Spaciousness and Contraction

    There is a back-and-forth rhythm or dance between (apparent) opposites to many aspects of life, as popularized by Pete Seeger's song, "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)."

         One of these 'dances' is our tendency to AT TIMES contract into our "small self," into self-concern: sadness, anxiety, basically a low mood or "ordinary unhappiness" AND AT OTHER TIMES, expand into our "true Self" or wisdom, "a peace that surpasseth all understanding," experiencing uncaused joy, awe, gratitude, awareness, concern for, and even Oneness with, all of creation!

    Expansion can occur spontaneously, because 'everything is perfect as it is' as experienced & understood by shamans, saints, prophets & mystics of all wisdom traditions throughout the ages. Expansion usually occurs when we're able to relax, self-reflect, and finally allow ourself to deeply listen to our inner wisdom's whisperings. 

    Today's mystics agree: 
    "... happiness is our default setting. That’s the way we come wired from the factory. It is our natural state. ... quieting of your mind allows that natural state to come back to the surface." Interview of Chip & Jan Chipman on The Three Principles and Relationships https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmqLI8_9pko
     “All we are is peace, love & wisdom, AND the power to create the illusion that we’re not.” Jack Pransky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kni9VRMIuD4 . 

    Contraction can be very easily triggered & maintained by stress. BUT, the WEIRDEST CAUSE IMAGINABLE is that WE are used to thinking shitty thoughts, which invariably CAUSE our shitty moods - our "ordinary unhappiness." YES, WE habitually choose to continuously re-tell & thus continuously re-suffer the sad "story of me," the sad story of my tribe, and visualize in gory detail horrible future events, which, to paraphrase Mark Twain, "never happened!" The QUALITY of OUR MOODS are ENTIRELY OUR CHOICE! Though we habitually blame our moods on our external circumstances, they have almost nothing to do with it! 

    “The simple truth is this: We’re living in the feeling of our thinking, NOT the feeling of our circumstances.” Michael Neill 

    “The original, shimmering Self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. 
    Instead, we live out of all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on & taking off like coats & hats against the world’s weather.” Frederick Buechner 

    “Stories are prisons we choose to live inside.” Bob Falconer  

    "How we experience life depends on our level of consciousness." Sydney Banks 

    “You can’t be in fear and curiosity at the same time.” John Clarke 

    WHEN you've had enough of being trapped in sad & anxious stories and wallowing in 'ordinary unhappiness' or depression, burnout or worse: 
1) realize self-talk's destructiveness,  
2) recognize self-defeating self-talk within seconds,
3) let it go,
4) immediately bring attention back to the present moment. 
5) cultivate the courage, perseverance & curiosity to remain, rest in, live in & savor the present moment. THIS is the HEART of Mindfulness Training & Practice! 

    You are cultivating PRESENCE - being fully awake, alive, free, engaged with whomever you're with, whatever you're doing - whether in motion or at rest. 
    While in presence, you will feel free, light, peaceful, relaxed, warm, loving, competent no matter what is going on, including a painful medical procedure!

    As soon as you start to feel down, anxious or otherwise troubled, DROP the shitty old thinking habits, go to #4 & 5 above.

    From Jack Pransky's excellent book: “Somebody Should Have Told Us!: Simple Truths for Living Well" 2011. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
    “I realized that if we deeply understood three spiritual facts or principles, how these facts work together and how our use of them gives us every experience we can possibly have in life, with this perspective we can move through life with peace of mind, well-being, mental health and psychological freedom. … The Three Principles point to ten little (but huge) points about life and relationships that would be extremely helpful for people to understand. … Each takes exploration and reflection. Thus a full chapter is devoted to each:

I. Our thinking is our life 
II. Wisdom is always available to guide us, if we know how to access it 
III. If someone’s thinking doesn’t change, they can’t change 
IV. When our mind clears our wisdom appears 
V. We don’t have to think our way out of our problems (or to happiness) 
VI. The feeling is what counts, and it’s foolproof 
VII. What we see is what we get 
VIII. In low levels of consciousness, it is unwise to believe, trust or follow our thinking 
IX. To deeply listen to others instead of to our own thinking gives us a richer experience 
X. We’re only as stuck as we think we are

    To deeply understand the meaning of these statements is to live in a different world, and inside-out world. You may never see yourself or the world in the same way again.

    Our innate Health and its natural intelligence is always hidden within us, just waiting to rise to the surface. All we have to do is allow what we think we know to drop away, or no longer take it seriously, and this wisdom will speak to us. It is so close to us that we have forgotten it is there – like the air we take for granted – yet it holds the key that unlocks the potential in everyone.” Jack Pransky

     Spiritual porosity refers to one of the qualities of Self: openness, connectedness, inter-relatedness or "interbeing," and ultimately Oneness with everyone & everything - nonduality. An old saying, "No man is an island." 

    “I’ve had the honor of being able to work with some of the Northern Plains indigenous peoples here - the Crow, and Sue, and the Northern Cheyenne. And I think they were much more comfortable with ‘porosity of mind.’ When they talked about the world around them, it was ‘all my relations.’ That’s a porous attitude toward the world. And I also think if we really could get back to that different attitude, we wouldn’t be able to treat the world around us so badly anymore.” Robert Falconer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSa9hvEgWpk WONDERFUL INTERVIEW

     Simon & Garfunkel sing about the opposite of porosity, the "small self":

Spiritual Intelligence

"There is a brokenness 
out of which comes 
the unbroken, 
a shatteredness 
out of which blooms 
the unshatterable. 
There is a sorrow 
beyond all grief 
which leads to joy 
and a fragility 
out of whose depths 
emerges strength. 
There is a hollow space 
too vast for words 
through which we pass with each loss, 
out of whose darkness 
we are sanctioned into being. 
There is a cry deeper than all sound 
whose serrated edges cut the heart 
as we break open to the place inside 
which is unbreakable and whole, 
while learning to sing." 
Rashani Rea

    We may be so familiar with feeling fragile, sad or worse, that a dark mood may almost feel like home, the "story of me," who we (assume we) are, our (assumed) identity, our 'normal.' We may also assume that our quality of life is chained to & rigidly determined by life circumstances, which we see as bleak.

    UNTIL somehow, even if just for a brief moment, we clearly see how this entire mess is ONLY a story. Eckhart Tolle's spontaneous awakening from severe depression is a dramatic example of this. Many dramatic awakenings are being reported with psychedelic-assisted therapy - exceptionally moving stories of Navy Seals suffering from combat PTSD are beautifully documented in the 2025 documentary "In Waves and War" https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/82047468. But most awakenings are gradual progressive life-long processes, during which spiritual practices help to uncover our innate spiritual intelligence.

    THEN we might notice that we are ACTUALLY this awareness, this witness to the "story" - NOT the story itself. Initially, this is a subtle felt sense of a shift, almost like remembering an old memory, impossible to put into words. A silent, peaceful, wise, loving intelligence that is our Self, our True Nature, who we truly, actually are. 

    WE CAN, with the help of spiritual practices - like meditation and self-inquiry - start to embody this, our real identity, for slightly longer stretches of time, very gradually connecting these stretches that are marked by peace & joy and are remarkably, wonderfully independent of life circumstances.

    Repeatedly practicing Loving-Kindness meditation toward ourselves & others can, over the years, melt the armor we no longer need, resulting in periodic ‘heart openings’ – feeling of warmth radiating forward from the heart area, occasionally accompanied by ‘uncaused joy’ – spontaneous, prolonged blissful peace & happiness for days, weeks or longer, without any change in our external circumstances.

    We're fully aware of all the usual challenges of life, however, we're experiencing life from a peaceful, wise, remarkably objective perspective, that is radically different from feeling helplessly trapped in a bad drama. 

    This is the process awakening, a mystical experience, the flowering of spiritual intelligence, etc. Wise people throughout history have considered awakening to be the very purpose of life. Our own culture desperately needs to be reminded of the importance of spiritual intelligence.

    Mark Vernon, former Church of England priest, now psychotherapist & author, introduces his book "Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps": 

    “Spiritual intelligence is a type of perception, although unlike types of empirical perception that see, hear, touch, taste or smell, it works by spotting what is alive & implicit. It delivers the felt sense, often first glimpsed out of the corner of the mind’s eye, that our experience of things is connected to a wider vitality, that what we grasp is only a fraction of what might be understood, that there is more underpinning existence to become alert to this presence is like becoming aware of light, which is not itself directly visible though simultaneously shines from all the objects it illuminates. 
    Spiritual intelligence is a kind of intelligence to with humble awareness, rather than slick analysis. And when someone has spiritual intelligence, you will think they are inspiring more than clever. It is a wonderful capacity and a source of delight, comprehension & purpose. It is also basic to being human. 
    But my fear is that it has become so overlooked and so sidelined in the modern world that people are inclined to be sniffy about it and deny that it exists altogether. 
    The word 'spiritual' is of course contentious. People can spend years trying to define it. For others it’s straightforwardly a turn off as it evokes superstition or woo. I’ve resorted to it partly because it is useful in signaling my conviction that there are more things in the world than can be accounted for by a materialist philosophy. 
    Also, if spiritual seems slippery, that is only in the way that defining what is good or beautiful or true seems slippery, though we know these things the instant we are in their presence. The realization lies in the recognition, not any definition which will inevitably be too tight. 

    My book – “Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps” – is in part a product of my involvement in a research group organized by the International Society for Science and Religion that is looking into these things. I feel it has become crucial to get a felt handle on the notion of spiritual intelligence, in contrast to other kinds, and in particular, artificial intelligence. The immediate concern is that AIs are already so pervasive that we are at risk of forgetting what it is to operate without their slick planning cunning manipulation and tremendous capacity for problem solving. The challenge is to ensure AIs benefit us more than threaten us, which requires us to understand more fully what it means to be human. If we can be brightly aware of the capacities we have, which no machine does, even as the technology continues to improve, we might have a chance of staying human in the age of the machine. 
    Emotional intelligence isn’t enough I’ve concluded, partly because it looks as if AIs will be increasingly able to mimic the qualities that Daniel Goleman originally highlighted as proficiencies of emotional intelligence. 
    The first two competencies he lists: social skills and empathy, machines can already be programmed to fake. 
    The next two, motivation and self-regulation, machines simply don’t need as it is in their nature to keep going without hesitancy or deviation. 
    Goleman’s fifth characteristic, self-awareness has so far eluded computers, and my guess it always will, though the danger is that it can be imitated so as to confuse humans, and it’s already doing so. 
    I put it like this, if artificial intelligence is mostly about solving problems by spotting patterns, and emotional intelligence is mostly about relating to feelings by understanding them as opposed to being swept along by them, spiritual intelligence turns to the steady presence that runs through, above & under it all. 
    This awareness is transformative, not because it is successful at what it does like an AI, nor because it fosters flourishing like emotional intelligence, though it might, spiritual intelligence enables the individual & groups of individuals to become increasingly aligned with the deeper pulses of reality. It takes us to the shoreline of knowledge where learning becomes a type of listening, consideration a type of resonance, and personal change a type of expansion. 
    With spiritual intelligence education becomes an activity that seeks to draw out and recollect, rather than pour in and test. The truly deadly thing is to fail to notice you are experiencing, because you have become lost in the experience. It is this self-forgetfulness and alienation that the pervasiveness of machines can bring about, not because they have woken up, but because their impressive presence has made us fall asleep. The risk is that we become like them, not that they’ve become like us.

    What I am proposing as spiritual intelligence is related but different to the ways it has been defined so far by the writers who have attended to it. It has been thought of as a skill that can handle values or as an ability to discern purpose or as a concern for ultimate issues like life and death. Experts have turned to it as a complement to emotional intelligence, rather than as the capacity that is onto the realm in which the imminent meets the transcendent, as I am suggesting. 
    There are two problems with these older approaches. One is that they commit the flaw of much modern psychology by trying to remain metaphysically agnostic, instead of concluding on the basis of experience & evidence, coupled to intuition & desire, that there is a ground wellspring & sustaining presence within our existence. 

    Psychologists typically attempt to hover above reality and comment on behaviors or observations, but this is not metaphysically agnostic. It is adopting the materialist assumptions of the physicist, which might work well when studying the objective world, but fragment when studying the subjective, because unlike the Cosmos, the psyche cannot be inspected in a detached manner. The so-called replication crisis is a result. 
    Second, spiritual intelligence is not a kind of know how, but more basic. It is know that – know that our plane of existence has qualities of being and consciousness and constancy and peace. That awareness will undoubtably help with our emotional intelligence, as I explore in the book, but spiritual intelligence as I see it is not a proficiency, because it is not something to be achieved. It is a perception, which you could say is born of a knack or a grace or a crisis, though it only appears to elude us in retrospect, because it is closer to us than we are to ourselves. It invites us to turn back to our ground of our being, and re-build from there. 
    My sense is that now is a good moment to become aware of its awareness for another reason. Many thinkers, including my colleagues at the research Network Perspectiva, believe that we live in a time of crisis, that is actually a meta-crisis. They mean that the challenges of the 21st century, from environmental collapse to social alienation, are not problems prevailing systems can fix, for all the specific policies and decisions may be able to impede pandemics and put out some of the fires, rather the problems have in large part been caused by the prevailing systems themselves. So while systems will have to be redesigned, and more basic tasks must be attended to, remembering what it is to be human.

    My seven steps are a set of reflective reorientations that turn the attention towards spiritual intelligence, deepen the understanding of it, and thereby locate it more consciously in life. 

    The first step is to retell the origin story of human beings. This is important because stories are like filters and the current crop of big history accounts of homo sapiens treat the spiritual element as if it were a delusion, which whilst once useful, can be filtered out now. I present the case, emerging from research in human evolution, that what I’m calling spiritual intelligence, developed in significant ways with the emergence of homo sapiens, and played the fundamental role in the development of culture and technology. We are homo spiritualis, and need to recall that now. 
    Second step, or perceptual shift continues this story into the annals of history, and explores how individuality and individual freedom emerged. The basic freedom is again often forgotten now. It is not freedom of choice, which is freedom from hindrance; or freedom of expression, the freedom to speak or do; but the more basic type of freedom, to recognize what freedom is for, which in a nutshell is to know ourselves in all our depth. Freedom grows as spiritual intelligence becomes established. 
    Step three is a type of discursive meditation on what it’s like to tune into spiritual intelligence. The upshot is a growing perception that reality is simple, not in a naïve sense of not complex, which is clearly not the case, but in the deeper sense that the myriad things arise from a spiritual commons, which spiritual intelligence can know. 
    Step four considers how spiritual intelligence relates to the inner life of the individual or the soul. It explores the ways in which developmental psychology and psychotherapy have charted this interiority that argues that without the metaphysical ground that spiritual intelligence brings, these methods of easing suffering and promoting development have no goal, and so can leave people journeying and journaling almost indefinitely. 
    A fifth step follows because when the soul settles into the being that sustains it, the tricky but transformative reality of death can be approached anew. Mortality reveals itself with spiritual intelligence to be a kind of natality, an insight that can be found in any wisdom tradition of merit with the advice to learn to die before you die. 
    Step six argues that spiritual intelligence precipitates a radical shift in our perception of ethics. It must move on from being understood as about morality – which tends to foster guilt & shame, and is readily weaponized, and so unwittingly weds us to alienation. Instead, the older tradition of virtue commends itself – which focuses on the qualities & characteristics that not only incline us to what’s good, but enable us to embrace more & more of life, especially when hard. 
    Spiritual intelligence offers a radically different way of being in the world, which is the focus of the final step seven. We might come to love realization instead of being wedded to growth & progress. We might value notions like awakening and conversion, alongside management and development, not least when thinking about education & ecology. In particular, the experience of time can be transformed. These capacities are essential now and will be increasingly essential in the future, so I commend the book to you.”

    Mark Vernon https://www.markvernon.com/books/spiritual-intelligence-in-seven-steps

 

Tending and Befriending

    Twenty-five years ago, Taylor et al published a paper, "Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-befriend, not Fight-or-flight" (Psychol Rev 2000; 107(3): 411-29) which suggested female behavior is more marked by a pattern of "tend-and-befriend" than by "fight-or-flight."  
    They defined "tending" as nurturing activities to protect self & offspring, to promote safety & reduce distress; "befriending" the creation & maintenance of social networks that help this tending process.
    Despite this surprisingly promising start, the story - to be published in a "scientific" psychology journal - had to devolve into reductionism: "oxytocin, in conjunction with female reproductive hormones & endogenous opioid peptide mechanisms, may be at its core." 
    So wise motherly love & nurturing care for children, family, friends, neighbors & beyond was reduced to meaningless, accidental matter activated by hormones, while other hormones activate male machines fight & run. 
    Now it's all figured out! BUT ONLY IF you value a meaningless, accidental, mechanical model to the exclusion of an infinitely greater, wiser reality!   

    "Spiritual intelligence is the foundation of who we are and our particular type of consciousness. It is the perception identified across wisdom & religious traditions, and known by many names, which can be summarized as the awareness of awareness, and so of being itself. It is the foundation of peace, even in the face of death, as well as purpose and solidarity. The challenge today is to recover and live according to that knowledge." 
    Mark Vernon, "Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps" 2023.

 

    Iain McGilchrist is a highly & broadly educated (a very rare combination) and experienced literary scholar, neuroscience researcher, psychiatrist and author of 3 respected books. He sees our present society as being very far from wise, and hence, recklessly self-destructive. 
    The key feature of this blindness is a strident left-hemisphere-dominant perspective, hellbent on grabbing as much as we can, as fast as we can, with no concern for the destructive impacts on other people, animals, plants, the Planet as a whole. This struggle to rob-or-be robbed, is openly adversarial, and feels like "fight-or-flight." India, China, Japan etc which once had profound wisdom traditions, are also drowning in rabid capitalism. The inevitable result is degradation of quality of life, the environment, international relationships, ... everything.
    This is in stark contrast to a right-hemisphere-dominant perspective on life, which uses & values the left hemisphere's qualities of looking after practical matters, AND BALANCES this with careful attention to larger contexts, 'the big picture' in order to nurture & collaborate or 'tend-and-befriend.' This is living in wise relationship with Self, other humans, other beings, Nature, Cosmos, Source. 

     Too many of us have forgotten our own wisdom nature, traditions & practices. We must reclaim these ASAP to help revive our culture's wisdom vacuum.

    "... consider Thomas Banyacya's four words: 'Stop, consider, change, and correct.' Stop what you are doing. Consider the effects of what you are doing. Is it upholding life on this land? Or is it destructive to the life on this land? If it is destructive, then change your value system and your actions. We are not supposed to be subduing the earth, treading it underfoot, vanquishing the earth and all its life. We are supposed to be taking care of this land and the life upon it. So it's up to you to consider which side you are going to be on." 
    Craig Carpenter, traditional Mohawk messenger, in "The Book of Elders - The Life Stories & Wisdom of Great American Indians" as told to Sandy Johnson & Dan Budnik

    In one of his recent informative online interviews, McGilchrist comments on materialist science when it strays far beyond its appropriate limited domain:
    "Reductionism has always tended to produce an answer that is unsatisfactory for what it’s going to make. A simple down to earth example, if I may give one, is a piece of music. So if you ask somebody who is analytically bent, to work our what a piece of music is doing, well they’ll say, first of all what is a piece of music made of? It’s made of notes. Well, the first question then to answer, what is a note? And a note is a sound like that. Then what does it mean? Nothing. Okay, well the music has another of these notes. What does it mean? Nothing. And after 30,000 notes, I’ve got Mozart’s G minor quintet. It’s just made out of notes, none of which mean anything. So it must be a heap of nothing! And in this process, you have driven out everything that was invisible to your analytic eye, which was the web of connections in which, and only in which, the thing had any meaning.

    The point I think I’m trying to get at is that if you take things apart, you destroy their meaning. And if you think of the Universe as just made up of little bits of stuff that you’ve got down to with your microscope, you can’t see what it makes in aggregate. 
    A simple analogy would be like, what is a motorbike? Oh, I’m going to find out. There’s one in the garage. I’ll take it apart. And several hours later, the other person comes back and says, ‘Okay, what is it?’ ‘Well, it’s got two of these and three of those, and something else, but search me, I have no idea what it is.’ And it doesn’t mean anything, because it’s completely destroyed by the acts of analysis. And the only way in which you could work out what it was, was to get on it and ride it. 
    And life is like that. You can’t stand aside from it, from outside, and understand it. A religious belief is like that. You can’t stand aside from it, and inspect it, and go, ‘Well, it doesn’t add up, according to where I am standing now.’ But it only doesn’t stand up from where you’re standing now because of where you’re standing now. 
    Another example would be like learning to swim by sitting on the bank of a river with a book saying ‘this is how to swim,’ and swearing you’re not going to get into the river until you’ve learned to swim from the book."
    Iain McGilchrist "Your Brain Has 2 Masters — And One Is Leading Us Astray" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ5C11mlTH4 

 

    “When good is done, it contains all good. Although good is formless, when it is done, it attracts more good faster than a magnet attracts iron. Its power is stronger than the strongest wind. All the accumulated karma throughout the earth, mountains, rivers, world and lands cannot obstruct the power of good.”
    Master Eihei Dogen

"Choices in a meditator's life are very simple: 
Do those things that contribute to awareness. 
Refrain from those things that do not." Sujata

“Now is the time, and we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Hopi elders

 

Suffering - a MUCH Bigger Perspective

    “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Joe Klaas

    "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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