Customer Reviews

Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit

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This is a monumental work by David Hay, bringing together over 30 years of his research and scholarship in the reality of human spirituality.

Hay guides us along historical pathways to understand just why expressing their spirituality can be so difficult for westerners and suggests how this apparent sickness of the spirit might be addressed.

While a significant scholarly work, the book is a very easy read interspersed as it is throughout with conversations from the many, many interviews with ordinary people, most of whom do not attend church, about their hidden spirituality.

A scholar could well buy it simply for the references. All would enjoy it with interest, gaining an expanded self knowledge in the process.

Dr Paul McQuillan
Honorary Reseach Fellow
Australian Catholic University

The human spiritual side is real and not an illusion: this is often a contention of spirituality titles but here the idea comes from a trained zoologist who uses his research and background to blend modern attitudes drawn from surveys and polls with results from his investigative work with a late zoologist Alister Hardy - and over thirty years of personal research. The idea is that spirituality is a built-in, biologically structured dimension of all humans: any serious spirituality holding will appreciate the reasoned, logical arguments which support his contention, and many a college-level collection in social science and psychology will also find this a unique, inviting and authoritative approach.

The biology of spirituality--is such a subject possible? David Hay is uniquely qualified to speak on human spirituality from a biological perspective. Having served as the director of the Religious Experience Research Unit at Oxford, he is well acquainted with the classic studies of spirituality conducted by zooligist Alister Hardy, founder of the research unit. In this book Hay surveys several key classic studies in the study of religion and spirituality, providing depth of coverage rarely seen in books of this nature. Hay also summarizes his own research work, which can be characterized by both having breadth and variety. As a complement to both the classic studies and his own work, Hay summarizes some of the best research conducted in recent years related to the spiritual experiences of humanity--including a variety of religions and, perhaps just as important, the spiritual experiences of non-religious people. The latter are important because as the influence of religion has significantly declined in much of the world, the interest in spirituality simultaneously has mushroomed. His conclusions point to not only a biological basis for spiritual experience, but also that spirituality is an important part of what makes us human, as the many first-hand accounts clearly underscore (although the possibility is admitted that some higher animals may have similar experiences). This book is poetry and science, historical and contemporary, subjective and objective, thoroughly human yet pointing beyond to the Other. A major addition to the literature on spirituality, it draws widely upon many sources--and perhaps The Source--to make a distinctive contribution to that literature.

This is a book about what many of us know deep down inside, but find difficult to impossible to put into words. Penetrating and eloquent, this is a crowning achievement for David Hay. It also is a tribute to his mentor Alister Hardy. For some, reading it will be a life-changing experience.

I came to this book after I had read and reviewed Hay's later essay: Why Spirituality is Difficult for Westerners, expanded from Chapter 9 in Something There.
Hay is a Zoologist of some repute and also a practicing Christian. In the first part of the book he explains the results of a carefully designed experiment in Nottingham where in both group scenarios and in individual interviews, participants who were not part of any institutional religion gave personal accounts of their spirituality and spoke of their own spiritual experiences. The results, carefully described and analyzed, lend support to the statistics that whilst church attendance may be in overall decline, spirituality is alive and well and evidently on the increase.
But the importance and presence of spirituality in the population is apparently underestimated due, Hay explains, to the current climate of secularization inhibiting open discussion, and the fear of stigmatization; there is even an ambivalence in the psychiatric profession towards religious and spiritual experiences and the line seems to be finely drawn between these phenomena and mental illness.
By critical consideration of his own experiments and the work of others in this field, Hay goes on to explain why he believes that our spiritual awareness is hard wired into our brains and has evolved through natural selection because, he says, it confers a survival advantage, it enables us to relate to others and to our environment, and is therefore important for our well-being.
The real significance of this book to me is to be found in the final Part 4, Facing the Crisis. Here Hay observes that the "privatized" and lonely spirituality that is all around us "has no political purchase and therefore cannot be brought to bear with full power on the structural evils of the day." He expresses his personal conviction that spirituality must therefore become a public force again, and that the churches hold the key to this spiritual recovery that is so needed in the world today. There is, he explains, a problem with institutionalized religion as it stands, in failing to nurture true spirituality, and there is a sickness of spirit, which needs healing. Address these issues, Hay writes, (and he tells us how) and there is then hope for a better world.
All in all a very readable book, with a serious message that we should all heed if we are serious about making our world a better place to live.

The book is well described both by the editorial reviewers above and by the (so far) two readers who offered comments. I like the book and intend to use it for my classes in the problem of belief as a counter to Sam Harris's END OF FAITH. So why does it leave me sad? Because while I agree with the premise of the book that we are "naturally" spiritual beings and, further, that the individualistic and skeptical trend of Western civilization since the 17th century (or so) has left us without grounding and without a reason for treating each other with love, he offers no real solution. Yes, the great religious traditions are letting us down, and yes, the traditions that are actually growing (in the US, though this book focuses on the UK) are fundamentalist and, for Hay, really part of the problem, where does that leave us? It's hard to believe that mainstream Christianity will reform itself along the lines he proposes. Catholicism had a chance to do that 40 years ago after Vatican II, but it didn't really work. We now have a conservative reactionary regime that doesn't seem to be attracting too much enthusiasm outside of the "usual suspects" in Europe or the USA. There is plenty of spirituality here in the USA, but as Hay might point out, it's fairly individualistic and politically powerless. One of the ironies of the book is that the individualism that Hay blames as the cause of our woes and the enemy of religion is precisely what fundamentalist Christians regard as God-ordained. An economic system which regards greed as a kind of virtue is so ingrained that after 9/11 all a deeply Christian President could recommend to Americans was to go out shopping and spur the economy. That Christians should regard this as compatible with the teachings of Jesus is unfortunate, and hard to understand ("Woe to you rich," as Jesus put it in Luke), but it seems not likely to go away any time soon. So: I'm still sad.

David Hay, a zoologist by training, is a researcher in divinity and religious studies. The most remarkable thing about this exceptionally accessible and stimulating book is that Hay maintains an equivocal stance towards religion: he wishes it would be more relevant to today's needs but concedes its shortcomings. Hay seeks the locus of spirituality by a combination of means; he interviewed a wide cross-section of volunteers expressing views across the spectrum of belief from the orthodox religious to the outright atheist. He attributes the erosion of spiritual awareness and relational consciousness to the growth of individualism - typically regarded as a product of the Enlightenment but expressed more by Hay in terms of the influence of Hobbes on critical reasoning. Hay is no closet theist; he makes his belief clear and offers the following civil but poignant demolition of one modern materialist position: "I believe that the dogmatic assertions of the mechanistic biologists, put forward with such confidence as if they were the voice of true science, where they are in reality the blind acceptance of an unproven hypothesis, are as damaging to the peace of mind of humanity as was the belief in everyday miracles in the middle ages."

Hay convincingly asserts that spirituality and openness to meditation and contemplative prayer, far from being the result of indoctrination, are tendencies found quite naturally in the young; he develops this theme to show that relational consciousness is a natural human state from which we have been enticed by the myths of postmodernism: "our neurobiology ensures that subjective experience is by no means arbitrary ... it is thinking that feels like something." Another reviewer expressed disappointment that the book did not offer solutions for the malaise that Hay describes; I did not see it that way. Hay discusses Yoshikawa's four types of cross-cultural communication (ethnocentric, control, dialectical, and dialogical) and leaves the reader in no doubt that the dialogical route is the favored one - an example of the equivocation towards religion of which I spoke earlier. Combined with his reference to the "global brain" school of thought I felt it clear that Hay was advocating a combination of traditional theistic values with modern thinking on entanglement. I felt a connection with the ideas of Ervin Laszlo and others - none has found the ultimate destination but Hay at least erects a signpost.

The book is not a dry, research tome, but a very enjoyable read from an author respectful of all points of view. It dispenses evidence aplenty but without giving offence and accompanied by personal interest stories and relevant quotations. I recommend it to anyone interested in consciousness, spirituality, or the relationship between religion and science.