Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Christopher M. Bache, PhD. Chris is a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University where he taught for 33 years. He’s also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and he’s on the Advisory Council of the Grof Legacy Training. Chris has written several books including Dark Night, Early Dawn, The Living Classroom, and a book that I think is a type of underground classic: it’s called LSD and the Mind of the Universe. I heard about this from several people who said, “Tami, pick up this book. You will read every page.” And it’s true. Chris, if there’s ever an episode that truly is “insights at the edge,” it’s this episode with you on LSD and the mind of the universe. Welcome.
Christopher M. Bache, PhD: Hi, Tami. It’s a pleasure to be here with you this evening.
TS: Tell us a little bit right here at the beginning. What prompted you to engage—ready for this?—over 20 years in 73 high-dose LSD sessions that were structured in a specific way for the purpose of deep spiritual awakening and exploring the nature of the cosmos? What inspired you to engage in such, what we’ll learn, was really an arduous undertaking?
CB: I had just finished graduate school. I got my PhD from Brown University in philosophy of religion. I had published my dissertation in a series of articles and was looking for where to take my work next. And at that point in my life, I met the work of Ian Stevenson in reincarnation research at Virginia. And more importantly of Stan Grof. And as soon as I read Realms of the Human Unconscious, which had just been published, this was in ’78 when I started, I immediately saw the profound implications for Stan’s work, for philosophy of religion, not just for psychology. And I knew I wanted to get involved in doing this work.
So even though LSD had been made illegal by that time, had been made illegal in 1970, I chose to conscientiously break the law and to begin a series of rigorously structured, following Stan’s protocol, of LSD sessions. I chose after three medium-dose sessions to work at high doses. This is a protocol I don’t recommend today—I would be much gentler on myself if I were doing it over again, but at the time I did—this is what I was doing to explore, to accelerate my own spiritual development. And then quickly it evolved into engaging the deep structures of human evolution and trying to support humanity’s spiritual development and then exploring this marvelous universe that we are part of.
TS: You write towards the beginning of the book, “In the end what’s important is not the method of exploration used, but what this method shows us about the extraordinary universe we live in.” And that’s what I want to focus on in our conversation is really the discoveries that you made. And why don’t we start off with the title of the book, LSD and, here we go, the Mind of the Universe. I’m not sure everyone even can track with you there. The universe has a mind? Tell us what you discovered about this.
CB: As I came to experience it, I experienced consciousness as like an infinite ocean. And when we open ourselves in deep psychedelic states, it’s like our mind is a seed catalyst that we drop into this ocean and it crystallizes a set of experiences out of this infinite potential. And by absorbing these experiences and internalizing them and learning what we are being offered, we’re being taught, we’re changed, we’re purified, we’re changed inwardly. And then when we drop that changed mind into this infinite potential, it triggers an even deeper set of experiences out of its infinity.
I always experienced myself as engaging an intelligence, a consciousness that was directing my sessions. I did not control what was unfolding in my sessions. I was always yielding and following a lead that came from deeper levels of consciousness. And as the journey continued, the levels of consciousness that I was entering deepened several times, multiple times. And so what do we call this infinite consciousness? It’s been called many things in the world’s mystical traditions. I hesitate to call it God, though I do refer to it as the divine, because God has so many layers of historical overlay, which I wouldn’t want to affirm.
So just to give them some sense of the approximation of the vast scale and scope of this consciousness, I call it the mind of the universe. Just as the universe has a body, it has a mind. As our body is a product of our universe, our mind is also a product of the universe. And when we sink deeply into our consciousness, we come out into a vast consciousness, which you can think of as the divine consciousness or you can think of it as the mind of the universe.
TS: Now you used this word “purification,” and I referred to the 73 journeys that you went on as having a quality of arduousness to it, at least it read that way to me as you include much of the descriptions of what you went through in each one of these journeys. In the beginning what you’re writing about is seizures, vomiting, convulsions. It sounded really rough. Why was that, do you think now in retrospect as you look back, why was all of that physical and energetic purification necessary?
CB: There are many levels of answers to that. But basically if we want to move into deeper intimacy with the consciousness of the universe, we’re moving into states of consciousness which are large, which are vast and operate at a much higher level, a much higher frequency, much higher energy level, and our egoic consciousness, the consciousness which surrounds our body in a sense and which is the consciousness that we are operationalizing as egoic consciousness, is just too small. We have to let go of that consciousness.
Some people find that easier and more difficult, but letting go of that consciousness and dying at the egoic level and entering into spiritual reality, I found, is actually the first of many cycles of death and rebirth, because the universe has many levels and many dimensions to it. In order to enter each successive deeper level, we have to go through a deeper level of surrender. And that often involves very intense purification, confrontations. And every step deeper into the universe is a step into a higher bandwidth of energy, if you will. We have to literally learn to become a being who can live at that level, become operational at that level for hours and hours at a time. That takes work. It takes a lot of work.
TS: You write in the context of a psychedelic session, “Pain is something we learn to embrace. One learns to reverse one’s instinct to avoid suffering and to open to it instead. Not because we like to suffer, but because of what lies on the other side of suffering.” And I wanted to understand more about what you learned about embracing pain. And I ask this question, Chris, because in the midst of our lives, there’s so much pain we need to embrace and so much letting go that we have to do. And I don’t think that many of us are that good at it.
CB: I want to be careful. I don’t want to overgeneralize the insights or truths that emerge in a psychedelic session and apply them to circumstances in our everyday life. Would have to make some necessary adjustments to it. But in a psychedelic session, when we hyper-amplify consciousness, consciousness begins to clean itself, it begins to transform itself. And as it purifies itself and as it goes through these—first we encounter unfinished business. Things we’d rather not face, things we’re scared of, things that frighten us. But that’s only early layers. Eventually we’re going through layers in which we’re sloughing off not only our personal identity, but we’re sloughing off our identity as a human being per se, and then our identity as a time-space being, as we’re moving beyond a linear time and beyond three-dimensional space.
All of these adjustments to move into these deeper states of consciousness involve—again, when you’re working with high doses of a psychedelic like LSD, it intensifies and accelerates this purification process. If you took an ice cube and put it next to a candle, meaning analogy for a gentler spiritual practice, the candle would melt the ice cube very gently and it would weep and it would dissolve. But if you threw the same ice cube on a hot skillet, it would bump around, jump around, and snap, crackle, and pop as the molecules exploded. And psychedelic sessions are like the latter. You’re doing the same process that you do in deep, long contemplative retreat context, but you’re doing it faster. And because you’re doing it faster, there’s more of a convulsive quality to it. There’s more intense quality to it.
But essentially it is the same as traditional spiritual practitioners undergo in the dark night of the soul in these processes. It’s the same process. And eventually I came to understand that the many deaths that one endures in this process are actually—that death is actually a symptom of purification. Once you’ve died several times and been reborn on the other side of that process, you realize you can’t die. It’s impossible to die. The form that you are can die, the structures of your life can be shattered, but the inner essence of your being cannot die. So that death itself begins to lose its category, begins to be a nonfunctional category. And I began to realize that death, what we experience as death, is actually a deep form of purification, which is letting go of the small in order to welcome and be welcomed by that which is larger.
TS: Which brings me to wanting to make sure that we carefully parse out, but I still want to address, here in the midst of our lives, not in the midst of psychedelic sessions, what did you learn about what it takes to die before we die? That’s really what I want to understand.
CB: Yeah. I want to be careful because I don’t want to frame my work in terms of the dynamics of spiritual awakening, and that phrasing “to die before we die” so that we do not die when we die is really oriented around the dynamics of spiritual awakening. In my sense, in my work, even though I began this work with an awakening, a spiritual awakening agenda, it became much more than that. It became an adventure of exploring the deep structure of the universe itself.
Death changes as one goes, as one pivots from spiritual awakening as a project to cosmological exploration as a project. But what I learned, if I were to try to summarize it in some way, first, I have no fear of death whatsoever. I have no fear of dying. I feel like I’ve died many times in that process. And in that process of dying before you die physically, there is a great relaxation that settles in. An abiding communion with the universe or with the divine, which begins to saturate one’s physical existence so that the boundary line between here and there, between being physically alive and spiritually alive and cosmologically alive, gets very thin in the process.
I guess I’ve learned to trust life more, to recognize that anything that’s coming at me, which is challenging and difficult, is to be embraced head-on, straightforward, to not back away from anything, to see everything to its root. And that’s a major lesson in psychedelic work. If you run from the hard stuff, it only gets worse. But if you embrace the challenges and let the universe take you where it wants to take you, then eventually you will come to a breaking point. And when you go through that eye of that needle, you will open up into a magnificent landscape, a different level of being.
TS: One thing I’m not clear on is it’s obviously important to you to make a distinction between spiritual awakening as an endeavor, as a focus, and exploring the structure of the cosmos. And I think I don’t really understand why it’s important to you to separate these two things. For me, it’s all tangled together, so I don’t really get that.
CB: They are overlapping enterprises, but I think they are distinct. I mean, if I understand spiritual awakening, for example, if I use Buddhist terminology of śūnyatā or emptiness of self, basically cultivating a condition of transparency where we relax and into the deeper felt fabric of our interconnectedness, and we become transparent to the larger flow of life that moves through us and transparent to the infinite potential that is constantly expressing itself second by second in our bodies, in our consciousness, in our mind. Cosmological exploration overlaps. It may start there and it may support spiritual awakening, but it is different.
I don’t think, for example, you need to go outside of time-space to spiritually awaken or come to your spiritual senses. I don’t think you need to go back to the origin point of the universe or to go back to the point of where we emerged with the big bang. I don’t think you need to engage archetypal reality, as I did, in order to spiritually awaken. There’s so many things that I went through that you don’t need to go through simply to spiritually awaken to the truth of your being. And so I see this as a different enterprise.
And while some of that cosmological adventure certainly does support spiritual awakening, it’s a different agenda. Moving into the deep future to experience in a sense such a radical dilation of time so that you not only experience your personal future, but moving beyond that radically into experiencing humanity’s evolutionary future, you don’t need to do that to spiritually awaken. It seems of a different project.
TS: All right, so we have to talk about this, of course, your cosmological exploratory discoveries. And we’ll start with what you were just describing: moving into the future in time. Through your journeys, you discovered something you refer to as the “future human,” and you also had some peeking into how we’re going to get there, to this future human. So can you describe that for us?
CB: OK, before I do, I just want to mention that involves jumping far ahead into the story. Because there are many levels that come before that. But one of the great surprises for me on this journey was how much of it did not concern my personal transformation. I started this work with a model of personal transformation, personal spiritual awakening, and that just got swallowed by the work. What I call “the ocean of suffering” involved years of working through a transformational process that was not aimed at my personal awakening, but was aimed at our collective awakening. I’m sorry, I’m getting a little distracted and losing a little bit of the focus in my answer.
TS: It’s OK, we can—let’s take it slow because you have this gift in LSD, in the mind of the cosmos, you build and it just keeps going. And here I’ve already, as you’ve mentioned, made this big leap because I was just so excited. But let’s take our time here, because in some of the earlier journeys—as I mentioned, these are 73 journeys over a 20-year period—you encounter this ocean of suffering. And it’s not just personal. You say you move from the small self to the species self. And so share a little bit about what this experience was like for you—we’re going to build to the future human here—but of discovering the species you.
CB: Yeah. In our spiritual traditions, we often speak about the liberation of the self and opening up into the divine mind or open up into infinity or the great tao. My experience is that’s true, but there are all these intermediate levels of consciousness that one enters. And one of those intermediate levels of consciousness is the collective psyche of our species, the species mind. As I said, I thought this was about personal transformation. I learned that that was just a miscategorization, a misconception on my part. Because consciousness is whole and united and integrated at the very start, when you hyper-amplify consciousness, you’re not simply hyper-amplifying your personal consciousness, but you’re amplifying in some sense the fabric, the unified fabric of consciousness so that the transformational process which gets activated is much larger than something which is realized for the purpose of just the individual.
But something was using my sessions to bring about some type of collective healing within the collective unconscious. And I came to understand that just as our individual trauma will get stored in our personal psyche and can complicate our personal life, likewise our collective trauma, all the things that humanity has experienced in the wars and the brutalities and the hard things that we’ve done to each other through history, these traumas get internalized not just within the souls of the individuals, but they get internalized within the collective psyche. Now, I came to understand that we are going through a tremendous accelerated growth process. That the universe or the divine or the creative intelligence of the universe is taking humanity through an intense accelerated process of spiritual development.
And the first stage of all such spiritual processes is purification. We have to, in a sense, offload the trauma of the past, the addictions of the past, in order to open to the influx of energy that’s coming into us now. And so something was using my sessions to heal. It took me years to understand this and years to accept it, because it sounds so arrogant and I apologize for that. But it was the only way I could understand my experience, that what was being aimed at healing was some aspect of the collective psyche of humanity. And this went on after I’d gone through two and a half years of ego death work. I entered into two years of this very, very intense, profound collective healing that stretched through millions of human beings and thousands of years of human history and just dissolving into becoming transparent to terrible, terrible suffering. Which was not personal suffering. It really didn’t have anything or had very little to do with my personal life.
And then eventually after two years, it came to a crescendo, it came to an absolute explosive crescendo in which it was very clear what the focus of this work was: a collective transformation. And then I was spun into archetypal reality and the collective healing. The collective suffering never returned. It stopped. My work with it was done for reasons that I really wondered about as the work continued. The way I divide the levels that I entered in this work was there were levels concerning personal mind, levels concerning collective mind—and the collective suffering is part of this—and then there were levels concerning archetypal mind and then causal mind or causal oneness. And then the diamond luminosity. And I experienced these as functionally quite distinct dimensions of consciousness.
Started at the personal level, went into the species level, and then in entering archetypal dimensions of mind, my entire, not just my history, but the entire anthropological set of the collective unconscious, just fell away from me. All the myths and stories and ideologies which have been part of how humanity has tried to understand itself, it just fell away. A radical transcending of human history in order to open into a deeper immersion in the consciousness of the universe.
TS: OK, now I have to ask this one question because as you were describing the ocean of suffering and the pain in the collective, it sounded like you were doing work for our species, for the collective. And of course, I believe that, I’m willing to go with you with that. However, it seems like there’s a lot more collective suffering that is easy to tap into. Anybody can just tap in, I think, to how horrific the ocean of suffering is that is in most of our experience. Even though I’m grateful for the healing work you did, could I say it’s a drop in the bucket or something like that? There’s so much.
CB: It is a drop in the bucket, yeah. It is a drop, and it left me with the question. Given that there’s obviously continuing pain and suffering in the collective psyche, why did my work with it end? Why was I moved beyond this territory after being in it, immersed in it for two years? And there are several answers that I consider in the book, but the one which I think was the most revealing is that you literally become more useful to the system. Instead of drawing the poisons of the collective psyche out of the system, you become more useful in pouring the blessings and grace coming from higher levels of spiritual reality into the system from above, so to speak.
TS: OK. I’m with you. And this is a good chance for you to pour them out of you verbally and pour them out here on Insights at the Edge. Now, one of the things I wanted to bring up at this point is you make a pretty strong case, you say it pretty directly, “Reincarnation is an idea that’s hard to see at first, but once seen it changes everything.” And you say, “Reincarnation is true. It’s a basic fact of life.” How did your journeys confirm this for you?
CB: When the ocean of suffering first opened—basically every session has two sides. There’s the first, the purification process. And then if you meet that challenge and you surrender to it completely, you’re spun into ecstatic spaces for the second portion of the journey. And when I moved through the ocean of suffering, I entered into a phenomenon that I call “deep time.” And I experienced all of my life from start to finish, from birth to death, all of those moments of my life as simultaneously present now. Just now. And I stayed there repeatedly entering the state for seven sessions over the course of a year. But this was just the first act of a much larger, deeper, systematic entering into deep time beyond my personal deep time, entering into our species deep time.
This is not eternity; it’s not timelessness. Timelessness is a different experience. But basically deep time is to experience different spans of time as either simultaneously present or different spans of time moving at different time rates. So that experiencing a hundred thousand years in a meaningful and orderly fashion, the way that we see—anthropology can show us movies of human evolution where we accelerate and we collapse time and we look at evolving forms. Something like that can happen in consciousness itself, where you can tap into what is the underlying evolving story of humanity over long periods of time. And then that can reach into what we would call future time.
I became convinced that there are actually many levels of time operating within the universe itself, and I was being given the opportunity to experience in some ways different ways in which the universe experiences time. It’s not all linear time projected against timelessness. There are multiple modalities of time that are actively alive within our universe.
TS: All right. Let me see if I can try to get a better understanding of this. Of course, linear time, timelessness, parallel time I think is something that is not that hard to understand, but it sounds like when you use a phrase like “deep time,” you’re pointing to even other additional aspects of time. Can you help me understand that?
CB: Boy, I have wrestled with that a lot over the years. Time. Just one of the deep, deep mysteries. It’s only after I’d gone outside of time and space and come back into time and space at the end of the session and had done that many times over many years that I began to appreciate what is distinctly beautiful and magnificent about time and space, the specificity of it. But it is only one modality of existence. There are multiple modalities of existence that lie outside linear time and linear space.
But I bypassed your question on reincarnation, so if I can double back to that. When I had the experience of my life as a completed whole, I also had deep insights into the people I was with, what my life was about, what the project of my life was about, and who I was here to realize this project, my project and their projects together. But by this time, I had already encountered the work of Ian Stevenson. I had already begun to read the reincarnation research. I had already began to be intellectually convinced by the research that reincarnation is just a simple fact of life. And I do think it’s a fundamental issue because spiritual systems and philosophical systems diverge at the point of, are we here only one time or are we here multiple times? And if we are here multiple times, and if there is a meaningful relationship between those lives over long periods of time, it opens the ceilings, it lifts the ceiling on the question, what is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of our existence?
Because if I give a quiz to my students and I only give them ten minutes to answer the question, I have a right to expect a certain answer. But if I give a take-home exam, I have a right to expect a better answer to the question asked. Likewise, if we have an open-ended amount of time to realize the purpose of existence, then that opens up the possibility of exponentially lifting the ceiling on what we understand the perfect purpose of existence to be. That’s why my first book was actually on reincarnation where I basically presented a digestion of the evidence for reincarnation and began to unpack the implications of that evidence. Then when I went into my psychedelic sessions, I had my own experiences of some of my own personal former lives. But I also eventually had experiences of the entire species of humanity.
The pulse of reincarnation is a pulse that’s not specific to just individuals. I think we’ve overly individualized the story of reincarnation in our spiritual traditions. We’ve made it a story of the evolution of the soul. And it’s true; that is true. But I experienced so many times the pulse of all of humanity reincarnating as an integrated whole, as a unified whole, so that all of our individual issues and individual challenges were part of humanity’s larger challenge in its larger developmental process. Reincarnation was just an axiom that came up repeatedly in my sessions and then led me eventually into a different understanding of where reincarnation is taking humanity than I think we find even in some of the Eastern traditions.
TS: So traditionally, the notion of an individual soul reincarnating is until you’re done with the wheel, you’re off the wheel, you get to exit, you don’t have to come back. So when you talk about a whole human species reincarnating together, I started thinking about those individuals who they’re free, they’re not part of it or they’re part of it in a different way in the realm of deep time. Help me understand your view of that.
CB: That’s the classic way that the Eastern traditions have talked about reincarnation, that the goal is you incarnate again and again and again. You work off your bad karma, you generate good karma, you become kinder, gentler, more compassionate, until eventually you have a spiritual awakening to your essential nature. You understand the fundamental identity of the individual and the totality. Atman is Brahman. And after that you can leave. They’re all “up and out” cosmologies. All the religions of the Axial Age are fundamentally up and out cosmology, so that life culminates off planet; it culminates in some dimension outside physical reality. I understand that type of ideology. I understand where it came from, and I understand it as a limited worldview that we are now in the process of transcending.
Because when we begin to understand how old the universe is and how big it is, and how much work has gone into billions and billions of years of evolving the form of existence. To say that, after what? A couple hundred thousand years with our big brain and 5,000 years of writing, and we finally develop enough concentration to drop down beneath our personal mind and tap into the mind, which is the mind of all, the heart and soul of all, once we can do that, then we leave? That’s the whole purpose of what life is about, to leave? And that leaves physical existence, the real meaning of physical existence, unexplained, insufficiently explained. And I think what we’re moving into now, just as we have a widening and deepening understanding of the universe, we have a deeper understanding of our role in the universe. So our goal, I think, is not to achieve awakening and then leave, but to actually achieve awakening and to continue to concretize our increasing spiritual capacity inside time and space.
I went through a process at one point midway through my journey where all of my former lives began to come into me. I had done previous work, so I was familiar with some of my lives. But they had begun to come into me. And when they seemed to hit a critical mass, they fused. And when they fused, there was an explosion of energy that came out of my chest, a diamond light, and I was catapulted into a state of awareness that in which I was an individual, but I was an individual beyond any frame of reference that I had ever known before. And I came to call this “the birth of the diamond soul.” That we’ve been ingesting—we’ve been gestating this diamond, the soul, for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years over and over and over again.
But the direction of reincarnation is not simply to wake up and leave, but it’s to integrate eventually all of our former lives into a single embodied consciousness and then to live that embodied consciousness on this planet. We may leave if we want to, but it’s an inadequate understanding of the purpose of existence, I think, to think that the goal of spiritual awakening is to get out of here.
TS: All right, so you’ve said a couple times the purpose of existence, and if we accept reincarnation as a fact, then it gives us a lot more time to actualize our purpose and to serve the purpose of existence. So tell me a little bit more how you understand the purpose of existence, your purpose, any human being’s purpose?
CB: Boy, you’re asking big questions, hard questions.
I don’t want to just talk about my purpose, because it’s too small. It’s widely taught, and I certainly agree with it, that the individual essence is the essence of the divine. The spark that cannot die. The spark which we are continually challenging, empowering, expanding, exploring, and just becoming more and more over long periods of time. When we die, we wake up to the soul. We return to soul, experience this tremendous expansion of consciousness. When we incarnate, consciousness shrinks to small scale. We die, we go large scale. We shrink, we go small scale.
If we keep that up over and over and over again, sooner or later, doesn’t it make sense that eventually the soul consciousness, which is our natural state in between incarnations, wakes up inside our time-space existence? So that at that point we no longer are tempted to identify with our ego so tightly or to accept our physical body and the parameters of that existence as our true being. We become conscious of being an eternal being, and we are actualizing the potential of that eternal being to create reality, to shape its reality. And I don’t mean this in a superficial say of think the right thoughts and say the right prayers, and you can manifest whatever you want to manifest. Maybe so. I think it’s much, much deeper.
We are in the process of potentiating this enormous creative power, which is ours by virtue of our divine nature, actualizing this creative power and actualizing it into more and more and more robust and complete forms. Where this will take us I don’t know, but I have a sense of what the next step is for humanity. But what lies beyond that step, a million years from now, several more million years, I don’t know. But it does seem that we are waking up and then empowering our divine nature to create consciously inside time and space.
TS: Now, you mentioned this fusing that you experienced of your past lives at the level of the heart, and then this emergence of the diamond soul. Why a diamond, the shape and light of a diamond?
CB: Not the shape, but the light. That was just the nature of the experience itself. Now, everyone experiences light when they go into deep non-ordinary states. It’s very common for people after they experience ego death to be surrounded and filled with light. And I had experienced light many times at different stages of my journey. But when I experienced the diamond light of the diamond soul, and then later in the last five years of my work, when I experienced diamond luminosity, what I call “diamond luminosity,” this is not simply a metaphor to try to describe the light. I’m trying to describe a particular quality of light, an exceptionally pure hyper, hyper clear dimension of light.
And when I look to the mystical sources, they seem to be clearly familiar with this light. The system that I know the best is Buddhism. And I came to associate this diamond luminosity with what Buddhism calls dharmakāya, the clear light of absolute reality. The correlation seemed to be very strong. It is the light out of which existence emerges, out of which the big bang emerges. It’s not the ultimate form of light, because I had an experience where I had experienced a light even beyond the diamond light. But it’s exceptionally clear, hyper, hyper clear.
Once I touched it the first time, in my 45th session, that’s the only thing—I didn’t want to bother myself with any of the other dimensions of consciousness I had been exploring up to that point in time. All I wanted to do was return to that particularly clear luminosity. And in the last five years of my work, I returned to it only four times, with tremendous cycles of purification in between those four times, but only four times. And those are what I truly call “the diamonds from heaven.” They are the diamonds from heaven, and that is my preferred name for the book, Diamonds from Heaven. LSD and the Mind of the Universe was given it by the publisher, but the book title that I hold in my heart for it is Diamonds from Heaven, because it’s a story of a journey into the universe and receiving the blessings from the universe and the awakening of our true nature wrapped with all sorts of insights and teachings, but ultimately realizing within one’s own being, to some degree, the nature of this very high level of clear, clear diamond light.
TS: What did it feel like? What does it feel like when you call in that diamond luminosity?
CB: I can’t live in this reality in my life today, so I can’t simply summon it and call it in. I use my session memories as part of my daily spiritual practice to evoke the awareness, which opens up into some aspect of that. So let me just speak just to the experience in the sessions itself.
Imagine yourself completely dissolved into light so that you become light. You have the qualities of light. Infinite extension, infinite breadth and depth. And clarity, just clarity beyond reckoning. I came to understand what the Buddhists meant when they say, “Touching it for just a second can undo thousands of years of living in the shadows of saṃsāra.” It’s just unbelievably beautiful, clear. To call it “bliss filled” would be to shrink it down too much. It is soaked in ecstasy, but it’s far beyond what we usually mean by ecstasy or bliss. It’s coming home. It has a feeling of coming home, and at the same time, it is open ended in that it seems to be almost a portal into ever-deepening dimensions of the divine itself. It is to be dissolved into what I would call “the crystalline body of the divine.” To be light.
And then hours later, the session is over. You congeal, you distill out of that light back into your human form, but the memory of the light stays if you work well and you work clear so that you have full recall of your experiences. The memories stay, and they’re like seed catalysts of your own evolution. You can’t actualize these experiences in an abiding sense after the session. And that perhaps is one difference between work which is aimed at spiritual awakening, maybe working with lower doses where you can hold on to more of it.
Cosmological exploration—I don’t know—I’ve written about integration, what integration means in this context. I’ve thought about it a lot. And I think that we haven’t even begun to truly understand what it means to integrate experiences of such cosmic proportions. How does a finite being integrate infinite consciousness? How does a time-being integrate radically expanded trans-temporal deep time experiences? How do you integrate the experience of completely dissolving into the oneness of all existence with all the insights and beauty that comes with that? And then coming back into your individual existence where you’re back into the world of individual shapes and forms. It’s a long process. That’s why I didn’t release—I didn’t write LSD and the Mind of the Universe until 20 years after I stopped my sessions. I stopped in ’99 and I published this book in 2019, because I spent many, many years pondering and trying to integrate these experiences. And it’s an incomplete process. It’ll take me lifetimes, I think, to integrate where I’ve been.
TS: But just to ask a slightly challenging question here, don’t you think it’s possible for there to be great spiritual—I’ll use a word I don’t usually use—“masters” or “prophets” that are capable of that type of integration?
CB: Absolutely. And that’s why the great spiritual beings, the great mahasiddas, those beings have always been my guiding light. And I always emphasize that my path was a path of temporary immersion, but there are beings who live permanently in these dimensions and in these depths, and truly all honor and respect to those great beings. Usually people when they are reading the experiences like the experiences that I record in my book, they’re drawing them from biographies or autobiographies of the great beings who can abide in these conditions in a more permanent sense. And I emphasize that to have temporary access is not at all the same thing as having permanent and abiding. So it’s not that it’s not possible, I believe it’s possible. I’ve read the autobiographies and been with the teachers. I’m just saying for me, personally.
TS: Sure. Sure. Well, I respect that.
CB: It’s not within my—
TS: OK, Chris, the time has come in the arc of our conversation for you to share with us the visions that you had about the next stage in our human species evolution and what you refer to as the “future human” that you saw in your journeys we are going to become.
CB: And again, I apologize. I know it sounds arrogant. And I know it sounds like ego run amok, but in the course of my work, starting back in 1991, long time ago, I started being given dropped-in bits and pieces, visionary experiences of the evolutionary trajectory of humanity. And over and over again, I was shown that humanity was coming to a turning point. We were coming into a before-and-after transition point. We were coming into a time of profound spiritual awakening that would require tremendous preparation for this transition. But this was a true before-and-after point for humanity. And it was just amazing.
Even though it was scattered in sessions all over, what I did for the book is that I took all of those visions and I collected them into one chapter called The Birth of the Future Human. And I grouped all these visions into a section that I call The Visions of Awakening, The Visions of Our Collective Awakening. And again, I wasn’t anywhere like my personal state of consciousness. When one has visions, they aren’t visions so much as they are—you become that reality. You become the human species and you experience as an aspect of your own history, your own future history, this transformation.
But nowhere in any of these visions had the universe shown me how it was going to do this. How could we possibly bring about such a profound transformation as I was being shown was part of our destiny? And then the work continued. I entered into the diamond luminosity work, and then in the middle of the diamond luminosity work in a rhythm that I was expecting to be returned, hopefully to another engagement of the diamond luminosity, I had the experience of what I call the “great awakening.” I dissolved completely into the species mind. And then in my experience, as the species I entered into deep time. I went deep into humanity’s future, and I experienced the death and rebirth of the human family. I experienced humanity going into a period of profound global crisis, an unraveling of all the assumptions that we make about how life can be, how it should be, how we can live in the world.
I wasn’t given any specifics. I wasn’t given any calendar or timetables. It seemed that this was a global crisis that was being triggered by a series of escalating ecological crises. But I wasn’t given the details of it. I experienced the panic and the terror of humanity as a whole becoming unraveled, losing the fundamental foundation of its existence. So much so that it seemed at one point that this was an extinction event. We were going into an extinction of humanity. But then just as this peaked, the worst of this storm passed, and we began to pick ourselves up. And even though many had died, many were still alive. And when we picked ourselves up, life was different. Our lives were different.
Something happened in this powerful crisis that it cracked open our heart, it purified our heart, it opened our mind. And when we began to pick ourselves up, we were saturated with new values, new insights, new priorities, new social institutions that were—we basically had entered into a fundamentally different condition of the human psyche. So that what came out of this death and rebirth of humanity was not simply a new civilization or a new economy or a new industrial foundation, but was actually a new collective psyche. This was a fundamental pivot in the deep structure of the collective psyche. Kind of a shift in the plate tectonics of the collective psyche so that any human being born after this transition went through, was alive and operating within a different collective psyche than we are operating within now or have been for several thousand years. And this is what I call the future human.
And I was given opportunities to experience the future human several times. And in the last major vision in my session in the 70th sessions, I was taken deep into the future and given the experience of this new archetypal form. And if I try to describe it, I’ll probably break down in tears because it is so magnificent. It’s so beautiful. Humanity with a healed heart and an opened consciousness, just radically expanded parameters of consciousness. I think we are in the process of giving birth to a new child in history. And the form that the future human will take, I think, is precisely the diamond soul.
We have been growing the future human for millennia. We have been growing it for hundreds of thousands of years. Gestation is long. Birth is short. I think we are entering into a time of history which will be very difficult. It’ll be convulsive; it’ll be pain filled. But what we are doing is giving birth to the form of life that we have been growing into for all of human history. And I think the future human is the diamond soul. And I think the great spiritual saints and sages, the Jesuses and Buddhas and prophets, are basically giving us an archetypal insight into the form that we are growing into, this radically different kind of human being, the awakened human being, the open-ended, compassionate human being. That, I think, is the future human that we’re all—and I think all of us knew what we were getting into when we incarnated at this time in history to be part of that process.
TS: There’s a section in LSD and the Mind of the Universe where you talk about the pre-incarnational period of time and the commitments, the choices, that we make for our incarnation. Maybe you can speak to what you saw in one of your journeys about that moment.
CB: Here, it’s not just what I experienced in my sessions, but it’s what other psychotherapists have uncovered. I’m thinking of Michael Newton’s work in Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls where he talks about the ring of destiny that people come to before they incarnate, where they’re given the opportunity to experience several alternative former lives. They’re given a partial insight into the challenges of that life. And they make their choice. In near-death episode research, in Ken Ring’s work and many people’s work, we have people remembering the choices that they made before they incarnated and a clear sense of “we knew what we were getting into. I chose this life. I forget after I’m incarnated.” But we often—we can do things that waken up this memory. We can do past life therapy. We can do deep contemplative practice. It’s part of our memory structure. We can awaken to that choice.
In Michael Newton’s work, he takes people—he discovered by accident that he could take people through their past life, through the death experience of that past life, and into the bardo where they experienced what the past life was about. And also experience that place that we are in when we choose our present life. And people can be guided to remember what they were thinking and what they were choosing when they chose this present life. It’s not just a matter of my personal experiences, though I have had that kind of experience, but again, it’s other people’s research.
TS: OK. So I’m going to bring you right here and speak from my heart for a moment.
CB: Please.
TS: And as I do, I actually feel like I am also wrapping my arms around a lot of the people that I imagine share something similar to what I’m about to share. Which is I feel like I’m here for a reason now, that I can sense a sort of pre-incarnational promise, if you will, even. To help at this time, to help usher in. And I hope it doesn’t sound inflated. I’m not trying to make it sound inflated. In my own way, in whatever way I can each day to the best of my ability, often in very small ways, often in small ways, to usher in this new humanity that you pointed to.
And when I hear you talk about the pain and the suffering, and you said, “It almost looks like it could be an extinction event before the breakthrough happens,” I feel a lot of deep, excruciating sorrow, and I want to prevent as much suffering as possible. What do you have to say to that? To that instinct in people who hear what you’re saying, and they’re saying, “I’d like to help there be as little suffering as possible” as we birth this new human that has this diamond soul shining?
CB: I absolutely agree with you. And I think that there are many, many hidden saints and many bodhisattvas, that we are all working, so many of us, some unconsciously, but many, many people consciously, working to help midwife this future human and to bring about a positive outcome of the crisis that we are entering. And if we could do it without pain, absolutely, that would be the preferred outcome. Every mother, every father would want their child to have the very best opportunities in life without this kind of pain and suffering. And yet, at the same time, when we look at the ecological evidence, when we look at the scientific evidence, when we look at the world which we seem to be entering because either the choices that we have not made in the past or that we have made, and that we are continuing to delay year by year, decade by decade, it seems that we are on a collision course with the limits of the planet.
Now, I say this not on the basis of my visionary experience. I really try to be very careful what is on the visionary basis and what is on the scientific basis. But I think we are coming into what is increasingly recognized to be a very, very difficult and challenging period of history. The sooner we begin making different choices, the sooner we begin to make sane choices for our planet, the more we can reduce that pain and suffering, the more we can soften the enormity of this impact. But I think we’re at the point where it’s not likely that we’re going to be able to avoid this collision, and we’re going to have to go through it. And the faster we wake up, the sooner it can be over. The sooner we can move on, the sooner we can get through it.
So what I would say is, yes, this is my goal too. I think I too was also with all of us incarnating in order precisely to do everything I could in small and large ways to help this birth take place in a positive way. So we just do it. We dig in, we do everything we can. And I don’t think we have anything to be afraid of. One of the strange things that’s come through many times in my sessions was a sense of how proud the divine is of us, how happy. The sense that we are right on time. It’s easy to look around and think, “Wow, we’re a mess. We’ve messed up the planet. We’ve done such a terrible job.” And yet what came through my sessions repeatedly was, “You are beautiful. The entire planet is beautiful. The human species is beautiful.”
Something believes that we are ready for this transition. I think if we weren’t ready for it, it wouldn’t be happening. The creative intelligence, the intelligence that’s behind the formation of planets, that’s behind plate tectonics, that’s behind the formation of galaxies, this is the intelligence that’s actually expressing itself in the crisis that we’re coming to. We’re not in control of this. We’re along for the ride. We do the best we can, I think. So I want to minimize the pain and suffering for all of our children. To me, if we don’t understand the deep structure of what’s happening when it gets very dark and when it gets very scary, we could panic and we could fall prey to false ideologies, fascism, demagogues. It’s important for us to have as clear view as possible of why this is happening and what we are trying to actualize. And that’s what I’m trying to describe in the chapter The Birth of the Future Human.
TS: Now, Chris, at the beginning of our conversation, you said, “I wouldn’t recommend to other people that they necessarily enter the mind of the universe through the same methodology that I used.” And I wonder here, as we end our conversation, what you might say about that. Because I imagine some people thinking, “Wow, this is my next move now after listening to Chris Bache, but then he said, ‘No, I’m not sure I’d recommend it.’” So say more about that.
CB: Please don’t. It would break my heart if people tried to do or set about doing what I did. Because if I knew in the beginning what I knew at the end, I would’ve done it very differently. I would take a much gentler approach. I would balance low-dose sessions with occasional high-dose sessions. I would balance psilocybin or ayahuasca, more organic psychedelics, with LSD. And I don’t think there’s a big distinction between organic and synthetic, but between high-dose work and low-dose work and organic or synthetics.
And one of the reasons I believe this is because of a particular experience that I had in my 50th session. It was my second immersion in the diamond luminosity. I was in a state of ecstatic bliss and transcendence. I was far, far beyond space and time, and all of a sudden my visual field pivoted 90 degrees, and I saw reality far in the distance. And a ray of light came out of that reality and hit me, and it shattered me. And just to give it a name, I called it the absolute light. It absolutely caused a fundamental pivot in my thinking. It showed me that it’s an infinite progression. I would never, ever be able to reach the end of the universe or the end of it.
And I had started this work thinking, “The goal of this work is to become one with God or to enter the primal void” or something like that. And I had those kinds of experiences numerous times. What I came to understand is the goal of this work is not what I thought in the beginning: to achieve a particular state or to reach a particular condition. Though they’re there. The goal is to open ourselves and to let in as much of the universe as we can at any one point in time, to bring it in, to let it change us, and then to try to actualize it and internalize that so that it becomes part of our fundamental way of being in the world.
I pushed myself very hard based on false assumptions and a deep and passionate desire to understand the structure of reality. But it’s very demanding work. This is not psychedelic therapy. It’s not spiritual awakening work. It’s extremely demanding. It took much more energy in my life to maintain the balance of my life than I had appreciated in the beginning. My sincere advice to myself and to anyone else is to be gentler on yourself. I’m much more patient with the gentler, slower methods of spiritual transformation than I was when I was a young, eager young man.
TS: And you mentioned, and we’ll end on this note, but I can’t help but take the time to bring it up here, that you’ve looked deeply at the topic of integration. And I notice how important that is to me. That whatever discoveries we make, that we’re able to bring them into our moment-to-moment life. And it seems like a gentler approach, contemplative inner work. And obviously at Sounds True we try to show people a lot of different options that exist based on their temperament. But I know for me, a gentle, highly pro-integration approach is what works best for me. And I’m wondering if you have a comment about that.
CB: I think that’s true. It’s absolutely true. My appreciation of how demanding integration is has deepened over the years. What it means to integrate these unusual experiences deepened. Again, I think spiritual awakening is a deep, profound, and noble undertaking. And it is where suffering lies down and where we awaken to the core truths of life. All the years during which I was doing my deep psychedelic work, I was always doing spiritual practice. I was always meditating. So it wasn’t like I was doing that and not doing the other. And I was teaching courses all the time in comparative mysticism and Buddhism. So I was constantly articulating and in touch with the spiritual traditions of awakening.
I think the more you want to work in temporary deep states, the more important it is to work in grounded daily spiritual practice, to anchor yourself in those ways. So I completely agree with you. And I also understand the spiritual masters who basically say, “Cosmological exploration is not a good investment of your time. A better investment of your time is simply to awaken to the eternal richness of the present moment and to relax into this abiding present, to awaken, to here now into the infinite potential which is here.” I understand that. And I agree with it in many ways. But my story is different, I came in with a certain agenda to deeply understand the universe, and that’s where I went.
TS: And you’ve done a gorgeous job of describing and writing about and sharing with us what you discovered in your 73 journeys. LSD and the Mind of the Universe, or the real title, Diamonds from Heaven by Christopher M. Bache. Chris, so great to have you here with us on Insights at the Edge. Thank you.
CB: Thank you, Tami. It’s wonderful to be here with you.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the aftershow Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
