B (3:18)

So you had a Catholic upbringing, obviously.

A (3:21)

And a very kind of ecumenically broad but strong Catholic upbringing down in the Deep south in Vicksburg, Mississippi. My family comes from Louisiana on both sides, so that French Catholic heritage down in the in New Orleans area. And so we were Catholic. And I'll tell you, I don't remember a time in my life When I didn't want to be a priest, I mean, when I kind of became aware, became conscious, and certainly by the time I'm five years old, I remember having memories of wanting to be a priest. It wasn't, you know, encouraged by my family. It wasn't part of that. It just was there in the beginning. And so I went into seminary as soon as I could in high school. They don't have high school seminaries anymore because they weren't really effective in yielding priests. But I did. I went in the seminary and stayed in until my freshman year in college, and then basically decided that celibacy and I weren't cut out for each other and left.

B (4:28)

It's not as if you left Catholicism at that point.

A (4:31)

No, no. I was at Notre Dame, and I got my degree in theology at the University of Notre Dame. But by the time I finished my undergraduate work, I was no longer a Catholic in any normative sense. And I went to Cambridge and I studied New Testament criticism. And the search for the historical Jesus was my earliest academic love. And by the time I left Cambridge, I really was no longer a Christian. The historical Jesus actually was my way out of Christianity and into a larger world of spiritual teachers.

B (5:07)

I see. What happened exactly?

A (5:10)

Well, you know, I learned Greek and Hebrew and all the languages one needs to become a young scholar of New Testament. And the search for the historical Jesus. After several years at undergraduate and then these two years at Cambridge, I think I got a pretty good grounding of where research was taking us, where we were going to be going in future years in that area. And I felt I had a good, strong grounding in the best historian's assessment of who this man was and what was made of him. And the theology, theological interpretations that followed really couldn't capture, I think, or adequately conve the depth and power of this person. And I encountered in him an intensity of spiritual awareness that was larger than the Christology that I had internalized. And then when I began to study world religions more broadly, I began to realize that there were other beings who had the same deep quality of spiritual connection. And so I opened up from. I never left Christianity. I just opened up into a larger family of religious discourse that took me. I taught world religions for decades, you know, on the arm of Houston Smith. His books were the ones that I used in my courses. And so I would travel the world every semester, learning from the great spiritual traditions of the world.

B (6:36)

Well, Houston Smith was a good friend of mine, really. I did at least half a dozen or more interviews with him. I got to know him well in the days when I started doing interviews in the San Francisco Bay Area. To me, he was a guiding light and a saint.

A (6:56)

He really was. And probably next to Stan Grof, the single individual that's had the largest impact on my mind because I taught out of his books in world religions for so many years. Wonderful man.

B (7:10)

And Stan Grof was also a big influence on you?

A (7:13)

Huge. When I finished my graduate work in Brown in philosophy of religion, and I was looking for where to take my work next, I encountered the work of two people who had a huge impact on me. One was Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, his work in reincarnation. And he convinced me in one reading of his book 20 cases suggestive of Reincarnation, that reincarnation is simply true, it's just a fact. And that meant erasing seven years of undergraduate and graduate school, because it had. Nowhere in my studies had reincarnation been taken seriously, neither in the Western religions nor in the scientific traditions, which had erased the Western traditions in some ways in my thinking. And so I had to start all over again and figure out if reincarnation is true. What does that tell us about the world we're living in?

B (8:07)

Well, what does it mean by true?

A (8:09)

Yeah, I think it's just a fact of nature. It's just an aspect of life. There's so much we don't understand about it. We don't understand the details of how. We don't understand anything about the physics of the soul. But the phenomenological evidence shows us that our mind predates our body and that our current life is part of a tapestry of a much larger causal web of lives stretching through time. And I began to understand that if you don't understand reincarnation, then you really don't. You can't understand much that's happening in this world. It's like trying to take one chapter out of a Sherlock Holmes novel and trying to understand the entire book. And all you have is that one chapter. We need the other chapters to really understand the things that led into this life and what we're starting in this life, continuing on in other lifetimes.

B (9:07)

Do you seem to feel that everybody has a chain of historical incarnations that they've experienced?

A (9:18)

Well, in general, I think so. But of course, there have to be beginners somewhere. They have to be people in their first lifetime or second or third lifetime. And then it's like at a universe, there are freshmen and there are seniors and there are people who have been at this game for a longer period of time. And the spiritual traditions often refer to those as old souls. That's a metaphor for someone who's gathered sufficient experience that they've spiritually matured over the course of their lifetimes.

B (9:50)

I would imagine as a student of theology, there would be in the literature many other options besides reincarnation.

A (9:57)

Yeah, yep, they are. But this to me is not a theological proposition. I mean, for a long time it was discussed in theological or philosophical terms and debated. But I think in the last 50 years it's moved from the theologians table to the psychologist's table. It's become a matter of empirical research. And the empirical research, I think, is overwhelming. So the first book I wrote was my response to Ian Stevenson. And, and there I just. Basically, my conviction is we have overwhelming empirical evidence. Stevenson's research and the research on coming out of past life therapy, Roger Woolger, for example, and other past life therapists. Cumulatively, there is sufficient evidence to make this the most reasonable hypothesis for understanding life. And that conviction is only deepened in my psychedelic work and in my other studies through the years. And that brings me to the second person that I encountered both in my first year, when I was just beginning my academic career, was Stan Grof. His book Realms of the Human Unconscious, which had just been published then, was a turning point for me. When I read it, I immediately recognized that Stan's work was incredibly important, not just for psychology and therapy, but for philosophy, my discipline. And I knew I wanted to get involved in this. I felt a calling and I knew that. I felt that the people who would be doing the most important work in my field of philosophy, of religion would be speaking out of an experiential basis, not simply a theoretical basis. And I knew it would take time, it would take a long time to really do serious work in the area. So I settled in in 1979 and began a course of LSD therapy, following Stan's protocols. And that ended up lasting much longer than I had expected. Lasting 20 years of active work.

B (11:54)

In fact, I'd have to say I think of you as one of the foremost psychonauts, if I can use that term, of whom I'm aware you took it very methodically, very seriously over years, keeping careful records of your experiences and with a clear idea of the goal.

A (12:15)

Well, you know, yeah, and many misunderstandings and misinterpretations. I mean, I had a limited understanding of the psyche and a limited understanding of how this work would proceed. And those had to fall away over time. But in the beginning. Well, let me back Up. I had been practicing meditation for years, since undergraduate work and then through graduate school, had started with transcendental meditation and then moved into vipassana meditation and had experienced the usual blocks that people have in the first years of their meditation practice. And when I met Stan's work, I thought, oh, here's a way in which I can push through these blocks faster. I could burn up my karma faster, and I would get on the other side and I would become enlightened faster. Well, that's not the way it kind of worked out because I came to understand that the fundamental model that we were using in the transpersonal community was still a model of personal transformation. You encountered, you sort of cleansed your own karma, you dealt with your past lives, you cleared up your inner baggage, and then you would move into some heightened state of spiritual sensitivity, like, you're finished. Yeah, we'll come enlightened. And that was, you know, but what happened was not that. And I think it was partly because of the very aggressive protocol I adopted. Now Stan outlines two protocols. Psycholytic therapy, low dose, where you peel the psyche layer by layer, piece by piece, and high dose psychedelic therapy, where in the Spring Grove program in Maryland, they were using high dose therapy to address anxiety, death, anxiety among people who were terminally ill. And it was limited to three sessions. So coming along later, I thought, well, if you could do it safely three times, you could do it safely more times. And because I was married at the time, and soon there would be children coming along and it was hard to get time away from dual career family for a weekend of this type of deep inner work. I decided to do psychedelic therapy working with high doses, thinking if I could maintain the stability needed to work creatively and productively at these high states, I would basically chew up my karma faster, I would clean my plate faster. But what happened, of course, is if you work with highly amplified states of consciousness, pretty soon you just shatter the boundaries of your personal psyche. So the working dynamic becomes larger than anything which could be explained in terms of your personal psyche, even your personal enlightenment. Within a couple of years I was being drawn into vast experiential territories that really didn't have too much to do with me personally. And over time I came to understand that I was engaging what you might think of as coex systems or systems of condensed experiences within the collective psyche, what I called meta coec systems, that there was some in which my individual work had been changed into serving not my personal clarification, but somehow contributing a small piece to the clarification of the human psyche as a whole to the collective unconscious.

B (15:44)

Are you suggesting then that you had personal issues that did not get addressed?

A (15:50)

Oh, no. They got addressed both before and after that work.

B (15:53)

So it wasn't a spiritual bypass?

A (15:56)

No. If you keep coming back over and over again, sooner or later the universe is going to clean you up. It may clean you up in the beginning using one protocol, it'll clean you up later using another protocol. But if you keep engaging the deep energy of life, it's going to bring out all your shadow material, all your former life material. It's going to release you from the pains that bind you. Yeah.

B (16:23)

So that happened, and then you entered into this state. I guess one way to put it. And if I recall, you used the phrase the consciousness of humanity.

A (16:35)

Yes. What I found was that when the bubble of your personal psyche pops, you know, when that egoic bubble pops and is no longer the organizing matrix for your experience, you don't simply pop into unitive, non dual consciousness. There are many layers of consciousness between your individual ego and unitive consciousness, or the consciousness of God or something like this. There's all these layers of the collective unconsciousness, the mind of the species, the psyche of the species. And early on in my work, when I was transitioning, after I'd gone through what Stan would have described as a classic perinatal death rebirth process where my individual psyche was just shattered, then I went through an experience where I was confronting the killing of thousands and thousands of children, just being mauled and maimed by soldiers, and I was powerless to be able to stop it. And I think this was an awakening of what the Buddhists would call bodhicitta, the desire to save all sentient beings. And the way I came to understand it later, I didn't understand it at the time. It was basically reminding me of a commitment that I had made before I was born, what my incarnation was about. And it was basically awakening my compassion so that I would do anything if given the opportunity to save the children, to save the lives of the children. And then began a two year process of entering into this ocean of suffering. In the cleansing portion of the sessions, of course, there's the ecstatic portion and the cleansing portion. But in the cleansing portion, there's this huge deeper and deeper and deeper experience of the terrible suffering that still resides within the collective psyche. All the things that we've done to each other, all the wars and the killing and the being killed and all the rapes and all the droughts and all the suffering of Humanity. Anything which is unresolved in any individual's life. By the time they die accumulates in the psyche. And just as our individual trauma compromises our individual clarity. Our collective trauma compromises our collective clarity. And for some reason, a large portion of my work for those years. Involved draining some of that toxicity out of the collective psyche. And I don't think there's anything unique to me. And certainly nothing unique to psychedelics about that work. I think there are many, many beings at all sorts of levels. Who are working primarily in service of healing the collective psyche. To make humanity more able to take advantage of the shifts of energy that are coming to us in history.

B (19:37)

Because I would think if you're in touch with the psyche of humanity. In addition to the enormity of the PA Suffering. The needless pain and suffering. The cruel, heartless pain and suffering. There are also many things to feel differently about. The ambitions of people. The visions that people have. The joy that people have. The creativity that has been expressed in art and music and literature.

A (20:11)

And the genius. What happened for me is that in the first year of experiencing the ocean of suffering. When I would go through the crisis and go through a breaking point and surrender to that. Then I was taken for the first time into what I came to call deep time. And I was taken for a year and seven sessions. I experienced my entire life from beginning to end as a single totality. And I was given a set of insights into what my life was about. Into personal relationships that I was involved in, about my work at the university. But it was very kind of personal. It was at the psychic level of transpersonal experience. And then I stopped my work for six years. For reasons I describe in the book. And when I resumed six years later. The ocean of suffering began exactly where it had stopped. And it kept getting deeper and deeper, worse and worse. But what was happening in the ecstatic portion of those sessions. Is that I entered what I call the initiation into the universe. I was being initiated. I was like. I was given a crash course in Cosmology 101. Being given a series of experiences. That far transcended my individual life. And opened me to some of the fundamental metaphysical truths of existence. In that process, as that process continued to deepen. I kept being immersed in the collective psyche of humanity. And I was being basically taught. I've always had a sense of being guided in my sessions by a higher intelligence, a higher consciousness. That never manifested in any figural form. It never adopted a form. It was always invisible. But it was always there, always guiding. Me and instructing me. And so I dissolved in the collective psyche repeatedly and was taught ways and the ways in which our individual minds are part of our species mind. Even our individual diseases are part of the collective diseases that we are processing in history. And that everything we do individually, both the acquisition of our problems and the solution of those problems come from and radiate back into the collective psyche. And even our diseases come out of our humanity's stage of our evolutionary history. And as we heal those diseases, that healing goes out and ripples out into the collective. And that's the primary thing I was addressing in Dark Night, Early Dawn. I was beginning to understand that there is no such thing as private karma. It's all collective karma in the end. Just as there's no separate private identity, but always an interconnected web work of identity. There is no such thing as private karma. We're always drawing from and feeding back into the karma of our species. We're all growing together. We're all arm in arm. We're all developing it together. And this was sort of laid out for me over and over, clarity and clear and clear instructions. And it's very interesting. I mean, it would take me through a series of instructions and then double back and take me through it again and again until it was sure that I understood, and then we would go on to the next lesson.

B (23:42)

As if you were following a curriculum.

A (23:45)

It was. And it was not a curriculum of my own making. It didn't come out of my studies. It didn't come out of my reading. It was the only teacher I've ever had, and the only spiritual teacher I've ever had has been the universe. Out of this kind of profound encounter and communion and then surrendering and let it teach me whatever it wanted me to know.

B (24:08)

On the one hand, you're learning from the universe, and on the other hand, it's being facilitated by a very particular molecule.

A (24:17)

Yeah. Isn't that interesting?

B (24:18)

Yeah.

A (24:19)

Yeah. And of course, we have hundreds, thousands of molecules we find in nature that facilitate these amplified states of consciousness. It just happens that LSD happens to be a synthesized version that came from Albert Hoffman's work. But the fundamental dynamic is the same. It amplifies consciousness for a few hours at a time. And how you use that amplified state determines whether you're just having an enjoyable afternoon with the Grateful Dead or whether you're having a spiritually cleansing, purifying process that then opens you up into some of the deeper currents of the divine life.

B (25:02)

Well, it's very clear from your background which path you chose. I assume you weren't exactly a party animal.

A (25:12)

No, you know, I left the priesthood, but in some ways the priesthood never left me. And then as I learned more about the Eastern traditions and my meditation practice deepened and I was teaching courses on comparative mysticism and advanced courses on Buddhism, I always considered the spiritual teachers from multiple religious traditions to be my mentors. And trying to live up to the examples that they gave us in your.

B (25:41)

LSD sessions and the layers that you described, I would imagine that. But the next obvious layer after the consciousness of humanity as a whole, which is huge, would be the ecosystem of the planet that we share. Because our species is not isolated either.

A (26:01)

Absolutely. But it's interesting, my work didn't go in that direction. Many people's do, especially I think when they're using organic psychedelics like psilocybin or ayahuasca. Many people have deep experiences of the deeper web work of life and the fabric of life. Mine didn't. And over time, the best I've been able to understand why it went the way it went and didn't go is because humanity forms the greatest danger to life on this planet. We are the problem. And my work seemed to be really narrowly focused on helping transform, helping humanity transform its consciousness. And if humanity can come to a clarity and resolution of its negative karma and a spiritual awakening, then the planet will be safe, the planet can be revived, will be safe because we will not use our intellect in a way which is at the expense of other life forms. So I didn't go laterally. I just, I kind of went deeper. So what happened when I kind of, after spending years working at the collective level, I went through a process where I went through another cycle of birth and death. In the beginning I thought, oh, you go through ego death and that's the death. And then you enter into transpersonal reality, spiritual reality. What I found was that that's not quite so easy, that there are multiple layers of death that you go through as you go into deeper and deeper layers of the universe. So after I had been working kind of at the collective layer for some time, I went through a process where my entire identity as a human being began to fall away from me. And I found that we have, we have an identity which is deeper than our personal identity. And just as ego death, your personal identity falls away, still you have a human identity which is underneath. And that began to fall away. And when that fell away, all the stories, all the mythologies, all the theologies, all the religions of the world fell away. And I entered into states of consciousness that were radically beyond human history. It was as if it had the quality like being in the space station, International Space Station, far above the earth. And all the details of the earth are just falling away. And I was in a world of extraordinary quiet stillness. And then a new round of teaching began. And the new round of teaching was taking me into archetypal reality. The layers of reality that are beyond the layers that stand in between the unitive source from which all life springs. And yet it unfolds in layers. And some of those layers we call archetypal. Not one layer, but multiple layers. They structure, they manifest. They create time and space. They manifest time and space. They're the fundamental constitutive processes that lead to time and space as we know it. And then I spent a couple years working there.

B (29:28)

Well, that's very interesting. I had a mentor years ago, Arthur M. Young, who was a cosmologist and an inventor. And he would sometimes poke us with a question. It was, how do you reconcile being single, unique, individual, separate from everything, and at the same time one with everything?

A (29:53)

Yeah, that is the paradox, isn't it?

B (29:56)

And he said the answer is in what he called the realm of mythos, mythology, or the archetypal realm, is the realm that connects the two.

A (30:07)

Interesting. Yeah, I can understand that. You know, in some spiritual traditions, they sacrifice the individual. And the vision is that when you achieve realization or spiritual awakening, you dissolve as a drop in the ocean. You return to the ocean, the drop dissolves, and you are now one with the divine. And there is no more individual, separate individual at all. But that's not been my experience. My experience has been that the boundaries of the individual are radically expanded. The commerce with the surround is radically expanded. There is no separate individuality, but there is nevertheless an individuality. I've come to believe that individuality is one of the great gifts that the physical universe gives us. And that gift is not simply to be returned when we're make contact with unitive reality. But actually there is a suffusion that union actually requires a highly developed individuality to sustain it. And then individuality allows us to enter, to grow and be nourished by this communion and to become a deeper kind of individuality than we were at earlier stages. But always there is this. There are these two fundamental truths, the truth of oneness and the truth of individuality, which shares and receives that interconnected truth that Buddhism emphasizes so much, the truth of interdependent co arising.

B (31:48)

Interdependent co arising. It's as if the self creation of the universe.

A (31:55)

Yes. And we are part of that. We're part of the manifestation. We're part of its evolutionary journey, and we are its children. And we are an edge as it explores itself.

B (32:10)

Here's where I get stuck a little bit, and I think maybe you can help me through this impasse. If you're dealing in the archetypal realm as you've described. To my understanding, all of the archetypes that we know are expressed in human terms. The father archetype, the mother archetype, the hero, and so on. But you're also saying that you move beyond human terms. So how do the archetypes manifest when you're beyond the human side of things?

A (32:44)

Yeah, good question. You know, I experienced archetypes that affirmed Jung's understanding of the collective psyche. But I didn't experience archetypes the way he describes archetypes. I didn't experience the wise old man or the wise woman or the tropester trickster. I didn't experience archetypes in that form. I don't. Not saying they don't exist, it's just not how I experienced it. The other major voice in archetypes is Plato, who conceptualize archetypes as unchanging ideas in the mind of an eternal being. So they are the blueprints, the unchanging blueprints which are used in creation. And I didn't experience archetypes in that way either. I experienced archetypes as vast, massive beings living on a different order of time, a different order of reality. So vast that I literally could not wrap my mind around them. I could not see them. The closest I could come to seeing them, my mind imaged them as galaxies. You know, just vast, completely different order, and not static like galaxies moving very slow relative to a solar system spin, but deliberately and on a different scale of existence. And that's how I experience archetypes. Not human, not in any human form, profoundly transcendent to the human project, and yet crystallizing the human project as their own intention. So the basic image that comes down is kind of classic Sri Aurobindo kind of image, where the one cascades into layers and layers and layers. And some of those layers we called archetypal. And I guess if we get down to the lower layers, we may find wise old man, wise old woman, those human forms. But at the deeper levels, we're looking at the cosmic principles of creation, the living beings that kind of manifest time and space and orders within time and space. But I only spent about a Year and a half, touching these realities, which is a pittance, in no way an exhaustive account of them. And then I was moved on into another layer, even beyond the archetypes. Beyond the archetypes? Beyond the archetypes. Because the archetypes emerge out of a deeper level of reality. A non, dual, a unitive, a oneness that births existence. You know, the primal void out of which the Big Bang emerges. Archetypes come. I want to say they come later, but they come. There is a distance between the One which is the origin, and then where we are. Where everything. The 10,000 pieces, as the Tao Te Ching says, the 10,000 beings. But, yeah, beyond the archetypes. And it was after I went through the archetypes. And after I had begun to experience some of the early stories of the way the humanity functions as a single organism. I began to have experiences there of reincarnation, not of individual souls. I had some extraordinarily broad experiences of experiencing the entire human family pulsing in reincarnation every hundred years or so. Another generation coming in and dying, living their lives. And I began to experience that there is a genuine sense in which it's not only individuals who reincarnate. But individuals are cells within the body of humanity. Which is incarnating and growing and becoming more collectively, but as a body, as a single being. And we are all parts of that being. And there is no private karma within this being. There is only the pulsing and nourishing of collective karma. As we grow individually, as it grows unitively as a species on this little piece of the corner of the galaxy. And then, after spending time in that territory, I went into a year of experiences in the book I call the Benediction of Blessings. It was just a cascade of extraordinarily deep experiences. That we recognize from the mystical traditions. One of them, for example, was a deep experience of shunyata, emptiness of self, where there is no self inside of you. You're experiencing the world and its diversity, but there's no self here. There's no self there. There's no self anywhere. The whole system is living and breathing as one. Just. It's a living experience of oneness. And that's when I began to understand that no self and oneness are two different sides of the same coin. Because if you have the experience of no self, then you naturally open up into the oneness of life. And if you open into the oneness of life, then you experience the transparency of all supposedly separate selves. There are no separate selves. Everything is living and breathing together. And I had an experience of the cosmic void, of going beyond all time and space into something which I think might have be some approximation of the field of reality out of which existence sprang, out of which the Big Bang came formless, and yet the source of all eventual forms, well known themes in mystical traditions. And I had an experience, one of divine love, just an overwhelming assault of touching, just briefly, the love that lies at the fount of creation, which is jarring for me because I was prepared to understand that there was great genius and intelligence and power behind creation, but that there was love. That creation was an act of love in service of some much larger cosmic process. I had not anticipated that before, but this love was so overwhelming, it just took me, broke me down into absolute core warmed places in me that had been cold for so many lifetimes. And then one of the last experiences there I had the experience that I came to call the birth of the Diamond Soul. Reincarnation had been part of my thinking for a long time by this point. But in the context of a long teaching session, I began to experience all my lives coming back into me one by one. And I had done past life therapy for three years. I was familiar with about a dozen or so lives and healed and had been healed by them and all that kind of stuff. But these were coming back in very fast, just coming back into me. And we reached a point where they fused, they became one. And when they fused, there was an extraordinary explosion in my heart. And that was an explosion of diamond light. And I was catapulted into a state beyond anything I had been in before. And I was an individual, so the individual was there, but it was a soul individuality, not an egoic individuality. And it was an individuality that was functioning on a different order, a different scale than anything I had known before. And I think what I was being shown was part of the story of where reincarnation is taking us. Because it wasn't. Anything that happens to me is happening to other people. So it's nothing private about it. And I was being shown that reincarnation is not simply about achieving some spiritual breakthrough or some condition of enlightenment and then you get to leave. But reincarnation is taking humanity's building a fundamental structure which becomes a new form for evolution to continue. And that new form is what we can think of as the soul, which for me is the intelligence, the consciousness that holds all of our former lives, all of our lives, between lives. Everything which we've ever experienced is held in that intelligence. And I think what's happening is that the soul, which most people experience only when they die and they return to their natural spiritual condition, that if we expand into the soul and we contract into ego and expand in the soul, sooner or later that soul is waking up inside humanity and the soul becomes our true identity, our living identity. And I think we're seeing this in our great spiritual teachers, that they're speaking out of a different sense of reality, a different identity. And I think we're all going there.

B (42:09)

Well, that's beautifully put. You're very eloquent and you're taking very, very subtle, delicate ideas and putting them into English, trying to. You're doing a magnificent job. Very few people, I think, could communicate as much as you just did.

A (42:27)

Well, you know, I waited 20 years after I stopped my sessions in 1999. I waited 20 years before I tried to tell the story of the trajectory of those sessions in LSD and the Mind of the Universe that was published in 2019. When I finished my sessions in my meditation, a voice said to me, 20 years in, 20 years out. And I thought, oh, okay, that means it'll take me maybe 20 years to internalize everything that I'd experienced in the 20 years of the journey. Now I'm coming to understand that that was probably an optimistic read, that it really will take many lifetimes to integrate these experiences. But I do think that it's a significance that there was 20 years on the journey and then 20 years after the journey before writing the book. So I really have had a lot of time to think about these things and of course to teach about them with my students.

B (43:26)

How many total LSD trips were included in this journey?

A (43:31)

73.

B (43:32)

73.

A (43:34)

Couldn't we get it rounded up to 75? We got to 73 and the universe kicked me out. It basically said, you're done. That's it. I didn't know I was done. But the last two sessions are what I call the goodbye sessions. It just really. They wrapped it up, they gave me an overview, they showed me how everything fit together, how what I was doing at different stages. And then it gave me one last set of teachings, personal teachings, as it let me go.

B (44:02)

So you haven't had any LSD since then?

A (44:06)

I haven't done any serious high dose LSD work since then. I've done some work with psychedelics, with psilocybin, with some ayahuasca, a little bit with five meo, DMT and San Pedro, but low dose, nothing pushing the boundaries that I had been pushing before. In fact, after I Stopped. And I really haven't done much psychedelics at all. But what little I have done has been focused on integrating what I had experienced in those deep sessions, not trying to push the boundaries any further boundaries.

B (44:41)

And we should mention you are not recommending or encouraging other people to do what you did.

A (44:48)

Absolutely. In fact, I discourage. Every time I'm giving talks, I discourage people from doing what I did in the sense that I'm not discouraging them from using psychedelics, but discouraging them from using the protocol that I did, which was a systematic constant, working with high doses on about five times a year, pushing and pushing the blowing your mind apart, entering into some communion, congealing again. It's just that when you do it that aggressively, it becomes a very demanding lifestyle. You spend so much of your energy having to navigate the ramifications of your experiences, of having to manage the implications of it, the physical, subtle energy ramifications. And I also had a sense in the beginning, I thought there was an endpoint to the journey. I thought the goal was to get to some definite endpoint, whether diamond mind, luminosity, diamond mind, or oneness with God or the metacosmic void. But what I found is that oneness with God. There are many permutations of oneness with God. There are many variations, and there are even variations of formlessness. There are permutations of that. And then I had this one experience in the middle of the diamond luminosity years where I was cooking in diamond luminosity. I was totally absorbed, totally happy, ecstatically in this hyper, hyper clarity. And then my visual field opened 90 degrees, it turned, and I saw reality far in the distance. And I saw reality there. And a light hit me from that reality and it hit me. And it just instantly transported me into a reality even beyond the diamond luminosity. And it lasted only a second or two. But then it totally changed my understanding, my cosmology, because that's when I understood that it's truly an infinite universe that we are in. We'll never get to the end of it, no matter how long we work. We just get to some deeper balancing point between the infinite and our individuality. Now that I know that if I were doing it over again, I would be much gentler on myself. I would work with lower doses. I would be more patient for the longer term journey. Because it isn't about getting to some end point. It's about your living relationship with the infinity that we are all part of. And you can to go deeper is not necessarily to get more. It's a balance, it's a balancing act.

B (47:36)

Well, that's a lot to digest. Many, many different visions. And obviously incorporating those visions into your life, has it changed you in terms of your mission in life or your purpose?

A (47:56)

It has changed me deeply and I wish it had resulted in a permanent, abiding state of enlightenment as one classically would love to enjoy. And it hasn't produced that, but it has changed me deeply. It's changed my understanding of life. It's given me a felt sense of relaxation and enjoyment. The religious traditions that I had studied professionally, essentially, they're all essentially with variations up and out cosmologies. You achieve salvation, grace or enlightenment and you come to some understanding. And then you're released from the wheel of Samsara. You're released into some trans Samsaric reality, extra Samsara reality to enjoy bliss and some off planet paradise. Over time I came to understand that transcendence is only the midpoint of the journey. To discover the truth of existence is a wonderful thing. To touch God, to understand that your nature and the divine nature are the same reality, that's a wonderful thing. But that's only the midpoint of the journey. The other point, the other half is bringing it in here, living it inside time and space. And that's a long, long process. My sessions told me toward the end, there's the dying of seeing and the dying of holding. The dying of seeing I had done the dying you have to go through to see and experience the communion. But the dying of holding begins after the sessions or after your journey. And that's been occupying me for all the years since 1999. And that's a long process. But along the way there's a peace that comes, a relaxation and an appreciation of the beauty and the genius that we are surrounded by continuously. And when you work at a university, you know, the primary religion of the university is science. And science is magnificent. You know, I love science, but it's been mixed with this reductive materialism, this carryover from 19th century thought which is so debilitating. And this vision that it's all chance, it's all screened by necessity, brute. And there's no intrinsic meaning to our existence and there's certainly no guidance. And that's a very debilitating philosophy for undergraduates to absorb in their life.

B (50:28)

I mean, that philosophy would suggest that all of these profound experiences you've just described were drug induced hallucinations.

A (50:38)

Absolutely. They have no existential value, no philosophical value, they're meaningless. But those Ideas are usually held by people who have never had any of these experiences. People who have those experiences quickly change their mind and they realize the truth of the experiences. Even though, you know, it's not like no experience is absolute. You know, it's not to privilege over privilege anyone's experience. What's important, I think, is not what any one person experiences, but what all of us experience together. And it's putting all of our experiences on the table together. Where we can sift out what's. What's ephemeral, what's transitory, what's idiosyncratic from what is really common ground. And that I think we're going to be moving more and more into in the years ahead. What's common ground?

B (51:29)

Your book the Living Classroom, is coming out or has just come out recently in a new edition. And in that edition, you go back and observe how your psychedelic work of many decades ago, which was profound and which you kept hidden from your students and your colleagues, actually was influencing them nonetheless.

A (51:55)

Yeah, the classroom was kind of like a test case for actually testing some of the metaphysical implications of these visionary experiences, where you learn the essence of oneness, that there is a fundamental oneness within which we all exist. Like we're all in a pool. And anything, any ripples we make or touches everybody in the pool. My students didn't know anything about my psychedelic work. Even when I taught psychedelics, I was teaching Stan Grof's work. I never let them know that I was doing this work myself. It was illegal, and I couldn't let them know. And yet I found that they were being touched by my experiences. When I would be going into deeper breakthrough levels. I found that they were beginning to be activated in their own lives just by being around me, just by encountering some of the ideas. And I found that there was a certain transparency developing in my mind. Which I was not aware of in the beginning. And I was powerless to control. But I would just be lecturing on an ordinary day, and I would be reaching for an example to crystallize some point, to make it real. And I began to have students come up to me after class and say things like, it's funny you use that example that you used today. Because that's exactly what happened to me this week. And I was not aware of making any paranormal contact with them. And at first I thought, okay, that's happenstance. I was taught to treat that as trivial. But it kept happening, and it kept happening over and over. And I began to realize something deeper was happening. And I had to understand it. And it took me a long time to really begin to understand the fundamental ways in which fields of consciousness work and energetic resonance works. So I found that my sessions and my immersion into these deep transcendent states had changed my psychic makeup in some way that made me kind of as a lightning rod sparking transformation in those of my students who are receptive to this type of influence. And it wasn't by conscious intention on my part or design. In fact, I had to learn how to manage and control these forces. How do you ensure freedom of consent and free will when this is operating so unconsciously in the room? And I developed a. A different way of teaching what you might call a quantum pedagogy in contrast to a Newtonian pedagogy. And it's not to pretend that individual minds don't exist. But there is that second part, the quantum fields in which all of our minds are within a field of mind. And so I developed strategies to begin to take advantage of this, to empower their learning by using exercises in the classroom that drew upon the strength and power of these collective fields. And when I first wrote the Living Classroom, I didn't mention psychedelics at all because it was 2008. I didn't want psychedelics to be a red herring that would prevent these ideas from being used by teachers up and down, you know, from K to graduate schools. But then later, after I had written LSD in the Mind of the Universe and I was out of the psychedelic closet and I was no longer working at the university, Sunni invited me to tell the truth in the second edition. And so there I tell the truth that what I refer to in the first edition as spiritual practices that were taking me deeper into that ground, those pre or practices was my psychedelic practice. And so I'm owning the fact that it really is the LSD in the Mind of the Universe is the backstory to the Living Classroom. And I might mention that I had been wrestling with the ideas from the Living Classroom, but the entire book was downloaded in 10 minutes in one session. It just dropped in clear. And took me years to work out all the details. But the fundamental solution why my students were being activated dropped in in 10 minutes. And it was so clear when I got to my notes and I looked at all again, I didn't even write down the details. I knew I had it.

B (56:28)

Would you say that your psychedelic experiences affected your aura?

A (56:35)

One could even deeper. I mean, I kind of, you know, Alex Gray's painting and his paintings are magnificent. And he's very Good at depicting the enormous energy that psychedelics can activate. And so his figures are figures on fire. And that's very true. Even after the session is over, your subtle energy system is running more powerfully than it had run previously. And this energy is, it's contagious. States of consciousness are contagious, negative states are contagious, positive states are contagious. And it's just a natural fact of nature. So my energy was triggering their energy. Now most people were not activated in this way, but those who were receptive were activated.

B (57:28)

And then I imagine it fed back to you and influenced you yet again.

A (57:33)

Yeah. So there was often a feedback loop that would happen. I would say something, it would open up them, there would be more energy come into the room, I would receive it, it would affect me. Sometimes there was so much creativity in the room that after the class was over, I would copy down the blackboard because I had gotten insights and seeing things that I had not seen as clearly, quite as clearly before that time.

B (57:59)

Now I've used LSD a lot myself and probably over 100 times. Not as methodically as you have done, but still with the intent of doing it for self awareness and spiritual purposes. And it's led me to be where I am today. I suppose I have no regrets whatsoever, but, but it can be a little bit debilitating. A heavy dose of LSD leaves one like the next day kind of exhausted.

A (58:34)

Exhausted? Yeah, there is. When you open in those deep states, you open your to very high energy levels of awareness. And I learned that every deeper level of consciousness functions at a higher level of energy. So when you go into those deep levels, you're opening into high energy. And after it's all over, you can feel tired, your subtle energy system can feel achy. And the more I began to appreciate the cost of each session to your body, the more I began to prepare more conscientiously for each session. So I would do certain spiritual practices before a session and then deeper different practices, soul integration practices after a session. I would make sure I would have a chiropractic adjustment and a massage before a session. Because I wanted my system to be as balanced and open as possible to handle what was about to happen. But it does, it takes days. I find that there's a 24 hour window, then there's kind of a three day window, about a 10 day window and a one month window and it closes gradually. And that's one of the things I emphasize if you're working systematically with psychedelics to have a daily spiritual Practice. And the deeper you're working with psychedelics, the more important it is to have a daily spiritual practice because it helps you stabilize what opens you in those experiences, stabilize it and also helps you process the enormous energy that otherwise would build up in my body. And by doing spiritual practice and meditation, it gave that energy a place to run in between sessions. So it is challenging. It takes time. It's not to be taken lightly.

B (60:22)

Have you looked into the physiological aspects of lsd? How it might work? I know there are different theories. Does it activate the brain to push you into a higher level or is it the opposite? Does it deactivate or activate parts and deactivate other parts?

A (60:40)

Yeah, the default. Turning off the default mode network and opening up, you know, I pay attention to that and I try to follow it. I'm not a scientist, so I don't pretend to be a scientist, but for the most part I let the science guys work out, hold on to those details. And I find that when they are interpreting the physiological data that they get, they usually are working it within some set of metaphysical assumptions. And some of those metaphysical assumptions are more adequate than others. And my metaphysical experience is rather extreme. And so some of that stuff doesn't seem to me to be getting at the core. Some of it does. Shutting down the default mode and default mode network opens us up greater creativity and whatnot. But I think that much of that discussion still doesn't appreciate the depth of cosmological access that can be that opens in deep psychedelic experiences. One of the problems, I think, in our history, our intellectual history around psychedelics is that many fundamental or influential accounts were written after only handful of experiences. So the Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley, wonderful book. After one experience.

B (62:06)

He was a great writer.

A (62:08)

He was a great writer and a great thinker. When Houston Smith wrote Cleansing the Doors of Perception, which is his collection of his writings on psychedelics, he had only taken LSD six times. And after that he said the bummers increased and he decided to hang up the phone. Take Alan Watts experience. But that sort of thing underestimates what can happen if you don't hang up the phone, if you keep going back to the well. And when Michael Pollan wrote his book, a very important, helpful book, how to Change youe Mind, he had only taken psychedelics a handful of times, which I think helps explain some of the limitations of his interpretation of how psychedelics work that come in the end of the book. I think it's important for us to not just look at the first few experiences that open, but what opens in a long lineage of experiences. And here we have a lot to learn from the indigenous cultures who have been working with psychedelics for thousands of years. And they have a long lifetime of working with these states. And there are advanced chapters that open in the book only after the preliminary chapters have been digested.

B (63:22)

Well, I was about to say that I thought you probably identified yourself as a philosophical idealist. Now I'm not so sure because I don't think that indigenous cultures would necessarily go along with that.

A (63:40)

Yeah, yeah. And you know, every psychedelic has a certain spectrum. It operates on a certain spectrum of consciousness from even low dose to high dose. But generally there's a certain range that it activates. And I think LSD tends to what I think of as kind of a high altitude psychedelic. It tends to operate, activate at higher levels, very high cosmological levels, something like psilocybin, which is such a wonderful psychedelic, which is so body oriented and heart oriented, emotional oriented. It tends to operate at a different level, a lower level in some ways, but a rich level. And so we have to look at each particular psychedelic, the spectrum of consciousness that it activates, how we can work with each one. And then we start to put the puzzle together. Does what we learn from psilocybin, how does that mesh with what we learn from ayahuasca and lsd? Pretty soon we start to have a larger landscape that's waiting for us in these states.

B (64:47)

Now, I know you are on the board of directors of the Grof Institute, isn't that correct?

A (64:54)

Yeah, I'm on the advisory board of Grof Legacy Training. Yeah, I see myself very much in Stan's lineage. He was the one who. His books gave me the confidence to go where I eventually went. And if I push the boundaries of his paradigm a little bit here and there, I still feel myself very strongly within his lineage.

B (65:19)

Well, if I understand it correctly, and I did know Stan quite well in the days when I lived in California, did many interviews with him. I am under the impression that his thrust was that there are ways to achieve psychedelic states through breathing exercises and through other methods that don't involve molecules.

A (65:48)

Yeah, yeah. And he's done that and demonstrated that in worldwide workshops and teachings. And you can't make breathing illegal. And all you have to do is breathe deeply in a precise kind of way in carefully controlled circumstances. And you act, you amplify consciousness, and the same mechanisms begin to be activated that can be activated with a psychedelic substance. So to me, psychedelics are not to the point. It's the nature of consciousness that is to the point. Psychedelics amplify consciousness, but it's consciousness that does the work. And that's why there's a fundamental convergence of the vision of reality that emerges in the great non psychedelic spiritual contemplative traditions and the psychedelic traditions. We're not discovering a new universe, we're discovering the same universe using a different set of techniques to explore that universe.

B (66:47)

But I presume you're not actively engaged in training holotropic therapy.

A (66:53)

No, I made a choice long ago not to function clinically. I think that's a different set of skills. You require a different set of training to when you work with other people, taking other people into these states. You have to not only know what you're doing from having your own experiences in these states, but you should have a good strong clinical grounding so you can recognize when things are not going well and how to work with other people. I decided to function as an explorer, as a solitary explorer, to push the boundaries as far as I could and then to bring back and share what I had learned with other people. And I find that people who respond to LSD in the mind of the universe, many of them are psychedelic people themselves, but many of them are not. Many of them have just have a long lifelong practice in meditation or yoga. And they recognize a parallel between what they've experienced and what I'm describing. And I think that's really important. It's consciousness that does the work.

B (67:59)

Well, I totally agree with you about that, and I guess that's the main thrust of our YouTube channel as well. But I wonder, now that you're retired, would you say that your emphasis is to share with people what you learned long ago taking lsd? Or is it more that your emphasis is to help save humanity from itself?

A (68:30)

Well, we haven't touched yet on what's happening to humanity as a whole. But yeah, I guess first it took me a long time. You know, I really try to be candid in the book. The last chapter of the book is called Coming off the Mountain. And that was the longest chapter to write. It took me a year to write that chapter because I had to really come to terms with what happened. When I stopped my sessions. I thought having I was carefully attending to integration all the way up the mountain, really trying to live the values that I had been shown, trying to maintain other forms of spiritual practice. And I thought that when it was time to stop, that I would simply be able to withdraw and hold on to those gems and let them nourish me. But what I found was that I had entered so deeply so many times into the crystalline body of divinity that I began to experience an existential kind of sadness. I knew I had to stop. My body was telling me, my mind was telling me I had to stop. And I knew I would never enter into these states again as deeply until I died. You can't enter these states simply by meditating very firmly, not these radical states. And the sadness of not being able to enter into communion with my beloved for years was very hard at first. It took me a long time, it took me about 10 years to really become committed to, to living on this planet again with feet solidly grounded. Which is another reason why I wouldn't encourage people to do what I did. Because I knew that somewhere along the line I had made a mistake. And I didn't know where that mistake was. And I turned to examine my history to find out where the mistake was. And I began to realize that I had lost the balance, the critical balance between transcendence and, and immanence, between going, leaving time space and going into the infinite and then being grounded in time space, which is the other important truth. And I was basically overextended. I was spiritually overextended. And I made a conscious decision to ground myself inside the planet in my life. But the second reason that it was hard is because I wasn't allowed to talk about my experiences. I'm a teacher. I love to share information. I wasn't allowed to share that information. So writing LSD in the mind of the universe was the beginning of healing that wound of silence so that I could take the two. I had split my life in two hearts. I was a professor and I was a psychonaut. But finally being honest about my experiences allowed those to come back together. And I began to be whole within myself. And that process continues. So what I've been asking myself and see the years since LSD and the Mind of the Universe has been published is how can I be useful? How can I make this unusual journey which I've taken useful to other people without. I'm not teaching them to go into these states. I'm not holding their hand while they go into these states. That's other people's work. The holotropic breathwork people, the other psychedelic therapists. That's what they're doing. I'm basically first. I don't really have an agenda. I'm comfortable just being, writing my life out as it is. I don't have any felt need to Accomplish anything or to do anything. But I like to be helpful. I'd like to be useful. And I think that means convening circles of conversation around the themes of the book. Drawing people in, inviting people in who have psychedelic experiences. Drawing people in who have spiritual experiences without any psychedelics involved. So that we can together process the deeper mysteries of life that psychedelics can reveal. And slowly that seems to be taking shape. I basically go where I'm invited. I don't really seek invitations. But if people want to have conversations about these things, I'm happy to go there.

B (73:03)

Well, you're certainly invited to come back here.

A (73:08)

Yeah. Now we go to. Actually, one of the most surprising aspect of the journey was insights into where humanity is in its spiritual evolution and where it's going, which I didn't even. I had no idea that this was possible when I went into this work. But it actually became one of the dominant motifs of the work. And I kept on having visions over a six year period of humanity coming to a turning point, Coming to a before and after history, epic making turning point. That we were going into a time of profound spiritual awakening, profound spiritual breakthrough. And this went on for years, but it never showed me how we were going to get there. I looked around, I didn't see us. I saw us heading to the mall and to the football stadium as much as to a spiritual breakthrough. And then I had that experience in one session which took me deeply into the future. Not as crisp, but again dissolved into the collective psyche. And gave me the experience of the death and rebirth that humanity is coming into. A time of profound deconstruction. A time of loss of control. A time of great existential suffering. Which is global, not national or individual. It's just global and time which will. The suffering will be so severe, at least in my experience, that we might think it will be an extinction event. That we are coming to the end of the line for humanity on this planet. We've so overdrawn and overtaxed our systems. But at least in my experiences, I was shown that we come through this experience. We're reduced in number, but we come through this experience. And something about the depth of suffering that we encounter opens us up at the deepest level of our being. It opens our heart and it opens our mind. And there were a lot of teachings around nonlinear systems. And what happens when the collective psyche, the collective unconscious, is activated to such a deep level. But that in this period of history, we are giving birth to the next iteration of humanity. And I think it has to do with the birth of the diamond soul, I think we are coming. We can no longer afford to live in a planet which is being run by egos, even well intentioned egos. We need to grow up if we're really going to survive as a species. And I think growing up means growing into the great age which has been gestating within us for thousands and thousands of years. Letting that age express itself and taking us forward. So I think that we are coming into a time of intense suffering, intense labor, but magnificent outcome. The birth of the future human is the birth of a. And many, many people have this insight. They have these insights. The indigenous people have these insights.

B (76:14)

I'm aware of that. We've done other interviews with visionary thinkers who see this and I always wonder though, can we be sure we're going to come out of the crisis? It seems to me we're very close, close to extinction. As far as I know, the future isn't fixed. There's no guarantee that we're going to pull through.

A (76:39)

No probabilities, extrapolating probabilities. And it does look very dire. And some very wise and well informed individuals think that we're already extinct. We just don't know it. Root living out the last years of an exhausted planet. And I understand that and I don't have an empirical evidence that would argue against that. All I have is my visionary experience. And I've had experiences of the future human. And in the last great vision of my journey was in the 70th session, the last vision, it stripped me down mercilessly. It was a largest strip down, deepest strip down I went through in any of my journeys. And it took me eventually deep into the future. And it gave me a series of teachings, but the core of it was, and it gave me an experience of the future human. So that for me and the future human that I experience is just, Just magnificent. It's not an improved humanity. It's a radical shift in the fundamental baseline of humanity. So for me, I cannot doubt that we will make it through it because I've been given the experience that we do make it through it. But I understand it is everything. We have to reach deep because there are no guarantees in nature. We have to reach deep and work very hard to realize the opportunity that's coming our way.

B (78:20)

Well, Chris Bache, what a magnificent time to share with you the ups and downs of this glorious vision. I'm so glad that you've come to Albuquerque to be with me and to open up your heart and your soul to me and to the New Thinking Allowed audience. Chris, thank you so much.

A (78:45)

Thank you Jeff. It's been a wonderful conversation and I'm honored deeply you who have been in this field for so long and touched so many people's lives. It's true privilege to sit with you.

B (78:56)

Well, I am honored to sit with you. I can tell you that someone who has explored psychedelics just about as far as possible. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here. For early access to our videos and live stream events, sign up for our free weekly newsletter at new thinking thinking allowed.org.

A (79:57)

Book four in the new Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.

B (80:12)

New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org.