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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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