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FLASHBACK: What 73 High-Dose LSD Sessions Teach You About the Mind of the Universe w/ Christopher M. Bache
238 Plays2 years ago
Christopher M. Bache, Ph.D. is professor emeritus in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University where he taught for 33 years. He is also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training. Chris’ passion has been the study of the philosophical implications of nonordinary states of consciousness, especially psychedelic states. An award winning teacher and international speaker, Chris has written four books: Lifecycles - a study of reincarnation in light of contemporary consciousness research; Dark Night, Early Dawn - a pioneering work in psychedelic philosophy and collective consciousness; The Living Classroom, an exploration of collective fields of consciousness in teaching; and LSD and the Mind of the Universe, the story of his 20 year journey with LSD.
Chris is a father of 3, a Vajrayana practitioner, and lives in Weaverville, NC.
Links to Chris' books and other resources:
LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life
Chris presenting on reincarnation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlCMfEOmsrY Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind
The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness
Website: https://chrisbache.com/
Chris' academic publications: https://youngstown.academia.edu/ChristopherMBache
Links to my book Autism Wellbeing Plan: How to Get Your Child Healthy:
US Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Autism-Wellbeing-Plan-Child-Healthy/dp/1916393004
UK Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Autism-Wellbeing-Plan-Child-Healthy-ebook/dp/B084GBBDL9
My podcast, Autism and Children's Health: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autism-and-childrens-health-lab-testing-diet/id1512380225
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Connecting Minds' Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Connecting Minds is a space dedicated to honoring the amazing authors, researchers, clinicians, artists, and entrepreneurs who are contributing to our collective evolution or simply making the world a better place. These thought-provoking conversations are intended to expand our horizons, so come with an open mind and let us grow together. Here is your host, Christian Yordanov.
Meet the Guest: Christopher M. Bache
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Connecting Minds podcast. My name is Christian Jordonov and thank you so much for joining me today on this 11th episode of the podcast. Today I have Christopher M. Baich on. We had a two hour conversation almost. It was a wonderful conversation, relished every single minute of re-listening to it while I was typing up the show notes.
00:01:05
Speaker
So much depth to it. You're in for a treat, basically.
Exploring Consciousness with LSD
00:01:10
Speaker
The focal point of the conversation will be Chris's latest book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, Diamonds from Heaven, where he
00:01:20
Speaker
It's basically an account of his 20 year journey of Heidl's LSD sessions between 1979 and 1999, where he undertook deep exploration of his consciousness and into the mind of the universe, as the title of the book suggests.
00:01:39
Speaker
We also discussed his first book briefly, Life Cycles, which is about reincarnation. So you're about to hear some amazing stuff from Chris, really awesome guy. So glad he agreed to get on the podcast. He was actually the first guest that I approached way back in September. So he was the first interview I conducted, so I was extra nervous. I did a ton of preparation. I really immersed myself into his work.
00:02:08
Speaker
you know, his books, his videos, etc. It was a very enlightening and illuminating experience.
Christian's Preparation for the Interview
00:02:16
Speaker
He really opened my eyes to so many concepts and authors and thought leaders and pioneers in various different fields. And I have a reading list from here till the end of...
00:02:29
Speaker
I don't know what it's that long, you know, but so I really think you enjoy this episode. I don't want to offer too many spoilers. I think the best thing to do is to just let Chris speak for the experiences of, you know, hear it from the horse's mouth as it were.
Christopher's Academic and Professional Journey
00:02:49
Speaker
even though we'll only be scratching the surface in this interview. Of course, he has a rather large body of work that I highly recommend you check out, of course, links to the books and to his website, some YouTube videos, etc. We'll all be in the show notes and on the website.
00:03:10
Speaker
So yeah, please get in touch with me. Let me know how you like the episode. And thank you once again for joining me today. Really appreciate you investing your time in this podcast. So without further ado, I present to you Christopher M. Bache.
00:03:27
Speaker
All righty. Today on the Connecting Minds podcast, we have Christopher M. Baich, PhD. Christopher Baich, or Chris, is a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He is a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He is also a junked faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies,
00:03:55
Speaker
and on the advisory board for Groff Transpersonal Training and the Groff Foundation. He's an award-winning teacher,
00:04:03
Speaker
and an international speaker. He's the author of four books and he lives in North Carolina.
Dual Life: Professor and LSD Explorer
00:04:10
Speaker
Now, he has written several books today. One of the topics of our discussion will be his latest book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, Diamonds from Heaven. Chris, thank you so much for taking the time out to join us today. It's a pleasure to be with you, Christian.
00:04:31
Speaker
All right, so we have a lot of ground to cover in a relatively short space of time. So what I would like to do is to start with, I would like if you could please tell us what were you up to between the years of 1979 and 1999.
00:04:55
Speaker
And maybe introduce us to your journey into exploration of your consciousness, but also in parallel, if you could kind of tell us how your career progressed during this time. So if you could kind of tell this, I know it's a parallel story that you lived almost two lives, if you could kind of show us there. Yeah, I'd be glad to.
00:05:22
Speaker
I came out of graduate school in 1978. I was trained as a philosopher religion. I was raised in the Deep South, got my PhD from Brown University. I had finished my dissertation, had done some published part of my dissertation, and I was looking for where to take my research next as a young academic. I had no experience in psychedelics whatsoever at that time.
00:05:49
Speaker
I was 30 years old, and I encountered the work of Stanislav Groff. I read his book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, which was published in 76. And as soon as I saw his work on psychedelic research, I immediately recognized that this was an important development, not only for psychology, but for philosophers as well, that he had a method for giving us experiential access to dimensions of mind and dimensions of the universe
00:06:18
Speaker
that many people have talked about and theorized about, but not many people have had direct access to. So I made a choice at that point. I was not comfortable with the choice, but because LSD was illegal, and his work was primarily centered on LSD at the time, because it was illegal, I divided my life into two parts.
The 20-Year LSD Journey
00:06:40
Speaker
In my daytime job, I worked as a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. I taught courses on world religion, psychology of religion, Buddhism, comparative mysticism, transpersonal studies.
00:06:55
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And in my personal life, I began a 20-year journey exploring working with LSD in a systematic, rigorous manner using Stan Gross protocols. Over the course of the next 20 years, as I progressed through the academic world,
00:07:14
Speaker
I did 73 high-dose LSD sessions, completely internalized, completely protected with the sitter using the traditional formats, private safely protected from the world with the assistance of a sitter who kept me safe and secure during this process.
00:07:34
Speaker
And I basically began this process and found that it engaged me systematically into a deepening and ever deepening exploration of my own consciousness and eventually into a consciousness that was so large, so vast, where you could describe it as the consciousness of the divine. But I often just refer to it simply as the mind of the universe.
00:08:03
Speaker
So while I continue to teach, and I love teaching, I love being with the students, teaching in these areas, I basically developed this second life. And it wasn't until after I retired from the university and after I was past the statute of limitations for working with these, what our culture deserved, called
00:08:27
Speaker
illegal substances that I was really able to begin to share the full scope of the experiences that I had had on this substance and to extract some of the philosophical implications of these experiences. Right. And so that was a 20 year journey that ended in 1999. How did your career progress over those 20 years?
00:08:54
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Oh, in a very traditional manner. I mean, I was progressed. I mean, promoted up the ladder, as ones does. I published through the process. I won two awards at the university for my teaching. I love teaching, love being with the students.
00:09:11
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I did the things that an ordinary professor does. I worked on committees. I did all the things that you do at a university in a department. My department was a complex department filled with philosophers and religious studies professors who became my dear and close friends over the course of time. Yeah, it was just kind of a traditional academic career.
00:09:37
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And you had three kids along the way. So we could say you led a productive life contributing to society, which I think is important because I think there's still this stigma. People recoil when they hear someone, even a learned person, an academic, did stuff with psychedelics.
Reincarnation and 'Life Cycles'
00:10:03
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They recoil and think, oh, this person,
00:10:06
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They'll never be a productive member of society and it's quite the contrary. So along the way around, I think 1990, you published your first book, Life Cycles. Could you please tell us what Life Cycles is about?
00:10:21
Speaker
Life Cyclist is about reincarnation. When I was on my first sabbatical, and I could only write books during my sabbaticals, I had been researching reincarnation. When I met Stan Groff's work, I also met the work of Ian Stevenson, professor at the University of Virginia.
00:10:41
Speaker
And his work convinced me that he had collected empirical evidence that reincarnation was a simple fact of life. It's simply something nature is doing. This completely jarred me because reincarnation had not been a serious part of my academic training. It was not part of my education in Western religions, which is where I spent most of my academic life training, nor in philosophy of religion or the scientific study of religion.
00:11:11
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But here it was, this massive body of evidence collected, he's collected evidence from children all over the world from different cultures who have spontaneous recall of their previous lifetime. 90% of the cases he never publishes because they don't meet the highest standards of scientific investigation. But about 10% of his cases are very, very important and substantive cases
00:11:37
Speaker
indicating that these children have an accurate documented recall of their previous life. So I wrote life cycles after teaching about this material for years and introducing it to my students for years. I wrote this book basically which begins with a review of the evidence for reincarnation coming from Ian Stevenson and supplemented by the research coming from past life's therapist who are writing a number of very important works at the time.
00:12:07
Speaker
Then I explored, once we had that evidence in place, I explored what the implications of the evidence were. What difference does it make if we are growing up in a universe where reincarnation is a simple fact of life?
00:12:23
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So that was my first project. It ruffled some feathers in my department because they weren't expecting a book like this. But it's gone on to be published in six languages. And it became a staple in my courses. And it's a very easily accessible and yet academically sound investigation of reincarnation.
00:12:46
Speaker
Yeah, it was sold out. I've been trying to get it from Amazon for a while. But in your book, I believe you published in 2001, Dark Night, Early Dawn, in chapter... I actually got that book a couple of weeks back. I've been slowly going through it. It's definitely... Yes, it's not the kind of book. It's not a light reading book. I read it in the mornings when my brain is still optimal.
00:13:16
Speaker
But in chapter two, you nicely summarize the stuff you talk about in life cycles, which I really appreciate the guys like you that judging from the books behind you, you read books and then present the information to us in a
00:13:35
Speaker
digestible manner, which I really, really appreciate. But what was interesting is that in the cases of the children who remember their past lives, it seems like the average period between lives is something around two and a half years. But when people do past life regression therapies, it was somewhere more around 40, 50 years, which I think was pretty fascinating because to consider the implications of your
00:14:02
Speaker
So, or you're being in between bodies for such a long period of time in these dimensions, it's unfathomable the amount of learning and development that could be going on. So that's just really fascinating. And I was actually aware of Ian Stevenson's work before that. So, you don't have to...
00:14:20
Speaker
convince me, but for folks that are just kind of hearing this for the first time, Chris has a really good YouTube video that I'm going to link in the description of this episode where he talks about, I think it's about 35 minutes, that you basically present Ian Stevenson's work and then some past life therapists accounts of that and some books. So there's a really good resource there on YouTube.
00:14:47
Speaker
And thank you. And really, philosophically, the important aspect of reincarnation research, I think, is that it invalidates our dominant paradigm about consciousness, and that our dominant thinking in our culture, in university culture, is that our minds are produced by our brain. So our brain is the core reality, and it gives off a glow, which is our mind. And reincarnation
00:15:15
Speaker
It invalidates that because if there is any period of time between the death of one personality and the birth of a second personality, and there is an organized transfer of memories from one life to another, then there has to be a dimension of reality where consciousness can exist
00:15:34
Speaker
independent of a physical substrate of the brain underneath, and that tells us that the universe is much more complicated, has many more layers to it than we have traditionally thought up to this century.
00:15:48
Speaker
Exactly.
Psychedelics and Consciousness
00:15:49
Speaker
That is beautifully said. So this is where things like LSD, psilocybin, certain other antiogenic compounds, psychedelics, if we want to call them, they seem to be able to allow us to tap into these dimensions. They seem to like open up the gates. So with that said,
00:16:15
Speaker
Can you, Chris, can you tell us, can you give us an overview, I suppose, of Stan Groff's work, what he contributed to the transpersonal field. He, in a sense, you know, is one of the founders of the transpersonal field. But can you tell us what happens to an individual, what happens when one takes a normal
00:16:35
Speaker
dose of LSD, let's say. And what happens when a person consistently brings themselves into that state? And what happens when someone takes high doses consistent? Can you basically tell us, you know, discuss the phenomenology talking about psychodynamic transpersonal perinatal as, as, as Gruff laid it out. And then the contributions you added on, on top of Gruff's paradigm,
00:17:05
Speaker
generally and then what you experienced in your journey, please. Yeah.
00:17:11
Speaker
Well, Stan differentiated in his work, Stan Groff differentiated between low dose and high dose psychedelic therapy. First, we have to understand in psychedelic therapy, you're not taking a psychedelic and engaging the world. You're not taking a psychedelic and going to a concert. You're going into a highly protected, sheltered environment, protected from the outside world.
00:17:37
Speaker
completely focused internally. You're wearing eye shades, you're listening to very carefully selected music. The whole focus is on confronting whatever is emerging in your mind and letting it take you where your mind wants to go.
00:17:52
Speaker
Our understanding is that LSD and other psychedelics basically are amplifiers of consciousness. They don't take our consciousness in a particular way, they simply amplify consciousness. And so they make dimensions of our mind which are far removed
00:18:13
Speaker
more available to us. And so when you amplify your consciousness and then you sit in a contemplative manner and you focus on what's emerging in your mind, what often happens is that your consciousness will use this opportunity to cleanse itself, to purify itself, to empty itself of problematic experiences that it's carrying. So we would describe this as confronting the shadow.
00:18:39
Speaker
Basically, one begins to confront all the things that were you, that scare you, that terrify you. One confronts things coming from earlier in one's life, from childhood, things that have happened, traumatic experiences, all the way back to your infancy, all the way back to the womb.
00:19:06
Speaker
If one continues this process, the mind reveals that this is working with low dose therapy somewhere on the order of 50 to 150, maybe 200 micrograms. So if you keep this process up and you go back into deeper and deeper levels of your life, eventually one gets into what Stan calls the perinatal level of consciousness.
00:19:29
Speaker
where you begin to confront the deepest fears that all of us share. They're not personal, they're kind of universal, the fear of death, the fear of what happens to us when we die, the anxiety over whether there is any ultimate meaning or purpose to our life since we die, since everyone we love
00:19:49
Speaker
to dies, everything that we care about is destroyed, is there any larger purpose or project? And one goes through the death rebirth process, which often involves curiously reliving one's birth.
00:20:03
Speaker
And what emerges over time is that you are transcending the limits of your physical consciousness. So we get here by being born, we leave the physical world by dying. And so the birth and death are all complexly intertwined in the psyche. So when one is pushing beyond the limits of your physical memory,
00:20:26
Speaker
of your physical being, physical consciousness, one is involved in reliving how you got here as you transcend out of here, going into states of consciousness which transcend physical reality.
00:20:40
Speaker
And a critical piece of this is going through what Stan calls ego death, which is to say your physical personality, your body-mind ego dissolves, and you experience a loss of control and a death at that level.
High-Dose Sessions and Consciousness Layers
00:20:57
Speaker
And then when that process has completed itself, one awakens inside a spiritual reality, inside a deeper level of existence.
00:21:07
Speaker
And then if you continue this process, one begins to go deeper and deeper into that spiritual reality through the various levels of transpersonal consciousness, which Stan identifies as the psychic, subtle, and causal levels of consciousness. Now, a different protocol was developed later for working with terminally ill cancer patients. These are patients that were not trying to be healed,
00:21:34
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These are people who are going to die and they developed a high dose strategy working with LSD and high doses.
00:21:42
Speaker
somewhere between 300 and 500 micrograms. And the goal here, this was at the Spring Grove Hospital in Maryland. The goal here was not to digest all the different aspects of one's personal shadow and personal consciousness, but to break through that and to give these people an experience of transcendence, essentially to give them a glimpse of where they were going to be going.
00:22:09
Speaker
when their body dies. And it was very successful. It had a tremendous impact, a positive impact on death anxiety.
00:22:19
Speaker
So what I did, I came along and I'm not a psychologist and I wasn't really interested primarily in the clinical aspects of this work. I was a philosopher and I was interested in exploring the deeper dimensions of consciousness that this work made possible. So in the early high dose therapy, the sessions were limited to three sessions. That was the maximum that any one person could do. So I thought, okay,
00:22:47
Speaker
If you can do three high-dose sessions safely, then you should be able to do more than three safely. After three sessions of working with lower doses, I chose a regimen of working with high doses of LSD, partly for efficiency, partly because it was a dual-career marriage. It was hard to find time to schedule one session.
00:23:09
Speaker
And so I was still thinking in terms of this being a personal transformational process, I was thinking in terms of clearing out my personal karma so I could get to enlightenment faster. I thought if you work with higher doses and you really confronted your shadow,
00:23:28
Speaker
you would have basically be able to dissolve your karma. It was like eating a meal, taking bigger bites out of your karma in every session. Eventually, this whole model exploded as my work continued to deepen because after about three years of work, I was entering dimensions of consciousness
00:23:48
Speaker
and was confronting levels of shadow which far transcended my personal shadow or anything related to my personal life. I was tapping into the collective unconscious. So what I did to back up a little bit
00:24:05
Speaker
What I did was to do 73 high-dose sessions extended over 20 years. I worked for four years. I stopped for six years for reasons that I give in the book. And then I continued for another 10 years. I was doing about, on average, about five sessions a year. So every two and a half months or so, I would be doing a session. And what I found was that
00:24:34
Speaker
I went through repeating cycles of death and rebirth, about four or five cycles of death and rebirth. And I found that the deep spiritual reality or transpersonal reality has levels to it, many layers to it. And every time you enter a deeper level of spiritual reality or transpersonal reality, you have to go through another act of surrender. You have to let go of
00:25:03
Speaker
your identity at a deeper and deeper level. So you go through a series of death and rebirth experiences. I also found that
00:25:11
Speaker
Each level of consciousness operates at a higher level of frequency, so to speak. It's a much more intense, energetic level. So it's like if you're climbing a mountain, you have to adjust to higher and higher levels of altitude. And you have to acclimate systematically to that higher altitude. In mountain climbing, you're adjusting to less and less oxygen. In psychedelic work, you're adjusting to more and more energy.
00:25:41
Speaker
So you have to acclimate literally for your consciousness to stabilize and have coherent experiences at these deep levels of reality. You have to go through not simply a death experience, but you have to go through a
00:25:57
Speaker
a purifying purification process. You have to empty yourself of different levels of your being that's in a sense or operate at a lower level of frequency. And if you don't do this, your experiences at these deep levels will not be coherent. They will be fragmented. You can touch into these levels, but you won't be able to maybe recall them. You won't be able to remember them
00:26:25
Speaker
consistently and you won't have coherent experiences of these levels. But if you engage them conscientiously, if you engage them with focus and determination, my experience has been that your consciousness goes through this self purification process and your awareness at each level of consciousness gets clear and clear and clear so that you become operational.
00:26:53
Speaker
at a deeper level of reality. And if you keep pushing the boundary sooner or later, you're going to reach the border of that deeper level.
Interconnected Consciousness
00:27:02
Speaker
You'll go through another purification process, another death and rebirth process, and they'll be thrown into yet another level of reality that operates by different principles. It's governed by different physics, so to speak.
00:27:17
Speaker
the process continues. So basically, that's what I did as a philosopher. This was the philosophical adventure of a lifetime, the opportunity to explore the the universe or the mind of the universe through exploring
00:27:33
Speaker
through using the vehicle of my own consciousness, because what I discovered, in contrast to contemporary thought, that our consciousness is not individualized. It's not like we are an atom, that everything in my mind is simply a result of the experiences of my personal body.
00:27:54
Speaker
What I discovered is what many spiritual traditions have taught and many transpersonal explorers have discovered is that the bottom of our mind that there actually is no bottom.
00:28:08
Speaker
to our mind, that when you go deeper and deeper and deeper in your individual mind, you open up into the ocean of consciousness. You open up into an infinite ocean of consciousness. So it truly is the case that our individual mind is like a wave that arises out of an ocean of consciousness. And if you penetrate this wave, you will drop into this infinite ocean, which doesn't dissolve you immediately into oneness, but it dissolves you into the ocean
00:28:36
Speaker
and the exploration continues. That's awesome. Now, just to go back to the, let's say, the more beginning parts of the journey, and this is something that Groff talks about a lot, is the initial stage of working with LSD
00:28:57
Speaker
People generally explore or go into the perinatal level. And this is where various traumas surface all the way, including all the way back to birth trauma. But in your
00:29:17
Speaker
in dark night early dawn and in lsd and the mind of the universe you make you have a great analogy. Of explaining the coex systems as the dialogue or the emotions of a protagonist in a novel so with that said can you give us a deeper overview of what.
00:29:42
Speaker
The perinatal level actually is, because generally this is kind of the first thing that people get head on with in their LSD work. What is the perinatal level? What are co-ex systems? What are the four phases that Gruff discusses? And what is the therapeutic potential of allowing yourself to kind of get in that level and re-experience those, let's say, emotions?
00:30:11
Speaker
A co-ex system is a system of condensed experience. So what we find is that, you know, the psyche organizes its memories in many different ways. But one of the ways it organizes them is that it groups all of our life experiences according to its emotional content.
00:30:31
Speaker
according to its emotional themes. So the analogy I give in the book is, imagine if you took a novel and you underlined all the passages that have to do with fear in yellow and all the passages having to do with the protagonist's experience of greed in green, say in anger in red, and then you cut up the book
00:30:53
Speaker
and you took the protagonist's experiences and all you grouped all the green in one pile and all the yellow in another pile and so on and so forth that you would have all of their experiences of fear clustered in one pile and something like that happens in the psyche that when you
00:31:11
Speaker
When you encounter your shadow, you encounter your shadow in these clusters of condensed experiences. So you often get into it feels almost like a tornado. There's just so many layers and layers to it. And the outer layers
00:31:28
Speaker
are the most recent versions of those experiences. And as you get into the center of the COAC system, you get into the more and more elemental layers until eventually you get to the fundamental core, the original trauma, the original disturbance. And going through this process, you peel these COAC systems over time.
00:31:51
Speaker
And then eventually when you get to the core, you relive the core trauma. And when that happens, the entire COVID system has been dissolved. And so its influence on your life has basically been emptied. So you melt all your experiences related to fear. You melt all your experiences related to anger, so on and so forth. Now, what Stan found is that
00:32:20
Speaker
There are co-ex systems that relate to things that happen to you after you're born, but there are also co-ex systems that seem to be rooted in the very act of birth itself, so that the act of being born is a traumatic experience. Here the fetus is floating very peacefully and comfortably in the womb, assuming that the mother is taking good care of herself and her child in the gestation process in pregnancy.
00:32:48
Speaker
But then all of a sudden that environment becomes hostile. The water breaks and the wound begins to contract and the child begins to be put under enormous pressure which builds and builds until eventually it climaxes and the child being released from this pressure into a new environment with its mother and father.
00:33:12
Speaker
that in Stan broke this process, he found that there were kind of four stages of this process.
Perinatal Consciousness and COEX Systems
00:33:19
Speaker
And he labeled these the four perinatal matrices, which are co-ex systems that are rooted in the perinatal level of consciousness. And so the
00:33:31
Speaker
The first one that usually appears, they appear in different orders, but often the one that usually appears could be correlated with the beginning of labor where there is contractions, but no place to go. The cervix hasn't been dilated. Then there is intensification of these symptoms of contraction, but the cervix is now opened and there is a place to go. The death rebirth struggle begins.
00:33:57
Speaker
This culminates in the final expulsion from the mother, the experience of death and liberation, and then the experience of beatific bliss, perinatal matrix one of oceanic bliss and ecstasy.
00:34:15
Speaker
And so what we find is if you kind of step back and look at many people's experiences who have gone through this level, what we're finding is that people are basically confronting and digesting their entire life as a physical being, their entire life as a human being. They are digesting the experience that brought them from another reality into time and space.
00:34:44
Speaker
And so this is part of the process of basically allowing your consciousness to expand beyond the limits of your physical identity. So you shatter your physical identity, but you dissolve all the constellations of stress and traumatic experiences and anxiety that are involved in being born at the physical level. And then you open up into
00:35:14
Speaker
the world that lies beyond the physical level. But then the process doesn't stop there. It's not simply a matter of getting into physical, into spiritual reality, but then it's a matter of going deeper and deeper and deeper into what appears to be an infinite and unlimited ocean of possibilities.
00:35:39
Speaker
Yeah, you really described that really well. So it's obviously the experience of a psychedelic is a very complex, but we have what you just described as the perinatal level. So we also can consider the psychodynamic level. So lower doses, psycholithic therapy may elicit more psychodynamic experiences where the people in your life and your own emotions.
00:36:09
Speaker
This perinatal level goes deeper. So what then happens when you, um, I guess overcome or dissolve these, uh, co-ex systems or these kinds of this birth trauma, when you actually overcome all of that, what happens then? Then you open up into a process of remembering who you are, really who you are.
00:36:35
Speaker
underneath your physical incarnation, who you are underneath all your physical experiences. There is a process of engaging what you might think of as the deep structure of the universe. Now, of course, one way of in order to understand what really happens in these sessions, you have to understand what's happening in life normally, naturally, and that is
00:37:05
Speaker
reincarnation for me is a simple fact of life. So reincarnation tells us that when we die, we expand into another universe, and then when we're born, we contract into our egoic identity. At the end of that life, we expand into another universe, and then we contract into a smaller egoic identity. And this process goes on over and over again, century after century, millennia after millennia.
00:37:34
Speaker
What seems to happen when you work with an amplifying substance like LSD is that you accelerate that process and you deepen the process. So in a sense, when you go through ego death in this process, you go through a death experience, which is truly terrifying.
00:37:56
Speaker
It really does feel like you are physically dying. It feels like you are absolutely losing control. You've lost control of your life and you're going to die. And there is a fundamental way in which you do. Psychologically, you do die. But when you die, you don't simply cease to exist. You actually are reborn into the deeper landscape, into the deeper tapestry of consciousness.
00:38:24
Speaker
And so you begin to explore the world that you enter when you die physically. So that's why there's a strong correlation between people's experiences with deep psychedelic work
00:38:39
Speaker
and people who have near-death episodes. So people who sort of suddenly have a heart attack or something happens and their body stops or their body almost dies and their consciousness explodes into a deeper dimension for minutes at a time. And then they come back talking about this other world that they had contact with.
00:39:00
Speaker
And something like that happens with LSD work that you basically more slowly shake off your physical identity and open into this deeper spiritual universe.
Spiritual Reality and Enlightenment
00:39:14
Speaker
And if you return to that over and over again, again, working with very, very
00:39:19
Speaker
I mean, I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms every session, very, very high doses of LSD. Now, this is not a protocol that I recommend. I do not recommend that people do this for reasons I give in the book, but that's what I did. And those experiences kind of replicate the entry, the experiences that people who have near-death episodes have.
00:39:44
Speaker
you enter into this deeper dimension, you see yourself, you see your life on earth from the spiritual dimension. You begin to have contact with the way the world is organized in spiritual reality, that there is a structure to it, that there is an organization to it, and there is a
00:40:04
Speaker
There is a relationship. It's almost like a relationship of physics. There is a relationship between the way the spiritual world is organized and it is the spiritual world which gives birth to the physical world. The Big Bang, everything that exploded into existence 13.7 or 13.8 billion years ago,
00:40:28
Speaker
The entire intelligence and all the energy and all the power and the unfolding which takes place, all of that came from somewhere. It came from some reality that is not physical. Physics stops at that point and says we can't go any farther. But in deep states of consciousness, you can go farther. You can enter into the reality that gave birth.
00:40:52
Speaker
to the physical universe, okay? That's when you begin this, I think of it as a, first of all, a communion. It's because when you enter this reality, you don't take your ego, you know, cleaned up, buffed up. You don't take an ego into this reality and have an experience of that reality. You literally dissolve
00:41:16
Speaker
into that reality you lose your sense of a small reality and you dissolve into this larger reality and for the hours that the session takes place you are dissolved into that reality and then of course the the drug wears off and slowly your consciousness shrinks back into your ordinary state and if you've worked well if you've really created
00:41:43
Speaker
optimal conditions for this engagement. You come back with accurate memories, with strong recall,
00:41:51
Speaker
of where you've been. And it's important to write down your notes from your session within 24 hours. I had followed a very, very strict procedure that within 24 hours of every session, I wrote a detailed, accurate description of exactly what happened in this session because this window closes. And if you wait five days, a week, a month before you write it down,
00:42:16
Speaker
you're not going to remember everything is exactly as you can when you first come back and then if you do that over and over again you begin to get a very coherent travel log. Of your experiences in this deeper reality and what i found was that.
00:42:36
Speaker
When you approach the deep, the mind of the universe in this systematic fashion with the desire to know, a desire to understand, and you're asking it, teach me, show me what is real, show me what is there, that literally this consciousness, this massive infinite consciousness takes you in and it begins a systematic process of initiating you, of teaching you what's going on in this deeper reality.
00:43:06
Speaker
There was a couple of questions that came into my head as you started speaking, but I think what is clear is that drugs like LSD can certainly accelerate one's spiritual practice, but it's also very easy to, as you write in your work, it's very easy to think
00:43:27
Speaker
you have accomplished more than you have in a single session, what would you say are some of the most important practices that, other than keeping meticulous notes, of course, and analyzing your sessions, what other practices allowed you to contain these experiences and embody them on a day-to-day basis? Yeah.
00:43:52
Speaker
That's an important question, and it's a very important issue. Because stabilizing these states of consciousness and integrating your experiences in your earthly life are a real challenge. What we're finding is that it's not that difficult to break through into these dimensions, but to hold on to them and to integrate them. First of all, just to remember them.
00:44:15
Speaker
And then to try to integrate them and to incorporate the teachings into your life is a very, very important part of the work. So it's like half of the work is getting out and then half of the work is getting in and holding on to. One of the ways that this was expressed in my sessions, Spirit said there's the dying of seeing and the dying of keeping.
00:44:39
Speaker
The dying of keeping is the integrating of these experiences. So during all the years when I was doing this work, I was doing spiritual practice. I mean, I was basically doing meditation. I was doing spiritual practice in different traditions. Eventually, my spiritual practice centered in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition. But it began, I began with transcendental meditation. I did Vipassana meditation.
00:45:08
Speaker
I was raised in a Christian tradition. The teaching of Christianity influenced me very deeply. I was actually studying to be a priest for four years when I was in high school and early college. So I absorbed deeply the values of Christian compassion, self-sacrifice, so on and so forth. And I also incorporated elements from Eastern traditions, but it's really very important for lots of reasons.
00:45:37
Speaker
to have a strong spiritual practice in order to integrate and stabilize the experiences that you have in these short, very intense days. Because these psychedelic sessions open you to vast fields of awareness and knowing, but they also open you to vast fields of energy.
00:46:02
Speaker
And a daily practice is really important to be able to simulate these huge fluctuations is tidal waves of energy and tidal ways of knowing that sweet through you.
00:46:16
Speaker
And you have to have a context to digest them and slowly, you know, roll them over in your mind and hold them in your heart and really digest them. So grounding is really important. So the grounding of a spiritual practice, but other areas of grounding. I mean, as I didn't quite appreciate it so much at the time,
00:46:37
Speaker
but when i got you know at the end of my journey and was looking back i really appreciated that the stability of my career and the stability of my marriage and my responsibilities as a father you know every week i was in the classroom teaching my courses everyday i was with my children everyday i was within
00:46:59
Speaker
a primary relationship, a relationship with my wife. So this is a very, very stable grounding activities. I was grounded as a homeowner. I was grounded in my weekly lifestyle. And that really provided me the foundation that allowed me to open up into these radically transcendent states and then come back and hold them in a way which didn't
00:47:28
Speaker
caused me to be fragmented or didn't cause me to be inflated because one of the great dangers of working with psychedelics is psychic inflation. You can think because you've had a deep experience that you must be a very deep person or because you've had an experience where you've touched the divine that you must be a holy person. But that, of course, is an illusion. That's a fool's delusion.
00:47:58
Speaker
What's important in a psychedelic session in this respect is not what happens to you on the day of your session. It's what you can do in the days following your session when you're back in your ordinary state of consciousness. So you may experience profound wisdom in the day of your session, but how much of that wisdom can you really concretize and embody in the weeks following your session? So
00:48:24
Speaker
When you're raising children, when you're married, they really keep you grounded and they protect you from having an inflated sense of your value in the universe. In the end, you're just a human being shoulder with shoulder with all the other human beings in the world, getting by in the world, trying to do the best you can.
00:48:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I really like about you. You seem to have like zero kind of ego inflation, despite the fact that, you know, you've touched the mention that most folks, you know, they have to live, incarnate many, many lifetimes to get to that state, you know? But I'm curious, if you didn't have that many responsibilities and that weren't so busy with this and that, how often would you have gone into sessions if you could have
00:49:20
Speaker
Hmm. That's an interesting question. Never, never thought about that. I probably would have been tempted to go more often, but I'm glad I didn't because I found that going, when you completely blow your mind apart and drink deeply,
00:49:47
Speaker
from the power and the knowing of the deep universe. It's an extremely, it's not only a psychologically demanding experience, but it's a physically demanding experience. It makes tremendous demands on your body and on your subtle energy system, on what the Chinese would call your chi or the Indians would call your prana.
Balancing Psychedelics and Life
00:50:11
Speaker
It's a very, very demanding process to open up your entire system and close it down, open it up and close it down. And that's one of the reasons I really don't recommend this particular protocol. If I were starting over again, I would do it very differently. I would work with lower doses.
00:50:30
Speaker
I would only occasionally, you work with high doses of LSD. And because LSD is a kind of psychedelic that tends to push the cosmological ceiling, it tends to sort of push to the stars, I would balance that with working with other psychedelics like psilocybin or ayahuasca
00:50:50
Speaker
which are much more kind of body grounded kind of states of consciousness. They open your system up, but you're much more kind of grounded in your emotional body, in your physical body. So working with the psilocybin or body grounded psychedelics and occasionally with the cosmological kind of high ceiling psychedelics, that is, I think, produces overall a more solid and secure journey.
00:51:20
Speaker
But these are things that I understand now. I didn't understand these things when I was doing this work. When I was doing the work, it was like pedal to the metal, let's blow it out, go as far as you can go, drink as much of it as you can. And I think I not only
00:51:37
Speaker
I'm glad I didn't do it more frequently than I did, because it really takes time to assimilate these material. But I think probably I went farther than was healthy for one person to do. Even though I followed all the precautions, I really paid a lot of attention to my physical body, to stabilizing my world, keeping everything on an even keel. Even so, I think I bit off a bigger piece of the apple.
00:52:06
Speaker
than is wise to chew. It took me years and years after I finished my sessions to fully internalize them. And I don't really think I've finally internalized them even now. I think I'll be absorbing them for the rest of my life.
00:52:28
Speaker
And I think in deep ways, they have impacted not only the remainder of this incarnation, but they've impacted the entire trajectory of my soul's future incarnations.
00:52:45
Speaker
Yeah. Talking about the toll that it can take, just reading what a session day was like for you. No breakfast because of, you know, the potentially impending vomiting all day, add it. And then as soon as you're done, you're up all night documenting everything because you need to get it on paper as quickly as possible. So that sounds like more demanding than partying.
00:53:10
Speaker
out on the weekend going to clubbing. It's good that you took good care of yourself. It is very demanding and what happens is when you start to go past the early levels that you might touch in partying and you go into the deep levels,
00:53:28
Speaker
And you don't start again at the early levels. You start where you stop. So it's like climbing a mountain. You establish Base Camp 1, Base Camp 2, Base Camp 3. You're working at Base Camp 3 and above. These are extremely high energy experiences. I found over the years I had to take more and more precautions.
00:53:48
Speaker
I had to take more care of my body. I really made sure that my body was in good condition. I watched my diet very carefully. I would have massage to get my body nice and soft and pliant. I'd go to the chiropractor to make sure that my body was aligned because if you take a body that's out of alignment into these states, you're going to feel the pressures and pains that are living within your body.
00:54:18
Speaker
And in addition to that, I was doing spiritual practice, of course, and I would do very, very intense practice for days before my session. And I would do very intense extra spiritual practice in the days following, because this opening is so huge. You're tapping so deep into the universe.
00:54:40
Speaker
it's extremely demanding. And so the demands are not only on the weekend when you're doing it, but on the week before and the week after. And I found that it took the closing of that window, it closes in stages, it closes within 24 hours, but then it closes at a deeper level within three days and it closes over several weeks. And it really takes about
00:55:05
Speaker
a month before it's completely, absolutely closed again. That doesn't mean you're having psychedelic flashbacks or anything like that. It just means that your entire system opens and closes organically. And therefore, there's an underlying deep structure to that rhythm. So you really, really have to take care of your life at all the different levels. And it's not just, and I learned,
00:55:34
Speaker
that it's not just impacting you.
00:55:38
Speaker
Because consciousness is like, it's an ocean.
Impact on Collective Consciousness
00:55:43
Speaker
Consciousness, you know, your life is like a vibration within an ocean and, or maybe thinking of it as a lake. And when you do deep work like this, when you engage and set a deep ripple like that in motion, it ripples out around you in 360 degrees and it touches and influences the people that you have karmic ties to.
00:56:05
Speaker
so that I found that even though my students never knew I was doing this work, even though I never talked to them about it, never shared this with them, I found that some of my students began to be activated in ways that were directly related to what was happening to me personally in my session. And that was happening not because
00:56:28
Speaker
I was consciously willing it, or I was talking about it, or triggering it. It was happening simply because that's the nature of consciousness. All spiritual traditions teach this, that when you engage these deep dimensions, you're not just influencing your personal life.
00:56:47
Speaker
You influence the lives of the reality around you, the people around you. So I found that integrating my sessions, taking care of my person in the sessions was only one phase of it. I also had to take care of anyone around me who is being impacted by this work. So there is a social dimension to working responsibly with psychedelics.
00:57:12
Speaker
I like that you took it in this direction because I was just about to quote something from your book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, right? So basically, this is a quote you cite from Marie-Louise von Franz, a lifelong collaborator of Carl Gustaf Young.
00:57:36
Speaker
Jung had come to a similar conclusion about the collective import of deep transformative work. She wrote, whenever an individual works on his own unconscious, he invisibly affects first the group, and if he goes even deeper, he affects the large national units.
00:57:58
Speaker
or sometimes even all of humanity. Not only does he change and transform himself, but he has an imperceptible impact on the unconscious psyche of many other people. So that's perfect how you describe consciousness as a lake or an ocean.
00:58:17
Speaker
and we literally send ripples, waves, invisible waves that reach potentially the ends of the universe, if there ever were such a thing. So with this in mind, could you take us through what the, say, mid and later stages of your journey were like? What experiences did you start having?
00:58:45
Speaker
Well, it took me about two and a half years and 10 sessions to go through the psychodynamic and perinatal levels and to go through my first deep ego death experience. And I was quite surprised at what happened next.
00:59:04
Speaker
First, let me back up. In every session, as this energy builds inside of you, there are two phases to every session. There's a cleansing phase, which is then followed by ecstatic phase. So there's a purification stage where you begin to encounter
00:59:21
Speaker
really deep deep disturbances and if you surrender to that process if you don't flinch and back away but if you let yourself be drawn deeper and deeper into this pain whatever it is without understanding it just go into it eventually this will reach a peak the culmination and you'll go through some type of
00:59:42
Speaker
deep surrender, eventually into another level of death. And when that happens, you're drawn into a very spacious place, a transcendent place, where you move into the ecstatic portion of the session, where you have a very positive, and the teaching continues at that level.
01:00:03
Speaker
So what i was surprised after i went through ego death and i thought well okay i've i've re-assimilated much of my own personal shadow. What happened is that i entered a period that lasted two years.
01:00:18
Speaker
of what I came to call the ocean of suffering. I began to have experiences of vast collective suffering, and I was systematically taken into the suffering stage by stage by stage, deeper and deeper, until eventually I was experiencing
01:00:34
Speaker
hundreds of thousands of human beings or stretched over thousands and thousands of years, all of them in massive pain and anguish and anger and killing and destruction. At first I thought this represented a deepening of my personal ego death, but eventually this kept on for so long and involved so many people that I began to understand that
01:01:03
Speaker
what I was doing was engaging some aspect of the collective psyche of humanity. That not only do individuals have co-ex systems where they consolidate many, many years of experience in these thematic clusters, but that also applies to the collective unconscious. That the collective psyche or the mind of our species has an unconscious in which it stores all of its unintegrated
01:01:32
Speaker
life experiences. So all the trauma of war, all the trauma of droughts and famine, all the trauma of the terrible things that human beings have been doing to each other, those register and collect, not only at the individual level, but they register and collect at the collective level.
01:01:52
Speaker
And so eventually I came and it took me a long time to accept this idea because it sounded like ego inflation, even to claim it. But I think Marie-Lévie von Franz is right. When we do deep work,
01:02:08
Speaker
personal transformation opens into collective transformation. We're working on behalf of humanity. We're working on behalf of the entire species. And the healing which is taking place as we were literally draining the pain, not out of the personal psyche, but we are draining the pain out of the collective psyche. And remember that
01:02:31
Speaker
It's not like Chris Bache's private ego is draining this pain, but by this time Chris Bache has been shattered. My consciousness is vast and it's like the collective psyche is draining the collective pain out of the collective psyche. This went on for two years.
01:02:52
Speaker
On the positive side, when I went through each session, I went through a series of ecstatically beautiful, powerful experiences. In one whole year, I began to have experiences of experiencing my life from beginning to end as a completed whole, as a totality that was finished.
Archetypal and Universal Experiences
01:03:12
Speaker
It was both going to happen and it had already happened. And it gave me a deep understanding of
01:03:19
Speaker
what my life was about. And then for another year I was taken in a series of initiations deep into the universe, taken back into what appeared to be the very beginning of the universe, and was given a teaching about the evolutionary dynamic which eventually culminated in a series of experiences about
01:03:43
Speaker
where humanity is going, where humanity is in its historical development, what is the next stage in its evolutionary progression. But eventually the ocean of suffering came to an end and went through this profound final
01:04:00
Speaker
death experience there, and I was catapulted into what I came to recognize as what I would call archetypal reality. So there was a personal reality death, ego death, and there was a collective reality death at this level. I was catapulted into archetypal reality, and I began to have experiences which were very unnerving in the beginning because I had the experience
01:04:27
Speaker
that there is a level of reality that is more real than time and space. Over and over again when I went back to this reality I was in a domain that was more real than time and space and in some ways which was the generative matrix which produces time and space. It was like Plato's cave you know the man in Plato's cave where
01:04:50
Speaker
He's chained and he only sees the shadows of reality reflected on the cave, but eventually he leaves the cave and encounters the reality that's producing these shadows. It is as if I had entered a reality that was producing the reality that we know of as time and space. And then I spent about a year and a half exploring this dimension of reality and having many experiences of the collective psyche, learning how the collective psyche works,
01:05:19
Speaker
learning how it is that all of our individual minds are cells within this larger tissue of the mind of the species and that the species is part of the larger tissue of the mind of the planet, the mind of the universe.
01:05:36
Speaker
I spent about a year and a half exploring these dimensions and then I went through another death rebirth process and was catapulted into what you might call the domain of causal oneness. I was catapulted into a level of reality where
01:06:00
Speaker
all boundaries, all divisions, all divisions became permeable and I began to experience the universe as a singularity, as a single entity living and breathing as one so that everything taking place inside physical reality were simply
01:06:26
Speaker
small life forms that were basically transparent to the fundamental life of the universe that's living within it. It's like experiencing a forest.
01:06:38
Speaker
where there are thousands of trees and hundreds of different species of trees, but you're experiencing the life that flows through all of the trees, the sun and the moisture that flows through all of the trees and doesn't care whether it's nurturing a pine tree or an oak tree or, you know, doesn't care. It's only the one.
01:06:59
Speaker
So I had many experiences of oneness, experiences of what the Buddhists would call a shunyata, emptiness of self. Because when you're experiencing the world as one,
01:07:11
Speaker
You know that your individual life doesn't have private existence. Your individual life, it is individual, but it's open, and it's porous, and you're breathing in and breathing out constantly the larger reality of oneness. I had experiences of the primal void.
01:07:33
Speaker
the primal matrix out of which all reality emerges over and over again, microsecond by microsecond. From there, after about a year,
01:07:49
Speaker
in that reality. I know I'm going very fast through this material, but I went through yet another death and rebirth experiences, and I was catapulted into a reality of light. I had experienced cosmic light many times, but I was catapulted in a domain of light that was exceptionally clear, just hyper, hyper clear. Dimension of consciousness, it was
01:08:19
Speaker
clear crystalline clear beyond imagination it is the domain that buddhism calls dharmakaya the clear light of absolute reality i called it the diamond luminosity the domain of diamond luminosity an absolute ecstatic transcendent reality
01:08:46
Speaker
In that, over the last five years of my work and 26 sessions, I made contact with this reality. I dissolved in this reality only four times, four times in five years and 26 sessions. In between those four times, I was going through, again, deep, deep intense purifications, deep catharsis around just purifying and purifying and purifying.
01:09:15
Speaker
in order to be allowed to enter back into these hyper-clear, hyper-pure states of awareness. So I guess I would differentiate five different levels of reality that I went through over all this time. There's the personal level, which culminated in ego death, the collective level, where you're working basically cleaning some portion of the collective psyche of humanity, the archetypal level,
01:09:45
Speaker
then the level of causal oneness, and then the level of the diamond luminosity.
01:09:53
Speaker
It was a long journey. That is absolutely fascinating and I would highly encourage folks to check out the book or at least some of your videos where you discuss this in a little bit more depth because when we look at folks that have near-death experiences, when we see what the
01:10:18
Speaker
what the Tibetan Buddhists, when they talk about entering the bardo of death, they do discuss that we see a light, but most of us are not say developed enough to
01:10:33
Speaker
realize that's our own essential nature so do you think this could be a part of what the buddha experienced under the body tree this kind of experiencing this light do you think these experiences are something the buddhist the tibetan meditators these guys are experiencing getting into these states after you know years and years of meditation do you think it's possible without lsd
01:11:00
Speaker
It sounds arrogant, I know, to even suggest touching into that which the Buddha touched into, but I think it is. The cosmology of the understanding of the universe that emerges in psychedelic states is basically the same cosmology that emerges in the great mystical traditions of the world.
01:11:24
Speaker
the understanding of the Bardo, the understanding of the post-death domain, the understanding of the fundamental union and oneness that underlies all existence. We're tapping into the same reality. And it's really important to understand first that when you're working with psychedelics, you're tapping into this reality in a temporary manner.
01:11:50
Speaker
When you're working with meditation and the sort of slower contemplative methodologies, which take longer to mature,
01:12:01
Speaker
you gain access in a more abiding fashion to these realities. So I don't want to suggest in any way that my experiences of these realities were comparable in terms of their significance to the experiences of the great spiritual masters of our different spiritual lineages, not at all. But even to have temporary access to these realities change forever
01:12:33
Speaker
They change your life forever. They completely banish your fear of death. They revise your complete understanding of the world that you live in, of how the world works, and also these experiences
01:12:50
Speaker
are very useful to use in your daily meditation practice, that even have temporary access to some of these dimensions of reality, then can be used to deepen and accelerate your daily contemplative meditation practice.
01:13:10
Speaker
So I think there is a correlation there. I would place the diamond luminosity experience in what the Buddhists call extra samsara reality. That is, samsara is the world of individual existence, the world of cyclic existence. And so that includes everything in the physical universe where everything arises and falls, arises and falls.
01:13:33
Speaker
But also in spiritual reality, when you die, you enter the Bardo multiple levels of reality where everything is temporary. Everything is much longer than physical reality, but still everything is temporary. That's part of the world of reincarnation. But then it's possible to go outside that entire system, outside the system of death and rebirth, outside the reality of samsara.
01:14:03
Speaker
And I think that's what I was tapping into in the Diamond Luminosity work. And that's what is held as a possibility in all the deepest spiritual traditions. Dharmakaya is the highest level of reality that one taps into in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition. Again, I'm not a mystic. I'm not an enlightened being. Temporary access.
01:14:33
Speaker
is different than permanent access, all honor to the great masters who have abiding permanent access to these realities. But even just to touch them temporarily is a profound life-changing experience. Agreed. Agreed. And I like, again, that you exercise humility, but
01:14:59
Speaker
I think it's what they do say we all have the Buddha nature. The core of mind is our essential nature. I think the Tibetans also call it rigpa.
01:15:18
Speaker
But if we are all part of this universe, which is, like you say, it's all the divine, we must have the spark of the divine within us. So to be able to access it, whether it's for a second or a lifetime, is certainly significant, especially with our current egoic minds that have so many layers
01:15:43
Speaker
so many layers of complexity that obscure this essential nature. So I think it's good that you're humble, but these are very important experiences. And we know there's some research being done that psilocybin can induce a mystical experience in people. And these are very important things, especially in our world today. And this is actually, maybe let's go a little bit back from the diamond luminosity
01:16:12
Speaker
In terms of, you didn't make some... Before we go quite there, let me add something that you just said. In my own sequence of experiences, after getting in contact with the diamond luminosity domain and that extra samsaric reality, my experiences actually pivoted and began to lead to a deeper internalization of that reality, so that eventually it brought me back into
01:16:42
Speaker
right here, right now, my present life, my present mind, and it uncovered this Buddha nature, this essential nature, which is right at the very center of my mind and at the center of all of our minds. It is a hyperclear
01:17:04
Speaker
transparent reality out of which all emotions arise, out of which all sensation arises, out of which all thought arises. It neither begins nor ends. It's not private. It's universal. It is our essential nature. When we tap it, we know that we're tapping into the essential nature of all beings
01:17:27
Speaker
Uh, it, it doesn't change. It doesn't become better. Uh, it neither begins nor ends. It has no boundaries. And yet it is the most fundamental level of our own being.
01:17:44
Speaker
And to tap into it is like finding diamonds in your pocket. I mean, it's just the most precious thing in the world. And here it is right in the center of our own mind. And it's impossible to be without it. We don't pay attention to it usually. We don't
01:18:00
Speaker
rely on it, but there it is. It's always waiting for us. It's always there. It's always nurturing us. And it's patiently waiting for us to turn our attention away from the world outside of us, back into the world that's within us. And when we go deeply enough, we find this extraordinary truth waiting for us. And I want to differentiate
01:18:27
Speaker
You don't have to go through all the experiences that I went through in order to find this. You know, I differentiate the use of psychedelics for spiritual awakening, which is what we're talking about here, and using psychedelics for cosmological exploration. You don't have to go through archetypal reality. You don't have to go back to the birth of the universe. You don't have to explore the deep structure of bardo reality.
01:18:54
Speaker
in order to clear your life in a way that allows you to have immediate daily access to this fundamental nature that's living inside of you, that is what you are at the deepest level.
Human Evolution and Spiritual Awakening
01:19:07
Speaker
And so I just want to make clear that... Getting goosebumps. Yeah. You know, it's like what I did
01:19:18
Speaker
really is best described in terms of the project of cosmological exploration. I wanted to understand the deep structure of the universe. I wanted to understand how things work, but you don't have to go through that in order to rest in your own essential nature. That is a much more kind of targeted project in one's spiritual practice.
01:19:45
Speaker
Well, you are a scholar, academic philosopher, so I think most humans cannot undertake what you did, even if they wanted to. I'm sure there's a few guys out there that will attempt to follow in your footsteps, and God bless them and best of luck to them.
01:20:05
Speaker
But I don't think most people will have the resolve to go through because a byproduct of your experiences as beneficial they are to your soul's evolutionary trajectory, you've also contributed
01:20:26
Speaker
a significant amount of thought to the transpersonal field, critical appraisal of the near-death literature, the reincarnation work. You've made a great contribution as part of your work, right?
01:20:47
Speaker
But there's actually quite a few directions that I want to take it, but I'd like to actually go back because we will definitely come back to the light and the diamond luminosity. I feel like this is a topic that needs a little bit more discussion before we finish up. But let's just go back to a little bit earlier in the journey. So in the book,
01:21:08
Speaker
I believe the chapter was called The Birth of the Future Human. So you did mention a little bit about that. But can you tell us what visions you had about the trajectory of our human evolution? Well, what I'm going to describe now, I know sounds fantastic. I know it sounds seemingly arrogant to even
01:21:35
Speaker
suggest that a human being can have these kinds of experiences, but I have no recourse except to simply describe what happened. And I think that chapter, The Birth of the Future Human, is probably the most important chapter in the book. And it's the most surprising to me and unexpected, because when I began this work, I thought this was about my personal transformation, my personal, you know, whatever, whatever. But
01:22:02
Speaker
What I found was as the work deepened, once I reached a certain point, once I, about 23 sessions into the process,
01:22:12
Speaker
When I would move into the ecstatic portion of the session, I began to be shown things and what I was being shown was consistent. Session after session, starting from the 23rd session, going all the way to the 70th session, periodically from time to time, I would be drawn deep into what I would call deep time. Deep time is a level of
01:22:38
Speaker
of reality where time behaves differently than it does inside time and space. I was taken outside linear time into deep time, not into eternity, not where there is timelessness, but into a deeper dimension of time itself. And I was shown things
01:22:59
Speaker
about where humanity had come from and where it's going. First, I was shown that the entire evolutionary project is rooted in a profound cosmic love and that everything that's happening to us inside time and space is part of this process of creation and creation emerges out of love and it's always suffused with love. And that I was shown over and over again
01:23:29
Speaker
that humanity is coming to a significant shift in its future, a profound catharsis point, a bifurcation point in its history, and that we were on the verge of a profound spiritual awakening, a profound
01:23:50
Speaker
transition in our history as a species. I began to realize that nature simply isn't trying to awaken individual human beings.
01:24:04
Speaker
nature is in the process of awakening the entire human species, that there is something taking place at the very core of our collective psyche. And then once again, we're looking at a species which is reincarnating over and over again, every hundred years or so, every just, you know, life pulsating with life, pulsating with life, and that we were evolving not only individually, but we were evolving collectively.
01:24:33
Speaker
And I kept being shown we're coming to a turning point, a major turning point, a profound awakening of spirituality within the human heart, a profound tapping into the oneness that underlies all existence. Because the ego is a magnificent thing. The ego is beautiful. The ego is individual awareness.
01:24:58
Speaker
The ego lives in a divided reality. So there's your reality, my reality, everybody's in separate realities. But oneness is the reality that we all emerge out of. Oneness is our common core reality. And there was coming, it showed an explosion of oneness within the human heart. And a society which is rooted in oneness, in the experience of oneness,
01:25:23
Speaker
creates a different social structures and different social forms than a society which is rooted in the division of ego. So I kept being shown that there is this turning point coming, that there was this spiritual awakening coming, but it never explained to me how it was ever gonna happen, how this was going to take place. And then in 1995, in my 55th session,
01:25:50
Speaker
I went through what was to me a seminal experience. I went through into deep time, I went into the deep future, and I went through the death and rebirth of our species. I went through, instead of ego death or collective death, I went through, I experienced a major global crisis.
01:26:14
Speaker
that was being driven by ecological crisis, being driven by global climate change and all the derivatives of global climate change, but which triggered a crisis in all of our governing structure, all of our economic structures, all of our political structures, that basically this was a crisis
01:26:37
Speaker
that was putting enormous pressure on the human species and causing enormous suffering for the human species. I was experiencing this not as Chris Bache, but I experienced it as the species itself. I had dissolved into the species mind.
01:26:54
Speaker
I experience a period of increasing loss of control, inability to control the outcome of circumstances, inability to control the circumstances of one's life, families being torn apart, just a crushingly painful experience.
01:27:11
Speaker
And what I saw, what I experienced or what I was shown was these experiences were so widespread. It wasn't like any other period of history before. If there is a hurricane that impacts one country or one part of the world, it doesn't touch the other parts of the world. But this was an experience that was touching all the people on this planet, wherever they live.
01:27:33
Speaker
And that means it was registering not only in their individual lives, but it was registering in the collective psyche itself. And it was hyper-energizing. The suffering that we were going through was hyper-energizing the field of the collective psyche and driving it into what physicists would call nonlinear conditions. So physicists differentiate between systems that are operating in a linear mode
01:28:02
Speaker
And then systems which become so highly energized, they operate into a nonlinear mode. And when systems are in nonlinear modes, things can happen that can't happen in linear conditions. Small changes produce large outcomes. Things can happen very, very fast. And nature pulls out from within it higher forms of integration, higher forms that were always potentially present but weren't there before.
01:28:32
Speaker
I mention this because what happened in the session is that as this pain got worse and worse, we came to a point where it looked as if we were going to die. This was a massive extinction event for the species. But just when we had gotten to that breaking point, the storm, as it were, passed and we survived.
01:28:58
Speaker
And when we began to pick ourselves up off the ground, so to speak, and rebuild our lives, we were different. We had been changed. There was something about this profound catharsis, this profound inheriting and shedding of the karma of our past as a species, something about the way this trauma had broken us down and forced us into
01:29:29
Speaker
into a new openness of heart, into a new depth of mind, into a new depth of sharing with other human beings. The way that happens in a crisis, you know, when there is a huge social crisis, suddenly people are helping each other. They're working together. This was happening and it opened up a future. I saw a future emerging. I experienced a future emerging where human nature,
01:29:59
Speaker
had been changed. It wasn't just that our political system had been changed, our industrial system had been changed, but the fundamental core of human nature had gone through a pivot and we were now operating out of a different
01:30:15
Speaker
collective psyche. We were operating out of a collective psyche that knew things that previously only advanced spiritual beings knew. We had access to the universe which paralleled the access that the great saints and saviors of history had had, but now it had been sufficiently internalized
01:30:39
Speaker
that had become part of our DNA, so to speak. We were literally spiritually awakening. We had awakened into oneness. And when we began to move forward, we built a different society. This is what I came to call the birth of the future human. That's, I think, what's happening in history. We have entered now the labor
01:31:02
Speaker
of birthing the next iteration, the next formation of the future human. This future human has been gestating inside us for thousands and thousands of years as we live and die and live and die and reincarnate again and again. We have been growing and developing and growing and developing. But the ego still tends to dominate our lives and our choices. But it was as if in this crisis, something shattered, something opened,
01:31:32
Speaker
And our deep consciousness, our soul consciousness exploded forward in the human psyche. And we began to live out of a different psychological basis, and we began to create a different world. And then later, after this 55th session, in the 70th session, again, I was taken deep into the future and was given the experience of the future human.
01:32:01
Speaker
I dissolved into this archetype of the future human. And if I try to describe this being
01:32:10
Speaker
I'll probably end up crying just because this being is so magnificent. We are giving birth to a new child in the universe. This being was extraordinarily magnificent. A heart that had been healed of all the traumas, of all the wars and all the terrible things we've been doing to each other at our lower level of development. A heart that was profoundly encompassing and encompassed the whole breadth of the human family and a mind
01:32:40
Speaker
that was profoundly clear, able to download information from the mind of the universe, capable of knowing things, of sustaining levels of awareness that previously only great geniuses and great spiritual beings had been able to sustain. This was an awakening which was changing the very foundation.
01:33:03
Speaker
of life on this planet. This is I think what we have entered. I mean, I think the COVID-19 perhaps is simply the overture of a crisis which is going to deepen as global climate change impacts us at deeper and deeper levels. We know we're going into a hard time.
01:33:21
Speaker
We know we're going into a time of deep, deep disruption. What's important to understand, I think, from a spiritual perspective, is what's actually taking place. What's actually taking place is that we're in the process of burning off a huge amount of personal and collective karma.
01:33:42
Speaker
We are burning off the consequences of the choices that we have been making as a species while we have been operating out of a private consciousness, out of an individual consciousness, where I can make my life better if I push off the pain and suffering onto other persons. But now we are beginning to create a profound sense of oneness consciousness
01:34:05
Speaker
where we are beginning to build a world which truly does work for all. This is a spiritual transformational process. It's an evolutionary process and it's a process which is being driven
01:34:19
Speaker
not so much at the individual level. Individuals are cooperating with it, but it's being driven by the intelligence of the universe itself, just as it has driven all the other quantum jumps that have taken place in the evolutionary process. It's likewise now taking humanity into this deep jump in its archetypal structure. We're living in hard time.
01:34:47
Speaker
but we are living in extraordinarily important and times which will lead to a magnificently beautiful outcome. If we do our jobs well, if we really dig deep and do our jobs well. I think you like to say that we chose to be here.
Embracing Mortality and Reincarnation
01:35:04
Speaker
Yes. When we do more, we chose. Yes. I think every human being on this planet before they incarnated,
01:35:13
Speaker
in spiritual reality, they could see what we were getting into. They could see what they were getting into, and they chose to be part of it. So there are no victims here. There are just people, actors in a place, so to speak, who made conscious choices to be on this planet during this time when it is going through this convulsive period. In the end, when we die, we don't die. I mean, we die clearly, and there is mourning to be done.
01:35:43
Speaker
But at a deeper level, the soul doesn't die. And at a deeper level, we come back. We keep coming back and we continue to participate. And this is how life works.
01:35:57
Speaker
We are going through a process and humanity will be here for millions of years, for billions of years yet. I mean, we are evolving in the life of the universe. We're being taken somewhere extraordinary. And even though my personal Chris Bache won't live to see it, my soul will participate in later reincarnations, as we all will. It's a deep. And because we all chose to be here,
01:36:28
Speaker
I think we should get past quickly the anxiety of being here. We can simply roll up our sleeves and get to work doing the work that we chose to do before we incarnated.
01:36:45
Speaker
And this is perfect. Again, you set me up perfectly for what I wanted to discuss next. I've been thinking about death a lot lately, which for many of my peers would be like, what's wrong with you? Are you depressed? But I think this is such an important thing to think about and even more importantly, get over.
01:37:10
Speaker
So you can get on with your mission, your intent that you came with here. So I know you've said this in other places, but I would like to share this with my audience. And you already kind of mentioned some stuff, but when you think about your own personal death as Chris Beige, how do you think about that?
01:37:40
Speaker
Well, one of the consequences of doing this work is that I have no fear of death whatsoever. In fact, death is something I'm looking forward to. I'm not eager to push it. I'm not going to run off and kill myself, but I have no fear of it because I have already tasted the world that I'm going into when I die. And to be afraid of death is to be trapped inside the physical world
01:38:10
Speaker
and to be trapped in the illusion that the physical world is the only world that's real.
01:38:15
Speaker
when so many areas of research are showing us that this is just simply not true. The physicists have shown us that 96% of the universe is invisible dark matter and dark energy. So only 4% of the universe is physical matter, is manifesting as physical matter. Near-death episode research is showing us again and again that when we die, we enter an extraordinarily beautiful dimension
01:38:42
Speaker
We enter, we return home, so to speak, to the reality that we were in before we incarnated. Reincarnation research is showing us that we go back and forth over and over again between the spiritual reality and the physical reality, not because we're being punished, but because we are choosing to participate in the conscious creation of this species in this conscious universe.
01:39:09
Speaker
I'm not afraid of dying. I look forward to it in the sense that, of course, I look forward to graduating. I look forward to returning to the domain of bliss. It's kind of like when we're born, the hard work begins. When we die, we graduate into returning to a deeper level of knowing, to a deeper spiritual reality. Now, of course,
01:39:38
Speaker
If you go through a deep enough spiritual death and rebirth in your physical life, then you don't have to die physically in order to die psychologically. There are beings, great beings, who are in their physical body, but they are already living the bliss of spiritual reality inside their physical existence. And I think this is where we're going. We literally are creating heaven on earth in that
01:40:09
Speaker
By going through our own developmental process, we are physically alive on Earth, but inwardly, spiritually, psychologically, and even physically in some ways, we become so transparent to the infusion of the spiritual world
01:40:31
Speaker
that we are literally mingling heaven and earth inside the vessel of our physical body so that when we speak about someone who is spiritually awakened or spiritually liberated, another way of thinking about that is they have simply become transparent to the energies of the spiritual universe. They don't have to die in order to die spiritually. They are already living
01:40:59
Speaker
in the spiritual world inside their physical body. And when you have enough of these experiences, when you go through death and rebirth often enough, one of the things you learn is that you can't die.
01:41:13
Speaker
The essence of what you are can't die. Chris Bache will die. The shell of Chris Bache will die. The physical form will die. But the essence of the individual does not die. The essence of the individual continues to live in an even greater and more luminous and more love-soaked reality. So if there were any one thing that I wish I could bring from my work and
01:41:40
Speaker
and give it to people, it would be the loss of the fear of death. That's so important, I think. Now, when you enter the bar, though, and you see the light,
01:42:01
Speaker
Maybe this is a question that you cannot answer at the level of Chris Beige, but what do you think you will do when you see the light, when you merge with the light, when you become the light? Do you think you will ever come back in human form? Well, I've decided to put that decision in the hands of the being that I will be after I die.
01:42:32
Speaker
I have spent so many days exploring the beauty of that spiritual universe at so many levels that naturally there is in me a profound desire, even a need to explore that universe more. And there is a longing to enter more deeply into this magnificent universe.
01:43:00
Speaker
So naturally, I would rather be there than be here. But I basically trust that when I'm there, I'll know better than I could know here what would be the best thing for me to do and how to support our collective developmental process than I could know here. So I just have rolled that decision into my
01:43:29
Speaker
into my soul, into the consciousness that will hold Chris Bache's life and merge it with all the other lives that this soul stream has had. And I'll let that decision be made then. That's wise. So just as we wrap up, maybe let the listeners know why you decided to stop your sessions in 1999, please.
01:44:00
Speaker
Well, as I explained in the book, I stopped for two reasons. One was pain and one was heartache. Basically, as I've mentioned,
01:44:14
Speaker
These experience, these states of consciousness are so intense. They involve so much of an increase of our energy. I found that my physical system was running very hot. My subtle energy system was running very hot. I was having more and more difficulty integrating the sheer energy.
01:44:37
Speaker
that it takes to enter these states in my physical incarnation. And I did lots of spiritual practice that helped, but in the end I began to understand that I was really running too hot and I needed to stop and let my
01:44:53
Speaker
my body calmed down to let my subtle energy system calm down. There was no pathology. I was not having any flashbacks or anything like that, but I needed to sort of cool down some, so to speak. But that's not the main reason I stopped. The main reason I stopped was heartache. Once you have known the joy of dissolving into light, of becoming light,
01:45:22
Speaker
Once you've known the joy of dissolving so deeply into the crystalline body of the divine, coming back into time-space, at least into the incarnation that I have, the limitations of my present incarnation, coming back into this time-space reality is just painful.
Balancing Transcendence and Existence
01:45:42
Speaker
It's so difficult to go from such exquisite intimacy with infinite being back into
01:45:52
Speaker
private finite existence. The going out and coming back was becoming too hard. And eventually I asked the universe and I called my beloved. I asked my beloved never to take me back this deeply until I could stay with her forever. And that's when I stopped the sessions, I was surprised by what happened next.
01:46:23
Speaker
I found that it took years. I thought I had been given so many gifts. I'd had so many blessings given me that I could simply stop my session, step back, and I had a wealth just to digest for the rest of my life. But what I found instead, that's true. That's part of it. But the other part of it was that I found I had in me a deep and profound longing to return.
01:46:51
Speaker
to these states of diamond luminosity. And I knew I couldn't return to them. It wasn't good for me to return to them anymore in this incarnation. I knew I would not go back there again until I died. And if I took a massive dose of LSD today, I would not return to these dimensions. It takes years and years and years of sustained work to develop the energy and the momentum to enter these states of being.
01:47:20
Speaker
So I knew I was waiting until my physical life died before I could really return. And there was a tremendous unfulfilled kind of longing for more communion. As long as I was returning to these states periodically once a year or so,
01:47:41
Speaker
This imbalance had not manifested, but once I stopped, I realized that there was an imbalance that I had created between too much transcendence and not enough eminence. Now, the entire physical universe is the body of the divine. It's not like I was going into the divine and coming out of the divine, but I was going into the transcendent divine and coming back into the physical divine, into the imminent divine.
01:48:10
Speaker
And it took me about 10 years to really make my peace with this and to really get completely consolidated to being comfortable
01:48:24
Speaker
and to be at peace living inside the physical universe again in my physical condition. But I also discovered that part of the sadness that I experienced in ending my sessions was that my culture did not allow me to talk about these things.
Cultural Restrictions and Personal Integration
01:48:41
Speaker
I just, you know, because psychedelics are illegal, I couldn't talk about it at the university. I'm a philosopher and I love to teach, but I wasn't allowed to do philosophy drawing from these very important experiences. I could not share them. I could not talk about them. And if you're not allowed to talk about these deep and profoundly important things, it tends to make you sick inside. So for me,
01:49:07
Speaker
finally giving myself permission to tell the story of this journey, to share it with other people, not because I'm special in any way, but simply that these experiences might be useful to other people in their own spiritual journeys and their own social journeys.
01:49:25
Speaker
that actually represented a process of putting together the two halves of my life that I had separated. I had separated my academic life from my spiritual life and now I was beginning to put them together and to bring myself into wholeness again. So the heartache that I experienced when I stopped my sessions has begun to be soothed
01:49:56
Speaker
And as this integration process has deepened in the writing of the book and in the beginning to have conversations like the one we're having, something interesting has been set in motion. It is as if the divine is not waiting for me to come back to it when I die, but it is as if the divine is beginning to come for me here.
01:50:22
Speaker
So there is a deepening sense of peace, a deepening sense of permeability to the ever-present divine dimension of life, even inside the nuts and bolts of our physical existence. Beautifully said.
01:50:51
Speaker
Chris, I want to thank you for your work. I was going over LSD and the mind of the universe over the weekend. Almost every third page in this book is dog-eared and the top is double dog-eared in certain places where it's really important for me to go back.
01:51:11
Speaker
I have a list of probably a couple of dozen authors whose work I need to investigate that came out of you. I want to thank you for bringing them all to our attention, for synthesizing their work, for undertaking this exploration of yours and bringing it to the world. I really want to thank you for that.
01:51:34
Speaker
and I really appreciate your time. Just before you can tell us where to find you and you're working, tell us, in terms of continuing your teaching, what is your plan for the future? Do you want to plan to run more books? You were saying something about workshops. What's your plan for the next, whatever, few years?
Future Plans and Conclusion
01:51:59
Speaker
Well, I'll tell you.
01:52:03
Speaker
When I wrote LSD in the Mind of the Universe, or as I prefer the title, Diamonds from Heaven, I had a deep sense of closure. I felt like I had finished my life's work. I had done what I came here to do in sharing this information.
01:52:23
Speaker
But I love to teach. I love to be with the people. COVID-19, of course, has interrupted all of those things, but I love to be with the people. And I love to explore these topics in conversation. So I hope opportunities will occur. I look forward to entering into retreats, to do retreats with people, just to have, to open up the sort of psychedelic conversations in circle.
01:52:54
Speaker
so that I can not only talk about the experiences that I have, but that other people can have the opportunity to talk about the experiences that they have had, because clearly all of our experiences together
01:53:06
Speaker
are more important than any one person's experiences by themselves. So I hope that to be doing retreats, you know, shorter retreats, longer retreats, week-long retreats. I'm not sure how this is going to materialize, but I hope that after the pandemic kind of eases, there will be opportunities. I mean, I've been
01:53:33
Speaker
I'm not very good at self-promotion and I'm kind of adverse to self-promotion, so I don't even have a website developed yet. But if people want to contact me, they can contact me at the
01:53:46
Speaker
email address, it's on the back of my book. It's C. M. Bache, my initials and my name at ysu.edu, which is my university email address. And within a couple of months, my website should be up. And the name of that website will be chrisbache.com. So if someone wants to reach me, they'll be able to reach me there.
01:54:11
Speaker
and they'll be able to keep in touch with what teachings I'm doing, where, or what talks I'm giving at chrisbeish.com. Awesome. And your books can be found. Can you briefly just summarize your books? I know we touched on a couple of them, but can you just briefly see if we can pick people's interest to explore on their own?
01:54:36
Speaker
Well, there are four books. Gee, I hope there's not more books coming. You never know. The first book is Life Michaels on reincarnation. The second book is a book called Dark Knight Early Dawn.
01:54:54
Speaker
which was published by the State University of New York Press and Academic Press. And it's a, you know, it's a challenging book. I mean, I'm really kind of using all my academic muscle, but I'm also beginning to share my psychedelic experiences and I'm trying to integrate psychedelic research, near-death episode research, and out-of-body research, the work of Robert Monroe. So I'm really kind of, it's a major kind of exploration
01:55:25
Speaker
of the implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness. And then I wrote a book called The Living Classroom, because as I mentioned, my students were being impacted by my own psychedelic work, and I began to understand that there are fields of consciousness that grow up around groups, and that it wasn't simply that they were having resonant experiences with me or that somehow I was triggering these experiences in them,
01:55:53
Speaker
But the groups of learning, there were fields of learning that were growing around my courses and that were influencing the learning of new students as they entered these courses. And so I wrote a book called The Living Classroom, which was also published by SUNY Press. And all these books are available on Amazon. And then
01:56:14
Speaker
Finally, I've written LSD in the mind of the universe, which really is kind of coming out of the psychedelic closet and really laying out what has really been
01:56:26
Speaker
the driving source of inspiration behind all of my work. Because even though I don't talk about psychedelics in life cycles, and I don't talk about psychedelics in the living classroom, once you know the full story of my psychedelic work, you can understand how those books
01:56:47
Speaker
came out of that work and express that work. And even though I integrate it with all of the scientific research and the philosophical research that's present in those books, experientially, the driving inspiration came out of my psychedelic work. There is an academic work. Thank you. Academia.edu is basically where all of my articles that I published
01:57:14
Speaker
can be found at that website. So if you go to academia.edu and just punch in Chris Sembesch, you'll get to a page where you have access to all of my research.
01:57:27
Speaker
Yeah, we'll have all the links in the episode show notes. Yeah, actually just to, in terms of your, just to go back to your, it's a great body of work because like I said already, you've synthesized so much. And what we were saying before we started is that bookcase behind you, you actually gave away more than half, I think two thirds of your books after you retired. So I said it to my girlfriend earlier today, I said, this guy,
01:57:56
Speaker
I'm interviewing today. Not only is he twice my age, but the books you and me have read, this guy's probably read like a hundred times more books, right? So it's truly, truly an honor to converse with you over the last couple of hours. Thank you so much for spending the time with us, Chris. And yeah, God bless. Thank you.
01:58:21
Speaker
Thank you, Christian. It's a pleasure, a deep pleasure and an honor to be with you and to be with your listeners today, truly. Thank you for listening to Connecting Minds.
01:58:44
Speaker
We hope you enjoyed this conversation and found it interesting, illuminating, or inspiring. For episode show notes, links, and further information on our guests, please visit christianjordanov.com. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with someone who might also enjoy it. Thank you for being here.