---
title: Christopher Bache at SkyBlue Symposia   Pt 2 of 2
slug: 2013-08-28-skyblue-symposia-pt-2
date: 2013-08-28
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/2013-08-28-skyblue-symposia-pt-2.txt
  diarist_srt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2013-08-28-skyblue-symposia-pt-2.srt
diarist_sha1: 73a2e227ceb51a282cae8da42c28d5cc7c098507

---
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**Host: ** You are listening to part two of our conversation with Chris Bache.

**Susan: ** Chris, now, Chris, you've mentioned this crisis or pivotal point for humanity. What insights or experiences have you gained from your psychedelic work about this crisis, and what do you see as the evolutionary trajectory of humanity coming through that?

**Chris Bache: ** Well, that is a big question, isn't it? That's a huge question, and it has absorbed a lot of my time. In non-ordinary states of consciousness, it's been one of the recurring themes. Because what happens when your individual bubble of consciousness dissolves, when the drop opens, you fall into the divine at different depths. One of the things that happens, I think, is that one falls into deep time. So one falls out of linear time into the deeper expanse of time. The universe seems to have many different time signatures, and one can experience arcs of time over thousands and thousands of years as if it were a simple hour, and even hundreds of thousands of years. As I dissolved at the individual level, I was repeatedly drawn into the evolutionary arc that underlies my individual existence. I was drawn into the arc of human evolution as a whole, one layer of the larger evolution of the planet and solar system. Just as I was drawn into these large episodes of collective suffering, when eventually these would peak and I would go through some large combustion, death-rebirth process, I would spin out into spiritual spaces, ecstatic experiences, or the deeper warp and woof of the universe. I was often drawn into our head. Various visions are drawn into the experience of what's really taking place behind the scenes. That is this evolutionary crescendo that's building in time, this breaking forth of this deeper consciousness in history that's breaking forward into time. Eventually, in the 55th session out of a 73-session series, I had an extraordinary experience in which I actually, what seems to have happened, as best as I can understand it, is that at some collective level, I went through the death-rebirth of our species. I was in a state of consciousness, hard to describe, but at that time, I was literally billions of people simultaneously, and every individual and all billions at the same time were beginning to go through a life-death crisis that was literally global. It was just a profound restructuring of life. Life was being broken down to the very core. It was, I think, in this massive die-off that's coming down to us, which is simply the fallout of our ecological foolishness.

**Susan: ** So this was just an existential death. It was a physical possibility as well.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, this was an entire species brought to extinction, brought to the very edge of extinction. This was being taken into the very essence, the depth of this historical crisis, which seemed to be peaking somewhere in the 21st Century. This is an imminent kind of crisis, and it looked like, in the center of this crisis, it looked like we would all die. It looked like this was it. This was the end of it. We were going to go extinct. It was like being on an island with a hurricane coming over. In the end, everybody was forced to just hunker down and hold on, hoping they weren't being blown away. It looked like death was inevitable, and then in the last minutes, suddenly the storm crested and passed, and there were survivors. Survivors began to find each other and began to reconstruct. But then what happened was the most extraordinary explosion of new social structures, new forms that reflected the birth of a new consciousness literally birthed by the pain of our near-extinction event. Out of this trauma of a species brought to the very edge of extinction, there was a tearing away of what is inessential and a birth of what is essential. This, I think of as the birth of soul consciousness, but not just a birth of soul consciousness. Or put it this way, the nature of soul consciousness is to know the truth of our interconnectivity. It is to know the common ground that we all share. It is to know our place in the universe and our camaraderie with all other beings, not just human beings, but all other beings who share this planet that sprang into an augmented capacity. It sprang into an empowered position, so that when we began to reconstruct our lives, we weren't really reconstructing; we were creating a new culture. We were creating new social forms that were reflecting new realities that had been birthed in the throes of this crisis. This was a shattering and profound experience for me because it took me several years to absorb the experience. It's like being in Hiroshima the week before the bomb goes off and knowing that every human being you see on the planet is about to go through a nightmare of great suffering. And then having so much profound respect for these beautiful beings who volunteered to undergo this crisis as part of our collective transformation. In the years following, as the work continued, I continued to go into this. There were several episodes where I entered into deep time and spent time with what I call the future human. I just had the opportunity to be with this new archetype that's coming forward in history. It's only in the experience of the future being that humanity is becoming that we really begin to understand the larger evolutionary trajectory and what we are actually giving birth to. It is as if we're going into labor. We didn't know we were pregnant. It's only in seeing the baby that we really understand the whole gestational process. Nature has been gestating this human being for 100,000 years. Ever since Homo sapiens emerged on the scene, we've been gestating the next layer of our evolutionary story.

**Susan: ** Well, you're perfectly describing the prenatal perinatal matrix outlined by Stan Grof too, but it's just on a collective level.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, on a collective level. The future human is such an extraordinarily beautiful being. When I focus my mind on it, even now, it brings me to tears because it's a humanity healed of its divisive history. It's a humanity with all its wounds resolved. It's a humanity with its heart completely open at a deep and profound level, in collective embrace. It's a humanity with its mind open into deep communion with Transcendence. It's a humanity where war ends and cooperation and collaboration are the norm. It's a planet that has outgrown its divisiveness and has entered into a time of history of collaboration—not monolithic sameness, but tremendous creative collaboration, where we begin consciously to cooperate with the divine, rather than unconsciously.

**Susan: ** And this is what you've termed the diamond soul.

**Chris Bache: ** The diamond soul, yeah. This birth of this new human on the face of the planet.

**Susan: ** I've also heard it termed homo luminous, which sounds about the same. Do you think this is not just our human evolution, but that it reverberates through the beingness of the source, that this is not just about us?

**Chris Bache: ** It's not just about us, and whatever is happening on this planet, I'm sure, is mirrored in similar processes taking place on other planets and solar systems and galaxies, so this gestational process is a natural process. It's simply an extension of evolution reaching a new critical point. Everything we're learning about the evolution of our galaxies and the universe at large is that whatever is taking place here, in one way or another, is taking place in other corners of the universe.

**Susan: ** We just send our fields out further and further, and we start to get a feel for what you're saying.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, we are cosmic citizens. We're not only global citizens; we are cosmic citizens. I'm sure there'll come a time when higher orders of community, intergalactic communion, will emerge as part of the natural sequence. Of course, many people believe that's already begun, and maybe it has, but it's almost inevitable that it will be part of our future.

**Susan: ** So beautiful, Chris, so beautiful. Thank you for that.

**Chipper: ** And it'll speed up the more of us cooperate with that process.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, it speeds up. The more we collaborate, the faster it moves for us, individually and collectively. That's the other thing that emerged from that critical session I described, and that is an understanding of how we actually have a huge distance to travel as a species and a very short period of time to travel that distance. Many people have pondered how we can possibly change as much as we have to to survive in as little time as the ecological crisis seems to be giving us. The key is understanding the collective dynamics at play. It's not simply 7 billion individual minds that have to change at core; it's this collective mind of the species that's undergoing a change. If you take what we know about fields and field theory, nonlinear systems, and tipping points, and catalytic points, and you make the assumption that the collective psyche is, in some way, a unified field, and that what we know about nonlinear systems applies also to the collective psyche, then we can understand how we might actually make it as far as we need to travel as quickly as we need to. All the suffering and confrontation with our divisive ways are not simply registering on our individual psyches. Everything that the individual registers is fed into and registers at the collective level. When enough individuals come to a tipping point and begin to choose a different way of living individually, sooner or later, the species comes to a tipping point. At that point, the 100th monkey phenomenon, the pace of evolution accelerates exponentially. The new common sense emerges.

**Chipper: ** It's like playing chess with Koyaanisqatsi.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, yes. That's why programs like yours are so important, because of the depth and breadth of the outreach, the number of synapses of our collective brain you're able to bring together. The new technology is just opening up an exponential increase of understanding.

**Chipper: ** In your advanced sessions, I'm going to change back to a question here, you experience various permutations of the Divine and domains that lie beyond the story of humanity's evolution and beyond all form but the Other intimately related. Would you share your experiences and insights with us regarding that? I mean, you have been all along, but with a specific focus.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah. You know, this is hard to do without sounding like a madman. That's the challenge of even trying to speak about psychedelic experiences because it expands the frame of a conversation exponentially. Unless you're willing to enter into that conversation, it's just... Since I live at a university, I know how easy it is for very intelligent, well-educated people to write off this entire conversation. If we let go of all of that and go into the possibility that one can open up to the mind of the universe, then the most extraordinary story begins to unfold. There's the invitation. There are so many ways one could put it, I don't know. The privilege is to experience the ways in which the universe is alive in depths that are hidden to physical consciousness, to enter into archetypal reality—not just in a narrow Jungian sense, but to enter into the flows of intelligence, consciousness, and life that give structure and form to time and space. To go outside of time and space, to enter back into them, to be drawn in some intimate way to the very birthing of time and space as an ongoing event. To experience the enormity of the universe's intelligence—it's mind-shattering. We know what it's like when we're around very intelligent people; they're just different. But to enter into orders of magnitude of intelligence behind the universe is a mind-shattering experience. To dissolve and, for a time, be that kind of being, to touch the edges of the garment of the Divine, radically reframes one's understanding of the life one is part of. And equal to the intelligence is the compassion, the love. It shatters all frames of reference again and again. The love behind the universe is as large as the intelligence manifesting in the universe. This planet is hard. Life is hard. There is so much suffering, it's such a difficult place, that the intensity of time-space experience has been used to argue against the intelligence or love, the compassion behind existence. But to actually experientially enter into communion with that intelligence, to feel that love, to begin to understand some of the ways... Once you open up to the true depth of the project of an emergent universe, the project of the Divine, you begin to understand how there really is compassion manifesting. The suffering we've been going through for so many hundreds of thousands of years is just a phase, a reflection of our species' limitations at this particular time in evolution. There is an ongoing fullness expressing itself. We will move beyond all this pain generation, beyond all the hate and bigotry of our divisive ego consciousness. To be moved to go into experiences like what Stan calls the super-cosmic and meta-cosmic void, to go into the domain of the formless, the great plenum.

**Susan: ** Is this beyond even the creation and the evolution?

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, it's where creation and evolution come from. It's transcending all time and space, going into some kind of fundamental reality where form does not exist, none of the forms exist. It is that reality which actually births all form. It's often described as the void, but it's also the plenum, the divine plenum. Sometimes it's called the Buddha womb, the awakened womb, the Cosmic Womb. It's the mother universe, gestating everything. This physical universe, vast and magnificent as it is, time and space as we know them, is not the only universe. There are other universes. We have to expand our cosmology radically. All these universes emanate from a primal reality that is formless. The sheer majesty of the mother—so beautiful.

**Chipper: ** With Sri Aurobindo?

Audience: ** Yes.

**Chipper: ** Sri Aurobindo's super consciousness?

**Chris Bache: ** Sri Aurobindo, I think, is one of the great thinkers helping us pivot away from the old cosmology, the up-and-out cosmology, into an incarnational cosmology. A great thinker.

**Chipper: ** Earlier, you talked about recommending a less-than-high-dose regimen. What would you recommend from your development state at this point to an earlier self?

**Chris Bache: ** If I were talking to my younger self, or if I'm talking to my own children, who are young adults now, I would recommend it partly depends on what you're trying to accomplish. When I got into this work, I was seeking enlightenment, like what most of us were seeking—to be a better human being, to be more awake and conscious. What I found was, if you want to seek classically what we mean by enlightenment, to be completely open to the depth of reality in the immediate moment where ego yields and what I call leaf consciousness yields to tree consciousness to the transparent life of the totality, I think it's better to work with low doses, to track the ego where it lives. The ego lives close; it lives on the earth, and it needs to be tracked back to its layer. Working with lower doses means really taking it apart bit by bit, integrating that type of work with meditation and classical meditation practices. I should mention, all my life I've also been a teacher of religious studies. I've taught courses in world religions, Eastern religions, and comparative mysticism all my life. I've spent my entire life learning from the sages, with deep, abiding respect for the spiritual realization achieved by great masters, men and women of all lineages. I've always tried to combine contemplative practice with shamanic practice. I became a Vajrayana practitioner 15 years ago and tried to integrate my Vajrayana practices with my shamanic psychedelic work, putting those together. But over time, I found a lot was happening in these sessions that were not serving individual enlightenment's purpose. I think when you start working with high doses, you become involved in a different game—the game of collective enlightenment and exploring the universe. You don't need to transcend time or take evolution back to the Big Bang or be absorbed in archetypal levels of reality to achieve enlightenment. It's a different enterprise. As a philosopher, I was drawn into knowing the universe. Even if we focus on that enterprise, I would do it differently. I would continue always to embed psychedelics into a daily spiritual practice. My rule of thumb is the deeper the non-ordinary state you go into temporarily, the more important it is to have a strong daily practice to anchor it. So it has to be grounded in the regimen of spiritual life, moral living, social commitments, and relationships. In working with psychedelics, I would alternate, working with strong doses. I think working with 300 micrograms of LSD is easier than 500 or 600 micrograms. I would alternate working with synthetic psychedelics like LSD with organic psychedelics. We all know Terence McKenna was a great advocate of Psilocybin and Ayahuasca and DMT derivatives. I think Psilocybin mushrooms, for example, really help the body absorb. It's a very physical kind of experience. If you're working with high-dose LSD, interspacing those sessions with Psilocybin or Ayahuasca can really help the body and subtle energy systems absorb LSD's deep visionary states. I think of LSD as a high-altitude drug that tends to blow you into cosmic territory.

**Chipper: ** A black diamond run.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, yes. There are organic substances, particularly Psilocybin and Ayahuasca, that kind of help the body and ground these deep states of consciousness more completely into the physical, mental, and emotional bodies. I guess I would do fewer high-dose LSD sessions and work with an alternate regimen of organic psychedelics.

**Chipper: ** That does tend to take the commonplace away. If you were to alternate, I can see how time after time of doing a high dose without the intention you've brought to it could get tiresome if all you were doing was playing.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, yeah. It's interesting how many people feel if you work with LSD, you eventually keep going back to the same level and re-experience the same lessons. Therefore, as Huston Smith said, when you get the message, you hang up the phone. But that hasn't been my experience. If you're working very internally, as long as you're willing to throw another log in the fire, the universe will keep taking you through break point after break point. The reason I stopped in 1999—what I call my serious work, the very high-dose work—was due to too much wear and tear on my physical body, particularly my subtle energy body. I was running quantities of energy that were just larger than even I could handle, even using archetypal Vajrayana deity practices. I had to step away, slow down, and let my energy recalibrate and adjust to what had been realized in these years of work. The other reason I stopped was that it was getting increasingly difficult to come back—not psychologically, but it was too painful. To come back into time and space, when one has gone into the fields of Diamond Luminosity, which are so magnificent and intimate with the divine, is challenging. That's the real drawback of what I call the path of temporary immersion. The methods that move you more slowly into these deep spaces allow you to keep those spaces after your retreat is over, but the path of temporary immersion punches you ahead of yourself. So, it's temporary.

**Chipper: ** It's just a visit rather than a move.

**Chris Bache: ** It's a visit. You know, Ram Dass said it opens windows, but it doesn't allow you to go out the door. I understand that, and it's true, but it's a visit that changes the course of your own evolution. One Spirit told me one time, 20 years in, 20 years out. So 20 years of work in, you can't assimilate that without expecting to spend 20 active years of assimilation. Now I actually think it's even more than that. When you work in very deep states of consciousness, it affects you for the rest of your life at a soul level. I think it would take many lifetimes to assimilate the full scale and scope of what has unfolded in the work. It changes your deep evolutionary trajectory. The challenge at this point is that now that we have these technologies that allow us to blow out the levels and plunge deeply into these places of the universe, the challenge really shifts from breaking out. The challenge shifts to integration—deep, deep integration in your mind, in your heart, in your social relationships, in your body on a day-to-day basis.

**Chipper: ** I guess that's why the Dao say, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, yes.

**Cybele: ** Fascinating. Chris, would you say that ultimately, the unconditional love you experienced on your journeys is the lesson we all need to learn?

**Chris Bache: ** To me, love, unconditional love, unrestricted compassion, is the correlate to oneness. If the universe exists as a single entity, if God is ultimately the fabric of existence, and if oneness is the great truth within which we live, then oneness manifests in all sorts of ways, but one of the ways it manifests is in this profound emotional, ecstatic embrace of everything, of all life. The shaman comes out of transcendence and cries, "All my relations, I am one with all my relations, with all the beings of the world." Love really is of the essence because oneness is of the essence, and love is the manifestation of oneness in the human heart. That deep feeling of acceptance of all beings and every human being, even those doing stupid, terrible, hurtful things to themselves and each other, requires not closing your heart down to them and holding them in that embrace of oneness. I think you're right. I think love is the breathing of the universe as one.

**Chipper: ** Do you sense this experience and experiences others have that are similar co-create a meeting with the divine so we can all remember what we have forgotten?

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, I do. I really do. The classic story of reincarnation is when we die, we remember, and when we're born, we forget. The near-death episode research shows us clearly that when people die or nearly die, they experience a tremendous, accelerated expansion of consciousness and a sense of remembering. How could they have forgotten the spiritual world? But then, when we're born, at least at this stage of our evolution, we tend to forget. We contract into these time-space suits, the egoic identity. So all these technologies, whether trans dancing, silence, fasting, meditation, deep tissue Rolfing, or other methods for loosening up the shell of our body-mind identity, open us to this more intimate dialogue with the universe, in which we experience it as a remembering. I think collectively, we are remembering who we are. We're remembering the purpose of life. We're remembering the project. Every time one of us remembers, it eases the way for others to remember. Collectively, we are trying to incarnate a field of remembrance, which ultimately converts into, in a sense, a field of communion. When we remember there is this reality, there is a universe surrounding the physical universe, a mother universe, a spiritual reality that is always there, always tapping at the back of our consciousness, sustaining our bodies, hearts, and minds, remembrance yields to communion—truly deeper communion. If we believe the universe is a dead universe, who would want to commune with that? But if it's a living universe, saturated with intelligence and intentionality, that's a universe I'd want to commune with. So remembering becomes an ongoing process of entering into sustained communion. Together, it allows us to create something that's never been before, really. We're in a process of creating thoughts, feelings, visions, and social realities that have never existed on this planet before.

**Cybele: ** Yeah, thank you.

**Cybele: ** Thank you, Chris. This is Cybele again. In all the work that you did and the personal transformation you experienced, and then going back to the university in a very academic world, how did your personal transformation and practice impact how you were in the "real world" and with other people? You weren't a mumble anymore, you know.

**Chris Bache: ** But you only get promoted for your muggleness. At the universities, it's a different order. That's a complicated process, and it wasn't entirely comfortable. I learned how to live in two worlds. This work, because of its legally problematic nature, cannot be discussed openly in academic circles. It can be discussed in certain avant-garde circles, in Bay Area circles, and in very progressive institutions. I've taught courses on this type of work at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. But here in Ohio, it's a much more conservative environment, and they have the right to be where they are. So there were tensions, but they were tensions that ultimately I found I could work with creatively. As my consciousness changed, naturally who I was or what I was changed, and that meant the experience of my teaching, what I taught changed.

So there are two levels. One is content, and then there's a deeper level that has to do with the energetic being underneath the content. Content-wise, I was able to design courses where I could discuss some of these phenomena in a certain way. I've taught a course called Transpersonal Studies where we studied reincarnation research, near-death episode research, and out-of-body research. I taught a course called Psychology of Religion, but it was really Transpersonal Psychology of Religion, where I traced the history of depth psychology and spent about a third of the course talking about Stanislav Grof's work in psychedelic research, never referencing myself, simply referencing the literature and Grof's work. I've also taught seminars through the years in Advanced Transpersonal Theory, where I created academic contexts for students and I to have conversations about some of these realities.

My colleagues have always known that I've been way out on the left, but they've given me room to work there. I found that if you have student numbers, if students want to take your courses, and if you're a good citizen of the university—doing your work, supporting the department, serving on committees—you have more room to improvise and push the boundaries than might first appear. Many people have asked how I got away with teaching the courses I teach at this open enrollment state university, and I found that we have much more freedom and flexibility, if you're willing to seize it, than we might initially think.

There are other people pushing those boundaries. Tom Roberts in Illinois at a state university has been teaching about psychedelics in his classes for years in an academic context, where you pay your academic dues to that discussion. But there's a deeper process going on. As my experience of the universe deepened, it changed how my mind works, how my psyche works, and my energy. In the classroom, when I was teaching things that were not about these topics like Intro to World Religions, subtle psychological things began to happen between my students and me that were unusual. For instance, I'd reach for an example to make a point, create one from my imagination, and after class, a student would come up and say, "It's strange that you used that example today because that's exactly what happened to me last week." That happened repeatedly, and students were finding parts of their life showing up in my lectures in precise ways without my intending it.

Not only were they finding their life parts in my lectures, but often those parts were deeply personal and needed for their own healing or evolution. It was as if their soul was whispering to my soul, passing information needed for their healing. During these years, I became a kind of lightning rod of the soul for many of my students, and this became so pronounced that I had to consciously engage this process and understand it more deeply, ensuring it didn't become too intense for them. This is the story I tell in "The Living Classroom." I began to understand it was more than just resonance between myself and my students; a field was being created by our focused study.

Even if the faculty had reservations, my students never did. They were more forward-thinking than the faculty; they always met me well, and we had wonderful adventures in the classroom. However, I couldn't bring everything I knew into my undergraduate classroom—it wasn't appropriate or fair. In my later career years, holding back became difficult for me; there was this tension, a catch in my throat, when I wanted to share more than circumstances allowed. Sometimes I would lose control of my voice, a tension between forces holding me in check and those wanting to express. I was a professor for 33 years and have now stopped that to write books I couldn't write while working as an academic, books more openly embracing the hidden, psychedelic side of my life, which I hope will put me in conversations with...

**Interviewer: ** A different group of adults, more spiritually informed, more advanced in their spiritual evolution. For two years, I worked as the Director of Education for a nonprofit, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where I had many opportunities to speak with and engage people, people like yourselves, who have been consciously living the spiritual life and engaging these issues, not afraid of them, plunging into transformative processes. I hope to be doing more of that work in the last phase of my life. I've entered, from an astrological perspective, the third turning of the wheel of Saturn. The second Saturn cycle, from when I was 29 to 59, was my academic career, and now I've entered the third cycle, more exclusively focused on these deep, transformative practices and insights.

**Cybele: ** Yeah, it sounds like your experience with your students was really beautiful.

**Interviewer: ** And I think it was. I think we all were touched, and we all learned many things from them. In fact, the last third of "The Living Classroom" is essays written by my students. I had my students do a lot of writing, mostly academic, intellectual writing, but occasionally a student would share a more personal essay—stories of transformation, a father's death, their own conversion or near-death experiences. I collected these magnificent stories through the years, and when I wrote the book, it was time to share them. So the last third of the book shares these students' stories with the public because they're just so beautiful.

**Cybele: ** Yeah, it sounds like it's the stretching dance of straddling two worlds in that way. And then, you know, I think we've all experienced where you might know something, but the person you're talking to is not ready for that yet. And now we're getting to have this free rein to talk about things and just let people be drawn to it or not. It's really lovely.

**Interviewer: ** Again, I think the undergraduate students were much more receptive than the faculty, as they're a different generation. They're already now, they have this in their bones; they're a different generation of souls.

**Susan: ** Chris, don't you think that those who are doing this work enable the newer, younger generations to come in already knowing a lot of this because the work's being done?

**Interviewer: ** I hope so. We all have different roles in this evolutionary saga, and if there is a seventh generation, as the Hopi prophecies predicted, or the Indigo generation, then maybe some of you are part of the sixth generation. Our job is to break ground for these young people and create the container that allows them to come to a speedier fruition of their own capacities and consciousness on the planet. I hope that what we're doing creates, not only a tangible social structure but also a subtler psychic structure that creates fields that empower them.

**Susan: ** Yeah, absolutely, because it is a collective consciousness, and what we learn or discover affects them, especially because they're more open to it. They don't have the letting-go like us old dinosaurs.

**Interviewer: ** Yes, and it's a complex feedback cycle. For example, I often had experiences where I would read a book, gain insight, have a new experience in a psychedelic session, and within a week, a student would ask me a question that I now had an answer for, which two weeks prior I wouldn't have. I realized that their need to know influenced my own field, even leading me to read certain books or have particular experiences. It's a circle, and I wouldn't be reading or thinking what I am if it weren't for these students coming to me. At this point, you open up to the mystery and majesty of the universe.

**Susan: ** Oh, I love this. This is wonderful, thank you.

**Cybele: ** So what are your thoughts on the legal use of psychedelics in therapy and healing, and what's going on right now with using psychedelics as tools, philosophically and cosmically? What do you think is the future of that?

**Interviewer: ** I think we're tilting back in the right direction. Many listeners are likely aware of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is successfully advocating to change laws around psychedelics and bring them back into respectable research and therapy. This class of chemicals is so important, we won't lose them forever. We are going to reappropriate these substances for their therapeutic and philosophical potential. The world psychedelics reveal is profoundly compatible with the world we're studying through science, particularly with quantum and field theory, moving beyond the Newtonian model.

As science internalizes the cutting-edge discoveries, it aligns more with the experiences that emerge from psychedelics. There's a shift happening at a deep cognitive level among leading thinkers, opening more doors to psychedelics. I believe we'll see a future where you can incorporate psychedelics into both therapeutic and spiritual practices. Some Ayahuasca communities have already won legal rights to use Ayahuasca in spiritual practice. Psychedelics are crucial for opening intellectual paradigms, as they offer short-term exposure to deeper realities, shifting our understanding of the world and moving away from blind consumerism.

**Cybele: ** Yes, it seems like the paradigm we live in, rooted in Newtonian physics, has people losing their ability to find new questions. Psychedelics give the fish a chance to observe the water, opening new possibilities.

**Interviewer: ** Yes, absolutely. Once the door is open, it may lead you to traditional spiritual practices like meditation or yoga. Psychedelics are great door openers, inviting us into a vast cultural awakening. Living in the Newtonian universe, I've witnessed how damaging secular humanism can be for students. The idea that existence is an accident, void of deeper intentionality, leads to consumerism. As we document and experience the universe's livingness, we gain leverage to change this vision towards a profound exploration of ourselves within the universe.

**Cybele: ** For those with a crisis of lack of meaning in the world, this could be a really beneficial avenue.

**Interviewer: ** Yes, it can be very beneficial. Reading alone is enormously beneficial. I sometimes do a workshop called "No Fear of Death." If you read the right books, it can completely dissolve any fear of death, offering new insights on life's meaning and possibilities. Reincarnation research, near-death episode research, life between life therapy, and psychedelics all create an intellectual context that opens new avenues for understanding life's meaning and purpose.

**Cybele: ** That's fabulous, thank you.

**Susan: ** Chris, before we bring this symposium to a close, I'd like to read something you wrote in "Dark Night, Early Dawn." You said, "I believe that this divine marriage of individuality and essential ground, of the masculine and feminine, of Samsara and Nirvana, is the dawn that humanity's dark night is driving toward. This is the dawn that, if successfully navigated, will unite humankind and elevate us into a form that has never before walked this earth—a humanity healed of the scars of history, its ancient partitions reabsorbed, a people with new capacities born in the chaos of near extinction. Only when we have made this pivot, when our long labor has birthed this future child, only then will we fully understand what we have accomplished. And when this moment finally comes, I deeply believe that like all mothers before us, we will count our pain as a small price. This birth is our gift to the Creator." Thank you for writing this. Thank you so much for such a wonderful conversation. We appreciate it.

**Interviewer: ** Thank you very much. It's been an honor and a privilege to spend this time with you.

**Chipper: ** Can I just read a poem? I motion as love's beauty is moving, standing nakedly and blushing in photonics, brightly rushing as love's artistries unbrushed time in silent rhythms, crushing sped slowly, long and in a hush to bring to riptide lushness out as and of coupling within flux. Namaste.

**Interviewer: ** It's beautiful, thank you.

**Susan: ** Chris, could you tell us the names of your books and maybe just a brief synopsis about them?

**Chris Bache: ** The books are: the first one is "Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life." It's basically a book on reincarnation, exploring empirical evidence, psychological and spiritual aspects, and asking what difference it makes if we see ourselves as reincarnating beings. 

The second is "Dark Night, Early Dawn," a philosophical study of non-ordinary states of consciousness, specifically psychedelic states. It integrates psychedelic studies with near-death and out-of-body research, asking if these pictures are cohering or fragmenting, exploring the collective psyche's influence on individual work.

The third book is "The Living Classroom," about fields of consciousness as they surface in the classroom, telling the story of how my deep states of consciousness began to impact my students, leading to an understanding of collective consciousness at an intimate level.

I'm now returning to psychedelic work to give a philosophical exploration of my 20-year psychedelic journey between 1979 and 1999.