Science is now transcending the materialist philosophy, and pointing toward a new sense of a living world. The cosmos is no longer like a machine running down; it is more like a developing organism with an inherent memory, and so is our planet, Gaia. The old idea of determinism has given way to indeterminism, chaos and complexity. The laws of nature may be more like habits. Minds may extend far beyond brains. Memories may not be stored as traces in our brains, and may not be wiped out at death. Mental causation may work from the future towards the past, while energetic causation works from the past towards the future. New experimental research points to the reality of our mental connections to the world around us. These new paradigm shifts in the sciences shed a new light on spiritual practices like pilgrimage, ritual, prayer and the survival of bodily death. In this workshop we will explore some of these many implications.
RUPERT SHELDRAKE Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books, including The Science Delusion. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, and from 2005-2010 the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. In India, he spent two years living in the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths, and has given workshops on science and spirituality with Matthew Fox and Brother David Steindl-Rast. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.
