LSD and the Mind of the Universe – Full Interview (In Reality)

Chris Bache: And eventually you come out with a certain understanding, at least, of the large structure, the nature of reality. We're not simply creating a new society or a better society or a new economy or a new ecology. We are actually giving birth to a new form of the human species. I never expected anything like this to emerge in the work. I didn't know that this was even possible. At the subtle level of consciousness, you open up to different levels of collective consciousness, and so when your individual identity pops, I have had the experience many times of opening up to my species identity, to the collective psyche.

Chris Bache: Well, I'm always hesitant to jump into this, because my experiences are based upon shamanic, rigorous use of LSD. And when everyone hears LSD, they think of the '60s, they think hallucinations. This is very far from that. This is really within a therapeutic tradition. It's within the Stan Grof tradition. It's the systematic use of these very hyper-intense states of awareness. When you engage in these states, there are cycles of tremendous purification, tremendous death and rebirth. But if you go through it often enough, deeply enough, there is a progressive initiation into deeper and deeper levels of reality. Eventually, you come out with a certain understanding, at least, of the large structure, the nature of reality. And it's not easy to summarize. I've tried to do it in this book. I'm just finishing Diamonds from Heaven to describe the progression. One of the qualities that come out of this vision of cosmology is that there are many levels to the cosmos. The physical world is a dense level, and there are layers within the physical world. As you build out into non-physical or extra-physical dimensions, there are layers upon layers. It's a repeated experience that the lower levels are sourced in the higher, deeper levels. The higher levels are more intelligent, more intense, energetically, and they are more conscious. So the experience of going out into them is like going into a more conscious, more powerful dimension of existence. Eventually, you leave behind time and space. Then there are dimensions that echo time and space, what the Tibetans call the Bardo, the intermediate dimensions. One can go beyond all the echoes of time and space and enter what some spiritual traditions would call extra-samsaric reality, or reality beyond all the cycles of death and rebirth, entering into the domain of just pure light. Quantum physicists say photons are light, and I find that's true in the domain of consciousness. Ultimately, all physical reality is sourced in an ocean of light, an ocean of radiance. You can't take your ego into that reality and have an experience of it. You can only enter those realities by surrendering what you were in the lower realities. It's not that these lower realities are inferior or bad. They are more specific manifestations of this larger reality. You reverse the process when you go out into that reality. You have to decouple, let go of a deeper level, so you literally become, for hours at a time, a citizen of that level of reality. You have to stop being Chris Bache, stop being a human, stop being a time-space being. You literally breathe the nature of that existence. There is always a profound sense of homecoming, of profound return. You know that all existence comes from this reality. There's a tremendous sense of stillness, calm, reunion, being restored to your primal wholeness. One gets a sense that these levels constantly infuse and inform this reality. Our theories of evolution are partly right and partly deeply incomplete. We think it's all happening by chance, screened by necessity, but my experience is that there is tremendous intelligence manifesting itself in the self-emergent quality of time and space. There is an intelligence manifesting. It's not a god outside manipulating, and it's not even like creative design manipulating, but a self-arising intelligence manifesting ever more complex forms of life. It's evolving and changing. One of the other things that come when you move into these deep dimensions is you move beyond linear time as we conventionally know it into deep dimensions of time, and sometimes even beyond any sense of time whatsoever. When you're coming in and out of these different states, you get a perspective that this reality is changing. We know it's changing. You get a sense of where it's changing to, what the next phase of human evolution might be, where we seem to be going. There is an intelligence expressing itself in this process. The end result is a sense of trust. You learn to trust where you are, that there is wisdom in where you are doing what you're doing, and somehow each one of our works contributes to the larger pattern of the creative intelligence manifesting itself inside time and space. I was completely surprised. I never expected anything like this to emerge in the work. I didn't know it was possible. I had never seen it addressed in the psychedelic literature. But when you pop the bubble of the ego, you don't simply drop into unitary or oneness consciousness. You open up to different levels of collective consciousness. So when your individual identity pops, I've had the experience many times of opening up to my species identity, the collective psyche, and I found that species consciousness is coherent. Carl Jung was right; there is a coherent species mind. As the shamanic traditions suggest, when you touch the species mind in deep states of consciousness, insights into the evolutionary progression of the species naturally follow. Over many years, I had repeated experiences taking me deeper, teaching me. There was a consciousness teaching me something about what is happening, showing me that humanity is coming into a time of tremendous fruition. We have been developing for hundreds of thousands of years, and we are coming to a pinnacle, a tremendous awakening, an opening of a new level of consciousness in humanity. This is a pivot point. Everything we have accomplished will quickly become passé as we pivot into this new platform of consciousness. For there to be a great awakening, the birth of a new consciousness, a great death must first take place. As the mystics go through a dark night of the soul to awaken into divine consciousness, humanity will have to go through a collective dark night of the soul to purge, to change the karmic residue of all its ego-driven competitions, hostility, and violence. The things we do to each other, this world built by ego, are moving into a larger reality. We have to let go of all those old restrictive poisons. I think we are coming into a time of great crisis. The visions show me we are entering a dark night of purification. I don't know the details, but I've experienced it. I think it will start in the 21st century. I don't know how long it will last, but it will be a time of loss of control, breakdown, and de-structuring of life as we know it.

Chris Bache: But coming out of it, we are not simply creating a new society or a better society, a new economy, or a new ecology. We are actually giving birth to a new form of the human species. The fundamental architecture of the collective psyche is pivoting, and as it pivots, we are giving birth to a new blueprint for humanity. The way I've seen it manifesting in the visions and my psychedelic experiences, reincarnation is accepted as a matter of fact. We die, we are born, and we keep going. Lifetime by lifetime, we rewind, collecting more and more experiences. In my sessions, I reached a point where all my former lives were coming together like winding kite string around a spool, and it hit a critical mass, exploding into the most brilliant, luminous diamond light in my heart. I think what I saw in this experience was where reincarnation is taking us. We're not just going through classes from one to the next. Sooner or later, we come to a fusion point where all of our souls, all of our lives, all of our experiences hit a critical mass and fuse. When that happens, the soul awakens inside the human body. When we die, we return to the soul, the mega consciousness that holds us all. But this is an awakening of the soul inside time and space, and I think that's the future human we are birthing. We've been gestating this consciousness for hundreds of thousands of years. We're giving birth to it now, but most of the work has been done. Most of the work has been done in history, but now it's time for all this inner development to manifest. When we awaken as souls, when our deep consciousness awakens, it will change life on our planet. Our minds will be safe, our hearts will be open, and we will no longer be a danger to each other and other species. There will be a much easier communion with the deeper creative consciousness of the universe, leading to a time of tremendous creativity, acceleration of creativity. In the very end of this long 20-year journey, my very last sessions, I was put through a tremendous strip-down process and thrown deep into the future. I don't know how far, but deep into the future, I was allowed to experience—it felt like trying on that form—the most beautiful, extraordinary being. It's important to understand we are giving birth to something magnificent. If we don't have a vision of what's happening in history, we will get swallowed by the pain of the coming purification. We must hold firm, stand firm, and not yield to despair. A mother giving birth is in terrible pain, but she knows what she's doing. We're giving birth, and we have to understand what we're doing. We have a tendency in our theologies and stories to think of human nature as static because it doesn't seem to change fast. But when you expand the horizon, intellectually or experientially, expand the time horizon, what I was given to experience is that humanity is built for speed. It has to do with our learning cycles—each span of hundreds of years. The universe does not think in a hundred-year increments. The universe thinks in billions and trillions of years. From that perspective, humanity seems to be designed for accelerated evolution. On a long scale, we're moving very fast through time. All our history, all our pains, our mistakes, the things we've done, we're carrying them, but we can shed them if our concentration, our awareness, is intensified, as I think they will be in the trials coming. If we pay attention, do our work well, live deeply, we can shed that past quickly. We can enact the soul in history. We have an opportunity. He tells his story in four journeys of being taken into the future, around a thousand years ahead. When he looked back, all of the Bardo was empty, all the souls were emptied. There was a much clearer communion between physical beings and spiritual consciousness. Easier to do a temporary visit, to share a physical life form, return to spiritual reality. I think that's what we're going to. The Bardo is this layered reality surrounding time and space, filled with soul fragments, unintegrated pieces of experiences. As we become more integrated, coherent, we're emptying the Bardo. As we empty it, the communion between deep spiritual reality and physical becomes clearer. We've seen it happen for individuals; great saints are translucent to this reality. I believe they foreshadow what is happening for the whole species. We're moving in that direction as an entire species. We have an extraordinary future ahead. Some hard work is necessary, but the messages in my sessions convey that the Divine is very happy with us. Everything is right on time. We make mistakes, do many things badly, but from the long view, the sense I get is that we're working hard and doing well. There's more hard work, but overall, the creative consciousness of the universe is very pleased with what's happening.

Audience: Space, oh...

Audience: Sarah Clay...

Audience: You.