Readable, speaker-attributed text with links back to the original recording.
Chris Bache: When one works with very high doses of LSD, one goes through a series of death-rebirth experiences. In this image, the drop at the center underneath the line represents our egoic consciousness, our private consciousness. Everything above the line represents spiritual reality. Transpersonal consciousness, the first death-rebirth experience, takes place at the interface of our time-space consciousness and the beginnings of spiritual consciousness. It's usually referred to as ego death—it's the complete destruction of our personal time-space identity and the beginning of an opening into spiritual reality.
But if we continue this process, if we press deeper and deeper into spiritual reality, we go through more deaths, more cycles of death and rebirth at the psychic, subtle, and causal levels of consciousness. To use terms that Stan [ed. note: Stanislav Grof] uses. Now, I have no vested interest in a particular cosmological map that delineates the various strata of transpersonal consciousness. Here, I'm simply trying to make a point that as you go into deeper levels of consciousness, you come to certain gateways, and at these gateways, you must give up everything you have known up to this point in time in your journey, in order to enter into the new fields of consciousness that are beginning to open to you.
Editorial note. All published transcripts in the Chris Bache Archive are lightly edited for readability. Disfluencies and partial phrases have been removed where they do not affect meaning. Verbatim diarized transcripts are preserved separately for research and verification.