Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative Experiences and their Effects on our Bodies, Brains and Health

"Well, when you asked me for my list of five books about nature, I was tempted, in order to make the point that I’m about to make, to choose a book which no-one would ever think of as a nature book. A book about the architecture of the inner city, say, or the biography of business mogul – just to hammer home the point that everything is nature . The biography is just as much a nature book as anything that Robert Macfarlane has ever written. Obviously the connection between Rupert Sheldrake’s book on spiritual practices and nature writing is clearer than the connection between the mogul’s biography and nature writing. Although Sheldrake is primarily concerned with the effect of various ‘spiritual’ practices on the human head and on the human ability to thrive, a lot of things advocated in the book demand the sort of express, ecstatic communion with the natural world that we’ve been talking about, and which is the main concern of lots of classic nature writing. Sheldrake talks about the need for us all to go and sit under a tree, and the need to be aware of the tide of our own breath in and out of our body. “Human thriving depends on having a physical connection with the natural world” Some of the lessons in this book will be familiar to modern readers. It has been conclusively demonstrated (and widely publicised) that human thriving depends on having a physical connection with the natural world. We know that there is much greater incidence of depression and ADHD in children brought up without access to a piece of green. We know that if you want to increase the productivity of your workers you should ensure that their workstations look out on trees. We know that hospital patients recover more quickly if they can look out on a field rather than the back of another building. In this book Sheldrake explores some of the reasons for these facts – as well as the reasons for the well documented benefits of gratitude, singing, religious affiliation, and so on. He also, appropriately and powerfully, uses the book to articulate some of the ideas for which he’s famous – for instance the idea of ‘morphic resonance.’ That laws of the universe are better described as a series of habits that the universe acquires. There are many exhilarating corollaries. We’ve touched on some of them already. The past continues to throb in every accumulation of molecules. We are profoundly affected by the things which have happened before. He speaks very potently about matters that relate to the way that we can appreciate a wood or a wild animal or a city street or our best friends, because he’s clear (as few people are) about the nature of the relationship between mind and matter. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think the most disastrous event in intellectual history (with the arguable exception of the Neolithic revolution – which made us sedentary animals, when we are constitutionally travellers) was probably the Cartesian separation of matter and mind. It put everything that you might normally lump with God, angels and so on into the ontological compartment, separate from matter. It disenchanted matter. It desouled the material world. And it led to nature being seen as a machine. If you see something as a machine, there’s no moral evil in tinkering with it or destroying it. You can draw a direct line between Cartesian dualism and Monsanto. The practices Rupert Sheldrake discusses are informed by his understanding of the principle that mind is inherent in all matter. This resonates much better with many people’s intuitions than the mechanistic model of fundamentalist materialism. We know that meditation is good for us. What happens in meditation? Well: many things. We discover something about the nature and functioning of our minds, and we realise that our minds are akin to other minds. To use some of the language that we’ve used already in our discussion, we discover that the boundary between us and the rest of the world (or at least that part of the world that can be called ‘mind’) is thin or non-existent. This entails humility – which generates gratitude. Sheldrake talks about the benefits of gratitude. To whom should we be grateful? We don’t have to be a theist in order to be grateful. It helps to say ‘thank you’ to the postman; it helps to say ‘thank you’ to the tree that shelters you. That sort of attitude (whether or not you accept the metaphysics behind it which Sheldrake wants you to accept), is exciting and rewarding both emotionally and intellectually. “We discover that the boundary between us and the rest of the world is thin or non-existent” This book is a useful exposé of the heresies of modern materialism. Those heresies are essentially religious in nature. The materialists assert, on the basis of little or no evidence, that mind is just a product of matter. The book is also an urgent call to arms. We are doing terrible damage to ourselves and to everything around us by hanging onto these fundamentalist materialist dogmas. The world is hugely more exciting and complex and vibrant than it appears in the materialist paradigm. It demands an ethical response from us which is entailed by animism, or a responsible view of stewardship, not by materialism. I completely agree. People know, if they are reflective even for a moment, that the way we live now is not the way we are meant to be. People rush for contact with the ground of their being, to put it pompously, in meditation. They rush out in cars to the countryside. They spend huge amounts of money on holidays – typically not on city breaks but in green places and the edge of the sea. They spend millions of pounds on dog food because they know they ought to have a relationship with non-human animals. Why? Because non-human animals have been part of what has sculpted them into the shape they are at the moment. They know they are better off if they have contact with minds other than the sorts of minds that they themselves have. So yes, I think this desperation is expressed on all sorts of levels. No doubt the reason that people spend money on nature books is part of the same phenomenon."