---
title: "2013 11 16, Dr. Chris Bache, Guest Speaker, \"No Fear of Death\", Part 3/ 3"
slug: 2013-11-17-no-fear-of-death-part-3-unity-myrtle-beach
date: 2013-11-17
type: lecture
channel: Unity Myrtle Beach
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
identifiers:
  wikidata_person: Q112496741
  openalex_person: A5045900737
people:
-
  name: Christopher M. Bache
  wikidata: Q112496741
  openalex: A5045900737
provenance:
  source: "otter+diarist->normalization"
  diarist_txt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2013-11-17-no-fear-of-death-part-3-unity-myrtle-beach.txt
  diarist_srt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2013-11-17-no-fear-of-death-part-3-unity-myrtle-beach.srt
diarist_sha1: 7180fc263b4877dc611dfdbb69de6b75cbdb132d

---
<!-- diarist_sha1:7180fc263b4877dc611dfdbb69de6b75cbdb132d -->
**Chris Bache: ** Tonight, let me throw in two more books. I want to get into the next category, but I realize I didn't put up the last two. The experiences are wonderful. They're extraordinary. But how do we know these people aren't just imagining them? How do we know that they aren't just a beautiful story? Pebble Van Loan, a Norwegian doctor, has written a book that, among many of its kind, I think is the best scientific evaluation of near-death episode phenomena. He really puts it through its paces. He looks at it from different angles, examines the cases, evaluates the arguments against their legitimacy, and patiently sifts through it all. If you have someone at home, like an engineer, who's hypercritical and thinks this isn't real, this is the book you want. It's the best critical analysis of the phenomenon. Lastly, I would mention *Proof of Heaven* by Eben Alexander. Some of you know his work. He's kind of the man of the hour on this topic. We have this at the bookstore. Eben is doing great work. He's really out there, absorbing a lot of abuse from the academic community, but his experience is powerful. Now, let's go to the next category: life between life theory.

This work began with a book published in 1988 by Joel Witten and Joe Fisher. Joel Witten is a Canadian psychiatrist who was doing past life therapy on behalf of the Canadian government. He was interested in foreign news and accidentally gave an ambiguous direction to one of his clients. Suddenly, his client wasn't remembering a past life but a life between past lives. Witten didn't even think this was possible but discovered it by regressing people back. He found that he could escort people into the place they went after they died. After doing this many times, he published a short book with Joe Fisher, a newspaper reporter. This was really the beginning of this research. 

The main figure I'd like to show you in this work is Michael Newton. 

**Chris Bache: ** Michael Newton wrote three books, and we have two of them, right? These are wonderful books. Newton, like Witten, was doing past life therapy, taking people back to heal their present life circumstances by revisiting former lives. Then the same thing happened to him. He discovered that people could go back to the life before they were born, to what happens between death and birth. He incorporated this into his therapy, and after taking 600 people through this phenomenon, he kept detailed records and wrote *Journey of Souls*, summarizing the structure of the post-mortem state. 

His next book, *Destiny of Souls*, published in the 2000s, provides more detail but covers the same phenomenon. It goes into greater detail about what he found. The final book, *Memories of the Afterlife*, came from the Newton Institute, which he established. Michael, after seeing so many patients, began training therapists. This has become the fastest-growing area in hypnotherapy and past life therapy—training therapists to do life between life therapy, which deepens and accelerates the therapeutic process. The last book is a collection of cases by different therapists, each presenting one case and moving on to the next.

There are so many wonderful things to share from this material. Like the near-death episode research, it’s consoling and illuminating to have a clear description of the death experience as a return to ecstasy. Let’s delve into the nuts and bolts of the world we return to when we die. 

Everything we talked about with near-death episode research is replicated in life between life therapy—taking the tunnel, the encounter with the light, layers and layers of light. Clients talk about levels of light, woven together, rising dimensions above the physical world. As one moves farther from Earth, they become less dense. He talks about a period of orientation where, upon dying, people find themselves in a comforting environment like a park or lake. Once oriented, they proceed deeper into the death process. 

There's a technology and a whole cadre of beings whose job is to help catch and reorient people to the true nature of infinity.

Audience: ** Just watch your mind, there's a movie. Is a movie...

**Chris Bache: ** Exactly, *Defending Your Life*.

**Chris Bache: ** It's very similar to what IBM could do with a Bardo contract. They go to this place that looks like Dallas, eat as much as they want, and review their life. Consider how many people die daily—hundreds of thousands. That's a lot to catch and integrate. It takes personnel, beings, to manage this.

**Margaret Hiller: ** Do they have a health and retirement plan?

Audience: ** It’s pretty good.

**Chris Bache: ** Good. He says that where we go when we die consists of many layers. Not everyone goes to the same place. It's like a condo with many layers. Not all go to the same layer. There are many guides and beings—even the guides have guides. The principle is that the more experienced coach the less experienced, up and down the system. You have guides, their guides have supervisors, and there's a hierarchy based on spiritual maturation. 

He says that ghosts, as Hollywood presents, are rare. It's uncommon for people to get stuck. Most people go through intermediate territories without a hitch.

**Margaret Hiller: ** Now we’re all worried. Are we in that small percentage?

**Chris Bache: ** He provides statistics on soul development stages. For instance, reincarnation is an obvious fact of life once you're out of your body. There’s no hell—it's just a distortion. Everyone goes home. That doesn’t mean you don’t deal with pain you caused on Earth. There are processes to help heal that. 

There are soul clusters—groups of 5 to 20 souls you travel with. You’re transparent to each other. If you’re younger, you stick close to your cluster, but you’re still part of it. The color of your light indicates your development level. He differentiates five stages, with statistics indicating that 73% he worked with are in levels one and two.

**Chris Bache: ** On the other hand, someone reached level three after only 4,000 years—an outstanding performance, he said. 

**Chris Bache: ** Now, the reason I appreciate Newton is his dedication to data, staying true to it while giving case examples. However, this also limits his work, as it reflects only those who seek him out. You won’t find the Dalai Lama or great saints consulting him. His descriptions of post-mortem existence lean towards the lower half of the Bardo, as the Tibetans phrase it. This is fine, as it pertains to where most of us will go.

**Margaret Hiller: ** In my Father’s house are many mansions. We’re just in different mansions.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, Buddhism teaches six realms of existence, each with subdivisions. It's a teaching about the afterlife but also about life here. The physical world mirrors these classes—some beings live in hell-like violence; others in heaven’s comfort. We’re already part of this matrix, experiencing various states.

**Chris Bache: ** Newton frames a hierarchy in terms of experience, not value. He describes watchers, sages, and the council of elders you face after death. It’s a collective universe, a community of heaven. The structure emphasizes that all souls—and guides—help each other grow. There’s no value inequality; just different levels of expertise.

**Margaret Hiller: ** We are creative beings. Jesus said, “Ye are gods.” This validates that.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, and you practice creativity. The world without ego he describes is like a spiritual maternity ward for newborn souls, nurturing them until they form individuality. Not all new souls reach individuality; some merge back into the whole. Individuality, though, remains an eternal covenant—an enduring signature given by the Divine. 

Our identities evolve, deepening through cycles of being and rebirth. While some spiritual systems suggest that enlightenment dissolves individuality, this doesn't align with my experience. Here, individuality, the capacity for integrated experience, continually returns in a new form after death, enriching our collective and singular journeys.

Audience: ** Can you define individuality between oneness and personality?

**Chris Bache: ** In *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, I navigate diverse territories, exploring the connective tissue of consciousness and how individual and collective evolution intertwine. Individuality refers to the capacity for integrated experience. Its nature changes as the soul matures—it can't be content defined, as it evolves dynamically. I disagree with notions like Laszlo’s that ego dissolves entirely into an Akashic memory. Both individuality and collective memory are valid frameworks.

Audience: ** And the soul creating its own universe?

**Chris Bache: ** Newton suggests that when a soul matures, it can create an entire universe. This is a vast creative potential we possess as beings capable of forming galaxies.

**Margaret Hiller: ** We're doing that workshop next week.

Audience: ** In '86, I experienced a personal Dante's Inferno—a spiritual emergency. My soul felt damaged, and it manifested a personal hell. After 18 months, I found help and emerged transformed. Through writing, my hell became heaven. That journey led to spiritual awakening, uniquely mine.

Each expression is an individual journey, and through that, we find our connection to the universe, gradually shaping us over countless cycles.

**Chris Bache: ** I don't believe in an eternal hell. I think that's an abomination, but I do believe there are hell realms, and if a person goes through a very terrible traumatic experience, they have nightmares because they've got a hell experience living inside their psyche. Until they clear that, it's there. Now, just think of all the terrible things that have happened to human beings in history. Think of all the people who died in World War One, think of all the people who died traumatically in World War Two, the people who died in the Philippines this last week. Just think of the human family with all the trauma that humanity has undergone. And if the human psyche is a single consciousness, if there is a collective psyche, then just as we have levels of our mind that have pockets of hell inside them, there are pockets of hell in the human psyche. If you read the biographies or autobiographies of some saints and great practitioners, you'll find they go into these hell realms and spend a long time there, not to heal themselves, but to help heal, I believe, the collective psyche of humanity.

And so I think those realms are there. We get into them for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, like in a spiritual emergency, they're bigger than we are. They have a power all of their own. Ultimately, even though they are long-lived in terms of history, they are ultimately temporary because all trauma can be healed. When it's healed, it clears. But humanity, if we are giving birth to a new human, to a higher form of human life, we have to heal all their human history in order for human history to move forward. That's why a lot of people who do deep spiritual practice spend a lot of time in the hell realm.

I mentioned Roger Wilber. I was giving a talk on this at a conference one time, and Roger was there. He and I had lunch together, and I was talking about the hell realm and the discovery that when you go into the hell realm, it's not about healing yourself, it's about healing the collective. He came to the same conclusion through his past life therapy work. He was taking people into past lives and saw lifetime after lifetime, trauma after trauma. He eventually concluded that this couldn't simply be people with a long history of trauma; something else had to be afoot. He became convinced that his clients were taking on collective pain, experiencing other people's lifetimes in suffering to clear the collective fear. I think we are in one of those periods of history where the hell realm is coming to the surface. The 21st century is going to be hellish, and all of this is part of a collective transformative process. You have to clear the pain to make room for greater joy and beauty.

**Audience: ** When you were talking about the signature, I mean when I meet a person, there's a sense or feeling I have about them beyond their words or looks. It's like an essence. Could that signature you're talking about be a divine gift of personality that goes with us throughout eternity? You know, just like we have a soul and the spark of the divine, those eternal elements help build the miraculous body. That personality, that distinguishing mark, even if a million years pass and we see that person again, you don't have to say a word, and we can feel their essence.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, I think I agree with the concept. I use a different vocabulary because the word "personality" is so connected to individual ego that it tends to carry that quality. I prefer the term "individuality," but the way you're using "personality," I think it's interchangeable. That basic concept that there is a unique identity, that identity is us at the deepest level, and it's a gift—we didn't give it to ourselves. It was birthed in the system, and once birthed, it never goes away. It's always there. And I think you can feel it beside people, yes.

**Audience: ** A year and a half ago, I purchased a couple of bottles of extra Tylenol. I was going to end my life, so I took about 275, and I wound up in Cedar Sinai. It was weird because I was at peace with what I was doing. I really wanted to go. But when I spoke to the first doctor, he said, "Well, you'll probably have permanent liver damage and maybe two or three days to live." I didn't know how to feel because I didn't plan to wake up and deal with... but that's not my question. There is quite a bit of suicidality in my family. Does this show up in the books about suicidality, or have I picked...

**Chris Bache: ** In fact, there was a question asked earlier about suicide. What's the evidence on suicide? First, the past life therapy evidence shows that suicide can become a habit like anything else. It can become an exit strategy, but it doesn't really solve things. Now, what are the consequences of committing suicide? The best wisdom I've seen is that the consequence of suicide is you have to repeat the grade. If you flunk the fifth grade, we don't take you out and torture you for the rest of your life; we just simply say you have to take the fifth grade over again. So if you choose suicide due to an inability to cope, the worst that happens is you may come back in even more demanding circumstances to face the challenges you weren't able to solve before.

I've mentioned Robert Monroe, the Monroe Institute. He said, "You can check out anytime you want, without cosmic judgment," but it doesn't mean there aren't karmic consequences—not in the sense of judgment, but of habits that can get established. I don't think suicide is a successful coping strategy. It just interrupts the process. You have to get born again, go through diapers again, to get back into the situation to face what took you out last time. I don't think it's the worst thing you can do, but it's not the best either. So, work with the situation until you can get through it. If you've lost someone to suicide, they're not outside of love. They go home, not to hell.

I'll share some research. A guy studied near-death episodes of people who attempted suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. He found that survivors went into ecstatic transcendence—totality of consciousness—and none tried to commit suicide again because they learned the soul is not killed when you kill the body. Suicide does not solve the problem; it just delays the inevitable. They weren't punished, but they never tried again because they discovered suicide is illogical. It doesn't solve the problem by killing the body. I thought this work was enlightening.

**Audience: ** Yes, one woman interviewed in that study said she was grateful she survived and never tried again. She processed her issues.

**Margaret Hiller: ** Chris, in your perspective and research, do you feel our prayers, blessings, and thoughts impact those who died by suicide, or with fear and angst?

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, I believe so. The community of Heaven is in rapport with the community of Earth. We can assist those who have died. At the Monroe Institute, there's training for people to leave their bodies, find those stuck in the post-mortem state, and take them to the park. Once in the park, they progress further. Some, when they die, don't know they are dead or are confused. We can help them beyond their uncertainty.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is the practice of "she troll," done for the recently departed, aiding them to move to their soul to avoid getting stuck. My sister works for hospice, and when her clients face difficult death processes, she asks me to do "she troll" for them. I often get visual impressions during the practice, and I'm careful, but when I relay them to her, they often contain a core truth understood by the families involved. It shows they were wearing a particular shirt or chair, which is real and familiar, helping them get into the clear space, the diamond light space. This thousand-year-old practice helps the departed make clear decisions. I firmly believe in it.

Audience: ** My husband died last year, and I was having a hard time. I felt his energy but thought blocking it would hurt him. An intuitive person told me he was in a learning place, processing life because he had undiagnosed autism. A grandfather or someone was with him, helping. It made sense, and I realized my relationship with him wasn't over. I was helping him understand when I remembered or felt him.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you for sharing that. A significant percentage of spouses have experiences of their departed loved ones. It's a majority experience. They want to come back to touch base. We can help them.

Audience: ** Her husband, a friend of mine, had hospice care near death. The hospice worker felt immense prayer and presence, seeing Buddhists and so much prayer, even at dying moments. It was encouraging. The hospice worker returned for his memorial, showing the prayer and life encouraged her.

**Chris Bache: ** We understand death is a loss for us, left behind. But for the departing soul, it's joy and celebration. The more we hold that vision, the more we support their process. Weeping and gnashing signify termination. In most university courses, except mine, students are taught death is end—biological, chemical courses, not doctors are failures if patients die. Death is graduation, a release, not permanent but a great release.

Time to shift categories. Are we ready?

**Chris Bache: ** I hope you read these books; they're wonderful. 

Audience: ** I really hate to do this, but I didn't ask two questions about the previous topic that tie into this. When people are at that jumping-off place and reaching clarity about suicide not being an exit, I've had similar experiences. I could see things and hear things far away, thought it was a hallucination, but later connected with people who confirmed it was real.

**Chris Bache: ** Einstein taught us the universe is a time-space, a four-dimensional universe. If you enter a state of consciousness beyond space, part of that is moving beyond time as well. From personal experience, you can move into trans-temporal experiences, outside time and space. There are variations on this, like temporal dilation where 1000 years pass in five seconds. You can move completely outside time-space, into a reality not limited by time. But it's not like there's time, then no time. It's permeable, and you can move into states with different temporal variables.

Audience: ** When we tap into those states, seeing a shirt someone wore, like a hallucination, is that heightened clarity?

**Chris Bache: ** There are hallucinations, seeing what isn't real, but also legitimate visions beyond time-space reality. People have had future visions that came true. It’s possible to have experiences of future reality even in our moment. After these experiences, we go to the particulars.

**Margaret Hiller: ** Also, consciousness can be in more than one place at a time. We can sense things, conversations, even if our body isn't there, our spiritual sensing allows it.

**Chris Bache: ** A woman's playing golf at a particular time and suddenly feels an overwhelming sense that one of her children is in trouble. She finishes the game, goes home, and immediately receives a call that her son had a car accident at that exact moment she felt it. This suggests part of her can sense beyond her physical senses, and we see many cases like this. 

Now, what's the difference between tripping and serious psychedelic work? First, there are many psychedelics, each needing individual consideration—LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA, DMT. I never use the term hallucinogen, as it's a pejorative materialist description. Hallucination implies seeing something that isn't there, making a metaphysical judgment I avoid. Some use "entheogens" for substances that awaken the divine within, which is valid if one holds a broad definition of God. I prefer "psychedelic," meaning mind-opener or mind-expander.

These substances hypersensitize consciousness, amplifying it rather than giving a specific experience. A hundred people on psychedelics won't have the same experience. It's about amplified consciousness, not the drug itself; it's a function of consciousness in an aroused state. Recreational users often aim to have fun or party, staying in dialogue with the physical world, leading to visuals without significant change. 

Native Americans are interested in sacred medicine work, not tripping. Therapeutic modalities isolate individuals from the physical world. Traditionally, they used a kiva, an underground space where they stayed until dawn. In contemporary settings, one lies down with eye shades, disconnected from the physical world, ensuring experiences arise from within. Carefully selected music aids each stage of the psychedelic experience, supporting breakthroughs and integration. 

The intent is consciousness purification and healing, requiring confronting pain and unfinished business, sometimes from past lives. One may recall trauma like childhood illness. This brings forth existential and philosophical questions about life's meaning. Detoxification creates crisis points, which most avoid, but in therapy or sacred contexts, one learns to enter the pain, making it an ally. It's physically, psychologically, existentially, and spiritually painful, but skillful navigation enables breakthroughs.

You should never do this alone; a “sitter” is essential for safety and support. When you reach a breakthrough by losing control, the mind works at enhanced capacity, going through a death process, emerging in a different reality. Some repeat high-dose sessions over a hundred times without undergoing this difficult but transformative process, also known to Native American, Ayahuasca, and ancient Greek traditions.

**Chris Bache: ** There are other ways to explore consciousness like sustained meditation or near-death experiences. Psychedelics are simply a different modality in humanity’s eternal quest to understand our world. Quickly, you realize your ego is just a shell, a popped balloon, shifting you into deeper consciousness—merging with humanity's collective psyche. Death-rebirth cycles continue, evolving deeper insights. I resonate with Eben Alexander and others speaking of experiences known firsthand.

Spiritual death, sometimes more profound than physical death, occurs in this work. Despite suffering, I sought to know the universe's structure. Not everyone needs this; it's intense and often terrifying. Yet, the fear of death evaporates because one understands they are a being who cannot truly die—only evolve. Once society embraces these truths, it can begin integrating them into therapeutic and consciousness-expanding practices.

Johns Hopkins and others are researching psychedelics for treating depression and PTSD. North American MDMA therapy helps veterans with trauma. Ibogaine shows promise in addiction treatment. A new generation of researchers seeks to harness these substances for healing.

**Margaret Hiller: ** There's still cultural prejudice against psychedelics, but they're returning as sacred medicines. People, including medical professionals, recognize their value in serious therapeutic contexts. Some doctors use Ayahuasca to prepare patients for surgery, signaling a shift from harmful "medicine" to healing. It’s profound how sacred medicines foster connection and treat anxiety and depression, unlike conventional pharmaceuticals.

**Chris Bache: ** Aside from psychedelic use, there are non-drug protocols like Stan Grof's Holotropic Breathwork. I'm more interested in cosmic structures than healing per se. However, integrating sacred medicines could heal deeper than personality, reaching the soul by connecting with the universe's essence, the realm of mystics and saints. They intensify spiritual processes, offering rapid, intense insights.

I wouldn't repeat my aggressive high-dose LSD approach today, but wouldn't trade the profound insights. My tentative book title is "Stealing Diamonds from Heaven." Imagine consistently experiencing profound insights, not just occasionally—a collective, integrative picture of the universe is within reach. Sacred medicines help us remember forgotten truths, dissolving death anxiety.

**Audience: ** I've had transformative experiences across multiple LSD sessions that changed my perception of self and led to profound realizations about interconnectedness, echoing what you're sharing now.

**Chris Bache: ** It's not about psychedelics per se; they're a method to release consciousness's latent potential. My wife, a natural meditator and my sitter during sessions, never used psychedelics herself. It's not the psychedelics; it's about consciousness work. We're nearing the end of our time, but these explorations require reflection and context. My book "Dark Night, Early Dawn" integrates my psychedelic experiences into philosophy. It's a new paradigm: enduring transformative experiences, returning to analyze and integrate their meaning into broader intellectual frameworks. This is essential for extracting their philosophical value.

**Chris Bache: ** The opportunity to see where humanity is being taken into the future, into human time, into that world. So we're on a scale of hundreds of thousands of years, and I was going, all of a sudden everything expanded real quickly. All of a sudden, it just went pop, everything popped. And I said, what happened? The intelligence I was with said, oh, we just passed your death. It's like I was going forward in time, and I passed when I would die. When you pass your death, you don't have the glue that holds you in a particular configuration. You just expand in that larger domain. I've gone in and out of that space so many times that it's kind of become more comfortable there, and that's why I love the near-death episode research. The difference with the near-death episode research and this type of research is this: most near-death episode people only have one shot at that reality. A few of them have had two or three near-death episodes, but mostly you get one shot. You get an intense experience, but you don't always see the full landscape, because it's like seeing a landscape in Arizona at night and you get a flash of lightning that shows you the landscape. You see it all, but you don't see it all. But if you could go back 40 or 50 times, then you have a much deeper perception of that reality. Also, because you go through many death and rebirths, you go deeper and deeper into reality, deeper into the cosmic itself, and you get a more complete portrait of what's real. It's not about psychedelics. It's about the nature of mind. It's about exploring the nature of the mind of the universe. And along the way, along with all the other work, we're looking at death. What is death? Death is your best friend. Death is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. I can't tell you how much I look forward to—no, that's the last thing I want to avoid. So I have an agreement with Jesus: don't you come for me. I'm gone. I'm not fighting this. This is—you know, don't come for me until you're ready for us to wrap this thing up. Thanks very much. 

**Margaret Hiller: ** There will be a group here who will always love you to come back. And everybody knows that Chris is our guest speaker in the morning at the 11 AM service. And also, we have a surprise guest musician, singer from the Agape International Choir and the Center in Santa Monica. She just happens to be passing through and has family in Georgetown, so she's coming to us tomorrow. We have the divine duo. Thank you, everybody, for coming. 

Audience: ** Back. Batteries. 

Audience: ** So I need to be off-check and, yeah, 

Audience: ** take a walk. 

Audience: ** On the beach. Yeah, that was great. So.