The Phoenix Always Rises: Evolving into the Future Human

Manda Scott: Chris, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you? This slightly gray December day over here, but it might be lovely where you are.

Chris Bache: Hi, Amanda. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I'm speaking to you from Weaverville, North Carolina, which is just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, and it's a sunny day here. It's going to be a lovely afternoon in the mid-40s. Wow.

Manda Scott: Okay, now I have weather envy, but hey, you're in a swing state, which at some point we might get onto. That must have been quite entertaining for a brief period of time. Let's not go there. That's two pages. All right. So you've written a number of books; you've had a very inspiring life, and my projection onto you, which I am almost certain is not true, is that you have the answers to life, the universe, and everything. So we'll lay that one to bed as it's my projection, and you don't see it that way, just so it's clear we're there. And from where you are, what is most alive for you at this inflection point of humanity?

Chris Bache: Well, we've just gone through an election in our country, which was, for the liberal side of the continent like me, very disappointing and very upsetting. What's happening in politics, in my country and in many countries around the world, this whole movement to the conservative right is very much of concern, especially since they are denying fundamental facts that are clearly critically important for humanity to address. First and foremost is the fact of global climate change. And yeah, so that's happening. In my book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, I have a whole chapter on what I call the birth of the future human, which summarizes all the transmissions that were given to me over a 20-year course of high-dose LSD sessions about humanity's future, where we are in our evolutionary development, the critical crisis that we are moving into, the birth of a new form of humanity coming out of that crisis. So when I see what's happening politically against that backdrop, it's a growing dismantling of assumptions, a growing unraveling of our social contracts, and a growing global crisis, which seems to be generating by a series of eco-crises.

Manda Scott: Okay, so that gives us an opening into the birth of the future human. For those watching on YouTube, my cat is on the desk. It's easier to let him just ramble across, and then he'll go away, and it'll be fine before we go there. So it seems to me, let's just address the politics because it's alive for everyone. This is going out at the start of the new year. 2025 is going to be the year when everything changes. America sneezes, the world gets a cold, and nothing will be the same, particularly not geopolitics is about to shift enormously. I think a US-Russian alliance has never happened before, and it looks like it's arising in real-time. And it seems to me, 71 million people voted for Trump. That means, by my reckoning, 259 million didn't. And yet there's been effectively a bloodless coup by the fascist right. And yet no amount of ideology, however forcefully they try to impose it, can actually overcome biophysical reality. You cannot stop climate change by pretending it's not happening. The ostrich position is only useful until the floodwaters fill the hole that you've stuck your head in. Yeah. So it seems almost to me that also to me that the shifts we need need to be inner and collectively inner, which is exactly the field that you're working in. Yeah, and we don't want to go back over everything that you experienced, but I wonder if you've got a kind of an elevator pitch of where you started and where it took you to in terms of your own spiritual process. Is that something that we could go into?

Chris Bache: Sure. I can give you a kind of a quick overview. I began my psychedelic work when I was just hired as a university professor in Northeast Ohio, and I began this work as a pretty well-educated, dedicated agnostic with strong atheistic inclinations. That's where all the years of graduate school had brought me. But just when I started teaching, I came across the work of Stanislav Grof, and his book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, changed the direction of my life. I saw the importance of his work for my discipline, which was philosophy of religion. I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a therapist; I'm a professor of philosophy of religion. And so I began an underground regimen of psychedelic therapy because I knew that in order to speak intelligently using this new methodology, you had to do the work yourself. And even though it was illegal by this time, this was 1978 when I started my career, I started my psychedelic work in 1979. Psychedelics were illegal. I made a decision to do this work in an underground fashion, completely isolated. I never let my students and most of my faculty never knew what I was doing in this regard. I continued this work for 20 years. I started it when I was 30, and I finished it when I was 50, and I did 73 high-dose LSD sessions, which is a very aggressive protocol. I don't recommend this protocol today.

Manda Scott: You did this so we don't have to, as far as I can see, and I'm enormously grateful.

Chris Bache: Yeah. And then I spent another 20 years digesting those experiences, writing about them, integrating them, trying to integrate them, and wrote two books based on those experiences. One of them is Dark Night, Early Dawn, which came out in 2000, and probably the more important one for a wide audience, is LSD and the Mind of the Universe, which came out in 2019. So I did this work for 20 years, and then LSD and the Mind of the Universe came out 20 years later, after I stopped.

Manda Scott: After you'd integrated a lot of what happened and after you were also, it seems, from the book, just beginning to be able to start talking about it, because you had issues where you couldn't speak. You physically couldn't speak because you couldn't speak of what you understood and what you knew. Can you tell us a little bit about that? That seemed to me quite an integral part of what was happening.

Chris Bache: Well, I love teaching. I love working with the students. I just really love being in the classroom. And I knew that if I began to speak openly about psychedelics in the 70s, 80s, 90s even, I very likely would lose my position at the university, and so I could not speak openly about my work. I mean, I spoke indirectly by giving teaching courses on psychedelic therapy and Stan Grof’s work and other people's research. But I wasn't able to own my experiences publicly at my university until the very, very tail end of my career. I retired in 2011 a little bit early in order to give me time to bring forward what I consider my most important work, and my conviction is that psychedelics represent a revolution, not just in therapy, not just a clinical revolution, but a revolution in how we do philosophy. This methodology is that we move systematically into very carefully controlled non-ordinary states. We experience them as consciously as we can. We bring them back, preserve them, write a detailed written account within 24 hours, and then spend some time digesting them, integrating them with our other bodies of knowledge, then going back into that state and coming in. So this method of systematically entering into non-ordinary states and coming back represents a new methodological platform for the doing of philosophy. So what we're looking at is the emergence of what I would call a psychedelic philosophy that's grounded on the systematic application of non-ordinary states of consciousness through the use of psychedelics.

Manda Scott: Yeah, can I interrupt you, because this is already opening doors, and I'd like to go down a few of them. So we're talking about integrating with other systems. And in the book, you are becoming quite deeply involved in some Buddhist practices. Were they Buddhist, I think. And so it strikes me, within the shamanic world, we get a lot of people who want to go off and do Ayahuasca or do mushrooms. And it seems to me there it's short-cutting and not universally. I have spoken to people who are absolutely prepared to go and spend six months in the forest alone with the plants and integrate it, but there are an equal number of people who seem to think they can go from point A to point B without actually doing any of the steps in between. And what I'm hearing from you is that the steps in between are absolutely crucial and that they need to be undertaken in a structured fashion, in spite of the fact that it feels to me to be moving away from the reductive, scientific space where atoms move around like billiard balls and everything is predictable, as long as we have enough data points, to a point where everything is emergent and complex and actually nothing is predictable, but experience, the phenomenology of living, is what matters, and the more-than-human world comes in and takes part. It seemed to me, reading certainly the second book, to an extent the first, but particularly in the second, that there was an extraordinary coherence. You had a six-year gap in the middle, and yet when you went back, you basically took off. It was like a serial dream, which those of us who practice dreaming, you sometimes night after night after night, you're in the same story. And you were getting this. You were in an almost linear progression, except it was more fractal than linear, I would say, building on previous knowledge, and you were being taught, quite clearly. And so can you unpick for us a bit of the structure that you see that is useful in order for this to be something that helps us move towards being future humans.

Chris Bache: Okay, well, there are several things rolled into your observations, and all good. They're all good observations. So some process comments: First, I think integration is very important. We're finding we have the technology, the chemical technology, to trigger very deep states of consciousness, but these states of consciousness may have very little lasting impact on how our deeply ingrained psychological and cultural habits, if we don't take time to sit with these experiences and integrate them as deeply as we can into our embodied existence. And over the course of my work, I learned that even though I was paying a lot of attention and doing as good a job as I could to integrate each individual session and doing an adequate job. I think I still underestimated the long-term challenges of integrating an entire spiritual journey, but I did not fully comprehend this until I had stopped my journey at the end and then realized how hard stopping hit me, which then exposed the imbalance, the failure to integrate the radical, the most extreme, most radical experiences, which were the deepest experiences, being drawn into intimacy, into communion with, I want to say the divine, but I'm cautious about that because we have to unpack all sorts of theological, you know...

Manda Scott: Distortion on this podcast, actually, you could. We talk about the heart-mind of the universe all the time, which I think is, for me, what you would call the divine. So I think we can assume that unpacking has been done in the past five years.

Chris Bache: The universe is good. I like. That's why the book is called LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It could be the heart-mind of the universe.

Manda Scott: But you came to a point where you were basically marking time, waiting to die in order to return to unity with the divine. Did I understand that correctly?

Chris Bache: No, you understood. You got it correctly. It's kind of jumping ahead to the story. Let me back up and work to that point. Okay, if you work, and I think in order to extract the maximal psychological, psycho-spiritual and philosophical value of these experiences, it's very important to create a container, what I call the Kiva of practice, a container which affords you the best opportunity for absolutely clear contact with these deeper states of consciousness, without interruption, without confusion, no outside contact. You're in a therapeutic environment. You're lying down, you're with a skilled sitter. You're listening to carefully curated music. It's a complex process which you have to prepare for. You have the session, you need, you're integrating the session acutely for several days after. So each session takes a week, essentially, to, you know, just for the immediate session, and then as you build on these sessions over time, you're right. It's a linear, I found a linear progression. Relatively speaking, you know, consciousness is a holistic phenomenon. So you may experience multiple levels of consciousness simultaneously. You may experience some deep levels of consciousness early in your journey work, but if you work systematically, my experience at least, is that there was a progressive deepening, so that I went through rounds of deepening when I was writing up my journey at the very end. I looked at the total landscape of my experiences, and I broke it down into five fundamental landscapes that I had been exploring. One is personal mind, your personal unconscious. Second is the collective mind, the species mind Carl Jung would have called the collective psyche. Third, archetypal mind. Fourth, causal mind, the mind of oneness. And fifth, the Diamond Luminosity. So my experience was I would work. I would go through a succession of death-rebirth experiences. Eventually, I would have a breakthrough that would catapult me into a new level of consciousness where I would have to learn how it worked. It was a totally different, it was like a different physics governing this level of reality. I would work there. I would continue to learn there. But in that process, I would go through more purification exercises, more episodes of death-rebirth that weren't simply repeating ego death, but were taking me into a deeper cycle of death-rebirth. And eventually that would culminate, and it would, I would have a breakthrough into a completely different level of reality, and that level of reality, I would all start over again. I wouldn't understand how it would work. It would be confusing. Then I would keep going back to it. I'd get my sea legs. I would acclimate to it. My visionary experience would get clear. And then I would go and get propelled into another level of reality. And when I was in the middle of the deepest, deepest level I went into, the Diamond Luminosity, I had an experience in which I was, I had an experience of a level of light beyond the Diamond Luminosity, and a ray of light came out of that reality, hit me, shattered me. And what it taught me was it's an infinite progression. I had thought in the beginning it was a matter of becoming one with God or getting to the meta, cosmic void stage of work. But what I found is that there are many, many levels of God. There are many levels even of the primal void. That's an infinite progression. You'll never reach the end of it, even using as powerful a protocol as high-dose LSD work, and that really is one of the things that shifted my entire orientation, because if I were doing it over again, I would be much gentler with myself. I would use lower doses. I would balance and vary the psychedelic that I was using, because I've learned that the goal of the work is not to get to some end stage or end point, which would, you know, change your life forever, but the goal is simply to open, let as much of the wisdom of the universe in as possible, as much of the love, as much of the insight, and then spend weeks, months, years, integrating those experiences, changing whatever it is about your life that is keeping you from experiencing those realities on an everyday, daily basis, and then continuing work. So at the end of my journey I found that I had gone so deep into intimacy with the divine, into the Divine Light, dissolving completely into fields of light, transcending space and time, so deeply that when I stopped this work, and I'll go later if you want to why I stopped the work, but I stopped it after 20 years, and then in the years following, I found that I was missing the transcendent clarity so deeply that I found I was just waiting to die so that I could return when I died. And after reflecting on this for a long period of time, I began to realize something's not right. This is not the way this work is supposed to end. It's not healthy. And I spent a lot of time then studying my work to try to find out where I had gone wrong. And I realized, I came to realize that I had gone so deeply into Transcendence that I had created an imbalance within my incarnation, an imbalance which was tilted towards Transcendence at the expense of embodied affirming my deeply physical, embodied existence. And both of these are two fundamental truths. We are always tapped into Transcendence. We're always tapped into the physical world. But I had tilted the balance very far, and I had to make a conscious choice to reground myself in physical reality so that I could become more comfortable in my own skin, and this began, and writing LSD and the Mind of the Universe was a tremendous help, because I was speaking about my experiences. And I'm an academic, and I love to talk, so I love to teach, and by speaking about these experiences, it empowered my integrating the experiences, and by sharing them publicly, after so many years of keeping them private, it allowed a healing to take place inside my own psyche, between that which had been hidden and that which had been public, between the higher and that which is, quote, lower or the Earth year. Yeah, yeah.

Manda Scott: Again, many doors opened. We want to come back to why you ended. I would like to make clear to people listening. First of all, this was industrial doses of LSD, and you've explained that you went through death-rebirth experiences. I think it's worth pointing out that there were points where you were vomiting so hard for so long that the vessels in your eyeballs ruptured. Yeah, it wasn't sounding like a whole lot of fun to me. And you also had your then-wife, who was a trained psychologist, psychotherapist, I can't remember, but she was very good at holding the space, so you had a lot of anchoring. And it still sounds like the early part of every single journey was living hell, as far as I can tell. Would that be fair?

Chris Bache: Yeah, what I discovered eventually is that there's a purification cycle, and traditionally, we would call it the death-rebirth cycle. But we often think of death as something that happens to us one time, and a lot of the therapeutic literature and psychedelic work circles focuses on ego death, which for me is only the first round. And what I learned later, after you've died many times in this process, I mean completely loss of control, metaphysical confusion, just complete surrender to overwhelming metaphysical waterfalls, you learn that first you cannot die. It's impossible to die. The form that you are can die. The structure of life as you have known it can be extinguished, but the inner essence of your being always re-emerges. The Phoenix always rises. And in that process, I also learned that what we experience as death is actually an extremely intense form of purification. When your purification reaches so deeply that it reaches into the fundamental assumptions that structure your experience of reality, then death has returned to grace you, right? So it's purification breakthrough experiencing a deeper state, and if you want to stop at that level, it's perfectly fine. Different people use different psychedelics, different modalities at different powers, and some psychedelics only have sufficient power to reach certain levels. It happened that the method that I was using, the substance I was using, was so powerful, it had the power to keep breaking me through level after level in this systematic fashion. Yeah.

Manda Scott: And did you choose LSD because of Stan Grof and it was the thing back in the 70s? I suppose that's a head mind question, but my spirit mind question is, you could have done a lot of different things. Ayahuasca wasn't around much, but mushrooms were. There were other things that were there. Do you think that whatever it is that guides you through this incarnation led you to that because you said you wouldn't do it again now, but you wouldn't be who you are now if you hadn't gone through the, the military version of completely destroying yourself many times. Can you speak to that?

Chris Bache: Well, to understand why I chose LSD, you have to go back to 1979, 1980. Ayahuasca was still not yet on the playing field for the most part. Just early mushrooms certainly were. I understood LSD to be more powerful than mushrooms. So the primary reason, though, is that my work was based upon Stan Grof’s work, and I trusted Stan. I trusted his research, and Stan did most of his work with LSD. So that's where I dug in. I dug in there. Later, after I finished my 20-year journey, I've done many psychedelics. I've done mushrooms and 5-MeO and salvia divinorum and San Pedro, different psychedelics, and Ayahuasca, which are beautiful, and they've taught me a lot, and I have a certain sense of that each of these psychedelics impact the spectrum of consciousness, or open some portion of the spectrum of consciousness. The kind of contact I experience with psilocybin, for example, is very body-grounded, very emotional. Body-grounded. LSD tends to have a high cosmological ceiling tendency, certainly at high doses, it tends to push the high ceiling, whereas psilocybin is much more grounded, earthy in my earthly existence.

Manda Scott: Yeah, and it seems to me, it's more to do with opening doors into the rest of the web of life, rather than necessarily cosmic awareness. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but there's, as you were saying, there's a tilt one way or the other tilt. I want to move towards the future human. But just before we go there, I'm wondering how was it taken in academic circles when you wrote these books? Were there people who then came to and went, Yes, I've been wanting to do this, or I have been doing this, and thank you for opening the doors? Or were there others for whom the door was now shut and your access was denied? How did it land with your people?

Chris Bache: My work has been well received in the consciousness community and in the academic community. They don't even know I exist for the most part. It's been ignored. There hasn't been a single professional review published of my work out of a hardcore academic philosophy journal or religious studies journal.

Manda Scott: But you must have friends who could publish in those journals. You must have ways into that if people wanted to. Is it just not worth their career to do that?

Chris Bache: You know, I just, one of the things I decided early on in my career was not to try to address the reservations which were abundantly clear to me coming out of the traditional academic mindset. I decided that if I tried to justify the method and justify the experiences to my colleagues, it would hamper me, it would hold me back. I just decided to push deeply ahead and let the chips fall where they may, and I understand how exotic, how strange my claims are, how they sound to people, right? You know, raised educated in a traditional environment, and I've just decided to let that go and let history sort things out. I am acutely aware that I'm writing not for my present generation. I'm writing for future generations who will, you know, paradigm change takes place in an evolutionary context, and so I'm just doing the work and letting other people sort out what they think it's worth.

Manda Scott: With any luck. I'd want to be one of your students, and it sounds like there are, particularly we touched on the earlier moments when you were having what we would now consider to be psychic experiences where you knew things from non-ordinary reality, not when you were on the LSD, but just when you were teaching and then, and then you had to hold them in, because if you said something, it was basically going to blow everybody's fuses, and they were going to wonder how you knew it and explain how you knew it. But those students, I am thinking, have been in the field of your awareness at a point when you are experiencing, I've begun to see the world in a different space. So with any luck, they'll go off and change the world.

Chris Bache: So I'll tell you one aspect about that particular. I never let my students know that I was doing this work, but I began to find that even though they didn't know about my psychedelic work, they began to have experiences which were moving, showing that they were being impacted by my psychedelic work. And secondly, my work was changing me at a deep structural level, so that my person became a lightning rod that was sparking transformational insights or breakthroughs among my students without me consciously intending it. I began when I would be lecturing. I was drawing into my lecture examples which were purely random for me, but the examples I was being told were actually exactly the same thing that had been happening to my students that week, and the things I was saying began to touch them in very, very deep, personal, intimate places, places they were wounded, places they were blocked from going forward. This became such a common feature of my work that eventually I spent a lot of time studying this and developing an entirely new way of teaching to take into account the truths that I was discovering in the classroom and in my psychedelic work that revolved around the boundaryless nature of consciousness. Fields of consciousness that fields develop in groups, there's an energetic resonance which happens underneath the verbal exchange of ideas as a consciousness, directly engaging consciousness. And so I published a book in 2008 after I stopped my sessions called The Living Classroom in which I lay it all out. But I never mentioned psychedelics because the issue is not psychedelics. The issue is consciousness, the potential of consciousness. So if you do very deep consciousness work without psychedelics, I think you can trigger the same things that I experienced. But eventually, just recently this actually, this month, SUNY press is bringing out a second edition of The Living Classroom, and in this edition, they invited me to tell the truth about my psychedelic practice, because I'm out of the closet by now. LSD and the Mind of the Universe was out. So the new edition of The Living Classroom makes clear that it was my psychedelic practice that was driving the phenomena that were emerging in my classes, even though I think other people not using psychedelics can experience the same thing, so that's a whole other aspect that has to do with integration. Because integration here means taking care, not only of yourself, but taking care of anyone whom your practice touches, which for me, included many of my students, and a third of the book is just essays that my students have written, very deep essays, personal essays about their own spiritual experiences, their experience of death. It's a beautiful section of the book.

Manda Scott: Right, I will find that and put a link in the show notes. And you were still teaching the philosophy of religion at this point. You hadn't branched out into other things. Is that right?

Chris Bache: Yeah, I was teaching classically Religious Studies courses, Introduction to World Religions, Eastern Religions, Buddhism, Psychology of Religion, Mysticism and Meditation, you know, classic curriculum.

Manda Scott: Gosh, I wish they were the classic curriculum when I went through, but with my senior apprentice, and I don't work with psychedelics, but we work with, we teach shamanic studies. And I found, even when I'm talking about the book in front of a literary festival, that's that basically full of ordinary middle-class people who've come along and had nothing better to do, and wanted to get out of the rain, as far as I can tell. And we end up drawing in examples that seem to come out of nowhere. And then someone goes, "Oh, you just mentioned Boston, and something about streets in Boston, about which I know precisely nothing. I come from Boston, and the streets are just like that." So I'm sure that what you said is absolutely true and at a deeper level when we're teaching a held circle, then the resonances move across the circle, but becoming aware of these such that everyone in the circle is engaging with that strikes me as a step towards future humanism. If we're, I think we're, becoming conscious of the things that can help us to be different humans.

Chris Bache: Once you understand how fields work and develop a protocol that maximizes the potential of consciousness-changing fields within groups, it accelerates and deepens the learning experience. This applies not just to university courses but also in research labs and boardrooms—anywhere citizens gather in sustained conversations, which is where most of our change takes place. This is very relevant to the challenge of moving into the future.

Manda Scott: Yes, so let's go there. Let's lay out where I think we are, and you can tell me, because you're in the US, and I'm watching it from across the water. Musk has said he's going to buy the next election, and we have the best democracy money can buy. Unless we change the democratic process, that's it. I've been reading on Substack about Musk, Starlink, and how he managed to control election numbers. We're communicating through technology essentially owned by one person, who might be interesting, but I don't want them knowing everything. Evolution happens under intense pressure, and I don't want more pressure, though it probably will increase. Can we evolve our consciousness to become future humans? It seems you have a framework for that. How does that land with you?

Chris Bache: That aligns well, and you're correct. I wouldn't recommend a specific doorway, but psychedelics have entered history at a time when we need heightened awareness—for therapeutic processes, political processes, and more. Thousands are conscientiously working with psychedelics to heal accumulated traumas and open up deeper communion with the universe's intelligence. This helps us transition from a mechanical, dead universe to one that's alive and expresses its intentionality through evolutionary quantum leaps. We're nearing such a leap now. I thought my work was for personal transformation and healing, but it unexpectedly opened up collective transformation. Years of experiences showed the shadow I engaged wasn't personal but collective—the pain of our species. I understood there's a collective psyche holding humanity's trauma, and healing it makes the collective psyche more available to divine energy.

Manda Scott: Can you say that again about opening a door to something trying to come in? I think it's important.

Chris Bache: We're living in a time of ascending spiritual energy pressing in on us. The pain of our history and our ego-driven lives keep us insensitive to this light. Before past mystics break into non-dual consciousness, they experience a dark night of the soul, letting go of obstacles. This is happening collectively—intense psychedelic sessions, past life therapy, social movements tackling deeper pains than personal ones. The collective is straining against past burdens to embrace our future's light. In this context, I received consistent visions of humanity's evolutionary journey and radical breakthroughs. Initially, I didn't know how nature would achieve this. In 1995, my deep sessions connected me to the species mind and into future time, experiencing humanity's death and rebirth—a systemic breakdown into survival mode appearing like an extinction event. But at our worst, things got lighter, and after crises, humanity reconstellated. This pivot may span three generations, perhaps through the 21st century's environmental and systemic crises. Through this, something deep will crack open, transforming humanity's fundamental psychic substructure—a shift in the collective unconscious's tectonics, so future generations experience a new realm of consciousness.

Manda Scott: Indeed, and for a long time before that.

Chris Bache: Yes. I received visions of the future human archetype and experienced reincarnation dynamics on a personal and species level. We've built the future human over hundreds of thousands of years. We're now at a point where soul consciousness is waking within historical life, supplanting ego existence. My experience involved former lives merging into one, an explosion of diamond light, revealing a state beyond individuality. It's the birth of the diamond soul. Many describe similar experiences with various names. The soul is waking up, forcing the entire species to evolve into a species of spiritual enlightenment. With the current crises, we're at a choice point: grow up or go extinct, moving towards soul rather than ego consciousness. It's a collective awakening—taking a long view, understanding deep history, and embodying a fuller spectrum of humanity.

Manda Scott: And potentially other species?

Chris Bache: Exactly. We're at a critical choice point driven by ecological and systemic crises. Each person's role is crucial. We must embody what the planet needs: heart-led action, connecting with the web of life, and becoming dynamically alive with our full history and potential.

Manda Scott: If someone listening still has resources and privilege, how should they prioritize to help this process forward in 2025?

Chris Bache: This transition requires the resources of the entire human family—scientific, economic, political, and more. Each of us, based on our incarnational positioning, has a role to play. It's not about looking outwards but inwards. Will we have the courage to do what we can reach? Individually becoming what the planet needs in our lives can stimulate change in others. If you know what the planet requires, embody that. This awakens and supports others around us, linking our efforts.

Manda Scott: The field effect you mentioned earlier—aligning with the web of life—seems essential. Head mind plans, and heart mind leads.

Chris Bache: Yes, if the future human needs a heart-based epistemology, we should emphasize heart over head. It's not the end point, just a starting point.

Manda Scott: It feels like learning deeply from nature—understanding our imbalance and restoring harmony—is key.

Chris Bache: Exactly, biomimicry, learning from billions of years of evolution, and healing the trauma of ancestors involve understanding how ancestral trauma and past life trauma ripple throughout time.

Manda Scott: Healing now can affect up and down the timeline, avoiding demoralizing tasks like healing 10,000 years of ancestors.

Chris Bache: Yes, in a reincarnation framework, we're our ancestors, healing our lineage. When healing begins, boundaries expand, and healing neighbors and future societies become possible.

Manda Scott: Some might ask about starting with psychedelics. Is it for everyone or just certain individuals who let the experience ripple out?

Chris Bache: It's not wise for everyone to try psychedelics. They're amplifiers of consciousness, and the use during amplified states determines their value. Not everyone can handle amplified shadows; for those who can, settings, purity, and structured support are critical. Solo isn't ideal; a group offers necessary sharing.

Manda Scott: Even though you were supported by someone, right?

Chris Bache: I was supported by my wife and a psychologist, but I still recommend group work, like Ayahuasca or Psilocybin communities. Group dynamics help with shadow integration and prevent psychic inflation, crucial in this work.

Manda Scott: Yes, it's essential to dedicate time to the process, not rush it like some Westerners who try Ayahuasca.

Chris Bache: Yes, dedication is key. Let me recommend Bill Barnard's book, "Liquid Light," about years in the Santo Daime community. It's insightful on Ayahuasca practices and personal experiences.

Manda Scott: I'll add that to the show notes. Before we conclude, is there more on why you stopped your work or any unaddressed topics?

Chris Bache: That's actually a good place to wrap up some of the discussion because it's relevant to where we might go. I stopped for two reasons. I stopped first because my physical system—my subtle energy system, my prana or qi energy system—was running so hot after all these years of practice that it was producing certain physical symptoms, leaving me continually uncomfortable. I describe these in the book, but I understood enough about chronic energy and Ayurvedic medicine to recognize what was happening. I was just running too much energy. But that's not the major reason I stopped. The major reason was heartache. It was getting increasingly difficult to return from deep states of ecstatic transcendence, immersion in the divine fabric, to my time-space reality. There are great beings able to sustain those transcendental states in their time-space personality—truly, all honor to the great masters. I'm not one of those beings. This is a path of temporary immersion, different from the path of contemplative presence. I can go into those states, but I have to come out, and eventually coming back became too painful, so I stopped, knowing it would be for the rest of my life. It takes years to build the momentum to break into these high-energy states. If I took a massive dose of LSD right now, I wouldn't reach where I was at the end of my 20-year journey. So, it was important for me to stop. I first had to learn to manage the heartache and begin integrating those living memories into my physical existence, which conversations like this help me do. It's healing for me to talk about these things with you. The way this applies to some of your listeners is to be careful about how much you bite off in your sessions. Even with conscientious integration, you can bite off more than you can chew or than is wise to chew. We can learn a lot from contemplative traditions. I had the advantage of teaching courses in mysticism, meditation, shamanism, and Buddhism. I understood the literature and practices of mysticism and tried to use those processes in my work. There's a lot of wisdom there. It's helpful to be well-read and recognize the limitations of any one incarnation. In some ways, I went so deep it will take multiple incarnations to truly integrate them—to manifest those levels of consciousness within my physical consciousness comfortably.

Manda Scott: Yes, yes.

Chris Bache: I would hate for anyone to try to do what I did and get into trouble and hurt themselves. That would break my heart.

Manda Scott: Yeah, I think we've got the health warnings clear here. If you're going to work with these things, work with someone who knows what they're doing. Me and my apprentice are finding people to whom we can refer others. We get emails saying, "I took substance X, and I'm having a psychotic breakdown. What can I do?" We’re shamanic practitioners. It's not our field, so we pass this on to people who can actually help, but they're few and far between. There are many more who think they can help than those who actually can. Take care, test people before doing something irreversible. Do the work beforehand, during, and after, to integrate—and do it in service to life, not for ego gratification. Is there anything I've missed?

Chris Bache: I think it's great. If you do your work well, one thing that happens is you lose all fear of death. Once you transition several times into that reality, you know, in your bones, from your own experience, that death is not an end but the end of an incarnational cycle. There's nothing to fear about death. Death is homecoming. All the Hollywood nonsense about dark places, demons, and ghosts—99% of people die and transition into the light naturally and comfortably. If you're afraid of dying, your metaphysics is upside down. Death is homecoming and the end of your matriculation, the harvesting of your life. Birth should be mourned. It's where the work begins, like being a freshman in college. Graduation is wonderful. Losing your fear of death changes your life because death is what people fear most. Without that fear, you're living differently, more joyfully.

Manda Scott: Yes, thank you. That feels like a fantastic place to end. Does that feel good to you?

Chris Bache: Thank you, Amanda, and thank you for your work. We need all the awareness we can bring to ourselves, and you’re certainly bringing awareness to many people. Thank you.