Tim Freke 3^rd Interview

Summary

Tim Freke explores a worldview that joins nonduality with the value of human life and the findings of modern science. He presents evolution, emergence, and accumulating time as central to understanding consciousness and the cosmos.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can nonduality affirm the reality and value of human experience?
• Does the universe exist independently of individual perception?
• How can spiritual insight and modern science be brought into one coherent worldview?
• What is the nature of time, and how does it relate to evolution and consciousness?

Key takeaways

• Reality is both objectively present and subjectively experienced.
• Human perception interprets information but does not create the entire universe.
• Evolution gradually produces new levels of complexity, experience, and consciousness.
• Time accumulates rather than simply passing away.
• Every present moment contains the influence of everything that came before it.
• Spiritual philosophy should value embodied life and engage seriously with modern science.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Those of you who watch this show regularly will have heard me say this many, many times, but for those of you who haven’t, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done maybe about 425 of them now.

If this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you will see all the previous ones archived in many different ways.

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I’m at the Science and Nonduality Conference in San Jose. This is my eighth year coming here, and it’s a very enriching experience. I usually do a few interviews while I’m out here. In fact, my coming here is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers.

This morning, I noticed Deepak Chopra coming into the dining hall. He’s an old friend from my early TM days, so I went over to say hello. He was just sitting down to breakfast, and I decided to sit down with him. There was Tim Freke, whom I had interviewed twice on BatGap in the past. Tim and I always really hit it off and felt like we were friends from the start, but he lives in the UK, and we’d never met in person. I’ve always wanted to, so I was delighted to see him.

Tim, Deepak, and I had a rather lively conversation for at least an hour or so. I had already eaten breakfast, while those guys wolfed it down as we talked. Later on, Tim and I thought, “Hey, we should do an interview about the stuff we were talking about.” Deepak was going to join us, but he’s got a very busy schedule and had to cancel. So Tim and I decided to go ahead, and here we are.

Since Tim and I last spoke, he’s written a book called Soul Story, which ordinarily I would have read cover to cover before doing an interview. But this was so impromptu that I haven’t had a chance. He’s going to tell us what’s in it. Judging from our breakfast conversation this morning, there are a number of very interesting topics that we’d like to discuss, and we’ll see where we go with this. So, welcome, Tim.

Tim: Thank you. It’s a great delight to speak to you again. In person, it’s fun.

Rick: Yeah. I must say, I think that you and I have had slightly different backgrounds, but we’ve kind of come around to similar perspectives. We actually found our perspectives differing from Deepak’s a little bit, even though he and I have even more similar backgrounds than you and I because of the TM background.

In the course of this interview, maybe we’ll contrast what he was saying this morning with what you were saying, and I think people will find it interesting. It’s probably been four years or so since we last did an interview. How would you say that your thinking has evolved since then, if you can remember where it was at that time? And, as probably represented by this book—this probably encapsulates or presents it?

Tim: The thinking has absolutely taken a huge jump. I think I’ve written 35 books, and this is, for me, by far the most important. I think it breaks the most new ground.

The big changes—I mean, one of the things we discussed last time, and which came up in the talk with Deepak, is whether you have a form of nonduality which dismisses life as an illusion, where the individual self is of no consequence and the reality is somewhere else, or whether you also value the human experience.

That’s been central to me for a long while. As I get pulled further and further into that, I’ve got the nondual and the human. That’s opened up into, “Well, what I want to understand for myself is how we can understand the cosmos itself and our role within it.”

Integrating Ancient Wisdom with Modern Science

How can I really bring together this ancient spiritual wisdom, which still speaks to me, although I think it needs a lot of updating, and modern scientific knowledge, which also, I think, needs a lot of questioning? There’s something amazing in there. How can they come together?

How can I understand a life in which it is both cause and effect, on the one hand, and can be utterly magical and sublime? And what is the nature of death? That’s what I’ve set out to do: create a whole new worldview.

The reason I’m at this SAND conference with you is because it’s about the emergent universe. That’s its name, and that’s the theme. That’s the theme of this book. I think the key to it is understanding the nature of evolution and emergence.

Subjective and objective reality

Rick: Okay. Now, just for fun, I’m going to try to do justice to the perspective that Deepak was expressing this morning, as I understood what he was saying. He was saying that everything is a human construct—the whole universe, as we understand it or perceive it, or even as it exists intrinsically, is a human construct.

Ultimately, there is no universe, there is no person, there’s nothing but Brahman or the Absolute. I used the word “nihilistic,” and he said, “Yeah, people say that to me sometimes.” I thought about it afterward, and another word I would use is that it seems that perspective is kind of anthropocentric. In other words, it’s as if the universe were somehow dependent upon human perception for its existence, or as if it doesn’t exist and human perception somehow brings it into existence.

That always puzzled me when people want to say things like that, because humans haven’t been around that long, but apparently the universe has.

I think of humans and all beings as sense organs of the Infinite. We all share, fundamentally, a common consciousness—or pure awareness, unbounded intelligence, whatever—that gives rise to the whole universe, and which is sort of seeing through all of our eyes, hearing through all of our ears, and so on.

We’re just like little, tiny peepholes through which that is shining, compared to its inherent nature, which is unbounded pure awareness. So it’s kind of putting things backward, it seems to me, to suggest that the universe is dependent upon human perception.

I mean, sure, the universe as we perceive it is the best our little peepholes can do. But there’s the key.

Tim: Yeah, that’s what he just said. There’s the key. Sure, and the bat has its peephole, and the mouse has its peephole.

But the universe—the intelligence itself, the totality of that intelligence—contains everything and is not dependent upon all these little sense organs.

You can see this philosophical battle way back to the Greeks: between the people who say the universe is really an object and the subject is a kind of illusion which has arisen—that’s modern materialism still—and the other side, idealism, or these other forms of philosophy, which Deepak was articulating, and an awful lot of spirituality, which says, “No, no, no, the subject is the reality, and the object is an illusion, just a passing show.”

The argument is, “Well, just look. All you experience is experience.” That was obvious; you can’t dismiss that. So all there is is experience, which feels very superficial, actually, because this is definitely what I’m experiencing. What I experience has to do with my eyes, my ears, but also my ideas. In that way, it is a construct, and, like you said, a bat would experience this room very differently.

But there is something we’re both experiencing. You’re experiencing the same thing from somewhere else. Within my experience, there’s you. When I go off and experience something else, I believe that you will often experience something else too. There’s something there. What’s there is not this. This is my experience of what’s there, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.

Beyond the Subject–Object Divide

That’s, I think, absolutely key for uniting these two perspectives, so that we get rid of the idea that it’s really the object or really the subject, and we recognize that it’s always both. It’s always the two coming together.

That’s, I think, absolutely key for uniting these two perspectives, so that we get rid of the idea that it’s really the object or really the subject, and we recognize that it’s always both. It’s always the two coming together.

So there is an objective nature. One of the key ideas in the new worldview that I’m exploring is an idea which is common in science now: the best way to see this is that we are subjectively experiencing information, which we interpret like this. If we’re going to look at the objective world, we need to understand it as information being interpreted, rather than as this solidity being the way I interpret it. Other things would interpret it very, very differently.

Rick: Last year at this conference, Deepak told a story about—well, we’ll get off Deepak in a few minutes. He’s not here to defend himself, but that seems fair. He told me the story about how Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore had this debate. I guess one of the points in the debate was, “Does the moon exist if we’re not experiencing it?” Einstein said, “Of course, it exists,” and Rabindranath said no, apparently, if I’m getting the story correctly.

I played with that idea a little bit and thought, “All right, what if everybody in the world agrees not to look at the moon?” We still have tides.

Tim: Very good. I love that. That’s brilliant.

Exactly. So what you’ve got there in that imaginary debate is the argument between the two poles. Somehow, they’re both pointing to something, but on their own, neither is right.

For reasons like you said, the moon has its own existence. That’s what makes it different from, say, a dream or something like that, where it’s just images. The image doesn’t have its own existence other than as an image, whereas the moon has its own story going on.

It’s there. It’s been moving and changing, and things have been happening there, whether we observe it or not. What wouldn’t exist is the moon as we experience it. We wouldn’t see the white ball; if there were no eyes, there’d be no rainbow, et cetera. There’d be no green.

These are emergent things that come with us. We change the universe. We create the universe we live in, on the basis of something which preexists us. That’s really important to get.

Rick: Yeah. And while we’re on this, there’s just another point that I keep kicking around. Right now, there’s you and me in this room, and three other guys who are watching this interview, and we’re all seeing basically the same stuff. There’s a lamp, a TV, a door, and a camera.

Obviously, there’s some kind of intersubjective agreement, which implies that there is a deeper template of the structure of things that is not just the fabrication of each individual’s mind or perspective—that something exists irrespective of the perceiver.

It seems to me that there is this whole idea that we just create the universe as we perceive it. Maybe there’s a collective mind that creates the universe as it’s perceived, but certainly each individual doesn’t. We’d have complete chaos.

Do people use this kind of argument when they have this kind of discussion? And what’s the rebuttal to that?

Tim: I don’t think there is one. I think you do end up—people try and resist it—but you end up in what’s known as solipsism, that really all that exists is your experience. Because if you start from the argument, “Look, all that there is is your experience,” that’s what you end up with. So you’re just my experience, and you’re not—I don’t believe that. The world we’re exploring has its own existence. And that’s why it’s so interesting, and why it’s anthropomorphic.

And, to your point, you were absolutely on the button, because we now know that the universe is very, very old, and that consciousness, human beings, even life, is just on the tail end of it. So we want to understand what the universe is. That’s philosophy in one word. We need a different philosophy, which can unite the spiritual intuitions—not the old one. The old one worked because the people who developed it thought the Earth was flat. They had no idea about this. A long time ago, they did a really great job, but we need to update it radically.

And then what modern science has done is just ignore it and can’t address the issues. So somehow, we need a different way, which can take what’s valuable here and what’s valuable here and bring them together into one story.

Evolution, emergence, and time

Rick: Well, yeah. Okay. One other argument—yeah, just let me take a stab at this. Getting back to the peephole idea, or the sense organ of the infinite idea: if we think of the universe as sort of…

My attitude, when I look at things and when I think about things, is that I always have the feeling that God is hiding in plain sight, and that everything we see is like the body of God, as it were. That includes us. We’re part of that body, and we’re sort of sense organs—we’re instruments through which the divine can be conscious of itself.

And according to the capacity of our instrument, we may not perceive everything as God. We might misperceive it as dead or as bad, or anything else. But the instrument can be refined and refined and refined to the point where God recognizes himself in everything. Muktananda used to say, “God dwells within you, as you.”

And I’m not saying that the individual is God, which is what people bristle at when they hear that kind of notion. I’m saying that there’s nothing but God, with God meaning infinite self-referral intelligence, which, through interacting with itself, gives rise to all these forms and phenomena.

I’m drifting off in my thought now, but you probably have a response to that.

Tim: Yeah. Well, I love what you’re saying. It’s absolutely central to my own thought, which is probably why we find ourselves resonating. So let me expand on that in a slightly different way.

It seems to me that the process of cosmic evolution, of emergence—the emergence of new things—has been a process in which things have individuated, and each individual thing is both object and subject right from the start. Not conscious, but object and subject. By that I mean, everything which has become a part of the whole is in relationship to the whole, and it is discriminating it right down to electrochemical discrimination.

Simple atoms and chemicals, and forms of matter, are discriminating the environment. A chemical will relate one way with this chemical, form a compound with this one, blow up with this one, and so on. It’s being read, so it’s reading information, and it is information being read.

As that’s evolving, that’s becoming more and more complex. By the time you reach life, it’s now sensually reading the information. So you’ve got electrochemical, and then it becomes sensual. And then with us, it’s arisen into this realm of psyche, where we’re dealing with concepts and doing all of that. So now we are discriminating it.

And where Deepak’s right is that we now interpret the information through concepts. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but he seems to suggest it might be. I think it’s a great thing; we just need to get the best concepts. Every time we get a better concept, we see a little bit more of the nature of reality because we can discriminate a bit more.

It’s a bit like when we learned art. When we developed eyes, we could now see the information. Now we’ve developed ideas, we can have ideas about what we’re seeing and see and have conversations like this about it.

So that’s the way I see one of the strands of evolution: that it’s happening objectively and subjectively, and that consciousness is emerging in that process, so that it becomes more and more conscious, more and more experiential.

So that’s the way I see one of the strands of evolution: that it’s happening objectively and subjectively, and that consciousness is emerging in that process, so that it becomes more and more conscious, more and more experiential.

Rick: Yeah. We heard a talk at the conference tonight from Robert Lanza. I nabbed him later on and more or less got him to agree to do an interview on these days. But he was talking about biocentrism, and how completely unlikely and essentially impossible it would be for any kind of orderliness, intelligent life forms, or anything else to have come into existence by random chance, which is what materialists seem to want to argue.

He used the example of a million monkeys pounding at typewriters and hoping to produce Shakespeare. They said that if you had a million monkeys pounding at typewriters, just to produce the first few words of Moby-Dick would take trillions of years randomly—many hundreds of times older than the universe is.

He has a brilliant argument about how there are hundreds of variables, any one of which, if it were off by a couple of percentage points, would render life impossible.

Tim: I mean, Roger Penrose estimated—I don’t know how he did it, but he did, mathematically—and the number is just gigantic. How do you explain that? Isn’t that it?

I think Roger’s or Deepak’s explanations don’t work for me. And the reason they don’t work for me is fundamentally because I disagree with them about the nature of time.

Rick: Okay, so wait. You’re saying you don’t agree with what Robert Lanza was saying?

Tim: I agree with that. Oh, yeah. But I don’t think his explanation is correct.

Rick: Okay. So let’s get into that, and don’t let me sidetrack you. I mean, you have a much clearer concept, obviously, of what’s in your book than I do, and the things you want to talk about. But this is what’s coming up as we talk, and it’s interesting. Hopefully, it will segue into other things you want to talk about.

Tim: For sure.

Rick: Yeah. All right. So, okay, well, I actually don’t have a response to what you just said. So take it from there.

Tim: I mean, okay, let’s go for time. Because when I listen to Deepak, when I listen to Roger, they’re very different perspectives, with certain similarities. I’m around a lot of people who see time as an illusion, as something which is unreal, and you go beyond it. I have probably said that myself, Rick.

You probably find it in my books. If you looked at it, you’d probably go, “Tim, you said this.” As I really sat with that over the last ten years, I don’t know what that means.

My method as a philosopher is just to look primarily at my experience and ask, “What can it show me?” What I see is that whenever I look at my experience, I see experience changing over time. And if there was no time, there’d be no experience. It’s fundamental to everything unconscious—there’s never been anything I was conscious of that wasn’t a process of time.

So I’m not talking about measurement here. I’m talking about the very nature of time. It seems to me that what the cosmos is is a process, and that everything in it is a process. In that way, everything—the cosmos itself, you and I—is made of time.

I want to suggest that we’ve got an analogy in the English language which is misleading: we say that time passes, which makes us feel like it’s all gone. When I really pay attention, it seems to me that the better analogy is that time accumulates.

By that I mean that there are some very obvious things: there’s more past now than when we started this interview; there’s more past now than when we first talked years ago; there’s more past now than when the human body evolved, and so on. The past hasn’t gone anywhere, because everything that’s ever happened is implicit in this moment.

If it wasn’t, this would not be this moment—our learning, our meeting, our deciding to do this, or learning to speak. Everything, including the Big Bang, is here. Everything that’s ever happened is implicit in this moment.

This moment is the meeting of everything that has been and everything that could be: the past and the possible. The possible is another word for formlessness or potentiality—something which is potential for everything but hasn’t a form.

This evolving process of form, which is time—the past accumulating—once you get that, then it ceases to be like, “Oh, time is an illusion.” You actually see the importance of this.

Then you can look at the evolution of the universe and see that the universe itself is a process, that the information has been accumulating, and that there’s a tendency, therefore, as it accumulates, for it to evolve and emerge at higher and more emergent levels all the time, which is exactly what we see.

Time itself is pushing us forward. Rather than that being a lesser thing, that’s the process whereby, as you said, the source of the universe is manifesting itself and experiencing itself in deeper and deeper ways.

Everything that’s ever happened is implicit in this moment.

Rick: I obviously only have a layman’s understanding of physics, but as I understand it, Einstein referred to spacetime. That kind of implies it has some reality, some substance—it’s a thing of sorts.

He talked about relativistic time dilation: traveling at different speeds is going to warp your time in different ways. And if you could ride on a photon, there would basically be no time.

Tim: But Einstein would be one of the people who saw time as a type of illusion, suggesting that you could go backward in time. Now, I think he’s mistaken about that, because even if you had the experience of going backward in time, it would be another moment, which came after the previous moment.

There’s never been a moment for anyone that didn’t have two qualities. First, it had never happened before. It’s a new possibility that’s realized. Second, it included everything that happened previously. That’s the nature of every single experience, every single now. It includes everything that’s ever happened and manifests a new possibility.

So it feels like this is fundamental. My conception of time isn’t the same as Einstein’s. It may be similar to people like Rupert Sheldrake and other people who talk about the Akasha, although I’m not sure about its memory until it actually has the—

So you’ve got not so much memory, though, but actually the past. The information of the past is implicit in the present. That’s it. That’s the way it looks to me. If you’ve got that as a foundation, then you can understand emergence in a whole new way.

And ourselves—I mean, the fact that, for me, here’s Tim. And what is Tim? He’s everything that Tim’s ever been, meeting everything that Rick’s ever been.

Yeah, I don’t remember all that, but that’s what I am. And now we’re in each other. This is now a part of who I will be forever, because it’s happened. Suddenly, rather than it being like what Deepak said, that all the past is gone, where has it gone? Well, it hasn’t. It has, and it hasn’t. Nothing is lost. Nothing is lost. Absolutely.

And because nothing is lost, it feels like that’s a key thing about why this process of evolving form is so important.

Rick: Yeah. Your coat was made some while ago. Before that, the cotton plant, or whatever it’s made of, was grown. Before that, there were seeds and other cotton plants, and back and back. It all just kind of keeps going. Everything is there.

Tim: So the place I want to go from there—are you okay for me to roll—

Rick: Just one more thread of the conversation I want to make sure we wrap up. And that is the idea of complexification. I think it’s really important, which is that there seems to be this trend, force, or tendency in the universe to evolve more and more complex forms, which would kind of go against the second law of thermodynamics, that everything’s supposed to just become more entropic. But it’s kind of like a negative entropy sort of thing. You know, what—

Tim: Once you get an idea, look objectively at what’s evolving. Evolution is information in time, and that information is accumulating, right? When there’s just hydrogen, there’s this much information. By the time you get to us, there are 13 billion years of information, which gives rise to emergence.

So the essential idea of emergence—I’m sure you know it, but let’s just say it so everyone’s on the same page—is that in the evolutionary journey, it is creative. New things arrive.

Rick: More and more complexity. Stars explode, and we get heavier elements, and—

Tim: New things. Much simpler examples: We have hydrogen arrive, and then we have oxygen arriving at some point. For the very first time, they combine and we have water, right? And then, for the first time, there’s life. A very simple form of life arises, and then multicellular organisms, and the first sensation.

You have this gradual emergence of deeper, more holistic potentialities, because there’s more information.

Rick: Yeah. And it’s interesting to ask why. Why is that happening? Why is there this greater complexity?

Tim: I think it’s because there’s more and more information.

Rick: Yeah, but that sounds a little dry. I think it’s because the divine, or the cosmic intelligence, or God wants to have a living experience; wants to know itself, himself, or herself through an actual living experience, rather than just as a flat, unmanifest ocean of potentiality. Well, there’s something more to that. We can, of course—

Tim: The information is very dry, because the other side of that is the experiential. It’s being experienced. All right, so let’s jump to that for a second.

If I’m saying that there’s the past and the possible, what can we say about that? Even from the first moment, the beginning of the time stream, this thing—where is it arising from? It feels like, well, you can say it’s arising from its opposite. It’s arising from potentiality. So where’s the universe come from? The potentiality for the universe. You can’t go wrong saying that.

One of the ways we can understand that process, which is not as dry, is that the whole evolutionary process is the realization of potentialities on more and more profound and emergent levels. And it’s reaching—

There’s a lovely line I love from Brian Swimme. I’m cutting it short, but his basic line is: “What have we learned? We’ve learned that if you take hydrogen and wait long enough, it learns to sing opera.”

What have we learned? We’ve learned that if you take hydrogen and wait long enough, it learns to sing opera.

I mean, that’s just gorgeous. It captures it.

From Matter to Psyche, Meaning, and Imagination

For me, the movement I’m interested in is the same one, but it’s like, look, we start with primitive matter. By 13.8 billion years later, it’s arrived at you and me experiencing psyche, or soul, or mind, or imagination, which is not made of matter. We’re experiencing right now a realm that is made of images, made of meaning.

Meaning doesn’t exist anywhere. I’m having ideas, but where are they? Right now, with my body, I’m making funny noises, but you’re hearing meaning. There’s no meaning in the funny noises.

So we’ve gone from matter to mind. Now, what happens with science in the mainstream is it goes, “All right, so we reach the brain and the body, and then there’s this thing, which is a side effect of—”

Rick: “Thing” meaning the mind—

Tim: Yeah. Mind, consciousness, soul—they’re all words for the same thing. The brain dies at the end of that.

Spirituality, on the other hand, says, “No, no, no. That soul or mind—there’s a whole domain. There is a mind domain we go to when we die. It’s something we’ve fallen from. It’s a primal place; we’ve fallen into this.”

What I’m interested in is challenging both of those and saying to science, look, what about if science started with the idea of evolution with Darwin and Wallace? It was a biological thing: Oh my God, all the variety of life has come from simple life. Amazing idea.

Then, 100 years ago, with the Big Bang theory, they went, Oh my God, the whole universe has evolved. Things evolve—not just life; everything has evolved.

So before there was biological evolution, there was all the material evolution. What about if there’s actually a third phase of evolution after biological evolution, which is a whole other domain—the domain of soul, or mind, or psyche, or imagination—not as a side effect, but as a whole emergent level of reality?

So it’s matter, life, and then soul. And it’s what we’re experiencing right now: a nonphysical domain has opened up.

What I want to say to society is, look, there’s this third domain. And what I want to say to spirituality is, how about if soul doesn’t preexist the whole thing, but everything—literally everything in form—has evolved?

What this domain that spirituality has been exploring actually is, is the most emergent level that has come last in the process. It’s opened up through the evolutionary process, so the soul dimension, or whatever you want to call it, has arisen through this accumulation of more and more past.

Rick: Okay, so when you say that, are you talking about individual souls, or are you talking about soul with a capital S, the universal soul?

Tim: I’m wanting to use all these words because they’ve got different meanings to different people, and because they have different qualities. I’m interested in pointing to the experience we’re already having.

I’m experiencing body sensation, and I’m experiencing imagination, or psyche, or soul, or mind—whatever name you give it. If you go into that, which I’m sure you’ve done in meditation, with power plants, or shamanic journeying, or 101 other things, there’s a whole universe out there to explore.

What I’m suggesting is that this has arisen as a collective domain, just like this is a collective domain, so that each domain is a collective domain individually experienced. And it’s the same with imagination.

Rather than being “Oh, it’s just imagination,” imagination is the taking of experiences and turning them into images. When I think, for instance, I am imagining speaking. When I dream, I’m imagining.

This realm of soul is the result of the process of evolution and is a deeper reality—not an illusion at the end, but the most emergent level that the universe has reached yet, which is why it’s the latest thing.

Rick: Okay, so I guess what I was puzzling about was that you almost seemed to be implying that consciousness, if that’s what you meant by soul, is—

Tim: It’s not what I mean by soul.

Rick: Okay. Because ordinarily, if we think of consciousness, we think of it as primordial, with everything arising from that.

Tim: Yeah, so I challenge that for myself as well. It feels to me like consciousness, in the sense of knowing—knowledge comes with knowing. That is knowing something. But the fact that I’m conscious now, and when I sleep I’m not, or that the chair isn’t conscious—that’s an emergent quality.

Where it’s coming from is this potentiality. I’m not sure the best word is consciousness. Maybe being, because it just is potentiality. But it becomes conscious.

And it’s not just consciousness. First, it’s consciousness in biology. The first thing is this consciousness of looking: I see the world, sensation. That’s the first thing. Then there’s this other level of consciousness, which is imagination, or soul. Now we’re on another level. It’s not made of matter; it’s made of images.

What I want to suggest—and it’s a big jump for science—is that this domain which has opened up is the domain in which we survive the death of the body, and which has developed as an emergent reality.

Once there was no biology, and then that whole area of biology emerged—a huge domain of biology. From that has emerged this other domain, which is a domain of soul.

It’s information on another level. It’s all information. And the soul level is a level in which there’s no death. There’s no death because there’s nothing to die. It’s not made of matter.

Rick: Here, you know, ancient religions, at their best, didn’t know 2,000 years ago—

Tim: What I’m trying to do is take what they knew 2,000 years ago and put it in an evolutionary context, rather than it being a fall from a great state—that we made this huge mistake and fell into this, and we’ve got to get out. Actually, it’s the other way around: it has emerged from this, and it’s the cutting edge of a process.

So there’s been no mistake; there’s been no fall. What’s happening is that we’re reaching further and deeper into it. As we go deeper into soul—and we can talk about the awakening of God in relation to this in a minute—more and more emergent possibilities are arising.

So, if you like, in relation to death, I’m saying that heaven has evolved. I’m saying that it’s not merely imagination, but imagination as a deep reality. If you look at the history of how people saw heaven, you can see it evolving. I wrote a book about that years ago.

Rick: Not heaven evolving, if there is such a thing, but people’s understanding of it.

Tim: Well, I’m actually suggesting that it has evolved, a bit like sensation evolved. There was no blue, and then there was blue. Then there were other colors, and there was hearing, and, well…

Rick: You’re kind of getting back to Deepak’s point, which is that objective reality somehow depends upon our understanding or ability to experience it.

Tim: How we experience it depends on how we interpret the information. As we interpret it in deeper and deeper ways, more and more emerges. And not just for me, but for everyone. As we experience it on deeper levels—as it experiences itself, to use what you said, on deeper levels—more and more emerges.

There were once no ideas, and then there was the first idea, and then ideas of their own, just like biology. Now there’s a whole domain of ideas. That’s the collective soul. Carl Jung explored it, and all those people explored it, and it now has an existence.

What we experience at death has also evolved. You can see that with the Greeks: it’s shades, it’s hardly there. Then you get the projections of life—happy hunting grounds or the drinking halls of Valhalla. Then, with the great religions, you get all lands full of Buddhas. Now we listen to NDEs, and it’s everything. You get a vista of something like a dream—not in the pejorative sense of “it’s just a dream,” but actually the most emergent level of reality in which we can experience things in this really beautiful, fluid way.

We’re in a world of images, rather than this more constrained way, because this is a world of more rigid form. Does that make sense, what I’m trying to say?

Rick: I think it does. Let me bounce it back to make sure I understand what you’re saying. Somebody 2,000 years ago dies. First of all, we’re talking about the existence of what happens in some realm you might go to after you die, which many people might not accept. Let’s presume that there is such a thing as an emerging reality. Many people listening will take that for granted anyway. But if you don’t, then just use it as a thought experiment.

What you’re saying is that if somebody dies 2,000 years ago, they’re going to go to a Motel 6 in the sky, whereas somebody who dies now might go to a Hilton or a Ritz-Carlton or something—that the actual…

Tim: The world has gotten bigger; it’s evolved into a richer place. It’s the imagination, which we can enter into, and it’s getting richer and richer, with more and more in the past—more of the past, if you like.

Rick: If we evolve as conscious beings, we kind of evolve or contribute to the enrichment of the possible realms of experience that we could co-explore.

Tim: Because everything we experience becomes part of the past. There’s that. So that’s the internet: everything that’s come into form has come into form forever and is now part of the repertoire of the universe.

Rick: Could be. I can accept that as a working hypothesis, as something to contemplate.

Tim: And what it does—and that’s a good thing. You know, it’s like, “Hey, I don’t know.” Let me state the premise, because we should say that, right? The premise for me—it starts my book and every talk I give—is, “Look, this is an awesome mystery. I don’t know anything. I don’t know anyone who knows what this is.”

What I do think is that, in this mystery, we need to find the best explanation we can. That’s the job of philosophy, and that’s what I happen to be—a philosopher. My job is to find the best explanation.

What we need is an explanation that can unite these two things. Once you’ve got one, what that’s done is say, “Look, this domain that spirituality is exploring has a reality and is part of an evolving universe that starts with matter, goes through life, and arrives at soul.”

Those intuitions we have about meaning—on the lower levels, there is no meaning in that way, because it’s arisen later. It’s deeper. This idea of immortality—you can start framing it in a really interesting way. You can ask, “Okay, so really, what are we asking?”

We’re asking whether this experience I’m having right now—this disembodied experience of imagination—and this embodied experience of sensation continue when the embodied experience of sensation stops because the body is no longer functioning. Does this stop as well, or does that continue? Is it possible that it can continue?

If it’s impossible, as science and materialism say, then that’s it. If it is possible, then how?

To use what I hope isn’t too crude an analogy, but is a quick way of getting it across: if you see that everything is information on different levels, then you can see that when I wrote my book, Soul Story, I worked on a computer. It looked like the book’s information was on the computer. You could see the cover: Soul Story—a bold response to the soul crisis in modern culture.

Rick: Sure. I’ve heard discussions among physiologists and others who say that we don’t really know how memories are stored in the brain, or anything else.

It kind of leads you in the direction of using a television analogy. If you’re watching television and seeing an old Bonanza episode, you’re not going to find that if you take apart the television. It’s not in there. The television is just a physical apparatus for presenting information to us that exists in a different realm altogether.

That would account also for past-life memories and things like that.

Tim: Then you’ve got the idea of, okay, we exist now, and everything is a stream of time. I call that the soma stream—the body. There’s a body stream.

But I’m also experiencing this other thing, which is a soul stream, a stream of images. If that continues after this ends, then two types of information are moving into and out of a psychosomatic relationship.

That makes what, on the face of it, sounds like a nutty idea become much more plausible. It’s like tuning your phone via Bluetooth to your speaker. There are two distinct things with information coming into relationship with each other and moving out of relationship with each other. But they’ve all been part of one evolutionary process.

There’s no fall from some perfect state. Everything is reaching toward a more emergent state.

When I wrote Soul Story, the information looked like it was on the computer in a particular place. If I dropped coffee on the computer, the book would be gone. But, of course, I was smart enough to have it backed up on the cloud. The information was on the cloud, so we destroyed the computer, but it wasn’t gone.

That’s the sort of analogy I’m playing with: information on two different levels. Clearly, at the moment, it’s linked to the processing of my brain. If you give me a sleeping tablet, render me unconscious, or hit me on the head, I could lose the function to speak, or other functions.

But all of that information is also on this other level, because I’m not seeing the psyche as a byproduct of anything. I’m seeing it as a domain in its own right, like spirituality does.

God as the future of evolution

Rick: I don’t know if this notion of a fall from a more perfect state does justice to all the ancient philosophical or religious traditions. You would know better than I.

Tim: Of course it can’t possibly do justice to them, because they’re rich, especially in India. But there is a fundamental idea—not in everything, but it’s pretty common. You can understand why, because people are waking up. They’re experiencing this deeper reality, and then they’ve got this.

They have no notion of the evolutionary process. They’ve got what we have today, and they’re seeing it as a better state that we’ve fallen from. So they’re prejudicing the soul as more real.

I’m also saying that soul is more real, but I’m saying it’s more real because it’s the latest thing to have emerged. It’s the deepest potential.

Rick: But as I understand it, the Vedic tradition, and probably some others, do have the idea of evolution through many, many lives—not that you fell from something, but that you started out at a fairly low state and are just working your way up from rocks to vegetables to little animals.

Tim: That’s the paradox. If you go to the ancient traditions, they’ve got a very—I mean, evolution is really a spiritual idea. You do have that sense. Yes, you’re right. But with the soul itself, usually you get this idea that we fall into the illusion of Maya, that we’ve become enmeshed in it.

The traditions vary, and you see different strands in them. So there is sometimes an evolutionary strategy. Right, yes, you’re right. The key thing is: do we see that final thing, that soul dimension, as something that has emerged through that process?

If you take that incarnation map—the transmigration of the soul, as with Pythagoras—then that is implied by it. Actually, that’s right.

Rick: When I mention ancient traditions, I’m not saying that the truth must be found in these ancient traditions. The truth is whatever it is, regardless of the degree to which any tradition has been able to understand it.

Maybe some of them understood it, and maybe some of them more closely approximated reality than others. We could find some pretty clear hints in them. But it may be something quite other than what any of them have understood.

Tim: What’s so lovely about the evolutionary, emergent idea—whether it’s from ancient Hinduism, Pythagoras, or from now—is that it links everything together.

Right now, I’m surrounded by all of those levels. There’s primitive matter in all of its forms. There’s biology, and then there’s soul happening. It’s all here.

I have to live with all of that. I have to live with an emergent universe. I have to live with my bodily needs, whether I like it or not. I have to live with cause and effect, whether I like it or not.

And then there’s this other realm where I’m free to journey through the universe in my imagination and go off and explore.

Rick: Like Stephen Hawking.

Tim: With very different conclusions, yes—different conclusions, for sure.

David: Yeah. Just wondering about the question of cycles, though. You were proposing a fairly linear process with evolution, but most of nature runs in cycles.

Tim: I’m not saying it’s from one moment to the culmination. I think what I tried to say was that it has a tendency towards greater emergence, but in every direction, and everything is still evolving. So it’s not like, “Well, it just all led to us.” These are the big kind of stepping stones, which you can see, but everything on every level is still evolving.

And within that, yeah, of course, there are constant cycles. But what it looks like to me is that the cycles going round are more like a wheel going forward, or a spiral. So, you know, it’s fall again, just like it was last year, but this fall is different because it includes last fall, and next fall will be different because it will include this one.

Rick: You mean autumn? I was thinking of the fall of Adam or something.

Tim: I was trying to be American! I was really trying to be American! Now, I could say we could call it fall, and we call it—

Rick: Autumn, either one.

Tim: So we can do English. I was trying so hard.

Rick: Okay, yeah. So all I’m trying to say is that those cycles exist within a greater process, and through the basic fact of the accumulation of the past, every new cycle includes the previous cycle. It doesn’t just go round; it goes round and accumulates through that process.

Yes, like a progressive thing. Okay, so, just getting back to God. You said you want to get back to God.

Tim: We all want to get back to God, Rick. No, I don’t want to get back to God; I want to get forward to God.

That’s a key idea of where the book ends up. And it’s a big idea for me, and it’s something which I’ve been sitting with for a long time: the problem of God. I experience, and I have done since I was a little boy, a relationship with, and being part of and an expression of, something which is full of goodness and full of love. It’s just an ecstatic relationship. You know, I love reading Rumi because it reminds me of that beloved.

The problem, obviously, which theologians and philosophers have wrestled with is the classic problem of evil. If you’ve got a good God, and He’s at the beginning of time—if, whatever, you dispense with the Christian God and just have whatever imagination you want—He’s still God. Why is the world like this? Really, why is it? How come babies get AIDS and die horribly? What is going on with a process that involves such suffering?

Rick: I have an answer.

Tim: Okay. Do you want to throw in yours first, and I’ll give you mine?

Rick: Yeah. If you’re going to have a relative creation, then by definition there have to be pairs of opposites.

Tim: And I’ve said that and written that in my books. Yeah. But when I look at a baby dying of AIDS, it’s not good enough.

Rick: And then what’s yours?

Tim: Because that being of love and goodness, if it’s all-powerful, is allowing this. I don’t like it. This is not a God I like. This is a God I want to have words with.

And then the other thing we’ve got on top of that is what I want to call the problem of absurdity. It’s like what we know about the evolutionary processes. It is amazing, but it’s also really crazy. So if God wants to get to us waking up to soul, there are 120 million years of dinosaurs ripping the hell out of each other and five extinctions. This God’s mad and indecisive this time in the world. Yeah, right. It’s kind of crazy.

Rick: He’s creative.

Tim: So how about this idea? I mean, it’s a pretty good movie. Well, that was a good movie, but there’s an awful long time just out in the dark. It’s like, what is that?

Rick: I mean, look at how long it took to develop a planet on which there could be any kind of life. Indeed, billions—I mean, billions of years.

Tim: Ages. So the whole process seems to make a lot more sense if, for me, I take the more scientific view: look, there is no great Being making this happen. This may be an expression, but this is not happening because there’s some loving Being making it happen. It’s just happening.

So what I want to suggest is that the mistake we’ve made is to put that being of love, that transcendent God, at the beginning of time. Actually, we need to put it at the end, or rather, see it as what we’re moving towards.

That works arising from its nondual, non-form potentiality, which is everything. It’s unconscious, it’s unformed, it’s not in time; it is potentiality. That’s where it’s arising from, and that’s with us all the time. It’s arising from that. As the form is arising and these potentialities are being realized in deeper and deeper ways, the deepest thing comes last.

So the first thing that’s arising is matter, then life, and then soul. Where does it arise from? It’s the potentiality forming itself as information.

Rick: What is that potentiality?

Tim: Well, that’s what I’m calling it: potentiality, because I think we can’t describe it as anything else. We can use a traditional word like spirit or Brahman, or these ideas, but it’s Brahman without qualities. It’s nirguna. It’s not this being of love.

So the questions that I raised—the problem of absurdity and the problem of evil, the traditional problems—don’t arise, because what it’s doing is just manifesting and realizing potentiality. Where it’s going is towards the realization of deeper and deeper potentialities.

Potentiality Experiencing Itself Through Time

What is happening at the leading edge—and you said this at the start, which is why I wanted to come back to it—is that potentiality is realizing and experiencing itself through the evolving, emerging time streams.

At this point, it is not only experiencing soul, but, as you said, if we’re ready or we’ve reached a certain place, we reach a place where that consciousness in soul can reflect back on itself and go, “Oh, my depth. What I really am, at the root of my being, is the Being of everything, the source of everything.” At which point, this unconscious oneness from which it’s arising has become conscious oneness. So we’ve gone from unconscious oneness—

Rick: But it really hasn’t ever become anything other than what it has always been. All it is—but in light of, in terms of our experience—

Tim: No, I’m not saying that. Personally, I think that the whole point, and why this is so important, is because it is manifesting and realizing itself. As it does that, it is becoming conscious of itself: first through increasing levels of form and then, at a certain point, as formlessness itself.

So when we become conscious of the oneness, that potentiality of spirit is becoming conscious through us.

God is evolving.

Rick: Yes.

Tim: The leading edge is that this whole universe is the fruit. God is the fruit as well as the root. The root is unconscious potentiality, and it is arising as conscious potentiality. It is unity, and that is love.

That’s the place I want to go to, and I probably need to say a little bit more to make sense of that. But what I want to end up saying is this: just as all of these cells, which are individuals, got it together at some point and made one thing called Tim—a communion of cells—to create something which includes and transcends them all, there is a communion of souls arising when we realize oneness, which is God, which is that transcendent spirit of love.

That is coming into being. As we ourselves evolve through the process of living and dying, living and dying, it is coming into greater and greater existence, so that the universe is actually God coming into being in the fullest possible way.

God is the fruit as well as the root.

Rick: Well, we’re talking about one little planet here, of probably trillions of inhabited planets, maybe in this universe, and there may be an infinite number of universes, or something. Some areas are asleep, and some areas are awake.

Tim: Absolutely right.

Rick: All those planets and all those universes are at different levels of evolution. And yet the intelligence which contains all of it and, through interaction with itself, gives rise to all of it—you would almost be saying that intelligence is at different stages of its evolution in different little areas.

Tim: But that’s exactly what we’ve got around us, isn’t it? There are areas where there’s matter, plants, and so on. The plant is relatively more energy than me, and we’ve got that already. That’s exactly what we’ve got.

So the idea is that when the more emergent arises, the other doesn’t disappear. It’s just that the more emergent transcends and includes it.

Rick: Yeah. So there are realms which are just celestial realms. The houses are made of celestial material; everything is enlightened there. The rocks are enlightened, if there are rocks. Everything is just brimming with celestial life. It’s a very awake, alive place—total sattva, no tamas.

And then there are other places which are sort of dull and dark and repressed. But again, it’s pockets: this pocket is very bright, this pocket is very dim. I wonder if that even matters in terms of the grand totality of things—whether the grand totality is actually waking up as a whole, or whether it just sort of has effervescence going on.

Tim: I think both. I think all of that is what’s happening in form, but as it wakes up to essence, to being, we are coming into something which transcends to a new level.

Just as we can see completely new emergent levels arising—the most dramatic of which is soul, because it’s not made of matter—that is leading to something which transcends and includes all souls.

The image which is very powerful for me with this is the experience reported again and again of the love-light at death, or the translation in the Book of the Dead, where it says it’s the luminosity of potentiality.

There’s the luminosity of potentiality. The traditional idea, which is often said—and again, the kind of negative view, in my opinion—is that you’ve got to dissolve into it. There it is; let it all go and just go back to the oneness.

That feels completely wrong to me. That feels like the opposite. It seems to me that we are conscious through our individuality, that only through subject and object, and through developing greater and greater individuality, do we develop greater and greater consciousness.

So the goal, for want of a better word, is actually the opposite of dissolving into it. Because if you dissolve into the potentiality, actually you go unconscious. We do it every night.

Rick: Even when you die.

Tim: Yeah. So if you aren’t—if the forming of the soul, which is what we’re doing now and always doing, again, is not some mistake that we have to let go of and dissolve, but actually we’re forming ourselves because we’re made of all we experience.

We experience the past. We’re forming ourselves into a more and more robust individuality, which can actually enter into consciousness of the formless and stay conscious.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s consistent with what people like Michael Newton would say. Do you know Michael Newton?

Tim: No, I don’t.

Rick: He was a hypnotherapist who was regressing people back to past lives and then accidentally started regressing them back to the period between lives. He specialized in that and worked with thousands of people in that way, mapping out the similarities between their stories, which were kind of remarkable. He was able to provide a description, based on the collective experience, of the kind of terrain one encounters when one dies.

The general idea is not that you just sort of merge back into total oneness, but that you come away with knowledge of this life and an assessment of the lessons you’ve learned. You set up your next situation based on the lessons you need to learn. So it’s a very active, engaged process—not just a sort of rest period where you chill for a while.

Tim: That sounds good. I look forward to that.

Rick: Yeah, just kick back.

Tim: Sorry, but that sounds very congruent with it. There’s an image that somebody shared with me when I was writing the book. A woman I met randomly at an event I wasn’t even planning to attend came up and started telling me her near-death experience, which captured it perfectly in an image. She said, “What I saw were souls like sparks going into the light and falling away. And the light was all the sparks.”

In that way, it feels like, yeah, that transcendent being of love toward which we’re emerging as the fruit of this evolutionary process—we are all the filaments of that. We are all, when we come together, just like when all of this comes together, you get Tim, you get the body. When souls enter unity consciousness, this greater thing emerges.

I can’t know. Just like a cell can’t possibly know what it’s like to be Tim, I can’t know what it’s like to be God, right? But what I can know is what it’s like to commune in God. I know exactly what that feels like, and it feels like love. It’s the deepest thing I ever experience.

I can’t know. Just like a cell can’t possibly know what it’s like to be Tim, I can’t know what it’s like to be God, right? But what I can know is what it’s like to commune in God. I know exactly what that feels like, and it feels like love. It’s the deepest thing I ever experience.

The reason that the world isn’t full of it is because it’s the newest thing. It’s the thing which has emerged last—not just because it’s emerging last, but because it didn’t start with love; it’s ending with love. It started with hydrogen and is ending with love, justice, compassion, and empathy.

🎵 Bringing heaven to Earth

Rick: I think people throughout history have experienced it, but they’ve been rather uncommon. Now we hopefully are entering into an age in which they’re becoming more common.

Tim: Of course, I’m not saying it’s only arising now. It’s been arising and developing through human history. But in terms of the evolutionary scope of 13.8 billion years, these deeper qualities arise last. It’s the same thing in human culture. Human culture has been on this huge journey, which has allowed us to soften, deepen, and find compassion and things that really weren’t present before, except among individuals or small groups of individuals.

As an historian, the thing that strikes me is how crazy people are when they think the past was good, because it was brutal and difficult. Now you’re going to die from a toothache. Oh, my God. Dentists.

Rick: Yeah, George Washington had a miserable time and had wooden false teeth, and Napoleon had hemorrhoids.

Tim: Really tough. No wonder people thought this was a mistake and that we should get out. It’s like, let’s get back to that place, which just in our imagination looks great. But we can make it heavenly here. It’s tough, but we’ve transformed it.

One of the ways we’ve transformed it is through a little idea that’s one of my favorites. What if you get the image of this evolution of heaven, if you like, and the soul? What are we doing? We’re doing it right now. Every time you have a good idea and make it a reality, you bring a little bit of heaven to Earth.

You actually reach up into that domain, find something beautiful, and then bring it here. So there’s my little heaven-to-Earth idea in my book. Someone did the jacket. That’s very nice. We did the microphone.

Rick: Yeah, that’s really good. And we’re bringing it here. We’re—

Tim: We’re all—

Rick: We’re sure. I mean, every creature created, every bridge, everything—we can’t see anything apart from your body that didn’t start as an idea. Ideas and creativity were channeled into a specific, concrete thing.

Tim: That’s where evolution is happening now. Biological evolution is far too slow.

Rick: Some ideas are channeled into bombs and implements of torture.

Tim: Yeah, but—

Rick: You know, there’s sort of—

Tim: I wouldn’t say that’s a channeling of heavenly intelligence, but rather of the hellish, darker, rajasic levels of creation.

You can see it. I know you have a really interesting presentation coming up on nonduality, ethics, and enlightenment, and I’m looking forward to it. One of the insights which comes to me from this process is that what we see as evil or bad, even in the grand sense, is simply where we’ve been and what we need to leave behind in the process.

One of the things I think is important is that, if you take the epitome of evil for most people—if you say, “Who’s an evil man?” people might say Adolf Hitler—and God knows he did evil things. But actually, if he’d lived at the time of Alexander, he probably would have been Adolf the Great. If he’d lived in the time of Charlemagne, we would have looked back on him differently, because people were celebrated for doing those things. He was a great conqueror who conquered a whole area. Okay, he lost in the end, but he conquered it.

Because it was in the twentieth century, we’ve reached a point where we need to leave that horrible, violent, nationalistic thing behind. The Romans did it, and the Greeks did it, and it’s like, enough! So now that becomes something repugnant to us. That’s because we’re reaching a deeper and deeper understanding all the time.

Rick: Yeah, our standards have evolved. Even at the soul level, look at what’s going on in the United States. There are a lot of things that were tolerated fifty or a hundred years ago. The way women were treated, the way Black people were treated, and the way gay people were treated have all changed quickly and changed a lot.

Tim: I think it’s hugely important to see that, because a lot of people think that everything’s going horribly wrong. Of course, there are huge problems, and things can go horribly wrong. Cultures can collapse. But if you take the biggest sweep, we still live in the most peaceful time in the whole of history.

The role of women and people of different races has been completely transformed. It’s remarkable what we’ve done. We live healthier lives. The evolution of the soul has led to the evolution of the world in the most incredible ways. Just the fact that Europe has been at peace for the first time ever—I mean, just that—

Rick: Yeah, it’s funny. We’ve somehow segued from this really abstract philosophical discussion about the nature of God and humanity, the mechanics of manifestation, the purpose of creation, and all that stuff into talking about the evolution of social issues in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Tim: Because they’re all linked, because they’re all the same thing. Let’s just touch on purpose. One of the things repugnant to science is the idea that the universe has a purpose, because that puts a big man at the front going, “I intend this.” They don’t want that, and I don’t want that.

Rick: It implies some sort of sentience to the laws of nature and the functioning and development of everything.

Tim: Exactly. But once you say, “Look, it’s not so much that the universe has a purpose; it’s more that the purpose is inherent in its nature,” then it makes sense. What the universe is, is the realization of ever-more emergent potentialities. That’s what it is. Those potentialities include the accumulation of time and the emergence of more.

So here we are. What’s our purpose? You and I are also part of that, and we’re doing this conversation, looking to realize the most emergent ideas that we can find. We’re looking to bring those into the world. That’s the purpose.

In social issues, it becomes the same thing. What’s the most emergent solution we can find to the problems we now face? How can we come in, rather than leave for some enlightened la-la land? How can we engage with the evolutionary process with greater consciousness, so that you get an enlightenment which is totally about the life process? It’s about embodying it. It’s about coming in.

With this great love which is arising, how can you take that great love that arises in unity consciousness and share it and bring it into the world, so it starts to permeate the rest of the universe? That’s what we’re starting to do. Let’s be realistic: that’s what we’re starting to do.

Rick: What’s coming to mind is that there are any number of things that could do us in, with climate change being one of the most likely in terms of how devastating it could be. Then there’s the potential for nuclear war, starting with North Korea, and the potential for incredibly virulent viruses to emerge.

Tim: Antibiotics that don’t work anymore.

Rick: And genetic engineering—

Tim: You just want to cheer us up.

Rick: Life sucks and you die.

Tim: Well, that’s reassuring, actually.

Rick: What I’m leading to is that I have a sense, from my own personal observation, which is totally unscientific, that there’s a counterbalancing force rising to meet those challenges.

Tim: Yes.

Rick: We’re seeing it in the proliferation of awakening and interest in spirituality and all that stuff. Many people might say it’s a David-and-Goliath kind of situation, because the problems are so big and huge. But look who won that battle, right?

The reason I think that this David of rising consciousness has a chance against the Goliath of the multinational corporations, the nuclear threat, climate change, and all that is that the subtle is more powerful.

Tim: Yes, something very subtle.

Rick: It’s operating at a more causal level.

Tim: And it’s because it’s more emergent. Yes, the more emergent is more powerful, and it’s the future. It just is, because what’s more emergent is always the future. It’s what’s going to grow.

And so we’ve got this situation now where the leading edge is Awakening. Yes, that’s the leading edge of this 13.8 billion years of evolution. It’s still small, but it’s happening to more and more people. As that happens, this connectivity, this love, comes in.

And that is—here’s a confession—really, all this grand philosophy is a way for me to have a rational, robust understanding to underpin the intuitions that arise for me in the deep awake state. They are actually really childish or childlike. I’d say the fundamental insight is the feeling of, “Look, despite all the suffering, life is essentially good. Death is safe. What really matters is love.”

What I get from this philosophy is: that’s right, death is safe; what matters is bringing in this deeper thing, which is love. And it is fundamentally good—not because there’s no suffering, but because that’s where it’s going. It’s always moving toward the greater good, and that redeems the past because it leads to something better.

Just like a terrible thing that happens to you can become a funny story because it worked out all right, if we’re moving ever toward the more emergent, toward the good, then there’s reason for intense optimism. I can’t throw that optimism away. It’s huge in me.

🕊️ A new synthesis of science and spirituality

Rick: Yeah. People have been doing what we’re doing for thousands of years, just spinning philosophies to try to understand and make sense of their experience, to articulate their deeper desires and conceptions and feelings about the way things work, and so on. I think it’s a natural human thing to do.

Tim: We need that. We have stories. We need to never lose touch with the mystery. Never get certain. Always have doubt—tons of doubt. Doubt everything. I spend my whole time doubting everything I say, and then I find the thing that holds up the best. I hold on to that until I find something better.

Hopefully, in progress, the next generation picks it up and goes, “That’s not good enough. How about this?” Right now, we need a new understanding that can bring in these more emergent possibilities. We need that, and it needs to link deep wisdom with scientific knowledge.

What we’re doing in this conversation—I mean, anything I’m contributing feels like just the beginning of the beginning. Of course, there are loads of other people doing it. But between us, we can establish something whereby this stuff, which otherwise gets dismissed as woo-woo, can come in with power. We can say, “No, this is saying something important and real.” It links everything, so our human understanding is no longer split down the middle but can actually be one narrative.

Rick: Yeah, well, I think that this is essential. In order for this stuff we’re talking about to be most influential and impact the culture, people like ourselves and others really do need to learn how to articulate it—not only between ourselves, but also between disciplines, across the bridge and across the divide from pure spirituality to pure science.

That’s what this conference is about, exactly, because science is the dominant and most influential form of knowledge in the world. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. It works in many ways. Spirituality isn’t going to just do an end run around it.

Tim: The problem for spirituality, it seems to me, is that science has just taken off. It’s evolved at such a rate, and spirituality hasn’t kept up. It’s still living way back in the past. Now, there’s a lot of great stuff in the past, but it’s out of date. Spirituality needs to rapidly catch up, and then it can stand on its own terms. The two can join.

Rick: And there are people who are helping it do that.

Tim: There are many people here—good people.

Rick: Maybe we’re helping a little bit.

Tim: Good people. Hopefully, we can help a little bit too.

Rick: Yeah. Obviously, even though science is so powerful and has progressed so much in the last few hundred years, it’s obviously a really mixed blessing. It’s so dangerous. It’s given us weaponry and various other things that are impacting the environment so severely.

There’s something missing in science that it desperately needs in order to be more beneficial. I think spirituality has exactly what it needs.

Tim: Exactly.

Rick: And on the flip side, science has something that spirituality needs, which is a rigorous, empirical, systematic approach, so that spirituality doesn’t get lost in woo-woo, imagination, and New Age ooga-booga. It is required to be pragmatic.

Tim: It has to be. It has to be willing to be a rational, really strong question. The story that I’ve been creating—and it is a narrative, a conceptual narrative; it can’t be anything else—is primarily about saying, “Look, this is my experience of life.” As I said at the start, that varies from synchronous magic to causal, banal, repetitive physics. That coexists.

My explanation is that these are different domains that coexist. We have the soul domain, which is full of meaning and in which events happen synchronously, and we have this other thing we’ve come from, which is cause and effect. Then it becomes one thing. If we can get that—

Rick: Yeah, I love that. One thing that I have a feeling I’ve said before is that, a few hundred years from now—I don’t know how long, but let’s say a couple of hundred years—it will seem quaint that there used to be these two streams of knowledge, science and spirituality, and that they were considered different and perhaps at odds with one another.

There will have evolved, hopefully, a kind of unified endeavor that includes the best of science and spirituality, and much more that will have evolved by then. It will just be, “This is how we learn and progress more and more,” with a thing that involves the subjective technologies and the objective technologies. They aren’t at all in conflict; they complement one another.

Tim: Maybe I’m biased here, but because it’s the more emergent, eventually it will be seen, in my humble opinion. What spirituality is concerned about, once it becomes a truly evolutionary, emergent form of spirituality, is the most important thing, because it’s the latest thing and the deepest thing.

The irony is that science is all soul work, really. It’s all ideas.

Rick: It’s all inspiration and intuition.

Tim: It’s studying what’s below it from this conceptual place. So once you get that, then the whole thing is—this is where the action is. That’s where the action is for all of us.

Rick: Yeah, and the really good scientists who have advanced their fields are able to dip into a deep, intuitive, almost mystical level of understanding. Many of them report that. One of the lovely things is that it comes from imagination.

Tim: Yeah, that’s where it comes from: imagination. That’s what I’m saying. Imagination is the realm through which we bring the new in.

Rick: Yeah. Even now, the best of science is a mystical endeavor. I’d say that the best of spirituality is also a scientific endeavor, because there are people who approach spirituality in a real, systematic way and aren’t content with loose and fuzzy thinking.

It’s cool to consider, because I think we’re contemplating the direction of the culture and of human knowledge, and how things might progress over the next several generations and so on.

Tim: The movement that I describe in the book is how we’ve gone from a really irrational, mythic form of religion, which has some depth to it, and then science has come along and tried to replace that with rational science. I think the new synthesis will be a rational spirituality.

By “rational,” I simply mean something that has good reasons behind it. I don’t mean we can reduce spirituality to science. We can’t, because you can’t measure these things. The scientific method really applies primarily to physics, and a little bit to biology. It’s much more rooted in anything that can be easily repeated. Physics is very good for that.

Once you get onto the psyche, it’s not easy to repeat any of it. You’re in a different realm. You can still believe something for a good reason, rather than because you just like the sound of it, because some book or tradition says so. You’ve actually got an understanding that says, “That is the best way I can understand what I know and what I experience for now.”

Rick: Yeah. One thing that I find hard to understand about how spirituality might become more scientific is simply the fact that there are so many varieties of spiritual experience, and it’s so subjective. It’s such a vast territory with so many variables.

Tim: I don’t think it can be scientific in that sense.

Rick: Maybe not. You’d like to think that if spirituality refers to a certain realm of deeper reality, that it should be able to be mapped out clearly and systematically, and not just be a confused mess according to who’s thinking about it.

Tim: Well, maybe. As we go deeper, perhaps we’ll find ways of doing that. But right now, the method associated with science—the basic experimental method—is much more suited to the lower levels of emergence.

What I’m saying is that the science that’s really done well is physics.

Rick: And even there, they only know some little, tiny fraction of what’s going on, of course.

Tim: And the further back they go, the more mysterious it becomes. But in that middle bit, they’ve done iPhones.

Rick: And GPS devices.

Tim: Incredible. Incredible. All of that has come from the understanding of physics. But for me, it’s no surprise, because physics is the most primitive emergent level. It’s still complex, but it’s the first thing to emerge. So it’s the first thing we’ll come to understand.

Rick: It’s the most fundamental.

Tim: Yeah.

Rick: We’re talking about “fundamental” for exactly that reason. Symmetries break once you get more complex.

Tim: Because the thing about the emergent view, whether in science or spirituality, is that it’s the opposite of the reductionist view. The reductionist view says that to understand the greater thing, you reduce it to its elements. So really, Rick, I think I’m talking to you, but you’re really just a pile of chemicals formed into this shape, clearly—

Rick: You don’t understand anything.

Tim: That is just, you know, all forms of reductionism, to me, are nonsense. If I had a pile of all the chemicals here, and I had you, they would not be the same. No, because the more emergent level has brought about information in a greater, more emergent way. So…

Rick: All those chemicals have been organized in a very ingenious way. Yeah, you know, so trying to understand the car by taking every last little part and spreading it out on the field—you no longer understand what a car is or what it can do.

Tim: Yeah, so the emergent thing is the opposite of that reductionist thing. Which means that once you get that, it’s like, well, the more emergent levels are going to take more emergent ways to understand. So, no surprise: the first thing we got was physics. We’re now making quite a lot of headway with biology, and then maybe we’re going to end up making that same headway with soul and with the domain that we exist in, which is not made of matter. But, you know, we’ll get there.

Rick: Yeah, I was listening to some talk by a psychologist the other day, and he was kind of joking around about how diverse and fragmented psychology is. There are so many different theories and approaches and ideas. He was comparing that with, you know, what if chemists worked that way? There would be 20 different opinions as to what some chemical reaction is or something. That would be considered ridiculous.

Tim: How simple chemistry is compared to the vast complexity of the psyche. Yeah, I mean, the level of complexity that we’re dealing with—it’s no surprise to me at all that it’s much more complicated. We need a whole different approach if we’re going to deal with that more emergent level of reality.

Rick: Yeah. That’s why I think that this whole thing is going to be a work in progress for hundreds, thousands of years—forever. Years from now, if we don’t manage to blow ourselves up, there will still be people sorting this stuff out, I think.

Tim: I think so. And because in that process, reality doesn’t stay the same. It’s not like there’s reality now, we understand it, and that’s it. Reality itself is emerging, and as we understand it, it moves forward as well.

Once we have new concepts in this conversation, we’ve created something new between us that now exists. If that was a big jump in culture, if this affected the culture, then the culture would be new. People would look back and go, “Yeah, that was the time when that took off.” And that’s now part of cultural reality. And just…

🕊️ Living an embodied, both-and spirituality

Rick: Interesting. What are some important points in here that we haven’t pondered? We produce so many… no need to buy the book anymore? We’ve covered it pretty much?

Tim: Well, there’s the story—the reason why. So, I think we’ve tried to make the book as short and as concise as I can be. It’s laid out in a very interesting form. You’ll see there’s no capital letters at all…

Rick: I think you sent it to me. I think I might have it on my shelf. Yeah, I just haven’t gotten around to reading it.

Tim: Well, maybe I’ve inspired you. I really hope that things are laid out so clearly, and in such a progressive way, that people who do have a philosophical passion, like I have—and ideally, you have—can actually engage with it and see if there’s something in there that can help them understand the process of life in a different way or not.

Rick: Now, a lot of people listening to this might have already stopped listening, but hang in there. These guys sound kind of complicated. I mean, they’re really getting into some trippy stuff here, and you might wonder if the book would be like that. You might think, “I wouldn’t be able to slog through it.”

Tim: No, you will find that I really pride myself, in all my work—and this one especially—on making it accessible to anyone, so that you can really understand it. It only came out in April, but so far, the people who have told me about it have found it to be like, “Oh, wow. Well, now, of course.” There may be hundreds of people who read it, hated it, and never told me. The feedback I’ve had so far has really been pleasing, because whether you agree or not, my job as an author is to plainly lay out the ideas.

I hope it will be a lot easier than our conversation, because this is spontaneous, and we’ve been moving between things and around things, and in and out, whereas the book is laid out in a much more structured way. You can get each section; it’s very, very discrete, and you can make a journey through to the big ideas. We’ve ended up like a garden…

Rick: You mentioned that a friend of yours sent a photo of this book on Ram Dass’s bedside table.

Tim: I just received it, yes. So I’m hoping he might be reading it. Ram Dass was a big influence on me when I was very young, so that’s nice.

Rick: Well, I’m really enjoying this. But my mind is getting to the point where I’m not thinking of new angles to discuss. I certainly welcome you to bring up anything that you think is important that we haven’t talked about.

Tim: I think there will be endless things that are important that we haven’t talked about, but I think we’ve covered an awful lot of ground. It’s been a really stimulating conversation, and it’s been great. I knew we would at least resonate with the essence of what we’re trying to explore.

Maybe the thing I want to say is just to tie it back to the conversation we had this morning with Deepak, and all of that. The reason that I’ve moved away from that position—I understand it so well because I was in it—is my deep feeling that this process of individuation, of Tim and Rick, is significant. Your life matters. Everyone’s life matters. Through this, something magnificent is happening—not as an illusion, not as something to recover from, not as something to disavow, to go back into potentiality and leave it all behind. Actually, the whole point is that through this, God is coming into existence, and we are part of that. We are coming into existence.

Being is just that: enough. We are forming ourselves every day. Every day we come into greater form because we are made of all we’ve been. So you are soul-forming; I am soul-forming. And we are more formed now than when we started the conversation. You can’t not do it, and that is the very process of what reality is.

Rick: I interviewed a guy named Paul Mueller-Ortega a month or two ago who was an expert in Kashmir Shaivism. I believe he made the critique that a lot of the nondual teachers, even respected ones like Ramana, had this sort of reclusive nature, which tended to incline them to just dismiss the relative world as insignificant and unimportant. I don’t think that’s worthy of consideration.

Kashmir Shaivism has a much more embodied approach to spirituality, in which they consider the relative creation to be extremely significant, not accidental, and not just some kind of game that is being played, but divine and pregnant with significance.

Tim: Beautiful. Yeah, that “pregnant with significance”—I have no problem with that. I’m glad that there are people like Ramana Maharshi, these great men and women who specialize in that waking up to formlessness. I’m so pleased. I just don’t want it to be it. It’s like, there’s that, and then there’s real embodiment. We need both.

The spirit is exploring itself through every angle. But let’s not have this idea that spirituality is all about that one thing. It’s actually about the whole process, and that this is not an accident, like hard-boiled science says, and it’s not an illusion, like hard-nosed spirituality says. It is a beautiful, significant process, billions of years old, of which we are the expression.

And the thing with us is that, with creativity, the universe is arising in you and me as choice—as the ability to creatively decide what we will do, what we will say, and how we will shape ourselves. We can form ourselves unconsciously, or we can form ourselves consciously by how we choose to be in the world. That is so significant. It’s beautiful. It matters.

Rick: And it’s funny, because when you talk that way to someone who has habituated themselves to thinking of the world as illusion, and nothing is real, and it’s all just a concept, they’ve kind of conditioned themselves to get into a certain groove. If you keep thinking that way, it takes a while to get out of that groove.

When you talk that way to such people, they start rolling their eyes, and they think, “Well, this guy is just conceding to maya again. He’s getting back in the mud.” It’s hard to snap them out of that judgment. You and I both say that we went through a phase like that, and many people have. Actually, it’s encouraging that I’ve talked to a lot of people who went through a phase like that and eventually came around to something more embodied.

Tim: The great thing is, you know, we’re at the Science and Nonduality Conference. I spoke at the very first one, 10 years ago or whatever it was, and I’ve done a few more recently. When I first came here, it was all, “Get away from the self. You don’t really exist.” I think I was probably the only guy going, “Yeah, and this is both. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.” That was my whole passion.

What I found was that the audience went, “Yeah,” and the teachers went, “No.” I was putting together panels and doing things about that as well. Now, more and more of the people themselves, and the people who are teaching this, I think have come around to saying, “No, no, no, it is both. This matters.”

So I think it’s a natural process that you come back in. It’s like the ten-bull story: you come out and it’s just the emptiness, and then you come in. That’s where you express the love in the world, so that you end up with an evolutionarily engaged spirituality, which includes nonduality, which takes you back to the raw human experience.

Rick: I did a long interview with Adyashanti the other day, which will have been posted by now. He’s an example of that. He has this model of awakening in the head, heart, and gut. He said it’s characteristic of the head awakening for people to have this detached, aloof, cool witnessing thing, where the world seems hardly real and illusory, and unworthy of consideration.

But then he said, when the heart awakening begins to dawn, you turn around and begin to appreciate the world much more fully. And then the gut awakening, he described as getting into this sort of primordial, premanifestation state, which doesn’t negate any of the others. You begin to sense creation from the vantage point prior to its actual emergence.

Anyway, the idea is that it’s not an either-or situation. One can incorporate all those perspectives and see them all as valid, each in its own realm.

Tim: Sounds good to me.

Rick: Yeah, cool. That might be a good point to end on, which is inclusiveness. I realize now that “both-and” is a common term, but I think I was the first one I heard use that.

I think it’s really taken off.

Tim: Yeah, that phrase—when I started talking about a both-and philosophy, both-and rather than either-or—obviously, I’m sure it’s been around forever. I don’t have anything to do with it, or whether it’s just that a lot of people started using it. But that is the key for me: if you want the oneness, it’s not either this or this. It’s not either one or many. It’s both.

This moment is the meeting of all the dualities. It is the past and the possible, the one and the many. It is where everything is both-and. That’s its nature.

This moment is the meeting of all the dualities.

Rick: And to me, that is such a comfortable place to be. It’s so much easier, and everything fits into place so much more nicely if you have an all-inclusive, all-embracing perspective that accommodates all the different perspectives that people tend to polarize around.

Whenever people polarize, they do so to the exclusion of all the other perspectives. But if you can just be a big enough basket to contain them all, then you can relax and everything makes sense. You can see how this fits, this fits, this fits. And just because—

Tim: You’re always looking for the thing to add, yeah. So I find myself all the time going, “Yes, and…”

Rick: That’s right. And it actually mirrors, I think, more clearly, the way creation actually is. Even using physics as a metaphor, you have all these different laws of nature on different levels. None of them invalidate the others, but each is relevant and significant in its own domain.

Tim: That’s right. So what I’m doing is rising up out of physics. Then you’ve got the laws of biology, if you like—the way that functions—and then you’ve got the way the soul functions, and they’re all interacting. That’s why your experience can be causal and magical right at the same time, because those are all operating.

Rick: I quoted something at breakfast that you got all excited about. It was a quote from Nisargadatta Maharaj, and I don’t know what book it was from or anything else. But he was quoted as saying—somebody told me this—that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is an important characteristic of spiritual maturity.

Tim: Well, I’m so pleased, because he’s been a big influence on me since I was younger. And the Soul Story book begins with ambiguity. We live in an ambiguous world, and we need to understand paradox and ambiguity.

Rick: Good. On that note, I was waiting for the right note to end this interview, and that should do it. So, thanks very much. It’s been a real pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

I didn’t know if I had the octane to have this conversation. It’s kind of late, and it’s been an intense day. But boy, it really gets me going to have a conversation like this with you.

Tim: Me too.

Rick: So thank you to those who have hung in there with us. I hope you found this stimulating. This obviously is part of an ongoing series, and we’ll keep doing them. They’re going to give me one or two more things produced at the conference here that I’ll be putting up in the next week or so.

After that, we’ll be back to the usual routine at home of interviewing people over Skype. So, if you would like to be notified every time a new interview is posted, just sign up for the little email notification thing on batgap.com.

If you’re not the type who likes to sit in front of videos for a couple of hours, you probably won’t have gotten to this point in this particular interview. But there is, I should say, an audio podcast of this show that you can subscribe to in order to listen while you’re commuting or whatever.

And there are a number of other things. If you just explore the menus on batgap.com, you’ll find some useful stuff that may appeal to you. So, thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one. Thanks again, Tim.

Tim: Thanks, Rick.