EP.6 - Chris Bache | LSD AND THE MIND OF THE UNIVERSE

Host: Okay, welcome everybody to the Naked Guru Experience. I'm Ryan Kemp. Just as a little forward, this discussion is part of a series in tribute to the American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna and is sponsored by the Psychedelic Society as ever. It really helps in the production of these discussions if listeners subscribe to our YouTube channel. Today's guest is Christopher M. Bache. Chris is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years, an Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a junk faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and on the advisory board for the Grof Transpersonal Training and the Grof Foundation. An award-winning teacher and international speaker, he is the author of a number of books, including Lifecycles, Dark Night, Early Dawn, and the book we'll be discussing today, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, in which Chris catalogs his epic journey over 20 years, where he engaged in 73 high-dose LSD sessions, working at 500 to 600 micrograms. Chris, welcome to the podcast, and thank you so much for agreeing to this discussion.

Chris Bache: Hi, Ryan. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Host: So we have a lot to cover in just a small amount of time. And I just wanted to say from the start that your book has been profound in my life, and it's in huge discussion all around the world and multiple groups. I know the feedback from many others—it's been life-changing for many others. So thank you for your work.

Chris Bache: Thank you.

Host: I'd just like to start with a little introduction to you and your background and influences, if you will, please, Chris.

Chris Bache: Well, I'm the last person you would expect to have written this book. I was raised in the Deep South, grew up in Mississippi. I studied theology at the University of Notre Dame. I was actually in the seminary for three years in high school and one year in college. I did my master's at Cambridge in New Testament criticism. I was going to be a New Testament scholar. Shifted out of that, got my Ph.D. from Brown University in philosophy of religion. But when I came to ISU, and I was looking for the next area to focus myself. I was trained in philosophy of religion. I encountered the work of Stanislav Grof, which was life-changing. I also encountered the work of Ian Stevenson, whose research on reincarnation was life-changing. But it was Stan's work, particularly, that seemed to set the course for my life. I understood immediately the implications of his research for not only psychology but for philosophy—the opportunity to develop a new philosophical methodology, the systematic exploration of consciousness through the disciplined use of psychedelic states. Now, of course, the United States had made psychedelics illegal at that time, so I divided my life in half. In my daytime job, I was a professor at the university teaching courses in Eastern religion, psychology of religion, comparative mysticism, and a course called Transpersonal Studies. And then I began, in my personal life, a very private exploration of my deep psyche, using Stan Grof's protocols for psychedelic therapy and then pushing those protocols to their limits to explore my consciousness. And through that exploration, what I came eventually to understand was the consciousness of the universe itself.

Host: Brilliant, brilliant. Now, a lot of what we're going to discuss in this talk, there'll be people within the psychedelic and psychological and even spiritual community that will be very familiar with what we're going to talk about and our terminology, but there is a good, I'd say, probably even a majority of human beings on our planet that are not aware of these kinds of psychological landscapes and the terminology. So for me, I think it would be helpful if you could please frame for us the context that we're talking about when we discuss LSD. A lot of people will see this as a discussion on drugs, when actually it's a discussion far from it, from something far more profound.

Chris Bache: Yes, yes. We all kind of suffer from the carryover of our culture's experience with psychedelics in the 1960s and all the negative press that psychedelics generated, or were generated around psychedelics, when the true story is really very different. Psychedelics in general, and LSD in particular, function as non-specific amplifiers and catalysts of consciousness. They don't give you a particular experience. What they do is hyper-amplify your consciousness, and if you use these hours of hyper-amplified consciousness carefully and conscientiously, if you shut out all outside stimulus and focus your attention completely from within, you can use those hours to explore and to, in a sense, excavate the deep architecture of the psyche. Now, in today's world, I'm always cautious saying this, but when I was doing this work, just to be clear, I was always working privately. I was always working in very controlled circumstances, either at my house or at my wife's office. My sitter for all the years of my work was my wife, my first wife, who is a clinical psychologist. So I was always protected from the world. I was isolated. I was lying down. I was surrounded by pillows. I was wearing headphones, listening to a very carefully curated playlist of music, which is designed to facilitate a deepening of the experience, and wearing eyeshades so I was completely protected. Someone was taking care of my body, taking care of the musical selection. My job was simply to focus on what was emerging at the center of my experience and to allow that experience to go wherever it would go. If you do that, what begins to happen in the early stages is you begin to confront your personal shadow. You begin to confront all those aspects of your life which you are ashamed of, are embarrassed by, are intimidated by, or uncertain about—the deepest fears of your life, including when you get down to it, the fear of death, the fear of extinction, and the fear of the meaninglessness of life. And then, if you keep that process, these fears kind of come to a crescendo, a peak expression. And if you will confront that peak expression and let it take you where it wants to take you, it will take you through some crisis, which eventually becomes some form of death and rebirth—some absolute shattering of your life as you had known it, of reality as you had known it. And then you fall into a deeper level of reality. You die at one level and awaken within a deeper level of reality. And your session shifts from purification to an ecstatic phase of the session, and you basically are given, you enter into an intimate dialogue with the universe, an intimate initiation into successive layers of the universe. This is what working critically, therapeutically with psychedelics is all about.

Host: And would you describe that, Chris, as what Jung would term the collective unconscious?

Chris Bache: Well, the collective unconscious is a stratum of consciousness that lies below the personal unconscious. So in Jung's model, we first encounter, when we go below our conscious mind, our personal unconscious. But if you can go deeper than your personal unconscious, you enter into a stream of awareness, which seems to be a collective stream shared by all human beings of your species. So this is Jung's collective psyche. Then, if you go deeper than that, you enter into still deeper streams of consciousness, entering into what some would call global consciousness. But you can enter into levels of consciousness that go beyond space-time reality altogether, enter into archetypal levels of consciousness, enter into complete states of dissolving into non-duality and what might be called causal oneness. And you can enter deeper states of consciousness even than that. So it's a long journey with many levels of exploration along the way.

Host: So in your view, like the view of Jung and in many spiritual texts and very many religious texts, we have our personal, individual mind, but the universe itself is a mind, a oneness of its own. Would that be correct?

Chris Bache: Yes. And as I experience it, at least, our individual mind is a fractal embodiment, a fractal manifestation of this larger cosmic mind. So at one level, there is a functional duality, which we might call a small mind and the big mind, but at a deeper level, there really isn't a duality. There is a continuum of awareness that we are a small actualization, a fractal manifestation of this larger cosmic consciousness.

Host: Now, just while we're discussing your technique and what you were up to in these sessions, one of our questions from the Terence McKenna guys was about the music you were listening to. So you described the area where you were and that Carol, your lovely wife—ex-wife currently—was sitting for you. But what about the music you were listening to? I know this changed over time, but could you tell us a bit about that?

Chris Bache: Well, here I was drawing upon Helen Bonnie's early work in the study of the stages of psychological opening in an LSD session. I learned about her work through Stan Grof's work, and she differentiates five stages of opening and closing in an LSD session. An LSD session is a long session—it’s, you know, a six to eight-hour session. And there are the early stages of latency, then the medicine begins to kick in. Then there is an acceleration of opening of consciousness. One begins to encounter resistances and fears as one moves deeper. The energy continues to build exponentially. There is a peak period, and then there is you hit the long, kind of steady plateau of the experience. And then there is a long, slow gradual return. So each of those stages of consciousness is best paired with particular types of music. In the early stages, you want music to calm you and relax you before the session actually gets underway. And then when the session begins, you want music that gives you a sense of flow and continuity, music that can support your letting go of fears and resistances, shifting gradually to stronger music with more climactic cadences and themes to support your really letting go into the deeper turmoil that rises in your consciousness, eventually leading to the moments of great breakthrough. And then, as you move into the breakthrough, you want music that supports the vast expanse and the opening of horizons that can open after you go through a death-rebirth process. And in the return, you want music which is very gentle, increasingly gentle, gives you a lot of space in which to process your experiences. Now, again, I want to mention that all of this is contingent on the type of psychedelic you're using and the dose at which you're working. Now, I chose to work with very high doses of LSD. I worked with 500 to 600 micrograms. I started working—I did three sessions with about 200 micrograms. I chose to work at five to 600 micrograms in a sustained protocol of this sort. And this generates enormously powerful experiences. I mean, it's not like taking 150 micrograms and relaxing on a sunny afternoon under the trees. It's a much more powerful hyper-stimulation of your consciousness that just challenges and shatters all the limitations of your known mind, and the music accordingly, I found it was important to have very strong music, engaging music. I found quickly that indigenous chanting and music from foreign cultures were more effective for me than classical music. Its very foreign nature made it easier for me to surrender to the foreign territory that I was entering into. It gave my ego less room to hold on to, and therefore it was more challenging, but it was also more productive in that it helped me get into the deep material more quickly, more easily.

Host: Right, and the indigenous music you were using, were these kind of Ayahuasca shaman chants, or were they worldwide different tribal chants?

Chris Bache: I have used icaros from Ayahuasca ceremonies late in my psychedelic life, mostly after my LSD years. I mean, I did this work between 1979 and 1999, between when I was 30 and 50. I'm 70 now, but in the primary years, I didn't really encounter the Ayahuasca music until much later in this process. The music tended to come from a lot of African music, a lot of Tibetan music, Indonesian music, Japanese music, South American music. I was basically just always looking for music that would give me a supportive but challenging context against which I would allow myself to enter into these deep states. And I found that I could only use a piece of music approximately about three times; after I'd used it three times, the music became encoded with the experiences that I had had with it. And in order to avoid being kind of repetitiously encoded or programmed by the music, I always had to be looking for and using fresh music.

Host: Right, so the mind had taken the music, and you kind of knew it, and it was then programmed along with the previous experience. So that's if you re-listened to it, you would go back to the same experience, or...

Chris Bache: Well, it would tend to pull you in that direction. Or at least there was some potential for it to pull you in that direction, maybe not the second time you listen to it, but if you listen to the music repeatedly, it can narrow your conscious experience instead of expanding and opening it.

Host: Right, so as you just touched on there as well, you saw this, or what you came to learn, that what you were doing was a series of iterated deaths and rebirths in one body, which is also quite common in the other literature with Stan Grof's work and whatnot. So could you talk a little bit about how you view that, and what is its relationship to actual death and rebirth as we know it, the leaving of this form and coming back into a new form? Perhaps your views on that?

Chris Bache: Yes, well, it took me a long time to understand the patterns of my sessions because in some ways they started as I expected them to, drawing upon Stan's map of consciousness that he gave us in his early writings. But then after a few years, they seemed to diverge in some ways and enter into new territory. But one of the things that I've come to understand over time is that consciousness has many levels, many tiers, operational levels. And each time you enter into a new level of consciousness, there is required a surrender of everything you had known before, of everything you had learned and assumed before, in order to enter into a level of consciousness that operates by completely different rules. Now, it's not that Chris Bache's ego, even a softened ego, can be catapulted out into some reality and have an experience. It's more that when you reach a certain level of release, the assumptions of time and space kind of place limits on your experience of that spiritual level of reality. And there comes a time if you keep pushing that eventually there is an invitation extended or a breakthrough which you come to, where you have to let go even deeper, let go to something even deeper than your physical identity, which shatters you yet again and takes you into yet another level of reality which is deeper, a deeper level of spiritual reality than the earlier level you had been experiencing. And this process repeats itself multiple times if you use your sessions in a focused way and always pushing to explore the deepest dimension of consciousness that's possible. Now I want to say, I don't advise that people do what I did. I mean, really, if I were doing it over again, I would not adopt such an aggressive strategy as I did, always pushing so hard with such high levels of LSD. I would be much gentler on myself. I would balance high-dose sessions with low-dose sessions. I would balance working with LSD, which is a kind of high-ceiling psychedelic, with psilocybin or Ayahuasca, which are much more body-grounded psychedelics. So I'm describing something without recommending it to be followed or used by other people. Truly, I don't. But doing what I did and learning how to navigate these waters and surviving my own foolishness, in the book I'm just trying to tell stage by stage exactly what happened as best I could on this deepening immersion into the universe.

Host: And when you say pushing forward, that suggests a kind of active role in the experience. Was it a process of pushing outward into these kind of further landscapes, these further psychedelic and psychological vistas, or was it a process of surrendering into them, or maybe a combination of the two?

Chris Bache: It's really a matter of surrendering. The only pushing is by the repeating of the circumstances of availability. You create a completely quiet and safe container. You detach yourself from all the circumstances of your daily life, you take a powerful medicine, you surrender yourself to the care of another, and then you open. You allow yourself to open. What happens next is beyond your control. At least working with this substance at this higher dose is beyond your control. You surrender to a larger consciousness. The longer I worked with this material, the more it became clear that there was a larger consciousness that was guiding my sessions, guiding my education in the sessions, that was meeting me, breaking me down, loving me, caressing me, breaking me down some more, forcing me to face certain things, challenging me to face certain things, and then thrilling me, taking me into deeper and deeper intimacy with what I would come to describe as the creative intelligence of the universe. It's hard to describe when you enter so deeply into states of consciousness that so far transcend your physical consciousness. How do you describe it? What categories do you have to describe it? We could call it the cosmic mind, the universe's mind, the great expanse. In my heart of hearts, I've come to call it My Beloved, because returning to such intimacy with the very source of your existence, with the source of all existence, awakens such a deep passion of embrace and being embraced that it, well, I call it My Beloved.

Host: I mean, what I really love about your work, for me and somewhat Stan Grof's work, is it reconciles psychology, psychedelics, religion, and spirituality in a way that can be read in a way that reconciles that. When you discuss terminology and you discuss it as your Beloved, Jesus may have called that the Kingdom of Heaven within, Buddha may have called that Dharmakāya, the Hindu Atman. And so there exists kind of a spiritual terminology that to a lot of people is very alien and dogmatic and separate, but once viewed in the context of your work, through the psychedelic where one can experience this as direct contact with the transpersonal, the transcendent, it all fits very, very nicely, and you all of a sudden come to understand what those human beings were trying to describe. It's not something abstract; it's something that can be experienced in a number of ways. Would you agree?

Chris Bache: Yes, it can. And certainly, once these experiences become part of our cultural story, they are subject to all the distortions that culture can bring, so they can be subject to the distortions of historically limited perspectives, to patriarchy, to all sorts of cultural constrictions. But I had the advantage of teaching world religions, and I was teaching courses in comparative mysticism. So over and over again, year after year, I was studying some of the great spiritual teachers from around the planet. And if you do this, you quickly outgrow the limitations of your own religion of birth, and you begin to enter into this collective perspective where you begin to recognize a deeper, fundamental core overlap of many of the teachings of the different great religious teachers, what is often called the perennial philosophy, the perennial tradition. And at the same time, so there is a sense of recognizing what people have been talking about when they talk about the divine, what they talk about when they talk about transcendence or Atman and Brahman. These categories become alive for you as an essential vocabulary to articulate what is becoming your natural experience of the world. And at the same time, at least in my experience pushing as deeply into the universe as I did, I was shown over and over again that all the religions of the last four or 5,000 years are radically and profoundly incomplete. They are noble initiatives in history which reflect a certain state of human evolution. But the landscape of human evolution, the landscape of the Divine initiative—I hesitate to even talk about God very much, and I hesitate to even talk about the divine, because those words are so heavily laden with theological presuppositions that I don't necessarily want to affirm or buy into. But basically, when you begin to experience the magnitude of the intelligence and presence that suffuses existence, and the magnitude of the compassion and an intimate love that the creative impetus, the creative intelligence has for all of its manifestation, all of its manifest beings, it just opens worlds within worlds within worlds. So there is both an affirming and a humble recognition of the greatness of the great teachers and saints of history, and at the same time, a sense that even they have not captured, perhaps, the vastness of the great expanse of the world as it is, our 13.7 billion-year-old world, and the scale of the evolutionary project. Sri Aurobindo said that humanity was a transitional being, and if we don't understand what we're transitioning to, it's hard to understand what we are. Even right now, everything we're doing is taking us. It's not—we're not only the culmination of everything that has been in our evolutionary story, but we're also laying foundations for what we are in the process of becoming. And what we're becoming is something, at least from my experience, that is not something that results in a culmination of a few thousand years out, but hundreds of thousands, millions of years, millions of years coming. So it's just that radical expansion of existential horizons that qualifies my relationship to the world's religions.

Host: And your journey in particular—I mean, what I really enjoyed in the book as well was your journey hasn't necessarily been one of just love and light and bliss and divine unfolding. As many have the kind of presupposition of, the spiritual path—to use, for lack of a better word—the spiritual path they think is some kind of love and light, blissful path, but actually it can be very difficult, very isolating, very lonely, and very nightmarish. In some sense, many people that are on the path, whether it be through psychedelics or whatever spiritual practices they may be involved in, to be on that individual path can be very difficult. And what you mentioned in your book was some of the dark side of what you've been through very openly and honestly, voyaging, especially in your early sessions, through the hell realms. In your sessions 11 to 15, you mentioned the hell realms. Could you talk about those a little bit?

Chris Bache: Yeah, I had to think a lot about how to present the different types of suffering and the different types of challenges that I faced on the journey because, and in fact, it was my greatest concern in beginning to share the story of my journey with the world, with others, because I did not want them to become scared of the unseen universe, and I did not want them to prematurely misjudge the psychedelic method itself. And I really had to think about this, and eventually, I decided to just tell what happened, to lay it out and tell what happened. And there is great joy and great beauty and great ecstasy. I wouldn't trade these 73 days for any treasures on earth. I mean, they showed me so much and they gave me so much that whatever purification processes I went through and whatever pains I went through, I paid them gladly to have been rewarded more than fairly for what happened along the way. But what you mentioned, the hell realms—well, this is the kind of scenario. I basically, after about two years of work, went through a really crushing ego death, where my historical existence was just turned inside out and shattered. And I thought, "Okay, I've gone through ego death, then I won't have to go through that anymore. I won't have to go through ego death. Everything's going to get better and better now." But what happened was that very quickly, within a couple of sessions, I began to enter into realms of collective suffering that were just much, much worse than anything I went through in ego death. I entered into what Buddhism calls the hell realms. I called it an ocean of suffering. I was systematically, over a two-year period, taken deeper and deeper and broken down at deeper and deeper levels into realms of collective anguish involving thousands and thousands and thousands of beings, human beings, and thousands of years of history in very detailed patterns of configuration. And at first, I thought, "This must be a deeper iteration of ego death. I must be going through a deeper form of ego death." But eventually, by the time this ended, I realized that this wasn't about my personal ego death. It wasn't about personal healing at all; that somehow the universe or something was using my sessions to facilitate a healing of my species, of my people, that somehow, in opening myself or allowing into my conscious awareness the unresolved trauma of history—all the terrible things we've done to each other, all the killings and maimings and rapes that gave terrible scars in the collective psyche—that somehow, when a person opens this deeply, if you are willing to let this pain and suffering in, it has a clarifying effect, a healing effect, a transformational effect that heals a certain portion of the collective psyche of humanity. Now I wouldn't dare try to estimate how large a portion or what its impact is, but I was just taken repeatedly through these hell realms. Eventually, they culminated—I was about four years, four and a half years in, 24 sessions in, and they culminated in an extraordinary kind of orgy of the ocean of suffering. Then I was spun out into a deeper level of reality that lay beyond the hell realms into archetypal reality. And at that point, all the collective suffering stopped, just as the ego death suffering stopped when I went through ego death, the ocean of suffering stopped when I went through this culmination and entered into archetypal reality. But later, at deeper levels, as I went into still deeper levels, there were still challenging periods that I would go through, just periods where I entered into patterns of chaos, patterns of psychological dismemberment, patterns of just different subtle forms or ordeals that were hard to understand because, you know, we're charting some territory that lies far, far deep into the dimensions of the Divine, into the dimensions of the cosmic mind itself. But every time I came into one of these sort of patterns of ordeal, or patterns of clarification, I came to recognize that these were all some form of purification; that if I allowed these things to take place, something was being lifted from my system, something was being broken open, and eventually it would culminate and take me into yet a new stunning level of discovery and a deeper intimacy with the body of the Divine.

Chris Bache: I didn't know what was over the horizon, but perhaps the most profound gift that Stan Grof gave me was a trust in the universe. A trust that you could surrender yourself to whatever was asked of you, and if you did so completely, the universe would ultimately take care of you. You would go through ordeals you may not understand, but in the end, with hindsight, you would gain a deeper understanding of what was going on. Absolute trust, if you surrender completely, will lead to breakthroughs and deepening initiations.

Everybody has different measures of tolerance and different circumstances. I don't think it's wise to push, even though I did this as responsibly as I could, taking very good care of my body throughout and between sessions. I was doing about five sessions a year. I worked for four years, stopped for six years, and then worked for 10 very intense years. Over those 14 and a half years, I averaged about five sessions a year. I had months between sessions to digest my experiences, to write them down, to reflect on them, and I was doing a lot of yoga, meditation, and spiritual practices in between. However, even with all those preparatory practices, I found myself pushed to my limits. Ironically, in the end, it wasn't the pain that was the most difficult to manage in my work. It was the ecstasy, the intimacy with the fabric of existence. Entering what I called the diamond luminosity, what Buddhism calls Dharmakaya, the clear light of absolute reality, dissolving into the light that precedes the physical universe, dissolving into the crystalline body of the Divine, that ecstasy, that joy, became more difficult to manage than the pain of getting there. The difficulty wasn't the joy itself, but that it was temporary. I could not stay in that condition. There are great masters who can stay in that condition, and I honor them. In my circumstance, I could only gain temporary access to these realities, and when I came back out of them, I was both deeply spiritually satisfied and left with an aching sense of bereavement because I had to leave.

Ryan Kemp: Yeah, it reminds me of what Baba Ram Dass used to say: "We're all walking each other home." It one necessarily doesn't require psychedelics to go there. Life itself is an analogy for what you're talking about. We go through forms of suffering on a day-to-day basis, which we tolerate and overcome for our good, the community, and the human race. We also experience periods of bliss. We're interfacing with that reality daily, independently of these cosmic experiences. Would you agree we're all walking together?

Chris Bache: Yes, absolutely. During these sessions, your consciousness is temporarily amplified. If you want to understand what truly happens in a session, you must understand what happens in life outside of a session. For me, reincarnation is a simple fact of life. We incarnate, taking on a particular persona—male, female, rich, poor—incarnating in historical periods and social conditions. We live our life, then die, expanding back into our soul consciousness, into spiritual reality. We contract with each incarnation into our next learning exercise, learning, and then we expand. I tend to see this like a semester, choosing our courses, locked in until the end of the semester, and then we expand.

As we begin to meditate without psychedelics, focusing on the consciousness living through all these lives, we speed up our spiritual evolution. Focusing on our inner experience, we confront themes and choices that might otherwise manifest physically. Psychedelics are simply another form of spiritual practice, intensely focusing on your fundamental core stream for temporary periods. It's a detoxification process that accelerates spiritual evolution. There are many levels of return, but we are simply dancing the dance of life, just in a slightly different form. You can stop anywhere along the way, just as you can stop meditation or psychedelic practice, and continue to dance the life dance. It is the dance.

Ryan Kemp: We discussed moving outward from the collective egoic mind, as Eckhart Tolle calls it, into individuation, as Jung termed it. That process can be lonely, especially if you're not in a community that understands you. Jung said loneliness doesn't come from having nobody around but from not being able to express your important ideas. This journey can be lonely, and the road to it is evolution and meditation. I'm sure you've been through those experiences, like many of our listeners and those on this journey.

Chris Bache: Yes, the deeper I've gone, the more I feel my fundamental connection with all human beings. I resonate more deeply with the human condition and dance. In "Dark Night, Early Dawn," I discuss individuality. Many spiritual traditions consider individuality an illusion, saying the goal is to transcend individuality and return to the one. The drop returns to the ocean, dissolving into the divine, and homecoming means losing a sense of separate existence. I disagree with that. My experience shows individuality is a great manifestation of existence. We shouldn't live in isolated individuality, thinking it makes us ontologically separate from others. I agree with Buddhism's teaching of anatta or no-self, that all experience is part of cause and effect manifesting continuously. There's no unchanging Self over time. However, if you let go of the small self, open and grow into a deeper individuality in exchange with all life, continually expanding, that's the maturation over time—this selfless individuality is a great spiritual gift. Two truths: the truth of oneness, interconnectedness, and the truth of the learning system experiencing, internalizing, and becoming more.

Ryan Kemp: Something I grappled with in your book was whether we have one soul known as God or many individual souls. Is it linguistic reductionism, or do we have that distinction?

Chris Bache: We can define terms as we go, as long as we're clear. We can use "God" as the one soul of which we're drops, or refer to "soul" as the totality of experiences in our former lives, unique within the collective species mind, a planetary and galactic mind. Midway through my journey, for example, I experienced integrating all my former lives, like wrapping a filament of light around a spool. They fused, and there was an explosion of diamond light from my chest. This catapulted me into a consciousness unlike any I'd experienced, an individuality beyond previous experiences, which I called the birth of the diamond soul.

I was given teachings that reframed my understanding of reincarnation. Previously, teachings suggested being mired in illusion, growing slowly over incarnations to divine breakthrough, and leaving time-space. These were up-and-out cosmologies, but this is incomplete. Eventually, the soul wakes up in the body, in time-space. The diamond soul is spiritual and psychological maturation, knowing we're more than our physical experience, recognizing relationships developed over thousands of years, with transparency to others, other species, the universe. This represents our next stage of evolution—a spiritual maturation, heaven on earth.

Ryan Kemp: So the spiritual realm, perceived as dreamlike, doesn't exist in matter. It's creative, divine, manifesting in matter within the universe. Is that correct?

Chris Bache: Yes, we can think of it as the mother universe infusing and shaping the daughter universe of physical reality. At the quantum level, there's a dance, an infusion of energy from the sub-quantum realm. 96% of the universe is dark energy and matter; physical existence is just the surface. Reincarnation teaches us our egoic identity is temporary. We stand astride two realities—one foot in the daughter universe and one foot in the mother universe. Conscious integration of these realities lets us live as expressions of the divine energy of manifestation. I image this simplistically: one reality is light, the other green. The manifest universe is the green manifest body of the Divine; the world of pure light is the transcendent divine. We often get caught in the physical side of reality, longing for the spiritual. As we awaken, it's not simply awakening to leave time-space, but to the fruition of the evolutionary project within it, as conscious creators and collaborators inside. A new cosmology, a deeper understanding of the purpose of physical existence.

Ryan Kemp: A question from a Terence McKenna group member: during your experiences, did you meet entities in a non-atomic realm, existing in the quantum, non-human souls, different from the collective or one soul?

Chris Bache: I've met discrete intelligences in spiritual reality, but my experiences were not centered on entities. My trajectory was not toward a society of beings but deeper levels of being itself, leaving atomic reality for quantum awareness, fields, and patterns. Each level may have patterns one could call entities, but they dissolve into deeper existence. I'm comfortable with the entities, like those depicted by Ayahuasca artist Pablo Amaringo, but my deeper experiences were of dissolving into patterns of being rather than separate beings.

Chris Bache: New social initiatives were basically an unleashing of something we had learned, something that had taken place in the center of the human heart in the midst of this crisis. Just as a saint, undergoing intense spiritual practice, goes through purification—which John of the Cross calls the dark night of the soul—likewise, in our collective evolution, the dark night of our collective soul is a time of complete surrender and intense purification. This breaks us down at the center, yielding a time of great awakening, a great spiritual manifestation, a redirection of the human heart and culture. It was a true great awakening of the species.

In subsequent sessions, I was taken into deep time again and shown that this represented not simply a historical breakthrough or a technical or economic restructuring of our culture, but a truly seismic shift in the depths of the collective psyche. A pivot took place in this global crisis—a global systems crisis, which appeared to be driven by a global ecological crisis. It was a shift in the core psyche, the collective psyche, which all human beings draw from in their individual life. So when the collective psyche shifted, it meant every generation born on the planet after this shift was informed by and infused with this new blueprint, this new psychological capacity. I think what I was experiencing was a true spiritual awakening, not just of individuals, but of our entire species.

Ever since this time, I’ve come to understand that my personal belief, and what the visionary experiences showed me, is that humanity is coming to a decisive moment in its evolutionary journey. We are coming into a time of critical challenge requiring maximum effort and clarity. Literally, this is a time of labor. Gestation is long, but the time of labor is short, intense, and convulsive. We have been preparing for this time in history for thousands of years through reincarnation, reincarnation, reincarnation. But now we are entering a time where I think we are giving birth to the future human. We are giving birth to a different kind of human being, the diamond soul. The soul is entering history in a collectively unmanifest and unprecedented fashion.

The world as we know it was designed by ego. The ego is a magnificently beautiful psychological structure, which I respect enormously. But ultimately, the ego is a fragmented psychological structure, leaving us cut off from each other and existence itself. The world designed by the ego creates divisions—between races, religions, and classes—division upon division. But the birth of the diamond soul represents a new starting point for humanity, a deeper experience of oneness—not just as a concept, but a profound awakening within the human heart. A species grounded in this experience of oneness builds a different world than the ego builds. And I think we are giving birth to the diamond soul in history.

COVID-19, I see not as the crisis, but perhaps as an early stage of this fermenting crisis. It is painful and difficult, but it's teaching us something. If we learn the lessons COVID-19 offers—compassion, the consequences of egoic leadership, divisive patterns, and self-centeredness—things can go very badly. But if we open to caring, selflessness, reigning in blind repetition and greed, we learn valuable lessons for the deeper crises that are coming. To appreciate the scale of what we are facing, you just need to read deeply informed ecologists and students of history about the tragedies generated by our changing climate. This is the crisis COVID-19 is preparing us for.

Ryan Kemp: Yeah, beautiful. It's in the collective mind as well. On an individual level, people are aware something is brewing or coming. Throughout human history, it seems there’s always been a sense of a looming cataclysmic event, but now, more than ever, it's certainly in the collective mind. Our habits and way of being are both destructive, yet there’s also this kind of psychedelic renaissance, and many are looking to the past for answers about the future. In COVID-19, you see only a small part of this larger vision. As you look to the future, do you see catastrophic events, like previous species having to die off for new versions to evolve? Is that what you're pointing to?

Chris Bache: Well, I want to be careful. I'm not a visionary outside of my psychedelic work. I don’t have a psychic ability to see into the future. I only have what I was shown in my visionary experiences inside my psychedelic sessions. These visions have been consistent and uniform, and I trust the consciousness that gave them to me. I recognize one person's visions are personal and may not hold the same value for others. What I saw was a world entering acute crisis, a depth of crisis breaking us down at fundamental levels. Only when faced with intolerable suffering were we willing to make choices we hadn't contemplated previously—choices for the greater good, for our children's children. These new choices were necessary to pull us back from this destructive binge we've been on for hundreds of years. A new future began to emerge. But I wasn't given specifics about how, when, or why, just very broad strokes.

What was imparted was the inner experience of species death and rebirth, some understanding of the collective mechanisms required to mature quickly enough to meet the challenges we face globally. I was shown mechanisms that operate at the collective level, which are detailed in my book. They involve how systems operate when moving into non-linear ranges—non-equilibrium systems, the physics of non-equilibrium systems as they apply to psychic fields and the psychic field of the human family as a totality.

The greatest gifts given at the end of my journey were experiencing what I'm calling the future human—the child we are giving birth to, what this future human feels and looks like. Describing it might make me weep, as this being was so beautiful and magnificent. We’re talking about a healed, truly healed humanity; a humanity with an expanded heart, like Christians see in Jesus' sacred heart—an awakened heart dichotomy. A mind open to the universe's intelligence in new and profound ways, a truly enlightened humanity, just a magnificent shift in human experience's common ground. Similarly to a mother forgetting the labor pains once a child is born, humanity may look back on the intense birth process and say it was worth it. We might have done it easier or faster if we’d been smarter or avoided some self-inflicted pain, but when the future human is born, it will be worth it.

Ryan Kemp: Yeah, yeah. You posed a question in your book, asking about the value of true but temporary knowledge, moving into these planes and returning. You mentioned having different answers at different times. What is your answer to that at the moment?

Chris Bache: The soft underbelly, if we do this work not just for temporary highs or insights, but to facilitate a maturation of our psycho-spiritual life leading to a shift in our consciousness's ground, an abiding shift—not only peak experiences but plateau experiences—then we must embrace the temporary nature of psychedelics. We enter these states only for a few hours and come out, reconciling with practice limitations. But if we use those hours diligently, they accelerate our evolution, showing us where we're going. Psychedelics act as strange attractors, drawing us into deeper collective evolution faster.

It's frustrating to be immersed in universal wisdom at 2 PM and by 10 PM to have congealed into ordinary consciousness again. As for true but temporary knowledge, I may have pushed myself deeper than was wise into deep, temporary knowledge. If I were doing it over, I’d be more patient with a slower evolution. After 20 years of work, it was time to end my sessions, and the consciousness I engaged knew it too.

After my final vision during the 70th session, there were three goodbye sessions closing our work. Despite many blessings, I encountered a profound existential loneliness because I couldn't return to the divine intimacy. Though spiritual practices helped, they couldn’t bring me back to those depths in this lifetime, leaving me quietly waiting to die and return to my beloved. That’s not a good way to live. It took 10 years after stopping sessions to reground fully and find contentment within my incomplete self inside time and space.

True but temporary knowledge is valuable; transcendence teaches us who we are and our purpose. But plunging too deeply into transcendence can undermine earthly belonging, a lesson I had to relearn after stopping. Beyond losing communion, it was difficult to remain silent about psychedelic experiences, never sharing with colleagues or students due to legality. However, now retired, I wrote "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" to openly share, past the statute of limitations, embracing being vocal about experiences is liberating. Writing the book and engaging in conversations like this has been healing, integrating psychedelic and physical existence, experiencing wholeness denied by societal silence.

Ryan Kemp: Would you say you have found happiness or contentment from these experiences? I empathize with that separation and bereavement of losing those landscapes and feelings. Post sessions, have you found deeper happiness and contentment? Or are these neuroses still present? Ram Dass often said his spiritual journey didn’t cure his neuroses, leaving him unchanged.

Chris Bache: Ram Dass, such an interesting man. Deep respect for him. There is a deep relaxation in having existential questions answered and existential pains soothed by clarity and truth. I’ve been given a deeper appreciation of life, fostering relaxation and cooperation with it. In intimacy with the universe's creative intelligence and experiencing divine love, there's profound spiritual fruition, perhaps not curing all foibles but hopefully tipping the balance towards being kinder, calmer, more compassionate.

Enlightenment is tricky; classically, it's living fully transparent to our eternal abiding nature, aware of that aspect of us which is eternal and indivisible. If enlightenment were the goal, I would have worked differently, with smaller doses. The work shifted from personal enlightenment to supporting humanity's enlightenment and cosmic exploration, going deep into the universe's inside. That’s different from classical enlightenment, where universal experiences aren’t necessary.

Though enjoying a promise towards spiritual awakening, healing historical fragments, finding deep peace and contentment, I fear not dying and look forward to it. I know where I'm going, back into the light. If I could offer others anything, it would be the loss of fear of death. When feared, cosmology is inverted. Life here, in time-space is challenging; spiritual reality is reward, home, and light.

Ryan Kemp: Have you been tempted in recent years to return to high-dose sessions? Aldous Huxley was famously administered a large dose of LSD on his deathbed while his wife read him the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Has that idea intrigued you, especially now, 20 years later?

Chris Bache: Actually, Huxley received two low-dose sessions, and Laura Huxley discusses this in her autobiography. I’ve done lower-dose sessions with LSD since stopping, but generally, it doesn’t work well for me now. I've pushed my system hard with high doses, almost developing an LSD allergy. If I attempted a massive dose today, I wouldn’t reach the same places I explored in later work. Each deeper level involves intense energy, which accumulates from session to session, creating breakthroughs into new consciousness realms. These aren’t merely hours of work; sometimes, they represent years of integration.

To return to those territories could take years of conscientious work to rebuild energetic momentum. Now, I lean towards conventional spiritual practices, daily meditation, or gentler psychedelics like psilocybin or ayahuasca, reconnecting fields of knowledge around me from LSD work. These aren’t for breaking new ground but integrating the reality touched in those days into my being.

Ryan Kemp: Like Alan Watts’ adage, "When you've got the message, hang up the phone." What are your thoughts on that?

Chris Bache: That’s not my experience. Huston Smith used this after about half a dozen psychedelic experiences, when bummers increased and it didn’t work for him. But I found bummers signify deeper cleansing and interesting challenges, especially when death really pushes you to the edge. Saying hang up after getting the message depends on identifying what that message is. There are messages early, middle, and late, each significant at that time. Everyone makes personal choices, and while early messages are okay to stop at, later revelations are equally important. I'll own biting off perhaps more than wise, though not more than manageable.

Ryan Kemp: Well, thank you very much, Chris, for this conversation. You've been inspiring in my life and many others engaged in these paths and pursuits, rigorous in cataloging your experiences in your book, assuring us what happens isn’t random but shared. Knowing someone like you—PhD, teacher, normal life—and experiencing the same offers reassurance against feeling insane.

Chris Bache: Thank you, Ryan. It's an honor to share this discussion. It’s joyful and a privilege in my old age to converse like this. A whole new generation is exploring this territory, and we can learn much from each other.

Ryan Kemp: Perfect. Your book is available on Amazon, and I presume you have a website, Chris?

Chris Bache: It's not finished yet, maybe out in a month or two. Moving to North Carolina delayed it, but the website will be chrisbache.com. Meanwhile, people can find articles and essays on academia.edu, and the book is on Amazon.

Ryan Kemp: It’s also available on Audible, nicely enjoyed as an audiobook read by you, which I recommend.

Chris Bache: Yes, I enjoyed that. The spoken word possesses a power beyond the written word, and I valued the chance to read the book for listeners.

Ryan Kemp: Absolutely, Chris. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chris.

Chris Bache: Thank you. Love and blessings.

Audience: You too. Applause.