Hi everybody. This is Karen Elkins. This is Mystical Science. I’m your host today, and I’m always your host. Our guest is Tim Freke, and the show topic is going to be a soul story for deep awakening and lucid living. Tim has for 40 years intensively explored philosophy in the practice of spiritual waking. He has 35 books cover’s everything from Zen hermetic stuff to Gnosticism. They’ve been translated into 15 different languages. He has an innovative perspective on the scientific theory of evolution with a fresh understanding of perennial spiritual insights. I like that word perennial. It really kind of had to really look it up Tim because it invoked a different sort of thinking about it, right? Because it’s reoccurring.
So in his latest book, Deep Awake and the Soul Story, offers a revolutionary approach to the awakening for the 21st century and a visionary understanding of the nature of reality. The best thing I actually, what drew me to giving them a call and putting them on the show was his bare feet and his laugh and his intense research. So he seems incredibly, casually contagious and honest in his insights and his looks. So welcome, Tim.
It’s a pleasure to be here having a conversation with you.
So, Tim, here’s a question. You say contemporary society has experienced a soul crisis. What do you mean by that?
Well, I think in the intellectual mainstream, and of course that’s not really the majority, but it does govern how culture sees itself, we’ve seen the rise of science. Quite rightfully, it’s given us the internet to label us to do this, it’s achievements are immense, but it’s come at a price because it’s very good explaining how things work and it can’t address why things exist, and it’s created a spiritual vacuum. And quite literally it’s taken the soul, I mean by the word soul for me, what I mean by that is the psyche, which is the ancient Greek word for soul, which we use today often, this other dimension that you and I are having this conversation, where my mouth moves, there’s meaning, which you are understanding from the sounds I’m making. And that is not something which exists in the world. It exists in the imagination, the world of images.
Well that’s the soul, and that’s been the area that spirituality has been studying forever, but what the view that’s being pushed forward now is that really is just a byproduct of the body, and what that does is it devalues it, and it takes meaning away from life because all the meaning is in the soul. And so the view which I come across a lot now is life in the universe is amazing and all of the rest of it, but the downside is we’re on a little rock in the middle of nowhere, hurtling through empty space, here for a few decades long enough to go, “What the heck?” And then we’re gone, and that’s it. There’s no meaning, there’s no purpose, and none of that is true in my experience of life.
So what I’d be looking for is how can I bring together these powerful spiritual insights, which I’ve been studying for the last decades, all my life, alongside all of these incredible physical and biological insights, which science has got to offer us because my feeling is is in my actual experience of reality, they fit together. So how do they fit together?
Well, here’s the interesting part to me. I am going to segue because this reminds me of the hermetic stuff. This reminds me of the alchemical aspect of the hermetic practices and our own sensations that arise. And that’s in this book as well. We live through our sensations or imaginations, but in it is that alchemical recognition that there is sort of a woven tapestry of sorts of how we maneuver through time and space and what it means.
Yeah. I mean, science came from somewhere and where it came from was esoteric studies, it came from alchemy and became chemistry, and it’s in the word, that’s where it comes from. And alchemy is really kēme, it’s the ancient Egyptian, kēme is Egypt, it came from the ancient Egyptian wisdom.
So what you see is the resurgence of pagan, I think it’s called pagan wisdom, the ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, which surfaced again in Italy in the Renaissance, gave birth to the modern world, which led to Galileo and Descartes, and then the enlightenment, and now to this incredible world where we can talk and completely opposite side of the world, and yet we can be as if we’re in the same room together.
So science has come from that, which is why really bringing them back together again is… Well, together again is not really right because what’s happened is that in the whole culture things differentiate, you just go back to everything that comes from one thing. So look at the way that drama say and religion have separated. They were once the same thing. You go back to the ancient Egyptian mysteries or the Greek mysteries, they’re the same thing and now we see them as different. We’ve secularized things, and that’s a good thing actually, but we need to see how they relate, and they do.
Yes they do. They definitely do.
They’ve been portrayed as enemies and they’re really not. They’re really not. But I do feel like, I mean certainly in the philosophy that I’ve been developing, I do think both, if we want to bring together spirituality and science, both need to change in their assumptions, that’s the key. It’s not going to be like, “Oh well science becomes spiritual. Spirituality becomes scientific.” I think we need a new paradigm, which is as rational as science, but also open to these deep spiritual experiences, which are very real.
All right, we’re going to take a small break. So Tim, before we get really going, because I know we are, where do they find you?
Timfreke.com is the best place and because I’ve got such a strange name as long as you spell it right, you will definitely find me. And of course, YouTube has lots of videos and Facebook and all this.
Yeah, you’ve got a lot of stuff on your site, that’s for sure. And you do workshops and things. Okay.
Yeah. Lots of stuff. Lots of it. Yeah.
Lots of stuff. Okay. So we’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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