2013 11 16, Dr. Chris Bache, Guest Speaker, \"No Fear of Death\", Part 2/3

Chris Bache: So some images, how do we imagine the soul? How do I ever imagine reincarnation? Well, one of my favorites is what happens in trees. We are eating time, and the more time we eat, the more soul weight we put on. Trees do that; they get bigger and bigger.

Chris Bache: We have other images; nature does all these things. We have these suggestive natural phenomena where nature just kind of builds and builds and spirals on. But imagining the soul for flowers, for example, when I'm with my students, I ask them to imagine that each one of those petals and each of those pistils and stamens is an entire life. Each one of those petals is 100 years. Each of those little 1000s is 100 years of life. And the soul is the beautiful, magnificent integration of all of that experience into an identity that is bigger than anyone, but which honors everyone. Just as there are many types of flowers, we're not all becoming the same thing. Actually, we're becoming more and more different, more and more individualized. We're cutting ourselves, developing ourselves in different directions with different aptitudes. We have to do something to imagine the soul that we are underneath as something large, magnificent, and beautiful. Many of you have seen Carl Jung's mandalas and these beautiful images that he would draw. Those, to me, are like images of the soul. They're not just images of a calm state of mind, but they're images of this deeper identity that's moving through us.

Interviewer: Are you ready to go to the next topic? Yes, one very basic question—where are all these souls, as the population increases, where are they coming from?

Chris Bache: I answer all of these questions in Lifecycles because I wrote Lifecycles after I've been teaching this stuff for 10 years, and the students pretty much asked every question you could possibly imagine. Here's a way of thinking of it: the problem of the growth of the human species and where those souls are coming from is only a problem if we make two assumptions. One is that the number of souls is limited, finite, and really very small. So, in the beginning, there were maybe 60,000 human beings on the planet. If we assume that there were only 60,000 souls, somehow we must be dividing them or doing something to get 7 billion souls. But here's a different way of thinking. At my university, at one time, we had about 3,000 students. Fifty years later, we have 13,000 students. If you never left campus, you saw the students coming and going semester by semester, you would see more and more students, and you might be asking yourself, where are they coming from? But of course, they're coming from the surrounding area because this is a much bigger community than our campus. Likewise, we have no reason to think there are only a small number of souls. There could be trillions and trillions of souls. There could be souls lined up waiting to get into the classroom that we're in right now. They cannot get on this planet until there is space available for them to get in. So every semester, there are some new freshmen and some graduating seniors. There's a matriculation; there are some humans who are leaving and some who are coming, but there are always more souls available who are eager to be part of this exercise.

Robert Monroe, who I talked about in Dark Night, Early Dawn, my second book—and we're not going to talk too much about today, but he's an interesting man—went out of his body when he was 40 years old, traveled over the universe, and wrote three books, autobiographical books describing what the world looks like from someone who's been exploring it in the out-of-body state. He says that every one of us is here because somewhere in our travels, in the spiritual, non-physical world, we came across a graduate of the earth school, somebody who had gone through this curriculum, and we were so blown away by the beauty and quality of their energy that we tracked down how they got that quality, and we tracked them down to here, and we began the incarnational process so that we could become like what we saw. So, massive, massive population. He says the majority of intelligent life in the universe is non-physical, the majority is non-physical.

Audience: Yes, I was born three pounds, three ounces, and I was wondering if there'd be any reason because I always thought, well, my mother smoked and the environment was smoky, and maybe I wanted to get out of there. But is there any reason why someone would be born so prematurely and with low birth weight?

Chris Bache: I don't know of any formula that gives us that answer. Reincarnation doesn't answer all our questions; it just gives us a new context within which we can explore answers. Once we get into the past lives therapy, where we have a context in which people ask, why am I this way? Why was I born with this particular set of circumstances? We find when you go into the details of their memory and help them remember the choices they made before they were incarnated, there are reasons for everything. What that particular reason is behind that particular circumstance, I don't know, but we have a context in which we can explore it.

Chris Bache: That question comes up. All the various conditions—why am I born this way? Why am I in this family? Why am I in this context? Why did I lose my legs in this accident? There is a deeper context, but we have to get into the soul to retrieve the memories that give us the information we need.

Audience: Okay, this is Carl. I don't think this is about reincarnation, but years ago, I heard the concept of the term called walk-ins, people that come and they're from, they're coming to watch us. I don't know if it's...

Audience: I don't know if it's to do that or what, but that concept has never left my mind. This was in a book group years ago, and I've never forgotten it. Is it a concept that's out there? Do we know of these people or souls called walk-ins?

Chris Bache: The idea here is usually the way to get here is to be born. You have to go through nine months of gestation and become, you know, go through diapers and adolescence to be an adult. In some instances, it seems as if the personality of a person, child or adult, leaves, and a different personality suddenly appears. These are sometimes called walk-ins. There's kind of a deal where they switch, where someone voluntarily leaves their incarnation, and someone voluntarily takes over the body so that they can be here without going through the whole gestational process. That's a complicated topic. Some people are skeptical about that interpretation of the walk-in phenomenon. Others are more supportive of the idea that you can have a step-in or walk-in, but the basic idea is there's an exchange taking place between spiritual beings and physical beings, or between embodied beings and disembodied beings. Because, if what I'm saying is true, we already are spiritual beings, right? You don't become a spiritual being when you die. We are spiritual beings with our bodies. We are embodied spiritual beings. Then there are disembodied spiritual beings. So the normal cycle is what we've been talking about, but there may be some variations on that interaction.

Audience: So it is a phenomenon. You said the walk-in phenomenon. So it's out there.

Chris Bache: It is out there, it is discussed, and it does come up. It's kind of a minor thread that comes up.

Audience: Reincarnation—I've believed in it forever, and it hasn't been popular in my church, so I've kept quiet about it. But the question I've always had is, when is it over? Are there completed souls that keep coming back, and you learn more and more and more? But are there ever, once in a while, I think there are people whom I consider complete, but I'm not sure that's...

Chris Bache: That's a large question. The classic way to think—we only began becoming self-conscious about 35,000 years ago as a species. Until about 5,000 years ago, when we began to develop the psychotechnology to explore the deep unconscious, to really explore the nature of mind itself through meditation, we discovered the mother universe, Brahman, the soul, this beautiful, spiritual reality gestating the physical world—what we consider the source of the Big Bang. Our first reaction was, my God, this is magnificent. This is beautiful. This feels so good. This is home. This is where I want to be. And so the religions that came into existence about 3,000 years ago are all variations on an up-and-out cosmology.

We want to achieve breakthrough to go home, to be good, to achieve salvation, to become enlightened, to achieve moksha—it's all kind of up and out. If it's an up-and-out, then there must be some threshold to pass to get our ticket punched to leave here. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism—all of them fundamentally, with a few variations, aim to get up and away. But this leaves a fundamental riddle unsolved: why the physical universe? Why did the divine create this magnificent physical universe? The up-and-out cosmologies leave that unexplained. I think these cosmologies are simply the first stage of human discovery. A more mature discovery takes place when we realize that the goal is to integrate that other reality and this reality into conscious presence wherever we are.

The goal is to draw more of the spiritual, the mother universe into the daughter universe, that reality into this reality so that these worlds become more integrated, so that eventually Heaven is a state of awareness. You can be in Heaven on Earth or in the spiritual world; it's a state of awareness, not a place. Once we have a species able to have more conscious and continuous rapport between spiritual and physical reality, the evolutionary game changes. We'll be doing this for another billion years, for tens of billions of years. When we die, we get to go home, be renewed, rejuvenated, return to the source—all these wonderful things happen, but the goal isn't just to get away. The goal is to become a more magnificent manifestation of the creative process itself. I'm distrustful of the criteria established for up-and-out cosmologies. To me, that’s just midway, and most sophisticated spiritual traditions recognize that.

A Western thinker, a Hindu thinker, who really drove this point home is Sri Aurobindo. He was critical of the up-and-out cosmology. He said we need an incarnational theology, a greater incarnational presence.

Near-death episode research—if any of you have looked at the literature for any of the four areas we're talking about today, most of you have probably looked at near-death episode literature. Isn't it magnificent? Here are my three favorite books for going into this literature. Raymond Moody got things going. One of my great heroes is Ken Ring. His first book is Life at Death; his second is Heading Toward Omega; and his third is Lessons from the Light.

Ken is a deliciously sweet human being, one of the founders of near-death episode research. He probably knows more about it than anyone alive today. He's got file cabinets of cases and lets people speak for themselves. Chapter three of Heading Toward Omega is for someone suffering from death in their life. It's 13 accounts of people who have unusually deep near-death episodes. In Lessons from the Light, you'll get all sorts of research. This is the last book he wrote, and there's a chapter called "Returning to the Source," where he distills people's case histories and shares them. There's also a chapter on near-death episodes of the blind because some people born blind regain an ability to see in these experiences, and Ken documented it.

He also documents long-term changes in people who have deep near-death episodes. He's part of the second generation of scholars asking not just if it happens, but why it happens. About 35% of people who nearly die have conscious recall of their experience. Ken differentiates five stages of Near-Death Experience; not all have the same depth. Stage one is the feeling of peace, then separation from the physical body, the tunnel, moving to a confrontation with a being of light.

For a variety of reasons, not everyone has the same deep experience. Ken hypothesizes that the meaning of near-death episodes can be best understood by studying those who have the deepest experience. He calls these "core NDEers," those who go right to the core. The fifth stage is going into the light, merging with it. This is the deepest homecoming where people are most profoundly changed. They lose all fear of death; they become disinterested in material possessions; they are more compassionate and spiritually attuned. Their physiology changes—they can't be around electrical appliances, lights blow out around them. Immersion in a higher energy form changes them physiologically and psychologically.

Chris Bache: Can I share the beauty of this in people's own experiences? How about if I read to you one of the cases in Ken's book? This one comes from chapter 13 of Lessons from the Light. Virginia Rivers separates from her body, travels through the tunnel, passing by galaxies, and receives knowledge. She feels her mind expanding, absorbing everything as if it was waiting for her. She experiences a melody man couldn't compose, a rhythm of her existence. Love pours into her from the universe. She reaches her destination, experiences total awareness, and realizes the purpose of life is to get questions because, with God, you want to have good questions. She learns there are only two things to bring back: love and knowledge. It's a paradox—when she died, she entered a state of absolute knowledge, yet she is told to bring back knowledge. The purpose isn't just to return home but to integrate more knowledge into time and space, to bring more love and knowledge here, uniting them into one being.

Margaret Hiller: It's hard to talk about this without feeling it's an up-and-out cosmology because even now, you discuss going out and bringing things back here. Isn't it all happening here, like a mandala, flowing through us? When we look into ourselves, we expand back up as if it's all happening here.

Chris Bache: Yes, it's hard to talk about it without lapsing into those old habits.

Margaret Hiller: So we don’t really bring something back except in our memory, right? It's all where we have access to it now, yes? So when we talk about bringing it back, we're bringing it back into memory or consciousness, right?

Chris Bache: I think it's a both-and. We don't really go anywhere when we die, but in another sense, we do. Abraham, the monk, said, "He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies." If you go through spiritual death, waking up to deeper spiritual knowing, it changes what happens when you die. It's more clear we're not really going anywhere; we're shifting registration, bringing more of it here, changing the conditions of life, but we're not really going anywhere.

Robert Monroe said that initially, out-of-body experiences feel like you're traveling, but later, you just think and you're there. It's not about going somewhere physical; it's about opening up to a consciousness depth where that reality is here, now. It speaks to what you're saying. It is all here, all now, but we keep ourselves shielded from it, so we're just taking down barriers of our mind.

Audience: It sounds like that shape, the Taurus, expanding out and then back to the center.

Chris Bache: Yes, exactly. Here, and then here.

Audience: I lost my father, and I think about him still being with me, like when someone leaves a room, they leave their essence behind. That's how I stay in touch with my dad.

Chris Bache: Yes, that makes sense, and this maybe allows us to address something else. My father died about 45 years ago. According to Stevenson's data, he or his soul was probably incarnated again. So a question my students ask is, what if I die and they’re reincarnated? Are they gone?

Chris Bache: A couple of things help us understand this. First, we don't incarnate all of our energy in every incarnation; the majority of our soul's energy stays outside of time and space, even while part of it incarnates. Your father's soul has now returned to his larger, deeper life, even if he has started a new incarnation. When you die, you meet your father's soul, and it wears the face you are most familiar with—your father. But you're becoming your soul, so it quickly becomes your soul connecting with his soul, a larger connection. He leaves a trace, but he continues to be a living presence in the larger world we encounter when we die.

Audience: Talking about a process where there is a God who, through expansion and compassion, makes souls more like God. It's an expansion and contraction process so we bring Heaven on Earth or in a new realm, or whatever, and then move from there.

Audience: Yes, exactly.

Chris Bache: We're going to see when we get a little bit further along. Michael Newton, if you ask, where does the soul come from? Where do souls come from? And the answer seems to be, the soul is actually kind of teased out of God. The soul is like the sun's throwing out silver flares, and the soul is kind of the essence of the Divine teased out, and it's actually incubated very carefully. There are beings whose sole job is to catch and nourish that energy and help it birth into self-awareness. It starts with the divine, but it's birthed as an individual self-awareness—it's pure potential, not yet actualized. Then the system seems set up so that self-awareness begins this journey of self-actualization. It has all the potential of the Divine, but it's in potential, not actualization, and it's actualized more and more. It's almost like God is cloning herself, throwing out stars, and each one of us is. The ancient Greek theologians called it Logos spermatikos, the seeds of the Logos, the seeds of the Divine, and we're incubating that seed potential into deeper and deeper actualizations.

Sooner or later, we develop enough to remember who we are. We remember that our essence is divine, and the essence of everything and every person we see around us is also divine. Holy smokes, we're all part of the Divine, all differentiating and becoming more, and it's all taking place inside the Divine. So, the classic phrase is from God to God, always in God. We come from God, we go back to God. Where are we now? We're in God. We never leave, except in our lack of understanding. We are becoming more and more, in some sense, what we were in the beginning, but not exactly because we haven't actualized it. We haven't brought it into full conscious expression.

There's one other last thing I want to mention, and I'm going to get to Newton soon. Newton's people clearly suggest that the God of this universe is not necessarily the ultimate God. They talk about God's grandfather. This system, this entire physical universe, which we measure in light years—6 million million miles is one light year—is not the only universe. There are other universes. There are many universes, and there is a being who is the generator and responsible for each universe, and none of those beings are the ultimate, ultimate being.

Chris Bache: Yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself. But when people remember what they were doing before they were born, they experience divine presence, like people who have near-death episodes, but they don't draw the conclusion or use the concept of God to describe it. Their vision is that the concept of God we are born with and work with in our churches is inadequate to describe the reality. They don't want to use that language to describe the reality they're confronting. This reality, which is magnificent beyond measure, as we saw from Virginia's experience, is not necessarily the end reality. It's just the magnificent reality. This is the generative intelligence of this system. So all of a sudden, we're in a bigger universe than we even imagined.

The question is, are we safe? What's going on? Are we part of an intelligent, meaningful exercise, or are we lost in chaos? I think we're getting clearer this awareness that we are safe. First of all, nothing can ever happen to us that will truly end our life. The concept of hell disappears out of the system. It's primitive beyond measure. We're doing something creative and immensely satisfying in the long term. It may hurt in the short term, but if we're going someplace, we're going into a developmental process that's profound and satisfying. It's hard, but it's important for us to know this is a meaningful, worthwhile exercise we are part of here.

Audience: Could that be why we come back with knowledge so that we start at a higher level than we left, or at not starting all the way at the beginning again? So we come back with this knowledge, so that we can go further, or perhaps bring back our knowledge to others?

Chris Bache: I think so. And as long as we keep a flexible vision, like in college, we may have a student who decides to major in math and takes mathematics courses for several semesters and develops a good ability in math. Then they say, "I think I'll drop that. I'm going to start being an artist. I'll try art for a while." Now, they may be a beginner artist, but that doesn't mean they're a beginner student. They're just beginning a new set of skills. It's always a mistake to think that proficiency in one set of skills is a reliable barometer of the soul's measure you're dealing with. Somebody can look like a beginner when they're not a beginner at soul level; they're just a beginner in a particular discipline. Sooner or later, all those skills will be integrated into one conscious presence. But we work in stages, minute by minute.

Audience: It's part of our development. I've noticed that if you read books, especially older ones, like from the 40s and 50s, about what you're talking about now, there's a book called "The Unobstructed Universe" from the 40s or 50s. It was so hard to understand. There were glimmers of good stuff in there, but the person expressing it had such trouble expressing it. But now, the way you express things, it's like in those few years, the ability to express it has advanced by leaps and bounds.

Chris Bache: Yeah, and I think the more people understand a particular idea, the collective psyche also understands that idea. When enough people understand it, it makes it easier for the next person to understand it. It gets easier and easier. People who do past lives therapy, like when it first started, had to take people into very deep stages of trance to access previous lives. But over the years, it became easier. Now, from Morphic field theory, as Rupert Sheldrake posits, the more people acquire a capacity, the species acquires it. For example, with remembering former lives, initially, it was hard, but it gets easier. Always, we stand on the shoulders of those who went before and become the shoulders for our children and grandchildren.

Audience: But when you think about it, they will be us.

Chris Bache: Yeah, let me read you one more dear episode here. These things are just so beautiful. This comes from "Heading Toward Omega," and it's the experience of a woman named Carl Parrish Hanna. I'll skip the early part. She's traveling to the university toll of light. She gets to the combination part and says, "By my side, there was a being with a magnificent presence. I could not see an exact form, but instead a radiation of light that lit up everything about me and spoke with a voice that held the deepest tenderness one can imagine. As this loving, yet powerful being spoke to me, I understood vast things beyond my ability to explain. I understood life and death, and instantly any fear I had ended. There was a totality, a completeness in the realization that I could continue to experience and that there was no reason to continue my frantic struggle to exist.

"For what seemed to be endless time, I experienced this presence. This light, being pure, powerful, and all-expansive was without a form. Great waves of awareness flowed into me and my mind as I responded to these revelations. I knew them to be so. Of course, it didn't matter if one lived or died; it was all clear. There was a complete trust and greater understanding of what these words meant. Whole truths revealed themselves, ways of thought and ideas greater and purer than I tried to figure came to me—thoughts clear and without effort in total wholeness, although not in logical sequence. Being in that magnificent presence, I understood it all. I realized consciousness is life, we will live in and through much, but this consciousness behind our personality will continue. I knew life's purpose doesn't depend on me; it has its own purpose. The flow will continue, as will I.

"A new serenity entered my being as this occurred. An intensity of feeling rushed through me, as if the light surrounding that being was bathing me, penetrating every part of me. As I absorbed the energy, I sensed what can only be described as bliss. It was dynamic, rolling, magnificent, expanding, ecstatic bliss, whirling through me and around me. I was immersed in love and awareness for ineffable time."

Margaret Hiller: That’s the kind of thing we can read to our beloveds when they’re passing. What a gift.

Chris Bache: To be afraid of dying is to have everything turned upside down. I tell my kids all the time, it's a great life, and at the end, you get to die. Some cultures mourn birth because birth is when the work begins. Birth is when you begin the class, the session. Dying is returning home. Dying is graduation. I usually don't share this, and certainly didn't 30 years ago.

Audience 2: You would understand them, but 30 years ago, I almost died, and I had a Near-Death Experience. I went through those stages of calm and everything. I went up to the ceiling, looking down at my body, which was in pain, everyone working on me down there. The calm and everything was there, and the light was behind me. I didn't get to go through the light, and I've felt bad about it ever since. I had two small children, certainly a reason to stay. But what I felt was so wonderful, and the light was behind me, pulling me. Then suddenly, bam, I was back in my body with all that pain, and I was so angry. Ever since, I've had a new concept and energy spiritually, but I was ready to go.

Chris Bache: Even with children, that never enters your mind when you're there. It wasn't like, "Oh, I have responsibility, I need to go back." It was complete serenity, complete bliss. Then, all of a sudden—

Audience 2: Body. I just, that's the first thing I remember, being because I had been in shock. I just remember being angry that I was back.

Chris Bache: Other people have shared that experience, because when they come back, sometimes they're angry. They get angry at the doctors, "Why did you bring me back?" It takes them a long time to adjust to life back on Earth, because once you touch infinity, who wants to be a young stone again?

Before you were born, you were in that ecstatic space. You were in ecstasy, in the light, with the divine, in your soul, all the joy that pulls you so instinctively. There you were, and then you made a series of choices where you left that voluntarily to come here.

Audience: There must have been some great purpose for you to come here, to leave that joy. There must be a great purpose drawing us here. Some mystics, like Julian of Norwich, a 16th-century Catholic saint, had a Near-Death Experience on her deathbed, and spent her life meditating on it. She unpacked it in "Revelations of Divine Love." She rejected the concept of original sin, saying God isn't angry with us. We're not sinful; we're not bad. God asks us to come, knowing we would get stuck, forget, get foolish. But we love God so much, we went where asked. When we die, we remember why; we touch back into our foundation. We're restored and debriefed, but eventually, we return because it's time to grow. We're constantly learning, expanding, and becoming more because our nature is God, and this is what God does. It’s part of the fabric of existence.

Audience: Yes, it's amazing to me that we can have these Near-Death Experiences. It did change my life. What's so amazing is that we can have these miraculous experiences, and I've also had similar experiences in meditation. You can have this miraculous understanding that there's nothing to fear, and then, later on, you're angry in traffic. No wonder we forget whole lifetimes. You can have this miraculous understanding and know there's nothing to fear, then lock your doors. It's that stupid thing.

Chris Bache: Time and space—it’s tricky, isn’t it? It's really dense here, incredibly dense. The veil comes down, and we feel trapped again, involved in things. A weightlifter becomes strong by increasing the weight on the bar, not complaining because it allows developing muscles. Time and space are the weights on the bar, allowing us to develop faster than if we stayed in heaven. But it's hard. There's a feeling like there are more ways to go wrong than right. It's challenging here. Thank God for unity. There's a place where people can put these pieces together, find their way back to deep sanity, live with dignity, and embrace the challenge of being human. Instead of feeling exiled or punished—this nonsense of being exiled from paradise. No, God is right here. God wouldn't send us here without means to make it work. Now it's time to take a break for lunch before we go—

Margaret Hiller: Before we go downstairs for this incredible lunch that Miss Charlene has put together for us, some of you are clamoring to receive the donation, if you're making it.