LSD and the Edge of Human Experience

Dr. Chris Bache had 73 massive-dose LSD sessions over 20 years. He tells us what he saw.

[This conversation is a 9/10 on the materialism to mysticism scale]

Dr. Christopher Bache is Professor Emeritus in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training.

Dr. Bache is perhaps best known for his remarkable 2019 book LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It relates his insights and experiences from 73 therapeutically-structured, massive-dose LSD sessions over the 20 years from 1979-1999. Upon revisiting the book for this interview, I was struck by how remarkable it is. I am not aware of anyone else who underwent such a sustained exploration of the outer limits of consciousness, especially one who returned able to lucidly articulate exactly what they experienced. Bache also maintained a high-level teaching career throughout his sessions.

While he admits his adventure was perhaps foolhardy, and he strongly dissuades anyone else from attempting it, his commitment to travel to the very edges of human experience offers an unparalleled vision of our present reality and maybe even our collective future.

For our conversation I was joined by my friend Devin Martin, an experienced transformational and psychedelic coach [available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts].

Bache summarized his findings from the 73 sessions in a single paragraph. When I first tweeted it, it attracted over a million views, which may indicate a strong degree of collective resonance. And, hey, a tight summary of twenty years of unimaginably intense mystical experiences is probably pretty valuable. In one (long!) sentence, Bache claims to have discovered:

That the universe is the manifest body of a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and power, that we are all aspects of this Being, never separated from it for a moment, that we are growing ever more aware of this connection, that physical reality emerges out of Light and returns to Light continuously, that Light is our essential nature and our destiny, that all life moves as One, that reincarnation is true, that there is a deep logic and significance to the circumstances of our lives, everything we do contributes to the evolution of the whole, that our awareness continues in an ocean of time and a sea of bliss when we die, that we are loved beyond measure and that humanity is driving towards an evolutionary breakthrough that will change us and life on this planet at the deepest level.

Bache believes that this birth of the “future human” will be preceded by a collective dark night of profound suffering.

When examining Bache’s findings, the first question is obviously: how trustworthy are psychedelic experiences in general? He has engaged in a thoughtful dialogue with Near Death Experience expert Ken Ring.¹ Psychonauts have been predicting a catastrophic collapse and glorious rebirth into a new evolutionary stage of humanity for decades. Ring is no longer as convinced as he once was that these represent prophecy. Instead, he suggests it might just be reflections of culturally-specific conditioning. The consistency of apocalyptic death and rebirth visions may just reflect something specific to a Western Christian psyche. For centuries our culture has been grounded in the myth of agony, followed by glorious resurrection into a heavenly rapture.

It’s not really an argument anyone can “win,” but Bache does note the consistency of visions across NDEs and deep psychedelic sessions. Someone’s sessions may start in culturally and personally specific territory. But, like his, eventually they move into the shared, common landscape of extra-physical reality

Bache also undertook his explorations as a professor of religious studies, with a solid understanding of cross-cultural mysticism, and yet he was consistently surprised by what he found in his sessions.

For example, reincarnation isn’t typically part of the traditional Christian worldview. Bache already had his mind opened to the robust empirical evidence for reincarnation through Dr. Ian Stevenson’s research at UVA.² This was then repeatedly confirmed by his direct experience. He also had experiences that aligned with the results of Dr. Michael Newton’s hypnotherapy research for the book Journey of Souls. Newton claims that our souls choose the nature of our incarnation in order to deliberately evolve our consciousness.³ One purpose is to learn how to master our innate creative powers.

Bache regards the soul as a system of consciousness that integrates all our different lifetimes. He himself has used hypnotic regression to experience and integrate his past lives. As he described them in our conversation, it was clear how many of them have aligned with his desire to explore the deep structure of reality. Our individual and collective goal is to eventually bring all of our former lives together into a single embodied consciousness and then to live that consciousness here on this planet. Bache calls this the “Diamond Soul,” which he experienced by gradually journeying through five ever more expansive scales of reality.

1. Personal mind: Ego death and purification of his own personal traumas

2. Collective mind: This is where he was encountering and healing species-level material. This involved more than two years in an incomprehensible “ocean of suffering,” where he witnessed atrocities like soldiers killing thousands of children.

3. Archetypal mind: Moving beyond the species mind, this is where he encountered vast forces that influence us on a cosmic scale. He experienced humanity as a single organism with our minds as nodes in a vast intelligent network.

4. Causal mind: This is where “oneness” becomes the dominant experience of reality.

5. Diamond Luminosity. This is his term to describe a glorious clear dimension of light that he encountered in the last five years of his journey. Buddhism calls this domain Dharmakaya. The “Diamond Soul” is the “future human” that he describes as being crystalized out of that light.

Accessing each level involved suffering a corresponding death or surrender of the prior stage as one opens to the next level of consciousness. First the personal ego, then the collective ego, then what he called the shamanic ego (the part that was used to navigate psychedelic space) and then the transcending of human-centric experience as a whole.

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Making the Cosmic Practical

As Bache himself warns against following his path, and his worldview plays out over generations, what’s the immediate relevance of his work? How do we bring this broadest imaginable cosmic exploration into our daily lives?

One immediate benefit is the potential it offers for a transformational worldview shift. In terms of daily practice, he recommended to us that we simply read. Mere exposure to these ideas opens your mind to the experience of deeper forms of reality. He believes that exploring them in community is even more powerful, and helps us grow faster.

Although it derives from a source many will regard as inherently subjective and untrustworthy, Bache’s experience further supports the primary anomaly that would torpedo the dogmatic materialist worldview that is poisoning humanity. The wider acceptance of life after death is the antidote to existential nihilism.⁴ Not only does Bache think that reincarnation is a fact of life, but also that there is an evolutionary direction to our existence.

The legendary systems theorist (and former Leading Edge interviewee)⁵ Ervin Laszlo famously called this forece the “holotropic attactor.” In the foreword, he calls LSD and the Mind of the Universe one of the most insightful and significant books he’s ever read:

“But to understand its significance and to endorse its message, one must be willing to entertain three premises:

1. That there is an intelligence behind the things that exist in the universe,

2. That there is purpose exhibited by this intelligence, and

3. That it is humanly possible to access some elements of this intelligence and learn some aspects of its purpose.”

If we are guided by some kind of energetic or bioelectrical intelligence, it would make sense that we dedicate a lot more attention to cultivating our subtle sensitivity and resilience.  As Bache cautions in our conversation, if you touch the divine light without having a very strong, clear field, it can shatter you. This requires making ourselves integrated enough to fully experience and participate in ever deeper levels of reality.⁶ This trajectory of transcending and including at ever-increasing levels of intelligence is also increasingly consistent with leading edge science.⁷ Moreover, the Diamond Soul could be the ideal form that humanity is being pulled towards (which was the argument of my last piece).⁸ In his final session he tells the story of how he was given a glimpse of what he came to call “Diamond Vision.”⁹

Suddenly my sight became impossibly sharp. Colors, shades, and textures were vividly distinct; looking at my hands, I could see every pore at the base of each hair follicle. Dust floated in the air with crystalline precision. I could count the leaves on a tree. After about ten minutes the clarity vanished, and my vision returned to normal. That was the moment I understood I had been seeing through the eyes of the Future Human; a glimpse of how our physical and perceptual capacities are being refined and brought forward by the universe.

Against this immense cosmic scale, Bache’s work indicates that our personal spiritual work ripples out and contributes to the healing of the wider whole. In our conversation, he described how his own explorations had a profound impact on the collective consciousness in his classroom.

Bache believes that we are each self-generating fields of energy in a living universe. Our choices generate energy and the universe responds in complex and subtle ways that can play out over minutes, years or lifetimes. The turning point for each of us is when you notice these responses and learn the corresponding lessons they are offering. But, in a lovely moment in our conversation, Dr. Bache emphasizes that we have time:

Even then I learned that there are deeper and deeper dimensions of reality beyond even where I had reached, and that’s when I realized I had made a false assumption; that eventually you arrive at some final end point of the journey, a culmination that brings peace, enlightenment, and completion. What I discovered instead was that it doesn’t work that way. You can stop anywhere along the way, take the blessings given at any stage, live with them, and be enriched by them, but the path itself is an infinite progression; you never get to the end of it. That’s one of the reasons I’ve learned to be gentler with myself: it’s not about getting somewhere, but about changing the porosity of the membrane between physical reality and spiritual reality, allowing more of the energy of spiritual reality into your life. That can be done gently, physically, psychedelically, or therapeutically. I got about as far as I’ve seen anyone get, and I have great respect for the masters who live in communion with those levels of reality at the more subtle tiers.

[You can listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts]

1. Are deep psychedelic experiences trustable? An exchange between Ken Ring and Chris Bache

2. I’ve written about this topic previously, leaning on the work of Mona Sobhani, PhD, who cites compelling work by Dr. Ian Stevenson of UVA. He studied 2,500-3,000 cases from six continents of children reporting past life memories. Children between the ages of 2-5 are allegedly especially permeable to past life experiences. In sixty five percent of cases the identity of purported past life identity could be verified. Creepily, there were also more than 200 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos. One woman who remembered a past life where she was killed by three blows from an axe to her back had three separate linear hyperpigmented scar-like birthmarks on her back. Another boy from India recalled a past life where he was killed by a shotgun wound to the chest. He was able to give the name of the person from the past life, and Dr. Stevenson was able to locate the autopsy report of the deceased person. The location of the gunshot wound matched the boy’s birthmark. This research is still being conducted after his death, as recently reported by the Washington Post. And here’s another article on current professor Jim Tucker in UVA magazine

3. Check out Do We Plan Our Lives Before Birth (Rob Schwartz) with

Scott Britton

4. The Sword that Slays the Dragon

5. Ervin László: A Short Conversation with a Living Legend

6. Yiquan: The Hidden Science of Power

7. For example, I recently wrote about Dr. Michael Levin’s revolutionary experiments that show individual cells exist in holonic bioelectrical relationships within a larger field of intelligence guided by what sounds like platonic forms. As I understand it, a frog’s cells are “intelligently” coordinating to make the whole organism in accordance with a blueprint held in the bioelectrical field. And this has been demonstrated by the fact that when Levin alters the field, he can alter the form. In this case, he can make a frog grow eyes on different parts of its body without altering its DNA. Check out The Conjunction of the Sun and Moon by

The Fourth Way

“Like in Levin’s experiments, the individual cells don’t really know how to build a hand or a head, but by tapping into the field of intelligence they are guided step by step to build whatever it is that needs to be built. The cells themselves possess limited knowledge, yet they participate in creating structures of breathtaking complexity.” Speculatively extrapolated to Bache’s experiences, this concept aligns with the archetypal platonic field he encountered.

8. What Are We Becoming? (It was also pretty wild to see a more comic version of this idea emerge immediately afterwards in Vince Gilligan’s new show Pluribus). In our conversation, Bache was at pains to emphasize that the view he has of the future human also enshrines the importance of the individual.

9. Source: 73 Trips: Inside the Psychedelic Universe with Christopher Bache, Ph.D. | Regina Meredith