Chris Bache, Waking Up in the Classroom – Lessons from 30 Years of Teaching

Host: Imminent experiences in class yet, of when mind and body and heart and spirit come together, and I, on a personal level, feel really lucky and happy that he's with us this week. I only know a little bit about your history of your life's work. So I'll just let you speak. Okay?

Chris Bache: Come on, people, let it rip. Feel how that changed the energy. Just that little bit... I don't have time to mess around anymore. We don't have time to mess around anymore. There's just not time. There's only time to get down to the serious stuff. So let's get down to it. Rick asked me to talk about teaching, like I've picked up some incalculable secret knowledge from teaching in Ohio for 30 years. I don't know, so I'll just tell you what I got, and then you can decide whether it was a good thing. But we're going to have fun tonight, no matter what. And you know, I don't think you wouldn't mind if we kind of finished before 10 o'clock, would you? It's been a long day. You people have been working hard. And for me, a talk is simply an excuse to get to the discussion, right? Because that's where the juice is. That's really where the good stuff is. So I'm just going to kind of lay out some bullets, throw out some material, to sort of focus our discussion, but I'm really hoping we can move quickly enough into some discussion, and if that goes really well, we'll still be out of here before 10 o'clock. All right. Yeah, okay.

Chris Bache: Is Robert here yet? He's coming. Here he is. Among his many illustrious publications, one of the ones that you may not come across too often is his beautiful introduction, his prologue, preface to The Living Classroom, which is a great honor. And he really made me look pretty good, very good. It was just an honor. So this is kind of PCC certified, you know. And how many people have read this? Okay, all right, well, I'm going to hit some bullet points on it, but I'm going to put it in a larger context. I'm going to give you some of the backstory to it, all right, and I'm just going to talk a little bit about how I came to write this, and kind of what happened during it and what's it about. But this is like my second Saturn Return book. I mean, I started teaching in '79 and this was published in 2008. That's pretty much exactly 29 years, and before I was coming up on sabbatical. Because the only time I can—this is a little loud, doesn't it sound a little loud? Maybe, no, okay, all right. The only time I can write books is when I'm on sabbatical. I can write essays before, but it takes a lot of time to get in deep. So before I came up on my last sabbatical, there were two books that I was thinking about: a book on psychedelics and The Living Classroom. And so I went into session space, what I usually do when I have an important question. And after I was done with the various things, I said, "What should I write?" And it said, "Definitely The Living Classroom." Because by the time you write the psychedelic book, you're going to be so far out in left field that, you know, you're going to be beyond the mainstream pale. And now where you are with The Living Classroom, you can do it in a mainstream fashion. So I said, "Okay," and as soon as I said okay, and as soon as I agreed to that and kind of made the mental intention, all sorts of wonderful things began to happen. I got some grant money that allowed me to spend more time writing the book, and just a lot of wonderful things happened. And The Living Classroom has been published, or there have been six chapters that have been published in five different anthologies. It's gotten more airplay than any other single thing that I've written, and I think it's because of Robert McDermott's preface. I think it's because consciousness, collective fields of consciousness, is an idea that's kind of bubbling up. Its time has come. We're ripe for it. So as the second Saturn Return, this is a book that the universe wanted to be written, and it's basically a summation of the most important things I learned about teaching from my 30 years of teaching at Youngstown. Now, another little background: when I had my second Saturn Return and I came to Youngstown, it broke my heart. I really didn't want to be here. I mean, I didn't go to seven years of graduate school in order to teach at an open-enrollment undergraduate college, about 12,000 or 13,000 students in a Rust Belt town in Ohio, with no graduate students. It wasn't my ideal, and I tried, like anyone with a grain of sense, tried desperately to leave for several years. Because, you know, when you get out of graduate school and you come to a good graduate school, you have a few years when you might jump out into something. And I tried jumping. The problem was I had also encountered Stan's work, and I started my own psychedelic work in '79, a year after I started teaching, and my mind got very quickly radicalized. I mean, one year I was writing essays on "towards a unified theory of metaphor." Two years later, I'm writing essays on "the emergence of perinatal symptoms and Buddhist meditations." Like, what happened? You know, my department was wondering what the hell happened to him. They hired a traditional analytic philosopher of religion and linguistic discourse, and suddenly I'm really saying, "Hey, this guy is onto something seriously good." Well, it wasn't happening. You know, Religious Studies is a very conservative discipline, and by the way, did you appreciate our just up for you. This is just for you. Yeah... it wasn't happening. And so this came to a head four years after I was there. Four years and there was the only job that had opened in five years, opened that year, and they decided to go with the very traditional philosophical, theological type. And I thought, when you teach at a teaching university where you're really in the classroom a lot, you're teaching three courses a quarter, nine courses a year, plus teaching in the summer. This is just pounding, difficult teaching. And I just said, "Okay, I give up. This is not what I wanted, but it seems to be what life wants." So I surrendered, and I said, "I'm going to become the best teacher I can possibly become. I'm not going to fight it. I want to work with it. Let's see what happens. Let's see where it goes." And it went in some very interesting places. And the result of what happened, basically, I was able to put down in this book. And one-third of this book is my students, one-third of it—the back third of it—is really a second book, essays that my students have written over the years, and just beautiful, beautiful essays. And there were hidden reasons I learned later for why I was in Youngstown, and I'll get to those in a bit. And there were some benefits of being there because if you don't have a lot of graduate students, and you don't have a lot of responsibility at that level, you can do a lot of exploration. You can do a lot of things. So if I ever wanted to learn something, I just said, "I'll teach a seminar on it." And I was teaching a lot of courses on things that lay outside my discipline. I just kind of learned. I learned a lot of things, and as I went through, I was able to do a lot of innovation in our curriculum. I taught a lot of what I call Transpersonal Studies. You know, near-death episode research, reincarnation research, out-of-body research. I taught Transpersonal Psychology of Religion. I taught lots of seminars and Stan Grof's work. So, you know, there were some benefits, there were some trade-offs. And one of the great benefits was non-traditionally aged students. About 40% of our students are non-traditionally aged, and that was a nice compensation for not having graduate students, because they were, you know, much more seriously engaging in their studies than the 18- to 19-year-old kind of might be. But the other thing that Youngstown gave me was an opportunity for deep, spiritual practice. It's something, you know, there's not much to do in Ohio. It's kind of boring, you know, watch the corn and watch the corn, you know. So it's just kind of a nice, contemplative, smooth environment if you want to do deep, serious work. And so I found out I wanted to do deep, serious work. So I started my psychedelic work right when I started my career. And I did four intense years, and then I stopped for six years, and then I did another ten years after that. Now, I loved teaching. I've always loved teaching. I've always liked to gab, but I'll tell you, teaching at an open-enrollment university, it's front-line teaching. I mean, it's the kids who—it's the first time anyone in their family has gone to college, a lot of people pulling them down, telling them what do you want to go to college for, you know, just get a job at GM Lordstown, make cars. You know, it's what—I—you have to do what I call full contact teaching. This is take no prisoners. Full contact teaching. You have to provide the motivation. You have to kick them in the butt. You have to slap them around. It's like when I come here to teach, I mean, you guys are so easy, you're so motivated, you're already, you know, it's like you want to learn these things. You're there in Ohio. It's a different game. And so they make you work for it, and I work for it. I'm willing to work for it. And eventually my classroom became—I began to think of it like a dojo. You know, it's like, you're on my mat. No one's going to get hurt, but you're going to hit the floor a few times, and it's like, I don't have time to mess around. Let's get down to it. So 30% of my students who sign up the first day, they drop out by the end of the first week. And I make it real clear, just to get credits in the humanities is a perfectly good reason to be here the first day. It's not a good reason to be here the second day, because it's easier place ways to get the credit. But I also then try to show them what we can do, show them a sense of where we can go if you're willing to work, and I find that they're willing to work, if you give them a quality product, they're willing to work with you because they're—they really—they've been damaged often in their high school. They've been hurt. They've been crimped. They don't have high expectations. You know, they're not at Oberlin, they're not at Yale. They have kind of low expectations. If you give them the promise of something substantive, they'll work their ass off for you, and they'll open their heart if you allow them to and go there. But when you start to psychedelics, and you make the choice to work with psychedelics, you kind of have to make some adjustments in your professional life. I had to split my life in two. I had a professional life where I did the things that you had to do as a professor, and you do all the traditional things. You serve on the committees, you do this, you do that, you publish. And then I had my personal life where I was doing the Grofian deep psychotherapeutic work. And you can't let those two blend in the classroom. This is not okay. The good people of Ohio do not like to hear that their professors are dropping massive quantities of acid. So you keep those two separate. I didn't talk about my work in front of my classes. I mean, my own faculty members, it was like 10 years before they really got an idea of what was going on. I mean, when I would do a session, I was kind of so poor as a beginning faculty member, I had to borrow the tape player from one of my colleagues. He began to get a sense of what was going on. But you don't talk about it. I didn't talk about it for years. Because these were kept separate in the physical world, it ended up producing some very interesting complications or consequences that taught me a great deal about the nature of consciousness. Because, as we're going to see, consciousness did not split itself, even though I split my world, the world of mind is not dividable in that way. And there were some things that happened that began to make those things be connected, but there are also some personal consequences. I'll come back around later about when you split yourself like this and you won't—you cannot be your whole and complete self in every circumstance, and you kind of know what you're doing going in, but I didn't really understand what some of the long-term ramifications of that would be down the way. So this is what began to happen early in my teaching: a student asked me a question. You know, after you've taught a course three or four years, you pretty much have heard most of the questions that undergraduates are going to ask. So as soon as they ask a question, your mind starts running with an answer. This time, I just stopped, and I thought, among all the possible answers that I could give, what could I say that would be most in tune with this student? And my mind kind of stopped, and suddenly I had an image of a door in the back of my mind, and a piece of paper passed through it, and I read the piece of paper, and it was an idea. It was an idea, an answer that I'd never given to that particular question. So I just, okay, let's try this. I ran with it, and it had the magic happen. Teaching happened. The student's eyes lit up. Other people's eyes lit up. The energy went up in the room. Something good happened. So I thought, okay. And I really prepare. I mean, I bring it—look, I even brought notes to Esalen. I prepare my classes. I have a lot of notes. I really work them through, and I keep on track with my syllabus. I know where I'm going to be in the 12th week in a course, you know, because I otherwise—anyway, I really prepare for it. But that little door in the back of my mind gave me a teaching about integrating improvisational intuition with data, with my prepared work. So I began to pay attention to that door in the back of my mind and to work with it. And when I did, you know, something happened in the room that didn't happen when I just kind of stayed in my prepared script. And then time passed, I kept on doing my psychedelic work. And if you've read, those of you who have read Dark Night, Early Dawn, you kind of know it—you know, I dropped into some pretty deep stuff pretty quickly. And really was engaging deep, deep collective dynamics and entering hell realms and the ocean of suffering I'd talk about. So it was pretty intense. But wherever I was on Saturday, Monday morning, I was back in the classroom, doing my job. It was really—that was a commitment. I would not let my personal work get in the way of my professional work. I had a major commitment to my students. And then one day, when it was just an ordinary day, I'd been doing my ordinary thing, teaching Intro Eastern, Intro World, teaching Psychology of Religion or Transpersonal Studies. This was actually an Intro Eastern course. A student came up after class, after he was sure that the room was empty and no one would hear what he had to say. And he said, "It's funny that you would use that example that you used in class today, because that's exactly what happened to me this week." And he told me a story, and it was right—it was like I quoted his life story. So that's interesting, you know. Okay, little synchronistic, you know, but I never thought of myself as being psychically sensitive. I always sort of think of myself as being kind of brickish in that way—I'm a psychic brick. I don't have those types of things some people do. I always envy those people who have, like, "I was 12 years old when I had my first mystical experience," I said, "Oh, lucky you," but it's not me. So I kind of, you know, I was trained to brush this stuff off. But then a few weeks later, it happened again. Somebody came up and said, "You know, that's exactly what happened to my mother." And to make a long story short, the deeper my psychedelic work progressed, the more frequently this began to happen. People were finding pieces of their personal life showing up in my lectures, and I wasn't intending it, and I wasn't conscious of doing it. I would just be reaching for an example to illustrate a point, and something was connecting me to them, and I was like reaching into their life and putting it forward. Now, if you're in a room just looking for three credits or four credits in the humanities, and you're in the back of the room with your baseball cap on backwards, and you're just kind of passing time, and all of a sudden the professor is using your life to illustrate a point being made, how could you not take that as a personal invitation? How could you not have yourself snapped to attention? This began to happen, not a lot, but often enough that it kind of became a pretty semi-regular thing in my classroom. And then the plot deepened when I began to go into deeper and deeper territory. When I got into the deep ocean of suffering, death-rebirth at the collective level, where you're just dealing with massive currents. It's like you're not dealing with the near-shore currents. You're dealing with the big tidal flows in the collective psyche, and you're getting into deep, deep collective death-rebirth meltdowns. I found that my students were being drawn deep—deeper and deeper into deep existential crises in their own lives. It was like we were all part of one giant, massive COEX melt-down system. Addictions were bottoming out, bad marriages or weak marriages were being forced into, you know, grow-or-die situations, people were having suddenly unearthing sexual abuse, and I don't talk about sexual abuse, but something was bringing to the surface deep pains in their life. I can't emphasize enough that this was not my intention. In fact, as this thing began to happen, I began to even try to slow it down, because it did not feel like I didn't understand it. So I couldn't control it. It was happening. How do you ensure informed consent in a process which is so involuntary? I even put on my syllabus one time. I even put, "Caution, taking this course may be dangerous to your psychological equilibrium." The students thought I was being cute.

Audience: Chris Bache: ** This thing, I called it the magic, you know, the magic happened. I'd come home and I'd say to my wife, "The magic happened today." You know, I was just doing my stuff, and bam, all of a sudden, this lightning bolt came out of nowhere and blasted somebody apart, and all of a sudden, we're having this intense conversation after class, and they're like, they're moving. Something's moving in their life. I began to sort of function like a lightning rod, you know, there was something sparking, and at that time, I didn't understand really what was going on. I knew it had something to do with my psychedelic work, but I really wasn't prepared for the enormity of the implications of the paradigm shift that I was going to have to make, and eventually did make, to understand how this happened. And by the way, everything that's in The Living Classroom—I mean, I had been thinking about it and wrestling with it some, but it all dropped in, intact, complete, in one psychedelic session, all the fundamental structure, and it's what gave me seeing it clearly in that space, is what gave me the courage of my convictions to articulate it, so that it—because if it's happening to me, I knew it had to be happening to other people. And it's not really about psychedelics. If I were using any type of spiritual practice that had the capacity to drop you deep into the collective psyche and into that territory, if you open up at that level, then you're naturally going to generate a kind of an energetic shockwave, which is going to touch the lives of people that you have karmic connection to. And I'm a teacher, so I have a lot of karmic connections to my students. This is just if you're a business person, if you're a researcher, if you're a choreographer, if you're working in the world and you're embedded in a network of relationships, and you go deep into that level, the mind, the universe doesn't necessarily—from one perspective—it doesn't recognize individuals. It's like the weather, it doesn't really recognize individual atoms or molecules of, you know, oxygen and whatnot. It's like, there's that side of it going, it just goes. So I began to realize that I was teaching on two levels at campus. There was something that began to happen at one level, and for the most of the students, I was just an ordinary professor. I was teaching the stuff, and they came, and our relationship was about information exchange, and they mostly left pretty happy. But there was a second group of students who began to take pretty much all the courses I would teach. And they were here because just being in my classes began to be a source of transformation in their lives. They were here for the energy or something. They knew that something was positively moving in their life when we came together to work, and again, it wasn't my intention. Eventually, I began to realize that there is an energetic resonance. This is just, it's nothing supernatural or paranormal; it's just normal. It's just natural. Life is like that. Consciousness is like that. Minds are like that. It's just an illusion of the physical senses that our minds are fundamentally separate. Well, they are. But there's that other side, where the, you know, individual minds emerge out of a unified field of mind. And when you come together and you focus intention, there is a natural sharing that takes place. And if one of you is working at a very deep level, then the universe seizes that opportunity to awaken and to heal other beings. It's not something I was doing. It was something that the universe was doing, almost in spite of me.

Chris Bache: Teaching is information transfer and all that magic that you do, you know, in the dance of the dance, but underneath that, teaching involves the direct engagement of mind and mind in the unified field of mind. Clarified states of consciousness are contagious. You cannot help it. It cannot help it. It just happens. Negative states are also contagious, but clarified states of consciousness are contagious. Our spiritual ecology simply does not allow private realization. If you're beginning to wake up, there's an energetic quality component of waking up. People around you begin to wake up. And if you're a teacher, or you're in anything that works with people, where you're working with groups, you have to be prepared for that consequence, for that implication. In fact, you cannot stop it. There may be a reason why people do this work in monasteries, on mountains far away, because it kind of buffers, you know, but if you're going to do this work in the world, you have to be prepared to handle the implications of the consequences of this natural process. And here's the thing, by the way, the better teacher you are, the more powerful this will happen, because teaching is that magical mystery. You know, it's that resonance. I mean, you're really—you're working communication, you're trying to organize intention, you're in the dance. And if you're good at that, well then that just makes it easier for this stuff to happen. You

Chris Bache: Yes, so eventually, I had no recourse but to learn what was happening. I had to understand what it means to teach at this level. What does it mean to teach when your person has kind of become an added catalyst in the room? It's not just the ideas that are the catalyst, but your person has become the catalyst. I had to learn how to manage, not control, but to manage the energies involved—how to make it more efficient, how to protect the students, how to choreograph it a little bit. Then I began to realize what was happening in the room was really too big to be understood simply in terms of an energetic resonance between my spiritual practice and my students. That was part of what was going on, but then I began to realize there was something else. Students were beginning to show up in each other's dreams. There was something happening socially in the room. It wasn't just a one-on-one resonance between me and them; there was a second dynamic moving in the room.

Now, I had read Rupert Sheldrake, his books like A New Science of Life, The Presence of the Past, and The Rebirth of Nature. I understood the concept of morphogenetic resonance and morphic fields, but Rupert is working in very large, historical, evolutionary fields. I didn't see the relevance of those giant fields to what was happening in my classroom, because we were together for just 15 weeks at a time. That’s not a lot of time. But then, in one particular psychedelic session, I suddenly realized that short-term groups generate fields. Fields are generated whenever people gather together, and the more focused they are in intention, and if they’re together long enough and deeply engaged enough, these fields emerge. They emerge out of the unified nature of consciousness, which is inherently a unified field.

It's not like an erector set where you're connecting two separate pieces together. It’s like an underlying potential being sparked into form—group fields, group minds. Phil Jackson, not typically thought of as a mystical guy, saw it when coaching the Los Angeles Lakers. He said that in critical situations when players are focused on the team goal, their effort can create chain reactions; it’s as if they become connected, like five fingers on one hand. Howard Bloom, a great author, wrote in The Global Brain, “Without knowing it, individuals form a team. Even in our most casual moments, we pulse in synchrony.” Isn't that a wonderful phrase—pulse in synchrony?

Other symptoms of this being a field phenomenon appeared in my classes, just like Rupert Sheldrake's theory predicts. There was a change in the learning curve; it wasn’t starting quite where the last class ended, but similar. I had a course refined over years, taking students through a scripted path from A to B to C to D. Yet, walking into the classroom on the first day, they were already in B, already in C. I had to rearrange my entire syllabus or step up because something had shifted. I realized a developmental process was occurring between classes, and sometimes something triggers that leads every subsequent class in that subject into a different context. That can be a pain, but it's worse not to adapt and go with where the students are because they might take you places you haven’t been before.

I differentiated two levels of these fields—what I call the class field and the course field. The class field is created by the energy of people in the room today, similar to the outer living edge of rings in a tree. The course field, however, is a much older, bigger field. It’s a residual arc in the learning field contributed by every student who has ever taken the course with this particular professor. Initially, the class field might be the stronger field, but over time, with teaching spanning 20-30 years, the course field becomes very strong.

So, here you've got three systems: the individual student whose consciousness is affected by both the class and course fields. It suggests an organic relationship between universal mind and individual mind through these intermediate fields. When strong and skillfully focused, these fields animate, empower, and make more creative the learning of the individual mind. In other contexts, these might be performance fields for coaches or healing fields for physicians. As a teacher, I talk about learning fields.

I learned you could work with these fields. I start working with them before a class begins. To me, the field is the unregistered student in the room—tangible. Even when deciding which books to assign a semester ahead, I tune into the field emerging around the course. I engage in spiritual practices to prevent old karma from interfering, such as cutting the cords of karma. Practices exist in all spiritual traditions, like the Hawaiian Ho’oponopono or the Tibetan Chöd, which I applied to the class roster before it began. I often wondered what colleagues might think if they saw me ringing a bell and singing Tibetan prayers for a class not yet started; it’s just preparation.

Once the class begins, you can work with fields during and behind the scenes, using visualizations or conversations to empower them. It’s important to close the field at the semester's end. This doesn’t mean dissolving it entirely, but helping students detach and re-empower as individuals before moving on to new fields and groups. If not, students may stay psychically attached, showing up weeks later, still lingering on the course's energy without a place to take it. Final exams, class feedback, and talking about their next steps all help reinforce the notion that their time with the field is finite—that they are part of a lineage of learning.

Waking up in the classroom—it's simply waking up to the fact that no one holds their own being alone. Our lives are intertwined. Feeling the weave relaxes the self. No self, a phenomenon inherently trans-self, occurs when you appreciate the transparent nature of your life interwoven with all. That's waking up—something in the classroom beyond your control, a wondrous experience of being used by something greater.

The Circle of Learning is when you learn something, and later, when someone asks for that knowledge, you’ve got it ready, seeing it’s being used for their benefit. Realizing that it's not just for you but arises from a collective need makes you appreciate that our lives aren't isolated. Knowing the beginnings and endings of our lives don't stop with us opens a dance with others—a dance that continues.

I kept diving deeper into psychedelic work, exploring areas beyond my writing, touching experiences of reincarnation at the species level, beyond the individual soul. Experiencing the species’ reincarnating mind and seeing humanity's evolutionary pivot, as if drawn into a historical crescendo through time, made sense only when I glimpsed the human we're gestating. It drew me into luminosities so profound they became painful to leave, yet I couldn’t share this depth fully with students. It became hard, physically, not sharing it transferred tension to my voice, affecting my teaching.

Eventually, external life changes transitioned my work approach. My marriage ended, Dark Night, Early Dawn was published, and a stint at IONS gave hope for a new platform, yet didn’t work out. Returning to Ohio to teach, knowing I didn’t belong, and struggles with grounding took time to resolve. Recognizing a detachment issue, I worked through coming down fully before new paths like writing emerged to share insights while continuing contributions to the psychedelic renaissance.

Knowing when to pull back from teaching, even if I loved it, marked a transition to writing. The current project, Stealing Diamonds from Heaven, and future plans with The Birth of the Diamond Soul, explore history, nature, and evolving human consciousness.

Robert McDermott: You can see why it was delightful to write the foreword to Chris's book. If anybody is interested in continuing this conversation with Chris or myself, I would be happy to engage. Pull up a cushion if you will. I have an announcement for later, but for now, please feel free to leave or stay as you wish. I was very moved, and if you read the foreword, you’ll see it was an easy affirmation to make.

Chris Bache: Most of you don't know, but I was Robert’s sitter in a Holotropic Breathwork session. He was mine too. We’ve got a bond through this. The floor is open—let’s talk.

Robert McDermott: I'll explain why I jumped up here. I had a similar teaching experience at Baruch College for 20 years, teaching first-generation students—averaging 40 students per class, not repeating students. Coming to Paradise, I found teaching a different experience here. I didn't have a psychedelic practice like the one Chris mentioned, though.

Nobody pressured me here to partake, but I'm always looking for etheric experiences described in The Living Classroom. Reading it was remarkable. I recall a significant experience during a Holotropic Breathwork session with Stan Grof, which left a lasting impression. Chris and I participated together, and it was deeply bonding. In smaller classes, the student relationship is intense, even if I teach less frequently now.

Chris Bache: Let me mention something about the etheric field. Over time, the energetic resonance I described in The Living Classroom has calmed down. Instead of happening like a lightning rod around me, it became subtler, teaching us about the etheric level. Intense practice opens and channels energy, creating circuits that remain even when the energy calms. This wisdom dictates evolution's pace, with transparency subtler now than during those peak years.

Panelist: During that time, the Uranus-Neptune conjunction created a larger, dissolving collective field, perfect for cultivating and perceiving transparent fields like those in The Living Classroom. It offered a unique privilege, much like what we're experiencing now with Uranus-Pluto's intensity, speaking to larger morphic fields and class dynamics from that era.

Robert McDermott: Yeah, thank you. Where are we going? Chris, Richard.

Audience: Chris, I just want to express my deepest gratitude. For some of us who have experienced you in the classroom and seen the living embodiment of your written word in person, it is unbelievable to be in your presence. Every time I leave the classroom, I feel a bit more dignified and connected to a larger purpose in life. On a personal note, about five or six weeks ago, I started teaching poetry to sixth and seventh graders, and I was terrified. If it wasn't for your book, I think I would have fallen apart because it helped me realize that not all responsibility lay on my shoulders. I could allow the field to create the class, and sure enough, it happened. So, I have a question: What cosmological implications do you see from the field experience you've had in your life? Does the universe relate to that potential to create fields everywhere we look? Like a galaxy as a kind of field?

Chris Bache: The nice thing is that it's been working this way for billions of years before we even began to understand what was going on. Whatever is happening has been happening for a long time. The fact that we're beginning to understand these dynamics means we can participate in them more consciously. Some colleagues have said this undermines individuality, but I think we're just starting to play with something that's been playing with us. I don't know the full ramifications of these dynamics. When we synchronize ourselves and work with guided intention, there seems to be a little bleed-through that reinforces the field. Then it gets scary when you think about it—there's a field around the Pentagon, shopping malls, the New York Times. Fields are everywhere. They're neither good nor bad morally. For instance, there's a field around the Ku Klux Klan, the NRA. It's just the connective tissue of consciousness. Once you understand this, you become more sensitive to your psychic hygiene.

Robert McDermott: Why did you say, as I think you did, that they're not good or bad, but then you indicated some fields are pretty negative and difficult?

Chris Bache: By good or bad, I mean nature doesn't seem to reinforce morally good fields or undermine negative ones. I, as an evolving consciousness, choose to cultivate certain energies in my life. So, I may make moral distinctions and associate with fields of compassion, intelligence, creativity, and try to detach from fields of competition and vitriolic energy. It's like the ocean with its currents and riptides—they're not moral in themselves.

Robert McDermott: We have surfaced two differences in our worldview. One is that I see this discussion in a comprehensive evolution of consciousness, influenced by Owen Barfield, for instance. We are in a situation where we must learn by love to reconnect with our etheric, discerning fields that may work against love.

Chris Bache: I agree with you. The universe, as Jung said, tilts towards growth. I do believe there are dynamics encouraging fields of compassion, oneness, and growth while not giving as much support to fields that are inherently divisive.

Robert McDermott: I’d revise your language. Fields aren't negative by themselves but are negative in relation to something the universe needs to accomplish.

Chris Bache: That's interesting language. I'll have to sit with that.

Robert McDermott: Jung talks about the universe evolving towards love and freedom. Those conditions allow love.

Chris Bache: Yes, love is an expression of the inherent oneness of life. It's powerful because it expresses and fosters that unity.

Robert McDermott: Fields that emphasize disunity and fear are negative. It's part of my life to transform those fields.

Chris Bache: I agree. A quick side note on Youngstown: my soul's choice to work with the ocean of suffering in psychedelic work required a place like that. San Francisco wouldn’t have been suitable for dealing with such negative fields. Youngstown, with its history of crime and turmoil, is a place where bad karma resolves. I believe in working to lift those fields and energies. The aggregation of negativity is a natural phenomenon, but it's energy that can be shifted.

Robert McDermott: How about "intelligible"?

Audience: Intelligible, okay.

Robert McDermott: How’d you like a job?

Audience: Thank you, Chris, for coming and sharing with us. It was beautiful to see you speak so freely. My curiosity in working with fields relates to the idea of the form of an atom, how an electron jumps from ring to ring, and the universe’s structure. I'm curious about the evolution of consciousness in a relational field and quantum leaps.

Chris Bache: I don't know exactly. We know about emergence and tipping points. People suggest we're coming to a collective near-death experience, a potential jumping point. If fields come to tipping points in small groups, I suggest we have a long way to go and little time to get there. To evolve as needed, understanding field dynamics is crucial. We don't have to change 7 billion minds—only one at the integral level. The collective unconscious as a system can be thrown into nonlinear dynamics. Nonlinear conditions might enable a quantum step change, a deeper summation within the individuals.

Robert McDermott: Following on Brian...

Audience: I didn’t want the microphone, but Robert does, and so here we are.

Robert McDermott: Jesse's all the way back, and Aaron, Lydia, thanks.

Audience: I have a question about working with fields. I see how it can be applied in any relational situation. Could you share something specific about a practice in working with fields? Also, many of us work closely with the crisis happening in the world. So, do you have any specific practice to share or thoughts for us to digest?

Chris Bache: Compassion practices come to mind. You're already doing the work you're describing. You've aligned yourself with an institution and followed your instincts. You're already engaged in the evolutionary dynamics. To do it just a little bit better, take care of yourself. There's a lot of wear and tear in this long-term process. Compassion practices allow you to expand your heart deeply into beauty, pain, and broad horizons and then take up your daily work. Compassion, as the recognition of life's inherent oneness, seems to most deeply address what you're talking about.

Audience: Thank you so much, Chris. My question is about coming down off the mountain. Your decision to move away from sacred medicine and your relationship with it interests me. I’ve struggled with attachment to marijuana, which kept me connected to the divine and the archetypal realm. Why is it important for you to move in that direction?

Chris Bache: Thank you for your heartfelt question. I'll do my best to respond to its depth. I'm Neptune, first house square sun in the 10th house. Addiction is the shadow of Neptune, allowing me to open deep fields easily. The shadow side is choosing lower unity forms over higher ones. Marijuana has been an issue for me, and I've had to learn when to let it go.

I stopped high-dose work for two reasons: physical and subtle energy complications and the realization that more dying experiences would worsen these effects. My body was telling me to let the energy calm down, despite doing a lot of supportive practices. The primary reason I stopped is that I couldn't take coming back anymore. The places I went were too beautiful and light. Returning was painful. I asked never to be brought back until I wouldn’t have to leave there. I learned that it's possible to have too much God. Coming back down, marijuana kept me a little off the ground, allowing a connection to the mother, but I needed to finish my life's work fully grounded.

I continue Vajrayana and Dzogchen practices, receiving teachings. The diamond luminosity domain is not like the state of Shunyata; it's different. Some beings can live there, but I'm not one of them yet.

Audience: Thanks, Chris. I have two questions. I'd love to hear more about the human we're moving towards as a species and the diamond soul. Also, you mentioned the moment when students are no longer your students. How might we relate to that in a community where we're always invited back as part of the learning field? Are the fields closed in certain ways?

Audience: Okay, that’s an interesting question.

Chris Bache: I think your full-time faculty have a better answer than I can provide. What I'm seeing is not a failure to close the field. Graduation at your institution is a tremendous celebration of accomplishment, and you seem to celebrate well. Having an extended community doesn't mean fields haven't been well closed. You're an unusual community, and it's natural to have a community that nourishes itself through various levels of re-entering the world.

Robert McDermott: Extremely good answer, Chris. Thanks for the question. The way I think about PCC, faculty, students, and alumni is not in terms of a single field. It's more about individual karmic joining of will and mind. Some people have great longevity in this community, and others don’t. It seems perfectly fine for different levels of participation.

Audience: It's a community of many levels, and some try to operate on all, whereas others have different commitments. The variety of ways of participation impresses me. Chris touches deep places in our community psyche, but some people work on different tasks. This place is about personal transformation, not a philosophical boot camp. Each person's journey through the community and beyond is unique, and the community keeps evolving due to the unique individuals who contribute to it.

Robert McDermott: We probably should end.

Chris Bache: How about if I answer your second question? Maybe that's a good place to stop. The hot tubs are waiting for you, not for us.

Robert McDermott: I think about Plato and the importance of law, but also the minimum level it sometimes represents. We are part of a larger legal culture, and we have to observe institutional expectations. There are three groups here: faculty, including adjunct faculty, students, and alumni. I suggest we consider faculty time and student time carefully for the hot tubs. The lower tubs are for faculty from to in the morning, and students are not invited then. The upper tub is handicap accessible and quieter. It has the same restricted time slot in the morning and an additional one from 10 to 11 at night. It's clear? Can you remember? Thank you; we don't want to keep addressing it.

Audience: Yeah, that's true.

Robert McDermott: The others have—we've all been here 25 years, 30 years. Don't worry, you're here. It's a special thing for you. We want you to have as much as possible. We also want to thank Chris for his wonderful, inspiring, deep, profound, transformative work, his wonderful writings, and for this extra conversation, which I thought was even more disclosing. So we do thank you and applaud you.

Chris Bache: You are wonderful. Really, I can't tell you how wonderful it is when I get to come here and spend time with you, to mix it up with you, to listen to what you have to say and what you do. Really, you're just an extraordinary group of people. My heart is really deeply touched.

Audience: About the question—okay, this has been something, it's been a—

Chris Bache: Reoccurring and deepening theme of my psychedelic work went on for many, many years, and a big hunk of it I put down in the chapter in Dark Night, Early Dawn, in the Great Awakening chapter. But it kept on going after that. In the last three sessions of the series—I didn't know it was ending, but it was about to end—the universe gave me three last installments, three last pieces, and one of them was the capstone of a series of installments around the evolutionary project and the future human. It'll be in this book, and maybe I'll make this particular session available to the PCC group. I'll give it to Rick or Robert and let it go out. It was the most absolutely, profoundly disorienting, death-dismember—not just reality ripped apart. I mean, really, 70 sessions in, you wouldn't think that you could go through something like this. I mean, you would think it would be used up, you know. But it was just an absolute rip-down, total shattering of reality in order to give me one last piece to finish this installment on what's coming forward. This is something that's taking place at the deep level of the collective psyche. This—this is—we all live our lives, and we die and are reborn. We die and are reborn, and we do it within a certain cradle, and that cradle is the archetype of the human species that we are at this point in history. And what's happening is that cradle is about to shift. The fundamental underlying structure of the human psyche is about to shift, and so the entire baseline of what we're dying and being reborn into is about to change.

Chris Bache: When we make this transition, and we will all be there in some way, shape, or form, we will feel it, will be part of it. It's going to be multiple generations, but we will all be part of it. When it happens, and as it happens, and as this exquisite creature comes out of our historical womb and walks the earth, we will look back on all the pain from Homo erectus, all the terrible suffering, all the things we've done to each other, all the horrendous things we've done to each other, all the loneliness and all the terrible things. We will look back on it and say, it was worth it. It was worth it, because this being is the most exquisite, beautiful being. Picture humanity with its heart completely healed of all the wars, all the rapes, and all the—just completely whole again in a new way. Picture the mind just radiantly strong, not fragmented, not torn apart and no conflict within the psyche. No push, pull, chest—

Chris Bache: Completely transparent on the earth, of the earth, green to its roots, and yet at the same time,

Chris Bache: In easy communion with the surrounding intelligence of the universe. Heaven on Earth for such a species as this. It was one of the greatest blessings of all the work, just to be able to see what history is making, what is in the process of emerging. And the sessions told me you have to start writing more about the future human, because when it gets dark, and we're going into the darkness, if you don't have a vision of what's coming, if you don't understand what's being birthed by the pain, you're going to get lost in the pain. The humans will get lost, and it'll—but if you have a vision again, and you all know, you all have the intuition, you had it before you were born. You took it into this incarnation. You feel it, and it's important to hold on to that. It's important to really, really deeply in your bones know that everything that you're investing in, you are working with the universe to bring this forward, and it will come forward. It's taking us right up to the edge of extinction. Really, the old has to die in order to give birth to this magnificent creature. This is a species of Buddhas, a species of Christ, a species of Prophets. This is when the feminine is completely healed and reconciled with the masculine, giving complete unprecedented access to the blessings of cosmic intelligence, and it is absolutely embodied. No up-and-out cosmology, no escapist theologies anymore, and no Bardo. The Bardo is in the process of emptying itself. In this process, the Bardo is a fragment of a temporary condition in the evolutionary saga. We are in the process, by becoming more integrated; we are in the process of emptying the Bardo. This species will not need that type of buffer. This is what we're working—this is one person's poor grasp at what we are working for. But I think we all feel it. We know it. I mean, this is not—this is just a piece of one person seeing something. What it is is much bigger than any one person can see. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.