It’s Not About Us!

An unexpected email arrived the other day, from a kind stranger. He wanted me to know about the visionary experiences of Christopher Bache who has had 73 supervised LSD out-of-body experiences over a period of 20 years.  “During these experiences he could envision many different dimensions of the universe and many layers of consciousness that seem to cover the original pure consciousness, which he describes in his new upcoming book ‘Diamonds from Heaven’.”

In this presentation,  Bache gives a vivid and moving account of his incredible visionary journey over twenty years. He was brought to tears several times in the telling, so close was he still to those profound experiences. Bache had encountered a mystery in the “beyond”, something alien to his human understanding (and ours) and was forced, like so many visionaries, to find language to communicate with us about it.

[When] I was writing Dark Night, Early Dawn in 1995, a very powerful session took me deep into the future and into the death and rebirth of our species. The collective convulsions I entered were species-wide and appeared to be driven by a global systems crisis triggered by a global ecological crisis. I was not given any details about how or when this crisis would take place, but this session showed me the fact of a global crisis; it took me inside the collective psyche’s experience of this crisis and showed me some of the mechanisms of collective awakening that will be activated by this crisis. For there to be a great awakening of our species, there must first take place a great death of our species-ego. What I saw was that the twenty-first century will begin the dark night of our collective soul, a time of intense purification and transformation. I experienced humanity being brought to its knees as the ordinary structures of our lives were taken from us. We were losing control of our lives. For a time, it looked like our species would not survive this crisis, but just when it was at its peak, the worst of it passed. As the survivors began to pick themselves up, we found that we had been profoundly changed by these events. The foundation of the collective psyche, the archetypal form of homo sapiens, had shifted in response to the severity of this crisis.

In order to communicate his almost ineffable experiences to us Bache chose to rework his profound and overwhelming at times LSD-inspired visions (over 20 years) into more familiar modern theoretical abstractions: “global, crisis, species, collective psyche, mechanisms of collective awakening, humanity brought to its knees,” etc. He organised 73 sessions into a coherent whole i.e. a book with chapters, distilling his experiences so that something of the mystery could be transmitted. He has clearly reworked his primary experiences into an form of rhetoric that he wants to disseminate or teach:

when I was in the peak of the experiences indicated by these large circles after about the first 12 or 15 sessions I was operating in a state of consciousness that was far beyond personal states of consciousness and that’s the story that I’m trying to tell in Diamonds from Heaven. That’s the philosophically significant story because that’s I think the story that in some way we all share. It’s all part of our collective inheritance and  it’s the cosmological story which is the important story … I was being shown what the evolutionary trajectory was of humanity and what the evolutionary agenda was for humanity. Eventually the ocean of suffering reached a level of intensity. It’s hard to describe. It culminated in what I call healing the collective wound; just a massive huge purification process of collective healing and when that finished, it spun me into an unprecedented, a new level of reality…

Such typical visionary texts represent the emerging dominant rhetoric of what I will call a new ideology of species transformation. I say “ideology” because we are now saturated by such abstract ideas circulating as such in the mass media. And such rhetoric involves a troubling contradiction. Bache tells us that he was taken “into an unprecedented a new level of reality…” where:

I had to leave behind the conditions of human consciousness images, like being in the space station orbiting above the earth I entered a state of consciousness that was beyond the collective psyche. I was being worked with for months, being taught how to experience how reality works at that level beyond the collective psyche … I encountered living forms that were responsible for creating space-time and the core structures of space-time they were vast they were huge my mind imaged them like galaxies billions of light-years across they were just enormous I could not wrap my mind around them they were like archetypes but they were not like Plato’s archetypes…

He thus encountered “something” that was utterly alien to anything human! Yet upon his return, in his understandable struggle to find language with which to reconnect with others, he develops a form of rhetoric that is entirely human-centered:

humanity, our species, collective, species-ego, homo sapiens, future human, a new base-line consciousness, we will give birth to a radically transformed human being: a human being healed of the scars of war and the terrible things we’ve done to each other through the centuries; a more conscious human being capable of deeper relationships and deeper communion with the creative intelligence of the universe; a more spiritually realized human being…

As many prophets or modern mystics do, Bache interprets his encounter with an alien presence as being in essence all about us, that the alien mystery wants to teach us something about us. Such human-centred rhetoric seems to me to be very wrong and very questionable. Where is the alien “speech”? We seem quite unable to distinguish our human interests (e.g. to be the centre of everything) from any deeper reality which may have nothing at all to do with our desires for self-preservation. Such misinterpreted visions (that they are about us) generate a feeling of false hope, particularly today when such visions are most often presented to us in the form of abstract rhetoric of generalised ideologies, e.g. “species transformation”.

Bache claims to know what is going to happen and that it is essentially once again about us:

It’s so important that we hold the vision of where we are going and what actually is happening, because as the dark shadows gather in this century and the century ahead, we can lose ourselves in despair. We can lose ourselves in hopelessness if we don’t understand that we are in labor. We are in labor and we are giving birth. And we are not simply giving birth to a slightly improved version of ourselves. We are giving birth to an extraordinary child. A child that never existed as a species on this planet before.

But it’s not about “me” or “us” at all. Bach strays close to this thought when he says, “We are giving birth to an extraordinary child. A child that never existed as a species on this planet before.” But the name “child” inevitably interpreted naturalistically or humanistically occludes a stark, unnatural phenomenon: An unknown X that has never existed before is approaching and, as Derrida says, if we name it, we tame it, domesticate it! At the same time we fail to address its uncanniness, it’s monstrousness, its alien character: