Interview with Rupert Sheldrake

(c) 2005 Stefan Thiesenthiesen@uni-muenster.denon-profit and private use free, contact me for commercial useS: By now I read much of your work, including several of your books, and what I find mostintriguing is that you seem to offer explanations that are able to bridge the worlds of Scienceand the spiritual realm. Two quotes from other authors came to mind. Robert Bauval, author of the Orion Mystery, ones said to me during a dinner: “Physicists don’t realize it, but Physicshas long merged with Metaphysics.” And the German Zen Master and Benedictine Monk Willigis Jäger said: “We all must become mystics, if we are to survive.” How would youcomment on these two quotes?R.: Oh – this is a difficult question. They are also quite different quotes. I think Physics hasalways been tied up with Metaphysics. In England the term ‘Science’ didn’t become widespread until the middle of the 19

century. Before that the term used for what we now calledscience was ‘natural philosophy’, the philosophy of nature. This was different from theGerman “Naturphilosophie” movement – this was just the standard name. And the Cambridgescientific society which I belong to is still called the Cambridge Philosophical Society. I think that the connection between Physics and Metaphysics has always been very close. You know,as soon as you are discussing time and space and causality, then you are dealing with both,Physics and Metaphysics, and then the Quantum revolution occurred in Physics, and of courseit changed the metaphysical basis of Physics as well. So I think it is pretty well accepted byeverybody – most certainly by the historians of science – that there is a very close connection.S: Yes, but would you agree that most contemporary physicists see that quite differently?R: Well, most contemporary physicists are simply getting on with their job of doing physics inthe laboratory, without thinking about the foundations of it. That’s true. (…) In most fields people just get on with their jobs without thinking about big philosophical questions and justdon’t spend much time bothering about these things.S: What do you say about Willigis Jäger’s quote “We all must become Mystics, if we are toSurvive”?R: Well – it is rather difficult to quite understand what he means. I mean I don’t think in the past there has ever been a time when most people have been mystics. Most people havealways been preoccupied with practical considerations of one time or another, and I guess thatwill continue, nor do mystics necessarily provide us with a very clear path for the future. For example in India. There has been a long tradition of mystic Sadhus living in caves in theHimalayas, and they are certainly mystics, but I am not sure that the best point is survival(UNCLEAR!), I mean they withdraw from society and from the normal concerns of society toachieve a vision of the mystic that goes beyond our present concern. Of course it’squestionable even in India how much influence they have on politics. Most of Indian politicsis about economic growth, building roads, internet cafés, Television…S: Yes, absolutely…1

R:…the problems that I could portrait. It’s hard to see how the quote of Willigis Jäger couldmake contact with reality, even in India – let alone in the West.S: What I have in mind here is the evolution of civilizations. In an interview I conducted withMichio Kaku two years ago, he pointed out the Kardachev classification of potential galacticcivilizations that classifies civilizations according to their energy utilization. The assumption behind this concept of course is that the evolution of other civilizations would continue in our own way, that is in terms of technological evolution, leading to an ever higher state of technology and ever increased energy consumption. Do you believe that evolution could takea different pathway and possibly be spiritual in one way or another?R: Actually it was spiritual in some way or another in the past. For example a lot of theimportant evolutionary changes in humanity until about 500 BC, you know, grades andfigures (?) and schools of thought in India, ancient Greece – there have been periods of humanity when there have been large developments of spiritual evolution, a spiritualevolution leading to a much higher rate than we are used to. But if that will happen today, Idon’t know. It seems to me that presently we are moving towards crisis – some kind of environmental crisis, driven by short term forces of politics and business. And – no doubtwhen things go badly wrong, people may start asking questions about did we get here. Theremay be some kind of spiritual evolution then, but I think what most people are preoccupiedwith, again, seems to be survival rather than major spiritual issues. Even at the time whenBuddha was alive in India with a major concern about spiritual questions, it was still aminority pursuit rather than that a majority of the population engaged in that. So I’m afraid Idon’t take the view that it is an inevitable thing. I mean it would be a wonderful thing if therewere more interested in cleansing the spirit. The problem is that at the moment we got a polarization between increasing consumerism, most (ward us? Unclear) now throughtelevision and world trade, (catering-unclear) to a consumerist culture spreading in China andIndia very fast indeed, and in the spiritual realm, as a kind of counter-action to consumers, wehave religious fundamentalism. So this powerful greater spiritualization isn’t particular obvious to me. Desirable as it may be, it is not at all clear that’s what’s happening.S: But that may actually precisely what Willigis Jäger meant with his saying “If we want tosurvive, we all must become mystics” – that we all simply must come to a greater awarenessof our spiritual side. Could you agree with that?R: I am not sure of it. I mean it would be wonderful if people did develop a greater spiritualawareness, and I am all in favour of it, but it is not clear to me that it is immediatelycorrelated with survival. Our survival my depend on political changes, changes of energyconsumption and reduction of consumption, and a spiritual path would help with that, it couldcertainly help with our survival, but it wouldn’t necessarily do. So I don’t see an instantcontact between those two, I am afraid. Sorry for being a spoil sport with that one.S. All right. No problem. In another interview you pointed out that science is a form of inquiry and I think that history shows it gets into severe trouble whenever it gets caught up in paradigms and dogmas. I would say that the evidence for phenomena generally classified asanomalies is really increasing. Like the topics publishes by the society for scientificexploration, and most modern theories in physics are not only unintuitive but bordering on theseemingly absurd from a layman’s point of view. Do you believe that science in general isfacing a major paradigm shift in the near future?2

R: I think science should be facing a paradigm shift, but whether it is or not is a differentmatter. I think we have enough evidence that the materialist, reductionist, mechanist view of nature is much too limited; I think we have seen plenty of evidence for this for a long time – for many years. This doesn’t necessarily influence the way science behaves, unfortunately. In biology, for example, over the last 30 years we have seen an enormous increase inmechanistic reductionist thinking. That is true for the biotechnology industry, the geneticmodification industry and the pharmaceutical industry, and these are the main employers of biology graduates, hundreds of billions of Dollars have been invested in those reductionistmolecular approaches. The result is that most biologists coming out of the Universities todayand most time if you talk to students, it is even more reductionist and even more mechanisticthan it was 30 years ago. So we are sensing that mainstream biology has moved in theopposite direction to a more holistic approach. Now of course fashions change and I dare saythis fashion will change, too, but it takes a long time to change these entrenched things. Most practicing biologists have been trained in molecular biology and don’t know anything elseabout biology except the molecular approach. They are not all suddenly going o wake up onemorning and change. What will happen, I suppose, is that a more holistic approach will become more fashionable and gradually will become something on which more people willwork and it will be taught more in school and universities. But there is not much signs of thathappening yet. I have spent years and years trying to encourage this kind of change this kindof thinking in biology, but I can’t say it has been met with much success within the academicand educational world.S: Is it mostly because the research basically is ends-oriented and motivated by profit andeconomic incentives?R: Well – I don’t see (?? Unclear 10:12) people do that – I think it is ideological. The peoplewho drove the molecular biology revolution had a very strong ideological agenda. They arelike the sort of neo-conservatives of the scientific world. They had a very clear idea of whatthey wanted to do. To take over biology and get the molecular approach to dominate over biology. They have managed to persuade a lot of people that this was a good area to invest avery large amount of money in, which means lots of people have jobs in it. And you know itmay not be as successful as they hope. I don’t think it is not just because of the money,though. For example if you take healthcare, which is of huge political concern in our countries, especially here in Britain. The national healthcare business is extremely expensive.The government is finding it very difficult to sustain the level of healthcare the populationwants without having a huge increase in taxation. And in America private healthcarecompanies are extremely worried about the escalating costs of high-tech medicine. So here isthis huge financial interest, but if we are looking into alternative medicine – it could deliver cheaper and more effective forms of healthcare for certain conditions – not for everything, butfor lots of things that people go to see Doctors about. Chronic conditions like back pain,migraine, headaches, chronic skin diseases, cold sores, things like that the conventionalmedicine is not very good at dealing with and alternative methods may be better at dealingwith. So if we’d have more research on holistic therapies, it could be something that healthand insurance companies and should be very interested in, because it might deliver better health care at lower costs to the population, which should be in their economic interest.S: so you would also say that ideological aspects are driving these developments?R: I think that the alternative healthcare would be less ideological than the mechanistichealthcare system which is dominated by lobbying groups and the ideology of mechanisticmedicine and mechanistic biology. They are ideologically driven – more than economically3