Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind by Christopher M. Bache with foreword by Stanislav Grof: (part of the Suny Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology), State University of New York Press, 2000. pp.384, £15.00, ISBN: 0791446069 This is an important book because it provides "a strong centre of integrated awareness" to anchor our sense of a greater Presence (p.277). Bache walks his own way in a path first trodden by the transpersonal psychologist, Stanislav Grof, and also by Richard Tarnas in the Epilogue to his wide-ranging philosophical history The Passion of the Western Mind (1991). It may sound simplistic, but Bache's central theme might be summarized as ‘wherever one of us goes, to some degree we all go' (p.20).
Tarnas identifies the basic crisis of the contemporary mind in its alienation, post-Copernicus, Descartes and Kant, from being able to reliably know anything about the world (p. 24). Grof identifies the pre-birth, or perinatal, experience as being "first the collective experience of humanity and only secondly an individual person". He pursues the logic of this to speculate that if the patient having psychotherapeutic healing in "intense states of awareness has expanded beyond the individual person, then the healing being realized...also reaches beyond the individual person" (pp.77-8).
Bache, in several personal 'Sessions' involving archetypal experiences (very articulately reported), finds his key argument stemming from these two revelatory observations.
He raises a number of seminal insights into 'species mind', 'Sacred Mind', 'racial memory', the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo (the intermediate state after death and before rebirth), 'interlaced quantum mind-fields' and the discovery that 'parts cannot be meaningfully isolated from the systems in which they exist' (p.156). He is very clear that we are approaching a crisis-point in human evolution in relation to the universe, and at such an accelerating speed that it
Many ancient and modern voices have suggested that history is rapidly drawing humanity toward a decisive choice-point. Everywhere our individual efforts seem increasingly to carry the weight of our collective past. ...It is the awakening of humanity as a whole that is the current project of history; nothing less will satisfy the Creative Principle. (pp.177, 181).
Bache sees spiritual practices as helping to dissolve the illusion of self and the private mind in favour of developing 'the sinews of collective intent’. This involves a sacrifice of ego, especially the male ego having to re-integrate with the repressed feminine (Tarnas again), before humanity's dark night is driven forward to a longawaited early dawn.
The book is not always an easy read, because Bache, a Professor of Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, Ohio, is also deeply engaged in Grof's therapeutic methods, but not uncritical on some points to which he chooses to give detailed professional attention, and likewise to Ken Wilbur's approach to the perinatal. But these specialist interests do not have to concern the lay-reader for whom the book's creative and imaginative metaphysical scope offers a valuable contribution.
Adrian Cairns is a member of the SoF Wessex Group.