PSA Fireside Chat — Dr. Raymond Turpin & Dr. Chris Bache

Ehren Cruz: All right, everybody, we're gonna go ahead and get started here. First and foremost, can everybody hear me okay? Across the back here, doing well? Okay, beautiful. Well, thank you all so much for coming to tonight's fireside chat on Sky Mountain. We have our wonderful guests here today who will be speaking: Dr. Raymond Turpin and Dr. Christopher Bache. We'll give a little bit more background on them, but first, foremost, I want to give a big thank you to Melissa and Joe Summerage for letting us use this lovely facility for our talk tonight. It's such an incredible venue in and of itself. Thank you so much for this opportunity.

A couple of housekeeping items: there are bathrooms straight back by the stairs if anybody needs to use the restroom. Also, water stations over there with hot and cold water. If anybody needs to stand up, stretch around, please feel free to do so. You're welcome to take pictures and such, but we are taking a formal video, which we will release through the Psychedelic Society website. If you guys can refrain from taking video, we'll make sure that we make that video available to everyone.

I'd like to introduce myself and a couple of the co-founders of the Psychedelic Society and a little bit about what we're about here. My name is Ehren Cruz, and I am a psychedelic ceremonial facilitator. I've been working with sacramental entheogenics for 15 years. I'm a professional certified coach, a Third Wave psychedelic certified coach, and an anthropologist by trade. We also have a couple of other wonderful co-facilitators and founders of the Psychedelic Society: Sarah Salex is over here, Levine, Dan Cao over here, and in the back, Daniel Polk, the original founder who instigated this whole amazing group here together, and several community members who have been a part of this experience. I see some new faces here, but many have been a part of this for now going on for about over a year.

To kind of break things up, and thank you, Chris, for this great idea, I'd like to ask: how many of you are new to psychedelics in general? Okay, awesome. How many of you have been kind of on your own journey with psychedelics, kind of growing and emerging, maybe in the last few years, starting to get some steam and momentum? Are there any tenured psychonauts and deep divers out here? Okay, plenty of hands. Excellent. Now, how many of you work within the mental health field? Just curious here. Okay, awesome. Let's talk about some specifics here. How many people are favorable to psilocybin as your medicine? Excellent. LSD? Okay, I see several hands going up several times. Respect MDMA? And how about DMT or ayahuasca? Beautiful. Okay. Welcome, everybody. This is our tribe.

Before we go into things here, I'd like to set the stage with a little bit about our mission, our vision, and the ethics that we represent. Then we'll dive into the deeper conversation here. So, the mission of the Psychedelic Society of Asheville is to educate, advocate, and create community around the healing and transformational power of psychedelics. Our vision is to provide support, resources, and a safe container for those seeking guidance and healing, spiritual growth, and personal development through psychedelics. We serve to foster the development of an informed culture that respects indigenous lineage, scientific research, harm reduction principles, ethics, and personal responsibility in the intentional use and facilitation of psychedelic medicine.

For ethics, these containers that we strive for provide physical safety. It's very important that consent is the highest priority, both in what you choose to share, how you choose to share it, and how you choose to express and experience touch and connection. Psychological safety, of course, is of critical importance as well. What we share here is to be honored within the confines of this space unless someone gives you direct permission to take their truth and share it outward. Otherwise, please honor and respect someone's discretion when they're sharing with you in this space. Transparency: speak from the authentic “I.” Speak from your own place of value and honor those of others as well.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion: we strive to ensure there is a balanced representation of gender, culture, and how people self-identify. We are on a quest to continue making this a more welcoming and inviting place for all aspects and walks of life. So, if you see people who are curious about this particular type of work, please welcome them and let them feel that this is a home for them, however they identify. This is a place for you, and we love and are richer for it. Self-care is also incredibly important to us. Do what you need to feel healthy and hale, whether that means stretching, taking a moment, or any other care. We want to ensure you have the space to move your body well.

With that, let's go ahead and do a land acknowledgment. We are on Cherokee Tsalagi First Nation land here. In the deep time of our work in psychedelics and stewardship of this planet, we really lean into and learn from the wisdom of our ancestors. I want to take a moment to acknowledge that this is sacred land, and we are gifted with the opportunity to be stewards and caretakers of this space. May we uphold the virtues and values they have brought before us and carry that forward. Let's give a couple of moments to honor the Tsalagi Cherokee First Nation.

Ehren Cruz: All right, now on to the talk here. We are really grateful to have two amazing gentlemen here. I know Dr. Turpin doesn't maybe describe himself as an elder yet, but you're an elder. Emerged, sir, you've made it. Congratulations. These two individuals have done so much for the community and for psychedelics at large, not just in this particular region, but in the larger movement. I'm going to go and introduce them both to you for some basic bios, and then we'll get into some questions for them.

So, Dr. Bache, on November 24, 1979, Christopher Bache took the first step of what would become a life-changing journey. Drawing from his training as a philosopher of religion, Bache set out to explore his mind and the mind of the universe as deeply and systematically as possible, with the help of the psychedelic drug LSD. Following protocols established by the great Stanislav Grof, Bache engaged in 73 high-dose LSD sessions over the course of 20 years, drawing him into a deep communion with cosmic consciousness. Christopher Bache is a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and serves on the Advisory Council of the Grof Legacy Training. Please welcome Dr. Christopher Bache.

Dr. Turpin has been studying the therapeutic use of psychedelics since the mid-80s, hoping to eventually legally use these medicines in psychology practice specializing in the treatment of trauma. Dr. Turpin has extensive experience with children, adolescents, and families in a multitude of settings, but has focused his practice on older adolescents and adults in recent years. Dr. Turpin earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Georgia in '88, his master's degree in psychology from the Humanistic Psychology program at West Georgia College in 1990, and his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CIIS, in 1999. In 2017, he earned a certificate in psychedelic therapy and research from CIIS. In addition to his private psychotherapy practice in Waynesville, North Carolina, Dr. Turpin was a mentor for the 2022-23 CIIS certificate program and became the lead mentor as well, and he is a training mentor in 2023-24. He's also one of the co-founders of the Pearl Psychedelic Institute here in Waynesville. Everyone, please welcome Dr. Turpin.

Ehren Cruz: All right, so let's dive into where this all began. Prior to your first formal experience, what first turned you guys on to psychedelics? What was it about these compounds that initially piqued your interest and then sparked engagement?

Raymond Turpin: I would have to go back to early 1984, probably when I was finishing up my freshman year at the University of Georgia. I discovered "Flashbacks," which was Timothy Leary's autobiography. He was still alive at the time, and I read that. I already knew who he was, and I was just stunned by the guy's brilliance, his writing, and insight. He wrote a good bit about psilocybin and LSD in that book. Much to my parents' chagrin, all the way to Mississippi at Thanksgiving, I was in the backseat chattering about Timothy Leary, and my dad was not real excited about that since he was a little conservative.

It wasn't until October 1984 that I managed to score some mushrooms with two good friends I'd grown up with. We migrated out to the cemetery outside Athens, Georgia. That sounds creepy, but this was a place we would go to and walk around, just fascinated reading the gravestones and putting stories together. It was kind of a sacred place to us. We found a little field, laid down by the creek, and I had this intense vision. At the time, I was an advertising major. I'd grown up in Atlanta and felt like I was a dirt farmer in comparison to the old Atlanta money. So when I entered college, I thought it was all about making money.

During this psilocybin experience, which was quite profound, I saw myself succeeding in this field and feeling extremely empty about it. There was almost a voice in my head saying, "What are you doing? You're going to convince people to buy a bunch of crap they don't need." I realized this was unlocking a part of myself that had been socialized out over the last few years. It seemed to be more of my true self. I got fascinated with that and started going to the UGA library, pulling off old bound journals, and finding all the old LSD research, particularly from the '50s and '60s. I realized what all was being done with these compounds back then, and it was astounding.

I decided to devote my life to studying these things, continuing to research them personally and academically, and hopefully be in a position one day to use them legally. That's how it all got started. The Grateful Dead was a big piece of it. Once I went to my first Dead show, Halloween, 1985, it locked me into a whole other level of psychedelics, using it somewhat ritualistically in large crowds.

Ehren Cruz: Awesome. Yeah, get more there too.

Chris Bache: The Grateful Dead, I’m afraid, did not ever have a significant impact on my life in that respect, but I respect it. I was just out of graduate school, given the opportunity for a high-quality classical Ivy League education. I was a pre-confirmed atheistically inclined agnostic when I finished my degree in religious studies and philosophy of religion, and I met the work of Stan Grof. Let me back up—Saturn return, had just come out of my Saturn return, had just begun my teaching career. The first year of my teaching career, looking around what to do, I found Stan's book, "Realms of the Human Unconscious," and he lit the fire. I knew this was really important to my discipline, philosophy of religion. I knew the only way to really work this was not intellectually and conceptually, but you had to do the work. You had to get into it and do the work. This was 1978, and the work was illegal at that point, so I decided to proceed anyway.

I'm not an illegal person by nature, but I decided to do my academic work and to do this work with the idea that sooner or later, somewhere down the road, I would be able to harvest it as a philosopher of religion, to bring it forward for its cosmological and philosophical import. I wasn't primarily interested in therapeutic healing, though a lot of healing came. I started with an interest in spiritual awakening, accelerating my spiritual awakening, but that got knocked out within the first couple of years. After about three sessions, I always worked in a Grofian protocol—eye shades, lying down, headphones. I've never tripped in a classical way; I've always done therapeutically focused, intense work. As you know, if you've done this work, it amplifies the intensity of the experience many times.

Now that we have the world's collection of music available, we can contour our sessions with that music, which deepens it even further. I made a choice very early on not to work therapeutically or with other people, not to introduce people into this—a different set of responsibilities. I always worked solo and was concerned just to push the boundaries as far as I could go. This seemed like a wonderful opportunity for a philosopher to actually get firsthand experience of some of the things that some of the great sages and mystics had been talking about. So that's what I did. I jumped in. I followed a protocol of working after the first few sessions at high doses of LSD, 500 to 600 micrograms. I aimed always at 600 but I'd lower it to 500 just in case some of the stuff I was using wasn't completely pure, though it was all pharmaceutical grade. I do not recommend this protocol—this is not a layman's protocol. When you work at those doses consistently over 20 years, it takes you to places that are extremely demanding. They require a great deal of discipline and spiritual practice to stabilize and hold on to those experiences.

Ehren Cruz: Wow, okay. Well, so you guys started getting the momentum; you had the impetus early on to follow that trail. You know, for you, Dr. Turpin, the kind of medicine that redirected you brought you into a different landscape in your life, and you had set off on this trail through inspiration from Dr. Stan Grof. So, can you speak to me about a particular time period, maybe a paradigm-shifting moment for you when working with the medicine really opened you into a new state of awareness? I know you had many of those expressed in your particular book, but maybe where you had felt that this particular trail or path had led you into a different level of how your devotion to this work expanded at that particular time.

Chris Bache: I can't say any one particular period or one particular time because of how recursive the experience is across time for me. Working in this very intense fashion over 20 years, there were so many levels of consciousness that I broke through, or that the universe took me through, that I can't point to any one time period as a culmination. I just kept at it, and it kept taking me through level after level. You have to learn how to work with these states—they're really complicated. If you're dealing with states at the personal level, that's one level of complexity. If you're dealing with states at the collective psyche level, that's another level. If you’re transcending into archetypal and causal dimensions, that requires a tremendous amount of discipline to stabilize and stay conscious at those levels.

One period of the work when we were experiencing, I think it was the Neptune-Uranus conjunction, squaring my lunar nodes if you're into astrology. It was a square all year long. That particular year, which I think was around 1993-94, just opened a new level, but that wasn't the last level. That was just a new level at that time, extraordinarily productive. But the last five years of my working was what I call the diamond luminosity. Once I touched that realm, I wasn’t interested in any of the other realms I had access to before that because it was so powerful and attractive. For the last five years of my work, that was the only thing I was interested in getting back to. In 26 sessions over those five years, I only got to that dimension four times, which wasn't because of lack of effort. The cycle involved intense purification in order to get into that territory. I guess the diamond luminosity would constitute, in some ways, a significant turning point for me.

Raymond Turpin: I'm afraid my story is a little more terrestrial than yours. I'm honored to be on the stage with Chris. His book was incredible. When I read it, I felt like I was reading something profound, kind of coming from the king acid head or something. It's comforting to see he's still intact psychologically and emotionally.

I can't really point to a single experience that was more profound than others. When I made the decision in the mid-80s to change my major to psychology and work with people doing this work, there was no support. The head of the UGA psychology department told me it wasn’t worth it because it had been tried and wasn’t coming back. Almost everyone I approached was not encouraging because it was a conservative psychology department. I found out about West Georgia College, which had a humanistic psychology program founded in 1968. I got out there, and there was a guy, Mike Aarons, who had worked with creativity and LSD back in the 60s. That's where I got to meet Stan Krippner, and Stan Grof came and did a talk there.

There were just so many times of doubt along the way, where people worried I was doing something that wouldn't work out for me. But something would always show up to reassure me, saying you're on this path, and it's important. I think another lesson I learned, and this applies to psychotherapy too, is the importance of maintaining humility with these compounds. I learned not to get too high on myself or too down, finding that middle ground. Psychedelics wouldn’t allow you to get too down and wouldn’t allow you to get too high. It was important to trust that this direction I felt was essential, and I needed to honor it. Having various meetings, people at particular times, and experiences that would deepen the path allowed me to continue and feel good about it.

Ehren Cruz: I love that. For both of you, the catalyst of the psychedelic itself, and how you synthesize that over the larger spectrum, is the real lesson—the real teaching. You guys, for large parts of your careers, you're working in what we could call the dark ages of psychedelics, between the mid-1970s through 2016. There was a complete moratorium on research; it was pretty much ostracized. What encouraged you to continue, and were there any prominent mentors over this period that you learned from or influenced your trajectory as you continued?

Raymond Turpin: Try to remember all that. The thing that probably kept me going more than anything was learning about conventional psychology and psychotherapy techniques and then reading the old LSD research. There was something unique about the way they were working with mental illness back then. They were using LSD. It was rough treatment. People were reliving their traumas. It was important to have safety and trust with your therapist because unlike MDMA, LSD does not work on the amygdala, so there can be anxiety and fear.

Noticing the development of psychiatric medications, the drive was about symptomology. We weren't getting at the core issues. Reading that old LSD research showed profound changes taking place. There was criticism because it didn't fit the conventional double-blind study design. But reading realms of the human unconscious was a shattering book for me. Sim was so deeply profound.

When I got to CIIS, it seemed it was pretty fringe, but that's where Stan was teaching. Ralph Metzner was there, and being in San Francisco, I got to see the Dead about twelve times a year. The Grateful Dead wasn't a scientist or therapist, but communicated what he learned through music. Going to their shows was like being taught.

Chris's book was fabulous. I'd wondered what would happen if you took all the acid you could and went as deep as possible—what would you find? Seems like there's this endless well. Mike Aarons was another important figure too. He valued growth as a human being along with good therapy, which was important.

Chris Bache: Stan was a huge influence because he's such a powerful intellect, and he had done 20 years of research before he wrote Realms of the Human Unconscious. I could recognize the caliber of his scholarship. He taught me some essential things, but I think the most important was to absolutely trust the consciousness of the universe. To trust the process, allow yourself to go into unknown territory, to be sliced and diced and broken down—no matter how bad, no matter how inscrutable it is. If you're working in a safe and contained environment, surrender completely, and it will catch you in the end. You'll die 100 times, but it will embrace you.

I don't think I would have had the courage to go some places I ended up if Stan hadn't been there first and survived to tell about it. Outside of that, Stan and I became friends and colleagues. He wrote the foreword to Dark Night, Early Dawn and brought me to some of the ITA meetings where we had wonderful encounters with different people. But intellectually, that was the starting point. I always envy people who do Ayahuasca work and speak of having a shaman mentor for 10 years. That's just not my story. All my mentoring came directly from the universe itself, which has advantages and disadvantages. I didn't learn from anyone intellectually. We're talking about dissolving into the Soul of the Universe, into the consciousness that created the universe. I never had anyone to help me with that—it was a continuous conversation, a communion, and then dissolving deeper into that consciousness, the illuminating consciousness of all existence.

When I was doing it, as you said, no one else was. I couldn't really talk about it. My friends in the department knew, but they didn't really know. I didn't bring it to campus or my students, which became a problem. I'm a talker; I love to learn and share, but I could not share this. It wasn't part of the curriculum. It wasn't until after I retired and wrote LSD and the Mind of the Universe—or my intended title, Diamonds from Heaven—that I could share. I did not attempt that until retirement, after the statute of limitations, when neither the state of Ohio nor the federal government could come after me. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be in Indigenous cultures. You come out of a deep experience and share it with the elders because it's not just your private vision; it’s about the life of your tribe. In my world, there were no elders, no sharing. It involved a long process of holding and digesting this material personally, individually, sharing it with my wife and a very small circle. That’s not something I wish on anyone, and I'm glad we're at a point in history where no one else has to go through that. We have enclaves now where people can share and process this work together, which is critical for exploring the deepest experiences of life.

Raymond Turpin: Talking about Indigenous cultures, one reason they used these substances successfully for thousands of years is they had a framework for respecting and valuing these experiences. They also had a cultural blueprint for integration and understanding, allowing them to use them safely and productively. One issue with our culture is that even in the 60s, there was no framework for understanding or acceptable way to use these substances. We were criminals just for taking them. In this renaissance period, it's our responsibility to learn about these substances, how to use them responsibly and safely, and to teach others who are curious. It's a role everyone has right now.

Ehren Cruz: Thank you so much for sharing that. In my work, I guide people through high-dose psilocybin experiences as a harm reductionist. It’s deep and profound. Often, I feel like more of a facilitator or doula, considering the nature of our reorientation after such paradigm-shifting experiences. They require re-acclimating with family and friends. That support structure is so critical. I have a question for you, Chris. How did your journeys impact your family? You're a father and had a wife supporting you at the time. How were you able to endure during that period, and what was your practice to manage that?

Chris Bache: First, I had a couple of strategic advantages. I held a PhD in philosophy, religious studies, and philosophy of religion, allowing me to study theology, mysticism, and mystical traditions—both Eastern and Western. I taught courses in comparative mysticism, spending a lot of time with great masters. Psychedelic and contemplative experiences are different genres. Psychedelic experience is temporary; you have to use those hours productively while dealing with the return from an elevated state, absorbing, and preparing to go back in. Contemplative practice allows you to hold onto more of what you discover.

Stabilizing, keeping grounded, and absorbing these experiences are critical, especially with a powerful psychedelic. Family and work were grounding forces for me. Jung once said that what grounded him was family and work. For me, it was my family, raising children, and my students. I was back in the classroom after a session, teaching classes.

A sustained spiritual practice was crucial for stabilization. My partner, Carl, was a serious meditator, which was very grounding. Knowing the lives of great masters and committing to a daily practice allowed me to absorb not only intellectually but also bodily the subtle energy shifts psychedelics activate. States of consciousness are states of body, and deep states involve intense detoxification processes that last beyond a session. Understanding this from the mystical traditions provided me with the grounding knowledge I needed. But ultimately, it was my career, teaching, and family commitments that kept me grounded.

Ehren Cruz: Thank you for sharing. It’s important to recognize the immersive quality of psychedelics. After a profound experience, as it subsides, the practice truly begins—integrating revelations into life through meaningful and holistic changes.

Chris Bache: After I stopped my sessions, at the very end, consciousness told me there is the dying of discovery, which we know, and the dying of keeping. The latter is what you do upon return to integrate these experiences meaningfully.

Ehren Cruz: Thank you, Chris. Dr. Turpin, I have a different angle for you. You're an accomplished psychedelic professional. The Pearl Psychedelic Institute, where you work, is one of two facilities approved for expanded access trials in MDMA treatment for PTSD. Let's acknowledge that achievement. But I want to touch on how you balance the professional and the ecstatic traditions, like your love for the Grateful Dead. How do you view both these pathways, and how can they be embraced in furthering this renaissance?

Raymond Turpin: Good question. It's doable and necessary. The medical model, often criticized, is a legitimate research track. Our culture may only accept psychedelic medicines if they successfully treat mental illness. Albert Hoffman advised not to leave this only in the hands of doctors. While there's risks with the egalitarian model advocated by Tim Leary, the medical approach might be how we introduce these substances as legitimate medicines. Rick Doblin's choice to push MDMA, with its mental acuity and lack of perceptual disturbances, was wise.

There's criticism of the clinical path, but it’s suited to our culture's acceptance system. It's crucial to have objective measures to get psychedelics approved as medicines. On the other hand, I had profound experiences with psychedelics outside clinical settings. Historically, rituals and celebrations involved psychedelics. Celebrating life, being alive, and community are essential. While there's more risk with the ecstatic tradition, it has value.

For example, the Grateful Dead shows felt like massive psychotherapy sessions—everyone taking care of each other, bonding in shared experiences. That communal ethos taught me there's more to life than the everyday grind, and it's an essential part of the psychedelic exploration. But it requires being informed about set and setting to ensure a safe and productive experience.

Ehren Cruz: Many movements have spawned from that tradition. From the Ellucidian mysteries to modern festivals, large-scale alchemical rituals are part of our human lineage. Chris, regarding high-dose psychedelic experiences, why push further in doses beyond typical research studies?

Chris Bache: I really agree with you, Raymond, that it's the medical work and the therapeutic work with psychedelics that is bringing them back into our society. It's so important that we do it well and document the therapeutic capacity. Once we reintroduce psychedelics, the question arises: if it's an amplifier, and if it amplifies our consciousness, drawing up dark things we can address and heal, then how far can we take it? What's going to happen next? I think it will take time. Some people are already pushing the boundaries, but institutional exploration is not there yet. It's just a matter of time, because it's not the psychedelic that does the work; it's consciousness. The psychedelic is an amplifier. If you handle the consciousness carefully, you can use it similarly to what happens on a meditation cushion at a Zen session.

I call my sessions "work sessions," referring to the Japanese word "sesshin"—a period of concentrated spiritual practice. I think of my psychedelic work in this way. I was fortunate to have a constitution that allowed me to open up into great breadth, become fluid, and dissolve my boundaries. Not everyone has that capacity; people need more support. I wouldn't do it the same way over again. I would be gentler with myself, balancing high doses with lower doses, maybe integrating Psilocybin with LSD and Ayahuasca for a nuanced approach.

Initially, I thought my work was personal, but it's not. Personal is the first layer, but as I delved deeper, I touched collective dynamics, historical processes, and human visions. I used to think the goal was enlightenment or unity with God. What I learned, about 16 years into my work, when I was deep in the Diamond Luminosity and resting in the Dharmakāya, was that it's an infinite progression. There's no end to it. The goal is not awakening or God-realization, but absorbing as much wisdom and healing energy as possible. The focus should be on how you live your life, integrating and holding the process.

I'll be teaching soon in the Polaris program, discussing integration. While we have models for personal unconscious and spiritual integration, when transcending time, integrating those experiences becomes challenging. How do we integrate the infinite as time-space beings? We may need to rethink much of what we've learned about integration.

We should learn from indigenous cultures, but we're pushing deeper with today's psychedelics and protocols, raising challenges even indigenous knowledge can't fully address. This will take time, generations even. It's long-term cultural work, expanding our communion with the universe.

Ehren Cruz: Thank you, Chris. You immediately cautioned with the need to slow down, being patient with synthesizing what these changes mean on a transcendental cultural level. We're in a current renaissance, with over 350 universities opening formal psychedelic research departments, and the FDA moving towards approving MDMA for therapeutic use. The momentum is unprecedented. The genie is out of the bottle, but integrating psychedelics into daily life will take time. We must honor the deep time of lineages and indigenous wisdom. This question is open-ended, but where do you see this heading in the next few years, especially considering the legality and cultural acceptance?

Raymond Turpin: Good question. If taking a psychedelic made you a better human, many would be Buddhas by now. What's crucial is intention and integration—what you do with the experience. Educating people about the importance of post-experience rituals is necessary. In our ketamine program, I stress that ketamine doesn't do the work; the insights from the experience should be integrated into everyday life, or else you regress. Psychedelics provide windows into the deep self, glimpses into inner healing intelligence.

Things are moving faster than I expected. I nearly went underground before MDMA showed progress. We have a responsibility to educate others with scientifically grounded information. Currently, MAPS is working on their new drug application for MDMA, and we anticipate approval for PTSD next year. It’s a lengthy protocol, with two guides throughout, and insurance coverage will take time. There's going to be a need to train therapists extensively. The Pearl Institute aims to support local therapists complete their training, reducing barriers. For anyone interested, educate yourself deeply; various resources are available.

Psilocybin is maybe three years behind MDMA in development. I foresee it having broader utility. LSD is also being studied, which I thought I'd never see. These sessions can be long and exhausting. I'm always wary of setbacks, but information dissemination is better now than in the '60s and '70s. If you're interested in this work, get appropriately trained, and understand our ethical responsibilities to progress thoughtfully.

Chris Bache: Let me expand the context. I agree with everything you're saying, particularly about MDMA and Psilocybin. We haven't discussed 5-MeO-DMT yet. My visionary experience suggests we're entering a time of profound social catharsis, crisis, and transformation. Looking ahead 10 or 20 years, the background context will be profoundly different due to eco-environmental, economic, and social crises. The social instability will be enormous.

Believing in reincarnation, I see that crises also occur internally. We carry pieces of humanity’s history within us, and the inner purification process is crucial. It’s a collective and individual need to process and transcend our historical behaviors. We have to do this for future possibilities. Psychedelics have a greater role in facilitating individual and collective healing if we establish a strong foundation now.

We're in a transformative time, comparable to the era when the nuclear bomb and LSD emerged. These revolutions, intellectual and spiritual, are around the corner. How we handle this is crucial. The festivals and collective healing experiences will be crucial.

Ehren Cruz: Thank you, Chris. The social responsibility you've charged us with is significant. Not only how we hold and care for these medicines but also how we work with them collectively as catalysts for important cultural shifts. Psilocybin has reminded us of being children of this world, stewards and caretakers. Our symbolic relationships must create a foundation for collective intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth. These principles are more important than ever as we step into this age of responsibility.

We’re opening up to questions now, but let's thank Dr. Bache for their wisdom today.

Ehren Cruz: We have time for maybe two or three questions. Does anyone have a question?

Audience: Dr. Bache, I've read your book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe. I've read it several times, each time gaining deeper insights. Could you elaborate on the 200,000-year gestation period humanity is in as we transition into what's described as the birth stage?

Chris Bache: I can only speak about that from my visionary experience. It is just visionary experience, yet it is also deeply significant. The creative intelligence of the universe doesn't think small. It considers whole species, ecosystems, and planetary development...

Chris Bache: Ask yourself, what is the finest that human beings can become? If we look ahead, what is the finest that human beings can be? And then imagine that the divine wants it to be like that, and it wants it to be even more than that. The question then is, how do we go from baboons or chimpanzees to that, and it takes time. It's a repetitive cycle, lifetime by lifetime. We accumulate more knowledge, more wisdom, hopefully more understanding, more wounds. So we're taking care of the wounds. We're taking care of the past while we're expanding potential, lifetime after lifetime, thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years we've been at this process. We have such a tendency to think in terms of short-term perspective. Achieve salvation, go to heaven, achieve enlightenment, go to parinirvana. It's an up-and-out cosmology which has been driving us. But the divine doesn't think in terms of up-and-out cosmology. It's about a continual receding and a fruition that's taking place on the planet and bringing us into ever, ever deeper levels of communion with the creative wisdom of the universe and the joy of the universe, and holding it in our body, and holding it in place, and holding it in this world together in peace and harmony with the other members of this other species that we share this planet with and with everyone of the human species that we share the planet with.

My sense of what's happening is that we're coming into a pivot point in history where all of the lives that we have lived, each of us can just look around this room, imagine how many lives are sitting in these chairs, how many hundreds of lives are sitting in each chair, and all of those thousands of years of experience sitting in each chair. My sense is, what's happening in history is that there's a coming together. Not only a coming together on the planet, forcing of the changes that that's taken, but there's a coming together in the soul, that all of our former lives are coming together. And as they come together, the first thing we have to deal with is all their unfinished business. So we've got this pain and that pain and that issue and that trauma that comes from this life and that life, and we have to deal with that. But as we deal with that, it makes it easier for these lives to come together.

And although it's not just the problems that they're bringing—that may be the first wave that shows up—it's all the learning that they're bringing, it's all the knowledge that they're bringing, it's all the history and texture of their relationships that they're bringing. And remember, these lives have been black, white, every imaginable possibility on the planet, every position in society, every position in class, all the adventures, and they're all coming together. I think they're coming together and they're beginning a process of fusing. And in my experience, in my sessions when I experienced all my former lives coming together and fusing, there was an explosion. It was like they hit a critical mass and there was an explosion. And there was an explosion of diamond consciousness that just broke out of my chest, and it threw me into a deep and profound condition where I was an individual, but I wasn't an individual. I wasn't Chris Bache, and I wasn't an individual with any frame of reference that I had known before, but I was an individual, but I was in a deep and profound cosmic communion as an individual.

And I think that's what's happening to all of us in history, every continent, every person on the planet is part of this process of facilitating an integration of all of our lives. This is what I call the birth of the diamond soul. It is simply the birth of the soul consciousness inside our human incarnation so that when we experience ourselves, we do not experience ourselves in any way as defined by the beginning and ending of this life. We have a natural, intuitive, awake awareness, conscious awareness of our deep history, which means a conscious awareness of our profound social connection, a profound awareness of the relativity of all these little fights. To get into, you know, all these stupid things that we have reasons to get in conflict with are not important and not relevant. We're swallowing all these things as we come together. And I think we're moving towards an explosion of soul consciousness on the planet. I don't think we can live on this planet out of egoic consciousness. I think the ego is a beautiful, individual ego consciousness is a beautiful, magnificent thing, but we cannot afford to live on this planet out of that state of consciousness. We either evolve into the next state of consciousness, which I think is fundamentally the soul consciousness, or we go extinct. And extinction is a powerful, psychedelic, powerful transformational motivator, and I think that's the process that we're coming into now.

So how long will this take? How fast can it happen? I don't know. And when I've seen it, when I've experienced it in my sessions, it didn't come with dates, and it didn't come with a brochure detailing how it's going to take place. But I know in my bones that it's happening, and I also know from my visionary experience, that we will make it through this process. We will survive. We will transform humanity. We will make it through. It won't look like we're going to make it through for a time. It will look like we're going to die in this process. That is the death and rebirth process. We're going to have to put it all on the line. We're going to have to lay it all down and make a complete, radical commitment to this process.

But my experience is that the diamond soul is born in history, the future human is born, and that future human is magnificently beautiful, just beautiful beyond description. And we see glimpses of it in the Great. We see it in Christ, and we see it in the great Buddhas and the prophets of history. We catch glimpses of what's emerging forward and what's coming forward in all of our lives. We're being taken there, and we're not in control of this process, right? We're not in control of evolution. We're hardly in control of our own individual evolution. There are deep forces at work that are pushing us, driving us. And lastly, we all knew what we were getting into before we incarnated. We made a choice to be part of this, and we'll make a choice to be part of the next generation. We chose to be part of this evolutionary transition.

When you die, you don't want to just have a comfortable life or an easy life. You want to have a meaningful life. And is there anything more meaningful than supporting this transition that humanity is making collectively so that we can really learn to live together in peace on this planet, healed, truly healed at the heart of all the wars and all the wounds and all the terrible things we've done to each other and all the things that were left unfinished lifetime after lifetime? Imagine a species that's truly healed all that stuff, individually, collectively healed.

Robert Monroe, whom some of you know from his books on out-of-body and from the Monroe Institute—his intelligent guides took him to a place in the future which he estimated was about 3000 AD. In that time, in the future, when he went there, the entire Bardo, where souls go in between their incarnations, was empty. We had integrated the Bardo because the Bardo is basically filled with soul fragments, just pieces of our lives which we didn't finish. Imagine all of those pieces integrated into us so that we are now whole and complete within ourselves, within our history, and so is everybody else that we're living with. If the Bardo is empty, the divine intelligence can reach more deeply, more easily, more fluidly, right into the very center of our hearts and into our minds. And that's what I think we're all working for. That's what we're all yearning for. We feel it. We can feel it in our bones. We touch it when we do our individual healing. We touch that, and we know that there's something afoot which is much deeper even than our personal healing, but our personal healing is part of it. We have to go through that if we're going to contribute to the birth of the diamond soul in history.

Ehren Cruz: Well, I think we might have gone on time with that, and I almost don't feel like—I don't know how you could actually follow that up, to be honest. But we will be here for some time, so if you guys want to connect afterward and mingle, please do come up and share. These gentlemen will be here for a little bit of time to connect. We're going to be wrapping up this session. On behalf of the Psychedelic Society of Asheville, we are so, so grateful and honored to have these wonderful guests do a fireside chat with us here this evening. So once again, thank you guys so much, and please do stay in touch with us. We're at psychedelicsocietyavl.com. We meet once a month, usually the final Sunday, for a gathering together. We shift different topic matters. Sometimes it's more back-and-forth sessions. We're connecting with people, cross-pollinating. Sometimes it's more harm reduction guidance, getting insights on how to do this safely, ethically, stepping into this work in medicine with education and resources, sometimes bringing our creative friends in. We had a panel of artists that came in and shared how this medicine has influenced their beautiful crafts. So please do be a part of this community. We're open-hearted and welcoming of all peoples. Stick around for a little bit and say hello to each other. There's a lot of beautiful folks here. We'd love to continue to establish relationships and friendships here. Once again, thank you to Melissa and Joe from Sky Mountain as well, helping us have this beautiful setting for the talk. Kind of wish I was facing this one, but this was excellent as well. Blessings to you all, and have a wonderful evening. Thank you for coming out tonight.