A Visionary Experience of the Birth of the Future Human

Chris Bache: We are a planet in crisis. This is very clear. Everyone knows the list of challenges we're facing: expanding world population, unchecked industrial pollution, escalating climate disruptions, increasing drought with associated forest fires, warmer oceans with stronger hurricanes, rising sea levels, collapsing water tables, species extinction, fished-out oceans, extreme economic inequality, unprecedented refugee migrations, unstable, interlocked national economies, cities and nations going bankrupt, stockpiled weapons we dare not use. With no end in sight, it's not an extreme statement to say that we are a planet on fire. If you subtract a few from this list or add a few, cumulatively, the list is overwhelming. What I would like to do today is share a perspective on the world crisis that we are entering and will continue to deepen over the years ahead, based on the perspectives given to me during my psychedelic experiences that I report in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. But first, let me give a little background on my work to set the stage for the sharing of the visions that I'm going to draw from that work. Let me move this over to the side here.

Interviewer: Okay, okay.

Chris Bache: So the visions I'm sharing today come from my work, Diamonds from Heaven, or LSD and the Mind of the Universe. My psychedelic lineage is squarely in the tradition of Stan Grof. His early writing, his books published in '76 and '80, provided the foundation for my work and determined the methodology I used in working with psychedelics. As those of you who know Stan's work are aware, he differentiates between two distinct modes of working with psychedelics: low-dose psycholytic therapy, designed to uncover the layers of the unconscious slowly and gradually with a therapeutic focus, and a very different method, psychedelic therapy, working with high doses. Here, the goal was less to heal than to trigger a near-death experience that would provide terminal cancer patients with an experience of where they were going when they died, thus relieving death anxiety.

What I chose to do in my work was to engage with very high doses. I saw that if this could be done safely a few times, it could be done safely more than a few times. As Janet mentioned, I conducted 73 high-dose LSD sessions over 20 years, between 1979 and 1999. At the end of my journey, I realized that I had gone places and had experiences not covered in the descriptions of early psychedelic therapy. I coined the term psychedelic exploration to describe this protocol. It's the protocol of working therapeutically, meaning in complete isolation with eyeshades, headphones, a sitter, protected from the world, isolated, and then going very, very deep. The difference between psychedelic therapy and psychedelic exploration is the number of sessions, the high number of sessions used.

While the method was extreme—500 to 600 micrograms is a very high dose of LSD—I do not recommend this protocol today. There were circumstances in my world that allowed this work to be very grounded. Through all these 20 years, I followed the same protocol, with the same set and setting in all the work, the same sitter, using the same substance at the same dose level, even in the same location in Northeast Ohio, and using the same recording process. By stabilizing all these variables, I think it created a very strong platform that allowed me to generate particularly clear access to the deep consciousness of the universe. In this work, I entered into deeper and deeper states of consciousness and digested it as carefully and thoroughly as I could. I kept track of all my sessions, taking careful note of their dates. I made a detailed record of each session within 24 hours after the session was over.

When you work in a sustained fashion with such powerful psychedelics, you go through not one death and rebirth, but a series of deaths and rebirths. In this image, the drop below the line represents our time-space identity, our egoic identity. The first turning of the circle represents the process of ego death—the first death and rebirth, the loss of one's identity as a physical human being, and one's first entry into spiritual reality. The subsequent circles represent repetitions of the death and rebirth process as one enters deeper levels of the vast expanse of spiritual reality. I follow Stan in adopting his vocabulary to describe these states as the psychic level of Transpersonal experience, the subtle level, and the causal level. I have no vested interest in cosmology that goes with this, but it's simply the principle that repeating the process of surrender leads to encounters with deeper structures of existence.

Let me give a different image for this. LSD is sometimes likened to a nuclear bomb of the psyche. With the nuclear bomb being developed in the same decade that LSD was developed, when you conduct a sustained course of intense psychedelic sessions, you set in motion a tremendous catalytic energy sustained over years. The sessions get deeper and deeper in a sustained fashion. It's not unlike a nuclear bomb in this case, revealing deeper levels of the atmosphere. These atmospheric levels were always there but had been previously invisible. Now, the force of this nuclear explosion brings them into visual awareness. This is just an analogy, but something like this happens in sustained psychedelic work. The deeper you go, if you work in a sustained fashion, you don't simply start over at the beginning of every session. One session starts where the previous session stopped, and you go deeper and deeper, eventually entering discrete levels of consciousness, which have their own rules. You acclimate to these levels and learn to become consciously aware at these deep levels.

However, we're not talking about nuclear bombs here. We're talking about entering the mind of the universe, the great expanse of consciousness. How do we describe this consciousness? Some might describe it as God or the divine, but I would prefer to call it the mind of the universe, the mind of the cosmos. In my personal journey into this vast consciousness, which holds all existence, I went through multiple layers, experiencing deaths and rebirths. I differentiate five core levels of reality I worked with in my sessions. The first took place at the level of my personal mind, my personal unconscious. The second at the level of the species mind. The third at the level of archetypal mind. The fourth at the level of causal oneness. And the fifth at the level of what I call the Diamond Luminosity, the source of the name Diamonds from Heaven.

Let me touch briefly on the chapters of the book to correlate them with this model. At the level of personal mind, there is a chapter titled "Crossing the Boundary of Birth and Death." This refers to what Stan calls crossing the perinatal level of consciousness. We enter time and space by being born, and we leave through dying. When consciousness expands beyond physical reality, one enters a domain where one's experience of getting here by birth and leaving by death intertwines in a complex fashion, resulting in existential crises culminating in ego death and entry into spiritual reality.

At the level of species mind, there are three chapters in the book pertaining to this work: "The Ocean of Suffering," "Deep Time and the Soul," and "Initiation into the Universe." I'm skipping some chapters that cover methodology and typical session days, but these focus on visionary experiences' content.

Chris Bache: When I entered the Ocean of Suffering, I engaged in work where I became thousands of human beings spread over millennia, experiencing rage, violence, and collective abuse. Eventually, I concluded this work wasn't about personal healing but instead offering therapeutic release to the collective unconscious of my species. In "Deep Time and the Soul," I experienced my life's entirety as a simultaneous whole, both yet to be lived and already lived. "Initiation into the Universe" took me beyond personal concerns, into instructions and initiations into the universe's functioning, beginning the story I'm telling today.

The level of archetypal mind is described in the chapter "The Greater Real of Archetypal Reality," engaging archetypal forces responsible for creating time and space, bringing forth forms that emerge. At the level of causal oneness, the universe is experienced as a single, organic whole, transcending differentiation. The story of Diamond Luminosity is told in chapter 10, reflecting years of intense cleansing and powerful experiences in these pure states of consciousness, akin to what Buddhism calls Dharmakaya.

The final chapter, "The Birth of the Future Human," is a story that surprised me, revealing my work's profound connection to our species' history, collective purification, and transformation processes. In this chapter, I summarize teachings given to me over 15 years, spanning multiple sessions and visions. This is the material I'd like to discuss today. For a preview, the material is divided into two bodies of visions: the Visions of Awakening and The Great Awakening. Visions of Awakening, given between 1991 and 1994, are divided into six themes: Divine Love, All Humanity, Guiding Intelligence, Our Species as a Single Being, Collective Purification, and the Future Human. The Great Awakening is one session from 1995, taking me deep into the future, where I experienced our collective death and rebirth.

Chris Bache: ** Let me stop here. Thank you for your patience.

Chris Bache: What I would like to do is share these visions with you today. I'd like to do something different and share these visions experientially rather than just discussing them. I invite you to relax, close your eyes, and hear these visions at a deeper level. My sense is the spoken word has an initiatory power that mere discussion lacks. I'll read a condensed version of these visions, sharing them as recorded. These visions come from years of psychedelic work and may sound extreme or exotic. Please remember the context.

First, the theme of Divine Love. Early in the initiation into the universe work, I experienced creation as an act of supreme love, unlike anything I'd known. Awakened to this love, I remembered a primordial decision we all participated in: choosing to be part of creation, driven by cosmic love. All of history's suffering takes place within this love, noble beyond words. Suffering, voluntarily shouldered for divine love, stretches across millennia, appearing absent of compassion. Yet, this is the nobility of humanity's gift to the universe's creative intelligence. No matter how hard times ahead may be, they unfold within the divine love that inspired creation.

Second, all of humanity. From history's struggles and conflicts, a new awareness is emerging, akin to a new continent's birth. It drives upward, requiring a transposition of everything before it. The process targets all humanity, attempting to awaken the entire species. It's unprecedented—humanity, integrated in a unified field of awareness, reconnected to its fundamental nature, thoughts attuned to Source consciousness. The scale was breathtaking—compared to religious traditions focusing on individual transformation, this showed a deeper process where the universe sought to awaken the entire species.

Third, guiding intelligence. Humanity ascends from a steep valley to a brilliant, sunlit world just ahead, promising to change life on Earth forever. Current structures quickly become irrelevant as a new epoch dawns. Though we can't see the deep future, a more encompassing consciousness guides us, aware of the future, preparing us for it systematically.

Fourth, our species as a single being. The evolution of our species is the unified being's growth, with extraordinary cooperation between parts and whole. The subtlety reveals new patterns and transparency. Our species is moving to greater self-awareness. In the past, such awareness was swallowed by collective inertia, but now, these flashes endure and connect.

Fifth, collective purification. When an organism becomes more conscious, it must cleanse itself of its lower-level awareness's byproducts. Our species is doing this on a grand scale by embodying our toxic legacy. This coordination is the species' self-evolution. Historical karmic streams are flowing into this century, forming a watershed. As this process matures, our species will surpass its current fragmented state, intent on rapid change.

Finally, the future human. Given a glimpse of the future human we are becoming, I was filled with rapture at this magnificent being, embodying spiritual realization and balance between spirit and matter. Its beauty, grandeur, and simplicity pierced my heart.

In these years, messages emerged, showing the profound spiritual awakening on our horizon, undertaken voluntarily as part of a cosmic plan inspired by divine love. Though clear answers weren't provided on how this leap would occur, these visions framed this historical project. As my psychedelic journey continued into the Diamond Luminosity work, I encountered the death and rebirth of the human species, introducing new categories, orchestrated by the movement of our collective species.

In the Great Awakening session of 1995, after personal cleansing and introduction, I dissolved into the species mind, experiencing events overtaking humanity: increasing alarm, fewer assumptions, and life structures falling apart. As the crisis peaked, new social units and awareness emerged, reflecting new priorities and values, spawning creativity between individual and group. Humanity's ecological crisis acted as a catalyst, accelerating changes faster than anticipated—faster than expected, outpacing past patterns.

Chris Bache: Yes, there were other components that were shown to me over the course of my long journey. Many sessions were spent exploring the dynamics of reincarnation, and I came to call this the birth of the diamond soul. All of our former lives eventually come together and fuse into a singularity. In that fusion, there's an explosion of diamond light within us, opening us to a completely expanded sense of identity. Ego yields to Soul; the small world of the present body-mind yields to the much larger world of the soul that travels in and out of time effortlessly.

To summarize, the core vision that came from my sessions helps me personally understand what's happening in history now. Humanity is coming into a time of profound transformation, a shift in the collective unconscious of our species, a shift in the archetypal blueprint of humanity, and a profound awakening into oneness. But for there to be this great awakening, there must first take place a great death. We must be empty of the old before the new can emerge. We must surrender our smallness, the ego's constant self-cherishing, with all the divisions it brings between races, religions, classes, nations, and even species. I believe we are entering the dark night of our collective soul. All mystics go through the dark night before awakening into the bliss of oneness. The dark night is a time of intense purification. Now, I think humanity as a whole is entering this dark night. It is a time of emptying, a time of intense anguish, loss of control, and breakdown—a global purification unto death that will last generations. Yet, through this hard labor, we will give birth to something truly extraordinary. More than just a new civilization, what is emerging is nothing less than a new order of human beings. Through the global systems crisis, our planet is giving birth to the future human, a higher form of humanity. The diamond soul is being born in history, and we are all part of its birth. I believe that each one of us, before we incarnated, knew what we were getting into and consciously chose to incarnate at this time and in the places where we are to participate and contribute to the spiritual awakening of humanity. Thank you very much. I think we have a few minutes to handle some questions, so I'll turn this back over to Jason and Jeannet.

Interviewer: Hi, gosh, I'm all choked up. Chris, that was beautiful. Thank you. Let's have a look at the question. There's one question here from Katie Carr. Katie, do you want to ask that question yourself? Jason, can we unmute Katie? Or can I unmute Katie?

Jeannet Weurman: There she is. I'm here. Thank you so much. It's actually two questions. I'll read them out. First, I'm intrigued by what you said, massive appreciation, about the centrality of the human species in these visions. It seems kind of anthropocentric, given that we invented the concept of species anyway. I'm wondering about the place of non-human life in this expanded consciousness.

Chris Bache: Let me take the first one, and then you can ask the second one, how about that? This is a really important question. I have friends who have spent a great deal of time at the interface of the human species and animal species, immersing themselves into various animal species with various insights. My work has not been like that. My work has been really focused on the human species. I don't know why, except for one particular thing: I think the human species is the most dangerous species on the planet right now. It is the imbalances of the human psyche that are placing the lives and well-being of other species in peril. If we can heal and make whole the human species, then the other species will be saved and safe on our planet. My best understanding is that my work is focused on the human species, not because it denies the importance of other species, but because it's trying to get at the problem where it lives. Right now, the problem is inside the human heart and our insensitivity to the larger, deeper rhythms of life that we share with all other life forms on our planet.

Jeannet Weurman: Yeah, I hear that it's like the biggest potential for purification is right here with us.

Chris Bache: Essential, yes. If the human species can be fixed, so to speak, can be awakened, everyone will be safe on the planet. If we're not saved, if we don't save ourselves and wake ourselves up, then all life forms will continue to be in danger. Beautiful.

Jeannet Weurman: Thank you. The second question was, after this incredible gift of realization—it's a big question—what have you been doing with your life for the last 20 years?

Chris Bache: Good question. Well, I spent 20 years really thinking about these sessions and trying to understand them. It takes a long time to integrate experiences this deep. It turned out, much to my surprise, that coming down the mountain of these visions was almost as difficult as going up the mountain. The last chapter of the book is called "Coming Off the Mountain," where I describe some challenges I faced, coming away from the visionary state and entering back into a fully grounded condition. So what I've been doing is, I continued to teach. I taught for a number of years and really couldn't talk about my psychedelic practice openly until I retired from the university because I loved teaching. If I let people know what I was doing, it would have terminated my academic career. I continued to take care of my children, to shepherd them into their adult lives as best as one can. I have tried to deepen my spiritual practice. I've always been a meditator, always done some form of spiritual practice, which is really important if you're going to enter into what I call the path of temporary immersion—working with psychedelics. It's important to have a stable spiritual practice, a daily practice that takes care of your body and mind, and helps you integrate these extreme swings of energy and the extreme ideas that pour into us during a psychedelic session. So, I've been digesting my work and finishing my life process. In the middle part of my life, I retired from the university, did a little more teaching, and wrapped that up by about 2015. It took me five years to write this book, even though I had all the sessions beforehand. It took me time to get myself into the psychological space where I would be willing to share these experiences because they are so personal, deeply intimate about my relationship with the divine. It took me time before I was willing to let anyone have access to such deep places within my life history, but Spirit kept telling me, "No, you don't have the luxury of being private right now. It's all oars in the water. Things are speeding up." People will be able to use your work to strengthen and support their own life's journey as we go into this time in history. After I'd finished my sessions, Spirit said to me in my meditation, "20 years in, 20 years out," meaning it would take 20 years for me to digest all the gifts given in that 20-year journey. By sheer coincidence, Diamonds from Heaven was published 20 years after I stopped my last journey.

Jeannet Weurman: Thank you. I'm really grateful that you started so young and have shared with us. Thanks so much.

Chris Bache: Thank you. Katie, yes, I did start young. I did this work when I was 30 to 50, and I'm now 71.

Interviewer: Thank you. Okay, is it okay to move to the next question? Jamie Mills, can we unmute Jamie Mills? And thank you, Katie, for your questions. Both were very good. Can we unmute Jamie?

Audience: Hi Chris, thank you for your heartfelt sharing.

Chris Bache: Thank you. Nice to meet you.

Audience: As someone with children, trying to hold this aspect in awareness, I often struggle with the normalcy of life as well as some awareness of what is to come. As part of that, do you anticipate seeing more, seeing these changes, in your lifetime?

Chris Bache: I want to emphasize that in my visionary work, I was never given particulars about when or how it was going to manifest. It appeared to be a global crisis triggered by global climate change, ecological in nature, impacting political, economic, and social processes. But in terms of when or how specifically, I wasn't given content. I was shown it was happening and would be happening. I was shown some mechanisms of the process, specifically how the role of the collective psyche would catalyze change beneath our feet quickly as needed for us to survive our foolishness. I have children, like many of us here, and I've been surprised, frankly, by how quickly COVID-19 escalated to a sense of global crisis, how our lives rearranged dramatically. To me, the pandemic feels like an overture to a symphony. It starts the process and touches themes we’re getting into, but it's not the key crisis. It's the beginning of a series of punctuated crises that will deepen in years ahead.

We're not powerless. How we respond in the next ten years is crucial to the depth of this crisis. We're beyond stopping it, but not beyond influencing it. In my lifetime, I expect to watch the beginning, but I won’t see the finish. That work falls to our children and grandchildren. I suspect this will last generations, as we’re talking about pivoting an entire planet.

One author who’s detailed the escalating scale of these crises is Dwayne Elgin, whose latest book, Choosing Earth, lays out the next five decades, decade by decade, compounding crises, all data-driven, not visionary. He’s monitored international forecasts and gives a sense of what's likely to happen. The book’s latter part addresses what individuals can do. We shouldn’t take this lying down; we need to mobilize. Mobilize inwardly, doing our spiritual homework, confronting our shadow, and outwardly, supporting collective psyche healing, confronting the shadow it's brought into this time. So, there's plenty of work to be done. Thank you.

Interviewer: Thank you, Chris. We've got a couple of minutes. Do you want to take one more question, or shall we pause here?

Chris Bache: Yeah, one more is fine.

Interviewer: The next question is from Claudius Schwartz. Thank you, Jamie, for your question. Could we unmute Claudius?

Audience: Hi Chris. We met about one and a half years ago at a conference in Philadelphia. I enjoyed talking to you, and later I read your book. I'm fascinated by your work. From a Christian perspective, I'm wondering if the vision of the future human could refer to something like heaven because what you describe sounds like Christian descriptions of heaven, but as you describe it, it's still on Earth. Is there a way to integrate your insights with Christian teachings? Has Christianity played a role in your explorations?

Chris Bache: Certainly, Christianity did play a role in my exploration. I was raised in the Deep South, in Mississippi, and raised Catholic. I have no complaints about my Catholic upbringing. My first vocation was to be a Catholic priest; I was in seminary for high school and college. But then I chose a different course with children and marriage. My life has been influenced by all spiritual traditions, especially Christianity and Buddhism. I think you're right—what we’re looking at is heaven on earth, the embodiment of heavenly states in our physical existence.

Quickly, the religions of the last 5000 years have been up-and-out cosmologies: you attain spiritual awakening and leave. The Hindu word for enlightenment is moksha, escape. They captured half the message but left, I believe, the importance of this magnificent universe unanswered. Seeing it as a veil of suffering, a place to escape, missed a deeper vision emerging today. With an understanding of the universe’s immense age, its intelligence, and the effort put into unfolding for billions of years, we glimpse a vision not to leave but to awaken and incarnate Divine Consciousness here in our body on this planet, co-creating a new developmental level—truly heaven on earth, an awakening of spiritual Consciousness in physical bodies. It expands the egoic consciousness and opens more naturally into divine consciousness. It aligns well with Christian vision, with minor adjustments. Thank you.