Conversation with Christopher Bache

Christopher Bache, an emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, is author of Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind, The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness, and Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life, as well as Diamonds from Heaven (forthcoming, Inner Traditions, 2019), which describes his twenty-year journey working with high doses of LSD in rigorous, therapeutically structured sessions. In this conversation, he joins Arthur Versluis and Morgan Shipley to discuss his work and its radical implications for sociocultural change.

Arthur Versluis (AV):

In JSR, we periodically do these wide-ranging conversations in which we're thinking more broadly about either the radical implications of something or radicalism more specifically. One of the contextual things that we wanted to start with is, in JSR, from the beginning of the journal, we've defined radicalism as characterized by the desire for sudden transformations in society through either nonviolent or violent means. To what extent do you think psychedelics lend themselves to the radical or sudden transformation of society? In other words, in brief, is the psychedelics movement itself radical? Are psychedelics? Do they have radical implications?

Christopher Bache (CB):

Certainly, in our cultural and historical context, they would seem to have radical implications since our dominant philosophical paradigm is reductive materialism, and psychedelics cut through that. Psychedelics break through many of our cultural norms, including religious, philosophical, and even some scientific norms. They reconnect us with a deep experience of the universe. And that in itself is a radicalizing process—to actually experience firsthand the intelligence that seems to be the driving intelligence of the universe. How could that not be radical? Especially when our culture says there is no such intelligence and yet experience says, yes, there is such an intelligence and we can have contact with it. So yes, I think it's radical.

AV:

It's radical in the individual sense, in terms of upending preconceptions on a whole variety of different levels. But to what extent is it radical—are the implications radical—with regards to society more broadly?

CB:

I think that really depends on how we use them and incorporate them into our culture. My focus has been on using psychedelics in carefully structured sessions as a method of philosophical inquiry. But if we begin to systematically incorporate psychedelics into our culture more broadly, then I think they could contribute to a collective social revolution. Our first experience with psychedelics in the 1960s was convulsive; we didn't have the cultural structures to handle them wisely. So the expectation that they would trigger radical social change was premature. But if we begin to harness these substances conscientiously, then they would have broader social ramifications. Just the experience of nonduality, the experience of oneness, or opening the heart to deep identification with other life forms could have profound ramifications if it became common cultural currency.

Morgan Shipley (MS):

I think what you're saying is, in terms of the 1960s specifically, there was that very personal experience often connected to, for instance, the Harvard Psilocybin Project or the broader sense of therapy, but it was always very personal and people who had the experiences you are talking about believed that, because I have had this one experience, I can now leap into the social world and make instant change. But I think there is this gap, that if the rest of the cultural setting is not conducive to thinking differently about how we relate to people, then it becomes an outlier, taboo, or convulsive, so it is interesting to think about how we would have to situate this more directly within our cultural lens, as not something that we do just to escape our culture, but something we do to get more directly involved.

CB:

Yes, exactly. I think initially psychedelics might have the most immediate impact on intellectuals and then as these intellectuals assimilate their experiences and extract from them theoretical reflections on the nature of reality, this would ripple out into the broader culture. When we eventually have scientists doing serious psychedelic...