---
title: Exploring the Boundaries of Death and Rebirth in LSD Psychotherapy
slug: 2015-03-16-exploring-the-boundaries-of-death-and-rebirth-in-lsd-psychotherapy
date: 2015-03-16
type: lecture
channel: Archetypal View
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
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  name: Christopher M. Bache
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**Host: ** Good morning, so I now have the joy of introducing to you our first speaker this morning, and also, I have to say, one of my most influential teachers, Christopher Bache. Chris is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for over 30 years in psychology of religion, Transpersonal studies, Buddhism, and Eastern religions. For two years, Chris was the director of transformative learning at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, and he is also adjunct faculty at CIS, where each of his classes feels like one is being held and participating in a transformative sacred container. His publications include *Lifecycles*, *The Living Classroom*, and his groundbreaking work, *Dark Night, Early Dawn*. This morning, Chris will be speaking on exploring the boundaries of death and rebirth in LSD psychotherapy. Please join me in welcoming Chris Bache.

**Chris Bache: ** Good morning, everyone. It's a true joy to join you this morning in the continuing celebration of Stan Grof, extraordinary lifetime accomplishment as a scholar, a healer, and a pioneer. Like many others in this room, Stan has had a profound influence on my life. He changed the direction of my professional and personal life. The turning point for me came in 1978. I had just finished graduate school in philosophy of religion, which left me an atheistically inclined agnostic and began my career as a young academic. I was in a time of transition, and I didn't know it at the time, but I was in a Saturn Return, and I read *Realms of the Human Unconscious*, and in that one reading, I found my life's work. I was convinced that the people who would make the most substantial contribution to my field in the philosophy of religion would soon be writing out of an experiential basis, not simply a conceptual basis. And here was a man who was opening up a methodology for exploring the deep psyche that had so much extraordinary potential and with such solid scholarship behind it that I knew I could trust this man. So I made the choice to begin what turned out to be a 20-year journey, working with high doses of LSD that lasted between 1979 and 1999, and what I'm going to talk about today basically comes out of my attempts to understand my experiences on that journey. After this journey, my life has never been the same. How do you thank someone for such a gift as that?

The experience of dying and being reborn is one of the central dynamics of Holotropic and psychedelic work, and at the same time, it's deeply puzzling. This morning, I'd like to share with you my attempts to address three basic questions about the Death-Rebirth dynamic. First question, why does death become as large as it sometimes does in psychedelic therapy? Secondly, why does death repeat itself so many times in this long process? And third, and perhaps most difficultly, what is actually dying in the Death-Rebirth process? Along the way, I'd like to also revise the discussion of Death-Rebirth that I presented in my book *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, which I now find to be incomplete. Now I'm just going to be giving you quick bullet points this morning of an article that discusses this in greater length. This article will appear. There we go. Okay, back. This is the book Tom Roberts mentioned yesterday, edited by Harold Abram Evans. Evans is Harold here. Raise your hand. This is a wonderful two-volume book, and you'll find a more complete discussion of what I'm going to be presenting today there. So let's jump into it.

Why does death become as large as it sometimes does in LSD psychotherapy? I wrote *Dark Night, Early Dawn* in part to answer this question, so I need to give you a little bit of background. My first two years of psychedelic work were focused on the perinatal level of consciousness. For two years, my sessions were filled with the usual perinatal symptomology, extreme existential confrontations, convulsive seizures, and various forms of fetal experiences, and then this eventually culminated in a Death-Rebirth experience that turned my life inside out and snapped my identity like a twig. I began the day as a white middle-class, fresh out of the Ivy League philosopher, obsessed with the meaning of life, and I was forced to become women—hundreds of women of color, women with no educational background, women with no philosophical horizons—and it was frightening. The inversion of my values, and particularly the loss of my sexual identity, was shattering. It was the perfect hell for a male academic. When I lost the distinctions that had defined my life, I died, and I was reborn into a new world, the extraordinarily beautiful world of the feminine explored under the arm of the Great Mother.

Immediately after this, a new cycle began, in which I was repeatedly immersed in experiences of collective anguish that dwarfed these early sessions and shattered all my previous frames of reference. In this second phase, I entered an ocean of suffering that expanded session by session until it eventually encompassed the entire history of the human race. The dying in these sessions was vast and elemental in scale and intensity. One excerpt will give the flavor: The anguish thickened into a terrible horror acted out around me on all sides. The forms of the horror were so many that there was no way to describe it. Disembowelings by the score, the mauling of lives, deaths in the thousands, swirling forms so complex, multi-dimensional and multi-thematic that isolated images barely stand out. It was war, savagery, destruction, killing, and anguish. It lasted hours. I know many in this room have had similar experiences. This phase of work lasted four years and 28 sessions, one year of active work, then a six-year break, followed by three years of active work.

My first interpretation of these experiences was to see them as leading to a deepening of ego death, as leading to a more complete ego death. My assumption was that if any form of death were taking place in a session, there had to be pieces of ego dying somewhere in the mix. What did the sensation of dying attach to, if not to an ego? Eventually, however, this assumption was overwhelmed by the sheer volume and intensity of the collective suffering involved. These episodes went on for too many years and were too extreme in their content for me to continue seeing them as being drawn in through resonance to a core of unfinished ego death. This forced me to reassess the boundaries and the goal of the entire therapeutic enterprise. The conclusion I eventually came to was that these collective episodes were not primarily aimed at the transformation of my personal consciousness, but rather they were aimed at the transformation and healing of the species mind as a whole.

In *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, I abandoned the person-centered narrative I had been assuming—that the goal of therapy was the healing of the individual—and adopted a larger narrative by integrating Rupert Sheldrake's concept of Morphic fields into Stan's paradigm. The way opened to viewing these collective ordeals as part of a larger process aimed at healing the scars that humanity still carried in its collective memory. I think that in these highly energized states, the field of the collective psyche is sometimes activated so intensely that it triggers a collective healing process through some fractal flip that I had not even thought possible at the time. The patient in My Sessions had stopped being me and had become humanity itself, or some part of humanity.

So I want to show you a couple of slides, but to do this, I have to sort of show you the vocabulary first. Stan's perinatal matrices organized as a cycle, and then drawing upon Rick and Stan's work on the correlations between the planetary archetypes and the perinatal matrices, changing this into the glyphs where one Neptune, Saturn, Pluto, and Uranus, and then this image simply an image to suggest the relationship between ego, represented as the little drop at the bottom, and the vast expanse of Tart, of the perinatal, of the Transpersonal territory and the Death-Rebirth cycle at the perinatal level, at the interface between personal consciousness and Transpersonal consciousness.

In *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, I kept the perinatal vocabulary to describe these collective ordeals, but I tried to stretch the rationale for their appearance. I proposed that a person's experience of the perinatal domain could tilt or slant towards either the personal or the Transpersonal side of that interface. If your perinatal experience tilted in the personal side, you might experience the loss of your physical identity intertwined with reliving your biological birth. But I hypothesized that if your perinatal experience tilted towards the Transpersonal side of the interface, then you might experience your death and rebirth in a state of profound fusion with the human species, in which case the birth canal would become the birth canal of history. I also suggested that there were two tiers of death and rebirth operating here, one tier aimed at personal ego death, and another tier aimed at collective ego death, trying to hold these two together.

At the present time, however, I've shifted to what I think is a simpler and more elegant way to understanding these episodes. My current thinking emphasizes that death and rebirth is an archetypal cycle that repeats itself many times as we move through deeper stages of psychedelic unfolding. It is a wheel that, like the wheel of Buddha, Dharma, turns multiple times. Being an archetypal wheel, any single Death-Rebirth experience can draw in elements from multiple levels of reality, but being a cycle, it repeats itself in different forms as one moves into deeper dimensions of consciousness. So the essence of my revision of *Dark Night, Early Dawn* is this: rather than seeing these episodes of collective suffering, at least in my experience, as a protracted first turning of the wheel of death and rebirth, now I see them as a second turning of that wheel. They are the second movement of a larger symphony, a movement taking place at the subtle level of consciousness, a movement whose dynamics are inherently collective, focused on the collective patient and aimed at a collective transformation. In a personal exchange with Stan on this topic, he supported this revision. He wrote me, quote, "I feel that for clarity, we should change the terminology and make it clear that the term perinatal should be used only for fetal experiences and not for experiences of death and rebirth on higher levels of the Transpersonal spectrum with no relation to biological birth."

So that brings us now to the next question. The second question, why does dying repeat itself so many times in psychedelic therapy? Let me return to my personal story. When this long phase of collective dying and being reborn had ended, it was followed by a series of five overwhelmingly positive sessions that seemed to constitute a mega-rebirth. I felt overwhelmed by grace and filled with blessings. I had a deep sense that I had accomplished the primary purpose of my entire incarnation. At this point, I didn't know what to expect after all these years. I hoped that the ordeal of dying would stop sooner or later. I thought the transition to Transpersonal reality would become easier, and it would have, I think, if I had stayed within the boundaries of Transpersonal experience that I had been initiated into thus far. But for better or for worse, the method of exploration I had chosen to use was so powerful that it kept pushing me beyond my experiential limits, and I was working with 500-600 micrograms of LSD in totally internalized sessions.

So another image. I don't have any vested interest in how many cycles of Death-Rebirth, and how you describe the multiple levels of reality. I'm going to be using the language of psychic, subtle, causal levels of reality. But we may have many different maps for mapping the vast expanse of Transpersonal territory. It's just the principle that I'm trying to illustrate with this graphic.

Over the next six years and 35 sessions, a third phase opened in the work in which I was propelled through a series of Death-Rebirth experiences that drew me ever more deeply into the divine. I was spun into the radiance of what the Buddhists call sambhogakaya, and what I came to call the domain of Diamond Luminosity. I had known light many times before this, but this was an exceptionally pure light. It was a different order of reality altogether. Its clarity was so overwhelming and its energy so pure that returning to it became my only goal, and it completely extinguished any residual interest I had in exploring dimensions of archetypal reality that had previously fascinated me. This was something different. When this phase was over, I counted six cycles of death and rebirth. There were many deaths, of course, but six seminal breakthroughs.

And it's the pattern of experience that's important to the point I'd like to make here, that death and rebirth is a cycle that repeats itself at successive levels of initiation into the cosmos. No matter how complete and satisfying each rebirth was, it was in time followed by more experiences of dying as the spiral continued to turn. Death repeats itself, not because it has failed to hit the mark and ego has survived, but rather because the Divine is an infinite landscape with countless levels to explore. Each death is a gateway to what lies beyond. In his beautiful book, *The Ultimate Journey*, Stan describes some of the forms that death can take at these Transpersonal levels. He writes, "We may identify with our ancestors or people from different countries and historical periods who are dying or whose lives are threatened. Such sequences from the Collective Unconscious can sometimes be associated with a sense of personal remembering, which characterizes them as past incarnational memories. Death can even be experienced in full identification with an animal or plant. Death is also powerfully represented in the collective unconscious as mythological motifs of death and rebirth and as various eschatological themes, including specific death gods and underworlds of various cultures, the archetype of death, astral or Bardo realms, the posthumanist journey of the soul and abodes of the beyond."

Only Stan, I think, could write a sentence like that, really. And, you know, he knows what he's talking about. That's what gives, that's what's so amazing. I really, I don't think I would have had the courage to go some of the places I went if I had not known that he had gone there before me and lived to tell the tale.

At whatever level it takes place, the core of dying is always the same: complete loss of control, absolute surrender, a disorientation so deep that it dissolves reality as we have known it. And rebirth is always the same: the experience of awakening inside a new and unanticipated dimension of reality, the birth of a new identity with new capacities, the experience of absolute grace of having been given infinitely more than one has given up. But within this basic structure, the details of dying and being reborn reflect the specific level of consciousness at which one is dying, at which one is working. The experiential texture of each death, its flavor, focus, and function and even, I'd suggest, what is dying changes as the work progresses. After one has died and been reborn many times, eventually, the very concept of death loses its meaning. One learns through repetition that at the deepest level of one's being, it's impossible to die. The form that you are can die, reality as you have known it can be destroyed multiple times, but the innermost essence of your being always reemerges. The Phoenix always rises. Death becomes simply a measure of the degree of purification being enacted. When purification reaches so deeply that it dissolves the form that you are, then dying has returned to grace you, and this is what I mean by calling it purification unto death.

It was during this third phase that I surrendered one more assumption about the Death-Rebirth process, namely, that there is an ultimate end to this cycle, a final death. I no longer believe that this is the case. 

I believe that the progression is endless. The dying stops when one's capacity for discovery is exhausted and one simply can take no more. Now let me qualify this carefully, because I know it goes against the notion that a complete death is a final death. When one's private existence has been dissolved, one can enter a state of oneness that is completely and utterly satisfying. One rests in the source of existence, one with all that is. You cannot imagine anything more satisfying. And yet my experience has been that with repeated immersion in this condition, new dimensions of oneness eventually reveal themselves, and new levels of joy are associated with each of these levels. The one exists in many modalities, and therefore can be known in many modalities, always one, but in different depths of expression.

So then, that brings us to, what is it that's actually dying? And here I want to affirm a delicate both/and balance. It's the individual who undergoes these deaths and absorbs them. They become part of his or her life story, and so they belong to the individual. On the other hand, I think that these deaths also belong to the universe in ways that transcend the individual. It is something it is doing. The Universe uses these opportunities to heal itself and commune with itself in ways that reach beyond the individual. I think both these perspectives are true and need to be affirmed.

So what is dying? Well, first, in the early deaths, particularly, the ego is dying, the constrictions and wounds, the illusions, the habits that are created by our earthly history. But in the later sessions, after ego has surrendered its grip on our consciousness, what exactly is dying then? There is often an acute sensation of dying, but what does it attach to? Well, I think part of the answer is some aspect of the species ego is dying when the wheel of death and rebirth is turning at the subtle level of reality, where the deaths are largely collective. What is dying, I think, is some part of the species ego, that is, some collective nodule of pain and suffering that's living inside the collective unconscious. When the patient shifts from being the individual to being the species, mind, the pulse of life we are living in those hours is the pulse of human history. We may participate in this death and rebirth, but we do so less as an individual and more as a fractal member of the entire species. The Coex systems that are resolving themselves are not personal Coex systems at this point but collective Coex systems in the collective unconscious, what I call the meta matrices of the collective unconscious.

But there's another level I think that we can move to, what's dying at these levels, and it's what I named the shamanic persona. Now, all of us have had the experience after a session has ended that we sometimes can't hold on to all the knowledge and all the experience and all the insights we had during a session. And yet, when we re-enter the psychedelic state, we find that this missing knowledge is there waiting for us, and we resume our psychedelic identity when the next session opens. Now, this common experience suggests that the psyche retains and integrates our psychedelic experiences at levels deeper than our conscious awareness. Ego-state psychology has demonstrated that this compartmentalization of experience is actually a common feature of our psychological makeup. And I'm thinking here of the work of Gordon Emerson, John Rowan, and Tom Zinser.

I think ego-state psychology can throw important light on how our psyche manages the extreme fluctuations that take place in awareness and psychedelic therapy. Specifically, I want to suggest that in the repeated opening and closing of awareness in psychedelic sessions, a semi-autonomous state-specific consciousness is formed that retains and integrates and preserves the knowledge and the capacities that we had acquired in our sessions. I call this psychedelically generated entity the shamanic persona. It can be thought of as a state-specific Alter Ego. There are many variables that affect the integrity of the shamanic persona, but basically, as a general rule of thumb, the better run the session, the tighter and more coherent will be the shamanic persona that emerges.

Now, returning to an earlier slide, when one system begins to open to levels of Transpersonal reality that are deeper than the levels that you have previously been exposed to, our earlier psychedelic history must yield to this deeper territory. Our previous psychedelic knowledge and the identity based on that knowledge must surrender control before a deeper mode of Transpersonal knowing can emerge and stabilize. In essence, then what I think is dying in these sessions is sometimes the shamanic persona. Its death may feel like a personal death, but it's not the ego that's dying here, but rather a deeper individual identity that has been birthed inside one's previous sessions. One shamanic persona may die and be reborn multiple times. After one shamanic persona dies and one’s experiences stabilize at a deeper level of Transpersonal reality, the second shamanic persona will retain the memories of the first persona and then will add to it the memories of the knowledge and the experiences from this deeper level. Down the road, when a still deeper level of Transpersonal reality opens, the second persona will have to die and yield surrender in order for Transpersonal experience to be stabilized at these deeper levels.

I'd like to suggest maybe one more layer of the answer to this question, what is it that's actually dying? I think it's actually a dimension of the cosmos itself. And here I am thinking primarily about those deaths that take place at what we might describe as causal level of reality. First, we might pause to ask, What could possibly die at these sublime levels of reality? What need do causal level reality levels have of rebirth at all? I don't know the final answer to these questions. I can only share some intuitions that I've formed over the years, and to do so, I need to very quickly invoke Sri Aurobindo's involutionary evolutionary cosmology, because his vision resonates so deeply with the cosmology that emerges in psychedelic states, as Stan has described so beautifully in his book, *The Cosmic Game*. Aurobindo's vision is of a cascading involution of the Divine, generating multiple levels of reality, all divine, but within those multiple levels, a descending scale of self-awareness of divinity like a series of one-way mirrors: the divine looking down sees all, but the divine looking up sees less.

Now at the end of *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, in the last chapter, I made the point that in such a multi-level cosmology, a Death-Rebirth Event can function simultaneously as a liberation from below to the above and an infusion of above to the below. You can often stand at that threshold, and you can feel the energy moving in both directions. So a Death-Rebirth can function as ascent and also as descent. So assume for a moment that we have managed to stabilize experience at the low causal level for a few precious hours. Inside our sessions, we exist as a life form that breathes the rarefied air of causal reality, bathing in Divine oneness. When through further exercises, a doorway opens to still deeper levels of causal reality, it allows a cosmic communion to take place. Deep communes with deep. Bringing different levels of Transpersonal reality into conscious communion with each other, even if only for a few hours, seems to nourish and bring joy to the weave of existence as the below remembers the above and the blessings of above pour themselves into the below. It is a cosmic dance taking place between deep levels of the Divine. It is God communing with God.

So what dies and is reborn at these deeper cycles of death and rebirth, beyond the ego, beyond the species ego, beyond a series of shamanic persona? I think what dies and is reborn is something of truly cosmic proportions, some dimension God is calling, some dimension that is extraordinarily vast, surrenders and in that surrendering awakens more completely to itself. And much to our surprise, the divine appears to genuinely appreciate our help in facilitating this communion. Stan, thank you from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

**Audience: ** [Applause]