Phil Watt seeks a deeper spiritual truth that embraces life, but doesn’t ignore conspiracy culture.

photo by: Skeptiko

Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Phillip J. Watt to Skeptiko. Phil is a fellow podcaster — which is always fun for me — he’s also quite a spiritual seeker, a former social worker, an out-of-body traveler, a lucid dreamer, a bunch of other stuff and you can add to that list an author of a very cool new book titled, The Simulation.

(later in the interview)

Again, this gets to this topic that I, kind of, just touch on sometimes and it might be fun to stretch it out into a little bit of a longer discussion, and the phrase I always put on it is backdoor-materialism. So, it’s like, we’re out there preaching post-materialism, “Hey, materialism doesn’t work, and consciousness is the underlying fundamental nature of everything and everything arises out of consciousness,” and then as soon as we get any kind of momentum, we want to go back and go, “And here’s how we can measure it, control it, make it better, optimize it.” It’s like, wait a minute, in what way would that mean anything to use empirical means to study the efficacy of…?

I mean, there’s an underlying contradiction there that begins with the assumption that driving this back into the material world, and measure it in some way, is somehow good, useful, important for some goal that we have ill-defined and we really think we’ve moved past. Do you get where I’m at all coming from, with the backdoor-materialism?  

Phillip Watt: Yeah, but I would say that the material world isn’t the material world, it’s an expression of reality and when we look at our scientific investigation into that expression of reality, if we look through a different lens, we’re going to see it differently, we’re going to have different results. But we shouldn’t be looking at it as, “Well, science is only the study of matter.” Science isn’t the study of matter, science is the organic investigation of humanity into reality.

So, how that unfolds, how we measure and actually interact with the so-called material world, which is very much connected to the quantum physical world, it’s connected to the observer and the collapse of the wave function into a particle experience, all the way the co-created process happens, as well as things that we don’t know about.

(continued below)

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Alex Tsakiris: I hear you and I’m going to bring you back to a point where we were at in our prior discussion that, to me, gets at this question in a beautiful way and I was telling you about my story with my friend and excellent host of the terrific show, Buddha at the Gas Pump, that I always reference, because it’s an incredible show with so many incredibly spiritually, awakening people as Rick calls them. And one of them is Amma, known as the hugging saint,