our biggest group ever at Conscious Cafe Skipton – at the Avalon Centre for Wellbeing
We had a throughly enjoyable evening in Skipton with philosopher Tim Freke in July, when he gave a lively presentation about the concept of spirituality based on his own experience and almost five decades of research. He said that we don’t need to work hard and aspire to a connection with Oneness. That is something that can actually happen quickly and joyfully and it is only a belief system that says it takes a long time with lots of hard work to attain a lofty spiritual plane. His own spontaneous spiritual connection as a child opened him to that idea of soul connection through joy.
He talked about a new form of spirituality being needed to take humanity forward. Something that is empowering and one where we can have a new language that helps us to understand our soul connection to each other. There is no need to enrol people to something like a religion. We all have our own individual journeys and each one is valid. It is all about the love we feel and can share, creating space for each other to be, without judgement, and to come together in acceptance and community.
Tim’s 45 minute introduction to his ideas about a new spirituality that is needed and which is emerging, was broadcast and recorded on Facebook LIVE on the Conscious Cafe Skipton page. Unfortunately, although the recording is good and worth watching, the camera transmitted the broadcast sideways. That is not good for the neck .. watching sideways! It is worth watching (click here) and I have taken the time to transcribe what Tim talked about. It gave me an opportunity to refresh and go deeper with Tim’s ideas and I got a lot of value and insights from that. I encourage you to watch the broadcast and/or read the transcript below. After the intro, Tim then led the group in a meditation process in pairs. This was not recorded but there are notes about it at the end of the blog.
The Big Question
Tim Freke opened up our evening, and our minds with the big question. What is it that we wake up to every day? What is this experience of LIFE?
The answer is …..We don’t know. But what we do do, like everyone else through history, is buy into the ideas of the age …. whatever teachings are prevalent at the time guiding us about the experience of being alive. How do we find out if there is much more to existence than simply the birth-to-death journey that we are all on in this large universe? Our vision of what this experience is now, is completely different to100 years ago. Back then we thought our world was part of THE universe but now we have come to realise that our universe is simply part of a galaxy with 100 billion others. Life is enormous.
Be Open in the Not Knowing
During this evening Tim asked us to be open in the not-knowing and he would provide us with some of his best guesses. He has spent all his life pursuing this big question. Whilst we don’t know, we pretend that we do. Then, for some people ….something happens ….. and the mystery gets us, just for a moment, and we wake up to the “Wow!” And that’s when we realise that we are alive. This is the awakening, the understanding of the experience that is life.
Finding the Deep Awake
This waking up moment happened to Tim at aged 12 when he sat on a hilltop puzzling over the question of what life is. He saw this awakening through the innocent eyes of a child wondering why none of the grown-ups ever talked about what life actually is. Something happened to him in that moment and he woke up. Suddenly he was in a different state of consciousness which he calls the Deep Awake. And when that shift takes place for anyone, there is a profound sense of oneness with the thing that we call Love.
He said he could feel the whole universe pulsating. He wondered if anybody else noticed that as well. He later realised that the answer to the really big question about life is actually an experience, it’s a “Wow!” Then he wondered how could he get back to that, how could he go deeper then how could he take others with him?
Experiencing the moment of “Wow!” is Natural
For 48 years that has been Tim Freke’s quest. He has studied a lot of spiritual traditions going into each and finding out, peeling away the layers of culture trying to find a place where one day the experience is one of “Wow!” .. the moment where you feel that everything is one and everything is Love. So how can we understand this awakening now, today, so that it is not just about words and archaic practices? So that it is about actual shifts that we can experience for ourselves? It is something that can happen to anybody at any time. The profound experience of “Wow!” is something completely natural. It does not have to happen in a church or temple. 12 year old Tim was not reading a holy Scripture at the time, he was simply sitting on a hill. His realisation was that this awakening is simply a natural part of being human.
A New Form of Spirituality called for
Tim says what we need today in the 21st century, is a new form of spirituality which can genuinely speak to science. One which is no longer antagonistic but which is a heart based, inspirational spirituality. One that can be intellectually robust and rational, and can actually engage with the incredible scientific knowledge that we have achieved. That is what Tim wants to put together. What story do we tell that will bring it all together?
Evolution is Making our Lives Significant Now
Tim says it’s important to understand why our lives are so significant. If we can understand the grandeur of what it is to be a human being, we can actually bring something significant to life. And more people can experience what he experienced on the hilltop, that feeling of kindness and connection. The latest information from the frontiers of science say that what we are in, or at the end of, is 13.8 billion years of evolution. We are certainly in an evolving consciousness. At the beginning all there was was hydrogen. And ultimately billions of years later here we are, us as human beings. He quoted Brian Swimme saying “take hydrogen and wait long enough …. that’s what we humans are now”
Consciousness is Evolving Faster
Four billion years ago life started on earth and there has been continual emergence since then. We are in a huge creative process. Once there was not even water, when that arrived life started then carbon came into existence, then sentience and then consciousness. That emergence process has not stopped. It is happening now but faster than ever before because it is exponential in its expansion.
We Experience the Material and the Non-material all the Time
Hydrogen is the basis of matter and through an extraordinary process has led to us as humans and the experience we are currently having, which is psyche. Right now we are experiencing the material nature of the universe as matter and also experiencing it at another level .. it is something else which holds our thoughts, images, ideas. It is a different completely different type of experience to sensation and it is not local to us like our physicality. These experiences are through the psyche, a Greek name, with the Latin version being called Soul. Soul is a non-material elements of reality that we are experiencing all the time.
The Soul is not simply a Byproduct of Matter
Tim explained that the process of evolution has taken the basic matter of hydrogen through biology to the level of Soul which is not made of matter but a whole different dimension of reality. All the action today is taking place in the Soul. The Soul is evolving really fast. Everything that has been through Soul, has been through the imagination. This narrative is different to what the spiritual traditions teach and is controversial to scientists. What Tim is asking science to consider is the possibility that this realm of Soul is not just a byproduct of a piece of matter. Science has such a reductionist approach. When scientists consider our feelings of love they say it’s simply chemicals in the brain. The whole point of the emergent universe is that it cannot be reduced, which is the problem with science. As a human we may be made of chemicals but we are not just chemicals. In this creative process there is always more, and the more cannot be reduced.
The Non-material Realm of Spirituality Needs to be Explored
Spirituality has always been to do with this non-material realm which you can explore through meditation and other spiritual practices like shamanic journeys, creativity and dreams. This is a whole reality which is not to be reduced. Imagination is the most emergent level of reality so you can’t refer to it as that as just imagination. All this is where evolution has come to. So Tim Freke is asking science not to reduce it. This reality of imagination that spirituality has been exploring needs to be treated as its own reality just like the biological sphere, or the physical sphere. What Tim is saying to spirituality is …. you need to let go of the idea of the ‘fall’, because the traditional spiritual idea says that the spiritual imagination realm has existed forever and we have simply fallen from it. We have fallen into the body and life is simply a big mistake.
A New Narrative is Called For
For many, the narrative has been .. “God had a dream, he got lost in the dream and your body is simply a tomb ..” according to Plato. Fundamentally, all the spiritual traditions are negative with narratives about falling from Grace. What this new story does is say “No, it is not negative. We have not fallen from this”. Rather … we are emerging into this. We are in an incredibly creative cosmic process that got us from hydrogen to having a conversation about hydrogen!
Meaning Comes From the Soul Level
The evolutionary process has got us from basic matter to this non-material realm. As we look at Tim standing before us, we are conscious that in the world of sensation and biology, we are looking at Tim, but essentially, he says he is just a monkey wearing funny clothes making funny noises. In the realm of soul or psyche, what we are feeling is meaning. There is no meaning in the funny noises. The meaning is in the non-material realm of Soul because meaning is an emergent reality that arrives with Soul. That is where it comes from that is where it arrives to.
Evolution Has Now Made us Individuals
Tim suggests what got us from the beginning of the universe to this moment now, is not over. It continues and it has led to this incredible evolution of imagination. It has happened through a process of individuation. So if you go back to the hydrogen beginning, when one hydrogen atom is the same as another….. by the time you get to the evolution of the biological world, things are getting very individual. The human being recognises it is different to a tree. Then we recognise that we are all different from each other.
The Journey of Individuation Brought us to Ourselves
As the universe has individuated, it has become more and more conscious through that process, as it has objectively become more individual, it has subjectively become more individual. And we have just been through, and are still in, the most enormous period of individualism. It is astonishing what has happened in the last hundred years, it is unprecedented. We have thrown off centuries, millennia of conditioning. Even having the human divided into two different sexes is an utter revolution, when compared to our beginnings. Look at old media footage and see how everyone 80-100 years ago, was more or less the same … you could tell the difference between people by looking at their hat and work out what class they belonged to. We have now individuated incredibly. We have become ourselves and there has been huge value in that but it has also left us quite isolated and in some ways, split off from each other.
Becoming Conscious of Unity
The phase of evolution we are now entering is the emergence of what Tim calls “uni-individuals”. There is no word currently for what we are becoming. An individual who is conscious of unity. And this process is now happening very, very fast.
Life Is Better Than we Think
Among all this wonder we are not seeing the good evolving in the world. We have an extraordinary propensity for thinking that things are much worse than they are. Most people think the world is going down the pan. Actually, things have been getting steadily better on just about every count, decade after decade. Often older people talk about the world as being terrible. Today, there is a generation of English men who have never been to war, which means they are part of only a few in the history of this country. Western Europe is in peace, the first time in the whole of history.
Positive News is Getting Lost but .. Monumental Change has been Happening
Things are actually better than we think. Because we are programmed to look for danger, that is what we see. We particularly do this as a parent, to protect our children from danger. Now we have 24 hour news and the thing that gets people’s attention most, are problems. We are getting overloaded with negativity. And it is skewing our vision of what the world is really like. Yes there are some things to be concerned about but we also need to step back and go “Wow! … Look at how good this is no!. Look at what our ancestors have achieved for us. Look at what we are able to enjoy now because of what they did, going into their imagination, imagining beautiful things and then making them happen. And now we have a world better than humans have ever enjoyed”. Mortality is lower, poverty is lower, we have made unbelievable improvements there, and most children get an education. Look at what the process of evolution has been doing, by human beings engaging with it and bringing their attention and love to it. We have achieved monumental changes.
A New Human is Becoming
What is behind all that is the rising of a new human being. The uni-vidual from individual with a sense of oneness. A lot of people now genuinely care about other human beings on the other side of the planet, people who they will never meet, who are suffering. Why are they doing this because it’s never happened before in history? In other periods of history, it was common to hate your immediate neighbour, let alone those on the other side of the world. You would simply steal and take the things you needed from your neighbours. Most human groups survived by being pirates because it was the quickest way to get stuff. Before the Iraq war, millions of people came out onto the streets to protest. This rising action of compassion for strangers is part of a new phenomenon and we need to notice of events like this.
The environment is something that large numbers of people focus on now. For most of history, the natural world was something we needed to engage with and was fundamentally dangerous. Look at some countries today and see how nature and animals are treated. We have moved so far in that, we don’t even notice. Now we care. We have cross species compassion. This is worth noticing. Underneath it, much smaller but highly significant, more and more human beings are having awakenings and spiritual experiences like 12 year old Tim. They are realising that there is one of us. We are coming to understand “I am the universe as me, meeting the universe as you”.
We are Increasingly Recognising our Oneness – a Deep Connection
What else could we be but the universe itself?! More and more people understand this concept now, it is no longer abstract. They know what that is. What comes with that recognition of oneness? It is Love. That’s what we feel when we experience oneness. We feel the separateness from each other when we see another individual and we also recognise the connection. We are becoming more and more connected as souls so we can feel a connection We feel it as kindness and empathy, beyond just the person into the universal.
When we wake up to this profoundness, so that we feel at one with everyone and everything, when that happens there is this big unconditional, universal love. When we come into that oneness and we are the universe, it is possible to do what the 2000-year-old Christian tradition has advocated and that is … love our enemies.
Deepening our Understanding Moves us to the Next Level
The cutting edge of the universe is the individuation that created you and me. We are the most individuated aspects of the universe. What marks out our individuation, is not just our bodies, but this other level of individual individuality which is Soul, the imagination, the place of conversation, ideas, understanding. Our job now is to take it to the next level. Having individuated, now we need to see that we can be soul conscious. Understand ‘I am more than me’. If we can do that, we can make a shift in the way we are the way we understand what’s happened to us. That will fundamentally shift the way that human culture is.
A New Understanding to Unite Science and Spirituality
Tim spends his life talking about ideas. He says a new understanding of the nature of reality is coming and when it comes, it will be as big a shift for the evolution of human culture as the arrival of science was 400 years ago. Just look at what that did to change human culture. It changed everything. It went beyond the dreams of everyone. If we can come up with an understanding that unites science and spirituality, that this is not a random universe in which your life has no meaning, that you’re here for a short time and then gone but rather we are in a profoundly meaningful unfolding of potentiality in which new things have been emerging in ever deeper ways all the time and the leading edge of that right now is you. And the leading edge of the leading edge is your soul recognising that it is actually at one with everything.
Connection and Compassion is Part of our Soul Awakening
Spiritual awakening is not about going up mountains. Spiritual awakening is not something that happened over 2,000 years ago. Spiritual awakening is something that happens to the soul when it is mature enough to realise that although it is individual, it is an expression of the universe and with that recognition, this connection with everything, is enormous compassion. This is how we are moving to a culture of kindness. To be able to hold all the less emergent levels (which we have to as the rules of physics over our bodies do not go away) …we each have to live with all the less emergent levels within ourselves.
The Future is What we Emerge and Create
We have to live with all aspects of ourselves. Somehow we keep evolving. What we are in right now is an “OMG!” situation. It’s something enormous. We need to see it and then engage with it. The way we can engage with it best is to use that creativity of soul to transform ourselves and the culture we are in. Is all this evolution inevitable? No. The future is coming but it’s always creative. Inevitability takes away creativity. We get to create the future. There’s huge momentum and there’s a lot of things playing against it as well. How do we respond? That will create the story.
That is why everything matters.
How can we transform the experience we are already having? The sense that we are one as well as two, separate and together as one, is to connect profoundly with each other. The key thing when we look at each other is what we see, how we pay attention. Maybe we don’t notice much or we do really pay attention. That’s a choice. Look at a unique face of another human, full of all their experiences, personality ….. that’s the body. We don’t just connect with a face. What we are really connecting with we can’t actually see. The soul of the other. Full of memories, hopes, fears, stories. We can’t see those but that is what we are connecting with.
Right now something you can’t see is connecting with something you can’t see, through you and the other person. It happens all the time, Soul with Soul. Connecting through the looking at each other. It becomes different if we pay attention. If I really pay attention and sink into my universal nature my uni-viduality, I am the universe looking at the universe. There’s just one of us looking at itself. The one is connecting with the one by being two.
A Meditation Exercise – Sitting in pairs acts to amplify your practice, together
Any form of spiritual practice is supported by meditation. Many people struggle with this .. trying to do it the right way and quieting their mind. There are so different ways of connecting with spirit and meditation, in its many forms, is just one of them. Yes, most people worry that they get mind-drift. It is common so you just keep choosing where you put your awareness. Awareness is simply focussed attention. Keep coming back to that choice.
Instead of solitary practice, meditating with another person is a very powerful way of connecting with spirit using a deep connection with that other person, almost like an amplifier. Tim talked about creating a magical space, an environment that is set up specifically so you can feel safe meditating together for a soul intimacy and deeper connection into the oneness with another person.
Sitting across from another person, in the stillness, with no expression, without judgement .. no data is being exchanged. This moment provides an opportunity for a high level of self acceptance.
At first, the lack of reaction feels blank but there is so much more going on within. Once you settle in, the experience is rich. The story starts to drop and we see the deepness inside the self. The narrative just fades away. You begin to realise that you are who you are. It’s as simple as that. The beauty of being with someone else in this process is that you realise the beauty you see within someone else, you have the hope that they see the same in you.
Always thinking ..
Tim says we spend far too much time in cognitive thinking. He says that spirituality today tends to give the mind a bit of a bad wrap. So much teaching is about not thinking and that thinking is negative .. but … thinking is actually imagination .. it is when you are speaking to yourself, generating ideas. Instead of feeling bad about the activity of the mind, honour the mind and help it to find its peaceful place.
Accept that you have an ego, a self, emotions and attachments and that you are simply“a work in progress”. Accept your individuality and re-affirm with yourself that you do not need to be perfect. It’s OK to be YOU. When you acknowledge that the Thinking Mind has its place, then it is easier to step into the silence.
Self Love is key
It is amazing that is such an issue for so many. Most people find it easier to love others than they do themselves. And yet Tim spoke of a time when the concept of loving others, as the Commandments now advise, was a strange idea. 2,000 years ago, Christ told people to not only love God, but to also love their neighbours as they would themselves. That was a totally new concept. Now, taking on love for ourselves is an important focus, perhaps also a strange concept for some!
The growth of kindness is powerful
Human cultures have moved on significantly over the last few hundred years and there has been a big shift in the last century. Our neighbours were to be feared and fought. Then we came to a better understanding and tolerance for them. Today, such is the growth of human compassion that people will go to extraordinary efforts to support and protect people on the other side of the world who they have never met. We are increasingly moved to take actions of their behalf when we see a deep need or injustice.
This is new for humanity and whilst we are inside this movement it is hard to understand the vast shift that is taking place. We are learning to give each other love and attention and this loving attention is the most emergent force on the planet right now. The expansion in compassion is so big that we hardly notice it! There has never been a time in history like it. A culture of kindness is a powerful force emerging globally.
Individuals pulling together
We are continually evolving and we each have to go through a process of individuality before we can experience the oneness that is there for us. Individuating gives us a strong sense of who we are. We need to do this as we grow up and create our own space. We test out all the beliefs we have grown up with and find out what we feel is true for us. Through the doubting, questing and learning we become our own person. Then we feel a deep need to come together with others in soul connection. This longing to be with others is an evolutionary pull. We are coming to understand that we are stronger together and that yearning is helping to create a society of what Tim calls ‘Unividuals’.
How many need to wake up?
It does not need everybody to “get it” to create the change we want to see. We don’t have to wait for that. Most big changes actually come from small groups of people. If you think of the power and complexity of one single human being, remember that they were born of one woman and they started out as one single cell. There is profound power and potential in the small.
Love needs Wisdom
Now we need wisdom to implement the love that is growing. Yes humanity has is developing a greater capacity for loving connection and the desire to embrace, but we also need to be wise. Love sometimes has to say “NO”. Love may be soft and gentle but it is also big, strong and bold. Go in to the love and learn to use your wisdom. As stupid as you may feel now, Tim says you are always wiser than you were!
It as was a pleasure to welcome Tim Freke to our Conscious Cafe Skipton July community evening – seen here with host Gina Lazenby
The beginning of the event was recorded on a Facebook Live transmission. Sadly the camera threw a wobbler and recorded it sideways .. !! Click here.
You can watch, if your next is flexible, but you can also listen in .. just pretend it is an audio podcast! It’s on our facebook page. This blog post is essential the transcript! ENJOY.
What does it mean to be a Good Friend?
Feminine Leadership Today 