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How to turn professional experience into practical knowledge? How to reflect over one’s professional practice in order to improve it? How to further develop a practitioner’s responseAbility when facing challenging situations? Already Aristotle spoke of practical knowledge in terms of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis), a notion which is also reflected in the term Bildung. In this podcast, the hosts prof. Michael Noah Weiss and prof. Guro Hansen Helskog are examining central aspects of this knowledge form and its relevance in professional studies by talking to different scholars who made significant contributions to the field. Listeners can get hands-on ideas on how to develop practical knowledge in their own professional contexts.
Hosts:
Michael Noah Weiss & Guro Hansen Helskog
TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY
(This transcript summary was AI-generated and then edited by the podcast hosts for quality assurance)
#24 Rupert Sheldrake | Re-enchanting Science and Nature
- a podcast dialogue with Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog
ORIGINS OF A RADICAL BIOLOGIST
Rupert Sheldrake began his career as a traditional biologist at Cambridge University, where he discovered key mechanisms in plant growth, including how the hormone auxin is produced and transported. Yet, this research led him beyond mechanistic explanations. If all plants share the same hormone, how can their forms be so diverse? This question opened his lifelong inquiry into morphogenetic fields — invisible, formative patterns guiding the development of living organisms. He proposed that these fields are shaped not only by genes but also by morphic resonance: the idea that memory is inherent in nature, passed on through patterns rather than molecules.
This idea—heretical to materialist science—moved Sheldrake toward a holistic understanding of life, one that views the world as alive, conscious, and creative. The mechanistic worldview, he argues, has turned science into a “straitjacket,” reducing living processes to lifeless mechanics. His work seeks to free scientific inquiry from these dogmas and reopen its imaginative and spiritual dimensions.
THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF THE LIVING WORLD
For Sheldrake, re-enchantment begins with rejecting the notion of a dead, mechanical universe. If nature is truly alive—if consciousness permeates it—then enchantment arises naturally. This view resonates both philosophically and practically. On one level, it transforms how we perceive the cosmos: not as a machine but as an organism. On another, it invites literal re-enchantment through acts such as chanting, pilgrimage, and communion with nature.
Sheldrake highlights his wife, Jill Purce’s, work with chanting as both metaphor and practice—“you can’t re-enchant the world without chanting.” He is involved with the British Pilgrimage Trust, where collective chanting along ancient paths reconnects participants with place and sacred landscape. Through such acts, re-enchantment becomes an embodied, ecological, and spiritual practice rather than a mere intellectual idea.
TELEPATHY, ANIMALS, AND THE BONDS OF LIFE
Sheldrake’s biological curiosity led him to study the telepathic bonds between humans and animals, most famously dogs that seem to know when their owners are coming home. He frames these connections as expressions of morphic fields—invisible bonds linking members of social groups. His controlled experiments (involving random return times and distance tests) indicate that animals often respond at the very moment their owners form the intention to return.
He connects this to folk phenomena like the Norwegian vardøger—a premonitory experience of hearing someone arrive before they do—and suggests that such intuitive communication is an evolved form of social sensitivity. Far from “paranormal,” telepathy is, in his view, a natural extension of biology, revealing the interdependence of life and consciousness.
THE “SCIENCE DELUSION” AND THE DOGMAS OF MODERNITy
In his influential book The Science Delusion (also published as Science Set Free), Sheldrake identifies ten core assumptions of modern science that have hardened into dogma:
- Nature is mechanical.
- Matter is unconscious.
- Nature lacks purpose.
- Natural laws are fixed.
- The total amount of matter and energy is constant.
- Inheritance is purely genetic.
- Memory is stored materially in the brain.
- Mind is nothing but brain activity.
- Psychic phenomena are impossible.
- Mechanistic medicine is the only form that works.
These, he argues, are not facts but beliefs—a metaphysical stance disguised as science. True scientific spirit, he insists, is open inquiry guided by evidence, not ideology. Mechanistic assumptions may explain machines, but they fail to explain life, consciousness, or purpose. His concept of morphic fields offers an alternative paradigm—one that integrates pattern, memory, and meaning within nature itself.
FROM MECHANISM TO CONSCIOUSNESS: A SHIFTING PARADIGM
Sheldrake situates his critique historically. In the early 20th century, many leading scientists—including members of the Vienna Circle—were still open to studying telepathy and other anomalous phenomena. But after the Second World War, biology became dominated by molecular reductionism, while psychology turned to behaviorism, denying subjective experience altogether. Science became “dogmatic materialism,” refusing to consider consciousness as real.
Today, however, cracks are showing. The hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism—the view that consciousness pervades all matter. Sheldrake himself has explored whether even the Sun might be conscious. Such openness, he suggests, marks the beginning of science’s re-enchantment.
SCIENCE AND SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
In his later work (Science and Spiritual Practices, Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work), Sheldrake turns from theory to practice, showing how ordinary spiritual disciplines foster health, meaning, and connection. He identifies seven key practices supported by empirical research: meditation, gratitude, contact with nature, relationship with plants, ritual, pilgrimage, and chanting or singing.
Each of these, he argues, generates measurable well-being and connects individuals with larger patterns of consciousness. For instance, meditation lowers blood pressure and increases emotional stability; gratitude enhances happiness; and being outdoors—what the Japanese call “forest bathing”—improves mental health. Rituals and pilgrimages connect participants through morphic resonance with all who have practiced before them, embodying both communal memory and spiritual continuity.
Spiritual practices thus become a method of participation in the living field of nature—a practical route to re-enchantment.
INDIA, MYSTICISM, AND THE INTEGRATION OF TRADITIONS
Sheldrake’s years in India were formative. After early exposure during his studies in Malaysia, he worked from 1974 to 1985 at the International Crops Research Institute in Hyderabad and later lived in the ashram of Father Bede Griffiths, a Christian Benedictine who integrated Hindu and Christian mysticism. There, Sheldrake wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.
India, he says, helped him rediscover the mystical roots of Christianity and recognize the consonance between his own theories and Indian thought. Concepts like karma and Akashic memory resonated with morphic resonance. This cross-cultural synthesis deepened his sense that science and spirituality need not be opposed—they are two languages of the same reality.
SPIRITUAL PRACTICE AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
Asked whether spiritual practice could be integrated into research itself, Sheldrake hesitates. He personally meditates, prays, and attends church, which nourishes his scientific imagination but would not want to influence his data directly—e.g. by praying for experimental outcomes. Yet he sees the potential for pilgrimage for scientists. He personally, for example, visits the “saints” of science—Faraday, Newton, Darwin—as a form of homage and inspiration. Such acts might cultivate humility and openness in research, recognizing that inquiry itself can be sacred.
COINCIDENCE, INTUITION, AND INVISIBLE GUIDANCe
Responding to the hosts’ reflections on synchronicity and intuition, Sheldrake distinguishes between telepathy (communicative resonance) and synchronicity (meaningful coincidence). Telepathy, he argues, is measurable and testable—he has thousands of documented cases and experimental data showing above-chance results. Synchronicity, by contrast, is harder to study statistically, though it may operate through prayer, intention, and morphic resonance.
He values case histories and phenomenological approaches, though his own temperament remains experimental. Reflective and interpretive inquiry, such as the hosts’ hermeneutic phenomenology, complements his empirical work by giving voice to lived experience—a humanistic form of science.
A WISH LIST FOR THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE
In closing, Sheldrake offers a vision for the future of scientific education and research:
- Teach students that many “facts” of science are actually assumptions.
- Encourage open questions rather than closed dogmas.
- Develop empirical, comparative research in medicine and psychology without prejudice against non-mechanistic methods.
- Empower non-Western scientific traditions—Indian, Chinese, African—to draw from their own knowledge systems rather than copying Western materialism.
Science, he insists, is a method, not a belief system. If it embraces its plural roots and integrates wisdom traditions, it can become a more creative, humane, and truly global pursuit.
CONCLUDING REFLECTION
This episode of the ResponsAbility Podcast unfolds as both a critique and an invitation. Sheldrake challenges science’s reductionist hubris while offering a path toward its renewal—a science that listens, chants, walks, and wonders. His vision restores responsibility in its deepest sense: the ability to respond to the living world.
In conversation with Guro Hansen Helskog and Michael Noah Weiss, Sheldrake’s life and thought reveal a continuous thread—from the chemistry of plants to the consciousness of the cosmos—woven through a conviction that life remembers. To re-enchant science is, for him, not to abandon reason but to extend it—to let reason breathe again within a living universe.