LSD & The Mind of the Universe with Chris Bache

Audience: Welcome to Om Times TV, a division of Om Times Media and Broadcasting.

Audience: Welcome to "What is Going On" for new thought from the edge of Om. Each week on Om Time's flagship radio show, veteran broadcaster, author, and media consultant, Sandy Sedgbeer, conducts thought-provoking interviews with inspirational authors, artists, musicians, scientists, speakers, and filmmakers who are working at the point where spirituality and science meet consciousness at the very edge of Om. Here is your host, Sandy Sedgbeer.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Hello. Throughout the years that 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 didn't know until I read it, and 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 is 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, some 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 aggressive 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 high-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, which was published in 1980, about the protocol differences between psychedelic and low-dose therapy versus psychedelic high-dose therapy. Psychelytic therapy runs doses anywhere from 50 to 150 micrograms, and high-dose psychedelic therapy ranges from 350 to 500. At that time, high-dose psychedelic therapy was being used at Spring Grove Hospital in Baltimore. They were essentially trying to trigger something approximating a Near-Death Experience for terminal patients, offering them a glimpse of where they were going. I thought, if you could do this work three times safely, 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 profoundly incomplete. I was thinking that spiritual awakening is about clearing your karma. Our karma is ultimately finite, and by working with high doses, I was basically, I knew it would be more difficult work and thought of myself as biting off my karma in larger bites and clearing it faster. It turned out that was a false model. Personal transformation was too small to describe it. The doses I took from the literature, I wanted to push my system as hard as I could to be efficient. I mean, 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, that 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, 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, really experiencing one's birth, confronting 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, after going through ego death, access to Transpersonal reality would get easier. But in my sessions, I began to go through periods of vast suffering that got deeper and deeper and larger, terrible suffering and pain, not personal but collective, opening up to the suffering of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people over thousands of years. 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, the vast quantities of trauma humanity has absorbed through history get collected and internalized in the collective psyche, producing 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 the time before.

Chris Bache: Yeah, 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 an intelligence. This continuity across time was dramatic perhaps. I did four years of work, stopped for six years, and then 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, engaging 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 truly 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. So I learned to trust that process.

Sandy Sedgbeer: But the suffering, you know, there were times when I was speaking to you, saying, "My goodness, why are you going back?" It is so painful.

Chris Bache: You go back, not because... 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. Right, with the understanding that the 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. When you go through it, the doors open, and that's why you do it—for the revelations, for the insights, for the visions, for 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 prana. We have to let go of being small to enter into being large, and it's not always easy to let go of being small. It's not just letting go of your personal identity. In therapy, we often focus on ego death, and many mystical traditions focus on ego death, but I found that ego death was just the first of many patterns of death and rebirth. At deeper levels of the journey, you let go of much larger aspects than just egoic structures. 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, yet you are still having sensations of dying and loss of control? What is it that's actually dying in that process?

Sandy Sedgbeer: Yeah, exactly. When we listen, we can't help asking the same question. I don't want to focus too much on individual sessions, but there was one I really wanted 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: That was my ego-death experience, where the universe 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, women of color, women not interested in the meaning of life at all, not educated. It didn't allow me to experience... I was myself but in all these other roles and modes. It terrified me and I fought it, but eventually, when I gave up and surrendered, and allowed myself to become all these women, things shifted. 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 to reclaim former lives as women. I know I have former lives as women. That has never been a question for me. The issue was that where you are going, gender does not exist. Let go. I was being taken into a level of reality where male-female is irrelevant. To do that, I had to be broken of my male identity and allow myself to go into some larger identity. Becoming women was simply part of that breaking process.

Sandy Sedgbeer: The whole 20 years seems to have been quite a massive breaking process. You were doing this alone; 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 your teaching that 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 with deep personal significance. An answer would spontaneously rise from within me, but one grounded in my psychedelic experience, and I couldn't... Some answers, I could attribute to Stan Grof's experiences or other psychedelic research experiences, but some I couldn't lay off. I began to experience a catch in my throat, and my voice would kind of... I would 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. The cost of doing this work was my silence, and I paid that price. But I did not realize at the beginning that committing to dividing my life this way—having a daytime job as a straight professor and a nighttime job as a psychonaut—causes fractures in your psyche that reach deeper than you may have anticipated. In the end, these cracks were only 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 NDAs, reincarnation, channeled works that explain who we are and where we go in the afterlife, and 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, and when we die, we return to that layer that reflects our spiritual development or maturity. It's a social domain with other beings, not only other discarnate beings but also guardians and guides. After you die, you go through a debrief process to process your most recently completed life. You learn what you did poorly and well, going through this process, returning to the spirit's home. Eventually, you go through the choice process of incarnating again. It takes many lifetimes to actualize the full potential of human existence, so there are many tiers of the Bardo domain. My experience affirms this classic vision. I had many experiences of tapping into Bardo reality, a collective reality. I think the ocean of suffering I experienced 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. There is reality outside the Bardo when you graduate from the Earth system and go beyond spiritual echoes of time-space experience, entering into 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, or psychedelic experiences. When you go through a Death-Rebirth process, you often have the sensation of being flooded with light, and it’s almost universal in spiritual traditions. I had encountered light many times in my practice, but when I came to this advanced stage of my work, which started with the 45th session, I encountered a light unlike anything I had encountered previously. It was incredibly bright, beautiful, and clear. It becomes so refined and intense it becomes invisible, just clear. Your mind becomes incredibly clear, and 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, and once I touched it, I wasn't interested in exploring other spiritual dimensions I had encountered before, which included 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, which is one-third of my entire journey, I only touched this reality four times. Every time I touched it, it would trigger more purification and a year's worth of work before I could come back and touch it again.

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

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

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

Chris Bache: Well, I want to be careful here. In a therapeutically focused psychedelic session, or spiritually focused session, you speed up what is happening in life at a slower pace. Reincarnation involves growing and evolving as we die, return to soul consciousness, and are born, contracting down into egoic consciousness, and this continues for countless lifetimes. We choose lives that challenge, stretch, heal, allow us to develop and deepen our capacities over time. I think in psychedelic therapy, that whole process is accelerated. It's true for meditation as well. In meditation, with long, sustained retreats, you're accelerating a natural process that takes place in ordinary life. So you do bite off larger chunks of personal karma, but then it’s no longer about personal enlightenment. Your ties to the human family, to life, to the universe deepen, and you begin to feel in a dance or engagement with this deep, profound life process. You can take it too far, more than is comfortable. You can go so deeply that it's hard to return because it's hard to leave the joy, the clarity, the ecstasy, and come back to time and space. Just because you’ve touched them doesn’t mean you stabilize that awareness inside time and space as the great spiritual teachers do. I emphasize this is a path of temporary immersion. It's temporary. You haven't necessarily accomplished all those evolutionary journeys in one lifetime, but you certainly pointed in that direction.

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

Chris Bache: It is challenging. Yet, there are mitigating processes. The deeper your experience of life's intelligence, the joy of creative intelligence manifesting existence, the more you see the universe as the body of the Divine, the body of God. The universe is a manifestation of intelligence, a profound intelligence. Once you touch that intelligence, it perfectly changes how you see the universe and life. It provides a larger horizon for understanding the human experience. Intellectually, I adopted reincarnation from empirical evidence early in my career, reading Ian Stevenson's work and past-life therapists. But it still takes years to live into a universe pulsing in a reincarnation cycle for individuals and the human species. Experiencing my life in continuity with past lives and the human species as a reincarnation species changes how I view other people, the planet, the galaxy. It implies deeper participation in a mystery. Once known, it’s sad not to sustain those peak experiences. But returning in months to another deep communion with the Beloved mitigated the cost of not returning more deeply into the transcendental side. The full cost became clear when I stopped—when something told me it was time to stop. Only then did I realize the true cost of overextending myself.

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

Chris Bache: We're part of the universe too, so we are part of the body of God, part of the universe's manifestation. Our body is rooted in life’s quantum reality, atomic reality. Our nerves, vascular system, the organs, inseparable from life's manifestation. Our mind is part of the creative intelligence manifesting existence. By going deep, the core truth is Atman is Brahman—the essence of the individual is the essence of the totality. Brahman is one, and we are a fractal manifestation of that oneness. After knowing that, the simplest of things in life still allows reflection on these deeper truths, the deeper pulse of 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 systematic 73-session, 20-year psychedelic series into a unified field of consciousness underlying physical existence. This is completely mind-blowing, so I need a break to reset my mind to ask intelligent questions. We'll be back in a few moments. Stay tuned.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Welcome back. Chris Bache, you've made it quite clear there's an evolutionary dimension to all of this. As you move into the later chapters in the book, discussing the birth of the diamond soul, you begin seeing we're at an evolutionary cusp, and the global systems crisis we're all experiencing is part of that. What is the ultimate purpose here for 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 it's held in most Eastern traditions, is that you grow, become clearer, kinder, more generous. You cultivate deeper and better qualities, and eventually, you reach a spiritual maturing 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 share this essence. There's an explosion of compassion and a deep embrace of the universe. Their interpretation of what happens next is that you are now free to leave time and space—what the Hindus call Moksha, to escape Samsara. It's an up-and-out cosmology, something all religions of the Axial Age, in one way or another, are part of. We don't want to be on Earth. We got here by accident, and it's a veil of tears. We want to get out, either by salvation or enlightenment.

But that leaves unexplained: What is the purpose of the universe? What is the purpose of this magnificent creation? We now understand the size of existence, the magnitude of the universe, how many billions of years went into its evolving and unfolding. It becomes profoundly unacceptable to think the purpose of life is simply to awaken to your true nature and escape into nirvana or some off-planet paradise.

At a critical point in my work, I experienced all my former lives coming into me, like wrapping a white filament of light around a kite spool. At a certain point, they all fused into one consciousness. There was an explosion of this diamond light out of my chest, and I was catapulted into a deeper state of consciousness than ever before. As an individual, I was beyond any frame of reference I had known. This is what I came to call the birth of the diamond soul. As we incarnate repeatedly, sooner or later, the soul, the consciousness we return to when we die, wakes up inside our time-space consciousness. The soul literally wakes up inside time and space, fully conscious—a 100,000-year-old being—not a 100-year-old being, fully conscious with an intuitive awareness of the breadth of human relationships and an ability to enter into deeper communion with the cosmic intelligence.

At that point, we don't leave; we begin to live differently on the planet. I think the entire human species is evolving in this direction, to fully manifest soul consciousness. By soul consciousness, I don't mean separate or isolated, but fully transparent: Shunyata, emptiness. Anatta, no self; all affirmed but a soul-manifesting consciousness. Imagine a planet filled with fully conscious souls. Such a species would create a different life on this planet than we've ever seen before.

Later in my work, I began to have visions about human evolution over a period of about four years. The message was always the same: We are coming to a turning point, a profound spiritual awakening—a before and after in human history. It would involve tremendous collective purification, emptying out the pains of history to lay a foundation for a new infusion of divine energy rising up within us. I was given glimpses of a transformed humanity, but it never showed me how nature would pull this off. Then, in 1995, when I transitioned to the diamond Luminosity phase of my work, I experienced being dissolved into the species. Chris Bache dissolved into the human family. Then, as the human family, I was taken into the future, into what I call deep time. There, I experienced a death and rebirth process impacting the entire human family. Just as an individual undergoes a death-rebirth process during spiritual practice or psychedelic work, history was putting the entire human family into a death-rebirth process.

I experienced an unraveling of life, a profound loss of control. We were losing control of all ordinary assumptions of life, a cascading series of crises breaking us down level by level. I wasn't given any details or calendar of events, but this was a global crisis, triggered by cascading ecological crises. The whole system of life was coming crashing down, and then, just when it was at its worst, when it seemed like an extinction event, the storm passed. Things began to get easier; we began to rebuild civilization, and when we did, everything was different.

We were suffused with new ideas, new ways of thinking, new values, new capacities within the human heart, which generated new social relationships and institutions. Somehow, going through this profound global systems crisis broke us down and broke us open. It tapped us into the universe at a deeper level than ever before. So, when we went through this crisis, we were transformed as a species. What emerged was not just a new civilization or economy, but a new kind of human being—a shift in the plate tectonics of the collective psyche, a shift in the fundamental core of the collective psyche.

Humanity has been through shifts like this in the past; when our brain size increased by 50%, that was an enormous shift. This is a similar deep shift of the collective psyche, and every human being born after this will live their individual awareness within a field of collective awareness different from what we know today.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Should the human being need to evolve?

Chris Bache: I think this is simply the next step in our evolutionary saga. I don't know how long this transition will take—generations, 100 years, several hundred years, or 1,000 years—but evolution won't stop. We've been at this for billions of years, and we'll continue for billions more. There's no telling where we might go next. I see it as the next step: to wake up to what's really going on, to who we really are, and to the depth and breadth of our relationships with life.

Sandy Sedgbeer: It's been 24 years since you stopped. Have you fully integrated all of those experiences?

Chris Bache: No, I haven't. When I finished my sessions and began the digesting process, the universe said to me, "20 years in, 20 years out." I thought it would take 20 years to assimilate 20 years of my journey. As I neared the end, writing "Diamonds from Heaven," I realized that was optimistic. I think it'll take many lifetimes to fully integrate all the gifts I've been given.

Sandy Sedgbeer: In light of what you've learned and seen, what do we most urgently need to address as a species?

Chris Bache: That's a multi-layered question. First, take full responsibility for our shadow, engage it, and clear any obstacles and blocks impeding our compassion and healthy psycho-spiritual functioning. We need to reconnect and rediscover our relationship with the universe and our core identity with it. We need to transcend thousands of years of teachings that place humanity at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, superior to all other life forms. Recognize that our body is divine, part of the manifestation of divinity. Sri Aurobindo thought humanity would reach a spiritually energized state where the body could live forever, perpetually refreshing itself through spiritual practice. Now, I don’t know about that, but it's an intriguing vision of the potential we're activating. What's important is realizing we're just beginning to wake up to what's happening, to who we are. We're about to become mature adults.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Do you feel there's an urgent need to get psychedelics back on the table so their efficacy can be proven and we can start adopting them to help people heal their wounds and evolve more quickly?

Chris Bache: Yes, I think they're very valuable, and we are reclaiming them after a 40-year interruption. These are amplifiers of consciousness. If used wisely, they can help heal life's wounds and recover insights into our true nature and fundamental core identity with life. Psychedelics have profound philosophical significance; it's a different way of doing philosophy by expanding our mind systematically. By bringing many people's experiences together, we develop a trustable set of insights. They have to be used carefully and with respect. The dirt comes out of the system during amplification, and if you're not prepared, it can be terrifying. But if precautions are taken, nothing that emerges can't be beneficial.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Back in the 60s, there was experimentation with them to find out how they could be useful to humanity, but they got shut down. Are you hopeful we'll move forward now and find the benefits?

Chris Bache: I hope so. The psychedelic Renaissance focuses on personal healing using scientific methodologies. Once established, these substances can help heal and also reveal and illumine our consciousness. Indigenous peoples have used ayahuasca, peyote, mescaline, and mushrooms for millennia, to open up spiritual communion. We’re catching up. Indigenous peoples are our teachers in using these substances wisely.

Sandy Sedgbeer: Do you ever wonder why you had these experiences and not someone else?

Chris Bache: Many people have used these substances wisely, so I'm just part of a broad social movement. Perhaps I've pushed the edge more and analyzed it more thoroughly. But I don't see myself as unique. Meeting Stan Grof’s work in graduate school, I knew it was my calling. Eventually, it came back to decisions made in the Bardo before incarnating—my soul's work around education and deep collective healing. Many hidden saints and Bodhisattvas work toward the birth of a new human and help us navigate the global crisis we face. I believe we all chose to be here at this time and in this form, even if we don’t remember why.

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

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

Sandy Sedgbeer: Likewise. LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven is published by Inner Traditions Bear and Company. For more about Chris Bache's articles, events, and books, visit his website at chrisbache.com. That's it for this week. I'm Sandy Sedgbeer. I'll be back with another edition of What Is Going On at the same time next week. Goodbye, and thank you again to Chris Bache.