---
title: "LSD & the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven"
slug: 2019-11-13-lsd-and-the-mind-of-the-universe-diamonds-from-heaven
date: 2019-11-13
type: lecture
channel: Trust Psyche
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
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people:
-
  name: Christopher M. Bache
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**Jessica DiRuzza: ** Welcome. Hello, everybody. I'm Jessica DiRuzza from Trust Psyche, and it is such a pleasure to be able to spend this Sunday together. This is our free monthly Trust Psyche live stream that we host right here every first Sunday of the month. All are welcome, so please invite your friends. We host a variety of speakers on a myriad of topics, and you can find out more about us at trustpsyche.com. You can sign up for these live streams at trustpsyche.com/live-stream to participate live and to ask your questions. If you value what we do here today, the best way you can support us is by subscribing to our YouTube channel, liking this video, and sharing it with all of your friends. I'm very honored and excited to present our guest speaker for today, Chris Bache, who's going to be presenting on his forthcoming book, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven," released this November 26. You can pre-order your copy today through Amazon. 

Up until the 1700s, humans believed that the edge of our universe ended at the planet Saturn, the last visible planet that we can see with the unaided eye. With the invention of the telescope, we turned it to the heavens, and to our great surprise, we discovered the planet Uranus, twice as far out as the planet Saturn. Our universe doubled in size. Then in the 1800s, with the discovery of Neptune, our universe once again doubled in size. Then in 1931, with the discovery of Pluto, our universe then again doubled in size, and now less than 400 years later from the discovery of Uranus, we have the Deep Space Hubble Telescope, which shows us that there are trillions upon trillions of galaxies in our universe. For me, this is analogous to the work that Chris has done in his deep exploration of consciousness, radically breaking open and through our cosmology and our philosophy and our metaphysics. 

Through the 73 high-dose LSD sessions that he did over 20 years and began to share with us in his work, "Dark Night, Early Dawn," "Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind," now with "LSD and the Mind of the Universe," Chris takes us further into Diamond Luminosity and brings back the diamonds from heaven that he so graciously shares with all of us here today. There couldn't be a more important time for Chris to share his work with all of us, both in the greater understanding and acceptance of psychedelics today, but also because of the psycho-spiritual death and rebirth that our collective human species seems to be going through right now. So please help me give a very warm and loving welcome to our beloved friend, Chris Bache. And when Chris is done speaking, you each have an opportunity to ask your questions, so please have those ready, as that is our favorite and most special part of these live streams. Thank you so much for being with us here today.

**Chris Bache: ** Hi, everyone. Thank you, Jessica and Travis. Thank you for this opportunity to share my work with the participants in Trust Psyche. It's truly an honor to do so. It's also an overwhelming task because this book covers so many dimensions of consciousness. It covers so many years of work, and when I talk about it, I have a tendency to get absorbed into the experiences I'm describing. That makes compressing 20 years of work and thinking and writing into a short presentation challenging. 

So to me, a talk is the most effective way to get to question and answers. I'll try to keep this contained and as brief as I can, and then save a good half hour at the end for Q&A. We'll see where that goes, maybe even more than half an hour. I'm going to start with a little bit of background. 

First of all, for those of you who don't know me, I'm the last person you would expect to have written a book on psychedelics. I was raised in the Deep South, in Mississippi, in a middle-class Catholic background. I wanted to be a seminarian priest early in my life, was in the seminary for three years in high school. I studied theology at Notre Dame, New Testament criticism at Cambridge, and then philosophy of religion at Brown. By the time I finished graduate school, I was an atheistically inclined agnostic, and the 60s had completely passed me by. I was not psychedelic involved in college or graduate school at all, so I was naive psychedelically and atheistically inclined agnostic, philosophically. 

Then came LSD. Shortly after beginning my career, I encountered the work of Stan Grof, and that set my life on the course that I'm still harvesting today. So first, let me start a PowerPoint that I'll be using. I'm going to keep this on only for about 10 minutes, and then I'll shift in and out of it again later. Let me see if I can get this started here. This is what the book will look like, and I'll tell you a secret about this book. This is the publisher's title, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." My title is "Diamonds from Heaven," because "Diamonds from Heaven" is a story of a journey. They wanted a more marketable title, and that's "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." 

The beginning of this book goes back over 40 years when I had begun graduate school in '78. Right then, I met the work of Stanislav Grof. His book, "Realms of the Human Unconscious," turned my life around, followed quickly by "LSD Psychotherapy." He gave me the method and the confidence to pursue the method of exploring consciousness and through that exploration to come to know the deep psyche, the deep universe better. 

I want to emphasize that I did this work as a philosopher. I was not a therapist. I was not primarily seeking healing, though healing did come, but I was seeking to understand our universe as deeply as I could by exploring my consciousness as deeply as I could. So a few observations on method, and then we'll go right into the content. Everyone is aware, I think, of the distinction between low-dose psychedelic therapy that Stan develops and high-dose psychedelic therapy. Low-dose therapy peels the mind gradually, layer by layer, in very intense therapeutic encounters. Psychedelic therapy is a very different protocol. Originally, we were trying to trigger a near-death experience for people with terminal cancer, not trying to heal them, but to trigger an encounter with the universe that would open them to the world they were about to enter. 

When I began my own work, I chose to work with high doses of LSD primarily because it was difficult to get time to arrange a day of inner journey with a dual-career marriage. I wanted to make the most out of every day that I could dedicate to this work. I thought of myself as doing an extended regimen of psychedelic therapy, just for a longer period of time. Originally, psychedelic therapy was limited to a maximum of three sessions. When I got to the end of this journey and was looking back over its length, I began to appreciate that what happened in my work was different than what I saw reported in psychedelic therapy—so different that I thought it needed a new kind of language to describe it. I've chosen the term psychedelic exploration. 

Psychedelic exploration involves the method of psychedelic therapy—isolation, headphones, music, total protection with a sitter. The difference is the number of sessions involved, in my case 73 high-dose sessions between 1979 and 1999. I worked for four years, stopped for six years for reasons I describe in the book, and then resumed for a very intense 10-year process. I did this work between when I was 30 and 50 years old. I'm now 70, so I've taken a long time to present this work candidly to the world, partly for legal reasons and partly because it took time to map and understand all the dynamics of the sessions during these years.

I want to say at the outset that this is not a methodology I would recommend today. If I were doing it over, I'd be gentler on myself. I'd take a slower process of engaging the expanse of the mind of the universe. I'd balance high-dose work with low-dose sessions. I'd also balance working with LSD with working with Psilocybin and Ayahuasca, more body-grounded psychedelics, for various reasons discussed in the book.

I tried to do this work as systematically and rigorously as I can. As a philosopher, I made it a priority to make a complete and phenomenologically accurate record of my sessions within 24 hours, then studied the sessions and the dynamics arcing across sessions and comparing my experiences to those of other psychedelic journeyers. This is a snapshot of my journal, about 400 pages of psychedelic notes that for me are my personal Bible—the record of my deepest experiences of the universe. For me, they come before all other discursive thinking and analysis. I kept detailed records of my sessions all the way through. I looked at and studied the astrological transits of my sessions. I was aware of Rick and Stan's thinking about the relationship between outer planets and global transits and how they affect one's work in deep non-ordinary states. So I wanted to study this hypothesis myself and see how my sessions projected against the rhythms of the solar system during the years I was doing this work.

I want to emphasize that the story I'm telling in "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" is not primarily a personal story. I mean, it is personal at one level, but in another sense, not primarily. This series of curves represents a series of LSD sessions. I found that after the first 15 sessions, when I was working insights and help in my personal life tended to come at the beginning and end of my sessions as I was leaving and returning to time-space reality. That's reflected in these small circles. When the session was in its peak hours, represented by the large circles, I was usually operating beyond personal reality. So the story I'm telling in "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" unfolds in those large circles at the peak hours of my sessions. This is primarily a cosmological narrative, not primarily a therapeutic narrative. In a therapeutic narrative, the personal details are important; not so much in a cosmological narrative.

I found that the work unfolded as a series of experiences of death and rebirth that concretized into this picture. The drop below the line represents egoic reality, our individual space/time consciousness. The first death and rebirth is ego death, which takes place in that first level when we transition from ordinary consciousness into early transpersonal consciousness. If you continue to work and press the limits of your experience, I found there are other deaths at other levels of consciousness. I follow Stan Grof in using the vocabulary of psychic, subtle, and causal reality to describe deeper levels of consciousness. I don't have a vested interest in how many levels of reality there might be or how many times a circle of death and rebirth may turn. What's important is the principle that if one pushes deeper and deeper, there is a series of deaths and rebirths that open in the process. 

As I looked back, these circles oversimplify, of course. These represent a number of sessions, and the circles within circles mark a deepening of causal level reality. When I looked over all my psychedelic work, I identified five fundamental death-rebirth processes or levels of consciousness. These are: the death of self, meaning the death of our time-space identity, our individuality; moving into collective mind, with chapters in the book dealing with the dynamics of collective mind, the ocean of suffering, deep time; then archetypal mind, experiences at the high and low archetypal levels; followed by immersion in causal oneness, which surfaces earlier but is distinct at the causal level; and finally, the Diamond Luminosity work, emerging into the diamond light that Buddhism calls Dharmakaya, which I call the Diamond Luminosity.

Let me take you through a list of the chapters of "LSD and the Mind of the Universe": a methodology chapter, then the content: "Crossing the Boundary of Birth and Death," "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," "Diamond Luminosity," and "Final Vision." Then there is the last chapter "Coming Off the Mountain," which took me a year to write. It's a reflection on what has been happening in my life in the 20 years after I stopped my psychedelic work. I'll go through each chapter, mention a few points, work through the list, and then we'll open it up for questions and answers.

First, "Crossing the Boundary of Life and Death," the most familiar and thoroughly described in Stan Grof's literature. When I entered this domain, which took about two and a half years and 10 sessions, my work became saturated with confrontations with death, fetal sensations, severe perinatal seizures, and body purging, culminating in ego death. My ego death involved a reversal of everything I knew myself to be. I was an academic, a white male concerned with life's meaning, and I became women, women of color, who were uninterested in philosophical reflection. It was a terrifying experience, but letting go allowed me to become these women and enter the world of women under the Great Mother's arm. It was life-changing, and I wish every man could have that experience.

After the death-rebirth process, I entered a domain of collective suffering I call the Ocean of Suffering. Sessions consisted of two phases: a purification phase, with cathartic engagement, and an ecstatic phase. The purification phase involved profound suffering. At first, I thought this was a deepening of ego death and involved personal transformation, but eventually, I realized these ordeals weren't aimed at my transformation but the purification and healing of the collective psyche. I engaged with pain and suffering lodged in the collective psyche, lightening our species' karmic burden. 

I wrote "Dark Night, Early Dawn" to understand this dynamic and how death became as large as it was in my sessions. By integrating Rupert Sheldrake's concept of morphic fields into Stan Grof's paradigm, the way opened to view these experiences as part of a larger transformational practice aimed at the collective psyche. 

In the ecstatic phase, I entered Deep Time in the Soul, experiencing my life as a complete whole, with all moments and themes simultaneously present. I received a crash course on Chris Bache's life. Initially, I couldn't remember the experience, unable to grasp transtemporal experiences with no reference point in ordinary consciousness. But by going back consistently, I could hold onto these experiences more effectively.

If you want to enter these states and cultivate recall, you must engage with a lot of discipline, recording consciously. You learn how to stay conscious in states previously inaccessible to awareness—a pattern that repeats at every breakthrough to a new level.

The Ocean of Suffering lasted two years and 14 sessions, divided into one year of work, a six-year break, and resumed work. After six years, under different circumstances and astrological conditions, my sessions began exactly where they left off, indicating the guiding intelligence's intentionality. When the ecstatic portion resumed after the break, it began with what I call Initiation into the Universe—cosmology lessons taught by an intelligence intent on teaching me how the universe functions.

I've given names to my sessions reflecting their core content. In the Initiation into the Universe, I had sessions like "You and I Creating," a crash course in cosmology, and "The Cosmic Tour," a tour of the universe. There was "The Council of Elders," training to maintain coherence at deeper awareness levels. There were insights into a master plan for humanity's evolution and healing collective wounds—the culmination of the Ocean of Suffering. It came to a crescendo, then I was spun into archetypal reality, and the collective suffering never returned.

After the initiation, I entered archetypal reality for a year and a half, involving 11 sessions. Entering this reality, I recognized it as more real than physical reality—more existentially real than time and space. My human identity began to fall away, letting go of human experiences altogether. Eventually, I entered a consciousness beyond human consciousness, given lessons on reality's operation at high and low archetypal levels. At the high platonic level, I encountered vast beings, creators of time and space. At the lower archetypal level, I experienced the collective consciousness and body, learning about reality's functions at this level.

**Chris Bache: ** The 28th session was an extraordinarily positive, ecstatic session in which I broke through and touched causal level reality for the first time, an extremely clear, lucid, hard-to-describe state of hyper-clarity. I was quite surprised to go through three sessions of just gut-wrenching cleansing, an ordeal of physical and psychological cleansing that had absolutely no cognitive content associated with it at all. It's just a gut-wrenching cleansing. In time, to make a very long story short, I began to realize that there is a cycle I came to call the cycle of purification. The cycle of purification is that every step into a deeper level of consciousness is a step into a higher level of energy. So when I first broke into causal level reality in the 28th session, I touched a purity that triggered a purification process in my being that lasted three sessions, extending over six months. I found that this pattern repeated itself: every time I broke into a new level of consciousness and had that ecstatic experience of waking up to a deeper reality, the following sessions were very difficult, very much involved in cleansing, carrying out the garbage. I began to dread the sessions that immediately followed the major breakthroughs.

I should mention here that one of the things that opened up at this level is that I began to experience reincarnation as a collective phenomenon previously. For those of you who know my book on reincarnation life cycles, the story of the soul I tell is one of our individual evolution over many lifetimes, reflecting our individual choices and learning. But now, I began to experience the entire planet entering into a reincarnation process. I experienced millions of people over time, century after century, incarnating in a way that was integrated, not uniform, but integrated so that all of our individual karma, soul aspirations, and challenges were part of the collective karma, challenges, and development as a species. It was magnificently beautiful to witness this interplay between individual and collective reincarnation—all of these taking place at the subtle level of reality—when one is gauging the deeper architecture of the universe.

After spending about 11 months exploring archetypal reality and going through this very quickly, I entered what I called the benediction of blessings. This was a period of extraordinary blessings, receiving one massive blessing after another. The forest was an experience of śūnyatā, emptiness of self, no self in me, no self anywhere around me, an experience of radical and profound transparency, the birth of the Diamond Soul. Singing the Universe Away was an experience of primal void, culminating in Satchitananda consciousness, being and bliss, eventually moving into a fertile void from which the physical universe emerged. Jesus' Blood was an experience of extraordinary cosmic love, like I had never known it before. The birth of the Diamond Soul was a deeply moving experience; I began to see all my former lives coming into me very fast, as if we were wrapping kite string around a spool. At some point, this spool ignited, as if we hit critical mass and all of these lives fused into a singularity. Extraordinary light broke out of my chest—it was my first contact with what I later called Diamond Light. What I was being given was an experience of how reincarnation works and where it is taking humanity. We are accumulating more and more experience, and eventually we reach a stage where all of our knowledge and experiences fuse, catapulting us into a higher operational status—a different relationship with the universe and those around us.

**Jessica DiRuzza: ** You

**Chris Bache: ** After the benediction of blessings, the work went into the diamond luminosity work. I was completely existentially satisfied after the benediction of blessings, having given something I'd been asked to give in the ocean of suffering and being repaid more than I could have imagined. Then we went into the diamond luminosity work. Before I tell you about that, I want to backstep a little to talk about the birth of the future human. This has been a recurring theme in my sessions, starting all the way back to the 22nd session. It’s a theme of what is happening to the human race and where we are in our evolutionary journey.

I tell this story in the book, bringing together all the session material related to the birth of the future human into one chapter. Starting with experiences that first appeared in chapter six, I gathered them together into two segments. The first segment is visions of awakening—visions given to me in piecemeal fashion about where we are and where we are going. I break this down into six visions, the six themes of our awakening. Most striking was how dramatic the process was and the experience that we were poised to make an evolutionary jump propelling us into a higher order of functioning.

We are poised on the edge of a profound awakening, and in all these visions, which I'm going through so fast, the consciousness of our universe was trying to awaken the entire human species. I was not shown how this was going to take place or even how possible it was. Then, about a year and a half after the last of these visions, I was taken into the deep time of our species during the diamond luminosity work. I was given an experience of the Great Awakening we are coming into, experiencing the transformation not as an individual but as our species. I was inside the collective psyche, experiencing what will happen from the perspective of the collective unconscious. 

For there to be a great awakening, there must first be a great death, a great surrender. We must be purged and emptied of old ways of thinking before awakening to a higher order of knowing, so the time of Great Awakening is preceded by a time of great breakdown and loss of control. Just as in a psychedelic session, one must let go before great visions open, so must our species let go of past constrictions to open to this new future. There’s a third segment on the birth of the future human in the chapter on the final vision. My visions didn't show how or when this would take place or give details, but took me inside the collective psyche, showing me mechanisms at the collective level helping us transition.

I discuss this in "Dark Night, Early Dawn" and revisit it in "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." After the benediction of blessings, I had no clue where the work would go, feeling existentially satisfied. But there were still five years ahead on the journey. The diamond luminosity gathers four years and 26 sessions, covering more than any chapter in the book. After another intense death-rebirth process, I entered a realm called Dharmakāya in Buddhism, a state of absolute pure light. This domain was unimaginably clear, and touching it for minutes was life-transforming. Over the next four years, I entered this reality only four times out of 26 sessions.

**Chris Bache: ** In between these sessions, there was intense purification because this deeper reality required my physical and psychological system's purification to stabilize consciousness. These sessions also involved significant personal healing. It was curious, as I expected personal healing earlier in the journey, but it happened here, and I understood why things unfolded that way.

The first two sessions took me deeper into diamond luminosity, peaking in the 50th session. The second two, sessions 60 and 66, saw diamond luminosity crunching deeper into my system, physically and psychologically. Talking about these sessions draws me into them due to their power, but time is short, so we'll continue, and I’ll address questions later. I'll mention that the 50th session was my deepest transcendent experience and brought a profound change in my existential understanding. Right in the middle of this session, my visual field pivoted, revealing a reality far beyond diamond luminosity. A ray of light from that distant reality shattered me completely. It made me realize this journey has no end. The divine is infinite, and I will never reach the absolute end of it, not even using this powerful method.

I had absorbed the idea that there is an endpoint—to become one with God, to enter the void. But I discovered many permutations of oneness and dimensions of formlessness. When the diamond luminosity work began, it felt like homecoming, deeply satisfying as if finding my destination, my journey's end. The 50th session showed me dimensions beyond that, with no final stand point. Death returned repeatedly because each drive past limits to deeper consciousness leads to discovering there's no end. I'd be gentler if doing the work over, knowing now that the goal isn't reaching some ultimate dimension. It’s about opening to the transcendent realities, letting them change us down to heart and soul, incorporating as much divinity into time and space, being patient with the rest. I'm more patient now, understanding this work’s true nature.

This brings me to the final vision chapter. I was put through a powerful stripping process, taken into deeper time, experiencing a series of visions on human evolution, experiencing the architecture of the future human. It's a magnificent being, and remembering its magnitude brings tears to my eyes. It's crucial to hold on to this vision of what we are becoming as shadows deepen in our travail. As we enter the great unraveling, the purification we are coming into, voices will speak of Armageddon and apocalypse. But this is not the end; it's the birth of a new version of humanity.

After this, the consciousness guiding my sessions wrapped it up. I didn't know we were stopping, but it took me through two experiences I call the goodbye sessions, wrapping up our work. By the end of the 73rd session, I knew it was time to stop. I want to briefly mention coming off the mountain. Overall, I think I did a good job integrating my sessions as I went. I paid attention to my body, took care of it, did spiritual practice, and wrote my sessions down carefully. I internalized them deeply session by session. Because of the many blessings, I thought I could stop the sessions and continue to be nourished by those experiences—and I was, but that’s not all that happened.

In the years following the end of my work in 1999, I entered a period of what I call deep sadness, a profound existential sadness from loss of communion with the divine. I had entered so deeply into the divine that I knew I'd never enter that deeply again until I died. For various reasons, too much to go into here, I had to stop my sessions, but knowing I'd never experience divinity this deeply again became an open heartache. Once you've known the joy of dissolving into divine light, life on Earth can feel dried up. I was losing interest in continuing to live inside time and space, eventually realizing I was waiting to die. I was taking care of my children, my students, but in my heart, I longed to return to the divine. After years, I realized this wasn't right; it screamed failure to integrate.

Though I tried conscientiously to integrate each session, somewhere along the line, something went wrong, leaving me existentially adrift. I turned to study my work further to figure out what went wrong, learning that integrating an entire journey is different than integrating individual sessions.

**Chris Bache: ** It's hard to talk about in a matter of seconds and a half a minute. Describing having too much of God sounds like a contradiction. More God should always be better. Although I knew the entire physical universe is the body of God, that didn’t save me from entering full divine presence so many times. Over time, I realized I lost balance between transcendence and immanence. Transcendence is magnificent and healing, teaching us what and why we're here, but too much can disorient. It can make you lose contact with another great truth—the truth of our embodied existence. I made a strong commitment to reestablish my presence in time and space, which took about ten years. I did it through exercises and a commitment to live as I was, where I was, for my remaining years. Over ten years, I became solidly grounded on Earth. I've learned to manage my memories of transcendence. They're always there, guiding me in life's larger trajectory.

**Audience: ** Thank you very much for sharing this amazing experience that you have. I'm from Israel. I wanted to ask two questions. First, when you say a high dose, what are the doses you're talking about?

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, good questions. Thank you. I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms, which is very high doses of LSD. Low-dose work may be 100 to 200 micrograms. This was very high levels. My setting was always in complete privacy and indoors, either in my own house or at my wife's professional office. I was always lying down. If you look at Stan's book, "LSD Psychotherapy," you'll see the protocol in great detail. Music was curated to pace session stages, always with eyeshades. My sitter communicated primarily through music, taking care of my body and the music. I wasn't in nature. Grounding was very important; it's a dynamic balance. My life was grounded in relationships, a long marriage, responsibilities as a father—three children. By Monday, I was back in the classroom, taking care of children on Sundays. I had a rhythmic set of responsibilities to keep me grounded, always teaching, always doing spiritual practice, meditating, and taking care of my body through yoga. Staying in contact with the physical world is crucial while doing this work. We blow consciousness to its farthest limits, and then it recongeals. I had a natural capacity to let go and recongeal back into my reality. Does that cover your questions?

**Audience: ** Yes, thank you very much. Just to confirm, you always ensured someone was available in a distance, like at a house, in case you needed assistance?

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, I was never left alone. My wife was my sitter, a clinical psychologist. She was always responsible, and we were isolated, with no interruptions from the outside world. It's important to have a clear container, entering a spiritual space isolated from external intrusions—like entering a Kiva in the southwestern United States, isolated while doing this work. It's vital to have a protected environment to ensure whatever you confront comes from within, not outside complications.

**Host: ** Let's hear from Carrie. Go ahead, Carrie.

**Audience: ** Hi, Chris. Thank you for all your work. I heard you speak years ago through PCC and have enjoyed your writings. This presentation was so coherent, walking through each stage. Thank you for that. Three questions: the astrological integration—I'm curious about your chart, transits, the lens it provided to see subconscious parts or the collective unconscious. How much of the chart do you think remained in less individuated states? And when you spoke of the ocean of suffering and healing, did those experiences affect your waking life or reflect back in people around you or world events?

**Chris Bache: ** Let's start on your last question and then work forward into the earlier ones. Yes, it did manifest. There were manifestations that emerged in the outer world. In my book, *The Living Classroom*, there's a chapter on teaching in *Dark Night, Early Dawn*. I never talked to my students about my work. I kept a firewall between my professional life and my inner shamanic work. Yet, over time, I found that as I went deeper, various students were being activated by my inner work, and the activation became more powerful. It became such a prominent part of my teaching that I had to understand what was going on and learn how to work with these forces. For me, integration doesn't just mean personal integration into my life; it also means dealing with the derivative social effects of one's experiences.

I found, for example, that when I was teaching and reaching for examples, students would come up after class and say, "It's interesting you used that example because that's exactly what happened to me this week." This happened repeatedly, suggesting some boundary had come down between my mind and my students' minds. It wasn't just triggering aha moments for my students; it began triggering very deep healing experiences. It felt as if their souls were communicating with mine, giving me insights into their needs and sufferings, without me being consciously aware of it. I really had to study this.

I wrote about these experiences in an entire book on *The Living Classroom*, about collective dynamics in the classroom. I don't mention psychedelics there; this isn't a psychedelic phenomenon but relates to the nature of consciousness. At one level, we have a private mind, but beneath it, mind lacks privacy. Throw a rock into a lake, and the ripples spread. When you do deep work, its ripples spread out and touch lives around you. I experienced this most profoundly in my classroom because I was working in a collective context, and I saw these ripples coming back at me all the time.

The issue of astrology, individual, and global transits is complex, and I'm not an astrologer, so I want to be careful. I tracked my sessions using astrology, planning them after learning from Rick Tarnas about the correlations between outer planets and inner experience in psychedelic work. I found a complicated correlation. While there were alignments between individual and global transits with my experiences, there were also unexpected differences, a kind of failed correspondence. For example, breakthroughs weren't always paired with Uranus transits. My intense 'death in your face' experiences weren't marked by Saturn or Pluto transits. As I entered deeper archetypal reality and eventually the Dharmakāya, astrology seemed to roll off, and my psychedelic dance didn't map easily onto the astrological dance. I began to think there might be a roll-off effect between one's solar dance and one's session experiences. This remains an area of active dialogue and consideration.

There's an appendix in the book, "Pushing the Limits of Astrological Correspondence," where I detail my session dates. While there aren't enough sessions for a definitive answer, I wanted to support a discussion about the relationship between astrology, astrological transits, and psychedelic work. It's an open question. Early in one's work, there are correlations, but whether they remain strong in the late stages, I'm unsure.

As for my chart, it's too complicated to go into here. I have a lot of Neptune and water, and a sun square Neptune with Neptune in the first house—dynamics that destined me for this work. The ocean of suffering wasn't forced on me. Rather, I voluntarily took it on; it was part of my incarnation's plan. I think we're all volunteers in these deep experiences.

**Audience: ** Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you, Kerry. Hi, Chris.

**Audience: ** This is Paul and Amber in Poland. We are so happy to finally see you live, and thank you. We wanted to express our appreciation for your call. I have a few questions, but let's continue with the theme of the ocean of suffering. Where we live, in Poland, was the site of one of history’s most horrific events—specifically, the Holocaust. When you experienced the ocean of suffering, did you have visions or specific information related to events like these? Even 80 years later, these events are palpable and persistent in the collective and the atmosphere here. Did you sense what happened during any of your sessions?

**Chris Bache: ** I did not delve into specifically identifiable historical traumas like the Holocaust. I was taken deeper into pain, fury, chaos, and extraordinary suffering that expanded to a large scale. It wasn't focused on any particular century, country, or place. It expanded to encompass hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, across hundreds and thousands of years. My experience was that it included all humanity's conflicts. I believe events like the Holocaust or the extinction of Native Americans were implicitly present but not explicitly. 

I refer to what Stan Grof calls a COEX system, a condensed experience system. I believe the collective psyche has these aggregates—meta matrices—that combine multiple historical periods, cultures, and experiences. Late in the series, it became clear what I dealt with was living memory of trauma in the collective psyche. Where I live in Youngstown, Ohio, there's a history of violence. It goes back to Native American massacres, Eastern European influx, patriarchy, and mafia violence. I feel that because the ocean of suffering was on my agenda, I was brought to a place where these poisons are close to the surface in the collective psyche. Working in a place like Poland might have made the historical trauma more explicit.

**Audience: ** Thank you.

**Panelist: ** First of all, Chris, thanks for all your work over decades. I've been a huge fan forever. On the ocean of suffering issue, as that's the next step for many, your book *Dark Night, Early Dawn* was extremely helpful. Petra and I don't work with LSD but with Holotropic Breathwork to connect with these insights. We've noticed unpredictable contacts with the ocean of suffering, unlike past life recalls, and people need to understand they're not personally burdened by this; they're volunteers. This understanding helps people in spiritual emergency realize they're part of something larger, not just personal strife.

We've used systemic constellations for those caught in this, setting representatives for their piece of the man-woman story and the larger one. It gives them clarity that there's work to do but not alone and not all at once. Your work brought clarity to these experiences. In these tense times, we're grateful for the insights you bring as these teachings may become even more useful in our workshops for future stages. 

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you. I completely agree. As we go deeper into this historical crisis, I think we're entering a collective dark night of the soul, a profound detoxification where history's poisons emerge from our collective experience. We're seeing this in our societal structures. If you’re interested in purifying or transformational work, with a powerful enough technique like Holotropic Breathwork, you open at individual levels and deeper ones. 

While I'm not a therapist, identifying different work levels can help differentiate personal from collective experiences. It’s crucial to wind down sessions properly, distinguishing personal from collective work. I went into this work voluntarily and am grateful for both personal and collective reasons. The work rewards not just through karmic payback but also by infusing the collective psyche with light when we take responsibility for human pain and suffering. This benefits the individual and the collective, preparing the species for an evolutionary leap toward what I call the diamond soul or the future human.

**Jessica DiRuzza: ** Thank you so much, Chris. That was beautifully laid out. I'm so grateful for your time today and for everyone connecting from around the world. Thank you for uniting in heart and mind. We send infinite love and blessings as you deepen your explorations and the healing work we’re all engaged in today. Thank you. Be well, and we'll see you next time.