In Chapter Eight, ‘The Great Awakening’, Bache writes:
“I believe that for there to be a genuine spiritual rebirth of our species, there must first take place a death of the species-ego, a complete collapse of our customary way of experiencing ourselves in the world, and the pain of such a massive collapse is extremely difficult to hold in one’s heart. If the dark night of the soul is the painful price the mystic must pay to awaken the divine within, the dark night of the species-soul will be a particularly dark and potentially dangerous time in human history.”
The author feels that after some time in transpersonal states of consciousness, the theme of spiritual rebirth consistently arises. Almost apologetically, he writes that this makes discussion of the spiritual rebirth of mankind an aspect which, because of its importance, is hard to ignore. Indeed, others voyagers into these realms have drawn these same conclusions. Bache includes seven pages from his various sessions relating to this topic. He combines chaos theory, near-death episode research, and the study of non-linear systems to suggest that the impending crisis of ecological sustainability may actually trigger a “dark night of the species,” analogous to the mystic’s dark night of the soul, that will be followed by a spiritual rebirth of our species. He calls this new brand of human which will arise from this dialectic, the Homo spiritualis.
Bache believes that a problem of future economic and raw material sustainability might be the trigger to the dark night of the species-soul catastrophe. He supports his thesis by presenting graphs showing that the present level of industrial production, expanding population, and depletion of natural resources cannot continue indefinitely. A crisis level might be reached early in this century.