Rupert Sheldrake – Science and Spiritual Practices
Rupert Sheldrake: Morphic resonance is the idea that there’s a memory in nature and it’s based on similarity. In its most general sense, it says that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits and also that each species has a kind of collective memory. This is rather like Yung’s idea of the collective unconscious. But where it affects rituals is that morphic resonance happens on the basis of similarity. The most similar patterns of activity are, the more they resonate across space and time with those who’ve done them beforehand. The whole point of rituals is that people do things in a similar way to the way it has been done before. For example, the American thanksgiving dinner is a national ritual. Rituals don’t have to be religious, they can be secular or national as well. It involves coming together, it involves having a meal together, of all giving thanks. It involves a particular kind of meal. It’s re-enacting, in a way, of the first thanksgiving dinner of the first settlers in the new world around 1620. By taking part in it, Americans connect with other people, they’re sharing ritual with family and friends and they also connect with all those who’ve done it before, right back to the first time. The same thing happens with the Jewish Passover ritual or the Christian holy communion itself which originated at Passover dinner. People who take part in these rituals connect with other people who are doing them at the same time, connecting with other co-celebrators or participants, but also, through morphic resonance, linking to all those who’ve done it before, across the generations, and linking to all those who will do it in the future.
So these rituals are about connection. They’re about connection with other people who are taking part in the same ritual and also connecting with those who’ve done it in past generations with ancestors and those who’ve come before and with those who follow. And that I think is why rituals are so important and so powerful because this sense of connection is something we all need. Happiness is very much to do with feeling connected, being in the flow, and being connected to a kind of flow, and rituals connect us with the flow through the generations, the flow of the community that we’re part of. Whereas unhappiness is about being disconnected, separated, alienated, and lonely. I think that’s the reason that rituals are so important. I think that’s why they play such an important role in every single culture in the world.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You offer seven spiritual practices in Science and Spiritual Practices and one of the ones which I particularly enjoyed was pilgrimage. I love the story about how you have created a ritual with your Godson and when you go on a small pilgrimage, would you share that with us?
Rupert Sheldrake: Yes. I have several Godchildren and one of them was a teenage Godson, and when he was 14, I was trying to think what to give him for his birthday, and I have stopped giving people stuff because most people have got too much stuff, so I give experiences, and I said to him, for your birthday present, I’ll take you on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. We’ll go to Canterbury Cathedral, which was this great site of pilgrimage in the middle ages, as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. We take the train to a village about eight miles from Canterbury. We walk the last eight miles through fields and meadows and orchards. We visit a healing well, the Black Prince’s Well, a medieval healing well. We go to the cathedral, we light candles at the shrine of Saint Thomas. We have tea and then go to choral evening song, which is this beautiful sung service that happens in all our English cathedrals, every day, more or less. So I said to him, is that something you’d like to do? And without hesitation, he said yes. And we did that. We had a wonderful day. Really wonderful. That was when he was 14. When he was 15, we went to Elle Cathedral. 16, Lincoln. 17, Wells. 18, Winchester. And this year he’s 19, we’re going to Chichester. In each case, we have the same general plan. We walk. The pilgrimage on foot is very important. It connects you with nature. You’re walking through the countryside, you go to a holy place, a place which is a link between heaven and earth that connects the two. You go an intention or a goal and it makes it very different from just going for a stroll in the country or a hike.
It has that as part of it of course, and it’s healthy in itself to be outdoors and walking. It also has a kind of bonding effect doing something together. In America, the most obvious pilgrim destinations are in the countryside, what I think of as sacred groves, the national parks, these great places of natural beauty, but American cities also have some great cathedrals. New York City has two fabulous cathedrals: Patrick’s and St. John The Divine, the Episcopal Cathedral. I’ve been on pilgrimage walks in New York as well. I think it’s perfectly possible to this in a city and it works so well with my own Godson, and now a few other people I know, have done it with their Godchildren. I think it’s something different that lots of Godparents could consider. We Godparents, on the whole, are chronically underemployed. I think this is a really good way of doing something about being a Godparent with this one’s Godchild.
Sandie Sedgbeer: I so agree. Ever since my young grandchildren have been small, I’ve had what we call adventure days and they’ve become a bit of a ritual, but as they get in older now, I really would like to take him on the Camino with me.
Rupert Sheldrake: That would be a fabulous thing to do. You couldn’t do it all in one go now probably, but lots of people do bits of it and then go back and do another bit another year. One of the things that’s happening in Britain is the old footpath pilgrimage routes are being reopened. One of the ones that has been reopened is the old way to Canterbury which is about 18 days from Winchester or Southampton. If you ever want to do a pilgrimage in Britain, there’s a website from the British Pilgrimage Trust called britishpilgrimage.org, which has dozens of wonderful pilgrimage routes in Britain. Some of them one-day routes, some of them three or four days, and some up to three weeks. This resurgence of pilgrimage is going on all over Europe.
It was inspired partly by the Camino to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, but there’s now a resurgence of pilgrimage even in countries like Ireland where it never stopped, but it’s being restarted with a greater emphasis on walking rather than driving or taking a bus or train. So this is a particularly interesting thing, although Europe’s become so irreligious, pilgrimages are very much on the increase at the moment.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Rupert Sheldrake, you say that pilgrimage has the great advantage of being both a practice and a metaphor? Tell us about the metaphor part.
Rupert Sheldrake: Well, pilgrimage is a journey to go a holy place, and all religions have them: Muslims go to Mecca, Hindus go to temples or the Sacred River Ganges, and Jews go to Jerusalem. There are many focuses in pilgrimage, but they all have this quality. You go on a journey, which is a literal physical expression of the spiritual quest, you’re going to connect with this place of spiritual path that links Heaven and Earth. It’s a place where people who have been transformed before, where there’s been opening up of the spiritual dimension. So, it’s a physical journey, but it’s also a metaphor because one can see the whole of life as a pilgrimage with a spiritual goal. In fact, that’s what happened in that very famous book of 17th Century English literature, The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, it takes the idea of a pilgrimage and makes it into a metaphor for our whole journey through life. So I think that the metaphor of pilgrimage is a very good one for life, but it doesn’t really work so well as a metaphor unless you’ve actually done a pilgrimage. Otherwise, it’s just an idea, but if you’ve actually done a pilgrimage or done several, it means much more. It fleshes out this metaphor. It makes it a living experience.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Rupert Sheldrake, in your forthcoming book, Ways To Go Beyond and Why They Work: Seven Spiritual Practices in a Scientific Age, you combine the latest scientific research with your extensive knowledge of mystical traditions to show how we may tune into more than human realms of consciousness. Can you give us a brief overview of the seven spiritual practices you’re writing about in that book?
Continue to Page 4 of the Interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake
