Diamond Luminosity (live stream)

Jeffrey Mishlove: Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, okay? And then I'll shut that.

Emmy Vadnais: And then I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Minimizing.

Jeffrey Mishlove: There we go. And so as of this moment, announcements are being sent out to one of our followers, and they'll be logging in, and so they'll be able to hear everything we say, and their screen will sort of look like this. They'll see little thumbnails of our images.

Emmy Vadnais: In a minute, I'll start the countdown clock timer, and then for those listening and joining, welcome and thank you for being with us. If you want to chat where you're joining from in the world, we'd love to hear where you're from. And then in just a minute, I'll start the timer.

Jeffrey Mishlove: I might mention for people who are watching the archival video, and they're wondering, why do they have to sit through 10 minutes of our conversation beforehand before we begin the program? And it's because, once we start the timer and go live, YouTube automatically makes it this archival recording, which YouTube then takes public. So I suppose the option would be for us to capture a recording on our hard drive and then edit it before we let it go public. So in theory, we could edit out the first 10 minutes because I got a complaint from a viewer who was unhappy. They could fast forward, I suppose, to the beginning of the video.

Emmy Vadnais: Right? That's why there's a timer. It says nine minutes until livestream, but this is to give a notification so that our subscribers will be notified that we're going live in a few minutes. And if we were to take it down and re-upload it, the only thing is we've already shared this particular URL all over the internet, so then we would lose this particular...

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, we'd have to have a new URL. I kind of like keeping things the way they are because if I were to start downloading and we're on Zoom, it's a Zoom video, which is not the highest quality from the Zoom recorder, to be honest. Anytime you mention another person, I would want to insert a book cover or something the way we normally do for our interviews, which would create additional delays, but this way, the archival video goes up as soon as we finish talking.

Emmy Vadnais: Yeah, it's pretty easy just to fast forward a YouTube video to when it actually begins.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Typically by the time the day is over, there are three or four times as many people who watch the archival video as those who are with us live.

Chris Bache: How many years have you been doing this, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey Mishlove: I started in 1972 doing interviews, but a YouTube channel—this is our 10th year on YouTube. Okay? I began at KPFA Radio, Pacifica Radio, a nonprofit station in Berkeley back in 1972.

Chris Bache: That's a lot of good information streamed out to a lot of people.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, really, and I was guided to do it by a dream, really, yes, at a time in my life when I didn't own a radio or a television and I was a long-haired Berkeley hippie. I didn't believe in radio or television. I thought they were all phony baloney, but I had this dream, and I acted on it and changed my mind. For most of the last half-century, I've been doing interviews.

Chris Bache: Wow, that's fascinating. Another example of the wisdom of the deep consciousness of the world, communicating and giving us directions in our private lives, our so-called private lives. Yeah.

Jeffrey Mishlove: And I'm very interested in people who have had what I would call life-changing dreams. Yes, because that dream that I had was a life changer. I mean, here I am, half a century later, still acting on that information.

Emmy Vadnais: Yeah, yeah. And livestreams have been on YouTube, what, three, four years, Jeff, you've been doing these?

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, maybe even...

Emmy Vadnais: I think maybe five years.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah. In fact, yes, five years.

Emmy Vadnais: Usually every two to three weeks, we have fabulous guests on like you, Chris.

Chris Bache: And how did you get into this particular role, Emmy, what drew you here?

Emmy Vadnais: Well, Jeff was a guest on my podcast back in 2018, and I originally learned about him on public television back in 1987 when I was probably 13 years old, interviewing wonderful people. From 1986 to 2002, although my understanding was that it was sent out via satellite in 1987, I began watching it and was just fascinated and very intrigued with the information. I didn't understand all of it at the time because I was 13, but I understood enough that I wanted to learn more. And in retrospect, I think it really did help set the tone for my career in understanding more about holistic health, intuition, spirituality, consciousness. Back then, Jeff, you were talking about UFOs and interviewing people like Jacques Vallee and John Mack, and I thought, well, this man is really intelligent. There must be something to all of this. Then I was researching for a book I wrote about intuition, and Jeff's name kept coming up. I realized, oh, Jeffrey Mishlove, he was the host of that program. Then I realized he had a doctorate in parapsychology, which was very downplayed on that original program, and then I thought, well, I'd love to talk to him, and I'll invite him on my podcast, and he said yes. In 2020, Jeff, you put out a call for volunteers, and then I started volunteering with you. Then he won the Bigelow essay competition for the best evidence for the continuation of consciousness in the afterlife in 2021, so he invited me to be a guest host. Then shortly thereafter, I became the co-host. Now he's invited other guest hosts. I'm just grateful to be here and help share this information and learn from one of the best people in the field doing this.

Chris Bache: In such a way, our lives are all intertwined around each other, aren't they?

Emmy Vadnais: Yeah, yeah. Very true. And Chris, I know we're going to learn more about you in a few minutes. When did you start? I know you were a professor for many years. When did you start public speaking or getting interested in these kinds of topics?

Chris Bache: When I started the LSD work in 1979, I had to keep it pretty under tight wraps. I couldn't bring it out publicly at all. It wasn't until I wrote "Dark Night, Early Dawn," which was my first book on psychedelic work, that I began going to conferences and began to teach at CIIS in that area. But I really didn't go public until I retired from the university in 2013. I was working on "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" for five years during that period, and when it finally came out in 2019, I became more public. So, I was out of the psychedelic closet formally when that book came out.

Emmy Vadnais: Yeah, and it's a wonderful book, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." I really enjoyed reading it. I like how you also put many of your session notes in there. It was like I was sometimes along on the trip with you.

Chris Bache: Yeah, that's what I wanted to do. My sense was that in order to have the philosophical conversation about the potential of psychedelics, first, people have to understand what happens in deep sessions. The first task was descriptive, and later, the second or third round would be more evaluative and analytic. So I really tried to bring the reader along with me into those sessions. I had to learn a whole new way of writing. I had to lose my academic voice and develop a different voice.

Emmy Vadnais: Well, you did it beautifully, I would say. You nailed it.

Audience: Thank you. Yeah, so...

Emmy Vadnais: We just got about a minute before we officially begin the program.

Jeffrey Mishlove: In retrospect, the impulse that I had to act on that dream and to be alert to it, I was primed for that from having had LSD a number of times prior.

Chris Bache: Yeah, and with the depth of our interweaving continues to go, yeah.

Jeffrey Mishlove: All right, welcome everybody. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. I'm with my co-host Emmy Vadnais and our honored guest Chris Bache. Emmy, will you introduce Chris?

Emmy Vadnais: Yes, hello and welcome, everybody. We're so grateful to have Chris Bache with us today, who is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, where he taught for 33 years. He is also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training. Chris is the author of "Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life," "Dark Night, Early Dawn," "The Living Classroom," and "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven." His website is chrisbache.com. Welcome Chris. We're so happy to have you here today. To get us started, do you want to share a little bit about your background? We also want to let people know that Chris has been a guest on New Thinking Allowed with a recorded interview talking about psychedelics and the Cosmic Mind.

Chris Bache: Well, I'm actually the last person you would have thought from the beginning of my life to end up writing a book on describing what happens on the long series of high-dose LSD sessions. I was raised in the Deep South, in Mississippi. I was a seminarian in the early days, studying to be a Catholic priest, but eventually, I left that because celibacy and I didn't get along very well. Got degrees in theology and New Testament criticism and eventually philosophy of religion from Brown University. So I had a very traditional upbringing. The psychedelic '60s passed me by entirely, and it wasn't until I got to teaching in 1978 that I encountered the work of Stanislav Grof. His book, "Realms of the Human Unconscious," was a life changer for me because I saw the philosophical significance of his work. If what he was saying was true, it had profound implications for how we could do philosophy in the future, not just healing, but actually explore the metaphysical structure of reality. Although uncomfortable, I made the decision to begin my own psychedelic work. I was uncomfortable breaking the law, but I chose to begin very private, circumscribed work in this modality using Stan Grof's protocol. So I divided my life into two parts. During my day job, I was a traditional member of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State, and kind of my night job was working with psychedelics, healing my own psyche, exploring the deep structure of the collective psyche, and what lies beyond the collective psyche. I worked for four years, stopped for six years for reasons that I give in the book, and then resumed for another 10 years. So, basically, between the time when I was 30 and 50, I did 73 high-dose LSD sessions using a tight therapeutic protocol. Then I took another 20 years to digest and assimilate those experiences and connect the dots before publishing "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" in 2019. After I finished my sessions, in one of my meditations, I heard this voice say, "20 years in, 20 years out," which I took to mean that it would take me at least 20 years to integrate and digest all the experiences I had collected in those 20 years. Now, I think that might have been overly optimistic because I don't think I have nearly integrated all the experiences that I had collected in those first 20 years.

Emmy Vadnais: So you feel like you're still integrating the experiences?

Chris Bache: Very much so. In fact, it raises substantial intellectual questions: how do you possibly integrate experiences which so radically transcend the conditions of time and space and our consciousness inside time and space? If you have experiences which go radically beyond spatial consciousness, radically beyond temporal consciousness, how do you integrate those experiences? It really comes down to thinking about what integration even looks like. What does it mean when you're dealing with such radical experiences? If you're dealing with lower dose work or gentler psychedelics, integration is less demanding, but if you really open up to the deep psyche, integration becomes more substantive.

Emmy Vadnais: All right. Well, we're getting lots of questions coming in, and I think this question from Robert Bushman might be a good place to start. What is consciousness? Is there an ultimate reality, or is it infinitely fractal? I guess there's a few questions in here. How can an individual's conscious awareness expand without psychedelics? How can one remember past lives? But maybe starting out with, what is consciousness?

Chris Bache: I'm happy to let the psychologists and philosophers tear their hair out on that one. I'm willing to go with whatever definition they come up with, as long as it's broad enough to incorporate the total phenomenology of consciousness. Simply, consciousness comes from 'com' to 'know.' Consciousness is that with which we know. It is the awareness of our cognitive capacity through which we know anything else. Then we ask, how big is consciousness? We tend to think that consciousness fits inside our skull, but now we realize that's not adequate because of all sorts of empirical parapsychological research. I think of it as consciousness being a field that our brain allows us to consolidate and structure inside our physical existence. Consciousness, in its own right, is a field. Being a field, it's open-ended and if you ask how big is that field? That's the real cosmological adventure. If you really go deep into your psyche, you drop first into the personal unconscious, into your personal psyche. If you keep pushing deeper, you drop into the collective psyche, the territory Jung described. But you can go deeper than that and drop below the entire psyche of the human species. You can transcend the species psyche, and then you're in dimensions of consciousness that truly, I think of as the mind of the universe. As vast as the universe is, consciousness is vast. The universe has a mind as deep, broad, and old as the universe's body. My individual experience of consciousness is a simple drop, a fractal aspect of the totality of consciousness that flows. That's why I titled the book "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." When you go very deep using a circumscribed protocol, you drop into deeper layers and explore the very nature of physical reality itself.

Emmy Vadnais: I think we just lost your video. Chris, we lost your video here.

Chris Bache: I lost the video—let me see what's up. Okay, let me see if I can...

Jeffrey Mishlove: I guess if the camera is pointing somewhere else.

Chris Bache: Yeah, let me see if... I don't know why it dropped, but I can shift to a different...

Emmy Vadnais: There we go. We've got a view of you now. Okay, wonderful.

Jeffrey Mishlove: You are back. I think it's important to emphasize early on in our discussion, or to repeat what you said in your earlier interview with Emmy, that you are not recommending that other people do what you did—take many high doses of LSD. I know one of our viewers has raised the question about what kind of people, or what populations of people should not use psychedelics.

Chris Bache: I absolutely agree. I really do not recommend that people adopt the protocol that I adopted. Knowing what I know at the end of this journey, if I were starting from scratch, I would be much gentler on myself. I would work with much lower doses. I would balance the organic psychedelics with the synthetic psychedelics. I just would take a much gentler approach. I was young when I did this work. I had a number of assumptions that turned out not to be accurate, and I would be much gentler and much more circumscribed in the project. There are many types of people who shouldn't be working with psychedelics for either physiological or psychological reasons. Psychedelics are amplifiers of consciousness. They take what is far away and make it available to you, and they take what is low volume and make it higher volume. So it's a tremendous kind of inversion, an explosion of awareness. If you are prepared for it, if you have the discipline and training to navigate those transitions, and if you're working with professionals who can help, okay. But there are a lot of people best suited for gentler techniques like yoga, meditation, or trans dancing, which can do a great deal of good work without psychedelics. Many of the people who have written me have never taken psychedelics or have taken them once or twice early in their life, but they've been meditators for 40 or 50 years. They're engaging with the cosmology that emerges in my story and comparing it to the cosmology that has emerged for them in their meditative experience, finding strong parallels. At the deepest level, the issue is not psychedelics, but consciousness itself.

Emmy Vadnais: How many micrograms? What was the dose that you were usually working at? I think you, like you said, you would go lower if you were to do it over again.

Chris Bache: After the first three sessions, which were medium dose sessions, I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms, which is right at the body's maximum capacity to absorb. It basically has the potential to just shatter the structures of consciousness and take you temporarily beyond your traditional ways of knowing yourself and the world. I would be much gentler now. Stanislav Grof differentiates between the therapeutic use of psychedelics and what I call psychedelic B. At Spring Grove, they worked with terminal patients using high-dose LSD to address death anxiety, essentially trying to trigger a near-death experience to relieve anxiety. It was quite successful but limited to three sessions. I thought, if you could work successfully three times, you could do more. Eventually, I learned I had a capacity for working at those levels. I could expand into the deep psyche comfortably enough and consolidate comfortably and strongly. It is an unusually intense protocol. I wouldn't do it again like that.

Emmy Vadnais: In fact, near-death experiencers are the group of people you often relate to with your own experiences with LSD, is that right?

Chris Bache: Yeah, I feel closest in some ways to people who have near-death experiences because when their body almost dies, they are catapulted into very deep states of consciousness. There's a strong overlap between what happens in a deep near-death experience and in a deep psychedelic experience. The difference is near-death experiencers get one take on that reality, whereas you get multiple immersions with psychedelics, which becomes a journey and a communion repeated and deepened over time.

Jeffrey Mishlove: We have a question from a viewer whose YouTube name is Greasy Slick, who would like to know if you've ever experimented with DMT, which is considered one of the most powerful psychedelics.

Chris Bache: I have experience with other psychedelics besides LSD, though my LSD work is primary. I have experimented with Psilocybin, MDMA, San Pedro, and 5-MeO-DMT, an extremely powerful short-acting psychedelic. I don't have a lot of experiences with 5-MeO-DMT. After a long period of not working with psychedelics, I nibbled on that for integration rather than pushing boundaries. 5-MeO-DMT is extraordinarily powerful. I also have some limited experience with high-dose ketamine sessions.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Are you able to draw any meaningful comparisons between those entheogens and LSD?

Chris Bache: That's a conversation we'd need to delve into carefully, and I don't think I have enough experience to make a fair comparison at this time. There's an advantage to psychedelics that open a long window, like LSD or Psilocybin, compared to short-acting ones like 5-MeO-DMT. You don't have as much time for the infinite consciousness you're entering to impact and transform your life. Rick Strassman found in his book on DMT that despite some deep experiences, they did not change lives deeply due to the short time frame. Even LSD is short, compared to meditational practices with longer windows. Combining meditation with psychedelics can create optimal conditions for transformative effects.

Jeffrey Mishlove: I wonder how many people who take LSD, and it's been widely used in our culture, have had their lives transformed as from my impression, many people took it more as partying.

Chris Bache: Yeah, I think that's the case, and nothing wrong with that. It is a wasted opportunity. So much depends on the focus and environment. Staying in touch with the world gives a certain kind of encounter, but isolating yourself with conscious intention creates possibilities. It can heal life's knots and increase receptivity to larger fields of consciousness. That is worth a lot more than concerts.

Emmy Vadnais: Yeah, could you expand a little on your session structures? Someone asked why not go hang out in nature, and how did you look to Stanislav Grof?

Chris Bache: Stan's work is so formidable and his intellectual synthesis of so many traditions is so important that he became my foundation for doing this work. Remember, I was doing this work in Ohio, a long way from San Francisco. I was not part of a psychedelic community or an Ayahuasca group going to Peru to work with indigenous shamans. I was really working alone, and I adopted the protocol Stan outlined in his book LSD Psychotherapy. So, my days would start early. I would have everything set up either at the third floor of our home or, later, when we started having children, in my wife's office. Carol, a clinical psychologist, was my sitter for all of my sessions. We would start early, with meditation, yoga, body stretching, and then begin the session. All sessions were guided with carefully selected music. Different types of music are appropriate for different stages of the process.

I would spend all day lying down with eyeshades. The only way my sitter primarily related to me was through music. One time we set up a movie camera to see if it would be interesting, but it was quite boring because all the action takes place inside. By mid-late afternoon, the session would wrap up, but even after, the tail was very long. It's important to reflect upon and integrate the insights that emerge because they can be powerful yet fleeting, like dreams. The day after, I would spend the morning writing a thorough account of each session. I developed a strategy to maximize recall by playing the playlist in order and writing each part of the session while playing the corresponding music. Once written, I wouldn't change it, as my attempts at improvements often diluted the focus.

Emmy Vadnais: That's fascinating. In psychological terms, it's called state-dependent memory, where you use the music you were listening to during the session to help reach back.

Chris Bache: The day after, you're still sort of one foot in, one foot out, standing at the edge of the well. By playing the music while your cognitive capacities are back, you can let your mind go back into that territory and capture it.

Jeffrey Mishlove: There's a question here related to the title "Diamond Luminosity." One viewer asked if it refers to actual diamonds or if it's related to the Diamond Sutra.

Chris Bache: That’s not a silly question at all. The phrase "Diamond Luminosity" points to states of consciousness I entered in the last five years of my work. I'd gone through the perinatal process, solid ego death, into the ocean of suffering, and into archetypal reality. In the last five years, I was catapulted into a state of consciousness that was light, exceptionally pure, and exceptionally clear. It correlates with what Buddhists call the Dharmakaya, the clear light of absolute reality. It is the foundational metaphysical structure, the light out of which the Big Bang emerges. It doesn't have anything to do with physical diamonds, but it relates to what the Diamond Sutra is talking about and Vajrayāna Buddhism. It's a diamond-like luminosity, which I know best from reading Buddhist sources.

Emmy Vadnais: There's a question about meditation. You talk about the importance of meditation and work outside of psychedelic work. What does your daily practice look like?

Chris Bache: The longer I worked with psychedelics, the more I appreciated the importance of a daily spiritual practice. Psychedelics open you to a vast field of consciousness and enormous energy flows, each deeper state of consciousness being a step into a higher level of energy. Stabilizing consciousness at that level requires intense purification, often in the form of fire, to transform your being. To live for hours at a time at that deep level of consciousness requires you to be clear and aligned.

Meditation helps keep your feet on the ground, and the skills in Vipassana or zazen are precisely the skills you use in psychedelic sessions. They reinforce each other. Meditation provides an environment to process both the cognitive content and the energy released during psychedelic sessions. I talk about integrating Vajrayāna practice with psychedelics. Carol brought me into the Vajrayāna tradition; she did a Chöd practice for me before one of my sessions, opening a window wider and deeper. This led me to always incorporate Chöd before sessions.

Yoga and physical care prepare your body. If your body is misaligned and you enter psychedelic space, blocks can become amplified. Personal hygiene, yoga, and meditation, both before and after sessions, are important. Teaching has become a spiritual art form for me, engaging students at deep, existential levels. It's its own form of demanding spiritual practice.

Emmy Vadnais: Thank you for teaching and sharing with us, Chris. I don’t see any questions at the moment about what you learned, and I know it could be a long answer. But what is it that you felt you learned from these sessions that our viewers and listeners might benefit from?

Chris Bache: That's a large topic. The challenge is doing justice to the layers of consciousness I traversed over this 20-year journey. Many books are based on fewer sessions, creating expectations that shrink the metaphysical window. But over many sessions, there are stages of initiation, from personal to collective, to archetypal and causal levels. Among the insights, I discovered that underlying all existence is a singular intelligence of unbelievable magnitude and genius. The physical universe is its manifest body.

Life and existence are unified in a fundamental oneness. Entering into intimacy with this consciousness and experiencing profound love beyond measure has been an overwhelming revelation. I was expecting intelligence, but the love was surprising. When people say love is the primary virtue, it resonates deeply with me. Reincarnation is a fact of life, and it offers an understanding not tied to a single life but a continuity in an evolutionary exercise. Enlightenment is not the final goal; it's about integration, bringing more spiritual reality into our physical incarnation until we transform our world.

These insights, while not new, are well established in mystical traditions but need to be continually engaged with and realized collectively.

Chris Bache: Well, I'm not a psychologist, so take what I say about derealization with a grain of salt. I understand it to be a psychological condition where you feel yourself dissolving or not grounded in your conventional identity. It's often associated with psychopathology because if it becomes endemic, it undermines your capacity to function within the world. Ego death is similar but different. It's said you need a strong ego to have a good ego death. If you're grounded in the way most people are, in bodily consciousness, reflecting the history of this body in this time reality, opening into deeper spiritual realities means letting go of your egoic identity to access states where the ego doesn’t function.

In mystical traditions, the death of self is achieved through compassion, service, generosity, prayer, and contemplative practices. It’s a slow softening of the heart, opening up to the divine flux always pressing upon us. The ego keeps it out, so through acts of selflessness and prayer, you transition from time and body-grounded consciousness to a more mystical state. In a psychedelic session, it's the same process but accelerated and intensified. As a professor of religious studies, I've always approached psychedelic work as spiritual practice, even though my goal was cosmological exploration. In psychedelics, deeper awareness is activated, opening floodgates to spiritual reality. The ego is pressured and ruptures; it can't contain consciousness within its structure.

Despite extensive psychological and spiritual focus on the ego's complexity, from a spiritual perspective, dismantling it isn't difficult. When I experienced a major ego death, the universe snapped me like a twig. It didn't involve derealization but a frightening confrontation, turning me into the opposite of who I knew myself to be. I became women, women of color with no philosophical interests, the opposite for a male academic philosopher. It scared me, but once I let go and became these women, I relaxed and was taken into an extraordinary journey into their lives. Upon returning, my male identity returned, but I knew my masculinity, whiteness, and intellect no longer confined me tightly.

The problem wasn't women or non-intellectual traits; it was my social identity's tight fit on my consciousness that had to be broken. The universe was saying, "Where you're going, gender doesn't exist. Let go." This letting go led to states of consciousness beyond male, female, human, and eventually beyond space and time. Ego death can be slow or fast depending on the method, but it's about letting go of self-preoccupation. Tibetans call it self-clinging, evident when your eye gravitates quickly toward yourself in a group photo. It's understandable but also sad.

Think of the ego as an ice cube; near a candle, it melts slowly. This is like contemplative practice. But throw it on a hot cast-iron skillet, it jumps around and melts rapidly, akin to how ego death manifests in psychedelics. There's no right or wrong way, but the pattern is releasing ourselves from the bars of self-referential existence.

Emmy Vadnais: Do you feel the ego serves a purpose since we all seem to have it? Is it something to be dissolved, eliminated, or accepted and transformed?

Chris Bache: I think the ego gets a bad rap in many traditions. By "ego," I mean our individual identity, our body-mind identity. It's magnificent and cosmologically important, a major gift of entering time-space. Classic traditions say the goal is to destroy ego and return to God, like a drop of water returning to the ocean. But I don't find that an adequate cosmology. I believe the system is designed for us to explore individual experience and engage the tremendous power of consciousness, love, and intelligence that runs through existence. You are still an individual, transparent to the Divine condition. Individuality isn't destroyed but transformed. It's a great gift of time-space existence.

Study autobiographies of spiritual adepts; they're distinctive individuals. Enlightenment is about no-self, but individuality isn't shattered irrevocably. That's a spiritual pathology. Healthy maturity involves individual reference points but not being imprisoned within them. You build bridges, care beyond yourself, your species, your generation, and you live larger.

Emmy Vadnais: You recognize the interconnectedness and perhaps can merge with that. That seems a definition of yoga—union with the Divine.

Chris Bache: Yes, union with the Divine, not dissolving irrevocably so that individuality ceases.

Emmy Vadnais: Thank you for the answers, Chris. To our viewers, we're over 60 minutes in with about 25 minutes left.

Jeffrey Mishlove: A question from Fabius on YouTube asks, "How can we reconcile transforming Earth into a paradise with the necessity of contrast and suffering for learning and growth?"

Chris Bache: Great question. We could spend the whole program exploring it. If intelligence is loving, why tolerate a painful world? Understanding suffering requires a long time horizon, and a galactic perspective helps. Humanity is radically unfinished, maybe five to ten percent of our potential realized. We've just woken up as a species. This universe has been building for 3.7 billion years; we're just engaging it consciously. High spiritual beings demonstrate capacities emerging over lifetimes. The project isn't current humanity but our evolution into the future—23rd, 25th, or 30th centuries.

Suffering is part of the crucible for learning. It's rooted in personal Karma and collective conditions. We're in early stages of understanding the full power of our nature. The goal isn't mere happiness but transforming our existence as incarnate beings. I foresee control over physical health increasing as traits considered miraculous become natural.

We've entered a critical pivot in human evolution, transitioning to greater joy, spiritual empowerment, and less collective suffering. This transition is part of an evolutionary story spanning millions of years. To understand suffering, we must explore deeply into divine intention and history.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Consciousness is primary, yet you reached this through a chemical substance, which materialists argue makes consciousness a product of chemistry.

Chris Bache: The same argument could follow proficient meditation, linking states to biochemistry. This reflects a materialist worldview inadequate to handle varied experiences in research contexts—parapsychological, psychedelic, near-death, and reincarnation. That worldview doesn't fit modern evidence.

Chemical substances interact with us, seemingly opening floodgates to deep reality. I see the mind as a transceiver. It shifts our default mode network to quiescence, accessing a spiritual dimension. We’re a synthesis: spiritual and physical reality intertwining. Post-body survival indicates we already exist partly in spiritual reality. Contemplative practices allow access without leaving the body. Substances like Soma in ancient traditions don't prove materialism but affirm our metaphysical synthesis.

Emmy Vadnais: My husband, Xander, asks about synesthetic experiences during altered states—sensing colors like sounds or hearing smells?

Chris Bache: I haven't experienced much synesthesia, so I'm not well-positioned to answer. My psychedelics experience is devoid of hallucinations, visual distortions, or sensory permutations. I've focused internally, journeying into conscious experience. Others might have more insight into your question.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Corey Burdick asks for powerful or inspiring examples of the new human's emergence.

Chris Bache: Examples include selfless figures laying down their lives for others or dedicating energy to enriching others' lives, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King. We've incarnated for thousands of years, generally viewed as linear development, but we're entering a synthesis phase—birth of the Diamond Soul. My sessions showed former lives fusing, birthing soul identity, a next evolutionary step.

Our consciousness will merge past lives naturally, transitioning to soul identity. Spiritual masters hint at this—distinct, robust souls. Emergence isn't sudden but gradual with increased compassion, vision, and service. Symptoms of older souls include those embracing long-term influence, compassion for classes, or service to others. The transition involves growing beyond ego into soul consciousness, mirrored by the world striving for unity. It's synergistic—a shared process of becoming one as individuals and a planet.

We're moving into a labor stage of delivering the soul into history, gestating for ages. Though painful, we will undergo this transition, despite skepticism about human survival. History progresses by embracing the soul, fulfilling collective tasks.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Beautifully put, Chris. A good note to close on. Emmy, any concluding thoughts?

Emmy Vadnais: Thank you for the hope and inspiration, Chris. It seems you gained precognitive insights in LSD sessions, offering collective and personal wisdom. There's concern about declining humanity; knowing challenges lie ahead, spiritual practices might alleviate some pain.

Chris Bache: We can approach this transition proactively, in cooperation with what's emerging. Many understand this, from mystics to Jungian thinkers. Letting go opens us to our species' life trajectory. Insights on our path are shared in various traditions; many see the pivotal change coming. We’ll make it—my concern is minimizing loss along the way.

Emmy Vadnais: More spiritual evolution seems vital. That's why programs like New Thinking Allowed exist.

Chris Bache: Many Bodhisattvas, including those behind this program, work for the common good. The essence of a Bodhisattva is with us today.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, once again, Chris, thank you so much for being with Emmy and me and with the New Thinking Allowed audience today. And Emmy, thank you once again for the wonderful job you do as co-host on New Thinking Allowed. I'd like to remind our viewers that you can subscribe for free to our weekly newsletter. You can download for free the first eight issues of the New Thinking Allowed magazine, and we hope that you continue to enjoy the videos that we post daily on the New Thinking Allowed channel.

Emmy Vadnais: Thank you so much for being with us, Chris.

Chris Bache: No, thank both of you for this wonderful conversation. I enjoyed it very much. Thank you for your work.

Emmy Vadnais: Our pleasure, and for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here. You.

Transcribed by https: //otter.ai