LSD & the Mind of the Universe (What Is Going OM)

Sandy Sedgbeer: Hello. Throughout the years I've been conducting interviews on science, consciousness, and spirituality, I've read numerous mind-shifting books and heard goodness knows how many extraordinary stories. But the story you're going to hear today is so far beyond remarkable that I've struggled to find words to adequately describe it. All I can say by way of introduction is that what you're about to hear is a story that I and no doubt countless millions of seekers have been waiting for our entire lives. Christopher M. Bache is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. A fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, he's also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and on the advisory board for Grof Transpersonal Training and the Grof Foundation. An award-winning teacher and international speaker, Chris Bache joins me now to discuss his book LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, which has been hailed as a gripping account of an utterly unique and extraordinary hero's journey that opens our minds and hearts to a new vision of our universe and ourselves as inseparable from the ineffable being that we have called God. Chris Bache, welcome.

Chris Bache: Hi, Sandy. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Sandy Sedgbeer: This is a long-awaited interview, I have to say. Chris, so little background: in 1979 you took the first step on a life-changing journey to explore your mind and the mind of the universe as deeply and systematically as possible, with the help of LSD. If you had known then that it would take 20 years of excruciating pain, suffering, bliss, and intense purification, plus many more years of digesting, processing, organizing, and writing to publish this book, would you still have put yourself through it?

Chris Bache: That's a good question. I'm not sure that I would. I think knowing now what I—if I had known then what I know now, I would have been gentler on myself. I would have used a gentler protocol, balancing high versus low doses, balancing LSD with Psilocybin and Ayahuasca. I still would have taken the journey, but it might not have been as aggressively as I did.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Yeah, yeah. Well, knowing the outcome, you can't really say No, I wouldn't have done it. So you experienced 73 higher-dose LSD sessions following protocols established by Stanislav Grof, with the intention of engaging hyper-intensive states in a way that would allow the initial chaos at each new level to clear and also allow your own biophysical and psychological systems to adapt. How did you know the precise dosage to accomplish that in the way that you wanted to?

Chris Bache: Well, Stan was very clear in his early books and in LSD Psychotherapy, published in 1980, the protocol differences between psycholytic and low-dose therapy versus psychedelic high-dose therapy. Psycholytic running doses anywhere from 50 to 150 micrograms and high-dose psychedelic therapy between 350 to 500. At that time, high-dose psychedelic therapy was being used at Spring Grove Hospital in Baltimore, and they were trying to trigger something approximating a Near-Death Experience for people who were dying, they were terminal patients, and trying to give them a glimpse of where they were going. And I thought, well, if you could do this work three times safely, then you could do it more than three times safely. I chose to work with high doses of LSD for a couple of reasons. One, I had a false model of what the project was. The model I had was a model of personal transformation. I thought this was about my personal healing, my personal spiritual awakening. That turned out to be a profoundly incomplete model. I was thinking that spiritual awakening is about clearing your karma. Our karma ultimately is finite, and by working with high doses, I knew it would be more difficult work, but I thought of myself as biting off my karma in larger bites and clearing it faster. Turns out that that's a false model. Personal transformation was too small a concept to describe it, and the doses I took from the literature, I wanted to push my system as hard as I could to be efficient. I was in a dual-career marriage. Getting time for these sessions was very complicated. I had to balance a lot of schedules, and I wanted to get as much done in every session as I could. Again, what I learned along the way is because consciousness is unified at its source, when you hyper-stimulate consciousness, you're not just hyper-stimulating your personal field of consciousness. You're hyper-stimulating some portion of the unified field of consciousness. Therefore, the dynamics that get activated, the dynamics of healing and purification and illumination, are much larger than personal dynamics.

Sandy Sedgbeer: At what point did you realize this wasn't going to be a personal journey at all, that there was so much more going on?

Chris Bache: Well, for about the first two and a half years, it followed very much the material that Stan Grof had been tracking. My first two and a half years of work were very much perinatal in nature, going through the death-rebirth process, re-experiencing one's birth, experiencing a profound confrontation with death and the meaninglessness of existence. But then this culminated in a crushing ego-death experience and a liberating ego-death experience. According to Stan's early descriptions, what I was expecting after going through ego death, access to transpersonal reality would get easier. But what happened in my sessions is that I began to go through periods of vast suffering that got deeper and deeper and larger, terrible suffering and pain, not personal, collective, opening up to the suffering of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of years of time. At first, I thought this represented a deepening of ego death, but it went on for so long and involved so many people that eventually I had no alternative but to conclude that what was being healed or transformed in this process was not my personal psyche, but some aspect of the collective psyche of humanity. Just as personal trauma gets internalized in our personal psyche and can produce pathology, likewise, the vast quantities of trauma that humanity has absorbed through history get collected and internalized in the collective psyche and produce a kind of social pathology at the collective level. Something was using my sessions to address and heal to some degree this collective trauma.

Sandy Sedgbeer: So there didn't seem to be anything random about this journey, because sometimes you didn't have a session for long periods, even years, but when you went back, you always seemed to catch up where you were at the time before.

Chris Bache: That was my sense of it too, that I was engaging in a long and sustained conversation, communion, initiation, with a larger consciousness. The size and scale of this consciousness kept deepening and changing as my work continued. I always felt myself engaging in intelligence. This was most dramatic, perhaps, this continuity across time. I did four years of work, I stopped for six years, and then I started again for another ten years of work. When I stopped, I was working on the ocean of suffering material in the purification phase of a session I was engaged in this ocean of suffering. I stopped for six years, six years later in a completely different time of my life, with different expectations. When I went into the work again, the ocean of suffering started exactly where it had stopped and continued, indicating clearly that the intelligence I was engaging was guiding what was happening. It was in charge of my sessions, and all I did was really open up, isolate myself from the world, open up and follow wherever it wanted to take me. I found that if I trusted myself completely and surrendered to where it would take me, I would go through these intense purification processes or death processes. Eventually, it would culminate in some type of crisis or breakthrough, and then I would be spun into ecstatic, revelatory experiences for the remainder of the session, and the next session would begin the cycle again. I just learned to trust that process.

Sandy Sedgbeer: But the suffering, you know, I was listening to it on Audible as well as reading the book. And there were times when I was speaking to you and saying, "My goodness, why are you going back?" You know, it's so painful.

Chris Bache: You go back not because—you know, I don't like pain, who likes pain for nothing like that? You go back for the joy that's waiting on the other side of pain. You go back with the understanding that this suffering, this pain, is in some way a purification process, which I did not understand the full scope of at the time. But I trusted Stan's work, and it was affirmed in my work that this is a purification process, and that when you go through it, then the doors open, and that's why you do it, for the revelations, the insights, the visions, the opportunity to enter into such deep and profound communion with the universe.

Sandy Sedgbeer: So the suffering is the gateway.

Chris Bache: It's a gateway. You know, we have to let go of being small in order to enter into being large. It's not always easy to let go of being small, but it's not just letting go of your personal identity. In therapy, we often focus on ego death, and many of the mystical traditions focus on ego death, but what I found was that ego death was just the first of many patterns of death and rebirth. What one is letting go of at deeper levels of the journey are much larger, much deeper than just egoic structures. And it's such a mystery that at the end of the book, I actually have an appendix where I ask the question, "What dies when you're so far beyond ego death, and yet you are still having sensations of dying, loss of control?" What is it that's actually dying in that process?

Sandy Sedgbeer: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And when we listen to it, we can't help asking the same question. So I don't want to focus too much on individual sessions, but there was one that I really did want to bring up, and it's actually a whole collection of sessions where you experience life as many different women in turn. What do you think was the purpose of those experiences and how did they impact you?

Chris Bache: Well, that was my ego death experience, where the universe, after about the ninth or 10th session, just broke me like a twig. It took my identity and snapped it. I had begun the day as a white, Ivy League-educated philosopher, passionately concerned with the meaning of existence, and the universe forced me to become the exact opposite of that. I became women. I became women of color, women who were not interested in the meaning of life at all, who were not educated, and it did not allow me to experience—I was myself, but I was myself in all these other roles, other modes. It terrified me. It scared the bejeebers out of me, and I fought it. But eventually, when I gave up and surrendered, and allowed myself to become all these women, suddenly things shifted, and I was taken under the arm of the Great Mother and initiated into the lives of hundreds of women, the more positive side of female experience, given many experiences of women's lives, conceiving, giving birth, loving husbands, loving children. I think the fundamental message here was not "reclaim your former lives as women." I know I have former lives as women; that has never been a question for me. I think the issue was where you are going, gender does not exist. Let go. I was being taken into a level of reality where male and female is irrelevant, but to do that, I had to be broken of my male identity. I had to allow myself to go into some larger identity, and becoming women was simply part of that breaking process.

Sandy Sedgbeer: The whole 20 years seems to have been quite a massive breaking process. I mean, you were doing this, nobody knew about it except your wife. You weren't allowed to talk about it to anyone, or you didn't allow yourself to. You were teaching mature students philosophy, and often there were aspects of things that you were teaching where your experiences would have been the perfect example to offer them, but you couldn't do that. What was that like for you?

Chris Bache: It wasn't so bad in the beginning, but it got increasingly difficult as I went on, especially when I could feel a question coming from students that had personal deep significance to them, and an answer would spontaneously rise from my person, but an answer that was grounded in my psychedelic experience, and I couldn't—some of them I could lay off on Stan Grof's experiences or other psychedelic research experiences, but some of them I couldn't, and I could not bring my own psychedelic experiences forward. I began to experience a catch in my throat. My voice would actually lose control for a split second, and it would sound like a little bark coming out of my voice. It was embarrassing. I was literally strangling on what I wanted to say and was not allowed to say, and that became difficult because the cost of doing this work I knew would be my silence, and I paid that price, but I did not realize in the beginning that when you commit to dividing your life in this way, to have a daytime job as a straight professor and then a nighttime job as a psychonaut, that it causes fractures in your psyche which reached deeper than you may have anticipated in the beginning, and in the end, these cracks were only able to be healed when I finally came out of the psychedelic closet and began to allow myself to speak openly about these experiences.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Most people these days, especially in the spiritual arena, are familiar with near-death experiences, reincarnation, channeled works that explain who we are and where we go in the afterlife. You've taught courses on these yourself, but your experience took you way beyond where anyone has gone before. It gave you a whole new vision of the Bardo. Tell us a bit about that.

Chris Bache: Well, the classic understanding of the Bardo, I think, was affirmed in my sessions. There are many, many layers of spiritual reality. When we return to that layer, it reflects our spiritual development or maturity, and it's a social domain. There are other beings there—not only other incarnate beings or discarnate beings, but also guardians and guides. The basic idea is, after you die, you go through a debrief process in which you process your most recently completed life. You learn what you did poorly and what you did very well. You go through this process, and then you go through a return. Coming to the world of spirit, to returning home, and eventually you go through the choice process of incarnating again. Because the evolution of the soul is so vast and covers such a wide spectrum of development, it takes many lifetimes to actualize the full potential of a human existence. There are many tiers of the Bardo domain, and my experience affirms this classic vision. I had many experiences of tapping into Bardo reality. It's a collective reality. I think the ocean of suffering is analogous to the Buddhist concept of the hell realm. I tapped into levels analogous to the high deity realm in the Buddhist cosmology of the Six Lokas, or the six realms. There's also a reality outside the Bardo when you graduate from the Earth system, when you move beyond that spiritual echo of time-space experience and enter into the reality beyond all Bardo existence, correlated with what I would describe as the diamond luminosity, the domain of diamond luminosity.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Why do you call it that?

Chris Bache: Because that was the experience. One encounters light, often in deep spiritual experiences, near-death experiences, and psychedelic experiences. When you go through a death-rebirth process, often you have the sensation of being flooded with light, encountering light. It's almost universal in spiritual traditions. I had experienced light in many forms and many times in my practice, but when I came to this advanced stage of my work, starting with the 45th session, I encountered a light unlike anything I had encountered previously. It was incredibly bright, incredibly beautiful, and clear. The hardest thing to describe—when I say light, it almost becomes so refined and intense, it becomes invisible. It's just clear. Your mind is just so incredibly clear. I came to understand what the Buddhists meant when they said touching this for one second undoes thousands of years of living in the shadows of karma. It is radically pure, clear. Once I touched that, I wasn't interested in exploring any of the other dimensions of spiritual reality that I had encountered before, which include collective dimensions, the collective unconscious, archetypal reality, even dimensions of causal oneness. This was something completely different. In the last five years of my work, in 26 sessions—one third of my entire journey—I only touched this reality four times. Every time I touched it, it would trigger more purification, more detoxification, and a year's work before I was able to come back and touch it again.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Wow. And was that something, having touched it, that kept you going, had you seeking it again and again?

Chris Bache: Absolutely. The last third of my work, that was my agenda, to go back, to do whatever I needed to do to go back into that reality.

Sandy Sedgbeer: So if I understand this right—you know, I haven't read a huge amount about the Bardo—what you're saying is that there are these different layers, almost stages, and over probably millennia, we gradually go through them, but you went through them, you know, in that much time. What kind of effect does that have on someone?

Chris Bache: Well, I want to be careful here. I think what happens in a therapeutic, spiritually focused psychedelic session is that you speed up what is happening in life at a slower pace in a natural process. So reincarnation, as I understand it, we are growing, evolving. We die, we return to soul consciousness. We're born, we contract down into egoic consciousness. We die, we go back into soul consciousness. We keep this up over long periods. We choose lives that challenge us, stretch us, heal us, allow us to develop new talents and capacities. What happens in psychedelic therapy is that it accelerates that process. This is true for meditation. In meditation, when you do long, sustained retreats, you speed up the process happening at a slower pace in ordinary life. You bite off larger pieces of personal karma, but then something else takes over. It's not about personal enlightenment or development; your ties to the human family, the family of life, the universe deepen. You feel a sense of dance or engagement in this deep life process. You can take it so deeply, you can be dissolved so completely into vast flows of consciousness and dimensions of existence that it's hard to come back out. It's hard to leave the joy, the clarity, and ecstasy and return to time and space. Just because you've touched them and known them doesn't mean you can stabilize that awareness back inside time and space. It doesn't mean you've accomplished what great spiritual teachers have—abiding one foot in, one foot out in those realities. I emphasize this is a path of temporary immersion. Temporary. Just because you've experienced oneness or transcendence doesn't mean you're as fully developed spiritually as someone who can abide there. So I wouldn't say I accomplished all those evolutionary journeys, but I certainly did something pointing in that direction.

Sandy Sedgbeer: But you also can't unknow what you know, and when you come back knowing what you know, it must be hell to move into a world so far away from that, that's just falling apart on every level. How do you cope with that? It's such a dichotomy.

Chris Bache: It is challenging. There are mitigating processes too. The deeper your experience of the intelligence and joy of the creative intelligence manifesting existence, the more you see the universe as it is. The universe is the body of the Divine, the body of God. It's a manifestation of profound intelligence, and once you touch that intelligence—you know what intelligence looks and feels like—you recognize it in people. This is cosmic intelligence that overwhelms you with its brilliance, wisdom, and love, beyond anything known in this lifetime. Once you experience those, it changes how you see the universe, life. It gives a larger horizon to understand the human experience. I adopted reincarnation on empirical evidence early in my career. I read Ian Stevenson's work, early work on past life therapists. I was intellectually convinced reincarnation was a fact, but it takes years to live into a universe pulsing in a reincarnation cycle, not just for the individual, but for the entire human species. I had experiences understanding my life as a continuity from past lives. At a deeper level, I had experiences of the human species pulsing generation by generation, as a reincarnating species, with individual challenges and karma as a fractal manifestation of larger species challenges. When you have those experiences, you look at others, the planet, the galaxy differently. You feel a deeper participation in a mystery you may not understand, but you can feel the joy because you've touched the intelligence behind it, making it more joyful to enter. There's sadness you can't sustain those peak experiences, but in another month or two, I was doing this about four or five times a year, I'd go back into that reality often enough, drinking deeply again. The full cost of going deep didn't emerge until I stopped my sessions. At the end, the universe told me it was time to stop, and I felt it. But only then, not returning for communion with my beloved, did I realize the full over-extension's cost into the transcendental existence.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Before we go to break, there's one question. You said the universe is the body of God. What are we?

Chris Bache: We are part of the universe, so we are part of the body of God too. We are part of the manifestation of the intention of the universe to create our mind, just as our body is rooted in the quantum reality of life and the atomic reality, and the whole evolutionary story is built into the nerves and vascular systems and organs of our body. So we become inseparable from life as it manifests in the galaxy, planet, continent. Likewise, our minds are part of the creative intelligence manifesting existence. That's why, when we go deep into our minds, we drop down into the curse's depth of our personal mind, finding no floor at our mind's bottom. We fall through into the species' mind, through into the universe's mind. When you go that deep, the Hindu teaching "Atman is Brahman," the individual is the totality's essence—becomes most natural, core truth. Likewise, a core truth is oneness. Brahman is one. We are a fractal manifestation of that oneness. Even when you go back to paying bills and physical world tasks, stepping back reappreciates these deeper truths pulsing through life.

Sandy Sedgbeer: We're going to take a short break now. I'm Sandy Sedgbeer. My guest today is eminent philosopher and theologian, speaker, and author Christopher M. Bache, whose latest book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, rigorously chronicles his intensive, systematic, 73-session, 20-year psychedelic series of journeys into a unified field of consciousness that underlies all physical existence. This is completely mind-blowing, so I need a break just to reset my mind so that I can ask intelligent questions. We'll be back in a few moments. Stay tuned. Welcome back. Chris Bache, you've made it quite clear that there is an evolutionary dimension to all of this. And as you move into the later chapters in the book, where you talk about the birth of the diamond soul, you begin to see that we are at an evolutionary cusp, and the global systems crisis that you know we're all experiencing right now is part of that for what point? What is the ultimate, you know, purpose here of all of this happening?

Chris Bache: Let me break that down into two parts, the classical vision, first on reincarnation. The classical vision of reincarnation, as held in most Eastern traditions, is that you grow, become clearer, kinder, more generous, and cultivate deeper and better qualities. Eventually, you come to a spiritual maturity where your consciousness opens to the core of your being. You awaken to the fact that the essence of your nature is, in fact, the essence of all nature, and that all beings and you share the same nature. There's an explosion of compassion and a deep embrace of the universe. This leads to what they interpret as freedom to leave time and space—what Hindus call Moksha, to escape Samsara. This is an "up and out" cosmology.

The religions of the Axial Age, in one way or another, share this pattern of escaping Earth, viewing it as a veil of tears, seeking either salvation or enlightenment to leave. But it leaves unexplained the purpose of the universe and our magnificent creation. Now, with a deeper understanding of existence's magnitude—billions of years of evolving and unfolding—it seems profoundly shortsighted to think life’s purpose is awakening to your true nature only to escape into nirvana or an off-planet paradise.

At a critical point, I experienced all my former lives converging within me, like wrapping string around a kite spool until those lives fused into one consciousness. This resulted in an explosion of diamond light from my chest, catapulting me into a deeper state of consciousness than ever before. I was an individual, but beyond any previous frame of reference—a manifestation I came to call the birth of the diamond soul.

I believe, with repeated incarnations, the soul-consciousness we return to when we die wakes up and manifests within our time-space consciousness. You literally become a fully conscious, ancient being, intuitively aware of human connectedness and able to enter deeper communion with cosmic intelligence. Instead of leaving, you live differently on this planet. I think humanity as a species is evolving in this direction—into full manifestation of soul consciousness. By this, I mean not isolated, but transparent, embodying Shunyata, Anatta affirming a manifesting soul-consciousness.

Imagine a world where a species filled with fully conscious souls creates a different life on this planet. During four years of my work, amidst everything else happening, I received visions of human evolution, consistently conveying we're reaching a profound turning point—a spiritual awakening, a before-and-after in human history, involving a tremendous collective purification. This purification serves to empty past pains and lay the foundation for a new divine energy infusion rising within us.

Though I glimpsed the future human—a transformed humanity—I wasn't shown how nature would achieve it. Then, in 1995, I entered the diamond Luminosity phase, working at advanced levels. Instead of re-entering diamond Luminosity, I dissolved into the species and was taken into the future, into what I call deep time. There, I experienced a death-rebirth process impacting humanity, as history propelled the human family into a Death-Rebirth process. We faced unraveling life and profound loss of control, cascading crises breaking us down. Without details or timeline, it was clear all systems of life were collapsing. Just when all seemed lost, when an extinction event felt imminent, the peak of the storm passed. We began to rebuild civilization. Our existence shifted, infused with new ideas, values, and capacities for social and institutional renewal, transforming us profoundly as a species. We produced not just a new civilization but literally a new kind of human. This shift in the collective psyche is akin to when our brain size increased 50%—a deep shift ensuring every human born thereafter possesses a different collective awareness.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Such a being has no need to evolve.

Chris Bache: I think this is simply the next step in our evolutionary saga. The time for this transition is uncertain—it might take generations, possibly hundreds or even a thousand years, though that seems too long. We're either transitioning to this new form or facing extinction. Too close to extinction becomes an evolutionary accelerator. Whatever the duration, evolution will not stop; it's ongoing for billions of years. We can't predict where we'll go next, but this represents waking up to who we really are, the depth of our relationships with life, and continuing onwards.

Sandy Sedgbeer: It's been 24 years since you stopped. Do you feel you’ve fully integrated those experiences?

Chris Bache: No, I haven't. When I concluded my sessions, my meditation revealed it would take 20 years to integrate 20 years of my journey. By the end, writing "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" suggested that was an optimistic estimate. It may take many lifetimes to integrate all I've been given.

Sandy Sedgbeer: In light of what you’ve shared and learned, what should we address urgently as a species?

Chris Bache: There are many layers. First, we must take responsibility for our shadow—engage and clear impediments to compassion and holistic psycho-spiritual functioning. Rediscovering our relationship with the universe and recognizing humanity is not the apex of evolution but part of a continuum is essential. We must transcend anthropocentric views that see other life forms as inferior or exploitable, renew our communion with spiritual and physical realities, and acknowledge our bodies as divine manifestations. Sri Aurobindo believed a sufficiently psychoplastic human body could eventually live forever, suggesting 300 years of spiritual practice could catalyze such self-renewal. We're children just beginning to awaken to a reality billions of years in development, but I think we're on the cusp of maturity.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Is there an urgent need to bring psychedelics back into practice to aid healing and accelerate evolution?

Chris Bache: Yes, I think so. Fortunately, we're reclaiming them after a 40-year pause. Psychedelics amplify consciousness, so it’s about how we use that amplification carefully. They can help heal modern culture-induced conditions like PTSD, depression, and addiction. Beyond healing, they offer profound philosophical significance, opening insights into our true nature and interconnection with life. This kind of expanded experience—analyzed collectively—can provide trustable insights into our condition. Used wisely, psychedelics face the "dirt" the amplification brings with courage, grounding, and skill to benefit us profoundly.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Embracing psychedelics was shut down in the '60s. Do you think this time will be different?

Chris Bache: I hope so. The psychedelic Renaissance now focuses on personal healing, utilizing science to demonstrate benefits, establishing them as legitimate subjects of discourse. Indigenous peoples have long used ayahuasca, peyote, and mushrooms for spiritual communion—civilizations we're now learning from, catching up to understanding their profound uses.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Have you ever questioned why you had these experiences and not others?

Chris Bache: Many have used these substances wisely, having similar experiences. I'm just part of a larger social movement, perhaps pushing edges harder or noting more details due to my background. But fundamentally, this connects back to pre-birth decisions in the Bardo, aligning my soul's work around collective-level healing. Many hidden saints and Bodhisattvas invest their lives in facilitating the birth of the future human and navigating our global crises. We're each here by choice, without compulsion, to participate in this journey.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Chris Bache, thank you for sharing your incredible journey with us and the world.

Chris Bache: Thank you, Sandy. It’s been an honor and pleasure to discuss with you today.

Sandy Sedgbeer: For more information about Chris Bache, his articles, events, and books like "The Living Classroom," "Dark Night, Early Dawn," and "Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life," visit his website at chrisbache.com. That's it for this week. Goodbye from me, Sandy Sedgbeer, and thank you again to Chris Bache.