Science and Spiritual Practices by Rupert Sheldrake
Charles Foster
Science and Spiritual Practices By Rupert Sheldrake Coronet £20 Oldie price £14.13 inc p&p
I know many biologists. I pity most of them. When they did their Phds, they were told that, ascending on the ropes fixed in the 18th and 19th centuries, they would be in the party that triumphantly conquered the great mountain of Extreme Certainty, from which they would have an undistorted view of the entire universe. The natural world, they were solemnly assured and devoutly believed, held no mysteries: everything that there is could and would be comfortably accommodated in their Enlightenment paradigm of material reductionism.
They were wrong. The paradigm is creaking and cracking. Dawkins is an embarrassment. Genes aren’t selfish. Lamarck is back in biology, under his new name of epigenetics. The Human Genome Project, despite its brilliant success in sequencing the genome, has produced almost no tangible benefits, and genetics generally doesn’t have anything like the explanatory or predictive power it was thought to have. The point, nature and seat of consciousness are as elusive as ever.
And no one has been able to suggest how consciousness could have emerged from unconscious matter; a problem that has led philosophers such as Nagel and Strawson to argue for the ancient solution – that matter is not unconscious at all. This makes the poor old biologists come over all funny. Physicists, used to quantum non-locality and entanglement, don’t raise an eyebrow.
Not only do many subjects of traditional scientific inquiry fail to fit into the old ways of thinking: almost all of what we really value about our lives doesn’t fit either. The 18th-century mindset – which saw nature as a machine – was good at making machines. But we know that we are more than machines, and intuit that dogs and trees and suns are also more than machines.
The biologists know it, too. They are material reductionists from nine to five – for the sake of their salary, their tenure, and out of cognitive dissonance – but, as soon as they come home, they treat their dog as if it were conscious, and their spouses and children with love that it is ludicrous to suppose is rooted in reciprocal altruism or kin selection. They stare wonderingly at sunsets, weep at the St Matthew Passion, and think that Wordsworth is wiser than their boss. This queasy oscillation between mutually inconsistent worlds is not a happy way to live.
It’s not just the biologists. Most of us live like that. But we needn’t and shouldn’t. For decades, Rupert Sheldrake has shown us how proper scientists behave, and how we are better off living like proper scientists. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it appears that people can know, to a degree significantly greater than chance, and before they see the caller ID, which of their friends or relatives is phoning. Here are two responses:
Traditional scientist: ‘The results are wrong. Why? Well because it can’t happen. Why? Because that’s not how things work.’
Sheldrake: ‘That’s interesting. Let’s investigate.’
The first is fundamentalism, as intellectually disreputable and as inimical to human thriving as the
rantings of Young Earth Creationists. The second is scientific and, because it is genuinely concerned with the elucidation of the truth rather than the confirmation of a dogma, it will set you free, cure you of the schizoid nine-to-five-ness, and make you much more interesting at the dinner table. This is the spirit of Sheldrake’s most recent book.
He examines seven practices: meditation; gratitude; reconnecting with the more-than-human world; relating to plants; rituals; singing and chanting; and pilgrimage.
The benefits of each are well recognised. If you meditate, for instance, you are likely to live longer and, because you will be happier, calmer and more relational, you will want to live longer. Sheldrake’s lucid documentation of the benefits, along with practical advice about how to start practising, would themselves be ample reasons to buy this book.
But he doesn’t stop there. Sheldrake is the ultimate big-picture person. He wants to know why these effects occur at a level above the boring, mechanistic ‘raised serotonin’ or ‘greater gamma brain wave strength’ type of account. He wants to know what sort of creatures humans are, and the nature of their relationship with the rest of the universe. And he searches honestly for the most parsimonious, anomaly-free explanation for all of the (tectonic) effects of the practices he describes.
Our minds, he contends, are not just stuffed into our skulls: they extend well beyond them, dancing ecstatically or miserably with other minds. And (because he’s a thoroughgoing evolutionist in a way that the whitecoated scientific Taliban are not) he thinks that the habits of the universe (which we anthropomorphically describe as natural ‘laws’) evolve, too.
The past is still present, shaping our thought and action. On one level, that is obviously true: the genes of ancestral jellyfish and the decisions of Jurassic shrews affect me as I sit writing this review. Yet the effects of the past are more immediate and exciting than the effects of the past that we find crystallised in genes and traits: if you kiss a Byzantine icon, you come into communion with the faithful who have kissed it before. We have astonishing powers to change ourselves and the universe – and concomitant duties to do so. We can and must re-enchant a world, disenchanted by the Enlightenment’s dislocation of matter and soul, by literally chanting into it.
Sheldrake writes with the simplicity that is possible only if you are very clever and have nothing to hide, and with the humility that comes from knowing that the point of searching is wisdom and kindness rather than mere knowledge. He never preaches.
You needn’t follow him all the way into pantheism and morphic resonance – though you might be pleasantly surprised if you did. But you should go with him on the congenial and exhilarating journey through these practices.