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Rupert Sheldrake (1942 - ) is a biologist and author of more than 75 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry.
When he was 44, he first went to Hyderabad, India, in 1968 as a plant biologist, more than just pollen and dirt rubbed off on him. He began digging into the Vedas and Upanishads, examining Buddhist doctrine and Sufi mysticism. He learned meditation. In 1974, India became this Briton's home, and his views of biology were becoming radically altered by his Eastern musings. Eventually, he would create a science theory so wide that it carried an ethical message of being psychically responsible for our thoughts and actions. It was so deep it receded back through transcendent creation gods to a God state that reads like many Upanishadic passages.
He would say in 1987, "My ideas find readier acceptance in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions of the East than in Western culture."
Sheldrake saw how a subtle, trans-physical field was responsible for defining, regulating and advancing biological form and intelligence - like the akashic form-building of the Vedas. In 1978, Sheldrake entered an ashram by the sacred Cauvery River in South India. Here he extended his biological insights to include inorganic matter, formulated a scientifically testable theory and wrote a brilliant book, A New Science of Life. He called his theory "formative causation." It simply stated that the combined form and the learned intelligence/behavior of anything appearing in the universe - from an atom to man-is guided by a single morphogenetic (form-evolving) field: M-field for short. One field per new form, no matter how numerous it appears in our universe. According to Hindu metaphysics, this is precisely how the interior astral universe works.
(source: Hinduism Today February 1988)
He spent seven years in India where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life (1981), while living at an ashram there. That book soon became the target of criticism among Sheldrake's peers, who view many of his theories, at best, as "unconventional." In 1968, Sheldrake went to India for three months while on his way to Malaysia to study tropical botany. Even after a year in Malaysia, he couldn't forget what he'd seen in India. "That had a huge impact on me," he says. "I suddenly saw this astonishing culture which I found completely fascinating, which had riches and depths beyond anything I had ever been taught about in England." "One of the effects of this exposure to India was to put the scientific perspective on the world that I had learned in Cambridge into a much wider context," he says.
"I saw that this was one rather limited way of looking at things. I was also much influenced by Indian meditation practices, starting with Transcendental Meditation around 1970, and various other forms of meditation and Yoga over the years. This gave me a different perspective on the workings of the mind and on realms of experience I had not known about before."
For the first time, Sheldrake was exposed to the teachings of Hinduism.
"I was impressed by the way that Hindus relate to the land of India and the holy places, and was moved by the great variety of pilgrimages and holy animals and plants and festivals. There are so many aspects of Hinduism that link it to the land and to the natural world in India. It is also closely linked to the culture and languages of India. I realized that as an English person I could never fully enter into those aspects of Hinduism."
http://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/2001/9-10/40-43_sheldrake.shtml).
http://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/1988/02/1988-02-08.shtml
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