The Living Conversation · A podcast on philosophy

Awakening, Incarnation & Free Will | Dean Graves on the Evolution of Consciousness

January 12, 2026·26 min·4 clips

Anthony Wright introduces Dean Graves as an author, podcaster, keynote speaker, mental health counselor, and meditation and mindfulness guide, then asks what set him on this path. Graves says it starts with awakening. He describes it as the moment when conventional success stops being enough. The hosts ask whether that belongs more to Eastern or Western thought. Graves says the experience is universal, even if different traditions explain and prepare for it in different ways. Adam Dietz shifts the conversation toward mindfulness. Graves widens the frame into a larger cosmology of creation. He says free will is the originating distortion that lets creation begin and unfold. He argues that the usual free-will debate often misses the deeper point. For him, choosing left or right is only one expression of a wider structure. He describes free will as the sense of separation, which gives beings a field of choice. Those choices make it possible to know the self through contact with others. Graves then turns to his own intellectual path. He says his teenage years were chaotic, but university and philosophy eventually pulled him into sharper focus. Kant mattered to him because of the claim that people cannot truly experience the world as it is. He says Buddhist teaching pushes on the same question and challenges ordinary assumptions about reality. The conversation pauses for a break, then ends with contact details, a website, and a light cosmic joke about humanity repeating itself across multiple planets.

As heard by us

A slow, serious search for what awakening means when success is no longer enough.

This episode follows a conversation about awakening, free will, and the point where conventional success stops feeling like enough. Dean Graves moves from a personal turning point into philosophy, with mindfulness, Buddhism, and Kant all pulled into the same search for a truer…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a calm, searching conversation about awakening, free will, and consciousness.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Living Conversation