Acharya Prashant in Dialogue with Eminent British Biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on Consciousness and the Limits of Science

Acharya Prashant, ranked among the world’s most followed philosophers, engaged in an extended dialogue with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, the Cambridge-trained biologist and former Royal Society research fellow, in Hampstead, London on July 2. Dr. Sheldrake, author of nine books and over a hundred papers in scientific journals, has spent decades questioning the materialist assumptions underlying modern science.

The nearly two-hour conversation ranged across the nature of consciousness, the limits of scientism, the structure of the ego, reincarnation, and the meaning of prayer.

Acharya Prashant argued that while the scientific method is invaluable, the claim that only what science can verify exists is itself unscientific. “Scientism is not science. This is a belief system refusing to accept that it is a belief system,” he said. Science, he observed, investigates the object but never the experimenter. “Science has been obsessed with two questions, what is it and how does it work. But the question, for whom, has been violently neglected. We are already paying a very heavy price for neglecting that question,” he said.

Dr. Sheldrake concurred, noting that the materialist assumptions of science arose in 17th and 18th century Europe and now restrict its scope unnecessarily. “Science has been exported to the whole of the rest of the world with this European baggage, which it doesn’t need,” he said. He also recalled his personal meetings with Jiddu Krishnamurti in England, California and India.

On prayer, Acharya Prashant distinguished between prayer as desire and prayer as dissolution, sharing the prayer spoken at his institution: “Hey Ram, mujhe mujhse bacha,” which he translated as “O God, save me from myself.” True prayer, he said, is not about getting more but about becoming less.

The dialogue closed on the question of education, with Acharya Prashant stating that knowledge is necessary but not sufficient, and that the world today needs mass education of the self. According to the PrashantAdvait Foundation, Acharya Prashant’s work reaches over 100 million people across digital platforms.

“Scientism is not science. This is a belief system refusing to accept that it is a belief system.”

Acharya Prashant, in Hampstead