What 73 high dose LSD sessions taught Christopher Bache PhD about the nature of reality (Rebroadcast)

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 Youngtown 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 for anyone who thinks deeply about questions like, "Who are we? What are we doing here, and where might we go from here?" If you've ever listened to an episode of Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers and thought to yourself, "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/our-training-selection and use the code PTF10 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 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, and 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. So, 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, 1978, I 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 in LSD and psychedelics in general were extraordinarily important, not just for clinical psychology and for therapy but for philosophy, which was what interested me the most. 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, then I worked for another 10 years, and then I spent another 10 years digesting this from '79 to '99, when I was 32 to 50. Then I spent the next 20 years digesting those experiences, trying to absorb them, trying to extrapolate and clarify the cosmological implications of those experiences. And then I published LSD and the Mind of the Universe. That's a brief sketch of what brings me here.

Steve Thayer: Yeah, and I remember, as I was reading your book, 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 you had, are not for the faint of heart. I've heard you say that you don't necessarily recommend the protocol, the things you did, to others, and I was curious 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, so 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, who was a clinical psychologist, so established in what I call the psychedelic Kiva, a Kiva of spiritual practice, for reasons we can go into but don't need to. I chose to work with very high doses of LSD, around 500 to 600 micrograms, which is the upper limit; it's the body saturation point. Naively, I was thinking at the time that 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 that this therapeutic work is a process of clearing the conditioning of my psyche, essentially engaging and clarifying and purifying karma. I thought if I worked with large doses of LSD, I could basically 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 the purification and the healing might be constricted to personal levels. But if you're working with a very powerful psychedelic like this much LSD, you basically amplify consciousness so deeply that what began as a personal transformative process becomes engaged in collective processes having to do with the collective unconscious, the species mind. And 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. As you go through one level of consciousness after another, systematically, you go through many forms of death that are more foreign than ego death. That's why I don't recommend the protocol. It's extremely demanding. It takes a lot; it basically becomes the center focus of much of your life, just to engage these deep states, to navigate them, to absorb them and integrate them into your life, and integrate them into your social life, and into your body. Also, I thought there was an endpoint to this journey—another of my false assumptions—the reason for doing this work was to get somewhere, to get to enlightenment, or become one with God, or to enter into the primal void of existence. I had all of those experiences and discovered many levels of divinity one can commune with, and even many levels of the pure void, the fertile void. About 15 years into my experience, I was as deep into the universe as I would ever go, to what I call the Diamond Luminosity domain. I had an experience where I saw reality far into the distance, and a beam of light hit me from that reality; it shattered me. I was in a very high and subtle state of consciousness, and that's when I realized it's an infinite journey. You'll never get to the end of the universe. The universe is too vast. The depth of the divinity is so great. Now, if I were to start this journey over, I would be much gentler with myself. I'd work with a balance of low dose, high dose, organic psychedelics, synthetic psychedelics. Now I understand that the real goal of this work is to open yourself to let in as much of the love and intelligence and wisdom of the universe as you can into your system, to digest it, hold on to it, draw it into your life, and let it guide you. It's not about getting to some final destination.

Reid Robison: That's beautiful, Chris. Thank you for sharing. So many questions come up, but I wanted to ask along those lines: what do you think the risks are of going straight to those deeper states without perhaps working through some of the healing or lower-dose work first? Can you share more about using those different dose ranges as tools?

Chris Bache: Any work with psychedelics, especially with higher doses in a therapeutic protocol, can be challenging and calls for good psychological screening to ensure you have a psyche ready to engage these deep levels. Some people should never go near psychedelics, others should work very gently or not at all. I happen to have a constitution that can flow into expansive states readily and congeal smoothly at the end, but not everyone is wired like that. So all the cautions have to be taken; all clinical criteria have to be met for this type of work. With high doses, you can bypass certain levels, but that wasn't part of my work. I spent the first 10 sessions, over two and a half years, in what Stan calls the perinatal level, the interface between personal unconscious and collective or transpersonal consciousness. You're reliving your birth and dealing with existential crises. You're grinding things deeply at that level. Along the way, despite working in states far beyond personal consciousness, there were personal healings at different parts. But late in my sessions, there was some quick healing of life pieces. If I had been working with lower doses, those healings would have occurred earlier. In my case, I don't think it was bypassing because the deep levels you confront are much more severe than personal-level confrontations. I began this work without personal trauma but carried the deeper wound every human has—stabilizing within time and space and understanding our purpose here. In my case, personal wounds weren't healed early because they anchored me in larger fields of consciousness, allowing me to accomplish some healing of the collective psyche. My personal wound anchored one side of a bridge, the other side being the collective psyche. This bridge allowed my sessions to pull some of the collective psyche's pain and transform it, a soul's work I had signed up for this incarnation. Many people are doing this type of work, and while my choice isn't special, it is significant.

Reid Robison: From our perspective, a very brave hero's journey, as Steve mentioned. I'm curious about the disposition you mentioned. How much do you think is nature versus nurture? How much can someone cultivate the ability to expand and hold those states without shattering into overwhelm or getting discombobulated?

Chris Bache: We can learn to enter these states more skillfully. Some people have a natural aptitude, but whatever the starting point, practice and careful integration matter. After accessing non-ordinary states, careful debriefing and recording are crucial. Integration and processing set the baseline for future sessions. My work involved maintaining stable variables over 20 years—same setting, substance, dose, sitter, recording process—to leverage LSD's power. This consistency allowed a deepening contact with the universe. Various psychedelics have different qualities and ranges, and my experiences would likely overlap with another, like Psilocybin, but LSD offers more cosmological headroom.

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

Chris Bache: Carol did this out of love. Psychedelics were too fast for her, but she's a deeply spiritual person. We eventually separated but remain friends and supportive co-parents. She's completed a three-year retreat in the Vajrayāna tradition—a serious practitioner with long-standing spirituality. Her spiritual wisdom grounded me during my work, but it was never her path. She supported me because I wanted to do this.

Reid Robison: That's really neat. Thanks for sharing all this.

Steve Thayer: Yeah, Chris, I'm captivated by your scientific-like, disciplined approach. By controlling variables, you returned to the same drill site, getting a deep core sample of the cosmos, unlike pockmarking the surface with less attentive practices.

Chris Bache: Yes, there's no right or wrong way to use psychedelics. Many good ways exist, and mine is one strategy. I'm trained as a philosopher of religion with a penchant for precision and analysis, wanting to leave breadcrumbs in case I needed to work my way back. Turns out that concern wasn't needed. Sorry, I'm losing my train of thought.

Steve Thayer: No problem, Chris. I have a follow-up. As a philosopher of religion, I've read you started this work as an atheistically-leaning agnostic. How did your relationship to the Divine change as a result of your experiences?

Chris Bache: Through my graduate studies, I studied my way out of religion entirely. I'd become atheistically inclined, believing science revealed the Axial Age's God too small for the universe we know. With psychedelics, the experiences change that quickly. Repeated cycles of death and rebirth make the reality of a non-space-time dimension overwhelmingly clear. I never encountered a deity but engaged an intelligence guiding my experiences, expanding consciousness far beyond our known reality. In that context, I could speak about God, but I prefer "the creative intelligence of the universe." It's easier to understand that the universe has a mind and is always sustained beyond physical understanding. Our historical concepts of God have been radically incomplete, and we're rewriting that story, with psychedelics playing a pivotal role for laity to engage the spiritual expanse firsthand.

Steve Thayer: So, Chris, who are we in this story? Unique organizations for the universe to experience itself? Each of us a fractal enabling unique joys?

Chris Bache: I think you say it well. The question has many layers. We're part of the universe's creative experiment, arising from and embedded within it. Our nature, body, and mind evolve from the universe. When sinking into deeper consciousness, you encounter vast intelligence and fathomless compassion, manifesting existence into being. We're fractally embedded, part of its story, and it's part of ours. That’s one level. Adding reincarnation, as empirically evidenced, suggests we're participants in the universe for not just 100 years—more like 100,000 years—deepening the plot of cosmic co-evolution. Our evolution and the universe's evolution intertwine, with reincarnation folding individual learning forward.

Steve Thayer: If you'll permit me, Chris, to pull more on this thread—one fascinating me my whole life—who we are relative to the universe, to divinity. Are we individualized intelligence continuously existing within a grander one? Does reincarnation mean continuity for us, Steve Thayer, back hundreds of thousands of years, or do we deconstruct, reassemble anew with new parts? What do you think?

Chris Bache: We don't know all the answers to those questions. We don't really know how reincarnation works or the physics behind it. Even if we have evidence that reincarnation is a fact of nature, we don't know its precise nature—how it goes, how it works. It seems the universe is a learning system, and reincarnation is part of that. Because our consciousness did not begin with our body, going back farther, we can use a concept like 'soul'—something that holds and gathers the learning from all incarnations we've experienced. How far back does it go? Two questions: how far back does it go, and what's the nature of the reincarnating soul? Nobody knows for sure, but all cultures believing in reincarnation say it doesn't start with human beings; it starts before human beings. How far before humans? Well, we're not sure.

My sense is it starts when individuality begins to emerge within the evolutionary matrix. I'll frequently use the term 'evolution,' but I believe in progressive development, a progressive unfolding. That doesn't mean I agree with the standard textbook theory of what's driving reincarnation. By 'evolution,' I don't mean that reductive determinist theory.

Chris Bache: So 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 broad classes. But somewhere in the evolutionary process, individuality emerges, and as that individuality emerges, it deepens over time. That's when I think reincarnation becomes possible. Classically, they look to animals lower than mammals, somewhere in the animal life form. Wherever individuality emerges, the next question is: What are we underneath these evolved changes? To get that, we delve into a deeper level underneath the soul. What's the essence of the soul and our individuality?

There, I think we find the same answers in psychedelic work that we find in 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, sparks of the Divine, drawn out of the unitive matrix of Divinity, given the privilege of individuated existence, which is polished and refined over thousands of years, going back and forth between spirit and matter on a developmental journey. But the essence of what we are is the divine itself. The manifestation depends on how long we've been 'cooking.'

Reid Robison: That's fascinating. Earlier, you mentioned karma and suggested that your view on it might have changed. How do you view karma now from this broader perspective you've been sharing?

Chris Bache: Simply as cause and effect. Karma and vipaka imply cause and effect. The universe pulses with cause and effect at all levels. Here, we talk about a substrate of cause and effect—set in motion by our capacity to choose. We make choices, inherit the consequences, make new choices in that context, and inherit those consequences. For instance, if we've been smoking two packs of cigarettes daily for five years, we're not free to not want that next cigarette. But we are free to set in motion choices that can free us from that addiction. We're constantly making choices and inheriting the consequences.

One change in my thinking since writing my first book, "Lifecycles," is my deeper appreciation of the synergy between individual karma and collective karma. In the West, we tend to personalize karma, seeing it as the story of the individual soul maturing over lifetimes. I think our species evolves, pulsing every 100 years in reincarnation, with a collective learning process in which our individual learning is part. The boundary between collective and individual learning is porous, and I'm more sensitive now to collective karma as part of individual karma.

Reid Robison: Earlier, you mentioned the role psychedelics might play in the evolution of consciousness. Considering Terence McKenna's 'stoned ape' hypothesis, do you see psychedelics as having played a role in evolution?

Chris Bache: Terence's hypothesis is interesting. I don't have an opinion or new insights on it; I hold it as an interesting hypothesis without independent ways of assessing it. However, we are coming to a turning point in history, a make-or-break point, and psychedelics could play a significant role. They're giving us extra awareness and accelerated, deepening healing at a crucial time. There's a tremendous inner fermentation taking place, a detoxification at both individual and collective levels, manifesting in karmic content surfacing. It's not just happening to select individuals; it's happening beneath our social movements and globally.

Psychedelics, by amplifying our consciousness, aid in managing this purification process and broaden our worldview. One deep psychedelic experience of communion with the universe can shatter materialism—the idea that only matter is real. Huston Smith said a mystical experience doesn't make one a mystic, but it can unmake an atheist. Psychedelics have a crucial role here. How far will this go? How deeply will psychedelic healing reach our culture, and how quickly will these insights contribute to the paradigm shift? I don't know, but the fact that LSD and the nuclear bomb were invented in the same decade suggests significant synchronicity.

Steve Thayer: As someone dedicated to exploring what it means to be human, I'm curious about your opinion on artificial intelligence, particularly as we might be creating conscious entities. Any thoughts?

Chris Bache: I don't really have an opinion. Artificial intelligence never came up in my sessions, which I finished in 1999. I watch AI developments from the sidelines and, personally, am concerned about it. It's happening and will hugely impact us in the future. Whether it will be friend or foe, I don't know. I'm more concerned about the ecological cliff we're approaching. We're witnessing catastrophic imbalances from the industrial era with cumulative consequences. Until we address this, we face tremendous global instability and crisis in the 21st century. AI's role in this is uncertain.

Reid Robison: Regarding ecological concerns, how much insight came from your psychedelic experiences versus life experiences? Any thoughts on how psychedelics might help us forge a better path forward?

Chris Bache: Let's hold the second part about psychedelics helping us, and I'll address the first. It was one of the biggest surprises of my work—letting go of the framing as a personal journey of transformation to a larger dance with the species mind, being catapulted to deeper causal levels of reality. This might sound outrageous or speculative, but working deeply beyond the personal psyche reveals where we are and where we're going as humanity naturally comes into focus.

In "LSD and the Mind of the Universe," there's a chapter on the birth of the future human. I never expected insights about human history to arise, especially before my ecological awareness in 1991-1995. I received visions about humanity's evolutionary saga, indicating we're at a turning point—a definitive turning point in history, an evolutionary pivot into a magnificent period of transformation. Early visions showed profound changes, but not how we'd get there, given the current state of affairs. In 1995, during my Diamond Luminosity work, I experienced the death and rebirth of humanity—a profound unraveling of life as we'd known it, a global systems crisis driven by eco-crises. While it seemed like a potential extinction event, after the crisis, humanity emerged transformed, with an open heart, new values, new social institutions, a shift in the plate tectonics of the collective psyche—a massive transformation of the human heart.

I received instructions on how the crisis would catalyze rapid change through understanding the collective psyche as a unified field. Like physical systems in chaos, a non-equilibrium state in human psyche allows rapid change and new structures to emerge. Consequently, we'll move through this crisis faster than expected. Later, I experienced 'Deep Time' and the archetypal form of 'Future Human'—a being with a massive, healed heart, open mind. Not just a transformation of heart and mind but augmented sensory experience—a hundred times sharper than ordinary consciousness. This represents a pivot to a radically transformed species, an open heart, mind, and enhanced capacities. This is our century's story—how we transition to our next evolutionary form, the birth of the diamond soul.

Reid Robison: As a professor of religious studies, do any religious or philosophical views align with this narrative, like the Kali Yuga from Hinduism and the transition into Satya Yuga?

Chris Bache: Besides the ones you mentioned, several Hopi prophecies and indigenous cultures have long perceived this profound transformation. It aligns, as we're in a period of darkness shaped by karmic patterns of the past. Now, we're in a phase where grace and energy drive these patterns to the surface for reckoning—all the hatreds and divisions. This toxic history must be purged for divine energy to enter. Prophecies about the Kali Yuga are deeply true; we're moving into a profound new age.

Steve Thayer: As a psychologist, I've always wondered about the human psyche, and your description resonates. We're capable of much more than we demonstrate—both great violence and creativity. While terrifying, this maturity seems necessary to draw out our potential. Psychedelic experiences can be an existential crisis, burning away impurities to reveal true essence, yet integrating them into daily life is challenging.

Chris Bache: Yes, it can be challenging. Once you engage deeply, you realize you're playing on a different field—more than personal transformation; it's part of historic processes. Diving into the deep psyche is diving into deep, fast-moving waters. Everyone has a tolerance for handling this complexity and intensity. So, recording visionary experiences is crucial, but so is taking care of oneself. After that session on the birth of future humans, it took me a year to recover and stabilize. It's vital to ground oneself physically, emotionally, and socially.

Before, reincarnation seemed like we chose our lives. Every person chose to be here in this demanding time, for the benefit of future generations and the Divine itself. The Divine's work isn't just humanity's doing—it's nature's doing, whatever the intelligence behind and within nature is.

Chris Bache: And I address this in "Lifecycles." 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 all this. I can come up with any number of partial and incomplete theories for how this stuff works or how it goes, but in the end, I think we're ultimately brought to our knees in trying to understand it intellectually. But if you experience the love and wisdom of the universe, then it gives us confidence that there truly is a logic to it. I want to say the universe is a hard taskmaster. When you look at pictures of Kali, the destroyer, she is a liberator who brings about enlightenment. She brings death and destruction in one hand and enlightenment in 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, does the universe in a deeper sense pay 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? Is the universe listening to us as we are in pain? And 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. I certainly feel like I'm on my knees, and I think I read somewhere, maybe this was yours or someone else, that the divine, as you've described it, is something we can experience but not necessarily comprehend. That concept has actually brought me quite a bit of peace as someone who is a self-described truth seeker. I really want to understand things, thinking that would give me assurance that everything would be okay, or help me understand what I should or shouldn't do—typical of someone who's looking for answers. So, permission to not know all the answers is quite comforting.

Reid Robison: Chris, do you have certain people you count as teachers, or are there philosophical and spiritual perspectives you lean on? I'm thinking of that question that I hope we can get into next: how does one proceed on a path of exploration like this wisely? What are good preparatory philosophies and spiritual frameworks to check out or try on, perhaps?

Chris Bache: Well, I had the benefit of being a professor of religious studies, so I spent much of my professional life teaching courses in comparative mysticism, in Buddhism, and introductory courses in Eastern and Western traditions. I got to study a lot of the masters and learn their stories. They were always my guideposts. The great masters, the great spiritual beings, were always my touchstones, even though my work was not focused specifically 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, although I have not academically studied them. My understanding is more of a layman’s, but I deeply appreciate that for people who are undertaking this type of work, it's very beneficial to do it under the tutelage of an experienced teacher or guide, someone who can help them process what they're experiencing. 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. The only teacher 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, but she's also helped, blessed, loved, and taught me more things than I ever imagined possible. It’s foolish to do this work alone. These were my circumstances, and I had the constitution to survive them. I had the companionship of my partner, a wise spiritual woman who helped keep me grounded, and the advice of the elders I was studying in my courses. For most people, when we do this work, it's good to do it in groups under the guidance of someone who has more experience in these states than we do. This is new territory, and when I say guidance, I don't just mean someone who directs our experiences, but someone who can help us enter these states safely and understand and process our experiences when we return. I think it's important to have people we can talk to. One of the burdens of my journey was working in isolation. Because it was all illegal, I couldn't bring it to the office or campus. I'm a teacher; I love to learn and share, and I'm a gabber, so I couldn’t talk about this stuff. It's not healthy to be without a community that you can share experiences with and listen to others. As that experience grows, we know we're in this together. We really learn from each other as we go deeper. It’s crucial to do this work responsibly, with guidance from those with more experience.

Reid Robison: Oh, thank you for that. I know time is whizzing by, as it tends to do, but I'm just on the edge of my seat dying 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 on a path forward.

Chris Bache: About halfway through my journey, in the 38th session, during a year of great blessings, I was taken on an experience that was preceded by very intense purification processes, very intense death-rebirth processes. At one phase in this journey, I experienced all my former lives coming into me. I had done past life therapy before and was familiar with about a dozen of my past lives. I'd already written a book on reincarnation, so I was comfortable with the idea, but I began to experience my former lives coming into me. It was like winding a kite spool, and when they reached a critical mass, they fused, resulting in an explosion of energy. 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 up to that point. I was an individual, but an individual beyond any frame of reference I had known before. I received many teachings, repeated until I understood what was happening, which changed my understanding of how reincarnation works and where it’s taking us. In Eastern cultures, reincarnation is often understood as making small, incremental improvements over lifetimes until reaching enlightenment and then leaving the system of space-time. It's an up-and-out cosmology. All religions of the Axial Age of the last 5000 years are up-and-out cosmologies. You achieve salvation or enlightenment, and fruition comes in an off-planet spiritual paradise. My sessions taught me this is not an adequate description. It stops halfway. Humanity is not simply evolving one lifetime after another making small improvements until the soul one day wakes up inside our physical existence. We die, expand into the soul, incarnate into our narrow egoic experience, and if this rhythm continues long enough, the soul awakens inside our physical existence. This is what I call the birth of the diamond soul. When the soul wakes in physical existence, there's a tremendous expansion of heart and mind. It changes our orientation, focusing on long-term vision and the wider good because we intuitively connect to all the relationships throughout history. We've been every race, every religion, up and down the economic ladder. When all those lives converge into a singular consciousness, it transforms our perception of what’s taking place, who we are, and where we’re going. People ask what form the future human will take, exploring this in science fiction, but it’s much simpler. We have been gestating the future human through reincarnation for hundreds of thousands of years. Gestation is long, labor is short and intense. We are entering a period of labor, striving to become the largest, deepest version of ourselves—the diamond soul. If the entire species went through this transition, awakening to this deeper identity, it would be extraordinary. We've reached a point where we cannot run this planet out of egoic consciousness. We either grow up or go extinct, and extinction is a significant evolutionary accelerator. Personally, I think this crisis of evolution will bring us to the edge, but I believe we will make it through. I’ve experienced the future human both as a task to be actualized and an accomplishment already realized. I believe we will overcome this crisis, and when we're looking back, we'll see that all the pain and hardship we endured was worth it, as we bring forth a new child in history.

Steve Thayer: Chris, I am feeling very grateful to you for your life's work and willingness to share it. I'm glad you've decided to come forward and share with all of us, beyond just your students. Your written work, and coming on podcasts like ours means a lot to me personally. I'm so 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 this teaching with your audience, it truly is.

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 in particular you'd like to point people for more information? A website, any of your current work?

Chris Bache: They can contact me through my website, chrisbache.com. It's a website in need of an overhaul, but it’s there. I’ve posted some things I’ve written there. I'm all over YouTube— various podcasts and talks I've given are available. If articles or things I've written aren't on my website, they'll be on academia.edu under my name. All the important things I've written are available there. They can reach me on my website. I'm not doing any structured teaching at present. I may be doing some retreats in the near future, but those are still in the planning stages. Right now, I'm just doing some talks at conferences and maybe some retreats coordinated by people I’m working with individually. Basically, I'm just following the work, letting it get into the world. I don't have a specific agenda; I'm responding to where the book takes me, like you have.

Steve Thayer: Well, a Chris Bache retreat sounds awesome. I’ll add it to my bucket list. We’ll include your website and other places where people can find your work in our episode show notes. Again, thank you so much.

Chris Bache: You bet, thank you.

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