--- title: Christopher Bache at SkyBlue Symposia - Pt 1 of 2 slug: 2013-08-27-skyblue-symposia-pt-1 date: 2013-08-27 type: lecture channel: SkyBlue Symposia language: en license: CC0-1.0 identifiers: wikidata_person: Q112496741 openalex_person: A5045900737 people: - name: Christopher M. Bache wikidata: Q112496741 openalex: A5045900737 provenance: source: "otter+diarist->normalization" diarist_txt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2013-08-27-skyblue-symposia-pt-1.txt diarist_srt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2013-08-27-skyblue-symposia-pt-1.srt diarist_sha1: 7849cffd7d59a6e635c6af31abb184acef351415 --- **Host: ** You are listening to part one of two of our conversation with Chris Bache. **Susan: ** Welcome to Sky Blue Symposia, a convivial gathering for stimulating conversation and a free exchange of ideas. We're so glad you could join us, friends. I'm Susan, your host, and here at our round table are Cybele and Chipper, and today, Chris Bache is kind enough to join us for a new symposium as we continue consciously exploring. Welcome, Chris, it's so nice to have you with us. **Chris Bache: ** Thank you, Susan, it's a real pleasure to be part of your conversation today. **Susan: ** We've been anticipating this, and we're all very interested in your field, so I think we're going to have a cracking time. I'd like to start off by talking a bit about Stanislav Grof, his extraordinary accomplishments as a scholar, healer, and pioneer of transpersonal theory and practice. I wonder if you'd be happy to tell us a bit about Stan's work, and most especially, how it's influenced your path, your decisions, and your use of psychedelic inquiry. **Chris Bache: ** Stan's been a huge influence on my life. I encountered his work, his books, a series of books when I first came out of graduate school in 1978. His work, along with Ian Stevenson, the scholar on reincarnation, particularly changed the trajectory of my personal and professional life. Stan is a psychiatrist and the foremost authority on the influence of LSD and psychedelics in general on consciousness and the integration of psychedelics into the psychotherapeutic process. He had been working for many years in Czechoslovakia at a psychiatric institute. He came to the United States and was the director of research at Spring Grove Hospital in Baltimore, and after a number of years there, he went to Esalen, where he was a senior research fellow and worked for many years in that distinctive hotbed of humanistic and transpersonal psychology. He has written over a dozen books and is one of the most seminal thinkers in psychology and consciousness studies. He was the president for many years of the International Transpersonal Association, co-founder of transpersonal psychology with Maslow. He brought transpersonal psychology and consciousness studies around the world through a series of conferences held in multiple countries. For me, he put forth an extraordinary model of consciousness and outlined a methodology for using psychedelics to explore the deep recesses of consciousness for therapeutic purposes. Eventually, this goes beyond therapeutic intent when one drops into the vast expanse of the mind of the universe itself. As a philosopher, my focus hasn't been on healing but on using psychedelics to explore the deep structure of consciousness—those non-ordinary states through which we experience the deeper reality itself. This involves healing in a shamanic sense, healing not only the psyche but the soul, and exploring healing at a deep existential level. I began a systematic 20-year inquiry into these realms, kept separate from my professional academia as much as possible, while I continued my work as a university professor in Ohio. Now that I've retired, I strive to provide a systematic account of that journey. **Susan: ** That is fabulous, absolutely fabulous. It's so needed right now. I think the time is ripe for this. As we were discussing before we started the symposium, it seems that Ayahuasca is the path most available to people, at least in North America. But I think people will find their own way to whatever they need to open up these avenues. We're starving for it. **Chris Bache: ** Yes, yes. **Susan: ** I appreciate very much what you're saying. Cybele, you had the next question you were going to ask. **Cybele: ** So, Chris, for a beginner, what actually happens in a psychedelic session, and what's the difference between using psychedelics recreationally or therapeutically or spiritually? **Chris Bache: ** There are many different psychedelics, so if we were to take this conversation down to a more precise level, we would have to discuss specific psychedelics and how they interact with consciousness. Generally, the category of drugs that we call psychedelics are consciousness amplifiers. They are amplifiers and catalysts of consciousness. They hypersensitize consciousness, perhaps with a particular tilt one way or another, so what happens in a session is not simply a function of the psychedelic but of consciousness itself. Consciousness becomes hyper-energized in a short period, and there's a confrontation with the deeper contents of what was previously the unconscious. If you take psychedelics recreationally, the focus is often on sensory enjoyment, engaging in hallucinatory experiences that blend the unconscious and the physical environment. For therapeutic or spiritual purposes, the approach is different. It's more serious work, where you harness that hypersensitivity, isolate yourself from the physical world, work with eye shades and headphones, listen to carefully scripted music, and have a sitter. This creates conditions for maximum confrontation with consciousness, opening up depths rarely surfaced in recreational tripping. In therapeutic and shamanic modalities, when the content of one’s consciousness begins to surface, early stages often bring up existential questions and fears, like the fear of death. These surface and come at you, and if you embrace them, you go through an engagement where your deepest fears and profound questions are confronted. The universe takes you where it wants to take you. A series of crises emerge, and usually there is a crisis that develops into a critical impasse. If you surrender to it, you experience a type of death and rebirth process. You surrender completely, something in you dies, then you find yourself waking up in a different, larger reality. That can be exciting and terrifying all at the same time. **Cybele: ** What I'm hearing is, like someone will take an antidepressant, and there's some brain chemistry going on with this medication. And even with psychedelics, there's some brain chemistry, but you're really talking about consciously taking this and moving it forward in a certain direction rather than just having brain chemistry, right? **Chris Bache: ** I'm not addressing the physiology of psychedelics at all, the brain chemistry. I'm addressing the psychoactive properties. My understanding is we don't yet fully know how psychedelics work. We understand some biochemistry but not completely. However, humans have used them for thousands of years, and we know a lot about their psychological and spiritual effects. **Cybele: ** Yeah, well, thank you. **Susan: ** Chris, when psychedelics are not used to entertain the ego, sort of a spiritual materialism, but instead as part of a process with the intent of personal ego death, is that existential death inevitable before you can move past it? Is it about facing one's deepest existential fears? **Chris Bache: ** I think that's inevitable. If I get lost, please bring me back to the question of dose, low versus high dose. It's inevitable that one arrives at these thresholds of impasse. Our consciousness is actually infinite, but in taking birth, we've accepted a contraction of consciousness. We've stayed within that contraction, thinking that our consciousness is person-sized. But when we start opening to our consciousness's natural dimensions, we must free ourselves from that contraction. To remember what we've forgotten, we face a crisis that challenges us to let go of everything we think we are. You can engage in low dose work, peeling back layers in small increments, or high dose work, breaking through contractions in leaps and bounds, forcing larger confrontations and moving into the deeper nature of mind. **Susan: ** You mentioned shells, plural. That implies cycles of death and rebirth and initiation over a long period. I can't imagine one would want—or be capable of—doing that in a short period. **Chris Bache: ** Yes, the universe is so big, beautiful, with so many layers of depth, taking years and lifetimes to explore. In my work, I chose to use high doses, causing maximum absorption into the universe, though looking back, I might have taken a gentler approach. Many layers of death and rebirth occur. Initially, it's about your personal identity and history. As Stan Grof describes, you encounter the perinatal level, which includes existential crises and can overlay with biological birth, physical death, and existential meaning. This process can also activate memories from previous lifetimes. As we transition through these states, there are layers, as Ken Wilber describes: psychic, subtle, causal, and non-dual levels. These layers have their own cycles of death and rebirth. The process reflects the universe's vastness. **Susan: ** That is so beautiful and resonates with my experience. I truly appreciate this. **Cybele: ** Chris, did you ever reach a point of complete relaxation into the experience of dissolving into the universe or source, cycling through without any losing of parts other than losing yourself completely? **Chris Bache: ** Many who engage in spiritual practice, whether through psychedelics, meditation, or retreats, return to source—a waking up to who we have always been. You don't become source; you return to it, relax into it. You move back and forth into source mode and individuality. Returning to that part of consciousness before you were born and always will be is one of the great healing and awakening experiences. There's a prevailing sense, in many traditions, that returning to source is the ultimate goal. However, my experience suggests that oneness itself has layers, infinite depths. It's not just about reaching an endpoint. The divine is far too vast, and the journey continuously opens new realities. **Cybele: ** So bringing heaven to earth rather than just returning to heaven. **Chris Bache: ** Exactly, bringing heaven to earth, creating greater porosity so that there's less division between the two. We're physical and spiritual beings, and the trajectory is towards greater interpenetration. Our capacities evolve beyond the physical and what we think are our limits. Being human is expanding and will continue to expand. **Cybele: ** Thank you. Chipper has the next question. **Chipper: ** Chris, it sounds like conscious interpenetration of awareness and individuality that returns to source over and over. It's this expanding capacity for fieldwork happening rapidly. From talking to people over the last two years, there's more sensitivity to what they ingest and associate with, pointing towards expanded capacity for fieldwork. **Chris Bache: ** Yes, scientists tell us everything we thought of as particles are fields. We are fields too, connected to our own history through fields of consciousness, and connected to each other through morphic fields. These fields are becoming more energized, like nature is turning up the fire, bringing the human psyche to a boil. The first book I wrote was on reincarnation, one of life's simple facts. The empirical evidence is strong, and there’s a deep soul fermentation happening, driven by the planetary crisis, pushing us beyond past limitations to global citizenship and oneness. There's also a parallel process at a soul level, integrating past lives into a singular consciousness. Historically, this fusion usually happens after death, but we’re giving birth to soul consciousness on the planet, intact. Our crisis is the womb for the birth of the diamond soul, a higher order consciousness manifesting. **Chipper: ** By order, you're talking about structural consciousness, conscious of itself. **Chris Bache: ** Yes, the deep soul identity is emerging, absorbing and bringing to fruition egoic identity. Egoic consciousness divides and leads to competition and consumption, which we can't sustain. We're on the cusp of evolution. **Chris Bache: ** A divided consciousness leads to a divided world, and an awake consciousness, an integrated consciousness, a soul-embedded consciousness—conscious of the breadth of our existence, conscious of the breadth of mind—leads to a compassionate world, a world which is first healed and then carried forward in the creation of new cultural forms. I think we are really on the cusp of creating an entirely new cultural form, as many of your participants in previous conversations have pointed to, right? **Chipper: ** It does seem to be a widespread topic of conversation these days. **Susan: ** Yeah, Chris, for years, I've felt like we've been approaching a collective initiation process. We may have to do it individually to get the ball rolling, so to speak, but also as individuals do it, it's done for the collective. But also, is the collective doing it to individuals? **Chris Bache: ** I think, yes, the relationship of individual consciousness and collective consciousness, particularly in this evolutionary pivot that we are making, is really the dominant theme of my second book, *Dark Night, Early Dawn,* where I'm talking about the dark night of the soul and the dawn of the rebirth consciousness. But here the emphasis is not on the rebirth of the individual or the dark night of the individual soul, but the dark night of our collective soul. Let me just back up and give you my particular perspective here. I reached a certain point in the early stages of my psychedelic work where I had already gone through a series of death and rebirth experiences at the individual level. I had my ego shattered in different ways in this type of work. Then what happened is that I entered into what I would describe as the ocean of suffering. I began to have sessions where the suffering I was confronting was not personal; the suffering was collective—vast tracts of human suffering of all sorts of different orders of magnitude, just shattering levels. And first, I asked myself, "What are all these people doing in my therapy? What's humanity doing showing up in work which I had previously thought of in terms of individual transformation?" What I came to understand over time is that I may have thought I was doing a process of individual transformation to contribute something to the collective good, but the universe doesn't think in those terms. The universe, the game it's involved with on our planet right now, is nothing less than the transformation of humanity as a whole. That's the game. That's where we have to go. That's what's happening. The collective psyche is boiling and bringing its history forward, outpouring in all sorts of historical and social movements as all the sins and toxicities of our past come forward. Naturally, we feel this at an individual as well as a collective level. In deep spiritual work, people find in hypnotherapy, in yoga work, in deep meditation practice, or in psychedelic work, shamanic work, they begin to open up into these vast tracts of human suffering which, in my experience, went on for about three and a half to four years. I began to understand that the patient in these sessions was not me. The patient was some aspect of the morphic field of the human species, so it's the collective psyche trying to heal itself and taking advantage of the opportunity I had provided. I think that's happening in all of our lives, that we are all with one foot in a personal world and one foot in a collective world, so we're all channeling a healing energy, which is pulling poisons out of the collective psyche and putting healing energy into the collective psyche. **Susan: ** Well, this actually answers a long-time question of mine because I've had two near-death experiences and trained as an existential and transpersonal therapist, then practiced as one for years. I was in that field of experiencing things that had nothing to do with me, and I was very aware it wasn't mine. It was not only the ancestors, not just personal, but the collective. I take it back and back and back, but when you said the universe, or source, makes use of those opportunities, that makes sense to me. So if an individual, through whatever means you mentioned, makes themselves open or available, that source is going to use that opportunity. That is really, really helpful and insightful. **Chris Bache: ** Wow, I think we all chose this. We knew what we were getting into before we were born; we chose to enter into this time in history, even though we may have forgotten that choice temporarily while we're here. There are no victims here, and there are no innocents, in a way. We all knowingly embraced this time in history to be co-participants in this evolutionary journey we are on. Clearly, the fire is heating up, and it's bringing out these collective threads. Perhaps they weren't as pronounced 1,000 years ago, but they're very pronounced now. My students have people who are not even doing this deep, introspective work recognizing that there is more going on in their pain and suffering and their healing than can be explained simply by their personal life. I was talking years ago to Roger Wilber, who's now passed on, one of the great past-life therapists. He said he had come to the same conclusion. He was working with clients who were uncovering so many lives, lifetime after lifetime of pain and suffering. He began to realize that in doing past lives therapy, they had become a midwife to a healing reaching beyond the soul history, into the ancestors, and into the collective. Their work may have begun as individual soul healing, but it had changed into a much larger collective healing exercise. **Susan: ** Absolutely, absolutely. Like you said, it's speeding up so much now, and it's overwhelming at times for some people. Hopefully, there's enough information going out, like our program here, to give people some sort of structure that might help them make sense of things, or, if they don't know about it, feel that someone else can resonate with what they're going through. Because if people experience it without understanding, it can be quite dangerous. It would be awful. **Chris Bache: ** Yes, there are times when you may need to step back from the intensity of this work, and other times when your life allows you to step more deeply into it. **Susan: ** And sometimes, just take a break to integrate it all, be with it, and see how your whole life changes as a result, because it will be drastically changed. No doubt about it. Chris, could you tell us the names of your books and maybe just give us a brief synopsis? **Chris Bache: ** The first one is *Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life.* It's basically a book on reincarnation. It looks at reincarnation through the issue of empirical evidence. It examines it as a psychological and spiritual phenomenon and, once it documents the empirical evidence for reincarnation, asks the question, "So what?" What's the difference if we see ourselves as reincarnating beings versus one-time-through beings? It's an early attempt to explore the universe as a pulsing, throbbing, reincarnating universe. The second one is *Dark Night, Early Dawn,* which is a philosophical study of non-ordinary states of consciousness, specifically psychedelic states of consciousness. But it integrates psychedelic studies with near-death episode research and out-of-body research, asking if the universe as it shows itself in these studies is cohering or fragmenting, and exploring how our collective psyche shows up in the work of individuals and how individual work influences our collective evolution. The third book is *The Living Classroom.* You can get all of them on Amazon or other book sites. *The Living Classroom* tells the story of fields of consciousness, collective consciousness, the subtler background textures of consciousness as they surface in the classroom. I found that the work I was doing in deep states of consciousness outside of the classroom began to impact my students. I had to think about and theorize the nature of collective consciousness, not at the species level but at the intimate level of the students I worked with, week in, week out, year after year. So those are the three. Now I'm going back to psychedelic work to give a philosophical description of that 20-year psychedelic odyssey I went on between 1979 and 1999. **Host: ** This completes Part One of two of our conversation with Chris Bache. Transcribed by [source].