Exploring LSD and the Mind of the Universe

Chris Bache: And all of a sudden, my visual field pivoted 90 degrees, and I saw reality far, far in the distance. Again, it looked kind of like galaxies. And out of that reality, a beam of light came and hit me, and it absolutely shattered me. It was a more powerful light than even the diamond luminosity that had become my ultimate reality, 50 high-dose sessions in, and just in that one second, it completely changed my understanding of reality.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Thank you, Chris, thank you for being willing to hop on with me.

Chris Bache: Glad to be here today. Luke, cool, everyone.

Luc Briede-Cooper: This is Christopher M. Bache. He's a PhD and professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. An award-winning teacher and international speaker, Chris's work explores the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states. And today, we'll be primarily discussing ideas related to his book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, his story of 20 years of his journey into the mind of the universe through 73 high-dose sessions of LSD. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Bache: Thank you, Luke, it's good to be here with you. Awesome.

Luc Briede-Cooper: So I figured I'd start by just tracing the path that a lot of people may explore with psychedelics. The first encounter people may have, at least today, is they may encounter psychedelics for biohacking or for productivity, say, with microdosing. Then, once they've experienced that, maybe they'll discover the therapeutic power of psychedelics. In those therapeutic journeys, maybe they'll discover that psychedelics are powerful tools for spiritual awakening. But there's a level even deeper than the level of spiritual awakening, and it's the path that you took. Could you tell us about that?

Chris Bache: Well, that path I call cosmological exploration, and it's a path which clearly overlaps with the healing capacity of psychedelics and the spiritual awakening capacity, but it's different. I think spiritual awakening invites us to clean our consciousness and system in a way that allows us to abide more comfortably and consistently in a transparent condition—transparent to what the Buddhists would call one's essential nature, one's Buddha nature, or what other traditions might call one's divine nature. Cosmological exploration is different. It really seeks to explore the deep structure of consciousness and the deep structure of the universe, to understand at a deeper philosophical level how reality works. Why are things the way they are? What are some of the deep structures of cosmic reality?

Luc Briede-Cooper: And I'd love to ask you more in a bit about reality itself and those layers. But could you tell us a bit more about the path or the protocol you followed and what that path looked like as you went along?

Chris Bache: Well, I was just out of graduate school back in 1978, and I read Stan Grof's first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, published in '76. Immediately, I recognized the significance of Stan's work for my discipline, which is philosophy of religion. I'm not a psychologist or a therapist. I've never been particularly interested in the therapeutic applications as Stan has, but I've always been interested in its philosophical applications. Recognizing a kind of call, I began my work, which ended up lasting 20 years. I did four years of very intense work, stopped for six years, and then followed that with another ten years of very intense work. I chose to work with high doses of LSD, and by high doses, I mean 500 to 600 micrograms. This is a regimen I don't recommend today. I seriously don't recommend it, and if I were doing it over again, I would do it differently. I would be much gentler, use lower doses, and have a wider distribution and spectrum of psychedelics. But I chose high doses of LSD for a couple of reasons. First, LSD was the substance Stan had done most of his research on, and I trusted that research. This was 1978, pre-Ayahuasca and pre-our appreciation of organic psychedelics used by shamanic traditions. I worked with high doses because I was still thinking within a model of personal transformation or personal spiritual awakening. The spiritual traditions basically taught that our karma is finite. I understood LSD psychotherapy as a process of cleaning up one's karma—unearthing problematic material from one's personal unconscious and clearing it. I thought by working with high doses, I could clear up my karma in fewer sessions, taking a bigger bite of the apple in every session. It turns out that assumption was completely wrong because the idea that this process was primarily focused on personal transformation was a mistake. The collective dimensions of the psyche surfaced quickly, just two years in, and the broader ramifications of entering into communion with the universe at large presented themselves soon thereafter. I worked in therapeutic protocol—Stan's protocol outlined in his book LSD Psychotherapy, which means working in total isolation with a sitter, lying down with eye shades and headphones, and a carefully curated playlist of music. I would stay internalized all day long, from early morning to evening, and then make detailed records of my experiences the day after. That was the protocol.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Got it, awesome. Of course, reading the book, I know a little bit about where that went in the end, but I'm curious. I know in another interview, you mentioned that you have since partaken in psilocybin and ayahuasca journeys. At one point in the book, you mentioned that one of the advantages of LSD being a longer-acting substance—around eight-hour journeys—is that it kind of buffs the diamond more in that time, so to speak. I know there are other psychedelics now entering potential use in society. Ibogaine is one substance with a very long active time, about 24 to 48 hours. We could contrast that with 5-MeO-DMT, which is active for about 15-20 minutes. Would ibogaine potentially be a better contender for that reason, if not for cosmological exploration, then for spiritual awakening? And what might the protocol look like if you were to use something like 5-MeO-DMT?

Chris Bache: First of all, I've never used Ibogaine, so I'm not really qualified to speak to its function or value. Just looking at the window issue, there are other issues with psychedelics. Every psychedelic has a mind-amplifying quality, but the texture or nuance, the way it opens consciousness, and the spectrum of consciousness it opens, varies from psychedelic to psychedelic. Just looking at the window, the reason I think the window is significant is, basically reflecting on people's experiences with DMT, which is relatively short-acting. Rick Strassman, in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, found that his clients were not changed very deeply by having significant DMT experiences. In comparing his data to mine, I think what happens is that, in order to explore the universe, you're using your small mind to explore big mind, your individual, personal consciousness to explore this vast field of consciousness. A long window gives more time for the large field to interact with the small field, doing the cleansing and purification needed for deep experiences of cosmic reality. If you have only a short-acting psychedelic, you don't have much time for the large consciousness to impact and be absorbed by the smaller consciousness, which means it has less of a transformative effect. There are other variables in the psychopharmacology of psychedelics, but just the window is an interesting variation. The short-acting psychedelics like 5-MeO-DMT are remarkable; they give quick access to very deep cosmic realities, but our time there is short. I don't have a lot of experience with 5-MeO-DMT, and I certainly don't work with it clinically with other people. I've talked with therapists who work with 5-MeO-DMT at different levels of intensity for clients. I know it has transformative value, but I'm not too comfortable comparing its transformative potential with LSD, other than to note the time window and opportunity for transformation.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Got it, awesome. Thank you. One of the things that stood out about the book was how it wasn't exaggerative. You don't go too far from the experience itself, and maybe that's your inclination as a philosopher and academic. I really appreciate that.

Chris Bache: I tried to. It's a huge challenge to document or present 20 years of such dramatic experiences. The choice I made was to stay close to the phenomenology, the experiences themselves. To me, the experiences were more valuable than any interpretation I might offer.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Got it. Now, you don't recommend people do what you did. Reading the book, initially, I felt inspired by your courage. I thought, "Wow, this is amazing. Maybe this is something I could explore." But by the end, that shifted. Overall, psychedelic use for spiritual awakening is basically inevitable for many in society. So for someone using psychedelics for spiritual awakening, not cosmological exploration, what might you recommend as a protocol for a slower psychedelic path, and how might that integrate with slow-burn traditions?

Chris Bache: I'll make a suggestion, but again, I'm not a clinician. I've chosen not to work with other people but to be a solitary explorer, pushing my system to map dimensions I entered into. That doesn't give me much experience working with others to answer your question. For spiritual awakening, I would recommend very low doses. It's about dissolving the glue that holds the ego, the structures keeping us in repetitive patterns. This is done with low doses of LSD, combined with sustained meditative practice. Occasionally, do more to challenge boundaries of consciousness. But if spiritual awakening is the goal, low doses of a psychedelic would be the way to go.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Cool, awesome. Thank you for that. Something interesting that I think some experience in their journeys, even with just a few, is there seems to be an effect of having just the right amount of experience as needed. You experienced something similar in your journeys. Could you tell us about that sense of guidance?

Chris Bache: In all my work, I felt myself engaging and being engaged by larger consciousness. This consciousness didn't take concrete form; it was never personified. The core qualities of this consciousness changed the deeper I went. The way I think of it is that the consciousness we commune with in psychedelic states is infinite, capable of generating many types of experiences within us. Our mind acts as a seed crystal, catalyzing certain experiences from this infinite consciousness. Repeatedly doing this, integrating experiences changes consciousness. Therefore, the consciousness taken into the next encounter is different, catalyzing deeper experiences. The guiding intelligence changes as experiences deepen. The invisible guidance was always felt, not in concrete form, and changed as experiences deepened. You're going beyond the collective level, beyond human history; interpretive frameworks fall away. There's always guidance and intelligence, but it's formless.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Amazing. I haven't yet reached that level in my journeys, but perhaps someday. I'd like to ask more specifically about the forms that can appear. Entity encounters are a popular topic of conversation. You explored this more in your book, and you speak about how devotion is related to these entities. I spoke to someone recently who mentioned they had a mystical experience encountering Ganesh, the elephant god of Hinduism. People may ask, "What is the meaning of what I experienced?" After your journeys, how would you reflect on the meaning of encountering a deity form?

Chris Bache: Let me qualify by saying I don't consider my experiences to be normative in any generalizable way. There are so many medicines, ways of using them, and personalities engaging this infinite consciousness. It's foolish to think any one person's experience is a map for others. I'm interested in others' experiences non-judgmentally. When we work with realities beyond our experience, tapping into qualities like infinite compassion, intelligence, creativity, these are often associated with deities. It’s not surprising our mind associates the experience with such forms. We may encounter deities not part of our lineage, completely unknown to us. My sense is that when engaging deity forms, we are encountering a collective thought form or a spiritual being wearing the guise of a collective thought form. If millions of devotees meditate and pray to a form, it creates a structure in the collective psyche, a collective thought form. This includes secular thought forms like greed or power—very powerful in our system. I believe that either we encounter a spiritual principle wearing this collective garment, or we experience the collective garment itself. Either way, the collective psyche is implicated. I hold that one can go beyond all collective thought forms and human history. As you deepen, these forms tend to fade. DMT often exposes people to entities; I’m not suggesting those entities aren't real, but they reflect different levels. As you go deeper, the entity level yields to levels less individual, opening to consciousness less focused on individual beings.

Chris Bache: Of course, many psychedelics have powerful experiences with animal species and the various totems of different species. They have powerful experiences of the planet filled with the minds of these species, not just the individual species, but aggregates of mammalian mind, and so on. That hasn't been the thrust of my experience. The focus of my work has really been with human consciousness. My experience of human consciousness completely opens me to the reality of animal consciousness in various forms. I think I've been focused on human consciousness because humanity represents the greatest danger to life on this planet. We are the life destroyers. We are the driving force of the Sixth Extinction. If we can heal humanity, then all other animals and life forms on the planet will be safe. That has been the focus of my work. Other people have been retrieving the consciousness story of other life forms—rock life forms, insect life forms, and so on. It's essential work; it just hasn't been my personal work.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Got it. It's very interesting. I read this book, Levels of Energy by David Hawkins. I'm not familiar with it, but he uses a method to assign a number to the level of consciousness of a being or object. For instance, bacteria land on the scale very low. It's interesting how acknowledging the consciousness of animals or higher forms may make us more aware.

Chris Bache: Let's imagine that there are as many levels of consciousness below us—simpler and simpler, moving down the evolutionary tree—as there are above us. We’re not the top of the chain but perhaps somewhere in the midpoint of that chain.

Luc Briede-Cooper: An image comes to mind of the ascension in consciousness as a pulling down of something from a higher level. How does that work for our tissue cells? They're reliant on us, and there's a bottom-up, top-down relationship. Speaking about levels, did your sense of reality change continuously, in jumps, or just that one jump? How did your sense of reality shift?

Chris Bache: My sense of reality changed repeatedly at different levels. When processing all the experiences and trying to organize them to share with others, I differentiated five levels: personal mind, collective mind, archetypal mind, causal oneness, and diamond luminosity. The jump from personal consciousness into collective reality was significant—seeing how reality is organized at a higher altitude. When that culminated, I was spun into what I called archetypal reality, a quantum step into a deeper modality of consciousness.

In this, over a year and a half of work, I repeatedly sensed entering a reality more real than time and space and dealing with phenomena more real than my personal existence. This touches on an ancient idea traced back to Plato, who conceived archetypes as eternal ideas. I experienced them as living entities moving in time on a completely different scale. Similar to how the earth spins quickly but moves slowly in the context of the galaxy, these archetypal beings were vast, living structures on a different causality order.

In a Jungian level of archetype reality, I experienced the human psyche and species as a single organism, with physical and mental networks connecting it. I saw how individuals are hardwired into this consciousness matrix, how it informs individual consciousness, and vice versa. We carry a holographic, fractal piece of our time's diseases, and healing ourselves contributes to healing the collective psyche. The collective psyche might be more real than the individual, but both are mutually implicated.

Beyond archetypal reality, I delved deeper into what's real. Everything was about exploring deeper levels of reality. Quantum theory and string theorists are comfortable with deeper structures, and psychology could be too.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Perfectly understood. There's something intuitive that resonates. Depersonalization and derealization are experiences more than 50% of people confront, and although listed as mental illnesses, they have an intriguing connection to mystical visions noted by Carl Jung and experiences induced by psychedelics. Has your sense of mental illness changed after your journeys?

Chris Bache: That's a complicated topic, better addressed by a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist with psychedelic experience. Huston Smith said a mystic learns to swim in waters where a psychotic drowns. We open to a larger expanse of reality, which can be traumatic if unprepared. It’s why therapeutic support and controlled circumstances are crucial. The work isn’t universally safe. There's screening to identify suitable candidates for psychedelic work.

I'm more interested in differentiating experiences within larger reality planes, distinguishing between confusion and breakthroughs. Discovering these levels in a non-traumatic, clarifying way is profoundly initiatory, unveiling the deeper fabric of reality, quite different from the pathological confusion.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Totally. When reaching the collective level, it becomes something very different. You mentioned the five levels: personal, collective, archetypal, causal oneness, and diamond luminosity. Could you guide us through those levels?

Chris Bache: We've touched on archetypal reality. After about a year and a half there, I went through another death-rebirth process, entering a year of powerful experiences grouped under “causal oneness.” Our initial experiences in spiritual reality are highly conditioned by time-space experience, often as separate entities. As consciousness enlarges, these entities become species or earth consciousness, existing as facets of a larger oneness. Causal level reality sees the universe as a single organism.

Upon entering oneness, you may no longer see separate objects—it's a singular living organism. I experienced this in encounters with what Buddhists call Śūnyatā, or emptiness, where self is not found anywhere, only oneness. I entered this level only four times over four years, with intervening periods of cleansing and purification. The purification process is necessary to acclimate to deeper energy levels, training for cognitive coherence. My experiences of diamond luminosity went deeper in two sessions, then shifted to integrating into my physical, mental, and emotional body.

I had one last big vision, marking the journey's end, culminating with the universe wrapping it up, signaling closure.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Amazing. The breath of life, the expansion and contraction are everywhere. A striking takeaway for me is the shift in understanding ineffability and levels being challenging to articulate, depending on stabilization and familiarity rather than inherent lack of understanding. Also, you mention beyond diamond luminosity, pointing towards infinite levels being possible.

Chris Bache: Well, this is not so much coming down the mountain, but still climbing the mountain. It started when I was in the end stages of the Ocean of Suffering work. When I was in the chapter "The Initiation of the Universe," I started being given visionary initiations into the human story and the stages of human evolution. In particular, the story I was being initiated into was that humanity was coming to a turning point in its evolutionary development—a major transformative pivot that would change the nature of life on this planet. Over four years in the early to mid-1990s, I had a series of visions, which I call the visions of awakening. It was shown to me that there was a historical process trying to awaken not just individuals but the entire species. That was the historical work at hand—a transformation that was truly collective. It was a transformation not simply of our psychological well-being or some levels of psychological truth, but a transformation of the fundamental plate tectonics of the collective psyche, the archetypal structure of the deep psyche, which was undergoing a revision.

Completely surprised by these visions—since I was at the tail end of thinking my work was about personal transformation—I found these consistently about collective transformation. Nowhere was I shown how nature would pull off this transformation. In 1995, during the diamond Luminosity work—having entered the diamond Luminosity twice—I was expecting to be taken back into that material. But that's not what happened. First, I dissolved radically into the species mind. I ceased to function as Chris Bache and began to function as the species of humanity. I was taken deep into deep time, deeper than before. In that session, I experienced the death and rebirth of humanity, a global crisis that humanity would experience. It didn't give me details, but it showed the crisis and that we would make it through, providing insights into the mechanisms of transformation involved in this crisis.

What I experienced was humanity coming to a turning point—a deconstruction of reality as we had known it. It seemed like a global systems crisis driven by ecological crises. I was naive about these things, yet I experienced humanity reaching a point where we lost control of our lives, moving toward extinction. Just as it peaked, we went through a threshold, and the danger began to subside. We began to pick ourselves up on the other side of this years-long series of crises. Profoundly changed, this crisis opened our hearts to one another and our minds to the universe in unprecedented ways. As we reorganized after the crisis, we found new values, perceptions, and capacities emerging.

In the 70th session, my last visionary experience, I was shown humanity was in the process of giving birth to its next evolutionary form—the future human. Understanding reincarnation was the key to this. My sessions showed not an escape from Samsara but continuous growth and change. Souls wake up inside individual historical consciousness. During a journey, all my former lives started to come back into me, reaching critical mass and exploding into a single consciousness. This fusion catapulted me into an individual state beyond previous understanding. I believe we've been gestating the future human for thousands of years, and we're about to give birth. Though traumatic, I believe we'll grow into the next evolutionary form—the future human. My experiences of this future human were ecstatic and humbling. This chapter, the birth of the future human, is the most important in the book, impacting future generations profoundly.

Covid is like a shot across the bow, an overture to the symphony, showing our vulnerability to disruption and how society can pivot. This is a lesson in our interdependence and the need to work together for the challenges ahead.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Thank you, Chris. The vision is powerful, and though I can't speak directly to it, there are signs of it happening—ecological and financial systems crises. In Canada, during Covid, the rush for toilet paper showed how quickly things can change. The world will be right when people plant trees for the next generation. The idea of souls fusing together makes intuitive sense—we'll be here in future incarnations.

Chris Bache: Yes, expanding the American tradition of considering impacts across seven generations aligns with understanding that we'll be those generations. The earth we leave is what we inherit. We must move from a species stuck in adolescence to maturity, acknowledging broader historical impacts. We can't run the planet on egoic consciousness anymore, as it leads to division and conflict. We need to grow into our soul consciousness, recognizing the interconnectedness of all races, nations, and classes.

Luc Briede-Cooper: I've got something for you, Chris—I emailed an AI art image representing the image from your book where you describe the future human standing against seated Buddhas. Some people use visual art like Carl Jung for visualizing their visions, and AI can help create images from prompts.

Chris Bache: That's beautiful, thank you. A standing Buddha incorporates both the clarity of sitting and the dynamism of action. It's about acting on awakened consciousness. Thank you for the image.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Great. Now that we've covered the background, I've specific questions, starting with how your understanding of God and religion has changed through your journeys, and how this relates to the lack of one ultimate level and meta-coexistence?

Chris Bache: That's a big question. I need to drink some water. I started as a religious studies professor, initially wanting to be a Catholic priest. Raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, the path treated me well. I then moved through different levels of theological study and emerged a sophisticated agnostic. I had scrubbed my mind of theological concepts. My psychedelic work led me to the reality behind these, affirming a deeper intelligence behind physical existence, transcending individual lineages of deity or teachers. It's a profound reality beyond historical attempts to conceptualize the divine. Though I respect religions, my experiences took me into a reality beyond their world. This journey led me to speak of the "mind of the universe" rather than theological categories, affirming infinite intelligence and compassion manifesting existence, possibly beyond our universe.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Yes, starting your own path isn't the aim. There's talk of a meaning crisis in the West due to scientific materialism wiping out higher realms from our reality. With upcoming challenges and possible global crisis, we need to navigate with meaning, leading to the future human. Not everyone can walk the psychedelic path. How can people prepare for the Great Awakening?

Chris Bache: You're right. We face a crisis of meaning because early scientific materialism stripped the world of significance. It's a bleak perspective taught in education, but psychedelics can break that bubble, leading us to experience the intelligence behind the universe. Psychedelics can initiate us into an ancient and new worldview, recognizing layers of intelligence in the world encouraging us to live with integrity and purpose. My understanding is we choose our incarnation, and everyone now decided to live through this time. Doing the best we can with our lives is a healthy way to face what’s coming.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Which begs the question, what is doing the best we can? It seems spiritual practices help us process reality, and directing attention flows energy. You mentioned how worship aligns values. How should we worship in light of diamond Luminosity?

Chris Bache: I worship the universe, the diversity of life, the galaxies, and solar systems. I honor the hidden drivers of reality. Most of the universe is dark energy and matter, indicating complex and infinite reality. To me, spending time with Hubble images is a spiritual meditation. I also meditate on my psychedelic experiences, entering their edges. Reading others' experiences enriches my sense of this infinite mystery.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Wow. I think I wrote "wow" like 50 times as I was going along. What comes back for me is returning to scientific materialism. Maybe the immediate thing that could happen is a softening of our concept of scientific materialism, and hopefully, psychedelics can play a part in that. I want to mention an interesting coincidence. Maybe it's not strong enough to be a synchronicity, but reading your book, you mentioned Carl Jung a few times, and I thought, "Oh, my God, no way." Then you specifically mentioned Jung's The Red Book, which I'm in the middle of right now. It's just crazy. Then you mentioned Richard Tarnas, and, lo and behold, I'm in the middle of his book The Passion of the Western Mind at the same time. It's a very interesting book, and you realize just how immature—well, recent, let's say—scientific materialism is, like 300 years in the scale of tens of thousands of years. That was a funny coincidence for me. So if we can wrap it around, psychedelics are a tool, not necessarily for everyone. How could we best use psychedelics for spiritual awakening in light of the coming challenges that we may face?

Chris Bache: Well, I hope we use them for more than spiritual awakening. For example, the whole movement in the psychedelic renaissance towards healing is really important. When I look at human beings, I don't simply see a human being; I see souls. When I look at children, I don't see young beings. They could be very old beings in a young body. And when I see old people, I don't see old beings. They could be very young souls in an old body. I tend to look at the qualities of soul present in an incarnation.

My sense is at this particular time in history, people are incarnating with lots of former lives active in their current life, and with lots of unfinished business at the soul level. There's a sense that healing is a very important contribution not only to their individual well-being but to our collective well-being. My sense is that we are incarnating generations of pain and suffering in this generation, and by clearing this pain and suffering, we are clearing out the whole system of all the garbage left over from our egoic consciousness through thousands of years of incarnations. We're opening up space for a deeper infusion of cosmic consciousness to enter our lives. Psychedelics can be a significant part of this healing.

If healing is allowed to deepen, then it becomes a tool of initiation into the intelligence of the universe, the intelligence that lies at the very core of our being. Psychedelics can help us experience, even if only temporarily, the truth of our divine nature and our inclusive nature. It really is like we are all leaves on a tree, and every leaf is part of my being. Only at the surface level does it look like we are separate leaves, but as a tree, we experience that we are all implicated in each other's lives. Naturally, compassion arises, fairness, justice arise out of that. Psychedelics can help us deepen and accelerate this process.

A whole separate issue is the balancing of psychedelics with spiritual practice, which is non-psychedelic. I don't think psychedelics by themselves are necessarily a very wise way to proceed. You need the support and grounding and insights that have been kept alive in our spiritual traditions, meditative traditions, and contemplative traditions. These work hand in hand with each other. I think those are maybe the most important—accelerating healing and deepening our insight into our true nature and the nature of the universe.

If we want to push farther, cosmological exploration takes that one step further into a conscious opening to layers of reality that lie beyond simply our physical senses. You don't have to push it as far as I did to do a little cosmological exploration, which can be very healthy and supportive. I think I just pushed it so far, so hard that it became a life-defining project, and there's no need for it to become a life-defining project for many people. Psychedelics have multiple layers of benefits. They can help heal us, help us come to our spiritual senses, and give us a sense of the deeper mystery we're part of.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Got it, beautiful. I'd like to bring us back to just one little point I skipped over, one thought I want to ask you about. Coming back to the understanding of there being infinite levels that are higher and higher, or by Huston Smith's law of inverse analogy, deeper and deeper. How do we align ourselves with the highest if there is no highest?

Chris Bache: Oh, yeah, your question catches the paradox. Let me give you—this will sound a little off target, but I'll focus it in. I often think that the relationship of physical reality to spiritual reality can be modeled on an apple. Physical reality is the skin of the apple. So the entire physical world is the skin of the apple. If an apple is expanding, like the universe is expanding, the skin gets bigger, but the meat of the apple is spiritual reality. We have a tendency, because we think of psychedelics as mind-expanding, mind-opening, to believe that spiritual reality is bigger than physical reality. But I don't think that's necessarily the case.

If you go underneath physical reality, you enter a layer of spiritual reality. As you delve deeper, you drive towards the center of the apple, and forms fall away because they're part of the emergence of physical reality. The light gets brighter and brighter as you approach the center because, at the core, it's light. You're asking, how do we orient ourselves to the ultimate, knowing that it's beyond our intellectual grasp? The key is recognizing that the essence of my life and the essence of your life is fundamentally the same essence. We all come from the light. We are all fractal embodiments of the light, evolving expressions of this manifesting intelligence.

At a very deep level, my essence is the same as that of mosquitoes, ants, leaves, everything on the planet. When I enter a transcendental state, dropping into selflessness or shunyata, I experience the world as one. As the shamans would shout, all my relations—all other levels of reality, all other beings are my relations. Even without adequately conceptualizing this essence, we can tune to it. We can let it suffuse our being, let go of anything small that keeps us from it, and regularly cultivate this tuning. It's partly an intellectual exercise, but more of a tuning exercise—we can do that even without solid answers about ultimate reality. It brings peace, harmony, and a profound sense of alignment as we draw closer to it.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Got it. I mean, not really got it, but I'm glimpsing it. What comes to mind is the distinction between process-oriented spiritual practice or religion and goal-oriented ones. Is that useful?

Chris Bache: It can be. Basically, one way of putting that is we can live in a world of nouns or a world of verbs. Verbs are more accurate than nouns. We live in a world of process rather than objects. It's all process; a human being is a process that begins, lives, and dies. Consciousness evolves, constantly changing. Neither you nor I are the same at the end of our conversation as we were at the beginning. It's all verbs, all process.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Noting the time, maybe one more thing on this topic I'll bring up. In certain scriptures, let's pick Christianity: Jesus says, "Not one word will change in the Scriptures until all is said and done." In Islam, you worship no other God but Me. This kind of exclusionary statement isn't just a cultural interpretation; it's core to the revelation of the religion. What do you make of that in two minutes?

Chris Bache: I understand it. There was a time in our history, not that long ago, where religions existed basically on specific continents, tied to a place. There wasn't mass migration; religion was part of its landscape. When you'd encounter other peoples, there was a conflict between your vision and theirs. Honoring the integrity of the vision was part of establishing identity. But all this changed with the steam engine, travel, and the internet. Everything's getting blended now. Since the 19th century, scholars have been bringing the world's wisdom together, trying to understand it all.

In that context, what was a virtue in the past can now be a limitation. The greater wisdom is in understanding all religious traditions simultaneously. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The pattern of global spirituality is more interesting than that of any single tradition. So, I recognize and honor the historical sentiment you describe, but I'm not beholden to it. The greater challenge now is understanding the world's diversity of spiritual beliefs and, in my case, taking exploration deeply enough to radically eclipse our human experience with a larger spiritual landscape.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Wow. To wrap it up, the first thing I read that led me down this path was Joseph Campbell and his writing about the global sense of all world traditions. Thank you, Chris, so much. So much to meditate on.

Chris Bache: Luc, it's been a pleasure. I thank you for the conversation, for giving me room to work, and for your thoughtful questions. I appreciate it.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Thank you, and I hope that this and other interviews will help you digest your journeys and find the community to share your experiences. I feel part of the same community with you, and I'm excited to see what you put out in the future.

Chris Bache: These conversations do help me. Sharing is good, and I hope they're useful to others, but they help me too, because they help me digest all these things.

Luc Briede-Cooper: Got it. Awesome. Thank you, Chris.