Learning to be Gods: Conversations about LSD and the Mind of the Universe with Chris Bache

Chris Bache: We can't solve the problems we're facing at the level of ego. So we either grow up or we go extinct. Growing up, I think, involves the maturation of the soul, the transition from ego identity to soul identity. The soul lives in the world differently than the ego. It has an awareness of its history and its extended relationships with all the people it sees around it. We've been black, white, red. We've been all the colors and religions of the world. We've been rich, poor. As the soul matures, there's a tremendous sense of compassion and generative freedom, and that's what I think we need to solve where we're going.

Lauren Taus: Welcome to Embodied Life, the podcast. My name is Lauren Taus, and this show is a space for you to move past the traffic of the mind and into the stillness of your heart. The journey is inward, and a courageous traveler welcomes the wide range of their human experience. We are meeting pioneers, healers, and changemakers, who are showing us the way with important guides and maps. Feel whatever it is that needs to be felt so that you can return home to yourself. Let's go. Let's get embodied.

Lauren Taus: Chris Bache is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He is also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training.

Lauren Taus: An award-winning teacher and international speaker, Chris's work explores the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states.

Lauren Taus: He has written four books, translated into eight languages: "Lifecycles: The Reincarnation and the Web of Life," "Dark Night, Early Dawn," a pioneering work in psychedelic philosophy and collective consciousness, "The Living Classroom," an exploration of teaching and collective fields of consciousness, and "LSD and the Mind of the Universe," the story of his 20-year journey with LSD.

Lauren Taus: Between the years of 1979 and 1999, Chris had 73 high-dose LSD experiences.

Lauren Taus: We sat down to talk about these experiences and the book that he wrote about them. I enjoyed every moment of my time with Chris, and I hope you enjoy our conversation. Take a listen.

Lauren Taus: Thank you so much for taking the time to share your extraordinary experiences and wisdom.

Chris Bache: I'm happy to share as much as I can. I'm also very much aware that your work has been working primarily with the therapeutic applications of psychedelics, and of course, my work is very different from that, so you'll have to sort of show me how I can support your work with what I have.

Lauren Taus: Very happy to do so. I think there's a larger conversation that I'm part of and that I'm weaving together around consciousness. For me personally, one of the biggest parts of the medicine is to sense into what else we're part of.

Chris Bache: Yes, and I think that's a lot where you come in, Chris.

Lauren Taus: Can you tell me a little bit about how you started your explorations in the psychedelic space?

Chris Bache: Well, I have to go back to 1978 when I had just started my university position at YSU. That first year, I encountered the work of Ian Stevenson, whose research on reincarnation turned my worldview upside down. I also encountered the work of Stanislav Grof, who turned me upside down even more because he gave me a method. He showed me a method that would allow me to explore these deep states of consciousness. Now, I was trained as a philosopher of religion. I'm not a clinician, but what interested me about these substances was their capacity, not only to heal or clarify my personal consciousness, but to explore the deeper structure of consciousness itself, and eventually the mind of the universe. That's where I began, and that's where I began doing the work. Of course, to do that, a large part of my life had to go underground because I was working at a state university, in a public environment. The age of legally sanctioned psychedelic research was over in 1970. This was 1978. So I divided my life into my public life, and in my private life, I began this psychedelic work.

Lauren Taus: You took 73 high-dose LSD trips over the course of 20 years, and really high doses.

Chris Bache: Yeah. I wouldn't recommend that. I wouldn't do it the same way again myself, and I strongly recommend people don't do it that way. I would be much gentler with myself and have a more modulated approach. But that's what I did. I started with three sessions of medium doses, about 250 mics, and then for the remainder of all the sessions, I was working at 500 to 600 micrograms.

Lauren Taus: What inspired you to double the dose and continue in the way you did?

Chris Bache: Well, I first saw Stan's early work and the distinction between psycholytic therapy and psychedelic therapy, so I knew working with high doses was safe and could be managed effectively. I knew the sessions would be more difficult working at that intensity, but I thought if I focused on confronting my shadow, I could work with those doses, as long as I could manage the intensity of what was emerging. I started working at those levels, frankly, simply because in a dual career, arranging a session day in a marriage and with children was hard to do, so I figured I wanted to make the most out of every day. But then, after working with these doses for a while, I developed an aptitude for them. I liked where they were taking me, and I just continued to press on.

Lauren Taus: For the sake of a listener who might not have as much knowledge as we do, can you name the difference between psychedelic therapy and psychedelic therapy?

Chris Bache: Psycholytic therapy is low-dose LSD therapy, working with doses anywhere from 50 to on average 150 micrograms, up to maybe 300, but mostly in the 150 or so range. It's an amplification of consciousness that causes your unconscious to surface, layer by layer, different layers of your personal unconscious, and then the perinatal level of consciousness. Psychedelic therapy is high-dose therapy, initially developed to work with terminally ill cancer patients to try to blow through all levels of consciousness and trigger a Near-Death Experience, or an approximation of an interior death experience, so they could have an experience of where they were going when they were dying. It was quite successful. So I thought if you could do this safely at a limit of three times in the early protocol, then you could do it more than three times safely. What I hadn't counted on is that when you do it like that, things happen and things are started that go beyond the framework of the early psychedelic therapy.

Lauren Taus: Chris, when you started this work yourself, did you anticipate that it would go for 20 years and you would continue at such high levels of exploration and experience?

Chris Bache: I didn't anticipate where it would go. I worked for four years, did 17 sessions, then took a six-year break. Then I worked for 10 years intensely, doing about five sessions a year on average. I didn't have a plan or strategy; I was just following the experiences, going where they led. As long as I could manage it and they continued to unfold new levels or experiences that were philosophically productive and personally productive, I went with it until I got towards the end. As I explained in the book, things developed that led me to know it was time to stop.

Lauren Taus: What were the questions leading you? What were you looking to answer or experience with the psychedelic work?

Chris Bache: As I said, I was trained in Western religious thought, philosophy of religion, so I had all the classical questions people take into philosophy—the love of wisdom, not modern, highly mathematized inquiry. I wanted to understand the structure of reality, why life is the way it is, and what are the working dynamics. What's the rulebook, the manual in this damn thing? I aimed to understand the deep structure of the universe as much as I could. And I learned a lot. The universe, if you approach these things conscientiously, in a way that encourages clear contact and high retention, and if you work on recording and integrating your sessions, it's as if the universe sees you're working to absorb its teachings and starts to pay attention. It took me systematically through levels of consciousness and experience, and I always felt the intelligence of the consciousness I was engaging. Can you describe those levels?

Lauren Taus: Well...

Chris Bache: It took me a while to figure it out after my work ended in '99, when plotting the larger trajectory for the book. I differentiated five levels of consciousness that seemed operational. The first is at the level of personal mind, going beyond personal time-space identity, culminating in what we call ego death. The second took place at the collective level of mind, the species mind, with experiences in the collective unconscious. The third level was the archetypal mind, going deeper beyond the species mind into archetypal reality. Fourth was the one mind, causal reality, where the fundamental theme is oneness. Many degrees and permutations of oneness exist there. In the last five years of my work, I entered what I called the Diamond Luminosity work, the clear light of absolute reality, as Buddhism calls Dharmakaya.

Lauren Taus: How is this not therapeutic? All these journeys and dimensions are so important. I can only grasp some conceptually, but I imagine there must be tremendous relief and ease accessing these dimensions.

Chris Bache: Sure, it's very healing at the soul level, rather than the personal level. Personal healing occurred in relationships and early childhood relationships. I didn’t bring a lot of trauma into this life, so there wasn't much deeply buried in my psyche. At a deeper level, it was healing at the soul level. When one begins to have mystical experiences or experiences of oneness, when you're shown how life works, how reincarnation works, the evolutionary dynamics underpinning existence—from billions of years back and billions forward—these are questions held for many lifetimes. In that respect, it was very healing at a soul level, very satisfying. It gave me a sense of what's going on, enough to relax, and it quieted that existential hunger to understand the game of life better.

Lauren Taus: Yeah, and I know that you had these experiences with your wife as your sitter, correct? She's a psychologist, right? You would do these journeys on Saturday mornings, usually, and music was part of it. Did you ever have one of these high-dose LSD experiences under different conditions or without a sitter?

Chris Bache: I've done sessions without a sitter, but never with these when doing this high-dose work. I've done lower-dose sessions or with gentler substances after this phase of work ended. But when I was doing the high-dose series, I always had a sitter. I was always protected from the world, working in isolation, buffered, and taken care of by a sitter. Music was always involved. I only had contact with my sitter during a session, largely through the music—not much conversation. At these high doses of LSD, verbal functions are knocked out, and you're not in strong contact with the room, so it was very controlled. I called it the Kiva; you climb in, pull up the ladder, and you're there for the experience's duration.

Lauren Taus: Were you able to control or direct the sessions in any way?

Chris Bache: No, not really. It's different working at low doses, where you might hold an idea of something to work on. But with high doses, the most effective thing is to surrender completely to the process, not knowing where it will take you but trusting the intelligence behind it. I didn't try to control it. There were times I was begging it to take me one way, but it would take me another. I just surrendered to it all and let it go.

Lauren Taus: Did your wife ever participate? What was that like for her, for your marriage?

Chris Bache: No, she never participated. She supported me but wasn't fond of the sessions; they weren't natural to her mode of spirituality. Carol had an early orientation towards meditative and contemplative practice. She's a serious Vajrayana practitioner. After our separation in 2000, she completed her three-year, three-month retreat in the classic Vajrayana tradition. She was never attracted to psychedelics—too violent, too intense, with criticisms of it. It wasn't her cup of tea, and we just navigated that difference comfortably.

Lauren Taus: You mentioned the violence of psychedelics. Often we speak about the dying, the death and rebirth. How has that process impacted you personally during these experiences?

Chris Bache: Violence may not be the right word, but in the early stages, powerful kriyas occur—tremendous physical and emotional detoxification, leaving you in convulsions, bouncing on a mattress, releasing physical and emotional stress. There's a certain "violence" in dying, but the deepest breakthroughs follow the deepest purifications, and the deepest deaths yield the deepest ecstatic joys on the other side. So death became my closest ally. I didn't try to avoid harsh confrontations; I facilitated them. I wasn't a fan of suffering, but I valued what was on the other side. Death in a psychedelic context is purification, letting go of reality at one level to gain access to a deeper reality. It became part of the work.

Interviewer: And so I think humanity, like individuals, is growing deeper, better, sweeter, stronger, more courageous. Humanity is growing in that way as well. But we find ourselves at a pivot point. I think we're coming to, and this was—well, let me back up just a little bit. When I began this work, I thought, "Oh, this is about personal healing, personal enlightenment, personal spiritual realization." But after a couple of years, most of my work was not focused on personal work at all. I was drawn into some collective project that I didn't understand at the beginning, and I began to understand only slowly. A lot of the pain I was engaging, as you mentioned, seemed to be collective pain. My sessions were being used by a larger intelligence to clear collective trauma, which I understand is kind of the trauma of history stored within the collective unconscious. There has always been a strong collective theme in my work. Starting in the 23rd session and continuing all the way up through the 70th session, a recurring theme was the evolution and transformation of humanity. There was this recurring series of teachings that I was given: humanity is coming to a turning point, a major breakthrough, entering a great awakening, a profound spiritual transformation—a before and after point in history that's going to change everything. I came to understand this as a change in the fundamental architecture of the collective psyche. When the core blueprint of the human psyche changes, all individual incarnations subsequent to that point in history will actualize their lives in the context of this shifted archetypal blueprint for the human psyche. Just as individuals, working towards mystical union, go through a dark night of the soul—a very intense purification process where they let go of everything keeping them small in order to open to that which is large—humanity seems to be going through the same process. We're having to let go of everything small to give birth to this new human. What are the things which have kept us small? Our hatreds, our divisions, our self-preferential treatment by race, by religion, by class, by country—all the ways we partitioned the planet in these socially constructed, but ultimately unreal, divisions. It's like the sins of our fathers and mothers are coming up on us now. It's as if we're vomiting up the racism, the gender abuse, all these terrible things we've done to each other in the past, in order to permanently remove them from our system and confront our past.

Interviewer: Right, but we're doing this not simply to heal that past. I think we're doing this to lay the foundation, the energetic foundation, for a different communion with the divine—a deeper, more porous communion that will reconnect us not only with each other, but with the universe, allowing a more intimate rapport with it, a rapport that I think has immediate consequences.

Interviewer: I think that since all the intelligence, all the things we could ever want to know, all the problems we could ever want to solve—the answers already exist inside the divine mind, inside divine reality. And of course, when I use the word divine, I don't mean it in a theistic sense or in a culturally defined narrow kind of sense. I mean it in a post-religious kind of broader horizon, on the scale that science has shown us of a universe millions and billions of years old—a creative project, billions of years in the making.

Interviewer: A framework which just dwarfs all the religions of history. But this process is basically taking us into a new opportunity and an unprecedented opportunity, and this means this is a hard time, the time of birth, and I think that's what we are entering. Gestation is long, labor is fast, and we've been gestating the future human for thousands of years through our evolutionary reincarnation dynamic.

Interviewer: But the time of giving birth to this new human is now. It's short, intense, very hard, very painful, but it's magnificent. The project is coming into a time of fruition—a hard time, because it's hard to let go of our habits of the past, but a magnificent time, a time of grace, and I think that's what's happening to us now. We're in a tumultuous time, and we're being pulled fiercely by forces trying to pull us back to the past, back to the old ways, divisions of history, patriarchy, "my religion is better than your religion," "my race is better than your race." And then there are forces pulling us into a future of more intimate equality, more intimate communion with each other, a different relationship with the Earth, a transformed relationship to the Earth itself. It's all on the line right now because this world was built by ego. It was built by a species at a certain level of its psycho-spiritual maturity, where it had matured into self-consciousness but had not pressed its maturity to the point where it really grasped the truth of our interconnectivity, our profound participation in each other's lives and in the life of the planet. We can't solve the problems we're facing at the level of ego. So, we either grow up or we go extinct. And what growing up looks like, I think, has to do with the maturation of the soul—the transition from ego identity to soul identity. The soul lives in the world differently than the ego does. The soul has an awareness of its history and an awareness of its extended relationships with all the people it sees around it. We've been black, white, red, we've been all the colors. We've been all the religions of the world. We've been rich, poor. We've been through that. When the soul matures, there is this tremendous sense of compassion and generative freedom in that process, and that's what I think we need to solve where we're going.

Host: I gotta take that in for a second. Well said, Chris. And there are so many different pieces along the way that really echo in the chambers of the soul. When I look outside, I feel like it's one giant Ayahuasca vomit, and all of it's coming forth and out, and I want it to bring it on so that we can let it go. Yeah, I've also likened this process to giving birth, which, in my mind, if you just look at a woman giving birth and you have no idea what's happening, you might think she's dying.

Host: There's blood and poop and pee and screaming and crying, and it's not pretty.

Interviewer: Yeah, new life, and it's beautiful. And I think that's why I know you're a yoga teacher, and so I think that's why disciplines like meditation and yoga and operating within a therapeutic awareness is really important, because there's a tremendous amount of poison coming through our systems. There's a tremendous amount of conditioning. If we don't have a system where we're purifying ourselves every day, this energy—which is a collective energy and part of our personal story, but it's a collective story—if we don't constantly do something to let it go through us, it can get stuck and get lodged in the system. Never has it been more important, I think, to have regimens of purification, self-transformation as part of our daily habit.

Interviewer: Couldn't agree more. And I've heard you also say, Chris, that sort of the twin anchors for the work that you did were courage and grounding.

Chris Bache: Yeah, courage to face the difficult experiences when they arise and grounding to bring back the insights one is given and ground them into daily life. What we're finding with psychedelics is that it's getting easier and easier to have extraordinary experiences with them, and now we're beginning to pivot to, in some ways, the harder task, or at least the equally hard task, of holding on to those experiences and integrating them literally into our body, minds, and social relationships.

Interviewer: Do you have any particular strategies that you've found to be effective in terms of integration? As a clinician working with psychedelic medicine, I have my worksheets. I invite my clients to journal, create art, dance, do whatever feels relevant to the individual and the learning. But I think commonly, profound experiences are not met with profound life changes. How do we bridge that gap?

Chris Bache: All the things you mentioned are really good, which are basically using all our talent, whatever our particular talents are, to reach out, grab, hold on, talk about them, write about them, create music about them, draw them, and most of all, follow the teachings we're given. In our psychedelic sessions, we are given teachings, instructions, and you have to put those into practice. Practice them every day as you go through. We have to self-modulate. I wouldn't say I've been very good at that, but we have to pace ourselves to know when to slow down, when to speed up, when we've gotten enough that we need to digest it longer rather than taking on more.

Chris Bache: For me, being an intellectual, in the sense that my work is mentally oriented, I spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to understand my experiences and their implications. But someone like Alex Gray, while I'm sure he intellectually absorbs his experiences, look what he does with them—he creates these magnificent works of art. Other people are plunged into social activism to actually bring about the social transformation that has a chance of saving this planet from us, taking us into this great future. Different strategies for different people, but it all involves some type of way of taking the time and paying attention to make those wonderful insights or experiences not just memories but part of our living tissue of our life.

Interviewer: And you've said, I don't remember exactly the language, but these experiences give us a taste of the infinite, and integrating that into the finite body and psyche of an individual is a bit challenging. You've also mentioned that it took you 10 years to really digest what you experienced.

Chris Bache: Yeah, when I came back, when I stopped my work in '99, I thought that I would be able—since I had, by that time, been given so many gifts—I thought I could simply withdraw and nourish myself by the continued digesting and assimilation of those gifts. But what I found was that it was more complicated. That was true, but only half the truth. The other half I had to confront was the tremendous sense of loss I had of not being able to enter deeply into the communion with the universe. There are some beings who can. The great teachers and masters of the meditation traditions have always been my heroes, and they can hold these experiences in an abiding way; that wasn't the case for me. It took me about 10 years to get over my sense of loss and to basically recommit myself to being as I was, who I was, for the remainder of my life and do as much as I could with that time.

Chris Bache: Yeah, and for me, the other thing that made it hard to come back was, of course, our society's rules that we can't talk about these things. I'm a teacher. I love to teach. I couldn't teach from this knowledge. So writing LSD and the Mind of the Universe has been a satisfying part of integrating my work—publicly owning my experiences and beginning to teach on the basis of those experiences. And not just my experiences. If my experiences weren't supported by the psychedelic experiences of others in the community, they would amount to nothing. But given that I'm part of a movement that has tremendous coherence—that's the significance—we are entering into the systematic integration of psychedelics into our culture. That's the exciting part, the teaching moment. Having community, for me, has always been one of the most important integrative tools. People who know me and my journey work know that I was not in San Francisco or LA, where this was fair ground for conversation, and of course, the risks in terms of being a philosophy professor and not feeling safe to talk about what you were experiencing. I'm glad that those conditions have shifted.

Interviewer: They have shifted. I'm glad too, because that cumulative effect—what I found was that it's kind of schizogenic. I divided my life into two halves, but I didn't realize the wear and tear that division would cause. Constantly checking yourself, when you can say one thing to one person and can't say it to another, you're living a divided reality. Those divisions enter your psyche and produce cracks, which I hadn't anticipated. Coming out of the psychedelic closet was, in some ways, as liberating as coming out of any closet. We know what some of these closets have been and how sane-making it is to come out of them.

Interviewer: What do your children think about this work?

Chris Bache: I think they understand it to varying degrees, some more than others. They have the aptitude for it more than others. Some have intellectual reservations. Some completely understand and accept it, others kind of understand it but more from the sidelines, not as participants—a range, there's a range.

Panelist: One of my proudest achievements is converting my father to psychedelic experience in his 70s. My dad is my prescribing MD in my clinical practice. I've developed a relationship with a lot of the Maps team, and Rick Doblin talks about the importance of coming out of the psychedelic closet. I think doing so in family constellations is also really healing and important. I ask now, Chris, you used 500 to 600 micrograms. I know you said you don't recommend it, but what was the gift in that?

Chris Bache: The gift is that it's like taking a month-long meditation retreat and cramming it into five hours. Again, I don't recommend it, but having gone through it, I try to describe it objectively. It's a very accelerated explosion of your life. It's very different than low-dose psychedelic work, which softens the boundaries of your life. Working with very high doses, amplified with intense music and in isolation, blows your psyche completely apart, layer by layer, until you dissolve into the universe. You basically dissolve as yourself and become some stratum of existence, some field of reality. You have continuity of memory in and out, but you dissolve into these fields of consciousness. When you are there, you can do things and learn things that you couldn't in your ordinary time-space reality.

Chris Bache: The second miracle is coming back into your integrated time-space identity. I seem to have a psychological makeup that makes it easier for me to dissolve into those realities and congeal again. Both rhythms are important—the letting go and dissolving into, then coming back and becoming a single human being again.

Interviewer: So profound. Given that you don't recommend that, what would you advise for someone seeking to access some of these experiences?

Chris Bache: I would recommend a more balanced regimen. Low-dose sessions balanced with high-dose LSD sessions, balanced with more body-grounded psychedelics like Psilocybin or Ayahuasca. LSD tends to be a high-altitude psychedelic, very different from Psilocybin, which is much more body-emotional. If I had a breakthrough session, I would balance it with Psilocybin sessions to integrate and absorb the intense energies I'd encountered. Each step into deeper consciousness is a step into a higher level of energy, requiring psycho-physical transformation to maintain cognitive coherence. It's one thing to touch them briefly in a confused way in a session, but to learn to hold that level of awareness requires acclimation.

Chris Bache: After every major breakthrough to another level of consciousness, the next session was challenging, involving cleansing lower-level components to sustain focus. It's an energetic as well as a cognitive process.

Interviewer: For sure, and working on a psycho-spiritual level, you're utilizing body energy, transpersonal space, collective space. What's the story you're telling with your book?

Chris Bache: The story I'm telling is what happened. Among all the psychedelics available and experiences being cultivated, this is one person's experience with one psychedelic used in a specific manner. It's extreme in certain ways. I drilled an unusually deep bore into the universe, moving through many levels quickly. It was radical and challenging to write, but ultimately, I chose to tell the truth of my experiences. Towards the end of my sessions, the universe said, "Let them see me as you've seen me." They'll know whether it fits them. Just show them what you've seen.

Interviewer: Did you write much of it during the course of these experiences, or was it reflections looking back?

Chris Bache: Reflections looking back. All my sessions were recorded within 24 hours. I had about 400 pages of session notes, which I studied, blocked, and diagrammed. It took years to piece together the storyline and decide what to include. I left out personal healings and small things because those weren't the important parts. The philosophically interesting story begins when the process takes you beyond the personal psyche into the deep waters of the psyche. The therapist's story is an important one, but the story I'm telling is a love affair with the universe, with the intelligence of the universe. I call this intelligence my beloved because it activates such profound love in your being. It's the most intimate kind of true becoming one. It's a love affair.

Chris Bache: I wish it were not a love affair, but an abiding marriage, and maybe one day it will be. But these are temporary states. You have to come to terms with that temporalness, but they're temporary states. So, it very much is like an affair. You enter, you make love in some way, and then you come back and try to live it as best you can, inside time and space.

Host: My face hurts from smiling, and my heart feels like it's exploding. I love this love, and it's a really healing love. As someone who works with the individual psyche, you're really contributing to this conversation, and I'm incredibly grateful to share your voice, your wisdom, your experience with my community. So, deep, deep gratitude and reverence for you and your wisdom.

Chris Bache: Thank you. It's a joy to share, and my hope is that, in some way, my story or experiences will support you and everyone else in their stories and experiences. They'll know what to do with it. We're all in this together. Everything you do, everything I do, reaches out into the larger collective network. So, yeah, it's a joy to be of use to people.

Host: Thank you for listening to this episode of Embodied Life, the podcast. You can learn more on my website, www.embodiedlife.com, and stay connected with me on my Instagram, at Lauren.Taos. I look forward to sharing lots more with you. Stay tuned for more inspiring, embodied conversation.