Readable, speaker-attributed text with links back to the original recording.
Chris Bache: What is a group mind or collective consciousness? The way I've experienced patterns of collective mind, primarily in my work with students in the classroom, has been very illuminating. Using Rupert Sheldrake’s work in morphic field theory and formative causation to understand the emerging patterns in the classroom has been very helpful. When a group of students comes together with a common intention, if you can strengthen that intention and attend to the quality of engagement—injecting our common work with emotional intensity, not just passive intellectual intensity—it leads to active engagement. When students have the freedom to choose, their freely made choices hold more power than those imposed on them. With time and repetition, meeting weekly, monthly, and in some cases, over years, a certain porosity develops. Students might show up in each other's dreams, and synchronistic experiences increase. As I described in Dark Night, Early Dawn, a transparency can sometimes open between my mind and my students' minds. I might reach for an example in a lecture and find that I've randomly chosen something deeply relevant to one of the students' lives, triggering an engagement despite having no conscious awareness of making any psychic contact. It seems there's a flow, an exchange of information, occurring in the room.
Initially, I thought of this as some psychic bridging between my mind and theirs. But over time, I began to see it as a more collective model—an emergence into conscious expression of what one might consider an entity or a standing wave within larger currents of mind.
Interviewer: Say more about that, the standing wave? Yeah, I realize you have to use metaphor. It's all a bit abstract.
Chris Bache: Yes, I use metaphors from fluid dynamics, chaos theory, nonlinear mathematics, Jungian psychology, and transpersonal theory to express a simple observation: mind is an inherent quality of life that characterizes every pattern of life. If the pattern in the physical world is collective and social, there will be corresponding patterns of mind in the domain of spirit. Where people gather regularly with common intentionality, energy accumulates in the world of consciousness. I've come to understand that classes have minds. Not only do classes have minds, but a course has a mind, reflecting the cumulative learning of all students who've ever taken it with a particular professor. The class mind is the most recent layer, but the course mind is a potent, dynamic force influencing the learning patterns of students today. In my case, it spans about 25 years.
Interviewer: Fascinating. Do students enter at a higher level? Is that your experience?
Chris Bache: Yes, I basically find that every few years, I have to redesign my courses because students start at a higher level. They get it faster. When you have a 15-week course with a set agenda, you usually plan weeks to reach different points. But sometimes, students signal they're already ahead, as certain ideas are more easily available to them. You give them shorthand, and then adjust the curriculum to keep up with their pace. This could result from improved pedagogical delivery or cultural shifts, but I believe it also stems from the learning of previous students making it easier for new students to grasp these concepts more quickly. That's what morphic field theory would predict.
Interviewer: How about individual mind? Would you say it’s a misnomer, since our individual mind is inherently an expression of something collective? There's a strong emphasis on individualism, especially in America, and the idea of a group mind can sound terrifying, like a loss of individuality. But aren't we always part of a group mind in some way?
Chris Bache: Yes, you're absolutely right about our cultural paranoia regarding group minds. The Star Trek series with the Borg illustrates this fear: the idea that a group mind has a dehumanizing effect. But in reality, it's quite the opposite. Evolution has found ways to advance not just groups and species but individuals within them. This ties reincarnation to evolution. While individuality is precious and evolutionarily important, it's an open system reflecting the cultural and psychological history of our species. For thousands of years, we've been on a journey of potentiating individuality.
Editorial note. All published transcripts in the Chris Bache Archive are lightly edited for readability. Disfluencies and partial phrases have been removed where they do not affect meaning. Verbatim diarized transcripts are preserved separately for research and verification.