Diamonds from Heaven – Lecture at TimeWaver Summer World 2018

Chris Bache: Marcus, I want to thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today and for the chance to address the TimeWaver community, which is certainly such a progressive and wonderful community. Martin mentioned Stanislav Grof. He's one of the co-founders, with Abraham Maslow, of transpersonal psychology, and he's the foremost authority on integrating LSD and other psychedelic substances into the therapeutic process. When I first read Realms of the Human Unconscious, his first book, I read it in 1979. I was a brand new, young junior faculty member at the university. As soon as I read that book, I realized that psychedelics would represent a turning point, a pivot point not only in psychology but also in philosophy. I was trained as a philosopher of religion, so I made the decision to begin a psychedelic voyage. I was convinced that the most important work to be done in the near future would be done by people writing from an experiential basis, not simply an intellectual basis. So, I began the process of doing that experiential work.

Now, I have to assume a certain familiarity with Stan Grof's work. I won't try to describe the methodology of working with psychedelics. It's a very intense methodology. It's not tripping and going to a concert. It's working in very contemplative, isolated circumstances, isolated from the world, with eye shades, going deeply within. I did this work over 20 years. I did 73 high-dose LSD sessions using Stan Grof's paradigm. I worked for four years, then I stopped for six years, and then I worked very intensely for another 10 years. To do this work, I had to split my life in half. On the outside, I continued to be a university professor. I gave my lectures, did the things that university professors do. In my inner life, I began this very intense journey, and I kept them separate. I kept a firewall between the two. I could not talk about my psychedelic work with my friends at the university, and I never brought it into my classes or to my students. It's only after I've retired from the university and after I'm past the statute of limitations for doing this work, because I stopped in 1999, that I'm able to really bring forward the philosophical significance of these experiences. And this is what I'd like to share with you tonight.

I'm just finishing a book that I'm calling Diamonds from Heaven. I don't know whether this is what it will ultimately look like, because it's still being considered by a publisher, but in my mind, this is how I've imagined it. Ervin Laszlo has contributed the foreword to the book, and what I'd like to do is take you through some of the highlights of this journey—just little touches, little scenarios here and there along the way. I'd like to emphasize that I did this work as a philosopher, not as a therapist. I wasn't primarily seeking healing; I was seeking knowledge of how the universe works. I saw myself as pursuing a new philosophical method, a method pioneered by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. This method consists of three stages: first, to enter and push the boundaries of your experience in carefully structured psychedelic sessions; second, to come back and make a phenomenologically complete and accurate record of your experiences within 24 hours after every session; and third, to critically analyze your experiences, bringing them into dialogue with other fields of knowledge, and compare them with the experiences of other psychedelic explorers.

Now, this is only the third time I've tried to speak about these things in public, so you'll have to forgive me if I follow my notes a bit more closely than I might otherwise do. A few comments about method, and then we'll go to the content. Most of you are aware of the difference between low-dose psychedelic therapy and high-dose psychedelic therapy. When I was doing this work, I saw myself doing an extended series of high-dose psychedelic therapy. The original protocol at Spring Grove Hospital restricted psychedelic sessions to a maximum of three. What they were trying to do was trigger a near-death type experience for people approaching their own physical death. I thought, whatever could be done three times safely could be done more times safely. What I learned, however, was that while my work always stayed within the bounds of safety, working with multiple sessions of high doses of LSD opened up challenges and opportunities that weren't really considered in the early stages of psychedelic therapy.

Looking back, I figured I needed a different name for it, so I call it psychedelic exploration. The method is the method of psychedelic therapy—complete isolation, working with eyeshades, a sitter, and carefully calibrated music to pace the opening and closing of a session. The difference is the number of sessions involved. For me, it was 73 sessions over 20 years. I kept detailed records of all my sessions. I even tracked the astrological variables, looking at the correlations between transits and my session experiences. I kept meticulous notes over these years, about 400 pages of raw experiential data, and the story I'm telling in Diamonds from Heaven. I call it Diamonds from Heaven because I wanted to start at the end of the story. I thought I'd put a title that indicates where it ends, but it took a long time before the diamonds came.

It isn’t really a personal story. It is a personal story, but it’s not primarily about me. This diagram represents a series of sessions, overlapping to emphasize that one session pretty much starts where the previous session stopped. I found that my personal experiences, the healing experiences and insights into my personal life, tended to take place at the beginning and end of these sessions, when I was leaving and coming back into time and space. But when I was in the peak of the experiences, indicated by these large circles, after about the first 12 or 15 sessions, I was operating in a state of consciousness that was far beyond personal states of consciousness. That's the story I'm trying to tell in Diamonds from Heaven. That's the philosophically significant story, because that's, I think, the story that in some way we all share. It's part of our collective inheritance. It's the cosmological story, which is the important story.

When one does this work, one goes through many cycles, many iterations of death and rebirth, not just ego death. The first circle, everything below the cross line, takes place below time and space reality. That bottom line kind of represents ego. The first death-rebirth cycle, which I've marked with the astrological glyphs, in recognition of Rick Tarnas and Stan Grof’s insights into the correlations between astrological transits and one's experiences in non-ordinary states, which I only partly affirm, my experiences affirm and then don't confirm. But that first death-rebirth takes place at what Stan calls the perinatal level of consciousness. One moves into deeper states of consciousness, and then death and rebirth repeat in deeper formulations, taking you into deeper levels of reality. Stan Grof follows Ken Wilber in describing these levels in terms of psychic, subtle, causative level reality. I don't have any vested interest in what scale you use, and certainly to differentiate only three dimensions of consciousness, transpersonal consciousness is elementary, because there are thousands and thousands of dimensions that one moves into. But basically, just to suggest that there are many levels of consciousness and transpersonal consciousness, and one enters these levels of consciousness in stages. At every stage, there is a cost which is exacted. There is a depth of surrender that takes place. In the beginning, what's asked is for you to surrender your ego. But there are other types of surrender that take place at deeper levels of the journey.

To draw only one circle is to oversimplify. Sometimes these indicate numbers of sessions entering deeper and deeper into causal reality. There are cycles within cycles within cycles. So you could mark all of these as one cycle. But in fact, there were cycles within cycles as the journey continues. The easiest way now is just to give you the chapters, to show you the chapters of the book, and maybe share a few comments on each of the chapters. So, here are the chapters of Diamonds from Heaven: Crossing the Perinatal Plane, The Ocean of Suffering, Deep Time in the Soul, Initiation into the Universe, The Greater Real of Archetypal Reality, A Benediction of Blessings, The Birth of the Future Human, and Diamond Luminosity. Now there are some missing chapters. There's a methodology chapter and there's a chapter where I introduce a typical session day. But these are the chapters that carry the content of the sessions, the content of the experiences.

The first, Crossing the Perinatal Plane, is the easiest to summarize because it’s the one most people are familiar with from reading Stan Grof's work. One goes through many fetal experiences. One relives one's experience in the womb, relives one's own birth, and goes through many variations of the death and rebirth process. My journey through this level took about two years and 10 sessions. In the end, in the ninth and tenth sessions, the universe, in my version of ego death, just snapped me like a twig. The ego is, in the end, not very difficult to take apart. It snapped me like a twig by turning me into the exact opposite of everything I had known myself to be. I entered the day as a white, middle-class, highly educated philosopher concerned with the meaning of existence, and it took all of those variables and reversed them. I spent hours experiencing the lives of women and women of color from multiple cultures around the world—women who were poor, women who had no interest in philosophy whatsoever. And yet, I was all of these things. I was all of these beings' lives. It was terribly frightening for me. It scared me to death. It was the perfect hell for a male philosopher. There’s nothing wrong with being a woman, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with being poor or with not being interested in philosophy. The issue was my identification with my maleness, my identification with my middle class—whatever, whatever—which was the problem is what the universe had to break in me. And the message was not simply to recover your lives as women, because I know I've had former lives as women. This was different. This was where you're going, gender does not exist, let go. So as part of my entry into deeper states of consciousness, my identity as a male was taken from me, and when I surrendered, I entered the most glorious experience of womanhood. I experienced hundreds and hundreds of women. I experienced all the aspects of female experiences that I could imagine. I conceived, I gave birth, I laughed with my husband. I wish every man could have the experience of having such a deep experience of women's lives.

When I went into the next phase, the next two years of work, I entered a domain of extraordinary collective suffering. I entered systematically deeper and deeper. I was taken into just an orgy of pain and suffering. It seemed to comprise all the wars of history, all the droughts, all the famines. It was a true ordeal. In the beginning, I thought this represented a deepening of ego death. I thought somehow pieces of my ego had slipped through the first death, and this collective suffering represented a deepening of ego death. But eventually, this went on for so long and involved so many thousands and hundreds of thousands of beings that I came to a different conclusion. The conclusion I came to was that somehow these sessions were using my sessions—not to heal my private person. It wasn't about healing my private life. It was about trying to heal the collective psyche of the human race, that somehow all the trauma of all those wars and all that violence through history had lodged itself in the collective psyche. And at least in this particular context, one of the ways the universe was trying to heal the human species was in these expanded states of consciousness, beginning to siphon and draw out through this awareness the pain of the human species, to transform that pain and bring it into the light.

Now, psychedelic sessions have two halves. There is the first half, which is the cleansing half, where I was experiencing this ocean of suffering. Then, there's the second half. You go through a certain amount of work, and the suffering comes to a culmination, and after that, the rest of the session, you're spun into positive, ecstatic, transpersonal spaces. The Ocean of Suffering lasted two years. Actually, there was one year of work, then I took a six-year break, and then I started another ten years of work. When I resumed my work six years later, the ocean of suffering started exactly where it had stopped six years before, which I think is an indication of the precision and the intentionality of the intelligence that we are engaging with in these deep states of consciousness.

When I came through the Ocean of Suffering in the first year, I entered into what I call Deep Time in the Soul. I had a series of experiences in which I experienced my entire life, from beginning to end, complete. I experienced the distilled essence of everything that I was in the process of becoming, and everything that I had become. It was my entire life, from start to finish. I came back to it again and again, the same system field, opening up layers, more and more layers. I began to have insights into the people I was related to, to my wife, and to family members. The first time I entered this state, when I came out of it, I couldn't remember any of it. It was the most meaningful experience of my life, but I couldn't remember it. When I went back into it a second, third, and fourth time, however, I began to remember more and more. I could hold on to more and more of the experiences. This is an important epistemological point. When you enter these states of consciousness, you, in the beginning, will enter into new states of consciousness that are so cognitively original you can't hold on to them. And this is where people talk about ineffability. But if you keep going back to the same state of consciousness again and again, you will remember more and more. You literally have to teach yourself how to stay conscious in these deep states of consciousness. It's possible—one can go through and remain conscious—though it involves tremendous purification. You go through one level of purification after another.

Six years later, when I entered my work again and the Ocean of Suffering resumed, at that time, when I went into the ecstatic portion of the experiences, it started in a completely different space with no explanation. I entered into what I call the Initiation into the Universe, a series of sessions that took me deeper and deeper into the universe and gave me a carefully calibrated series of instructions. It was like going to a course, except in this case, the professor was the universe itself.

I give my sessions names to help me remember them. I try to give them a name that represents the pith of each session, and I break my sessions down into bullet points. I'm trying to remember the entire session and the entire journey. These are the names of the sessions that I'm addressing in the Initiation into the Universe. Final Visions, You and I Creating, The Cosmic Tour—some of these are represented. If you've heard these names before, they're in Dark Night, Early Dawn. The Council of Elders, Dying into Oneness was a session of repeatedly dying deeper and deeper into oneness. The Master Plan was the first of a series of visions that took place over many years in which I was shown what the universe's agenda was for the human race. I know it sounds arrogant. It sounds like ego run amok to say that, but in my experience, what I was being shown was what the evolutionary trajectory was for humanity and what the evolutionary agenda was for humanity.

Eventually, the Ocean of Suffering reached a level of intensity that's hard to describe. It culminated in what I call Healing the Collective Wound, a massive purification process of collective healing. When that finished, it spun me into an unprecedented new level of reality—a level of reality that I call archetypal reality, the Greater Real of Archetypal Reality.

When I first entered archetypal reality, my identity as a human being began to fall away from me. I found there is an identity we have as a human being deeper than the identity we have as a specific human being. To enter into archetypal reality, I literally had to leave behind the entire history of the human race and the—not just my personal history, but the conditions of human consciousness. It was like being in the space station, orbiting above the Earth. I entered a state of consciousness beyond the collective psyche, and I was being worked with for months, being taught how to experience how reality works at that level, beyond archetype, beyond the collective psyche.

In my experience, there were two levels of reality that I encountered at the archetypal level. One of them, at the high subtle level. I think of it as kind of the Platonic level. I encountered living forms responsible for creating space-time and its core structures. They were vast. They were huge. My mind imaged them like galaxies, billions of light-years across. They were just enormous. I couldn't wrap my mind around them. They were like archetypes, but not like Plato's archetypes—not eternal ideas in the mind of an unchanging God. They were living forms changing over vast tracts of time. Subsequently, I went into lower subtle-level reality, more of a Jungian kind of level. I entered into the living tissue of the collective psyche. I had many experiences, over and over, of the wholeness the human psyche represents. Even the human body—I had experiences of the archetype of the body. All of us are fractal manifestations of aspects of it. I experienced how each of us, in healing our individual diseases, is contributing to the archetypal structure of our human body as it becomes stronger through history.

I began to have experiences of reincarnation as a collective process. I had always imaged reincarnation as an individual process, where we individually develop our soul's journey. But I began to have experiences of the human race as a single organism incarnating intelligently, creatively, intentionally, generation by generation. I was working in deep time, experiencing the pulse of humanity's self-evolution through the incarnation of billions of beings every century. It was both a numinous experience and absolutely devastating at the same time—experiencing all of humanity with all the experiences that all of us are going through in every generation, to experience that from the perspective of the unified intelligence manifesting as the species and evolving the species further through time. It gave me a completely expanded horizon of the universe's intelligence.

After spending 18 months exploring archetypal reality—which is not long, and I went through it in very big steps, so my description is very incomplete of the totality of that reality—I entered a year of extraordinary blessings. I called it the Benediction of Blessings. It was one blessing after another for an entire year.

These are the names of the sessions. Let me jump back to explain a bit. Notice how much cleansing is involved, even when you're working at such a deep level of consciousness. Session 28 was an extraordinarily positive blessing. It was my first contact with causal reality. I touched this extraordinarily beautiful, ecstatic state of consciousness. I was there for only 30 minutes, but the next three sessions over six months involved grueling ordeals of detoxification and purification. What I came to understand is each deeper state of consciousness is a higher level of energy, and when you enter a deeper state of consciousness, you have to acclimate to that higher level of energy. Otherwise, your experiences will be fragmented and chaotically confused. So, just that one touch of causal reality—it took three sessions, hours and hours of physical and psychological detoxification, for me to be able to return to that state of consciousness more clearly and stay cognitively coherent in that state. This pattern repeats itself over and over again as you go deeper and deeper into the universe, so much so that I began to dread the session after every major breakthrough. There was a "carrying out the garbage" quality every time I broke through into a new luminous state of consciousness. The next sessions were terribly difficult.

Now, I can go into the Benediction of Blessings. I present four sessions in the book. Each was different. The Forest was an experience of oneness, śūnyatā, emptiness. It was like no self present in me, no self present in the world, an absolute transparency to the totality of life as a living singularity. It was a deep entry into causal reality. Singing the Universe Away was entry into the primal void, the Buddha womb, satcitananda. It was entering the primal, fertile void underlying all manifest existence. Jesus' Blood was an overwhelming experience of cosmic love—being drenched in love like never before. You've never been loved until you've been loved like God. It's an overwhelming experience of love deeper than anything I had ever encountered.

Let me mention The Birth of the Diamond Soul a little longer, because it will come up again later in the sessions. Eleven years previous, I had the experience of my life as a completed whole, start to finish. But in the 40th session, I began to experience the integration of all my former lives. It was like winding a string around a kite spool. All my former lives came in fast and furious, like winding a string of white light on a kite spool. When it hit a certain critical mass, it exploded—all those individual lives fused into one life and exploded. It was my first contact with what I would call Diamond Luminosity. My heart just ruptured and exploded. My consciousness jumped far beyond any consciousness of any individual life. I think what I experienced that day was where reincarnation is taking humanity. Reincarnation is not about adding a little bit lifetime by lifetime, adding a few more qualities, a few more capacities. Reincarnation is taking us to a point where all our former lives, all our history, all our learning will fuse, and when it fuses, it lifts us into the next step in human evolution. The soul will literally wake up on Earth.

Reincarnation is about moving back and forth between soul and ego. As we continue this process over thousands of years, sooner or later, the soul is going to awake on Earth. When that happens, everything changes because the soul experiences life differently than the ego does. The soul experiences a depth of connection with other beings because we've been in each other's lives for centuries. The soul has a different relationship to the Earth because it knows that the Earth it leaves will be the Earth it inherits in its next incarnation. So it has a whole different relationship to issues of ecology and caretaking of the Earth.

Where the sessions went next, chronologically, was into the Diamond Luminosity work. But before I go into that, I need to backtrack a little and talk about the birth of the future human. When I started this work, I never imagined that what I'm about to describe would become part of it. I thought I was doing this work for my personal healing, transformation, enlightenment, whatever. But what happened, starting in the 23rd session and in multiple sessions over the years, was I began to have repeated visions of the human race and what was happening to it. I think this is a natural progression because when you die as an individual, when you die as an ego, your consciousness opens—not just into oneness with God but into the life of the species. You enter the age of your species, just as you have a feeling of your individual age. I was repeatedly shown that the human species is coming into a time of tremendous exponential explosion in its capacity. We are coming into a time of great awakening.

In this chapter, I present what are six visions that I call the Visions of Awakening—visions that I pull out of all these other sessions already presented, and I weave them together to show the coherent story of this great awakening, this birth we are coming into. I had seen this story over four years, but it never showed me how it was going to pull it off. I never saw how we were going to make this jump in consciousness. And then, in 1995, a week before Christmas, I was in the Diamond Luminosity work, expecting to go once more into the Diamond Luminosity state. Instead, the universe threw me far into deep time, far into humanity's future. It gave me the experience of the death and rebirth of our species at a collective level. There was nothing personal about my experience—I was the human species, the psyche of the planet as a whole. I had dissolved into the collective psyche and experienced a death at that level. It was a near-death experience for the species.

There was a time we were overtaken by conditions—a loss of control, a deconstruction, a time of great suffering. I think the 21st century is going to be the beginning of the dark night of our collective soul, a time of great undoing. We're going to lose control. We've postponed making important environmental, ecological, cultural decisions so often that there's no avoiding the impending global systems crisis. Just at its worst, it passed—the storm passed like a hurricane over an island. When we began to collect ourselves, an exponential growth of light within the human species emerged—an exponential growth in intelligence, ideas, creativity, social formulations, new families springing up. This process is leading us not simply to recreate our culture, technology, and economy, but to a transformation at the core of the collective psyche. Our collective psyche is going to shift into a new foundation, and after that, everyone born a human being will operate from this new foundation. We truly are becoming a species of Buddhas, a species of Christs and prophets.

Chris Bache: After the benediction of blessings, I was completely content. The universe had asked me to contribute something to the ocean of suffering, and I gave it. In return, it rewarded me with more joy than I could ever imagine. It was just an overwhelming joy. I had known God, I had known the fertile void—it was a philosopher's dream come true. Though I didn't know where things would go, there were still five years ahead on my journey.

After one more death and rebirth cycle, I entered an extraordinarily hyper-clear state of consciousness, a state I came to call Diamond Luminosity. It's what Buddhists call Dharmakāya, the absolute clear light of being. I had experienced light many times before, at the subtle level and in different dimensions, but this was a different order of light. When I call it the "diamond light," I'm describing a particular quality of light—ultra-clear and beyond imagination. I entered the Diamond Luminosity four times over the next four years, in only four of 25 sessions. Between each entry into the Diamond Luminosity, there was tremendous purification—detoxification and healing—but then, I would be spun into another experience of this diamond light.

There were two movements in this process: progressively entering deeper into the Diamond Luminosity, with the 50th session being the deepest. I found myself in a state of deep absorption into pure light. I was light, entirely lost of boundaries. I was as happy as one can imagine being. Just then, something happened that changed my entire understanding of life. My visual field pivoted 90 degrees, and in the far distance, I saw a reality as far beyond where I was as I was beyond Earth, time, and space. In that reality, I saw light, and a ray of that light hit me, shattering me. I call it the "absolute light."

That's when I understood it's an infinite progression. There's no end to the journey, no reaching the end of God or the Divine. I had believed there was an end, described differently by different people as oneness with God or the super cosmic void. But I learned there are dimensions of oneness, depths within voids. I assumed there was an end, a final stopping point. This taught me there's no stopping point; the Divine is infinitely large. Were I to do it over, I wouldn't use the same method or push so hard. I'd be gentler with myself because now I know the goal isn't to reach some state or condition, but to open up and let in as much of the Divine as you can, allowing it to transform your life and existence.

The last year's work features final visions, the sessions examined in the book. The last two visions were the "goodbye sessions." I didn't know I was stopping; I thought I'd continue, but the consciousness that guided my sessions choreographed the ending before I knew it. It provided an overview of my life's work, showing how all the pieces fit together. I used those experiences to organize the story in "Diamonds from Heaven." Before parting, I received a series of last instructions.

However, Chapter Seven—session 70—was serious work. The universe put me through one of the deepest, most demanding strip-downs. I wouldn't have believed I could go through so many layers of dying and complete loss of reality. After that, I was spun into a very clear state of consciousness. To summarize, it took me deeper into Deep Time than ever before, to a timeframe of around 100,000 to 200,000 years. It provided a culmination of the birth of the future human—the capstone of our master story. I tried on the being the universe is bringing forward on our planet—an extraordinary being.

It's vital to hold a vision of our direction and what is happening because, as dark shadows gather, we might lose ourselves in despair. If we understand we are giving birth—not to a slightly improved version but to a magnificent being—we won't lose hope. I learned we are built for speed. Though we might think human nature is stable, if you look at reincarnation and the winding of lives, there is an exponential jump in the evolutionary dynamic. We carry our history in much smaller packs than we'd think without considering this larger perspective. We are built for speed and evolutionary acceleration, and we're in an accelerated time.

Before our birth, we knew what was happening to humanity, chose to participate in this time, knowing it would be hard, but exciting and dynamic. I stopped my sessions for two reasons: pain from an overexcited subtle energy system, even though I practiced yoga and meditation, and heartache. I couldn't bear coming back from the Divine. Once completely dissolved into light, reality feels dried up. After halting my sessions, I went into deep sadness, akin to near-death experiences or Carl Jung's experience in the hospital. My wound was unusually deep after entering the divine expanse profoundly.

I realized it wasn't good to live waiting to die, to return to the beloved. I made an effort to ground myself back into historical existence, into time and space. I had to rebalance Transcendence and immanence, having lost my footing in the immanent divine. It took about ten years to be comfortable in time and space again. My journey is a cautionary tale; it's not merely the hero's adventure. Transcendence is paradoxical. A little is good and healing, but too much can cause you to overlook the physical world's divine body. Thank you for letting me share my story with you.

Audience: Ian.