Collective Karma and Reincarnation — with Chris Bache

Chris Bache: The idea that we all have to get past the same finish line at the same time in order for things to work out right—that we all have to be saved before we die, or something like this—that doesn't make nearly as much sense as thinking of ourselves as a developing flower garden. We are different types of flowers, which are developing and emerging over large periods of time.

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Emmy Vadnais: Hello and welcome. I'm Emmy Vadnais, co-host with Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is collective karma and reincarnation with my guest, Chris Bache, who is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, where he taught for 33 years. He is also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training. Chris is the author of four books: Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life, Dark Night, Early Dawn, The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness, and LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. If you enjoy this program, please like, subscribe, press the bell icon, and share. Chris is joining us from just north of Asheville in Weaverville, North Carolina. Now I'll switch over to the internet video. Welcome, Chris! It is a great joy to be with you on New Thinking Allowed today.

Chris Bache: Thank you, Emmy. It's wonderful to be in conversation with you.

Emmy Vadnais: This is our second interview together, although we also had a live stream. In that first conversation, we talked about your book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. I'll link to that interview in the upper right corner of the screen. In your book, and in that conversation, you shared about how through your 73 LSD sessions, you experienced many deaths and rebirths. Today, we're going to explore the notion that it sounds like you came to an understanding that we all have our own individual or personal karma, and that we reincarnate for the collective good or benefit of all toward what you describe as the future human. To get us started, how did you become interested in this topic of personal but also collective karma and reincarnation?

Chris Bache: Well, the first book I wrote as an academic was Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life. I was interested in reincarnation early in my career. I encountered Ian Stevenson's research at the University of Virginia. Around the same time, I encountered Stan Grof's research in his book, Realms of the Human Unconscious. I took in Stevenson's research deeply, and I began to see the world in a way I had never seen it before. I began to see the world in terms of reincarnation—through a lens of reincarnation—understanding that every life is a continuation of lives lived in the past and is leading toward lives in the future. I began to study the evidence for reincarnation, and I studied a lot of past life therapy cases. I began to understand the deeper mechanisms of how lives start many things they don't get finished, and they sometimes experience injury and wounds that don't get healed, or they have hopes and expectations that are not fulfilled. Those transfer into subsequent former lives in a complex and subtle way. We are living, in a sense, the continuation of projects that began before our life, and our life will lead to a continuation of projects after we die, after our body dies. That was all kind of working itself out in my mind, and then when I entered into my psychedelic work, that was all affirmed and elaborated. I had numerous experiences of former lives, and the reality of reincarnation as a fact of life was presented as a natural exposition of spiritual reality and how the physical world and the spiritual world are deeply intertwined in this evolutionary process. But all of that thought so far is on the level of personal karma—personal cause and effect, personal choice, conditionings transferred from lifetime to lifetime. But in the process of doing the psychedelic exploration, I began to drop into levels of consciousness that were not personal but were collective. Jung's concept of the Collective Unconscious is an early exploration of this idea. I dropped into levels of conscious reality where the working unit was not an individual human being but an entire species. I began to have experiences that were working themselves out in my individual psychedelic sessions, which were not personal. They were really focused on collective dynamics. I describe this in a chapter called "The Ocean of Suffering," where I enter into what I later came to understand were memory matrices held in the collective psyche—all the suffering that members of a species experienced, unresolved by the time they died. Memories of war, killing, rape, pain, drought, incest—just lots and lots of painful memories. I began to understand that just as individuals can be burdened by their past trauma, the psyche of the collective consciousness of our species is likewise burdened by its collective trauma. That led to a deepening understanding of the relationship between individual and collective karma, individual karma, and collective karma. That's the fundamental theme of my second book, Dark Night, Early Dawn. It examines how, when you get very deep, the boundary between the individual and the collective dissolves. This leads to a much more dynamic relationship between what's happening in our individual lives and what's happening in the life of the species of which we are a part. And that, of course, is contextualized within the life of the planet, the life of the galaxy, and so on. I had many experiences of being initiated into the life of our species on a collective level. I dissolved not into the mystical state of oneness with God, but before getting to that, I dissolved into the consciousness of our species. I began to have experiences of how the species is evolving through collective karma and collective reincarnation, with individuals within that matrix evolving through individual karma and individual reincarnation.

Chris Bache: I think when we first begin to entertain possibilities that we are larger than we conventionally have thought that we are, and that we have these interconnections which are larger than we thought, I understand the kind of fear and reflex to draw back and say, "Not me." That's an understandable, natural reflex. But if we let that pass, and we sort of relax and begin to look at the data, if we begin to look at near-death episode research, people who get glimpses of what's going on behind the scenes, and we look at not just a few of them, but hundreds of them, and begin to sort out the universal threads that run through their accounts... When we look at past-life therapy research and the demonstrated continuity between lives and the richness that emerges in a person's life when they untangle some of those knots from their past, and when we just begin to look deeply into where this body-mind came from, tracing its long evolutionary pedigree back through its physical pedigree on the emergence of our beautiful body, it turns out the mind has a similar elegant, magnificent pedigree, reaching back through time. The more we absorb the fact that this body is not ours privately, and our mind is not ours privately—it's always been a collective summation, in a way, always from the start—then I think that feeling of anxiety or pushback softens, and we begin to open to a different world.

And it's not a world that dissolves the individual or washes out the individual; it's a world that actually affirms the individual very deeply, but it contextualizes the individual within a web of interconnections which is larger than the individual, which we draw from and give back to, just as a leaf draws energy from the tree and gives back energy to the tree. It becomes a natural way of seeing things. I'm glad that physicists have jumped on with quantum physics and unified systems theory and all those good things, but fundamentally this can be an experiential thing. When we quiet our mind, calm our heart, and enter into deeper states of self-aware stillness, perceptions arise. Instincts, usually so subtle that we don't notice them, make themselves felt in a quiet, meditative mind. When these arise, you begin to realize it's like threads that connect us to other people's lives. There's no breaking these threads; they're part of the fabric of life, just like there's no breaking the threads between any one leaf on a tree and other leaves on the tree. They are connected into the same organism.

Emmy Vadnais: Yeah, and the roots of the trees. I like how you're describing it as a collective mind, or collective consciousness, that we are all a part of, and I agree with you. I had the pleasure of speaking with Jill Bolte Taylor, who has written the book My Stroke of Insight. She had a stroke and the left side of her brain went offline, and she only had the right side of her brain. She talked about how she felt this merging of oneness and could even sense the energy people were bringing into her space, even if they were just visiting for less than five minutes. She wrote a follow-up book about whole-brain living because she wanted to share with people how they can also have these experiences. What is the significance of reincarnation? How does karma play a role with that, and how does it give meaning to our lives, or even change our lives if we engage with that potential?

Chris Bache: Well, that's a large question, so let me start with how it impacted me and share how it impacts the students I've shared these ideas with over decades. First, I think it changes everything. It makes life more intelligible. It makes the experience that all of us have make more sense. All of us have things we know how to do that no one ever taught us, or we have aptitudes toward certain activities different from everyone else in our family. Some people are oriented towards intellectual chess-like games, and others like full-contact rugby, social things. There's all these differences. Some people have tremendous capacity to create in art and music, and others are writers. Where do those come from?

Classically, we think they come through genetic mutation—random, accidental. But when you sink into them, it begins to make more sense that everything which is large in a life comes from a line of choices, where at some time in our past, they were small. An interest in music begins small, but it's practiced and develops until eventually you have someone like Mozart, who's writing concertos at six years old. So everything which is large adds up. An ability with guns, to be very facile and quick, came from a history of a former life of a marshal on the frontier. That makes sense, and it is grounds for hope because it means not that we are prisoners of our past, but we operate within a context shaped by our past. Within that context, we make choices which feed into our future and future lives. It's empowering because even though you may be temporarily burdened by something with a deeper history, you have the power to change your history. You have the power to exert your will, make better choices or different choices, and lead into a better future.

When you look at the world through reincarnation’s eyes, you realize that everybody's playing a different game. They're not playing your game. I think of it like school. Some people are in kindergarten and first grade, some are in high school, some are doing postgraduate work, and that gives you tremendous permission to let people be themselves. The idea that we all have to get past the same finish line at the same time to work out right, that we all have to be saved before we die, doesn't make nearly as much sense as recognizing we are a developing flower garden. We are different types of flowers developing over long periods. We have an open-ended amount of time with which to develop ourselves. I tell my students sometimes, the only important question you should be asking yourself is, "What do you want to be doing in 10,000 years?"

Emmy Vadnais: That's a simple question!

Chris Bache: But provoking, isn't it?

Emmy Vadnais: Oh, well, I'm joking. It's profound. It's like...

Chris Bache: Take the large perspective, people. The creative intelligence of the universe thinks large. It doesn't think small, right? The greatest thing about reincarnation is—though the Hindus initially thought reincarnation was a burden because they discovered they go round and round, going through puberty and the hardships of life over and over again—I think we can appreciate that the greatest burden in the psyche of modern humanity is the terrible idea that we are nothing more than our biology, everything mental condenses to physics, and that when the body dies, our mind disappears. There's no survival. Reincarnation opens this myth and shows us that we are developing over vast tracts of time, allowing us to elevate our assessment of life's purpose.

If I give an in-class test, a quiz, I have a right to expect a certain set of results. If I give an hour-long test, I expect more because there's more time. If I assign a research paper, I expect more because there's more time to develop it. If the universe has a purpose, it should be proportionate to the time we have to realize it. If we only have one lifetime—and for some that's just minutes out of the delivery room—it can't be a greater purpose than the amount of time we have. With reincarnation, we learn that we have an open-ended infinite time. That doesn't cause us to be lazy. Anyone who thinks they can just deal with it later is naive, not understanding how hard it is to work here. But having an open-ended time lifts the ceiling and allows us to see the beautiful images from the Hubble telescope of galaxies and nebulas. We recognize we aren't just 100-year players in this drama; we're ancient players. It allows us to view the grandeur of a galaxy and recognize we have a meaningful part in this unfolding of intelligence across planets and suns. That changes everything, doesn't it?

Emmy Vadnais: What do you feel the purpose of our individual karma is that contributes to the collective? What are we reincarnating toward?

Chris Bache: Let me start with a general observation, then move to more specific ones. The boundary between individual and collective has been made porous so many times that I see it as one living organism with different folks. The individual is an individual, but it's contextualized within the individuality of a species. Our species, as a single consciousness, is an individual. Humanity on planet Earth is different than other species on other planets, in other galaxies. The mind of our species, the collective psyche, the memory, is unique, and we are part of that. We live in a constant dialogue, a constant transmission back and forth between the collective and the individual. So, what are we evolving toward? That leads to interesting territory. Many answers, like evolving to love, compassion, or knowledge, might end up being too small, as they would be formulated from our moment in history. Ask again in 5,000 years, and we'd likely give a richer answer.

The safest answers are process answers, not goal answers. The essence is growth and empowerment of our nature, the empowerment of our form. Growth toward what—that's the tricky part. We'd like to say growth towards oneness, love, wisdom, intelligence, more aesthetic capacity, more creative capacity, more communion between human and spiritual intelligence. But those are limited intermediate baby steps. However, there is a progression toward growth, something we can extract from the evolutionary record, and growth toward individuality. I think of reincarnation as a higher octave of evolution. Evolution evolves whole groups forward. It folds learning forward of entire groups. Reincarnation folds the learning forward of individuals within species. Nature has found a way to let individuals run forward in time. We've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. Where are we going? The universe has been evolving for 13.7 billion years and will continue for hundreds of billions of years. Where are we going? What could we become with 10,000 years to work with? We'll become more, better, more in tune with reality—I deeply mean spiritual reality—stronger because we'll work together to solve problems instead of fighting over a small plate of food. We'll be lower.

Emmy Vadnais: How can people engage in the karmic and reincarnation process more consciously? Because some might be thinking, "Well, I have a horrible lot in this lifetime. I don't want to be here anymore. I'm never coming back. Some truly believe this is a prison planet run by dark forces."

Chris Bache: My heart goes out to those suffering that level of pain. I know people in that much pain, and inevitably, when we try to understand what's going on, we project from our circumstances. If we see our planet controlled by dark forces, that might be a projection of one's psychological experience into metaphysical parameters. I suggest as you clear—by deepening experiences of your life through spiritual practices—and living as good a life as you can, your mind gets clearer. The forces constricting your life loosen, and you'll begin to realize, in subtle and mysterious ways, you control the flow of your life's energy. If choices have constricted that flow in the past, you can reverse them in the present. If you've had tight karma in the past, choose different, generous, clear karma. All spiritual traditions have procedures to help you move into deeper clarity. Buddhists start with the Four Noble Truths: do no harm, right speech, right conduct, and so on. Every religion has guidelines to clear your mind and heart. As you do, a different picture emerges, one not governed by dark forces, though clearly, political and social movements, wars contain darkness. But your experience of the universe itself opens to a divine banquet, a wonderful mystery.

How do you connect with that? How do you change your life for such experiences or feel properly aligned with fellow human beings on this journey? That's basic spirituality 101. Anything favoring yourself over others, stop doing that. Everything hurting others, stop doing that. Every time you injure with speech, stop. Slow down the turbulence in life. There are techniques to bring your mind beneath the surface turbulence to live a lifestyle that's calmer and more peaceful. Engage life differently. As your clarity grows, crystallize opportunities for growth around you. We're not trapped by karma. Karma is a platform to reach beyond our past and create a future—still with its challenges, but clearer, gentler, and more exciting.

Emmy Vadnais: Can you share a bit more about your understanding of karma? Some may think of it as simply cause and effect, or even as punishment.

Chris Bache: Not punishment, but certainly cause and effect—karma, vipaka, cause and effect. We live in a universe entirely of cause and effect. There's not a single part that's exempt, except the fundamental ground state—it's all cause and effect. No problem recognizing that in the scientific world—with molecules, atoms. But here's the nub: choices have cause and effect—meaning we're learning systems. When we make choices, we set a trajectory of learning into motion. We push things away or include things, hurt or support, constantly making choices. These choices echo back and become part of our subsequent experiences.

An easy way to explain good and bad karma is talking about inheriting consequences. The good vipaka from good action, the bad vipaka from bad action. Experiencing these cycles gives humans incredible power—power over destiny. Maybe not in the short term due to momentum, but systematically engaging causal forces lets you make clear choices. As choices clear up, your inner and outer environments become clearer. For Hinduism, this is basic Dharma 101—how life works: we're here to grow and learn. An academic transcript reflects grades in various courses and is similar to karma; it's the cumulative effect of choices. So in life, nothing magical about karma—it's a reminder that not only the physical world but our psychological world and our spiritual world move according to cause and effect. Yet, there's depth in a spiritual level—perhaps in quantum as well—but certainly deep in your center that's outside of cause and effect. Spiritual traditions emphasize reducing karma's turbulence to experience your being that's free of cause and effect. That's one's divine nature—never beginning, never ending, always stable. Karma begins and ends, and spiritual practice is about living more from that stable reality than from life's turbulence.

Emmy Vadnais: What role do historical traumas and collective traumas play in what we're experiencing on Earth? Of course, I know you mentioned there are pleasant attributes we bring with us as well.

Chris Bache: All the virtues of history pour into us, just as all the burdens of bad choices and sins of history surround us. We're in an intense time now, a critical time in human history. We've never been here before. Pieces of continents have been in danger, but now it's the entire planet, becoming unable to sustain our population—we're causing it. Nature isn't causing the problem; we are. We're in times of increasing turbulence, disruption, chaos, with social uncertainty and divisiveness because many aren't clear how to face the challenges we encounter as a species. Global climate change will have enormous impacts, with many lives lost in the future, leading to uncertainty and turbulence.

From a deep spiritual perspective, asking what's causing this inner turbulence, we might look at individual mystics' lives, which are well-documented. Before the breakthrough of enlightenment, there's the dark night of the soul—personal cleansing. From a reincarnational perspective, we're cleaning the basement. All incompatible history with enlightenment—convictions and urges incompatible with universal love—are forced out. Spiritual practitioners experience this upheaval during meditation. The advice is always: stay centered. Let it flow, and it will pass. If we think of the species as a meditating being, I think something similar is happening.

Personally, I believe we're entering a profoundly positive turning point in human evolution, taking us to a higher level of psycho-spiritual functioning. To actualize this, we must clear everything preventing us from experiencing this state today—our collective karma, our cultural institutions' history, and individual histories. We're experiencing tremendous purification—exposing the shadow to heal it. Certainly, the shadow of humanity is exposed through destructive, self-absorbed policies and practices. This purification is part of leading the way to a spiritual awakening—a deep and profound one.

Emmy Vadnais: Yes, Carl Jung and the shadow—focusing on our own individual shadow selves, letting ourselves heal from what ails us. What do you suggest people consider doing as far as focusing on themselves or assisting the collective? I understand you're saying that as we focus on ourselves, we're part of the collective.

Chris Bache: Yeah, it's a both-and situation. An enlightened individual in a monastery might uplift the whole, but most of us live embodied in the world and want to practically make the world better—helping people, solving problems. Without deep inner clarity, efforts might succeed yet leave damage too. So it's both: becoming socially active for clarity and peace, and being inwardly clear oneself. I engaged in years of spiritual practices and worked hard academically at an open-enrollment university, nurturing the corner that was mine. My colleagues did the same, making things better. Some focus more on interior projects, others on social ones—no right or wrong, it's both.

Emmy Vadnais: What would you say to someone thinking, "I'm doing my part, but that person or group or institution or country is really messing things up, and they're the problem"?

Chris Bache: Yeah, and they may be. There are certainly other players doing bad things. Any right-thinking person would want to mitigate those bad things. If we see a child being beaten, we naturally intervene to protect the child. But at a deeper level, reincarnational worldviews help us understand there’s more to a person's current situation than meets the eye. It's a waste of time to envy others’ good fortune or judge their bad fortune. We don't know what got them there—a sinner inheriting bad karma or a saint taking on someone else’s. Best to take care of your own shop, doing the best with your circumstances, as meaning and intention exist in those circumstances. Recognize people are at different soul-life stages. Stand your ground where necessary, but know most judgments are barriers that create more separation. There's a way of drawing conclusions without living within harsh judgment boundaries.

Emmy Vadnais: Do you feel we're going through a collective Near-Death Experience, even though we don't really die, since our consciousness seems to continue?

Chris Bache: I think we are going through something like that. You know what happens when people have a near-fatal accident. We know that when they're in it, their mind speeds up. They become able to do physical things they would never have dreamed they could do. If they're falling off a mountain, they can take action. The mind speeds up. Often, the heart and mind open, entering into transcendent spaces under the pressure of almost dying. It's not alarmist to say we are going into a near-extinction event on this planet. The crises, which are just beginning, will worsen, and everything we're doing in this country, politically, will make that confrontation with the planet's limits even harder and more severe. So, we're going into very difficult and challenging times. Some very smart people, clear-thinking people, conclude that humanity is toast. We're living on borrowed time, heading for extinction. If you look at the statistics, the patterns, we're going extinct. Personally, I don't think we are going extinct. I don't believe it on rational grounds; I believe it because of my spiritual experiences that we make it through this crisis. It clearly will be a planet-changing, civilization-changing crisis—a near-death experience of our culture and life on this planet. We might learn what might happen during it if we study individuals who have had near-death experiences. I think things are speeding up, things are becoming dire. There are fewer and fewer innocent decisions. Every decision has infinite ramifications. We're coming into a make-or-break point—grow up or die. The threat of extinction is a tremendous evolutionary accelerator. We're beginning to realize that if we don't change our practices, we'll lose our life on this planet. Deep down, the transformation required is not simply of politics, economics, industrial production, or agriculture. It is fundamentally a crisis of consciousness—our consciousness has gotten us into this mess. It's the limitations of ego and self-centeredness of our so-called cut-off ego that has led us into these dead-end scenarios of consuming more and more without satisfaction. We either make it through this crisis, or we go extinct. Personally, because of the visions I've been given, I think we make it through. My concern is how many of our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will die before we make it through. That's my major concern.

Emmy Vadnais: There may be those listening thinking, if there is this oceanic wave of love and oneness, why does it have to get so bad or hard? Why do we have to get to this point? Why do we have to suffer so much? Why does there have to be pain and suffering and people being treated poorly and dying a bodily death when maybe they didn't otherwise have to?

Chris Bache: Yeah, boy, that's a hard question. You're asking hard questions today. You're basically asking the question, why is there suffering? If there is intelligence and wisdom and love as a starting point of creation, why is it so hard? Why do we suffer so much? Why didn't somebody give us an instruction manual to help us do better? Why is it so hard? And we get angry at the divine intelligence and think we could do it better. If I were designing this universe, I could design a better universe with less suffering. We judge from the context of our historical position and make judgments about what a good humanity would look like. But maybe we're not building toward that. Maybe we're building through that. Clearly, the creative intelligence thinks on a huge landscape. When you meditate on astrophysics and astronomy, the landscape of creation is vast and magnificent. So, we have to genuinely ask ourselves, what is this intelligence creating in this species? What is the project? Where are we going? What might we become? If we expand even lightly for 100,000 years, which is a second in cosmic time, and imagine what we could become, we might understand where suffering fits into this larger agenda, which is larger than most of our agenda. Most of us would think if we could just be comfortable and happy as we are, we'd be okay. But maybe that's not the agenda of the creative intelligence. And I don't mean to treat people suffering cavalierly. I mean it's all with great respect to those who suffer honestly. But suffering in some ways is like when we're building a house, and we have the walls up, the stud walls up, and we have the trusses up, but we haven't put on the roof. And if it rains, rain comes in because the house is unfinished. Humanity is an unfinished species. Sri Aurobindo made a large point of this. He talked about how humanity is a transitional species. We are transitioning from what we were 100,000 years ago into what we are in the process of becoming. We are not the end of the project; we are just in the middle of the project. In that context, if we take disease, for example, we are only at the early stages of developing our consciousness to heal diseases in our body with our minds. We know psychoneuroimmunology has shown us this, but I'm talking about the serious diseases that seem resistant to this subtle manipulation. We are just getting started exploring the potential of our consciousness to keep this system healthy and strong. Some of the suffering of disease is just unfinished business. We haven't gotten to the point where we can control ourselves. Our knowledge has not expanded yet to supplement what we can do with our mind. There's just so much which is unfinished. So before we take over control and blame God for doing a mess-up, we might examine our assumptions of what the purpose of the project is and what the goal of the project is.

Emmy Vadnais: Because you're a man of deep philosophy and religious and spiritual studies, I know you mentioned this in your book and our previous conversation. Since you brought up God, can you briefly mention your relationship to that term?

Chris Bache: I was raised in a Catholic tradition. I was studying to be a priest in the early years. I've learned a lot watching religions come into existence. In some ways, dogma is like sausage; you never want to see one being made. It may look good on the outside, but a whole lot of personality gets involved in the forging of dogma in history. So it's a sobering experience to truly watch how religions come into existence. I've learned from the study of history that one of the most dangerous things a human being can say is, "I know what God wants you to do." There's so many cultural and historical limitations built into God vocabulary, into God language, that I prefer not to use that term. I would talk about the divine, but even that is loaded with historical associations. In the title of my book on psychedelic work, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe," I chose not to concretize that with an image of divinity, because I see those images as too historically conditioned to envision what I was trying to describe. Now we have a sense of how vast the universe is, counting its distance in light years. Imagining a mind as large as this universe and trying to fathom what that mind might be like, then taking a journey where you self-initiate into the edges of that vast mind—several things happen, at least to me. One is that I fell in love. I fell in love with this reality. Once you experience it in its clarity, it's powerful, magnificent, and beautiful. I call it my beloved. It's a love relationship with life, with a deeper intelligence embedded in life. Sometimes I talk about the divine, sometimes even God if the context is clear that I'm not using conventional references but pointing to what those terms ideally point to—the infinitely large horizon, the vastness, the beauty, the knowledge, the genius. We're talking about cosmic genius in this universe. The hardest part wasn't what happened during the psychedelic journey, it was stepping out of it. The loss of contact with my beloved, even though I knew it was always here, only my own blinders kept me from experiencing it. It was a deep sadness, a deep withdrawal. It took me about ten years after stopping my sessions to get grounded and committed to living on Earth on its terms again. I give you that anecdote just to say my journey into the divine had many stages, many layers, over many years. I wouldn't trade any of those days for any treasures on Earth. Learning to live without constant immersion into those treasures has been a real learning exercise for me that continues.

Emmy Vadnais: How do you suggest people explore themselves and get in touch with the deeper creative intelligence inside to move that karmic part of them forward? Are there practices beyond psychedelics that can help listeners?

Chris Bache: There are so many practices. What we're talking about is spirituality. Christians have an approach to spirituality, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists—all have approaches with a lot of common ground. It's no secret now. We live in a time where previously secret teachings are available everywhere. After China invaded Tibet, lineage holders of this tremendous ancient spiritual lineage flooded Western countries, and we have centers throughout the U.S. and Europe. We're talking about basic spiritual practices, potentially psychotherapeutic practices, for healing the heart's surface wounds. My first sitter was my wife, Carol, a clinical psychologist. She never did a psychedelic session herself; wasn't her cup of tea. She found everything she needed on her meditation cushion.

Emmy Vadnais: Just to clarify, by sitter, you mean the person with you during LSD sessions.

Chris Bache: Yes, she was my sitter, holding the fort while I was in LSD sessions, managing them with music and whatnot. She never wanted to do a session herself but completed a three-year, three-month, three-day solo retreat in the Vajrayāna tradition. She's been recognized as a lama in her community and has a rich interior life. We're friends, and it didn't involve psychedelics at all. There are so many spiritual teachings—Celtic, Native American, South American—and Ayahuasca traditions. Everyday wisdom traditions are available abundantly, at any bookstore or airport. Programs like this illustrate the availability of inner teachings. Even if I start a list, it would be just a fraction of what's available. We can find the practices that help us live a calmer, quieter, more centered, richer life. Those are available, and the practices taught are similar: kindness, non-injury, simplicity, voluntary simplicity, centering, stillness, being good to others. It's a long road, not traveled in one lifetime—traveled over many lifetimes, but each can be better than the last.

Emmy Vadnais: How much of a role does joy, love, and creativity play in a person's karma and reincarnation?

Chris Bache: It certainly does. It's part of the fabric. Because we often learn about reincarnation from reading books from therapists, we tend to cast it in a negative light because people go to therapists when they're in pain. But if you're a brilliant, creative composer, for example, you can explore that dimension of your life and find that your love for music's roots go deeper than this present lifetime. Our past gives us virtues and vices. We honor existence by accepting the virtues, building on them, and working to release the vices.

Emmy Vadnais: What role does self-love play in this process?

Chris Bache: How can you love the world if you don't love yourself? That's something that was clear in my teachings. If you want to become one with God, you must become one with yourself. Therefore, when you try to become one with God, everything incompatible with oneness with yourself surfaces—all your injuries, trauma, self-defeating habits. Self-love, self-acceptance is absolutely critical—not superficial self-love, but deep, unconditional self-love. The type a mother has for her child. You take on the shadow, love that shadow until it becomes a baby in your arms, nurturing it deeply.

Emmy Vadnais: Unconditional love covers a multitude of sins.

Chris Bache: Well, let's say it compensates, doesn't it?

Emmy Vadnais: Chris, you've shared so much today about collective karma and reincarnation. I know we'll continue about the birth of a future human that you discovered in your LSD sessions. Do you want to touch on that?

Chris Bache: I'd love to. One surprise in my psychedelic work was how much of it wasn't about personal transformation—it was about the collective. My love for myself expanded to embrace love for my people, my planet, and all beings on the planet—not just me personally. As it deepened, I began to be initiated into visions about humanity's spiritual evolution and where humanity was going. It's natural when you relax the boundaries of your mind; your consciousness opens deeply into your personal unconscious and even further into the collective psyche. It's natural as you go deeper, and I began to have insights of humanity poised on a global death and rebirth process. This death-rebirth dynamic, that meditators experience individually, seemed to be fermenting within history on a communal scale. This was a surprise, but it led me to understand that at this point in history, the project is to give birth to a new kind of human—a future human or Homo spiritualis. It's a new form, a revolution causing a shift so that children born after this pivot function within a different psyche. This shifted psyche takes place over decades, not overnight. I received teachings explaining reincarnation's role in this—introducing the concept of the diamond soul, an integration of all our former lives into a unity, leading to an exponential explosion of insight and compassion. We'll talk about where reincarnation is taking humanity and the mechanisms behind the turmoil of our times. I found these teachings deeply reassuring amidst growing darkness and chaos, giving me strength. That's what I'll share next.

Emmy Vadnais: I look forward to the conversation about the future human. Anything else about collective karma and reincarnation today?

Chris Bache: I'll share one experience from "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." Late in my journey, about fifteen years in, I had gone through multiple layers of death into deeper realms and experienced humanity as a single organism, undergoing reincarnation and development as a species. I saw humanity experiencing perpetual development, integrating more spiritual reality into lives—a profound, uplifting, yet devastating experience. From one perspective, generations were sacrificed in this transformation, holding the ruthlessness of Kali, the destroyer. Yet, this is a role we voluntarily took on as our offering to creative intelligence. It was a hard and magnificent lesson. Individually and collectively, we're moving together through this transition, ultimately toward something magnificent. I'm not sure how I'll discuss this without tears at our next talk.

Emmy Vadnais: Oh, I teared up a few times today and when reading your book, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." It's deeply moving. I look forward to more. Chris Bache, thank you for this incredible conversation. I hope many find it insightful and uplifting on this shared journey of life.

Chris Bache: Thank you, Emmy. It's been a real pleasure and an honor. Thank you.

Emmy Vadnais: My pleasure as well. For those watching or listening, thank you for being with us. You are the reason we are here.