Episode 147 – Dr. Christopher Bache – Navigating the Mind of The Universe

welcome to the human experience podcast the only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet as we approach our ascent please make sure your frontal temporal and occipital

lobes are in their full upright position as you take your seat of consciousness relax your senses and allow us to take you on a chip we are the intimate strangers thank you for listening ladies and gentlemen welcome we've got an incredible show

planned for you guys this evening we are going to be talking about consciousness psychedelics namely LSD the exploration of consciousness thank you so much for being here especially if you're listening to this on the youtube live version so sit back

grab a drink and enjoy this conversation the human experiences in session my name is Xavier katana my guest for this evening is dr. Christopher Bosh dr.

Basha is a professor researcher and author who has been teaching and writing about consciousness philosophy and religion for more than 30 years Christopher received his PhD in philosophy and religion from Brown University and went on to be a professor

of Religious Studies at Youngstown young Youngstown State University Christopher has written a number of books life cycles reincarnation the web of life and his latest is the is LSD and the mind of the universe diamonds from heaven for the most part which we'll be

covering this evening Chris thank you so much for making time welcome to hxp Thank You Xavier thank you for this conversation it's a pleasure to be here so Chris I mean let's just let's start this off with you know how you got into this work if if you want to kind of get

into a little bit of your background and it's an I mean would you say that's an unusual field to be in it certainly is I come from a very classical mainstream background I was raised to the deep south I went to Notre Dame in Cambridge and Brown University I

was a very standard classical mainstream education in religious studies and shortly after I started my teaching career right this is back now this is in 1978 I just I was publishing some articles out of my dissertation I was looking for where to take my research

now that my dissertation was done and I encountered the work of stanislav grof where's the foremost authority and psychic integrating psychedelics into psychotherapy his book realms of the human unconscious was an eye-opener for me and in one reading I felt like I had

found my life's work I thought that this work was extraordinarily important not only for psychology but very important for philosophy understanding that psychedelics in this case LSD but in general psychedelics function as amplifiers of consciousness so they

increase the sensitivity of our mind many times over for a short period of time for an LSD session that's about eight hours and by amplifying consciousness that gives us an opportunity to explore systematically the deeper dimensions of consciousness

and what we so I saw this I thought this is tremendous I've got a I want to do this but of course psychedelics had been made illegal in 1970 in this country and so I had to make a difficult choice what I decided to do was divide my life and

so I had what you might call a daytime job in a nighttime job my daytime job I was a professor studies at Youngstown State University I did the things that professors do I lecture and go to committee meetings and publishing then I you know my private

life I went into a very inner hidden side of my life and I began a rigorous process of using LSD following stanislav Graz protocols to explore my own consciousness and then when the bottom dropped out of like unconsciousness I moved right into a larger field of

consciousness so large that I think of it as the mind in the universe okay and that's that's when we get into sort of the subtitle of your book the primary focus of your book you know I really want to know did you at any point when you were beginning the research did you

feel as if you know that I mean this is very much taboo in our society and did you feel at any point that your tenure would be threatened did you feel that you know your job would be threatened did you feel like coming out with this information would risk your

career in any way absolutely I think that was a reasonable assertion I knew that I was breaking the law in order to do this work I knew that there would come a time as there is now there we would reclaim these important substances but my entire well I knew that we would

come back around to these substances but I couldn't wait until we did I knew that if I if this became public knowledge if I was too public about this I would probably lose my job and I love teaching I love being with the students in the classroom I love

being an academic and so I just kept this work private my you know close colleagues in the department knew but I kept it private I'd never talked to my students about it I did not become in any way a public figure I mean this is between I did 73 high-dose LSD sessions

following stanislav grof protocol for high-dose psychedelic sessions between 1979 in 1999 okay so this is this was a 1/2 in when I was 30 and 50 and I'm 70 now so this book I spent 20 years integrating and digesting these experiences before producing this book

hmm okay I mean that's that's quite a range of time and a tremendous amount of sessions to to have with this compound was there a reason that you selected LSD you namely specifically why not another substance why not DMT psilocybin why not by you Oscar well you have to go back to

1978 and think about the landscape then ayahuasca was this is before the era of ayahuasca psilocybin Muslims were around it was really before the era of DMT but more importantly my work really was founded on stanislav grof work and most of stan's work his early work was

basically done with LSD and i trusted what i saw in his in his research so basically i chose to work with with his this substance LSD after I stopped my sessions I've had experiences with other psychedelics you know psilocybin and DMT in ayahuasca but my prep what I consider

my primary work the core work that's the subject of my philosophical reflections are these 73 LSD sessions okay I mean I find it intriguing because I think Congress passed you know into law that you know banning LSD I think that went into effect 1967 right yeah well there

were a series of laws basically 67 69 70 basically is a nice convenient easy date for that was the Controlled Substances Act that was passed okay and I mean there in your book you talk about certain synchronicities that started to happen in your world can you talk a

little bit about that that encouraged you to carry out these experiments because even though you did them in secret did you do you have did you have a plan that you were gonna release this sort of book later oh I always assumed that there would come a time and this became

a stronger conviction if the work continued that there would come a time when I would bring this work forward to the world but I knew that it could not be while I was an academic and I could not be while I was still subject to the statute of limitations for this work so

it was only after I retired from the University and afterwards passed the statute of limitations but I felt comfortable speaking about the make sense but in the work itself I always thought of saw myself one way or another sooner or later finding a way

to bring the core content of these sessions to others because I'm a I'm a philosopher I'm I was trained to ask large questions I was trained I really wanted to answer the typecast the type of questions that you know it keeps us up late at night when we're thinking

about the meaning of existence the purpose of things and whether there is a purpose of things and is there an intelligence operating deep in this superstructure and sub structure of the universe and this was an opportunity to explore those questions on an

experiential basis and I became quickly convinced in this work that the most important contributions to my field in the near future which was philosophy of religion would be done by people who were working not out of a theoretical basis but they would be working out of

an experiential basis sure so I'm not sure if you you answer my question regarding the synchronicity if you could just touch on that kind of jumps ahead in the storyline a bit okay it wasn't I did not I was not aware of any particular synchronicities going into

the work but if I'll just tag this and maybe we'll come back around to it later okay asked my work deepened over the course of those 20 years even though my students never knew I was doing this work I found that some of my students were being activated in their own personal

lives by my psychedelic work there was a Spiller of consciousness transformation that began in my sessions but because consciousness is not a private phenomenon because consciousness is in essentially the deeper levels of consciousness our boundary lessness

their boundary lists ok the impact of my sessions began to unroll beyond my personal life and that's that led me to do some serious thinking and research on how to continue to do my work while also taking care of my students and continuing my work as a professor

writing the normal life and that led to writing the book the living classroom which is about fields of consciousness in group settings and in that book I don't even mention psychedelics because the issue is not psychedelics the issue is the nature of consciousness

and what happens when people come together and focus their intention and sustained exercises for periods of months and years I love that I love that I'm feeling this resonance in your words of which I'm really enjoying so I mean we mentioned that these compounds

amplify consciousness in a way you said your words and so you know I want to know what were the some of the questions that you were asking yourself what were the questions that usual wanted answers to well I got into this again we're thinking late 70s because I was

interested in enlightenment and I had been meditating for a number of years and I had encountered the kind of blocks that people typically encounter in the early years of the sitting practice and I thought that if I could do some sessions and engage my unconscious and

confront whatever blocks were waiting for me and my unconscious it would basically speed the process of my own spiritual realization that model of individual transformation is a model that was shattered along the way in this work because within three years

I was getting and drawn into vast intense purification processes that involved thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people I got into a whole series of experiences for years that were just far too large and far too intense to understand them in

terms of some type of healing or clarification or realization of one's personal transformation I began to understand that in these deep highly energized states of consciousness if you focus in them in a very specific way you actually can begin to impact or

heal some portion of the collective unconscious okay okay please continue well let me back up and a little bit about method stan grof clearly distinguishes between low dose psycholytic therapy and high dose psychedelic therapy low dose psychedelic

therapy usually fifty two hundred micrograms is a process of peeling the unconscious layer by layer multiple sessions gradually unfolding the unconscious and helping heal whatever issues are lurking in the unconscious psychedelic high-dose therapy is very

different it in the early years in the Spring Grove Hospital the agenda was to try working with a patient population of people who had cancer or had terminal illness they were not that we're not trying to heal them these people were going to die they basically were trying

to blast through all the layers of the personal unconscious and trigger an experience of an encounter with the universe that would give them some kind of glimpse of where they were going when they died it basically were trying to trigger a near-death episode experience

when the it was a very interesting and a very successful project so I came along later and I thought well if psych if LSD can be used in hypo their protocol was limited to three sessions no more than three sections okay so I thought if you can do it safely three times and you can

do it safely more times so I chose partly for matters of efficiency a number of different things I discuss in the book but I chose to work after about three sessions to work with very high doses of LSD and I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms well sistent lee for those 20 years the

state of arousal the state of amplification when you're working with doses of LSD that high plus when you completely internalize the experience so let me back up for a minute we're talking about sessions we're not talking about tripping never gone to a concert

on acid never say it up all night talking with my friends okay the days when I did these sessions I was totally isolated from the world I was working with the sitter who took care of me I was lying down with eyeshades and earphones a very very carefully curated

playlists and what you do is when you're when your consciousness becomes hyper amplified like this if you focus it internally if you really create conditions where you do not engage the world but you engage just your mind a series of things

began to percolate and you confront deeper and deeper levels of your consciousness okay when you are working with very high doses of LSD like this eventually in a relatively short period of time after 10 or 15 sessions you're just blowing your consciousness far far

out into the universe and then slowly gathering it back in at the end of the day and then making a detailed record of your experience within 24 hours that's the method to open up consciousness experience the universe is clearly our experience whatever it is it's cleanly

and clearly as you can with no distortions and no complications come back and then write it down and then analyze your experience keep track of your experience and if you do this basically there is a conversation that takes place with the universe or deepening communion that

takes place with the universe you are initiated systematically step-by-step into a deeper experience not only of your own mind but into this larger mind which is the context and surround mine which underpins your mind ok ok so this was just just to restate what you just

mentioned was you established this protocol for yourself with a therapeutic protocol to engage hide extremely high doses of LSD and in you purposely set up ways where you would disconnect as much as possible from contact with the outside world civilization to better

understand these questions you were asking or better understand the information that you were receiving studying the nurse understand I wanted to understand my own consciousness and through that to understand the nature of reality itself stands early work gave me

evidence that one could have not only knowledge of one's own unconscious but you can have knowledge of the mind of the universe of the mind of the cosmos or some would say the mind of God so I was interested in learning as much about the universe as I could and I also

wanted to know the truth about my own being what was my being because I was a you know professor of Religious Studies and because I taught courses in comparative mysticism I knew about the spiritual traditions of the world I knew what the cosmologies were of our deepest mystical

traditions and I thought of I kept that all in the maybe table and I just set out to see what I could learn using this protocol so I mean what was it what did you find well that's not an easy question to answer brain because these experiences are

extremely complicated they have many layers and layers to them and it takes years literally - you mean you understand them when you have them but it takes years to really unpacked the deeper themes and the correlations that emerge over this course of time how

to wear what did I learn was there something that you know sparked some sort of realization for you as far as why we're here you know what our purpose is our connection to this reality what happens when we die I mean what was what was the lesson I think yes to all of

those things you basically I mean this is one of those things were I mean I'm a professor and I like to do things in an organized fashion and that means starting in the beginning and laying it down phase by phase by phase if I jump into the end stages or the later stages

without covering the earlier stages it'll sound very ungrounded it'll sound very you know druggie you know psychedelic kind of conversation and that wasn't the nature of my experience and so I'm kind of hesitant to sort of get to the conclusions too fast but basically

methodologically here's how I understand it when you go into these hyper states if you were willing to confront honestly even courageously whatever emerges you'll go through a series of death and rebirth processes as I have looked back over all of my accessions over the over

the 20 years that I did them I basically identified five layers or five cycles of the death rebirth process it took me into different levels of consciousness the first layer is the death of self where you basically go through ego death and you go through

the death of your time-space identity the identity that we all walk around in it would that basically emerges from birth to death after that I entered into a level where the dynamics were all larger than private self the dynamics were the dynamics of the collective mind

I entered into a domain that I call the ocean of suffering entered into an experience of a year's worth of experiences where I experienced my entire life from start to finish beginning to end as a complete now all past-president future collapsed into a

noun I went from there into a series of deep systemic kind of instruction notes given a course in cosmology 101 okay I you can't control these experiences I mean I could set my intentions but when you're working with doses this high it's impossible to control these experience

so the best thing to do is completely surrender let it take you wherever it wants to take you and where will take you into these deeper deeper levels where you have to allow yourself to surrender over and over again and eventually to go through the series of

death rebirth processes so after death itself two years of work at the collective mind another two years working at what I called archetypal mind the greater real of archetypal reality okay beyond that the level of causal oneness where you enter into a

completely different experience or reality where all the dualities that we conventionally recognize as part of time and space are dissolved and then after that the last five years of my work I entered into a domain that I called the diamond luminosity work this is what

Buddhism calls dharmakaya the clear light of absolute reality an extraordinarily subtle subtle refined clear clear your dimensions of consciousness in the process of going through all of these levels the sessions gave me many many experiences of the many experiences when

I visit eight to use language of the divine because the language of God or the divine has so many culturally imported limitations that I understand I'm not comfortable with but it is the closest we have in our culture to really speak about these things I talk about

the creative intelligence of the universe one is I mean you're basically taking deep into dissolved into the intelligence of the universe so naturally you have I had many sessions many teachings around what we're here for what's going on what is our

relationship to the universe and very importantly lots of experiences having to do with human evolution and particularly the phase of evolutionary challenge that humanity is facing right here right now what is happening in our time in history this came to be one of

the most consistent and dominant and recurring themes of the book and there's a chapter in the book called the birth of the future human so lots and lots of levels what happens to us when we die certainly one can go into the realms of what the Tibetan tradition Buddhism

tradition would call the Bardo dimensions you go when you die and you can also if you were really hard and consistently go into what the Buddhists called extra samsaric reality or reality beyond all the cycles of reincarnation all the cycles of existence going into

that reality that lies well beyond the incarnated domains so there's lots of insights that emerged in this work and what I've done in this book because I simply have taken the reader in a sufficiently as I can starting in the beginning of the

work breaking it down chapter by chapter year by year where I went what happened what what emerged and I really well I just lay it out like that it says transparently as I can't I mean it sounds phenomenal right I mean and you seem to have the language very clear

which which I find incredibly important when discussing these types of experiences it seems like you're very cautious with your verbage which I respect very much you know what I'm curious about is to know how you worked the integration aspect of it you talk

about something called psychic inflation in the book I mean how did you maintain because it is important to have this sort of critical discernment that you used and I think it would encourage others to when they're in these experiences to also have that as well

because sometimes I hear about people that experience a sort of depersonalization when they experience something so transcendent so profound it's difficult to integrate it's difficult to come back and and apply that in a practical way to your

understanding of of life reality yeah it is and I think integration is it isn't a topic that's being given more attention now I don't think has been given nearly enough attention there is an anthology in England later this year 2020 devoted

specifically just to integration that the first first the most important danger of working in these states is psychic inflation we can have this experience we can have dramatic experiences extraordinarily deep experiences and we can think sometimes

that by having these experiences would become a deep person but that's really a fool's delusion you have to really keep yourself grounded you you go into these states for a few hours you come back you write them down get back to your nine-to-five job you

get back to your children you get back to your world responsible responsibilities and you first you remember your experiences and then you think about them and you try to understand them and you put into practice because you're put into practice the teachings and the values

that you were given you were shown to me the two critical features for using these states of consciousness in a productive way that leads to deep transformation is one courage willingness to confront the hard experiences that rise in these experiences confronting the shadow and

more and more than that and secondly grounding really really grounding and that means grounding them in other sets of spiritual practices grounding them in a daily meditation practice grounding them in care for the body that's really important because usually we describe

these states of as states of consciousness but they are also states of body they have profound effects on your body both your physical system and your subtle energy system and so it's really important to take care of your body take care of your diet to take care

of your lifestyle because if these states are opening you into increasingly deep states of oneness and if your lifestyle is violating oneness you know if it's not a lifestyle of compassion it's not a lifestyle of service and you're living in one way in your daily

life and in your sessions you're going into a different way and you know you're either going to neutralize your sessions by your daily life or you're going to kind of tear yourself apart and become as a kind of spiritual schizophrenia that can sometimes result so I'm really

staying very very grounded in the world and to me this was really strongly from two things for me my teaching because wherever I was on Saturday on Monday I was back in my classroom doing my teaching and the second thing was my family by by marriage and my children

really really keep grounded I mean were there certain protocols that you use for grounding specifically I mean was there you know a set sort of amount of things that you did every day after your sessions what I mean how did you ground yourself better

other than just kind of a cursory look at you know you're maintaining your relationships and and an accountability to yourself how did you like were there are some practical things that you did as far as grounding well once again because I because of what I do for a

living I knew a fair amount about shamanism I knew about mystical spiritual traditions so I understood the practices that come out of that tradition I had a good grounding in Western religious thought and I did a lot of teaching in eastern religious thought so I had that

background to draw upon but basically you know it's not that dissimilar from what happens if you go on a two-week retreat but you know meditation retreat you're with the teacher and you go out in the woods or you know you're in a retreat center for two weeks you you

move into a state of consciousness and then when you come back it's often grinding to come back and engage traffic jams and you know the regular physical world it's the same thing that happens in the LSD session it's just that you get into it deeper and faster and you

come back faster but the basic process of holding still absorbing these experiences taking them deeply into your mind and into your body you know that's kind of shared by all spiritual practices so practically I think that the deeper you want to go in

non-ordinary states of consciousness using psychedelics the more important it is to have a daily spiritual practice and for me this meant a meditation practice also a light yoga practice to help you take care of the body I was helped in this in that my sitter was my

wife she is a clinical psychologist Carol and she was a she is a very serious spiritual practitioner whom whose practice I respect a great deal she never did a psychedelic session she was a sitter for all of my sessions never did one herself because they did not

call to her they you know she was basically a meditating person and she found what she needed on the meditation cushion and she really helped captain keep me grounded during all these years when I was jumping out and exploring different dimensions of the universe she

really kept reminding me what's important is not what happens on the day of a session what's important is what you can do the day after a session so that really is that really calls that you really have to integrate these experiences into your daily lifestyle

and that takes practice I mean it takes self clarification critical self-examination it takes there's a social dimension a moral dimension of compassion and equality you know but these are traditional recognized in all traditional spiritual practices yeah I

know and it's essentially the same I think it's so important because when you're unraveling the aspects of the psyche in this way can be very dangerous man as you said that you know there was never a time where you kind of you dosed and then hung out with friends there was

never a time where you dosed and went out to a concert so you know for you it was a very deliberate intention to you know connect with yourself and explore consciousness to to ask these these larger questions but you know specifically keep it in to in this

controlled environment controlled setting yeah and in that controlled setting of course the most important thing is you have to ask yourself at the beginning of every day every session are you ready to die are you ready to give it all up and because you confront you

go through many many deaths in this process you know you don't die physically but you go through death processes that are so deep you think you're dying physically and then you go through processes where how to put this and again I don't want to jump in too deep

too fast but you go through processes where the death Agony's are not personal the death Agony's really our species wide and you go through processes when you're moving into archetypal reality and then moving out of archetype or reality you're dealing with orders of

magnitude that are really hard to relate to anything on earth so let's define archetypal reality I said I'm sorry to interrupt you yeah yeah yeah yeah well archetype of reality that the two figures that come to mind most er Plato and Carl Jung and his work on the

collective unconscious and so clay relate those ideas that basically there is a reality behind the physical world which informs and organizes the fundamental structures of the physical world it's a it's an order beyond that beyond physical reality and Carl Jung of

course in talking about archetypes and the collective unconscious he's talking about the way the idea that there is a collective mind which is the soup with in which our individual mind floats so that all of our thinking and feeling and processing is contextualized within

a species mind within a collective unconscious of the species when I went into archetypal reality I had experiences on both levels on both the high levels kind of a quasi platonic level where I encountered beings of such magnitude I could not wrap my mind

around them I mean there's just vast beings that I knew were the beings responsible for creating space and for in sort of infusing or growing the order that's emerging in space-time but they were so fast and in such a different order of reality okay I could

not give them firm description I'd describe what I what I experienced in the book but they don't lend themselves and like I describe this as a quasi platonic sense because the archetypes that I experienced were not Plato's eternal ideas in the minds of an

unchanging infinite consciousness my experience was that the archetypes these deep deep archetypes were living structures they were living entities they were they were identity to call them entities because they're like galaxies sighs I mean they're bad

dimensions but they're living their dynamic they change very slowly relative to us inside time and space but they still change they evolve they grow likewise when I went into a lower level of archetypal reality continent the collective unconscious of humanity the

more quasi Union SS I didn't experience archetypes the way young describes it but I experienced over and over again the mind of the human species as a living integrated whole and I had many experiences where I experienced all of our individual minds as modes as fractal

nodes within the larger landscape of consciousness and I was shown how our individual consciousness interacts in complex ways with this larger species mind right now when you here's another little does a footnote turn way every level deeper into a deeper level of

consciousness as they step into a higher level of energy so when you shift from one level of consciousness into a deeper level of consciousness you have to learn how to manage a much much higher level of energy and so every time you go into

a deeper level and you know I'm just describing five or six different you go through intense purification processes otherwise if you go into these levels and you're not acclimated you haven't done your homework and you haven't been able to acclimate your

energy to this very very very intense energy levels then your experiences there will be fragmented they'll be incoherent you won't be if they won't make as much sense to you and you won't be able to bring them back clearly but if you go back to these levels again and

again and you submit to the purification processes and the death rebirth processes then you basically acclimate so that when you go into these states you learn how to stay conscious in levels of consciousness that previously just swallowed you whole okay

Wow and you do it in a consistent fashion you then break through into deeper and deeper levels but every time you break through you have to go through more purification processes more death rebirth processes just in order to stay clear to establish clarity at these

levels okay so I'm really enjoying everything that you're saying Chris so II you know I want to I want to inject a little bit of my own personal experience I you know I only got a handful of LSD sessions but ayahuasca for me is a big part of my life I take it in a highly

controlled setting with instructed shamans and the the state in which you're describing and I do my best to you know regard it in as skeptically as I can and as critically as I can and I've definitely had that experience of encountering and intelligence that I

can't explain or I mean it and it's very difficult to understand kind of what it's trying to show me but when when I look at it in the perspective that you just mentioned that it's a purification protocol that it's it's a it's a refining of your yourself of your own

consciousness to bring you to a point in which you can sort of understand the larger reality that fits into a puzzle piece for me mm-hmm yeah absolutely ayahuasca is a beautiful medicine an extraordinary medicine if I were starting this whole sequence over

again first of all I would not do it the way I did it I would not work so consistently in the sustained fashion in high-dose LSD sessions I just wouldn't do it I'd do it differently and balance low and high dose sessions I'd also balance LSD with ayahuasca sessions and

psilocybin sessions because psilocybin and ayahuasca are more kind of body grounded psychedelic experiences LSD tends to be a high ceiling it tends to push the high cosmological ceiling and so balancing those I think if you overall a better trajectory in your

experiences but ayahuasca is an extraordinary teacher and you know people who do ayahuasca sessions seriously conscientiously you don't have to be convinced that there is an intelligence communicating to you in these sessions because it's just so

clearly that you engage levels of intelligence that know you that you look at you that see you and that help you unearth those things which are holding you back and showing you truths of existence that lie outside your normal state of consciousness but once you see

them then things begin to make sense do you make more sense and you begin to understand what some of the great spiritual teachers have been saying and the great Saints of our different traditions have been saying for hundreds of years it's a living intelligence you

know that's really that's why our universe we now have an approximate idea just how vast our universe is okay so let's just temporarily imagine that the you know the universe has a mind that there is a mind of the universe and then imagine if you were going to become one with

that mind you really want to do that I mean that's an extraordinarily mean imagine being one with every life-form just on our planet let alone our galaxy it's just a vast vast huge energy dimensions here and so what these substances do is open us up and allow

these larger layers of mind with beings that are part of that allow them into our awareness and begin to interact with them to have a communion with them to have a conversation with them to have an interaction with them and if we do this in a sustained fact if we do it a little

at a certain level then we have a little bit of communion can teach us some very important things about ourselves and about you know it can give us an understanding of what happens to us when we die but if we go deeper and go deeper we engaged this

consciousness this infinite consciousness at deeper and deeper levels until eventually you know all form is left behind one moves into domains of what traditionally call the primal void or formlessness and then into the domain of light this absolute

crystalline clear light I have so many questions okay so Chris and we're running out of time so you know I I want to know Chris let's many of the people that are gonna be listening to this show I know already that you know perhaps they're not gonna have access to LSD or

ayahuasca or any of these compounds no is it possible to reach these states through meditation through inner work absolutely absolutely I mean the cosmology that emerges I think on this work is not a new cosmology it's the same cosmology we see emerging and the

very deepest and chris are many levels of mystical traditions but in the very deepest the highest levels of teaching the cosmology that emerges in psychedelic States is the same cosmology these are this is simply an amplifier of conscious so it's consciousness it does the work

not that psychedelics are giving you experiences psychedelics amplify your consciousness so naturally anything that you experience in that state will find corollaries to experiences that emerge with just meditative experiences having said that these experiences can become

so deep and so profound I mean you don't usually transcend time when you're even if you have a regular and consistent meditation practice and you don't transcend time to go into the future into future time and you don't necessarily go back to the beginning

before the Big Bang to experience the context out of which the Big Bang emerged I mean so on the one hand yes you can experience these things with just meditation absolutely on the other hand the some of these experiences are so radical that they only show up in the

very very most subtle spiritual traditions where they become comfortable with the things that I'm saying talking about experiencing future time so on and so forth hmm okay okay fair enough so you know I want to move back into gear of where we

were going with with where you stopped diamond luminosity let's address the yeah I mean this is this is a part of your book that you you talk about and I'm very curious to sort of hear your first-hand account of what is diamond luminosity how did you engage

this how did you get this point would you call it the the final point would you call it reaching this state of oneness with source or yeah when this came earlier the diamond and velocity okay this is you know hard to put this in short succinct form when I did this work

I was I was 15 years in the work first let me mentioned I did four years of the work I stopped for six years for reasons that are in the book and then I resumed and did a very intense ten years so even though it's great over 20 years was actually 14 years of intense work okay

so I'm about halfway through the second that's ten year period and I had you know gone through ego death I'd gone through the ocean of suffering done a lot of work at the collective level I had gone through archetypal reality and then I went came into a year of just

jaw-dropping extraordinary spiritual experiences of Shunyata emptiness the oneness of existence primordial void a variety of experiences that I talked about in a book called the benediction of blessings okay by the time I was done with that I felt absolutely and

completely existentially satisfied you know there was work that I had been asked to do on behalf of others and I had done it voluntarily and the universe had rewarded me with just extraordinary blessings of experience I felt completely content but there was still

five years of work to go when you go through this series of death rebirth experiences many people experience it when they come through a death rebirth experience they encounter light it's very common when experiences different orders of light and this happened for me

too there were many experiences of light through those years I talked about what happened after the experiences of oneness of permutations of oneness and the primal void I went through yet another series of death rebirth experiences which brought me into a

quality of consciousness that was beyond individual consciousness beyond the species mind beyond even oneness consciousness it was basically to be a hyper hyper clear incredibly it was light but but a particular quality of light when I used

the word diamond luminosity I'm not using simply a a colorful metaphor to describe the light I'm trying to describe a particular quality of light hyper hyper clear it's just the Buddhists are right to touch it once undoes thousands of years of wandering

lost in samsara you know it's just so cleared so pure and in the last five years of my work over twenty six sessions I made contact with this Diamond luminosity four times and only four times all right so for me there were sessions 45 50 60

and 66 very specific days in between those four times tremendous kind of purification tremendous detoxification in order to be able to come back into this territory this that's light how to describe it once I touched it in the 45th session then it became the soul

agenda of my work to return to it there was nothing that I had touched in any of the other levels of consciousness interested me at all compared to returning to this light I think it's very similar to the light that some people when they have near-death

experiences when they enter the light it's something like that it's on the order of that kind of experience it's in many ways content lists in lower levels of consciousness I had many experiences of being taken on a tour of the universe and being shown this and being shown

that how this works and that works but when you move into the diamond luminosity are again what Buddhism calls the Dharmakaya the dharmakaya it's it's absolutely content 'less it's not about it's not about content it's not about things it's not

about the dynamics it's it's the quality of consciousness itself it's it's the matrix within which time and space emerges it's the light that infuses all times based reality and receives all time-space reality at the end of our lifetime I mean it's it's such a

profound state of being and you know like I said I've said many times I truly sincerely appreciate the way in which you're explaining it and it really does sound you know that it was resounding for you and changed you you know forever was there you know was there something

that you felt that you left behind or that you should have done because I know there was a point that you decided to stop and yeah I'm wondering you know what pushed you up against that decision to stop and if there was a sort of catalyst yeah well I stopped for two

reasons as I explained in the book I stopped because of pain and because of heartache the pain was when you move into the states of consciousness this large and this intense it activates very very powerful ways of energy that moved through your body and my subtle energy

system you know what the Indians call prana and the Chinese would call Chi my subtle energy system it basically was so hyper stimulated was so hyper aroused that even though I had done lots and lots of spiritual practice specifically to work with my subtle energy system

I was basically plunging myself into the furnace of creation so many times in so deeply that my subtle energy system was having trouble managing the flows of energy I mean I could manage it all fine on the day to day month to month basis but cumulatively I was in a state of

chronic uncomfortableness I was uncomfortable in my body and I knew that it was time for me to stop to let my body cool down to really focus on integrating experiences that I had hand rather than plunging into still deeper experiences remind me to come back to

it's an infinite progression I just remembering I wanted to say this is it you don't get to an endpoint it's an infinite regression but the second reason I stopped and the primary reason was heartache basically when you when I'll does keep it personal going into

such hyper clear hyper transcendent states where you were dissolved into light you are light you are dissolved into the crystalline body of the Divine coming back into time-space became just too painful for me it became I was basically it became too painful for me

to keep going back and forth and back and forth I eventually decided I realized it was time for me to stop it was time for me to finish digesting everything that I had had been given and I just couldn't take the heartache of going into the luminosity anymore

because sure they were leaving her well no I mean I I knew I was leaving yeah at the end I mean at the very end I knew I was leaving I knew that I would not that there would be no time in the rest of my life when I would ever be this absorbed

so intimately into the universe because I could not take a massive dose of LSD and get into that space today it takes years and years of sustained work to build up the momentum to build up the energy to crack into these states of consciousness so that I knew when I was

leaving I knew I was leaving for the rest of my life and I basically made a deal with universe you should never bring me back until I could stay and that's when I really that's when my sessions really did end Wow now the thing about it open-ended

when I was deep in the diamond diamond luminosity work I was halfway true that five-year period and I got as deep into the luminosity as I ever went it was the 50th session so I was an extremely clear really really special place right when I

was in it my visual field pivoted 90 degrees and I saw in reality far far in the distance and the light of that reality hit me and it hit me like a lightning bolt and it just shattered me it just completely transfixed me and so I called it the absolute light just to

give it a name but I knew that there was a reality as far beyond the diamond luminosity as the diamond luminosity was beyond space-time and that's when I came to understand that it's an infinite progression because like many people I had assumed that there was an end to

this journey you become one with God or you enter into the primal meta cosmic void and I experienced oneness with God and I learned that there were many degrees and levels and permutations of oneness and I experienced that experienced the void and I learned there

were even permutations of the void but I always assumed that there was an endpoint you would reach a point and it would be absolutely you had reached your destination right now for me personally the diamond luminosity was my endpoint it was my

destination what it filled as many experiences had been with an absolute sense of home coming home coming and just when I was at this point the universe showed me that there are dimensions of reality beyond anything I would be able to touch in the

lifetime even using this powerful method and that's what I understood it's an infinite progression you don't get to an endpoint that's one of the reasons why I would be gentler with myself if I were doing it again and why I would recommend that other people be gentler with

themselves because the goal I think is not to get to some state of being or some state of consciousness wispy which is an end point the goal I think is to open us to the universe and to let as much of the energy of the creative intelligence of the universe into our

being to purify ourselves and to engage it and to enter into dialogue with it and then basically let nature take its course and let us grow I'm more patient with a slower transformational process than I than I was when I was a young man Chris I mean I've thoroughly thoroughly

enjoyed this conversation quite surprised by the preciseness in your verbage and and the way that you're discussing and talking about this if you could you know somehow bring this all together and perhaps include a warning for explorers people who are I mean

we've seen this surgeons resurgence in the usage of psychedelics many people use them without caution you know they're doing them at concerts and so you know if people are going to do them you know and and they're aiming for connected states such as the ones that

you described you know maybe a warning for those explorers and those travelers and then if you could wrap this together in being a bow tie because even though your journey didn't have you know a sort of specific endpoint this conversation does have an endpoint so yeah yes the

more experience I've collected using psychedelics the more cautions I am and the more uncomfortable I end with people taking psychedelics in less than controlled circumstances now many people have had very deep life-changing experiences tripping and I wouldn't want

to I don't mean to criticize that but when you are taking a substance that has the potential to open up all the sluice gates in your mind and open up into these deep deep levels of reality if you do this in a complicated or a socially complicated or sense that

sensational complicated sensation complicated setting it can be really complicated and you you can get over your head quickly and you can well you can get over your head you can really have experiences that can leave you traumatized and in order to go where I

went you have to be willing to enter into unthinkable places but you also have to see all of your experiences all the way through to the very end if you stop Midway if you enter into some of the intense purification or threatening death of self spaces and you try to stop that

then it's like you leave the spring coiled in your consciousness that just always trying to finish the job so I really encourage be very very cautious I would hate for anyone to take my book and and use it as a guidebook to try to have similar experiences and injure

themselves it would just be terrible and it is possible to injure yourself using these amplifiers I we recommend extreme caution and their note get the literature do your research there's lots of good literature out there lots of good books

on methodology there's more coming out every year and if there were takeaway if there were one thing I wish that I could lift from people's lives it would be the fear of death I mean to me not only am I not afraid of dying I'm honestly and truly looking forward to it I'm not

looking forward to the dying itself but I'm looking forward to being dead because my experience of the universe of the intelligence of the universe and the compassion of the universe and the wisdom of the universe such that I have a sense that I have I

have touched where I'm going when I die and it's a magnificent reality layers and layers of reality and to be afraid of death is to have you the whole world upside down time-space is where the hard work is done time-space is where we're here and we're working and we're trying

to regain our consciousness and there's lots of important work to do here death is like graduation death is like homecoming death is return to source and essence now if you die before you die you know there's a monkey said those who die before they die do not die when they

die it is possible to enter into the reality that one enters into after you die but to enter into that while your body is physically alive right that is I think classically I wouldn't say that's what the Enlightenment experience is but that's we're going in that direction

where you can stand in the physical world be completely transparent to spiritual reality and live consciously in the physical world and in spiritual reality at the same time and there may many permutations of that kind of experience but to be apt to be afraid of

death that's such a heartache because that's best to not understand how the universe works how its organized that's why my first book of the ones you mentioned my first one was a book on reincarnation because I think we have a great deal of empirical evidence that

reincarnation is simply true and if you don't understand reincarnation then you don't understand your relationship to the universe I love it Chris this was such a phenomenal conversation if if you could just remind me how I say your last name and also where people can go your

website URL book my last name is pronounced beige there people can contact me at this email address see em beige my initials in beige at YSU dot e-d-u but within a month around the time the book comes out around Thanksgiving I'll have a website

complete and it will be crisp acecomm and that way the easiest way to reach me okay Wow guys that's gonna do it for us here at HSN a phenomenal conversation I hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did my guest dr. Christopher beige and the book is called LSD and the mind of

the universe and I guess you guys have his email address for those of you that had questions in the chat that I didn't get to apologize if you're listening to this on YouTube or if you're listening to this on the podcast version please as well so you can catch the live shows

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