A warm introduction by author and journalist Graham Hancock at the SYNCHRONICITY: Matter & Psyche Symposium, 2015.

Transcript

Rupert and I have known each other for a number of years but in January 2013 we both appeared at a now rather notorious TEDx conference in London, following which, after being online for a few days, both our talks mysteriously vanished, setting in motion a discussion that went worldwide that we had not expected or anticipated.

It was funny, really, I mean TED they wanted to shut us up by taking us offline but they had the opposite effect in doing that. Now actually the talks that we gave were very different but the one, I think the one area that they had in common which particularly got under TED's skin was the notion of non-local consciousness, that consciousness may not be simply an artifact or an epiphenomenon of brain activity, that it may be more mysterious and more complex than that.

I am simply a writer, a journalist, but Rupert's a real scientist and here's the interesting thing, Rupert has brought his real scientific discipline to the investigation of problems and mysteries that most so-called real scientists wouldn't touch with a bargepole, and that's exactly what we need. We need scientists with the courage to bring rigor and discipline to the investigation of the mysteries that surround us all and Rupert's work over many decades has been of, I would say, incredible importance in bringing forth rational and focused discussion on these key areas, which so often are the subject of rather woolly and not thoroughly thought through discussions. And I want to pay tribute to Rupert for that now.

Rupert's most recent book is actually called the Science Delusion in Britain but here in America they gave it the title Science Set Free. It's called the Science Delusion in Britain in a wry reference to the Pope of materialist science Richard Dawkins who wrote a book called The God Delusion, but I think Science Set Free works really well as well as a title. Rupert's also written the Presence of the Past. He's written a very intriguing book called the Sense of Being Stared At. Morphic Resonance of course is the subject for which Rupert is most widely known, perhaps. And then an intriguing title here, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.

Well actually that's a really, that's a really important issue because if dogs know when their owners are coming home and there are in fact no cues to enable them to have that information then they're breaking the so-called laws of physics, and the laws of materialist science, and these are precisely the kind of problems we need to be investigating. And Rupert is the man who's investigating them, and doing them with rigor and with intelligence and with imagination, and it's my pleasure to introduce him.