What Can the West Learn from the East?

Meditation, yoga, vegetarianism. Eastern practices have become a feature of western life. But what do we learn from them? This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, is prompted by a sense that the western way of life is being challenged, if not facing a full-on crisis. As Rowan Williams puts it in his new book, Looking East In Winter, climate change and environmental degradation are leading to a sense of needing not a programme or an ideology but an epiphany, which might renew our perception of reality. They discuss how eastern Christianity, as well as traditions in India, are based on participating with life and on the cultivation of conscious. They ask how this relates to insights such as the Christian Trinity and movements such as romanticism, as well considering the emergence of mechanistic science, which itself arose from western religious perceptions.