Bicycle Day Psychedelic Talk (recorded 2025-04-19)

Ehren Cruz: Before I welcome our esteemed keynote presenter, I want to share a quote from Albert Hofmann after his first psychedelic experience. He said, "The psychedelics gave me an inner joy, an open-mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation. In human evolution, it has never been as necessary to have the substance of LSD—it is just a tool to turn us into what we're always supposed to be." Now with that, I want to welcome Dr. Christopher Bache.

Ehren Cruz: Dr. Christopher Bache is

Ehren Cruz: a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He's also an adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, an emeritus fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the advisory board of the Grof Legacy Training. Chris's work explores the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states. He's an award-winning teacher and international speaker and has written four books, including Lifecycles, Dark Night, Early Dawn, The Living Classroom, and LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Everyone, please welcome Dr. Christopher Bache.

Chris Bache: What an honor to be here with you today to celebrate Bicycle Day—an opportunity for the psychedelic community to come together, to see each other, reunite, and make plans for the future. Now, I know what you're probably thinking. You look at me and think, "He doesn't look like he's done a whole lot of LSD." I think the divine designed me as an undercover agent for the psychedelic revolution. It's amazing what you can get away with in a university classroom if you look like an accountant. I tell my students sometimes, if I looked on the outside like I think on the inside, I would probably look like Jerry Garcia.

Eighty-two years since Bicycle Day, we've come a long way. Think of how many people are doing psychedelics regularly, 82 years after Albert Hofmann's first famous bicycle ride, and the reasons we use psychedelics—what draws us into psychedelics—and how we use them vary enormously. If we were to do an inventory of everyone in this room, we would find so many different approaches to psychedelics, methodologies in using them, and different results coming out of that. The psychedelic testimony of the community together is always more important than the testimony of any one individual because there are so many medicines and ways in which they impact human consciousness. Always the collective is more important than the work of an individual.

What I'd like to do is talk about my work and some of the potentials that lie untapped so far in the current psychedelic renaissance. The current psychedelic renaissance is focused primarily on healing. That's how we're getting psychedelics back into the academic discussion, back into the intellectual discussion, and back into the mainstream: by demonstrating psychedelics' capacity to heal the wounds of a broken heart, to heal the wounds of life, and even to heal the wounds of the soul if it goes deeper. This is critically important, and I understand all the scientific brethren who are working hard to document and legitimate the healing that psychedelics can facilitate, and to refine our ability to integrate them into our clinical practice. Really, very important.

But for me, this is just the first stage, the first step into the deep waters that psychedelics make available. If you think of consciousness as an ocean, healing, or maybe using psychedelics to augment creativity, is another separate function. Or to generate insights—to go to psychedelic states in order to gather insights that one might use to apply to one's life or changing circumstances. Whenever I have an important choice—a big, important choice—I will go into psychedelic space to get that larger expansion, a little more dilation, a little more communion, and bring my questions there and seek the guidance that I'm asking for. I follow the advice I get there. I follow that advice in terms of what books I write next, where the people are, and where to go with the research—healing, creativity, enhancing creativity. I think of my friend Alex Grey and all the psychedelic artists in the movement. But these are still only in the shallow waters of the ocean, near the shore, near where we live in the personal world.

What if we go deeper? What if we use our psychedelic protocols to go deeper into the ocean of consciousness and begin to get into the area of spiritual awakening? I'm thinking, for example, of the dialogue between the Zen Buddhist and the psychedelic community that was published years ago, Zig Zag Zen. Are psychedelics useful in the facilitation of genuine enlightenment, or are they a hindrance, as classical Buddhists would hold? Spiritual awakening is different than healing or creativity because here we're using psychedelics to break into the deeper universal themes of human existence. Enlightenment is not about personal healing. You may go through personal healing, of course, to move there, but enlightenment is really grappling with the fundamental human condition at its core. What is the core struggle that we are working with here? What are the core issues we're dealing with? What is the nature of my identity? Underneath all the social conditioning and psychological conditioning, we feel there's something more authentic underneath. What is that deeper identity?

Ultimately, we come to some realization that the Hindus describe as Atman is Brahman—the essence of the individual is Brahman, the essence of the totality, the essence of God. It's awakening to seeing first, then entering into communion with the creative intelligence of the universe that permeates all things. This is different than healing, right? Broad, deep—something we share with all human beings. Our personal problems we may not share with all human beings, but the deep spiritual questions, the deep seeking underneath, we share with all human beings.

To me, healing, creativity, insight, spiritual awakening—wherever you imagine that is still only into the mid waters of the ocean of consciousness. And what I'd like to talk to you about today is what I call cosmological exploration—using psychedelics to probe the deep structure of reality at the deepest levels possible, to see, experience, and understand what is the underlying structure of human existence. What are the layers of human existence? What is the source of creativity, the creativity that gave birth to our universe 13.7 billion years ago?

My psychedelic journey began 45 years ago when I was a brand new academic, freshly minted out of graduate school, beginning my academic work. I was pretty much an atheistically inclined agnostic at the time—that's what seven years of graduate school in religious studies made me. Then I met Stan Grof's work. I met two people's work my first year: Ian Stevenson, whose work on reincarnation convinced me in one reading that reincarnation was a fact of life—just a simple empirical fact of life. Deal with it. As an academic, that wasn't part of my worldview. But secondly—and more importantly—Stan Grof's book Realms of the Human Unconscious turned my life. It was a major pivot point.

So I began the therapeutic, psychedelic-oriented work that I knew would be required for me to have access to the kinds of experiences that would allow me to hopefully make some kind of contribution to my discipline, which is philosophy of religion. I started a psychedelic practice, which, after three medium-dose sessions, led me to develop a facility for working with high doses of LSD. I developed a protocol, following Stan Grof's protocol. You know the drill: total isolation, private, protected with a sitter, a carefully curated playlist—all day engagement, start to finish. A long day. I chose to work with 500 to 600 micrograms of LSD.

I don't recommend that protocol, truly. Knowing what I know now, at the end of that journey, I would do it differently if I were starting over again. I would work with lower doses. I would balance periodically, maybe working with high doses of LSD, with intermediate sessions of psilocybin or ayahuasca. I have experience with all those psychedelics, but my primary work has been with LSD, so perhaps it's appropriate to speak to that on Bicycle Day, which we honor here.

Chris Bache: I chose to work in a Stan Grof paradigm, always in isolation, and took these massive doses of psychedelics. I was doing it about five times a year on average, and it ended up lasting 20 years. I worked for four years, stopped for six years, then resumed again for a very intense 10 years. Over that 20-year period, between ages 30 and 50, I was in my second Saturn cycle. I stopped when I was 50 years old, and I didn't publish LSD and the Mind of the Universe for another 20 years.

If I published that book as an academic, I probably would have been fired since the good people of Ohio where I was teaching don't like their university professors doing massive doses of LSD on the weekend. All my work was secret. None of my students ever knew what I was doing. My faculty, my close friends on campus knew, but they didn’t really understand it. The conversations usually started with, "Yeah, I remember I did some psychedelics back in the day." But doing 500 to 600 micrograms amplified by the most powerful music I could pull, just driving it completely hard—you shatter your mind. You shatter consciousness. You blow it all apart, which is dangerous unless you're really prepared, have your seatbelt fastened tight, a strong support system, good clinical grounding, and a solid sense of self. It's not wise to blow yourself apart that often.

I found I had a capacity, and astrologically it's in my chart. I could get open, spacious with Neptune, opening into deep states, and congeal well. The expanding, I managed. Over the first few years, I had the capacity to navigate this domain and developed an interest in working this hard because what interested me was not the clinical applications or creative applications. It was the capacity of LSD to take me into states where I could truly enter communion with the intelligence of the universe, and then that intelligence would teach me—just like we all have that experience. You open up, go deep, open into this larger field. You clean up your house, and when you're clean, you take in this larger field. It speaks to you. It teaches you.

I've often wished for advanced degrees in quantum physics and astronomy because if I had, I would have understood so much more of what it was teaching me. My background was in philosophy and religious studies, so it took me into areas I was most interested in: understanding the paradoxes of the human condition. Why is it so hard here? Why is there so much suffering? Why are we estranged from our deepest connection to the universe? Where is reincarnation taking humanity? Reincarnation lifts the restriction of time. When reincarnating, you open up a time horizon, maybe similar to how the divine thinks. The divine doesn’t think in small-term projects. It thinks in large, species-wide, planetary, galactic-size projects.

The challenge becomes, how do we let ourselves begin to think and experience in galactic-size projects? The first is to unlock the barrier of linear time, to go beyond the confines of this moment. This is where the divine lives—in the present moment. Many spiritual practices focus on deepening the present. But in psychedelic work, there’s a potential to transcend the present. When you step outside of linear time and enter into what I call deep time, you experience time in many dimensions and levels. Many different modalities let you step into vast expanses, experience 100,000 years in an hour. You go beyond your personal story into humanity's story, into the larger evolution the divine is working to seed in the human community.

Sri Aurobindo, the Oxford-educated Hindu sage, said humanity is a transitional species. We’re not stable. We’re transitioning from before Homo sapiens to what’s coming. Galaxies are in motion, Earth systems are in motion, and humanity is in motion. Where are we going? What's it going to look like?

Chris Bache: I want to inject a cautionary note. I'm happy we're spending time writing books on integration because breaking out with these chemicals can transcend our time space suit easily. But to do it in a valuable way, bringing back something we can keep is the harder part. The first step of integration is to remember—we can go so deep, we can't remember the experience. You train yourself to remember deep experiences. If you go into deep waters, far beyond personal and human identity, into archetypal reality, into causal levels, and into what I call Diamond Luminosity or what Buddhism calls Dharmakaya, you have to train yourself to remember those experiences.

The first time you touch a new level of reality, you might not remember everything. But with repetition, you see more, understand more, and there are fewer gaps in your session notes. I found this pattern repeated every time I broke into deeper levels of reality. Understanding it took time. I didn’t just fear losing my job, I also liked teaching, being with students. It takes a long time to digest, to understand experiences. A long journey with psychedelics is different from one or two interesting sessions. I think expectations have been shaped by a literary tradition based on few experiences. Aldous Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception after one experience. Huston Smith wrote Cleansing the Doors of Perception after only six trips. He stopped because the bummers increased. That’s when it gets interesting for me—when deep purification begins.

Michael Pollan’s important book, he took psychedelics a handful of times. It creates short-sighted expectations of what a psychedelic journey can be. In a long journey, you go through cycles of death and rebirth, going deeper into the universe as deeply as your medicine and capacity allow. Your protocol must hold you in a carefully contained container, support you to go deep and come back, integrate and internalize.

At the end of my journey, working up my notes, I identified five levels I worked on: personal mind, the level of collective mind, archetypal mind (in a Platonic sense, not Jungian), and beyond to causal reality, where oneness permeates everything. Beyond causal reality, the last five years were exploring what I call Diamond Luminosity: states of luminous clarity, beyond imagination.

Touching it once undoes thousands of years of karma. The hyper-clarity became my sole interest. My journey spanned a third of my sessions reaching that reality only four times. Touching that level felt like the true "diamonds from heaven," the subtitle of the book.

Chris Bache: Caution—you can go deeper in the universe, and it's wise for you to go. You can go. You can have too much God. That seems like an oxymoron, right? Because it's always better to have more of God. But at least in this method, which gives us temporary access and then brings us back, I think—at least it's been my experience—even though I paid a lot of attention to integration, all the way through physical integration, subtle energy integration, emotional integration, social integration. Even though I had taken all those precautions, I found in the end that I had gone so deep into transcendence, I had gone so deep into the subtle, luminous body of the Divine, that I lost my interest in living inside time and space. Time and space began to feel kind of like papier-mâché when you know that this reality is not as real as that reality.

I lost—I didn't lose my bearings. I was doing my job, taking care of my family, and doing all the stuff I ordinarily do, but in my heart, I was waiting to die so I could go back. I reached a point in my work where I knew I had to stop for reasons I talk about in the book—73 sessions. If you're not cooked by 73 sessions, forget it; 74 is not going to give it to you. I was cooked. I was overcooked. I was waiting to die. I knew that I would not do any more deep, deep work. Going deep takes years and years. It's like training an Olympic athlete. You don't run out and break—it takes years to develop the momentum, the psychic momentum, to be able to get back into this territory.

I could not get back into the territory today, now that I've stopped this work 20-plus years. I could not get back into the territory I was exploring at the end, no matter how heavy a dose of LSD I took today. It takes time to be able to develop the momentum to move there. So I reached a point where I knew I had to stop. It was time to stop, and I knew I would not get back into this reality until I died. This is one of the differences, maybe, between using psychedelics for spiritual awakening, where the goal is to consume all one's karmic fixations and blocks until one can enter the transparent condition and deep communion with the eternal dimension of existence as it courses through this present moment right here—a noble goal. Spiritual masters have always been my guides on my journey.

This is different—entering so deep into deep time where you're dealing with the evolutionary story of humanity, so deep into the light which is the source from which the Big Bang exploded. When I stopped my sessions, it took me about 10 years to sort of reground myself in being committed to living out the rest of my life inside time and space. When I say that, I mean I was totally functional in the world. I was doing all the things I had to do, but in terms of recommitting myself to living in the immanent divine, instead of immersing myself in the transcendent divine, it took me 10 years to kind of recommit myself until I could be comfortable living in the immanent divine. That's why a word of caution—you can go too deep. You can't go deeper than is good for you. You can go deeper than is good for your family, the people who depend on you.

Where is reincarnation taking us? I've talked about the large trajectory. Where is reincarnation taking us? There was a point in my sessions where—and again, I've always been envious of people who have lots of teachers. I mean, I think that's great. That's really important. I don't have lots of teachers. I've only had one teacher, and that's the universe. The consciousness of the universe itself has been my only teacher, and it's been a rigorous teacher. I mean, beating me up, breaking me down, crushing me, loving me, bringing me back to life multiple times. Only one teacher.

There was this one particular day where the teacher seemed interested in showing me where reincarnation was taking us. I experienced all of my former lives beginning to come back into me, fast and furious. I had done past life therapy, had a sense of my history, but this was larger. They were all coming back very quickly, like wrapping kite string around a kite spool. These lives were coming back. Eventually, there reached a time when they fused. They seemed to fuse into one. With that fusion, there was an explosion of energy that just exploded inside my chest. It was my first deep contact with diamond light.

I was catapulted into a state of consciousness where I was an individual. It wasn't like losing all boundaries and entering into oneness. I was an individual, but I was an individual beyond any frame of reference I'd known before. I came to understand that this is where reincarnation is taking all of us. Every one of us—we reincarnate, we die, we come back. We die, we get big into the soul, we come back into our incarnate life. We die, we get big into the soul. We come back. If we keep this up—if we keep this rhythm up of expansion, contraction, expansion and contraction—and keep it up hundreds of thousands of years, sooner or later, doesn't it make sense that the entire totality of our lives, which we meet when we die, when we return to our total soul, that totality of integrated historical experience would incarnate eventually inside time and space?

That's what's happening, I think, with the birth of the diamond soul. We are giving birth to the next form of human consciousness. The next form of human consciousness is a human being whose mind is the repository and integrated into a singularity of all the experiences he, she, or they have ever had in all their lives. Now they look at the world, and they know they're not this. They know they're not a 100-year-old being. They know their relationships are steeped in age and time. They know their life projects are steeped in thousands of years of practice, not 100 years.

I don't think we can continue to run this planet on the basis of egoic consciousness. The egoic consciousness, and I think ego is a beautiful thing. I'm not going to badmouth ego. Individual consciousness is a magnificent, beautiful, potentiating, empowering thing. But left to its own devices, it also tends to be cut off from each other, cut off from the earth. We've created a civilization based upon the psychological limitations and assets of egoic consciousness. Right now, this civilization is generating problems of a magnitude that I don't think can be solved operating out of egoic consciousness. We literally can no longer afford the luxury of being children on this planet. We have to grow up.

Growing up, I think, means owning ourselves, owning our histories, owning our former lives, owning the destiny that's carrying us through time, arching through time, taking us into—not our plan for the human future—

Chris Bache: —but some, I call it the divine. I'm not always comfortable with that word, because it's been sullied by our world's religions. But the creative intelligence of the universe, the creative intelligence that's taking us into billions and billions and billions of years more still to come, which we have not seen.

Personally, I think we are entering a period of history with profound challenges. The challenges we're facing are not simply political and social challenges. They are not simply ecological challenges—though that's going to become more and more powerful as we move forward into the 21st century. At their core, all of these challenges are symptoms of a challenge of consciousness. We literally do not know who we are. We don't know what we are. All we have to do is look at the White House to see that we do not know who we are. We do not know what we are, and we cannot afford to run on this incomplete knowledge any longer.

The universe is taking us into a profound death and rebirth process, which in many ways will be very similar to the death and rebirth process that we have seen mystics go through when they enter the dark night of the soul. A time of intense purification until their natural, spontaneous, spiritual nature shines free, just as happens in psychedelic sessions when we go through those very dark sessions, which are turgid, painful, and difficult. But you embrace it and take it down to the bottom until you go through the death process and then are spun into clarity, kindness, compassion, understanding, wisdom.

I think the entire planet is going into a death-rebirth process. That's why, ever since my book Dark Night, Early Dawn, I talk about the dark night of our collective soul, the purification of our collective psyche, purification of our collective institutions. We are entering a period where, just as in a psychedelic session, we lose control. We're losing control of all the things we thought we could assume about culture and civilization. We're losing control of the ordinary assumptions of life. We're going to be facing unprecedented challenges. The oceans are rising. You know the scenarios. I don't have to repeat them—coming at us very fast. Cities going underwater, mass migrations, eco-migrants.

Chris Bache: We're entering the time of the great undoing, just as in a psychedelic session or on a meditation cushion, where you have to face the deepest fears, the deepest anger, the deepest terrors in order to melt into the truer condition, into the lasting condition, into the true peace that satisfies the inner longing. Our culture is going to do that. I have no idea how it's going to do it, but in my sessions, I have seen it. I've experienced it in deep time—a period of profound trauma, of profound uncertainty, and a deep unraveling of the human community. Yet my experience is that we make it through this. We come through it. We don't survive it; we die and come through, changed and transformed.

In this international crisis, we go through a process that breaks open the human heart, and oneness is born in the human family—concentrated in some individuals subtly pervasive for the collective as a whole. The theme of oneness, the theme of compassion, the theme that makes all our intelligence and discoveries safe. We will stop using them for war. We will stop using them for destruction. We will start using all our talents to serve the common good. I think the global crisis we're going into is synergistically coupled to the psycho-spiritual process that we are going through in the birth of the diamond soul. As we experience perpetual transformation in our psychedelic sessions, the world is trying to become one.

We cannot solve our problems within the world of nation-states. Just as the world is trying to become one, the soul is trying to become one. There's an inner wholeness here. We are trying to become our deepest self, our deep soul self, just as the world is trying to become one, and there's a synergistic coupling. I think as the world transitions through this crisis, the world is composed of souls. Souls are not 100-year-old things. Souls are 100,000-year-old things. It means that the humanity going into this crisis is a humanity of 100,000-year-old beings. Personally, I'd rather go into a global crisis with 100,000-year-old beings than with 100-year-old beings because we have the knowledge. We have all the knowledge. We have the capacity within us.

This is one of the most exciting centuries to be alive. I think by the end of the 21st century and beyond, we will be living in a very different world than the one we're living in now. I don't know how long it will take us to navigate this—at least three generations, maybe more. This is not something that's going to be accomplished quickly and easily.

Chris Bache: By reminding ourselves of the power of psychedelics to profoundly impact one of the scariest things that human beings go through in this life—dying. My wife of 25 years, Christina, died a month ago, six weeks ago. She had cancer. She, like me, was a Psychonaut. She had extensive experience of spiritual reality, and this completely changed her death and my experience of her death. She was not afraid of dying. She knew where she was going. She had firsthand experience of where she was going.

That changes death from a crushing experience of defeat or fear into a celebration of a life well-lived, a life brought to rich fruition. Knowing she was returning home into the arms of the Beloved, returning home to the Great Mother that gave birth to her. There's no fear here. There's joy and celebration. This is the way it's supposed to be. This is what the Center for Conscious Living and Dying is helping bring about in the community here. This is what death really is. Death is a celebration.

We should mourn children who are being born because they're beginning the hard work. Death is graduating, going back home. Psychedelics—Christina had a lot of psychedelic experience. Psychedelics were not part of her active dying process; it was already done beforehand. She took what she had learned into her dying and engaged death differently than others might.

If there were one thing I wish I could take out of all the psychedelic work I'd done for all those years, if there were one thing I could just reach into my heart and give to people, it would be: please lose your fear of death. If you're afraid of dying, you have your cosmology upside down. Death is returning to the world of plenty, the world of fullness, the world of light, the world of super intelligence, the world of understanding, the world of infinite compassion. Being born in Asheville, maybe not so much. We have to work hard here. We have to work hard there. We receive the rewards of the work we've done—what a revolution. 82 years since that bicycle ride, and we're just getting started. Aaron said, we're just getting started. We are just in baby steps.

If we look forward to 15 years, 50 years, 100 years, just imagine: if we handle this transition well, if we harness the energy of psychedelics conscientiously, responsibly, wisely, then we can accelerate this generational change that, I think, nature and the divine intelligence is trying to bring about in the human family. We are all part of this revolutionary transition. By being here, we acknowledge we are part of this revolutionary transition. Thank you very much.

Ehren Cruz: Thank you so much, everybody, please—Dr. Christopher Bache.

Ehren Cruz: Just taking a moment to honor this man's profound courage. You know, as I shared before, mental health—the healing dynamic—is the on-road to our reintegration of psychedelics into our culture, into our community, and very much an important on-road for many reasons. But as he has shared, the exploration into consciousness, into our connection, to our spirituality, and to our cosmology—there is a frontier. A profound frontier that maybe many of the ancients were aware of as well, that we are re-stepping into. So let's carry that in our hearts as we are now expressions of this possibility. We are active members in this great learning tasked to us. How do we take these medicines and grow and learn beyond the self into a collective, into a holistic being?

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