Next Level Soul Podcast Episode 672
Tim Freke is a philosopher and author who argues that spirituality needs to be turned the right way up. In this episode of the Next Level Soul Podcast, he explains why he believes we did not fall from grace but are rising, why God may be the leading edge of the universe, how the ego fits in, and why your life matters more than you think.
Key Takeaways
- Tim says life is not a dream or an illusion. It is the experience of being human, and it matters.
- He asks: what if we did not fall, and are rising instead?
- He describes one evolutionary process moving from matter to life, life to consciousness, and consciousness to soul.
- He suggests God is the leading edge of the universe, formed by minds coming into communion.
- He says time does not pass; it accumulates, and you are made of your past.
- He coined univigil for an individual who is consciously one with the universe.
- He believes every life, even the smallest, contributes to something greater.
Who Is Tim Freke?
Tim Freke is a philosopher, author and spiritual explorer based in England. He has written around 35 books, including the international bestseller The Jesus Mysteries, the short book Lucid Living and Soul Story. For about 30 years he has also run retreats where thousands of people have, in his words, come into color for the first time.
What makes this conversation unusual is that Tim is willing to say that most of his own books are wrong. He has revised his worldview more than once, and he says that in his 60s he would have to be a complete idiot to think he could not be wrong again. That openness shapes the whole episode, and Alex meets it with plenty of curiosity and a few friendly pushbacks.
The Experience of Being Human
Alex opens with a deep question: who are you when you strip away the titles and are alone with yourself? Tim says he loves it because it is exactly where he always wants to start. His answer is simple and honest. He is a person who is going to die, who finds life beautiful and horrible and everything in between, and who wants to live it fully and understand it as well as he can.
From there Tim makes a point that runs through the entire conversation. For years he used analogies like life being a dream or a movie. Now he feels they quietly say that this is not really real. He wants to turn that around. Life is not a dream, a movie or an illusion. It is the experience of being human, with all of its cares, struggles, loves and heartache, and that is the spiritual journey. Anything that takes us away from it, he says, is a loss.
The Hill at Age 12
Alex asks about the moment Tim’s understanding of reality broke open. Tim describes sitting on a hill at age 12, overlooking the small town in the southwest of England where he grew up, while walking his dog. He had always felt that life was an enormous question that must have an enormous answer. Watching the grown-ups rush around below, apparently pretending they knew what was going on, something shifted.
He calls what happened being deep awake. The biggest thing, he says, was the love: the whole universe seemed to pulse with it. There was also a profound sense of connection, which he would now call oneness or communion, and the colors were brighter. Since he had heard that God is love, his young mind concluded that this was God. What that actually means has been his life’s work. The first thing he did when he came down the hill was write, and he still has those pages.
He uses a lovely image for it. Imagine everyone sees in black and white, and then one day you open your eyes and it is all in color. Then it fades, and you spend years asking how to get it back. His priority ever since has been experience, and sharing it with others.
Getting Older, Facing Death and Taking Life Seriously
Alex shares that in his early 50s he has started to look at life more like a game, with real stakes but a clear sense that he may be past the halfway point. He asks Tim whether this is a natural stage of life. Tim says every human life has an archetypal shape, a process of maturing and heading toward death, and that each person lives their own version of it. Recognizing death, he says, is huge, and he has felt it closer in recent years.
Tim gently pushes back on the game language. After he had a family, around age 40, a lot of what he believed spiritually went out the window, and more has gone since his 60s. When he thinks of his daughter, he says, it is not a game. He prefers to tell the difference between what truly matters and what is less important. Alex clarifies that he means the lightness of a movie, not devaluing anything, and the two agree on the heart of it: take life seriously without taking yourself too seriously.
Turning Spirituality the Right Way Up
This is the core of Tim’s message. He argues that we need a post-scientific spirituality. Science has changed everything, from medicine to being able to talk across the Atlantic, and spirituality has not caught up. He notes that with brain surgery we do not go back to Plato, who thought the brain cooled the blood, yet with spirituality we keep assuming the ancients knew best and we forgot.
The biggest thing science has shown us, Tim says, is that the universe is not a thing but a process. It is about 14 billion years of evolution, and he loves the line that most of the universe was once just hydrogen, and that gas has become you and me talking about the universe. Our ancestors, east and west, could not have known this, so their spirituality was built on a different picture.
Traditional spirituality, in his caricature, says the real world is supernatural and has fallen into a dense natural one. You are not really Alex, you are a spark of God or pure consciousness that got lost, and you will find your way home. Tim says everything spirituality explores is real, including survival of death, a super intelligence and the magic of life. It has simply been set the wrong way up. We have not fallen from anywhere. We are growing into something.
Soul, Psyche and What Survives Death
Alex shares his own belief that souls choose to come to this dense school of life to learn through adversity, and that we return having evolved. Tim says that makes sense inside an evolutionary view. In his picture, matter became alive, life evolved sentience and consciousness, and then the psyche emerged. He points out that psyche is the Greek word for soul, so the two words mean the same thing, and that we experience two levels of reality all the time: the level of the senses and the level of the psyche.
His suggestion is that this psyche evolved to survive the death of the body. Having done so, he finds it very plausible that it re-engages with a biological form, which he calls psychosymbiosis, and which is what is usually called reincarnation. He leaves room for different experiences: some may make choices, while for others it might be like falling asleep. The difference he wants to stress is that we are not souls who were already perfect and then fell. We are a strand in an evolving process that learned to survive the body’s death.
Why Time Accumulates
To explain identity, Tim talks about time. He says time does not pass or disappear. It accumulates, and he credits Rupert Sheldrake, who has also appeared on the show (our conversation with Rupert Sheldrake), as a major inspiration. If the past accumulates, then you are made of your past. Everything you have ever been is implicit in this moment, and so are all of your relationships with the universe.
So what are you? Tim says you are a process that arose at some point in the evolutionary story, perhaps with Alex, perhaps many lives earlier. That process continues after the body dies, because the psyche keeps functioning in the imaginal realm and can later re-engage. In this view nothing needs to exist outside the process, no souls, sparks or God at the beginning. That, he says, is the big shift for him.
God as the Leading Edge
If the universe is evolving, where does God fit? Tim says the experience he had at 12, the sense of oneness and love, is not the source of everything. It is the leading edge of one process. It is the fruit, not the root, and the sky, not the ground. The universe, he says, is flowering into a super intelligence.
He draws an analogy from the body. Individual cells came together to form a multicellular organism that is more than any one of them. He suggests the same thing is happening at the level of the psyche. When we come into a state of communion, we begin to form a Super Soul. The great mind is made of all the individual minds. He even turns around a Christian phrase: tradition speaks of a communion of souls around God, and Tim says the communion of souls is God.
Alex sums it up as the two of them being cells in the great body of the super intelligence. Tim says yes, we can be, if we come into these deeper awake states. By entering that communion we contribute our own little part to creating something bigger.
What Does the One Actually Mean?
Alex says he agrees with almost everything and thinks they are mostly arguing about language. Tim appreciates the push, and clarifies what he means by the one. In his earlier books, he says, the one was already God, with intentions and a will to know itself. Now he means the one in the mathematical sense: something undivided, with no qualities at all, yet with the potential to become anything.
That potential has become this, and maybe much else. Along the way being became conscious, then soul, then the super intelligence we experience as love. He sees it as a development of the Taoist idea that the one becomes two, yin and yang, and that the essence is relationship, like the simplest bit of information in a computer. Spirituality then becomes the most emergent level of the natural, rather than something supernatural.
Gnosis and the Limits of Language
Alex notes that when the conversation reaches the edge of language, that is often a sign they are getting close to something real. He mentions that he has spoken with about 150 near-death experiencers, many of whom describe a kind of knowing on the other side with no words involved. He calls it being tapped into the cloud. Tim says he was one of the first members of the International Association for Near-Death Studies in the UK. If you want more on that, see our conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Long on near-death experiences.
Tim says gnosis has been central to his life. We sense with the soul and the psyche, he says, and we often know without knowing how we know. He thinks it is worth finding out how, because then we can communicate it, and with work, we can. He shares a story about a young woman who came to one of his events dressed in black and depressed, and who left saying she was a convert to something. He says that is exactly right.
Revising a Lifetime of Books
Alex asks how someone can stay fluid when their worldview keeps changing, when most people grab a belief system like a lifeboat and fight for it. Tim describes his own path. In the first phase he wrote about many traditions and drew out the perennial philosophy, the idea that the same core experiences appear everywhere: oneness, enormous love, meaning, and death not being the end. His bestseller The Jesus Mysteries, about Gnosticism, found that commonality inside Christianity.
In the second phase he wanted to say the perennial philosophy as clearly as possible, which became the short book Lucid Living, using the analogy of life as a dream. He got it so clear that he could see what was wrong with it. That coincided with the death of both his parents, when he was spending a lot of time around death, and his evolutionary view began to form. That was about 12 years ago, and the revision has deepened since. He says that if you are a philosopher, your job is to make the feeling make sense.
His advice to anyone whose beliefs are being shaken is to put experience first. He does not want to take away anyone’s faith. He just wants people to have spiritual experiences, and he says it does not matter to him whether you think the universe is evolutionary or that God is a big man in the sky. When you have a genuine connection with something greater, he says, it becomes easier to evolve your ideas, and a better understanding can deepen the experience in return.
An Age of Integration
Tim also wants a collective shift. Individually, whatever gets you through the night is fine. Collectively, he says, we need to be as rigorous about this level of reality as we are about physics or biology, so spirituality can move from the oddball periphery toward the center of culture, especially in the UK.
Alex offers a Bruce Lee analogy. Bruce Lee took the best from separate martial arts and unified them, which became mixed martial arts. A unified spiritual path could likewise celebrate every tradition rather than dismiss any. Tim agrees and adds the history: Zen arose when Buddhism met Taoism, and he sees Christianity as a meeting of Judaism and Platonism. Today the wisdom of the world sits on our phones, so this is an age not just of pluralism but of integration.
The Ego and the Univigil
Alex asks about the ego, noting that he believes it is a tool and not an enemy. Tim says he does not even know what people mean by the word. Being egotistical, thinking only of yourself, is not attractive or helpful. But awake states bring a universal benevolence in which you still look after yourself, your family and your community, without doing it at anyone else’s expense, and you wish well to everyone.
Some forms of spirituality hold that merely thinking of yourself as an I is in the way. Tim thinks that is profoundly mistaken. Since he could not find a word for his idea, he made up univigil, an individual who is now consciously one with the universe. We are evolving from individuals to univigils, he says, and the individual is not gone. It has become the foundation for something greater.
Alex adds the cell analogy, noting that without the individual cells there is no Tim and no Alex. For related thinking on consciousness, you might also enjoy our conversation with Donald Hoffman.
Sparks Rising Into the Light
Tim makes one of his favorite points here. In near-death experiences, people often describe the light, and some report seeing sparks rising and falling from it. He thinks this vision helped create a supernatural spirituality in which we are sparks that fell from the light. What he says we have missed is the rising up into it: we are each filaments that form the light, we fall away to live a life, and we come back and add to it.
This changes how death looks. Instead of being a drop in the ocean that dissolves, and with it all the struggles of being Alex and all of his care, you bring everything you have become into the communion. The meaning of your life is therefore massive. It is your contribution to the arising of this sublime super intelligence. Alex adds that every life, no matter how small it seems, feeds the greater whole, and compares it to trees and ecosystems, such as the Florida Everglades, where removing or adding one element throws everything off balance.
When Your Life Feels Small
Tim says that if you feel your life is insignificant, you may be experiencing it in black and white. He has felt that himself, especially when he was younger. For him, getting older has brought a love of small things, like watching nonsense on television with his wife or a phone call from his kids. Smallness can be just as beautiful when it comes into color.
From that comes service. Once you see the amazing mystery we are in, you want to benefit the whole, and that may be a grand gesture or simply smiling at the person who sold you milk and truly seeing them. If you connect soul to soul for a second, he says, they will feel it, and a ripple of love goes out. No life is too small for that.
The Truth the World Needs to Hear
Alex closes with his signature question: what truth is the world not ready to hear but desperately needs? Tim answers that benevolence alone can lead you anywhere, including into dumb choices, so it needs evolutionary wisdom. Part of that, he says, is how we work together while we sort ourselves into ideological echo chambers and silos.
He loves that we can now find the best version of almost any view online. What we need, he says, is to understand each other from the other person’s perspective rather than our own. That does not mean agreeing, and it might even turn out worse than we thought, but it is the step from individual to univigil, and a way to turn enemies into friends.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Take part in it. Life is the experience of being human, so engage with it fully instead of calling it an illusion.
- Try the rising story. Ask what changes if you did not fall but are growing into something new.
- Put experience first. Seek the moment the world comes into color, then let your ideas evolve around it.
- Value your contribution. Each life adds something to a greater whole, including the small moments.
- Understand the other side. Try to see a disagreement from the other person’s perspective before you respond.
- Offer a real moment of connection. Look at someone soul to soul, even for a second.
Please enjoy my conversation with Tim Freke.
Guest Links: Connect with Tim Freke
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Tim Freke?
Tim Freke is a philosopher and author who has written around 35 books on spirituality, including The Jesus Mysteries, Lucid Living and Soul Story. He first experienced what he calls being deep awake at age 12 and has spent his life trying to understand it and share it. He runs retreats, an online community and a podcast, and he describes his current work as a new, evolutionary approach to spirituality.
What does Tim Freke say the meaning of life is?
Tim says life is not a dream, a movie or an illusion. It is the experience of being human, with all its cares, struggles, loves and heartache, and that experience really matters. He believes anything that takes us away from it, including calling it just a dream, is a loss. For him the spiritual journey is a deeper engagement with being human, not an escape from it.
What does it mean to say we are rising rather than falling?
Most spiritual traditions, Tim says, tell a story of a fall, in which a spark of the divine drops into a dense world and needs to get home. He turns that story upside down. In his view the universe is a 14 billion year process of evolution that moved from hydrogen to life, from life to consciousness and from consciousness to soul, so we are growing up into something rather than falling from somewhere.
How does Tim Freke describe God?
Tim suggests God is the leading edge of the universe rather than its distant source. He describes a super intelligence formed as individual minds come into communion, much like cells forming a body. He turns the Christian phrase communion of souls around, saying the communion of souls is God. He calls it the fruit rather than the root and the sky rather than the ground.
What is a univigil?
Univigil is a word Tim made up because he could not find one that did what he wanted. A univigil is an individual who is now consciously aware of unity with the universe. He calls his philosophy univigilism and hopes we are birthing a new human. The key point is that the individual is not erased. The individual becomes the foundation for the univigil.
What does Tim Freke say about the ego?
Tim says he is not sure what people mean by the word ego, since it simply means the I. He points out that being egotistical, thinking only of yourself, is not very helpful. Awake states bring a universal benevolence, so you still look after yourself and your family but never at anyone else’s expense. He does not want to dissolve the individual. He wants it to grow into something greater.
What happens after death in Tim’s view?
Tim believes the psyche, which he treats as the same thing as the soul, has evolved to survive the death of the body. It keeps functioning on the level of the imaginal and may then re-engage with a biological form, which he calls psychosymbiosis. He leaves open whether some make choices about this and others do not. He stresses that this fits inside one evolutionary picture and does not require anything supernatural.
What does Tim mean when he says time accumulates?
Tim says time does not pass or disappear. It accumulates. Everything you have ever been is implicit in this moment, so you are made of your past, and so is everything else. He credits Rupert Sheldrake as a major inspiration for this idea. For Tim it explains how a self can be a continuing process that carries all of its relationships with the universe.
How can I stay open when my beliefs are challenged?
Tim’s first priority is experience, not belief. He wants people to have spiritual experiences, which he compares to going from black and white to color, and he says he does not care what you believe if you have that experience. With a real connection to something greater, he says, it becomes easier to let your ideas evolve, and a better understanding tends to deepen the experience too.
Where can I learn more about Tim Freke?
Visit timfreke.com to find his books, his retreats and his online community, which meets on Sundays. He has a YouTube channel and a pod book called Why Your Life Really Matters, which is free on YouTube and runs 37 chapters. He is also starting the Univigils podcast. You can also watch this episode ad-free on Next Level Soul TV.
Keep Exploring
- Hear Tim’s inspiration on time and memory in nature: Rupert Sheldrake on the Next Level Soul Podcast
- Go deeper on reality and consciousness: Donald Hoffman on the Next Level Soul Podcast
- Explore what people experience at death: Dr. Jeffrey Long on near-death experiences
- Watch Kyle Cease’s Free Masterclass on letting go of the self: Kyle Cease: Becoming Nobody
- Explore all of our free masterclasses
Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
Who are you when you're alone with yourself?
Tim Freke 0:02
I love that question, because that's where I always want to start. It's the experience of being human. That's what it is. It's not like anything, and it makes us what we are. And that is the spiritual journey, and anything we do to take us away from it is a loss, actually. What if everything is part of one process of forming. So the the rising of the soul is also part of one process of forming, which is what we experience in these mystical states, and that in that we are contributing to the emergence of this divine next level.
Alex Ferrari 0:35
Can you talk a little bit about the ego and what is so misunderstood about the ego and how we can truly use the ego for not only our day to day life, but our spiritual evolution.
Tim Freke 0:47
Because what I think is happening is that we're evolving from individuals to what I call...
Alex Ferrari 0:57
Now before we get started, I want to thank you so much for clicking on this video and getting ready to watch this amazing conversation we're about to have. But one thing I've noticed is that about 40% of you who are watching are not subscribed. It is the easiest way to continue to support the work we're doing at next level soul, and it has been the joy of my life to have these amazing conversations with some of the most remarkable and profound souls on the planet. So from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you so much for giving me the ability and the privilege of doing this work for you. So please just hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, and it really, really helps us out a lot. Thank you so much, and let's dive in.
Alex Ferrari 1:50
I'd like to welcome to the show Tim Freke man, how you doing Tim?
Tim Freke 1:52
I'm doing very well. Nice to be here.
Alex Ferrari 1:54
Oh, pleasure to meet you, my friend. You are calling from, from England, my new favorite second home, my new favorite second home, London. I love London. I love England, but I love London as well. I went to a whole bunch.
Tim Freke 2:08
Well, it's mutual. I love the US and Texas particularly, actually,
Alex Ferrari 2:13
We have, we have some good barbecue here, some good barbecue. Not, not as much the barbecue over in London, I didn't see a whole lot of barbecue joints.
Tim Freke 2:22
Kind of need the weather to go with barbecue, don't you think?
Alex Ferrari 2:27
Yeah, barbecue is not really for the gloomy cold, not so much, not so much, but. But your work's been pretty interesting. Tim, I've been following your work for a little while now, and your approach to spirituality is pretty remarkable, and to the self in specifically. But my first question, I want to want to dive into the deep end of the pool with you, is right when you strip away the titles, philosopher, author, teacher, who are you when you're alone with yourself?
Tim Freke 3:00
What a fantastic question to start with, Alex. I love that question. I love that question because that's where I always want to start. You've come just straight to the place that I always want to start, which is, hello, I'm Tim. I'm 67 years old. I'm going to die. Life is beautiful and horrible, and everything in between, and I want to live it to the full, and I want to know what it is as best as I can, and I want to be able to approach my death feeling like I've done my best, or if that's too ambitious, I've done my best to do my best, and everything else comes from that, that that's why I've ended up drawn to spirituality because it seemed to offer the best chance to do all of that. But I'm also interested in the whole everything you know, just just desperately curious. And it's been such a ride, and here I am in my 60s, and it feels like someone's hit the accelerator. It's all increasing. So isn't
Alex Ferrari 3:59
it amazing, though, as you get older, that does happen. Yeah. I mean, when I was in my 20s, 30s and 40s, it was very it's been the slow progression of speed and intensity in the spiritual side of my life. And it seems like now that I'm in my 50s, it's, it's just ramping up. You're absolutely right if you're open to it, and not for everybody, but if you're open to it, it definitely does so. So let me, let's go back, then, to the moment in your life when your understanding of reality completely broke and you can never come back. What was that moment for you?
Tim Freke 4:39
Yeah, I was 12 years old. I was sitting on a hill overlooking this kind of small little town in the south west of England where I grew up. And ever since I can remember, I've always had a profound sense of how mysterious it is to be alive. It felt like life was this enormous question, and that. There must be an enormous answer, because it's such an enormous question. And sitting on that little hill, I was taking my dog for a walk and looking at all of the grown ups rushing around in the town below me, pretending they knew what was going on, when it was absolutely clear to me that none of them did, and wondering why they were all pretending, or why they were ignoring the big question, why no one was what, you know, they all seemed worried about trivia and and something happened, and I experienced what I now call being deep awake for the first time. So it's a familiar shift. I'm sure many people listening will go, Yeah, I know that is. I've had it where suddenly I was, suddenly my whole perception of what exists was transformed in that there was a profound, well, the biggest thing was the love Alex. That was the thing that really hit me as a kid, was this enormous whole universe is pulsating with love. How did I miss that and a profound sense of connection? Now, I'd say oneness, perhaps, or communion, along with it, all the colors brighter, all this things which many people experience. And because I had no context to understand that in I'd, I had the ideas were available to me. So I'd, I'd been to church when I was younger. I probably stopped by then, I can't remember, and I picked up ideas there. And at school, I'd heard that God is love. And so my natural assumption was, oh, wow, this is, this is God then, and it was God. And so I now, of course, it opens up huge questions. Is what the hell that means to say it's God and that I've been working on ever since, and I'm working on now more than ever. But that was the start, and then from that, from that profound sense that, Oh, I see, all of my questions felt they were resolved into this experience. And so I was left with, okay, what was that? How do I get back to that? And that's ever since, really, I've been going, right. How do I find it? How do I deepen it? And because of my nature, I don't know why, unlike it, how do I share it? So the very first thing I did when I came down the hill was write, and I still have the writing. And so I was off on that journey, and then that led me to write far too many books and to do everything I'm doing.
Alex Ferrari 7:27
So Tim, let me ask you, because you, you've been on this rock a little longer than I have, and you so you're ahead of you're ahead of me on the road by by a little bit. But something has been happening to me lately, and I'd love to hear your perspective on it where, and I don't know if it's a natural progression. As you get older, you know, I just hit, I just hit 51 I'm 51 right now. I'm going to be 52 this year. And it seems that when I hit my 50s, things started to shift very dramatically. Now I know that, you know, I don't have a Porsche. I'm not dating a 20 year old. I'm not having a midlife crisis by any stretch, but it is a form of a midlife crisis, but a spiritual one for me, and it's unique because of the nature of my work and what I do all the time. I live and breathe and talk about this stuff all the time, death and and and awakening and spirituality and frequencies and all of these things, but I started to shift a little bit differently in the way that I do approach the world. I look at everything much more as a game, even though there are stakes in this game, but just the same as Mario would have stakes of a turtle biting him and killing him. In Super Mario Brothers, there are stakes for the player playing the game. But as I'm walking through things, I just started to realize I'm like, Well, you know, if I at best case scenario, I'm halfway through this game, at best case scenario, let's say I'm going to live over 100 which, Hey, God knows, maybe I will, but in but if not, I'm over halfway through, you know, if I just do the normal death rate of of humanity, especially here in America. So that gives you perspective. It changes the perspective of everything for me, at least for me so is my question to you, is is this a natural progression, or is this just something very specific? Is a case by case basis? I mean, I obviously in the spiritual space. I mean, in the people who are in the spiritual space and and think about these things. This is a shift for me. If you're just, you know, not, you know, not doing things like this, or not even thinking about spirituality and just living your life. This is not going to be something that you're going to be doing deep thoughts about, but I just love to hear your thoughts about it. For someone who has been on the spiritual path and is ahead of me, you know, a bit than I am now.
Tim Freke 10:00
Yeah, older, at least. So yeah, I think there's a I think every human life, regardless, has a certain shape to it, which is a process of maturing and heading to death, and that there's an archetypal journey that unfolds underneath each individual journey. But each individual is quite unique, so it's a different version. And then if you engage with the more, what I would call the more emergent levels of reality, the spiritual levels, then it often takes on a different character. The recognition of death is huge, absolutely huge. So it's hard for me to respond personally, because I kind of engaged with it, very, very young. Worked with people that were dying. I I, I sorted out death, because it felt absolutely the only way that I could come to understand what life was. So it was that hasn't changed, although I am very aware that it's closer now than it's ever been. I mean, it could be today, you know, but it's closer. And so I think these things do happen, and 50 is a really great age. I mean, my suspicion, Alex, is that your unique journey has elements of this archetypal journey, especially the spiritual archetypal journey, and then it will be unique to you. So one shouldn't go by that too much, but that at 50, you're feeling Hearing you say that as a man who's that little bit older just feels like, Oh, great. That sounds good. That sounds exactly right. I'm in the spirit of the honesty, which was you started this conversation. I'm hesitant personally about the game thing, because Jeff family, yes, of course, yeah, okay, you know, it's like the all of that, that kind of to me now, the one of the big transitions that happened in my life when I was about 40, I guess, was I had family, and then suddenly a whole load of things that I believe spiritually just went out of the window. A whole load more have gone out since I've been 60. And so my views now are utterly different to where they were before, in so many ways. But one of the things is I completely get what you're saying, and there's something really valuable about it. There's a lightness, there's an ability to engage. And but there's also, I prefer the sense of, I can see what is and isn't important, because some of it really matters. And so this, this part of me that when I think of, say, my daughter as an example, and I go, Yeah, it's kind of a game. It's like, no, no, it really isn't.
Alex Ferrari 12:44
I understand what you I understand
Tim Freke 12:46
Trying to say. So there's a language which gets used in spirituality, which I feel a bit like, No, don't. Let's not do that. Let's just go. I can tell the difference between what matters and what is is less important.
Alex Ferrari 12:57
I understand what you mean. I always like to use the analogy more of a movie and different characters playing different roles and interaction with those and how they affect each other. But when you're watching a movie, there is a level of game, a gamification of it. But I understand what you mean, not to lessen it and not to devalue it, and not to take it for granted, like a game like, Oh, it's just, I'll just restart again.
Tim Freke 13:20
Exactly and also, it's like you, if you go back to some of my, my books, one of the things that happened to me, Alex, is I have to come out. I've had to come out and go, You know, I've written 35 books, and in 34 of them, there's a whole load of ideas. I don't think right, which was a bit of a, it was a bit of a, okay, can I? I'm going to have to do this. So there's a there's a flavor for me now and and, you know, again, the movie, I get it. I've real. Find it in my books. You'll find that analogy or a dream, is another analogy I used a lot, a lot, as I've come into my 60s now, it feels like, No, it's not a dream, it's not a movie. It's the experience of being human. That's what it is. It's not like anything. It's the experience of being human, and that human adventure and all of its cares and all of its struggles and loves and heartache, just as it is, really matters and it makes us what we are, and that is the spiritual journey, and anything we do to take us away from it is a loss, actually. To look at your life and go, it's just a dream. That's a loss. To go, it's like a movie, yeah, but it's a loss. What it is this, you know, trying to get at so I kind of want to, I've reshaped how I've the analogies that I've been drawn to, to try and capture that sense of how human it is, what we're in.
Alex Ferrari 14:54
Yeah, I think it's innately human to try to create some sort. Of structure in one way, shape or form, whatever that is. So we use game, use a movie. We use a play. Shakespeare, yes, very famously said his a fellow, a fellow, a fellow Englishman said that, you know, life is just the stage, and we are all just actors on it. So on, yes, I get, I get that. I get, but I understand deeply what you're saying,
Tim Freke 15:22
The thing that it does is that without noticing it, because it's done for good reasons, and I did it for good reasons, but what it does is it makes it. It goes, this isn't really real. And there's a lot of spirituality which does that this is not real. You're not real. It's all a kind of illusion. And what's happened for me is I've wanted to turn that completely upside down and go, No, this is real. We're in something real, and we're in something significant, and we shouldn't we shouldn't be drawn by spirituality, into anything which takes us away from, from that. That's, that's where I'm at. That's where I've kind of arrived at the moment, at 67 it's like, no, this is actually, I'm not quite 67 yet I mustn't age myself more than I am 66
Alex Ferrari 16:17
You know but it's, it's funny that I mean the, I mean the whole the the old Hindu idea of Maya, or the or the dreams, or, I think the Aborigines call it the great dream, that there's just an illusion, and there is this. There is a truth to that. I get it, but I understand at a very deep level what you're saying is, like you're here in this is something very, very important, or else you wouldn't be here. You won the lottery just to be here,
Tim Freke 16:49
Absolutely right. So maybe this is a chance to, you know, sort of head into the philosophy that I've been sharing recently in my my, my, my book behind me, Soul story, which is fairly old now, but, but in my pod book, which is a kind of love child of a pod, good pod book, sorry, a love child of book and a podcast. It's videos and audio on so I can give it away. And what I'm exploring there, Alex, and I know it's, well, it's new, and I'm drawn to it. Is one way of getting it is, I feel we need to turn spirituality the right way up, and it's quite a radical shift. But it's not meant to dismiss the past. Quite the opposite. I couldn't have come to it unless I'd written books on all just like every spiritual tradition, I should think at least one book. And what I mean by that is, everything evolves. But spirituality is a little bit obsessed with the past and with the idea that, you know, the the ancients knew and we forgotten and all of that stuff. Whereas, you know, with brain surgery, you don't go around going, let's, let's, let's go to Plato. He thought the brain was a cooling system for the blood. Don't you think we should? We don't do that, but with spirituality, we do do that, you know? So, so what are it seems to me that we what we need now. It's a radically new form of spirituality, and it needs. It needs to be a post scientific spirituality. Spirit science has arrived. It's changed everything. It means that you can be in Texas and I can be in England and we can talk, I mean, it's a miracle. It's done all of this, and spirituality really has not caught up. And the biggest thing that the scientific method has shown us, which is astonishing, is the universe is not a thing. It's a process, and it's a 14 billion years, as far as we can tell right now, process of evolution that has gone from the simplest things you can possibly imagine to this. It's a line which I love, which I stole, actually, from somewhere else I admire, but is 14 billion years ago most of the universe. It was just hydrogen, just a gas, and that gas has become you and me talking about the universe, that that is what we found out is astonishing. So what I want to suggest is that in the past, for absolutely understandable reasons, our ancestors, all of them east and west, and the Aborigines all on they had no idea that the universe was a process of evolution. They didn't, hadn't, couldn't possibly guess that. We know that. So we can understand spirituality in a new way. So the traditional spirituality is about some kind of fall. There's a supernatural thing. It could be God, it could be pure consciousness. It could be Brahman, something which has fallen into this illusion and needs to get back. And you're not really Alex, really you're that. You're a spark of God, or you're a soul, or you're already perfect, or you're You're something else. You're not Alex, and you've got confused, and if you could stop. Think you were, Alex, everything would be all right. And don't worry, you'll get home eventually. This is I'm, you know, I'm doing a kind of caricature of it, but that's essentially the message spiritual, the reality is supernatural, and it's fallen into this dense natural world. What I've been exploring is to go, no, no, that's the pre evolutionary understanding we need to turn that it's all good, everything that spirituality is exploring, survival of death, the existence of a super intelligence, the magic of life, all real. It's just we've got it the wrong way up. We haven't fallen from anywhere, which is actually a really negative view falling into illusion. Actually, we're growing up into something, and that what spirituality is exploring is the most emergent level of one process of evolutionary emergence through which everything has come into form, one process of forming that's started with physics, biology, psyche, soul, and that's the domain of spirituality. So it's it's like, yeah, spirituality, it's really important. It just needs a radical shift to put it the right way up, and it will all fall into place, and how it meshes with everything else we know about the universe will suddenly start to become, become obvious.
Alex Ferrari 21:28
So when you're saying the I agree with you, I don't, I don't, I don't agree with the fallen. We didn't fall anywhere. We're not the we're not Lucifer. We didn't fall from from the heavens for being a bad boy, if you will. I this is my belief, which, again, makes the most sense after as much research and stuff I've done over the years, is that we as a soul on the other side choose to come down to learn certain lessons and to evolve by going through these lessons, by going through this very dense, very dense School of Education, and we choose what we kind of come across in many ways, because I don't know about you, but I have only learned the biggest lessons I've learned in life is because of overcoming adversity, overcoming struggle in one way, shape or form, and as I continue to walk this path, that makes the most sense to me, to the point where we eventually come eventually we go back to where we came from, but we have evolved to another level. Does that make sense at all?
Tim Freke 22:43
So I think what you're saying does make sense, but I want to see it within an evolutionary view. So what I think the turning up the right way goes, matter has become alive, astonishing, but that's what's happened. Life has given, has evolved, sentience and consciousness, and then this the psyche, the area that you're understanding the meaning of the funny words I'm saying. So I'm making these funny sounds on the biological level, and you're understanding their meaning on the level of the psyche. Psyche is the Greek word for soul. They mean exactly the same thing. They're both all these words, soul, mind, psyche. These are words from different linguistic roots that were all evolved to talk about the obvious, that we are experiencing two levels of reality, the level of senses and the level of the psyche or soul. That's what everyone's experiencing all the time. What I wanted like to suggest is that in that evolutionary process, which you see miracle after miracle after miracle, as it were, that the psych, the system, has has evolved to survive the death of the body. Now, having done that, I think it's very, very plausible that it is coming back into a relationship with a biological form, what gets called reincarnation, and that there may be all sorts of choices made by some. Maybe for others, it's just like falling asleep and you don't make any choices. Maybe there's, there's all sorts of levels with that. Who knows. So what you're saying makes sense, but within an evolutionary picture. So yes, now we are a psyche or a soul, which can survive the death of the body that's re engaging with a biological level and learning things and going through things, but not because that's what we already were that has evolved. Also. It's not like there's some supernatural thing that just exists. What I'm what the radical idea I'm trying to explore Alex is, what if everything is part of one process of forming, so the the rising of the soul is also part of one process of forming, which has been going on for all this time. And the power of that vision is, it's, it's, it's elegance. Is that you don't have to just accept that anything just exists. You can start from something really simple, like the Daoists do, like the one is also two, yin and yang, the sim the bit, like the bit of in a computer, the simplest piece of information and from the one as two or relationship has come everything from that information, everything and the soul is a very, very emergent level of that. So in one way, that accommodates all the views that you were expressing, there it goes, yep, should take that seriously. But in another way, it profoundly changes it because it goes that is true, not because you already are this, something other, this other supernatural thing. It goes, no, what you are is a strand in this evolving, forming and that has learned to survive the death of the body. Am I making any sense?
Alex Ferrari 25:58
You are. You are. I want to clarify a couple of ideas there. So the the idea of the soul as an evolutionary track, I get 100% it wasn't that we were, you know, Tim soul, Tim and soul, Alex was just chilling at the bar on the other side and going, man, you know what? I wouldn't mind doing. I got to go down learn about this, this and this. And I could do it slowly up here, but down there, it's like, it goes really quick, but it's going to be really intense. And then I'm going to go down, then we both come down here, you know, at the bar on the other side. We'll call it bar Cafe heaven. At Cafe heaven, you and I, you're like, Listen, I'm going to go up ahead of you about, you know, 17, 16, years, 15 years, and then we're gonna have a conversation later on, and we'll talk about this. It'll be fun. And be like, Oh, great, I'll see you. I'll see you in 2026, you know. And we come down, we do our thing, we learn. And then when we pass, we've now, we we've definitely evolved more as a soul by going through this experience. I do agree with you that I don't believe that on the other side, we were always just soul, Tim and soul, Alex. I think there was an evolutionary process even on that side, that we start at a certain point and then we grow and we grow and grow. And that's very aligned with a lot of spiritual ideas from multiple different cultures around the world. Does that all jive with you at this point?
Tim Freke 27:25
Kind of, but I suspect we still might be saying something kind of different. So, so let's go for identity. What is identity? What makes anything a thing? What makes the plant, that plant? What that's behind me? What makes you, you Me, me. Because, if we can get that now, the traditional idea of spirituality is that your identity is something supernatural, the spark of God or pure consciousness that's got lost, or a soul, or all various various different versions of that. What I want to suggest is, how can I do this quickly? I want to talk about time. Can I need to talk about a few things? If that's all right, Alex, should I talk about time? I think we the universe is a process, and that, therefore we can understand that its process, that's time. And I want to suggest that time doesn't pass, it doesn't disappear, it accumulates. I think you spoke to Rupert Sheldrake, yes, yes. Did you speak to Rupert? Yes. And this is, this is in this is in large part inspired by Rupert, that time doesn't pass, it accumulates. That's my phrase for it. But he's saying something very similar. And it doesn't just accumulate it. It runs the present. So we'll talk about that another time. But right now, I just want to go look so part the past accumulates. So you're made of the past. Everything is and it hasn't gone anywhere. It's implicit in this moment. Everything you've ever been is implicit in this moment. That's what I'm meeting and everything I've ever been, all of my relationships with the universe are implicit in this moment. So what you are then is a process. So that process has emerged at some point. Maybe it arose with Alex. Maybe it arose many, many lives before Alex. But nevertheless, it arose at some point in this evolutionary process, same with Tim, and that process is continuing. And that process continues after the death of the body, because the psyche is able to keep functioning on the level of the imaginal and then it reengages. I call it a psychosymbiosis. It comes into another symbiotic relationship with the biological system. And then it continues. And it does that, and it does that, but the whole thing is arising from the one tree of evolution. It's nothing outside, no souls, no sparks, no God at the beginning. That's the big shift for me, and we can, we, maybe we can talk about that as part of it. I don't know whether you want me to carry on or whether to break with that, that that the whole vision is not. Something outside, not the Divinity, which has got lost or sparked and can become all these different sparks, but the other way around that, that thing I experienced when I was 12, that's not the source. It's the leading edge of this one process, which is why it feels so amazing. So the whole process, it's, it's where it's, it's the fruit, not the root, it's the sky, not the ground. It's where it's been heading. So that the whole universe is is flowering into that super intelligence, because that's the next level on in soul and and what I'm exploring, and is that in that experience of communion which I had when I was 12, and I've been coming back to and taking people to in my events, and just seen so much of it, and that amazing, beautiful thing, actually, what's happening is that we are, in a sense, forming that super intelligence because the pattern which has gone throughout throughout the whole evolution process is really obvious. If you look at your body, somehow lots of individual cells came together to form something beyond any one of them individually, which is this multi cellular body. And my sense is that's what's happening on the level of the psyche of soul, that when we come into that state of communion, we begin to form a super system, a Super Soul. And so so the great mind is not the source. The great mind is actually the leading edge, and it's made of all the individual minds. The super intelligence is lots of individual intelligences which are coming into communion, which is what we experience in these mystical states, and that in that we are contributing to the emergence of this divine next level.
Alex Ferrari 31:51
So what you're saying is that, essentially, you and I are both cells in the great body of the super intelligence.
Tim Freke 32:01
I'm saying we can be. I'm saying we if, if we come in, if we come into these deeper weight states, when we, when we, when we follow that the most profound spiritual communion we begin, we, we. You know, there's a phrase which I thought, I can use that and turn it around. In the Christian tradition, they talk about the communion of souls around God. And what struck me was, ah, no, the communion of Souls is God. That's what is God? So that by coming into that communion, we are creating this super intelligence. We're creating this bigger thing, or we're contributing towards it our own little
Alex Ferrari 32:42
We're not saying different things. We're not saying different things at all. I agree. No, no, I'm you're not. We're not saying different things at all. I think it's just we're coming at it from two different flavors. But it's, I agree with you 110% we are one, as the concept of the One is we are all contributing to the one. We are all connected at a very deep level. The illusion of separation is that an illusion in my in my point of view, but we are all contributing to the super consciousness, the super intelligence, the oneness, the God, whatever term it is. But we're part of that process. We're not like, there's a guy in a white, white beard sitting on a chair somewhere, going and then we're all just kind of chilling around. Like, tell me the story of what happened when you were Tim, tell me the story of what happened with no, no. We are that and and just us living our lives as an evolving as we are, are kind of contributing to the greater one does. That is that makes sense.
Tim Freke 33:50
It does as long as this is great to be able to push, push this Alex, I really appreciate it. It's like it. I just need to check what you mean by the one, because here's what i If you look to most of my books, I talk about the one, but in the past, what I meant by the one really wasn't the one. What I meant was on something, and really it was already God that was for me. So the one already had intentions. It wanted to know it's a mythic one. It was the presence of consciousness. Now, when I say, yeah, it all starts with the one. I mean, the one like when you talk about in maths, one, something undivided, something which has no qualities. What so ever something with the potential to form into anything, but which itself is nothing, and that potential to become anything has become this, and maybe many other things. So if we mean by that the one, then, yeah, there's a oneness of let's call it the oneness of being. Which is being everything, and then it's arrived to the point where it's conscious, arrived at the point where it's soul, and then arriving at the point where it's this super intelligence, which we experience as a love.
Alex Ferrari 35:10
Tim, we are definitely in deep waters this conversation, which I absolutely love. I love this because we're exploring very deep questions from different angles. But I think, again, I think we're we're not saying different things. I think there might be a couple little tweaks here, but I'm not anything. Anytime I'm hearing you speak, I'm not going well, this guy's wrong. No, no. I'm like, No, it's like, this makes all the sense of the world. No, no. I've had those conversations before. I'm like, No, that's not the way it works. He's just No. He's just a little No, no, I don't agree. I agree with you 100% it's just right. It's we're now getting into semantics of language, which is that is, in my opinion, the sign that we're getting close, because when language starts to break down, that means we're going into a territory where language is the limitations of language are becoming more and more prevalent in what in our
Tim Freke 36:08
You just have to be clearer than you know. We just need to be very clear.
Alex Ferrari 36:11
Yeah, and it's we start. That's why a lot of the ancient truths are so simple. Yeah, so basic. I mean, Jesus, Buddha, the basic, basic ideas, because they are the most powerful. When we start getting into these areas where we're going to I feel like we're on the edge of the universe right now. We're like, kind of in the outskirts, where you could barely see any light at all. That's when it starts to get interesting, because we're starting getting to an area now that is, you were trying to explain the unexplainable in the current language abilities that we have. I don't know how much experience you have with this, but I've spoken to about 150 near death experiencers, people who have died and come back.
Tim Freke 36:59
Yeah, I was, I think I was one of the very first members of the International Association of near death studies in this country when I was
Alex Ferrari 37:06
Oh, really. So by, by speaking to so many of them, they speak about this ability on the other side that you're kind of tapped in. I call it the cloud. You're tapped into the cloud, and you're able to get anything you want, any information, and you'll understand it instantly. And there's no language. It's a knowing. And I don't know if you've ever had this experience in meditations, or any of your spiritual experiences, when you've been able to transcend the mind and actually just know that, oh, I know this is happening right now. I know that has happened, and it's very unexplainable. With language, you just you just have a knowing about something you're seeing, something you're experiencing, whether in a meditation or in a spiritual experience, you just know, and I think we are now getting onto the edge of that. We're now like we're trying, we're pushing. And maybe it's just maybe it's me and my density of not being able to understand exactly what you mean. But I feel it that we're both talking about this in the similar fashion. It's just a couple of nuances in the language. But I don't disagree with anything that you're saying, to be honest with you. Does that make all does that make any sense?
Tim Freke 38:31
It does. Yeah. I mean, so that Gnosis is is something which has been very central to my life and and certainly, it seems to me, we sense with the soul, we sense with the psyche, and that is often where we have these experiences where we know but we don't know how we know. I personally think it's worth finding out how we know, because then we can communicate about it, and it's if you work at it, you can. So yeah, I absolutely know what you mean, and that's certainly what happened to me when I was a kid. You know, I just it happened. I knew something and I didn't, I didn't know how to express it. And one of my favorite things that ever got sent to me years and years ago to buy a lovely young girl who came to one of my events and had a very profound experience and arrived all dressed in black and very depressed at the end, just went, I'm a convert to something. I was like, Yeah, me too, yeah, I'm a convert to something that's exactly right. So I completely get that so but, but the overall vision that I'm wanting to convey for your consideration, Alex, it's a development of all traditional spirituality, but it does turn it on its head. And so it's kind of like, I guess you could say it's kind of Taoism at the beginning, and theism, or Christianity at the end, or perhaps, or Buddhism at the beginning.
Alex Ferrari 39:51
Yeah, it starts one way or the other.
Tim Freke 39:55
It starts with the void. It starts with the one as two. The the tao is empty, but it is the mother of all things. It and the essence of the tao is relationship yin and yang. It's a bit of information. It is the simplest thing you can imagine, because what we're in is a process of forming. It's the realization of ever more emergent possibilities based so each moment is that, here's another one. It's never happened before, but it contains everything that's happened so far. Oh, here's another one. Everything we've ever experienced is that. So that simple idea, one process of forming, allows us to potentially understand how everything fits together. I mean, obviously it's just a sketch, but it is a sketch, and it then refashions spirituality as the most emergent level of the natural, not something which you could see in any way as supernatural, including that experience of a super intelligence that gets called God.
Alex Ferrari 40:57
I want to let's shift gears for a second. Let's do it. You mentioned before that you've written 34 books, and a lot of the stuff that you've written before, you're just like, Yeah, I was just going through my process. Not some of Of course, of course. But this, that's a very interesting thing that I think needs to be dug into a little bit, because so many people. I think, as a human being, we want to set our belief system, our programming that we were born as a I wouldn't call it a blank slate, because I think there is some programming at the factory that comes in that you have certain skills, certain abilities, and so on. But we're pretty much a blank slate, almost when we come in, and we're depending on where we come in, we start getting programmed by our by our reality that we're experiencing rich, poor, abuse, love, community, country, religion, all of that stuff starts to get programmed into us. And then once we set our belief system, and we set the rules of our understanding of reality, because this is crazy down here. Tim, this is not, I say down here because I'm a Catholic. I was a Catholic, so I'm very covering Catholics. I always say down here, you know?
Tim Freke 42:12
So I could go with that. That's fun.
Alex Ferrari 42:16
So being in this reality is not easy. It's kind of insane. And all we're trying, it's hard, and we're all we're trying to do is make sense of all of it. So once we have a framework that works for us, many people will die, will fight to the death. And I'm not, I'm not just giving an example. That's reality. People fight for the stories that right, for the stories that they believe. And if they it takes a special kind of person to go maybe I was wrong. Maybe I could evolve a little bit, you know, things I believed in my 20s, I do not believe in my 50s, and vice versa. So why should our understanding of the reality that we live in be any different? It should be shifting, yeah. So as so as you have been going through these experiences over the course of your career, in your life, writing different books, and then going back to read a book that you wrote, and go, God, I was daft. Oh, my God, I just that wasn't right. I was I was so off, but that's what I knew at the time. Can you explain to people or give advice on how to process that? Because obviously you, at least from my point of view, you're very open person, you're very curious person, you're trying to understand things, but you're very fluid. At least from this conversation, I understand. I can get that from you. You're not locked in. You can move a little bit. There's a there's give, where most people tend to lock in, even when they find like, oh, it's Buddhism, oh it's Christianity, oh it's New Age, oh it's crystals, oh it's Oh, whatever it is, you know, it's Wicca, whatever it is. They hold on and like, this is the way, because that's, it's kind of like the lifeboat in the ocean. It's kind of like the hole in the ocean that you can wrap your boat around in the storm that is life. So as you have been constantly been free flowing in the ocean and kind of going from island to island and to port to port. How? What advice do you have for people who when they hear this conversation, it's going to start to mess with them. It's going to start to shake the foundation of what they've built their life upon, or their belief system upon. What do you say to people that are struggling with that right now, and how can they become a little bit more free flowing, because in my line of work, doing what I do, I talk to so many different spiritual paths, philosophies, scientists, you know, rocket scientists, channelers, psychics. I talk to everybody trying to do what you're doing, figuring it out for myself and for the audience, goes along for the ride of it. It, but understanding like, oh, that I like that part, well, I like that part that make part makes sense to me. Let's and I start to combine my world. But my world has changed dramatically in the last four years. I've been doing this show from when I started to where I am right now, talking to you, my worldview has changed from experience, but also from research, conversations and other things that I've come across. So a long question, how can people
Tim Freke 45:25
Great question Alex.
Alex Ferrari 45:26
How can people adjust themselves?
Tim Freke 45:29
Okay, there's quite a few things I'd like to say. Let me see which of the important ones are. So firstly, I think what I've done in my own suite life is kind of similar to what you're doing, but I did it in a pre internet time. So what, what I did was go through all of that much more difficult in my day, but I wrote books on all of these different spiritual traditions, and I was working with the idea of the perennial philosophy. Oh, look, there's something similar in all these traditions people have experienced the thing I'm experiencing, that there's a state of oneness, that there's an enormous love, that life's full of meaning. Death isn't the end. Life can become dreamlike and magical, all of those things. And, oh, here, here it is in China. Here it is in India. Here it is in South America. You know, here I can take ayahuasca, and I can experience it there. It's like all of these different things. So there was a long period of my life of writing lots of books on these different traditions, drawing out the similarities. And then probably I wrote a book which was an actual, genuine, real international bestseller on Christianity called the Jesus mysteries, which was about Gnosticism, and it had a very controversial idea in the heart of it, and it became a this big bestseller. That's when I was touring around Austin and places like that, and and that that became about finding that same commonality with inside Christianity, which people often miss. That led me to that was kind of the first phase one, which read a lot of books. And then I stepped back and thought, I don't want to write about history anymore. I want to write about what spirituality can become now. I want to do all these people I've written about, all my heroes. The reason I even know their names is because they changed it. Well, how does it need to change now? I should be concentrating on that. I should be how can I say the perennial philosophy so clearly that people can experience it and get it and make it short and snappy and without blowing my own trumpet too loud, I think I did that. It led to a tiny little book called lucid living, using the analogy of life being a dream in which I could express the perennial philosophy in something that you could read in an hour. It is a beautiful little book, and it's wrong. And that was the I think I got it so clear for myself, and I got so good at communicating it to other people that I saw, what was wrong with it,
Alex Ferrari 48:01
You turned inside and turned inside out, yeah,
Tim Freke 48:06
It led me to have to stop and revise it. It was coincided with the death of both my parents. I was very introspective of spending a lot of time around death. And I came, I started this, this radically evolutionary view started and like, like you said, you know, like, so much things would come up. Like, yeah, this feels like, I should. This feels right. It feels strong, but doesn't make any sense. And then follow it. Follow it. Follow it. Now, if you have that, you don't need it to make sense, you can just but if you're a writer or a philosopher, then your job is to make it make sense. My job is to say it to other people, so that, you know, my favorite thing, a lot of people said to me, I love it, is they go, Oh, you, you're saying what I've been trying to think, because that's my job. So if I can do that, that's marvelous. And that's led to a complete revision. So that's happened, whatever it was 12 years ago, and then the revision has just increased, and it's been about revisioning how we understand these perennial states. So I would say to anyone, well, let me say this first two things. I don't want to take away anyone's faith, anyone's belief, anything. My biggest aspiration with an individual, any individual, is to do anything I can to help them have these spiritual experiences. That's it. The analogy I use is there's a moment you imagine, everyone sees in black and white, and then there's a moment where you open your eyes and suddenly it's all in color, and the spiritual experience is like that. That's what happened to me when I was 12. I was living in black and white, open my eyes and it was all in color, and then it went and it's like, what the hell was that? And how do I get that back? Since then, I've been focused primarily on experience and sharing experience with others, and been around 1000s of people who have come into color for the first time. That's my priority. I don't care what you believe. I don't care if you think it's an evolutionary universe. If. You think God's a big man in the sky? Doesn't matter to me, that's absolutely central. If you are, if you do experience that, it becomes much easier, because of the very Gnosis that you've been talking about to evolve your ideas. Because you're not relying on them. You've got something you've got a genuine connection with something greater than yourself. And that opens up the possibility that you can go, is there a better way to understand this? And then when you understand it, in my experience, when you understand it better, the experience gets better. It shifts. It's not necessary, but it shifts. It it becomes deeper, it becomes better, it becomes more emergent. And then so, so I'm doing two things, I think, Alex, one is for individuals. I want to go if it's working for you, you know, whatever gets you through the night, good for you and I. And if I can help you, I will. But as well, it does make a difference. But as well, more importantly, culturally, collectively, we need a new spirituality. What we've got at the moment with all these little bubbles of people that don't really connect with each other, and you know, it's like a private thing, or you think that, you think that whatever you think is fine. That's fine for individuals, but collectively, we need to be as rigorous with understanding this level of reality as we go with understanding physics or biology, and it needs to be part of the one endeavor of understanding what the hell this is, because it's not separate from it. So my philosophy is aimed at those people who want to go, how can we how can we understand all of this? How can we integrate our knowledge? How can we see spirituality in any way? And my hope is, if we can do that right, if we're willing to think clearly enough and ask deep enough questions, we can bring spirituality into the center of mainstream culture, whereas at the moment, it's kind of an oddball periphery thing, and not so much in the States. It's bigger in the States, but but here, especially, you just want to go look, this should be the very center of what we take seriously, and to do that, we need to sharpen up. Now. Not everyone needs to, but those who are involved in what you're doing and what I'm doing, we need to
Alex Ferrari 52:11
As you were talking, the image that came into my head was you're you're speaking as if you were Bruce Lee, and I'll explain what I mean by that.
Tim Freke 52:21
Okay, no one's ever said that to me before.
Alex Ferrari 52:25
Bruce Lee was not only obviously who he was, but he was also a great philosopher. He was a very deep, deep philosopher as well. And what he decided to do was it's similar to what you're saying. He took all the martial arts that were all in their camps, like I'm the karate is the best. Kung Fu is the best. Jiu Jitsu, whatever Jiu Jitsu. But you know what I mean, all the different forms were out there. And he's like, No, you guys are all too dogmatic about all this stuff. And he started to pull the best from everything to create one unified idea of what a martial art could be, which is what has turned into MMA, which is a mixed martial arts, which is a combination of all of it. Now I'm using a violent example, but, but it's an illustration of what I think you're trying to say is all of these different forms need to come into one and look at now, if you look at the fighting styles, you know before, people would argue, is karate better? Is kung fu better? Is jujitsu better? Is is Judo or Akito or all these forms? But now there's not a question anymore, because when you mix them all together, not one of those individually stands up to a mixed martial artist who understands what they're doing, because a mixed martial artist has taken the best of all of them, trained in all of them, and now combines all of those different art forms to do his one art form. So if we combined all the different elements of spirituality and all the schools of spirituality into one unified spiritual path that can celebrate all the other ones. It's not distant, it's not taking and dismissing the other ones. It's celebrating them, but putting them all into one unified path, I think we would be so much more powerful. Does that make sense to you? Bruce, yes, yes. Bruce,
Tim Freke 54:27
Yeah, it does, because you're talking about the east. I'm thinking Zen. Sure you get bodies up if you ever existed, but let's go with the myth body. Dharma takes Buddhism to China and Zen arises as a meeting of Taoism and Buddhism, and it becomes something new. That's the history, that's the history of everything. Every I mean Christianity, in my view, is the meeting of Judaism and Platonism, or pythagoreanism. You know, that's what's, you know, that's, yeah, so, so that's. Always happens now. Here we are today, I suspect on your bookshelf, like mine in front of me. Here, you've got the wisdom of the world. I can pick it all up on my phone within seconds. Absolutely, you know, if everything is available, I can go online. I can hear any teacher speaking. I can so what is that about surely, what that asks of us, if we're inclined towards this, doesn't everyone hasn't got to do it, is to go. This is an age now, not of pluralism only, but of integration. Now we need to see if we're living in one reality which it seems we are, What? What? What is its nature? How's the best way to understand it? What's going on over there. How does that meet with this? And then how can we formulate it with also with the other things, like, like I said, biology and physics and mathematics as well, for that matter. So that becomes the requirement of our age. So individually, whatever gets you through the night, collectively, let's work together, and let's be willing to push each other. I love this conversation. It's been very frank and fun. And we can move around and we go, try this, try this. Well, is that the same? Is that different? That's what we need to do. Because from that can come a whole new approach to spirituality, which breaks with all of that precious pretense where you know you have to be a certain way and talk in a certain tone of voice, and this idea of arriving at certain things, and some people, they've arrived, and it's like, let's leave all that behind. I feel now, you know that's enough of that, which goes, Look, we're all together in this, and let's work together to find the best way of experiencing it and understanding it.
Alex Ferrari 56:44
I think that the one thing I feel that is wonderful about our conversation right now, and I think it's something that's missing from conversations in every spectrum, politically, specifically, but that, but the term ego, which we're going to get into a little bit, because I know you like to speak about the ego as not the enemy. But if you would have walked into this conversation with ego, and I would have walked into this conversation with ego, and I would have put my flag down, that it has to be exactly the way it is, and you put your flag down, this is, this is where we have. Why are we even having a conversation? But both of us came in very open to these conversation, and as the conversation has progressed, we've kind of flowed with each other, you know, and it doesn't have to both flow in the exact same way. We're I'm learning a ton from this, and I think you're learning as well from these point. And it's just kind of this beautiful dance, and that's what it should be. So can we talk a little bit about the ego and its place in this all? Because I do believe that the ego has it is a tool, like you've said. I think it is something that most people misunderstand. You must crush the ego. No, no, it's you need the ego. Without the ego, I don't do this podcast. You don't write 34 books. The ego is the one that pushed that through, because it's ego to a certain to a certain extent. So it is a tool. But when the ego goes out of control, like we see in our political parties around the world, it just is all about boistering and peacocking and all that kind of stuff, and trying to like I have to be right, where I walk into every conversation saying I don't have to be right, unless something is said so outlandish that it completely goes away from the story that I've told myself, that's when a conversation will be had. But generally speaking, I'm very open to different conversations, different points of view. So can you talk a little bit about the ego and what is so misunderstood about the ego, and how we can truly use the ego for not only our day to day life, but our spiritual evolution?
Tim Freke 58:56
Yeah, I feel like I've been wrong so many times now I'm sick in my 60s. I'd have to be a complete idiot to think that I couldn't be wrong again.
Alex Ferrari 59:10
You obviously haven't seen our political parties.
Tim Freke 59:12
So, yeah, I don't even know what people mean by the word ego. Or rather, I know they mean all sorts of different things here, here's the way I would approach it look, being egotistical, eg, thinking only of oneself. That's not a very attractive or helpful thing to do. And if you come into these awake states, there is enormous love and a bit benevolence, a universal benevolence, which means you're not just thinking of yourself, but you have to look after yourself as well. And you have your family to look after, and your community look after and that's that's right, that's how it should be, but you're not doing it at anyone else's expense. And you really want to, you really want things to be as good for everyone. You wish well to everyone, because that's what comes from the recognition of oneness. And then really this idea of a negative ego. We don't need to, we don't need to labor it. I mean the word actually just means the I, the I Am. And you do get that idea in certain forms of spirituality that the mere fact of thinking of yourself as an i is in the way. And I think that's profoundly mistaken. The way I would approach it, Alex is to go, Well, I have this I made up this word because I couldn't find a word that did what I wanted to do, which is the word univigil. And fact, the whole philosophy, I call it univigilism, because what I think is happening is that we're evolving from individuals to what I call univigils, where a univigil is an individual now conscious of unity with the universe. And that's the tradition now that the key thing is that that's an individual. The essence the individual is not gone. In fact, the opposite, the individual has has evolved into into something greater, which includes, and it's the so the individual becomes the foundation for the univigil. And my hope is that we're birthing a new human, and that's a individual.
Alex Ferrari 1:01:02
Well, I mean, again, we'll go back to the analogy of the cells. Without the individual cells, we are not human. We can't this is, I mean, no, it's like without all of our cells inside we have trillions of cells inside of us that are dying in trillions and trillions, yeah, and dying and being born every second of every day. So without that combined, combination of all those cells, it doesn't make Tim, it doesn't make Alex, but they are all individual cells that are helping the greater being that is to analysis, yes, but it's no lack. It's not no lack of individual. Without them, we have nothing. There has to
Tim Freke 1:01:47
So here, here's one. Sorry, this is so I'm getting too enthusiastic because you've opened up something which is one of my, literally, my favorite ideas. With near death experiences. It's a very common for people to have? Well, I've had numbers of people relate it to me, two or three just recently, of the light, which is incredibly common, but also seeing like sparks rising and falling from the light. Now, the truth, I think that that vision is, I think why we've ended up with a supernatural spirituality. Because I think people have had that vision and go, Oh, the lights. What exists? And we fall. Fallen from it. What I'm suggesting is we're missing out the rising up into it, which is actually the light is we are each filaments that form the light. And then we fall away, and we have a life, and then we come back and we follow. And of course, we can merge with it now too, as well. You don't have to wait till you're dead. But what that does is it turns around a very negative view, which goes, Alex, you're just a drop in the ocean. You go back and you dissolve. And all the struggles of being Alex and your family and all your care, there's nothing. It just dissolves back into the one where you came from. And what, which I hate? I hate that because it just goes, your life is meaningless. And I don't think that's right. What this says is you, what you bring to God, is you! And what you're doing right now is forming you, and what you bring into that communion is everything you have become, and so that so the meaning of your life is just massive. It goes like this is your contribution to the arising of this beautiful, sublime, super intelligence with which you get to be a part, which you get to commune.
Alex Ferrari 1:03:32
So this is and this is something that's so important for people to understand. And I think that we get lost in it, especially I always say the West, because that's my experience. But specifically, I think that we all get, many of us get lost in the idea that we are why am I here? What is the purpose of me? My life is meaningless. I'm just going to a dead end job. I'm not happy all this stuff, all lives, every single one feeds into the greater God or whatever you're talking about. It's exactly what you're saying. But people have to understand that every part every life is has a meaning. There is a purpose for every single person who has come onto this planet, and in many ways, also beings in general, have a purpose and an experience like that as well, that helps feed the Greater One, if you will.
Tim Freke 1:04:36
When I did my pod book, it's the philosophy book, really. It's free on YouTube. I called it why your life really matters, because I wanted to get across that all of this was feeding into the importance of your individuality. That's why I want to go. You know, Hey, Alex. You're Alex. You're not something else. I'm Tim. Hello. You know, like, like, two branches on one of tree going, Oh, you're a branch. I'm a branch. That must mean we're the same tree. That kind of vision and that we're reaching up into something greater than ourselves, and we get to contribute to that. It's, it's, it's profoundly redeeming. And because it's so beautiful and so much love it, it in a very literal sense, it redeems the suffering. It doesn't take it away, but it redeems it, because it's all leading to somewhere so good.
Alex Ferrari 1:05:27
Tim, let me ask you this, because, again, something just popped into my head when you were when you were saying that, if we look at nature as an example of this concept that you're talking about, you said branches, when? When you said branches? I thought leaves. When I thought leaves? I thought fruit. I thought all a tree is a perfect example, but a tree is just one of many organisms that do this in nature where there's a lot of individual elements that feed back to the main one, the tree Beautiful, isn't it? So a tree is a perfect example of that. Beautiful eco ecosystems are perfect example of that all these different things that feed not only into the greater system, but without but if you pull one thing out, it throws the whole the whole the whole walk, the whole thing goes out of whack. So if you take leaves away from trees and it's just a bunch of branches, other than if it's in the wintertime, they can't survive. They can't survive because without the leaves catching the sun, that turns into the energy or catches even the water that turns into the all of these elements, the tree doesn't survive. Generally speaking, I'm sure there's a tree out there that doesn't do that. But generally speaking, that's, there's, I'm sure. But in an ecosystem is, if we A perfect example is, I'm from South Florida, and in South Florida, there's the ecosystem is the Everglades, the biggest freshwater I forgot the habitat in the world, in the ever in the Florida Everglades, there is no other place on the planet like it. And is a very delicate ecosystem where the alligator, the American alligator, is the top of the spectrum, as far as the he's the apex predator. But there's so many other things that go along in that ecosystem to make it work. The problem, what's happened is they introduced something. I don't sure if you're aware of this, but they introduced it years ago, accidentally. People would bring home pythons and anacondas as pets, and then they would just like that. When they got too big or they didn't want to deal with it anymore, they would just let them go off into the into the swamps, and you're like, what's the harm in that? Now the anacondas and the pythons have completely taken over the Everglades, killing the alligators, who are now not the apex predator anymore, and it's thrown the entire ecosystem out of balance. It's fascinating how every part of a system has to be there. What is cancer in our bodies, parts of our body that have gone rogue, that are not working for the whole so it's again, just another way to illustrate what you're saying. Every single one of us matter, no matter how small of a life you think you might have it is so, so, so, so important.
Tim Freke 1:08:24
And also, you know, Alex, I always want to say, look, if, if you're experiencing that your life is insignificant, then to use the analogy I used before, you're experiencing your life in black and white, I understand. I've also have that from you know, it's not like it never happens to me. It does. And when I was younger, it happened a lot. But what I've seen is that the smallness of life is can be just as beautiful if it comes into color, if it comes into color, and a huge amount for me has been and that's another transformation, just as getting old, I suppose, is that whereas I used to think, oh, I ought to focus on all these spiritual things, and I do, and it's nice, but also the little things, you know, just to go in of an evening and chill out watching some nonsense on the television with my wife, How precious is that? How precious that I can do that, and how much I would miss it if it was not possible, the trivial of life beautiful, those little conversations, you know, the phone call from your kids. It's like these little things. So it's really about how we see them, and the aliveness that can come when you, when you recognize what we're in, that we're in this amazing, like mind blowing mystery, and it is exquisitely beautiful. If you, if you look at it right, it doesn't mean it's not all so ugly and cruel and it is got, you know. But what happens then is, you like your analogy with the tree saying it's all. Like feeding, they're all playing a role. It's like suddenly, oh, like, I want to benefit the whole that's where service comes from, and your great delight becomes a being of service. And that may be going out and doing some grand thing, but it may be just smiling at the person you bought your milk from, absolutely and actually seeing them. Because if you actually see them, if you connect soul to soul with them. Just for a second, they will feel it, and it will brighten their day, and a little ripple of love will go out. And there's no one whose life is so small they can't do that. We can all. We can all make that, make that transition, and then when we do, you know, it comes alive.
Alex Ferrari 1:10:38
This has been such a beautiful conversation. Tim, I have to ask you one, one last question, what truth do you think the world isn't ready to hear yet but is desperately needing to listen to?
Tim Freke 1:10:55
There's a lot I'm going to go for. The one that I think is actually the one which is, I think, I think, you know, the whole ethic for me has come into Universal benevolence. But with evolutionary wisdom, benevolence, on its own can be, can lead you anywhere. You can do a lot of dumb things. From benevolence, you need evolutionary wisdom. And part of that, for me, has become how we work collectively, and this period where we're ghettoizing each other ourselves into these ideological echo chambers, silos, yeah, echo chambers, silos. And what I what I love about the modern age is that I can go out and I can discover the best of any view now on YouTube, so I can really understand all these different things. And I would I really feel the truth we need to get is we need to understand each other in a deeper way. And we need to understand each other, not from our own perspective, but from the perspective of the other, so that we don't dismiss other people as you're a this, and you're a bad and you're this, which is, I just see so much throwing of words at the other side, and I feel like to get to the Next stage, to go from individual to univigil, we've really got to to step out and understanding each other from the other perspective. Doesn't mean we agree. It might even be worse than we thought, but we've actually done it and then to to find a way to turn enemies into friends.
Alex Ferrari 1:12:38
That is, boy, from your mouth to God's ears, my friend, from your mouth to God's ears, if he has ears, I'm not sure, but
Tim Freke 1:12:49
It's the most enormous ear you can possibly imagine, and it's listening right now,
Alex Ferrari 1:12:54
All the time, all the time, just like Santa Claus, but Santa Claus just does it with kids. It's so Tim, where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing in the world my friend?
Tim Freke 1:13:10
Well, they can go to my website, which is timfreke.com but you have to spell my crazy name the right way, because it's F, R, E, K, E, it's an old English name. You can find me there. You can find out there about my retreats, which I'm I run occasionally, which are soul to soul experiences, where, where it's about coming into the color and honest to goodness, nearly everybody does. I want to say everyone actually, it's a very powerful, transformative experience. I love doing it. Been doing it for 30 years. And then there's the on YouTube. There's my my channel, and also my pod podcasts, where you can I've just starting a new podcast called the univigils podcast, which may launch like immediately, but this pod book 37 chapters of the ideas I've touched on in this which may sound a bit like what's that laid out chapter by chapter. Get this, get this, get this, get this, get this 37 chapters. So you can really get it like a book, but it's me talking, and we can connect directly. And I respond if people want to ask questions or push me, and I engage with people. And if it's in good faith, if people really want to like you know, this conversation. I love it. I love it. So I will do that. So yeah, you can find me on YouTube. You can find me on my website timfreker.com, I have an online community where we meet up every week on a Sunday. It's lovely, beautiful. We explore ideas, we explore experience, how we can come into color together. And all of that is pretty much just available. Gonna have a look. And I love to connect with anyone in person.
Alex Ferrari 1:14:49
Tim, it has been such a pleasure and honor speaking to you, my friend. It is, is it has been eye opening, and I think it's a conversation that people will they can't Ignore it's a conversation that's gonna open it's gonna open up some stuff in them, and they're just gonna be like, what is what's happening? Why do I feel different now after watching this or listening to this conversation? So I appreciate you, my friend, and everything you're doing to help awaken this planet. So thank you again.
Tim Freke 1:15:24
My pleasure, and let me return that to you, Alex, for what you're doing.
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