Behind the Curtain — Christopher M. Bache, Ph.D. (Episode 64)

Chris Bache: Like a smile, another side, purification, purifications unto death in order to enter that dialog.

Interviewer: What do you think death is?

Chris Bache: Well, as I say in the book, eventually you come to a point, if you've gone through many cycles of death and rebirth, where death loses its meaning. You learn from experience that you can die. You can lose all your reality reference points, everything you know yourself to be can be shattered and destroyed, but the Phoenix always rises. You always wake up changed. You awaken in a deeper capacity and a deeper level of reality. So, from this perspective, eventually you learn that there is no such thing as death. There is only the shedding of one particular set of parameters within which awareness operates and letting consciousness expand to a deeper experience of reality. What we usually mean, and I think death of the physical body is something very similar to what you go through in a deep LSD session. That type of death approximates what happens when you go through physical death. The body dies. You lose your physical reference points, and consciousness expands into a deeper and broader universe. But eventually, the very concept of death loses its meaning in this respect.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah. There were two ways I was going to go. I'll come back to the other one. The grueling impact of that, like I spoke to somebody, and in a way, it's existential. It can be existentially violent, a psychedelic experience. Yes, there are moments. I mean, that's a good description, existentially violent, and what's like—I don't think you ever get comfortable. It's not like you suddenly go, "Okay, I've done 50, and this is going to be no problem," because there are bigger levels. Is that fair to say?

Chris Bache: And I thought that you would go through a period of, you know, Death-Rebirth and purging and whatnot, and you would get to a stable place and all entries from that point on would be clearer and easier. I found that's not true. The universe is infinitely deep with an infinite number of levels. As long as you keep pushing the outer edges of your experience, if you're willing to go farther, the universe will keep taking you in deeper, and it always will require some deep surrender, some death and rebirth process to move deeper into it.

Interviewer: And when you say "universe," what does that word mean to you?

Chris Bache: Yeah. Well, my experience is, of course, when you let go of consciousness at the physical level, you enter into a deeper dimension of consciousness, and then later a still deeper dimension, and still a deeper dimension. It's all coherent from top to bottom, and it is all fundamentally unified. For me, it never took a face. It never showed an identity as such. It was always open-ended and perpetually fluid and invisible yet very deeply felt. So what do we call this thing? What do we call this consciousness into whose successive levels we dissolve? Some might call it the infinite, the absolute. I call it both of those things. I call it the creative intelligence of the universe. It feels to me like the creative intelligence that's inside the universe and behind the universe. Different aspects coming forward at different times. In the end, in my heart of hearts, I call it my beloved because once you enter into it, once you dissolve into it, once you recover your true identity within its identity, it opens up dimensions of love within you, and it pours dimensions of love within you that it becomes my beloved. Sometimes I call it the great expanse, something to suggest the vastness, its vastness, its power, its creativity, its intelligence. And of course, since compassion is a mark of oneness, it's inherent oneness, so that compassion is a spontaneous manifestation of its innate oneness.

Interviewer: Yeah, it's funny. I think you called it something an Indian guru used, the word "the beloved." There was a guy in England who referred to oneness, so he would refer to the Beloved. Tony Parsons talks about unconditional love, but not the love that we would know. It's love beyond conditions. It's not a personal—it's the allowance of all things.

Chris Bache: It's a deeper love than human love, but I think it is alive in the best of us when we experience love. It's a radical love. It's the love that the Dao has for the 10,000 things. It is the love that being has for its own self, for its own being. Because, in the end, from its perspective, all of us and all of creation is a manifestation of its being. So how could it not love itself? And therefore, how could it not love us?

Interviewer: So, let's see, can we go this route and see where it goes? The idea of "my beloved" and its... Who do you think is describing when you say "it's my"? Who is describing the beloved? You know, this sort of perspective? Because there is a perspective that it cannot see itself, only in reflections, because it is already what's happening. The Beloved is already what's happening there. It can only ever appear as... You know where I'm going with that, or do you have your sense?

Chris Bache: Yeah, I do. It's very hard to objectify in a way. When that objectifying is almost what is a part of the Beloved. It is a happening already. It's fresh already. Yeah, it's already complete. In other words, what you're saying there, whilst we're kind of talking about the experiences you've had and you've written a book, gives the impression of being once removed, but obviously, it's a part already.

Chris Bache: Yeah, you know, we have all sorts of ideas and stories we tell ourselves about what this totality consciousness is and isn't, and what it can know and can't know. I think a lot of that is just cultural scripting. It's our best guess. Our best cultural guess, and our best cultural guess is not very old. At this juncture, we've been making these metaphysical guesses or intuitions for 5,000 years, but this intelligence is 13.7 plus billion years in the making and unfolding, and we're just kind of getting to the stop place in our evolution where we can really begin to engage it. So my sense is I don't know whether this intelligence is not self-aware, except through us. That seems to outrageously put an enormous privilege of place on us to be the mirror of the Divine Eye. Why should we assume that this intelligence is not self-aware as it unfolds itself with seeming pointed accuracy through time and space? What I can say is this: when I lose my boundaries as Chris Bache, while I allow myself to dissolve as Chris Bache and enter into these deeper layers, there are many, many layers of this phenomenon. Some of the early layers have to do with my species consciousness, the mind of the collective unconscious, the mind of my species. Other layers have to do with the mind of our planet, Gaia consciousness. And there are multiple layers going right through species mind, the archetypal dimensions, the root causes of some of the patterns inside time and space, the root cause even of time and space itself, moving even deeper into dimensions of oneness, permutations of oneness, even entering into the primal void that appears to be the formlessness out of which all form emerges with the Big Bang and subsequently, and then entering beyond even that. At each level of entry, there are clearer and clearer states of being, states of awareness. So, it's hard for me to imagine that the being or dimension of being I have been in for hours at a time would not also be self-aware in its unfolding. Now, it's also been the case that I've had the experience that this creative intelligence, or an aspect of creative intelligence, met me in my sessions and took me on a cosmic tour, you know, in that chapter initiation in the universe. It seemed to want to show me its work. It seemed especially pleased to have evolved consciousness to the point where some of that consciousness could come back and be shown what has actually been being worked on for billions and billions of years. So it seems to delight in being known. But I wouldn't say necessarily that it didn't know itself before I knew it. You know what I mean?

Interviewer: And did you get a sense of, do you still have a sense of, despite having spent so much time, in a way, you're still only—it's impossible—it's so vast, the enormity of the all of everything.

Chris Bache: So, this was a major change in my thinking. It took place in the 50th session. So, my background is I did four years of work, I stopped for six years, and then I did ten years of work. So, 14 years of active work over 20 years. But when I was entering into the last five years of work, those years of what I call the diamond luminosity work, and this was 26 sessions out of 73 sessions, that's about a third of all the sessions in the book. Four of those sessions took me into this diamond luminosity, an unbelievably beautiful, ecstatic, empty consciousness that was just clear, just clear beyond imagination—just so clear, so hyper clear that once you touch it, nothing else matters except returning to it. Nothing else I had entered in earlier stages mattered in the least compared to connecting with this. And this is what the Buddhists call, I think the closest thing I could find is what they call Dharmakaya. You know, they have three dimensions, or three modalities of existence: Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya. Dharmakaya being the deepest and Dharmakaya the absolute, the light of the clear light of absolute reality, just kind of the light out of which existence emerges. I'm sorry I got so involved in the description. I lost track with the original question focus.

Interviewer: Well, I think I know where you're going though, because we were talking about the vastness and scraping the surface, and you said...

Chris Bache: Yeah, yeah. So I was 50 sessions in. I was in the second of the four diamond luminosity sessions. I was as deep into ecstatic diamond consciousness as I had ever gone and would ever go; it was the deepest penetration in that way. Toward the end of the session, I had this experience where my visual field flipped 90 degrees. A huge space opened up. Beyond where I was, there was another reality, worlds upon worlds beyond me. And there was a light there, and a beam of this light hit me, and it shattered me. I called the light the absolute light, just to give it a differentiating name from the diamond luminosity light. But what it showed me was that there were worlds and worlds beyond where I was, as far beyond where I was as the diamond luminosity was beyond time and space. So that told me that an idea I had taken into this work, that the purpose of this work was to get to an endpoint, an end stage, a destination, to go home—something like this—that that was just not an accurate assumption. You do repeatedly have a sense of going home. You do enter into deep experiences of homecoming. For me, the diamond luminosity was my actual practical destination. I did not go deeper than that. It totally satisfied me in all respects. I continued to do the session work, but for the next 23 sessions, it wasn't going deeper into the diamond luminosity, but it was internalizing diamond luminosity, soaking deeper and deeper into my physical and psychological being. But it's an infinite ocean, and I gave up completely the idea of ever getting to the end of it.