The One You Feed - Tim Freke on the Evolution of the Human Psyche

Episode Date: April 11, 2018

 Please Support The Show with a DonationTim Freke is a truly pioneering philosopher. His many books, talks, and retreats have touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Tim is the author of 35 books, the newest being Soul Story: Evolution and the purpose of life. As you listen to this interview, your ah-ha moments will grow in scope and scale throughout the conversation. He is a radical thinker and one of the great minds of our time. His big view of where we've been, where we are and where we're going will hit you as perhaps surprising, remarkably realistic and fundamentally inspiring. Listen and see for yourself. Molekule for $75 off your first order, visit www.molekule.com enter promo code WOLFIn This Interview, Tim Freke and I Discuss...The Wolf ParableHis book, Soul Story: Evolution and the Purpose of LifeThe deeper level of evolution going on inside of ourselvesThe evolution of the psychePerhaps it's all one evolutionary journey: physical evolution, biological evolution and then an evolution of the psyche or soulWhat if rather than the concept of God creating the universe, we've evolved such that we've created a godMaybe God is where we're going towardsIn life - the deepest things happen at the endAn arriving of conscious onenessThe point of view that life in the world is getting better over timeCreativity is the heart of the universeThe great religions of the world were created at a time when people still thought the world is flat. We've moved on and so can our recognition of spiritualityThe ark of time pointing towards a better world nowRather than the passing of time, perhaps it's the accumulation of the past meeting the possible.The past meeting the possibleThe weight of the past that can limit us and pull us backParalogical thinking: both AND (not either or)Transcend and IncludeHow he teaches others to have the experience of "deep awake"Allowing vs. Pushing AwayBeing pulled towards the better while living in the presentBeing a spiritual being in an animal, human bodyCause and Effect, Meaning and Magic - all of the levels are interacting all of the timeThe power of realistic thinking that's inspirationalDeep Awake: being spiritually awake, you experience the oneness of life and that feels like loveWaking up doesn't mean we ditch our individualityThe form of consciousness that comes through our senses which are rooted in the bodyThe form of consciousness that is in the psyche and imaginationThe form of consciousness that questions itself and realizes that our essential nature has no form  Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The past itself is not good or bad, it's both. It's a foundation from which we can do great things and it can be a limit which pulls us back. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort

to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really no really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead the really no really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Tim Freak, a pioneering philosopher whose bestselling books, inspirational talks, and life-changing retreats have touched the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Tim is the author of 35 books translated into more than 15 languages, including The Jesus Mysteries, which was a top six Amazon bestseller and Daily Telegraph book of the year. His newest book is Soul Story, Evolution and the Purpose of

Life. Hi friends, there's a couple of other ways to feed your good wolf in addition to just listening to this show. One is that you can support us on Patreon, and that will allow you to get additional bonus content, as well as a mini episode from me each month. You can do that by going to oneyoufeed.net slash support. And the other thing that you can do is join our Facebook group where we have discussions about the episodes and other ways that people feed their good wolf and deal with challenges in life. And that is at OneYouFeed.net slash Facebook. And here's the interview with Tim Freak. Hi, Tim. Welcome to the show. It's a delight to be on the show. Thanks for inviting me.

It's a pleasure to have you on. Your latest book is called Soul Story, Evolution, and the Purpose of Life, and we will get into all that here shortly, but let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that

parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it's such a great little story, isn't it? And so simple, like all the great stories. And I was thinking about it before I came on the show, that it's kind of resonant also for me, because one of the meanings of my rather unusual surname, Freak, spelled F-R-E-K-E, is it's one of the names of Odin's wolf. So I'm kind of a wolf clan person myself. What strikes me is that I definitely experience those two wolves, and I'm guessing why the story works so well, as so does everybody. The thing that I find myself asking is, what are they? What are those two voices?

And if I can understand what those two voices are, that probably is the secret to how to live with them and how to choose wisely who I feed. And so I think that one of the themes that I'm working with, it's in the book Soul Story you just mentioned, is the powerful idea of evolution. And I think an understanding of evolution can really help us understand those two parts of us. The traditional view is that there's a bad side and a good side. You know, we have a god and a devil at war inside of us. Or in spirituality, you get a lot the idea that we've got a real self, and then there's this other ego self, which is the enemy.

And I'm not any longer convinced by any of that. It feels to me that what we've really got is an evolutionary process in which we're always coming from somewhere less conscious we're coming from the lesser into the greater into the more emergent so what we have within us are things from the past both our own individual past from our collective societal past and from our animal past our biological past and those voices can be pulling us backwards. And then we have this evolutionary current pushing us forward to realize new possibilities. And that, I think, is the voice which encourages us to grow into love and courage and see new possibilities. And what we have is an inherent tension which arises from the very evolutionary process that everything is in,

because it's the nature of life. Yeah, I like that approach, too. We talked recently with Robert Wright, who wrote a book called Buddhism is True. He's an evolutionary psychologist, very similar perspective in that, you know, our evolutionary wiring, at least in the biological sense, is pulling us towards these fight versus flight, very basic survival tendencies. What I find fascinating is you're taking the idea of evolution, and you're going from a, let's think of ourselves from a physical evolution perspective, which is what most of us know, but you also believe that there's a deeper level of evolution happening within us.

And what is that? Well, for modern science, which has created this great story for for us it started with the idea of darwin's and and wallace's idea of biological evolution which an incredible idea all life has come from one source all this huge variety comes from one simple cell what an idea and then a hundred years ago physicists said no it's more than that the whole universe has evolved from the moment zero the big bang so now we have this incredible story about the evolution of the whole universe 10 billion years of physical evolution 3 billion years of biological evolution what i want to do is suggest that having looked back and gone, there's a period before biology

of evolution, we need to realize that there's a period after biology. And that's the evolution of the psyche. And no one could dispute that because the psyche is the latest thing to arrive, this experiencing the experience you and I are having right now of disembodied thought, images, imagination, that's that's a whole new thing which has emerged in this evolutionary process now for mainstream science that's just a funny byproduct of the body but for spirituality which has studied the nature of the psyche or the soul in great depth it's a whole realm of existence it's a realm of the soul it's where you can you can visit it now shamans journey in it psychedelics will take

you into it meditation will take you into it it's a whole it's a it's a realm of reality now the the traditional spiritual idea is that that's always existed and we've fallen from it. And there's all sorts of problems with that idea. It's a very negative idea, really. So what I'm trying to do is go, what happens if we see that as having evolved? So that we've had a period of physical evolution, then biological evolution, and then this evolution of the psyche or soul, but not just as a funny byproduct, but as a whole level of reality. Which has emerged in this last phase. And in that way, there's the potential to unite some deep spiritual insights that have been around forever with modern science, because it's all one evolutionary journey.

Right. And you refer to this as emergent spirituality and taking it all the way to the end. And you and I were joking before we started, there's no way we're going to cover everything in this book in our 30 or 40 minute conversation. So we're going to be picking pieces here and there. But if we take it all the way to the end, you've flipped that idea that God created the universe and everything has sort of come out of that. And you've flipped that all the way to, we have evolved to the point that we have created God. Yes, or the whole universe is creating God through us. So again, the traditional idea of spirituality is one of the four. So God is there at the beginning of time, it's all perfect, and then God dreams a dream and he gets lost into it, or there's a fall, and there's something that's gone wrong, and we need to get back to the way it was or there's a fall, something's gone wrong and we need to get back to the way it was. There's all sorts of problems with that. Firstly, it's a very negative story about life.

It casts life in a very negative way that I don't feel myself. I feel very positive about life. Also, this God is troublesome, which is why so many people have abandoned him. A little bit. You know, and the basic problems are twofold there's the traditional problem of evil which is uh you know if there's this great god this being of love at the beginning of time why is there so much suffering why is it so terrible it's very hard to get over that uh and then there's a new problem which has come more recently which is what i call

the problem of absurdity which is you know we now know there was 125 million years of dinosaurs well what kind of sane god does that what kind of sane god is this guy is crazy and mean so if you put god at the beginning he's not this being of love which people relate to and which I've experienced since I was a kid. So the insight which I want to share is maybe God isn't at the beginning. Maybe God is where we're going towards. And the reason I say that is because what you can see with the evolutionary journey is that the deepest things in life arrive last. You know, it didn't start with soul. It didn't start with meaning. It didn't start with love. It started with hydrogen.

And then over 13.8 billion years, it turned into us having this conversation. So the deepest aspects of life don't come at the beginning. They come at the end. And the deepest aspect of all, it seems to me, is the arising of a conscious oneness, which we experience as a being of love, which is a communion of souls, if you like, where we can come together and something greater than us is arising. And you could call that God. It's an old-fashioned word. You may want to avoid it. But you could give that word to the experience which so many of us have,

that there is something greater than us, which we can relate to. which so many of us have, that there is something greater than us, which we can relate to. Yeah, there were a couple things in the book that spoke to me very strongly, at least as far as my own personal philosophy, such as it is, right? And one of those is that we as people seem to be evolving towards better things. And this is a controversial point, because people can very easily point to all of the awful things that are out in the world and that are happening. But you mentioned, and there's some other people who have this perspective, Steven Pinker being a very prominent one, and you say this, and this puts into words better than I have before, we should feel encouraged by the fact that so many of us

now feel appalled by acts of brutality that have been commonplace throughout history. And that's what strikes me is, yes, awful and brutal things still happen, but more and more of us think of them as awful and brutal versus the absolute norm. And that just sort of shows me that on some level, even if it's just cultural, we are growing towards a place of greater kindness and inclusion than we have been in the past. And that's halting because, as you've mentioned and the book talks a lot about, we have this whole history behind us that we occasionally are sort of battling both the pull towards what has been as well as the push forward. And then the second piece that you talk about, and I'll let you

kind of talk about both these, is that you mentioned that creativity is sort of the heart or the main spirit of the universe. And that's been one of those things that has always seemed to me to be so true, that life just wants to do more. And I've always wrestled with, I've studied Buddhism for a long, long time. And this show, to a certain extent, has been a way to work with the tension between, I recognize this innate desire for more out of the world and out of nature. And yet the Buddhist philosophy in a lot of ways is saying, well, you should want less. And there's been a tension there that I've wrestled with. And so when you talk about that, and when I've heard people talk about, you know, spirituality, its fundamental nature being a creative process, that's always resonated very strongly. I'm so pleased you picked up on those things, Eric, because they're really important to

me. And to address the last one first, I think what you're describing is the problem. I mean, I've written books on probably all the spiritual traditions of the world and i have great respect for buddhism and all of them but you know it was created by people who lived at a time when they thought the world was flat you know things have moved on a great deal since these traditions were created so they're all in living in the past and one of the things that characterizes them all just about is this negativity, the fall. And Buddhism doesn't want us to be in this world. It wants us to leave this behind. It wants us to withdraw and avoid suffering, which is the complete opposite of this

evolutionary spirit, which goes, no, actually, what we're in here is 13.8 billion years, which has led us from hydrogen to opera to us having this conversation to internet to all of the things we have and if you if you take if you come up close there's always problems and god knows we face huge ones in the world right now but if you take the the broader look things have got better and better there's no doubt about that there is much more kindness in the world now we have laws against racism in many countries which would have been for before racism was seen as a virtue you know the things you did was you pirated your neighbors human beings lived like that for most of history so there's no doubt in my mind that not in a straight line but generally we move forward

and our idea of evil develops i mean one of the little insights I dropped into the book, which fascinates me, is to think, you know, Adolf Hitler, who was the epitome of evil for us, for many of us, because of the awful things he did. If he'd lived 2,000 years ago, he would probably be called Adolf the Great, like Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan, or these people that did awful things then. Because what makes him so bad now is that we've moved on so far. We don't do that anymore. We don't want all conquering bloody warriors who go out and impose themselves. We're looking for something new now. We've evolved. You know, one of the things that really moved me with the war in Iraq

was seeing millions of people come out around the world saying, let's not do this. Now, it didn't stop it, but that's never happened in history before, that people cared about other countries to that degree. So I see a huge evolutionary push. And again, the greater things arrive last. So people often say to me, why is there so little love in the world and justice and equality and all those great virtues. And my feeling is, well, because they're only just arriving. They're new. And it's up to you and me to bring them in. They're the new thing. And our lives are not just realizing our individual potential, but this collective potential. So our job is to bring more love into the world. And the more conscious we become, the more we awaken,

the more we can do those things. I agree completely. And I think it is not only a more hopeful way to look at the world, it strikes me as a more factual and real way to look at the world. We just seem to be becoming better, kinder people. Well, Eric, it is worth saying, perhaps in relationship to that, of course, one of the things that happens is the more you care, the more you see the suffering. Yep. So as you awaken and your heart becomes tender, then suffering that you may have been able to ignore, suddenly you can't. And so the impetus, the evolutionary impetus, you feel is stronger. I agree. And I think, you know, certainly it's not to minimize the considerable suffering that still occurs in the world and for humans and for animals. I mean, that's a whole nother category of horrificness.

But again, the fact that more of us are choosing to say, you know what, I actually care that that chicken suffers is, you know, somewhat unprecedented. Cross-species compassion. Wow. That's a whole new level. That's wonderful. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And here's the rest of the interview with Tim Freak. So let's talk a little bit about a concept that runs throughout the book, and it's the concept of the time stream,

which then goes into sort of a life stream and a soul stream. But let's start with what the time stream is and see how far we get. Okay, well, this is really helpful, because it will lead us into some stuff around the wolves, which is where we started. Because it seems to me that time often gets dismissed as an illusion. But actually, when I study the nature of reality that's in front of me right now, what I see is time, I see a stream of experiences unfolding in time. So for me, time is fundamental to the nature of reality. And the universe really is not a thing, it's a process. And processes are made of time. And what I do in the book and i'll this is a big thought which i'll say quickly and people can perhaps contemplate it later is i suggest we need a new metaphor for

how we understand time because we think of time as passing like the past is just gone whereas actually i think that's not quite right i think actually the past accumulates and that there's more of the past now than there was when we started the show and there's more past now than there was when human beings first evolved or the big bang happened and that everything that's happened in the past hasn't gone it's implicit in the moment because if anything that has happened wasn't there it wouldn't be this moment and so implicit is you inviting me to do the show us learning to speak language everything ever has

ever been hasn't gone so the past is accumulating and that and what time is is a process of the past which is the flow of the time stream accumulating uh meeting the possible the potentiality for what could be and everything is therefore made of the past and then when i apply that to myself and i go oh look so what's happening now is everything that tim has ever been is meeting everything that eric has ever been that's what's happening right now. That's who I am. That's what defines me as an individual. That past is both a foundation for me to realize new potentials. I can realize the potential of this new sentence because I already know how to speak. It's in my past. Couldn't do it otherwise. But the past also has a kind of weight to it you referred to it earlier it has what i call a pastivity like gravity and that that keeps things solid which is good but it also limits us

it pulls us back and i think we all experience that those times when we become very awake and then back into old habits familiar anxious thoughts just old ways of being we get pulled back by the past so we're living we by the past. So we're living, we are the past meeting the possible. And we experience the pastivity of the past pulling us back. And then the creativity that you mentioned, which is the possible, that from this moment, every moment is the realization of something new that's never happened before. Every single moment includes everything that's happened before, and is a new possibility being realized. And that means you and I are like that. So that the two voices we have inside of us are the ones that is pulling

us back to just repeat and the one which is urging us on to realize a deeper, new possibility to bring something more emergent into the world. Yeah, you use the word transcend and include, which, you know, you mentioned in the book, I think the first time I ever heard it was Ken Wilber. It also makes me think in some of your other work, you've used the word paralogical thinking, I believe it is. And you talk about paralogical thinking being the, you know, instead of either or, the and, right? The yes and. And so it seems to me that transcend and include is another way of the same thing. And it's basically saying, hey, you know what, everything that came before set the stage for what's here. It's not that

it's irrelevant. It certainly is important. And yet we're going to go beyond that, but we're not going to lose that at the same time. Brilliant. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And, you know, it's a great phrase, transcendent including. I took it from Ken's work. And this paralogical thinking, which is a foundation for me, this not just either or but both and, seeing things from opposite perspectives at once. So this moment, it's not just the past.

It's the past and the possible. And the past itself is not good or bad. It's both. It's a foundation from which we can do great things. And it can be a limit which pulls us back. So we always need to see these two sides. And when you invited me to be on this show, one of the things which you mentioned was this, how do I personally live with these two wolves, which are in us all? And I thought, well, I think the key for me is paralogical thinking.

Because when I developed that, it was a way of understanding spiritual awakening, primarily. That's where it started. Because that's what I do primarily. I teach people how to have the experience of being what I call deep awake how they can have this experience of being one with the universe and this huge love which opens up from that space and that's really something which transcends all separateness and you you go to somewhere beyond yourself it's kind of you connecting with that essence which i which you could call god there's a there's something greater which is your which is your own essential nature but which is greater than your individuality and you can awaken to that and what struck me was how much of spirituality again was a very negative take on that

which was like oh your individuality is a mistake get rid of it your humanity is in the way and what i wanted to go was no no no it's both of those you can have your humanity and this deep divinity if you like they exist together it's not one or the other it's it's both of those and that for me is the way that i deal with this conflicts that arise between these different voices that for me it feels like look I can, if the secret is not to deny one, but to have both. And so if I can find the deep place within me, the creative, the awake, then the other voice, which wants to pull me back, ceases to have the power, but it's still there. I haven't pushed it away, because if I push it away, it'll come up and bite me from behind.

still there i haven't pushed it away because if i push it away it'll come up and bite me from behind i've allowed it and therefore i can have both at once and i've really noticed that at times a great trial and suffering i think back to a few years ago sitting with my mum while she was dying of cancer and how awful that was and how i didn't want to avoid it. I didn't want to escape the suffering, like Buddhism might suggest. I didn't want that. I wanted to be suffering with her because it was my mum. But also, if I'd just been in the suffering, it would have destroyed me. And yet I could be in both.

I could be in both this place where it was what it was. It just is. And there was a complete freedom in that. And then there was Tim, whose heart was breaking. And they were both there together. And that, for me, is the way in which we can deal with these paradoxes, that we have these different places we can experience life from. A lot of stuff in what you just said. And I think we would both agree agree if we talked about it a little bit more, that the way we're discussing Buddhism is probably a little bit of a superficial understanding, right?

And that's not exactly what Buddhism says, but it can be interpreted that way. You've actually got phrases in a few of your books, you know, some great Zen phrases. I think the transcendent include idea is really interesting, because on one hand, it's very positive, and it is, but it also indicates also indicates like the rest of that is still there. And I think that is a very humanizing idea. And it's one that we talk about on the show a lot. Like we have this spiritual desire, we have these growth and we have this human body, right? And so when I have a stomach ache, I'm just not at my best.

And that's the transcendent include. And in addition to being this spiritual being or this soul that's evolving, I'm in this animal body, too. And I can hate that, right? And I can fight against it, or as you said, try and escape it. But ultimately, I really can't. All my attempts at escape end up backfiring one way or the other, right? But I think recognizing that we are both those things is so liberating, both in the sense of it gives me the possibility of things to grow to, and it doesn't allow me or doesn't make me feel like I'm an awful person, or I'm a failure, or I'm all these different things, because I'm also human. And I think it's that older spiritual idea I've seen in places that, you know, part of the challenge of being human is we're both God and an animal, right?

In one body, right? And that's just the reality. You know, the evolutionary idea which we've been focusing on, like everything, has two sides. That's the paralogical insight. So the good side of the evolutionary picture is it goes, look, we're moving towards this better future, that we're being pulled towards realizing greater and more beautiful possibilities. The other side of it is that we have to live with all of the less evolutionary aspects all around us. So I have to live with physics. Physics developed a long time ago, but the fact is it's still here. So things still fall,

and if I drop something, it will break. And it doesn't matter how awake i am if i drop it it will still break and and i have to live in my body biologically developed quite a long time ago and and it has its needs and it breaks down and it gets ill and there's viruses and i have to live with that i have to live with that less emergent level of evolution and then in society I would love to live in a world where we were all kind to each other, but it seems not everyone's quite ready for that yet. There's still a lot of other evolutionary currents around, and I have to live with that. I have to negotiate how to get along in a world in which people are seeing something very different to what I see. And then in myself, the same thing. There is part of

me which is waking up and full of love and has growing wisdom. And then there's all my less evolved parts from my own past, which grasp on and pull me back and all sorts from my soul in all sorts of different ways. So the great thing is, yes, the evolutionary is very optimistic. It allows us to see the future opening like a flower before us. But it also means we have to live with all these other levels, which haven't gone anywhere. They're still with us. And that's why we need this wisdom and compassion to negotiate that. Yeah. And that's part of why I love the concepts around that so much is because it just strikes me as being realistic. It strikes me that

a lot of the two fundamental narratives we often get, one is sort of the scientific objectivism of, you know, the world is just a meaningless process that's being carried out by the laws of physics. And then on the other hand, there is the completely spiritual thing that it's all very lovely and great sounding, but it doesn't resemble my experience. Yes, exactly. And thinking of things in this sense, actually, I look at and I go, oh, yes, that feels and sounds true to me. And my experience has been as much as there's been points in my life where I would love to believe things because they would make me feel better. I just usually can't, or not for very long, right? And so, it's the idea of a spirituality that works that I think is so important. And for me,

a spirituality that works has to have both that practical and realistic sense, but also an aspirational angle to it, a better story. And you talk about story throughout the book, and we don't have time to get into all that. But you do talk a lot about how our evolution as spirit or souls or psyche, there's a very narrative component to that. Yeah, I mean, the basic insight, what you just said there resonates so much with me, Eric. And I love the way you're saying it needs to be realistic and aspirational. There's the paralogical insight, both there together. And so the great intention for me when writing the book on developing the philosophy was to explain my own experience, which is just like yours. So on the one hand, life is relentlessly causal.

It's very cause and effect. It's quite brutal. And there's plenty which makes me think the objectivist scientists are onto something. It works. And other times, it's really magical and amazing things, synchronicities and so full of meaning and luminous in its nature. How can they both be true? And what I see is that people polarize one way or the other.

Like you said, they either go, oh, well, it's all just really high causality, and the rest is just wishful thinking. And other people go, no, it's all meant to be. Everything is meant to be. Everything is, you know, or the other one is you're causing it all yourself. It's all your intentions, which all of which sounds very positive, but of course actually isn't. Horrible. Because that means you just created your own cancer. It means God has allowed the Holocaust? That's right. It means just horrendous. Some baby being abused right now did something to cause it.

Yeah, it's a brutal philosophy if you take it to its conclusion. What I love about this emergent spirituality is it goes, look, all of these levels are happening at once. And they're all interacting with each other. It's happening right now. So the different things dominate at different points. So there's something which is cause and effect. There's something which is biological.

And then there's the soul dimension, which is full of meaning and sometimes magic. That is also real. It's just not the only reality. All of these different levels are interacting all the time. It's happening right now. Right now, my soul, my psyche is intending to convey meaning to you it's making my body the biology move my mouth in certain ways and that's moving uh atoms in the air and then through the technology around the world so all of those levels are interacting all the time and that

i think can explain the great paradox of our experience, that it can be both quite brutal and cause and effect and totally magical and full of meaning. And we don't have to abandon either of these very real things. We can actually have an understanding big enough to embrace them both. Yep. And maybe in our post-show conversation, we will go into, I have a question for you about artificial intelligence and robotics, which is an interesting concept. And then a couple of things I think that, you know, as we got deeper in the book that I started to get a little bit lost on or that I felt like we were making a jump in logic. So maybe we'll get to that in the post-show conversation. So listeners, if you're interested in that, become a Patreon supporter. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And now, back to the interview. What I want to talk about now briefly is the idea of deep awake. You've written a book by that title. It's a big part of what you teach. So let's talk briefly about deep awake. And what I'm interested in is briefly your thoughts on what's the best way to get there for people.

Most of what I do is very practical, is actually introducing people to a new state of consciousness. So I get the chance to travel around just back from Tokyo as it happens, going to America in October. I'm doing stuff here where I run these deep awakenings, where I take people to this deep awake state. And I've seen astonish me I wouldn't believe it was possible 10 20 years ago is that the vast majority of people can experience the deep awake state over the course of a couple of days because it's we're really ready for it right now and what the deep awake state is is finding something deep within yourself your own essential being your deep being which is one with everything and that's because in my view relating to what we said about evolution is that evolution is arising

from a primal potentiality which is one and formless and it's coming to know itself through this journey of evolution and when we become spiritually, we wake up to the essence, which is this fundamental oneness. And that oneness feels like love, because love is how oneness feels. When you see through the separateness with someone or an activity even or a place, you feel that connection, that communion, and that's love. So it's an experience of oneness, this what I call big love, which is very powerful indeed, and a fundamental goodness, because the universe is unfolding, we are all unfolding towards the good. In an up and down sort of way, there's a movement towards the better. So what I do is I introduce people to it. And the simplest way to do it the starting place

is actually to really just notice what we're in because it's so easy to get so wrapped up in our our everyday thoughts that we don't notice how profoundly mysterious it is to be alive that we're we're having this experience right now of existing in this huge infinite universe in which nothing's what it seems we're on this immense journey from birth to death and if we can find that sense of deep mystery consciousness starts to change you start to step out of your social conditioning the limits of the numbness we call normal. And if you then can be shown how to focus on that, it can open up into this completely beautiful and life-affirming state in which there's this love and appreciation of being.

Yeah, I love that idea of deep awake. And I think it's a lot like what listeners in the show have heard lately as I've talked about awakening. We've had Adi Shantiyan and Richard Rohr and a lot of different people where we've talked about no self or not self, where we've talked about being awareness itself. And I think deep awake is a very similar idea. witness that's behind everything, or it's recognizing that we are not just our thoughts, and we are not just our body, that we are bigger than that. I love the way that you talk about a way to get into it is to really try and appreciate the mystery of what's happening, because I do find that to be a useful way to change consciousness to some degree if we can do it. It's one thing to sit back and

try and be awareness and observe what's going on around me. And there's used to that. And I've had good experience with it. But I also do think sort of sitting back and being like, what the hell is all this? I was petting my dog the other day. And I'm reading your book. And I had that same sort of experience where I thought, let me just stop for a second and really think about like, what is going on here. And it's when you do that it reality, as we know, it starts to drop away a little bit and a different perspective arises. So one more question for you on that is the fact that you're able to get people into that space, you know, more often than you certainly would have thought. What are your thoughts on the idea of awakening or enlightenment, right, as a thing

that happens, it's sort of a permanent condition versus something that we move in and out of? I'm just kind of curious as somebody who's pursued these questions and written many books around mysticism, I'm kind of interested in your perspective on that. I've completely abandoned the idea of enlightenment as some sort of permanent state that you're heading for, partly because that concept is part of this rather negative traditional spirituality of the fall. So enlightenment is when you've got rid of your separate self, you've transcended this world, and you're now free and you never have to come back, all of which flies in the face of this evolutionary understanding we now have.

So for me, there is just deeper and deeper states of consciousness that we can find. Consciousness is always moving in and out. We literally go to sleep and go unconscious every day. So we move between wake and sleep. But in the waking state, we can be awake or we can be deep awake. And the deep awake state isn't

like a permanent fixture or a limit it feels in my experience as something which can unfold in new ways we each experience it slightly differently i suspect which is part of the whole purpose of us being individuals so for me i've changed my understanding from when I was younger. I no longer aspire to be enlightened and get free. I now aspire to be a lover of life and to be engaged, but from an awake or more awake, wiser place. around awakening, which is different to what others sometimes do, is that I passionately feel that the way to wake up is not to get rid of or question or destroy the individual self. In fact, the opposite. There's been no mistake. Our individuality wasn't an error. It's the whole point. By becoming individual, we become more become more conscious not less so we wake up to oneness through the individual and i think that's one of the things which makes people very ready to wake up at my events because i don't try they don't have to get rid of something they can't get

rid of they can just see that there's the individual and then through that you can wake up to something which is transpersonal, something which is bigger. Not instead, but as well. And that becomes much easier to do because the other actually is totally unrealistic. It's never going to happen because consciousness only arises with individuality. It's an emergent quality of the universe, which has happened through individual sentient beings. And that's where it comes from. I would say I'm a relative newcomer maybe to deep awake experiences, but I've had a couple over the last year, you know, one pretty profound one when I was on a long retreat. And yet some of what

you're saying rings very true. And the part that rings true to me is this idea of awareness that I always get hung up on when folks will say that awareness is this non-localized thing, which I understand in a sense, and you talk about that in the book also, that I can move my awareness here, I can move it there, I can move it over there, but it is localized to the sense that it's within my, you know, more or less my range, right? I am not seeing, you know, what's in the other rooms of your house right now. I think what we need to see is that there's the consciousness has evolved. So the most basic form of consciousness that we experience is sensation. And that's rooted in the body. Like you said, I see where my eyes are looking. I can't see anywhere else, right? It

doesn't matter how much I want to, my senses are rooted in a place fixed in the body. And it doesn't matter how many spiritual teachers tell me it's not individual, it damn well is. Because I can see from these eyes and nobody else's. And that's as separate as you can get. Then we consciousness has arisen on another level, which is the psyche or soul imagination. And there it's non local in the sense that I can move, it can go wherever my attention goes. I can take my attention inside my house now. I'm in my office, I can go in my house. I can remember when I deeper still, which is what is it that's conscious? What is that profound, deep eye, that subjectivity? And the great insight of all the mystical traditions, which is as true now as when they first came across it hundreds and hundreds of years ago,

is that our essential nature has no form because it's what's conscious of all form, and therefore it's totally non-local. But that doesn't mean that when you become aware of it, that profound formless oneness, that you're experiencing everything. It's rather that Tim experiences that he is an expression of this profound formless oneness. It doesn't mean he knows what it's like to be eric that's the whole point that oneness is experiencing being tim through tim and experiencing being eric through eric then when we meet if we're just in normal consciousness we just see tim and eric we just see bodies maybe we see souls if we look really deeply though then, then I can see, oh, the whole universe is looking back at me through Eric.

I'm the whole universe looking out through Tim. I'm that formless oneness of being looking out through Tim. And there's that formless oneness of being, my own deep self, looking back at me. And that's when you enter these very deep states. And like you said earlier, really, Eric, what's happened is you've just seen what was already happening from a deeper place. Yep. That's a great way to lay it out. Well, Tim, thank you so much for coming on the show. We could spend all afternoon or evening for you, since you're in the UK, talking about these ideas. You've got so many books, and I've read a couple

of them. They've both been great. So we'll have links in the show notes to your work where people can get it. And just thank you again for coming on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Me too. It's been a great pleasure. Okay. Take care. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts