THC 60: Rupert Sheldrake | Animal Telepathy, Plant Consciousness, & Morphic Fields

01:43 How's it going higher side chatters, you know the routine. Drinking a little drink smoking a little smoke I'm Greg Carlwood and for all the uncertainty i have about reality and consciousness my core belief is that we'd gain much more knowledge of the world around us by examining the stranger aspects of life rather than dismissing them things like psychedelics out-of-body experience psychic ability and the behavior of other animals Unfortunately, most of today's highly respected academics and leading scientists operate in exactly the opposite manner. And it is very rare to find someone strong-willed enough to absorb the education tools and intellects of traditional academic systems but remain free enough to openly explore topics considered fringe or paranormal. Today's guest Rupert Sheldrake is just such a rarity!

02:26 Rupert Sheldrake was a student at both Harvard and Cambridge with a PhD in biochemistry, and has authored numerous books and papers on a whole host of interesting topics. I couldn't be more honored that he's going to spend some time with an idiot like me! Rupert welcome the show thanks for being here. Pleased to be with you Man, you have such an impressive body of work. There's so many subjects we could talk about I know your book Dogs that Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home it's over a decade old at this point but i've always been curious about animals and pets And I've always wondered how different our minds and consciousnesses and emotions are from them Would you mind telling people a little bit about the research for that book? The unexplained power of animals that you found

03:05 Sure. Incidentally, a new edition came out last year so there's now a fully updated version of the book available. Well, in the book I deal with three main areas of unexplained powers of animals. Firstly telepathy, secondly the sense of direction including homing pigeons and dogs and cats that find their way home over hundreds of miles. And thirdly premonitions – the ability of many animals to apparently foresee earthquakes tsunamis or other disasters All of these are areas that we have researched that haven't really been done much with animals or with people. And they're all things that we share with animals, many humans are telepathic too. People have a sense of direction but it's often not as good as that of animals and animals are better at premonitions so animals have abilities that we have to but often to a lesser degree

04:07 And when I was investigating these, I went about it in two or three ways. Firstly, I have a huge database of more than 5,000 case histories of stories from vets and animal trainers, horse riders, hunters, pet owners and so on about animals, which is the natural history. And this falls into a whole range of categories. Secondly I do surveys to find out how common this behavior is and third experiments and ones that mainly investigated experimentally have been the ability of animals to know when their owners are coming home

04:46 Many dogs and cats, and some horses and parrots, and some other animals too know when a member of the family is coming home even if it's not in routine time. Even if they're not in the familiar vehicle And even if nobody at home knows when they are coming They get excited or dogs go and wait by the door or window sometimes ten minutes even half an hour before the person comes home So, in our experiments we have people go at least five miles away. They come home at randomly chosen times –we choose the time and let them know by cell phone– they don't know in advance when they're going home, they travel in unfamiliar vehicles, the people at home do not know when they are coming and we film the place that a dog waits for the whole time that person is out

05:35 In that way we have a full record of their behaviour and we can tell that over and over again they seem to know when the person is coming home long before the person arrives and in a way that can't be explained by sound or routine, or people at home giving them clues. But which seems to depend on picking up the intention of the person who come home In other words it seems to be telepathic Right! That's the most interesting part to me is that in your studies The animal would get excited when the person stands up at their desk at work Rather than you know when they're coming up the driveway because I definitely experienced that with our dog if my if my girlfriend is parked

06:20 a block away walking towards the house, the dog definitely picks that up. I've had friends dismiss that as a keener sense of hearing and I'm like but you can't see through the door! You don't know who that is walking up so it is a really interesting phenomenon. I definitely think I experience it with my pets um...that they are they seem more in tune to certain things Given some of those examples of the mental connection between pets and owners, do you think that it's something that could be strengthened or developed? Well I think its already very strong in some dogs and cats. Um...I don't know if anyone has actually tried to train it um..it seems to happen spontaneously in so many animals. I don't know how you'd train it but I suppose rewarding the dog for

07:09 for giving a warning of someone coming would be one way, but just paying attention is a kind of reward. So I think many people are as it were unconsciously training them anyway by paying attention to them So I just don't know. Some are so good at it that you could hardly get any better really. Yeah, it seems like just a sixth sense but um...I always thought cats were particularly interesting animals and I don't know if you've heard about the cat in that Rhode Island hospital but it seems to know when patients are going to die and spends the night with them before they go apparently its pretty well documented in the hospital

07:47 Yes, that case has been well documented because one of the doctors actually studied it and wrote it up in a paper in a medical journal. There are many other cases of cats that do that. In my book I describe several of them. They seem to know when people are going to die and its surprising in this case people they don't know very well, you know. They're strangers really but many animals know when their owners are sick or have a problem and they go and comfort them I mean it's one of the reasons that people get so attached to their pets because they really do seem to care about us

08:33 And some dogs give warnings of epileptic seizures and they're very helpful to people with epilepsy because they give them warnings long before they can know themselves, long before any other sign is available that a seizure's going to come on. It enables them to be in a safe place when it happens It's a phenomenal thing. I tend to think that if animals can do it, people should be able to do it! Do you think that these abilities give some type of clues into what consciousness is? What the mind is? Do you think there's a mechanism there?

09:10 I think they do. I think what they show is that telepathy normally occurs between people or animals that are closely bonded emotionally, and I think what they show is the bonds, the social bonds we have with with people or with animals are real bonds, they're real connections and I think they're mediated through what i call morphic fields. They stretch when people go away these bonds aren't broken they stretch people remain connected at a distance. That's why animals and people can quite often tell when someone they know has had an accident or even has died, or when they need them, or when they're going to come home because they are connected I think these social bonds that connect still at a distance are the medium for telepathic connection or communication

10:10 Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. I hear some alternative speakers and thinkers and philosophers talking about consciousness existing outside of the body, and it wasn't really until I heard about your morphic field that it painted a little bit easier picture for me to grasp And I think it's a really interesting concept. It definitely explains some of these stranger aspects that the dogmatic scientists, the traditional scientists tend to just ignore rather than explore which is really a shame Well, it certainly is. I think that the concept I'm keenest on is the extended mind—the mind extending through fields beyond the brain. We're used to the idea of fields inside magnets which stretch beyond a magnet or the field inside a cell phone that stretches beyond the cell phone.

11:03 of the mind are in our brains and stretch beyond them. I think when we look at something, the image we're seeing is projected out by the eyes to where it seems to be and our minds connect with what we're looking at And that is the basis of what I call The Sense Of Being Stared At Incidentally my book called that The Sense Of Being Stared At Is coming out in a new edition In a couple of weeks So the extended mind is I think better than the idea of the non-local mind or the mind outside the brain, because I don't think that the mind is just kind of free floating nowhere in particular. I think our minds are normally rooted in our brains just as they seem to be but they extend much beyond them which is why attention and intention can have effects at a distance

11:50 Now, I know you've done a whole lot of work with plants that was in your early career. Do you think plants have a consciousness and trees have a type of consciousness? I know there's been some alternative studies in that area. Well, I think they have I think they have morphic fields that organize their form. What plants mainly do is grow, and the shape they grow in depends on a form-shaping field which is called a morphogenetic field. It's to do with morphogenesis—the development of form. It's one kind of morphic field which are these shaping fields that I think shape everything in nature and contain any kind of memory

12:29 So I think plants do have a kind of memory. I do think they have rather mind-like field, but I don't doubt if they're conscious in the same sense we are conscious and you know our own consciousness is shaped by language and as animals we have the ability to move around and all animals that have brains that control their muscular systems Well, plants don't do that. What they do is have an awareness of gravity and light which are the main things that concern them And they grow towards light or away from light in case of roots So I think their minds in so far as they have minds are primarily concerned with things like gravity, light growth and form

13:17 would be very hard for us to recognize as minds if we were able to get inside a plant. But they do communicate with our minds and There's a sense in which plants communicate with animals all the time, and flowers after all and fruits are a kind of communication. There'd be no point in a plant forming flower if there wasn't an animal to see it unless its wind-pollinated flower but most of the coloured flowers and scented flowers that we have in our gardens are there because plants evolved them in a kind of communication or dialogue with animals

13:53 I mean, in one of his rare poetic moments Darwin said there could have been no flower until there was an eye to see it. So you see there, that's an interaction and fruits are an interaction too. Plants produce fruits that smell good taste good look good precisely because they attract animals if it wasn't for animals they wouldn't bother producing fruits And they also of course produce chemicals which give flavor to things like mint and all the herbs and spices and of course they also produce psychoactive chemicals

14:33 as in the case of cannabis, ayahuasca and so forth. The plants that make up ayahuasca. Why they do that? Who knows! These are things which have powerful effects on animals including humans. These are another form of communication between plants and animals, so I think there's a whole lot of dialogues going on between plants and animals but they're usually taking place through smells colors chemicals yeah and so on That's really interesting. I never thought about flowers and fruits as a type of communication, but it just is about changing your definition of communication really. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense! To segue into another topic...

15:19 Let me say I became familiar with your work due to the crossovers and conversations you'd had with Terrence McKenna, who have always considered one of my favorite minds. And as Graham Hancock whose TED Talk also faced the same banning controversy as yours, I sometimes wonder if it's the experiences with psychedelics that fertilized the minds of some great scholars to entertain the less conventional theories and study fringe subject material? Do you think that has anything to do with it?" I think it could have. Yes, I wouldn't like to say it always does because there are a lot of people who are just naturally creative and who don't seem to need any chemical aids. True

16:05 And there are some people who take psychedelics who are completely conventional in their outer life. There's quite a number of scientists, to all intents and purposes when you visit them in the lab they just look like regular guys but behind the scenes they're interested in psychedelics they have psychic experiences. Science is full of closet psychedelic takers and people with psychic powers and spiritual interests It's just that within the culture of science, most people don't feel free to talk about it to their colleagues. In a sense I'm out at the closet so a lot of scientists talk to me about their experiences in private but most of their colleagues wouldn't have the faintest idea that they have deviant views because in public they try to pretend

16:57 to be completely conventional and straight. That's a common feature of science, and it's a great shame actually because most scientists aren't as boring as the official view that science makes science look But they're very afraid of coming out of the closet or making their colleagues think they're at all weird in their interests because they are afraid that they'll lose their grants, jobs and reputation. I think science will change dramatically when scientists feel free to come out of the closet and talk with their colleagues about things that really interest them

17:36 Yeah, I guess with psychedelics it's kind of a chicken or an egg kind of thing. Well usually it's probably the inquisitive mind would entertain psychedelics already rather than the rigid mind who would dismiss them as party favors. Yes But you know I mentioned your TED talk and this is kind of what we're talking about, the material in Science Set Free. The dogma of science to not look at the stranger aspects of life. You've been working on this it seems like Graham Hancock's doing the same similar thing talking about the dogma of history and the dogma

18:13 looking back at some of the structures we have and re-examining the timeline of humanity. Terrence kind of did this in The Dogma Of The Social Structure, trying to challenge that I feel like you guys are all doing similar things to challenge the paradigm in just different areas and I love it! That's one of my favorite things. I feel like that's what brings new ideas to my mind And without it...I mean what are we really learning? Well, I agree. And again, there are many people who actually are interested in these things even though you'd never guess it from their public persona and there's a lot going on behind the scenes

18:56 I think the interesting thing about the TED controversy was that Ted took down my talk and Graham Hancock's from the TEDx site in response to protests by very reactionary figures, PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, the militant atheist bloggers. I think they behaved hastily and I think they've come to regret it. I got the impression he rather regretted that they'd taken this decision. Once they had taken it, they had to stick with it. But a journalist who is writing a book about this whole TED episode told me last week that he interviewed Chris Anderson recently and Chris Anderson said as a result of

19:48 all this controversy over my book, Science Set Free. He actually bought a copy and has read it and apparently really enjoyed it and found that gave him a whole new way of looking at things so I just I don't think Anderson himself is necessarily stuck into this old mindset. Some of the people around him are, and he's under pressure from some of these very reactionary forces in the scientific world I think he has the potential to be considerably more open, as a matter of fact. I hope that will be reflected in the future direction of Ted and TED Talks so it might all have done some good in the end. It certainly was helpful in spreading ideas this controversy but I think it might also have done something too to lighten up Ted itself Yeah

20:42 I think it definitely had the reverse effect. If they would have just left it alone, amongst all these TED Talks there would have been nothing anomalous about it but by drawing all this attention specifically to you and Graham Hancock censoring your talks. I mean, they're now what everybody talks about as far as TED Talks are concerned. I think the biggest conversation going around is this bit of censorship and then everybody goes online to watch these two specific talks over other ones? No, no it's... Before they banned my talk it had 35 thousand views and has now had at least 500 thousand so certainly being completely counterproductive from their point-of-view

21:25 Funny how it works out. The universe works in mysterious ways, but there is a lot of good material on that talk and if we had more time I'd love to discuss the details and examples of it but A side note that I found interesting was that you made the presentation barefoot What was the motivation behind that? I don't know. The organizers of this event had created a kind of mossy platform on the stage and they asked all the presenters to do it barefoot, so it wasn't me being eccentric or with some peculiar idiosyncrasies. I was just following house rules. Oh that's so funny!

22:03 I'd never been in a TED event before. For all, I knew all TED talks were barefoot so you know, I just did it because they said this is what...this is the way we're doing it would you mind taking your shoes off and standing on this moss? So no that's fine but when the TED talk was screened on stage quite few people thought that I had some kind of peculiar thing about being barefoot well I like being barefoot and its nice standing on moss and stuff but um I can't claim that it was my own idea Well, the reason I even bring it up is because there are a lot of people who talk about energy and electrical charges. And they utilize products like grounding mats and they recommend walking barefoot on grass to discharge the static buildup in the body. And I'm not sure what I think about that...I've never...I don't know but do you think there's any validity to those kind of things?

22:53 Well, I certainly think it feels more natural walking barefoot and you know there have been periods in my life when i have done it. When I lived in India, in a village in South India, I was barefoot quite a lot of the time but of course you have to harden up your feet and if I do now just be quite painful in most circumstances yeah I think...I mean like no idea whether one absorbs earth energies but it certainly feels more natural to do that and it does give give a greater sense of connection. Interesting, well I know you need to get going it's been great to be able to bounce some of my weirdo questions off someone that i admire the reality that the scientific community is dogmatic and stuck within an established rigid paradigm is definitely not new to listeners at this show its actually probably the fact they contribute to the success of this show because people are hungry here about things that conventionalist won't touch

23:49 and because the establishment isn't doing it, they've got to look somewhere else. But your latest work is doing a great job in breaking it down and hopefully turning a lot of young scientific minds which is crucial and I applaud that path but is there anything else you're working on or any other information you'd like to leave the people with? Maybe your website? Oh yes definitely take a look at my website sheldrake.org And I have an online, at least a cell phone telepathy test and other tests online at the Online Experiments Portal. So anyone who wants to try out an experiment for themselves do have a go. Awesome! That is very cool. Well Rupert good sir, I'm just thankful that I was able to form full sentences in your presence. Thanks for being here. I appreciate your time and know that people do too

24:40 Take care and keep fighting the good fight. It's my pleasure, all the best! Bye. There we go people a little shorter than most episodes of THC but I'm a big fan of Rupert Sheldrake and i'm happy to have talked to him for any amount of time please share this show with your people if you found it interesting and review us on iTunes that's always a huge help And you can support and sustain my life with the purchase of one of many t-shirts offered at conspirates.net I got two new designs coming very soon Anyway, you guys are great Thanks for the support The show is growing like a pesticide resistant strain Of good old fashioned Monsanto corn and that's fast We'll be back next week with Jeff Berwick The dollar vigilante to learn how To internationalize ourselves To avoid going down with the ship we call the USS Economy I suspect we might learn something

25:26 In the meantime, take care of yourself. Enjoy some good vices and walk barefoot! We'll talk about that DMT experience soon. Peace! I should be allowed to have a college shower. I should be allowed to think, I should be allowed... I should be allowed if necessary. To the scene was the worst hope of my starving hysterical. I should be released! I should be allowed to pee. I should be allowed to glue my fur.

27:34 I should be allowed to think.