Mapping of Transcendence

Chris Bache: I want to thank Swamiji for taking us into such a wonderful, spacious place. It was a little disorienting for me because I went so deep with him that when he was finishing, I suddenly realized I have a talk to give. I would also like to mention that the cosmology that emerges in psychedelic research is not a new cosmology. It's the same cosmology that has been discovered and emerges in the deepest and best mystical traditions around the world. We are simply looking at a new set of technology, a new set of techniques for entering into these states of consciousness.

It's a pleasure to be with the TimeWaver community. Last year, I spoke to you about a book I was writing called Diamonds from Heaven. This book has now been finished and it will be released this coming November. The publisher has given it a new title, LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It's not my favorite title; it will always be Diamonds from Heaven for me. The revolution begins with the question: what is it possible for human beings to experience? The work in the Global Consciousness Project pushes the edges of what is possible for human beings to experience. Parapsychological research pushes that question. Psychedelic research pushes that question.

The foreword to this book was written by Ervin Laszlo, who I'm so pleased will be with us this afternoon by television. It is Ervin's work through his mastery of multiple scientific disciplines to demonstrate that there is a super implicate, super coherent cosmic intelligence that informs time and space. It's my experience and my contention that psychedelics, when used in a disciplined and therapeutically structured environment, give us the opportunity to enter into a progressively deepening experience, a deepening communion with this cosmic intelligence.

Now, as you all know, there is a revolution, a renaissance in psychedelic research taking place across the world. Most psychedelic research today is taking place in two forms or is focused on two projects. One of them is mapping the neurology and biochemical pathways that psychedelics activate, and the second is healing the personal psyche—the wounds that we collect in life: post-traumatic stress, depression, a variety of different conditions. I think these are important first steps in reclaiming these valuable substances, but these are only the first steps. Historically and cross-culturally, our experience with these mind-opening substances has been that healing the personal unconscious is only the first stage of a much longer journey.

The psychedelic agents we have access to today are so powerful that I believe they mark a new frontier in human experience. We can shatter the shell of the earthbound mind so consistently that it becomes hard to describe the depths of cosmic communion that follow. By taking our life to its limits and repeatedly shattering those limits, we dissolve for hours at a time into flows of life that transcend all measures. By entering these states with focus and clear intent, by submitting to the harsh demands of death and rebirth, we surrender all we have been to become something utterly new for six or eight hours at a time. We become beings who can do things we could never do, beings who can know things that we can never know. As we enter larger and older levels of existence, the universe receives us and tutors us. It rewards our courage with exquisite intimacies, drawing us into almost unspeakable ecstasies of discovery.

My own psychedelic journey began 40 years ago when I was a brand-new academic, fresh out of graduate school. I encountered the work of Stanislav Grof and read his early books: Realms of the Human Unconscious (published in 1976), which I read in 1979, and soon after, LSD Psychotherapy, where he sets out the methodology of working clinically, therapeutically, and in a very disciplined, structured manner with psychedelics, integrating them into the therapeutic process. I want to emphasize that what I'm describing today is not tripping. It's not the recreational use of psychedelics. It's not the careless engaging of these states of consciousness. These are amplifiers of consciousness, and when we contain that amplified consciousness, when we take it into a meditational situation, into a kiva, completely isolated from the outside world, and use this energy to drive deeper and deeper into consciousness—that's what I'm talking about. That's what Stan Grof's work is exploring.

First, let me say a few words about the protocol that I used, and then describe where this journey, which I'm telling the story of in LSD and the Mind of the Universe, went. Most of you who know Stan Grof's work, and I have to assume a certain familiarity here, know that the fundamental distinction he drew in their methodology was between low-dose psycholytic therapy and high-dose psychedelic therapy. Psycholytic therapy essentially involved working with lower doses of psychedelics, up to between 40 and 100 sessions where you peel the unconscious layer by layer, stripping down the various levels of trauma or angst or pains that we carry bit by bit. At Spring Grove Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, they developed a different form of therapy, high-dose psychedelic therapy. But the strategy was quite different there. It was to take an overwhelming dose, a very high-level dose of psychedelics, about 500 micrograms, and blow through all the levels of consciousness to try to trigger a Near-Death Experience. They were working with terminally ill cancer patients, and they wanted to see if they could trigger a confrontation with the universe that would give them a glimpse of where they were going, thereby reducing the anxiety of death, and they succeeded in doing so.

I came along and thought, well, if you could use psychedelics safely three times, and their protocol was limited to a maximum of three doses per patient, then you could do it safely more than three times. And that's what I set out to do. I began a quiet, covert exploration because I couldn't do this work legally. I had to create a barrier between my professional life as a professor of religious studies and my personal life, where I began the systematic work of exploring my own consciousness using Stan Grof's protocols in psychedelic therapy. It ended up being 73 high-dose sessions. I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms spread over 20 years. I did four years of work, stopped for six years for reasons that I explain in the book, and then did another ten years of very intense work. I did this all between the age of 30 and 50. I stopped in 1999, and it's taken me this long to digest everything that I experienced, to put it in an organized fashion, and to write it down in a way that I could share it with others.

What's important is not that I experienced these things. What's important is that these levels of consciousness are available for everyone to experience, whether through psychedelics or non-psychedelics, because it's the nature of the universe itself. I want to emphasize that I'm not a psychologist or a therapist. I didn't undertake this work seeking healing, though I received much healing. I am a philosopher. I was trained as a philosopher, and I had a philosophical agenda. I trace this work back to William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, where he talks about his experiences with nitrous oxide. The essence of this new philosophical modality involves three steps: first, to push the boundaries of consciousness as hard as possible; second, to write a detailed and complete, phenomenologically accurate report of your experience within 24 hours; and third, to critically analyze your experience, comparing it to other bodies of knowledge and the experiences of other journeyers.

So a few words on the methodology. When I got to the end of my 73 journeys and began writing it up, I realized this was something different. When you enter into this state so many times in a controlled fashion, it opens opportunities not considered in the early years of psychedelic therapy and also presents challenges not encountered then. I recognized it needed a new name, so I called it psychedelic exploration. The method is psychedelic therapy, conducted in very controlled circumstances, always working with a sitter, in contained and private environments, with eye shades, earphones, and a very carefully curated musical list. The difference between psychedelic therapy and psychedelic exploration is the number of sessions. For me, it was 73 sessions.

I want to add that this is not a protocol I recommend. At the time, I thought I could do this work safely, and I did do it safely, always staying within safety limits. But I found that pushing oneself that hard into the universe generated complications that it took all of my resources to manage. If I were doing this work over again, I would be gentler. I would balance high-dose sessions with low-dose sessions, and because LSD tends to be a high-altitude psychedelic, I would balance working with LSD with working with psilocybin and ayahuasca, which are more body-grounded psychedelics. I think a more nuanced approach would produce better results.

I did this work as systematically as I could. I have very detailed records, about 400 pages of my psychedelic journal. I kept track of all my sessions' dates and looked at astrological variables from the understanding that there is a correlation between the outer planets and what happens in one's psychedelic sessions, based on insights from Stan Grof and Rick Tarnas. My protocol was highly standardized, minimizing as many variables as possible. I always had the same sitter, a clinical psychologist whom I happened to be married to at the time—the same set, setting, location, substance, dose level, and recording process remain constant.

The stability of these variables contributed to the clarity and the stability of the communion that opened and the psychedelic window that opened in this work. The story in Diamonds from Heaven—it will always be Diamonds from Heaven to me—is not primarily a personal story. While it's inherently personal because it's based on my experience, it represents a series of psychedelic sessions drawn to illustrate that the sessions systematically engage in a conversation that continues session by session. The peaks and sessions addressed broader insights beyond personal reality.

When doing this work, one undergoes many deaths and rebirths. This line in the image, everything below, is time-space reality. The drop in the blue image represents our individual time-space identity, our egoic identity. The first circle represents the Death-Rebirth that occurs when we transition into spiritual reality, ego death, which gets a lot of attention in psychedelic literature. But there are deeper deaths that occur at more profound levels of existence.

Stan Grof uses vocabulary like psychic-level Transpersonal experience, subtle-level Transpersonal experience, and causal-level experience. The universe tends to reveal itself in layers, resulting in deaths when moving into these levels. Every time you go deeper, everything you've known, including your psychedelic experiences, must be surrendered for a novel dimension of existence to open. Evaluating my experiences, I considered the number of fundamental core Death-Rebirth transitions I went through—five in total.

The first is the death of self, the shattering of your time-space identity, letting go of everything from your birth till that moment—ego death. The second was entering the collective mind. The third was entering the archetypal mind, as discussed by Carl Jung and Plato. Fourth was entering causal oneness—there is no outer boundary at the level of causal oneness, the totality of existence itself. The fifth level for me is the domain of Diamond Luminosity, which occupied me for the journey's last five years.

Now, I'd like to shift to the book and show you the relationship between these stages and the chapters of the book. For the death of self, there is the chapter "Crossing the Boundary of Birth and Death." Then, exploring collective mind, there are chapters on "The Ocean of Suffering," "Deep Time in the Soul," and "Initiation into the Universe." Archetypal mind has "The Greater Real of Archetypal Reality," causal oneness has "A Benediction of Blessings," and Diamond Luminosity is discussed in Chapter 10, which includes 26 sessions, almost a third of the journey.

Before discussing Diamond Luminosity, the birth of the future human needs mentioning. It's a series of experiences that began during the universe's initiation and continued into the Diamond Luminosity work, culminating in a final vision—the capstone of the birth of the future human work.

Crossing the boundary of birth and death is straightforward because it's well-described in Stan Grof's work, entering and transitioning through the perinatal level. Many relive their own birth and confront death and dying. When pushing consciousness' boundaries, birth and death intertwine, leading to profound existential crises until an ego death event occurs. It took me two years and 10 sessions to navigate this process, with the universe snapping me like a twig, reversing everything I knew myself to be.

I became women of color, women with no interest in philosophical exploration. It was a broadening experience, not to reclaim femininity or former lives as a woman, but to let go of gender entirely.

Excuse me.

Where things went next was unexpected. After ego death, things should get lighter, but instead, I entered a domain of extraordinary suffering—collective suffering—over two years, systematically deepening until I became all human beings of our species over 100,000 years, understanding it's not personal death but a transformation process for the human species. Through communion with Ervin Laszlo's Akashic memory, holding the memory of the universe and our species, our wounds collectively burden us, but the universe works to cleanse these to allow higher functioning.

Sessions have purification and ecstatic phases. If you allow the suffering phase to take you as far as it wants, it culminates in a death-surrender process, awakening into a completely different, unexpected reality, leading to ecstatic states. The process repeats in subsequent sessions.

After the ocean of suffering, I entered "Deep Time in the Soul," experiencing life as a complete whole, overwhelmed by instruction on my life's purpose and connections. Initially, such awareness was impossible, but I learned to anchor states of consciousness over time, developing accurate recall of previously novel consciousness levels.

After a six-year break, resuming work saw the exact continuation of the ocean of consciousness, worsening before shifting to a systematic cosmological instruction process. Though seemingly arrogant, that's what happened. My sessions were documented, each named to anchor their essence, and explained in the book. The Master Plan showed what was happening with humanity’s trajectory.

Eventually, the suffering culminated in healing the collective wound, spinning me into ancient archetypal reality—never to reappear in subsequent sessions.

Chris Bache: Where I went next was into the greater realm of archetypal reality. I entered a reality that was more real than physical reality. It was like Plato's cave, where the fellow escapes and enters a world more real than the physical—a very disorienting experience initially. When I entered this archetypal reality, for the next year and a half, I stayed in this reality during my sessions. I went through a death that was deeper than ego death. It was a death in which I ceased to be a human being in any way, shape, or form. My consciousness could no longer operate within the confines of even our collective psyche. I entered a state of awareness beyond our collective psyche. At that level, I was being worked with to be taught how reality functions.

At this level, the experiences I address in this chapter are listed here. My experiences are divided into two levels. There was a kind of high, subtle level—the Platonic level—in which I encountered archetypal forms and beings that were vast, impossible for my mind to fully comprehend. I imaged them as galaxies, billions of light years across, impossible beings of such magnitude. These beings are responsible for creating time and space itself, responsible for the emergence and governance of life within time and space.

At a lower subtle level, I entered deep into the collective psyche. I repeatedly experienced the human species as a single organism, with all our individual minds as fractal aspects of this comprehensive mind. Our bodies were cells within the unified body of humanity. As we heal our minds and bodies, we contribute to the developmental history and strengthening of our species' mind and body. When I entered archetypal reality, the deaths I went through involved enormous energy—fire, volcanoes, sun flares—experiences of being burned alive and consumed at this profound level.

This is an important point: as you go deeper into the universe, every deeper level of reality functions at a higher level of energy. This is well recognized in the deep mystical traditions—a deeper level of consciousness is a higher level of energy. To have a stable experience at that deeper level of consciousness, you must stabilize your consciousness at that higher level of energy. Like mountain climbing, dealing with less oxygen as you ascend, in deep, non-ordinary states of consciousness, you must adjust to greater levels of energy and learn to manage that energy. Otherwise, your experiences will be fragmented, incoherent, and not provide much detail upon returning.

I began to have experiences of reincarnation as a collective phenomenon. I'd previously written a book on reincarnation, envisioning it as an individual soul story: learning, hopefully making progress, reborn, and our individual choices leading to an improving destiny as our soul matures. But now, I began to experience the entire planet as a single organism, maturing through the pulsating rhythm of its entire population reincarnating century after century. I began to understand, or was shown, that our individual karma is part of our collective karma. The boundary between individual and collective karma came down entirely. That's the primary theme of Dark Night, Early Dawn: it's impossible to achieve spiritual awakening alone because there is no private self to awaken. All awakening emerges from a collective context and contributes back. We are always working with the divine for the good of the entire species and beyond.

After time spent in the greater realm of archetypal reality, I entered causal oneness. I entered a period of tremendous blessings—a year of unbelievable blessings. The sessions described here are those experiences. The first was an experience of emptiness, śūnyatā, complete transparency—no self in me, no self anywhere in the world. The world is a living oneness, and when you experience it, you instantly experience no self, the absence of an independent self. When the self goes, the world is one.

Jumping ahead, the birth of the Diamond Soul, "singing the universe away," was an experience of the deep, fertile void, the primal void that is the matrix from which all form emerges. An experience I called "Jesus's blood" involved extraordinary cosmic love, a profound immersion in love unknown anywhere in my life or previous sessions. I mention the birth of the Diamond Soul because it comes up later. In that session, former lives surged in fast and furious. I had worked through hypnosis to understand my former lives, experiencing them as a totality. In the session, lives appeared like filaments of light wrapping around a kite's spool. When they hit a critical mass, they fused, exploding into an extraordinary diamond-light from my chest. I was thrust into a consciousness that was both individual and a higher level of individuality than I had ever known.

I believe I was given a glimpse of where reincarnation is taking us. It's not just about gradual improvement. Eventually, all life experiences merge into a singular individuality, and we wake up. We wake up as cosmic beings, no longer tempted to identify strictly with our bodies within the time-space continuum.

From here the work went into the Diamond Luminosity work, but before I continue, I need to backtrack a bit and talk about the birth of the future human. I mentioned in "the initiation the universe work" a series of visions about humanity's evolution. This sounds ridiculous at one level, but within Transpersonal Psychology, when you shatter individual consciousness, you open into a multi-layered universe, including the consciousness of our species. Insight into our growth is a natural consequence of accessing this layer of consciousness.

Over five years of sessions, I repeatedly received the same story, different aspects of which I describe in this chapter. I gathered visions concerning humanity's future here. The first are the visions of awakening—six visions revealing a profound awakening of the human psyche and heart, what I call the Great Awakening: a shift in the fundamental architecture of the collective unconscious.

A year and a half later, after those initial sessions, I was taken into deep time—beyond personal time—into collective deep time. There, I was shown what appeared to be our species' death and rebirth in the near future. I didn't receive information about how, when, or why, except that it seemed triggered by a global systems crisis, likely ecological in nature. I experienced the transformation's inevitability and gained insights into transition mechanisms—methods to facilitate this rapid shift.

Our time to transition is limited and deeply linked to understanding our collective psyche—our collective unconscious as a field that, when hyper-stimulated by collective suffering, enters non-linear, far-from-equilibrium conditions. This creates structural parallels between psychic and physical fields under similar conditions—accelerated change, heightened creativity, and emergent self-organization.

In my sessions, the idea always came that this evolution would unfold faster than imaginable—a pace unconnected to our historical development rate. It hinges on profound, collective psychic transformation. From here, I went into the Diamond Luminosity work, five years of entering progressively clearer consciousness, devoid of content yet breathtakingly luminescent—what Buddhism calls Dharmakāya, or the clear light from which physical reality springs, a state I called Diamond Luminosity.

My time is running short. I can only cover so much, but all of this is in the book, where you’ll find greater detail.

Out of these four sessions, I entered this reality only four times in five years—four days spent in that state at great cost. Between sessions were intense purification episodes. To return to and stabilize in this realm, one must purify oneself of anything less than this reality. The first two entries to Diamond Luminosity took place in sessions 45 and 50. Thereafter, we didn't delve deeper but rather let the diamond Luminosity imprint itself into my physical body, restructuring my biology, emotions, and subtle energy system. It even affected my cellular makeup in ways beyond my understanding.

From these experiences, I learned the work's purpose isn’t mere transcendence—it's not about disembodied transcendence but integrating spiritual reality into physical existence, transforming our lives into a balance between spiritual understanding and temporal reality.

In the work's final year, I was given a capstone vision. The universe put me through an intense stripping process, a profound loss of control, dying again and again until it spun me deeper into deep time than ever before. I haven't even explained deep time, but again it’s in the book. Deep Time lets you experience time as a simultaneous present, entire lifetimes as pulsations of birth and death—truly experiencing Samsara's cycle.

I was taught three things from this vantage. First, humans are built for speed, for accelerated evolution, tied to our short lifetimes. Beneath repeated incarnations, we gather knowledge and experience, eventually flipping them into a new base for future incarnations. We must think dynamically about human nature to grasp our evolutionary potential.

Second, the universe operates as a "diamond maker," reincarnation cultivating diamonds—pure crystalline distillation of experience—crafted over time, enabling entry into unimaginable spiritual dimensions.

Finally, I glimpsed the "future human," a preview of the exquisite being we are evolving into. This brief encounter expanded my understanding of human potential. Having an idea of where we are going is crucial, especially as we enter a collective soul's dark night. Without hope, the crises may seem insurmountable, but we are more accurately in labor. Nature gestates us over millennia, and crisis ultimately births newness—a profound labor of both historical and personal transcendence.

It’s important that many are having similar experiences, as Stanislav Grof has documented. While I don't recommend my approach—what I endured to enter these domains—I advocate for gentler, multimodal exploration of these levels of consciousness. There’s a vast information field ready to be entered, or simply to soak into us, enriching our very being.

Thank you very much.

Audience: [Applause]