Rupert Sheldrake – Science and Spiritual Practices
Sandie Sedgbeer: It’s a very important aspect. What we see nowadays is people might meditate together, but actually they’re meditating on their own in the same room as others, or they may all be joined by an app. They’re doing some meditation, but they’re not really connected.
Rupert Sheldrake: No. I think with some spiritual practices, it is perfectly fine to withdraw into one’s own consciousness. I myself meditate every morning, so I’m certainly not against meditation, but I also pray and in my book, Ways To Go Beyond and Why They Work, I discuss the difference between prayer and meditation. I think they are complementary to each other. I think meditation is more like breathing in, you’re withdrawing your attention from the world around you and then when you’re meditating, withdrawing your attention from the train of thoughts and worries and ruminations that is going on inside your mind, the internal chatter and dialogue, by having another focus, either the breathing or a mantra. It is a kind of withdrawal from engagement in daily life, personal worries, and so on, to get to the ground of consciousness itself.
And that’s very important and it has a very connecting effect, not with other people necessarily, but with the ground of being. On the other hand, petitionary prayer, asking for things, is the opposite. You start with making a spiritual connection. All prayers begin with invocations like “Our Father who art in heaven”, or “Hail Mary, full of Grace”, or “Om Namah Shivaya.” Starting with an invocation, invoking a spiritual being, and then connecting, that spiritual power with needs, wants, requests: people often pray for healing for themselves or for others, or for protection, or for success in business, or exams, or all sorts of every day and rather mundane things, as a focus of much of this petitionary prayer. But what that’s doing is connecting the spiritual realm with these concerns. The meditation is withdrawing from them, prayers connecting with them. So it’s a flow in the opposite direction.
I don’t see these as either/or. I see it as both hands and I myself meditate in the mornings and I pray and evenings before I go to bed. I think that prayer is something which can be done more communally and, of course, in all religious services, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, people are praying together with other people and so it can have a unifying effect to pray with others. The other thing that has a very unifying effect through the practice of traditional religion is singing and chanting because all religions have singing and chanting as part of them. When you sing and chant with other people, then you literally come into resonance with them. It’s a very bonding and connecting experience. That’s why, I think, singing together is good for people in secular societies where they no longer sing every week in church with each other. I think that’s why community choirs and other forms of communal singing have become so popular because they do have this bonding effect. They connect you with other people.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, even as religion seems to be on the decline in the west, it’s rising in countries like Africa, which is interesting, and I think we tend to see more community amongst people in countries like Africa, especially those that really aren’t looking for unification.
Rupert Sheldrake: I live in London and you see it here in London. Most English people, recent survey shows, say that they have no religion and on Sunday mornings they would be cleaning their cars, or reading their newspapers, or doing social media or something like that. People go to church, but not many, but when you look at African populations, Nigerians, West Indian, other parts of Africa, their churches are absolutely packed and full of people singing vigorously, having a wonderfully bonding and community experience. And they look so happy when they come out. Whereas people who’ve just spent their time on social media and hadn’t bonded or haven’t sung together, don’t look particularly happy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the prevailing mental disorder in Europe and other so-called advanced parts of the world, is depression. Depression is the sense of separation, isolation, pointlessness, and disconnection. Lots of scientific studies which I described in my book, Science and Spiritual Practices and Ways to Get Beyond, there not being many, many scientific studies that show that people who have regular religious and spiritual practices are much less prone to depression, and also much less prone to drug abuse and other harmful lifestyles.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, Science and Spiritual Practices has been described as a book for anyone who suspects that in the drive towards radical secularism, something valuable has been left behind. In short, the rituals and the ceremonies that not only connect us to each other as families and communities but also connect us to something bigger than ourselves. In what are the ways do we connect and what are the benefits have we lost through the spiritual practices that we don’t practice?
Rupert Sheldrake: Well, I think all religious traditions have a whole mixture of spiritual practices, rituals, prayer, singing, and chanting, celebrations together through festivals and holy days, pilgrimage, fasting. There’s a whole range of these practices which are common to all religions and you can do them without being part of a religion as well. And that’s why I wrote this book because it’s clear that there’s a wide range of spiritual practices. It’s also clear that they are common across the world. It’s also clear that the reason so many people do them, the reason they’re traditionally adopted, is that they work, they have measurable effects on brains, physiology, people’s wellbeing, a sense of community and so on. And there have now been a lot of scientific studies that show that’s the case. So that’s the whole point of my books is to show how the scientific evidence points to their effectiveness, personal experience points to their effectiveness.
In each of the chapters, I suggest ways in which people can do these things themselves. I would say one of the simplest of them all is gratitude. There’s now a lot of research by positive psychologists, psychologists who look into what makes people happy, that suggests that it’s people who are grateful are much happier than people who are not grateful. If you do gratefulness exercises, then you get happier. Quite simple things like just making a list of things, good things that have happened in the previous week, or people to whom you feel grateful, who have helped you, actually makes people feel happier. It also makes them more popular because this research has shown something that is not really very surprising: it’s that people who are grateful and who appreciate what’s going on around them and what people do for them are more popular than people who take everything for granted and instead of being grateful, complain. They’re less popular, they’re less fun to be with. It’s obvious really, but now there’s scientific evidence that this is the case. Coming back to gratitude, it can be done individually, one can make a list mentally or writing it done, or it can be done together. One of the things I suggest in my chapter on gratitude in Science and Spiritual Practices is simply restoring what used to be a standard practice in many families. Certainly, when I was growing up, it was quite common, families before meals would sit down together and share a grace, someone would say a grace or they’d say a grace together, and so there was a way that everyone came together in giving thanks.
It still happens in traditional institutions like Cambridge College, where I still dine several times a year, at the beginning of dinner, everyone stands up and then there’s a long Latin grace. Most people probably don’t know what it means, but the fact is it creates a kind of break or pause before eating in which there’s a space to give thanks and it’s giving thanks together. I think that many families could restore that practice if they don’t already have it. In my own family, we always hold hands together before we eat a meal, sometimes in silence, sometimes someone says a grace. When there are more of us at gatherings, we usually sing a grace and the atmosphere changes completely before the meal, suddenly everyone’s brought together, there’s a sense of joy and there’s a sense of connection. It takes, you know, less than a minute.
The alternative, the normal thing in secular modern Britain, is that there is a kind of awkward pause before the meal and then someone says, oh, do start, it’ll get cold or something like that. But by having a way of bringing people together and doing it silently, it means that there’s no one’s going to object. I mean, even atheists don’t object to a bit of silence before a meal, a chance to collect one’s thoughts. Indeed, there’s no reason why atheists secular humanists should object to giving thanks, because, even if you don’t believe in God, there’s a lot to be thankful for: the people who prepare our food, grow it, the sun that enables the plants to produce our crops, and so on. There is plenty to be thankful for even if one doesn’t believe in God. So I think that these simple practices like this can actually have a transformative effect on people’s lives. In other words, people who don’t do these things are really missing out.
Sandie Sedgbeer: The other thing is that the hypothesis of morphic resonance illuminates what we are tapping into when we do engage in ceremony, or ritual, or chanting, or singing. There’s this whole field that we’re stepping into which is rich and historic and that must be beneficial on many levels that we cannot see.
Continue to Page 3 of the Interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake
