Exploring Psychedelics and the Mystical - An Interview With Christopher Bache

What follows is a transcript for the podcast Homegrown Humans – Christopher Bache – Psychedelics - Hosted by Jamie Wheal

Topics within the interview include the following:

• Christopher’s 20+ year experiment and experience
• Different psychedelics and their range of effect
• The point of pain and suffering, or the “bad trip”
• The future humanity and non-ordinary states
• The path home is through suffering
• The omega point is the new alpha point

Christopher’s 20+ year experiment and experience

Jamie Wheal: Welcome to the next edition of HomeGrown Humans, where we speak with some of the thought leaders and pioneers of our time, about the very basic questions of where have we come from. What's going on, and what do we do now. And it's my great pleasure to welcome Chris Bache, the author of, LSD and the Mind of the Universe. And my preferred subtitle, Diamonds from Heaven.

And get to riff on what is one of the more courageous and outrageous thought experiments and lived experiments of recent history. And everything that Chris has brought back from a sustained multi-decade inquiry into the mysto, and what it might share or hint with us for the future ahead. So Chris, thank you for joining us and welcome to HomeGrown Humans.

Christopher Bache: Thank you, Jamie. It's pleasure to be here with you.

Jamie Wheal: Absolutely. Now, I've noticed that you've been out and about on the podcast, and talking circuits since your book came out. And interestingly, a number of mutual friends and colleagues had been recommending that I read it for the last 18 plus months. I was obviously busy, and heads down getting out, Recapture the Rapture. And I was also actually just a little bit leery of one more Trip Report.

I was just like, "Oh, come on. Have seen this dug deep into that world back in my earlier years." And then I think it was Roger Walsh actually that had most recently recommended. And that was just the puzzle piece. I just deeply respect Roger and his discernment. And I was like, "All right, I'm in, but let's do this."

And in reading it, I found myself teleported back to my college and grad school years of reading John Lilly's accounts, reading Philip K. Dick, reading [Kizzy 00:02:15], reading Crowley, reading anybody really who had gone deep into the non-ordinary realms, and come out with some form of a map.

And just very much appreciated, both what you did and also how you did it. So before we jump in and I don't want this to be just one more retread of your normal storytelling. So if it's okay, I want to paraphrase what you got up to, and then let's jump into the implications.

But for listeners who have not come across your book yet, or have heard of your experiment, this was fundamentally a 20 plus year, quite methodical inquiry into high dose therapeutic explorations of the LSD realms and whatever they were disclosing to you. And then documented, logged and unpacked with, not the typical kind, but an intersectional or interdisciplinary set of frameworks ranging from comparative religion to transpersonal psychology, to your own lived experience of what were the types and classifications and categories of experiences you had.

How did they show up, and when? In the sequence of your multi decade or journey. And then what are perhaps some of the implications of all of that high bandwidth information that you [crosstalk 00:03:46].

Christopher Bache: That's a great summary, Jamie. I have to remember that, that's a good summary. And by the way, also my preferred title for the book and the title that I always had while I was writing it was, Diamonds from Heaven. LSD and the Mind of the Universe is an honest title, but it's a publisher's title.

Jamie Wheal: Yes. Well, and interestingly for Stealing Fire, my subtitle was going to be The Secret Revolution in Altered States. Not, how Navy SEALs, Silicon Valley, and Maverick Scientists... That was pure publisher bullshit. And I was like, "Oh, come on. That's painful." And funny enough, I couldn't even remember your main title, Diamonds from Heaven is what lodged in my mind as well.

Christopher Bache: Yeah, because Diamonds from Heaven basically is what was given me in an non-ordinary state, basically. And the idea was, don't try to take them in, layer by layer from the beginning, give them a sense of where you're going to go at the end, because there's too many layers. There's too much depth. It's too hard to navigate all those resistances. Give them at least a signal of where the journey ends. And for me, the journey ends up in the diamond luminosity territory, Diamonds from Heaven.

So what I did, just as you said, I took Stan Grof's protocols for working with high doses of LSD. And in the early years, those protocols were restricted to three sessions. They were for terminal cancer patients to give them a taste of where you were going when you die. And I took that protocol, and I just pushed it to its limit for 73 sessions, stretched out over 20 years in my methodical way. And I was trained as a philosopher religion. So I wasn't primarily interested in the healing potential, I was interested in the philosophical or cosmological potential to explore the deeper dimensions of reality. So that's what I did, yeah.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. Well, and first, let me just offer thoughts and reflections, then we can get deeper and deeper into the Juju. But the first thing, and I share this, and I recommended your book to a number of friends because I'm like, "Hey, this is, at least in my experience, a contemporary update on the "Psychonaut, Trip Report."

And to me it differed meaningfully, although there were some fascinating similarities with Lilly, and with Philip K Dick, right? Because those guys were, on the one hand, bold psychonauts plumbing the depths of the mysto. And on the other hand, they were slightly addled by that '70s era, and slightly prone to either mytho poetic, or romantic, or even... You just never could quite tell if they were shooting straight, right?

And so, you had to unwind some of the claims. And the same with Leary and Dos, the same with any of the folks from that era, and even Stan's, transpersonal models of perinatal matrices, and past life regressions. Because we're doing a project to John's Hopkins using Stans work. He's an emeritus advisor to the project, and we actually ran into to this as we were trying to do the IRB protocols, which was, "Hey, wait, if you're going to provide any NOSC, any state induction technique, and in this case, just holotropic breathwork, and people start having unusual phenomenological experience, is it okay to stamp it or collapse it into, you are having a past life experience, or you are having a prenatal rebirth experience.

If you're going to be putting this into the veteran's administration. If you're going to be putting this cross culturally into India or Africa, or Catholic South America, will that not potentially create blowback? So effectively, the teleological certainty of some of these prior conversations is something that I felt was refreshingly lacking in yours. You were agnostic and very provisional in how you held these lightning bolt insights.

So talk to me about that for starters, right? How did you balance the overwhelming almost gnostic certainty, right? Of having these epiphanies, and on the other hand, the agnostic, looseness, or humility with which you held it?

Christopher Bache: Well, several components of that, the technique that I use turned out to be so powerful, it kept expanding the territory of the experiences beyond known territory, beyond previous territories. And once I began to realize that this was happening and it didn't just happen once over three, four year period, but it happened several times subsequently, then I was entering territory that was genuinely new and I knew it was going to take me a long time to digest it.

General rule of thumb is, I never talk about any experience, ideally until I've had 10 years to digest it, or at least five years. And that's one of the things I think that happens. If you look at many of the people's books, they write about psychedelics after a half dozen experiences, and very close in time to the experiences.

Jamie Wheal: Or on Instagram TV. Like, "Hey, I'm just out of the jungle herd, guess what?

Christopher Bache: Yeah. And I understand there's a tremendous wave that passes through you, but I would prefer to let that wave pass capture as much as possible. And it took me years. I mean, I understood my experiences as I was having them. I plotted them. I maintained the dialogue even where I didn't understand them, I knew I would understand them with repetition, more experience.

But I didn't understand some of the subtlety of the interconnectivity of the sessions until I was actually writing the book. The writing of the book came 15 years after I stopped, and it took me five years to write the book. I had to overcome tremendous resistance. I didn't want to share this story. On just the opposite, people are eager to get it out. I really seriously considered publishing this posthumously.

And it's not just because it's so radical, but because it's so intimate. I mean, you're dealing with your experience of the divine, or your experience of the deepest realities that human beings discuss. And I wasn't sure, I was ready to let people that deeply into my life, our life. But in the end, my commitment as an educator, as a philosopher, because I knew that there was nothing personal about what I was sharing. I was sharing something that's, not universal, but tending in that direction. It's something that underlies all of us, and therefore... And the universe was quite clear towards the end, as I was wrestling with this, whether to share, whether not to share.

It said very clearly, "You didn't give yourself these experiences. We gave you those experiences. They were never just for you. They were never intended just for you. You don't have the right to hold onto them." Now I know that sounds in ego inflation, but it's not. It's just the simple awareness that in deep work you enter into collective territory, you enter into cosmic territory, and no one enters there without having the shit kicked out of their ego, and for taking responsibility that you are going as a member of a family, and you're representative of your family. And in the end, it's your family that deserves the witness that was given you.

Jamie Wheal: Beautifully said. That has an echo of John Lilly's, Earth Coincidence Control Office, right? Where he has those eight or nine principles as to what is that higher order intelligence that he would go and reflect on LSD and flow tanks and then subsequently ketamine and flow tanks. And he started being a cartographer of that at domain.

And one of the things he said was that the Earth Coincidence Control Office had basically told him, "Hey, look, here's the deal. We're putting you through the ringer, never forget you're in a training academy, we control all the big coincidences, you get to control the little coincidences, and no matter how shitty or weird, or wild this gets, know it's on purpose. So how does that both echo your experience of commitment, obligation, initiation. And are there any differences or nuances that you experienced in your own path?

Christopher Bache: It echos it. I would verbalize it maybe a little differently, but maybe that's inconsequential. The basic insight is the same. To me, it was Stan Grof's work that gave me the confidence and the deep understanding, and the willingness to trust wherever it takes you. Wherever it takes you, if you submit to it completely. No matter how inscrutable, or how horrendous it is, you'll understand it later down the road.

And it will take care of you even while it's punishing you and crushing you. When you come through that, it'll catch you on the other end and it'll take you into a world beyond anything you've ever imagined. And that this cycle of death and rebirth will repeat itself, so just trust the process and go. And I think that, over time I discovered that I was always met by a consciousness, and the nature of this consciousness, and the scale of this consciousness was kept on escalating and expanding.

So I could never associate it with a being, speaking in the plural is a good way to approximate that unknown quality. But I found myself always being engaged by an intelligence that was orchestrating my experience. And it was a classroom. It was really like I would be taken into class, and I was brought back again and again and again, till I had mastered a certain territory.

And of course in this territory, you always learn by becoming what it is you're learning. So you become this dimension of reality, this [inaudible 00:14:36]. You dissolved into its bandwidth. And then when that's done something, this intelligence guided me into another death and rebirth surrender. And then a gradual over years, acclimation to another level of reality, with different rules, different patterns. And then the process would repeat itself. I mean, eventually I learned that I always thought in the beginning, first, I thought, this was from my benefit. And I learned that that's not true.

And then later, I had thought there is an endpoint to this journey. You come to a goal. The point is to get home or something like this. And what I learned along the way is, no, it's an infinite journey, don't think that you're... Because I had many homecomings, and many end points, but they kept on being transcended. So I learned, eventually, with one powerful experience, it's an infinite progression. You're going into the infinite, so it changes your strategy.

Which is one of the reasons I would be gentler on myself if I were doing. And I'd really honestly, sincerely do not recommend that people do what I did. Because in ways that I only partially describe in the book, it takes a toll, and it takes a toll in subtle ways, but it becomes your life, and you can't do it on the edge of your life.

And when you go this deep, this intensely, so much of your life is about understanding it, navigating it, integrating it, and dealing with the social haul out, as I found with my students. So I really recommend for all these reasons, the open-endedness of it, a gentler approach, smaller steps, letting in as much as possible, taking it and digest it. I'm more patient now with the slow growth of pace of human evolution.

Jamie Wheal: At the same time that you're more aware of the absolutely mortal stakes.

Christopher Bache: Yeah. Well, nature is turning up the heat underneath us now. History is turning up the heat. We are at a make or break moment. I think this is probably something that other species and other systems probably face, but basically I think we are at a make or break moment in human evolution, yeah.

Jamie Wheal: Well, you just present said something that I think is fascinating, and then there's a bookend to it as to the future human, and the potential, the end of history, as you've glimpsed it. But, for now you were just talking about that sense of, "Hey, no matter how wild and willy, this is all taking place, according to plan. I have some connection, however, tenuous or deliberate enacted to higher intelligences.

My life has a purpose that is beyond my necessarily immediate and rational knowing, but it's all going to work out, right? And this is, on the surface, very similar to new thought, new age, #universe, right? Everything happens for a reason, and a lot of the absolutely superficial glosses, right? Are basically neoliberal, hyper individualistic consumptive, spiritual narcissism.

Christopher Bache: Yeah. I'm afraid so.

Jamie Wheal: Right. So how do we tease those apart? Because, and again, Lilly had that similar idea of like, "Hey, my life's on rails. I'm being reeled in by a golden thread. And no matter what happens, this is part of the plan. I don't know if Kate Bowler's work. She's a theologian at Duke, but she studied evangelical movement. She wrote a book about it, and then she was diagnosed with stage four cancer.

And she wrote an awesome book called, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved. And she just does this beautiful, really funny poignant. Unpacking of her lived experience. And then she's still in these communities of faith and practice, and everybody's telling her, "Oh, this is happening to you for a reason." She's like, "Fuck you, I've got a three year old. This sucks and it's random."

So how did you reckon with and wrestle with both on the one hand that incredibly, and profound reassuring sense of, "Oh, my life isn't random. This isn't just heat death of a distant star and chaotic nature of red and tooth and claw unfoldings of nihilism." And on the other hand, that sense that, even if your life was unfolding according to some cosmic or divine plan, it didn't save you from getting your ass roundly handed to you on a routine basis down here in 3D. How did you balance those?

Christopher Bache: Good questions. This is a good question. Partly I think it's primary by being initiated or being taken into deeper complexity that lies behind what we experience as the manifest existence. Being shown enough of it, and that you begin to respect how incomplete our understanding of it is. And that so many of our philosophies and religions and new age formulas are very superficial. They catch elements of a truth, but it's much more complicated than that. Our individual evolution is much more embedded in our collective evolution.

The structures of our collective maturity influence the structures of our individual maturity in complex ways. Well, let me back up a little bit. I'm still thinking about your first question about the surety of the cosmology that comes with these experiences and why we have to be careful when we introduce that cosmology. And this ties in here.

I spent a lot of time unpacking the cosmological implications of my experiences. I really wasn't interested... And I didn't present to the world in Diamonds from Heaven, many of my personal experiences, personal illuminations, personal healings, because that's not very philosophically significant except that it happens. But what's more important were the insights that came when I was in the peak series of experience, the peak hours, and the experience, I won't say visions, but the experience of reality that was given me during those hours. And so there was a definite unfolding.

And even when I was begging for it to give me more of something or the other that I wanted to, I learned that it wasn't. These experiences were being titrated to me because it didn't want to destroy the consciousness that was integrating and organizing these experiences inside time and space. Too much ecstasy is very disorienting for living well on earth.

Jamie Wheal: That could be a bumper sticker.

Christopher Bache: Yeah. Quite different than some of the past experiences, huh? When you begin to get taken into the vastness, and to experience, for example, the entire human species in a way which doesn't collapse any of our individual stories, but all of them are present as strands within this single organism, the human species. And to experience it from a transtemporal perspective, incarnating generation by generation and growing itself through all of our individual struggles, being an expression of, and developing it's larger evolutionary development.

All these truths then about, well, you control your reality, you make reality, or you can think your way into a better reality. All those are small sub truths within much, much bigger tapestry of truths. And so, I began to realize, I just had to keep my mouth shut for a long time and do my best to understand, digest what was given to me. And yeah, that's why I waited so long to write Diamonds from Heaven. I basically didn't publish it for 20 years after I stopped this journey.

And I did psychedelic sessions in gentler substances and different substances after I stopped in 1999. But the core work was the industrial strength, LSD work. And that I waited a long time, because I knew it wasn't going to fit into many people's vision of reality, including religious, but also in the transpersonal movement to a degree. And even in the psychedelic movement to a degree, it was going to push an edge.

Jamie Wheal: And what edge did you feel that you were closest to? Where was the biggest gap between what you received and the map, or the gestalt of what you were experiencing. And then the various bridges to the other communities of practice that you felt nearest to. Where was the most, either, challenging or controversial, or unique, or just hard to wrap one's head around information as you experienced it?

Christopher Bache: Well, the first was letting go of a personal transformational model. I wrote Dark Night, Early Dawn, which was published in 2000, to answer the question, how did so many people get involved in my therapy? Why did my death rebirth process get expanded to include hundreds of thousands of human beings, and thousands of years of human history? How is this in any way serving my healing? And the answer was, "Well, it's not, dummy." That's not what's happened.

You did your personal, digesting of any pain and suffering that you little bitty life had gotten. This is different. This concerns your human family, this concerns all the pain and suffering that's lodged in the collective psyche, that still lives in pulses there. And it can be described in different ways in terms of souls in the Bardo. It can be described in terms of the collective psyche of this unified organism that human beings are. But it's there, and the work becomes collective. That was the first differentiation. Once I made that jump with the help of Rupert Sheldrake work and let that-

Jamie Wheal: And specifically the morphogenetic fields, some sense of noosphere like, nonmaterial carrier way of consciousness that we share.

Christopher Bache: And the feedback between the individual and the collective. Not that the collective is the ultimate, but it is a significant next step, that feedback system.

Different psychedelics and their range of effect

Jamie Wheal: Which by the way, just to put a pin in the map here is fundamentally different than the medical therapeutic model that maps, and that others are now advocating, right? Which is almost neurochemical, psychosocial, therapeutic, but still hyper individualistic in its focus as to what happens inside you under the influence of a given compound with talk therapy or any other adjunct modality, right?

Christopher Bache: And, I'm so happy for the Renaissance taking place. I'm so happy for the researches being done in so many fine institutions, and I lo-

The researchers are being done in so many fine institutions and I love what they're doing, but from my perspective, this is just the beginning of the story. They're just getting the story and there is so much stuck in the physiology of this phenomenon. How the brain is behaving and models of what that means for human behavior but they're still working within a pretty tightly held cosmology.

It's close to materialist cosmology, and it is close to an individual therapeutic modality, but my confidence is the medicine will take them into the deeper waters and they will get there. We've already been there and they will get there. Because, once you peel off those outer layers, then you begin to sink into the deeper waters naturally. Now the question is, does psilocybin have the power to take people that deep? And my sense is every psychedelic has a range, kind of a capacity of strength.

And I think psilocybin doesn't have that much of a range, not as much of a range as LSD. I tend to think of it as psilocybin ayahuasca LSD. And LSD has its own distinctive properties. It tends to be, in my experience, a high ceiling psychedelic, whereas psilocybin is really close to your body and your emotions and, and your physical system. Ayahuasca is kind of integrating both, but LSD, at least at the dose levels I was working with, which is at the body saturation point to 500 micrograms. So I was working 500 to 600.

Jamie Wheal: That's a full send folks. For you folks listening.

Christopher Bache: Yeah, it's a strange art form. Now I understand what I was doing better than I understood what I was doing it. And now I would describe it a little differently.

And it's because of that, that I really don't recommend it. You just have to really gird your loins tight and if you're going to do this, you have to be really willing to lay your life on the line.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. Screw your courage to the sticking point. Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Christopher Bache: Yeah. Basically.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. Stick the fucking landing.

Christopher Bache: Yeah, And I found that there's a balance to it, a balancing act. There is the short term courage and it does take the way any kind of... Anybody who to does any adventurous sport to an edge, it takes that kind of courage, but then there's a long term wisdom which has to do with balance. And I'm not sure that I got that right. What I went through after I stopped tells me that I didn't get it right.

Jamie Wheal: Or that it's near impossible to walk the path of the mage or the shaman while also holding a house, right? Relationships and career and socially constructed identities where in the past the magician lived in a hut at the edge of the forest and did not explicitly deal with the fuckwitts back in the town. They came to visit them.

Christopher Bache: It really is. There are some advantages to doing it on the mountain and being in relative isolation. I think that is really true, part of it. And I think another part of it is the sheer power of the medicines that we have access to today. So LSD is the most concentrated psychedelic in the history. I think maybe before 5-MeODMT super concentrated, super powerful. But now we have the augmenting technology of sound and access to the world's music. So we're not sitting around the fire beating a drum as good as that is, but we're putting on headphones and using a very carefully calibrated playlist to really amplify the experience and drive you to new limits.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah, which brings to mind that the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound in 1974, right. They put all their money, right. Into one of the highest fidelity. Spatially imaging sound systems specifically for people going to the Dionysian as Campbell said, the Dionysian ritual of a dead show on lysergic acid. That was arguably some of the most innovative tech supportive on that.

Christopher Bache: Tech? And personally, I can't imagine taking my consciousness into that environment, given my story, my journey was just so different. I can't imagine placing myself in that complex of a social situation and opening up my consciousness up into some of the territory I went into.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. And the way they did it. Right? And the reason that there's such a fetish for specific Grateful Dead's tunes, it's not that they'd love to sing along to them on the radio it's that they were these 15 to 20 minute journeys. They were sonic soundscapes that everyone could just offload where and consciousness to. They could dance and move in their body. And then they would go on these lyric sonic journeys. And they would always bippity boppity boo, take you back to the beginning.

So they became this shared cultural meme scape of like, "Oh, this is a Terrapin station. This is a song about redemption. This is a song about fucking heaven. And I know we'll get there soon, or this is this song about the doc star. Transitive nightfall of diamond. Shall we go? You and I?", right?

So these lyrics took on an epiphanic scriptural capacity at the same time that the kinesthetic and poly rhythmic elements, offloaded default mode network working consciousness. Right? And they trusted the band to not take them any place, excessively spooky or scary. Right? So it became this beautiful kinesthetic, acoustic moving meditation, and you're like, "Oh, they cracked it.", That was a very innovative thing to come out of the Redwoods of LA Honda. At Northern California.

Christopher Bache: In some ways my work is similar in a sense that there's music, it's carefully chosen music. It's calibrated a little differently. It's handled by someone who's monitoring me and taking feedback for where I'm going and what I need to make a transition. And in the end five, six hours later, it brings me back and with carefully selected music. So there's a going out a peeking and running and then a coming back. So it is a long, carefully calibrated day.

Little different in the sense that never any words in English, never any words that I can understand, no thematic content. And I found that for myself, very quickly, Johns Hopkins uses a lot of classical music in their sessions and whatnot. I've seen their playlist, I'd let go of Western music of west... In, especially, classical music. And I found, I used only indigenous music from different cultures for the power parts, for the real power part. And then kind of yoga music coming back into the gentle face.

Jamie Wheal: That's very, "Okay Boomer." I think lately, between Burning Man and various EDM, there's way more intergalactic and otherworldly sounds with some incredible carrier wave base, especially in high fidelity, both either like sound stack systems like function ones, or both headphones and whatever. But I think that the fact that music is the wallpaper of our minds. And especially so in these susceptible states is no doubt about it.

Now, quick question, just the different qualities of molecules. I'm also wondering, my sense is that the LSD mushroom ayahuasca stacking, that you were just describing as far as the kind of the hierarchy of access to information, my sense is that's also massively dose dependent, right? Because lower dose mushrooms tend to be somatic and tend to be very earth based like, "Ooh, I'm decomposing into this pile of leaves or I'm feeling one with the tree that I'm leaning against", but on higher doses they get wackily galactic.

And arguably true for Aya as well. So I'm wondering, let me run this past for me, LSD feels like Interteler mind latice, it's very, very clean and it's literally almost like the intersectional coordinates of a laser map. And it's very low friction and you can travel literally at the speed of photons, and it's clean, there's no body loading. There's none of that. Right? It absolutely precise. And that mushrooms are predominantly... They feel very, not surprisingly mycelial in their networking rather than clean grid coordinates. It's almost dendritic. Right? Yeah.

And that Aya is potentially, again, not surprisingly, sort of more like multilayered jungle, humus. It's all the things in all the directions. So does that track for you? Or, and again, I don't what your experience has been with the Sonoran Toad or anything like that, but comparing and obviously... What is your sense, let's say of 5-meO to LSD and, or your perception... The access to the information layers and how do they represent based on which compound you're jacking into your synapses.

Christopher Bache: Yeah, I'm still working out my understanding of the relationship between 5-meODMT and LSD. So, I'll reserve that one. I have a tremendous respect for 5-meODMT. But one of the things we'll talk about later is the significance of the length of exposure, the time window.

Because I think that's a major factor when you're talking about long term cognitively coherent immersion into the mind of the universe, how big that window is, gives you time for interaction, time for that reality to purify this reality for you to stabilize and for the conversation to develop when it's so short you can have multiple immersions, but it's still so short. It really contracts the ability to do that. I think that's why Rick Strassman and his DMT research, he found that people were not... They had extraordinary experiences, but they were not very changed by those experiences.

And I think it's primarily because they were short acting, not because of some defect in the state itself. I think low dose, high dose has huge range and big influence. And I think you're right. Each of those substances has a different kind of level of consciousness or range of consciousness overlapping that it accesses.

And when I look at... I have some limited experience with ayahuasca, not as much as I would like, but some. And I learn a lot of it in addition to my own experience from the art and in the art, I see this complex jungle interweaving of all life forms it, going up into the Astro world of spirit and then going up into the celestial world of the gods and goddesses. And then UFO is popping along into the background because we're clearly in communication with ISA and there's that.

And the LSD experience has been different for me, just different. I participated in a conference a couple of years ago and it was on DMT and entity encounters. So I was talking with the guys who were there with about 20 of us presenting and in my experience in the doses that I used and the way I used it, I didn't have many entity encounters with LSD.

So, I hypothesized that you have to be an ego to meet an ego. You have to be a self to meet a self. So there is a level of reality, which is granular and there are spiritual beings in that level of reality with all the interconnectivity and permeability and stuff that we assume. But there, there is that level of reality, but that is held within larger levels of reality that just wipe out all that particularity and dissolves it into sinewy textures of a deeper connective tissue.

And then there is another modality where it all lives and breathes as one. All the textures, all the bits and pieces, everything. It's just like, "There's only one of us here. There has only ever been one of us here. Everything is folded into that one". Just a different reality. Now, LSD for me, at least the way I was met and what I was put through, it just ground me up and just ground me and destroyed me, and ground me and destroyed me again and again, and then plunged me into these bandwidths where I lived as some aspect of life for hours at a time. And then I would come back into Chris Bache and digest that, but I never was able to concretize the consciousness that I was engaged by as a being. Every time it... I tended to, kind of, hold it as a being, it dissolved us all into an even deeper strata of being and then it would dissolve it.

So any attempt to kind of hold a marriage image to an individual self and think of it as an individual, it just collapsed under the enormity of the scope now-

Jamie Wheal: Meaning, including yourself as that individual that was trying to hold it?

Christopher Bache: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. What happened was I was... It started around... Maybe I was 18, 19, 20 sessions in and I asked... I was with this consciousness, was having this deep experience and I turned and I asked, "Who am I with? Who are you?" And I experienced a dying, a kind of a mini death, a loss of control, a collapse. And I woke up in a state of awareness in which I was with a deeper aspect of myself. What had been it and me at this level, at a deeper level became myself and then the same thing happened.

I asked it again and this went on for hours. I kept dying and being born into a deeper aspect of my consciousness, but it wasn't my small M it was my capital M. And so I was basically being taken until eventually all boundaries fall away. And we were in that condition where there is only one reality. Its a cosmic reality. It takes all physical existence taking place within that reality. And this is the condition of being home in that sense. There is no place to go beyond oneness. At least I thought at the time you're in the home of oneness that core core truth.

Jamie Wheal: Well, let's toggle this to the other bookend, right? Because, on the one hand you were describing in, in the beginning of this dialogue, that sense of like, "Oh wow, my life is on rails. It has a purpose and it is being unfolded even beyond my can, but I get to glimpse it with that kind of deep knowing". And on the other hand there was... Now its at that was at the sort of nominally at the personal to trans personal level. Like, "I thought this was about my personal healing, but it's not, but on the other hand, you're here for a reason, buddy. This is for your extended human family", right? So you're kind of a proxy or a representative getting this information. And on the other hand, and this was actually where you kind of won me for the rest of your book.

The point of pain and suffering, or the “bad trip”

Jamie Wheal: Right? Which, because if it had just been, Hey unicorns and fluffy, rainbows friends and neighbors, right? I would've put it down, but you were like, "Fuck man, I kept getting dragged into the collective suffering". Into the war, the rape, the pillage, the famine. Right? And this sea of seemingly perpetual grief of the human experience.

And rather than bypassing it, or even being initiated into it and then transcending it, you kept getting dunked in that apple barrel, repeatedly. Again and again and again. So-

Christopher Bache: -Two years-

Jamie Wheal: Even...Yeah. So before we get to the other side of that, just share what that experience was like and what insights you gained from that seemingly overwhelming amount of suffering. That is our lot.

Christopher Bache: It's not our lot permanently. It's our lot temporarily. It's our lot as part of a stage in the evolution of consciousness in the form of homo sapiens. So it's a deeply endemic in the system, but I think it's reflective of where we have been and where we are, but it's not reflective of where we're going.

I truly think we are processing and off loading. A lot of the carmic impact of this less intelligent, less aware being that a human being was with only a few sparks coming through in Jesus and Buddha and Mohamed and great beings like that, of what we are at a deeper level. But I think we're... Anyway. So I think we're coming into a different era with a different kind of potential to write a different story. But what it was like to open up to it was confusing. I didn't understand it.

I trusted it because every time I went through it and I was brought out the other end... This is when I was entering deep time for the first time in my life. So I was given a series of a year of experiences where I experienced my entire life as a completed whole start to finish everything, present all my time moments in a now.

That that was like, "What the hell is that all about? That's amazing." But then to get to that, I'd have to go through this pain and suffering, which kept getting bigger. Then I stopped my work for six years. I started again, six years later and this pain and suffering, Bam! Right there. And it just get worse and deeper and deeper. But by then I was beginning to understand, I was beginning to pick up enough of the texture of the experience to realize that this is in some way, the human, the story, which I'm engaging.

Now, I don't try to describe beyond what I do in the book often what the ocean of suffering was like, because at one point I say in the book, it takes you years to learn how to sustain suffering of this magnitude and stay conscious. In the beginning you go unconscious. And it's not an ego... A aggrandizing thing. It's just a reporting. This is the phenomenology of the experience to op... You learn that your being,, somehow it can open up into... And to capture or catch or process or receive the hell realms. You're basically in the hell realms. But if you receive that experience completely. It doesn't lodge in you, it moves through you. And there is a greater health that comes out of the system, but it's a profound mystery. To me, it became a mystery when I hit a culmination and we hit this culmination point, and then I was catapulted into my first contact with archetypal reality.

Why did it stop? Why did the ocean of suffering stop after two years, and this about four years into the journey, why does one... Once you've merged, and once you've learned to become a facilitator of this type of collective healing, why did the universe take me past that? There were still deaths, there were still terrible suffering, but it wasn't in the form of human history. It was a different kind of pattern. And that's where I ended dark matter Ladon with that question. Why does the suffering end? And I come back to it in diamonds from heaven. And the two answers I've come up with is I think some cosmic oversight says, "Okay, that's enough. It's too big for any one person to do. You've done a share, that's it. You're not allowed to do anymore." But I think the deeper answer was you're more useful to the system operating, infusing higher energies from above than drawing those lower energies out from beneath. You don't lose your commitment to the system. You serve it in a different way. You serve it from a higher register.

Jamie Wheal: There's so many questions here. One is, and this is tactical, but for listeners, it might be helpful, which is, I think most people in the psychedelic journeying would assume that a quote on quote, "bad trip" was a sign of either impurities or imbalances or not worthy messes in me. That's why I'm getting hammered. And then I cleanse them and purify them. And then I get to the fluffy clouds and rainbows. But if I keep having these fucking experiences, there's something defective or wrong with me. Same way people would be like, "Oh, I don't like weed, man. It makes me paranoid." Like, "You sure about that? It might just be you." Right?

But somehow you decoupled that egoic personal journey identification with getting dunked in the suffering and you somehow, you either... There were breadcrumbs or stepping stones. I don't know which that led you to, "Oh, perhaps I am experiencing this impersonally to trans-personally." And the two models that should have show up as I was listening to you were either the Buddhist notion that the Tibetan Buddhist notion of Tonglen, right? Literally I am metabolizing the suffering of the world and buffering it and transmuting it into love and compassion. Or a kind of cristic, initiatory experience, which I'm bearing witness to the deep now and the temporal realms. The temporal realms of Cronos where all this shit happened, the life's a bitch. And then we die versus the always and already. Curious if either of those was alive for you or which one feels most resonant for the experience of you bridging that monumental Abys.

Christopher Bache: Well, there have been two... I've taught and studied world religions all my life, but there have been two that have been the strongest shaper of my experience. And the first is Christianity and I studied to be a priest starting when I was in high school. Left it after my first year of college, but it made a deep impression. And there is the suffering servant, the Christ and the cross. The idea of taking on the suffering of others is a theoretical possibility that's handled in an archetype way, but it's there. And in Buddhism, you have the bodhisattva. So both of them are coherent with this idea that a higher life is lived when you live your life for others. And I had internalized that, but I'm also a dad. And I think what I did is not special. It's not Saintly.

If you, if you see suffering, if you see a child that's suffering in, there's something you can do to help it. You naturally do it just because you're men. You just, you naturally do it. And if you're given an opportunity to somehow help suffering, you just do it. And at first I did it, because I thought this was part of an ego death, a deeper ego death. And I did it because when I went through it, I was given a great reward. I was given an unusual experience to transcend time was, and then to be taken into a cosmological journey that followed, I did it for the reward. And over time I began to understand that what this was serving, but in the work at a deeper level, not just the collective suffering. In this work, I learned to overcome a lot of conditioning, the conditioning to pull your hand out of the fire when you're suffering.

I learned that in this circumstance, the secret is to go deeper into the suffering because I learned that the deepest breakthroughs with the deepest, most glorious insights and experiences came after the deeper purification. And I learned that all death is purification. All this suffering, it's all purifications. It's all it is, is purification. And once you've died and been born multiple times the concept of death loses its meaning. You learn that death is simply when purification reaches so deep, its dissolving the structures that have held your awareness. Once those structures are going, you experience a collapse of death and then an awakening within a larger context, you befriend death. So you actually... Not only do you not misinterpret a bad experience over [inaudible 00:54:03].

Misinterpret a bad experience over personally, and you not only do you not be willing to handle it when it comes, you actually facilitate the immersion, the confrontation with death. Death becomes your greatest ally because death is purification and the deepest purification leads to the greatest immersion.

Jamie Wheal: There's that beautiful quote from Ghetto, "He who does not know the secret die and become, shall remain forever a stranger on this Earth."

Christopher Bache: Yeah. That's beautiful. You hold a lot of gems in your mind. I love reading you. You really hold a lot of them.

Jamie Wheal: Well, funny. I mean, they literally are just the ones that have spoken to my soul people ask, "How do you remember that show?" I'm like, "I don't remember anything." It's just, we get to that location in the grid and there they are just shining in neon. You're that right now is this. Let's keep going then because I think we've deliberately slow rolled. Although, interestingly, you said that the suffering was temporary. But I wonder if it is temporality and anything in Kronos time is by the big scheme of cosmic time, temporary. But is it that the suffering is a byproduct or a substrate of life in Kronos, life in matter, life in birth and decay and the thing that you lay out, not now you get to the grand.

You were in that collective suffering repeatedly. At first, you didn't know why it began to take shape and order, and then you were elevated to the higher realms on the other side of sort of enduring it without being broken by it. And then you were given this kind of grander explanation of the inservice of what and to me if I compare it, let me see if I [try 00:56:03]. Which is that it was remarkably similar to some of those kind of ancient, Hindu stories and origin stories. At one point in the timeless time, there was only the one, there was the all, and then a little bit like Shivan Shakti, there was that sense of, well, this is kind of boring. Let's split into the imminent in the transcendent.

And then we're going to play a grand old game of cosmic hide and seek. By the way, at some point along the lines, monkeys with thumbs and prefrontal courtesies got in on the game and we were the stalking horse for self-referential consciousness. By the way, it's going to hurt for a really long time and that's your world of suffering, despair, war famine, rape and hardship. But that is to spin you up to a high enough frequency to become self-aware man gods contemplating our own existence in the all and if you can just hang on until then, friends and neighbors, it all works out swimmingly.

The future humanity and non-ordinary states 

Christopher Bache: You have a beautiful way of describing things. I think you've compressed it, all that with reincarnation, you have to understand. In terms of this, go back to the [quantum 00:57:20]. Why is the cosmology of the emerges out of psychedelics, potentially threatening to science and whatnot? It isn't an improvisational cosmology, it's a real cosmology which can be cross validated with enough seekers that enter into this condition. But it's a very deep look. You have to understand reincarnation. You have to understand that we're popping in and out of time and space. You have to understand the structure of what we're going into when we die and that this is a deep evolutionary process. And then once you have that, and once you understand that the veins in our body will basically being worked out in trees long before human beings got to it.

And that way in which we are a crescendo of an evolutionary current, which will continue for billions of years yet. But to me, like you, I didn't figure any of this out. I just had things given to me, things were dumped into my mind over and over again. One of the things that was dumped into my mind is human beings are coming to a tipping point. Human beings are coming to a crescendo. By the way, the whole theory of reincarnation that you've internalized from all your study of Eastern religions, it's wrong. Or it's actually only half wrong. It's half right, half wrong. They got reincarnation. They got karma. But they didn't see where it was going.

Jamie Wheal: Okay. Well, we'll just slow that down and unpack that. Because I think that would be just helpful for anybody listening.

Christopher Bache: Well, my understanding, my take on it is that in the axial age, where there was this tremendous kind deepening of our conscious experience, we began to have experiences of the metaverse of the mother universe. And all the theologies that came out of those religions were basically theologies of escape. There were cosmologies of up and out what I call an up and out cosmology. You achieved salvation, you're saved of your sins, or you achieve realization, your enlightenment, and then you no longer have to be here because once you touch the mother universe, it's so blissful that you know that's where you want to be. And you know that, that's where you came from. So, you develop a theology of the fall and then you have to be saved or you have to work your way up. But even if you're a [inaudible 00:59:45], you basically keep coming back in order to get everybody up. It's an up and out cosmology Which leaves the fundamental meaning or the purpose of physical existence unexplained.

Jamie Wheal: This is just a bus station for us to solve our Sudoku puzzle.

Christopher Bache: Exactly. Yeah. But once you begin to understand the scale of the universe and the complexity of the universe and the project that this thing is about, then that just becomes unacceptable. And I think reincarnation is we're now grabbing just as we're grabbing a deeper understanding of nature and a deeper understanding of ourselves as part of nature and the continuities that are taking us on our own existential journey and the limitations of worldviews that reflect the stages of human evolution. I think now we're getting to at least what happened in my sessions, what was shown me in my sessions, that there comes a point in evolution in our reincarnating evolution where the soul, which is the consciousness that holds all of our lives, all of our memories as an integrated singularity, that soul incarnates or wakes up inside a human being. That's not simply being an enlightened human being. There is so much life experience there. It's not only a new and improved human being. It's a quantum step into a different order of conscious being.

Jamie Wheal: But is incarnate and on this Earth, is that?

Christopher Bache: Incarnate and on this Earth. And I call that the diamond soul because when this happened to me, when I was incarnating all these lives at a particular session, when the synthesis hit and I was catapulted into this kind of gift of a pre-experience of my diamond soul. I experience this diamond light, just exploding from my trust and just so I call it the diamond soul. That's where we're going. I think that's the transition, we'll come back to this, but that's a transition that we're trying to make right now into that caliber of existence.

Jamie Wheal: And you pose it that as the future human, was that your phrase? You gave it a specific term for that [crosstalk 01:02:07]

Christopher Bache: I just call it the future human. I think many people have this intuition that they touch it in meditation, in their various non-ordinary states that the future is not going to look like the present. I know this is an old recurring Arctic type and it's a meme in our culture and it's a meme, which is mostly disappointed us, but it comes up very strongly in indigenous cultures and in mystical cultures and in psychedelic cultures that we are on the cusp.

Jamie Wheal: As does the fall, right? The fall is recurrent and through indigenous cultures. There was almost always a time when the nations of man and the nations of the beavers and the bison and the Eagles could speak to each other. There's almost always a pre historical time where all was in some form of union or communion. And then the clock started and history turned and those moments or we sucked with the gods, whatever it was. And then we ended up in the now of words and language and matter and constraint. We just riffed on Lily and his Earth coincidence control office and that sense of everything happens for a reason. And it's analogs in your experience. Then what you're describing as far as the rationale or justification for the suffering and that bifurcation of the Monan, the Shiva Shakti two step.

To find ourselves, to find each other in our divinity and recognize it again, plays really closely. I don't know if you've ever come across Philip K Dick's, there's a one or two pages and if anybody wants to Google it, just look up, we are plural forms of God. And he describes it as the [I Ching 01:03:52]. He unpacks it. It's just this incredibly dense page. And to me, it was the closest thing I've ever seen.

He basically said, "Hey, the great blast for me of the Western world is not, it is that the original sin is. We mistook the signal. The great blast for me is that the Yin and the Yang actually bifurcated and that the Yin became imminent and forgot itself in matter and that the Yang were these plural forms of God and then through their own volition, they choose to descend to Earth and in that immanentization of the eschaton, they forget themselves," where he says, "which is a grand irony, that in choosing to remember ourselves, we must forget ourselves." He goes, "but also a chance to redeem our ourselves and in then reanimating the [homoplasmics 01:04:40]," what he calls us humans, "with the little slices of the divine, we sort of redeem and remember ourselves and each other and become whole, and then go home again."

Christopher Bache: That's where I stop. Then go home again. I would say what we do is we wake up, but now the evolutionary trajectory, we now wake up, that is exactly the model that I was given in my sessions, but now awake physical consciousness or awakeness within divinity, awake within physical experience comes back to the universal transcendent consciousness. It's like the mother universe, the daughter returns to the mother universe. And now out of this communion, we will create consciously instead of creating unconsciously so that this doesn't necessarily lead to an off planet realization, but it leads literally to a heaven on Earth as the boundary between spirit and matter dissolves in the sheer power of our awareness. So, Samsara and Nirvana are the same. So that, the difference is how our experience of them is our experience of it. That's-

Jamie Wheal:

That's the [inaudible 01:06:03] thing, always and already the other world is this world rightly seen.

Christopher Bache: Yeah. And that's so the trigger-

Jamie Wheal: Is that unique? Is that a triumphal pinnacle of consciousness in the universe or is it just one of gajillions popping off all over the place?

Christopher Bache: I think it's one of gajillions. I think it's our this planet, this solar system, this species story, it's this time, but just you look at the Milky way. How could it not be going on all over the place?

Jamie Wheal: Is there something about our anthropomorphism? Is there something that we are made in the image of God and God has made in the image of man? Is there something, anything unique to four limbs and opposable thumbs?

Christopher Bache: No, I don't think so. I think there's something beautiful about four digits and opposable thumbs, but I think that... God vast plurality of creation, whatever is taking place, whatever, when we look at the stars and we look at the solar systems and our deep space images and whatnot and we know everything that's unfolding in that complex world and to realize that the creative power, which is animating within us and this world is the same animating power that's animating within that world. Not that it's producing identical types, doesn't seem to be interested in identical types, it's producing an abundance of differentiation and we just have to accept and embrace that complexity. I think that's just part of just waking up inside the garden.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. But you do see for the human race, for this family, that our culmination lies not in piecing out to the mother should, but that in turning the desert back into a garden, like in reclaiming this little blue marble as the locus of our meat suits, as we remain connected to a stable down link to source.

Christopher Bache:

Yeah. Now this is, I think the project of the creative intelligence for planet Earth, but whether we choose to continue to associate with this project, I think is at our discretion at a certain point in time. In the end, I think we can come back in a million years and we will find this process continuing to percolate. If we back in a billion years, we'll find this process continuing to percolate. But I think there comes a point and this, I do think it was well captured in some of the Eastern traditions we can leave.

We don't have to stay bound to the project and with one of the very last experiences I had took me in a place that seemed to give me permission and to forgive me the [Bodhisattva 01:09:06] guilt by giving me permission, not to return for the indefinite future. Just because there was such a longing inside of me to explore these diamond realms, which I had tasted. And I knew that I would not be able to explore them for thousands and thousands of years in my physical form, but I wanted to explore them in their own natural form as like-

Jamie Wheal: So, you got a whole pass for the penultimate act. You're like, "I did my bit, good luck kids. It's going to get worse before it gets better."

Christopher Bache: No, I think my life has been so deeply into world and with the human family life that I'll be back and I'll be around as I think we all will. I don't know where, when and basically I've turned over that decision to my soul. I don't think I'm qualified to hold that. I just turn it over and I know that my soul will know what to do at the right time and let it go at that. But I do expect a little R and R.

The path home is through suffering

Jamie Wheal: Oh, sweet. It's like Sally in Charlie brown. I just want, what's coming to me. I just want my fair share. I [inaudible 01:10:27] some miles for you guys. Let's steer into that. We have kind of held off on discussing the cataclysm. But you don't mince words on it, that the idea that the path ahead entails in a massive intensification of grief suffering and disorganization, dismemberment from at a bare as minimum. Let's just say late stage Petro capitalism and all the obscene and unsustainable material abundances and eases that we've experienced and that to you is the buns and burner and the crucible. That is what creates the catalytic conditions for the transmutation to the diamond soul to the embodiment of being in human form.

But to me, all of these utopian conversations, any of them, any of the just so stories, people talk about the Kali Yuga, then they talk about, if forest fire is necessary and then it populates the ground and upcoming new shoots, and that's fine and dandy for whoever gets to be the daffodil, it sucks. It sucks for me and my children. Basically my generation and that of my children is the only thing that biologically and psychosocially, we're actually wired to act on. Everything else is abstract and academic. And my sense is if you're delineating literally cosmological process, it's highly unlikely to resolve itself in the next 10 years before I start drawing down my social security. It going to take a while.

There's going to be a period of deep suckage before anything can possibly happen. Since that's where we're all actually living, how do you both without dissociating and that's key without dissociating into magical thinking, spiritual bypassing, or even like apocalyptic, ecstatic death cults, like heavens gate, like hell if that's where it is and in between just sucks. Why not just peace out and accelerate the process? What wisdom or constellation can you hold for the humans about to sail off the edge of the screaming of this for an indeterminate period of intensified suffering and still keep the light, still keep the faith that there is something better this is in service of?

Christopher Bache: Or you really have sharpened the question to a razor edge there and it's a really important question. It's an important sense, because on the one hand... If we don't know where we're going, the odds of us making it are going to be lower. A vision of what's coming, a vision of what it serves, what our work serves is I think really important in the decades ahead, but we have to live it. We have to live into it. We have to really kind of do it completely. It's important to understand how we can accelerate this process, how we can shorten it. What would it take to, to go through this process faster, more consciously instead of being dragged through it unconsciously. That's becomes part of the discussion. For myself, first I was shown the promise.

I was given this series of visions over four years and the message is always the same, just bits and pieces that would be dropped into different sessions. I grouped them all together in this one chapter, the promise of the turning point that we were coming to the promise of something cataclysmic taking us. But I didn't understand how could humanity ever make such a huge transition? Because while I look around, it doesn't look like we're going to get there anytime soon. Then in 1995, when my ecological consciousness was near Nil in 95. But in 95 I was taken into a transtemporal state of the deep future and in a trans individual state. I dissolved into the human psyche and I experienced the human psyche at a future time or in a future expansive time. In that context, I experienced as the species, a complete loss of control, a complete collapse, a complete destruction of life as I had known it and it looked like an extinction event. It looked we weren't going to make it.

It was a loss of all hope, but just when the psychedelic session, when you go through those crisis where you lose all hope and you lose all control that happened for humanity too. The storm passed, the peak worst passed and when we began to pick ourselves up, we discovered that we had been profoundly and radically changed. We were not the same species coming out of this as we were going into it, that we had found something inside ourselves at the core of this and I think it has to do fundamentally with the rupturing of the heart, the expansion of the heart that comes not only from our pain, but from other people's pain and other children's pain and experiencing this suffering that's going to take place on the world, on television every night, where there's going to be no escaping it. It can't be a private pain, it can't be a local pain, it's a collective pain.

But if we can understand that this is a purification process, if we can understand that this is something which is we're clearing the artifacts of our evolutionary history out of the system, then we can ask, what is a higher way to live? And the higher way to live has been always taught to us by the spiritual giants of our lineages, compassion, fairness, other regard service, deeper communion with the intelligence of the universe. When I had this experience and I experienced this death and rebirth and I came out of it took me really about a year to recover. And as I say in the book, it was like walking around Hiroshima. The week before the bomb went off with tremendous compassion for every person I was seeing and because I had experienced that each one of us is a volunteer on planet Earth.

None of us are conscripts. We're all volunteers and we knew what we were getting into when we entered time and space. We may have forgotten, we may have lost contact with it. We can take on the victim role if we want to, but when we were more conscious, we chose it and the trick is now, can we live fully conscious while we're here? Can we exchange the small petty things for the great big magnanimous things? Can we accelerate this process? The more we understand it? I think the faster we can accelerate it, the faster we can move through it.

Jamie Wheal: Well, let me ask you this, because there was a phrase speaking that you wrote that just sort of cracked over my heart. Which was something along the lines of not a tear or a drop of blood was wasted. Every single instance of human suffering was part of the metabolism was required and therefore sort of rendered purposeful and holy.

Christopher Bache: Yeah. And is part of the experience of the divine. The divine is not separate doing this to us or outside of us gear steering us through it. The divine is all of us together. We are all in concert within the divine so anything we experience it experiences.

Jamie Wheal: But now, you said something interesting and I'm curious. It may just be that different levels of reality just don't resolve the paradox. But this is on the other hand, vital to resolve in some way in this contemporary spiritual marketplace where you've said, "Hey, none of us were conscripts. We were all volunteers." That gives it, even if we've forgotten our agency. Part of our path to redemption is remembering our choices. Now that again, at the level you expressed, it feels beautiful. But at the level of new age spirituality these days, it's path of logical because you have a bunch of booji folks in their suburban homes doing IAS ceremonies and then waving their hands about Abraham Hicks and what they saw on YouTube lately. And going, "Oh, nevermind those child soldiers in Rwanda, nevermind the genocide, the [hunger 01:20:02] or any of that, they chose that. That was their incarnations density. They need to learn that."

Meanwhile, we are happy as clams and we get to go to our meditation retreats in Bali. It becomes this profound, absolutely sickening copout of social justice and responsibility and fundamentally the obligations of privilege. And again, the paradox may not resolve because the elevations may be too far apart, but can you do you see a way to resolve the caring for our brothers and sisters in the dispossessed and actually taking stands in the streets if needed for equity and human justice and at the same time, some deeper, long term, knowing that we're all in this to win it.

Christopher Bache: I must be able to, but I don't know how exactly, because where I live right now, I don't see any tension or contradiction between those two things.

Now, I don't see any tension or contradiction between those two things. To me, one naturally implies the other. The deeper your experience of the deep wave, the evolutionary process, the more you naturally want to help others, the more you want to engage, all those children in those terrible wars. To me, when you, as you dissolve deeper into oneness, your heart, you don't simple, you dissolve your mind into the mind of the universe, but you dissolve your heart into the heart of the universe. You dissolve into the one heart. When you dissolve into the one heart, you experience the pain of life, as well as the joy of life. And when you experience the pain of the one heart, then naturally when you come back to your little bitty fractal manifestation of that heart, you now naturally want to end pain.

When you dissolve into the brilliant mind of the universe, you naturally want to bring in more of that mind into a daily life. So to me, one compels the other, and, but that's always been the teaching of the, the Buddhist traditions and the Christian traditions. When you wake up, compassion is the spontaneous manifestation of emptiness, because emptiness of self, to me, oneness and emptiness are two different sides of the same corn. When you, experience complete dissolving of all the boundaries of self deeply enough, you experience the world living as one entity. When you experience oneness, an explosion of compassion naturally rises and reaches out through you. So to me, any step deeper into oneness that is authentic, manifests in compassion. If it's not manifesting and compassionate action of some form, whatever it is your karmic attunement to give, then there's been a disconnect. There's a kind of a spiritual pathology, which is set in.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. Beautiful. I was kind of thinking this like the lotto ticket test, you know, like if you just found by accident on the street, blowing down the sidewalk of winning a lotto ticket, what do you do with the money and, you know, and if somebody is truly, their bucket is full, it's like easy come easy, go. I'm going to gift it. If there's some lack, then they're like, oh, well I'll pay off my mortgage. Or, oh, maybe I'll style out my family, or maybe I'll get that bigger house, because I deserve it. Or maybe I'll get the house or the car, and the plane. And like, and how far down that road of rationalization of I deserve to hang onto something. That was given freely by fate is, is not a bad kind of just, you know, thought experiment on how much light would I cling to.

Right. If I was suddenly blessed, you know, by the sun. So-

Christopher Bache: How much do you need?

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. How much do I, what is my story of how much I've got coming to me?

Christopher Bache: Yeah. Right.

the omega point is the new Alpha point

Jamie Wheal: To the exception of just easy come easy go. And just being a conduit. So in let's conclusion, bring this home, I'm curious, you know, we, we, we talked about Lily, we've talked about PKD, and the remaining one that seems to loom large in both of our kind of frameworks, is Teilard de Chardin, and his notion of the omega point and the idea that, you know, his profound insight in, you know, the 1920s and 30s even was, was just, hey, there's going to be an end of history, but it's going to be this beautifully paradoxical all of us.

He in fact, he laid it out in a way that I thought was, he's almost goosebumpily pressing, he's like, there's three intersecting curves. There's the caring capacity of the earth, which way back, when was quite something to put a pin on the map. Then basically the death eaters, right? The people devoted to separatism, tribalism, and egoic win-lose, and then they were going to be, there was going to be the jaw love brigade. They were going to be the folks committed to oneness and wholeness, and that they were going to become at the omega point, the opposite of the alpha. So alpha in the beginning, omega at the end, that there was going to be this crystallization in the mind-sphere. So not dissimilar than Sheldrakes' morphogenetic field. That we were going to wake up to our connectivity and at the same time, our profound uniqueness and individualism. And that, that would be all of us as omegans, all of us becoming this larger body of Christ at the end of time.

Not, not a Second Coming, but an umpteenth coming. And that, that would represent some fulfillment, in a much groovier compared to like Francis Fukuyama's end of history. Which was very neoliberal and very sort of sociopolitical, but more like an end of history of the way human civilizations have been done until now. So how does that, the omega point, and even that, the Greek notion of your future human as, anthropos. Some vitruvian perfectibility what, what are your, what are your thoughts on that? Like are those nearly identical hits of the same transmission, you think? Are there nuances or distinctions that are important for you between what you received and what [inaudible 01:26:35] laid out?

Christopher Bache:

They're basically deeply congruent with maybe a couple of tweaks, but deeply congruent. And to me, it's just so amazing that like Carl Jung, what he explored simply through the power of his own mind and what Chardin absorbed through the power of his own communion with the universe, without any assistance, without any amplification, it's just astounding. One difference, I think, would be simply to remember that the omega point is also a new alpha point. So it's just a stage. And so we're it, maybe it really important stage, but it's just a stage. Another point for me is that this is a reincarnational process. So it is a human story, but it's a soul story. It's an evolution. It's about creation. It's about what are we? What are we as beings? Are we machines generated by accident? Or are we rising up this intelligence of exist at the quantum level, and in the atomic level, and cellular level.

And it just, it's rising up within us. Now, it's a rising up within our individual awareness into this, it's a crea- it's, it's a matter of what, what is your creation story? I think what he saw and what I saw, what I was given or fundamentally congruent for me, what stands out is this acute sense of purification under death? That's what we're coming into, I think, is a purification that de-structures, the world that we have created through thousands of years, acting on different truths or different degrees of self-centeredness. But basically it's a world built by the ego, an increasingly mature ego, but it's still an ego. And I think we can't have a planet managed effective by so many billion separate egos in the sense that as long as this is self-other-differentiation, then I'm going to gather power to myself and improve my side at the expense of your side.

That's okay, because, we're not separate, but when the soul arises with so much activated history with so much on understanding of, of their own life experience as the other, then the other disappears and a different way of living on the planet begins to emerge that species, which is so deeply connected to each other and deeply connected to their spiritual essence, which connects them to the intelligence and the consciousness of the larger totality. That being is the beginning of a new creation point in history. But of course, this universe, what we might think of and see in terms of a process that takes place in a hundred years or a couple hundred years. The universe thinks in terms of clearly hundreds of thousands, billions of years. So we don't know, the timeframe or anything, but I think we can glimpse something of the intentionality.

And I think there's a widespread concurrence that this is how going happen much faster than we think. The way it was laid out for me, in that experience, I mentioned in 1995, I got a long, long download on the role of the collective psyche in this transition that this was not going to be done by an aggregate of individual psyches. To understand the dynamic, you have to understand several things, feel theory, non-linear systems, the function of non-linear systems and psychological theory to understand that the collect unconscious of humanity is a field. When this field becomes hyper-stimulated. By our years and years of suffering to we're just tearing our clothes, rending garments, then it gets hyper-stimulated and it shifts into a non-linear condition. And we know something about out how physical fields behave in non-linear conditions. They are extraordinary capable of doing extraordinary things.

The psychic field of humanity is moving into a non-linear condition in a non-linear condition. We can move faster, we can move mountains. We can do things who we wouldn't think we would ordinarily be able to do. And this is how evolution works. Evolution catalyzes, new creative structures out of latent potentials, and it actualizes those structures, which become permanent and enduring structures. So this is a shift, literally that's taking place at the architectural, archetypal architecture of the collective psyche.

It's really the morphic field, this shift. And it's like every human being who is born subsequent to this shift, and I'm not thinking this is going to happen, but however, it happens, subsequent human beings will be wearing a different collective psyche. They will be acting out of a different base. And out of this, then we begin to experiment, we begin to explore, we don't know what to do with this consciousness. But, I think part of what, one of the things we will be learning how to do is to use our consciousness, to create our reality consciously and with tremendous power in that, versus what we had been doing is using our consciousness to create our reality unconsciously and in fragmented manner.

Jamie Wheal:

Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually kind of provisionally the subject area of my next book, which is what happens if we culturally start stabilizing our up links. And my current thought experiment is the same way that homo sapiens, innovated logos, the power of the word. And we were still monkeys with clothes. We still have to do glucose to the brain and avoid shop objects and big cats. Yeah, but we also unlocked symbolic consciousness past, present, future, technology, philosophy, science, and religion, right? All through the power of language. What is that comparable step function where we continue with everything we already are, but there is that capacity to basically fundamentally stabilized and socialize the very things that all genius in all innovation, all Promethean efforts, whether it's Einstein on his rowboat in Geneva or whether it's Stanislav Grof or anybody and everybody who's ever experienced the muses grace, inspiration, epiphany.

Right. And we've always had kind of socially approved ways to express or explain it, or keep it under the rug and keep it secret, now become normalized and, and broadly accessible. And now we're, instead of just the occasional avatars, right. We're linking together a collective field that you're describing. And, and what's possible then, right. What's possible when we actually a transtemporal consciousness. Embodied in 3D, but stably recognizing and integrating both.

Christopher Bache: Yeah, that's absolutely, I mean, that's kind of, that's the science fiction future, that's becoming the real future. What will that look like? What will it be? And to have a planet of saints-

Jamie Wheal: Be lived by love. Yeah. To be lived by love and full surrender.

Christopher Bache: What with the kind of psychic empowerment, because the soul operates at a much, much higher wattage than individual awareness, individual ego. I mean, because that is, is an integration of thousands of years of memories of living experience. So an awakened being in this soul deep soul sense, I think, is operating in a different energetic reality. And you experience this in a psychedelic session. I mean, because every state deeper into the universe, it's a state into higher energy. And when you tap into that higher energy, it fills your body. Your body starts to go through all this detoxification, emotional detoxification, history, trauma, detoxification, physiological detoxification in ways that I can't even understand. But as this light crunches itself into our biology, sorry, I'm getting distracted by that, by that experience there, I'm losing my track. My train of thought.

Jamie Wheal: No, I mean, to me it's just like William Blakes, you know, "tiger, tiger burning bright", you know, "what fearful symmetry", right. That, that sense of right. The sense of that, that perfection and unfolding. Now, you know, I read your book resistingly because as you, as you now know, having come across mine, right. I mean, I took a stand against rapture ideologies, right. The happily ever after just so stories that are so prevalent in the Judaeo-Christian Cannon, right. The idea-

Christopher Bache: Sage advice.

Jamie Wheal: There was a fall from grace, but, and here we are, but wait, wait just a second. There's going to be this redemptive arch and then happily ever after. And so not only does that lend itself to lots of pathologies and disconnected wishful thinking.

Christopher Bache: Sure it does.

Jamie Wheal: But the things that I appreciated about you was one use spend so much time acknowledging both the preexisting, backlog of suffering, the collective unconscious, and also that there is more to come.

So to me that just felt much more reality-based and inclusive. And then also that your point is not up and out. Yeah. Right. Your point is a here and now.

Christopher Bache: Deeper in.

Jamie Wheal: Yeah. And to me, so there was reconciled and, and that sense of, because obviously where I put the final pin in the map, at least in the story I was attempting to, to frame was radical hope. Right. Which is Jonathan Lear, the University of Chicago's phrase for like belief in a future we cannot see from here. Right? But that we maintain commitment to regardless. Yeah and so-

Christopher Bache: I think we can get glimpses, but we, those glimpses are not detailed visions. We get glimpses and glimpses, give radical hope kind of an ontological foundation, which is

Jamie Wheal: Yeah, yes. Which it, which is the death re-birth practice. Right. Which is, which is wonder Barry's idea, practice resurrection. Because it, if it's just a post-it note on your bathroom mirror, we're fucked, right. There's no way that those kinds of flimsy affirmations, the sort of whistling past the graveyard types will, will remotely be able to handle the amount of grief and disruption that is coming down the pike, but a truly embodied sense of I have been to the mountaintop.

Right. And I, remember what I have forgotten. I remember the point and the purpose of this, and I am here to bear witness to it regardless of how my particular chips fall. To me feels like the prerequisite for unlocking collective soul force. Right. That the, you know, the Howard Thurman notion of like, there is the, to me, it's very congruent with what you described as kind of that, almost like that EMP of collective coherent intelligence, which is like, I like, I'm no longer seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. I am here to bear witness with courage and compassion. Maybe even play and love. You know, if, if we, if we, if we really can send it and, and that, that has the capacity to move mountains in a way that sheer metabolism doesn't.

Christopher Bache: Yeah, I think so. And I think when we, when we plug to this larger story, however, we do it, when we plug into it, it activates our own, our own soul seed that we're carrying our own karmic seed. I'm an educator. If I were a doctor or healer, I would be actualizing this plugin in a different way. If I was a social activist, I would be activating it in a different way. My karma or my stream is to try to give into intellectual clarity. I'm an educator and a philosophical thinker, which is simply trying to distill clearly what the visionary experience is in the trust that will combine with the work of a social activist, the work of a doctor, the work of a choral director, the work of a politician, all of us have these roles to play in releasing and no one can guide it.

I mean, this is not a transition that we will be pulling off. This is a transition that nature is pulling off that there are huge, powerful forces, which are involved in bringing humanity into this melting pot, into this crisis. In the end, my session stopped a long time ago. I have to live in the world of, of bread and butter and paying bills like everybody else. And I have to live with the awareness that my visions are incomplete. And in the end, I think every one of us has to make a choice. Do we trust the universe? Do we trust? And I think this brings me back to your radical hope. Do we trust that the gene that has expressed itself in evolution through time is smart enough and trustable enough and cares enough? Do we trust it? That includes my life too.

That it includes anything I'm asked to do. And it includes our children who are not our children in a larger sphere. We are responsible for them, but they could be our soul masters. You know, they could be, we don't know who they are until-

Jamie Wheal: Don't tell that to my kids.

Christopher Bache:  Too late. They'll be, they'll figure it out themselves.

Jamie Wheal: Done for, yeah.

Christopher Bache: Yeah. We don't know where it's going. We don't know how it's going to get there, but substantive human beings, I think are the model for how it might go and how we might do it. Flighty human beings, they will always be there, they'll do their thing, but engaging people who have taken history seriously and you take knowledge serious and take the responsibility seriously. They are the beings, I think who open up real possibilities for catalyzing, the deeper experience underneath larger numbers of people.

Jamie Wheal: Beautiful. Well, Chris, in an age when any grand narratives with a teleological thrust, right. Are being looked upon with increasing suspicion and whether that's neoliberal triumphalism, or even Orthodox religious redemption songs, this feels like a moment, where we are, rightly so, probing and testing all of our grand stories. And in fact, David Graeber, who was a Yale historian has just, he's about recently come out with the Dawn of Everything, a new history of humanity. And in that one, he tackles basically Yuval Harari versus Stephen Pinker, the kind of the Hobbesian versus the Rousseauvian. Are we noble savages in the state of nature and perfection, or is nasty, British and short, and we took a wrong turn back at Albuquerque, 12,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture and his whole sense, yeah.

Was that it's actually much more chaotic, much more experimental, much more innovative, much more ebbing and flowing, much more agentic, much more decentralized. So for listeners, I'd encourage like juxtaposed Chris's book and take a look at Diamonds from Heaven, which is a, it's an experimental and experiential teleological grand story. Like there's a beginning, there's a middle and an end. There's a point. And then contrast that with Graeber's. If you feel like reading Recapture, feel free, juxtapose these, what are the stories that we live by and what feels true?

And I think Chris, you're, you're, you're closing inquiry, which is, can we trust the universe? And not in a facile saccharin sense that lets us off the hook for agency and responsibility, but in a profound and deep sense that is actually deeper than our grief. And that gets down through the aquifer, right? To the so Springs of internal and radical hope. That fundamentally feels like our project. And as you pointed out, we get there by dying repeatedly to everything that is not that, so that we can carry those waters of life through the desert and, and through the hard times ahead and get ourselves back to the garden. Hey?

Christopher Bache: Hey, remember Carl Jung said nature supports growth. He was asked, why do people heal? Why? And he said, your supports growth nature supports us as we let go of the small and embrace the large as we embrace the challenge of purification and doing better, it's just a matter of doing better. It's just like, we can do this better. We can do it better. I'm a better human being that I've lived in the past. I can do better in the future. That's what we have to be doing. And nature will support that in surprising ways. Because nature is the driving force behind this uplifting that's taking place and it's lifting all of our boats, all of us going forward in time.

Jamie Wheal: Beautiful. Yeah. Well Chris, thank you. I've been looking forward to this ever since I ever since I cracked your book, I'm like, oh man, we've got to talk.

Christopher Bache: A real pleasure, Jamie. I really have enjoyed your writing. I enjoy our conversations. Let's do it again.

Jamie Wheal: For sure. For sure. Thank you.

Christopher Bache: Much love.

Jamie Wheal: Cheers.

Chris Bache: Thank you.