The Evidence for Reincarnation

Dottie Koontz: So welcome, everybody. This is the Vancouver IONS community group, and our speaker tonight is, I'm very excited to have Chris Bache PhD back to talk about another of his areas of contemplation, which he wrote about in his book, Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life. Reincarnation is a topic that I'm sure people have different ideas about, either believing, disbelieving or curious. Based on my own contemplation in my younger years and subsequent personal experiences, including a past life regression in my 20s, I'm in the believer camp. Chris, who was our speaker a couple of years ago, was just wonderful. As we've said in our check-ins, a lot of people have read his book and been very appreciative of the work that he did and the work that he wrote about. Chris is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He's also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, on the board of the Grof Legacy Training, an award-winning teacher, and international speaker. Chris has written four books: Lifecycles about reincarnation, Dark Night, Early Dawn about pioneering work in psychedelic philosophy, The Living Classroom, an exploration of collective fields of consciousness in teaching, and LSD and the Mind of the Universe, the story of his 20-year journey with LSD, which is a fabulous book. Chris lives in Weaverville, North Carolina with his wife, Christina Hardy, a professional astrologer and past life therapist. So Chris, take it away and thank you for being here.

Chris Bache: Hi everybody. Sure, it's nice to see you. And thank you for all of your warm greetings. It really touched my heart, and I hope we have a lot of fun today. Because many of you know my work, I just want to show you something which I think you'd like to see. In 2008, I wrote The Living Classroom. I talked about fields of consciousness, the transmission, energetic transmission. I never mentioned psychedelics in that work. SUNY is bringing out that book in a new edition. So this is the new edition just out this coming month, and it's inexpensive in hardback, but available as an ebook, and will be in paperback in a year. This is the true edition of The Living Classroom. This time they gave me permission to talk about psychedelics. So this time I'm actually saying I was a university professor for 20 years, I was taking these large doses of LSD in a therapeutic setting, and this is what happened with my students, and this is the theory of classrooms and fields of consciousness that came out of it. I'm sharing this with you because it's a special joy, and it kind of deepens, puts the final stitch into bringing back together the two halves of my life that I had to separate in order to do the psychedelic work, to stay a university professor while doing this work. Now they're coming back together again late in my life.

But before I published in psychedelics, I tackled what I thought was a really important fundamental question dividing world philosophies, and that is reincarnation. If you believe this is the only life we got, you're going to go down a certain direction. If you believe we have multiple lifetimes, you're going to go down a different direction. It seemed to be a fundamental thing. And the amazing thing is, after I got out of graduate school, and after I started teaching, I found that we had an amazing body of evidence that documents that this is a true and legitimate part of life. None of my graduate courses had taken reincarnation seriously, not the Western religions that I studied, nor the scientific traditions that had displaced those traditions in my mind. And here was Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia proving that reincarnation is a fact of life. I had to erase my entire intellectual blackboard and start over again, because if reincarnation is a fact of nature, then we're living in a much different universe than I had thought we were living in before. So my entire life has been unfolding an understanding of what it's like, just like we see plate tectonics now, and we see galaxies giving birth to stars, and we see planets terraforming. There is this understanding that reincarnation is part of how nature has carried forward and advanced the learning of individuals within certain species. Up to that point in time, evolution is carrying forward the learning of entire groups, forward into more groups and more groups, but eventually there reaches a point where individuality matures and nature has found a way to fold individual learning forward into cascading accumulations of knowledge and wisdom and experience.

So during my first sabbatical, I wrote Lifecycles, and it starts with a chapter on the evidence for reincarnation, and then it goes on to look at, say, if reincarnation is true, what does it say about our relationships? What does it say about family? What does it say about larger patterns? So what I'd like to do tonight is share with you this lecture on gathering together the scientific evidence for reincarnation. Now, it turns out I gave a good lecture on this topic at an internet European gathering, World Congress on Consciousness, and it's 35 minutes long. So what I'd like to do is play that and let that carry the water for taking you through the evidence. I can't say it better than I said it here. I was younger, had more energy. It was a stage, and it worked well. And then after 35 minutes, I'll catch it, finish it out, and then we've got all the time remaining for questions and answers. So let's hope the technology gods are with us. Fingers crossed, everybody.

Chris Bache: I hope you're seeing what I'm seeing, which is a large screen, and I hope the sound works. If the most important philosophical question one can ask in life is, do we survive the death of our body, which Dr. Van Lommel is asking, I think the second most important question is, do we live once, or do we live more than once? And it all hinges on time, the significance of time. As a teacher, if I give a quiz, I have a right to expect a certain performance from the students. If I give an hour exam, I have a right to expect a higher level of performance. And if I give a take-home research paper, I expect a higher level of performance because they have more time. If this universe, if this magnificent universe that we are in, has a purpose, we have to measure the purpose of the universe proportionate to the time. We have to fulfill that purpose. If we only live one time, then we might extrapolate or estimate or calculate the purpose of existence to be... but if we live 100 times, if we live 1000 times, if we live 10,000 times, if our participation in this magnificent universe is truly open-ended, then we have a very different relationship with the universe, and we have a reason to think about the possible purpose of existence in a completely different framework.

The religions of the last 4000 years have had a tendency not to value physical existence. They've had a tendency to say, well, you achieve realization, you achieve enlightenment, and then you leave Nirvana, Samsara, you escape. Samsara, moksha, escape, or you achieve salvation, and then you leave. But that leaves the fundamental question, what is the purpose of the universe unanswered? What is the purpose of my physical existence in the universe? But if we come back to this life many times, then we have a different story that begins to unfold. Our understanding of reincarnation is completely incomplete at this point, just as we've begun to understand the true depth and breadth of the universe that we are part of. Likewise, when we begin to understand that we participate, we're dancing with this universe for an extended period of time, then we have a deeper understanding of what the universe might actually be trying to accomplish in us, and what might be our gift to the universe in the continual refinement and compounding of our talent over time.

What I'd like to do today is talk about the evidence for reincarnation. I've been thinking about this and been in this game for a long time. The first book I wrote was Lifecycles. Notice how long ago I wrote it. It was the first book I wrote as an academic, and that signals how important I think this topic is, and that there is good, critical empirical evidence that allows us to decide this topic. If there weren't critical evidence, then it would just be a wasted exercise. I think this evidence did not exist 50 years ago, and theologians used to debate about reincarnation, going round and round, but today we have a different body of empirical evidence on reincarnation that has moved the topic from the theologians' table to the psychologists' table to the philosophers' table to the psychiatrists' table. That's what I'd like to take you through today. When looking at the evidence for reincarnation, we can either go small or go large. We either look at the detailed cases or we examine the larger body of literature. The beauty and real joy is in the detailed cases, but in 45 minutes, I've chosen to go large. I would really like to encourage you today to read one book on reincarnation that you haven't read yet, and so I want to take you into some of the literature on reincarnation and show you some of the patterns that are emerging.

Ready to go? Let's go. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation by Ian Stevenson. This is a book that changed my life because, like many people, when I finished graduate school in 1978, I was an atheistically inclined agnostic. I was trained in the philosophy of religion, but all that training basically made me an atheist. When I encountered this book right after finishing graduate school, it turned my life around because he convinced me that there was evidence that we live more than once.

Stevenson was the Carlson Professor at the University of Virginia between 1967 and 2001. He has written 11 books on reincarnation. Some of the most important are these: cases of the reincarnation type written over a seven-year period from '73 to '84, unlearned language—children who have an ability to speak a language which no one in their family speaks, sometimes an ancient language, children who remember previous lives. His last book, his magnum opus, a 1000-page, two-volume work, studied 187 cases of children who not only have detailed memories of their most recent life but also carry the scars in their body which relate to the death wounds of the body in their previous personality. That, of course, really upsets academics. I mean, it's one thing to have continuity of memory—that's bad enough—but to suggest that a wound of death can actually be transferred into the physical body of a subsequent personality drives my colleagues right up a wall. But 187 cases, well-documented case histories. It's a magnificent book.

What are we looking at with Stevenson? We're looking at cases of children from around the world who have detailed recall of their most immediate recent life. They know their way around towns that they've never been in before. They can recognize persons when they're brought into the life place of the previous personality. They can recognize persons they have never met before. They know their personal history with that person. They have the appropriate emotional responses with that person—husbands for wives, children. You have cases of a five-year-old child who is showing all the feelings of the husband of a 35-year-old woman with all the emotional responses. There is one case of a child called Parmed. When he was reunited with the family of the previous personality, he was very shy around the wife of the previous personality. He wouldn't identify her until she left the room, but then he identified her, and then later, he took her aside and said two things to her: "I've come, but you've not fixed bindi," which is the spot that Indian women wear on their forehead as an indication that they're married. He also criticized her for wearing a white saree instead of a colorful saree. In the tradition in India, when you become a widow, you don't wear color. For the rest of your life, you wear only white. Essentially, this five-year-old boy was saying to this 35-year-old woman, "I've come, but you're acting like you're not married."

They know the inner architecture of homes that they've never been in. They know people who owed them money when they died and the debt had not been collected. In one case, this little child was brought back to the home of the previous personality, and the wife of the previous personality said, "Okay, if you're my husband, where did you put the will? We couldn't find the will." The little boy walked over to a floorboard in the kitchen, pulled it up, and retrieved the will from a secret place only he knew about. Cases like that drive my philosophical colleagues up a wall. They don't know what to do with it. It's hard for them to deny it, but there it is.

Some patterns in the data: the average time interval between the death of the first personality and the birth of the second is about two and a half years. The average distance between the life place of the first personality and the life place of the second is 50 miles. These children tend to lose their memories around the year, around eight years old. When they begin school and are in a more complex social environment, they forget. They lose their memory. So we're looking at a small time window for research, from about age three to eight, a five-year window to document their memories. The remaining 90% forget them by the time they're eight. The remaining 10%, the vast majority of those, forget them when they hit puberty. When they hit puberty, you know, all hell breaks loose, and they forget the subtle traces of their former lives. Stevenson asked why these children remember what most of us forget, and his answer is he doesn't know. We need more research. He has a hypothesis. He points out that about 60% of these children died violently in their previous life. The remaining 40% died either early, suddenly, or with an acute sense of unfinished business, like a mother who dies shortly after the birth of her baby. His hypothesis is that maybe there's something about the trauma of being wrenched from life violently, suddenly, with an acute sense of unfinished business that encodes consciousness in a way that draws them back faster than usual and closer than usual because this time, I don't have time to give all the evidence, but this two and a half and 50—two and a half years, 50 miles—is faster than the population at large and closer to home than the population at large.

In reviewing Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, the Journal of American Medical Association wrote, "Stevenson has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases in which the evidence for reincarnation is difficult to understand on other grounds." Two years later, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, a major psychiatric journal in the United States, published an entire issue devoted to Stevenson's cases, such an unusual move that they published an editorial to justify or explain their rationale, and in the editorial they wrote, "Our decision to publish this material recognizes the legitimacy of his research methods and the conformity of his reasoning to the usual canons of rational thought." That's the way an academic qualifies their endorsement.

Now, the philosophical institution, the guardians of orthodoxy, are not going to let Stevenson get away with this without a fight. He has had his critics, and the most important critic is a man named Paul Edwards. This is the best picture I could find of Paul Edwards online. His book, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Paul Edwards was a major American philosopher. He taught at the New School for Social Research. He's best known for being the editor-in-chief of the eight-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He's a heavyweight in the philosophical tradition. He wrote a series of articles in 1986 to '87, a four-part article on reincarnation, and eventually he published these articles in a later form in this book, Reincarnation. He is the harshest critic of Stevenson. He accuses Stevenson of fraud. He accuses him of not being sufficiently rigorous in his analysis of the data. He accuses Stevenson of not actually verifying that there couldn't have been contact between the two families.

But there's a deeper point here. To accuse someone of bad research is one thing; to prove that research invalid is quite another. If you go through Edward's arguments very carefully, you see there's a deeper logic operating in his work. He says reincarnation would represent a crucifixion of our understanding, by which he means secular humanism—the philosophical, scientific tradition of the Newtonian, Cartesian framework. He says if you believe in reincarnation, you must accept what he calls six collateral assumptions. These assumptions are: materialism is false, mind is not reducible to brain, our identity is more than our personality, there is a domain other than space-time, death is an illusion, there may be a deeper logic to our lives. He says these assumptions are surely fantastic, if not nonsense, and even in the absence of a demonstration of specific flaws, a rational person will conclude either that Stevenson's reports are seriously defective or that alleged facts can be explained without reincarnation.

I won't go over Edwards' arguments more carefully, because Robert Almeder has done this for us. Robert Almeder is another major American philosopher. He is Professor Emeritus at Georgia State University. He has authored or co-authored 24 books. He wrote this book in which he evaluates five categories of evidence for survival of death. The major analysis he's doing in this book is the debate between Stevenson and Edwards, and what he shows is that Edwards does not refute Stevenson's argument. What he does is refuse to even look at it seriously, because he is so convinced it must be false. Almeder says his argument constitutes a blatant bit of question begging, because he always assumes precisely what is in contention. What's in contention is whether consciousness can exist without a brain, and because Edwards believes science has proven consciousness cannot exist without a brain, he concludes there must be something wrong with the evidence. Almeder says if you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, then not to accept the argument is to act irrationally.

Stevenson's tradition continues, even though he's passed on. This book by Tom Schroeder, Old Souls, definitely wins for having the worst cover of any book in reincarnation research. But Schroeder is an interesting guy. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter; he's one of the editors for The Washington Post, a major American newspaper. He wanted to see if Stevenson's research could stand up to a critical reporter's eye, so he went with Stevenson on one of his trips around the world studying these small children, looked over his shoulder, and he came away convinced, as the subtitle shows—Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives—convinced that Stevenson's methods were good, the data would stand up, these children were real. It is a compelling case for reincarnation. And at the University of Virginia, Stevenson's work continues in the person of Jim Tucker, who has now inherited Stevenson's chair. This book is a wonderful book, very much in the Stevenson tradition, continuing to look in detail at the cases and explaining why these cases cannot be attributed to weaker hypotheses like super-psi or something like that. I might mention that Jim Tucker's book is a lot easier to read than Stevenson's books. Stevenson writes and thinks like a lawyer. It's very good but very detailed and dry. Jim Tucker brings a little more life to the subject matter.

Now, everything we've been looking at so far has to do with what I would call the evidence from spontaneous memories, just children who spontaneously have memories of previous lives. But there's another body of evidence you have to approach with a different framework—it's evoked memories, memories evoked through different techniques. Even massage can evoke a former life memory, but the most common one we're familiar with is hypnotherapy, some type of hypnosis. The following cases, the following books, are representative titles of people who have worked in the field of past life therapy. My favorite book, written by a single therapist who has worked in this area and has thought about it a great deal, is this book by Roger Woolger. Notice the date: an earlier book, Other Lives, Other Selves. He started as a Jungian, ended up in past life therapy, doing past life work, even though Carl Jung, I don't know whether you probably know, believed in reincarnation in the later years of his life but kind of kept it quiet. This is a wonderful book, intellectually competent, with a great review of detailed cases and a discussion of the implications of these cases.

Past life therapy began to really explode in the '70s and '80s, and many therapists were concerned that there was no graduate school, no curriculum, no agreed-upon curriculum for how to establish credentials for people who wanted to do past life therapy. This task was taken on by Winifred Lucas, who wrote a magnificent two-volume anthology, a compendium of essays and articles of the best people working at that time in past life therapy. So if you wanted to read a single book, I would read Woolger's book by one author. But if you wanted to see an overview of multiple people writing in the field, I would go to Winifred Lucas's book, Regression Therapy: A Handbook for Professionals.

Chris Bache: Carol Bowman...

Chris Bache: ...was a social worker. She wasn't interested in past life therapy. She got into it because her son started having nightmares. He started waking up with very disturbing nightmares, and she approached him. She tried to work with him, took him to therapists, tried to do conventional things, but it didn't work. And then she began to do her homework. She began to look into past life therapy. She began to learn the field, and she began to help her own child solve his own trauma carried over from a previous life that was spontaneously bubbling up in his life. She began to attract other people with other children who were also having problems, and eventually, she wrote this beautiful book, specifically a therapeutic book for parents who have children with traumatic memories surfacing that they're having difficulty dealing with. It was very successful, very persuasive. It had a lot of impact. She got more business coming in. She wrote a second book. She gets the award for the second worst title cover on a reincarnation book, Return from Heaven. She's looking specifically at relatives who have been reincarnated within their own families. Now, as a philosopher, that's a weaker body of evidence, right? Because there's so much potential for contamination if you're remembering your grandfather. But as a father, this is interesting.

It's interesting because reincarnation doesn't just happen where it works well for the researchers, across great distances and great families, but inside families—is a very common occurrence, and therefore it deserves to be looked at. Next, Michael Newton, two wonderful books, and I must confess a special partiality. If you wanted to just pick out one or two books out of this entire list, I can't help but wish that you would read Michael Newton's work. Michael Newton was a hypnotherapist who got into past life therapy and was doing past life therapy. Then he accidentally discovered that his clients in deep hypnosis had the ability not only to remember their previous life but to remember what happened to them after they died.

Basically, his clients were beginning to describe the afterlife, and he thought, he didn't think this was possible, but he followed his clients, being a good therapist that he is, and he took hundreds of people into deep hypnotic regressions. He followed them through their former life and the death experience. He would follow them into their memories, continuing on, and then he would ask them questions. He kept detailed notes, asking questions about what was this, what was going on, what was it like? What he found was that regardless of what background people came from—whatever their cultural enculturation was: fundamentalist, Baptist, Karl Marxist, atheist, hardcore scientific reductionist—whatever their background was, people were describing the same fundamental reality in the after-death state.

They were describing a world that had order, that had structure, that had logic. There was actually a social structure. It was a world in which older learners taught younger learners. And it was also a world where people made the choice to reincarnate as a conscious, careful decision. It's one of the most important choices you make. If you go to college, what courses you sign up for, that's an important choice, because once you sign up for a course, you're committed for the entire semester. When you incarnate, what life you take on is an important choice. Michael Newton found that in the spiritual world, the choice of what life to take is a consciously taken choice, made under the guidance of your spiritual helpers and made in cooperation with the other persons that you're going to be incarnating with. So before we were born, when we knew more than we know now, when we were aware of more than we are aware now, we chose the life that we are living now. That fact alone just bears deep meditation.

Two last examples, not from professionals, and that's what makes them interesting. The first is this book Looking for Carroll Beckwith, and what makes it interesting is the man who wrote it, Robert Snow. Robert Snow is the commander of the homicide division of the Indianapolis Police Department. So he's chief of detectives; he investigates murders. His opinion is very important. It must stand up in court. He would be the last person you would think would be doing research on a former life. But it happened that he kind of, he did a hypnotic session not oriented towards past lives. On a lark, he did the session, and in this session, he was hit in the face with a life that appeared to be his life. It scared him to death, and he literally ran out of the room. But he was curious, so he brought all his detective skills to the search to see if he could identify and track down whether there was such a person. And the story of his experience and detective work is told in this short book, Looking for Carroll Beckwith.

And lastly, this book, Soul Survivor, which you may have seen because they did some news clips on it, written by Bruce and Andrea Leininger about their son, James. This is a case of a child, three years old, two years old, who started having spontaneous memories and trauma, waking up crying in the middle of the night. He had spontaneous memories of apparently dying in World War II as an airplane pilot over the coast of Japan. His father was a fundamentalist Baptist and was absolutely, vehemently opposed to his son reincarnating. The mother was a little more receptive. So they got involved; first, they wanted to help their son, but he got involved in the inquiry because he wanted to disprove reincarnation, whatever was going on with James. He wanted to disprove reincarnation to protect his faith. In the end, they tracked down this pilot. They tracked down the story. They were able to reunite James with the people at a military reunion, with the people who had served with this pilot. And James was able to identify people from this group. The father became convinced that, in fact, his son was a reincarnation of this pilot, and reincarnation is true.

Now I'd like to just finish with two observations. Quick observations, as lunch awaits. I'd like to emphasize what we don't know about reincarnation. The evidence for reincarnation may be compelling. However, we really don't know a lot about how reincarnation takes place or what the physics of rebirth is. We're still beginners in this. At this point, we can't say what the soul is or what it's made of. How does it come and go from the physical body? How does it interface with our biology and our genetic makeup? How does it encode its previous learning into our present body? And how does it leave with its learning intact after we die? These things right now are beyond our present grasp. I'm sure we'll make progress in the future, but before we do, we're going to have to stop reducing mind to brain, and we're going to have to approach this research with a more multidimensional metaphysical cosmology.

And lastly, I'd like to point to a certain paradox in the evidence. To do this paradox, I need to go back to Ian Stevenson. Stevenson's evidence, I think, is the most powerful evidence for reincarnation, and his evidence liberates our thinking at one level, but it also constricts our thinking at another. The strongest evidence for reincarnation comes from lives that show the tightest connection, the tightest correlation. But the correlation can be so tight it can lead, if you just study Stevenson's evidence, an anemic, underdeveloped vision of what life is like when we die, when most of us die. In that respect, we must remember that Stevenson's cases are not typical cases. These children are coming back very fast and very close to home. Most people spend much more "time" in the timeless condition of the spirit world. They have a much wider breadth of experiences. So Stevenson's evidence liberates us to think about the soul and our lives in a much larger, expanded framework, but in order to fill in that canvas, to actually explore more deeply what happens to us when we die, and what the larger cycle of life is like—from expanded consciousness to contracted conscious. and back into expanded consciousness—we need to look at other bodies of data. I think Michael Newton's work is an important body of data that gives us a larger vision. And this afternoon, when I talk about psychedelic research, I'll look at another body of data, which I think can give us an expanded vision of our life in this universe. Thank you very much.

Chris Bache: Okay, that brings us back. Brings us back.

Dottie Koontz: Excellent.

Chris Bache: I sure had fun sharing this with you. It brings back a lot of memories for me. I had a good time with this group of people giving this material, and now you have to picture yourself. We've just finished this talk. I'm walking around on stage with a microphone, waiting for the questions or contributions you'd like to make in the wake of this presentation. I will just say that my thinking of reincarnation has evolved beyond where it was when I wrote Lifecycles. I opened up a deeper level of reincarnation thinking in Dark Night, Early Dawn, when I began to bring in the psychedelic experience, and then in LSD and the Mind of the Universe, I give the most complete expanded understanding of reincarnation with the concept of the birth of the diamond soul in history. But where it all begins is, do we have good evidence? Do we have good, reliable evidence that any good, hard-nosed skeptic should endorse whether or not they do. So that's some of the literature, and Dottie has a core bibliography that she's going to hopefully send out to everybody afterwards. So all the names and places and books that I mentioned are there, plus more, so you'll get those. So now the floor is open.

Audience: Yeah. So if...

Dottie Koontz: If you'd like to ask a question, use the little hand raise thing down at the bottom. Let's see which one is it? React, raise your hand, and we'll call on you. Victoria, you're the first. Wow.

Victoria: That was very lovely. And you actually answered one of my questions, which was, how has your understanding evolved? But the two questions: you talk about species reincarnation, which I'd love to hear more about, especially given our current situation. And I also would like to understand more what you mean when you talk in the book about purification and detoxification, because that also seems very relevant. What does that mean for us, individually and collectively?

Chris Bache: When I began my psychedelic work, I thought it was about personal transformation, personal enlightenment, if I got lucky. But then, of course, what happened is that I dissolved. The method I was using was so powerful, it dissolved me so deeply into collective consciousness and the collective species mind again and again that it began to activate dynamics at a species level. One of the very powerful ones way down the road was actually experiencing—like I was in deep space—experiencing the pulse of life on our planet. It was a pulse that kind of pulsed every 100 years more or less, but it was a pulse of reincarnation. And I was experiencing all of human beings as cells in a superorganism. The superorganism was evolving itself through their individual life tasks. It was the most magnificent thing, and it was beautiful, but it deepened my sense that everything we're doing is part of a larger collective dynamic, an evolutionary dynamic. What we think of as private is not private. Everything is wired into a collective network. That's true of reincarnation in general, and then in specific things. When I went into the Ocean of Suffering, the things we get involved in, in deep spiritual work, some of it's personal, some of it's former life. Some of it's not personal at all. Some of it's just larger, cleaning the bayou.

Now, we know from studying mystical autobiographies, when an individual is opening to deeper, pure, more comprehensive, unitive states of consciousness, those states of consciousness are incredibly powerful and pure, and they tend to churn up the psyche and bring to the surface all the things that are distorting their natural ability to enter into this awareness. All the bruises, the sneaky little things, whatever is mucking us up, comes to the surface. We process them, and as we process them, we clear them out, let them go. Our whole psychic system gets cleaner and cleaner, and we're able to heal, and go into deeper spiritual states of awareness. We know mystics do this, meditators do this, people in psychotherapy do this. It turns out that this is also true for the entire species. The entire species carries the wounds of its history in its collective memory bank. The entire species has lived through all these years of war, died in these terrible deaths of plague—mothers who've died in childbirth. Anything not processed out by the present or future life of that soul stream is still in this collective psyche, holding humanity back. It scares humanity, keeps us focused. If humanity is—as I think it is—in the process of growing up into a deeper existential level of awareness, it has to offload all these things that keep it small, which means it has to purify itself, sweat out all the pain that we're carrying collectively, all the pain and suffering, all the vicious wounding of other beings.

This is coming to the surface in us, collectively and individually. If you begin to look like that, certain things happening in a culture might seem less as we thought of them before—as a lot of individuals manifesting this thing—and more as the pulse of a deeper process. I think we are entering a time in history of exponential growth. But exponential growth requires exponential purification, exponential detoxification. This is how complex systems evolve, how we grow. It's a very exciting time, a very challenging time—a time of exponential growth. But for that reason, a time that calls on the warrior within us. The warrior within us, it's going to be hard times.

Victoria: Well, just briefly. It brings up so much emotion. It feels like patriarchy needs to be within, needs to be let go of. That seems huge. It feels like you alluded to the wrong leaders. Who knows? But it feels like it's being brought up. Can you just give an example of what does that mean? That's huge, but minute to minute, or what does that mean to do?

Chris Bache: We just went through this election. Now, I'm pretty sure I'm in a safe room, but I apologize if I step on people's political toes. We had a choice between a man and a woman, a particular kind of man with a particular worldview, and a particular kind of woman with a particular worldview. Collectively, we chose, I think, the worst choice. We chose regressively, looking backwards, trying to hold on to what we had instead of facing the uncertainty of the future with vision and courage. This is going to hurt us for years. Decisions will be made, things will get worse. I don't know if that's a bad or a good thing, that things will get worse faster than if we had wisdom at the leadership level. I don't know, but it will be years before we begin to recognize and recover from the political decisions enacted over the next decade under the influence of this election. We have choice points in this process—choice points of wisdom or of not being wise. I'm afraid we didn't pass this intelligence choice in our country. Fingers crossed and hands folded, yeah.

Victoria: So just for me individually, keep a focus on the kind of person I want to be, rather than going into judgment or grief or outrage?

Chris Bache: One of the things about reincarnation is that it gives everybody permission to be at the level of spiritual development they are at. You kind of lose the habit of judging other people because you can't judge other people; you don't know what their calling or challenge was. You don't know how old they are. They could be babies, they could be graduate students. So it leads me to be respectfully distant in that way. My focus is to do the best I can, help those who see what I see do the best they can together. I think we will make a difference. As we go into more intense destabilization in the future, the individual can have a significantly greater impact. We've learned from nonlinear systems and chaos theory that the more nonlinear a system is, absorbing more energy, it becomes unstable. In those highly energized states, individuals can have a disproportionate impact—like a butterfly flaps its wings, and there's a hurricane in China. So there's an interconnection of the web. As we go into this crisis, each individual will have a greater impact than they might have 100 years ago, because the whole foundation is going to be energized.

Victoria, thank you very much. Thank you for your good questions.

Jonai: You're next.

Jonai: This has all been wonderful. I've enjoyed listening to your presentation, Victoria's questions, and your answers. Past lifetimes have been so interesting to me. I've asked for lifetimes with certain people. I've been wounded, killed, set out to die, all kinds of things. But now I am preparing myself to write a memoir—not the usual type of memoir book, it'll be in three parts. The first 56 and a half years, of course, will be the first part, and that'll probably be the least amount, but I have to write that without judgment, without blame, clear, and so on. The things you're saying about what we have to do for ourselves hit home for me, so much. And I'm close to that, and have been for a while, just had to figure out in my mind how to say it, how to be it, how to present it. The second part is all of the esoteric studies, ancient wisdom techniques, past life stuff, and everything. And the third part is now.

Dottie Koontz: Jonai, sorry to interrupt, but do you have a question?

Christopher: I wish I had a question. I can't. I'm working with all the answers, and I guess my question would be, I want to make a difference. Somehow I feel I can do it with my writing, the way I write, the things I write about. It's a big, big task, and I'm wondering, how do I build that? How do I keep focus despite what's going on around us?

Chris Bache: The life of a writer is a different kind of life, isn't it? It's like climbing a mountain, closing the door, opening the windows, but it's a deep inner focus, and you hold that focus for a long time. It took me five years at the computer to write LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Three years just to get myself in the position of letting people in as deeply as I was going to. It took decades—20 years—just to gather the experiences I put into that book. It's a very intense process, and I'd encourage you to trust your calling. If writing is your calling, your contribution, what you can give, then buckle in. Take it as far, take it as deep, and share it with the world. Throw it out there, let it go, and dump attachment to the results. You do the best you can, let it go where it will. That's a great gift.

Christopher: I set a very high intention, and the other part of that is not to be attached to the outcome. But I don't have a long time to do this. I'm 83 years old. This is for a legacy for my family, but I want the world to understand many things they're missing now. We just came up with a huge challenge in this election, a huge challenge. This is my way of trying to address all of that.

Chris Bache: When the pressure is on, amazing things can happen, huh?

Christopher: Yes, I can do it. I know everything is happening around me, but I can do this. I've got to let go of all that other stuff.

Chris Bache: Good luck to you. Fingers crossed. Looking forward to seeing what you produce.

Christopher: I did read your Life Cycles, but if I'd read this sooner, my life would have been different. I don't know that I would have wanted it that way, because part of what I was doing those 56 and a half years was my purpose, what I had to do to move on.

Dottie Koontz: Thank you, Jonai. Our next question is, Christopher.

Christopher: Thank you, Dottie. Tremendous presentation. Thank you for sharing that. It's an honor, and I wish I'd attended the rest of your lecture as well. I don't know if you still do in-person events, but it would be wonderful. Moving forward with the question, as a child, I was taught that I had sinned, and therefore I had debt. Later in life, I moved on, thought, more sophisticatedly, and then I had karma and, again, debt. So here we are again. Then, you know, the idea of reincarnation and karma became entwined. It was the idea that since you have karma, you have to reincarnate to keep working on this wheel of karma, this reincarnation. So I'd be interested in your thoughts about whether karma is really entwined with reincarnation. Certainly, for those who have had the experience of meeting Divine Presence and Source and incredible love, life becomes an honor, a tremendous honor to be here.

Is reincarnation bound to karma? And the second part of that being more recently, I've heard people saying our karma is being lessened, and maybe in the future, we're reincarnating because we don't have karma anymore. Your thoughts?

Chris Bache: There are a lot of questions rolled into those couple of questions. Yes, I think of karma as cause and effect. It's part of the process; the physical universe has a lot of cause and effects running. The spiritual, conscious universe has a lot of cause and effect coming. But the question is, how do we interpret that cause and effect pattern? I think we've been interpreting it too narrowly for a long time. If you listen to or read about past life therapy, you could justifiably come away with the conclusion that life is basically about healing—that we mess up a lot and have a lot of fixing up to do. You could kind of have a negative perception of what carries over from the past with so much mess and clean-up needed.

In fact, I think most people pass their karmic tests. Most kids in school systems graduate; they go to the next level. That means we bring into our next life not just liabilities, but assets, skills, and matured relationships. But people don't go to therapists to celebrate their victories; they go to heal their wounds. So it's okay, but we must remember there's a larger pattern here. The story that emerges isn't just about healing, but investing in human development, growth, and the enriching of the human spirit. That is the larger share of what's happening in reincarnation, not just picking over grudges.

Looking at religion, there's been a similar damping down. The religions of the last 4,000 years, during the Axial Age, reflected an intensification of getting access to spiritual reality through yoga and meditation. With a deep experience of spiritual reality, it's easy to feel that we belong there more than here, like there was an accident, and we got marooned here. The job is to get back there. Christ will come and save me from my sins; I'll awaken and go there, because who wants to be here when you can go there? But now we're beginning to understand the vastness and age of "here"—measuring in light years, in billions of light years across. It doesn't make sense to say, "Just as we become conscious, we leave the system because it served its purpose." I disagree.

At least, what came through in my work and what many affirm is that it's about incarnating deeper, not just patching up history, but incarnating the power of spirit into our bodies and relationships. It's about giving birth to this deeper consciousness inside our incarnations. We're bringing forth the soul consciousness in the body, the diamond soul, which holds all our lifetimes unified as one. When all those lifetimes fuse into a singularity, it gives birth to more than just an enlightened consciousness. It creates a consciousness that is 100,000 years old and becomes the new operational consciousness of humanity. To get there, we must let go of divisions we've invoked—racism, political divisions, national divisions, and so on. We must sweat it out, and I don't know how long it'll take—it's a multigenerational task. We go through transformations like the mystics, through death and rebirth, surrender to forces beyond our control.

The human heart will be opened, purified, touched, and will emerge massive, beautiful, ecstatic, enlightened, prophetic. I think all of us knew what we were getting into when we chose to incarnate in this part of the century. We chose to align ourselves with this movement for our evolution and to help our children and grandchildren. We're all in this together.

When we are privileged to touch the infinite, it's like "Olly olly oxen free"—joy, no judgment, infinite capacity to transform karma and let it go. We can learn much faster than we think and let go of old, narrow concepts of God that imprison us in fear. This is an extraordinary, powerful time. I'll tell you, Robert Monroe, from the Monroe Institute, described a future where, when he looked up, there was no Bardo anymore. It was physical reality opening into the Luminosity of diamond light. The Bardo represents unresolved or unfinished lives—individual and collective. As we process our former lives and karma, we become more transparent to divine intelligence, love, and information. When we have that access, no problem will be unsolvable. That's what we're working towards. So, thank you for the great question.

Dottie Koontz: Beautiful answer. So, Janine, you're up next.

Janine: Thank you so much, Chris. Let's see. I guess maybe if I put it on gallery, then I won't feel strange.

Audience: Yeah, thank you so much. I actually have so much in my thoughts right now that I'm going to try to connect them. I said to a friend who didn't have spiritual connections, then her husband died, and she had experiences. She had judged me before for my experiences, and what popped out of my mouth is, "One person's experience is another person's woo," you know? That's important to me because I don't want to prove anything to anybody but simply to experience and share when appropriate.

Wow, that last response reminded me of having a soul retrieval during a low point in my life. In that two-day process, I went from being overwhelmed to expansive, joyful, and at ease. It showed me that things can happen fast. I'm not assuming we know how it's going to go, and it may be different for different people.

Dottie Koontz: So Janine, do you have a question?

Audience: Yeah, I was saying these things to hear responses. One question...

Chris Bache: I think you're right. Soul retrieval is similar to what's happening historically. We retrieve split-off portions of our soul, healing and integrating them back into unity. I think the same is happening historically. We are retrieving our souls from when we thought we were egos. We have to retrieve all those pieces and grow into a fully manifest soul.

Audience: Thank you so much. I'm curious whether you've looked at the work of Nassim Haramein, the unified field physicist. I think there's some alignment.

Chris Bache: Sounds like it, doesn't it? Unified theory is appealing. Being retired means I don't have to keep up with the literature anymore. Irvin Laszlo's work, Akashic field, chaos theory—fertile ground for sure.

Audience: Great. Thank you so much for all you're sharing.

Dottie Koontz: Thank you, Dean. Oops, Norma, you're up next. What's your question?

Norma: I don't exactly have a question, but I've been studying myself getting old. I'm losing my identity; each decade, I'm a different person. Now I'm losing my ego identity. I think I'm headed toward becoming something else—maybe dust to dust and returning to the earth. That's kind of bringing it together for me, and I do appreciate more information, so I'll look you up.

Chris Bache: Well, Norma, your experience speaks to me. As I get older, I feel the same. I'm 75 now, maybe a couple of years behind you. My arms and skeleton are getting weaker, like they're falling off, and with them, memories fall off. It's easier to move into egoless places because my skin is wrapped a little loose. When we get to the end, it's a big release into the light.

Norma: That's what I'm feeling, too, getting lighter. I'm excited about the last breath. I hope to be conscious with it.

Chris Bache: I've always told my children that it's a great life, and in the end, you get to die. Death is graduation, coming home. If there's one thing I'd give to people, it's to give up the fear of death. Death is joy and celebration. Most people experience it as a rush into the arms of the Divine. If you're clear on what birth and death are, you celebrate life coming to fruition, returning all your learning to your core soul.

Paul: It may not be just joy and sorrow; it could be something whole.

Chris Bache: Yes, something bigger than joy and sorrow. Thank you.

Dottie Koontz: Thank you, Norma. I guess it's my turn because Paul has a question.

Paul: My question is about reincarnation. Is reincarnation, from your perspective, strictly related to humanity on Earth, or does it serve a different role in the broader universe?

Chris Bache: Good question. My work focuses on human consciousness because humanity represents the greatest threat to all life on the planet. My belief is if we can heal humanity, all other life forms will be safer. Cultures that believe in reincarnation generally see it beginning with higher life forms. Individuality is the seed that makes reincarnation possible. I think it starts before humans but nobody knows precisely where. Once we reach certain thresholds, there's little point in incarnating at a lower level. It's about progress, much like in education where each stage builds on the previous.

Dottie Koontz: Thank you. I have another question related to that. I've not seen accounts of reincarnation from or to another planet or star system. Do you have anything to say about that?

Chris Bache: Well, I'd say, why not? The dynamic principles of evolution play out in other solar systems, galaxies—there's intelligent life out there, and if we can incarnate, so can they. Distance is immaterial. Some people recall being a life form on another planet. If you dig around, you'll find those cases. I don't personally recall such experiences, though a spiritual workshop revealed a planetary system connection. So, I'd say sure, why not?

Dottie Koontz: Great, we have time for one last question unless you'd like to wrap up.

Chris Bache: Let me draw some things together. Reincarnation doesn't answer all questions—it's the beginning of a rich vein of questions. It opens possibilities and relieves us from the burden of time. We're thinking in terms of 10,000-year increments, not just 100-year increments. Do you want to be the next Beethoven or great poet? Now we have unlimited time to develop all the talents latent within the human form. The diamond soul functions at a higher sensory level. It's not just an open heart or mind but an entire body animated into higher orders of realization.

As green reality and light reality converge more and more, we become spiritual beings filled with radiance. It will take time, but the pace is picking up. When we succeed in bringing this new awakened consciousness into the world, it will be worth it. This is for all of humanity, not just special people here and there. Women will be key in getting us through this crisis. Men have had their chance and messed it up. Women need to reclaim their power. We're stronger together, growing deeper community, not just as individuals.

Most of the work has already been done. The fetus isn't gestated in the day of labor. It's just the last bit, the last waking up, allowing this birth to happen. This century, it will happen—it has to. Thank you for giving a slice of your day to this time together. I hope you take the work and share it. It's an honor. Thank you.

Dottie Koontz: Thank you, Chris. That was fabulous. I'll put it on gallery view and if you want to unmute and say goodbye to Chris and everyone else, thank you all for coming. This has been wonderful.

Jonai: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Audience: Thank you, Chris and Dottie.

Dottie Koontz: Have a beautiful rest of your day. Chris, I have one question. Can you say your last name?

Chris Bache: Thank you. Bye.