Psychedelics and Cosmological Exploration with Chris Bache – Reach Truth Podcast

Tasshin Fogleman: Hi friend, thanks for joining me.

Chris Bache: I was glad to be here, Tasshin, thank you for the invitation.

Tasshin Fogleman: Yes, my pleasure. I've read three out of four of your books in the last month or so and have just been devouring them. So it's been a real treat to read them, and I've been very excited to have this conversation. So just to begin, I'd love to hear you share your background and really your life story, anything that you'd like to share about yourself biographically and your story.

Chris Bache: Basically, I made my living as a university professor at a modest university in Northeast Ohio. I'm a professor of religious studies. I have a degree in theology from Notre Dame and New Testament criticism in Cambridge, and a PhD in Philosophy of Religion from Brown—so very classically educated. I was raised in the Deep South, coming from Mississippi, but when I finished my graduate training and came to Youngstown State University, where I taught for 33 years, I met the work of Stanislav Grof. He is one of the foremost authorities in integrating psychedelics into psychotherapy, and his work was a turning point in my life. So at that point, I continued to do my work, and I've just made my living week in, week out, year in, year out in the classroom, doing the things that professors do. But in my personal life and private life, I began a 20-year journey working with high doses of LSD in a therapeutic protocol pioneered by Stan and other early researchers, exploring the deep structure not only of my own consciousness but of the consciousness of the universe itself—at least that's my understanding of it. I did this work for 20 years between 1979 and 1999 and I sat on it and crunched it for another 20 years before releasing "LSD and the Mind of the Universe," the story of that journey. So basically, I'm a university professor who's part of the underground psychedelic movement in this country.

Tasshin Fogleman: It's been an incredible journey to learn about and I appreciate you sharing it. You allude to who you were before you started this journey, and your younger self. I forget exactly how you put it, but sort of like you're straight-laced and analytical. What were you like at that time before you started all this?

Chris Bache: I began my life seeking to be a Catholic priest. I was in the seminary in high school for three years and got a degree in theology from Notre Dame. I began in a very conventional way. By the time I finished graduate school, because of all my education, I became an atheistically inclined agnostic. The study of philosophy of religion and science wiped my theological slate clean, and I became a pretty hard and fast agnostic, which is the way I began this work. It was the LSD work that opened me up to a broader understanding of existence. Now, I've been a meditator all my life since college, and I've practiced within different Buddhist traditions but eventually settled into the Vajrayāna tradition. Though that all came after the psychedelic work, I started meditating beforehand. I've raised three kids, been married, had mortgages, the standard kind of affair. And you know me, look at me—I mean, I look like an accountant. I was designed to be an undercover agent for psychedelics.

Tasshin Fogleman: Wow, I love that description. What was it that so captured you about Grof's work when you encountered it?

Chris Bache: Well, I immediately saw that if what he was saying was correct, this had enormous implications for philosophy, which was my interest, not just for healing in clinical psychology. Here's a method that allowed us to get deep, firsthand access to dimensions of consciousness and reality that are described in many spiritual bodies of literature. It's a path of temporary immersion. We have to be careful not to confuse this with a path of abiding presence like a contemplative meditational path, but it gave us temporary access to states of consciousness far beyond our ordinary egoic awareness and space-time awareness to explore the deep structure of the universe itself. That's a philosopher's dream, especially in a culture with materialist metaphysical convictions. Here was a method challenging that assumption and offering experiences difficult to explain in terms of materialist hypothesis. That immediately picked up my philosopher's ears.

Tasshin Fogleman: I'm not quite sure how to ask this question, but when you decided to go on this journey and were inspired by Grof, what did that look like practically for you? How did you embark on that?

Chris Bache: I followed a very strict protocol, which I think made my work a little unusual. In a therapeutic protocol, you are totally isolated from the world. You don't take psychedelics and go for a walk, or to a concert, or even stay up talking with friends. You're protected by a sitter, handling logistics, with carefully curated music, headphones, and eye shades—like in a meditation retreat. Psychedelics are an amplifier, and they amplify the condition of your unconscious, allowing subtle dimensions of your mind to come forward. This process can lead to a confrontational, therapeutic engagement. It's an entire weekend agenda. If working on a Saturday, I'd start in the early morning and go all day. There's preparation of body, diet, spiritual practice before and after the session. It's a several-day commitment each session. I eventually worked at 500 to 600 micrograms for 73 sessions over 20 years, which averages to about five sessions a year. I worked for four years, took a six-year hiatus, then worked aggressively for the next ten.

Tasshin Fogleman: Can you explain the difference between psychedelic and psychelytic protocols?

Chris Bache: A psychelytic protocol is a low-dose protocol that gently stimulates the unconscious, allowing layers of trauma to surface incrementally. High-dose psychedelic therapy was initially limited to three sessions with terminal cancer patients to precipitate a Near-Death Experience, offering a foretaste of life after death. It's more evocative, driving consciousness beyond individual layers to a more radical awareness. I thought if it could be done safely three times, maybe more. Initially, I aimed to clean my own consciousness with bigger exercises—eating my karma in fewer, larger bites—but that model was incorrect, as I learned later.

Tasshin Fogleman: Did you have a sense when you were starting out that this would be a long-term endeavor?

Chris Bache: No, I didn't. Initially, I thought I would use this therapy to push through meditation blocks and accelerate my personal awakening, but that was a false model. Once the adventure started and I began experiencing the cosmos, I was hooked. I didn't expect it to encompass such a large part of my life. Deep spiritual practice becomes your life, not something supplementary. It was the core of my deeper philosophical undertaking.

Tasshin Fogleman: I'd like to return to that. Maybe one of the themes in your work is, I think, giving a really persuasive case for reincarnation. I was already sort of believed in reincarnation from my own explorations, but it's a really solid case that you make for it, I think. You wrote a book, Lifecycles about it, and then later on, in your most recent book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, you're like, oh, there were some things that I think I didn't quite get to in that book. I wonder if you could describe your current understanding of reincarnation.

Chris Bache: Well, as a philosopher, I think reincarnation is a fundamental and important concept to examine, because philosophical traditions diverge. If you believe that there is no reincarnation, and if you believe there is reincarnation, you end up with two different understandings of reality. So one of the early things I did in my academic career was really look seriously at the question, is there empirical evidence? What's the state of empirical evidence for reincarnation? Now, 50 years ago, this evidence did not exist, but today it does. I think we have ample empirical evidence that reincarnation is a simple fact of life. The primary work here comes from Ian Stevenson's studies of young children around the world who have spontaneous, detailed memories of their previous lifetime. We have verified these memories and eliminated the possibility that they could have acquired these memories through natural means. For that and for evidence from past life therapy, a strong philosophical case can be made for reincarnation being a simple fact of life. It doesn't mean we understand how it takes place. We don't understand the physics of it. We may even have a very incomplete understanding of the project of it, what the purpose of it is. I personally think that the classic Eastern interpretation of reincarnation is incomplete. It's a first approximation, but it's not the complete story. Because of this available evidence, the first book I wrote was on reincarnation, which presented the evidence and then asked, okay, so what if reincarnation is a fact of life? What does this tell us about the way the universe works? The classic story, and the story that I used in telling that story, is the story of the individual soul or individual consciousness making choices, inheriting the consequences of those choices, out of which they then make new choices. So there is a learning cycle between choosing and inheriting, choosing and inheriting, and this takes place within a lifetime and across multiple lifetimes. It's the story of the individual soul becoming individually more spiritually mature, more capable, more compassionate, more talented, and so on. It's an individual story.

What I found in my psychedelic work when I began to open up into the collective psyche, and deep within the collective fields of consciousness, is that in addition to this individual story, there was a collective story that the entire human species, in some fundamental ways, operates as a single organism. There is an intelligence operating within the entire species, and all of our individual incarnations are profoundly and subtly integrated into this group. There is a way in which the intelligence of the species is manifesting itself in certain patterns of detoxification, purification, and breakthrough that are happening collectively. It wasn't just individual choices driving it all, but also collective choices and a collective intelligence driving the entire process. I also came into a series of experiences that gave me a different understanding of where reincarnation is taking humanity. The classic Eastern vision is that reincarnation evolves you to a certain point until you have a core breakthrough. The Hindus call it moksha, escape, where we escape ego but also escape samsara. We escape physical existence. The basic vision here is you achieve moksha, or you achieve nirvana, and then when you die, you achieve parinirvana, final nirvana. The goal is to achieve some type of spiritual fruition, which then allows you to graduate from space-time and to rest in some spiritual paradise off-planet, whether it's the Muslim garden, the Christian heaven, or the Buddha pure land. It's some off-planet paradise. But that leaves unanswered what is the purpose of time and space?

Which was okay as long as we were thinking that time and space had only been around for a few thousand years. But now that we understand we're talking billions and billions of years of evolution of time and space, it doesn't seem to be a very satisfying account to say that after all these billions of years of evolution of Homo sapiens, all the work that has gone into learning how to walk upright and use and become a tool user, and about 5,000 years ago we became conscious of this deep common ground of the psyche that as soon as we begin to become conscious of this underlying, encompassing Buddha nature, our essential nature, as soon as we become aware, then we leave. The goal is just to leave. What happened in my sessions was something quite different. At a pivotal session, and I'd done past life therapy before—not in psychedelic work, but hypnotherapy—I was familiar with a dozen or so and had worked with healing and integrating a dozen or so of my former lives. But in this session, my former lives started coming into me. They were coming into me like wrapping filaments of white light around a kite spool. More and more consciousness, more and more lives were coming into me. They had been healed. They reached a point where they fused, and all of these individual lives fused into one life. When they fused, there was an explosion of diamond light from my chest, and I was catapulted into a state of awareness beyond anything I had known up to that point in time. I was an individual, but an individual beyond any frame of reference I had previously known. I came to understand this as the birth of the Diamond Soul. I language it; other people give it different words. But the idea here is that reincarnation doesn't just grow us individually, layer by layer, class by class, challenge by challenge. There comes a time when our entire history is aggregated and integrates into a single consciousness, and at that point, that single consciousness becomes one's working identity. Basically, what's happening is the soul is becoming born inside history. By soul, I think there are ways of understanding the soul completely compatible with the Buddhist teaching on anātman and no-self, because this is not an egoic soul. It's not a soul of boundaries; it's not a soul of self-centered appetites. Once the soul emerges, there's a tremendous breadth of intellect, compassion, and a deep communion with the spiritual forces of the universe. The goal of reincarnation is not simply to evolve us to the point where we become spiritually awake and leave, but the goal is to evolve us to the point where truly we become the next iteration of human evolution. We become a species of incarnate souls, where we are never tempted to take our private ego as our true identity. We know ourselves to be of this time traveler. We know ourselves to be deeper than that, and we have kinship relations with so many thousands of people, and we have a kinship relationship with the Earth. We know that the Earth we leave will be the Earth we inherit in our next incarnation. Souls live on Earth differently than egos do, and I think that's the pivot we're in the process of making now. I understand four or five thousand years ago, in the Axial Age, when we first began to make discoveries of the spiritual reality, the spiritual reality which is much more satisfying than time-space reality, we developed an up-and-out cosmology and theology, which says the purpose is to go home. We don't belong here. This is our fallen condition. We don't want to stay here. We want to go back to where we came from. I understand that, but I think it's an incomplete understanding of the deeper project of creation. The project of creation is to awaken and bring heaven to Earth, to live the Buddha world here inside our physical existence.

Tasshin Fogleman: What do you feel in... you know, in my own life, I've been really moved by Buddhism and inspired by Buddhism and certainly other traditions as well. I find what you're saying compelling, that there was an incomplete truth to the teachings offered in the Axial Age. There's wisdom to them and benefit, and yet it's also incomplete. I wonder how you would describe the relationship of the perspectives you hold now to the teachings we may have received from the past, and perhaps Buddhism in particular.

Chris Bache: Well, once again, I want to emphasize that the work I did is a path of temporary immersion. Temporary immersion does not easily or conventionally lead to permanent shifts in awareness. You have to do a lot of spiritual practice before any of the things we experience in the temporary condition, the psychedelic amplified condition, can become our ordinary daily consciousness. The great masters of the spiritual traditions and the great masters of the Buddhist tradition have always been my heroes, and their teachings have always been my guiding light in terms of engaging psychedelic states responsibly, investing in them in a way that leads to long-term transformations of one's baseline consciousness on this earth. So first, truly, genuinely, all honor to the Great Beings of these traditions. At the same time, we know that there is patriarchy, for example, in the Buddhist traditions and Buddhism has had to clear itself of its patriarchy, just as other religious traditions have. I think there are other limitations. There is a kind of anti-physical, a disparagement of the physical body, which is a subtle disparagement of nature, which it is becoming aware of and is having to transcend. I think there are elements within Buddhism that have a deep appreciation of the joy of living the Buddha nature, and see that the Buddha nature is intended to be lived within time and space, that samsara truly is nirvana when understood completely. Nirvana does not require an abandonment of samsara, but actually is coherent with it. Yet, the mainstream sources of Buddhism for the popular people still have an up-and-out cosmology, working in Christianity too. You achieve salvation, and then you escape to go to heaven. I think, as a historian, it's simply a matter of understanding the historical context within which these great masters were working, which helped them and hindered them in some ways from giving full expression to their spiritual realization.

Yet, even if you're working spiritually within an incomplete cosmology, the levels of spiritual realization that can be achieved are just extraordinary. What great masters can do, the great mahasiddhis of the lineages can do, is just extraordinary and deserving of all respect. So in criticizing the cosmology within which some operate, that's not to criticize the level of spiritual realization they have achieved. Nor do I want to emphasize again that to have had unusually deep spiritual experiences in a psychedelic state is not to have stabilized those experiences in any meaningful way in one's ordinary consciousness. There is still much work to do before those states of awareness can become abiding in any serious sense. I always want to qualify the insights that emerge in psychedelic work.

Tasshin Fogleman: Yes, yes, and certainly for myself, this is a question that comes from a place of deep respect. I mean, Buddhism is like my home in a certain way. But I appreciate the clarifications that you add to it. I wonder, you spoke earlier about your own spiritual practice and the different traditions that you've been exposed to, and it seems like you found a sort of home in Vajrayana Buddhism. Is that right?

Chris Bache: It is, and it's a kind of a modified Vajrayana, because I was doing intense Vajrayana practice for a number of years and have modified it from my own psychedelic experiences. I've come to understand that it's not that I've realized the states I encountered in my deep psychedelic work, but I have an understanding and experience of those levels of reality. They live inside me as memories. They are active memories. So I've developed forms of Vajrayana practice. I've expanded them by actively integrating those memories into the realization protocols. For example, in classic Vajrayana practice, we distinguish between the Samaya Sattva and the Jnana Sattva. The Samaya Sattva is the being of construct. It's the being we formulate through mantras, visualizations, and using of tankas and exercises to create some approximation of pure goodness, pure insight, which then attracts the Jnana Sattva, the reality, the cosmic reality. We make our visualization pure to open a channel between the cosmic reality, which we invite to pour its blessings into us. In a way, I use my psychedelic memories as part of constructing my Samaya Sattva. To me, the living memory of the diamond luminosity is a more effective spiritual vehicle of practice than the beautiful tankas that attempt to give some type of physical expression of sublime perfection. I modify it in that way.

I also have a sense, because I've died so many times and because I've gone where I will go when I die physically, I've gone into that domain so many times. I feel a deep comfort with it and a familiarity with that domain. I think this changes one's practice because we're told we practice to prepare for the moment of death, as it has great potential for accelerating our evolution. I agree with that, and I've tried to live that in my psychedelic practice to prepare me for the moment of death. The net result is that I feel very comfortable with death, and I feel very comfortable navigating what comes after death because I feel like I've already encountered it in many ways.

Tasshin Fogleman: What do you think it was about Vajrayana Buddhism that attracted you and made you feel you could metaphorically find a home there?

Chris Bache: Well, it was my first wife, Carol, who was my sitter in my sessions, a clinical psychologist herself, who really brought me into Vajrayana. I was kind of aesthetic. I was more interested in the Zen tradition. I really wasn't interested in all the bells, candles, incense, and fanfare that comes with Vajrayana. But she went there, and I basically followed her. Through her, I met the teachers at Tara Mandala Buddhist retreat center, established by Lama Tsultrim Allione in Colorado. I began to study with her and go into retreats with the teachers of that lineage. I met their lineage of awakened beings which deeply impressed me. If my karma had been such as to introduce me to the great awakened beings of the Zen lineage, then I could have gone there just as easily. But it was the opportunity to meet these beings, to receive teachings from them, that made a large impression on me.

Tasshin Fogleman: Coming back to your explorations, you use the phrase Deep Time. Can you say what you mean by that?

Chris Bache: When I first began to enter the ocean of suffering, after ego death, and went into episodes of collective anguish, each session seemed divided into two halves. There was a purification half followed by an ecstatic half. You go through the purification, and if you submit to it, it crescendos and breaks through, spinning you into a transpersonal section of teachings. When I was thrown into these intense collective purifications, I began to have experiences of my entire life as a completed whole. It was like every time moment in my life was a tree, and I experienced the whole of my life as a single tree. I experienced old age, middle age—themes of my life simultaneously present. This dramatic expansion of my cognitive frame was so profound that initially, I couldn't hold on to it. It disappeared. But with repetition, returning to that state and working diligently, I learned to stabilize my consciousness there.

Eventually, I came to believe there are multiple modalities of time operating within the universe. Later, as I went deeper into archetypal reality, I experienced larger swaths of time than just my personal life. First, it was about 100 years, then whole time or Deep Time came in terms of 100,000-year increments, maybe larger later. Not only was my sense of time expanding, but the being having those experiences was expanding. It's not like a disembodied ego having an experience of transpersonal reality—your ego shatters, you dissolve into a deeper consciousness, and that opens up these deeper levels of time. In still deeper states, you become a different being for hours at a time. You're dissolved into the fabric of existence, having experiences of how existence itself experiences time.

There are trends in physics today hypothesizing dimensions beyond time and space, and some dimensions involve different modalities of time. I don't know the exact relationship with my experiences, but as you reach the edges of space-time, you encounter different modalities of time, with different insights emerging. I understand how this sounds to academic and scientific colleagues, accustomed to the linear time concept, but I think the very edge of quantum thinking goes beyond that. In my psycho-spiritual experiences, time became very porous, as did all boundaries.

Tasshin Fogleman: I imagine it's difficult to put into words, but is there anything more you can say about what the experience of that is like, seeing your entire life or larger scales at once?

Chris Bache: Once you acclimate to it, it's not confusing at all—it's clear. Insights emerge from an extended fabric of time. For example, when I experienced my life as a complete whole, I understood the deep structure of my life better, the recurring issues of my philosophical inquiry, and my personal life became clear. All your time moments congeal into a deep reading of what your life is about. When you dissolve into the human species, into larger spans of time, insights about the developmental stages of human evolution arise. You have experiences of humanity's future.

I know this might sound arrogant or like ego run amok, but dissolving into the species mind and into Deep Time makes it natural that some sense of humanity's developmental future becomes visible. When you experience that, it’s not just something yet to be—it’s something that already has been, held simultaneously. Understanding emerges, not only about my personal life but also about humanity's present, its developmental crisis, the evolutionary pivot point we're in. Elements of that crisis and a breakthrough I believe is coming, all become possible by shedding the limitations of linear time for a deeper dimension of time.

Tasshin Fogleman: I was definitely thinking about free will just now. It's difficult to address that philosophically on a large scale, but I wonder what sensibilities these experiences gave you about your own life, free will, and choices. Having a sense of your entire life, did you feel fated to make certain choices, or did you perceive you had free will?

Chris Bache: Free will is tricky, and much of our popular discussion is not very satisfying. Advocates of free will understate the level of conditioning qualifying our freedom, while determinism is often overstated. One theme in my work is that we have conditioned free will. Within those conditions, we can make choices. Without true choices, there wouldn’t be a genuine adventure of learning. If life were predetermined, it'd just be a mechanical process without genuine learning. Freedom is important. At early stages, there’s little freedom—like grass growing. But as consciousness develops, more choice enters, the cycle of learning becomes important. Choice becomes clearer as we move beyond mind conditioning. Meditation traditions emphasize quieting the mind to reveal conditioned layers. In psychedelic work, you're throwing off conditioning layers—it’s all one long practice of purification to uncover what is already there, a deeper experience of clarity in one’s awakened mind.

Tasshin Fogleman: Can you say more about the visions you had for humanity's future and the time we're in?

Chris Bache: This was one of the great surprises for me because I never expected anything like this to emerge in my work. I thought this was about personal transformation or even personal enlightenment. I never imagined that the evolution of the species would become such a dominant theme. What happened was that all the way back to about halfway through the work, in the early 90s, starting in 1991, I began to have a series of visions during my sessions. These visions indicated that humanity was coming to a turning point, a true before and after point in history. We were entering a time of intense purification, essentially purifying the human psyche of the "sins of our fathers," lifting the conditioning of the past to make us more receptive and capable of internalizing spiritual infusion and insights. There was a tremendous sense of rebirth coming, contextualized within an initial experience of creation as an act of cosmic love. This creation, despite all the suffering that has taken place since the Big Bang, happens in a context of love. This suffering is not something done to us or that we're guilty of; it's all part of a creative process we entered into by choice.

At the core of these experiences was the realization that all this suffering was coming to a crescendo in history, where we would pivot into a higher order of psycho-spiritual realization. Eventually, I cataloged these visions in my book, referring to them as the visions of awakening, six core visions. The creative intelligence wasn't just trying to awaken individuals, but to awaken the entire species. However, it gave me no insight into how it would achieve this breakthrough in human evolution. Right before Christmas in 1995, during a session, I was taken deep into "deep time," dissolved into the species, experiencing the death and rebirth of humanity in a transtemporal context. I saw a time of increasing destabilization, chaos, and tumultuous unraveling, triggered by ecological crises leading to a global systems crisis. We were losing control of life; it was a profound shattering of life as we knew it.

Interviewer: And in the—

Chris Bache: Yes, in the midst of this, when it seemed like everything was ending, it was as if a storm passed over, and the metaphorical winds began to subside. The worst of the crisis passed, and we found ourselves different beings on the other side. There was a profound crisis, but humanity discovered new values, insights, and ways of being together. This wasn't simply an ecological or cultural rebirth; it represented a shift in the core structure of the human psyche, a shift in the plate tectonics of the collective psyche. The future human is much more than the present human, the emergence of the "diamond soul" in history. We have been growing the diamond soul for countless incarnations, but its birth is relatively short and traumatic. We've outgrown a world run by egos—we must grow up into our deeper spiritual identity, the diamond soul, or however we choose to phrase it. We are in the early stages of this unraveling, and it's important to have a vision of the future human. Without understanding, we might fall into despair, leading to apocalyptic interpretations counter to survival.

Tasshin Fogleman: How does this phrase, "diamond soul," relate to the "diamond Luminosity" you began to experience in your sessions? Is it the same thing or something different?

Chris Bache: I think it's a variation of the same thing. The diamond Luminosity is a level of reality in the cosmos, beyond cyclic existence, beyond the Bardo, encompassing realms beyond deities and archetypes. When the diamond Luminosity congealed in my being, it exploded with that same quality of light, though slightly lower in intensity. We experience light often in the psychedelic journey, but the diamond Luminosity is an exceptionally pure dimension of light. The diamond soul, as an embodied light being, is a manifestation of this light inside individuated existence. While not identical, they are very close in nature. Entering the diamond Luminosity was rare, occurring only four times over five years, each time following intense purification.

Tasshin Fogleman: From the way you're describing it, it sounds almost like humanity is evolving from Homo sapiens to a different kind of humanity. Would you agree?

Chris Bache: Yes, people call it different names: Homo noeticus, Homo spiritualis, Homo luminance. There's this intuition that humanity is moving into a next iteration, akin to the sudden increase in brain size 100,000 years ago. Nature is driving this evolutionary process, bringing us into new conditions. Many cultures sense this time of global crisis followed by breakthrough. Though not certain of survival, many beings share this intuition of a future human, a next evolutionary phase.

Tasshin Fogleman: There's a term you borrow from Grof, "COEX systems," and you describe "meta COEX systems." Could you explain those?

Chris Bache: Stan Grof found that the psyche organizes experiences in thematic clusters called COEX systems, like experiences around abandonment or anger. These clusters span from personal experiences to birth or even former lives. In a similar way, the collective psyche stores its history in massive thematic clusters I call meta COEX systems. When engaging with the ocean of suffering, one taps into these collective clusters, contributing to dissipating them from the collective psyche. This is the work of generations, and many spiritual traditions have shared similar insights.

Tasshin Fogleman: What is this species aiming at, as you understand it?

Chris Bache: It's about growth. We're constantly evolving, and any identification of our growth goal is merely the next stage. It took 13.7 billion years to get here, and we have billions more to evolve. Our project is to grow, become more capable, and realize that the essence of individuals is the same as the universe's. As we awaken to our essential nature, we actualize it, participating consciously in creation. We are learning to become creators, reflecting the creative principle that manifests the universe.

Tasshin Fogleman: It seems earlier teachings like Buddhism emphasize escaping a cycle of birth and death as hellish. It sounds like you're pointing more towards growth and evolution.

Chris Bache: Indeed, it's about escaping a constricted consciousness associated with time and space. When we transcend that, we experience time and space as the Buddha world, the Buddha nature.

Tasshin Fogleman: If you don't mind me asking, what is your everyday consciousness like now after all these experiences?

Chris Bache: I wish I could tell you I'm fully enlightened, but integrating these experiences is a lifelong task. We don't fully know how deep explorations impact us. Moving beyond space and time raises questions about integration. What's important is removing anything that keeps us smaller than the reality we're entering. It's a lifelong endeavor of spiritual practice, integrating the finite into the infinite.

I also pushed myself harder than wise, realizing now there's a danger in going too deep in one lifetime. It's the ecstasy and beauty of those experiences that can diminish physical life. In retrospect, I would have pursued this work more gently, valuing this body-mind more.

Tasshin Fogleman: What would that look like, practically, to be gentler?

Chris Bache: Fewer high-dose sessions, integrating psychedelics like LSD with body-grounded ones like Psilocybin or Ayahuasca, and maintaining daily spiritual practice. Daily practice is vital for managing the energy and insights from psychedelic work. I was driven by the false model of reaching an awakened state, not realizing that depth is infinite and ever-expanding. Now, understanding it's not about attaining a condition, I'm more patient, open to integrating reality into daily life with modest expectations.

Tasshin Fogleman: What would you recommend to someone embarking on a similar journey inspired by your work?

Chris Bache: Honestly, don't do it the way I did. Many experience similar insights without psychedelics, through meditation. I suggest going slow, working within therapeutic modalities, and paying attention to your set and setting. The journey impacts everyone around you. Be mindful of the collective effect. It's not a recreational, but a lifelong commitment. Explore close to home; use psychedelics thoughtfully for therapy and spiritual awakening. It's not for everyone, and there are risks. Opening up under less-than-ideal conditions can be harmful. Psychedelics aren't an end-run around traditional spirituality; they demand respect and cautious use as they amplify the mind.

Tasshin Fogleman: I imagine those drawn to your work might be determined regardless of warnings but could heed advice on being gentler.

Chris Bache: I hope that sharing my experiences quenches some existential longing, offering a textured spiritual practice. Just as the moon landing satisfied many of us who long to go, similarly, describing these journeys can satisfy without one necessarily making the trip oneself.

Tasshin Fogleman: That's a good metaphor. It resonates with my experience reading your book, much like seeing the earthrise photo from the moon. It's that kind of perspective. I'm curious about your thoughts on the current psychedelic renaissance.

Chris Bache: I think it's very exciting, and I think it's about time. I'm very glad that we're going back in the direction of integrating psychedelics into our culture. Right now, the psychedelic renaissance is focused on therapeutic healing. By demonstrating the clinical effectiveness of these amplifying substances, we are opening the door to these substances in our culture by showing that they help us deal with post-traumatic stress, depression, alcohol addiction, or death anxiety, by healing us of the wounds of life. We are demonstrating that these substances have therapeutic value and efficacy. We're also taking pictures of how the brains behave on psychedelics, and we're doing very carefully controlled studies, with control groups versus a testing group, and so on. This is all really important. I think it's a very important stage, but I do see it as only a stage. What we're going to find is the same thing we found in the early decades of the psychedelic movement: that amplification of the psyche, which allows us to heal the wounds of the personal psyche, when continued, gives us access to deeper and deeper dimensions of consciousness.

Now, there is resistance to these deeper dimensions right now because of our metaphysical commitment to materialism. Our pre-quantum commitment is to believe that only things which are physical are real. Therefore, when someone is having an experience beyond physical reality, we call the substances that open these experiences hallucinogens because a hallucination is something that is not real. It feels real, but it's not real. But I think what’s better understood is that these substances are mind amplifiers. They are psychedelics, mind openers. Once we consolidate and provide sufficient evidence for the healing potential of these substances, we will then begin to harness their deeper manifesting potential, or their philosophical potential. I think psychedelics represent an enormous philosophical revolution because they allow those of us with modest capacities to have temporary access to states of awareness and reality that lie far beyond spacetime—awareness that has profound metaphysical and philosophical implications.

To paraphrase Huston Smith: a mystical experience does not a mystic make, and that's true, but a mystical experience does a materialist unmake. I think it can undo some of the metaphysical constrictions of our era and open us up to a deeper understanding of what's actually taking place. Once you dissolve into the intelligence of the universe, the intelligence of the mind of the universe, and the compassionate center of that mind, it radically transforms your understanding of what life is about, what we are doing here, and what the process is. That has enormous ramifications, and I think we will be moving in that direction, but first, we have to earn the right in a way. We have to earn access through demonstrating its clinical efficacy. I am not a clinician. I'm not a psychologist. I was not primarily interested in healing. I was trained as a philosopher of religion, and I simply could not wait for us to get to this point in time. If I had waited, I would have missed the opportunity of a lifetime. So I did the work I did underground, privately, quietly. I wish I didn't have to. I wish I could have done it publicly, but I did it with the belief, as the early researchers did, that there would come a time when we would reclaim these sacraments, and begin to systematically harness their deeper potential. I think that's where we're going.

There is a movement among the pharmaceutical industry that wants to make money off these substances, trying to strip the magic out of the mushrooms, to basically extract substances from the psychedelic substances but not induce some of the more exotic or demanding states of consciousness that these substances do in their natural state. They want to give us a pill you can take every day, which they can sell every day. Psychedelics, you can't make money on them because you don't use enough of them; you only use them intermittently, and the healing effect is so powerful that you don't need them every day. The pharmaceutical industry wants to make money off of them, which I think is a danger. We have to really watch that. I also think the medicalization of psychedelics is a danger. It's understandable, and it's important for scientists to maintain research in these early years, but I think entering into these states of consciousness is a human right, and it doesn't belong solely under the governance of the medical community. I think we'll come to recognize a broader community of specialists skilled in navigating these landscapes, who are not necessarily MDs or PhDs.

Tasshin Fogleman: You know, in the movement, various organizations have formed around the therapeutic use of psychedelics. I wonder if in the future there might be institutions structured around the more philosophical or cosmological explorations of the kind you did. What do you imagine those might look like?

Chris Bache: I think it's just a matter of time. In the near future, there will be clinics and institutional settings, hopefully deep in nature, where people who want to explore the deeper dimensions of their consciousness can go and do so under careful supervision. They can do so safely, with backup, but in a non-clinical or non-medical setting. It's like the transition from taking birth out of hospitals to midwives, where you have medical care nearby if you need it, but birth is not a medical procedure; it's an entirely natural process. Similarly, opening up into deep levels of your mind in the universe is not a medical procedure, even if medical support can be very helpful in the early stages. I anticipate that there will be organizations and structures where you can work with sacred medicines and various psychedelics safely and effectively, in ways that go beyond therapeutic healing. It's a matter of time.

Tasshin Fogleman: What kind of affordances might those structures need different from clinical or medical treatment and therapeutic usage?

Chris Bache: First, we should recognize that humanity has already been doing this for thousands of years among indigenous people, First Nations peoples in America, or those in Brazil or South America. They've been working ceremonially with sacred substances for hundreds, even thousands of years. So we have a great deal of historical precedent on how to do this, how to open up individuals and whole communities into sacred space and bring them back, putting them through exercises so they come back grounded. We're not reinventing the wheel. We have much to learn from indigenous people and First Nations people on how to work with these substances. There are screening criteria—you want to screen those entering these states. Some people should not be entering these states due to physical health problems or psychological issues. It's just not wise if you're carrying certain tensions within your body and mind. So there is a place for screening, but these indigenous cultures knew to screen even without MDs. It's building on what we're doing, incorporating the wisdom from these cultures, and moving to create our own unique forms.

Tasshin Fogleman: Coming back to the vision for humanity writ large, do you have any advice for the coming generations?

Chris Bache: The first thing I would say is that we know enough about the universe through reincarnation. If you really do your homework and look at data from near-death experiences and out-of-body research, we know enough to know that we choose our incarnations. Before we were born, we made an informed choice about the life we were entering. At a time when we knew more than we remember now, we made the choice to live this life, not seeing every detail, but understanding the fundamental components. Whether or not we recall this choice consciously, we have reasons to be confident we are where we should be at this time in history. Every one of us has volunteered for this very challenging time.

So, firstly, be centered in your core, knowing you don't have to run around or go elsewhere. You're already on a trajectory that allows you to participate in this process, the transformation of an entire culture. There isn’t one person, one type, or a healer or therapist who will make this transition alone. It will take all of us, all the skills humanity has, to make this work.

The real question is, do we have the courage to do what we know we can? Do we have the courage to truly enter this process consciously? We need the courage to become the future human the world needs. We need to become more compassionate, create a more egalitarian, fairer, and just culture, and show greater respect for the Earth and our animal cousins. We need to become in our personal lives what humanity is trying to forge in our collective life, which means doing inward practice and outward social transformation. It means clearing our hearts of what keeps us small and helping clear the cultural values that destroy the Earth.

Tasshin Fogleman: Thank you for sharing that, and for answering all my questions, speaking on so many topics. Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Chris Bache: We are coming into hard times. As decade by decade things get worse, there will be tremendous social and personal anxiety as we inherit the consequences of our abuse of the Earth and this extractive economy. But I hope everyone, through their spiritual practices, encounters the universe enough to experience the profound wisdom and great intelligence behind this transformation moment, and the great compassion and love behind this time in our history. We are not victims; this is not an accident. This is a call for us to become the heroes we have the possibility of being. Deep heroic sacrifice and actualization are called for. The universe will support us. Every time we choose to live for the greater good, the universe will help us overcome our shortcomings. This is the game of life, the great time of our life. In the end, we don’t want a comfortable life so much as a meaningful one. This will give us all the opportunity to live very meaningful lives.

Tasshin Fogleman: I appreciate you putting that in perspective and speaking so clearly about it. Thank you for your time today. It’s been a real pleasure to speak with you.

Chris Bache: Tasshin, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for your conversations with many people, all focused on helping us know and become more than we have the possibility of being. Thank you.

Tasshin Fogleman: You're so welcome. It’s an honor and a privilege. Thank you.