Future Fossils Podcast #69 - Tim Freke (The Evolution of the Imagination)
Tim Freke is a philosopher and the author of thirty five books on comparative religion, gnostic scholarship, and nondual awakening. I met him as a fellow speaker at the Global Eclipse Gathering in Oregon last year and was immediately taken by his bright presence, wit, and grounded genius. In this episode, we talk about imagination as a product of the evolutionary process – that the soul and afterlife might be themselves emergent properties, rather than fixed or prior qualities, of our cosmos’ continuous unfolding creativity.
timfreke.com
timfreke.com/ONLINE-TOUR/COSTS.aspx
We take a deep dive into the nature of time, reality, and creativity:
• Is spiritual awakening the “leading edge” of evolution? (Not technology, as proposed by Kevin Kelly et al.?)
• How story may be more fundamental to reality than we’ve believed
• Is evolutionary “novelty” created, or simply discovered lying in wait?
• A psychedelic view of time in which the present is a “handshake” between all possible pasts and all possible futures
• Can we change the past, or merely our interpretation of it?
• Soul as the fundament or medium of our intersubjectivity
• Does the imagination operate as an information platform distinct from biology and physics?
• Is Heaven an evolutionary emergent?
• Is mind, imagination, and soul a different level of a hierarchy of being, or is it the interior experiential dimension of what we
call body and matter?
• The relationship between subjective and objective in the time-stream
• The ongoing trialogue between MG, Ken Wilber, and Bruce Damer on the origins of life and co-enactment of mind and matter “all the way down” through orders of complexity to the very quanta of our cosmos
• The role of landscape and material agency in prebiological and postbiological inheritance (what comes before and after DNA?)
• The Invention of Death
• The proposed/hypothetical symbiosis of the soul and body
• Tim’s critique of artificial consciousness and mind uploading
• Can we ensoul technologies? If bodies can provide a vehicle for these nonphysical information patterns, can we engineer new bodies that invite souls into novel forms of incarnation?
• Can you give something a soul by loving it?
• The Question of Death
• Evolution as the movement from unconsciousness unity through individuation into conscious individuated unity.
Quotes:
“Fundamentally, it’s a flow. It’s a process. The universe is not made of things.”
“The philosophy that I’ve been exploring is that we have the wrong metaphor of time. That time doesn’t pass…but rather, time accumulates. And there is more past now than when we started this conversation…and the past hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s actually present, because everything that has ever happened is implicit in this moment.”
“Every moment is the meeting of the possible, the ground of being, the potentiality, and everything that has been. But what this next moment can be, it’s limited. It must contain everything that’s happened before.”
“The potentiality for the rainbow was there before eyes. But there was no rainbow.”
“Technology is brilliant, but it’s nothing compared to the imagination.”
“What I’m suggesting is that there is information on the soul level, which is nonphysical, which is a separate domain….we can’t reduce the body to physics, and we can’t reduce the soul to biology.”
“The immortality of the soul has evolved as a continuation of the emergent and evolutionary universe. If you look at the history of what people have said about death, it’s almost like it’s evolving.”
“There is no objective reality. There is, rather, objective information objectively and subjectively perceived.”
“The body is discriminating information sensually, and then over the top of that, imagination is discriminating conceptually.”
“Evolution itself has evolved. The physical universe did not happen through genetic mutation and natural selection.”
“The more individual we become, the more we can understand the oneness.”
“The whole philosophy, really, is a way of intellectually shoring up some almost childlike insights that arrived for me when I feel most deeply awake.”
“Life is Good. Death is Safe. And what really matters is Love.”
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