Science & Spiritual Practices

In his later work Rupert Sheldrake turned the same empirical eye he had trained on telepathy and memory onto an unexpected subject: the practices of the world's spiritual traditions. The result is a pair of books — Science and Spiritual Practices (2017) and its sequel Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work (2019) — arguing that meditation, gratitude, ritual and the rest are not merely matters of belief but have real, measurable effects, open to anyone who cares to try them.

Spirituality you can test

The argument is that these practices have effects you can measure — they make people happier, healthier, and more connected — and that those effects are now being studied scientifically as never before. Crucially, the practices can be lifted out of the doctrines they grew up in, so that a sceptic or even an atheist can take them up for the documented benefits. Spirituality, in this telling, is approached not as a creed to be accepted but as a set of experiments to be run.

Fourteen practices

Across the two books Sheldrake examines fourteen. The first volume takes up meditation, gratitude, connecting with the living world of nature, relating to plants (psychedelics included), rituals, singing and chanting, and pilgrimage and holy places. The sequel adds the spiritual side of sports, learning from animals, fasting, cannabis and psychedelics, the powers of prayer, holy days and festivals, and the cultivating of good habits and kindness. In each case the question is the same: what does the practice actually do, and why does it work?

A thread back to morphic resonance

Ritual is the clearest link to his larger theory. When people enact a ceremony as it has been enacted for centuries — the same words, the same gestures, the same foods — Sheldrake suggests they come into morphic resonance with all who performed it before, so that the past is in some sense made present. It is a striking application of the idea worked out in Morphic Resonance & Formative Causation: that nature, including human culture, remembers.

The scientist who prays

Sheldrake's own position is part of the point. He is a practising Anglican who also draws on Hindu and Christian contemplative traditions. An atheist through his years of scientific training, he took up yoga and meditation while living in India in the 1970s, later returned to Christianity, and has held the two together ever since — an empiricist who prays. It is a stance that discomfits partisans on both sides, and it is of a piece with the rest of his work: take the phenomena seriously, and find out for yourself.

Sources

Primary sources: Rupert Sheldrake, Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative Experiences and Their Effects on Our Bodies, Brains, and Health (2017) · and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work: Seven Spiritual Practices in a Scientific Age (2019).