---
title: "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven"
slug: 2020-01-07-lsd-and-the-mind-of-the-universe-diamonds-from-heaven
date: 2020-01-07
type: lecture
channel: Psychedelics Today
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
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people:
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  name: Christopher M. Bache
  wikidata: Q112496741
  openalex: A5045900737
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**Joe Moore: ** Hello everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics Today. This is Joe Moore coming at you from Breckenridge, Colorado. On this episode, Kyle and I talk to Dr. Chris Bache, who is a very interesting character. Over the course of many years, he went through 73 high-dose LSD sessions and has some fascinating insights to share about personal growth and much more. We delve into this in quite a bit of detail, and the name of his book is *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. We're giving away three copies, and you can find that in the show notes. We'll have a link to the contest there, and also in our social media. You can typically find it at psychedelicstoday.com/welcome. This was a mind-blowing episode for me. Dr. Chris Bache is a recently retired university professor, and he brings a wealth of knowledge that I think is crucial for anyone delving into the transpersonal.

This show is brought to you by Onnit—o-n-n-i-t.com. Use the code 'PsyToday' at checkout for 10% off everything but fitness equipment. I've tried a bunch of their products and really like their Alpha Brain product, a nootropic cognitive enhancer. It's helped me out in tough situations like business meetings. They also have a melatonin spray, fish oil, and various other supplements. Again, it's onnit.com, code 'PsyToday' for 10% off your order.

We are also brought to you by Audible. You can visit audibletrial.com/psychedelicstoday for a 30-day free trial and a free audiobook. It helps us out quite a bit. There are great books there, from Tim Leary to Terence McKenna, even Mike Jay's recent book on Mescaline. If you like podcasts, you'll probably enjoy audiobooks. They flesh out ideas in full, ideal for your cognitive diet.

Also, we have a course called "Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists." The course is designed to help you understand the landscape of psychedelic drugs in clinical practice. This is a big deal in medicine. It covers microdosing, macrodosing, and psychedelic therapy at the basic level. It's now an 8-week course, expanded from five weeks, with masterclasses from experts like Dr. Catherine McLean and others. Check it out at psychedelicstoday.com or psychedeliceducationcenter.com. Classes start in February, with schedules friendly to both European and North American audiences.

Please tell your friends about Psychedelics Today. Send them links to episodes or invite them to our Facebook group. And consider supporting us with a donation as small as $2 a month at patreon.com/psychedelicstoday. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoy this interview with Dr. Chris Bache, and we'll see you on the other side.

Today on the show, we have Chris Bache, retired professor and Professor Emeritus at Youngstown State University and author of the recent book *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. We're also going to be doing a giveaway. So stay tuned. Chris, thanks for joining us.

**Chris Bache: ** Glad to be here, guys.

**Joe Moore: ** I talked about you a couple of years ago when I found out about your long-term project, probably before the book was even with a publisher. I was really excited by the idea, and then I forgot until we got connected through the publisher. I'm very excited to record with you because this is quite the project you've undertaken, and you've got some unique insights to share. How do you like to start this story? Maybe we can start with how psychedelics initially came onto your radar?

**Chris Bache: ** Well, I had just finished graduate school. I was publishing a few articles from my dissertation and looking for new research directions. I met the work of Stanislav Grof, and it really captured my attention. I did not have a psychedelic history. I finished graduate school in religious studies as an agnostically inclined atheist. Reading Stan's work, a light bulb went off inside me. I realized it was important, not just to psychology but to the philosophy of religion. I wanted to get involved, but it was illegal, so I split my life. I functioned as the professor of religious studies while engaging in a 20-year journey with LSD. I followed Stan's paradigm and pushed its limits far beyond what I appreciated at the time. After I retired from the university, I finally shared these experiences and insights with a broader audience.

**Joe Moore: ** Did you have any previous spontaneous mystical experiences before that indicated the importance of this work?

**Chris Bache: ** I've always envied people who had mystical experiences from a young age. That wasn't my path. I've been deeply locked into my body and physical experiences. I was reasonably well-educated in Western and Eastern religious thought but had no background in psychedelics. In many ways, I'm the last person you'd expect to write a book on deep psychedelic states. I grew up in Mississippi and earned a theology degree from the University of Notre Dame.

**Interviewer: ** I'm curious, how did you stumble across Stan's work without any exposure to psychedelics beforehand?

**Chris Bache: ** I was reading widely. I encountered Transpersonal psychology and two people whose work impacted me. One was Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, whose research convinced me that reincarnation is a fact of life. That was a shock since it wasn't part of my education. Then I met Stan's work, and it gave me the methodology to explore another dimension of reality. So, I decided to pursue it.

**Joe Moore: ** Awesome. What did your protocol look like? To me, it looks similar to the work at Hopkins and by MAPS now, but was it different for you at that time?

**Chris Bache: ** No, it was quite conventional. I was always working in complete isolation, with a sitter, and a carefully curated music playlist. The difference was that I shifted to high doses of LSD, between 500 to 600 micrograms. Initially, it was for efficiency, but it became a more profound project. I carefully documented everything, knowing I would eventually share these experiences.

**Joe Moore: ** And did you have any predetermined number of sessions to complete?

**Chris Bache: ** No, I didn't have a set number of sessions in mind. I just knew that I needed to embark on this journey to understand these levels of consciousness deeply. The process revealed many layers of the universe, and I went through several death and rebirth cycles.

**Interviewer: ** How do you define these layers of consciousness?

**Chris Bache: ** I adopted the vocabulary from Stan Grof's work: psychic, subtle, and causal levels of consciousness. The universe is incredibly deep, and these are approximations. My experiences included ego death at the personal mind level, collective mind at the subtle level, archetypal mind at the high subtle, and causal mind, leading to diamond luminosity.

**Kyle Buller: ** I'm not a proponent of high doses myself. I mean, I did this work. I came through it. In the early years, the high-dose work done at Spring Grove Hospital with terminally ill patients was limited to three sessions. Low-dose psychedelic work was open-ended; high-dose work was limited to three sessions. I thought, going into it, if you could do it safely three times, you could do it safely more. But what I found was that by doing it as systematically as I did and pushing that edge as hard as I did, issues arose. Challenges emerged that had not been discussed in the early levels of the work. Opportunities for insights emerged, but also challenges navigating these increasingly intense levels of consciousness and what it does to your body and mind. As you go into these realities, I found that my students never knew about my work—I kept it completely isolated from anyone on campus. But I found, at a certain point, my students began to be activated by my psychedelic work. There was a natural contagion happening because consciousness at these deeper levels is open-ended. It's like a lake; you throw a rock in and ripples spread out. When one person goes very deep, people around them are naturally impacted. I had to learn how to take care of the activations my students were experiencing. That's why I wrote the book "The Living Classroom"; that came out of years of trying to understand this dynamic between my mind and their mind, and our minds together in the context of consciousness at large. It's not just about taking care of your own body and emotions; it's about taking care of everyone touched by your work at a larger collective level. I wouldn't push it as hard if I were doing it again. It's not that I would avoid working with high doses, but I would balance it with lower doses, and I would balance working with LSD, which pushes a high cosmological ceiling, with Psilocybin and Ayahuasca, which are much more embodied psychedelic states.

**Interviewer: ** There's a couple of questions I want to ask. Much direction I want to go, but I want to come back to the idea of the ripples. I've thought about this a lot, and I'm curious about your take on having some of these experiences. I've even had it in Breathwork sessions, where it's like tapping into this lake—you toss something in, and there are ripples and a time wave, or something like that, where synchronistic things start happening. I'm wondering, from your perspective, when you talk about your students changing, do you think that was more in the sense of your presence and the way you were showing up, or do you think it was more in that subtle realm, where you're going into these states and having more of a ripple on another level?

**Chris Bache: ** I think it's both. As my work changed me, certainly my presence in the classroom changed. But the more interesting aspect is working at the subtle level. For example, I found that when I was lecturing and looking for an example to illustrate a concept, I would pause, my mind would go blank, and an idea would come to me. I would use that example. Students began to come up to me after class and say, very quietly, that it was funny I used that example because it was exactly what happened to them that week. At first, I thought it was just an interesting accident, but it kept happening. The deeper I went into my work, the more students were touched in deep, private, personal areas of their lives—places where they needed healing, where they were blocked, where they needed help getting through to the next stage of their own development. As I faced my blocks and entered into a deep communion with the intelligence of life, it was as if the very intelligent fabric around me was being activated, triggering aha moments with my students. Students began taking my courses partly for the intellectual content and partly to be in the energy of the room. But it wasn't just a resonance spontaneously occurring between my energy and theirs. There was a second phenomenon I discuss in "The Living Classroom," the effect of group fields. Similar to Rupert Sheldrake's concept of morphic fields, although these are smaller, more specific fields, I found there were psychic fields growing around my courses, getting stronger year by year. The more students studied with me, the stronger these fields became, impacting and deepening the learning of subsequent students.

**Interviewer: ** Yeah, it's fascinating, and I don't know how to make sense of it at times. So, thanks for sharing that.

**Chris Bache: ** Once you let go of an atomistic psychology—which treats our individual consciousness as a standalone phenomenon—you open to a larger participatory cosmos where there's a deeper context. It's like a deeper tide always moving in and out. It's very coherent and easy to understand once you shift your metaphysical basis.

**Interviewer: ** Yeah, that makes sense.

**Chris Bache: ** It's like plate tectonics. In the early years, it seemed ridiculous, but once we began to see it, a lot of data made sense. It was elegant, simple, and transparent.

**Interviewer: ** I'm curious about incorporating mushrooms and Ayahuasca. You mentioned they seem to be more body medicine. Could you talk about the difference between your experiences with LSD and more plant-based psychedelics? We've been asked a lot about this. What are your thoughts?

**Chris Bache: ** Inevitably, my take is based on personal experience, so I don't want to overgeneralize from an N of one. Psychedelics used historically have fields associated with them. Mushrooms have been used for thousands of years, creating a field of human experience and consciousness. When one takes a substance, it impacts you partly through the history of your species with it. That's true with Ayahuasca as well. With LSD, we don't have those fields. LSD is new, and I don't think the difference is fundamentally organic versus synthetic—our experience in the '60s and '70s isn't much historically. That living quality, that living intelligence, may come from spiritual agencies on the other side and from humanity's living experience with these substances. LSD strikes me as cleaner in that respect. It doesn't have the same programmed quality. Working with high doses of LSD, after the first 15 sessions, during peak hours, I wasn't working in relationship to my personal psyche at all. The personal story showed up at the beginning and end of a session, but during peaks, I was beyond personal psyche. With Psilocybin, I don't feel so far removed from personal reality. I have limited experience with Ayahuasca, but it has given me extraordinary clarity. Overall, Psilocybin tends to be less disruptive. Ayahuasca is more disruptive, opening up deeper levels. For me, LSD opens very deep cosmological levels. I haven't seen experiences with Psilocybin or Ayahuasca that correlate with what I experienced in the last 10 years of my work with LSD.

**Interviewer: ** What were some of your experiences like during those last 10 years? Could you give examples of big themes you worked through, if they weren't so personal or psychodynamic?

**Chris Bache: ** That's a tough question because each state builds upon earlier stages. One barometer would be time. I had a consistent set of experiences where I experienced my life's totality from beginning to end in an immediate now. I had insights into my old age, experiencing the distilled essence of my entire life boiled down to now, which was mind-shattering. I also entered archetypal dimensions, experienced something like the Platonic domain of reality, except these beings were vast and responsible for creating time and space. I had episodes of causal oneness, the experience of the primal void, cosmic love, and compassion as the emotion of oneness. Eventually, I entered the diamond luminosity, which occupied the last five years of my work. It was a state of incredible clarity, and once I touched it, it became my sole objective to return there in my sessions. In between those times were tremendous cleansing and purification. There's a lot of levels, making it a complex story to tell.

**Interviewer: ** People should read the book to learn all this.

**Chris Bache: ** Well, with the book out, they don't have to get it from me speaking. I've done my best to tell the story as cleanly and simply as I can, without philosophical baggage.

**Joe Moore: ** Is there a specific story from your project you'd like to share here, a specific gem you like to share the most?

**Chris Bache: ** It's a story of a journey, and every phase was an exciting adventure. I don't have a favorite per se. The diamond luminosity is, from my heart, the deepest dimension. The story of the birth of the future human, where reincarnation is taking humanity, is important. In one session, I experienced all my former lives integrating into me, resulting in an explosion of diamond light from my chest. This wasn't just an incremental improvement; it was a profound transformation of consciousness. Reincarnation is about developing compassion and understanding, working gradually towards the birth of the diamond soul. It's not just egoic but eternal in being. The universe evolves entire species, not just individuals. If I had to share one thing, it would be to let go of the fear of death. Death reverses the hard work done here. When we die, we return home. For most, it's an easy transition. There's nothing to fear about being dead—in fact, it's something I look forward to.

**Joe Moore: ** How do you respond to that?

**Interviewer: ** That resonates a lot with me and gave me chills. When I was 16, I had a near-death experience. In the MRI, I was overwhelmed with a blissful feeling of love and going back home. It wasn't scary. I had a hard time coming back here because I wanted to return to that oneness. That's what got me into exploring psychedelics, experiencing that oneness again. Over time, I've learned the work is here; this is where magic happens and showing up in the world matters.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, to complain about the restrictions of time and space is like a weightlifter complaining about weights. This is where the work is done. Time-space is demanding, but progress made here impacts our after-life experiences significantly. Near-death episode people are the closest group I feel an affinity with from my psychedelic work. I've taught and researched near-death experiences deeply and find strong correlations, especially with Ken Ring and others.

**Interviewer: ** It's a powerful topic. Early experiences got me on this path. I had a psilocybin experience that was on par with a near-death experience. Similar experiences captivated my attention, and that's how psychedelics have helped process trauma.

**Chris Bache: ** I've died many times in my journeys. The early work at Spring Grove was meant to give people a foretaste of what's beyond. Shamans are familiar with this. The hardest chapter to write was "Coming off the Mountain," about deep existential loneliness after stopping my sessions. I thought I'd integrate my sessions well, but integrating an entire journey proved different. I felt a loss of communion and existential sadness, realizing I was waiting to die to return to the light. I cultivated an imbalance between transcendence and immanence, losing my footing in the imminent divine. It took a choice and specific practices to ground myself back in the imminent divine, a journey that took about ten years.

**Interviewer: ** I can imagine, after 20 years of deep exploration, that's a long integration process.

**Kyle Buller: ** And that's, I think, in this respect, my story is sometimes described as a hero's journey, but it's not the hero's journey the way it's usually thought of. It's not simply going and experiencing something and bringing back something valuable for your culture or yourself. It's tempered by a kind of lesson that comes from dealing not with the failure of some aspect of the journey, but actually with the success of the journey, of being wounded by the sheer beauty of what one experiences. You literally are wounded by the beauty of the universe, by experiencing the extraordinary intelligence of the universe, extraordinary love of the universe. And if you're not able to create a container inside your historical existence where you can breathe this intelligence in and breathe the compassion in, then it literally can become painful.

So, my story is partly a cautionary tale. It cautions against, and even though I tried to be as methodical as possible and do it as carefully and integratively as I could, going too deep, too fast. If you can call 20 years too fast, going too deep or deeper than you can actually productively use, I think my memories have changed not only the rest of the years of my life, but the trajectory of my soul's entire evolution. I don't think of the results of my journey as necessarily coming to fruition in just the next few decades; I think they come to fruition over lifetimes. It’s changed the entire trajectory of my deep evolutionary project. And I think that's true for anyone who enters into this. When you enter into deep intimacy with life in this way, you purify; you offload a lot of painful trauma, but you also open up to a different relationship with the universe.

So, right now, my primary way of being with the universe in this intimate way is not working with psychedelics. That time of my life is largely over. I'm 70 years old, and this is somewhat of a young person's game, but I do a lot of classical contemplative practice. I do a lot of Vajrayāna practice, which I find to be very complementary to deep psychedelic work. I don't feel any cross purposes between the two different methods of working. I should mention in this context, though, I think it would be a mistake to evaluate the value of psychedelic work by holding it accountable just to the Enlightenment project. I started this work with an agenda of an enlightenment project. What happened was my personal awakening was completely eclipsed eventually by a project of a collective awakening. All my work began to focus on a type of healing of the collective psyche that went beyond my personal healing, and an awakening of the collective psyche that went beyond my personal awakening. And then it became just a radical adventure, a cosmological adventure going so deep that it would be impossible to bring those experiences back and stabilize them in some kind of spiritually awakened state. It's just a different project—the Enlightenment project and cosmological exploration project. These are two different projects that have to be evaluated on their own terms. My two cents.

**Joe Moore: ** Yeah, this is quite the interview. Certainly, I knew it was going to be a big topic, but I'm always impressed by how big some of these things become. And yeah, I do think some people are doing similar projects nowadays, though. I wonder if LSD is still in vogue in this context. I don't know.

**Kyle Buller: ** I don't know. I worked with LSD primarily because that was the work that Stan had done most of his early work with, and I trusted what I saw in Stan's research. I trusted the history there and the methodology he developed. I only began to work with other psychedelic substances pretty much after my LSD work was done. And so, the mind that I brought to my Psilocybin experiences and my Ayahuasca experiences and so on, was the mind that had been transformed by all my previous psychedelic work. The experiences that we have reflect the entire history of our working in non-ordinary states of consciousness. So, if we've done this work only a few times, well, then we have that kind of depth of experience to bring to it. But if we've been doing this work for years and years, naturally, these substances are going to have a different effect because we've been transformed.

The way I think of this is that, in my experience, the universe is an infinite ocean of possibilities. We will never, ever get to the end of it. I used to think we’d get to an end state. That was the project—to get to the end condition. That was taken away from me along the journey. I began to understand it's an infinite progression.

**Joe Moore: ** But that works for us, because our orientation is this Grofian meets Whitehead and John Cobb kind of synthesis. And, yeah, this rhymes, in a sense, with that Bodhisattva vow of, let's keep going, like there's not this endpoint of Nirvana until everybody's there, and it's going to be a long, long time, if time even enters into that discussion.

**Kyle Buller: ** It's a long time, except, of course, it's speeding up. It's kind of like our collective karma as a species is coming at us hard. You know, our culture is basically a culture that's been built by ego, and for all the many virtues and values of the ego, it's fundamentally a fragmented condition, and therefore it creates a world that is deeply imbalanced between ourselves and other life forms. And that world is coming to a radical and accelerated breakdown. And I think this is actually part of the evolutionary pivot that we are coming into a time where we literally will not be able to continue operating out of the same psychological basis that we go at consciousness.

So how fast we might make this transition? If we use historical projections from the past, we probably deeply underestimate how fast this could happen. In that chapter on the birth of the future human, where I talk about session 55—it took me deep into the death and rebirth of humanity—the message that kept coming through was this is going to happen much faster than anyone could have imagined. So, the game is getting very, very intense. We're being driven into non-linear dynamics.

When systems enter into non-linear conditions, they can do things that they could not do when they were in lower energy linear conditions. I think something similar happens with psychic fields. The integrated psychic field that holds all of our individual minds is hyper-stimulated by the suffering we're going into. It's hyper-stimulated; it will eventually move into a non-linear condition, and the rules of non-linear dynamics apply to psychic fields as well as physical fields. Small changes can elicit huge outcomes. Latent connectivity, which was invisible at the linear level, becomes suddenly active and visible at the non-linear level. So, we're going into a trial by fire, and I think this trial is part of the conscious intention of the creative intelligence itself. I don't think it's accidental, and I don't think there are any victims here. Personally, I believe we all chose to be here. We chose to be part of this time in history. It's an extraordinarily important time to be fully conscious and fully active.

**Joe Moore: ** It gives me chills thinking about that. It does feel like things are really speeding up. Sometimes I'm like, you always kind of hear that as you get older, time seems to be speeding up. But even talking to people that are older, things just seem to be happening quicker and quicker. It is really interesting. I feel like I can't hold on to anything. Once you grasp onto it, something else has already changed form.

**Kyle Buller: ** Yeah. So many of our, not only our technology is driving this way, but our social customs are dissolving right out from underneath us. The standards of truth are changing. It's a confusing time; it's a dangerous time, and it's a hard time. But, wow, it's an extraordinarily exciting time.

**Interviewer: ** Do you see psychedelics aiding in this in any way?

**Kyle Buller: ** Yeah, absolutely. I think that the ways in which psychedelics have come back into our culture, both from the Central American and South American cultures, which have kept this tradition alive, and new psychedelics. LSD is often compared to the atom bomb, discovered at the same time. This opportunity to explore dimensions of consciousness that previous generations, for the most part, had to spend lifetimes meditating to just get access to. Now, people of even modest spiritual capacities can have temporary experiences of these realities, which require a profound redrafting of our existential assumptions about how life works. We can engage these dimensions of consciousness systematically for educational and deep transformational purposes, not only for our own personal transformation, but we can work on behalf of the collective in these states of consciousness.

That's what I saw when I first read Stan Grof's work. I thought, wow, this is going to change everything. It's going to be a true before-and-after development. It's like the invention of the microscope for biology and the telescope for astronomy. It just increases the quantity of data we have access to, forcing a radical revision of our theoretical understanding. I think psychedelics are part of it, and just in time, because we have very little time. It's coming at us very fast.

**Joe Moore: ** So, I hate to end the podcast, but we're at over an hour, and I want to be respectful of your time. I really appreciate this. This is a very enlightening episode. Can you tell us a little bit about where people can find your book and perhaps the upcoming audiobook?

**Kyle Buller: ** They can find the book on Amazon. I'm just putting the final edits on the audiobook. I'm not sure that will be released through Inner Traditions, but it should be out, hopefully by the beginning of the year. I will have a website up, hopefully by the first of the year. I'm way overdue in revising this website and getting it posted, but eventually, within a month or so, people will be able to find me at chrisbache.com. That's going to be the easiest way. Right now, most of my written work and some tapes are collected at academia.edu under my name. You can find them listed there. But right now, I'm not as good on social media as I should be.

**Joe Moore: ** It's hard to keep up with.

**Kyle Buller: ** Only do one; it's not worth being everywhere. But what's really exciting is the book is finally out, and it's as clear a presentation of this material as I've been able to take me five years to put it together and bring it forward. It's as good as I can tell the story.

**Joe Moore: ** Well, thank you for all your work, and I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.

**Kyle Buller: ** Thank you, guys. It's been a real honor. I really appreciate the work you're doing. Keep it up. Thank you. Keep getting the word out. You guys are social catalysts. We need all the social catalysts we can get these days.

**Joe Moore: ** Thank you for tuning in to Psychedelics Today. This interview with Dr. Chris Bache was super interesting for me, and I really can't wait to dig into his work more. It sounds fascinating, and I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did or didn't, let us know. We'd really like to hear feedback. If you want to support the show, we accept small monthly donations over at Patreon. If you want to do it at no charge, you can just tell a friend and also leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes or your podcast app; any of those places help a ton. So please, just take a quick minute to help us out, and it would be much appreciated.

We also have a course called Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists coming up. Class starts February 6, and we are very excited. It's an eight-week course that goes through the end of March, and it is extraordinary. Tons of pre-recorded content, class time with Kyle and I to discuss ideas. We'll also have guest teachers. There's master classes and much more. We facilitate the class on Zoom as a kind of web platform. So it's video, you get to see our faces, we can see your faces if you want to let us see your faces, and we get to chat and work through a lot of this material together. So, hope you are interested. If you are, check it out at the Psychedelic Education Center or Psychedelics Today to find the link for this course for clinicians and therapists. And I think that's it for now. Thank you all for tuning in to Psychedelics Today. This is Joe signing off from Colorado. See you on the next episode. Bye-bye.