Reincarnation Q&A (Live) with Richard Rudd

Richard Rudd: Hi, Chris.

Chris Bache: Hello, Richard. Here we are.

Richard Rudd: Here we are, made possible only with new technology. Exactly, me in North Carolina and the USA. Our guests from all over the world, I see.

Chris Bache: Yes.

Richard Rudd: Absolutely, and the magic of, you know, even though we're doing this now, many other people will be watching this in another now. And I want to welcome all those people in all of those nows, all those different timelines.

Chris Bache: Yes. It sure has been fun having this dialogue with you, sharing ideas and perspectives on reincarnation. I've really been enjoying it.

Richard Rudd: Me too. I've learned a lot from you. Since I read your book—LSD and the Mind of the Universe—it really blew my mind and had so many resonances for me. For those who haven't heard about it yet, it's quite something. So I recommend that heartily, right at the beginning here, and the exploration it's afforded us and the overlaps with my work with the Gene Keys.

Chris Bache: Real pleasure.

Richard Rudd: And we're also, you know, it's an ongoing journey for us, isn't it? We haven't finished; this is just us sort of getting going. I think we're probably going to explore this subject in the coming months and perhaps years, and keep diving deeper into it, mining the insights we can and involving a community of people to engage with us like this today.

Chris Bache: Yeah, that's going to be fun. I look forward to that. If we can get into as much trouble as we got into in three hours, just imagine what we could do with more time.

Richard Rudd: Exactly. So, I mean, we might as well just jump straight in. We've got a load of questions that have already been sent in. The plan here is, Chris has sorted the questions into categories, and we're going to rip through them first because they cover a broad area of subjects connected to reincarnation. Thank you, by the way, to all those who sent in your questions; they've really helped us sharpen our focus. Some of those questions lead to more questions, and you should know that we don't know the answers to all of them, but we're going to explore them together. So we'll do that first, and then we'll come to the live Q&A questions that you can put in the little Q&A button down here. If at any point you have a question, you can drop it in there. We have 90 minutes, so a lot of time to explore.

Chris Bache: We broke up the questions; there were so many good ones, and we could spend hours just on those that have already been sent in. We broke them up into clusters. We thought that we'd go through some of the first cluster just to read some of the questions, so participants can get a sense of the types of questions people asked after they listened to our dialogue, and then we can just touch on a few of those and move into the second cluster of questions. The first cluster we identified as, how can we acquire personal knowledge of our former lives? Because it's one thing, as many noted, to have someone tell you about these things. It's another to do your own research and to investigate these things, and then it's another thing still to have personal experience of your own former life history. Let me hit a couple of these questions. One was, how can we get closer to completely trusting the universe and that reincarnation is true if all we have is book knowledge on the topic or stories from others? Another person wrote, is it possible to have a connection with your previous lifetimes in your present life? Another asked, can you give us a practical method that allows us to remember our past lives and see the lessons we're working on in our present life and what needs healing? Just to touch lightly on these, just to start on these three questions, maybe. And then one last one was, have each of you personally experienced an awareness of your past lives leading to the present, and was it beneficial for you to do so? It strikes me that this whole question of, can we trust this material? How can I get closer to this material? How can I begin to experience these things for myself? It's a really important question. I personally started to accept reincarnation on the basis of research, on the basis of people's research. I think this research is abundant. There's a lot of wonderful books deserving of our attention. But it's another thing when you start to have a personal experience of your own lives, when you do the work, when you go inside, either through contemplation or hypnosis or some form of past life therapy, and you begin to follow your own memories back into earlier memories. You begin to have this vivid experience that your consciousness is bigger than your body; it's older than your body; it has a longer history than your body. That does tend to cause this idea to live in your heart differently than before. Don't you think?

Richard Rudd: Absolutely. One of my favorite questions in there was, once I know about the soul that gathers all my lives into one, what are some practices to help me embody it in my present human life? Because we're talking about contacting the energy of the soul, the part of us that's eternal. That's a journey, a journey we're all on, and most people listening to this certainly are. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here, I'm sure. To contact these realms and to discover or come across wisdom buried inside you, I firmly feel these memories are actually held in the physical body. Begin with knowing or even the premise that inside your physical body, somewhere, memories are held. This is going to involve some work with the physical body in some form, with breathing, with awareness, with mindfulness, with, as you said, Chris, contemplation. There are lots of ways, techniques, and things that can help you. But rather than give many now, I'd rather just give broad guidance. If you're keen to know your own story beyond this lifetime, forwards or backwards, start really listening. To listen, you need to clear space in your life. So have a practice of listening or contemplation or meditation, or perhaps prayer. Anything that enhances and increases awareness of those other frequencies. Find the techniques that work and resonate with you. It's a good indication that's a technique to begin opening up the inner world and then create space. Put out the question: I'd like to know more. It's already in you. If you're here, it's probably already in you. I'd like to know more. I'd like to remember more. You're reaching out into the ethers of the cosmos, inviting a revelation, or series of revelations, and that's going to be a journey, as it has been for Chris and me. We've gone different ways; Chris's route has been very different from mine. You have to follow what feels right, and then the rest will open up inside you. You've had more experience, I think, Chris, with the past life therapy community than I have, so maybe you could give a few pointers.

Chris Bache: Well, when one of the questioners asked if we have any practical suggestions for techniques to help people discover their former lives, I don't want to say there are shortcuts. There is the living with this information and systematic exploration of your deep consciousness, which is following your memories to earlier stages. This can be done with contemplation, meditation exercises, as Richard said, but it can also be greatly aided by working with professionals who can help you stay conscious at deeper memory levels than you might ordinarily be. Often, when we go beneath our personal unconscious, we tend to get fuzzy and maybe fall asleep, but someone can help you focus as you go deeper. It's often good to focus on an issue or problem or joy and follow that to its root as you go deeper. But there are many ways inside. Some memories are activated on a massage table, others in meditation. Once you appreciate your being is older than your body and live with that idea every day, it just becomes natural to live in a world saturated with time, in relationships saturated with time and life projects. It makes less sense to compress everything into one lifetime and more sense to let it unfold into a larger agenda.

Richard Rudd: Yeah. Another good tip is not to be in a rush. Take your time. You have all the time you need. The subject we're opening up isn't just about reincarnation and rebirth; it opens all other questions, all the deep ones. What are we, why are we here, how does it work, can we be eternal, how can that work? In the work I do with Gene Keys, as many of you will know, it has an infuriating habit of pointing people back into their own wisdom. When you access the wisdom inside you, start with your body, explore who you are, work through issues and trauma, forgive, let go, surrender, go through inner transformation. That's a journey, as everyone here will know, then you start to open space for your wisdom and memories to appear. They tell you what you need when you need it, not before or after, just when you need it. The memory will come if it's meant to, in the way it's meant to. Some people are visual, kinesthetic—you go somewhere, feel you've been there, meet someone and know you've met them. Some are visual inside your cortex. Or it could be a smell, a sense. Or attunement to synchronicities. As we become more aware of these realms, we pick up on interconnectivity beyond this world, realize dimensions, and resonate with those dimensions. That's wisdom when our world opens up and clarity starts coming through from dimensions and informs this dimension in an expansive, therapeutic, virtuous way inside us. So if you have these questions, know the journey is one of going deeper into the question, sinking into the heart of it. Holding it is valid, and it probably hides another. Begin to open up. I want to say that as a way of empowering everyone to trust in their own intuition, follow the threads through the labyrinth.

Chris Bache: Yes. Shall we pull a couple of questions from the nuts and bolts section? The category, nuts and bolts, basically, how does reincarnation work? Some are long answers, some short. Here are a few that could be answered quickly. Do we stay in one ancestry or hop to others? We hop. Could our next reincarnation be as our children or grandchildren? There's research that says, "Yeah, could be." People reincarnate in families. Are animals part of the reincarnation cycle? All reincarnation cultures say yes, but at earlier stages. Once you've reached a certain cognitive development, functioning at a human level, not much is learned from going back to living as an animal. Animals are part of our heritage, but not necessarily as humans. Folk belief, not held by informed reincarnation thinkers.

Richard Rudd: I'd like to go back to the ancestry one. I was recently talking to Tyson Jung ka Porter, an Aboriginal indigenous man. He was talking to me in an informal interview about reincarnation's historical heritage within tribal societies, and how it'll often skip a couple of generations; for example, great-grandchildren. So there's overlap there, but it tends to operate within the bounds of familial lines. And recently for myself, my father died, and I've been going through all his ancestral things. I found photographs of my great-grandparents and had an uncanny resonance with them. So, perhaps, there is something going on there. And I pondered it only after maybe hearing Tyson say it and drawing some connections after we had this conversation too. I've now included them in my daily spiritual life just because of a resonance coming from somewhere deep within. I wanted to touch on that, because it happens within ancestry lines, but there is also major expansion that allows for it to hop around the lines and it's a deeper intriguing connection between them. But, really, it'd be much longer talk to explain it properly. Sorry, I kind of wanted to touch on that one. There was also one about the wounding from the past, which I thought was important not to miss, about healing trauma in the body. And I think it connects to some of the further questions, which relate to the nature of incarnation and how it means being in one of these. In the work I do, as you so well put, Chris, we’re moving on now from this up and out philosophy. The idea of transcending beyond everything is now more about going down, immersing ourselves in our own bodies. The more inner work we do going down and inwardly, the more potential we all have to actually incarnate and be connected to reality as a whole. It's like our soul is vast. Most of it isn't here yet. But there's potential to fully incarnate if we do the work on ourselves. If you can clear patterns, transmute shadows, forgive and let go of trauma through the physical, emotional, mental body of our being, then more space is made for us to incarnate more deeply. More light can live here, more potential, more joy. It's heaven on earth from all this shadow work. So, I wanted to mention that, because it felt like a really important connection between trauma and incarnation. I'll let you take it from there.

Chris Bache: Well, let me toss a couple of these questions here. One of them, I thought, stood out to me. Why do we forget our past lives in the first place? And a variation on that question: if we are all eternal, immortal, and infinite, what is the point of reincarnation in a different physical body? Could we not live eternity, different experiences, places, and people in one body? When I talk about this to my students, I ask them to imagine being the creative intelligence of the universe, designing a system to maximize accelerated learning, accelerated development. You have two scenarios. You create a body that would live 100,000 years and gather 100,000 years' worth of experiences, or you create a body that lives 100 years and every 100 years, you plug it into the system in a different body, different gender, role, etc. At the end of 100,000 years, which system do you think would produce the most evolved being? I believe it's the one with discontinuity because discontinuity leads to greater variety, which leads to accelerated learning. So, we forget our former lives to immerse ourselves fully in a new set of circumstances; the differences create challenges, accelerating learning. That said, there comes a time when the soul begins not only differentiating and gathering but also integrating life experiences. Often, the problems from past incarnations are the first to manifest. We continue to work on these, we begin tapping into the virtues, capacities of past lives, all the assets. Reincarnation discussions focus heavily on past life literature, influenced by therapeutic trends. People come to therapy bearing pain. I believe most past lives don't manifest pain in our present; rather, they're capacities, skills, knowledge. We shouldn't tilt our understanding towards pain alone. There's a time when we integrate lives, rather than just pushing forward. I think we're at a time in history where the emphasis is integrating the past, not just extending boundaries into new territories.

Richard Rudd: Yeah, a great point, Chris. Our work translates into external transformation, seen visibly in the world now as humanity's group consciousness transmutes the karma. I was prompted by the question of parallel universes for incarnation, and there may be room in higher consciousness for travel between dimensions, fracturing the linear sequence. The fixation on time stitches this beautiful fabric through coming in and out of lives. But as wisdom evolves, flexibility allows for playing with dimensions, breaking rules, traveling with beings, and inter-dimensionally existing. Like, feeling twinned energy in another dimension, marking an element of experimentation. There are so many layers and intricacies within this woven tapestry of time-space. In our talk, Chris, we talk about notions of deep time where you step out of a space and simultaneously experience 10,000 years as a single moment. Suddenly, you're aware of your impact as a stitch or a part of a bigger picture and a multi-level experiment. Even the last incarnations feel temporally far, yet they're still within one brief loop. It provides elasticity or play where ideas emerge quickly, and bindings loosen, and you can explore depth perception in a symphony of dimensional levels, manifesting in transformational journeys.

Chris Bache: Beautifully said, Richard, beautifully. Reincarnation opens us to a more complex universe, changing directions of questions we ask. There's one question I want to address, considering its depth concerning an individual circumstance: the question about suicide. What happens with the soul of a person who commits suicide? I've got thoughts on this, and I'll hand it over afterward. In a reincarnating universe of constant change and incremental learning, suicide is another episodic mark, not a mortal sin leading to eternal damnation. Various motivational structures exist under the suicide banner. Still, even acts in desperation are met with understanding and compassion post-transition. Life is incredibly challenging. Desperation action doesn’t yield eternal consequences. Acts made in desperation do not punish for eternity. They're met, evaluated, understood, and learning continues. Habits like character traits need confronting of limits leading to different outcomes, evoking growth. Certainly, acts like suicide don't result in estrangement from the intelligence and love of the universe. Richard, would you like to share thoughts on this?

Richard Rudd: Well, I was thinking how suicide is almost, it's always almost loneliness taken to its far, far extreme, isn't it? You know, where it's become so unbearable that you feel that's the only option there is. And so, that's a very human condition. It's understandable that we feel, at times, deeply lonely, and sometimes the conditions around us are challenging. One can empathize with that. I think, in one of the recordings I did recently that I shared with you, which I think we're going to link to, I called it the rebirth sequence. It's about the stages of moving from dying and going through these Bardo stages, simply laid out. The final stage is called "the arms of the mother." And that's what you land in when you've gone through those sequences, the life review, and you're coming into that place of self-forgiveness because you are forgiven, but you have to forgive yourself. That includes acts of aggression and violence towards others, or things like murder, terrible things that take place on this earth plane. So the view from outside the human plane, from the arms of the mother, is not about revenge or retribution. It's simply about reconciliation and transmutation, and a lot of times about forgiveness, self-forgiveness. The soul has to learn from whatever it's done, and then absorb, integrate that, forgive, move on, and become stronger through it. That's what this whole reincarnating journey is offering us. If you really tune in deeply like you have, Chris, in your journeys into the field of wounding, you realize we've all done atrocious things in our history. We carry the memory of terrible deeds we were part of or on the victim side, on all kinds of levels inside us. I have a hunch that a lot of that memory is in the non-coding DNA in our body, the so-called junk DNA, almost 90% of our DNA that we can't understand. Somewhere inside here are all those memories of places and things we've done. Isn't the most beautiful insight that arises from an incarnating worldview that we are always forgiven? Knowing that opens up the journey of the higher soul. Then the soul begins to experience itself as light, as a Christ impulse or a Buddha impulse. It becomes a beacon, wishes to help others, be of service, and enter into that higher evolution. That seems to me to be the natural progression of the deep encounter with the nature of what we call evil, or sin, or suffering. That is the edge that helps us become better beings—more beautiful beings—ultimately, through self-forgiveness and the forgiveness of others. But it's a big stretch. For some people, it's a big stretch.

Chris Bache: Forgiveness of ourselves and others, but also restitution. There's nothing we've done that we can't repair or make better because we have time and opportunity. We can change our past by changing our present, by moving forward. We can make restitution and bring healing where we brought injury before. We have many questions stacking up in the Q&A, but I know we wanted to touch briefly on the coming shift. For a couple of questions about the coming shift, let me just mention a couple. One person wrote they feel very worried about the changes ahead and wonder if you could offer a sense of hope to those struggling. Another person said they think this shift can happen as soon as 20 years. I think there is great ground for hope. It's not the hope that we can avoid suffering or change it, but hope based on trust in the intelligence of the universe. The intelligence that brought us through the oxygen crisis billions of years ago, that increased our brain size 200,000 years ago, that we see bubbling up in the natural world. This intelligence has brought the human race to a point in its story where it is forcing us to shed the limitations of living at a level of merely our private, egoic mind awareness. The summons is to live out of a deeper soul awareness, with a deeper sense of our connection to other beings, species, the planet, and life as a whole. There is tremendous ground for hope—not the avoidance of pain and suffering, but the type born in their midst, out of a deep conviction of a deeper intelligence expressing itself. We may not see all its parameters, but we can have the confidence that intelligence is functioning here as in other areas of life.

Richard Rudd: Exactly. That intelligence is essentially benevolent. It has that ultimate nature. As we experience that as individual souls, as more of us come to that point in our souls' evolution, the whole of humanity begins to realize we're one being here. We see this externally in the way our world operates through the internet and global connectivity. We see the shadows more clearly, but we also have the capacity to heal more than ever due to connectivity. Humanity seems to drive itself to the edge of a precipice. It appears to be a pattern. Talking to indigenous people recently, they say in their racial memory, this has happened many times—over millions of years even. We have to come to these crux points for an energy shift to push us over and through. It's not a pleasant situation, and as the energy builds, we'll collectively feel more uneasy. However, in soul awareness, as we expand into trust, that underpins the whole process and creation. That can begin to inform our biology. Chris and I both feel deeply safe in this world, even as it moves closer towards an Armageddon-like scenario. There's this underlying benevolence and intelligence preparing us for a quantum leap. We have to sink into that trust field embedded in the eternal nature of our soul. This journey into expanding our awareness of the incarnating universe and humanity is crucial because it opens our minds to play again. When we were teenagers, the mind loved this realm. As many of us moved into our twenties and thirties, conditioned by the materialistic viewpoint, conditioning paradigms fall over us like a cloak. It's fun and a relief to shed some of that. It doesn’t mean shedding science and its revelations but opening to deeper possibilities. The mind can expand, and that’s the first stage in starting to feel safe again. I hope that’s part of the journey we can help build here together, Chris, by continuing to map these other realms.

Chris Bache: Yes, very much so. We're committed. We're here. One thing I talk about in this coming era is the birth of the diamond soul in history. I think the conversation we're having here with everyone gathered is a small part of that process. To become aware of reincarnation, to be intellectually and in your heart aware of this larger story playing out in your life, is important. Being aware of something allows it to manifest more deeply into your life. Becoming aware of reincarnation, of the soul, and its dynamics facilitates the emergence of the diamond soul in consciousness. This awareness can come slowly for some, dramatically for others, but it’s coming. To be conscious of the possibility facilitates deeper integration. Shall we shift to some of the questions from our live audience before we touch on more?

Richard Rudd: I want to address a couple of the Gene Keys questions specific to me. Someone asked about walk-ins—when a being enters a body to supersede it—and people say they've experienced this, feeling completely changed. They ask if they should study a different Gene Keys profile from that date. I’d say it's important to have both. You need the old rootstock. If there's a new hybrid, those two must harmonize, so use and explore both. There's also a question about Gene Keys' algorithms determining our awakening journey and incarnation themes. Is there continuity? Absolutely, but not always obvious. Patterns are woven within the matrix and numbers. If you look at lifetimes, you'd see patterns and sequences. Doing readings, I've seen recurring numbers in families, partners, and loved ones—so densely woven. These patterns are not confined to one lifetime but continue on. There are continuities; more on that later. Let's move to some live questions.

Chris Bache: So many good questions here. One touches me: why do souls reincarnate for short periods, like infants who die after birth, or a young child dies young? These are heartaches for any parent or anyone experiencing the death of a child. I'd suggest that from inside the time-space perspective, it feels tragic for us to have a short-lived life. But for the soul, they're all short lives. A ten-minute life and a hundred-year life are all small in the soul's vast lifetime spectrum. Past life therapists often agree that these incarnations are chosen. Sometimes, the lesson was for someone else, to be the grain of sand in the oyster that leads to others' development. Relationships and purpose do not end at death.

Richard Rudd: Yes, a tender question indeed. Malabika asked about the soul outgrowing Gaia and moving to other systems. Can the soul determine where and as what it will go? How much free will does the soul have? This deep question touches on evolution and involution—the soul's evolution through experiences and the whole's evolution, the divine consciousness. There's choreography from the whole, yet a serpentine freedom in individual souls as they become aware of their nature as parts of the whole. The paradox of the ocean and the drop—both are true. The Mother determines, the mothership has its dance that we're part of. It's amazing, playing with that paradox. Thanks, Malabika.

Chris Bache: Thank you. A question from Catherine: Buddhists say reincarnation is like transferring light from one candle to another. What do you think of this? It's like transferring both personal and collective karmic stuff. The Buddha used a similar metaphor with candle flames to discuss the self, leading to a subtle description of reincarnation. The teaching of no self highlights there is no permanent or separate individuality. Feels are open at the boundaries, like soul feels aren't an entity or a thing but open and porous, allowing for give and take.

Richard Rudd: Beautiful answer. Chris, you bring vast knowledge of different theologies. Nishad asks about the Bardo realms, wondering if this life is in Bardo. The Bardo is the transitory threshold between lives. Tibetans describe stages from birth to death and death to birth, a transformational journey. The Bardo is seen as impermanent realms, transitional worlds. Earth could be one of these experiences with all characters and storylines in a theater watched by the whole, which is outside space and time. Various Bardos could represent different states from hell to heaven, all a theater, as Shakespeare said. That's my take, but you might have more to add.

Chris Bache: Yes, there are different aspects of Bardo teaching—levels of existence. These exist in the cosmos, in the spiritual world outside physical reality, entered depending on the quality of our consciousness. It's not just states for one lifetime; they last minute by minute. The invitation is, what inside us doesn't change? What witnesses everything as emotions and bodies change? Discovering that and holding it in our awareness deepens the quality of our life. It grounds us in the divine awareness of the living universe.

Richard Rudd: Thank you for that great story. Modern metaphors like "Groundhog Day" are clear representations of reincarnation—trying things in different ways, facing dramas until the perfect day. This planet is one world with different dramas to play out until creating the perfect life for the soul. It's about perfecting within it, through terrible things. What do you think, Chris?

Chris Bache: Am I on? Yes. Here's another good one. Sherry asks about the necessity of past life regression. She's tired of all the spiritual practices and processing. Is it necessary? I think not. Reincarnation works whether or not we know or believe in it. Awareness can speed the process, but living one's life well is paramount. All karma is right here, and living deeply addresses it. If you need help with a particular issue, therapy can help, but it's extra.

Richard Rudd: Great, great, and a lovely question as well, really beautifully phrased like that, the being just is, it's enough to just be. It is, of course, it's enough to be. That's the most we can do, really. So I very much resonate with that question. There's a question here about old and new souls, and number of souls, and kind of populations expanding and contracting. It's an interesting question. If you think about it, most of the answers lie in nature. If you're observant and you're listening and you're looking, and you're really contemplating nature, most of the answers are there. Like you're walking through a forest, you see all these plants and trees. There are old trees, middle-aged trees, and then there are young ones shooting up everywhere, and then there are parasite trees. There are all kinds of, you know, there are weeds, and they're all part of this ecosphere.

The same is here on this earth, you know, on Gaia. We have enlightened beings. We have beautiful beings. We have villains and ruffians and vagabonds, and we have all the different souls, exploring and experimenting. We have young ones, young little saplings that are still learning, maybe getting involved in all kinds of difficult things, suffering, deep in suffering, and deep into corruption and learning through that. And then there are older ones, perhaps, who've done all that. They're like here, trying to work more deeply into the collective, or into some area where they've taken on a lot of suffering, to heal either inside themselves, on behalf of the whole, or they're working in service in some way. So there's all these different storylines and threads within the picture. Sometimes the forest dies back in places, and it's less populous. And then sometimes it suddenly expands and it's more, and it does. It's thriving, but they're all phases. None of it's healthy or unhealthy. It's just what it is. It's just part of the whole theater, the tapestry.

One of the things that the whole reincarnating view, the rebirth view really brings to me is this sense of amorality. That doesn't take away true morals and ethics that are naturally inherent in human beings, I believe. But there's this kind of, it's just going on, and there's a journey taking place, and we're at some point in that journey right now. The Collective is in some point right now. Our individuality is at some point participating in that right now. As I was really sharing deeply recently, in the process, I'm taking a big retreat, thousands of people in the Venus sequence, which is a process of healing trauma, emotional trauma, especially. I was saying, when you heal some pattern inside your own being, then you reach out and you heal it in the whole, in the collective, because it is all just one rippling web, one interconnected, woven web. I mean, I seem to be saying the same thing over and over, but I really want people to understand. Yes, it's kind of, this is the theater, old souls, new souls, you know, and then there's old souls. Maybe, yes, when you get to a certain stage, you have more choice available to you. You can leave, you can go somewhere else, like you've earned it. You've earned enough money to be able to buy a ticket somewhere else, further. That's the kind of metaphor, but then you might also come back and bring your wisdom here. So I think there's a lot of imagination that is needed when we're entering into this kind of territory.

Chris Bache: Yes, very much. You know reincarnation, you have to live with it for a long time and then bring the questions that people are asking into that reincarnation paradigm and sit with it for a long time to get intimations of the depth the way it recontextualizes and gives a new context for the way we usually think about these things. Here's a question that really stretches us, a question by Jacqueline. This is a challenging question: How can collective suffering be a creative process rooted in cosmic love? That's a hard question, just because of the sheer scale it works. It's a question that's hard for an individual life. How is suffering in our individual life compatible with the idea that the universe is compassionate and loving? But at a collective level, how does collective suffering of the type that we were talking about in our third dialogue, in our coming challenging period of history—how can that magnitude of suffering be a creative process rooted in cosmic love? I'm reminded that Ramakrishna, the great Hindu saint, said if you want to understand God, you must be willing to look evil in the face, because evil is not outside the divine, but it's actually part of the Divine process, and suffering is part of the Divine process.

When we want to understand how any compassionate person wants to reduce suffering and end suffering, that's the natural impetus. That's what we want. We see suffering as the enemy, and it's something we want to stop. But when we start to second guess creation, when we start to think there has to have been a better way to do it, God—damn it, couldn't you have given us everything that you want us to become without dragging us through so many centuries and millennia of pain and suffering, or taking us more in the future? That's a wonderful impulse, but that assumes that we know what the project is, that we know what the agenda is, and that we know what is the best way to get to that particular outcome. So we would have to ask, what is the project? What is the project of cosmic love? What are we doing here? What is creation growing on this planet Earth? Could it grow a species of diamond beings? Could it grow a species of fully awakened beings and fully empowered beings, and a species that can create out of the sheer power of the divine consciousness that lives, that is flowing in their awareness without having to have gone through some of the ordeals that we have gone through in our long evolutionary agenda?

This is challenging. On the one hand, I want to affirm the compassion behind the question, and I want to invite a deep sitting with the scale of creation. We have to look at the galaxies and look at the stars to appreciate the scale that the universe thinks on, and the scale of the creative intelligence thinks on. Look at all the stages of evolution that humanity and all life on this planet has gone through. Suffering seems to be part of it. It's just part of the grit of life that brings us forward. Now, I think we may be coming into a time when we won't have to grow through suffering as much as we have in the past. I think suffering has been part of the paradigm of how we have grown in the past, and it may be that we'll be able to grow out of grace more in the future. We may be challenged by creativity, not simply by our pain, but certainly, suffering has been part of the stuff which has brought us where we are, and I think where we're going. Suffering takes things away from us. It breaks us down. It doesn't allow us to continue the way we are. It forces us to reassess and look at things anew. I think we're coming into a time where in order for something radically new to come into the human story, we have to let go of what we have been. Letting go of what we have been is hard work and does involve a certain amount of suffering. But the sooner we cooperate with this process, the sooner we surrender to it, the sooner we let it go, and the sooner we start taking care of each other with that deep compassion, which is rooted in that cosmic love, the sooner the suffering ends and the creativity begins. I know that's not a completely adequate answer to the depth of this question, but it's just a piece.

Richard Rudd: Thank you so much for that. I'll add a layer, which is in the book I wrote, the Gene Keys book, I laid out the codes of consciousness available to humanity. You see this through these shadows and these low-frequency shadow patterns that we all play out with, playing in the suffering. Then hidden inside those are these potential gifts. Those gifts are the creative flowering, the healing, if you like, of the growing through that suffering. Out of that comes this fruit, which I call the Siddhis, the 64 Siddhis. This is probably where we want to bring our talk to a close with this notion of, there's something hidden deep in the core of that suffering, and it is something so beyond what we can understand now, and it's something so beautiful. It's another realm, another dimension, another way, another field of learning, you know, and we might call it grace or might call it bliss. You could even say we may be entering the epoch in which incarnation itself starts to fall apart and starts to open up so that we no longer need to move in and out of these forms in the way we did. We may one day look back and go, "Oh, yeah, we used to have to differentiate in that way because of the shadow and the impetus of the shadow inside us, but now we've explored that fully, we can sit in these Siddhis."

These Siddhis are these higher states of consciousness, these avataric fields of oneness. We can still retain our soul's wisdom and individuality and its journeys and its continuation and its continued adventures, but from within a much greater field and of understanding and compassion. These Siddhis are the kind of Buddhic fields that are opening up for us in the future. Chris and I set this talk for Good Friday for good reason. It just fell there very beautifully, because it's this notion of the constant rebirthing of the universe, of itself, from within itself. I was saying recently that it's like, if you take the image of the butterfly, you know, of what a butterfly is, the myth of the butterfly, the allegory, the metaphor of the butterfly—do you need any more proof for incarnation, for reincarnation, than that? That right there is the emblem of what is hidden inside our suffering, of what's hidden inside this whole journey. So, yes, I think we're moving into this next phase, and it's good to be realistic, and it's also good to really expand and open up into that and let your heart really ring out with what the boundless potentials are inside you, of your soul. What happens if you really have worked those shadows through, and then the full soul can come in, and that the body would hardly be able to hold it, contain it, because of the incredible frequency of the quantum field that's generated from that, what we call those Siddhis. Then we start to be co-creators with the Creator. Our thoughts become all-empowering, and we become these children of God, or these children of Christ, where we get to play in a much vaster field, that field that Chris was talking about, the galactic level, the universal level, we become a universal consciousness. We can kind of interact with dimensions and paradigms that right now we can't even begin to fathom. I think there's cause for great hope, more than hope, certainty, really, but we have a few boulders to clear first. I invite you to have the last word.

Chris Bache: Well, I'm glad you brought in Easter, because it is Good Friday, and this is a special weekend in the Christian calendar. I know that you and I have both been touched by Christianity, by its teaching, and by people who have been steeped in Christian teaching. We have been Christians and we have been Hindus in different lifetimes, and we have been Muslims and we have been aborigines. We have been all the religions of the world and the non-religions and atheists. We have sampled and drunk from those wells. We have been male and female, and in that constant collecting of experience, and gathering experience and bringing that experience to higher, higher levels of fruition, when we encounter figures like Jesus, or like Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, or like Muhammad the Prophet, when those beings are pictured in art, they're always pictured filled with light. They have halos around them, and light just emanates from their body. They have so much energy in them that they can heal beings with a touch. Easter, of course, is death and rebirth, the indestructibility of life, death and rebirth continually going, and also, of course, the symbol of compassion, because this is a being who did not have to suffer, but who chose to suffer out of his great love for the world and every mother worth their salt, every father worth their salt understands that and would suffer for their children.

Those qualities, those precious qualities, those are the qualities that we're developing. Those are the qualities that we're bringing in and empowering, as Richard said. The power of the soul, the energy of the soul, is huge, and to be able to internalize the soul, we must make our body capable of functioning at that level, the way Christ was able to function at that level, the way the Buddha and the Prophet were able to function at that level. So I think that's what we're coming to in history, at a time when we, who have been struggling in the shadows for so many generations, are now beginning to come into a time of light, a time of great culmination, a time of greater freedom, greater compassion, greater wisdom, and where that will take us will be a great adventure, an adventure for us all. I really appreciate this conversation we've been having, Richard. I really appreciate everyone who's gathered around us and made this possible and made this adventure possible. Thank you very much, everybody.

Richard Rudd: Thank you from me also, and to my soul, to all of you who've joined us and who are joining us in other timelines and in other dimensions. Thank you so much, Chris, and we will continue our journey, Chris and I, together, and we'll have more for you in the future, I think. So, yeah, see what that turns into.