Contemplating Reincarnation (Part 1)

Richard Rudd: Welcome everyone to a series of talks that I'm doing here with my friend Chris Bache. We're going to be discussing a subject that we're both really interested in and fascinated by, which is rebirth and all the things that go along with rebirth. Might also call it reincarnation, because that's part of the story. This began really because I read a book by Chris, a wonderful book called LSD and the Mind of the Universe, and what it did is it kind of just triggered a real recognition in me. Since I'm a teacher of spiritual matters and I'm the founder of a system called the Gene Keys, that resonance caused me to reach out via email to this amazing man. You never know whether you're going to hear back, and Chris very kindly got back to me. We started a series of dialogues and discussions and realized we really enjoyed having dialogs together. That's why we're here, and we're going to explore this subject in several sessions. Today we're going to just begin with some introductory concepts and basics and then see where it leaves us. I hope you enjoy it, and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Chris Bache: So we're anticipating three discussions.

Richard Rudd: Absolutely. So Chris, if you want to say a few things about yourself, just so that, yeah, people know who you are.

Chris Bache: It's a pleasure to be here, and I've enjoyed our conversations prior to this, which our present dialog grew out of. I am a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, retired from Youngstown State University. In the course of my teaching, I've taught courses on world religions and Eastern religions, Transpersonal psychology of religion, comparative mysticism, Buddhism. I've been teaching in areas touching on reincarnation for many years. I've written several books. My first one was on reincarnation, starting with the scientific evidence for reincarnation, which we'll be touching on today. It's been seminal in my thinking. I just believe that reincarnation is like plate tectonics. At first, it's hard to see because it's not obvious, but once you see it, it changes everything. It opens up the horizon of existence. We thought this would be a good topic to have a shared conversation about, and I'm just really pleased to be here.

Richard Rudd: Thanks, Chris. And I mean, we'll put the link in afterwards, but there are some great talks that you've done, particularly one which I watched recently about whether there's evidence for reincarnation. It's so illuminating and extraordinary and kind of overlooked by so many people. Tell us some of your story in assembling and amassing some of that evidence or meeting the other people that have.

Chris Bache: Well, you know, I came from a traditional religious background, but over the course of many years of graduate education, I finished my doctoral work in philosophy of religion as an atheistically inclined agnostic. I had studied my way out of religion altogether. I started my academic career as a young man a long time ago, in 1978, and I met the work of two people in my first year, both of whom changed the course of my life. The first was Ian Stevenson, the Carlson professor at the University of Virginia. His lifelong work has been to provide carefully documented cases of young children, small children, who have spontaneous memories of their previous life. By researching these children from all over the world, collecting thousands of cases, publishing hundreds of cases, he convinced me that reincarnation was a simple fact of life.

Richard Rudd: Well, that's quite a book, isn't it? That's a big book he's written.

Chris Bache: He's written about, oh, I think close to a dozen now, but the first one was called 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. To me, it was a life pivot because reincarnation was never discussed in my graduate education. It was never discussed in Western religions or in the scientific tradition that had wiped the slate clean of religious traditions. So I just erased my blackboard and began to rethink again, the larger questions of life, incorporating reincarnation. The second person I met at that time was Stanislav Grof, who is the foremost authority on integrating psychedelics into psychotherapy. He was providing a methodology that actually allows one to explore the deeper dimensions of one's own consciousness. That began a whole other journey, a second journey, which culminated eventually in the publication of this book Richard mentioned, LSD and the Mind of the Universe. But today, the focus here is on Ian Stevenson's work and the revolution of really providing carefully documented evidence that reincarnation is simply a fact of life. It's not a religious thing; it's simply a natural phenomenon that's happening in the world.

Richard Rudd: In your talk, you gave an argument from your years as an academic, showing both sides, how different people have come in and even written books to refute those things, and how they've fallen short. There's this whole story around it and this growing body of evidence that's been documented in the last 50 years. I mean, it's fairly recent, isn't it?

Chris Bache: It is recent. Fifty years ago, we didn't have this evidence. Reincarnation was a speculative topic that theologians argued back and forth on. But now it's moved from the theologians' table to the psychologists' table. As we explore more deeply the deeper levels of consciousness in the depth psychology tradition, we find we're bumping into this evidence over and over again. Now, the Western philosophical tradition is still saturated with the metaphysical position of naturalism, which says the only thing which is real is that which is physical. Therefore, the brain produces your mind. So obviously, in that system, once your brain dies, your mind ceases to exist. It's impossible for there to be something like reincarnation because it implies a dimension of reality behind the physical world, if consciousness can exist there for any interval of time between the death of one personality and the birth of a second personality. Naturally, there's been a real pushback from philosophical traditions in the West. Mostly, they've just ignored the evidence. They don't look at it, and even those who engage it, like the foremost critic I mentioned in my talk, Paul Edwards, a substantial American philosopher, refuse to look seriously at the evidence because they're convinced beforehand that the evidence must somehow be faulty because we know that reincarnation can't happen.

Richard Rudd: Of course, and that's often the way with academics sometimes, isn't it? So that's really interesting, just the evidence. I don't think we need to go further into that now, but what are the implications? This year, I've done a series of videos myself, short ones, just exploring the implications of what if I say yes to this concept, open my mind and heart to it, and begin to deeply explore it. The implications to our worldview and the way we move through life are huge, aren't they?

Chris Bache: Yeah, it all hinges on time, how much time we have. Let me back up. I'm a professor, right? If I give a quiz in class, I can expect a certain quality of an answer back. If I give an exam that takes an hour, I expect a higher quality of response. If it's a take-home research paper, I have higher expectations still, because they have more time. Philosophically, if we believe we only live on Earth one time, and we have only a few minutes to as many as 100 years, we extrapolate from that. If there is a purpose to existence, that purpose must be proportionate to the amount of time we have to fulfill it. But if we have 100 lifetimes, 1000 lifetimes to actualize the purpose of the universe, then it expands exponentially our potential assessment of what the purpose of existence might be. That's why it's such an important philosophical discussion, because once you understand the dynamics of reincarnation, it lifts the constriction of time and allows us to think in terms of and appreciate longer patterns of cause and effect, overarching centuries of time, elevating the whole discussion.

Richard Rudd: Absolutely. If I can be blunt, if you have an inherent sense of divinity behind creation, it seems logical to extend that to a concept of generosity. If you have divinity and only have one life, it's very stingy. It doesn't seem to have any pattern or reason. For me, spirit is filled with generosity in terms of time. If we open to the eternal nature of life, it would make sense for there to be a continuity of consciousness. The more people open to this, the more they realize it has a deep root inside them. I've discovered that a lot because I've begun to talk about it more. I've realized that other than people doing past life regression therapeutically, a lot of spiritual teachers today avoid this subject. I don't know if they consciously avoid it, but they don't talk about it. They get asked questions, but their answers are usually short, and it doesn't get picked up. I'm really interested in something that is passed over and should be in plain view for all of us.

Chris Bache: Isn't that curious? I understand why my colleagues at the University, who tend to be materialist and reductionist, why they don't talk about it. But why wouldn't spiritual teachers use it to frame a larger and expanded horizon? Sometimes people say it can dilute your intensity of commitments for realization in the present. But that argument evaporates quickly once you look at it carefully. I think it deepens the textures of the situations we find ourselves in. Let me give you one example. Michael Newton's research in Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls has found evidence that we choose our incarnation. Many people may go haphazardly and take what's available, but as you get mature, you choose your incarnation carefully. If we choose our incarnation carefully, when there was a time when we knew more than we know now and we could see more than we could see now, if we chose the life we're living now, with all its ups and downs, challenges, and opportunities, doesn't that change how we relate to those circumstances? Not to chase hidden meanings, but to temper the quality of self-responsibility in how we engage the people and circumstances we find ourselves in.

Richard Rudd: Yeah, and it makes you feel more like an eternal, cosmic adventurer. It enriches this time I'm in now. In many ways, it focuses me more into the present because I'm not worrying about dying. It's not just a concept. You have to contemplate something like this deeply to let it take root in you. As it takes root, it brings out the truth in our DNA. It's like it's in us. Once it gets triggered, an awakening of memory brings a certainty and stability that grows inside us, enabling us to handle challenges more powerfully because we're rooted in an eternal acceptance. You hear on the radio: "You've only got one life, so make the most of it." It's a great thing to say, but "only one life" is such a tight reality from whichever belief system you're in.

Chris Bache: Yeah, it cuts the legs right out from under you. It correlates with the idea of existence driven by blind chance. If there's no existential significance, you only get one shot. Make the best of it, but when you die, you're gone anyway, so who cares? That's such a demeaning and counterintuitive philosophy of life. When we look at the beauties of nature, the night sky, the Hubble telescope images from the deep cosmos, the emergence of life and self-awareness on the planet over time, all these projects take place over enormous sweeps of time. We are the first generation to appreciate how much time the universe has had to evolve into its current form. If everything in the universe takes enormous amounts of time and we have only one life, existentially, we're cut off; we don't participate in that massive project. But if we live multiple lifetimes, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is it's hard work in this lifetime, and we'd like to have it over with when we die; the good news is we're participating in a larger project, and the fear of death drops away. You envision a deeper, longer-term project. When you let it in and look around, you realize every person you see has been here before and will be here again. It allows you to engage life with more meaning and intensity. What we're good at are things we've practiced in the past. New things we'll get better at in the future. We have that much time to think in larger landscapes.

Richard Rudd: We’re not alone in this. Many thinkers, philosophers, and sages have come to the same conclusion about rebirth. Notably, Jung springs straight into view because he's a bit more contemporary—a pillar of modern psychology in understanding the unconscious and collective unconscious.

Chris Bache: Jung tended to hide his belief in reincarnation. He came to it late in life and pushed boundaries so much he was concerned about backlash. But it's there in his work.

Richard Rudd: That's what happens with a lot. They say, "I'm not sure I want to go into that area; it's got a stigma attached." The moment you say "reincarnation," skeptics come from Christianity, materialist science—you really put your head above the parapet.

Chris Bache: For years, I was taking students into the reincarnation literature. Once you look at the cases, the evidence, 95% of my students overcame resistances, both secular and religious, because in our culture, they're trained to follow evidence. Once they saw how consistent it was in various contexts, spontaneous and evoked memories, they accepted it. It was life changing.

Richard Rudd: Do you have favorite stories about those recurrences?

Chris Bache: I have many, but the one I opened my book Lifecycles with is about a young girl named Romy Creese, born to Catholic parents in Iowa—so it's okay if they reincarnate in India, but Catholics don't reincarnate. She had memories of being a man, Joe Williams, in a previous life. She remembered being married, three children, their names, dying in a motorcycle accident. She had a phobia of motorcycles. Long story short, researchers brought her to the town where she remembered living as Joe. She identified Joe's mother, insisted on blue flowers, remembered personalities from Joe's life, and developed a deep emotional bond with Joe's mother and wife, Sheila. Joe was married, had three children, and died in a motorcycle accident.

Richard Rudd: Hundreds of these cases, so many.

Chris Bache: Yes, they remember intimate family details, the architecture of homes they’ve never been in, know their way around towns, remember personalities and incidents like a neighbor's dog biting at a kid's birthday party.

Richard Rudd: The little details. I loved one about a Muslim family where a girl identified women with veils, naming them by body language alone. This is the depth of the detail.

Chris Bache: One for the cynics: Ian Stevenson had a case where a child knew where a will was hidden under a floorboard, found it where no one else could. How many cases before you realize it's part of life's rhythm?

Richard Rudd: And there's the documentation about body marks—another documentation area.

Chris Bache: Ian Stevenson's last work covered reincarnation and biology, finding death wounds in previous lives show up as birthmarks in new ones, suggesting our mind and body experiences carry over, deepening the story.

Richard Rudd: Opening to this idea can lead to therapeutic work for people facing difficulties or complexes. Understanding the roots in a previous lifetime opens a therapeutic journey.

Chris Bache: Yes, past life therapy finds significant cases where issues have roots in past lives. Revisiting those helps untie knots and release psychological or physical problems.

Richard Rudd: We’re pulling them out from a greater depth in the individual consciousness.

Chris Bache: Yes, but distinguishing between collective unconscious and soul consciousness, which is the personal unconscious through time.

Richard Rudd: I have a dear friend, a startling intellect, who struggles with this concept despite being very spiritual. There's a strong spiritual leaning towards ego surrender into the ocean of being for liberation, leading to an "up and out" cosmology.

Chris Bache: Just because cultures have believed in reincarnation doesn't mean they have it right. I've revised Eastern understandings of reincarnation. All cultures teach a cosmological journey that's up and out, but it leaves unanswered what the physical world's purpose is. Now we see billions of years have gone into physical existence. It's not satisfactory to think self-awareness is just to escape it.

Chris Bache: I think they're basically all the axial religions got two things fundamentally wrong. They got many things right, but they got two things wrong. They got nature wrong. They don't really have an adequate theology or understanding of nature, and they got women wrong. The two are connected because women are so closely connected to nature. They're patriarchally and escapist-oriented. As a historian, I understand it. I think about four or five thousand years ago, through various psycho-technologies, either yoga or meditation or psychedelic substances, we began to have a deeper experience of the mother universe, of this universe that surrounds the physical universe. Once you have experiential contact with that universe, it is so blissful, it is so ecstatic, that you cannot help but recognize that that's where we're from, and you believe that's where we belong. We don't belong here; we belong there. They developed a theology of return, where the Savior comes to take us home, the enlightened being comes to liberate us back into our home. But that leaves the question, what is the purpose of creation? What we're beginning to understand now, as our experience of this mother universe deepens over time and our understanding of the physical universe deepens, is that we're not here to achieve escape velocity and leave. We're here to incarnate more and more spiritual reality and capacity inside our physical being so that we can truly live and create heaven on earth, to wake up and stay. I mean, not just to wake up as an individual, but to wake up as an entire species and stay.

Richard Rudd: Yeah, now that you can't leave that. We're going to discuss that more, aren't we? We're going to come back to that. But that's a huge window to open up. And you've touched on a lot of themes there, particularly about the feminine and the physical body. That's what I interpret partly from what you're saying. Those religions didn't really understand the physical body, as you said, nature didn't value it because there's vast beauty in this physicality. Perhaps what we're exploring is, perhaps it's here to be spiritualized. Perhaps it's here to bring that ecstatic realization deeper into the form, because then, if we see that's our highest purpose, we no longer want to leave. Our role, through subsequent incarnations, is to bring more and more of that light down into the earth. Then we're also taking full responsibility for the body and the earth, which is something we also haven't done very well. Absolutely.

Chris Bache: And if that sounds at first disappointing, where we would say, "Oh no, I want heaven, please. I don't want a transformed body here, because here is still too difficult," I think we may be underestimating what is possible and what it would really feel like to live a truly fully spiritualized, enlightened existence. Here we can look at some of the God-soaked masters of history who are truly living in the God-soaked condition or the primordial condition that is radically open to the vast mind of the universe, inside their body, inside time and space. What we're seeing from these mahasiddhas, these great beings, is that they can do what we would call miracles because there is so much spiritual power concentrated in their presence. It's as if the laws of nature operate differently around them, and they are showing us a prototype of what each of us is in the process of becoming. Imagine what it would be like to have an entire species living in that kind of presence.

Richard Rudd: And our physics is also pushing us in that direction, isn't it? The understandings that we're entangled with nature, with the universe. My whole teaching is based on this notion that in our DNA are contained these sleeping, dormant codes, these siddhis, these, as I call them, 64 siddhis. Like you're talking about, they are an activation inside us that's waiting for its moment so that we can enter more fully into the next phase of our evolution, the magical universe, the quantum universe, where our thoughts, feelings, and sensations are actually traveling outside our physical body. They're entangled with nature. Nature then responds to us, which perhaps it already does at a level that we're not aware of. It's just about opening up those pathways, literal pathways in our being, into that next phase of our evolution.

Chris Bache: We are already plugged into nature at very deep levels, down to the quantum level in the unified field. We're plugged into our ecosystems with subtle, intimate feedbacks, and we're plugged into each other. Our minds wash back and forth, we're already there. But when we can become conscious of those connections, lift off the obstructive shadows from other sadder times, then that connection begins to rise, empowering a conscious participation. It makes what was unconscious conscious, and existence becomes more enlivened and enlightened with synchronicities that indicate the broader intelligence alive in life around us.

Richard Rudd: Yeah, and I'd love it if we could bring our conversation into people's lives a little bit, so they can consider their relationships from this perspective, and how that might change attitudes or views towards difficult relationships or the afflictions that come up in us that we have to handle in our everyday life. It changes all of that, doesn't it? Life is actually a process of opening the heart, as teachers have always said. Every relationship serves to show us some grace, what I call the law of unseen grace. Every relationship, particularly the difficult ones, offers us incredible teaching, some virtue we haven't yet polished. Whether it's forgiveness, clarity, or some form of love, we are here to learn from those relationships, as part of our teaching karma. The ancients called life a Leela, a game, a drama theater. It's like before you come in, you're given an envelope with a script, and there are things you're going to learn. You've chosen it at some level, and it changes the way we behave, doesn't it? Statics, I'm sure you've had personal experience of that in your life, in your emotional life.

Chris Bache: Yeah, and one more step. It's not simply the envelope given to you, but you were given three envelopes, and you chose the one most suited for your evolution at this point in history. It's your choice to engage these challenges. When we engage our life that way, taking full responsibility for our circumstances, it allows us to engage challenges with more patience, dedication, and the long term, because we know if we don’t deal with it now, it's just going to come back in another form. Let's get it done now, deal with it now. It also allows you to build on things. Our understanding of reincarnation is being informed by therapists working heroically in past life therapy. But if you only pay attention to those cases, it creates an understanding of reincarnation tilted towards failures, traumas coming forward. But just like the school system, most kids learn and pass every year. Most people rise to the karma, the challenge of their life. That means every lifetime, we're not simply dealing with leftover issues from the past. We're building on assets, investing in greater fruition in the future. It helps us handle challenging circumstances and embrace the positive ones, the hidden talent which comes forward unannounced, the partnerships with deep kinship that allow us to do something new.

Richard Rudd: You triggered a memory of mine about Sri Aurobindo, who spoke incredibly clearly about the complexity of karma and how we misunderstand it by oversimplifying. When you look at the universe with its multiple dimensions, the quantum field, force fields operate at different levels, and there's this karmic force that equalizes and balances, allowing us to go through this educational process. Everything at different levels is influenced by these karmic strands. This karmic force, like unseen grace, if fully embraced in your life, you get the grace through unwrapping it, but you have to have the courage to face it fully, take it in, let it in, whatever the suffering is, transform it, transmute it. Transmutation of karma plays a huge part in this reincarnative theology.

Chris Bache: If we just look around us, it's the web of cause and effect. Everything is cause and effect. We live in a continuous web of cause and effect, the air we breathe, weather patterns, biology, what we ate, the purity of what we ate, the universe, the movement of the planets, the solar system. We live in a continuous web of cause and effect, focusing on the portion of the web influencing human psychophysical development. In that context, we've tended to narrow our discussion of karma. Many teachers talk about karma, focusing only on that portion which immediately impacts our spiritual maturity. But a lot of karma is just moral cause and effect. A habit becomes a skill, an automobile accident develops into a trauma that carries over into another life. It's not necessarily about your spiritual development, just cause and effect. When you open to the conditioning etching itself in your life, engage it, lift it out, the wellspring of your life becomes freer, clearer. You're not stepping out of the web of cause and effect, but stepping into greater freedom, a greater capacity to make increasingly free choices, greater capacity to ask yourself, what do I want?

Richard Rudd: It's tempting for some people to say, well, karma and reincarnation. Then there's this oversimplified story, like that person was born disabled, did they do something terrible in their last life? It's oversimplifying a very complex arena, where you don't know unless you plug into the soul quality inside that being. They could be a hidden saint deliberately taking on an incredibly challenging role to polish a virtue or skill over one lifetime. Similarly, very short incarnations, like a child coming in for a short time and leaving, have implications for the healing of the whole. Why does a child come in for a short time, leaving grief behind, but the feeling that it's still part of your life? Explore that.

Chris Bache: You can recognize the principles of cause and effect, of karma, vipaka. But many teachers, all of us, think we can determine cause and effect when we're really just touching the wrapping on the package. The safest position is recognizing we're looking at a deep, deep mystery, and it would be foolish to try to judge anybody's karma, a wasted exercise. Better to focus on the karma you can penetrate within your own life. When you see great suffering, you're seeing a sinner or a saint, and you can never know which it is, so best not to make any judgments. There are many hidden saints, taking on cause and effect from their own larger soul stream or even a collective soul stream. They're focusing what we call negative karma for the uplift of the whole. That type of generosity and compassion we see all the time in good parents, good mothers, good fathers—they would do anything for their children. I think souls at that deeper level do that too. We can't judge. It's a waste of effort.

Richard Rudd: I read this book, and anyone, it's a recommendation, called "Sand Talk," by an Aboriginal from Australia, part Aboriginal, a really intelligent man. He tells a story of talking to one of the elders about the problems of the indigenous people, particularly men who went down the alcoholic path, eating terrible food, and had obesity issues. He was concerned, and the elder said, yeah, they're the warriors. They are warrior spirits in our tribe, holding this negativity in their bodies. One day, they will move from warrior to healer, and that's the evolutionary pathway. It really stuck with this young man as he explored solutions for the cultural problem. It's a powerful, empowering way to see someone dealing with a societal difficulty that's more collective.

Chris Bache: Yes, it's a very deep, deep current that requires us to open to a much deeper, expanded spiritual story. We often think of reincarnation and karma individualistically, atomistically, like an individual soul evolving through skillful choice within karma. If we sink into a deeper understanding, we recognize each individual as a fractal point within a unified field, with deep currents running within the unconscious of humanity or the soul field of humanity. We're all players on a larger evolutionary dynamic, opening a deeper understanding of what's taking place here. I know we've tagged this as one of our topics for a second discussion.

Richard Rudd: We'll plant the seed now. When you go into that worldview, the perfection of the choreography is just mind-blowing, in terms of soul groups' interconnectivity, fractals, patterns of humans. One insight I got from your "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" book is the paradox of being an individual soul yet being everything at the same time. How does that paradox hold up? You described it beautifully, the soul as open on all sides, part of the ocean yet still a focalized drop. Your awareness names it.

Chris Bache: Yes, it seems common sense that you can't be both a part and the whole at the same time, as those seem mutually exclusive. Even in Vedanta and other spiritual systems, the goal is often to abandon individuality, to dissolve it and be absorbed in the totality, knowing the bliss of absorption. This view implies the individual capacity developed over incarnations ends in extinction, which seems wasted. It's an inadequate worldview. In my spiritual and psychedelic paths, a different worldview emerges. We are moving into higher, more sophisticated forms of individuality, which is one of creation's great gifts. The divine encourages individuality, but early individuality feels cut off from the larger texture around it—it's us against them or us in the whole. Mature individuality, what I call the birth of the Diamond Soul, experiences a defined individuality emerging from historical lineage while open to larger existence patterns, human kinship, and the universe's intelligence. We must have a very strong individuality to withstand the intensity of communion available to us when in communion with the one, the whole. We need to be diamond-hard, focused, and clear; the universe's love would shatter us otherwise.

Richard Rudd: That's such an empowering vision. It opens the question of our notion of enlightenment, divinity, which we have to keep expanding beyond inherited notions. They've been useful, but we must expand further. What's missing currently is creativity. The idea of it coming to an end, going into wonderful absorption, maintaining individuality. What you maintain is creativity, as you're a shard of the Divine creative essence. It's like, "Go out and create my children." If divinity wanted children, it would want them to be free, to create, to become Gods within God. That's the vision I hold: becoming creator Gods within the broader God, with a big G.

Chris Bache: Yes, God within God, the creative spark within the fire of creation. I agree with that vision. It changes everything, how we greet children born into our families; they're not coming from us, they're coming to us. It changes how we view old and young people; young souls might be old in soul age, old people not necessarily so. It opens a larger tapestry, acknowledging deep aspirations towards greatness, creativity, spiritual fulfillment. Things may not finish in this lifetime, but we can move towards them.

Richard Rudd: It's a more sophisticated spirituality, more nuanced, requiring subtler understanding, not just, "Here's the law of karma, governing everything." It's like Aurobindo said, layers and layers of understanding. It becomes more subtle with deeper attunement. I love fine tea, understanding its nuances. We are becoming more attuned, more evolved in soul essence, understanding subtler nuances. We get empowered by the creative current. People talk about past lives, but I'm also interested in future lives, as when you expand your sense of time. You don't only need to look backward; you remember forwards too, as revelation. Revelations come backward and forward in time, into this essence, expanding it, focused in the beauty of the present moment. That's the thought I'd like to end on. Do you want to close us off?

Chris Bache: That's a really good thought and a great spot to end. One principle I bring to understanding creation is accumulation. The universe is a self-learning system, constantly learning. Even in a mediocre lifetime, you're learning. As we learn, we're activating genius in all life areas, as if each lifetime is a petal in a flower. The soul is the flower; each 100-year lifetime is a petal in this magnificent flower. To be a genius at life means unfolding completely, taking advantage of our opportunity to grow beyond. Many cultures have understood reincarnation but not fully grasped its potential, seeing it within early limitations. Regarding the future, Robert Monroe, the great out-of-body researcher, discovered you don't necessarily have to incarnate in the next century. Incarnation isn't necessarily historically linear. Former lives could be in future times, challenging our linear thinking. In addition to intuiting the future, I wonder if some of us have sampled future time, inculcating its awareness now.

Richard Rudd: That's what I would call a current, the current of involution, as opposed to evolution. There is a spiritual force coming down, an evolving force going up, a funnel.

Chris Bache: I love you quoting Sri Aurobindo because he's one of my heroes too.

Richard Rudd: Great. What a wonderful beginning. Chris, thank you. Where we go next, I'm not sure, but I'm looking forward to it. Take care.

Chris Bache: Take care, Richard.

Audience: You.