Spiritual practices work, and this is not a matter of opinion. Scientists have been measuring their effects for more than thirty years, and there are now thousands of papers in peer-reviewed journals showing that people with a regular spiritual or religious practice tend to be healthier, happier and longer-lived than those without one, whatever they happen to believe. In this talk I look at the practices themselves rather than the arguments around them: gratitude, meditation and prayer, mantras, ritual, holy days and festivals, sport, and pilgrimage. Most of them cost nothing and require no prior belief system.

The thread running through all of them is connection. Meditation and prayer are complementary rather than rival, more like breathing in and breathing out. Rituals and festivals connect people to each other and to those who did the same things before them. Even sport, which is usually thought of as a supremely secular activity, brings people into the present more quickly than almost anything else.

This talk was recorded live at Hollyhock on Cortes Island in British Columbia, 2026.

We’re often told that the scientific revolution banished souls from nature, leaving a universe of dead matter pushed around by blind forces. I don’t think that’s what happened. The soul of the world didn’t disappear in the seventeenth century; it changed its name. It’s now called a field.

Gravity turns out to be an attraction, a pull toward a final unity, which is to say a purpose. The electromagnetic field turns out to be what William Gilbert in 1600 called the soul of the earth, and I’ll show you what it does with a handful of magnets, something I’ve never done in front of an audience before. Matter turns out to be frozen light, with the energy trapped within quantum matter fields. And the fields that shape a growing leaf turn out to be very close to what Aristotle meant by the vegetative soul. Formal and final causes were never really expelled from science. They’ve been hiding in plain sight, in the one part of physics almost nobody thinks to examine. I’ll also make the case that the laws of nature are better understood as habits, and that nature has a memory, an idea that got my first book condemned in the pages of Nature as a candidate for burning, and which my colleagues in India found entirely unremarkable.

Delivered at The World Soul Symposium, a conference of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism, on the 19th of June 2026, Thirkill Room, Clare College, Cambridge University.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction: Why the World Soul Matters to Science Now
• 03:06 Gravity as the Unifying Principle of Modern Cosmology
• 11:36 The Electromagnetic Field, Polarity, and the Soul of the Earth
• 18:00 Magnet Demonstration: Formal and Final Causes in Plain Sight
• 21:16 Quantum Matter Fields: Matter as Frozen Light
• 23:23 Morphogenetic Fields and the Vegetative Soul
• 29:38 Morphic Resonance: Memory and Habit in Nature
• 33:46 Questions and Discussion

Rupert speaks with Jonas Atlas about the high cost of scientific heresy and what it reveals about the gap between science's public face and its private reality. Beginning with the 1981 Nature editorial that branded A New Science of Life "a book for burning," they trace how Rupert was effectively excommunicated from mainstream science, then turn to deeper questions: how to tell genuine inquiry from pseudoscience in a "post-truth" age flooded with AI-generated theories of everything, why morphic resonance remains a hypothesis to be tested rather than a truth to be defended, and why survey evidence suggests hardcore materialism is actually a minority view among working scientists who mostly stay quiet about it.

First published on the Re-visioning Religion podcast, Sep 02, 2025.

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/re-visioning-religion/

About Jonas: A scholar of religion, teaching at KDG University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Jonas is also an independent researcher at the Radboud University, as a member of the Race, Religion and Secularism network.

Across decades of reading and travel, something has struck me again and again: wildly different traditions, from Daoism to Hinduism to Christianity, converge on a threefold or Trinitarian model of ultimate reality. In this talk I trace that pattern through philosophy, theology, and modern physics, and suggest it reflects something fundamental about the nature of things.

Many churches will be celebrating the Holy Trinity on Sunday May 31, Trinity Sunday.

This talk was recorded live at St James’s Church London, May 13th, 2026 as part of the Alternatives programme. The full video with human readable transcript is available on substack.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0_Lkku3QH-c

What if gratitude isn't just good manners, but measurably changes your wellbeing? What if the medieval Christians were right about nature being alive, and we've spent the last 400 years getting it fundamentally wrong? And why are half a million people now walking ancient pilgrimage routes across Europe when rationalist materialism promised to free us from such "superstitions"?

In this wide-ranging conversation at Hampstead Parish Church, I explore these questions with Dr. Jessica Harland, touching on everything from my early crisis of conscience in a vivisection lab to discovering LSD at Cambridge, from the Protestant Reformation's assault on pilgrimage to why your GP should probably be prescribing forest walks. We go into the scientific evidence behind spiritual practices—yes, there are thousands of peer-reviewed studies—and discuss why saying grace before meals, walking to holy places, and reconnecting with the living world aren't quaint relics of the past, but practices our secular age desperately needs to rediscover.

Whether you consider yourself religious, spiritual-but-not-religious, or simply curious about why these ancient practices refuse to die, I hope you'll find something here that sparks your imagination—and perhaps your own spiritual journey.

Recorded at The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead, October 2025. If you're in London, I highly recommend coming by to experience choral evensong.
https://www.choralevensong.org/uk/the-parish-church-of-st-john-at-hampstead-27.php

For more see Rupert’s Substack article on this topic
👉 https://rupertsheldrake.substack.com/p/animal-warnings-of-earthquakes

Recorded on November 4, 2017 at the Society for Psychical Research in London. 

When disasters strike, it is often animals who seem to know first. Long before seismographs were invented, people noticed that snakes, rats, dogs, and birds behaved strangely in the days leading up to earthquakes. Similar reports come before tsunamis, avalanches, air raids, and even medical crises like seizures. Are these simply heightened senses—an ability to detect tremors, gases, or subtle vibrations—or do they point to something deeper, an anticipatory awareness we do not yet understand?

In this talk, I share some of the evidence I’ve gathered over the years: from ancient Greek accounts to modern field studies, from the Chinese earthquake networks under Mao to the toads of central Italy abandoning their mating grounds days before a quake. The pattern repeats across cultures and circumstances, yet mainstream science has largely dismissed it as superstition.

Why is that? What are we overlooking when we ignore such a consistent body of observations? Could systematic study of animal behavior, especially with today’s global communications, provide early warnings and even save lives?

I don’t claim to have the answers. But I invite you to explore these questions with me, and to consider what they reveal not only about animals, but about our shared sensitivity to the unseen.

What if the “weird” feelings we shrug off—being watched, knowing who’s calling, waking seconds before an alarm—aren’t glitches but signals? In this talk, given at the How The Light Gets In festival, September 21st, 2025, Rupert Sheldrake argues that these everyday hunches point to mind-to-world reach (projective vision), mind-to-mind links (telepathy), and mind-to-future sensitivity (presentiment). How do we decide what counts as evidence, who gets to ask taboo questions, and how science should treat common human experiences? Beyond anecdotes, Rupert shares simple experiments, huge natural-history datasets, and a working picture of mind as something that reaches, bonds, and anticipates—often strengthened with emotional closeness. He flags practical paths forward: citizen science, the Eyesense Training app to sharpen sensitivity, and real-world applications from caregiving to early-warning via animal behavior.

Try the Eyesense Training app
👉 https://eyesense.training

See Rupert’s Substack for the Latest  articles and early access to videos
👉 https://rupertsheldrake.substack.com

A dialogue on praying for ancestors and on pilgrimage: Hollyhock, Cortes Island, BC; August, 2016. 

See Rupert’s Substack for the Latest  articles and early access to videos
👉 https://rupertsheldrake.substack.com

For many people, Christianity is like a toxic brand. Why is this so and what can be done about it? A dialogue with Marc Andrus, the Bishop of California, at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco; September, 2015.


See Rupert’s Substack for the Latest  articles and early access to videos
👉 https://rupertsheldrake.substack.com

A dialogue with Marc Andrus, former Bishop of California, at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, in August of 2016.

See Rupert’s Substack for the Latest  articles and early access to videos
👉 https://rupertsheldrake.substack.com