Trialogue: Fractal Boundaries and Dischaos, with Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna

Spiritual practices work, and this is not a matter of opinion. Scientists have been measuring their effects for more than thirty years, and there are now thousands of papers in peer-reviewed journals showing that people with a regular spiritual or religious practice tend to be healthier, happier and longer-lived than those without one, whatever they happen to believe. In this talk I look at the practices themselves rather than the arguments around them: gratitude, meditation and prayer, mantr...

We’re often told that the scientific revolution banished souls from nature, leaving a universe of dead matter pushed around by blind forces. I don’t think that’s what happened. The soul of the world didn’t disappear in the seventeenth century; it changed its name. It’s now called a field. Gravity turns out to be an attraction, a pull toward a final unity, which is to say a purpose. The electromagnetic field turns out to be what William Gilbert in 1600 called the soul of the earth, and I’ll sh...

Rupert speaks with Jonas Atlas about the high cost of scientific heresy and what it reveals about the gap between science's public face and its private reality. Beginning with the 1981 Nature editorial that branded A New Science of Life "a book for burning," they trace how Rupert was effectively excommunicated from mainstream science, then turn to deeper questions: how to tell genuine inquiry from pseudoscience in a "post-truth" age flooded with AI-generated theories of everything, why morphi...

Across decades of reading and travel, something has struck me again and again: wildly different traditions, from Daoism to Hinduism to Christianity, converge on a threefold or Trinitarian model of ultimate reality. In this talk I trace that pattern through philosophy, theology, and modern physics, and suggest it reflects something fundamental about the nature of things. Many churches will be celebrating the Holy Trinity on Sunday May 31, Trinity Sunday. This talk was recorded live at St James...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0_Lkku3QH-c What if gratitude isn't just good manners, but measurably changes your wellbeing? What if the medieval Christians were right about nature being alive, and we've spent the last 400 years getting it fundamentally wrong? And why are half a million people now walking ancient pilgrimage routes across Europe when rationalist materialism promised to free us from such "superstitions"? In this wide-ranging conversation at Hampstead Parish Church, I expl...