An Interview with Chris Bache — LSD and the Universe

Marc Caron: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Marc Caron. I'm here with my co-host for the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference, Mr. Steven Gray, a good friend. Glad to be here. Today, we have a very special guest on our little talk about our speakers for the upcoming conference. We have Mr. Chris Bache. Chris is a 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. He's an award-winning teacher, and Chris's work explores the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states. Chris has also written three books. One is called Lifecycles, another Dark Night, Early Dawn, and The Living Classroom. His new book is LSD and the Mind of the Universe, which is actually the title of his talk as well for the conference. Coming up in actually a month tomorrow, we start in four weeks. So, welcome Chris. Pleasure to see you again and have a conversation. It's always great to hear what you have to say, and we look forward to having you at the conference again. But as we get started, maybe you can introduce yourself and let our viewers know a little bit about your story and the work that you've done in terms of, I think we were just talking about, you know, 73 high dosage LSD journeys as a mind in the mind of a psychologist or philosopher, if I remember correctly, from last year.

Chris Bache: Well, I was actually a professor of religious studies, and I taught in a Philosophy and Religious Studies program at the university, which is part of the Ohio State system, up in the northeast corner of the state. I'm really excited about the conference. I'm very pleased that the book is actually being released for the first time anywhere at the conference. After all the years of research and writing, finally, it's coming out and allowing me to have a conversation that I've been waiting to have for a long time. To do psychedelic work myself and explore the philosophical potential of psychedelic states, I had to do all this work underground, hidden from my colleagues. I couldn't really talk about it. In my day job, I was a conventional, maybe not so conventional, religious studies professor. None of my students knew about my work. This is a conversation that I've been waiting for a long time. I had to wait until after I retired to have it. I had to wait until after I was past the statute of limitations for my psychedelic crimes. I'm just delighted to begin this conversation here at the conference and in the workshop we'll do the weekend after the conference.

Stephen Gray: Great. Wow. So, oh gosh, you know, we could all ask all kinds of questions.

Marc Caron: Just that introduction gave me about ten of them right now.

Stephen Gray: Why don't you fire one out then, Marc?

Marc Caron: It might not even be a question now that I think about it. But the big part that struck me there, Chris, was talking about how you had to hide the work from your colleagues, doing it underground, and even the consideration of the statute of limitations running out before you can talk about these things. You know, it's a really profoundly thought-out process in terms of what you had to deal with, even to do your research. So, I wanted to acknowledge that. I guess the question is, what was the biggest challenge in terms of keeping it all kind of contained to yourself?

Chris Bache: Well, I knew that silence was going to be the prerequisite that would allow me to do this work, so I took that responsibility when I did the work. Over the long term, I did not appreciate that, first of all, the loneliness would become the issue that it became—the inability to share your experiences, the inability to engage in conversations. If I lived in San Francisco or Vancouver, where there's an active psychedelic community, it would have been different. But I lived in Ohio, and so there wasn't an active psychedelic community here to share my experiences with and have the conversation. What I found was that in the long term, after I finished the work—I did 73 high-dose sessions between 1979 and 1999—I waited 20 years to write the book, to tell the full story. I've written about my story in Dark Night, Early Dawn, but I really didn't tell the full story until now. Not being able to talk about your experiences actually inhibits or compromises your ability to fully integrate your experiences into your life. So, I was able to integrate them at one level, at a sort of a personal psychological level, but I wasn't able to integrate them into my full person. I'm a teacher. I love to learn knowledge and to share that knowledge with students. I could not teach from these experiences. I could not draw upon the things I had learned, and I found that that cumulatively made me sick. It literally made me psychologically sick, like living in a closet is just sickness-making for anybody. So being in a psychedelic closet was a real burden. Now the first level of the burden is off by writing the book and going public, and the second level has been lifting as I have begun to talk about this material. I hope this will continue to deepen in the years ahead, as I have the give and take of conversation.

Stephen Gray: Well, that's quite understandable. Thank you for sharing that with us. That was a good question, I think, Marc. But now let's talk about the material itself.

Marc Caron: Can I make one comment about that? I think it's a really important part of what we're seeing in our community here now as well, especially in the past year since the last conference. Integration is now the biggest buzzword, and you talked about that in terms of your isolation and being alone in that and how important that is. That's what we're seeing in terms of the community we're creating, and not even really creating, we're bringing people together. We're just pulling it together like a hub. So, I think it was really important that you talk about that, and that's the big part, is so people can talk about their experiences, which is a big part of what our conference is. Because it's not just for doctors and practitioners, naturopaths, and so on. It's for people who are looking to connect with others, so they can actually share, talk about their experiences, and go even deeper with their work. Thank you for touching on that. I think it's really important, especially considering you know that 20 years of doing it in the closet.

Chris Bache: I'm really pleased to see integration being discussed more. There's an anthology coming out in London within a year, all about integration. Of course, with the technology we have with session material and sacred medicines, we can blow out the system increasingly easily, but integrating those experiences—learning how to live with the memories of deep immersion in the universe, using them skillfully as part of your daily meditation practice and social integration—is really important. Another aspect for me has been—while my students never learned about my psychedelic work, they were actually being activated by my private work. Consciousness is not private; it's an open field. The deeper I went, the more deeply my students were being drawn implicitly into my work. That's what really led me to address this in Dark Night, Early Dawn and then to write The Living Classroom about fields of consciousness in groups.

Stephen Gray: Well, I was going to try to lead you into some of the content of the material that you learned. But as long as we're on integration, maybe we should follow up a little bit more on that. So, what do you think are the most important aspects of integration for the typical person who's doing, say, a couple of Ayahuasca sessions or weekends a year, or working with Psilocybin mushrooms a bit, and then they're living in Vancouver or some urban center? What do you think are the most helpful things that those people can do to keep those channels open and keep themselves grounded properly?

Chris Bache: Good question. I mean, I don't think I have a pat answer for that. I'd like more dialogue around it. But basically, the things that spring to mind are, first, in your sessions, emphasize clean contact, controlling the variables, controlling the isolation, so that you have clean contact with these realities, not smudgy contact, any confusion—clean contact. The first step is remembering your session, so writing up a detailed description within 24 hours, because these memories fade over time. Personally, once I write up a session, I never change it. I've learned that trying to edit it, clean it up, you can lose some things. When I'm writing up, I listen to the music that I played during the session. It allows me to get deeper into my memories and get them down on paper. I think the other thing important is a daily spiritual practice, whatever form—yoga, meditation. Rule of thumb is, the deeper you're going into non-ordinary states, the stronger should be your daily practice. And then just, you know, people use art to bring their sessions, hold on to their sessions. For me, I've been given lots of teachings in my sessions, and I've been given meditation and practices, so my responsibility is to try to live by that teaching as best I can, to cultivate those practices, to do the assignments that I was given. I think sharing with other people is really critical—listening to their experiences and sharing yours. There's nothing that can replace that.

Stephen Gray: Wonderful. So, now, can we get into some...

Marc Caron: Steve, it's your turn.

Stephen Gray: No, it's not about my turn. I'm looking for the material. It's not about any of us, really.

Marc Caron: I just like having fun with you, my friend. That's all.

Stephen Gray: Indeed, yeah. It's all good. From my point of view, you know, I've read this book, and I've also read Dark Night, Early Dawn. What stands out to me—there are so many amazing things that happened to you during that 20-year period that people would find stunning. Like the whole time when you experienced all your past lives, the time when they, where they grabbed you by the ball, so to speak, and made you become just about every different kind of woman on the planet. But the ultimate for, from my point of view, is what most affects everybody on this planet, which is what you've called the Great Death and the Great Awakening. I wonder if you could elaborate on that somewhat.

Chris Bache: Let me back up a little bit to give context, and then you bring me back. If I don't get back to it, bring me back to this—the birth of the future human. I found that when I was working with these very high levels of LSD—and again, this is a protocol that I sincerely do not recommend people follow. Doing individual high-dose LSD sessions is fine, but doing such a relentless, long, rigorous course with nothing but high-dose LSD sessions is not something I would recommend. I would balance high-dose, low-dose, and balance Psilocybin and Ayahuasca with LSD. But I did this work starting 40 years ago, so I didn't understand it as well as I do now. Essentially, by working with these very high doses, you can blow open consciousness and enter into a deeper level of reality, go through a death-rebirth process. What I found was that by going back again and again, not only does your experience stabilize at this deeper level of reality, but if you keep going back and keep pushing your limits, you will go through a death-rebirth cycle again and enter a deeper level of reality. If you keep pushing, you'll go through another death-rebirth and enter a deeper level of reality. It's not ego that is simply dying over and over again; it does become a question: what is dying in these advanced deaths and rebirths? I actually have an appendix that is in the book, asking, "What dies? What's actually dying?" But when I was charting the overall levels of development in my journey, I identified five core fundamental cycles of death and rebirth. This is something I'll be talking about at the conference. First was going beyond physical identity, the death of self, ego death. The second was going into collective mind, the Ocean of Suffering, and some of the lower levels of subtle level reality. Third level was going into archetypal mind, moving deep into archetypal reality, both in terms of the collective unconscious, species mind, and also into cosmological archetypal reality. Fourth level was going into oneness, the fundamental condition of oneness. The fifth level is what I call Diamond Luminosity, going into the Diamond Luminosity, what Buddhism calls Dharmakāya or the clear light of absolute reality. All of my sessions can fall into these categories. But while there's this deepening process—going into collective dimensions, archetypal dimensions, causal oneness, and going into Diamond Luminosity—I began to have rhythmic, systematic initiations into a series of ideas that had to do with the entire human species. In fact, the entire trajectory of my experiences was not personal. It really wasn't primarily about my personal healing, my personal development, or my personal enlightenment. Everything seemed to be converging around the theme of humanity's collective transformation. That seemed to be the work of the hour. That's what we're about. We're at a life-and-death moment for the species. My work and all of our work seem to be part of this convergence taking place in history, taking us through this transition that we're going through. This is what I came to call the birth of the future human, leaving it open-ended what the form of this future human will take. I have my experience of it and my theory of it, in a way. I think it is a combination of the reincarnation process that will take us into a different level of our species evolution. It's a shift that takes place, I think, at the fundamental archetypal level of the core blueprint of the human species. We're doing some work that's going to influence and trigger a pivot in the blueprint of the human psyche. I don't think we're going to make this jump into this new psychological awareness of the heart and mind without going through a tremendously painful transformation process, the dark night of our collective soul, which is essentially a time of purification, a time of letting go of the past, a time of basically coming to terms with the choices we've been making historically, making new choices. Choices that do not reinforce stories of hate, class division, racial division, religious division, the nationalisms that tear our planet apart, the economic divisions that cause so much damage. Literally, I think we have to consume the karma that those choices have brought us, and we've been making those choices. We reincarnate generation by generation. So, we're carrying the entire history of the human planet in our history, in our souls, in our stories. As we change those stories, we contribute to a change in the playing field of humanity. In my work, I've been taken into that process, gone through tremendous exercises of purification and healing of the collective psyche, of the wars we've fought and the terrible things we've done to each other. I have been taken into what I call deep time, into dimensions of time where the future becomes available as the present, and given glimpses into the culmination of this death-rebirth process experienced at a collective level, and then the transformation of our species into this higher order of humanity that's coming forward. To me, that is the most important theme of the work.

Stephen Gray: Yeah, because all of us are involved, all of our children, all of our grandchildren. I think where we're going with this is that it's, you know, I don't know what the timeline is, but you know, in some relatively near future, it is going to be clear to the whole planet that this is job number one, as Ford used to call it. So, how about this question related to that? You listed off the kind of ways in which the human enterprise is off track—like nationalism, racism, religious divisions, and perhaps, you know, right up there at the top, materialist illusion that promotes 50 families having half the wealth on the planet. Given that it appears that we are as a species so far away I mean, lots of people are making inroads into the transformation, of course, but in total numbers out of seven or eight billion people, it's a minuscule number of people. Given that, you know, 98 or 99% of the planet is not getting it, not even aware of this possibility, let alone doing anything to move in that direction. What's it going to take? It seems to me it's going to take terrible disasters of some kind to open up a crack. What do you think?

Chris Bache: How can we get as far as we need to in as little time as we have? As the global crisis triggers a cascade of economic, political, social crises that we're seeing.

Marc Caron: Not even mentioned environmental.

Chris Bache: I don't have any secret, inside information on the how, when, and why of what's happening. Just that we're going into a global systems crisis, driven by a global ecological crisis and other imbalances in the world. But then, after years of being shown this very positive, optimistic fulfillment of our evolutionary destiny, it hadn't shown me how we could possibly make this transition. And you're asking that question exactly, Stephen. Then, in one particular session, what I call the Great Awakening session, session 55 took me into that process and into this trauma. It also gave me a set of teachings around how we could actually make this transition, and it has to do with understanding the dynamics of the collective psyche that all of our individual psyches feed into and are part of. We are fractal embodiments of our collective psyche, and all of our experiences, as Rupert Sheldrake talks about in morphic field theory, are being processed at a collective level. The basic formula is this: our collective psyche is a field. Fields behave in certain predictable ways. There's a correlation between the way the collective psychic field of humanity will behave as it enters into extreme crisis and the way physical systems behave when they go into what are called non-linear systems, or far-from-equilibrium states. The basic vision is this: when we go deeper into this century, we are going to enter a period of tremendous pain. I don't see any way around it. We're going to suffer terribly. In contrast to anything that's happened before, this pain will not be restricted to one continent or part; it's going to be global. It's going to be massive, and all of this pain that we are going to experience individually is going to feed into the collective psyche, causing it to move into increasingly non-linear conditions. When the psychic field of humanity moves into these non-linear conditions, if we can extrapolate lessons from physical fields, several things might begin to happen. First, small perturbations can produce very large effects. So the impact of individuals on the outcome of history increases. Individual people can have a larger trigger on the future.

Stephen Gray: Could I interrupt for a sec? I think I understand what you mean by non-linear conditions, but perhaps it needs a little more clarification. Can you go into that a bit more?

Chris Bache: Basically—and here, I'm not a scientist, so my apologies to those who could answer this much better—when you have a system, it develops a balance between energy in and energy out. If you keep pouring more and more energy into that system, it becomes increasingly unstable. When it becomes unstable, it shows characteristics that are not like it was when it was a stable system. When it becomes so unstable, nature can respond to this instability to draw out new levels of creativity from within itself. Non-linear systems are highly creative systems. They produce things that wouldn't be predicted previously, and it's fast. Changes can happen very quickly when they're in non-linear conditions. Individuals can have disproportionate effects on the outcome in non-linear conditions, technically in systems that are in the far from equilibrium state. So, creativity, spontaneity, fast speed, and individuals having larger influence.

Stephen Gray: Obviously, that's a pretty scary prognostication for the decades coming, but it also suggests that, as Leonard Cohen said, there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. So what might that look like? I think it might be useful for people watching this to imagine what conditions or what the new human might be like, so that we can recognize the inklings of that awakening in ourselves. Can you elaborate on that?

Chris Bache: Let's remind ourselves that the human beings this will be happening to are thousands and tens of thousands of years old, because it will be happening to souls in human bodies, not simply bodies that are 200 years old, but beings with 100,000-year-old histories. They have complex psychic histories of their former lives, all flowing within them as they enter into time. My understanding, from my sessions, is that what is happening on the planet at the geopolitical level, at the geophysical level, as we are trying to become an integrated planet and move past this stage of evolution where we are so fractured and divided, as we confront our history geopolitically, we are also confronting our history inside—the history of the soul and its fragmentations. The sessions have shown me that there seems to be a synergistic relationship between engaging a changing world outside of us and our own maturation, where we integrate our former lives, leading to an arising awareness that my mind and heart are not the age of my body. My mind and heart are much older than my body, and my relationships are much older than my present body's relationships. I am living in time as a manifestation of creative energy. Everyone around me is doing this. We've been doing it for generations. Putting it another way, the ego created this global crisis. The ego cannot solve it. Soul is the only thing that can solve it. I think we're making a transition from ego consciousness, individual body-mind consciousness, to soul consciousness. By soul consciousness, I don't mean simply a disembodied ego. I mean what I call the diamond soul, all of our history integrated in a way that generates a higher level of functioning, so we begin to live out of a larger platform. I think we see this happening around us when people take on projects they know they won't finish in their lifetime, when they are willing to die so others can live, when their commitments are not to their individual enhancement but to the enhancement of larger numbers of people. What we're seeing is the soul—the maturation of the soul within our individual lives.

Stephen Gray: Do you see a lot of that happening?

Chris Bache: Just look around us. There are a lot of people doing injurious things, but there are also people doing magnificent things. They are committing themselves to projects they'll never see realized in their lifetime. I think we're going to see more of that as we come to terms with the fact that the way we're living just isn't working. The way we've organized our culture isn't working. We need to experiment with new and different ways of creating an economy, social systems, family structures, and so forth. There's no guarantee in evolution. There's no guarantee that we'll come through this. There's no guarantee that the next form of the human being will be born successfully. But the more we experience the intelligence of the universe in our sessions, the more we experience the profound wisdom behind the formation of galaxies, solar systems, and the emergence of life—the intelligence seems to think humanity is ready for this transition. Gestation is a long process, but birth is very short—convulsive and fast. I think we've been maturing through thousands of years. Nature says it's time to give birth to the soul inside history—not just when we die, inside history. This is the hard work we're coming into.

Stephen Gray: What a beautiful vision. It's this idea of having a vision and hope that's going to keep people going as things collapse that way. I'm just curious. It may not be all that relevant to the discussion at hand, but I want to ask you anyway. I gather from reading the books that the teachings you received are about humanity and our journey. But just what you can see with the naked eye—there are many thousands of bodies much like our sun, producing heat and light. Did you ever get a sense that there are other planets, other species going through similar things, or have been through them and successfully come through them, or any of that sort of thing?

Chris Bache: You know, I've never explored that aspect or it was never put in front of me. I never directed my sessions. I tried to set intentions, but a deeper intelligence laid all the groundwork for what happened. Essentially, it never took me there, but the very nature of the experiences it took me into—it was just assumed that we are one speck in a much larger, cosmic process with life emerging all over. It parallels things happening elsewhere, because nature is vast and works in groups. So, I just assume when I look at the night sky and see all those stars, that somewhere out there, life is percolating and struggling at different levels around the universe.

Stephen Gray: Switching tracks a little. There's a segment of the psychedelic community that's very devoted to natural plants. The core of your work was with a semi-synthetic substance, LSD. What's your take on that? What do you say to those people who say, "Nature knows best?"

Chris Bache: Somehow, I think nature does know best in many ways. Natural plants are very good to work with, excellent ways to work. Most of human history has been in dialogue with natural, sacred medicines. I don't make too much of the difference between synthetic, meaning man-made medicine, and organic medicine. I don't know that I would put quite the emphasis on that as some people do. I do think that around any work with a medicine, with any regularly induced state of consciousness, fields develop. There are fields around Psilocybin mushrooms, psychic fields that reflect humanity's history with them. There are fields around Ayahuasca. Perhaps that's why people who have never lived in the Amazon encounter these giant snakes in their first session when doing Ayahuasca in Texas. There's a field around these medicines. When we open our mind, we don't just open our mind; we open up through these fields, into these fields, and they speak to us.

Now, LSD doesn't have a historical field associated with it. A few years in the 60s is nothing compared to the fields associated with Ayahuasca, Mescaline, or Peyote. It's relatively field free, and it tends to be a high-altitude psychedelic. Many organic psychedelics are more sensitively tuned to the nearby psychedelic world, which is a very helpful and relevant world—the world of spirit guides, the world of animal collective psyches, of angelic figures, and so on. LSD tends to be somewhat neutral; it doesn't have a lot of history, and it tends to drive into high cosmic, logical territory. It’s good for an overview but didn't give me as much experience up close with the nearby territory, like those explored in Ayahuasca or Psilocybin sessions I did after completing my LSD work.

Stephen Gray: So you found those to be a good adjunct for you?

Chris Bache: They have been a good adjunct, and I wish I had been smart enough to use those adjuncts all the way along during those 20 years.

Marc Caron: That was my question for you, Chris: what was it that made you choose LSD in 1979 when you did, versus, say, the magic mushroom back then?

Chris Bache: Well, I read Stan Grof’s work. Stan Grof published "Realms of the Human Unconscious" in 1976. I came out of graduate school in 1978, read that book, and quickly read "LSD Psychotherapy," which came out in 1980. This was what Stan had done his early research on. In my case, I was able to get high-quality, laboratory-grade LSD. It was a combination of trusting Stan Grof’s work and the methodology, which was focused on LSD in the early years. It was only because of Grof's research that I trusted my mind to go through this process, and it was the substance available to me.

Stephen Gray: What about what's your take on 5-MeO-DMT? It's becoming more popular, and I think it needs more discussion. Let me just put it this way: I was on a panel discussion about psychedelics and their future role last weekend at a small conference. One person said her view of psychedelics was that they were a door that shouldn’t be opened. I say that about 5-MeO-DMT because I had one full-on experience with it. It was absolutely stunning at the moment where I just went, "Oh my God, this is what I've been waiting to realize at the gut level my whole life." But since then—three months ago—I really have no idea how it's informing my ongoing spiritual awakening journey. I don't know where that fits into the Pantheon. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Chris Bache: First of all, I don't have a lot of experience with 5-MeO-DMT. I've only had a couple of sessions, which were ecstatically wonderful and luminous. I did this years after my LSD work. So, the mind I brought to the 5-MeO-DMT experience wasn't the mind I had at the beginning of my LSD work; it was much polished from years of that work. I yield to those with more experience on this substance. It’s striking how fast it can drop you deep into the universe, but the short time you spend there makes integration challenging. It’s better for opening doors than deeply internalizing experiences, but opening doors can be helpful too.

One thing I’ve learned from LSD is that it’s a long day, a big commitment—it’s an eight-hour session that extends beyond that. By keeping you in these states for long periods, it allows the mind you explore to polish the mind doing the exploring. The universe gets more time to heal, show, and teach you things repeatedly until you're sure you've got it. Longer sacred medicines polish the mind differently than short-acting ones, which doesn’t mean they’re not useful—they’re just different. Longer sessions that Native American and Brazilian traditions prefer, like Peyote, Ayahuasca, and Psilocybin, consider the time spent in these conditions special and sacred.

Rick Strassman found that short sessions with DMT didn’t produce long-lasting results for most people. Quick in, quick out makes it challenging to convert into a transformational experience.

Marc Caron: I certainly agree with your statement. My experience with DMT left me with more questions. It left me questioning what I’d seen—hieroglyphics, and so on. I trusted that my DNA and spirit got it, but I still look back and wonder what it was about.

Stephen Gray: That brings up another related question. I don’t know if I'm capturing the exact nuance, but it seems that in your journeys, the first two hours were often about letting go—sometimes exquisitely painful—before breaking out into the living intelligence of the universe. Perhaps you're unusual in how you’ve been suited, maybe by past lives or karma, to go to these places. Many psychonauts might not go there; it might be more about healing and getting out of one's own way. Do you have thoughts on that for most people?

Chris Bache: My understanding now is different from the beginning, leading me to approach non-ordinary states more patiently, without rushing to reach an end destination like becoming one with God or dissolving into the void. Those experiences did happen but weren't as transformational as I anticipated. I found infinite territory beyond where I reached even in the deepest diamond luminosity. The idea of getting to an end of a journey doesn't work anymore. Now, I’m more patient with opening up, receiving teaching and healing, but keeping it practical. There's productive work at lower levels. We don't have to tear apart our psyche deeply as I did. I counsel a gentler approach into these things.

Stephen Gray: Yeah, that’s good.

Chris Bache: As a philosopher with a passion to understand how the world pieces together, I wouldn't trade those 73 days for anything—they gave me understanding that changed my heart and life.

Stephen Gray: And your work for this lifetime, too—to share that. On the notion of being gentler, what do you hope to accomplish in the workshop you're doing after the conference?

Chris Bache: I really don't know yet. I know what's living inside me—living memories. I'm figuring out how to make them useful to others. When describing them, my consciousness changes, and we’re interconnected in these subtle ways. The question becomes, with our shared intention, what can we do—what insights and healing can we trigger when hearts and minds open?

Stephen Gray: So, people interested should note that it won't be you talking at them for two days, right? There will be many exercises.

Marc Caron: We’re not doing LSD.

Stephen Gray: No, of course not.

Chris Bache: Shamans often use a sacred medicine alongside clients, but I’ve chosen not to work with people in psychedelic states, focusing instead on pushing my own limits. As a teacher, opening hearts and minds can have powerful impacts. A time may come when I'll do what you’re suggesting, but now is about idea engagement within the psychedelic circle. At the end of my work, when deeper energies were moving into me, I realized I needed not to alter my consciousness but to let energies come to me.

Stephen Gray: You spoke about having to stop using cannabis for similar reasons. Didn't you?

Chris Bache: It's a bit different with cannabis. When I stopped sessions in '99, I was amazed by the many treasures, amazed by stepping back into time-space consciousness. I entered a deep existential sadness—from withdrawal from the Divine experiences I'd had. I developed an overattachment to cannabis to not come completely off the mountain, and eventually addressed that to fully ground into time-space.

My work—it's not that I never touch it or don’t do psychedelics—but now it's primarily contemplative. I’m developing spiritual practices integrating psychedelic experience with traditions from Vedanta. Building conscious practice forms that integrate psychedelic experiences without replicating them.

Stephen Gray: Sounds like a good plan for those heading toward eldership.

Marc Caron: We’re about ready to wrap it up. We can dive deep with you, Chris, each time. Thank you for sharing. I look forward to you again, at the conference. Feel free to rabbit hole additional thoughts, Stephen.

Stephen Gray: No, a lot of good stuff came out. I hope many will see this and come to the conference if they haven’t yet decided.

Marc Caron: You just did an amazing job, Chris. You've shared so much. We’re looking forward to the VIP party in Vancouver, and with the conference in its ninth year thanks to Mark’s work. Grateful for your second-year participation, Chris.

Chris Bache: Thank you. Looking forward to returning to Vancouver. It was such a meaningful audience last time, an excellent group. It's a real, living, vital community you've created.

Marc Caron: Wonderful. We’ve placed links and information in the session notes. It’s happening soon—a month from now. Excitement and the pressure of preparations begin to build. Thank you both.

Stephen Gray: Mark deserves much credit. All the moving parts! The ninth annual conference, so excited about it, and your contributions, Chris.

Chris Bache: Thank you again. It’s been an honor, and here's to another journey.