James Cooke Transcript: Consciousness, Psychedelics, and the Nature of Reality

James Cooke Interview

Summary

James Cooke describes how a crisis of religious doubt led to a lasting experience of peace and a sense that reality exceeds words and concepts. He discusses how this experience shaped his views on science, consciousness, fear of death, and the potential of psychedelic research.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can a crisis of doubt or intense thinking lead to a spiritual awakening?
• How can thoughts and ideas contribute to suffering?
• Can scientific inquiry and spiritual experience inform each other?
• How might mystical experiences affect a person's fear of death?

Key takeaways

• When his thoughts stopped, Cooke experienced the present moment as peaceful and complete.
• Reality is not limited by the concepts or scientific descriptions used to understand it.
• He sees science as a way to study reality with humility rather than strip it of meaning.
• A sense of separation can foster fear, while experiences of connection may ease it.
• Cooke sees carefully supported psychedelic research as a possible way to help people facing death anxiety.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done around 570 of them or something now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu.

This program, this show, is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. And then there’s a page that talks about other ways of supporting it if you don’t like to deal with PayPal.

One thing: I was listening to local radio, National Public Radio, this morning, and they were talking about having people ask their employers if they have matching donation schemes. Several people donate to BatGap through something like that. So if you’re at a company that has some kind of arrangement like that, you might want to check into it.

Okay, my guest today is Dr. James Cooke. Dr. Cooke is a neuroscientist, writer, and speaker whose work focuses on consciousness, with a particular interest in meditative and psychedelic states. He studied experimental psychology and neuroscience at Oxford University and is passionate about exploring the relationship between science and spirituality. And I’m passionate about that too. I’m always excited about that topic.

James writes for RealitySandwich.com and is the host of the podcast Living Mirrors with Dr. James Cooke, which can be found on his YouTube channel. I’ll link to it from the show notes of this interview. He splits his time between London and the mountains of Portugal, where he is building a retreat center, the Surrender Homestead. That also has a website and social media pages and so on, which I’ll also link to.

So welcome, James. Good to have you here. And what happened to—oh, good, you’re so still I thought maybe we’d frozen the video.

As usual, I’ve listened to quite a few hours of James’s other interviews and talks and gotten to know him pretty well through that, and we’ve also had a few personal chats. I thought it might be good to start with an awakening or a big shift that he had when he was about 13 years old. So let’s start with that, James. And if you want to go back a little before that to tell us what your life had been like leading up to that event, please do.

James: So I may go a bit further back than my own life. My family background: my parents are from working-class East London, and their families come from backgrounds where there’s a lot of intergenerational trauma. There’s antisemitism on one side and Irish famines and all of this kind of stuff in the mix.

Without me knowing it as a kid, I was born into an atmosphere of intergenerational trauma, a lot of emotional stress. But as a kid, you don’t know that; you just take your family to be normal. It meant that by the time I was 13, I’d been going to Catholic school. My parents weren’t particularly—they were kind of lip-service Christians from the Irish side. But with this background, carrying this trauma and fear and anxiety and all of this kind of unpleasant emotion, and then this fire-and-brimstone message of Catholicism, I took it all basically way too seriously.

I think I channeled my emotional distress from an early age into the big metaphysical questions. As a kid, you don’t have a vocabulary for understanding intergenerational trauma. You just know the world feels scary, and you’re told that if you commit a sin, you’re going to be burned in hell. This really bothered me. Everyone else seemed to be pretty fine with it, or just didn’t take it as seriously as I did.

By the age of 13, I think, like a lot of kids, certain faculties are coming online in the brain, and you start to be able to question things. I was always, I guess, a scientifically minded, rational-minded kid, even back then. I had an incident where I was on the bus and really preoccupied with this issue of hell, but also with my inability to have blind faith and how that was supposedly going to send me to hell.

What I was being told was that there was this benevolent God who had made me exactly as I was, made me without the capacity to have blind faith, and yet was demanding that I have blind faith. And if I didn’t, I was going to be sent to hell. This was just a perfect paradox. I looped around it in my head again and again, thinking, “Oh, wait, but a benevolent God wouldn’t do that. But apparently he has.” There was no way out. There was no way for me to magic up this leap of faith.

I think what I now understand happened was that it functioned effectively like a Zen koan or something. It baffled my rational mind. I don’t know how long this went on for, but it went on and on and on until I had just physiologically exhausted myself, or the rational mind realized there was no way out. And so it stopped. It felt like it just stopped completely.

A Sudden Experience of the Infinite Present

I was on the bus outside the castle there in Colchester, in England. I remember this moment of collapsing fully into the present moment and feeling, knowing intuitively, that in the present moment the world just is what it is, and it’s fine and it’s perfect. The present moment opened up into this infinite quality.

I was on the bus outside the castle there in Colchester, in England. I remember this moment of collapsing fully into the present moment and feeling, knowing intuitively, that in the present moment the world just is what it is, and it’s fine and it’s perfect. The present moment opened up into this infinite quality.

I realized all of this intuitively. I realized that what I was engaging in was just thoughts, just ideas—ideas that people had told me. I was projecting fear into the future, remembering things from the past, and living in a kind of fantasy world. This is just what our minds are like all the time, right? But I’d been suffering immensely just through thinking. As soon as I stopped thinking, there was no suffering at all. There was just utter peace, utter bliss. I remember I just wanted to jump up and shout with joy, but I didn’t. I’m an English, reserved man, so I just saved that.

I would say it was a pretty classical, I guess, kind of mystical experience, or a non-dual awakening, because the core of it was realizing that reality just is. It is what it is, and it’s infinitely more than what you could ever say about it. Concepts and words are just so limited, and reality is just here.

As soon as I stopped thinking, there was no suffering at all. There was just utter peace, utter bliss.

After that, once I read about Buddhism, it made a lot of sense that suffering is generated through this kind of clinging and craving and these thought patterns. Meditation became a way for me to cultivate this.

But maybe something that’s very much in the forefront of my mind with this is that everything that exists in reality, because it’s just the nature of the world, is natural. There’s just the natural world. I’m not saying I’m closed-minded to phenomena that maybe science doesn’t fit into the current scientific mainstream. If it turns out ghosts exist, ghosts will be natural phenomena. It’s this understanding of the natural and lawful as just the stuff that exists. For me, that was a huge relief.

Rick: I even think that with regard to stuff Christ was supposed to have done, like walking on water or something: if he really did that, then it was natural. There were certain laws of nature he knew how to tap into that most people don’t. But nothing violates the laws of nature.

James: Yeah, exactly. We just need new laws, because the laws are just descriptions. Reality is what it is. Reality doesn’t care what you say about it, what your laws are. So, yeah, that was the kind of realization, and it was so freeing.

Rick: You know, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

James: That’s a good quote. I may steal that one from you. But, yeah, I think that set me on my scientific bent. It’s a funny one, because I did think about just becoming a monk or something. It seemed to me that the logic of this experience—the logic of, you know, we’re all to some extent trying to find well-being in life, and most of us go out into the world and try to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic to make us happy—but then this realization was the obvious realization that happiness comes from within. So it’s like, “Well, why don’t I just cultivate that directly? Why don’t I just become a monk and do that?”

Rick: And this was still at the age of 13 that you had that insight?

James: No, I remember thinking about becoming a monk when I was about 17. That’s when I was making decisions like, should I go to university? And, yeah, so I—

Rick: But in any case, this epiphany that you had when you were 13, it didn’t go away. That was a big switch that you didn’t switch out of again.

James: Right. It wasn’t like I had it and then reflected back and couldn’t remember what it was like. Every time I looked for it, it was there. It was just a very kind of—you know, as we talk about it, it happens now. There’s this non-dual aspect of it as well, where it’s an appreciation or a feeling of everything that’s appearing just being appearances in consciousness. The feeling of James being in here, looking out at the external world, collapses, and you can oscillate between those two.

A fairly trivial example would be when you’re wearing headphones, especially big over-ear headphones. You go from feeling like you’re in between them to realizing that the pressure on your head is just another appearance in consciousness. The way I feel it is like suddenly I’m this field of consciousness, or I’m the self in between the ears.

A fairly trivial example would be when you’re wearing headphones, especially big over-ear headphones. You go from feeling like you’re in between them to realizing that the pressure on your head is just another appearance in consciousness. The way I feel it is like suddenly I’m this field of consciousness, or I’m the self in between the ears.

So that became my main practice: just returning to that non-dual insight. But then the reason in my late twenties, as a scientist—I mean, maybe I’m skipping ahead there. I should say why I ended up not going down the monastic route and ended up going down the science route.

I think it was this realization, or this feeling, that whatever exists is natural, and science should be the humble, lawful study of this incredible phenomenon of existence. I’m comfortable calling reality God, as it’s utterly transcendent to our ideas. I think once you have these experiences, you realize there is a thing people are talking about when they talk about God, and it is this thing that is utterly beyond words.

Science should then be coming up with maps and reverently studying it, just understanding its behavior, rather than being the way science tends to be: reductionist, stripping away meaning. The meaning is very much first for me.

God, atheism, and the limits of language

Rick: Yeah, I heard you say in one of your recordings that when you had this breakthrough at the age of 13, you then became an atheist. But listening to everything else you said, I sort of had the feeling, like, well, I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in, and we just have to define the term differently. Then we can talk about what we really mean by it, you know?

James: Yeah. For me, being raised Catholic in a very—I mean, I now think of the kind of Catholicism I was raised in, where God is a big, scary man in the sky, and it just seems like, you know, I’m sure none of the founders of these religions had that in mind. That’s the God I don’t believe in: the blind-faith, punishing thing. So you could say I’m a pantheist or something, or I’m a—you know. But I guess when I was in my late teens, there was all the kind of new-atheist stuff, and it actually resonated a lot.

There was a sense in which I, as this kind of wounded child who’d been deeply distressed by what I was being told by these institutions, really reveled in people like Richard Dawkins saying, “Oh, Catholics are telling kids ridiculous things, and it’s like child abuse and stuff.” Part of me felt like that was someone defending me. Now I’m very, very critical of a lot of that movement. But, yeah, there’s complexity here. I think obviously people like Richard Dawkins probably wouldn’t call themselves a pantheist or say they’re uncomfortable calling reality God. But there’s an aspect of that kind of religion to me.

Rick: But those guys are actually interesting to listen to—you know, him and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, when he was alive. And there’s one other, I forget. But they call themselves the Four Horsemen.

James: Dennett. That’s the other one.

Rick: Dennett, right. But they’re interesting because they’re very intelligent. What I always find them doing, though, is taking potshots at a straw-man God that they fabricate, based upon the most ludicrous aspects of religion, and saying, “Oh, see how silly and ridiculous it is.” But they don’t usually address the notion of God as being some kind of transcendent, all-pervading intelligence or some such thing. They just try to parody the more antiquated versions, the cultural notions of God.

James: Yeah, and my concept of God is—I think Spinoza had a similar idea and faced a lot of criticism for it, because people were like, “If God is literally just the natural world, it’s not even an intelligence or something, then what is it? It seems kind of meaningless.” But for me, it’s something like that.

I think for me, God is a word that’s used to refer to the attitude, to a kind of religious feeling that you get when you stand in awe of the vastness of existence and the fact that you’re part of it. I mean, anyone who thinks for a second about what the word God means would have to agree, I think, that it’s inherently—if you think you can label God and then point to everything that’s utterly beyond words, utterly beyond what you can conceptualize. And I’m happy with it that way.

I think this might be something we’ll talk about a bit. For me, the core of all of this stuff, and the core of my worldview and how I think about consciousness, is this idea—which I think is the core of nonduality as well—that reality is beyond words, beyond concepts. And, yeah, I think this is why I don’t say things like—I think we might differ here—I don’t use the word consciousness to refer to this all-pervading reality. And the reason I said I use the word God—I actually don’t tend to, but I basically don’t like to use the word because I think it’s used to refer to the absolute. Yeah, it’s a fool’s errand, I think, trying to name the absolute.

Rick: Yeah, you can’t use the word God without defining what you’re talking about; otherwise, you’re miscommunicating with people. But I have a little quote from Einstein here, which relates to what you were just saying. He says, “Contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity; to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe, which we can dimly perceive and try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.” That’s kind of a nice one.

James: Yeah, that is nice. I like the idea of all eternity as well. You said conscious life kind of going for all eternity, because my conception of—if we think about what this totality of reality is—yeah, the way I think about it would be something like, you know, I’ve gone straight into something that’s even harder to put into concepts, probably.

If there’s nothing, effectively there’s infinity, because if there are no boundaries, you just have an infinite void. I think that’s my starting point for thinking about why we’re here. And then I think, if anything can happen in infinity, it will happen eventually. So if existence can happen, then there’s existence, and nonexistence isn’t a thing by definition. Suddenly, out of nothing, you have reality.

And then I think that does go on infinitely, because how could it be any other way? How could you have a boundary in existence that just says, “Nope, no more”? I understand that with science, you have to—well, modern science really restricts itself to observation. So it says there’s the Big Bang, there’s the heat death of the universe, and that’s all that exists. But conceptually, for me, I’m like, well, surely we’re just on one little spiral of existence. Surely this is just one little puff of a firework or something.

And presumably that’s just—I mean, in recent years, we have people talking about multiverses and things like that, and big-bounce theories, where things contract once they expand. But, yeah, I like the idea that maybe Einstein was onto something similar, because in that picture, life would appear again and again and would just keep going, and there’s no end to it.

Rick: Yeah, I just bought a book that I haven’t read yet by a guy named Jim Holt, called Why Does the World Exist? He interviews a bunch of different people. I heard about it from Swami Sarvapriyananda. He interviews physicists and mathematicians and so on, and basically asks the question, “Why does the world exist? Why is there anything at all?”

There’s so much I want to get into with you about randomness and free will, whether there’s some kind of purpose to the universe, whether there’s a soul, and whether we continue after we die. All these things actually pertain to the kinds of things you’ve just been saying, although it may not have been obvious. It’s all tied together. And I think there are more fundamental paradigms we could explore, upon which very different perspectives could rest about why things exist, what the universe is, what we are, and so on. So I hope we can dig right down into that stuff as we go along today.

James: Yeah, that’d be great.

Rick: Yeah. So, let’s start digging, and feel free to throw in anything that comes to mind. If you want to talk more about your personal journey right now before we proceed, we can do that. Do you want to do that, or shall we start getting into some of this stuff?

James: Yeah, I’ll give a bit more of an overview, because where I got to was kind of why I ended up choosing science. What I ended up studying was effectively how the brain builds concepts. I took that almost with the attitude of trying to understand the enemy: trying to understand the thing in my mind that makes me feel separate from the rest of the universe, that makes me believe we live in a universe of junk, of just objects floating about, instead of some huge, unfathomable process, which is how I think it’s really going on.

That took me down that avenue, and neuroscience is just utterly fascinating as a field. We’re in a real boom of it at the moment. For many years, I was just very happily playing around in that. But with my kind of nondual perspective, on the walk to work I would just basically be inhabiting that perspective and not really talking to many people about it. There were a couple of friends I would talk to about it, but then there was always a fear. I was hanging around with scientists and science-minded people, and most people, I think, just assumed it was some kind of mental illness or something. At least jokingly, they would think, “That’s a concern.”

Rick: Probably due to your weekend chemical explorations or something.

Well, that’s what I was about to say: at that point, I hadn’t tried any psychedelics, which is where I was heading with this. By my late 20s, working as a full-time neuroscientist, I had been reading the research around psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety. For me, the mystical insight I’d had had—I mean, ask me again in a few decades when I’m nearer to death—but it felt like it completely obliterated my fear of death.

James: Well, that’s what I was about to say: at that point, I hadn’t tried any psychedelics, which is where I was heading with this. By my late 20s, working as a full-time neuroscientist, I had been reading the research around psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety. For me, the mystical insight I’d had had—I mean, ask me again in a few decades when I’m nearer to death—but it felt like it completely obliterated my fear of death.

I’ve tried to have this conversation with so many people, and no one ever agrees with me, but I’m always trying to say that the fear of death is just an arbitrary evolutionary trick. It’s just from the perspective of a survival machine that you care about your own mortality. That’s it. It’s just a little thought, but you are the same thing as everything else that’s going to keep going. So it really doesn’t matter. Sure, it relatively matters, and there can be attachment, but it’s not ultimately meaningful. So you don’t have to fear it.

Rick: There’s a line in the Upanishads which says, “Certainly all fear is born of duality.”

James: Exactly. That’s great. I mean, that’s at the core of my worldview, I would say. I’m sure we’ll get into my theory of consciousness later, which is very much that effectively, separation, or attempted separation, of life brings consciousness into existence, I think.

But it’s also that the cost of that dynamic is fear. It’s like, to perpetuate yourself, you become this survival machine that’s resisting the kind of collapsing back into everything else. I understand most things through this lens now. The trauma stuff I spoke about earlier is also an issue of separation, of excessive fear and separation. I think that’s why spiritual states could be an antidote to that.

But it’s also that the cost of that dynamic is fear. It’s like, to perpetuate yourself, you become this survival machine that’s resisting the kind of collapsing back into everything else. I understand most things through this lens now. The trauma stuff I spoke about earlier is also an issue of separation, of excessive fear and separation. I think that’s why spiritual states could be an antidote to that.

Rick: Yeah. So what you just alluded to—is that what you mean by the Living Mirror Theory?

James: Yeah. So the living mirror theory is effectively the life process. Yeah. So, well, I’ll just finish this quick point about psychedelics before I go, if you don’t mind. Then I’ll happily get into that next.

I’d read these papers saying that people who were dying of cancer—papers from Johns Hopkins—had psilocybin-occasioned mystical experiences. Psilocybin is the active compound in magic mushrooms, and high doses can produce these non-dual states. People came away no longer fearing death. I read the reports and thought, “Oh, this is the thing I experienced.”

I think these days we’re a small community compared to the mainstream: spiritual people who understand what we’re talking about with awakenings and stuff. I think the future of the species depends on more people understanding this stuff. So I thought, if there’s a naturally occurring compound that’s less toxic than a cup of coffee, that can be administered safely, and we can help people have these experiences, then we should be doing that.

That led me to self-experimentation. I thought, “I’m a trained neuroscientist. I’ve had a naturally occurring mystical experience…”

Rick: James, your voice broke up just there. You were saying, “I’m a trained neuroscientist,” and then it went blah, blah, blah. So pick up that sentence again from just before you said, “I’m a trained neuroscientist.”

James: That is what I actually said. I didn’t just say blah, blah, blah. But, yeah, I also had this naturally occurring mystical experience, and then I had a psilocybin-occasioned one. I thought it would be good to see if they really were the same thing, and I found they largely were.

But in that process, what happened—and happens to a lot of people, especially with things like ayahuasca as well—is that your mind naturally brings up traumatic memories and emotional material, and an incredible amount of healing happens, or can happen, if you do it intentionally. I was doing this; I’d never done them recreationally. It was always in a very intentional way, and that really transformed my life. I wasn’t expecting that.

When I first went into the public, I was expecting to talk about psychedelics only in the context of how they can trigger non-dual awakenings of some kind. But now I’m really passionate about their use in personal growth and healing trauma. I would say I’ve gone from having this very non-dual, slightly disembodied, almost dissociative experience—not in a pathological way, but way over on that side—to having a practice that’s far more embodied. It’s like mindfulness couched in a kind of non-dual knowing that there’s really no goal, that the present—this—is it. But it’s a very embodied way of being, and it feels incredibly healthier than where I was before. So that’s why I’m an advocate for psychedelic medicine.

Rick: And I heard you mention that…

James: We can jump to the living mirror theory, or we can…

Rick: Well, before we get to that, I’ve heard you mention that you had some physical problems. I think it was eczema or something like that, and some other similar problems. You actually, I guess during an LSD trip, found your body literally shaking and purging itself of whatever was causing that symptom, and you overcame it.

James: Yeah. This was multiple sessions. Effectively, I went from… At first, with psilocybin, I would have memories of painful things coming up, maybe some emotional release and crying. Afterwards, I felt incredible, like I’d dropped a burden, like a weight had been lifted off me.

Gradually, as you strip away these layers of things you’re preoccupied with, you get back to really early-life stress that was stored in the body as you developed—real tension and fear. I ended up finding the work of Peter Levine, who started the field of Somatic Experiencing. As I was reading about it, I was figuring out my own version of these kinds of things.

The thing that really utterly transformed my life was allowing my body to find some homeostatic peace. The main thing was that I had asthma. I was told I had asthma because I couldn’t breathe very well, and I would breathe very shallowly in my upper chest. What I came to realize was that my stomach muscles—their set point was so tight—and all of the soft muscle was just clenched tight. It had been that way my entire life.

I had eczema and irritable bowel syndrome, just a whole bunch of issues. The Western medical model says those are separate physical issues of mysterious origin: you just got unlucky and genetically have bad skin and bad breathing. What I realized was, no, I was stressed. “Stress” is an understatement: it was trauma, like childhood trauma, which a lot of us have, and it was still with me.

I was highly functional and getting on with my life, but it was all in the body, and it was also producing periods of depression. It was just so much to carry, all this stuff. The non-dual stuff really helped me get out of the depression, but I think it was kind of spiritual bypassing to some extent.

Then, as you say, I started doing this. There’s a particular exercise where your hips basically have this natural way of trembling, which animals do to release stress. If you’ve been attacked by a lion and you play dead, there are all these hormones in your body; glucose has gone to the muscles, and the muscles are tense, ready for you to run as soon as you can. But if you don’t shiver that off, it’s just going to stay there, and you’re going to carry it around.

It was hour after hour of feeling the emotions, letting them out, and breathing. A lot of it was centered around the breath. Now I can breathe comfortably into my belly and take long, slow, deep breaths. In the past, it was this stressed-out, shallow chest breathing.

Along with that, my skin got better, and my breathing got better. I was told I don’t have asthma, but my thinking is I probably never did. My stomach’s fine now. I feel like a healthy person. For almost three decades, I really was carrying this incredible stress.

Rick: Hmm. I want to emphasize something you said, which is that you didn’t do this recreationally, like, you know, drop a tab of acid and put on Jimi Hendrix. You were going about it in a really serious, careful, controlled way. I think if you hadn’t—if you had done it in a more trivial way—you wouldn’t have derived these benefits.

James: Absolutely. Absolutely. Once I realized this was a method to bring up and work through difficult material, that was all I wanted to do with the assistance of these chemicals.

The interesting thing is that if you try to do this recreationally, the concept of a bad trip, I think, is that you want to go and have fun. You get the mood-elevating effects, but then suddenly you’re thinking about something horrible that happened to you in the past, or you’re stuck in a fearful thought loop. Fundamentally, you’re trying to run away from it, and you don’t feel safe.

Whereas what I was doing was putting on some blindfolds, imitating scientific studies, putting on a pre-prepared playlist of music, turning off my phone, making sure I wouldn’t be disturbed, and then basically running full speed ahead at the difficult material and feeling the emotions.

It’s a shame that these things have been pushed underground because the thing I’m most proud of in my life is the work I did in those hours. I was pushing myself so hard, really going to the depths of my being and wrestling with what felt like existential anger and sadness. The fact that it’s seen as trivial, or has this image of just being some kind of recreational thing, could not be further from the truth.

It’s a shame that these things have been pushed underground because the thing I’m most proud of in my life is the work I did in those hours. I was pushing myself so hard, really going to the depths of my being and wrestling with what felt like existential anger and sadness. The fact that it’s seen as trivial, or has this image of just being some kind of recreational thing, could not be further from the truth.

It’s a shame that these things have been pushed underground because the thing I’m most proud of in my life is the work I did in those hours. I was pushing myself so hard, really going to the depths of my being and wrestling with what felt like existential anger and sadness. The fact that it’s seen as trivial, or has this image of just being some kind of recreational thing, could not be further from the truth.

I went on an ayahuasca retreat at the beginning of this year, and the work people do there is very serious and thoughtful. They’re kind people, for the most part, doing really important work for themselves. I want to do what I can to change the image of this stuff.

Rick: Did you happen to see my interview with Michael Pollan and Christopher Baich?

James: Yeah, I think I saw that. I read that book recently. I read both of the books, yeah.

Rick: Right. Well, I was just wondering: Christopher talked about, like you, putting on blindfolds and having a playlist of music. I don’t think I asked him, so I’ll ask you: why music? Why not just silence?

James: I think silence can produce a natural fear response. You’re kind of scanning your environment. If you think of relaxation music, it really does relax most people. It just sends an unconscious signal that you’re safe.

I think it’s a very evolutionary thing: if you’re in a group of humans and someone’s singing, you have to be very relaxed to sing. You don’t do it if you’re stressed out. So I think it just makes you feel safe and cushioned.

But maybe equally importantly, if you choose the music well, there’ll be some periods with crescendos and things, and it really evokes emotion. Someone who may struggle to feel normally under psilocybin or LSD may hear a swell of music—some classical music that never affected them before—and suddenly they’re right there in that emotion. It triggers all the associated memories and things. So, yeah, I think that’s the main reason why.

Rick: Okay. So let’s switch now, unless you want to say more about that, to the living mirror theory, and that’ll launch us into…

James: There’s one more thing, actually, I will say about that. Terence McKenna, who’s a famed advocate of this stuff in the ’90s, used to advocate taking high doses of psilocybin mushrooms in silence, in the darkness, with the explicit aim of having these very strange experiences. He described them as almost like alien encounters with the spirit of the mushroom, or just something where you felt like you were in dialogue with some other being.

I think you’re put into a very fearful mode, where you’re worried about other entities coming and eating you, so you start to see that kind of thing. Whereas if you’re listening to music, you can really go inside yourself, and there’s less of this hallucinatory projection. That’s my theory.

I think you’re put into a very fearful mode, where you’re worried about other entities coming and eating you, so you start to see that kind of thing. Whereas if you’re listening to music, you can really go inside yourself, and there’s less of this hallucinatory projection. That’s my theory.

Rick: Yeah, it’s almost like the music is like a mantra that the mind can dwell on or something, which is how I’ve always meditated. I’ll just throw this in—we can pick it up later, and it might be a point of interesting contention—but I wouldn’t deny or insist that there actually aren’t some kind of entities on some subtle level, and that you could open yourself up to their influence if you went about it the wrong way, or if you weren’t prepared in a certain way or something.

We can get into that, because at some point in this conversation I want to talk to you about the whole idea of subtle realms and subtle matter, and the implications of that.

James: Yeah, that would be good to get into. Should we go into that now, or should we go into the Living Mirror stuff?

Rick: Well, let’s do Living Mirror first, because that’s kind of a foundational thing for you, and then that’ll be a springboard to a lot of other things. And as much detail as you wish to offer on it.

✨ The Living Mirror Theory and consciousness

James: Okay. Yeah, so this is, I guess, like a lot of—I mean, not everyone, but a lot of people who are interested in this kind of stuff are faced with the question: What is consciousness? What is its nature? How does it fit into the grand scheme of the world? And in science, this has been cast as what’s often called the hard problem of consciousness, which is: How do you get consciousness from matter? There’s kind of a presumption that it’s that way around.

And I think, as you’ll know, there are lots of people, probably maybe yourself included, who would argue that that’s kind of a fake—that it’s an illusion that there’s a problem there—because all that exists is consciousness, and what we call matter is a kind of pattern within it. People like Bernardo Kastrup argue that.

Rick: Yeah, his whirlpool metaphor, where a whirlpool is only water, and yet it has an existence as a whirlpool. So that’s the kind of thing Bernardo would say.

James: Right. Yeah, so I guess my starting point would be: the Living Mirror Theory tries to offer an answer to the place of consciousness in nature, how it fits into this picture of what is the material world and what’s consciousness. And the core of it is what I’ve already mentioned, but I think what reality is in and of itself is unnameable. I don’t think it makes sense to call it matter, but I also don’t think it makes sense to call it consciousness. I think it’s just—for me, this is the kind of core of the nondual insight—it just is.

You also think of this: language is all self-referential; it’s all kind of relative. You can’t really come up with a word to label the absolute, because if it’s the only thing, if I say, “All of reality is X,” that’s actually a kind of meaningless statement. X doesn’t mean anything, because it’s not opposed to anything. So, I would say…

Rick: Let me just interject here before we lose this point, and that is: isn’t language only useful if it refers to things that are shared experiences? If I come up with some word for something I’ve experienced that you haven’t, the word just can’t communicate that experience to you. And so, if we’re talking about really deep, sort of ontological realities, and people happen to experience them, then you can call them anything you want, or nothing at all, but it really doesn’t help much one way or the other because it’s not a shared experience.

James: Yeah, that’s a good point, and I think experience is a big part of it, because the average scientist, having spent their lives typically in the kind of ordinary state of consciousness, can very easily look around, hit a table, and say, “Reality is made of hard stuff. Matter is hard stuff. Done.” And that is—if you study science, no serious philosopher of science thinks that’s the case. Matter isn’t hard stuff. That’s textbook, kind of mainstream philosophy of science, but most scientists don’t think of it that way.

Rick: There was this physicist—I forget his name—but he got a little bit mentally unbalanced. Being a physicist, he understood very deeply that matter was not hard stuff, that there was really basically nothing there. And he became really trepidatious about walking along. He would wear really big boots because he didn’t want to sort of fall in.

James: Right. That’s good. But yeah, so I would say my starting point is clearly reality exists, something’s happening, and change is a crucial part of that. In meditative states, this is really—when you meditate, you notice impermanence, notice change. If there’s anything that’s fundamental to the nature of reality, it’s that. It’s not a solid, static thing. It’s identified with flow.

And I found the concept of the Dao to be really useful, because the core idea there as well is that the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao, right? It’s the start of the Dao Te Ching, and that’s the same thing I’m saying. You can’t name this process. But there’s something happening, and certain aspects of that process are quantifiable. There’s my laptop in front of me. The manufacturers tell me how many inches across the screen is; I can measure it, you can measure it. There’s some pattern there that we can get a number for, and it exists in between us, and we can agree on it.

So that’s what I call matter. It’s just some part of this process that we can quantify. I’m not saying it’s made of anything. I’m not saying it’s a substance, but it’s clear that we can measure stuff. Basically, that’s as humble as you should be with matter, I think. And then consciousness is this vast experiential realm of qualities. You can’t measure how tasty my dinner was, but I have this relative qualitative scale from disgusting through to pleasurable. And so consciousness is inherently qualitative. The redness of red doesn’t come in units of red.

And so there’s been this mystery of how you go from the quantities to the qualities, which is another way of saying: Where does consciousness fit into this picture of the natural world? But again, if you think the natural world is hard matter and consciousness is some kind of airy substance, then you are going to have a hard time explaining how they fit together. Basically, how do you get this gas-like consciousness from this hard stuff of matter?

But what I’m saying is everything’s just a process. And within that, the whirlpool is a really good analogy. You have life forms. To be alive is to engage in separation from the rest of the universe. The whole universe, quantum mechanics tells us and thermodynamics tells us, is one big thing. It’s one whole. But within that, you get these little separations of living systems.

And effectively, if you look at that, well, the concept—the idea for me is that if you’re going to keep yourself together, because we’re highly ordered, right? The universe is very chaotic, and it’s kind of falling apart, and there’s a lot of stuff going on in it, but we have a lot of order. That seems like it could be a bit of a mystery. But if we’re kind of self-maintaining, self-creating systems, the only way you can maintain your order and survive is to attempt to know what’s going on around you.

If you’re a little single-celled organism wandering around in the ocean, and you could go into some lava, you need to detect where that lava is and move away from it. And that just needs to happen. That happens kind of evolutionarily. If you don’t do that, you’re going to die. And if you look at the thermodynamics, I won’t get into the science, but effectively the physics of it corresponds to inference, which is like inferring things. This kind of attempt to know exists at the informational level.

So I think that’s the key. I think life is the key to understanding where consciousness fits into the natural world. So I think all living systems are conscious. And by consciousness, I’m talking about experience, this wordless, apprehending feeling that occurs in awareness. And I’m using synonyms here. I’m kind of looping back on myself, but it’s hard to talk about consciousness any other way.

But I don’t think a rock is conscious. I don’t think it even makes sense to talk about a rock as a separate thing. I think it’s just part of the whole of the universe. So I think life is like eyes opening in the universe, but I don’t think there was experience. You have people now, a lot of people arguing that matter is conscious, all matter is conscious. That’s like panpsychism, or that everything is consciousness. And so, in those pictures, before life forms, there would be experience.

In my view, there’s a lot of unconscious stuff happening, and then, weirdly, the eyes opening in the universe. But the whirlpool is what creates consciousness, and consciousness is kind of, therefore, not a property of the little separate organism. It’s a property of the whole; it’s the property of the universe.

And we can get into why I think this cashes out certain spiritual intuitions about what it is that survives death, why consciousness is indestructible, and why my nature and your nature are fundamentally the same. Even though we’re these little islands of consciousness, I think the quality of consciousness—there is effectively only one consciousness, even though it’s manifesting in all these little bubbles. I think there’s basically just one—yeah, one fact of consciousness in the universe.

Rick: Okay, so let me respond to that as concisely as I can. First, I’ll start with a question that came in from Bharat Bedia in London, who asks, “What are your thoughts on Advaita Vedanta, which rationally and logically explains that Brahman, the absolute, Sat-Chit-Ananda, is all there is, and what scientists call reality, including concept theories, are a duality, hence an appearance in non-dual pure consciousness?”

And before you—keep that in mind; I mean, you understand the Vedanta perspective—let me throw a couple of things at you. There’s a Sufi saying: “God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.” And panpsychism, which you mentioned, seems to me like a kind of subtle materialism. In other words, we’re saying, “Well, there is physical stuff, and physical stuff has some consciousness to varying degrees.” Some scientists have even said that maybe a neutron or an electron has a little bit of consciousness.

Consciousness as the Fundamental Reality

I still think that even if you take it that deep, they’re getting it backwards. It’s not that things have consciousness; it’s that things are consciousness, and that consciousness, through a sort of self-interacting dynamic, has given rise to all these things. If you think of consciousness as fundamental, a fundamental universal field, then ultimately, at that level, there’s nothing but that.

I still think that even if you take it that deep, they’re getting it backwards. It’s not that things have consciousness; it’s that things are consciousness, and that consciousness, through a sort of self-interacting dynamic, has given rise to all these things. If you think of consciousness as fundamental, a fundamental universal field, then ultimately, at that level, there’s nothing but that.

But if it’s consciousness, then it wants to be conscious; it’s its nature to be conscious. And yet there’s nothing for it to be conscious of other than itself; there’s nothing else down there. But then, in becoming conscious of itself, a threefold structure is set up between observer, observed, and the process of observation. That threefold structure continues to elaborate through what physics would call sequential spontaneous symmetry breaking, and all of the diversity grows by degrees: force and matter fields, and eventually, you know, concrete, apparently concrete structures, and eventually biological life.

And so that’s God kind of waking up from sleep to dream to stirring to being awake. In light of that scenario or theory, you could say that the whole universe is this sort of giant evolutionary machine through which God, or the divine, or pure intelligence, pure consciousness, says, “I am one; may I become many?” In becoming many, it is able to have a living experience of itself rather than just a sort of abstract, unmanifest state.

And so, from our perspective—you know the T. S. Eliot poem Burnt Norton, where it’s like, there will not be an end to all of our seeking, and finally we’ll arrive back from where we started and know the place for the first time. So there’s this sort of progression through various degrees of greater and greater complexity. The more complex the forms are, the more able they are to express or reflect consciousness, and ultimately to become self-aware, and then ultimately to have instruments refined enough—namely ourselves—to actually know the ultimate reality from whence all of this has sprung.

Irene is saying, “Jesus!” That was one of the longest raps I’ve ever done, but I wanted to get it all out in one big lump so you can go on.

James: There’s lots of good stuff there. Yeah, yeah, I’ll dive into it, and then remind me of different things and we can—yeah, that’s a good lump to navigate around. Yeah, so the poem you quoted: I would feel comfortable saying that God stirs in the stars and the planets and awakens in life. So I don’t think God awakens in man. That’s my picture. I don’t think God, as the ground of being—which I think is unnameable—necessarily needs to be awake every moment.

This is the thing: I took the picture you sketched out, and it seems like a really good description of perhaps the Advaita perspective that the questioner was raising as well. So I’ll try—and I’ll assume those are kind of the same, that he’ll be happy with me tackling those together. Something that I’ve always been struck by, as someone who had this awakening experience as a teenager, is that my conclusion wasn’t, “So, you know, what’s known as philosophical or ontological idealism, the idea that only consciousness exists.” I’m quite careful to say that I really think non-duality, Advaita, and all these non-dual traditions are separate from the claim that what only exists should be called consciousness, or that its nature is consciousness.

The non-dual experience is an experience, and I think it can have a couple of different conclusions. You can have a couple of different conclusions about the nature of reality from it. If you look, especially in Buddhism, there are loads of different traditions. Some say “mind only”; some say more what I’m saying. So I like to make sure those are two separate things: you’ve got the non-dual experience of realizing everything really is one, really is not separate, and really is beyond your concepts, because your concepts are what make you think things are separate.

My picture is a non-dual picture, but it’s not an idealist picture. It’s not a picture where only consciousness exists. But responding to that idea, I think what we’re founded on—so, we agree that, I think we agree that you could say, “I am conscious,” which I think we probably agree actually isn’t the best way to say it. There is consciousness here. You could say, “I am consciousness,” but I think just saying there is consciousness here and there is consciousness where you are is not controversial.

Then the question becomes: what’s the nature of the rest of it? If you say that for every life form—say we agree, for the sake of argument, that all life is conscious, or just humans, if you want—then the question becomes: what about the rest of it? What about planets? What about the vacuum in space, the Big Bang? Is that consciousness? Is that conscious?

To me, consciousness is this phenomenon that’s located here, and it can access these states where you realize the fundamental unity of existence. But I think that’s from this perspective: I’m looking out and realizing that I’m part of this greater whole. But I would not feel comfortable saying the nature of the vacuum of space is consciousness, because I don’t know what I mean when I say those words. I know what I mean when I say this is consciousness over here, or where you are. For the same reason, I don’t feel comfortable saying it’s matter. I just don’t think you can say what it is.

Something it might be good to get your perspective on: yes, you wrote this article about “If Everything Is Consciousness, Is Everything Conscious?” I think that’s something I would be keen to understand. In this picture, it’s only life that attempts separation. Rocks don’t attempt separation. Physicists can describe thermodynamically how everything blends into everything else, and it’s only life that resists this.

So if everything outside of life is one whole, then I guess it would have to be one mind kind of looking inwards at all of these life forms. It’s like a negative of where the life is, like Swiss cheese almost. The rest of the universe is like one mind with all these holes in it, and then you’ve got these little minds. I guess I just don’t know what that gets you. I don’t understand where—I mean, maybe I understand where the instinct to claim that would come from.

Because in that picture, I think maybe a key difference between those pictures is that after you die, you return to, I’m assuming, a kind of blissful, unitive state with the rest of the conscious cosmos. In my picture, this is it. In my picture, it’s like we’re stuck in this little squirm where, if we’re going to be conscious, we have to exist and struggle. We can try and get enlightened, but there’s this nagging, “Ah, you can never quite get it,” because the ultimate union is death, but then the lights go out.

So I think this is it. I think this is the game, and it’s a fascinating, wonderful game. It’s a privilege to be living it. But I don’t think that this is like a hell realm where we’re suffering for no payoff. I think consciousness is the payoff, and you can think of it as the universe exploring itself, in a sense. But, yeah, that would be my worry: if death is that great, then I’m not sure what the point of life would be.

Rick: Well, there’s a lot in there that I can reply to. Where to start? First of all, this thing about life being sort of unlike rocks and stuff because life has the ability to resist entropy and keep—you know, I think it was one of the physicists, perhaps Schrödinger, who said that we eat negative entropy; we imbibe orderliness and thereby maintain our structure.

I guess one question we could ask is: Brian Swimme said, “You leave hydrogen alone for 13.8 billion years, and you end up with rose bushes, giraffes, and opera.” Why did all this beauty and orderliness come out of a completely entropic soup of hydrogen? How did everything form into these beautiful structures? So there’s some kind of counterforce to the second law of thermodynamics that seems to be creating structure and orderliness in spite of the second law, which wants everything to sort of disintegrate and become more entropic.

So why don’t you respond to that bit before we get into some of the other things you just said?

James: Right. Yeah, so I don’t think there’s a contradiction between… I don’t think, you know, all the phenomena we’re talking about are kind of emergent phenomena. The specific technical idea of negative entropy is kind of out of fashion, but the idea is right: you have these kinds of stars, you know, where we are on planet Earth, and you have all this energy, all this orderliness streaming out of the sun. Plants basically eat that to make their own order, and then we eat the plants, and all of this order is getting passed down. But it’s all in the direction of diffusion into this thermodynamic kind of equilibrium, just as some lukewarm soup at the end of it all, it seems.

But, yeah, my take would be: if you imagine our universe as just some explosion in a huge firework, and it produces the most beautiful flourish, that may seem astounding, but I think it’s just the nature of it. I don’t think there’s a mystery.

But, well, I think the important thing is that, when you were talking, I got kind of shivers, in the way that I’m talking about the nature of reality. As you were describing it, you look at it and you’re like, “What the hell is going on here?” You can get in touch with this feeling of, “How is all of this beauty and complexity here?” To me, that evokes the kind of mystical reverence for reality that makes me think I’m not actually going to be able to really—no matter what, you know, I think the physicists could probably do a really good job of explaining why the complexity is there.

But the big question that you raised is: Sure, you can show why it does it in this particular instance, but what’s the big why? Why is there awe and beauty and all of this stuff happening? To me, that’s the core kind of religious feeling: just standing in awe of reality. And I don’t expect that to ever be explained away by ideas, or by any kind of thing I can think and go, “There you go, that’s why.”

I actually apply that as well to why I don’t say things like, “Perhaps the universe is some intelligent creator,” or “It has some plan,” or “It has agency.” I really just stand in awe of it. So I guess you’re making me realize that maybe, more than a lot of people in this kind of spiritual community, I have quite a split between saying, “Reality is this transcendent, awe-inspiring thing,” and, “Let me come up with some maps for it, because it’s beautiful to be in awe of it and to study it.” But those maps will never take away that awe.

Rick: No, and I think the word awe implies, to a certain extent—well, maybe not. It may imply that we really don’t understand what it is, but it’s amazing, and so we’re in awe. But I think that we could also get to a level of enlightenment—we could use that word—where you do deeply experientially understand what’s going on.

I say experientially as opposed to just understand, which is a mind thing, because you have actually realized your true nature as being that intelligence which is fundamental to the whole universe. And it doesn’t mean you are God, but it means you have merged with God. The wave isn’t the ocean, but the wave has realized that it’s the same stuff as the ocean, so to speak.

That realization is experiential and abiding. And there, too, there would be tremendous awe and gratitude and devotion and profundity in one’s moment-to-moment experience, but there would also be a clear understanding of the mechanics of nature in a very deep way.

Let me just throw one quick quote at you. The notion of randomness: there are physicists and scientists who think that the universe is random and meaningless, and that we’re just sort of biological robots. And there actually is this many-universes theory that says, “How could the universe have evolved as it is if it’s random? Well, there must be an infinite number of universes, and we just lucked out in terms of being in the one which resulted in all this orderliness.” But here’s a little quote, a paragraph:

So go ahead and respond to that.

James: Yeah. So there’s—well, I want to respond to the other thing you said as well. I’m drawn… Okay, I’ll go with that one first.

Yeah, so I think what I said at the beginning about reality must be infinite: I can’t think of it being any other way. Because if you think there’s any endpoint or any boundary, then just the nature of it is that you can’t have hard boundaries.

Rick: And what do you mean by reality here? You say reality must be infinite. What are you referring to?

James: All that exists.

Rick: So the universe or whatever—there’s no limit to it?

James: But even beyond—think of beyond our universe. So, you know, if we take the multiverse and stuff, but even beyond the multiverse, just for all being, you know, the nature of that has to be infinite. I can’t see how it’d be any other way. It’s hard to… Maybe people think that would click or not, if they agree.

As a result of that, you have to find yourself in the bits where it’s possible to find yourself. We can’t find ourselves on the sun because life can’t exist on the sun. So if you have infinity, things will happen by chance, and then you’ll sit there and go, “Hey, look what happened by chance.”

I remember when I was in my teenage years, in a religious education class, being told a similar logic: there had to be a creator God because we’re in the Goldilocks zone on planet Earth. Too close to the sun, too hot; too far away, too cold. And what a miracle that we find ourselves here. It was one of my earliest memories of having what I felt was an original thought. It was the same thing we’re discussing. I was like, “Wait a minute, but we have to find ourselves here. We can’t find ourselves anywhere else.”

If there are a billion planets and there’s a one-in-a-billion chance of life occurring, it will occur on one of them. Then they will find themselves there and look around and go, “Whoa, what are the odds that we found ourselves here?” And it’s a certain kind of fallacy. You can imagine hitting a golf ball and it landing on a blade of grass. If the grass could contemplate this, it would go, “Whoa, what are the odds it was me?” You’re like, “Yeah, there has to be someone.” So there’s the same logic there.

But also, the core thing that I find thrilling, the core insight that I find most powerful in understanding the natural world, is—there’s not really a good name for it—but it’s kind of the logic of survival dynamics. It’s the same thing that powers evolution. How could it be that giraffes have such long necks? Well, get enough animals together, give them that goal, and let those with long necks survive, and you get these long-necked animals.

Same thing with a bacterial cell, a single-celled organism. How could you possibly have such complexity? Well, give it enough time with a chemical soup. And even if it’s a one-in-a-trillion chance, if you run it through this idea that you have—you know, a kind of multiverse idea, but even bigger than a multiverse—who knows how much time has been happening before we came on the scene? But we are… The eyes open when the eyes open, and they assemble when they assemble.

So I don’t feel that there’s a God or a creator or an intelligence that is anything like us. You know, I think there can be this feeling—a lot of people feel like, I think, the identity… I mean, the Atman-is-Brahman thing. I think sometimes people can feel like the identity of the universe is very similar to myself in my most awakened moments, something like a human intelligence. That’s not the line I take. I think it’s just something deeply mysterious.

Rick: Yeah. When we’re talking about this unbounded intelligence, and God in the way we’ve now defined God, there’s nothing human about it. Humans are just one of a gazillion different reflectors of that intelligence, sort of the way there are innumerable electrical devices that reflect the same electromagnetic field, the same electrical field. So we don’t want to anthropomorphize God.

And this thing you said about there can’t be life on the sun—I’ll go out on a limb here and say, “Oh, yeah, there’s life.” In fact, there’s life in interstellar space; there’s life everywhere. But we have to obviously define life, with life being that field of intelligence that’s all-pervading.

If you go to the sun, theoretically, and you notice the fusion reaction taking place there and what’s happening in all the little atoms and molecules, there are certain orderly laws of nature that reflect that intelligence, that are expressions of it. And I would go—now, here’s something that will really sort of knock your socks off—I don’t think it’s archaic or primitive for certain cultures to have revered the sun as a God. What I would suggest is that, yeah, on a subtle level, the sun could very well be a conscious being, just as we’re conscious beings, just a very different kind of conscious being, actually.

Subtle realms, souls, and evidence

So this gets us into something I wanted to talk to you about. I don’t want to leave anything on the table that you had wanted to discuss, so we can keep picking all that up. But there’s not only the gross physical form that meets the eye and the senses; there are subtler realms. We could call them astral or celestial; various terms have been used. And those realms are as populated with life, even life forms, as the gross realm is. They’re just subtle life forms that can’t be seen with the naked eye, like you were alluding to when you suggested ghosts possibly being real a while back.

And it’s in that sense that I would suggest we have a soul, which you have kind of refuted in some of your talks. The soul is sort of like the Russian doll on a subtler level that’s within our physical form. There aren’t an infinite number of these Russian dolls, but there’s sort of a subtle essence, and that would explain out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and reincarnation: that there is something more subtle to us that lives when the physical body dies and carries on, eventually taking on another physical body the way we put on new clothes the next day after we’ve had a night’s sleep.

So that’s enough to bounce off you for now. Let’s see what you have to say about all that.

James: Yeah, that’s good stuff to jump into. One thing I’ll say on the previous topic before we move on: you mentioned this thing of experiential recognition, of kind of getting the intelligence of nature, kind of feeling like you know it in a non-intellectual way. I completely agree with that.

Rick: You are it. You know it because you are it.

James: Yeah, exactly. You look inward and—I’ve had that many times—this feeling of, like, all you can say is, “Yes, yes, yes, it makes sense. I know it. I’ve known this so many times. This is so inherent in me to know this, and it makes sense.” So, yeah, I completely agree with that.

But, yeah, this idea, I guess my worldview in Cards on the Table is one in which there’s one reality. Mind and consciousness are tied up with the life process; they’re deeply embodied. And so, when the life process dissipates, that individual island of consciousness doesn’t continue. And so it’s a very kind of non-dual, holistic, oneness kind of picture.

Now, I kind of contrast that to the sense of individuated souls that might somehow survive the physical body. The version we’re taught as kids is a kind of dualism, where it’s like matter is one thing, consciousness is another thing. Consciousness feels like it can kind of survive death. And, you know, that’s a view I don’t see many people defending. I basically haven’t read accounts that I can point to and say, “Ah, here’s someone who’s explained to me how that could work.”

But what I would have to say is, if there was truth to this, the Whirlpool idea would be something like the idea that all of reality is consciousness. My feeling of being this body now is just some kind of dream of this island, and it can move on and have another life. So that’s the thing I would leave the door open to if there’s literal truth to the things you described: out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, encounters with entities, disembodied kind of subtle entities.

And so, to cycle back to the topic of psychedelics, if you’d spoken to me a few years ago about this stuff, I wouldn’t have had much of interest to say. I would have just said—I would have stopped here, basically—“Yeah, I don’t believe that stuff. I think it’s probably just imaginative or whatever.” And I would have said it in a kind of way.

But then with ayahuasca and the active chemical in that, DMT, that produces the most astounding experiences. It feels like your disembodied soul goes to another realm where there are entities that you engage with, and they’re intelligent. And it’s the most convincing thing I’ve ever experienced. It’s more convincing than thinking I’m talking to you right now, which is crazy.

The Johns Hopkins psychiatric research team recently had a paper come out this year. On average, when asking people about these experiences, they say that the experience of that realm, if you want to use that word, is 50 percent more real than this experience of daily life. This experience of daily life feels about two-thirds as real as that does.

My instinct is that’s similar to dreaming, maybe. Once I wake up from a dream, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that felt maybe 60 percent as real as normal life.” So it’s a similar kind of ratio. And you really would feel like you’re waking up from this world being a dream and that being the real world.

Before—well, I feel like I’m in this odd position. If this was several hundred years ago, and we didn’t have science and philosophy, and we weren’t trying to play this game of coming up with consistent maps for the world, I would have just said, “That’s real. You’d have to be insane to think that wasn’t real. I saw it; it’s as real as anything.”

Taking the Mystical Experience of Unity Literally

As someone now playing this pedantic game of science and philosophy and trying to make everything square, I really can’t. My honest conclusion, after I think about it a lot, is to come down to a worldview where I think the mystical experience of non-dual unity is literally kind of real. The insight should be taken as actually real.

But I think that the visionary states, or states where there’s content of that kind, are more like a generative thing going on inside the individual. Through intuition and our ability to integrate vast amounts of information, as well as through archetypal cognitive structures within the Quaith revolution, I think there’s a huge amount of meaning that happens there. So I think shamans and spiritually adept people can go into these mental spaces.

I don’t think it might—and again, this is my guess. Science has… It’s pathetic how little science has paid attention to this stuff. Engaging with spirits is a key part of the human experience. It happens across all ancient religions. And to just say, “Ah, it’s nonsense,” is really a cop-out.

And so that’s why I’m glad you’re talking to me now, as opposed to a few years ago, when I might have been more like, “Ah, it doesn’t need explaining.” Because I really think it does. And I’m going out on a limb here to say, “Here’s my honest opinion,” with the humility of saying, “Science has really not backed me up. There are no textbooks I can look to on the psychology or philosophy of how this stuff happens.”

But that’s my instinct: you might genuinely be able to channel someone’s… But through something… There’s nothing supernatural, nothing outside what we currently know about the laws of physics. I don’t think we need to bring in the idea of other levels of reality. But you can channel intuitively, you can gain insight, and a lot can happen. It’s really important and valuable.

But, yeah, I would say—actually, if you don’t mind me monologuing a bit more—the way I think about this goes back to this idea of all of reality being a process. So I think reality is just this one process.

When I say, “This is a glass,” glass is a concept. There is no… If I melt it down, at what point does it stop being a glass? I think I’ve heard you—I think in your interview with Donald Hoffman, you had a quote about pots, and whether, when a pot has a certain form, you can say that it has an essence of pots. And then, if you… Is it there in the clay? Maybe I’m mangling that particular analogy, but this is a core idea of… Was that vaguely what you said?

Rick: Kind of. There are three analogies that are common in Advaita Vedanta: pots, waves, and jewelry. You walk into a room full of clay pots, and you can truthfully say there’s nothing but clay here. But it’s not a complete picture; it’s not the full truth, because there are also pots.

You could look at an ocean and say there’s nothing but water, but you can’t say there aren’t waves, because there are, even though there’s only water. Or jewelry: you can say there’s nothing but gold here, and yet there are bangles and earrings and rings, different forms that the gold takes. You can’t say those don’t exist.

This is called—there’s a term, vyavaharika satyam in Vedanta, which means transactional truth. In actual life, sure, everything is ultimately all one, but in actual life there are relative realities, and you can’t sort of deny that they exist if you want to live. You have to sort of take them at their own level, and knowledge is different in different states or different levels of consciousness.

James: Right, yes. It’s the same thing as the doctrine of two truths in Buddhism, I think, where you have the absolute and you have the relative.

I think the jewelry one is useful as well, because I would say when someone goes into that shop and looks at the different jewelry, it’s highly contextual. Basically, the words you use and the concepts you bring to bear are all to do with which part of my body am I going to wear this on? Do I think it’s valuable? The labels of bracelet and, you know, brooch and things like that only exist in that landscape of ideas.

If you took a bracelet and sent it into space, I would argue it’s not a bracelet anymore. No one’s going to wear it. It’s now just a circle of gold. You could say that, but it’s not a bracelet.

But this is pointing to the limitation of concepts and the fact that everything, including the self and all objects, has this quality where, in absolute terms, there’s just the one pattern of reality. And within that, there are relative structures.

Now, in a sense, I would say my experience of this glass exists, but the glass doesn’t actually have an intrinsic essence of glass. It doesn’t exist as a glass. I don’t exist as James. These are just concepts. And so I would actually say that spirits exist in the same way that glasses exist. You can have the experience of a spirit, and there’s a real pattern in reality happening there and in consciousness. But on the absolute level, there’s not really a solid thing that you could point to and say, “That’s a spirit.” It’s a pattern.

So that’s my take, which I think, yeah, you can probably go either way on whether you think that’s radical or not, with respect to whether glasses or spirits exist.

Rick: Well, you could also put spirits in glasses, right, and get drunk drinking them. Different kind of spirits.

But I would say on the absolute level, there are no things. On the absolute level, there’s absolute. There’s no relative and therefore no things. And, you know, I think the idea of Vedanta is that ultimately all this is one thing, one stuff, Brahman. And it’s not a thing, but it’s the ultimate reality. It assumes forms, but if you look deeply enough into what those forms actually are, they’re Brahman.

So there are these phrases in the Upanishads: “I am that, thou art that, all of this is that, that alone is,” and so on. There’s one fundamental stuff of the universe, which isn’t stuff; it’s sort of consciousness, really, or God, if you wish to use that term. Through its self-interacting dynamics, it assumes all these forms, and we are among those forms.

I just wanted to throw in one other quick thing here, which is that we’re using our computers right now. If we had to actually interface with what’s really going on in the computer in terms of the bits and the bytes and all that stuff, binary language, we wouldn’t be able to use it. It would be completely incomprehensible to us. So we have a graphical user interface that enables us to interact with the computer, with the inner workings of the computer.

Like that, all beings are like graphical user interfaces. And, you know, that famous Thomas Nagel article, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The bat and the cow and the human being and every other living thing under the sun could interact with the same tree, but they’re all seeing something very different according to the way their particular graphical user interface functions.

But that doesn’t mean that there are ultimately that many different realities: one ultimate reality that the bat somehow lives in, and another for the human being, and another for the cow. There’s one ultimate reality, and we all reflect it or interface with it in different ways.

Now, just a wrap-up point for this is that the cool thing about being a human being is that you can realize—and here the language breaks down, because it’s not you who realizes it, but let’s put it this way—the ultimate reality can awaken to its own nature through the instrumentality of the human nervous system. Bats and cows can’t do that.

James: You mean a kind of intuitive knowing, like an awakened, enlightened state where consciousness knows itself?

Rick: Yeah, and not intuitive in the sense of a fleeting sort of hunch about it, but in terms of the fully embodied realization of it, so that you are that and you know that with absolute conviction, based upon your experience, and you live from that realization.

James: Right, yeah. And that’s something very real. I mean, just to clarify, I think intuition is the core of knowing in the mind. Everything—the rational mind—is secondary to intuition. Intuition is the most… Like, even all of science, when you ultimately cash out, you know, two plus two equals four sounds like a very rational proposition, but actually, I’m not sure when, but it took a very long time for mathematicians to actually prove it logically and rationally. You just kind of have to get it. You show someone two things, you show them another two things. Now there are four of them. You just kind of go, “Huh, yeah, it seems like two plus two equals four.” And so it’s funny. It feels like that’s really rational, but actually, ultimately, everything comes down to that kind of intuitive, just getting it.

But, yeah, I don’t want to lose my thread of where we were going with the previous question. Oh, yeah. So I would say, with the subtle realities, I guess in the same way that most people are comfortable saying glasses exist, tables exist, jewellery exists—

Rick: Yeah. It’s an agreed-upon reality.

James: Yeah. I would say it’s more accurate to say the experience of those things exists. In the same way you were saying, it’s like a graphical user interface. They’re like icons, but the ultimate reality isn’t—they don’t really exist. So, in the same way, I would say the experience of the subtle realms exists. And if people are happy to say glasses and cups and tables exist, then they should actually, by the same logic, be happy to say the subtle realms exist.

Now, the question, I guess, in that picture, is what is their nature? Where do they fit into the picture of reality that we have? And, knowing the way that I think about the mind and the brain and their being embodied, my honest… The only way I can make it fit with everything else I know or think about the world is to say, I suspect that as we map the space and understand how it arises, my guess is it won’t cause us to rewrite—or, like, it won’t cause a huge paradigm shift where we have to rethink the nature of reality. But that’s a possibility. It could turn out we’ve not really explored these areas scientifically and philosophically in a rigorous way, and when we do, we’ll realize that they’re vast and actually have a different nature.

They’re not the thing I was saying, which is a combination of generating imaginative stuff combined with that kind of intuitive, perceptual mapping of what’s going on in order to have some knowledge. Yeah, this may be getting a bit subtle in itself, these arguments, but I hope it’s conveying that I don’t believe it’s supernatural, but I also don’t believe it’s just trivial.

Rick: No. Well, let me bring up an example that I think relates to what you were just saying. I heard you say in some recording that, well, you can’t experience your own death, and when I die, that’ll be the end of me. But, you know, some little girl will be born in Australia and she’ll open her eyes and begin to have experience. But you weren’t saying that maybe that little girl will be me reincarnated, that my soul will somehow transmigrate into that body. You weren’t saying that.

But where we differ is I would say, yeah, that could actually be your soul transmigrating into that body. And the logic of this is that there’s not enough time in one lifetime to achieve the full span of spiritual development that we’re destined to achieve, for which we have come into existence. It takes many lives to evolve, life by life by life. And, of course, this is ancient, traditional understanding, not anything I dreamed up. A lot of people like to brush it off as sort of ancient ways of thinking, but I think the guys who talked about this stuff were onto something.

If you see it that way, a lot of things fall into place, to my mind anyway. A lot of things that otherwise don’t make sense, like children being born with some incurable disease and dying after a year, begin to make sense. And it also helps you to think of God as some kind of benign reality that is not capricious or cruel, but that is—there’s a word—evolutionary panentheism, which is kind of a competitor to panpsychism. It’s that there’s this sort of evolutionary force pervading everything and slowly but surely, in its own sweet time, bringing about the evolution to greater and greater embodiments of divine intelligence in all beings. Anyway, I could keep rambling, but you can respond to that.

James: Yeah, so remind me to come back to reincarnation, because I want to. But, yeah, the last thing you said is fascinating too. I guess I don’t believe—I don’t think of reality as being kind of intentional, having a goal, intentionally evolving in a particular way. And something you mentioned earlier that we could touch on is, I don’t believe in individual free will of this ego to control things. But I think the nature of the ultimate reality is ultimate freedom. I think it’s ultimately unconstrained. It’s just process happening in infinite space. And so every part of it is exploring, is doing exactly what is in its nature to do.

So that’s a very long way of putting it. You could say that’s determinism: everything just does the thing it’s going to do. But to me, that looks like a being of ultimate—or just the fact of being in ultimate freedom, just expressing its nature perfectly.

But, on the reincarnation point, yeah, it’s related. Because I guess I don’t think there is a me to be reincarnated. I really think that the idea of a self is an illusion and that we really are a process in this greater whole. Relatively, there’s some separation now, but it’s really a transient illusion and a product of this survival, fear-based thinking of, “I have to protect this pattern.” But I don’t think there’s anything at the core of that. So I don’t know what would be carried over between people.

Rick: The subtle body.

James: Yes. So that’s, yeah. I mean, I think—I guess I think of it this way: if you describe the subtle body or the soul as being kind of synonymous with consciousness, my picture is that consciousness is deeply embodied in the dynamics of the universe and arises in the universe, and can’t be taken apart from it.

Ultimately, when we have… If things are happening in the physical world, so, like, yeah, if we’re talking about—we mentioned at the very beginning—things that might, you know, supernatural things happening, levitation or walking on water and things like that. Any claims… You know, in my days of listening to Dawkins, I would have been very dismissive of that stuff. I now am open-minded when I see how widespread these kinds of things are. Maybe there are things we don’t know, but I do ultimately have to come back to the idea that an object, a claim about something happening in objective reality—the reality in between us—has to be cashed out with objective evidence. I just can’t allow myself to think people are probably telling the truth anecdotally.

No, no, that’s very important. I have to think, you know.

Rick: Yeah. In fact, what I was just thinking is, when you say, “I don’t believe this and I don’t believe that,” and then I’m saying, “Well, I believe this and I believe that,” we both have to acknowledge that we’re playing with hypotheses here. None of us has the wisdom or authority to make absolute truth claims that are indisputable.

James: Definitely, yeah.

Rick: So, hypotheses, by their very definition, are things which you accumulate evidence to either support or refute. And I would say there’s a heck of a lot of evidence to support the notion that there is some kind of subtle essence. I wouldn’t say that it’s ultimately what you are, because what we ultimately are is that sort of universal Consciousness, Brahman, and that has no individuation, really. But Brahman sort of arises in individual ripples the way an ocean does.

We’re kind of a—using a metaphor—there’s the sun shining and many things reflecting it, or many different kinds of radios and cell phones and everything that pick up on the electromagnetic field. When the radio breaks, the electromagnetic field doesn’t break. In fact, the specific programs that are playing, that particular Beethoven symphony, keep playing, and other radios can pick them up. But anyway, metaphors have their limitations.

Ultimately, we are not—we could say we don’t exist, but at that level nothing exists; there is no universe. However, as soon as we acknowledge a universe, we can acknowledge all sorts of individual expressions of it as possibilities, one of which is that there is a subtle essence to us that actually outlives the physical body, outlives many physical bodies.

And you speak of evidence. Okay, well, people go under general anaesthesia and then watch the operation from the vantage point of the ceiling and see things that are happening down the hall and things like that when the physical senses are shut down. Or Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia interviewing thousands of kids who remember past lives, and then going to the villages that the kids describe and meeting the people that they predicted he would meet and things like that. So there’s just a lot of—I have some evidence for the point I’m making, and I’m not sure what the evidence is to support the notion that there is no personal self whatsoever, and that we’re just sort of… and that there’s no free will whatsoever, which is another argument we can get into.

James: Yeah, I mean, for the self thing, I think it comes down to—it’s more…

Rick: The Buddhist thing.

James: Yeah, you can have the experience of realizing there is no self. And then you can—I mean, now there have been a whole bunch of books written about this, basically saying how modern neuroscience completely catches it out. You look at us; we’re just this network system. There is no central controller. There are a lot of people kind of making these arguments. It’s more like you’d have to find some evidence of what the self really is.

Rick: Yeah, you have to define it. You pick a radio apart; you don’t find Beethoven in there, or the Beatles or whatever.

James: Yeah, so the self is a pattern, you could say. I would say what we take to be the psychological self is the mind of the organism pointing back at itself and saying, “This thing, this pattern that’s continuing.” But then, when you pick it apart, you realize it’s a concept. I mean, that’s the main thing. It’s a concept rather than, in my view, a thing that exists like a soul or a subtle body.

But, yeah, I’m really glad you said that. Every time I use the words “I think” or “I believe,” it’s really important to emphasize, as you said, what I’m saying is that my honest place, having come down to thinking about this stuff, is this, and I’m open-minded. And, yeah, it’s not a kind of, “This is definitely like this.”

Rick: Ten years from now, our positions might be reversed.

James: But then also, I wrote an article recently on out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences because basically I was in a place of really being like, “People have these experiences. A lot of people have these experiences. Something like 10% of people have had some kind of out-of-body experience, which is insane. That makes it a real part of the human experience, and we don’t have a good explanation for it. And I don’t like the idea that we just dismiss it in the scientific mainstream as just some weird experience, because there’s this deep structure to it. Clearly, there’s some phenomenon here that needs to be explained.” In my research, yeah, I looked at those studies that you mentioned, and I was really pleased that so much of it is being done because this is effective.

My point is, you can make yourself feel comfortable by just saying, “I’m a skeptic, and I’m not going to be open-minded about anything.” And then you can live an unhappy life and never experience the joy of meditation. Or you could be a really hard-nosed, closed-off skeptic, but I don’t think that’s the way to go.

But then you can get stuck in this middle ground if you’re a sincere person who wants to take people at their word. You can get stuck just comparing people’s anecdotes. And then ultimately, after some amount of time, I think you have to say, “Okay, they’re doing the studies. I look forward to when they come back and say, ‘Here’s the evidence.’” And you can look at the evidence and go, “Huh, yeah, looks like it’s real.” But again and again, the studies seem to be fairly inconclusive.

I would say, take something like telepathy. I feel fairly strongly about telepathy. I don’t believe in it because the experiments to prove it would be so simple. Any 18-year-old or any undergraduate could run the experiments with a notepad. And the data collection doesn’t require any particular technology or funding. And if you could prove it, you would win a Nobel Prize. The incentives are there. So that’s one thing where I’m like, I would feel more comfortable putting money on it not being an actual phenomenon that exists in terms of information transfer between minds.

Rick: In response to that point, I want to refer to a book written by a friend of mine whom I’ve interviewed on this show called An End to Upside-Down Thinking by Mark Gober: “Dispelling the Myth that the Brain Produces Consciousness and the Implications for Everyday Life.” What he does in this book is he takes every sort of possible angle of, you know, telepathy and near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences and a whole bunch of different things like that, and then looks at the research on animals having psychic abilities and psychokinesis—mind influencing physical matter—and on and on. He just breaks it down very systematically, and that’s worth a look. See what you think. I can’t really recapitulate the whole book off the top of my head, but in all these areas, there’s a lot of evidence.

I’ve interviewed Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and I’ll be interviewing him again in a month or so. Although a lot of the studies he does seem to detect sort of infinitesimal aberrations from the norm, they are statistically significant, and it does appear that some of this stuff is taking place.

But I think more importantly, you can take relatively ordinary people and test their abilities in this regard. Or, relatively ordinary people have out-of-body experiences during a surgery or something. But you have to also look to the real mystics who’ve advanced far beyond the norm and who speak apparently from their own experience when they describe these deeper mechanics of creation or of life.

James: Yeah, I think, I mean, I’m definitely deeply aware that the mainstream really doesn’t give this stuff a fair chance. So, for all I know, there’s really compelling evidence that I’m just not seeing because it’s not accepted.

I guess when I raised the thing about objective evidence, that’s basically where I just felt like I was in a space of not being able to have any conclusions because I really want to trust people, you know, who seem to know what they’re talking about. And especially when I look at stuff like Tibetan Buddhism, I deeply respect their teachings on the nature of consciousness and think that it’s incredibly accurate and advanced. And then when they talk about subtle realms and past lives and things, it would seem strange of me to suddenly say, “Oh no, they’re just mistaken; they’ve got it completely wrong.”

So that’s why I’m like, I think every tradition probably has some things that get better than other things, but I’m definitely not just saying these things or dismissing them completely. But, yeah, I guess it’s the thing I tell myself eventually: I’m to remain open-minded and wait for the compelling evidence.

Rick: Yeah.

James: But, you know, a lot of these phenomena can’t really be studied in compelling ways. Yoga took a very long time. Clearly, yoga is deeply beneficial. Clearly, meditation is. But because it’s holistic, it’s hard to prove in a reductionist framework.

The kind of healing experiences I had—these holistic, embodied experiences—people have started doing experiments on these kinds of things, but it’s hard. And when the mainstream is against it, it really doesn’t give it a fair go. So I should have started with that and said how much time I’ve spent being very open-minded before saying that my ultimate conclusion is I have to lean on the evidence side of it.

Rick: It’s true. I mean, if you went to the American Medical Association and said, “Hey, I took LSD and I got rid of eczema”…

James: Right, exactly.

Rick: They’d say, “You know, bug off, kid.” But, you know, I think it was Max Planck who said that science progresses one funeral at a time because people are very attached to their cozy little paradigms, and it can be career suicide for a graduate student to say, “Hey, I want to study psychic phenomenon,” or something like that. So there’s this strong influence to be conformist.

James: Exactly, I think that’s really suffocating.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s some value in that because if we just sort of, you know, anything goes and blah blah, then you have what you sometimes have in places like Sedona, Arizona, where it’s just like every kooky idea that comes down the pike is taken seriously. So there have to be some brakes on the vehicle, but often those brakes are just applied too heavily.

James: Yeah, I think really being open-minded and interested, and then using evidence, is a really wonderful thing. We’ve learned loads of cool things, you know, by using the scientific method. But I think the big problem is that, so what happened to me is stress when I was young made me kind of flee into my rational mind and this fear-based desire to understand.

I think a lot of people who end up in science or end up as skeptics are those kinds of people—people who have some core wound of fear. And so that’s why they look at meditation, they look at yoga, and they go, “Oh, that touchy-feely stuff. They’re using all these words around feelings; I don’t like it.” And then they confuse that feeling with science. And that’s not, you know, I think en masse, that’s partly why you get this divide.

I think that’s terrible, you know, so I would like to see more of the kind of conversations we’re having that are fundamentally open-minded, and then we discuss what’s the best way to move forward.

Rick: Yeah, and science, I mean, ordinary science deals with stuff that’s a lot more concrete and easy to prove, you know, and it’s gotten us to the Moon and it’s given us computers and skyscrapers and all kinds of things, whereas the spiritual realities that we’re talking about are much more subtle.

I guess a good analogy might be that there are very advanced physicists who understand the kinds of things that might be explored with the Large Hadron Collider, for instance, and who know how to use that apparatus. You and I are just out of our league; we couldn’t possibly replicate their findings. We have to take their word for it. If they say they’ve found the Higgs boson, well, I guess they have. And if they haven’t, then they’ll argue amongst themselves and sort it out.

So when it comes to these subtler phenomena, these spiritual realities, there are Einsteins of consciousness, we could say, and have been for millions of years—or not millions, but many thousands of years. I think maybe their perspectives need to be taken somewhat seriously. They’ve really put in the hours, you know, the 10,000 hours that what’s-his-name wrote about in…

James: Malcolm Gladwell.

Rick: But who was it?

James: Malcolm Gladwell.

Rick: Malcolm Gladwell, right. But here’s the deal: we can’t all become PhDs in physics and run the Large Hadron Collider, but we can all become sort of yogis and mystics. We all have this apparatus of the human nervous system, which actually, in many respects, is far more sophisticated than the Large Hadron Collider. We can learn how to attune it and use it in such a way as to actually replicate for ourselves, to our own satisfaction, the findings of all the mystics and saints and yogis. We can dedicate our lives to doing that and actually succeed. So that’s exciting.

Cultivating Awareness and Compassion for a Better World

James: Yeah, and I think that’s the more important thing as well. We’ve been talking about very big-picture, zoomed-out stuff, but to bring it into a kind of more embodied thing, ultimately, if we spend as much effort as we spend on science cultivating awareness and compassion and just these fundamental aspects of the mind, that would be a better world.

That would also be, you know, what I’ve personally discovered from my own experience of health arising from holistic wellness rather than from just this kind of symptom-management model of mainstream Western science: I think we could be a healthier world as well.

If we just invested in that kind of—in my picture, it’s one where we’re living in separation, and by bringing ourselves into closer union with the greater whole, what you realize is that awareness exists beyond the self, and also that the feeling tone is one of compassion and love and acceptance. In that process, healing happens as well, because we are these naturally homeostatic patterns. You can have all the kind of trauma-relief stuff I mentioned and improvements in health.

I agree. I think we need to be centering that stuff for the everyday person and taking seriously the experts, as you mentioned. In every field, as you say, there will be experts. And, yeah, it feels like a disservice to us that the mainstream doesn’t really know what to make of the testimony of experts in meditative or introspective or contemplative traditions, because I’m sure there’s stuff of infinite value there.

Rick: Right. The mainstream these days, and for quite some time, has been dominated by the materialist-reductionist paradigm. That’s what dominates modern science and is the predominant intellectual influence of our age. But we could envision a time when we don’t discard science, but supplement it with subjective technologies, technologies of consciousness. You can imagine a society in which all the children learn to meditate in school and are taught to discuss the kinds of things you and I are discussing here, and grow up doing that.

If that became a universal reality, we would have a completely different world in every respect—in the economy, in the way people are treated, and in what we do to the environment. The ripple effect would be huge because we’d be watering the root of the tree rather than just tinkering around with the leaves while the tree is still deprived of its nourishment.

James: Yeah. And I think you’re right because basically all of the world’s ills can be traced to this issue of separation and alienation, and to people—our culture—living on average in an unconsciously stress- and trauma-ridden state of fear and self-concern. The antidote to that is everything we’re talking about: cultivating this, instead of being over on the separation side and the fear side, being on the side of opening. I think if we could get to a situation where we address that stuff, that would be the root of the issue, and everything else would kind of fall into place.

And on the point you mentioned about reductionism in science, I think it’s really not the case that science needs to be reductionistic. It’s just an attitude that we have, linked up with the last several hundred years of commodifying and destroying nature and ripping everything apart to sell it. When you study the brain—I’m a systems neuroscientist—you have to study it as a whole system. You can’t study its individual parts because all of this complexity exists in the whole structure. It’s inherently holistic.

It’s the same with ecosystems. We’re realizing that networks are the basic structure of the emergent properties of the universe, and that’s not a reductionist program. You need a holistic systems program in order to understand that stuff. There are people arguing for this, but it’s not the main attitude in science, unfortunately.

Rick: Another thing that occurred to me as you’re speaking—and I’m sure you’ve experienced this—is that at a certain point, you unleashed a lot of energies within yourself that healed your physical body. There are many ways of doing that, obviously. We’ve been alluding to this deeper reality of the absolute, or of consciousness, or whatever you want to call it. One thing that is traditionally said about it is that it’s a reservoir of tremendous energy, creativity, intelligence, and happiness. Sat-Chit-Ananda—ananda means bliss.

If you begin tapping into this, it begins bubbling up into your life, and all kinds of marvelous changes begin to take place in your outer life: your productivity, your efficiency, and the way you align your life with a more evolutionary purpose. You don’t mess things up for yourself by doing dumb stuff. So again, you can extrapolate from an individual doing that to millions and billions of individuals doing that, and imagine how the world would change.

We’re all worried about the problems that beset humanity—pandemics, environmental disasters, and so on. I would say that the greatest untapped natural resource of all is that inner potential, that inner intelligence. If we, as many individuals, can tap into that—if we can tap into it as a society—we will literally produce a heaven on Earth.

Yeah, I think you’re right. What I hope for is that we get to a place of health as a species and with the planet. And I think that happens, as you say, when individuals feel themselves to be part of the greater whole. Then it’s clear that you want the health of that greater whole. It’s obvious; you don’t even need to put it into words. It’s so simple.

James: Yeah, I think you’re right. What I hope for is that we get to a place of health as a species and with the planet. And I think that happens, as you say, when individuals feel themselves to be part of the greater whole. Then it’s clear that you want the health of that greater whole. It’s obvious; you don’t even need to put it into words. It’s so simple.

This is what you see again and again. It’s why there’s a correlation between holistic health and wellness and spiritual stuff. It becomes pretty obvious. So, for me, moving society forward means this stuff has to be at the center of it. Ideologies don’t work in terms of imposing on people, “Here’s how we need to organize things. Here’s my idea of how we need to organize the world.” What we need is for people each to wake up to realizing the intuitive, obvious truth of how to cooperate in mutually beneficial ways.

Then the rational mind, with all its ideas and ideologies, doesn’t need to be the master. It can be the servant to this goal, as opposed to the tyrannical master that gets it wrong all the time.

Rick: Yeah. I remember maybe about six months or a year ago, a group of European countries offered Bolsonaro of Brazil a couple hundred million dollars to preserve a certain portion of the rainforest, and he said, “Eh, use it to replant your own forest. We’re going to burn it down because we need to think about our own economy right now.”

It’s a sort of myopic thinking, and billions of people thinking myopically, thinking in terms of the small and not having the big picture—not having the broad comprehension that results in an every-man-for-himself world. Who was it—I don’t know, Gandhi or somebody—who had some quote about how if every man is for himself, then nobody benefits? We all suffer.

James: Yeah, and if you’re just looking out for your self-interest, you’re inevitably going to cause discord. It spreads and becomes its own kind of virus, a psychological virus of a race to the bottom. And it’s unconsciousness. This is why awakenings of many kinds are the answer, I think, because all you have to do is see it.

Then, as you said, the natural, logical, homeostatic, evolutionary nature of what makes sense starts to take over, and you live in line with the Dao, or whatever you want to describe it. You live from that place where you no longer have to make decisions; the decisions just present themselves, and the system finds its own healthy balance.

Systems like ourselves tend toward resilience because they propagate themselves; they basically have to cultivate health in order to exist. That’s why our skin heals, and why I had my healing experiences. The same goes for the ecosystem. It can heal itself and come back to equilibrium, to some healthy balance, but not if we’re constantly resisting.

Rick: That’s a great point. You know, there’s that saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” In my own life, and I think I could speak for you here too, I couldn’t have orchestrated or foreseen all the details of how my life worked out once I got on a spiritual path. I just did my spiritual path thing, and then all kinds of marvelous developments came about—unfoldings and opportunities, one thing after another over the years.

In a way, this argues both for and against free will. I used what I perceived as my free will to stick to something that I found valuable and, despite distractions and opposition and whatnot, to just stick with it. But then something larger than me took care of the details. There’s a verse in the Gita that says, “You have control over action alone, never over its fruits.” The fruits took care of themselves; I just took care of the action.

Going back to “God helps those who help themselves,” I really feel like there’s been some kind of divine support, or something—a larger intelligence helping to orchestrate my life. Do I speak for you in saying that also?

James: Yeah. I think there can be an absolutely natural intelligence. This is the same thing I was reaching for with the… I think it’s astounding that this is the case: if you go from living as someone who feels like a separate person, if you’re an atheist, and then you discover—for me, I guess the concept would be something like redemptive love—that if you open yourself radically and welcome everything with love, you trigger this process of homeostatic healing.

Suddenly, you can produce states of self-transcendence and self-compassion, and you start to have all of these experiences that are attached to Christianity in particular, that are real. I actually think they make biological sense as well, not in a way that reduces them, but as genuine phenomena that are helpful.

I think that’s the same thing you were saying: you open yourself to the processes that are larger than you, and you flow with them. Then they take care of what needs to be taken care of. And on the free-will thing, we can go back to the idea of the absolute and the relative. In absolute terms, you’re going to do what you’re going to do. But in relative terms, you do make choices. Living systems are agents; they have the capacity to choose.

In the same way that I was saying I see the totality of reality as this ultimately free process that’s doing what is most worth its nature, that’s what we should aspire to do as well. Most people’s idea of free will is this kind of fantasy that I can utterly transcend my history—that even if I deeply don’t want to do something, I could choose to do it, just magically. Why would you even want that kind of free will? Why wouldn’t you want the capacity to choose in line with what you are and what is wise? That’s what we do have. It’s not libertarian free will.

Rick: As I see it, we have a certain amount of wiggle room. There’s a lot of conditioning and everything, and there’s our whole makeup, what we’re born with. But we have some wiggle room. If we use that wiggle room wisely, we can increase our freedom one degree after another.

Ultimately, what do we want to do? What we really want to do is that which we could say divine intelligence wants to do, because it knows better than our individual perspective. By using that wiggle room, we can move ourselves into alignment with that divine intelligence, or with the Dao, as you quoted earlier.

I’m again tempted to expand it out to society. The Dao Te Ching actually says this kind of thing: if society is in tune with the Dao, if a lot of people are aligned in this way, then, putting it in modern terms, we’ll find solutions to climate change, various diseases, and economic inequity. These things will just spring up. Maybe they already exist in the minds of certain people, but they’ll become acceptable to the majority, to the politicians, and to everyone else. It’ll clear away what seemed like intractable obstacles.

James: Yeah, I mean, with Lao Tzu, in China, you also had Confucius, and China ended up organizing society along Confucian lines. And then in ancient Greece, you had Heraclitus, who had very similar ideas to Lao Tzu. He was the philosopher who said, “You never step into the same river twice.” He was very much thinking in terms of these realities of transcendent process and concepts, these limited things. But then everyone basically followed Aristotle in Western thinking.

And this brings me to why, again, I’m an advocate for psychedelic medicine, because I think it’s not going to be easy for everyone to just open themselves to this stuff when they have trauma. If you take people like Bolsonaro, for example, he’s ossified in his hate and all of his coping mechanisms. That is not someone who’s going to meditate and do yoga tomorrow, and maybe isn’t reachable. But there are a lot of people who are reachable, and something like ayahuasca might be able to take their physiology and move them in the right direction, show them how they can live in a healthier way.

But without healing whatever deep issues people like him have—because clearly there are deep issues—we’re not going to be able to do it. That’s the blockage, I think, that causes people not to follow these value paths.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I think that stuff can definitely be a kickstarter. Whether it’s a lifelong path for most people or not, I have doubts. I mean, for me, it was a kickstarter.

James: Some people say it takes a few sessions.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, it opened my eyes after a few sessions. Believe me, they were not controlled, careful sessions like you’ve done; this was back in the ’60s. But at least I realized there was much more to life than meets the eye.

After about a year of that kind of exploration, I realized there must be a more natural and healthy way to go about it. Then I found one and stuck to it. So, I don’t know if you yourself will be taking these substances 20 or 30 years from now. You may or may not, but you might find that they have served their purpose. As you say, as a neuroscientist, DMT exists in the brain, along with all these various chemicals. Perhaps these more built-in processes, like meditation, bring about the full advantage of those chemicals in a more natural and abiding way. “Abiding” is an important word.

I interviewed—what’s his name? Holotropic breathwork?

James: Stan Grof.

Rick: Stan Grof. And sitting next to him and doing the interview, I sort of had this feeling of a little bit of sadness or something, like he was late in his life and he’d had all these amazing experiences, but there was some feeling of not having realized things as fully as he’d originally hoped. I might be totally wrong, and my apologies to Stan if I misread that feeling. But I think the name of the game is to proceed in whichever way will be best, will be most effective in establishing appreciation of ultimate reality as a 24/7 condition, not just something that we experience on occasional weekends.

James: Yeah, I completely agree. I think these things are big medicine. They’re not something to be done recklessly and often, but for some people they’re necessary in order to help them move in this direction.

Ultimately, for me, it comes down to cultivating a sense of home. This nondual, mindful space—what our nature is at bottom—feels like ground. It feels like home. It feels like the kind of place I should be inhabiting. Then I can go off and think things through, but ultimately I want to come back to that grounded sense of home. So, like all of these things, whatever we go and do is temporary, but that’s the abiding thing, I think.

Rick: Yeah, and meditation itself is temporary. You meditate, you have a nice experience, and then you get back into activity. But the influence of it is cumulative. The nervous system undergoes some changes while you’re sitting there, and then, to a certain degree, those changes become permanent. After many years of it, the whole physiology is transformed. I don’t know if you could do psychedelics that regularly, or if you did, whether it would bring about permanent changes that you’d actually want to have.

James: Yeah, I think you’d want to cultivate it more organically through your own practice. It’s very easy for people to think they’ve figured everything out because they’ve had some big experiences, and that’s not a very wise, integrated way of being.

Rick: Okay, well, we’re just about at the two-hour mark, and I think this has worked out organically to be a nice conversation. I had a lot of notes that I didn’t even refer to, but I just wanted some stuff to fall back on. I think the way it’s unfolded has been an interesting back-and-forth.

James: Yeah, it’s been great.

Rick: Yeah. So tell us a little bit. I’ll be linking to about three or four different things in the show notes for this episode, but just tell us what they are, what you’re doing over there in Portugal, and what folks can plug into if they want to tune into what you’re doing.

James: If you want to see what I’m up to, drjamesCooke.com is the easiest place to find links to everything except the Surrender Homestead. Most of my stuff is on my YouTube channel, YouTube/drjamescooke. You can also find me, drjamescooke, on the usual places, Twitter and Instagram (@drjamesCooke) and all those.

Rick: I’ll link to all that.

James: The Surrender Homestead is also on Instagram (@thesurrenderhomestead). In particular, we’re building a retreat center. My wife’s main thing is to make it an artist residency, a place for people to come and do creative projects. I’ll probably eventually be running meditation retreats. We’re talking about potentially doing some kind of psychedelic therapy. So, there are a whole bunch of things we’re working on. We’re in the mountains of Portugal, and it’s really beautiful.

But I’d say my YouTube channel is probably the main place. You can also subscribe to the podcast, Living Mirrors with Dr. James Cooke. The audio version is available in the usual places, like Spotify and iTunes and all of those.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, good. And as I said, I’ll link to all those things on your page on batgap.com. So thanks, James. It’s been a lot of fun, very stimulating and enriching. I always say this, but it’s not only the conversation that’s enriching; it’s also the whole previous week, where I’ve been listening to all of your things. It’s been very educational for me, and I really enjoyed the whole process.

James: I’m glad. Yeah, thanks. It’s been really great.

Rick: Yeah. So, to those who’ve been listening or watching, thank you, and keep listening and watching. We’ll continue on. Come to batgap.com if you haven’t been there, and explore the menus and see what you find. There’s a place to sign up for email notifications of interviews and things like that. So thanks, and we’ll see you next time. See you later, James.

James: Yeah, see you, Rick. [Music]