Bicycle Day Conversation with Jef Baker

Jef Baker: Author and psychedelic explorer Chris Bache meticulously documented the insights from 73 high-dose LSD sessions conducted over the course of 20 years. Drawing upon his training as a philosopher of religion and following protocols established by Stanislav Grof, Chris embarked on a life-changing journey to explore his mind. What he discovered drew him into deep communion with cosmic consciousness. Chris Bache is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. Chris is also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies and a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. An award-winning teacher, Chris's work explores the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states. Chris has written four books: "Lifecycles," a study of reincarnation in light of contemporary consciousness research; "Dark Night, Early Dawn," a pioneering work in psychedelic philosophy and collective consciousness; "The Living Classroom," an exploration of teaching and collective fields of consciousness; and his new book, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe," which I must say is absolutely brilliant and seems to be getting really good reception with everyone I know who's reading it. It is a different form of, as you said, the deepest states that LSD gives us access to.

Chris Bache: It was quite an adventure, quite a long and interesting journey.

Jef Baker: How long did it take you to write? Because there's obviously years of notes, and well...

Chris Bache: Yeah, I had years of notes, and all the 20 years that I did the work. Then I digested that material for more years, took notes, condensed them, and got prepared. Once I actually started writing, it took five years. So it's a long project.

Jef Baker: I think it really highlights the importance of some type of integration. You being a writer, obviously that's your modality of integration. For others, it's art. For others, it's music. But yeah, it really highlights the importance of finding a way of making sense of these experiences after the fact. I remember reading in the book that you would take the time to write as soon as possible after such an experience and to use the music that you had played during the sessions as a trigger, as a mnemonic device, to those emotions which can often get lost in the cloud of the intensity of, I guess...

Chris Bache: Yeah, let me just mention something about the method, to give a context, because that was an important aid in solving a problem, a challenge with work. Doing the work the way that I did, what I did was to work after three medium-dose sessions, always following Stan Grof's protocol. So I was always totally isolated, always working with a sitter, always working with eyeshades and music. Totally internalized sessions. After three preliminary sessions, I did all the rest of the sessions—73 sessions total—as high-dose sessions. So I was working at, essentially, I aimed at 600 micrograms, so between 500 and 600 micrograms. When you're working with doses that high, and you're going as deep in serial sessions over many years, recall becomes a serious issue because you're just pushing the boundaries of consciousness so deeply. I found that to record the sessions, it was important to record them within 24 hours. Recording them often had me writing at the very edges of my comprehension, because I was trying to describe experiences that were deeply mysterious to me at the time. It was a help if I listened to the music that was played in the session in exactly the order in which it was played. I would play a piece of music over and over again while trying to record the session the day after. When I was done with that section, I'd go on to the next piece of music all the way through. On the day after a session, you're kind of hoarse around the edges, but your verbal functions are back, so you're one foot in, one foot out. I found by listening to the music, I could get into a state where I called it standing at the edge of the well, where I would basically get back to the edge of it enough that I could get it down on...

Jef Baker: Paper. Yeah, still a liminal stage. Yes, I remember you writing that some of the things you'd written down during the session, it might have been like "reality is," which, at the time, can be so profound and meaningful. You read it back later, and you go, "Of course it is!" Sifting through that stuff to get your themes that can really...

Chris Bache: Be applied. In general, I didn't try to make notes or record anything during the session itself, because I was so far removed that I just wasn't even in touch with my own body, let alone with anything going on in the room.

Jef Baker: Interesting. Because that's something I've been thinking about recently—recording sessions in the moment, particularly with 5-MeO-DMT and toad medicine. People seem to be channeling stuff, things are coming through—languages and vocalizations that are quite simply out of this world, which there is almost no way of recollecting afterwards. So there does seem to be some merit in recording in the moments to catch things that might come through when your vessel is empty and universal.

Chris Bache: Maybe it may vary by substance and the agenda, of course. The tricky part about the 5-MeO experience is how fast it is. It's short, and it's incredibly fast. The LSD experience is very, very long. It's an eight-hour window. Each of them pose distinct challenges for recall and integration.

Jef Baker: As and as generally applicable across all psychic medicines, I think they all have their own unique challenges. Defining Grof's protocol, I guess the key question to begin with is, what made you decide to do such large doses, given that Stan's general protocol...

Chris Bache: Yeah, well, you know, in Stan's early work, he clearly differentiates between psycholytic or low-dose therapy and psychedelic high-dose therapy. The protocol for psychedelic therapy was developed at Spring Grove Hospital. They were trying to trigger a near-death experience with patients who were terminally ill. It was limited to three sessions. I thought, well, if you could go into high-dose session space three times, you could do it more times. If you could do it safely three times, you could do it safely multiple times. I guess in the beginning, I did high-dose sessions simply because it was hard to find time to do sessions in a dual-career marriage. Soon there were children involved, just to get in both of our schedules, to get a day where we could give the entire day over to this work. I was still thinking in terms of a personal model of therapeutic engagement. All the Eastern sources I had—I'm a professor of religious studies, teaching psychology of religion—and these Eastern sources basically said your karma is ultimately finite, even with many lifetimes, your karma is finite. I thought I could just work through mine faster by working with high doses. I knew the sessions would be hard, but I thought if I could just stay grounded and stay focused and confront the shadow, I could just work through my shadow faster that way. Eventually, that whole protocol was shattered when I began to realize that what was happening in my sessions went far beyond anything that concerned only my personal psyche and my personal karma, my personal soul.

Jef Baker: Even after that point—sorry, would that be at the point of the ocean of suffering that you experienced, where it was quite honestly hard to read that experience of the entire collective human pain throughout all of history?

Chris Bache: Yeah, it is hard to read. I had to really give some careful thought to how much to expose that because I know it's challenging for readers to go into that material. Just to finish that other topic—even once I let go of that personal model, I found that I developed a taste for where the high-dose work took me. It took me farther than I imagined, and I liked it. Now I don't recommend this protocol. I really don't. I would do it differently if I were doing it over again today. I would be much gentler on myself. I would balance high-dose work with low-dose work. I would balance LSD with psilocybin, ayahuasca, more organic psychedelics. But at the time, I mean, this was really—I started in '79, so I did this work between '79 and '99 when I was 30 to 50 years old. So at the time, Ralph, I just, I ended up pushing myself harder than I would recommend other people to push themselves. It's really not necessary.

Jef Baker: You also got that in the book too, which is good.

Chris Bache: Yeah, yeah. I thought the goal was to get somewhere, to get to some endpoint that would be enlightenment or oneness with God or the primal void, and I came to realize that that was a naive expectation. I mean, 50 sessions in, I had experiences which convinced me that the universe is infinite and the Divine is infinite. It's not a matter of getting to the end or some ultimate state. It's a matter of opening ourselves as deeply as we can to the intelligence of the universe or to the intelligence of the Divine, letting as much of it into us as possible, and stabilizing it as deeply as possible.

Jef Baker: You would have known that, at least on a theoretical level, from Eastern studies, that enlightenment isn't a destination; it's a journey, as cliché as that may sound. So you would have gone into the sessions with that, at least in mind as a conceptual...

Chris Bache: Mm-hmm, conceptual, yeah. But I found even the Eastern models that I was familiar with and working with did not encapsulate or profile the full scale of the experiences that opened in this journey. I found that, yes, you can work through multiple layers of the bardo, the after-death states. You can go into extra-samsaric reality, into spiritual dimensions beyond the bardo. But whereas Buddhism, particularly—which is kind of the Eastern tradition that I was most familiar with and most comfortable with—even that tradition sort of stops at that point and invokes the grand silence. When the Buddha was asked the ultimate questions, he invoked the grand silence. He wouldn't describe it, and I found there were realities that would open at that dimension that were just well beyond that.

Jef Baker: The grand silence is correlated with ineffability, which is often thrown about in the psychedelic world, particularly in relation to these large doses. I remember noting the concept of ineffability in the book that...

Chris Bache: Well, as I say in the book, I think ineffability is overrated as a category. It really comes from William James in discussing this talk. One of the qualities of mystical experience is ineffability. Of course, ultimately our rational mind and our verbal mind fall silent when confronting the infinite. But I work very, very hard to put language to things, and I believe in pushing language as far as humanly possible repeatedly before surrendering to the ineffable. Because if we prioritize ineffability as one of the primary features of mystical experience, it's almost as if we're saying the Divine wants to be not known. My experience is that the Divine wants to be known. Ineffability, I think, often is a symptom of hitting our experiential limits. When we break into a new level of consciousness, we can't bring all of it back. There are gaps in my notes. We just can't bring it all back. But I found that if you go back to that same level of consciousness again and again and again, the experiences that were undigestible, unrecognizable, or ineffable in the beginning become comprehensible with repetition and experience. To me, if you can't say where you went, this is a little harsh, but if you can't say where you went, you probably just got lost.

Jef Baker: It reminds me of McKenna's saying about bringing back a middle-sized fish—that you need to bring something back for the community. You've been living in the realms of extraordinary consciousness. You need to bring back something useful. Otherwise, what's it for? At least you can articulate it and express it. For me, that's creative. Some things seem to have a real sort of purity about them, that you can create something beautiful, like a painting or a sculpture that others can see and appreciate. It's a true gift to be able to articulate this life experience in a creative manner. Writing certainly falls into that category.

Chris Bache: Yes. I found it just takes time. I've really had to sit with my experience for years and years to understand. In fact, it's a general rule of thumb: I would never talk about an experience until five years after I'd had it because it just takes a lot of time to fully digest and to understand. In fact, I had the narrative recorded my experiences all the way through, but I was still learning things about the journey in the process of writing the entire journey down.

Jef Baker: Yeah, I've noticed that too. When you start to write things down, other things fall into place. It creates a space for those perhaps otherwise forgotten aspects to drop back in. There's even an aspect of this Amazon shamanic tradition that says you shouldn't speak—like sharing circles are not a thing—simply because by sharing your experience the next morning, it dilutes it.

Chris Bache: I had to really—Buddhism also says one does not speak about one's spiritual experiences except to one's teacher. I had to sit with that for a long time because Buddhism is an important tradition for me, as are all the traditional spiritual traditions, but particularly Buddhism. I really had to ponder whether I should even be talking about these experiences. But in the end, my experience was that the universe wanted me to share what it was that she or it had allowed me to experience. I didn't program my experiences. I didn't choose what I experienced. Something else was entirely in control of my experiences throughout the entire journey. At the end, the universe made it clear: it said, "You didn't give yourself those experiences. We gave you those experiences. Those experiences were never meant for you by yourself. They were always meant for you to share with others." I think no one person's experiences are really important, but when all of our experiences are shared together in the circle, then we begin to have a deeper understanding of this mysterious universe that we're exploring.

Jef Baker: And can build a cultural picture that then has a context for it, yeah. Just to go back to what you said earlier about if you were to do it again differently, that you would use different plants, almost like, and different compounds, almost like building a house. You use different tools for different parts of the construction. Do you work with other plants now? Or did you end your experiences at those 73 LSD sessions, if that's not too personal a question?

Chris Bache: No, not at all. I still use medicines from time to time, though, much less than I used to. It's somewhat a young person's game. I'm 70 years old now, so if I haven't learned by now... So, after I stopped my work—the LSD work—in '99, from time to time I would do light sessions, or I would do psilocybin sessions, and a few times ayahuasca sessions, or salvia divinorum. I broadened my experience by working with those substances. But the LSD work was in a category unto itself. One of the things I found was that my body, my system, was storing energy over time. So when I was doing multiple sessions, my system was storing energy from those sessions and then using that stored energy periodically to trigger breakthroughs into new levels of consciousness. If I were to take a massive dose of LSD today, I would not be able to get back to where I was working regularly when I finished my work in '99. It would take years for me to develop the energy, the power, to be able to access those deeper dimensions of the universe. My understanding over time developed that every step into a deeper level of consciousness is a step into a higher energy, a higher energetic...

Jef Baker: State really stood out, that line, yeah.

Chris Bache: Yeah, and it just takes a long time to develop the power to access these very, very highly energized states of consciousness.

Jef Baker: I think that's with integration, particularly with 5-MeO, I've noticed this. A lot of people can be quite depersonalized, disassociated after a very high-dose toad session. One of the things we advise is embodiment—to bring that energy back into the body and to ground it through the earth, not to go into meditation, which will get you more into the ethereal realms, to bring it back into the earthly realm, almost to discharge it. It's like your body becomes a capacitor for this energy. It's been an empty vessel to accept it. I think it was a good point to jump into the three other two phases. You spoke about the cleansing and the ecstatic phase.

Chris Bache: Yeah, basically working the way I did, I found that my sessions had two phases. Though, at the beginning of every phase, there was some type of intense cleansing or purification process. If I surrendered to that completely, it would eventually hit a peak threshold, and then there would be some type of death-rebirth process. The rest of the session was spent in an ecstatic state, in some type of transcendent experience. That process kept repeating itself over and over through the years.

Jef Baker: You'd think that was all down to the nature of the compound itself? I guess just the way LSD works is a turnaround point halfway at those doses?

Chris Bache: No, I don't think so. I think it's one of the dynamics of consciousness that when you're opening to deeper levels of consciousness, these deeper levels require a—just to enter them triggers a purification, a spontaneous purification of your system, purification of your thoughts, your emotions, purification of your body. Just when you're entering into these very intense, pure states of consciousness, you start a spontaneous detoxification process. There are so many concepts and belief systems and emotional complexes that we all carry that have to be taken apart, have to be undone, if we're going to experience the universe at that deeper level.

Jef Baker: Ayahuasca is, and then obviously the purge is very much associated with ayahuasca, but as you point out, it's applicable to all psychedelic medicines in which you need to remove the blockages in your own system, be they psychological, emotional, energetic, before you can open up and be open to those levels. You extrapolated three factors from those two phases to...

Chris Bache: Refresh me on which particular ones you're plugging into there?

Jef Baker: The cleansing and ecstatic phase with a sliding line between two functions of the larger whole, which was influenced by three factors that related to each planetary setting...

Chris Bache: Yeah, and then first, the depth of the ecstatic portion of the session was influenced by several factors, as I came to understand it. One of them was the depth of cleansing that had taken place in the first part of the session. So usually, the deeper the cleansing, the deeper the ecstatic revelation or entry. The second was the depth of cleansing that had taken place in all of the sessions up to that point in time. Naturally, I say in the book, you expect a deeper experience 50 sessions into a journey than on the first couple of sessions into a journey. The third has to do with this energy quality, the quality of the massive amounts of energy involved. When you work in serial sessions, and I was doing, on average, about five sessions a year—I worked for four years, stopped for six years, and then worked for 10 years, and on average, I was doing about five a year—you're taking your body and your mind into those states. You build up this energetic momentum. It's like an athlete in training. The more you train, you build up this energy, which then carries you through new performance levels. I think that happens with the universe too. It just carries you into deeper levels of consciousness. I found that because these sessions were so intense and demanding, psychologically and physically, I really had to prepare myself for days before every session—physically, yoga-wise, chiropractic-wise, making sure my body was carefully aligned—and then spiritually, dietarily, there were certain practices I would do before a session and others to integrate the session afterwards. It's just so extremely intense.

Jef Baker: It was interesting you used the term breadth there as well—not only depth but breadth, like width, like a bandwidth, which is the first time I've heard it sort of referred to that way.

Chris Bache: Yeah, well, in certain specific experiences, the breadth is a metaphor that describes the ways in which we connect with humanity, we connect with other persons, we connect with nature. We can enter into states of consciousness that are extremely wide, so to speak. Depth is something different. Depth is entering into contact with deeper levels of reality, other systems of reality, other beings, archetypal reality, void, the pure void, cosmic void, types of reality. Those are different categories of experience.

Jef Baker: Okay, that might be a good point to talk about archetypes.

Chris Bache: Hmm. Let me just kind of lay out some of the sequences, the categories. When I got to the end of the journey, well, I went through what I experienced as a series of punctuated death and rebirth experiences. I would break into a new level of consciousness. I would then stabilize at that level over multiple sessions, becoming more familiar with that level, understanding it more and becoming more cognitively aware of how it works and energetically be purified by engaging that level of consciousness. Over time, if I kept pushing, I would come to a threshold and would go through another death-rebirth process, driving me into yet another level of reality, and it would start all over again, having to stabilize my consciousness at that level, learning how to manage the factors at that level. When I got to the end of the journey, I asked myself how many levels of consciousness did I enter, how many fundamental core platforms did I go through? I boiled them down to five. There was a level of work at the personal level of consciousness, then a level of work at the collective mind, which is where the ocean of suffering work and the purification was really aimed at the purification of the collective psyche, more than the personal psyche. After that, there was the archetypal dimension of consciousness, entering into archetypal consciousness, then entering into oneness or causal consciousness, and finally into what I call the diamond luminosity, which is what Buddhism would call Dharmakaya, the clear light of absolute reality. After I went through death and rebirth at a personal level, which took about two years, and then after two years of work at the collective level, working in the ocean of suffering work and experiencing successive deeper initiations into the universe in a chapter I call initiation of the universe, I was spun into archetypal reality. My experience was when I entered archetypal reality, I had the extraordinary sensation that I was entering a level of reality more real than time and space was—more real than our lives here. It took me a long time, several sessions, to stabilize and be able to enter that level. The nature of death required to enter that reality was different than ego death. I had to die as a human being to enter archetypal reality. I found that there was a level of identity we all have as human beings. It's our humanness, deeper than our personal identity, and the human identity had to die to function at a level of consciousness beyond human consciousness, beyond the collective psyche, beyond, and enter into archetypal reality. I only spent about a year and a half at that level, which is not much time—just the tip of the iceberg—but I experienced sort of two levels of archetypal reality. One you might think of as a more platonic level, where I encountered beings and phenomena that were vast—huge. I could not wrap my mind around them. They were just staggering. They were the forces of nature responsible for creating time and space and orchestrating the events taking place in them. At a lower level of consciousness, what I'd call a Jungian level, I entered into repeated experiences of the psyche of the human species, the literal collective unconscious—how the system works, that the human species lives as a single entity, psychologically, even physically. Our minds are cells within our collective mind, and our bodies are cells within the collective body of humanity. I learned that healing our individual diseases contributes to healing those conditions within the body of humanity as a whole. It was just over and over again being taken into the dynamics of wholeness, the wholeness of our species. These experiences, teaching me one after another, first stabilizing at this level, going to another level, going to another level, were teaching me what I needed to know to receive the visions that came later on—where humanity is going, the birth of the future human, the crisis that we're coming to in history, what that's all about.

Jef Baker: Great, yeah. I think what that really shows too is the fractal nature of reality. You describe the different levels as being parts of the whole. It's interesting you mentioned entities because it's something we tend to associate with DMT more than anything. Even though we know from those experiences that, yes, you have to die, and there has to be death of the self to open up to those larger realms. I just wanted to acknowledge things I just noticed in my notes. Kalindi, were you aware of him?

Chris Bache: I'm sorry, say again?

Jef Baker: Were you aware of Kalindi E., who was a large advocate for 30 grams of dried mushrooms, plus, and he was entering some very deep realms of psilocybin? He passed recently, last week. I just wanted to note that there before I forgot.

Chris Bache: No, freight.

Jef Baker: Did you have a teacher during all of this?

Chris Bache: I consider the universe my only teacher. One of the things that might be a little unusual about my experiences compared to others I've talked to is that I didn't have much contact with individual beings, which are common in the DMT experience. Over time, I've pondered why that was the case. I kept being dissolved into levels of being, deeper levels, opening up into vast expanses of consciousness and learning how the universe works—but not in a way that involved engaging individual beings who live on those levels. About the closest I could come to encountering beings as such is when I describe archetypal reality. These realities were so large, I could only image them as galaxies—billions of light-years wide. They were so foreign. In general, I have had contact with beings with psilocybin or ayahuasca, but the LSD work kept dissolving me into being itself. I would encounter an intelligence that would guide me, orchestrate, teach, and talk to me, escalating in deepening. But I never experienced discrete intelligences. To me, the universe is an infinite potential. I experience a dialogue or rapport, dissolving into deeper layers of this infinite ocean. I consider the universe my teacher, always articulately at the other end. The nature of the intelligence I was encountering kept changing and deepening as it went.

Jef Baker: There's a difference, lots about LSD itself in relation to other compounds. I think there's a kind of resonance between the form of the compounds or plants and the experience. LSD has always been a very human-centric experience, from the therapeutic levels of the individual self through to our place in the largest cosmos we can imagine. But as you noted, it's not about beings from other realms or dimensions. It seems to be grounded in the human psyche and what it's capable of. I'd love your thoughts on whether that has anything to do with it being synthetic, discovered by Hoffman in a laboratory as opposed to occurring in deep jungles.

Chris Bache: A lot of people have convictions about the difference between synthetic psychedelics and organics. I don't have a big investment in that distinction. I don't have enough data points to draw conclusions, but I observe that substances humanity has worked with longer develop energetic fields, like Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields. When people encounter the ayahuasca or psilocybin deity, I think all of humanity's experiences with these substances create a field surrounding the chemical. Taking the chemical is not just putting it into the body. It's opening to the field of humanity's experience with it. LSD is new, only a few decades old. The 60s and 70s are nothing compared to the length of time we've been using ayahuasca. I've found LSD to be a very clean substance without much cultural baggage, being shattered over and over at deeper levels, taken into evolutionary territory that feels fresh, without many footprints from other human beings. I don't have that experience with psilocybin or ayahuasca, which feel more frequently traveled.

Jef Baker: It's interesting you note the universe as feminine.

Chris Bache: For a couple of reasons I discuss in the book. The tremendous love the universe triggered in me, the deep heartfelt opening, and passion had a feminine quality. Secondly, the specific cosmology that emerged in my sessions surprised me. A series of experiences took me back to creation, before the Big Bang. I experienced the universe emerging from primal oneness, yin-yang. One consciousness stayed outside time and space, felt masculine, and the other, which created, felt more feminine. This felt congruent repeatedly. The Great Mother lineage is very strong in me. I've always understood my work as in service of the Great Mother.

Jef Baker: As in many cultures around the world, you know. The Earth being the Great Mother.

Chris Bache: I consider my work always in service of the Great Mother.

Jef Baker: As I noted earlier, I'm just up to the point of deep time in your book. Could you give us some insight into the nature of deep time?

Chris Bache: Early in my work, I entered the ocean of suffering during intense collective cleansing. Coming through each session, I'd be spun into a reality so foreign that initially, I couldn't remember it. It took months to fully remember entering what I call deep time. For a total of seven sessions, I experienced my life as a complete whole, start to finish, all days simultaneously. This was hard for my mind to hold because it operates linearly. Learning to stabilize consciousness in that condition took a year. Later, I entered more radical dimensions of time—evolutionary deep time. I had experiences of patterns within time on scales of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, either simultaneously or in an accelerated fashion. To understand, or be taught, what was happening beneath the evolutionary dance. Deep time is entering a different modality of time consciousness. I think the universe has multiple envelopes of time, multiple modalities of time. Linear time is for time-space, but as you move to its edges, you encounter different temporal modalities. You can learn to stabilize consciousness at those levels. It seemed the universe wanted to teach me certain things that required being conscious in these unusual temporal modalities. The last great vision in the 70th session was the most extreme strip-down taking me into the future of humanity.

Jef Baker: I was going to ask what window of deep time insights you had on our future direction of human evolution.

Chris Bache: Starting around the 23rd session, the universe gave teachings about humanity, showing me outlines of what you might call the master story. I don't mean this arrogantly; it kept emphasizing a crescendo, a before and after turning point in our evolutionary journey after thousands of years. Within a reincarnational framework, we're coming to a turning point in our larger story, so decisive that it marks history. Then, in the 55th session, it showed me a profound change in the human psyche, an opening not previously understood. It took me deep into the future, into the death and rebirth of our species—not as Chris Bache, but humanity as a whole. Just as individuals go through death and rebirth, the species would too. We went through a breakdown, a loss of control, and just when extinction seemed imminent, we began to emerge differently, changed profoundly. This collective death-rebirth opened the heart and mind. A pivot took place in the core of the collective unconscious. Post-pivot, humans would be born into a new matrix of consciousness. It was literally, I think, an enlightenment of our entire species, a spiritual opening—the birth of the Diamond Soul. Reincarnation involves expansion upon death, becoming small upon birth. This cycle, repeated over millennia, awakens the larger soul consciousness inside time and space. That's what I think is happening. Crises like global ecological issues signify an ending of ego-built worlds. We must transcend egoic consciousness. The evolutionary drive is for soul reality in time and space, for an awakened species—a turning point in history.

Jef Baker: Yes, Apocalypse means revelation, lifting the veil. It feels like a dramatic catharsis, a battle between control and freedom, suggesting two directions. Many from spiritual circles talk of birthing into the new man. It would be beautiful if we truly are transitioning to a better species.

Chris Bache: There's a chapter in the book "The Birth of the Future Human." The concept was challenging. I began the work thinking of individual transformation but realized it was in service to the species. That's where the Divine focus lies, on a species-wide scale. It's taken us into the dark night. We're confronting past sins, unraveling choices' consequences for new dimensions of being. Awakening the soul expands compassion and consciousness, creating rapport with cosmic intelligence. That's our direction.

Jef Baker: Your description of the ocean of suffering, experiencing every woman's pain ever existing, exemplifies how empathy in this reincarnation model must resolve to a higher level. When did you write "Dark Night, Early Dawn" in relation to this book?

Chris Bache: I wrote "Dark Night, Early Dawn" in 1995–96. I stopped my work in '99 during the Diamond Luminosity years. I restricted myself to analyzing sessions from the journey's first half, needing more time for the second half. "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" takes you from the first session to the end. So "Dark Night, Early Dawn" was three-quarters through the journey.

Jef Baker: I haven't read it, so I asked Andre to throw questions. As a teacher of comparative religion, your thoughts on theodicy—reconciling intelligences with radical evil in history. Is there a solution to the destructive phenotype in human minds?

Chris Bache: The problem of suffering, or evil, relates to understanding the universe's logic. Ramakrishna is right: to understand God, face suffering. It doesn't come from a secondary source; it's in creation's logic. We're incomplete and evolving over billions of years. Suffering is strong now, but we're a work in progress, developing control over body and mind, continuing for billions of years. Suffering's scale relates not just to past achievements but to ongoing development. We're building something incomplete, like rain on stud walls. Humanity hasn't reached a capacity to stop suffering. It's a process, not due to malicious forces.

Jef Baker: Within yin-yang, is suffering balanced by pleasure? Does every suffering child balance with joy elsewhere?

Chris Bache: I don't think it's a direct balance. If we're to deepen joy, we wouldn't deepen suffering equivalently. Imagine we're only 1% along the evolutionary line. No, we're just starting, with the universe billions of years in the making. Engaging this scale provides hope—we're evolving into a higher species. We'll look back on suffering as essential for where we're going.

Jef Baker: Yes, Bali in relation to love and devotion, easing all beings of pain, fits into that concept, doesn't it?

Chris Bache: Yin Yang. Yin Yang is an attempt by a particular culture to articulate some of the deep structures of the universe and to point to this primal duality which then divides into the 10,000 things, becoming the 10,000 things, the complexity of the evolving life. But I think we have to be careful not to hang too much on the primary polarity—good, bad, male, female, things like this. But bhakti is a different issue, and this was a surprise to me. In Hinduism, there are four systems of spiritual work, four yogas: Jnana Yoga, the yoga of meditation; Karma Yoga, the yoga of action. Bhakti is the yoga of emotion. It's loving God, becoming awakened through love. I had always been attracted to the more mental forms of spiritual practice, and of all the various yogas in Hinduism, I was least attracted to bhakti—the emotions, the cultivation of an emotional relationship with the divine. Yet I found in the psychedelic work that bhakti was activated. Bhakti was very powerfully activated, so I had not only a mental relationship with the universe and a cognitive experience of the universe, but an overwhelmingly powerful emotional connection to the universe and experience of the universe, so that it just became a love relationship. For me—everyone has to develop their own vocabulary for the ultimate reality—my vocabulary for ultimate reality is "the Absolute" and "My Beloved," just because of that bhakti quality.

Jef Baker: Yeah, I've noticed that with 5-MeO, when everything is stripped away and there is that zero-point singularity where everything is fused into one point, the only thing left is love. The only thing that can exist or is left to exist is this universal love. From a neuro-reductionist perspective, you can say that's because your serotonin receptors have been completely flooded. Yeah, it's love.

Chris Bache: Love is the experiential quality of oneness. Oneness and love are two sides of the same coin. When you dissolve into oneness, instantly, love is the experience that the universe has for itself. There is no division in oneness, so oneness is all-embracing. We might experience this as compassion or love, but the logic of love is the logic of oneness. Everything short of oneness is fragmented.

Jef Baker: Okay, so would you agree with this perspective that I see a lot in the psychedelic community, that the universe creates separation in order to experience itself, to experience the joy and the pain because one cannot experience itself alone?

Chris Bache: That really presses the question of why existence—why is there anything? When there was the primal void—let's say, using God language, when the Divine was whole and complete in perfect equanimity within itself, why did it manifest the universe, knowing what would be involved, knowing all the pain and suffering that were involved? What was that about? One of the proposals is that this is a way for the Divine to know itself, a way of learning itself. Personally, I've never found that very persuasive. I understand it, and I think there is truth to it, but to make creation an exercise in self-knowledge never settled well with me. Another aspect is that creation is a way for the Divine to share its being. From my cosmology, all of us are sparks of light that emerge out of the primal light. We are aspects of the Divine, little pieces broken off from the primal one. Those little pieces grow and grow, actualizing their innate potential, actualizing their divinity. In the end, it is as if you have one light, which is growing millions and billions of lights out of its own one light. It's a sharing of its being, a cascading of sharing its being, which I'm sure is an inadequate model by itself, but I've asked the universe...

Jef Baker: It's similar in the form of the universe being this diamond with infinite facets, each face being an individual human, showing a piece of light that is part of the whole.

Chris Bache: And we always have to remind ourselves that what has emerged up to this point in time is just the tip of the iceberg. It's just getting started. We have to imagine ourselves a million years from now, which is nothing in evolutionary time. A million years from now, what we might be envisioning as the answer to this question—what is the purpose of creation, why is this happening? A million years from now, we'll have a much deeper answer to that question, and a million years after that, an even deeper answer. So there's a way in which I caution closure on these questions. I'd rather be agnostic, somewhat open-ended. I do think it has to do with self-knowledge, self-expression. I think it has to do with sharing nature, opening opportunities for life to breed life, life to grow life.

Jef Baker: We're seeing a lot of people, particularly at the moment, falling into the trap of certitude, of knowing there's some grand design behind it all, whether it be hidden, sinister cabals. In this time of uncertainty, people seem to be struggling with that and looking for answers that provide some kind of strategy.

Chris Bache: Exactly. When we dissolve into the universe, when we die and die and dissolve into the universe, many of us tap into this condition where we experience the intendedness of it. We experience the meaningfulness of existence, and we come away from it saying, there is a plan, there is a purpose, there is a project here. But when we try to describe exactly what that plan or purpose is, we very quickly reach limits. These limits are built into our evolutionary condition at this moment, for this species, on this planet, in this evolutionary period. I don't think we have a brain big enough to begin to comprehend the mystery's scale. We can feel it, we can affirm it, we can assert it, but closure is elusive.

Jef Baker: It steeps into our fingers, our inclination, our drive to find answers and pin them down. It's rather futile. Perhaps that is what gets us into so much trouble.

Chris Bache: Certainly one of the things.

Jef Baker: You mentioned in Dark Night, Early Dawn Homo noeticus and the widespread use of entheogens as a condition for the evolution of humanity.

Chris Bache: The concept of Homo noeticus is simply a way of putting language to this. Different people have different ways of languaging—Homo spiritualis, the future human, the diamond soul. These are different ways of articulating what I think is a widespread collective intuition and perception, and that is that humanity is growing into something new, that there is an evolutionary development. We go from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens, and there's something after what we are now. There's something coming. Certainly, this is so strong in psychedelic experience—that we are an unfinished species, a developmental species. We're not just getting smarter or more compassionate in incremental ways. I think there are major turning points, like when the rules change. We're coming into a bifurcation point in history. We either make it across this threshold or we probably go extinct. I believe we will make it across this threshold. We will make this jump. And when we make it, however long it takes, that's not the end point. That's just going to be the new platform. We will eventually reach the end of that platform and jump into yet another level because that's the scale of what we're engaged in, of what we're involved in.

Jef Baker: How do you see psychedelics as a catalyst in this moment? There's a huge push for them to be used only within the medicalized model as therapeutic tools for trauma. Then there's the proposal of modern-day Mystery Schools, which I personally think is greatly under-focused. Where do you see psychedelics playing a role in this evolution?

Chris Bache: I understand the strong emphasis in the psychedelic community on demonstrating the therapeutic effectiveness of psychedelics. It's really important that we not blow this opportunity we have. We kind of blew it in the '60s; it blew up in our faces. We lost the right to use these things and had to go underground. It's important we document things, demonstrate their effectiveness. Right now, their effectiveness is being demonstrated in their therapeutic potential. But if we keep going, it's only a matter of time before mainstream thinkers begin to understand why psychedelics are so therapeutically effective: because they open up communion with the deeper dimensions of mind. In the early stages, this encounter with the deeper dimensions of our own consciousness is cleansing and healing. It's very therapeutically efficacious. That can be demonstrated. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. As we go deeper, it opens up our relationship to each other, to the planet, to other life forms, and to spiritual reality. Personally, as a philosopher of religion, the philosophical import of psychedelics has always interested me. I'm not a clinician or therapist. I've been interested in the philosophical or cosmological opportunities. In that perspective, we're coming to a critical moment in history. It's not enough just to heal us at this moment. We have to heal not simply the personal unconscious but also the fundamental human condition. We have to recover an understanding of what we are, who we are, where we are, what existence is about. Psychedelics are coming at a time when we need them because we can't get through this period with the limited understanding that has grown out of 19th-century science—a materialist, mechanistic, reductionistic understanding, which is devastating as a worldview. That worldview leads us to develop a planet where we just try to consume as much as possible because when we die, it's all over and was an exercise in futility anyway. Psychedelics can help us understand that that's not true. It's a very different agenda.

Jef Baker: It's almost like they are the perfect tools for the human condition at this point in time. It feels like there's a grander scheme playing out with this renaissance. How do you think we can incorporate psychedelics into the field of philosophy more?

Chris Bache: Therapists have to do their work. That's what's really going to open the door. They need to study the physiology, demonstrate the therapeutic efficacy, but the Mystery School aspect, the philosophical aspect, is there.

Chris Bache: The key to opening this deeper dimension in mainstream society is for therapists to lead us into it. Once the therapeutic use is demonstrated, society might be more open to the more exotic qualities of psychedelics. However, we have much maturing to do. There are so many psychedelics, unleashing such varied experiences. It's overwhelmingly complex, a maze. You go from 5-MeO to salvia divinorum to psilocybin and ayahuasca—so many experiences. It requires expanding our cosmology to even begin to understand how all these can co-exist within a meaningful framework of existence. To begin this understanding, we have to be highly motivated. The therapists are opening that door for us.

Jef Baker: I think one way to understand it is that these plants, for whatever reason, have evolved with human neurotransmitters. The plants, being much older on the evolutionary scale, are trying to teach us.

Jef Baker: A simpler way of being, to perhaps look back through historical lineage and examine where we went wrong.

Chris Bache: Yeah, where we went wrong again, we don't blame a first grader for being six years old. They didn't do anything wrong; they're just six years old. Humanity has made mistakes, done dumb things, terrible things. But in a larger sense, we're just young and inexperienced. Eastern traditions say the core problem is not that we're evil; it's that we're ignorant. We literally don't know, and because of that, we make bad choices with bad consequences. But the more we understand...

Jef Baker: The more we can make them too. I like the analogy of how we don't judge a tree for growing a certain way; it just is. We accept it more easily than we do with people.

Chris Bache: Yeah, yeah. Exciting times we live in. As we're coming to the end of our discussion, I want to mention something from the last chapter of my book, called "Coming Off the Mountain." It discusses what happened after I stopped my sessions. It's getting easier to break through into consciousness, into intimacy with the universe. But what I found after stopping was a deep existential longing to return to those dimensions. I knew I had to stop, but in my heart of hearts, I was just waiting for this life to be over to return to the full intimacy of the Divine. It took years to find grounding in space-time reality, to live in joy in space-time reality. As we have more experiences of transcendence, we naturally want to integrate that. Integrating a journey is different than individual sessions. I mention this to encourage others not to make the same mistakes.

Jef Baker: Thank you for mentioning that. It's pertinent. After this goes to air, the Australian Psychedelic Society is running a large integration workshop. People struggle with integrating peak experiences like 5-MeO. Embodying the divine in everyday life and small things, being in nature, eating clean, looking after the presence rather than constantly seeking transcendent experiences—it's a pertinent way to round the interview off. A quote from your book fits well: "It's all too easy to think that because we have had a deep and profound experience, we have become deep and profound ourselves." This is a false delusion.

Chris Bache: Yes. The greatest danger of working with psychedelics is psychic inflation. We can overvalue temporary experiences and undervalue the stable platforms of day-to-day consciousness. In Maslow's terms, we can overestimate peak experiences and underestimate plateau experiences. We can have a profound spiritual experience on Saturday and still be an asshole on Monday.

Jef Baker: Yes, certainly visible within some community aspects. We're all growing and learning. If you're happy to leave it there, thank you very much on behalf of the Australian Society and everyone viewing this. Thank you for your time.

Chris Bache: Pleasure to have the conversation. Good to have this conversation.

Jef Baker: Yes, I recommend everyone read your latest book.

Jef Baker: Where can people get hold of the book?

Chris Bache: I've just been told Amazon isn't delivering to Australia now, so the easiest way is through digital forms. Amazon will deliver digital forms. I'm late in getting my website up, but it will be there soon, I hope. So the easiest way is through inner traditions, Amazon, or other booksellers—and get it digitally if it's not being mailed in hard copy.

Jef Baker: Thank you for that. Stay safe in these strange and interesting times.

Chris Bache: Thank you for your work. One day I hope to get to Australia in person and have conversations with your larger psychedelic society. It would be a pleasure.

Jef Baker: Absolutely, yes. We'd love to have you speak at larger conferences here if you're so inclined when you come out.

Chris Bache: That would be great. Thank you, Chris, all the best.