---
title: What 73 High-Dose LSD Sessions Taught Christopher Bache
slug: 2023-12-05-what-73-high-dose-lsd-sessions-taught-christopher-bache
date: 2023-12-05
type: lecture
channel: Numinus Network
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  name: Christopher M. Bache
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**Steve Thayer: ** Steve Thayer, welcome back to Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers, the podcast devoted to exploring the frontiers of psychedelic medicine and what it takes to cultivate a healthy mind, body, and spirit. As always, Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers is brought to you by Numinous. I'm Dr. Steve Thayer, and today, my co-host Dr. Reed Robinson and I are joined by Dr. Christopher Bache, PhD. Chris is a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, adjunct faculty at the California Institute for Integral Studies, emeritus fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training. He's the author of several books, but the one that prompted us to reach out to him for this interview is *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*, an account of what Chris experienced and learned from 73 high-dose LSD journeys that he embarked on over the course of 20 years. In today's conversation, we explore Chris's LSD session protocol, the difference between using psychedelics for what he calls cosmological exploration versus spiritual enlightenment or even psychological healing. We talk about how Chris processed and integrated his very intense experiences, what he learned about reincarnation, evolution at the collective and individual levels, what humans need to do to survive the mounting existential threats we face, what he means by Diamond Luminosity and Diamond Soul, and of course, much, much more. Chris's book had a profound impact on me. His disciplined, scholarly approach to psychedelic exploration, combined with his ability to articulate and teach what for most of us would be an overwhelming or ineffable experience, has resulted in a must-read, in my opinion, for anyone who thinks deeply about questions like, Who are we? What are we doing here, and where we might go from here? If you've ever listened to an episode of Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers and thought to yourself, you know, I wonder where I could find good training on how to use psychedelics in a clinical practice. Well, wonder no longer. Numinous has several excellent psychedelic therapy training programs. Click on the link in the show notes, or go directly to numinous.com/hour-training-selection, and use the code PDF10 for 10% off selected trainings. You hear Reed and I talk a lot about the psychedelic clinical trial work that Numinous does. If you or someone you know is interested or might be interested in being a participant in a psychedelic clinical trial, you can click on the link in the show notes, or go directly to numinous.com/research to learn about the trials we're currently running. If you'd like to support the show, you can do so by leaving us a rating and review in places like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you're watching on YouTube, please click the like button, subscribe to the channel, or share the episode with somebody you think might enjoy it. Please enjoy our conversation with Dr. Chris Bache. Welcome back, folks, to Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers. Reed and I are very honored today to be joined by Dr. Chris Bache. Chris, thank you so much for joining us.

**Chris Bache: ** It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

**Steve Thayer: ** So why don't we just start, Chris, by introducing yourself to our audience? You can share as much or as little as you'd like, just to give us some context.

**Chris Bache: ** Well, I'm a retired professor of religious studies. I've made my living teaching in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, which is a state university in Northeast Ohio. What brings me to this program, I guess, is the book I published three years ago called *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*, which is a strange book for a professor of religious studies to have written. So my story is that right at the very beginning of my academic career, in 1978, I had just finished my graduate work at Brown in philosophy of religion, and I met the work of Stan Grof. I immediately recognized that his research into LSD and psychedelics was extraordinarily important—not just for clinical psychology and for therapy, but for philosophy, which interested me the most. And so, even though it was illegal, I began a quiet, private psychedelic practice, which ended up continuing for 20 years. I worked for four years, then stopped for six years for reasons I describe in the book, and then worked for another 10 years. I then spent another 10 years digesting the experiences—from 1979 to 1999, when I was 32 to 50—and then spent the next 20 years digesting those experiences, trying to absorb them, trying to extrapolate and clarify the cosmological implications of those experiences. Then I published *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. So that's a brief sketch of what brings me here.

**Steve Thayer: ** Yeah, and I remember, as I was reading your book, I was thinking, what a heroic undertaking. I don't know if "heroic" is a word that lands for you, Chris, but I mean heroic in the sense of a hero's journey. The things you describe in the book, the experiences that you had, are not for the faint of heart. I've heard you say that you don't necessarily recommend the protocol, the things that you did, to others, and I was curious as to why.

**Chris Bache: ** Well, first, let me describe the protocol. Everything I did was within a strict therapeutic protocol. I followed Stan's protocols from his book, *LSD Psychotherapy*: traditional, lying down, eye shades, earphones, listening to very carefully choreographed music to guide the session. I was always in private, always protected, always with a sitter—who was my wife at the time, a clinical psychologist—established in what I call the psychedelic Kiva, a Kiva of spiritual practice. For reasons we can go into, but don't need to right now, I chose to work with very high doses of LSD. After about three sessions at 250 micrograms, I chose to work at 500 to 600 micrograms, which is the upper limit; it's the body saturation point. I naively thought this work was about personal transformation, even personal spiritual awakening. All the spiritual literature described one's karma as ultimately finite, even though it may involve causation patterns from multiple incarnations, but ultimately, it's finite. So I thought therapeutic work is a process of clearing the conditioning of my psyche and essentially engaging and clarifying and purifying karma. I thought if I worked with large doses of LSD, I could go through this faster if I could manage the intensity of the work, essentially taking bigger bites of karma in every session. Well, I found out down the road that all those assumptions were wrong. This work was not about personal transformation—not working at this high dose level. If you're working with a gentler psychedelic or in lower doses, then the activation and purification and healing might be constricted to personal levels. But with a very powerful psychedelic, like this much LSD, you amplify consciousness so deeply that what may have begun as personal transformative work becomes engaged in collective processes—related to the collective unconscious, the species mind. From there, you're off to the races into deeper levels of consciousness, cycles of death and rebirth. Not just ego death—ego death is the first of many deaths you face on this journey—but as you go through one level of consciousness after another, systematically, you face other forms of death that are more foreign than ego death. That's why I don't recommend the protocol. It's extremely demanding and becomes the center focus of your life—to engage these deep states, navigate them, absorb them, integrate them into your life, your social life, and your body. I also thought there was an endpoint to this journey—another false assumption—thinking it was about reaching enlightenment or oneness with God, or entering the primal void. I had all those experiences and discovered many levels of divinity and even the pure void. About 15 years into my experience, deep into the universe, in what I call the Diamond Luminosity domain, I realized the universe is infinite. You'll never reach its end; it's too vast. Its divinity is so great. If I were to start over, I'd be gentler, balancing low-dose and high-dose, organic and synthetic psychedelics. The real goal is to open yourself to the love, intelligence, and wisdom of the universe, digest it, hold onto it, and let it guide you—not to reach a final destination.

**Reid Robison: ** That's beautiful, Chris. Thank you for sharing. So many questions come up, but one thing I wanted to ask is, what are the risks of going straight to those higher, deep states, bypassing some of the healing work or lower-dose work? Can you share more about how you might use those dose ranges as tools?

**Chris Bache: ** Well, any work with psychedelics, especially with higher doses in a therapeutic protocol, can be challenging. It requires good psychological screening to ensure your psyche is ready. Some people should never go near psychedelics, and some should work gently, if at all. I have a constitution that can flow into expansive states and smoothly coalesce at the end of the day. Not everyone is wired like this. All the clinical criteria must be met for this type of work. With high doses, you can bypass certain issues and get into situations where you chase experiences and bypass others, but that wasn't my experience. I spent the first 10 sessions, or two and a half years, in grueling work at what Stan calls the perinatal level, the interface between personal and collective or transpersonal consciousness. You relive your birth, deal with existential crises—you grind through deeply. There was personal healing along the way, often at the beginning and ending of sessions because, in the peak after the first few years, I worked in states beyond my personal consciousness and even space-time. Along the way, there was lots of healing in different parts, and late in sessions, some very quick healings. With lower doses, these would have occurred earlier. I found in my instance, it wasn't about refusing to confront issues—what you confront at deep levels is much more severe than anything personal. I entered this work without personal trauma. I had a reasonable start in life—no deep wound. The deeper wound is the one every human carries: stabilizing within time and space, understanding why we are here, discovering our reason for being, entering into communion with a saturated intelligence. My personal wounds weren't healed until late because they anchored me in the larger consciousness fields, allowing some healing of the collective psyche. It was part of my soul's work, something I signed up for. There are many people doing this work, nothing special or unique in my choice. 

**Reid Robison: ** It's indeed a brave hero's journey, as Steve mentioned. I'm curious about the disposition you mentioned; it plays a role in people we work with. How much is nature versus nurture? How much can you cultivate an ability to expand and hold those states without shattering or becoming overwhelmed?

**Chris Bache: ** I'm sure we can learn to enter these states more skillfully. Some have a natural aptitude, but we can practice these states, enter carefully, process, and debrief carefully. It establishes the baseline for future non-ordinary states. Integration and careful debriefing, recording your session, processing it, and sitting with the content really matter. In my work, given the highly amplified states, I kept many variables stable: same setting, substance, dose, sitter, recording process, even the same region. Stabilizing variables created a container for deepening communion with the universe. These experiences depend partly on the psychedelic's headroom. Different substances like Psilocybin, Ibogaine, MDMA, 5-MEO-DMT, LSD—all have qualities and spectrums. I kept breaking through levels of consciousness—stabilizing the contact with the universe allowed for deep progression over time. Working with LSD provided cosmological headroom I wouldn't have achieved with something like Psilocybin.

**Reid Robison: ** And how did your wife feel about trip sitting? Kudos to her for that dedication. Was it hard to convince her, or was she aligned with you in this philosophical adventure?

**Chris Bache: ** Carol did it out of love for me. She wasn't particularly drawn to psychedelics; they were too fast for her taste. She's deeply spiritual, and after 24 years of marriage, we separated but are still friends. We stay in touch for our children, especially. She's completed a three-year, three-month retreat in the Vajrayāna tradition, a serious practitioner with a lifelong deep spiritual orientation. Her grounding while I delved deep was invaluable. It wasn't her work but was mine, and she supported that.

**Reid Robison: ** That's great. Thanks for sharing.

**Steve Thayer: ** Yeah, Chris, I'm really captivated by your scientific-like approach—deliberate and disciplined. I imagine, by controlling variables, you returned to the same drill site, getting a deep core sample of the universe, as opposed to pockmarking the surface without much attention to set and setting or experimenting with many substances.

**Chris Bache: ** There's no right or wrong in using psychedelics; many valid ways exist. I represented one approach, trained as a philosopher of religion, inclined towards precision and analysis. Not fully knowing what I was getting into, I left breadcrumbs to potentially work my way back out. Turns out, that concern wasn't needed, but it was ingrained in me.

**Steve Thayer: ** As a trained philosopher of religion, it seems your views on divinity evolved. I read you were once atheistically inclined agnostic. How did your relationships to the Divine change after these experiences?

**Chris Bache: ** I essentially studied my way out of religion and theism. After studying world religions, theology, and philosophy, I began this work atheistically inclined agnostic. It was a "put up or shut up" moment. Science showed us a universe so vast that the God of Axial Age religions seemed too small, given the universe's intelligence and scale. The Blackboard was swept clean, and we're still catching up. I wasn't against religion but was against theology. But when you have experiences beyond space and time, it changes you. In cycles of death and rebirth, you surrender your known reality for another dimension. This reality becomes clear and engrossing. Throughout my work, I never encountered a deity or personal spiritual guide, even though many do. I engaged with an intelligence guiding and feeding experiences to me in a participatory manner. I tend to use terms like creative intelligence, as "God" has connotations I'm not comfortable with. Maybe you call it divine or smuggle the concept in another way. Our universe arises from consciousness, sustained by fundamental reality—perhaps spiritual or akin to dark energy. It's not radical to propose a reality behind it all. Concepts of God have been profoundly incomplete, and now we must rewrite the story. Psychedelics can play a role, allowing ordinary people firsthand contact with the spiritual reality so often described as God.

**Steve Thayer: ** So Chris, who are we in this story? Are we, as others have put it, a unique organization of molecules—fractals of the universe experiencing itself?

**Chris Bache: ** I think you say it well. The question has many facets, depends on framing. Clearly, we're part of the universe's creative experiment, an aspect, not separate from it. Our nature, our body, arises from an evolutionary masterpiece, as does our mind. Our understanding is incomplete if we view the universe as a machine evolving by random processes. When you delve into deeper psychological layers, you engage stunningly vast intelligence—depths of love and compassion sustaining it all. It manifests the universe, ourselves included, and we're fortunate enough to be fractally embedded within it, our stories intertwined. With reincarnation, not just faith but empirical evidence supports it. Nature found a way to fold learning forward in individuals, an octave higher evolution. Once we comprehend reincarnation in our evolution—over hundreds of thousands of years—the plot thickens. We're co-participants in a profound creative experiment, our evolution intricately linked with the universe's evolution.

**Chris Bache: ** We don't really know how reincarnation works. We don't know the physics of reincarnation. Even if we have evidence that reincarnation is a fact of nature, we don't know the nature of it, how it goes, how it works. But it seems to be that the universe is a learning system, and reincarnation is a part of a learning system. Our consciousness did not begin with our body, but it goes back farther. We can use a concept like Soul, some type of concept that holds and gathers the learning from all of the incarnations we've experienced. How far back does it go? Two questions: how far back does it go? And the answer is, nobody knows for sure. All the cultures that have believed in reincarnation say it doesn't start with human beings. It starts before human beings. How far before human beings? Well, we're not really sure. My sense is that it starts when individuality begins to emerge within the evolutionary matrix. I'll use the term evolution frequently. I believe in the concept of progressive development, of progressive unfolding, but that doesn't mean I agree with the kind of standard textbook theory of what's driving reincarnation. I don't mean that reductive determinist theory.

**Chris Bache: ** It's about learning. How far back does it go? Somewhere between grasses and chimpanzees. It's hard to think of individual blades of grass having individual consciousness. We usually think in terms of broad classes, but somewhere in the evolutionary process, individuality emerges. As that individuality emerges, there's a learning that deepens over time, and that's when I think reincarnation becomes possible. Classically, they look to animals that are well below the mammalian chain, but somewhere around animal life forms. The next question is, what are we underneath these evolved changes? I think the answer is you have to get to a deeper level underneath the soul. We ask, what is the essence of the soul? What is the essence of our individuality? There, I think we find the same answers in psychedelic work that we find in the classic mystical traditions. The essence of the individual is the essence of the Divine. The essence of the one is the essence of the totality. We are, in essence, derived from the Divine, sparks of the Divine. We've been sort of teased out of the unitive matrix of the Divinity and given the privilege of individuated existence, which is then polished and refined over thousands of years of going back and forth between spirit and matter. But the essence of what we are is the divine itself. The manifestation of what we are depends upon how long we've been cooking.

**Reid Robison: ** That's fascinating. Earlier, you mentioned karma and how you viewed it going into this work and suggested that maybe it changed. I'm wondering how you view karma now, in this broad perspective you've been sharing.

**Chris Bache: ** Simply as cause and effect. Karma, vipaka, cause and effect. The universe pulses with cause and effect at all levels. Here, we're talking about a substrate of cause and effect, the causes set in motion by the exercise of our capacity to choose. We make choices, we inherit the consequences of those choices. In that context, we make new choices, and then we inherit the consequences of those choices. If we've been smoking two packs of cigarettes every day for five years, we're not free to not want that next cigarette, but we are free to begin to set in motion a series of choices that can free us from that addiction. We're constantly making choices. We inherit the consequences of those choices. One way in which my thinking has changed over the years since writing my first book, "Lifecycles," is that I have a much deeper appreciation of the synergistic relationship between individual development or karma and collective development or karma. In the West, we have a tendency to over-personalize the concept of karma, to tell the story of the individual soul maturing over many lifetimes. I think our species is evolving, reincarnating every 100 years, and there is a collective learning process taking place, which our individual learning process is part of. The boundary between collective and individual learning is porous. I have much more respect and sensitivity to the collective karma that I might have previously seen as personal karma.

**Reid Robison: ** Yeah, wow. Earlier, you mentioned the role psychedelics might be playing in the evolution of consciousness these days. When talking about that place between blades of grass and chimpanzees, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on Terence McKenna's stoned ape hypothesis, and if that was an example of the universe between spirit and matter, learning as it evolved. Do you view psychedelics as playing a role in history as well?

**Chris Bache: ** Terence's hypothesis is interesting, isn't it? I don't have an opinion on that. I hold it as an interesting hypothesis. I don't have any independent way of assessing it. I do think we are coming to a turning point in history, a make-or-break point, and I think psychedelics have a significant role to play. They are giving us extra awareness at a time when we desperately need it. They also give us accelerated and deepening healing when we desperately need it. There is a tremendous inner fermentation and detoxification process taking place at the collective level as well as the individual level. It manifests in our individual lives as a kind of up-rushing of karmic content, conditioning, pain, and trauma we've been carrying in our soul history. This is happening not just to a few individuals who can attend to it; it's happening underneath us, in social movements, and the world at large. Psychedelics amplify our experience of consciousness and the consciousness we're part of, helping us heal and manage this purification process. They give us a wider worldview. It only takes one good, deep psychedelic experience of communion with the universe's deep structure to shatter materialism, the philosophy that matter is the only thing that's real. Huston Smith was right that a mystical experience does not a mystic make, but it can unmake an atheist. Psychedelics have a very important role to play. How far can this go? How deep will psychedelic healing reach in our culture? How fast will insights realized under psychedelic communion contribute to the paradigm shift driven by multiple disciplines right now? I don't know, but the fact that LSD was invented the same decade as the nuclear bomb, which changed global order, may be a significant synchronicity.

**Steve Thayer: ** Speaking of this time in human development, as someone who has dedicated his academic and personal life to exploring what it means to be human, I'm curious about your opinion on artificial intelligence. Some people say psychedelics help us learn who we are, which might be important given that we might be creating something that is different but also conscious. Do you have an opinion?

**Chris Bache: ** I don't really have an opinion. It has not come up in any of my sessions. I finished my sessions in 1999, and artificial intelligence never came up. I stand on the sidelines as a layperson, and kind of an old layperson—I'm 74 years old, and this is really a younger generation's work. I watch what's happening in artificial intelligence just from the edges. It's developing much faster than I could keep track of. I'm concerned about it, but clearly, it's here. It's happening now. It's going to have a huge impact on us in the future. I don't know what role it will play, whether it will be a friend or an enemy over time. I'm more concerned about the ecological cliff we're going over. We can extrapolate, and we are getting a clearer vision of how the imbalances generated in the industrial era are beginning to manifest with catastrophic consequences. The cumulative effect of these ecological crises will keep hitting until we get on top of it, and we're not anywhere near being on top of it. This is turning the 21st Century into a century of tremendous global instability and crisis. That's been the focal point in my thinking. How artificial intelligence plays into this, I don't know.

**Reid Robison: ** On the ecological front, how much of that realization of the problems we face came from these psychedelic deep dives, and how much of it is just from life experience? Did you get any insights or think psychedelics or expanding awareness might help us on a better path forward?

**Chris Bache: ** Let's hold the second part of that question about how psychedelics might help us on a better path forward, and let me address the first part. This was one of the biggest surprises of my work. First, I had to let go of framing my work as personal journey, personal transformation, personal healing, personal awakening, and spiritual awakening. I got involved in a much larger dance with the species mind, with the collective unconscious, being catapulted from there into levels of archetypal reality and then into deeper, causal levels of reality. I say this to emphasize that what I'm about to share about where we are and where we're going historically will sound outrageous and highly speculative. But my experience is that when you work deeply, far underneath the personal psyche, dropping into the collective psyche and the creative intent underlying evolution, these things come naturally into focus in a way that makes sense from a quantum paradigm or post-Newtonian paradigm. There's a chapter in "LSD and the Mind of the Future" titled "The Birth of the Future Human," where I gather all experiences from my journey that bear on this question: where is humanity now, and where are we going? It was a complete surprise that this came up in my sessions long before I had any ecological awareness. I was naive about hitting our environmental or ecological limits, the crisis building in our culture. These visions took place between 1991 and 1995, so a long time ago. What began to happen, tucked in around the edges, was being given visions of where humanity was in its evolutionary saga, visions of a turning point, a definitive point in human history, an evolutionary pivot. I saw we were entering a magnificent period of history with tremendous blessings, profound transformation—a future radically unlike its present and past. There was some fundamental process taking us there, but for the first three or four years, I was given consistent visions of a future with no indication of how we would actually get there. How was nature going to pull this off? You look around, it doesn't look positive. More people are at the shopping mall than in transformative workshops. Violence is escalating. How are we going to make this transition? 

In December 1995, when I was deep into psychedelics, I had entered a stage I call the diamond luminosity material. I was halfway through years of work in this sublime diamond luminosity. Suddenly, I was dissolved into the species mind and underwent a process or experienced a death and rebirth of the human family. The unraveling of life as we had known it and the shattering of systems reduced humanity to the bare challenge of survival. It looked like it could be an extinction event, a global systems crisis driven by cascading eco crises. I wasn't given details beyond that, no timetable, just a deep cultural crisis. At its worst, we seemed to move through it. We were changed by this crisis, radically. There was an opening of the human heart, compassion, change in what we would classically call human nature. It was a shift in the structure of the collective unconscious. What we looked at was a shift in the plate tectonics of the collective psyche. New values, perceptions of the good, and social institutions. This was a transformation of the human heart. I was given instructions on the mechanisms, how we would move through this crisis faster than expected, given the space history usually moves at. It explained the collective psyche as a field. The collective psyche is a unified field, and this crisis will shove not only individual psyches into a non-equilibrium state but the collective psyche into a far-from-equilibrium condition. Physical systems in non-equilibrium states behave similarly: rapid change and emergence of new structures. I saw that the human psyche, when shoved into a similar state, would exhibit these characteristics: rapid change, emergent new structures. Small changes could produce dramatic outcomes. We would move through this crisis much faster than we would think possible because the severity and negative impact were so intense. In the subsequent years, I experienced the future human in deep time beyond linear time. This being is an extraordinarily beautiful, magnificent being—far beyond us as we are beyond Homo erectus. It has a massive heart, a healed heart, an open mind. Not just a transformation of heart and mind opening possibilities but a transformation of sensory experience. More consciousness consolidated in our body leads to refined sensory experiences. At the end of my journey, I experienced vision 100 times sharper than in ordinary consciousness—same applies to all senses. This is the pivot of a radically transformed human species with an open heart, open mind, and augmented physical capacity. This is the story of our century: how we transition from our present condition into our next evolutionary form, the birth of the diamond soul. That stops here for questions.

**Reid Robison: ** Well, one follow-up question on that note, but I definitely want to get into the birth of the diamond soul. Do any religious perspectives align with what you're describing? I'm thinking of Hinduism's Kali Yuga, the dark age of materialism and corruption, with ancient sages retreating but not disappearing entirely, leading to the Golden Age or Satya Yuga. Wisdom, intelligence, compassion return. Does any of that line up with your thoughts or studies?

**Chris Bache: ** In addition to Hinduism, there are Hopi prophecies and other indigenous cultures who've seen profound transformations. The general perception is that we are in a period of darkness, a period where the conditioning of the past, the karmic patterns shaping the human psyche, are driven to the surface for us to deal with. The divisions we've carved—race, gender, nationality, haves and have-nots—are toxicities coming out to make us available to the influx of divine energy. That energy enters us from above or rises from within. There's truth in these ancient prophecies. We are in the age of the Kali Yuga, moving into a new profound age. When or how we'll get there, I don't know, but there's a relation between these prophecies.

**Steve Thayer: ** As I hear you describe it, Chris, it feels very true. As a psychologist, I've been curious about who we are and our potential. Humans are capable of both great violence and tremendous love and compassion. We're such a paradox. The maturity process you describe does sound necessary, like we need a crisis to draw out our next development stage. In psychedelic experiences, both my own and others', there are exercises in existential crisis—burning away the dross so our true essence can emerge. But back to integration, it's hard to make sense of it in our immediate, day-to-day lives.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, it can be. Once deep in this work, we realize we're playing a bigger game than we thought—not personal life but historic processes of immense importance. It's like diving into the deep end. The deep water is moving fast, creating a bubbling effect. Everyone has a tolerance for handling what's happening at that deep level. When returning, we must carefully record our visionary experiences and take care of ourselves integrating them. It took me a year to recover from the birth of the future human vision. For years I've held that vision, practicing grounding arts because it's demanding. Reincarnation gives us life choices; we choose this demanding time in history. I think it's for our benefit, our children and grandchildren around the world, and the development of the Divine itself. Because the Divine is working, it's not something humanity is doing, but something nature does.

**Steve Thayer: ** I've always wondered about choosing to incarnate, especially as a baby with fetal alcohol syndrome, or kids born in war-torn countries or areas with disease and conflict. If you'd rather not tackle it, it's okay, but how does a reincarnation perspective grapple with these realities?

**Chris Bache: ** It's terrible suffering, like babies born without a brain or in violent circumstances, destined for short, painful lives. How can we assert intelligence or compassion in such a universe? To see wisdom and intelligence, we must look deep and wide. Life on the surface seems cruel. From a reincarnation perspective, life doesn't begin at birth or end at death; it's part of a larger story. Why someone would choose such a life is maybe impossible to answer from a time-space perspective or individual perspective. We must open to a large evolutionary and spiritual perspective. What's important is that all suffering is preserved, conserved, and used. It is all experienced by the Divine. There is no divine outside viewing suffering; every human, animal, and spiritual suffering is deeply felt.

**Steve Thayer: ** If we are the universe experiencing itself, it's not just awesome lives the universe experiences. It's every life, the ones suffering and those not as much.

**Chris Bache: ** And I address this in "Life Cycles," human suffering brings us to our knees, and I don't think we have an adequate understanding or explanation of it. In my experience, when I have been drawn into this larger overview, and when I have experienced the intelligence behind this process, I have found myself trusting beyond what I can understand. I trust because of the quality of the being that I encounter that's behind these circumstances. I can't understand all the pain behind this, and I can come up with any number of partial and incomplete theories for how this stuff works, but in the end, intellectually, we're ultimately brought to our knees trying to understand it. However, if you experience the love and wisdom of the universe, then it gives us confidence that there truly is a logic to it. The universe is a hard taskmaster. When you look at pictures of Kali, the destroyer, she is a liberator who brings about enlightenment, but she also brings death and destruction with one hand and enlightenment with the other. These things go together. There is nothing easy or gentle about the love of the universe or the love of the Divine. It is a fierce, fierce place that we are part of. It's a very, very demanding world. But the question is, in a deeper sense, is the universe paying attention to our pain? Is there a way in which, by engaging our pain as conscientiously as we can, it leads to our own development in the long term? And is the universe listening to us as we are in pain? I think it is. I think it is an intentional process, even though I can't answer your question satisfactorily.

**Steve Thayer: ** Well, it was a beautiful answer, and I really appreciate you taking it and trying to answer that question, Chris, because I certainly feel like I'm on my knees. I think I read somewhere—maybe this was yours or someone else's—but that the divine, as you've described it, is something we can experience but not necessarily comprehend. And that concept has actually brought me quite a bit of peace. As somebody who's a self-described truth seeker, really wanting to understand things, thinking that would provide assurance that everything would be okay or help me understand what I should do or shouldn't do, it's a typical experience for someone looking for the answers. So permission to not know all the answers is quite comforting.

**Reid Robison: ** And Chris, do you have certain people you count as teachers or influences on your philosophical and spiritual perspective? I'm thinking of that question, how does one proceed on a path of exploration like this wisely? What are good preparatory philosophies and spiritual frameworks and systems to check out?

**Chris Bache: ** Well, I had the benefit of being a professor of religious studies, and so I spent a lot of my life, my professional life, teaching courses in comparative mysticism, Buddhism, and introductory courses in Eastern and Western traditions. I got to study many masters and learn their stories. They were always my guideposts. The great masters, the great spiritual beings, were always touchstones for me, even though my work was not focused on spiritual awakening. We haven't talked too much about that, but still, the great masters were my touchstones, and I tried to hold myself accountable to them as I conducted myself in this unusual spiritual practice. I have tremendous respect for indigenous cultures. I have not academically studied them; I have a layman's reading of a number of books and a respect for them. I appreciate that people who are undertaking this type of work benefit greatly from doing it under the tutelage of an experienced teacher or guide. That hasn't been my particular destiny or work. I've never had a teacher or been advised by an elder in a psychedelic community. In this way, the only teacher that I've personally had has been the universe itself, and she has been a fierce and loyal teacher. She's broken me down, ground me up, spit me out, and beat me severely. Yet she's also helped me, blessed me, loved me, and taught me more than I ever imagined possible. When we do this type of work, it's foolish to do it alone. These were my circumstances, and I had the constitution to survive it. I had the companionship of my partner, a very wise, spiritual woman who helped keep me grounded, and I had the advice of the elders from my courses. For most people, it's good to do this work in groups and under the guidance of someone with more experience in these states than we do because this is new territory. When I say guidance, I mean someone who can help us enter these states safely and process our experiences when we come back out. I think it's important to have people to talk to. One of the burdens of my journey was working in isolation because it was all illegal. I could not bring it to the office or campus. I couldn't talk to my students about it. I'm a teacher; I love to learn and share, and I'm a gabber, so I couldn't talk about this stuff. That's not a healthy way to be. It's good to have a community to share experiences with and to learn from others as we delve deeper into this. I think it's essential to do this work responsibly, with the guidance of those more experienced.

**Reid Robison: ** Thank you for that. I know time is whizzing by, but I'm eager to know if there's anything you could share about the birth of the diamond soul, or that second part of the evolution and ecology of consciousness, or where we might focus our intentions going forward.

**Chris Bache: ** About halfway through my journey, in the 38th session, in a year of great blessings, I was taken on an experience preceded by intense purification processes and a very intense death-rebirth process. At one phase in this journey, I experienced all my former lives coming into me. I was familiar with about a dozen of my past lives, having done past life therapy before. I was comfortable with reincarnation, having written a book on it, but this experience was different. I felt my former lives coming into me like winding a kite spool. When they hit a critical mass, they fused. There was an explosion of energy, and all these separate lives fused into one life. There was an explosion of diamond light out of my chest, and I was catapulted into a state of consciousness beyond anything I had realized before. I was an individual beyond any frame of reference I had known. I received multiple teachings to understand what was happening, which changed my understanding of reincarnation and where it is taking us. The classic understanding in Eastern cultures is that you incarnate, make progress, get better, stronger, and more compassionate over time, until you reach a spiritual realization or enlightenment, then you're free to leave the system of space-time—an up-and-out cosmology. All religions of the Axial Age have been up-and-out cosmologies. You achieve salvation or enlightenment, with the fruition in an off-planet spiritual paradise. My sessions taught me that's just a first stage approximation. Humanity's evolution is not merely an incremental lifetime-to-lifetime improvement. Eventually, all our lives come together inside our physical existence. We incarnate with egoic experiences, die, expand into the soul, incarnate again, and recognize the soul between lifetimes. But if we keep this incarnational rhythm long enough, the soul wakes up inside our physical existence. It's what I call the birth of the diamond soul. When this happens, it radically changes our perception. We focus on long-term, wide good because we have an awareness of all the people we've been throughout history. We've been every race, religion, position in history. When these lives unify into a singular consciousness, it transforms our perception of what's happening, who we are, and where we're going. The future human will emerge from this process of incarnation over hundreds of thousands of years. I think we are entering a period of labor in history, growing into the diamond soul, the future human's form. Imagine if the entire species went through this transition—awakening spiritually to a deeper identity gestating inside us for years. Look at the extraordinary species and its history that would arise. We can't run this planet on egoic consciousness any longer. We either grow up or go extinct, with extinction as an evolutionary accelerator. The century's evolving crisis will push us to our edge. But I believe we'll make it through. The future human is both a task to be actualized and an accomplishment already realized. From my perspective, we'll survive this crisis and developmental challenges. Looking back, all the pain and hardship endured will have been worth it as we birth a new child in history.

**Steve Thayer: ** Chris, I'm very grateful for your life's work and your willingness to share it. I'm glad you decided to come forward and share it with all of us, not just your students. You've done so covertly by living the difference, but now through your written work and podcasts like ours. It means a lot to me personally, and I'm grateful for your willingness to come on our show.

**Chris Bache: ** It's an honor to have this discussion with you, gentlemen, and to share these ideas and teachings with your audience.

**Reid Robison: ** Thank you, Chris. This has been such a delightful honor and pleasure. We'll cherish this conversation. Thank you for your generosity in sharing with us.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you for your work, gentlemen. Thank you for the healing and insight you're bringing into the world.

**Steve Thayer: ** Chris, is there anywhere you'd like to point people to learn more about you?

**Chris Bache: ** They can contact me through my website, chrisbache.com. It's in need of an overhaul, but it's there, and I have posted things I've written there. I'm all over YouTube with various podcasts and talks. If my articles aren't on my website, they'll be on academia.edu under my name. All the most important things I’ve written are available, and they can reach me on my website. I'm not doing any structured teaching at present. I may be doing retreats in the near future, but those are still in planning. For now, I'm responding to where the book takes me, and I'm following it out.

**Steve Thayer: ** Well, a Chris Bache retreat sounds fantastic. I'll put it on my bucket list and keep an eye out for it. We'll link your website and other places where people can find your work in the episode notes. Thank you so much.

**Chris Bache: ** You bet. Thank you.

**Steve Thayer: ** Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers is brought to you by Numinous, a mental wellness company committed to tackling the global mental health crisis by delivering best-in-class psychedelic-assisted therapies, contributing to psychedelic research, and fostering healing through community connection and social responsibility. Learn more at numinous.com. If you enjoyed the show today, support us by rating and reviewing it on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribing to the Numinous YouTube channel, liking the videos, and sharing them. This podcast does not constitute medical advice or mental health treatment. Consult with a medical or mental health professional if you need assistance.