Episode 5 - Transcendence
SUMMARY
Humans find great meaning in transcending our physical and mental limitations and tapping into enhanced states of consciousness. When we do so we are expressing an impulse that has been inherent in the evolutionary process from the big bang onwards. From cosmological, to biological, to cultural evolution, the evolutionary process has continually transcended its limitations, breaking free from the determinism of blind laws and mechanisms. But what does that have to do with consciousness?
references
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia - Samuel Johnson
Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Sri Chinmoy’s Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race
Lila - Robert Pirsig
transcript
RC: Welcome to Conscious Evolution
An Antidote to Meaninglessness
A podcast by Robert Cobbold
In June 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức sat down on a cushion at a busy intersection of a road in Saigon, and, adopting the lotus position, began to meditate.
Two other monks removed a 5 gallon can of petrol from the boot of a car nearby and doused him from head to foot. By this time a crowd had gathered, forming a circle with Thích Quảng Đức in the middle. Many of them, like him, had been protesting against the persecution of Buddhists by the Catholic minority government.
Thích Quảng Đức rotated a string of wooden prayer beads, said a short invocation, and lit a match. The flames quickly engulfed him, and the entire crowd watched on as he burned to death. Amidst the cries and sobs and gasps of horror, Thích Quảng Đức didn’t move a muscle, didn’t utter a sound.
How is this possible?
So far in this series we’ve been taking a look at all those things that humans find meaningful, and after consulting some of the best psychology research available, we settled on three pillars of a meaningful life. Cooperation, creativity and transcendence.
Then the question became: why these three things? What do they have to do with the evolutionary journey that life has been on? And can they tell us anything about where we must go next?
In the first episode we began telling the story of Samuel Johnson’s character Prince Rasselas, who lived in a Paradise called the Happy Valley along with the other princes and princesses of Abysinnia.
SAMUEL JOHNSON: They wandered in gardens of fragrance and slept in the fortresses of security. Every art was practised to make them pleased with their own condition.
RC: They enjoyed the finest foods and wines, the most skillful musicians and poets and the most beautiful dancers, and so few of them ever considered the prospect of leaving the Happy Valley.
All that is, except Prince Rasselas.
RASSELAS: I can discover in me no power of perception which is not Glutted with proper pleasure yet I do not feel myself delighted.
RC: There is a lot we can learn from Rasselas. It is one of the great ironies of Western civilisation that our generation has better material living conditions and more diverse forms of entertainment at our fingertips that at any time in history, and yet so many people are unhappy.
Recent statistics suggest that roughly 1 in 4 people in the UK will experience a mental health problem in a given year. In the US, suicidal ideation among adults increased to over 4% percent in 2017. That’s over 10 million adults in the U.S. who had serious thoughts of suicide at some point during that year.
Just like Rasselas, we are slowly coming to the conclusion that:
RASSELAS: Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification or he has some desire distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.
RC: What is that desire distinct from sense which the Happy Valley, and Western civilisation, seems so ill-equipped to fulfill?
One answer to this question comes from the famous developmental psychologist Abraham Maslow.
Maslow argued that once we’ve met our security needs like our needs for food, water, shelter and community, a new need kicks in. Maslow called this need, the need to self-actualise: to fulfill our creative potential and to find meaning and purpose.
The need to self-actualise is something of an evolutionary luxury. It’s a need that can only be felt keenly by someone whose basic needs on Maslow’s pyramid have always been met and met comfortably, but who are living in a culture whose values and goals don’t speak to our need for meaning and purpose.
That’s why Rasselas, and so many Western people today are unhappy. Our culture is experiencing a crisis of meaning.
Of course, being a fictional 18th century prince, Rasselas wasn’t aware of Maslow’s pyramid, and so in order to try and discover what that need might be, he left the Happy Valley and set out on a pilgrimage along with his tutor Imlac.
RASSELAS: To judge with mine own eyes of the various conditions of men, and then to make deliberately my choice of life.
RC: Rasselas and Imlac travel far and wide, they meet revellers, philosophers, rich men and poor, Stoics, and hermits. They confront grief, jealousy, consider marriage as opposed to celibacy, befriend a delusional astronomer, and negotiate a kidnapping. But in all their diverse experiences and encounters they fail to answer that one simple question: given the luxury of choice, how should one live in order to be happy?
In the final chapter, titled, “The Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded”, they decide to return to Abyssinia, frustrated.
As well as being a pointed parable for the shortcomings of Western civilisation, the story bears a striking resemblance to the life of the Buddha.
Both Princes begin life in Garden of Eden parallels where all sensual desires are met, and both received a privileged education. Yet both come to the same conclusion that there’s something more to life.
They begin to withdraw themselves from material pleasures and immerse themselves in ‘silent meditation.’ Both leave their sanctuaries at the same age of twenty-nine with the goal of surveying life and finding happiness.
It is at this point, however, that their paths take different directions. For while Rasselas began a life of purely rational intellectual inquiry, The Buddha begins a life of spiritual inquiry and eventually find what he is looking for in Transcendence.
To transcend, according to my dictionary, is to go beyond the range or limits of something, and the adjective transcendent is defined as “existing apart from and not limited by, the physical universe.”
Transcendence then, involves overcoming our limitations, particularly those imposed upon us by the physical world.
People find great meaning, for example, in exploring the far reaches of the earth, climbing mountains and deep sea diving, where we transcend physical boundaries, in space travel where humanity transcends the limitations of gravity to reach out into the stars, or strenuous feats such as weightlifting, sprinting, and marathons where we transcend the limitations of human strength, speed, and endurance.
But out of all these physical achievements there is one race in particular which makes the link to transcendence explicit, pushing the limits of human endurance further than any other.
NEWSREADER: It’s the Sri Chinmoy 3,100 mile race, around this half mile block in the heart of Queens, where for more than 50 days Christchurch’s Harita Davies has been pounding the pavement 24/7 in a test of mental physical and spiritual strength.
HARITA DAVIES: A lot of tears and smiles and hard work, you’ve made it to the finishing line, so it’s an incredibly fulfilling feeling. The main thing you have to do is really live in the moment. So, not think about the whole distance because that’s way too overwhelming.
RC: 3,100 miles, to put in in context, is 200 miles longer than the distance from the East to the West coast of America. As the crow flies it’s further than the distance from London to Saudi Arabia. Except you don’t get any of the nice scenery. You get the same city block in Queens New York, again and again and again. And what’s more, you have to run the distance in 52 days. Which means that you have to run an average of 60 miles a day. That’s two marathons, and then 7 miles on top of that, every day, for 52 days on about 5 hours sleep a night.
What kind of person would put themselves through such an ordeal?
Most of the participants are devotees of the late Indian spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy, who founded the race in 1996 to challenge runners to "transcend their own previous capacity", "gain spiritual insights" and "overcome the entire world's pre-conceived notions of possibility". Mission accomplished I would say!
Roughly 10-15 participants complete the race every year, and of those that do many come back year after year. One woman, Suprabha Beckjord from the US, completed the race 13 years in row, finally retiring in 2009 at the age of 53. Here she is explaining Sri Chinmoy’s teachings about self-transcendence.
SUPRABHA BECKJORD: Sri Chinmoy has written many many beautiful things about self-transcendence. He wrote, self-transcendence is man’s conscious awareness of perfection. When you put self-transcendence into action it’s really going beyond what we feel our capacities are. Today I run one mile, and tomorrow I run two miles, when I accomplish two miles, I get a lot of satisfaction from that.
RACE ORGANISER: Our races are all called the self-transcendence race because, say today you do sixty miles. Well the next day that’s your starting point. Okay, then the next day that’s your… and it goes on and on and on.
SUPRABHA BECKJORD: That’s the essence of self-transcendence, it’s just going beyond what we previously have done.
RC: The challenge is so monumental that many of the runners say it’s not simply a question of transcending your physical limitations. You actually have to transcend your mental limitations, using meditative techniques to “go over the mind”, as four time race participant Pushkar Müllauer describes it:
PUSHKAR MÜLLAUER: The mind starts to doubt why I’m doing this, and it’s so painful and so forth. So my job is actually to stay happy and go over the mind. The meditation is, like, absolutely essential for me to be able to running this race. It’s like, for me it’s actually a long meditation I try to go into my spiritual heart and be there, or go just over the mind and kind of enjoy it. And don’t go too much into the physical consciousness.
RC: The race is so gruelling that it’s necessary to maintain these meditative states for long periods in order to stop your mind from getting on top of you. Many runners describe a point in the race where they “transcend” into altered blissful states.
PUSHKAR MÜLLAUER: It was incredibly beautiful, it started a little bit before, like a few laps before or I don’t know a few hours before and I felt just like I’m in peace. I’m just peace. It’s not just around me it’s also within me. And I finished and it was just like the whole life is somewhow perfect. I’m the most happy person on earth so I did this incredible race I could finish it even with a new personal best, and there’s nothing else you need actually at that point
RC: Despite the monotony of the course, and the physical, mental and emotional pain involved in running it, the transcendent state which Pushkar and other runners describe experiencing is so overwhelmingly beautiful and meaningful that it keeps runners, and the community of support around the race, coming back year after year.
SUPRABHA BECKJORD: You really feel a connection with everyone who’s involved. It is like a family. Like the ultra family. There’s so much caring and love that goes into it, and I think that’s part of the beauty of it. Our marathon team just puts out this tremendous effort and there’s so much love. That’s one of the things that always strikes me, how much love it brings forward.
RC: This isn’t a coincidence. If you listen to people who report experiencing transcendent states at some point in their lives, and according to research it’s a majority of people, they’ll tell you that the overwhelming sensation was a feeling of “oneness”. What’s really being transcended here is duality.
Your sense of a self, separated from the rest of the world, a “skin encapsulated ego” as Alan Watts famously put it, fades away, and in its place you identify with something much larger and more profound.
And this feeling logically precipitates an increased generosity towards others, for if you do not think you are separate from all that exists, then generosity to others is literally generosity towards yourself. And indeed, as writer and journalist Emily Esfahani Smith describes, this effect has even been studied:
EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: These transcendent experiences can change you. One study had students look up at 200-feet-tall eucalyptus trees for one minute. But afterwards they felt less self-centred, and they even behaved more generously when given the chance to help someone.
RC: If transcendent states can act as a catalyst for cooperation, a similar process seems to happen with creativity. Some people report experiencing transcendent states while listening to music or looking at art, and equally artists themselves are often inspired and moved by transcendent experiences.
In the last two episodes we looked at cooperation and creativity and we realized that, while they are human behaviours, they are also extensions of evolutionary trajectories that have been going on since long before humans evolved. Human cooperation, most powerfully expressed in love, is an extension of the evolutionary trajectory towards cooperation over ever greater scales. And human creativity, is an extension of evolution’s tendency towards increased evolvability.
Can we say the same for transcendence? Is transcendence part of some evolutionary trajectory?
If for humans we define transcendence as overcoming our physical and mental limitations and tapping into enhanced states of consciousness, then can we even speak meaningfully about transcendence in the world before humans evolved?
To explore these admittedly difficult questions, I’d like to introduce you to one of my favourite thinkers of all time, Robert Pirsig.
ROBERT PIRSIG: The term quality is the central term of the book and that’s what meant by inquiry into values. We’re trying to find out what quality is. If you assume there is such a thing as quality then you find out what you have to do to your philosophy to adopt this thing called quality, you find your whole philosophy is upended, you have to do what’s called a Copernican revolution. You have to say that quality is the source of subject and objects rather than that subjects and objects are the source of quality, and that I hope is the philosophic turtles back that will gradually gain acceptance.
RC: Robert Pirsig was an astonishing intellect. He only wrote two books but they are without parallel. His first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became one of the bestselling philosophy books of all time and had a profound transformational effect on the thousands and indeed millions of young Western minds who read it, mine included.
In the book, Pirsig describes a time in his life when he was working as a creative writing professor at Montana State University, when he began to become obsessed by trying to define Quality.
He goes on a long intellectual journey into the matter and ends up systematically deconstructing Western metaphysics, dismantling the assumption that the world is divided up into subjects and objects and deriving the tenets of Eastern philosophy from scratch. It’s an unbelievable intellectual feat, and a good story thrown into the bargain. If I was marooned on a desert island and could only keep one book – that would be the book I’d keep.
But it’s in his second, less popular book Lila, that he really lays out his entire system of quality, and starts to relate quality to the theory of evolution. It’s a bit tricky jumping into his argument halfway through, because he builds up his concepts and terminology very gradually throughout the book, but if you are familiar with Eastern philosophy at all then just substitute Dynamic quality for Tao because it’s the exact same concept. Pirsig refers to himself throughout the book as Phaedrus:
ROBERT PIRSIG: Phaedrus saw instantly that those seemingly trivial, unimportant, 'spur of the moment' decisions that directed the progress of evolution are, in fact, Dynamic Quality itself. Dynamic Quality, the source of all things, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, always appears as 'spur of the moment.' Where else could it appear?
When this prejudice against 'spur of the moment' Dynamic Quality is removed new worlds of reality open up. Naturally there is no mechanism toward which life is heading. Mechanisms are the enemy of life. The more static and unyielding the mechanisms are, the more life works to evade them or overcome them.
RC: When Pirsig writes evade or overcome, read: transcend. Life works to transcend static deterministic mechanisms.
ROBERT PIRSIG: The law of gravity, for example, is perhaps the most ruthlessly static pattern of order in the universe. So, correspondingly, there is no single living thing that does not thumb its nose at that law day in and day out. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. Thus, while the simple protozoa just barely get around on their cilia, earthworms manage to control their distance and direction, birds fly into the sky, and man goes all the way to the moon.
RC: Can you see how this ties back into our earlier discussion about the connection between human transcendence and transcendence in the world prior to humans?
The law of gravity is a physical law which limits human freedom. I am not free to float off into the sky whenever I want, sadly. But using technology and cultural evolution humans have invented aircraft and spacecraft which allow us to transcend the limitations imposed upon us by the physical law of gravity.
But the invention of the aircraft is just the latest example of a long line of evolutionary innovations which have allowed life to evade capture by the law of gravity, to not be determined by it.
For example the behaviour of a rock when placed at the top of a steep slope is 100% predictable. If you know the size and shape of the rock, the inclination of the slope, the friction of the surface etc. then you can work out exactly where it’s going to end up. Its movement, its behaviour, is totally determined by the law of gravity and other physical laws.
But with the emergence of life comes a degree of freedom from that law. If you place a hedgehog at the top of the slope instead of a rock, you can no longer predict exactly where it’s going to end up. Sure, the hedgehog might roll downhill, but it might also catch sight of a nice looking female hedgehog and decide to bimble uphill – the hedgehog is still under the influence of gravity, but its behaviour is not determined by it.
ROBERT PIRSIG: A similar analysis could be made with other physical laws such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems 'run down' like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep 'running up' faster and faster.
It seemed to Phaedrus that if one gathered together enough of these deliberate violations of the laws of the universe and formed a generalization from them, a quite different theory of evolution could be inferred. If life is to be explained on the basis of physical laws, then the overwhelming evidence that life deliberately works around these laws cannot be ignored. The reason atoms become chemistry professors has got to be that something in nature does not like laws of chemical equilibrium or the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics or any other law that restricts the molecules' freedom. They only go along with laws of any kind because they have to, preferring an existence that does not follow any laws whatsoever.
This would explain why patterns of life do not change solely in accord with causative 'mechanisms' or 'programs' or blind operations of physical laws. They do not just change valuelessly. They change in ways that evade, override and circumvent these laws. The patterns of life are constantly evolving in response to something 'better' than that which these laws have to offer.
RC: This is the elan vital of Henri Bergson, which we discussed at the beginning of the last episode and it’s what Steve McIntosh was talking about when he said that freedom is a direction of evolution.
The physical world prior to life appears to be entirely determined by physical laws, but with the emergence of life comes a degree of freedom from those laws. Even the most simple organisms on the planet, single celled organisms, exhibit a degree of agency that no computer can possibly predict. And as life evolves and gets more complex and more conscious those degrees of freedom increase.
It’s worth pointing out that these kinds of claims are not uncontroversial, as Pirsig himself is only too aware.
ROBERT PIRSIG: This would at first seem to contradict the one thing that evolutionists insist upon most: that life is not responding to anything but the 'survival of the fittest' process of natural selection. But 'survival of the fittest' is one of those catch-phrases like 'mutants' or 'misfits' that sounds best when you don't ask precisely what it means. Fittest for what? Fittest for survival? That reduces to 'survival of the survivors,' which doesn't say anything. 'Survival of the fittest' is meaningful only when 'fittest' is equated with 'best,' which is to say, 'Quality.' And the Darwinians don't mean just any old quality, they mean undefined Quality! As the Darwinists makes clear, they are absolutely certain there is no way to define what that 'fittest' is.
Good! The 'undefined fittest" they are defending is identical to Dynamic Quality. Natural selection is Dynamic Quality at work. There is no quarrel whatsoever between the Metaphysics of Quality and the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. Neither is there a quarrel between the Metaphysics of Quality and the 'teleological' theories which insist that life has some purpose.
RC: When I read that for the first time, a huge piece of the puzzle slotted into place. I can remember sitting in the park just devouring page after page, my heart racing with excitement. There’s so much there to unpack, and to do so properly I’d have to quote half the book, so rather than dissect what Pirsig is saying and I’m just going to tell you to go and read it for yourself.
For now, I hope I’ve done enough to convince you that when humans find meaning in transcending our limitations we are expressing an impulse that has been inherent in the evolutionary process from the big bang onwards.
From the physiosphere to the biosphere to the noosphere, the realm of human cultural evolution, each level has its own set of laws, and these laws set the stage for the emergence of the next level, and yet at the same time each new level transcends the laws of the level below it in important ways.
This doesn’t mean that the biosphere violates the laws of physics. On the contrary the biosphere depends upon the laws of physics, is nested within them. And indeed the noosphere, the evolution of human culture, depends on a healthy biosphere – something we seem to be forgetting.
The point I’m making is that biological life is not absolutely determined by physical laws. Nor is cultural evolution absolutely determined by biological laws.
To give an example, the behaviour of animals is directed by the biological imperative of survival and reproduction. All, or almost all, of animal behaviour can be explained in light of that one simple law.
Humans are also under the influence of the biological law of survival and reproduction, but because we have cultural evolution, our behaviour is not determined by it in the same way that other animals are: we use contraceptives, swear vows of celibacy, and even occasionally sacrifice our lives for our beliefs even though none of these behaviours are going to help our genes survive or reproduce. In fact these behaviours directly contravene the biological imperative to survive and reproduce. They transcend them.
However, these behaviours do help the survival and reproduction of certain forms of culture. Certain memes. Catholic priests who swear vows of celibacy have much more time to devote to spreading the meme of Catholicism. The Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire in Saigon in 1963 drew attention to the persecution of Buddhists in Vietnam and in doing so helped promote the survival of the meme of Buddhism, which, to link it all back, is a striking example of the human ability to transcend physical pain through meditative techniques.
When you think about it, it’s almost as if cultural memes use us as vectors for their own transmission, sometimes in ways which are actively against our biological interests.
Equally, at a lower level we are saddled with all sorts of biological urges and instincts which no longer serve us, like the example we gave in the first episode about our maladaptive drive to eat sugar.
But through increasing knowledge of nutrition, and increasing self-awareness, that is to say through the evolution of our consciousness and culture, we can gradually free ourselves from our biological programming, and train ourselves to resist the impulse to stuff our faces with chocolate. And the more conscious we are, the more able we are to exert our willpower, the more able we are to override our biological programming with a conscious decision.
This is what Abraham Maslow was talking about when he wrote that self-actualising individuals – that is, those people who have moved further up the hierarchy of needs, have more free will and are less determined than average people are.
One more example, this time from evolutionary philosopher John Stewart:
JOHN STEWART: Human emotions such as anger, and jealousy and love (all forms of human emotion) at a lower evolutionary level, at a lower level of the evolution of consciousness those emotions have us. We don't have them. In other words, we're bound by those emotions, we can't stand outside them, they consume us, we're absorbed in them. It's then possible to discern a level beyond that where those emotions become an object of consciousness. We're no longer embedded in them, we're no longer bound by them. We can stand outside them and so on. So that enables us not to be automatically controlled by emotions but instead to bring consciousness to bear. We can then therefore exercise choice over how we act. We can act in ways for example that might be more appropriate than the blind acting on, for example, anger. So we might be able to act in a wiser way to a situation that resolves it without the automatic behavior that generally follows from anger.
RC: Characteristic of anger is a loss of self-control. When we are consumed by anger, we aren’t as free to choose and direct our behavior as we are when we are calm. We lose a certain amount of sovereignty.
But as we become more conscious, more aware of ourselves, it’s also possible to transcend the limitations that anger places on our behavior, so that rather than being consumed by anger and losing our self-control, anger becomes an object of our awareness, allowing us to choose how we respond to that emotion.
John Stewart describes how as our consciousness evolves, more and more of our subject become an object of consciousness. Becomes something that we’re able to witness. That’s one way to think about spiritual growth. Many spiritual traditions train you to focus on your thoughts and feelings as if they were an object of consciousness, and by doing so your sense of self gradually recedes further and further away and you are able to spectate more and more of your emotions and thoughts, to stand outside them, rather than be consumed by them.
Some people are better than this than others, but through spiritual practice it’s also something that you can train.
JOHN STEWART: If we're conscious of something we can be innovative about it. A classic example is when you're driving a car and you hop in the car and then the next thing you're aware of is when you're at your destination. There's very little you've been conscious of in terms of driving the car while you're going to your destination. However, if somewhere along the journey a car comes out of left field, something unexpected happens, the possibility of an accident, then consciousness kicks in and that enables you to adapt your automatic driving patterns. It enables you to be creative and innovative in that situation. So that's the essence of consciousness as an information processing phenomenon. The essence of consciousness and its adaptive advantage is this ability to be innovative, to not just be stuck in automatic behavior.
RC: What a fascinating way to think about consciousness. Consciousness is an emergent property with the adaptive advantage that it allows us to be more innovative, more creative about how we respond in a given situation. Rather than just responding with an automatic behavior programmed by our evolutionary past, we can come up with novel solutions.
As complexity researcher Kelly Smith, who we heard from in the previous episode, says:
KELLY SMITH: A conscious being is much more capable of generating complex novelty than an unconscious being.
RC: On that basis, I’d like to make an evolutionary case for spiritual practice.
Whether or not you believe in God, spiritual practice, and the moments of transcendence that they reliably induce, can make you more conscious, they can make you more aware of your patterns of behaviour, and that in turn frees you up from the automatic behaviour programmed by your evolutionary past. It gives you the opportunity to make conscious choices. And the more conscious you are, the more adaptable you are. And the more adaptable we are as individuals the more likely we are to survive as a species. As psychologist Steven C. Hayes wrote in a recent article, survival of the most adaptable is far truer to the whole of evolutionary data than survival of the fittest.
And not only do transcendent states make us more adaptable, but as Emily Esfahani Smith pointed out, they can also make us more cooperative.
And that is the evolutionary function of transcendence. When we become more conscious, as we do in moments of transcendence, we are actively pushing forward the trajectory of evolution on its way towards increasing evolvability and increasing scales of cooperation.
We are becoming free, active, conscious participants in a process that has been going on for 13.8bn years and will continue long after we die.
And so spiritual practice, and moments of transcendence are evolutionary to their core, and that is why people who experience them, report them to be amongst the most meaningful moments of their lives.
Conscious Evolution is a podcast by Robert Cobbold.
Editing was done by Thomas Glasser, and sound design by Mark Pittam.
Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas was read by Max Marcq, and Robert Pirsig was read by Chris Griesemer.
I’d also like to give a special thank you to John Stewart and Kelly Smith for speaking to me, to Robbie MacInnes for his all his guidance in the art of podcasts and to the band Afro Celt Sound System for letting me use their extraordinary music in the soundtrack.
This podcast is entirely a labour of love to help people find meaning in life. Spreading the word about Conscious Evolution certainly gives my life meaning and purpose, but all the same every interview, every hour of editing and every cent on advertising has to be paid for out of my own pocket. So if you drew something valuable from listening to this episode then please consider supporting me on Patreon, even if its for a tiny amount. To support the podcast and to listen to other episodes, go to ConsciousEvolution.co.uk