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Another World Is Possible. The old paradigm is breaking apart. The new one is still not fully shaped.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, to transform the nature of ourselves – and all humanity.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the membership program and the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this podcast. At the start of 2025, is absolutely devoted to the ways that we could lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave as our legacy. So that we could imagine going seven generations down the line and looking in the eyes of the people that we meet there, and them look back at us and say, thank you; you made this possible and our lives are exceptional as a result of the actions that you took. Five years ago, when we started out, it was possible still to imagine that the world might stabilise with just a vestige of the old system forming a scaffold for the new. I would say that that assumption is growing increasingly ragged. At the same time, it is becoming obvious, at least to me, that the shifts we need to be in the world are primarily inner. That the truly urgent work is in healing both our own and the global human psyches. That we need to remember how to connect with the web of life so that we can ask it, what do you want of me? And respond to the answers in real time.
Manda: In short, we need to evolve. But we need mentors and guides along the way. It's possible that we could each carve out our own route, but part of being human is sharing best practice. Is having elders and mentors who open the doors of possibility for those of us who strive to walk the ways of healing. And so this week's guest is one of those elders and mentors. He is a trailblazer of the most incandescent kind. Professor Christopher Bache is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University. He's adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, emeritus fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the Advisory Council of the Groff legacy training. He hasn't always been at the leading edge of consciousness studies. He grew up in a Catholic household in the southern US, and he spent four years at a seminary, training to be a priest before deciding that this path really wasn't for him. Moving into academia, he took degrees in the US and at Cambridge in the UK, and finally a PhD. By the end of which he had concluded that and I quote: 'using language derived from finite existence to describe an infinite God, was like shining flashlights at the stars'. Which is in itself, I would say, a pretty impressive conclusion. So he duly finished graduate school as, and again I'm quoting from his website 'a deeply convinced agnostic with a strong atheistic bent', and he went on to teach the philosophy of religion as an academic study.
Manda: So far, so academically straight. He took a post teaching at Youngstown University in Ohio. And then he read Ian Stevenson on reincarnation and Stanislav Gross' then recent work on LSD. And these two changed his life. 45 years later, I read his book Diamonds from Heaven; LSD and The Mind of the Universe, and I realised that here is someone who has actually walked with the heart-mind of the universe. Here is someone who has taken himself to the edge of being, in order to understand the process of getting there, and to experience and bring back everything that this entails. As you will hear in the extraordinary conversation that we've just had; over the course of 20 years, he took 73 truly heroic doses of LSD in really carefully controlled conditions, wrote down the results, processed them, synthesised them within himself, and built a repertoire of understanding and knowledge that he was able to bring back and eventually, over time, to integrate. He has reflected deeply on those results in the 20 years since he stopped. I will let him tell the detail of the story. It is genuinely remarkable.
Manda: And what he brings to us is visions of how humanity could be. The visions of a future human that he has walked with and as. This future is not guaranteed, but the concept of it is the opening of a door to possibility where every one of us can play a part. Where, as he says, if we can align ourselves with the needs of the living planet, find out what's ours to do, and devote all of our being to doing it, then we have no idea what might arise. The potential of this is genuinely infinite and Chris has seen it. He brings it back as a gift from the future, even as we are sitting in the dark night of the soul that feels as if the entire world is collapsing. I am not trying to minimise the darkness of these times, and I am completely aware that sitting in the UK recording this in relative political stability is an extraordinary privilege. But while I have this privilege, I will use it to bring you the openings that I see in the world; the rise of hope, the concepts, the beingness and the mentors and the elders who can help us to walk the new paths into being. So I offer this conversation in that light, as a ray of potential; that out of this moment of immense pressure might arise the Conscious Evolution of humanity. If we can all find ways to be the change. So with this in mind, people of the podcast, please do welcome Professor Christopher Bache, author, psychonaut, mystic, deep thinker, and potentially a guide for all of us.
Manda: Chris, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this slightly grey December day over here, but it might be lovely where you are.
Chris: Hi Manda, it's a pleasure to be here with you. I'm speaking to you from Weaverville, North Carolina, which is just outside of Asheville, North Carolina. And it's a sunny day here. It's going to be in a lovely afternoon in the mid 40s.
Manda: Okay. Now I have weather envy, but hey. You're in a swing state, which at some point we might get on to. That must have been quite entertaining for a brief period of time. Let's not go there, it's too painful. All right, so you've written a number of books. You've had a very inspiring life. And my projection onto you, which I am almost certain is not true, Is that you have the answers to life, the universe and everything. So we'll lay that one to bed as it's my projection and you don't see it that way; just so it's clear and we're there. From where you are, what is most alive for you at this inflection point of humanity?
Chris: Well, we've just gone through an election in our country, which was for the liberal side of the continent, like me, was very disappointing and very upsetting. What's happening in politics in my country and in many countries around the world, this whole movement to the conservative right, is very much of concern, especially since they are denying fundamental facts that are really critically important for humanity to address. First and foremost is the fact of global climate change. So that's happening. And in my book, LSD And The Mind Of The Universe, I have a whole chapter on what I call the birth of the future human, which summarises all the transmissions that were given to me over a 20 year course of high dose LSD sessions. About humanity's future, where we are in our evolutionary development, the critical crisis that we are moving into, the birth of a new form of humanity coming out of that crisis and a great future for humanity. But for deep spiritualised realisation to emerge in humanity, there must take place first a dark night of the soul. A collective dark night of the soul. So I see what's happening politically against that backdrop, of a growing dismantling of assumptions, a growing unravelling of our social contracts and a growing global crisis, which seems to be generated by a series of eco crises.
Manda: Okay, so that gives us an opening into the birth of the future human. Um, for those watching on YouTube, my cat is on the desk. It's easier to let him just ramble across, and then he'll go away and it'll all be fine. So it seems to me, let's just address the politics. Because it's alive for everyone. This is going out at the start of the new year; 2025 is going to be the year when everything changes. America sneezes, the world gets a cold and nothing will be the same. Geopolitics is about to shift enormously I think; a US-Russian alliance has never happened before, and it looks like it's arising in real time. And it seems to me 71 million people voted for Trump, that means by my reckoning, 259 million didn't. And yet there's been effectively a bloodless coup by the fascist right. And yet no amount of ideology, however forcefully they tried to impose it, can actually overcome biophysical reality. You cannot stop climate change by pretending it's not happening. The ostrich position is only useful until the floodwaters fill the hole that you've stuck your head in. So it seems also to me that the shifts that we need need to be inner, and collectively inner, which is exactly the field that you're working in. And we don't want to go back over everything that you experienced, but I wonder if you've got a kind of an elevator pitch of where you started and where it took you to in terms of your own spiritual process. Is that something that we could go into?
Chris: Sure. I can give you a kind of a quick overview. I began my psychedelic work when I was just hired as a university professor in Northeast Ohio, and I began this work as a pretty well educated, dedicated agnostic with strong atheistic inclinations. That's where all the years of graduate school had brought me. But just when I started teaching, I came across the work of Stanislav Grof and his book Realms of the Human Unconscious, changed the direction of my life. I saw the importance of his work for my discipline, which was philosophy of religion. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a therapist. I'm a professor of philosophy of religion. And so I began an underground regimen of psychedelic therapy, because I knew that in order to speak intelligently using this new methodology, you had to do the work yourself. And even though it was illegal by this time, this was 1978, when I started my career. I started my psychedelic work in 1979. Psychedelics were illegal. I made a decision to do this work in underground fashion, completely isolated. I never let my students and most of my faculty never knew what I was doing in this regard. I continued this work for 20 years. I started it when I was 30, and I finished it when I was 50. And I did 79 high dose LSD sessions, which is a very aggressive protocol. I don't recommend this protocol today.
Manda: You did this so we don't have to, as far as I can see. And I'm enormously grateful. Yeah.
Chris: Then I spent another 20 years digesting those experiences, writing about them, integrating them, trying to integrate them. And I've written two books based on those experiences. One of them is Dark Night, Early Dawn, which came out in 2000. And probably the more important one for a wide audience is LSD And The Mind of The Universe, which came out in 2019. So I did this work for 20 years, and then LSD And The Mind of The Universe came out 20 years later, after I stopped.
Manda: After you'd integrated a lot of what happened. And after you were also, it seems from the book, just beginning to be able to start talking about it. Because you had issues where you couldn't speak, you physically couldn't speak because you couldn't speak of what you understood and what you knew. Can you tell us a little bit about that? That seemed to me quite an integral part of what was happening.
Chris: Well, I love teaching and I love working with the students. I just really love being in the classroom. And I knew that if I began to speak openly about psychedelics in the 70s, 80s, 90s even, I very likely would lose my position at the university. And so I could not speak openly about my work. I mean, I spoke indirectly by teaching courses on psychedelic therapy and Stan Groff's work and other people's research. But I wasn't able to own my experiences publicly at my university until the very, very tail end of my career. I retired in 2011, a little bit early, in order to give me time to bring forward what I consider my most important work. And my conviction is that psychedelics represents a revolution. Not just in therapy, not just a clinical revolution, but a revolution in how we do philosophy. And this methodology is that we move systematically into very carefully controlled non-ordinary states. We experience them as consciously as we can. We bring them back, preserve them, write a detailed written account within 24 hours, and then spend some time digesting them, integrating them with our other bodies of knowledge. Then going back into that state and coming in. So this method of systematically entering into non-ordinary states and coming back, represents a new methodological platform for the doing of philosophy. So what we're looking at is the emergence of what I would call a psychedelic philosophy. The psychedelic that's grounded on the systematic application of non-ordinary states of consciousness through the use of psychedelics.
Manda: Can I interrupt here? Because this is already opening doors and, um, and I'd like to go down a few of them. So we're talking about integrating with other systems. And in the book you were becoming quite deeply involved in some Buddhist practices. Were they Buddhist?
Chris: Yeah.
Manda: And so it strikes me within the shamanic world, we get a lot of people who want to go off and do ayahuasca or do mushrooms, and it seems to me it's shortcutting. And not universally; I have spoken to people who are absolutely prepared to go and spend six months in the forest alone with the plants and integrate it. But there are an equal number of people who seem to think they can go from point A to point Z without actually doing any of the steps in between. And what I think I'm hearing from you is that the steps in between are absolutely crucial, and that they need to be undertaken in a structured fashion in spite of the fact that we feel to me to be moving away from the reductive scientific space where atoms move around like billiard balls and everything is predictable, as long as we have enough data points; to a point where everything is emergent and complex, and actually nothing is predictable. But experience, the phenomenology of living is what matters.
Manda: And the more than human world comes in and takes part. It seemed to me, reading certainly the second book, to an extent the first, but particularly in the second, that there was an extraordinary coherence. You had a six year gap in the middle and yet when you went back, it was like a surreal dream, which those of us who practice dreaming you sometimes night after night after night, you're in the same story. And you were getting this. You were in an almost linear progression, except it was more fractal than linear I would say. You're building on previous knowledge and you were being taught. Quite clearly. And so can you unpick for us a bit of the structure that you see that is useful, in order for this to be something that helps us move towards being future humans?
Chris: Okay. Well, there are several things rolled into your observations and they're all good observations. So some process comments. First, I think integration is very important. We're finding we have the technology, the chemical technology, to trigger very deep states of consciousness. But these states of consciousness may have very little lasting impact on our deeply ingrained psychological cultural habits, if we don't take time to sit with these experiences and integrate them as deeply as we can into our embodied existence. And over the course of my work, I learned that even though I was paying a lot of attention and doing as good a job as I could to integrate each individual session and doing an adequate job, I think; I still underestimated the long term challenges of integrating an entire spiritual journey. But I did not fully comprehend this until I had stopped my journey at the end and then realised how hard the stopping hit me, which then exposed the imbalance, the failure to integrate the radical, the most extreme and most radical experiences. Which were the deepest experiences being drawn into intimacy, into communion with I want to say the divine, but I am cautious about that because we have to unpack all sorts of theological, you know.
Manda: Not on this podcast, actually. We talk about the heart mind of the universe all the time, which I think is for me what you would call the divine. So I think we can assume that unpacking has been done in the past five years.
Chris: The heart mind of the universe is good. That's why the book is called LSD And The Mind of The Universe. It could be the heart mind of the universe.
Manda: But you came to a point where you were basically marking time, waiting to die in order to return to unity with the divine. Yes? Did I understand that correctly?
Chris: You got it correctly but it's kind of jumping ahead of the story. Let me back up and work to that point. I think in order to extract the maximal psychological, psychospiritual, and philosophical value of these experiences, it's very important to create a container, what I call the the Kiva of practice. A container which affords you the best opportunity for absolutely clear contact with these deeper states of consciousness. Without interruption, without confusion, no outside contact. You're in a therapeutic environment. You're lying down. You're with a skilled sitter. You're listening to carefully curated music. It's a complex process which you have to prepare for. You have the session, you're integrating the session acutely for several days after. So each session takes a week essentially, just for the immediate session. And then as you build on these sessions over time, you're right I found a linear progression, relatively speaking. You know, consciousness is a holistic phenomenon, so you may experience multiple levels of consciousness simultaneously. You may experience some deep levels of consciousness early in your journey work. But if you work systematically, my experience at least is that there was a progressive deepening, so that I went through rounds of deepening. When I was writing up my journey at the very end, I looked at the total landscape of my experiences, and I broke it down into five fundamental landscapes that I had been exploring. One is personal mind, your personal unconscious. Second is the collective mind, the species mind, Carl Jung would have called the collective psyche. Third archetypal mind, fourth causal mind, the mind of oneness. And fifth, the diamond luminosity.
Chris: So my experience was I would go through a succession of death and rebirth experiences. Eventually I would have a breakthrough that would catapult me into a new level of consciousness, where I would have to learn how it worked. It was like a different physics governing this level of reality. And I would work there, I would continue to learn there, but in that process I would go through more purification exercises, more episodes of death and rebirth that weren't simply repeating ego death, but were taking me into a deeper cycle of death and rebirth. And eventually that would culminate and I would have a breakthrough into a completely different level of reality. And in that level of reality it would all start over again; I wouldn't understand how it would work. It would be confusing. Then I would keep going back to it, I'd get my sea legs, I would acclimate to it, my visionary experience would get clearer, and then I would go and get propelled into another level of reality. And when I was in the middle of the deepest, deepest level, I went into the diamond luminosity. I had an experience of a level of light beyond the diamond luminosity, and a ray of light came out of that reality, hit me, shattered me. And what it taught me was it's an infinite progression. I had thought in the beginning it was a matter of becoming one with God or getting to the metacosmic void stage of work.
Chris: But what I found was that there are many, many levels of God. There are many levels even of the primal void, that's an infinite progression. You'll never reach the end of it, even using as powerful a protocol as high dose LSD work. And that really is one of the things that shifted my entire orientation, because if I were doing it over again, I would be much gentler with myself. I would use lower doses, I would balance and vary the psychedelic that I was using. Because I've learned that the goal of the work is not to get to some end stage or end point, which would, you know, change your life forever. But the goal is simply to open, let as much of the wisdom of the universe in as possible, as much of the love, as much of the insight, and then spend weeks, months, years integrating those experiences. Changing whatever it is about your life that is keeping you from experiencing those realities on an every day, daily basis, and then continuing the work. So at the end of my journey I found that I had gone so deep into intimacy with the divine, into the divine light, dissolving completely into fields of light and transcending space and time so deeply; that when I stopped this work, and I'll go later into, if you want to, why I stopped the work. But I stopped it after 20 years. And then in the years following, I found that I was missing the transcendent clarity so deeply that I found I was just waiting to die so that I could return when I died.
Chris: And after reflecting on this for a long period of time, I began to realise something's not right. This is not the way this work is supposed to end. It's not healthy. And I spent a lot of time then studying my work to try to find out where I had gone wrong. And I I came to realise that I had gone so deeply into transcendence that I had created an imbalance within my incarnation; an imbalance which was tilted towards transcendence at the expense of affirming my deeply physical, embodied existence. And these are two fundamental truths. We are always tapped into transcendence, we're always tapped into the physical world. But I had tilted the balance very far, and I had to make a conscious choice to reground myself in physical reality so that I could become more comfortable in my own skin. And writing LSD And The Mind of The Universe was a tremendous help, because I was speaking about my experiences. And I'm an academic, you know, I love to talk. I love to teach. And by speaking about these experiences, it empowered my integrating the experiences. And by sharing them publicly after so many years of keeping them private, it allowed a healing to take place inside my own psyche, between that which had been hidden and that which had been public, between the higher and that which is 'lower' or the earthier. Yeah.
Manda: Again, many doors opened. We want to come back to why you ended. I would like to make clear to people listening first of all, this was industrial doses of LSD. And you've explained that you went through death and rebirth experiences. I think it's worth pointing out that there were points where you were vomiting so hard for so long that the vessels in your eyeballs ruptured. It wasn't sounding like a whole lot of fun to me.
Chris: No fun at all.
Manda: And you also had your then wife, who was a trained psychologist. Psychotherapist? I can't remember.
Chris: Psychotherapist.
Manda: She was very good at holding the space. So you had a lot of anchoring, and it still sounds like the early part of every single journey was living hell, as far as I can tell.
Speaker3: Pretty much. Yeah.
Manda: Would that be fair?
Chris: What I discovered eventually is that there is a purification cycle. Traditionally we would call it the death rebirth cycle. But we often think of death as something that happens to us one time. And a lot of the therapeutic literature and psychedelic work circles focuses on ego death, which for me is only the first round. And what I learned later, after you've died many times in this process, I mean completely loss of control, metaphysical confusion, just complete surrender to overwhelming metaphysical waterfalls. You learn that first you cannot die. It's impossible to die. The form that you are can die. The structure of life as you have known it can be extinguished, but the inner essence of your being always re-emerges. The phoenix always rises. And in that process, I also learned that death, what we experience as death, is actually an extremely intense form of purification. When your purification reaches so deeply that it reaches into the fundamental assumptions that structure your experience of reality, then death has returned to grace you. So it's purification, breakthrough, experiencing a deeper state. And if you want to stop at that level, that's perfectly fine. Different people use different psychedelics, different modalities have different powers. And some psychedelics only have sufficient power to reach certain levels. Happened that the method that I was using, the substance I was using was so powerful it had the power to keep breaking me through level after level in this systematic fashion.
Manda: And did you choose LSD because of Stan Grof? And it was the thing back in the 70s? I suppose that's a head mind question, but my spirit mind question is you could have done a lot of different things. Ayahuasca wasn't around much, but mushrooms were. There were other things that were there. Do you think that whatever it is that guides you through this incarnation led you to that? Because you said you wouldn't do it again now, but you wouldn't be who you are now if you hadn't gone through the...
Chris: There's a paradox, yeah.
Manda: The military version of completely destroying yourself many times. Can you speak to that?
Chris: Well, to understand why I chose LSD, you have to go back to 1979, 1980. Ayahuasca was still not yet on the playing field for the most part, just early. Mushrooms certainly were. I understood LSD to be more powerful than mushrooms. So the primary reason, though, is that my work was based upon Stan Groff's work, and I trusted Stan, I trusted his research. And Stan did most of his work with LSD. So that's where I dug in. I dug in there. Later, after I finished my 20 year journey, I've done many psychedelics, I've done mushrooms and five meo and Salvia divinorum and San Pedro, different psychedelics. And ayahuasca. Which are beautiful, and they've taught me a lot. And I have a certain sense that each of these psychedelics impact the spectrum of consciousness or open some portion of the spectrum of consciousness. But the the kind of contact I experienced with psilocybin, for example, is very body grounded, very emotional body grounded. LSD tends to be a have a high cosmological ceiling tendency. Certainly at high doses it tends to push the high ceiling. Whereas psilocybin is much more grounded.
Manda: Earthy.
Chris: In my earthly existence.
Manda: And it seems to me it's more to do with opening doors into the rest of the web of life, rather than necessarily cosmic awareness. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but there's, as you were saying, there's a tilt one way or the other.
Chris: It's a tilt. Yeah.
Manda: I want to move towards the future human. But just before we go there, I'm wondering how was it taken in academic circles when you wrote these books? Were there people who then came to you and went, yes, I've been wanting to do this or I have been doing this, and thank you for opening the doors. Or were there others for whom the door was now shut and your access was denied? How did it land with your people?
Chris: My work has been well received in the consciousness community and in the academic community they don't even know I exist for the most part, it's been ignored. There hasn't been a single professional review published of my work out of a hard core academic philosophy journal or religious studies journal.
Manda: But you must have friends who could publish in those journals. You must have ways into that if people wanted to. Is it just not worth their career to do that?
Chris: One of the things I decided early on in my career was not to try to address the reservations, which were abundantly clear to me, coming out of the traditional academic mindset. I decided that if I tried to justify the method and justify the experiences to my colleagues, it would hamper me. It would hold me back. I just decided to push deeply ahead and let the chips fall where they may. And I understand how exotic, how strange my claims are, how they'd sound to people raised, educated in a traditional environment. And I've just decided to let that go and let history sort things out. I am acutely aware that I'm writing not for my present generation. I'm writing for future generations. Paradigm changes take place in evolutionary context. And so I'm just doing the work and letting other people sort out what they think it's worth down the road.
Manda: And with any luck, I would have given my eye-teeth to be one of your students. And it sounds like there are, particularly we touched on it earlier, moments when you were having what we would now consider to be psychic experiences, where you knew things from non-ordinary reality. Not when you were on the LSD, but just when you were teaching. And then you had to hold them in because if you said something, it was basically going to blow everybody's fuses and they were going to wonder how you knew it and you couldn't explain how you knew it. But those students, I am thinking, have been in the field of your awareness at a point when you are experiencing, have begun to see the world in a different space. So with any luck, they'll go off and change the world.
Chris: Well, I'll tell you one aspect about that. I never let my students know that I was doing this work, but I began to find that even though they didn't know about my psychedelic work, they began to have experiences which were moving, showing that they were being impacted by my psychedelic work. And secondly, my work was changing me at a deep structural level so that my person became a lightning rod that was sparking transformational insights or breakthroughs among my students without me consciously intending it. When I would be lecturing, I was drawing into my lecture examples which were purely random for me, but the examples I was being told were actually exactly the same thing that had been happening to my students that week. And the things I was saying began to touch them in very, very deep, personal, intimate places. Places they were wounded, places they were blocked from going forward. This became such a common feature of my work that eventually I spent a lot of time studying this and developing an entirely new way of teaching, to take into account the truths that I was discovering in the classroom and in my psychedelic work, that revolved around the boundaryless nature of consciousness. Fields of consciousness; that fields developed in groups. There's an energetic resonance which happens underneath the verbal exchange of ideas, there's a consciousness directly engaging consciousness. And so I published a book in 2008, after I had stopped my sessions, called The Living Classroom, in which I lay it all out.
Chris: But I never mentioned psychedelics, because the issue is not psychedelics, the issue is consciousness, the potential of consciousness. So if you do very deep consciousness work without psychedelics, I think you can trigger the same things that I experienced. But eventually, just recently, actually this month, Suny press is bringing out a second edition of The Living Classroom, and in this edition they invited me to tell the truth about my psychedelic practice because I'm out of the closet by now. LSD And The Mind of The Universe was out. So the new edition of The Living Classroom makes clear that it was my psychedelic practice that was driving the phenomena that were emerging in my classes, even though I think other people not using psychedelics can experience the same thing. So that's that's a whole other aspect that has to do with integration, because integration here means taking care not only of yourself, but taking care of anyone whom your practice touches, which for me included many of my students. And one third of the book is just essays that my students have written, very deep essays, personal essays about their own spiritual experiences, their experience of death. That's a beautiful section of the book.
Manda: I will find that and put a link in the show notes. And you were still teaching the philosophy of religion at this point. You hadn't branched out into other things. Is that right?
Chris: Yeah, I was teaching classically religious studies courses: Introduction to World Religions, eastern religions, Buddhism, psychology of religion, mysticism and meditation. You know, classic Curriculum.
Manda: Oh gosh, I wish they were the classic curriculum when I went through.
Chris: With a Twist
Manda: My senior apprentice and I don't work with psychedelics, but we teach shamanic studies. And I've found even when I'm talking about the book in front of a literary festival, that's basically full of ordinary middle class people who've come along and had nothing better to do and wanted to get out of the rain, as far as I can tell. And you end up drawing in examples that seem to come out of nowhere and then someone goes, oh, you just mentioned Boston and something about streets in Boston, about which I know precisely nothing. I come from Boston and the streets are just like that. So I'm sure that what you've said is absolutely true. And at a deeper level, when we're teaching a held circle, then the resonances move across the circle. But becoming aware of these such that everyone in the circle is engaging with that, strikes me as a step towards future humanism, where we're becoming conscious of the things that can help us to be different humans.
Chris: Yeah. Once you understand how fields work, and once you develop a protocol that maximises the potential of the emergence of these consciousness changing fields within groups, then you do it in a way that accelerates. It deepens not only the learning experience, but it accelerates the transformational value of these exercises for everyone involved. And this applies not just to university courses. It applies in research laboratories, in boardrooms, wherever citizens gather in sustained conversations, which is where most of our change takes place, in dialogue with other human beings. And so this is very relevant to the challenges that we're moving into. Yeah.
Manda: Yes. So let's go there. So let's lay out where I think roughly we're at, and you can tell me, because you live in the US and I'm just watching it with kind of squinched up eyes from across the water, waiting for it to come over here. You know, Musk has already said he's going to basically buy the next election and we have always had the best democracy money could buy. So unless we can change the democratic process, that's it. So Musk and Starlink, I've been floating across Substack, watching some very interesting, very geeky people, pointing out how he managed to steal the election and how the numbers don't add up. But, you know, if you're going to feed everything through Starlink, the person who owns the Starlink can make it say what they want it to say. You and I are talking across many thousands of miles using technology that, in the end, is basically owned by an individual who might be very interesting, but I don't necessarily want them knowing everything that I think and do. So it seems to me that evolution only happens under moments of intense pressure. I would like this moment not to become any more intensely pressurised. It probably will. But this is as much as I ever want. Therefore, can we evolve our consciousness to become future humans? And it seems to me that you have a doorway and a framework and a concept within which that could happen. How does that land with you?
Chris: That all aligns fine and I think you're absolutely correct. I'm not sure that I have a doorway that I would recommend as such, but I do think that psychedelics have entered our historical scene at precisely a time when we need more awareness. We need it for therapeutic processes. We need it for political processes. We need to wake up and grow. And so I think it's historically important and there are thousands and thousands of people working conscientiously, not superficially, but very conscientiously working with psychedelics in order to heal the accumulated trauma of many lifetimes, and to open up a deeper communion with the intelligence that resides within the universe. To help us make a transition from a mechanical dead universe of dead matter, to a living universe that's alive at its core, that's expressing its intentionality through the quantum jumps that take place in our evolutionary journey. And I think we are coming into a quantum jump right now. Let me back up a sec. This chapter, the birth of the future human and everything that it contains, came into my work by complete surprise. I thought of myself doing the work I was doing for personal transformation, personal healing, maybe even personal enlightenment. But what happened is that the method was so powerful it pushed beyond all those categories, and I had to reframe my understanding of the boundaries of conscientious psychedelic work, in a way that dropped the model of personal transformation and opened up into a model of collective transformation. I had years and years of experiences where the shadow that I was engaging was not my personal shadow. I did that work. This was a collective shadow.
Chris: The pain and the excruciating suffering that I was processing had to do with the pain of my entire species. And I came to understand that there is a collective psyche that holds the trauma of humanity's history, just as our individual psyche holds the trauma of our individual history. And this collective trauma and collective pain encumbers the free functioning of the collective psyche, just as our individual trauma encumbers our individual health and well-being. So by doing this work, I began to understand that something in the universe was using my sessions to make a small contribution to healing the collective psyche, in order to make it more available to the influx of energy from divine consciousness, to allow it to manifest more completely in humanity.
Manda: That bit. Can you just say that again? Because I think that's really important. It's that opening of the door to something that's trying to come in. Is that what I just heard you say? Can you just repeat that? Because I think that needs emphasising.
Chris: I think we are living at a time of ascending spiritual energy. It's almost like there's an influx of higher light energy, spiritual energy pushing in on us. And the pain of our history, the karma of our narrowness, of our smallness, of our trying to live within a framework of individual ego at cost of anyone else's well-being, keeps us locked away, insensitive to this incoming light. And as in any mystical development before there is a breakthrough into non-dual or unitive consciousness, there is a dark night of the soul where you have to undo, you have to let go of all of the obstacles, all the the blocks. And I think this is happening at a collective level, not only inside intense psychedelic sessions, but everywhere. If you're doing past life therapy, many of the lives that come up to be cleansed or not necessarily your personal former lives, but they can be lives within the system. Social movements to end child abuse, to end abuse of our daughters, to end racism, to end speciesism. These movements are tackling pains which are much deeper than simply our personal pain. And the whole system is kind of straining against the burdens of the past in order to open itself, to take in more powerfully the energy of our future, the light of our future.
Chris: So in that context, in the middle of this work, I began to receive visions that were stable, they were consistent, and they stretched over several years. They were dropped into my sessions about where humanity is in its evolutionary journey, where it's going. And there was a message of we were coming into a time of radical, pivotal breakthrough, a before and after time. That the past would become quickly irrelevant because something fundamentally new was emerging. But it never showed me for years how nature was going to accomplish this. I had no idea. And then in 1995, years later, I had a fundamental experience; and I was working at very deep levels by this time, I was into the diamond luminosity material. But this session took me and it broke me open, it dissolved my mind into the species mind and then asked the consciousness of the species. And I understand how radical an assertion that is, and I don't take it lightly, but the species mind took me into future time. It took me into what I call deep time. And in that future, I experienced the death and rebirth of humanity. I experienced humanity coming to an absolute breaking point. A breakdown, an unravelling of fundamental trust, fundamental convictions within our culture. A deep, systematic breaking down. Until the entire planet, it seemed, was faced with the task of mere survival, just trying to survive. And it looked like it was an extinction event at first, it looked like that was it. We had overloaded the system so badly, we had overdrawn the ecological balance sheet of the planet so badly that we weren't going to come out of it.
Chris: But then what happened in the visionary experiences, just when things were at their worst, things began to get lighter. People who had been brought to their knees began to stand up, and it began to re constellate. And as we reconstellated after these series of crises, and I don't know how long they will last, I think of this as kind of a three generational pivot. I can't imagine it lasting less than that. It seems to be the 21st century is a major pivotal point, because we know by by 2030, 2040, 2050, we're going to be getting into worse and worse and worse environmental crises. And what I think is happening is that by the time we go through this crisis, we will crack open something so deep in the human spirit, so deep in the human psyche, that what will emerge is a literally transformed humanity. Not simply transformed individuals, but a transformation of the fundamental substructure of the human psyche. I think of this as a shift in the plate tectonics of the collective unconscious, so that every human being born after this period of history will be experiencing consciousness within the context of a collective psyche that is different than how we were experiencing it in the 19th and 20th century.
Manda: Or for a long time before that, within our culture.
Chris: A long time before that. Yeah. Now there's another theme that came in that gave me some of the details of what the future human is. And in other sessions, I was taken far into the future and experienced the this new archetype of the future human. But in a very profound experience, I had an experience of... I believe in reincarnation. My first book was on reincarnation. I think the empirical evidence for reincarnation from a philosopher's perspective is overwhelming, so I'll put those cards on the table. It's always been part of my thinking while I went into these sessions, based on the evidence, not because of religious beliefs. And I experienced reincarnation dynamics many times in my sessions, not only in my personal reincarnational history, but I experienced reincarnation as a dynamic process for the entire planet. The entire species is pulsing in the rhythm of reincarnation. And if that's true that reincarnation is a basic fact of life, then we have been building the future human for hundreds of thousands of years. We have been growing bit by bit, bit by bit, bit by bit. We remember our former lives usually when we die and we return to the domain of the soul. But I think we are coming into a point of history where the soul is actually becoming conscious inside our historical existence. And the way I experienced this was one day in my session, former lives were coming into me, just coming into me, and it was like wrapping a bright white light filament around a kite spool. And there came a moment where they seemed to hit critical mass, and when they hit critical mass, they fused into one. And when they fused into one, there was an explosion of diamond light from my heart.
Chris: And I was catapulted into a state of consciousness where I was an individual, but I was far beyond Chris Bache. I was an individual like I had never known individuality before. And I came to call this the birth of the Diamond Soul. Now many people are experiencing this. They give it different names. How I call it is simply my way of languaging it, the birth of the diamond soul. And I think what's happening is that the soul, which is the consciousness that holds all our former life history, is waking up inside our historical existence and is supplanting egoic existence. So that we have lived egoic existence for thousands and thousands of years, but now the ego has driven the planet into red line conditions, into unacceptable stressful conditions. And now we either grow up or we go extinct. And what growing up amounts to, I think, is owning the deep history and the deep consciousness, which is our truer nature. It's all divine, of course. But the form of the divine is our soul nature. And it's not just individuals who are waking up, but now nature is putting enormous pressure to wake up the entire species, the entire species is becoming a species of Christ. A species of Buddhas, a species of prophets, of great spiritual saints and sages of history. That's the pivot we're trying to make. We're trying to make the pivot of growing up, taking the long view, the seven generation view. And when the soul wakes up, of course, our whole history becomes kind of dynamically alive within us. We have been male, female. We have been every race on the planet. We've been every religion on the planet.
Manda: And the other species. I don't think we were all human all the time.
Chris: And the other species. We have a history there. Absolutely. And so I think that's what's happening. And I think we are being brought to a critical choice point, driven by the ecological crisis and the other systemic crises which are contingent upon the economic realities of the past. We're coming into a meltdown point of those realities, a choice point.
Manda: So definitely, I totally take what you're saying, and I would agree with it. If somebody is listening to this podcast, pretty much by definition, they still have an amount of resource and privilege because they have the time and the resources to do that. And I hear you that this is perhaps a three generation span, but I'm wondering where we are in those three generations. We might not be the first. Or the three generations alive on the planet at the moment; the kind of boomers, Gen X, Gen Z, but then all the others, we've got more than three generations alive. Anybody listening, wherever they are in the span of age or gender or race, what would you recommend? Clearly we don't have a formula - go and do this and this and this - but the concepts within which they could prioritise their life. What do we create as our soul priorities for 2025, that would help to move this process forward.
Chris: Quick background assumptions that I make. One is that this is a transition which will take the entire resources of the human family. So there is no one formula. It'll take everything we have, everything we are. It'll take scientific knowledge, economic knowledge, political skills, educational skills, medical skills. It'll take everything we have to move us through. Second thing is, my assumption is, and this is based upon years of studying the past life literature. That each one of us has chosen where and when to incarnate, with a certain pre-vision of what we're getting into, and what will be the dominant themes of that incarnation and the resources available within that incarnation. That this is part of our incarnational psychic makeup. And that means each one of us is already positioned by the soul, by our soul to make a contribution to this transition that we are coming into. So it's not a matter of looking around outside of oneself or somewhere else. It's a matter of looking deeply into where we are, what we are. The key question is not so much what can I do? The key question, I think, is will we have the courage to do what is within my reach to do? That's the key question.
Chris: If everybody does what is within their reach to do, we will make it through this. Now, going one step beyond that, there are many people, I think, who are giving us good, wise, elder advice on how to engage this moment in history, how to move it forward. Very simply put, I believe one of the ways to do this is to become what you believe the planet needs right now. To become it in your own personal life, to internalise the beliefs, the habits of mind, the generosity of heart, the clarity of our thinking and our social skills and social community networks to become what the planet needs. If you have a clear understanding of what the planet needs and we begin to do that, then we become kind of a microcosm of the whole evolutionary pivot. And what is alive within us stimulates and activates the people around us who are struggling to do the same thing. So we're all in this together. Our arms are all interlinked. One cell awakens another cell, right?
Manda: Yes. The field effect you were talking about earlier. If we can come into alignment and connect to the web of life, ask what do you want of me? And be that. Then that in itself ripples out and it stops our head minds having to plan. Letting heart mind lead and head mind follow, is an inversion of how we got here, but seems to me quite important. That's so lovely. Thank you.
Chris: Yeah. For example, we think that the future human, the planet needs more of a heart based epistemology, a heart based source of action. And so to put the heart mind kind of ahead of the mind mind, the head mind, that's a reading of what's emerging, of what we need to do.
Manda: And our understanding may yet evolve. I wouldn't say that's necessarily an end point, but it's a starting place to move from here.
Chris: Absolutely. Learning deep. Biomimicry. Learning the rhythms of nature. Learning what's alive and what's in the physical world and the animal world. And the world of insects. Everything around us. Understanding how we have created imbalance, how we can restore systems, how to create harmony with those systems. How to learn from the engineering that nature has already accomplished through billions of years of evolution within those systems. So many ways.
Manda: And I'm thinking healing the trauma. If Francis Weller is right and we are the trauma culture and the indigenous peoples are a more whole version of humanity, we have 10,000 years of ancestral trauma and potentially previous life trauma. And I end up talking sometimes with people who are fixated on healing their ancestors. And I am increasingly feeling that if I can heal in the moment, that that ripples up and down the timeline. That time is not necessarily one linear thing chunked into identical portions, but that healing now, if I can become a fully realised human being, that ripples to my parents and their parents and their parents all the way back down the line. And I don't have physical descendants, but down a spirit descendant line. And that saves me feeling that I have to heal 10,000 years of ancestors, which is a big ask and quite demoralising. How does that land?
Chris: It lands well. Now within a reincarnational framework we add the rider that we were our ancestors. So if we can think of our ancestors in this way, we were our ancestors. So when we're healing our ancestors, in part, we're healing our own lineage. But anybody worth their salt, any mother, any father worth their salt, who sees a child which is not their own in need, in pain actually, reaches out to help heal that child. So once you really immerse yourself in that process, the boundaries of healing expand. That healing the trauma of ancestors, healing the traumas of your neighbours, of actually creating trauma less societies for our future children. It's all good work. It's all hard work. And it's the work of the hour, isn't it?
Manda: And people, I have a suspicion, are going to be emailing me afterwards asking where they can get enough LSD to start on the process. Read the book first, people, because Chris did things that the rest of us I don't necessarily think we want to do. But psychedelics are big now. Is it your belief that everyone should be within a structured and held way and with suitable reflection, exploring psychedelics? Or is it that a critical mass does that and the effect rolls out to the rest of us?
Chris: I don't think it's wise to have a value that everybody should try psychedelics, get into psychedelics. Psychedelics are basically amplifiers of consciousness. They amplify consciousness. What you do with those amplified states of awareness, in those precious hours, really determines the value, how you use them. You can use them recreationally. You can go to a Grateful Dead concert, you can talk with some friends. Or you can use them to expose your shadow, to heal your shadow and to move into deeper cosmological exploration. But many of us are carrying tensions within our psyche, which should not be amplified.
Manda: Thank you.
Chris: I mean, Carl Jung would listen to people's dreams on their first day when they came to work with him and he wouldn't work with some people, because he knew that they were not ready to undertake the depth of work that would emerge working with him. And I think this is true for psychedelics. There are a lot of people who should not use psychedelics. The circumstances, the patterns of their consciousness currently, it's too strong a medicine. They need a gentler way in, a slower way in. But among people who are basically healthy, a healthy psyche, who are not carrying...
Manda: Do you know anyone who has a healthy psyche?
Chris: I know some who have a healthier psyche!
Manda: Healthier? Yes, yes. I'm thinking of a lot of my friends who are just really wounded. Guys, I think a lot of people that I know have have healthier psyches, but I think all of us are carrying quite deep frozen parts still.
Chris: And if you choose to work with psychedelics, I would say very controlled circumstances. You know, you really want to batten down the hatches carefully before you set out into the deep water. Very conscientious control of dose. First, purity of substance, because that's always an issue, because a lot of crap comes in what you get on the street. Pure substances, careful containers, therapeutically monitored, structured experiences. I don't think it's good to do what I did, to work solo. It adds unnecessary burden. It's good to have a group.
Manda: Even though you were held by the person who held you. You weren't completely solo.
Chris: I wasn't totally alone. I was held by my wife, Carol, who was a PhD psychologist. But it wasn't healthy in the sense that I didn't have a group that I could share my experiences with beyond that inner circle. I wasn't able to talk about it and to take in other people's experiences until way too far down the road. So Ayahuasca communities and psilocybin communities, where people can journey together, process together, be a mirror to each other, help expose the shadow in their post-session personalities. The greatest danger of working with psychedelics is psychic inflation.
Manda: I have become God and now I can tell you everything.
Chris: Exactly. Just because you've had a special experience, you think you're a special person. And you know, that's just a big fallacy.
Manda: There's a few ayahuascarians in the incoming administration in the US. Or at least not ayahuascarias, but people who have taken ayahuasca in the incoming administration in the US. And yeah, I'm sure they're wonderful human beings, but they're moving fast and breaking everything. And I think one of the things that I heard from an Ayahuascaria who has spent very large amounts of time in the forest, is that Western people tend to want to come and do it and go away again, and don't want to spend the weeks and months of really getting to know the plant. And letting go of the ego. It's a process, not an event and we're not used to that in our culture.
Chris: Yeah, it's a long process. And let me recommend a book on ayahuasca to your audience. And that is Bill Barnard's book, published by Columbia University Press, and his book is Liquid Light. And Bill is a university professor at Southern Methodist University. He has several books under his belt, he's a very well recognised philosopher of religion. He has a book on William James, a book on Henri Bergson. But the book Liquid Light tells a story of years and years and years, decades of going down to South America, living in the Santo Daime community, working every sabbatical and every vacation with his teachers there. And it's an analysis of the Santo Daime community and it's also an analysis of his own experiences in the Santo Daime community. So it's another academic becoming autobiographical without being trapped within his personal story. And it's specifically focussed, and he is a beautiful writer and these experiences are very powerful.
Manda: Brilliant. I will find that and put it in the show notes. I could go on forever. We are heading towards the end of time, the end of our time, not necessarily the end of all time. A number of questions, with all of the codas of what we've just said. It strikes me that you are probably familiar now with an emerging network of people who are working together with a variety of different psychedelic substances. Are you seeing networks of consciousness such that people are, this is about sound really flaky, but a lot of the push that I'm getting is to do the work so that I can actually connect with all of my students in the dream in a way that we're both fully aware of. Not I just get an email going I saw you in the dream last night and you did this. And I think, well, that's really nice, but I have no awareness of that. That we moved to methods of human networking that are similar to, but beyond the digital networking that we've just moved into within the last 20 years. Are you seeing anything approaching that? Or if not, would you like to speak to what is happening in terms of a collective community, if anything?
Chris: well, first I want to own my limitations. In that even though I've published this book and even though I speak at some conferences, I don't speak at most psychedelic conferences because my work is pretty radical, and the focus on the psychedelic renaissance right now is on therapy and careful scientific studies demonstrating the therapeutic efficacy of psychedelics. And that's perfectly fine. That's where we need to be. But the movement is not yet pushing the cosmological territory that I pushed in my work.
Manda: There must be somebody somewhere. It can't be that just you did it.
Chris: Well, people like Bill Barnard and there are people, but I think a lot of it is still underground at this point. So I am aware of certain trends in the Renaissance community and in the psychedelic community. But I don't have a comprehensive breadth of access to what's happening. So I worked in isolation. My work is unusually intense and extreme, and I live basically a pretty quiet life around that.
Manda: Okay.
Chris: But what I do see, and there are some people doing, as you're describing, cultivating kind of communities of paranormal contact within the dream state. Extended dreaming, doing different things. There are people who are working in meditation, trying to integrate psychedelics into meditation circles. There's a lot going on, a lot moving. I think the internet is a physical manifestation in a sense, that the hardwires of this emerging field consciousness, so that even if we don't accomplish these networks psychically, we're on a network right now, this is a global network that we're part of.
Manda: It is, but somebody could pull a plug on it tomorrow. You know, if China or Russia or somebody decides to just switch it or monitor it such that it's not safe to say anything outside a certain narrow bandwidth.
Speaker3: It could be.
Manda: It could vanish. The freedom that we have just now is not a given, I would say. Whereas if we could talk to each other without needing the internet, it would be quite hard to interfere with that.
Chris: It would be great. The complication, of course, is the clarity of the transmission, the purity of the transmission, because the personal psyche throws up all sorts of filters.
Manda: Sure does. Yeah. Ego gets in the way, basically. Head mind gets in the way.
Chris: Yeah, it gets in the way. Yeah.
Manda: Okay. I think we never got to actually, you said I'll come to it later of why I stopped. Did you feel that you covered that? Did you want to cover that? If not, is there anything else that you feel we could usefully cover in the time that we've got?
Chris: Well, that actually might be a good place to to wrap up some of the discussion, because it's relevant to where we might go. I stopped for two reasons. I stopped first because my physical system, my subtle energy system, my prana or chi energy system was running so hot after all these years of practice, that it was producing certain physical symptoms that was leaving me continually physically uncomfortable. And I describe these in the book, but basically, I understood enough about Pranic energy and ayurvedic medicine to understand what was happening. And I was just running too much energy. But that's not the major reason I stopped. The major reason I stopped was heartache. That is, it was getting increasingly difficult to come back from the deep states of ecstatic, transcendent immersion in the divine fabric. To come out of that back into my time-space reality. And there are beings, there are great beings who are able to sustain those transcendental states in their time-space personality, they are great masters, and truly all honour to the great masters. I'm not one of those beings. This is a path of temporary immersion that's different than the path of contemplative presence. So I can go into those states, but I have to come out of them and eventually coming back out just became too painful of a separation. So I stopped. And I knew I would be stopping for the rest of my life, because it takes years and years of momentum to develop the energy to break into these high, high energy states. If I did a massive dose of LSD right now, I would not be able to go back to where I was working at the end of my 20 year journey.
Chris: So I knew I was stopping for the rest of my life, but it was important for me to stop. And I had to first learn how to manage the heartache and then to begin the process of working, the slower process of integrating those living memories, actively living memories, into my physical existence. Which conversations like this actually help me do. So it's healing for me to talk about these things with you.
Manda: That's good to know.
Chris: And the way that this applies to maybe some of your listeners, is to be careful about how much you bite off in your sessions. Because even if you're really committed to conscientious integration, you can bite off more than you can chew, or more than it's wise for you to chew. So I think we can learn a lot from the contemplative traditions. It's one of the advantages I had going into this work. I was teaching courses in mysticism and meditation, teaching courses in shamanism and Buddhism. So I understood the literature of mysticism. I understood the practices of mysticism, the purification processes. And I tried to use those processes in my own work, and there's a lot of wisdom there. So it serves you to be well read and I think to recognise the limitations of any one incarnation. I think that in some ways I went to places that were so deep it will take me not just one incarnation, but multiple incarnations to truly integrate them. And by that I mean being able to manifest those levels of a consciousness inside my physical consciousness comfortably. So I would basically hate for anyone to try to do what I did and get into trouble and hurt themselves. That would just break my heart.
Manda: Yeah. I think we've got the the health warnings fairly clear on here. If you're going to work with things, work with somebody who knows really what they're doing. Me and my apprentice are working to find people that we can pass people on to. Because we get emails saying, I took substance X, and basically I'm having a psychotic breakdown, what can I do? And we're shamanic practitioners, actually, it's not our field. So we're trying to pass this on to people who can actually help, but they're few and far between. Because there's a lot more people who think they can help than the ones who can actually help. So take great care. Test your people out before you decide to do something that is irreversible, I would say is really clear. And then do the work beforehand, do the work during and do the work after to integrate.
Chris: After.
Manda: And integrate and integrate and do it because you're doing it in service to life and not because you're trying to make your ego feel happy, strikes me as a quite important one. Have I missed anything out on the health warnings?
Chris: I think it's great. And if you do your work well, one of the things that happens is you lose all fear of death. Once you transition several times into that reality, you know in your bones from your own experience that death is not an end of anything, it's simply an end of an incarnational cycle. And there is absolutely nothing to fear about death. Death is homecoming. All of the Hollywood bullshit that are thrown up at us for, you know, dark places and demons and ghosts and all this stuff is just nonsense. 99% of people die and make a transition into the light perfectly naturally and comfortably. If you are afraid of dying, you've got your entire metaphysics upside down. Death is homecoming. Death is the end of this matriculation. It's the harvesting of your life. Birth should be mourned. Birth is where the work begins. It's like being a freshman in college, it's hard. Graduation is wonderful. And when you lose your fear of death and you begin to understand the deeper, meaningful challenges which are embedded in our time space experiences; if you lose your fear of death, your whole game of life changes. Because death is what people fear more than anything else and if you don't have that fear, then you're going into a different lifestyle, a different way of living, a more joyful way of living.
Manda: Yes. Thank you, thank you. That feels to me a fantastic place to end. Does that feel good to you?
Chris: It feels good to me.
Manda: All right. In that case, Chris, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. This has been an absolute delight. I have enjoyed every moment and I think what a way to start the year! Thank you.
Chris: Thank you Manda, and thank you for your work. We need all of the awareness that we can bring to ourselves, and you are certainly bringing awareness to many people. Thank you.
Manda: And that's it. Huge, huge thanks to Chris Bache for all that he is and does, for his astonishing dedication and the journey that he took. Truly, reading that book is enlightening and terrifying. If you get to the end of it and you still want to take heroic doses of LSD, I will be surprised. I genuinely think he went places that the rest of us don't need to go, or at least not in that way. As a shamanic practitioner, I think there are non-psychedelic routes to the places that he went, but it takes a lot of focus, and I do not want to pretend that each of us has to take that route exactly. What I do think is that we absolutely now have to do the inner work, whether we use psychotherapy or spirituality, or, I am increasingly inclined to believe a combination of the two, so that we can heal ourselves, our culture, our lineage of blood and of spirit, so that we can move into each new moment as healed and as whole as we possibly can. And so that we can find what is ours to do and do it with all of our heart. This is urgent now, and it may be that this time next year I will be saying, this is really urgent now, but we have to do this. There is no option not to if we're going to avoid extinction. We are right on the edge of so many tipping points. It matters that we step back from that edge. That we undo some of the collective knots into which we have tied ourselves, and find new paths. That we cast new lines across the landscapes of tomorrow, and we find new ways of being. And that starts inside.
Manda: So I put a bunch of links in the show notes as usual. Please go and explore Chris's website. It's beautifully written and there are links to all of his books, plus a link to a website devoted to Stanislav Grof and a couple of other books that Chris mentioned. Go and explore. Do as much as feels good to you. But this year is going to be a year of pushing the edges of our being. Do what it takes to unfreeze the traumatised parts inside, to become liquid, to become fluid. To be able to flow out into the world in a way that is stable and balanced. Find the connections with the people who are your tribe. The people of place and of passion and of purpose, who share the world with you. Share as much as you can of your vulnerabilities and hold space for other people to do the same. Our world is going to change in ways we cannot possibly predict, but every step is a new learning. Every step is a step into a new way of being, a new way of feeling, a new way of expressing our gratitude, our compassion, our joyful curiosity.
Manda: And yes, if you're inside the Accidental Gods membership, it is entirely likely that these will continue to be the absolute baseline from which we work. I am planning a few other things, but I haven't got them quite straightened out yet. They will emerge during the year, I hope. So there we go. I hope your new year has dawned with some bright sparks, and that this conversation has been one of them. As ever, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot and for this week's production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the videos, to Anne Thomas for the transcript, to Faith Tilleray for the website, and for all of the conversations that keep us moving. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who is at all interested in the ways that we can change our consciousness to bring the future of humanity alive in new ways, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.