Soul Story

While checking the publication details of Tim's hugely significant new book, I find that I am writing this review on its exact publication date - a nice synchronicity. His starting point is what he calls a soul crisis brought about by the demise of outdated religious ideas and the rise of a hard-headed science 'which has left us adrift in a meaningless universe.' Hence his proposal for evolutionary and emergent spirituality that creates a genuinely fresh understanding of life by reconciling scientific knowledge with spiritual wisdom - going beyond both religious and scientific dogmatism. In order to articulate this, he invents a number of new terms, of which more anon, but also sets the book out in an unconventional minimalist format without punctuation and capital letters in the interest of conciseness. He provides a useful glossary defining his new terms at the end.

The overall evolutionary narrative in the 'timestream' can be seen as 'the journey [of self-realisation] from unconscious oneness through conscious individuality to conscious oneness' (p. 142), a similar structure to the thinking of Owen Barfield with his original participation, individuation and final participation - as an overall narrative, this makes a great deal of sense to me. From timestreams emerge lifestreams with individual somastreams and finally soulstreams. Each new level transcends and includes the previous one, but they exist alongside each other. Time is understood not so much as passing as accumulating, building ourselves up as we go. If the future is open, however, the past, like inertia and gravity, exerts a backwards or downwards pull - as we can all experience. He calls this 'pastivity'. At the same time as individuation, we have a corresponding process of what Tim calls 'unividuation' combining to form a greater timestream on a more emergent level of evolution.

Within this picture, body and soul are seen as emergently related, the former associated with sensation and the latter with imagination. Beyond is the spirit as formless presence witnessing both. We are at the same time individuals and one in spirit, moving towards self-realisation and the expression of love and wisdom. Awakening is spirit becoming conscious of itself as spirit, what Thomas Troward calls the great realisation of the relationship between individual and universal. A key insight is the evolution itself has evolved. Tim sees chance predominating in the early stages of evolution, and a gradual emergence of choice and consciousness with complexification. These levels of emergence exist alongside each other and we are shaped not only by physical causality and biological necessity, but also by what he calls magical narrativity and divine transivity - these last two terms refer to the way in which conceptual narratives shape the way our lives unfold, and how the power of transcendent spirit shapes are life stories in benign ways.

Tim's understanding of immortality and God is that these have also evolved with our imaginative capacities. He cites earlier pictures of the afterlife and how these have gradually been refined; a corresponding process applies to our understanding of God, as Sir James Frazer and Grant Allen were pointing out at the end of the 19th century, even if the direction of their thought was towards atheism. While the lifestream is necessarily temporary, the soulstream is postulated as permanent - the word itself means lasting through. Hence his picture of reincarnation and the 'imagnos' of the afterlife as a shared collective dream or dreams. If death enables us to remember who we are, then incarnation is postulated as a forgetting or fall/descent, as in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. As the NDE suggests, death provides us with an opportunity for a deeper review and evaluation of our lives within an evolutionary context. While in incarnation, we have to work with the body and its genetic heritage as well as our cultural situation.

We also know from NDEs and mystical experience more generally that people become what Tim calls love-light and that this is an intensely real experience of communion, which experiencers try to apply when they return, in other words bringing heaven to earth. This picture means that even what we understand as transcendent is in fact emergent, which has made me rethink my previous understanding of the relationship between transcendence and immanence (Whitehead's Process and Reality is a key text with this his ideas of the primordial and consequent natures of the Divine). Traditionally, transcendence is primordial, existence is a manifestation and unfolds a gradual process of immanently coming to realise the divine within. This view, however, gives rise to the classic problem of evil or theodicy where an all-powerful and all knowing God seemingly permits evil and suffering. Like some Gnostics, Tim postulates that the divine is essentially goodness but is not all-powerful, guiding rather than coercing, but doing its best in the circumstances. An encouraging thought is that our outrage at terrorist barbarities is an indication of evolutionary advance as such things were taking for granted hundreds of years ago. In that sense, such acts represent a regression that will gradually be replaced.

This brings Tim to a consideration of the complementary importance of love and wisdom, which he hyphenates into love-wisdom. This helps us live with paradox and balance individual needs with universal oneness, autonomy with connectedness, as we become more conscious more often. He proposes a new discipline of 'soulology' to assist with the process of social transmutation and spiritual awakening. Summarising the overall process, Tim suggests that 'individually and collectively we are evolving from ignorance to wisdom, from biological need to universal empathy, from egoism and tribalism to compassionate communion.' (p. 170) I find this an inspiring vision in which we can all play our part by expressing our individual genius in fulfilling ourselves and contributing to the good of the whole. He urges us to take the risk of really living our lives, deciding to make the most of being the person we are right now, remembering that 'life is good, death is safe, and what really matters is love.' (p. 108) This is a book of true philosophy - meaning the love of wisdom - and deserves the widest possible readership.