Wisdom Keepers conversation with Duane Elgin

Bas de Cock: Thank you all for joining. I will give a short outline of tonight. We have two and a half hours together, which is a great amount of time, and you'll see the time will pass quickly. We'll start with an achievement and meditation to settle in with the theme for this Wisdom Keepers gathering. We'll look ahead to the upcoming hour to hour and a half with Chris and Duane. What are their backgrounds and why are they here? You'll see they're coming from two different angles, two different perspectives, two different paradigms. This is a beautiful dance we're going to encounter. What are the possibilities, especially for creating a new mindset as humans, a mindset of the whole universe? It's not just about the technological evolution or what world leaders do; it's about creating a starting point of kindness towards others, driving less, planting more trees. After an hour and a half with Chris and Duane, which sounds like music to my ears, we'll have the last 45 minutes to look ahead for creating more circles as a community, as a human family, to create and practice this new mindset. We'll guide you through this step by step, so please sit in your comfortable chair and have a good evening. Before we start, I'd like you to close your eyes, trust us as hosts—for we are good people with a good mission—and ask yourself: Why are you here tonight? What's the real intention of your presence during this gathering with Duane, Chris, and this human family?

Bas de Cock: Are you here out of curiosity? Are you here to learn? Are you here to thrive?

Bas de Cock: Whatever your intention is, it doesn't matter. Just really sense the reason why you're here; that's already present in this moment.

Bas de Cock: Visualize your intention for this evening as if it’s the present time.

Bas de Cock: What's your contribution to this beautiful world we're living in?

Bas de Cock: What do you sense from your core, from your heart, why you're here to contribute as a whole, as a whole human family?

Bas de Cock: If you have a deeper understanding of why you contributed tonight, then try to remember this for the rest of the evening,

Bas de Cock: and please feel guided as we start the meditation now.

Bas de Cock: Before we start this meditation, take some deep breaths,

Bas de Cock: just to settle in and allow yourself to open up to this visualization. I'm going to guide it now for you.

Bas de Cock: Sense that you are floating in a galaxy, and you have a clear and bright view of Mother Earth.

Audience: It feels at home.

Bas de Cock: Floating in this universe and seeing our common ground, Mother Earth, you feel at peace and deeply connected to this beautiful planet in a sky full of stars.

Bas de Cock: You can deeply feel you made this journey before, and now you feel so grateful to see Planet Earth from this perspective again.

Audience: Excitement,

Bas de Cock: ecstasy, and tears of joy are felt in this present moment.

Bas de Cock: You feel a pull of Mother Earth pulling you towards her body, and

Bas de Cock: you can sharply feel and see all the continents and the oceans of Mother Earth coming into your view.

Bas de Cock: Pulled more closely, you have a clear view of your own continent.

Bas de Cock: You see your country, where you live, you see more sharply your province,

Bas de Cock: and you zoom into your own city. You can feel your neighborhood, the neighborhood you know so well.

Bas de Cock: Instantly, you see your house. The interiors of your house, the furniture, and you see your loved ones sitting in your beautiful house.

Bas de Cock: Then you sense you're back in your body. You can feel your skin.

Bas de Cock: You can feel your organs. You're in your bones. You are aware of your breath.

Bas de Cock: You are aware of the heartbeat of your beautiful heart. You feel instantly at home, the same feeling when you watched Mother Earth from above.

Audience: What a journey, a journey

Bas de Cock: from beyond.

Audience: Nothing lasts forever. No one lives forever. A flower that fades and dies, winter passes and spring comes—embrace the cycle of life; that is the greatest love.

Audience: Go beyond fear. Go beyond fear. Beyond fear takes you into the place where love grows.

Audience: When you refuse to follow the impulses of fear, anger, and revenge, beyond means to feel yourself start every day singing like the birds. Singing takes you beyond, beyond, beyond. We need repeated discipline, a genuine training to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing. Go beyond the rights and the wrongs. Prayer clears the head and brings back peace to the soul. Go beyond to feel the oneness of the unity.

Audience: Sing, singing takes you beyond. Beyond.

Audience: We are all the same, all the same, looking to find our way back to the source, to the one, to the only one. Go beyond revenge. The greatest moment in our lives is when we allow ourselves to teach each other, to go beyond, to feel the oneness of the unity. Singing takes you beyond, beyond, beyond, beyond.

Audience: Take the journey. Take the journey inside of you, to become quiet, to hear the beyond,

Audience: to become patient, to receive the beyond, to become open, to invite the Beyond and be grateful. Be grateful to allow the beyond. Be in the present moment, to live in the beyond. Start every day, singing like the birds; singing takes you beyond, beyond, beyond. What does love have to do with it? Love grows when you trust. When you trust, love heals and renews. Love inspires and empowers us to do great things and makes us a better person to love. Love makes us feel safe and brings us closer to God.

Audience: When you go beyond,

Audience: is where you find true love.

Audience: Keep singing. Singing takes you beyond. Beyond.

Bas de Cock: You make a connection to your breath again, deepen your breath,

Bas de Cock: and take your own time to open up your eyes and go external.

Bas de Cock: To all people who joined this gathering, feel free to make some contact with the people. Look at the thumbnails, the faces. Before we introduce Chris and Duane, I want to thank you for all the donations. There are a beautiful amount of donations provided as a gift for the Choosing Life Project. We're going to hear more about it from Duane, I think, so thank you for that. I also want to introduce Mayo, my co-host for the Wisdom Keepers every month. I want to mention that Melanie is also one of the hosts, but she can't contribute tonight because she has a course running. So Mayo, before we go to Duane and Chris and we open up, please feel free to share something from your side. Duane, your microphone is still off.

Mayo: Thank you so much, everyone, for being here with us. Can you hear me now?

Bas de Cock: Fantastic.

Mayo: It is so important to have these conversations within ourselves, but imagine the power of sharing our ideas and connecting from a human stance. These conversations, though mediated through this platform—a technology that provides us a sense of community—bring us together even if we're continents away or in our own neighborhoods. What we just did through that guided meditation is truly beyond; it’s combining our energies into one essence, into this consciousness. It's important to have this meeting, to have more conversations in your neighborhoods with those around you, sharing your reality and co-creating that reality together. We look forward to growing with you, perhaps meeting face to face one day. For now, let's enjoy the ride. Tonight's conversations are going to expand our universe into what we can do as human beings here, now, and today, so we can come together as one species to thrive as a whole.

Audience: Thank you, Mayo.

Bas de Cock: Yes, before we start with Chris and Duane, and introduce them, of course, I'd like to highlight why we're here together. If you feel like writing something down, like a question or an emotion, or something you sense in your system, feel comfortable to do so. It's useful for the second part of the Wisdom Keepers gathering when we have a Q&A and sharing part. Feel open to do so and trust that this environment is reliable. We're here with a good heart. We'll see about using a whiteboard to integrate what's coming up. Before reaching out to Chris and then Duane, I'd like to introduce them from both the heart and perspective. Personally, I started as a medical doctor, trained in ENT, and later moved into integrative medicine, a calling into life, including the Grof legacy training in Transpersonal Psychology and Psychedelic Therapy. That's where I met Chris. Chris, I attended your course, LSD and the Mind of Universe, and it opened something up for me about caring for this planet and universe, acknowledging it's all integrated, a one life system. So thank you. After my own psychedelic experiences, it’s deepened further. Maybe we start with you, Chris, since the initial outreach was to you. You're a Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and Religious Studies, specialized in Buddhist studies at Youngstown State University, and affiliated with the California Institute of Integral Studies, and on the Advisory Council of my training, Grof legacy training. You're also involved with the Institute of Noetic Sciences. You're not retired; you're active in contributing to the current mind shift. You're an author of several books, with LSD and the Mind of the Universe being your latest. It's on my desk every day. Anyone, whether or not into LSD or psychedelics, should read it for the essential insights. You describe your empirical research, including 76 high-dose LSD sessions, and share visions of impending global crisis and the future human. Thank you for being here, Chris.

Chris Bache: It's a pleasure to be here, Bas and everyone. Thanks for the invitation. My voice is rough due to a cold, but this material is too important to pass up, especially an opportunity to talk with Duane, a friend for over 25 years. Our research and writing brought us together; now it's a deep, lifelong brotherhood. Duane and I see tonight as a conversation, sharing the kind we have when we meet. I view a talk as a gateway to the Q&A, where the real engagement happens. Duane and I share a vision of a universe rich in intelligence, both manifest and the intelligence behind the Big Bang, still nourishing existence. Our consciousness, whether sitting quietly or amplifying it, can sink into levels deep beyond the species, even beyond time and space. This communion with what we see as the mind of the universe, both levels manifest and beyond, both shared by us and crucial. We discussed the universe's intelligence and compassion. It's evident in DNA, stars, and galaxies—their order displays layers of intelligence. Compassion might seem trickier; life is hard, generating suffering, seemingly from a mean source. Truly seeing the universe's wisdom means looking deeper—beyond sensory consciousness to the collective psyche, diving deep. Ramakrishna said to see God, we must face evil. Similarly, seeing the universe's wisdom means facing life's suffering, not sidestepping it. Dwayne and I will discuss our times, the crisis, an existential trigger point—evolutionary leap or extinction. This potential extinction is an enormous evolutionary accelerator. So, over to you, brother Dwayne.

Duane Elgin: Thank you, brother Chris. Chris is one of my dearest, dearest brothers and friends, and I am so grateful for the lifelong journey we’ve shared with our mutual interest in the universe's nature and vision for humanity. This transformative time has us examining suffering’s purpose, pushing us towards understanding and awakening. The violence of the Vietnam era swayed my path from physical to social healing. Underpinning this is our connection to a living universe, where Chris and I meet in passion and exploration. Our focus is on social healing and exploring a living universe. Let's acknowledge a shared environment—the crisis isn’t future; it’s now. According to the UN, humanity is on a climate “Highway to Hell,” just a metaphor for our broader crisis: climate, species extinction, earth’s depletion. This plays out as an overshoot—exceeding Earth’s capacity. The future carries about two billion, but we are eight billion, a harsh path needing healing and respectful Earth relation. Now, address Chris’s framing of whether crisis mitigation is possible? Can humanity reverse it with significant effort?

Chris Bache: So, can we stop this crisis with collective mobilization?

Duane Elgin: No, it’s too late for crisis reversal. In the early 1970s, starting my research, a pivot was possible. We've consumed half a century through inaction, cornering ourselves. We're now confronting the overshoot, species extinction, climate catastrophe, and resource depletion. So, now's the time for decision and choice, not theory or the distant future; it’s now, needing redefined humanity, the universe and evolutionary path understanding. Let's embark on this inquiry.

Chris Bache: The destabilization is already underway; the social fabric unravels. Our political discourse, polarized, moves toward extreme governance—fascism, totalitarianism, fact denial. Common ground erodes, symptomatic of seismic societal shifts. Research reveals shaking cultural foundations—decades of deepening seismic shifts. Imagining its eventual depth swells our hearts; we’d avoid it if possible but must endure. This deepening understanding is crucial, else we succumb to despair, theodicies, or destructive philosophies. Pass it to you, brother, yes.

Duane Elgin: Here’s what I’ve seen over four decades, speaking globally. Audiences are asked, "Considering global human behavior, what life stage are we in?" Given choices: toddler, teenager, adult, elder—responses typically indicate adolescence. Programs evidence maturity-cultural upliftment due via "fires of initiation," triggering future explorative human progress—a new self, universe, and evolutionary journey sense. Chris and I continually explore maturation of the species here. Right, Chris?

Duane Elgin: Indeed, we're moving into a time of intense compression. This is going to be a heated journey, a compression of humanity in the fire of initiation. We're already experiencing it as we look beyond our nation-state boundaries to the Earth as a whole system. We're seeing that this will not carry us even to the end of this century. We are in compression times, and we are going to be pushed outside of our usual circumstances into new conditions as a species, not just as nations, but as a whole. That's already beginning to happen, and that will be the catalyst for the rapid acceleration of the evolutionary potentials that are already surfacing. This gathering is one expression of that, like the role of psychedelics as a catalyst for awakening us to a new domain of understanding ourselves and the human journey. So here we go as a species, into the fire, into the initiation, and hopefully into our higher humanity.

Chris Bache: Yeah. And in that context, I want to put on the table one fundamental axiom of my thought. I know Duane shares this axiom, and I suspect everyone in this group does too: the concept of reincarnation. My first book was on reincarnation, starting with the empirical evidence, which I believe is overwhelming. I came to this conclusion as a philosopher of religion. So when I look at the world and see human beings, I don't see them as most people do. I don't see old people as old people and young people as young people. I see souls. There are old souls in young bodies and young souls in old, withered bodies. The key here is understanding that reincarnation is a higher order of evolution. It's one of the fundamental truths of a self-manifesting, self-evolving universe. So far, we've been telling the story of reincarnation from a perspective that focuses on individual evolution and enlightenment, but it's been largely individually oriented.

Now, that's not false; it's true. However, we're missing something if we stop there. When we understand that every human being on the planet is a reincarnating essence, we realize that reincarnation is a collective driver. It's not just about personal salvation or transformation; it's an evolutionary driver of the highest magnitude. In my book LSD and the Mind of the Universe, there's a section where I record experiences showing me the entire species pulsing in and out of time-space every 100 years or so. Our individual karmic agendas are skillfully woven into a collective karmic agenda. This theme became central in my second book, Dark Night, Early Dawn, where I discuss the dark night of the collective soul. My sessions made me understand that our individual work serves not only our development but also our collective development. There are no personal problems that aren't also collective problems. Try to think of any personal issue that isn't echoed or reflective of a collective issue in our culture. I'll pause there and hand it back to you, Duane.

Duane Elgin: Chris held up a book or two. I can't let that pass without holding up one of my own, which relates directly to what Chris is speaking about: a reincarnational perspective. How can that happen? Here's a book I worked on for 30 years, The Living Universe. According to modern science, the universe is considered non-living at the foundations, and as far as modern consumer society is concerned, it's just dead matter and empty space. People like Chris come along and say, "Wait a minute. I've explored the deeper reaches of the universe; it's a living system." In that living system, life can reconnect and evolve with itself, and reincarnation then is not losing the thread of our existence as we move through multiple cycles of life within this larger aliveness. So we can explore the foundations of a living universe and that perspective further.

Chris Bache: Well, in that context, I want to say something that's both hard and consoling. From a reincarnation perspective, we're always popping into time-space and popping out into a spiritual metaverse. From this perspective, birth is not the beginning of our life. Look inside, and you'll find evidence of a range of experiences that predates your physical body. Death is not the end of our existence. There's an abundance of evidence for a continuity of consciousness that predates and postdates our individual lives. When we talk about deaths, we relate to it on two levels. The death of a human being is a painful, horrendous experience. We're ending a life cycle, which hurts. But from another perspective, cycles end and begin, but the consciousness within that organism is not extinguished; it's simply paused while we go home, recalibrate, refresh, and rejuvenate before entering back into the fray.

This is consoling because it suggests death is not the end. But this pattern of leaving and returning, shredding the social fabric, is part of how life works. We have to understand that the universe thinks in very different terms than we do, operating on a much larger time scale. We must learn to think like the universe, recognizing every human being as a precious soul, a companion on this long journey. Working for the collective good of our planet and the human family is the commitment of a maturing soul. A young soul is small; a maturing soul is large. Great souls like Gandhi and Martin Luther King hold large swaths of humanity in their hearts.

Duane Elgin: So well said, Chris. Part of growing up is recognizing that we have a soul and keeping its fire alive so we can grow into the future you're speaking about. I've often wondered why the larger world doesn't recognize what we're discussing here. This wisdom is known throughout history. Where is it today? I'm reminded of the American Indian tradition of three miracles: that anything exists at all, that living things exist, and that living things exist that know they exist. The third miracle elevates our capacities as a species but tends to overshadow the first miracle—anything existing at all.

What I appreciate about Chris's life journey is that he not only explores reincarnation and the individual soul but also the nature of the universe that carries these processes. We're beginning to see the universe as a living system and learning to live within its aliveness. This is an extraordinary transition from living in a dead universe, where to maximize short-term pleasure is our focus, to seeing that we're part of a deeper journey of aliveness. Chris is talking about this larger journey, and I'm working with it in my own life.

Chris Bache: You're pointing to me, Duane, but you wrote The Living Universe. You spent years looking at the scientific evidence to convince skeptics who adhere to a materialist perspective. I'm presenting evidence for reincarnation, and they're dismissing it. But you laid out the evidence and cross-cultural testimony testifying to the deeper mystery and intelligence we can experience. A philosophical revolution begins with the question of what it is possible for a human being to experience. My colleagues say you can't experience these things, and I say that's nonsense. We've documented the experiences of people using methods like LSD psychotherapy. You can't dismiss the reality of those experiences just because they don't fit a materialist view.

Duane Elgin: Let's look beyond philosophy to the direct experience. The psychedelic experience is immediate; you don't think about it. You're overwhelmed with direct encounters with life from a different mode. Let me share my experience in parapsychology. Almost half a century ago, the US government began its research into psychic potentials. Two aspects of our intuitive potentials were found: we can receive information beyond our body's normal capacities, and we can extend our energetic impact way beyond. The receptive side is called remote viewing, and the expressive side is psychokinesis or mind manifesting in matter. These opportunities to explore our relationship with the living universe expand our awareness.

We're a physical body anchored to unbounded awareness. After the body dies, the consciousness it carried moves into larger realms of the universe. We are learning to live in this larger aliveness. Instead of focusing on material consumption, we're here to learn about who we are beyond the physical body, recognizing we're part of a journey that has infinite origins and potential.

Chris Bache: I want to explore as we develop our potentials and mature as a species, what kind of human being are we becoming? I think it's far beyond what we see even in science fiction. But I want to build up to that and talk more directly about psychedelics. Are you ready to make that pivot? Both Duane and I share this interest, and many in our generation find psychedelics part of their spiritual practice. Used responsibly, psychedelics can heal the soul and deepen our awareness of life itself.

Personally, when I was a brand-new professor, I read Stan Grof's work and saw my vocation. Although psychedelics had been made illegal by 1970, I developed a sideline to my academic career using a psychedelic protocol I inherited from Grof. After a few sessions, I chose to work with very high doses of LSD. My goal was personal enlightenment, but I was wrong. If you work with high doses in a controlled situation, the process can reveal that your work has been drawn into the larger drama of collective development, often engaging with the collective pain stored in the human psyche.

Humanity must heal to make the evolutionary pivot from an adolescent stage to a mature stage of soul development. Healing is the first step to establishing a new foundation, a new platform where we can then take in more light and wisdom from the universe. As we heal, we take in more. Initially, breaking through our awareness's fixed boundaries brings ego death and rebirth into deeper consciousness. Continuing this work brings experiences of species-level awakening.

If you diligently pursue this path, taking care of your body, communion with the intelligence within the species can occur. Over time, I began to have visions of the fate of the human species, downloaded in pieces over several years. These visions showed humanity coming to a turning point, a period of profound spiritual fruition, marking the end and beginning of history. Transitioning to a species-wide awakening was foretold. It became clear that this is a massive, collective experience rather than individual enlightenment. Extinction is pressing upon us hard and fast. Many others share this vision, affirming a shared collective experience. Duane, I'm sure you've experienced similar material.

Duane Elgin: Let me summarize, from my perspective, what we've been speaking about. Three elements come up. We're a world, a species, not really recognizing what's going on here. First, we're not recognizing the nature of the universe in which we live. The universe is a living system, and current science says it's just dead matter in empty space, so we work with the material dimensions. But the deeper aliveness is not recognized. Secondly, we don't recognize who we are. We think we're biological beings in this dead universe, making the best of it in a consumer society. We're not recognizing that we are part of that larger aliveness. Thirdly, we're not recognizing the evolutionary journey. We think we die and the lights go out, but as Chris, you've been speaking about the reincarnation universe, we continue evolving. The transition I see is threefold: a new recognition of where we are as a living system, recognizing who we are as beings part of that larger aliveness, and where we're going beyond consumerism. It's learning to live in that larger aliveness. What an extraordinary journey we're blessed with. You raised the good question, Chris, of how in the world do we make the transition, the threefold transition in understanding the universe, who we are, and where we're going? A lot of attention is on material systems—climate crisis, too much CO2—meaning we have to cut back materially. It's a material response to a trans-material challenge. We often ask what we're going to do about it. One key aspect I've been working on for decades is media. Media access, often seen as a problem, as it hypnotizes us into a materialistic mindset, leading to more consumerism, but it's more than that. Mass media is access to the mass mind. Here, we're beginning to grow the neurological structures of the species using the mass media to speak with one another and grow a new understanding, a new consensus, a new consciousness of who we are as a species. Transforming our uses of media is critical for our future. This gathering is an example, and there are many more. We're at the cusp of using extraordinary media potentials. Two-thirds of the world's population have a cell phone. By the end of the decade, it'll be three-quarters, giving us access to the collective mind. We're equipped with the tools to communicate and grow into a new collective consciousness of transformation. We're learning, awakening, growing, and we're well-equipped for the journey.

Chris Bache: This is one area where our work is complementary. You are a deeply committed, lifelong social activist, understanding social transformation beyond me. You understand the roots holding us back and see opportunities for deep social change at a collective, tangible level. My work has been more internally focused. Let me speak to the inside of this process. My psychedelic experience, while deeply collective, takes place in one room in one street, offering a different access to the collective. Let me tell you the next installment in my journey. Personal Death-Rebirth occurred, then collective Death-Rebirth, leading to visionary experiences of an extraordinary future for the human species. No explanation of how we get there, but then profound mystical experiences of Non-duality and Shunyata, leading into the diamond Luminosity work, which occupied the last five years of my work. In the middle of those diamond Luminosity sessions, expecting to return, I was in for something different during my 55th session in 1995. I dissolved completely into the species, into the collective unconscious so deeply that individual consciousness became a remnant. I entered deep time, transcending linear time deeply into the future. It was a transtemporal and trans spatial experience, where I systematically experienced the death and rebirth of the human family, seeing the storm both as a whole and in individual drops. The entire human family was moving into a crisis. Civilization was being shattered, lives torn apart, driving us to the verge of extinction. Yet, when we thought it was the end, like a hurricane passing, things began to get lighter, people began to pick themselves up, realizing they had been changed. The crisis tapped us into something deep, unlocking something within us, shedding assumptions, tapping into the one heart. With creativity catalyzing cultural change, feedback loops formed, new values and perceptions grounded in a new awareness. This wasn't a forecast but an experience from deep time, already happening and yet to happen. After this, I knew, walking in Ohio, surrounded by beautiful souls, they consciously chose to incarnate at this time in history, deeply courageous spiritual warriors. It took time to learn to live with that, but I did, and brought it into "Dark Night, Early Dawn," and more fully into "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." It's a perspective I know I share with you.

Bas de Cock: Dwayne, yeah, it's intense.

Duane Elgin: As a long-time social activist, I want to bring another note into our conversation before we conclude. There are no guarantees. We've seen the possibilities and felt it in our being, but there's no guarantee we'll realize it as a species. I see three great pathways: an extraordinary invitation into greater aliveness, a future of collapse and functional extinction, and the authoritarian future. The authoritarian orientation is strong; people are ready to surrender their freedoms. What we've been speaking about is a narrow pathway into the future, needing all we can as a community to elevate ourselves into that future of evolutionary potential. Bless you, brother, for your life of contribution and service to that future.

Chris Bache: As we transition soon into questions and answers, there is shared view that this century is a century of labor. We've been gestating the future human for millennia, but now we're in labor. Labor is short and intense, interrupting ordinary life, as we birth the future human, a more evolved form of humanity. What might this future human look like? Returning to reincarnation, in my experiences, my former lives began to return rapidly, hitting critical mass, leading to an explosion of energy and a fusion into a singularity. The experience taught me of the diamond soul, a point in evolution where history coalesces and explodes our consciousness beyond individual generational time. It's a vision of human reincarnation beyond classical views. Typically, enlightenment permits departure from time and space, but what emerged was the birth of the diamond soul: reaching a point of integration and exploding into greater consciousness.

Bas de Cock: Awaken.

Chris Bache: Truly awaken to our soul consciousness opens us to relationships with others and the intelligence manifesting time and space. The goal is awakening, embodying that in our physical being, and bringing consciousness into history-making. As mind creates destiny, we're learning to control the nuclear energy of the soul and manifest creativity. We're evolving into beings at peace with ourselves and capable of creativity, aligning with mahasiddhas. I believe we're giving birth to the future human, maturing into adult humanity, and once we make this transition, we open to an awakened human form. But this isn't the end of the story. Beyond this transition, millions of years are ahead. The universe isn't stopping; this is the beginning of awakening. Although no guarantees exist, acknowledging our collective task and exerting effort is crucial. My psychedelic experiences have led me deep into the future, perceiving the transformation as a certainty we accomplish. Yet, I worry about the cost—how many of our children will endure hardship. Though human beings aren't driving this shift, recognizing and cooperating with this creative intelligence is essential. It's a tectonic shift within the psyche, out of which every human will possess a different level of awareness—a shift we're part of, having chosen this journey.

Audience: So brother, let's open it up and see where these good people want to go.

Duane Elgin: Thank you, brother, for this delightful hour of sharing. I'm deeply grateful for our friendship over these decades. Bless you.

Audience: Likewise, brother.

Bas de Cock: From this place, what amazing, deep words. The energy felt during your dance is transformative by itself. I'm honored by these words. I have a thousand questions, thanks to your course, Chris; now I have two thousand questions. But concerning the time, I want to open the microphone for fellow wisdom keepers. If you have questions or sharing, this is the time and place.

Chris Bache: I see Todd has got his hand raised.

Audience: It's lovely to see you both. Your synergy offers great optimism for the future. I'm a painfully optimistic sort, having tasted unconditional love and complexity. Though we know a collective great NDE is coming, transformative power is wonderful. The wider conversation around psychedelics—an essential tool—will help change consciousness individually and collectively. I've received news of leadership schools with a psychedelic component, allowing a cohort to think deeply about planetary, holistic ideas. It's unheard of decades ago. Folks are working towards a greater understanding, despite the pain ahead. Thank you for your work. My optimism is unshakable.

Chris Bache: How could we not mention Dwayne's great book, "Choosing Earth?" He has created a film, a course, and many initiatives surrounding it. This powerful book is being given away, including a PDF form with hot-linked references, offering deep exploration opportunities.

Audience: Dwayne?

Duane Elgin: Moderating my optimism, this book looks 60 to 70 years into the future from a half-century of futures research. I wish to be optimistic, but the world is fiercely confronting us now. It's not ten years from now; it's now. The reality requires our courage, collective consciousness, and new media to reflect new possibilities and priorities. It's an urgent call for action now.

Bas de Cock: Thank you. I see a hand from Henrik. You can open your mic.

Audience: Hey, thank you. So I came here as someone who's curious, and I'm going to ask a question at the risk of sounding flippant because I obviously don't have the experience that the three of you have. I'm just going to ask this question from a position of curiosity and trying to get some clarity. I've heard a lot of things, reincarnation, karma, the path of the soul, humanity going forward. We come from a source and intelligence, and it sounds like a very profound worldview, right? I came from a Christian worldview and am no longer in that world. My question is, what makes you guys so convinced this is actually reality, or this is actually true? And it's not just the LSD messing with your heads. To be honest, I told you it was gonna be flip, but—

Chris Bache: Absolutely, good question. Absolutely, thank you. I'll take a shot, Dwayne, then you take a shot. Yeah. Ken Ring, founder of near-death episode studies, founder of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, good friend, long friend. He and I... He asked the same question at me and asked it hard and pushed it hard, and we had a back-and-forth dialogue. It was so rich that we decided we'd publish it. So if you go to medium.com, there's an article that you can track down. It's a dialogue between Ken and me, and the title is "Are Deep Psychedelic Experiences Trustable?" How do we know I'm not just picking up on the echoes of my personal mind or the echoes of the collective psyche? What criteria can we use to evaluate these experiences? I lay it out as clearly as I can. Ken punches at me; I respond. It's a good dialogue. It's a really important question: Are they trustable? Right? There's not a simple answer to that question. You really have to kind of take it and look at it deeply as you go through it, because it's not enough to say experientially, they're trustable. There has to be more meat on those bones. There has to be more substance. And I think there is. I think we do have some empirical evidence that these experiences are verifiable and trustworthy, some of them, not all of them. But then there are other ones which begin to look at cross-disciplinary coherence that adds another layer of trustability. Yeah, it's an important question, but what I would emphasize is that I would never say the things that I said today if I were speaking 30 years ago. Now, if you take a look at my scholarship, and I know Duane's scholarship, it's not just that we're sharing visionary experiences. We've done our homework. I don't offer reincarnation as a philosophical or theoretical perspective or based on only an experiential perspective. I did my homework. I looked at all the available evidence for reincarnation. I looked deeply at Stan Grof's work and the available evidence supporting the hypotheses and cosmology he presented in many of his books. So it's a combination of rigorous scholarship, which has lots of different aspects to it, and then carefully recorded, offered psychedelic experiences. And what we find, of course, is that the cosmology that emerges in psychedelic work is essentially the same as the cosmology that emerges in other deep, contemplative mystical traditions. It's not a new cosmology; it's simply a new way of accessing that same fundamental core worldview.

Duane Elgin: Yep. Let's see. That's a really important question, really important. And I raised, you know, the book The Living Universe. I spent 30 years looking across cultures, through different dimensions of science and so on to ask that question: is there any agreement, as we look around the world through different wisdom traditions, that this is the nature of reality, or am I just fantasizing that we're living in this living entity? Well, indeed, there's a very strong consensus and a surprisingly strong consensus. And if we had more time, I would love to get into that. So first of all, if we look at the world's wisdom traditions, there is a growing consensus about the nature of reality, human identity, and the evolutionary journey. Secondly, if you want other evidence, as I said, I spent three years in a laboratory setting with experiment after experiment exploring the intuitive potentials of the human being. And those are the potentials that are required for us to reach into the larger universe and draw into ourselves the insights that Chris has so beautifully spoken of. And I assure you that the CIA would not continue this work for 20 years after they declared it secret—they went for another 20 years—unless they were getting meaningful, validated scientific information about our expanded capacities as human beings. So we can go to different sources of validation and verification, but it's there. We're just beginning to accumulate that evidence now, and that is now being presented to us, whether through the psychedelic vehicle or through the meditation experiences and so on. But the evidence is there, and it's a beautiful question. Thank you.

Chris Bache: And in addition to that article by Ken and me, that dialogue. You'll see a reference there, and you can find it at my website, chrisbache.com, and you can also see it on academia.edu, where I've put a lot of my major articles posted. You just look up Chris Bache there, and there is a section from the first chapter of Dark Night, Early Dawn, which really drills down on this question. And the section is called "The Epistemic Value of Psychedelic Experience," the epistemological value, and I really lean on that hard. So, yeah, important question.

Audience: Yeah. I appreciate your answers. Thank you very much.

Bas de Cock: I see a hand for Sue, please open up your microphone.

Audience: Okay, I just want to say a huge thank you to both Chris and Duane because I think they have the most enormous courage, and I feel encouraged to face whatever is coming our way because they have the courage to go there in detail. Chris, I've read your book, so I know the detail of how much pain—collective human or other human pain—that you went through. And I just think, yeah, to have kept going with that is absolutely amazing. So thank you. And for Duane to look into the future, to see really the terrifying prospects there, and still be encouraging us and going forward. So I just wanted to say, I wonder whether our collective consciousness has gone down rather than up, which, with reincarnation, the idea is that you learn something and come back. But I personally feel that the goddess culture going back to prehistory had a lot of very high consciousness going on, you know, the Minoan civilizations, etc. And I kind of feel that through our materialism, our consciousness has gone down, become more limited. So I suppose I wonder whether the idea of reincarnation taking us forward, how that could fit into a kind of decline in consciousness and awareness of who we are in a living universe. Because I think there were cultures in previous times that had that. Sorry, I'm going a bit crazy on this thing on my screen. Stop. But so just, I'd be interested in what you thought about that.

Chris Bache: Duane, you want to start on this one?

Duane Elgin: I have a very simple response to that. We have just become a collective species, civilization only in the last few decades, with the growth of the mass media in the post, post-World War Two era, we are becoming a collective entity, a collective being, if you will. That's not to diminish the wakefulness of earlier people and civilizations, but it's rather to recognize this is a new epoch, a new era, a new condition of the whole human family being pushed together by multiple crises. You know, we went down the list, the climate crisis, the species extinction, all the rest. We are being compressed and squeezed as a species to awaken in a new way, and we did not have those pressures in earlier times at a planetary scale. That's where we are now. So this is a very unique situation. It's not to diminish the past, but it's rather to awaken to the challenges of the future.

Chris Bache: I'd suggest a very simple analogy. You can look at it in the context of meditation, but also in the concept of physiology. If you fast for health, if you go through an extended fast, a safe fast, and you're doing so for health, what we find is that after a day or two, you begin to have all sorts of flu-like symptoms, you just feel miserable, you feel terrible, your nose is running, and all this stuff. And then, after several days, you move through that, and then you enter a period where you begin to feel better than you had when you started. Same thing happens in meditation. You meditate in order to feel better. So you quiet your mind. You get very still, you fast your mind. What happens? Your unconscious begins to throw up all its garbage. I mean, all the pain starts coming up and all the emotions start coming up. And you think, what the hell? Why this is getting worse, not better. But if you hold it, it eventually works its way through, and you begin to move into a deeper state, a sense of well-being. Understand that reincarnation is happening not just individually, but it's happening collectively. One of the ways of understanding some of the rhythm of the epochs that we have been moving into is that humanity has begun to detoxify itself. Literally. I think souls are taking into their incarnations, into their current incarnation, and it has been for some time more karma than they might have in earlier generations and earlier centuries. They are literally stacking up more collective and individual karma to work on in their lifetime. If you looked at this only from the outside, you would think that we are kind of devolving because we're dealing with more and more basic problems and more elemental problems. But again, from an evolutionary perspective, if we hold this, like in meditation, like in fasting, we are clearing this past. Humanity is clearing its past. It looks maybe like things are getting worse, but what it is, is we're getting down to business. We're getting down to some serious business, and we are healing that past. But the only way to heal that past is to confront it, is to let it into your awareness. We heal the past by expanding our consciousness and embracing the consciousness of it. Likewise, socially manifesting states of awareness in our culture, where we heal the racism, we heal the genderism, we heal the speciesism by holding that in our awareness and saying, no, we're not going to do that anymore. We're not going to rape our daughters anymore. We're not going to behave toward people of other cultures and other colors the way we've done in the past. We're going to move into a better world. So it is a complex picture, but I think from a deep enough perspective, it can begin to make more sense.

Bas de Cock: I would like to add something as a holistic doctor as well, because from a biological perspective, as you see, our brain developments during evolution, I think trauma has a major effect, especially the collective trauma, which made us, during evolution, less receptive to the collective view, instead of, yeah, seeing life as separate, and we're now waking up to these collective traumas and the healing, as you said. So I think there are several aspects which are very much coming together on a biological but also on a social, but on the spiritual level, which come together, which give us deeper insights into these evolutionary swings during our last decades. Thank you. David, saw a hand of you, please open up your microphone.

Audience: Yeah, okay now, yeah, I want to thank you both so, so much. That was so moving, and I want us to be moved tonight. I mean, out of this, I want us to be taking some action. I'm 80 now. I know I'm in the final phase of my life. It might go on 20 years, or whatever, whichever way you look at the mathematics, I'm in the final phase of my life. I don't have children, so I haven't passed on genes. But I've been thinking recently, it isn't only genes. At this moment, the important thing is passing on memes. I'm going back to Richard Dawkins' original formulation of that; he was looking for a sociological, a social thing that was transferred. And it's the memes that we now pass on to future generations that are important. And one of those memes for me is unconditional love. I can't go through the story of how that's come up in my life. As a very mature student, I did my masters in consciousness and transpersonal psychology on the title of "From Fear of the Other to Unconditional Love." I really looked into the nature of it. But how do we move? How do we move from here? We've got a prevailing ecosystem of memes, which are separation. And with separation comes you have to make up for this emptiness somehow. As you say, we are the one at our deepest level. So separation leads us to greed and all the things that are happening. And so that's a prevailing ecosystem. How do we change it? And sometimes, if you have a prevailing ecosystem which dominates, there can be niches in that ecosystem where new cells can form. And I see this is a cell here tonight, and I'm a consciousness-only person. I think the nature of reality is consciousness, and I think we underplay the value of this Zoom meeting, for example. We think we're all in separate places, and we are, but consciousness itself is nonlocal. There's no separation between our minds at this moment. If we were in the same room, your words, Chris and Duane, they would be sounding the same in our heads, whatever the medium of transmission. So right now, we're not separate here, we're not separate now. We can communicate mind to mind, and sometimes species have different phases of their individual evolution. Like a fungus can have a phase as a spore, and then it can come to earth and then form, and I think there's a great possibility in doing what you were talking about, Duane, the medium right like this, that we can form these cells of spores at the moment, so we're ready to come to earth, and we can begin to come to earth now. And I hope out of this meeting tonight, there'll be a few people I want to be part of cells now, looking at how we can transform. I haven't had a psychedelic path. I took acid once, 50 years ago, a new girlfriend introduced me to it, and it blew my mind. If I could have continued, if I could have got standardized doses and proper supervision, I definitely would have continued, but I probably wasn't ready for it at that time. But I know that the power comes from that one experience, you know, it changed a lot of things for me. So what I would like to do is maybe the conveners of this meeting could do it. I'll put my email address. And if anybody wants to form a cell tonight to take up some of the themes we've been talking about, I would love to be part of that cell, and I want us to move from tonight. So thank you both very much for such a stimulating and motivating tool.

Chris Bache: Thank you, David. And how do we change? How do we move forward? And when that, when I'm asked that question in public lectures, I say, read Duane Elgin's book. Talk to Duane Elgin. So Duane, this one's yours.

Duane Elgin: Thank you both, David. First thing I would say is that separation is now breaking down, and like it or not, we're being pushed into a sense of unity as a species organism, and we need to step up to take care of the emergencies that surround us now. So first of all, the separation is true, and it has been really amplified by a consumerist, materialist mindset. But that mindset is breaking down. That is the mindset that's creating the crises that we're facing right now. So the first thing that needs to happen is we withdraw legitimacy from that mindset, that worldview, that paradigm, and we are withdrawing legitimacy from that paradigm. If you look at the young people on the planet, surveys show, a recent global survey showed that 57% of young people feel we are doomed—quote, "we're doomed." That's what they were saying. 57% now, the politicians are certainly not saying that, the corporate people are not saying that, typical academics are not saying that, religious leaders traditionally are not saying that. But it is surfacing in the world, nonetheless, because that is the reality. It's breaking you know, separation is breaking down, the legitimacy of the old institutions is declining. And so we have an opportunity to choose new pathways ahead, personally, institutionally, collectively. And so this is an extraordinary time in human history, when, when we do have a, we have freedom. There's this interval of freedom that we have to make choices anew. And we didn't have that like when I'm 80 as well, David. And so when I was a young boy, there were not there wasn't the freedom to make those kinds of choices. But there is now, and so this is an awakening, time for the human family, instead of time to use the media and the computer systems and all the rest, create new memes. Create new memes for possibility. That's what Chris is doing. That's what I'm doing. And it's clearly, it seems, what you're doing as well. Keep going. We're just getting started here. Keep going.

Chris Bache: Let me add a footnote to that. When I was doing my psychedelic work, I never let my students know about it, never talked about it. I mean, I taught psychedelic research, I taught Stan Grof’s work, but I never let them know that I was doing this work. Personally, I only a few people and a few friends in my department knew what I was doing. So I had these two separate sides of my life. I had a silo where I did my psychedelic work, and then I'd come to campus and I would be doing my ordinary teaching work. But what I found was that the deeper I went in my psychedelic work, the more the effects of that work began to spill over and show up in my classroom. My students were being impacted by my psychedelic journey. Even though they weren't being impacted, they weren't knowing about it, they were—I wasn't talking about it—it wasn't a physical impact. There was a sort of a psychic impact. I began to find that there was a porosity, where I was beginning to have access to aspects of their life, where in my personal experience, I was just answering a question. I was reaching into the fertile void of my imagination to answer a question that a student was being asked. But then they would come up and tell me that the answer that I had given was actually reflecting, actually what was happening in their life that week, at this time. And this was, this was... rattled me so badly that I began to have to study what the hell is going on here. How can my personal work be producing these collective manifestations? And I worked on this for a long time, and eventually I wrote the book The Living Classroom, which is really not so much about teaching, it's about the dynamics of the collective psyche in groups. States of consciousness. There is no such thing as private realization. States of consciousness are inherently collective, an awakened state of consciousness naturally distributes out around us. It's like throwing a rock in a lake. The ripples just spread out when a person begins to throw off the layers of distortion and pain and begins to enter into deeper and deeper states of clarity, the people around us are naturally, spontaneously, and inevitably, are affected. Now, there are things that we can do to accelerate and intensify this contagion. We can meet online. We can dissolve distances of thousands of miles by bringing our minds together in this one space. And I believe psychically, we energize the field of this mind of this collective space. If we did this once a week, every week, for several years, we would begin to experience an even stronger field because it would be influenced by Rupert Sheldrake's work and Morphic genetic field theory, not just by the energy of this particular group of people, but by all the people who had ever come together to study or to discuss this particular issue. And that's what I found in my classes too, that it wasn't just a matter of my mind having a derivative or an impact on the present students, but the students, in coming together to study these things and to learn these things, were generating a field, and the field persisted after the students left, and it was reinforced and deepened by the students who came next semester. There was learning that was taking place within the semester, and there was learning that was taking place across semesters over years and years. So we have the psychic reality that where one of us goes, all of us go, to a degree, but then we can reinforce that by using the technology that reinforces this collective sharing, right? And it doesn't have to be simply a psychic distribution. It can be a physical distribution and a physical creativity. Yeah, yeah. Great question.

Bas de Cock: David, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I see three questions, also a question in the chat box, we'll serve for the end. And I want to say this because David, I want to reassure you, this movement will continue. And we, as wisdom keepers, we already started the trajectory of this movement. So everyone subscribed for this wisdom keepers or the formal wisdom keepers will be invited for our next wisdom keeper circle to keep this alive. It doesn't matter where you want to share your future perspectives or your ideas or etc, you are more than invited to our next gathering. Our circle will be on the 18th of February, that's on a Saturday, to have space for everyone to want to be involved, to continue with the journey and to learn to grow into maturity. So great question. David, thank you.

Audience: Are they regular meetings? How far apart are they?

Bas de Cock: So we want monthly because as youngsters, we—and as youngsters—I feel I'm almost 50, a male, a little bit younger, but you are youngsters. I do my psychedelic training. I do my psychedelic work. I'm a doctor. I have a retreat center and etc, so on a monthly basis. But there are a lot of groups where you can share in, but you're more than invited to join and to join together.

Audience: Yeah, I'll come. I'll also put my email address in the chat box. Okay. Thank you very much. I'll let the questions move on. Perfect.

Bas de Cock: And I think it's, and that's, that's an indirect question. Council of Elders, as we already discussed, Chris, during the LSD in the Mind of the Universe course, I think it's wise to invite them as well, just to open a space for wisdom keepers to add their wisdoms during the meeting so we can learn and thrive together. So thank you for that. A question by Todd, please feel open.

Audience: Okay, I'll be brief, I already had my turn, but I wanted to mention to Duane. First of all, thank you both again, for everybody that shows up here for being part of this living classroom. But Duane, I had a captive here, and I might have shared with you previously, my son is a college student and several of his friends for a recent upper spring break, and we used your book Choosing Earth, and we had little assignments and play and deep conversation. But I would offer is that, if we're not amongst those of that age group, we're not realizing to what degree the consciousness is already changing amongst those folks. I mean, it's, it's palpably different, and the questions that they're asking are starting from a higher or deeper level of consciousness. You know, I'm not to in any way malign you two lovely 80-year-olds, but I'm a great fan of the actuarial tables. I mean, I think that's our continuing reincarnation blender. And so when you see these ones coming up that are having the questions that they're grappling with have already been answered in their line that previous generations thought were not even questions were valid. So anyway, I appreciate Choosing Earth, and there are a lot of good youth out there that are populating further and farther and forward. So thank you and good night.

Bas de Cock: Thank you. Thank you. Tom,

Chris Bache: Aren't they just amazing? They are so much farther along, the young people are, than we were when we were their age. I mean, it's just, it's like when the going gets tough, God sends in the A team. You know, they are just extraordinary in their capacities and their drive. Terry, you've got your hand up.

Audience: Yeah, I do. And no one's thanked the wisdom keepers yet. So thank you for putting this on, and thank you, Chris, I've been following you a bit over the years. And Duane, I had never heard of you until I read Choosing Earth. So huge gratitude for giving that to us for free. Really, really appreciate that. And my question has to do with the labor pains and the creative intelligence. Is it in the realm of possibility that things like COVID, like the climate crisis, that they're part of the labor pains to bring us into an awakening, an awareness, a connection, a worldwide union of spiritual souls, to know that, to know the truth and to move us forward into a miraculous future?

Duane Elgin: Yes, indeed the traumas of our time are catalysts for awakening. And so a trauma is not something to avoid, but rather to embrace, to learn from and to rise above. And so we're being pushed by the traumas of our own creation. The species extinction, resource depletion, climate crisis, and so on. These are things we're creating. But now our creations are coming back to impact us and push us into a larger sense of who we are as a species, a deeper sense of what is going on here and where we're going. So absolutely, this is a part of the labor pains of the birth of a species, civilization, and soul.

Audience: Yes, thank you.

Chris Bache: Yep, I really do. You don't need, you got it. You know, what we're seeing going into this century, where we are now, decade by decade, things are going to be getting worse. It's going to be a deeper unraveling, a deeper falling apart. We can see some of the ways in which this is likely to manifest. It's going to manifest in ways that we can't anticipate quite yet, and it's going to hurt like hell. But as Duane said, these are all problems of our own making. These are problems of our own making. So we're going to have to confront that in us which has made these problems. And I, again, I want to remind you who is confronting this crisis, who's going to be going into this global systems crisis—not human beings, the way we ordinarily think of human beings. Souls will be going into this crisis. Each human being carries multiple, multiple, multiple incarnations woven into the fabric of their psyche and into their body. That means that each human being is carrying potentially thousands of years of experience going into this crisis. Some of those experiences are really negative and kind of, you know, destructive, but many of those experiences are mature, wiser, and we, if we, if the world is at odds with itself, our soul is also at odds with itself. We're having to come to terms with our own limitations. And the important point here is that what's happening on the world at large mirrors what's happening in the world intra-psychically. The world is trying to become one, is trying to confront the limitations of its past behaviors. But we carry those behaviors, those tendencies inside our psyches, so that as the world is struggling to become one, we are struggling to become coherent within ourselves, to become one soul. And I think there is a synergy there, so that the drivers of global systems crisis and global climate change and the various diseases that will be hitting us and so on and so forth, those are driving a global awakening, and simultaneously, they're driving an inner, internal awakening. So it's a both/and situation.

Audience: Thank you. Thank you both.

Bas de Cock: It's amazing how two and a half hours already passed, and it feels like we're just beginning. And that's a beautiful thing. And I want to create 10 more minutes for a rounding part. As we say—psychedelics need to be beautifully round before we go. I want to invite someone who didn't ask a question, but feels somewhere deep inside they want to ask a question, to think about it, to have this opportunity to ask or to share something. I want also to give the opportunity to Mayo, to ask a question from whatever sort it is. I go to the chat box now, because I saw there was a question coming in, and I have to see where it is. Sorry.

Bas de Cock: So please, I can't find a question in the chat box. If you have put a question there, feel free to raise your hand and ask us directly. Lively Mayo, please go ahead. Michelle, I saw your hand as well.

Audience: Okay, Chris, I love you guys. There's nothing more to say, but I love you as much as I love everyone else. As David said, we are consciousness. Even though we're utilizing some systems and technologies that might have accelerated us here, we're connected, and that's what matters most. My question is for both Chris and Duane: Chris, you mentioned compassion, and Wayne, you mentioned suffering. On the other side of suffering, there's compassion. What are three practical steps we can take to gain this sense of compassion? Can you give us one practical application? I'm interested in how communication plays a role in sharing and understanding compassion from our humanness.

Chris Bache: Good question. Duane, you're asking us to put it on the line here. Okay, the first one...

Duane Elgin: I'm going to give one that may surprise you. I was going to be a doctor or a vet early on. One thing I do when looking at how humans impact the world is watch animal rescue videos. Looking at earth's creatures and saying, "It could be better," opens our hearts. So, number one, go online and see these videos; it goes beyond whether we eat meat. This is about life shared with other creatures on this earth. It's really powerful.

Chris Bache: I agree. The first thing that came to my mind was taking some suffering out of the world, not just among human beings but towards other species. Look at how our life is impacting the world and take suffering out of it. In spiritual practice and in Buddhism, you cultivate bodhicitta—the desire to save all sentient beings—and distribute merit. This shatters the illusion of individual enlightenment. It's about collective transformation. Duane, how could you not mention voluntary simplicity, your first book? This is common sense for a world living beyond its means—simpler to liberate and integrate.

Audience: Great, thanks. Both of you noted using media as a tool. How can we use media? Are there projects you're involved in where we could build real human connections?

Duane Elgin: The Choosing Earth project, choosingearth.org, is building networks of care and compassion for all life. It's not just for humans; it's for all life. We all rise or fall together. Let's build relationships of awareness, compassion, and love. Young people are along this path as well. As for Chris, I don't think he's near 80. He's a kid on the block.

Chris Bache: Moving beyond the media question, this transformation requires all our skills and capacities. It's going to take doctors, social activists, educators, politicians, artists, musicians—if we make a specific list, it reflects our strengths. The hard part is finding courage to do what we know we can do right now. Each of us, with our different aptitudes and karmic trajectories, can come to the end of our life knowing we did our part deeply. That's what we want.

Audience: Thank you for existing and for sharing your wisdom and energy. We appreciate who you are and what you are.

Bas de Cock: Michelle, you had a question.

Audience: Thank you, Bas. Listening to the last two answers brought up more questions, but I'll hold those. My original question projects far into the future. At this point, we're at the end of our experiment with separation and materialism. Chris, in your journeys, have you seen a place where there's no need for this dense physical form, where we only need our etheric, emotional, and causal bodies?

Chris Bache: That is a potential that may be actualized over our evolutionary trajectory. However, my focus is different. We've been historically oriented towards transcendence for 5000 years, experiencing the mother universe through meditation or psychedelics. This leads to valuing transcendence over immanence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, with science showing how old and big the universe is, leaving it behind doesn't appeal as much. My sessions are about embodying spirituality, transforming the body, and extending life expectancy for deep practice, as seen in Sri Aurobindo's vision. Whether there are purely transcendental aspects, we don't know. We might not know how big the entire arena for incarnation is.

Duane Elgin: I'd like to add to that. The universe, even at 13.8 billion years, is a cosmic instant. In addition to our universe, we are within the life force of a mother universe, unbounded in dimensions. Our body is useful for four-dimensional living, but the mother universe can mean hyper-dimensional living. We are early in the evolutionary game, so let's embrace the physicality we have, knowing there's deeper evolutionary potential for new forms of being.

Audience: Thank you both, my dear friends. Building on what we can do now, each individual, unique in the whole, contributes. Our greatest motherboard is between our ears. We broadcast morphogenetic fields. Notice your thoughts and ask if that's what you want to contribute. Elevate them if needed. Our encounters nourish these interactions. Seeing each other soul to soul is Ubuntu: "I see you, you see me; therefore, we exist." Our contributions can be immediate and impactful from where we are.

Audience: Yes, amen. Thank you,

Bas de Cock: Beautiful contribution. It adds to what our first wisdom keeper spoke about, the information field. Our interactions enrich this mind of the universe. The YouTube channel has more recordings if you're interested. We don't want to leave this setting; it's beautiful what we've created together. One more question, if anyone feels urgent to ask or share, please open your microphone.

Chris Bache: May I make a suggestion? I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the group. Though Duane and I carried some of the discussion, this was an extraordinary group. Each of you has brought your entire history and awareness into this moment, making it what it is. Thank you all for coming together.

Bas de Cock: Yes, thank you, Chris. Bye.

Audience: I would like everyone to put a heart on their screen and share some love at the end.

Audience: I don't know how to do that.

Audience: Under reactions, or use your hands, okay, sending love from this space to all. Thank you for your contributions. The Choosing Earth project appreciates it. Let's go on together as a family. Thank you, Chris, and Duane, for your work and wisdom.

Bas de Cock: Bye, everybody.

Audience: Namaste, everybody. Ciao, ciao,

Bas de Cock: Nice seeing you again, Bridget, David.

Audience: Let's talk.

Bas de Cock: It's been a long time.