Rupert Sheldrake – Science and Spiritual Practices

Rupert Sheldrake: Yes, the first one I write about in the book is on sports and for most people that’s a surprise because in a secular world, most people don’t think of sports as a spiritual practice. But actually, I think that the principle way in which most people in the modern world do actually enter altered states of consciousness have a sense of connection and presence that they don’t get through the more mundane parts of their life. One of the things about spiritual practices is coming into the present and in meditation, one of the important things is to come into the present through the mantra, or the breathing, rather than being taken away from it all the time by ruminations, thoughts, worries, et Cetera. Now if you’re skiing downhill at 60 miles an hour and there’s a cliff on one side, you could easily go over. Or if you’re in the middle of a football game and people are coming to you to tackle you to get the ball. Or if you’re driving a racing motor-bicycle very fast, you have to be in the present. Or on a rock face, if you’re a mountaineer. You have to be in the present because otherwise, you’re dead or at least going to have a serious accident. So one thing sports does is it brings people into the present, into a state of flow. Many people actually have mystical experiences through sports. One of the first people to point this out was Michael Murphy, who was a founder of the Esalen institute in 1962. He’s a very keen sportsman, a keen golfer, and he wrote a famous book called Golf in the Kingdom about the mystical side of golf, which has been the bestseller among golfers for years. It brings out this mystical side of golf. It’s not just about winning or testosterone or hitting small balls around the golf course, there’s a lot more to it than that and also with other sports. I have a whole chapter on the spiritual dimension of Sports.

Then I have a chapter on learning from animals. Many people find that surprising because animals are normally considered not part of the spiritual realm, but any spiritual view of nature has to include the fact that all creation is a reflection of the divine. In all animals, there’s something of the divine and we can see it in lots of ways. There is beauty. Some animals are very beautiful. In the way they move and the way they look.

All of the nonhuman animals don’t have the problems we do. We have worries, and inner chatter, internal dialogue. They don’t have language, so they don’t have internal dialogues. That means they’re much more in the present. And one of the aims of spiritual practices is to come into the present. Animals don’t have to work at it. And that’s their natural condition, which is why I think we can learn from them. For example, if you’ve got a cat sitting on your lap, purring, the cats completely in the present, is expressing its pleasure and joy at being in the present. And one way is just stroke it distractedly while thinking of something else to just enter into that sense of presence with the cat. It can actually help you come into a sense of presence and connection.

I count spiritual practice as coming into the present. I myself think that animals may also have kind of mystical-type experiences. I think it’s very arrogant of us humans to think we’re the only ones with the hotline to God. I think animals have many of the features we experience as spiritual. They live in the present. They often show altruistic behavior, even insects like ants or bees. They’re not in it for the money. They’re not in it for themselves. They’re in it for good of the greater community, far more so than most humans. Dogs are famous for their loyalty and the unconditional love they show us. Among humans, that level of unconditional love is found in saintly people, but most people fall short of the level shown by the average dog.

I think it’s quite possible that when a lizard is basking in the sun or when a songbird is singing his beautiful song, it has a sense of connection to something much greater than itself, beauty, the sun, and the wider universe. So I think we can learn from animals about spirituality.

Then, I talk about fasting because fasting is a spiritual practice in old traditions. Jewish people fast Yom Kippur, Muslims in Ramadan, Christians in Lent, Hindus have various fasting days. Shamanic cultures often have fasts before ceremonies or rites of initiation or do them during vision quests. The physiology of fasting is that you go into Ketosis where the body breaks down stored fats. The ketone bodies in the blood, acetone, acetoacetate, and beta-hydroxybutyrate, actually affect the level of neurotransmitters in the brain.

Beta hydroxybutyric acid is psychoactive in the sense it changes the levels of neurotransmitters leading to altered states of consciousness. People when they’re fasting often feel their minds are clearer, they can pray and meditate better, concentrate better. It’s known to have enormous health benefits to fast, that is for people who are in reasonable condition to start with, obviously not recommended for anorexics or for people on vast numbers of pills that the whole fasting might disrupt or, in difficult medical situations. But for most people, fasting is tremendously good for them both spiritually and physically. I myself do it every year during Lent for at least four days and usually just before Easter and find it a really helpful practice.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, you also write about cannabis and psychedelics.

Rupert Sheldrake: Yes, I also write about cannabis and psychedelics. That’s probably for some people surprising, even shocking, and perhaps unexpected. But the reason I do that is partly because for me, in my own lifetime, both cannabis and psychedelics have been helpful spiritually. I’ve had kind of spiritual openings and this, particularly in the 1970s when I was in my kind of atheistic rather narrow scientific phase. I first took LSD in 1970 and I would have been 28 and the effect was extraordinary. It gave me the sense of a vastly greater realm of consciousness that no one had ever told me about before, that I’d never thought of before.

The same thing happened when I first took cannabis, which I did in India with a holy man in the Himalayas. It was the first time I ever experienced it. It was a kind of spiritual mystical experience for me. Cannabis and psychedelics have been used in shamanic cultures and in religious practices for a long time. There are now psychedelic churches. The Santo Daime church in Brazil is a psychedelic Christian Church where people take ayahuasca as a kind of communion in services. So, certainly, there are a lot of people who do feel that these things have a spiritual value and for many young people in our society where we no longer have powerful rites of passage, I think psychedelics, for many people, serve as a kind of rite of passage, as they did for me. I think it’s better to acknowledge that and recognize that this can be a spiritual opening than to pretend that it’s meaningless, valueless and so on. Because people who’ve had these experiences don’t find them meaningless, or valueless. They often feel that they’re having openings and they’re helpful.

Of course, cannabis and psychedelics can be dangerous, particularly for people prone to psychosis, and I’m certainly not advocating the indiscriminate use of illegal substances, but I, I think the situation in the United States and in Canada is now a very interesting one because cannabis is now legal in many states. In some like Colorado who has decriminalized the use of psilocybin, magic mushrooms. So now it’s possible to do these things without the stigma of illegality, and I think that churches and synagogues and other religious organizations are going to have to come to terms with this. They could just say no when it was illegal. As a matter of fact, there are now Jewish groups in the United States, in states where cannabis is legal, who’ve introduced taking cannabis into their Havdalah ceremonies which are at the end of the sabbath, they have communal meal at the end of the Sabbath on Saturday evening, where traditionally they drink wine and they have sweet spices, but some now have cannabis-infused bagels. They find that it brings the communal spirit, the celebration, the togetherness of the group of friends, and makes it more powerful and really helps.

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