What does it mean to be a good person, psychedelically? | Chris Bache PhD

Interviewer: Given where we are, and given what's happening, maybe you've already answered this somehow, but from the perspective of the deep psychedelic work you've done, what does it mean to be a good person right now?

Chris Bache: Man, that's a large question. I think of a half dozen ways to answer that question, and all of them seem wrong. So I'm sifting through layers.

In some of my deepest experiences, there are moments, even after a session, where something falls away, something opens. I experience the world as truly living and breathing as one. I feel like my feet are rooted in the earth like a tree. I look down at the grass and feel a complete continuity of being between everything around me and my own being. I feel us all breathing the same air, sharing the same moment in time. I feel the pulse of the universe in its utter simplicity, not paying attention to our divisions of species or moods or incarnations. The entire universe just being itself, and I am part of that. It's not even communion, because communion implies a subtle duality, and this is when all of that falls away, and a great transparency of being opens.

From that position, I experience an opening of my mind, a delicious sense of presence. It gives me an intimacy with grass. At a deeper level, I experience an opening of my heart, where the idea of harming anyone is the farthest thing from my mind, and the idea of helping everyone is the most natural thing in the world. It's not about being good; it's about being alive within this reality of oneness. To me, goodness is simply an approximation or a compass needle pointing in the direction of this fundamental truth of oneness. Compassion, fairness, justice, are all aspects of oneness, fractal manifestations of oneness.

What does it take to be a good person today? I think it takes a willingness, a commitment, to serving a collective good, a good that's not private, that opens up to future generations and people and species unlike us—an honest confrontation with what is, to bring about a better life for other beings. I know this is simple, but to me, goodness is simple. It gets complicated in the enacting of it, but at its core, it's an action that comes out of oneness. If it's not coming from a deep grounding in oneness, then maybe there's something not to trust in it, because deep goodness comes from oneness.

I don't know if this addresses the depth from which your question is coming, because I understand the true, kind of quandary from which that question arises. But the deepest answer I have is a mystical experience of oneness, in which goodness becomes an insignificant component, a spontaneous component, like the way you react when you see something beautiful. Goodness is simply an arising that comes up inside of you when you're in the condition of oneness.

Interviewer: I have a more serious response and a more joking one. The serious response is along the lines of, what does the dance look like? You said it becomes difficult to enact. Because I've had that experience, and honestly, anywhere from 10% to 99% of the time, I'm not there at all. There's no sense of it in my experience. I'm not grounded in that as I'm showing up in the world. And the playful response is, should we all take 500 micrograms of LSD? What does it look like to have had that experience? Because naturally, goodness flows from you when you're there. It’s the most organic and natural expression. But having a profound experience doesn’t make you a deep and profound person. Experiencing oneness doesn't mean you now walk through the world with oneness streaming from your fingertips in every interaction. Maybe this is a question around integration. What does it mean to remember and catch ourselves in forgetting?

Chris Bache: We go up on the mountain, see some things, receive blessings, and then come down, returning to work on Monday morning. It means constantly engaging, being aware of how you engage, checking yourself, recommitting to doing a better job, over and over. Much of it for me was in my work as a teacher. Always enjoying it, loving to be with the students, wanting to do it better, but constantly catching myself making assumptions, false inferences, letting my students down, and trying to do better the next day, the next week, the next semester. It's about trying to live up to what we know to be true.

Integration is a strange term. I'm glad the psychedelic community is paying more attention to it because it's critical. But there are dimensions and aspects it doesn't cover. Living our visions is hard because it commits you to constantly being aware of how we're not living them. If we live around people who are really good and naturally kind, it makes it easier to face our shortcomings because we have someone to look up to as a measuring stick. That's why, in the Buddhist tradition, spiritual friends are one of the great pillars of progress. It’s wonderful to have the experience, but we don't walk around in that state. We practice, practice, and practice. Ten years later, maybe we're in it a bit more. If we ever think we're really there, just ask our young children, and they'll remind us we're not as far along as we think.

Interviewer: Perhaps, or as Baba Ram Dass said, if you ever think you're spiritually awake, go spend a week with your parents.

Chris Bache: Yeah.

Interviewer: You.