Turning spirituality the 'right way up'

In our first episode of the Speira Podcast, I speak with philosopher Tim Freke about a radically different way of understanding the nature of reality and our place within it.

At the heart of Tim’s work is the profound ambition to “turn spirituality the right way up”:

What’s inherent in my ideas is that I take spirituality seriously. Now there there’s a whole lot of people who don’t, and I understand why they don’t, they think it’s illusory and can be explained by brain states that they discount it as having any significance. I don’t think that, having spent my life exploring it - I am personally absolutely convinced that spiritual experiences are pointing towards things that are real, and highly significant. And also, that is where the deep meaning of human existence lies, and the fact that we’ve cut ourselves off from it - collectively if you like - in the intellectual mainstream, is why there is a meaning crisis or a soul crisis.

I don’t disagree. For those genuinely exploring the frontiers of science and spirituality, it’s becoming increasingly hard to deny that spiritual experiences - and the deeper reality they point toward - are profoundly real.

Approached with that same spirit of sincere inquiry, the more I sit with Tim’s ideas, the more seriously I take them.

Central to Unividualism is the claim that traditional spirituality has misinterpreted what it has been encountering all along. Part of this is historical: pre-scientific traditions worked with the best conceptual tools available to them, but those tools are no longer sufficient today. Another part is a familiar cognitive error: we take our most emergent qualities (such as love, compassion, purpose), and project them backwards onto the origin of reality. This feels intuitive: Something as extraordinary as the universe must have come from something even more extraordinary, right?

But we’ve learned more recently that this isn’t necessarily how emergence works. Extraordinary complexity can arise from remarkably simple beginnings (AI being an obvious modern example), and that insight changes everything.

What Tim is pointing to, then, is not a failure of spirituality itself, but a failure to utilize the right categories of explanatory power today.

The encounter was real all along. What has been missing is the right conceptual lens to understand it today.

This reframing doesn’t diminish the depth or beauty of love, compassion, or purpose. If anything, one may be able to even more fully connect with the idea of a divine, loving intelligence because it makes far more sense when relating to it through Unividualism’s evolutionary lens.

See, placing God (or whatever name one prefers for a benevolent divine force) at the beginning of reality gives us the insoluble problems of evil and unnecessary suffering, as well as a deep sense of absurdity. By contrast, seeing God as emergent helps us wrestle with these things in a different way: God is not the cause of suffering, or a passive overseer. God, emerging through us and as us, is a responsive presence who is no less heartbroken by suffering than we are.

The net result of this perspective, is that life - your life - truly matters.

We’re imperfect, we’re evolving, we’re not something else which is already perfect if only you knew it – no, you’re you. You are the universe forming, as you. And you’re on this epic journey. And you are in part creating yourself, by the choices you make. You are navigating your relationship with everything else. There’s a process of becoming happening, chaotically all around you, and you’re negotiating your relationship with it, and that forms what you are. Behind your name is something real and particular and individual, and it’s a very emergent branch of the whole evolutionary tree and it connects back and back and back to hydrogen and beyond. You know, we’re all connected. And when you get that, that’s the idea of the Unividual. The individual who’s becoming conscious.

For a recovering non-dualist like myself, I have to admit some of this is music to my ears. The individual is no longer the obstacle to unity, but the very foundation which leads to the experience of unity. I am that through which unity is realised.

Over the course of our conversation, Tim and I talked about the evolutionary nature of spirituality, the nature of being, death and reincarnation, the unidual nature of One, and much more.

You can find the full conversation here, I hope you enjoy it.

• 0:00:58 – What is the nature of reality?
• 0:02:55 – Harmonizing suffering and absurdity with a benevolent force
• 0:12:30 – Is God something we come from, or are becoming?
• 0:20:43 – Unividualism vs Vedanta
• 0:24:00 – Self-negating Eastern spirituality
• 0:26:50 – God and the Unividual
• 0:31:40 – Communion with God and the Supersoul
• 0:39:53 – Homeorhesis as the driver of emergence
• 0:49:42 – Why not a dark Supersoul?
• 0:55:34 – Pastivity
• 0:59:33 – Is Pastivity subjective or objective?
• 1:06:20 – Unividualism vs foundational consciousness
• 1:09:27 – Hegel’s being is not being
• 1:14:14 – Death and reincarnation
• 1:20:17 – Reintegrating the psyche in reincarnation
• 1:25:25 – Telos and homeorhesis
• 1:30:24 – Humanity’s current situation
• 1:36:54 – Speed round

Speira is a private, conscious community of leaders, founders, thinkers and mystics committed to expanding consciousness and exercising meaningful agency in the world.

Our world is in desperate need of credible, optimistic, post-materialist worldviews. Ones that transcend and include materialism, honouring all that the scientific revolution has given us, while recognising that it has been necessary but not sufficient for what comes next.

Speira is at the forefront of this discovery process. If you’re interested in joining Speira, you can learn more here.