ABOUT TIMOTHY DESMOND

Timothy Owen Desmond, who also goes by his acronym, Tod, was born in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1971. He attended Catholic schools until his last two years of high-school, after which he went back to a Catholic, Jesuit school, Boston College University, in 1989. During his first semester there, after being exposed to Plato and other great masters of Western philosophy and theology, he dropped out of the School of Management and enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences so he could double-major in Philosophy and Political Science. He graduated in 1993. By his senior year he decided to dedicate his life to serving God by studying philosophy, with a focus on the Krishna-worshipping, Gaudiya Vaishnava school of Vedanta, Plato, Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. Knowing that his unique interpretation of these topics would not likely harmonize with most graduate school philosophy programs, for the next thirteen years he studied and wrote independently. To support himself he worked at various jobs in Southern Maryland, Boston, and Washington, D.C., including tree-farm work, night-watchman duties, and clerical work near Capitol Hill. In 2006, after being advised by publishers that he was not likely to get published without a Ph.D., he went back to school. Continuing his tradition with Jesuit education, he earned a Master of Liberal Studies degree from Georgetown University in 2008. After that, in 2009, he earned an M.A. in Political Science with a concentration in Alternative Futures Studies from the University of Hawai’i in Manoa, where he focused on how to apply the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics to the Constitution. Finally, he earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2014. It was while studying there that he discovered the parallels between Leonard Susskind’s holographic string theory and Jungian psychology, which became the topic of his dissertation, and then his book, Psyche and Singularity: Jungian Psychology and Holographic String Theory, which was published in 2018. Most recently, in 2023, he published an online course based largely on his book, with additional material from Joseph Campbell and Ernest Becker, titled Immortality and the Unreality of Death: A Hero’s Journey through Philosophy, Psychology, and Physics.