---
title: Face to Face with Chris Bache
slug: 2024-02-08-face-to-face-with-chris-bache
date: 2024-02-08
type: interview
channel: OMTimesTV
language: en
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**Host: ** Welcome to OM Times TV, a division of OM Times Media and Broadcasting. Welcome to the No BS Spiritual Book Club's live streaming interview series, where leading New Thought teachers, speakers, and authors share the intimate stories behind the ten best spiritual books that inspired them the most on their spiritual journey. From well-known classics to hidden gems you might never have heard of, the No BS Spiritual Book Club saves you time and money by sharing reliable recommendations from those who've walked the path before you. The No BS Spiritual Book Club, the only no BS guide to the best spiritual books to inspire your own journey of self-discovery. Here's your host, founder of the No BS Spiritual Book Club, Sandy Sedgbeer.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Hello and welcome. Joining me today to share the ten best spiritual books that inspired him the most on his life journey is award-winning teacher and international speaker Christopher M. Bache, whose latest book, *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*, is, in my opinion, probably the most important book of our time. Chris Bache is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He's a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and advisory board member for Grof Transpersonal Training and the Grof Foundation. And if you want to know why I regard *LSD and the Mind of the Universe* as the most important book of this time, stay tuned. We'll find out more about that later in the show. Meantime, Chris Bache, welcome to the show.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you, Sandy. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** I'm always intrigued to know what books our guests will choose, but I've been especially keen to learn and share with our audience your ten best spiritual books. When I saw it, I said, "Well, that is one list, the only one so far where all ten books are favorites of mine."

**Chris Bache: ** Well, that's good to hear, Sandy.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** So how did you find the process of having to pick your ten?

**Chris Bache: ** It's kind of interesting that there were so many books to choose from, and in the process of choosing the ones that spoke most deeply to me at any particular time in my life, I found myself kind of drawn to more intellectually oriented books because I'm an academic. And at the end, I was quite struck by how much I don't know. You know, the books helped me so much, but there's so much that I've left untouched in the spiritual field. Wow.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Well, I beg to differ, and our audience will find out later why I say that. I mean, when you say there's so much you need to know, I would have thought, you know you know what we all want to know, and that's enough.

**Chris Bache: ** It's not so much what I need to know. It's just stuff that I don't know. I feel content with what I have learned through my journey.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Well, the don't know bit, I mean, you know, we can go on forever there. So your first book, understandably, is Stanislav Grof's *Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research*, published in 1975. You're a great supporter of his work, aren't you?

**Chris Bache: ** I am. I think Stan's work is critically important to the emerging paradigm in transpersonal psychology. I came upon this book right after I was out of graduate school, just beginning my teaching career, just beginning to look around for where to take my research next. I came upon this first book by Stan that was published just two years before. As soon as I read it, it activated something in me, and I knew I needed to get involved in this process, even though psychedelics were illegal at the time. This was almost ten years, eight years after they had been made illegal. I nevertheless decided to begin what became a 20-year journey, working with LSD in a therapeutic protocol that Stan lays out, working with high-dose sessions. Not not as a clinician—I wasn't a psychologist. I wasn't primarily oriented towards healing. I'm a philosopher of religion by trade. I was interested in the cosmological significance of these substances, how they would give us the potential to show us new insights into the deep structure of the universe, and that book just really sort of lit the fuse for me.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Now, how old were you then?

**Chris Bache: ** I was 30 years old.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Yeah, wow. And that started your 20-year journey.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, between 30 and 50. That's really the book that started it all for me. And of course, I read all of Stan's books as they came through, and I always felt that my books were largely first and foremost in dialogue with Stan's work.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** So book number two, Ian Stevenson's *Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation*, published in 1966.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, I met this book at the same time I met Stan's book, and at the time, I was a deeply convinced agnostic with strong atheistic leanings. I encountered this book by Stevenson, which I think presents overwhelming evidence—the first of many books of his that present overwhelming evidence—that reincarnation is simply a fact of life. It's a natural fact of life, which required that I erase my entire intellectual blackboard, because reincarnation had never been taken seriously by any of the courses that I had taken in college or graduate school. I had to erase the blackboard and start from scratch, which resulted, eventually, about ten years later, in my publishing my book on reincarnation, *Lifecycles*, which is my response to Ian Stevenson's pioneering work.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** So when you went down that path, did you risk, you know, the ire of your colleagues?

**Chris Bache: ** I did actually. I went on sabbatical, my first sabbatical. I had not planned to write a book. I had not planned to write this book, but I came back with the manuscript of the book, and my colleagues were not terribly happy with it. But it got published, and then it got translated into several foreign languages, and they began to pay more attention to the subject matter.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** So it didn't affect your career?

**Chris Bache: ** It didn't. I was afraid that it might when I first did it, but this is a kind of a personal, karmic thing. I've paid the penalty for going against the grain in former lives. This lifetime, it seems that it's important for me to continue to go against the grain and not receive any negative consequences, and only receive positive consequences.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Book number three, *Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives* by Michael Newton in 1994.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, Michael Newton's work is so beautiful and so important. Started as a past life therapist, then accidentally gave an ambiguous instruction to a client, through which he learned that we could regress people, not only to their former lives, but we could regress people to the time in between their death and their subsequent rebirth. He began to give us not an autobiographical, but individual experiences of what happened to them in their time between their incarnations, and his series of books just were fantastic. They had not been published when I published my book at first, but they certainly do complement it very beautifully.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** I mean, he really was a pioneer there, wasn't he? I mean, so many people I speak to trained with Michael Newton.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, really was, and his description of the Bardo existence concurs with my experience in psychedelics completely, with the provision that I think he's seeing more the lower half of the Bardo, not the upper edges of the Bardo. But yeah.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Well, book number four is *Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience* by Kenneth Ring, and that one was published in 1998.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, I again, which one of these books by each of these authors we focus on? Kenneth Ring has always been a colleague and friend. He wrote the foreword to *Lifecycles*. His work on near-death episodes was so critically important. I taught a course for many years at the University called Transpersonal Studies in which we always included near-death episode research, and I always used Ken Ring's books because they were so accessible to the students and so well-researched. This book is kind of Ken's last book on near-death episode research. It's an overview. It's a compendium. It contains beautiful passages, all sorts of empirical analysis. But my favorite chapter in the book comes towards the end, where he's describing the deepest near-death episodes that he has recorded, and they are just magnificent. Personally, as a psychedelic-oriented person, I feel the deepest compatibility or deepest resonance with people who have had deep near-death episodes. 

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** So continuing the theme, Robert Monroe's *Far Journeys*, his best-selling classic, published in 1985.

**Chris Bache: ** Robert Monroe has been a real companion to me on the journey through his works. This book came out when I was on my first sabbatical, and I was writing *Lifecycles*. This book came out, and I immediately made a reservation to go and do a week's training program at the Monroe Institute because I was so impressed by his work. And then I went back one more time right after he passed, to go back to the Monroe Institute for a week's training to say goodbye. Monroe, I think, is an under-studied figure in the consciousness community. Maybe it's because he's on the East Coast and doesn't penetrate West Coast circles so much, but the model of the universe that he presents, that emerged over decades of his going out of his body every night, every time he went to sleep, is just a stunning model, idiosyncratic, very candid. Monroe just calls it like he sees it. But it's a very compatible model with Eastern, particularly Buddhist cosmology, the structure of the Bardo. The large model, I think, is just a fantastic excursion, and I've read it multiple times through the years.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Did you have many out-of-body experiences when you were there?

**Chris Bache: ** You know, getting out of my body is never an aptitude that I seem to have developed. When I was there, I had definitely non-ordinary states of consciousness, expansive, diffuse and spacious states of consciousness where I was able to make contact, for example, with people who had died and were in the Bardo, but they weren't accompanied by the sensation of being out of my body. And this is true for all my psychedelic work. I never had the sensation of leaving my body. Rather, my consciousness expanded exponentially beyond the limits of my body, but not as kind of a separate consciousness, individualized consciousness traveling out.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** I always wanted to go there. I never got there, but I did attend a weekend session by somebody who had trained to do it, and it didn't really work for me.

**Chris Bache: ** Didn't?

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** I'm so disappointed. 

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, yeah.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Book number six, by a man whose work I love, Duane Elgin, *Choosing Earth: Humanity's Great Transition to a Mature Planetary Civilization*, published, I think that was 2020, but there's been a new edition published.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, he's updated it, put it in a new edition. Duane Elgin is a dear friend, great colleague. Jokes, he's one of my heroes. He's been trying to raise the alarm about humanity's peril and what we're doing to the planet and the limitations of our understanding of the universe, the consequences of buying into a materialist paradigm instead of a living universe paradigm. One of his books, *The Living Universe*, from his first book on voluntary simplicity, where he points us where we need to be going, reducing our impact on the planet, living a simpler life with more focus on what we want to achieve with our life. Not a life of doing less, but a life of doing more with less. But this book, *Choosing Earth*, is a distillation of decades and decades of his thinking on the earth. He lays out a very carefully, scientifically informed proposal for what the next 50 years are going to look like, decade by decade, and then he follows this with a series of recommendations for how we can consciously and intelligently engage this crisis and work to ensure a better outcome. It's just, it's a beautiful book, and his wife, Colleen has produced a film that is the companion to the book. You and they're giving away the book and giving away the film for free. It is. Duane says it's too important. We are right now. Things are too important to try to make money out of this peril.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Do you know where people can go to find the movie and what's it called?

**Chris Bache: ** It's called, oh my goodness, I'm having a senior moment here. You can go to Duane Elgin's website, duaneelgin.com, and his books are listed there, and the movie is there. His wife's name is Colleen LeDrew Elgin. 

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** I'll check it out. Number seven, another author whose work I admire tremendously, Rupert Sheldrake, *A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance*, published in 1981.

**Chris Bache: ** Again, it's a person who has written such an extraordinary series of books. When I was trying to understand, as I say in my notes here, when I was trying to understand why my psychedelic purification healing experiences had expanded so exponentially to include hundreds of thousands of human beings, the whole breadth of the human species, and later, when I was trying to understand some of the dynamics that were showing up in my classroom, that seemed this permeability between my mind and my students' minds. Rupert Sheldrake's work was really helpful to me, and very important because he helped me understand that our individual minds of every being are always also simultaneously networked into a species mind, so that as the species learns, the individual learns, as the individual learns, the species learns, in a complex feedback dynamic. This was extraordinarily helpful when it helped me make the transition of thinking about what was happening in my sessions in terms of a personal model of transformation into a collective model of transformation. That became the primary theme of my second book, *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, where I'm really talking about the collective, the dark night of our collective soul, the transformation of our collective soul. And that has Rupert's fingerprints all over it.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** He took a lot of flak, didn't he? He really has had to fight the good fight there. And yet, he's said to me that some of the people who publicly deny his work privately...

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, too often in academia, we have our public reputations and our private convictions that don't match our public positions.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Sad, isn't it? People don't feel that they can be authentic and say what they think.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, yeah. And Rupert's been just a real hero in challenging the status quo in scientific thought and just pushing and pushing and pushing the issues on the table that he believes in.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Yeah, yeah. So, book number eight, Richard Tarnas, *Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View*, published in 1996.

**Chris Bache: ** Rick Tarnas is another colleague and dear friend, an extraordinary astrologer. After establishing his professional reputation as a historian of intellectual thought with his book *Passion of the Western Mind*, he then came up with this book, *Cosmos and Psyche*, in which he makes the case that astrology not only illumines the lives of individuals, and he demonstrates this very powerfully in the book with known historical figures, but that astrology can be used to illumine historical epochs. It's so, that is the larger thesis which is so particularly provocative—his analysis of history in terms of the rhythms of the of the archetypal astrological pulses of our solar system, and showing a correlation between the quality of the archetypal energies that are being brought into focus from an archetype from an astrological lens to looking at what's actually happening on a historical level and showing the correlations. I think it's an extraordinarily important and very valuable book, also a real tour de force. You have to strap in when you read one of Rick's books.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** I'm sure. I was looking it up earlier, and I think it was contents listed one of the things on there that caught my eye because it relates so much to your work and what's in your book, the transformation of the cosmos, the birth of the modern self, and the dawn of a new universe, which is pretty much where we are now, the birth of the modern self. I mean, you talk about the future human in your book. What is the modern self?

**Chris Bache: ** I think the modern self is a birth that was given, is the self-sense that was given birth to in the Age of Enlightenment, and it's the rational self; it gives birth to science, the scientific self. I think what we're seeing is now that the modern self is thoroughly and deeply established, the modern self is someone who, like Martin Luther, can pound his 95 Theses on the door of the cathedral and basically say to this multi-hundred-year-old religious tradition of Roman Catholicism, "You're wrong, and you're wrong on this, this, and this." That self consolidated within ourselves so that we can become critical, turn a critical lens on our history and our culture and our context—that self now thoroughly established in history is yielding to a post-modern self, I think, and that's the future human that so many of us are feeling, intuiting, and experiencing in our contemplative practices. The post-modern self doesn't negate the modern self, but it reconnects the modern self to the underlying, deeper fabric of consciousness that runs through all things, not only through all human beings, but through all of life. So the modern self is being recontextualized within the larger fabric of existence. That is, I think, the future human, and the way I understand the technical parts of that is in terms of the birth of the diamond soul.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Well, we will talk more about that after the break. So, book number nine, *Sri Aurobindo, or The Adventure of Consciousness* by Satprem, published in 1968.

**Chris Bache: ** Sri Aurobindo is one of my heroes. He's just such a brilliant man, Oxford-educated and Hindu saint and guru, transitioned from being a political activist to being a spiritual activist. He more or less channeled all his books. I mean, apparently all of his books were written within six years. He just channeled them. But they're very dense. They're, you know, you really have to sit down with a cup of coffee if you're going to read Aurobindo, because he's so rich. Satprem has written a biography which basically extracts the core insights that Aurobindo presented in his writing, but he does it in a way which makes them more accessible to the average reader like me, and I just I really appreciate Satprem because he gives me a backdoor way into Aurobindo's thought, and he makes it easier for me when I want to tangle the tackle the primary text.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** We had a guest on a few months ago who recommended, I don't know if it was this book, but one of his, and was talking about how he and the Mother, I believe it was during the war, they would meditate, and they would basically send thoughts, you know, to Hitler—good thoughts. They would send thoughts to Churchill as well, and they basically sent one particular thought to Churchill about how he would mobilize, you know, the British spirit to back him completely. In fact, what he then said in his next speech was almost word-for-word what they had transmitted.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, they just, they live in the truth of the open expanse of mind, and that our individual thoughts and minds, when focused, can travel into the ocean of consciousness and reach their intended destination.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Yes, yeah, it made me, you know, I've got to put him on my reading list. The last book is *The Flight of the Garuda: Teachings of the Dzogchen Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism* by Keith Dowman, published in 1994.

**Chris Bache: ** Well, Vajrayāna Buddhism has been a large influence on me, and the challenge I had was, which of the many books that have moved me so deeply in Buddhism, could I put here? One that I considered, almost put—so I just want to mention—is the book *Graceful Exits*, which is a story of how great beings, enlightened beings, die. It's a collection by, oh, I'm blanking on her name, of just the death experiences of enlightened beings. But I chose, in the end, one of my favorite tantric texts, *The Flight of the Garuda*, which basically was a bit controversial when it was first published, because many traditional Vajrayāna practitioners did not believe that he should have made public such an esoteric text as this. Personally, I love it when I read tantric texts like this. I'm always bringing to it all of my background in psychedelic experience. When I read this text and his commentary, I just feel illumined. I feel so at home with it, and I learn so much from it that helps me process my own psychedelic experiences. Dzogchen is considered the fastest path, the direct path in Vajrayāna Buddhism. It's a form of Buddhist practice which more or less kind of starts at the end, instead of kind of developing stage by stage up the mountain. It draws upon the insight that where we end up at the end of our spiritual practice, our end of our journey in enlightenment, is in a condition which always existed from the very beginning. It's not something which is brought into being, but it is always there, never changes, never ceases to exist, never begins to exist. Once you know that, then you can build your spiritual practice around the fact of this pre-existing condition, the direct path. That's what this book is coming out of.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Of those ten books, do you have a favorite?

**Chris Bache: ** Oh, I have so many. I guess I've lived my life around the first two, Ian Stevenson and Stan Grof, just because I believe that reincarnation is an absolutely essential understanding to life, and psychedelics have been the way for me to personally explore the deep structure of the universe. So I guess I'd have to say those. But all of them are favorites of mine. They're all on my must-read list.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Well, some of these people you know, of those that you don't know, who would you most like to meet?

**Chris Bache: ** Those I don't know? Well, I would love to have met Michael Newton. He's now passed on, so I'll be looking him up when I die, that's for sure, because he's contributed so much to my life.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** I bet you're not the only one who'll be looking him up.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, you know, Marjorie Monroe says we can go anywhere and find anyone that we want when we die. All we have to do is know their ID, you know. And so we can, we can check up on people.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** That'll keep us busy until we come back again, I guess. Well, that's your ten best list, but it's by no means the whole of this show. We're going to take a brief break now, and when we get back, put your listening ears on. You're listening to a No BS Spiritual Book Club interview and sharing the ten best books that had the biggest influence on his life. Journey today is award-winning teacher, international speaker, and author of the seminal book *LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven*. We'll be back with more from Christopher Bache after the break. Stay tuned. OM Times TV. 

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Maya Angelou once said that there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. I'm Sandy Sedgbeer, and when I'm not hosting OM Times Media's flagship radio show, "What is Going On," and the No BS Spiritual Book Club, I help people share their untold stories. Books are my life, my joy, and my passion, and there is no greater reward than helping aspiring writers get their books out of their heads and into the hands of those who are waiting to read them. If you feel that you have a book in you but don't know where to begin, visit sedgbeer.com, click on the "Work with Me" tab, and find out how my experience helping others tell their stories might be just what you've been looking for. That's sedgbeer.com, S-E-D-G-B-E-E-R.com

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**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Chris, welcome back. Christopher Bache, in 1979 you embarked on a life-changing journey, you said, to explore your mind and the mind of the universe as deeply and as systematically as possible, with the help of LSD. Over the next 20 years, you experienced 73 high-dose sessions following Stan Grof’s protocols. Those journeys, which were intensely grueling and also equally blissful, took you beyond the beyond, took you to a place I would love to go. Into a unified field of consciousness that underlies all physical existence. So many questions, so many questions. We won't have time for all of them. But why don't you tell us what is the most important thing that you think we need to know that you learned on those journeys?

**Chris Bache: ** Well?

**Chris Bache: ** Oh, that's a hard question. The first thing that pops into my mind is, don't do what I did. I wouldn't do it the same way if I did it over again. I would be much gentler on myself. That's partly one of the things I learned: I thought the purpose of this work was to get to an end state, that there was a state that would transform my life. What I learned along the way—17 years into this journey at that point—is that it's an infinite progression. It's an infinite universe, and you'll never get to the end of it. The whole project of pushing as hard as I did, thinking I could reach the end, was a mistaken concept. 

What happens in a psychedelic state is an amplification of what takes place in life, in ordinary processes. To understand what happens in a psychedelic state, you have to know what's happening in ordinary life. Here, I think, we have to understand reincarnation. We have to understand our being as cosmic beings, living in time frames of hundreds of thousands, millions of years. This particular incarnation is only one of many on this planet. We must look beyond the short-term, 100-year lifespan to the soul's lifespan, which is vast. 

So, that's the first thing: an underscoring and reinforcing of reincarnation. Also, just the encounter with the living intelligence, which I call the mind of the universe. Our concepts of the Divine and God have so many cultural limitations through history. I don't want to affirm those, though I do sometimes speak of the Divine less often, but I'll talk about God, consciousness, and the intelligence one can encounter. To even experience briefly the intelligence of the mind that's generating the universe—the compassion, love, and wisdom. When you look at life, it looks hard; it looks like it could have been created by a despot, because it is so seemingly cruel. But to understand the genius, wisdom, and compassion of it, you have to step back and look deep. It's like stepping back off the planet to understand what's happening on it. 

In that context, you experience the universe as a magnificent garden created for our transformation. We have unlimited time to learn and grow in this garden. It's not an easy garden; it's a hard place to live and grow, but it offers infinite potential to develop our essential being, which is the divine being—our light of the Divine. We come from the Divine, a spark of the divine light. Yet, we're small and kind of immature in the early stages, but we develop, develop, and develop it until eventually we can become a being that has complete control over their incarnation, health of their body, and wealth of their mind and creativity. We're growing toward that direction. 

And another major takeaway is an understanding of where we are in history, where humanity is. Here, so many visionary experiences reveal that humanity is coming to a turning point, a bifurcation point—a radical deconstruction followed by a reconstruction at a higher organizational level. After hundreds of thousands of years of reincarnation, where we have been gestating the future human, we have entered a period of labor. The day of labor is a very intense, very dangerous, and very painful time. But when it's over, the mother gives birth to a new child. Humanity is giving birth to a new child—its latest iteration of its own fundamental form. We're witnessing a shift in the collective psyche, the architecture of the collective unconscious. All future human beings born after this transition will be living in the context of a fundamentally different psyche. This is what I call the birth of the diamond soul. After all these years, these lives are coming together inside us. As they do, we first have to purify and heal their broken pieces, but then they move deeper. Either gradually or suddenly, there is an ignition and the soul is born. The soul is the intelligence that holds all our experiences through all our incarnations. That, I think, is the emerging future human in history—the soul being born inside history. So, how can I pick and choose which of those concepts are the most important?

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Yeah, well, you said in the book that there are many, many layers to heaven and the death experience, and that there is no hell, but there is confrontation and accountability. Is that what many people regard as the life review—karma? More about that.

**Chris Bache: ** Our understandings of God and life have been very primitive historically. As a species, we've just begun to make experiential contact with the core, essential nature of our being, about five or six thousand years ago. Many of our concepts of God, punishment, reward, Heaven, and Hell are completely inadequate to understand the true scale and scope of creation. When we die, in the life review, we encounter not only a detailed memory of everything we've ever done, but also how it impacted those around us, both directly and indirectly. Our bad choices can bring an experience of hell, and our good choices, heaven. But the goal is not to punish or reward us in a cheap way, but to educate us, to teach us so we learn from our mistakes, and we learn from other things we've done well. We keep growing. The idea that Infinite Intelligence and compassion could produce something like eternal damnation is just ridiculous. It's done much damage and is wrong.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** The experiences you've had. The concept of the Infinite is challenging. The mind has to reach a point where it says, "Enough, I don't want to do this anymore. It's endless." How do you feel about that?

**Chris Bache: ** I think when we die, we go home. We return to spirit and are brought back into peace, wholeness. There are many levels of home. You can experience homecoming spiritually at introductory, intermediate, or advanced levels. There is a sense in which we pause, rest, and refresh after every incarnation. Some die under traumatic circumstances and get thrown off, but most return home without difficulties. We are restored, reconnected with the divine, and in that context, choose whether to incarnate again. Though we may be tired, from the soul's perspective, we voluntarily choose another course of instruction to deepen ourselves and help others. Eventually, it becomes clear that we're all in this together and want to help others in their evolutionary journey.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** When you say there are many different levels, it makes sense. Messages from the afterlife are so contradictory, but if there are many levels, it explains a lot. You talked about transformation. We are sparks on a journey of transformation. Are we very young sparks that need refining? Do older sparks not come back?

**Chris Bache: ** Good question. To address it, we have to push back on our assumptions, think deeper and larger. Spiritual traditions that believe in reincarnation say it's obligatory up to a certain point in our development. There comes a time when you no longer have to. Early Eastern traditions said that's the critical moment to leave, and religions speak about moksha, escape, getting to the Pure Land. I think that's not what it's about. Once we no longer have to reincarnate, it's optional. We can choose to participate freely and support human development. Some beings reach that point and explore other dimensions of existence, as the physical universe is only one dimension of a multidimensional cosmos. So, the question of old sparks takes us into the vast expanse of things. When Buddha was asked, "Where does an enlightened being go?" he refused to answer, not to confuse the listener. Focus on your own transformation until you experience awakening yourself, then you'll know your own truth.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** You talked about the incredible intelligent consciousness—I'll call it a divine being—but calling it a being minimizes it. Is this something we all can experience?

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, absolutely. Its nature is our nature. When we experience the deepest aspect of ourselves, we experience its nature. It's impossible to step out of this being. The body of this being is the body of the universe; all of spiritual reality is its consciousness. I hesitate to call it a being as it implies boundaries, but there are none. It's our destiny to experience this. When we die, we remember this nature and want to incarnate again to deepen our experience of our essential nature. It's like we want a bigger cup to experience more divine bliss.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** You said it became painful to leave the presence of that being, leading you to stop the sessions. Have you found other ways to experience it that aren't so painful?

**Chris Bache: ** The full intensity of communion with the light of existence? No, I've not found other ways. I've committed to my physical existence and learning to love the divine manifest in my everyday life. I love this world and do my spiritual practice, but in terms of accessing those same dimensions of diamond luminosity, I've had to let that go. However, great spiritual beings, mahasiddhas, can live in communion with those subtle planes. I’m not one of those yet, but I practice daily. 

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** But knowing what you know, it must make life hard knowing that is always there.

**Chris Bache: ** It makes it hard and easier. Easier because now I know, in my heart and bones, that we're surrounded by divine intelligence and love, which we can draw on continuously. The greatest burden of existence is not knowing, and that burden has been lifted from me. Yet it's hard to return to time and space and be content, knowing that only our imperfections keep us from it. 

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** This 200 years of transformation is a wonderful thing and gives hope. Many are afraid of the world today but think, "I won't see it in my lifetime." It sounds too much.

**Chris Bache: ** The timetable and details weren't given in my visions, but I experienced humanity's profound collapse and the certainty that we make it through. Many think we're facing extinction, but I see we'll make it through, profoundly changed. A woman in labor can't choose to do it another day. We're in it. Our actions have large outcomes in times of change, so each of us can positively impact this crisis. This is the work of the hour.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** It's not as if we're not going to experience the transformation. If we keep coming back, we'll be part of it.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, and when we experience this new human, it will all be worth the pain and suffering. This is an extraordinary event in human history.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Chris Bache, we're out of time. Thank you for adding your 10 Best list of spiritual books to the No BS Spiritual Book Club and for taking that journey for all of us.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you, Sandy. Thank you for the work you're doing and for the tremendous source of information you bring into the world.

**Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Thank you, Chris. Christopher Bache's 10 Best lists can be found at the No BS Spiritual Book Club. You can download an excerpt from *LSD and the Mind of the Universe, Diamonds from Heaven,* published by Inner Traditions, Bear and Company. For more about Chris's articles, events, and other books, visit his website at chrisbache.com. This show is also available as a free downloadable podcast at omtimes.com, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Audible, and all major podcast platforms. That's it for this week. I'm Sandy Sedgbeer. I'll be back next week with another 10 Best interview for the No BS Spiritual Book Club. Goodbye from me, and thank you deeply to Chris Bache.