Rupert Sheldrake

I saw Rupert Sheldrake speak the other night. He was addressing the theme of what you might call peak experiences and their attribute of bringing us into the present. So this is the purpose of meditation, for example: staying with the mind, in the present, and there is a blissful quality to that. But then we have extreme sports and their current popularity - in an era of concerns with health and safety! He also suggested that this is one reason we have pets: because animals live in the present and bring us into the present. 

For me, with my shamanic leanings, sweatlodges and trance dance have this function: the physical experience is so compelling that I am taken out of my distracted mind and into the present. And the experience of the present is outside this construction we call time and it is profound.

Sheldrake is also known for having his TED talk dropped from its list of talks because of his questioning of science, and his theory of morphic resonance, that proposes a collective memory in nature. An example of the way his mind works, which I loved, was his questioning of physical constants like the speed of light, and even the constancy of the laws of physics. He did some research on the speed of light, and found that it has indeed changed over the decades! So here is his infamous TED talk, in which he highlights, and questions, the 10 basic assumptions about the world that science leads us to hold.