Opening the door to ecstatic experiences of cosmological communion and discovery

Prof Christopher Bache at TimeWaver Summer World 2018

I feel privileged to have received this inspirational response from Christopher M Bache, professor emeritus, now retired from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, Ohio, to my review of his latest book LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven (Park Street Press, November 2019). Professor Bache writes:

I want to thank Geoff Ward for his thoughtful, clear, and beautiful review of LSD and the Mind of the Universe, which I deeply appreciate. I also want to respond to the important question he raises about the role redemptive suffering plays in my narrative and the influence my background and training may have had on my visionary experience. He writes:

I feel that everything constituting Bache’s career and learning…must have had a crucial bearing on the kind of LSD experiences he had, or at least his interpretation of them — especially those involving redemptive suffering about which one must ask: is it a property of the universal mind, which seems unlikely, or a projection of the individual (or collective) human mind? It would have been interesting to have had Bache’s views on these matters.