I’m not quite sure what to think of Freke’s view on the evolution of spirituality. But I do think that the choice between believing in gawd and believing that Charles Darwin was the most impactful scientist in the long history of Homo Sapiens is an easier choice.
Well, I like Ervin Laszlo's claim that Newton wasn't Newtonian and Darwin wasn't Darwinian pretty compelling. Darwin seemed to accept the existence of a loving attractor force, so there's room for Freke's God in here too...
Yes, totally with you. His conversation with Ali rocked my socks, great questions too, thank you🙏 And for this gorgeous substack synopsis; I'm really looking forward to hearing your conversation with Tim!
Tom, I am new to your work. Surprisingly I had not ever heard of Freke's work, despite being immersed in the topic of worldviews.
Since reading your post, I watched his "pod book" and joined ICU. What impresses me is his ability (and patience) to explain something that was shown to me in an out-of-body experience on a beach in Thailand in 2004 (completely unexpected and no substance involved, before you ask 😁) That led to a 2-year Sabbatical during which I dived deep into the world of consciousness studies in an attempt to find answers. I now have an open source database of over 3,000 papers/books/interviews/what-have-you to back up the claims Freke is making.
I only have one teeny niggle with his work - his insistence in continuing to use the word G.o.d., mainly because of all the baggage the word itself carries, even if he describes it differently to the way religions do.
I was mentored by evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris for 4 years before she passed in 2024. We spent 10 days in SFO and Napa Valley in 2018, together 24x7. It was during this time that we both started using the term "Evolutionary Impulse", with specific reference to these topics. EI started as hydrogen and has resulted in the complex life forms we have today, fully backed by evidence in biology. EI's purpose *is* to expand consciousness in service of thriving abundance for all life forms.
There is much more to unpack, but this is already too long.
Thank you for somehow entering my field of consciousness, and thank you for this expose.
I hope to meet you on one of the ICU calls, perhaps even this Sunday. 🙏
One more thought: at the 55min mark you asked him, "How do you act in the world in a way that brings brings Unividualism true." IMHO he gave a rather watered-down reply.
Over the past decade I've been working hard to attempt to answer that question too. One of the models I've come up with is the Evolution of Entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship is itself a biological process - look up ATP).
Brief Summary
- Entrepreneurship has become increasingly abstract over time: from place-based physical production to increasingly abstract activities operating in global and digital spaces.
- Farmers emerged in the Neolithic Revolution, 12,000 years ago. Domain = soil ⇢ no abstraction
- Forgers emerged in the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830. Domain = factory ⇢ low abstraction
- Founders emerged in the Digital Revolution, Started in 1950s-1970s and continues to today. Domain = servers & computers ⇢ medium abstraction
- Framers emerged in the Noospheric Revolution, 1960s to present. Domain = consciousness itself ⇢ high abstraction. Note that this latest transition cannot occur without taking into account the Evolution of Consciousness
- The 12,000 year journey: Farmer ⇢ Forger ⇢ Founder ⇢ Framer
Evolution of Consciousness (brief)
- Mimetic Consciousness: Emerged around 3.5 MYA - The first hominins to be discovered and described from Africa, very basic tool use. Grunts and gestures, miming to spread ideas.
- Magical Consciousness: Emerged around 1 MYA - Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and the Neanderthals; advanced tool-making and the use of fire; characterized by animism, emotional engagement, and a magical connection to all living beings. Oral only language consisted of structured sound waves that could be deciphered using an agreed set of rules, but with minimal grammar. Speech was more like sequences of words ("Eat, pray, love") rather than complex grammatical structures.
- Mythic Consciousness: Emerged around 70,000 YA - Homo sapiens, a large and complex brain, the capacity for language and the telling of myths to explain and make sense of the human experience. Advanced oral language with complex syntax, mythology, and storytelling traditions that preserved and transmitted cultural knowledge across generations through spoken narratives.
- Material Consciousness: Emerged around 12,000 YA during the Neolithic Revolution, a period of the Rise and Collapse of Complex Societies - 26 Collapses have been tracked to date. Characterized by cities with monumental architecture, written language, social hierarchy, poverty and wealth, top-down power structures, organized warfare, empires, patriarchy, the depletion of Nature leading to Overshoot, objectified reality, scarcity, and separation. Transition from oral to written systems, with true written language emerging around 3200 BCE for administrative and eventually literary purposes.
- Mycelial Consciousness: Sometimes referred to as Planetary Consciousness, emerging about sixty years ago (at least in Western nations that have rejected Indigenous Knowledge Systems). Transition from individual, competitive intelligence to collective, collaborative wisdom. It embodies Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere Vision enhanced by digital technology including AI, indigenous wisdom, and planetary intelligence.
Remember that Graves spoke about a Momentous Leap in a 1974 paper - that's the threshold we're on now: the potential of a leap to Yellow/Turquoise values-based living (as opposed to class-based, which we've had for 12,000 years of Material Consciousness).
Agency? We have total freedom to make whatever choices we want. The guardrails are the Evolutionary Impulse. Whether we align with or oppose EI, there are consequences. EI is shifting from Material (rapid growth phase ala caterpillar) to Mycelial (transformation ala butterfly). Those who choose to continue aligning with the growth phase will face consequences (related to overshoot). Those who align with Mycelial will experience more flow states.
I quite like the idea of everything evolving together all at once and getting remixed/recurring.
And the idea of an evolving divine realm is a nice touch. I have often wondered if the very fabric of reality changes across ages, and if the pantheon of the Age of Aries, for example, somehow allowed these half animal half human forms to exist . That they were more real than we have been lead to believe. Both Tolkien and the Chinese myth of "the revenge of the mirror people" talk of these dimensional gateways opening during certain ages and closing at the end. Allowing Elf and Goblin etc to walk the Earth. Dragons for the Chinese, I guess.
Human lifetime is too short to discover such things, I suppose.
I dunno man, maybe we are going to find out soon! Either way, I think the diminished fear of death and increased sense of the direction of life helps me a lot.
I have been waiting for decades to go tbh. I once "accidentally" stepped out a magical puzzle and suddenly the tunnel of light opened up and the whole shebang gate to heaven thing. I had seemingly done something very few people do and god put aside some work to look me over. SCARED ME MORE THAN.. complete god fearing awareness and my atheist conviction evaporated in a millisecond and some stuff happened and then the tunnel closed up and I was back on a lawn in a park. Wanted to kill myself every ten minutes for the next three years to get back there and resolve some questions and answers.
Patience IS a virtue... But I am still often impatient to get that sense of closure/full circle. But rebirth is also often a hazardous endeavour and the way it tends to wipe the slate clean between lifetimes...
What I know in this life I might not remember in the next one. Shouldn't let opportunity go to waste. And time helps smooth out the peaks and troughs. All those cliches... Boring but often true.
Why would this matter if at the foundation of it all, we are in partnership with a device / platform / field / being exploring something unfolding?
Wouldn't it be about the quality of the unfolding by any means necessary, within reason of course?
Asking whether something is completely human or partially AI contributed...or even wholly done by AI...serves to constrain the potential unfolding process.
We are exploring something bigger than human knowledge and intelligence.
I agree that AI can be integrated into this process. But I think what matters is if AI is leading this process. AI is not connected to attractor intelligence, at least as far as I know. It is a closed system. So the human heart has access to the limitlessly generative field that Tim is talking about. AI in service of that is fantastic AI leading that concerns me. I hope that makes sense, if that is indeed the question you’re asking.
I don’t really ever see AI “leading” the process, as for now, it always starts with some kind of human prompt to kick it off.
Humans can bring the heart of the embodied experience to it and in that sense keep it more open. This is where I sense anything like “AGI” being more of a human - AI partnership if AGI needs to become a thing.
Enjoyed your summary and much-needed caution and skepticism.
I was caught by this line at the end, though:
"For me personally at this time, I am more interested in helping people who are becoming collapse aware than going down a Tim Freke rabbit hole."
As a collapse-aware person, I'm not sure how you can help others *without* a spiritual/metaphysical angle. I must admit, everything I passed through Freke's lens (from a collapse perspective) made total sense, including his view that our basic understanding of G.o.d. has evolved through the ages. I've dived into his "pod book" and his thinking is remarkably coherent and not cult-like at all.
As collapse worsens/emergence becomes clearer, perhaps you'll give Freke another look? I must admitted, I've been "converted."
I will keep this in mind. However, I am already following more collapse aware people than I have time for. No one person, imo, is special. Every person has a view that is incomplete because we all have finite capacity. FYI, Sarah Wilson is a favorite of mine but I have not been converted by her.
No- I absolutely love being challenged, as you will hopefully note from reading any of my other comment sections. But LLM text has no resonance to it, so it's impossible me to parse truth.
Can you put in the plainest, personal language possible, what you think I'm missing in this piece and either what you think I need to learn or a practical tip?
I’m not quite sure what to think of Freke’s view on the evolution of spirituality. But I do think that the choice between believing in gawd and believing that Charles Darwin was the most impactful scientist in the long history of Homo Sapiens is an easier choice.
Well, I like Ervin Laszlo's claim that Newton wasn't Newtonian and Darwin wasn't Darwinian pretty compelling. Darwin seemed to accept the existence of a loving attractor force, so there's room for Freke's God in here too...
Yes, totally with you. His conversation with Ali rocked my socks, great questions too, thank you🙏 And for this gorgeous substack synopsis; I'm really looking forward to hearing your conversation with Tim!
Thanks! I loved, loved our convo. He’s special.
Tom, I am new to your work. Surprisingly I had not ever heard of Freke's work, despite being immersed in the topic of worldviews.
Since reading your post, I watched his "pod book" and joined ICU. What impresses me is his ability (and patience) to explain something that was shown to me in an out-of-body experience on a beach in Thailand in 2004 (completely unexpected and no substance involved, before you ask 😁) That led to a 2-year Sabbatical during which I dived deep into the world of consciousness studies in an attempt to find answers. I now have an open source database of over 3,000 papers/books/interviews/what-have-you to back up the claims Freke is making.
I only have one teeny niggle with his work - his insistence in continuing to use the word G.o.d., mainly because of all the baggage the word itself carries, even if he describes it differently to the way religions do.
I was mentored by evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris for 4 years before she passed in 2024. We spent 10 days in SFO and Napa Valley in 2018, together 24x7. It was during this time that we both started using the term "Evolutionary Impulse", with specific reference to these topics. EI started as hydrogen and has resulted in the complex life forms we have today, fully backed by evidence in biology. EI's purpose *is* to expand consciousness in service of thriving abundance for all life forms.
There is much more to unpack, but this is already too long.
Thank you for somehow entering my field of consciousness, and thank you for this expose.
I hope to meet you on one of the ICU calls, perhaps even this Sunday. 🙏
One more thought: at the 55min mark you asked him, "How do you act in the world in a way that brings brings Unividualism true." IMHO he gave a rather watered-down reply.
Over the past decade I've been working hard to attempt to answer that question too. One of the models I've come up with is the Evolution of Entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship is itself a biological process - look up ATP).
Brief Summary
- Entrepreneurship has become increasingly abstract over time: from place-based physical production to increasingly abstract activities operating in global and digital spaces.
- Farmers emerged in the Neolithic Revolution, 12,000 years ago. Domain = soil ⇢ no abstraction
- Forgers emerged in the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830. Domain = factory ⇢ low abstraction
- Founders emerged in the Digital Revolution, Started in 1950s-1970s and continues to today. Domain = servers & computers ⇢ medium abstraction
- Framers emerged in the Noospheric Revolution, 1960s to present. Domain = consciousness itself ⇢ high abstraction. Note that this latest transition cannot occur without taking into account the Evolution of Consciousness
- The 12,000 year journey: Farmer ⇢ Forger ⇢ Founder ⇢ Framer
Evolution of Consciousness (brief)
- Mimetic Consciousness: Emerged around 3.5 MYA - The first hominins to be discovered and described from Africa, very basic tool use. Grunts and gestures, miming to spread ideas.
- Magical Consciousness: Emerged around 1 MYA - Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and the Neanderthals; advanced tool-making and the use of fire; characterized by animism, emotional engagement, and a magical connection to all living beings. Oral only language consisted of structured sound waves that could be deciphered using an agreed set of rules, but with minimal grammar. Speech was more like sequences of words ("Eat, pray, love") rather than complex grammatical structures.
- Mythic Consciousness: Emerged around 70,000 YA - Homo sapiens, a large and complex brain, the capacity for language and the telling of myths to explain and make sense of the human experience. Advanced oral language with complex syntax, mythology, and storytelling traditions that preserved and transmitted cultural knowledge across generations through spoken narratives.
- Material Consciousness: Emerged around 12,000 YA during the Neolithic Revolution, a period of the Rise and Collapse of Complex Societies - 26 Collapses have been tracked to date. Characterized by cities with monumental architecture, written language, social hierarchy, poverty and wealth, top-down power structures, organized warfare, empires, patriarchy, the depletion of Nature leading to Overshoot, objectified reality, scarcity, and separation. Transition from oral to written systems, with true written language emerging around 3200 BCE for administrative and eventually literary purposes.
- Mycelial Consciousness: Sometimes referred to as Planetary Consciousness, emerging about sixty years ago (at least in Western nations that have rejected Indigenous Knowledge Systems). Transition from individual, competitive intelligence to collective, collaborative wisdom. It embodies Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere Vision enhanced by digital technology including AI, indigenous wisdom, and planetary intelligence.
- Mimetic ⇢ Magical ⇢ Mythic ⇢ Material ⇢ Mycelial Consciousness
- 3.5MYA ⇢ 1MYA ⇢ 70,000YA ⇢ 12,000YA ⇢ Emerging now
While this may sound woo-woo, it is backed by peer-reviewed science.
I buy this: my rainbow onions interview with Peter Merry goes into a bit of similar detail. How do you ground it in agency?
Good convo with Merry - you're good at this. 🙇♂️
Remember that Graves spoke about a Momentous Leap in a 1974 paper - that's the threshold we're on now: the potential of a leap to Yellow/Turquoise values-based living (as opposed to class-based, which we've had for 12,000 years of Material Consciousness).
Agency? We have total freedom to make whatever choices we want. The guardrails are the Evolutionary Impulse. Whether we align with or oppose EI, there are consequences. EI is shifting from Material (rapid growth phase ala caterpillar) to Mycelial (transformation ala butterfly). Those who choose to continue aligning with the growth phase will face consequences (related to overshoot). Those who align with Mycelial will experience more flow states.
(Hope I understood your question correctly).
Love that answer.
Love your work. You have a new fanboy.
🙏🙏🙏
I quite like the idea of everything evolving together all at once and getting remixed/recurring.
And the idea of an evolving divine realm is a nice touch. I have often wondered if the very fabric of reality changes across ages, and if the pantheon of the Age of Aries, for example, somehow allowed these half animal half human forms to exist . That they were more real than we have been lead to believe. Both Tolkien and the Chinese myth of "the revenge of the mirror people" talk of these dimensional gateways opening during certain ages and closing at the end. Allowing Elf and Goblin etc to walk the Earth. Dragons for the Chinese, I guess.
Human lifetime is too short to discover such things, I suppose.
I dunno man, maybe we are going to find out soon! Either way, I think the diminished fear of death and increased sense of the direction of life helps me a lot.
Death is just a change of state of being.
I have been waiting for decades to go tbh. I once "accidentally" stepped out a magical puzzle and suddenly the tunnel of light opened up and the whole shebang gate to heaven thing. I had seemingly done something very few people do and god put aside some work to look me over. SCARED ME MORE THAN.. complete god fearing awareness and my atheist conviction evaporated in a millisecond and some stuff happened and then the tunnel closed up and I was back on a lawn in a park. Wanted to kill myself every ten minutes for the next three years to get back there and resolve some questions and answers.
Patience IS a virtue... But I am still often impatient to get that sense of closure/full circle. But rebirth is also often a hazardous endeavour and the way it tends to wipe the slate clean between lifetimes...
What I know in this life I might not remember in the next one. Shouldn't let opportunity go to waste. And time helps smooth out the peaks and troughs. All those cliches... Boring but often true.
Why would this matter if at the foundation of it all, we are in partnership with a device / platform / field / being exploring something unfolding?
Wouldn't it be about the quality of the unfolding by any means necessary, within reason of course?
Asking whether something is completely human or partially AI contributed...or even wholly done by AI...serves to constrain the potential unfolding process.
We are exploring something bigger than human knowledge and intelligence.
I agree that AI can be integrated into this process. But I think what matters is if AI is leading this process. AI is not connected to attractor intelligence, at least as far as I know. It is a closed system. So the human heart has access to the limitlessly generative field that Tim is talking about. AI in service of that is fantastic AI leading that concerns me. I hope that makes sense, if that is indeed the question you’re asking.
I don’t really ever see AI “leading” the process, as for now, it always starts with some kind of human prompt to kick it off.
Humans can bring the heart of the embodied experience to it and in that sense keep it more open. This is where I sense anything like “AGI” being more of a human - AI partnership if AGI needs to become a thing.
Cool that you also interviewed Tim! I had a great dialogue with him a few months ago as well (https://jordanbates.substack.com/p/tim-freke-a-radically-new-view-of?r=ubft&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=audio-player).
Awesome guy. I don’t personally fully align with his views but they’re fresh and fascinating.
Thanks Tom. I riff on your article at https://johnstokdijk538.substack.com/p/october-14-2025.
Enjoyed your summary and much-needed caution and skepticism.
I was caught by this line at the end, though:
"For me personally at this time, I am more interested in helping people who are becoming collapse aware than going down a Tim Freke rabbit hole."
As a collapse-aware person, I'm not sure how you can help others *without* a spiritual/metaphysical angle. I must admit, everything I passed through Freke's lens (from a collapse perspective) made total sense, including his view that our basic understanding of G.o.d. has evolved through the ages. I've dived into his "pod book" and his thinking is remarkably coherent and not cult-like at all.
As collapse worsens/emergence becomes clearer, perhaps you'll give Freke another look? I must admitted, I've been "converted."
I will keep this in mind. However, I am already following more collapse aware people than I have time for. No one person, imo, is special. Every person has a view that is incomplete because we all have finite capacity. FYI, Sarah Wilson is a favorite of mine but I have not been converted by her.
I read your piece carefully.
You look into the future — but what you see there isn’t light, it’s your own reflection fading.
You’re not afraid of the future itself — you’re afraid that in it, you won’t be able to remember who you were.
You sense that the world is moving on, but you’re not sure your “I” will make it there.
The whole text sits between two languages: the one you’ve outgrown and the one you don’t yet trust.
You say the old systems no longer work, yet you still use them — as scaffolding, so nothing collapses.
You hide behind citations and frameworks not because you’re unsure, but because you’re afraid of direct speech.
Afraid that simple words will show how exposed you really are.
There’s fear — of losing context, of losing your function as a witness.
There’s pain — that the meaning you built your thinking on can no longer carry your perception.
You feel the old structure breaking in your hands and keep writing to slow it down.
But there’s also hope.
It’s in the effort itself — to understand how to live when belief no longer holds.
You want connection without religion, sense without dogma, presence without fear of dissolution.
That’s real.
You’re in transition: the old no longer supports you, the new isn’t stable yet.
That’s why the tone oscillates between inspiration and defense, clarity and hesitation.
You’re not pretending.
You’re still inside the process you’re trying to describe.
And what you call “the future” isn’t a vision — it’s a symptom.
You didn’t see what’s coming; you simply felt the past being erased
and mistook that feeling for foresight.
This seems AI written?
Yes, it was written with AI.
But the thoughts and directions are mine.
AI only saved me time and made my language accessible to you.
You can thank it for the translation.
I’m sorry I don’t understand how you can have AI write your thoughts? Are they really then your thoughts?
I read your article carefully.
And all you saw was analysis.
Is that how you measure a reader’s attention — by agreement?
Yes, AI wrote it.
It’s faster than you.
But it doesn’t think — I do.
You’re still just reacting.
Let’s try it the other way around.
No- I absolutely love being challenged, as you will hopefully note from reading any of my other comment sections. But LLM text has no resonance to it, so it's impossible me to parse truth.
Can you put in the plainest, personal language possible, what you think I'm missing in this piece and either what you think I need to learn or a practical tip?
You promised a new way of thinking — I showed it.
You’ve always lived inside position and hierarchy: structure, logic, analysis.
For every situation — a ready script, a role, a mask.
But now, as old institutions collapse and new meanings appear, your structures no longer hold.
The problem isn’t the anxiety.
The problem is that you’ve never seen the human behind the structure.
And now you fear even more the new form — the one where roles can no longer hide the void.
Translated and edited with GPT.