Rupert Sheldrake on why he's spiritual AND religious

like that yeah do you think um that there is a risk with um the spiritual but not religious that it can end up well the people are not really grounded in a local community that because they've rejected religion they end up really not part of any community or tradition but rather this kind of free-floating marketplace well i think that's the principal danger of it i think it it leads itself to an ultra individualist point of view and and um means that people can mix and match spiritual practices you know a bit of hawaiian kahuna tradition here a dream catcher there you know crystals um and then possibly a bit of peruvian neo-shamanism with ayahuasca and you know a bit of yoga and it's a kind of salad a mix and match of personally selected bits taken from religious traditions and cultures around the world but providing a purely individual solution which means there's no local community and there's no sense of continuity or anchoring in place and one of the reasons that um i myself practice christianity against church and so on is precisely because it anchors my spiritual life in place in community and in tradition and i'm certainly not a fanatical evangelical christian who think everyone wants to become a christian i don't i think it's much better for jewish people to be good jews and hindus to be good hindus and so on muslims to be good muslims and sufis to be good sufis um but coming from an english background myself with the christian ancestors um for me the christian tradition anchored in england in cathedrals and parish churches going back many centuries and then relating back before that to pre-christian holy places on which many of these churches and cathedrals were built and rooted in the medieval landscape through pilgrimages and once again through the revival of pilgrimage today all this i find a kind of an anchoring which uh personally i find satisfying necessary and important and you would describe yourself then as as a perennialist anglican in the sense that you also think other paths can get one to to god oh yeah religion yeah definitely i mean i think all religions have passed to god and and um and of course all religions can be abused and misinterpreted as well like every human institution but um i lived for two years in the ashram of father b griffiths in south india i went to india first as an agricultural scientist i worked in hyderabad for five years at the international crops research institute ikrasad where i was the principal plant physiologist but when i was in india i discovered father b griffiths and i wrote my first book a new science of life living in his ashram and one of the things that father beed did was was integrated the indian and the christian traditions and he wore orange robes his ashram was vegetarian we you know we chanted the gayatri mantra at the beginning of the mass service and and so on and one of the things father beed like to say was that the religions like the palms of a hand as a center which is that spiritual experience of unity with the ultimate which all religions start from and then they'd like the fingers and the thumb they they go out into different cultural traditions different languages different histories so if you go out along these fingers each one becomes increasingly different but if you go back to the source from which they all come there's that that direct insight into a consciousness far greater than our own which is within and underlies the universe and yet um christians seem to have a problem with perennialism and perennialists often have a problem with christianity so it's it's rare to come across christian perennialists much more common to come across like hindu perennialist for example well i don't know i don't know how rare it is i don't know if anyone's ever done a survey but um for example in hampstead the great writer on mysticism evelyn underhill um it was it was bearish she's buried in our church yard and in fact there was a ceremony just a few weeks ago to putting a new gravestone on her grave because um it wasn't very clearly marked the gravestone just said evelyn wife of so-and-so under hill and so she was simply wife of her husband and there was no mention so people looked for the grave and couldn't find it so it was a new bravest thing well evelyn underhill was a definitely a christian perennialist she started as a pre perennialist and then became an anglican um and so it's not as if this is something new it's been going on a long time as william blake was and and ralph waldo emerson was yes i mean emerson wouldn't have called himself an anglican of course but he was a a kind of christian influenced universalist i don't know how many people would call themselves christian perennialists but i would say that the growth within uh christianity of an understanding a new understanding of nature which is really expressed most fully in the theater in the philosophy of panangism um is more friendly to perennialism panentheism of course as you know is the idea that nature is in god and god is in nature so it's different from pantheism which equates nature with god because it has a transcendent aspect of the divine as well but it's also different from old star theism which sees god as separate from nature since the 17th century many theologians have thought of nature being exactly as described by science namely a machine proceeding autonomously and unconsciously with god somehow outside it all um panentheism is panzykist and you could say it includes many of the elements of pantheism but um but it it goes beyond it and so nature is in god as well as god being in nature so i would say that point of view which in i think is represented although he doesn't call himself a panianteist most clearly by the person i think is the best and most brilliant of christian theologians today david bentley heart who wrote a book which you may have seen called the experience of god being consciousness bliss and yeah i thought it was the it was the the best uh expression of i mean of the perennial philosophy really and he says that he was quite influenced by the perennial philosophy in that and it's uh yeah the masterful book yeah i think it's completely brilliant because the very subtitle being consciousness bliss is an allusion to sat chit ananda the one of the hindu ways of thinking of ultimate consciousness and it it fits very for me it comes very naturally because father beats ashram um that i lived in in english is called the ashram of the holy trinity and in indian languages is called sachitananda ashram so a direct translation of the holy trinity into sachitananda and so david bentley heart who's actually quite an influential theologian i mean i would say among professional theologians he's well known widely respected and at a conference on theology at cambridge a couple of years ago that i went to called new trinitarian ontologies you know he was one of the star speakers and this was a conference at which rowan williams was speaking and john milbank who's head of the you know leader of the radical orthodoxy school of theology and this is a a turn away from biblical criticism type theology more towards um i know an awareness of consciousness and the ultimate nature of consciousness and um returning really back to the kind of mystical taking up where the mystical theology of the early church and of the middle ages left off the 17th century scientific revolution created this view of nature as machinery uh which now thankfully we're beginning to grow out of um but i think that this general move in christian theology to reconnect with the mystical tradition gregory of nissa for example and some of these early theologians who had a very rich and view of nature and of consciousness um this is something that makes the mainstream of of the more serious kind of theology much closer to perennialism and and and the traditions you're talking about um i'd like to just uh come back to the question of kind of science and and anti-science um uh you um you mentioned um the kind of anti-vaxx aspect which one can which has kind of uh one comes across it in in the kind of world of yoga and wellness and so on um of course new age spirituality in some ways criticizes mainstream science the orthodoxy of mainstream science when it sees it as limited and like you yourself did in your book um the science delusion however at the extreme sometimes that can lead to a complete rejection of peer review of orthodox science in favor of intuition or you know whatever works for you kind of um you know free-for-all how does one how does conspiracy find the balance between pushing against scientific um orthodoxies without completely falling into irrationalism and anything goes well it's a difficult line to walk isn't it i mean i myself have plenty of problems with the narrowness of scientific orthodoxy i mean in in a way much of my career has been trying to deal with this narrow focus and dogmatism which unfortunately pervades a lot of the scientific world um it's um so it's mostly driven by a minority of scientists who are very committed materialists and atheists i mean people like richard dawkins who are kind of crusading atheists and for them atheism equals scientific materialism so it's it's a kind of philosophy of nature nature is purposeless matters unconscious the mind is nothing but the brain that kind of philosophy which um motivates these extreme uh dogmatic materialists most scientists are not extreme dogmatic materialists they're rather frightened by the extremists like dawkins who are often aggressive and bully people who step out of line but recent surveys of of scientists engineers and medical professionals in britain france and germany have shown that the percentage of the the scientific community um that's actually committed atheists is about 25 percent it's quite a large minority but um the point i'm i really want to get at is how when one is challenging say mainstream medicine or big farmer you know um how do can one do that without whilst guarding spirituality against charlatans hucksters uh you know really irrationalist anti-scientific thinking well i mean so there's no simple formula for that i mean i get because i'm fairly well known in in sort of alternative circles my email inbox every week contains quite a number of very strange emails from people with all sorts of strange theories or beliefs um which uh i think of as irrational and um and pseudoscientific genuine pseudoscience rather than um the this sort of dismissive use of the term you know is it but i mean these are sort of real pseudoscience if you like you know they claim um that some weird theories explained by quantum theory for example when it has nothing whatever to do with actual quantum theory um so um well it's i myself have to you know try and judge which things are really new ideas that are exciting and important um compared with ones that are simply crank ideas and um i don't particularly like having to do this i mean i get all these people sending me manuscripts books they want my comments often endorsement they want endorsements if i read all the stuff i'm sent i would be doing nothing else 24 hours a day so personally i can't devote that much time i have to make fairly quick judgments about this and no doubt they reflect my own prejudices but um i don't think there's a simple answer because as soon as one's on the fringes of science there are things that dogmatic science dismisses wrongly um there are also a lot of really weird and strange beliefs that people have and um you know if one went into each one of them to evaluate the evidence and stuff it would take a great deal of time and most people haven't got time to do that um i myself find that the the the anti-vaxx stuff for example um i mean there are certain i mean i've read i have actually read quite a lot of things people send me because it's an important issue and one point they make is that you know 50 years ago the average child had maybe one or two vaccines smallpox or something now the sort of 20 or 30 vaccines that children are expected to have and being pumped full of them are these all really necessary and is it good for the immune system to have so many vaccines and they have to have these adjectives so you know things to stimulate the immune system to make it work and could this be doing some harm but it could i think um so i think there's a reasonable case that there's too much vaccination going on and some of it unnecessary against very rare conditions or against conditions where natural immunity might be better you know when i was a child i had all those childhood diseases because there weren't vaccines i had measles and bumps and whooping cough and german measles and i'm immune from them because i had them not because i had these vaccines um and some people of course died of them a few minority i wouldn't like to have to make nhs or government policies on these subjects because it's always a call between do you give this to everyone to protect the minority who might otherwise die or suffer terrible it affects or it is other side effects worse than so there's a case to be made for there being too many vaccines um but in the case of covid personally i'd much rather have the vaccines with possibly small associated risks than covid itself which has known and quite high risks and there are a lot of people know we read in the papers almost every day about people who've refused the vaccine and then died of covid so there's a kind of natural selection going on yeah for anti-vaxxers and it um and many of them apparently regret their decision not to have it when they're in a death store um kind of couple of last things i'd like to think about just as i'm reflecting on how the culture of spirituality could be strengthened one is whether as spirituality historically evolved out of christianity in the west it seems like in the early 20th century in the late 19th century it rejected the christian idea of charity and philanthropy as victorian and old-fashioned and you know uh instead one should follow one's bliss do you think that there is a a a lack of focus on on charity and helping others in in contemporary spirituality as you see it well again one would have to um do an actual survey of various different spiritual movements and practitioners to have an informed opinion on this but most of what one sees in new age magazines and things is about self-improvement in one way or another you know yoga for better health you know positive thinking for greater success in love and business meditation for being less frazzled and being better able to concentrate on business deals or on romantic relationships or whatever so the focus is very much on self-improvement and self-help and of course in the united states there's been a very long tradition of self-help books i mean this is goes back to the 19th century the new thought movement um so something very american about that side of it and um and self-help things are all about you know getting on in the world improving your relationships and so forth how to win friends and influence people and they're not about charity uh they're not about helping others they're about helping yourself that's what the self-help actually says it's about yourself and so i think there's a strong tendency in in many of the um new age type spiritual movements of self happens there's nothing wrong with helping yourself means good to help yourself in in by taking up practices that are beneficial um but i think one of the reasons why i think it's better for a spiritual path to happen within a religious framework is all religions emphasize the community aspect the whole point about religions is they're community based and if one has individualist spiritual practices then there are certain things you can do on your own very well like meditate or pray and jesus in the new testament advises his followers to pray in a quiet room you know when they're praying or he went up into the hills to pray in the natural place away from the crowds so private prayer and meditation are best done privately and in quietly on the other hand singing together and chanting together which uh have do have great effects on health and well-being it's hard to do on your own uh it's much better to do it with other people and one reason i like going to church i like singing and last sunday for the first time we were able to sing in church for for first time in a year and a half so singing together doing rituals it's hard to do a ritual on your own these are collective celebrations and rites of passage like births marriages and deaths or you know like um christenings and weddings and again those aren't really things you can do on your own uh there are also celebrations 100 and also helping people in your community most churches will do things like you know soup runs or have or have shelter nights occasionally yes um or they'll they'll try to take care of people within their um you know within the community if where you know console them if they've just lost someone or to support them if they're ill so so all of that is is it can be lost as as religion becomes spirituality oh yes i mean it's a regular thing of churches and not just churches mosques i mean one of the pillars of islam is is is charity and helping others so it's so it's it's and i mean and jewish people have charities to help mostly other jews but they they but there's a sense of communal responsibility which i think is inherent in many religious traditions um so i wouldn't say it's a unique voucher of christianity but it's certainly the case i mean our own parish church in hampstead for example has shelter for the homeless one day a week at least before lockdown it helps with food banks it helps with donating food helps with christian aid for people in other countries and helps with local charities and runs services and visits people in care homes and so all these are things which many churches are doing just routinely as part of their community outreach but they're not things which the average yoga center is doing routinely or um this is what i was wondering whether in your experience you've come across counter examples of spiritual organizations or spiritual teachers who are good on the charity stuff well i mean secular humanists to take an extreme case of as what i think of as a secular religion because secular humanism has ceremonies they have celebrants they they agree on the need for celebrations of rites of passage and they um so and they have a a code of ethics which is actually very similar to christian view they should help others and help the downtrodden um i would say that some secular humanist movements um do actually try probably less effectively than churches but do actually have an ethos of helping others that's part of their humanist belief system and um i think when one looks at the political recent political movements all about you know helping people who are discriminated against firstly starting with women's rights and more recently with transgender rights and minority rights etc etc i mean this all this gender identity politics is driven by uh i think more by secular humanist than anyone else i would think um and it's a serious attempt to help people who are otherwise discriminated against by political action so i would say that that kind of political activism does have a kind of religious motivation even though the people who have the religious motivation think of themselves as anti-religious right it's basically a kind of secularization of christian ethics which based on the idea that everyone's equal before god so there's a sense in which and in islam and judaism too there's that ethos which i think contributes to these secular activist movements but they're less about i mean if someone's they're more political and if someone's actually bereaved or suffering or sick an actual individual in living nearby i mean they they may not pay much attention to those compared to the big sort of demonstrations slogans uh political activist campaigns yes it's less pastoral it's less pastoral yes and more yeah yeah okay well um so if there was um you know then what just in conclusion uh a way that you think uh spirituality spiritual culture could be improved how do you think it could be improved strengthened well i think for people who have spiritual practices like meditation yoga um and so on i think it grounding it helps to improve it some people's spiritual practice involves connecting with nature and connecting with a particular places in nature that is a grounding uh and and very helpful thing to do because it connects us with something beyond ourselves and with the natural world um and i personally think that something that's really helpful and i'm keen on because i helped with the setting up of the british pilgrimage trust um pilgrimage is a very very good way of grounding a spiritual impulse a pilgrimage is a spiritual journey and going on a pilgrimage walking to a holy place which can be a cathedral or a church or a holy well or an ancient tree or an ancient megalithic site going to a holy place with an intention and walking through the countryside and is something connects one with both history sacred place nature and links one's spiritual journey it makes it a literal physical a physical spiritual journey linking it to place and i think that this can help connect people on the spiritual journey with place and with tradition and one of the slogans of the british pilgrimage trust for the organized pilgrimages is bring your own beliefs byob um and um to say it's not about belief it's about experience and i think from as i do every year with a god sound of mine i go on a pilgrimage to he's a teenage teenager every year we go on a five or six mile walk from a village through the countryside to one of the great cathedrals we've done canterbury wells lincoln ely chichester winchester so far um we walk there we visit the shrine we go with an intention someone who wants to give thanks for or pray about or ask for or seek inspiration about light candles of the shrine have a cream tea and then go to coral even song which has this lovely service almost every day in cathedrals which again you don't have to be a practicing christian to be part of you the beauty of the music resounding around an ancient sacred space designed to be mind-altering um is is a wonderful experience so i think that's a a simple practical way that people can do wherever they live in the world because everywhere has sacred places and most places have traditions of pilgrimage and if they don't then you can still go on a pilgrimage to a place of particular significance and importance and it links you to the land to tradition and to other people and takes you out of a mere focus on yourself fantastic well thank you very much uh fascinating as ever to talk with you and um uh uh i'll i'll i'll put this up and um yeah thank you for your time rupert very good to talk with you jules yeah take care and you bye bye

Channel: Jules Evans

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Length: 29min 53sec (1793 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021