Diamond Luminosity — Exploring High-Dose LSD Experiences with Dr. Chris Bache

Joe Moore: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics Today. Today on the show, we have Chris Bache, retired professor and Professor Emeritus at Youngstown State University and author of the recent book LSD and the Mind of the Universe. We're also going to be doing a giveaway, so stay tuned for that. Chris, thanks for joining us.

Chris Bache: Glad to be here, guys.

Joe Moore: So, I had been talking about you, I think, even a couple years ago when I found out about your long-term project, before the book was with a publisher. I was really excited by the idea, and then I just totally forgot, and all of a sudden, we got connected through the publisher. Now I'm very excited to record with you because this is quite the project you've undertaken, and you've got some very unique insights to share. How do you like to start this story? Maybe we can start with psychedelics. How did psychedelics come on your radar initially?

Chris Bache: Well, I had just finished graduate school. I was publishing a few articles out of my dissertation and looking for where to take my research. I was a brand-spanking-new university professor, and I met the work of Stan Grof, which really snapped my head to attention. I did not have a psychedelic history. I finished graduate school in religious studies as a pretty deeply convinced atheistically inclined agnostic. But I read Stan's work, and a light bulb went off inside of me. I thought this is important, not just to psychology, but to philosophy and religion, which was my training, and I wanted to get involved. I wanted to do it, but, of course, it had been made illegal. So I split my life. In my ordinary day job, I continued to function as a professor of Religious Studies, taught conventional or semi-conventional courses. And I began what eventually became a 20-year journey working with LSD, following Stan Grof’s paradigm and pushing the limits of that paradigm pretty far, much farther than I appreciated at the time. I was trained in philosophy of religion, so I kept careful records, careful notes, and tried to make the engagement as clean and as productive as possible. I knew there would come a time, sooner or later, when I would share the experiences or insights from the experiences with a broader audience. After I retired from the university, that time finally came.

Joe Moore: Perfect. Did you have any kind of previous, spontaneous mystical experiences or anything before that clued you into how important these things might be?

Chris Bache: I've always been envious of people who had spontaneous mystical experiences early on. That’s not how it's been for me. I've always been kind of deeply locked into my body and my physical experience. I was reasonably well educated in Western religious thought and became educated in Eastern religious thought, in a broad spectrum of contemporary thought, but no, I had no background. In many ways, I'm the last person you would have expected to write a book on deep psychedelic states of consciousness. I grew up in Mississippi and got a degree in theology from the University of Notre Dame before going on to graduate school, so this wasn't part of my background at all.

Kyle Buller: I'm curious, how did you stumble across Stan's work without having any exposure to psychedelics beforehand?

Chris Bache: I was reading widely in different areas. I was reading kind of emerging Transpersonal psychology. It interested me. Two people whose work I met my first year out: one was Ian Stevenson, whose work at the University of Virginia convinced me that reincarnation is a simple fact of life. That was a jolt, because it hadn't been part of my education anywhere. Then I met Stan's work, and he had just published, two years before, Realms of the Human Unconscious, which really did it for me. Ian gave me empirical evidence of another dimension of reality, other than the physical world, and Stan gave me the methodology that allowed me to explore that reality. So I decided to go for it.

Joe Moore: What did the protocol look like to you? To me, it clearly looks like the work being done at Hopkins and by MAPS now. Was it any different in your perspective at this point?

Chris Bache: No, I think it's pretty much conventional in that respect. You're always working in complete isolation with a sitter and a very carefully curated playlist of music. The difference is that after three medium-dose LSD sessions, I shifted to very high levels of LSD, working at 500 to 600 micrograms. At first, I did it simply for efficiency, as it was hard to get time in a dual-career marriage to arrange a session day, and I wanted to make the most out of every day. I thought it would get me to my early goal of enlightenment faster if I could kind of chew through my karma in bigger bites. That project eventually dissolved along the way, and the whole concept of a personal spiritual journey, or a strictly personal evolutionary project, fell out along the way. So the difference, I think, is the quantity—the fact that I used very high doses of LSD, which changed the whole trajectory of the experience. Then I began to curate a much more aggressive playlist with the music, using a lot more indigenous music instead of classical Western music. Otherwise, it’s very much like contemporary therapeutic approaches to psychedelics.

Kyle Buller: That's interesting. So your book covers these 73 high-dose sessions. The book is about your insights, experiences, and some of your philosophical work in understanding consciousness. We should give some context of what we're talking about and what Joe meant about the protocol. I'm curious why the music changed over time?

Chris Bache: I happened upon some indigenous chanting music and included it in my session the next day or the next week. It had such a profound impact on the intensity of the session. It rattled my cage much more aggressively than even some of the aggressive classical music. I liked the effect and recognized that it was more disorienting, providing stronger support for going deeper into consciousness. So I began to cultivate and collect that type of music.

Kyle Buller: How important is music to you when doing high-dose psychedelics or psychedelic therapy in that self-discovery format?

Chris Bache: I think it's very important. I've done sessions without music eventually, after a long period, and I've done psilocybin sessions with and without music. But when working with a powerful psychedelic like LSD and at high doses—which, by the way, I do not recommend—it’s critical. I wouldn’t approach it the same way today. Music has a concentrating, amplifying effect, maybe five or ten times stronger than doing it without music. I started using music only in the fourth session, and the jump in that fourth session was enormous. I think it's very important.

Kyle Buller: It's a topic that keeps coming up within the psychedelic community, especially when talking about playlists for therapy. I recently recorded an episode with a fellow who composes music based on his experiences. So, I think the music piece is really interesting. It's a huge part of Breathwork as well.

Chris Bache: Yes, and Helen Bonnie's early work, plotting the various stages of an LSD journey and the characteristics of music that support each stage, is important work.

Kyle Buller: So where did the idea come from to engage in these high-dose sessions? Did you start off planning to do many sessions, or did you go in saying, "I'll have a few and see where it goes," or did you have an idea of doing a certain number of sessions or a specific goal?

Chris Bache: No, I didn't have a specific trajectory or goal. I saw the range of experiences Stan described in Realms of the Human Unconscious. With my grounding in Western philosophical and theological thought, I recognized the significance of these states of consciousness. I believed most important contributions in my discipline would come from experiential bases, not just theoretical bases. I knew to do that, you had to do your work. I didn’t know how long the work would be. Early on, I thought ego death was the key to unrestricted access to deep consciousness. But I found the universe has many layers. While all are holographically integrated, if you engage methodically, the universe takes you in degrees and layers. Moving into a new layer stabilizes your consciousness there until you push further to another death-rebirth process. That repeats as you explore deeper consciousness. I laid out the book starting at the beginning, consolidating the experiences and insights to efficiently convey another level or engagement with the universe.

Kyle Buller: How would you define a layer of consciousness? You hear in the New Age, "you ascended to 5D," but how would you describe moving through layers?

Chris Bache: I adopted the vocabulary Stan Grof developed: psychic levels, subtle levels, and causal levels. Consciousness differentiates psychic low and high, subtle low and high, causal low and high. Those are approximations, as the universe has many hundreds of levels. I didn't have a vested interest in a particular model, but looking back at the journey, I differentiated five levels. The first takes place at the personal mind, culminating in ego death. The second is at the collective mind, dynamics fundamentally at the early subtle levels of consciousness—species mind dimensions. The third is archetypal mind, entering the highest subtle level, beyond collective species consciousness into different levels of archetypal reality. The fourth is causal mind, profound states of non-dual reality. The fifth, which I call Diamond Luminosity, is a particularly deep, clear dimension of light. Many degrees of light exist; the closest conventional term is the Buddhist concept of Dharmakaya, the clear light of absolute reality that pre-exists the Big Bang.

Kyle Buller: Thinking about these levels of consciousness and the new psychedelic renaissance with psychedelic therapy, how important do you think it is for therapists to understand these levels when working with clients?

Chris Bache: If you're going to be a psychedelic therapist, understanding different levels of consciousness is crucial. A therapist can work effectively at early levels without deep familiarity with all levels, but if guiding clients into deep Non-ordinary states, one must be personally familiar with those states. Being the stabilizing factor when someone is terrified of losing everything they know to be real requires personal experience. Personal experience creates strong therapeutic grounding and effectiveness when supporting clients through deep states.

Kyle Buller: Yeah, thanks for that. It's been a hot topic, the necessity for therapists to understand these layers and experiences to be guides.

Joe Moore: It’s fascinating. You can get training, but you might not need a session. Yet there's a whole realm of religious and philosophical material discussing these states. I want a very strong argument for this, and I haven’t been able to come up with one personally.

Chris Bache: A strong argument for?

Joe Moore: At least personal experience. But your point is unique. There are very complex spiritual and Transpersonal experiences not discussed in literature, as far as I can tell.

Chris Bache: It's important to have a theoretical grounding, reading deeply in Transpersonal psychology and works like Stan Grof's. But working at a disadvantage without personal experience, you can have a verbal understanding but will make mistakes. These experiences are incredibly complex. My journey spanned 20 years from 1979 to 1999. It took years to work out the complex phenomenology of these states. "Guide" may not be the best term as it implies active guidance, which isn’t always the case. But to help someone go to the edge of everything they know, you need that firsthand experience. The effectiveness of therapists or sitters will be limited to their depth of experience. They can be skillful at certain levels, maybe not at deeper levels.

Kyle Buller: It's interesting when thinking about practicalities, going to different people for different sessions, focusing on personal dynamics.

Chris Bache: Yes, we're proceeding methodically, using gentler psychedelics, no federal protocol suggesting high-dose LSD like I used. That's important. The window we lost 40 years ago is back, and we must expand it judiciously. Healing the personal unconscious is just the first step of a long journey into the universe, into deeper dimensions of consciousness. I don't call it the divine mind or mind of God due to its cultural implications, but when dissolving into comprehensive fields of experience, realities open never even imagined. Returning consistently helps acclimate, allowing consciousness at new levels previously unattainable.

Joe Moore: Right. Are you familiar with Ken Lindy from Detroit?

Chris Bache: No, I’m not.

Joe Moore: He advocates high-level doses; I struggle with his arguments, but yours seem quite sensible.

Chris Bache: I’m not a proponent of high doses myself. The early high-dose work was limited to three sessions. I thought if you could do it safely three times, you could do more. But it presented new challenges not discussed in early work and opportunities for insights. High doses affect your body, mind, and those around you. At a certain point, my students were activated by my work—a natural contagion. Their synchronization and shared activation created fields that affected me and peers. The Living Classroom addresses those dynamics over years. It’s not just about personal care but taking care of those touched by your work collectively. I wouldn’t push as hard again, I'd balance with lower doses and varied substances.

Kyle Buller: I want to return to the idea of ripples. Having such experiences, even during Breathwork, it’s like tapping into some lake where everything synchronizes. You mentioned your students changing—was it your presence, or was it more on a subtle realm where states have a broader ripple effect?

Chris Bache: I think it’s both. As my work changed me, my presence changed. But more interesting is working at the subtle level. Random examples used in lectures were validated by students’ life events. Initially thought coincidental, but proved impactful, addressing healing, blocks, and aiding development. As I advanced, students were touched in deep personal areas needing attention themselves. This synchronicity points to a participatory universe and its intelligent fabric triggering moments of insight.

Kyle Buller: It’s fascinating, and sometimes hard to make sense of.

Chris Bache: Once you let go of atomistic psychology—the standalone individual phenomena aspect—and accept a participatory cosmos with deeper tides always flowing, it becomes coherent and understandable.

Kyle Buller: Yeah, that makes sense.

Chris Bache: Like plate tectonics once understood; previously peculiar, then made transparent and elegant when the underlying layers were revealed.

Kyle Buller: I'm curious to go back to the idea of incorporating mushrooms in ayahuasca. You mentioned that it seems more of a body medicine. Could you talk about the difference between your experiences with LSD and more plant-based psychedelics? This is a question we get asked a lot, and I think we chatted about it in our course recently. What's the difference with LSD? I've heard it's more psychological, biographical, and doesn’t have this spiritual component. Albert Hofmann mentioned that Psilocybin seems to have something in it. I wonder what your take is.

Chris Bache: Well, inevitably, my take is based on my own personal experience, and it's always dangerous to generalize from a sample of one. Psychedelics, historically used, have fields associated with them. We've been using mushrooms for thousands of years. There's something about the biochemistry of these substances and the human experience engaging deeper dimensions of consciousness at large. When you take this substance, you're not just introducing a chemical into your body for a private experience. The effect is mediated partly by the history of your species with this substance, and this is true with ayahuasca, which has a multi-thousand-year history. With LSD, we don't have those fields; LSD is new. The difference is not fundamentally organic versus synthetic. Our experience in the 60s and 70s doesn't equate to the depth I'm talking about. My experience with LSD is kind of cleaner; it lacks that programmed quality from mushroom-related fields. On high doses of LSD, after about 15 sessions, during the peak hours, I was far beyond my personal psyche. My personal story would show at the beginning and the end, offering healing insights. But during the peak hours, it was beyond personal reality. With Psilocybin, I don't have the same experience of removal from personal reality. I have limited ayahuasca experience, but it's a powerful medicine. Psilocybin tends to be less evocative, less disruptive. LSD, as I've worked with it, opens up to deep, cosmological levels. I haven't seen many people having experiences with Psilocybin or even ayahuasca that compare to my last 10 years with LSD. But that's just my experience; it's not a scholarly comparison.

Kyle Buller: Right. What were some of your experiences like in the last 10 years? Could you give examples of those big themes if it wasn’t so personal or psychodynamic?

Chris Bache: That's a hard question because there are multiple levels and stages. It's tricky to jump into later stages since every stage builds upon earlier stages. One example would be time. I had a consistent set of experiences where I experienced my life's totality from beginning to end as immediately present. I had insights into my old age and experienced my life's distilled essence in the now. Initially, after these experiences, I couldn't remember it. It took multiple entries before I could hold onto those experiences, which I write about in the chapter "Deep Time in the Soul." Beyond that, I entered archetypal dimensions, something akin to Plato's domain. These weren't unchanging ideas, but vast beings, larger than I could comprehend. My mind imagined them as galaxies, attempting to rationalize something measuring in vast scopes. These beings were responsible for orchestrating time and space. I also delved into "Deep Time," experiencing humanity's future and the archetypal trajectory in this global sustainability crisis. This led to episodes of cosmic oneness, śūnyatā, and the primal void behind existence. Cosmic love, the inherent oneness of life, is experienced as compassion. Eventually, beyond oneness and the void, I entered the diamond Luminosity, an incredibly clear state of consciousness. This became my focus, overshadowing all other dimensions. It took 26 sessions and intense purification to experience it more clearly. It's complicated to tell because of many levels.

Kyle Buller: Yeah. People should check out your book for all this.

Chris Bache: It's nice the book is out; people don't have to rely on me speaking. I've tried to tell the story cleanly, without philosophical baggage from earlier works.

Joe Moore: Is there a story you'd like to share most about your project?

Chris Bache: It's a journey, and each phase was exciting in its own right. I don't have a favorite. Personally, the diamond Luminosity is profound. The story of the birth of the future human is significant, as it relates to reincarnation and humanity's trajectory. In one session, all my lives integrated, and this fusion ignited a tremendous explosion of diamond light. I understood reincarnation as a gradual development, leading to an eventual awakening of soul consciousness within physical incarnation. This awakening, the birth of the diamond soul, is when we identify not just with the ego but as eternal beings in relation to other eternal beings. I think the universe operates with whole species, not just individuals. If there's one message I'd hope to convey, it's to let go of the fear of death. Hollywood misconstrues death. When we die, we return home, entering layers of reality. There's nothing to fear. I'm not afraid of death, though dying can be uncomfortable; being dead is not something I fear.

Joe Moore: Kyle, how do you respond to that?

Kyle Buller: It resonates a lot with me, like chills. I don't know if you know my story, but when I was 16, I had a Near-Death Experience. I ruptured my spleen, and during an MRI, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of love, realizing I was going back home, back to the stars. It wasn't scary. When told I was dying, I was terrified, but in that moment, I accepted it. Returning was hard because, like you with diamond Luminosity, I longed to return to that oneness. It led me to explore psychedelics, seeking similar experiences and integration. The work is here, and how we embody that is magical.

Chris Bache: Yes, to complain about time-space restrictions is like a weightlifter complaining about weights. Progress here is exponentially important for the afterlife. I feel a deep affinity for near-death experiences, with strong correlations to deep psychedelic experiences. Ken Ring in near-death research is a good friend.

Kyle Buller: It's a powerful topic. I entered a similar space with Psilocybin. The substance captivated me. It felt like reliving trauma, processing experience. I've had similar experiences, correlating with my Near-Death Experience.

Chris Bache: I've died many times. The early work at Spring Grove aimed to give a foretaste of death. Shamans know this territory. It's natural and comforting. Coming back is sometimes challenging. The hardest chapter to write was the last, about coming off the mountain, entering a deep existential loneliness. I integrated sessions carefully but integrating an entire journey was different. Going deeply into the universe and experiencing ecstasy, eventually, I found myself waiting to die to return to the light. It wasn't right. The work is to integrate here. There's an imbalance between Transcendence and Imminence. The physical universe is divine, yet I lost my footing in it. It took 10 years to comfortably ground myself back in time-space.

Kyle Buller: Wow, after 20 years of deep exploration, that’s a long integration process.

Chris Bache: Yes, my story is sometimes described as a hero’s journey, not for achieving something for culture but tempered by the success of the journey. Wounded by the beauty and intelligence of the universe, if you can't breathe that in within historical existence, it becomes painful. My story is a cautionary tale against going too deep, too fast, even if done methodically. The journey changes your soul's trajectory over lifetimes, opening a different relationship with the universe. My work with psychedelics is largely over; I focus on contemplative practice, particularly Vajrayāna. It's complementary to deep psychedelic work. But evaluating psychedelic work shouldn't solely fall under the Enlightenment project. Initially, I sought personal awakening, but it evolved into a collective awakening and cosmic exploration. These are different projects evaluated on their terms.

Kyle Buller: Yeah, that makes sense.

Joe Moore: Certainly a big topic. I wonder if LSD still has prominence in this context.

Chris Bache: I worked with LSD due to Stan's early work and methodology. Only after completing my LSD work did I explore other substances. My mind, changed by previous work, brought different effects to Psilocybin and Ayahuasca experiences. The experiences reflect one's entire history in Non-ordinary states of consciousness. With more experience, substances have a different effect. The universe is an infinite ocean of possibilities; the project is not to reach an end state, but to partake in an infinite progression.

Joe Moore: It aligns with Grof and Cobb’s synthesis, reminiscent of the Bodhisattva vow—continuing until everyone reaches Nirvana.

Chris Bache: It's a long time, but it’s speeding up. Our species’ collective karma is accelerating. We've created an ego-built world, deeply imbalanced, leading to radical breakdown. This evolutionary pivot means we cannot continue with the same psychological basis of egoic consciousness. Historical projections underestimate how quickly this could happen. In "The Birth of the Future Human," I mention session 55, revealing humanity's rapid rebirth. The message was it’ll happen faster than anyone imagines. We're heading into intense, nonlinear dynamics, with the collective psyche hyper-stimulated by trauma, moving us into nonlinear conditions where small changes elicit huge outcomes. It’s part of creative intelligence. I believe we all chose to be here; it's an important time to be conscious and active.

Kyle Buller: It gives chills. It feels like things are really speeding up. Even older people notice things happening quicker. It’s interesting, you can't hold onto anything; once you grasp it, it changes form.

Chris Bache: So many of our technologies are driving this way, but our social customs are dissolving right out from underneath us. The standards of truth are changing. It's a confusing time, a dangerous time, and a hard time, but it's an extraordinarily exciting time.

Kyle Buller: Do you see psychedelics aiding in this in any way?

Chris Bache: Yeah, absolutely. The ways in which psychedelics have come back into our culture, both from the Central American and South American cultures, which have kept this tradition alive, and the new psychedelics like LSD, often compared to the atom bomb since they were discovered at the same time, present an opportunity to explore dimensions of consciousness that previous generations, for the most part, had to spend lifetimes meditating to access. Now, even those with modest spiritual capacities can have experiences of these realities, requiring a profound redrafting of our existential assumptions. We can engage these dimensions of consciousness, not for recreational or even strictly healing purposes, but systematically for educational and deep transformational purposes—not only for personal transformation but on behalf of the collective states of consciousness. When I first read Stan Grof, I realized this was going to change everything. It's akin to the invention of the microscope for biology or the telescope for astronomy, increasing the quantity of data we have access to and forcing a radical revision of our theoretical understanding. Psychedelics are part of this, and just in time because we have very little time. It's coming very fast.

Joe Moore: I hate to end the podcast, but we're over an hour. I want to be respectful of your time, and I really appreciate this. Can you tell us a little about where people can find your book and the upcoming audiobook?

Chris Bache: They can find the book on Amazon. I'm just putting the final edits on the audiobook. I'm not sure yet what the vehicle for that release will be, but hopefully, it will be out by the beginning of the year. I plan to have a website up soon at chrisbache.com. Most of my written work and some tapes are available at academia.edu under my name, but I'm not as savvy with social media as I should be.

Joe Moore: Only do one. It's not worth being everywhere.

Chris Bache: But what's really exciting is that the book is finally out. It's as clear a presentation of this material as I could make, taking five years to bring it forward.

Joe Moore: Thank you for all your work. We really appreciate you joining us today.

Chris Bache: Thank you, guys. It's been a real honor. Keep up the good work. You're social catalysts, and we need all the social catalysts we can get these days.

Kyle Buller: Thank you. We'll keep plugging along.