Mapping Consciousness with High-Dose LSD (ATTMind #83)

Chris Bache: Okay, testing one two, testing one two, yeah, you're great.

James Jesso: I'm also great. Audio-wise.

Chris Bache: Hey, good. How you doing? Squared image, okay, it looks good. Yeah, yeah. How you doing today? I'm doing well. Looking forward to our conversation. You, you.

James Jesso: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Adventures Through the Mind. I am your host, as always, James W. Jesso. I'm going to start this episode off with a big thanks to the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference in Vancouver, happening November 2nd to the 4th. You've probably noticed they've sponsored a few episodes over the last couple months, and, yeah, that's very exciting. The guest today, Chris Bache, is one of the presenters at the conference, and I will be one of the attendees. So if you want to come check me out, or check out the conference in general, or come check out Chris at that conference, follow the link contained in the description to this episode. Jump over there. If you buy a ticket, then I get a little bit of commission from that, which goes towards my costs to fly to Vancouver to attend this. So it's a, and you get to go to a great concert or, concert, Jesus, conference. It's a win-win.

Okay, today's guest is Christopher M. Bache. Bache is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He is also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies and a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an award-winning teacher and international speaker. Chris's work explores the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states. He has written three books, translated into six languages: Lifecycles, a study of reincarnation in light of contemporary consciousness research; Dark Night Early Dawn, a pioneering work into psychedelic philosophy and collective consciousness; and The Living Classroom, an exploration of teaching and collective fields of consciousness. He has a new book being released from Inner Traditions in 2019, Diamonds from Heaven: A 20-Year Journey into the Mind of the Universe.

So let me just give you a little bit more detail as to Christopher and what he's been up to. At some point about 40 years ago, he decided it would be a good idea for him to take high doses of LSD regularly with the intention, I guess, to map consciousness as a metaphysical philosopher. And then proceeded to do so 76, I believe, 76 times over the course of 20 years. 20 years after his last journey in that specific structure, he is about to release his book Diamonds from Heaven, and he is on the show today to talk about basically, what drove him to do this, what it was like, and what did he learn. And furthermore, not just what did he learn about the nature of consciousness and the psychedelic experience, but what did he learn about what we can do as human beings to make sense of experiences that are as massive as the ones you're going to hear him describe in this episode.

We also had a great post-credits talk that, with his permission, I am going to be releasing as well, exclusively to the patrons at first, but after a few weeks, you will be able to get access to it on YouTube. So if you're not already subscribed to YouTube, please head over there. Do so, hit the little bell so that you get notifications. Because these sort of extra episodes, the post-credit sequence, only get notified to patrons, and then once they're public, they only get notified basically out through those who are subscribed on my YouTube channel. So head over there and do that if you're not already watching this on YouTube. And if you want to become a patron, that would be amazing, because it is thanks to my patrons on Patreon that I am able to give my time into building this podcast in the larger domain of my work for you, the psychedelic culture. Big thanks to the patrons whose names are listed in the upper corner of this episode on YouTube, and to Tempoic Massage and Lola for the excellent and very generous PayPal donations.

Okay, got a little bit of noise happening in my environment now, so I'm gonna end this quick. If you want to support the show, becoming a patron or by leaving a donation, the links to do so are contained in the description to this episode on YouTube at jameswjesso.com, and whatever podcatcher you are listening to it. Enjoy this episode with Christopher Bache on Adventures Through the Mind.

Just because of the context of my work and my travel, I didn’t get a chance to really look into what you do until yesterday. Other than, you know, Steven's, you know, what's the word I'm looking for, shining recommendation definitely put you on the map. And then I was, I was really blown away. I found it to be, yeah, yeah. That's just really blown away. It's interesting, yeah, interesting stuff you had going on there.

Chris Bache: Yeah? Well, I've been sort of on the side of the psychedelic community but been there for a long time doing my own thing.

James Jesso: Yeah, it makes sense because you had to protect your career for some time.

Chris Bache: Yeah, yeah. All right. So okay,

James Jesso: Why don't, why don't we start it off here? Just easing in, give me a sense of where you're coming from. When you start this work, you were doing high dose LSD experiences for 20 years. You stopped about 10 years ago, which means that you started doing this 30, 30 years ago. At that point, I believe LSD was already illegal. Can you sort of like draw or paint us a picture of the context that you were entering into the decision to do this? And while doing that, can you also explain the difference between what you were doing and what was popular at the time insofar as psychedelic therapy or psycholytic therapy?

Chris Bache: Yeah. Well, I came out of graduate school in 1978. I was trained as a philosopher of religion, and I came to Youngstown State University in Northeast Ohio to begin my teaching career. And at the time, I was an atheistically inclined agnostic. But that first year, I read Stan Grof's first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, and I immediately connected with it. I felt I had found my life's work. This was 1978. The Controlled Substances Act had been passed in 1970; the early era of psychedelic research was over, and, of course, we had entered that blackout between 1970 and when Scientific American had published its front page editorial recommending that we end the ban on psychedelic research in 2014. But there was this blackout. No one was allowed to do this work anymore. I was convinced that it could be done safely. And Stan Grof's work was very important to me in that respect, and I was convinced that the people who would be making the most important contributions in philosophy of religion would soon be people who were writing out of an experiential basis.

So I made the decision to divide my life in half. In my public life, I continued my work as an academic professor, teaching my courses, doing all the things professors do. But in my private life, I began a 20-year journey working with high levels of psychedelics of LSD, 73 sessions extending over 20 years between 1979 and 1999. I chose to work with high doses first because it was complicated to arrange time for sessions when you have a dual career, marriage to professional people, and I wanted to make the most out of every session. But then, after the process got started, I found that I thought it would get me to my goal of enlightenment faster, basically breaking off larger pieces of karma, chewing up larger pieces of karma in every session. After that model of personal enlightenment dissolved along the way, I continued to work with high doses of LSD, because it took me where I wanted to go, and then it took me farther than I ever dreamed was possible.

James Jesso: Now I'm just going to take a quick pause to clarify something, because high dose LSD is not very clear for the listeners, how high of a dose? What was the metric?

Chris Bache: The metric was 500 to 600 micrograms, which is kind of a maximum high dose. Stan's work differentiates between psychedelic or low dose therapy averaging about 200 micrograms up to 300; psychedelic therapy is high dose between 300 and 500, more typically 300 to 500. But in the early work he did at Spring Grove Hospital, it was deliberately limited to a maximum of three sessions. The idea was to trigger an experience of Transcendence that would help people come to terms with their impending death. I thought, if you could do this safely three times, you could do it safely more frequently, and so I saw myself, at the time, simply doing an extended dose of high dose therapy.

When I got to the end of this journey, however, and was looking back, I realized that what unfolded on this journey was more radical and more challenging than what had emerged in the early psychedelic therapy work. And so I had to coin a new term, a new phrase for it. So the way I would describe my work now is that psychedelic period is psychedelic exploration, the method is psychedelic therapy, with totally internalized sessions, strong, evocative music, working with a sitter, always in a protected, isolated environment, classic set and setting. The difference is the high number of sessions, seven for me, turned out to be 73 sessions.

James Jesso: Some of the conclusions that you drew are, I just remember having recently listened to some of your lectures, and just being so moved by it, and I'm noticing myself now wanting excitedly to ask you basically what you learned in the end. But I know that this, I'm just like, kind of suppressing that urge a little bit and to maybe deepen into, you know, what exactly was happening? What? And I want to ask that question couched in very specific phenomenon that you observed, which was multiple layers of death and rebirth and like an increasing expansion into, and I'm kind of, I guess, using my own my own words here, but like of higher levels of reality. Can you sort of couch in this idea of, what do you mean by multiple death and rebirth? Can you give us an outline of, I mean, what the hell was happening in there after 70 something? Or, you know, progressively through 70 something sessions of 500 Mikes of LSD?

Chris Bache: Well, that is the question. And it is, it's, it's hard to summarize. I mean, it's taken me about 300 pages just to tell the story of what happened. It's hard to jump into it quickly, because there were so many layers. But basically, my experience has been that the universe, or the mind of the universe, or the mind of Divine is an infinite ocean of potential, and when we drop our individual mind into that ocean, it catalyzes a set of experiences out of that infinite potential. And as we are changed and influenced and healed and purified by that exchange, the seed crystal of our mind changes, and then later, when we drop that same mind, now transformed into the ocean, it catalyzes a deeper set of experiences out of that infinite potential.

So my experience was that there were a series of initiations that took place over many years, a series of deaths, followed by a rebirth into a deeper level of reality, and then a gradually acclimating to that level of reality, adjusting to its conditions, going through a purification process, because, as I experienced it, leads every deeper level of reality, or every deeper state of consciousness that gave us access to a deeper level of reality was a higher level of energy. So to stabilize consciousness at that deeper level of consciousness, so that your experience of that deeper level of reality would be coherent and not fragmented, you had to go through a very intense purification process, but if you continue to work at a particular level, if you can continue to stay internalized and push, my experience was you would go back to the same level, and you would, I would acclimate to that level. I would begin to have more coherent experiences at that level. And eventually, I would come to a point where the death-rebirth process would repeat itself. I would go through some agonizing, complete loss of control, and then I would collapse, and be an internal collapse, and then I would be reborn into a yet deeper level of consciousness, which gave me access to a deeper level of reality. And this went on systematically, periodically for 20 years. So to describe the levels of consciousness that I entered into, it's a, that's, it's a longer story.

James Jesso: Absolutely, yeah, and I was thinking at some point I might ask you a couple like, what does this mean? In so far as like, why is the chapter titled this? And, yeah, but maybe because all of this, you know, having listened to the longer story, you know, all of this is very descriptive, but for someone who's just entering into this for the first time, it can be kind of abstract. So maybe you can, you can talk about what this looks like, because I got one description from you that seemed to make a lot of sense to me, which was something like, you know, in the early sessions, you were working through your own personal stuff, and that eventually you needed to die to who you were, to become, you know, yeah, beyond your personality into a greater, a greater sense of like, the underlying human consciousness, and then even at some point to die from that underlying human consciousness into something beyond it. Can you give maybe a step by step in the early stages, what that looked like?

Chris Bache: Yeah, for about the first two years, I worked at what Stan Grof describes as the perinatal level of consciousness, which is the interface between your personal reality, your egoic reality in space-time, and early Transpersonal consciousness. So I went through many experiences of reliving my own birth, of experiences of death and dying, until eventually, after about two and a half years, my personal reality was just shattered. I was just crushed and extinguished. I died as the person I had known myself to be. And then I was reborn into a level of reality that transcended, radically transcended, Chris Bache's reality. And I was working, at that point, at a deep within the collective unconscious, and then the entire process began again.

And in my experience, there are two phases of every session. There's a cleansing phase, which lasts usually a couple of hours, and then there's an ecstatic phase. So if you enter into the cleansing phase and let it take you wherever it wants to take you, you reach. It reaches a peak. You go through some type of crisis, some type of transition, and then the remainder of the session is spent in ecstatic reality, where you receive teachings and experiences. So in the cleansing phase of phase two, I entered into what I call the ocean of suffering, just domains of pain and suffering that were vast, encompassing large swaths of human history and hundreds of thousands of persons. It took about two years to go through all of that material at the personal side, on the ecstatic side, I was experiencing, for about a year, my life as a completed whole, start to finish, all the time, moments of my life as a simultaneous present. I just kind of experienced my life as a complete totality.

And then in the second phase, I went through a series of initiations in which I was taken deep into the mind of the universe and just given a series of teachings and given a series of experiences, it basically grounded me in a larger cosmological vision of reality. After about two years of that process, I went through another death and rebirth cycle and was spun beyond, not only beyond my individual reality, but also beyond my reality as a human species, altogether, beyond the collective psyche into what I identified as archetypal reality. But it wasn't the archetypes described by either Plato or Carl Jung. It was both, I mean, it had certain features similar to Plato's description and certain features of Jung's description, but it really had other features that did not fit in their description. The realities that I encountered there at the high archetypal level were not eternal, unchanging ideas in the mind of God, as Plato describes it, but vast, living cosmic forces, giant beings being so vast, my mind literally could not wrap itself around it. I could only get approximations of the scale of their dimensions.

At the slightly beneath that, at the Jungian level, I entered deep into the collective psyche, and then for a couple of years, had all sorts of experiences of how our species functions as a single organism. I was taken deep into the sort of meta neural networks of the species mind, and also began to have experiences of reincarnation, but not as an individual, not from the perspective of individual souls, but from the spectrum of an entire species that was incarnating every generation, a whole generation of its beings, and experiencing the centralized intelligence that was kind of orchestrating or collaborating with the individual souls to facilitate not just an individual journey of transformation, but to facilitate a species journey of transformation. And I went through another round of death and rebirth. I'm skipping over, of course, a lot of things, right, right? And then I was catapulted into what some people call causal reality, into non-dual reality, and where the entire universe began to function as a single totality. And had a number of experiences of what the Buddhists call śūnyatā, emptiness, of self, oneness, cosmic love, experiences of the primal void, the fertile void, you know, the formlessness that is the source of all existence.

After that, then I went, I was coming into the last five years of work, and the last five years catapulted me after again, more rounds of purification, death and rebirth, into a cosmic light that was so intense and so clear and so pure. I called it the diamond luminosity, and that's where the title of the book comes from, Diamonds from Heaven. Buddhism calls this the absolute clear light. It associates it with its concept of Dharmakāya, the fundamental reality that is the source of all existence. Now let me back up. Light entered into the experiences. There are many, many levels of light, many gradations of light, in my experience there, I had experienced light many times in earlier death-rebirth processes. So when I talk about the diamond light, I'm not simply talking using metaphor to describe that light, I'm trying to describe a particularly intense, exceptionally clear state of awareness of crystalline light that becomes so clear, eventually becomes transparent to itself. And in those last five years, in the last 26 sessions, which was actually about a third of all of my work, I entered that reality four times and just four times. So about once a year, I would be catapulted into this reality, and then I would go through more detoxification, more purification, and about a year later would enter into this reality one more time. That's the kind of larger overview.

James Jesso: Right, right, good, and I'm glad that you stopped there, because your closing experiences, I want to get to near the end, but I want to maybe jump back a little bit and focus on what you're talking about here with this purification and also with this idea of becoming more coherent. Now, when you say purification, what exactly do you mean? Because I, my immediate assumption is something akin to, you know, what the Ayahuasca culture calls purging, where you're basically putting, pushing out or releasing or letting go or discharging, suffering, pain, you know, hardships, whatever, through the active metabolic process of feeling them so that you can, having let those go, enter into a state of being that exists without them. Is that what you mean when you're saying purification?

Chris Bache: That's a good description. It is that it's physiological. I mean, you know, people throw up a lot on Ayahuasca. They don't tend to think of LSD as something that causes throwing up. But to me, I was working with such high levels, I threw up a lot on LSD, and that's part of this whole releasing of physical toxins, biochemical toxins, psychological toxins, just letting them come through your system and offload in very rapid sequences. When you move into deeper levels, it takes different forms. I mean, if you want to enter into very, very deep states of consciousness where you enter into unitive consciousness with the divine or different dimensions of existence, or different dimensions of the cosmos, you have to completely let go of everything in your life which keeps you small. So it's not just negative experiences, it's not just pain, it's every thought form, every emotional derivative that constellates around smallness. But you have to allow your system to step up to handle the enormous waves of energy that move through you in these very deep states of consciousness.

So purification begins at the personal level. You're purifying all sorts of pieces of your personal history, including your former life history. But as you go deeper and deeper, the forms of purification become harder to identify with anything personal they become, and eventually you literally are transcending time and space. And there is a sense in which you have to empty yourself of everything associated with your entire history of being a time and space, being to enter into realities beyond time and space, but it is exactly as the Ayahuasca, the Santo Daime tradition, describes it. It is a purging, it's a letting go. It's a manifesting and letting go of those realities.

James Jesso: I'm, you know, given that we're talking about transcending time and space, I'm gonna assume that it, you know, it's Transcendence linguistic form as well. But I'm just curious, like, what, what does it feel like to, I like, I know what it feels like to, you know, purify or discharge, sadness. Yeah, I know what it feels like to feel like the grief and the fear, you know, particularly the grief of letting go, of who I think I am, or who I, who I thought I was, yeah, but it really, it's, it's mind blowing. Really, is there a way that you could describe in language what it's like to purify and let go of your very essence of being bound by time and space?

Chris Bache: Your question really penetrates right to the some very heart of some very thorny issues. Let me, let me, let me mention before we jump into it, you know, ineffability is taken as one of the signature qualities of a genuine mystical experience. William James first brought it in, and it's been incorporated into some of the diagnostic questionnaires to assess the depth of one's mystical experience. Personally, I think ineffability is overrated. So these things are hard to put into words. They are hard to define ways of expressing experiences that you enter into in these realities. But my experience is, when you first break into a new level of reality, it is hard to get it down on paper. It is hard to find words, and there are some tricks that I learned in order to concretize my recall of these experiences.

But what I found is, if you keep going back to the same level of reality over and over again, if you go through this purification process and consciousness stabilizes at that level of reality, your cognition becomes clear, you begin to understand how this works, the pieces begin to cohere, and it becomes easier and easier to find the right words to describe it. Then when you break into a new level of reality, the same dynamic repeats itself that you're kind of overwhelmed by the enormity of something different, but if you keep going back with focus, you will be able to stabilize it. The particular experience that you're talking about, of letting go all of your experience in time and space, well, partly I experience it as a matter of fear. You're becoming something so large that it's swallowing everything you've ever known. Not only swallowing everything you've ever known as an individual, but there's a sense in which when you're working at that level, even to even to push that particular boundary, you are no longer an individual. Having gotten to that level, there's a sense in which you're you're functioning as a species. You're functioning as a fractal member of an entire human species. And then at a deeper level, you're not even a species. You're somehow a fractal embodiment of an entire evolutionary impulse that's been manifesting galaxies and solar systems and planets and evolving life.

So you literally have already dissolved into those deeper patterns. So you're not an individual having a Transpersonal experience. You have surrendered into that part of the universe that lives as a galaxy that lives effort as an evolutionary thrust. So when it comes to the point of letting go of that and entering into something which is where the Big Bang came from, entering in the domain of formlessness itself, it feels less like a personal crisis. It feels like an almost an evolutionary crisis, or a species anxiety. But if you let go, the universe takes you in, and you just lose all frames of reference. Yeah, and then suddenly you're alive within a different reality. I mean, it's hard to describe, because I say you're alive, but you're not who you were before. But there is a thread of memory that connects who you were inside time and space to who you are in this reality, which is outside time and space. But what you are experiencing it's not you're literally adrift in the mind of God, so to speak, you're in the in the cosmos as part of the title, currents of the cosmos.

James Jesso: Like part of but also as the title currents, like, there, is there? Like, it's not just like, Oh, I am in the universe. Is there a sense of being all of that as well?

Chris Bache: Yes. I mean, basically, in each deeper and deeper level, I experience it as a remembering. I wasn't entering a reality that I was not. I was remembering a dimension of my own existence that I had forgotten about. So becoming one with God is not a matter of confronting an external deity, which you then merge with, becoming one with God. Or I don't even like to use the word God, because of all the, you know, historical associations, the baggage that comes with it. But to become one with that reality, with that fundamental reality, it's a matter of remembering. It's a remembering the fundamental truth that that's what you are. You are a manifestation. You are a fractal embodiment of an aspect of this divine impulse. So the whole experience is as you become larger, you remember more. As you remember more, you become clear. As you become clearer, you enter deeper and deeper into these ocean currents, but always the sense of waking up. You're waking up. It's not really about dying and being reborn. It's just a matter of waking up to something that is your true and natural condition.

James Jesso: So I might, I might be jumping the gun here, as they say, but I feel like this might be a good time to ask something that I wanted to save till later, and then I'll jump back afterwards. Okay, I'm assuming that you're familiar with the anecdotal reports of 5-MeO-DMT that have been really growing a lot over the last 10 years or so. Yeah, and a lot of the people who are, we'll say the people of the five, you know, they they experience, and then claim that what happens is like, this is the ultimate non-dual experience. And you enter into, you become like the apex of consciousness, in some way, like the God. And in your experience, you at one point even got to what could be described as this apex, maybe this is this diamond Luminosity. And then at some point, realized that there was something even further beyond that as well. I'm curious, given your experiences like your, you know, your deep experiences with high dose LSD over such a long time, and these, this, these entrances into into different levels of consciousness. How do you feel about the sort of the larger cosmological or metaphysical claim that's being made by people who are experiencing 5-MeO-DMT?

Chris Bache: I'm really comfortable with the 5-MeO-DMT discussion. I think it's a fascinating substance with the capacity to catapult us through many layers, giving us a short immersion into deep cosmic territories. However, I think the situation shares similarities with people who have near-death episodes. They might be walking down the street, have a heart attack, nearly die, and experience a transcendental state, which lasts minutes or hours. Upon returning to their bodies, they try to understand what they experienced. Fleeting contact with these realities can give you a sense of immersion in the ultimate. Still, because they are short-term and singular, sometimes we draw premature conclusions about what they imply for the universe itself.

When I was engaged in my work, I reached a point in the final five years where I immersed into what I call the Diamond Luminosity, moving past oneness and merging with the divine into levels beyond causal reality. In my 50th session, everything pivoted 90 degrees, revealing a reality far removed, a reality that was light-soaked. A beam of light hit me, shattering me with a completely different light, beyond even the Diamond Luminosity. I called it the Absolute Light. That’s when I realized this progression is infinite, and I set aside the belief in a definitive end to the process, such as becoming one with God or entering the primal void. I discovered many gradations of oneness and formlessness and realized the universe is much larger than I imagined. Thus, the sessions stopped taking me farther out, and the Diamond Luminosity began anchoring deeper into my body and psyche.

I understand the senses of ultimacy emerging in these experiences; it’s phenomenologically accurate. However, as a metaphysician, I would bracket discussions of ultimacy since I’m not sure we can safely claim what is ultimate, even with these powerful substances.

James Jesso: Yes, cool. Thank you very much. Now we’re going to put a pin in that and jump back to talk a bit more about purification and coherence. You’ve made a comment multiple times about the need to get familiar with certain states of consciousness, becoming coherent while in these higher energy states. Could you explain that a bit more deeply?

Chris Bache: This was a learn-as-you-go process for me. I wasn’t part of a psychedelic culture, didn’t have a shaman guiding me, and was figuring it out alone, using a medicine without much history like mushrooms or Ayahuasca. It was a relatively new medicine pushing my experiences to the edge. In reading literature on psychedelic experiences, particularly with powerful psychedelics like LSD, I saw people touched various levels of reality, but their experiences often seemed fragmented—bits and pieces. Multiple sessions seemed as if starting over.

In contrast, I experienced a sustained conversation deepening into communion with a consciousness that took no form but orchestrated my sessions. My role was to participate, let it guide me, and then make sense of it. Making sense involved methodically recording the session and extensive post-session reflection. It was more than maintaining a clean setting; it was integrating the experiences intellectually, personally, emotionally, and physically.

With my background as an analytic philosopher, I would enter states as clearly as possible, understanding and retaining as much as possible. Meeting the universe with this devotion, it would orchestrate the experience, taking me as deep as I was capable of going. But holding this posture involved attention, surrender, and courage—to let it take me, to confront death repeatedly—and then to document it, think it through, and let it unfold.

James Jesso: Interesting. I wrote a book on working with Psilocybin mushrooms, and during that extended period, each use seemed to enhance cognitive coherency, allowing me to articulate experiences accurately. Unless you want to comment further, I have another question.

Chris Bache: I understand how our experiences are congruent with different psychedelics. Each has its quality, but the engagement phenomenon is consistent among them.

James Jesso: You definitely went much deeper than I did. Let's talk about the difference between LSD and Psilocybin. Phenomenologically, how do they differ?

Chris Bache: Psilocybin is a body-grounded psychedelic; it strongly affects my body, with its intelligence entering and sweeping through, causing it to hum and glow. It's similar with Ayahuasca. High doses of LSD, on the other hand, accelerate consciousness into deep states, almost leaving the body behind and driving towards a "high cosmological ceiling." It doesn’t connect, for example, to elemental or earth spirits for me but drove me to a cosmological ceiling, beyond personal ego, into species consciousness, and further. Later, Psilocybin helped integrate LSD experiences by opening my body, allowing cosmic energy in.

James Jesso: Were you taking high doses of Psilocybin or more average doses?

Chris Bache: I mostly worked with standardized doses after stopping LSD, finding Psilocybin and Ayahuasca helpful for integration. I wasn’t breaking new territory but recovering from past explorations, learning to walk on Earth again after many transcendental experiences.

James Jesso: After exploring that, did gaining cognitive coherency in high-energy consciousness levels and integrating purification phases change over time? Did challenges remain consistent or become easier?

Chris Bache: The Ocean of Suffering was much harder than dissolving my ego, a different magnitude altogether. Experientially, the purification phase is counterbalanced by ecstatic blessings, which make enduring purification possible. Through the rhythm of purification and ecstasy, I sought purification, knowing blessings awaited. This rhythm reduces fear, and though transiently terrified, you trust the process and go deeper. However, the 70th session was my most demanding, showing you it can intensify if you’re being taken somewhere especially deep.

Experiences transcending time, what I call "deep time," involved immersion in time units as whole experiences, like evolution over 100,000 years, not merely as projections but how the universe experiences time. Many experiences formed a narrative of humanity reaching a crisis and transitioning to a soul-oriented, transparent archetypal state. Despite becoming easier, the universe occasionally delivers a hard lesson.

James Jesso: Each lesson, even when you feel competent, teaches caution. Approaching the hour mark, why did you stop, and how did these experiences change your relationship to physical death and dying?

Chris Bache: I’m looking forward to being dead, not the process, but with confidence, knowing dying transitions are comfortable in my sessions. I stopped focusing on high-doses LSD for two reasons: pain and heartache. High doses demand much from the body and subtle energy systems, running energy too hot. But mainly, I stopped due to the heartache of separating from the Divine repeatedly—entering deeply into the Diamond Luminosity, then returning to time-space caused unbearable heartache. I made an agreement with the Divine to stop until I could permanently stay. Despite careful integration, leaving sessions behind brought deep sadness and existential loneliness, stunting my interest in life but realizing this wasn't the intended outcome. It took years to reground in physical existence, balancing Transcendence with appreciating the manifest divine.

Integration, silenced by a psychedelic-phobic culture, increased this burden. Unable to openly discuss or teach from my experiences, I faced increased integration challenges. Eventually sharing my experiences through works like Diamonds from Heaven led to deeper integration, merging the transcendent and imminent divine in my life’s synthesis.

James Jesso: Just a few more questions, if you have the time. You mentioned high subtle energy causing physical discomfort. Were you practicing any physical spiritual disciplines, like yoga or tai chi?

Chris Bache: Yes, during my journeys, I practiced meditation and Vajrayana, maintained physical health with yoga, and a vegetarian diet, supplemented by chiropractic care and massages, caring for my body's needs.

James Jesso: Thanks for that clarification. Another personal, maybe uncomfortable, question—did these experiences affect your capacity for intimacy with others? When deeply engaged in mushroom experiences, I felt existential loneliness, unable to relate fully to others. Did your intimate partners undergo similar experiences, or how did this impact intimate human relationships?

Chris Bache: I know exactly what you're referring to. I understand that loneliness, and that was the unexpected cost of doing this work. Of all the things I had anticipated entering this shamanic path, the loneliness and separation from other people was the most unexpected. It's curious because my capacity to empathically enter into other people's lives deepened enormously, but unless they were psychedelic initiated themselves, they had no capacity to understand what were, to me, the most important experiences of my life. A certain distance naturally grew between myself and my social relationships. There's a place in Carlos Castaneda's book where Don Juan talks to Don Genaro, and Genaro says the world is only real when I'm with him, meaning Don Juan. If you take up the psychedelic path or any practice that opens up deeper levels of experience, it inevitably separates you. You're on a different road than people who are interested only in physical, tangible things. There is a loneliness that comes with that. This loneliness eases as I become more public and enter into conversations with people who have had their own experiences. It's easier now.

In terms of my most intimate relationships, I've been blessed. I've been married twice. Carol, my first wife, was my sitter during all the years I did this work. She's mystically inclined, a deep Buddhist practitioner, but she never did sessions herself; meditation was her path. I didn't truly understand her until I reached advanced levels of my own engagement when I began to touch into the Diamond Luminosity. She has since remarried and completed her Vajrayāna training. I didn't experience a lack of headroom in my conversations with her. We came to a point where we separated, not due to the sessions but for other reasons, and we're still friends.

I was then blessed with a second marriage with Christina Hardy. Christina is also a journeyer and understood the dimensions I experienced. She's an astrologer, deeply a daughter of the earth and the stars, grounded in the textures of time and space. In my most intimate relationships, I've been with two women who understood my unique experiences. It would have been lonely to share intimacy at one level but not at another.

James Jesso: The final question I have, I want to hold on it for a second because you said something, and I want to make sure I understand. You said your first wife didn't want to do what you were doing because she found it too violent. You began to understand her. Is that what you mean? You started to understand why she wouldn't choose to do what you were doing?

Chris Bache: No, it wasn't that particularly. I shouldn't focus just on the violence. She's a gentle, mystically oriented person and found the vehemence of the cleansing portion of the sessions hard to relate to. She also found the temporary nature of the experiences—to have deep ones and not be able to hold onto them—difficult. She was attracted to a path where you could hold onto more of your experiences. It was a slower path, but more could be retained. When I say I began to understand her more deeply, it was when I began to touch into the Diamond Luminosity, a reality so absorbing and powerful for me that nothing else in my sessions mattered except reconnecting with that reality. I began to appreciate how her entire life had been oriented towards accessing and stabilizing this deep participation in the universe.

James Jesso: Okay, I got it. Thank you for clarifying. As you have said elsewhere, you wouldn't recommend this path for others and would be easier on yourself if you could go back. Is that what you were leaning towards?

Chris Bache: I would be gentler for several reasons. One is learning that it's not about reaching an end destination, but about living as much of the infinite in your being as you can absorb. If you focus on grounding transcendent experiences here and now in this body, it's often better served by working with lower doses to hold on to more of what you experience. I don't recommend what I did. I pushed myself. It took a lot of concentration and commitment to go to those places. You don't need to go where I went to spiritually wake up. I have more compassion for myself and wouldn't want others to undergo what I did.

James Jesso: Thank you. Before promoting your new book and connecting people with you, could you explain integration? You've mentioned the importance of writing it down, naming sessions, etc. How do you integrate something as profound as the experiences you went through?

Chris Bache: The personal challenges I faced with integration is one reason I recommend people not do what I did. With these substances, we can dissolve into vast territories that can be mind-boggling. As long as you're uncovering personal trauma, we have models for integration. Even with deeper spiritual intelligence experiences, there are models. But it's one of the leftover questions of my life: what does integration mean when going so deep? How do you integrate 100,000-year swaths of time into daily consciousness? How do you integrate becoming one when you're one among many again?

After my sessions, Spirit said to me, "20 years in, 20 years out." It sounded right; 20 years to integrate those experiences. Now, "Diamonds from Heaven," being published 20 years after I stopped my sessions, seems apt. The depth of the loneliness I experienced was not due to failure in my sessions, but from success. Once I started communicating, with "Dark Night, Early Dawn" and later "Diamonds from Heaven," I began to experience deeper integration. I don't think you can integrate the infinite into the finite, but you can integrate your finite existence into the infinite, moment to moment.

My teaching nature was interrupted by psychedelic laws. Now retired and past my statute of limitations, I can speak freely. My life aspects are coming together, and I'm becoming whole again. Something fresh is arising, even in my relationships with others, because of the shared consciousness depth. In workshops or group teachings, there's a deeper aliveness that surfaces. I don't know where this will lead me, but it feels natural, and the integration is ongoing.

James Jesso: Thank you, Chris. Could you tell listeners where they can learn more about you and your books?

Chris Bache: My website is still in the making, but soon. "Diamonds from Heaven" will be released by Inner Traditions in 2019. My three earlier books are available on Amazon: "Lifecycles," "Dark Night, Early Dawn," and "The Living Classroom." I've given many talks scattered online that can be found by searching my name.

James Jesso: Beautiful. Are you on social media?

Chris Bache: I'm on Facebook, but not deeply ingrained in social media. Once my website is live, I'll consolidate my talks and make them accessible.

James Jesso: Cool. I'll consolidate some links to your books and website once it's live at jameswjesso.com. Chris, thank you for being on the show.

Chris Bache: Thank you, James. Great conversation. I appreciate your probing questions.

James Jesso: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of "Adventures Through the Mind." If you liked it, share on social media. Consider supporting the show financially via Patreon, PayPal, or cryptocurrency. Links are in the episode description on YouTube, at jameswjesso.com, or within your podcast app.

Audience: [closing music]