--- title: "Diamonds from Heaven: Exploring the Mind of the Universe" slug: 2023-07-12-diamonds-from-heaven-exploring-the-mind-of-the-universe date: 2023-07-12 type: lecture channel: Sounds True language: en license: CC0-1.0 identifiers: wikidata_person: Q112496741 openalex_person: A5045900737 people: - name: Christopher M. Bache wikidata: Q112496741 openalex: A5045900737 provenance: source: "otter+diarist->normalization" transcriber: gpt5 model by OpenAI diarist_txt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2023-07-12-diamonds-from-heaven-exploring-the-mind-of-the-universe.txt diarist_srt: /Users/howardrhee/Documents/chris-bache-archive/sources/diarist/2023-07-12-diamonds-from-heaven-exploring-the-mind-of-the-universe.srt diarist_sha1: 852aae524753ac575e0d57b235a96ad3ddc0ad46 --- **Chris Bache: ** Eventually, I came to understand that the many deaths that one endures in this process are actually symptoms of purification. The form that you are can die. The structures of your life can be shattered, but the inner essence of your being cannot die. And I began to realize that death, what we experience as death, is actually a deep form of purification, which is letting go of the small in order to welcome and be welcomed by that which is larger. **Tami Simon: ** Hello, friends. Welcome. I'm so happy that you're here with us for Insights at the Edge Live. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Christopher M. Bache, PhD. Let me tell you a little bit about Chris. He's professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, where he taught for 33 years. He's also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and he's on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training. He's written several books, including *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, *The Living Classroom*, and a book that got my attention. Some friends of mine said, "I'm reading this book. It's called *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. You've got to read it. It's so engrossing. It's a page turner. It will actually introduce you what the mind of the universe? What's that?" And you know, if there was ever a moment where I think it's appropriate to say this conversation is a conversation that truly will be filled with insights at the edge, it's this conversation with Chris Bache. Chris, welcome. **Chris Bache: ** Hi, Tami. It's a pleasure to be here with you this evening. **Tami Simon: ** Tell us a little bit right here at the beginning: what prompted you to engage—ready for this—over 20 years in 73 high-dose LSD sessions that were structured in a specific way for the purpose of deep spiritual awakening and exploring the nature of the cosmos? What inspired you to engage in such what we’ll learn was really an arduous undertaking? **Chris Bache: ** Well, I had just finished graduate school. I got my PhD from Brown University in philosophy of religion. I had published my dissertation in a series of articles and was looking for where to take my work next. At that point in my life, I met the work of Ian Stevenson in reincarnation research at Virginia, and, more importantly, of Stan Grof. As soon as I read *Realms of the Human Unconscious*, which had just been published, this was in '78 when I started, I immediately saw the profound implications for Stan's work for philosophy of religion, not just for psychology, and I knew I wanted to get involved in doing this work. So even though LSD had been made illegal by that time—this was made illegal in 1970—I chose to conscientiously break the law and begin a series of rigorously structured, following Stan’s protocol of LSD sessions. I chose, after three medium-dose sessions, to work at high doses. This is a protocol I don't recommend today. I would be much gentler on myself if I were doing it over again, but at the time, this is what I was doing to explore and accelerate my own spiritual development. Quickly, it evolved into engaging the deep structures of human evolution and trying to support humanity's spiritual development, and then exploring this marvelous universe that we are part of. **Tami Simon: ** You write towards the beginning of the book, "In the end, what’s important is not the method of exploration used, but what this method shows us about the extraordinary universe we live in," and that's what I want to focus on in our conversation, is really the discoveries that you made. And why don’t we start off with the title of the book, *LSD and the Mind of the Universe.* I'm not sure everyone even can track with you there—the universe has a mind? Tell us what you discovered about this. **Chris Bache: ** Well, as I came to experience it, I experienced consciousness as like an infinite ocean. When we open ourselves in deep psychedelic states, it's like our mind is a seed catalyst that we drop into this ocean, and it crystallizes a set of experiences out of this infinite potential. By absorbing these experiences and internalizing them and learning what we are being offered, we’re changed, we're purified, we're changed inwardly. Then when we drop that changed mind into this infinite potential, it triggers an even deeper set of experiences out of its infinity. I always experienced myself as engaging an intelligence, a consciousness that was directing my sessions. I never controlled what was unfolding in my sessions. I was always yielding and following a lead that came from conscious, deeper levels of consciousness. As the journey continued, the levels of consciousness that I was entering deepened several times, multiple times. What do we call this infinite consciousness? It's been called many things in the world's mystical traditions. I hesitate to call it God, though I do refer to it as the divine, because God has so many layers of historical overlay, which I wouldn’t want to affirm. Just to give some sense of the approximation of the vast scale and scope of this consciousness, I call it the mind of the universe. Just as the universe has a body, it has a mind. Our mind, as our body is a product of our universe, is also a product of the universe. When we sink deeply into our consciousness, we come out into a vast consciousness, which you can think of as the divine consciousness, or you can think of it as the mind of the universe. **Tami Simon: ** Now you use this word "purification," and I referred to the 73 journeys that you went on as having a quality of arduousness to them—at least it read that way to me, as you include much of the descriptions of what you went through in each one of these journeys. I mean, in the beginning, you’re writing about seizures, vomiting, convulsions; it sounded really rough. Why was that? Do you think now, in retrospect, as you look back, why was all of that physical and energetic purification necessary? **Chris Bache: ** Well, there are many levels of answers to that, but basically, if we want to move into deeper intimacy with the consciousness of the universe, we're moving into states of consciousness which are large, which are vast, and operate at a much higher frequency, much higher energy level. Our egoic consciousness, the consciousness which surrounds our body in a sense, and which is the consciousness that we are operationalizing as egoic consciousness, is just too small. We have to let go of that consciousness. Some people find that easier, some more difficult, but letting go of that consciousness and dying at the egoic level and entering into spiritual reality, I found, is actually the first of many cycles of death and rebirth. The universe has many levels and many dimensions to it. In order to enter each successive deeper level, we have to go through a deeper level of surrender, and that often involves very intense purification, confrontations. Every step deeper into the universe is a step into a higher bandwidth of energy, if you will. We have to literally learn to become a being who can live at that level, who can be operational at that level for hours and hours at a time. That takes work. It takes a lot of work. **Tami Simon: ** You write, "In the context of a psychedelic session, pain is something we learn to embrace. One learns to reverse one's instinct to avoid suffering and to open to it instead, not because we like to suffer, but because of what lies on the other side of suffering." Yes, and I wanted to understand more about what you learned about embracing pain. I ask this question, Chris, because in the midst of our lives, there's so much pain we need to embrace and so much letting go that we have to do, and I don't think many of us are that good at it. **Chris Bache: ** Well, I want to be careful. I don't want to overgeneralize the insights or truths that emerge in a psychedelic session and apply them to circumstances in our everyday life. We'd have to make necessary adjustments to it. In a psychedelic session, when we hyper amplify consciousness, consciousness begins to clean itself. It begins to transform itself, and as it purifies itself, as it goes through these, first we encounter unfinished business—things we'd rather not face, things we're scared of, things that frighten us. But that's only early layers. Eventually, we're going through layers in which we're sloughing off not only our personal identity, but we're sloughing off our identity as a human being per se, and then our identity as a time-space being as we're moving beyond linear time and beyond three-dimensional space. All these adjustments to move into these deeper states of consciousness involve—again, when you're working with high doses of a psychedelic like LSD, it intensifies and accelerates this purification process. If you took an ice cube and put it next to a candle, meaning an analogy for a gentler spiritual practice, the candle would melt the ice cube very gently, and it would weep and dissolve. But if you threw the same ice cube on a hot skillet, it would bump around, jump around, snap, crackle, and pop as the molecules exploded. Psychedelic sessions are kind of like the latter. You're doing the same process that you do in deep, long contemplative retreat contexts, but you're doing it faster, and because you're doing it faster, there’s more of a convulsive quality to it. There's a more intense quality to it. But essentially, it's the same as traditional spiritual practitioners undergo in the dark night of the soul in these processes. It's the same process. Eventually, I came to understand that the many deaths that one endures in this process are actually symptoms of purification. Once you've died several times and been reborn on the other side of that process, you realize you can't die; it's impossible to die. The form that you are can die. The structures of your life can be shattered, but the inner essence of your being cannot die. So death itself begins to lose its categories. It becomes to be a non-functional category. And I began to realize that death, what we experience as death, is actually a deep form of purification, which is letting go of the small in order to welcome and be welcomed by that which is larger. **Tami Simon: ** Which brings me to wanting to make sure that we carefully parse out what I still want to address here in the midst of our lives—not in the midst of psychedelic sessions. What did you learn about what it takes to die before we die? That's really what I want to understand. **Chris Bache: ** I want to be careful, because I don't want to frame my work in terms of the dynamics of spiritual awakening. That phrasing, to die before we die so that we do not die when we die, is kind of really oriented around the dynamics of spiritual awakening. In my sense, in my work, even though I began this work with a sort of awakening, a spiritual awakening agenda, it became much more than that. It became an adventure of exploring the deep structure of the universe itself. Death changes as one pivots from spiritual awakening as a project to cosmological exploration as a project. But what I learned, if I were to try to summarize it in some way: first, I have no fear of death whatsoever. I have no fear of dying. I feel like I've died many times in that process. In the process of dying before you die physically, there is a great relaxation that settles in, an abiding communion with the universe or with the divine, which begins to saturate one's physical existence, so that the boundary line between here and there, between being physically alive, spiritually alive, and cosmologically alive, gets very thin in the process. So I guess I've learned to trust life more, to recognize that anything that's coming at me, which is challenging and difficult, is to be embraced head-on, straightforward, to not back away from anything, to see everything to its root. That's a major lesson in psychedelic work. If you run from the hard stuff, it only gets worse. But if you embrace the challenges and let the universe take you where it wants to take you, then eventually you will come to a breaking point, and when you go through that eye of the needle, you will open up into a magnificent landscape, a different level of being.