Biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake, a former Fellow of Clare College Cambridge, believes that being completely present in sport is to enter the joy, energy and flow of the Holy Spirit. Once an atheist, Dr Sheldrake returned to the Christian faith after living in a Christian ashram in India. The following is an edited extract from a talk* he gave on 20 May about his most recent books: ‘Science and Spiritual Practices’ and ‘Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work’.
Most people don’t think of sport as a spiritual practice, but I think it’s probably the commonest form of spiritual practice in the modern world, even though it’s under the radar and almost unconscious as a spiritual practice.
At first, sports seem supremely secular. Commercial football matches, huge sums of money, sports as exercise, for physical strength and ability. Sports that enable people to perfect their physical skills.
All of these things seem unspiritual, but actually I think that the majority of people who carry out sports activities are doing them because they have a spiritual effect, and the reason they have a spiritual effect is that they bring people into the present.
The mind is often not in the present, but the body is. If you’re skiing downhill at 60 miles an hour you have to be completely present, otherwise you might go over a cliff and die.
I think that’s one of the reasons for the thrill of speed, for people who love sports that involve speed like motorcycle racing, or cycling downhill, or surfing, or skydiving, or flying jet planes very fast. The thrill of speed is partly because speed is so dangerous, and if you allow your attention to lapse for even a second, you’re dead.
This is taken to an extreme with dangerous sports. I talked last year in London to the world champion free solo highline person, a young German, who works not on tightropes but lines, sort of flattened tightropes, over thousand foot drops with no safety harness. He told me that when he’s doing this he has to be so completely in the present it’s ecstatic. He feels this kind of sense of total spiritual presence while he’s doing this, and although it is dangerous and his girlfriend wants him to stop, he does it because it’s just so utterly joyful. It is the experience of being totally present and the total presence comes from the danger.
If you’re playing football and you’re in the middle of a football match and someone’s passing you the ball, you’re not going to have time to think about bills you haven’t paid, or some annoying person who’s annoyed you by some remark they’ve made, or some quarrel with your girlfriend or boyfriend; you’re going to be totally present.
And for crowds watching football matches where the rhythm of emotions rises and falls together with that of the other people there’s a sense of presence and also connection with others in team games; not only a sense of presence in the present moment, but also connection with other members of the team or, more vicariously, with supporters.
All of this involves connection, and spiritual practice is primarily about connection, connection with states of being greater than ourselves. Sports are a portal for this.
Michael Murphy, who founded the Esalen Institute in California, which has played such an important part in the human potential movement, wrote a book called Golf in the Kingdom about the mystical side of golf. It’s been a best seller among golf players for many years.
In fact, Murphy, who spent a year at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in India, has always had this sense of the physical and the spiritual coming together in sports.
In the oriental martial arts the spiritual dimension is explicit. People in the West, I think, first became aware of this through a famous book called Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Harrigel, a German who lived in Japan and studied archery. He learned that this was not just a matter of hitting the target and winning competitions, it was a spiritual discipline. Martial arts make it clear that this is about energy flows and presence, and not just about building up muscle and brute force and winning. It’s much, much more than that.
So I think sports are one of the spiritual practices which are present in the lives of millions of people in modern secular societies; and I think it helps us to recognise that these sports activities are opening spiritual doors for people in the West even if they’re unaware of it.
Why is it that sports can have a spiritual effect? By spiritual effect I mean giving us a sense of connection with a presence or being greater than ourselves, or consciousness greater than our own. Meditation, which involves sitting quietly with your eyes closed, couldn’t be more different from sports. How can both have a spiritual dimension?
My own thinking about this is very much shaped by the view of ultimate reality as Trinitarian – as being about what Christianity calls the Holy Trinity. My favourite theologian at the moment is David Bentley Hart. He wrote a book called The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss in which he shows that there is far more in common between different religions than divides them. One of the things that is common is a kind of Trinitarian model of ultimate reality.
In the Hindu tradition it is called Satchidananda – which means being, consciousness and bliss. For two years I lived in Fr Bede Griffith’s Ashram in Tamil Nadu in South India. In English it is called the Ashram of the Holy Trinity, but the Indian name is the Satchidanandan Ashram, an explicit linking together of these different trinitarian frameworks.
Sat in Satchidananda means the very ground of consciousness and being itself. The equivalent in the Holy Trinity is called the Father, and the revelation of that aspect of divine being occurs most clearly in the Old Testament - in Moses’ encounter with the burning bush when he says, “What is your name?” And God says, “I am who I am”. I am being in the present. You couldn’t think of a simpler, clearer definition of this state of conscious being in the present.
Chid relates to the second person of the Holy Trinity, the Logos, and corresponds to manifestations of the divine beauty in the realm of forms and names.
The third aspect of ultimate reality, the divine reality, is Ananda, which is joy or bliss. This is also movement and change. In the Christian Trinity this is the Holy Spirit. It is the breath of life in all nature, recognised by physicists as energy which flows through the whole of nature, which we experience as breath. The Hebrew word for it is Ruah, and the Greek word is Pneuma. They mean wind, breath and spirit; they didn’t separate these different meanings.
I think that sports, which are all about movement and change, relate to the dynamical aspect of ultimate reality, the Holy Spirit. Sports connect to this ultimate reality through movement, through being in the flow, through being present in that flow. I think this also applies to music and dancing, particularly sacred dancing, which are about movement and flow. They also relate primarily to the dimension of the Spirit.
*Dr Sheldrake spoke via zoom as part of a monthly series of talks organised by the Bonnevaux Centre for Peace, the international home of the World Community for Christian Meditation in France. For more information about the Bonnevaux Speaker Series see: https://wccm.org/events/speaker-series/
This article first appeared in the July edition of The Melbourne Anglican.