Diamonds From Heaven – The Mind of the Universe (Chris Bache)

Rachel Fleming: Hmm, Diamonds from Heaven. It was LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Was that the title?

Chris Bache: Yes, that was the publisher's title, but my title, while I was writing the book, was always Diamonds from Heaven.

Rachel Fleming: Okay, beautiful. Absolutely, I've been a fan of your books. Actually, Colin and I talk about you regularly. I've been a fan. Lifecycles was wonderful, and then the one in the middle, and then the LSD book has been fabulous. So, a lot of the people here do not know your research methods. So kind of, what I would describe you as, kind of, is an explorer of the outer reaches of the cosmos, really in search of the truth of reality, and really what it means to be human in this reality. Your research method is deeply interesting. I would love it if you could start us off by telling us about what that is and what your work has been.

Chris Bache: Well, what we all share in the animistic community is the belief that nature is infused with consciousness, is fused with mind and soul. And of course, now we know how vast the physical universe is, and the question becomes: How large is the mind of the universe? How deep is it? I was just out of graduate school in 1978, finishing my studies in the philosophy of religion, when I encountered the work of Stanislav Grof, one of the foremost thinkers in the transpersonal psychology and psychedelic community. I read his book Realms of the Human Unconscious, and my life pivoted with that. His research was relevant not only to clinical psychology but also to philosophy. He offered a method to safely and systematically explore the deepest levels of consciousness, where lay the answers to the philosophical questions I had after my training in religious studies.

In 1979, I began what became a 20-year journey working with LSD. LSD was what Stan had done his research with, so I chose to continue with that. If I were doing it today, I would have a more diversified cocktail including Ayahuasca, Psilocybin, and more, but I worked with LSD and chose to work with very high doses. This choice had a profound impact on the work, changing not only how deep the work went but also how wide. The field of consciousness in these transformational exercises expanded with the power of the state of consciousness I was entering.

I did this work within the Grofian protocol—totally isolated from the world with a sitter, a trained clinical psychologist. I did it at home, in a controlled environment, totally internally focused, without contact with the outside world. We amplified the states of awareness with carefully selected music designed to empower and expand these states, shattering the mind and allowing it to dissolve into subtler aspects of reality. It became a systematic exploration of what I think of as the mind of the universe. I hesitate to call it the divine because the divine has so many culturally infused qualities in history that I'd rather avoid. So, I think of it as the mind of the universe.

I did this work for 20 years, always keeping very careful records, and then I digested those experiences for another 20 years because these were not immediately transparent experiences. They're complex and interwoven, involving many levels of reality being orchestrated in tidal surges of states. There was systematic instruction; one session often started where the other stopped, leading to progressive deepening. It took years to understand what the universe was showing me and where it was taking me. I always felt I was encountering an intelligence orchestrating these experiences in dialogue with me—not taking any form, but dissolving into deeper layers of infinity. So, that is the story I tell in LSD and the Mind of the Universe.

Rachel Fleming: Would you say, Chris, that this is an objective reality? If anybody used a similar method, could they reach this unfolding that you did, or is that not possible to say?

Chris Bache: I think it is possible to say. Stan Grof's work allows us to say it, where he's integrating the experiences of thousands of people, and I'm only integrating mine. My experiences fit comfortably within the larger matrix Grof's work has explored. It's a complicated answer because I want to say yes, but when you begin this work, these substances only amplify consciousness. They don't give you an experience or take you to a particular place; they amplify your mind. Since each of us has a different life story, the amplified mind is different, and the experiences reflect our individual histories early on. This is why these substances are helpful for healing—they evoke our unconscious and our problems, making it an individual experience.

If you continue and press to the limits of your time and space identity, going through the transformation we call ego death, you begin to open to spiritual reality, farther removed from personal history. That's when experiences begin to overlap and converge. Spiritual reality isn't something you just enter and take from; it's interactive. The mind you bring acts as a seed catalyst, crystallizing certain experiences from the universe's infinite potential. As we internalize and are purified by those experiences, it catalyzes even deeper secrets. It's a participatory process. Once you understand this cycle, the universe we discover is coherent and consistent. It's the same universe discovered by contemplative monks, mystical traditions, and near-death experiences. There are degrees of depth, and we must be careful because we might think, "Oh, this is reality." But it turns out that it's reality at this level, and it can deepen further.

Rachel Fleming: One thing that I find really exciting about your work is that we talk about finding the right practices to open the cracks in ourselves, to return to a porous, expanded way of being. Yet, these practices require repetition and tenacity. You have used a different method—what one might think of as a fast track. It's a very difficult method, not one you'd recommend to many, but that's where the excitement of your work is. You fast-tracked many slower practices and possibly reached the edge of the map that many contemplative practices aim for. It feels as though you've gone further in understanding the underlying nature of reality. Would you say that's true?

Chris Bache: It is a fast track, but it's a fast track that doesn't allow bypassing. It's a much more intensely concentrated track. So, purification, which would be drawn out over years in a conventional spiritual path, can occur within days here. As anyone who's given birth knows, a short labor isn't necessarily an easier labor; it's just much more intense. This is true for this practice: the purification and detoxification to acclimate to these subtler states are extremely intense. They require convulsions, throwing up, and a systematic purification of lifestyle like any traditional spiritual practice.

The states of consciousness I touched for hours are usually learned from contemplative mystics who abide in these realities. This practice isn't about abiding; it's temporary access, temporary immersion. I don't want to confuse temporary immersion with the abiding immersion of the great ones who live in these realities. This is temporary, intense purification, but you don't come away with permanent access. You come away with seeds of transcendence, seed experiences to nurture within your daily spiritual practice, within your embodied existence. I also want to mention that these practices have historically been associated with dissociative spirituality—achieving transcendence and escaping Earth's struggles.

The cosmology that emerged for me was different. It was transcendence in service of incarnation, in service of deeper integration, allowing the universe's energy to live in the historical body. It also provided insights into where evolution is taking the human family. Initially, I thought it was personal transformation, but I realized it was part of a collective transformation. My individual work was part of a process that yielded insights into our collective evolutionary trajectory.

Rachel Fleming: I want to ask about that in detail, as that's incredibly exciting. But first, about the aliveness and intelligence in the universe. Is everything an animate world, an animate universe? Could you summarize your understanding of the universe's aliveness, its layers, and its depth?

Chris Bache: Well, you're asking a lot because the universe is vast, and its mind has many complex, interwoven layers. It's all alive and intelligent, and everywhere we look, we encounter this intelligence. When you dig into the universe's mind, you find layers of intelligence. I experienced the biosphere's intelligence, the incarnational rhythms of the planet. For example, at one point, I experienced reincarnation and time dilation—my human family as a single organism—a network of exquisitely tuned collective karma.

History expresses collective transformation through individual transformation. Going deeper, I experienced the universe's pulse as a single living organism. When you dissolve into that oneness, the Buddhists call it Nirvana or Śūnyatā—the self pops, and life breathes as one. Everywhere you touch it, the world is intelligent. At the end of my journey, in my 70th session out of 73, I experienced deep time and visions of the universe's large story. I saw stars of light, diamond souls, indicating the fruition of a reincarnation process. It signified souls capable of exploring previously inaccessible spiritual dimensions—layers upon layers of intelligence.

Rachel Fleming: When I read your book, Chris, it's literally mind-blowing—it feels like science fiction. Yet, there was nothing that didn’t sound right. I'd love to delve into the evolutionary process you discovered, but first, reincarnation. Not everyone believes in it, but you did earlier work on this. Can you speak about reincarnation and why you believe it’s happening?

Chris Bache: I wrote my first book on reincarnation because it's an essential principle that divides philosophical understanding. Believing we're on Earth once versus multiple times leads to different visions of reality. I think we have overwhelming empirical evidence that reincarnation is simply a fact of life. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia studied children with spontaneous past life memories, and his research has held up. There's past life therapy healing traumas through past life memories, and it's an empirical fact to me.

Living within a reincarnation universe takes time to understand, the overlapping complexity—how all of us are connected through multiple lives. In the early stages of my psychedelic work, I experienced reincarnation's nuts and bolts and began seeing the human family evolving collectively through reincarnation. Reincarnation is the higher octave of evolution, evolving individuals within species. The question becomes: What’s the purpose? When you understand everyone's reincarnating with a specific purpose, you see the vast breadth of human experience. It's not just love or generosity but a wide array of lessons.

Most Eastern religions suggest activating higher consciousness brings enlightenment and escape from Earth. It's an "up and out" cosmology. But midway on my journey, my former lives fused into a Diamond Luminosity—a being with a hundred thousand years of history awakened. It's a different kind of being than an egoic one, with deeper relational and environmental ties.

It's not just individual awakening; it's collective. We're all giving birth to the Diamond Soul. The species can't afford to live fragmented anymore. An ego-built world serves some, not others. When the soul wakes to its profound compassion, we live differently. I see this period as tumultuous, a birth process—the death of ego culture, making way for a new stage. It's a tectonic shift in the collective psyche, creating a different matrix for future human life, reawakening to the intelligence that surrounds us.

Rachel Fleming: Wow, Chris. For people hearing this for the first time, it's a lot to take in. I want to bring Colin in. To summarize, we're evolving individually and collectively to remember our entire history. If reincarnation is a given, we're moving towards recalling all our past incarnations. Colin, can I bring you in? We need a completely new cognitive framework for what Chris is discussing. How do we connect with the intelligence in the universe that's foreign to us? What’s your take?

Colin Campbell: Thanks, Rachel. First, it's an honor to meet you, Chris. Encountering your books, starting with Dark Night, Early Dawn, was tectonic for me. I have many questions from reading and rereading your work, some difficult to articulate beyond a feeling or sense. I'm on the edges of my current cognition. I was fortunate to grow up in a traditional indigenous culture in Southern Africa, with wilderness and cosmology shaping part of me. Now I find myself reconciling that within the post-industrial world, feeling like I straddle two cognitive frameworks—tasked with reconciliation.

Reading your books drew me back to the cognitive system I grew up in, forming an understructure to my experience now, sparking questions. Reincarnation doesn't feature strongly in Southern African cosmologies, though it's somewhat implied. The framework relies on a sequence of time from past to future. What if we removed that sequence in understanding reincarnation and its trajectory? What happens if time isn't linear, if that's just within our current cognitive framework? I'm not sure I'm making sense.

Chris Bache: It's a good question. If we eliminate the arrow of time, then reincarnation begins to look like multi-incarnation, not reincarnation. Some people have conceptualized this. We're living all of our lives simultaneously, interacting in a way that befuddles the logic of linear development, and it requires a different kind of logic. I've tried to think in that world multiple times, and I basically keep coming down to—I can't do it. I mean, I literally cannot live in a world where multi-incarnation makes sense. I can't make it make sense.

Now, another little thread: Robert Monroe, from the Monroe Institute of Applied Science, the out-of-body guy, has written three wonderful books in the out-of-body state, exploring the universe daily. He says you reach a point in your spiritual development where you discover that you can incarnate in any time period you wish. So "soul forward" does not mean "time forward," right? You can incarnate in the 10th century BC and next in the 20th century AD. This permeability of time continues the concept of linear development but flexes on the concept of time's absolute linearity.

For myself, I've gone through so many permutations of time, moving into deep time where I experienced my entire life—birth to death—simultaneously present. Absolutely, I was experiencing the whole of my life, the end and the beginning, and all of its development as a simultaneous whole. Later, I was taken into periods where 100,000 years were being lived out as if it were one minute. It's convinced me that the universe has many modalities of time built into it. When we move into deeper dimensions of reality, there are different modalities of time available. This makes me receptive to the idea of letting go of a concept of linear time and linear development.

Somehow, I try to reconcile the fact that from the universe's perspective, there are multiple modalities of time, so that the universe can show me the future from its time. It can give me the experience of knowing the future as something which has already happened and simultaneously which is yet to happen, and at the same time, hold on to some notion of the value and the challenge of something approximating linear development. My best take is that life chops its challenges into bits and pieces. We can't learn it all in one lifetime; it's easier if it's broken down into bits.

If this challenge of linear development is coming to fruition, to a diamond soul, an awareness that holds all of its time moments in its present consciousness on Earth, this, of course, is not the end of the developmental story. In a million years, we'll be farther; in a billion years, we'll be farther still. The universe is just getting warmed up. We have no reason to think the universe is near the end of its evolutionary story; it's at the early stages of its story. I think of time as one of the great gifts of evolution. Individuality is one of the great gifts of the physical universe. Time is one of these gifts. Behind that lay permutations of metaphysics that are more fluid with respect to time, but inside space-time, I think there is an approximate linear arrow of time that serves the soul's purpose, serving some deeper cosmic web.

And yet, at the same time, when we are in the linear development, if we open up to the universe, if we open to the universe's sense of time, we often get these flashes of more than the present, more parallel dimensions of time. So your question makes a lot of sense, and it's a substantive question.

Rachel Fleming: Can I ask one, Colin, or do you want to come back on that? Okay.

Colin Campbell: Yeah, great.

Rachel Fleming: This is the problem with your work, Chris. We're out in kind of inarticulate ball terrain, aren't we, when we get to what you call the "diamond soul"? When there's this moment of remembering, what are the other attributes? What does that bring, other than remembering and wholeness? Did you have an experience of what else?

Chris Bache: Well, first of all, I think soul consciousness is what we return to when we die. While we are in the Bardo Earth stage, when we die, we return to whole consciousness. It's not something we're unfamiliar with; it's something we are familiar with. Then we precipitate out of whole consciousness into part consciousness, egoic consciousness, and we return. It's a constant accordion effect: we die, we get large; we're born, we get small. We die, we get large; we're born, we get small. Sooner or later, if we keep at it for a few thousand years, 100 million years, large wakes up inside physical consciousness. It's simply a consolidation of what's taking place naturally and normally. It's just a stage in this process.

The times I've been carried into deep time and experienced temporarily my diamond soul, the diamond soul that's emerging as an archetypal imprint, an archetypal form—it's hard to describe because of the enormity, beauty, and joy. We're talking about a human being completely healed of all the wounds of history, healed of all the terrible things we've done to each other—men and women, wars and violence—healed of those scars. It's a tremendous breadth of communion with the natural world, an intimacy with all life forms, a breadth of companionship with all life, with other human beings, and human community and with nature's community. An openness of the mind, able to take in more directly, enter into deeper communion with the intelligence of the universe.

The genius of the universe has all the answers to all the technological questions we want to have answers to, and we just are not able to download all that knowledge. The diamond soul is a more complete and higher potency of human being that can enter into deeper downloads from the divine intelligence. It's not only an expansion of heart and mind; our physical senses are also amplified by orders of magnitude. In the very, very last session, after 73 sessions, the universe gave me an experience of what I call "diamond vision." Suddenly, in a late session, wind down, clear space, my vision became thousands of times more acute and sharper than it had ever been before. I could see things, details, gradients of color, sharpness, and precision of form. I could see. I was amazed that I ever accepted this fuzzy stuff as real seeing. This was diamond clarity seeing. Then after 10 minutes, it went away, and I was seeing the way I normally see.

That's when I realized sensation is not just a biomechanical process; it's a conscious process. The more consciousness is present in this body, the body has the capacity for infinitely higher levels of sensate experience—touch, hearing, seeing, sensitivities of all manner of physical sensations. It truly is heaven on earth in the body. The body participates in the qualities of heaven without having to leave physical existence. It's not an up-and-out cosmology. It's bringing it in deeper and deeper, changing the physiology of the body to allow it to operate in this ecstatic state, which becomes the normal state.

That's a child worth the labor we're going into to give birth to. We are going into terribly severe labor. Our past is being stripped away. It will be stripped away. We will lose all capacities that we associate with normal existence. This happens in all mystical traditions; in all psychedelic traditions, the small has to be broken down to dust, stripped, and dismembered for the new to awaken within us. This is happening now historically. We're entering into what I think of as the dark night of our collective soul. The Dark Night is often used for a hard time, but it's not just a hard time. In John of the Cross, the Dark Night of self is a hard time. The Dark Night of the Soul is a very intense purification time that precedes the awakening of full illumination. A dark night of the collective soul is a time of intense purification, intense loss of reality as we've known it.

Out of the pain and suffering that's coming, it's going to crack us open and break us down to our center. In this ordeal, we will not survive, but we will give birth to that in us which is more beautiful, ecstatic, competent, more plugged in. I think we are truly becoming a species of Buddhas, a species of Christ and prophets. These are the models we've had trying to give us some forevision of what's happening. In the early years, we could not imagine an ordinary human being reaching that level of excellence. But now we're beginning to understand through reincarnation, over and over, we grow into that level of excellence, which is simply a level of transparency to the essential condition in which we experience life. The irony is we experience what's always been happening all the way along. The universe has always been one. The universe has always been filled with intelligence. We have always been empty of self. But somehow, we distracted ourselves from thinking that's not there. It's always been there. We're waking up to the paradise the universe already is. We've just been missing it.

Rachel Fleming: Wow, Chris, I just find your experience and your vision such a hopeful one as we move into what we see as an ecological crisis and societal crisis. I felt quite emotional, as I said at the beginning. It was just one of the most inspiring books last year, or the most inspiring book of my lifetime, and I'm sure Colin would agree with me on that. It's so wonderful to hear.