The Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven

Aviv Shahar: Central to the portals project is the inquiry about the future and the evolutionary change underway. We seek to perceive what is emerging at the edge of the human experience, to decode and integrate insights about how we humans are evolving through this liminal transition. Chris Bache is a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He's a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Chris is the author of The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness, and of Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind. His third book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, describes his 20 years of intensive work through 73 LSD sessions. In the interest of transparency, I have never touched LSD, never touched any psychedelic or any mushroom. My own 42 years of journey to unlock the universal human potential was centered on the premise that the human brain, when we are open to the blessing realms, is the most advanced chemistry and pharmaceutical production unit in the universe. And I've applied my spiritual and development search in ways that promote naturally arising states and inner conductivity. So we are not here to recommend that you should do anything. I've invited Chris because, Chris, your rigor and focused inquiry are profound, and your account, where you frame insights and perspectives, is of great interest as we seek to appreciate what is emerging at the edge of human consciousness. Chris, welcome.

Chris Bache: Thank you, Aviv, it's a real pleasure to be here with you today.

Aviv Shahar: So you have already lived several lifetimes in this one life. You've had a full academic career, published three books, raised a family with three children, and alongside all of this, you've done this intense 20-year research work. So let me first ask, what is the portal you are in right now? What is the inquiry you're working on at this time?

Chris Bache: Well, when I published LSD and the Mind of the Universe, or, as I prefer to call it, Diamonds from Heaven—that's its name for me—when I published that, I felt like I had accomplished my life's work. After a long career of teaching as a philosopher of religion, this was my most important gift to the history of philosophical inquiry into the deep structure of existence. And that brought with it a tremendous sense of closure and relaxation. Since the book has come out into the world, about three years ago now, I've just been content to follow the book out into the world and to engage in conversations that people want to have around the issues that have come up with the book. I don't have any agenda or any felt need to achieve anything. In the last three years, I've moved to North Carolina, and I've been doing a lot of yard work. My hands are in the soil, and engaging in all those basic things. I have children and grandchildren that I love to stay in touch with as often as I can. They live farther away, so that takes some work. I'm kind of growing old in a comfortable place. I am cultivating a form of spiritual practice that builds upon the systematic remembering of the experiences that I had on the 73 days covered in my book. And those are living memories for me. I'm experimenting with how to use those memories to more deeply absorb and integrate the realities that I touched very intimately on those session days.

Aviv Shahar: We will pick up this thread, which is fascinating. You're describing a condition where a memory is not frozen in time; it's a living stream of intelligence that continues to inform you here and now. We will pick this up as we unfold the conversation. In his forward to your book, Ervin Laszlo writes, "This is one of the most insightful and significant books I have ever read. But to understand its significance, one must be willing to entertain three premises: A, there is an intelligence behind the things that exist in the universe; B, that there is purpose exhibited by this intelligence; and C, that it is humanly possible to access some elements of this intelligence and learn some aspects of its purpose." So I'm interested, given the way you're describing where you are, how is this deliberation unfolding for you in terms of your belief, your feeling about these three premises: A, that the universe is an intelligent place; B, that there is an inherent or latent purpose; and C, that we actually have, as humans, the capacity to unpack or to connect or to decode both?

Chris Bache: Those premises are absolutely foundational to my lived reality these days. The worldview that I was educated in during graduate school is the scientific worldview of the early 20th century—that the world is basically a fantastic machine. It has no innate intelligence. Intelligence is a lucky accident that sprung up somewhere along the way. Our existence is accidental; it's not purposive. When we die, when our brain ceases to function correctly, then our consciousness disappears. There is no existential meaning or significance to our lives. All of those assumptions have been overturned in my psychedelic work. What I found is that by dissolving into the deeper levels of my own mind, I opened beyond my own personal existence into the mind of the universe itself. Through this process, repeatedly, over many years, I came into communion with an intelligence that was profoundly brilliant, vast beyond imagination, and compassionate beyond measure. Returning to that intelligence and drinking from it, being willing to undergo challenging processes of initiation, always rewarded with deeper intimacy with this intelligence, has changed my life. The universe I now live in is saturated with intelligence at all levels I can see and at levels I can't. The world I live in, intellectually and emotionally, is a world of genius unfolding systematically over vast epochs of time. Humanity's participation in this creative endeavor is not limited to a 100-year lifetime or one single lifetime; it continues lifetime after lifetime through the process we classically know as reincarnation. It's larger than that. Our entire species and the development of this planet, this solar system, and this galaxy are all part of an exquisite, purposeful, systematic unfolding of the creative power of this creative intelligence. I hesitate to call it God or the divine, because, as a professor of religious studies, I know how that word has been used and what it has come to mean in different cultures. While part of it is good and beautiful, many parts are limiting. I prefer to speak of the creative intelligence of the universe, the intelligence behind existence and inside existence, expressing itself in the complexity of life.

Aviv Shahar: You have just given us a condensed preview of everything we are about to explore in the next hour and so, which is beautiful. It's exactly what I hoped we could do: give the people that join us a sense at the front end of what we are about to unfold. You again described three layers there: making contact with this intelligence, appreciating it, and then, as you engage with that intelligence, a fuller whole-person experience, discovering a sense of compassion and intimacy. You say that the universe is interested in our experience of it. What do you believe about why that is the case?

Chris Bache: Part of my experience is rooted in the classic teaching in some Eastern traditions that the essence of the individual is the same as the essence of the totality—that Atman is Brahman, that our nature is the nature of the Divine, which is the nature of reality itself. It's not accurate to think of this in terms of a duality between me and it. At a deeper level, my being is a fractal manifestation of its reality. Our relationship is essential and mutually participating from the start. However, in terms of function, I am so small, and it is so vast, that there's a relative duality involved. Moreover, it's not just the small bit and the totality; between them, there are layers upon layers. It's a complex, organic system of massive scale. To focus on your question, my experience has been that through my spiritual work and psychedelic practice, I went through initiations and cycles of death and rebirth, which we'll discuss later. I spent hours absorbed in communion and dialogue with this intelligence, and as I began to return to my normal shape and size, the window that would open for hours would close. I repeatedly sensed that this intelligence was pleased to share, to commune, not just with me but with humanity. After 13.7 billion years, we are just becoming able to embrace the scale of the universe's intelligence. For that time, it has been creating this magnificent garden and holding it as we evolve slowly to the point where we can become aware of what it has been doing, and it seems pleased to consciously share what it has constructed unconsciously.

Aviv Shahar: The idea of seeing ourselves as a fractal of the whole inside a nested reality that is interpenetrating carries some powerful propositions and ideas that we will unfold, and you explore in your book. It suggests that as I change in myself, as you change in yourself, because we are a fractal of the whole, we facilitate and catalyze a bigger change. We are participants in this unfolding, gigantic story you describe.

Chris Bache: Absolutely, we are participants. We are an expression of the creative process. We are a continuance of the creative process, and we are learning to be more conscious generators of the creative process.

Aviv Shahar: Would it be right to say that when you suggest, and when we contemplate, that the universe is interested in us, in humanity, that it's a form of the universe's interest in its own evolution, that it comes to experience through its beloved human?

Chris Bache: I think so. That's a widely held insight in many mystical traditions of the world. There's a deep collaboration, and this intelligence is interested in its expansion, and we are, in some ways at this point in time, one of the cutting edges of its expansion, its learning.

Aviv Shahar: Well, let's begin to explore a little into and through the journey. You described that we are at the leading edge of something that's evolving through this universe. In Session Six, you mention the vast community of explorers. You write about experiencing explorers in different fields of learning as part of a vast cooperative enterprise. How did you experience then, and when you reflect now, on this community of explorers? I get the visual sense of people who are in different spaces and domains, right at the edge, the cutting edge of discovery.

Chris Bache: I was first trained as a historian, then in the philosophy of religion. I spent years studying great thinkers in history in these fields, so I had a sense of great beings who contributed to the tapestry of learning that I inherited. This session was about liberating me from responsibility to the intellectual lineages I was educated into. It was as if I was above the earth, watching these beings through history make their contributions to art, literature, and science. Usually, I would be intimidated by their genius, but here I felt like a young learner entering the fellowship of learning. I saw all the knowledge I acquired through years of study, and I learned about its incompleteness. I was shown a new way of doing philosophy that was opening in my life. I believe psychedelics represent a revolution in philosophy, not just insights into consciousness, but in how philosophy can be done. This new way involves systematically expanding the boundaries of experience by entering non-ordinary states of consciousness. Throughout history, humanity has practiced this through meditation, yoga, and psychedelics. In my case, psychedelics helped move into non-ordinary states, where I paid careful attention to those experiences and recorded them precisely. I then reflected on and integrated them with knowledge from other disciplines. By expanding and contracting consciousness, we can think and understand things beyond the reach of most humans, things only sophisticated mystics could access in esoteric traditions. With psychedelics, if handled responsibly, even a person of modest means can access these realities and understand some workings of the universe revealed through these states. As our minds change in sensitivity, we can experience different aspects of the cosmos, like the color spectrum. We see a portion of the visible spectrum, but our awareness can slide to different portions, opening us to different worlds of color—similar with consciousness. This session gave me permission not to prove everything to my peers but to begin a new methodology in philosophy, one that might not be recognized for generations and would take the rest of my life to fully explore. That's why I did 20 years of psychedelic exploration and another 20 years digesting those experiences before publishing Diamonds from Heaven.

Aviv Shahar: Would it be correct to say that in any pathway to altered states, whatever we come into contact with—whether you view it as a stream of intelligence or another way—depends on the frame of reference you've cultivated. So, your studies in philosophy and religion provided inner scaffolds for translating these experiences. If someone else approached an adjacent experience with different scaffolds, they might interpret it differently. How would you restate this idea?

Chris Bache: Good point and an important consideration. The question isn't just whether they would interpret their experiences differently, but whether they would have different experiences because of different conditioning. This is a discussion I've had with Ken Ring, one of the founders of near-death episode research. He and I published our dialog around whether deep psychedelic experiences are trustable—whether they simply reflect personal or collective conditioning, or provide veridical insights. I subscribe to a participatory model of spiritual experience, meaning experiences are not like apples on a cosmic tree you can simply take. It's more complex. My conditioning was shattered repeatedly during this journey, as most who work systematically with these states will find. Initially, conditioning plays a strong role, but after several years, you move beyond that conditioning, experiencing collapse, and moving into unknown territory. My academic background helped understand what I was experiencing but didn't structure it. Instead of picking an apple from a tree, it's like this: The mind of the cosmos is an infinite lake of potential, and our mind acts like a seed catalyst dropped into this potential, catalyzing experiences reflecting that seed crystal. As we internalize those experiences, purification and transformation occur, changing our individual consciousness. Later, a different seed crystal dropped into that infinite lake precipitates different experiences. This participatory model means consciousness doesn't dictate what emerges but involves a complex feedback process. The more we do this, exploring new frontiers beyond imagination and taught teachings, we face tasks of understanding what we've experienced. These experiences are sequential and like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Aviv Shahar: You describe this further in session 16: self-generating fields of experience. You write that we are self-generating fields of energy in a living universe, generating energy by making choices, and the universe responds in complex ways. The more one moves towards one's center, becoming conscious of being the source of one's experience. This insight is true in daily consciousness without the need for altered states. You discover the edge of your own experience, realizing you're the catalyst of what the universe brings to you.

Chris Bache: Absolutely. I hope my book is useful to people who never take a psychedelic. In the end, psychedelics aren't critical. LSD, the psychedelic I used, amplifies consciousness; it doesn't give specific experiences or hallucinations. How you use amplified consciousness, how you protect and meditate with it, determines perception's quality. Many have written, saying they've never taken psychedelics but meditated for years, and they understand what I wrote. I say yes, because it’s not about psychedelics. We're exploring consciousness's nature to reveal its deeper truths. This idea of self-generating fields is an ancient one, central to beliefs in karma and rebirth. We're born in circumstances of our choosing and make choices to learn and change. When we die, it doesn't end but continues. My experience was an escalated vision of that teaching.

Aviv Shahar: You then describe a cosmic tour, taken through the universe to show you its work, bringing an overwhelming sense of homecoming. What did you discover about the universe, and what was the sense of homecoming?

Chris Bache: This was my 19th session. By then, I was 3-4 years into the work. I had experienced ego death and entered what's described as the Ocean of Suffering, navigating the collective psyche's most torturous memories. As a grace or gift for volunteering to heal some aspect of the collective psyche, the universe gave me many gifts, including this cosmic tour. It would take me through aspects of cosmic reality, showing me genius, intelligence, and intentionality. It taught me about reincarnation patterns of our species, the formation of galaxies, and deeper ontological levels. I experienced homecoming in extraordinary peace, overwhelmed by the sadness of losing contact with this innate being. I asked what had happened, and the voice accompanying me said we had left time, stating, "We never intended so many to get caught in time." Somehow, moving deeper into home meant moving beyond space and time's conditions. The tour revealed not only the physical universe but the levels behind it that give birth to space and time itself. We come from these realities, participate inside divine creation as spiritual beings rooted in spiritual realities.

Aviv Shahar: We will explore further into these divine realities and cycles of death and rebirth. But just to pick up where you started, describing the sense of suffering, what do you understand about the significance of suffering and its place in the evolutionary process? Why is suffering part of the evolutionary process?

Chris Bache: That really is a core question, isn't it? It's a deep question, and it's a hard question to answer without preparing the ground well. Preparing the ground well would take much longer than we have room for here, so I'm going to have to take shortcuts, and I'm going to have to ask for the indulgence of your listener. During the cosmic tour, that same year, when I was being given a crash course in cosmology 101, I was taken back to what appeared to be the beginning of creation itself, the beginning of time and space. I experienced an overwhelming love saturating and overwhelming me. It was a cosmic love. And then I experienced all of evolution, the birth of space and time, and all the evolution of space and time taking place inside this love, and this love was holding it and guiding it. Because of experiences I had had, I knew that evolution involved tremendous suffering, terrible suffering, not just for the human race, but for species up and down the evolutionary line. But let's focus on the human race. I knew history, and I knew how much harm we had done to each other and how much harm the planet had done to us, and how much suffering was involved. In this experience, I experienced all of this suffering as something that humanity had taken on by free choice, motivated by the divine love of creation that lies behind creation. The suffering that is inevitable in an evolutionary project stretched across billions of years was not something being done to us; it was not a punishment. It was not being inflicted on us. It was not the work of demonic forces but a burden that we had consciously chosen to participate in this creative project.

Now, why is there so much suffering? There are layers and layers of response to this. One of them is we make choices. Sometimes we make good choices, sometimes bad. We learn by inheriting the consequences. Sometimes we inherit bad consequences from bad choices. But I think the answer goes much deeper. To understand why human beings suffer, we have to have some understanding of what a human being is, and more importantly, what a human being is becoming. We are not finished as a species. We are just beginning. We only developed sufficient consciousness to reach our minds down to the source of our own mind about 5,000 years ago. We're going to be evolving for millions and billions of years. We are not finished. Much of the suffering inherent in human existence has to do with the unfinished nature of our own evolutionary process. There will come a time, I'm sure, when we will have sufficient consciousness and self-control that we will be able to wash disease out of our body through complete control of our mind. But we're not there yet. We will be capable of so many things that we are not capable of now, but all we are going through now is part of not only the learning exercise but the building exercise of building a form of human being much more advanced than the form of human being we are today, just as Homo sapiens is more advanced than Homo erectus, which is more advanced than our ancient ancestors in the primate kingdom.

So I think the core, the deepest level of the answer to your question—what is the role of suffering in evolution?—is that it's simply a burden that we take on voluntarily to participate in the joy of creating the universe, of creating our species in the universe, and that in the end, it benefits us. It's in some ways like the suffering a woman takes on when she gives birth. She knows it's coming. She does it voluntarily. It's absolutely terrible. It's really horrendous. But when she holds her child, it's worth it. And I think that's true for evolution too. There will come a time when we will have evolved to a point where we will look back on the entire history of all that pain, without diluting it, without denying it, and we will say it was worth it in order to become what we have become today.

Aviv Shahar: So central to this ethos is recognizing that we are involved in an unfinished project. As you say, evolution, the universe is an evolving unfinished project. And you're making, right there in your journey, some potent points about the cost of existence and of the physical universe. In that context, as you just framed it now, this entire appreciation of the visible universe as it contains only small parts of the universe, which for us, for all intents and purposes, the dimensions that you are describing that you said you wish you had astrophysics in your degrees in education—some of those dimensions are what scientists today describe as dark energy and dark matter, which I intuit we can anticipate is a very crude, primitive definition of the so much more that is going to be discovered once we are prepared to reintegrate the greater realities of consciousness and human possibility and escape this idea that the universe is a machine that just reproduces.

As you describe and paint the sense of the physical universe, you're making a very important point, which is that the universe is not a trap, not a punishment that we have fallen into or from, and that there is this purpose inherent in the totality of life, which you describe as the continual transformation, the continual growth. For me, what you are describing, there is a lucid and beautiful distinction about the project, the evolutionary project, which you just narrated again. What else must we, whether you choose to do any psychedelic or any other expedition to altered states—what else must we understand about that relationship of the universe at large, the physical universe, and us as agents of the cutting edge, the leading edge of this process?

Chris Bache: Boy, you're asking good questions. Let me step back and put this in the context of all the religions of the last 5,000 years. What I call the Axial Age religions all came into existence, five, three thousand years ago, when we first began to get underneath our individual consciousness and tap into spiritual consciousness, tap into the consciousness of the universe or the consciousness of the Divine. All the religions of this era, both Western and Eastern, are examples of what I would call an up-and-out cosmology. I understand their intention; when you begin to experientially touch your divine essence, it is so ecstatic, so bliss-filled, so much more satisfying than physical existence, that how could you not think you belong there more than here?

And so all the theologies that were given birth in this period are theologies of return, which basically say we don't belong on Earth. We belong in heaven. Somehow, through some mishap or misfortune or punishment, we’re here. But what we want to do is get out of here and get back to there, and whether it's by Western concepts of salvation, being saved by faith, or Eastern concepts of reincarnation, where you evolve until you wake up spiritually, and when you wake up, the Hindus call that Moksha—escape—because you escape back to spiritual paradise. The whole agenda of the Axial Age religions is to achieve some catharsis that allows you to abandon time and space and return home. But that leaves open the fundamental question: what is the purpose of time and space? What is the purpose of the entire created order? When we thought the universe might be only 6,000 years old, as many of us did in ancient times, you might justify an up-and-out cosmology. But now that we understand much more about how big our universe is, how old it is, and how brilliant it is, how filled with genius, the idea that spiritual awakeness, spiritual fruition should lead to leaving the physical universe just doesn't ring true as powerfully. It doesn't have the same appeal.

And I think what's happening is we are now growing up enough to recognize and understand that first vision, but to see that it's actually a very incomplete cosmology, because now we're beginning to understand that the next step after waking up—or the step of waking up—is the reality of one's divine nature and the co-participation, the coexistence of divinity and physicality, and physicality itself as an aspect of divinity. Then that opens up the possibility of waking up and then bringing heaven to earth, bringing truly the ecstatic experience of heavenly consciousness inside, into time-space reality, and building and truly shaping the physical world to be a reflection and an embodiment of spiritual paradise. That's where we find the importance of emergent spirituality, of embodied spirituality, this theme becoming more prevalent. It's not an escapist spirituality; it’s an embodied spirituality. Psychedelics, if they give us a sensitivity, it's not about getting up and out. It's about getting more and more deeply within, to open up, to bring it in deeper and deeper and deeper within. So then the question becomes, okay, now, if we understand that, if that speaks truth to us, if we feel that's true, how can we do this? And then the question becomes, well, now we're talking practicalities.

Aviv Shahar: Yes, well, so before we transition to that, this axial vision you describe of the two worlds, described in different religious texts in various ways—so you're narrating in your experience an updating of that theological cosmological view. When you describe the sense of two cosmic beings, one with the nature of a he and one with the nature of a she, and you describe the feminine cosmic being, if I get that correctly, as the one that devoted itself to the creation of time and space and the physical manifestation, and its partnering intelligence, the he, holding that other part of that compassionate communion of love—describe what that insight was and how it builds on what you were just narrating, that this next phase of evolution in what you are proposing is actually those two parts of the cosmic process getting integrated and interpenetrating each other, such that they liberate each other of their loneliness.

Chris Bache: I want to be careful and remind us that a finite mind does its best to give cognitive structure to transcendent experiences. So what I'm about to describe is, just as you summarized it, a splitting of the Divine Principle into two halves: a male half that stays outside of time and space in a transcendent position, and a female half that begins the process of manifesting time and space in the entire physical cosmos. Now, I don't literally think in terms of male and female in this way, but this is the best my mind could come up with to understand. So it's the principle that's important. The principle is that not all of the creative intelligence manifests as physical reality. Some of it holds the position outside physical reality. There is a spiritual reality that gives birth to physical reality. My experience was, as we are growing up through thousands and thousands of years, millions of years of evolution, we finally have reached the point where physical reality is sufficiently conscious that it can return to transcendent reality and not merge but enter into communion, to consummate a return. This return doesn't lead to an up-and-out exit, but this return leads to the Divine wedding, the divine marriage, the deeper and deeper infusion of the transcendent divine and the eminent divine. I think of this as kind of like white light—the transcendent divine—and the immanent Divine is kind of green light, green energy. So when the white energy and the green energy fuse, we have awakened resplendent physical existence with a consciousness that far transcends what we have known up to this point in time.

And I think we see this in the lives of the great mystics, the lives of the great spiritual teachers. They are living an absolutely grounded physical life, and yet they are also living a profoundly spiritual life simultaneously. From that perspective, Buddhists say nirvana is Samsara. Samsara, the world of form, and Nirvana, the world of transcendence—those are not two separate realities. Those are now co-existent realities in our lives, and that is embodied spirituality.

Aviv Shahar: And I would say one way for us to describe this is that we are engaged in the project of spiritualizing this world. We don't need to go to another world to gain the spiritual experience. We are in the physical form to help spiritualize this world. Part of the report from these journeys that you're offering us is the validation that indeed we have entered a time where you don't need to be a high Lama or just a special priest. It actually is an invitation for humanity at large to each, in our own way, become participants in what you called earlier, the fellowship of learning, and then become involved in the evolutionary project.

So I want now to start making the next transition for you to describe the realization of the relationship between the personal awakening and the collective awakening and how you have gone through these different cycles of death and rebirth through this experience and the significance of these and how they facilitate collective awakening.

Chris Bache: Well, first, what I'm going to describe is my variation on an ancient teaching in Buddhism. For example, when one sits down to meditate or do some form of spiritual practice, the first thing they do is cultivate what is called bodhicitta. Bodhicitta is the wish to save all sentient beings. So you do this practice not for your personal benefit. You do it to nourish the uplifting of the whole of creation. The last thing you do at the end of your practice is called the distribution of merit. You give away all the blessings you've acquired. You don't try to hold them to yourself. So everything you're doing in mature spiritual practice is not for your personal benefit; it's for the benefit of the whole. These ideas show up in spiritual traditions up and down the line.

The way this showed up in my practice, my psychedelic practice, I began thinking this was part of a personal transformation. I would go through some purification process, some death-rebirth process, resulting in my personal healing, my personal liberation, perhaps. But it was always personally referenced. But what happened was, after about two years, after I had gone through a lot of personal cleansing, relived my own birth, and gone through a death-rebirth process, my earth identity shattered. I entered a new cycle of very intense purification processes. They were not personal; they were collective. They systematically got larger and larger for two years until they included the experiences of hundreds of millions of human beings over thousands of years. There were periods of intense agony, suffering, and violence. At first, I thought this must be a deeper ego death. But it went on for so long and involved so many beings I eventually came to a new way of thinking, which was very challenging. It took me years to even admit this possibility, but eventually, I came to the conviction that, in these sessions, I was not working to heal or transform my individual being but used cooperatively to heal and transform my entire human family. The pain I engaged in was not part of my personal pain or even my reincarnational soul pain, but it was part of humanity's history itself. This pain of history was lodged in the collective psyche, just as my personal pain might be lodged in my personal psyche. Humanity's collective pain was stuck in the collective psyche. And somehow, by becoming as large as these sessions allowed me to become, I could take on this suffering and digest it. Just as at an earlier time, I had taken on and digested my personal suffering. As a result of making this choice, the universe began to take me deeper into a spiritual awakening process, not personal but collective. It began to take me into the future, into what I came to call Deep Time. It took me there not as an individual but as a field of energy, encompassing large swaths of the collective psyche. I repeatedly experienced that there is no ultimate membrane between the individual and the collective, between the individual and the species. Everything the individual is, is a distillation of something going on in the species, and the species is the collection of everything going on in its individual members. Pick any problem, any issue anybody is working on in their life, and they would not have that issue if it weren't for some pattern of this issue touching the lives of many, many people in the human family.

I learned over and over again, in many different settings and contexts, that the work of spiritual transformation of the individual and the work of spiritual transformation of the collective are all intertwined, and there are no absolute boundaries. There are relative boundaries, but there are no absolute boundaries. In my book, "Dark Night, Early Dawn," I describe this in terms of the dark night of the soul. The dark night of the soul is a very intense period of spiritual purification that takes place before the individual mystic awakens into spiritual realization. But here, I was talking about the dark night of our collective soul, that humanity as a whole was going through a dark night, a period of profound purification, which I think, by analogy, is a period leading up to a profound spiritual awakening for humanity as a whole. Many people have said this: we are past the age of individual enlightenment. Now, we either become enlightened as a species, we either wake up as a species, or we're going to lose this planet. So my work has been about collective transformation, not personal transformation, so much.

Aviv Shahar: And implicit inside this insight is also the idea that anybody can choose to work on their individual struggle or healing, and when you work on the individual, you can choose devotionally or by sentiment or frame of mind. Recognize that your work on yourself is part of your contribution to the whole, and if you make that internal inclusion and integration, you become part of the fellowship of learning and healing, and essentially you opt-in to the evolutionary project.

Chris Bache: Yeah, now you are in the evolutionary project, whether or not you recognize it. Whether or not you opt-in, you are part of it. You are hardwired into it. But if you recognize it, you can consciously participate, and that deepens and enriches that process.

Aviv Shahar: And then, as the journey continued, you moved from the personal to the collective and to the archetypal and to the higher archetypal dimension. Describe what these realms and these cycles of death and rebirth meant for you in this discovery.

Chris Bache: Well, after two years of working in what I came to call the ocean of suffering and experiencing the blessings of insights that were also coming in a chapter I called the initiation into the universe, where I was given these teachings of cosmology 101, the suffering kind of reached a culmination. It's hard to describe, but it was a collective breakthrough, and then it spun me into a level of reality that was stunningly old. It was ancient, and for the next year and a half, it kept bringing me back. Now it's always progressive, so it takes me back to that level of reality. Every time I entered that reality, what was stunning about it was it was ancient and more real than physical time-space was, and that's very disorienting to think there is a reality more real than physical reality; it just completely shattered me. But it was such a consistent part I had no chance but to yield and give into that.

Aviv Shahar: So part of your struggle in the journey must have been how you stabilize these insights and awarenesses when you need to come back to teach in the classroom and be a family man and all the rest of that?

Chris Bache: Wherever I was on Saturday, in my inner work, on Monday, I was back in the classroom teaching my courses, which is part of the grounding. It's really, really important if you're going to go deep, you have to be grounded. You have a lifestyle of commitment to grounded practice, and for me, that grounding was provided by my family and by my teaching, my students always. But it is difficult. And there's one thing I'll mention: every time you break through to a new level of reality, it's cognitively very confusing. You don't understand what you're experiencing at first, and when you write up your description, it has gaps and fragments. But if you go back again and again to that level of reality, eventually your mind learns to adapt to it, and you begin to be more capable of having more coherent experiences there. So in the beginning, your write-ups may have holes in them, but with repetition, those holes are filled in, and you have more complete pictures. This is part of what I mean by cultivating the philosophical discipline required to have coherent, sustained experiences of deeper levels of reality. The second part that's required is—and this applies at multiple levels of the adventure—higher levels of reality are deeper levels; let's say of reality are higher levels of energy. Every deeper level of reality functions at a higher level of energy. So when I made the transition into archetypal reality, I went through huge purification processes in which I was dissolved into white-hot lava, plunged into burning suns, just tremendous fields of energy that burned more and more out of me. If I hadn't gone through that, I wouldn't have been able to have coherent consciousness. You literally have to become a being that can live at that level for hours at a time, even only temporarily, to have coherent cognition at that level. To enter into archetypal reality, it takes—

Aviv Shahar: To capture the principle you're describing there, because that would be the case not just in the psychedelic experience but in any developmental journey. Because if you are to embrace larger and more potent realms, then several processes will have to take place. For a start, what you're describing is you're being rewired on the inside because there are different circuitries in your brain and in the energy field that you are that get activated, get switched on in the process, and then secondarily, once you're engaging with a higher level of potency, what you describe as purification process, your system needs to cleanse and release any of the residue of the previous infrastructure that you were part of. Because what you're describing is that the universe is a compassionate, loving actuality, but it's not a socialistic environment. Rather, it is a gradient. It has levels and dimensions, and those can sometimes interpenetrate, but there are also containers that, for the sanctity and fidelity of the process, must be retained, and if you are as a human vessel to enter these realms, your system, your physical system, needs to be rewired and updated to be able to manage that. The 51% of the work is actually stabilizing the work that you got exposed to. That's how I would translate what you just shared through my lens of non-psychedelic experience but engaged on the cutting edge of the spiritual and developmental journey.

Chris Bache: Absolutely. And all we're seeing is a particular variation of a universal pattern that if you want to open to deeper truths and a deeper participatory relationship with the universe, you have to empty yourself of everything keeping you small. You have to empty yourself of old ways of thinking, old ways of feeling, and all of these thought and feeling patterns have biological correlates. So you go through a detoxification process that is physical as well as mental and emotional. When a monk in Tibetan Buddhism wants to receive higher levels of teachings, teachings capable of generating awakening or enlightenment, they must first do what's called Ngondro, the preparatory practices, which are five practices you do 100,000 times each. One of those practices is doing full-body prostrations while reciting prayerful mantras. So you're going on the ground, you're lying down, you're getting up, you're praying. You’re going on the ground, you're lying down, and you're not only retuning your mind with these mantras and you're retuning your heart with the devotion of these mantras, but you literally are working your body to purify it while you are purifying your mind and heart. And this is the way it is for all spiritual practice, isn't it? We always have to purify ourselves. And if psychedelics push you into a higher state of consciousness kind of quickly, you then have to purify after you go into that state of consciousness.

Aviv Shahar: You either need to do it on the front end, during, or after.

Chris Bache: Now or pay me later, but you have to pay. Yeah.

Aviv Shahar: The one distinction I'd make, and I'm interested in your comment, is that some of those Buddhist practices emerged in ancient times. What we're describing is that humanity has now entered an environment, a universal environment, where you may be able to go through an accelerated journey, not just in the way you have done that journey, but because, in metaphoric terms or in actual terms, we can say the universe has drawn nearer to the human realm. That's part of the epochal shift that we are experiencing at this time, such that, because of what you're describing, that we have entered the phase of collective awakening. In one lifetime, we may be able to go through an accelerated journey, especially when we engage with the exercise not through the lens of the individual but as part of the bigger project of humanity participating in the evolutionary process.

Chris Bache: And so if you open your individual life, whether it's through spiritual practice or psychological transformation, or even as you engage with diseases in your physical body, to this larger collective landscape, then I think you participate in this evolutionary project in a new and intense fashion. Also, if you are engaged in social transformation, working for social justice, or for true equality in our healthcare delivery systems, with a conscious understanding that this is the time we must change our culture, change our historical practices, and let go of the divisions of history, then you lay a foundation for a future that works for all citizens, not just some. This too is part of this larger, deep transformation. And I think you're right; what we're finding is that many spiritual practitioners and visionaries from different lineages are coming to the same conclusion — that everything is speeding up, our evolution is accelerating, and humanity is reaching a critical pivot point, a bifurcation point, where we either grow up or we probably go extinct. We cannot continue to manage the planet with the lower level of consciousness we have operated from in the past; we must breakthrough to become the species that has been growing within us for thousands of years. I understand this in terms of reincarnation. We've been reincarnating, learning bits and pieces, and as the world tries to become an integrated whole, we face problems that cannot be solved at a local level, but only globally. Likewise, individually, we are amalgamating all the lives and karma from our previous incarnations. We've lived every race, religion, and nationality. All these lives are inside of us, and as the world has torn itself apart — nation against nation, race against race — these divisions exist within us too. As we become one and whole, we fuse this history into one integrated being, and in that process, we support humanity's fusion of its past into one integrated being, giving birth to what I call the Diamond Soul, a fully awakened soul consciousness.

Aviv Shahar: Just before we get to the diamond revelation and experience, what bridging will you offer? What you've framed there is a way to view the meta crisis unfolding in every aspect of life on the planet. We can choose to view it as the living crucible, the initiatory crucible of this evolutionary project, forcing us to realize that we can't do it alone. We have to come together. What bridging comment will you offer about that journey where you appreciate the archetype, and through that, come to some vision of the birth of the Future Human, that new species that's arising? What other scaffolds do you want to put there before we explore the sense of Diamond Luminosity?

Chris Bache: Well, what I share with you now doesn't come from an intellectual basis or books I've read. I wish I could give documentation that academics love to cite, but I have to speak to you out of my spiritual and psychedelic experiences. Over the course of this long journey, I was plunged into a series of initiations and visionary experiences. What I shared in that last statement is simply what was shown to me with consistency: that humanity is coming into a critical, unstable time, a bifurcation point. The world is entering a global crisis driven by cascading ecological crises, causing a breakdown. Many wise people see it as an extinction event. However, my experience in the psychedelic condition suggests otherwise. We're coming into a time of acute suffering and dismantling, surrendering our past, but in that process, we will give birth to something extraordinary — not just a new civilization or culture, but the next form of the human being, the Future Human. This vision was given to me starting in the early '90s, culminating in 1995, not as a prediction but as a result of deep work where I was taken into Deep Time and experienced this transformation as something that has already happened.

Aviv Shahar: Where time is non-linear, so you could be in those different positions and experiences concurrently.

Chris Bache: Yes, and so for me, it is out of that experience that I say this is an initiatory event, not an extinction event. It is a process we will navigate. We can either go through it clumsily, awkwardly, dragging our heels, or we can engage with vision and foresight, and accelerate our way through it. That's our choice: to move forward with vision or try to hold onto the past. Do we forge ahead into a new future?

Aviv Shahar: This realization, the experience, and the calling likely became a driving issue. Stabilizing that and operating in life must have been a challenge. When you speak of it now, it lives in you as powerfully, but you convey that it's about containing these insights rather than broadcasting them. This is about realizing these extraordinary events unfolding globally, where individual, collective, and archetypal consciousness can transform to become participatory in the evolutionary process.

Chris Bache: Yes, exactly. When I had this culminating breakthrough, after years of visions and experiencing humanity's death and rebirth, it took me about a year to recover. It was such a profound experience. As I say in the book, it was like walking around Hiroshima a week before the bomb was dropped. I had profound compassion and deep respect for every person because each of us chose to incarnate at this time, knowing it would be hard. There are no victims here, only saints, only volunteers who chose to participate in this historic transformation.

Aviv Shahar: Then you were led into the Diamond Luminosity and its discovery. Describe that transition, please.

Chris Bache: I have to back up a bit. I went through another death-rebirth process, entering what I call causal mind — the universe experienced as a condition of consciousness where everything is one. All of life pulses as a single totality, an overwhelming experience of fundamental oneness, where personal boundaries dissolve. I encountered Shunyata, or emptiness of self. I experienced the fertile void out of which the universe emerged, with overwhelming cosmic love. This continued for a year. I was completely satisfied as a philosopher. Then I went through another intense death-rebirth experience and was taken into a consciousness of clear light, which I called the Diamond Light or Diamond Luminosity. This exceptionally hyper-clear luminosity is what I believe Buddhist texts refer to as Dharmakaya, the clear light of absolute reality. It's so clear it eventually becomes invisible, with an ecstasy beyond bliss. After touching this, I only wanted to return to it. Over the next four years, in 26 sessions, I returned to the Diamond Luminosity only four times, with sessions of intense purification in between. In the middle of that cycle, I experienced the Great Awakening — the death and rebirth of humanity. Then, two more years of work brought two more initiations into the Diamond Luminosity, further intensifying its presence in my physical body and mind. Eventually, it altered not only my thoughts and feelings but also gave me a brief glimpse of a change in my vision, which I called Diamond Vision. This experience suggested that the Future Human we are birthing is not only healed and expansive in heart and mind but also lives physically differently. All our senses function at a more refined level of consciousness, going beyond mere biomechanical process. Bringing heaven to earth involves activating divine consciousness within our bodies.

Aviv Shahar: What you're describing is that the universe seeks not just altered human consciousness but wants that consciousness to permeate all levels of physical reality, experiencing through us at a richer, higher fidelity.

Chris Bache: Yes, and I think the universe shares with us the gift of its capacity, kind of cloning itself. It grows us to allow us to incarnate and embody its experience of life at deeper levels. It's an act of generosity.

Aviv Shahar: Chris, this has been a fascinating exploration. I appreciate that you're able to narrate your experience, integrate it with your teaching and practice, and talk from the contemporary experience of being a conscious being on this planet. Through difficult transitions, like Viktor Frankl teaches, carrying a different logos or purpose transforms the experience, whether it's personal pain or collective crisis. The spiritual work of this time involves transcending moments of conflict, making higher choices, and tapping into the cosmic dimension of life. That's the invitation I hear in your narrative.

Chris Bache: Absolutely. Psychedelics were incidental; one can encounter these principles through many forms and contexts. As we enter this dark night of the collective soul, we'll hear various interpretations. It's crucial to have a deep vision of what's being produced, the Future Human being born within us and collectively. To see the universe's intelligence and compassion, one needs to understand existence at a deep level. We must be capable of looking deeply to cooperate with this transformation, making the highest choices for the greatest good.

Aviv Shahar: Thank you for your commitment and generosity. This has been an extraordinary journey.

Chris Bache: Thank you, Aviv, for your work. This is noble, important work. Thank you for our conversation.