This book is the result of a long journey through the realms of science, history, philosophy, spiritual practice, theology, and religion, as well as physical journeys through Britain and Ireland, continental Europe, North America, Malaysia, India, and other parts of the world. Science and spiritual practices have been part of my life since I was a child, and I have thought about the relationships between them in many different contexts.
I was born and grew up in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, a market town in the English Midlands. I had a fairly conventional Christian upbringing. My family was Methodist, and I went to an Anglican boarding school for boys.
From a very early age I was interested in plants and animals. I kept many kinds of animals at home. My father was an herbalist, microscopist, and pharmacist, and he encouraged my interests. I wanted to be a biologist and I specialized in science at school. Then I went to Cambridge University, where I studied biology and biochemistry.
During my education, I realized that most of my science teachers were atheists and that they regarded atheism as normal. In England at that time, science and atheism went together. An atheist outlook seemed to be part of the scientific worldview, which I accepted.
When I was seventeen, in the gap between leaving school and going to university, I worked as a lab technician in the research laboratories of a pharmaceutical company. I wanted to have research experience. When I took the job, I did not know that I would be working in a vivisection facility. I wanted to be a biologist because I loved animals. But now I was working in a kind of death camp. None of the cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, mice, or day-old chicks that were used in the experiments ever left the lab alive. I experienced a great tension between my feelings for the animals and the scientific ideal of objectivity, which left no place for personal emotions.
After I expressed some of my doubts, my colleagues reminded me that this was all for the good of humanity; these animals were being sacrificed to save human lives. And they had an undeniable point. All of us benefit from modern medicines, and almost all of these drugs have been tested on animals first. It would be irresponsible and illegal to test untried, potentially toxic chemicals on humans. Humans have rights, so the argument goes. Laboratory animals have almost none. Most people implicitly support this system of animal sacrifice by benefiting from modern medicine.
Meanwhile, I read Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, who reinforced my atheist views, and when I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate I joined the University Humanist Society. After going to a few meetings, I began to find them dull, and my curiosity took me elsewhere. The event that has stuck most in my mind was an address by the biologist Sir Julian Huxley, a leading light of the secular humanist movement. He argued that humans should take control of their own evolution and improve the human race by eugenics, namely selective breeding.
He foresaw a new breed of genetically enhanced children, who would be fathered by artificial insemination using donated sperm. He enumerated the qualities that the sperm donors should have in order to create this uplift in humanity: They should be men who come from a long, scientific lineage, who have great personal achievements in science, and who have risen to a position of high esteem in public life. The ideal sperm donor turned out to be Sir Julian himself. I later learned that he practiced what he preached.
As an atheist and as a budding mechanistic biologist, I was expected to believe that the universe was essentially mechanical, that there was no ultimate purpose and no God, and that our minds were nothing but the activity of our brains. But I found all this a strain, particularly when I fell in love. I had a beautiful girlfriend, and in a phase of intense emotion, I was going to physiology lectures on hormones. I learned about testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen, and how they affected different parts of male and female bodies. But there was a huge gap between the experience of being in love and learning these chemical formulae.
I also became increasingly aware of the great gulf between my original inspiration—an interest in living plants and animals—and the kind of biology I was being taught. There was almost no connection between my direct experience of animals and plants and the way I was learning about them. In our laboratory classes, we killed the organisms we were studying, dissected them, and then separated their components into smaller and smaller bits, until we got down to the molecular level.
I felt that there was something radically wrong, but I could not identify the problem. Then a friend who was studying literature lent me a book on German philosophy containing an essay on the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the poet and botanist.1 I discovered that Goethe, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had a vision of a different kind of science—a holistic science that integrated direct experience and understanding. It did not involve breaking everything down into pieces and denying the evidence of one’s senses.
The idea that science could be different filled me with hope. I wanted to be a scientist. But I did not want to plunge straight into a career of research, which my teachers assumed I would do. I wanted to take some time out to look at a bigger picture. I was fortunate to be awarded a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship at Harvard and, after graduating from Cambridge, I spent a year there (1963–4) studying philosophy and the history of science.
Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had recently come out, and it made me realize that the mechanistic theory of nature was what Kuhn called a “paradigm”—a collectively held model of reality, a belief system. Kuhn showed that periods of revolutionary change in science involved the replacement of old scientific models of reality with new ones. If science had changed radically in the past, then perhaps it could change again in the future—an exciting possibility.
I returned to Cambridge in England to work on plants. I did not want to work on animals, my original intention, because I did not want to spend my life killing them. I did a PhD on how plants make the hormone auxin, which stimulates the growth of stems, the formation of wood, and the production of roots. The hormone powder that gardeners use to promote the rooting of cuttings contains a synthetic form of auxin. I then continued with research on plant development as a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and a research fellow of the Royal Society, which gave me tremendous freedom. For that, I am very grateful.
During this period, I became a member of a group called the Epiphany Philosophers, based in Cambridge.2 This group was an unlikely confluence of quantum physicists, mystics, Buddhists, Quakers, Anglicans, and philosophers, including Richard Braithwaite, who was a professor of philosophy at Cambridge and a leading philosopher of science;3 his wife, Margaret Masterman, director of the Cambridge Language Research Unit and a pioneer of artificial intelligence; and Dorothy Emmet, a professor of philosophy at Manchester University who had studied with the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Four times a year, we lived as a community in a windmill on the Norfolk coast, in Burnham Overy Staithe, for a week at a time. We had discussions about physics, biology, alternative medicine, acupuncture, psychic research, quantum theory, the nature of language, and the philosophy of science. No idea was banned.
During this seven-year period, I was free to do whatever research I liked, wherever I liked. Funded by the Royal Society, I went to Malaysia for a year, because I wanted to study rainforest plants. I was based in the botany department of the University of Malaya, near Kuala Lumpur. On the way there, in 1968, I traveled through India and Sri Lanka for several months, and it was a major eye-opener. I found that there were totally different ways of looking at the world for which nothing in my education had prepared me.
When I returned to Cambridge, I continued with my research on plant development. In particular, I focused on the way the hormone auxin is transported from leaves and stems toward root tips, changing the plant as it flows through. Although this work was very successful, I became more and more convinced that the mechanistic approach was incapable of giving an adequate understanding of the development of form. There had to be top-down organizing principles, not solely bottom-up ones.
An architectural analogy for a top-down principle would be the plan of a building as a whole. A bottom-up explanation would concern itself with the chemistry and physical properties of the bricks, the adhesive properties of the mortar, the stresses in the walls, the currents in the electric wiring, and so on. All these physical and chemical factors are important for understanding the properties of the building, but by themselves they cannot explain its shape, design, and function.
For these reasons, I became interested in the idea of biological fields, also known as morphogenetic or form-shaping fields, which were first proposed in the 1920s. The concept suggests that the shape of a leaf is not only determined by genes inside its cells that enable them to make particular protein molecules, but also by a leaf-shaping field, a kind of invisible plan or mold—or attractor—for the leaf. This is different for oak leaves, rose leaves, and bamboo leaves, even though they all have the same auxin molecules and the same kind of polar auxin transport system, moving auxin in one direction only, from the shoots toward the root tips and not in the opposite direction.
While I was thinking about how morphogenetic fields might be inherited, a new idea occurred to me: There might be a kind of memory in nature creating direct connections across time, from past to present organisms, providing each species with a kind of collective memory of form and behavior. I called this hypothetical transfer of memory “morphic resonance.” But I soon realized that this was a highly controversial proposal, and that I would not be able to publish it until I had thought about it much more thoroughly and looked for evidence, a process that might take years.
At the same time, I became increasingly interested in exploring consciousness through psychedelic experiences, which convinced me that minds were vastly greater than anything I had been told about in my scientific education.
In 1971, I learned Transcendental Meditation, because I wanted to be able to explore consciousness without drugs. At the Transcendental Meditation center in Cambridge, there was no need to accept any religious beliefs. The instructors presented the process as entirely physiological. That was fine by me; it worked, I was happy doing it, and I did not need to believe in anything beyond my own brain. I was still an atheist, and I was pleased to find a spiritual practice that agreed with a scientific worldview and did not require religion.
I was increasingly intrigued by Hindu philosophy and yoga, and in 1974 I had a chance to go and work in India at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), near Hyderabad, where I became the principal plant physiologist. I did research on chickpeas and pigeon peas and was part of a team breeding better varieties with higher yields and greater resistance to drought, pests, and diseases.
I loved being in India and spent some of my spare time visiting temples and ashrams and going to discourses by gurus. I also had a Sufi teacher in Hyderabad, Agha Hassan Hyderi. He gave me a Sufi mantra, a wazifa, and for about a year I did a Sufi form of meditation. One of the things I learned from him was that in the Sufi tradition, pleasure is God-given. His religion was not puritanical or ascetic. He wore wonderful brocade robes, was a connoisseur of perfumes, and sat running his fingers through a bowl of jasmine blossoms as he recited poetry in Urdu and Persian. I had always associated religion with a denial of pleasure, but Agha’s attitude was completely different.
Then a new thought crossed my mind: What about Christianity? Since my teenage conversion to atheism and secular humanism, I had not given it much thought, even though the Epiphany Philosophers was a Christian group; we chanted psalms together in plainsong every morning and evening at the windmill.
When I asked a Hindu guru for his advice on my spiritual journey, he said, “All paths lead to God. You come from a Christian family and you should follow a Christian path.” The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. The holy places of Hinduism are in India or nearby, like Mount Kailash. The holy places of Britain are in Britain, and most of them are Christian. My ancestors were Christian for many centuries; they were born, married, and died within the Christian tradition, including my parents.
I began to say the Lord’s Prayer, and I started going to the Anglican Saint John’s church in Secunderabad. I rediscovered Christian faith. After a while, at the age of thirty-four, I was confirmed in the Church of South India, an ecumenical church formed by the coming together of Anglicans and Methodists. I had not been confirmed at school, unlike most of the other boys.
I still felt a huge tension between Hindu wisdom, which I found to be so deep, and the Christian tradition, which by comparison seemed spiritually shallow. Then, through a friend, I discovered a wonderful teacher, Father Bede Griffiths, who lived in a Christian ashram in Tamil Nadu, in the south of India. He was a British Benedictine monk who had been in India for more than twenty years.
He introduced me to the Christian mystical tradition, about which I knew very little, and to medieval Christian philosophy, particularly the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure. Their insights seemed deeper than anything I had heard about in sermons and churches or in universities. Father Bede also had a profound understanding of Indian philosophy and gave regular discourses on the Upanishads, which contain many of the core ideas of Hindu thought. He showed how Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions could illuminate each other.4
While I was working at ICRISAT, I continued to think about morphic resonance, and after more than four years, I was ready to take some time off to write about it. I wanted to stay in India to do this, and Father Bede provided the perfect solution by inviting me to live in his ashram, Shantivanam, on the banks of the sacred Cauvery River.
Father Bede’s ashram combined many aspects of Indian culture with Christian tradition. We ate vegetarian food off banana leaves while sitting on the floor; there was yoga every morning, and one-hour periods of meditation in the morning and the evening. I usually meditated in the shade of some trees on the riverbank. The mass in the morning started with the chanting of the Gayatri mantra, a Sanskrit mantra invoking the divine power that shines through the sun. I asked Father Bede, “How can you chant a Hindu mantra in a Catholic ashram?” He replied, “Precisely because it’s catholic. Catholic means universal. If it excludes anything that is a path to God, it’s not catholic, but just a sect.”
I stayed there for a year and a half, from 1978–9, living in a palm leaf–thatched hut under a banyan tree where I wrote my book A New Science of Life. I then went back to work at ICRISAT on a part-time basis for several more years, spending part of each year in India, part in Britain, and part in California.
Back in Britain, I had a wonderful time rediscovering my native traditions. I loved the fact that just as Indians have pilgrimages, Europeans have pilgrimages, too. I went on pilgrimages to cathedrals, churches, and ancient sites like Avebury. It felt like coming home, reconnecting with my native land and with those who had lived there before. I made it my practice to go to church on Sundays, wherever I was, usually in my local parish. I still do so.
Soon after A New Science of Life was published in Britain in 1981, I was back in India working on my field experiments, when I was invited to speak at a conference in Bombay called “Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science.” I took a few days off from harvesting my crops and went there to give a talk on morphic resonance. While I was at the conference, I met Jill Purce, who was speaking as part of the ancient wisdom program. Jill had written a book called The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul, and she was also the general editor of a series of beautiful books on art and imagination, published by Thames & Hudson, which are still in print today.
Jill and I met again a few months later in India, after she had been on a retreat in the Himalayas as part of her practice of Dzogchen, a form of Tibetan Buddhism. Later that year we met up again in England, where we came together. We were married in 1985 and have lived in Hampstead, in north London, ever since.
When I met her, Jill had developed a new way of teaching chanting, introducing people to the power of group chant and drawing on traditions from many different cultures and religions. In the workshops she taught, and still teaches, a form of overtone chanting, traditionally practiced in Mongolia and Tuva; it makes audible high, flute-like notes, harmonics of the fundamental tone of the chant. She also shows how chanting can have powerful, consciousness-shifting effects and bring people into resonance with each other.5
Over the last thirty-five years I have been doing experimental research on plant growth, morphic resonance,6 homing pigeons,7 dogs that know when their owners are coming home,8 the sense of being stared at,9 telephone telepathy,10 and a range of other subjects. From 2005 to 2010, I was the director of the Perrott-Warrick Project for research into unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge.
The results of this research have convinced me that our minds extend far beyond our brains, as do the minds of other animals. For example, there seem to be direct telepathic influences from animals to other animals, from humans to other humans, from humans to animals, and from animals to humans. Telepathic connections usually occur between people and animals that are emotionally bonded.
Such psychic phenomena are normal, not paranormal; they are natural, not supernatural. They are part of the way that minds and social bonds work. They are sometimes called “paranormal” because they do not fit into a narrow understanding of reality. But the phenomena themselves can be studied scientifically, and they have measurable effects. They are about interactions between living organisms, and between living organisms and their environment. However, they are not in themselves spiritual phenomena.
There is a distinction between the psychic and spiritual realms. Phenomena such as telepathy reveal that minds are not confined to brains. But we are also open to connections with a far greater consciousness, a more-than-human spiritual reality, whatever we call it. Spiritual practices help us to explore this question for ourselves.
Jill’s work is one of my inspirations for writing this book, because she has developed a way of teaching spiritual practices that includes anyone who is interested, whatever their religion or nonreligion. As I found with Transcendental Meditation, and as I have seen over and over again with Jill’s workshops, people can learn spiritual practices and practice them without having to start by articulating their beliefs or doubts. Their practices can lead to a deeper understanding, but direct experience comes first.
The same principles apply to all the practices I discuss in this book. All of them are open to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, animists, neo-shamans, people who are spiritual but not religious, New Agers, secular humanists, agnostics, and atheists. I myself am a Christian—an Anglican—and I take part in these practices in a Christian context. But all of them are practiced by followers of other religions, and also by atheists and agnostics. No religion or nonreligion has a monopoly on these practices. They are open to everyone.
Many scientific studies have shown that these practices confer benefits on those who do them. For example, people who make a practice of being grateful are, on average, happier than people who do not. I am writing this book because I believe that, in our secular age, there is a great need to rediscover these practices, whatever one’s religion or nonreligion.
There are many kinds of spiritual practice. In this book, I discuss a selection of seven, all of which I participate in myself.
Hampstead, London
February 2017