Part II of his Remarkable Twenty-Year Journey into the World of Psychedelics (Edge of Mind Podcast – Part 2)

Andrew Holecek: So welcome everybody to our ongoing Edge of Mind podcast, where I have the great honor and delight to spend a little bit more time with this remarkable thinker, psychonaut, and explorer of the mind and heart, Christopher Bache, and really continue to unpack some of the many aspects of his remarkable journey that we introduced in round one of my conversation. I will reiterate a very brief bio of Chris, and then we're just going to jump right in and slowly venture into hopefully some rich, deep waters. Christopher Bache is a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years, a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He was also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies and on the advisory board for Grof Transpersonal Training and the Grof Foundation, an award-winning teacher, international speaker who's the author of three books and lives in Portland. You're still in Portland, right?

Chris Bache: Actually, we're in Weaverville, North Carolina now.

Andrew Holecek: Well, I'm glad I asked! Chris, thank you again for taking the time to return and unfold with me some of the remarkable implications of your journey. At the outset, deep gratitude for you.

Chris Bache: It's a pleasure to be with you today, Andrew. Thank you for the invitation.

Andrew Holecek: I deeply appreciate it. What I thought we could explore is, I was re-reading some of the material, especially the latter chapters in your journey, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe"—that's mostly what we're going to be unfolding—but also conjoined with "The Living Classroom," because there's obviously some wonderful interconnectivity between those narratives that will be woven into this. I thought we would introduce a narrative, a topic that's very near and dear to my heart right now, so much so that I'm writing one book on it, and probably two. I think we pinged on this just a wee bit in our first session, but I want to explore it in a little bit more detail now. To me, using your language, this narrative of openness and contraction is really—I've come to see it as kind of the combustion cycle of the spiritual path. I thought we could start with that narrative as a way to, perhaps, like a fractal, reiterate the entirety of your journey within the session itself. Start a little bit more with this narrative and maybe continue to expand into deeper and deeper dimensions. As in fact, your journey, both during the 20 years and after, took you through as a way to really talk in both a philosophical and—why I love these terms—somatic sense. I love the notion of openness and contraction because these are things we can feel. They are not just cerebral, intellectual storylines. These are things we can feel in our body-mind matrix. I would like to dive into that with you as we perhaps set our direction towards what I consider to be the climax of your book, the "Diamond Luminosity." Because that light is so bright, that space is so open, we perhaps can dilate the aperture of our awareness, our hearts, and minds a little bit more slowly and start by sending a question in your direction about how this, your journey, could be articulated in this expression, this kind of pulsation. Or the Hindus talk about it beautifully, in the tradition of spanda, the doctrine of vibration, which I'm starting to see now, and I'll share some of my own experiences and insights of openness, contraction, openness and then contraction. Maybe we could start there and then that, I think, will lend us gradually into wider and wider and perhaps greater degrees of openness.

Chris Bache: Okay, you bet that's a good place to start. In my understanding, in my experience, psychedelics in general, and in particular LSD, which was my primary medicine in this journey, is an amplifier of consciousness. When consciousness is amplified, signals which are quiet become large, become loud, and you have the sensation of becoming aware of more and more. How you meet that increase of awareness, how you engage what emerges is seminal in the process. If you engage the shadow consciously, you confront those things which keep you habitually contracted and small. You engage those fears, or whatever it is, you take them to their source, to the root. They resolve themselves, and when they resolve themselves, your consciousness is free to open into more spacious places. Every time you let go of something which is holding your consciousness in a fixed pattern or holding it small—particularly, initially, your time-space identity, your historical egoic identity that tells us who we are. But if you can let go of that, you discover that there are these dimensions beyond your time-space identity, which are even more truly, really what you are. If you keep this going, you go through multiple layers of consciousness. There's a point where you have to let go, surrender or die, not only to your individual identity, but to your identity as a human being. There is a deeper sense of humanity that holds the limits of your knowing, and there's a going even deeper. There's a sense of time-space identity. You let go of your entire existence, including all your reincarnational experiences of time-space as a framework for holding experience. Your experience flows beyond time and space, and this is an entirely natural process. My understanding of what happens inside a psychedelic session is that it basically accelerates and intensifies what is taking place in nature all the time. When we are born, our consciousness contracts into an individual, egoic time-space identity. When we die, we expand. There's a sense of expanding back into the soul, back into deeper spiritual awareness. When we're born, we contract. When we die, we expand. What happens in a session simply accelerates and intensifies this natural process which is taking place in history over a longer period. It allows you to accelerate that process and to start by burning off more karma than one might get around to otherwise, and that's the same thing that happens in meditation, of course, too. Same dynamic.

Andrew Holecek: It's interesting, isn't it? My favorite running definition of meditation these days is habituation to openness, and I find there are so many implications of that, Chris. I mean parenthetically, the Buddha is usually translated as the awakened one, but I've also heard renderings as the opened one. The reason I find this beautiful, for a number of reasons, is in contrast to us. We're the contracted ones. The reason I think this is so important is because by bringing this process, this phenomenology, into the light of our conscious awareness, we can better sensitize ourselves to it in a more somatic sense. Again, this is something we can feel. This is not just a cerebral, intellectual thing. We can feel this process of contraction and openness within our very soma. For me, what I'm curious Chris is two things. One, how early in your journey did this become apparent to you? I mean, how—I can't remember all your sessions with great specificity—but where did this narrative become identifiable for you? How did it help you as you continued to go further? And then parenthetically, just so I don't forget this as well, the other thing I find around this narrative that's so helpful that you were suggesting at the outset is that we're practicing this, whether we know it or not; we are either on the path of practicing habituation to openness, or if we don't know it, and most of us don't, by default, we're practicing contraction every time we capitulate to grasping, to beliefs, to a sense of—I mean, virtually everywhere that is our default contraction. I know I'm throwing a couple of things out there, but I think this is so foundational for me that after decades, when I look back, it's like, oh my gosh, I can really look with a new sense of understanding from this altitude, wow. My whole journey has been this kind of pulsation—opening, expanding, how much of that can I deal with, then metabolizing, contracting—so a little bit more on that.

Chris Bache: Sure, it actually started in the very first session. My very first session, I hit an experience where I could not remember anything about myself. I could not remember who I was, what I was; I couldn't remember what I did for a living. I could not remember whether I was a man or a woman; I was absolutely jammed. And I looked in 1,000 mirrors. I couldn't find any piece of individual, egoic identity, and it was, of course, very jarring, frightening in the beginning, and then later in the session, my sense of identity returned. But that experience was really important, because it told me—at first, it gave me an insight into the dynamic. It shook me up, and it showed me a certain measure of the true cost, you know, because I had read about ego death, and I thought, Oh, good, let's do it, and I hadn't appreciated, this is a true death. This is a loss of your identity. And it taught me the Art of Letting Go and the art of surrender, because if you can't control your self-identity, and that's about as basic as it gets. And so later, when the ante kept increasing, I knew that the key to navigating whatever was coming was to surrender, let it go, and it stopped me from trying to hold on to something familiar, hold on to something I could identify with. And that just then, that just went on. It escalated from there, about two and a half years later, when my individual, egoic identity was turned inside out and just crushed, I went through a collapse of that smaller state, and a rebirth into a deeper state, and then later through after the Ocean of Suffering, after spending two years in that you know, surrounded by the historical suffering of humanity and these unfinished memories, painful memories, there was a death process which then catapulted me into a deeper level of reality, beyond the collective unconscious, into archetypal consciousness. This pattern just kept repeating itself. It started very early on, and then it's just the texture of the openness differs, the context differs, the purity of it differs. There's a lot of light, of course, engaging fields of light, but I found that light itself also has gradients, various levels of purity of light, levels of clarity of light. So the actual content of openness—it changes in the work. But the phenomenon of opening into something larger, something deeper... Now I want to caution this little bit, qualify it, the sensation at a certain stage of work and what I would call the psychic and subtle levels of consciousness. The sensation often is of getting larger, and I think this is characteristic of subtle level reality, subtle level states of consciousness, and then later, much later in the journey, this experience was just reversed. That is, I was experiencing huge fields of light, contracting into the present and just exploding me into that, into some different state of consciousness. But everything was contracting, contracting. So I began to realize that the whole subject—I even began to wonder whether we had misidentified the nature of psychedelics by calling them mind openers. Yeah, I understand. But at another level, they are mind contractors, where you're contracting deeper and deeper and deeper into the present, present, present, present, until you drop into a very different experience of that present. So openness, we just want to be careful to recognize that there are different modalities.

Andrew Holecek: It's a multivalent term, isn't it, Chris? It has different iterations and contexts. Several things come to mind here. That contraction into the present moment is very interesting in the languaging that I'm familiar with, and you may be familiar with this too. Padmasambhava talked about it as the fourth moment, which one can only actually access through the conduit of the present moment. So what an interesting kind of juxtaposition and almost clash of traditional approaches where, on one level by contracting in the healthy sense—and again, this is super important, because in and of itself, contraction is utterly non-problematic. We couldn't operate in the world without that aspect of that pulsation. We tend to clamor towards openness as that somehow being the ultimate spiritual thing. I think provisionally, there's some truth to that. But if we can't merge that openness with our contraction, then contraction becomes the bad boy, the bad girl, and we look at it in a kind of limited way, but in my experience, and Padmasambhava uses this language of the fourth moment, you contract, you condense into the portal, it becomes the portico into the timeless beyond, where you come to the present moment, and then that blows up, so to speak, into the fourth moment, which transcends even the present moment itself. I think that's helpful because we're going to start to tread into waters where languages will, because it's dualistic in nature, become problematic. As you know, in the Buddhist tradition, one is invited to be incredibly articulate, precise, in order to realize when we use this term, exactly how are we using it in what context. I think therefore it seems like, Well, wait a second, isn't the whole thing about opening? Well, yes, but it's also honoring the process of contraction, and how that can lead to this.

Chris Bache: Yeah, you know, you're mentioning Padmasambhava. It gives me an opportunity to, once again, emphasize the point that there are correlations, and I'm grateful for the correlations between my experiences and those recorded by the Great Beings. But this path that I was on is not that contemplative path. It's a path of temporary immersion. So when I'm describing things, it always has to be understood that this is a temporary experience. To unpack the spiritual potential of that temporary experience, we can have that conversation, but it's not the same as when you come into these experiences using what you might think of as the slow bake method of sustained contemplation, you know. So I just always want to be careful to keep apples and oranges separate, because so often people think, Oh, I've had a tremendous revelatory enlightenment experience. That's it! Well, good for you, but that's a temporary experience.

Andrew Holecek: That is unbelievably important. How does the saying go? An enlightened experience does not make one an enlightened being. I mean, that's a difference in Tibet language, between experience and realization by definition. Experience always has a beginning and an end, and in order to mature that, that's a large part of the path where I think a lot of people really get tripped up. I speak from my own experience, you have these tremendous metanoias, these openings. You think you're enlightened. And then what do you do? You grasp after that, and you just replace a chain made of lead with one made of gold. Understanding that there's the path, quality of continuing that. Just to reinstate a couple things, when you're talking about deeper states, just to make sure I'm understanding you, Chris, it seems to me that you're also saying a deeper state is, is somewhat synonymous with a more open state, that is, you're waking in, you're also expanding and then, perhaps, as you pointed out, that it then points or directs us to how we are constructing this self-sense, moment to moment. This is the other thing I think that is incredibly important, that we tend—and I'm speaking from a confessional thing—we tend to think that the ego structure, the self-sense, is this monolithic, reified entity. This is where we can learn a lot from our scientific brothers and sisters in science, physics, and neuroscience—it's a process. It's not a product. The self-sense is constantly being constructed. Therefore, when you go through this type of deconstruction, or demolition derby, by immediate implication, you can see through the process of demolition, the process of construction, and therefore, how we are responsible for the way we contract and we do so largely for purposes of protection, fear and the like. But is that a fair representation of what you discovered?

Chris Bache: It is, it's a fair representation, and it's a description which fits better, in some ways, the early stages of the work, where you are still kind of working at insights which help you understand your individual way of being in the world. I describe my work fundamentally as a work in cosmological exploration, where not only do you leave your individual ego behind, at least temporarily, but you leave deeper and deeper levels behind, at least in my experience, and are given the opportunity to explore how the universe constructs its reality, how archetypal reality structures time and space reality, how oneness manifests in the diversity of all physical, of all life forms, of all atomic, nuclear, quantum life forms, how the pure void of emptiness is that mysterious, fertile essence which is giving birth to time and space, the vastness of time and space, moment by moment. It is very useful to understand your personal way of contracting, the personal way of you know, sustaining your smallness. But for me, I mean, not trained as a philosopher, I wanted to understand the larger spectrum of reality, and so the invitation that was given to me was just to explore how time and space is made. I wish, I mean, I so often wish I had a PhD in physics and astrophysics. I could have understood so much more of what I was being shown. But, you know, always, the universe can only communicate to you successfully, that which you have the capacity to understand.

Andrew Holecek: Yes, exactly. That's a fantastic statement, Chris. To me, and this is what you suggest towards the end of your book, when you were wrestling, struggling, working with this process of integration, in a very real way you used this particular mechanism—disintegrated, opened, opened, opened, opened. Then, really, in my language, in frameworks we're both familiar with, this notion in the Indic traditions of hearing, contemplating, meditating, and ingest, digest, metabolize. The way I read your experience, that I think is really worth talking about, is that you you opened to such an extent, and I can speak a little bit from my own experience, that the issue became one of digestion and metabolism. The reason I mention this, that I think has tremendous applicability, is that sometimes, when we look at things like psychosis, and you were treading sometimes that thin membrane between transcendence and psychosis, the loss of self-sense, that the issue of integration, bringing that in a certain way, and pardon my play on languaging here, is that psychosis can be, in fact, a type of eating disorder in that you actually open to such an extent that then you don't have the capacity, you don't have the infrastructure, the wherewithal to digest and metabolize. Instead of opening body-mind, you blow body-mind, and the sense of reference is then completely so decimated that is one way to perhaps talk about the whole psychotic aspect and the risk, perhaps some of the perils of doing this type of deep diving.

Chris Bache: I understand, and you're certainly right that doing this type of work does carry certain risks and has to be approached cautiously and with careful support structures in place and careful self-monitoring and so on and so forth. I don't think, and I do understand the relationship between psychosis and transcendence, and I think it was Huston Smith who said a mystic is someone who learns how to swim in the vast waters, and a psychotic drowns.

Andrew Holecek: That is like actually, Lang, R.D. Lang, yeah.

Chris Bache: In my case, I understand the psychotic-looking qualities of loss of self, but I would not describe my experiences as walking that particular edge. If I had gotten into a situation where I felt I was at that edge, I would have changed course. I would have done something differently. My experience was that by working in a very carefully clinical type, modality and opening systematically. The universe really opened me systematically, in a way beyond my calculation. But it opened me very, very carefully, and so it peeled me carefully, and it broke me open, layer by layer by layer. If it had catapulted me, you know, beyond, beyond, beyond so quickly, then I could have had problems of integration. But in my experience, I always opened and I always congealed comfortably and carefully. If I had not congealed comfortably and carefully, then I would have been given pause because that's a symptom of something really going wrong. So it's not the depth of loss of self which marks the psychotic episode. I think it also has to do with a kind of confusion, but I absolutely agree you have to walk these waters very carefully. I seem to have a kind of natural constitution. I mean, you know, I started this work. I never came from any traumatized background, just the ordinary, you know, pains of growing up and whatnot. But I had fundamentally, a core, strong self, and I also had a capacity—it's in my astrological natal chart—a capacity to open and an interest in opening up into the vast expanse of consciousness and to contract back. So if you don't have that natural capacity, or if you're bringing in disruptive trauma or other qualities in your person, then very much this work may not be for you. It's a little bit like Jack Engler famously said, and I think it’s an appropriate statement, you have to be someone before you can be no one.

Andrew Holecek: That's right there. I think that cannot be overstated, that the ego itself, fundamentally, is non-problematic. It's a developmental stage. It's just a form of arrested development. If you don't have that stable self-sense, then, in fact, instead of dis-differentiating, you dissociate. And then that's where it becomes somewhat problematic. Then the ability to find that identity, to find some refuge, becomes really somewhat disconcerting. But Chris, towards the end of your book, I want to come back to this just a little bit, because my understanding of what you're sharing towards the end, like what dictated stopping after the 73rd journey was, and I found this one of the most compelling, pardon the pun, electrifying parts of your book. It was as if your body-mind matrix had become so open. We talked about this last time. This is so important. This kind of tantric work, body is as important as mind. When you're opening your mind, you are opening your body. As you open your body, even in the classic inner yogic sense, all these energies, what they talk about is the winds come through. If those winds aren't written properly, they can throw you. If I understand what you said towards the end, in a certain way, your system was running too hot. There was so much energy, so much release that, again, this returns us to this digestion, metabolism component. It was like my cup runneth over. I have enough experience here to spend the rest of this life, or other lives now, digesting this feast. Isn't that a fair way to recapitulate what you said at the end, that you stopped the feast because there was just too much to eat, so to speak.

Chris Bache: I think that's a fair description. In my case, I don't think it's because I didn't ride the wind successfully. I think I rode the wind successfully, but I rode the winds too long in the sense—it stretched me out so wide and so deep. You know, in the early stages of psychedelic use, both individually and I think culturally, we get excited by having being able to have contact with transcendent dimensions. That's so liberating. It's so intellectually, you know, opening to us to the intelligence that lives in the universe, that is the universe. But our traditions, our theological and even our contemplative traditions, I think, tend to accept at the very highest levels, tend to underestimate the dimensions of the divine, or underestimate the dimensions of the universe. That leads us to underestimate how vast the world is that we can open into. Psychedelics do give us the capacity, even when they are used well, and I hope I use them skillfully and responsibly, but even when I did that, it basically opened me so deeply into such intimacy with the universe, transcending time, transcending space. Even though I contracted back, okay, the memory or the beauty—and memory—of the communion was just so dear and so intense that I could not take returning—I just couldn't do it anymore.

Andrew Holecek: You couldn't go to the train station and leave your lover one more time.

Chris Bache: Right, yeah. I just had to stay here and let her come to me in whatever form was possible by me not going into a non-ordinary state but staying here and just digesting like you say. I picked up a lifetime and more of experiences to digest.

Andrew Holecek: So let me ask you this, and I hope it's okay if we go into—I mean, the book itself is so intimate, it's so personal, that I don't think I'm violating any borders with you. But if I go into areas where it's like, yeah, I don't want to go there, you will not offend me. But what you said at the end so much was the end of the book. I was really moved by this because in a certain way, when I look back over my own life, Chris, it became more articulate over the last couple of years. My entire life has been a way of learning how to prepare to die. I wrote a book by the very title, and in the most elegant way, that journey has actually brought me more fully into life than I could have imagined. So my passion for death has actually brought me more fully into life than I could have possibly imagined. I have a deep, deep fascination and interest in death, dying, thanatology. To me, really, the whole spiritual path is death in slow motion, opening, titrating, opening on our terms. But what you share at the end I thought was so beautiful, just to expand what you said here that, in a certain way, I couldn't wait to die, that I couldn't wait to return to my beloved. But let me ask you this: how do you think, why? What do you expect will happen, and why do you think somehow you'll be more prepared for her ultimate embrace with the dissolution of your body at the moment of death than you are now? I mean, are you perhaps again? I don't know. Kidding yourself is a very open question. What is the intuition or the felt sense that says I can't wait to dissolve into the embrace of the beloved at the moment of death? And then why? Why do you think you'll be able to handle that any differently than you can handle it now?

Chris Bache: I don't think I would handle it differently at the moment of my final death, whenever that takes place, than I could handle it now. If I were to die right now, the training I went through in my psychedelic work—it's just as you say, training to die—actually becomes training in how to live. There are two realities: the domain of light, which I think of as pure light, and the green reality, the manifest physical world, the world we are part of, nirmanakaya. So there's Dharmakaya and nirmanakaya, and they interpenetrate. They’re the same reality experienced in different modalities. What we experience as death is really just an intersection between these realities. As you awaken, you awaken deeper into the constant intersection, the simultaneity of these realities. So what happens when we die physically and what happens when we die spiritually are deeply one and the same, in a way. In my sessions, I was taken into my own death process multiple times. I can’t count how many times I died, and I have a sense that I know the pathway well. I've read the literature about the Bardo confusions that can distract us from returning fully to a Dharmakaya when we die. I recognize that; I feel I've dealt with many of those. I may be wrong—we'll find out in the final exam, right? But to me, death will be not only joyful, as it is for everybody, but easy because I don't feel a deep clinging to my personal identity, human existence, or time space. You're absolutely right—all spiritual practice, and I think of psychedelic practice as spiritual practice, prepares you for that moment of death. If everything goes well, you get to die before you die. Remember those who die before they die do not die when they die. What would be lovely, if I could experience what I think of as full liberation, is if she came to me while I was still in my body, and I got to live in the death state, alive in the physical state.

Andrew Holecek: Beautiful, and this is so important.

Chris Bache: This view...

Andrew Holecek: ...alone can irrevocably, radically alter our relationship to the end of life and transition. We should make a deal with each other, Chris. When I was reading your book, I thought both the use of the word psychedelic and death are branding issues. We need to rebrand these terms. I was impressed by the conditioned button to the word psychedelic. You should replace every instance of psychedelic with entheogen. I should replace death with transition because death seems so final, so solid, like this terrible, monolithic thing. Marie Curie beautifully said nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood. What we're doing here is a tremendous understanding. This is so important for us.

Chris Bache: Before we go on, let me just respond to something you said. One of the things I write about in the book, in the Diamond Luminosity chapter, is that once you've died so many times at so many levels of consciousness, the very concept of death loses its meaning because you learn you cannot die. The form you are can die; everything about all your understandings and all your history can die, but you cannot die. In that Diamond Luminosity chapter, when I first transitioned into the Diamond Luminosity, my realization was the death state. The song of realization was the death state. And the death state is the awakened state; it is the reality state.

Andrew Holecek: This is exactly the question I was going to ask. When you went through these repetitive openings, releases, and deaths, it became easier. You became more familiar with it, right? The very Tibetan word for meditation is to become familiar with. It's only because we don't understand it, so we fear it. You die over and over, you become more familiar with it, you understand it, you befriend it. And you realize this is just a natural state of openness that is only fearful in reference to the ego structure, which we're so afraid of letting go. I want to reinstate this: the more you die in meditation or through these sessions, the more familiar you get until it becomes like His Holiness Karmapa said at the moment of his transition, two days before he died, nothing happens. To get to that point to say, with utter conviction, nothing happens—unbelievable.

Chris Bache: Yes, death becomes your best friend. Truly. In your practice, you're always looking for your best friend. I just want to qualify a little bit: the hardest strip down I went through in any of my sessions, the most extreme destruction, was in the 70th session, the last vision I was given among many major visions. I had gone through many deaths, and they do get easier, and you look forward to them. But I have to put that beside this particular phenomenon where the transition was not easy. I didn't resist it; I gave into it, but it was really extreme. That's because my session or the consciousness guiding my session was taking me into a radical state of consciousness, deeper into deep time than ever before. It was giving me one last culminating series of teachings that required an unusually large canvas, and it had nothing to do with personal enlightenment or ego death. We always have to contextualize all observations in terms of consciousness level, but in general, you're absolutely right. The more you die, the more comfortable you get with it. To be able to say, as the Karmapa did, "Nothing happens," is to be in a cherished state.

Andrew Holecek: Isn't it? If we truly understand and feel in our hearts, when we die, it's the ultimate grand opening. These are little miniature openings; we become more familiar with them in our meditation state. How much of the path is letting go of identification with thought, the body, exclusive forms? It's death in slow motion, and toward the end of life, we have something to look forward to instead of going into the Bardos looking through the rearview mirror. Now we have something to look forward to—the big unwind, the final exhalation, the final openness, which is absolutely fundamentally ecstatic. This is so important. I love your language of the return to the Beloved. If in our hearts we know we are going to return to the embrace of the Beloved, return to your lover at the moment of death and be held in this ultimate holding environment—oh my goodness, does that change our relationship to the end of life? Return to the embrace of the cosmic mother. Die as a sinner with a smile on your face, instead of kicking and screaming and making a difficult transition. This cannot be overstated, as it will radically change the way we relate to old age and sickness. When this apparatus that has served me well for decades starts to crumble, instead of "Oh crap," it's "Oh wow."

Chris Bache: It's a wonderful joy and mercy of life that they can't stop you from dying. The older you get, you get one foot closer to joy and ecstasy. Cryogenics and freezing the body is so terribly sad. I taught near-death episode research for years in my courses, along with reincarnation and other things. Students saw how people's lives were completely changed, their relationship to death changed by temporary experiences of what's on the other side. Experiencing the Beloved in their form softened their fear of death and changed their expectations. Death research is powerful psycho-spiritual work.

Andrew Holecek: I couldn't agree more—the work of Grayson, Eben Alexander, and others with these remarkable stories. I think it's like—I’ve never had an official NDE, but I’ve had meditative NDEs. You don't have to have them over and over to change your life. Just one can completely change the texture of your life. And this resonates because they're so true, so real. They’re using these agents now to remove fear of death for people who are terrified. One session will open you to the point where all fear of death is done.

Chris Bache: People say, "How do you know what you experienced was real? Maybe it was just a complicated hallucination." No, you know what reality feels like, and this is more real than physical reality. It's a hyper-reality with unmistakable objectivity. You don't need to quibble with it or argue; it's obviously true.

Andrew Holecek: Returning to the narrative—to me, it is ego's inability to digest or metabolize that; it contracts against it, fights it. It's a reducing valve. Huxley called the brain a reducing valve. We need it, as we're not developmentally open enough. But that's what growth constitutes—reducing the reducing valve, continuing to open until we become this ultimate openness, and in that sense, become the cosmos itself. This ties to what we talked about: to become one with the universe, we first need to become one with the self. Can you say a little more about that? That's where we go when we die—becoming nothing and simultaneously everything.

Chris Bache: The experience was to become one with all of existence, or God, or the universe. We can't do that if we're not one within ourselves. If we have unintegrated pieces of shadow or ego fragments or wounds, life brings these unintegrated pieces to the surface to make peace with them. You become whole and coherent within your being, because how could you become one with life if you're not one with yourself? These things develop synergistically. The deeper your experience of oneness with life, the deeper your experience of oneness with yourself, until divisions disappear inside you. One quality we appreciate about awakened beings is their integrity and deep relaxation within themselves, an outgrowth of intimacy with life itself.

Andrew Holecek: Isn't that fantastic? This yet again reiterates the process of reiteration itself. By befriending every part of our being, including shadow elements brought into the unconscious, we open, accept, and say "yes" to whatever takes place. Then integration, integrity within leads to fundamental integration with the so-called outside world.

Chris Bache: One of the last pieces, well-recognized in spiritual traditions, is giving up private enlightenment, spiritual shadow. Everything you do for others is part of your awakening, and trying to become enlightened gets in your way.

Andrew Holecek: Yes, this brings the social nexus of the path into play. We often think provisionally, starting at home, cleaning up our stuff. But the solitary path can become a trap. You can't wake up without others; others become your path. I aspire to enter lifetime retreat, viewing all these unwanted aspects as my path. When you understand the divine nature of reality, it includes the entire spectrum of your being. Shadow elements become aspects you embrace instead of avoiding. This radically changes how we relate to unwanted experiences. We can bring those onto our path, realizing they are our path. Anyway, it’s like I'm interviewing you. I get so excited. With your permission, Chris, I'd like to transition into a dazzling section from your book. Let's discuss the light, the Diamond Luminosity, a profound aspect of the whole experience. Walk us through your exploration of this light and how it introduced you to the fundamental matrix of reality.

Chris Bache: This transition occurred 15 years into my work. I had gone through ego death, the ocean of collective suffering, archetypal reality, and had been through incredible blessings—experiences of oneness, emptiness, cosmic love, primal void. I felt existentially complete; the universe had rewarded me with blessings that left me feeling profoundly complete. I'd been given a new understanding of reincarnation, a deeper experience than classical Eastern understandings. I'd been taken into the birth of the Diamond Soul, given many visionary experiences of humanity's future. Along the way, I experienced light many times in different modalities. Then I went through another intense death process, and in the next session, I was taken into the fruition portion, into light beyond any I'd experienced before. I dissolved into Luminosity, spellbinding and intoxicating. I called it the death state because I entered it through dying, an ultimate form. A swirling disc contained all my life's moments. I would fall into it, touch some aspect of my life, and instantly die into Luminosity, being brought back to the center. Eventually, there was no coming or going, only abiding. The striking characteristic was its clarity, clarity, clarity. It was the context within which all thinking and feeling took place. I understood touching something like this for one second dissolves thousands of years of wandering in Samsara's shadows. This was extra-samsaric reality, a particularly intense version. It felt more like Dharmakaya, the clear light of absolute reality.

In my next session, I returned a year later after more intense work. I was taken into the Diamond Luminosity again. It took a year of intense work before dying awake into it. My second experience was the deepest of any session, and my cosmological vision was reversed. I experienced a reality of Light Beyond the Diamond Luminosity. The absolute light, a light beyond diamond Luminosity, shattered me in one second. I realized spiritual tradition had taught me about end states. Now, I had to give up the idea of an end state; it's an infinite progression. Death would keep coming as long as you keep pushing because you never reach the end. In subsequent sessions, the Diamond Luminosity would crunch more deeply into my being, shifting around, dissolving my body's structure, until I received initiation into Buddha nature, the pure nature of mind. I understood that magnificent reality has no beginning or end; it always is. It’s the abiding foundation of existence, the embodied Diamond Luminosity. It was the last time I experienced the Diamond Luminosity. From there, I went through further experiences, the 70th session, and my consciousness wrapped it up, sending me on my way.

Andrew Holecek: I just want to take a pause and digest that.

Chris Bache: I've been digesting it for 20 years. The ineffable enormity of it...

Andrew Holecek: This is interesting, Chris, thanks for sharing this. There's a dance between the mythopoetic aspect of my being and bathing in the artistry of what you shared, versus formulating references. It's almost hesitant to say anything—it might water it down. With your understanding of Buddhist nomenclature, I recall synchronicities with Vajrayana becoming a part of your path when experiencing diamond Luminosity. Utilizing that language, I'm humbled to reference my understanding with yours.

Would terms like clear light mind resonate? You used the term Diamond Luminosity; Vajrayana is the diamond path. Are there other Tibetan terms that relate to what you experienced, like Dharmakaya or Dharma Datu?

Chris Bache: Yes. Clear light mind may be closer to the nature of mind. I'm still digesting the differences between diamond Luminosity as an extra-samsaric reality and its foundation in nirmanakaya existence. There are correlations. All honor to the great beings who have explored these dimensions deeply. I'm a humble student of great teachers. I use names to clarify but acknowledge the mystery that the mind can't fully grasp.

Chris Bache: The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Our planet is about four and a half billion years old. When we plot the evolving structure of Homo, we go through Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and the various stages. We got the big brain, the 50% increase in our brain about 100,000 years ago, and self-awareness begins to emerge. Along the way, about three to five thousand years ago, we began to develop the spiritual technology that allows us to concentrate our mind and bring us into that part of our being where we are not of the private self but touch the life of the world. We touch that which is universal. There's this tremendous aha, this awakened sense, and we've applied all sorts of names to that experience of our true nature, our essential nature. Now, whatever this is, and I think you and I have a pretty good sense of what that experience is, it is the tip of the iceberg of the unfolding—the intentional, exquisite unfolding of this extraordinary consciousness that we might call divinity, or maybe not want to call it divinity. This unfolding has been gestating in creation for 13.7 billion years, and that's only in this Big Bang. We don't know how many other expansions and contractions of earlier universes precede this particular Big Bang explosion. We don't know. I mention this just to underscore the enormity, the profoundness of the reality within which awakening takes place, and the reality within which even deeper and deeper awakenings take place, as have been recognized by our spiritual traditions. Our spiritual traditions are only 3, 4, 5 thousand years old, and that's a lot of time for an incarnating soul to penetrate into the deeper texture of existence. But if we were to go forward in time 100,000 years—and that's a wink of cosmic time—surely, reasonably, we would expect our great spiritual teachers to have deeper experiences of the universe than our best spiritual teachers today, because it's an ongoing developmental process of exploring the deep mystery. So, on the one hand, I want to honor and affirm the categories and descriptions of the beings who have lived up to this point, and I place my experiences at their feet, seeking their guidance and understanding of what has taken place. But just as the absolute light came from a reality far beyond whatever the diamond Luminosity is, likewise, evolution is continuing. Evolution is developing, and we are nowhere near even 10% of human development. I would expect, and almost demand, that we expect deeper capacities for spiritual experience to continue to emerge. So, we want to use the categories to help us hold on, to illumine, understand. On the other hand, we don't want to shrink-wrap them. We want to stay open. And staying open in this way, I think, is to stay open to a deeper intimacy with the beloved, to stay open to the light that gives birth to the world, second by second.

Andrew Holecek: That's exquisite. What comes to mind again is this wonderful, fundamental archetypal narrative of openness. On one level, the invitation here is an ideological openness. We can very easily—again, the near enemy of tradition—like you, I have tremendous allegiance and respect for tradition. But if tradition isn't, and I think you understand this in the best sense of the word, modernized without being edited and distorted, then it can become ossified. You can reify even the tradition, and then we become closed around our ideologies and belief systems. So what I hear you saying that I appreciate is this ideological openness. Let's keep even open to that. But Chris, if I might, a question of clarity: when you use the term "extra Samsara," that is not a term commonly in my vocabulary. What do you mean when you talk about the light as extra? Do you mean post-trans Samsara? What do you mean by extra Samsara?

Chris Bache: I mean beyond the Bardo, beyond all the layers of the Bardo, beyond all Samsara, at a place where the patterns of cyclic existence have been eclipsed. My sense of it is that in between the physical reality and the rhythms of physical reality, when we die, we enter into various patterns of Bardo reality, various spiritual states. There are many, many layers, thousands of layers, but one can go beyond that. What is the nature of reality that's beyond the Bardo existence? The Buddha refused to describe it very wisely, saying, "Experience it for yourself." My sense is that outside of that, what happens in the upper Bardo is that the light gets brighter and brighter until you move into a world which is all light. It's just all light, and the quality of light is different because it’s trans Bardo and all individualized existence. Here, I have to be careful because I, for one, do not see individuality as the enemy of Spiritual Awakening. When we stabilize deep spiritual awakening, our individuality is liberated, not extinguished. So I don't want to say that in the domain of extra Samsara Luminosity, there is no individuality, but it is an extraordinarily translucent or extraordinarily transparent individuality.

Andrew Holecek: Yeah, I'm going to make it a practice to pause and work with my usually habituated reflex to fill the space after you make these amazing statements. I want to rest in the somatic impact of what you're sharing and not capitulate to my usual intellectual contractive predispositions, which don't respect and honor what we're discussing here. But let me ask you this, Chris: there are profound principles being explored and even challenged here. I was as surprised when I read your account as you were when you experienced it—the dissolution of the so-called omega point, that there isn't some final destination. How might you reconcile or balance your experience of this endless evolutionary unfolding with concepts like the changeless nature? Emptiness, in this case, is Dharmakaya. Emptiness doesn't evolve. Form evolves. How does that land with you? When the Buddhist tradition talks about Buddha nature being changeless nature, how can something change and evolve that doesn't have form? Form evolves, not emptiness. How does that land with you?

Chris Bache: I don't feel it as a dissonance, and it is a deep mystery I don't pretend to fathom profoundly. On those occasions when I have relaxed into or been drawn into the unchanging condition, the reality in which everything arises and passes away and is not impacted at all, it appears to be the fertile void from within which all existence springs. If we then step into the existence that springs from this cosmic, fertile void, and we look at the Big Bang, the explosion of energy, the congealing into matter, the formation of galaxies, solar systems, and life—the emergence of self-awareness and so forth—clearly, existence seems to be going somewhere. It delights in form, unfolding, complexification, becoming self-aware, awakening, and empowering the soul, as our former life memories become conscious, and we wake up to our 100,000-year identity, not just our 100-year identity. So form is going somewhere, and that which drives form is going somewhere. It's the magnificent creativity of the universe, the mind of the universe, if you will. I didn't want to call it God, which is why I got comfortable with the word Entheogen—it has Theos, and our understandings of God are so limited. So, I yield to the cosmologist's language of the universe. We measure the universe in light years, billions of light years across, that vast. Yet right now, as this complex biped becomes self-conscious, when we drop our awareness to the center of ourselves, we find this magnificent reality, which feels to be unchanging, and yet seems to be at the center of everything that is changing. It's clearly a both-and situation: divinity that delights in existence has, at least at some level, an infinite nature that is unchanging at the center and perpetual change. That's kind of the best I can do about it.

Andrew Holecek: It's fantastic and revelatory of conceptual frameworks. Just because concept can't relate to the seeming paradox doesn't mean reality doesn't abide by those paradoxes, right? It's only a paradox to the conceptual mind.

Chris Bache: It has no problem. Exactly, exactly.

Andrew Holecek: It's only when we try to shrink-wrap it that we enter the world of paradox and irony. On one level, this is beautiful because it's one way I've come to register this marvelous dissonance—isn't the right word—when duality tries to wrap itself around Non-duality, which they cannot do. The characteristic of that is, in fact, this irony, paradox, things like Niels Bohr's notion of complementarity. It's not either-or, it’s and—they can be both light and particle; you can be both Chris Bache and the cosmos. Who says you can't? Aristotle? We live in his world. Another important thing: there seems to be a suggestion in your language, in what you're sharing here, about the quality of return. I want to return to the beloved, the light—longing to return. But perhaps there's the notion that path is a provisional approach, and then a more absolute approach would be recognition—that you don’t need to return to anything, the issue is recognition and self-liberation. Does that speak to you when you reference longing to return to the mother, the beloved, the clear light? That denotes subtle dualism: I have to return, versus recognizing the light and mother are here right now.

Chris Bache: Absolutely, that's a fair observation. Return implies absence, and the nature of union dissolves absence, dissolving the category of return. It encourages different categories, like the eternal here, the eternal now. It's just here all the time. That’s true at one level, but then it dissolves at a deeper level. I want to contextualize this within my particular journey, which is not the same as the journey of spiritual awakening. The journey of spiritual awakening is the art of releasing all the present self's constrictions to live in abiding transparency, or Shunyata, resting in the universe's present as it unfolds. Cosmological exploration is more like getting into a rocket ship and going into a different solar system—or even a different galaxy. It's pushing the limits of awareness, remembering beyond even the nature of mind. If I had sought only to awaken into the abiding present, I would have adopted a completely different strategy. Working with high doses of LSD pushes consciousness far beyond enlightenment—not to say I'm more enlightened, but beyond the state of abiding emptiness into the unchanging reality underneath. It explores deeper physical reality, consciousness reality. What informs the structure of time, space, and archetypal consciousness? What forms give birth to time, space, and the light that created the world itself? There’s a sense of return entering and coming back from that condition. In a spiritual context, return is an oxymoron, better using other categories. But in cosmic exploration, there's a ring of truth because I can't imagine how I personally could live in places I've touched. I can only visit them, and try to cultivate that condition in daily life. But much of that reality I will never bring back in this life—maybe in a hundred lifetimes. So, in that context, return has some truth to it.

Andrew Holecek: Several things come to mind. You're a philosopher; things become philosophy because they haven't become direct experience yet. It's interesting what you're sharing. It's not just to discuss it—how do you reconcile when you talk about the difference between the individual versus the cosmic? Advaita Vedanta, for instance, how do you reconcile the duality implied by separating individual from cosmological? Because it still implies duality. I'm wrestling with this in Buddhism—Chitta, Mantra, Yoga Chara—the world is heart, mind, spirit. What you're saying seems to suggest cosmological versus individual duality. How do you play with that, reconcile it with oneness? Now, I seem to hear a monism from you, but there's dual aspect monism. It's like I'm talking about such beautiful stuff, and here I am dual aspect, monism. I want to understand this so it’s not just a wonderful transmission from your experience. Is there an inherent cosmological dualism when you say individual versus cosmic versus a monism?

Chris Bache: I don't see any dualism in it. If there is a dualism, it’s not of my making—it’s the universe’s making. The universe begins as one in some fundamental core, pre-Big Bang, and it manifests diversity. We are part of that diversity, and the universe chose to empower life to be self-aware and self-empowering. The soul grows, expands, holding awareness of all our lifetimes. We are discovering a world designed before we showed up. There's a part and a whole. Spiritual experience deepens into the whole, we experience ourselves as a part. We reconcile with understanding Shunyata. Emptiness here is emptiness of self—open to the wholeness of life, no separate self. We are a part of life, a bubble in the ocean, part of the process. Oneness and emptiness are two sides of the same coin, experienced as part of the universe. There’s no ontological duality, just a functional duality forced upon us by life. Philosophical categories can trap us in human thought, especially in constrained Western tradition. Psychedelics open cosmic experiences, deeper than clinical insights—cosmic exploration allows entertaining deeper ideas. Philosophy of religion differentiated me from psychologists in clinical contexts. But I don't speak like a philosopher—I don't do what they do, and they disown me. To me, there's no duality, just a functional one—a bubble on the ocean of existence.

Andrew Holecek: That's an incredible response to a subtle, thorny issue. One question from the outset: when you had the experience of the diamond Luminosity post-session, post-meditation, where does that light go? What is its relationship to the phenomenal display of the world and appearance? Does the world emerge from that light or express it, or both? What is the relationship between the discovery of that light and the world appearing?

Chris Bache: A good question, which I'm not fully competent to answer. I take pointers from science and my experience. The light doesn’t go anywhere; it’s always there. We gain access for a period and then withdraw from the light, into Plato's "world of shadows," but that denigrates the beauty of physical reality. Scientists tell us molecules are made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles, ultimately light. Matter is light. When we drop into our mind's deepest levels and encounter light, there’s synergy. My understanding is the light manifests as the physical world. We experience the world as the manifestation of the being of light. Everywhere we touch the world, we find layers of genius. If we keep digging, we fall into quantum reality—dark energy, dark matter, light. They call it dark energy, dark matter, but it should be light. If I get depressed and disconnected, that’s my mind’s illusion; when clear, I see the world as a miracle. The Prophet Muhammad cited the universe as the miracle he would cite.

Andrew Holecek: On one level, it experiences itself. It's impossible to talk about this without stumbling into it. It’s reflexive awareness of the light itself. Is it fair to say that what we know as our self-sense, when we condense from the Unity of that formless light back into reified form? That arises from dissociation, losing memory of this fundamental expression of the beloved as a body of infinite Luminosity and emptiness.

Chris Bache: I think there is a sad way of doing that, and then there's a happy way of doing that, or maybe there's a pathological way, but then there's an entirely healthy way. Imagine it this way. Let's use God language temporarily, just because it's kind of handy. If we were to become one with God for an hour, and if God is the essence and totality of all life forms, then we would become one with all life forms. Imagine the nearby life forms in your neighborhood—that would involve becoming one with all the beetles and ants and grasses and seeds and cockroaches, all the human beings in all their manifest forms. There are so many layers and layers of life. When we say we're becoming one with God, we don't really mean, "Oh my God, we became one with the billions of ants right in my neighborhood." But in fact, if God is one, if all life is one in God, then that's what it involves.

What happens, I think, is that we do become one with the one. We reconnect to the one. But the happy way is that when we come back, I don't come back into being an ant or a toad or bird; I come back into being Chris, a human being. There is a happy and healthy way in which I come back into this individual life form, which recognizes that its essence is the same as the essence of those ants and birds and toads. No better, no different. It's more complicated, but the essence is the same. There is that profound kinship with all of existence. I happen to be a human bubble. They are other kinds of bubbles. Together, we make up the unified existence of the totality.

Let's sing in celebration. We work together. We didn't choose it. We didn't create it. We are waking up within it. It is the design of a deeper intelligence, a deeper organization that's manifesting itself in joyful diversity. We can enjoy the diversity, acknowledge it, and be comfortable within it, and I don't think there's anything pathological about it. In fact, there's an ecstatic joy in celebrating being a human being in the now. If we exalt our humanness at the expense of other life forms, and we're willing for them to go extinct to allow us to buy something bigger and better, there's a steep pathology there. But when truly liberated, our individuality is recognized as a gift, just an extraordinary gift and a responsibility. We have to handle that responsibility to protect the well-being of all the life forms around us. Then the sense of our common ground, the sense of the common ground out of which all life emerges, deepens and deepens. Again, a sort of eco-psychology and eco-spirituality. We can't awaken as a separate self without simultaneously awakening as an earth self, an earth being.

Andrew Holecek: Yeah, that's fantastic. Talk about applicability. Sometimes it's easy to think that these are kind of elite, treasured, sterile, ivory tower spiritual experiences, but really, there's nothing more practical, more applicable. This is the farthest from being philosophy; this is the most radical transformation in view, from which activism, enlightened activity, extraordinarily practical, applicable behaviors and actions arise spontaneously. This also cannot be overstated, because, to me, if what we're discussing here can't be of benefit to what's happening in the world, it's irrelevant. And this is far from irrelevant. This is absolutely foundational; it is the ultimate basis. From this foundation, spontaneously, without thought, arises the activity that is appropriate for this day and age. So, Chris, let me ask you this. When I hear you talking about these experiences, these are types of Samadhi states. You're entering into particular absorption states, like when you're bathing in the light, you become the light. That's a luminous Samadhi. Why does it end? Why does post-meditation, post-session still take place? Why not abide in that light eternally? What brings you back in? It seems, on one level, it's involuntary. So, in a way, we're talking about rebirth processes. Is involuntary rebirth due to unpurified habitual patterns bringing us back because of their karmic power?

Chris Bache: Well, once again, there are some beings for whom their Samadhi does not end. But even those beings experience movement in and out. They live at different levels in different seconds of every hour. I would say my Samadhi ends because I'm not a being who can sustain those levels of purity or clarity in my current condition. The habits of consciousness reassert themselves, the habits of my embodiment reassert themselves, and I once again look at the world through the levels of awareness I can manage in my embodied existence.

In a sense, is the goal spiritual awakening, or is the goal cosmological exploration? If the goal is spiritual awakening, then there is a way in which we can realistically aim to enter into a kind of Samadhi that is abiding and allows us to live with a profound sense of freedom within the context of life. If the experiential trajectory is cosmological exploration, then the burden, at least on this path that I practice, is that it's temporary. It might even be that Samadhi isn't the right word for it—to go beyond, to experience the future, to experience the future of humanity in a realistic, graphic sense, to absorb time, space, existence in a profound expansion of time that spans millions of years. How could one possibly live in that condition and have breakfast, really? So, if you want to understand those things, here's a way of doing it, but then you have to come back. Now you have to live in my 72-year-old self, cut the grass, and do my things. And that's okay, because if you do it well, there is a happy way of coming back and integrating and recognizing the limits of what you experienced. It's a temporary condition. No big deal to not make too much of it, learning more as I go. There is a healthy way, and then there are all sorts of unhealthy ways of doing it, but hopefully the healthy way is an abiding calm and trust, an abiding trust in the wisdom of the universe in its self-emergent glory.

Andrew Holecek: Would it be fair to say, Chris, that when we're basically talking about this fundamental process—rebirth really takes place in two dimensions of experience? The degree of openness we can tolerate, what ends the process of involuntary rebirth is the ability to open, open, open—to such a degree we're comfortable with it, we abide in it as that fundamental openness. And when we do return, it's not that rebirth ends, but involuntary rebirth ends. And as you said, the play continues infinitely out of love and compassion in service of others. Is that a fair way to express your understanding? I'm trying to dance around the dissolution of the Omega Point. On one level, it's the final goal for self, but it's just the beginning of this endless voluntary display of wisdom and compassion.

Chris Bache: I think it's a very fair description. I think what ends is the involuntary nature of reincarnation, and we transition into voluntary incarnation. With that comes—I think our future incarnations are not the same as our past incarnations in this respect. The way I've languaged this, the way it was shown to me in the sessions, is that long term or short term, in the end, we all become voluntarily incarnate. When the entire planet is populated by self-consciously incarnated beings, humanity will have transitioned to a new level of its evolutionary trajectory. This was presented to me in the sessions as the birth of the diamond soul. All my former lives started coming into me, and when they hit a critical mass, they fused into one. When they fused into one, this diamond light blew out of my chest and catapulted me into a deep state of consciousness that was individualized, but individuality was actualized in a way I had no previous experience of. I think that's where humanity is going. All of us are incarnating, every generation, billions and billions of people are incarnating over and over again. Sooner or later, the entire species not only becomes awakened but gives birth to a deeper spiritual awareness gestating inside it all this time. We awaken into deeper awareness, which is not just the awareness of enlightenment but the awareness of awakening—our history, our relationship to the universe, a deeper intimacy with the intelligence of the universe, and all life forms on this planet.

This is when soul consciousness awakens—not in an anti-Buddhist way, but in a way compatible with śūnyatā. We awaken to the being we are in the community of beings as they are on a planet at this evolutionary stage, with billions of years ahead of us. I think we're just beginning to see the edges. When we first encountered enlightenment 5000 years ago, we called it escape—moksha, escape from samsara. Let me get out of here. But now we understand we want to awaken here, and in awakening here, humanity pivots into a new stage of the evolutionary story—not just a larger stage, but a more peaceful one, peaceful of heart, non-violent, more compassionate, more creative. That's the kind of planet I think we're giving birth to right now. All our individual spiritual aspirations, purification aspirations, healing aspirations, and justice aspirations are organically part of this deeper story. The deeper story is that humanity is reaching a point where it can't afford the lower maturity level of the past. We can't run a planet run by egos. We have to grow up, and when we grow up, we grow into this higher form of spiritual awareness that spiritual teachers have been telling us about for thousands of years. This begins a turning point in human history. That's what we're trying to give birth to—what I call the future human. People give it all sorts of names. We all feel it in our bones. It's Maitreya. It's that higher level of realization working its way to us.

Andrew Holecek: That's really exquisite. I'm wondering, if you know, I understand the language, but growing down might be a more appropriate embodied aspect. Because growing up is, again, fundamentally moksha, escapist—FedEx my consciousness to a pure land. When it's really waking down into the majesty, it's a nice way to start to close things up with the integration of your work—waking down, bringing, metabolizing, digesting, incorporating, literally incorporating, bringing into soma, body, this vast realization. Chris, if you don't mind me being a slight devil's advocate here, I've become very interested, fascinated for some decades with development, structural development—not just spiritual development. This is where I like integral approaches. I take complete delight in this vision and make aspirations that may it be so, that we can all become Tukus. But I'm also wondering, again, wishful thinking—as you talk in your book about evolutionary breakthroughs—when I look at the world and I see what's happening, and we can't even agree as a society to wear masks for the benefit of each other. Why should there be something special now, like a meteor hitting this earth of sanity, wisdom, and insight that shakes us from our collective slumber and brings us to this collective evolution and awareness? It doesn't seem to work that way. Evolution stumbles and trips along these painful, laborious, long stretches of time. I revel in what you're saying, but I'm less optimistic than I used to be. I look at this world, and I put my finger up to the winds that are blowing, and it doesn't seem to be blowing in the right direction, yeah.

Chris Bache: So they seem to be getting worse. They seem to be going the wrong way, right?

Andrew Holecek: So I'm curious, outside of your experience—and that's ultimate refuge for you—what else outside of that, if anything, gives you the conviction to say we're heading towards this evolutionary breakthrough as a species? The big question these days is, will we do it in time? I personally am not so sure. I try to retain my optimism, but it's conjecture on my part. I'm curious how that challenge or rub lands with you. The development doesn't seem to work this way.

Chris Bache: Yeah, outside of my visionary experience, I have nothing to say. We all look at the data. We all see what's going on. We see the stupidity and insanity around us. We see a growing series of eco-crises. We anticipate the desertification of middle America. We see famine on the horizon, already started, but slowly penetrating into middle-class experience. We're told a 12-foot rise in the oceans is already baked into reality, unstoppable by 2050—12 feet by 2050. We can calculate how many billions of people will be flooded out of where they live. We know we're coming into extremely difficult times. We see the forces of conservatism. We see the reactionary, regressive forces manifesting in politics internationally. We see higher concentrations of wealth in smaller and smaller numbers of people. We see very, very dangerous and forbidding trends. Outside of my visionary experience, I have no certainty or surety that this is going someplace good.

The nature of my experiences—if there is any... well, the nature of my experience is that starting around 1992 or 1993, I started having consistent visions coming in by surprise. Just as I had not anticipated the possibility of doing any type of therapeutic work and healing some aspect of the collective psyche, I had no idea it was even possible to have insights into humanity's evolutionary trajectory. But once I lived with this for years, I began to understand that just as we have a deeper understanding and experience of our personal trajectory as we go deeper within our personal lives, one can have a deeper understanding of the collective trajectory by living in service to the collective.

In that context, my experience has been consistent over years of psychedelic experience and visionary experience—many years of saying humanity is coming to a turning point. We're coming to a before and after. We're coming into a dawn of something fantastic—a genuine spiritual awakening. Everything our spiritual traditions have described for the individual—guess what? It's not just an individual thing. It's a collective thing. It's a collective dynamic. The forces of the collective unconscious are activated, not just my personal unconscious. Then, at that critical time in 1995, during my 55th session, when I expected to be taken back into the Diamond Luminosity, it dissolved me into the collective psyche. It dissolved me into the collective unconscious, took me into deep time, into an expanded sense of time. In that state, I experienced the death and rebirth of humanity. I experienced a global systems crisis that led to billions of people dying, the total unraveling of culture as we have known it, of civilization as we have known it. I experienced our entire species losing control of its story, losing control of its life on this planet, being put under enormous, terribly crushing pressure of death and destruction. It felt for a time as if this was an extinction event, that we were really going extinct as a species.

But then the storm began to pass. The storm began to subside, and those of us who were still alive picked themselves up and began to rebuild. What we were was different from what we had been before. What began to happen was a synergy of conscious creativity, a synergy of compounded freedom, a synergy of compounding insight, a new set of values, a new set of understandings, a new set of capacities manifesting themselves—humanity as a whole was going through a process that every spiritual aspirant has known: a complete collapse of reality as known and a waking up into a more spiritually animated whole, magnificent, beautiful, conscious awareness. Humanity was going through this process.

In my 70th session, the last session, it gave me a capstone experience that took me deep into the future. It showed me the archetypal structure of this future human, the archetypal form of it. Truly, it brings tears to my eyes, even to remember it, to think of it. This is a truly different form of humanity—like the best of the best of us. Our hearts healed, our minds opened. Outside of my visionary experience, I have no reason for suggesting what I have suggested: that humanity is coming to this evolutionary pivot point. I know that evolution has dead ends, that whole species die off, whole planets could die off. I know there is no cognitively compelling reason for hope. As we enter the next century, as we enter what's going to happen, we will lose hope again and again. That's why I think it's important to have a vision, an understanding of what's taking place at a deeper level. Because it's going to get bad. Realistically, we could be looking at more than half of the human population lost, and we'll watch it on television every night. It's going to rack us with terrible pain.

Inside, we will be led to do things we would not otherwise do. We're going to be cracked open in this pain and suffering, just as in deep meditation, in a deep psychedelic experience, we will reach deeper into ourselves than we have ever reached before. We will accomplish something we might never accomplish without this ordeal of pain. The other thing I was shown in the 55th session was some of the mechanisms responsible for this, and I was shown this over and over again, taken through it until it was made sure I understood. It has to do with the functioning of the collective psyche. In this time of accelerated and intensified individual suffering, it's not just our individual psyches that are activated, but all the suffering of humanity gathers as a centralized process at a morphogenic field level, as Rupert Sheldrake has helped us understand.

The scenario that was unfolded was one where the collective psyche moves into a highly energized state, operating as a non-linear system—far-from-equilibrium system. We know something about how physical systems operate when they enter non-linear conditions. They are capable of accelerated change. Small perturbations produce expanded outcomes. Creativity emerges from within the system in an unprecedented way—hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce water. Things happen that are unanticipated according to a linear system operation. This was shown to me: this future pivot is going to take place much faster than we imagine if we use calculation based on the past. It's going to take place faster, more quickly, and deeper than we could imagine in the past.

I know that sounds like optimism run amok. I understand, and everyone has to make their own decisions on this. All I can do is report the vision and let it go at that, and then we're all in this together—you and I, our children, and grandchildren, we're all in this together.

Andrew Holecek: Yeah. Part of me says, may it be so, and another part says, may it not be so. Chris, as we start to wrap up, I know your time is valuable. We've covered so much amazing material, really. Prescriptions—what, on some level, should we do, or not do? How do we bring our individual, empowered selves—or lack thereof—to help this world now and for our ancestors? Let's end on some prescription notes, if we might.

Chris Bache: In terms of the transition I've been describing, someone I know, love, and respect dearly, who has thought a great deal about accelerating this process, removing the worst pain, and moving into this new future better and quicker, is Duane Elgin. His book Choosing Earth is powerful, a beautiful book. He lays out what he thinks the next five decades will look like, and it's not a pretty picture—it's frightening. But he also lays out a series of prescriptions for engaging this future, how we can bring about a safe landing, how we can change and engage socially, individually, and socially. His advice is worth much more than mine. Duane Elgin's Choosing Earth, and he's giving the book away. You can get a PDF on Amazon—he's giving it away because it's important, not trying to profit, but in service of humanity.

I would also remind everyone that from a reincarnation perspective, each of us—every one of the thousands of listeners on your program, and all of us around the world—we chose to be incarnated at this time in history. We chose the time and place of our incarnation, with the talents and challenges we brought in. We are exactly where we need to be to make a creative offering to this time in history. We don't need to look elsewhere. The real question is, do we have the courage to actualize, activate the potential we are standing on right now? Once we commit to our life counting towards the good, we look around and say, okay, what needs to happen? What are we trying to become? Then we put our hands to work. We're all different with different missions and agendas: medical, political, philosophical, creative, hard labor—all these talents are required to bring this about. It's not a matter of looking elsewhere; it's looking at where one is incarnated to serve.

Spiritual practice is important—facing the shadow, clarifying it, becoming open and individually receptive. Community is important—not only practice community but social community—learning to do more with less, sharing, restructuring society. Political community matters—we see what happens when ego runs amok in politics. All these things are needed, important. All we have to do is look around, see what needs to be done, and give ourselves to it completely.

Andrew Holecek: Wow, wonderful. Anything you wish I would have asked?

Chris Bache: I don't know, yeah, it's serious territory, partner—rich. As we really wrap up, there's a lot to summarize, but any final thoughts or questions you felt were missed?

Chris Bache: You mentioned The Living Classroom at the beginning. It's too late for a large excursus, but the core truth is that consciousness is unified. Everything we do in our individual sphere radiates out 360 degrees. All actions, all spiritual practice radiate and interact with the consciousness around us. Knowing this, we take responsibility for sending out a positive experience, never isolated from those around us. It may be invisible or subtle, but it's always there. Acting on this basis strengthens the sinews that bind us to life. This isn't just true for humans, but for all life forms. That's the core teaching of The Living Classroom: an atomistic quality and a quantum quality coexist in teaching. We've had an atomistic conversation, but there's also a quantum quality to our conversation.

Andrew Holecek: Yeah, a field effect that extends beyond our limited self-sense, which is illusory in nature. It's a wonderful way to end, because it invites us to discover the power we have to impact the world, both negatively and positively. Our thoughts, aspirations, motivations aren't contained within us—they radiate out like a pebble in a pond. Understanding this can empower us to benefit the world. Chris, I can't thank you enough for spending so much time with us. It's remarkable. I've learned so much. I applaud your bravery, capacity, and heart in doing this work. It's marvelous and of great benefit.

Chris Bache: Thank you for the conversation, Andrew. Thank you for your work, bringing this conversation and similar ones into the world. Conversations change lives. Thank you for what you do, and thank you for the opportunity to talk about these things together.

Andrew Holecek: It's been a delight for me too, and like we talked briefly last time, this—I haven't really thought of it before—the dialog, the conversation, the sharing, is actually a quality of the path itself. This is new for me, and I haven't really thought of it that way. So it's a wonderful insight, among many that you've shared. So thank you so much for everything. Let's do it again with the next book that comes out.

Chris Bache: Oh no, help me, but I'm always happy to have a conversation with you.

Andrew Holecek: Yeah, really, yeah. It's such a delight, Chris. Till next time, thank you so much for your time. Good heart. Love and blessings. Love and blessings. Thank you, bye, bye.