Earth Talk: Science and Spiritual Practices - Dr Rupert Sheldrake

In this lecture at Schumacher College, Rupert Sheldrake shows how the "scientific worldview" is moribund; the sciences are being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. But science itself is now transcending the materialist philosophy, and pointing toward a new sense of a living world. The cosmos is no longer like a machine running down; it is more like a developing organism with an inherent memory, and so is our planet, Gaia. These new paradigm shifts in the sciences shed a new light on spiritual practices like pilgrimage, ritual, prayer and meditation.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books, including The Science Delusion. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) in Hyderabad, India, and from 2005-2010 the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. While in India, he spent two years living in the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths, and has given workshops on science and spirituality with Matthew Fox and Brother David Steindl-Rast. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, California, and a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. His web site is www.sheldrake.org