The Mind of the Universe – Conversation with Prof. Chris Bache

Audience: Hi everybody, welcome.

Rachel Fleming: Lovely to see you wherever you are in the world. It's a beautiful evening here in Devon, England, so thank you so much for joining us tonight. You could be out in the sunshine, but it's lovely to see you. And welcome to anyone who is watching on the recording; I think there will be quite a few of those. So we are talking about contemporary animism tonight. This is a talk in our contemporary animism program. We are really delighted to show you an interview that we did some time ago with a chap called Chris Bache. Colin is going to introduce him a bit more in depth, but just to say that he took part in our contemporary animism Confluence back in February, and we just thought that what he had to say was so hopeful at a moment when we as a species, and as a community of species, are looking at a fairly dark night of the soul with all the climate change news and social crises. It just seems that Chris's vision is one of hope, and we really hope you'll enjoy it. What we're going to do tonight is play you the interview. It's quite heady. I'll just warn you, there's a lot of talking, and it goes for about 15 minutes. We would really like you to watch it, to go in and out of it as you like, and then to stay with us for 10 to 15 minutes afterward, if you're interested, to just share some of your feelings, the stuff that might have come up for you as you were watching it. See whether you like it, whether you're excited as we are, or whether it's not for you. So without further ado, Colin, can I ask you to introduce Chris? Also, just to give you the logistics, Chris is a professor of theology, retired from one of the American universities, and he's the author of several books, all of which are wonderful. The first one is about reincarnation, the second one is called "Dark Night, Early Dawn," which was fantastic. His most recent one, and the one he will be talking about tonight, describes his research method, which he'll tell you more about, called "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." Colin, over to you.

Colin Campbell: Thanks, Rachel. Good evening, everyone. I don't almost know where to start, because, well, let me start by saying this. It was about, I think, a year ago, a little more relatively recently, I stumbled upon the title "Dark Night, Early Dawn." I was particularly struck by the subtitle, "Steps Towards a New Ecology of Mind." That, for me, just rang massively, and I simply had to get a hold of this book and read it, just because of that; because that's just such a huge passion of mine, in the sense that I think that what we are in search of in these times, amid the very particular conundrums and transformations and all that we're up against, in both crisis and other terms, as a human collective, what we're faced with is a kind of a redo of what we conceive of as our relationship with existence, with life, with the rest of the natural world, and so on. So the idea of a new ecology of mind really appealed to me. And I must say, I wasn't disappointed by the book. I think it's a seminal piece, to be very honest. I think he was saying some really profound things, and things which are very close to my heart as well, in terms of finding ways into, in an experiential way, reinvigorating much of what we've lost over the process of secularization, industrialization, globalization, and so on; finding a way of re-entering, re-accessing that and revivifying it, bringing it back into being. It's part of our search for what being human means now and here forward, you know. For me, there are lots of ways of entering into this, but of course, the primary way of exploring into it is to delve deeply into what it means to be human. And part of the problem we sit with presently is that we're so drastically distracted in the world that we've created for ourselves. I mean, by that primarily the industrialized world, where we're so distracted by our outer concerns that our inner environment—what we broadly refer to as our inner environment, and what I would call our pre-industrial ancestry, which, of course, is dynamically within us—has somehow fallen beneath the level of our everyday interactive awareness. Unfortunately, as we question this conundrum of how we move forward as a species, how we renegotiate our relationship with the rest of the natural world, how we confront, or at least engage with, some of the more dramatic crises that we face as humanity now, we need to find ways of bringing back what I conceive of as that pre-industrial aspect of who we are, which has kind of been labeled regressive, primitive, and all sorts of names that we use to sublimate it, trivialize it, depreciate it, and throw it out of the engagement with where we're at. So, when I came across Chris's work, and I've read some of his subsequent work, and of course, before that, I was a great follower of Stan Grof's work, out of which a lot of Chris's work comes, I just think that this is an incredibly important way of delving into it radically. I must say, I'm very deeply of the belief that our engagement with the state we find ourselves in as humanity requires a radical, potent engagement. We can't really afford to dabble around on the edges of things. So if we're going to look at finding contemporized forms of our pre-industrial ancestry, if we're going to look at experiential exploration, deep delving into who we are, what we are, and our broken relationships with the natural world, there has to be a radicalness to this, because it's urgent. It's desperate, in fact. So, with Grof's work and with Chris's writing subsequently, and his experimentation and exploration, his deep and profound courage in the way he's gone in—I think this is just such a profound part of what we are certainly passionate about in this time, in terms of the kind of work that we're doing, as Rachel said earlier, in our contemporary animism program, and trying to rally interest in an experiential exploration of what reanimating ourselves might mean and look like. I think what you're going to see tonight in this talk is the absolute tip of a profound iceberg, if we could put it that way. It’s well worth reading his work. It's well worth looking at Grof's work as well. It's very much, in my opinion, a critical part of the kind of exploration that I think is most needed at this time. Pardon my bias on this, but I really do believe this. So, having said that, I'm going to pass back to Rachel, and I'll be very interested to hear some of your reflections at the end.

Rachel Fleming: Thank you, Colin. So we'll dive straight in. I have just asked him—so we've just started—and I have asked him to tell us about his research method and how he came to the vision that he will then tell you about later on in the interview, and how that fits into the animist world that we're exploring. It starts in the middle of a sentence; his first sentence, so you've only missed about two or three words, but yes, that's where we'll start. So, I'm going to hand over to you now, Gabby. Enjoy. I find him very mind-blowing. But see what you think. Gabby, go.

Rachel Fleming: We're not getting any sound, Gabby.

Rachel Fleming: I know this works because we checked it earlier. So sorry. What's the problem?

Audience: Any insights here, because I'm not exactly sure what's going on.

Rachel Fleming: You want to give it another go? Press go again.

Chris Bache: Share in the animistic community is the belief that nature is infused with consciousness, fused with mind and soul. And, of course, now we know how vast the physical universe is, and the question becomes, how large is the mind of the universe? How deep is it? So, I was just out of graduate school in 1978, finishing in philosophy of religion, and I met the work of Stanislav Grof, who many of you know as one of the foremost thinkers in the Transpersonal psychology community, in the psychedelic community. I read his book, "Realms of the Human Unconscious," and my life pivoted with that book because I immediately saw that his research was relevant not only to clinical psychology but also to philosophy. He was offering a method to safely and systematically explore the deepest levels of consciousness where the answers to the philosophical questions I was carrying could be found, coming out of training in Religious Studies. In 1979, I began what became a 20-year journey, working with LSD. In 1979, LSD is what Stan had done his research with, and that's what I chose to continue with. If I were doing it today, I would have a more diversified cocktail of ayahuasca, psilocybin, and more, but I worked with LSD. I chose to work with very high doses for reasons that are too complicated to go into now, but that had a profound impact on the work because it not only changed how deep the work went but also how wide it went. The field of consciousness that I took in these transformational exercises expanded with the power of the state of consciousness that I was entering. So, basically, I did this work in standard Grofian protocol, totally isolated from the world with a trained clinical psychologist sitter. I did it at home, in a controlled environment, totally internally focused, not with any contact with the outside world, amplifying the states of awareness with carefully selected music designed to empower the states of consciousness in which you basically shatter your mind. In working at these levels, you just shatter your mind, and your mind dissolves out into subtler and subtler forms or aspects of reality. It became a systematic exploration of what I think of as the mind of the universe. I hesitate to call it the divine, though sometimes I do, just because the divine has so many culturally infused qualities in history that I'd rather avoid. So I think of it as the mind of the universe. I did this work for 20 years, always keeping very careful records. I then digested those experiences for another 20 years, because these are not immediately transparent experiences. They're very complex and interwoven, and they involve many levels of reality being orchestrated in the surges of these states. There was a systematic instruction. I found that one session more or less started where the other session stopped. When you work in this systematic fashion, there is a progressive deepening, and it just took years for me to understand what the universe was showing me and where it was taking me. I was being shown things. I always had a sense of a systematic encounter with an intelligence that was orchestrating my experience in dialogue with me, not taking any form, never taking any deity form or any archetypal form, but always, when pressed, dissolving into deeper and deeper layers of infinity. So that is, cumulatively, the story that I'm telling in "LSD and the Mind of the Universe."

Rachel Fleming: Would you say, Chris, that this is an objective reality, that if anybody did a similar method, they'd reach this unfolding that you did, or is that not possible to say?

Chris Bache: I think it is possible to say. I think Stan Grof's work allows us to say it, where he's dealing with integrating the experiences of thousands of people. I'm only talking about integrating my experiences, but my experiences fit comfortably within the larger matrix Grof's work has explored. It's a complicated answer because, on one hand, I want to say yes, but I have to qualify that immediately. When you begin this work, these substances only amplify consciousness. They don't give you an experience; they don't take you to a particular place. They amplify your mind. Because each of us has a different life story, the mind which is amplified is different, and, therefore, when an amplified mind engages the deeper mind of the universe, what comes forward will be, in the beginning, somewhat unique and will reflect our individual history. That's why these substances are very helpful for healing. They evoke our unconscious, and therefore they evoke our problems. It's an individual experience, but if you keep going farther, if you press to the limits of your time, space, identity, and through this transformation we call ego death, then you begin to open into spiritual reality, farther removed from your own personal history. That's when the experiences begin to overlap and converge. My understanding is that spiritual reality is not simply something you enter and pluck fruit from, like plucking an apple from a tree. It's interactive. It's always interactive. There's a participatory quality to our experiences. The mind that we bring to the encounter acts as a seed catalyst that crystallizes a certain set of experiences from the infinite potential of the mind of the universe. As we internalize those experiences and are purified by them, it changes the seed mind, and then it catalyzes an even deeper level of secrets from the universe. It's a participatory process. But once you understand the cycle of participation, the universe we discover is coherent and consistent. My universe is the same universe discovered by contemplative monks, the mystical traditions, and the near-death episode traditions. There are degrees of depth, and we have to be careful because you can reach a point where you think, "Oh, this is what reality is." Then it turns out this is reality at this level of reality, but you can pop that and go into a deeper level, and things change.

Rachel Fleming: One thing I find really exciting is that we talk about practices, finding the right ones to find the cracks in ourselves to get back to a much more porous, expanded way of being. Yet, these practices take repetition and tenaciousness. You've used a different method here, a fast track to some of these experiences. It's a very difficult method, and I'm sure not one you'd recommend to a lot of people, but that feels, for me, where the excitement of your work is, as you've fast-tracked a lot of slower practices and possibly got to the edge of the map that a lot of these contemplative practices have reached. It feels as though you've managed to go further than much that I've seen before on what the underlying nature of reality is. Would you say that's true?

Chris Bache: It is a fast track, except it's a fast track that doesn't allow any bypassing. The fact that it's a fast track means it's a more intensely concentrated track. Purification, which in the conventional spiritual path would be drawn out over years, can take place within days, and as any woman who's given birth knows, a short labor is not necessarily an easier labor. It's just much more intense. This is true for this type of practice too. The purifications one goes through in order to acclimate to these subtler and cleaner states of reality are extremely intense. They send you in convulsions across the floor, in throwing up, constantly coming and going, and they require a systematic purification of your lifestyle, just as any traditional spiritual practice does. I want to emphasize that the states of consciousness I touched for hours at a time usually only come from the work of contemplative mystics who have a sense of abiding in these realities. I emphasize that this is a practice, not of abiding. It's temporary access. It's a temporary immersion in these states. I don't want to confuse temporary immersion with abiding immersion. All honor to the Great Ones who abide in these realities. This is different. This is temporary access, very intense purification. You don't come away with permanent access embedded in your nature to these realities. What you come away with are seeds of Transcendence, which you then have to nurture within your daily spiritual practice. You have to nurture them within your embodied physical existence. I also want to mention that earlier, these practices have tended to be associated with a dissociative spirituality, where the goal was Transcendence and to get away from Earth, the up and out cosmologies of the last five Axial Age religions in the last 5000 years. The cosmology that emerged in my work was very different. It wasn't about getting Transcendence; it was Transcendence in service of incarnation, Transcendence in service of deeper integration. It was about opening up and letting in as much of the universe as possible, then going through transformations that would allow this energy to live in the historical body, giving insights into where the evolutionary intelligence was taking the human family as a whole. I began this work thinking in terms of a personal model of transformation, but things happened that shattered that model. I began to understand that I had been drawn into a collective transformation, and my so-called individual work was part of a collective process, which naturally yielded some insights into our human family’s evolutionary trajectory.

Rachel Fleming: Fantastic, and I want to ask about that in great depth in a minute, because, for me, that's the exciting thing that you discovered. But first, I'd love to ask you about the aliveness and intelligence in the universe. We're talking about the aliveness and intelligence in everything around us, humans being just one part of that, as everything is an animate world, an animate universe. I just wondered if you could summarize your understandings of the aliveness in the universe, how layered that is, how deep it goes, and how big it is.

Chris Bache: You're asking a lot, because the universe is so vast, and the mind of the universe has so many layers to it, which are all complexly interwoven. It's all alive, and it's all intelligent. Everywhere we dig into the universe, we discover aliveness and intelligence. We can't dig in anywhere and not encounter this intelligence, this living intelligence. When you dig into the mind of the universe, you find layers of intelligence operating there. There are layers of intelligence operating in the biosphere, in the incarnational rhythms of a planet. I began to experience at one point, for example, reincarnation. I had gone into states of consciousness in which time was radically dilated—not eternity, not timelessness, but radical dilations of time and personal boundaries—dissolving into my human family, becoming the human family. From that perspective, experiencing reincarnation, the pulse of reincarnation, taking place, all of us together as a single organism, incarnating generation by generation. I experienced whole lifetimes, generations living their lives, dying, and returning into spiritual reality. There was an intelligence to this entire process, so that what I had previously thought of as individual karma, individual challenging, individual transformation—our individual karma was part of a vast network of exquisitely tuned collective karma. History was expressing the rhythms of collective transformation through the medium of our individual transformation. Just one example. Then, going deeper, beginning to experience the pulse of the entire universe as a single living organism. When you dissolve into that level of oneness, the Buddhists have a word for it: Nirvana, blown out. Self is blown out, or Śūnyatā, emptiness of self. When you experience the world as one, you realize there are no permanent boundaries between yourself and the world. Literally, there is no private self. The self pops, life runs through you, you run through life, and the whole of life breathes as one. It breathes together, as Plotinus said. So, everywhere you touch it, the world is intelligent. At the very end of my journey, in the 70th session out of 73, I was taken deep into what I call deep time, farther into time than I'd ever been before, and given a series of visions. One of those had to do with experiencing, in some way, from my perspective and history, the large story of what was happening in the universe. I experienced reincarnation and the same deep pattern, and I experienced stars of light shooting out of time and space into the universe. I understood these as diamond souls, the fruition of a reincarnation process creating a diamond-pure soul that could explore the spiritual world in dimensions previously unavailable to it. Time and space were creating diamond souls over vast periods, so layers and layers of intelligence were operating at different levels.

Rachel Fleming: When I read your book, Chris, it's literally mind-blowing. It feels like science fiction, in the realms of science fiction, and yet, for me, there was nothing in there that didn't sound right. It just kind of has that feeling, "Ah, yes, I understand this," and it feels right to me. I'd love to talk to you about the evolutionary process. You touched on it, but let's go into more detail, starting with reincarnation. That's something not everyone believes is true, but you did earlier work on reincarnation. Just before we get to the evolutionary story you've seen, could you talk about your work on reincarnation and why you believe it is what happens?

Chris Bache: I wrote my first book on reincarnation because I thought it was an essential principle. Our philosophical roads diverge if we think we're only on Earth one time versus multiple times. Those lead to different visions of reality. Today, I think we have overwhelming empirical evidence that reincarnation is simply true. It's a fact of life. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia and his study of young children worldwide with spontaneous memories of their most immediate life—he's documented hundreds of these children. His research has been challenged but is holding up. I think he is the Charles Darwin of reincarnation studies. We have past-life therapies, people healing using past-life memories to heal present-life traumas. This, to me, is an empirical fact. After living in a reincarnation universe, it takes time to understand the implications of this pulse of life and that all of us have been here multiple times. We have deeper histories with place, people, and projects. We're always starting something, continuing something in one lifetime, and doing something that will be continued in another lifetime. It's overlapping complexity so that I don't see little children as little or old people as old. Sometimes children are deeply old in soul, and old people are sometimes very young in soul. You just tune to a different level. I had that in the early stages of my psychedelic work. I was taken into the nuts and bolts of reincarnation and karma, which became ground one before being taken into experiencing the human family evolving and growing through reincarnation. To me, reincarnation is simply the higher octave of evolution. It's the cutting edge of evolution in our particular species, where evolution aimed to change whole species. Reincarnation is evolving individuals within certain species. I don't think just humans; somewhere lower down, reincarnation begins to turn. The question becomes, where is reincarnation taking us if we're reincarnating so many times? What's the purpose of it? To answer what the purpose of a reincarnating species is complicated because once you understand every person reincarnates with a specific purpose, then you realize the full breadth of the living experience of being human, the breadth of what's being learned. Humanity is learning something enormous. When we try to say, "this is the purpose of life," we might overgeneralize it to encompass all purposes. We must look at the whole human family and the things people learn to come up with a generality that encompasses them. So, in some cases, we might learn love, generosity, strength of self, physical defense, surrendering physical defense—what one person grows into in one lifetime, another may grow out of, and both are living their truth.

Colin Campbell: At a process level.

Chris Bache: Most of the Eastern religions basically say, yes, you grow, you activate the chakras, you bring higher and higher levels of consciousness online. But when your consciousness opens up to divine essence, when it opens up to the you that is more real than any of your individual, private incarnational selves—the divine you, the essential you—when you open up to that, then you reach enlightenment, what the Hindus call moksha, meaning you can escape, you can leave. So once you wake up, then let's get out of here; there are better places to be than Earth. So that's an up-and-out cosmology. But what happened in my sessions was different from that. I reached a point about halfway through my journey when all of my former lives began to come into me. I was in a kind of pregnant time, a reality of deep time, and my former lives were coming in, like wrapping a filament of kite string around a spool, but that string was human experience. It was whole human lifetimes. They kept coming together and reached a critical mass, and when they reached that critical mass, they fused into one. When that happened, there was a tremendous explosion of energy, and a diamond luminosity exploded from my chest. That's when I began to understand and was shown that we make progress incrementally, lifetime by lifetime, as we incarnate. But the goal is not simply to make incremental progress. The goal eventually is that all of our lives come infused into one, and we become, on Earth, a being who has hundreds of thousands of years of history awakened and empowered within it. That is the being that we are becoming, and that is a different kind of being than an egoic being. Its heart is deeper, its mind is broader, its social relationships are richer, and its relationship to nature is different because it knows that the world we leave is the world we inherit. It has a deeper, embodied texture of its relationship with nature. My discovery was that this is not simply a path of individual spiritual awakening. We are all going through this transition. We are all giving birth to the diamond soul. The entire species is at a point in its history where it can no longer afford the luxury of trying to live on this planet in the fragmented egoic state. When the world order is created by egos, it leads to a fragmented order that serves some and not others. But when the soul wakes up with the profound compassion of its history, the soul lives on this planet differently than the ego does. We are coming into a very profound, tumultuous period of history, which I think of as a birth process. It will feel like a death process, and it is a death process. It’s essentially destroying the culture that was built by the ego, and destroying the ego which built that culture, and in that process of dying to that which is small, giving birth to something new, giving birth literally to a new stage in the human story. A new body politic, new economics, and a shift, I think, is taking place at the depths of the collective unconscious. The plate tectonics of the collective psyche are shifting in that Jungian sense, deep inside the human psyche. This transformation is taking place so that all human beings who are born after this transition will be living their individual life within the matrix of a different collective psyche. That, I think, is the work of the hour. That's what we are working to actualize, and part of this is reawakening to divine presence, which we've stripped out of nature—we tried to unsuccessfully—but reawakening to this common ground that we have with nature, to this intelligence that surrounds us and saturates us.

Rachel Fleming: Wow, Chris. I mean, I'm imagining people hearing this for the first time. It's kind of difficult to get your head around it. I want to bring Colin in in a minute. To summarize in my terms, what you're talking about, really, is the evolution of the human species, individuals, and collectively, towards a position where we can remember our entire history. So if we take reincarnation as a given, then we're evolving towards a place where we can remember our past incarnations on this Earth. Colin, can I bring you in here? There's something that you talk about—in reanimating ourselves, we need to have a completely new cognitive framework. The way of connecting to the intelligence in the universe is so foreign to us now that we need a whole different framework to be able to wrestle with that kind of information. What's your feeling about what Chris is talking about? I know you've read the book too, and I know you love it. So, biased question here, but from your perspective?

Colin Campbell: Thanks, Rachel. Well, first of all, I really wanted to say how much of an honor it is to meet you, Chris. I have to say the encounter with your books, starting with "Dark Night, Early Dawn", was really, well, tectonic in nature for me. I'm filled with questions and have been all the way through reading your books, re-reading them, and thinking about it. A lot of the questions I really want to ask, I have no idea how to even articulate. I can feel them and sense them, but I can't. I was lucky enough to be born into and brought up within a traditional indigenous culture here in southern Africa. Through my childhood, I lived in wilderness and among people who had a very particular relationship with the wilderness and a cosmology that came from that. Subsequently, I find myself in the post-industrial world, trying to reconcile that part of me with the part of me I find myself in now. It feels like there are two cognitive frameworks within me at some level, and somehow I'm tasked with trying to reconcile these two parts of myself. Reading through your books, I find myself back into the cognitive system I grew up in, which forms an understructure within my experience now. Within that, I have questions—loads of them—which your books brought up in me. Among the most difficult to articulate are questions around time. The notion that somehow, reincarnation is not something that really comes into the cosmologies here in southern Africa, and yet it does, implicitly in certain terms.

If we look at this idea of reincarnation, the cognitive framework we perceive it in relies on a sequence of time that speaks of a past from which we come and a future to which we go. But what happens if we take that out? If, in fact, that's merely my present cognitive framework, how would we understand reincarnation and the notion of a trajectory towards something if time in its kind of sequence from beginning to seeming culmination—or some such thing—if that wasn't the case? I don't know if I'm making any sense.

Chris Bache: It's a good question. If we eliminate the arrow of time, then reincarnation begins to look like multi-incarnation, not reincarnation. Some people have conceptualized us living all of our lives simultaneously, and we're interacting. All these lives are active and interacting in a way that befuddles the logic of linear development and requires a different kind of logic. I've tried to think in that world many times, and I basically keep coming down to I can't do it. I literally cannot live in a world where multi-incarnation makes sense. I can't make it make sense. Now, another thread—Robert Monroe from the Monroe Institute of Applied Science, the out-of-body guy—wrote three wonderful books in the out-of-body state, exploring the universe daily from that state. He says you reach a point in your spiritual development where you discover that you can incarnate in any time period you wish. So soul forward does not mean time forward. You can incarnate in the 10th century BC and next in the 20th century AD. Permeability of time continues the concept of linear development but flexes on time's absolute linearity.

I've gone through many permutations of time, moving into deep time, where I experienced my entire life in the early stages, birth to death, simultaneously present. Absolutely. I was experiencing the whole of my life, the end, the beginning, and all its development as simultaneous. Later, I was taken into periods of time where 100,000 years were being lived out as if it were one minute. It's convinced me that the universe has many modalities of time built into it, that when we move into deeper dimensions of reality, there are different modalities of time available. There are all those which you would think. And it does make me receptive to the idea of letting go of a concept of linear time and linear development. Somehow I try to reconcile the fact that from the universe's perspective, there are multiple modalities of time, allowing the universe to show me the future as something which has already happened and simultaneously is yet to happen, while at the same time holding onto some notion of the value and challenge of something approximating linear development.

I think my best take is that life chops its challenges into bits and pieces, and we can't learn it all in one lifetime. We can't do it all simultaneously. It's easier if it's just broken down into bits and pieces. And if this challenge of linear development is coming to fruition and coming to a diamond soul—an awareness that holds all of its time moments in its present consciousness on Earth—this is not the end of the developmental story, of the linear story. In a million years, we'll be far; in a billion years, we'll be farther still. The universe is just getting warmed up, you know. We have no reason for thinking that the universe is anywhere near the end of its evolutionary story. We know it's really at the early stages of its story. I think of time as one of the great gifts of evolution. Individuality is one of the great gifts of the physical universe. Time is one of the gifts of the physical universe. Behind that lie permutations of metaphysics that are more fluid with respect to time. But inside space-time, I think there is an approximate linear arrow of time that serves the soul's purpose, serving some deeper cosmic web. Yet, at the same time, when we are in the linear development, if we open up to the universe's sense of time, we often get these flashes of more than the present, more parallel dimensions of time. Your question makes a lot of sense, and it's substantive.

Rachel Fleming: Can I ask one, Colin, or do you want to come back on that?

Rachel Fleming: Okay, great. This is the problem with your work, Chris; we're out in inarticulable terrain, aren't we? When you call it the diamond soul, when there's this moment of remembering, what are the other attributes, what does that bring? Other than remembering and wholeness, did you have an experience of what else?

Chris Bache: Well, first of all, I think full consciousness is what we return to when we die. While we're in the Bardo Earth stage, when we die, we return to whole consciousness. It’s not something we're unfamiliar with; it’s something we are familiar with. Then we precipitate out of whole consciousness into part consciousness, egoic consciousness, and we return. So it's a constant accordion effect: we die, we get large; we're born, we get small; we die, we get large; we're born, we get small. Sooner or later, if we keep at it for a few thousand years, or a hundred million years, sooner or later, large wakes up inside physical consciousness. It’s simply a consolidation of what's taking place naturally and normally. It's just a stage in this process.

The times that I've been carried into deep time and experienced my diamond soul temporarily—this diamond soul is emerging as an archetypal imprint, an archetypal form. Yeah, it's hard to describe because of the enormity, the beauty, and the joy. We're talking about a human being that's completely healed of all the wounds of history—all the things we've done to each other, men and women, wars, violence—healed of all those scars, with a tremendous breadth of communion with the natural world, an intimacy with all life forms. Not only a breadth of companionship with all life, with other human beings, with human community, and with nature’s community, but an openness of the mind, able to take in more directly and enter into deeper communion with the intelligence of the universe.

The genius of the universe has all the answers to all the technological questions we want to have answered, and we just are not able to download all that knowledge. The diamond soul is a more complete and higher potency of a human being that can enter into deeper downloads from divine intelligence. It's not only an expansion of heart and mind; our physical senses are also amplified by orders of magnitude. In the very last session, after 73 sessions, the universe gave me an experience of what I call diamond vision. Suddenly, in a late session, my vision became thousands of times more acute and sharper than it had ever been. I could see details, gradients of color, sharpness, and precision of form. I was amazed that I had ever accepted this fuzzy stuff as real seeing. This was diamond clarity seeing. Then, after 10 minutes, it went away, and I was seeing the way I normally see. That's when I realized what I was being shown is that we tend to think of sensation as kind of a biomechanical process, but it's actually a conscious process. The more consciousness present in the body, the more capacity it has for infinitely higher levels of sensation—touch, hearing, seeing, physical sensations. It's heaven on earth in the body, participating in the qualities of heaven without leaving physical existence. It's not an up-and-out cosmology. It's bringing it in deeper, changing the physiology of the body to allow it to operate in this ecstatic state, which becomes the normal state. That's a challenge, but I think it's worth the labor we’re going into to give birth to. We are going into terribly severe labor, our past being stripped away. We will lose all capacities that we associate with minimal existence. In mystical traditions and psychedelic traditions, the small has to be broken, ground to dust, stripped, and dismembered for the new to awaken within us. This is happening now, historically. We're entering into what I think of as the dark night of our collective soul. The dark night is often a term used for a hard time, but in "The Dark Night of the Soul" by John of the Cross, it's a very intense purification time, immediately preceding the awakening of full illumination. The dark night of the collective soul is a time of intense purification, intense loss of reality as we have known it up to this point. Out of the pain and suffering that's coming, it's going to crack us open and break us down to our center. In this ordeal, we will not survive, but we will give birth to what in us is more beautiful, more ecstatic, more competent, and more plugged in. We are truly becoming a species of Buddhas, a species of Christs and prophets. These are the models we've had to give us some forevision of what's happening. In the early years, we couldn't imagine an ordinary human reaching that level of excellence. But now, through reincarnation, over and over again, we grow into that level of excellence, which is simply a level of transparency to the essential condition in which we experience life. The irony is we experience what's always been happening all along. It's always been this way. The universe has always been one; the universe has always been filled with intelligence. We have always been empty of self. But somehow we distracted ourselves into thinking that's not there. It's always been there. So we're waking up to the paradise that the universe already is. We've just been missing it.

Rachel Fleming: Chris, I just find your experience and your vision such a hopeful one as we move into what we see as ecological crisis and societal crisis. I felt quite emotional. I said at the beginning it was just one of the most inspiring books—if not the most inspiring book—last year, but one of the most in my lifetime. I'm sure Colin would agree with me on that. It's so wonderful to hear you speak. We have 10 minutes. I wondered if anybody had any questions. I appreciate it's quite a lot to take on. Please raise your hand if you have anything to ask Chris. Also to say, we've invited Chris back later in the year to be with us a bit more, so there will be more opportunities to talk with him. Does anybody have a question? Otherwise, I'm going to pick on Colin again, because I know you've got a list, Colin.

Audience: Rachel, maybe I can speak to the question I put in the chat. It was really for Stefan, but it was a tiny, tiny gesture towards some sense of rightness in these much, much bigger movements that we can't even begin to fathom. And then Chris, you spoke on paradigms that I've never heard before, and part of me feels extremely joyful, and like Rachel, I kind of want to weep at the same time. As we enter this dark night of the soul, which most of us feel, and it's... I don't know, I feel small and I'm a mother of three kids, and I'm trying to understand how to be a mother in this moment in time and love my children well. I'm not very sure how to do that. It's a very human thing, but it's the sort of smallest fractals of all the other things. If I can make any sense in that, I just wondered if you could speak to that a little bit. No?

Chris Bache: A couple of thoughts. One of them is I absolutely identify with what you're saying. I have three children. Parenting is of the age, and the age we're going into is different from the parenting of the past. We're trying to inculcate a different set of values in our children as we internalize these values ourselves. I think that's how nature works. Each of us is a cell within a fractal cell, and as we actualize the future in our individual lives, we catalyze an actualization of the future in our collective lives. We do it not simply by example but because every person who internalizes and becomes the future we need becomes a seed catalyst, psychically activating the web of transformation in people they will never know or meet but who are there. Just as we have been nourished by the ancestors, we have been nourished by others making transformations. Our transformation nourishes others. This came up in my sessions multiple times—that the states of consciousness I was entering were being fed into the collective psyche. When we do rituals of embracing the sun as a representative of this collective intelligence, or rituals of conservation, cultivating a lifestyle of using less, when we actualize those things, we make it easier for the entire species to do so, until we reach a tipping point. At the tipping point, uncommon sense becomes common sense.

This transformation is not something that will happen to us; nature knows what it is doing. We are not generating this transformation. Nature is taking us through it, but we are cooperating. It's not going to be handed to us. We have to create it out of the fabric of our being. Here's another consoling thought: when you look at reincarnation literature or near-death episodes, one thing becomes clear—we choose the incarnations we find ourselves in. At a time when we knew more, we knew what we were getting into, we knew the dark night of the soul was coming, and we made a choice to incarnate where we did and become who we are. Therefore, each of us carries a component of the transformation humanity is trying to make. The question is not what we can do, but do we have the courage to do what is within our reach to do, because what is within our reach has already been decided by the soul. Parenting is a big part of this transition. Everything we're doing—art, medicine, knowledge, communication technology—is a part of this transition. We're working it as we go.

Rachel Fleming: Thank you, Chris, thank you.

Rachel Fleming: Right. Thank you so much for sticking with us. I see some hands up. Just to say, we've gone over time. We wanted to keep it less than an hour, but when we edited, we found we couldn't, and I really wanted to include that question at the end because it brings it down to what we can do. Apologies for that. We'd love you to stay a little longer to share your thoughts. I saw two hands up—Carol and Isabella. Carol, would you like to go first if you unmute yourself?

Rachel Fleming: Gabby, can you unmute? Are we able to?

Audience: Everyone can unmute themselves.

Audience: I'm sort of rendered speechless, but I wanted to ask—what I thought I heard Chris say at the end was that our task is to tune into who we are in this lifetime and live that, and that's the best we can do. Because my first question was, what ritual can I do to accelerate this process? But it sounds like, from what he says, that's not what it's about. It's about living what we've dreamt in for this lifetime. Would you agree with that or comment on that?

Rachel Fleming: That's certainly what I heard. In the book, I think he's saying that as well. Colin, would you like to comment?

Colin Campbell: Yes, I think that is very much what he's saying. A lot of what he says in this talk is a tiny fragment of a much bigger body of work, dating back to Stan Grof’s work and others. To really appreciate each of his statements, understanding it in the context of the bigger picture is helpful. As we were coming to the end of this, I realized I made a mistake in the introduction. I spoke of the subtitle of his book as "Steps Toward a New Ecology of Mind," when it's actually "Steps Toward a Deep Ecology of Mind." Listening to the talk, you can probably see why I made that mistake. We're in a moment now that is unprecedented, and while we're in a moment of experience that never existed before, we come from a long history. We're reaching back into our historic roots, our experiential historic roots, our psycho-spiritual historic roots, informing this present moment. Then we potentially translate that into a response to the newness of where we are now. That's the task of our time—not doing very well with reaching back into the vast form of who we are, expressed also in our long trajectory of where we've come from. The totality of who we are is, as Chris points out, it's always there. We compress ourselves into a fragment, and a lifetime is a certain sense of that. But the particular time we're in now—industrial, cultural, globalized—is even more so. We've compressed and retracted ourselves into a smaller fragment than before. What we're tasked with fundamentally is remembering—on the one hand—finding ways to reenter what is inherently in us, which is our past, dynamically present and active, and at the same time, spring out of that into dreaming who we are now and what's asked of us in this moment of profound change in what it means to be human and a universe.

Audience: My experience in this lifetime has been many different ways of being, and I'm aware of the sort of small self that just gets on with everyday life and isn't really doing much, but then there’s part of me that is doing much more interesting or spiritual stuff. My question is, can I relax and let that happen? Will it happen, or should I be focusing? There's always this worry, isn't there, that the world will win? We haven’t done enough. Anxiety comes from the industrial setup here. No answer probably... it's one to brew on.

Audience: Hmm... always brewing.

Audience: Isabella, you had a question. You’re going to have to unmute, I'm afraid.

Audience: Yes, brilliant. Thank you. Um, my name is actually Christina, but I'm on my laptop. Sorry, so that's why the Zoom is named Isabella. It's maybe more of an observation, or I don't know exactly, but I have to admit that I haven't read that book yet. I had many of my own experiences with LSD and Ayahuasca when I was young, and it has certainly informed my life. I would completely agree with so many things that have been said up to now, and I have been thinking about this for a long time, though never very scientifically. I've just tried to live by what I had experienced and learned. One thing always puzzled me, like was said at the very beginning, the taking of the drugs is a shortcut to an opening into a world. I always felt that, and I always felt it helped me have a bigger understanding of the universe and many of the things that have been talked about, particularly the connections, to my ancestry and the wisdom of my ancestors. I always felt an obligation, in some ways, for some strange reason, to try and share this with others. In my case, I did try to do that mostly through art. However, my observation was that we are all at so many different stages in our lives and in our, I suppose, so-called journey, that it's very difficult to often try and explain these things that we can see and these connections to people who may not have had the privilege of opening their minds. So I've often wondered, when we talk about the collective well-being, does that actually really exist? Is it only some who are at a certain stage in their rebirth or reincarnation, and does that time we are apparently entering really exist collectively, or is it an illusion we've created to try and understand things? I don't know. I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear. It's really difficult to talk about these things.

Rachel Fleming: I'm thinking of what he was saying about if the individual does it, then it kind of adds to the collective. I'm just thinking of Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance. Colin might be able to talk more about that. But I just wonder if it's that kind of process at work, that once the individuals start, then it becomes easier for the collective. Is that what you're saying, Christina? I may have misunderstood.

Audience: Yes. I'm not sure what I'm saying. More that I'm asking. There is maybe this worry or doubt because I have become very aware and try hard to live my life being conscious of everything one says, and every gesture one does. Every pebble you drop into the pond makes a wave, perhaps, and it changes things. It changes the universe, if you wish. So there is that awareness, but I'm not sure that awareness is the same for everybody. Yes, it does make a big difference, but at the same time, we are worrying about an age we are entering. I do like to think about this, but at the same time, I'm sort of thinking, "Hang on a minute, in a way that doesn't make sense in the big scheme of the universe because it's already there. It has already been." Whatever comes is not a particularly new entrance because some people are at this stage, and others have this. We've already had it. It's not the same exactly, but it's not necessarily very specific to our lifetime here and now. The same pains, the same choices, have been experienced a million times before. In the end, it's about the individual, which historically has been named many times. Like what Carl says, it is like the Greek poets saying, "Become who you are." That development, that understanding of the universe, the vastness, the lack of boundaries—everything is interconnected, absolutely everything. I don't know anyway.

Rachel Fleming: Thank you so much, Chris. I'm sure we could really explore that further, but we have about six minutes left. Theresa has a question. Before I come to you, Theresa, I just wanted to mention for anyone who might have to leave—Chris is going to come back as part of our contemporary animism program, which starts again in July. We have a new intake every year and still have some places available. Someone mentioned they'd love to explore this subject further, which is what we're aiming to do in this year's program. Breathing workshops are included as well. Absolutely. Breathwork is where it's at for me. So, Theresa, I'd like to come to you, and if anyone else has something, please put up your digital hand.

Audience: It's just a comment. I haven't read his books or heard of him before, but it's just an observation. Even though he kind of rejects the transcendent thought of transcending earthly, bodily reality, like you find in much Eastern thought, he still presents an idea that fits neatly with our Western thought of evolution and development. I'm not quite sure what I think about that. It seems like he takes old evolutionary thoughts, rejects them, and replaces them with another. I guess I'd like to see more use of his experience to accept that time isn't linear, and things exist simultaneously in different layers, here and now. It's not necessarily for a means but just that this is how it is. I'm not sure if I'm making much sense.

Rachel Fleming: Yeah. Do you have a response on that, Colin?

Colin Campbell: Well, I think you're opening a door we could easily spend the rest of the night on.

Rachel Fleming: Yeah.

Audience: Sorry.

Colin Campbell: It's very important. You're raising some interesting questions, harkening back to my question on time and how we perceive it. We have this notion in the West—and perhaps as humanity—of a certain way of perceiving time, believing it's part of being human. I don't agree with that. I think the way we perceive time and sequential events is characteristic of a particular moment in our history and is not necessarily the case in earlier or maybe future states. We face the struggle of being immersed in this framework we call present existence in this particular cultural and socio-cultural context. When we have these conversations, we're tasked with modulating to other views and perspectives within us and within our history, like circular dynamics instead of linear ones. At the same time, we must rest within where we are to not get completely lost in the transitive process we're attempting. I wouldn't know how to answer the question exactly, but I think it’s a really good one and worth pondering further.

Rachel Fleming: We are going to have to wrap it up because we’ve gone over time. I apologize for keeping you longer than you expected. It's lovely to see those who made it to the end.

Audience: Yes.

Rachel Fleming: I don’t have much more to say, really. That was Chris Bache. Check out his books and our contemporary animism program if you want more conversations like this. We also incorporate a lot of embodied practices, so it's not all talking. Lovely to see you all tonight, and see you very soon. Bye for now. Thank you, Gabby, thank you, Colin.

Audience: Thank you very much.

Audience: Thank you. Bye. Thank You.