Live with Chris Bache — 73 LSD Sessions: Journey Through the Mind of the Universe

Audience: There is a door in your head that no one told you about.

Interviewer: It is the door through which we enter into life and pass out of life again.

Audience: It is the door which separates ordinary consciousness from genius. It is the door that separates time-bound mind from timeless mind, the door that leads from personal consciousness to cosmic consciousness. The mysterious cultures that existed at the very beginning of recorded history, whose cultural and technical accomplishments demonstrate an almost unfathomable genius, took special care to immortalize the instructions that enable each individual to access their own hidden door.

Interviewer: Thank you so much, Chris, for being with us today. I really appreciate your time and the opportunity to share this amazing information. I want to say that your book has been one of the most revelatory I've ever read, and it's so rich with information. Sorry, I'm touched.

Chris Bache: I'm touched, honestly. I mean, I think it's so interesting and also so helpful to us at this particular time. There's a lot in there that can guide us into the future. I appreciate that the book is filled with pain, suffering, and ecstasy beyond ecstasy. What I would like to do today is, because there are several interviews with you covering protocols and process, focus on the content of the journeys and teachings that came to you. I think we'll start with the worst, what you've called the Ocean of Suffering. You have sessions in—well, let's step back. You undertook 73 LSD sessions to obtain this information, and the book...

Chris Bache: Actually, it was 79 over a 20-year period. I did 73 high-dose sessions, and 3 medium-dose, but for convenience, we'll say 73 high-dose.

Interviewer: That's an undertaking following the protocols established by Stanislav Grof. Were these sessions clinical or shamanistic, or just based on Grof's protocols?

Chris Bache: They emerged from a clinical setting. But whether you call it clinical or shamanistic depends partly on your cultural perspective. They originated in that therapeutic context but went far beyond therapeutic applications, so it's not clinical per se.

Interviewer: That makes sense. Ocean of Suffering, sessions 11 through 17.

Chris Bache: In the first two and a half years, I went through what Stan Grof describes as classic perinatal symptomology. I experienced a profound ego death experience that blew me apart, turning me inside out. After that, a new cycle began lasting two years and 14 sessions, where during the purifying phase, usually the first half of the session, I encountered vast landscapes of human suffering that deepened progressively. Initially, I thought it was deepening ego death, but eventually, I concluded something had shifted. The sessions were being used to heal not my personal psyche, but an aspect of the collective unconscious of humanity. So, I stopped my work for six years but resumed it for another year, and the Ocean of Suffering began exactly where it had stopped. This indicates extraordinary intelligence and precision directing these arts in our session work.

Interviewer: This brings up a point I want to address. These sessions seem well planned, not haphazard trips as some might experience with hallucinogens. Who was doing the planning and organizing?

Chris Bache: It certainly wasn't me. I was never in control of my sessions. Working with high doses of LSD, you can set intentions, but you can't direct what happens. It's a collaboration. My responsibility was to create a clear field for contact: isolation, focus, and detailed transcripts post-session. What happened after setting the stage was a matter of larger consciousness directing my experiences, which went beyond anything in my personal unconscious.

Interviewer: Absolutely. An inconceivable idea for those who haven't been on this journey. We'll get to the communications and dialogs you had, but back to the Ocean of Suffering. In session 11, trapped in a chamber of horrors; session 12, killed, mauled, maimed; session 13, reminded of Dante's Inferno; session 14, crescendo of torture; session 15, excruciating pain and unspeakable heart. Why did you continue?

Chris Bache: It's because of what happened in the second half of the sessions. The first half involved terrible suffering, and I trusted the process completely. If you give yourself over to it, it builds to a crescendo, and if navigated well, spins you into positive, transpersonal spaces. The sessions turned into extraordinary experiences described in deep time, soul initiation, and universal immersion. At the session's end, I internalized both intense suffering and hours of ecstatic participation in the universe, drawing me back for the initiation.

Interviewer: It sounds like such torment. Regarding suffering and session 24, you speak about consciousness, a consciousness of incredible love overall. The pain began in love. The pain didn't represent a rupturing of love but was an expression of this love born into space-time. Can you explain how pain comes from love?

Chris Bache: Because creation comes from love. The pain I encountered was rooted in the collective psyche: human suffering over thousands of years. If suffering isn't cleared at life's end, it becomes a burden for the species as well as individuals. By dissolving into the collective unconscious, the healing process represents lifting suffering out of the psyche. The suffering began in love, as all existence does. We are co-creators, not victims. Creation is a long, unfolding process with many stages of incompleteness. We knew we were engaging in an unfinished system, but we volunteered for creation's grandeur.

Interviewer: Do struggles rise from a disconnection from the source, or is it a birthing process as described by Stanislav Grof?

Chris Bache: In the early stages, there's reliving birth and experiencing the birth canal. The womb is entry into time and space, the grave the exit. As consciousness expands beyond time-space, there's a revolving door of death and rebirth, often reliving birth to re-enter spiritual reality. In later stages, it's not literal but metaphorical. I discuss the birth of the future human and see this global crisis as birthing a fundamentally changed human being. It's a collective transformation, not a trapped birth canal but a greater process.

Interviewer: That brings hope. It's important for humanity to understand this. Another theme is this process is not only an individual initiation but humanity's as an organism.

Chris Bache: It's a clear message. The creative intelligence behind evolution isn't only interested in individuals but entire species. The awakening involves the human family as one. Individual efforts are fractal embodiments of a larger collective effort, mutually influencing each other. The intention is clear: to awaken humanity as one, not just isolated souls.

Chris Bache: When you start dialoguing with this infinite consciousness that can show you so many things at so many levels, you have to train yourself to stay cognitively coherent when working at deep levels of consciousness. It happens kind of spontaneously in your work, but in this particular session, it seemed that I needed some training to make this better. I was in this council of elders, surrounded by beings I didn't see but felt. I could know anything I wanted if I could endure the consequences of knowing it. I'd put forward a question, and the elders would take it, start to gather, and chant. The music was the Tibetan chanting, the very deep, guttural chanting of the gyota monks in Tibet. They would chant and then release this knowing at me. If I was centered when this knowing hit me, it would send me into an orgy of cognitive ecstasy, showing me things. But if I wasn't centered and allowed myself to get distracted, it would just shatter my mind, and I couldn't stay cognitively coherent. In this session, many times I was shattered, and many times I was sent into cognitive ecstasy. The point was to train, to learn how to receive conscious information from different dimensions and stay awake and coherent in levels beyond any you've ever experienced before. And it can be done. Shamanic cultures and meditation masters master entering these states of consciousness. It's the same dynamic, just within a psychedelic context.

Interviewer: Has this training stayed with you, and is there any application for it in normal consciousness?

Chris Bache: It's about the relationship between deep psychedelic experiences and ordinary resting consciousness after a session. It's a complicated question. We clearly can't take our experiences back and stabilize our Earth consciousness in those states. It would be wonderful if we could. I wish we could. But it's a more subtle process. These experiences give us practices, literally practices to do every day after the sessions. Particularly if we stay grounded, because the greatest danger in psychedelic states is psychic inflation. We have an extraordinary experience and think we must be extraordinary people, which is not true. If we stay grounded, I think the experiences act as strange attractors and accelerate our evolutionary development. I hope that some experiences, learnings, and training affect me outside the sessions. But the proof is in the pudding when I die. In Buddhism, all spiritual practice trains you for what will happen when you die. I think the same is true in psychedelic sessions; they prepare you to enter states waiting for you when you die.

Interviewer: Do you have an idea of what level we go to when we die? You've visited so many levels of creation and before creation.

Chris Bache: I've had many experiences that make sense in terms of the Eastern concept of the Bardo or multiple levels of reality one enters at death. The basic idea is you don't go to a place but to a complex domain with many layers. The level you go to reflects your present spiritual development and ability to stay conscious. All these levels are part of the Bardo, part of Samsara, the evolving cyclic nature of existence. It's possible to penetrate through the Bardo and enter extra-samsaric reality, which is outside the domain of Samsara. It's where I'd place the diamond luminosity experiences. Where we go when we die depends on how much homework we've done while here.

Interviewer: You've died a lot, as mentioned in the introduction. Has dying so many times changed your perspective on death?

Chris Bache: Being afraid of death is such a sadness. Not only am I not afraid of dying, but I'm looking forward to it. Not the act of dying, but what happens after. There's no fear for me because I've crossed that line multiple times over the years. I feel comfortable and filled with ecstatic joy about where I'm going. If we're afraid of death, we've got our world upside down. This is the hard place, inside time and space. Where we go when we die is much more benign, intelligent, and compassionate.

Interviewer: The first time you died, was there fear? Did it get easier with subsequent deaths?

Chris Bache: The essence of dying is losing complete control—of your identity, knowledge, everything. That has a frightening quality. But going through it multiple times, you learn to trust the process. You learn that you can die, and the structure of your life can be dissolved, but some essence of you reawakens in unexpected joy. You learn there's truly no such thing as death; the form can be destroyed, but the essence is indestructible. It's still terrifying going through an advanced death and rebirth process because it's a deep unraveling of all you've known—your time-space identity, body, mind, and ego.

Interviewer: I've had an LSD trip where I tried to hold on to my ego. It was terrifying to think of it dissipating without knowing what would happen.

Chris Bache: It is. But as you repeat it, you get used to it. The total fear that grips you at first changes to a more informed quality of fear. Eventually, death becomes your best friend. The deepest ecstatic experiences follow the deepest death experiences. Once you understand that, you seek it out, creating conditions in your sessions for death-associated turbulence because you know what's waiting on the other side. Death becomes your gateway into transcendence.

Interviewer: Speaking of which, in sessions 22 and 23, you were shown the master plan for humanity. Can we talk about that?

Chris Bache: This was a surprise for me. Between ages 30 and 50, I wasn't concerned about humanity's fate. It wasn't on my radar. But starting in the 22nd and 23rd sessions, the theme of human evolution and the master plan emerged. It continued to the 70th session, with visions proposing a major breakthrough for humanity. It was not of individuals but the entire species, catapulting us into accelerated development. However, I wasn't shown how nature would accomplish this. In 1995, in the 55th session, I was taken into deep time and experienced the death and rebirth of our species, not as an individual but as the species itself. It was a global systems crisis, a global ecological crisis, leading to a profound shift at the foundation of our being. A transformation filled the post-crisis world with new values and perspectives. A collective awakening, an opening of the human heart and mind.

Interviewer: Back then, hearing about ecological crises must have been surprising. It wasn't as much an issue in those times.

Chris Bache: This awareness rises not only in psychedelic states but also in deep contemplation and is visionary. Indigenous people have had these visions, warning the civilized world. Beads Griffith, a contemplative, had visions about humanity's direction. The process took me by surprise back then.

Interviewer: The process sounds much like an individual death process. Everything we rely on goes away, leading survivors to develop new ways.

Chris Bache: Those transitioning individually ahead of the collective become seed catalysts for future transformation. The extended crisis will hyper-stimulate the collective unconscious, leading to non-linear dynamics in psychological systems. Unexpected insights and knowledge will emerge from our potential, facilitating faster transformation.

Interviewer: It sounds scary yet exciting. It's like having a baby—scary but rewarding.

Chris Bache: Yes, labor is intense but short compared to gestation. Our species has been gestating the future human for eons. The transition period will demand immense effort, but ultimately, it's profoundly significant and meaningful. Would you rather have a pleasant yet insignificant life or one invested in something profound?

Interviewer: I agree. As a believer in reincarnation, I'm aware of how future lives might be if nothing changes. It's an opportunity to contribute to the process.

Chris Bache: Late in my sessions, I felt it's crucial to understand the future human we're becoming. Knowing you're pregnant changes your experience of labor. In this dark historical period, with understanding, we can avoid despair. It's a psycho-spiritual transformation.

Interviewer: Let's end on the future human. Tell us about it.

Chris Bache: I can't describe the world, but in my sessions, I connected with the future human. A magnificent being, with a mind tuned to the universe's deep structure and a heart in touch with all beings. A transformed human being, committed to reversing damage done to the planet. This is where we're headed. Great religious figures essentially describe this: a way of living deeply different, an awakened heart and mind.

Interviewer: People have been persecuted for holding beliefs in something beyond physical life. Imagining a world full of awareness is amazing.

Chris Bache: We're cleaning our psychic basement, learning to create consciously. Our creativity will go from being unconscious to conscious, manifesting in amazing ways.

Interviewer: You said creation results from choices. Conscious choices, not unconscious ones, will distinguish future humanity.

Chris Bache: Yes, in a living universe, choices trigger responses. Ignorant choices teach us we are interconnected, leading to wiser ones. Choices enhancing well-being generate positive feedback cycles.

Interviewer: It feels good to make others' lives better. It's surprising how little that happens, but we'll get there.

Chris Bache: Kindness, courage, truth feel good. It's hard to make the right choices amidst challenges, but it's worth it.

Interviewer: Thank you for spending this time with me. I have a more hopeful perspective for the future and less fear of death.

Chris Bache: It's not about the personal aspects of my journey but that these experiences are available for everyone. They provide insight into our lives' textures. I've enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for the opportunity.

Interviewer: Thank you so much, my love. Have a wonderful day.