---
title: Diamonds from Heaven – Interview with Iain McNay
slug: 2018-07-05-diamonds-from-heaven-interview-with-iain-mcnay
date: 2018-07-05
type: interview
channel: Conscious TV
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
identifiers:
  wikidata_person: Q112496741
  openalex_person: A5045900737
people:
-
  name: Christopher M. Bache
  wikidata: Q112496741
  openalex: A5045900737
provenance:
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  transcriber: "Otter.ai (diarized, speaker-attributed) + GPT-5 normalization"
  diarist_txt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2018-07-05-diamonds-from-heaven-interview-with-iain-mcnay.txt
  diarist_srt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2018-07-05-diamonds-from-heaven-interview-with-iain-mcnay.srt
diarist_sha1: 11f89bf22309ff2648cb43e0313f1a38307df964

---
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**Iain McNay: ** Hello and welcome again to Conscious TV. I'm Iain McNay, and my guest today is Chris Bache. Hi, Chris.

**Chris Bache: ** Hi, Iain.

**Iain McNay: ** We found Chris quite recently. He was doing a lecture in London. I read his short bio that came along with the details for the lecture and thought, "What a fascinating person." So I invited him, and he very kindly agreed to talk with us today. Chris has written three books. I only have two here: *Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life*, and then this one here, *Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind*, and *The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness*. He also has a new book, which isn't published yet, called *Diamonds from Heaven: A 20-Year Journey into the Mind of the Universe*. So, Chris, let's start with the questions you had, didn't you? You worked for many years lecturing in comparative religions, psychology, I think, to some degree. There were these questions burning inside you.

**Chris Bache: ** Well, I was trained as a philosopher of religion. Philosophers of religion are concerned with exploring the deeper questions of existence, the meaning of life, the structure of the universe, and the limits of human consciousness. These are the questions I was trained to pursue in graduate school. Then I came to Youngstown State University and encountered the work of Stanislav Grof in psychedelic research, particularly in his book *Realms of the Human Unconscious*. This was 1978. As soon as I read that book, I was deeply impressed with the caliber of the research he had done and the caliber of his mind. I knew that I wanted to do this work.

**Iain McNay: ** And the questions you had were about consciousness—what its potentials and patterns are, what its boundaries are. These are slightly different from the usual "Who am I? What am I?" type questions.

**Chris Bache: ** For a time, yes. There were two people I met during my first year of teaching. One was Ian Stevenson, with his work on reincarnation research, which opened a new world for me. I had finished graduate school as an atheistically inclined agnostic, and his work opened up reincarnation. Stan opened up the opportunity to experience deeper dimensions of consciousness and existence itself, which felt like the opportunity of a lifetime. What philosopher wouldn't want to do that? However, this was 1978, and psychedelics had been made illegal in the United States. The first generation of work was over, and we were 40 years away from the psychedelic renaissance happening now. I made a difficult choice to split my life. In my public life, I was a university professor, teaching, publishing, and serving on committees. In my private life, I began a 20-year journey using Grof's methods of high-dose LSD therapy—73 sessions over 20 years. I worked for four years, stopped for six, and then worked intensely for ten years. From 1979 to 1999, I did this work. Because it was illegal, I would have lost my job if I had talked about it. It wasn't until after I retired and was past the statute of limitations that I could begin to talk openly about what one can learn about consciousness and the universe by following this method.

**Iain McNay: ** I think what's interesting is you went into it as an adventure, but in a disciplined and organized way. The sessions were laid out. Your first wife was supporting you during the sessions. From what I've learned by talking to you and reading, the sessions were organized not by you; they were sequential. I didn't know much about psychedelics. I know people have been on LSD trips, but it was always just a trip, not a serious study. You approached it as a serious study. There's a big difference between doing that and doing it for a recreational purpose.

**Chris Bache: ** I've never taken LSD and gone to a concert or stayed up talking with friends. It's a specific methodology, completely internalized. It's Stan Grof's psychedelic therapy, as he describes in his book *LSD Psychotherapy*. You're totally isolated, in a private space, lying down, wearing eye shades, and listening to carefully selected music. My first wife was, and is, a clinical psychologist and my sitter. You take the medicine and completely surrender, letting it take you where it will. In contrast to current research, which focuses on healing with much smaller doses and gentler substances, I did this work as a philosopher interested in exploring the structure of consciousness and the universe. I found that if you submit to this intense destructuring of consciousness, you don't go through just one death and rebirth, but over time, a series of deaths and rebirths that take you deeper into what we might call the mind of the universe, the mind of the cosmos, the mind of God. In my experience, I never controlled what was happening during the sessions. I would try to set intentions, but working at these high levels, which I don't recommend— 

**Iain McNay: ** Because it was 500, 600 micrograms?

**Chris Bache: ** I was working at 500 to 600 micrograms, which, now that I'm through it and looking back, I don't recommend doing in a sustained manner at those levels. I would be gentler if I were doing it again. At the time, I was young and took good care of myself, and everything was methodical. Within 24 hours of every session, I made a complete phenomenological record, noting all variables and dates. I studied the sessions over years, because these are complex experiences. I found that if you open yourself deeply, you enter a conversation with the universe. The universe is interested in deepening your experience, taking you in, teaching, training, softening what needs softening, breaking what needs breaking to allow you to enter more intimately into the deep structure of reality.

**Iain McNay: ** Doesn't it take a certain courage from you, as a human being, to allow that to happen since you've got no idea where it really leads?

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, it does. One of the great gifts Stan Grof gave me was to trust the process. If you submit, if you let it take you where it will, no matter how terrible or inscrutable, if you surrender to it, it will always culminate. It will take you through a breaking point, then catch you. You will die but then awaken into a different condition, a different reality, as a different being in a different dimension.

**Iain McNay: ** What do you mean by "you will die"? What does it mean tangibly?

**Chris Bache: ** To experience intimately the deep nature of reality, you can't take your ego into that reality and have a transpersonal experience. You have to become a citizen of those realities. Our time-space identity keeps us small. To enter vast expanses of reality, we have to let go of what keeps us small. You undergo a psychological death, an ego death.

**Iain McNay: ** So an ego death—it's a death of the construction of who we think we are, who we've become through conditioning.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes. I was a white male, highly educated philosopher. The universe broke me by turning me into the opposite of all that. For hours, I experienced being a female, being poor, women of color, women not interested in philosophy. Not that it was wrong, but it negated my sense of who I was. When I yielded and became a woman, it took me into a marvelous experience of being feminine, which I wish every man could experience.

**Iain McNay: ** What is the "you" during these adventures? If the ego is dissolved, who is having the experience?

**Chris Bache: ** That's a linguistic puzzle every mystic addresses. The "I" is not this "I," but is continuous with it. The first death is the ego's. There's continuity of awareness and memory, but discontinuity of capacity. Post-death, you remember who you are, but you're not your human self. You've become a different kind of being for six to eight hours; Chris Bache shatters. Once consciousness stabilizes at this post-egoic level, with further purification and transformation, if you continue deepening, you surrender more deeply. You're no longer Chris Bache, or even who you were, but a different entity. Coming back, there's a thread of memory, but you're literally remembering being different things.

**Iain McNay: ** Is the transformation happening within the trip, after you come back, or both?

**Chris Bache: ** It's both. There's a lot of discussion about psychedelics and enlightenment—do they lead to enlightenment? These adventures weren't aimed at enlightenment. Initially, I was interested in enlightenment, thinking sessions could accelerate the process. But it shifted after my first ego death. Instead of personal transformation, the story opened into one of deep collective transformation. I entered what I call the Ocean of Suffering, experiencing deep suffering within the collective psyche. This spanned two years and multiple sessions, eventually shattering my personal transformation perception. It wasn't about my personal transformation but transforming some aspect of the collective unconscious. After this, I entered archetypal reality, where I ceased being human, discovering a deeper human identity. To move into archetypal reality, I had to die as a human being, leaving all frames of reference behind. Every step deeper involves much more intense energy, so it takes getting used to.

**Iain McNay: ** You did 73 sessions over 20 years, sequential each time, starting where the previous left off?

**Chris Bache: ** Approximately. Keeping a dream journal is similar. There's a logical flow, but sometimes you see the sequence after multiple layers.

**Iain McNay: ** Yes, I understand. You took time in-between to integrate and adapt, helping the body accommodate that powerful energy. That was quite significant, wasn't it?

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, every step is more intense. In these states, you open into vast consciousness fields with huge energy running through you. Preparing your body for these states and helping it absorb experiences healthily is crucial. Staying clean in habits, meditation, and yoga is essential. I found a natural capacity to let go, always coming back without trouble. After a session, I'd write it up and have months to think, ponder, and follow its teachings, then the process would repeat.

**Iain McNay: ** There's layers of conditioning you're letting go of. It's not you saying you're letting go. The sessions allow the letting go through surrender.

**Chris Bache: ** I surrender. The creative intelligence takes me in, usually starting with intense purification, reaching a peak, then leading into an ecstatic experience and teachings as it slowly closes down.

**Iain McNay: ** Do you remember all those teachings when you come back?

**Chris Bache: ** I do—though, initially, recall can be hard. With gaps, coherence comes after frequent returns and deeper work. There's a technique: playing the session's music order while writing it up to remember and ensure fidelity. It's crucial for capturing and internalizing the experiences.

**Iain McNay: ** One highlight when reading *Dark Night, Early Dawn* was your realization that one cannot fully awaken individually. At the absolute level, it's all one. How can someone awaken if another doesn't?

**Chris Bache: ** I use a metaphor when teaching: leaves are individually conscious but also the tree's consciousness. Progress is individual, yet draws from collective consciousness, like the planet's or galaxy's consciousness. Individual awakening infers individuality, but it involves touching the consciousness of many. The universe thinks in terms of collective evolution, not individual religions or continents, aiming to awaken the whole human family. I realized my sessions weren't personal but collective transformation work.

**Iain McNay: ** It started with questions, but the adventure led you beyond them.

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, beyond collective transformation, it became an adventure in knowing the universe, drawn into intimacy with creative intelligence, causal reality, oneness, and deeper states. The universe loves being known, and as we return to source, we're met with supreme intelligence and love. It's thrilled when we're open to experience and see its billions-year creative process unfold.

**Iain McNay: ** Do you view your journey as different from those on a contemplation and meditation path, realizing your method involved substances?

**Chris Bache: ** The cosmology from this work aligns with great contemplative traditions. The masters I've studied were my guides, and what they describe matches my experiences. There's nothing new, only a different method. It allows someone of modest capacity to have temporary experiences if determined. Huston Smith said mystical experiences don't make a mystic, but practice internalizes them and helps you grow.

**Iain McNay: ** Midway through this, you wrote *The Living Classroom* about your students, yet you don't mention psychedelics, but something special was happening between you and your students.

**Chris Bache: ** I wrote *The Living Classroom* at the end of my teaching career. It's not about psychedelics, but consciousness. I taught, did my private work, and kept a strict division between both. Yet, over time, I noticed my students were activated by my private work. When I experienced deeper states or Death-Rebirth, they were reflected in their life. I began to realize synchronicities—like choosing an example that coincidentally matched students' experiences. It wasn't coincidence; it was happening regularly. I had to understand how to work with it as an educator. *The Living Classroom* explores how consciousness in its natural condition is boundless, like a lake with ripples. I developed strategies to work with consciousness in groups, realizing fields of energy congeal around courses and students. If you teach regularly, a field builds, reflecting students' cumulative learning over the years, accelerating future students' learning. Knowing this, you can work with these fields strategically and ethically. For instance, closing fields at course end is crucial. I noticed students seemed stuck if fields weren't closed, so I learned to close them mindfully, letting students move forward freely, reflective of a kind of quantum pedagogy.

**Iain McNay: ** I think there was one interesting example you used in *The Living Classroom* about how you found that when a student would ask you a question, if you didn't reply straight away, you'd just open for a few seconds, you'd see this door open, and a whole new dimension to the answer to the question would come.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah. Well, it's like I found if I stopped, and instead of saying the first thing that came to my mind—because pretty much every question they ask is something you've already heard before—but if I stopped, I visualized suddenly I saw a little blank door in the back of my mind, and a piece of paper came through that door, and I read the paper, and it was a different answer. And so if I tried it, all of a sudden the eyes would light up, and the energy of the room would light up, and we would go in a new and novel direction. My teaching began to be a dialogue between organized notes—I do a lot of notes and really thoroughly organized—and this improvisation. My understanding is the improvisation that was coming through this deeper consciousness connection was what happened when my mind was put into the context of our collective mind, and the teaching came out of a dialogue between the minds who were there and my mind who was there.

**Iain McNay: ** And you also talked about how the students were changing you. You felt that, and you talked about a quote from the book, “over the years, the students broke me down and rebuilt me.” That's quite radical to say the students broke you down and rebuilt you.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, I've always been blessed with really good students. They were willing to engage deeply with the questions that I asked, and we danced together, and in that process, they opened up my heart. They invited me into the room, and they let me into their lives—not in a counseling kind of way, but in an intellectual, philosophical inquiry kind of way. We worked together, and in that process, they taught me about this hidden territory in the room. They taught me what could happen when good people of good hearts came together in this adventure. And they did, they broke me down. I learned, for example, at first I thought a student would ask a question, and I would have an answer only because of an experience that had recently happened to me, or a book I had just recently read, or a session I just had. I thought, "Oh, that's interesting." But then I began to realize I had it all backwards, that sometimes I was having the experiences and reading the books I was reading because there was a questioning student who was coming to me in the future, so my learning was actually being seeded by their desire to know. Once you let go at that level, once you stop thinking that you are the orchestrator of this entire enterprise, that it's really a collaborative enterprise from the start, you realize that your learning and teaching is so deeply embedded in their learning and teaching—then where is the self in that? Where are the boundaries of the self? It becomes a dance of presences in the room, and when life uses you in that way, when that cross-fertilization takes place, it's the sweetest feeling in the world to me. You're part of something larger. You release to it, and they release to it. They took me there. I could not go there by myself. They took me there.

**Iain McNay: ** And then at some point, a great sadness came upon you on your adventure. You talk about, as years passed, you found yourself entering a deep sadness. Your enthusiasm for life was fading, you began to feel separated and marooned. You reached a point where you realized you were just waiting to die, to return to your beloved.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, that was after I stopped the journey. Yes, so I have to fill in a little bit of a blank, and then I can say what happened after the journey. In the book *Diamonds from Heaven*, I tell the story of ego death, moving into the ocean of suffering, and then moving into archetype of reality, and then into causal reality, having these wonderful unitive experiences. I was completely satisfied at that point, but there were still five years in the journey ahead. I went through yet another cycle of death and rebirth, and I was taken into a domain of light that was so clear, so exquisitely clear, beyond imagination. Buddhism calls it Dharmakaya, the absolute reality of clear light. Over five years and 26 sessions, I was taken into this reality four times, just four times. And in between those four sessions, there was tremendous purification. In these states of awareness, you become light; you dissolve completely into light and have the qualities and boundlessness of light, dissolving into the crystalline nature of the Divine. I don't mean divine in any theistic or conventional sense, but I don't know what other vocabulary to give to it. In each of those four adventures going deeper into the divine, there were a series of things that happened. Then the divine began to come deeper into my body. I reached a point after being handled carefully and broken down, where this consciousness brought me to the end of my work. It gave me an overview of all my sessions from the beginning to the end. It gave me a last set of instructions as I was about to leave. I didn't know it was over, but it called it. I knew I had to stop my work. The primary reason I stopped was because it became too difficult to come back from the light. It became so painful to come back into time and space after having dissolved so completely into this infinite light. Light comes in many layers, but the diamond light, as I call it, is a particularly deep expression of light. So I stopped my sessions. I had always been integrating my sessions carefully. But after I stopped, a deep sadness settled over me. Over time, I realized I was suffering from a loss of communion. I had such a longing for that light, and I did not have the spiritual maturity or capacity to incarnate that light in my physical existence. I reached a point where I began to realize I was just waiting to die, taking care of my students, my family, doing what I had to do, but in my heart of hearts, waiting to die so I could return to the light. I began to realize this is not right. This is not the way it's supposed to be. So I went back and reexamined the whole process, realizing that somewhere along the way, I made a mistake. You could say I was suffering from too much God. I had lost balance between Transcendence and immanence, having plunged deeply into the transcendent divine, losing my foothold in the immanent divine. That's incredibly valuable. I had to make a concerted effort to congeal my life, to come to terms with being where I was, to continue my spiritual practice so I could let the divine, the light, enter more deeply into my body and consciousness. It's an ongoing process, a work still in progress.

**Iain McNay: ** Yes, but you also talk about in the book, which isn't published yet, *Diamonds from Heaven*, about the fact that human things like family were so important to you in helping you sort of find the ground again, finding pleasure in human things. You were almost blown away by what was there, but there's so much beauty also in the human realms. These are my words rather than yours, which have been taken out of significance, but in themselves, they're wonderful.

**Chris Bache: ** Absolutely. My family was always my rock, my students and my family. I have three children, and I was always with my classes and my children, like these flowers on the table. What magnificent creations there are. The diamond luminosity, the light, is magnificent. We have a tremendous hunger to touch these realms and return to them. But the physical world is the manifestation of that reality in tangible form. Nature has been a tremendous balm for me—just nature, the starry sky, being in the woods, being with people. This is another aspect of that sadness. The sadness wasn't just loss of communion, but also isolation. In our culture, I wasn't allowed to talk about these things. In traditional culture, you bring your visions back to the elders, but in my culture, I couldn't talk about my sessions. That sickness of silence just added to my sadness, isolating me, making me sick inside. Living in a psychedelic closet is just as injurious as living in any other closet. Writing *Diamonds from Heaven* was my step back to sharing these visions, doing what I was designed to do: to share them, to hopefully be of use to people. It's important that all our experiences be shared, so I don't own them.

**Iain McNay: ** But you say in one of the books that at the end of the 20 years, you were told or felt it would take 20 years of integration, and actually, the 20 years is up next year.

**Chris Bache: ** It's getting close.

**Iain McNay: ** It might take 20 lifetimes.

**Chris Bache: ** At first, when my meditation spirit told me 20 years in, 20 years out, that it would take 20 years to absorb them, I thought it might have been optimistic. These things are so deep it feels like many lifetimes to absorb. I have basic questions—how do you integrate infinity into finite structures? Some experiences involved deep time, outside time and space, far into the future. How do you integrate those into Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday consciousness? In the end, I don't think you can. The only thing we can do is integrate our finite existence into the infinite. We do our practice, surrender, make ourselves available, respond to the present, and hopefully, the infinite becomes a deeper living reality in our awareness.

**Iain McNay: ** Yes, and as I was saying last night, it's not just the experiences you had, which are amazing. I find for myself, I get to understand something or have a realization, and it can take years to properly integrate that. I realize it's still lingering in a form that isn't totally something I can absorb. On the spiritual journey, people might give themselves a hard time, thinking, I must move on, or get something else, or be clear. No, you do your best, but as you found out, it's a process. It takes time. You cannot force these things. You can be available, meditate, look after yourself, and support your work, but it happens in its own time.

**Chris Bache: ** It does. It's a slow, gradual process. You can't cheat nature; it takes time. You can push it, but in the end, you have to let nature take its course. Yes.

**Iain McNay: ** Okay, Chris, I'm looking at the clock, and nature's taken its course, and time is very up.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you so much, Iain. It's been so good to have this conversation with you. Thank you for it.

**Iain McNay: ** Thank you for coming along to Conscious TV. I'm going to mention your new book, which should be out sometime next year, *Diamonds from Heaven: A 20-Year Journey into the Mind of the Universe*, and the three books already out: *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, *The Living Classroom*, which we touched on about halfway through the interview, and the first book, *Lifecycles: A Study of Reincarnation in Light of Contemporary Consciousness Research*. So if you're interested in Chris, there's a lot to read. There's also, I think, a lecture you did in Prague, which is about an hour long, which I found very useful for picking up the details of Chris's psychedelic adventure.

**Chris Bache: ** The International Transpersonal Conference last September in Prague, right?

**Iain McNay: ** Yes, okay. So there's a lot to follow, and I'd like to explore this more on Conscious TV. If you have any ideas of people we should look at interviewing, then get in contact. Okay, thanks again, Chris.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you, Iain.

**Iain McNay: ** Thank you for watching, and I hope we see you again soon. Goodbye.