---
title: Michael Pollan and Chris Bache – Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview
slug: 2019-05-15-michael-pollan-and-chris-bache-buddha-at-the-gas-pump-interview
date: 2019-05-15
type: interview
channel: Buddha at the Gas Pump®
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
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people:
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  name: Christopher M. Bache
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**Rick Archer: ** You welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I've done over 500 of them now, and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com—B, A, T, G, A, P—where under the past interviews menu you’ll find all the previous ones organized in several different ways. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to support it in any amount, there is a PayPal button on every page of the site, and there's a donations page for people who don't like to deal with PayPal. 

My guests today are Michael Pollan and Chris Bache. I'll introduce Michael first. Michael is the author of eight books, including *How to Change Your Mind*. Michael, say something, because Chris's voice, his picture, is on the screen.

**Michael Pollan: ** Yeah. Hi, Rick, hi Chris, perfect to be here.

**Rick Archer: ** There we go. There's Michael. Mike, I think Chris sniffled or something, brought him up. He's the author of eight books, including *How to Change Your Mind*, which is the one we're going to be talking about today, and then a number of books about food, including *Cooked*, *Food Rules*, *In Defense of Food*, *The Omnivore's Dilemma*, and *The Botany of Desire*, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. Michael is a longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the John S and James L Knight Professor of Science Journalism. In 2010, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Okay, Chris Bache has been on Batgap before in a panel discussion about five or six years ago. You go ahead and say something, Chris, so your picture...

**Chris Bache: ** Good to be here, looking forward to our conversation today.

**Rick Archer: ** Good. There you go. My software switches back and forth according to who's talking. Chris is a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He's also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies and a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. An award-winning teacher, Chris's work explores the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states.

Chris has written four books: *Lifecycles: A Study of Reincarnation in Light of Contemporary Consciousness Research*, *Dark Night, Early Dawn: A Pioneering Work in Psychedelic Philosophy and Collective Consciousness*, and *The Living Classroom: An Exploration of Teaching and Collective Fields of Consciousness*. His new book is *LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven.* I didn't show Chris Michael's book when I mentioned it. Here's a picture of Michael's book, *How to Change Your Mind*. The subtitle is *What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.*

So, it's great to have you guys as guests. I've been really looking forward to this and really enjoying preparing for it, and there's been a lot of excitement, I think, among the Batgap listeners and viewers. In fact, I mentioned this interview the other day on some Facebook group. I mentioned Michael Pollan's name, and some guy said, "The food guy?"

Michael, how did you switch, if you did, from being "the food guy" to exploring psychedelics?

**Michael Pollan: ** Well, before I was the food guy, I was kind of the nature guy. I've always been interested. The reason I got into food is that I was very interested in the reciprocal relationship between people and, particularly, plants, but other species in general, and co-evolution. In the book you mentioned earlier, *The Botany of Desire*, I looked at this whole question of domesticated plants and proposed the idea that they manipulate us as much as we manipulate them, and that a very fine evolutionary strategy for a select group of plants—and this is true for animals too—is to figure out. And by that I mean, you know, through trial and error, natural selection or visual selection, what sorts of—how to gratify human desire. And a big human desire, obviously, is for food, and that's what most domesticated plants have worked on, that strategy. But beauty is another, and I mean, there's a whole bunch of them. But the one that I found most curious is the plants that thrive by gratifying our desire to change consciousness. And so in that book, I wrote a long chapter on cannabis, looking at how it has served the cannabis plant to basically, through trial and error, figure out how to engage with the whole receptor network in our brains and elsewhere in our body. 

So, I've had this long-standing interest in plant medicines and psychoactive plants. I laid that aside while I was doing all this food research for the last several years, and then stumbled on this new research going on to use Psilocybin specifically, which I realize is not a plant but a fungus, a mushroom. Well, no, it's technically not; it's another kingdom entirely. Actually, we're more like fungi than we are like plants. Plants are primary producers; they can take sunlight and make food from it. We are parasitic on them, and so are mushrooms. So we share that; we depend on plants' use of photosynthesis.

Anyway, I heard about this research giving Psilocybin to people who had terminal cancer, and that it was helping them deal with the prospect of death or the fear of recurrence. This struck me as very curious. On its face, I didn't see the logic of it. And then I was also, kind of, as journalists do, picking up that there was something in the air around psychedelics right now, and that there was a kind of renewed interest that was very serious from a scientific or philosophical point of view. That came when I was at a dinner party with a group of people I didn't know. It was a long table in a big house, and I heard down at the end of the table this woman who looked to be about my age, talking about her acid trip. I figured she was talking about some college adventure, and then I listened a little more closely, and it was a couple of weeks ago. 

Here she was—a very prominent developmental psychologist—talking about the insights into the consciousness of children that her new acquaintance with LSD had given her. As journalists, we put together a couple of data points, and that was enough to convince me that there's something going on here that I want to look into. So that's kind of how it happened. I was also just thrilled to have a new topic as rich as this, and one that, you know—I mean, I was a total neophyte when it comes to spiritual matters, neuroscientific matters, psychological matters. To me, the great thing about writing books and being a journalist and not a specialist is you get to master whole new topics as an adult and get paid to do it. It's kind of a gig.

**Rick Archer: ** Yeah, I kind of feel that way doing this. It's although it's pretty much the same topic, but a different flavor of it every week, and I love just focusing on it. So one thing that comes through in your book, Michael, is that—and one thing you just kind of alluded to—is that there's a certain intelligence in the plant kingdom, and also specifically in the psychedelic plant kingdom. You know, they're not just dumb chemicals. It's almost as if there's a spirit of the plants, which has an agenda, an initiative, which wants, in some people's estimation, to foster human evolution by providing themselves to us as means of shifting our consciousness. You want to touch upon that a little bit?

**Michael Pollan: ** Yeah, I don't think I would go that far, or I haven't had evidence to go that far, that plants are bearing a message and trying to get us to save them or save the planet. It could be true, but I don't have evidence of that. But I've written on plant intelligence, and I'm constantly amazed at what plants can do and how much we underestimate them. 

We're learning now that plants have a pretty elaborate communications network, that the trees in a forest convey messages using mycelium, which are the filaments of mushrooms, to send messages and trade nutrients. The trees in a forest can warn each other when there's a threat, and when they are told of that threat, they'll change their flavor in their leaves to make them less appealing to insects, or they'll start producing toxins of various kinds. Plants have memory; plants are intelligent. I have no question about that. It has something to do with how you define intelligence, of course, but a basic definition is a problem-solving ability. Their reactions to situations are not simply automatic or instinctual, but they can deal with novel threats in novel ways, and they can remember things too. There have been some very interesting trials. Monica Gagliano is a botanist who's demonstrated that plants can remember and store information in a way. So I have enormous respect for them. 

I think that we do have to acknowledge they have a kind of subjectivity the way we do. They're conscious, not in the sense I think we normally mean by that word, which also folds in ideas of self-consciousness and a subjective sense of what it's like to be Chris Bache or Rick Archer or Michael Pollan. I don't have any reason to believe they have that, but they have a point of view, and they have interests, and they pursue these in a different way than we do. They're conscious in the sense of being aware of their environment and responding appropriately.

**Rick Archer: ** We may get into this later, but some say that consciousness is fundamental, and matter is sort of an epic phenomenon of consciousness, rather than the other way around, and that all forms of matter reflect or express consciousness to varying degrees, even a stone, and obviously way on up the evolutionary ladder. But let's table that for a little bit later. 

So, you overheard this conversation at the dinner party, and how did you proceed? I know you proceeded in many cases with a great deal of caution and seriousness, reluctance, trepidation. You were often unable to sleep the night before a session because you were sort of anxious about what might happen.

**Michael Pollan: ** So, you know, the idea of even having a session came, you know, a little later. The first thing I did was reach out to an editor at the New Yorker and say, "I've got a really cool story I want to write about these trials, interview the people who are going on these Psilocybin journeys, talk to the scientists, try to understand the neuroscience of it and the psychology." And to my delight, they were willing to underwrite that project. So that was the beginning of my investigation, and I wrote a piece for the New Yorker, which came out in February 2015, called "The Trip Treatment," and it's available online for free. If you just search that, that was a kind of straight-ahead piece of science journalism. There was no participatory angle to it. I don't think they would have published it if there were. It was all like white coats and scientists and patients, volunteers. But the interviews were extraordinary, and the people I met and the kinds of transformative experiences that a single psychedelic journey had given them completely resetting their attitude toward death, lifting their fear entirely in many cases.

**Rick Archer: ** Any cancer patients? I'm sorry, cancer patients?

**Michael Pollan: ** These are cancer patients, yeah, with serious diagnoses. Some were terminal, some were paralyzed by fear and anxiety at the threat of a recurrence. But in all ways, they were—they had what the doctors call existential distress, and they found relief in about 80% of the cases, which is quite remarkable. And it's a single intervention. I mean, we don't have much like that in psychiatry or palliative care. We have morphine we give people, which dulls their perception and relieves their pain but doesn't help them spiritually deal with the situation they're in.

**Rick Archer: ** Tell us some more anecdotes, and give us an overview of the research that's taking place. And it's not only cancer patients but alcoholics and depressed people, right?

**Michael Pollan: ** It started with cancer patients. The first kind of clinical applications, and the reason for that is a couple. One is it's a sympathetic group. The regulators are a little less worried about any potential toxicity in the case of people who have terminal diagnoses. In the same way that people with AIDS, they were willing to give drugs that hadn't been thoroughly vetted yet if people wanted to take them. So, there was a comfort level, I think, for the regulators and a sympathetic angle for the public in general. I mean, how could you withhold this from someone who was dying and had fear, tremendous fear? And here was something that promised to lift it.

But since then, since the success of those trials, there have been several others looking at different indications, medical indications. An important one that's being worked on now is depression, and this grew out of the cancer trials in that they saw that depression scores, as the psychologists measure them, had dropped significantly. And so, the FDA actually encouraged the researchers to, "Why don’t you look at depression more widely?" Because this is a tremendous problem. The tools we have to treat it are very poor. Rates of depression are rising rapidly. I think a big question remains is whether depression is one thing, and if the kind of depression that a cancer patient experiences is similar to the kind of depression of someone who has general depression or treatment-resistant depression for years and years. The cancer patient's depression is recent, very often, and has a clearly defined cause. And that's not true for everyone struggling with depression. So, we'll see. We'll see if it works. There's some evidence that it will. There was a trial at Imperial College in London of depressive patients—treatment-resistant, I believe they were—and many of them, most of them, showed significant but short-lived results. Their depression lifted for a couple months, and then gradually it returned, not in all cases, but in most of them. So, there's encouraging reason to pursue this. There are two big trials going on right now for depression about to get started.

There have been, as you suggest, trials for addiction in alcoholics and cigarette smokers and cocaine addicts, and those, in a preliminary way, are showing very promising results. I think that's interesting and may turn out to be, I think behavioral change may be one of the really big applications of psychedelics. With that in mind, they're looking at—Johns Hopkins, I think, is going to look at eating disorders, and that's very important because anorexia is actually the hardest psychiatric illness to treat and has the lowest rates of success and the highest mortality of all psychiatric problems. So, I think if we can make progress on that, it would be fantastic.

Let's see what else is being tried. There was a small trial of obsession, obsessive compulsive disorder, and there'll be more work with that. The drugs have been used with high-functioning autistic people who have social anxiety, and that result has been encouraging also. So, there's a whole range, and to people who think, well, how can a psychedelic be such a panacea? I think it's important to note that the kinds of problems it works on or seems to be effective with have a lot in common. They're all at the end of the spectrum where people's thinking becomes too rigid, too trapped in deep grooves of habit, whether mental habit or behavioral habit. People are in these loops, and they can't break out of them. And what the psychedelics seem to do is a real jolt to the system and gives people the kind of perspective on their lives that can actually break mental habit. And it needs to be accompanied by lots of therapeutic intervention. These aren't people going off and having a Psilocybin trip in the woods alone. These are guided trips, and I think it's a really important distinction. People are very carefully prepared in advance, told what to expect, how to deal with difficulties that will come up because it can be a very, very frightening thing that can happen, especially if you're if you're facing your mortality. And then during the experience, the guides are with you the whole time. In the university trials, they're usually two guides, a man, and a woman, and they're not saying very much. It's very non-interventionist. The idea is to basically give you a sense of safety so you can surrender to what can be a very disturbing set of mental events.

And then after the session, you come back, usually the next day or in the next couple days, and you have what's called an integration session, where you tell the therapist what you saw, what happened, what you're puzzled by, and with the therapist, you try to kind of come to some interpretation of what happened and figure out how you can take the lessons, the insights of that trip, and apply them to the conduct of your life.

**Rick Archer: ** Have these therapists usually taken Psilocybin themselves so that they have a better idea of what the person is going through?

**Michael Pollan: ** Well, I can only guess about that because none of them will admit it, but, you know, I can see why it would put them at reputational risk for objectivity. People would challenge the study, saying, "These people are, you know, aficionados of psychedelics." I have reason to believe that some of them have, but none of them would talk about it on the record. A couple would talk about it off the record, and some would just simply say no. So it's hard to believe you wouldn't develop the kind of curiosity I developed because in the course of doing this research, it became clear to me that I couldn't really understand what these volunteers were going through without having a similar experience myself. And that then became the more autobiographical part of the book where I engaged with several underground guides because I couldn't get into the above-ground trials and work with them to have a very similar experience in a slightly different context.

**Rick Archer: ** Yeah, your answer to that question brings up a point, which is that since, I guess it was the early 70s when Nixon declared Timothy Leary to be the most dangerous man in America, and psychedelic research was clamped down upon, there hasn't really been much going on. And now it sounds like it's kind of burgeoning, but is it, I mean, can anybody, anywhere who's qualified study this, or is it still like a real trickle compared to what might be taking place?

**Michael Pollan: ** The only reason it's trickling at all is because there's no federal funding. All the funding is private money, charitable donations. Luckily, there are a lot of visionary people with a lot of dough in this country, and they're supporting the work, but there's quite a bit of it. There are many universities around the country getting interested and getting involved. There are these two depression trials. Each is going to have six or eight sites, each of which is a medical school or a university. The FDA is not standing in the way. They made a decision way back in '92 because people have been knocking on the door for a long time that they would treat psychedelics like any other drug. And if you could persuade them that there was a good reason for this experiment, they would grant permission, and the DEA would grant a license to use it. So I haven't heard of people, I mean serious researchers, encountering federal obstacles. The main obstacle is money.

**Rick Archer: ** Yeah, your comment about the kind of commonality of all the types of difficulties which are being addressed with psychedelics, being that all these people are too kind of rigid or locked down in their thinking or in their perspective. I was thinking that as you were leading up to that comment. It seems like Psilocybin and some of these other drugs they're using are so different from usual protocols because most things tend to dull you in one way or another, you know, whereas this is a real opening up of your awareness and a radical shift of your perspective. In fact, I think you say many times in your book that a lot of people say, "Wow, that was the most profound experience I ever had in my life, and I don't feel like drinking anymore or smoking cigarettes anymore" or something. So it's interesting that there could be such a thing that, you know, with one session would give you such a radically different perspective and shift your behavior permanently.

**Michael Pollan: ** Yeah, and also, you know, other psychiatric drugs essentially deal with symptoms, and you take them every day, perhaps for the rest of your life, and chemicals are in your brain all the time. Here you've got this one-shot or two-shot intervention. The chemical, which is not very toxic, whether you're talking about Psilocybin or LSD, is in your brain for a short amount of time, and you are dealing with cures. In many cases, you're solving the problem because you're, as you say, you're not dulling the patient; you are opening them up. I think relieving them from ego consciousness for a period of time, I think that's probably an important mechanism for how this works.

One of the really interesting findings of the research that I cover in the book is the effort to figure out what's going on in the brain when someone's having a psychedelic experience. The current thinking is that there's one particular brain network, the default mode network, which is this tightly linked set of structures in the midline that connect the prefrontal cortex to older, deeper areas of memory and emotion in the posterior cingulate cortex. This is kind of the orchestrator or conductor of brain activity. This network is closely associated with the generation of the idea of a self, and so it's where self-reflection takes place, it's where mental time travel takes place, theory of mind, the ability to impute mental states to others, and what's called autobiographical memory, the faculty by which we take the events, whatever happens in our lives, and tie it into the story we tell ourselves of who we are. So, you know, if the ego could be said to have an address, it's probably in this area, and this area of the brain is suppressed dramatically.

This was a big surprise because they thought psychedelics in the brain would just represent a lot of fireworks, an excitation of everything. In fact, it's the opposite for this one particular network, and you can correlate a radical down-regulation of the default mode network with reported experiences of ego dissolution. When people tell you, "Yeah, on that trip, I just completely—my sense of self was obliterated," they will see on the fMRI that their default mode network has been essentially deactivated. So that's a very interesting insight into where that kind of thinking, to the extent it has a material manifestation, where that's happening.

It may be that the relief from ego consciousness and an overactive default mode network is implicated in a lot of these problems, like depression. You know, there is research to suggest that depressed people have an overactive default mode network that is kind of punishing, and they can't get out of their heads because the default mode network also lights up when you're mind-wandering when you don't have anything in the world getting your attention. It operates in a seesaw relationship with the attentional networks, and so giving people a vacation from that regulatory authority allows lots of other activity to bloom.

There's an illustration in my book that shows—it's an attempt to show people how the brain gets rewired during the Psilocybin or LSD experience. In this drawing, around this circle, you get all these different brain networks—the visual cortex, the auditory networks, the networks that direct your physical activities—and suddenly you get all this communication between networks that don't ordinarily communicate with one another. That might explain synesthesia, the phenomenon of being able to see musical notes, that perhaps your auditory center is talking directly to your visual cortex without going through the default mode network. So the brain is temporarily rewired, and we know that brain connections, new ways of thinking, if you have them, even temporarily, you can exercise them and make them more salient.

So it's just a theory, but that's one of the operative theories of what might be going on here—that when you have some profound insight on psychedelics, it may be the product of connecting the dots literally in a new way.

**Rick Archer: ** Yeah, a couple of thoughts on that. One is that if we think of the brain as a filter or a lens or a receiver of consciousness, rather than as a generator of consciousness, then what you said about the default mode network shutting down or becoming more quiet would imply perhaps that there's less filtration taking place, so whatever consciousness is can shine through more fully. The ancient traditions say that consciousness is bliss in one of its attributes. And so you can experience very gratifying, fulfilling states if that default mode network is shut down somewhat.

Another little point there is that a lot of the meditation research has shown that there is a remarkable degree of coherence between different parts of the brain that are ordinarily not correlated or coherent with one another, as measured by EEG. So frequencies will just sort of line up in synchrony, whereas before they were asynchronous.

**Michael Pollan: ** And also, the meditation research done by people like Judson Brewer, who also has taken fMRI images of experienced meditators while they're meditating, those scans look very much like the psychedelic scans. He saw that actually and was quite struck by the similarities. So that meditation also down-regulates the default mode network, and I think that's really significant. But your point, too, about opening up the doors of perception, as Huxley called it, when he talked about the reducing valve, it was pretty clear he was talking about the ego. The ego is really what walls us off from, you know, whether it's internal unconscious material or external sensory information. It is what defends us from being overwhelmed by reality, by being overwhelmed by nature, by being overwhelmed by what's in our unconscious, and those walls come down during a psychedelic experience. That accounts for the sense of merging that people have.

I think we're talking about a lot of different vocabularies for the same thing. I'm using ego and walls, and I know that's very psychodynamic, and you're using a more spiritual vocabulary, but I think we're talking about the same thing.

**Rick Archer: ** Chris, do you have any questions or comments on what we've been saying so far?

**Chris Bache: ** I've just been enjoying Michael's presentation a great deal. I'm so deeply appreciative that a person of your caliber, Michael, has done such an excellent job of presenting the history and the issues in the people's lives being touched in this form of therapy. You just open up the conversation to many people who previously would have never been willing to have a conversation about psychedelics, and you've done such a good job with it. You've done it so well, and you capture the personalities involved so well. Just really appreciate what you've done.

**Michael Pollan: ** Thank you. Well, I was approaching it from outside, obviously, and with a certain naivete and skepticism. There are people with a lot more knowledge and experience in the psychedelic world, but they've tended to be in a conversation that takes place within the psychedelic community. I wasn't coming from there. I also always write for an audience that I don't assume has any interest in the subject. I'm much more interested in talking to the general reader and grabbing them by the collar to say, "Hey, this is really cool. You should read this stuff," whether it's about food or agriculture. So, I think that stance was very useful to me in bringing people into this conversation. It's been very gratifying to see how many people, whether they're in the therapeutic or neuroscience communities, have gotten excited about the potential here. I feel very lucky to have played some role in bringing people into this.

**Rick Archer: ** So we can probably spend an hour going through all the various stages of your exploration with psychedelics and different experiences. All of that is covered very well in your book. I'd like to ask you a question that came in from Susie Parkinson in Carlsbad, California. She asked, "Since your original psychedelic journeys, or as a result of them perhaps, has your belief system or perspective changed, deepened, or taken on a meaning which it didn't previously have?"

**Michael Pollan: ** Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you for posing it. My experiences have changed me in various ways. I think, for the most part, the personality changes are pretty subtle. My wife's not here right now, but I would drag her in to tell you that I've asked her this question because your partner knows you better than anyone else and is sensitive to changes. She basically feels that I'm more open and patient than I was. She was apprehensive when I started getting involved with this, concerned I might change for the worse. She doesn't seem to think I have. Intellectually, there has been a change. I think my understanding of spirituality has changed and what that means. Before, I was really kind of spiritually retarded; it's just a part of my life, my mind, that I hadn't developed. Some people look at body and desire as very spiritual, right? I talk about food in a spiritual way, and the importance of communion, but I didn't see myself as spiritual. Partly because my understanding of spirituality suggested it existed in opposition to science skepticism and implied a belief in supernatural things beyond the scope of science. I was a pretty confirmed materialist in my philosophical outlook, believing the laws of nature could explain everything. I realized how limited this was.

After my psychedelic journeys, particularly one where I transcended my ego and beheld myself dissolving into a cloud of post-it notes, it was profound. A new perspective arose for me. It was an "I" that wasn't familiar, unburdened, and reconciled to whatever there was. It was quite profound. Once that sense of self was gone, I merged with a piece of music—Bach’s Cello Suite No. 2—and became the music. There was no subject-object duality. I could physically feel the vibrations. The next day, during integration, I reflected on having experienced complete ego dissolution. My guide asked, "What did you learn?" I said, "That you're not identical to your ego; there's another ground on which to stand." She said, "Wasn't that worth the price of admission?" And I agreed. But I wondered, what do you do with it now that my ego is back? She said, through meditation, I could cultivate that experience, and like many American Buddhists, it made me much more comfortable in the mental space of meditation. Sometimes I can attain that perspective again. Did it make me more spiritual? I'm not prepared to conclude that new perspective was some Transpersonal perspective or universal consciousness. It could just as easily be another product of my mind, overshadowed by the ego. My understanding of spirituality was faulty. Spirituality, I learned, is about powerful connection, an openness to nature, to other people, without a screen between you and the other. The opposite of spiritual should not be material but egotistical, as the ego stands in the way of powerful connections. This was my takeaway. I'm very curious to know how Chris would interpret this experience of a new perspective opening up on your dissolved self.

**Chris Bache: ** Well, as I listen to you speak, I'm reminded of Shunryu Suzuki's book on meditation, *Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind*, which speaks of "big mind" and "small mind." Small mind is efficient at getting things done, answers the phone. Then there's big mind, profoundly larger and inclusive of the small. It's a different wavelength of consciousness. The question, of course, is about the layers of ego, which all meditation traditions agree exist. You can clear one level and get caught at another. According to their ways, it is possible to allow ego to become transparent, and when this happens, the larger background context surfaces in awareness. That rings true in my experience. The question becomes, what is the nature of "just mind"? That opens us up to a discussion about consciousness and who can have consciousness.

**Michael Pollan: ** I mean, what is the nature of mind? I know that's a big question.

**Chris Bache: ** It's a big one. Personally, I don't have a vested interest in specific definitions of consciousness. I'm happy to go with different understandings as long as they're open to the phenomenology of mind, which is my background. It's important to critically examine the broadest data we have on what mind is and how it manifests. Can mind influence the health of the body? Can it influence physical objects? Is there mind-linking between humans and plants? When Aldous Huxley talks about mind at large, that's the idea of an encompassing mind that holds all sub-minds within a master intelligence. I'm comfortable with that concept, having experienced dimensions of that mind. I talk about the creative intelligence of the universe, though I don't know what to call it. It's all natural, part of nature, within the realm of scientific investigation, something I've explored over many years using LSD, Ayahuasca, Salvia, and others, but primarily LSD.

**Rick Archer: ** Michael mentioned his initial aversion to spirituality because it seemed anti-scientific, hearing a lot of "woo" things. Religion and science have been at odds for a long time. But we're at a point where science and spirituality can complement each other if we take spiritual propositions as hypotheses open to experiential investigation. Chris will comment on his experiential investigations, which seem hypothetical but have far-reaching implications. I don't see value in just believing something because tradition says so. Everything should be open to experiential and scientific investigation. Spirituality can contribute to science by adding tools like psychedelics or the human nervous system to explore subtle dimensions. This is something modern science isn't equipped to do, but the mystics have been doing for ages.

**Chris Bache: ** Just as a footnote to what you said, Rick, it's one thing to study the quantitative aspects of consciousness and another to study the qualitative. Science excels at the quantitative, but the qualitative is approachable with broadened scientific methodologies, critical experimentations, and cross-cultural historical analysis. We can study these experiences critically beyond neuroscience.

**Michael Pollan: ** Well, consciousness as a subject for scientific exploration can't be separated from experience. You can't investigate it without phenomenology. It's interesting that in psychedelic work, the volunteers' reports are critically important. You sometimes correlate them with brain scans, but sometimes you don't need to. The big question is whether there's evidence that brains don't produce consciousness or that mind precedes matter. That's the consensus among scientists, although nobody knows exactly how neurons create consciousness. It's the more parsimonious starting principle, but some come out thinking differently after psychedelics.

**Rick Archer: ** Yes, I interviewed Mark Gober, who wrote *The End to Upside Down Thinking*, addressing consciousness being an epiphenomenon of brain function. There are many anomalies to the materialistic view, like those explored by Jeffrey Kripal, who studies cases of people who shifted beliefs about mind preceding matter.

**Chris Bache: ** Reincarnation research influenced my thinking at the University of Virginia under Ian Stevenson documenting detailed cases of children remembering past lives. After reviewing his data, it suggests memory predates our current body, indicating our awareness and minds aren't solely generated by our brains.

**Rick Archer: ** A simple metaphor is that radios receive signals without transmitting; if consciousness is like a field, individuality and reincarnation are possible. Research shows subjective experiences like meditation affect physiology. Western science hasn't measured the subtle body or realms. Traditions understand the necessity of preparing the subtle body to sustain spiritual awakening. So what are your thoughts on anyone ingesting a psychedelic substance without this preparation, or can psychedelics facilitate such preparation?

**Michael Pollan: ** I'll give this one to Chris.

**Chris Bache: ** In answering, I don't want to assume your observation that it's the subtle body that transfers from incarnation to incarnation. It may be, but I'm not sure we've nailed it down that closely. Let's take it as a hypothesis. The question is, what is individuality? Is the individuality of one life intact in another life? I think those are very subtle and complicated questions, and I don't want to prejudge them. I have convictions around the subtle body, specifically how psychedelic experiences can impact it. Let me say a little about my background, because there are so many variations of psychedelic experiences, and I want to define mine.

That's the body of data I draw from. When I finished graduate school in '78, I encountered the work of Stanislav Grof. He had just published *Realms of the Human Unconscious* and had around 100 essays published. Although I was agnostic, I was taken by his research proposal that, through these substances, if used in careful, controlled circumstances, we could experience deeper dimensions of our own mind. I was particularly interested in his observation that one can go deeper than personal consciousness, deeper than the collective unconscious, into the mind of the universe itself. He didn't say it quite like that, but that was the implication. As a philosopher of religion, exploring the consciousness of the universe could have enormous implications for philosophical questions.

This was 1978, and I wanted to do the psychedelic work. Like Michael, after research and examining the literature and seeing how others' lives had changed, I wanted to participate. I made a choice to conduct some underground experiments with psychedelics. I would rather have been in a legally sanctioned experiment, but that wasn't available. So, I chose to learn Stan Grof's methods and how to have a psychedelic session, using all the philosophical and psychological tools I had gathered in graduate school.

Stan differentiates between two types of psychedelic work: low dose, usually between 50 and 200 micrograms, and high dose, which may be up to 600 micrograms. Low dose work gradually peels back the layers of consciousness from the personal unconscious through the perinatal dynamics into transpersonal reality. High dose work initially focused on terminally ill patients, not to heal, but to blow through all levels of the personal unconscious, triggering a profound encounter with the universe and impacting their anxiety around imminent death.

After a few low dose sessions, I chose a very intense regimen with LSD, undertaking high dose psychedelic therapy over 20 years with 73 sessions at 500 to 600 micrograms. My first wife, Carol, a clinical psychologist, was my sitter for all sessions. I worked for four years, stopped for six, then returned for ten aggressive years, totaling 20 years. I wouldn't recommend this protocol—I've learned more since. I opted to push the limits, thinking that if high dose work could be done safely three times, it could be done safely more than that. It opened challenges not envisioned early on, like how deep consciousness states impact our body and subtle energy system.

Entering deeper levels of consciousness puts one in higher levels of energy, requiring work with the body and subtle energy system to detoxify and strengthen it. Purification is essential in working with psychedelics. In Tibetan Vajrayāna, monks do *ngondro*, which involves 100,000 prostrations while reciting mantras and prayers, transforming and strengthening their subtle energy system. If you enter deeper consciousness quickly, as in psychedelics, powerful purification processes are triggered—physical, emotional, and mental detoxification. This catharsis is well described in terms of our subtle energy system.

**Rick Archer: ** You're actually almost downplaying what you went through here. If people read your book, they'd see what a tribute it is to your wife that she could sit through this. You were in convulsions, vomiting, making all kinds of weird noises, experiencing excruciating suffering—beyond imagination. You chalk it up to deep purification. In your book, you describe the cycle as increased awareness triggering the surfacing of toxins, leading to disease, followed eventually by higher health, operating at physical, psychological, and soul levels. Often, your sessions began with horrible ordeals, transitioning to ecstatic realms and beautiful experiences.

**Chris Bache: ** I'm going to discuss this strictly in terms of the LSD body of work. After stopping, I've done psilocybin and ayahuasca—a few times, but I'm comfortable in those worlds. I want to restrict myself to the LSD work in describing this.

When you die as a self, when you—following Stan Grof, psychedelics activate and catalyze psychological processes—take what's small and make it loud, what's distant and make it close. It's a hyper-catharsis and hyper-amplification. We enter a hyper-sensitive state of awareness for hours, and what we do with that determines the session's outcome. We can enjoy music or conversation, or go deep to unearth obstacles to healthy functioning, or deeper still into existential relations with the universe.

It's important to remember we're rediscovering chemicals used for thousands of years. Ayahuasca has been used for at least 1,500 years; psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, and mescaline have long histories with humanity. We're studying them in a context giving great insight. However, a large body of wisdom exists in cultures using these materials for so long.

According to many systems, consciousness is a universal quality of life. We are individually conscious, but the universe is conscious too. As you enter deeper states of awareness, each is a higher energy level, requiring purification and stabilization to maintain coherence. The tricky part is realizing that when I began this work, I believed it was about my individual healing or enlightenment. Yet, as the agony unfolded, after two years, going through a crushing ego death, I moved into a layer of work involving excruciating psychophysical suffering, broad and deep—lasting years. Eventually, I realized this wasn't about healing Chris Bache's psyche. I was forced to conclude something used my sessions for healing at the collective level, a species-level consciousness. I understood this through years of work and integration of Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic field theory into Stan Grof's paradigm. Eventually, it made sense beyond the person-centered model into a collective one.

**Rick Archer: ** This gives new meaning to "Christ died for our sins." If someone reaches vast awareness, it's like an ocean dissolving mud, versus a glass of water overwhelmed by it.

**Chris Bache: ** We see this in Buddhist traditions. The Bodhisattva places the good of the whole above their own. I don't think this is heavy-duty requiring great beings. Any parent would end suffering for their child. It's human nature. In deep psychedelic sessions, you're sometimes given this opportunity. If so, it's natural to try.

**Rick Archer: ** Yet, capacity is crucial. Rupert Sheldrake's Morphogenetic fields suggest the field stores humanity's traumas, analogous to lightning's static discharge. We can attune and become an instrument for its purging. 

**Chris Bache: ** The universe nurtures us as individuals and as a species. When in consciousness communing with the species, having dissolved personal boundaries, it's clear this nurturing power cares for species' well-being. Moving beyond ego death into collective consciousness, I understood the species remembers all experiences. Addressing personal shadows is an analogy for collective healing. Social revolutions often handle this, but deep psychedelic work can address collective suffering. It led my understanding to a collective model in interpreting data.

**Chris Bache: ** I think when we have temporary experience of infinity, it leaves a lasting impression, even when we're back to being finite beings. If we have a temporary experience of infinite love—an all-embracing, all-inclusive love that transcends species and reaches out to the very molecules of existence—when we recongeal into our ordinary time-space suit, it has a profound effect. That's one reason I suggest we give these experiences a measure of credence. It's not just about the empirical assessment or data correlation between multiple experiences. There's always deception, incompleteness, distortion that we have to deal with. It's a worthy question—a word-worthy experience.

**Michael Pollan: ** It has an enormous authority. One of the most striking things about psychedelics, which William James called the Noetic sense regarding mystical experiences, is that they don't seem like mere subjective opinions. They seem like authoritative truths, which makes them impactful. I wonder, Chris, whether you feel the same way; that with proper discipline and commitment, one could reach these states through meditation.

**Chris Bache: ** Absolutely, with some qualifications. As someone who teaches religious studies and comparative mysticism, I’ve studied some mystical traditions. The great masters, whether through natural or assisted means, have always been my guiding light. Sustaining these states for a few hours is great; sustaining them for months or years is even more commendable. I should mention my sitter, Carol, is a serious Vajrayāna Buddhist and never did a psychedelic session with me, maintaining a contemplative practice instead. Though we're now both remarried, she's completed a significant retreat, which demonstrates her seriousness. I see a strong correlation between my psychedelic experiences and the meditative traditions she and others have introduced me to. The cosmology we encounter with deep psychedelic work isn't new; it's reflected in great spiritual, mystical traditions. Though historical contexts shaped them, I see them as approximations of ever-expanding truths. Therefore, the cosmology psychedelics introduce us to can push the edges of classic cosmologies, opening new possibilities. Transtemporal experiences, for example, are common in my psychedelic explorations, though not deeply ingrained in mystical experiences traditionally. I began this work in 1979 out of a spiritual interest in enlightenment, having meditated for years and wanting to break through typical early-stage blocks. Though it didn't happen as expected, it opened another track—cosmic exploration. This path dominated my sessions, so I see them as differing projects rather than using enlightenment as the measure for all that took place in my sessions.

**Rick Archer: ** Some Yogis and Siddhas have done cosmic exploration, too, writing down their findings through various means. Did you want to add something, Michael?

**Michael Pollan: ** No, I’m good.

**Rick Archer: ** If psychedelics, like LSD, amplify consciousness, it means nothing is beyond reach through other methods. It's all about consciousness exploration, whether through meditation or other means.

**Rick Archer: ** As you grow older, patience develops, moving beyond the "enlightenment or bust" mentality. I took psychedelics in the '60s and have meditated for 51 years. Initially, there was a desperate desire to break through, but over time, contentment dawned—likely due to natural maturation or the meditation itself bringing fulfillment, independent of circumstances. However, while exploring, safety should be the primary guideline to prevent reckless situations.

**Chris Bache: ** Absolutely.

**Rick Archer: ** A friend, Dana Sawyer, asked about the connections between psychedelic and mystical states of consciousness, something we’ve covered. Should we address it briefly?

**Michael Pollan: ** Researchers I interviewed see them aligning closely, often using "mystical-like experience" as a term to avoid offending religious individuals. They study mystical experience anatomy closely, aligning it with William James' descriptions.

**Rick Archer: ** A related story is of Ram Dass giving LSD to Neem Karoli Baba, which seemed to have no effect, suggesting his already high abiding state couldn't be augmented by LSD.

**Michael Pollan: ** I've heard the story of him taking a large dose, but always suspected it to be apocryphal.

**Chris Bache: ** It's told in *Miracle of Love*, a book containing Ram Dass's anecdotes about Neem Karoli Baba. He reportedly took 600 micrograms, unaffected, disbelieving American friends. On a return visit, Ram Dass gave him 1,200 micrograms, swallowed openly, without effect.

**Rick Archer: ** Bruce Joel Rubin had an experience with a jar of liquid Sandoz during his teenage years, leading to an unintentional massive dosing, which is a notable story.

**Chris Bache: ** According to Grof, there's a natural threshold at around 500 micrograms; more than that doesn't necessarily increase the effect, essentially a saturation point.

**Rick Archer: ** Dana Sawyer asked a question, citing Huston Smith's argument that traits matter more than states. While psychedelics can trigger mystical experiences, can they develop religious lives? Might they improve behavior over time?

**Michael Pollan: ** It's tough to know for sure. Quick attainment might lack enduring impact compared to hard-earned experiences, possibly being less transformative. While some insights gained are carried forward, making the person more ethical, this integration isn’t automatic and requires conscious effort. There are pitfalls, including inflated egos post-ego dissolution.

**Rick Archer: ** The same applies to meditation. Some long-term meditators undergo genuine transformation, while others behave badly, neither automatically cultivating positive traits. Conscious attention to personal ethics is key.

**Chris Bache: ** I agree. A mystical experience doesn't automatically make one wise or kind. Experiences have philosophical significance, reflecting a collective consensus about cosmic visions. Integration is key; they act as seed catalysts needing conscious cultivation.

**Michael Pollan: ** A great point to end on. Thanks for the stimulating conversation. I must leave for another appointment but look forward to continuing this dialogue.

**Rick Archer: ** Thanks, Michael. To listeners, Michael’s book will soon be available in paperback. Chris, let's continue a bit longer. I have audience questions and want to discuss your notion of the birth of the future human, a fascinating area. Let me shift our focus. Here's one from Amit in New Zealand. He asks about integration practices post-Ayahuasca sessions, specifically managing detrimental energetic effects like long-lasting fatigue. Can you recommend any practices for recovery and integration?

**Chris Bache: ** It's complicated as every psychedelic varies. Ayahuasca impacts physiology and psychology differently than substances like LSD or psilocybin mushrooms. Strong doses can shake up one's system, requiring gentle personal care and contemplative practices for integration. There is no formula ensuring outcomes without fatigue, but spiritual literature suggests contemplation and care for physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects. We should cultivate meditative practices and attend to body and energy systems conscientiously. While specific regimens vary, it's good to ask such questions and seek advice to stabilize the system post-experience.

**Rick Archer: ** Also, incorporate beneficial habits like regular exercise and a proper diet. Everything in life is interconnected.

**Rick Archer: ** Bobby from Griffin, Georgia, asks if psychedelic experiences hint at a veil masking common experience, if early childhood is akin to psychedelic states.

**Chris Bache: ** I understand the logic, though I hope children never experience the extremes encountered in psychedelics. Children may be more receptive to subtle dimensions, which get conditioned out over time. Death expands consciousness, incarnation contracts it. I study various non-ordinary states; they suggest incarnating contracts consciousness, a natural effect rather than conditioning children incorrectly. Understanding this allows us to better guide children's adjustment to the world.

**Rick Archer: ** Meditation reflects this too. The practice involves moving between states (e.g., Samadhi and activity) to stabilize spiritual insights.

**Rick Archer: ** David from Cambridge asks if broader psychedelic access risks negative societal impacts, potentially justifying current restrictions.

**Chris Bache: ** Cultures with long-term psychoactive substance relations don’t use them recreationally, applying careful ritual, spiritual contexts. We naively lack this historical relation, deserving cautious cultural integration. While decriminalization is advisable, allowing respectful, guided use, placing someone in jail for having psychoactive mushrooms is unjust considering their safe toxicology and non-habit forming nature. These require respect and caution, potentially life-transforming but necessitating careful approach.

**Rick Archer: ** Agreed, well said. You describe global crises in your book, relating evolutionary shifts to humanity’s anguish. Could you elaborate?

**Chris Bache: ** Let me back up a second. When you work with high doses of LSD and do it in a totally internalized, compacted form, intensifying it with music and eye shades, you basically explode your consciousness. You shatter and explode it. For six or eight hours at a time, you become a different kind of being. You are not simply a human being; you open yourself up to unprecedented intimacy with the universe, which plays the role of teacher and instructor. The universe decides where you go and what you learn. It seems to be a balance between what you're capable of absorbing and what the universe wants you to absorb.

As my journey continued—systematically over the years—around 23 sessions in, I began to have visionary experiences about where the universe was taking the human race, particularly regarding the evolutionary dynamics once consciousness became a powerful factor in human evolution. We aren't fundamentally changing our body very fast, but we are changing consciousness relatively quickly. I had many experiences of where humanity is and where it's going. The vision that came repeatedly was that humanity was poised on the edge of a tremendous breakthrough that would forever change the foundation of life on this planet. It was not just a civilizational, economic, technological, or industrial breakthrough, but a breakthrough in the fundamental platform of consciousness—the baseline of human consciousness.

There was tremendous pressure building, an acceleration of consciousness dynamics, and detoxification through the reincarnation of generations. This was not merely influencing individuals but the entire human species—a collective dynamic. The vision showed we are coming to a great awakening, with an exponential increase in our psychological and psychophysical capacity. However, it gave no indication of how this would be accomplished until 1995, when the universe took me deep into Deep Time. After a grueling experience, it expanded me into a radical time framework and into the death and rebirth of humanity. In that state, I was not Chris Bache having a collective experience. I dissolved and experienced a coming crisis as the species does, akin to experiencing a thunderstorm both as a whole and as individual drops.

It showed me a global systems crisis driven by an ecological and ego crisis leading to a fundamental institutional crisis and significant die-off, causing pain and suffering. Yet, this pain was transformative, part of a process of confronting our past and karma, going through a death and rebirth process beyond our previous functioning. This is not a single event but an evolutionary process that may span multiple generations. We will be brought to our knees, lose control, and suffer, but this suffering is labor, not simply destructive or extinction. At its peak, when it seems like we would all perish, the storm will pass, and survivors will begin to connect in new ways, ushering in new values, insights, technology, social relationships, and spiritual values. We will experience a sense of oneness in our daily lives, acknowledging deep responsibilities to all life forms.

That's part of what you quoted, but there's another aspect involving reincarnation. I wrote my first book on reincarnation and have spent extensive time thinking about it. The experiences took me deeply into reincarnation, where I integrated all my former lives rapidly. It was like winding a light string around a spool. When enough lives had been integrated, their learning and experience fused into one, and my consciousness exploded into a diamond-like consciousness. I became an individual in a new order of individuality—a sum total greater than all previous experiences—catalyzing a deeper functioning of conscious awareness related to myself, others, and the universe. This is what I call the birth of the Diamond Soul. Reincarnation isn't merely incremental improvements; eventually, the soul wakes up inside our physical incarnation. Our former lives and experiences fuse, reaching a crescendo, and we wake up knowing we are more than just a body or ego. We have ancient relationships that open new possibilities for communion with the universe's creative intelligence.

This transition is both personal and collective. We are growing into the birth of the Diamond Soul while facing cascading global crises. As we attempt to become one planet externally, there is a synergistic coupling to becoming one being internally, integrating all our former lives. This reflects an evolutionary crisis and gives birth to a future human. Late in my sessions, the universe gave me a vision of the future human, allowing me to try on the fundamental blueprint of the future psyche. The future human is an extraordinary being with the highest spiritual capacities, a mind open to the universe, and a heart open to others. That's what we're striving to become.

**Rick Archer: ** Beautifully and eloquently put; I can't add anything to it. If anyone finds what you said frightening about the world's transition to a beautiful future—there are those stocking food and guns out of fear—I’d say what to stock up on is consciousness, spiritual evolution. That's the best preparation for whatever life may bring.

**Chris Bache: ** I absolutely agree. The survivalist is trying to hold onto the ego. What we need is cultivation of service, transformation, generosity, and compassion—qualities that will carry us into the future.

**Rick Archer: ** I've enjoyed this conversation and your book. I'll close with an endorsement from Anne Baring about your book, “Once or twice a century, a book appears that has the explosive force of a supernova, breaking through the limitations of religion, science, and culture. *LSD and the Mind of the Universe* is such a book, offering a gripping account of an extraordinary hero's journey, opening minds to a new vision of our universe and ourselves, inseparable from God. It's a deeply moving template of our evolutionary journey.”

So, the book comes out in November, and people can pre-order it for Christmas.

**Chris Bache: ** I worked on this for 20 years, then waited another 20 to publish. It took that long to digest everything before sharing.

**Rick Archer: ** Conversations like this could go on for many more hours, but they are meant as a sampling. You’re opening so many minds and having meaningful conversations—a catalyst for positive change.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you, Rick. I hope we meet in person someday.

**Rick Archer: ** Yes, let's do that. Thanks to those watching or listening. Please explore batgap.com to sign up for newsletters, subscribe to the podcast, or donate if you wish. Thank you, Chris, and Michael who has left, for this great conversation.

Audience: ** Thank you. [Applause]