Tim Freke & Richard Cox, UFOs, 9-11, Climate And Truth |391|

Alex

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Tim Freke & Richard Cox, UFOs, 9-11, Climate And Truth |391|
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Tim Freke and Richard Cox join me for a freewheeling talk about stuff they usually don’t discuss.
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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.
 
Alex's question at the end of the podcast:

What do you make of the little "truth club" idea and it popping up over and over again as we look at cultures, or secret/forbidden/hidden/veiled knowledge -- be it through religion, secret societies, ancient cultures like the Dogon -- or any other examples you might be able to think of?
 
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I enjoyed it as well and I downloaded a couple of episodes of these gentlemen’s Podcasts to cbeck them out. (I have a 45 hour drive, yes 45 hours, ahead of me so I’m hunting for shows!)

Alex I’m with you on the thought of “emergent consciousness.” I feel very strongly that consciousness precipitated the formation of our planet and, likely, shaped the evolution of life forms partly (if not completely) on this planet. This was either the result of our conscious or subconscious intent (along with that of the other life forms), or through a form of “extended” consciousness either consciousnesly or subconsciously or through a combination of the aforementioned. I don’t believe that these “random” mutations of Neo-Darwinism were random at all, if in fact there were even genetic mutations in the first place. This idea also fits in nicely with Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. I don’t think that the creation of this universe, this planet, and consciousness are things that “just happen” on accident. I’ve always thought that philosophy absurd.
 
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Good show :)

Although this discussion was somewhat productive, there was quite a bit of Alex and Tim talking past each other. Tim made his share of strongly worded statements early on and then backed off and said it is most valuable to move between perspectives. Then Alex came in like a sledgehammer with very strongly worded deliberately provocative statements to which Tim initially objected equally as strongly... then after a few minutes of seeming to talk past each other both Alex and Tim backed off, equivocated a little... then basically agreed on most things.

Regarding the questions around 19:00 of what is the ground state of being... there is no ground. Everything floats on nothing. All valid ontologies are circular. There is the duality of perfect structure with platonic forms and ideas as objects and the realm of chaos and choice... The fully conscious being or god is the unification of those opposite realms.

Regarding the questions about the nature of time around 30:00... I feel like I've heard all this before... Yes we are making progress towards something. Consciousness is emerging, but we could also say it is returning. Spirit moves in spirals. What has been will be again, but always a bit different than before.

Regarding Tyson's comments... On the one hand I see why Alex would call it "complete and utter bullshit", and on the other hand I can see why if we take it on its face value, Tyson's words are the most reasonable and responsible statements he could possibly make. Tyson probably sees himself as teacher, an authority figure, a father to the ignorant masses children, and he probably sees it as his responsibility to play it cool and conservative and act as everything is business as usual to reduce the number of insane reactions among the more mentally unstable members of the population. If even one person could use Tyson's words as justification for some crazy act, he would probably feel very bad about it (and he would lose status as an authority figure).

On 9/11 I was in history class taking a quiz and the event was televised in our classroom. Our history teacher (for whom I always had great respect and admiration) maintained a calm attitude with gentle smile and acted as if everything was business as usual. She told us to continue taking our quiz and gave us instructions for homework. It is obvious to me now that she was in a position of leadership and responsibility and had to act as if everything was business as usual because this was the best thing for her students' mental health. If she displayed a genuinely human reaction she would only inspire fear and terror in her students amplifying the trauma and damage of the event. Tyson felt like he was in the same position here. And the governor of Arizona was also in the same position when he held a press conference and made a joke out of the Phoenix lights while privately being very interested and curious having seen them himself. He felt it his duty to downplay the events to avoid mass panic and people checking out of life from the overwhelming sense of transcendence or doom or both.

So while Tyson's reactions which feigned calm secure understanding were responsible and conservative and protective of status quo societal structure, they were not a genuine intellectually honest reaction to something that should be of ultimate importance and a subject of great interest and curiosity. So yes in that sense they were "complete and utter bullshit". But whether or not you see that as a good or bad thing depends on whether you view the mass public as children in need of leadership or not. My history teacher's actions on 9/11 were very admirable... were Tyson's?

Tyson, my History Teacher on 9/11, and the governor of Arizona: none of them were told to be disingenuous (as far as I know). They were acting out with the best of intentions - the Demiurge - the tyrannical parent - trying to keep us in the garden of perfection but in doing so withheld the choice from us... the choice to question and challenge the structure we find ourselves within... the choice to leave the garden.

The part about climate change was a little painful to listen to because of all the talking past one another, but I think Alex succeeded in pinning Tim's shoulder's to the mat and got him to say "we should just act!" and then in the very next sentence say that we shouldn't just do something without understanding it... and then getting him to admit he goes along with it because that is what people he trusts believe should happen.

Regarding the nature of the "conspiracy" I agree it is a combination of many things and diverse motivations of interested parties (some nefarious, some naive, and some well-intentioned) and it is better to take the view that everything involving money and power and mass psychology is a conspiracy until proven otherwise. And I agree with Alex that if you get into business at any level above low-level manager: "everything's a fuckin conspiracy!" I work for a small company, so my boss is the owner, and I get to witness the evolution of real life conspiracy theories (not that he is doing anything unethical, but that he has to default to conspiracy theory thinking in regards to employees, customers, competition, and always assume people have hidden motives and it turns out they usually do. Having a default naively positive view of the honesty of humanity will get you run over in business).

Alex's question at the end of the podcast:

What do you make of the little "truth club" idea and it popping up over and over again as we look at cultures, or secret/forbidden/hidden/veiled knowledge -- be it through religion, secret societies, ancient cultures like the Dogon -- or any other examples you might be able to think of?

Everything that is new will initially be rare. When it becomes widespread it is no longer new. The conscious being that is escaping the labyrinth of nested matrices of perfection to discover his will will always be "new" because he is by definition an emergent phenomenon and those muggles and normies which are not conscious form part of the structure of the walls of the labyrinth. So to be at the bleeding edge of knowledge and ontological completeness means you will always find yourself in a very little club... this is both fun and dangerous because being contrary to the masses doesn't necessarily mean one is right, so a good sense of humor is absolutely imperative to prevent your new "truth" from becoming another man’s false prison.
 
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I couldn't make up my mind whether Tim Freke was a monistic Idealist or a dualist. On investigation I found a podcast (https://timfreke.podbean.com/e/idealism-vs-emergent-spirituality/) where I discovered that though once an Idealist, he calls his current philosophy "emergent spirituality" (so that isn't just a phrase he mentioned in the interview with Alex).

Anyway, In the podcast I've just linked to, he has a debate with David Websdell, who regards himself as an Idealist. I was surprised that neither of them seem to be aware of Bernardo Kastrup, particularly Websdell, who thinks of himself as holding to a philosophy (Idealism) that "dare not speak its name". He's apparently unaware that Bernardo -- also an idealist -- is getting a fair amount of traction in the scientific press, including a number of fairly recent articles in Scientific American.

I find Tim's philosophy very confusing; I don't really know what he is saying, and at times, he speaks almost like a materialist. He throws in the word paralogical, which is a form of reasoning not dependent on logic, and constantly flits about from this to that without seemingly being able to describe what his philosophy actually is in coherent terms. Maybe he does somewhere and I just haven't found it? If so, please do let me know.

I'm with him that evolution seems a fact, but am convinced that Darwinism can't explain it (except at very low levels, such as speciation events, though not at the higher levels of the formation of body plans). I also agree that evolution seems to occur at all levels in all realms: in organic forms as well as in ideas and culture and so on. How there could possibly be anything more fundamental than consciousness I just can't see from his line of argument.

What, for one thing, is perception? For me, it's a faculty of consciousness apparently instantiated as what we call perceptive organs such as eyes and ears, etc. We live in a world of only apparent instantiation. The world of the "objective" is just the way things appear to our perceptions. We attribute causality to independently existing objects or "things", but they aren't causes, so much as appearances that we fit into our explanatory model of reality. The brain, for instance, doesn't cause consciousness, but is how the process of consciousness appears to us from a certain perspective -- Bernardo's "second person" perspective -- which we take as a part of objective reality. But actually, it's just how the processes occurring in Mind At Large (MAL) appear to our perception as its dissociated alters.

The whole idea of "subjective" and "objective" is misconceived. It presupposes subjectivity and objectivity, when there's actually just the one thing, namely consciousness, either that of the One (MAL), or of its dissociated alters ("organic beings", including ourselves). The world of the inorganic (apparently insentient objects and forces) is just our second-person perspective of the inner, first-person, workings of MAL, which appear to our perception as patterns and regularities that it is the purpose of science to investigate and model.

If the materialist agenda were simply to accept that we can only model reality (and then often only roughly) rather than dogmatically insist that the models are reality, we'd find ourselves in a saner place than we find ourselves within the paradigm of materialism. It's not so much that materialism is wrong, as that it's like a person with greatly defective eyesight imagining that he can see with 20/20 vision. He thinks his images are sharp, even crystal clear, when in fact they're often extremely blocky and vague.

It might be true that over time these images become a little clearer (i.e. that evolution of ideas occurs), but we're still a very long way from the truth. To make progress in science, at some point we're going to have to accept that materialism isn't the master of understanding from which all wisdom proceeds, but rather just a clumsy and fumbling handmaiden of truth. IMO, things will only start to become usefully clearer when science drops materialism, with which it's gone pretty much as far as it can go; currently, I think it's becoming an active impediment to making further progress.

Just as sterile religion may concretise around an initial genuine spiritual impulse, the initially exciting and fruitful impulse of science is now rapidly degenerating into sterility, into scientism. I'm not saying we have to drop science, only what has been for a few centuries its main guiding principle, namely materialism. Thanks to Bernardo, I can sense just a little light at the end of the tunnel.
 
Just finished the latest show - haven't read through this whole thread yet so apologies if this is covered: the UFO stuff, specifically re Strieber. Strieber doesn't actually think that his experiences are extraterrestrials.. his view is far more like Tim's (Or is is Richard?) and the Imaginal/Imagination aspect.
 
Just finished the latest show - haven't read through this whole thread yet so apologies if this is covered: the UFO stuff, specifically re Strieber. Strieber doesn't actually think that his experiences are extraterrestrials.. his view is far more like Tim's (Or is is Richard?) and the Imaginal/Imagination aspect.

Speaking of Richard, I found a number of his contributions to be the best of the three. I like the way he positions himself as the true sceptic (in the best sense of that word), which is something I also try to do.

It's true enough that we tend to form ourselves into little "truth clubs", but in extremis, we each form a club of one. For instance, whilst I agree with a certain amount that Tim says (some of the bits I can understand, at any rate), I don't share his ideas on climate change -- which, Like Alex, I think is one of the the biggest boondoggles man has ever manufactured (it has faint echoes in Tulip mania), and sooner or later, that it will unravel. At that time, one might hope that the many people espousing it will own up and admit their error, but more likely the idea will be quietly dropped and we'll all be billions the worse off for it.
 
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Speaking of Richard, I found a number of his contributions to be the best of the three. I like the way he positions himself as the true sceptic (in the best sense of that word), which is something I also try to do.

It's true enough that we tend to form ourselves into little "truth clubs", but in extremis, we each form a club of one. For instance, whilst I agree with a certain amount that Tim says (some of the bits I can understand, at any rate), I don't share his ideas on climate change -- which, Like Alex, I think is one of the the biggest boondoggles man has ever manufactured (it has faint echoes in Tulip mania), and sooner or later, that it will unravel. At that time, one might hope that the many people espousing it will own up and admit their error, but more likely the idea will be quietly dropped and we'll all be billions the worse off for it.

Which one was talking about imagination? Tim or Richard?

Personally I think the abduction thing now has really thrown out any possibility of it being ETs if one does what Alex says and looks at the data. What you would need to do is to explain exact correspondences with shamanic lore, religious founders, NDEs etc. Not just surface but pretty much exact parallels. The fairy stuff is the most lightweight parallel if you really get into it. We still don't actually KNOW much but I would contend we know enough to throw out the ETH.
 
We still don't actually KNOW much but I would contend we know enough to throw out the ETH.

I agree to an extent, but we certainly can’t just dispose of it. Two possibilities to consider 1) Aliens are flesh and blood and from this universe but are technologically/spiritually/psychically advanced beyond our wildest imagination and, therefore, we get what we see. That would have some explanatory power. Possibility 2) We are being visited by physical beings from another planet in our universe AND by other mystical/spiritually/inter-dimensional beings simultaneously. Even if we determine that these bizarre abduction accounts and an enormous amount of anomalous phenomena observed in the sky are the work of spiritual/inter-dimensional beings, we still can’t conclude that there has never been craft from another planet in our skies which people have observed. But I do think that the more birds you can kill with one stone in these instances, the more likely you MAY be to being correct. Logically speaking, appealing to multiple explanations is not as sound as appealing to one. But that’s only if one explanation covers the facts. Does it here with UFOs? Maybe, maybe not.
 
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I agree to an extent, but we certainly can’t just dispose of it. Two possibilities to consider 1) Aliens are flesh and blood and from this universe but are technologically/spiritually/psychically advanced beyond our wildest imagination and, therefore, we get what we see. That would have some explanatory power. Possibility 2) We are being visited by physical beings from another planet in our universe AND by other mystical/spiritually/inter-dimensional beings simultaneously. Even if we determine that these bizarre abduction accounts and an enormous amount of anomalous phenomena observed in the sky are the work of spiritual/inter-dimensional beings, we still can’t conclude that there has never been craft from another planet in our skies which people have observed.

Yeah I am thinking more of the abduction type alien motifs. Sure, some structured craft seen at some point over human history could well have been of ET origin.

But the thing is re the actual interaction with aliens then one needs to explain the parallels in other areas. That's point 1. Most ETH proponents don't address that, it's split into two camps.

Then if we are arguing for aliens who are non-materialistic - i.e. 'spiritually' based as it were - and I think we have to, unless we want to twist the evidence, but if we go there then we don't need the alien/craft/travelling through space motif at all.

It's like what critics say about the Shakespeare authorship issue "you need to believe that another actor and playwrite, also called Shakespeare, was working at the Globe and came from Stratford". It has some truth to it.
 
Yeah I am thinking more of the abduction type alien motifs. Sure, some structured craft seen at some point over human history could well have been of ET origin.

But the thing is re the actual interaction with aliens then one needs to explain the parallels in other areas. That's point 1. Most ETH proponents don't address that, it's split into two camps.

Then if we are arguing for aliens who are non-materialistic - i.e. 'spiritually' based as it were - and I think we have to, unless we want to twist the evidence, but if we go there then we don't need the alien/craft/travelling through space motif at all.

It's like what critics say about the Shakespeare authorship issue "you need to believe that another actor and playwrite, also called Shakespeare, was working at the Globe and came from Stratford". It has some truth to it.

Right, I edited my post but you had already quoted it in response. The less explanations you need, the closer you may be to the truth.
 
Right, I edited my post but you had already quoted it in response. The less explanations you need, the closer you may be to the truth.

True. I agree. But the experience could also be religious - in the sense it is not susceptible to 'proof'. It could actually be something that is just a manifestation of the numinous that we can't conceive of so we see it as technology because that's where we are now. Before we saw as fairies or whatever. It's not the phenomenon projecting how we see it, it's maybe us.
 
So far I have just listened to part of this show - so I'll expand this comment later.

Tim seems to take evolution as a fact, by which I assume he means that we evolved by a process of repeated accidents from which natural selection picked the best! I don't believe that any more, and I think we should have a podcast from Stephen Meyer or one of the other people at the Discovery Institute to put this idea forcibly - and with a lot of hard science. Believing in ID, absolutely does not mean believing in Christianity, or even in God, it is simply an acceptance that the science of evolution is falling apart, and some alternative to NS (that doesn't subtly incorporate NS within itself) is needed.

I half accept Tim's point that just saying 'consciousness s the base' is uncomfortably close to saying we emerged from atoms, or God did it!

To me, I like temporary theories - theories that encompass a bit more of what is true, without expecting to jump to an absolute explanation for everything. Science thought it was close, but that is excluding so much that we discuss here - that means that a final theory is very far off.

David
 
I haven't listened to the show yet, but look forward to it. So, I'll bung in a few thoughts in advance.

1) The ETH is less a hypothesis and more a foundational belief for many people. This then shapes their interpretation of the evidence and what they will and wont include in their data. It's like materialism all over again. Boo.

2) I think Freke is trying to collapse the binary between material reality, individual consciousness, and the extended consciousness realm. In this view the extended consciousness realm (ECR?) is intimately linked to the human psyche (or perhaps the presence of consciousness in general on a universal level). So, the ECR would change and evolve as consciousness evolves and gains complexity. I think this is closer to Alfred North Whitehead than traditional Idealism. Drop the abstraction between consciousness and the material, and suddenly the two would have to be interlinked. But this would still leave the problem of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing). So, I don't know.

3)Emergence could kinda work if you posit a transcendental platonic goal state (or characteristic) towards which the cosmos is pulling. Maybe the whole process is like Teilhard de Chardin's 'spiritualization of matter'.
 
Once again, Tim Freke exposes himself as a disingenuous Huckster.

Kudos to Alex for trying to pin him down on admitting Conspiracies exist. A heroic effort.

Listening to Freke dance like a mad fool to avoid admitting anything is wrong with the Climate Scam or Official 9/11 was hilarious.
 
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Once again, Tim Freke exposes himself as a disingenuous Huckster.

Kudos to Alex for trying to pin him down on admitting Conspiracies exist. A heroic effort.

Listening to Freke dance like a mad fool to avoid admitting anything is wrong with the Climate Scam or Official 9/11 was hilarious.

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Seems more than a wee bit overly harsh. I don't hear him being disingenuous at all... and as far as the huckster claim: well he makes money doing what he loves to do talking and writing about things at the limit of our understanding... wish I could make money doing the same.
 
Sure. UFOS = aliens is at this point discredited if you look at the evidence fully. I.e. there are no aliens,

I don't know how you can say that with total confidence.

I think the idea of aliens = advanced Columbus and Conquistadors arriving on our shores has such a small probability of being correct as to not be worth considering, but that doesn't mean that the entities involved in UFOs couldn't be originating from another physical part of the universe.

My thinking is... to travel faster than light or do the kinds of things we see UFOs do means moving in a semantic dimension which could also be considered the platonic dimension of forms or the imaginal dimension. I find it hard to believe the universe is too big to explore. I think it can be explored, but gaining the technology to do so means we realize mind and matter are a lot more closely related.
 
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