---
title: "LSD and the Mind of the Universe – Christopher Bache, Ph.D."
slug: 2021-06-03-lsd-and-the-mind-of-the-universe-christopher-bache-ph.d
date: 2021-06-03
type: lecture
channel: Portland Psychedelic Society
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
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  name: Christopher M. Bache
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**Donna Loeffler: ** Hi everyone. Welcome to *LSD and the Mind of the Universe* with author Chris Bache. The format of this meeting is going to go as follows: I'm going to introduce everyone, then we're going to have a Q&A. As John said, just put your question in the chat, let us know who it's directed to, and we'll try to answer as many questions as we can. Our panel, Teresa and David, have some questions that are going to be asked first, and that will basically be the format. So I have the honor to introduce Chris Bache. We are so happy he is here with us today. He's here from North Carolina. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He is also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, an Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the advisory board of the Grof Legacy Training. Chris's passion has been the study of the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states. An award-winning teacher and international speaker, he has written four books: *Lifecycles*, a study of reincarnation in light of contemporary consciousness research; *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, a pioneering work in psychedelic philosophy and collective consciousness; *The Living Classroom*, an exploration of collective fields of consciousness in teaching; and *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*, the story of his 20-year journey with LSD. Chris is a father of three, a vision seeker, and lives in Weaverville, North Carolina. Welcome, Chris, and thank you so much for being here today.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you, Donna, my pleasure, and thank you everyone for spending part of your Sunday with me. It's a pleasure to be here, a pleasure to talk about these things, and I'm really looking forward to our discussion that follows my comments here. So let me first shift us into share screen so I can throw this PowerPoint up and people can let me know if this is coming through correctly. John, we're looking good?

**John Hock: ** We are looking good. Good.

**Chris Bache: ** All right. What I'd like to do today is simply take you into some of the highlights. It's kind of a highlight reel of my book, *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. As Donna mentioned, I've written four books, but all of them come out of my psychedelic work, and this book summarizes the entire trajectory of my 20-year journey working with LSD. I consider it probably the most important book I will write in my life, and it's an honor to share it with you here today. So let me give you some background: When I came out of graduate school in 1978, I was a philosopher of religion and kind of an atheistically inclined agnostic, and I was looking for where to take my research next. It was at that juncture that I met the work of Stanislav Grof. Let me get my picture out of here—a little bit of Stan Grof—and this book changed the course of my life. All right, come on. Get to me. Here we go. Here we go. These two books, *Realms of the Human Unconscious*, which Stan had just published two years before, and *LSD Psychotherapy*, his manual on conducting psychedelic sessions. I immediately saw not only the psychological significance of Stan's work, but the philosophical significance—to actually be able to explore experientially the deep states of consciousness that allow us to experience the deep structure of the universe itself. That immediately, I recognized, had profound philosophical significance. So what I did was to split my life in half. During my day job, I continued to teach at the university. I was teaching in a Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, doing the things that professors do. And in my nighttime job, I began a 20-year journey working in Stan Grof protocols with high doses of LSD, recording all my experiences systematically. That's the backstory to the book.

Now, as you know, in Stan Grof's work, he differentiates clearly between low dose psychotherapy and high dose psychedelic therapy. Low dose, maybe up to 100 sessions unfolding the mind gradually, layer by layer; psychedelic therapy limited to three sessions designed to trigger something approximating a near-death episode experience for people who were facing death. So after three introductory sessions, medium dose sessions, what I eventually chose was to work in the high dose psychedelic therapy protocol. I eventually did a total of 73 high dose sessions, and I tried to be as systematic and rigorous as I could. I followed the same protocol in all these sessions, the same set, setting, same sitter, same substance, same dose level, same recording process, and even the same location working in Northeast Ohio. I mention that because, as you know, sometimes the setting in which we do our work can influence the nature of the experiences itself. So this was a long, sustained inquiry into the deep structure of consciousness in the universe.

Now, I saw myself, at the time, simply doing an extended course of psychedelic therapy. But when I got to the end of my journey, and I was looking back, I realized that this was more than simply psychedelic therapy, that I was encountering phenomena and dealing with challenges that were not being addressed or had not been addressed in the psychedelic therapy literature. And so eventually, I named this particular protocol, psychedelic exploration. The protocol, the methodology, is that of psychedelic therapy working in isolation, protected with the sitter, eye shades, headphones—the whole nine yards. The usual thing, the difference is the number of sessions. The high number of sessions allows, turns this into something more than therapy, into an exploration of the deep structure of the universe. So, of course, there are many uses for psychedelics. We use psychedelics for many different purposes, for recreational purposes or to augment creativity. Let me mention just three purposes that stand out in my world. One of them is, of course, therapeutic healing, as this picture from MAPS shows, which is generating so much attention in the literature and so much important attention in this new renaissance. The second use is for spiritual awakening, as we see reflected in this dialogue between the Buddhist community and the psychedelic community. Zigzag Zen—the use of psychedelics to facilitate a spiritual awakening into one's deeper essential nature. This is actually why I got started in psychedelics myself—to accelerate my own spiritual transformation process. The third is cosmological exploration, and this is what my journey turned into, cosmological exploration. By this, I mean not simply collecting insights that arise whenever we open in a psychedelic state, as always happens, but the systematic pushing of the boundaries of consciousness again and again and entering into deeper and deeper communion with the consciousness that lies within and behind the universe itself.

I kept detailed, careful notes of all my sessions, writing up every session within 24 hours, tracked the dates of my sessions, and even looked at the astrological variables of my sessions, exploring correlations that Stan and Richard Tarnas have proposed. Now, a few more introductory comments before we jump into the book itself. The story that I'm telling in *LSD and the Mind of the Universe* is not primarily a personal story. It's primarily a cosmological story. I found that this series of sine waves represents a series of psychedelic sessions, which I've drawn overlapping in order to emphasize the continuity that runs between our sessions. I found that insights into my personal life tended to arise in the beginning and endings of my sessions, when I was leaving and coming back to time-space reality. Working in this modality, and I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms, which, as I explain in the book, is a protocol that I don't recommend working at such high dose levels. When I was in my peak hours of my sessions, I was usually operating far beyond my personal reality, at least after the first 10 sessions or so. Sometimes an entire session was given over to personal healing, and sometimes I would be shown certain correlations between what I was seeing and what I in my own personal life. However, for the most part, when I was in my sessions, I was operating at a state of consciousness far outside my personal consciousness.

**Chris Bache: ** Hold on, Chris, you're muted.

**Donna Loeffler: ** Hold on, hold on one moment. Okay, there you go.

**Chris Bache: ** I actually filtered out a lot of my personal experiences or experiences of personal healing because I did not consider them primarily important to the story I wanted to tell. If you're writing about therapeutic psychedelic use, then your personal experiences are, of course, absolutely essential. But I was really functioning as a philosopher of consciousness. I wanted to explore the deep structure of consciousness. All of us have a story. All of us have a personal story, but this personal story tends to fall away the deeper one enters into the cosmological journey.

Now I found that there was a continuity between my sessions, that one session tended to end and the next one would start exactly where the previous one had ended, more or less, with some varying degrees of overlap. In that process, I found that I went through not one, but a series of death-rebirth experiences. In this graph, everything below the line is time-space reality and our consciousness functioning in time-space reality. Above the line is transpersonal consciousness when we enter spiritual reality. Of course, when one makes this transition from time-space consciousness to spiritual consciousness, one goes through an ego death experience, which Alex Grey has illustrated so powerfully in this picture, which I like very much—a complete loss, a complete destruction of one's individual, ordinary conscious identity. What I found on my journey was that as I continued to press the limits of my consciousness, I went through not just one type of death-rebirth experience at the egoic level, but a series of death-rebirth experiences. I began to understand that death and rebirth is a cycle that repeats itself as you enter deeper and deeper levels of consciousness.

If we use the vocabulary that Stan uses, as we enter psychic, subtle and causal levels of consciousness. Now, I don't have any vested interest in any particular metaphysical ladder or description of these deeper states of consciousness. In my experience, the universe is infinitely deep. One can enter hundreds of levels of consciousness. This is simply an articulation of a principle that, as we stabilize consciousness at one level, when we go deeper, we have to go through yet another cycle of complete surrender in order to enter into the initiation that's possible at this deeper level of consciousness. In some ways, working particularly with high doses of LSD has been compared to a nuclear bomb. The nuclear bomb was created in the same decade that LSD was created, but a long, sustained series of psychedelic experiences focused in a therapeutic modality triggers, as it were, a sustained nuclear explosion—not only destructuring reality as you have known it but introducing you into deeper and deeper levels of reality. The way this nuclear explosion exposes deeper levels of the atmosphere that were always there but had been invisible until this nuclear explosion brought them into our awareness. We're not talking about nuclear bombs, of course. We're talking about this beautiful universe that we are part of, 100 billion galaxies, billions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. So I'd like to use this picture now as the backdrop to talk about some of the turning points on my journey and some of the levels of reality I entered.

When I was looking back over the whole of my journey and trying to create the structure for the telling of the story, I identified five core levels of consciousness or core cycles of death and rebirth that I went through: one having to do at the level of personal mind, personal consciousness; the second, collective mind or the species mind; the third, archetypal mind; the fourth, operating at the level of causal oneness or the one; and the fifth, Diamond Luminosity. This is the organization I used in actually creating the travelogue that's in the book.

So let me back up and simply pull out the chapters or take you through the book, identifying the sequence of experiences. Can't talk about them very much in the brief time we have, but just give you some signposts. The chapter dealing with personal mind is chapter two, "Crossing the Boundary of Birth and Death." This, in my experience, was like a classic perinatal death-rebirth process. I felt like a poster boy for Stan Grof's description of the perinatal process: very intense convulsions, very intense confrontations with the meaninglessness of life, with the limits of existence. Eventually, in the course of two years and ten sessions, I came to a point where the universe just snapped me like a twig. It basically broke me in half, and it did that by forcing me to become the exact opposite of everything that I had known myself to be. I entered this work as a male, white, male academic, passionately interested in the meaning of life. I became the exact opposite of that: I became hundreds of women, women of color, women who have no interest in philosophical inquiry at all. It was just—it was a terrifying ordeal, and when I let go and I surrendered to that ordeal, I was then flipped into the positive side of women's experiences and taken on the most extraordinary journey of women's experiences under the arm of the Great Mother. Now I believe in reincarnation. I believe we all have had lives as men and women, but this wasn't simply an encounter with my previous lives as women. The message here was not embrace your former lives. The message was: where you are going, gender does not exist. Let go. When I let go of my identity as Chris Bache, as I had known myself, I entered into the beginnings of a deep conversation with the universe, a deep communion with the universe.

And I thought, after having gone through this very deep ego death, that my suffering was over then, that I would just be introduced to a banquet of cosmological insights. But that's not what happened. At the level of collective mind, there are several chapters here. Now I divide my sessions—or my sessions divided themselves—into two halves: a purification, a purifying stage or cleansing stage, and an ecstatic stage in the sessions. In the two years following "Crossing the Boundary of Birth and Death," in the purifying stage, I began to enter levels of reality that involved hundreds of thousands of people, thousands and thousands of years—a vast domain of terrible anguish and suffering and violence. I was brought back into this domain consistently and taken deeper and deeper into it. At first, I thought this represented a deepening of my ego death. But this went on for so long and it involved so many people in such excruciating detail, that eventually I came to a different conclusion. The conclusion was that somehow in my sessions, my personal reality, my personal transformation, had been exchanged or surrendered and became a process of collective transformation. The healing that was taking place and the uncovering of trauma that was taking place was not about my personal healing and not about my personal trauma, but was about collective healing—the healing that our species has collected over its thousands and thousands of years of history.

When I went into the ecstatic portion of the same sessions, I entered into what I called "Deep Time in the Soul"—chapter, "Deep Time in the Soul." I had, for one year, a repeated experience, seven sessions, of experiencing my life, from start to finish, beginning to end, as a simultaneous present. I experienced the beginning of my life, the end of my life, all the middle of my life as a completed whole, as something yet to be and something that was already complete when I first entered deep time. It was an extraordinarily powerful and moving experience for me, and yet, when I came out of the session, I lost it. I couldn't remember it. But what I found was that by going back into the same state of consciousness again and again, my experiences in those states got clearer, my recall got more complete. I was learning how to stay awake, stay conscious inside deep time.

This is an important epistemological point: when you systematically enter states of consciousness that are so far removed from anything we know inside time and space, it's very hard to bring back all our experiences intact. But if you go back to the same state of consciousness with rigor and discipline, eventually your consciousness adapts to the unusual conditions, and you learn how to stay awake in states of awareness that previously had simply swallowed you. This repeats itself—or in my experience, it repeated itself over and over and over again. When I would break into a new state of consciousness, it was very hard to retain everything that I had encountered, but with repetition, my recall got stronger.

Now, just a quick side comment: in my 20-year journey, I worked for four years, I stopped for six years for reasons given in the book, and then I resumed for a very intense ten years. This is where my journey stopped after four years, and then I took a six-year hiatus. When I began, this is reported in the chapter "Initiation into the Universe," when I began, the ocean of suffering began exactly where it had stopped six years before without missing a beat, and it continued to deepen and deepen and deepen in intensity. Meanwhile, in the ecstatic portion of the session, I was taken into an extraordinary journey into the universe, completely transcending anything to do with my personal life. That was over now. It was as if the consciousness guiding my sessions was giving me a crash course in Cosmology 101.

Now, I give names to all my sessions. I take notes, I break them down into bullet points. When I see the name, it brings the entire session to mind. My goal as a philosopher is to hold my entire journey in my mind at the same time. The names of the sessions that I address in this chapter are as follows.

**Chris Bache: ** All of these were operating at the subtle level of consciousness, beyond the psychic level of consciousness. They were all taking me deep into this learning about how the universe is put together. The "Master Plan" was an initiation into some of the core themes of humanity's evolution, and I'm going to come back to this later. Eventually, the ocean of suffering culminated in session 24, healing the collective womb. The suffering that I was absorbed into reached unprecedented levels, and then it culminated in this orgy of healing, healing this collective pain, and then it disappeared. The collective pain, the ocean of suffering, never reappeared in any subsequent session. We then went on to the next level of work.

The next level of work for me involved an encounter that took place at the archetypal level of consciousness in the chapter "The Greater Real of Archetypal Reality." So much that I could say here—trying to keep it short so we can go into the questions and answers soon. I found that basically, I could break down my experiences here between two levels: one level taking place at the highest subtle level, at what you might call the platonic level of consciousness, in which I experience archetypes that lay far, far beyond time and space. But they were not archetypes as Plato described them. Plato describes archetypes as unchanging, eternal ideas in the mind of an eternal Deity. I experienced archetypes as vast, living processes so radically beyond anything we know of inside time and space, anything I had known, that I literally could not wrap my mind around them. The closest I could come to seeing them in any coherent way was I saw them as galaxies, which was simply the best my mind could do to approximate them. They were operating in a different order of time, a different order of intentionality, and these were the constitutive forces that were responsible for creating time and space and creating the reality that was unfolding inside time and space.

At a lower subtle level, also at the archetypal level, I entered what you might think of as a union level of consciousness, where I had repeated experiences of the universe, of this mind of our species, operating as a single whole, one mind of the entire species. I was given repeated lessons in how this works—how is it that each of our individual minds are fractal aspects of the mind of the species? How our individual karma is part of our collective karma? I began to have experiences at this level of collective reincarnation. That is, I began to have experiences of the entire species incarnating, generation by generation, as a single unified whole. Previously, I thought of reincarnation in terms of the individual, the story of the individual soul, the story of all of our individual souls, choosing individual lives for our individual development. But here, all this dissolved into an experience of the entire species as a single organism evolving itself through a deep, profound collective process, and all of our individual lives were fractal aspects of this deep collective process.

The magnitude of what I was seeing completely reframed my understanding of the intelligence operating inside the universe and in our own evolution. These are the sessions which I address in this chapter, and I'd like to point out how much cleansing is involved, even at this high archetypal level. Session 28, "The Fever is Broken," was a very high, my first encounter with causal reality, very pure, celestial state of awareness, after which I was plunged into three grueling sessions of just excruciatingly purification. It took me a long time to understand what was happening here, but eventually, I began to understand the following: that every deeper level of reality functions at a higher level of energy. When you break through to a deeper level of reality, your entire psychophysical system has to go through a purification process that will allow you to handle the enormous flows of energy operating at that higher level of reality. This repeated itself again and again after I would have a major breakthrough into a new level of reality. The following session was always a "carrying out the garbage" session. It was always a session of deep cleansing. So much so that I began to dread the session following a major breakthrough session. Again, this is an insight that's important if you touch a deep state of consciousness very briefly, this may not manifest itself. But if your goal is to have sustained awareness at a particular level of reality, then you must go through this cleansing ordeal. Otherwise, your experiences at that deeper level will be fragmented and you won't be able to bring back a coherent story.

After moving into archetypal reality, I then went into what I came to understand as causal reality. Causal oneness was an extraordinary year of blessings—one blessing after another. The four sessions that I address in this chapter are these. The "Forest" was an experience of Śūnyatā, what the Buddhists call Śūnyatā, emptiness of self, profound transparency, no self in me, no self anywhere in the world. I experienced the world as a manifestation of diversity, but complete interpenetration and no separate self anywhere in existence. "Singing the Universe Away" was an experience that culminated in an experience of the void, the fertile void out of which all existence springs. "Jesus's Blood" was an experience of profound cosmic love, love unlike anything I had ever experienced up to this point in time. The birth of the diamond soul—let me just linger there for just a second. The traditional teaching of reincarnation—this was about reincarnation. The traditional teaching here is that when we achieve a certain state of spiritual maturity, we awaken to our spiritual essence, and at that point, then we leave time and space. The Hindus call awakening spiritual awakening moksha, to escape samsara, to escape cyclic existence. When one reaches spiritual maturity, one then transcends time and space; you can leave samsara, you can enter the Pure Land, you can enter the Garden or enter Heaven. In this experience, in session 38, I was given a very different model of reincarnation. I began to experience all my former lives coming into me very quickly, and it was like wrapping a filament of white light around a kite spool. And at some point,

**Chris Bache: ** All these lives fused, and there was a huge energy generated, which catapulted me into a state of consciousness beyond any that I had experienced up to that time. I was both an individual, but an individual beyond any frame of reference I had imagined previously. I came to understand there was, when this happened, an explosion of diamond light from my chest, and I was given a series of teachings. This is where reincarnation is taking humanity. We're not simply growing incrementally, lifetime by lifetime, century by century, making incremental improvements in our developmental sequence, becoming more, bit by bit, actualizing our innate potential. Eventually, we come to a point where all of our former lives merge, and we experience our soul. Now, I think this happens when we die and return to spirituality, but the birth of the diamond soul is the birth of soul consciousness inside our physical incarnation. I believe humanity is evolving in a direction where eventually every human being born will be born not into a contracted, egoic consciousness, but as a soul more conscious, fully conscious of their past, and in much deeper communion with surrounding spiritual reality.

From here, my sessions took me next into the diamond Luminosity material in the chapter called Diamond Luminosity. This chapter covers 26 sessions and four years of work. In those four years, I entered this state, which I call diamond Luminosity, four times and only four times. I entered a state of reality that was beyond anything I had previously touched. It was an exceptionally clear, luminous reality. I had touched light many times before, but this was a higher order of light than any I had previously known. When I call this light the diamond Luminosity, I'm not simply using a metaphor to describe the light. I'm trying to describe a particular register of light, a particular quality of light. I've learned that light has many levels to it. There are many gradations, and this was an exceptionally pure state of luminous awareness. I think this is what the Buddhists would call Dharmakaya, the clear light of absolute reality.

In between these four immersions, there were, as you might guess, repeated episodes of deep cleansing, profound purification, many personal healings, and then coming back into these states of hyper clarity. There's so much more I'd like to say here, but I'll stop here and move on to the ninth chapter. I wish I had written the book and put it in this order, because this is the order it really belongs. One of the recurring themes that kept coming up in all my work, going all the way back to the chapter on the initiation End of the Universe, was this master story of humanity. I kept being taken into the deep future and the deep structural evolutionary process underpinning history. I kept being given a series of visions about where humanity was in its evolution and where we were going. In the book, I've pulled these bits and pieces together into one chapter, the birth of the future human.

When I began this work, I never imagined that I would be talking about the birth of the future human. I thought of this work as personal transformation, personal awakening. Yet, I think this chapter may be the most important because, if the visions shared here are true, they concern my children, my grandchildren, your grandchildren, all the children of our grandchildren. The vision that emerged is that humanity is coming to a turning point in its long evolutionary journey, a turning point that will forever change the conditions of life on this planet. Here's what I address in this chapter: the visions of awakening. I gather all the snippets from these sessions over four years into a series of six visions, indicating that the creative intelligence of the universe is trying to awaken the entire species, not just individuals, but the entire species.

For there to be a profound collective awakening, there must be a profound purification. In session 55, which took place in 1995, I was taken deep into the future. I apologize for the seemingly absurd nature of this description but, if you've been with me so far, you'll go with me here. I experienced not as an individual, but as the human species as a whole, the death and rebirth of our entire species. I experienced the entire world coming into a profound global systems crisis that seemed to have been generated by a series of global ecological crises. I was not informed on ecology at this time. I was not aware of the series of ecological challenges we are facing, which we're all quite aware of now. This was in 1995, so this is over 25 years ago, and I experienced humanity being brought to its knees—a radical loss of all the certainties we live with in life, a complete loss of control, just an absolute life-threatening, species-threatening crisis that went on for years. Yet, just when it was at its worst, just when it seemed as if all was lost, the storm passed. When the survivors picked themselves up and began to reassemble, they were different. They had been changed profoundly at the core of their being by the intensity of the crisis. Their hearts were different, their minds were different. They began to generate powerful new patterns of civilization based on new values, new understanding, new insights awakened in them during this crisis. There's much more to say, but I'll stop at that point.

The 11th chapter, Final Vision, is the last year of my work, which included one particularly intense session—the most radical strip down I had gone through in any of my sessions, taking me far into the future and giving me experiences of our universe that seemed to be the capstone of everything that had taken place on my journey up to this point. I won't try to summarize it here because the clock is relentlessly moving. The last chapter, which you can't see here, is Coming Off the Mountain, in which I describe what happened when I stopped my journey.

**Chris Bache: ** Long story, I will say this was the hardest chapter for me to write. It took me over a year to write this chapter because when I stopped my journey, I had been given so many gifts. I thought I could simply withdraw and receive the blessings of all these visions. I've been given the gift of a lifetime as a philosopher, but I found over time that I was entering a state of deep existential sadness. I realized I was suffering from a withdrawal of intimate communion with the divine fabric. Eventually, I reached a point where I realized I was simply waiting to die so I could return to intimacy with the divine, dissolve into the divine light again. Once you've dissolved into the diamond Luminosity, time-space can lose its appeal. It took me years, about 10 years, to finally consolidate myself back into time-space in a way that allowed me to live contentedly within it. I did so by focusing on living in the physical world and the continued assimilation of the visions I had been given.

All my books come out of my psychedelic work. The work on reincarnation comes out of my early work in deep time in "The Living Classroom" and "Dark Night, Early Dawn," though it was published after my sessions ended. This work was done between 1979 and 1999. I talk about my journey in "Dark Night, Early Dawn," but only about the first half. The core theme is the collective structure of consciousness and the collective import of our transformative practices. Then I wrote "The Living Classroom" in 2008. Even though my students never knew anything about my psychedelic experiences and I did not talk about them on campus for obvious legal reasons, I found that my students were being impacted by my work. It was like the deeper I went into the Unified Fabric of Reality, the more it sent ripples of transformation out around me, and my students were impacted by those ripples. Eventually, I had to study them and understand more deeply what was happening, and I wrote "The Living Classroom," which is about collective consciousness. It doesn't mention psychedelics, because they are not the issue. The issue is the nature of consciousness itself, and it doesn't matter which transformational method you're using. If you go deeply enough into the structure of consciousness, you will have ramifications that will spread around you in 360 degrees. All of these come out of my psychedelic work, and this is where we go here. "LSD and the Mind of the Universe," "Diamonds from Heaven" really tells the core story of this journey. Thank you very much for letting me describe it to you today.

**Donna Loeffler: ** Thank you so much, Chris. It does tell the story in detail. It's an amazing book. I highly recommend it, especially after hearing this talk. Before we move on to the Q and A, I'd like to introduce our two co-hosts. Teresa is going to ask a few questions, but I'll give introductions first. Teresa Marie is a certified coach and speaker on neuroscience and consciousness. She has a master's degree in organizational development from John F. Kennedy University and has spoken internationally with a TEDx talk on what the dying can teach the living. Teresa and Dr. David Jackson, an anesthesiologist, co-facilitate psychedelic psychotherapy sessions using ketamine and other psychoactive medicines. David uses his medical, scientific, and problem-solving nature to work with clients to find the right medicine, and Teresa supports clients through integration work. The goal is to make clients conscious of unconscious patterns that keep them in cycles of depression, anxiety, and addictions so they can experience personal transformation. Their integrated approach helps clients achieve a more meaningful existence. Teresa, you want to say hello?

**Teresa Marie: ** Hello, hello. How are you?

**Donna Loeffler: ** And Dr. David Jackson, an anesthesiologist and functional medicine doctor with his BSEE from Rice University and MD from Southwestern Medical School. David developed his interest in transformative mental wellness and entheogenic treatment of addiction in a family member after 30 plus years of failed conventional therapy. With his experience in anesthesiology, Dr. Jackson has developed specific means for the mitigation of undesirable effects, pharmacological treatment, while developing compounded therapies tailored for optimal effect, timing, and safety. David emphasizes the importance of interaction with concurrent medications, age, coexisting medical conditions, medical and therapeutic history, precision dosing, chemical purity, and safety through education of therapists and clients. David partners with Teresa for an integrative approach to transformative therapy for enduring results and offers telemedicine consultations to determine the best approach to your wellness. Welcome, David.

Audience: ** Thank you, Donna. Thank you, Chris. That was awesome. Thank you.

**Donna Loeffler: ** Okay, at this point, we're going to go to the Q and A, and we're going to start with Teresa.

**Teresa Marie: ** That was an amazing talk, and I love it. I have to tell everybody his book is really wonderful. Can everybody hear me okay? Great. You worked with Stan Grof early on, and a lot of people wonder if you can reach these states of consciousness without psychedelics. How would you compare Holotropic Breathwork to your high LSD sessions?

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, well, I've not done any of Stan's training in Holotropic Breathwork directly but rather as a colleague. Stan is a primary intellectual figure for me, and we've been in dialogue at conferences. Absolutely, one can enter these states without using psychedelics. Psychedelics are an amplifier of consciousness, but it's consciousness that does the work. Many people have written to me saying they've had similar experiences without psychedelics—some lifelong meditators and so on. I've taught courses in comparative mysticism and studied the lives of great spiritual masters who have certainly moved into these states and deeper. All honor to the great masters. They've always been my guides. One can move into these states without psychedelics, but it involves not just years, but lifetimes of consistently working to push these boundaries.

My sense is that Holotropic Breathwork is a powerful amplifier of consciousness. It can evoke states of consciousness equally strong to psychedelic states. I do not think it generates states comparable to high-dose LSD sessions, but it can certainly offer experiences parallel to low or medium-dose sessions. I've had deep experiences in Holotropic Breathwork that were comparable to my psychedelic experiences in many respects.

**Teresa Marie: ** Thank you. You talk a lot about the Future Human and say that we are going to undergo suffering. Can you talk about some of your visions and whether they have come to pass since the 90s?

**Chris Bache: ** The consistent theme in my sessions was positive—that humanity was coming to a turning point, a decisive one that would change the course of history. We are coming to a collective spiritual explosion driven from a cosmological level. I only had one session where I was taken into the specific conditions of our collective death and rebirth. It was a deep compression, a profound loss of control, existential anxiety, and hopelessness. In this, we went through something like a collective near-extinction event, metamorphosing into more than before. Past sessions focused on reincarnation, development, and eventual birth of diamond soul in history. This is a relatively short and cathartic process. We've been in a developmental process for thousands of years, and birth is an evolutionary pivot I anticipate taking multiple generations.

Experiencing the future human drove me into deep ecstasy. We're talking about humanity healed of historical scars, open to profound communion with universal intelligence. We're entering the hard part of development, the birth process. It's important to have a vision of this transformation. When it gets challenging—and COVID may be an overture—we should be prepared for deeper crises, likely ecological, hitting us wave after wave. Dwayne Elgin's book, "Choosing Earth," breaks down upcoming decades of challenges, so we have a clearer sense of what's coming.

**Teresa Marie: ** There was a question in the chat about the same setting each session. Can you describe your set and setting?

**Chris Bache: ** I did a lot of preparation for each session, took care of my body, maintained a diet, and started my day with yoga and meditation. Either at home or in my wife's office where she, a clinical psychologist, acted as my sitter. All my sessions focused on spiritual intention. I experimented with setting an intention but found at high doses, personal intention became irrelevant. My focus became complete surrender—whatever the universe needed, I would give. I carefully wrote up my sessions within 24 hours. As you go deeper into sustained states, they impact your subtle energy system. Spiritual practice is essential after a session. Later on, I focused more on Vajrayana Buddhism practices, which facilitated deeper states of consciousness and helped absorb the insights. Experiences take a lot out of your body—careful preparation, focus, and debriefing are essential.

**Host: ** Chris, you mentioned music was a part of your journeys, especially at higher levels. Could you speak on that?

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, I used music in all sessions—carefully selected to match session stages. I preferred music without English words to avoid familiar associations. Indigenous music became more evocative for me compared to classical. Writing up sessions, I listened to session music in the same order, replaying it while writing. This allowed a more complete recall and understanding. Though I've done sessions without music, at high LSD doses, music was helpful for opening process.

**Teresa Marie: ** Your LSD doses were typically 500 to 600 micrograms, correct? You mentioned coming back down from those high states was challenging and that you've tried other psychedelics. Can you explain why LSD felt most powerful?

**Chris Bache: ** Each psychedelic opens consciousness differently. LSD, a high ceiling psychedelic, pushes cosmic boundaries. Psilocybin is more body-grounded and emotion-focused. Ayahuasca integrates with the body and emotional system but has limited experience on my part. 5-MeO-DMT is profound but short-acting, a different exploration. Short versus long-acting psychedelics is a complex area. Longer sessions allow sustained contact with nonordinary states, leading to mental purification—short doesn't.

What I did was deepen a specific path; many areas other experiences touch, I didn't. Psilocybin and Ayahuasca connect to the elemental, spirit, time-space—many levels I didn't engage.

**Teresa Marie: ** Thank you. David, do you want to check chat questions?

**Donna Loeffler: ** That was beautifully said, Chris. John Hock has a question. Go ahead, John.

**John Hock: ** I asked Stan Grof if anything could correlate a difficult trip, and he cited a Mars transit. You've charted correlations—any specific astrological ones linked to breakthroughs or higher levels?

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, good question, and a complicated question. I'm aware of, and Rick Tarnas is a good friend, as is Stan. I'm aware of Stan's writing in his analysis of certain cases and the astrological correlations of certain people going through breakthroughs. I'm aware of the proposal that the outer planets correlating with the perinatal matrices seem to be somewhat predictive of the patterns of oppression, contraction, breakthrough, and liberation in people's experiences. I've looked at these correlations in my own work. First of all, I completely accept the proposal they've made. I understand it. I think that makes sense—the intelligence of the universe that I experience. It makes intuitive sense that the rhythm of the universe would be part of the rhythm of this intelligence, and that as we open up beyond the personal psyche, there would be this solar system pulse to the nature of our experiences.

That said, I have not found correlations to be as striking as I had expected, and I have found that as my work deepened over the years, I could not correlate breakthroughs and impasses with astrological variables as much as I had expected to do. That led me to formulate a hypothesis, and I call it the roll-off hypothesis. In the early stages of our work, or when we're working at lower doses, or in earlier stages, when our time-space identity is being unfolded and impacted, I think there would be stronger correlations between our natal transits—the transit to our natal chart—or even our global transits. But once work deepens, when you begin to go into and beyond archetypal reality, when you're going beyond time and space and deep into the universe, I think there is a roll-off effect of the planetary correlates to experience. At least, I found that the dynamic relationship with the universe—the way the universe crushed me and kissed me, drew me out and melted me into herself—did not seem to correlate tightly with specific planetary correlations. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. So, I think there is a roll-off effect. My proposal is that there's a roll-off effect of astrological import. Now, this is an open question. I'm not an astrologer, and this is something I'm interested in. It's an active dialog between Richard Tarnas and myself about this issue. This is why, in my book, I actually put the dates of all of my sessions, and I give my birth information, because I would like to encourage this discussion of the correlations between astrology and our own psychedelic experiences.

**John Hock: ** Thank you very much. Excellent answer, and your hypothesis makes an awful lot of sense. I'm going to stop my questions now and let other people open it up for other people. There's a number of very good questions in the chat.

**Donna Loeffler: ** So, David, did you?

**Teresa Marie: ** One or Teresa? Well, Rachel had a really good question. I don't know if she wants to ask it herself, but she wanted to speak a little bit more about how your consciousness work has changed and affected your life over time in your physical essence right now. In other words, how has that been transformative in your life?

**Chris Bache: ** Good question, hard question to answer. I'll tell you one of the things that really complicated things in my particular instance, and the thing that complicated it was that I wasn't allowed to talk about my work. I'm a teacher. I love to teach. I love to learn and share what I've learned. I'm a philosopher, and yet our psychedelic-phobic culture did not allow me or give me any platform to bring the deepest philosophical experiences of my life forward and mine them with my students or with my colleagues, to extract their philosophical potential. When I stopped my sessions, the deep sadness I entered was not simply a sadness that came from withdrawing from the cosmological communion, but it was a sickness which was generated by silence. I have not been allowed to talk about this work publicly.

As I wrote the book, I began to experience a number of changes, and as I began to speak about the book, these changes have deepened. I found my sessions beginning to, as it were, come together into larger aggregates, into a larger whole, as I began to own my sessions, to own my psychedelic history, and come out of the psychedelic closet. The sessions began, as it were, to saturate me and soak into me at deeper and deeper levels. This process is still continuing. I don't know where it will go. 

I wish I could say, "Wow, I've touched the oneness of the universe, and I live in perpetual oneness all the time, in this state of ecstatic joy.” But it's not like that. These are temporary states. These are not the same as touching these realities after 30 years of contemplative practice on the top of a mountain. These are temporary immersions which are genuine, and you can't abide in these states when you're done, even if you've done all your homework carefully and attend to integration very conscientiously. But they change the trajectory of your evolution. They change the trajectory of your soul's development. 

I live with an understanding of reality that allows me to open into a prayerful engagement of reality, which is certainly different than I had at the beginning of this journey. Late in my sessions, or at the end of my journey, Spirit said two things. It said, "20 years in, 20 years out," meaning it would take at least 20 years to assimilate 20 years of the journey. I thought at the time that sounds about right; now I think that might have been optimistic. I literally think the things I've touched will be unfolding over many lifetimes, not simply one lifetime, but it's changed the trajectory of the evolution of my soul. 

The other thing it said to me is, there's the dying of seeing and the dying of keeping. The dying of seeing is the death and rebirth process you go through when you're being initiated into the deep structure of the universe. The dying of keeping is what you do when you are in your ordinary state of consciousness back inside time and space, in order to let those experiences enter into and saturate you deeper into your daily life. My practice these days is primarily contemplative practice, Buddhist Vajrayāna practice. I'm basically sitting still and letting the universe come to me, rather than going out to meet it there.

**Teresa Marie: ** Thank you. So, I know Donna, you said there were a couple more questions in the chat you thought were...

**Donna Loeffler: ** I do, yeah. Andrew has a question for Chris. And Chris, none of these are going to be easy just because of the nature of your work. How has your understanding of the future human changed or been reinforced since first experiencing it in the late '90s to the writing of this book to the present day?

**Chris Bache: ** It hasn't changed one bit. I say in the book that when I had the experience in session 55—the death and rebirth of humanity in 1995—for weeks I walked around like I was walking around Hiroshima a week before the bomb went off. I have carried in my being, in my body, a knowing of where we are in history and what's coming. When I look around at everyone, whether I agree with them, politically or socially, or not, I see heroes. Every human being here on this planet has incarnated voluntarily, has chosen to be part of this evolutionary pivot. Every person here, even though they may not remember it, has chosen to be here. This is going to be a very, very difficult period to incarnate, and the beings who are part of the incarnation process are extraordinarily powerful, valuable beings. 

Nothing has changed. It's been interesting to watch COVID; it's been interesting to watch ecological awareness begin to grow. Frankly, things are coming to a head faster than I had expected. I expect this decade—if everything the scientists are telling us is true—this decade is the last window we have to change the trajectory of what's coming at us. But if the past is any indication, we're not going to change as radically as we need to avert this trauma, so I expect the patterns of trauma to intensify in the coming decades. This century is going to be the dark night of our collective soul. The dark night of the soul is, of course, a process of profound purification. We as a species are purifying ourselves extraordinarily rapidly. We're purifying ourselves of all the decisions we've made in history—how we've chosen to treat each other, animals, and the planet itself—all of these choices are coming at us very fast and deeply. 

This is what I saw in my sessions. This is what I'm carrying now. This is the vision I'm bringing to my children and to your children. It's important for every individual to reach as deeply as possible and to manifest their noblest intent. If the future were moving in the same way as the past, with a linear understanding of history, we might say the forces against us are overwhelming, and the individual can't do anything. But that's not what I saw in my sessions. What I saw is that as the suffering increases, the entire psychic field of humanity, the collective unconscious, will be increasingly pressurized and shuffled into nonlinear conditions, or far-from-equilibrium conditions. In such conditions, individual perturbations produce large outcomes, which means as we enter deeper into our crisis, individuals can have a larger impact on the outcome, on how this crisis will manifest. So, I think it's a time of individual empowerment to facilitate deep, cultural, profound social transformation.

**Donna Loeffler: ** Thank you, Chris. Another amazing answer. Again, I highly recommend this book. It's so detailed, just an amazing work. We're almost at the end of our time with you, Chris, and again, many thanks for being with us today and presenting on our platform. Just a note to everyone, everyone here is not being paid. We're all volunteers. Chris is here for the love of the work, as are David and Teresa. If you find any of our content valuable and you're able to donate, we would much appreciate it.