Episode #63

Laura Dawn: Chris Basche. Thank you so much for taking the time to drop in with me today.

It’s really just such an honor to meet you. I am just so impressed with your path and all the work that you’ve done.

and It’s really already been a big blessing in my life, and I know in so many other people’s lives.

Chris Basche: Thank you. I was hoping the work would be useful to others. It’s nice to hear that it is. Hmm.

Laura Dawn: And I think it’s helpful to just open this space by really setting the context for your work because so much of the conversation in the psychedelic space is revolved around, you know, therapeutic aspects of these medicines, and you have such a unique journey.

You’ve done 73 high dose. LSD Journeys, you’ve written LSD and the Mind of the Universe, such a phenomenal book . And I’d love to ask you just what your educational background was and setting the context for the time. How old were you when you were about to journey for the first time and what called you to this medicine?

And then maybe from there that will help set the context of the perspective that you are bringing that is really beyond just talking about healing of self.

Chris Basche: Well, it all began about 45 years ago. I had just finished my graduate work at Brown University. I was trained as a philosopher of religion. I had published a number of articles out of my dissertation and I was looking for where to take my research next.

And I came across the work of two people. I changed the course of my life. The first was Ian Stevenson and his work on reincarnation, which proved to me that reincarnation was a simple fact of life. And my first book, life Cycles was a response to Ian Stevenson in that way, but more importantly was Stanislav Gro f.

And he had just published two years before Realms of the Human Unconscious. This is 1978. And when I read that book, I realized immediately the importance of Stan’s work for philosophy of religion, not just psychology. And so I, I knew that in my discipline, the people who would be making the deepest contributions in the near future would be those speaking out of an experiential basis, not simply an intellectual basis.

So I decided to begin a regiment in a course of psychedelic therapy following the protocols at Stan had developed. And that turned out to be a much longer undertaking than I had thought or anticipated. After several medium dose sessions, I did 73 high dose LSD sessions. I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms.

And this is a regimen I truly don’t recommend today. I mean, it’s, it’s a very, very demanding regimen. If I knew then what I know now, I would do it differently. I’d be gentler on myself. But that’s what I did. I did this work between 79 and 99 when I was 30 to 50 years old. And then I spent another 20 years digesting it, assimilating it, thinking about it, figuring out what the patterns were, and then published LSD and the Mind of the Universe, in 2019.

Laura Dawn: And what would you say were the questions that really inspired you to embark on this journey? Like what was the level of self-inquiry that was there for you?

Chris Basche: Well, I, as a philosopher of religion, I had always been interested and fascinated by the fundamental questions of life. You know, why are we here?

What’s the purpose of our existence? Why is there so much suffering in the world? How do we cooperate with the life process? And of course, I had read enough and learned enough about the eastern traditions and was, I finished graduate school as a, a deeply convinced, agnostic, but interested in human potential, and particularly the potential of enlightenment.

So I began this work with the idea of accelerating my own spiritual evolution, accelerating my entry into enlightenment, accelerating the burning off of personal karma. But that was a model I learned as it was kind of a false and restrictive model of consciousness. It fell away after just a couple of years of work, but that was the agenda kind of to grow spiritually faster than I would simply by following my meditation practice.

But then it became an adventure in cosmological exploration. First, I learned that the personal model of transformation was inadequate. That when you hyperstimulate a consciousness using this very intense protocol, then you, generate an activation of consciousness that reaches much farther than the individual.

And the dynamics that manifest in this work become collective as well as personal. So that the goal shifted very quickly from personal awakening to our collective historical awakening. And then it matured beyond that into an adventure in exploring the deep structure of the universe. The deep structure of consciousness and what I came to call, you know, the mind of the universe.

Some would say the mind of the divine or the mind of God. And, and that’s okay, except that those terms have kind of a historical theological overlay that I’m not terribly comfortable with. So I frame it as exploring the mind of the universe.

Laura Dawn: I really, I love the concepts that you present and the languaging and the words that you use to describe so many aspects of your experience over these many, many years.

How much was your experience influenced by the concepts that you learned before going into that experience?

In terms of Stan Griff’s work and the theories of religion and Buddhist philosophy, how much was that an influential factor in terms of the outcome of what you actually experienced?

Chris Basche: I’m sure that played a role. It played probably a larger role in interpreting my experiences than in actually seeding or generating those experiences.

But I’m sure it played a role in, in seeding those experiences.

The way I understand it generally is that consciousness is an infinite ocean of potential. And when we drop our individual mind into that ocean, it acts like a seed catalyst that catalyzes a certain set of responses out of that infinite potential.

As we internalize those experiences and let them purify us and change us, then the seed catalyst that we drop into the ocean in our next session is a little changed. And because it’s changed, it catalyzes a different and deeper set of responses from the infinite ocean. So I’ve often wished I had a PhD in physics and astronomy, particularly because if I, if I did, then I would be able to, the universe would’ve been able to show me so much more in those areas than it was able to show me, given the mind that I have.

So what emerges is an interaction, a participation between the mind, which is seeking to know and the, and what the universe mind wants you to know. But I, I wouldn’t think that my conditioning, while it certainly had a conditioning effect in the early stages, there were so many surprises, so many things that the universe showed me and taught me that were completely beyond my expectations.

I wouldn’t overstate the conditioning effect of our background. Because when you’re in dialogue or in communion with an infinite intelligence, this intelligence is so much larger and so much broader and has so many more things to say than we think it might have to say. And it’s the creativity of that dialogue that stands out for me.

Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: Yeah. This concept of it being a dialogue is really interesting. Sometimes I feel that when I’m also in ceremony, I feel like I’m in dialogue with my plant teachers and also recognize that part of my intention and my prayer and , the questions, the inquiry that I bring in as part of me speaking.

And then there’s a receptivity and a listening and so, mm-hmm. How much do you think it’s important to actually cultivate the inquiry and the questions that we bring in? Do you think that that has an impact in terms of what is shown to us?

Chris Basche: I think it does especially when working with medicines like psilocybin or ayahuasca or things like this, when you’re working with very high doses of L S D.

However, I found that my agenda was practically irrelevant because. These substances were so powerful that they would just shatter my mind and, and just tear the lid off my mind. And what determined the nature of the conversation was much more what the universe was wanting to teach me more than what I thought I wanted to know.

So that what I would bring to this was an absolute willingness to follow the experiences wherever I was led to follow them. And and that really determined the content. So my sense was I was always confronting a massive intelligence in this work. And the intelligence kind of showed deeper and deeper aspects of itself as I went deeper and deeper into the universe.

It never congealed into a specific form. It never took any visual form of deities or spirit guides or anything like this. It was always an open-ended field of intelligence dissolving into that intelligence and living for a while in, at some level of its reality, experiencing what it experienced. As you know, what one learns in these things you, you learn by becoming.

So to learn something about a reality, you have to become that reality. And so you dissolve completely leaving behind your historical existence, dissolve into this reality, and then slowly as you congeal at the end you bring your memories back. But, but the fact that you bring your memories back doesn’t mean that your ego or your, your awareness is intact in the peak hours of the experience itself. So I surrender completely to where it wants to go, and I’ve found that its agenda was always much more interesting than my agenda. Mm

Laura Dawn: mm mm-hmm. You mentioned, I watched your course on the Shift Network. It was very well delivered. I really appreciated the way you structured that course.

And you said some things that really caught my attention because I’ve experienced something very similar, but the way that you articulate what you’re learning is really impressive, and I’d love to actually talk to you about that as well. Like how do you translate these big transmissions and. The insights received into something tangible.

But before we get there, I wanna ask you about this statement that you said you said, if you want access , to the knowledge of the universe, it will teach you how to receive it. And that every dimension of reality can teach you how to receive the wisdom and information inherent in that. And that we actually have to learn how to learn at these different states of consciousness.

I really appreciate that. I feel like every dimension has different teachings for us, and these medicines have the capacity to actually teach us how to receive it. I’ve never heard anyone else express it that way, that felt so deeply resonant with my own experience. Mm-hmm. So I would just love for you to unpack what that means for you.

Chris Basche: Well, just a, a touch of background. My experience has been that. When you work in a systematic fashion, you know, in a highly controlled environment, you know, a therapeutic setting with a sitter, with eye shades and earphones, you know the whole thing and you work consistently using the same protocol, the same set setting, particularly the same medicine in, in a fashion like this.

Then you go through this learning process, you go through the death rebirth process, and eventually are brought into a deeper level of spiritual reality. And that level of spiritual reality works differently than time space does. So you have to acclimate to that level of reality, and if you keep pushing after a period of work, you will come to another threshold.

Go through yet another form of death and rebirth. It’s not repeating ego death, but a different form of death and rebirth and are brought into a deeper level of reality, which works with a different set of principles and almost a different physics. And that each step deeper into the universe is a step into a higher level of energy.

So you, part of it is just learning how to acclimate to that level of energy. If you have just glancing contact with it, then this may not be quite clear, but to have sustained communion, cognitively coherent immersion in that reality, you have to let yourself become, you have to be emptied and purified so that you can sustain the vast energy that is operat at that level of reality.

And this repeats itself as you go deeper and deeper. The energy just becomes enormous. So in that process, once you transition into that new level of reality, the first time you enter a new level, it’s often cognitively very confusing. I mean, you just don’t understand everything you’re seeing. Or when you come back, you may not have full memory of that, of what you actually experienced, no matter how moving it was.

But if you go back again and again and again to that level, then what happens is you cognitively adjust to that reality. You learn how to stay conscious in a, in a level of reality that you had not been able to stay fully conscious in before. And so this is what I mean. You, you have to cooperate with the process and let this reality teach you how to stay conscious in how to receive information at that level of reality.

And it takes, as you know, a, a great deal of discipline. And focus to be able to stay conscious in that way. And then once this happens, the universe takes you in and teaches you what it can teach you about that particular level of reality and what you can see of itself mm-hmm. At that level of reality.

And the wonderful thing is, one of the many wonderful things is it seems that the mind of the universe or the, the mind of the divine is very eager and, and wants to teach you about itself. It wants to show you these realities has been waiting for humanity to evolve for millions of years, excuse me, till it gets to the point where it can begin to take in this information.

Not of course, for the whole species to begin to get into this conscious relationship with the universe, but it takes time. Mm-hmm. It takes discipline. Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: So fascinating. There’s so much here. I wanna talk about the cycles of death and rebirth, but while we’re here mm-hmm. Do you think that attention is the focus of the discipline?

In recent journeys that I’ve had, I feel like the core teaching was that when my mind is fully present and right there, it’s almost like a way of paying attention that a deeper level of receiving happens. But the moment that my mind goes away and gets carried by something else, and this is a different setting, it’s a different dose, obviously, when we’re talking high doses that you are experiencing, and that’s something worth emphasizing.

Your systematic approach is incredible and that’s what makes this insight so valuable. And I, I’m curious where. The level of, of discipline and training to open up to these energies. And like this is, this other question I have is like, how are these energies here all the time? And is it the way that our mind pays attention and chooses to focus that we open up to it and that we’re able to experience it?

So how much is it about attention and awareness of where we shine our light of consciousness?

Chris Basche: Well, I think attention plays a critical role. I mean, all the years that I was doing psychedelic work, I was also a meditator. And so I had learned meditation about entering into focused awareness and letting things arise and not engaging them and, and you know, staying in that observer position.

And that is very helpful training when you’re working with psychedelics, when you’re working with lower doses of psychedelics, it more closely approximates the meditation context. When you’re working with very high doses of the psychedelics, it, it changes some of the dynamics. I think attention is still critical, so you’re staying focused in your, in your process.

But when you’re working with very high doses, it is so intense. It’s like going over a roller coaster. You don’t have to worry about paying attention, you’re just worrying about staying alive. And, but the, the key here I think is to cultivate active surrender. And this is one of the great things I learned from Stan Griff’s work an absolute trust that if you surrender to what’s happening, no matter how terrible it is, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how inscrutable it is at the time, if you completely surrender to you to it, it will take you somewhere.

It will do something to you. And eventually this will culminate. It will, you’ll go through some type of acute or subtle or acute transition a death rebirth process. And then you will wake up, you’ll recover awareness at a deeper level of consciousness in an an ecstatic level of consciousness. And so it’s that trust that the universe that you are engaging or the mind that you are engaging is absolutely trustworthy.

And you can trust it even as it’s killing you, even as it’s torturing you. You can trust it and you may not understand for multiple sessions down the road why things are happening the way they are, but you can trust it and yeah, give yourself over to it. So of course, that involves attention. A focus of attention, but it, what stands out for me more is the trust and surrender that is involved.

I really

Laura Dawn: appreciate that concept of active surrender. It makes me think of the concept of open attentiveness to whatever arises. Mm-hmm. Which is a foundational Buddhist teaching where we’re, we’re really open, we’re aware, but we’re relaxed. Yeah. So we’re engaged, but relaxed at the same time. And it’s that fine balance between I, so I really, I love that active surrender.

And so. Mm-hmm. And it’s interesting that you say that about trusting the, the sort of the pain and the suffering. And I, I wanna know what you’ve learned about pain and suffering. Because sometimes it does feel like opening to this higher degree is, is painful. That it feels like really intense and that we have to trust that.

Like sometimes when I’m in that, that place, like I can feel my heart pounding and I am like, okay, I’m having to kind of tell myself it’s okay. Just stay right here. Be right here with it. Mm-hmm. It’s okay. This is okay. Mm-hmm. And so what, what have you learned, maybe actually before we look at what you learned about suffering what was the process of the death and rebirth cycle for you?

Did you feel like that was what was allowing you to go deeper, the catalyst to go deeper? And is this a very synonymous concept as traditional Buddhist philosophy of reincarnation, or is it different?

Chris Basche: Well, you’ve, you’ve added another layer with dimension of reincarnation in there. So let, let me just start there and just say, reincarnation to me is an, is a fundamental truth of life as many religions and spiritual traditions have recognized.

And so that gives us a different context within which are an expanded context to understand what’s happening in a psychedelic session. Because my sense is that. Psychedelics are an amplifier of consciousness, and if you engage that amplified state of consciousness in a productive way, what you’re doing is accelerating the life process.

And so to, to understand that, you have to ask yourself, well, what is the nature of the life process? What’s going on in life within a reincarnation context? If you then lay that out how reincarnation works, how it’s a, we are living every reincarnation as a, , an opportunity to learn and grow. And the challenges are not random and accidental, but they are chosen.

Challenges that we choose to be here. We choose to manifest the conditions in which we are living. And by confronting those conditions and responding to the challenges of our life, we slowly grow. We become more, we become more compassionate more skillful in certain settings, and so on and so forth. We die.

We, we return to the soul, we return to our kind of bardo resting place. We debrief and then we come back into time and space again under a new set of circumstances chosen, and we continue. So what happens in a psychedelic session is an intensification of that process. So when we hyper. Energize consciousness, and we start to churn the whole system.

What the system spontaneously does is in part, it begins to bring forward its problems. It’s its impurities, it’s its pains and sufferings, the things we’re most worried about, the things we’re anxious about, the things that scare us, the things that hurt us, and the system just starts to clean itself. But that’s just the, when these things are coming from our personal life, we recognize that therapeutic value of that.

And we have a context. But some of the things that are coming are coming out of our soul history. They’re coming out of our former life history. And so in a way, what we’re doing at that point is healing our soul. We’re facilitating the integration of all of our past lives, cooperatively, creatively, into our present incarnation.

But then the things that can come up and get be brought forward come from the collective unconscious of our species. Sometimes they come from the history of our solar system, the history of creation. So there’s no way to set a limit on what may be generating the painful circumstances that you may be confronting at any particular point in time.

But if you do kind of engage them there is a suffering, but there’s a joy that follows the suffering. Now, I write in the first chapter of L s d in the mind of the universe that my major concern in telling my story was the quantity of suffering that it involved. But I felt it was really important to do that for two reasons.

One was so that we could understand the dynamics of how this process works. And the second part is it’s just what happened. It’s true. And I promised my reader that I would give an a as true an account as I could of what happened. So this to me, when you really step back and look at a long series of sessions it’s not that the universe wants us to suffer or that suffering has a, a particularly innate value or anything like that.

I mean, I certainly didn’t enjoy the suffering. And, and I put up with it because I wanted to get what was waiting on the other side of suffering. I was a glutton for ecstasy. I was a glutton for joy. And the suffering was simply a purification process that I was willing to go through in order to be initiated into the joy and the ecstasy that was waiting on the other side.

So the primary thing, I think. Is that if you want to enter into deep states of consciousness, states of consciousness in which you enter , into greater intimacy with the soul, with the forces behind the soul, with the creative intelligence of the universe, you must allow yourself to become larger.

What, keeps us from experiencing these things right now, right this immediate second, is our smallness, the habitual conditioning of our emotions and thoughts that keep us focused narrowly on our private or individual existence. And in order to become, enter into communion with that which is larger, we have to allow ourselves to become.

That which is larger, and that means letting go of the conditioning, which has kept us small. And for most of us, that’s, painful, that’s difficult. That requires that we really challenge the boundaries of our existence as we have known them, and be willing to enter into the great unknown where we’re not really sure what we are, who we are, or how life works.

That’s scary. But if you can manage that fear and have the capacity to go into that fear, always the light is waiting for you. It receives you and , it teaches you and it is so glad to embrace you. Hmm.

Laura Dawn: Did you know, did you have this palpable sense that there was ecstasy beyond the suffering?

Chris Basche: Well, I had it in reading Stan Graf’s work. I mean, I had his experience and I trusted Stan’s work. And then I had my own experience as I began the work. And it just deepened over years. The cycle showed itself early on the cycle of purification breakthrough ecstasy return. So that’s the cycle.

You go into a purification process, breakthrough ecstasy teaching, and then slowly coming back to your ordinary state of consciousness. So once you have experience of that cycle, you can trust it, not just because you have other people who have witnessed the cycle and you trust that witness, but you have your own experience too.

Then it just keeps getting deeper and deeper, and pretty soon you’re, you’re off to the races and the universe is taking you on a journey that. You know, you could never have anticipated because it’s a somewhat shared journey with other human beings, but it’s also a somewhat unique journey that’s calibrated for your specific needs or your specific contribution to the project.

Because my sense is we’re all in this together. All of our work serves a larger purpose, larger than our own personal lives. We’re all moving into these domains, or we’re moving into the future of human evolution together. And we all have different roles to play in this process. So what’s important is only that you fulfill your particular contribution.

And if we all do that, then the whole, the whole system thrives.

Laura Dawn: What do you think is really at the essence of the, the wisdom of suffering?

Chris Basche: Life is a complicated process, isn’t it? We get life in bits and pieces and stages. One life at a time, one life at a time, a hundred years at a time. And so often there’s unfinished business in life. We get hurt and we can’t resolve that hurt during this lifetime. Things happen to us. We carry traumas, or there’s just a sense of unfinishedness with different lifetimes, and I think we carry that unfinishedness in our continuing life adventures

in order to finish what was unfinished and in order to grow larger through finishing it. And I think suffering, part of suffering is simply the wisdom of our past, carrying forward into our present so that we can do a better job of healing that past and resolving whatever issues lie there. And in that context, that particular suffering is wise in that it gives us an opportunity to heal what could not be healed previously and to become more through that healing.

Okay? Mm-hmm. And I think this is an evolutionary process. I mean, we are growing hundreds of thousands of years, but in short increments of a hundred year increments, it’s a lot of start, stop, start, stop. Die more, die born. It’s over and over again. And in that sense, the suffering is, is wise.

There’s a deep wisdom Now. I don’t think suffering is inherently valuable and hopefully there comes as the wiser we get and the more skilled we get in the life process, we suffer less, you know, because we do a better job of finishing up business when it presents itself. We, we leave fewer loose ends and we’re all, we’re working out of a, a reservoir of pluses rather than a reservoir of negatives.

I think if we only pay attention, for example, to pass life therapy and we try to understand reincarnation and the dynamics of life by listening and learning from the past life therapy, we can develop an an. Inappropriately negative view of what life is about. We can begin to think that life is about healing.

Life is about, you know, fixing things, which we didn’t fix in the past. But really that’s only, that’s only partial, the partial of the truth. We are also developing positive assets. We’re developing capacities. We’re developing talents, we’re developing all sorts of things. And every lifetime carries forward.

Not only unfinished business, but finished business. Things that, you know, people, I mean, when Mozart is writing concertos, when he is five years old, I mean, come on, where did that talent come from? The things which we, the talents that we found embedded in our children either athletic talents or intellectual talents, or social talents or artistic talents, they all come from somewhere.

So it’s not simply a matter of finishing unfinished business, it’s continuing to develop those capacities and taking them to higher and higher levels, mathematics. Mm-hmm. How many lifetimes does it take to become a great mathematician or a great sailor, or, you know, you see where I’m going? Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: Yeah.

Yeah. I really liked this concept that you dropped in the course too when you said that our species is designed for rapid psychological transformation. Yeah. Is this also what you’re pointing to here?

Chris Basche: Yeah. You know this became clear and clear towards the end of my journey when I was given a certain set of experiences.

And the larger dynamic is this, every lifetime is about learning. Every lifetime is about growing, and we are, and all of our individual learning. Is embedded in our species collective learning. So we are fractal, embodiment a cell within the body of our species. So everything that we are individually learning is connected to what the species is learning as a whole.

So the universe is growing our species and we are growing within an aspect of that larger growing. And so both for the individual and the collective, what I’m going to describe works at both levels. There are sort of two tiers of this growing process. We are learning at the individual level and we’re constantly transitions are taking place there, but inside the soul is learning at an inner level.

So we are constantly kind of taking on new challenges and there’s a resolution and a. You know, realization of those challenges at the surface level. But inside the soul is accumulating the residue of all of our learning. It’s like when you go to college every semester, you take new courses, but you are holding together the learning of all the courses just you’ve taken through all of your years.

Right. And what you know is much bigger than what you are learning in any one set of courses. Mm-hmm. So if you expand this to the species level, the species is learning at a certain level, but inside, at the level of the collective unconscious, at the level of the collective psyche, the species is collecting information at that very deep, centralized level.

And what Rupert Childre would call the morphogenetic field level are urban Laslow would call the ACA field level for the species as such. So my sense is that for individuals and for the species, we are learning. We’re constantly learning, but the inside core is learning. And there are certain thresholds that when, when the inner core is ripe for it, there is a transition that takes place at the very, very deepest center of the collective psyche.

And when this pivot takes place, it influences everything that’s happening on the surface. So viewed from this perspective, I think that our theology and philosophy has taught us to think about human beings in far too narrow a context and to think about us as much more static than we actually are. We talk about human nature this, human nature that, but really, We are a dynamic species and we are constantly learning and growing and changing, and this learning is taking place at these two levels, at the surface and underneath.

And when you view from the large perspective, it really does seem like we are designed for speed. We are designed for accelerated evolutionary growth, but we don’t tend to see that if we don’t look at the world from a reincarnation perspective. Because from within a one time through perspective, each generation is dying and disappearing.

But from a reincarnation perspective, it’s dying and returning, dying and returning while this accumulation is taking place at a centralized level. From that perspective, we can see that the entire species and we individually, are designed for accelerated learning, and that means that we are carrying our history.

On our backs and that in backpacks, so to speak. And it’s much lighter than we really may at first think. We may think all human beings have always been like this, or human beings have always been like that, but really human beings are, are designed to learn and to change and to grow. And then from this perspective when you just opened the horizon to a hundred thousand, 200 or million years, we can sort of see that our species is constantly evolving.

And I think the exciting point is we are entering a time in history right now where the, collective unconscious of our species is on the cusp of making a a fundamental pivot. We are going through a growth spurt, which is going to change the foundation of our psychological existence on this planet, our spiritual existence.

Laura Dawn: Can you say more about this important moment in time and what the universe from your perspective is really asking of us?

Chris Basche: Well, again, of course, all of this, I’m only speaking out of an experiential basis. I’m not speaking out of an intellectual basis or a theoretical basis. So whatever value in what I say, it’s always limited by, is it a reflection of what’s been shown me.

I reached a point at the particular point in my work in a particular session when all of my former lives started to come into me. I’ve done past life therapy before and I have a working knowledge of, you know, a dozen or so of my former lives. None of them being historically significant, just, you know, peasants like most of us have all been.

But they all started coming back into me in this particular session. And in this session they seemed that at one point to hit a critical mass. And when they hit critical mass, they fused. And when they fused into a singularity, I was catapulted into a state of consciousness that was deeper than anything I had been in at the time.

And yet I was an individual, but I was an individual beyond any frame of reference that I had known before. And I called this the Birth of the Diamond Soul, and I was given a series of teachings around that, that let me see that this is, was not a simply a personal. Process, but this is where reincarnation is taking humanity.

This is a, a dynamic that’s our evolutionary dynamic, that all of us are being born and dying and being born and dying. We’re learning, we’re growing, but the purpose of reincarnation are the actualization of real reincarnation is not simply the incremental improvement of our soul, but eventually we reach a point where we integrate all of our former lives, all of the learning within those former lives.

And when that integration takes place, there is a fusion in which we experience our soul, the soul, which is deeper than and underneath our individual ego at personalities. Now, in the normal place of life, we experience a soul. When we die, we go from being an ego back to our soul identity. Back to being an ego again into our soul identity.

But I think , it seems that the evolutionary trajectory of humanity is eventually, when the time is right to wake up for the soul, to wake up inside our physical existence. So that truly we experience ourselves as being a hundred year old being, I mean, sorry, a hundred thousand year old, being not simply a hundred year old being.

And with that, we have an intuitive remembering of all our relationships. Imagine how many people we have had relationships with in our entire reincarnation history, and we have been . Every color on the planet. We’ve been male, female, we’ve been rich, poor, we’ve been every possible combination. And so when those congeal, there is a, an explosion in our sense of identity, but our explosion in our sense of relatedness and with this enhanced consciousness, a deeper capacity to bring in information from the mind of the universe, from the creative intelligence of the universe.

Now, I think that we are reaching a point in history where this is what’s happening for the entire planet. I think as the entire planet is grappling with problems, which it cannot solve at an individual national level, but it requires a global coherence to solve. As we are trying to become one planet, we are also trying to become one soul.

So the fragmentation of history, Which has brought us to this place in history and in this place in our personal development, is being worked at an individual level and is being worked at a collective level now. Mm-hmm. Let me add to this then another piece of my journey. One of the great surprises of my journey was how many things I was shown, how many visions I was given about human evolution, not my personal evolution.

I thought it was gonna be a personal story, but how many times I was taken into human’s evolutionary story, and I was given a series of visions over many years that humanity was coming to a turning point in its destiny. We’re coming to a bifurcation point, if you will. We were coming to a before and after point that the pace of change in the past was irrelevant to the pace of change in the future, the time we’re entering a time of acceleration.

We are coming to a time of enormous fruition, a period of great awakening, a, a true explosion of our, our deepening of consciousness on the planet. Not just for a small group of individuals, but for the entire planet. But it never showed me how nature was gonna pull this off. What would it take to actually make this tremendous leap and consciousness?

And then in a session, one particular session in 1995 when I was deep into some very advanced doing the diamond luminosity work, which we can talk about, but in the middle of this work in 95. So how many years ago was this? Almost 30 years ago. Mm-hmm. I dissolved into the species mind, just dissolved into the collective psyche.

And in that form, I entered what I call deep time, or I went into the future and asked the species. In this expanded temporal framework, I experienced the death and rebirth of humanity. I experienced humanity coming into a time when it was losing control. Everything was unraveling. We were losing control of our life.

Everything we had assumed about life was falling apart. It seemed to be driven, a global crisis seemed to be driven by a cascading series of ecological crises. But I was totally ecologically naive about this. You know, 25 years ago, global climate change wasn’t on my horizon at that time. But we just entered profound destructuring.

At a cultural civilizational level, our lives were completely falling apart so deeply that it seemed like this was an extinction event. It seemed that we were really all going to die, but then when things were at their worst, suddenly we moved through this crisis and the the pressure began to let up. We began to pick ourselves up, and we began a process of rebuilding our world.

But when we began to rebuild our world, we were different. We were suffused with a different set of values, a, a new set of values, a new set of insights, , a new set of capacities that were emerging spontaneously out of our inner nature. , that led to a creation of new forms of social institutions, new forms of collaboration, access to new sources of information.

We had literally collectively all gone through a death and rebirth process that in this crisis we were broken down, like going through , a loss of egoic consciousness in the psychedelic or spiritual setting. We were broken down and we tacked into something deeper than we had been living from before.

And going through this metamorphosis when we came out of it. We were living in a, literally a different psychic reality. So that I, I think my understanding of history is that we are entering a time of history when we are going through this death and rebirth process that , we literally can no longer survive on this planet.

Living out of an egoic level of consciousness, even a, a compassionate egoic level of consciousness is not sufficient. We now, the challenge I think is to grow, to grow up as a species, and for me to grow up means to awaken the soul, grow up into our soul identity, to become a, a human species of conscious souls, not simply a human species of conscious individual egos.

Now, I think we’ve been preparing for this process for thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. Gestation is long. And we have been gestating the diamond soul for hundreds of thousands of years. Labor is short and very intense, and I think we are entering into the time of labor. We are entering into the time of giving birth to the future human.

And I think the future human is the diamond soul.

Laura Dawn: Oh, wow. There’s so much here. I just, I have, I know so much inquiry about so many aspects of this. Yeah. Do you think that this is a predestined moment in time that it is happening and we can either get on the train or get off the

train? Mm-hmm.

Chris Basche: You know, I think it is a predestined moment. It is a challenge that’s embedded in our destiny, and I think it’s also an open-ended.

Challenge. I don’t think it’s predetermined in the sense that the outcome is necessarily predetermined. I think this is a moment where everybody has to show up. It’s an all hands-on deck. Everybody has to really put all their effort into this transformative process so that we can bring this potentially life extinction event into a good outcome.

And at the same time, having said that, my experience as a visionary is that I have been taken many times sufficiently into the future and given an experience of the future human of kind of dissolving into the archetype of the new humanity that is emerging. And in those moments, in those experiences, I experienced the future human as already having been born.

So it was both something to be accomplished and something that had already been accomplished. And from that latter perspective, my deep conviction is that we will make it through this process. This is a challenge that we are coming into. We will make it through it. I cannot doubt that we will make it through it because I have experienced it as something which has already been done.

But I don’t think there is any security in that knowledge. I think that if we sit back and just try to ride this thing out, we are just gonna make our suffering so much worse, and we’re gonna threaten this potential transition. But, and here’s the other thing. I think every human being on this planet knew what it was getting into when it chose to be incarnate.

We all knew what we were getting into. We chose to be part of this dynamic. This is a very, very intense process that we’re entering, but very exciting and very growthful, very soul challenging and growthful we’re all here to help one another through this very exciting dynamic. Hmm.

Laura Dawn: It makes me think of this concept again, of active surrender.

It’s like you are trusting the process, but yet it’s all hands on deck and you need to show up for it and do the work. And so I’m curious. To get a sense of what does that actually look like for people listening who are like, I feel the call to be, , dedicating my life to the awakening of humanity.

So many people listening to this podcast feel this. I know. I know this to be true. Yeah, I feel it too. And so what does that really look like? What does that tangibly look like?

Chris Basche: You know, I think in essence we have to become individually what the human species has to become. Collectively.

We have to grow up.

We have to let go some of our childish ways and adolescent ways, and we have to become mature adults of our species. We have to take the long vision. We have to reconnect. We have to really discover what is the true. Of our life. Who are we? What are we? We have to reconnect with nature. We have to discover or rediscover our embeddedness in the divine fabric of life.

So much of what’s driving this planet to ruin is an, is an insatiable hunger in that’s manifesting in the physical world as the desire to have more and more and more and more things physically, which is being driven by a spiritual hunger of being insufficient, inwardly, insufficiently, spiritually. So mm-hmm.

When we awaken spiritually, when we recover our divine identity, if you will, when we discover. How much the universe loves us and how much we as part of the universe deserve to be loved because we are part of this magnificent creation. When we come into that kind of awareness, that satisfies our heart in a way that allows us to put less demands on our environment around us.

The more we discover our soul identity, where we have been every race, every religion, every being on the planet, so to speak, then that naturally expands our compassion. We naturally want to work for social justice. We naturally want to make sure every human being and every being, including non-human beings on this planet, has a good life.

That just becomes natural. Now there is no one call that’s going to get us through this. It’s going to take all of us, bringing all of our talents to this task of transformation. It’s gonna require teachers and scientists and musicians and artists and politicians and all of us working all of our talents to take us through this vortex that we’re coming into.

And I think that each one of us, before we were born, we chose the life that we are living right now, and our children and our grandchildren choosing, have chosen the life that they are entering into and that we already have embedded in this life. Not only the challenges that we need to rise to, to make this transition, but the resources.

I don’t think the real question is, what do we need to do to make it through this  labor, this birth process. I think the deeper issue is, do we have the courage to do what we know is ours to do as we move forward? If we really look deeply into our circumstances, we find that there are resources available to us. There are things that we can do. Do we have the courage to do what is ours to do?

I’m an educator and so my focus, my personal focus has been on teaching, learning, and teaching. Other people are physicians. They’re they’re doctors. Other people are social activists, artists. Every one of our talents are needed to take us into this transition.

Laura Dawn: Did you have a sense, and at what point did this potentially arise for you throughout the arc of your journey that you would be teaching this?

Did you have that knowing that you were receiving something of infinite value so that you could really cultivate that, integrate it, and then share it? And did you have that awareness while you were journeying at all, that you would be learning how to receive this transmission and translate it into something coherent that you could share with other people that can inspire real change?

Chris Basche: Yes. I mean, in the course of, you know, I worked for 20 years, so that’s a long time. And it’s also , you know, you have these experiences, you bring them back, you digest them, you try to understand them. And I was doing about. Five sessions a year. I did four years of work. I stopped for six years, and then I did 10 years of for work, and I was doing about five sessions a year.

So I had a couple of months in between every sessions to process. And over the course of time, you know, somewhere along that process I began to understand that these visions that were being given to me were not being given to me simply for my personal usage. I’m a teacher, you know, I love to learn. I love to share what I learned.

So I knew that there would come a time when I would sh try to share what I was being given at the time. I mean, remember when this was? I started in 79. This awareness began to dawn with me in the late eighties. I didn’t stop my work until 99. We, we were in the, the prohibition of all psychedelic substances.

I was doing this work underground. I never was able to bring it to my university. I did not let my students know what I was doing. Did not let my colleagues know what I was doing. So I could not imagine. We were underground. I could not imagine a really receptive circumstance, which I would be able to share or teach this work cuz I w I couldn’t teach it while I was at the university.

But then what happens now, we’re in a radically different setting with respect to psychedelics. There’s this tremendous psychedelic renaissance alive Michael Pollan has come around, written this wonderful book, which has changed middle class interest and receptivity to psychedelic research. Who could, I could never have anticipated that there would be this much receptivity and interest in what I had to share.

Now I find I’m also pretty private person and it’s not easy for me to share such deep and intimate experiences. I mean, it’s really like sharing your sex life. You’re sharing your, your deepest experiences of the universe. But I reached a point where I took me years, really years to become to the point where I was willing to release these things.

And I did it by reminding myself continuously that what was important was not that I had these experiences or I experienced these realities. What was important is that these realities are available for everyone to experience.

And the mother told me in my meditation, she said, you didn’t give yourself those experiences. I gave you those experiences. We gave you those experiences. They were never intended just for you. They were always intended for everybody. You were simply the holder of those experiences. You were the, guardian of those experiences, and they were relevant to everybody else’s experience.

So there, there came a time when it was time to share those experiences. Again, to support other people who were in their own process, making their own discoveries just to support them in their awakening and actualization.

Hmm.

Laura Dawn: And I, I feel like this is actually the kind of courage that we’re talking about. You used the word visionary earlier, and I really appreciate that word and mm-hmm. To evolve. When you are a visionary and you are at the forefront of awakening and evolution, you are fundamentally challenging the status quo.

And so there is that component of really trusting your truth. I, I feel like I’m even in my own version of my process around that, where I’m bringing through curriculum on creativity and what I’m really learning about Creativity. Yeah. On a universal level, down to the human level. And I have also received, you know, different levels of flack around, you know, that’s irresponsible to talk publicly about having a solo practice.

You’re gonna encourage other people to, , experiment in these ways. And yet I know in my heart, this is my truth. And so it does actually take a lot of courage to be able to say, this is my authentic expression of who I am and what I’m bringing through in my life. Yeah. And I wanna speak to this because I think so many people listening feel something similar, that we have this calling, and yet we are in this weird, bizarre pressure cooker of social media and cancel culture and so much judgment, and yet we’re waking up, you know?

And so it’s this interesting dichotomy that we find ourselves in. And so anything that you could speak to on this level for people listening who do feel that fear of stepping out and really listening to that authentic expression coming through them.

Chris Basche: You know, one of the difficult parts of my experience was what I call the sickness of silence. I had to go silent in order to go underground in order to do the work that I was doing. Cause I love to teach. I mean, I, I just love being , with the people. I love , to be in a classroom. And I didn’t want to give that up, but I also wanted to do this deep inner exploration.

And so silence was the price of doing the exploration. But over years, over decades, I began to realize that there was a sickness being generated by being in the psychedelic closet because I had increasingly an ability to answer students’ questions. And when a student would ask a question that was coming out of the very deep place in their own heart, and I could answer that question only because of my psychedelic experience, I couldn’t answer it on the basis of academic knowledge.

I would have to hold myself in check. Or speak around the edges of it. And that basically the silence began on the outside of my life, began to work its way and cause fractures and fissures in my inner life, which is why I, why I retired a little early in order to write diamonds, or I call it diamonds from heaven, L s d, in the mind of the universe in order to begin that phase of my life, which involved teaching out of this on a basis of the psychedelic conversation.

And in that process become more whole within myself. So I was putting together my psychedelic self and my academic self into one coherent public figure. Now, I take complete responsibility for this in that a another level. And again, moving into your question along the way, I learned that I had a number of former lives.

In which speaking out against authority and speaking out against religious authority or with the creativity had had very injurious consequences. I had been tortured, I had been killed. So inside me personally, part of my karma was a real fear, a real re inhibition about speaking out. So I had to really work that edge in my life.

When I fir wrote my first book on reincarnation, my department was not happy and it was potentially a career killer to be writing a book on reincarnation, which said there was overwhelming empirical evidence that reincarnation is true in a department which is governed by atheism. And in a, an institution, universities which are governed by the religion of me reductive materialism, you know.

But the universe only rewarded me for taking that risk, and I found that. Mm-hmm. Every time I took a risk, every time I said what was my best take on what was real and what was true, the universe rewarded me. So I was being healed in the process of fulfilling my opportunity in this lifetime. And I think that’s the way it is for all of us.

Many of us have started to become conscious at an earlier time in history where we were injured for speaking our truth, but now we, we are in a much more accepting and permissive environment. And even though there may be challenges that we’re facing, if we lean into the heat, if we do speak our truth, I think people will find that it really does work well for them.

It’s not going to be the same as it was before. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I, I really think a lot of people are reaching within themselves, finding what their truth is, bringing it forward, and then in the process, finding allies. Mm-hmm. We find all these hidden allies that are in there waiting for us. We wouldn’t have found them if we hadn’t become to speak up.

Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: I so agree. I would say that so much of my life has been about following that spirit of inspiration, regardless of where the trail led me. And I’ve always been rewarded, and I’ve had to cultivate the courage to actually not focus on making money and actually focus on tending to that spirit of inspiration and that spark within me and speak my truth from that place.

And every time. I’ve taken big risks, you know, of which there have been many at this point. But I think a lot of this also came from a lot of the teachings that I received throughout about 12 years of also going really deep with L S D and having many journeys in the upwards of 400, 500 micrograms as well, and different settings.

So it’s a very different scenario, but I think that that, that wisdom also really encouraged me to follow my truth and yeah. I’m curious to ask you what your days, right after your journeys looked like. Were you really dedicated to trying to transcribe and write and, you know, capture such a powerful transmission channel . I saw you hold up your book when you were recording for , the course, and I really appreciate seeing that level of detail. And so would that writing happen immediately after, or would you, let the dust settle and then would you notes and what was that creative process like for you?

Chris Basche: Well, working with high doses of LSD like this, my cognitive functions, my verbal functions did not come online until late in the day. My processes that I would write a detailed, phenomenologically accurate description of my session within 24 hours, usually the morning after my session. It’s really important to get it down quickly because they’re like a dream if you wait a couple of days mm-hmm.

You, you can’t remember it as clearly as you can at that time. And I also developed a strategy. I would replay the music when I was writing up the session. I would replay the music that was being played, that had been played in the session in the same order. So I would play a piece of music over and over again until I felt I had captured what was happening during that period of music.

And then I would go to the next piece of music because the day after a session, you’re kind of one foot in, one foot out. You know, you’re, you’re, you’re back in physical reality, but you’re still porous and you still are open to that. Very intense field. Mm-hmm. So by staying one foot in one foot out, I would use that state to capture as detailed a description as possible, which often required writing at the very, very edges of my understanding.

I did not understand the significance of what I was writing. I did not understand how all the pieces would fit together. It was only years later when I was looking at a whole string of sessions that I began to understand the, the flow and the missing pieces. Sometimes a session is recapitulating, something that’s happened before, sometimes is breaking new ground, and sometimes it’s giving you.

It’s starting a conversation, which is only going to come to fruition in the sessions in the future. So you have to write with this complete sense of, of dedication to preserving the experience without necessarily understanding the full texture of the experience. While you do that, once you then get the core experience preserved, then it’s a matter of internalizing it, learning it.

I mean, I would read, I would study my sessions, and then when I finished the entire journey, it took me years of the analyzing the sessions, breaking them down, finding what was the most compelling story that was emerging over the course of the sessions. So it, it really takes a lot of work to engage in a debrief process.

With your own experiences. It’s not just a matter of recording these exotic experiences. Of course, I’m a philosopher by training, so I want to understand now someone like Alex Gray converts his experiences into magnificent works of art. Other, you know, Martina Hoffman. For some people it’s, it’s artistic expression.

For some people it’s social action for me. Mm-hmm. Mine is to give cognitive coherence to what the messages are. Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: I’m curious to know your philosophy on creativity. I heard you use the word creative intelligence when using words to describe this infinite. Life force. Yeah. And do you see creativity as a powerful tool for meaning making?

For how we make sense of our experiences after we go through inner transformation and then we come and we interact with the world around us and we create in so many different facets. Mm-hmm. What is your philosophy around the benefit of that?

Chris Basche: Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know whether I have a, a philosophy of creativity, but I have the experience of it.

I call the mind of the universe often the creative intelligence. At first my experience is it’s intelligent. Once you experience it, it’s this overwhelming genius. I mean, we know what intelligence feels like and within a certain frame of reference, and this is the intelligence, the genius that manifested galaxies.

Planets species. And the creative intelligence because it is so profoundly creative. I mean, it gave birth to everything which is in existence, and it continues to give birth to everything that’s in existence. It’s an emergent intelligence. It’s drawing the new out of its inner resources continuously.

So I just, I call it the creative intelligence because it is intelligence, it’s creative, it’s also loving, it’s compassionate. One could use, describe it in those terms too, and I do. Everybody I think who experiences genuine, novel creativity and not simply recycling creativity, but novel creativity, I think has the experience that they don’t create, they receive, that passes through something that’s coming from a, a wider, larger, deeper source.

They’re fortunate enough to catch it and it flows through them. And I think creativity of this sort is really giving voice to or capturing an awareness, an idea, a symphony, an artistic inspiration that exists beyond us, outside of us, higher than us, which if we tune to it, concretizes itself in our awareness and, and then comes through us.

I think this is true for teaching when, when ideas, creativity of ideas are coming through us, not arising in us or coming from us, but through us. And so creativity in that sense is a prayer. It is a communion with that which is larger. And many spiritual teachers have recognized this, that we’re communing with the force, which is the creative force of the universe.

Other times we’re communing with the force, which is the love, because I, much to my surprise, I mean, genius behind existence is matched by the profound love, A cosmic love that just when you, when it touches you, it just shatters you because the loved create a universe. The extraordinary commitment and dedication and and compassion that’s involved in, in manifesting the universe and everything that’s in it, overwhelming.

And so I think when we love deeply, you know, when we, the same thing happens. This love flows through. This doesn’t come. It just flows through us. And so it, it is all communion with these deeper resources.

Laura Dawn: Do you feel that we are a way for the universe to come to know itself?

Chris Basche: I wonder, you know.

One often hears something like that. We are the way in which the universe knows itself. You know, so , but it’s hard for me to imagine that this creative intelligence doesn’t know itself until I actualize some part of itself that brings that into its experience. That hasn’t really worked for me too much.

It, it may be the case, I, I don’t know, but to me, we are the actualization of potential. Does the universe not know this potential fully until it’s actualized? Mm-hmm. If we think back in, in evolutionary terms, the first time, if we go back to the origin of homo homo Hobolus or homo rectus, you know, when it’s 3 million years ago or something like that, and we think of everything that’s going to be happening after that point, do we really imagine that the universe did not know homo sapiens until help know itself until homo sapiens actualized another aspect of itself, to me, it, , doesn’t strike me because I’ve always been impressed as I’ve dipped back into this infinite ocean of potential that I am engaging infinite knowledge, infinite love, and just trying to catch the edges of it, just trying to dribble it into my life. So mm-hmm.

I’m not, I think more than kind of teaching the universe about itself, I think the universe, it’s sharing its existence. It we are of the universe, we are of the divine. We are sparks of the divine. We are the, the universe has created this extraordinary garden for growing life, for growing intelligence, for growing.

But what is it? Growing, but parts of itself, it is as if it’s cloning itself. It’s, it’s taking itself, dividing itself into billions of pieces and letting those pieces grow and grow and grow and grow. And from my perspective, it’s sharing its life, it’s sharing its existence. Mm-hmm. So I feel much more that I am on the receiving end more than I am on the giving end of that relationship.

Laura Dawn: I really appreciate that perspective. Mm-hmm. Considering that everything feels a lot more amplified right now, this turning point that you’re speaking to, I mean, there are no coincidences and yet, what is your perspective on the fact that as we are going into this time of rapid opening and awakening and amplified energies that more people have access to these psychedelic substances than ever before.

More people are opening their mind in this way than ever before. Do you think about that correlation?

Chris Basche: Yeah. That does seem quite striking, doesn’t it? These mind opening substances. Are becoming available to us. I mean, L s D was invented in the same decade that the nuclear bomb was invented. But we also have all sorts of organic psychedelics.

Indigenous use of psychedelics are coming into Western culture. So ancient traditions are becoming part of suburban existence at this point in time. If we are wise in the use of these substances, I think these have tremendous beneficial effects, not only in helping us heal our past, but also in opening us to the future, opening us to a deeper understanding of existence.

It sometimes said a mystical experience does not a mystic make. I think this paraphrasing Houston Smith so that we don’t become mystic simply because we’ve had a mystical experience. However, a mystical experience can a, an atheistic philosophy, unmake. And if you have a reductionistic, you know, it’s all being generated by accident.

And you know, we are just sort of riding an accidental curve of evolution. And when we cease to exist, when our brain goes, we cease to exist. That can be destroyed by one good, deep psychedelic experience.

So I think psychedelics have a role of opening us to a deeper understanding, mm-hmm. Of existence, a deeper understanding of what’s going on.

And I think their role in healing is, is really important. I think that we are incarnating the karma of our history in a very concentrated manner, at this point in time. Generations are incarnating the karma of our divided past of all the things, terrible things we’ve done to each other, all the violence we’ve inflicted on each other, all the privations we’ve endured.

These are all kind of embodied in the beings of the generations who are incarnating now, which means there are, there’s a lot of healing to be done socially, politically, but personally, there’s a lot of healing to be done, and psychedelics can help this healing and accelerate this healing as we heal the past, as we offload, in a sense, the carmic conditioning of the past.

It’s not just about healing. It’s establishing a clear foundation, a stronger foundation to receive the powerful energies which are coming up underneath us. So it’s like these energies are coming up underneath us. The new is pouring itself up into us from underneath us, and that’s pushing these toxins to the surface.

Just as in the psychedelic session, it pushes the toxins of our unfinished business to the surface. History is pushing our toxins. We see it. It’s pushing racism to the surface. It’s pushing our gender toxicities, it’s pushing our species toxicities to the surface in us. And while we confront those toxicities, then we have an opportunity to heal the past, to open up to a new future.

So, yeah, I mean, I think psychedelics are coming in just in time to help us through this process. Yeah.

Laura Dawn: And I’m so curious to ask you about your perspective on technology. I’m curious if you’re tracking, I mean, it’s hard to miss everything that is exploding with artificial intelligence right now. Now we have quantum computing coming online. Yeah. How much do you think that that is also sort of predestined or are we creating it? And then that is accelerating, you know, , the process even more. Yeah.

Chris Basche: You know, I want to be careful. There’s a fallacy in philosophy, the generalization of expertise, that if you’re an expert in one area, you may begin to feel that you have the right of expertise in another area.

And I want to be careful about that. I don’t know where the artificial intelligence revolution is taking us. I don’t know where the medical revolutions are taking us, or even where the toxicity of our environment is taking us in these ways. It, it does seem that so many things are challenging the assumptions of the past.

It’s like it’s, we’re churning ourselves. Social media. I mean, who, who would’ve imagined 20, 30 years ago what social media would’ve done? Mm-hmm. Good side and bad side. Artificial intelligence is potentially extraordinarily beneficial and potentially extraordinarily lethal. And it’s coming at us so much faster than we had anticipated even, even 12 months ago.

It’s happening so much faster. I don’t know how this is going to play out, but it, it does seem to be increasing the instability. It’s increasing , the idea that the future is not gonna look like the past. We’re gonna have to change the way we’re doing things. We’re gonna have to take more responsibility for things that we weren’t necessarily taking responsibility for before.

It’s literally changing the conditions in which we are living our lives. That produces an instability. And I, I think this instability seems to be at least part of the instability of our larger transformational process, our larger death and rebirth process. Mm-hmm. But how. How it will play out, what it, what it actually means, what it figures.

I don’t know. The invention of the nuclear bomb seems to have been a part of something which is accelerating. Dwight Eisenhower, when he saw the films of the nuclear bomb, nuclear explosions, he said, well, that’s it. Meaning, and he was a leader of allied forces in World War ii, and he knew that this bomb changed war.

It changed the history of war, and there’s a way in which when our weapons become so lethal, , the very lethality of those weapons forces a kind of maturation process on humanity because we now have weapon. We can’t fight conflict the way we have always fought it up to this point in time, you bring out your army, I’ll bring out my army, whoever wins gets the results.

Now our weapons are so lethal. And our biological weapons, we dare not use them. Now, this pushes us to grow in ways we’ve never grown before, right? Mm-hmm. So, so many things are changing the ground up from under our feet. Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: And as the ground is crumbling under our feet, the importance of finding that stability within ourselves and our center and holding that center is more important than ever before.

And I’m curious if you could speak to that at all and maybe how you find that center of stability and where you turn to for strength and to resource yourself when moments are difficult.

Chris Basche: Yeah. Ah, well, as I said, all the years that I was doing my psychedelic work, I was also a meditator.

I also had the privilege of teaching courses and comparative mysticism, comparative spirituality, eastern tradition psychology, religion. So I was engaged in sharing with students the history of human spirituality, or at least some major slices of it. So much I didn’t know, but some I did. And so I had the opportunity to learn the stories of some great religious figures and spiritual figures and great spiritual teachers.

And so they, became their actualization of their spiritual potential was a touch tone for how I tried to guide my own life.

Once you touch even temporarily, The love of the universe and the intelligence of the universe, it changes forever how you see the world that you live in .You see the body, the universe as the manifest body of divinity. You see the universe as the manifestation of this living intelligence. So where I go, I mean, I go through the trials like everybody else goes through trials, and I’m strengthened by my knowledge of other people’s experiences, other people’s spiritual depth.

And I’m strengthened by my memories. All I have to do is go into my memories to have my faith in the intelligence of the universe restored, renewed I go into quiet, I go into meditation, , I go into retreat like everyone else does. I’m not doing psychedelics now. I mean, that period of my life is pretty much over.

My practice really focuses more on contemplative presence, where I sit in a way to practice in a way which invites the continued integration and deepening of the experiences that I was fortunate enough to have in years back.

I think in psychedelic sessions and in spiritual practice, one learns that the portal to all that we’ve been talking about, the true portal lies only in one place.

It lies inside ourselves and in the present. So we all, so much spiritual practice and vows. Focusing in the present, focusing the present, pulling our mind out of the past, present, and future. Focusing it in the present, bringing it in the present. And when we’re really focused in the present, sometimes we can drop down into, through that moment of the present and, and tap into a totally different expanse of reality.

So I think those exercises that teach us to live in the present, to confront the present, including the difficulties and challenges of the present, including the political and environmental challenges of the present, to not avoid them, to not deflect them, to face them to the very best we can to solve them when they come up as they enter our awareness.

These are all centering. These are, this is how to live a centered life spiritually, politically ecologically. We have to sort of take care of the present as it is live in the present. Hmm.

Laura Dawn: Do you have a knowing within you that when you choose to show up in your center and cultivate the awareness of the present moment, that you are directly contributing to the awakening of humanity, like what Buddhist philosophy talks about and what Rupert Sheldrakes morphogenic field points to?

Do you think they point to the same thing?

Chris Basche: Yeah, that’s, that’s been my experience so many times. It resides within me as as a deep abiding knowing. I know that we are all connected to each other. I know that what I do impacts other people and what they do impacts me. I know that the Buddhist are right when they, they start every spiritual practice by cultivating Bodhicitta, which is a wish to, to enlightened or to heal all sentient beings.

And at the end of their practice, they give away all of their good karma that they’ve generated. They give it away to everyone else. And , the reason we do things we do at all levels is , for the wellbeing of all life, for the wellbeing of all life. And that has just been hammered into me, or, you know, so many times.

It just, it’s become a simple part of my acceptance. So when I meditate in the morning, I’m not simply meditating from my wellbeing. Mm-hmm. I’m meditating hopefully, to have a beneficial outreach on other people’s wellbeing. And I, I’ve experienced this in my classroom so many times. I mean, I wrote a book, the Living Classroom at the end of my teaching career. And , the secret backstory of that book is that my students never knew I was doing psychedelic practice, but I found that my psychedelic practice was actually impacting the lives of some of my students. Because consciousness is unified. When you have a deep clarifying experience, it naturally radiates out around you 360 degrees.

And so when a person reaches very deep into the ground of consciousness, people who are around you are necessarily affected. It’s like throwing a, it’s throwing , a rock in the lake. The ripples reach out, and it reached out so powerfully and touched the lives of my students so deeply, I had to learn what was happening, and I had to develop a new way of teaching with greater intentionality and forethought in order to. for me to continue to do my work, but to do it in a way which it protected my students and made sure that , they weren’t getting into something that was taking them too deep, too fast. And the living classroom is about energetic resonance in the classroom. And it’s also about fields of consciousness that spring up in groups that I learned that courses have a field of consciousness.

Just as Rupert Sheldrake talks about, morphic fields for species, even short-term groups generate a field of consciousness, which has an integrity and this field of consciousness learns. And that’s this learning. So I, that courses develop fields around them which impact the learning of subsequent students when they are learning this material.

Mm-hmm. So there’s, there’s so many ways in which this has become , such a common part of my experience. I just, I don’t doubt it.

Laura Dawn: I would love to have you back on to do a whole episode just on the Living classroom because so many people who listen to this are teachers. They’re launching programs leading retreats, you know, working with people.

And really genuinely from the bottom of my heart, Chris, like I just am so grateful for everything that you have dedicated your life to because it has been so impactful for me and. I feel so grateful to read someone else’s work where it’s deepening my own understanding. And I’ve had these experiences where I’m bringing through curriculum and I learned about what you’re talking about in terms of the living classroom from a very different perspective.

And the way that you’ve dedicated to giving language to it , is helping me enormously as I’m teaching and learning about these principles and bringing it through to other people. And so I, I wanna go much deeper into that, but we’re gonna have to keep it for another conversation. I’d be glad

Chris Basche: to have that conversation.

Yeah,

Laura Dawn: so much like , I think it really is something that no one’s really talking about in the space. Mm-hmm. And so, and it, it’s just such a next level conversation, but one of the things that I wanted to wrap on was this notion of being a visionary and working with visionary medicines and the necessity to cultivate inner vision.

And you did mention in the shift course on your the program that you led, that you know, right now it’s really important that we cultivate vision and if we don’t have that vision to give us hope, then there is going to be a lot more suffering. And that vision can help us, you know, guide us through these, these oceans of suffering.

And so I’m curious if we could speak to that necessity. Mm-hmm. And how do people go about cultivating vision? Is that something that you weave into your practice and your meditation practice? Is it something that you feel like you receive a vision or project, a vision? Is there more of a dialogue there?

Is it visual for you? If we could unpack some of that. Yeah, I would love to wrap on this.

Chris Basche: Well, I think we’re always guided by a vision. And the vision often doesn’t come from us, it comes from other people around us. We’re given a vision by how our nations celebrates its national holidays. We’re given a, a vision by learning history.

By learning science. We learn about the world around us, which congeals into a certain vision of what’s happening, which then if we’re wise, we guide our life, our choices with respect to that vision or by that vision. So this is happening continuously. So anything that I might say about cultivating inner vision is simply an adjunct or part of a larger process because we’re always, we’re always guided by vision of one form or another.

You know a shaman is basically a healer for his or her community. And there’s a different kind of shaman, which is a visionary shaman. And, and I think that’s kind of what I am, if you use those categories I’m not a healer. I’m not healing a community in any localized sense. I don’t work in that way.

I am receiving visions of a very broad cosmological and existential and evolutionary sort, which I then try to understand and try to share, hoping that they’ll be useful to other people. Whether we are reading books or exploring the history of science or the future of science or the future of technology, are cultivating non-ordinary states of consciousness where we cultivate a receptivity to an inner knowing and inner vision that comes through us in these states.

I think these are all different strategies for cultivating the same broad horizon, and what we need is a broad horizon in order to allow our lives to become maximally coherent with the circumstances that we are in. So I think cultivating inner vision is valuable and important. I think cultivating a vision based on scientific knowledge is also, you know an ecological knowledge is critical and important, but we’re always, always living out of visions.

Mm-hmm.

Laura Dawn: I know we didn’t dive into diamond luminosity. I don’t know if this is too much to unpack right now. When you go into those states after going through all these cycles of purification, of death and rebirth and moving through the ocean of suffering, as you outlined in your book and your journey, and you experience these, these other realms, these deeper dimensions of mm-hmm.

Consciousness. Mm-hmm. Are you in a more clear. I wanna say, are you more of a clear conduit to receive these cosmological visions that are, you know, so much bigger than you could ever possibly imagine?

Chris Basche: Well, in all spiritual practice and, and in this context, understanding psychedelics is just another variation on spiritual practice. You’re cleaned out, you know, you’re always cleaned out, reamed out, crushed up ground up. You are broken down and rearranged so as to be able to receive more. Mm-hmm. As you are initiated deeper into the universe, you moved into psychic level, transpersonal states, cult, subtle level, causal level, non-dual level, visionary states for me in the last five years of my work, in the last 26 sessions, this was one third of my entire journey, I began to enter a domain that I call the diamond luminosity. And I entered this domain only four times in the last five years of my work. So it’s in between those four times, lots of purification, continuing purification healing, but four times entering this diamond luminosity.

Now one encounters light many times on a journey, on a spiritual path. Many people experience deep, profound light after they go through ego death experience. And I had encountered light many times on my journey at different stages. So when I describe this light as the diamond luminosity, I’m not simply using the fancy metaphor to describe the light.

I’m trying to describe a particularly intense, particularly clear quality of light. Light, just breathtakingly clear, just so clear. It takes your breath away. There is ecstasy in experiencing this light, but , the experience is much deeper than ecstasy. As I look at the spiritual literature, and Buddhism is one of the traditions I know the best Buddhism calls this slight Dharmakaya.

You know, they divide three different levels or descriptions or levels of reality Dharmakaya Sambhoga-Kaya, nirmana-kaya, the clear light of absolute reality, the light out of which the Big Bang happened that the light, that is the fundamental foundation of all physical existence. My understanding is that this light, this is the light that lies outside the bardo.

That in between a outside of physical reality for humans, there are many, many levels of existence. We call them the bardo, the different levels that we go to when we die, from the near inner rings to the outermost rings. But outside the bardo there is a domain of pure light, which is deeper than any heaven, deeper than any of the ecstatic states that are available to us in bardo existence.

It is being dissolved in the crystaline body of the divine, if you will. Absolutely contentless, sheer luminous beyond measure. Once I touch this reality, I wasn’t interested in exploring any of the other dimensions of consciousness that I had explored up to that point in time. The only thing I wanted to do was to go back into this reality, and it took me a year of work before I could return to this reality, and then another year before I could return to it again.

And these four sessions really are the true diamonds from heaven that I, that I think of in writing this book that I wanted to share. And, and this is a level of reality that is our birthright. All of us come from this level of reality. All of us return to this level of reality eventually. It, there is nothing personal about it.

It is common ground to all existence. It is the source of everything which is, and and in some fundamental primordial state primordial condition.

Laura Dawn: What do you think is the message? If you had to relay the wisdom and a message of that dimension to people listening, how would you summarize that wisdom?

Chris Basche: I don’t know that I could boil it down into one message. If I were to try to do it, it would be something like if the light is speaking, it would be: to know me is to know your true and essential nature. To know me is to know where you come from. To know what you are. To know what you always have been, every moment of your existence, even when you are completely asleep.

To know me is to know joy and infinite fulfillment, and to consciously participate in the full measure of your infinite being, my beloved child.

Hmm. That’s beautiful. Hmm.

Laura Dawn: That feels like a good place to wrap up this first conversation. I’m curious, probably good if you would be open to ending with a dedication, a prayer to send this out into the universe to benefit all the people who may listen to it or may not listen to this.

Chris Basche: I’d be pleased to.

I’ve never been asked to do that in an interview, so I will just finish with a simple Buddhist prayer, which is a distribution of merit, prayer, Vajrayana. It’s something we sing at the end of every practice, okay? It distributes the merit of our conversation to all levels of existence.

Any level where any being at any level can benefit from it, can use it.

May

Laura Dawn: the resonance of this frequency ripple out and touch the hearts and minds of all beings everywhere. Yeah. Thank you, Chris, for your life. Thank you for your life work. I’m grateful for your time and to be on the receiving end of all of your wisdom.

Chris Basche: Thank you, Laura.

Thank you for all the conversations that you bring into existence and all the people that you connect in the world. Much love. Thank you.

Laura Dawn: Wow. That was so rich. I feel like I could talk to you for hours and days and months and lifetimes.

Chris Basche: Well, we can do it again.

Laura Dawn: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you