--- title: Reincarnation and the Web of Life (What Is Going OM) slug: 2024-11-07-reincarnation-and-the-web-of-life-what-is-going-om date: 2024-11-07 type: lecture channel: Sandie Sedgbeer language: en license: CC0-1.0 identifiers: wikidata_person: Q112496741 openalex_person: A5045900737 people: - name: Christopher M. Bache wikidata: Q112496741 openalex: A5045900737 provenance: source: "otter+diarist->normalization" transcriber: gpt5 model by OpenAI diarist_txt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2024-11-07-reincarnation-and-the-web-of-life-what-is-going-om.txt diarist_srt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2024-11-07-reincarnation-and-the-web-of-life-what-is-going-om.srt diarist_sha1: 3b9b2a582d585238cfaeee98f1d232d447174e64 --- **Announcer: ** Welcome to “What Is Going On?,” the new thought from the edge of OM. Each week on OM Times' flagship radio show, veteran broadcaster, author, and media consultant Sandy Sedgbeer conducts thought-provoking interviews with inspirational authors, artists, musicians, scientists, speakers, and filmmakers working at the intersection of spirituality and science at the very edge of OM. Here is your host, Sandy Sedgbeer. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Hello and welcome. Today, we're going to be talking about life after death, heaven and hell, and reincarnation. Christopher Bache is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, emeritus fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and he's on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training. An award-winning teacher and international speaker, he is the author of four books, including one that I rate as a favorite of mine, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven," which chronicles his 20-year psychedelic journey exploring consciousness. The other book we're discussing today is "Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life," which combines scientists' testimonies about reincarnation with a synthesis of findings from consciousness research and near-death studies. Christopher Bache, welcome back to the show. **Chris Bache: ** Hi Sandy. It's a pleasure to be with you today. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** You too. So "Lifecycles" has been hailed as the first book to describe the dynamics of rebirth and explore the ramifications of adopting a reincarnationist perspective. Now, this was published, what, 35 years ago? **Chris Bache: ** Thereabouts, yes. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** That was right after you started your journey with LSD. How many years into that journey, and how did that journey inspire this? **Chris Bache: ** Well, I started my psychedelic work after my first year of being an academic. I worked for four years, then I stopped for six years. During that interval, I did three years of past life therapy, uncovering and working with my own former lives, and I wrote "Lifecycles." By that time, my psychedelic work had reached deeply enough that I had been given many personal insights into karma, the deeper cause and effect that underlies our lives. But at that time, I had not had personal experiences of my former lives in a psychedelic context—I had in a hypnotherapy context. It was really my study of Ian Stevenson and other pioneers in the research documenting children and adults with verified past life memories that became the foundation for my work in "Lifecycles." **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** You shared a few of those stories. They're fascinating because there's so much evidence that you really can't question it. One that interested me was Dr. Helen Wambach's five-year-old patient who rejected human contact and withdrew into autism, yet demonstrated mathematical and reading skills she hadn't been taught. Over time, she communicated her feelings by force-feeding Dr. Wambach with a baby bottle, feeling treated like a helpless infant, and when the doctor understood that, the child began to come into herself but lost the reading and mathematics. What do you make of stories like that? **Chris Bache: ** What I make of them is that our personal lives are much longer than we tend to think. They're always beginning, starting, and overlapping. Once you understand the larger life of the soul, there's continuity of qualities, knowledge, learning, traumas, and virtues blending from one life into another. We don't start our lives a tabula rasa; we start with a history—a specific history. We can see this clearly when we begin to look at children with fresh eyes. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Why is it always the last life they seem to talk about? **Chris Bache: ** It's not always the last life. Ian Stevenson's research focuses on children with active recall of their most immediate former life. His children are reincarnating quickly compared to the population at large—an average of two and a half years. Larger studies indicate a longer time frame between lifetimes and a much broader geographical radius. People come to therapy due to pain, sometimes grounded in their recent or even distant incarnational past. Our former lives are like a deck of playing cards. We may have many lives, but only a few are active in this present life from different centuries that weave into the composite that makes up the present life. We begin to understand that we return to the soul, which holds all our former lives, and decide the combination for the next incarnation. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** You mention the word soul, but in the book, you make a distinction between soul and oversoul. What's the difference? **Chris Bache: ** I use the term oversoul to help Westerners expand their concept of soul to include all former lifetimes. At the end, I dissolve that distinction. For me, the soul, with a capital 'S,' is what I mean by the oversoul—holding all our lifetimes. Soul with a small 's' is the consciousness integrating experiences in this incarnation. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** So the oversoul is what some would call the higher self, the part that continues forever? **Chris Bache: ** Yes, I think so. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** I came across an article by Dr. Alex Lickerman, who is a Buddhist but doesn't believe in reincarnation. He said the real question at the heart of reincarnation is not one of evidence but of identity. **Chris Bache: ** Good point. When you adopt a reincarnational worldview, the concept of identity shifts and expands. The soul reflects different histories and individuates qualities, but its essence is the same as the divine essence. Shifting into a reincarnation worldview recontextualizes our identity within the soul's identity, which holds the meta-consciousness across all our lifetimes. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** It's hard to believe you have a different identity or that the essence of you is infinite. It's hard to get your head around that. **Chris Bache: ** It's hard in the beginning but becomes easier with intellectual and experiential practice. Intellectually understanding reincarnation aligns many things that didn't make sense before. Experientially accessing past life stories reinforces this understanding, leading to acceptance of a transcendent dimension to identity. Eventually, it becomes hard to think smaller, taking only this as your identity. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Why do we reincarnate? **Chris Bache: ** To learn, grow, and become more. It opens up our understanding of what the universe is doing in and with us. If we see ourselves living multiple lives, it invites a more expansive understanding of our participation in cosmic unfolding, contributing to the creative process. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** If we are sparks of God and know everything when we leave, why do we need to learn more? **Chris Bache: ** Whether we expand knowledge much more when we die, the question is, why would the creative principle manifest the universe? It's about participating in a creative process, contributing to higher, deeper forms of humanity. We're not imprisoned when we incarnate—we're enlightened, infinitely aware. That's our trajectory, participating in the dance of creation. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** When we reincarnate, what happens to all the gathered wisdom? **Chris Bache: ** We don't forget everything. What we've known is built into our unconscious recall. Our capacities have histories behind them, so we express and develop that knowledge in our lives. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** How is it that loved ones from beyond can reconnect and give messages if they're reincarnated or elsewhere? **Chris Bache: ** This touches the soul's mechanics. The soul holds our lifetimes. If we wish to meet a passed loved one, the soul manifests an image of that being, though the encounter becomes soul-to-soul. A medium encountering a deceased individual may not see their current form—it reflects our limited understanding of post-death. Our fascination with communicating with deceased loved ones reflects a limited understanding of what happens when we die. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Are souls just showing compassion by stepping into forms we remember? **Chris Bache: ** Yes, they're showing compassion by wearing the form we once knew them as. That persona isn't necessarily who they are now. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** How can there be reincarnation with the population increase? **Chris Bache: ** Using an analogy: a university may increase in number even if students leave, as it draws from a larger town outside. Similarly, the number of souls available to incarnate might be much larger than those present on Earth at any point in history. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Ever more people access lifetimes not lived on Earth. Why? **Chris Bache: ** The spiritual universe is much larger than our physical world. Why not interplanetary crossings? **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** We're going to take a short break. You're listening to "What is Going On." I'm Sandy Sedgbeer, and my guest is Christopher Bache. We're discussing his book "Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life." Stay tuned. **Chris Bache: ** Well, yes, of course, it's conceivable because your essential nature already is one of those beings. But let me just flip this a little bit first. I've been teaching this for years, and I've had generations of students come through my courses. One of the things I've learned is you can't judge a person's soul development by looking at what they're dealing with. It's like at a university: someone may have developed great expertise in music but decides to start developing expertise in art. They might let go of their expertise in music to start a whole new course in art. If you only looked at what they do in art, you might think they're a freshman, when really they're a sophisticated senior with other skills. It's the same for the soul. Look at what you do: you're an enormous influencer, hosting one spiritual dialog after another, touching thousands of lives. If your soul were in the Bardo, say in a pre-incarnated state, given the opportunity to bring down some sense of what you know—to explore spiritual knowledge not in a monastic context, but on a platform that reaches the world at a time in history when the world needs this knowledge—it just makes sense. Don't sell yourself short. I think there are many more Bodhisattvas in the world than we think. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Another question: several spiritual teachers say that we should not go towards the white light, as we'll be trapped in cycles of reincarnation. They suggest you can bypass that and go somewhere else. What do you think about that? **Chris Bache: ** It doesn't make any sense to me. The white light, at a simple level, when we separate from our body, is our homing beacon, taking us back to our essential nature, our deeper spirit. The classic idea is people instinctively move towards the light and go as far as they feel comfortable. Eventually, for various reasons, they might stop, feeling it's more natural at that level of spiritual development. The usual teaching is to train ourselves to be comfortable with the light so we can follow it all the way home through all levels of the Bardo to the most intense form of that light, which resides in what Buddhists call Extra-Samsaric reality—a reality outside the reincarnating universe. Whether our journey takes us back to our peak spiritual realization or all the way to the highest level, it makes most sense to follow the light as far as you can. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Yeah. You've seen that, haven't you? **Chris Bache: ** I have, and it touched me in a way that has affected the rest of my life. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Why was reincarnation taken out of Christianity? I mean, for the first 500 years, it was a vital commitment, and then Justinian removed it. **Chris Bache: ** That's a complex story. My first academic love was the search for the historical Jesus. It's complex, and I don't think the definitive story has been written. Did Jesus teach reincarnation? It's present in some Gnostic Gospels, but do they reflect the actual teaching of Jesus? And if Jesus did teach reincarnation, why was it filtered out—or if he didn't, why isn’t it more apparent in early scripture? Clearly, there were multiple Christianity variations early on. Some taught reincarnation and the empowerment of women, which were both filtered out. Geddes MacGregor, a Christian theologian, believed there is nothing contradictory between reincarnation and the teachings of Jesus, although it gives individuals too much autonomy. In the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Church—seeing centralized authority as essential—filtered these ideas out. I’d say they thought they were doing good by creating this system, making individuals reliant on the Church. But from a reincarnation perspective, it took a long time to recover this deeper teaching of individual responsibility for our divine relationship. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** I have another question about that. You devoted a chapter to whether there's room for reincarnation in Christian thought. Has your view on that changed? **Chris Bache: ** I've lived within the reincarnational worldview so long. If reincarnation is demonstrated as a fact—and I think it has been—Christianity will find room for it. All we need is to expand the notion of the age of the soul. Even if we maintain Jesus as a unique savior, understanding the soul’s journey over many lifetimes alleviates the inadequacies from assuming only one lifetime. It allows for the compassion of Jesus to flourish, addressing souls, not just personalities. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** You end the book by discussing understanding the rhythms of life as an ongoing dialog. Anything to add? **Chris Bache: ** Reincarnation doesn't answer all questions, but it's the beginning of deeper ones, bringing a richness to life. It removes the horror of a good God imposing absolute consequences and brings in a compassionate universe. Understanding reincarnation offers a foundation for a deeper, fulfilling spiritual journey. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** We have about four minutes. Quickly, is there room for reincarnation in Christian thought? **Chris Bache: ** Traditional Christianity might say no, but if reincarnation is proven, and I believe it is being proven, Christianity will evolve to incorporate it. Understanding the soul's maturation process over many lifetimes helps align Christian teachings with this expanded view. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Thank you so much for joining us today. You've given us much to think about. **Chris Bache: ** Thank you for having me, Sandy. **Sandy Sedgbeer: ** Life Cycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life is available in paperback. For more information, visit ChrisBache.com. That's it for this week. Goodbye, and thank you again, Chris. **Chris Bache: ** Thank you, Sandy.