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.