Ways to Go Beyond And Why They Work: Seven Spiritual Practices in a Scientific Age

Ways to Go Beyond And Why They Work: Seven Spiritual Practices in a Scientific Age is a trade book by the biologist and consciousness researcher Rupert Sheldrake, first published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Coronet (an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton) and issued in the United States by Salix Press / Penraeth LLC of Aurora, Colorado. It is a companion volume to his earlier Science and Spiritual Practices, and it extends the same project: to argue that a broad range of spiritual practices connect practitioners to what he calls "greater conscious realities," and that the effects of those practices can be studied scientifically rather than merely asserted or dismissed.

The book is organized around seven practices — sports, learning from animals, fasting, cannabis and psychedelics, prayer, holy days and festivals, and the cultivation of good habits and kindness — followed by a concluding chapter asking why spiritual practices work at all. Sheldrake states plainly that he has personally undertaken all seven, that many people are more expert than he is in each, and that he is "not a guru, but an explorer." Each chapter closes with two suggested ways for readers to try the practice themselves.

The framing argument

Sheldrake's central thesis is that science and spirituality, after several generations of apparent opposition, are becoming complementary. He claims we are on the threshold of a new era of consciousness exploration, driven both by a revival of spiritual practices and by scientific study of them, and that together these are contributing to what he calls an unprecedented phase of spiritual evolution. This is a programmatic claim rather than a demonstrated result: the book synthesizes secondary literature, personal experience, and the author's own theoretical commitments, and does not report new controlled experiments of its own.

Chapter 1: The spiritual side of sports

Sheldrake argues that in modern secular societies sports may be one of the most common routes to the self-transcendence that comes from being fully in the present. His illustration is comparative: a meditator's mind wanders and only occasionally returns to full presence, whereas a football player in an important match, a downhill skier at sixty miles per hour, a surfer on a giant wave, a free climber on an unroped rock face, or a hunter stalking a deer must be completely focused or fail. He supports the framing with etymology — sport derives from disport, from the Latin root portare, "to carry," as in export and deport — and with the older English sense of play as frolicking.

The chapter's more contestable claim is attributed to Michael Murphy: that sports are the principal way human physical potentials are evolving in the modern world. Sheldrake offers two lines of illustration. The first is record progression: Roger Bannister's 1954 sub-four-minute mile, now a standard achievement for professional runners, with the record cited in the book as 3 minutes 43 seconds. The second is the natural selection of techniques in mixed martial arts, where practitioners of different styles are pitted against one another under the Ultimate Fighting Championship, allowing fighting methods to be tested and recombined; the first UFC event in 1993 is described as having virtually no rules beyond prohibitions on biting and eye-gouging.

Against this celebratory account Sheldrake sets a cautionary case. Competitive freediving, he writes, can become an obsession with numbers — divers lulled into a catatonic state, the aim reduced to hitting a number on a rope. In 2012 Nicholas Mevoli, a thirty-two-year-old from Brooklyn, attempted a 314-foot dive to set a record, was dragged back to the surface with blood dripping from his mouth, and died the following day after attempting another record. Sheldrake quotes Mevoli's own description of numbers infecting his head "like a virus." The chapter's evidence is anecdotal and illustrative rather than controlled.

Chapter 2: Learning from animals

The second practice is attention to animals, and the chapter's claims are a mix of cited studies and interpretive framing. Sheldrake reports that pet owners have shown an improved survival rate a year later than a control group of non-pet owners; that pets offer children companionship and security and uncritical sympathy; that disturbed children rely especially heavily on animals for support; that in one study delinquent adolescents were twice as likely to talk to their pets and three times as likely to seek out an animal's company when lonely or bored; that pets help children develop mutuality and responsibility; and that in a Baltimore, Maryland study of pets and family life, many families felt closer, played together more, and argued less after adopting a pet. Prisons allowing animal visits or resident pets, he writes, have seen reductions in violence, suicides and drug use, and improved relations between prisoners and staff.

He also acknowledges the exceptions: some people acquire a pet for the benefits and abandon it when it develops behavioural problems or fails to make them feel better. His explanation for animal benefits draws on the same vocabulary used for human healing — empathy, acceptance, companionship, emotional security, affection — and he locates the "secret" in acceptance and love.

The chapter's most philosophically pointed move is its treatment of the placebo. Critics, Sheldrake notes, might say the health benefits of feeling loved are "nothing but placebo effects." His reply is that calling them placebos renames rather than explains them: blank pills in double-blind trials often make patients better because of positive expectation, and conversely people who are lonely, depressed and without hope tend to do worse, with less effective immune systems, more inflammation and disease, and slower wound healing. Hopes and despairs, he argues, act directly on the healing system. This is a genuine point of tension with mainstream medical interpretation, in which placebo effects are partly understood through expectation, conditioning and neurobiological pathways — Sheldrake treats the mechanism as unexplained, while much of the research literature treats it as partially characterized.

He closes the chapter on the theme of learning from animals: humans vastly exceed other species in language, culture, mythology, agriculture, art, architecture, science and technology, but in senses, abilities and what he calls intuitive capacities, many animals exceed us, and we might learn from them about abilities we share to a lesser degree.

Chapter 7: Good habits, bad habits, and kindness

The seventh practice concerns habit cultivation and the spiritual virtues. Sheldrake treats hope as more fundamental than faith and as "built into life itself," illustrated by the vast numbers of sperm and pollen grains that attempt fertilization though most will fail, by fertilized eggs that attempt to become organisms though most will die, and by seedlings that sprout in spring though many perish young. Optimism, he notes, literally means hoping for the best, from the Latin optimum. Faith is linked both to the traditional Christian hope in the coming of the kingdom of heaven — still prayed for in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy kingdom come" — and to the spiritual faith he sees underlying the secular vision of progress.

Love, charity or kindness, the third virtue, is presented as the least transcendent and most basic. Cooperation, he argues, is fundamental in animal societies: ants and social insects work for the good of the colony, workers leave no offspring, soldiers die for their kin, and honeybees die when they sting, their guts attached to their barbed stings — "suicide stingers." The queen is not a tyrant revelling in power but an egg-layer, and colony members behave as if they continuously put the greater good above personal pleasure, like cells in a single organism. This section is philosophical and analogical rather than empirical.

Chapter 4: Psychedelics and psychedelic churches

The chapter on cannabis and psychedelics describes the blending of Christian teachings with indigenous psychedelic practices into psychedelic churches: the Native American Church, based on the mescaline-containing cactus peyote, and the Brazilian ayahuasca-based churches Santo Daime and União do Vegetal. Sheldrake also points to secular developments — unitive "in-the-flow" experiences through sports, ecstatic dancing at raves, clubs and festivals, heightened and transformed through substances such as MDMA, and the exploration of consciousness with LSD by many millions of people in contexts very different from traditional use.

He observes that most of these developments have occurred outside established religions, whose traditions did not prepare them for such rapid change; beyond the purview of institutional science, which he says has largely ignored or dismissed them because of a secular ideology and anti-spiritual bias; and outside official educational systems, which confine themselves to academic activities with little to do with direct experience. This is an internal tension in the book: it asserts both that these developments have been ignored by science and that scientific study is now validating them.

Chapter 8: Why do spiritual practices work?

The concluding chapter argues that science and spirituality are becoming complementary and that we are entering a new phase of spiritual and scientific evolution. Scientific studies of spiritual practices, Sheldrake writes, are illuminating how they affect bodies, brains, health, wellbeing and behaviour, and may in turn make the practices more effective and easier to teach and transmit. Beyond the seven practices of this book and the seven of Science and Spiritual Practices, he lists many more: yoga, chi gong, tai chi, caring for the dying, confession, devotional worship or bhakti, forgiveness, dream yoga, dream incubation and art. Dream incubation is offered as one example of an ancient practice with contemporary relevance.

Evidence and limitations

The book is a work of synthesis and advocacy rather than a report of new research. Its evidence is uneven: the animal chapter cites specific studies of pet ownership, family dynamics and prison programs, giving moderate support for correlations but weak support for mechanism; the sports chapter relies on record progression, a contested attribution to Murphy, and a single cautionary death; the habits chapter is philosophical and analogical; and the psychedelic and concluding chapters are largely interpretive. The explanatory backdrop throughout is Sheldrake's broader framework of morphic resonance and the habits of nature, though the book does not attempt to test that framework here.

The available text of this source is partial. Chapters 3 (fasting), 5 (prayer) and 6 (holy days and festivals) are not represented in the excerpted content, so their arguments cannot be assessed from this source alone. Readers should treat the book's claims as the author's assertions and interpretive framings, not as verified experimental results, and should note where Sheldrake's reading of placebo and of institutional science diverges from mainstream accounts.

Related work

The book sits within a cluster of Sheldrake material already represented in this wiki, including Science and Spiritual Practices (), The Presence of the Past () and Morphic Resonance (). It also connects to his collaborations with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham in Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness () and with Matthew Fox in The Physics of Angels (). Its distinctive contribution to that cluster is the "practices" dimension and the explicit thesis that science and spirituality are becoming complementary.

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