Spirits Reaching Out

Have you ever had the sense of being stared at? Me too.

I’m one of those who read several books at the same time. I’ll start on one with every intention of reading it straight though, and before you know it something else captures my interest and away I go. I confess I don’t always finish what I start; the good news is I don’t tend to waste much time on the dross, and once in a while I stumble upon a real gem, like Rupert Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared At. I noticed the title while browsing through Borders one day and I was snagged.

Sheldrake, a resident of London, took his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge after a stint at Harvard. He is a Research Fellow of the Royal Society and has authored more than sixty scientific papers and several books.

Here’s why his book grabbed me. I’ve long been intrigued by the mind – body connection. The Bible teaches something like a duality of material and immaterial realities that coexist in human life. God is described as immaterial Spirit. If we are made in God’s image, it stands to reason that spirit is also a component of our being. Genesis 2:7 states: “Then the LORD GOD formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being [literally ‘soul’].

The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament referred to body as “basar”, or flesh. In the New Testament, the Greek words “sarx” and “soma” are used in reference to the body. The idea here is that the body is material, physical, and distinguishable from the spirit. The Hebrew word for spirit is “ruah”. In Greek it is “pneuma”, but the same concept is conveyed in both languages. Described as breath, life giving air or wind, the spirit is the body’s energizing power, or, in the parlance of Star Wars, the life force.

The word soul, to breathe (in Hebrew “nepes” and in Greek “psyche”) relates to the integration or union of spirit and body. God breathes life (spirit) in the body and the union of the two results in a living soul. As Robert Saucy puts it:

The soul is the total person enlivened by the spirit. The spirit is thus a meta-physical entity, namely, the principle of life which empowers, while the soul is the individual subject or bearer of that life. The spirit is thus immaterial in essence, whereas the soul encompasses the total person, material and immaterial¹.

At the risk of being pedantic there is one more word the Bible uses frequently in relation to human life – heart. If soul is the union of spirit and flesh, then heart can be thought of as the “operating center of the soul”. The Scriptures describe it as the origin of desire, feeling, sadness, joy, motive, and decision. As Proverbs puts it: “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out it spring the issues of life (Proverbs 4:23)”.

The word heart in the Old Testament is most associated with what we think of as mind. Our mind, or heart, is the place where we live. It’s the part of me that thinks, reasons, remembers, holds grudges, feels love. My heart is who I am. Now I know that this can be confusing, and for the sake of simplicity the terms "spirit", "soul", and "heart" are often used interchangeably to describe the immaterial phenomena of our minds.

“Heart, Schmart”, I can hear someone saying. “You’re giving me a headache”. “Who cares anyway?” “When you die you die -- game over”.

We’ll I know some people believe that. But, curiously, most do not. In poll after poll people say that they believe at least part of them lives on after death. The Bible supports this. For though the body is dependent upon the spirit (James 2:26), the spirit is not dependent upon the body. Jesus told his disciples: “…do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell (Matthew 10:28)”. Recall what Jesus, while dying on the cross, promised the thief dying next to Him: “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise (Luke 23:43).” Obviously Jesus was not talking about the man’s body. He was referring to the part of the man that would live on after his body died, the part of him not subject to time and space – his spirit.

Most people feel their souls are ageless. When you’re sick, does not your heart view the whole affair from a certain distance? Your body may reel and writhe with the pain, but the mind stays above it all with a measure of detached objectivity. There is a mysterious line of demarcation that distinguishes body from mind.

I still remember this incident that happened over twenty years ago. I was with friends enjoying a business lunch. At the table next to us was a very old man who paid his bill and got up to leave. As he did so we watched him take notice of a pretty waitress. One of my friends, Dave Bellandi, remarked casually, “there’s a twenty five year old locked up in an eighty year old body”. It was true.

As I type these words, at the age of fifty-two, in my heart I’m still twenty five. Yes, I’ve slowed way down. My body shows and feels the years. I’m often shocked a bit when I see a recent photo or video of myself. Yet the core of who I am, my thoughts, hopes, passions, and the dreams that drive me have not aged at all.

So what does all this have to do with Sheldrake? Just this. His work supports the Bible’s teaching of the mind/heart being somehow independent from the body/brain. Having read his book, I doubt Sheldrake is particularly religious, let alone a Christian. And I almost didn’t buy the book when I read the endorsement from Deepak Chopra. Nevertheless, Sheldrake’s studies on some of the stranger aspects of the human experience, I think, are very telling.

What is consciousness? How does it interact with the body? Is the mind locked completely inside the brain, or not? Sheldrake has tackled these questions by studying what he calls “the seventh sense”. As the title of his book reveals, the seventh sense has to do with that prickly sensation that someone is staring at us, or suddenly knowing something is wrong with a loved one that turns out to be true, or having a strong hunch about something that proves accurate. Almost all of us have experienced this. My mother, for instance, seems to have a very well developed “seventh sense”. I recall numerous occasions where the phone would ring, and she knew before answering who was calling even with people she had long lost touch with. It was weird, but I knew something real was going on.

In the Second World War, pilots with the RAF were instructed not to stare at their enemy during a chase. Experience had taught them that the intensity of the gaze would often make the enemy do an about face to discover an otherwise invisible attacker. It’s as if the mind reaches out beyond the body and makes a connection.

Related to this is the “phantom limb” phenomenon. For years after losing a limb, and often for the rest of their lives, amputees will feel excruciating pain where the limb once was. It’s as if the mind reaches out beyond the truncated limb’s boundaries remembering or looking for that which has been lost. Indeed, doctors count on this phenomenon to help amputees adjust to prosthetic replacements, which the mind tends to embrace and integrate with the rest of the body.

Sheldrake points out that these experiences are more than anecdotal. In controlled, double blind, studies these phenomenon occur with statistical significance and which eludes simple explanations. For instance, during big news events when millions of people are focused on a similar event -- like the O.J. Simpson verdict -- random event generators all over the world, which normally produce “noise” related to quantum processes, are seen to encounter statistically measurable changes. It happened again on September 11, 2001.

So does Sheldrake have any theories about all this? He does.

I have suggested that minds are not confined to the insides of our heads, but stretch out beyond them. The images we experience as we look around us are just where they seem to be… Our intentions, likewise extend beyond the brain. They are generally directed toward people, things, and places in the outer world, in accordance with our needs, appetites, desires, loves, hates, duties, ambitions, and sometimes, ideals.

Through attention and intention, our minds stretch out into the world beyond our bodies² .


Sheldrake calls the mind’s ability to stretch out beyond the body: “morphic fields.” The significance should not be missed. Think about it: the computer screen or paper you’re looking at. Where are you actually seeing it? Inside you’re brain? Or are you seeing it right where it is? What do you think? What does your heart tell you? According to Sheldrake, in actuality the mind reaches out beyond the brain and sees the object of its focus right where it really is. If true, that means that when you look up into the stars at night your mind is instantly, at the speed of thought, able to reach out toward objects millions of light years away

Likewise, according to Sheldrake, the mind can reach out and touch the person you’re staring at, or thinking about, in a way their own minds can often sense and respond to. When you pray for or meditate on someone, your spirit, your mind, actually and really connects with theirs. But there is more:

Our minds project forward into the future through our intentions, which extend outward not only in space, but also in time, toward future aims. By their very nature, intentions extend into the future³… .

We are used to the theory that all our thoughts, images, and feelings are in the brain, and not where they seem to be. Most of us picked up this idea by the time we were ten or eleven. Although Francis Crick called this theory the Astonishing Hypothesis, it is not usually treated as a testable scientific hypothesis. Within institutional science and medicine, it is generally taken for granted, and most educated people accept it as the “scientifically correct” view. Yet the mind-equals-brain theory turns out to have very little evidence in its favor.⁴


While I certainly don’t subscribe to all Sheldrakes’s conclusions, I do embrace his main point. I’ve long believed that the brain acts as an exceedingly complex interface between our spirits and the material world we live in. Yes, it shapes and, to a significant degree, controls personality, intelligence, and memory. But all that applies to our life in this world. The writer of Hebrews talks about “the spirits of just men made perfect (Heb. 12:23)” in heaven. That perfection will never be achieved in these corrupt bodies. Yet I do believe, and science is beginning to support that belief, that our minds, our spirits, even while tethered to the body in this life, already are able to act somewhat independent of it.

The world is more than we know, and I find that very exciting.

Though I’m sure he didn’t intend to, Sheldrake’s work bolsters my faith. It is also a vivid reminder that my spirit will return to the Spirit who gave it, and unite with Him in a way that is unimaginable.



Remember him-before the silver cord is severed, or the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
or the wheel broken at the well,
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it. (Eccl. 12:6-7)




1 Edited by J.P Moreland and David M. Ciocchi, Christian Perspectives on Being Human – A Multidisciplinary Approach to Integration (Baker Books, 1993, p. 35)
2 The Sense of Being Stared At (Rupert Sheldrake, Three Rivers Press. p. 263)
3 Ibid., p. 266
4 Ibid., p. 284