Re-Discovering God

Re-Discovering God

Talk
Wednesday, March 20, 2024 - 19:00 to 20:30
Science
Spiritual
Wellbeing
Alternatives says: 
Rupert's own journey through India, psychedelics, science, prayer and pilgrimage
Description: 

This evening, Rupert will speak about his own spiritual journey, which included a long atheist phase starting as a teenager and continuing until his late 20s.

He will describe how travelling in India in 1968 and later living and working in India from 1974 to 1985 had a transformative effect on his worldview, how experiences with psychedelics expanded his understanding of consciousness, how his disillusionment with mechanistic materialism gave way to a broader and more inclusive view of scientific possibilities, how meditation, prayer and other spiritual practices have informed his life, how he rediscovered a Christian path in India and learned from Father Bede Griffiths, in whose ashram he lived for 2 years in Tamil Nadu and how he became involved with the British Pilgrimage Trust and the rediscovery of pilgrimage in Britain.

About the speaker, Rupert Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake PhD is a biologist and author of more than a hundred technical papers and nine books, including The Science Delusion (called Science Set Free in the US).

He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and the History and Philosophy of Science at Harvard. As a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, he was Director of Studies in Cell Biology, and was also a research fellow of the Royal Society. He worked at the University of Malaya on tropical ferns, and in Hyderabad, India, as Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). In India, he also lived for two years in the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu. From 2005-2010, he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project for the study of unexplained human and animal abilities, funded fromTrinity College, Cambridge.

He is currently a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, of Schumacher College in Dartington, England and of the Temenos Academy in London. He lives in London and is married to Jill Purce, with whom he has two sons, Merlin, a mycologist and author of the bestselling book Entangled Life, and Cosmo, a musician.

Timetable: 
7pm
Talk starts
8.30pm
Talk ends
Venue: