Psychedelics and the Cosmic Mind

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Jeffrey Mishlove: Thinking Allowed—conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.

Emmy Vadnais: Hello and welcome. I'm Emmy Vadnais, co-host with Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is psychedelics and the Cosmic Mind with my guest, Chris Bache, who is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, where he taught for 33 years. He is also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training. Chris is the author of four books: Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life, Dark Night, Early Dawn, The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness, and LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. If you enjoy this program, please like, subscribe, press the bell icon, and share. Chris is joining us from just north of Asheville in Weaverville, North Carolina. Now, I'll switch over to the internet video. Welcome, Chris. It's a great joy to have you with me on New Thinking Allowed today.

Chris Bache: Thank you, Emmy, it's a pleasure to be here.

Emmy Vadnais: We're going to discuss your deep exploration of yourself, your spiritual journey, and the cosmic mind when you had 73 LSD sessions between 1979 and 1999. You outline that in your book LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Before we get into all that you experienced and what you gleaned from those sessions, can we start by talking about what you've observed in the last ten years or more, where it seems that the taboo related to psychedelics is shifting? Not each one individually, but overall, why do people engage in this, and specifically, today, the cosmic exploration of them?

Chris Bache: Well, as you know, there is a worldwide renaissance of research taking place in psychedelics. At the forefront of that research is the focus on therapeutic healing. That's what's bringing psychedelics back into the intellectual and clinical community—the capability of these amplifying substances to bring forward the personal unconscious and unearth its wounds. They assist in deepening and accelerating the healing of trauma, issues like post-traumatic stress and depression. A second use, overlapping but distinct from therapeutic healing, is to promote spiritual awakening—an awakening to our true nature, beneath our personality. It's about deepening our understanding of the wisdom, intelligence, and consciousness of the universe. It's a classic spiritual awakening to the nature of spiritual reality. That's why I started in this work: to deepen my spiritual awakening. The protocol I used was so strong and evocative that within a few years, I was experiencing realms far beyond therapeutic healing or spiritual awakening. I came to understand over time that the project I was involved in was cosmological exploration, a systematic attempt to explore the deep structure of spiritual reality, or the deep structure of the consciousness of the universe itself. So that's really what my work is about. I'm not a clinician; I'm trained as a philosopher of religion. What interested me from Stan Grof's early work was the capacity of these substances to lay bare personal issues and to enter into deep communion with the consciousness behind existence.

Emmy Vadnais: Can you give us an overview of the different types of psychedelics? We're going to primarily talk about your experience with LSD today.

Chris Bache: Many psychedelics come to mind: LSD, psilocybin, MDMA—though that's probably more of an entactogen than a straight psychedelic—5-MeO-DMT, salvia divinorum, San Pedro. Most people are familiar with these. There are also derivatives, like of MDMA, tweaks along the way.

Emmy Vadnais: And we also want to say upfront that you're not necessarily recommending that people follow the process you engaged in or advocating for the use of these per se, is that right?

Chris Bache: Absolutely. There's a large percentage of the population who shouldn't do psychedelics at all. These are very powerful amplifiers of consciousness with tremendous evocative potential, and certain people should not venture into these waters. No one should venture in without high-quality, professional guides to keep you safe as you enter this territory. Now, the protocol I chose was high doses of LSD, between 500 to 600 micrograms. Looking back, I wonder what I was thinking—it was ridiculous, but I had a deep hunger to explore existence. Working at these high doses took me on an adventure of a lifetime. This work is very demanding, requiring concentration, safeguards, and time to assimilate experiences. Knowing what I know now, I recommend against using the protocol I used. If doing it over again, I'd work with lower doses and be gentler on myself, willing to peel back the layers of the psyche more gradually.

Emmy Vadnais: To begin your journey, what prompted you to embark on this deep exploration with high doses of LSD?

Chris Bache: I had just finished graduate work and started my academic career. At that time, I was a pretty convinced atheistically inclined agnostic. Then I encountered the work of two people: Ian Stevenson, whose work on reincarnation convinced me it was a fact of life, and Stanislav Grof. I read his book Realms of the Human Unconscious in 1978, two years after its release, and recognized its significance for psychotherapy and philosophy. I knew I had to undergo my own therapeutic exploration. So, hesitantly, I decided to break the law in what I hoped was a disciplined and restrained way, and began a series of psychedelic sessions, which, surprisingly, lasted 20 years. I worked for four years, stopped for six, then worked for another ten, finishing in 1999. I spent the next 20 years integrating these experiences, analyzing, sifting, and sorting them, and wrote LSD and the Mind of the Universe in 2019—20 years after I stopped my sessions.

Emmy Vadnais: Can you give us a sense of what your sessions were like, how you began, and how you chose to set up your set and setting?

Chris Bache: I followed the protocol established by Stan Grof, as reflected in his book Realms of the Human Unconscious and further clarified in LSD Psychotherapy, where he lays out all the nuts and bolts of this modality. I was always in a room, isolated from the world, protected, with just my sitter—my wife at the time—who was a clinical psychologist that studied the psychedelic literature with me. I would lie down, use eye shades and headphones, very carefully curated music to support the opening, peaking, and closing of a session. The idea is to deeply energize the unconscious and create an environment where the energies rising can be engaged cleanly. If you stay in contact with the physical world by dialoguing or going to a concert, that's fine for other purposes, but not this work. It requires a powerful amplification of the unconscious and a controlled environment, allowing you to engage what arises conscientiously and follow it to its bottom level.

Emmy Vadnais: If I recall correctly, it was typically on Saturdays since you had a significant day job teaching at a university, and your sessions lasted about eight hours each?

Chris Bache: Yes, I would start in the early morning and finish by late afternoon or evening—about 8 to 10 hours. It's a major commitment. I developed spiritual protocols to accompany my sessions, both before and after. Working with high-dose LSD taps into deep levels of the universe, so it's a significant time commitment—much more than just the day of.

Emmy Vadnais: You also took meticulous notes from your sessions, which are a lot of what's in your book.

Chris Bache: Yes, the first step of integration was to create an accurate phenomenological description of what happened in my sessions. Integration is the foundation for future sessions; if you don't integrate them thoroughly, you're less likely to have as deep an experience next time.

Emmy Vadnais: It seems like they built upon each other.

Chris Bache: In my experience, they did. I standardized my sessions as much as possible, eliminating variables—the same substance, dose, setting, sitter. This created a sustained dialog with deeper consciousness, taking me deeper and deeper systematically—a series of graduate courses in consciousness, if you will.

Emmy Vadnais: Why did you choose this path over meditation or another spiritual path that could also lead deeper into these realms?

Chris Bache: I had been meditating since college and was familiar with different traditions. As a professor of religious studies, I had grounding in various spiritual traditions, teaching courses in psychology of religion and comparative mysticism. I thought sessions would help me break through obstacles in my contemplative practice. They opened a protocol of spiritual exploration deeper than I imagined, and once I developed an aptitude, I continued meditating alongside these practices. The deeper you want to go with psychedelics, the more important daily spiritual practice becomes to anchor and absorb experiences. Psychedelics gave me access to states of consciousness that you can reach with meditation, but typically after many lifetimes. It's a different protocol—temporary immersion allows a deep dive but requires integration, while contemplation grows abiding presence.

Emmy Vadnais: Let's start with your very first session to give a sense of what your experience was like and why you kept coming back for more.

Chris Bache: The most significant aspect of my first session was entering a phase where I couldn't remember who or what I was, no longer recalling my identity, not even if I was a man or woman. It was a complete interruption of self-knowledge—frightening but ultimately helpful, teaching me that control is pointless in this work. Surrender is necessary, as trying to maintain identity would be futile. This first lesson saved me time and energy later when more demanding experiences arose, knowing I had to let go and go where it wanted to take me.

Emmy Vadnais: Before discussing more of your sessions, have you come to understand the physiology of what LSD is doing to the human physiology, the nervous system?

Chris Bache: I've followed the scientific discussion on the biochemistry of LSD and its effects on brain structure, but I'm more drawn to a psychological approach. These substances amplify and hypersensitize consciousness, allowing experiences of mind dimensions beyond the usual, physical, time-space constraints.

Emmy Vadnais: It seems to move us beyond feeling trapped inside our bodies or the material world, which is what we're exploring today.

Chris Bache: Yes, the attraction for me lies in that exploration, working within the frameworks I learned from Stan Grof. I'll leave the physiological details to scientists, as those discussions often carry reductive assumptions I'm not interested in.

Emmy Vadnais: There might be listeners thinking this is just the brain on drugs causing a whole chemical reaction. We can discuss trusting these experiences later. Can you take us more into your LSD sessions and share what they were like?

Chris Bache: That's a hard question. Influential books were written after limited psychedelic experiences—Aldous Huxley with one mescaline experience, Huston Smith after six LSD sessions. Michael Pollan's important book came after a handful of experiences. The challenge for me is conveying a 20-year journey, with so many consciousness layers opening. It's not about opening 73 times to the same interface; it's a cycle of death-rebirth that repeats, moving through multiple reality layers. It's not just focusing on any one layer but understanding each step acted as a gateway to deeper levels.

I categorized five broad stages: personal mind, collective mind (humanity's psyche), archetypal mind (Platonic rather than Jungian archetypes, outside time/space/collective psyche), causal realms (oneness as the dominant reality), and further into diamond luminosity—clear, illuminating experiences toward the end. Sessions follow a sequential journey through these realms.

Emmy Vadnais: I'd love to discuss those levels. It seems a common theme in your sessions included pain and suffering to reach deeper consciousness levels. Can you share what that was like?

Chris Bache: Early stages involved personal mind, pain in the form of Stan Grof's described perinatal levels, confronting life's existential questions: Does life have meaning beyond death if everything we know is destroyed by it? It's an existential angst leading to a surrender of identity. Deeper into the collective psyche, I confronted immense suffering, not just personal but encompassing humanity's collective pain across history. I came to believe my sessions initiated reconciliation and healing of humanity's collective wounds. At each new layer of reality unfolded, death and rebirth allowed entry into expansive dimensions of existence.

Emmy Vadnais: What key teachings did you receive?

Chris Bache: That the universe is a manifestation of a vast, singular consciousness beyond our notions and philosophies, intentional in its creation. We are part of this intelligence, our essence mirroring the totality's essence—ancient ideas phrased as "Atman is Brahman." Reincarnation is a fundamental reality; understanding life's cycles and challenges reflects deeper, intentional patterns inviting personal growth. Our evolutionary path is guided by more than just chance, suggesting cosmic intelligence manifesting in life's circumstances, shaping our spiritual evolution.

Emmy Vadnais: Going back to your sessions, how did the recurring theme of death, rebirth, and purification unfold?

Chris Bache: Each session involved death-rebirth and purification, aligned with the essential journey of surrender—opening to release identity, immerse in greater awareness, and integrate profound teachings upon return. The cycle of opening, learning, and integrating achieved a systematic expansion of consciousness.

Jeffrey Mishlove: First, the general structure of the sessions, as I experienced them, is that every session has a rhythm—a cycle with variations. The early hours are spent in some type of deep purification process, a deep confrontation. If you surrender to that process, it reaches a culmination, a Death-Rebirth process, where you are then spun into transpersonal, ecstatic places for the remainder of the session. This runs its course. The next session, however many months in between—and I was doing about five sessions a year—starts you back into the purification part, carrying you forward into the ecstatic portion. The purpose of the purification and the purpose of the death is simply cleaning—cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Eventually, you come to have a deep experience of the fundamental identity theory of your nature and the divine nature, the infinite nature that you are. The infinite gives you a different perspective on what prevented you for years from realizing that. It was this tight conditioning of the psyche, associated with your time-space consciousness, that had to be softened and released to move into these expansive places. The Death-Rebirth cycle is actually a purification cycle. In fact, I learned that death is an intense stage of purification. Once you've died many times, you learn it's impossible to die. What you are can die. The structure of your life can die. Reality as you've known it can die, but the Phoenix always rises. The essence of the person always emerges in a different reality with new potentials and capacities. It's impossible to die, and the reason we can't die is that our nature is the nature of the Divine. The form can die, but the essence cannot. Once you know that, you begin to understand that the experience of death, which kept coming up in my sessions, was actually an advanced experience of purification. When purification reaches a critical position, dissolving the fundamental structures of what you knew as real, you're at the death point, the death and rebirth point. Death has come back to grace you again. From my perspective, experiencing death in a psychedelic session, or experiencing horrendous suffering or pain, is an exciting stage in the work. It's not something to avoid. A lot of people worry about having a bad session, doing everything to avoid it. But that's a misunderstanding of the depth of consciousness and the power of this technique. My experience is you begin to understand the deeper the purification, the deeper the ecstatic immersion. You begin to welcome purification, welcome the challenges, welcome the bad sessions to actualize a higher, more intimate experience with Divine Consciousness. That's assuming you're working in a completely controlled environment, having done all the homework, the preparation. You can have a bad session for many bad reasons—wrong place, wrong time, lack of preparation, wrong set and setting. Those can yield bad sessions not of the quality I'm discussing.

Emmy Vadnais: Yeah, I will share that when I was in high school, a group of friends wanted to do LSD, or acid, and I did not partake. However, I was the sitter, ensuring everyone had a good experience, which was always the case. But I know you mentioned that a bad trip is not necessarily bad, yeah? So you suggest that's part of the process, but one needs to have done the preparation ahead of time to understand what they're getting into. Yeah.

Jeffrey Mishlove: I mean, psychedelics amplify consciousness, and most people—I don't want to overgeneralize. Some take a psychedelic looking for a good afternoon, a little more openness to life and the universe. They maintain their fundamental parameters of personality, become softer and expansive, letting in these experiences, which is fine. But if you want a deep dive, to explore the deep structure of existence, transcend space, transcend time, move into the deep future, it requires more strategy in working with these states. I'm not suggesting my way is the only beneficial way, just the way for me. As a philosopher, I was looking for depth of immersion and understanding, requiring serious work.

Emmy Vadnais: So while we're on the topic of this death and rebirth, surrendering, purification, can you share with us what it is that dies and is reborn? I know you outline in your book a few different areas.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, well, this became an intellectual issue for me. When you experience dying and being reborn through multiple levels of reality, it raises the question, what is actually dying? You may have deep experiences of dying years after ego death. It's not simply the ego dying repeatedly; it's a different kind of death. In the appendix of LSD and the Mind of the Universe, I suggest four levels addressing that question. One is the personal ego. Second is some aspect of the collective ego, or the collective psyche. Third is what I call the shamanic persona, a complicated concept. When you've been on the journey long, moving into psychedelic space, you resume your psychedelic persona—your shamanic persona. As my friend said, you walk with the old ones once again. It's the living integration of all your psychedelic experiences up to that point. In this case, twenty sessions working at the collective psyche level into what I call the ocean of suffering, you stabilize a psychedelic identity, a shamanic persona that integrates Transpersonal states of consciousness beyond physical consciousness. Going to a deeper level of consciousness beyond before requires the shamanic persona to die and surrender for new experiences and a deeper persona to emerge. In advanced sessions, what's dying is the previous identity developed from sustained psychedelic experiences over years. The third thing is what I call the shamanic persona or the shamanic self dying—it's not the egoic self. Then at a more subtle level, what dies is some dimension of consciousness itself. This is harder to discuss, requiring understanding, but in my late work at deep consciousness levels, working in divine communion, I felt the divine communion itself crescendoed, opening up a higher level unactualized before. Sri Aurobindo, in his metaphysical system, says looking down, the divine sees all reality levels manifested. It's a one-way mirror—divine sees everything, but we, as divine looking up, only see our level. So even at deep levels, some aspects of divine consciousness can't see or experience deeper levels. In this work, we facilitate a communion between divine consciousness levels far beyond space-time, far beyond personal reality. There's a celebratory joy when divine consciousness wakes to a deeper level, a joyful celebration when higher infuses more deeply into the lower. So, one way to think about what's dying in advanced stages is some aspect of divine consciousness itself.

Emmy Vadnais: And yet, according to your experiences, that death then precipitates a rebirth. Typically, did you discover that with consciousness itself as well? Yes, the divine itself?

Jeffrey Mishlove: Again, it's complicated because we’re rushing into areas where angels fear to tread, right?

Emmy Vadnais: We’re trying to put language to an experience that many, like near-death experiencers, say is ineffable. So I understand there's a language barrier.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, there is a language barrier. But for me, the bigger issue is laying the foundation, putting things in place so people can understand the language to describe these phenomena. It's not ordinary language or experience. It requires a conceptual reframe for describing things far beyond sensate experience. But in some ways, it's not that different from a near-death episode. I find correspondence and collegiality with people who have deep near-death experiences because deep NDEs are closest to my deep psychedelic work. If you work with psychedelics focusfully over time, you can access dimensions like an NDE. The difference is, for most, the NDE is once. Sustained psychedelics can revisit this territory, bringing more nuances in the interplay of consciousness.

Emmy Vadnais: Can you help expand the conceptual framework for us, about what that experience has been like for you?

Jeffrey Mishlove: Let me narrow it to one example. Four or five years into the work, I accessed archetypal reality systematically. Each session, I entered a level of reality more real than space-time, the primary reality. Space-time was secondary. I encountered vast beings beyond comprehension, responsible for space-time creation and conditions. To access these realities, everything about human history, thought—collective psyche—had to fall away to enter consciousness levels humanity hasn't accessed. Few experience these deep realities. Even in archetypal reality, dualism remains—self and other, archetype and self differ. Beyond archetypal reality, causal reality dissolves all dualism. You experience world aspects as a single consciousness. Plotinus says the world breathes as one; the experience is radical transparency, encountering life's wholeness—affirming differentiation as manifestations of a single, undivided reality called God, the Divine, or the One. That's a different category from archetypal reality.

Emmy Vadnais: Can you share more about why it's termed archetypal reality or that layer, for those unfamiliar with archetypes?

Jeffrey Mishlove: I use "archetype" in two senses. Jung talked about archetypes as primary themes, repetitive human experience themes—old man, old woman, trickster, jokester, shadow—archetypes as primary, dominant themes of the collective psyche. The second is Platonic, where Plato discovers reality beyond time-space. I experience both Plato's and Jung's archetypes but not as Plato describes, not as eternal within an unchanging divine but as living entities on vast time-space scales. They inform time-space manifestation through fundamental, intermediate, super-intelligent, super-powerful structures. Space-time reality as we know it concretizes energy focusing through intermediary structures. Jung's archetypes associated with the collective psyche are similar, but not experiencing Jung's specific archetypes. I learned our minds integrate into the collective mind; seed crystals within the collective. Our bodies, even diseases, are aspects of humanity's evolving body. Archetypal, in a sense, means superpersonal motifs within the human psyche but not fully Jung's archetypes. Archetypes reflect superpersonal structures in both Jungian and Platonic ways.

Emmy Vadnais: So at the causal level, you mentioned, this is where you connect with the divine intelligence, or what we perceive as God. I imagine those. There may be people listening, wondering. Did you discover that there is a God?

Jeffrey Mishlove: I generally dislike God language, knowing world religions' histories and the abuses in God's name. I'm not talking traditionally about God. I use "the Divine" instead. Yet, even "Divine" carries time-space experience carryovers. I affirm profound generative intelligence manifesting time-space. Time-space isn't independent of the Divine; it's a manifestation of the Divine's body in classic Hindu thought. I affirm Divine vision widely but can't fit cosmic principle understanding in world theologies; it's much larger. Calling it God requires clarifying what it’s not; this or that religious interpretation.

Emmy Vadnais: Right? Many in monotheistic traditions see God as an individual or being we're made in the form of. People may wonder about divine beings, angels, or other divine entities. Could you share about that realm?

Jeffrey Mishlove: In all my work, I never encountered a divine being saying, "I'm God." It wasn't like that. It was deeper consciousness levels—communion, teaching, knowing, dissolving, bringing deeper levels. Entering communion with deeper levels, internalizing energy, I never experienced a personalized God. I felt its presence, its guidance, dialogued, communed, dissolved into it. Yet it didn't crystallize into a personality, deepening into vastness. Many theologies come from early encounters with infinite intelligence, far too vast for religious lineages. The deepest consciousness I entered, Diamond Luminosity work, far beyond time-space, dissolved in luminous Divine body, then reality turned—90 degrees—seeing a distant light, a beam shattering my mind. Infinite progression; the Divine is infinite. Even this method doesn't reach its end, so I’d approach it more gently now. Initially, I aimed for a state, enlightenment, oneness with God—but I'd known God at different levels and entered voids, understanding it’s about opening to universe love, intelligence, deepening ongoing communion beyond some endpoint but with spiritual reality.

Emmy Vadnais: Very beautiful. Can you share more about the Diamond Luminosity?

Jeffrey Mishlove: Light surfaces in our psychedelic work; post-Death-Rebirth, people encounter light, many forms. After ego death, ocean of suffering, archetypal, and causal realities, I accessed a pure dimension of light—Diamond Luminosity. After much spiritual treasure, I felt existentially satisfied—radical Shunyata, oneness. Upon accessing this pure reality, beyond anything I’d touched, it stunned me, making it my sole objective in remaining work. This Diamond Luminosity reality surpassed archetypal and causal interests—its purity breathtaking, ecstasy staggering. In five years, 26 sessions, one third of my journey, I accessed this reality four times. In-between: purification, learning—accessing it four times. In world spiritual literature, Buddhist literature calls it the Dharmakaya, clear light of absolute reality—a foundational, pre-samsaric outside space-time, physical reality, or bardos post-mortem existence. It's extra samsaric. Touching it undoes karma's shadow years—a penetrating, transformative impact changing existential understanding and experience.

Emmy Vadnais: Is this what you refer to in your book as the Beloved?

Jeffrey Mishlove: Everyone finds words to describe transcendent reality—God, Divine, Absolute, Taoism's Eternal Dao, Jewish mysticism's Ein Sof. I call it my Beloved, moving into intimacy and out, establishing a love relationship—dissolving beings in profound spiritual communion. I adopted this vocabulary naturally, calling it my Beloved. It manifests at all levels—early, middle, and advanced stages, always dialoguing with creative intelligence, feeling more like a she than a he. I associate the feminine with creation's act and the masculine with radical transcendence. The primal one divides, one beyond space-time, the other manifesting within. For me, the Beloved is the Divine Mother, the feminine Divine side.

Emmy Vadnais: Yes, it seems that light is a theme in your experiences. How much of a role did or does love play in these experiences?

Jeffrey Mishlove: Eventually, it played a large role. Some sessions blessed with cosmic love, love beyond experience, shattering and overwhelming. I experienced existence not generated from power alone—the Big Bang not just intelligence, but profound cosmic love. Creation itself is a kind of love beyond human understanding, love and oneness being reality's two sides. Love as the assertion of oneness in duality was significant, surprisingly, for me as an intellectually and meditatively-oriented person, not a Bhakti devotee. Profound Bhakti experiences arose, leading to speaking of the Beloved in a lover context.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Anything I say at this point—first of all, please forgive my hubris at daring to describe the nature of the Divine. I mean, come on, get real. Anything I say is going to be totally inadequate to the reality itself. We could describe the Divine nature as infinite knowledge, infinite power, infinite love—and all of those are equally true. I'm sure there are other qualities to add, but let's start with those three. The challenge of understanding the love aspect of the Divine is that life, as we experience it, is often dirty, nasty, mean, and cruel. So, any suggestion that the world with all its pain and suffering is a manifestation of a supremely loving Consciousness is horrendously difficult to reconcile. As a philosopher of religion, I understand the challenge. I think the only way to overcome it is to understand the deep structure, the deep intentionality manifesting in our evolving universe. You have to radically expand your time horizon to understand what's taking place here. The human condition, as we know it, is just a small point in a long developmental process, one that has been going on for 13.7 billion years, and will continue for billions more. As Sri Aurobindo said, we are a transitional species. If we think we could have done a better job creating the universe, that assumes we know the Divine intention. We are like children in a playpen, just beginning to understand the enormity of existence, especially with modern cosmology. Psychedelics are like the Hubble telescope of psychological insight, giving us a glimpse into the depth of consciousness. The Divine seems to think on a scale of billions of years. The problem of suffering challenges our understanding of the role of love in the Divine nature. Once we have experiential access to the deeper trajectories of the Divine intent, things make more sense. I think the Divine is creating a masterpiece, a refined, elevated human experience that takes billions of years to orchestrate. We're not passive in this; we intentionally cooperate in this creative process.

Emmy Vadnais: At the same time, it sounds like you found that the Atman is Brahman, that you discovered we are part of the Divine and the Divine is part of us, right?

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yeah, there's very little that's new in the experiences I describe. The vision of reality, the cosmology that emerges from psychedelic work, is fundamentally the same as that from deep, mystical traditions at the highest and most refined levels. It's not that we're bringing something new to the table, maybe a little, but not a whole lot. We have a different protocol, a different strategy for accessing these deep levels of reality, yielding deep insights into existence. You'll find the same fundamental cosmology in the great spiritual traditions.

Emmy Vadnais: Since you brought up the Hubble telescope, and we've talked about consciousness, what did you discover about our universe, about space or outer space? Did you traverse that aspect in your sessions?

Jeffrey Mishlove: I wasn't taken on journeys into our galaxy or other galaxies. That just wasn't part of the work for me. Others may have those experiences. While I had a session I called the "cosmic tour," much of what I was shown I couldn't articulate because my time-space consciousness lacked the vocabulary or tools. I've often wished I had a PhD in physics to articulate those experiences better. I didn't travel much within time and space; it was more about going beneath time and space and exploring the underlying deep structure.

Emmy Vadnais: I recall in your book that you were shown that the universe continues endlessly, right?

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yes, basically. There are two models: one, the universe keeps expanding forever; two, it reaches a maximum expansion and then contracts. Whether it's pulsating or infinitely expanding, I don't have an answer, but clearly, the universe is ongoing for billions of years. That's a deflating insight if human existence is limited to 100 years. But if reincarnation is true, and our essence is indestructible, taking all we've learned into future lifetimes, we participate in this divine unfolding. It's our future, not someone else's. We are co-participants in this eternal process.

Emmy Vadnais: In your experiences, you talked about the birth of the future human. Can you shed light on that?

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yes, there's a chapter in my book called "The Birth of the Future Human," which I think is very important. It caught me by surprise. I began with personal healing and awakening, believing it was an individual journey. But halfway through, starting in 1990, I began receiving visions about humanity's evolutionary destiny. We were at a turning point, a culmination in the evolutionary journey catalyzing a transformation in humanity. This profound spiritual transformation was coming to a crescendo. I didn't understand how it would happen until much later in the Diamond Luminosity work. I was shown a profound global crisis seeded by ecological crises, leading to an unraveling of life. A crisis so deep that no one could isolate themselves from it, which would bring humanity to its knees. But just as the crisis peaked, we moved through it. We discovered we had been changed; there was a birth of oneness within the human psyche, transcending divisions of race, class, and religion. Oneness wasn't just a mystical experience for a select few but was born within humanity. This led to new creativity, new social forms, and structures. Over time, I understood this was about pressure building within the collective psyche, taking humanity through a collective Death-Rebirth process, marking an irreversible shift in the psyche. The shift in the plate tectonics of the collective psyche ensured that any child born post-transition would operate in a more spiritually informed psychic field. We're only in the early stages of this transformation in the 21st century. I believe we're at a crucial turning point. Ecological disruption and inequality mean we can't continue operating as we have. We need to evolve to a post-egoic consciousness for the wisdom to rise to these challenges. I believe we'll come through this crisis and evolve.

Emmy Vadnais: Well, I know there's more you can share, and we'll have another conversation about it and reincarnation. Can you share why you stopped these LSD sessions in 1999?

Jeffrey Mishlove: In the book's last chapter, "Coming Off the Mountain," I boil it down to two reasons: pain and heartache. Psychedelic states open you to huge energy flows, and it takes years to manage these. I realized I was running hot, permanently uncomfortable; my body needed to calm down. But mainly, it was heartache. Once you dissolve into Divine Light or Diamond Luminosity, returning to time and space is hard. The zest for living here diminishes when you know more is accessible outside time and space. Going into and coming out of these states became too painful. My beloved and I agreed I'd not return until I could stay forever. I had to focus on internalizing the gifts I'd received.

Emmy Vadnais: You've been in communication with Stanislav Grof and Ralph Metzner, pioneers in psychedelics and consciousness exploration. Have you shared your experiences with them?

Jeffrey Mishlove: I've dialogued with both and shared my sessions with Stan. He quotes some in his books, sometimes anonymously, sometimes not. Stan wrote a beautiful foreword for "Dark Night, Early Dawn," my first major psychedelic work. We have complementary paths; Stan is a therapist and healer with a vast collection of session experiences, while my work has been a deep individual journey. I love both dearly. Ralph, who has transitioned, gave feedback on "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." They're close colleagues and friends.

Emmy Vadnais: That's wonderful. Regarding how much we can trust these experiences, I know you had an interaction with Kenneth Ring, co-founder of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Could you share about that?

Jeffrey Mishlove: It's an important question. How do we know we aren't exploring just hidden corners of the personal or collective psyche? Ken and I dialogued about this after he read "LSD and the Mind of the Universe." We published our exchange in an essay titled "Are Deep Psychedelic Experiences Trustable?" His questions were probing, and we eventually decided to share this dialog. We need to develop a more sophisticated ontology for understanding these experiences. After I stopped my work in '99, I spent 20 years digesting and analyzing, looking at other metaphysical systems before publishing. It's not just about my experiences; it's about creating a protocol involving many experiences to find common ground. This challenge of collective verification is just starting but has a promising future.

Emmy Vadnais: It sounds like you're suggesting more research is needed, despite the taboo and legalities, although interest is shifting with studies on psilocybin and other psychedelics.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yes, it's beginning to shift. The psychedelic community is showing these substances' healing potential, bringing them back into public discussion. The same properties that allow therapeutic impact also open deeper consciousness levels. Eventually, we'll harvest the philosophical and cosmological significance. I think we're going to get there.

Emmy Vadnais: Well, Chris, I know this is a large topic, and we're excited for future conversations. Is there anything more you want to share about psychedelics and the cosmic mind?

Jeffrey Mishlove: I want to return to the cautionary words we shared earlier. This is deep, challenging work. You don't try to climb Mount Everest without the best equipment and guides; you don't go deep into the psyche without the best context. A rigorous protocol is critical first for survival, then for distilling experiences into clear insights. Once precautions are taken, we're at the cusp of a new chapter in consciousness philosophy, understanding existence, and engaging with the intelligence behind the universe. It's a profound deepening of our understanding and our opportunity to commune with the source of our existence, something once reserved for advanced mystics.

Emmy Vadnais: And for people to know the risks and benefits, as each person might respond differently.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Yes, there are screening criteria to ensure that only those who should do this work do it.

Emmy Vadnais: Chris Bache, thank you so much for being with me today. I appreciate you going beyond and bringing it back for us. I've enjoyed our conversation and look forward to the next one.

Jeffrey Mishlove: Thank you, Emmy. I've enjoyed our conversation too. Thank you for the work you're doing. We need all the wisdom we can get in the years ahead.

Emmy Vadnais: And for those watching or listening, thank you for being with us. You are the reason we are here.

Audience: You book

Emmy Vadnais: Three in the new Thinking Allowed dialog series is UFOs and UAP. Are we really alone? Now available on Amazon.

Jeffrey Mishlove: You can now download a free PDF copy of issue number eight of the New Thinking Allowed magazine or order a beautiful printed copy. Go to newthinkingallowed.org.