Diamonds From Heaven

LSD and the Mind of the Universe

by Christopher M. Bache, Ph.D.

(2019 | Park Street Press)

The book is beautifully written labour of love. I think the author has done a great service to humanity on a par with other great explorers. He has navigated his way beyond the horizon, and drawn us a map.

Chris Bache (above) is professor emeritus in Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, Ohio, where he taught for 33 years.

Between the ages of 30 and 50 (1979 to 1999) he undertook a secret, twenty-year exploration of consciousness using very high doses of LSD. This became his life’s work. He had to keep quiet about, though, to protect his career, family and reputation. Even then, he remained silent while he overcame a dark night of the soul and integrated his experiences.  

Now over 70, he is ‘going public’ with his great experiment.

Psychedelic explorations

Secret quest

Bache was first introduced to the idea of psychedelics in 1978, when he read Stanislav Grof’s great book, Realms of the Human Unconscious. Grof wrote about his early explorations with LSD, both on himself and with his psychiatric patients.

Grof found that by re-experiencing the personal root of an emotional complex, such as birth trauma, our experience will expand from personal to transpersonal levels, often with profound spiritual insights. 

On reading all this, Bache felt compelled to explore the hidden depths of consciousness and reality for himself. Having graduated in philosophy with a special interest in religion and spirituality, he saw Grof’s use of LSD as a way to discover more about reality.

LSD had been illegal for ten years, however, so it had to be a secret undertaking. 

Bache wanted to go as deep as possible and see how far he could break through into the spiritual reams. He committed to an extended series of sessions. These began in 1979, and reached a natural conclusion in 1999.

Ultimately, there were 73 sessions in total, with gaps of several months from one to the next, and all meticulously recorder for posterity.

Dosage

Bache knew from Grof and others that for psychotherapeutic work with LSD, dosages tend to be around 200 micrograms. This opens up the psyche sufficiently to allow therapeutic processing of personal material as it emerges. 

At higher doses of, say, 300-500 micrograms, the experience is much more intense and takes on a more mystical flavour.  

Bache worked with even higher dosages of 500-600 micrograms precisely to see what happens if you push the psychedelic experience as far as you can take it.  With hindsight, he does not recommend anyone else to do the same over an extended period of time.

Protocol

Bache says that it was important to stick to a regular, well-defined protocol for his psychedelic sessions.

He always kept to the same environment (a room at home) and the same sitter (his wife). The sitter would be on hand to keep an eye on him and do things like pass the sick bucket whenever needed.

Taking his cue from Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork sessions, Bache included in his sessions a soundtrack of emotionally intense, varied music (classical music, world music, etc).  The sitter could change the music on request.

The day right after any session, Bache would return to the room and play all the same music again in order to recall his entire experience and faithfully write it all down. 

Intention

It is well known that both set and setting are crucial in priming the quality of a psychedelic experience. ‘Set’ refers one’s mindset or intent. 

Bache’s initial goal was to see if he could achieve personal liberation or enlightenment. As a philosopher of religion, Bache understood the eastern concept of liberation from suffering and the cycle of rebirth. He wondered if working through the lessons of his karma on LSD would be a fast track to enlightenment.

By the end, however, his whole understanding was different.

While he came to believe in the evolution of the soul through reincarnation and karma, he did not see any urgent need for personal liberation from the process. Rather, the individual soul’s journey is all part of a much bigger dynamic of cosmic evolution, unfolding in its own good time.

The ‘liberation’ of the individual soul is no more significant than the continuing evolution of all life, which in turn is an integral part of an eternal process of exploration by the divine itself, within itself. 

Over time, then, Bache’s intention in the sessions shifted from personal liberation to serving the divine. 

Session phases

Typically, every session went through two phases:

1. Purification (painful)
2. Transcendence (ecstatic)

Purification

Purification involves discovering and working through difficult, often painful material that is not yet incorporated and accepted into one’s overall experience of ‘self’. For example, there might be unresolved shame or guilt around one’s behaviour in relation to others. 

The purification phase would always keep Bache immersed in something until it came to a crisis or peak. Sometimes the focus of purification was purely personal; sometimes it was on a more collective level (e.g., ancestral karma). This would finally transform only whenever Bache dropped all resistance and fully opened up to experience the suffering that was being revealed, whether that suffering was his own, or another person’s, or the whole of humanity’s. 

Sometimes the purification phase didn’t reach a conclusion in one session. In the next session, though, it would simply pick up exactly where it had left off. 

Transcendence

Transcendence involves a breakthrough into higher levels of consciousness. This is usually blissful and profoundly illuminating. To get there, however, the purification process must be followed through to a peak, culminating in a death-and-rebirth experience.

Once the purification phase reached a peak and something was resolved, a window to the transcendent would then open up. The extent of ecstatic transcendence that followed would correlate with the depth of purification that had just taken place. 

Over time, as the purification process continued into deeper and deeper levels of conflict, the transcendent phase likewise extended to higher and higher levels of consciousness and bliss. 

Bache soon learned to start a session by tuning into any kind of pain or discomfort in his current experience, as this served to initiate and accelerate a purification process. 

Real-life effects

Bache found the inability to share what he was doing extremely difficult. It became a kind of torment. 

On the other hand, however, he noticed that his heightened energy and consciousness were having an unconscious effect on his university classes. Students would ask questions and he would intuitively know the answer they needed to hear. Or, he would come up with an example during a lecture, only to be told by a student that the example was exactly what they needed to hear at that moment. 

This became such a common effect that he wrote a book, The Living Classroom, in which he suggested that when people intentionally collaborate, as in the classroom setting, a collective field of consciousness is created and developed. The longer this field is engaged, the more alive it becomes. 

Realms of consciousness/reality

Bache consistently encountered certain realms or levels of consciousness again and again, so he is confident about the following ‘map’. 

Personal reality

The first level is purely personal. This is where one’s everyday ego-consciousness meets one’s personal unconscious with its repressed feelings, memories and other material from one’s own life. This level of experience is also immersed in the normal, physical realm of space and time which each of us inhabits while in human form.

Subtle reality

Beyond the familiar level of one’s personal mind lie more subtle realms, which are normally invisible to human consciousness. One’s sense of self at this level is no longer as a human being in the physical realm of space and time, but is that of an evolving consciousness in ‘deep time’, where entire human lifetimes are like short intervals. 

Bache identifies two distinct layers or sub-levels: 

One subtle level that broadens out from one’s individual experience to incorporate the collective experience of mankind. This taps into a sort of ‘species-mind’ or ‘human soul’ that contains the feelings, images and memories of people generally, or the whole of humanity. 

For example, Bache underwent a long-lasting process of experiencing femininity and womanhood. This, he later realised, was orchestrated so as to steer him past his identification with being a man. To move through the experience of female suffering, he had to give up his sense of identity as a ‘man’ and accept the female experience as equally his own. 

‘Above’ or ‘behind’ the collective experiences of humanity, Bache encountered the deeper archetypal dynamics and intelligence orchestrating the whole of evolution. This includes, for example, karma as a mechanism to promote the evolution of consciousness. This evolutionary orchestration isn’t just specific to humans, but is universal. Every species has its own guiding intelligence. 

Causal reality

Whereas subtle reality consists of oneself and many other consciousnesses evolving over time, the causal level consists of complete unity, oneness and wholeness. It is a single cosmic being of infinite love, which is perceived as brilliant light.

There is no point of reference outside this unity, nor is there any division within it. Every ‘thing’ (object, subject, dimension, event, experience) is simply The One unfolding itself in infinite ways. 

The direct experience of this universal love-light is what Bache calls ‘Diamond Luminosity’. Once you have experienced this, you cannot help but wish to return to it. After just a few experiences of it, in fact, Bache actually struggled with living ordinary life; he found himself just waiting for his own death in order to return to the realm of light. 

He gradually came to see the significance of ordinary life, however. The light of divine love is always present and is our natural home between lives. But while ‘down here’ in the realm of physical form, our evolutionary purpose is to find and share the light of love within our own lives.

Spiritual insights

There are many insightful lessons to be draw from Bache’s explorations:

Death and rebirth

The movement from one level or realm to another always involves a cycle of death and rebirth. In other words, de-identification from a shallow/narrow sense of self followed by self-realisation at a much deeper or broader level. 

This is because the ordinary structure of the ‘self’ cannot interact in levels of reality for which it isn’t prepared. 

To function at the level of humanity’s collective consciousness, one has to cease being a specific ‘person’ and surrender into the whole of humanity. 

To function in the higher realms beyond human experience, one must dis-identify from human beingness and surrender into a non-physical self or soul. 

To function in the causal realm, one has to cease being an individual consciousness altogether and surrender into becoming the cosmic source itself. 

The surrender of any current sense of identity is always a form of death. Bache experienced this death process many, many times. By death, he means the willing loss or abandonment of one’s current sense of self.

For example, Bache had to let go of his image of himself as a professional, intellectual, adult male called ‘Chris’. This was forced upon him in early purification phases by first witnessing, and then experiencing for himself, the many painful experiences of other people, especially women, throughout history.  

To stabilise our consciousness at any deeper level, Bache learned that we must learn to accept the uncertainty of the unfamiliar and adapt to its different energy flows. Just like when we are born as human individuals, we must become reborn into each new level of reality. Eventually we find our feet there and we are free to explore at will.   

[Bache doesn’t mention it, but I also noticed another repeating pattern whereby his experience would shift from witnessing some aspect of reality to actually becoming that.

You can see something happening ‘over there’, but you don’t fully understand it until you directly experience it in, or as, yourself. This was the case with both experiences of suffering and experiences of ecstasy.

Ultimately, Bache shifted from merely witnessing the divine light to merging with it, knowing himself to be the source.] 

Suffering

Suffering, Bache found, is integral to the experience of life. But rather than seeing it as an ‘error’ of the human condition, to be transcended once and for all, Bache came to see it as a natural mechanism for the evolution of consciousness. 

We are absolutely free to create suffering for ourselves and for others, both deliberately and accidentally. By witnessing or experiencing suffering in whatever form, we may then choose to avoid it by becoming more conscious of how we have created it, or how we are maintaining it. 

The more we open to suffering, the more we can evolve. That’s not to say there is any value or merit in just suffering for its own sake. The purpose of any experience of suffering is to learn from it, for the good of both oneself and others.

Transcendence

What our human mind regards as transcendence, our soul experiences as simply relaxing into itself. The option is always there for anyone who seeks it. 

Likewise, what the soul yearns for in terms of union with God, the divine welcomes and embraces as part of itself returning to full consciousness.

Again, that door is always open. In fact, Bache learned that the divine is delighted for us to join with it in directly experiencing its absolute love. This ultimate experience is like no other.

But Bache also learned that we still have a life to live ‘down here’, otherwise there is no personal fulfilment, no evolution.

We can alternate between higher and lower states of consciousness as freely as we like. But just as there is no merit in endless suffering, so there is no evolutionary benefit to be gained from just disappearing forever into the divine. 

‘Enlightenment’

The idea of ‘total enlightenment’ as some kind of final end state or destination point is without any basis.

Not only is existence infinite, but it is also infinitely creative, with a longing to explore every possibility. Consciousness relishes the limitless opportunities for creation and exploration that its existence affords. There is no point at which evolution stops. There is no end of joy to be found.

‘God’

There is a universal consciousness which is engaged in a never-ending exploration of experiences. Among those experiences it is exploring is the experience of evolving in individuality and self-awareness. 

As individuals, we are all aspects of that same universal consciousness. Mostly we are tuned into our own individual experience of life. But (especially with psychedelics), we can also tune out of our individuality and tune into the universal field of experience of which we are a part. 

The difference between individual and divine consciousness is like that between a leaf and the tree. Each leaf is but a small part of the whole tree, yet it plays an integral role in the overall life, growth and bounty of the tree.  At the same time, the unique form and beauty of each leaf is perfectly valid and essential in its own right. 

The future of humanity

Bache says that he was shown the whole of humanity as an evolving work in progress –past, present and future. As part of that, he was also shown humanity’s future ‘destiny’ as a highly evolved species.

But first, there is a global death-rebirth crisis to be got through. It seems likely that only a catastrophe can awaken humanity to a new, collective sense of itself as a single community…

LSD and the Mind of the Universe at Amazon

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