menu
Tom Campbell X Jemma Foster
Tom Campbell is a physicist, researcher, author and creator of Tom's Park.
JF: When I came across your tome My Big Toe: A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics: Awakening in 2012, together with Michael Talbot’s Holographic Universe it was the catalyst for a paradigm shift in my understanding of consciousness. Tom’s Park takes this a step further as a practical guide to achieving altered states of consciousness. It is a book but it is also an interactive course in altered states, which you describe as a ‘Virtual Imaginality’ game. How was it devised and how does it function?
TC: Tom’s Park is a tool that people can use to get into the altered states necessary to do all the paranormal things - lucid dreaming, astral projection, remote viewing and so on. It is an alternate reality, a park with lakes and lodges, people and activities, it is a place to gather information and learn things. It is a virtual reality that I have created in detail, and its geography, content and function are detailed in the book for people to engage with not as a story but as an interactive gaming experience and course in consciousness.
It relies on imagination not meditation, which is the traditional route to these altered states where you learn to discipline your mind and find the stable point of consciousness or void state. You have to empty your mind before you can become aware and then from there you can move into these exploratory states of consciousness . You don’t have to ever have meditated or know how to meditate for Tom’s Park, it’s a different process entirely. It uses the imagination instead of meditation. So you still have to learn some discipline, not in how to keep your mind empty for an hour, but instead you learn the discipline of letting your imagination run wild and not having your intellect come in and arrange things. You just let your imagination go and daydream. It’s a daydream that you’ve lost control of, a daydream that is just going off on its own. It may take some 5, 10, 20, 30 times in Tom’s Park before they’re able to imagine and just let their imagination run free, so it takes practice and some discipline, but you can bypass the 10-year commitment to meditation to get to the same place.
So it gives you something to focus on with your imagination that’s interesting and fun. And it doesn’t take long before people are able to get in there with their imagination and just let things happen. They can go to the hexagon building and do the paranormal things that they want to do, or they can just go and sit by the lake and chat to someone. For many people, the reason I created the park was that I had a lot of people who just weren’t able to get into a good intuitive space through meditation. They were just too left-brained, too much logic and process, and they couldn’t get their intellect to sit down and be quiet. The intellect was always up there, asking them and questioning, is this right? Are you doing it right? Are you not doing it right? Is this real? Is this not? And they couldn’t get that to be quiet and go through the imagination route.
Now they’ve been much more successful. So really, the thing that got me to create the park was an alternative way for people to get into the intuitive place where all the paranormal things are and where they have ready access to answers, things that’ll help them grow, things that’ll help them understand and see big pictures and they can get there through their imagination. And I have a whole bunch of real left-brain, engineer-scientist types, techies and so on, that have really appreciated the different route rather than the meditation route, because they just find that discipline too hard to do.
JF: I resonate with that. While I have a meditation practice, I have a strong imagination and I find that visualisations can invite the saboteur or trickster that will come in and distort the thing that I am visualising. With Tom’s Park, the foundations are solid. There’s enough information that you don’t have to think it up. It’s already there.
TC: Yeah. It’s all there. So it makes it easy to get there and not get lost in it. Like you say, if you just say, “Go daydream”, then yes, all kinds of things would be pouring in all the time. But this gives you an interesting enough place that you can focus on it. And it’s multi-sensory. You can taste and smell and touch and there’s textures. There’s just lots of different things there.
And the more you engage your senses in the daydream, the less likely it is that your intellect is going to come in and crash the party because you basically crowd the intellect out because you’re so busy with all these things you’re seeing and all the colours and all the interactions that your intellect just gets crowded out in the margin where there’s no room for it to step in and really do anything.
JF: You describe the LCS – the Large Consciousness System – as a co-host that tailors the experience of each individual to match their awareness. Is the LCS representative of the collective unconscious or higher realm of consciousness?
TC: The LCS is a co-host and I talked with the LCS and got an agreement that it would work with all the people who were in Tom’s Park and would pick up where their imagination got going. It would pick up with that story and start feeding them information and lead them off into whatever might be good for them to experience or help them grow. So all they have to do is get to the brink and open, and things are going to happen. That’s the whole idea of Tom’s Park. And it seems to work just the way it’s supposed to for most people.
JF: You also describe some glitches in the Park’s systems, for example people entering the kiosk turnstyle and losing their clothes. Is that something that was written into the narrative or something manifesting from shared experiences developing within Tom’s Park? A sort of 100th Monkey syndrome?
TC: I did write that into the narrative because what that does is give people not only permission, but even an expectation of the unexpected. If you have that, if you can give somebody a sense that an unexpected thing might happen, it tends to allow them to let things happen that are out of the ordinary. It opens them to the possibility of strangeness. The possibility of spontaneity. Whereas if you don’t put those in, then they might still have spontaneity, but it’s not as likely as if you give it to them. It leads people to the brink of an experience , but then lets it happen for them. So none of it is me holding their hand through any of it, I don’t guide people through the park.
When you go through this, you need to be a little careful because sometimes some strange things happen. The system has a good sense of humour. And people will play with that. And they have a lot of fun with that because it gives them – I don’t know, it’s not really permission, but it primes them to let their mind go in some unpredictable way and see what happens. See what falls out the other side.
And often when you do that, if you let your mind be unpredictable, you’ll find something that really is educational. You’ll learn from it. You’ll suddenly see something from a different perspective, or see an issue or a problem or a fear that you had. Because when you open yourself up to the spontaneous thing, you often get things that are inside of you, but not part of your intellect, they’re deeper than what your intellect sees. And that’s the stuff that pops out when you allow this. I encourage people to be creative, add things, take things away, move things around in the Park, whatever makes sense, customise it as you wish.
The things I put in the park are things that take you just up to the experience. You pick up the phone and talk with the man in charge - who I call The Big Cheese. That leads them to an experience of getting a communication and they’re open to it. But I don’t give them any idea of what that communication is going to be like because it is personal to them. Similarly, if they sit down in the movie theatre, they might witness a memory or a snapshot of a past life or something that they are interested in is going to play on the screen.
So the first part is getting in the intuitive mindset and being open to the experience. Secondly, the LCS is working with these people such that when they’re open, it sends them something meaningful, it sends them a data stream that helps them grow up, expand, raise their awareness. It helps give them information they want or need.
In terms of shared collective experience, I haven't documented collective experiences. They will happen, but primarily this is a single-player game. Of course there will be as people talk and say, “This is what happened to me,” then that opens up that as a possibility for other people. Over time, we will have some collective consciousness or unified field eventually develop around the park where there’s a lot of people who see certain things. And that will begin to be common, that people do see those things there, just because there will be a collective consciousness of those people who frequent the park. And in that collective consciousness, if you belong to that group, then you’ll get some feedback from that collective consciousness that will make it shared in that way.
Now, occasionally, you can go there with friends or meet people there, and that works. It’s a little harder to do, but it's possible. Like it’s the same thing. You read my book and you read where Dennis and I went out of body together and we had this big adventure that went on for a long time and we were with each other seeing the same things and whatever. So you could do the same thing at the park. If Dennis and I could do that out of body, two people could do that in the park. We have had any number of people who have interacted with some of their friends or other people or family while they were in the park. And both people were aware of the interaction. So that when they discussed it later, they agreed on what was going on and what they were doing.
JF: Do people tend to be drawn to a particular activity, in the way that lucid dreamers often all start out wanting to fly, before they get serious about intention. In general, are people there to play or are most headed for the Hexagon room to train in extrasensory skills?
TC: Yeah, both probably in equal numbers. There’s quite a few who just want to play and interact, have conversations, meet people, meet critters, talk to a horse. Just hang out and interact in a kind of a fun, very safe space. This appeals to people who are insecure or frightened in waking life about relationships or whatever, they know it’s going to be fine. I know a few people that go to Tom’s Park because they’re very shy. They have relationship issues. They have a hard time meeting people. They have a hard time speaking and opening up. In Tom’s Park, they’re working those kinds of problems out because it’s a safe place. They can go in and open up, they can make friends, they can have relationships, and it’s safe because that’s not going to blow up in their face. Some people come to heal an aspect or relationship and it is a safe place for that too. Then there are the ones that skip all that, just go right to the hexagon room and that’s their launchpad. After a while it becomes their own personal metaphor for their launchpad so that they can remote view or whatever paranormal things they do.
Everybody has imagination. Tom’s Park has all the ‘physical’ things to do that helps you develop that imagination to the point where then you can move on to the non-physical things. So I tell people, if you’re having trouble in the hexagon room, go back out into the park. Lie down in the sun. Feel the texture of the grass, go walk around the lake. Sit in one of the yellow benches that transports you someplace.
JF: Who are the staff, do you consider them to be projections of the player’s psyche or independent entities?
TC: They are entities as such. They started as non-player characters created by the larger consciousness system. So they were just NPCs. It’s like in a multiplayer virtual reality game, there are some players that are just created by the computer. They’re not players who pay $10 a month to get on their computer. They’re things generated by the computer just to interact with, give the other people their quest, so they’re part of the game. NPCs are just subsets of the LCS. They have free will because the LCS has free will, and they’re just played through the context of a particular character with a particular background and a particular family that they grew up in and all the backgrounds there. It’s just an NPC with a full life and background to focus on what this particular character is, so they have personality, they have their own quirks, they have some of their own beliefs and issues.
JF: Are they constant or do they adapt to each player?
TC: No. What happened is that the system started that way, but eventually some of these characters became very involved with other characters who come to the park and yes, people will go to the park and talk to the same people, so they go to the lake and see George every time. That becomes an important connection for them, this individual who happens to work there, and now the LCS can take an individual unit of consciousness and have that individual unit of consciousness play George in this game.
Here we are individual units of consciousness (IUOC) and I’m playing Tom and you’re playing Jemma, and we’re in this particular game. There’s some that are in Tom’s Park and the staff that work there and play there and interact with are there. When there was enough traffic in Tom’s Park to make that viable so that an IUOC could learn from its interactions and so on. Then it became another learning space. So it started out as NPCs, but it doesn't necessarily stay as NPCs. It turns into other IUOCs like us.
JF: Similar to dream reality. I’m often not myself in dreams, I will ‘play’ or inhabit other people. It’s that liminal space of working out whether the characters in your dream are projections of your unconscious or other dreamers dreaming.
TC: Yes. It could be like that. They’re just other players that you’re interacting with. So it’s really not much different than interacting with somebody here in this physical reality. It’s just that they don’t live here in this physical reality. You have to go visit them in the reality they live in.
JF: What about non-human consciousness as players, the horses and ducks?
TC: Those were all NPCs. And again, it’s the same thing. If they get to the point that there’s enough interaction where an IUOC can learn by playing that character or playing the character like that, then you’d let an IUOC do it. Inasmuch as that isn’t yet built up.
In other words, there’s not enough traffic, there’s not enough action going on because there’s not enough people in Tom’s Park to make that viable. But once it gets viable, then you switch over to other individual units of consciousness playing those roles. But initially, until the traffic builds up, it’s the LCS playing all the parts. That happened in this virtual reality too, as this virtual reality created beings that were conscious. Then it started out with the larger conscious system playing all of them. And it played them all till it got to a point that it said, okay, IUOCs.
I have some characters here that are going to be valuable to your growth. So now you start logging on and playing them. But initially, the larger conscious system played them all. So that’s how it develops. And Tom’s Park develops in the same way.
JF: Are the NPCs bound by a moral code or set programming, or do they have free will?
TC: No, the NPCs would act like they had free will because they have the free will of the larger conscious system. They’re just a character with a certain personality and background that the larger conscious system is playing. So rather than an IUOC playing it, the larger conscious system is playing it and the larger consciousness system has free will. So those characters do have free will, but the system tries to play them within a specific character.
And then once it turns it over to IUOCs, then the IUOCs have free will. So all the staff there have free will to interact with you freely. So you’re getting real interactions. And some of the people that would rather interact with critters than with people, they make very good friends with their horse or with a chipmunk or with a bear. They go hiking in the woods and make friends and do that.
So it’s a good, safe place for people to be in, and just be themselves. Be authentic. It’s a good place to try out the authentic you, and see how that plays.
JF: Can people seek out specific extrasensory training and skills?
TC: Sure. They can have that training while they’re there, if that’s what they want. There is a fear clinic for example. You get a person assigned to you and they then work as a team to help you get over your fear. And that’s basically you and the larger consciousness system that you’re interacting with is working now as a team to get over your fear. So it’s a pretty optimal situation.
JF: What is the role of the sacred in Tom’s Park? There are references such as the Lily pond consecrated by the Monk Masters of the 27th order. The avatar rejuvenation coordinators (ARC). The terminology and the language you use avoids references that could be prohibitive to certain people. For example, the description of the ARC is of angelic beings.
TC: Yes. I had to set up a lot of different metaphors for a lot of different people because some people resonate with one metaphor and don’t resonate with another. The park is a very spiritual place and it’s where you connect with wisdom. Where you connect with beings that are very advanced in their own growth, in their own getting rid of fear.
The people who are lightworkers and have their beams of light to get rid of dark stuff. There are people who don’t visualise at all, so they can’t do that, but maybe they feel their way through things. It is all metaphor anyway - there is no light, there is no dark stuff, there isn’t any of that. It’s a virtual reality. There’s only information. But intention modifies the probability of how that information will come out. It will evolve into this reality. So if you have a positive intent, however it looks to you, then you tend to evolve towards health, not towards illness.So that’s the way Tom’s Park is built to serve. Everybody will find something there that they can connect with in a very personal and in a very profitable way. And some people will connect to all of it. I suspect a person like you would tend to connect to all of it because you don’t just approach things from a single angle.
What it does is that the park has to work for all sorts of people, and some people work very well in a rational space. Other people work better in more of a mystical or religious space. It just depends on the individual. So I have some things for everybody there. Talking to a crew or a master who is a teacher that would help them learn. If you want to work with that metaphor, then yes, the larger consciousness system can work with you within that metaphor.
And there is no teacher more qualified than the LCS. It’s the thing that is the source of everything. So the system will interact with you within that context, because that’s a context that you like. If you’d rather have a different kind of context, then there’s different places in the park for almost everybody to work with. People might go to the hot springs to heal, but even taking a jetski out on the lake or talking to a horse can be somebody’s metaphor.
Some people would find a religious metaphor as something to stay away from. That would be, “Oh, I don’t want to have anything to do with religion or any kind of thing like that.” A lot of people are like that. The people who would come to Tom’s Park are because they may even be atheists and think the whole idea of any kind of spiritual thing is nonsense. But there’s this other reality out here called consciousness, and I can explore that. It’s just a different metaphor, the experience is the same.
In our Western culture, we highly prize the intellectual side. And the places where people develop that intellectual side in order to do real complex things with it, they get high salaries, they get the respect and credibility, and people look up to them.
On the other hand, the people who are right-brained and have developed their intuitive side, they get called names like ‘airhead’ and ‘woowoo’ and that kind of stuff. They are not highly regarded in our culture. They end up doing things that don’t have high salaries because our culture doesn’t value it as much.
In our culture, people spend 99% of their time developing their intellectual side because that’s the side that gets rewarded. And they just ignore their intuitive side. As a matter of fact, scientists will tell you there is no such thing as intuition, it doesn’t even exist.
JF: So a great unlearning has to happen.
TC: Yes. So you see the difference. Here we are with this really well-developed intellectual side and an intuitive side that is not even as good as it was when you were three years old.
JF: Is this what the Cosmic Brain Drain Library is about? Dissolving the rigidity of left brain intellect to engage in the plasticity of intuitive seeking?
TC: That’s part of it. We go there to get a deeper understanding of things that we can’t grasp without our intellectual mind. Intuitive understanding rather than intellectual understanding. You’ll come away understanding things better, but you won’t really know why or be able to explain it to somebody else because it’s not intellectual. We need that intellect to explain it to somebody else, but you’ll know it anyway. You’ll have that knowing sense that this is the way it is.
JF: What were your conversations like co-creating Tom’s Park with the LCS?
TC: Yeah, the LCS and I have a good working relationship. I’ve interacted with it personally for a long time. And I said, “Look, I’ve got an idea that I think’s going to help a lot of people grow up and it’s going to be particularly advantageous to those that are struggling, that would like to expand and are having trouble with it”
I present my ideas and the LCS says, ”Great idea. I think it’ll work. I think it’ll be good. And it says, “I’ll support it.” So then it’s aware of anybody going into Tom’s Park. It’s aware of that and it’s there to help, but it’s not there to do it for them or just to give them things. They have to interact, they have to connect to it. It’s not like going to a library and getting a book out that you need to read. You have to interact and own it and you have to come to the conclusion yourself. You have to see the big picture. And that’s what the LCS is all about. It evolves as we evolve. Our evolution is its evolution.
JF: Would you describe the LCS as a group, guides as such, or a single source?
TC: Not so much anymore. It began as a group, but now it is just one-on-one, mostly. I also work directly with the Big Cheese. I have a one-on-one and I have a more personal relationship with the big cheese. It would be fair enough to say, we’re good friends.
JF: In Tom’s Park, you describe the Big Cheese as the manager, an omnipotent entity, or the creator. Why the ‘Big Cheese' and what is your relationship to them?
TC: Tom’s Park also has a little humour with it. We don’t want people to take themselves or Tom’s Park too seriously or start praying to the Big Cheese. You’re here to grow and you can’t grow if you're all wadded up with fear – you have to have a light attitude. The more you let go of that intellect, the more childlike you are in some ways, you play.
The Big Cheese is an entity that I have known and interacted with since I was very young, when I had spiritual teachers that interacted with me when I was very little – 6, 7 years old. Now, at that time, he was not the Big Cheese, he was just somebody who was working with me for his own reasons and had worked with me before and other lifetimes. So I knew him then and have known him for a long time. And he got the job of being The Big Cheese, I don’t know, about 20 years ago or so.
We were friends then and we’re still friends now. When I was a teenager, I could always get information from beings that I communicated with. I didn’t know that was unusual at the time, I thought everybody did that. I didn’t really have any names for these beings, I’d just think and I’d put out my query and I would get information back, and the guy who is the Big Cheese now was one of those people for me. They worked with me for quite a while. I was groomed to be of value to them, there were things I was supposed to do. They weren't just coming here to see what would happen, which is the way it is most of the time, they wanted to keep me on track to where I needed to be and that was the job of the Big Cheese.
JF: So the Big Cheese was an entity that had lived human lifetimes, acted as your guide and then ascended as a spiritual master, or IUCS with a greater perspective, to support human consciousness?
TC: Yes, let's say that the Big Cheese is a manager of a subset of reality, but also as an individual unit of consciousness. Some are just bigger and have more capacity than others. The larger consciousness system is also an individual unit of consciousness. It’s just bigger and does more and has more responsibility. It’s all consciousness, it’s the operating system, not all the piece parts, like we are. The LCS takes pieces of itself and makes IUCS out of them. So you and I and the Big Cheese are all individuated units of consciousness, but the Big Cheese operates at a much higher level with a much bigger picture than most of us operate at.
There’s a lot of other virtual realities (VRs) like what we call the physical reality that we live in. That’s a virtual reality, but that’s not the only virtual reality. It’s not like all the conscious systems eggs are all in this one basket. There’s lots of virtual realities. Some of them like this one that seem physical and others that are more dreamlike and lots of things in between.
So there’s this big subset of VRs that the big cheese is kind of manager of, because anytime you have a VR, you have rules. And when you have the big picture of that, you have multiple VRs. You also have rules about how beings in the various VRs can interact with each other.
So whenever you have rules, you have to have some way to enforce the rules to make sure the rules are being obeyed. You also have to have some way to learn to make better rules. Because rules shouldn’t be dead things, things evolve and so rules evolve, they need to be alive. Something needs to oversee things, how can we improve or modify things for the better? That’s who the Big Cheese is.
JF. So holographic universe aside, where the Big Cheese comes from the LCS and the LCS is inside the Big Cheese, would you describe the boss of the Big Cheese as the LCS?
TC: Yes the Big Cheese answers to the LCS, but that’s really our boss too, in the sense we’re pieces of that larger consciousness system. So there are individual units of consciousness that are small – your cat and your dog and your horse and the raccoon that lives in the woods, those are small pieces of individual units of consciousness. Then there’s bigger ones that have bigger pictures, like humans. And then there’s bigger pictures, like the Big Cheese, and then there’s even bigger pictures yet, like the LCS. But they’re all individual units of consciousness, from the raccoon up to the Big Cheese. They’re all chunks of consciousness and they’re all part of this one consciousness system.
JF: As a sensitive right-brained child, how did you end up being a physicist?
TC: It was an absolutely necessary part of it because, In several incarnations before that, I was not in any kind of a technical space. I was always in a right-brained, intuitive space kind of person and being, and I needed to become more balanced. I needed to have both.
So when I got here, as a very young child, I was a very intuitive child. I understood all sorts of things that no child should understand. I was very aware of things and my sister would tell you that we’d go on long rides. This is when I was like four or five, six years old. We’d go on a long trip someplace and she and I would be in the back seat of the car. The parents would be up front and you know how it is with children, every 10 minutes. Are we there yet? It’s hard for kids to sit still in the backseat of a car. And my sister wanted to play and interact with me, but most of the time I would be lost.
I would go into a chant, I’d have this little chant going on and I wasn’t there. And I’d wake up after we got to wherever we were going. So the whole trip took two or three minutes for me. I was only aware for a few minutes of it. I got in the car and then I got out of the car and we were there. It’s almost like we teleported because I wasn’t aware of the trip itself, which annoyed my sister to no end. Because then she had to sit in the backseat by herself. So sometimes I would play with her. She was two years older than me, so sometimes she could get me going. But in any case, I was very right-brained and very intuitive and not too much on that reduction aside.
But I knew even at a young age that’s what I had to become. I had to learn how to be left brain, had to learn how to think in that way. I had to learn logic. I had to learn math, I had to learn science. And that was not easy for me. It wasn’t natural. It took a lot of work to do that. I had to put a lot of effort into that and practice, to work at it before I got it. And it wasn’t until I probably was out of graduate school before a lot of it sunk in. I learned what I had to learn, but I got there in my middle 20s. I finally conquered that intellectual space to where I could live in that space and understand it very well and could think that way, and that was necessary because My Big Toe is basically a ramp for logical people.
There are literally thousands of books that will help people who are already intuitive, help the right-brainers gain a bigger picture. But the left-brain people can’t read those books. They get just a little way in and they just say, “I just don’t understand this, this doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t see the logic in it and I can’t deal with it,” and they throw it away
JF: That’s what I needed. That’s why it had such a profound effect on me, because II needed to understand with my mind before my mind would allow me to understand from an intuitive space.
TC: Exactly. And a lot of people are that way and they just can’t get it in our culture. So our culture makes all these left-brain people because that’s what’s valued in our culture.
That’s what we grow to be, that’s what we’re encouraged to do. And then we can’t get that bigger picture. There is no bigger picture. Our picture’s limited to just what we can do with our intellect. So my job was to write this book, the set of books that would be the on ramp for those people who were intellectuals who needed rationality, needed a logical process to get there. And once they got there, oh now they could get the big picture and see it and develop their intuitive side. But there wasn’t any way for them to get there.
And the movers and the shakers, the people who made a lot of difference in our culture, were all left-brain people. They were the people that ran things and they were shut off basically from the bigger picture of how things worked. So I couldn’t write that book unless I was one of them. I couldn’t write it from a right-brain perspective because my language would’ve been such that, they just wouldn’t have been able to deal with it.
So I had to write it like a physicist would write it, it had to be logical. You had to be this, this enabled you to see that, which enables you to see the next thing. And by time you got through all the books, ’wow, there's this other whole reality out there I didn’t know about.
You had to lead people there and you had to lead people there with good rationality, with logic. Yeah. So that was one of the missions that I had to do. So I knew that, yes, I had to learn how to do mathematics. I had to learn how to do physics. I had to develop that side of me. It was a very important requirement for me this time.
But I struggled with it. And, all the way through school, even graduate school, I always had to figure everything out from basic principles. I didn’t memorise things, the memorise-and-regurgitate-the answers sort of thing. I just couldn’t go there.
I had to understand it and I had to start from basic principles and then derive it from there, which made me very slow as far as getting right answers on tests. I was very slow because I’d have to start at the beginning and derive everything and get to the right answer, which is a much lengthier process than just memorising what the right answer is.
JF: That’s what learning should be, but in mainstream education systems It’s not encouraged to actually learn. It’s encouraged to just cram it in enough to get it out for the test. And then you can forget it all.
TC: I remember sitting in graduate school with a guy who was from University of Chicago and he had learned the plug and jug way. He had probably better math skills than I did. And he looked at me and he said he had this problem, he couldn’t work. I worked it out for him and showed him how to work it out. And he saw that I was working it out from the ground up. And he said, I wish I could do that. I wish I could solve those problems.
And I told him, I wish I could get the answers that you can get. You can look at it and say that’s this kind of problem, this kind of equation with this kind of solution. And bingo, there’s the answer. And I said, I can’t do that. I have to start at the beginning and solve everything from the ground up. I can't just sort out what the right answer should be.
And so we both wished that we could do what the other one could do. But as it turned out, though, it made taking tests difficult for me. As it turned out in the long run, I was much better off. For sure. I was able to solve problems that other people couldn’t solve because – and I saw that a lot when I got out in industry working doing applied physics – that most of the people who got out of school, whether it was college or graduate school, who were trained technically, if the solution wasn’t in one of their textbooks, they’d have no idea how to approach the problem.
It’s like they were lost. They needed to have it worked out for them in a textbook and then, okay, if it’s a problem, like this problem in a textbook, they could go do it. But if it actually required them to come up with something new, something original, some understanding or some way of solving a problem that wasn’t in their textbook, they were just totally lost and had no idea how to start the problem. And that was unfortunate, but that’s where I shined. That was what I was good at, solving problems that nobody else knew how to solve. So then in my career where in my university and learning, I was at a big disadvantage with tests in my career. I was at a big advantage at being able to figure out things that other people couldn’t.
So what was a drag through school became a real value once I got out of the academic world and into the world of having to solve real problems, most of which are not in textbooks. There are a lot more complicated problems than textbook problems. Even things as simple as, which is your right hand, I could not memorise that this was my right hand. Finally I was able to memorise that when I was about 50 years old. I actually could memorise it. But up until then, if somebody said, “turn right”, in my mind, I’d have to think, all right, I have a ball and I’m going to throw the ball and I’d see myself throwing a ball and I know that I’m right-handed. So the arm I used to throw the ball with was my right hand. And ah, okay, this is my right hand. But I didn’t just know it. I couldn’t memorise it. It wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t available to me unless I went through this little process of figuring it out.
So my birthday was like that too. How old am I? I don’t know. I wouldn’t remember that. Oh, I knew about, plus or minus a year. I knew what it was. I knew about how old I was, but whether I was 27 or 28, I really didn‘t know, but I could figure it out. I’d have to figure it out, but I just couldn’t memorise it. It wouldn’t stick. My mind was like Teflon to everything that most people took for granted that they could memorise. I couldn’t memorise anything. I just had to figure it out. And I think that I was made that way on purpose, because that would force me to have to figure everything out from scratch and not be able to just come up with answers because I read it in a book.
JF: In The Master and The Emissary, Ian McGilchrist talks about the relationship between the left and right brain and the back and forth between the two. How have you noticed the balance between your intellect and intuition and the guidance that you have received from the Big Cheese or LCS?
TC: I’m a physicist. I’ve got a strong intellectual side, but I also have a very strong intuitive side. I choose to live in an intuitive space, because that’s a more interesting space, it is more valuable. The intellectual space is very limited because the intellect has logic. But to do things logically, you need a lot of information. And mostly you don’t have that much information. You know, who should I marry? Susie? Or should I marry Sally? How do you get that out of an intellectual space? You can’t, there’s just not enough information, so you just spin your wheels, and you get confused because you can’t figure it out.
None of what I have created, such as to write the book or invent the park, has been directed by the LCS or Big Cheese. It originates within me and then there is a certain amount of intuitive process, back and forth. The intellect and intuition working together as a team. I’m not a medium or messenger practising automatic writing, these are my own creations, but I don’t doubt that I may have been getting a nudge from the LCS that said, “These people who are just not getting the point of consciousness, they just can’t get there and hold that state very long. They need another path.” The rest I had to figure out for myself.
I didn’t get told this is the way reality worked. I had to figure it out. I came here with that mission and had to learn a lot of stuff in order to do it, a lot of intellectual stuff. So now I’m both – I'm a very strong intellectual and I’m a very strong intuitive thinker. Both have their values but work best when working together. One doesn’t try to dominate the other, typically the intellect tries to dominate the intuitive side, but mine they just work together. Where you need information, the intuitive side gets the information and where you need logic to put puzzles together, you know that the mind is logical.
Image 1: Hex Room 1
Image 2: Hex Room 4
Image 3: Lodge Floor Plan
Image 4: Map Book Key Page
Image 5: Tom's Park
Image 6: Map Poster
All images by Justin Snodgrass
Tom Campbell X Jemma Foster
Tom Campbell is a physicist, researcher, author and creator of Tom's Park.
JF: When I came across your tome My Big Toe: A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics: Awakening in 2012, together with Michael Talbot’s Holographic Universe it was the catalyst for a paradigm shift in my understanding of consciousness. Tom’s Park takes this a step further as a practical guide to achieving altered states of consciousness. It is a book but it is also an interactive course in altered states, which you describe as a ‘Virtual Imaginality’ game. How was it devised and how does it function?
TC: Tom’s Park is a tool that people can use to get into the altered states necessary to do all the paranormal things - lucid dreaming, astral projection, remote viewing and so on. It is an alternate reality, a park with lakes and lodges, people and activities, it is a place to gather information and learn things. It is a virtual reality that I have created in detail, and its geography, content and function are detailed in the book for people to engage with not as a story but as an interactive gaming experience and course in consciousness.
It relies on imagination not meditation, which is the traditional route to these altered states where you learn to discipline your mind and find the stable point of consciousness or void state. You have to empty your mind before you can become aware and then from there you can move into these exploratory states of consciousness . You don’t have to ever have meditated or know how to meditate for Tom’s Park, it’s a different process entirely. It uses the imagination instead of meditation. So you still have to learn some discipline, not in how to keep your mind empty for an hour, but instead you learn the discipline of letting your imagination run wild and not having your intellect come in and arrange things. You just let your imagination go and daydream. It’s a daydream that you’ve lost control of, a daydream that is just going off on its own. It may take some 5, 10, 20, 30 times in Tom’s Park before they’re able to imagine and just let their imagination run free, so it takes practice and some discipline, but you can bypass the 10-year commitment to meditation to get to the same place.
So it gives you something to focus on with your imagination that’s interesting and fun. And it doesn’t take long before people are able to get in there with their imagination and just let things happen. They can go to the hexagon building and do the paranormal things that they want to do, or they can just go and sit by the lake and chat to someone. For many people, the reason I created the park was that I had a lot of people who just weren’t able to get into a good intuitive space through meditation. They were just too left-brained, too much logic and process, and they couldn’t get their intellect to sit down and be quiet. The intellect was always up there, asking them and questioning, is this right? Are you doing it right? Are you not doing it right? Is this real? Is this not? And they couldn’t get that to be quiet and go through the imagination route.
Now they’ve been much more successful. So really, the thing that got me to create the park was an alternative way for people to get into the intuitive place where all the paranormal things are and where they have ready access to answers, things that’ll help them grow, things that’ll help them understand and see big pictures and they can get there through their imagination. And I have a whole bunch of real left-brain, engineer-scientist types, techies and so on, that have really appreciated the different route rather than the meditation route, because they just find that discipline too hard to do.
JF: I resonate with that. While I have a meditation practice, I have a strong imagination and I find that visualisations can invite the saboteur or trickster that will come in and distort the thing that I am visualising. With Tom’s Park, the foundations are solid. There’s enough information that you don’t have to think it up. It’s already there.
TC: Yeah. It’s all there. So it makes it easy to get there and not get lost in it. Like you say, if you just say, “Go daydream”, then yes, all kinds of things would be pouring in all the time. But this gives you an interesting enough place that you can focus on it. And it’s multi-sensory. You can taste and smell and touch and there’s textures. There’s just lots of different things there.
And the more you engage your senses in the daydream, the less likely it is that your intellect is going to come in and crash the party because you basically crowd the intellect out because you’re so busy with all these things you’re seeing and all the colours and all the interactions that your intellect just gets crowded out in the margin where there’s no room for it to step in and really do anything.
JF: You describe the LCS – the Large Consciousness System – as a co-host that tailors the experience of each individual to match their awareness. Is the LCS representative of the collective unconscious or higher realm of consciousness?
TC: The LCS is a co-host and I talked with the LCS and got an agreement that it would work with all the people who were in Tom’s Park and would pick up where their imagination got going. It would pick up with that story and start feeding them information and lead them off into whatever might be good for them to experience or help them grow. So all they have to do is get to the brink and open, and things are going to happen. That’s the whole idea of Tom’s Park. And it seems to work just the way it’s supposed to for most people.
JF: You also describe some glitches in the Park’s systems, for example people entering the kiosk turnstyle and losing their clothes. Is that something that was written into the narrative or something manifesting from shared experiences developing within Tom’s Park? A sort of 100th Monkey syndrome?
TC: I did write that into the narrative because what that does is give people not only permission, but even an expectation of the unexpected. If you have that, if you can give somebody a sense that an unexpected thing might happen, it tends to allow them to let things happen that are out of the ordinary. It opens them to the possibility of strangeness. The possibility of spontaneity. Whereas if you don’t put those in, then they might still have spontaneity, but it’s not as likely as if you give it to them. It leads people to the brink of an experience , but then lets it happen for them. So none of it is me holding their hand through any of it, I don’t guide people through the park.
When you go through this, you need to be a little careful because sometimes some strange things happen. The system has a good sense of humour. And people will play with that. And they have a lot of fun with that because it gives them – I don’t know, it’s not really permission, but it primes them to let their mind go in some unpredictable way and see what happens. See what falls out the other side.
And often when you do that, if you let your mind be unpredictable, you’ll find something that really is educational. You’ll learn from it. You’ll suddenly see something from a different perspective, or see an issue or a problem or a fear that you had. Because when you open yourself up to the spontaneous thing, you often get things that are inside of you, but not part of your intellect, they’re deeper than what your intellect sees. And that’s the stuff that pops out when you allow this. I encourage people to be creative, add things, take things away, move things around in the Park, whatever makes sense, customise it as you wish.
The things I put in the park are things that take you just up to the experience. You pick up the phone and talk with the man in charge - who I call The Big Cheese. That leads them to an experience of getting a communication and they’re open to it. But I don’t give them any idea of what that communication is going to be like because it is personal to them. Similarly, if they sit down in the movie theatre, they might witness a memory or a snapshot of a past life or something that they are interested in is going to play on the screen.
So the first part is getting in the intuitive mindset and being open to the experience. Secondly, the LCS is working with these people such that when they’re open, it sends them something meaningful, it sends them a data stream that helps them grow up, expand, raise their awareness. It helps give them information they want or need.
In terms of shared collective experience, I haven't documented collective experiences. They will happen, but primarily this is a single-player game. Of course there will be as people talk and say, “This is what happened to me,” then that opens up that as a possibility for other people. Over time, we will have some collective consciousness or unified field eventually develop around the park where there’s a lot of people who see certain things. And that will begin to be common, that people do see those things there, just because there will be a collective consciousness of those people who frequent the park. And in that collective consciousness, if you belong to that group, then you’ll get some feedback from that collective consciousness that will make it shared in that way.
Now, occasionally, you can go there with friends or meet people there, and that works. It’s a little harder to do, but it's possible. Like it’s the same thing. You read my book and you read where Dennis and I went out of body together and we had this big adventure that went on for a long time and we were with each other seeing the same things and whatever. So you could do the same thing at the park. If Dennis and I could do that out of body, two people could do that in the park. We have had any number of people who have interacted with some of their friends or other people or family while they were in the park. And both people were aware of the interaction. So that when they discussed it later, they agreed on what was going on and what they were doing.
JF: Do people tend to be drawn to a particular activity, in the way that lucid dreamers often all start out wanting to fly, before they get serious about intention. In general, are people there to play or are most headed for the Hexagon room to train in extrasensory skills?
TC: Yeah, both probably in equal numbers. There’s quite a few who just want to play and interact, have conversations, meet people, meet critters, talk to a horse. Just hang out and interact in a kind of a fun, very safe space. This appeals to people who are insecure or frightened in waking life about relationships or whatever, they know it’s going to be fine. I know a few people that go to Tom’s Park because they’re very shy. They have relationship issues. They have a hard time meeting people. They have a hard time speaking and opening up. In Tom’s Park, they’re working those kinds of problems out because it’s a safe place. They can go in and open up, they can make friends, they can have relationships, and it’s safe because that’s not going to blow up in their face. Some people come to heal an aspect or relationship and it is a safe place for that too. Then there are the ones that skip all that, just go right to the hexagon room and that’s their launchpad. After a while it becomes their own personal metaphor for their launchpad so that they can remote view or whatever paranormal things they do.
Everybody has imagination. Tom’s Park has all the ‘physical’ things to do that helps you develop that imagination to the point where then you can move on to the non-physical things. So I tell people, if you’re having trouble in the hexagon room, go back out into the park. Lie down in the sun. Feel the texture of the grass, go walk around the lake. Sit in one of the yellow benches that transports you someplace.
JF: Who are the staff, do you consider them to be projections of the player’s psyche or independent entities?
TC: They are entities as such. They started as non-player characters created by the larger consciousness system. So they were just NPCs. It’s like in a multiplayer virtual reality game, there are some players that are just created by the computer. They’re not players who pay $10 a month to get on their computer. They’re things generated by the computer just to interact with, give the other people their quest, so they’re part of the game. NPCs are just subsets of the LCS. They have free will because the LCS has free will, and they’re just played through the context of a particular character with a particular background and a particular family that they grew up in and all the backgrounds there. It’s just an NPC with a full life and background to focus on what this particular character is, so they have personality, they have their own quirks, they have some of their own beliefs and issues.
JF: Are they constant or do they adapt to each player?
TC: No. What happened is that the system started that way, but eventually some of these characters became very involved with other characters who come to the park and yes, people will go to the park and talk to the same people, so they go to the lake and see George every time. That becomes an important connection for them, this individual who happens to work there, and now the LCS can take an individual unit of consciousness and have that individual unit of consciousness play George in this game.
Here we are individual units of consciousness (IUOC) and I’m playing Tom and you’re playing Jemma, and we’re in this particular game. There’s some that are in Tom’s Park and the staff that work there and play there and interact with are there. When there was enough traffic in Tom’s Park to make that viable so that an IUOC could learn from its interactions and so on. Then it became another learning space. So it started out as NPCs, but it doesn't necessarily stay as NPCs. It turns into other IUOCs like us.
JF: Similar to dream reality. I’m often not myself in dreams, I will ‘play’ or inhabit other people. It’s that liminal space of working out whether the characters in your dream are projections of your unconscious or other dreamers dreaming.
TC: Yes. It could be like that. They’re just other players that you’re interacting with. So it’s really not much different than interacting with somebody here in this physical reality. It’s just that they don’t live here in this physical reality. You have to go visit them in the reality they live in.
JF: What about non-human consciousness as players, the horses and ducks?
TC: Those were all NPCs. And again, it’s the same thing. If they get to the point that there’s enough interaction where an IUOC can learn by playing that character or playing the character like that, then you’d let an IUOC do it. Inasmuch as that isn’t yet built up.
In other words, there’s not enough traffic, there’s not enough action going on because there’s not enough people in Tom’s Park to make that viable. But once it gets viable, then you switch over to other individual units of consciousness playing those roles. But initially, until the traffic builds up, it’s the LCS playing all the parts. That happened in this virtual reality too, as this virtual reality created beings that were conscious. Then it started out with the larger conscious system playing all of them. And it played them all till it got to a point that it said, okay, IUOCs.
I have some characters here that are going to be valuable to your growth. So now you start logging on and playing them. But initially, the larger conscious system played them all. So that’s how it develops. And Tom’s Park develops in the same way.
JF: Are the NPCs bound by a moral code or set programming, or do they have free will?
TC: No, the NPCs would act like they had free will because they have the free will of the larger conscious system. They’re just a character with a certain personality and background that the larger conscious system is playing. So rather than an IUOC playing it, the larger conscious system is playing it and the larger consciousness system has free will. So those characters do have free will, but the system tries to play them within a specific character.
And then once it turns it over to IUOCs, then the IUOCs have free will. So all the staff there have free will to interact with you freely. So you’re getting real interactions. And some of the people that would rather interact with critters than with people, they make very good friends with their horse or with a chipmunk or with a bear. They go hiking in the woods and make friends and do that.
So it’s a good, safe place for people to be in, and just be themselves. Be authentic. It’s a good place to try out the authentic you, and see how that plays.
JF: Can people seek out specific extrasensory training and skills?
TC: Sure. They can have that training while they’re there, if that’s what they want. There is a fear clinic for example. You get a person assigned to you and they then work as a team to help you get over your fear. And that’s basically you and the larger consciousness system that you’re interacting with is working now as a team to get over your fear. So it’s a pretty optimal situation.
JF: What is the role of the sacred in Tom’s Park? There are references such as the Lily pond consecrated by the Monk Masters of the 27th order. The avatar rejuvenation coordinators (ARC). The terminology and the language you use avoids references that could be prohibitive to certain people. For example, the description of the ARC is of angelic beings.
TC: Yes. I had to set up a lot of different metaphors for a lot of different people because some people resonate with one metaphor and don’t resonate with another. The park is a very spiritual place and it’s where you connect with wisdom. Where you connect with beings that are very advanced in their own growth, in their own getting rid of fear.
The people who are lightworkers and have their beams of light to get rid of dark stuff. There are people who don’t visualise at all, so they can’t do that, but maybe they feel their way through things. It is all metaphor anyway - there is no light, there is no dark stuff, there isn’t any of that. It’s a virtual reality. There’s only information. But intention modifies the probability of how that information will come out. It will evolve into this reality. So if you have a positive intent, however it looks to you, then you tend to evolve towards health, not towards illness.So that’s the way Tom’s Park is built to serve. Everybody will find something there that they can connect with in a very personal and in a very profitable way. And some people will connect to all of it. I suspect a person like you would tend to connect to all of it because you don’t just approach things from a single angle.
What it does is that the park has to work for all sorts of people, and some people work very well in a rational space. Other people work better in more of a mystical or religious space. It just depends on the individual. So I have some things for everybody there. Talking to a crew or a master who is a teacher that would help them learn. If you want to work with that metaphor, then yes, the larger consciousness system can work with you within that metaphor.
And there is no teacher more qualified than the LCS. It’s the thing that is the source of everything. So the system will interact with you within that context, because that’s a context that you like. If you’d rather have a different kind of context, then there’s different places in the park for almost everybody to work with. People might go to the hot springs to heal, but even taking a jetski out on the lake or talking to a horse can be somebody’s metaphor.
Some people would find a religious metaphor as something to stay away from. That would be, “Oh, I don’t want to have anything to do with religion or any kind of thing like that.” A lot of people are like that. The people who would come to Tom’s Park are because they may even be atheists and think the whole idea of any kind of spiritual thing is nonsense. But there’s this other reality out here called consciousness, and I can explore that. It’s just a different metaphor, the experience is the same.
In our Western culture, we highly prize the intellectual side. And the places where people develop that intellectual side in order to do real complex things with it, they get high salaries, they get the respect and credibility, and people look up to them.
On the other hand, the people who are right-brained and have developed their intuitive side, they get called names like ‘airhead’ and ‘woowoo’ and that kind of stuff. They are not highly regarded in our culture. They end up doing things that don’t have high salaries because our culture doesn’t value it as much.
In our culture, people spend 99% of their time developing their intellectual side because that’s the side that gets rewarded. And they just ignore their intuitive side. As a matter of fact, scientists will tell you there is no such thing as intuition, it doesn’t even exist.
JF: So a great unlearning has to happen.
TC: Yes. So you see the difference. Here we are with this really well-developed intellectual side and an intuitive side that is not even as good as it was when you were three years old.
JF: Is this what the Cosmic Brain Drain Library is about? Dissolving the rigidity of left brain intellect to engage in the plasticity of intuitive seeking?
TC: That’s part of it. We go there to get a deeper understanding of things that we can’t grasp without our intellectual mind. Intuitive understanding rather than intellectual understanding. You’ll come away understanding things better, but you won’t really know why or be able to explain it to somebody else because it’s not intellectual. We need that intellect to explain it to somebody else, but you’ll know it anyway. You’ll have that knowing sense that this is the way it is.
JF: What were your conversations like co-creating Tom’s Park with the LCS?
TC: Yeah, the LCS and I have a good working relationship. I’ve interacted with it personally for a long time. And I said, “Look, I’ve got an idea that I think’s going to help a lot of people grow up and it’s going to be particularly advantageous to those that are struggling, that would like to expand and are having trouble with it”
I present my ideas and the LCS says, ”Great idea. I think it’ll work. I think it’ll be good. And it says, “I’ll support it.” So then it’s aware of anybody going into Tom’s Park. It’s aware of that and it’s there to help, but it’s not there to do it for them or just to give them things. They have to interact, they have to connect to it. It’s not like going to a library and getting a book out that you need to read. You have to interact and own it and you have to come to the conclusion yourself. You have to see the big picture. And that’s what the LCS is all about. It evolves as we evolve. Our evolution is its evolution.
JF: Would you describe the LCS as a group, guides as such, or a single source?
TC: Not so much anymore. It began as a group, but now it is just one-on-one, mostly. I also work directly with the Big Cheese. I have a one-on-one and I have a more personal relationship with the big cheese. It would be fair enough to say, we’re good friends.
JF: In Tom’s Park, you describe the Big Cheese as the manager, an omnipotent entity, or the creator. Why the ‘Big Cheese' and what is your relationship to them?
TC: Tom’s Park also has a little humour with it. We don’t want people to take themselves or Tom’s Park too seriously or start praying to the Big Cheese. You’re here to grow and you can’t grow if you're all wadded up with fear – you have to have a light attitude. The more you let go of that intellect, the more childlike you are in some ways, you play.
The Big Cheese is an entity that I have known and interacted with since I was very young, when I had spiritual teachers that interacted with me when I was very little – 6, 7 years old. Now, at that time, he was not the Big Cheese, he was just somebody who was working with me for his own reasons and had worked with me before and other lifetimes. So I knew him then and have known him for a long time. And he got the job of being The Big Cheese, I don’t know, about 20 years ago or so.
We were friends then and we’re still friends now. When I was a teenager, I could always get information from beings that I communicated with. I didn’t know that was unusual at the time, I thought everybody did that. I didn’t really have any names for these beings, I’d just think and I’d put out my query and I would get information back, and the guy who is the Big Cheese now was one of those people for me. They worked with me for quite a while. I was groomed to be of value to them, there were things I was supposed to do. They weren't just coming here to see what would happen, which is the way it is most of the time, they wanted to keep me on track to where I needed to be and that was the job of the Big Cheese.
JF: So the Big Cheese was an entity that had lived human lifetimes, acted as your guide and then ascended as a spiritual master, or IUCS with a greater perspective, to support human consciousness?
TC: Yes, let's say that the Big Cheese is a manager of a subset of reality, but also as an individual unit of consciousness. Some are just bigger and have more capacity than others. The larger consciousness system is also an individual unit of consciousness. It’s just bigger and does more and has more responsibility. It’s all consciousness, it’s the operating system, not all the piece parts, like we are. The LCS takes pieces of itself and makes IUCS out of them. So you and I and the Big Cheese are all individuated units of consciousness, but the Big Cheese operates at a much higher level with a much bigger picture than most of us operate at.
There’s a lot of other virtual realities (VRs) like what we call the physical reality that we live in. That’s a virtual reality, but that’s not the only virtual reality. It’s not like all the conscious systems eggs are all in this one basket. There’s lots of virtual realities. Some of them like this one that seem physical and others that are more dreamlike and lots of things in between.
So there’s this big subset of VRs that the big cheese is kind of manager of, because anytime you have a VR, you have rules. And when you have the big picture of that, you have multiple VRs. You also have rules about how beings in the various VRs can interact with each other.
So whenever you have rules, you have to have some way to enforce the rules to make sure the rules are being obeyed. You also have to have some way to learn to make better rules. Because rules shouldn’t be dead things, things evolve and so rules evolve, they need to be alive. Something needs to oversee things, how can we improve or modify things for the better? That’s who the Big Cheese is.
JF. So holographic universe aside, where the Big Cheese comes from the LCS and the LCS is inside the Big Cheese, would you describe the boss of the Big Cheese as the LCS?
TC: Yes the Big Cheese answers to the LCS, but that’s really our boss too, in the sense we’re pieces of that larger consciousness system. So there are individual units of consciousness that are small – your cat and your dog and your horse and the raccoon that lives in the woods, those are small pieces of individual units of consciousness. Then there’s bigger ones that have bigger pictures, like humans. And then there’s bigger pictures, like the Big Cheese, and then there’s even bigger pictures yet, like the LCS. But they’re all individual units of consciousness, from the raccoon up to the Big Cheese. They’re all chunks of consciousness and they’re all part of this one consciousness system.
JF: As a sensitive right-brained child, how did you end up being a physicist?
TC: It was an absolutely necessary part of it because, In several incarnations before that, I was not in any kind of a technical space. I was always in a right-brained, intuitive space kind of person and being, and I needed to become more balanced. I needed to have both.
So when I got here, as a very young child, I was a very intuitive child. I understood all sorts of things that no child should understand. I was very aware of things and my sister would tell you that we’d go on long rides. This is when I was like four or five, six years old. We’d go on a long trip someplace and she and I would be in the back seat of the car. The parents would be up front and you know how it is with children, every 10 minutes. Are we there yet? It’s hard for kids to sit still in the backseat of a car. And my sister wanted to play and interact with me, but most of the time I would be lost.
I would go into a chant, I’d have this little chant going on and I wasn’t there. And I’d wake up after we got to wherever we were going. So the whole trip took two or three minutes for me. I was only aware for a few minutes of it. I got in the car and then I got out of the car and we were there. It’s almost like we teleported because I wasn’t aware of the trip itself, which annoyed my sister to no end. Because then she had to sit in the backseat by herself. So sometimes I would play with her. She was two years older than me, so sometimes she could get me going. But in any case, I was very right-brained and very intuitive and not too much on that reduction aside.
But I knew even at a young age that’s what I had to become. I had to learn how to be left brain, had to learn how to think in that way. I had to learn logic. I had to learn math, I had to learn science. And that was not easy for me. It wasn’t natural. It took a lot of work to do that. I had to put a lot of effort into that and practice, to work at it before I got it. And it wasn’t until I probably was out of graduate school before a lot of it sunk in. I learned what I had to learn, but I got there in my middle 20s. I finally conquered that intellectual space to where I could live in that space and understand it very well and could think that way, and that was necessary because My Big Toe is basically a ramp for logical people.
There are literally thousands of books that will help people who are already intuitive, help the right-brainers gain a bigger picture. But the left-brain people can’t read those books. They get just a little way in and they just say, “I just don’t understand this, this doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t see the logic in it and I can’t deal with it,” and they throw it away
JF: That’s what I needed. That’s why it had such a profound effect on me, because II needed to understand with my mind before my mind would allow me to understand from an intuitive space.
TC: Exactly. And a lot of people are that way and they just can’t get it in our culture. So our culture makes all these left-brain people because that’s what’s valued in our culture.
That’s what we grow to be, that’s what we’re encouraged to do. And then we can’t get that bigger picture. There is no bigger picture. Our picture’s limited to just what we can do with our intellect. So my job was to write this book, the set of books that would be the on ramp for those people who were intellectuals who needed rationality, needed a logical process to get there. And once they got there, oh now they could get the big picture and see it and develop their intuitive side. But there wasn’t any way for them to get there.
And the movers and the shakers, the people who made a lot of difference in our culture, were all left-brain people. They were the people that ran things and they were shut off basically from the bigger picture of how things worked. So I couldn’t write that book unless I was one of them. I couldn’t write it from a right-brain perspective because my language would’ve been such that, they just wouldn’t have been able to deal with it.
So I had to write it like a physicist would write it, it had to be logical. You had to be this, this enabled you to see that, which enables you to see the next thing. And by time you got through all the books, ’wow, there's this other whole reality out there I didn’t know about.
You had to lead people there and you had to lead people there with good rationality, with logic. Yeah. So that was one of the missions that I had to do. So I knew that, yes, I had to learn how to do mathematics. I had to learn how to do physics. I had to develop that side of me. It was a very important requirement for me this time.
But I struggled with it. And, all the way through school, even graduate school, I always had to figure everything out from basic principles. I didn’t memorise things, the memorise-and-regurgitate-the answers sort of thing. I just couldn’t go there.
I had to understand it and I had to start from basic principles and then derive it from there, which made me very slow as far as getting right answers on tests. I was very slow because I’d have to start at the beginning and derive everything and get to the right answer, which is a much lengthier process than just memorising what the right answer is.
JF: That’s what learning should be, but in mainstream education systems It’s not encouraged to actually learn. It’s encouraged to just cram it in enough to get it out for the test. And then you can forget it all.
TC: I remember sitting in graduate school with a guy who was from University of Chicago and he had learned the plug and jug way. He had probably better math skills than I did. And he looked at me and he said he had this problem, he couldn’t work. I worked it out for him and showed him how to work it out. And he saw that I was working it out from the ground up. And he said, I wish I could do that. I wish I could solve those problems.
And I told him, I wish I could get the answers that you can get. You can look at it and say that’s this kind of problem, this kind of equation with this kind of solution. And bingo, there’s the answer. And I said, I can’t do that. I have to start at the beginning and solve everything from the ground up. I can't just sort out what the right answer should be.
And so we both wished that we could do what the other one could do. But as it turned out, though, it made taking tests difficult for me. As it turned out in the long run, I was much better off. For sure. I was able to solve problems that other people couldn’t solve because – and I saw that a lot when I got out in industry working doing applied physics – that most of the people who got out of school, whether it was college or graduate school, who were trained technically, if the solution wasn’t in one of their textbooks, they’d have no idea how to approach the problem.
It’s like they were lost. They needed to have it worked out for them in a textbook and then, okay, if it’s a problem, like this problem in a textbook, they could go do it. But if it actually required them to come up with something new, something original, some understanding or some way of solving a problem that wasn’t in their textbook, they were just totally lost and had no idea how to start the problem. And that was unfortunate, but that’s where I shined. That was what I was good at, solving problems that nobody else knew how to solve. So then in my career where in my university and learning, I was at a big disadvantage with tests in my career. I was at a big advantage at being able to figure out things that other people couldn’t.
So what was a drag through school became a real value once I got out of the academic world and into the world of having to solve real problems, most of which are not in textbooks. There are a lot more complicated problems than textbook problems. Even things as simple as, which is your right hand, I could not memorise that this was my right hand. Finally I was able to memorise that when I was about 50 years old. I actually could memorise it. But up until then, if somebody said, “turn right”, in my mind, I’d have to think, all right, I have a ball and I’m going to throw the ball and I’d see myself throwing a ball and I know that I’m right-handed. So the arm I used to throw the ball with was my right hand. And ah, okay, this is my right hand. But I didn’t just know it. I couldn’t memorise it. It wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t available to me unless I went through this little process of figuring it out.
So my birthday was like that too. How old am I? I don’t know. I wouldn’t remember that. Oh, I knew about, plus or minus a year. I knew what it was. I knew about how old I was, but whether I was 27 or 28, I really didn‘t know, but I could figure it out. I’d have to figure it out, but I just couldn’t memorise it. It wouldn’t stick. My mind was like Teflon to everything that most people took for granted that they could memorise. I couldn’t memorise anything. I just had to figure it out. And I think that I was made that way on purpose, because that would force me to have to figure everything out from scratch and not be able to just come up with answers because I read it in a book.
JF: In The Master and The Emissary, Ian McGilchrist talks about the relationship between the left and right brain and the back and forth between the two. How have you noticed the balance between your intellect and intuition and the guidance that you have received from the Big Cheese or LCS?
TC: I’m a physicist. I’ve got a strong intellectual side, but I also have a very strong intuitive side. I choose to live in an intuitive space, because that’s a more interesting space, it is more valuable. The intellectual space is very limited because the intellect has logic. But to do things logically, you need a lot of information. And mostly you don’t have that much information. You know, who should I marry? Susie? Or should I marry Sally? How do you get that out of an intellectual space? You can’t, there’s just not enough information, so you just spin your wheels, and you get confused because you can’t figure it out.
None of what I have created, such as to write the book or invent the park, has been directed by the LCS or Big Cheese. It originates within me and then there is a certain amount of intuitive process, back and forth. The intellect and intuition working together as a team. I’m not a medium or messenger practising automatic writing, these are my own creations, but I don’t doubt that I may have been getting a nudge from the LCS that said, “These people who are just not getting the point of consciousness, they just can’t get there and hold that state very long. They need another path.” The rest I had to figure out for myself.
I didn’t get told this is the way reality worked. I had to figure it out. I came here with that mission and had to learn a lot of stuff in order to do it, a lot of intellectual stuff. So now I’m both – I'm a very strong intellectual and I’m a very strong intuitive thinker. Both have their values but work best when working together. One doesn’t try to dominate the other, typically the intellect tries to dominate the intuitive side, but mine they just work together. Where you need information, the intuitive side gets the information and where you need logic to put puzzles together, you know that the mind is logical.
Image 1: Hex Room 1
Image 2: Hex Room 4
Image 3: Lodge Floor Plan
Image 4: Map Book Key Page
Image 5: Tom's Park
Image 6: Map Poster
All images by Justin Snodgrass