Into the Silence
I’ve recently finished a weekend silent retreat with “stand-up philosopher” Tim Freke. When I am with him I sense a tremendous intellect and wide-open heart—a presence I’m privileged to share with a group of fellow seekers. As Tim states it, he has spent his life in pursuit of truly accounting for his "awakening" experience as a 12-year-old lad in Somerset, England. He has seen (and I'm summarizing, of course) that the current "materialist-objectivist" view of the universe has nothing meaningful to say about our subjective experience—our consciousness. In the materialist view, consciousness is simply some by-product of all the electro-chemical reactions of our bodies. When the reactions stop, consciousness stops, and that’s the end of it. In the radically non-dual subjectivist view, on the other hand, everything is simply consciousness, and the world and all that is in it, including our bodies, are just a projection of that consciousness. TIm finds the latter closer to his actual experience, but it is still an unsatisfactory and incomplete description of reality. Tim has taken the bold step to state that both objective and subjective views are true and that this is the fundamental paradox that we simply have to learn to live with. He calls this a "para-logic" view. I can be non-dual and subjectivist when I’m sitting in deep meditation, but I'd better be a materialist-objectivist when I drive a car!
A big bonus I get when I’m with Tim is that he has developed ways to make the most complex and esoteric ideas amazingly clear and simple. I feel that I finally understand important concepts that were inaccessible to me before. Furthermore, he has developed exercises and techniques that bring these abstract ideas right down to where we live—in our bodies. He turns ideas into experience. What a joy!
Tim is a complex human being. He is a stand-up (read: entertaining) philosopher, and his ideas of a good time include lots of blinking Christmas tree lights, incense, candles, rock music, and dancing. It all gets a little too glitzy for my taste, but I allow him that. Indeed, I go with him all the way, because I have seen the spark of Divinity in his eyes, and he, in turn, has shown me how to see that spark in everyone’s eyes.
If anyone is going to be able to lead us into the next stage of our evolution as a species it will be someone like Tim Freke. Hey Tim, want a BIG job?
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