---
title: "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven (SDI Meeting)"
slug: 2024-02-10-lsd-and-the-mind-of-the-universe-diamonds-from-heaven-sdi-meeting
date: 2024-02-10
type: lecture
channel: San Diego Integral
language: en
license: CC0-1.0
identifiers:
  wikidata_person: Q112496741
  openalex_person: A5045900737
people:
-
  name: Christopher M. Bache
  wikidata: Q112496741
  openalex: A5045900737
provenance:
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  transcriber: gpt5 model by OpenAI
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---
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Audience: ** 
Tom, welcome to San Diego Integral. February 10, 2024, our topic today, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, Diamonds from Heaven, presented by Chris Bache.

**Tom Habib: ** 
Welcome to San Diego Integral. I'm Tom Habib, and I'm a member of the leadership team. We have an exciting presentation today. LSD and the Mind of the Universe. We'll begin shortly, but I first wanted to mention that we're recording this meeting. If you prefer not to be seen on video, you can turn your camera off, although we love to see your reactions. The link to the recording will be posted on Meetup and a day or two after this event on the SDI YouTube channel. Also, you can find future events on our website, either SanDiegoIntegral.org, the Facebook page, or by coming back to Meetup.com. The advantage of joining one of these groups is that you'll automatically be notified of future presentations. If you have any questions today about these meetings, you are welcome to contact any member of the leadership team. Next month, we're meeting on March 9, and the speaker is to be determined, but it's going to be similar to today. Chris was nice enough to do a pre-presentation of what he's going to talk about at the Future Human Conference in May, and San Diego gets exclusive rights to this. Finally, we invite you to make a small donation today to help cover the cost of our meetings and equipment, and you can make that donation at SanDiegoIntegral.org. I want to introduce Chris. As you've heard, he's going to be the keynote presenter at the upcoming IONS Conference, the Future Human. Chris is a 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 and at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and is also on the Advisory Council of the Stanislav Grof Legacy Training. One might ask, how does a boy raised in the deep South, that is Vicksburg, Mississippi, who was raised Roman Catholic and actually entered the seminary to become a priest, write a book about his 20-year journey with LSD? It appears that Chris's devotion to transformation appeared relatively early, just as he was receiving his degree from Notre Dame's Theology Department, and he was awarded for excellence. He decided to leave Catholicism. This radical transformation occurred again at Brown University. Halfway through his doctoral program, he realized that he had gotten what he wanted from Biblical Studies, and in his words, "I changed horses and began again." Those of us in Integral Studies recognize this fidelity to what wants to emerge, although we may not always have the courage for radical transformations. Chris is now fashioning himself into a philosopher of religion. He settled into Youngstown University, where he would teach for the next 33 years. Along the way, another transformation was pending. Chris read Stanislav Grof's work on the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy, the non-dogmatic influences of Buddhism and Huston Smith's perennialism, which we know in Integral, soon followed. Chris ended his psychedelic explorations in 1999, and it wasn't until 2009 that he wrote his first book, The Living Classroom. Here he shared how his expansive consciousness seemed to impact his students in what he called "leaky boundaries." Again, those of us in Integral recognize the psychoactive effect presencing has upon others. In 2019, he wrote LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, some of which he'll share today and at the conference. Please give Chris Bache a warm San Diego Integral welcome.

**Chris Bache: ** 
Thank you, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you tonight. Since my understanding is that psychedelics is not a frequent topic in the San Diego Integral community, in talking with Kathy, Tom, and people on your board, we decided that we would begin with a short breakout before I talk, just to do a quick inventory together of each of your backgrounds with psychedelics, both in terms of whether you have any psychedelic experience and if you have, what it was like, what context—real short—and the second part is, what kind of beliefs have you formed about psychedelics either from your own experience or from your reading or conversations with other people? So both, what is the nature of your experience, and what are your beliefs and perceptions about psychedelics? So, we'll do it before, and then after I talk, we'll do an after, okay? Just about 10 minutes, and Kathy will break you up into groups. Kathy,

Audience: ** 
Breakout sessions are not recorded.

**Chris Bache: ** 
Okay, is everybody back? Yeah, I think we're back. We're all back. Okay, I sure wish I didn't want to encroach on your freedom. I didn't want to be part of the groups. I wanted you to have complete freedom, to be able to say what was on your mind. But I sure wish I could have been a fly on the wall and heard your answers to the questions. Maybe when we get a little farther down the line this evening in dialogue, you know, I can learn what some of your answers were to the questions. So, all right, so we've kind of looked at our history in terms of our own experience with psychedelics and our beliefs, whether positive, negative, or neutral around psychedelics. And now I'm just going to jump in and take you on a ride, give you an overview of my work that I've reported in my book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe. So let me share a screen here. First of all, let me ask first, how many people have read my book? Just perfectly okay if you haven't. How many people have, just wondering? Okay, good. All right. Good to know. All right. Let me see if I can share my screen.

Audience: ** 
Okay, and this just confirming we can see your screen.

**Chris Bache: ** 
You can see? Good. Am I saying—whoops, supposed to go back. All right, okay, somehow I wish I could get the whole screen to show okay.

**Tom Habib: ** 
So...

**Chris Bache: ** 
I'm an unusual person in that I've been a university professor all my life, a professor of religious studies, teaching in a small state college in Northeast Ohio. And I've also done one of the longest regimens of high-dose LSD work that I'm aware of in the background. I couldn't talk about it until after I retired because the good state of Ohio, the citizens of Ohio, don't like their university professors doing massive doses of LSD on the weekends. But so the hardest thing about trying to introduce my work for the first time is how long it lasted and how many layers of consciousness I accessed in the process of this long, 20-year journey. And I think that many of our expectations about where psychedelics can take us or should take us have been shaped by accounts based on a very small data set. For example, when Aldous Huxley wrote his very important book, The Doors of Perception, in 1954, he had taken Mescaline only one time, and he took psychedelics only a total of 10 times in his life. Similarly, when Huston Smith, the great historian of religion, wrote his book, Cleansing the Doors of Perception, he had taken LSD only six times. After that, he said the bummers increased, and that led him to take Alan Watts's advice: when you get the message, hang up the phone. But notice this gives a sense that you do psychedelics, you get the message, that's it. That's what it's about. And my book is about what happens if you don't hang up the phone. But moving on, we go to Michael Pollan's very influential book, How to Change Your Mind. And Michael had taken psychedelics only about a half dozen times by the time he wrote this book. Other developments have tended to give us a sort of a shortened metaphysical horizon in terms of what we can expect to experience with psychedelics. For example, the psychedelic renaissance right now is focused on exploring the capacity of psychedelics to heal the wounds of the personal psyche. If you're untouched by the psychedelic literature, it's dominated by the studies which are demonstrating psychedelics' various capacities to heal the wounds of life, Whether it's post-traumatic stress or depression or addiction, we're finding they're very powerful, but this tends to focus us on the horizon of the personal unconscious. A second use of psychedelics, different but similar, is using psychedelics for spiritual awakening, as we see in this anthology Zig Zag Zen, which is a discussion between the psychedelic community and the Buddhist community on the relevance of psychedelics for spiritual awakening. But still, we're still thinking in terms of a kind of an individual level, individual spiritual enlightenment. These two categories, the therapeutic and the spiritual awakening, these are the major kind of topics that come up for discussion, I think, in today's psychedelic renaissance. And my work is different than this. I was trained as a philosopher of religion. I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychotherapist, not a psychologist. I primarily was interested, have been interested in the philosophical potential of psychedelics. So my work really falls into a third category where the project is cosmological exploration—not healing, not really aiming at awakening, but using these deep, non-ordinary states to explore the deep structure of reality. My work descends or derives from Stan Grof. I was just out of graduate school, and I encountered this book by Stan, Realms of the Human Unconscious, which was followed by his manual LSD Psychotherapy. And of course, all the dozen or 15 or so books that followed, very important works. And in these two early works, Stan clearly differentiates between low-dose psycholytic therapy and high-dose psychedelic therapy, a very different therapeutic regimen. Psycholytic, healing the unconscious, layer by layer, like an onion. Psychedelic, trying to generate a breakthrough. One maximum, supreme dose kind of approach. Here, the Spring Grove Hospital was working with terminally ill patients, trying to trigger something approximating a near-death experience, to give them a glimpse of where they were going when they died. But the psychedelic therapy was limited to three doses, three sessions. So you have low dose, many sessions, psychedelic, very few. I came along in 1978 and thought, well, if you could do psychedelic therapy three times, you could probably do it safely more than three times. So, for various reasons, I chose to work in a psychedelic therapy protocol. And in the end, between 1979 and 1999, I did 73 high-dose LSD sessions. Actually, I did three moderate doses, but then I did all high...

Audience: ** 
And you see bottom. Yeah.

**Chris Bache: ** 
Okay, so I just say 73 high-dose sessions. And I did this in a very rigorous fashion, following Stan's protocol. In my case, I used the same protocol, same set and setting, same substance, same dose level, same sitter, same recording process, and same location. I tried to standardize all the variables as much as possible so as to ensure clean and consistent recurring contact with the deep structure of deeper levels of consciousness. And when I got to the end of my journey and was trying to organize the sessions into the narrative that I put into the book, I began to realize that this really was a very different undertaking than psychedelic therapy. I was dealing with a number of different issues that don't come up in psychedelic therapy, and so I felt the new terminology was required, and so I call my protocol psychedelic exploration. It's not really therapeutic in its agenda. It's psychedelic therapy in its techniques. It's high-dose, isolated, same-sitter, music, the whole thing. But it is more than three doses. It's my case, 73, and the project in psychedelic exploration is cosmological exploration. It's not primarily healing, though there was a great deal of healing. It's not primarily spiritual awakening. It is exploring the deep structure of the universe. So I kept very detailed records of everything going through, even looked at some of the astrological variables, kept records of every session made within 24 hours of the session itself. And what I'm writing about in LSD and the Mind of the Universe is not primarily my personal story. I mean, it's all personal, of course, and I own it. But these lines represent a series of sessions, and the small circles represent what's taking place in the beginning and ending of a session. The large circles are what's taking place during the peak hours of the session, and LSD and the Mind of the Universe is basically describing what took place in the peak hours of the sessions over the course of 73 sessions. It's primarily a cosmological narrative. It's not a therapeutic narrative. I drop out a lot of the examples of personal healing or personal insights which were given to me at the beginning and ending of the sessions. But when I was operating in the peak session, I was usually operating far beyond personal reality, the personal segment, and that's the part that I think has the most important philosophical relevance and cosmological relevance. So just to give you one more important concept before we turn to looking at the book itself, it's what I call the spiral of death and rebirth. Everything below this line is time and space and our ordinary consciousness. Above the line, Transpersonal consciousness. The drop at the bottom of this, what my students sometimes would call the pantyhose model of consciousness. This drop represents egoic consciousness, our time, space, identity; everything above the line in between the blue lines represents various orders of Transpersonal consciousness. And of course, to make a transition from our egoic space-time identity into spiritual reality involves going through some type of death of self or ego death, in order to basically let the programming of our time, space, identity, be dissolved or be shattered or be melted, so that we can enter into deeper states of consciousness. And while Ego Death gets a lot of the attention in the therapeutic literature, and appropriately so, in my journey, Ego Death turned out to be only one of a number of deaths that took place at different levels of the journey, and this is what I call the spiral of death and rebirth. What I found is that when you're entering a deeper level of Transpersonal consciousness, you have to go through a death and rebirth. Even after ego death, you go through multiple layers of deaths and rebirths. And the nature of that death is tricky to describe because it's a type of death and rebirth that takes place far beyond egoic consciousness, far beyond anything to do with space-time consciousness, and it changes as the adventure deepens. And here I use Dan and Ken Wilber's categories of psychic, subtle, and causal reality to describe some of these levels. I don't have any vested interest in a particular cosmology, particularly identifying of levels, or rating of levels. This is basically just to indicate a pattern. And the pattern is there are many levels of consciousness in spiritual reality, and you go through many levels of death and rebirth if you access these levels of consciousness in a systematic fashion. And this is why I emphasize the standardization of the protocol in my work. Because I think the more standardized our protocol, the more we basically return to the same membrane, the same platform of interface between our individual consciousness and this larger consciousness. And it makes, in my case, it led to a perpetual deepening of the experience, a perpetual series of initiations and entering into deeper communion with the creative intelligence of the universe. Now, when I got to the end of my journey, was working on preparing for the book, doing the book, I identified five areas or cluster areas, or levels of consciousness that my experiences kind of could be grouped in. So here are the five levels that stand out for me. One is the level of personal mind, collective mind, or our species mind, archetypal mind, causal oneness, and diamond Luminosity. So what I'd like to do is simply go through and throw up the chapter titles of the book, and organize them according to these levels of consciousness, and give you a quick overview, a quick thumbnail of just some of the stages of this journey. This is extremely frustrating for me to do, because just to convey adequately the content of one deep psychedelic experience is very challenging and would take a while. Juliana of Norwich, the great British mystic, spent decades digesting one particular transpiritual near-death experience that she had. And to try to summarize 20 years of such experiences is challenging, especially, and I should have mentioned this before, I was working at 500 to 600 micrograms, which is right at the peak of what the body's tolerance is, in terms of you don't get higher if you take more. So, I was working with very high doses. And this is a protocol I do not recommend today. If I were doing it myself again over, I would do it differently. I'd be much gentler on myself. But nevertheless, this is what I did, and this is where we went. So let me just go through them. First, the level of personal mind. This is a chapter called Crossing the Boundary of Birth and Death. This is what Stan Grof calls crossing the perinatal level of consciousness, the level of consciousness between our time, space, identity and spiritual reality. It involves confrontations with death, lots of fetal sensations, often reliving one's birth, very extreme, facing deep alienation. The question is whether life has any meaning whatsoever, because everyone we know and everything we know and everyone we love is going to be dead, including ourselves. How can there be any meaning in a universe where everything of value dies, which eventually culminates in our time, space, identity, our ego, death identity, being turned inside out. And for me, this took about 10 sessions and two and a half years of work until eventually the universe got me to a point where it just snapped me like a twig. It turned me into the exact opposite of everything I'd ever known myself to be, and radically expanded the boundaries of my awareness. I thought I was a male, white university professor concerned with the meaning of existence. It turned me into hundreds of women, women of color, women who had no interest in philosophy or the meaning of existence. And it just snapped me. It forced me. And the message was, where you are going, gender does not exist. Let go. And of course, the problem was not women or education or anything like that. The problem was the tight role that my social identity had on me that was confining the limits of my experience. After I let go and surrendered, I was taken under the arm of the Great Mother and given a wonderful, long, many-hour journey into the world of women, becoming hundreds of women in all sorts of life circumstances. And then the journey continued. The next several sessions come under the category of collective mind, or species mind. Now working at these dose levels, the way I worked, my experience was that more or less every session began with the first portion of the session being a purification, detoxification process, the dying process. The second portion of the session being a transcendent experience, an ecstatic experience, Transpersonal teaching, instruction, and so on. The first half of the next year of session, I entered a domain that I came to call the Ocean of Suffering. I was repeatedly and systematically immersed in a collective anguish that shattered all my frames of reference. It completely dwarfed the previous phase. I entered a domain that expanded to encompass the entire history of the human species. The dying at this level was almost entirely collective. The surrender that was demanded was the ordeal of repeatedly opening to the sheer enormity and savagery of the ocean of pain that I was encountering. I did not understand what was happening, but for several hours in every session, and then I would get into this ocean of suffering, and then I would be spun into what I'll describe in a minute. At first, I thought this represented a deepening of my ego death. But it went on for so long, and it involved so many thousands of people that I eventually came to a very different conclusion. And this is really the major theme of my second book, Dark Night, Early Dawn. And that is, I think what happened is, in my sessions, and in many of our sessions when we reach this level, the universe used my sessions not to heal me or not to try to enlighten me, but to heal some aspect of humanity at large, to heal some aspect of the collective psyche. And just as an individual internalizes trauma in their unconscious, which then distorts their well-being, the human species likewise internalizes all the trauma of history. Anything not resolved by the end of our individual lifetimes, the species internalizes all the trauma from all the wars and all the deaths and all the droughts and all the hunger, and it aggregates in the collective psyche, distorting the functioning of the collective psyche. And in these unusual, highly expanded, amplified states of consciousness, I think what happens is we open up to the depths of the collective unconscious, and in that process, we have an opportunity to take on and experience some of the depths of these terrible memories, and in that process, lift them from the collective psyche. Now, when I went through each stage, each day of the collective Ocean of Suffering in the first year, in the second half of the session, I entered what I came to call Deep Time in the Soul. For seven sessions an entire year, I entered a reality where I experienced my entire life from beginning to end as a completed whole. I moved beyond linear time, not into eternity. In between linear time and eternity, there are many modalities of time, and these, I came to call Deep Time, where you could experience different spans of time as simultaneously present, or you could experience time speeding up or moving into evolutionary speed, so to speak. For one year, I experienced my life in all of its moments, from start to finish, as simultaneously present now. It was a very powerful distillation of my life's work, of who I was being, doing this work, with what my life was about. The years, and at this point I ended. This represented four years of work and about 18, 17 sessions. And at this point I stopped my work for six years for reasons that I go into in the book. Six years later, I started my work again, and when I did, the Ocean of Suffering began exactly where it had stopped six years before. So there was a year of the Ocean of Suffering before my six-year break, and a year of the Ocean of Suffering after that six-year break. And the precision with which this started again and kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper is a measure, I think, an indicator of the magnitude and precision of the intelligence which was guiding these sessions. On the positive side, once I went through the Ocean of Suffering in this next year of session, I entered a domain of consciousness which took me radically beyond anything to do with my personal reality, into the universe, the mind of the universe. In the section I call initiation into the universe, different time of life, different expectations, different astrological transits deep into the belly of the universe. I was given a series of carefully orchestrated teachings, initiations into the cosmic order of things. Now I always give all my sessions a name, just simply as a mnemonic device, I write down my sessions. I put them down on bullet points. I give them a name in order to help me remember, because I want to remember my entire journey all at once. The names help me. Here are the names of the sessions that I present in this chapter, initiation into the universe. You can see, just from the nature of the names, how profoundly Transpersonal these experiences were and frustrating not to be able to tell you more about them, but I just can't. There's not time, a deep excursion in cosmic cosmology 101, how the universe works at a fundamental level.

**Chris Bache: ** 
When the Ocean of Suffering came to a culmination in the 24th session, healing the collective wound, there was sort of an orgy of feeding on the pain. And it reached a culmination, and I was spun into a level of reality that I came to understand as archetypal reality. And I discussed this phase of the work in the chapter, the greater real of archetypal reality. This lasted about 11 sessions and one and a half years, and every time I entered this reality, I entered a level of reality that was more real than space time. It's a very disorienting experience at first, but every time I went there, I was engaging something that was more real than space-time and also ancient. It was just ancient beyond imagination. Time worked at a completely different scale. A completely different order of reality. I felt like Plato's prisoner having climbed out of the cave, entering a little more level, a more real level of reality in the universe than my own existence in space-time. When I began to enter archetypal reality, I went through a death process in which I had to die as a human being, per se, that I found that there is a level of identity that we hold in our psyche simply by virtue of being a human being. It's more fundamental than ego identity and to go through species ego death or to slough off your entire history as a human species and all the cognitive parameters that go with being a member of the human species is a deeper form of surrendering to the great unknown than simply letting go of your individual egoic identity. The transition was to very, very high levels of energy. I learned in the process that high levels, deep levels of consciousness represent and are driven by high levels of energy. The deeper you go, the higher the energy. And if you want to have abiding, stable experiences in these levels of reality, you must go through the purification, detoxification process that allows you to maintain clear cognition at these deep levels of reality. That means submitting yourself to these levels of energy, which in my case, had the flavor of white hot lava flows, exploding sun flares, liquid fire pouring through me, changing me completely. Now, I would experience archetypal reality as completing two levels. One is kind of the Platonic type level where I experience principles are beings. I don't really want to call them beings because that makes them sound too compact. More principles, cosmic principles that were clearly the constitutive principles responsible for creating space-time and some of the structures in space and time, but they were so large, so vast, I could not wrap my mind around them. The best my mind could do to giving them some type of semblance of form is that I saw them as galaxies, hundreds of light-years across. But galaxies very vast, moving on a different order of scale than our small solar system. So I spent some time there, and then I also spent some time in experiencing at what you might think of as a more Jungian level, the living tissue of our species. I was given the experience over and over again, of experiencing our species as a single being, a single mind, and each of us ourselves within this mind, fractal iterations within this mind, and even each of our bodies as cells within the collective body, so that there was nothing private about our existence, neither our personal psychological issues nor our physical issues, our diseases, all of them were in a back and forth process, osmotic process, between the individual and the species as a whole.

**Tom Habib: ** 
Bruce, can I ask a question here?

**Chris Bache: ** 
Sure.

**Tom Habib: ** 
I mean, this is a really good point where you are right now, because in the book you mentioned, you know how we're being guided gently, that when we have deep, subtle intuition or something in creativity, would it be correct to say it's either these cosmic principles or the Council of the Elders influencing our development now, that we're not alone?

**Chris Bache: ** 
We are absolutely not alone. The universe is hyper-intelligent, hyper-conscious, hyper-compassionate, hyper-wise. It infuses us every minute of the day, whether we're paying attention to it or not, taking advantage of it or not. But if we tune into it, if we step away from our narrow focus and tune into deeper levels of our consciousness, which then open into subtler and subtler levels of consciousness, one does receive help, one receives healing and advice and insight. And these come from multiple potential levels of consciousness. I would hesitate to identify a particular source that they would come from. It's more a matter of an infinitely deep source that you can draw from at multiple different levels. Yeah.

**Tom Habib: ** 
So a lot of integral people are aware of a moment of creativity connection, that somehow they become a vehicle for what wants to be expressed.

**Chris Bache: ** 
Absolutely. So that's an alignment.

**Chris Bache: ** A deep alignment. You just become transparent. Basically, when you drop underneath your personal identity, when you pierce the membrane and pop the bubble, you drop below that and into the mind of the species, and beneath that, into different levels of the creative mind. You become transparent. The joy is that in becoming transparent—chunyata, empty of self—you become open to these deeper orders of awareness that nourish you with healing, love, insight, and creativity.

**Tom Habib: ** Yeah. Oh, one final comment is whatever this intelligence is in the universe is grooming us to participate in it.

**Chris Bache: ** Grooming might be a little strong, but I understand. I want to say yes, but I might choose different words. We are of the same stuff. It is large, and we are small—relatively speaking—but we are part of the same stuff, and we are always in communion with each other. It's more like older brother, younger brother, or older sister, younger sister in the spiritual universe. Dwayne Elgin talks about it as the mother universe, and time-space is the daughter universe, so naturally, there's a relationship between mother and daughter. You wouldn't say the mother is grooming the daughter, but the mother brings the daughter along. Yeah.

**Chris Bache: ** I began to have experiences at this level of reincarnation as a collective process. I witnessed the entire planet and species reincarnating in a pulse that moved through history. I had written my first book on reincarnation, where I construed reincarnation classically as the soul's journey toward enlightenment, lifetime by lifetime, making progress and clearing mistakes. But it was an individual journey. Here, though, I was dissolved into the species as it moved through intelligent, articulate collective karma, which is too crude a phrase—an intelligence growing itself generation by generation. Somehow, all our individual soul projects fit magnificently inside this collective soul project.

The names of the sessions in this particular chapter—I won't go into them all, but notice how much cleansing is still taking place at this advanced level. Session 28 was a very deep session, an archetypal meltdown. It briefly threw me into the next higher level of consciousness, an extremely pure, crystalline level. Even though I was only in that reality for a few minutes, it triggered a cleansing and detoxification that lasted six months and three sessions—just an ordeal of cleansing. It's hard to describe because it's not about personal history. It's partly biological, emotional, and subtle energy. It's a radical cleansing to allow me back into that pure energy with clear cognition, which happened by the 32nd and 33rd session and continued into what I describe as the Benediction of Blessings. This was an extraordinary year after archetype reality, where I received a series of extraordinary transpersonal blessings.

The forest was an experience of oneness and no self—Shunyata, emptiness of self. A universal force ran through the forest, not caring whether it animated a pine tree or an oak tree. Deep experiences of oneness and emptiness are two sides of the same coin. When you experience deep oneness, it becomes obvious that there is no separate self anywhere. We are all intertwined. When you experience no self, the oneness of life manifests spontaneously—they go hand in hand. Singing the universe away was a deep experience of the void, the primal void out of which the universe springs. Jesus's blood was an experience of cosmic love, more profound than any love I've ever known, an overwhelming immersion in cosmic love.

In the birth of the diamond soul, it was like all my former lives wrapped around me like string on a kite spool, returning very quickly. I had done three years of past-life hypnotherapy and had a sense of my former lives, but they came back quickly, reached a critical mass, and fused. When they fused, there was an enormous explosion, and diamond light broke out of my chest, catapulting me into a high, subtle state of consciousness—an individual beyond any frame of reference I'd known. Over time, I understood this as the birth of the diamond soul. My understanding is that when we die, we return to the soul, the larger consciousness holding all our experience. When incarnate, we shrink focus; when we die, we expand. We return to the soul if all goes well, many times. But the soul is being born inside time and space. If you keep expanding into spirit and returning to time and space, over time, it seems the soul would awaken inside our existence, such that the awareness of identity claimed in that incarnation is the soul as our identity. With this comes a vast expansion of the heart, an awakening of compassion—the birth of the diamond soul.

Fifteen years into my journey, I received more blessings than I could have imagined, having paid my dues in the ocean of suffering work, rewarded with more blessings than I could count. Yet, there were five years remaining, and I went through another death and rebirth process, entering what I call the domain of diamond luminosity—a reality that was exceptionally clear. I had known light many times before, but when I talk about the diamond light, it is a particular quality of light—exceptionally clear, pure, taking your breath away. This is akin to what Buddhism calls Dharmakaya, the clear light of absolute reality. Over four years and 26 sessions, I only entered this reality four times. These are the names of the four sessions. In between were more purification, more teaching, more lesson absorption. I'm just going to have to stop here briefly.

**Chris Bache: ** In the 50th session, I had a profound experience in the diamond luminosity that changed my understanding of existence. Initially, I thought the purpose was to reach a particular condition or end stage, to become one with the universe or the cosmic void. I had experiences of oneness and learned there are degrees of oneness, and even degrees of the void. In the peak of diamond luminosity, as deep as I would ever go, my visual field pivoted, and a circle opened, revealing a reality far beyond—another domain of light. A ray from that reality hit me, shattering me, and took minutes to recover. That's when I understood it's an infinite progression. You never reach the end of it, even with this mode of exploration. Oneness doesn't exhaust all there is to learn from the universe.

Now, I've skipped chapter nine, which speaks to humanity's future and may be the most important chapter. Over my journey, I had visions about humanity's spiritual evolution, indicating we are at a turning point in history—a before and after moment. Rather than address them piecemeal, I gathered them into a chapter titled "The Birth of the Future Human." From visions of awakening to a series of visions about humanity from 1991 to 1994, it revealed a positive assessment of where humanity is—a guiding intelligence intent on awakening the species as a single being. We were entering intense collective purification, the dark night of our collective soul, and glimpsing the future human—humanity's next evolutionary leap, not merely an awakened human but a different kind altogether. I didn't understand how this transition would occur, but in 1995, during session 55, in the midst of diamond luminosity work, I was taken deep into the future, dissolved into the human species.

Experiencing the death and rebirth of humanity was a profound, spiritual, psychophysical transformation—a challenging session marked by ecological crises and unraveling of global order, echoing a psychedelic session's core unraveling. It appeared as if we might go extinct, but we transcended the crisis. Oneness broke out inside the human heart, with radical permeability to higher states of awareness. Details were sparse, only shown that we would give birth to the future human. I believe we've been reincarnating to gestate the future human, and now we are entering labor—a labor that, if all goes well, will birth a new child. This historical process, giving birth to the future human, is what we are involved in.

The final chapter concerns the last year of work, where I was given one last vision of the future—my deepest experience of the future human. But the sessions wrapped up with goodbye sessions. I didn't choose to end them; the universe did. Coming off the mountain tells some highlights of what it was like to stop this journey. After 20 years on this journey, I processed the experiences for another 20 years before releasing *LSD and the Mind of the Universe*. Coming off the mountain turned out to be a demanding process, as challenging in some ways as going up the mountain. Spirit said there is the dying of seeing and the dying of keeping. The dying of seeing happens as you enter deeper consciousness states. The dying of keeping is the integration part, integrating the entire journey.

I recognize the extreme and radical nature of these claims, which raise questions about the reality and trustworthiness of these experiences. Are they personal psyche echoes or those of the collective psyche? In an exchange with Ken Ring, on the trustworthiness of deep psychedelic experiences, we found it useful, publishing it in *Medium*, accessible online and on my academia page. In my first book, *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, there's a section called the epistemic warrant of psychedelic experience, arguing why these experiences are trustworthy, drawing on Ken Wilber's work.

All my work emerged from this psychedelic journey—my first book on reincarnation, the second on trends in psychedelic theory, and *The Living Classroom*, coming out in a new edition now to include psychedelics in the story. I deliberately kept psychedelics out originally, but they're part of the story. My students were impacted by my experiences, requiring me to learn a new way of teaching, a quantum pedagogy.

**Tom Habib: ** Chris, we have a couple of questions before going to breakout. Can we do a couple?

**Panelist: ** As I say in the chat, I've been working with Jeremy Johnson on Gebser but barely scratched the surface. Much of what you're discussing about the current shift coincides with what Jean Gebser wrote about. I'm curious if you can relate those two, or where your experiences intersect with Gebser's ideas.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, I'll make it easy. Gebser is one thinker I know I should read but haven't. There's zero influence in terms of correlations, so I'll have to let others make those connections. Many in the psychedelic experience don't have perpetual deepening; it's often a similar territory revisited. I'm describing a perpetual deepening that comes from using a very powerful psychedelic at high doses in a standardized, isolated manner. I call it the Kiva of psychedelic practice. If you stabilize the mind's interface, exploration can take you deeper. It's a natural progression—a repetition people have intuited and felt.

**Tom Habib: ** Regis has a question, Colin.

**Audience: ** I just wanted to express gratitude for you both doing this work and coming back. Ken Wilber often talks about the transformative and translative nature of spiritual inquiry. My appreciation for you is that you've beautifully held that ethos. My personal transformation aligns with what you're discussing. I'm very inspired by your work and can't wait to read your books.

**Audience: ** I suggest we process this in small groups and then have time for Q&A.

**Chris Bache: ** The idea in this breakout is to respond to the ideas presented, different from the first breakout. Okay, see you in 15.

**Interviewer: ** Breakout sessions are not recorded.

**Moderator: ** Okay, we'll have time for questions and then some San Diego Integral business before more informal Q&A. Chris, you said you'd stay for about 15 minutes. Sandy, go ahead with your question.

**Audience: ** I want to follow up on the question around Gebser. How do your experiences align with the intensification of consciousness he describes, in contrast to Wilber's level-up model?

**Chris Bache: ** I might disappoint you here. I don't focus on a theoretical overview of structure. When I wrote *Dark Night, Early Dawn*, I used an academic voice, but this work is more shamanic, visionary. It's taken much of my life to survive these encounters, so I speak from a witness perspective, without theorizing human evolution. LSD sessions may not relate to historical patterns, but there's a natural progression. Dying as a private self doesn't dissolve you immediately into eternity. There's an intermediate level into humanity, like seeing an overview. The emergent being concept can be linked to the diamond soul—bringing the past into the present and driving it into a higher synthesis. It's akin to glimpsing great saints throughout history, but the difference is considering the entire species' metamorphosis.

**Audience: ** Your mention of the intensification and unfolding resonates with Gebserian concepts. I just wanted to throw in some theory and express my appreciation for your work. It's a valuable, deep understanding and very articulate. Thank you.

**Tom Habib: ** Sandy has another point since last iteration.

**Audience: ** Thank you for the event—a miraculous gift. It's overwhelming for my ADD. I tuning in and out but found it dreamy to explore this stuff further. I wonder if you offer counseling, as some things about my path resonate with your specialization. I've used AI like ChatGPT, but it would be neat to speak with you. I'm also curious, as I'm exploring belief in Jesus, where your path has led you.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you for the trust. I'll disappoint you by saying I've chosen not to be a therapist, instead being a solo pioneer and teacher. I love working with groups, but not one-on-one; I'm not clinically trained for that. My focus remains on group work and writing.

**Audience: ** I'm starting books myself with subject matter that might be miraculous for you. It would be neat to discuss, but I understand the time constraints.

**Chris Bache: ** After publishing, I always have to make choices. There are many conversations I wish I could have.

**Moderator: ** Trudy is up next. Unmute yourself.

**Audience: ** Yeah, hi, I'll make it quick and simple. I apologize I missed the very beginning of your presentation, and it's been great the part that I did catch, but my questions are probably more along the practicality line. One, why did you decide to go on this journey? Two, when you were in trips, did you have somebody that was there, as I don't want to say, a guide, but somebody to take notes, or did somebody record what was going on and were in any way, were they influenced by your trip?

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, so quick answers to those is, as soon as I read Stan's work, I just knew that this was something I wanted to get involved in. And I've come to recognize, you know, your soul's code. When you recognize something, that just speaks to you so deeply, you know it's part of your intention built into this lifetime. When I saw this, I knew that this was part of my intention, and it was just there. As a philosopher, I just couldn't turn down the opportunity to explore the universe using this protocol. This was giving an ordinary layperson, not a great spiritual genius, but an ordinary layperson, an opportunity to have temporary experiences of some of the subtleties of layers of consciousness, layers of reality. It was just too good to pass up, so I made the choice to break the law and go for it.

In these sessions, I always had a sitter. The sitter was my first wife, Carol, and she's a clinical psychologist. She really wasn't very fond of what I was doing, but she knew I wanted to do it, and so she agreed to help me so that I could do it safely. She wasn't taking notes. We set up a video camera one time, but basically, it's boring as a person is just lying down. It's all internal. I'm not in touch with Carol except through the music in the room and once in a while, an exchange of a word or two, but I'm so far outside of time, space, and reality, I don't even relate to what's going on in the room. But she was always there taking care of me. Was she influenced by my sessions? In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. I mean, Carol never did a psychedelic session. She's a serious Vajrayāna practitioner. She has completed her three-year retreat with her Vajra teacher, so she's a serious practitioner. She has her own deep commitments to her spiritual lineage, and I learned a lot from her. In this respect, I think it's more of a side-by-side play.

**Tom Habib: ** Yeah, my friend Larry's up next.

**Audience: ** Yeah, Chris, thank you for several things, having the courage to take your journey, for having the wherewithal to organize it, you know, bring it into the mind, to organize it in a way that then you can present it to other people. So thank you for all of that, and I really appreciate the last piece of coming off the mountain, because that's what's been very important for me for some 30 years now, is bringing this into the world and facing the confusion, the complexity, the awkwardness, the discomfort, the whatnot of trying to bring from the ineffable into language, into interaction with other people, how to not just talk about this, but how to be in a way that is hopefully to some degree reflective of what we garnered while we were on the mountain, so to speak. And it all seems to come down to how we're going to be right here, right now, and even in this moment that we're talking with one another. And how can we bring that all just to be present? Okay, on a lesser interesting note, maybe is, I'm curious as to why the word diamond, once you get into all these step stages, degrees, domains, realms, whatever out there, the word diamond shows up, of all things, yeah, our diamond.

**Chris Bache: ** Having experienced the light itself, the diamond is the most natural image that comes to mind. Perhaps I'm influenced by the fact of Vajra, the diamond way you know, that part is in the background. The image of diamond is not uncommon in the terma texts, trying to describe these subtle levels of consciousness. So it just came naturally out of the experience itself. Yeah. I want to mention, and I think integration is getting more and more attention because we're finding that we can blow through the levels and reach out and have extraordinary experiences with increasing predictability, but to have an experience and to internalize and hold on to it, and then to really digest it, make it part of your being—that's a long, long process. I think we kind of overemphasize the dying of seeing and underemphasize the dying of keeping. I will say that after coming back from my— and I don't do any high-dose LSD work anymore. I've done some low-dose sessions of different sorts, and Ayahuasca and Psilocybin and different things, but I am continuing. After I finished my sessions, in my meditation, the universe said to me, "20 years in, 20 years out," which I took to mean it would take about 20 years to integrate the 20 years of a session. And I thought at the time, about right.

**Audience: ** If you’re lucky.

**Chris Bache: ** Now I'm thinking I was naive. I seriously underestimated how many years, how many incarnations it would take to totally integrate these sessions. Now my focus is, yeah, we do this for integration. There's therapeutic integration, and then there's this, that, and the other. But in the end, I'm faced with confessing that I'm an absolute failure in integration, because I've been able to integrate the language, I've been able to integrate the memories and hold the memories and whatnot, but in terms of embodying those realities, I truly wonder, how does a finite being embody infinity? How does a time-bound being exquisitely tuned to time and space embody deep time or no time? And how do you embody the love? How can you be as loving to other beings as you have felt the universe being to you, and you know that you're supposed to be that loving to everyone, but that love is so pure and so magnificent that I feel like I'm not anywhere near done integrating those magnificent pieces. So I thought integration would be an easier task. In the end, I think what it comes down to is you cannot integrate the infinite into the finite. Your only option is to integrate the finite into the infinite. So that means, even though my journey was not about spiritual awakening, in the end, when you're trying to integrate cosmological exploration, you're brought back to basic spirituality 101—what can you hold right here, right now? What are you able to actualize right here, right now? And that's spiritual practice. You get brought right back to your cushion.

**Audience: ** Yeah. So this is, as I like to say, the journey continues.

**Chris Bache: ** The journey continues. Yeah.

**Tom Habib: ** So this is a good place to end, the venue where we are, we've come to the end of the time. Thank you, everyone, for joining.

**Tom Habib: ** I think I can speak for most of us. This was very rich with the future vision, the future human that we're all interested in. Thank you, Chris. So where can they get more information on you? On your books?

**Chris Bache: ** My website, Chrisbache.com. It's kind of an unfinished website because my web designer kind of just jumped ship about three-fourths of the way through, and I never quite got it finished. But it's there, and you can reach me through that, Chrisbache.com.

**Tom Habib: ** Thank you. Chris and Kathleen put in the chat one of the docs he wanted you to have. I can see it right there right now. So a quick reminder for everyone. We're going to be meeting again on March 9. That's a TBD, but we're going to try to get someone else from the future human. I thought Chris was an excellent choice to start with, and he was gracious enough to take all of this on when he agreed to speak and come to SDI. There was one more thing I was going to ask him, but I said, I better not wish my luck. So please RSVP for the next presentation, and you can always make a donation if you're feeling rich, to help us. So we're moving to the informal aspect of this, so feel free to make comments, whatnot. I know for me, I feel humble after this talk. Is this idea of infinite progression, and one of the breakout groups we talked about trying to reach second tier, trying to reach yellow levels of stage awareness, it almost seems trivial when you look at the breadth of what Chris articulated, but we are on the path we're on. And as you said, in the end, whatever we can realize the moment. Now, it's not full integration by any means, but I'm way beyond expecting that. I hang on to moments of resonance and love and try to participate in it. And I think this community does well in this is where we're stealing glimpses. Prometheus got grounded for stealing fire. We're stealing glimpses of the future, and I feel privileged to do that. So with that said, feel free to jump into the dialog. You have to raise your hand, just jump in.

**Audience: ** Regis, yeah. So the theme for me, throughout my spiritual explorations and my other explanations or variations, my psychology seems to have a commonality, which I'm hearing also in this and that. And that's you just, I think discard is really, it's the profundity of humility that is required to do any of this work, you know. So that's actually, for me, the I'm struck by a few things. As somebody who's spent the last 15 years trying to unpack my own transformative stuff, it is its own form of transformational work to do that you go through and have these experiences. But then there's this, the amount of universe there is is extraordinary. And also what's interesting is right about this time, I also discovered that I had autism. And so one of the things about autism is you have an inability to filter. And so what yoga gave to me was the ability to no longer be crushed under the overwhelm of my input, and it became a kind of usable bandwidth situation for me. And so then my ability to do translative work that would actually took me the translative effort, I wrote 5000 answers on Quora, for example, about spirituality, just in an effort to do that. I then was kind of, I think doing what Chris Bache was trying to do is, is just like I went through this experience. And how is it that I'm supposed to it's almost a part of the, you know, like through mushroom trip, you know, you have a time up. You have a workspace. I think you have a time going down. I almost felt like the years I spent in spiritual practice, then I had a workspace there, but now, how am I supposed to land without crashing or going insane, and you know all of that? And it just seems like no matter what I do, I keep being humbled, and that seems to be foundational for everything that I know about and what I heard also in Chris Bache's thing. More than that, I also hear his translative imposition upon his experience, given that he is an academic and had to have a job and couldn't be non-functional for months at a time, because he had to show up in front of students all the time so that just I can see that that boundaried his experience too, and in a certain kind of way, you know. So the humility comes with all that. So thank you guys for having this, and I really appreciate the entire person.

**Chris Bache: ** You know, I think you're right. Regis, the greatest risk of working with psychedelics is psychic inflation. You can think that just because you've had a remarkable experience, you've become a remarkable person. And that doesn't fly, you know, so it's really important to keep your feet grounded, grounded, grounded. For me, it was my family and my students who kept me grounded. Just the absolutely, you know, the requirements of being there for them, showing up over and over and over again, and discovering that you don't really have to change much on the outside of your life with these changes are really cooking your insides, and they're taking you some places, and there's a real kind of a need to wear different clothes or do something different on the outside, which that's really just doesn't real. That's a temporary kind of thing. Just sit tight, stay where you are, and let this inner transformation take place. And it's humbling. I mean, it's just really humbling to confront your faults and just to be to stay grounded. Just to stay grounded.

**Audience: ** Yeah, and to be able to laugh at it all, that's part of being humble, yeah.

**Audience: ** I just like to say thank you, Chris, for doing this work and bringing it back to us and your pioneering life is a beautiful model. Thank you.

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you, Wheaton, it's been an honor. It's been a true pleasure. I never imagined when I was doing this work hidden that there would be this kind of audience and receptivity in my lifetime. Thank you. Michael Pollan, you know, who would have figured such a shift in such a short period of time that we're able to have this conversation in so many living rooms across the country?

**Audience: ** I just want to add my thanks as well, Chris. Every time I've heard you, it's been phenomenal, and I'm so grateful you're coming to the conference. And I do want to say I find this book an absolute paradigm shifter. I think it's one of the most important books out there to read. So I hope everybody does read the book, because you can't even—I was thinking you could write 40 books based on the book that you wrote. I mean, one of your chapters could be taken into three or four. It's so dense, but it’s also so clear, so beautifully written. So I really, really,

**Chris Bache: ** Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Lynn, I tried to make it as clear as possible, and it took me five years to really boil it down and to make it as transparent as possible, because I wanted it to be available not just for people who worked with psychedelics, but to be with people who did not take psychedelics. And half of the letters I get are from people who have never taken psychedelics, but they've had a spiritual practice, and they know what I'm talking about because of their practice.

**Audience: ** Yeah, I have to leave and go play horn, but thank you so much. I saw your French horn. It's a demanding mistress.

**Chris Bache: ** Hi, Tom,

**Audience: ** Chris, I got a question. I noticed that it's probably weeded out in all the condensation that you're condensing things that you did during the writing process, but you mentioned the work you did. I think, um, I don't know what like, like. There's a difference between trip and session. I don't know whether you could talk about why you use the word work because that sounds like you show up, and just who you are is what happens. But could you talk a little bit more about what's the work of it?

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, you know, in the Japanese tradition, there is something that the Zen monks call a sashin. A sashin is a period set aside for intense spiritual practice. So it's like a five-day, two-week meditation retreat, a session. And a session, to me, is kind of an anglicized version of sashin. For me to do a psychedelic session, I'm completely isolated from the world. I've taken myself out of contact with the world. I'm not allowing anything into my mind except what's already there. And I sit and face what's there, and take it where it goes, as far as I can take it, and follow it. And so it is work. And now there are many different psychedelics, many different ways to work with psychedelics. I'm not trying to generalize in any way, but for me, working with high doses of psychedelics, it takes a tremendous commitment and a willingness to let yourself be dismantled because it very quickly shatters the boundaries, and you're in foreign territory very early on. And year by year, you're going deeper and deeper into foreign territory. It takes time to acclimate. When you break through to a new level of consciousness, you can't always remember everything that you experienced. I take notes. I have gaps in the notes, but going back again and again to the same level of consciousness, you learn how to acclimate. You learn how to stay conscious in this level of consciousness, and what was previously a gap narrative you fill in the gaps. You get the whole story that's being taught to you. And my experience is we are taught consistently—something was trying to teach me certain things—being brought back over and over and over again until it was sure that I understood those things. So it is work. And I think processing the sessions is work. I mean, I developed a strategy for how to capture these experiences, so much so that, you know, there's a little line in the book where I say, "I think ineffability is overrated as a measure of mystical experience." You know, it's part of our test whether it's a genuine mystical experience, whether it's ineffable. And I understand that, but I basically think that if you can't say where you've been, you basically just got lost somewhere. And there's nothing wrong with getting lost, but ineffability, I understand it is, it's hard, but if you really work it hard, you should be able to find words to be able to describe it. Remember that the Zen masters don't have trouble talking about enlightenment to other Zen masters. They can talk about it just fine. They have trouble talking about it to people who have not had the experience. That's when it becomes challenging, right? So we can find words for these things. Inevitably, it's, you know, they're inadequate, but we can find words. You know, I don't know. I'll just mention also this condensation process. I did a count not too long ago. I have about 400 pages of notes from my sessions. The passages that I actually include in the book are less than 25%—three quarters of the content I did not include, partly because they're repetitious and whatnot. I really try to pick the most powerful passages, but there was a lot left out.

**Tom Habib: ** Bruce in one part, I think about two-thirds of the way through the book, you touched upon preparing ourselves to receive the transmissions. I don't think you were talking about under the LSD. I think you were talking about a normal existence. Am I right on that point? And could you say something about preparing to receive them? I assume there's being able to read the deeply subtle, being open to that.

**Chris Bache: ** How subtle it is and what form it takes depends upon the form of practice we are doing. And as we open to these realities. So anything I say really would pertain just to my individual situation, not to the pattern as a whole.

I think we know what transmission is about when we're talking about it with a spiritual teacher. And you know, in the Tibetan tradition, they give a practice in three different levels. The first level is they teach the mechanics of the practice. The second level, they teach the meaning of the practice. But the third level, the most important level, is the transmission of lung, the seed energy of the practice. You receive a seed from the teacher who has already brought the practice to maturity in their being. When they give this lung, they're transmitting a distilled essence of the practice that you then water and nourish in your practice. So that's my context for thinking about transmission, and I think this kind of is true for my psychedelic context, and that is, I was put through enormous purification processes to receive the teachings that came from these levels of consciousness. And if I'm right that there is a certain parallel between what we do on our cushion and what takes place in a psychedelic session and what's happening historically, then it supports the intuition that I have, that we are experiencing a shift in divine influx, so to speak with there is a rise in energy coming up underneath us. There is more information becoming available, not only at the physical level through the internet and all this tremendous impact there, but at the center of our being, there are teachings and insights and understandings rising up inside of us, which we can catch. But to catch them, we have to prepare ourselves to receive them. You know, we must prepare ourselves and empty ourselves of everything which is small to catch pieces of that which is large coming to us. And so I think transmission is a larger, broader category.

**Audience: ** Yeah, yeah, you're reminding me that when you get initiation, in my tradition, I got to visualize it as, like, there's a kind of a silver tube that's kind of going into me, and it's like certain things are kind of flowing into me, and then I end up basically just being like a small little reservoir of a thing out of which a certain amount can come, and my guru is a giant reservoir, you know, of a lake or whatever, during saying where I might be just this little bottle, you know, but, but what's beautiful about what you're talking about also? And then I would like to just point out the humility of saying that you don't think it maybe applies to everything else, but the things that you're saying so closely resemble my own that I might want to disagree with you on that, but I understand the humility of saying it like that. So thank you.

**Chris Bache: ** Okay, yeah,

**Audience: ** I was curious. Um, I had a phone call with a gentleman, Simon Dwan. I found an article of his in Scientific American magazine. He was writing about, like, oh, he doesn't think the scientists will ever figure out if reality is a simulation or not, but I feel like, from my perspective, like I know it is, and I'm curious, like, if the idea, I don't know if you saw the movie *The Matrix*, if you have any thoughts related to these kind of things.

**Chris Bache: ** Well, that's a pretty popular theme in sci-fi isn't it, the simulation and the complexity that we're living. And quantum theory is telling us that everything we see in the visible world is underpinned by this in this larger, subtle, real quantum reality. Now 95, 96% of reality is dark energy and dark matter. So that's telling us over and over again, that what we're living is not the whole of what's real. And to me, physical reality, it could be described as the skin on an apple, you know, and it's and the apple grows the bigger the skin gets. The universe is like. Like that. It gets bigger and bigger. But when you can, when you fall underneath the level of time, space, reality, fall deeper into it. You're falling deeper into the apple, toward the center of the apple, and in the center of the apple, of course, it's all light, even physical reality is composed of light. But at the center of the apple is most radiant, beautiful, extraordinary light brilliance in so I think this idea that there is a larger reality out there that structures and informs and receives this reality, then after that, then our psychology takes over. And so do we see that reality as threatening? Do we see that reality as demanding or manipulative? Do we see it as a dark and hostile reality, or do we see it as a beautiful, magnificent co-creating reality, you know, and my experience is that the mother universe is extremely so, so creative, so intelligent, so wise, so loving and compassionate. And of course, you just looking at time and space. If you want to see the wisdom of life or the little or the compassion of life, you have to look very, very deep, because if you look on the surface, it doesn't look wise and it doesn't look compassion and it doesn't look lovely, it's a mean ass son of a bitch. But you have to step back and step back and step back and look deep in order to really see the wisdom that's built into this amazing laboratory that we're part of, of growing the human experiment.

**Audience: ** Sorry, fascinating, yeah.

**Chris Bache: ** Sure is, isn't

**Audience: ** Yeah, Chris, I'm not sure how to draw this up. I'll speak for myself, some of the experiences I had like the first time was I took nine months, dropped out, just meditated several hours a day. Then what, two years later, I did it for six months. And some of the experiences I had were so mind-blowingly profound that in loving that I was I was just left sobbing, sobbing and bliss doesn't isn't a word that really covers it. It just experiences I've just never had, never could imagine I would ever have. Yeah, and they just left me wordless, like just a pool of sobbing wonderfulness, yeah, just, and I just know that you had a lot of those experiences. It wasn't just all rational, oh yeah, that, oh yeah. This opened up into that. And did it? No, it's like some of these ones that showed up in front of you. It's like, oh my god. I mean, just no words for it. No language.

**Audience: ** It's like, you're giving words for this stuff. It just, yeah, yeah.

**Chris Bache: ** It's like when the universe's heart touches your heart, it just explodes it into the most magnificent, dimensional radiance that it just just there's nothing to do except have a good cry of joy. It's just so joyful. It's just so extraordinary. And that's why, you know, the word that I give in the book for the universe, in this way, is my beloved, because contact with it was so overwhelming. It became a love affair. I mean, it really, I talked about the rumpled sheets where we made love. It's a love affair, and it's it does it inspires such a hunger for it, this eternal hunger that's in our being, not only to reunite, but to bring that reality, to experience it wherever we are right now, right here. It's so deep. It just, it's a heartache. To be separated from it, even for a day, and to touch it is just joy, just joy in the body, joy in the heart and mind.

**Audience: ** And it's more than a worldly joy. You know, because we all humans, you know we can experience joy in our daily lives and maybe not every day, but you know what I mean, yeah. And these were experiences that were, I'm a pretty articulate guy and like that, I had such difficulty being able to put into words some of these experiences, yeah, other than just like your knees collapse, I wasn't standing at the time that these were happening. But just like these, knee buckling, soul buckling, mind blow, mind blowing. Not even knowing how to be with it, other than just you can't not be with it. You can't be with you. Just there. It's happening. Yeah, it's an overwhelm in terms of what the mind can make sense of. And it's wonderful in the highest sense, pure, clean, clear. And you can't capture it. You cannot capture it. You can't bring it back. At least for me, I had to leave it there. I didn't know how to bring it back. And just what gives me justification to want to keep evolving, expanding, be it through your model or anybody's model that's about being an evolutional being of consciousness, there's such anchoring experiences that I can't ignore them in terms of my daily life anyhow.

**Chris Bache: ** Yeah, and no one could ever talk you out of them.

**Audience: ** Yeah, I mean, that's just, it's like, you go where I went then try to talk me out.

**Audience: ** Yeah, exactly yes.

**Tom Habib: ** But isn't it interesting that at the moment of that type of joy, we touch sadness too.

**Audience: ** I don't experience. Tell me about that, Tom.

**Tom Habib: ** Well, I know in therapy, like when, when somebody reaches a level of intimacy and they start crying, it's this deep hunger and absence they've had for so long. Yeah, and so in the midst of joy, there's actually sadness. When you two were talking, I could feel that cosmic hunger to know the mind of God, and when you get a glimpse of it, I think it's the same thing. It's kind of good because there's a humbling awe going on that moment. And it's almost like it's saying to you, you haven't seen anything yet. I know you said that there's so many worries a couple of times.

**Audience: ** This also reminds me of the book *Quantum Questions* that Ken Wilber wrote about how, you know, all the writings of the guys who did the work on quantum mechanics were all very sciencey beforehand, and they were all very mystical afterward. And it seems to me that what you did was actually examine paradox at a kind of cosmological level, whereas they were kind of looking at it in a, I think the expression that I use in the breakout room is you were looking at it through a telescope, and they were looking at through a microscope, you know. And so they like, there's a you can see the infinite in either direction, you know. And I've had some mushroom trips where I've had, like, a Taurus like thing, and I've got it was literally Ken Wilber in the middle talking to me about what was going on on both ends of that thing. Do you know I'm saying it's like as the, my, my, you know, Avatar of Vishnu, or whatever, you know, to explain it to me was all going on. So it's, it's really interesting to see your book in light of having already read Kant impressions. There's a lot of parallels there.

**Audience: ** Yeah, it's interesting.

**Chris Bache: ** Well, folks, it's approaching my time, and I haven't seen my wife all day. She just got back while we were having our talk here. I think it's time for me to go be a good husband for a while. I just want to say how much I enjoyed our time together. I really appreciate the invitation and our discussion a great deal. I hope to see many of you at the conference in May. When you're there, please introduce yourself. Track me down; I'd love to see you there.

**Tom Habib: ** Okay, Chris. You're welcome.

Audience: ** Thank you, Chris. Thank you, everybody. Thank you from my heart. Bye, everyone. Thank you, Tom. Bye.

Audience: ** For further information, including upcoming events, resources, and links to our Facebook and Meetup pages, and our fabulous donate button, please visit our website at sandiegointegral.org. Donations are greatly appreciated as they help us to continue to provide information and connection within the integral community.