Tim Freke on the Evolution of the Human Psyche

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. Thanks

for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Tim Freak, a pioneering philosopher who's best selling 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 thirty five books translated into more than fifteen 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 for me each month. You can do that by going to one you Feed dot 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 it one you Feed dot net Slash Facebook. And here's the interview with Tim Freak. Hi, Tim, welcome to the show. So de line to be on the show. Thanks for dividing 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 others a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and

hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks of at 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 mean, I definitely experienced those two wolves. And I'm guessing why the story works so well, is 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 feel. And so I think that one of the things in that I'm working with that's in my book sold story you just mentioned is the powerful idea of evolution, And I think an understanding of evolution can really help us understand us to 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 that war inside of us. Or in spirituality, you get a lot the idea that we've got a real self, and then there is 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 emergence. 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 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 or everything is in because it's in the nature of life. Yeah, I like that approach to 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 you're going from a let's think of ourselves in the 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 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 Wallace's idea

year of biological evolution, which an incredible idea. All life has come from one source, All this huge variety comes from one simple cell. One 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 band. So now we have this incredible story about the evolution of the whole universe. Ten billion years of

physical evolution, three 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, is Shaman's journey in it. Psychedelic schill take you into it, meditation will take you into It's a whole, it's a it's

a realm of reality. Now that 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 happened if we see that as having evolved, so that we've had a period of physical evolution and biological evolution and then this evolution of the psyche or soul, but not just as a funny by product, but as a as a whole level of reality which

has emerged in this last phase. And in that way there's the potential to night some deep spiritual insights that have been around for ever with modern science, because it's all one evolutionary journey, right, And you refer to this as emergent spirituality and taking it all away 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 thirty or forty minute conversation, so we're gonna

be picking pieces here and there. But if we take it all away to the end, you've flipped that idea that God created the universe and everything has sort of come out of that, and and you 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 and

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 full and there's something that'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 an they're very negative story about life. It costs 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 and the basic problems are twofold. There's the traditional problem of evil, which is, 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. 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 a hundred and twenty five 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 him and which

I've experienced since I as a kid. So the insight which I want to share is maybe God isn't at the beginning. Maybe God is where we're go 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 arrived 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 a thirteen eight 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 experienced 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. Yeah, there were a couple of 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, Stephen 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 as Yes, awful and brutal things still happen, but more and more of us thinking of him 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 mentioned in and the book talks a lot about, we have this whole history behind us that we occasionally are sort of battling both the poll 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 when you talk about that, and when I've heard people talk about you know, spirituality and it's fundamental nature being a creative process that's always resonated very strongly. I'm so pleased you picked up on those things are 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 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. 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 a complete opposite of this evolutionary spirit which goes, no, actually, what we're in here. It's thirteen eight 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 it to come up close, there's always problems, and God knows we face huge ones in the world right now. But if you take 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 formed before racism was seen as a virtue. You know, the things you did was you pirated your neighbor's. 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 is to think, you know, Adolf Hitler, who is the epitome of evil for us, for many of us, because of the awful things he did. If he lived two thousand years ago would probably be called Adolf the Great, like Alexander the Great or Jenger's 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 from all conquering, bloody warriors who go out and impose themselves. We're looking for something new. Now we'll be evolved. You know. One of the things that really moved me with the war in Iraq was seeing millions of people come up out around the world saying, let's not do this now. He 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

arrived 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 because they're only just arriving. They're 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 it's collective potential. So that our job is to bring more love into the world. And the more we're 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 hope full 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, although it is worth saying perhaps in relationship to that, and 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 and and so the the inputus, the evolutionary impetus, you feel it stronger, I agree, and I think you know, certainly, it's not to minimize the considerable suffering that still occurs mass in the world, and for humans and for animals. I mean, that's that's a whole

another category of of horrific nous. 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 across species compassion. Wow, that's a whole new level. That's one of full 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 let's start with what the time stream is and see how far we get. Okay, well, this is 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 passon 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 invited me to do the show, us learning to speak the language. Everything ever there's ever been hasn't gone. So the past is accumulating and that and that what time is is the process of the past, which is the flow of the time stream, accumulating, 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's Eric's 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 from 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 refer to it earlier, what I call a pestivity 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 pope times will 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 are the past meeting the possible, and we experienced the pestivity 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, 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, and I think the first time I ever heard it was Ken Wilbur. It also makes me think in some of your other work you've used the word

parallogical thinking. I believe it is. And you talk about parallogical thinking being the you know, instead of either or the and right, the yes, and and and so it seems to me that transcendent include is another way of the same thing. And it's basically saying, hey, you know, 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 and and and you know, it's a great phrase, transcended including. I took it from Ken. From Ken's work and this paraological thinking, which is a foundation And for me, this this not just either all, but both and seeing things from opposite perspectives at once. So at 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 you know, when you invited me to be on this show, one of the things which you mentioned was this, how do you 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 paraological 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 that how to have the experience of being what I call deeper wick, 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 separate and you go to somewhere beyond yourself. It's kind of you're connecting with that essence

which I which you could call God. There's 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 humanities 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 ideal with this conflicts that arise between these different voices, that for me it feels like, look, I can if 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 will 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 are 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 you know, like what does it might suggest. I

didn't want that. I wanted to be suffering with her because it was my mom. But also if I had 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, it was what it was, it was just it just is, and there was a complete freedom in that. And then there was Tim who was whose heart was breaking, and they were

both there together. And that for me is how is 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 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 ideas really interesting because on one hand, it's very positive, and it is, but it 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 talked 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. 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, as you said, try and escape,

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 it 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 humans 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 paraological insight. So the good side of the evolutionary picture is it 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 aspect 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 dropped something, it will break, and it doesn't matter how awake I am, if I drop it, it will still break. And I have to live in my body biologically developed quite a long time ago, 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 and 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 also from my soul in all sorts of 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 makes 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.

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 there's I just usually can't or not for very long, right, And so it's it's the idea of a spirituality that works that I think is so important.

And for me, a spiritually that works has to have both that practical and realistic sense, but also an aspirational angle to it a better story. And you you talk about story throughout the book, and we won't 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 inside. I mean what you just said that resonates so much with me, and I love the way you're saying it needs to be realistic and aspirational. There's the paraological insight, you're 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 objective is scientists are onto something it works, and other times it's really magical and amazing things synchronicities, and is 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, it's all just really high causality and the rest is just wishful thinking, and other people got it's all meant to be everything, Everything is every you know, or the other one is you're causing it all yourself, your your intentions, which all of which sounds very positive, but of course actually isn't horrd that you just created your own cancer. It means God has allowed the Holocaust.

That's just renders some baby being abused right now, did something that as yet it's a it's a it's a brutal philosophy if you take it to its conclusions. 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. Is happening right now, so

that 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. Is 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 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 or 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. 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. But most of what I do is very practical, is actually

introducing people to a new state of consciousness. So I get a chance to travel around just back from Tokyo as it happens, going to America in October and doing stuff here where I run these deep awakenings, where I take people to this deeper wig state, and what I've seen astonish me. I wouldn't believe it was possible ten twenty years ago. Is that the vast majority of people can experience the deeper Wig state over the course of a couple of days because it's we're really ready for

it right now. And what the deeper Wig 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 formness, and it's coming to know itself through this journey of evolution. And when we become spiritually awake, we wake up to the essence, which is this fundamental woneness.

And that oneness feels like love, because love is how how one feels when you when you when you see through the separateness with someone or an activity, even or 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 I introduce people to it. And the simplest way to do it, or 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 everyday thoughts that we don't know is how profound and mysterious it is to be life. That we're having this experience right now of existing in this huge, infinite universe which nothing is 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 Audie Shantian and Richard Roor 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. It's the it's recognizing the 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, 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 in 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

certain would have thought. What are your thoughts on the idea of awakening or enlightenment right as a 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 that's 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 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 that the deeper wake 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 inspire to be a lover of aspire to be a lover of life and to be engaged, but from an

awake or more awake, wiser place. And what marks out what I do 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 was an error. It's the whole point. By becoming individual, we 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 and that's where it comes from. I would say I'm a relative newcomer, maybe too 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. In the part it 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 a 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 that 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 can see where my eyes are looking. I can't see anywhere else. 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 was in Tokyo. I can move it around anywhere I want, anywhere in the world, but in my imagination too, and go to things that don't exist. I can create new things. Also, there's great fluidity, and then there's somewhere deeper still, which is what is it that's conscious? What is that's that profound deep eye, that subjectivity and the

great insight of all the mystical traditions. Which is 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 nonlocal. But that doesn't mean that when you become aware of it, that that profound formless wonderus that you're experiencing everything. It's rather that Tim experiences that he is an expression of this found

formless wonders. 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 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 wondness of being looking out through Tim, and there's that formless ononess of being my own deep self looking back at me. And that's when you enter these very deep states. And and like you said earlier, really Eric, what's happened? If you've just seen what was already happening from a deeper place, 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

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