Readable, speaker-attributed text with links back to the original recording.
Audience: Like a smile, another side I truly live. All right, are you doing good? Nice to meet you.
Frank McCaughey: Frank, likewise. All right. Well done on the book.
Chris Bache: Thank you. Thank you, pleasure.
Frank McCaughey: Not only because obviously writing a book, in and of itself, is an achievement, but the nature of this particular book, yeah, yeah. I'm almost exhausted reading some of it, you know? I've read a good bit. I'm exhausted because of the journeys.
Chris Bache: Yeah. It was quite a journey. Always hard to summarize in any meaningful way in a one-hour podcast or whatever, but certainly a message that I'm looking forward to bringing into the world.
Frank McCaughey: Yeah, where do you begin? I mean, you can begin at the start, which is always the easiest way. But I suppose, well, actually, you know what, before we even get into the book, I might just ask because it's ongoing. I feel it's a big part of the book anyway. How are you now? How are things? How is life now?
Chris Bache: Life is very good now, especially now that I've finally written the book and finally gone public with this. Going public with this has been a very healing and deepening experience, actually, to claim my memories, to claim those experiences, and to begin to speak about them without inhibition. It has deepened my integration of those experiences in my life. I don't know where it's going. I suspect in three years, I may be in a very different place than I am now, and I'm in a good place now.
Frank McCaughey: Okay, yeah. The title of the book is LSD and the Mind of the Universe, and it's basically a documentation of 73 high-dose LSD sessions, trips, and everything that comes with that, and all your insights. So maybe let's begin at the start because I think anybody who's taken a psychedelic will know, especially if you've gone on one big trip, 73 is like 73 babies. 73 childbirth, you know? So maybe let's start at the start. You didn't know at the start that this is what was going to happen, you just took a trip and documented it, but you didn't know you were going to keep going and going over this long period of time.
Chris Bache: What happened was, fresh out of graduate school, 29 years old, in the middle of my Saturn return. Didn't know that yet at the time, had finished my dissertation. Was looking for where to take my research. I was a brand-new professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University, and I read Stanislav Grof's Realms of the Human Unconscious. It had just been published. To read it in 1978, I saw that and thought, I got to get in on this. This is just fantastic. It's not only extraordinary for psychology, but it will have enormous implications for the philosophy of religion as well. I felt the draw. I felt like I had found my life's work. I started the work. I knew that you had to, you know, to write truly out of an experiential basis, first you had to do your work, and that meant doing an unspecified number of sessions. I started with three low-dose sessions. Me, about 200 micrograms, got my bearings, got my feet wet, and then I shifted in the fourth session to high-dose sessions. I started working at 500 to 600 micrograms consistently all the way through, which is not a protocol that I recommend. In the book, I strongly do not recommend this protocol for reasons I explain in the book, but basically recorded, documented as carefully as I could, kept all the variables as consistent as I could. I think one of the things that makes this story unusual is not just the depth of where it went, but the stabilization of the variables over 20 years. Always the same sitter, same set and setting, same physical location, Northeast Ohio, a couple of places within Northeast Ohio, same medicine, same dose, same protocol for recovering memories of the session. I think that established a very unusually stable listening post as I entered into this dialogue with the universe.
Frank McCaughey: Yeah, I always admire works of patience. And 20 years is a work of patience. And I like, in a way, how, when you're approaching the psychedelics at the moment, you get a huge amount of coverage. It seems to be everywhere, especially in the last six or seven years, in mainstream media, all of the work, and then you have all these conferences. But the harsh side of, let's say, the dark side of psychedelics is not spoken about. I feel that they're not as well documented in terms of the levels to which the mind, the places you can go. And I feel you really have captured that because that really comes across very early on. We don't want to give away the entire book, obviously, but it does. You capture that this is not like someone going and getting high with friends for 73 times. Obviously, you had your rigorous sort of process, but you are going into the depths of suffering, living and being the suffering. How do you go back into that every time knowing it's like, you know you're getting suited and ready for war, almost?
Chris Bache: Yes, in a way. I mean, you have to go through the same type of mental preparation that a soldier does before battle and a mother does before labor, to be focused, internalized, and ready for whatever the day may bring. At the end of the first chapter, I said the single greatest concern I have about bringing the story of my journey forward is the amount of suffering that it contains. I take some time to try to explain and prepare the reader for what this suffering represents, specifically the suffering of death and rebirth. This is one of the natural components of deep work with psychedelics that, in order to move into a deeper state of consciousness, a state of consciousness where you can experience things that the physical consciousness cannot experience, you must surrender deeply your attachment to your physical consciousness, to your embodied identity, and you go through a death-rebirth process. That first level of death and rebirth around ego death is frequently discussed and honored in therapeutic discussions. But what is less attended to is the fact that, when you go into still deeper levels of consciousness, beyond the early levels and beyond the middle levels, you have to go through the same process of radical surrender of everything you've known to be true up to that point in time. You have to surrender even your own LSD experiences, your psychedelic experiences, in order to go through yet another round of death and rebirth to wake up to yet another deeper dimension of existence. If you're going to press the journey hard or long as I did, you're going to go through a lot of purification, a lot of detoxification, and a lot of death and rebirth. The reason I think you go through so much purification is that I think every deeper level of the universe operates at a higher level of energy. If you're going to break through to a deeper level of consciousness and a deeper level of the universe, you have to go through a purification process so that your consciousness can stabilize effectively at that deeper level of consciousness, so that your awareness can remain coherent there. Otherwise, if you don't, your awareness will remain fragmented. You won't be able to bring back the coherent experience. But there is a lot of suffering. This is not to say there's suffering in the universe, but if you want to explore the universe, you must be willing to go through a deep series of purifications, purifications unto death, to enter into that dialogue, that communion.
Frank McCaughey: And what do you think death is?
Chris Bache: Well, as I say in the book, eventually you come to a point where death loses its meaning if you've gone through many cycles of death and rebirth. You've learned from experience that you can die. You can lose all your reality reference points. Everything you know yourself to be can be shattered and destroyed, but the phoenix always rises. You always wake up. A changed you always awakens in a deeper capacity and a deeper level of reality. From this perspective, eventually, you learn that there is no such thing as death. There is only the shedding of one particular set of parameters within which awareness operates, shedding those parameters and letting consciousness expand to a deeper experience of reality. I think death of the physical body is something very similar to what you go through in a deep LSD session. That type of death approximates what happens when you go through physical death. The body dies, you lose your physical reference points, consciousness expands into a deeper and broader universe. But eventually, the very concept of death loses its meaning in this respect.
Frank McCaughey: Yeah, there were two ways I was going to go. I'll come back to the way I was going to go on that. The grueling impact of an existentially violent psychedelic experience—yes, and there are moments. I think that's a good description. And also, I don't think you ever get comfortable. It's not like after 50 sessions you say, okay, this is going to be no problem because there are bigger levels. Is that fair to say?
Chris Bache: I thought that you would go through a period of death-rebirth and purging and you would get to a stable place, and all entries from that point on would be clearer and easier. I found that's not true. The universe is infinitely deep with an infinite number of levels, and as long as you keep pushing the outer edges of your experience, if you're willing to go farther, the universe will keep taking you in deeper. It always will require some deep surrender, some death and rebirth process to move deeper into it.
Frank McCaughey: When you say universe, what is that to you? What's that word mean to you?
Chris Bache: My experience is that when you let go of consciousness at the physical level, you enter into a deeper dimension of consciousness, and then later a still deeper dimension, and still a deeper dimension. It's all coherent from top to bottom and it's fundamentally unified. For me, it never took a face, never showed an identity as such. It was always open-ended and perpetually fluid and invisible, yet very deeply felt. So what do we call this consciousness that we dissolve into at successive levels? Some might call it the infinite, the absolute. I call it both of those things. I call it the creative intelligence of the universe. It feels to be the creative intelligence inside the universe and behind the universe, different aspects coming forward at different times. In the end, in my heart of hearts, I call it my beloved because once you enter into it, once you dissolve into it, once you recover your true identity within its identity, it opens up dimensions of love within you, and it pours dimensions of love within you that it becomes my beloved. Sometimes I call it the great expanse, something to suggest its vastness, power, creativity, intelligence, and of course, since compassion is a mark of oneness, its inherent oneness, so that compassion is a spontaneous manifestation of its innate oneness.
Frank McCaughey: Yeah, it's funny. I think you quoted an Indian guru who used the word the beloved, and was the guy in England who would refer to oneness. So he would refer to the Beloved. Tony Parsons would talk about unconditional love, but not the love that we would know. It's love beyond conditions, beyond—it's not personal; it's the allowance of all things.
Chris Bache: Yeah, it's a deeper love than human love, but I think it is alive in the best of us when we experience love. But it is radical love. It's the love that the Dao has for the 10,000 things. It's the love that being has for its own self, for its own being. Because, in the end, from its perspective, all of us and all of creation is a manifestation of its being. So how could it not love itself? And therefore, how could it not love us?
Frank McCaughey: So let's see, can we—I'm going to go this route. Let's see where it goes. Say the idea of my beloved. Who do you think is describing when you say it's my? Who is describing the beloved? You know this sort of perspective, because there is a perspective that it cannot see itself, only in reflections, because it is already what's happening. The Beloved is already what's happening there. It can only ever appear as—do you know where I'm going with that?
Chris Bache: Yeah, I do. It's very hard to objectify in a way, when that objectifying is almost what is a part of the Beloved, is that happening already. It's fresh already. It's already complete. In other words, what you're saying there, while we're kind of talking about experiences that you've had and you've written a book, it gives the impression of being once removed, but obviously, it's a part already.
Audience: Yeah, we have all sorts of ideas and stories we tell ourselves about what this totality consciousness is and isn't and what it can know and can't know. And I think a lot of that is just cultural scripting. It's our best guess. It's our best cultural guess, and our best cultural guess is not very old at this juncture. We've been kind of making these metaphysical guesses or intuitions for 5,000 years, but this intelligence is 13.7 plus billion years in the making and unfolding, and we're just kind of getting to the stop place in our evolution where we can really begin to engage it. So my sense is I don't know whether this intelligence is not self-aware, except through us. That seems kind of outrageously puts enormous privilege of place on us as to be the mirror of the Divine Eye. Why should we assume that this intelligence is not self-aware as it unfolds itself with seeming pointed accuracy through time and space? What I can say is this, when I lose my boundaries as Chris Bache, when I allow myself to dissolve as Chris Bache and enter into these deeper layers. There's many, many layers of this phenomenon. So some of the early layers have to do with my species consciousness, the mind of the collective unconscious, the mind of my species. Other layers have to do with the mind of our planet, Gaia consciousness. There are multiple layers going right through species mind, the archetypal mind, archetypal dimensions, the root causes of some of the patterns inside time and space, the root cause even of time and space itself, moving even deeper into dimensions of oneness. Permutations of oneness, even entering into the primal void that appears to be the formlessness out of which all form emerges with the Big Bang and subsequently, and then entering beyond even that. At each level of entry, entering into clearer and clearer and clear states of being, states of awareness. So it's hard for me to imagine that the being or dimension of being that I have been in for hours at a time would not also be self-aware in its unfolding. It's also been the case that I've had the experience that this creative intelligence, or an aspect of creative intelligence, met me in my sessions, took me on a cosmic tour. You know, in that chapter, initiation into the universe, it seemed to want to show me its work. It seemed especially pleased to have evolved consciousness to the point where some of that consciousness could come back and be shown what has actually been being worked on for billions and billions of years. So it seems to delight in being known. But I wouldn't say necessarily that it didn't know itself before I knew it.
Frank McCaughey: And did you get a sense of—do you still have a sense that despite having spent so much time, in a way, you're still only—it's impossible. It's so vast, it's scraping the surface, the enormity of the all of everything.
Chris Bache: So this was a major change in my thinking. It took place in the 50th session. My background is, I did four years of work. I stopped for six years, and then I did 10 years of work, so 14 years of active work over 20 years. When I was entering into the last five years of work, or those years of what I call the Diamond Luminosity work. This was 26 sessions out of 26 sessions, that's about a third of all the sessions in the book. Four of those sessions took me into this Diamond Luminosity, an unbelievably beautiful, ecstatic, empty consciousness that was just clear, just clear beyond imagination, just so clear, so hyper clear, that once you touch it, nothing else matters except returning to it. Nothing else I had entered in earlier stages mattered in the least compared to connecting with this. This is what the Buddhists call, I think the closest thing I could find is what they call Dharmakaya. You know, they have three dimensions, or three modalities of existence: Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya. Dharmakaya being the deepest, and Dharmakaya the absolute, the light of the clear light of absolute reality, kind of the light out of which existence emerges. I'm sorry, I got so involved in the description. I lost track with the original question.
Frank McCaughey: Well, I think I know where we're going though, because we were talking about the vastness and scraping the surface. And you said, yeah.
Audience: So I was 50 sessions in. I was in the second of the four Diamond Luminosity sessions. I was as deep into ecstatic diamond consciousness as I had ever gone and would ever go. It was the deepest penetration in that way. Toward the end of the session, I had this experience where my visual field flipped 90 degrees. A huge space opened up. Beyond where I was, there was another reality, worlds upon worlds beyond me. There was a light there, and a beam of this light hit me, and it shattered me. I called the light the absolute light, just to give it a differentiating name from the Diamond Luminosity light. It showed me that there were worlds and worlds beyond where I was, as far beyond where I was as the Diamond Luminosity was beyond time and space. That told me that an idea I had taken into this work, that the purpose was to get to an end point, an end stage, a destination, to go home, something like this—that that was just not an accurate assumption. You do repeatedly have a sense of going home. You do enter into deep, deep experiences of Homecoming. For me, the Diamond Luminosity was my actual practical destination. I did not go deeper than that. It totally satisfied me in all respects. I continued to do the session work, but for the next 23 sessions, it wasn't going deeper into the Diamond Luminosity, but it was internalizing Diamond Luminosity, soaking deeper and deeper into my physical and psychological being. But it's an infinite ocean. I gave up completely the idea of ever getting to the end of it.
Frank McCaughey: Unfathomable. It's unfathomable everything.
Audience: Well, in a sense. What is the term we use for not being able to—ineffable? We like to say the mystical is ineffable. I don't necessarily agree with that. Language falters, but I think making ineffability a primary characteristic of mystical experience cuts off rather than opens up. We should exhaust ourselves trying to describe what lies at the edges of our awareness, rather than surrendering to the silence. So, unfathomable in one sense, but not unfathomable. In another sense, I think I fathomed what I entered. I went back again and again and again, and I stabilized consciousness and I understood it. But there are dimensions beyond what I understood, and even my understanding of what I experience is admittedly limited, okay? I wouldn't want to say that the reality itself is innately unfathomable. We can fathom, but it takes hard work and discipline.
Frank McCaughey: There's a part of the book, I think you describe it as "the royal we." Let's say, you describe it's us. You say us creating everything "the royal us." You haven't used the word "the royal," but that's the sense for me. It's a generic feeling of us-ness. What does that bring back to you when I mention that?
Audience: First of all, this reminds me to mention that this book is not primarily a therapeutic story, and it's not a story about my personal healing or the advice I got from the universe at a personal level for my personal life. It's not that I didn't receive those things; I did receive those things. But I've dropped them out for the most part, in the story. In the story, I'm focusing on what took place during the peak hours of these high-intensity sessions. It's fundamentally a cosmological story, a story about the universe and the aspects of these sessions that have generalizable significance, where we're touching dimensions of reality that all human beings share in one way or another. So, sometimes I speak about the "we" in the book because I'm basically acknowledging that what's important in these experiences is not that I experienced them. That's not the important thing. The important thing is that these dimensions are available for all of us to experience if we use sufficient technologies and techniques to get into these territories, including non-psychedelic techniques such as meditation, contemplation, silence, so on and so forth. That's the important story. When you enter these profoundly expansive, encompassing states of consciousness, you're not an "I" when you go into it. There's an "I" in the sense that you have continuity of memory, so there is a sense in which "I" is present to facilitate recall. But you cease to function as an individual. In some of these, I ceased to function as a human being when operating beyond the species mind at archetypal reality levels. You have to cease to function as a human being, and you have to learn how to be conscious, not as a human being is conscious, but in a totally new and unprecedented way, and the universe will take you in and teach you. It literally will give you exercises inside the sessions, and you have to take the assignments you're given and do your homework to enter fully consciously into subsequent sessions.
Frank McCaughey: I mean, it's interesting, even though you didn't focus on the personal journey in the book, it's funny how psychedelics seem to always remind you of that element. It'll give you a list of things, but there will be personal aspects every time, like eating well, being nicer, very personal things.
Chris Bache: It's personal. I mean, I own the journey. It was my journey, and it has all my limitations in it. What's important is whatever I experience, that it be placed on a table beside other people's experiences. We look at lots of people's experiences simultaneously to find common ground, what's idiosyncratic. From a philosophical perspective, I want to know what's real, and one of the best ways is to compare lots of people's experiences of this reality, so we can see it through that prism. Within my own experience, I own that it is my journey. It's a personal journey, yet the most important parts of the journey didn't really involve me. In a sense, let's say the filter of Chris Bache was highly polished away, shattered, deconstructed at the most important parts of the journey.
Frank McCaughey: Do you think, in a way, when you went through this suffering, the humongous amount of suffering—"the ocean of suffering," you called it—an ocean is pretty big. Do you talk about the ego death within that ocean of suffering? Do you think that you were there in that, or was there just the suffering? Or do you feel like it's almost, I had to go through all that to be—it's like the dying on the cross, that symbology of suffering is almost to kill the resistance, and then within that, the expansiveness can happen. Is that true?
Interviewer: Well, my understanding of the ocean of suffering deepened and changed over the years. What happened is, after about two years, two and a half years of work, the first ten sessions, I went through what Stan Grof describes as the perinatal level of consciousness. I felt like a poster child for the perennial severe seizures, existential crisis, confronting the meaninglessness of life, so on and so forth, reliving aspects of my birth, and eventually went through a deep and shattering ego death experience. Everything I knew myself to be was turned inside out, and I was forced to become the opposite of what I knew myself to be. I was a male, highly educated, white academic obsessed with the meaning of life. I became a woman, many women, women of color, women who had no philosophical interest whatsoever, and basically, it just shattered me, shattered my identity, and then took me into a deeper spiritual dimension.
After one transition experience, I went from that condition into the ocean of suffering, which was an expanding landscape that was systematic, expanding year by year for over two years of active session work—14 sessions—just horrendous planes of human suffering, opening to thousands and thousands of beings, thousands of years, just unimaginable brutalities. And at first, I thought this was a deepening of my ego death. I didn't understand why I had to go through this, but based on the information that I was working on at the time, I thought it was a deepening of ego death. But over time, I changed my mind on that, and that is now I understand that there are different levels of the universe, and what's happening differs according to which level you're operating on. At this level of the universe, I was operating in subtle level reality. I was operating in the context of the species mind, and these tremendous purification processes, this encounter and opening to the pain, and letting the pain in that it moved through me, was not really aimed at my personal transformation, but at transforming some aspect of the collective psyche, so that the healing being generated here was aimed at my species, not at me personally. And this built up for two years. Actually, there was one year I stopped. For six years, I started, then six years later, and the ocean of suffering started exactly where I had stopped six years before. And it continued to deepen and deepen, and eventually reached a crescendo of an orgy of suffering and pain, and then I was spun into archetypal reality, and the ocean of suffering never returned.
I think just as there was a process of cleaning out the personal unconscious leading to an ego death, there was a cleaning out or healing of some aspect of the collective unconscious, and then being spun beyond the species mind into archetypal levels of reality. What prevents this suffering from being internalized in your system is trauma. When you do this work, if you surrender completely and let the session take you wherever it wants to take you, even though it doesn't make sense at the time, it will take you to a culmination, a breaking point, and then you will be spun through that. You'll go through to a point of reconciliation, of ecstatic embrace. And then what you internalize and love, what you internalize then is the whole cycle: the trauma, the physical violence, or the psychological violence, breakthrough, and reconciliation harmony so that it doesn't internalize as trauma. You learn the cycle. You trust the cycle. I was willing to go back into the pain for two reasons: one, because I felt a calling to it. I felt a destiny calling me to engage this pain for reasons I explain in the book. The other is that I really wasn't a glutton for pain. I hated the pain. I was a glutton for what lay on the other side of pain, or the insights and the ecstasy that I got on the other side. One I started going through on the second year of this ocean of suffering, and I broke through into these series of sessions that I summarized in that chapter, initiation of the universe.
One of the first things it did was take me deep, deep, deep in time back to what felt to be the font of creation. And there I was. I experienced the beginnings of creation, the Big Bang type of experience, and I experienced it as a choice that in some strange way, I and all of us had participated in that we chose to participate in creation, we chose to participate voluntarily in the act of creating a universe, galaxies, solar systems, the human species, that the suffering that we've encountered on this agenda, on this adventure, is not being inflicted on us. It's something we chose as a kind of passage, a rite of passage to participate in the creation, or the self-expression, the self-manifestation of our universe. Chose, hard to say what that means at the level of soul that we're talking about, but there are no conscripts here we are volunteers.
Frank McCaughey: During the book, there's a part you mentioned, the sense of no beginning.
Chris Bache: No beginning. I have to think about that. You know, that doesn't ring a bell. I'd have to...
Frank McCaughey: Yeah, well, say this idea explodes time.
Frank McCaughey: Psychedelics explode the sense of duration, or let's just say, the idea of infinity or eternity or timelessness, maybe more so.
Interviewer: There are different modalities in which time exists that you experience in psychedelic states. There's an experience of timelessness, or moving beyond time, moving outside of time and space. I've had that experience. I've gone there. But there's another more subtle dimension of time experience that I call Deep Time. Deep Time is moving into temporal envelopes, where different spans of time can be experienced as simultaneously now. In one of the early sessions and teens, I experienced stably in seven consecutive sessions, my life from beginning to end, all the experiences of my life as simultaneously taking place now. I experienced what it felt like to be old in a distilled essence kind of way. Later on, I was taken into larger segments of Deep Time, what I would call collective Deep Time, where I was being taught or shown aspects of human evolution that required a larger time landscape to show them to me, maybe a landscape of 100,000 years or so. At the very end of the journey, in the 70th session, and what I call the final vision, I was taken into a temporal landscape. Who knows, hard to describe the scale, but somewhere on the order of maybe a million years.
I've come away with the conviction that there are different modalities of time operating within the universe, and I don't begin to understand how this is possible. I've had some interesting conversations with some physicists exploring different temporal dimensions within the universe. I'm not a physicist. All I know is that I've been taken in and out of time many ways, in multiple frames of reference, only one of which is a negation of time in itself. Most frequently, it's allowed me to experience different modalities of time or different aggregations of time.
Frank McCaughey: Yeah, I suppose the idea, if I said to you, there is no time...
Interviewer: I would say there are dimensions of existence in which that's true. Time comes into existence with space. Time and space are a sort of fundamental unit, so when one moves to the edges of space, you move into domains where time behaves differently. Within space-time, time is very convenient. The arrow of time is generally true, but that doesn't seem to exhaust the whole of the universe with respect to time. We now know that what 96% of the universe is dark matter and dark energy, which we don't know what the hell is going on there. So we're getting used to understanding that time-space is really just like the skin of an apple. There's a lot going on underneath the skin of the apple. That's true for space. It's also true for time, I think.
Frank McCaughey: Do you think time is related to the sense, the ego would say, or a sense of this, that when there is a center in the universe, let's just say, you know, when you're location-based, and then sometimes during the trip, you can be exploded. It can be just gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.
Frank McCaughey: And in that, even this idea of time, that it's almost a requirement of a separate human who lives in time and is a certain amount of finite and who knows the world knows this is Earth, and this is 2019 and all these pillars of knowledge, and that's what's the little piece in the center of all of that, is that holds it together, this little me and this world. And when that's gone, that there's just timelessness, and in that, it's whatever appears. So, yeah, whatever is appearing here in this conversation is all of everything, and whatever appears in the vastness of one of those trips is all of everything. Yeah.
Chris Bache: You describe it very nicely. I like your description of how individual awareness kind of anchors our sense of time, and when individual awareness is shattered or blown out, then our experience of time changes. Now, I don't know whether for everybody, when individual awareness becomes transparent, or Shunyata emptiness, or is blown out, I don't know whether everybody necessarily flips into pure timelessness. My sense, I'd rather say there are different modalities of time that we can move into when we're not so heavily grounded in our physical body, sense of identity, okay, but yeah, time becomes porous. Times becomes, well, becomes porous, and we can experience insights that have to do with future, so-called future time. We can have insights of what's going on that violate the patterns of space. We can know something that's happening outside of our physical senses, that's happening now, but far away in space. We can have experiences of something happening far away in time. So time does get permeable.
Frank McCaughey: Yeah, yeah. And you did speak a bit about this, being able to see futures, and I'd be familiar with that, and I've heard it in a good few places too. It collapses a lot of things. What was I going to ask? You the, I suppose...
Chris Bache: If I don't know what I am right now, it's not because the universe hasn't beaten it into my head repeatedly and just shown me mercilessly the truth of my being and the truth of all of our being. So I'd say, yes, I know what I am. That doesn't mean I can always hold that in my awareness 24/7, but I've had ample experiences of what I am, and that my identity is essentially the identity of the totality. And with that experience, there's tremendous relief, tremendous release. All judgments are dissolved. All judgments, good or bad, are dissolved. There is just the infinite joy of one's true nature, one's true reality, and then the joy of living consciously in that reality, rather than living unconsciously in that reality. If we live consciously in that reality, our life gets better and better. If we live unconsciously in that reality, then we're subject to the fluctuations of karmic conditioning. We get caught in all these scenarios. So the trick is to stay mindful, to be aware that we are always, in subtle ways, creating our reality, and we can always create a better reality if we are more transparent to our nature, which turns out to be the same nature which is bubbling up inside every living thing, inside around us, every person, every object. It's all one nature, and in that, there is tremendous relaxation.
Frank McCaughey: I think that's a nice way to finish. I think that's... keep talking to you, but we have so the book. Have a couple of... it's available. Is it online now? I'll put a link. You can send me a link.
Chris Bache: Amazon, I can send you a link. Amazon.com, in the United States, has it. They'll be releasing it November 26. I'm told that in England, Amazon will not be releasing theirs until January 2. I would assume that Ireland probably is more linked to Amazon.com, so either November 26 in America or January 2 in the UK.
Frank McCaughey: Okay, very good. And is it on Kindle? Also, it's both, obvious...
Chris Bache: And there will be an audiobook that will be released. I just finished recording it for Inner Traditions.
Frank McCaughey: I mean, it's an epic journey. Epic is the only way you've gone. And I like how, like I said at the very start, you haven't necessarily glamorized it. You haven't. This isn't a prescription; it's a description of what you have gone through and experienced and you've managed. It's like when I was a kid, I used to go into dreams, and I used to try and take sweets out of the dreams and bring them home, and I'd wake up disappointed that I couldn't bring the sweets out. But in this book, I think you've managed to bring a few diamonds from heaven. So well done, fair play. I'll put the links up, and I'll do a short version of this, and then I'll do a longer one—great.
Chris Bache: Thank you, Frank. Thank you for helping me bring the book forward. I really do appreciate it. Excellent questions. I enjoyed our conversation a lot.
Frank McCaughey: Yeah, likewise. Thanks for the chat. Thank you and good luck with this. I hope it does well.
Chris Bache: Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye, bye.
Frank McCaughey: Hi, if you like the conversation that I just had and you'd like more, please hit the subscribe button. Thank you.
Audience: Where to take it. Here.
Editorial note. All published transcripts in the Chris Bache Archive are lightly edited for readability. Disfluencies and partial phrases have been removed where they do not affect meaning. Verbatim diarized transcripts are preserved separately for research and verification.