The Human Experience Live Show #022 — Dr. Chris Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe

Announcer: Welcome to the Human Experience podcast, the only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet. As we approach our ascent, please make sure your frontal, temporal, and occipital lobes are in their full upright position as you take your seat of consciousness. Relax your senses and allow us to take you on a journey. We are the intimate strangers. Thank you for listening.

Xavier Katana: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. We've got an incredible show planned for you this evening. We are going to be talking about consciousness, psychedelics, namely LSD, and the exploration of consciousness. Thank you so much for being here, especially if you're listening to this on the YouTube live version. So sit back, grab a drink, and enjoy this conversation. The Human Experience is in session. My name is Xavier Katana. My guest for this evening is Dr. Chris Bache. Dr. Bache is a professor, researcher, and author who has been teaching and writing about consciousness, philosophy, and religion for more than 30 years. Chris received his PhD in philosophy and religion from Brown University and went on to be a professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University. Chris has written a number of books, including Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life and his latest, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, which we'll be covering this evening. Chris, thank you so much for making time. Welcome to HXP.

Chris Bache: Thank you, Xavier. Thank you for this conversation. It's a pleasure to be here.

Xavier Katana: So Chris, I mean, let's just start this off with how you got into this work. If you want to kind of get into a little bit of your background, I mean, would you say that's an unusual field to be in?

Chris Bache: It certainly is. I come from a very classical, mainstream background. I was raised in the Deep South. I went to Notre Dame, Cambridge, and Brown University. It was a very standard classical mainstream education in religious studies. Shortly after, I started my teaching career. This was back in 1978. I was publishing some articles from my dissertation, looking for where to take my research next after my dissertation was done, and I encountered the work of Stanislav Grof. He was the foremost authority on integrating psychedelics into psychotherapy. His book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, was an eye-opener for me, and in one reading, I felt like I had found my life's work. I thought that this work was extraordinarily important, not only for psychology but very important for philosophy, understanding that psychedelics, in this case, LSD, and in general, function as amplifiers of consciousness. They increase the sensitivity of our mind many times over for a short period of time, for an LSD session that's about eight hours. By amplifying consciousness, it gives us an opportunity to explore systematically the deeper dimensions of consciousness. So I saw this and thought, this is tremendous. I want to do this. But of course, psychedelics had been made illegal in 1970 in this country, so I had to make a difficult choice. I decided to divide my life. I had what you might call a daytime job and a nighttime job. My daytime job was as a professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University. I did the things professors do: lecturing, committee meetings, publishing. And in my private life, I went into a very inner, hidden side of my life, and I began a rigorous process of using LSD, following Stanislav Grof's protocols, to explore my own consciousness. When the bottom dropped out of my own consciousness, I moved into a larger field of consciousness, so large that I think of it as the mind of the universe.

Xavier Katana: Okay. That's where we get into the subtitle of your book and the primary focus of your book. I really want to know, did you at any point when you were beginning the research feel as if, you know, this is very much taboo in our society? Did you feel at any point that your tenure would be threatened? Did you feel that your job would be threatened? Did you feel like coming out with this information would risk your career in any way?

Chris Bache: Absolutely, I think that was a reasonable assertion. I knew that I was breaking the law in order to do this work. I knew that there would come a time, as there is now, when we would reclaim these important substances. But I couldn't wait until we did. I knew that if this became public knowledge, if I was too public about this, I would probably lose my job. I loved teaching and being with the students in the classroom. I loved being an academic, so I kept this work private. My close colleagues in the department knew, but I kept it private. I never talked to my students about it. I did not become in any way a public figure. This was between 1979 and 1999 that I did 73 high-dose LSD sessions, following Stanislav Grof's protocol for high-dose psychedelic sessions. This was between when I was 30 and 50, and I'm 70 now. I've spent 20 years integrating and digesting these experiences before producing this book.

Xavier Katana: Okay, that's quite a range of time and a tremendous amount of sessions to have with this compound. Was there a reason you selected LSD specifically? Why not another substance? Why not DMT, Psilocybin, or Ayahuasca?

Chris Bache: Well, you have to go back to 1978 and think about the landscape then. It was before the era of Ayahuasca, Psilocybin mushrooms were around, and it was really before the era of DMT. More importantly, my work was founded on Stanislav Grof's work, and most of his early work was done with LSD. I trusted what I saw in his research. I chose to work with LSD. After I stopped my sessions, I've had experiences with other psychedelics, such as Psilocybin, DMT, and Ayahuasca, but my primary work, the core work, is the subject of my philosophical reflections on these 73 LSD sessions.

Xavier Katana: Okay, I find it intriguing because I think Congress passed into law banning LSD, which went into effect in 1967, right?

Chris Bache: Well, there were a series of laws. Basically, 1967, '69, '70, 1970 is a convenient date for the Controlled Substances Act that was passed.

Xavier Katana: And in your book, you talk about certain synchronicities that started to happen in your world. Can you talk a bit about that, which encouraged you to carry out these experiments, even though you did them in secret?

Chris Bache: I always assumed that there would come a time, and this became a stronger conviction as the work continued, that I would bring this work forward to the world. But I knew it could not be while I was an academic, and it could not be while I was still subject to the statute of limitations for this work. It was only after I retired from the university and I was past the statute of limitations that I felt comfortable speaking about this. But in the work itself, I always thought I would find a way to bring the core content of these sessions to others. I'm a philosopher. I was trained to ask large questions. I wanted to ask the type of questions that keep us up late at night: the meaning of existence, the purpose of things, and whether there is a purpose. Is there an intelligence operating deep in the superstructure and substructure of the universe? This was an opportunity to explore those questions on an experiential basis. I became quickly convinced that the most important contributions to my field in the near future, which is philosophy of religion, would be done by people working not out of a theoretical basis but out of an experiential one.

Xavier Katana: Sure. I'm not sure if you answered my question regarding the synchronicities. Could you touch on that?

Chris Bache: That kind of jumps ahead in the storyline a bit. I was not aware of any particular synchronicities going into the work. But I'll just tag this, and maybe we'll come back later. As my work deepened over the course of those 20 years, even though my students never knew I was doing this work, I found some of them were being activated in their personal lives by my psychedelic work. There was a spillover of consciousness transformation that began in my sessions. Consciousness is not a private phenomenon; deeper levels of consciousness are boundaryless. The impact of my sessions began to unroll beyond my personal life. That led me to do some serious thinking and research on continuing my work while taking care of my students and continuing my work as a professor living the normal life. That led to writing The Living Classroom, about fields of consciousness in group settings, which doesn't even mention psychedelics, because the issue is not psychedelics but the nature of consciousness and what happens when people come together and focus their intention.

Xavier Katana: I love that. I'm feeling this resonance in your words, which I'm really enjoying. You mentioned these compounds amplify consciousness. What were some of the questions you were asking yourself? What did you want answers to?

Chris Bache: I got into this thinking about enlightenment because I was interested in it. I had been meditating for a number of years and encountered the blocks others typically encounter in the early years of sitting practice. I thought if I could do some sessions and confront whatever blocks were waiting in my unconscious, it would speed my spiritual realization. That model of individual transformation was shattered along the way. Within three years, I was drawn into vast, intense purification processes involving thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. I got into experiences too large and intense to be understood as personal transformation. I began to understand that in these deep, highly energized states of consciousness, focusing in a specific way allows you to impact or heal some portion of the collective unconscious.

Xavier Katana: Okay, okay, please continue.

Chris Bache: Let me back up a bit about method. Stan Grof distinguishes between low dose psycholytic therapy and high dose psychedelic therapy. Low dose psycholytic therapy, usually 50-200 micrograms, peels the unconscious layer by layer, helping heal issues in the unconscious through multiple sessions. High dose psychedelic therapy is different: used primarily with terminally ill patients to induce near-death experiences, offering a glimpse of where they were going. This protocol used no more than three sessions. I thought if you can do it safely three times, you can do it more. I chose to work with very high doses of LSD after three sessions. I worked consistently at 500 to 600 micrograms for those 20 years. The state of amplification is intense at these doses. My sessions were not about tripping. I never went to a concert on acid or stayed up all night talking with friends. On session days, I was isolated, working with a sitter, lying down with eye shades and earphones, a carefully curated playlist. In these hyper-amplified states, if you focus internally, confronting deeper levels of consciousness results. Over time, you're projecting your consciousness outward and then gathering it back, making a detailed record within 24 hours. You systematically engage a conversation with the universe, stepping deeper into an experience of not only your mind but the larger mind, the context that underpins it.

Xavier Katana: Okay, just to restate, you established a therapeutic protocol with very high doses of LSD, intentionally disconnecting from the world to explore consciousness and study the universe, your consciousness.

Chris Bache: I wanted to understand my consciousness and, through that, the nature of reality itself. Stan's work suggested one could access not only personal unconsciousness but the cosmological mind, the mind of God. I wanted to learn as much about the universe as I could and understand the truth about my own being. As a professor of religious studies, I kept mystical traditions on the maybe table, setting out to see what I could learn using this protocol.

Xavier Katana: What did you find?

Chris Bache: Well, that's not an easily answered question. These experiences are complex, with many layers, taking years to fully unpack and correlate themes over time. What did I learn? Hmm.

Xavier Katana: Was there something that sparked a realization for you about why we're here, our purpose, our connection to this reality, what happens when we die?

Chris Bache: Yes, to all of those things. I'm a professor who prefers organized discussion, starting at the beginning and moving phase by phase. Jumping to conclusions might seem ungrounded, psychedelic. That's not my experience. Methodologically, here's how I understand it: In hyper states, courageously confronting emerging experiences, you go through death-rebirth processes. My sessions over 20 years identified five cycles of the Death-Rebirth process. The first is self-death, with ego and time-space identity death. After that, dynamics larger than the private self emerge, entering a domain called the Ocean of Suffering, experiencing life as a complete now. Then, a systematic instruction course in cosmology unfolded. You can't control these experiences, but surrendering takes you to deeper levels. After self-death, I worked at the collective mind, then archetypal mind, then causal oneness, where dualities of time and space dissolve. Lastly, the final five years focused on Diamond Luminosity, or Dharmakaya, a refined consciousness dimension. Throughout these cycles, I had many experiences related to the universe's intelligence and humanity's evolutionary phase facing our time. The book's recurring theme is this stage of human evolution. There's a chapter called The Birth of the Future Human. Insights also touched on life after death, accessing realms equivalent to Buddhist bardo dimensions, and beyond cycles of reincarnation. The book takes the reader back to the beginning, breaking it down year by year, transparently.

Xavier Katana: It sounds phenomenal. Your language is clear, which is incredibly important to discuss these experiences. You seem very cautious with your verbiage, which I respect. How did you work the integration aspect of it? You talk about psychic inflation in the book. How did you maintain critical discernment? I think it encourages others to also have that, since others experience depersonalization from such profound experiences, finding integration and application challenging.

Chris Bache: Integration is crucial and is getting more attention now, but still not enough. An anthology devoted to integration is coming out in England later this year. Psychic inflation is the biggest danger, leading to a delusion of personal depth from dramatic experiences. Grounding is essential. You get back to your 9-5 job, your children, your responsibilities. You remember the experiences, think deeply about them, and apply the teachings. Courage and grounding are key for transformation: confronting hard experiences, grounding in spiritual practices, meditation, body care. Conscious states have profound body effects. If your lifestyle violates that oneness, you could neutralize sessions or create spiritual schizophrenia. My teaching and family kept me grounded, keeping me realistic post-sessions.

Xavier Katana: Were there specific grounding protocols you used, beyond maintaining relationships and accountability? Any practical grounding techniques?

Chris Bache: I had knowledge of Shamanism and mystical traditions and maintained a meditation discipline. Similar to returning from a two-week meditation retreat, reengaging daily life can grind. It's the same with LSD sessions—deeper, faster engagement and return, but grounded reflection and application are shared. A daily spiritual and meditation practice, light yoga for the body, aligned with deeper exploration. My sitter, my wife, a clinical psychologist and spiritual practitioner, kept me grounded. She never had a session but supported my exploration, reminding me what's important is post-session impact, not the session itself. That calls for integration, involving lifestyle choices, moral compassion, and traditional spiritual practice elements.

Xavier Katana: Unraveling the psyche this way can be dangerous. As you said, you never dosed and hung out with friends or attended a concert. It was deliberate intention to connect with oneself and explore larger questions within a controlled setting.

Chris Bache: And in that controlled setting, of course, the most important thing is you have to ask yourself at the beginning of every session, "Are you ready to die? Are you ready to give it all up?" Because you confront, you go through many, many deaths in this process. You don't die physically, but you go through death processes that are so deep you think you're dying physically. You go through processes where the death agonies are not personal; they're species-wide. You go through processes when you're moving into archetypal reality and then moving out of archetypal reality. You're dealing with orders of magnitude that are really hard to relate to anything on earth.

Interviewer: Let's define archetypal reality. Sorry to interrupt you.

Chris Bache: Yeah, well, archetypal reality brings to mind Plato and Carl Jung in his work on the collective unconscious. Plato's ideas suggest a reality behind the physical world that informs and organizes the fundamental structures of the physical world. It's an order beyond physical reality. Carl Jung, of course, talks about archetypes and the collective unconscious as a collective mind within which our individual mind floats—contextualized within a species mind, within a collective unconscious of the species. In archetypal reality, I had experiences at both levels—on a quasi-Platonic level, encountering beings of such magnitude I couldn't wrap my mind around them. These vast beings were responsible for creating space-time and infusing the order that's emerging in space-time. But they were so vast and from such a different order of reality that I couldn't give them a firm description. I describe what I experienced in the book, but they don't lend themselves to easy definition. I describe this as quasi-Platonic because the archetypes I experienced were not Plato's eternal ideas in the minds of an unchanging, infinite consciousness. My experience was that these deep, deep archetypes were living structures, living entities. They're like galaxy-sized dimensions—living and dynamic, changing slowly relative to us in time and space. And on the collective unconscious level of humanity, a more quasi-Jungian experience, I didn't experience archetypes the way Jung describes, but the mind of the human species as a living, integrated whole. I experienced our individual minds as nodes, fractal nodes within a larger landscape of consciousness, and I was shown how our individual consciousness interacts in complex ways with this larger species mind. Every level deeper into a deeper level of consciousness is a step into a higher level of energy. Shifting from one level of consciousness to a deeper level requires learning to manage a higher level of energy. Every time you go into a deeper level—I'm describing five or six different levels—you go through intense purification processes. If you're not acclimated, you haven't done your homework to acclimate your energy to these intense levels, your experiences will be fragmented and incoherent. But if you return to these levels and submit to the purification processes and death-rebirth processes, you acclimate to stay conscious in levels of consciousness that previously just swallowed you whole. You do it consistently, and you break through into deeper and deeper levels. Every time you break through, more purification processes, more death-rebirth processes, are necessary to stay clear and establish clarity at these levels.

Interviewer: Okay, so I'm really enjoying everything that you're saying, Chris. I want to inject a little bit of my own personal experience. I've only had a handful of LSD sessions, but Ayahuasca is a big part of my life. I take it in a highly controlled setting with instructed shamans, and I try to regard it skeptically and critically. I've definitely had that experience of encountering an intelligence I can't explain. It's very difficult to understand what it's trying to show me, but when I look at it in the perspective you mentioned—a purification protocol, refining your consciousness—it fits a puzzle piece for me.

Chris Bache: Yeah, absolutely. Ayahuasca is a beautiful, extraordinary medicine. If I were starting this sequence over again, I wouldn't do it the way I did. I wouldn't work so consistently with sustained high-dose LSD sessions. I'd balance low and high-dose sessions, and I'd also balance LSD with Ayahuasca sessions and Psilocybin sessions. Psilocybin and Ayahuasca are more body-grounded psychedelic experiences, while LSD tends to push the high cosmological ceiling. Balancing those gives you a better trajectory in your experiences. Ayahuasca is an extraordinary teacher. People who do Ayahuasca sessions seriously, conscientiously, don't need convincing that this intelligence communicates to them. You engage levels of intelligence that know you, see you, and help you unearth what holds you back, showing truths of existence outside your normal state of consciousness. Once you see them, things begin to make more sense—for example, what great spiritual teachers and the saints of our traditions have been saying for hundreds of years. It's a living intelligence. We now have an approximate idea of how vast our universe is. Imagine the universe has a mind, and you become one with that mind. Do you really want to do that? It's extraordinary—imagine being one with every life form on our planet, let alone our galaxy. The substances open us to larger layers of mind with beings that are part of that—to have a communion, interaction, or conversation with them. If we do this consistently at a certain level, we have a little communion that can teach us important things about ourselves and help understand what happens after we die. But if we go deeper, we engage this infinite consciousness at deeper levels, eventually moving into what we traditionally call the primal void or formlessness, and then into the domain of absolute, crystalline, clear light.

Interviewer: I have so many questions. Okay, Chris, we're running out of time. Many people listening might not have access to LSD or Ayahuasca or these compounds. Is it possible to reach these states through meditation or inner work?

Chris Bache: Absolutely. The cosmology that emerges from this work is not new. It's the same cosmology we see in the deepest mystical traditions. Psychedelics are simply an amplifier of consciousness. Anything you experience in those states has corollaries to meditative experiences. Some experiences, however, are so radical they show up only in the most subtle spiritual traditions, where they become comfortable with things like experiencing future time. While you can experience these through meditation, certain radical experiences—like transcending time to go into the future, or going back to the context out of which the Big Bang emerged—are typically not part of a regular meditation practice.

Interviewer: Okay, fair enough. I want to move back into where you stopped, diamond Luminosity. How did you engage this? How did you reach this point? Would you call it the final point, or reaching oneness with source?

Chris Bache: Oneness came earlier than diamond Luminosity. This is hard to put succinctly. I did four years of work, stopped for six years, then resumed for an intense ten years. Though spread over twenty years, it was fourteen years of intense work. Midway through the second ten-year period, after ego death, the ocean of suffering, collective work, and archetypal reality, I encountered a year of jaw-dropping spiritual experiences—Śūnyatā, the oneness of existence, primordial void. By the end, I felt existentially satisfied, but five years of work remained. Moving into hyper-clear, hyper-transcendental states dissolved into light. I was light. Coming back into time-space became too painful. I decided it was time to stop, to integrate experiences rather than dive deeper. I stopped due to pain—my hyper-stimulated, hyper-aroused subtle energy system—and heartache from transitioning back and forth into these states. I realized it was time to let my body cool down and integrate what I'd been given.

Interviewer: Because you were leaving?

Chris Bache: At the end, I knew I was leaving, as I couldn't maintain that space without years of sustained work. I made a deal with the universe not to bring me back until I could stay. As I delved into diamond Luminosity, I realized it was not an endpoint but part of an infinite progression. Midway through the five-year period, I reached a hyper-clear diamond Luminosity state. My visual field pivoted 90 degrees, revealing a distant reality. The light of that reality hit me like a lightning bolt. I called it the absolute light, understanding it was as far beyond diamond Luminosity as diamond Luminosity was beyond space-time. I had thought an endpoint was becoming one with God or entering the void, but each was part of an infinite progression. Now, I would be gentler with myself and recommend others be gentle with themselves. The goal is not achieving an endpoint but opening to the universe, engaging creative intelligence, entering a dialogue, and letting nature take its course.

Interviewer: Chris, I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Your precision and the way you discuss these topics are impressive. Could you offer a warning for explorers of psychedelics, especially given their resurgence today? What should people consider when aiming for connected states like those you described?

Chris Bache: The more experience I've collected, the more cautious I've become. I'm uncomfortable with people taking psychedelics in uncontrolled circumstances. You can quickly get over your head in socially or sensationally complicated settings, leading to trauma. Extreme caution is advisable, along with thorough research. There's a lot of literature on methodology coming out. A key takeaway I wish to impart is the lifting of fear of death. I'm not afraid of dying; I'm looking forward to it—not the process of dying but being dead. My experiences with the universe's intelligence, compassion, and wisdom suggest a magnificent post-death reality—layered and rich. Fear of death flips the world upside down, misunderstanding the universe's organization. My first book, on reincarnation, asserts a belief in our empirical evidence that reincarnation is simply true, and if you don't understand that, you don't grasp your relationship to the universe.

Interviewer: I love it, Chris. This was such a phenomenal conversation. Could you remind me how to pronounce your last name and share where people can find you online?

Chris Bache: My last name is pronounced Bache. People can contact me at my email address, cmbache@ysu.edu. I'll have a website, chrisbache.com, around Thanksgiving, coinciding with the book's release.

Interviewer: Okay, wow. That's going to do it for us here. What a phenomenal conversation. My guest, Dr. Christopher Bache, and the book is "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." If you're listening on YouTube or the podcast version, please subscribe and share. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week.