"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"
“Dear ones, you who are trying to learn the miracle of love through the use of reason, I am terribly afraid you will never see the point.” Hafiz
"The small man builds cages for everyone he knows. While the sage keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful, rowdy prisoners." Hafiz
Most feel the need for strict boundaries to feel safe from life's uncontrollable changes. Prisoners are known to re-offend just to get back into the tightly structured life of a prison. It takes deep self-reflection to become aware of the invisible, yet tightly constraining prison walls - cages - others have built around us, as well as ones we've built for ourselves & carefully maintain, as if these could protect us. The only thing they "protect us" from is growing up - especially spiritually!
Below are excerpts from Tami Simon's recent interview with author & philosopher Christopher Bache, who shares his personal journey
through psychedelic exploration and academic research, revealing how
these experiences have shaped his understanding of the soul’s evolution.
Together, they discuss how embracing the possibility of reincarnation
can transform our relationship to suffering, purpose, and each other.
Tami Simon asked why anyone would choose a life that had so much suffering in it?
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."
*** (Watch Natalie Sudman's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8lQs1MccoU)
*** (During meditation retreats, I've had a couple of experiences of such intense pain that I assumed it couldn't possibly be just my own 'stuff' I was processing, but that I was surely helping to process all
of humanity's 'stuff.' It's essential to state that I was well aware
that simply getting up from sitting meditation would instantly have
ended the pain ie working through this was entirely voluntary, transcended the personal AND as soon as I recognized the fact that I was no longer alone & it was no longer just about my small, separate self, but about everything - Self, the suffering immediately ended, leaving only joy & ease.
“The true significance of (any of) Buddha’s radical instruction ‘Just sit’ cannot be realized except in the context of the vow to save all living beings.” Reb Anderson. “Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains. Dharma Talks on Zen meditation.” Rodmell Press, 1999.
Neither *** or *** above make sense, and may even be met with anger, while lost in separate-self concern ie left-hemisphere dominant perspective.
However, the shift that occurs from personal suffering to the realization that this must be universal human suffering & willingness to somehow help humanity relieve this IS ALSO the shift from exclusively left-hemisphere to a balanced right-hemisphere dominant way of seeing & being.)
"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.
Ian Stevenson PhD, at the Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia, is considered the Charles Darwin of Reincarnation research. He's had 11 books published documenting 3,000 detailed studies of children from around the world who have spontaneous memories of previous lives. And he was able to document, verify or falsify their memories. That just turned my mind around. And then later, as I began to move into my own self-exploration, both in the LSD work and also with hypnotherapy, I encountered a number of my own former lives and worked with them. So at first it was an intellectual encounter with Ian Stevenson’s work, then later, a personal experiential encounter.
Despite the very compelling research, it's hard to accept reincarnation first of all because the effects of reincarnation are subtle. The ending of a life at death is definitive. The beginning of life at birth is kind of clear, but the carryover, the continuities of reincarnation are subtle.
But I think the most important reason that it’s hard for many of us to see it is because basically science is the religion of our era. And science in its early stages has been wedded to the concept that 'matter is the only thing that’s real.' There is nothing in the universe that we can’t explain by reducing it to its material substrate. And this belief basically suggests that our mind is generated by our brain. And when our brain disappears, our mind disappears too, like a light bulb that goes out. And so with this belief that everything is material, that there is no independent spiritual universe, and that our mind reduces to brain, then we basically undercut any possibility of allowing the existence of reincarnation because reincarnation assumes a parallel dimension of spiritual reality.
And that makes it hard for (dogmatic materialists) to even look at the evidence seriously, because they have such countervailing belief systems."
Tami Simon: "Once seen, reincarnation changes everything. Even now as we’re going deeper into the interviews in this series, I’m noticing the impacts that it’s having on how I view my life ... a level of relaxation that’s starting to come in that previously was unknown. And I’m curious how this taking on of a reincarnation view instead of, as you call it, a one timer’s perspective, how it’s changed things for you?"
Christopher Bache: "Yeah, well, there are lots of spinoffs on that question. It does change everything. And as you live within a Reincarnational worldview, and kind of think through it, live through it and apply it to your life circumstances, it deepens. And so what stands out in the early years is different from what stands out in the later years.
It all hinges upon an understanding that we have a vast quantity of time in which to live, develop & grow within the universe. We aren’t simply a 100-year project adjacent to the universe’s multi-billion year project. But we are actually ancient beings who have been reincarnating for millennia, hundreds of thousands of years.
And as such, we are part of the universe’s extensive development. As a philosopher, that means a great deal to me because when I look at the magnificent photographs coming out of the Hubble or other space telescopes, and see this magnificent universe massive & vast in its depth and beauty, if I only live one time through, I basically a part-time player in this, a sideshow in this universe.
But once we understand that the intelligence within & behind nature has found a way not only to evolve whole species as we think in evolution, but to evolve individuals within certain species, as in human beings. Then I think we have a new starting point. It’s a new starting point.
It changes your understanding of your identity because it’s beautiful and it’s important, uh, as our individual body mind awareness is. Our ego is, it’s just one facet of the diamond that the soul is. There are other facets we can encounter, we can meet, and which we will become, uh, part of this larger diamond as we die or even as we wake up.
On this planet, it changes your relationships to your children, so you stop seeing them as somehow an extension of your genetic & your wife’s genetic heritage. You begin to see that your genetic matrix is a nest, which catches an incoming soul. And so the child that you’re holding may be thousands of years older than you are in a soul perspective.
And so I don’t see children as children anymore, and I don’t see old people as old people anymore. I tend to think in terms of souls and there are some children who are very old souls and some adults who are very young souls in, in their foolishness. So it’s a fresh starting point. Always paired with reincarnation is the concept of karma - cause & effect, and that there is a cause and effect that derives from the choices that we make.
Extended in our extended lives that those choices carry over and set up the conditions within which I’m living in this lifetime. And then when you explore the data more carefully, you learn that there is a great deal of evidence that suggests that we choose the life that we are born into. And that makes an enormous difference because when we look at our life, and it may be a life of pain & suffering, it may be of unexpected hardship, it may be a life of ease. (Do read at least "The Bus Stop Conversation" - by Sue Morter, in: http://www.johnlovas.com/2023/01/the-nearly-unforgivables.html)
To understand that we chose this life at a time when we knew more than we know now. We chose this life that tends to deepen our commitment to working with the conditions of this life, trusting in a deeper intelligence that brought us into these circumstances. So to me it, it’s, it’s an absolutely fresh starting point in philosophy.
Your whole philosophical insights diverge between one road, which says we only incarnate once, and another road, which says, no, we incarnate many times. They go in very different directions."
"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/
Curiosity & open mind / heartedness seem to be key even in, and perhaps especially during, the most severely challenging times.
“... 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.
“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.
"When a system is far from equilibrium,
small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos
have the capacity to lift the system
to a higher order." Ilya Prigogine - physical chemist and Nobel laureate
“The real question is: Are you willing, whether your experience is tranquil, turbulent, ecstatic, tragic, opulent, or austere, to give yourself wholeheartedly to what is truly alive in you?”
Amoda Maa. “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017. HIGHLY-RECOMMENDED WISE, VALUABLE BOOK
“What is Buddha’s (OUR) work in the middle of the cold? Have a dialogue with the cold, a dialogue with emptiness. Stare at the cold, stare at the not-you. If you look at it long enough, it will look back at you. The cold mountains will smile.” Reb Anderson. “Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains. Dharma Talks on Zen meditation.” Rodmell Press, 1999.
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