Tim Freke and Richard Cox join me for a freewheeling talk about stuff they usually don’t discuss.

photo by: Skeptiko

Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Tim Freke and Richard Cox back to Skeptiko for what I hope will be entertaining freewheeling dialogue about all sorts of stuff that I’ve cooked up.

Tim Freke is, of course, a bestselling author, an acclaimed international speaker, as well as a “standup philosopher” with a deep love for deep truth, which I share with him, and it’s just always drawn me to Tim’s fantastic work. I consider him a friend and a colleague and he’s always great to connect with. I’m very glad to have him on today.

Richard Cox is the co-host of Tim’s podcast and he’s created just a really good podcast of his own called Deep State Consciousness Podcast and I’ve really enjoyed talking to Richard over the last year or so and diving into his world and some of the podcasts that he’s gotten into, that seem to have a great synergy and crossover with a lot of the stuff that I’ve done here on Skeptiko.

So, both of you, Tim and Richard, this is going to be so fun. Thanks for joining me.

(continued below)

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Read Excerpts:

Start 00:12:58

Tim Freke: The thing which unites and divides science and spirituality is science reaches out into the object and goes, “What is it?” and spirituality reaches back into the subject and goes, “Who am I?” So, if you reach back into the subject and go, “Who am I?” you eventually find the ground of consciousness, so then that’s the ground. Whereas, if you reach out into the object you find an objective ground. We thought it was material, it turns out it’s not, it’s energetic or informational. But, that’s the paradox, that’s the paradoxity of those two things.

The question is, is either actually the ground, because it looks to me, now we have this evolutionary understanding which our ancestors didn’t have, that it’s harder for us then to go that consciousness is the ground of reality because it looks like, very strongly, that consciousness, this ability to know that you exist, is an emergent quality. It wasn’t there for the first 10 billion years at least.

Alex Tsakiris: Why would you say that, what evidence do you have for that?

Tim Freke: That’s it’s an emergent…? Well, I would say the opposite. There is evidence that it has emerged with life, because we don’t find it in other things, not consciousness, not the knowledge that we exist. Therefore, the idea that it’s the constant ground is an assumption and we’d have to go, what you’ve done then is you’ve taken this idea, which is essentially a God idea, and you’ve plonked it at the beginning in the same way that people have been plonking at the beginning forever and going, “We just assume that’s there.”

What I think we can do is see it in a different way. So,