---
title: "LSD & the Mind of the Universe (SMN webinar)"
slug: 2022-12-07-lsd-and-the-mind-of-the-universe-smn-webinar
date: 2022-12-07
type: lecture
channel: "Scientific & Medical Network"
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
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people:
-
  name: Christopher M. Bache
  wikidata: Q112496741
  openalex: A5045900737
provenance:
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**David Lorimer: ** A warm welcome, everybody. I'm tuning in here from the Cathar area of South West France. As many of you will know, my name is David Lorimer. I'm the Program Director of the Scientific and Medical Network. So, Chris, I've known Chris for a long time. He taught for 33 years at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University and is also connected with the California Institute of Integral Studies and Noetic Sciences. He's an advisor to the Grof Legacy Training, which I'm also involved in. He writes here that his passion has been the study and the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness, particularly psychedelic states. I'd like to add a plug, as it were, for his book that isn't on this particular theme, *The Living Classroom*, an exploration of collective fields of consciousness in teaching. This is particularly fascinating in terms of the synchronicities that seem to arise in Chris's teaching with his students, and he may refer to that in passing. So, his two books that I've read and reviewed—this is the initial one here, *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, and I think that's exactly where we are collectively at the moment. And then his book, prize-winning *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. Many of you will have read his article in the current issue of *Paradigm Explorer*. So, Chris, I'm really looking forward to this presentation. Very warm welcome from us, and we can't wait to hear what you have to say.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you, David. Let me shift into screen sharing, if I can do this correctly. Good. Okay. Well, thank you, David, and thank you, everybody. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here with you tonight, and I really look forward to sharing with you the experiences that I'm reporting in this book, *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. David has framed our conversation this evening as a question of whether we can all participate, all access the cosmic mind, I'm assuming, using psychedelics. Well, I believe that we all can, but whether we all should is another matter entirely. In contrast to the early idea that psychedelics represent a shortcut to mystical experience, my concern is that the psychedelic journey into the cosmic mind is extremely demanding and must be approached with great care and caution.

In *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*, I try to describe as clearly and carefully as I can experiences that opened in 73 high-dose LSD sessions conducted over 20 years when I was a young man between 30 and 50 years old. This was from 1979 to 1999. I spent another 20 years thinking about these experiences, digesting them, mapping them, and pondering their implications. I hope that the visions I brought back from this journey will be useful not only to other psychonauts but also to those who would never take a psychedelic themselves. What's important here is the vision of the cosmos that they contain and a vision of where humanity is in its long evolutionary journey and the turning point we're coming to.

Now, I want to say upfront before we begin that I'm not sure what I did was wise. I pushed myself very hard on this journey, harder than was sometimes good for me, and I sincerely do not recommend this protocol to others. If I were starting this journey over again, I would be gentler with myself. I would work with lower doses and gentler psychedelics, but I made it through intact, and I would not have missed it for the world. I also want to say that I know what I'm presenting tonight is a radical story. It raises many questions that we won't get to speak about tonight about the reality of these experiences and how this path compares to other spiritual paths. But this radical nature is inescapable. I believe that psychedelics represent a genuine turning point in philosophy, a true before-and-after advance. They give us more than new insights into consciousness and more than a new therapeutic method for healing the wounds of the personal psyche. As important as these things are, the critical use of psychedelics gives us a new philosophical method that has two parts: first, immersing ourselves into temporary states of hyper-aroused consciousness, and second, stepping back and critically analyzing our experiences.

By moving back and forth between non-ordinary and ordinary states of consciousness, we can gather and distill new insights into the structure of reality. Now, of course, this method is not really new, is it? It was present in the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece and in the Ayahuasca ceremonies of Brazil that date back 1000 years, but they are new to us, new to our scientific culture, and that's the point. We are witnessing, I think, the emergence of a true psychedelic philosophy.

So let's begin. My psychedelic lineage is rooted in the work of Stanislav Grof. I was a brand new faculty member in 1978 when I first read his book, *Realms of the Human Unconscious*, and my life pivoted. That was followed quickly by his book *LSD Psychotherapy* in 1980 in which he laid out the method for working with these substances. Stan has demonstrated that LSD is a non-specific amplifier and catalyst of consciousness. It does not give us specific experiences. Rather, it hypersensitizes one's consciousness for six to eight hours at a time. Everything that follows hinges on how we use these hours. Stan's work clearly differentiates two therapeutic modalities: psycholytic therapy, or low-dose therapy, and psychedelic therapy, or high-dose therapy. In psycholytic therapy, the mind is peeled away layer by layer, uncovering the different layers of our shadow and taking us back deeper and deeper into our unconscious. In psychedelic therapy, a very different protocol developed and used at Spring Grove Hospital, it was limited to three sessions maximum and was designed to trigger near-death type experiences among patients who were terminally ill.

Well, I thought if you could use this therapy of working with high doses safely three times, you could use it safely more than three times. So during the years I was doing this work, I simply saw myself as doing an extended course of psychedelic therapy. But when I came to the end of this journey and was looking back over its length, I came to appreciate how radical this undertaking had actually been. This went beyond psychedelic therapy as it was originally conceived and practiced, and therefore it called for a new term to avoid confusion, and so I've named it psychedelic exploration. Now, I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms. This is a very high dose level. The method is the method of psychedelic therapy: complete isolation and complete protection from the outside world, trusting your care to a sitter, wearing eyeshades, and working with very carefully chosen music to pace the opening and closing of your session. The difference is the high number of sessions, in my case, 73 times.

Now, I think that the stabilization of the protocol and minimizing the variables that I followed in my session contributed to the stability and clarity of the psychedelic window that opened in my sessions. I always followed the same protocol, the same set and setting, the same sitter, who was my former wife, my wife at the time, Carol, who is a clinical psychologist, the same substance, the same dose level, even the same location and the same recording process. I think this provided a very stable reception platform that allowed my sessions to develop cleanly and clearly over time. Now, I did this work as rigorously as I could. I kept detailed records, making an exhaustive, descriptive account within 24 hours of each session. I tracked the dates, and Rick Tarnas, a good friend of mine, and as we've all read his book, *Psyche and Cosmos*, I tracked the astrological variables to see what the interplay was between my experiences and the astrological transits.

I want to emphasize that the story I'm telling in *LSD and the Mind of the Universe* is not primarily a personal story. It's primarily a cosmological story. The personal is the least important in my experiences. After the first 10 sessions or so, the portion of the experiences that were relevant to my personal life tended to come up in the beginning and endings of the sessions, represented by these small circles that are drawn at the beginning and endings of the sine waves, which represent psychedelic sessions. When I was coming back, leaving and coming back into space-time, I often had many insights and gifts given to me about my personal life. But when I was in the peak hours of psychedelic arousal, I was at the top of these waves, experiencing phenomena that far transcended my personal life, as represented in these larger circles. That's the story I'm telling in *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. That's the philosophically interesting story; that is the universal story. It's a story that is basically telling the developmental sequence of experiences over these hilltop perspectives.

**Chris Bache: ** After going through yet one more intense cycle of death and rebirth, I was spun into a brilliantly clear radiance that Buddhism calls Dharmakāya. I came to call it the domain of Diamond Luminosity. I had known light many times before, but this was an exceptionally pure light. This domain captivated me so completely that it extinguished any interest I had in exploring the other levels of existence that had previously fascinated me. This was a different order of reality altogether. Its clarity was so overwhelming, its energy so pure that returning to it became my sole focus in future sessions. Over the next four years and 26 sessions, the Diamond Luminosity domain opened to me only four times, and these are the four sessions that I describe, that I present in this chapter.

**Chris Bache: ** My understanding is that the Diamond Luminosity is an extra-Samsaric reality that lies outside the Bardo, outside of Samsara, outside all the cycles of physical reality, and the Bardo realities of psychic reality. It is the pure light from which the universe arises and returns. It is Dharmakāya, the clear light of absolute reality. In between these four immersions in Diamond Luminosity, there were many intense episodes of cleansing and personal healing. In general, there were two movements during this four-year period. There was first a movement of going deeper into Diamond Luminosity, and then a movement where Diamond Luminosity began to crunch itself more deeply into my physical body. The turning point for this was Session 50. I only began to understand what was happening after the fact. Always, I had no control over what was happening in the sessions. I basically went along with whatever the universe was, wherever it was taking me, and only figured out after the fact what was taking place. In Session 50, I was as deep into the universe as I ever went in any of my sessions. I was in the clearest, most sublime state of Diamond Luminosity that I had ever known. And then in that session, everything in my visual field pivoted 90 degrees, and I saw a reality far into the distance that looked like luminous galaxies. A ray of light from that reality hit me, and it absolutely shattered me. I call it the Absolute Light, just to give it a name. But what it showed me is that the universe we are exploring in these deep states of consciousness is endless. I would never get to the end of the divine mind. I would never get to the end of the cosmic mind, even using this powerful method of exploration. This was a turning point in my thinking because I had adopted the belief that I inherited from other people that there was an end point to this journey, that there was a point that you came to which represented your ultimate destination. Some had described it as oneness with God, or as the return to the primal void. But I had experienced oneness with God many times, and what I learned is that there are many permutations and degrees of oneness. And I had entered the primal void several times, and I learned that there, too, there are degrees of void. When I first entered the Diamond Luminosity, it brought such a feeling of homecoming, such a feeling of absolute peace and contentment. I thought that I had finally found what I was looking for. I had finally found my ultimate destination. And then practically I did. It completely satisfied all my philosophical and spiritual longing. But just at the peak of this satisfaction, the universe showed me that it is an infinite journey. It is an infinite being that we are exploring in our lives. This both first shattered me and then relaxed me into infinite wonder. This is one of the reasons why I would be gentler with myself if I were doing this today—because one of the things I've learned on this journey is that the goal is not to get somewhere, to get to a particular state of consciousness or particular state of being. The goal of this work, I think, is to open up to the universe and let as much of it as possible into your being, to let as much of the love and as much of the intelligence and as much of the power and consciousness into your being and stabilize it and hold it and live your life, living by its truths. After this Session 50, the next sessions really seemed to take me into the Diamond Light, but the Diamond Light was crunching itself deeper and deeper into my body, changing even what I think of as the physiological structure, the cellular structure of my body. And now to the chapter I skipped over the birth of the Future Human. When I began this work in 1979, I never imagined that humanity's future would become part of this story, but now I think this may be the most important chapter of the book because it speaks of our children and our children's children as far as we can see. It speaks of a crossroads humanity is coming to, and of powerful forces taking us into a future that will change us at the deepest levels of our being. In this chapter, I summarize bits and pieces of experiences and visions that actually go all the way back to the initiation into the universe material and run all the way through up into Session 55. These are the sessions that I discuss, that I present in this chapter. Here I collect the pieces of visions. I extract them from Sessions 23 to 47 and gather them together in what I call the visions of awakening. There are six visions of awakening—six themes that kept showing themselves over and over in these visions concerning humanity's future. The themes of those six visions are divine love, all humanity, that the universe is trying to awaken all humanity, that is being enacted by guiding intelligence that's guiding our evolutionary process, our species as a single being, again seeing the awakening as not simply a number of individuals awakening but our entire species going through the awakening process. The theme of collective purification, again, through the dynamics of reincarnation, that we are undergoing a collective purification. And finally, the experience of the Future Human, being given the grace of experiencing the Future Human that is being born in history. But nowhere in these visions over these four years was it shown me how this was going to take place. The vision was that we were coming into a period of profound spiritual awakening, a shift in the fundamental architecture of the collective psyche, a shift that will change the foundation of human existence on this planet. But it had not shown me how. And then in Session 55, right in the middle of the Diamond Luminosity sessions, I was taken deep into deep time, and I was given an experience of the death and rebirth of humanity. For there to be a great awakening in the human heart, in our collective human heart, there must first take place a great death. We must be emptied of the old before the new can fully emerge. I believe that the 21st Century will be such a time. It will begin the dark night of our collective soul, a time of emptying, of intense anguish, of loss of control and breakdown, a collective purification unto death that will last generations. But through this hard labor, we will give birth to something extraordinary, more than just a new civilization. What is emerging is nothing less than a new order of human being. Through the global systems crisis, our planet is giving birth to the Future Human. When I first described these themes in Dark Night, Early Dawn, it sounds quite appropriate for our times that we are living in now. But I would just remind you that these visions were taking place in the early 90s. The Great Awakening session took place in 1995, 25 years ago. At that time, it was completely beyond my purview that we were going into such an enormous watershed moment in history.

**Chris Bache: ** In my visions concerning the human where humanity is, it was as though the transformation of humanity as a whole was the only thing that creative intelligence really cared about. Everything else—my life, our lives, everything we are struggling with in history—was part of this larger project. It was the context that framed all of our endeavors. It was the work of the hour. Now, my visions did not give me any details of when and where, so don't ask. It showed me the fact of this collective awakening. It took me into the collective psyche's experience of this death and rebirth, and it gave me insights into the mechanisms of our collective transformation. There's probably not time here to discuss these mechanisms, though I think they're really important, and it has to do with two things: the unified field, that the collective species mind is underneath all of our individual experiences, and the perception that then the enormous suffering that is being, that will be, generated by a global ecological crisis leading to a global systems crisis. This suffering will impact not just individuals; it will actually stimulate the collective psyche so deeply it'll shift the collective psyche into what we would call nonlinear conditions. And we know something about nonlinear systems from physical systems when they are shoved into nonlinear states. And there is a parallel between what can happen to a psychic system—a field of psychological energy—and what happens to physical systems when they are both shoved into nonlinear conditions. There's heightened creativity, higher self-organization, the capacity for rapidly accelerated change, and small inputs leading to enormous outcomes.

**Chris Bache: ** The final vision, to bring the journey to a close, just touching it very briefly. Actually, the three sessions that I discuss in this chapter, the final vision, was one of the most intense sessions that I went through anywhere on my journey. In it, the universe put me through a strip down that was more violent and more radical than any strip down I had ever gone through at any other time in my journey. And it did so, I think, in order to catapult me more deeply into deep time than it ever had taken me before. I won't try to reproduce or tell you much about that. I will invite you simply to look at it in the book itself. It was the final vision given to me as a capstone to the long story of where humanity is going. It showed me things about the evolutionary process that I have held dear to my heart ever since. It showed me things about our universe—that our universe is a diamond maker, making Diamond Souls, and it cares very little whether it takes a million or billion years for us to interest, for it to produce the souls that it is creating. And it gave me my deepest experience of the Future Human, an extraordinary being, just an extraordinary being. The last chapter is coming off the mountain. This chapter was the longest to write, and in it, I describe two things that I have struggled with and confronted in the years after my journey. I ended

**Chris Bache: ** The first I called the deep sadness. I had been given so many blessings on this journey, I thought that I could simply step away and spend the rest of my life digesting these treasures, but in the years following my sessions, I began to experience a deep existential sadness. I had been taken so deep into the divine, into the divine expanse, so many times that I was suffering from a loss of communion with the divine. Once you have known the joy of becoming light, once you have experienced the ecstasy of dissolving into the crystalline body of God, life on Earth can begin to feel dried up. I found that I no longer wanted to be here, and this is similar to what some people who have near-death episodes experience when they return here. They are plunged deeply into the light, the divine light, filled with overwhelming love, and then suddenly they're back on Earth with all the limitations of earthly experience. It's hard to make that transition. I knew that I was every moment immersed in the body of the Divine. I knew that she was the root and the flower of my existence. But this knowledge did not save me entirely from the pain of being separated from the full intensity of her presence. It took me about ten years to become fully grounded and comfortable living inside space-time again. But there was a second factor contributing to my disharmony, and this is what I call the sickness of silence. Because of our restrictive laws around psychedelics, I was not allowed to speak about my experience to others. I am a natural-born teacher. I love to learn new things and share that knowledge, but I was not allowed to teach from my psychedelic experiences in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. I had to keep silent about the most philosophically meaningful experiences of my life. How can you behold under such restrictive conditions? Over time, this enforced silence made me sick inside. Living in a psychedelic closet is just as damaging to your soul as living in any other closet where you are forced to deny your true nature. Writing LSD and the Mind of the Universe and speaking openly about my psychedelic experiences, as I'm speaking to you tonight, has been part of my personal path to becoming whole upon this earth once again, to become in my public life what I have been in my private life. And in closing, I'd like to leave you with this thought. I still have many questions about what it means to integrate experiences such as those that I've been describing tonight. I think we are still in the early stages of understanding how entering such extreme states of consciousness is affecting us in the long term. What does it do to a person to hold the kind of memories that I am holding? What does integration even mean in this context? How does a time-bound person, a time-bound being exquisitely tuned to the conditions of space-time, absorb excursions into deep time? How does a finite being digest our forays into the infinite? What is the residual impact of merging with all of existence after we have returned to being just one among many? I am asking more questions than I have answers for. My life has become a living experiment in these matters, with the outcome still being determined. But I say again, I would not have missed this journey for anything in the world. It has been the philosophical and spiritual adventure of a lifetime, and I take great joy in sharing it with you tonight. Thank you.

**David Lorimer: ** Thank you very much indeed, Chris. If you could just stop your screen share, that would be good. There we go. My eyes, I'm on. Well, I don't know how many of you have read Chris's book or his article and the earlier book, which I read 20 years ago, Dark Night, Early Dawn, but it's, it's, it's a pretty shattering experience to read, let alone go through. One of the things that I felt was that Chris has done something on our behalf, undertaking this journey so that we can borrow, in inverted commas, some of his insights, which I think are hugely important for our own understanding of who we are and where we're going. I'm just going to make two or three observations, then we'll have a break and come back for questions. One of the main questions you can ask about what Chris has been talking about is: does what he is conveying here give us access to the deep structure of reality or the deeper structures of reality? This is something that we ask in the Galileo Commission report, in which Harold argues in the affirmative—in other words, that they do. And this would correspond to the third bar of Jeff Kripal, who was with us a couple of weeks ago. Now, do these experiences have important implications for understanding of consciousness and reality? Well, my answer would be absolutely. But obviously, everybody has to draw their own conclusions. What you'll find, what I found, is that I have an extensive background in near-death and mystical experiences in terms of the literature, which many other people on the call also have, and it's consistent with all that, but it takes it a bit further—in fact, a lot—and it's a kind of ultimate gnosis, or knowing by identification. An observation is that we are clearly living in apocalyptic times here at one level or another, and about the evolutionary prospects and the birth of the Future Human has an extraordinary resonance, I think, at this time. It's something that Ann Baring, who's on the call tonight, was referring to last week. It'll be very interesting to see how people feel about that. We've got a lot of questions that have come up already in the chat box, but we'll get some live contributions. So, Chris, wonderful. Thank you very, very much indeed for sharing that so lucidly. Paul from Poland, you have a question?

**Audience: ** Hello, yes. Hi, Chris, a very nice presentation. I mean, you know, whenever you use the word "universe," something just sticks in me. As an astronomer, I know galaxies, I know stars, clusters of galaxies, vast physical spaces. That's what "universe" means to me. I have a universe in a very different way, but again, whenever you say "God," I don't universe. The universe? It's a place where, well, anyway, it's a long subject. I think I've asked my question anyway, if you could elaborate a little by what you mean by "universe," so that—

**Chris Bache: ** You're absolutely right, Paul, you've caught me out on this. I struggle with language. I struggle with how to describe some of these realities that I've entered. I don't like using the word "God." I don't use it much, but I use it once in a while, and I don't like using it because it carries so much baggage from history, and what most people mean by God is not what I mean by God. So, I'll use the word "divine" sometimes, but that's just a bit of a ruse because it comes back to the same. But I'm trying to strip the concept free of the historical accumulation. I collect pictures of galaxies, I collect pictures of nebulas, and when I move into meditation practice, I just will play them over and over and over again because this is my God. This is my divine, and what I'm referring to, what my experience is, is not to the outer body of the Divine, though I was taken into exploring some of the body of the universe. But if I were a physicist, and I would love to have degrees in physics and go into these states because this consciousness could have shown me so much more. If I had degrees in astrophysics and degrees in quantum theory, just my mind was not tuned to that type of knowledge. I'm talking about the consciousness which is the consciousness of the universe, the consciousness which has given birth to the universe. I'm just scraping the edges of it; I'm just touching the pieces of it. My experience of it is certainly limited by what I can understand, and again, what I would love to do is have 100 of our best, brightest, most talented scientists, artists, social activists going into these states in a systematic fashion. I mean, can you imagine a protocol if we had 100 of such people working one day a month for two years, what body of knowledge they would come back with and would be able to share? It's never the experience of any individual which is important; it's the experience of our collective genius and our collective talent as we are engaged. So, I stretch language. It's as big as the universe. It's deeper than time, it's more intelligent than any intelligence I have ever been able to touch inside time and space. The compassion, which is the emotion of oneness. It's when the quantum physicists talk about the implicate order, the oneness that underlies all manifest existence, that implicate order has a wholeness, that when I touch it, it just explodes me with love because love is the emotion of oneness. But I don't mean love in an ordinary sense of love, but it's kind of the closest approximation I have. So you're right that I am using "universe" in a borrowed fashion, and I'm using it in an extrapolated fashion.

**David Lorimer: ** Thank you very much. For those of you who've read the book, you'll understand that or the books that, for me, the way that you articulate these ineffable experiences into language gives me the sense that I'm as near vicariously as I can get to that gnosis, the understanding from within. In the Galileo Commission, we talk about exploring inner space. In that sense, you're a Psychonaut, obviously, of exploration of inner space. So thank you very much for that question. Next question is from our president, Professor Bernard Carr in London.

**Audience: ** Bernard. Oh, hi there, Chris, good to see you, and you too. First of all, thank you for taking this cosmic journey, and then for coming back to tell us all about it. It was absolutely engrossing. I noticed at one point you said you rather wish you had a degree in astrophysics, and then you would be able to in another way. Well, I have a degree in astrophysics, and I rather wish I had a degree in psychedelics. But my question really is a follow-up to Paul's. It's this question about the use of the word "universe," because there's a sort of distinction between your constant references to humanity as a species, and then your description in cosmological terms. Even your images are from cosmology, and you said that in some sense that was poetic license. But on the other hand, it does seem to me that if you really are contacting in that greater reality, that cosmic consciousness, you really will be contacting, if you like, a cosmic level of consciousness, not just the terrestrial level of consciousness. If, for example, one studies the writings of Buddha, when Buddha, in the Vasuti Marga, when he had his experiences, he was very explicit in the fact that he was experiencing realities beyond the normal terrestrial, you know, the galactic and the cosmic and things like that. So my question was this—although you're always referring to humanity, humanity is something which, by definition, is very much linked with Planet Earth. Did you ever feel that actually what you were encountering was something on a scale much larger than humanity? In other words, that it really was cosmic?

**Chris Bache: ** Yes, absolutely. And again, I wish I had your degrees. The universe could have taught me so much more. But when I entered into archetypal reality, I said I died as a human being, as my species identity. From that point on in the journey, my sessions basically took me outside of the operational range of our collective psyche, outside of human experience, outside of human history. When I began to move beyond the collective psyche, everything associated and held within the collective psyche began to fall away. All our understandings of God, all our projections of God, all the flotsam and jetsam of history just fell away, and I moved into these hyper, increasingly clear, hyper-clear states of consciousness harder to describe because so contentless. And I don't think I think we can be very cavalier about language, and I apologize if I've contributed to that. But I think when we talk about universal mind or cosmic mind, these are huge, huge concepts. I would say that the only part of that mind that I know and learned about was the part that it taught me about. There was a consciousness which took me in. There was a consciousness that taught me, broke me down, ground me, grounded me up into dust, and took me deeper and deeper into itself. But even so, I know I was only experiencing pieces, aspects, fractal manifestations of its totality. So my language peters out at that deep level. When I moved into Diamond Luminosity, I had a very clear perception of moving outside of Samsara, outside the Bardo, into a reality that's truly even outside archetypal reality. There was a period when I was born into archetypal reality, and then there was a process in which I was born out of archetypal reality into a level of reality which pre-exists before archetypal reality.

**Audience: ** Yeah, non-physical, yeah.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you very much, absolutely non-physical.

**David Lorimer: ** I'm just going to take an observation from the chat from Sri about, in your journeys, did you get a sense of why we seem to learn only through pain and suffering the divine heritage we come from or must return to? Why was this path into matter, back into spirit, necessary? And of course, that's sort of the $64,000 question, and it reminds me of this, which you will have heard before, probably, that there are only two reasons we change: desperation or inspiration, where we certainly change if we're desperate and we can preemptively change, perhaps, if we're inspired. I mean, for me, this is part of the kind of gnostic myth that we forget, we fall into darkness, we try and return to the light, and we forget who we are. We then have to try and remember who we are. We go to sleep, we have to wake up. It just seems to be how things are constituted. Is that your view, or do you have another?

**Chris Bache: ** I agree with you, and this is my experience. When I would go deeper and deeper and deeper into these levels of reality, I always experienced it as a remembering. I was remembering. I was remembering, and I don't have any sense that in forgetting that that was a tragedy or that was somehow my mistake, or some cosmic sin or some, you know, original sin—it seemed to be part of the natural order of things. There is the greater and there is the lesser. When we come into the lesser, we forget, but we have to remember. Everything that we're describing is constantly changing. It's constantly evolving. So I don't think we have had a tendency to sort of freeze our level of evolutionary maturity and to form judgments around how we got here, where we're going, and what we're doing. And we have to let go of all these sort of fixated fragments because the human being, as Sri Aurobindo said, is a transitional being. We are moving from what we were to what we are becoming. We are changing. Life is changing. Planets are changing. Our species is changing. We are in movement. So why things are the way they are isn't something that we can answer on an absolute scale. It's something we can only answer on an evolving scale. But that, of course, requires expanding our time horizon enormously. When a geologist helps us expand our time horizon and helps us understand plate tectonics, that's extraordinarily exciting, or when a physicist helps us understand the evolution of galaxies, it's extraordinarily exciting. This is something similar. We have to expand beyond our personal consciousness to have something about the intentionality that's manifesting itself in this ever-evolving, magnificent universe that we are part of.

**David Lorimer: ** So we need to tune into that part of ourselves which knows, as you said, that we're here. We're here for the ride. Fasten the seat belts—or maybe not fasten the seat belts. If we're really centered as we go through this process, we'll get the guidance we need, both individually and collectively. But we need to listen to that guidance, and we need to enable the new shoots. There's so much creative thinking going on. I was in a group this afternoon on the spirituality and Education Alliance, and there's a huge amount of good happening that we don't hear about, except in positive news like Humanity Rising. Thank you. That's also Humanity Rising and all the Ubiquity University. We need to keep ourselves buoyed up by the positive things that are going on, but also, as you say, face down the negative with the kind of courage you demonstrated in your journey. 

I thank you on behalf of us all for the journey you took and for bringing back these treasures, these gems that we can appreciate and incorporate into our own journey and understanding because you have made that journey. I really salute you for that odyssey. You could translate it into the hero's journey. Just a point of information for people: I mentioned Thomas Troward a moment ago. This is a book I recommend as a good starter from Thomas Troward; it's called *The Wisdom of Thomas Troward* and it has four of his main sets of lectures in it. He was a judge in India, and you can really get to grips with this stuff. He talked about self-recognition, where the universal became the particular in us, and then we had to recognize ourselves back again as the universal. He was actually talking about these things in his own way, a hundred years ago. 

So we're all trying to catch up with the perennial and live through it. Thank you to everybody on the call for coming and being part of this evening. I hope you've been inspired by it. I hope you've learned something that you can apply to your own lives and your own journey. Thank you very much, Andrew, for all the coordination; Jessica Cornet, thank you for all the help with the publicity. And Chris, thank you so much for sharing that deep wisdom, which we all really need to take on board in the rapids we are entering at the moment. I look forward to seeing everybody at a future event. Good night, everybody, and God bless. Much love and light to you all.