Philosophical Implications of Non-Ordinary States (live)

Marc Caron: Hello and welcome to Conscious Living. My name is Marc Caron, and today I'm coming here live from the beautiful I'm Awake Foundation Center, where they do consciousness research and a lot of really interesting work in the field of spirituality, medicines, consciousness, and transformation. I was blessed to be invited, and I'm actually broadcasting live from here today in this episode of Conscious Living Radio, where it's going to be another spirit and plant medicine-focused program. I'm happy to invite my good friend and partner of the conference, Stephen Gray. Stephen, always a pleasure to have you here. We're going to air our program today on 100.5 CFRO FM in Vancouver, Co-op Radio. We're happy to have been running that program for over 15 years now locally. Stephen, you've been a guest many times and really a co-host in many programs, so thank you for joining me in what's, I'm sure, going to be a really, really great conversation with our guest today.

Stephen Gray: Absolutely.

Marc Caron: Well, Stephen, I guess you know you're a man of many words today. Why don't you introduce our guest? You've done it many times, that's for sure.

Stephen Gray: Yeah, happy to. Well, that's partly because I have a big heart feeling toward Chris but also an immense amount of respect for him as a person and for the work he's done on behalf of the rest of us in elucidating central issues of our time. Chris, I could ask you for a very brief synopsis of that 20-year journey, but maybe you'd allow me to stumble through it, and then you can sit back and smile and see if I got it right. So welcome to the people who are live and those who are going to join us later. Chris Bache, the story I know about Chris is that he is now a retired professor of religion and philosophy, or religious studies and philosophy, from Ohio State University and Youngstown, Ohio. Early in his career, he was interested in mysticism and deep spiritual exploration, and he came upon the work of the legendary psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who pioneered a protocol for working with high doses of LSD, in particular. Chris undertook what amounted to, what turned out to be, a 20-year journey of 73 high-dose LSD sessions following the Stanislav Grof protocol. Those were sessions using 500 to 600 micrograms of LSD, which, for any of you who are not familiar with that kind of calculation, that's a high dose. That protocol involves being at home or in a safe, quiet space with headphones on and a carefully curated playlist, eyeshades to block out the light so that inner visions are not obstructed or mitigated, and a qualified sitter. The person he had, in this case, was a therapist, and so she knew what she was doing with the situation. The following day—he generally did this on a Saturday—and then the following day, again following the Grof protocol, he spent basically the whole day with those headphones on again to kind of trigger memories of what was playing on the music when he had certain kinds of experiences and visions, and then meticulously transcribing all that. Chris is the author of several books, including a book that I read long before I ever met him, from 20 years ago or so, called Dark Night, Early Dawn, which was really impressive. I really liked it—a standout book. I still have it on my shelves back here. The Living Classroom, which I have not read, and hope to because there's a new edition coming out, I believe, right, Chris?

Chris Bache: Yep.

Stephen Gray: Yeah. And the incredible LSD and the Mind of the Universe, subtitled Diamonds from Heaven, which many people have read now. Excuse me, I just want to add a little bit more about how I understand what happened in that 20-year journey. Mind you, this would be like an all-day description if it were to do justice to what happened. But the very, very short version, and again, please correct the nuances of this if I didn't quite remember it correctly, Chris, in each one of those 73 journeys, the first two hours were, as you described it in the book, sometimes exquisitely painful as you had to go through the difficult process, which most of us probably would never want to go through, of ego dissolution and then beyond, in a sense beyond ego, personal ego dissolution, but letting go of any kind of identity, even as a human as I recall. And then what happened—and again, please correct my language if I haven't got it quite right, Chris—but as I recall, and in my language, you broke out into what you have called in various ways, but one way is the vast intelligences of the universe. Believe me, folks, this is no exaggeration. The kind of material that Chris, you might say, downloaded or brought back is absolutely stunning and absolutely relevant to what's going on on the planet. One of the things that's most, in my mind, anyway, important and absolutely central about the things that Chris downloaded, as it were, is that, especially in the latter third or so of the 20 years, he started to get increasingly clear, and I would say, or interpret it as confident messages that we are—well, he had already heard, I guess, that we are going through, as a species, a death and rebirth trajectory or process that has been coming toward us for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years or whatever. And excuse me, but the confidence that I just mentioned implied that in the later years, as I recall, Chris, these voices, or this intelligence, started indicating a greater likelihood that we would indeed somehow get through this and that we will come out into what you might call a natural state of being on this planet. You've labeled it the birth of the future human. So there are so many questions we could ask you about that, but let me ask you a two-part question to start with. First of all, correct me on anything that I didn't quite get right. And secondly, I've been thinking a lot about this, off and on. It's central to my life and where my mind wants to go. One thing that I'm wondering about is you have, I think, first said you thought this process might take hundreds of years before something, you know, the light might shine again, so to speak. But I think it was either an email or a phone conversation in the last few months, you said you might have had to correct that to say thousands of years, or more than a thousand years. So, I'm trying to keep this simple and turn it over to you, but the context of that question is that one of the things that I, and I think Marc also, is really tuned into, and probably you as well, is that there's an incredible amount of energy going on right now on the planet to try to reconnect that spiritual disconnection. So, I guess the question is, is it really going to be a complete emptying and dying off over the next decades, or might there be a crossfade where things start to lighten up, or the light starts to shine in more to counterbalance that dissolution, so to speak, of species over the next decades? For example, pardon me one more little thing, because you know this. You're the person who turned Dwayne Elgin onto me for my book How Psychedelics Can Help Save the World. He laid out sort of a possible scenario over the next six or seven decades that might result in what he called the birth of a mature planetary civilization. So how are you seeing all that now, timelines and all that?

Chris Bache: Yeah, first, Stephen, thank you, buddy, for that very nice and warm introduction. I really appreciate our friendship, and I appreciate what you're doing with the conference, and Marc, you too. This is a great conference. It's my favorite psychedelic conference to participate in, and I always find it such a rich setting and audience to ask and answer, to address these types of questions. To focus specifically on the question you ask, I would strengthen the visionary component. It was really less like messages downloading than deep and profound immersion into transtemporal states of consciousness, going into what I call deep time, letting go, moving outside linear time. These visions started coming into me when I was a good 12 or 14 years into my process. A lot of things happened before then, like ego death, entering into collective suffering, or entering into what I think is some dimension of the collective unconscious of humanity which stores all its pain and suffering, just as an individual stores their individual trauma. Going through that and going into archetypal reality and beginning to have visionary encounters showed me the same basic story: humanity was coming to a pivot point in its evolutionary journey. We were like the karmic streams of history entering a canyon. We were about to go through a revolutionary pivot that would be seen in time as a before and after transformational event—an event so powerful it was going to literally trigger a shift in the collective psyche of humanity, so that all beings born after this shift had taken place would be operating out of a different inner landscape, a different collective psychic landscape. I was completely unprepared for this because I had begun this work thinking that it was about personal transformation, then maybe personal awakening or spiritual awakening. But then I entered these profound collective territories and began to have these visionary downloads about where the creative intelligence of the universe, or where the divine intelligence, was taking humanity—where all this was going. These deep experiences of extraordinary spiritual awakening taking place at a collective level, extreme transformation, a deep intelligence working inside nature, inside history, underneath us all, bringing this about. But it didn't show me how this was ever going to take place. It didn't show me the how of it. And then, in 1995—which, look how long ago—this is almost 30 years ago—I went through a very deep experience in which I was dissolved well beyond egoic identity, dissolved into the human species, became one with the human family. In that condition, I experienced a death and rebirth of humanity, a profound unraveling, a loss of control. It was a global systems crisis that seemed to be triggered by a cascading series of eco-crises. It was excruciating to experience, and it kept building in intensity. I experienced this not as a human being—but I experienced it as the species. As it seemed deeper and deeper, we were forced into survival mode. Just when it was at its worst, the peak passed, the dangers began to recede, and we began to pick ourselves up and put the pieces back together. When we did, we were changed, finding that something had been unleashed in us, something had been tapped into, something had been broken open at the very deep level of our being. When we began to build after this crisis, all of our work, all of our being, all of our relationships were filled with new insights, new values, new understandings of the Human Project. There was a creative contagion, where the work of individuals and collectives fed back into each other, spiraling us into, very quickly, a new condition. I think now that's a basic outline, and that's clear. But like Black Elk in the visions he received as a young boy about the future of his people, my visions did not come with dates and did not come with a lot of detail. There was a lot of attention paid to the mechanisms involved, but not to the specific pattern of causation other than this escalating global eco-crisis. Also, it did not come with dates, so I don't really have a sense of when this will happen, how long it will last. To fill in all that information, I have to turn to the scientists in terms of their calculations for the depth and the speed with which the eco-crisis is moving. I turn to people like Dwayne Elgin, who has been processing this information for decades. I've been surprised at how fast the crisis is coming at us, faster than I thought. It's coming out hard, and we're still in the early stages. I think Dwayne is right; the next 50 years are going to be absolutely pivotal in terms of the intensity of the ecological forces that will be bearing down on us and that we will have to respond to. I don't think we have a thousand years to address this. I think of this as kind of, and again, I don't say this as a Psychonaut or as a visionary. I say this just as a person trying to understand historical information. I think this thing may take three or four generations, and if we don't make the pivot within that time frame, we may lose the planet. I think the 21st century is the critical century that is going to bring us to our knees and force us to make choices we're not willing to make now for a variety of different reasons. I think this is going to be such a deep pivot. It's going to result in a shift in what I might call the plate tectonics of the collective psyche, a shift at the very core of our being. In other ways, I think this represents a culmination of a reincarnational process that has been building for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. I think we've been gestating the next iteration of the human condition for all this time. We've been reincarnating, learning, growing, and becoming more. Gestation is long; labor is short and intense, life-threatening. I think we've been in gestation for a long time, and we are entering into labor, which is going to be a volatile and very dangerous period. I think we will give birth to this new human, this future human. Many people have this vision; they call it different things, Homo spiritualis, Homo noeticus. But basically, there is this common intuition that something new is coming up underneath us, coming into expression. It's being driven by the same intelligence that drove the creation of galaxies, the creation of the planet, the emergence of life on the planet, the emergence of conscious awareness on the planet. This is being driven from deep inside the process. Now, I think we classically say there are no certain outcomes. Everybody has to exert full and complete exertion for us to get through this. Like labor, it's potentially life-threatening, and mothers die in labor. Children die in labor all the time. I understand that and endorse that. And at the same time, the entire trajectory of my psychedelic experience, particularly in the last five years or so, took me so deep into the future with such realistic perception and gave me experiences of what this future human will be like. Those touches of the future of humanity just bring me to my knees. They're so extraordinarily beautiful. It's our deepest dreams come true, and I experienced this pivot as something yet to be accomplished but also as something that had already been accomplished. So from deep time, I experienced this as an actuality that had taken place, and yet from my linear time, it's an actuality yet to take place. In my heart, I don't doubt that humanity will make it through this transition. My concern is how many of our children, how many of the world's children, will have to die before we come to our spiritual senses?

Stephen Gray: So that definitely leaves it open for, as you say, incredible exertion, which is something that's really important to people like Marc and me.

Chris Bache: Oh, yeah. You mentioned in that context. One of the things that this visionary series showed me is that as we enter deeper into crisis, the whole foundation of the psyche and our culture will be shifting into what chaos theorists would call nonlinear systems. There will be so much energy, so much engagement—a high-energy engagement—that we'll be shifting from a linear dynamic of history into a nonlinear. We know something about how nonlinear systems behave and some of their characteristics, one being that in a nonlinear condition, systems are particularly susceptible to small influences, small perturbations. As we go into this crisis, the actions of individuals will have proportionately greater impact than they would have at earlier, more quiet periods of history. So the individual becomes a more dynamic player moving forward than individuals have been in the past.

Stephen Gray: That's an incredibly important message for people. Go ahead, Marc, I see your mouth moving.

Marc Caron: Well, you did partly answer what I was thinking a little bit, Chris, because there’s so much you said there, and then my question is: what can we do as individuals, as groups, as collective society? You know, it's hard enough to organize important stuff in the world for a lot of people. How do you suggest that we move forward from starting as Me to We, to the many? What do you think is a good approach for that?

Chris Bache: Yeah, you know, there are probably people who are better qualified and more skilled at filling in that particular piece of how we can respond. I mean, I know Dwayne Elgin is really good at that, and other people are really focused on how we can move forward dynamically, creatively in this process, so I'd rather not—Barbara Marx Hubbard was great. Remember her wheel and all the different professions? I think it's going to take all of us to get through this. It will take all the scientists, all the educators, all the politicians, all the artists. It's going to take every one of us and all the skills that we bring to our various livelihoods to move into this. What I would offer is the metaphysical perspective that comes from reincarnation research, and without going into the data supporting us, the basic vision is when we incarnate, we choose our incarnation. We choose the time, place, and circumstances of our birth. Therefore, it's an axiom of my thought that all the human beings on the planet right now knew what they were getting into when they chose to incarnate in this century under these very demanding circumstances, and they chose to incarnate with a specific kind of karmic agenda, with a specific sense of how to contribute. So I think each one of us needs to look deeply, look under our feet, look at where we are, who we are, how we are positioned. The question is not really, "How do we find the right thing to do?" I think the deeper question is, "Will we have the courage? Where do we find the courage to do what we discover we can do?" Absolutely. The essence of this pivot is a pivot into oneness, an awakening of oneness underneath our feet, which will completely change technology, how we apply technology, international conflict, social relationships, organization of society—this fundamental awakening in the human heart, the healing of the human heart, an awakening into a true, deep, vivid, mystical experience of the fundamental oneness of all life. And that means that's an inclusive vision. So as we move toward that time in history and back into ecological balance, of course, a oneness that includes all living species on the planet. The more we become the human being that Earth needs right now, that culture needs right now, the more we accelerate the transformation of this, this transformational change in our own role in it. We must become the future being that Earth needs, and as we do, we enter into synergistic relationships with other beings who are also working to become what the planet needs right now.

Stephen Gray: Right. Well, I agree with you, you know, in the sense that we don't know what people need to do. And if I may dare, a bit of a provisional answer about that, I've got Marc interested in this term that I got from Stephen Harrod Buhner, which I believe he translated from William Blake, which is "follow the golden thread." So, you know, obviously, I think we all know it's a platitude in some ways that the inner work is the foundation for moving out into the outer work. One would hope that if the inner work is being done properly, effectively, then you can follow the golden thread, or as they sometimes say, "Let go and let God." And that's, I think, another central component of this revision that we're dealing with, as we're moving—hopefully, we need to move—from a sort of head-based calculation of how to move through the world to a heart-based or intuitive-based approach. Then I'll just add one more thing before tossing it back to you, if I may, Chris. One of our other speakers, Mary Sanders, just sent me the title of her talk for the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference for this year, and it's "Reimagining Collective Care as a Path to Liberation." It seems to me that's another central component of it. You talk about us moving toward oneness, so the recognition of the power of connection and shared vision and shared prayer—shared manifestation seems to be central to this movement forward.

Chris Bache: Yeah, I think—

Marc Caron: I just wanted to add one more thing if I could, gentlemen, because Steven, you said something about—you mentioned the head and you mentioned the heart. I think we have so much wisdom and knowledge, educational-type knowledge, that when we lead with our heart, it's so much more powerful. You know, we can just repeat what we hear, what we read, and what we learn, but in my experience, when I share, I know when I'm in my head and when I'm in my heart. The difference that it makes in rapport and relating, and the same is true when somebody's presenting or you're working with someone. You know the difference, and it reminds me of a quote that I always loved hearing, that made a lot of sense: "The longest journey you'll ever take is the one between your head and your heart."

Chris Bache: Yeah, now I would add the third piece, and that is the body's wisdom. Of course, this is the context within which head and heart meet. One of the reasons we're in so much trouble in terms of the planet is our theologies and philosophies have tended to aim us away from the body, away from physical embodiment, away from the Earth, and have ignored the messages that we've been getting from the Earth. An opening of the heart at that level, an opening of the mind at that level, and an opening of our body to our body as a cell in the body of the planet—lots of levels going on all at the same time. Very interesting.

Marc Caron: Yeah, and to add to that, if I may, because the body, of course, is the connector between spirit and the planet, with the importance of food and what we put in our body. So with our conference called Spirit Plant Medicine, all plants have spirit, whether it be broccoli, cannabis, iboga, mushrooms, whatever it is. The importance, I think, for us to get back to clean, nutritious food that isn't contaminated lets our body work in a much better way. When we acknowledge the spirit of the plants—whether it be a psychedelic medicine or a psychoactive, to something that nurtures our body for nutrition and health and vitamins and all the things we need—it makes that connection even more powerful. I feel that, in so many ways, when we look at the mass population of, say, North America, the quality of our store-bought food is, you know, something we all need to become aware of.

Stephen Gray: Yeah, so no more beer and pizza, Marc, no—

Marc Caron: Well, everything in moderation. I believe it's like every now and again you have to have a zag or not, but you understand what I'm saying. It's just what you put in.

Stephen Gray: Of course. No, that's really important. Chris, you might have things to say about that, but I'd like to try leading you in another direction, if I may, just before—I know Marc's going to want to turn it to questions soon. You've spoken, obviously, about the birth of the future human. There's a kind of humorous saying from the famous baseball catcher and pitcher from the Yankees way back, Yogi Berra, who was prone to these sort of malapropisms. One of them was something like, "If you don't know where you're going, you might end up somewhere else." So it's sort of like a two-part question. I don't even know if you can answer this—I know you don't want to step beyond the bounds of your knowledge—but we've talked about this before. How would you describe what the awakened human looks like in terms of how they move in the world and so on? What might be the signs of awakening that people might look for? It's on this principle of the "If you don't know where you're going" kind of idea. I think it is helpful—and correct me if I'm wrong—to have some kind of signpost: What is the natural human being looking like? What is the birth of the future human, or what does the future human look like?

Chris Bache: I think our spiritual traditions have been giving us insights into what's emerging. The great saints and sages responsible for establishing the religions of the Axial Age drew humanity because we could feel a deep resonance with them. They were archetypal prototypes of what we were becoming, inviting us to become what they had become. In the Buddhas, prophets, Christ, and saints of all the deepest spiritual traditions, we see the prototypes of what's coming. Some have said—and I agree—that the age of individual enlightenment is over. Now it's collective enlightenment or death. It's a collective game.

So, the dynamic that's unusual is that nature seems intent on awakening the entire species. The entire species will go through what individual mystics have gone through in their awakening. The individual mystic experiences the dark night of the soul—a period of intense purification, offloading past karma and negativity en route to spiritual awakening or enlightenment. Humanity as a whole is beginning to undergo a collective dark night of the soul. It's a period of profound purification, confronting the sins of our fathers—which are our sins because we are our own fathers—in order to clear our basement, so to speak, making us receptive to spiritual energies.

Another way of putting this, which ran through my sessions, is that we're coming to a pivot in our reincarnational story. We've been reincarnating, dying, expanding to soul, incarnating, contracting into ego, expanding to soul... repeatedly for thousands of years. We've been learning and growing. Enlightenment, as Eastern traditions have seen it, culminates in enlightenment. Yet, they've often contextually placed it as: you become enlightened, and then you leave time and space, leaving Samsara. But now, with our understanding of the vastness of the universe, it makes little sense to think that after evolving for hundreds of thousands of years, humanity achieves spiritual awakening only to leave it all behind. I don't think that's happening.

I think we're beginning to have a deeper understanding: all our former lives are beginning to come together, bringing all their unfinished business, which becomes our unfinished business. This is happening collectively, and when this process reaches a critical stage, all former lives start coming into us, fusing, and hitting a critical mass. At that point, an explosion of diamond light emerges, catapulting us into a state of consciousness beyond any frame of reference we had imagined before. This new identity, the birth of the diamond soul, becomes our future. We become human beings with a living, conscious memory of ourselves as beings existing in and out of time for thousands of years. We hold a harmonious singularity of all differences we've lived—every race, religion—coming together.

This vision moved me to tears. It pictures a humanity healed of all history's wounds, with open, compassionate hearts like the saints. A humanity in deep communion with the universe's creative intelligence, living intentional lives of integration of spirit and matter.

Stephen Gray: That was absolutely beautiful, Chris. I'm going to play this back with headphones before bedtime—it's a beautiful story.

Chris Bache: We really are, in ordinary hard times, heading towards deep beauty.

Stephen Gray: We need that encouragement. Chris, this is such a gift. It reminds me of something Bishop Desmond Tutu once said—the problem is that most people don't believe in the possibility of possibility. We need people to believe that what they do matters more than ever, right?

Marc Caron: Exactly. I believe we as human beings can do much more than we think. We have the ability to push through and persevere. It's about pushing our limits. Sometimes we get soft, but we have the strength to push through.

Before we go to questions, Chris, I know you've done such amazing work with 72 high-dose journeys. Most wouldn't expect that from a professor of religious studies because of LSD's stigma. What inspired you to choose that path for this deep dive work? Do you have any advice for someone considering it after hearing your experiences?

Chris Bache: My advice is, please don't do it the way I did. I was young and foolish, and I understand much more now. I'd advise a different protocol. I came out of graduate school as an agnostic, passionate about answering the big questions. Stan Grof's work changed my life, and I knew I wanted to do this work. I went underground, doing high-dose work for efficiency—thinking I could manage the intensity and reach enlightenment faster. All my assumptions were wrong. High doses activate larger pieces of existence, and your individual process becomes part of humanity's collective transformation.

While I discovered a taste for high doses and had the constitution for it, it required discipline to stay conscious at those levels. It's a philosophical discipline—not just engaging new territory, but bringing experiences back through writing, art, or music. The task of integrating such a radical journey spans lifetimes, as the universe is vast.

Stephen Gray: You can't answer this definitively, but speculatively—would you have been able to bring back such deep insights without going through this fire?

Chris Bache: Staying conscious at those profound levels requires discipline. You must engage deeply to break into and bring back such experiences. Initially, I thought the farther out you went, the greater the impact. But integration is more complicated. I won't fully integrate these journeys in my current lifetime; the universe is too immense.

Stephen Gray: Thank you deeply for having done that work.

Chris Bache: Yes, it turned out that way.

Marc Caron: We've got a comment from Melanie White thanking you, Chris, for your book LSD and the Mind of the Universe and insights tonight. If you're watching online, you're welcome to join our studio audience for questions.

Jacob: Thank you. It's exciting to join this conference. Your book, Chris, articulated a process familiar to me. How does your journey relate to Christology or Christ avatar experiences?

Chris Bache: The two traditions impacting my life most are Christianity and Buddhism. Christology, as the study of the Christ archetype, represents a larger dynamic of profound awakening across cultures. I didn't experience many individuated beings, like avatars or angels, during my journeys. The nature of my work was to grind my being into dust, blending me into life's fabric, rather than individual dialog. My work aligns with larger archetypal dynamics and dimensions, guided by a massive consciousness that never took a form but guided me deeper.

Stephen Gray: Was there a visual component to your journeys?

Chris Bache: Yes, strong visual components—not hallucinatory, but very deep. I never visually saw the intelligence guiding me, but felt its presence guiding, purifying, and educating me deeply, though it never adopted a form.

Jacob: Could I ask a brief follow-up?

Marc Caron: Sure, nobody else has questions yet.

Jacob: Your work resonated with Teilhard de Chardin. How does his work map onto this epochal birth period?

Chris Bache: The overlap is striking. Teilhard de Chardin's insights about humanity's turning point in the noosphere and his geological training provided a large historical perspective. His natural spirituality and deep Christian faith showed profound insight into humanity's evolutionary journey.

Marc Caron: Thank you, Jacob. Anyone else with questions for Chris? Raise your digital or physical hand. Jackie?

Jackie: Hi, Chris. About accelerating shifts in consciousness—are psychedelics part of that shift? Can they help restructure our capacity for consciousness shifts, aligning with Stevens' book, Can Psychedelics Help Save the World?

Chris Bache: Yes, we're all hardwired into the collective psyche, impacting each other deeply. Our work registers in the collective, and the spiritual traditions remind us there's no private spiritual practice. Everything we do is conserved and radiates benefits across networks of life. Spiritual traditions emphasize universal merit and compassion across levels of sentient beings.

While in academia, I kept my psychedelic work hidden, but eventually saw students activated by it, illustrating consciousness's oneness I experienced and requiring a new teaching approach. We're arm in arm, and everything we do serves the collective.

Audience: Beautiful.

Marc Caron: Thank you, Jackie, for the question. Fascinating to see diverse attendees. We have Michael K. with a question.

Michael K.: Hello, from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Chris, could you expand on individual inspiration spreading quickly into the collective consciousness, moving us through the birthing process?

Chris Bache: Now, with America's current presidential election, we see deep divisions, turbulence, and uncertainty. Truth can catalyze connections, but lying and darkness have their dynamics too, as seen in shamanic practices managing contrasting forces.

Carl Jung believed nature tilts towards growth, greater intelligence, and being. Despite collective upheaval, the deeper movement is towards clarity, truth, and goodness. Individual transitions catalyze emerging collective consciousness, as spiritual traditions recognize the subtle influence around those engaged in deep practice. Such influence is increasing as we move forward.

Marc Caron: Great question. Thank you for that, Michael. And I think unless anybody else raises their hand in the next half a second or so, we'll start wrapping up our program. Chris, I first want to thank you for the work that you do. I've gotten to know you over the past number of years, as you've been a great supporter of the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference. Your graciousness, your wisdom, your energy, and that of your beautiful wife, Christina, is just so beautiful to be in your presence and to hear your words. I just want to let you know how grateful I am for you and the work that you do. I'm going to have to pay you later when you get up here, Chris. You know, at the beginning, you said it's one of the best psychedelic conferences ever. So thank you for that.

For those here in the Zoom room, if you're thinking about coming to the conference or you're not sure, or you're watching online, one of the things that we do is bring in this virtual aspect. We have a virtual community where you can connect with each other, have questions and answers with the speakers. Chris was one of our surprise guests last year who talked to some folks in the room. It's a different way of connecting because not everybody can join us physically. But if you can join us in person, we'd love to see you, and we'd love to see you in the virtual room. The bonus of the virtual setup is you get replays, and you can catch up on it instead of just getting that one hit from a physical presence. So thank you so much for your work, Chris. I really appreciate the support of you and your beautiful wife with our conference. And I've got a shirt for you because I know the ones you like.

Chris Bache: Ah, good. I've worn the other ones so much they're getting worn out. So a new shirt is good.

Marc Caron: You know, the only one is a fun side note, but it's true. I was at the Unicorn Music Festival for those who don't know, and John Stockton, a beautiful soul, lawyer from the days of cannabis and everything else, came up to our tent at the conference wearing the same shirt, the green tree shirt. As you said, Chris, it was all worn out. He loved it. It was one of his favorite shirts, so we had to set him up with another. Just a funny story as a sidebar. But if there's anything you want to add, Steven or Chris, before we wrap it up, that would be great.

Stephen Gray: Well, excuse me, I'm assuming you'll say a little bit more about ways that people can join the conference, Marc. Also, I have a question for a friend of mine who lives in Switzerland and wanted to catch this interview. It's 2 a.m. there, so how can he see this later? The other thing I want to say to anyone still with us now, plus anyone who sees this later, is if you heard the things Chris said today, along with other information he's shared, this is absolutely important for our planet right now. It's crucial, particularly for the encouragement and upliftingness needed as we go through increasingly challenging times on the material level. There's no doubt that what's already happening will increase further into deeper levels of anxiety, depression, confusion, and tendencies to grasp onto unreasonable hopes, such as what's going on in the Maga movement, for example. So, my hope is that thousands of people will watch this interview. Starting with my friend Craig in Switzerland, how can he tune in?

Marc Caron: What a great question, Steven. Thanks for asking. It's really simple. For anyone who signed up, we're going to send out an email with the direct link. But you can check out our Spirit Plant Medicine YouTube channel. It's streaming there live as we speak. You can check out our Facebook page as well. They're always there for replays after the fact. If you're inspired or moved by what you're hearing, please share it with your friends. Share it far and wide, and that helps the algorithms in the social media platforms to start showing it more. It's important that if there's something that moved you, find those and share them far and wide, so it's easy to find. We'll send out some email reminders.

Stephen Gray: And I would like to put in one final pitch for people to attend the conference because of the kinds of things that Chris has been sharing. We are moving into a collective journey. This is not really a sales pitch. It's a call to a gathering. I've been thinking of the conference as an empowerment hub, now that we can support and encourage each other by meeting, whether it be virtually or in person. It's part of the collective journey that we're working with here.

Marc Caron: Yeah, yeah.

Chris Bache: I can jump in with a heartfelt plug for the conference because, truly, I love going to the conference. It's an intimate setting. It's not like, god bless Maps, the 13,000 mega conferences. This is a group of dedicated practitioners working with many therapeutic modalities and substances. Opportunities for conversations and a lot of new things get opened there. I released LSD and the Mind of the Universe in 2019 there. Now, at this conference, I'm going to be releasing the new edition of The Living Classroom. This is the first time I'm able to tell the story of the role psychedelics played in the ideas that I wrote about in the original version in 2008. So there's new material that comes forward, new ideas. There's just nothing like the contagious quality of being in the room with like-minded people and the exchanges that take place. It's just a wonderful place to be.

Stephen Gray: Hey, Chris, have you been talking to Colin about getting that book in time for the conference?

Chris Bache: Oh, good. I think we're going to have it in time. It'll be an advanced release. I don't know whether we'll have the paperback. I don't think the paperback is going to be out, so it'll be a bit pricey with the hardback. It's SUNY Press, State University of New York Press. But, yeah, we will have copies there. I wish we were going to have the paperback, but that won't be out for another year.

Stephen Gray: Hey, Marc, maybe we could offer a slight special discount ticket price if they purchase the book at the same time.

Marc Caron: Well, that's a good one. I'm not sure how I would rip that out of my mind right now.

Chris Bache: Warn you, it's a pricey... I don't remember exactly what it is, but it's aimed at libraries. You know, the heart of that challenge is, yeah, it was the publisher.

Marc Caron: Definitely share it. Share it out there far and wide for those interested as well through our community. Thank you for your kind words, Chris. It's not really a conference. We just call it a conference. It's a ceremony, and we put a conference inside it. It certainly is a community-based gathering. I'm blessed to be here today at the I Am Awake Foundation. This is a story about Chris and Jen and the work they're doing in consciousness research and exploration. They met at the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference in 2019, and their work grew from there. They've been doing this beautiful work for five years. We've met so many people who have met and created relationships and worked together. It's a great connecting opportunity, even if you're not in person. You still have that ability in the virtual world as well to connect and chat with like-minded people. So, if you're interested, please join us. We'd love to see you there, whether virtually, and of course, in person, there's always room. I just want to thank you again, Chris, for the work you do. I look forward to seeing you and Christina again in the very near future. And Steven, thank you as well for being my partner and co-host. It's always a pleasure. A big shoutout to Michael Krause behind the scenes with Unify, the World Peace Movement, and many things regarding spirituality and consciousness. Thank you for your support.

Audience: Can I just deeply express my gratitude to you, Chris, for your wisdom and knowledge, and having done the work for all of us? What I really got from you, and felt into your energy, is where you've arrived in that deepest level of the gentleness of your heart. That is what we need to cultivate across the planet for the transformation we seek. It's emotional because I can feel your presence. I deeply thank you for your work, your wisdom, and the beauty of your soul. Thank you. What an honor to support this through the technology here in the background. Thank you, Steven and Marc, for the beauty and commitment that shine through you.

Marc Caron: Thank you for that, Michael. As a segue, Steven, this Thursday we have a great series coming up in the next month of pre-conference events and conversations. This Thursday, at 4 o'clock, Marco Sanchez and Acashia Lewis will be joining us.

Stephen Gray: They were absolutely brilliant last year. For me, they were the two strongest speakers. They're both brilliant and have a lot of relevant things to say. And hey, Michael, if you're still listening, Chris has gone beyond the level of spiritual realization where he's seduced by flattery.

Marc Caron: Lastly, next week, Rick Doblin from MAPS is joining us. I think the following Thursday after we have Soy Keen.

Stephen Gray: Actually, we need to talk about that.

Marc Caron: Let's just talk about who's joining us next Thursday.

Stephen Gray: Part of that, Marc, is we might have to switch to Wednesday for Anya. We'll talk about it.

Marc Caron: Okay. Stay tuned. We've got lots coming. Check your emails to confirm everything. We'll be posting that soon. I just want to wrap up with a closing for Conscious Living on Co-Op Radio. My name is Marc Caron, joined by Steven Gray and our special guest Chris Bache here on 100.5 CFRO FM in Vancouver. Until next time, take care of each other. Thank you.

Audience: Thank you, everybody.

Marc Caron: All right, we are completing.