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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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really really appreciate your presence

we will be back next week

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