Episode #63

Laura Dawn: Chris Basche. Thank you so much for taking the time to drop in with me today.

It’s really just such an honor to meet you. I am just so impressed with your path and all the work that you’ve done.

and It’s really already been a big blessing in my life, and I know in so many other people’s lives.

Chris Basche: Thank you. I was hoping the work would be useful to others. It’s nice to hear that it is. Hmm.

Laura Dawn: And I think it’s helpful to just open this space by really setting the context for your work because so much of the conversation in the psychedelic space is revolved around, you know, therapeutic aspects of these medicines, and you have such a unique journey.

You’ve done 73 high dose. LSD Journeys, you’ve written LSD and the Mind of the Universe, such a phenomenal book . And I’d love to ask you just what your educational background was and setting the context for the time. How old were you when you were about to journey for the first time and what called you to this medicine?

And then maybe from there that will help set the context of the perspective that you are bringing that is really beyond just talking about healing of self.

Chris Basche: Well, it all began about 45 years ago. I had just finished my graduate work at Brown University. I was trained as a philosopher of religion. I had published a number of articles out of my dissertation and I was looking for where to take my research next.

And I came across the work of two people. I changed the course of my life. The first was Ian Stevenson and his work on reincarnation, which proved to me that reincarnation was a simple fact of life. And my first book, life Cycles was a response to Ian Stevenson in that way, but more importantly was Stanislav Gro f.

And he had just published two years before Realms of the Human Unconscious. This is 1978. And when I read that book, I realized immediately the importance of Stan’s work for philosophy of religion, not just psychology. And so I, I knew that in my discipline, the people who would be making the deepest contributions in the near future would be those speaking out of an experiential basis, not simply an intellectual basis.

So I decided to begin a regiment in a course of psychedelic therapy following the protocols at Stan had developed. And that turned out to be a much longer undertaking than I had thought or anticipated. After several medium dose sessions, I did 73 high dose LSD sessions. I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms.

And this is a regimen I truly don’t recommend today. I mean, it’s, it’s a very, very demanding regimen. If I knew then what I know now, I would do it differently. I’d be gentler on myself. But that’s what I did. I did this work between 79 and 99 when I was 30 to 50 years old. And then I spent another 20 years digesting it, assimilating it, thinking about it, figuring out what the patterns were, and then published LSD and the Mind of the Universe, in 2019.

Laura Dawn: And what would you say were the questions that really inspired you to embark on this journey? Like what was the level of self-inquiry that was there for you?

Chris Basche: Well, I, as a philosopher of religion, I had always been interested and fascinated by the fundamental questions of life. You know, why are we here?

What’s the purpose of our existence? Why is there so much suffering in the world? How do we cooperate with the life process? And of course, I had read enough and learned enough about the eastern traditions and was, I finished graduate school as a, a deeply convinced, agnostic, but interested in human potential, and particularly the potential of enlightenment.

So I began this work with the idea of accelerating my own spiritual evolution, accelerating my entry into enlightenment, accelerating the burning off of personal karma. But that was a model I learned as it was kind of a false and restrictive model of consciousness. It fell away after just a couple of years of work, but that was the agenda kind of to grow spiritually faster than I would simply by following my meditation practice.

But then it became an adventure in cosmological exploration. First, I learned that the personal model of transformation was inadequate. That when you hyperstimulate a consciousness using this very intense protocol, then you, generate an activation of consciousness that reaches much farther than the individual.

And the dynamics that manifest in this work become collective as well as personal. So that the goal shifted very quickly from personal awakening to our collective historical awakening. And then it matured beyond that into an adventure in exploring the deep structure of the universe. The deep structure of consciousness and what I came to call, you know, the mind of the universe.

Some would say the mind of the divine or the mind of God. And, and that’s okay, except that those terms have kind of a historical theological overlay that I’m not terribly comfortable with. So I frame it as exploring the mind of the universe.

Laura Dawn: I really, I love the concepts that you present and the languaging and the words that you use to describe so many aspects of your experience over these many, many years.

How much was your experience influenced by the concepts that you learned before going into that experience?

In terms of Stan Griff’s work and the theories of religion and Buddhist philosophy, how much was that an influential factor in terms of the outcome of what you actually experienced?

Chris Basche: I’m sure that played a role. It played probably a larger role in interpreting my experiences than in actually seeding or generating those experiences.

But I’m sure it played a role in, in seeding those experiences.

The way I understand it generally is that consciousness is an infinite ocean of potential. And when we drop our individual mind into that ocean, it acts like a seed catalyst that catalyzes a certain set of responses out of that infinite potential.

As we internalize those experiences and let them purify us and change us, then the seed catalyst that we drop into the ocean in our next session is a little changed. And because it’s changed, it catalyzes a different and deeper set of responses from the infinite ocean. So I’ve often wished I had a PhD in physics and astronomy, particularly because if I, if I did, then I would be able to, the universe would’ve been able to show me so much more in those areas than it was able to show me, given the mind that I have.

So what emerges is an interaction, a participation between the mind, which is seeking to know and the, and what the universe mind wants you to know. But I, I wouldn’t think that my conditioning, while it certainly had a conditioning effect in the early stages, there were so many surprises, so many things that the universe showed me and taught me that were completely beyond my expectations.

I wouldn’t overstate the conditioning effect of our background. Because when you’re in dialogue or in communion with an infinite intelligence, this intelligence is so much larger and so much broader and has so many more things to say than we think it might have to say. And it’s the creativity of that dialogue that stands out for me.

Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: Yeah. This concept of it being a dialogue is really interesting. Sometimes I feel that when I’m also in ceremony, I feel like I’m in dialogue with my plant teachers and also recognize that part of my intention and my prayer and , the questions, the inquiry that I bring in as part of me speaking.

And then there’s a receptivity and a listening and so, mm-hmm. How much do you think it’s important to actually cultivate the inquiry and the questions that we bring in? Do you think that that has an impact in terms of what is shown to us?

Chris Basche: I think it does especially when working with medicines like psilocybin or ayahuasca or things like this, when you’re working with very high doses of L S D.

However, I found that my agenda was practically irrelevant because. These substances were so powerful that they would just shatter my mind and, and just tear the lid off my mind. And what determined the nature of the conversation was much more what the universe was wanting to teach me more than what I thought I wanted to know.

So that what I would bring to this was an absolute willingness to follow the experiences wherever I was led to follow them. And and that really determined the content. So my sense was I was always confronting a massive intelligence in this work. And the intelligence kind of showed deeper and deeper aspects of itself as I went deeper and deeper into the universe.

It never congealed into a specific form. It never took any visual form of deities or spirit guides or anything like this. It was always an open-ended field of intelligence dissolving into that intelligence and living for a while in, at some level of its reality, experiencing what it experienced. As you know, what one learns in these things you, you learn by becoming.

So to learn something about a reality, you have to become that reality. And so you dissolve completely leaving behind your historical existence, dissolve into this reality, and then slowly as you congeal at the end you bring your memories back. But, but the fact that you bring your memories back doesn’t mean that your ego or your, your awareness is intact in the peak hours of the experience itself. So I surrender completely to where it wants to go, and I’ve found that its agenda was always much more interesting than my agenda. Mm

Laura Dawn: mm mm-hmm. You mentioned, I watched your course on the Shift Network. It was very well delivered. I really appreciated the way you structured that course.

And you said some things that really caught my attention because I’ve experienced something very similar, but the way that you articulate what you’re learning is really impressive, and I’d love to actually talk to you about that as well. Like how do you translate these big transmissions and. The insights received into something tangible.

But before we get there, I wanna ask you about this statement that you said you said, if you want access , to the knowledge of the universe, it will teach you how to receive it. And that every dimension of reality can teach you how to receive the wisdom and information inherent in that. And that we actually have to learn how to learn at these different states of consciousness.

I really appreciate that. I feel like every dimension has different teachings for us, and these medicines have the capacity to actually teach us how to receive it. I’ve never heard anyone else express it that way, that felt so deeply resonant with my own experience. Mm-hmm. So I would just love for you to unpack what that means for you.

Chris Basche: Well, just a, a touch of background. My experience has been that. When you work in a systematic fashion, you know, in a highly controlled environment, you know, a therapeutic setting with a sitter, with eye shades and earphones, you know the whole thing and you work consistently using the same protocol, the same set setting, particularly the same medicine in, in a fashion like this.

Then you go through this learning process, you go through the death rebirth process, and eventually are brought into a deeper level of spiritual reality. And that level of spiritual reality works differently than time space does. So you have to acclimate to that level of reality, and if you keep pushing after a period of work, you will come to another threshold.

Go through yet another form of death and rebirth. It’s not repeating ego death, but a different form of death and rebirth and are brought into a deeper level of reality, which works with a different set of principles and almost a different physics. And that each step deeper into the universe is a step into a higher level of energy.

So you, part of it is just learning how to acclimate to that level of energy. If you have just glancing contact with it, then this may not be quite clear, but to have sustained communion, cognitively coherent immersion in that reality, you have to let yourself become, you have to be emptied and purified so that you can sustain the vast energy that is operat at that level of reality.

And this repeats itself as you go deeper and deeper. The energy just becomes enormous. So in that process, once you transition into that new level of reality, the first time you enter a new level, it’s often cognitively very confusing. I mean, you just don’t understand everything you’re seeing. Or when you come back, you may not have full memory of that, of what you actually experienced, no matter how moving it was.

But if you go back again and again and again to that level, then what happens is you cognitively adjust to that reality. You learn how to stay conscious in a, in a level of reality that you had not been able to stay fully conscious in before. And so this is what I mean. You, you have to cooperate with the process and let this reality teach you how to stay conscious in how to receive information at that level of reality.

And it takes, as you know, a, a great deal of discipline. And focus to be able to stay conscious in that way. And then once this happens, the universe takes you in and teaches you what it can teach you about that particular level of reality and what you can see of itself mm-hmm. At that level of reality.

And the wonderful thing is, one of the many wonderful things is it seems that the mind of the universe or the, the mind of the divine is very eager and, and wants to teach you about itself. It wants to show you these realities has been waiting for humanity to evolve for millions of years, excuse me, till it gets to the point where it can begin to take in this information.

Not of course, for the whole species to begin to get into this conscious relationship with the universe, but it takes time. Mm-hmm. It takes discipline. Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: So fascinating. There’s so much here. I wanna talk about the cycles of death and rebirth, but while we’re here mm-hmm. Do you think that attention is the focus of the discipline?

In recent journeys that I’ve had, I feel like the core teaching was that when my mind is fully present and right there, it’s almost like a way of paying attention that a deeper level of receiving happens. But the moment that my mind goes away and gets carried by something else, and this is a different setting, it’s a different dose, obviously, when we’re talking high doses that you are experiencing, and that’s something worth emphasizing.

Your systematic approach is incredible and that’s what makes this insight so valuable. And I, I’m curious where. The level of, of discipline and training to open up to these energies. And like this is, this other question I have is like, how are these energies here all the time? And is it the way that our mind pays attention and chooses to focus that we open up to it and that we’re able to experience it?

So how much is it about attention and awareness of where we shine our light of consciousness?

Chris Basche: Well, I think attention plays a critical role. I mean, all the years that I was doing psychedelic work, I was also a meditator. And so I had learned meditation about entering into focused awareness and letting things arise and not engaging them and, and you know, staying in that observer position.

And that is very helpful training when you’re working with psychedelics, when you’re working with lower doses of psychedelics, it more closely approximates the meditation context. When you’re working with very high doses of the psychedelics, it, it changes some of the dynamics. I think attention is still critical, so you’re staying focused in your, in your process.

But when you’re working with very high doses, it is so intense. It’s like going over a roller coaster. You don’t have to worry about paying attention, you’re just worrying about staying alive. And, but the, the key here I think is to cultivate active surrender. And this is one of the great things I learned from Stan Griff’s work an absolute trust that if you surrender to what’s happening, no matter how terrible it is, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how inscrutable it is at the time, if you completely surrender to you to it, it will take you somewhere.

It will do something to you. And eventually this will culminate. It will, you’ll go through some type of acute or subtle or acute transition a death rebirth process. And then you will wake up, you’ll recover awareness at a deeper level of consciousness in an an ecstatic level of consciousness. And so it’s that trust that the universe that you are engaging or the mind that you are engaging is absolutely trustworthy.

And you can trust it even as it’s killing you, even as it’s torturing you. You can trust it and you may not understand for multiple sessions down the road why things are happening the way they are, but you can trust it and yeah, give yourself over to it. So of course, that involves attention. A focus of attention, but it, what stands out for me more is the trust and surrender that is involved.

I really

Laura Dawn: appreciate that concept of active surrender. It makes me think of the concept of open attentiveness to whatever arises. Mm-hmm. Which is a foundational Buddhist teaching where we’re, we’re really open, we’re aware, but we’re relaxed. Yeah. So we’re engaged, but relaxed at the same time. And it’s that fine balance between I, so I really, I love that active surrender.

And so. Mm-hmm. And it’s interesting that you say that about trusting the, the sort of the pain and the suffering. And I, I wanna know what you’ve learned about pain and suffering. Because sometimes it does feel like opening to this higher degree is, is painful. That it feels like really intense and that we have to trust that.

Like sometimes when I’m in that, that place, like I can feel my heart pounding and I am like, okay, I’m having to kind of tell myself it’s okay. Just stay right here. Be right here with it. Mm-hmm. It’s okay. This is okay. Mm-hmm. And so what, what have you learned, maybe actually before we look at what you learned about suffering what was the process of the death and rebirth cycle for you?

Did you feel like that was what was allowing you to go deeper, the catalyst to go deeper? And is this a very synonymous concept as traditional Buddhist philosophy of reincarnation, or is it different?

Chris Basche: Well, you’ve, you’ve added another layer with dimension of reincarnation in there. So let, let me just start there and just say, reincarnation to me is an, is a fundamental truth of life as many religions and spiritual traditions have recognized.

And so that gives us a different context within which are an expanded context to understand what’s happening in a psychedelic session. Because my sense is that. Psychedelics are an amplifier of consciousness, and if you engage that amplified state of consciousness in a productive way, what you’re doing is accelerating the life process.

And so to, to understand that, you have to ask yourself, well, what is the nature of the life process? What’s going on in life within a reincarnation context? If you then lay that out how reincarnation works, how it’s a, we are living every reincarnation as a, , an opportunity to learn and grow. And the challenges are not random and accidental, but they are chosen.

Challenges that we choose to be here. We choose to manifest the conditions in which we are living. And by confronting those conditions and responding to the challenges of our life, we slowly grow. We become more, we become more compassionate more skillful in certain settings, and so on and so forth. We die.

We, we return to the soul, we return to our kind of bardo resting place. We debrief and then we come back into time and space again under a new set of circumstances chosen, and we continue. So what happens in a psychedelic session is an intensification of that process. So when we hyper. Energize consciousness, and we start to churn the whole system.

What the system spontaneously does is in part, it begins to bring forward its problems. It’s its impurities, it’s its pains and sufferings, the things we’re most worried about, the things we’re anxious about, the things that scare us, the things that hurt us, and the system just starts to clean itself. But that’s just the, when these things are coming from our personal life, we recognize that therapeutic value of that.

And we have a context. But some of the things that are coming are coming out of our soul history. They’re coming out of our former life history. And so in a way, what we’re doing at that point is healing our soul. We’re facilitating the integration of all of our past lives, cooperatively, creatively, into our present incarnation.

But then the things that can come up and get be brought forward come from the collective unconscious of our species. Sometimes they come from the history of our solar system, the history of creation. So there’s no way to set a limit on what may be generating the painful circumstances that you may be confronting at any particular point in time.

But if you do kind of engage them there is a suffering, but there’s a joy that follows the suffering. Now, I write in the first chapter of L s d in the mind of the universe that my major concern in telling my story was the quantity of suffering that it involved. But I felt it was really important to do that for two reasons.

One was so that we could understand the dynamics of how this process works. And the second part is it’s just what happened. It’s true. And I promised my reader that I would give an a as true an account as I could of what happened. So this to me, when you really step back and look at a long series of sessions it’s not that the universe wants us to suffer or that suffering has a, a particularly innate value or anything like that.

I mean, I certainly didn’t enjoy the suffering. And, and I put up with it because I wanted to get what was waiting on the other side of suffering. I was a glutton for ecstasy. I was a glutton for joy. And the suffering was simply a purification process that I was willing to go through in order to be initiated into the joy and the ecstasy that was waiting on the other side.

So the primary thing, I think. Is that if you want to enter into deep states of consciousness, states of consciousness in which you enter , into greater intimacy with the soul, with the forces behind the soul, with the creative intelligence of the universe, you must allow yourself to become larger.

What, keeps us from experiencing these things right now, right this immediate second, is our smallness, the habitual conditioning of our emotions and thoughts that keep us focused narrowly on our private or individual existence. And in order to become, enter into communion with that which is larger, we have to allow ourselves to become.

That which is larger, and that means letting go of the conditioning, which has kept us small. And for most of us, that’s, painful, that’s difficult. That requires that we really challenge the boundaries of our existence as we have known them, and be willing to enter into the great unknown where we’re not really sure what we are, who we are, or how life works.

That’s scary. But if you can manage that fear and have the capacity to go into that fear, always the light is waiting for you. It receives you and , it teaches you and it is so glad to embrace you. Hmm.

Laura Dawn: Did you know, did you have this palpable sense that there was ecstasy beyond the suffering?

Chris Basche: Well, I had it in reading Stan Graf’s work. I mean, I had his experience and I trusted Stan’s work. And then I had my own experience as I began the work. And it just deepened over years. The cycle showed itself early on the cycle of purification breakthrough ecstasy return. So that’s the cycle.

You go into a purification process, breakthrough ecstasy teaching, and then slowly coming back to your ordinary state of consciousness. So once you have experience of that cycle, you can trust it, not just because you have other people who have witnessed the cycle and you trust that witness, but you have your own experience too.

Then it just keeps getting deeper and deeper, and pretty soon you’re, you’re off to the races and the universe is taking you on a journey that. You know, you could never have anticipated because it’s a somewhat shared journey with other human beings, but it’s also a somewhat unique journey that’s calibrated for your specific needs or your specific contribution to the project.

Because my sense is we’re all in this together. All of our work serves a larger purpose, larger than our own personal lives. We’re all moving into these domains, or we’re moving into the future of human evolution together. And we all have different roles to play in this process. So what’s important is only that you fulfill your particular contribution.

And if we all do that, then the whole, the whole system thrives.

Laura Dawn: What do you think is really at the essence of the, the wisdom of suffering?

Chris Basche: Life is a complicated process, isn’t it? We get life in bits and pieces and stages. One life at a time, one life at a time, a hundred years at a time. And so often there’s unfinished business in life. We get hurt and we can’t resolve that hurt during this lifetime. Things happen to us. We carry traumas, or there’s just a sense of unfinishedness with different lifetimes, and I think we carry that unfinishedness in our continuing life adventures

in order to finish what was unfinished and in order to grow larger through finishing it. And I think suffering, part of suffering is simply the wisdom of our past, carrying forward into our present so that we can do a better job of healing that past and resolving whatever issues lie there. And in that context, that particular suffering is wise in that it gives us an opportunity to heal what could not be healed previously and to become more through that healing.

Okay? Mm-hmm. And I think this is an evolutionary process. I mean, we are growing hundreds of thousands of years, but in short increments of a hundred year increments, it’s a lot of start, stop, start, stop. Die more, die born. It’s over and over again. And in that sense, the suffering is, is wise.

There’s a deep wisdom Now. I don’t think suffering is inherently valuable and hopefully there comes as the wiser we get and the more skilled we get in the life process, we suffer less, you know, because we do a better job of finishing up business when it presents itself. We, we leave fewer loose ends and we’re all, we’re working out of a, a reservoir of pluses rather than a reservoir of negatives.

I think if we only pay attention, for example, to pass life therapy and we try to understand reincarnation and the dynamics of life by listening and learning from the past life therapy, we can develop an an. Inappropriately negative view of what life is about. We can begin to think that life is about healing.

Life is about, you know, fixing things, which we didn’t fix in the past. But really that’s only, that’s only partial, the partial of the truth. We are also developing positive assets. We’re developing capacities. We’re developing talents, we’re developing all sorts of things. And every lifetime carries forward.

Not only unfinished business, but finished business. Things that, you know, people, I mean, when Mozart is writing concertos, when he is five years old, I mean, come on, where did that talent come from? The things which we, the talents that we found embedded in our children either athletic talents or intellectual talents, or social talents or artistic talents, they all come from somewhere.

So it’s not simply a matter of finishing unfinished business, it’s continuing to develop those capacities and taking them to higher and higher levels, mathematics. Mm-hmm. How many lifetimes does it take to become a great mathematician or a great sailor, or, you know, you see where I’m going? Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: Yeah.

Yeah. I really liked this concept that you dropped in the course too when you said that our species is designed for rapid psychological transformation. Yeah. Is this also what you’re pointing to here?

Chris Basche: Yeah. You know this became clear and clear towards the end of my journey when I was given a certain set of experiences.

And the larger dynamic is this, every lifetime is about learning. Every lifetime is about growing, and we are, and all of our individual learning. Is embedded in our species collective learning. So we are fractal, embodiment a cell within the body of our species. So everything that we are individually learning is connected to what the species is learning as a whole.

So the universe is growing our species and we are growing within an aspect of that larger growing. And so both for the individual and the collective, what I’m going to describe works at both levels. There are sort of two tiers of this growing process. We are learning at the individual level and we’re constantly transitions are taking place there, but inside the soul is learning at an inner level.

So we are constantly kind of taking on new challenges and there’s a resolution and a. You know, realization of those challenges at the surface level. But inside the soul is accumulating the residue of all of our learning. It’s like when you go to college every semester, you take new courses, but you are holding together the learning of all the courses just you’ve taken through all of your years.

Right. And what you know is much bigger than what you are learning in any one set of courses. Mm-hmm. So if you expand this to the species level, the species is learning at a certain level, but inside, at the level of the collective unconscious, at the level of the collective psyche, the species is collecting information at that very deep, centralized level.

And what Rupert Childre would call the morphogenetic field level are urban Laslow would call the ACA field level for the species as such. So my sense is that for individuals and for the species, we are learning. We’re constantly learning, but the inside core is learning. And there are certain thresholds that when, when the inner core is ripe for it, there is a transition that takes place at the very, very deepest center of the collective psyche.

And when this pivot takes place, it influences everything that’s happening on the surface. So viewed from this perspective, I think that our theology and philosophy has taught us to think about human beings in far too narrow a context and to think about us as much more static than we actually are. We talk about human nature this, human nature that, but really, We are a dynamic species and we are constantly learning and growing and changing, and this learning is taking place at these two levels, at the surface and underneath.

And when you view from the large perspective, it really does seem like we are designed for speed. We are designed for accelerated evolutionary growth, but we don’t tend to see that if we don’t look at the world from a reincarnation perspective. Because from within a one time through perspective, each generation is dying and disappearing.

But from a reincarnation perspective, it’s dying and returning, dying and returning while this accumulation is taking place at a centralized level. From that perspective, we can see that the entire species and we individually, are designed for accelerated learning, and that means that we are carrying our history.

On our backs and that in backpacks, so to speak. And it’s much lighter than we really may at first think. We may think all human beings have always been like this, or human beings have always been like that, but really human beings are, are designed to learn and to change and to grow. And then from this perspective when you just opened the horizon to a hundred thousand, 200 or million years, we can sort of see that our species is constantly evolving.

And I think the exciting point is we are entering a time in history right now where the, collective unconscious of our species is on the cusp of making a a fundamental pivot. We are going through a growth spurt, which is going to change the foundation of our psychological existence on this planet, our spiritual existence.

Laura Dawn: Can you say more about this important moment in time and what the universe from your perspective is really asking of us?

Chris Basche: Well, again, of course, all of this, I’m only speaking out of an experiential basis. I’m not speaking out of an intellectual basis or a theoretical basis. So whatever value in what I say, it’s always limited by, is it a reflection of what’s been shown me.

I reached a point at the particular point in my work in a particular session when all of my former lives started to come into me. I’ve done past life therapy before and I have a working knowledge of, you know, a dozen or so of my former lives. None of them being historically significant, just, you know, peasants like most of us have all been.

But they all started coming back into me in this particular session. And in this session they seemed that at one point to hit a critical mass. And when they hit critical mass, they fused. And when they fused into a singularity, I was catapulted into a state of consciousness that was deeper than anything I had been in at the time.

And yet I was an individual, but I was an individual beyond any frame of reference that I had known before. And I called this the Birth of the Diamond Soul, and I was given a series of teachings around that, that let me see that this is, was not a simply a personal. Process, but this is where reincarnation is taking humanity.

This is a, a dynamic that’s our evolutionary dynamic, that all of us are being born and dying and being born and dying. We’re learning, we’re growing, but the purpose of reincarnation are the actualization of real reincarnation is not simply the incremental improvement of our soul, but eventually we reach a point where we integrate all of our former lives, all of the learning within those former lives.

And when that integration takes place, there is a fusion in which we experience our soul, the soul