--- title: Great Conjunction Reflection (short) slug: 2020-12-21-great-conjunction-reflection-short date: 2020-12-21 type: other channel: Spirit Plant Medicine 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" transcriber: "Otter.ai (diarized, speaker-attributed) + GPT-5 normalization" diarist_txt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2020-12-21-great-conjunction-reflection-short.txt diarist_srt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2020-12-21-great-conjunction-reflection-short.srt diarist_sha1: 744acd8fb305c013ee8f12acaba280ac3c1890b2 --- **Stephen Gray: ** So I'm going to call on our friend and colleague Chris Bache to share some words with us. I want to thank you very much for taking the time to do this, Chris. I know it's getting later in the evening for you, and I imagine a lot of you—the rest of us—know Chris by now, to some degree, through his work. But if you don't, I just want to suggest that if you have any interest at all in the fate of humanity, you get yourself a copy of *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*, his most recent book, and it's a stunner. It really is, in a beautiful and positive way. So thank you for joining us. Chris, over to you. **Chris Bache: ** Thank you, Stephen. Am I coming through okay? Mark, sound okay? Good, yeah. It's a pleasure and an honor to be with the community again, especially on this winter solstice. Saturn conjunct, Jupiter entering into Aquarius—good sign, good time—hopefully a marker of changes that are coming. It's been a hard year. The pandemic has touched us all in one way or another, and many of us are looking forward to 2021 as a time of a shift, a time of change, and I'm sure it will be. I hope it will be. So, a few words spoken softly in the mode, in the manner of our special ceremony tonight about our collective transformation. I've picked this picture of the Earth to start with because the Earth is going into convulsions. It seems like there's no way to stop it. Now, we can ameliorate it, but we're going into the dark night of our collective soul. We have set in motion a sequence of events that's taking us into a very, very turbulent, convulsive period of history. That's what my reading of the ecological sources tells me. It's also what my visionary experiences in psychedelic work tell me. We are going into a time of ascending energy, a time in which nature is reaching down and bringing up energy underneath our feet, taking us—taking humanity—into an extraordinary new phase of its evolutionary journey, a time of great awakening, a time of great spiritual fruition, a time of change in the fundamental archetypal architecture of the collective psyche that informs all of our individual psyches as we work together. But when this happens, when nature turns up the heat underneath us, it triggers profound purification processes. It triggers a process in which we have no choice but to confront our shadows—both our individual shadow and our collective shadow—because our shadow is rising. And it's a time in history when our shadow is clearly rising, and the ecological consequences that we are inheriting in this century are aspects of this large collective shadow. The ego, and a civilization of ego, has made the decisions they have with respect to the Earth and with respect to each other. Those are all coming out on us really hard now; it's all coming forward. So I want to change perspective a little bit and take us because if we really want to go deep into this collective transformation, if we want to engage it fully, it's a good time to step back. It's a good night to step back into a larger context. But I'm going to encourage us to step even farther back, to place ourselves in the context and in the presence of the creative intelligence of the universe, of the divine intelligence, or the creative intelligence, the great power. These star lights behind me are not just stars. Some are stars, but many are galaxies with billions and billions of stars, an unimaginable outpouring of power and genius, just incredible genius unfolding. And it's the same genius which birthed this universe, which is birthing this time in history, and it's the same genius which has placed us here to participate consciously in this milestone period, this milestone century that we are coming into. We will come out of this century profoundly different than we came into it. And so I'd like to encourage you to think about who it is that's undergoing this transformation, who it is that's engaging these powerful forces carrying us forward. And it's not who we think we are. We are not who we think we are. We have, by habit, a custom of thinking of ourselves as basically 100-year-old beings, but the science of consciousness tells us today clearly we are not 100-year-old beings. Reincarnation is a simple fact of life, and knowing this, when we look at ourselves, we see that we are 100,000-year-old beings. We have enormous quantities of time folded into the person that we now are. Every talent that we have, every piece of genius that we have, every habit that we have—even our bad habits—they come from somewhere. They come from a deeper history. One way to imagine a human being as a reincarnated being is the samurai sword, which is made from folding level upon level of metal, folded and hammered over each other up to 10,000 layers of metal, subjected to fierce heat and fused together to create a blade of incredible lightness and strength and agility. And I think a soul is that too. We are the result. This generation is the result of hundreds and thousands of lifetimes of precious human experience, of precious learning, folded in upon one another, folded upon one another, and are being fused. And just as the planet is facing a huge crisis to become one planet, one ecosystem, one system that lives in a healthy manner with each other, with the planet itself, if that's taking place in the outer social world, there is a similar process taking place in our inner world. I think it's a time when all of our former lives are coming into us really hard. We were born with many of our former lives active in our psyches, much more than in previous generations, and as we engage our shadows, as we engage our individual and collective shadows, and submit ourselves to the transforming fire of deep awareness and let the divine awareness that we all are focus on our past and purify our past of all of those things which hold us back and constrict us. We then become initiated into deeper and deeper levels of intimacy with the universe, with each other. This genius behind all these stars and galaxies behind me—this is our nature. We open ourselves as we purify ourselves, we open ourselves into the cosmic arms, into the embrace of our own history, into the sacred communion, which is taking us forward out of this century. I think a new humanity is coming, the future human. You know, I call it the birth of the diamond soul, which is simply all of our former lives coming together and fusing into a single intelligence, a single consciousness, an individual awareness, which is individual and yet a deeper form of individuality than we've ever seen on Earth before—not just a few of us, all of us, the entire human species coming forward in this crescendo of power, purification, destabilization, reaching out, reaching out, and achieving something that has never been achieved in history before. This is something I share with you, which comes from my own psychedelic work, but I don't think it has anything to do with me privately. I talk with people; I think many of us are seeing this basic same truth in our own psychedelic sessions. The indigenous people have been seeing it for generations in their work. Some of the great saints and mystics who never touch psychedelics have seen these things coming forward. This is the time of the great unraveling. The pandemic unraveled us faster than we ever thought possible, but it's just the overture. There are harder times coming. If we embrace those hard times with foreknowledge, with absolute dedication, not turning away from any of the hardship that's coming, but engage it fully, asking ourselves the question, what is the highest good that I can bring to the challenges that I'm facing? What can I give that's being asked to be given now? I think we accelerate our own individual evolution, and in accelerating our individual evolution, we accelerate humanity's collective evolution. I think we're all in this for the collective right now; the time of the individual saints and saviors is gone. It's over. They've done their job. They've done their work. **Chris Bache: ** The hour now is for the children and the grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. The only calling that's worthy of ourselves is our collective salvation, our collective transformation, our collective good to bring us back in alignment with the deep truths, with our deep soul, with our deep heart. As the future human emerges in history, I anticipate a tremendous opening of our hearts to each other as we open our hearts to the Divine heart, which holds all of existence—not just humans, but all beings, all of existence. And as our minds open up into the deep communion, it opens us up into the cosmic communion that opens us into the intake of awareness and insights, truly scientific insights that can come pouring into us when we're open and clean and clear. We've passed the longest night of the year. We're coming into the beginning of the rising daylight in our lives, just a short cycle, just a six-month cycle, and then the cycle of darkness will begin again. This challenge that humanity is facing—it's a huge challenge. We'll make it, but that itself is not the end. It's just a phase. It's just a phase. We've been here for billions of years. We're going to be here for billions of years more, taking us deeper, farther, in unimaginable ways. My last thought I share with you tonight is this: this journey is so long we're not going to accomplish it in this lifetime. It's going to take more than one lifetime, many lifetimes, to stay on this journey. And therefore, as we open deeply to the cosmic communion, one thing that should fall away quickly is our fear of death. Absolutely nothing to fear in death, because death is in no way an ending. It's simply a punctuation in the cycle. And the same beautiful universe that we open up in sacred medicine space is the same universe we open up to when we fall—when our bodies fall away. The journey continues in the cascading ecologies of light. Thank you for letting me share these thoughts with you on this special night. **Stephen Gray: ** Thank you so much, Chris.