Del Mar, CA (October 4, 2018): Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Tim Freke and Richard Cox.

Tim Freke is a pioneering philosopher, bestselling author, acclaimed international speaker and creator and host of The Tim Freke Podcast.

Richard Cox is creator and host of Deep State Consciousness Podcast, as well as co-hosting The Tim Freke Podcast.

During the interview Richard Cox talks about his journey to finding a meaningful existence.

Richard Cox: I recall being a teenager and had logically accepted a materialist paradigm. I’d rejected the Christianity of my early childhood and came to believe we were all a semblance of atoms and that took me into quite a depressive place because it might have been beautiful in some scientific way to see this world of physics around me, but it didn’t lead to a meaningful existence. I remember wrestling with this in my mind and coming to a sense of, a very similar sense of like, one must act as if God exists, essentially, one must act as if there is transcendent meaning, okay? Because we can just assume that, because if we don’t assume that then we’re totally lost, right?

The analogy I had at the time was like, imagine if you were running for a bus and it was imperative that you got on the bus, but you didn’t know if it was still there or not because it was touch and go. Well, you’d have to just go for it as fast as you could, because there’s no point in assuming the bus has gone, you’ve just got to run as fast as you can until you know it isn’t there. And that was my thought about life; we must act as if there is this transcendent meaning, because otherwise we’re stuffed before we begin.

So, that resonates with me. It probably got me through a few years, and I think this is maybe why I don’t totally have this sense of resonance with Jordan Peterson, because for me that broke down at some point and led to a period of depression, because upon looking it seemed like the bus was gone, like there was no transcendent meaning, and ultimately that led me into Advaita Vedanta, the inner looking at the nature of the self and kind of transcendent mystical experience, which gave this direct experience of meaning. Or, to give it perhaps a more relevant example for the Skeptiko podcast would be, people who have near-death experience and come face to face with this all-embracing love light, don’t come back and talk about assuming God, living as if God existed, right? There’s this direct experiential knowing and that’s like a different level, I think, to what Dr. Peterson is talking about there.

The Skeptiko interview with Tim Freke and Richard Cox (audio and transcript excerpts) is available at: http://skeptiko.com/tim-freke-richard-cox-ufos-9-11-climate-and-truth-391/

About Skeptiko

Over the last 10 years Skeptiko has become the number one podcast on the science of human consciousness. With millions of downloads, and tens of thousands of worldwide listeners, Skeptiko's provocative interviews explore the tipping points of science and spirituality. Many of the world's leading researchers and thinkers on consciousness and spirituality have participated in Skeptiko interviews