Jeff Carreira: Hello Tim, our theme for this issue is The Nature of Truth and Reality and, with you, I was hoping to speak about this topic from a spiritual and philosophical point of view. You and I both have a background in the philosophical tradition of Advaita Vedanta, and that tradition is rooted in an idealistic philosophy that sees reality as essentially created from consciousness. I know that you have recently said that you were wrong about the everything is consciousness point of view of idealism, and I thought that would be a great jumping-off point for our conversation today. So, tell me, why do you think you were wrong?

Tim Freke: The thing I want to say first is that Idealism itself has evolved. I think the idea that reality is all the dream of Brahman is a kind of mythic idea about God. All of the traditions have stories where something even more mysterious than the universe was there first and gave birth to the universe. That something is God in one form or another, but with the rise of science, it became unacceptable to just say, “God did it.”

But the belief in a mythic God is only one form of Idealism. Another form says that there is a fundamental ground to everything that is an abstract thing called consciousness. And that's the view which I had. And now, by recognizing the failure of one of my own arguments for this, I realize I was mistaken.

Jeff Carreira: I liked what you said in one of your YouTube videos, “That is one interpretation of your experience.” And I would add that it’s not necessarily an invalid interpretation, but it's also not self-evidently valid.

Tim Freke: Yes, that's it, and the mistake that I see being made, and the one I made myself, is to prove the Idealist view by asking people if they have ever had an experience that was not a perception or a sensation in consciousness? But the answer already exists in the question. The question itself assumes that a thing called consciousness exists, but is there actually a thing called consciousness? Maybe we are not just experiencing perceptions and sensations in consciousness. Maybe we are actually experiencing the world. I think, as I've gotten older, I've headed more in the direction of common sense and believe that I am actually experiencing the world.

Jeff Carreira: Wouldn't you say that this is also part of the general problem with assuming that what I think about reality somehow represents what is really real.

Tim Freke: It seems obvious to me that concepts and systems of concepts are like maps which can never be the terrain. The menu is not the meal. They're different things, but you still want the best map you can get your hands on.

Jeff Carreira: I think this is why I've never been completely comfortable labeling myself as an Idealist even though I do see the world as fundamentally mental. At one time I distinctly considered myself a Materialist, but I suppose philosophically I am more of a pragmatist than anything else. And that makes me deeply aligned with what you were just saying. I think it's best to think of our ideas about truth as models that are useful or not useful, rather than thinking of them as images of what's real and true.

Tim Freke: I would go with that, but I would also want to avoid Relativism, which sees the value of everything as relative to our purposes. In that way, we treat ideas like tools in a toolbox, we use this one like a wrench and that one like a screwdriver. That’s why there are so many people who are scientists in their day job and go to church on Sunday, they just see them as two different things. But the two things don't really fit together, and that kind of discrepancy bothers me. I'm not just looking for something that will get the job done. I'm looking for something to help me understand life in the deepest way and experience life in the deepest way. So, fitting it all together into some kind of picture seems really important as well.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, and one of the reasons Pragmatism as a philosophy died out for decades is because of the inherent problem of figuring out what it means for something to work better. Work better for who?

Of course, it is also true that often we believe those things that suit our purposes. I know we have talked about this before, but there is a way that you and I are both Pragmatic in the way we think. My background was initially in science as an engineer, and I was very devoted to a materialist perspective. So now I feel that our culture is too materialistic, and I want to shake up our unconscious materialistic assumptions. And you started in the spiritual world and I see you recognizing the ‘stuckness' there and wanting to infuse it with a different worldview.

Tim Freke: I think that's right, but it is also not enough for me because I am actually looking for the truth. I'm not expecting to find the truth or nail it down definitely or absolutely, but I'm very interested in the evolution of how we conceive of this strange, mysterious, bittersweet thing we're in. And I want us to be able to integrate all the various aspects that we've learned about into a powerful narrative.

That feels like a noble pursuit to me. So, it isn't just that I want to shake things up. You spoke about shaking things up, but I’m saying that there's more to it. I think there's a chance to find something beyond just shaking it up.

Jeff Carreira: I would agree with that. And although I don’t think in terms of knowing what's true in an absolute sense, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an optimal narrative about reality that will help the most people. I believe that, in your case, part of what you are finding is that an evolutionary view of spirituality offers that possibility. In my own spiritual history, I was steeped in evolutionary forms of spirituality, maybe even more than Advaita Vedanta, so I am curious to hear you speak about this aspect of what you are discovering because, at this point, I’ve stopped talking so much about that part of my past.

Tim Freke: Jeff, I'm fascinated by that. Why did you drop evolutionary spirituality?

Jeff Carreira: I guess there are two main reasons. One, because I find that our modern notions of evolution are very wedded to Darwinian ideas of natural selection. And they're ripe with adverse hierarchical assumptions about progress and the inevitability of progress, and these assumptions prove to be unhelpful in many ways.

Tim Freke: You really are a Pragmatist aren't you? You select ideas based on their helpfulness, not on their truthfulness.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, but I do see those two things as very intimately connected. So, the other problem I have with our Darwinian model of evolution is that it takes place on the stage of three-dimensional space in linear time. So, there's always an assumed background of time and space. And I want to be clear, I wouldn't say that I don't believe in evolution, but I'm reluctant to use evolutionary ideas because I think there are other dimensions of reality that we are unaware of and our general view of evolution tends to be limited to the world we see.

Tim Freke: I would agree with that. My interest in evolution or emergence is about how it explains our experience. So, if I look at what I see right now, there's this process of change in which one thing emerges from the other. The world emerges; it's moving and it's changing.

And it contains within it the past, which is implicit in the present. And I don't know what it's going to become. It’s open-ended. And what I love about the scientific story is that, over 14 billion years ago, the universe started with the simplest qualities and eventually those led to life and then to the psyche.

One of the reasons a lot of people want to challenge science is because of Scientism, and the Reductionism, Determinism and Materialism behind it. They think it's going to rule out all of our spiritual experiences. It rules out the idea of the soul. It rules out life after death. Spirituality wants to defend its experience of the magic of life and the fact that life can be so dreamlike.

I want to say that science stopped too soon. It’s followed the evolutionary process up to life, but the process didn't end there. Evolution continued into a transmaterial realm. And that is the psyche or the soul. And that's what spirituality has been always exploring. Evolution is happening now from that realm. So, you've got to extend the story. There's a whole realm, the most interesting realm, waiting to be explored.

Jeff Carreira: There is a double-edged sword. On one side, the spiritual ends up demonizing the physical and material world, and that leads to all kinds of problems. On the other side, science demonizes the nonmaterial and there are other problems associated with that. So yes. How does one navigate to get the best of both worlds?

And something that just came up when you were speaking, that gave me chills, is the fact that what's going to be best is also going to be the truest. I can't imagine a truth that isn't also best. That is exactly the conclusion that my spiritual awakening has left me with. Truth and best are one. If something doesn’t work, it can’t be true because the truth is that reality works.

Tim Freke: That opens up another motivation for what I do that sounds like it might be similar. Every awakening experience that I’ve had has one thing in common, it feels more real, not less real. And I think it's more real because it's more emergent, more immediate. In these experiences, we're stepping into the next evolutionary level in some way. And so, it feels even more real.

One thing that has always been obvious to me is that whatever is truly good is also redemptive. In an evolutionary view, that means we see that all of this is moving towards something which redeems it. And always, at the heart of my realizations, has been this sense that although life is full of the most awful things, it's moving towards something which redeems it.

Jeff Carreira: And isn't that beautiful. Our spiritual experiences reveal something so true, good and beautiful, and so miraculous that the rest of our lives is spent in service of just trying to share that. How can we come up with a philosophy that will communicate it? What practice will ignite it in the hearts of others? Can I paint something, write something, or sing something that will make it clear? The secret is so wonderful that it wants to be shared.

Tim Freke: Yes. And I think my early books, up until a book called The Mystery Experience, were all about that. No matter what name I gave it, every book was about this oneness, this enormous love, this benevolence towards everything. It was all about the beautiful state of recognizing wholeness. And then, over the last period, which might have to do with the fact that both of my parents died and I sat with them through every day of that process, I started having other questions to answer. There was not just the deep mystical truth of spirituality, there were also questions about being a soul that survives death, for instance. You can't ignore death. If death is the end, how is the suffering of a two-year-old kid who's got cancer redeemable? How is death itself redeemable?

Unless death isn't actually the end, in which case redemption is possible. So it's important to think about death because this has a huge effect on how we live. Through that experience with my parents, I saw how the reductionism of science was seeping into our culture in the UK. I saw that it was touching me. It was touching my friends who'd all had mystical experiences, and yet, still had an underlying feeling that all this stuff was really wishful thinking. It's ‘woowoo'. It's got no ground. And yet, I was having experiences which were not ‘woowoo', they were more real than anything else.

Even though science is spectacular in its pragmatic success, many of its attitudes are very problematic. The old mythical spiritual ideas are not enough, Scientism and Reductionism don’t help. I believe that we need to think about all this in a new way. And my question became, how can I articulate this in a way that has intellectual respectability? And I have come to think there is an articulation of how everything emerges that can do that for us. I want to create that narrative, or at least help it along.