Tami Simon: [00:00:00]
Welcome friends to this special series from Sounds True Once More, exploring Reincarnation and the Gap Between Lives. In this episode, my guest is Christopher Bish, professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for more than three decades.
He’s also the author of several influential books. They’ve been influential in my life and in the lives of many spiritual explorers and including a book called Life Cycles. Reincarnation and the Web of Life. It’s a book described as one of the most intelligent and broad ranging discussions of reincarnation ever encountered.
He’s also the author of the book LSD and The Mind of the Universe, a book in which Kris Chronicles a 20 year [00:01:00] exploration of the structure of the cosmos through his engagement in more than 70 high dose LSD sessions. Chris, welcome.
Christopher Bache: Hi, Tammy. Very glad to be here with you.
Tami Simon: I’m so excited to have this conversation with you.
Really, I’m kind of jumping outta my skin, so to speak. Here’s where I wanna start. You write reincarnation is an idea that’s hard to see at first, but once seen it changes everything. Yeah, and I wanna break this down a little bit. Hard to see it first. What allowed you to see it at first?
Christopher Bache: Ian Stevenson’s research.
He was at the University of Virginia. He’s considered the, the Charles Darwin of e of Reincarnation thought, uh, his research, uh, oh. About 11 books published documenting in detail studies [00:02:00] children from around the world who have spontaneous memories of their previous lives. And he was able to, uh, get to them, document their memories, verify their memories, or falsify, uh, and published multiple books.
Uh, and that, that just turned my mind around. And then later as I began to move into my own self-exploration, both in the LSD work and also with hypnotherapy, I encountered a number of my own former lives and worked with them. Um, so it was both a personal experiential, uh, encounter, but first it was an intellectual encounter with Ian Stevenson’s work.
Tami Simon: Dr. Ian Stevenson’s work and the continuing work at the Division of Perceptual Studies at University of Virginia has been really part of the inspiration behind this special series that sounds true, exploring Reincarnation. And we have two different [00:03:00] guests included in this series who are part of the division of Perceptual Studies, which brings me to the next question.
3000 documented stories, very compelling research. Yeah. Why is this hard to see for so many of us?
Christopher Bache: It is hard to see, uh, first of all because the effects of reincarnation are subtle. Uh, the ending of a life at death is definitive. The beginning of appearing of life at, at birth is kind of clear, but, but the carryover, continuities of reincarnation or subtle.
But I think the most important reason that it’s hard for many of us to see it is because basically science is the religion of our era. And science in its early stages has been wedded to, uh, a concept that matter is the only thing that’s real. There is nothing in the universe that we can’t explain [00:04:00] except reduc reducing it to its material substrate.
And this belief basically tells us that it suggests that our mind. Basically is generated by our brain. And when our brain disappears, our, our mind disappears too, like a light bulb that goes out. And so with this belief that everything is material, that there is no independent spiritual universe, and with the belief that our mind reduces to brain, then we basically undercut any possibility of allowing the existence of reincarnation because it assumes the, a parallel dimension of spiritual reality.
And that makes it hard for my colleagues, for example, in the department where I talk, is very hard for them to really even look at the evidence seriously, because they have such countervailing, um, belief systems.
Tami Simon: And then we get to the final part of this quote, which is really the most important to [00:05:00] me.
Once seen, it changes everything. And I wanna talk about that because I’m noticing even now as we’re going deeper into the interviews in this series, impacts that it’s having on how I view my life. Yeah. A, a level of relaxation that’s starting to come in that previously was unknown. And I’m curious how you, in your own life, this taking on of a reincarnation view instead of, as you call it, a one timer’s perspective, how it’s changed things for you.
Big question.
Christopher Bache: Yeah, well, there’s lots of spinoffs on that question. Uh, it does change everything. And as you live within a Reincarnational worldview, uh, and kind of think through it and live through it and apply it to your life circumstances, it deepens. And so what, [00:06:00] what stands out in the early years is different from what stands out in the later years.
Uh, and it all hinges I think, upon an understanding that, um, we have a vast quantity of time in which to live and develop and grow. Within the universe. We don’t, we aren’t simply a 100-year-old project adjunct to the universe’s billion, multi-billion year project. But we are actually ancient beings who have been reincarnating for millennia, millennia, hundreds of thousands of years.
And as such, we are part of the universe’s extensive, uh, development. Now, as a, a philosopher, that means a great deal to me because when I look at the magnificent photographs coming out of the Hubble or other, you know, space telescopes, and I see this magnificent use universe massive and vast in its [00:07:00] depth and beauty, if I only live one time through, I basically am a bar, a part-time player in this, I’m a sideshow in this universe.
But once we understand that nature. The intelligence within and behind nature has found a way not only to evolve whole species as we think in evolution, but to invol evolve individuals within certain species as in human beings. Then I think we have, it just is, is a new starting point. It’s a new starting point.
It changes your understanding of your identity because it’s beautiful and it’s important, uh, as our individual body mind awareness is. Our ego is, it’s just one facet of the, the diamond that the soul is. There are other facets we can encounter, we can meet, and which we will become, uh, part of this larger diamond as we die or even as we wake up.
On this [00:08:00] planet, it changes your relationships to your children, so you stop seeing them as somehow an extension of your genetic and your wife’s genetic, uh, heritage. You begin to see that your genetic matrix is a nest, which catches an incoming soul. And so the child that you’re holding may be. Thousands of years older than you are in a soul perspective.
And so I don’t see children as children anymore, and I don’t see old people as old people anymore. I, I tend to think in terms of souls and there are some children who are very old souls and some adults who are very young souls in, in their foolishness. Um, so it, to me it’s, it’s a fresh starting point. It also speaks to, of course, always paired with reincarnation is the concept of karma, of cause and effect, and that there is a, a cause and effect that derives from the choices that we make.[00:09:00]
Extended in our extended lives that those choices carry over and set up the conditions within which I’m living in this lifetime. And then when you explore the the data more carefully, you learn that there is a great deal of evidence that suggests that we choose the life that we are born into. And that makes an enormous DA difference because when we look at our life, and it may be a life of pain and suffering, it may be of unexpected hardship, it may be a life of ease.
To understand that we chose this life at a time when we know knew more than we know now. We chose this life that tends to deepen our, uh, commitment to working with the conditions of this life, trusting in a, in a deeper intelligence that brought us into these circumstances. So to me it, it’s, it’s an absolutely fresh starting point in philosophy.
I mean, it really, [00:10:00] your, your whole philosophical insights diverge between the one road, which says we only incarnate once. And another road, which says, no, we incarnate many times. They very go in very different directions.
Tami Simon: Now there’s one place I wanna slow down and understand a bit more because when it comes to the research at the Division of Perceptual studies, 3000 documented cases of young children who remember their past lives, anyone who looks at this and really kicks the tire, so to speak, has to come away taking that seriously.
Christopher Bache: I think so. Now
Tami Simon: the interpretation of it is of course more something that we can discuss. Yeah. So when you were talking about how this evidence, which leads to a belief, these are reincarnated young children, they remember lives, they could have had no access to that information. Okay, I’m with you. But now you are saying there’s data [00:11:00] that says we choose, use the word data, that we choose our lives.
And that I became a little skeptical there and I was like, is there, this seems like it’s more a realm of. Positing a theory, but I’m curious how you view it.
Christopher Bache: Yeah. I think the work done at the University of Virginia department is critically important for putting reincarnation on the table with strong intellectual credentials.
But personally, when I look at Ian Stevens’s magnificent work, it became clear to me that he doesn’t have a fully, he doesn’t have a, a rich textured understanding of the entire cycle of reincarnation. What happens to us when we die, what the structure of postmortem existence is, and what the deeper intentional.
Purpose of reincarnation might be, and that’s perfectly fine because his job [00:12:00] is to work close to the data. And the data which he’s working with is data where you have two lives which are very closely enmeshed so that the time interval between the death of one and the birth of the other is two and a half years for his subjects.
And the distance, the between the life place of the first in life and the life place of the second in life is approximately 50 miles. So that’s faster than the population at large and closer than the population at large. So these are an exceptional subset of human beings who have this memory of their former lives.
There is other. Uh, work, uh, Edith Fioris work and, and people looking at larger demographics, trying to give people experiences of regression and then trying to document where they went to. And looking at the larger numbers, we find that people incarnate on average much more slowly and much [00:13:00] farther a field than they do now.
Once you allow reincarnation on your maybe table, and you can then start looking at other bodies of evidence, you can look at the bodies of evidence that come out of the mystical traditions, the spiritual traditions, va Adriana, Buddhism’s, extensive, you know, treatment of reincarnation, uh, particularly in, uh, the self-consciously and reincarnated, uh, enlightened beings tuku.
We can also look at the evidence coming from past life therapy, which I don’t think is as strong. A body of evidence as Ian Stevenson’s evidence. But once Ian Stevenson’s evidence is absorbed, it gives us permission, I think, to look seriously at the patterns that emerge in past life therapy work. And here I’m thinking particularly on the question you ask about choosing our next life.
I’m thinking of Michael Newton’s work, his [00:14:00] excellent books, journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls. And Michael Newton was a therapist who got drawn into past life therapy. He was working as a past life therapist, hypnotherapist. And then he made a mistake one day and he accidentally gave an ambiguous instruction, which his client ran with.
And he began to realize that his client was describing what happened to him after his death in his previous lifetime. He did not think this was even possible, but he took eventually hundreds of people through. Uh, uh, transitioned from their previous in, uh, incarnation and death and he began to ask them questions to explore and provide content to the nature of postmortem existence.
And he found that there is a civilization of spiritual reality. There is a civilization, there is a kind of almost, if you will, a university of [00:15:00] education in going on in spiritual reality. And one of the things he found his clients describing is choosing their next incarnation and what he calls, um, following one client, the Ring of Destiny, where basically with your spiritual guides, you come before this council and you are shown several.
That they recommend that you would choose from to develop your own spiritual capacities, long, greater. You don’t have to accept any of them, and some people don’t. Um. But you can ex, you see the early stages of your life. You see a sense of what the trajectory is. You don’t see the whole of the life, but you get a a, an experiential contact with what the themes of this life would be and who you would be spending this life with.
So that we make a choice to choose the [00:16:00] life that we have incarnated, and we do it in concert with the other beings that we have incarnate, that we are incarnating with together. So it’s not just each individual separately, but it’s incarnating in groups, incarnating in patterns to support each other in our collective work.
Tami Simon: I think the reason, Chris, that my questioning mind comes in. Mm-hmm. So I’m with you with reincarnation being on the maybe table and I think the listeners to this series. There’s been enough said they’ve, they’ve gotten there. But when it gets to things like the structure of post-mortem experience and the council that’s there, my spirit guides that are guiding me, you know, so many people say different things about it.
Like they have different, it’s not like there’s some, uh, agreement across the board. 90% of the people say the same thing about postmortem experience. So that’s where I get confused. I don’t have my own access [00:17:00] to it. Yeah. So I can’t say for my own experience and when I hear a bunch of different things, I think, I don’t know.
Christopher Bache: Yeah, that’s
understandable, isn’t
it? You know, I think something similar happens in, uh, studying near death episodes that people do seem to have different experiences when they almost die and come back. Um, and sometimes these experiences are, seem to be contradictory. Be a one person has a near death experience in which Jesus is the savior of the universe, only son of God.
And another one person has an experience in which he sees all the religious saints and, and saviors as simply, um, manifestations of older souls on earth, and no one being its superior to the other. But when you take all of the experiences together and you look at them critically and you begin to sift through them.
Certain universal patterns begin to emerge patterns, which Kenneth Ring has documented beautifully in a number of his books. And I [00:18:00] think the same thing is true, uh, with reincarnation research. There is a, a wide diversity of opinion on what happens in postmortem existence. But if you take the large body of data and you sort of sift out really looking at it, the get data, I think, which has the most value is data, which has been gathered by professionals, uh, who are critical cri, have a critical posture to their evidence.
I think once again, you begin to find universal trajectories moving through the data so that it’s not simply a matter of he says, she says, and it’s, it’s hopelessly chaotic. I think there are structural similarities and once you place the reincarnation memories. Alongside the near death episode Memories, and you place that alongside the, some of the deep spiritual traditions, teachings on the structure of the bardo, and you place that alongside psychedelic, deep psychedelic experiences for [00:19:00] accessing these domains.
What you find is that these bodies of data do not diverge in a hundred different directions, that there’s actually a convergence of opinion on at a deeper structural level. So I think it’s important to be looking at that structural content.
Tami Simon: Chris, we’re connecting. I feel quite happy about how you’re, uh, hearing my concerns and taking me step by step.
So let’s keep going here. Okay. What are the trends you could say, the patterns, the identifiable places of agreement, about the structure of postmortem experience, and dare I say, what we can expect.
Christopher Bache: Well, I think we can expect to be surprised by how valued we are. By the intelligence that’s behind the entire manifest universe.[00:20:00]
Um, we, I think we’ll be surprised by the love that’s waiting for us. The, the unqualified acceptance of our being and the depth of that love that’s waiting for us and the intelligence that we are being returned to. Basically death is a time of homecoming, a time of expansion, a time of remembering things that we forgot.
When we incarnated a time of remembering the deeper, our deeper identity, which I think of as our soul identity, a time of remembering deeper, the deeper texture of relationships that the people that we are connected to. Importantly. In our incarnate life, that those relationships have a history, a deeper history which we can remember when we die.
Uh, and so that the community of beings when we die is a, not a community of simply dead human beings, but they’re community of souls. [00:21:00] And souls are a hundred thousand year old beings, not a hundred year old beings. I think we can, uh, I think what happens when we die is there is a period of, of gradual reintegration.
We are escorted into this experience soul territory. Gradually, carefully. Uh, we are assisted in this process. Some people need. More remedial work than others. People who have given themselves over to violence and anger and, and injuring of other people violating the fundamental oneness of life often have to be, um, taken back into oneness carefully and gradually with a lot of attention to healing other people whose lives have been given over to compassion and generosity and service move through this transitional period more slowly.
But eventually there is this transitional period ends the, the process of digesting your life, [00:22:00] digesting everything that happened to you, everything that you experience, the what the near death episode people experience as the life review happens when we die, um, but eventually that entire digesting of your most recent life ends, you return to your deeper identity.
It’s not like Chris b. Doesn’t just return to a deeper Chris be, but Chris Bees reintegrates with Chris’s soul, which is a, a much, much larger, uh, extensive identity. And the community of beings in the afterlife is basically there’s this community of souls, community of beings with deeper knowledge. One of the other patterns is that older learners help younger learners.
It’s a process in which, um, it’s just recognized that people are at different stages of their own spiritual and evolutionary development. Older learners help younger [00:23:00] learners, and we tend to travel together in groups. It’s kind of the most natural thing. Students do it at the university. They form relationships with people in their freshman year and they tend to stay in touch through their entire cycle.
So there are these patterns, uh. I think underlying all of it though, for me, the most important is the extraordinary love and, uh, acceptance and intelligence and wisdom that we are met with so profoundly that it completely just takes our fear away and takes all of our misgivings about dying and overwhelms us with this profound sense of the joy of being where we are.
And this is described by the Near Death episode, people extensively just so much joy that they don’t want to go back when they’re told they have to go back. They’d rather be where they, where they are. [00:24:00] I think these are, uh, these run, these are some, just some of the universal themes that run through the deeper accounts.
Tami Simon: Yeah. Now one thread I want to pick up, because you talked about this notion of having choice about our next incarnation. Mm-hmm. And I think at, at least before recording this series, I held a, a viewpoint, I’m not sure if it was valid or not. I guess my working hypothesis was that some souls have a choice and some don’t.
And it depends on the strength of your habit patterns. And if your habit patterns, your karma, if you will, are just so strong, your next incarnation’s just gonna be a product of that. And that actually having a choice is a, a relatively evolved place where that option occurs. And I’m wondering how you see that.
Christopher Bache: I think that’s makes sense to me what you’re describing. [00:25:00] I think of it sort of, since I’m in education, I tend to fall back on educators metaphors. Um, when people are in the first or second grade, we don’t give them any choice of what they study in school. Here’s your books, here’s your curriculum. This is what you do.
And as you move into high school, you have more choices of what courses you want to take. And when you go into college, you have radically more freedom to self define your educational trajectory. And I think it probably is something like that for souls. Young souls require more spiritual guidance and they basically kind of, if they’re wise, they go where their spiritual helpers or guardians.
Advise them to go. And I think it’s also true that some people are so locked in to rigid kind of behavior patterns, that it’s hard even in the afterlife for choice to really enter in and help them, uh, digest those patterns and make new, new directions [00:26:00] started. But as we get more experience, I think, uh, our choice increases.
We become more self-directive. We understand what’s happening better, uh, and we can, we can make better choices. And we are given the freedom to make those choices. We’re also given the freedom to make bad choices. It wouldn’t be choice if we didn’t have that freedom. Some people, uh, uh, Newton, Michael Newton describes choose to reject.
The lies that were offered to them by their guardians. And when they incarnate, they then report, uh, a life that sort of, without a feeling of, of, uh, direction, without a feeling of, uh, intuitive alignment with their circumstances or people because they, they literally have incarnated in pure improvisational mode, and they don’t kind of have that inner blueprint that most of us have.
That tells us when we are in alignment [00:27:00] with our deeper truths and when we’re out of alignment with our deeper truth.
Tami Simon: What do you think of the often quoted idea that the last thoughts we have before we die make a difference in our trajectory in the afterlife?
Christopher Bache: I understand that, and I think that may be true in some circumstances.
For example, in Stevenson’s Children, if he asks a question, why do these people remember what other people do not remember? He finds that 60% of his clients died early and the remaining 40% died on with an acute sense of unfinished business. Like a mother who’s just given birth but hasn’t raised her child, or an acute sense of being wrenched from life suddenly, quickly.
Uh, and so that seems that the ending of their life did leave a strong imprint on their next incarnation. But again, [00:28:00] remember, these are the exceptions to the, a much larger principle. Um, and while I do think our last thought can have a, a heavy imprint, I tend to really tend to think that. The divine are the ultimate, the absolute consciousness which is behind and within and manifesting all of this reality is much more compassionate and understanding than we give it credit for.
I think we have a tendency to, to make inferences and gather inferences. Um, but I don’t think the last thought is necessarily that. Absolutely. Um, directive. For example, someone who’s dying of cancer and is taking pain, uh, pain killing drugs, and they die heavily under the influence of a, of this numbing, mind numbing drug.
[00:29:00] Does that mean that they’re gonna be predisposed towards addiction in their next incarnation? Uh, I I don’t think it works like that. I think we are brought in, we’re, we’re debriefed. We go into a period of deeper communication with our guardians. Uh, and, uh, we continue to learn. It’s not all learning doesn’t take place on earth.
We continue to learn and exercise, learning in spiritual reality, and then we make choices on coming back so that the choice of coming back may. Pick up on our last experience or it may not. Uh, so I guess the, the more programmed we are, the tighter that bond will be. But the more evolved we are, I think there’s less, less of a bond.
Tami Simon: In your book lifecycles, you introduce the notion of the oversoul. Yeah. And I [00:30:00] wonder if you can speak some to that and how the oversoul plays its role in your view in Yeah. Afterlife,
Christopher Bache: when I use the term, uh, which has been, you know, in esoteric literature, very common, the oversoul, uh, the Seth material, it’s there.
I kind of have used the term soul in two different ways, or, or soul is usually thought of as the conscious entity. Which is the holder of my individual life experience. So capacious soul is the psychological construct, the consciousness construct that holds all of my life experience. The being that I return to, the being that planned.
My reincarnation is much, much larger than I am. And so this larger soul is often called the over soul. Um, so the over soul is really the soul which holds the memories of all of our incarnations through [00:31:00] time. Now, eventually after finishing writing that chapter towards the end of the book, I said, I’m just gonna call that entity the soul.
And I, I would capitalize it to differentiate it from soul with a small S, which is my personal self identity, but soul with a capital S. Is the a hundred thousand year old being the soul, which chooses my incarnation and which receives my incarnation back because the vast majority of our consciousness and our learning doesn’t incarnate in any lifetime.
Michael Newton says, if we were to incarnate all of the soul’s power in one lifetime, all of its substance, it would basically short out our circuits. It is we, he thinks we incarnate maybe five to 15 max percent of the power of the soul. And I think something like that is true. However, I think we are [00:32:00] moving into a point in humanity’s larger story evolutionary story that we are moving into a time when I think the soul is waking up.
Inside humanity so that there is a process in which we are moving towards greater and great incarnation of greater quantity of our total soul identity in our historical incarnations.
Tami Simon: You know, it’s interesting. I love the fact that you used percentages, so I’m gonna stick with that for a moment, and I think I’m gonna use the over soul and soul language just to make it easily distinguishable for our conversation.
Mm-hmm. But in this moment, there’s Chris the Soul who’s here talking to me in 2025 on Insights at the Edge. What percentage of you do you feel is in that? Ray, if you will, of sunlight of the over soul sun. Like do [00:33:00] you feel more of that? Could be, you can access it, it’s present. You can tune into it and feel it or no, you know, five to 15 percent’s pretty good.
Tammy, come on, or no? I feel that ancient. Yeah. Hundreds of thousands. I can, I can ask. I can touch it.
Christopher Bache: Yeah, I think we can. I mean, I basically, once you kind of have a vision, an understanding of the structure of how life works, how reincarnation is a cycle, but it accumulates in the, in spiritual reality as well as in, uh, physical reality.
But once we have that, once it then opens up the possibility that I’m in earth. I’ve chosen the circumstances of my life, but I would like to. Remember more of who I am. I would like some deeper guidance from the higher intelligence, the higher soul, to help guide me in my actions in this lifetime. And we have all sorts of technologies that allow us to do that, all [00:34:00] sorts of exercises.
Meditation would be an exercise, hypnotherapy would an exercise. Even working with yoga, working with psychedelics puts us in contact with our soul consciousness. And then you can go beyond soul consciousness into the larger web of consciousness that the soul is part of. Yeah.
Tami Simon: Now I have to ask this question one more about choosing our lives, because for those of us who have a sense of, you know, I think I might have chosen my life, but why would I choose a life that had so much suffering in it?
Really?
Christopher Bache: Yeah. Really like
Tami Simon: those parents that I had really, I mean, maybe the case of maybe something else for someone or some early trauma that was terrible, or a later trauma, why would I choose that?
Christopher Bache: Yeah, I don’t want to make light of any of these, any of suffering. I mean, I, I don’t, and I think I get very angry when I hear people pronounce.
How suffering works or, you know, [00:35:00] makes large metaphysical pronouncements on it. Uh, I think we have to be very respectful of suffering and yet at the same time, hold out the hope that this suffering has significance. It’s that this suffering is meaningful in a larger. Uh, landscape and I take great encouragement as I studied the past life therapeutic literature, and I watched therapist basically following a present pain in a person’s life and letting it unfold into a deeper story that has been moving through, uh, several lifetimes up to this lifetime time.
And again, people have been able to take their pain to its source in which it’s anchored in experiences that they don’t remember having, but because they come from another lifetime, and in that remembering, it provides a freedom and a release from suffering in their current lifetime. [00:36:00] So when you see that happening over and over again, it supports the conclusion that, um, this suffering is.
I don’t wanna say intentional, but it’s accepted as a circumstance of learning. Uh, and then we would ask, you’re asking, why would we ever want to learn? What do we have to learn from those horribly, uh, depleted or compromised lives? And I think we have to, we have to make a transition of thinking like a human being and start thinking like a soul or thinking it about our lives from God’s perspective.
Because things that may look meaningless from the human perspective, from the individual life perspective can be saturated with meaning at a larger metaphysical level, a larger spiritual level. And sometimes I think, for example, some [00:37:00] people have voluntarily taken on. Pain memories, which are not part of their personal karmic lineage sometimes.
I mean, in my psychedelic practice, I found that a lot of the work I was doing, a lot of the purging of, of negative karma was not personal. It was collective. And I think that some, uh, I think many of us are actually living lives, which are serving the release of trauma of the, from the collective psyche, which goes beyond simply healing the personal psyche.
So there’s just, we, I think we have to learn to think in a much more expanded framework to even address suffering.
Tami Simon: You know, Chris, you talk with a lot of conviction about reincarnation and the structure of postmortem experience, a phrase I’d never even heard before this [00:38:00] conversation. And I, I wonder how much of that comes not from your research and academic learning, but from your own psychedelic experiences, and if you can share a bit about how you encountered past life, your own, past lives, past life, knowing in your psychedelic journeys and how that’s informed this conviction that you have.
Christopher Bache: Yeah, that’s an interesting question because clearly both of them are present. I’ve, I’ve been reading the reincarnation literature for 40 years now, and, uh, so. It has very much shaped some of my thinking, but what really has given that intellectual knowledge, a particular depth of ex of conviction, has been my personal experience, um, both psychedelic experience, but also, um, hypnotherapy, uh, [00:39:00] experiences.
I did three years of hypnotherapeutic regressions to explore my deeper history, and I worked, found and worked with about a dozen lives, uh, worked toward healing them and they healing me. Um, and the psychedelic experience opens up a whole new category. Some of my psychedelic experiences, I have relived former life, uh, trauma, former life clashes with people who are in my life now.
Uh, and I’ve experienced some, you experience these things so deeply and so intimately and with so much detail and such power of access, uh, that it, it’s overwhelmingly convincing that this is real. This is not something my mind is making up in order to do something or other. It’s, it’s a real memory. And I’ve experienced in my psychedelic work deeper, I’ve been given deeper understandings of the landscape of [00:40:00] life and how there’s this deeper causal structure that’s manifesting itself in our life, in our, in our choices through ourselves, into the world.
And then there are those experiences where. One is taken into
the love and the heart, and the mind, and the intelligence, and the genius of God, of divine, of the universal spirit. When one experiences that just, just the intensity of, of the clarity and the depth of love that’s there, then it makes it easier, I think to once the, the intellectual horizon expands. You begin to understand that all of these mechanisms that we are studying, [00:41:00] they fit into a larger pattern.
That this reality, this being or this oneness has manifested itself as the universe and us as part of it, as the universe. And this being does not think in short terms, it does not think small. It thinks in billions and billions and billions of years. And it is growing a universe from nothing. To what we have today and continuing to develop, and that we are part of that process.
And so when you touch the essence of your own being and discover that the essence of your individual being is one with the essence of all reality and then drawn into that all reality, to experience the intention of that reality in creation and the love that’s motivating its creative process, then this takes that intellectual knowledge and, and weds it [00:42:00] into the heart and just fuses it into, well, let’s say a deep conviction that this is true, that it’s real.
It’s just very simple. It’s true and it’s real.
Tami Simon: And what is the intention from your perspective of the universe itself and our creation? This poor intention, what is it?
Christopher Bache: Boy, that’s going right to the deep, deep heart of the matter. And I, I have to say that whatever I understand, I’m sure is incomplete because the, the magnitude of this being is so vast that even after exploring it for 20 years as I did, I learned late in the journey that there were dimensions beyond what I had seen, beyond what I had seen, and that I didn’t have the grasp on the totality of it.
So I, I begin by saying I don’t understand the whole of it, but what I’ve seen [00:43:00] leads me to conclude that, uh. Some people say that this oneness creates in order to know itself, and I’ve never personally found that very convincing. Uh, I think it’s more, it speaks to me more to think that this oneness creates, in order to share itself, in order to increase the creativity of life forms in existence, that it divides itself into these sparks of light, which become human beings, human souls, and those souls are actualizing its power, its potential in this particular form through the chakras and that whole system, it’s actualizing higher and higher capacities.
So that I think the behind creation. Is a profound love [00:44:00] that seeks to share its existence in manifold ways, as it knows itself in a singularity, um, before existence as, as an entity, as a consciousness before existence. Um, I think it’s basically to grow, to grow, to become more, if we try to say what we’re experience, you know, what the goal of the growth is, you know, to become loving and to become this, that or the other.
Anytime we try to pin it down to a goal, I think we’re, we’re, we, we’re anthropomorphizing and shrinking the horizon that we have to keep an eye toward that is we are going to be a very different species. 10,000 years from now, we will be growing, but we’ll be growing into things that we might not now even be able to imagine.
So to me, to say that. Creation is about growing, [00:45:00] about becoming more potentiating powers that are latent within our nature. That’s a safer generalization than trying to pin it to specific things, but it is all, I think, an exercise in love
Tami Simon: And your own alignment with that. How do you experience or attune to aligning personally with that greater, yeah.
Ulence, if you will.
Christopher Bache: Yeah. Well, I’m not doing psychedelics anymore. Um, because that was a, that was a well-worn and, and bountiful path. And now I’m content to simply try to, uh, continue to learn the lessons that I was given and to absorb those lessons and to integrate those lessons into my life. And even 20 years after I stopped those sessions, I feel like sometimes I’m still just getting started.[00:46:00]
It, it, it’s, it’s a magnificently long process to try to somehow integrate transtemporal, trans spatial, you know, deep diamond luminosity kinds of experience into everyday life. So I meditate, I do spiritual practices like we all do, but because. I’ve been kind of organized as a teacher and my psyche works in the ways of teaching.
One of the ways that I come closest in touch with all of these deep truths is when I’m sharing them with other people who are also seekers. It’s in the act of sharing, in the act of their questions and their minds coming and touching something inside me that lets something loose inside of me, which opens up something deeper inside of them, which we move back and forth in this journey of, of learning that I actually feel myself integrating [00:47:00] more, more of what I’ve known in these states.
Than if I were simply just sitting on a meditation cushion, doing it in quiet silence. I’m kind of wired for collective learning together.
Tami Simon: And in that spirit, let’s keep going. Chris, in your book life cycles, you introduced the notion of deep time. Yeah. And that deep time is distinct from timelessness.
Christopher Bache: Yeah.
Tami Simon: And I wanted to understand here in this postmortem structure of the cosmos.
Christopher Bache: Yeah.
Tami Simon: When I’m with my over soul, me I, when my soul with a small S is with. Am I in deep time or timelessness? And help me understand also to begin just what you mean by deep time and then let’s compare it to timelessness.
Christopher Bache: Okay. So just so your readers don’t get confused. It, it wasn’t in life cycles where I talk about deep time, but in LSD, in the mind of the [00:48:00] universe where I talk extensively about deep time and the basic idea is that often we think that time is linear in inside space and time, but when you go outside space and time, there is no linear time.
It’s all happening simultaneously. It’s eternity and. I think that’s basically, um, uh, simplistic that we, we find, uh, through psychedelics and through going through the success of death and rebirth processes and initiations into these things, that there are many modalities of time in the universe at the time that the universe experiences within itself, multiple modalities of time.
And as you push the boundaries of space, time consciousness, you enter transcendent spatial experiences and transtemporal experiences. Deep time. The first time I entered deep time, I had a [00:49:00] series of sessions in which I experienced my entire life from beginning to end as simultaneously present. How is that possible?
I mean, but it was just simultaneously present and I, I, I had insights. I could experience myself as an old man when I was 28 years old, 30 years old. Um, and then when I went deeper into deep time, I began to be drawn into larger tracks of time that concerned the evolution of the human species. So just as the individual has a story and a timeline, the entire species has a story and a timeline.
And just as we can kind of recreate speeding up with photography, we can speed up time and watch a deeper unfolding, uh, take place. Even the movement of continents take place through animation. Likewise, [00:50:00] when you enter into deep, deep time, you can experience a hundred thousand years of evolution. Uh. In five minutes that that hyper compression, so that there are multiple modalities of time and then far on the outer edges is this experience of timelessness that you enter a reality where there is no time.
There’s simultaneously present, past and future, but there is no time. Uh, and it’s, that’s just a mode of the universe. Now when we bring all those insights back to your question, what is the reality of time in our postmortem existence?
There’s a con, a sense of continuity. There is a sense of action which is spread out over time. It’s not necessarily linear time like it is on earth, but there is a sense of coherence, which is temporally in embedded, temporally soaked. And you can also move into different temporal [00:51:00] modalities in bar in the bardo experience.
You can, if you have access to these deeper levels, you can go into deeper levels of time before coming back to bardo time and then before coming back to time, space, linear time. So it’s what I would off, what I’d suggest is not a definitive answer to your question, but more of an open-endedness for, um, thinking about time in a multidimensional universe.
Tami Simon: And timelessness. Tell me more about that.
Christopher Bache: Timelessness is a way of describing a particular experience in terms of what is not present. It is, uh, not a time experience. It’s kind of like, uh, the, when the Buddhist tried to describe, uh, enlightenment by describing what [00:52:00] it’s not, it’s nirvana. It’s not a self, it’s not that kind of experience. When we turn from trying to describe what it’s not to describing what it is,
it gets. Exponentially more difficult
because I’m trying to describe an experience where it is as if time has not yet begun and it’s already finished. It is a time of, it is an experience of absolute fullness. Everything is present of all potentialities are present in a translucent, clear form.
And maybe the most striking thing about it is, is that this sense of timelessness are [00:53:00] time fullness. This fullness of beyond time doesn’t go away when time begins inside time and space that you find that this timelessness is an innate quality. Deep, deep mind, which you can tune into even when you are in your body and in your incarnation.
It is an inherent quality of existence, just as oneness consciousness is an inherent quality of existence, which you can tune into even when you were in differentiated consciousness. So
Tami Simon: one of the things I’m curious about, Chris, is when I first heard about reincarnation as a young person mm-hmm. In the context of Indian philosophy mm-hmm.
I heard about it in the frame of, and the goal is you don’t have to reincarnate again. No, no more. [00:54:00] Once more it’s over. You get off the wheel.
Christopher Bache: Yeah. And
Tami Simon: do you step into. Timelessness. And I wonder how, how you see that, this notion of no, you’re, you’re not coming all the way back around again and again and bringing endless learning to the over soul, over kaput.
Done.
Christopher Bache: Yeah. All the religions of the Al Age basically adopted some form of what I would call an up and out cosmology. So you achieve enlightenment in the Indi Hindu tradition, you achieve moksha, which means escape from samsara. Once you achieve enlightenment, you don’t have to reincarnate again. You go on elsewhere.
Um. In the, in Western religions, you achieve salvation or the grace of God and then you enjoy the fruits of your salvation in some off planet paradise, whether it’s the Buddha, pure world or the garden [00:55:00] or heaven. But the basic vision is this is a really difficult place and we want to not be here and we, we almost actually count here by accident or by some fundamental flaw in the in human design, and we want to get out of here.
And I think that’s understandable if you place it in its historical context where about 5,000 years ago we began to get. Access to the deeper consciousness that underlies our individual consciousness. We began to have experiential access of the mother universe, of the spiritual reality. And when you experience the mother universe, it is so magnificent.
It is so ecsta, ecstasy filled that how could we not but think that we belong there? There’s a feeling that we belong there and that we have fallen out of it and we want to get back to there. But now that we have an understanding of how old the universe is and how long this, this [00:56:00] landscape of existence has been taken to be brought into reality and the challenges that, that we’re moving toward, I mean, we’re 13.7 billion years into a project that’s gonna be going on for over a hundred billion years at least.
And on, so we’re, we’re just getting started. And I think with that comes a new understanding, which changes. The perspectives of the older teachings on reincarnation, which are the up and out teachings. Now, I think we begin to understand that the goal is to bring your life to a fruition. Now, how you describe the fruition of, you know, a surrender of ego, egoic consciousness, an opening into the oneness of life, an opening into, uh, shta emptiness of form, um, however you describe it, that the goal is to achieve that, but then to incarnate those qualities more and more [00:57:00] deeply, to bring spiritual reality more deeply into physical reality, to literally bring heaven to earth and that.
You know, in the last several thousand years, people achieve that realization and humanity has not changed. And it’s almost like you have to leave in order to experience that reality in its fullness, unless you’re particularly motivated by compassion and then the bodhisattvas come back to help other people.
But I think what we’re witnessing, what we are on the threshold of seeing is that now the time of individual enlightenment is over. We have to enlighten as a species, the entire species as to make a jump in consciousness if we are going to survive the ramifications of our industrial and scientific technologies.
Because if we don’t make a jump, if the world continues to be run by egos, we’re [00:58:00] basically, I think we’re going to go extinct. We have to grow up. And I think growing up means. Beginning to bring into our incarnate consciousness, our soul consciousness, and what the soul consciousness holds in its intimate communion with the divine.
So that we are now engaging a process where, beginning to see that the goal of reincarnation is not to simply achieve a level of, of enlightenment, say, and then leave, but to achieve that level and to bring heaven onto earth. Now, that doesn’t mean, I mean, I think there, there are people, there beings who can and, and will leave once they achieve this level.
They can come back. They can come back anytime. But I think I. But I think if we achieve and leave for a million years and come back, we’re gonna find nature [00:59:00] doing the same thing. Growing humanity, growing the species, making it more intelligent, more compassionate, more creative, more saturated with spirituality.
We are in the process of transforming this planet and making it a divine garden, but clearly we have a lot of worries, a lot of work to do still.
Tami Simon: Now you said something that tripped me up a little bit, Chris, you said, you know, we’ve been at this 13.7 billion years and we’ll be at it a hundred billion.
What, what, what’s gonna happen once we cross the a hundred billion mark?
Christopher Bache: I’m just throwing a hundred billion out. Not as a, a literal figure, but just it’s a very, very large number. It could be a thousand billion years. Let’s, we have to turn to the cosmologists and get their, uh, their take on how long the universe has got in it.
But it’s clearly vast compared to what we have already. Uh, we have already realized, and I, when I said that I really, I’m saying that the creative intelligence [01:00:00] of the universe has generated 13 7.7 billion year history. At least this after this big bang. We don’t know whether there were other big bangs before this big bang.
Uh, whether it’s an expanding once more,
Tami Simon: there’ll be another big bang once more.
Christopher Bache: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you know, there are some traditions like the tic tradition, which basically says the goal of life is to return to the oneness of all life. So in, it’s like the drop returns to the ocean, the drop disappears, and now lives as ocean, not in ocean, but as ocean.
I don’t believe, I don’t find that to be true in my experience. In my experience, I think individuality, and by that I mean I’m focused on soul individuality, particularly. Individuality is a precious gift given us by the creator. Uh, and we don’t [01:01:00] just when we take that individuality to a point where we can penetrate to the depth of our being and discover our communion with all other life forms in the oneness of life.
At that pinnacle point, I don’t think the universe takes that individually back and says, okay, now you can come back into me and dissolve into the totality. So whatever, whatever happens at a hundred billion years or however many billion years out, whatever it is, I think that we are becoming century by century ever more empowered players in this, in the universe, not just in the physical universe, but in the reality behind the physical universe in spiritual reality.
I don’t think that’s something that’s taken away. I don’t think it’s something that’s dissolved. I think this is one of the great gifts, uh, of existence to actually be empowered to explore more and [01:02:00] more potent worlds. Now, let me add, just throw something in Kyle from left field.
I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t do this.
Tami Simon: We’ve started, we we’re, we’re already there. We’re in left field.
Christopher Bache: I think there are, uh, there are many spiritual cosmologies, which says this physical universe, as big as it is, it’s not the only universe. There are other universes overseen by other spiritual beings and, and.
Enlightened masters and so on, so forth. And there are levels of spiritual reality. Many, many levels of spiritual reality. And my experience from psychedelic work is the deeper you go into a state of consciousness, the more you are penetrating a higher level of energy. The deep states of consciousness are extremely high energy, and I think one of the things we are developing here in our physical [01:03:00] incarnations on earth is developing the kind of clarity and strength of focus and strength of being that allows us to enter these deeper states of consciousness or deeper intimacies with the divine without shattering if we become one with God, so to speak.
Prematurely or too early. It’s just shattering. It just, it completely shatters us because the, the differential between the divines energy or that level of reality and our energy is so great, we, it just explode us. But by incarnating more and more and, and getting into it gradually and assimilating those gradual immersions and initiations, we develop a strength that allows us to enter consciously and without risk, the love of God and the knowledge of God without being destroyed.
And I think of this in terms of [01:04:00] the birth of the diamond soul. We, we, we give birth to a, a, the soul reaches a point of gestation of such intensity and such power that it can return. Into various levels of divine reality and can experience them consciously without fragmenting its being. And then it makes choices in that context whether to incarnate again and to be part of this mission of evolving the human species or whether it wants to go into some other reality.
Tami Simon: Now you mentioned the diamond soul, and I wanna bring all of our listeners along with us in LSD, in the mind of the cosmos. You, you write this, you write about something that occurred in one of your high dose psychedelic sessions, and you say that all of your former lives came to you, all your previous lives came to you, fused, [01:05:00] and there was an explosion of energy that came out of your chest, a diamond light.
You describe this as the birth of the diamond soul and this notion that all of your past lives fused and then an explosion came from your chest. Help people who are hearing what Diamond light, diamond soul, what’s Chris talking about?
Christopher Bache: Yeah, I understand.
My worldview is that reincarnation is a simple fact of life, and it leads to an accumulation and development of our lifetimes, incarnation by incarnation, but it also leads to an accumulation at the level of soul. And usually the, the way that the system works is when we incarnate, we forget the deeper identity, we [01:06:00] become small, and then when we die, we open and we become large again.
We return to the boundaries of the soul. We incarnate, we get small, we die, we get large. And this has been going on for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. It, it just seems logical and it is part of this experience that, um, I had the experience of my former lives coming into me. It was like wrapping a white filament of, of cord on a kite spool, and they fused, and when they fused, there was this explosion of energy, which catapulted me of this diamond energy.
Pure, clear, clear, beautiful, white light catapulted me into a level of reality that was deeper than any. I had entered up to that point in time in which I was an individual, [01:07:00] but I was an individual without boundaries of any kind, and I was a larger individual than I had ever known individuality to be and contextualized in the teachings that I was given.
With this experience, I came to see that this is the next stage of human evolution. We have been gestating the future form of humanity for thousands and thousands of years. Gestation is long. I. Labor is short and intense and dangerous. We have been gestating the future human for thousands of years. We are entering into the century, I think, of our birth of this higher consciousness within humanity.
And what happened to me in that session was being given to me to help me understand where reincarnation is taking humanity. It’s taking us not simply in incremental steps to [01:08:00] be better wise or smarter, more creative, but eventually it takes us to a point where the entire platform of human awareness shifts.
To that of the soul. And I think we can see the prototypes of this in the in Enlightened Masters where they are and are great saints and great sages. They are speaking out of a level of awareness that clearly is beyond most people and they’re speaking with a depth of perspective. Love your enemies.
What? Love your enemies. Are you sure? I mean, this is a, a totally different perspective. So I think the pattern, what I experienced was simply a slice of what is happening at a larger process, at a larger process. I think, um, nature is in the process of giving birth to what I call the diamond soul. Other people have seen this process [01:09:00] also.
They give it different names, uh, but that we converge in this understanding that there is a summing up of human history. And as these former lives come into us, there’s a tremendous purification that has to take place. ’cause a lot of these former lives are been stupid and done dumb things, and they carry really, uh, elemental, primitive beliefs.
So we, there’s a purification where we kind of winnow these things out and, uh, heal these aberrations and, and reach. New center of balance, but also they bring not only their faults, they bring their gifts, they bring their creativity, they bring their successes, they bring their artistic abilities. All of these things are coming together and manifesting as a singular integrated consciousness.
And I doesn’t, I don’t think that means necessarily remembering all the little details of each of the informal lives, their addresses or their, you know, phone numbers or things like this. It’s [01:10:00] internalizing what has been learned in each of those life scripts, what has been learned and that we, we reclaim this learning.
We experience this learning that’s taking place inside our incarnation. Everybody experiences the soul when they die, but I think we are in the process of giving birth to a humanity who is experiencing the soul fully when they are alive on earth.
Tami Simon: Now I just wanna clarify something, Chris. Yeah. Because I noticed when you talk about the religious systems of the axial age and this up and out emphasis, I, I, I respond. Yeah. They wanted to get up and out. They didn’t change the world and bring that expanded consciousness here to the planet. I wanna do that.
I wanna be one of those people who’s part of that new embodied, we’re bringing all [01:11:00] of that beauty and love here to earth. And then another part of me goes, oh, come on. Really? How impossible Tammy to take a vibration? That high, a frequency that high and actually bring it into our human society in the mess that it is.
And you know, then I go back, let’s just get up and out. Come on. And I wonder how you sort of work with that tension.
Christopher Bache: It does seem hard, doesn’t it? When we look at the world, we look at what’s going on, we wonder how could we possible, how could we possibly bring a heart? That loves the entire world into this highly divided world. It just seems ridiculously difficult. But then we look around and we find people who are doing that.
You know, we find great people, social [01:12:00] figures who are doing this. Like Mahatma Gandhi are, the Dalai Lama are, um, Martin Luther King. But we also find ordinary people on the street who just in their corner of the world, they’re bringing love, compassion, they’re bringing service, they’re bringing healing.
They’re doing, they’re, they’re basically bringing the compassion that comes with oneness. Into the world. And so my sense is it’s happening all around us. Um, it’s not going to happen like a tidal wave that’s gonna be big and, you know, change everything dramatically, or a spontaneous explosion of spiritual compassion instantly.
But I think organically we are doing this. I think we’re step by step, generation by generation bringing this, uh, these higher values into our physical lives. [01:13:00] Uh, at least when I, when I step back from human existence in my psychedelic years when I was going into those deep states, it seemed inevitable.
That this is what we would be doing because there’s nowhere else to go. And basically we, you know, we have a line, we have a circle of, we die. We go to some spiritual reality. We incarnate in physical reality going round and round and round. There’s nowhere else to go. Uh, you don’t get out of the circle cycle of life.
Uh, simply by being fed up, you enter into spiritual reality. You come back into physical reality, enter into spiritual reality, come back into physical reality. That being the case, they’re not being a third option. That it is inevitable that spiritual reality and physical reality becomes more deeply integrated, not only in spiritual reality, but also in [01:14:00] physical reality.
It’s just what’s the alternative.
Tami Simon: Okay. One final question for you, Chris. Did you, uh, oh see a vision of. Your future life or future lives and what have you seen?
Christopher Bache: Well, that’s an easy one to answer ’cause the answer is no. I haven’t seen a vision of my future lives. Um, I basically, I have kind of a wishlist for what may happen in the future, but basically I’ve let go of that wishlist and I’ve just turned it all over to the soul.
Um, the soul, my soul brought me into existence. I return to union with my soul and as a soul, I trust that entity to make wise choices for where that entity, my deepest ent and, and being is going to go [01:15:00] and what they’re going to do. That’s, I just don’t know it. I don’t see enough to know what would be good for me from what comes next.
I have some guesses and hunches. I don’t see enough to really do it. So I trust my soul and I trust the, the intelligence behind the soul, the guardians of the guardian, so to speak. Yeah.
Tami Simon: Well, I am certainly so honored, privileged, and glad that our souls could meet like this at this time. Me too. And placed.
Christopher Bache: Yes. Yes, me too. And thank you for all the good work you’re doing in bringing into the world. We need wisdom so much now, and you really help bring a lot of wisdom into the world. Thank you.
Tami Simon: Christopher Beach, he’s the author of the book, lifecycles and LSD, and The Mind of the Universe. Thanks for being here with us once more together.
Christopher Bache: Yes, [01:16:00] yes.
