Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative Experiences and Their Effects on Our Bodies Brains and Health

Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative Experiences and Their Effects on Our Bodies, Brains, and Health is a 2017 book by the biologist and parapsychology researcher Rupert Sheldrake, published in the United Kingdom by Coronet (Hodder & Stoughton) and in a first Counterpoint edition in Berkeley in 2018. The book's project is to take practices that religions have long treated as devotional — meditation, gratitude, connection with nature, relating to plants and animals, singing and chanting, pilgrimage, and ritual — and ask what scientific research says about their effects on bodies, brains and health. This article is a reading guide to the material available from the book, which is fragmentary: it covers the framing of ritual, a speculative reinterpretation of baptism, the pilgrimage-healing argument, the critique of scientism, and a proposal for family orchards, but does not present the full treatment of all seven practices.

The framing: ritual and the presence of the past

Sheldrake's central interpretive move is to read ritual through his hypothesis of morphic resonance, the idea that memory is inherent in nature and that all organisms, humans included, draw on a collective memory and contribute to it in turn. On this account, ritual conservatism is not merely social convention. Rituals repeat what was done before, and the repetition connects present participants to a pooled memory of prior performances. Myths, in Sheldrake's telling, presuppose the same logic: they are stories of origins in which "the present repeats the past," tracing back to a first time something happened. He contrasts this traditional orientation with the modern ideology of progress, which he describes as an all-pervasive orthodoxy committed to economic development through science and technology. The argument is a framing claim rather than a report of experimental results; it belongs to the same family of ideas as habits-of-nature and the critique of fixed laws of nature.

Baptism as an induced near-death experience

The most speculative passage in the available material concerns near-death experiences (NDEs) and the rite of baptism by total immersion. Sheldrake first summarizes the reported phenomenology of NDEs: a tunnel, a light, a sense of loving presence, meetings with deceased relatives or beings of light, a life review, and a blissful quality, followed by a return to the body. He notes the widely reported after-effects — reduced fear of death and more spiritual and loving attitudes — and that many who undergo them describe the experience as the most profound of their lives.

He then turns to interpretation. Materialists, he writes, hold that consciousness cannot separate from the brain, so NDEs must be hallucinations produced by a dying brain starved of oxygen. Against this he cites cases in which people reported NDEs while their brains were being monitored and showed no apparent electrical activity. He acknowledges the materialist reply — that there must have been undetectable brain activity precisely because the experience occurred — and then characterizes the whole disagreement as a matter of belief systems rather than empirical facts, arguing that no evidence would move a committed materialist while religious believers welcome the same reports. This is Sheldrake's own framing, and it is worth noting the tension inside it: he treats the dispute as non-empirical while presenting empirical-sounding monitoring cases as support.

From there he offers an explicitly conjectural reading of John the Baptist. What if John was, in effect, a drowner — holding initiates under the water of the Jordan just long enough to induce a near-drowning NDE, so that on recovery they would say they had died and been born again, seen the light, and lost the fear of death? Sheldrake presents this as a "what if," imagines helpers assisting recovery on the riverbank, and concedes the alternative reading that the death-and-rebirth language was symbolic. His rhetorical question is why one would do something symbolic when the real experience was available. He notes that early Christians practiced adult baptism in this tradition, that infant baptism was widespread by the second century and standard by the third, and that the Protestant Reformation saw a revival of immersion. The hypothesis is presented as speculation, not as a finding, and it conflicts with mainstream biblical scholarship; it should be read as Sheldrake's interpretive proposal.

Pilgrimage, hope and the Lourdes record

A separate thread concerns healing at pilgrimage sites. Sheldrake lists several factors that plausibly contribute to well-being: meaningful activity over purposeless activity (a tenet of occupational therapy), physical exercise as protection against depression and ill health, and above all the influence of hope and expectation. The placebo effect, he notes, is powerful and shows up strongly in drug trials, especially when patients and doctors believe a new wonder drug might be in play. If pilgrimage raises hope and expectation — which he says it does — then healing at holy places is what one would expect, and it is stronger still when supportive people share those hopes.

He then turns to Lourdes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, which rose to prominence in 1858 after a peasant girl reported apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at a grotto and was told to dig, releasing a spring. Cures were reported almost immediately as people drank the water; today the flow is far greater and pilgrims bathe in it, with roughly six million pilgrims a year. Sheldrake states that many thousands claim miraculous cures, that the official Lourdes medical bureau investigates claims in a rigorously scientific spirit, and that some claims have been very well authenticated. He also notes that even skeptics concede that some very sick people improve there, though they attribute it to the placebo effect or spontaneous remission rather than to miracle. His argumentative conclusion is that calling a cure a spontaneous remission leaves the remission unexplained, and that if faith makes remission more probable, then faith works. The available material cites the bureau's investigative process but does not present primary data from it, so the strength of the underlying record cannot be assessed from this excerpt alone.

The critique of scientism

The book's polemical spine is a distinction between science as an open-minded method and scientism as a dogmatic ideology. Sheldrake argues that many people have made science into a religion, accepting a scientific worldview on faith and on the authority and prestige of scientists while imagining they arrived at it by freethinking. Most believers in scientism, he claims, are not scientists but devotees — people who have made no observations or discoveries themselves, who have not worked at the Large Hadron Collider, sequenced genomes, studied nerve-cell ultrastructure, done radio astronomy, or worked through superstring mathematics, and who therefore cannot question the authority of what he calls the scientific priesthood. He grants the undoubted triumphs of science and technology — computers, the internet, smartphones, antibiotics, keyhole surgery, jet engines, space probes — but argues that the materialist philosophy of nature has hardened into a belief system that is holding the sciences back.

The area he identifies as least successful is consciousness. Materialists, he writes, assume consciousness is nothing but brain activity — "minds are what brains do" — yet the existence of consciousness remains what is often called the hard problem. Religions, by contrast, assume consciousness transcends the human level, which he offers as one reason scientism tends to be anti-religious. He also observes that when people abandon ancestral religion they typically drop the associated practices — singing and chanting together, praying, participating in rituals and festivals, saying grace — and asks what that paradigm shift does to them. This connects to the broader themes of psi-taboo and the extraordinary-claims-rule in the wiki's consciousness and parapsychology cluster.

Research design and the family-orchards proposal

Sheldrake describes how experimental research on spiritual practices is typically conducted in a secular context: researchers assume participants are non-religious and have no existing practice, then add one practice and compare the results with a control group that does not take it up. He gives examples — gratitude versus no gratitude, meditation versus no meditation, time outdoors versus indoors, singing versus not singing — and reports that most such studies show beneficial effects for the practice. This is a description of a study design, not a meta-analysis, and the excerpt does not supply effect sizes or study citations.

A separate, more concrete proposal appears in the material: converting agricultural land to horticultural use for family orchards. Sheldrake argues that such plots would not be residences — otherwise they would become housing developments — and so should not raise major planning difficulties, since the land stays dedicated to growing plants. He imagines a successful trial generating rapid demand, with families growing fruit and vegetables and children playing in what he calls an oasis of peace, and argues that orchards with hedges, fruit trees, flower beds and vegetable gardens support far greater biodiversity than a monoculture arable crop. This is a design argument about land use rather than an empirical finding, and it sits at the periphery of the book's core argument.

Limits of the available evidence

The material available here is fragmentary and jumps between chapters, so claims about chapters not represented cannot be assessed, and their absence from this excerpt is not evidence about their content. The baptism hypothesis is explicitly speculative and attributed to Sheldrake. The NDE interpretation is presented as a belief-system dispute in which Sheldrake takes a side. The pilgrimage-healing argument rests on the Lourdes medical bureau's process, which is described but not documented with primary data here. The scientism critique is an argument about the sociology and philosophy of science rather than a research finding. Readers should treat the book as an interpretive and programmatic work, and distinguish throughout between Sheldrake's proposals and the evidence he cites for them.

Related work

The book sits within Sheldrake's wider corpus, including A New Science of Life, The Presence of the Past, The Rebirth of Nature, Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, The Sense of Being Stared At, and Science Set Free (published in the United Kingdom as The Science Delusion). He has also co-authored Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness and The Evolutionary Mind with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, Natural Grace and The Physics of Angels with Matthew Fox, Boy's Best Friend with Kate Banks, and Arguing Science with Michael Shermer. The book carries a cover endorsement from Deepak Chopra, who is not otherwise a subject of its argument.