Exploring LSD as a Practice (Edge of Mind Podcast – Part 1)

Andrew Holecek: Everybody. Andrew Holecek here, and I simply cannot contain my excitement about my guest for today, Dr. Christopher Bache. And so, with a brief introduction, we're going to launch into what I believe will be quite a revelatory, I hope, provocative conversation. So, Chris, Ph.D., 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 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, Chris has written four books: Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life, Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind, The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness, and LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. Chris is a father of three, a Vajrayana practitioner, and lives in Weaverville, North Carolina with his wife, Christina Hardy. Oh my gosh, Chris, where do we start? Right? First of all, thank you, my dear friend, for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with us. It's a pleasure. Really. I've been looking forward to this one for a while. And so, oh my gosh. Just some preparatory comments before we launch in. I have read a fair amount over my years. I consider myself a bit of an academic. I love to read. I love to devour books, and I have to say, I have never read anything like your last book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe. And so out of all the books that you've written, this is the one I really want to focus on because it's no exaggeration to say that it really stretched my mind open, challenged me. And maybe we can talk about some of the areas where I was challenged, created both tremendous resonance with my own path and also some dissonance. And so that's a great way to make modern music, right? So maybe, maybe we can create a symphony of sanity with some questions to you, of which there is no shortage. But one kind of preparatory comment: There's a term by the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton that I really quite like. He talks about hyperobjects, and he refers to this in relationship to climate change. When you have something that is just so enormous that it is really difficult to wrap your mind around it, it just defies description. It's literally mind-bending, mind-stretching, and then maybe even mind-blowing. And it's no exaggeration that your book and your journey is a hyperobject to me, and I can't tell you how it's impacted me and how I want to really get into some of the nitty gritty of what you went through. But in order to give our listeners even a rough idea of what we're going to be talking about, perhaps give us a long elevator pitch. Okay, so we have 1,000 floors to ascend, right? So this is a long elevator pitch. Share with us, if you would, a little bit about this book before we get into the weeds, and I start exploring particular topics with you.

Chris Bache: Well, I know it's a radical book, and I think we are at a pivot point in history, and I think that psychedelics represent a major transition point, a true historical before-and-after point with respect to philosophy, not just psychology. It generates not only a new therapeutic protocol for healing the personal psyche, but literally, a new way of doing philosophy. It's not really new, because it goes back to the Eleusinian mysteries and the ayahuasca traditions in Brazil, but I got involved in it right out of graduate school. I had just finished my Ph.D. from Brown University. I went to work in Ohio, at Youngstown State. I was looking around for where to begin, where to continue my research. I was a pretty deeply convinced agnostic at the time, and I encountered Realms of the Human Unconscious, Stan Grof's first book, and that was a turning point in my life, quickly followed by his methodology book, LSD Psychotherapy. This was 1978 when I began graduate school, and I saw the significance of his work for philosophy, for my tradition, which was philosophy of religion. And I knew that I needed to do this work, that the people making the most substantive contributions to my discipline in the future would be people writing out of an experiential basis, not simply an intellectual basis. So I began to work privately. I split my life into two. In my day job, I was a traditional academic, you know, teaching courses, grading papers, going to meetings, and all that. And in my private life, I began a 20-year journey following Stan Grof's protocol. I ended up working with high doses of LSD for reasons I describe in the book. This is a very aggressive protocol. It's not a protocol that I would recommend today at the end of the journey, but I basically did 73 high-dose LSD sessions. Let me say that each session was completely isolated. I was separated from the world. I was in what I call the psychedelic kiva, a very protected environment separate from the world, lying down with a sitter. My sitter was a clinical psychologist who also happened to be my wife through all of my sessions, wearing eye shades and with headphones, listening to very carefully selected music to support the deepening of the process. So that's where I began. I worked for four years. I stopped for six years, again for reasons that I give in the book, and then I resumed for another 10 years. The psychedelic method, as a philosophical method, involves systematically expanding the boundaries of one's consciousness. And let me say that we understand that psychedelics in general, and LSD in particular, are amplifiers of consciousness. It doesn't give you any specific experiences. It amplifies your consciousness. Makes you hypersensitive for a number of hours at a time. How you use that hypersensitivity very much influences what emerges over time. If you go to a concert or you just sit down and chat with friends, you're going to have a certain level of experience. But if you approach these hours in a contemplative manner, if you approach them as an opportunity to go deep within your consciousness, totally internalized, isolating yourself from the world, a journey begins. It's a journey that has many levels because as we confront all the things that a hyper-sensitive mind throws up to us to confront—and it usually starts with all the fears, all the things we're ashamed of, all the things we're unhappy about—those are the early confrontations that lead to the healing process. But if you keep that up, it keeps going deeper and deeper and deeper. If you navigate this journey carefully, I always recorded my sessions within 24 hours, and that's really important, because the more careful you are in recording your session and pondering them, the clearer, the deeper your next session is likely to be. So there's a circle of learning that's involved. For 20 years, I kept up this systematic practice, and then I waited. I stopped it. I went from '79 to '99 and then I didn't publish LSD and the Mind of the Universe until 20 years later, in 2019. I spent many years analyzing my experiences, pondering them, trying to sort them out before I was ready to publicly release this hidden side of my life. My students never learned about my psychedelic work. I kept a firewall between my public life and my private life in this regard, and it's only after I retired from the university that I've really been willing to go public on this side of my life.

Andrew Holecek: Even there, there's so much to talk about. Let me just, if I might, ping one question for you briefly. I am a musician. My first degree is actually in classical piano, and so just briefly, why? Why music? What was the role of music and how did it help you? How did you choose it? I don't want to spend a ton of time on this, but I am interested. Where did that inspiration come from, and how did it end up supporting your journey?

Chris Bache: There's early research done on how music influences psychedelic sessions. I have references to those sources in my work. Basically, it creates a field and an ambiance that supports you, letting go of your current physical reality, relaxing and yielding to this uprush of material that comes from the unconscious. There are about five stages in a psychedelic session as the energy is building, as it's peaking, and as you're coming down. It's hours—you know, it's eight hours of the day—and you have to choose music to support each stage of that process. So the music would be very aggressive and have long chordal sequences with powerful crescendos in the early stages, long, expansive passages in the middle stages, gradually tapering off into quieter and quieter judgmental music at the end. After only a year or so, I basically stopped using classical music, which is more commonly used. I shifted to using a lot of indigenous music because I found it to be more powerfully evocative. It helped me let go of my conventional reality and enter into unusual reality.

Andrew Holecek: Well, that's really interesting, Chris, because in the inner yogas of tantric Buddhism, which I know you're a student of Vajrayāna, as you know, the subtle body is actually the kind of frequency or the domain that is literally quite in resonance with sound. And so when we're actually touched by music, it's really our subtle body that is touched. This is really interesting to me because when you talk about this journey, which in one way, and I'll be curious to see if this resonates with you, I really appreciated your frequent allusions to the work of Carl Jung, and I don't remember you saying this overtly, but the process of individuation, how it is that bringing the unconscious processes into the light of conscious awareness is what, in fact, constitutes one vector of awakening. And so the reason this is interesting to me is that the subtle body is also connected to the unconscious mind, and so in a certain way—and let me see if this is landing with you—when you're working with this type of music, it's almost as if you're creating a tuning fork, invitational harmonic in external auditory mechanisms or mediums that therefore could perhaps evoke correlative inner qualities that help you bring these processes into the light of consciousness. Is it fair to say something like that?

Chris Bache: I think that's fair. And, you know, basically, I think that's a good description. The subtle body is very actively involved in the psychedelic process when you open up into deeper states of consciousness. I learned that deeper states of consciousness are higher levels of energy, and so it places enormous demands on your physical body, but particularly on the subtle energy body. So the subtle energy body is very much involved. You're moving into highly stimulated states, which are not simply psychologically stimulating, but they're energetically, subtly energetically stimulating, and physically stimulating.

Andrew Holecek: That really makes so much sense to me. But I want to put an exclamation point and return to something that you intimated that you also ping on later in your book, connected to this kind of amplification, using these agents as means to heighten awareness and amplifying the mind. What you said at the end really struck me because, in fact, I was a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a statement that I always took from him to be pejorative, negative, that LSD is "super samsara." I originally heard that as a negative. Your twist on it was fantastically alchemical or tantric, because now you put a positive spin on it, that in a very beautiful way, the super samsara gives you the opportunity to bring these unconscious processes into the light of awareness. And therefore, I think the word you use is "confront," even confrontation. You could say inner jihad, right? To wrestle with these inner dimensions as a way, again, in the alchemical or tantric spirit, to transform these super samsara into nirvana through proper relationship. Is that one way to talk about what you experienced as well?

Chris Bache: It is. I want to tag two items there. The first one, again, it all depends on how you meet this super samsara. Samsara is very addictive. It's very distracting, it's very alluring. And if you increase your sensitivity to samsara, it can take you on a journey that will just distract you and lead you, and it really doesn't take you anywhere except through into more samsara. But if you use this opportunity in a true contemplative fashion to look deeply at the samsara that's there, then you find that the samsara will fall apart. When you really take the samsaric tendencies to their roots, and when you take them to their roots, they become uprooted, and you begin to move into deeper levels, deeper levels of samsara, but then eventually into the levels that go beyond samsara, into the bardo, but then eventually into extra-samsaric levels of reality. Now I want to mention the second point: People use psychedelics for many different purposes, some for recreation, some to hyper-stimulate creativity. But three basic purposes are therapeutic healing, which is the dominant way that people are using psychedelics today in the psychedelic renaissance, to heal the wounds of life, of the personal psyche; second, for spiritual realization, to accelerate one's awakening, to accelerate one's awareness of nirvana or entering into the condition of nirvana. This is why I had started. This is what got me started, like many people in the late '70s, into the psychedelic work, but eventually, very quickly, really, that agenda fell away in my practice, partly because of the very powerful protocol that I adopted. Personal enlightenment fell away as not a significant part of my journey. It came back around in the end, and it was always there, but it wasn't the primary modality. Collective awakening became very important, that is, working on behalf of the human family. The Bodhisattva vow, in a sense, came through very strongly. But eventually, my work settled into a third agenda, which I would call cosmological exploration. What my work became was a long journey into what I think of as the consciousness of the universe, or the consciousness of the creative intelligence that's behind the universe and within the universe. You don't need to explore all those deep pathways in order to awaken spiritually. You don't need to go into archetypal reality. You don't need to go back to the birth of the universe in order to awaken to the truth of your essential nature, as the Buddhists would say, or to your Christ consciousness, as the Christians would say. And so I wanted to differentiate cosmological exploration from the project of spiritual awakening because if we hold cosmological exploration to the measures or criteria of success of spiritual awakening, I think we're going to miss the mark of what's actually taking place in the journey.

Andrew Holecek: Oh my gosh, Chris. Boy, you're going to the deep end of the pool. Wow. So let's unpack this, because I think this is really interesting. This is super important, in my opinion, because it begs a number of questions. One is the relationship between the individual and the collective, the individual and the cosmos. And therefore, deep, as a scholar of religion and philosophy, deep questions about the nature of mind and reality. I guess, to paraphrase it, there's so many ways to get into this, but one question that comes to mind is, is it, in fact, the mind that's in the universe, or the universe that's in the mind? In other words, what exactly is the relationship between the individual and the cosmic? And is, in fact, part of what I hear is a dissonance, a potential dissonance for me, a subtle cosmological dualism that, therefore, seems to intimate a difference between the individual and the cosmic, that there's still some sense of separation implied there. So maybe help me understand that, tease that apart for me, because I noticed in one of your footnotes, you talk that if you were to pin yourself into a corner philosophically, you would define yourself as a monist. And so how does monism play into this if, in fact, you're intimating a subtle dualism?

Chris Bache: It's only a functional dualism which all monist traditions recognize. At core, I'm a monist at heart. And this is not a philosophical position, it's an experiential position. The deeper one goes into one's own consciousness, you eventually come to that point where—let me back up. Contemporary thought, scientific thought, tends to see the physical world as the only world that exists. And they tend to see the physical world as operating by mechanistic processes, that there is not consciousness in atomic and chemical processes, and that consciousness somehow pops into existence at some point in the evolutionary process. Now there are lots of philosophical reasons for challenging the adequacy of that understanding of consciousness, and I align with those philosophers who are panpsychists who believe that consciousness, or what you might think of as origin consciousness, is present in physical reality or energetic reality from the very start, and that consciousness isn't added later, but consciousness is part of the emerging universe from the Big Bang forward. So just mark that. Experientially, when one shatters one's personal mind, when one reaches the limits where your personal history can no longer contain what's happening in your mind, and when you've excavated through the various levels of your personal unconscious, one drops into a larger field of consciousness. Part of that field you drop into is the field of your species mind. And here's the common ground with Carl Jung, the collective psyche. But if you keep working and dropping, you drop into deeper and deeper, larger and larger levels of consciousness until eventually you're in territory that's very familiar to the mystics. When they are talking about God consciousness or talking about all as one, the experience over and over again is that the entire universe, both its physical manifestation and the mind that underlies this manifestation, is fundamentally a single organism, and that all life takes place within this single singularity, and all life is a manifestation of an emergence of this singularity in diversity. When we first began to discover this underlying reality, what I would call the mother universe that underlies the daughter universe of the physical world during the Axial Age, about 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, it was so intoxicating and so ecstasy-filled that we developed an interpretation of life that said the purpose of life was to get back to that, that there's nothing worth holding on to in physical reality. There's nothing worth holding on to in individuality; what you really want to do is take the drop and put it back into the ocean. You want to dissolve ego and end up back into the oneness. I understand that, but I think it's a fundamentally flawed cosmology. Now that we're beginning to understand how old the universe is, how big it is, how intelligent it is, how long it's been working to bring forward the more evolved forms of life that it has, to think that after 13.7 billion years of evolution, when just a few thousand years ago, we've become self-conscious enough to be able to penetrate our individual consciousness and discover this underlying cosmically conscious awareness, just when we discover that, then we want to dissolve and disappear out of existence altogether makes no sense. What I've learned, or what I've been taught in my sessions, is that the universe wants to support individuality—not the individuality that's imprisoned within solitary, egoic awareness, but a robust individuality of what we might call the soul, which is open and porous and in constant exchange with the larger rhythms of life. This is the both/and position that when one awakens spiritually, one literally becomes more, more of an individual than you were before you awakened. So there's a, I think that when we go deep, we not only discover the oneness, and we discover that that oneness is the essence of our individual being. Classic Atman is Brahman. The essence of the individual is the essence of the totality. But now we discover that Brahman delights in manifesting Atman and in growing Atman, and in Atman waking up to its own true nature, and then that waking up is just a stage in a larger evolutionary process of empowerment so that we literally learn to become more and more and more of a conscious synthesis of individuality and spiritual totality.

Andrew Holecek: Oh, Chris, oh my gosh. I can hardly contain myself here. What I mean? Talk about diamonds from heaven. I mean, this is your journey. You're not Johnny Appleseed. You're Johnny Diamond-seed. Your life is throwing diamonds. But maybe this is an issue of semantics and the nuance of talking. Yeah, what a challenge when you start talking about non-duality, nature of mind and reality, using dualistic mechanisms, you're headed into trouble. But help me understand a couple of things. When you talk about the universe wanting to support, and there are other intimations in your book that I found really compelling, how it is that you felt from day one that there was a larger intelligence that was guiding your journey, that you felt held by the beloved. And remind me to come back to this, because I want to share a personal story about my own retreat time where this came into real dissonance with me as a practicing Buddhist, because, as you know, in the Buddhist tradition, one of the biggest teachings is on emptiness, non-theism, and that sort of thing. And so I'm wrestling a little bit with reconciling things like non-theism and emptiness with what you're talking about. So to be a little more articulate about this, let's be a bit more point-blank. From my end, how do you reconcile non-theism with this notion of universal intelligence, which almost seems to intimate a creator principle, a God, if we dare say, because you almost seem to be implying that there is a divine trans-human intelligence, God, whatever term you want to pen to it, that somehow is, in fact, your beloved that is holding you, guiding you, and nurturing you. How do you reconcile that with the teachings on emptiness and non-theism?

Chris Bache: Yeah, it's really not difficult when you move into it. So let's focus on the Buddhist teaching of anatta, no-self, emptiness of self. Śūnyatā, which can also be translated as transparency. I really endorse the Buddhist position of its radical agnosticism. I think it's anti-theism. Basically, it's a critique that says every theism which is being proposed or has been proposed has structural flaws to it, so the concept of God, the concept of theism is critiqued as being inadequate, and in its place, Buddhism proposes a pure process understanding of reality, that everything is dynamic, everything is constantly changing, everything is fluid, everything is in process. There is no thing that holds its existence by itself. You only exist in the interplay of the whole ocean of causality, of karmic forces, cosmic, down to species, down to individual. It's all an open system. And when you wake up to your essential nature, you don't wake up to a separate thing. You wake up to a fluid process, and you breathe. Now, the fluid process of existence, I take that to heart, and that resonates with my experience. I experienced myself as constantly being guided and instructed and tutored in my psychedelic sessions. But the nature of that consciousness that held me and broke me down and opened me and then broke me down some more never revealed itself as a being, as a person, as a personality, and the very structure of what it was that I was engaging kept expanding and changing. Now, in psychedelic states, you don't learn, or you learn by becoming what it is that you're trying to learn about. You don't take the ego there and have an experience of something. You literally shatter and you dissolve and become this. So my experience was that when I began to become aware of this other that was holding me and guiding me, and I began to ask it, "Who are you? What are you?" I experienced a death, which then dissolved me into a deeper level of reality where I discovered that this was myself. It was a deeper level of "myself," not my personal self, capital M. This repeated itself over and over and over for hours on this one particular session, until eventually it brought me into the realization that it's an endless progression. It's a seamless consciousness within this vast consciousness. We are an individual consciousness confronting an infinite consciousness. How we experience ourselves at the moment of contact, as we dissolve into it, influences what arises out of this infinite consciousness. That awareness, that this consciousness that I was engaging and discovered myself to be part of was truly infinite and open-ended, and that I reached a point 15 years into the journey where I discovered I would never reach the end of it. It was an infinite progression. No matter how many years I did this work, there was always more to discover. That, to me, resonates very deeply with the Buddhist position on its critique of theism, its critique of gods that have physical forms, the critique of gods that come out of human history that we can understand to be partial approximations, attempts to understand something which are partially adequate and radically inadequate at the same time. You know, so when you move beyond individual consciousness and move into the collective psyche and begin to engage some of the dynamics of the collective psyche, part of what you engage are all the stories that we've been telling ourselves for tens of thousands of years, all the values that have been involved in these stories, which have been reinforcing themselves in all these cultural traditions. And there comes a point where you die out of the collective psyche, just as earlier you had died out of your personal psyche. When you die out of the collective psyche, you move into states of awareness which are trans-species, which go far beyond the entire human history. At that point, you're moving into states of awareness that are radically, radically beyond and clearer than any states of consciousness that take place within the collective psyche. You realize that all the stories of our religions are part of the collective psyche story, and that the reality is far, far, far beyond any of those realities. I think that Buddhism is pointing to that phenomenon when it says it's fundamentally agnostic. It says you shouldn't restrict yourself to any limiting belief about God. However, you can experience the reality that we're pointing to. We can experience this reality, but our understanding of it will always be partial and fragmented.

Andrew Holecek: Oh, my goodness. Every one of these little snippets could spin off for a couple of hours. There are a couple of things here that really stood out for me, Chris. These are seed syllables for massive arenas of conversation. One is what you talk about so beautifully in your book. I have not read The Living Classroom yet, but I just received it in the mail. It's this radical, revolutionary new pedagogical approach you talk about, and I love it. This transition from kind of Newtonian, atomistic pedagogy—individuality separate from others—to a quantum entangled pedagogy using the connective tissue of consciousness. Learning by becoming—what a fantastic thing to say. This has resonance in both the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, through what I call the Gnostic pedagogical approach of hearing, contemplating, meditating—ingest, digest, metabolize—until the teachings are purified into full somatic embodiment. That's where true knowing comes from. I love that aspect of your journey because it introduces a pedagogy resonant with classic wisdom traditions.

You experienced this through your journey. I also want to come back to this, as it was key for me when I did my three-year retreat. I experienced what you're referring to for the first time, and I wrestled with it because at the time, it wasn't in accordance with my limited understanding of emptiness and non-theism. I felt I was being held and loved by something bigger than me, which created a rut for me. I thought there was no externality; I thought it was all mind only. How could there be an external agency without capitulating to the god principle? Your book was such an inspiration for me. In a real way, when I was doing these guru yogas and devotional practices properly, my mind broke. I died to a limited self-sense. There's just tremendous hardship and pain before that breakthrough occurred. Then, I felt this complete container, a mandala, a holding environment of love, and dare I say, an "external" agency that was, in fact, holding me.

What became unbelievably interesting to me was that, in the third year of my retreat, I lost something. I lost some of those initial qualities and entered a kind of dark night of the soul. A female lama came and said the dakinis can bestow awakening and they can take it away, and I said, "What?" Like a big bong just hit my head. But it felt true; it felt like somehow it had been taken away. It took me decades to finally understand the painful, powerful lesson developing in my retreat. You mentioned this in the very last chapter of your book, which I thought was genius, that I was getting stuck in a kind of spiritual bypassing or Transcendentalism in the negative sense. I was dissolving into the formless realms where I became the universe. I realized when this agency took it away, the thought was, "You will find me in form, or you will not find me at all." It was almost as if saying, "Don't get stuck on this formless stuff. Come back to earth, come back to the body." That turned out to be one of the most radically challenging and revelatory experiences. It’s not about the ascent into the Godhead; that’s just half the journey. The other half is taking that and bringing it back into the earth. I want to pause to share that story because your book resonated with what happened in my experience. I want to return to help me further understand, and this will help many listeners who work with non-theism and emptiness, the so-called agency, the beloved, that can embrace us. We really are not alone; we can take refuge in these greater forces. Sorry for the long interjection, but this is a big deal in my own practice life.

Chris Bache: Yeah, maybe as a footnote to my earlier comment to bridge into this new wing: I think Sri Aurobindo's critique of Buddhism is correct in criticizing Buddhism for not sufficiently confronting the fact of existence—the extraordinary power and majesty of existence. In rejecting anything static and form-based, in its agnosticism and anti-theism, Aurobindo says we must confront the magnitude and majesty of the universe we are part of. Buddhism might say, "Thank you, but we need freedom from our suffering. I'll take that over engaging in metaphysical speculation." Aurobindo's response is it’s not either-or. It's a capitulation to not confront the magnitude and breadth of life.

Now, to move towards what you were describing—when we have these breakthroughs, go through purification processes, face our shortcomings, and let go, we immerse ourselves deeper. When we have these melting experiences where we are embraced, held by orders of genius and love beyond anything we've experienced, one realizes there are many levels of oneness—levels of the void, the fertile void. It may initially feel like an external or another because it wasn't there, but we experience it now, and it clearly feels outside of us, holding us.

But the more you experience this condition and back, the more you realize you're waking up to your own nature. Your nature and the universal nature are the same; this expanse is both within and around you. The challenge is stabilizing those insights and bringing them into daily experience. This is a challenge of all spiritual practice. We go on long retreats, reach subtle territories, and return to the mundane world, trying to integrate day to day. This is particularly so with psychedelic practice, whether for spiritual growth or cosmological exploration. I pushed myself far deeper into the universe's consciousness than I could ever stabilize in this lifetime.

Coming off the mountain after my work, I realized I had unwittingly created an imbalance. I thought I could integrate each session and carry those blessings. I leaned so heavily into transcendence, losing my foothold in immanence. I knew from experience the universe was the body of the divine, but couldn't hold that awareness in physical reality. The great beings are always guides in these things. I was kind of kicked off the mountain by the sessions themselves. It wasn't my decision to end them; they were being ended. My meditation taught that to stabilize these states in historical existence, I couldn't expand or alter consciousness anymore. If these states of being from my sessions were to awaken in my life, I had to live my ordinary existence to fully integrate ecstasy. What the sessions called for was the dying of discovery and then the dying of keeping. I had done the dying of discovery, and now the dying of keeping was a different process.

Andrew Holecek: You're stopping my mind with every one of these insights, so many things here. It's really mental yoga, stretching almost to the breaking point. A couple of questions: the integrity of your being, clarity of your writing, elegance of your academic predispositions, have been incredibly important for me to substantiate the veracity of your journey. Your presence, it’s like this is the real deal, but it's such a mind stretch. Alongside this beautiful challenge of stretching into psychedelic practice, talk about the revolutionary notion illuminated by Michael Pollan, James Kingsland, Stan Grof. Stand on those mighty shoulders to now silently but radically proclaim the validity of psychedelics as path. Discuss more about psychedelics as practice and path. Also, the process of integration and the danger of disintegration—were you ever afraid of going insane, stretched beyond your capacities to contain, and instead of stretching, you snap. Two big noodles thrown there. First, talk about psychedelics as practice and then the process of integration versus disintegration, sanity versus insanity.

Chris Bache: In different interviews, I've noted I've never "tripped." People say I've done 73 trips. No, I've done sessions, therapeutically focused. In my mind, I think of the Japanese term sashin, a meditation retreat for intense spiritual practice. When I talk LSD sessions, I mean LSD sashin, a period set aside for therapeutic, spiritual, cosmological work. As in sashin, your daily life changes; you alter your schedule, eating, sleeping, rhythm to focus and intensify the practice—similar to your three-year retreat. Everything changes for sustained introspection. Psychedelics as transformation practice has an underbelly—its temporariness. You have these states for just a few hours. Even if used diligently, it becomes the main reason I stopped; returning became too painful. Eventually, I made a deal with my "beloved," whatever the intelligence is, not to bring me back into those dimensions until I could stay. Before that point, you can do a lot of cleaning, healing, and good for others.

After about two and a half years, having gone through what Stan calls the perinatal process, reliving birth, confronting death fears, facing existential crises, shattering egoic reality, I thought the ordeal was done. Not so. Everything intensified all over again, suffering got worse for two more years, expanding into larger levels, 1000s, 100,000s of people, I had entered the hell realms. I eventually realized it wasn't about me but healing an aspect of the collective psyche. There’s a consciousness organizing our species, holding unresolved wounds at not only individual but species level. Wars, trauma, all unresolved reside in the collective psyche. Every deep spiritual practitioner gets an invitation, to lift some of that collective suffering. It's just the normal workings of life. What perplexed me was why collective suffering stopped. Why wasn't I allowed to stay?

Andrew Holecek: Yeah. You're right, the role of fear, integration vs. disintegration—did you fear becoming unhinged? I've come to see psychedelics as a type of Tantra, body as important as mind, chemical body, neuro-chemistry as important as mind in neuro-phenomenological way. These are expanded tantric environments. The question was fear, integration vs. disintegration, and containing the information.

Chris Bache: Yes, going through a Death-Rebirth cycle always involves surrender to the unknown. There were places in advanced stages where I truly feared for my sanity, knowing I was going beyond my capability to maintain sanity, like going over a waterfall. But once through, waking up as a new kind of being, experiencing the universe as itself beyond human reference—it becomes the nature of the cycle. The great gifts from Stan Grof gave me an absolute conviction. If you surrender completely, it takes you through a crisis into a blessing. I have no trauma from my psychological history. I love even the most horrifying parts of the journey because completing the cycle brings back knowledge. Things get bad, but then they get great, a rhythm of death-rebirth. However, there can be challenges in living with memories, like haunting beauty, not negative but profound. Embodiment becomes the challenge.

Andrew Holecek: Honestly, a section in your book, I struggled with—the dying children, the pain. Yet, I hung in, echoing your perseverance. Was it about developing equanimity—no preference between agony and ecstasy? That’s near the highest bhumis—no preference between Samsara and Nirvana, discovering inseparability. Is that what was being suggested? Does that resonate with you?

Chris Bache: The teaching you're referring to is present but maybe not the full intention. My understanding of the ocean of suffering is different. Not everyone has to face the hell realms or spend as long as I did. It manifested so quickly and was so tenacious in my experience. I think this was literally a pre-birth choice of my soul. There’s no pride here; many beings are doing this now. We're in a critical time—a collective detoxification as universal intelligence tries not only to awaken individuals but collectively too. The hell realms are manifesting as part of a deep turning within. It's a necessary path. We're a species on the brink of a major evolutionary leap, awakening beyond ego to soul consciousness. These deep teachings are part of a broader collective agenda—to heal the human species, to make room for a grace-infused awakening that transcends ego dominance for a world led by awakened souls in conscious, inclusive unity.

Andrew Holecek: Yeah, that's really beautiful. With your permission, and if you don't want to go here, that's fine. I want to turn again. I have to contain both my enthusiasm and the energy of like, Oh my gosh, we need to talk about that. So I'm letting so much slide that's fantastic. But with your kind permission, I want to turn to this issue of the scientific and academic elephant in the room. How do we know if any of this is actually true? How do we know issues of replicability? How do we know if what you're seeing is idiosyncratic to your own biochemistry, and in the best sense of the word, not pejorative, this is your trip? How do we know that if 1,000 other people did what you did, they could replicate your insights? Or would they have their own biological, historical, phenomenological matrix where they'd write a different journey, a different book, through 20 years of exploration? The issue here is the problem of proof and universality. What would happen if 1,000 people did what you did and came up with 1,000 different visions? How certain are you that what you're experiencing is actually true, or simply your enculturation, your own unique biochemistry, and all the histories that bring about the narrative you're sharing with us? So are you okay going in this direction?

Chris Bache: Absolutely, that's a really important question. I mean, that's like a foundational question because if it’s only echoes from my own personal psyche or even echoes from the collective psyche, then it has a certain kind of epistemic value, but it doesn’t really have sufficient epistemic value that warrants our attention. I discussed this all the way back in Dark Night, Early Dawn, in the first chapter, where I outline psychedelic philosophy. There's a section called the epistemic warrant of psychedelic experience, where I explore this question and the issues involved in questioning whether these experiences truly have epistemic value. I just point there. Also, Ken Ring and I have had a dialog about this. Ken is a good friend, a wonderful researcher in near-death experiences. I used his books for years in my classes. He challenged me on the same questions, and we did a dialog. We eventually published it, and I'm blanking on where it is. I should have this at the tip of my tongue, it's online. Yeah, it's quite the essay: Are our deep psychedelic experiences trustworthy? If it were just my experiences, that would be one thing. But here’s, I think, the great value of Stan Grof’s work, where he's collected psychedelic experiences from hundreds, if not thousands, of people over decades, and he's integrated them into a certain model of what happens at different stages of the journey. My experiences fit squarely within the broader phenomenological discussion of experiences that he has already outlined. So I think he provides, in a sense, a broad epistemic warrant for taking my—maybe a little unusually intense, or maybe a little unusually deep—experiences seriously. But there's not too much new here when you look at the full breadth of experiences he has reported in his many books, culminating in his great masterwork, The Way of the Psychonaut. So there's a deep overlap.

Another point, I think of Michael Sabom, who was a cardiologist in the early days of the near-death experience movement. He was very upset that people were talking about coming back from a cardiac arrest and talking about spiritual realities. He didn’t believe in any of that stuff, and he was going to systematically disprove it. He eventually wrote a book where he concluded this stuff is real, and he differentiates between what he calls the local event and the transcendent event. When somebody has surgery or a cardiac arrest, they have a sensation of getting out of their body, and they can experience what's going on in the local arena, the surgical theater, the waiting room down the hall, the hospital, what's going on in the parking lot outside, and then they go into the light and leave physical reality, entering a transcendental reality. He says we can't evaluate the transcendent experience that they have, but we can evaluate the accuracy of their local experience, and that's what he tries to do—whether what they think they experience locally is, in fact, verifiable in that world. He provided evidence that in fact it was. Now that doesn't prove that the transcendent experience is true, but it certainly increases the credibility. If the local experience is true, the transcendence experiences get a little boost of credibility. The same thing happens in psychedelic experiences. Many psychedelic experiences can be verified—information about the conditions of birth or circumstances of birth—the things that people learn that we can reasonably exclude the possibility that they had learned through natural means, and yet, it turns out these things can be validated. That plays here. The other part, though, is cross validation, other people having similar experiences.

Andrew Holecek: Communal confirmation, exactly.

Chris Bache: What we find is this: when people start working with psychedelics, if you took 100 people from 100 different backgrounds, different socio-cultural backgrounds, different trainings, they would have very different experiences. Psychedelics, or LSD, are amplifiers. They don't take you to a particular experience; they amplify your mind. And because we have different histories, we come in contact with different experiences. However, Stan reports that when people go through the perinatal Death-Rebirth process, our experiences get very concentrated and standardized. We begin to deal with issues not idiosyncratic but universal, fundamental existential issues. When people navigate the Death-Rebirth experience, everyone he has seen who goes through that process comes back with an understanding of spiritual reality that is fundamentally compatible with each other—that there is a spiritual world waiting for us and receiving us. From there, it's a matter of evaluating our individual explorations of that spiritual world.

What I did in my first book on psychedelics, Dark Night, Early Dawn, was put together three areas of inquiry: psychedelic research, near-death episode research, and out-of-body research, particularly the work of Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute of Applied Science, author of three books exploring the out-of-body state. I asked whether the cosmologies that emerge from these separate bodies of exploration—out-of-body research, near-death episode research, psychedelic research—are their cosmological visions diverging, or are they converging? Once you look at them carefully, they are converging. They are clearly converging. So that's addressing the question: are these experiences trustworthy? In my dialog with Ken Ring, I present other reasons why I think they're trustworthy. For every time I had my cultural expectations fulfilled, because I'm educated in world religions and comparative spirituality, I have an understanding of certain things. But for every time I've had them confirmed, I've also had more experiences that shatter my expectations. I learned things I was not expecting. I learned an understanding of reincarnation, how it works, and where it's taking us that I was not expecting at all. I wasn't expecting anything about the birth of the Future Human. There was nothing about my conditioning that led me to think humanity was coming to this crossroads. So many things were shown to me so consistently that were far and beyond anything I had personally expected, that I think one can reasonably conclude this is a confrontation with truly an independent reality. And I mean independent—but I have to qualify that—a reality not simply echoing back to me, my expectations. If you study the work of other people who push deeply into these states, I think we find fundamental convergence, which doesn't mean we're seeing the exact same thing. But the issue is, do our visions overlap? Are they coherent with each other? Do they overlap? Clearly, we're only at the very early stages of this inquiry. What's important is not any one person's experience. What's important is if we were to get a standardized protocol, take 100 people, 1,000 people with some type of standardized protocol with very different backgrounds, and put them through the same regimen of internal, introspective work, then we get all their testimony, all their experiences, put them on the table, and begin to look at what is consistent and what is idiosyncratic. That's where we're going. We're just not there yet. We're only at the very early stages. So I have no doubt some things may be somewhat idiosyncratic to me. But I think when we get to that point where we have hundreds of people putting their testimony forward, we're going to find much more consistency and overlap than divergence.

Andrew Holecek: Oh, my goodness. So many things here as well. What a beautiful answer. The difference between correspondence epistemology and coherence epistemology, I mean, the truth is born of coherence—this is the type of knowing you're alluding to here. But this begs the question of aspirations around this. Pardon the tongue-in-cheek reference here, but this came to me out of who knows where. Where do you see yourself in 20 years? Do you see yourself—again, if you don't want to go here, fine—but how do you see yourself? Are you a shaman for our age? Do you see yourself—this is where the play on words comes in—not establishing the church of LDS, but the church of LSD, right? So do you see yourself creating, as a visionary, a revolutionary, a holding environment, a mandala container that can allow future Psychonauts to embrace this as a path? Because otherwise, where is this going to go? Are you just a unique and really interesting blip, or are you portending the possibility of creating a tradition of Psychonauts using rigorous methodologies, frameworks? I think you see where I'm coming from. What's next in terms of people—say, someone comes to you and says, "Chris, I'm so blown away by your book. I want to take psychedelics as a practice, create this as a path. What do I do? Where do I go?"

Chris Bache: Well, the first thing I tell that person always is, "Please, don't do what I did. Do it gently. Be gentler. Be more careful." I think I'm a symptom of a cultural pivot we're making. I don't think I'm important. As we make this cultural pivot, I think I will disappear under the wave of history as a somewhat early explorer. But I think we're making a pivot that's going to include and embrace the value of psychedelics now. Right now, you know, we did about 25 years of this work, and then in 1970, '69-'70, it was all made illegal. Then we went into this long dry period until 2014 when Scientific American published an editorial on the front page saying it's time to let scientists, not politicians, determine whether psychedelics have therapeutic value. There’s this tremendous Renaissance happening. Universities all over the world are studying psychedelics, establishing centers for studying them. A tremendous explosion. We're starting where we started back in the 1950s, exploring these potentials for healing the personal psyche. We're looking at post-traumatic stress, healing addiction, healing death anxiety, healing depression. We’re really focused on using these substances in therapeutic applications under controlled scientific conditions.

This is perfectly where we ought to be. We need to, now that we’ve started this inquiry again, be very rigorous, establish the protocols, do the documentation, look at the brainwave pictures, and so on. Sooner or later, however, we’re going to discover the same thing we discovered far back, and I'm not talking about the popular '60s psychedelic movement—though that too. But the serious researchers, like Stan Grof and that early generation—Ralph Metzner, that generation of researchers—discovered these substances have philosophical value, not just psychotherapeutic value. They give us entire insights into the structure of the deep psyche. They can even provide insights into the structure of the cosmos, into the cosmology of the mind. If we have PhDs—people with PhDs in physics and astronomy—they can come back with deeper insights into the realities they are educated to understand. I often wished I had PhDs in astronomy and physics because then I would understand so much more than I was able, given my background in humanities.

We're making this pivot. I think, just as psychotherapists are creating creative protocols for exploiting the therapeutic potential of these substances, it’s only a matter of time before we develop philosophical protocols for systematically exploring these states of consciousness, going into them in a rigorous manner, recording them, evaluating them, placing our experiences in the context of other bodies of knowledge. We'll look at how these experiences correlate to quantum physics, for example, or superstring theory. This is not about me. I’m going to be gone in 20 years. Hell, I won't be around in 20 years! I don't think I'll be around nearly that long. I’ll be gone. Actually, it took me a long time to be willing to share these experiences, because I know how upsetting or controversial they are. I literally thought of writing the book and letting it be published posthumously.

Andrew Holecek: Exactly, what Wolfgang Pauli did with Carl Jung—he didn’t want it revealed until after he died. But anyway, I'm sorry—I didn't mean to cut you off.

Chris Bache: Yeah, I just, I thought, but you know, the Mother told me, "No, you can't do that." She said, "We need all oars in the water. You didn’t give yourself these visions—we gave them to you, and they were never meant for your private edification. You were holding these visions in trust," and she wanted me to share them. Not because they’re my visions, but because they will support other people in their spiritual practice, in their social work, to help us through this very intense time of history that we’re coming into— all hands on deck. So I did the book, and I have no agenda. What's clear is a social pivot is taking place, and that’s what’s important, as we move forward collectively. The work being done in graduate programs and medical schools all over the country—that’s what’s important. I think I’m a little ahead of the curve in philosophical discovery only because of the very intense methodology I used. But I don't think I'm really that far ahead.

There is a professor from Southern Methodist University, Bill Barnard, who’s written two fantastic books, one on William James and one on Henri Bergson—a fine academic. He's publishing a book from Columbia University Press this year called Liquid Light, which is a philosopher’s reflections on his extended experiences with Ayahuasca and living with the Santo Daime community in Brazil. Beautiful, magnificent book, and symptomatic of one more academic willing to go public on their psychedelic experiences, not just to record them but to evaluate them critically, digesting them and offering them as part of an ongoing historical discussion. So we're making this pivot. It's happening.

Andrew Holecek: And it's radically brave. Chris, I want to acknowledge your bravery on this. It's a stretch for me, because the last couple of years have shown me how conservative I am, in some ways. I always thought of myself as a liberal, far-out kind of guy, but I've realized I have my own conservative tendencies. They're being challenged and stretched open, and I'm going, "Wow, this is fantastic." Another is the generous courage of writing a book like this, because you know this from the traditional admonitions: "He who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know." And so here you are, speaking all over the place. I used to question it, then read a beautiful book by Mingyur Rinpoche, "In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying." It's an amazing journey of his intimate sharing that is profoundly inspiring. Your book, in a certain sense, violates the code of secrecy, but I think we're living in unusual times that require unusual, even extreme, measures. I, for one, applaud your courage—stretching boundaries in pedagogy, radical innovations in path, and courage in sharing.

You were about to say something—please return to that—but I deeply thank you for this. As Trungpa Rinpoche said, sharing experiences inappropriately, and that's the key, is like being in a dark cave with a candle, giving your candle away, leaving you in the dark. Opportunity is transformed into obstacle. Both an applause for what you're doing and a commentary inviting more sharing, so people can realize there is a chorus of sanity coming out.

Chris Bache: I had to face resistance around that too, because Buddhism traditionally says you don't talk about your experiences. It can become an encumbrance to talk about your experiences. But I'm a teacher. I love to teach. I was designed to teach—I'm a yacker. I just, that's what I love to do. And as I said coming off the mountain, it wasn't only the imbalance toward transcendence that made me sick. It was the silence I had to live with. As a philosopher of religion, I had the most powerful philosophical experiences of my life, and I wasn't allowed to talk about them. I wasn't allowed to share them. I wasn't allowed to do my job as an academic because of our phobia, our laws around psychedelics, and holding that information literally makes you sick inside. I wasn't allowed to be who I truly am, and writing the book was part of my healing. Speaking about it is part of my healing too.

At the same time, I have no agenda whatsoever. I'm not trying to persuade anybody. I don't have an ax to grind. I've got nothing to sell. I'm an old man; I'm 72 years old. The end of the diving board is getting close, thank goodness. This being that I am is so ephemeral, so short-lived. I have no attachment to it, certainly no attachment to using it as a model of anything. But I love to teach, and I hope the experiences will be useful to other people, even if they never take psychedelics. I hope the vision of the universe and the intelligence of the universe will resonate deeply with people's inner and cognitive experiences as science becomes more aggressive in pushing its boundaries. I hope it speaks to people, whether or not they ever take psychedelics, because I think we are at a pivot point. We are coming out of this terrible period of history where we believed there’s no intelligence to the universe, that it's all an accident, mechanistic, a roll of the genetic dice, with no real intelligence in the existential circumstances we confront. I think this is being exploded, and we're waking up. Suddenly, it’s like a veil is being lifted. We're waking to a world where reincarnation is a fundamental fact of life, a fact of nature. We're waking to an emergent intelligence in the universe—whether in the solar system, in galaxies, in the genetic code—everywhere we look, we see orders of intelligence. This is simply accelerating that immersion into that intelligence, and it opens up a whole new... I think this is a pivot point we’re entering, and it couldn’t happen a minute too soon, because we're about to go extinct if we don't change.

Andrew Holecek: It really reminds me, Chris, of what ecology scientists talk about—punctuated equilibrium. Things simmer and then flip in a certain way. It's like what you said beautifully in the book: gestation takes a long time. Birth happens quickly. From the 50,000-foot view, I'm seeing what you're intimating—correlative, like the Taoists say, with the dark is the emergence of light. In direct proportion to the insanity, are voices of sanity. If we can relate to that, it's like they say in Tantra: hell is paradise, the greater the obstacle, the greater the opportunity. Voices like yours, and others, coming up in this ocean of tremendous darkness—talk about the Kali Yuga—lend credibility to this co-emergent principle. If we simply look properly, voices like yours, just part of a chorus of sanity... If we see that, it’s about right view, isn’t it, like the Buddha said? If we have the right view, then the greater the obstacle, the greater the opportunity, and what you’re talking about adds to that view. I don't want to take too much of your time. I could talk to you all day, but with your permission, there are just a few more things that, oh my gosh, I have to ask you.

One is, and this is a little bit philosophical, but interesting. When we say, oh, that's just theoretical or philosophical, it may be so because it's not your experience yet. But when it becomes your experience, it's no longer theory or philosophy, it's your reality. One of the things you talk about challenges both Hindu and Buddhist approaches to teleology, purpose. On one level, as you know, the Tibetans talk about Leela. The world is just play. The Tibetans talk about Rolpa, divine play and dance without directionality or purpose. So is it a matter of stepping out of binary modes of thinking? Switching to more, what do they call it, dialetheism? The ability to hold different views concurrently. I think Jung talked about this as well. Talk to us a little about the emerging human, which implies purpose, teleology, ends— the Omega point. Does that fit into your experience and understanding of what you went through?

Chris Bache: I think when some of the great masters talk about life as Leela, life as play—creation as Leela, a dance—I don't think they're saying this in a frivolous way. I believe they're suggesting that life does hold an intelligence expressing itself in purposeful activity. But it isn't generated out of compulsion or necessity; it emerges from the fullness and excess of being, not a deficit. There's an exuberant quality to life that we express metaphorically through dance because dance is not compelled; we dance out of joy, out of excess, not necessity. When I think about the theme of the future human and its emergence, it was unexpected yet one of the most consistent themes of my work. It became the overarching context for all that took place and how I understood my entire incarnation. This theme started in the 23rd session and continued to the 70th session.

To suspend any theistic notions or intentions of manipulation, I hold onto an emergent cosmology understanding—a genius at work beyond our comprehension. In my sessions, when I dissolved into this larger intelligence, both existentially a part of and cosmologically beyond my personal understanding, it told a consistent story of humanity approaching a turning point. Humanity faces a true before-and-after moment where, much like rivers pouring into a canyon, there's nowhere to go but up. This critical time has been foreseen by the great seers, saints, spiritual geniuses, and indigenous peoples who recognize this coming era.

As my work progressed, especially some 15 years in, time became porous. I was taken beyond linear time into what I call deep time—not eternity or timelessness, but different spans of time from a new frame of reference. I was taken into the future and experienced what felt like the death and rebirth of humanity—a cataclysm stripping us to mere survival. Yet, as we emerged from the worst, we discovered transformation had occurred at our core.

This crisis opened our hearts, made us more compassionate, opened our minds to new intelligences. As we reconnected, creativity accelerated, values shifted, leading to new social and political realities. The shift occurs not just politically or socially, but in the collective psyche's core architecture, changing how future humans will operate collectively. We see prototypes of this psyche in figures like Christ, Buddha, and Muhammad—expanded beings we're moving toward emulating.

Andrew Holecek: It's literally breathtaking. Chris, I'll need to bring you back because we haven't fully explored much. Your chapter on the diamond luminosity blew me away, and "Coming Down from the Mountain" was deeply moving. Attempting to distill 20 years of insight even in two hours is constraining. I wanted to concentrate on a couple of heart-essence points.

Chris Bache: You're hitting really important topics.

Andrew Holecek: What remains crucial to me is the journey implying a type of attainment. The language could use rebranding, like referring to LSD work as entheogenic practice. The notion you have attained extraordinary states isn't contested, but is it just as viable to say these states are ordinary, and the extraordinary is this non-ordinary Samsara state?

Opening the mind—and body—is significant, and it's about waking down, not ascending, into what's already present. What you're describing might mislead people to think it's unattainable, while it fundamentally empowers immediate openness and recognition. Is there a false path notion implying needing to go somewhere else, while in striving, you leave what you seek?

Chris Bache: I absolutely agree there. In the early journey stages into psychic and subtle realities, there's an opening and becoming larger. Hence, psychedelics are called mind-opening. Later, in causal reality, everything converges back to the here and now—a concentration where extraordinary states take place within ordinary reality. The substances might be more mind concentrators than openers. At core, as in sashin, you focus on the present, eliminating distortions, ending up where you started—purely what you always were.

The purification process is constant, simplifying the mind into the truth everyone knows yet obscures with nonsense. None of what I describe is original; it's echoing age-old cosmologies, traditions, and the purification work that brings us into more intimate experiences with existing profound reality.

Andrew Holecek: This deeply resonates because of the parallels with my path and how original insights have been cautioned against as potentially unreliable. We need to adapt wisdom traditions with new skillful means for relevance today; else, they risk becoming obsolete.

As we close, considering mental stretching as growth, is your work also pointing towards accelerated learning? Can psychedelic experiences facilitate hyper-pedagogical approaches under the right conditions, paralleling rapid Vajrayana evolution?

Chris Bache: I think so. In The Living Classroom, I don't mention psychedelics at all. I wanted this book to be about fields of consciousness and the effects of fields on learning, and the accelerating effect of focused intentionality and energetic transmission that takes place in the classroom or in any group context. The backstory to that book is this: I was doing my private psychedelic practice, opening up into the ocean of suffering, going into these very deep collective states of consciousness, and eventually into deeper transcendence states. I never talked to my students about it, but I found that my students began to be impacted by my work in very precise ways. When I was going through certain thresholds, they began to go through certain spiritual thresholds. It began to happen when I was lecturing, nothing to do with psychedelics—just lecturing on world religions.

I would be looking for an example to use to make a point, and I experienced a door open in the back of my mind. This little piece of paper slipped in, and I read it; it was an idea of something to use. When I tried it, all of a sudden, the energy in the room shifted, and everything became more animated. I began to work consciously with these subtle suggestions that would pop into my mind from seemingly nowhere. A few years down the road, students started to come to me and say at the end of class, “You know, it's strange that you said what you said today because this is exactly what happened to me this week, or to my mother.” At first, I dismissed it, but it kept happening. The deeper my psychedelic practice went, the more it began to happen, and it also touched deeper areas of their life.

It was as if their soul was slipping messages to my soul, which would slip to me, leading me to say things that were giving them information or touching intimate places in their lives that I had no way of knowing about—experiences that needed healing or information they needed to take the next step in their learning. This became such a characteristic part of my teaching—so many people were being moved in ways beyond my conscious intention and even awareness. A pivot point came when I looked at my class one day while lecturing and saw half a dozen people with tears quietly rolling down their faces. I realized I had to understand what was happening. The entire book, The Living Classroom, was downloaded in one session. The title just dropped right in, and it gave me all the information I needed to understand two basic points: consciousness has an atomic quality and a quantum quality.

There's individual awareness, and that's true. They're here to get what I know, but there's also a quantum reality. My individual experience is grounded in an expansive field of consciousness, and they are grounded in that same field. It activates entirely natural potentials, like throwing a stone into a lake—the ripples spread out. When one person does deep clarifying work, it triggers clarification in those they have a karmic connection to. It's a simple, natural phenomenon. I think what I eventually wrote down was about teaching consciously in a transpersonal or integral pedagogy recognizing the innate interconnectivity of consciousness. This doesn't mean we abandon effective individual strategies but incorporate strategies of focused intentionality and engagement that go beyond classical teaching.

For example, you know Chöd as a Vajrayana practice, a purification practice. I learned Chöd and incorporated it into my spiritual practice. Before class, I'd get a roster of students, and I'd pray for them using this particular vehicle throughout the entire course. I didn’t presume to know what's right for them; I simply prayed for their well-being. The more we activate these latent potentials in groups, the more we accelerate learning. I found not only a collective field in the room but a class field, and deeper than that, a course field. Learning and empowerment take place over years, with individual minds situated within a class mind, within a course mind. Once you see it, you recognize it in various contexts. If there is a hyper object, it is the connective tissue of mind—we are inherently connected, and we become conscious of and responsible to that in our work.

Andrew Holecek: Yeah. Again, it's back to making unconscious processes conscious. If you can do that, you increase communication and evoke what is already there. Why not take advantage of it, engage it, bring it into conscious awareness, and enhance it? Chris, I want to honor your time. Just a few last things. The famous last words—wait a second, it'll be midnight.

Chris Bache: Wait, Chris! This is fun.

Andrew Holecek: I could talk to you all day, but to wrap it up, people are going to see this as a Pandora's box of both wisdom and potential neurosis. I wonder if you worry about what you've released. I can definitely imagine listeners thinking, "This is my path. I want to do this," and seeing it as a quick fix or a lazy man's approach. Your book shows this is not for the feeble-minded or feeble-hearted; this is jihad, inner Dharma combat. So, what would you say, like the Dharma Surgeon General's warning, “These teachings are hazardous to your egoic health.” I want to caution listeners who go, “I don't need to do retreat, I can just pop these pills and attain states.” People may run with this with the wrong motivation, so talk to us about this.

If someone came to you, would you act as an advisor, or are there advisors they can reach? Do you take responsibility for this Pandora's box of wisdom you're releasing? What are the shadow sides of doing this without proper set and setting? I know we're trying to close, but this is important. We have to caution those who might see this as a spiritual silver bullet.

Chris Bache: Yeah, boy, no silver bullet. There are no shortcuts here. There are intensifications of practice, but no way around the fundamental laws of spiritual reality. The early idea of psychedelics as an easy path has proven facile and untrue. My concern is that even conscientious use of these substances can be so intense it's too demanding a path. You have to be wise in handling it. I was very concerned about sharing this material. It would break my heart if someone read my book and injured themselves by jumping into psychedelics recklessly. It's easy to injure yourself by opening too deeply too quickly, disrupting a healthy psyche in ways that can be permanently crippling.

Breaking through the boundaries of the personal psyche, entering deeper states, isn't difficult, but integration is critical. We're seeing more attention given to what constitutes healthy practice. I've offered myself as an example of practice that wasn't entirely healthy. I went too deep, causing years of management on the joy I knew. One reason I included suffering was to give an honest account and to show psychedelics amplify everything, including our garbage. We must confront that garbage and understand the wisdom of integration.

A book called Psychedelics and Psychotherapy focuses on integration. I contributed an essay called "The Challenge of Integrating an Extreme Psychedelic Journey." We need more discussions on healthy practice and signs of imbalance. Many students have fried themselves going back to the well too many times. They chase new experiences without integrating past ones, leading to psychological imbalances. Our culture lacks wisdom in using psychedelics. Indigenous and shamanic cultures have that wisdom. We must learn from them and integrate it with therapeutic and sage traditions for wise use.

Experiencing deep states is easy, but not necessarily beneficial. Julian of Norwich had one profound experience and spent her life unpacking it. It takes years to fully integrate profound experiences. Hopefully, we'll be wiser with psychedelics in this century than in the 1960s, where not as many lives were profoundly changed as thought. We must be wise and grounded in our psychedelic reappropriation.

Andrew Holecek: Do you worry about what you've released? I spent time in the Himalayas, where high altitude sickness is a concern. Psychedelics can be like that—failure to acclimatize can lead to serious problems. Do you worry about what you've shared?

What you're discussing is like marathon practices in Tantra, Tummo, and other intense yogas not for public consumption because they are too powerful. If not done properly, these can burn you up. Your book indicated you're doing an inner yoga, not just opening your mind but your body too. Without proper motivation, setting, and wisdom, it could be dangerous. Do you worry about opening these avenues without sufficient caution?

Chris Bache: Yes, I do worry. I'm glad we're discussing it, and I hope to discuss it further. This needs to be addressed, the relationship between potent psychedelics as spiritual and initiatory practices, which can singe unprepared individuals. While my journey singed me, it was also my service. The mother asked me to let people see her through my eyes. It's not about me; it's about what was shown to me, hoping it aids others in their spiritual development. That's my motive as a philosopher: trusting students with challenging information while working to integrate it with them.

I've chosen not to function as a therapist but as an explorer, bringing back reports and supporting clinicians trained to facilitate wise psychedelic use. Lots of people train as psychedelic elders and therapists; I'm involved in those discussions. We need to merge therapeutic wisdom with shamanic and sage traditions to work with psychedelics well, aiming for no or minimal casualties. Psychedelics aren't going away. We need to deepen our understanding of their workings and limitations. I don't recommend high-dose LSD use like I did; I'd be gentler, using smaller windows, gentler substances, and doses to manage impact better.

Andrew Holecek: You exemplify openness, a transparency that’s remarkable. I feel magic in our conversation—I hope listeners sense it. Some questions seem to come from a deeper source. In considering the beloved, the mother, do you feel brought into this world as her child, as a voice on her behalf? Do you consider yourself an avatar of the mother, fulfilling a divine purpose?

Chris Bache: Before addressing the specific, I'll talk about the general. I believe we all know what we're getting into before incarnating. We choose our reincarnation, much like selecting a curriculum. This applies to me; I've always seen myself in service to the mother. That intent showed in my earlier ambition to be a priest, and while that path fell away, the desire to serve didn't. I've learned in past life work about my history with psychedelics, aligning with my comfort in this mode of spiritual practice. I believe I was born to do this work. It's not about inflation—it's natural unfolding of who I am.

Additionally, I've faced challenges from past lives where I suffered for speaking out. That resistance has been present, but each time I've overcome it, I've been rewarded. There's been significant learning in rising to these challenges. Writing on psychedelics isn't easy, but the friendships and opportunities it’s brought are rewarding. There are many like me, like you, with deep spiritual drive. They practice not just for themselves but as Bodhisattvas for all. The core practice is awakening bodhicitta, distributing merit—an elementary aspect of our shared reality.

Andrew Holecek: Breathtaking, Chris. How can people learn more about you? What are you working on, and how can we support you?

Chris Bache: Thank you. I recently taught a seven-week course at the Shift Network based on LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It's available for download with lectures, Q&A, and supplemental readings. I have a website, chrisbache.com, where you can find talks and writings. I don't maintain a bulletin. Right now, I'm absorbing feedback from the course. I expect to teach more with the Shift Network and have further conversations on psychedelic spiritual practice.

When possible, I hope to organize retreats in Asheville, where there are many retreat centers. No immediate plans for that exist, but I live in a responsive mode, open to what comes.

Andrew Holecek: Well, Chris, just like with your book, I'm left with this sense of awe and wonder. It really captures the magic and mystery of the entire affair, the surrender to some hyper-object. It's not a silly word, but a shrink-wrapped word for the ineffability, the elegance, the beauty, the magic of this world. Your presence really embodies this to me, and that's why I wanted to do this, not just through auditory means, but also visually. You're doing something right, and your presence conveys the authenticity of what you've done and what you've chosen as your path. We are the beneficiaries of the diamonds you're throwing across this planet. On behalf of my community, thank you for taking time out of your busy life to spend with us. I'm left somewhat breathless; the insights you've shared are truly inspiring. I don't use these words lightly. It's mind-bending, mind-blowing. What a tremendous gift your courage and beauty have brought to this world. Deep thanks, my friend, until next time.

Chris Bache: I'm really touched, Andrew. Thank you very much, and thank you for your work. Thank you for the goodness that you're spreading, for the ideas that you're seeding. It's really been an honor to be in conversation with you today.

Andrew Holecek: Thank you. My words, and maybe we can do it again, in this dimension or another. So all the best, until next time, my friend.

Chris Bache: Sounds good. Okay. Much love to you.