Podcast: My Three Wishes

In this conversation between two Insight Timer teachers, Hannah Reimann explores how Tom Evans ended up on the app and what three wishes he holds for himself and the world. Tom share his passion for making the esoteric exoteric.

Transcript

Good afternoon,

Tom.

Your good evening,

My good afternoon.

I'm so delighted to be here with Tom Evans today to find out a little bit more about him.

He was one of my first teachers on Insight Timer,

And I learned a lot about the metaphysical world.

And I commented and connected with him as a student.

And he wrote back to me.

And since that time,

We've become friends and colleagues.

And I'm truly honored to be interviewing him today.

So let's just cut to the chase,

Tom.

Why did you start doing this?

Why did you become a metaphysical guide,

If I can call you that?

Well,

Thank you for that.

That's a new moniker for me.

Well,

We're just talking this lifetime,

Aren't we?

Not lifetimes gone past.

But let's talk about this lifetime.

So,

In a nutshell,

I was thrown down the tech route and I was made into a BBC TV engineer,

Got to understand television,

Audio,

And then the internet came about and got to know the internet.

And I've done two successful businesses that I raised from nothing and then sold.

And in my mid 40s,

I was burnt out.

And I thought,

What's life all about?

And someone said,

You look really haggard,

You should learn to meditate.

And I thought,

Well,

Don't be stupid.

I haven't got time to meditate.

I can't make my mind go blank.

But this lady showed me some techniques and I started to meditate.

And weird things started to happen.

So,

I switched my attention from the magic of television,

Which is magical if you think about it,

Getting an image from one side of the globe to the other,

Like we're doing right now,

To the magic of the mind.

And I started to research it all,

Started to write about it.

And the more and more I wrote about it,

The more and more what you call magic would come into the world.

But I started to explain what this so-called magic is about,

I call it now making the esoteric,

Exoteric.

And from pretty much early on,

I started putting meditations for my non-fiction books,

So that when I was talking about something,

I said,

Well,

Let's get into this state so you can actually experience it.

And I didn't think anything about those,

I was just giving them away.

In those days,

You know,

2009,

2010,

What you'd classically do is try and sell a book,

You'd put something up for free,

Get someone's email address,

Try and sell them something,

Upsell them and this sort of stuff.

And then in 2016,

I got approached by Insight Timer,

Who said,

You've got these meditations,

Would you like to come onto our app?

I thought nothing of it,

Uploaded a meditation.

And then within a very,

Very short amount of time,

I morphed from being an author with meditations on the side to being a meditation teacher with books on the sides.

Bear in mind,

I'd never been to a school of meditation.

So,

I guess one reason why was that Insight Timer approached you.

Yeah,

But also the bigger reason is the path was shown to me.

I didn't know I was a meditation teacher.

I didn't appreciate my own voice.

I thought I was a writer with a hard,

Reasonable voice.

I didn't know that people would like the voice.

And also,

We hear our voice through our bones,

In the cheekbones and stuff like that.

So,

I didn't like my voice.

And then the feedback comes in that they like the British accent,

The fact I don't take things too seriously,

The fact there's a sense of humor in meditation,

Which is needed.

And also the fact that that whole thing I did all through my tech career,

I was very good at explaining high tech to people,

And making it simple and accessible.

And I took that same ability to make the complex into the simple into this world.

And people said,

I get it now,

I can understand this now.

So,

I got more and more confident.

My books went from being,

I'd say what were workshop manuals,

Extended workshop manuals,

Into I started writing philosophy.

I started writing about what Tom thought.

And then I started really diving into the more metaphysical aspects of the work and started doing more work in that area.

At the same time,

Deepening and widening my study and my adventure,

And just having a lot of fun with it.

And then the weird and wonderful things that happened to me when I started meditating,

More weird and more wonderful.

Beautiful.

So interesting.

Well,

You know,

My mother was a Korean psychoanalyst.

She was the first Freudian out of Korea.

And the way I was brought up,

We were always talking about childhood.

So,

I would like to actually know what life was like for you as a child?

Well,

I would say that's a great question.

I don't think anyone's ever asked me that on any of the many podcasts I've been on.

Yeah,

I grew up in an Irish Catholic family in a very poor part of Manchester,

North England,

One of seven.

My father was very hardworking.

But Lee left school about 13,

14 years an Irishman.

My mother was very intellectual,

But she had to leave school at 15 and not go into higher education,

Go to work,

Because of the end of the war.

And they say that as children,

Before we even incarnate,

We choose the environment we want to go into,

So we can get the best experience to help us evolve.

So,

I've got that mix of hard work,

But also inquisitiveness and academia.

And I think what drove me was,

We were poor,

And I said,

I want a life which is more abundant than this.

So,

That drove me to find the streets that were painted in gold.

In that time in the UK,

It was London,

And that's where the TV industry was really regrowing.

So,

That's what drove me.

And then from there,

Everything else kind of unfolded.

But when I got into this more creative world,

I'd been equipped with all the technical tools that I needed,

So I could build my own website,

And record my own audiobooks,

And all the stuff that I'm now doing,

I'm doing every single day.

I really needed that as a set of tools to help me then deliver all this material.

But what goes underneath it all is this curiosity to know how do things work.

So,

How does television work,

But also how does the mind work,

And why are we here,

And where are we going,

And that sort of stuff.

And actually,

You get to a certain point in your journey when a non-fiction book doesn't cut it anymore.

And some of the stuff that I was telling you is so wild and fanciful,

It has to be dealt with in fiction.

So,

I've now switched into being a fiction author.

And the stories aren't true,

But we imagine they are true.

It's a great way of understanding why we're here and where we're going.

Yeah.

Did you read science fiction as a boy?

Yeah,

Avidly.

Yeah,

I loved Asimov and Arthur C.

Clarke.

Me too,

Tom.

I was just talking about Asimov's short stories last night when I was at a dinner party with some friends and how prophetic they were.

They were truly mind-blowing about computers,

About everything,

About relationships,

About people.

So,

You read science fiction.

Did you read history as well?

Not so much.

No,

I'm more into… I read a lot of metaphysics more recently,

A little bit when I was younger,

But I didn't really understand it,

But I was drawn to it.

And kind of what I've done with the soul waves work is do that whole sort of thing.

I'm using Asimov and the like as my muses to say,

Well,

Actually,

Today's science fiction is tomorrow's reality,

In the same way that Star Trek had communicators,

And we've got mobile phones and this sort of stuff nowadays.

So,

I've used that as a tradition.

I also broke that into short stories.

I think one of the people that inspired me to do that was Ted Chiang,

Because he wrote Stories of Your Life,

Which got made into the film Arrival,

Which I just love.

And so,

I wrote this big novel,

Soul Waves.

And then after that,

I wrote a set of short stories as companions to it called Soul Waves Insertions.

And that was a lot of fun.

That was my lockdown project.

And I've got a third in the trilogy that I'm kind of working on now.

And I want to mention to everyone that the audiobooks are delightful because of Tom's voice.

So,

I highly recommend the Soul Waves audiobooks.

I became an audible listener much more avidly during the pandemic.

And I loved listening to books.

And I loved listening to your book more recently.

So,

That's just something I'd like to recommend.

But I want to dig a little bit more back there.

So,

You liked sci-fi.

And how about the natural world?

You seem to be a great lover of nature and sustainability.

Were those things that were part of your childhood,

Being alone in nature,

Being outside,

Away from people?

Not really.

I was brought up in tenement streets,

So not much green around at all,

And was desperate to find it.

So,

You know,

It may- That was my next question.

Did you long for that?

Because to me,

Intuitively,

I see you as this nature person,

Even though you're a city guy,

Too.

Originally a city guy,

But I wouldn't go back to a city anymore,

Unless I had to.

But yeah,

And I guess what intrigued me was books like James Lovelock's Gaia.

And also a book that really,

Really inspired me early on before I'd written anything.

I wrote a really terrible draft of soul waves before I wrote anything.

And the book that inspired me was The Phenomenon of Man by Taha Deshadan,

This Jesuit priest.

And he talked about the newest sphere,

And the fact that everything's connected,

Not just from a biosphere connected,

But a kind of spiritual perspective as well,

And how the earth herself is a being.

And we are co-inhabiting the earth with Mother Earth.

Gaia really,

Really inspired me.

The Phenomenon of Man inspired me to write soul waves.

And then 17 other books got in the way.

And then I went to my best friend from school's funeral on my 59th birthday,

And I thought,

Before I'm 60,

I must get this soul waves book out.

So,

I wrote it from the ground back up again.

It's the same sort of narrative,

But the original book,

I wrote it from the perspective of the granddaughter.

And then I wrote the book from the perspective of the grandfather,

This guy called Shen.

And interestingly enough,

Shen,

I named him Shen,

Because in Chinese,

Shen is deep thought.

And one of my heroes is Douglas Adams,

Who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I don't know if that ever made it to the US.

But it's fantastic radio show.

Fantastic radio show became a film and everything.

And I was using that as a sort of my muse for the book.

And this year,

What I'm doing after I wrote the book,

I then did an album of ambient music inspired by the book.

And also the set of meditations inspired by the book called The Soulful Path,

Which you walked with me on.

And what I'm doing this year is to merge the music in with the original audio book.

And I'm publishing that on Insight Timer,

Serializing it as well,

Which is a great Charles Dickens kind of tradition.

Serializing a book.

And it's great to bring all the media together.

It's like bringing in my talent through as a,

As a,

An orator,

A writer,

And just a musician,

Not of your caliber,

But somebody who didn't press some buttons on a keyboard and play with MIDI,

Which is inspired.

I know how much you love your music and how inspired you are.

I think it's wonderful.

I think it's wonderful that you,

You know,

Use your many talents for your tracks.

Yeah,

Always looking forward to hearing more.

Oh my goodness,

So many thoughts are flitting through my brain about where we can take this because there's so many paths with all of the things that you do.

If you could wave a magic wand and make three wishes come true in the next six months,

What would they be?

Well,

A wild,

Wild dream is that,

That Soul Waves or Soul Waves Insertions,

Which is,

I've written Soul Waves Insertions,

12 short stories,

Very much in the tradition of Tales of the Unexpected.

You know,

So there's a thread going through them,

But the stories are all completely different in and out of time,

A bit like Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell,

Where you jump across time and some of the same characters reincarnate later on.

But I start,

I start pre the universe being built and right to the end of the universe as well.

So it goes up and down in time.

And so I'd love if something I got picked up and made into,

Into a Netflix series,

Amazon or something else.

And all these things start like that.

They all start by someone just finding it,

But at random.

So that's wish number one,

A Netflix series or something of that sort.

Around the Soul Waves,

Kind of around the Soul Waves meme,

If you know what I mean,

That's wish number one.

Wish number two is that we really do find peace on earth.

Why are we still fighting in this day and age?

Why are we spending trillions and trillions of pounds on military spending when that same money could feed everybody,

Sort out all the so-called problems.

So all,

Like all the dictators and all of those people that are wrapped up in their own ego,

The dinosaurs to,

To peter out.

I'm not going to use the word dire,

Just to peter out and be replaced by the New Guard,

People that see mother earth.

We're on this spaceship together.

There is no planet B.

There's only a planet A.

And let's all get on and let's stop wasting money,

Killing each other.

And and also other aspects of the planet.

There's some really great news going on on the planet that doesn't get reported.

And let's just switch everything around.

We can do it within a generation.

So,

And we can start now.

So that'd be really good.

And then number three,

Going back to personal again now,

Is back in 2009,

I wrote a book called Flavors of Thought.

And Flavors of Thought was my interpretation of the major arcana of the tarot.

And in 2012,

I wrote a book called Planes of Being,

Which is my interpretation and contemporization of the minor arcana of the tarot.

And the tarot is not a divination tool.

It's actually,

It explains who we are,

What we are.

And then in 2022 and 2023,

I wrote the third in the trilogy called the Book of Overstanding.

And I'm now getting all those materials,

Remastering them all.

I never did the audiobooks of those.

And I'm going to serialize them again on Insight Timer.

And they're about awakening the human consciousness.

But there's a bigger play.

There's a bigger play.

And this might sound a bit weird.

I've really not shared this in any interview.

But Mother Earth is about to become self-aware.

And she's going to be one of the first self-aware planets in the cosmos.

And when she becomes self-aware,

Other planets in the cosmos also become self-aware.

And that hasn't been done in the whole history of this particular universe.

And we don't know.

And what is our experience of her self-awareness?

What happens when Mother Earth becomes self-aware?

We don't know.

I personally feel as if she's already self-aware and she's letting us know.

And we need to stop abusing her because she's answering to that and saying,

You're going to have all this unpredictable weather and unpredictable conditions.

And I don't want to say getting back at us,

But there's a cause and effect,

Right?

Well,

Definitely the biosphere is self-regulating.

So,

That can cause some of these side effects.

I think that it's more accurate to say that she might not be aware that she's self-aware.

So,

She has a level of awareness and self-awareness.

But when she becomes self-aware,

My understanding is that it's not been done yet in the cosmos.

And an app like Insight Timer brings enough people together collectively to enable something like that to trigger.

And it's not just my work on the app.

It's other people's work on the app.

Your music that's on the app and all sorts of stuff.

It's pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.

And in some respects,

It's the universe getting and the cosmos getting to know itself.

I see.

So,

It's that exploration,

That journey,

That excitement.

What does that mean?

Well,

Hats off to Insight Timer.

It is my favorite app.

I'm not even sure why,

But I find it so much more peaceful and harmonious from the concept of millions of people meditating together to the experience that I have of all these different personalities and souls expressing themselves and wanting to help people.

The activity that comes from the app,

It's all about wishing for your fellow man to feel better if you're not feeling well.

I can't evaluate everything up there.

There's just thousands and thousands of tracks.

And of course,

We both know some aren't as good as the others,

But the intention.

Everything starts with an intention as Oprah and everyone else in the spiritual realm,

Deepak and Tom and everybody reminds us about.

But everything starts with an intention.

And I believe that,

As you were just reflecting,

The intention that comes from Insight Timer is a truly powerful and valuable one.

And I hope that it continues to have that pureness about it.

Yeah,

A massive paying it forward as well.

So,

I was involved in the app,

And there was no revenue model at all.

So,

That came about two or three years after I was on the app.

And so,

I think when I joined,

Or I got invited to the app,

There's about 150 guides,

There's about 18,

000 now.

And a lot of people now are looking at it as a source of income,

Which is great,

Because then it self-sustains people and more people can earn money and then create more stuff even better.

But the early guides and myself were just putting,

And Insight Timer themselves were just putting it out there,

With the aim of just getting the whole world meditating one person at a time.

And if we all do that,

Then we live on a better planet.

My background as an engineer is like,

When I discovered meditation,

The first thing that happened to me is my creativity and productivity shot up.

So,

I started writing about that,

How that 10 minutes a day was a great,

The best investment you could make,

Apart from the well-being benefits you get,

You know,

Being calm and reducing blood pressure and all of these sort of things.

There's an instant benefit to anything we do creatively.

And I extended that to entrepreneurship.

So,

Let's say you're running a business,

And you want to have a bright,

Or you're short on ideas,

You want to have a bright idea.

I wrote a whole book on how you have lightbulb moments on demand.

And I'm going to take that onto the app shortly as well.

So,

That content is going to be on the app,

Because I never made the audio versions of that.

I started writing about how you can change the speed and nature of your thoughts,

So you get more things done in less time.

And also how you can just change your whole demeanor,

So the perfect things happen at the right time.

And then when I extended that into the whole soulways concept,

How the right people arrive in your life,

As you did for me,

At the perfect time.

But even you and I were talking before we had this chat,

This recorded this chat,

We still don't know why we've been brought together,

But we just trust there's a reason that will be shown to us in good time.

And that whole thing about how,

You know,

Especially when we have the lockdown and stuff like that,

Everyone got quite isolated.

But the number of co-creations that are going on across the globe right now,

Not just in the artistic fields,

But in science and medical,

You name it,

You know,

We've learned with this amazing technology how we can co-create together in this wonderful way.

And then the app Insight Time,

Which gives us this repository,

A place where we can put it all,

So the right people find it just at the right time.

And I'd like to think that some of the work that I do is kind of goes in some ways to explaining it,

But I'm not a scientist,

I'm not a quantum physicist,

But there's some amazing people out there.

I've interviewed people like Professor Amit Goswami and Irvin Laszlo,

These professors of quantum physics,

And they're starting to put some of the science into explaining how all of this stuff works,

Which I just love.

There's great value to that.

I would love to listen to those interviews,

So I'll have to search talks when I look at your teacher profile.

And I am,

Just so that everybody knows,

I have either taken or am taking those courses by Tom.

I have a massive Insight Timer library,

And right now Purposeful Living is the one that I've been enjoying.

But I did the one about the arcana and the keys to overstanding,

That was the last one.

So,

I enjoy these as,

How shall I put this?

I ingest these courses that you've made and other teachers that I love,

And it improves my day.

If I'm cooking dinner,

Or I'm waking up after I've meditated,

There are times when I just listen to the news.

But sometimes I'll decide I want an entire hour while I'm doing things to be in this more sacred space,

And it changes the entire day.

And with things like the keys to overstanding,

Do you enjoy the fun and playfulness when we start building the Tower of Babel and ascending off of it and this sort of stuff?

It's wonderful.

That's wonderful.

I encourage everybody to experience these new courses.

I don't know if you're comfortable speaking about this,

But I think you've just completed building a sustainable house.

Is that correct?

The second one we've done,

Yeah,

We did one in North Wiltshire about five years ago,

And we just didn't quite like the area,

So we then repeated it.

So,

Last year I didn't do a lot on Insight Timer.

I was kind of treading water,

And so I've got this pent-up hard disk full of lots of materials,

Which I'm now converting it into Insight Timer formats.

So,

Four courses live on the app already.

There's keys to overstanding,

Living timefully,

How you get back in touch with natural time.

So,

You work with natural time,

The moons,

Not the months,

And all that sort of stuff.

Purpose of living,

You say,

Channelling for beginners,

And that's a fun one.

And then I'm going to take all the flavours of thought,

Planes of being,

Which you know,

Book of overstanding,

And that's going to take till the end of 25 to get all of that stuff onto the app.

But channelling for beginners has got a lovely,

Lovely lesson that you'll appreciate.

And when we jump into the managerial space,

We jump into what I call OMT.

So,

I've got three time standards I talk about in this other course called The Art of Timefulness.

One is EMT,

Which is Extended Me Time.

It's the space you get into where time just flows,

And whatever art is coming through you,

Whether it's art or science,

It just flows through into the time allocated.

IMT is Inner Mind Time,

Because our gut and heart-mind work slightly ahead of time,

And it makes you very intuitive,

And you always make the right decision.

OMT is Outer Mind Time,

And in Outer Mind Time,

You go into the collective consciousness,

And there you can access the past,

The present,

And the future at the same time.

And the person that we resonate most with is ourselves,

Because we've got our own memories,

But you also resonate with your future self.

And let's say you're writing a new album or something like that,

Or I'm writing a book or a meditation,

There's a version of me in the future who knows the words I haven't written yet,

And you tap into that person,

Bring them down,

And you almost get into your final draft by doing it that way.

So,

There's a lesson in that course on how to tap into your,

How to channel your future self.

Saves so much time,

And it's fun.

Might be active imagination,

But if it's imagination,

It works.

Who's to argue?

The main thing is you can sense that I'm having a lot of fun with this,

And making this stuff,

Which could be quite weird and bonkers,

Accessible.

Yes,

Yes.

You find the vocabulary from your future self while you're making this discovery in your present self.

And yeah,

Music to me is definitely has that,

Maybe that's just my language,

Has that ability to bring things from the future into the present.

So,

Yeah,

So that's good.

Your home is all completed,

And you have a good place to do all your work through 2025,

Now you're all settled in.

But this is just something I think that people all over the world should be doing,

Is creating sustainable homes and housing.

That's one thing,

And I would like to do that as I get older.

So,

I hope to learn more about that from you,

How you did it,

And how,

Are you completely off the grid?

No,

We're net zero.

So,

What happens where you put,

It's called a fabric first approach.

So,

You spend money on insulation.

So,

The house is intrinsically insulated,

And we live behind a hill.

So,

Between November and January,

We don't get much sunlight.

And then we got solar panels on the roof that generate our electricity.

But in winter,

We have to,

We need to get a bit of ambience coming through.

So,

We have to pay for electricity,

But we pay for it off peak,

Store it in a battery,

Then use it on peak,

If you know what I mean.

And then over summer,

We're creating an abundance of electricity,

Shipping it back to the grid.

So,

Over the year,

Our total electricity bill is virtually zero.

But to do that,

We had to spend a lot of money,

Physical money,

On insulation.

And it's a bit like getting one person meditating,

Getting the whole world meditating one person at a time.

I'd love to get every single house in the UK like this,

Or every house in the world like this.

And so,

This becomes like a demonstrator.

And we've been used as a case study for our first house,

And as a case study for this house by a National Centre for Sustainability in the UK.

So,

We're recognised for what we're doing.

We're like vanguards in a way,

In the same way that I'm a vanguard for hopefully raising consciousness and awareness.

This stuff is also a part of that.

So,

You're living and breathing.

Yes,

This is hugely newsworthy.

I think everybody should know about that.

I have some friends who are off the grid on this island in Maine,

Where I have a summer house,

And I aspire to be like them and to be like you,

Because I think we'll all be contributing something.

And it also helps break down a little bit more of this monopolisation of business and how people.

.

.

There's just so much injustice in the world.

For us to empower ourselves as individuals in terms of the natural resources,

And helping the planet,

And saving money so that we can just live out our years in a much more practical way.

I truly admire that.

And we've got an awakened energy supplier over here.

A lot of them are part of this old dinosaur guard I was talking about before.

And they pay you peanuts for anything you export.

But this is the company I use.

I won't mention them on here because you're not allowed to advertise them.

I don't want to advertise them.

They pay you good money for what you export.

And they've got a good spirit.

What I'd like to see is some of these principles that we use individually and to go into business as well.

So businesses become more mindful,

More timeful,

And more kindful.

That's my mantra,

Mindful,

Timeful,

Kindful.

So,

Tom,

I bought a pair of shoes today.

And they are created from the leather that's left over from the meat industry in Peru.

So this is a sustainable shoe company.

They were a steal because they were like 80% off in some fancy store on Bleecker Street,

Where I live in the village of New York City here.

I used to write for our local paper quite a bit.

And I like to report on those kinds of stories.

So your stories,

Who you are,

It's the kind of news everybody should know about,

I think,

You know?

Yeah.

And I think you've got to see an app like Insight Timer as actually a purveyor of good news.

You know,

There's only good content coming from it,

Which is just marvelous.

You know,

You dive in there and you see a different view of the world.

Maybe at some point,

I'll make some tracks called Good News.

They're opening up their blog to teachers I see this morning.

And I'm going to encourage them to also put a podcast out as well.

So it becomes not just meditations,

But it becomes a channel.

So that should be quite good to play with.

Bravissimo.

Thank you so much.

Tom,

This has been such a delightful conversation.

Please tell us where people can find you.

So the best place to find me and loads and loads of free meditations and then the resources that I've been on about these courses are accessible,

Not just my courses,

But all the other teachers on the app for the mere $60 a year,

Like $5 a month,

Something like that.

That's at www.

Insighttimer.

Com slash Tom Evans,

That's where you'll find me.

Lovely.

Well,

I'm always looking forward to all of your content,

Tom,

And I feel like it's a good friend to me.

It changes my days.

And I'm,

I'm excited that we had this chat and that we're able to share,

You know,

More about you personally with people in your world and new people who will come into your world.

Actually,

I said this is the second we've already got a conversation on Insight Timer between the two of us.

So this is the second of many conversations.

Reviews

Loved this, Tom, and funny that you emailed about our collab as I was listening and I paused to reply at 4:44 and your next response came through at 10:08! 🙏🏼

Takk for nok et lag med innsikt i din verden og også i min som følge av å lytte til dette Tòm! Og Hannah: flott intervju! Det blir bare bedre og bedre å være en del av denne verdenen! Mother Earth loves you!