---
title: "Global Collapse, Spirituality & The Birth of the Future Human (ATTMind #142)"
slug: 2021-04-21-global-collapse-spirituality-and-the-birth-of-the-future-human-attmind-142
date: 2021-04-21
type: lecture
channel: Adventures Through the Mind
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
identifiers:
  wikidata_person: Q112496741
  openalex_person: A5045900737
people:
-
  name: Christopher M. Bache
  wikidata: Q112496741
  openalex: A5045900737
provenance:
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**Host: ** Hello everyone. Welcome to Adventures Through the Mind. I'm your host, as always, James W. Jesso. This podcast explores topics relevant and related to psychedelic culture, medicine, and research. I'm going to start this one off with a question: Have you ever wondered what 76 high-dose LSD sessions over the course of 20 years might teach a person about how to make sense spiritually of a global crisis and perhaps the collapse of civilization as we know it? If you have wondered about that, you're in luck for this episode, because that's exactly what we're going to talk about. We're talking with Christopher Bache, the author of the book *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. 

Christopher M. Bache is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He's a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and on the advisory board for Grof Transpersonal Training and the Grof Foundation. He's an award-winning teacher and international speaker, and he is the author of three books. He's been on the show previously—oh, I forgot to get the number of that episode. One second. Episode 89, Mapping Consciousness with High-Dose LSD, where we talked about, essentially, his 73 high-dose LSD journeys over 20 years and what he experienced and learned about the nature of reality and the universe throughout the course of it. 

Now, this is sort of a follow-up from that interview. It was intended to be a discussion of various different themes of the book, but pretty quickly, it focused on a particular aspect, which is that while Chris was having experiences of deep time—sort of like you can imagine experiencing the entire course of human existence as a singular moment, or the entirety of time and space as a singular thing—he had a vision at one point of what he called the birth of the Future Human. It's coming out of extreme cataclysm, in some sense or another—a long phase of extreme strife, grief, suffering, and challenges that push humanity into its next phase of evolution. Chris considers where we're at now to sort of be the start of that. 

What initially was going to be me just taking quotes out of this incredible book turned out to be a discussion with Chris about the situation we seem to be in as a planet right now and what, from his perspective, the sort of spiritual meaning of it all might be, or how we might approach it spiritually. Yeah, so that's what we talk about now. This interview was actually recorded in September of 2020. I'm not entirely sure why it took me so long—I'll tell you why it took me so long to get it out. When I was in the interview, I was going through a difficult time, and at some point, it became less of an interview and more of a young man pleading to an older man for some sort of wisdom to make sense of crisis, to make sense of the challenges personally and existentially, that I felt like I was facing in the moment and still kind of feel like I'm facing. Maybe I was a little embarrassed about that. I don't know. But either way, now is the time that it's coming out. Some of you might see some similarities in some of the topics to some recent controversies in the 5-MeO-DMT world, but none of this is a response to that. This was actually recorded, what is it now—April, so like more than six months ago. 

So, yeah, that's for context. This was recorded September 2020. Another point of process about it is that Chris's sound is not always super great. There's some banging, some knocking in the background. I did my best to clean it up, removed a lot of stuff that you won't hear, but bear with it a little bit. In fact, there's one point where he's saying something super meaningful, and it’s like some loud thing comes in the background that's so distracting at this moment. That feels like just such a pinnacle in terms of the value of what he's offering. It's just an interesting sort of reality dance moment. But anyway, those are the caveats, and that's the interview we’ve got today with Christopher Bache. Before we get into it, I want to give a big thanks to my patrons on Patreon, without whom this podcast would not exist. So, thank you. The people whose names are listed on the screen here on YouTube have been giving significantly, some of which for a long time. Their names are also in the show notes to this episode, wherever you're catching it. So thank you so much, patrons. If you're not yet a patron, please become one by heading to patreon.com/jameswjesso or you can give a one-time donation through PayPal or cryptocurrency. Listed links are in the description to this episode. 

Thanks so much for helping support the show financially. Not only for me and for you, but also when people donate, it allows other people who are enjoying the show, who don't donate, to enjoy the show for free. Because it’s free no matter what. This is sort of like, on good faith, I'm producing it for free, and if you like it, toss me some money, and I'll keep making it regardless, as best I can. Okay, so that's all for this intro. Stay tuned to the end; I got a special announcement. But here we go. This is my second interview with Christopher Bache here on Adventures Through the Mind. Enjoy. 

So, Chris, I had been going through, like, the extensive amount of notes I have. I listened to our first podcast again, and I went back through the notes I took when I was in your workshop in Vancouver, and also was going through the book. I just kept wondering to myself, what's the course here? I felt like in our first interview, I had the ability to listen to your talks and pay attention to the way that you structure your lectures, and then utilize that as the path to walk, having a sense of how you start, what you talk about, and where you go, and then sort of use that as the way. I didn't have that this time, and if you're okay with it, I thought it might be interesting because I have your book here, and as you can see, I've had quite a...

**Chris Bache: ** Time-worn book. Yeah, an author loves to see it. 

**Host: ** Very. Yeah, I moved on to little tabs because, well, you know what? As much as most, like authors, say, "Oh yeah, write in it, fold up the pages, whatever works." I just kind of grew out of wanting to destroy the paper that holds the book. So I thought maybe it would be fun, if you're open to it, that I would just go into some of the things that I've felt really moved by or relevant in your book, read the piece, and then be like, "What is this?" and have you sort of speak to that. Would that feel cool for you?

**Chris Bache: ** Sure, that's fine, great. I'll tell you, now that the book's out, the first round of interviews and all that stuff, COVID hit, stepping back, digesting people's first reactions—I don't think I sent you a copy of an article that I just sent to Cy MedNet in England. Basically, I'm calling it a postscript to *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. It's responding to people's first takes on the book, first round of experiences. In that process, I'm finding there's a whole other tier of the implications of these potentials, which I just feel like I'm beginning to want to get into. It's like nothing new. At the same time, the sheer audacity of the claims concerning the limits and the revised limits of human experience, what we're capable of, and the import of entering such deep intimacy with the consciousness of the universe is all just sinking into me at a new level. So that's a constant conversation. I'm really glad to be doing this second bite at the apple. Something different, there's been a whole lot of first interviews. I'm glad to spend this time with you and happy to see where we go.

**Host: ** Cool. Is that something you feel like you'd like to get into, or if I pick a section of the book, can it work as a reference point, even for your sort of second tier of considerations on the impact of the book?

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, let's do that. I trust it'll come up where it's relevant in our discussion. It floats in the back, and it's not a specific set of themes. It's partly the enormity of the vision of history that's involved, and it seems like we're getting into that period of history faster than I thought we were going to be getting into it. Partly, it's simply the sheer scale of the undertaking, but it'll come up as it comes up. It'll flow as it comes up in our discussion. I trust our discussion.

**Host: ** Well, I think it's right here, right now, because this is something that definitely came up for me while reading near the end of the book. I read it this year, during the 2020 pandemic lockdown. It was one of the things I was immersing myself in while I was locked away from the world—really no different than I would have been otherwise, except I didn't have social events to unfurl into at the end of the day and on the weekends. Oh, not to mention all the existential gravity of it all. You talk about being this rock tumbler, and this future human emerging out of deep strife, struggle, and pain—not using your terminology here, or maybe accidentally I am—but something about a cleansing process. I'm not sure if I'm getting this right. But looking at what will become history as an event not too dissimilar, something analogous to the cleansing process of your psychedelic explorations, strictly so. As I was reading it, I thought, "Man, I might be foolish to think we're already there despite how bad this is. This is nothing." You know, it’s ultimately just a virus, right? But how do you feel about it?

**Chris Bache: ** I think of it as an overture. It contains some of the key elements of the symphony that's coming, but only in short, abbreviated forms. It's mobilizing us. I think what's coming is going to be much, much worse, but this has disoriented us a lot, and it’s given us a lot of lessons. Hopefully, it’s giving us learnings, teachings that will help us in what comes next. But you’re right, this is just act one, just an overture.

**Host: ** Yeah, a stress test is how I heard it described early on. This is a stress test. Of course, it has evolved well and beyond just the pandemic. We have the total dissolution of what was once thought of as objective reality due to multiple levels of narrative warfare and the destruction of deep, considerate, coherent thinking and dialogue because of social media and how the news and all the populism and nationalism, and also the big pushback against these types of things as well, especially Black Lives Matter and stuff like that. At the same time, this is really not nearly as bad as it could get, or maybe will get.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, I think so. You're right. In fact, let me grab a book to bring it up here because I'm probably going to want to mention it somewhere in this process, and I'd like to have the cover to show you. Sure. This is a book I went to get—Duane Elgin's last book, *Choosing Earth*. It's literally a lifetime of research going into it. He gives a detailed decade-by-decade view of what he thinks is coming. He's been tracking the large scientific data, global health of the planet people for a long time, and he really lays out a time of increasingly tight collapse over the next several decades. He thinks by 2050 we're going to be more than halfway into the great collapse. I just want to bring it in to mention it when it comes up.

**Host: ** So, then what's coming up for me right now is this question, and for listeners, if they are getting to know your work for the first time: this is very much a continuing conversation between you and I and with your work. What comes up for me is this immediate, "What do we do? What do I do?"—that quick-to-problem-solve, fix, action-now approach rather than "How did we get here? What does this mean?" Prior to even coming to understand what an action based solution is. I'm curious where you see that process of understanding where we are. You mentioned about, there's a lot of lessons here. What do you think these lessons are? What are we learning? In fact, perhaps, what does it appear from where you're sitting that we're not learning out of all of this?

**Chris Bache: ** I have to be careful; I'm not on the front line. I have only secondhand information from the news accounts. As I watch people react and respond, we're learning a number of things. One of them is the fragility of our system. We're learning our interconnectedness, how systems that have functioned quietly, side by side, seemingly independently, are not independent at all. They're quite interdependent. We're learning a lot about supply chains and where our resources come from. We're learning that people who have very modest jobs, from some socio-economic viewpoint, have very important jobs when it comes to maintaining the health and well-being of our collective.

I think we're learning interdependence. We're learning our entire life can be turned upside down much faster than we thought it could. We don't have nearly as much stability as we think we do. I think we're learning something about the limits of patriarchal ego, and I think Trump is the embodiment, I hope, of the last gasp of the patriarchal monarchy. We're learning how ugly ego is, just how really, really ugly it is. We're learning a lot about where to go and where not to go when we come into crisis. There's polarization taking place, the resort to violence—how quickly we move to violence? It's like we take almost any issue, no matter how trivial, like masks, and turn it into an issue which leads to people killing each other. 

The mirror of what we're seeing is not very complimentary. It's pretty ugly. The way I see the larger landscape, of course, is that, in so many ways, it's ego that built our culture. By that, I mean simply, it's a human being at a level of spiritual development that identifies with their body, has a certain level of self-awareness. But that self-awareness stops pretty close to the edge of their fingers and toes, and they still are looking out rationally for their well-being and the well-being of a small number of people near them and around them who basically look like them or are related to them in some fundamental way. Ego is a magnificent thing, a beautiful thing, an important thing, but a world built by a species that's operating out of egoic awareness is a divided world. It's a world of haves and have-nots, and we can't get more extreme in the presentation to ourselves than the haves and have-nots. In Duane's book, I came across the statistic that five people own as much of the world's resources as half of the world. Five people have half of the world's resources. You just can't have that big a disparity of haves and have-nots. This illness is just blasting this into our faces. Who's suffering the most are the poor and persons of color.

So, a lot going on, but this is just warming up. This is just the first wave. I think maybe the first wave was actually the credit crisis of 2008 because that taught us some things, and it also sucked a lot of liquidity out of the system. We have much fewer financial resources to fight with than we did before. Now, this is getting deeper—national debt increases—but certainly, we are, if not in the first round, we certainly are in a significant second round.

**Host: ** For listeners who don't know, this conversation is couched in your 20-year journey as a philosophy professor and a 20-year journey with high-dose LSD sessions. The book we're referring to earlier details those journeys, as well as a number of other books. I'm just curious because what I'm seeing in the world—which is mostly the world mediated by a screen at this point—is not the kind of place I really want to be both in. I don't want to be where it appears we're going. I don't want to be a part of a system that does the things it does. I don't like the fact that I'm a part of this disgusting, distorted thing. Also, what I see from the behavior of the people around me, and there's a lot to be said about how social media algorithms and isolation and mental health crises, acknowledged or not, are contributing to this. I see a lot of toxic behavior, a lot of toxic people, and toxic discussion, sort of draped in this self-confident, self-righteous, almost Machiavellian style moralism of "the good versus the evil," and the good is me, and anyone that disagrees is the violent devil I must cast out. I don't feel good about what I'm seeing about the world, and it makes me want to hide away inside.

That said, couching this in psychedelics and looking at it as a large psychedelic—I'm using air quotes for listeners—process that's happening collectively on a global scale, not just with humanity, but we don't know what the feelings and thoughts or perspectives are of the birds, the salamanders, and the whales and whatever, but they're going through that with us. It's a planetary experience. When I see these parts of myself in a psychedelic session, it's no more comfortable by any means. It's equally as ugly, and I want to hide away from that too. Yet, one of the things you talk about in your book is that we need to learn as a part of the psychedelic journey not to turn away from our pain, or from that pain. I mean, like the pain of touching a hot fire we turn away from, but this kind of pain we learn to turn towards it. That's not a clear question, but can you comment on that?

**Chris Bache: ** The starting point of serious psychedelic work is taking complete responsibility for one's own shadow. You go into a room, close the door, lock the door. You're inside by yourself, nothing there but you and your mind. You go into the parts of your being which are initially the most daunting, the most intimidating, the most frightening, the ugliest—ones we acknowledge the least. But the commitment is to take that on, to enter into it. When we see that ugliness manifested in the world around us by people who have not yet taken responsibility for themselves, they're still in this exterior mode where the shadow is really outside of them. The evil and the darkness and the really ugly things are outside of them. That's a very different world, isn't it? I think this process of breaking down, this breaking-down process we're going into, is going to break down that defense that we have to think that we're the good guys and the other people are the bad guys. 

Eventually, we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that we did this. We created this imbalance. We have benefited from it. We are continuing to generate it in the cars we drive, in the lives we live, and the lifestyles we aspire to. We have done this. There's going to come a time eventually where there's no place else to look but to take individual and collective responsibility for the pain that is alive within us and the lives of everyone around us. That really is a pivot point when we just stop blaming the other, stop blaming previous generations, stop blaming so on and so forth. We really settle in. We're not there yet. Some of us are there yet. I think the psychedelic community understands these things because that's how you make progress in psychedelic work—by confronting the shadow.

Now, when you go into the work, the more you purify, the more you cleanse, the deeper the reward, the deeper the ecstasy, the deeper the teaching. The more you purify, the deeper the communion. Once you learn that not only do you become more comfortable facing the shadow, but you actually actively embrace the shadow. You actively embrace pain and suffering, not because you like pain and suffering, but for two reasons. One, you learn the deeper the purification, the deeper the ecstasy. You don't like to suffer, but you like what's on the other side of the suffering. The second is, you embrace the pain and suffering, even knowing a lot of it is not yours, out of the same compassion that every father has for his children, every mother has for her children, and every teacher has for all their students. You embrace the pain, not counting whether it's yours or somebody else's, but because by doing so, you are helping somebody. You are helping other beings that you may never meet.

My experience has been that if you do that, if you are willing to take on more than your fair share of suffering, you reap more than your share of benefit. The universe responds. It can't help but respond. I think that's going to happen with us generationally. This generation, the next generation, the generation after that, is going to go through more than their share of suffering compared to previous generations. After they stop kicking and screaming and begin to get down to taking it on and just doing it, I think they will experience the blessings that come from that deep generosity, that profound existential choice to work with the given, even when the given is terrible, even when it crushes your personal life, but you still dedicate yourself to the good of the whole. In that process, something begins to change, something shifts inside your person. The more complete the surrender to the process, the more complete the commitment to that process, I think the deeper and faster the transformation is in our individual lives and our collective lives, so that as we move deeper into this and come through it, I think generationally, we will learn what every psychedelic journeyer learns. We confront the shadow; there are riches on the other side of this ordeal, and there's no other way to get to it. In the end, the irony is you kind of end up where you were in the beginning, except you're all cleaned out. All sorts of gunk is out of your system, so you are you, and you are where you were before. But you literally are living a different life because stuff that you hadn’t realized was compromising you and burdening you is no longer there, and something new has taken its place. I think that's where we're going to be going. It's going to take time.

**Host: ** There's a lot that has come up there for me, as you were talking around the complexity of the situation and how each different person and demographic is coming at this differently. Then the confusion of what is good or what is not. Getting into, "Yes, I'm going to put myself in the pain of this," does that look like being around people? Does that mean getting involved in places where I'm interacting with toxic people? There's all these weird complications. As I'm listening, I'm efforting to hear it from a larger perspective than what's happening right now. Because if I think about generations that suffer, I'd say that right now, my demographic, even my local community, is not suffering nearly as much as people in the hardest-hit areas of the United States with COVID, and not nearly as much as people who are in poverty or who are oppressed by systemic racism or sexism or whatever it is. Especially systemic racism—it's a huge and important issue, with very strong issues of police violence and all the rest. Even then, I'm just trying to break out of the thinking that wants to immediately point to small examples that don't fit into the larger generational narrative. I'm wondering if there's something there you want to comment on about how what you just said applies to the acute as much as the bigger picture.

**Chris Bache: ** You're certainly right. In my local community, we're not suffering much, and I'm retired, I haven't lost my job, I know where my next meal is coming from. A lot of people don't have those certainties. If we just expand the horizon to include the hundreds of thousands of people who are ecological migrants fleeing disastrous circumstances—people whose whole lives fit inside a bag, a suitcase that they're carrying everything they value in the world—the upheaval is tremendous. We don't have to go very far to find it, but even if it is far from our local community, I live in a strange world in that way. We all watch television, we all try to keep abreast of the larger patterns out there. But inwardly, because of the psychedelic work, because I've been dissolved so many times over so many years into the collective breath of humanity, and because I've been drawn into the collective shadow work, the dark night of the collective soul work, and have gone far beyond the collective psyche outside, as outside of the collective unconscious into larger patterns of time, deep time, evolutionary time—which you might think of as geologic time—my insides are tuned a little differently because I sort of... on a smaller scale, when I see human beings, I don't see them the way other people tend to. I see souls. I relate to human beings as incarnations of souls. So I'm always tuning to the soul quality of a person. In that respect, for example, we can see young people who are truly old in their heart and mind, and we can see old people who are like children in their hearts and minds and everything in between. When I think of the people and what we're seeing on the streets, the people riding around in pickup trucks carrying weapons, I'm seeing souls that are in one phase of a long evolutionary journey of the soul’s progression. I have some approximate sense of the large scale of self-education, self-maturation process, and some of the stage points along that scale. I don't bring that as a model to judge and rank and classify people, but I approach people knowing that their entire current incarnation is just a short phase of their larger learning process. So I understand the challenges they're facing within this larger context, within this larger matrix. The tricky part is you can get so absorbed into large perspectives like that, that you can lose sight of the immediate suffering. You can lose sight of what it actually feels like to be undergoing the privations right here, right now, of many people. So you have to live in both worlds at the same time—the immediate at hand and the large scale. My professional work and my psychedelic work have focused me on the large scale.

**James Jesso: ** Chris, I unexpectedly really have to pee. I'm just going to take a little me, and I'll be right back.

Audience: ** Okay, okay, wow, okay, so free all of a sudden, much better.

**James Jesso: ** Yeah. So there's a lot of inner conflict that's coming up for me as I'm listening to you. Part of me is like, yes, and another part of me is like, does this like... It's the smaller frame of like, does saying it this way equate to passivity? Does that equate to, you know, if this is all part of a larger process, is me just looking at myself... is that actually doing anything? I know, if I look at the larger picture, yes, of course, it's doing something. By doing good as best I can, I help sort of bring goodness into reality more. On one level, I'm like, yes, but on another level, is that really enough? There's a lot of psychedelic rhetoric around, if we just gave more people Psilocybin, then we'd stop burning down the rainforest, or Ayahuasca, and then we would stop voting in authoritarian leaders, right? But I think that type of thinking feels really foolish, to think that if I just do the work, that's going to make big changes in the world, that it's going to properly address things. And yet, there's this whole other layer, which is like, can I really do any good as part of a social movement if I'm showing up with hatred in my heart and anger and just looking for someone to blame for my suffering? Some people are showing up because of that, some are not. I think movements are inspired by appropriate responses to injustice. Yeah? And then a whole other layer is like, if I say this wrong, will I be canceled because of that blame or hatefulness in the heart? These aren't clear questions. I feel like I'm just baring my soul to you, Chris, like, help me understand.

**Chris Bache: ** I understand. I really do. Because if your genuine spirituality leads you away from social engagement, then I don't think it's very mature, because mature spirituality leads to that place in the heart where we contact the heart of all living things. When we contact the heart of all living things, naturally, we want to help all living things. So, the natural progression of deep spiritual work is to be socially engaged in some form or another, whatever we feel particularly called to. The important thing is that we find our niche, our particular contribution and do it. And you're right, if we do it, maybe we aren't as clean as we thought going in, so we step back, clean, and work that part. I understand the tension. I would feel it more if I were a young man like you. I'm older, so I've made my decisions around those things, and mostly I'm past that active time. I still write, teach, and talk, but other people my age are on the front lines, working very tangibly to bring about a better world.

No standardized rules for engagement, but we can feel when there's a feeling in our center, when we are aligned with our place in the world and our place in the movement. We're self-correcting beings. What's most important is tuning into that point in our center, that connection to the larger intelligence, drawing us towards deeper levels of engagement with humanity and non-human life forms being affected.

**James Jesso: ** I've been sitting with... we were going to open up your book, and maybe at some point we will. The first part of the book that received a red tab, which was particularly important for quoting or reference, and I'm wondering how much it applies in comparing deep psychedelic work or journey to the journey we're on as a planetary organism facing increasing layers of collapse and catastrophe, funneling more out of the year of clear vision. The part is about one of the greatest risks of psychedelic work, as you put in the book, being ego inflation. I'm curious about your comments on that.

**Chris Bache: ** You know, I'm essentially a hermit, and I don't really have a lot of living contact with the psychedelic community. You go to conferences, workshops, but the actual number is relatively small. I pay attention more to the important books that come out. So I don't know what's happening in the psychedelic community. In some ways, we're moving into a psychedelic period of history, starting at low dose and moving into high dose psychedelic history where you will be put through the meat grinder. Policies set in motion for decades and centuries, like a hurricane, will affect everyone. 

The great danger of psychedelic work is psychic inflation—that is, having a deep experience and thinking it makes you a deep person. It's a fool's delusion. If you have that attitude, your own psychedelic sessions will likely knock you down harder. It's not about extraordinary experiences but doing what's necessary so that 48 hours after, you're living a better life. Carrying out the garbage is what gives you a better life, not just taking a vacation. When you come by joyful experiences through hard work, it doesn't lead to psychic inflation as much because you understand the deeper process. 

The intelligence giving you blessings is teaching you—these blessings are given intentionally. If your psychedelic work is disciplined and part of a spiritual practice, everything you're given lays the foundation for future work you will do. Your entire relationship with the universe is one of maturational development. Once you feel the rhythm of this development over the years, it draws to a close all that psychic inflation. Ego is the obstacle.

**James Jesso: ** The question that's kind of, like, forming is: what does it mean to be a good person right now? Given where we are, from the perspective of your deep psychedelic work, what does it mean to be a good person?

**Chris Bache: ** It's a large question. Some of my deepest experiences, there are times when, and even after a session, something opens, and I experience the world truly as living and breathing as one. My feet are rooted in the earth like a tree. I feel complete continuity between everything around me and my own being. The pulse of the universe in its simplicity, not paying attention to our divisions—or incarnations—the universe being itself, and I'm part of that. In that position, a delicious sense of presence gives me intimacy with everything. A deeper level opens my heart, where helping everyone is the most natural thing. It's not about being good; it's about being alive. To me, goodness is a compass needle pointing to oneness. Compassion, goodness, fairness, and justice are aspects of oneness.

What does it take to be a good person today? A commitment to serving a good that's not private, opening up to future generations, beings unlike me. Goodness is simple. It gets complicated in enacting it, but at its core, it's an action from oneness. If it's not from oneness, there's something not to trust in it, because deep goodness comes from oneness. I understand the true quandary from which the question comes, but the deepest answer I have is a mystical experience of oneness where goodness becomes an insignificant, spontaneous component.

**James Jesso: ** I have a more serious response and a joking response. The more serious is, how do you enact that? I've had that experience, and yet, anywhere from 10% to 99% of the time, I'm not there. I'm not in the ground of that as I show up. The playful response is, so we all should take 500 mics of LSD, right? What does it look like to have had that experience? Experiencing oneness doesn't mean you walk through the world with oneness streaming from every interaction. It's a question around integration—what does it mean to remember that and catch ourselves in forgetting?

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, that's—well, we go up on the mountain, we see some things, maybe receive some blessings, then come down to work on Monday. It's a matter of engaging, being aware, checking yourself, recommitting, over and over. Much of it for me was in teaching—enjoying it, wanting to do better, but catching myself, coming back, trying to do better. Integration is a challenging term—it's critical, but living our visions is hard. It means constantly aware, facing shortcomings, living around people better than us, measuring and improving.

In the Buddhist tradition, spiritual friends, those committed to awakening, make it easier to face shortcomings. We don't walk around in that state, but we practice and practice. Then maybe 10 years later, we're in it a little more, practice more. And if we ever think we're really there, our children remind us we're not as far along as we think.

**James Jesso: ** Or perhaps we could—Baba Ram Dass said if you think you're spiritually awake, go spend a week with your parents, or the other way around.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, yes. As you were speaking, a question started forming. You mentioned being around spiritual friends. If your practice means not engaging in the world, it's not mature spirituality. There's a balance between spiritual friends and engaging in the world, right? Right now, much of our interaction is mediated by screens, informed by the situation, so interactions are in this landscape of contortion, and we're generally not operating from oneness. Avoiding isolating ourselves with only spiritual friends, being in the world with goodness but encountering toxicity—how does one walk that?

**Chris Bache: ** It's a good question, and it will look different for you than for me, different people in different circumstances. Years ago, my life was with students. Wherever I was on the weekends, whatever practices, at a.m. Monday, I was with my class. In a front-line education environment, it was hard work, constantly confronting biases. Now, I'm retired and buffer myself from screen time. I don't immerse myself in toxic confusion—it doesn't help me maintain clarity. I engage less than others now, but the principle remains: Mother Teresa worked with the poorest—dragging people off the streets for dignity. We engage as we are, as it is. 

**Chris Bache: ** I return to that inner integrity, whether aligned with our deep being or out of kilter. Even in isolation, whether living aligned with deeper aspirations or not, for with maximum benefit when engaging others. It's not something that happens on the presentation day; it happens in living in tune with your truths, ensuring when called upon, you have something genuine to give, whether on the subway or alone. It's just harder on the subway.

**James Jesso: ** I think one thing is coming up: what it looks like for different people looks different based on where they're coming from. Some feel they're doing good things by doing toxic acts, propagating harmful ideologies, or neo-Nazi beliefs, canceling others with righteousness. They feel they're doing good. I want to be able to say I'm doing the good thing, not doing those things, but am I making myself a fool? Are all of these acts good, in the grand frame, even if I see them as harmful or toxic? And if everything is good, then what does it matter what I do?

**Chris Bache: ** Once again, you're pushing into deep territory. In the highest level of Buddhist teachings, especially in Tibetan Buddhism and Dzogchen, they would radically qualify goodness, or "the good," saying it doesn't make any difference whether you're doing good or not. If you're truly aligned with the absolute essence of all things, it places you beyond the simplistic dichotomy of good and not good. However, until you're living in that absolute condition, it's best to do good because that's the closest approximation we have to that absolute state. So, I'm not willing to relativize good in the way one might from that perspective—I mean, understanding it's all good. We might all think we're doing good, but I won't say all that we are doing is good. For instance, injuring other people, physically or psychologically, is a marker of not good. Oneness is all-embracing, and the first rule in this embrace is non-injury. 

The behaviors you're describing have been going on for a long time, but now they're more public than before. Previously, they were more private or surreptitious, but now there's social reinforcement and echo chambers on platforms reinforcing those patterns. Yet the fact people are reinforcing different patterns doesn't eliminate the choices for goodness, nor does it make goodness any less a reasonable, rational, and spiritually rich criterion. Lynching, even if believed to be good, is certainly not good. Many people who did such things believed they were doing good.

**Interviewer: ** When we wake up—

**Chris Bache: ** When we begin to wake up—through whatever means, whether from a scripture passage, an Ayahuasca session, or other forms—genuine awakening consistently produces gentler, kinder, more compassionate people. It doesn't produce homophobic or violent people. It always leads to more respectful individuals. That doesn't mean we don't fight for justice or confront injustice, but the balance is towards equality with a gentle, compassionate component. The question is how to confront the not-good without perpetuating evil or encouraging more divisions. It's a difficult question that can only be addressed piece by piece, by individuals in their specific circumstances—whether deciding to protest, counter-protest, address violence in the street, and so forth.

**James Jesso: ** Do you think the almost ubiquitous rise of what is often called bad faith arguments and the devolution or destruction of discourse—as a consequence of all conflict being perceived as abuse—affects open discourse between different expressions of self-perceived good? How does that play in the evolutionary process as humans, and how do you balance that with the understandable limitation of not giving a voice to hateful, racist, or violent individuals?

**Chris Bache: ** That's a large question, and my framework to respond is limited. As an academic in religious and philosophical thought, my discipline prizes engagement, discussion, collaboration, and conflict as a vehicle for determining greater truth. I've undergone significant personal revolutions in my thinking, shifting worldviews and assumptions. This process has given me insight that reality is made of models, not absolutes, and I now view realities as models within paradigms. 

I've navigated being a conventional Christian to a non-Christian deeply informed by science, later challenging reductive materialist interpretations through psychedelic work. I've been in dialogue with students, faculties, and colleagues, often disagreeing yet managing to remain friends. I've allowed opinions I find abhorrent to be expressed to open possibilities for broader perspectives. However, this is within a certain framework of give-and-take. Today's world has different standards—every position seems as valuable as another, and might makes right. This is a paradigm change where certainties become uncertainties, and constants dissolve. Science, for example, now points to a universe largely invisible—dark matter and energy—challenging our understanding of the universe.

All religions, meeting in the past two centuries, have forced a reassessment of truth claims. This complexity of plurality, from a disciplinary mindset, taps into deep uncertainty about divine intentions and truth. Many discussions lack self-awareness of paradigm limitations. We're in a time of falling apart values; nature’s patterns and societal balances are shifting, causing unrest and fear as people hold onto old values. New understanding is necessary for this unstable terrain, but it's also where we must grow.

We have to grow up, to mature as adults in holding perspective and temperance. It's "grow up or die" time, and we must measure up to higher demands of growing truth, as truth is expanding rapidly. 

**James Jesso: ** Yeah, this conversation is difficult. Your questions are hard, and forming them reflects our reality's challenge. You're asking me about things I don't know much about, like:

**Chris Bache: ** Ask me about my book—I thought this would be about psychedelics! It's more like a spiritual inquiry on being a good person and facing the meta-crisis. 

**James Jesso: ** Right, I anticipated questions about psychedelics. Instead, it's a deep satsang-like dialogue on grace and goodness. But we're in this conversation together—listeners too. Your discussions encourage self-reflection and growth. The discourse's quality is itself a roadmap for the future.

**Chris Bache: ** Absolutely. That's valuable, pushing boundaries in a disciplined way. I don't engage much with social media, which separates me from the societal pulse. But psychedelics offer a different historical perspective, one that aligns more with the aliveness of the universe.

Where I live, philosophically, stems from the psychedelic experience—recognizing different soul levels within human bodies and the intelligence of the cosmos. It's a distinct insight that doesn't rely on earthly wisdom. Understanding our challenges comes from these experiences, beyond a time-space perspective, intimate with the universe's mind and creativity. It's not about having answers but about sensitivity to fear's drive in our world.

If psychedelics have taught me one thing, it's that fear is destructive. When you've dissolved fear and experienced pure truth, love, and understanding, you perceive life differently. Much of the world is fear-driven, afraid of dying or losing their existence. But if we can overcome that fear, our perspective changes. My work, reflected in LSD and the Mind of the Universe, captures that journey of intimacy with the universe. Psychedelics shatter the earthly life, open us to a broader reality, and reincarnation does the same on a larger scale. Once you embrace this deeper cycle, you never return to your previous worldview.

Much of the aberrant behavior in society I perceive as youth, inexperience, and naivety. There’s sadness in souls 'not knowing better,' as they're in earlier maturation stages. That’s the childishness psychedelics can help us grow out of, accelerating maturation if engaged responsibly.

**James Jesso: ** Well, that might be a good point to close. You've taken on challenging questions beyond your book's focus, pushing the edge of your thinking. I feel nourished by this dialogue, and I trust listeners will be as well. Thank you, Chris.

**Chris Bache: ** You're welcome. I trust our conversations and hope they're useful for your audience. It's always a joy to talk with you. 

**James Jesso: ** Thank you, Chris. For viewers, here's Chris's book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It's excellent. I'll also plug another book, Choosing Earth by Dwayne Elgin on our current transition. It's concise with great insights on the future ahead. 

Are there any social media channels you'd direct people to, considering our discussion?

**Chris Bache: ** Soon there will be ChrisBache.com, but meanwhile, my university email is available. In a couple of months, the website will be up.

**James Jesso: ** Thank you, Chris. Looking forward to our next conversation.

Thank you for tuning in. Check out Chris's book—it’s insightful. If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting on Patreon. I’m taking a two-episode break, so catch up or explore exclusive content there. Thanks for listening, and see you next time on Adventures Through the Mind. Take care.