--- title: Contemplating Reincarnation – Part 2 slug: 2021-03-16-contemplating-reincarnation-part-2 date: 2021-03-16 type: lecture channel: Gene Keys 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: gpt5 model by OpenAI diarist_txt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2021-03-16-contemplating-reincarnation-part-2.txt diarist_srt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2021-03-16-contemplating-reincarnation-part-2.srt diarist_sha1: 05f67ceed1c55e0ae6b8867d0bf6c4c351aae626 --- **Chris Bache: ** Well, hello, Richard. It's good to continue our discussion. In our previous conversation, we began exploring reincarnation, examining evidence for reincarnation through extraordinary children from around the world. We started to unpack this evidence into a deeper understanding of the rhythms of life and the stages of human evolution that reincarnation makes possible—the restoration of meaningful challenges in our lives and the opportunities to deepen therapeutic interventions where we are stuck, holding pain rooted in our deeper history. Now, today, we'll take it further. We dive deeper into the significance of what it means to be reincarnating beings in a universe that supports, nurtures, and created this reincarnation dynamic. **Richard Rudd: ** That's a huge difference, isn't it, to be living in a universe nurturing us with a sort of paternal and maternal energy? It provides such a different framework to be born into. **Chris Bache: ** Yes, absolutely. I want to mention at the outset that sometimes thinkers in reincarnation go toward the notion that every tiny aspect of our life has a deterministic quality. But I don't think we need to go there necessarily since chance is a powerful element of this universe. We can affirm meaning and intentionality without reducing every detail of our life to a deterministic framework. It's important to understand that the universe pays attention to how we respond to chance events as well as intentional ones; our learning and the quality of our response carry forward, regardless of the origin of the challenges we're facing. **Richard Rudd: ** Yeah, absolutely. Funnily enough, today, I recorded a short meditation where I asked people to imagine the universe crisscrossed by karma fields, like ley lines through time and space, rippling with karmic energy. I asked individuals meditating to send out one beautiful thought from the depth of their souls into that field and see the universe respond and expand, touching every tiny area like synapses opening. The incalculable power of something like that dropped into the ocean of time and space is very powerful to contemplate. **Chris Bache: ** Absolutely. That's been very much my experience in my own work with psychedelics—nothing I did at deep levels was mine alone. The pain came from a larger collective web, and the healing spread out into that web. Exercises and meditations like you're describing are important for shifting our perception of living in the universe. Physical senses often lead us to feel life happens to us, as if we are passive victims. But when we start sending energy, healing, and love into the universe and observe the universe responding, we shift into a sense of living within a dynamic field. At a deep level, you realize you're creating your universe as you go, even as past karma works through the system. The balance of your life tilts from being a passive recipient of things you didn't personally start to being the generator of the life you are now inheriting. **Richard Rudd: ** You're no longer a victim; you're a creator. We have a great question we thought to inject into this talk: What happens to us when we die? Shall we explore that? Many other cultures, like the Tibetans and Egyptians, have insights on this. The Tibetans, being more contemporary, are very much still practicing those Bardo teachings. **Chris Bache: ** Psychotherapists are now exploring this territory, too. Joel Whitten's "Life Between Life" and Michael Newton's "Journey of Souls" and "Destiny of Souls" are systematic attempts to explore what happens during the death process through spiritual regression. We've got two halves of life: birth to death and death to birth. Really, to understand what happens, we have to consider the whole circle. Let's jump into it. **Richard Rudd: ** The Tibetans coined the phrase "Bardo," which describes a transformational in-between state. Life is filled with transformational experiences, particularly when moving through thresholds like death or birth. They stand as allegories of all transformation, as life contains many deaths and births even within one lifetime. So it seems logical to expand that allegory beyond individual births and see it throughout the entire cosmos. I know you've experienced this profoundly in your psychedelic journeys, with constant states of transformation or rebirth. **Chris Bache: ** Yes, when I began my work, I thought there was just one death—ego death—that would launch you into the spiritual universe. But I found that the spiritual universe has many layers, and you have to undergo another metamorphosis of death and surrender to be reborn into deeper layers. This reflects the Tibetan idea of Bardo, meaning discrete layers of consciousness. In the after-death journey, they describe multiple Bardos. The Western use of the term often represents all that happens after death. The pattern they've identified aligns with what psychotherapists find: upon dying, we reunite with our soul and soul lineage, processing the life we just lived in infinite love. It's not even a matter of forgiveness; we experience our life, shortcomings, and good deeds in this context, understanding what we did well and where we can improve. **Richard Rudd: ** There's the notion of life flashing before your eyes, replayed in timeless dimensions, which makes sense as a deep reflection at the end. We often do that in life. **Chris Bache: ** I think the Near-Death Experience life review is a snapshot of what happens in a full death experience—an incredibly detailed reliving of our life beyond what we can track in time and space. We see how our life rippled out, experiencing the impact of our deeds in a seamless fabric. **Richard Rudd: ** And we experience it without a physical body, our subtle bodies intensifying emotions. This might give rise to notions of eternal damnation from Christians or eternal bliss realms from Buddhists. When out of time, the eternal nature of experience emerges. You feel the gravity of what you've caused, be it harm or joy, seeing its consequences. I imagine we experience subtle dimensions of our karma very intensely. **Chris Bache: ** Yes, but the notion that locks eternity as a metaphysical principle comes from the mistaken view that we live only once and there's no chance to correct our path. Fortunately, when deeply explored, neither past-life therapists nor Buddhists find eternal damnation. We're accountable for our actions but learn from them, enabling us to come back to do better next time and grow. **Richard Rudd: ** I'm from a lineage of distillers, and I see a distilling process—in my colorful interpretation, anyway—where grosser matter falls back to Earth while something higher crystallizes our life's Quintessence. Our karma returns to be addressed, and we collectively co-create humanity's karma. When we return, we are enhanced, with more awareness present, crafting a continuity and trajectory in life, a spiraling arc that suggests where we've been and where we might return. **Chris Bache: ** I've never been much interested in tracing my genealogy, but tracing my soul's lineage intrigues me. It's a process of remembering who we are and witnessing the trajectory of our development. Your point about the collective evolution is spot on. The individual and the collective evolve together. So much of what we experience feeds into humanity's collective experience, enriching its generative matrix for the next generation. **Richard Rudd: ** Like the Akashic field, constantly recording and growing, the concept of Tarma from the Tibetans fascinates me. These teachings, or wisdom treasures, arise at specific times for specific individuals, dropped by great teachers like Padmasambhava. They resurface at appropriate times and expand our understanding of evolution and involution. Could you explain involution, Chris? **Chris Bache: ** First, I want to celebrate your receiving the terma of the Gene Keys. Reincarnation is a cycle with an incarnational bottom half and a spiritual top half, populated by layers of beings. Just as human communities are here, spiritual beings and teachings assist our gestation. Understanding this deep evolutionary trajectory of the soul and soul communities, like the Tibetans, we track great beings and teachings through time. This changes the parameters of our dialog with the universe, altering our sense of self—we are beings traveling through time, reincarnating profound teachings into our being. This understanding opens up the playing field of human experience. I teach at a university where secular enlightenment holds that the universe is chance-driven, with no meaning beyond life. But when reincarnation transcends empirical understanding into deeper spiritual appreciation, it restores meaning and engagement with universal wisdom. Involution embodies this flow of meaning, purpose, beauty, and truth into our lives, which we then grow and seed through the circumstances of our existence. **Richard Rudd: ** Beautiful. Sometimes I see involution as the future burrowing into the past and evolution as the past spiraling toward the future, these forces meeting in the eternal Now. Aurobindo, whom we both admire, described involution as spirit's seeds sown in matter, awakening over time. The divine presence is in everything—from rocks to humans—awaiting its time. In humans, spirit is more apparent as we unlock heightened consciousness states from dense creation. It's a profound responsibility we carry. **Chris Bache: ** Yes, over time, shadow seeds diminish, and creative seeds expand through reflective awareness, enhancing transparency to the universe's intelligence. Assuming this is true collectively, humanity evolves, cooking its shadow seeds, transcending past limitations, and striving toward enlightened existence. We're moving from history's shadows into a brighter future. **Richard Rudd: ** Particularly as our understanding of the universe expands. You have some wonderful slides to share, Chris. **Chris Bache: ** When contemplating topics like reincarnation's purpose and rebirth's scope, I meditate on NASA's images of the universe. The distances, countless stars, and profligate life illustrate the universe's scale and fertility. This genius and beauty are not something to which we remain unconnected. With reincarnation, our minds grow through countless incarnations, becoming part of the generative creativity displayed in these magnificent images. **Richard Rudd: ** ...of the universe, and this then becomes our playground. Without the physical body, this is surely where we live. This is our playground, and it could even be within the physical body at some deep level. As a hologram, that could be a deep truth that we come to—an "as above, so below" truth. I know you've experienced some of that yourself in your journeys, and so have I. That's a fundamental truth I hold at the core of my being. In my teachings, we have this profile called a hologenetic profile. I named it that because it is a map of the inner workings of our being, but it kind of has a fractal reality that corresponds way beyond this microorganism of one body. It is replicated throughout the cosmos. A lot of the great alchemical teachings of the Taoists, for example, have explored this in their deep studies and meditations, where you go within and find the galaxies and the stars existing in the glands of the body. Everything has a correspondence, and therefore knowing those correspondences allows your awareness to travel into that reality and outside your physical body. Many people have experienced that in dreams, astral projection, deep meditation, or psychedelic journeying. I mean, feel free to share some of your experiences in that. **Chris Bache: ** Well, I've done that as carefully as I can in my book, *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. But I think the invitation is to appreciate—we only became conscious of the mother universe about 5,000 years ago. We began to have sufficient discipline to drop beneath the conditioning of our individual egoic mind and to tap into that stream of consciousness we share with all life. We've been walking upright for 5.8 million years. We've been operating with our larger brain about 200,000 years. Writing came in about 5,000 years ago; the Upanishadic breakthroughs came in about three, 4,000 years ago. But these are nothing compared to the billions of years that lie ahead of us. We're just waking up. We're just waking up to who we are, and so naturally, we kind of get confused given the enormity of what we're growing into. But I think the meditation exercises you're describing and those philosophical and spiritual traditions which have begun to recognize the correspondence between the above and the below naturally lead us to exercises where we intentionally reinforce the hybrid nature of our life, that we are a spiritual being and a physical being. We are both pure light and pure green, and there are correspondences in our body which correspond to the realities out there. The more we can internalize, reinforce, and strengthen them in our meditational exercises, the more conscious we become as a mixing pot, a mortar and pestle, integrating the above and the below. If we keep this up for a few tens of thousands of years, a few million years, we should ask ourselves, what do we want to be in a million years? Because we're going to be here in a million years. So let's get down to it. What is our deepest heart's desire? **Richard Rudd: ** The fundamental question. I heard a really interesting talk by Roger Penrose, the imaginative top-level physicist in the world today, saying how there's this notion that the universe is expanding in physics, getting further apart and slowing down, reaching a steady state where we'll end in a distant, dead, lonely stopping point. That's not his intuition. He describes it as when you reach that stopping point, it's the same as if you've gone incredibly fast, as if everything's come together again because one end of the spectrum meets the other. You wouldn't be able to tell if things are slowing down; they might look like they're speeding up. My paraphrasing of what he said, but what blew me away was that he said the condensing point would then give birth to another universe out of itself, like rebirth leads to another birth and another eon. But he went further. He said the background radiation we see through our furthest telescopes shows certain objects he sees repeatedly. His assumption was those were leftovers from the previous eon, the previous universe. That blew me away. That's a physicist at the top of his game willing to take a few leaps. **Chris Bache: ** I've heard Irvin Laszlo describe that once you reflect on the extraordinary precision of our universe unfolding in the Big Bang, the magnitude of the balance of elements present in the first picoseconds for it to unfold as it has, it leads to his hypothesis: do we think this is the first time the universe has tried this? There have been expansions and contractions, and the universe is learning. Perhaps this isn't the first Big Bang, but the 1000th Big Bang, and it has learned from previous experiences. That's that background radiation, the traces which are there. **Richard Rudd: ** And it's constantly ironing out flaws, perfecting itself, yeah. **Chris Bache: ** But of course, this wide view, it's rich to take the wide view, the deep view, and look at very special, developed beings who are pushing the edge of this large view. But I want to bring it back down. How does this impact me here today? How does this help me with the immediate problems or choices I'm living with? I think it does in that it's an invitation to look at our life as an intentional, intelligent convocation of circumstances, not as a meaningless, blind, deterministic combination. If we engage life circumstances as an intentional challenge chosen for us, by us, at a time when we knew more, and we start making choices from a deeper sense of engagement, knowing our choices matter—even if we don't see how they change things immediately, we can trust they do in the long term—then life changes the circumstances. Things that were hard become soft, things that were bare become richer. **Richard Rudd: ** Yeah, and it gives us a different backdrop to tackle the world's problems. The problems today that worry us so much give us an empowered view from a much wider view. We've been looking at cosmic background images. Then you come to the world today, this tiny blue planet with its problems. They're very real, causing a great deal of suffering. They always have, but they're now more easily seen than ever before. We've enacted them globally because of our technology. So for me, I'm constantly reminding people that action coming from a state of trust is different from action from fear. If we can dive into that field of wider trust and begin to make friends with our death, instead of it being something looming like "I'm running out of time," having this long-term view as an individual and even as a community—how about if a community of people on the same wavelength play with this together? If we're all going to come back, return into this, that's why I've created these teachings. They appear because we can come back into them and continue progressive evolutionary work as communities, rather than doing great work and then leaving with no sense of direction. If you're reborn into the same community committed to transmuting karma of the planet, bringing different gifts and skills in different locations and interconnected through the internet and teachings resonating in our soul, so we recognize them even as a child, and synchronicity helps us find them, it's a different playground. You don't have to say goodbye to loved ones forever. You're going to remember them differently, and bring more awareness through the transitionary Bardo, the more it opens them up. This is my intuition. The more we open them up, the more we create a memory game. Memory is strange. There are memory tricks, therapeutic aids. There are things you can do forwards in time to ensure you don't forget. The tulkus sometimes leave objects they retrieve in the next life. Once you know the way through wormholes, you can play more. We can bring more awakening to the collective. It changes everything. **Chris Bache: ** I think we're shifting slowly from living an ego-based life grounded in this incarnation to living a soul life grounded in a much, much deeper life in the universe. It always struck me that in the classical story of the Buddha's enlightenment, when he went through the four watches of the night, he saw all his former lives. They became a living part of his awareness. To see your former lives is to become the soul that gathers all that knowledge and experience into one. When he did that, he shattered his suffering. Suffering is living small, as if this body is all you are. And I think historically this is happening. The more we bring that memory forward, practice the skills of soul inside time and space, our soul gets stronger. We remember and have intuitive feelings for relationships we have deep history with. If people come as enemies, we'll heal them. More and more allies come. Waking up is social—a generative process that's never been private in history. I think the soul is waking up inside time and space; the human species is growing up on an unprecedented scale. Comparable to 200,000 years ago when we made the jump to a bigger brain. Now, the physical plant isn't changing, but the awareness it supports is changing exponentially. You and I share a vision of history entering into a challenging time of darkening shadows. I hope in our next conversation, we can understand the dynamics of this period of growth we affirm deeply. **Richard Rudd: ** Yeah, how those fit perfectly together—what you've called The Birth of the Diamond Soul. And a term I also happen to use, Diamond Awareness. It is that memory transcending lifetimes, maintaining memory between lives. Many people I engage with are excited by being here and returning, opposed to "I want to get out of here," which was prevalent in spiritual communities. A more compassionate and exciting view is that this place needs us, needs us here to do this work. That's why we're having these conversations. **Chris Bache: ** I don't think the creative genius that gave birth to galaxies, planets in the galaxies, and solar systems created reincarnation; nature did. I don't think it would create reincarnation to grow us to an inkling of our deep spiritual essence with the purpose being to leave. Awakening is part of the transformation of time and space. We are changing the world; it really is heaven on earth. **Richard Rudd: ** Let's leave that as a seed for next time. Thank you, Chris. What a fantastic... **Chris Bache: ** I'll just leave with this thought: I wonder what our personal former life history is that we meet in such ease and fruitful dialogue. I honor the history between us, whatever it is. **Richard Rudd: ** I will contemplate that. Much love. Great, thank you. Audience: ** You.