LSD and the Mind of the Universe – S2S Podcast

Simeon Mihaylov: Simon, welcome to The Secret to Seeker podcast. My name is Simeon, and it's my honor to introduce to you today our first ever guest on the podcast, Dr. Christopher M. Bache. Chris is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. His work explores the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, particularly psychedelic states. He has authored four books, his latest one being LSD and the Mind of the Universe, or as Chris prefers to call it, Diamonds from Heaven. In Diamonds from Heaven, Chris combines his expert knowledge of the world's wisdom traditions with the insights he personally gained from 20 years of intense, high-dose psychedelic work undertaken in secrecy. The cosmic plan that revealed itself to Chris is both astonishing and beautiful, and carries great implications about the way we should understand our individual and collective existence. Chris and I split our conversation neatly into two parts, so in the first half of the podcast, you can get some more details on the general areas that Chris's work focuses on, and the general chronology of his work. But if you're familiar with Chris's work, feel free to skip ahead halfway where we delve into issues that Chris hasn't spoken about at length before, such as the nature of suffering and evil, and also how reincarnation and the non-self can both be true at the same time. One final note, please bear with me as I get this podcast up and running. I know that video quality and audio quality on my end are pretty bad, but I promise better quality in the future. Fortunately, Chris does most of the talking here, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue. I hope the beautiful conversation Chris and I had brings you joy and wisdom, the same as it brought me, and I hope you enjoy.

Simeon Mihaylov: Thank you for watching. So to begin, would you like to kind of give a general overview of your work, what you talk about in the book, what the book is about, and what your experiences really were?

Chris Bache: It all began right after I finished graduate school in 1978. I started my career as a professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, and I read Stan Grof's first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, and I knew immediately that this was critically important work to my discipline, which was the philosophy of religion. Stan outlined a methodology that allowed us to enter systematically and carefully—and safely—into these deep states of consciousness in which we could not only heal but explore the deepest levels of our mind, and enter into levels that went beyond the individual mind. As a young philosopher, this excited me very much. I thought it was a whole new philosophical method. So I began to do this work, and since it was illegal at the time, I had to make a choice. I don't like doing things illegally, but I decided to divide myself in half. In my daytime job for the next 33 years, I was a professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University, teaching courses and doing what professors do. Then, in my nighttime job, I began a systematic journey into deep, non-ordinary states of consciousness using LSD.

I used LSD because that was the substance Stan had worked with in his early years; that's what his research was based on, primarily, and I trusted what I saw in his work. After my sessions, my work always followed the protocols he laid out in his early book, LSD Psychotherapy. The sessions were always private, protected from the world. I worked with a sitter, always lying down with carefully choreographed music that paced the stages of opening and closing in the sessions. I made a very careful and sustained effort to record each session faithfully and completely after it was over. I began this work intensely for four years, then stopped for six years, and resumed it for another 10 years. I started in 1979 and finished in 1999, completing 73 high-dose sessions over this 20-year period. I started with three medium-dose sessions, then all the rest were high-doses of 500 to 600 micrograms, a protocol I don't recommend. I wouldn't advise such a long, sustained hammering of the boundaries of consciousness. Today, I would proceed differently, working more slowly, alternating high doses with low doses, and balancing LSD with more body-grounded psychedelics such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.

What happened on this journey was that I went through not just one death, not just ego death, but multiple layers of reality, entering deeper and deeper levels of consciousness. Accessing these deeper levels required going through a series of deaths—dying at one level of consciousness to enter a deeper level, mastering it, then dying again to go deeper. I identified five fundamental levels of reality or cycles of death and rebirth. The first was personal mind, or ego death. Then there was the level of collective mind, the collective mind of our species. Then archetypal mind, causal reality or the level of oneness, and in the final five years, the level of Diamond Luminosity, which Buddhism calls the Absolute—the clear light of absolute reality.

After I finished my sessions, Spirit said to me in my meditation, "20 years in, 20 years out." I took that to mean it would take me 20 years to fully assimilate and integrate 20 years of my sessions. As it turned out, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, or as I call it, Diamonds from Heaven, was published exactly 20 years after I finished my sessions. There was 20 years of exploration, followed by 20 years of digesting, reflecting, integrating, and finally, telling the story of this journey. I share it hoping it will be useful to others—both those who are journeyers and those involved in spiritual practices other than psychedelics, because I hope the cosmology and understanding of cosmological processes emerging from the story will be useful.

Simeon Mihaylov: Yes, your work is definitely fascinating. One thing I think that is very important to address when talking about psychedelic states and insights that arise from them is the skeptic's argument: these are states that appear while the mind is under the influence of a substance. Therefore, why should any insight gained be legitimate? How do you know what you are studying in these states? How do you know what you're seeing? Is it the cosmos? Your personal psyche? What is it that you are experiencing?

Chris Bache: Yes, that's really an important question, isn't it? Can we trust what emerges in psychedelic states of awareness? I took my starting point from Stan's observations and many other psychedelic therapists: psychedelics don't give you an experience. They simply amplify your own consciousness. They are like an amplifier and a catalyst. If you focus these hours of amplified awareness, internalize them, and stay focused on the awareness arising within you, you begin a process of purification and confrontation with blocks and pains we often avoid in daily life. Your system spontaneously moves to eliminate these challenges, which are sometimes lodged in our history, either from this lifetime or past lives.

In the initial stages, we can judge the legitimacy of what we experience by activating memories from our lifetime. We can verify these experiences; they have the texture of memory. When confronting these pains, there's a liberating and healing experience with demonstrable impacts on our daily life. This tends to give confidence that experiences beyond the familiar also carry truth, even when coming from a foreign level of consciousness.

The process repeats itself by entering unknown realities, initially strange but becoming familiar over repeated visits. If you engage these experiences carefully, retaining and listening to what they teach, the universe enters into a dialogue with you, taking you through an educational process with a series of lessons about reality. Early stages might illuminate your personal life within a larger spiritual trajectory, potentially offering insights into past lives that clarify present relationships and confirm their legitimacy through impacts seen in current life.

As one delves deeper into collective mind, archetypal reality, and spiritual reality, I had the advantage of a PhD in philosophy of religion and familiarity with spiritual traditions. I'd studied spiritual practices and the maps of various spiritual worlds, providing reference points for comparing my psychedelic experiences with other spiritual seekers using meditation, yoga, or psychedelics. I take a global perspective when I teach, having taught courses on comparative mysticism and world religions. I find the deeper patterns emerge across multiple traditions, linking different lineages into larger wholes. I found my psychedelic experiences fit comfortably within that larger landscape, although they also pushed the boundaries and took me deeper.

Aside from personal verification and global correspondence, there's an experiential quality to these states of awareness. Paying a high price to enter these states involves multiple cycles of purification, detoxification, and confronting limitations, layer after layer, enabling entry into clear perception and awareness. These states carry a quality where it's transparently clear you're experiencing something genuine. It doesn't mean you're seeing everything or that there can't be limitations or distortions, but you know you're confronting something real.

In this dialogue, my conviction grew that I was on a meaningful journey with philosophical value, producing genuine insights into how the universe works. My experiences aligned not just as personal illusions but correlated with other explorers' accounts, further compared to cosmologies of meditation traditions. This gave confidence that psychedelics weren't just keys to accessing universal states of awareness, accessible through other methods as well.

Simeon Mihaylov: I see. So you began your work with the motivation to explore the universe as a philosopher, correct?

Chris Bache: Yes, that was my intention. I'm not a therapist, though I've received much healing in this work and I'm always grateful for it. But that was not my primary intention. I was trained as a philosopher of religion. I wanted to explore the universe as deeply as I could and understand not only my nature, but understand the larger landscape of the universe.

Simeon Mihaylov: And you're saying that the fact your experiences fit into the larger body of religious and philosophical traditions gives you confidence that what you're experiencing is genuine. But at the same time, you also push the boundary in seeing things you hadn't encountered elsewhere. Do you believe that psychedelics offer the promise of new insights that we can gain philosophically and spiritually that we have not uncovered before? How do you see psychedelics fitting into future developments of philosophy and spirituality of our species?

Chris Bache: Yes, well, this is an exciting territory. I became convinced early on that psychedelics represented a true before-and-after development in philosophical reflection. In philosophy, we reflect on the breadth of human experience—ours and others'. Psychedelics afford the opportunity to deepen consciousness and push its boundaries. This opens up not only individual insights into consciousness but a new method of exploration, first articulated by William James and evident in the Eleusinian Mysteries and Ayahuasca churches in Brazil.

This involves systematic expansion of consciousness, experiencing new depths, returning, recording, evaluating, and comparing experiences. This rhythm of expansion and evaluation allows us to explore invisible dimensions of consciousness. With rigorous process, psychedelics allow exploration of these states, gathering insights about how the universe works.

We find that intelligence, compassion, and awareness are not assembled by random mechanical processes but open into an infinite mind shared by the universe. Philosophically, we’ve long pondered this mind, whether it's meaningful, intentional, or an illusion. Even if modern minds abandoned such questions as unanswerable, they remain alive in us. Psychedelics methodically engage these core philosophical questions—why life includes suffering and how evolution proceeds—offering systematic and rigorous inquiry.

I envision taking educated and creative thinkers on this journey, allowing systematic understanding, encounter, and comparison of experiences. This journey marks a difference between traditional philosophies, practiced through sensory consciousness, and a new methodology embracing expanded consciousness and encounter.

Simeon Mihaylov: That's a really momentous change within the psychedelic renaissance happening now. For our viewers, your book highlights a day in your psychedelic session practice. For those unaware, could you share your protocols—how a typical session day went?

Chris Bache: Yes, there’s a chapter in the book about a session day, as early readers asked me to capture a typical day. Here's how it went: all sessions took place at my house or my wife's therapeutic office, always starting early morning. They began with meditation, yoga, or centering practice, to get centered. The importance of preparation grew with practice—not just set and setting, but one's emotional and physical states. That meant ensuring my physical condition, even bone alignment, to remain balanced, open, and sans energy blockages.

On session day, after preparation, I took the psychedelic and entrusted responsibility to my sitter, my first wife Carol, a clinical psychologist. Apart from early activities, there was little verbal interaction due to high-dose LSD use. I listened to music curated by Carol, who determined when to transition between session stages. The six-to-eight-hour session kept a focus inwardly, with Carol ensuring safety until consolidation afterward—often spending the evening reflecting on session contents.

The next priority was documenting the session, challenging when entering unfamiliar territories. Some express through art—like Alex Gray—but my skill lay in written accounts. I developed a technique, 'standing at the edge of the well,' for writing with one foot in an altered state, one out. By replaying the session’s music in order, I re-entered its psychological space, documenting as comprehensively as possible. Once completed, the draft was locked, never altered.

Days post-session were for meditation, further processing experiences. Statistically, I averaged five sessions annually, ensuring substantial periods for integration. Sessions began on empty stomachs—often throwing up due to energy shifts, and ended with a light evening meal.

Simeon Mihaylov: So many elements of your approach captivate me, particularly music. Music and psychedelics share a special relationship, with varied philosophies. Terence McKenna's approach was silence, allowing experiences to lead naturally, humorously equating Bach-genius reflections as common truths. You describe selective music curation, an evolving choice, even recounting a humorous anecdote where the wrong music assisted a challenging moment. What is your musical approach?

Chris Bache: Well, music does influence our experience, and I do value working without music. I've continued to work with psychedelics after stopping my high-dose LSD work. During this post-LSD work, I often enter into meditative spaces with psilocybin or ayahuasca. In the late years of psychedelic work, I would often end music in the second half of the session and move into meditative space. Basically, I followed the protocol laid out in early psychedelic research. The understanding is not that music gives you experiences, but that music can support the underlying immersion of your unconscious into awareness. It provides a background making it easier for you to detach from the habits of your mind and go with the flow into what emerges. I think of it as supporting and reinforcing what happens when you go into the dark without any music.

We know there are stages of the LSD experience. It takes many minutes to become active and builds in potency. You have to look carefully at the psychedelic you're using, the curve of activation and depth of activation. It's different with low doses of LSD than high doses. Working as I did with high-dose levels, there was tremendous acceleration of consciousness and speed with which your body and mind adjust to the extraordinary increase of energy and awareness as you break through the bounds of personal consciousness. Helen Bonny's early work on the stages of a psychedelic session and the type of music that supports that session is what I followed. Those early guidelines have been further expanded in the Holotropic Breathwork network, which has a large library of musical recommendations.

By the fifth to seventh session, I came upon some indigenous chanting and found that this music had a much more powerful impact on my experiences than classical music. Indigenous music, which was foreign and unknown, had a more cathartic opening effect on my consciousness, so I began to collect all manner of indigenous music from different cultures and incorporate them into my sessions. When you are at the peak, having gone through the purification or death process and transitioned into deeper, ecstatic reality, you want music that is more expansive, giving your mind room to work. LSD has a long tail, providing time inside the session to integrate and reflect upon your experiences. You want long, gentle expansive music until the very end without any words in your native language, as you don't want them to script your experience.

I found that I could only use music three times before having to let it go because it becomes saturated with the experiences you've had. When in the downward slope, when returning to familiar life, that applies less. I'm more comfortable using familiar music in the spacious return.

Simeon Mihaylov: I see. Well, another thing about your sessions is that people unfamiliar with your work might think, "Here's this person having visionary experiences; it must be very exciting and pleasant." But anyone familiar with the psychedelic experience knows that high doses are challenging to go through. Your initial sessions were expansive and exciting, but over time they became more difficult. The difficult times appeared more often and were harder to endure. So, knowing what awaited you, how did you work with daily spiritual practice to prepare and integrate your insights into daily life?

Chris Bache: Let me try to address two parts of your question: working with high-dose LSD and then integrating those experiences into daily life. Stan's early work differentiated between low-dose psycholytic therapy and high-dose psychedelic therapy. Low-dose therapy amplifies consciousness gradually, layer by layer, taking us systematically into inner confrontation.

High-dose therapy was different at places like Spring Grove Hospital, where they worked with terminally ill cancer patients trying to trigger an encounter with cosmic reality—essentially an NDE, a Near-Death Experience. This was limited to three high-dose sessions. The protocol aimed to blow through the personal unconscious into cosmic reality. I thought if you could do it three times, why not more? So, I embarked on a journey to see how deep I could go.

It took about two years, or ten sessions, to go through the perinatal level of consciousness. I relived my birth, faced existential crises, and experienced ego death, moving into more expansive awareness beyond personal identity. As I went deeper, I encountered challenges in vast territories of pain and suffering—like Dante's Inferno, except worse.

I spent hours in this condition, knowing the next session would be challenging. But it always culminated in a crescendo that spun me into ecstatic, visionary states. The intense pain was balanced by tremendous ecstatic joy and insight. Understanding this cycle—intense pain followed by deeper immersion into ecstasy—gave me strength to return.

The challenge increases as you go deeper, but so does the payoff. I've always been a volunteer in this process, valuing the engagement and rewards. I wouldn’t trade these 73 days for any worldly treasures.

Simeon Mihaylov: That's beautiful about psychedelic work. It parallels normal spiritual daily practice, even if you forget the psychedelic aspect. These cycles of purification and bliss appear in normal states of consciousness. There are almost fractal-like parallels between psychedelic states and real life. I'm interested in how you've used daily spiritual practice because of this synergy. Ram Dass likened LSD trips to being in the presence of Buddha or Jesus but emphasized staying in that room through daily practice. What are your views?

Chris Bache: I completely agree. There's nothing unique about psychedelic experiences because they are consciousness amplifiers. In the end, it's consciousness doing the work. Many readers relate to my descriptions without having taken psychedelics, as it mirrors their meditative experiences. There's a profound overlap between ordinary spiritual and psychedelic spiritual practice.

Reincarnation as a fact of existence informs this understanding. My studies support a view of evolution through multiple lifetimes. Spiritual and psychedelic practices can accelerate this process by engaging challenges at their core, nuclear form before they manifest in physical reality. This acceleration is seen in meditative and psychedelic practices.

The deeper the psychedelic experience, the stronger your daily practice should be. It's crucial to bring vast experiences into daily spiritual practice to integrate insights and navigate challenges. The last five years of my work included Vajrayāna Buddhism. Practices within this tradition helped sustain encounters with intense states of awareness and energy. They allowed my body and mind to breathe more freely, creating dialogue with the universe.

It's important to remember, you can't take psychedelics when you die. In death, you enter the universe with only your mind. Knowing this, everything you do in psychedelic work should prepare you for that final encounter. Psychedelics can teach and prepare the soul for its journey. Despite criticisms, I've found spiritual and psychedelic work to be compatible. Psychedelics can reinforce and accelerate spiritual practice in beneficial ways.

Simeon Mihaylov: Yes, I agree. I'm interested in how one can achieve synergies between the two. You mentioned some deeper territories of your work earlier. Would you like to discuss the cosmic blueprint revealed during your work? Reincarnation is intriguing, and your book gave me permission to explore it intellectually. What has convinced you of reincarnation, both in reading and personal experience?

Chris Bache: When I began teaching at Youngstown State, Stan Grof was pivotal, but so was Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia. He and his team studied children worldwide who remembered past lives, describing people, places, and events they shouldn't know. His work convinced me reincarnation is a simple fact of life. Many cases he studied allow verification that these children know things about other lives, indicating continuity.

Stevenson showed memories and even birthmarks correspond to past life events. His monumental work on reincarnation demonstrates biological and memory continuity. Reading hundreds of cases of past-life therapies, it became clear reincarnation is part of our life rhythm. The nature of reincarnation and its broader implications also emerged in my sessions, expanding my understanding of this continuity and life's larger rhythm.

Chris Bache: There was a particular session which I call the birth of the diamond soul, in which I experienced all of my former lives coming into me very quickly. Tremendous work had been done earlier in the session, and I was in a state where I was integrating streams of consciousness from multiple lifetimes. It was like wrapping string around a kite spool, filaments of white light, and they seemed to hit a critical mass. When they hit that critical mass, they fused—all these lives fused into a single energy entity. When they fused, there was an explosion of diamond light that exploded from my chest, catapulting me into a completely different state of consciousness. I was an individual, but an individual beyond any frame of reference I had previously known. I wasn't Chris Bache, but I was a being that Chris Bache was part of, along with all of these former lives. This is what I came to call the birth of the diamond soul.

The idea is that life grows, and part of the intelligent process of life is growing human consciousness, layer by layer, grade by grade, course by course, allowing us to expand and grow—hopefully more intelligent, more compassionate. We make mistakes, we learn, and we grow. But the process is not simply about becoming incrementally, gradually more than we were. Sooner or later, there comes a time when all of those lives, all of their learning, fuse, and the soul consciousness awakens within us. I think in the normal process of reincarnation, we experience our soul when we die. So we go from ego to soul, back to ego, back to soul. But if we keep this up for thousands and thousands of years, sooner or later, it's a natural process that the soul wakes up inside time and space. This is what's happening not only for us individually but for us as a species. Through our long history, our evolutionary journey, our learning process, we are transcending the ego and waking up. The soul is waking up inside time and space. This is where history is taking us into an epoch when the diamond soul is waking up on Earth.

Simeon Mihaylov: That's beautiful. Concerning this vision of reincarnation that you gained through your experiences and through your reading, there are two particular questions that I have, which I think are very difficult to answer. They arise, as many other issues do, from the fact that it's difficult to talk about these things. But the first issue is how can consciousness travel from one biological mechanism into another? But we can leave that alone, because it's probably beyond each one of us at the moment. The answer is, we don't know.

Chris Bache: Yeah, we don't know what the physics of the soul is. We don't know how our memories leave our biological base and how consciousness reprograms or returns to and integrates with a new biological body. We just don't have the answer to that question. But we won't begin to find the answers until we start asking different questions. We have to open up to a more complex cosmology of a multi-level universe and stop acting as if our consciousness is being generated by our brain. That's a reductive cosmology, which doesn't allow us to begin to find the answers to the question you're asking. So I hope you're right. We don't know, but I think in time, we'll get more and more knowledge in that area.

Simeon Mihaylov: Yeah, hopefully. That would be very interesting to realize how it works. But also, when you talk about the soul, that's something I'm very interested in. Let's say, if somebody is just doing meditation practice, one of the key insights is non-self, Non-duality, the co-arising of everything. How does that align with the idea of a soul reincarnating? What is reincarnating? Is it the doer, the thing that makes choices in life, or is it the witness, the thing that is just conscious of all of these things?

Chris Bache: Yeah, I've had those experiences of Non-duality and what Buddhism calls emptiness, Śūnyatā, emptiness of self, where there is such intimacy that there is no self inside you, and also no self anywhere in the world. Everything is just open and porous. It's a magnificent experience. It depends on how you think of the soul. If you think of the soul—and this is kind of the way we have, by habit and by custom, thought of the soul—in an atomistic way, as a fundamentally isolated unit that doesn't change and is isolated from other souls, then you have a problem. Non-duality and Śūnyatā contradict that atomistic notion of the soul. But if you have a quantum model of the soul, if you think of the soul as a field, as a learning system that is never isolated from the surrounding world, always in an energetic exchange, always incorporating information and energy, then you can understand the soul as dynamic. It's always changing, evolving through time, and porous.

I think it's consistent to affirm an emergent individuality in creation alongside the fundamental condition of Non-duality. This is also affirmed in the spiritual traditions. Even the Dalai Lama has written that what Buddhism rejects in its anātman doctrine, its no-self doctrine, is not individuality but a static soul that doesn't change in time and is independent of surrounding reality. Once you shift your understanding of soul to this open field vision, it's completely compatible with Śūnyatā emptiness.

Simeon Mihaylov: This open field vision of the soul also aligns with your observation that enlightenment isn't a private process. You talked about how your experiences of purification and healing affected not only your personal sphere but also the larger collective of humanity. I found that very interesting. How does that work, and how does it feed into your vision of the future human?

Chris Bache: Oh, that's a big question. When I began this work, I thought I was doing it for my personal edification, for my personal healing, maybe even my spiritual realization. But even though that was my mindset, it wasn't the universe's mindset. The mystery of the collective ramifications of our work, the collective import, is only a mystery if we start with the assumption that we are fundamentally private entities. But in classical meditative spiritual deepening and psychedelic spiritual deepening, we discover that we have always been part of an interwoven network of life.

The image I like to use is the image of a tree and a leaf—leaf consciousness and tree consciousness. Imagine seeing a tree where all you could see were the leaves, and imagine all the leaves were individually conscious with individual personalities. If everything covered in bark were invisible, all you'd see are the leaves, not the trunk or limbs. Imagine one leaf decides to explore its real nature, finds where it connects to the twig, pushes deeper into the twig, limb, branch, and eventually the trunk, experiencing the tree and thus knowing what a leaf is. The leaf is not a separate, private part; it is a living aspect of a much deeper being. The well-being of the leaf is connected to the well-being of all other leaves.

As this awareness dawns, if the consciousness returns to its leafness, it sees all other leaves as aspects of the deeper identity they all share. It might say, "There is no self. Śūnyatā; it is anātman." Compassion would manifest knowing that what you do to another leaf, you do to yourself because you're doing it to the tree. We are all connected. In psychedelic practice, I found that when I opened deeply, I was involved in healing work that expanded beyond my personal history. It was as if I were working to heal all the leaves on a particular branch of this tree.

Nature doesn't hold the boundaries we imagine in our private minds; it lives as an integrated whole. As we open to that totality, as we do with psychedelics, we can dissolve completely into that reality. In purification processes, we affect the collective around us, entering ecstatic experiences of intimacy with life and the divine that naturally radiate through awareness into the beings around you. All spiritual traditions recognize that spiritual practice radiates through the fabric of the world, including the animal fabric.

In some ways, it helped me understand the Buddhist tradition in cultivating bodhicitta, the desire to save all sentient beings. You do the practice for all beings. You give away all the benefits to all the universe at all levels. By doing this, you strengthen the awareness that you are a fractal aspect of the totality. In that awareness, there is great liberation, great joy. It dissolves alienation and loneliness. One becomes a joyful aspect of the totality.

Simeon Mihaylov: Chris, I have many quotes from your book, and it's difficult choosing which one to go with. But there's one section where you talk about the purpose of reincarnation and learning. You say, "I also felt an exquisite tenderness coming from the Creator who experienced with us every pain we had taken upon ourselves. Humans were so precious to the Creator that not a single ounce of pain, not a single tear, was wasted. The depth of that divine care so moved me that no sacrifice seemed too large or unreasonable." I think here you're talking about the suffering involved in this learning process and a vision in which this kind of made sense for you. This reminded me of The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, which discusses these issues. Two brothers discuss the existence of God, one very faithful and one a complete atheist. The atheist rejects God because of the cruelty inflicted upon innocent beings, such as children.

You were faced with these experiences, not just images, of children being killed. How can this cosmic plan justify the suffering of innocent beings? What can justify this suffering? Eventually, one brother says, "Perhaps there is a God; maybe I believe in God, but I do not accept the world He has created." What's your comment on that?

Chris Bache: That is the hardest part of all of it, isn't it? How can we affirm an intelligence, let alone a compassion behind existence, when everywhere we look, there is so much pain, so much brutality, so much horror compounding? There's so much suffering. You know, Ramakrishna, the great Hindu saint, said, "If you want to understand God, you must be willing to look suffering in the face." I hold that dearly. You cannot understand the true divine without engaging suffering.

I'm comfortable with atheism as a rejection of theism. Most of the gods of many religions are terrifyingly small and do not provide an adequate understanding of existence. I won't succeed in answering this question satisfactorily, but it's a question I live with. To understand suffering, we must also understand genius and the larger trajectory of life. When I've dissolved into the creative intention of the universe, I've experienced a process that is vast and ancient. The universe extends beyond microorganisms and life on this planet to countless galaxies. We're just beginning to appreciate the scale of the universe.

In that context, we must consider what we're doing and why life is so hard. Someone might believe in God but not accept the universe God created. Those deep sentiments honor our children and life. There is no justification for their suffering and pain on the surface. But if we look at this in context, a human being is growing. Our growth rests on the primates, the life forms before us. Are we at the end of this process? To assess a process, we must see it through to the end.

Psychedelic states allow us to expand beyond this moment, dissolving into the intelligence manifesting the universe. They also allow us to experience not only the distant past but the future, entering what I call deep time. My experiences in deep time show dimensions where the universe knows itself far beyond this moment. Entering into deep time dissolves experiences of creative processes in human beings. We come here to make choices, learn from bad and good choices.

We became self-aware about 5,000 years ago and are just beginning to exercise our full potential. In this creative process, we're dealing with an incomplete creation, a species still living out of primitive self-understanding, inflicting damage. The evolutionary process itself is incomplete. Sri Aurobindo said humanity is a transitional species, not the end, but going from lower awareness to higher awareness. The mind's ability to influence matter and manifest joy is still being developed.

My response to suffering is that it reflects the incompleteness of the universe, the terrifying demands of learning through experience. Not all suffering derives from human choices. Some suffering derives from what we call the cruelties of nature. We must be willing to look suffering in the face to understand the deeper intentionality expressing itself. We tend to see God as static and unchanging, holding God responsible for everything. I don't think that's how it is. We are cells in the being of God. The Divine is not separate from the pain children are experiencing. We are aspects of it. Pain is always felt, registered, held. We're growing together.

If we stopped the process now and held the creative intent accountable for where we are, the conclusion would be that it's too much pain. But if we went forward in time, we would experience a kinder, more intelligent humanity, better able to manage nature's fluctuations. It's hard to envision where this is taking us.

Chris Bache: Where are we now in this process? What is our historical circumstance, and what's the future for our species?

Chris Bache: I know that I'm sharing just my own visionary experiences. I know that what may be powerful and true for one person would not necessarily be powerful or true for another person. So I can only share with you what my experience has been. Early on in my sessions, starting around the 23rd session, and for the last 50 of my sessions, one of the recurring themes was where humanity is going and what's happening. The vision was repeatedly that we are coming into a turning point in history—a decisive before and after point. We were poised on the edge of a magnificent transition into a higher level of functioning, that there was greatness emerging within humanity. When I look at history, I sometimes think, "Well, I don't exactly see that." I see people being just as misguided now as they were, you know, 5000 years ago, in many ways, and just as cruel. But my sessions kept saying, "No, no, look deeper. There is an emerging greatness in humanity."

I understand this within the context of reincarnation. To see humanity is not just to see the present generation; it is to see the living pulse of life, incarnating again and again over many thousands of years. The greatness that is emerging is a greatness emerging at the deeper level of the soul's accumulation, which is collecting and harvesting all the learning, all the suffering, all the experimentation, all the courage, all the innovation we've been cultivating through all these lifetimes. My sessions kept showing me that there is a greatness emerging in the human story and that we are coming into a decisive turning point in history. However, it never showed me how this was going to be realized; I had no idea how this was going to come about.

Then, in the 55th session, it took me into what I call the Great Awakening session. It took me deep into the future, allowing me to experience the death and rebirth of the human species. I don’t mean a physical death and rebirth but a sort of psycho-spiritual death and rebirth, though it did involve much physical suffering and many deaths. I had this experience not as Chris Bache, or even an expanded version of myself, but as the entire species. My consciousness dissolved into the collective psyche. I experienced a profound crescendo of suffering and a birth coming out of the suffering, a birth of a new form of human being. Basically, I experienced a historical period of unraveling, a loss of control—a tremendous confronting of the sins of the fathers. We are our own fathers, of course. So, confronting our past, of all the foibles, limitations, and divisiveness of history, and the short-sightedness of our forms of governance emerged. It was a global systems crisis driven by an ecological crisis, where humanity was ultimately forced into simply trying to survive. For a time, it seemed like we wouldn't survive—like it was an extinction event. It looked like we were going to lose our place in existence altogether.

But just when the storm was at its peak, just when things were at their worst, it was as if a hurricane passed over the island and the skies began to clear. When the skies began to clear, many survivors remained. There had been many deaths, but there were many survivors. When the survivors began to pick themselves up, find each other, new ways of knowing, feeling, understanding, and new insights sprang forth. Fundamentally, at its core, there was the birth of an appreciation of oneness—not as a theory, not as an ideology, but an experience of oneness, the tree underlying individual leaf consciousness. We truly are one; we truly are connected to each other. In the birth of that awareness, we began to build a new world, not the world created by the ego.

The ego is a magnificent expression of creativity; it is magnificent, but it is divided from the fundamental springs of consciousness and from each other. The world the ego has created favors some portions of society at the expense of others; it does not work for all. But with the birth of oneness and this transformation, we began to build a new world that truly worked for all, truly a new beginning. This creativity and these new ideas fed upon themselves, resulting in a cascade of more and more beauty, more and more knowledge, more and more understanding. I think this was the collective birth of the Diamond Soul, with the soul waking up on Earth. We were waking up and understanding ourselves not as merely 100-year-old beings, but as 100,000-year-old beings with 100,000-year-old relationships. In that awareness, we experienced deeper compassion with other human beings and other life forms altogether, experiencing greater transparency to the universe's creative intelligence.

We were no longer experientially isolated from the cosmic intelligence of the universe but could take in deeper downloads from that intelligence. With these deeper downloads, there was no technological problem unsolvable because we were intellectually awake at deeper levels. Understandings came easier; there were no technological barriers to what we could accomplish. This is the birth of what I call the Future Human.

In one of my journey's last great visions, the 70th session, I thought I was beyond all previous meltdowns. I had gone through many, yet it put me through the worst strip-down of my 20-year journey. It broke me down terribly, which I think was necessary for the following experiences, taking me deeper into the future than ever before. In this condition, it gave me my deepest experience of the Future Human once again, as if I were allowed to try on the new archetype of the new human that had emerged in evolution. Just touching this being...

Audience: Wow.

Simeon Mihaylov: That really leaves me speechless. It's hard to know what to say to that. That’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I see how that removes any anxiety about death, about life, and about our future as individuals and as a species. It's a beautiful vision.

Chris Bache: Every time we die, all spiritual traditions tell us no one truly dies; we transition into a different reality level. I'm not making light of death or trivializing it, but affirming this deeper insight that everything we are survives the death of this body. At the end of every lifetime, we return to where we came from as a resting place, refreshed, and then return to history's challenges. We don’t have to go through the entire evolutionary future to know freedom from the fear of death. If there's one thing from my psychedelic experiences that I wish I could give to the world, it would be eliminating the fear of death. I not only am not afraid of dying; I look forward to it because death is homecoming. Always, death is homecoming.

Simeon Mihaylov: I know different spiritual traditions have said that in different ways, but I find Carl Jung puts it beautifully when he says life is a short period between two infinities, which might ultimately be one. How do you interpret this in light of your experiences? Jung also said, "I can either be good or whole," showing respect for the psyche's dark side, for evil. Do you see evil falling away as our egos fall away becoming the Future Human, or do you see a deeper logic where evil continues, integrated and serving a higher purpose?

Chris Bache: I would begin by differentiating between darkness and evil. People often fuse those, but they're different. Evil is a twisting of life, a process where life has turned in upon itself, cutting deeply off from its source, becoming twisted and needing restoration and healing. Darkness, on the other hand, is an inertia of existence, resistance to the creative process itself. When Jung talked about being whole rather than good, he was embracing all parts of his life, including those not deemed socially good. This happens in spiritual practice, certainly in psychedelic practice, where we claim the whole of our life, even the parts we're embarrassed by or feel unforgivable. By embracing all, twisted or injured aspects are restored to wholeness, emerging a higher order of goodness.

In evolution and spiritual evolution, there's much darkness and twistedness, we could say evil, but I don't see evil as a cosmological process. I never experienced it that way. I've experienced darkness, confusion, suffering, but not evil as such. This aligns with Sri Ramakrishna, who said to understand God, you must look suffering in the face. Suffering is part of the divine expression, not from an evil principle. We have to understand how life works, and in looking deep, see the compassion in existence despite suffering. I believe suffering is being redeemed in history as part of a self-learning process taking us somewhere magnificent.

As we transition into this higher form of humanity, challenges and thresholds will continue even if we make this transition within 1000 years or sooner. We must let go of old stories that evil has its hand on Earth or that malevolent forces intend our suffering, or that we escape suffering by being good and ascending to heavenly salvation. Instead, open to a deeper understanding of the cosmological creation process, of self-manifestation, and the creative intelligence.

Simeon Mihaylov: Chris, I realize I've taken a lot of your time. How has writing your book and speaking about your experiences changed your insight? What remains for you to do in this lifetime?

Chris Bache: Well, let me backtrack and explain what happened when I stopped my work, which will lead to the writing of my book. I stopped in 1999 for several reasons, mainly because the domain of Diamond Luminosity I entered in those last five years, over 26 sessions, was overwhelming. In those years, I experienced that joy of dissolving into the light only four times, with intense purifications, healings, and catharses in between. Coming back from that joy began to be too painful. The sadness and separation from that deep intimacy with the universe became unbearable; I needed to let go.

There were other reasons too—I was energetically running too hot, needing to let my system recalibrate. Still, the primary reason was heartache. I thought I could stop and continue being nourished by the treasures given to me. And while true, a deep sadness emerged over the years—a loneliness with the Divine. So profound, I was just waiting to die to return to my Beloved. This isn’t a healthy way to live, prompting a reassessment of where I might've gone wrong. Eventually, I realized my problem was an imbalance between Transcendence and Immanence, where I lost my footing in the manifest divine—I needed to address this.

So, I made a decisive move to embrace my physical existence, live it fully by force of will and practice cultivation, recommitting inside time and space on Earth. It took me about 10 years to feel fully comfortable here again. If doing this work again, one should work in smaller increments, avoiding what I went through. Also, the silence surrounding psychedelic work, not integrating psychedelic knowledge into teaching or sharing with colleagues, contributed to a personal imbalance. Writing "Diamonds from Heaven," now retired, is a healing process, bringing forth honesty and candidness about my experiences.

Being in an open conversation about these experiences with people like you has allowed me to integrate these aspects of myself better. I'm now more relaxed, patient, and understanding about how long true spiritual unfolding can take.