this than others.

• 29:01Jesse Michels?

  So yeah, this brings up a really fundamental question with all of this stuff, which is, if you're looking at the bioelectric field as a possible candidate for receiving somebody else's staring at you, is traditional electromagnetism the right candidate? Even when we talk about morphic fields, so, you know, if a dog knows when their owner is near, or a child knows when their mother is near, or as you got into this sort of topic, you know, a bean plant grows around, you know, a pole that isn't even there, can that possibly be traditional electromagnetism, which decays at one over distance squared?

• 29:43Jesse Michels?

  And we'd probably be detecting those signals left and right with, you know, radio antennas that we have? Or does it have to be some new sort of exotic electromagnetic signal that we haven't yet detected?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  I don't think traditional electromagnetism can explain all these things, even Levin's results. There's definitely, he's right, there's a bioelectric field, you can see where an eye is going to develop in a developing newt embryo and so on, from a change in the bioelectric field. There's bioelectric fields around all cells and all organisms. But I don't think that they alone can shape the organism. I think the bioelectric field is a response to other formative influences. It may be the interface between what I call morphic fields and the organism. You see, I think, don't think the bioelectric field has the ability to carry all the form

• 30:40Speaker 01

  of every organism within itself and shape it, because it's more passive, it's responding, it's produced by what's already there. And the shaping of animals and plants as they grow and the shaping of self-organizing systems, I think depends on a new kind of field that physics doesn't have in its standard vocabulary, which I call morphic fields, fields that shape form. Morphy means form. Morphic fields are fields of form. And I think that the morphic fields that shape a developing plant and the field of a leaf that shapes the leaf and the field of the flower that shapes the flower, a flower

• 31:24Speaker 01

  field. Or in the quantum level, the quantum matter fields that shape the electronic orbitals around a nucleus, I think these are a kind of morphic field too. And I think these morphic fields have a kind of memory within them, given by what I call morphic resonance, an influence of similar patterns on other similar patterns across space and time, from the past to the present. Now, electromagnetic fields can't do all that. But I think the electromagnetic fields may be the interface between morphic fields and regular physics and biological objects and so forth.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  So I think the basic point where I differ from most of my scientific colleagues is that I think there's something that science has left out that's really important. It's to do with the fields that shape things, it's to do with the extended fields involved in perception and in vision, it's to do with the kinds of fields that enable telepathy to happen at a distance. I think similar fields are involved in bird migration, pigeon homing, and I think there are many mysteries in biology which we can't solve at the moment without taking into account a new kind of field that's not part of the scientific map at present.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  That's why I'm drawn in my research to phenomena that we don't understand, because I think it's precisely through those phenomena we don't understand that we're likely to expand our understanding. If we take the view that if we don't understand them, they're impossible, they don't exist, which is sadly what many of my colleagues assume, then we're never going to advance to understand these things. So anyway, that's my basic point of view, there's a lot we don't know.

• 33:41Jesse Michels?

  I think for a lot of people, it's very intuitive to see how light could come from the sun, bounce off of you, and then go into my eyes, and then, you know, some sort of retinal display of you could exist in my, in my head. And then I think it's way more counterintuitive for somebody to conceptualize the idea that you are, for me, some sort of, you know, handshake between the past and the future in the present, you're like this constricted present, and you're a marriage between a, maybe a photon and some yet undiscovered anti-photon. So what are you to me, the perceiver, and what are all of the objects around me in

• 34:25Jesse Michels?

  this kind of ontological model?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I don't agree it's more intuitive to think of it as being inside the head. It's only more intuitive if you've done a science degree at a university. And if, if you actually do surveys of what people think, vast majority of people do think the images are out there where they seem to be, it's your direct experience, my image of you is right there. So if somebody comes along and says, actually, Jesse's not sitting right, your image isn't right there, it's inside your head, and you just falsely imagine it's out there, that's much more counterintuitive than thinking my image is right where it seems to be.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  And when you actually ask people how they experience it, I do this in some of my lectures, I sometimes say, how many people think that the images they're seeing are out there where they seem to be? Most people just say, yeah, of course. If they're unsophisticated, if they're university graduates, they know they're meant to say no. But there was a survey done at Ohio State University some years ago by a professor of psychology, who was appalled to discover that most of his psychology students believed that the images were out there. You know, he did them tests, he showed little diagrams of, you know, does something go out, where is the image?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  And most of them believed in the extramission theory, he regarded this as a failure of scientific education. So they had to go, undergo compulsory re-education, so they had to repeat many, many times, you know, it's all inside the head. And he tested them immediately afterwards, then they got the right answer from his point of view. Six months later, they diverted to their direct experience. So I think actually, when I try and explain this to people who are not very sophisticated scientifically, most of them find it hard to believe that anyone does think it's all inside the head. I have to explain to them, there are people who actually believe this, really?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  You know, they, they find it really hard to believe that what you call the intuitive view is true. As I say, I think it's only something that sophisticated, scientifically educated people know they're meant to believe.

• 36:46Jesse Michels?

  Well, yeah, you, I mean, you talk about how the Greeks believed in extramission, going back to Euclid, and yet, again, and maybe this is too biased towards the Western materialist reductionist paradigm, but like, it's easy for me to conceive of, okay, I am this like objective material person, light bounces off me, it goes into your eyes, you sort of conceive of what I am. This sort of handshake between, you know, the future and the past feels a little more hard to conceptualize. And so I want to press on like what that means ontologically. There's a cognitive psychologist named Don Hoffman, who talks about, you know, you're probably familiar with him, talks about how fitness beats perception and how the probability that we are seeing base reality is, is at, is zero essentially.

• 37:30Jesse Michels?

  The probability is zero that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see any true feature of objective reality. And so what are you looking at when you look at the outside world? Are you, do you believe the mind collapses the wave function like, you know, Roger Penrose? You know, this constriction between past and, and, and future that you're seeing, this sort of transactional theory, what, what does that mean as far as ontological truth?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  I think the mind constructs based on habit and based on expectation, an image, or you could call it even a hypothesis about what's likely to be there. And that we project out our projection, it's our mental projection. And of course, the mind can get it wrong, and that's the basis of optical illusions and hallucinations. We project out things that aren't there if we're hallucinating. And in our dreams, we're projecting out an entire three-dimensional, full-color world, even when we're asleep. So our minds can do this without any visual input at all, our eyes are shut. So our minds have the capacity to create three-dimensional, projectional worlds.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  In the dreams, it's not anchored to perception and can float free in a kind of realm of possibility. During waking life, it is anchored to perception, and normally, what we see is, that's why Anil Seth, the neuroscientist, calls it a controlled hallucination, our normal perception. So I think that's perfectly valid way of, I mean, I, he's a neuroscientist and a materialist, and I think he's right about that. It's not, I don't think it's very contentious that it's a kind of projection of our own mental construct. So the, the only question is, where Seth and I would differ is that he would say this projection and controlled hallucinations all inside the head.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  And I'm saying, well, if it's hallucination and it's non-physical, why should it be restrained by the bone of the skull? I mean, you can't have it both ways. If it's an all illusion, why can't illusions be extended? Our dreams are extended, and they don't seem to be constrained by the bone of the skull.

• 39:42Jesse Michels?

  So what about what you're seeing is something that's sort of objective and outside of yourself? And what about what you're seeing is, you know, being extramitted or superimposed by your own mind and preconceptions?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Well, I think that when you're looking at a tree, the tree's really there, and it has its own organizing field and its own relationship to the environment. It's not just a construction of my mind, but my interpretation of it and my projection of my image onto the tree is a construction of my mind. And the way that I see it will depend on, well, partly depend on how much I know about trees, my previous experience of trees, my memory, et cetera, will depend on my own personal history and, and, and my own prejudices and biases and all that. But I'm not so, so what we're seeing is definitely, in my view, a projection, but it's not a projection into nothing, into a vacuum, we're not making it all up, I'm

• 40:41Speaker 01

  not a solipsist. Everything that exists has its own organizing fields, its own position in relation to everything else. So I think it's really there.

• 40:52Jesse Michels?

  Last time we spoke, you were doing research into Michael Faraday, who was really the father of electromagnetism, at least in its kind of theoretical conception in the early 19th century. He was a poor bookbinder in South London and an apprentice to a famous chemist at the time, and then came up with these sort of lines of force model, which then later got developed by James Clerk Maxwell. You were saying that you were looking into these sort of lines of forces and fields as, you know, a way to possibly explain morphic fields, is that, is that right? Do you feel like you've made any progress since then?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Well, I think about fields a lot, you know, what are fields? What is the electromagnetic field? What is the gravitational field? And so I think morphic fields are fields, but, so when people say, well, you know, what kind of, what, what are they? Then it makes me wonder, you know, well, what is the kinds that everyone accepts exists, gravitational electromagnetic fields? What are they? And this is a very deep question, you see.

• 41:58Jesse Michels?

  Differential calculus, maybe, I don't know.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Calculus is not the field, it's a model, a mathematical model of the field.

• 42:05Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And so the field itself has a reality, if I drop something, it falls to the ground. The gravitational, I'm not seeing equations, I'm seeing a pull that the earth exerts that it's holding us in our seats right now, otherwise be floating around. So.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  To understand the nature of fields really brings us to a question about the nature of causation. And I mean, this involves history of science. I don't know whether it's whether you think we should go into this, but I can do if you'd like to.

• 42:40Jesse Michels?

  Well, are you talking about causation and like, you know, the the kind of Chomsky mind body problem of?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm talking something that that about the very nature of causes. This is something Michael Levin's very interested in too. And and he and I have discussed this recently. You see, with 17th century science, the mechanistic revolution in science, it said everything's mechanical and basically depends on forces and forces push and pull things. You know, a billiard ball hits another billiard ball and moves it along. So it's based on contact and pushing and pulling. Mechanical causes. But when Faraday introduced the idea of fields, he had the idea of something that's physical, the field is physical, but

• 43:32Speaker 01

  it's not material. The field around a magnet is a physical reality that has physical effects at a distance from the magnet, not by pushing and pulling, by direct physical contact. So the field's something else. It's extended in space. It's a region of influence, but it's not made of matter. Well, in the 19th century, people tried to say, well, it must be made of matter because everything is material. So they said it's made of subtle matter called the ether. And so they tried to invent a new kind of matter called the ether. Then Einstein came along in 1905 with the special theory of relativity and said, well, actually, fields

• 44:14Speaker 01

  aren't made of matter. There's no such thing as the ether. They're just made of fields. Fields are structures in space that have causal effects through their structure, but they're not made of matter. So people then said, well, what are they made of? And he said, they're just made of fields. So then in superstring theory, grand unified field theories and physicists ever since then have been trying to explain the fields. And basically what they do is say it's fields all the way down. In superstring theory, they say there's 10 dimensions of space and time. And they were all there at the big bang. There was a unified field, then it split up into the gravitational, the electric, magnetic, and

• 44:55Speaker 01

  the strong and the weak nuclear force fields. They all came from an original field with many dimensions, and it's fields all the way down. So then you say, well, what's that made of? It's not matter. It's not, is it made of space? Or is it made of time? Or you say, well, yes, they're made of space time. But then what are they made of? You always reach an end, you see. And I think morphic fields are fields like other fields that are basically patterns in space that have formative influences.

• 45:28Jesse Michels?

  Isn't that just a replacement for ether? The critique of the ether would be, well, actually, it's funny, you know, Einstein did sort of semi, you know, pour cold water on it in 1905. And then in 1917, he said that the ether actually isn't totally incompatible with relativity. But when I hear that, it just sounds like, okay, well, maybe there's some more higher abstract field that is operating on these like low level fields that we can detect and have control over. What do you say to that?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Well, I think there might be. I think it's it's fields all the way down and all the way up, really.

• 46:07Jesse Michels?

  What's the difference then between morphic fields and the ether?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Well, the ether's just the ether was not a field in itself. The ether was something fields were supposed to be made out of. The lines of force were made were supposed to be in Faraday, in Maxwell's first model of lines of force of Faraday. They were lines in which the ether was a fluid that flowed in spirals along these lines. They were like tubes containing spirally flowing ether. It was the this flowing nature of flowing matter. But the thing is, the ether didn't in itself have a form. The ether only had a form when it was shaped by the fields. So the you could say that the fields can first even in the

• 46:54Speaker 01

  most developed ether theory of Faraday, Maxwell's electromagnetic ether model of lines of force. The ether was shaped by the field. The ether didn't explain the field. You still needed the field. The ether was what was inside the field or shaped by it.

• 47:11Jesse Michels?

  Can you say anything specific about the relationship between a morphic field and say, the electromagnetic field? Because it seems like we cut straight to morphic fields and then, you know, the behavior of rats in riverbanks where, you know, they know how to make it to shore safely because, you know, their their ancestors did, or a crystal structure, you know, growing faster because it's already been grown, that sort of thing. But can we say how morphic fields actually interact with the everyday fields we work with in science?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think the question, and we can ask the same question in a much more conventional framework. What's the relationship between the quantum matter field of an electron and the electric charge of the electron? Because we've got two fields associated with the electron. There's the electric field everyone knows about. And and according to quantum theory, there's the quantum matter field, which binds the energy in an electron field to take on the nature of an electron and to move in orbitals around the atom. Now, it's not the electromagnetic field that's shaping those orbitals. It's the quantum matter field. And so an electron has two fields. It has a double nature. One, it's electron nature

• 48:27Speaker 01

  with the electron field, the other, it's electric nature. And a neutron, which is in the nucleus, and one of the nuclear particles, has a quantum matter field of the neutron, but it doesn't have an electric field. So we have fields, we've already got two kinds of fields, which are interacting or coexisting, even in quantum theory. So I think the relationship between morphic fields and electric fields is a bit like that at all levels of organization. But if you say, well, then what exactly is the relation between them? I'd say, well, then what exactly is the relation between the electron, quantum matter field of the

• 49:08Speaker 01

  electron, and the electric field of that electron? And I'm not sure that anyone has a very clear answer to that.

• 49:15Jesse Michels?

  No, probably not. Do you have you ever looked into the subquantum field? So this idea of vector and scalar potentials, for example, you have the Ernoff Bohm effect, where you could have, you know, vector and scalar potentials present without, you know, traditional electromagnetic wave present. And some people think that that points towards an extended view of electromagnetism. And actually, if you go back to James Clerk Maxwell's original 20 equations, and not the condensed heavy side, you know, four vector calculus equations that were simplified and later used in most textbooks, that there

• 49:57Jesse Michels?

  are things that that allows for. And in fact, they say that, you know, maybe the Lorentz gauge shouldn't be necessarily set to zero because of the presence of these vector and scalar potentials. And there's even a guy named Hal Puthoff, who's kind of at the forefront of the UFO conversation in the United States. I don't know if you've ever met him.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Yes, I have, yes.

• 50:17Jesse Michels?

  Well, there you go. And he is working on sort of communications using vector and scalar potentials. And so I don't know if you've ever looked at that as sort of a candidate because these are supposed to decay at one over R, not one over R squared necessarily. And so, and he, by the way, ran the CIA psychic spy program, and he thinks that maybe, you know, his sort of extended electrodynamics model might explain these sort of telepathic, you know, abilities.

• 50:47Jesse Michels?

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• 51:29Jesse Michels?

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• 52:13Jesse Michels?

  And he, by the way, ran the CIA Psychic Spy Program, and he thinks that maybe, you know, his sort of extended electrodynamics model might explain these sort of telepathic, you know, abilities.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not a physicist or a mathematician, so I can't really understand what they're saying. I mean, I know they're saying it. I've met Putoff, and I knew Bohm quite well. We had quite a few dialogues.

• 52:38Jesse Michels?

  What was he like?

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Well, he was a very thoughtful man and a very open-minded thinker, and fun to talk to. I mean, because he had an original free, he was a free thinker. He just wasn't hemmed in by the normal dogmas and prejudices that many scientists are.

• 52:58Jesse Michels?

  Can you explain where he sort of broke with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and, you know, some of his basic beliefs for the audience?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Oh, well, again, I'm not an expert on physics, but basically, they were saying that it's pure chance where electrons would move in double slit experiment. I mean, I can't go into all of this, but they were saying that the electron is guided by a probability distribution. It's random which way it goes and so on from any individual electron. He thought the individual or the electrons were guided by what he called a potential wave. And this, this wave, he thought there was a new kind of field which guided quantum processes,

• 53:48Speaker 01

  an invisible field that shaped what was happening, and that these fields were embedded in yet more implicit fields. He called the implicit order, that there was a whole set of shape, structuring or shaping fields in nature which underlay quantum processes. And it wasn't just random, and it wasn't just a matter of what you can observe, and you can't ask any questions except for the results of the experiments, the Copenhagen thing, which says, basically, don't think about it.

• 54:19Jesse Michels?

  I believe he also resuscitated de Broglie, who had like a pilot wave model and wasn't...

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yes, it was a pilot wave model, his potential, it was a pilot wave. So there was these invisible pilot waves that shaped what happens. And he liked the idea of morphic fields, and we discussed it together at some length. And because he came to the conclusion that his fields would depend on what's happened in the past, there'd be a kind of memory built into them. So if rats learned a new trick in one place, it would make it easier for the same kind of rats to learn it somewhere else, which is what I say from the point of view of morphic resonance. So it turned out that his theory predicted just the same kinds of things as morphic resonance, but it came to it through a physics lens, through a quantum

• 55:09Speaker 01

  physics approach. So we got on really well, and he was actually very interested in morphic resonance. He was also very open to psychic phenomena like telepathy, because he thought his interpretation of quantum mechanics would enable these other, hitherto unrecognized ordering principles in nature to be fitted into the rest of science.

• 55:35Jesse Michels?

  He's a fellow heretic among academics. He was known as really Einstein's smartest student, and then sort of got banished.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Well, yes. I mean, there was this famous thing, there was recently a documentary about Bohm, you've probably seen it, where Robert Oppenheimer, who was one of the leading physicists at the time, when Bohm put forward his pilot wave theory, he said, we must find a way to refute Bohm, and if we can't refute him, we must ignore him. And that's what they did. They couldn't refute him, so they ignored him. And they tried to airbrush him out of quantum physics as it was taught in universities. Well, he's come back a bit, but he's still treated as a fringe figure, even though he was one of the most brilliant physicists of his generation.

• 56:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's unfortunate. There's a great book by a science journalist named Adam Becker, and it's called What Is Real? And it goes back to all the kind of early quantum interpretation debates at the Copenhagen School, where Einstein would go over there and he would debate Niels Bohr. And it was basically this question of like, what is wave function collapse? And there's a reason Einstein called, you know, entanglement spooky action at a distance. It was very spooky and ontologically very trippy to him. And so he wanted to kind of explore the trippiness of, you know, what the implications were for these measurements on reality itself. Whereas Bohr was more of this, you know, sort of, you know, hey, this is just a mathematical formalism. If you think you understand it, you don't understand

• 57:05Jesse Michels?

  it. And that turned into this sort of shut up and calculate model. But I do think going back to those early debates is important, because even the idea of the Copenhagen interpretation itself, that, you know, if we do have free will, for example, if you're choosing to make a measurement, then you're sort of changing reality fundamentally, because that collapses the wave function. So we're all just going around wave function collapsing constantly.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:32Jesse Michels?

  And we're sort of choosing at what rate to do that and how to do that. And then, but it's just supposed to be this roll of the dice and random as, you know, to what kind of state gets picked in the, in the wave function. It's very confusing. And I think we should go back to those debates.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Well, that's why I'm interested in Faraday and the nature of fields. And you see, one of the interesting things about the nature of fields is that they can act without energy. You see, when the Earth's gravitational field stretches out into space, if a meteor comes near the Earth, the Earth is pulled by the Earth, and it crashes into the Earth and makes a big bang when it hits the Earth and throws up lots of soil and stuff and rock. Now, that's an energetic event, the crash of the meteor, but the Earth's gravitational field expends no energy at all in making that happen. And in fact, the meteor adds to the mass of the Earth and marginally increases its gravitational pull. And the

• 58:31Speaker 01

  same with a magnet. When a magnet on your fridge door holds a piece of paper on the door, that's not expending any energy, and yet it's doing something. And you see, we're used to the idea that causation is energetic. This is going back to the 17th century idea of causes are energetic, with pushing and pulling involves measurable amounts of energy, and thermodynamics is all about work and energy and so on. But actually, fields don't work energetically. They're not a kind of energy. They're a kind of form. Their role is formative, not energetic. And so there's a kind of causation in nature, which I call

• 59:13Speaker 01

  formative causation, which in the ancient world, Aristotle, in ancient Greece, called formal causation. That which causes form is not the same as energy or matter. And you probably know his famous four causes. I, maybe I should, I think they're very important for this discussion. Aristotle said, to understand anything, you have to understand four reasons or causes. So he gave the example of a sculptor making a sculpture to put in the marketplace. There's the material cause. That's the block of marble. You can't have the sculpture without that. There's the moving cause, or what he called the efficient cause. That's the chisel,

• 59:57Speaker 01

  the sculptor's chisel chipping off bits of marble. And you can't have a sculpture without that. Then's the formal cause. And that's the idea in the mind of the sculpture of the person he's making the statue of. Now, that is not the same as the matter of the marble, and not the same as the energy of the chips, chipping, chisel. And there's the final cause, or the goal, or the purpose. Why is he making it at all? He's had a commission. He's being paid a fee by the town council to make the statue. And what happened in the mechanistic revolution of the 17th century was that scientists said, oh, this is all old stuff. We don't need Aristotle, all the stuff taught in the universities. It's a

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  revolution. We're going to reject all that. There's only two kinds of cause. Material causes, matter, and efficient causes, energy or force. And these explain everything. And they omitted formal causes and final causes. No purpose in nature, no purpose in anything. Things don't fall to earth because of a purpose. It's just mechanical causes. And there's no formal causes. And so ever since then, science has been incapable of explaining forms, which is why the problem of morphogenesis, the development of form in biology is so intractable within mechanistic terms. That's why Michael Levin and I and others think

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  you have to have formal causes, which are given by fields, which are formal causes. Now, I can actually illustrate this, but I have my favorite demonstration here, if I could show it to you.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

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• 1:02:04Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Well, I have to explain this a little bit. This is called a Galton board. This you see is a normal distribution curve. Can you see these small metal balls?

• 1:02:15Jesse Michels?

  I can. Is that after Sir Francis Galton?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Yes, after Sir Francis Galton, the statistician, the founder of statistics. And what this does is you tip it over like this, and all the balls roll down to this reservoir here of balls. Now, when I tip it over, they're going to roll down each one of the pegs. The ball can go left or right. And so it's chance which way it goes.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  And so what has a result of that is you get the normal distribution curve, and you can do it over and over again. And it's slightly different each time because it's a chance exactly which way each one goes. So

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  you see, each of these pegs here, it can go that way or that way. Very few of them go right every time. Very few go left every time. Most of them go sometimes right, sometimes left. And on average, they go about the same number of right and left. That's the middle of the curve. Now, this is straightforward. It's demonstrating using gravity as the motive force, how the balls fall. And that's randomness, and it illustrates randomness. Now, what I need to do now is I've got a pair of magnets here, regular magnets, which attract each other, of course. And I'm going to put them on this Galton board. So that

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  between the magnets, there's now an invisible magnetic field

• 1:03:48Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  between the magnets. They're steel balls. So obviously, the magnet's going to affect the steel balls. Now, I now run the

• 1:03:59Jesse Michels?

  Makes sense, yeah. If you have a distribution.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  So you have a biased distribution that's no longer the normal distribution. I've biased the randomness by means of an invisible field. Now, you know, some people say, well, so what? You know, obviously, it's magnetic field's going to attract steel balls. You know, what's the big deal? I mean, that will, that's a simple response. But if you think about it a little bit more, it's, it's really very interesting because this magnet has lost no energy in bringing about this distribution change in otherwise random distribution. It's not expended any energy. You do it over and over and over and over again, and it won't lose any energy. It won't get weaker as a result.

• 1:04:43Jesse Michels?

  And I think the implications of this are massive because you take something like Schrodinger's equation, which predicts all sort of subatomic particles and their, you know, position and, you know, you know, where they're supposed to be at any given time. There could be some sort of, you know, implicit order above them, sort of biasing, you know, what probability gets picked. It's not, you know, ultimately random. There's something ordered beyond the perceived randomness.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly how I think morphic fields work, you see. I think they bias the intrinsic randomness of quantum processes or of higher level processes. I mean, the weather's basically random. You know, lots of chaotic dynamics systems are basically random. It's not just at the quantum level. And I think that these fields work by biasing randomness. And in order to bias it, they don't have to be a form of energy. This magnet is not a form of energy. It's the magnetic field, has energetic consequences, but it's not doing it by expending energy. And so the magnetic, the morphic field can actually have causal effects, but without working by, you know,

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  brute force pushing or pulling something by contact. It's shaping otherwise random processes. And that's, that's, I think, how, I mean, this is a very simple illustration of that principle. We have a random process. It's, it's influenced by an invisible field, and it hasn't expended any energy. If I put the magnets here, where they're not going to immediately influence where the balls are falling, then you'll get back to your normal distribution curve. I mean, there might be a tiny influence from this, but the, the, the, this, the position of the field affects what happens. And the field isn't itself doing it through energy.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  I mean, it's the same amount of energy for me to put the magnets here or to put them there. And it's my choice where I put them. And again, my free will, I think, is working by biasing otherwise random processes in my brain and in the world around me in, because it's working through fields.

• 1:07:00Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. Do you think there is a central repository of learned knowledge that when you do something new? So we should probably go back to a classic, you know, morphic field experiment. Do you want to explain like the rats on the riverbank? And then I'll get into my follow-up question.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Well, the idea of morphic resonance is that similar patterns repeat. Basically, it's the theory that the so-called regularities of nature, the laws of nature are habits, not governed by eternal laws or fixed at the moment of the Big Bang. That there's a kind of memory in nature. And there's a memory in each species, each kind of thing, each kind of crystal, each kind of animal, each kind of plant, each kind of planet, or each kind of star. And so when an oak tree is growing, it's tuning in because it's similar. It got similar DNA and similar cell structure and so on to past oak trees. And it's shaped by the forms of past oak trees. There's a kind of formative field,

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  the morphic field, with a memory of past form. And the same's true of behavior. When a baby spider starts spinning a web, it doesn't have to go to spider school or web spinning workshop or anything. It just does it instinctively. And I think it's tuning into the experience of countless spiders in the past. It's a habit of the species. So you can test this. And so the most famous experiment was one done not to test morphic resonance. It was done anyway to test a different theory. But it was the biggest and longest series of experiments done with rats. Starting at Harvard, they trained rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim and get out of one exit or the other.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  And one exit was lit up and the other one wasn't. And they had to learn to go out of the dim exit or they got an electric shock. And it alternated at random. And the first generation of rats took about 250 trials before they got it right every time, before they learned. The next generation took about 200 trials, next from about 150, until after 20 or 30 generations, they got down to about 25 trials. And this was an improvement in learning, which now might be explained by epigenetics because the rats were descended from trained parents. And the experiment was actually set up

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  to find out whether there was an inheritance of acquired characters, whether parents could pass on what they'd learned to their offspring. Well, this was very controversial at the time. And so people tried replicating it at Edinburgh University and at Melbourne University in Australia. And their rats, with the same breed of rats, the same water maze, same kind of water maze, started off making about 25 errors. They took up where the Harvard rats had left off. But the Melbourne experiment involved a control group. In every generation, they had rats that had descended from a control land whose parents had never been trained.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  They compared them with rats whose parents had been trained. And they all got better, more or less to the same extent. So it was not passing on through the genes or epigenetically. Something else was happening that was making them get better. And I think that was morphic resonance.

• 1:10:31Jesse Michels?

  So learned behaviors that transcend genetics. And we've talked about this in the past, but you know, this seems like it flies in the face of Darwin. But you actually talk about how Darwin wasn't as much of a modern Darwinist as people sort of think he was. And I believe in the descent of man, not, you know, on the origins of species. He sort of entertains ideas like this.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Well, Darwin's very far from being a neo-Darwinian, which put all their eggs in the genes basket. I mean, they all think the whole point of Dawkins-type neo-Darwinian evolution is it's all in the genes. But Darwin didn't think that. He didn't know about genes for a start, because they weren't discovered till, or rediscovered till around 1900, after his death. But Darwin was a strong believer in the inheritance of acquired characters. He even gave, wrote a letter to Nature, the International Scientific Journal, about a dog that he'd heard about. It was an anecdotal story. He thought it was worth repeating in Nature. This dog was very afraid of butcher shops, and every time it went past them,

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  it was terrified. And it turned out his father had been terrified of butcher shops. So Darwin speculated that maybe the grandfather had been mistreated by a butcher, and this aversion to butchers had been inherited. Well, I mean, that's very like a morphic resonance type effect. So Darwin was, would have been perfectly happy with morphic resonance, I think. And some recent experiments on, that were done with mice, which were, when they were discussed in Nature, the headline was "Inheriting the Fears of Fathers", where they trained mice, male mice, to be averse to a chemical called acetophenone. It's a

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  synthetic chemical, smells a bit like cherries. So they smelt this, they gave them electric shock in their paws. This classic, rather cruel Pavlovian-type experiment, conditioned aversion. After, this had happened a few times, they were petrified when they smelt acetophenone. They then bred from these male mice with mothers who hadn't met them before. And they tested their offspring, their children and their grandchildren. And whenever they smelt acetophenone, they froze with fear. So this is a very recent experiment. And they try and explain it in terms of an epigenetic change in the sperm cells, some chemical

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  modification of the methylation of the DNA, or small bits of RNA, or something that's been included in the sperm. But I think it could well be a morphic resonance effect.

• 1:13:17Jesse Michels?

  Well, if you do it halfway across the world with, you know, unrelated, you know, animals, you know, rats, you know, again...

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Well, unfortunately, that's not what they did. And it's, I haven't been able to persuade anyone to do that experiment. But it should have worked around the world, yes. So anyway, the thing is that in, in modern epigenetic research, which, as you know, is research that shows that organisms can inherit characteristics acquired by their parents, adaptations, or, for example, in plants, in tomato plants, or in other plants, if the plants are attacked by insects, they make a chemical that protects against insect attack. They make chemicals within them that are toxic to insects, or repellents. And

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  if you do this, and then grow seeds from those, their offspring automatically produce more of these repellent chemicals, and they're more insect resistant as a result of their parents adapting to insects. This is called epigenetic inheritance. And under neo-Darwinism, which was all about genetic inheritance, it was impossible. In fact, they had a big taboo against the inheritance of acquired characters. But this is now mainstream biology. It's now widely accepted this really happens. And this is getting very close to morphic resonance, you see. They assume that there's a molecular mechanism that can explain this. But I think they should include in these experiments a morphic resonance control, where

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  they're not descended from the parents, you're just seeing whether this would happen anyway. Because I think there could be a morphic resonance component to these epigenetic effects.

• 1:14:58Jesse Michels?

  Just to explain to the audience, you know, I think genes were seen as static for a long time. Now they're seen as turning on and off, and that dictating which proteins get assembled. And you can, you know, accedulation historically often, you know, turns the genes on, and then methylation turns them off. I think there are exceptions to that, but that's the very high level crude version of it. But if you're doing experiments that show learned behaviors moving between totally unrelated, you know, animals within the same species, that is really exciting. That shows that there's something more at play than even epigenetics, which is a new kind of burgeoning field. And, and you do show that. You show that with, you know, crossword puzzles, where if, you know, a certain amount of people

• 1:15:40Jesse Michels?

  do a crossword puzzle today, and tomorrow they do that, you know, a new set of people do that crossword puzzle versus a control crossword puzzle, that one is likely to get done a little bit quicker. Or crystal structures, you know, you grow a crystal structure, and for the first time it takes longer, and then subsequently it sort of takes shorter. And a question I wanted to ask you is, is it sort of like we are uploading knowledge to a central server or something? So I think of like a client-server relationship in, you know, computer terms. And upload times are always longer than download times. So if you have somebody like a Charles Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic for the first

• 1:16:21Jesse Michels?

  time, or, you know, somebody achieving some great feat of athleticism, you know, Roger Bannister, great example, breaking the four-minute mile in 1952. And then it's called the Bannister Effect, because immediately, you know, I think 11 people break it within the next two years. Is it really hard to upload that new feat or accomplishment? And then the rest of us get to benefit from that thing that is now stored in some sort of central monad, and we can do it that much quicker? And is that, is that, could that roughly be like a model for how this works?

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you explain it well. And, and I think that these examples, you know, suggest something's going on. Actually, better than, with the four-minute mile, you could argue that there's a psychological barrier. People will come up with alternative explanations. But there are lots of things, skateboarding, for example, where when people first did skateboarding, some tricks were really difficult. And now thousands, millions of kids can do them really easily. There's lots of examples like that.

• 1:17:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it feels like athletic accomplishment feats are moving faster than just updates in nutrition and training, and definitely a biological evolution, which moves over, you know, thousands of years' time scales.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  But you see, I don't think, I wouldn't take the idea of a centralized storage center. I mean, even if you take the computer analogy, there's not just one data center sort of storing things. There's thousands of them. It's a distributed system. You know, it's not as if there's one, everything that I can get on my computer from Google or something, it's not just in one place. Whole point of the internet, it's a network. And so I think that actually how morphic resonance works is by resonance on the basis of similarity across space and time. So I think that as an oak seedling grows, it's tuning in direct to past oak trees, wherever they are, all over the world, at a distance in space and

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  time. It's not that they're going, all of them are going up to some central storage thing and then coming down again. I'm suggesting you just do it direct. I mean, that's a hypothesis. You could argue, well, why not postulate some third or fourth or fifth or 10th dimension, where they're stored in some off-planet storage system, or a Karshik record in another dimension, and then they come down from that central store. I think that's an unnecessary theoretical complication. I think it's much simpler just to think of a direct resonance across space and time on the basis of similarity. But it may be that there's another dimension where there's a store, who knows? Right now, I don't worry too much about how it might

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  work. I'm just interested in trying to find out whether it does happen, you know, whether morphic resonance really happens. And if it does, there could be many theoretical explanations. Now, thanks to Claude and other forms of AI, I get about 10 theories of morphic resonance a week coming into my inbox, that some people have hyper dimensions, some people have resonance based structures, some people have other prime number matrices. I mean, I had, just this week, I've had three or four different theories of morphic resonance and how it works. I mean, it clogs my inbox. And so basically, that makes me even more determined

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  that what really matters is empirical evidence, because you can have any number of theoretical structures. And if there was convincing experimental evidence for morphic resonance, and it's not yet, there's not yet enough to be convinced most people, because there hasn't been that much research. It's a taboo subject, it's hard to do the research. But say it was established that it was really happening. Say there was a paper in Nature saying conclusive proof for morphic resonance. All sorts of people were going to overdrive on coming up with theories to explain it. But then that would be a matter of taste, really. You know, Faraday put forward magnetic fields and electric fields without knowing

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  any theory, except that just measured what happened, how they interacted. Maxwell came up with a theory involving ether. Einstein comes up with a theory not involving ether. Quantum electrodynamics comes up with quantum theories of electromagnetic interactions with matter that are very accurate in their predictions. But they're quite different from Maxwell's theory. But nevertheless, electric motors go on working just fine, whatever the theory.

• 1:21:07Jesse Michels?

  Do you have a sense of what the new sort of physics of the future might look like? I see you as sort of experimentally compiling a lot of anomalies. And in the model of somebody like Thomas Kuhn, that would basically, you'd have to create a new framework or theory around these anomalies in the next, you know, scientific model. It seems like there are a couple of things in physics. I would say time is one of them that just seems fairly kind of anomalous. It's, you know, on a macroscopic level, you know, it's tied to gravity and gravity itself is much weaker than, you know, the other three forces. It's irreconcilable with those forces on a, you know, in quantum mechanics.

• 1:21:52Jesse Michels?

  And then time itself is treated as this sort of classical axiom in Schrodinger's equation. And then, yeah, we need even macroscopically, like with dark matter, we have to, you know, that's how we justify gravity's weakness. You know, it seems like the universe would fling apart, you know, if we didn't have this sort of, you know, placeholder in the form of dark matter. And so it seems like time and time again, you have these anomalies with gravity and time. And, you know, we were stuck in this sort of quantum gravity, you know, bridge to nowhere, you know, Sisyphean framework with string theory, it seems. So, yeah, do you have some sort of, you know, a hunch as to what a new updated model of physics will be?

• 1:22:34Jesse Michels?

  And do you think it'll involve a new model of time?

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, the idea of morphic fields is an attempt to have an updated, having extra fields that physics misses out and therefore can't explain formative processes. And then the biggest thing of all that it misses out of consciousness. And all these theories of consciousness, all these so-called theories of everything, completely emit consciousness. So then, when you come to the question of, when you come to the question of how are we conscious? How is the hard problem of consciousness? Then you can't explain it in terms of theories which have no consciousness in them in the first place.

• 1:23:15Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  So I think that the extra fields and consciousness are the two missing ingredients, which, and it may be they're related because consciousness, I think, depends on fields and works through fields and/or works within fields even. So I think what I'm trying to do is find, on the basis of these anomalies, exploring the anomalies that don't fit in. They give us clues about what this theory would need. If you don't have clues and if you don't take these into account, you end up with sort of AI slop. I mean, the stuff that pours into my inbox every day, theories of everything generated by AI, which are pretty useless. There's nothing whatever I can do with these theories because we need more data.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  And in relation to time, for example, I'm currently doing research on this in my own kind of way. Because what I do is start from, not from equations or not from theoretical assumptions, but from natural history, which is where science has to start from when you're exploring a new field. And what I'm interested in at the moment in relation to time is the phenomenon that about 95% of people, according to surveys I've carried out, have the experience of waking up shortly before an alarm clock goes off. Terribly common. And I have that experience myself. So now, most people just assume, oh, well, we've just got a time sensor,

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  a circadian rhythm or clock or something, biological clock, easy armchair explanation. But I don't think that. I think that it's very unlikely for evolutionary reasons, we'd have an ability to wake at 4:30 in the morning to catch an early flight. Our ancestors didn't have clocks and they woke up with a cock crow at the dawn. You know, they didn't have to catch early flights. There were no flights or trains or buses or anything. I don't think there's any evolutionary basis for a precise time sensor when we're asleep. Instead, I think what's happening is a form of pre-sentiment, feeling the future,

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  feeling when the alarm's going to go off and responding by a kind of time working backwards, as it were, retrocausal effect in pre-sentiment. There's now a lot of evidence from parapsychological experiments that pre-sentiment over a short term, you know, seconds or minutes exists. And I think it's a pre-sentiment effect. So then the crucial experiment becomes, what would happen if it's an unexpected alarm? Say a fire alarm. Would, do people wake up, you know, a minute or two before a fire alarm goes off? After all, with an alarm clock or a phone, they know when they set the alarm. They don't know when a fire alarm is going to go off.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  And the answer is, a lot of people say they do. And right now, I'm doing a survey of paramedics and firefighters and emergency responders who are woken up as part of their job at unpredictable times in the night. And many of them say, oh, yes, it happens all the time. Wake up just before an alarm. One Australian firefighter said, I wake up, you know, 30 seconds or so before the alarm goes off in the fire station. By the time it goes off, I'm already getting my boots on and I'm the first to slide down the pole. So there's a lot of people say that. Now, you can actually do experiments.

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  So I'm having trouble recruiting subjects who are willing to be woken at random times in the night for this research. As you can imagine, it's not a terribly popular thing to want to participate in. But, I mean, this is a testable hypothesis. And what it suggests, like other forms of precognition or premonition, is that our minds are open to the future. And this happens through precognitive dreaming as well. And so what I'm interested in, you see, is doing empirical studies on precognitive effects, which have been investigated for years by other people as well. I mean, it's not just me. The alarm clock at the moment is just me, but.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  So I'm thinking, if we know more about, over what time span does this happen? What kind of phenomena trigger it? It's already known, it's emotionally arousing phenomena that trigger it, not kind of neutral phenomena. An alarm is alarming, especially if it's a loud one. So anyway, I think that there's a lot we don't understand about the nature of time and about the nature of minds and about the nature of formative fields in nature. And those are the things I think about. And those are the things I think a theory in the future will have within it. Because these are the anomalies in Kuhn's sense that just don't fit into the mechanistic materialist model of reality that's still dominant.

• 1:28:22Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. Well, Roger Penrose thought that the mind was sort of a room temperature, you know, a quantum mechanical system. And so in that model, you can actually reverse qubit positions in certain quantum computations. And so is it possible that, you know, and a lot of, you know, quantum theorists entertain ideas like this, that when we engage in precognition, when we wake up, you know, before an alarm or when we have pre-sentiment around a loved one calling us or, you know, any of these things, we are accessing a future knowledge state that knows the event is about to happen. And then that information is sort of trickling its way back in time.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  It's less a future knowledge state than an emotional arousal. And the, you know, the, but you could say, you could say that's a kind of knowledge. It's emotionally arousing events that do this most. People have precognitive dreams, sometimes about trivial events, but the most spectacular ones are about disasters, like the World Trade Center, you know, 9/11. I did a study on dreams of 9/11. I collected dreams from people in New York City within a few days of 9/11. And a lot of people dreamed of things that are very closely related to what happened in 9/11.

• 1:29:40Jesse Michels?

  You know about this resident artist? He was in 9/11 and he depicted himself as the Saint Sebastian, who was, you know, had all these, you know, arrows in him in the forest and he's dying. But in this case, it was like Tuskegee Airman going into his body. And he sadly passed away in the actual catastrophe of 9/11. And, you know, when the planes hit the towers. For this wild precognitive event. And there's this great book by a friend of mine named Eric Worgo, who discusses a lot of these sort of events. And I agree with you, it's often, don't get on that plane or, you know, you know, avoid XYZ thing because it is a matter of life and death.

• 1:30:22Jesse Michels?

  So I think it's not inconsistent with this model of the brain as a quantum system because it, if there is some sort of adaptive, you know, there are resource constraints around what trickles back to the present. You would only trickle back, you know, the stuff that's super essential for your survival and the hinge points around timelines in your life.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  No, I agree. And with animals, again, animals predicting earthquakes is something I've been studying too. That's sometimes several days in advance before major earthquakes. Animals start behaving abnormally in a way that could actually be used to predict earthquakes. The Chinese did it successfully in the 1970s. Western seismologists simply won't consider it. I mean, I've presented evidence to people in tsunami warning programs and earthquake warning programs. And they say, oh, that's just folklore. It's just make believe. It's just fantasy. It's just, you know, people thinking about it after the events and so on. They don't want to know. But actually, you don't even need to ask them.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  If anyone set up an app where it would be so easy to do. I mean, I can't do it myself, but imagine an app that could be around in the whole world, linked to Google Maps or something. If you see unusual animal behavior, dogs looking frightened for no apparent reason, snakes waking up from hibernation, rats coming out of their burrows, birds moving agitatedly in different directions to usual and so forth. You just press a button, unusual animal behavior button. And if there was a surge of reports from any particular region, it'd sort of glow red on a Google map. And for research purposes, you'd then check out, is there an earthquake following this? And I think there probably would be.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  You couldn't issue warnings straight away because you could cause panic unnecessarily. But it wouldn't be difficult to set up an animal-based earthquake warning system, given modern technology. In fact, it'd be really easy. I've been trying to get people to do this for years. And why don't they do it? Because, not because it's expensive, not because it's proven not to work. It's never been tested, and I'm sure it would work. But because they're afraid they'll be ridiculed for being pseudoscientific or credulous or something. It's pure dogmatism that prevents this. And I think that would be a really good way to get into this whole time thing and precognition and premonition through a functioning earthquake warning system

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  based on animals and other anomalous behavior.

• 1:32:56Speaker 00

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• 1:33:21Jesse Michels?

  That would be wonderful. Yeah, if we actually relied on it for something that was sort of life and death for us.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Well, we could. I think it could easily work. And I think that would be, I mean, you know more people than me in the tech world. And you know, might be, you might find someone who's open minded. And if you do, suggest they set it up because it could be really valuable and it would work everywhere. You know, Greece, Turkey, India, Pakistan, California, Washington state, all the earthquake-prone areas. You could have governments or non-governmental organizations promoting this. A simple app that people have on their phones. Most people would be fascinated by it and would willingly participate.

• 1:34:01Jesse Michels?

  I love it. I will say I'm sort of, I feel like I'm dragging Silicon Valley along. They're historically actually very myopic when it comes to some of these things. And I think it's a fair felt sense or instinct that it's hard to sort of scale this stuff into sort of very useful technology. But I do think, I think you're just very ahead of the curve. And I think we will have technology around all of these things. Can you explain synchronicities with this model? So, so many people watching, I'm sure, have the experience of, you know, you're talking about, you know, a certain book, you know, say the picture of Dorian Gray or something.

• 1:34:42Jesse Michels?

  And you see that the book come up, you know, on a library shelf or something. Or you, you know, you walk by a sign of, you know, somebody you were, you know, it's the name of the thing that you were just thinking of or whatever. And it feels deeply meaningful. And Carl Jung has written a book about this. Can you explain synchronicities through morphic fields?

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's several kinds of synchronicity and some can be explained and others perhaps not. Some synchronicities are telepathic, you know? You think of someone, then they ring on the phone. I think that's telepathy. I think there's, and I think telepathy is now fairly well documented. And I've done a lot of experimental studies on telephone telepathy myself. And it's telepathy rather than precognition because you can do tests where you can ask people to guess who's about to ring. And they're no better than chance. But if it's somebody who is actually thinking about them, then you get a positive, significant, quite a strong effect.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Some synchronicities may be precognitive or pre-sentiment. I've just written a paper on this by where people think of somebody who they then meet. For example, a couple were in Paris, walking down the street. The husband says to the wife, I've just thought about old so-and-so, someone they knew 20 years ago, they hadn't seen since, hadn't talked about since. They walk around the corner and they bump into that person. Now, I think that's a form of precognition. And I've just written a paper on hundreds of case studies of this kind. And I call that pro-apantasia, anticipating unexpected meetings. So some kinds of synchronicity may be precognition, some may be telepathy.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  But some, which are meaningful coincidences, can't be explained either of those ways. And they suggest there's some sort of higher pattern involved, which Jung was fascinated by. And it could be a morphic field connecting things together invisibly and providing meanings. But that's way beyond anything we can do research on at the moment. So, so in relation to synchronicities, just to summarize it, I think some are telepathic, some are precognitive, and some are much more mysterious, especially the meaningful coincidences.

• 1:37:07Jesse Michels?

  Is there something around our future selves having a pull on us? And, you know, we think of, you think of post-Big Bang, you just have the second law of thermodynamics where it's just, you know, entropy all the way down, things get more and more sort of chaotic. But I think everybody's felt sense of their life is they often have these sort of anchor point moments, which are, they're often very in touch with their intuition. They make this big decision and the synchronicities sort of speed up. And they end up, you know, maybe where they're, where they're supposed to be. And it almost feels like, you know, Maxwell had this idea of Maxwell's demon where you could reverse the second law of thermodynamics.

• 1:37:48Jesse Michels?

  It almost feels like these sort of consciousness-based synchronistic events are a reversal of, you know, normal universe entropy.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think the idea of universe entropy is as a way of explaining things is pretty limited in the first place. It's thermodynamics is about the movements of heat. That's what it's primarily about. The name is that. It was developed in relation to steam engines in the 1850s. And somehow it's been elevated into this cosmic principle of everything. Far beyond this, it's grown far too big for its boots. It's not, I don't think it's a terribly important cosmic principle. I mean, it is an important cosmic principle in that it says that in energetic processes, there's, you have differences in heat or pressure tend to equalize.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  And so it's, I mean, it's important in practice, in designing and making machines. But it doesn't explain any of the order in the universe. It doesn't explain why in the course of cosmic evolution, there's been a succession of more complex forms, atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, and then evolution of life on Earth, bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, people. And then all the creations of human ingenuity, art and technology. All of those involve more form than was there before. None of them can be explained in terms of reduction of order, reduction of. There's a formative principle at work in nature, which is, I think, depends on morphic fields

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  and on a kind of creative process in nature, which gives rise to more complex forms. And so thermodynamics has nothing whatever to say about any of that, except to say that, you know, if you've got a biological organism like you or me, then there's going to have to be a flow of energy to maintain it. So you're going to have to take in food and it can't function without energy. I mean, that's pretty obvious. I mean, you don't need thermodynamics to tell people who've, in tribal cultures, for example, who've never encountered science, they will know that you need food and that animals need food and plants need light. And it codifies that very common sense thing. But it doesn't explain the form in the first place.

• 1:40:09Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that we're going to experience a re-enchantment of reality? So if we've lived in the age of, you know, to quote Max Weber, disenchantment for, you know, maybe post-enlightenment, and we all think of ourselves as sort of happy accidents of random atomic interactions congealing together into a sort of consciousness. With the advent of things like AI, which help us make sense of the world, I could see us, you know, right now, for example, we have the anthropic principle, which is like, you know, why are all of the physics constants just perfect to house life on Earth? And why does, you know, the sun emit just amount of UV,

• 1:40:51Jesse Michels?

  you know, the perfect amount of UV radiation that makes it, you know, just enough through the magnetosphere of the Earth to create random mutations for differential selection? It just all feels so perfect. And then the Schumann resonance of the Earth is actually important for, you know, again, animal morphology and human morphology growing normally. So it all feels just very sort of, you know, set up. Do you think with AI, we make more connections along those lines? And we come to some new insight that, oh my God, like this isn't random. The sun is conscious. It's some supercomputer. You know, the Earth is, you know, a node of it or something. We're all, you know, micro nodes. And we just completely rethink our reality

• 1:41:34Jesse Michels?

  because we're able to make sense-making progress so much quicker through these new tools.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  But I don't really think that. AI is certainly very useful in finding out what's already known. I use it all the time in my research to find out, you know, when I'm doing research on some obscure phenomenon, I look it up and it scans the literature for me in a way that would take me weeks if I did internet searches on scientific journals or physically went to libraries and looked up papers. It's tremendously helpful. But basically, its modus operandi is scraping what's already known. So it enables us to find out obscure papers in scientific journals we might not otherwise have found or bring together information that we might not otherwise bring together. But it's always stuff that's already there.

• 1:42:24Jesse Michels?

  But it's not inherently, it's not biased maybe in the way that academia is. And it might be biased in the way that it's built now. But if you pour all of your, you know, anomalies that fit awkwardly into conventional models into this or, you know, some other heterodox scientists, I do think you could make progress much more rapidly as to the true nature of reality.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  Well, possibly. I mean, it's, it's true that it's less biased than, say, Wikipedia, which in areas to do with psychic phenomena is incredibly biased. It's been captured by dogmatic skeptics. So AI is better than that for sure. And in other areas of disputed, where, where, where the gatekeepers of academia and, and the materialist paradigm try to filter out anything that's contrary, it's much more rounded and balanced in my experience. But it doesn't come up with new ideas. And so if I want to find out, you know, how consciousness relates to vision and how extramission, it will tell me what other people have said about this in the past.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  It won't come up with the answer. I mean, I'm trying to think how to understand these things, how to fit them together. AI can't do that for us. If I found a way of fitting it together and wrote a paper in a scientific journal, AI would then scrape it and other people would then find it on AI, but it's not going to do it for us. And it's certainly not going to do the crucial experiments for us.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  And so I don't think AI is going to be that much of a help in anything truly creative.

• 1:44:00Jesse Michels?

  So I, I guess I half agree with you. I think it, yes, it, it's basically solves combination problems, not conciliance problems. So things that are truly require inter-domain, you know, specialization or, you know, polymathism between the domains. It's, you know, it's, you can't really cut up, you know, fire and digitize it and, and, and get a light bulb on the other side or do that with a horse into a car or something like that.

• 1:44:30Jesse Michels?

  And then when it comes to pattern matching, it's obviously much stronger. But I do think the reasoning is getting to a point where if you feed it a bunch of anomalies and you ask it to do sense-making around those anomalies, the anomaly set has become so wide. I mean, you could pick your poison. It's like UFOs, telepathy, you know, consciential, all, all of these sorts of things. And then you say, hey, like, help make sense of it. I could see that at least accelerating or speeding up one's own sort of thought process. And then obviously they would need to, you know, follow their own intuition where fit.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's already happening. I mean, as I said, people are doing this all the time, putting in these anomalies into AI and it comes up with theories that they clog my inbox. They, they, I mean, I've just got so many of them. I mean, it did occur to me that I should just put all these theories that people generate by AI into AI itself, come up with a meta-theory. I can't be bothered, but the problem with it is that it's only too easy for AI to come up with these theories. And when they first start, people first started sending to me, I thought of the five-page theory, I mean, mercifully short, some of them. So I'd read it and then I made a series of comments on it and thought about experiments to test it. I took it seriously.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  And I sent my response to the person who'd sent it to me. Ten minutes later, back came the response. He'd obviously just put everything I'd said into AI and it just fired it back at me. So I thought, well, why don't I just have AI read these things that people send and fire back a response? And just keep, cut out the middleman, just have AI firing things back and forwards. But that's not what these people who send these things want. They want a real person to read it. Unfortunately, they want me to read it.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  And the trouble is that we're awash with theories now, thanks to AI. You know, all these dimensions, some are filled with mathematic equations, something, but so what? I mean, that, that's the problem. It's not that AI can't do this. It can do this and it's doing it already. But in my experience, quite uselessly.

• 1:46:41Jesse Michels?

  You, speaking of things that distinguish humans from AI, you mentioned that people who are close experience more telepathic connectivity with one another. It seems like a lot of the people I know who've studied these random event generators or parapsychology, it almost feels like they go in with this sort of scientific method in mind and then they come out like religious initiates or something, where the more they know, the less they need on the materialist dimension. Like, it's like they don't even want to like harness the power for, you know, some sort of left-hand path, you know, materialist ends or whatever, or even turn it into technology. And they become far more aligned with their, themselves. They become more heart-centered.

• 1:47:25Jesse Michels?

  And they'll even say things like my, you know, how far above the standard deviation or, or my Z score on the random event generator, which is basically your ability to affect the material world, is determined by my, you know, heart coherence or something sort of seemingly very woo-woo like that. Do you think that's like an essential part to, to, to all of this? And, and is that sort of a microcosm of life?

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I mean, if they really can affect the, the thing more when their hearts coherent, that's testable and it would be a great subject for an experiment.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  I don't, within the very small world of parapsychology, I mean, there's probably in the whole world, there's probably what, 20 or 30 people actively engaged in parapsychological research?

• 1:48:15Jesse Michels?

  And even less who are, you know, really rigorous.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, it's very small. There's an email discussion list which I'm on. And I'm in almost daily contact with people in the parapsychology research community.

• 1:48:28Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  Any new discovery, et cetera, was immediately shared. And there's a small enough number of people, you can know them all. There's hardly any field of science like that. You know, work in cell biology or molecular biology or something, they have conferences with 20,000 people at them. And in this, there's, you know, 20 or 30 active researchers. And there's a growing number in China, interestingly. And I think that if there are going to be major advances, it may well happen there. Because in the West, this is academically excluded, underfunded, whereas the Chinese are getting really quite interested in this.

• 1:49:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  So I think that the, and things like morphic resonance and, and psychic phenomena and stuff could take off in China long before they take off in the West. Because, well, it all depends on the climate of inquiry. If, if you could get a good job doing parapsychology research or morphic resonance research, and if there was lots of funding for it, lots of people would love to do it. But right now, you can't get a job, or at least it's very hard. You can't get the funding. People are worried about destroying their career. PhD students have warned off doing these topics, told that if you do research on this, you'll destroy your career before it's even started.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  So there are these sociological or institutional, institutional barriers. And the Chinese may be able to remove them before people in the West.

• 1:50:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's extremely frustrating. You know, I don't know if you know who Bob John is, but he was the-

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, I knew him.

• 1:50:06Jesse Michels?

  You knew him. So he was the dean of the engineering school at Princeton. He was a well-respected plasma physicist and he, he worked on plasma propulsion that's, you know, are still in satellites today. And he sponsored the, the, the Paralab, the, you know, he created this, you know, Engineering and Anomalous Research Center at, at Princeton. And they got all these positive effects from the random event generator experiments. He writes a book about it and none of the physicists take it seriously at all. And they say things like, oh, it's file drawer issues or survivorship bias or P-hacking or, you know, pick your sort of lame, you know, Occam's razor way of explaining away, you know, the actual effect.

• 1:50:48Jesse Michels?

  And they would say, no, it's not. Here's, here's what we did to mitigate that. And, you know, and it's sort of, you just end up in these sort of circular conversations. And if you think that, you know, somebody of, of that sort of pedigree and credentials, who's, you know, in the, at the heart of the ivory tower of the United States academic system, can't, can't get this across the line, I don't know who can. And it got to the point where he almost shut the Paralab down. And then ironically, some Navy guys came to him. And I think James McDonnell from McDonnell Douglas Aircraft were like, you can't do this. This is really important research. And so it's this weird, you know, in, in my experience, covering the UFO topic in the US,

• 1:51:29Jesse Michels?

  you have this academic citadel that won't entertain any of this stuff. And then you have, you know, the people with sort of more skin in the game at these prime defense contractors that, you know, they can make money off this stuff. It's sort of life or death. And, you know, they have skin in the game and they, they think it's all real. And it's this weird bifurcation. So, yeah.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  But it's the same in this area. You see, the thing is that-

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  I've come to the conclusion that publishing papers and peer-reviewed journals on statistically valid experiments makes very little impact. I've done it for years. I still do it. I play the game by the rules. That's the rule and I do it. But that's not what changes people. What changes people is personal experience. And the scientific world is full of people who've had telepathic or psychic experiences. And whenever I give a talk in a scientific institution, on the surface, everyone's pretty conventional. But in the tea break after the talk, people come up to me one by one and they say, you know, I've had these experiences. I can't talk to them. My colleagues are all so straight and stuff. And sometimes so

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  many of them say this to me, I say, I just say to them, why don't you guys come out? You know, you'd have so much more fun. So the scientific world is full of people who actually know these things are happening, but they don't dare talk about it. It's a bit like gays in the 1950s, you know, before the gay pride movement and gays coming out and so on. It's a bit like that. I think what will really make a difference is, as you suggest, some technological applications or public events. So I think that an earthquake warning system based on animals, if it worked, would have a huge impact because people would then say, well, people would then say, well, how does it work? You know, and they'd

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  say, well, it's there picking up tremors. And so and then you'd say, well, why can't seismologists pick them up with their fancy kit and apparatus? And then, and it may be something much more, much more profound. But in relation to pre-sentiment, one idea I had there is that you get an emotional reward for picking, detecting something in advance that's emotionally challenging. And I think the best way of making that something that would make a difference would be using day trading, where people are using very short term, some people are betting, you know, seconds in advance on price movements.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  I went to one of the top day trading firms in the city of London, and the guy in charge was interested in my work. And I met the traders. And I said to him, well, how do they do it? And he said, well, our best trader is here. He's Greek Cypriot by background. And he just seems to know which news screen to look at, which stock out of all the screens on his desk, you know, which is going to move next. He just seems to know he's making millions a year. And this is over seconds. It's not sort of carefully reading the financial news, evaluating, you know, futures in cobalt or something like that. It's, I think it's

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  pre-sentiment. And I said, how do you train staff? He said, we take 10 recruits a year. We give them a year to play with. They do real trading. And at the end of it, we keep one of them, the one of them that's doing best. And I said, well, if all this depends on intuition, then you could just set up a testing app where you could do test, playing with fake money, monopoly money or something, do day trading with actual trades and train people to make these punts by they get immediate feedback to hone this ability. And if they could do this, you could potentially even train people to become very successful day traders using pre-sentiment. That would make a difference because lots of people would

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  sign up for training courses in pre-sentiment. If so, companies offering them would make a fortune. The people doing it would make a fortune. And they'd beat the computers because the computers wouldn't have pre-sentiment.

• 1:55:47Jesse Michels?

  You famously wrote a great paper about how the sun might be conscious.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  So the sun may have all sorts of possibilities in its mind if it's conscious. It's assumed to be totally random within regular science.

• 1:56:00Jesse Michels?

  And we were talking about a mutual friend, Robert Temple, who's written a great book called The New Science of Heaven. And the thesis of the book is that atomic matter, you know, this is sort of prosaically understood, is actually the exception to the rule in the universe. And actually, most of the universe is charged to ions in the form of ambient plasma. And he goes a little further and he says that plasma could itself be alive. And you could explain a lot of our sort of human metaphysics through plasma. It seems like plasma engages in sort of cell division, you know, or like, you know, fractal forms of plasma are created by, you know, higher forms of plasma. It seems like it has maybe

• 1:56:40Jesse Michels?

  a role in prebiotic life. Do you think that that takes your sun is conscious thesis a step further? Because the sun is basically full of plasma.

• 1:56:54Speaker 01

  Well, I think that it's, I think the idea of organized plasma, which is enormously conductive of electric currents with magnetic fields, there are magnetic plasma threads stretching, joining galaxies throughout the universe with, there are hundreds of millions of light years long, some of them.

• 1:57:14Jesse Michels?

  He describes them like nerve filaments or something.

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  Yes, they're like nerve filaments. Well, yes, I think that there's a whole school of thought called the Electric Universe Group. I don't know, you've probably come across them in your journeys.

• 1:57:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's like Donald Scott and.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  Yes, who think that we've got it basically completely wrong, thinking the whole universe is primarily organized by gravity. They think it's primarily organized by electric currents, plasma, and magnetic fields and so on. And that the people who think it's all gravity end up with, they have to postulate dark matter because their theory just doesn't work to explain galaxies. So they say, okay, well, there's all this invisible matter. And at the stroke of the pen, they invent as much invisible matter as they want, many times the amount of real matter that we do know about.

• 1:58:01Jesse Michels?

  And we've never detected dark matter.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Never detected. And yet that passes, there was not a shred of evidence for it. And it passes as mainstream physics, inventing an imaginary substance to explain anomalies. And the same people would be terribly offended if you suggested that telepathy might exist. They'd immediately say, where's the evidence? How does it work?

• 1:58:22Jesse Michels?

  I don't think heterodox thinking scales alongside IQ.

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  No, but, but the fact is that it's a matter of fashion in science paradigms, as Coon said. Well, I think that plasma may well be able to sustain consciousness. Not every random bit of plasma is going to be alive, but organized plasma structures like the sun and the stars, I think, could well be conscious. And actually, I myself thought about this a very long time ago when I was at school. I was a fan of an astronomer called Fred Hoyle, largely forgotten today. But Fred Hoyle was really one of the top astronomers at the time. And he wrote popular books on astronomy. I remember I got the School

• 1:59:11Speaker 01

  Science Prize and my prize was Frontiers of Astronomy by Fred Hoyle. He also wrote science fiction. And he wrote a book called The Black Cloud. I don't know if you've ever read it. It's very little known. In fact, a few years ago, I tried to find out, it was out of print. I had to get a secondhand copy. But in The Black Cloud, he has a group of scientists in a kind of country house, a bit like Bletchley Park. It was modeled on Bletchley Park and, you know, where they were in this country house cracking the Enigma Code and so on. These scientists are there and there's this, astronomers detect this sort of black cloud in the sky that seems to be a plasma cloud. And they find it's

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  coming near Earth. And they're frightened because it might block out the light of the sun. And then everyone gets, governments get involved and secret discussions and all that. And someone beams a radio signal at the black cloud. And it responds in a meaningful way. And they gradually come to the conclusion that this plasma cloud is intelligent, that it has a mind, it has a consciousness, and they can interact with it through electromagnetic impulses. And finally, they manage to persuade it to go away and solve the problem. But the whole thesis of Fred Hoyle's book, which was written probably in the 1950s, and we're talking probably 1955 or something like that, was that plasma can become conscious.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  And for me, that was, it helped liberate my mind from the idea that consciousness has to be in brains when I was about 17 years old. And I'm very grateful to Hoyle for doing that because although it was science fiction, it explored a possibility that would never have occurred to me otherwise. And in a sense, Robert Temple's thesis is like Fred Hoyle's black cloud writ large.

• 2:01:02Jesse Michels?

  It's amazing. And he's written a new paper about the L5 Lagrangian point between the Earth and the moon. And he uses that to explain these quote unquote, long delay echoes, which are these signals that we sent out at the, you know, the early advent of the radio in the, I think, the 20s and 30s. And if, you know, I think seven or eight seconds later, you'd get the same signal back. And he thinks that there are these sort of, you know, there's this sentient Kortolosky cloud, which is basically a cloud of plasma that is intelligent and might be sending the signals back. And if you watch Carl Sagan's Contact, for example, it's this sort of really jarring scene where you see this Nazi message back from the alien entities. And you're like, what's going on? Or it's, I think it's

• 2:01:46Jesse Michels?

  a Hitler speech. You know, like, this is horrible. And maybe that is an homage to this sort of Kortolosky cloud. Who knows? But it's fascinating. There's even a video, actually, of somebody walking up to a plasmoid. And the plasmoids seems to cohere to the heartbeat of the, of the person. And then obviously, in UFO world, you have people sort of seeming to commune with, you know, doing these protocols, these like theological protocols, where they sort of see these, these plasma beings, these UFO like things, and often receiving sort of telepathic messages. And Robert Temple talks about, you know, Moses's burning bush as possibly just being this plasmoid sentient ball or something in the air. It's amazing.

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  Well, Robert Temple's a very original lateral thinker. I mean, he's an independent scholar of the most creative kind. And he's worked on many themes over the years. So he's prepared to go where most people would not be prepared to go. So I think it's very interesting, his thing about the Lagrangian point and these plasma clouds.

• 2:02:53Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, it seems to be perfectly possible there are intelligent plasma clouds. And ball lightning, of course, is a form of plasma phenomenon which is widely accepted to be real and behaves in very anomalous ways. That's something that's probably, well, you've probably looked into it much more than I have. It's on the fringe between UFOs and regular physics because regular physicists agree that it happens, but it's still very mysterious and behaves in a very unpredictable way.

• 2:03:24Jesse Michels?

  It's fascinating, and I have a friend whose YouTube channel is called Land of Chem. His name is Jeffrey Drum, and he talks about a lot of, you know, ancient megalithic architecture as actually involving a buildup of positively charged telluric currents in the ground in order to sort of attract ball lightning phenomena.

• 2:03:44Speaker 05

  So these telluric currents in the crust of the Earth flow and accumulate more prolifically in areas where there's the subterranean mineral water. These stone circles are built right on top, which facilitate the accumulation and flow of telluric currents into the site.

• 2:04:01Jesse Michels?

  And so maybe you would, maybe some of these sort of sacred experiences that we have coincide with this sort of ball lightning that we're sort of, we were able to harness that we no longer really know how to.

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:04:15Jesse Michels?

  It's just fascinating. You, you wrote a book about the physics of angels. Do you believe in angels? And if so, what do you think their physics are?

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  I wrote the book with a theologian called Matthew Fox. And what we did was looked at the traditional understanding of angels in the West, looking at the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, who was a sixth century AD philosopher, probably a monk in Syria or a Syrian Orthodox monk. Hildegard of Bingen, the visionary medieval abbess, and St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century codifier of a whole lot of ancient knowledge and synthesizer of knowledge, who, they all had theories of angels, and we looked at what they said about angels.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  And why we called it the physics of angels is that when Aquinas is discussing how angels move, he says that each angel is complete in itself. When it acts, it acts with its whole being. And you can't have half an angel acting with half its being. It has to act with its whole being. So it acts, so in a sense, angelic action is quantized. And he said, when they move from one place to another, because he was convinced they did, could move from one place to another because they're messengers, is one of their roles, they move from place to place, that from the point of view of the angel, no time elapses, but from external observer, there would be a finite time between it leaving

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  one place where it was acting and reaching the next place where it was acting, very like photons of light. So there's a whole section where he's discussing angels that are very similar to a photon.

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  Well, in terms of angels, this is the minimalist way of thinking of angels is that they're creatures of our imagination, but they're creatures of our collective imagination. And they may exist in a much more, much more than human imaginal realm. In fact, the mind of God may be a realm of divine imagining or imagination. Angels may exist as beings within an imaginal world. And you may then encounter them in states of consciousness where your normal consciousness isn't functioning, like in dreams. And in the Bible, where people encounter angels, for example, Joseph, the putative father of Jesus.

• 2:06:46Speaker 01

  There are several stories in the Christmas story where Joseph is warned by an angel in a dream to do this or to do that. In the Old Testament too, there are many cases where people encounter angels in dreams. And today, people encounter angels in dreams, and people encounter them in altered states of consciousness with psychedelics. And in fact, in the Christian psychedelic church in Brazil, Santo da Imi, which is a Christian church where ayahuasca is their sacrament, this has been going for decades, this church, they have invocations, the angels and hymns to the angels where people collectively experience angels.

• 2:07:28Speaker 01

  Now, at that level, you could say that even a materialist would say, well, okay, yes, people can imagine, they're just fantasies of the imagination, and people see them in their dreams or imagination, doesn't prove they're real. But what's real? If there's an imaginal world, that it has huge effects, the world of the imagination, enormous effects, I mean, Hollywood movies, the media, fiction, book, novels, most people spend most of their spare time involved in an imaginal world. I mean, looking at plays or films or fantasies or reading novels or indulging in various imaginative activities. So the world of the imagination is extremely important.

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  And I think it's very significant that the main global driver of the world's imagination is Hollywood. And Hollywood's in Los Angeles. And as you probably know, the original, how it came to be that in 17, I think it's 69, this Spanish expedition up the coast of California had Franciscan friars in it. St. Francis was very devoted to Our Lady of the Angels. His little church in Assisi was, the holiest place on earth for him was called the Church of Our Lady of the Angels. They found themselves camping by a river on the feast day of Our Lady of the Angels. And as Franciscans, they took this seriously, so they called the river, the River of Our Lady of the Angels.

• 2:09:00Speaker 01

  And when a time town grew up around that, it was called the City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels. Nuestra Senora Reina de los Angeles. That's Los Angeles. So Los Angeles actually grows out of St. Francis's intense devotion to the angels. And it's to me significant that the angels, which can be thought of as beings that work in and through the imagination, among other ways of working, are the presiding spirits to whom the whole city of Los Angeles was dedicated, Our Lady, Queen of the Angels. And so in the Middle Ages, people thought that we had a good angel and a bad angel,

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  that good angels would suggest higher things, good angels would turn towards God and would put into our minds helpful thoughts and lead us onwards and into better ways. Now, bad angels would suggest to us thoughts and actions that would lead us into lust, greed, envy, avarice, pride, all the things the advertising industry does for us now. It's sort of more or less supplanted the bad angels.

• 2:10:13Jesse Michels?

  Would you call those demons?

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  I'd call them the seven deadly sins, or you could call them demons. Yes, I think the bad angels, you could call demons or, or yes.

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  So I think there's no doubt that they exist in the imaginal realm. And then the only question is, what kind of reality does the imaginal realm have? Is it all inside our heads, just produced by distorted activity of nerve cells and neurotransmitters? Or is there a conscious world out there that we tap into, which all religions take for granted, all traditional cultures take for granted, there's a realm of spirits and beings that influence the course of the world and influence us.

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  So in that sense, yes, I do believe in angels.

• 2:11:00Jesse Michels?

  Speaking of the intersection between the imaginary realm and the material world, that's what I find so fascinating about UFOs, because they seem to exhibit flight characteristics and do things in the sky that, you know, we could never dream of with sort of even tip of the spear modern aerospace. And yet there are all sorts of rumors now coming out of the American government that they exist in real nuts and bolts form, you know, in hangars. And I don't know what you make of that conversation. Do you have a take on it?

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  I don't really, I haven't followed the UFO world very much. I mean, I've got so many other things. I feel there's a lot of people investigating it. I'm glad they are. But I feel that's not a field that's underpopulated. The fields I work in are fields where there's practically no one else doing it. So I focus on these areas.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm happy to read about any conclusive results that come out of UFO research or suggestions or, but it's, I don't have time to follow it in detail.

• 2:12:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, I want to, I want to end on perhaps the most practical, but also transcendent note, which is, you gave a great talk about the usefulness of different religious practices and rituals. And so it almost feels like you sort of force ranked and did statistical analysis on some of these rituals. If somebody is watching today and just wants to be a little bit happier and have a little more meaning in their life, are there rituals that you would particularly recommend?

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  Well, it's not. They're spiritual practices. My book Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work, and my other book, Science and Spiritual Practices, are really about, each book's about seven different practices that's been studied scientifically, not by me. I mean, I've tried all these practices myself, but there have been actual studies, these things have measurable effects. And meditation, for example, has measurable effects on brain activity, blood pressure, countering insomnia, reducing depression, and so on. All these spiritual practices have measurable effects. And taken together, people who have religious or spiritual practices are happier, healthier, and live longer than those that don't, on

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  average. I mean, that's a very clear result from thousands of papers in scientific journals.

• 2:13:25Jesse Michels?

  That has to be the case because you have people like Andrew Huberman, who has like the most popular health podcast in the United States, who's all about sort of statistical meta-studies in medicine, basically saying, yeah, it's adaptive for you to believe in God. I don't know if he attaches any sort of metaphysical ontology there, but, so I think what you're saying is definitely true.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  Yes. So in terms of practices, I mean, the very simplest one and the easiest one is gratitude. There's lots of studies by positive psychologists that show that people who are grateful are happier and more popular than those that take things for granted or feel entitled, and who complain when they don't get what they feel they're entitled to. And not surprisingly, such people are less popular. So it's a really simple thing. You know, they did exercises where they divide a group into three. One group, they asked them to write five things that happened in the last week, which were hassles and problems

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  for them. Another group to write just five stories about things that had happened. And the third group to write down five things, good things that had happened for which they felt grateful. And the people who'd simply listed the great, the things for which they felt grateful were measurably happier as a result. And, and sometimes some of their exercises lasted for weeks. So it's, it's not a new idea, counting your blessings, but being thankful, grateful for things makes people much happier. I do it myself every day. In the evening, I think about things for which I'm grateful. And I find it's incredibly

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  helpful, and it's a really simple thing. Also, you know, giving thanks before eating a meal. Everyone used to say grace before meals. You know, go back a hundred years and most families would have done this. Now, hardly anyone does it. And yet, it's very simple. We always do it at home. Either we hold hands in silence, or I say a grace, or someone else says a grace, or we sing a grace together. And just pausing to give thanks for the fact we're alive, we've got food to eat, we're together, we're among friends, we feel safe. And these are such important things that giving thanks for them, acknowledging

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  them collectively, just changes the atmosphere in a really positive way. So I think if, if anyone's looking for one simple thing they can do that won't cost them anything and will have noticeable effects, that's what I'd suggest.

• 2:16:08Jesse Michels?

  Final, final question. Do you think those rituals bring you closer to God, or do you think they're just effective?

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  Both. I think that they provide spiritual practices, don't necessarily turn on God like a tap. They all depend on grace. Grace is a gift. You know, God's presence or the feeling of God's presence, experience of God's presence is a gift. But these practices can make it more likely that that will happen. They remove barriers that stand in the way and make it more likely that you'll be, experience this sense of being closer to God. And that, generally speaking, is for people a joyful thing to feel. So, yes, I think they, they really help.

• 2:17:01Jesse Michels?

  Rupert Sheldrake, thank you so much for, for being here. And it's always, always fun to, to come out here and, and speak to you. And yeah, I think people are gonna get a lot out of this conversation.

• 2:17:12Speaker 01

  Very nice to speak to you, Jesse. You think about a lot of different things and you have an open mind. And I love the way you're spreading ideas in the world which need to be spread.

• 2:17:23Jesse Michels?

  That, that means a lot. I'm just, you know, I'm, I'm not the, the source material like you, but I, you know, I like to aggregate and make connections and that sort of thing. So, thank you.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:17:34Jesse Michels?

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