Reincarnation and The Web of Life with Christopher Bache

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to what is going on for New Thought from
the Edge of Arm. Each week on home Time's flagship
radio show, veteran broadcaster, author, and media consultant Sandy Sedgebeer
conducts thought provoking interviews with inspirational authors, artists, musicians, scientists, speakers,
and filmmakers who are working at the point where spirituality

(00:32):
and science meet consciousness, at the very edge of arm.
Here is your host, Sandy Sedgeber.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Hello and welcome. Today we're going to be talking about
life after death, heaven and Hell, and reincarnation. Christopher Bach
is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious
Studies at Youngstown State University, adjunct at the California Institute
of Integral Studies, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences,

(01:07):
and he's on the advisory Council of Growth Legacy Training.
An award winning teacher and international speaker, he is the
author of four books, including one that I rate as
one of my favorite of all time, lsd and The
Mind of the Universe, Diamonds from Heaven, which chronicles his
twenty year psychedelic journey exploring consciousness, and the other book,

(01:32):
which We're going to be discussing today is Life Cycles,
Reincarnation and the Web of Life, which combines scientist testimonies
about reincarnation with the synthesis of findings from consciousness research
and near death studies. Christopher Base, Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
Hi, Sandy, it's a pleasure to be with you today.
You two.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
So, Life Cycles has been held as the first book
to both discribe, vibe the dynamics of rebirth and explore
the ramifications of adopting a reincarnationist perspective. Now, this was
published what thirty five years ago thereabouts?

Speaker 3 (02:14):
Yeah, so that was.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Right after you had started your journey with LSD. How
many years into that journey and how did that journey
inspire this?

Speaker 3 (02:26):
Well? I started my psychedelic work after one year, my
first year of being an academic, and I worked for
four years, and then I stopped for six years. And
during that six year interval I did three years of
past life therapy, uncovering and working with my own former lives,

(02:48):
and I wrote Life Cycles. So my psychedelic work by
that time had reached deeply enough that I had been
given many personal insights into karma, the deeper cause and
effect that underlies our lives, But at that time I
had not had personal experiences of my former lives in

(03:10):
a psychedelic context. I had in an hypnotherapy context, but
not a psychedelic context. But it really was my study
of Ian Stevenson and then later other pioneers in the
research documenting children and adults with validated, verified past lives

(03:31):
memories that really became the foundation for my work in
life cycles.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah. I mean, you shared a few of those stories
which I have read before, and they're absolutely fascinating because
the whole circumstance is there's just so much evidence there
that you know, you really can't question it. One of
them that really interested me was the child who you mentioned,

(04:00):
doctor Helen Wombak, who had a patient, a five year
old girl who rejected human contact and withdrew into childhood autism.
But somehow she demonstrated mathematical and reading skills which she
had not been taught, but she would not communicate. But
then over the period of their work together, she showed

(04:25):
Dr Wombark the how she felt what she was feeling
by force feeding her with a baby bottle, because she
felt totally, totally, you know, that she was being treated
like a helpless infant. And when the doctor you know,

(04:45):
understood that, then the child started coming into herself. But
she lost the reading and she lost the mathematics. I mean,
stories like that are just you know, what do you
make of them?

Speaker 3 (05:00):
What I make of them is that life is much
our lives, our personal lives. Let's say, our individual lives
are much longer than we presently tend to think that
they are, and that they're always beginning and starting and
their overlaps. And once you understand the larger life of
the soul, then this kind of continuity of qualities, knowledge, learning, attitudes,

(05:27):
traumas of virtues that are kind of blending from one
life into the start of another life, where we pick
up and continue to the learning, making it over simple, overlinear,
and overly simple. But that basic idea that there is
a blending. We don't start our lives a tableasa, we

(05:48):
don't start our lives blank. We start our lives with
a history, which is a specific history, which we can
see very clearly when we begin to look at children
with fresh eyes.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
Why is it the last It's always the last life
that they seem to talk about.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
Well, it's not always the last, last life. Actually in
the literature, Stevenson's research focuses on children who have an
active recall of their most immediate former life their last life.
But remember that Stephenson's research is addressing a very unusual population,
children who have spontaneous memories of their former lives. Most

(06:31):
people do not have spontaneous memories of their former lives.
His children are reincarnating very quickly compared to the population
at large, only an average of two and a half years,
and very close to their life circumstance of their previous
life fifty years. Studies which look at larger people larger

(06:52):
populations of people who don't have spontaneous recall indicate a
longer time frame between lifetime times and a much broader
geographical radius. So that is a little bit of a
distortion from the research protocol. When we look at therapy,

(07:14):
people come to the therapeutic literature, people come to therapy
because of pain, and sometimes this pain is grounded and
something that happened to them in their recent past, their
recent incarnational pass but not always. Sometimes it comes from
several lifetimes before. So the way I think of it
is our former lives are like a deck of playing cards.

(07:37):
We may have had fifty two lives, but only a
handful of those cards are active in this present life.
And those let's say five cards come from different centuries
and only weave together certain elements of those five lives
into the composite that makes up the present life. So

(07:58):
when we we kind of develop a more textured understanding,
we begin to understand that it's not a linear development
from life to lifetime. Is that we go back to
the soul. The soul holds all of our former lives,
and then the soul decides which of those former lives
in which combination it's going to incarnate into as the

(08:21):
next incarnation.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, you mentioned the word soul, but in the book
you may you know a distinction between soul and over soul.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
Yeah, so what is the difference? Well, and then at
the end of the book I dissolve that distinction. But
the soul. The distinction is that for Westerners who are
accustomed to thinking of the soul as the spiritual essence
of this present lifetime, we need a larger concept of
soul to include all of our former lifetimes. And for

(08:55):
that I use the concept of the over soul, borrowing
that term from other people at the end, in the
end of the book, I say, it gets increasingly cumbersome
to maintain this division. And for me the word the soul,
and I usually differentiate it by a capitalists. Soul with

(09:17):
a capitalists is what I mean by the oversaul, the
consciousness that holds all of our lifetimes. Soul with the
smalless is the consciousness that's integrating all my experiences in
this incarnation.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
So the over soul is what some people would call
the higher self, the part of them that you know
continues forever.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Yes, I think so. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
So I was doing some research today and I came
across this article on psychology today by doctor Alex Lickerman,
who is a Buddhist, but he doesn't believe in me incarnation.
But he said that the real question at the heart
of reincarnation is not one of evidence, but one of identity.

Speaker 4 (10:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
Good point. I haven't read that article. I'd be interested
in seeing what he says. Yeah. I think once you
move into a reincarnational worldview, the concept of identity shifts
and expands because I accept this body and my personality

(10:29):
as my current identity. And you know, if I have
deep mystical experiences of oneness with the universe that I
would accept a universal cosmic principle as my deeper identity.
The concept of the soul is kind of intermediate position,
isn't it Because it's on the one hand, it's individual.

(10:51):
It's because my soul and your soul are different in
that they reflect different histories and they have an individuated quality.
But if you ask the question what is the essence
of the soul? What is the essence of that spiritual identity,
then it comes back down to the same mystical insights.
The essence of one is the essence of all. The

(11:12):
essence is the essence of the divine. Some would say
of the cosmic intelligence, the cosmic principle, but it is
the question of identity is really quite critical. Shifting into
a reincarnational worldview doesn't undermine the value or the integrity
of this identity, but it recontextualizes that identity within the

(11:37):
soul's identity, which is the meta consciousness which holds the
one hundred thousand years say, of identity of all of
our lifetime experiences.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
It's you know, it's very hard to believe that you
have a different identity that you are not. You know,
this thing that you've lived for so many years, it's
even harder to think that, actually, you know, the oversoul
or that essence of you is infinite. It's lived forever

(12:13):
and it will live forever. I mean, that's a hard
one to get your head around.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
Well, it's hard in the beginning, but it gets easier
with practice, both intellectual practice, but particularly with experiential practice
and experiential access. It's one thing to be intellectually convinced
by the evidence that reincarnation is a principle operating in life,
and then when you begin to look at life through

(12:41):
that lens, a lot of things begin to make sense
which didn't make sense before, and that deepens one sense
of opening to that. But when you actually sort of
turn within and follow your awareness deeper within your own consciousness,
that eventually it taps into levels of your own self awareness,

(13:05):
which predates your physical body, and you learn the stories
of that self awareness that come from another life, and
those experiences of that former life have a distinct quality
of being you while being other than you, but you
know that they are you. And if you encounter several

(13:28):
such lives and you dialogue with them and you work
with them, then it kind of has causes a dilation
within your not only in your thinking, but within your
heart that it becomes easier to accept this transcendent, though individuated,

(13:48):
but transcendent dimension to your identity. It just and eventually
it becomes hard to think smaller than that. It actually
becomes hard to take this as your only identity.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
That just yeah, I'm going to ask you some questions
some of the most common questions that come up with
this subject, and you know, the first one is why
do we really incarnate?

Speaker 5 (14:17):
Ah, well, to learn to grow, to become more than
we are, And that really kind of gets down to
the very basic question what is the purpose of existence?

Speaker 3 (14:29):
If we think we don't reincarnate, if we only live
one lifetime, then if there is a purpose to existence,
it must be something that can be realized within however
many years we have in one lifetime. But if we
live an open ended number of lives, then it provides
us to expand our understanding of what the universe is

(14:52):
doing in us with us with all that time, and
so it opens up an open ended developmental possibility. We
now have an understanding of the universe's time frame for
the creation of galaxies, and planets and systems and so on.
But we've been excluded from that because we haven't had

(15:14):
a sufficiently expansive understanding of ourselves. Reincarnation invites us to
open up into an expansive understanding of our individual participation
in the cosmic unfolding. And so we have all these
lives in order to learn more, to become more, to

(15:35):
actualize more. And it's not simply a matter of becoming enlightened,
though that's a noble gold unto itself. Its enlightenment is
simply a stage in an evolutionary progression which extends far
beyond enlightenment. I mean, if you just think ahead, will

(15:56):
what could we become if we had a million years more?
Are a billion years more?

Speaker 2 (16:03):
And I have a problem with this because if we
are sparks of God, yeah, if we know everything when
we leave and many people say suddenly they understand everything,
and you know, they're in a whole other kind of
you know, their awareness is so expanded. Why do we

(16:25):
need to learn more? How much more is there to learn?
Aren't we complete when we're there? But then we actually,
you know, kind of regress when we come here. And
I don't understand the point of that.

Speaker 3 (16:39):
Well, that would be like asking too a real good question.
When the infinite, before creation, before manifesting the physical universe,
why would the creative principle manifest the physical universe which
almost is inherently less self aware knowledgeable? And I think

(17:02):
it's not so much. We do expand our knowledge much
much more when we die. Whether it seems like it
is infinite knowledge, maybe it is, but maybe there's even
more than what we think of as infinite knowledge. But
the real question becomes if God were to come to

(17:22):
us and say, would you help me grow this universe?
Would you bring as much knowledge as you can into
your person and help me grow this universe into a
higher form of physical manifestation of our spiritual nature. So
it's not simply what happens to us when we die.
I think we get a glimpse, we expand we get

(17:44):
a contact. The question is who would turn down the
invitation to actually participate in a creative process which will
produce higher and higher and higher deal deeper and deeper
and deeper forms of humanity in evolution in history, so

(18:06):
that truly we will eventually be able to make heaven
on Earth. We won't simply be imprisoned and dumb and stupid.
When we incarnate, we will be enlightened. We will be
infinitely aware in our physical incarnation. I think this is
the trajectory that we're on. So it's becoming more and

(18:28):
more and participating in the dance of creation.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
You know, I can follow that some of the way.
I you know, yeah, I'd be there saying, yeah, I'll participate.
But the fact is, you know, to then come here
and forget everything and to really be living like you're
starting all over again. You know, all the knowledge, all
the wisdom that you've gathered over all of those years,

(18:56):
what happens to it?

Speaker 3 (18:57):
But we don't forget everything, do we, Because we may
lose a fair amount of our conscious recall, but what
we have known is built into our unconscious recall, just
like these children who may not remember how they acquired
that mathematical knowledge or other kinds of knowledge, but it's there.

(19:19):
We may not remember how we developed the capacities that
are now natural to us, but there is a history
behind everything that we are, So we don't really forget
it all. We just forget some of it, but we
bring a lot of it into our very being and
then we express that knowledge in our life, and we

(19:43):
develop so that by the time we finish, we have
become more we have incarnated more completely some of that
knowledge than we were at the beginning of our lifetime.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
So many you know, we've always saying mediums who bring
loved ones, you know people, How is it that if
somebody has passed over and they're either in the bardo
or they're reincarnated, or they're you know, they're doing whatever

(20:16):
they're doing, how is it they come back, you know,
they can reconnect to that identity in that moment to
give that you know, believed loved one, whatever message they need.

Speaker 3 (20:29):
Yeah, well, now we're getting into the nuts and bolts
of the soul. And it's a good question, and I'm
going to give a short answer to a long, a
long question. This is an ideal scenario, but a not
uncommon scenario. I think when we die, we return to

(20:50):
the soul, and after a transitional period where we evaluate
our current past life and we evaluate what went right
what went wrong, and we assimilate that learning, we return
to the soul and we begin to naturally exchange what
we might think of as our small identity for a

(21:10):
large identity. Our one hundred year identity for one hundred
thousand year identity, so that Chrispage no longer lives just
as Chrispage, but is restored to the total knowledge of
my soul. Now, let's say my father died when I

(21:31):
was eighteen, Okay, so when I die, I may want
to see my dad. And if I want, if I
get the opportunity to see my dad, whether or not
his soul has incarnated an aspect of him in a
subsequent incarnation. I think it works something like this. When

(21:52):
my being wants to meet my dad, his soul comes
to me, but manifesting the front image of that soul
would be the being that I had known him. Asked
which would be my father? So Chris Bache would meet
his father, but soon before too long, it would be

(22:14):
a matter of soul to soul, So Chris Bach's soul
would be meeting my father's soul, and we would be
having a much deeper conversation than simply Chris Base speaking
to his father. Now we're having a cosmic conversation. Now.
I think the mediums can contact people who are discarded,

(22:37):
but that we should be careful before we infer that
the form in which the medium encounters them is the
form in which they are truly existing in their post
death state. I think a lot of our fascination and
compulsion even to communicate with those who have died in
the form in which we knew them reflects a limited

(22:59):
understanding of what happens to us when we die, and
it tends to reflect a Western understanding that when we die,
we are judged and we go to heaven or hell
or purgatory or some level of the Bardo. And it's
a pretty short term concept. I am not particularly interested

(23:20):
in communicating to my father as I knew him, when
there's so much more could take place in our exchange.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
So in a sense, you know, the soul of the
person that comes through for somebody is in a way
doing something with compassion, and they just stepping into Yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
They're wearing that, They're wearing the God compassion, the presence
of that that this person had known them as, and
communicating to that person through that persona. But that persona
isn't necessary who they truly are now.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah. Another common question is until I read this book,
I didn't know how to answer it. Is, well, how
you know, how can there be reincarnation, there's far more
people on the planet now than there were, you know,
a thousand years ago.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Yeah, yeah, Well, you know, I'll answer with an analogy.
Start there. If you were at a university and the
university had six thousand students and you never left campus.
You lived on campus, and there's a rhythm. Every semester
there were fewer people that went home, and then every
semester they came back. But over a few years you

(24:41):
would notice that the population of the campus is getting bigger,
and you might wonder where are all these extra people
coming from. Well, of course they're coming from a town
outside of campus, which is a much much larger town
than the number of people on campus. And I think
it's like that in with reincarnation. We have no reason

(25:03):
for believing that the number of souls available to incarnate
is finite, or that it's small, and that all of
them were present at some early point in Earth's evolutionary history.
And therefore we have to explain where all the extra
souls are coming from. Perhaps there are billions of souls

(25:25):
in line waiting to take up positions as positions become
available in the Earth School, we have no reason for
believing that the number of souls is finite, or that
they were all present on Earth in the beginning. So
we just have to Well, the invitation here is to
open up to understanding that the spiritual universe is many,

(25:49):
many times larger than the physical universe. Robert Monroe has
working out of body work in the Monroe Institute, emphasizes
over and over cycle universe is a small slice of reality.
Most of reality is spiritual.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
But wasn't it Robert Monroe who also said that some
humans evolved from higher animals.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
Yeah, Actually that's the That is the common view of
most reincarnation societies. That is, if we look, if we
follow the line back and ask where does reincarnation begin,
they generally think that it doesn't begin with human consciousness.
It begins farther back in our animal pedigree. So reincarnation

(26:42):
seems to be a dynamic that is correlated with the
birth of individuality. Grass hard to see Grass as individual,
but sooner or later we have individuated consciousness emerging within
the animal kingdom. Reincarnation seems to be a function of

(27:05):
that individuated consciousness exploring and empowering and expanding itself, and
that starts before human beings now.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
We're actually getting I think it's doctor Linda Beckman, who
does a past life big quession, who was trained with
Michael Newton, and he told her that the time would
come when many people's the lives they accessed were not
lived on this planet. And that's actually happening, she said.
I mean, her books are full of stories of you know,

(27:38):
people's experiences that they connect with previous life somewhere else entirely.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
Well, we'd have to ask, at least on a theoretical level,
why not if we just look up at the universe
and look through the Hubble telescope and all wonderful images
that are coming to us, and we see life burgeoning
and stars and planets, why shouldn't there be evolve life
on those forms? And if reincarnation is possible, then why

(28:07):
should it only be restricted to one star system? Why
might there be some type of interplanetary crossovers. I don't
have any personal experience of that myself, but I know
that she does, and so I think, well, that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
It is interesting. It is We're going to take a
short break. Now you're listening to what is going on.
I'm Sandy saigber My guest today is Professor Emeritus in
the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University.
And I won't read the rest of what you do
other than you're an international speaker, a teacher, and an

(28:47):
author Christopher bag And we're discussing the compelling, research and
intentalizing questions raised in his book Life Cycles, Reincarnation and
the Web of Life Still to Come. What happens to
those identities that we once thought were us? Why was
reincarnation removed from the scriptures? Why is our time between

(29:10):
lives as important to our development as their earthly phase?
And more? Stay tuned.

Speaker 1 (29:19):
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Speaker 2 (29:25):
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Speaker 6 (31:28):
Everything that we do, we can do in a contemplative manner.
Through the art of contemplation. You can use the gene
Keys in a really powerful way. Gen Keys is basically
the codebook of life in the gen Keys, the book
is made up of these three levels shadows, gifts, and cities,
and the journey is from is through those three levels

(31:49):
kind of unpicking of the shadow states, the releasing of
the gifts, and then the embodying of this higher consciousness
called the city. And the city's are very exalted words,
and it's not like we kind of suddenly are all
these exalted christ like beings. But we have flashes and
illuminations along the journey. And the more we get stuck

(32:11):
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inside our DNA, so all those revelations are inside us.
So the contemplative way is the inner way.

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Speaker 2 (33:07):
Welcome back, Christopher Base. So I'm rather attached to this,
you know, person personality, the thought that it might disappear
at some point, you know, like an actor just sheding
a role that they've played, take off the costume and
never to be seen or heard from again. You know,

(33:29):
it's never.

Speaker 3 (33:30):
To be heard and seen from again.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
Well in that form, in that form, Well, in that form.
You know it's I don't like that idea. I mean,
I'd like to know that. You know, maybe I could
connect with her sometime. Maybe I could even bring her
back and be that character again. Do you think any
of that is possible?

Speaker 3 (33:53):
Well, I think the the essence and the system of
our lives is preserved beautifully intact. When we die, we
take with us, not only all of our memories, but
we take with us a living and vivid version of
the experiences that we had on earth in technicolor and stereo.

(34:17):
As the near death episode experiences have shown us, when
they relive their life, they relive it in much much
more detail than they will ever remember having it in
the first place. So not only do we continue perfectly intact,
but we continue in this supersaturated version of ourselves, and

(34:41):
all of that is taken forward, all of that is
brought into the soul, and the soul can crystallize its
larger consciousness in any of its forms, or it can
actualize all of their integrated consciousness into a singular, integrated form.
And in the end, and I'm only willing to give

(35:04):
this this one hundred years if that, you know, it's
just it's just too limited. I mean, why ride a
bicycle when you're can have a spaceship. I mean, it's
just it's so much so there's no sense of sacrifice.
I think there's there's a sense maybe of trading up.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
You know. Sometimes I think that I'm not very elevated
in my consciousness, you know, and if I have been
alive for millennia, then I'm really not doing a very
good job. I would like to think, you know, after
all of that time, that i'd be further on. You know,

(35:46):
I tend to look at things like people are beings,
like spirit guides and angels and ascended masters as they
were once, you know, just as human as me, enjoyed
a human life pers and have reached such an elevated state.
I mean, is it conceivable that I could be one

(36:07):
of them one day?

Speaker 3 (36:09):
Well, yes, of course it's conceivable, because your essential nature
already is one of those beings. But let me just
kind of flip this a little bit at first. I
just I've been teaching this stuff for years, and I
had just generations and generations of students come through my courses.
And one of the things I've learned is you can't judge.

(36:31):
You can't read a book by looking at the cover.
You can't judge a person's sole development by looking at
what they're dealing with. And it's kind of like at
a university, somebody can have developed a great deal of
expertise in music, for example, but then they decide to
start developing an expertise in their art, and so they

(36:51):
let go of their expertise and music in order to
start a whole new course regimen in art. And if
you were to look at only what they do in art,
you might think, oh, this person is a freshman, when
really they're very sophisticated seeing you with all these other skills,
And I think it's also that way for the soul too.
So I mean, I mean, look at what you do.

(37:12):
You are an enormous influencer. You're hosting one spiritual dialogue
after another, You're touching thousands and thousands of people's lives.
How could your soul if your soul were in the
Bardell say, in a preincarnated state, and you were given
the opportunity to bring down some sense of what you know,

(37:37):
some aspiration, some capacity and enthusiasm for exploring spiritual knowledge,
but not by yourself in a monastic context, but in
a platform that reaches out into the world at a
time and history when the world needs this type of knowledge.

(37:57):
So my basic sense is, don't sell yourself. I think
there are many more boatie officas in the world than
we think.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Okay, So another question, white Light.
Several spiritual teachers are of the opinion that we should
not go towards the light as we will be trapped
in cycles of reincarnation. They say, you can bypass that
and go somewhere else.

Speaker 3 (38:25):
What do you think of that one, Well, it doesn't
make any sense to me. It doesn't compute for me
to me. The white light just at a simple level,
when we separate from our body, the white light is
our homing beacon, taking us back home, taking us back
to our essential nature, our deeper spirit, our deeper divine nature. Now,

(38:49):
the basic classic idea is people instinctively move towards the light,
and they move as far towards the light as they
feel comfortable, and at some point to why along the way,
for various reasons, people feel less comfortable, or they feel
sort of it's more natural just to stop and drop off.

(39:11):
And at that they're at that level of spiritual development
that they feel most comfortable in the thousands and thousands
of levels of the Bardo, and so the the admission
the admonition for and from that level they will eventually
go through a process in which they will make the

(39:33):
choice to incarnate again. The admonition in most spiritual traditions
is to do a kind of training that allows you
to be comfortable with the light, so that you can
follow the light all the way home, all the way
through all the levels of the Bardo, all the way

(39:53):
to the most intense form of that light, which resides
within what the Buddhists call extra sumsaric reality, so a
reality which is outside the entire reincarnating universe altogether. So
to me, whether our journey into the light takes us

(40:14):
back to our own natural level of peak spiritual realization,
or whether it takes us all the way back beyond
all those intermediate levels to the highest level, it doesn't
make any much difference.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
To me.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
It makes most sense to follow the light all the
way as far.

Speaker 5 (40:36):
As you can.

Speaker 2 (40:37):
Yeah, well you've seen that, haven't you.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
I have anything that touched me in a way that
has affected the entire rest of my life.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah. So why was reincarnation taken out of Christianity? I mean,
for the first five minutes in Christianity it was a
vital combutment and then Justinian removed it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
Well that's a complex story, and that I was first
and historian of early Christianity. That was my first academic love,
and the search for the historical Jesus was my first
I did my masters at Cambridge in the search for
the historical Jesus, and it's a complex process, and I
don't think the definitive story has yet been written. Did

(41:32):
Jesus teach reincarnation? It certainly is present in some of
the Gnostic gospels, But do those Gnostic gospels reflect the
actual teaching of the historical Jesus. And if Jesus did
teach reincarnation, then we have to explain why it was
filtered out, or if he did teach reincarnation, why isn't

(41:54):
it more thoroughly saturating the earlier level of the scriptural tradition. However,
we answer those, and we don't have the time to
answer those today. It clearly is the case that there
were multiple variations of Christianity in the early centuries, and
some of those variations taught reincarnation, and they also taught

(42:19):
uh the empowerment of women, that women should have clerical
capacities and responsibilities, so on and so forth, and both
of those elements were filtered out of the tradition. It
is Gettis McGregor, who is a Christian was a Christian
theologian wrote numerous books on early Christian thought around reincarnation.

(42:41):
He was of He's of the opinion that there is
nothing inherently contradictory to the belief in reincarnation and the
teachings of the essential Jesus kind of the or early
early core teachings of Jesus. But it gives an individual
too much at etonomy for their spiritual welfare. In the

(43:04):
historical context of the collapse of the Roman Empire the
emergence of the Catholic of highly centralized authority, the Church
saw this highly centralized network of priest, bishop's, cardinals, the
pope as essential to the salvation of the salvation of

(43:24):
the Church, and therefore to all whom the Church served.
So I would give them the benefit of the doubt
and say that they thought they were doing a good
thing by really creating the system that made individuals contingent
upon the intermediate clergy and the authority of the Church.

(43:45):
Now from a reincarnational perspective, they didn't do a good thing.
It took us a long time to uncover this deeper
teaching that were each one of us is responsible for
our relationship with the Divine. The Church may help us,

(44:06):
but in the end, the Church is not essential to
the maturing of our relationship to the divine.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Well, I have another question about that. I mean, you
devoted you know, chapter six to the question of whether
there's room for reincarnation in Christian thought about thirty five
years ago. You know, I'd like to know in a
minute if your view on that has changed. But before
we do that, I want to make sure we get
this one in talk about the hidden phase of life

(44:39):
for the time between lives, which you say is just
as important to our development.

Speaker 3 (44:46):
Yeah, and that's actually why I named the book life Cycles.
I think wish I had named it a little bit differently,
because it became acutely significant to me that if you
look at the cycle of life, life is only taking
place between birth and death. You're missing half of the cycle.

(45:06):
We miss what happens between death and birth, and you
have to look at the whole cycle to understand the
rhythm of the soul, the rhythm of human consciousness. And
so there are just as there are kind of standardized
gradations of what happens when a child is born, there's

(45:28):
a standardized process of what happens when we die. And
I think Michael Newton's work is some of the best
work I've seen, explaining what happens in the minutes, hours, years,
relative using time in a non time universe after we die.
The integration, the introspection, the review of our most recent life,

(45:53):
looking at it deeply from within a spiritual perspective, looking
at our relationships and our challenge, and from a relationship
from a deeper spiritual perspective, integrating all of our successes
and failures, really internalizing them, Entering into the civilization of

(46:13):
spiritual beings, in the civilization, in the community of fellow
soul travelers, enjoying the recess, the return to a more
complete spiritual awareness of existence, and then in time, a

(46:36):
gradual focusing into the next challenge that we set for ourselves.
Because it's like a university. You finish a semester, you
take your exams, you digest and rest forbid, but you
make then choices for what you're going to take next semester.
And Mutant shows that these choices are done not by ourselves,

(47:01):
but under the guidance and tutelage of our guides, our
senior kind of more senior spiritual beings, and we have
some insight into the lives that we're choosing. We have options,
and we make a choice that this particular set of
challenges suits my particular needs where I am in my development,

(47:26):
or it gives me an opportunity to be of service
in ways that I haven't experienced before. And then we
make those choices, and then we've engaged the incarnational process
and we wake up kicking and screaming as a newborn child.
If you understand the whole of the cycle, then you

(47:47):
have a the beginnings of a much deeper understanding of
what makes life tick in a human psyche than if
you only pay attention from birth to death.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
So I was doing some research on statistics, and I
discovered that it seems, you know, very obviously rough numbers,
but something like over fifty seven percent people in the
world believe in life after death. Between twelve and forty

(48:24):
four percent depending on you know which country you're looking at,
believe in reincarnation, and seventy five percent believe in heaven,
you know, which makes me wonder because if you know,
only fifty seven believe in life after death, where's that extra?

(48:45):
You know? Where do they think heaven and hell is?
I don't know, what do you have to say about
heaven and hell?

Speaker 3 (48:52):
And twenty five percent of American Protestants and about the
same percentage of American Catholics believe in reincarnation. That's one
of the statistics that really blows my mind. Heaven and Hell,
you know, I think in some ways the Buddhists get
closest to it, and their basic vision of is when

(49:13):
we die, we enter at a universe, a stage of
our life where what we are is mirrored back to
us in our experience. So if we've done good in life,
if we've been generous and kind and thoughtful, then that
is mirrored back to us in the experience of heaven

(49:33):
or the heavenly beings. If we've done harm and injury
and selfish and stingy things and hurt people, then that
is simply mirrored back to us, not out of punishment,
but to educate us. And this is the experience of hell.
So from this perspective, Hell is the experience of our shortcomings.
Heaven is the experience of our joys. And I think

(49:56):
that works. And newton his cosmology seems to integrate that.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
But this.

Speaker 3 (50:05):
Would be mistakenly and could be mistakenly interpreted as a
cosmological absolute, when really it's simply a stage in our debriefing.
It's a stage that we go through. I think the
deeper reality is that there is a heaven of heavens.

(50:26):
There is a heaven beyond the heaven of our feedback
to our own goodness. There is a heaven of heavens,
a reality of infinite love, infinite knowledge, infinite bliss, within
which the entire human evolutionary saga is just a small

(50:46):
piece and should not be taken as defining the limits
of the universe. Is there Similarly, a hell of hells?
Is there an eternal hell? And absolutely do not believe
there is. It has not been so in my experience
at all. That is simply a theological mistake, a mistaken interpretation. Now,

(51:11):
I think there is accountability. There is. We are responsible
for the actions that we take, and there is an accountability.
Nobody gets out scot free. But that accountability does not
include this loathsome idea of eternal damnation or eternal punishment.
No mother or father would do that to their child

(51:32):
for making mistakes, and likewise, the supreme intelligence of the
universe would not do that to human beings. Now, having
said that, let me step into something different. As you know,
from my book You know, Ellesty in the mind of
the universe, I have entered and spent many years and

(51:54):
days in hell realms, in experiencing extreme torture of that
looks like a hell realm. And my understanding eventually of
this is this, just as my individual psyche retains all
my individual memories, both good ones and traumatic ones, there

(52:15):
is a consciousness of the human species which retains all
of its memories and processes all of those memories in
a central meta psychological condition what Bun called the collective unconscious,
and that means all the terrible things that human beings

(52:35):
have done to each other, all the wars, all the horrors,
and all the injustices, and all the rapes and the pillaging,
to the extent that those have not been clarified or
healed or removed, they become part of the collective torment,
the collective shadow of humanity. So you might say that

(52:57):
within the human psyche there are clusters of memories that
have a hellish quality, But that doesn't mean that there
is a cosmological state of being of hell. Because just
as individuals have bad experiences that they can then clear

(53:19):
from their system, the human species can have terrible trauma
which it is in the process of clearing from its system. Okay,
And I think that in the early Church maybe some
of the people who had contact with these collective Hellish
realms mistakingly interpreted them to as a cosmological principle of

(53:45):
eternal hell.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
Well, we've got about four minutes left less than that.
Quickly go back to this question whether there is room
for reincarnation in Christian thought. You say that it would
only take small Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:02):
I think, of course traditional Christianity would say no, there's
no room for it whatsoever. One life, eternal helen. But
I think there are many. Christianity has committed itself that
if anything can be demonstrated as a fact, then we'll
find out how it works and work it into Christian theology.
And if reincarnation is demonstrated as a fact, which I

(54:24):
think it has been and is being, then Christianity will
find out how it works and how it makes how
to make room for it. All we have to do
to incorporate reincarnation within a Christian framework is expand the
notion of the age of the soul. We can even

(54:44):
give Jesus a unique role in salvation history if we
want to. We may choose to expand to see Jesus
as part of a whole brotherhood and sisterhood of awakened
beings helping humanity. But even if we wanted to make
Jesus the unique, salid savior of Christianity, all we have

(55:05):
to do is open up the notion that the journey
of the soul is a journey of maturation that takes
place over many lifetimes. It's not finished in one lifetime.
And all of a sudden, the inadequacies that have been
foisted on Christianity by this terribly short sighted assumption that

(55:26):
we only have one lifetime. So if you only live
six days and you die, there's a consequence to that.
Or if you are a bad person or you do
something bad in the first ten years of your life,
you could go to hell for the rest of your life.
These terrible consequences. The kindness of the universe, the compassion
of Jesus, has much more room to grow in a

(55:50):
world which understands that he's talking to souls. He's not
simply talking to personalities, He's talking to souls.

Speaker 2 (55:59):
In his teaching, last question, very quickly, you're in the
book by talking about the web of life. Understanding the
rhythms about life is an ongoing dialogue which you've kind
of covered in what you've just said more on this,
Is there anything that you want to add to that.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
I've lived in the reincarnational worldview so long, and I've
taught it and talked with people and listened to their
stories and processes people's life experience that it is so
natural to me to understand the uniqueness of every soul
and the uniqueness of every incarnation and the complex background

(56:41):
web between lives and circumstances that to see life in
the old way, what I used to see it in
this kind of silent way, is completely unnatural, intellectually and
spiritually untenable and spiritually unnourishing. So to me, reincarnation doesn't

(57:01):
answer all our questions, but it is the beginning of
deeper and deeper and deeper questions and deeper answers, which
brings a true richness and deep satisfaction to the life process.
It takes out this terrible horror of a good God, Who's.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
I'm going to have to cut you there. It looks
like we've gone over time. I'm so sorry, but that's okay.
What can I say you know, talking to you is
always fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 3 (57:35):
Thank you sy So.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Life Cycles, Reincarnation and the Web of Life is still
available in paperback format, and for more information about Elsdi
in the Mind of the Universe and Chris's other books, articles,
and events, visit his website chrisbase dot com. That's it
for this week. I'll be back at the same time
next week with another What is going on? Till then,

(57:58):
it's goodbye for me and thank you again to Space.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
Thank you Sandy,

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