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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Collective Karma and Reincarnation with Chris Bache
01:42:38
Collective Karma and Reincarnation with Chris Bache Chris Bache, PhD, is professor emeritus in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio where he taught for 33 years.
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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. We all have to be safe before we die or something like this. That doesn't make nearly as much sense as we are developing. Flower Garden we are different types of flowers which are developing and emerging over large periods of time.
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Keep watching to learn more. Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
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New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here we we are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.edu thinking allowed conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Foreign.
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B
Hello and welcome. I'm Emmy Vadnais, co host with Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is Collective Karma and Reincarnation with my guest Chris Baish, 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 author of four books, Life Cycles, Reincarnation and the Web of Life, Dark Night, early dawn, the Living Classroom, Teaching and Collective Consciousness and LSD in 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.
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A
Thank you Emmy. It's wonderful to be in conversation with you.
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B
This is our second interview together, although we also had a live stream. And in that first conversation we talked about your great book LSD in the Mind of the Diamonds from Heaven. And 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. And today we're going to explore the notion that it sounds like you came to an understanding of that we all have our own individual or personal karma and that we do reincarnate for the collective good or benefit of all toward what you describe as the future human. Yeah, to get us started how did you become interested in this topic of personal, but also collective karma and reincarnation?
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A
Well, the first book I wrote as an academic was Life Cycles, Reincarnation and the Web of Life. So I was interested in reincarnation. Early in my career, I encountered Ian Stevenson's research at the University of Virginia. At about the same time, I encountered Stan Grof's research in his book Realms of the Human Unconscious. So I really. I took in Stevenson's research, you know, deeply. And I began to see the world in a way that 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 continuation of lives lived in the past and is leading towards lives in the future. So I began to study the evidence for reincarnation, and I studied a lot of past life therapy cases. And I began to sort of 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. And those transfer into subsequent former lives, not in a simple or simplistic way, but in a very complex and subtle way that 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. So 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 that was elaborated. I had numerous experiences of former lives. And the reality of reincarnation is just a fact of life was presented as kind of 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 of so far is all on the level of personal karma. You know, personal cause and effect, personal choice conditionings transferred from lifetime to lifetime. But in the process of doing the psychedelic exploration, I also dropped in, 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 that I dropped into levels of reality, of conscious reality, where the working unit was not an individual human being, but the working unit was an entire species. And I began to have experiences that were working themselves out in my individual psychedelic sessions that were not personal. They were really focused on collective dynamics. So that I describe in a chapter called the Ocean of Suffering. Entering into what I later came to understand were memory matrices held in the collective psyche of all the suffering that members of its species had experienced if it was unresolved by the time they died. Memories of war, of killing, of rape, of pain, drought, incest, just lots and lots of painful memories. And I began to understand that just as the individual can be burdened by their past trauma, the psyche of this, of the collective consciousness of our species is likewise burdened by its collective trauma. And then so that led to a deepening of an understanding about the relationship of individual and collective karma, individual karma and collective karma. That really is the fundamental theme of my second book, Dark Night, early dawn, that has to do with examining that when you go very, very deep, that boundary between the individual and the collective dissolves. And it leads to a much more dynamic relationship between what's happening in our individual lives and what's happening in this life of the species of which we are part. And that of course, is contextualized within the life of the planet, the life of the galaxy, so on and so forth. And so I just had many experiences of being initiated into the life of our species at a collective level. So I dissolved, not like into the mystical state of oneness with God, but before getting to that, I dissolved into the consciousness of our species and I began to have experiences of how the species is evolving through collective karma and collective reincarnation. And individuals within that matrix are evolving through individual karma and individual reincarnation.
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B
Before we go any further, I know we mentioned this in our previous interview. You we are not suggesting that people engage in LSD per se in order to have these same experiences.
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A
Yeah.
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B
It's not necessary, right. For a person to get in touch with these parts of themselves to use those substances necessarily.
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A
Absolutely. I mean, what I did was illegal. I did it because I felt that it was wrong for these important mind opening drugs to be made illegal. But I would never recommend that anyone else break the law. And there are other techniques that we can use in order to get access to these deep levels of consciousness. This is simply just one of the ways that I entered into this domain. I also did three years of hypnotherapy exploring my own former lives in that process had nothing to do with any psychedelics at all.
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B
You have a whole career as a professor of philosophy of religion. What can you share with us about the spiritual evidence, if you will? And then we can go to the scientific evidence as well for reincarnation.
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A
Well, I start on the empirical side. I found Ian Stevenson's work intellectually and philosophically compelling. He and his teams have done research and contacted thousands of children around the world who have spontaneous memories of their most immediate previous life. And he was able to document those memories, sufficient detail to be, I think, intellectually credible and overwhelmingly providing overwhelming evidence that reincarnation is just a fact of life. Then later, when I began to study a past life therapy literature, and I began to watch and work with people who had experience helping people remember their deep past in order to heal, but also in order to bring forward consciously the many gifts that are stored in their past. Because not all. You know, we have a tendency to think that we inherit mostly problems from our past, but that's not true. We inherit all the, all the pluses, all the benefits, all the, the hard work that they've done in certain areas. In my meditation, I began to experience the boundaryless nature of consciousness itself. I knew that there were dimensions of my mind, my consciousness, that were transpersonal, that went beyond my personal identity. And then when I went into deeper psychedelic work, I had many experiences which showed me that reincarnation is simply true. It's just a fact of life. And Stevenson's evidence is, is really, really important, but it's the tip of the iceberg, because by itself, his evidence does not give us a comprehensive picture of how reincarnation works, how the universe is working in reincarnation. And there's so much we don't know. I mean, I want to say up front, we don't have any idea of what the physics of the soul is. We don't know how consciousness leaves at death and, and brings all the memories forward. We don't really understand the physics of how that consciousness reintegrates with another incarnation, how its store of knowledge interacts with or interfaces with genetic conditions, genetic and social conditions. There's so much that we don't know. There's a lot to be learned with research ahead. But experientially, when you remember your previous lives and when you run deep into the fabric of life so that you begin to understand that our entire species is reincarnating generation by generation. It's not just individuals who are living and growing. The entire species is living and growing collectively in that process. It's just there's theory and then there's direct experience. And in this case, theory and direct experience reinforce each other.
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B
Yes. In your experiences, using LSD and other forms of substances to take you deeper beyond your personal self, you described how you really felt, a sense of oneness. And can you kind of recap that a little bit for us or for those who might be new to your story?
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A
Yeah, this is a deeper theme than simply the theme of reincarnation. So let's go there and then we can bring it back into reincarnation however you would like. The truth of reincarnation is a truth that we are an evolving consciousness over a large, large swath of time. But there, there are many other truths. And one of the other truths is if we ask, where did we come from and what are we? And in essence, underneath all this social conditioning and psychological conditioning, what are we? And there, the spiritual traditions are very clear and they speak with one voice, that the essence of the individual is the essence of the totality, that we are at core, the essence. Our essence is the essence of the divine or the essence of God, if you use that language. And so that's another truth. And then you go deeper into that, you realize that what your essence is is the same as the essence of every living thing in this world, every inanimate, so called inanimate thing. So that when that happens, when that opens, there's a profound feeling of oneness that you know, in a sense, self dissolves in the sense of there being a boundary, a firm boundary between self and other that disappears. And one experiences the marvelous miracle of life living and breathing as one. You are just part of life. It's surrounding you. There's a profound feeling of intimacy, kinship, those graces of being touched by oneness, they can change your life forever because it shows you a truth, that even if you can't sustain that experience, you've seen the truth, you know the truth of it, you can use that truth to guide your life. It leads you to become more compassionate with people. It leads you to become more compassionate with yourself. You always are kind of spontaneously looking out for the good of the whole. That's the natural outcome of experiencing oneness, is compassion. That's why in the mystical traditions, wisdom, insight and compassion move hand in hand. The deeper you experience oneness, the more compassionate you become.
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B
Can you describe a little bit about your own personal experience of that oneness and what that was like for you?
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A
That's a challenging question. Because to answer your question, I have to remember, and to remember, I have to sink into the memory. Otherwise it's just a reading of headlines of it. And that, that takes a little time. But working within the restrictions we have, one of the things I learned is oneness is not like a switch that goes on and off. But there are many degrees of oneness. There are many stages of initiation into oneness. One can have a perception of oneness. One can touch the edges of oneness and feel the truth of oneness in the world. But then you can go deeper into actually kind of dissolving into the quantum structure, if you will. I'm using that metaphorically of oneness. It's a deeper immersion in the living totality of life. It's challenging because at least what I've learned is that deeper states of consciousness exist at higher levels of energy. So the deeper you're going into a reality in consciousness. You're going into a higher and higher and higher level of energy. So oneness with the totality, or oneness with the divine. Is an extremely intense state of consciousness and state of energy to move into. And in my case, I approached it through going through years and years of very intense purifications in my psychedelic sessions. When that oneness, when you're graced with the. An opening into oneness. It's like the entire world comes alive in a new way. And it's like there's a song in the world that you maybe hadn't heard before, but it's always been there. There is a joy and a falling away of all forms of loneliness. And a birthing into an exquisite spiritual intimacy. I should say an intimacy which is both spiritual and physical. Because it overflows in compassion towards the world. And it also overflows in homecoming. A feeling of homecoming to one's essential nature, one's essential being. And it's like, finally I found you. Or finally I've been found by you. And then it's just, how deep do you want to go? How deep into the oneness of existence do you dare to go? And I think if one goes too fast, it becomes very challenging and difficult. It takes time to assimilate oneness. And then it takes time after you've had the experience to. To know what to do with it, to try to. We talk about integrating our psychedelic experiences. And I'm thinking in many ways that we don't really understand yet. How these profound experiences are impacting our psychological development, our psycho spiritual development. Because indigenous people have been having these experiences for millennia, of course. But we in the west are relatively new to cultivating these experiences. And so we're taking all of our learning and all of our scientific knowledge and all of our, you know, high academic knowledge into these states. And in some ways, we're like the first generation to combine everything that we have learned about the world from science and critical analysis. And now entering into these deep, deep states of consciousness. And we're holding memories that very few people in History have tried to hold. We're holding memories of a profound transcendence, profound intimacy with the divine, profound transcendence of time moving into deep time, permutations of time moving into cosmic void experiences. And those are living memories. I mean I can tell you what I was doing on a particular day in a particular year 30 years ago. They're very specific and I remember them the way that most people remember their 50th birthday party. You can just remember it. But how those experiences which are so transcendent, how they are impacting us and infusing themselves deeper into our being, I think we're just beginning to map some of those processes.
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B
From those experiences. It sounds like you had a more personal insight into how everything that each of us perceivedly, individually do think, feel impacts the oneness.
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A
Yes. Think of it this way. Let's take any of the list of negative qualities that we have personally that we're bothered by and we would like to get rid of and we would like to transform, et cetera, et cetera. None of those are private. All of these are part of a social configuration. Any problem we have personally is part of a social problem. It's part of a cultural problem. So where is the line between solving my personal issue and the society solving its collective issue? Now we in classically, in Western thought, we have thought we're all individual monads. We can't communicate with each other. We're all separate self contained egoic structures. So we're kind of, we may be one in aggregate, but we're really just a whole bunch of people shoved up against each other. And we each to have our own individual experience. But I don't think that's the way it works. At least that's not what I was shown. What I have experienced is that each human being is a cell in the tissue of humanity. Every mind is a light, a cell of light in the fabric of human consciousness. And even our bodies are cells within the body of humanity as a whole. And that just as we don't none of our problems or issues or virtues, we arrive at them individually, we kind of arrive at them together. Collectively, they're part of an historical landscape, part of a cultural landscape. Also when we solve our problems, when we have spiritual breakthroughs, when we have psychological breakthroughs, those breakthroughs radiate out into the world and they touch lives. Now that's all spiritual traditions have recognized this. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu traditions have recognized this collective nature. But one of the ways I experienced it, as kind of empirically demonstrated, was in my classroom. Because all the years when I was working very intensely with psychedelics, I was working very privately. And because they were illegal, I couldn't talk about it. And I never talked to my students about my own personal psychedelic practice. But what I found over time was that my psychedelic practice was impacting my students. And I began to have experiences or have access to their minds in a way that was showing me that my individual process of transformation was radiating out and influencing other people's processes of self transformation. And this I was completely. I didn't expect this at all. And it took me a while, took me years, really, to understand what was happening. Until eventually I wrote my book, the Living Classroom, which has now just come out in a new edition, which. Where I can explicitly say that the practices that I was doing which was driving this kind of collective awakening in my classroom was a psychedelic practice primarily. But it was showing me that truly we are in a boundaryless condition. Not just in high, subtle, mystical states of awareness, but we are in a boundaryless condition all the time. That we are always. There's an always a porosity, an interconnectedness between what's going on in our life and what's going on in the world around us. So that I think we have more and more reason to believe that when we live our life well and when we rise to the challenges that are presented to us in life, whatever they are, whether they're surgical, political, social activists, meditative, psychological, whatever the artistic, whatever those breakthroughs are, that those breakthroughs have a nourishing effect on everyone around us.
- [26:11]
B
Among the world's spiritual traditions and religions, some of them are advocates or proponents of reincarnation. They just take it as a given, it's natural. And then there are other religions and practices where some have suggested that has been removed from those religious practices. And I'm just wondering if you can comment about that, because there are people who might adhere to a particular religion where they have been taught, sure, reincarnation just does not exist. And in fact, you have one shot to get it right, and that's it. You're either going to go to heaven or hell or maybe purgatory if you don't. If you really screw it up, you could also go there.
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A
Yeah, isn't that interesting? It's interesting. You know, religions have many levels to them. There's kind of the exterior, lay level of religion, and then there's the esoteric, mystical, high, deep, spiritual practitioner level of religion. And what we find is that some religions, like the religions of the East, Buddhism, Hinduism, even Daoism, they. They naturally affirm reincarnation. But even in the west, where reincarnation is not absorbed into the primary religions, it's often present in the mystical branch of that religion. So that in Judaism, Judaism doesn't affirm reincarnation. Rabbinic Judaism doesn't at a collective level. But Hasidism, the mystical tradition, in Judaism it does. And likewise in Islam, traditional mainstream Islam does not place any emphasis on reincarnation. But mystical Islam, the Sufi tradition, does affirm reincarnation. With Christianity, it's a little more complicated because Christianity tended to execute any of its mystics who were affirming reincarnation. There were have been crusades, of course, against the Cathars and others. When we look back at the history of Christianity, it appears that reincarnation was taught by certain early sects within Christianity. And it was taught in what later came to be called Gnostic sects, which were then delivered, decided to be heretical and not accepted. But it was, you know, it was taught as a standard kind of operating interpretation of Christianity for hundreds of years. But then as the ecclesiastical church began to consolidate itself under the. Remember the background this around 3rd, 4th century AD under the falling of the collapse of the Roman Empire and a really disintegration of order at the social level, the church really believed that its survival depended upon a strong ecclesiastical center. And reincarnation gave too much autonomy to individuals to work out their own reincarnation. And so a particular council was held and there was a decision that reincarnation was not going to be included as an acceptable form of Christianity, particularly for this particular reason. I think it's not that it's incompatible with the teaching of Jesus. They never said that it was incompatible. It's that it gives too much autonomy. It undermines the primacy of ecclesiastical authority in the Church. Now, that may have been helpful for Christianity at that time. It may have helped Christianity survive the Dark ages that followed. But now that we have reincarnation evidence coming forward from scholarly sources, there is nothing in Christianity that prohibits Christians from reassessing that old teaching and looking at it anew. We know that from several national surveys that approximately 25% of American Catholics believe in reincarnation. And it's about the same number for Protestants, 26% for Protestants. And so clearly, 25% of Catholics aren't waiting for a papal encyclical saying that reincarnation is okay to accept. In fact, the largest chapter I have in my book in Life Cycles is a chapter on reincarnation. And Christianity where I. Because most of my students who I was teaching at this state university, they came out of Christian backgrounds. They were also trained to follow the evidence, to believe. Let your beliefs be guided by the evidence. So they were having evidence of reincarnation presented to them, and yet their religious tradition said that evidence can't be true. But they saw the quality of the evidence. And in this chapter, I'm basically sharing my experiences with students, helping them understand how they can reevaluate reincarnation and what a reincarnationist Christianity might look like. And I outline a minimal option and a maximal option, but trying to show the way in which you can affirm deep Christian values and even dogma and incorporate a reincarnation element. And it makes things make more sense, you know, because the. The real delament of Western theology, which believes, or Christian theology, which believes in a one time through metaphysics, is, is that it makes life radically inexplicable. Why do some people have so much and some people have so little? Why are some people so burdened with pain and suffering and some people just have so much ease in their lifetime? And ultimately this gets thrown into an inscrutable God, a God that makes no sense whatsoever. We just can't understand it. We just have to live it and abide by its jurisdiction and. And hopefully things will work out well. But when you open up to a reincarnational perspective, suddenly certain possibilities emerge and things begin to make more sense. And suddenly the inscrutability is not God's inscrutability. It's an inscrutability that is introduced by believing something which isn't true, and that is that we live on life only once. Now, let's be careful. We have to say these things carefully. Chris Bache only lives once. The soul, which Chris Bache is part of that soul, lives more than once. So, you know, you just have to, you know, say things carefully to make your points clear.
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B
Yeah. The personality or the identity of Chris Bache or Emmy Vadnais lives once. However, the soul that is our consciousness, our energy, or animates us, or however you term that, lives on, perhaps forever lives on.
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A
That's right. It's like each personality, each incarnation, is a facet of the diamond. The diamond lives forever. The facet doesn't necessarily live forever. Well, it lives forever in the diamond, but the diamond lives forever. Yeah.
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B
The story of Jesus's death, where he rises on the third day, some have suggested that is really a metaphor for reincarnation.
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A
It's an interesting question, and I have an appendix in life cycles where I address interpretations which. Certain interpretations of certain biblical passages which have been offered to suggest that Jesus himself believed in reincarnation. You know, we get into a real biblical studies, you know, rabbit hole on that one. Yeah, yeah. And my sense is that I don't think there's compelling evidence that he did teach reincarnation, but there certainly is very strong evidence that his teaching is compatible with reincarnation.
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B
Yeah, I mention it because it is a very significant holiday, Easter, for many Christians and Catholics.
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A
My first love, my first academic pursuit was in New Testament studies and I learned Greek and Hebrew and I really was going to become a New Testament scholar, but I changed and shifted later on, but up and through my masters, I was doing biblical studies work. We learned that the oldest gospel, Mark's Gospel, does not have a resurrection, does not have an empty tomb scene in it. In fact, it. It ends with death and the. The power. The influence of the story of the resurrection was so strong from the later gospels, Matthew, Luke and John, that there was an actual. A new ending added in the last chapter of Mark's Gospel to include that kind of experience. I think that when we ask historically what is the deepest level of experience that may lie behind the belief in the resurrection of. I think it is the experience that Jesus followers experienced him as being alive, even though he was dead. He was alive and therefore death is conquered. Christian theology tended to interpret that in unique terms that made Jesus's survival of death somehow unique. And he was uniquely the son of God and uniquely sharing this gift with humanity who accepts it on faith. That would be. That's one way of interpreting. And another way of interpreting is that what he's showing us is a universal truth, that when we die, we are still alive. You know, that there's a larger dynamic.
- [36:03]
B
Unfolding here going back to the oneness that physics shows seems to be a reality with quantum entanglement. Some people really embrace that, find it beautiful, such as yourself. I think it's quite beautiful. Although there are probably people listening to this thinking, well, I don't want to be a part of that other individual or. And I know it's not just humans, there's also creatures and animals and bacteria that we're all a part of as well. I'm wondering if you want to comment on. On those thoughts.
- [36:43]
A
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 that we are. I understand the kind of fear and reflex to draw back and say, not me, you know, that that doesn't work. And that's an understandable, it's a 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 have get glimpses what's going on behind the scenes. And we look at not just a few of them, but look at 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 look at the, you know, the, the demonstrated continuity between lives and the richness which 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 did this come from, where did this body, mind come from? And we trace its long evolutionary pedigree back through its physical pedigree on the emergence of our beautiful body. And it turns out that the mind has a similar elegant, magnificent pedigree reaching back through time. And 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 which actually affirms the individual very deeply, but it contextualizes the individual within a webwork of interconnections which is larger than the individual, which we draw from and we give back to. Just as a leaf draws energy from the tree and gives back energy to the tree. And that just, it becomes a natural way of seeing things. It's just a. It's an easy secondary way of seeing things. And I'm glad the physicists have jumped on with quantum physics and unified systems theory and all those good things. But fundamentally this can be an experiential thing that when we quiet our mind, when we calm our heart and we enter into deeper states of self aware stillness, then there are perceptions, there are instincts which are usually so subtle that we don't notice them. But in the space of a quiet meditative mind, these things make themselves felt. And when these arise, you begin to realize that it's like they're threads that connect us to other people's lives. Then 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.
- [40:14]
B
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 and followed up with a where she had a stroke and the left side of her brain went offline and she only had the right side of her brain.
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A
And.
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B
And she talked about how she felt this merging of oneness and could even sense the energy that people were bringing into her space even if they were just visiting for less than. No less than five minutes. And she wrote a follow up book about whole brain living because she wanted to share with people how they can also have these experiences as well.
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A
Yeah.
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B
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?
- [41:18]
A
Well, that's a large question. So let me just start with how it impacted me and share with you maybe some of how it impacts the students that I've shared these ideas with, you know, for 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 that we know how to do that no one ever taught us or we have aptitudes towards certain types of activities that are different from everyone else in our family. Some people are oriented towards private intellectual chess, like games. And other people like full contact rugby, social things. There's all these differences. Some people have tremendous capacity to create in art and music. And other people are writers. Where do those come from? Where do those qualities and traits come from? And classically we think they come through genetic mutation. It's random, it's just accidental. There's no logic to it. You got a good luck good. You good genes good. They're great. But when you actually 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. So an interest in music begins small, but it's practice and it develops until eventually you have someone like Mozart who's writing concertos when he's six years old. So everything which is large, even in one case I'm remembering from past life cases, an ability with guns, an ability to be very facile and very quick draw came from a history of a former life of a marshal on the frontier, you know, and that makes sense. And it also is grounds for hope because it means not that we are prisoner of our past, but we operate within a context which has been shaped by our past. Within that context we make choices which then begin, they feed into the, to our future and our future lives, future. So it's a very empowering position because even though you may be temporarily burdened, if you are by something that's got a deeper history, you have the power to change your history. You have a power to exert your will and exert your choices. Make better choices or stronger, different choices and lead into a better, better future. It begins when you, when you look at the world through reincarnationist eyes, you realize that everybody's playing a different game. They're not playing your game. And if it's like I think of it like school, there are some people who are in kindergarten and first grade, some people who are in high school, some people are doing postgradu work. And that gives you tremendous permission to let people be themselves, just to let them be because they're working on their court, their rules that they're working on. Somebody else is working on a different court, different rules. And 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. We all have to be saved before we die or something like this, that doesn't make nearly as much sense as we are. We are a developing flower garden. We are different types of flowers which are developing and emerging over large periods of time. 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?
- [45:11]
B
That's a simple question.
- [45:13]
A
Simple question, but provoking, isn't it?
- [45:15]
B
Oh well, I'm joking. It's, it's profound.
- [45:17]
A
Yeah. It's like take the large perspective people. The creative intelligence of the universe thinks large, it doesn't think small. Right. And if we, we have this, the greatest thing about reincarnation is. And it's. The Hindus thought this was a burden. I mean that when they discovered reincarnation they thought, oh my God, we go round and round and round. We have to go through puberty. All these times we have to go hardship of life over and over and over again. They did not think it was a joy, they thought it was a burden. But I think we can appreciate that the greatest burden in the psyche of the modern man, modern humanity, is this idea that it's terrible idea that we are nothing more than our biology, everything mental condenses to physics. And that when the body dies, our mind disappears and dissolves. We're nothing. There's no survival of the body. Reincarnation opens this puts the myth to that. It shows us that we are developing over vast tracks of time. And that allows us to elevate our assessment of what the purpose of life might be. If I give an in class test, a quiz, I have a right to expect a certain set of results. If I give them an hour long test, I expect more because I've given in the more time. And if I give them a research paper, I expect more because they have more time to develop it. If the universe has a purpose, if it has a purpose, it should be proportionate to the amount of time we have to realize that purpose. If we only have one lifetime, remember for some people that's just five minutes before they're dead out of the delivery room. Sometimes it's five days. If life has a purpose, it can't be greater than the amount of time we have to realize that purpose. Okay? With reincarnation we learn that we have open ended infinite amount of time. That doesn't cause us to be lazy. Anybody who wants to say, oh, I'll just deal with it later, they're stupid. You know, they haven't really taken into how hard it is to be working here. But when we have open ended amount of time, it lifts the ceiling and it allows us to look at the beautiful pictures that come from the Hubble telescope, for example, pictures of our galaxies and nebulas and the infinite depth of the universe and to recognize that we aren't just a little bitty short, 100 year part player in this drama. We are an ancient player in this drama and, and it allows us to look at the magnificent grandeur of a galaxy and recognize that we have a meaningful part in this magnificent galaxy's unfolding of intelligence on its planets, around its suns. That changes everything, doesn't it?
- [48:19]
B
What do you feel the purpose of our individual karma is that contributes to the collective? What are we reincarnating toward?
- [48:30]
A
Well, let me kind of start with a general observation, then go to the more specific observations. What are we reincarnating toward? To me, the boundary between individual and collective has been made poor so many times that I see it as one living organism with different kind of foci of light. The individual is an individual, but it's contextualized within an individuality of a species. And our species, as a single consciousness, is an individual. I mean, it's humanity on planet Earth is different than some other species on some other planet, on some other galaxy. The mind of our species, the collective psyche, the memory of our species is unique in its history and in its components in our mind. We are part of that. So my understanding is we live in a constant dialogue, a constant transmission back and forth between the collective and the individual to the collective. So then we ask the question, okay, what are we evolving toward? Where is it taking us? And that gets us into very interesting territory. Probably the large majority of the answers that we would give that we are evolving to love or to compassion or to knowledge or something like this. Inevitably that probably is going to end up being too small. Because we're going to formulate those goals out of our particular moment in history and take something good and project it forward. But ask the same question in 5,000 years. And we'd probably give a different, richer answer. So I think the safest answers are in terms of process answers, not in terms of goal answers. I tend to think the essence of the whole process is growth and empowerment of the nature that we have. The empowerment of the form that we are. Growth. Growth toward what? That comes the tricky part. I mean, I would like to say growth towards oneness, growth towards love, growth towards wisdom, growth towards, I mean, literally intelligence, more intelligence, more aesthetic capacity, more creative capacity, more communion between human intelligence and spiritual intelligence. But those are just limited, intermediate baby steps, I think. But that there is a progression towards growth. I think we can extract from the evolutionary record and also a growth towards individuality. I think of reincarnation as a higher octave of evolution. Evolution evolves whole groups forward. It folds learning forward of whole groups. Reincarnation folds the learning forward of individuals within certain species. Nature has somehow found a way of kind of letting individuals run forward in time. Where is it going to go? Well, we've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. And a universe has been evolving for 13.7 billion years. And it's going to continue for hundreds of billions of years. Yet where are we going? I mean, what could we become if we had 10,000 years to work with? Yeah, we'll become more. I think I'm better. We'll become more in tune with reality. And I deeply mean spiritual reality. We'll become stronger because we'll be working together to solve our problems. Instead of fighting over a small plate of food.
- [52:39]
B
We'll be more how can people engage in the karmic and reincarnation process more consciously? Because I imagine there are those listening, thinking, well, I have a horrible lot in this lifetime. I don't want to be here anymore. I'm never coming back here. In fact, some people truly believe that this is a prison planet and it's run by dark forces that are trying to control us or that do control us.
- [53:06]
A
Yeah, my heart goes out to people who are suffering that much pain. I mean, I know people who are suffering that much pain. And I think inevitably, when we try to understand what's going on, inevitably we kind of project out of our own living circumstance. So if we see ourselves living on a planet that's a prison planet controlled by dark forces, I mean, I can't help but think that there is a projection of one's own psychological experience into metaphysical parameters. And I can only suggest that as you get clearer, as you go through deepening your experience of your own life through various spiritual practices, and by living as good a life as we can live, as fair and compassionate, as just and compassionate and generous a life as we can live, your mind gets clearer. The forces that constrict your life loosen and you begin to realize that all along you, in very subtle and often mysterious ways, you are controlling the flow of energy that is your life. And if you've made choices that have constricted that flow in the past, you can reverse those choices in the present. If you've had bad karma, constrictive, tight karma in the past, you can choose, begin to choose different generous karma, clear karma, and all the spiritual traditions have procedures to help you move into deeper clarity. The Buddhists start with the four Noble Truths. They start with the fundamental truths of do no harm, do no injury, right speech, right conduct, so on and so forth. Every religion has these commandments, if you will, these guidelines. How to clear your mind, how to clear your heart. As you clear your mind and clear your heart, a different picture of the universe emerges, one which is not governed by dark forces. Though clearly, if you look at certain political movements and certain social movements and movements of war and whatnot, there's a lot of darkness and there's a lot of oppressive forces, and there's a lot of greed and negativity in there. But your experience of the universe itself changes. It opens into a. A divine banquet, A wonderful mystery, but a divine banquet. And how do I connect with that? I mean, how do I begin to change my life so that I can begin to have that kind of experience? Or I Can feel that affinity with the fellow human beings who are traveling with me. This is. This is kind of like basic spirituality 101. So anything which you do which favors yourself over someone else, stop doing that. Everything you do which hurts other people around you, stop doing that. Every time you injure someone with your speech, stop doing that. And just the whole system slowly begins to calm down. And then there are other techniques which teach you how to bring your mind underneath all the turbulence that's on the surface, and we can just start to live a lifestyle which is calmer, quieter, more peaceful. Doesn't mean we're not in the world. We're in the world. We're making a living, we're doing our jobs. We have to deal with everything everybody else does. But you can engage it in a different way. And as you individually come into greater clarity, I think crystallizing around you will be opportunities of greater growth around you. We are not trapped by our karma. Karma is simply a platform. We can reach beyond our past and to create a future which may still have its own challenges, but it'll be clearer, it'll be gentler, more exciting.
- [57:28]
B
Can you share a little bit more about your understanding of karma? Because some people listening might be thinking, well, it's simply cause and effect, or maybe even a form of punishment.
- [57:40]
A
Not punishment, but certainly cause and effect. In Hindi terms, it's karma vipaka, cause and effect. And so the basic idea is this. We live an entire universe of cause and effect. Everything has cause, everything has effects. Everything. There's not a single part of this universe which doesn't have cause and effect except the. The fundamental ground state. It's all cause and effect. So we don't have any problem with that. In the scientific world, we recognize molecules, atoms, you know, movement of things. They have cause and effect, no problem. Yeah, now we get to the nub of it. The Hindus would say, and ancient traditions would say choice has cause and effect. The choices we make, which is to say we are learning systems, we are constantly learning. And when we make a choice, we are basically setting in motion a trajectory of learning. When we make a choice to push away something or to include something, to hurt or to support, we are always making choices. Those choices basically echo back around and become part of our subsequent experiences. One of the easiest ways to describe some of the logic of this, when people talk about good karma and bad karma, inheriting the consequences of the. Technically, it's the good vipaka that comes from good action, the bad vipaka that comes from bad action, bad karma. When we are experiencing these cycles. What's at the center of it is giving the human being incredible power to control their destiny. You may not be able to control it in the short term because there's so much momentum in the system. But if you begin to systematically engage the momentum of the causal forces powering, pushing your life, you can begin making clearer and clearer and clearer choices. And as you begin making clearer choices, your inner environment becomes clearer and your outer environment begins to become clearer. For Hinduism, this would be simple Dharma 101. This is just kind of how life works. We are here to grow. We are here to learn. An academic transcript is a history of grades in various courses. You could say it's karma. You make choices. You make choices to pay attention, not to pay attention. To apply yourself, not to apply yourself. You make choices. The cumulative effect of all those choices is your transcript at the end of college. Okay? It's like that in life. We're making choices constantly. There's nothing magical or infamous about karma. It's just reminding us that not only does the physical world move according to cause and effect, but our psychological world also moves according to cause and effect. And our spiritual world does too. Except that there is a depth in the spiritual level. There may be also in the quantum level as well, but there is a depth in the physical level which you discover deep inside your center that is not part of cause and effect. It's outside of cause and effect. And so the spiritual traditions make a great deal of emphasis on, of reducing the turbulence of karma, cause and effect, until one can actually experience the aspect of your own being which is free of cause and effect. It's part when they describe the one's essential nature of one's divine nature, it never begins, it never ends. It doesn't have a beginning and end. It's always present, it's always stable. Karma has beginning and end. It runs around, does all sorts, like a playground, but underneath there is this reality which has neither beginning nor end. And so spiritual practice is about living more and your more of your life from that reality rather than living your life from that turbulence. Cause and effect.
- [61:58]
B
What role do historical traumas and collective traumas play in what we're experiencing here on Earth? Of course, I know you mentioned earlier, there's a lot of pleasant attributes we bring with us as well.
- [62:13]
A
All the virtues of history are poured into us that surround us as well as all the burdens of bad choices, of history, all the sins of history. We seem to be in a very intense time now. We're Coming into a critical time in human history. We've never been here before. We've had pieces of continents in danger. But now we have an entire planet that's in danger of becoming unable to sustain our population. And we're doing it. It's human made. We're making the choices. We're causing the problem. Nature is not causing the problem. We are causing the problem. And so we seem to be in a time of increasing turbulence, disruption, chaos. We're dealing with a lot of social uncertainty and social divisiveness because many people are not clear how to face the challenges that were coming into us as a species. We know that global climate change is going to have enormous impact. We're going to be losing many, many, many lives in the near future, in the future. And this leads to uncertainty and a lot of turbulence. And if we look at this same situation from within, a deep spiritual perspective and we ask what is causing this inner turbulence? Well, we might look at, in some ways, I look towards the lives of individual mystics. When we look at the life of an individual mystic, this is well, kind of documented and testified that before the breakthrough of enlightenment, before the breakthrough of the universal one heart, we go through the dark night of the soul, we go through a period of deep, deep, intense personal cleansing. And another way of thinking about this from a reincarnational perspective is that we're cleaning the basement. All the things inside of us which are incompatible with enlightenment, all the history which has led us to have convictions and urges and whatnot, which are incompatible with universal love are being forced out of the system. And when, and in your meditation, they, the spiritual practitioners can experience that. They experience upheavals coming up from within them. Sometimes they're crying on the meditation cushion, sometimes they're feeling unspeakable rage. But the advice is always the same. Keep centered. Let it flow through you. It will pass. It will move through you. If we kind of think of the entire species as a single meditating being, I think something like this is happening. I personally think we are entering into a profoundly important, very positive turning point in human evolution, which will take us into a higher level of psychospiritual functioning at a across the board platform. For us to actualize this, for us to realize this, we have to clear ourselves of everything which is keeping us from experiencing this state right here, right now, today. And the things which are keeping us from experiencing this is all our collective karma, from collective history and all our cultural institutions and the history that we each of us carry individually and we all carry collectively together. So I think that we are actually experiencing a time of tremendous purification, tremendous kind of ex. You know, it's kind of like you have to expose the shadow before you can heal the shadow. And we are certainly exposing the shadow of humanity right now in many of the very destructive and self absorbed and injurious policies or practices that are arising in our midst. I think of this as kind of a collective purification which is part and parcel of leading into a spiritual awakening. A deep and profound spiritual awakening.
- [66:35]
B
Yes, Carl Jung and the Shadow. Focusing on our own individual shadow selves or letting ourselves maybe heal from what ails us.
- [66:50]
A
Yeah.
- [66:51]
B
What would you suggest people consider doing as far as do they primarily focus on their own selves and or assisting the collective? I mean, I understand what you're saying, that as we focus on ourselves, we're part of the collective.
- [67:09]
A
Yeah, it's a both end situation, isn't it? Because while an enlightened individual in a monastery, in a mountain with no contact in the world may have an uplifting effect on the whole and that person has that reality. Most of us live embodied in the world. And we would like to do more than have a meditative effect, uplifting the collective from the ground. We would like to do something practical. I mean, we'd like to help the world be a better place, leave it a better place before we die. We like to sort of help people in need or help to solve the problems that are endemic to our culture. If we do that or try to do that without deep inner clarity, we may get some success, but we'll also leave more damage behind too. So I think it's a both and becoming socially active to work for social clarity, social peace, and to be personally inwardly clear and at peace with oneself. I did this years and years of psychedelic practice and other spiritual practices that time. But I was always working as an academic. I was working hard at an open enrollment university and trying to raise that corner. That was my garden. That was where I worked and where I was trying to make things better. And all of my colleagues, they had their gardens, they were working to make things better in the world. And so I don't think it's an either or. I think some people are drawn more to the, this incarnation, to an individual interior project. Other people are drawn more to an exterior social project. There's not a right or wrong here. I think it's both.
- [69:04]
B
And what would you like to say to someone who may be listening, thinking, well, I'm doing my part, but that person or that group or that institution or that country is really messing things up. And they're the problem.
- [69:21]
A
Yeah, and they may be. And there are certainly people, other players in the world besides ourselves, and they're doing bad things in the world. Any right thinking person would want to try to mitigate those bad things. If we see someone beating a child, naturally we try to intervene, to stop without thinking. We just, we do it to protect the child. But at a deeper level, a sort of a more philosophical level, one of the things that comes with the reincarnational worldview and understanding the deep, deep forces that guide people's lives and set up circumstances is it's an absolute waste of time to be envious of someone else's good fortune. You should never judge someone else's bad fortune. We don't know what got them there. We don't know whether this is a saint or a sinner. It could be a sinner inheriting bad karma, or it could be a saint who's taken on hard somebody else's bad karma. We don't know. Best to take care of your own shop. Best to do the very, very best you can with the circumstances in which you find yourselves in. Because there's meaning and intention in those circumstances. Engage that part of the outside world which is yours to engage. A lot of it is recognizing that people are at different stages of their life, their soul's life, and we have to stand the ground that we need to stand. But most of our judgments aren't about standing ground. It's just being judgmental in a way that creates more barriers that only have to be taken down later. Judgments are barriers. You know, there's a way in which we can draw conclusions, but without living within the harsh boundaries of judgments.
- [71:17]
B
You know, 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?
- [71:31]
A
Yeah, I think we are going through something like that. You know what happens when people have a, a near fatal accident and we, we know that when they, they're in, their mind speeds up. They become able to, to do physical things that they would never have dreamed that they could do. If they're falling off a mountain, they can take, you know, action along the way and the mind speeds up and often the heart opens. The mind opens, one begins, enters into transcendent spaces under the pressure of almost dying. Now it's not being alarmist to say that we are going into a near extinction event on this planet. The crises which have only now just beginning to start are going to be getting worse. And everything we're doing in this country, I'm afraid politically is going to make that crisis, that confrontation with the planet's limits, even harder and more severe. So clearly we're going into very, very difficult and challenging times. And there are some very smart people, good, clear thinking people who basically have concluded that's it, humanity is toast, we're living on extended time, there's no reversing this process, we're going to go extinct, we're going to die. We just don't know it yet. But if you look at the statistics, you look at the information, you look at the patterns, we're going extinct. I personally don't think we are going extinct, but I don't believe that like on rational calculus grounds. I believe it because of my spiritual experiences that we do make it through this crisis. But it clearly is going to be a planet changing crisis. It's going to be a civilization changing crisis. It's going to be a near death experience of our culture, of our life on this planet. And we might learn something about what might happen during it if we study people, individuals who have had near death experiences. So I think we are, I think things are speeding up, I think things are becoming dire. I think there are fewer and fewer innocent decisions. Every decision has infinite ramifications. I think we're coming into a make or break point. This is, we're coming into a point of grow up or die. And the threat of extinction is a tremendous evolutionary accelerator. And I think we're coming into a time where we're beginning to realize that if we don't change our practices, we're going to lose our life on this planet. And that core deep down inside this transformation that's required is not simply a transformation of politics or economics or industrial production or agricultural. It's not that primarily it is fundamentally a crisis of consciousness. It is the structure of human consciousness that has gotten us into this mess. It's the limitations of ego, the loneliness, the self centeredness of our so called cut off ego that has led us into these dead end scenarios of just consuming more and more and more, but not experience any satisfaction that really gives us any deep true psychospiritual nourishment. We either make it through this crisis or we go extinct. I personally, because that's the visions I've been given, I think we make it through. My concern is how many of our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to die before we make it through. That's my major concern.
- [75:26]
B
There may be those Listening, thinking, well, 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?
- [75:57]
A
Yeah, boy, that's a hard question. You're asking hard questions today because 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 damn hard? Why do we suffer so much? Why didn't somebody give us an instruction manual, you know, help us do better? Why is it so hard? And we get angry at the divine intelligence, and we say we think we could do it better. If I were doing this universe, I could design a better universe. There wouldn't be as much suffering. You know, we'd do it differently. But all of that assumes that we know what is being built. We judge from the context of our own historical position, and we make judgments about what a good humanity would look like, or what a spiritually realized humanity would look like, or just what a peaceful humanity would look like. And this is how we could build toward that. 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 really just meditate on what astrophysics has taught us and astronomy has taught us the landscape of creation is vast and magnificent. So we have to genuinely ask ourselves, okay, what is this intelligence creating in this species? What is the project? Where are we going? What might we become? And if we expand in even lightly 100,000 years, which is a, a second in cosmic time, even if we imagine what would be the best that we could become in a hundred thousand years, we might begin to 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 get comfortable and be a happy human being as we are and live, eat and die would be okay. But maybe that's not the agenda of existence at all, of the creative intelligence. And I don't mean to treat people suffering cavalierly. I truly do not mean so. I mean, it's all great respect to those who suffer honestly. But suffering in some ways in our time 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, it's because the house is unfinished. It's not because there's any structural design flaw in the house. The house is just not finished. 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 a hundred thousand years ago into what we are in the process of becoming. Deep. 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 so clearly and strongly that we can 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 so resistance to this subtle manipulation. We are just getting started in basically exploring the potential of our consciousness to keep this system healthy and strong and some of the suffering of disease. It's just an unfinished business. We haven't gotten to the point where we can control ourselves that much. Our knowledge has not expanded yet to be able to supplement what we can do with our mind. There's just so much which is unfinished. So before we kind of take over control and blame God for doing such a mess up, we might examine our own assumptions of what the. What the purpose of the project is, what the goal of the project is.
- [80:23]
B
Because you're a man of deep philosophy and religious and spiritual studies. I know you mentioned this in your book in our previous conversation. And since you brought up God, can you briefly mention your relationship to that term?
- [80:41]
A
I was raised in a Catholic tradition. I was studying to be a priest in the early years for four years. I have learned a lot in watching religions coming to existence. And in some ways, dogma is kind of like sausage. You never want to see one being made, you know, because it's. It may look good on the outside, but boy, a whole lot of personality gets involved in the forging of dogma in history, you know, so it's a sobering experience to truly watch how exit religions come into existence. And so I've learned just from the study of history that one of the most dangerous things that a human being can say is, I know what God wants you to do. You should do this, you know, and there's so many limitations, cultural limitations, historical limitations that are built into God vocabulary to the God language, that I prefer not to use that term. But. And I would talk about the divine, but even the divine is super loaded with historical associations. And so the. In the Title of my book on psychedelic work is LSD in the Mind of the Universe. And I chose not to kind of concretize that with an image of divinity because I see those images of divinity as so historically conditioned that they weren't large enough to envision what I was trying to describe. Now we have a sense of how vast the universe is. We count its distance in light years. And each light year is 6 million million miles. And we count it in terms of multiple thousands of light years. And then to imagine that there is a mind which is as large as this universe is large, and then to try to fathom what that mind might be like and then to take a journey in which you self initiate into the edges of that vast, expensive mind. Several things kind of happen, or at least happen 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 so powerful and so magnificent and so beautiful that it. I call it my beloved. It's just. It is a love relationship with life, with this deeper intelligence embedded in life. Now, I sometimes talk about the divine as I have here, and sometimes I'll even talk about God if I feel that the context is clear, that I'm not using those terms in their conventional references, but I'm using to point to what those terms point to. Ideally, this infinitely large horizon, this expanse, this beauty, this knowledge, this genius. We're talking about cosmic genius in this universe. The hardest thing that I found in negotiating all of my psychedelic work was not what happened in that journey during the sessions. The hardest part came when I ended that journey. And everything was fine, everything was good. There was no trauma. I had had been given many, many gifts of intimacy with the divine. But then when I withdrew and I stepped out of it and I was no longer making contact, experiential contact, with that deeper reality. For reasons that I explained in the book, it was the loss of contact with my beloved. Even though I knew the beloved was always here, I knew that it was only my own blinders which were keeping me from experiencing it. I knew it was always the warp and woof of reality that I was embedded in. But the intensity of being dissolved into the body of light that is the underlying light of universe. It caused such a deep sadness, a deep withdrawal. It was very difficult. And it really took me about 10 years after I stopped my sessions to really get fully grounded and committed to living in this earth on its terms again. I give you that anecdote just to say that my journey into the divine had many stages and many layers over many years. I would not trade any of those days for any treasures on earth. And learning how to live without the constant immersion or the repetitive re. Immersion into those treasures has been a real learning exercise for me. That it continues.
- [85:46]
B
Yeah, Chris, how do you suggest or what do you recommend are ways that people can explore themselves, get in touch with the deeper creative intelligence inside of them to be able to move that karmic part of them forward? Are there any particular practices that are maybe outside or part of psychedelics that can assist people listening?
- [86:19]
A
There's so many practices because what we're talking about is spirituality. And the Christians have an approach to spirituality. The Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, they have an approach to spirituality with a lot of common ground. But it's no secret, and now we live in a time in history where these previously secret teachings are now available on every street corner. You know, after China invaded Tibet, lineage holders of this tremendous ancient spiritual lineage have now flooded into the Western countries and, and we have centers throughout the United States and Europe. We're talking about basic spiritual practices. We're also talking about maybe psychotherapeutic practices. We're basically using a psychotherapeutic approach to heal some of the surface wounds of the. Of the heart. My first sitter was my wife, Carol, and she's clinical psychologist. And she never did a psychedelic session. It wasn't her cup of tea. She really found everything she needed on her meditation cushion.
- [87:23]
B
And just to clarify, by sitter you mean the person who was with you during your LSD sessions?
- [87:29]
A
Yeah, she was. She was my sitter and holding the fort while I was in my LSD sessions and she was managing them with music and whatnot. She never wanted to sit her, wanted to do a session herself. She has subsequently gone on to complete her three year, three month, three day solar retreat in the Vajrayana tradition. She's been made and recognized as a lama within her community. And she has a very, very rich interior life. We're friends and it didn't involve psychedelics at all. So there's so many, there's so many lineages of spiritual teachings. There's Celtic lineages, so many Native American lineages. There's South American lineages, there are the Ayahuasca traditions, There are some psychedelic shamanic traditions that are entering our country strongly now. There are everyday wisdom traditions that are available in abundance at any bookstore, at any airport. Sounds true. And this program is an example of inner teachings being made publicly available. Even if I started a list, it would be just a fraction of what's really available. We can find the practices that can help us live a calmer, quieter, more centered, richer life. You know, those are available and the practices which are taught are pretty much the same. First kindness, non injury, simplicity, voluntary simplicity, centering stillness, social kindness, social being good to people. And it's a long road and it's not a road which is going to be traveled in any one lifetime. So this is a road that's going to be traveled over many lifetimes. But every lifetime can get better than the life before it.
- [89:34]
B
We've also touched on the shadow part in addition, and kind of building on what you just shared. How much of a role, does having a good time, joy, love, following your own bliss or creativity play a role in a person's karma and reincarnation?
- [89:55]
A
Yeah, it certainly does. I mean, it's just part of the fabric. I think because we learn about reincarnation from reading the books from therapists, we have a tendency to cast the thinking about reincarnation in a negative light because people go to therapists who are in pain. But if you are exceptionally brilliant, creative composer, you know, you can explore that dimension of your life and find and trace the roots of your love of music. And you'll find that it goes deeper than this present lifetime. All of our past gives us all of our virtues and all of our vices. And we honor existence by accepting the virtues, building on them, and then working to reduce the vices, to unlock them and let them go.
- [90:52]
B
What role does self love play in, in this process?
- [90:58]
A
Oh, how can you be in love? How can you love the world if you don't love yourself? It's one of the things that came real clear into some of my teachings that if you're going to become one with God, if you're going to become one with all of life, you must become one with yourself. And therefore, when you try to become one with God, one with the universe, everything which is incompatible with becoming one with yourself is forced to the surface. So all of your injuries, all of your trauma, all of your self defeating habits and behaviors, these are all shoved to the surface right inside you, right in front of you. So self love, self acceptance is absolutely critical, but not superficial. Self love, real deep self love, love that's willing to take on the shadow love, which is willing to love that shadow until that shadow becomes a baby in your arms and you take care of it and nurture it. You know, the deep love, really deep, the type of love a mother has for her child. That love is the type of love we have to have for ourself. And so we can handle. We can clean anything that needs to be cleaned in it.
- [92:20]
B
Unconditional love and unconditional acceptance. And love covers a multitude of sins.
- [92:30]
A
Well, let's say it compensates, doesn't it?
- [92:35]
B
Chris, you've shared so much today about collective karma and reincarnation. And I know we're going to have another conversation about the birth of a future human that you discovered in your LSD sessions. And I'm wondering if you want to just touch on that a little bit to prime us for our next conversation and what that's about.
- [92:58]
A
I'd love to. One of the surprises for me in my psychedelic work, because I began this work adopting a model of transformation, the model of personal transformation, which is pretty widespread in the transpersonal community, that when you do these practices is it's about personal transformation, personal awakening, personal healing, personal enlightenment. And one of the surprises for me has been how much of my work didn't seem to be about me personally at all. It was about collective, and it was collective dynamics. And my love for myself expanded to embrace the love of my people and the love of my planet and the love of all the beings on the planet. So it just wasn't about me personally. As that deepened over the years, I began to be initiated into a series of visions where it was not about my spiritual evolution. It was about the spiritual evolution of humanity, where humanity was going. And this is. This is. I just want to emphasize this is an utterly natural phenomenon, our individual mind. When we relax the boundaries of our individual mind, our consciousness opens and deep into our personal unconscious. But as you keep clearing and you keep relaxing, it opens up into this underlying field that Jung called the collective psyche. And it's just natural that when you go deeper into that collective psyche and even pushing through it to the matrix underneath that, that you inherit insights into what's going on in the life of this being. We count our lives in years, it counts its life in millennia, right? So it's just. It opens up naturally. And I began to have insights of humanity poised on the edge of a global death and rebirth process. That what I had experienced as death and rebirth and what every meditator experiences in terms of death and rebirth on the meditation cushion that there was actually now fermenting within history a death and rebirth dynamic that was so large, so powerful, it was carrying all of humanity in its grip. This was a surprise, an absolute surprise to me. But it led me to have a Certain understanding that the project of history at this point, I think a way of summing up a project is to give birth to a new kind of human being. The giving birth into what I call the future human. Some people call it Homo spiritualis, homo noeticus. There are different words for it, but a new form of human being who isn't simply the old human being polished up and cleaned up and, you know, doing better. But truly a revolution that causes the plate tectonics of the collective psyche to shift so that all children born after this shift takes place. And I'm not talking about a shift that takes place in 24 hours, but takes place over decades of work. All children born after this pivot are literally functioning within a different collective psyche. This is something that's taking place at a very, very deep collective level. And I was given teachings to explain how this is working out through reincarnation. What the project of reincarnation is, how does it play into this? I introduce concepts that will talk about the birth of the diamond soul, this integration of all of our former lives coming into a unity, synthesis and leading to an exponential explosion of insight and compassion inside the human heart and human mind. That's what we're going to be talking about. We're going to be talking about where humanity is taking, where reincarnation is taking humanity, what some of the mechanisms are trying to understand underneath the turmoil of our times, which are getting more and more tumultuous almost year by year, and where we might be going, what the larger project is. And I must confess that I found what I was given deeply reassuring because I feel the growing waves of darkness, I feel the chaos and I see the social struggle that we don't know how to navigate the falling apart process. But I take great strength in being given an understanding of what's going on here at a deeper level. And that's what I'd like to share with you in our next conversation.
- [97:58]
B
Well, I'm very much looking forward to the conversation about the birth of the future human. And Chris, is there anything else you want to share about collective karma and reincarnation today?
- [98:12]
A
Well, I'll just share one visionary experience which I. I share in LSD in the mind of the universe. It was late in my journey. It was, I don't know, 15 years or so into my journey. And I had already gone through multiple layers of death into deeper and deeper levels. And I opened up into a very, very deep level in which I experienced all of humanity as a single organism, reincarnating generation by Generation, the entire, the entire family of humanity was going through this developmental process that all of us individually are going through and experiencing all of humanity in this flow of learning and in this flow of perpetual development, perpetual integration of more and more spiritual reality into their lives was, on the one hand, an extremely uplifting experience. And it was also a devastating experience because I saw from the one perspective, you might say that whole generations will be sacrificed in this historical transformation we're going through. And it had the ruthlessness of Kali the destroyer of, you know, of, you know, the gods, which bring death and destruction in order to liberate. And at the same time, this was not something which is being done to us. This is some. A role that we voluntarily took on as our offering to the creative intelligence in the evolution of this species at this point in time. So it was hard teaching and it was a magnificent, ecstatic teaching all at the same time. And the key is then to just to realize that what is taking place in the lives of individuals is also taking place in the lives of the species. We are all in this together. We're moving. Ultimately, we all have to move together. Some people may get a little ahead, some people may drag a little behind, but ultimately we are moving together as we move through this transition and the magnitude of the beauty of what we are becoming. I don't know how I'm going to talk about that without crying when we talk next. It's just so magnificent.
- [100:47]
B
I know I teared up a few times in this conversation today and also when I read your fabulous book. Book LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It is very deeply moving and I look forward to exploring more with you in the next conversation. Chris Spaish, thank you so much once again for this incredible conversation that I hope many find insightful and hopefully uplifting in this journey of life that we're all a part of together. Thank you for being with me today.
- [101:18]
A
Thank you, Emmy. It's been a real pleasure and an honor. Thank you.
- [101:22]
B
My pleasure as well. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [101:46]
A
Foreign.
- [101:52]
B
The new Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
- [102:05]
A
You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies go to newthinkingallowed.org.