Into the impossible question
I was very lucky to have this second long conversation with Chris Bache on the Speira Podcast, where we picked up where we left off.
We didn’t get to everything still open from our first interview. My wish-list was long: non-human intelligence, AI and consciousness, and the question of suffering. We nevertheless covered a lot of ground.
For the uninitiated, Chris is a professor emeritus of religious studies and the author of LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Over two decades Chris sat through 73 carefully structured high-dose LSD sessions, and the book is his recounting of his cosmological journey and a glimpse into his world-view as a result.
Chris is largely aligned with the perennial truths: the nature of reality as the fundamental quality of love, which derives from the quality of oneness.
The question I really wanted to probe in this session: if all is divine, all of it, how can gratuitous suffering possibly be part of that divine reality? If love really is the ground of reality, how do we make sense of truly unnecessary suffering, the kind with no redemption in it at all, the type of gratuitous suffering that seems built into nature itself.
On this, Chris says:
“The question of suffering, really boils down to the question of: why creation at all?”
“To me, the closest Ive been able to make sense of this hinges on the incompleteness of the human condition, and the incompleteness of the universe.”
“Maybe, just maybe, the pain of human suffering begins to take on a meaning, in terms of contributing to the larger developmental project, of a fruition that is so far beyond our ability to envision right now, from within the fragmented condition.”
We turned to AI and consciousness. My sense is that something is shifting at a collective level, that AI is forcing a reckoning with how we identify ourselves. It's stripped away the assumption that intelligence is what makes us special. The "is AI conscious?" debate is a red herring, I suspect. We'll never settle it, but in asking it we're confronted with how little we understand about consciousness in the first place, and how many of our priors no longer hold.
Chris places all of this inside the larger frame of the polycrisis:
“I think the pain of that crisis is going to open us up to a level of human suffering that will precipitate a profound transformation of the human heart… The polycrisis is giving birth to a new cultural structure on the planet, more integrated and unified. But it’s also giving birth to a more unified structure within our individual consciousness. This is what I’d call the birth of the diamond soul: our soul consciousness, fully embodied in the body.”
On what that diamond soul asks of us:
“Taking responsibility for the pains created by a humanity operating at a lower level of functioning, and at the same time opening to the opportunities created when humanity awakens and chooses the responsibilities of the soul: a much broader entity, a much older one, in far more natural communion with the creative intelligence of the universe.”
The perennial traditions themselves, Chris suggests, may be running their course:
“[The perennial traditions] are basically coming to the end of their sojourn, the end of their vitality, and there’s a restlessness, a seeking for something larger, something stronger.”
You can find the full conversation here, I hope you enjoy it.
0:01:38 – Framing: paradox, the forms of knowing, the illusion of separateness
0:06:56 – Perennial truths and perennial lies
0:13:02 – The impossible question: gratuitous suffering in an all-loving reality
0:13:59 – The divine as co-participant in suffering
0:16:42 – What would a mother do?
0:19:27 – The desire to share divinity; becoming gods
0:24:09 – Did we choose this?
0:29:37 – Being and becoming
0:31:35 – Love as the recognition of oneness
0:34:05 – Individuality sharpened
0:43:00 – The mission of Speira
0:48:51 – Collective fields and the oversized impact of the few
0:52:58 – AI and the reckoning with identity
0:58:46 – Experience vs. theory
1:07:18 – The diamond soul and where reincarnation is taking us
1:11:02 – Past lives fusing: the diamond light
1:16:08 – The polycrisis
1:19:41 – Labor: giving birth to a new humanity
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Our world is in desperate need of credible, optimistic, post-materialist worldviews. Ones that transcend and include materialism, honouring all that the scientific revolution has given us, while recognising that it has been necessary but not sufficient for what comes next.
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