The Living Classroom by Christopher Bache

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The Living Classroom by Christopher Bache

Foreword by Robert McDermott

September 130, 2007

William James would love this book. Because he was a vigorous empiricist, someone who trusted his own experience and the varied experience of others, James would love the courageous, patient, modest, and convincing empiricism on display in this book. For the last thirty years of his career, as founder and dedicated leader of the American Society for Psychical Research, James was in search of what he referred to as “one white crow,” one person whose experience might slay the enemies of empiricism—dogmatic religion, skepticism, materialism, and what has come to be called scientism, the prevalent dogmatic use of science to prevent the full range and variety experience from breaking into thought and culture. James would have loved the way that the author of this book lets his surprising and very significant experiences, and the amazing experiences of his students, chip away at both a simple received theism and the prevalent flatland, mono-dimensional academic worldview.

Traditional religious believers tend to be convinced that dogmas do not limit the immediacy of experience. Like the philosophy of William James, the philosophy of Professor Bache is more nuanced, complex, intriguing, and open to exploration than the worldview of many religious believers. Because such believers to do not level reality to one dimension, however, they are not the ones who Professor Bache keeps in his dialectical focus. Rather, again sSimilar to James’s philosophical project, Chris Bache’s argument is primarily focused against the position that continues topresently dominates the academy, the position that regards the human mind as singular, isolated, and horizontal, i.e., incapable of either a transcendent or depth experience precisely because there is no transcendent or depth reality to experience. Scientists and philosophers of science typically assume that their methodologies are true to experience, truly empirical; this is the whole point of the scientific method, to observe and conclude theorize on the basis of observation. Bache’s entire book opposes this too easy claim. Where scientism sees flatland, Bache presents and argues for multiple levels, a variety of dimensions, a rich panoply of influences and effects. Bache’s is a not very tidy worldview but it is very rich and exciting.

As the methods of scientists tend to focus on potentially replicable experience and repeatedly verifiable observation, they tend to leave out experiences that are not measurable, particularly experiences that are unique and non-replicable. Consequently, important dimensions of experience miss are often missed by the scientific purview. Not so with the empiricism in this book: here the experiences of a

professor and his students, over more than two decades, are respectfully attended to, critically analyzed, and in the end honestly and modestly affirmed. Published on the centenary of James’ Pluralistic Universe (1908), this book finds meaningful relations between minds where most professors would be oblivious to such connections or have to deny them because their worldview simply would not allow such robust interaction at an unconscious and unintended level. James, of course, would say “listen to the experts,” the ones who are having such experiences and then articulate a worldview faithful to such experience.

Bache’s careful recounting of his wakefulness to the varied dimensions of psychic experience in his “living classroom,” and his students’ vivid descriptions of their experiences, though anecdotal, combine to bring into question the usual conventional view of mind—i.e, the view of that splits the individual mind from the material world, first formulated by Descartes in the 17th century and dominant in western thought ever sincethat minds are fundamentally isolated from one another. They also bring into question the usual conventional view of the universe as essentially dead, and exercising a deadening effect on human beings—i.e., the a view of the universe first formulated in the 18th century by Isaac Newton. Breaking through a this comfortable worldview—though comfortable only because we are used to it, not because it is healthy or enlivening—to one unbounded, astonishing, and wildly pluralistic, Bache’s universe is profoundly open, enchanting, and startling. Bache and his students comprise exhibit A of James’s “white crows.”

C. G. Jung would love this book. In addition to being a thoroughly Jamesian book, The Living Classroom is also deeply Jungian. Probably more than anyone else, C. G. Jung has brought to the 20th century West revolutionary insights concerning the deep psyche’s wisdom, persistence, and ability to communicate of deep psychic processes. Jung calls the most basic of these “archetypes,” i.e., foundational influences.foundational influences “archetypes.” These archetypes (such as the wise old man, the great mother, the sacred marriage of yin and yang, certain shapes such as circularity and triangularity), and an unlimited number of symbols, all influence human consciousnessawareness. They carry, carrying significant messages from the depths of the unconscious, or height, to normal consciousness. This worldview is important background for the experiences reported in this book because Bache, following Jung,, among others, has an eye to see what most professors cannot see, or refuse to see, namely the active role of the unconscious in the unsuspecting

conscious experience shared between Professor Bacheby teachers and students. In his interpretation of such surprising experiences, Bache is of course totally at odds with the Cartesian-Newtonian dualistic view of the mind. Bache’s His entire book (and project)project is supported by the worldview articulated brilliantly by Jung and subsequent archetypal thinkers such as Stanislav Grof, James Hilllman, and Richard Tarnas.

As we have learned from Jung, synchronicity is one of the primary instruments by which the depth of the unconscious communicates significant coincidences to the conscious life of individuals and groups. What most people take to be coincidences are in reality meaningful acausal events. According to Jung and others, synchronicities are subtle ways by which an intelligent universe brings about a startling juxtaposition, a surprising, significant, more-than-coincidence, of events, the kind that awakens a person to a new or secret truth,truth or an important meaning that would otherwise have been missed. Synchronicities can happen at any time and to anyone, but the kind of synchronicities Christopher Bache is describing in this book seem to favor a group, such as a college class, that meets and shares ideas regularly.occur inside groups that meet and share ideas regularly, such a college class.

Rupert Sheldrake would love this book. A lecture that Professor Bache delivered in class included essentially the same event as a student had experienced two days prior: the student had not mentioned the event to anyone, Bache used the example spontaneously, unconscious unaware of the student’s experience. How is the world constituted such that this kind of sharing of words and events could happen regularly? It would seem to be constituted in such a way as to include Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic fields, a subtle realm that holds weaves together discrete centers of consciousness (such as dog and master). The experiences that Professor Bache presents in this volume suggest that there is a consciousness, or field,field of consciousness within which we function, from which we draw, by which we send messages—and, according to a predominance of the examples in this bookgiven, a consciousness by which messages are received without a person having consciously sent them! Professor Bache leads us to the idea that consciousness sends them, orin this field of consciousness, the part of consciousness that is Professor Bachethe professor receives the part of consciousness that is the student. Once led to consider this unorthodox idea, the thoughtful reader wants more evidence

and an argument on behalf of this idea. Many examples and arguments on behalf of uncommon meaningful experience are to be found are given both here and in the published research of Rupert Sheldrake.

It makes all the difference whether, at that moment, the reader questions whether the reported phenomena actually happened as reported or whether the report goes against one or another cherished assumptions about the world.accepts that the experiences reported here actually happened as reported or whether they reject them out of hand as impossible. The first are genuine empiricists, inquirers who are faithful to experience, to what is really truly happening in the room so far as possible before interpretation, analysis and argument. The second way of questioningresponse issues from a worldview that disallows these phenomena, no matter how accurately they might have been reported. Professor that he is, Iin writing this book about teaching college courses, Chris Bache had college professors most clearly in view, but the phenomena he is describing and interpreting with such significance are profoundly relevant for teaching at any level, and for anyone who participates in a group with any regularity. In principle, the typical professor couldany teacher can gain the ability to see and hear above or belowbeneath the usual level of discourse but this is unlikely while if he or she holds a view of reality that lops off the far sides and the peaks of experience.

The phenomena described in this book depend on Professor Bache’sthe teacher’s openness to subtle modes of consciousness and a subtle body that he builds within his classroom with the same students for a full semester.field of consciousness that develops over the course of a semester, even growing stronger from semester to semester. The first ingredient, or condition,condition for the emergence of these phenomena would seem to be a build-up of shared experience, some kind of bonding between student and professor. It might be important that the remarkable experiences Professor Bache reports generally did not happen the first day of class, but rather happened surfaced as a result of a shared consciousness experiences that developed overfor at least a few weeks, the time necessary for the class to build a subtle body. It is also noteworthy that in one case an elderly recently widowed woman who was brought to class by her friend for only one night experienced an opening that proved to be enlightening anddeeply healing for her. It would seem that the morphic field of the class sensitively if unconsciously co-created by Professor Bache and some of his students served as a live environment for that woman’s pain and aspirationhealing. She brought her living situation to the living relationship between professor and student.

Parker Palmer would love this book. Parker Palmer is prized for his ability to encourage and empower teachers to develop the courage to teach out of their own experience. Christopher Bache has taken this ideal to its furthest limits. When Bache was a young professor soon after finishing his Ph.D. in philosophy of religion at Brown, he held an agnostic view concerning the divine, and considered and thought that profound religious or mystical experience was for others. He says in this book that at that stage of his life he considered himself, or specifically his consciousness, to be made of brick. to be a “psychic brick.” He needn’t have worried; by the time he wrote this volume, his third, he is more like a psychic switchboard or part of a super-subtle world wide web. As this book argues demonstrates so vividly and convincingly, Professor Bache is alive to the consciousness (memories, thoughts, feelings) of his students, and perhaps more remarkably, they to his and to each other’s.

The essential component of the phenomena described in this book is the distinctive ability of the professor. Perhaps at one time (in his early agnostic days) his Bache’s consciousness really was as close to brick as he reporteddense as a brick, but now that he has been meditating for several decades, his consciousness is porous, extended, and acute. He has eyes to see and ears to hear what most professors—in fact, all but a very few professors— neither see nor hear. Professors tend not to hear the unspoken largely because their worldview prevents them from listening to the unconscious of the student, or to their own unconscious as an expression ofit registers a student’s thoughts or recent experience. In this case, the adage is reversed: believing is seeing (or empowers seeing hearing), and not believing, which of course is the dominant academic paradigm, inevitably results in neither seeing the invisible nor hearing the inaudible.

When professors comment, as they often do, that individual classes have personalities—whether alive or deadly, contentious or pacific, harmonious or factionalized, etc. —they are referring to observable traits that become dominant, usually slowly but occasionally from the first day. What this book is describing, however, is not so much a personality trait as an emergent psychic capacity, an access to thoughts, words, and images that are shared at a mysteriously deep level, a level that leaves everyone involved both amazed and sometimes confused. If that really happened, how

did it, how could it? Similarly, in this book we experience a professor who doesn’t just have a good sense of a class, a knack, or a facility for language and affect, but rather a capacity, presumably developed by meditation, to access an openness to the unconscious of his students, a capacity to hear and speak reflect back a student’s thoughts or recollections and memories even though the student had not previously communicated them to the professor. In principle, any every professor and teacher can bring about such experiences inthis sensitivity to his or her classroom, but such teaching will take courage!