"Man is not destroyed by suffering, he is destroyed by suffering without meaning." Victor E. Frankl
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor E. Frankl, "Man’s Search for Meaning"
In a recent interview, host Tami Simon asked Christopher Bache, (if I had some choice in the matter), "why would I choose a life that had so much suffering in it? Really?
Christopher Bache: "I don’t want to make light of any suffering. I get very angry when I hear people pronounce how suffering works, or make large metaphysical pronouncements on it.
I think we have to be very respectful of suffering, and yet at the same time, hold out the hope that this suffering has significance, that this suffering is meaningful in a larger landscape.
I take great encouragement as I studied the past life therapeutic literature, and I watched therapists basically following a present pain in a person’s life and letting it unfold into a deeper story that has been moving through several lifetimes up to this lifetime time.
People have been able to take their pain to its source in which it’s anchored in experiences that they don’t remember having, but because they come from another lifetime, and in that remembering, it provides a freedom and a release from suffering in their current lifetime. So when you see that happening over and over again, it supports the conclusion that this suffering is - I don’t want to say intentional, but it’s accepted as a circumstance of learning.
And then we would ask, why would we ever want to learn? What do we have to learn from those horribly, depleted or compromised lives? And I think we have to make a transition of thinking like a human being and start thinking like a soul or thinking about our lives from God’s perspective, because things that may look meaningless from the human perspective, from the individual life perspective, can be saturated with meaning at a larger metaphysical level, a larger spiritual level.
And sometimes I think, for example, some people have voluntarily taken on pain memories, which are not part of their personal karmic lineage sometimes. In my psychedelic practice, I found that a lot of the work I was doing, a lot of the purging of negative karma was not personal. It was collective. And I think many of us are actually living lives, which are serving the release of trauma from the collective psyche, which goes beyond simply healing the personal psyche.
So I think we have to learn to think in a much more expanded framework to even address suffering.”
"Christopher Bache: Deep Time and the Birth of the Diamond Soul — Sept 23, 2025"
Audio (at 34-38min): https://resources.soundstrue.com/podcast/christopher-bache/?utm_source=%5BKL%5D%200-180%20Day%20Engaged&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=N250928-Bache%20%2801K60R1QNHVRW70WEMVXPM2EMZ%29&tw_source=Klaviyo&tw_profile_id=JsSQsZ&tw_medium=campaign&_kx=oubFt43NAjNBb0_NppHaGCF951bovtuCAx1o4i41Tys.JMDgaq
Transcript: https://resources.soundstrue.com/transcript/christopher-bache-deep-time-and-the-birth-of-the-diamond-soul/
“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment – he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
Viktor E. Frankl. “Man’s Search for Meaning. An Introduction to Logotherapy.” ed 3, Simon & Schuster, 1984.
“The best way out is always through.” Robert Frost
Social workers' classic advice, "lean into" difficulties.
“What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being
whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but
whose lips are so strangely formed that when
the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound
like beautiful music.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Each one of us is a poet.
Every one of us carries a heavy load.
And each of us is called to make beautiful music.
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