Notes based on a joint conference held by the Alister Hardy Trust and the London Science and Medical Network group at Kensington Unitarian Church 6th June 2009.
Rupert gave a perfectly organised and cohesive talk on this topic straying into areas that he does not frequently cover in public forums. Interestingly he talked about the use of psychedelics to catalyse religious experiences throughout the history of spirituality and also divulged the positive lasting impact of his own personal experimentation with these drugs. He included this comment within a comprehensive categorisation of the types of activity that induce or generate religious experiences.
He followed this by describing three theories of mind; the materialist view which he claims has failed to prove its case, those metaphysical theories that are in essence platonic because they claim that there are laws outside of nature that govern the mind. Finally he explained his own theories and evidence for what he terms the extended mind.
He then talked about his appreciation of religious place, ceremony and ritual observance, commenting on how acts of ceremony and liturgy repeated consistently over time provide us with a direct ancestral connection. Those identical acts performed by our forbearers have set up a sympathetic field of Morphic resonance that is so embedded in sacred spaces that they can induce spiritual experiences in people simply by entering them.Rupert also extrapolated on his recent musings on the nature of consciousness and the past as well as the realm of possibility.
In the plenary session he depicted his own views of the 'credit crunch of materialist science'. He states that conventional science has constantly offered promissory notes on it’s conviction that a complete explanation of various phenomena in scientific terms is not far off. He stated it was time to insist on an end to these promised explanations. Especially because these scientists have cornered all the available funding using just one modality of scientific research.
He proposed a Littlewoods football pools betting exchange, whereby scientists had to declare specific dates and then bet their personal finances on these predictions! Furthermore he proposed an ‘ecumenogenesis’ of western life sciences in order to properly pool information to create a more convincing explanation of the unexplained and conveniently ignored gaps in the current scientific model .
In the break I commented to Rupert that his musings on consciousness the past and possibilities had move forward since the time he had spoken on the topic, he replied by stating that it was constantly on his mind as he tried to come up with a coherent explanation for the relationship between past present and future.
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