EIGHT
A Benediction of Blessings
Sessions 36–43
This was Saccidananda,
Being-Consciousness-Bliss,
the Fertile Void,
Mother of All Things,
the Buddha Womb.
SESSIONS 40
After eighteen months of exploring archetypal reality and the sinews of our collective being, the year that followed was one of extraordinary blessings. It was a veritable benediction of blessings. It drew to a head processes that had been building for years as I stepped into the Oneness of causal reality. In this respect, these next sessions represent something of a high point on the journey. Not an end point, but a piece of high ground that brought a new understanding and a deeper intimacy with life. This high ground then became the jumping off point into the final five years of the journey.
What follows are four of the eight sessions from this year. I’ve shortened them to focus on the essential elements. The second is the longest and most complex, and I will discuss it later in the chapter. Recall in these eight sessions was sometimes challenging, telling me that I was crossing a new threshold. With repetition I became more familiar with the territory and absorbed its patterns and rules. The names I gave these sessions are:
S 36 The Forest
S 38 The Birth of the Diamond Soul
S 40 Singing the Universe Away
S 42 Jesus’ Blood
Sharing these sessions has been harder than I expected, and it will likely get harder still in the chapters ahead. I am a private person by nature, and it is not easy for me to open to public scrutiny experiences of such deep and personal joy. It feels like I am letting the reader into my inner sanctum, into that place in each of our hearts where we store our most precious treasures. I release these sessions by reminding myself that what is important is not that I experienced these things but that they are available for all of us to experience.
Session 36—The Forest
This session represented a radical jump in experiential categories that was absolutely intoxicating. New experiences and a new way of thinking opened today.
The theme of the opening movement was: “If only you could see reality as it truly is!” Layer after layer was being pulled away as I moved beyond physical existence and the categories of physical existence. As in the past two sessions, there was no pain and no chaos, only a pervasive sense of disorientation. It felt as though I had actually taken a smaller dose of LSD. How could I be experiencing so many dramatic transitions and yet still be so centered? Assuming that the energy of today’s session was as intense as previous sessions, where was this energy focused?
In pursuit of answers to these questions, I turned to address that small, stubborn remnant of unlovability I had been processing in the previous two sessions. I don’t how or why, but soon after focusing on this problem, it suddenly opened and everything changed. There was no explanation; no content emerged for me to examine. I simply moved quickly, quietly, effortlessly into a new reality. I entered a world that moved according to completely different patterns than any I have known before.
In this entire world, there were no separate “units,” no “things.” There was diversity and movement, color, shape, and form, but no isolation. Life here was not the assemblage of parts but the harmonious expression of a unified whole rippling through life, the way wind ripples through a wheat field. It was as though the wheat knew there were no separate stalks but only one “wheat” coming into expression through millions of strands.
The vision that mediated this experience was that of a Forest—thousands of trees and grasses, hundreds of species rendered transparent to the universal energies of soil and sun moving through them. Diversity did not rupture oneness. Oneness expressed itself in diversity without itself falling into diversity. “If only you could see reality as it truly is.” As I saw it today, reality was a fluid energy expressing itself in diversity. The trees were many, but there was a single life force that flowed through them all, ignoring completely whether they were pines, oaks, or maples. This underlying energy brings everything into existence, keeps everything alive, and reabsorbs everything at its end. It knows no divisions whatsoever. My usual divided reality was completely unreal. Division truly is an illusion.
The reality I was in preserved the forms of Earth. There was activity, process, movement, and people. Everything was as it normally is except that there was no “I” present anywhere, either in me or in any other. I kept thinking to myself, “Nothing has changed except that I’m not here. ‘I’ do not exist.” What a cosmic joke! What a relief! What freedom! Here was my form, my processes, my distinctive patterns of awareness, but there was no “I” to be found. It was simply gone. Feeling but no feeler; thinking but no thinker. What quiet, expansive joy. It continued for hours.
Collective Import
There was a second component here that is harder to acknowledge but just as real. I could feel that the spiritual opening taking place was not just a private experience but was also a collective experience that touched many lives. The sessions were being used to leverage something beyond my personal being. Every time I come up against the collective import of what I once viewed as my personal work, I draw back. I have to overcome great resistance to even admit the concept. “You inflate your significance,” I say to myself. “Just another ego trip.” And yet, my heart tells me this is not so.
In order to be true to my experience, my first loyalty is to record it as accurately as I can. If I do this, I record that this awakening to Oneness reached out and nourished an enormous field. Just as earlier sessions had pulled the toxins of suffering out of the collective field of humanity, now the experience of no-self was being infused into the collective field. To the extent that this took cognitive form at all, it took the form of becoming comfortable with the loss of boundaries. Surrendering the boundaries of race, of class, of nationality, of religion. Wherever we had drawn boundaries in history, there was fear. I seemed to be mediating a calming energy that encouraged the dissolving of these boundaries in the collective psyche. This went on for a long time as boundary after boundary kept falling away. Soothing energies moved through me into the human field, making it a bit easier for people to yield to the flow of historical events that were challenging the unreal divisions humanity had drawn.
On a more personal note, I record that the threads that were originally woven into my incarnation feel to be drawn from the collective psyche. How this works, I don’t know. What is the measure of personal and collective? Where are the boundaries? I don’t know. But from deep within these experiences, it sometimes feels that my entire person derives from the collective human field, like pinching a tightly woven tablecloth and twisting it into a standing shape. It feels like the threads of my individual being are almost wholly exhausted in this collective cloth, that my person has been brought into existence as an instrument to rescue the whole.
In this condition, I ask: Is there anyone here beyond these collective threads? Are there no personal threads at all? Where is the individuality of my soul? Is there no true individuality? Will it come into view as my vision adjusts to this new reality? Have I simply lost my ability to see it as I enter the joy of this unified field?
Comment
Buddhism teaches that there are no separate things in existence, that all conditioned reality is characterized by śūnyatā, “emptiness” or “transparency.” As the Dalai Lama explains in The Universe in a Single Atom, “Things and events are ‘empty’ in that they can never possess any immutable essence, intrinsic reality or absolute ‘being’ that affords independence” (2005). Nothing holds its existence by itself but is always transparent to the underlying matrix of cause and effect. When one experiences emptiness, one experiences the complete absence of an independent self, not only in one’s own person but in all reality. In this session, I experienced emptiness and Oneness as two sides of the same coin. When we experience the universe as One, it is clear that independent, separate things do not exist. Conversely, when the separate self dissolves completely, the Oneness of life spontaneously rises in our awareness.
At the end of chapter 6, I asked: If a person can take on the suffering of others at the subtle level of consciousness and relieve that suffering to some degree, why does the suffering ever cease for an individual while it still continues for the species-mind as a whole? This session answers this question. The work of draining poisons out of the collective psyche from “below” is followed by pouring blessings into it from “above.” When we move into levels of reality beyond the species-mind, we do not abandon humanity, but rather we become more useful to humanity by acting on it from a higher position.
Session 38—The Birth of the Diamond Soul
The Tibetan chanting carried me into a deeply chaotic state that was very disorienting. I was not experiencing pain, only confusion and chaos, and then fear, though I could not find anything to be afraid of. The confusion seemed to be reaching deeper and deeper into me, leaving less of “me” to orient to. The power of the thundering chants was dissolving me, breaking me into incoherent pieces. I kept choosing to open to the process, letting it draw from me whatever it would.
After what felt like hours of this, I began to feel exhausted and completely spent. Now there was a panic growing in the chaos as my feelings shifted from stoic endurance to exhausted desperation. “I can’t take much more of this. Please stop. Please let me go.” I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by these voices that were dissolving me with their thundering cadence. I could not remember anything that had happened in any previous session. I was completely incoherent. Once desperate to escape the chanting, now I was simply thundering vibration itself. And the chanting continued on and on.*50
From somewhere the sense eventually came that it was time to move on, and I signaled this to my sitter. I was so disoriented, however, that I had absolutely no idea what should happen next. Then the spacious music of Paul Winter came on. In response to its soothing rhythms, my shattered mind began to move again. It slowly curved back in around the edges, coaxing me into motion with comforting strokes of intimacy. It felt to me as if I were a standing dead man, as if I had died and not even had the decency to fall down. The meaninglessness of the category of death cascaded through me, and I laughed.
Paradise
From the middle of a profound emptiness, I began to stir. Against complete darkness, I felt myself to be the silhouette of a human being, completely empty within. The figure began to move, and as I did a world of color sprang into existence around me. It was the world of nature, of trees, birds, grasses, and flowers. As I moved within this familiar-looking world, suddenly I began to experience it in an entirely new manner that was completely and utterly intoxicating.
I was experiencing its many pieces all at once. Birds flying between trees and the trees themselves were not separate things but flowing strands in a single field. These strands were sparkling white and glistening with a diamond-bright luminosity. My previous experience of nature had been so diluted and diminished. I had been able to experience only one piece of it at a time. Now I was experiencing the ecstatic wholeness of it. Not an amorphous wholeness that blurred the distinctions between things but a brilliantly clear wholeness that preserved and delighted in the distinctions. I was not swept into this world quickly but entered it step-by-step, maintaining a clear perception of events and reveling in the ever-widening circles of experience that were opening to me. What exquisite ecstasy!
As I began to move about, I suddenly found that I had abilities completely beyond any I had ever imagined. Capacities that I never dreamed possible were now part of my spontaneous nature. I was like a kid in heaven’s candy store. It took me awhile to realize what was happening. These new abilities were actually new ways of being conscious. I was suddenly able to experience textures of reality, modalities of existence that had been completely unavailable to me seconds before, that I had never touched in any previous session. Any lingering unfulfilled dreams or aspirations from my present earthly life suddenly fell away from me as irrelevant. The deepest leftover longings of my heart simply dropped away in the face of the simplest, most elementary mode of just being conscious at this new level.
As I moved through this reality, new constellations of experience kept opening to me, and each carried with it a different form of ecstasy. I cannot describe these experiences because they correspond to nothing in space-time. Possibilities were opening faster than I could keep track of. I knew that I was just scratching the surface of this realm and that it would take eons for me to understand and tap its full potential. I felt like a child, deliriously happy to have been given more blessings than I could ever have imagined.
The Diamond Soul
The jump in experience from chaos to Paradise was in time followed by still another jump that was even larger than the first. The insights and experiences that follow derive from a different order of reality altogether, and words will be even less satisfactory to give a sense of their proportion or impact.
The falling away of the concerns of my present historical personality carried with it a sense of regathering the energies of my life. It was as though I was regathering energies that had been strewn over centuries of time through many incarnations. As I did this, I became step-by-step what I had been before I had incarnated in space-time, but at the same time I also focused and clarified what had been accomplished by entering space-time. So there was both the sense of return, with a profound resonance of homecoming, and also the sense of realization of accomplishment, of seeing clearly what had been the purpose of the entire exercise.
Once the first transition beyond my present historical personality was made, it became easier to regather other layers of energy. I felt that these other layers pertained to other lifetimes, but I could not see specific details. As I regathered wave upon wave of energy, I rose to quieter and quieter levels of existence and into deeper intimacy with an Intelligence that spoke with the authority of “God.” Whatever its ultimate status in the cosmic matrix, it profoundly engulfed my minuscule awareness.
As I ascended through these levels, many teachings from years of sessions returned and organized themselves into profound experiential exercises. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together, carrying me into an extremely concentrated distillation of experiential instruction. Many of the components of this teaching were familiar from previous sessions, but today they were demonstrated to me with devastating power and impact. I will first describe the conceptual content of the teaching and then the experiential aspects.
The Teaching
Reduced to its essence the teaching was this: Matter is the canvas that mind paints upon. It has no capacity to act apart from the animating presence of consciousness and is responsive to the direction of consciousness. Therefore, whatever our experience is in space-time, we must have the courage to sit still and face the fact that we are experiencing nothing but the manifestation of our own consciousness. No matter how terrible the pain, no matter how horrendous the injustice or inscrutable the logic, our experience in space-time is the direct expression of our consciousness in a higher order of reality.*51
If we do not face this terrible fact, we fail to understand the most basic fact of life. Matter is the canvas on which we practice and refine the art of creating. It is the notebook in which we draw sketches and explore possibilities. If our experience in this life is convoluted and torn by conflicting forces, it was transparently obvious that this was caused by the carryover of exercises from previous lifetimes in space-time. The experience of matter is extremely intense and leaves a powerful impression on the mind. If we go to see a frightening movie, later when we are home safe in our beds, we may have nightmares. Likewise, the impressions physical existence makes on our consciousness carry themselves over into other incarnations. It is as if we have tried to sketch too many drawings on the same page and the pictures interfere with each other. “What we are is the result of everything we have ever thought,” says the Dhammapada. And yet, there is a method to this madness, a direction to our experimentation.
We move into space-time to experiment with our creative abilities. But the intensity of space-time experience is such that we tend to get caught in the echoes of our experience. Home safe in our cosmic beds after death, we get caught by our dreams and return again and again to Earth, weaving new layers into the dream. Eventually, however, the time comes when we begin to collect the tangled threads of our physical experiences. Lifetime by lifetime, we rewind the threads of our dreaming and regather the energy of all our human exercises.
As I rewound the threads of my existence, I began to experience more clearly what the entire exercise of reincarnation had been about. It had not been about what happened in any individual lifetime. It had been about learning how to control the powers of creativity that were my innate nature. We were, in effect, learning how to be gods, learning how to create.
The fact that matter follows mind implies the ability to control one’s physical experience through the power of consciousness. This cannot be done at the level of the ego but requires the coherent integration of all the lives one has lived. Beginning to access these former lives first brings forward their unresolved fragments, causing their unfinished karma to manifest in our life. Eventually, however, these fragments are healed and the threads are rewound. As this happens, we become more internally coherent, and our physical existence begins to become more transparent to choices originating in our Soul and the deeper fields that our Soul is part of. To begin to be able to consciously direct our experience inside space-time instead of being unconsciously dragged around by our past represented a major accomplishment.
This step, however, was quickly superseded by yet another realization. To be able to control one’s physical existence was a good thing, but to learn that physical existence itself served the purpose of developing and refining our creative ability, this was a development whose significance radically transcended any physical lifetime. This was what the exercise of space-time was all about. The goal seemed to be about becoming a fully conscious creative being.
The Experience
These discoveries were not just an intellectual exercise as I have described them here but a series of profound experiential realizations. Regathering the energy of my former lives led to the conscious control of my physical existence. My historical existence became transparent to my Soul’s conscious intent, with fewer complications arising from the shadows cast by pockets of unresolved karma. When I moved into the next level and discovered that the deeper purpose of the exercise was controlled creativity itself, a brilliant, diamond-like light broke forth from my chest.
I now understand why it is called Diamond Consciousness. Truly, our experience of physical light is but a metaphor for the intensity and brilliance of this energy. It had the characteristics of brilliant light, of sparkling luminosity, but also perfectly aligned density. It was extremely concentrated, like a laser, yet at the same time completely transparent. It was perfectly focused power. I suddenly knew that all my experiences in space-time over all these centuries served the cultivation of this Diamond Energy. This is what I am here for, what we are all here for, to learn how to consciously control this extraordinary power.
Let me backtrack to another layer of the experience. As I was re-assimilating my lives and ascending through various levels, I was also entering into intimate dialogue with a Presence that addressed me. It communed with me and “spoke” to me in messages that were only sometimes put into words. It was explaining to me what I was experiencing not so much with words but with direct illumination.
When I reached the point of Diamond Light, I was lifted beyond physical existence and beyond the bardo echoes of physical existence. It felt like I had re-assimilated all my incarnations on Earth, that I had brought back into one all my experiences in duality. From this point, which carried the flavor of both before and after physical existence, the Presence illumined for me the human project. With the deepest, most tender words of a divine parent, It said:
“Go and create, My Children.”
It was setting us loose in a cosmos that contained many realms. The one I had just reemerged from was only one among many universes, some of which were physical, others not. We were small aspects of this Being, truly Its children, of the same type, only smaller in size and capacity.
Having just returned from a sojourn of countless years in space-time, I knew that our creative capacity was enormous. I knew, too, that our capacity for creating destruction and pain was also enormous. And yet, this Being was setting us free, placing absolutely no limits on our creative choices. Our absolute freedom seemed as precious to It as our creative ability. No limit was placed on our learning. “Go and create, My Children.” How generous and terrible the conditions. How immeasurable the wisdom behind the exercise.
I was different from my surrounding environment, and the difference was the Light that was shining from me. It was what I now was—a defined speck of infinitely dense, infinitely transparent Diamond Light. This is what I had entered space-time to actualize. I could feel many universes around me to explore and grow in. I felt the truth of the ancient mandalas that depict multiple universes all overseen by a cadre of divinities, each focused in a different project. These too were about expanding and refining one’s potential, about becoming more through the disciplined exercise of awareness.
“Go and create, My Children.” The opportunities were infinite. I felt myself returning to a condition of undivided wholeness within myself. Regathering aspects that seemed to derive from some of these other realms, I rose through level after level until I felt myself to be alone with the Source of my existence, suspended between worlds. The warmth of this reunion soaked me to the bone. The peace cannot be described.
There is nothing more I can say at this point except to note that the experience was both personal and collective. It felt like some enormous ball of intertwined threads that did not begin or end in my private life was dissolving into this Light. The threads that were originally twisted into my being derived in large measure from the collective, and therefore as this tangled knot dissolved into the Light, the luminosity flowed into the field of the species-mind, spreading itself deep into the fiber of the collective unconscious of my people.
Comment
I will discuss this session later in the chapter, but here I want to point out that there is a certain tension between this session’s experience of a true individuality emerging through reincarnation and the experience in session 36 of a nondual consciousness that sees no separate self anywhere in the world. My sessions embrace this tension. Their consistent vision is that this emerging Diamond Soul is completely compatible with emptiness. This post-egoic individuality is not a static, independent, or closed entity but “open on all sides.” It lives in continuous exchange with the world.*52
Session 40—Singing the Universe Away
The categories of this session were without precedent and seemed to represent almost a completely different genus of experience. My summary, therefore, will not adequately reflect the strangeness of today’s experiences, and my pitiful summary stops far short of full disclosure.
The music was from the Bulgarian Women’s Choir—“Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares.” Early on there was a sense of a theme: “Today we work on reconciliation with the feminine.” This involved many facets—my present life and former lives, human women and archetypal feminine forces. A variety of disruptions between myself and the feminine forces of life were being elicited and worked with. The sharp singing drew from me many unpleasant experiences of intrusive women, all smeared together. These experiences deepened and changed as the singing took me deeper into a strange state. In time the unpleasantness faded and was replaced by fascination, then by complete absorption.
Eventually, the theme of my death emerged amid the strangeness. It seemed somehow appropriate that after all the masculine pain I had endured in these sessions—wars, torture, physical violence—today my death was being elicited by women. Complete inversion (again). The theme of death continued to deepen until I realized that I was beginning to die. It seemed to move slowly and to take a long time. I knew that I was being consumed by a process that would leave absolutely no residue. I had just enough composure to know what was happening and to yield to the process. I don’t know if I could have resisted it if I tried, but I did not try. It felt unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Death was simply there, gnawing away at my being.
I did not die precipitously or with a sense of culmination as I had expected, but instead simply slipped smoothly at one point through a definitive transition into a new state. It was so easy. The transformation, though not dramatic, was profound. The death state was expansive and beatific. I had many visions of deep space filled with ethereal light. I was so grateful to be dead, and this gratefulness and expansiveness formed the backdrop to everything that followed.
My state is difficult to describe because it was so novel to me. I was not in the intense ecstasy of heavenly paradise as in session 38, nor was I absorbed in the image-filled cosmological vistas of earlier sessions. Today was simply death as I have never known death. Death moved me into a condition marked simply by unbounded expansiveness and ecstatic appreciation. I was so grateful to be where I was, so grateful to have died. The singing carried me deeper and deeper into this reality. It was as though I was listening to the voice of God singing me into her universe.
I stayed in this reality for hours. I cannot describe what I experienced here beyond the most superficial remnants. It is trivial, for example, to observe that this universe has many levels, but I experienced movement through many levels that felt archetypal and then beyond archetypal.
Then something happened that stunned and transfixed me. I was following the singing when suddenly the entire universe began to disappear. The singing simply erased the universe in a few deft strokes, smoothly and effortlessly dissolving it. I didn’t know where I was. I was in a domain that was entirely devoid of content save for faint traces of the singing in the background. I was self-aware, but at the same time my awareness seemed to be infinite. The bliss caught me and held me transfixed for a long time, though the category of “time” had ceased to exist.
I intuitively knew that the singing had been guiding me here all day, that this was my destination. This was Saccida-nanda, Being Consciousness-Bliss, the Fertile Void, Mother of All Things, the Buddha Womb. I was stunned and eternally grateful.
In time the Void-Beyond yielded and content-filled experience returned, but the echoes and bliss of the Formless saturated everything that followed. For a long time, I lay quietly, completely enraptured with the singing of these wonderful women whose voices had become the voice of God singing the universe away. Content returned, but I cannot describe much more than its flavor. It was celebratory, appreciative, extremely clear, and feminine.
In the end, what stands out from today is this: death, great gratitude, extraordinary clarity, and, most strongly, the dissolving of the universe and the voices that sang it away.
Comment
In Hinduism, Saccidānanda is the name given the experience of ultimate reality. The word is composed of three roots that communicate the essence of the experience: Sat-chit-ananda—infinite being, infinite awareness, and infinite bliss. In Buddhism, the Buddha Womb refers to the infinite source of all existence. As Anne Klein describes it in her book Meeting the Great Bliss Queen, the Buddha Womb is the infinite expanse from which all existence arises. She quotes the great eighth-century Tibetan sage Padmasambhava who said:
This is the basis of all coming and going
The place of arising of all existents,
The womb of the mother consort.*53
This experience of the Void-Beyond was foreshadowed by an earlier experience of the Void that had taken place two years before in session 23, the session that contained the first vision of the master plan for humanity. It would have disrupted the flow of the narrative to have included it in that discussion, so I add it here as a supplement to this session.
The Void (S 23)
During the historical overview when I was being shown glimpses of the larger evolutionary plan for humanity, something happened that was intended to help me put what I was experiencing into perspective.
I was in a condition of consciousness that might best be described as “ancient.” Surveying what had been unfolding through billions of years of evolution and what would be emerging in humanity’s future, I was not so much in the material domain as in a domain that was responsible for generating material reality. Matter always exists at a specific time, but I was encompassing many time-moments simultaneously and so was stretched across time. The experience carried with it a sense of being “time-filled” or “ancient.”
In the middle of this grand tour, it was as if something said, “Just to put this into perspective,” and then the most extraordinary thing happened. The physical universe began to be folded up and put away. It was as simple as that, like one puts away Christmas decorations after the holidays. The physical universe, planets surging with vitality, whole galaxies teeming with life, started to be folded up and slipped into a background of total EMPTINESS. I immediately recognized that this was the Primal Void. I was being shown that matter and time are not ultimately real, that they emerge from and are at every moment sustained by something that is more real, something completely without form.
As the universe got smaller with each fold, I could feel billions of life-forms being slipped into the folds of the Void, and a protest rose within me. I did not want to let go of all this exquisitely beautiful form, everything that had been so painstakingly crafted through billions of years of evolution. Indeed, it was my love for the physical universe that seemed to precipitate this extreme lesson—as if to break the spell that physical creation had on me, seen as I had seen it in the broad sweep of its evolutionary glory. My protests changed nothing, however, and the universe’s bursting vitality became fainter with each fold.
As the universe continued to shrink, my experience began to shift to what was swallowing it. What had been background was becoming foreground and capturing my attention. It was SILENCE like I had never experienced silence before. It was STILLNESS more still than I had ever known. And most strange of all, I experienced its emergence as a REMEMBERING. I was remembering something that it seemed I had lost contact with billions of years ago. The shock of remembering something so ancient left me stunned. In one second, it completely transformed my sense of what I was. Our memories define the boundaries of our being. In one sudden movement, I was remembering a sea of Infinite Formlessness that was the source of all Form, including my own form, and I knew that this was what “I” at root was.
The physical universe did not disappear entirely. At one point, the folding was simply stopped, and I am left wondering what would have happened if it had been allowed to continue. Just this partial disappearance into the Void, however, was sufficient to break the spell of matter and leave me awash with feelings of paradoxical fullness.
Two months after session 40 and the formless bliss of Saccidānanda, a different manifestation of Oneness emerged in session 42—the warm embrace of Cosmic Love.
Session 42—Jesus’ Blood
As I again entered into the singing of “Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares,” its tightly packed harmonies shifted me as before into an intense condition of plurality. This time I flowed with the experience, allowing myself to become Many instead of simply being me. This continued for a long time, taking me through many places that are not important to me now. Eventually, I asked for the music to be changed, and “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” came on.*54 Over the next several hours, this repetitive hymn to humanity carried me into one of the most satisfying experiences I have ever had in a session.
In the midst of the powerful currents of plurality, I began to experience a white Light, first around the edges, then moving to the center. Gradually, the currents of plurality dissolved into the Light. The experience of being Many became an experience of being seamlessly extended throughout the Light, and I felt waves of gratitude wash through me. I was so deeply grateful to be where I was. How kind was the universe. How insignificant my death. In fact, the very category of “death” had been abandoned as inappropriate. From where I presently stood, the ego of separate existence felt like a foolish burden I was glad to have dropped off. How impoverished its capacity for experience. How narrow its vision. Enough of that; let me play in the Fields of the Lord.
I remember listening to the bum’s frail voice singing his faith in God. As I listened, his voice opened me to humanity and suddenly I was one with us all, starting with the lost and poor, with the cast aside and overlooked. The warm currents of the uplifting refrain carried all of us into the Light as everything took on the inner radiance of that Eternal Light, becoming transparent to that reality. I was all of humanity and all of humanity was the Light. In this Light, I moved like a current in the ocean, both all and yet with my own distinctive pattern.
So spacious, so free. In becoming simple, my experience began to open. Though I was an individual, by becoming “uncomplicated” I suddenly reached across unimaginable distances, opened to unimaginable depths. Breadth and depth were distinctly different dimensions of the experience, each with its own characteristics.
BREADTH opened me to the world of humanity; it carried me beyond my individual experience into an underlying flow of collective human experience. Here, I and the many became one. DEPTH opened me to something entirely different. Through this mode of awareness, alternative universes came into view, alternative levels of reality underpinning the physical universe became present.
I cannot emphasize too strongly how experiential these changes were. The richness of these modes of experience took my breath away. Having lost my boundaries, I spread out into this field of experience like ripples spreading across a lake, like sound spreading through air. The resonant textures of the music vibrated through me, and I seemed to be more like vibration than anything else—definitely present in one “place” but open on all sides.
Divine Love
For hours I bathed in this state of grace. Then I began to experience something new. An overwhelming Love surrounded me and moved through me in a tangible embrace.
When I first began to feel the edges of this Love, I became conscious of how little love like this I had known as a child. As this came more clearly into view, I felt the contrast between the enormous pain I had taken on in the sessions and the absence of unqualified love in my early life. The disparity between what I had done for others and what had not been done for me came sharply into focus. I looked deeply into this paradox, trying to fathom its harsh edges, and as I did I saw that the absence of deep love in my early life had been necessary to seed the pain that would drive me so relentlessly in my life. I saw that my desire to end the pain in my personal life had been what had motivated me to end the pain in the lives of others.
As I felt the poignancy of this simple fact, suddenly something opened and I felt a Deep Love, a Cosmic Love that had preceded my incarnation. A Presence reminded me of the love that had driven me to take this incarnation. In this Presence, I remembered a choice I had made, and as I did I was swept into a cosmic embrace. I was held there and caressed. Never have I known love like this. It spilled through me, filling every crevice, melting every ache. I wept as the Love soaked deeper and deeper into me, warming places cold for so many years.
The Presence somehow communicated a knowing to me that said, in effect, “Did you think that we would ask you to do this unattended, that love was not waiting for you?” And now my entire life was encased in love, and the absence of love was only a temporary condition required to restore a larger flow of love in my species, a flow that was now running freely.
I wept soft tears. I wept on being restored to this primal condition. I wept on being brought home again. I was loved after all. I was loved and we were One. Never would we be separated again.
Comment
The connection between the blessings I received in these four sessions and my earlier work in the ocean of suffering was made explicit in the next session. In doing so, it affirmed the ancient teaching that everything we do for others eventually comes back to us in one form or another because life is one at its core. Once we experience the grace of this return, it generates an unusual feeling of gratitude for having been allowed to suffer on behalf of others.
I saw that there was a direct correlation between the scope of the pain cleansed in the ocean of suffering and the magnitude of the Light that is beginning to explode inside me now. By immersing myself in the collective fabric of humanity, by taking on its pain and drawing its poison out of the human system, my being is now beginning to spontaneously manifest the higher energy that is emerging in history. Today I sensed that this Light will be coming into me over many sessions still to come but that it is somehow already present, already “won” through that cleansing. Something that is waiting for me when I die is beginning to work its way into my embodied consciousness on Earth. I feel so deeply grateful to have been given the opportunity to take on as much suffering as I have. (S 43)*55
On a separate matter, I can now bring closure to a question I left open in chapter 7. In session 33, the experience of dissolving into Many had generated a crisis of disorientation and chaos. Now in session 42, I am flowing with this experience more easily, indicating that this particular boundary has been successfully navigated. Becoming Many at the archetypal level appears to have been a final stepping-stone into causal Oneness, part of a systematic exercise of expansion from being small (the egoic self), to being archetypally Many, to being All That Is.
Reflections
Taken together, these four sessions felt like the closing of a circle. They gave me a feeling of deep completion, a sense of inheriting blessings for work done. I had given something to the universe that was mine to give, and now the universe had given me back more treasures than I could hold. I felt completely and utterly satisfied.
As I write this account many years later, the larger arc of my sessions up to this point feels clear to me. Two years of intense physical and psychological purification had ended in my ego being turned inside out and broken open. Then the deeper work had begun, the work chosen by my soul before I was born. I stayed in the ocean of suffering for two years, draining rage and violence out of the collective human psyche. For this I received two gifts: experiencing the whole of my life from beginning to end and then being taken deep into the splendor of our universe. When the ocean of suffering ended, I was catapulted for a year and a half into archetypal reality and the collective fields of humanity. And now the blessings of Oneness, the Diamond Soul, the Fertile Void, and Cosmic Love.
The poetry of these four sessions makes further commentary unnecessary and perhaps even un welcomed. Experience always trumps intellectual analysis, and my comments always feel like downshifting to a lower gear. And yet, I have always felt a responsibility to not just have these experiences but to do my best to make sense of them. The most meaningful parts may need no analysis at all, but other parts may be helped by being examined and clarified. This is especially true for the concept of the Diamond Soul, which will play a significant role in the coming chapters. I think this may also be a good place to address something I’ve not spoken of yet—how my sessions were touching the lives of my students, who knew nothing of my psychedelic practice. So in these brief reflections I will address three topics:
- Dying and Causal Oneness
- The Living Classroom
- The Birth of the Diamond Soul
1. Dying and Causal Oneness
The experience of dying has changed in these four sessions in ways that throw an interesting light on the nature of causal reality. Dying has changed in three ways. First, in some sessions it appears to be getting easier to die.
There was no explanation; no content emerged for me to examine. I simply moved quickly, quietly, effortlessly into a new reality. (S 36)
I did not die precipitously or with a sense of culmination as I had expected, but instead simply slipped smoothly at one point through a definitive transition into a new state. It was so easy. (S 40)
Second, dying has somehow become a new experience: “It felt unlike anything I had ever experienced before” (S 40). This was such a striking sensation that after the session I questioned how this could possibly be true. After going through so many deaths, how can dying become something genuinely new? And third, in one session even the very concept of death is discarded as no longer relevant: “How insignificant my death. In fact, the very category of “death” had been abandoned as inappropriate” (S 42). A fundamental concept I have been using to interpret these experiences seems to be dissolving, but why?
The experience of dying is changing, I think, because in these sessions I was entering causal reality and causal reality operates by different rules than other levels of reality. At the causal level, the world moves as One. In the transparent Forest, in the sparkling luminosity of extra-samsaric reality, in the formless bliss of Saccidānanda, in the warm embrace of Cosmic Love, the world reveals its indissoluble Oneness. At this level of consciousness, the world is ever whole within itself, and the logic of wholeness is different from the logic of a world in pieces, even the large pieces of subtle level reality.
When dying has this distinctly effortless quality, it is as though effort would contradict the very truth of the reality one is entering. Causal Oneness has an already-present quality and an all-at-once quality. Oneness at this level is not something one enters by degrees, but rather it arises whole and complete. When duality is being dissolved this deeply, effort is extinguished because effort implies separation. Because there is no separation in Oneness, there can be no effort. One simply tumbles into it. Similarly, death disappears as an interpretive category because in Oneness we discover that there never have been any separate parts to life in the first place, so there can be no death of a part. Here only illusion dies. In this way, dying becomes a new experience, unlike anything experienced before.
Causal Oneness transposes all our assumptions: “If only you could see reality as it truly is!” (S 36). It is so different from anything we have previously known that it catches us by surprise: “What a cosmic joke!” And my response to this joke?
I was so grateful to be dead, . . . stunned and eternally grateful. (S 40)
I wept on being restored to this primal condition. I wept on being brought home again. I was loved after all. I was loved and we were One. (S 42)
Once we have returned to Oneness, it would be nice if all the transitions from this point on would be easy, but this was not my experience. Sometimes death was easy in future sessions, but sometimes the cleansing became fierce once again. Even after I transitioned into causal Oneness, episodes of intense destructuring returned. This raises the question of whether Oneness is the final destination of this spiritual journey.
I mention this because I think many of us, myself included, have had a tendency to see Oneness as the summum bonum, “the greatest good,” that answers all our existential questions. This makes it tempting to see Oneness as marking the end of our spiritual journey. My experience, however, has been that while Oneness does resolve perhaps our deepest existential questions, it is not the end of the adventure. As profound as Oneness is, it does not exhaust all the cosmological truths waiting for us, and so the adventure continues.
Oneness is a core truth of life, a foundational truth, but if we press Oneness, we discover that there are many levels to it, many permutations of the seamless condition. I must twist language to convey my experience that there are degrees of Oneness, orders of magnitude within Oneness. And then there are the worlds beyond space-time that we glimpse through the portal of Oneness: “DEPTH opened me to something entirely different. Through this mode of awareness, alternative universes came into view, alternative levels of reality underpinning the physical universe became present.” (S 42)
Oneness is a good place to stop one’s journey if one chooses to do so, for here the fragmentation of life is healed and we rest in the “true condition.” Here we learn that the essence of the individual is the essence of the Totality, that Atman is Brahman. Here we learn that all beings are empty of self-existence, that we all rise and fall together in the infinite field of the Creative Intelligence. But if we press on, if we seek to know Brahman even more intimately, we will undergo more periodic meltdowns as we are drawn even deeper into the infinite beauty and grandeur of the cosmos.
2. The Living Classroom
The experiences reported in this book took place in the privacy of my home, but there was a second side to this story that took place at my university. In this section, I’d like to briefly describe a series of experiences that surfaced in my classroom while I was doing my psychedelic work. It took me years to understand these experiences and to comprehend their full implications. They became such a significant part of my teaching experience that I eventually wrote a small book about them. I hope this short introduction will encourage readers to read that more complete treatment. This is the backstory to The Living Classroom (2008).
For obvious legal reasons, I never spoke to my students about my psychedelic practice. Even when I taught courses in transpersonal psychology that included psychedelic research, I never let them know that I was doing this work myself. For my own protection, I built a firewall between my professional life and my personal life in this area. And yet, despite this tight compartmentalization, nature did not honor the boundaries I had so carefully drawn. As if confirming the truth of the open boundaries of consciousness, the effects of my psychedelic practice began to spill over and touch the lives of some of my students. It was as though by entering into conscious communion with the deeper fabric of life, the threads of that fabric were being activated in the physical world around me. In fact, this is exactly what happened.
About five years into my teaching and four years into my psychedelic work, students began to quietly come up to me after class and tell me that an example I had used in my lecture that day was identical to something that had just happened to them personally. In my experience, I was simply pulling these examples out of thin air to illustrate some point I was making, but in their experience, I was describing their life in precise detail. At first this struck me as just an odd coincidence, but the trickle of such reports continued to grow. The fit between lecture and life was so precise and repeated itself so many times that eventually I had no choice but to recognize that something more than chance was operating here. My mind and my students’ minds were becoming porous to each other. Without my intending it, without my even knowing when it was happening, my unconscious seemed to be tapping into some field of information that held their life experience.
When students hear their recent experience coming back at them in a lecture, it snaps them to attention. Safely buried in the back of the room, anonymous in the crowd, suddenly their lives are exposed, their hearts pierced by words that seem aimed directly at them. Given such a personalized invitation, how could they not get more deeply involved in the course?
This pattern continued to grow stronger through the years. As I entered progressively deeper levels of consciousness in my psychedelic work, not only did these synchronicities become more frequent, they also began targeting increasingly sensitive areas in my students’ lives. It was as though a radar had been activated that was zeroing in on some part of their life that was hurting or constricted. Sometimes it lanced a private pain that had been festering inside them for years or triggered an insight that they desperately needed. It was as though their souls were slipping messages to me, telling me where they were hiding, where they were hurting, and most importantly, what they needed to take the next step in their development.
Students taking my courses during these years often found themselves undergoing life-changing transformations without any encouragement from me to do so, as though the very act of our coming together in class was giving them added leverage in their lives. Some chose to end bad marriages or to heal wounded ones. (Thirty percent of the students at my university are older, nontraditional students.) Others left careers they had outgrown but were still holding on to, while still others began to confront their addictions. In one case, a woman began to spontaneously recover memories of childhood sexual abuse. While the activation these students experienced was sometimes quite powerful, there were no casualties and many positive breakthroughs. On the rare occasion that a student’s self-transformation became particularly turbulent, I referred them to a gifted therapist in the area with whom they could process what was emerging in a safe setting.
While these kinds of responses might be expected in certain types of courses, such as a counseling course, this was not the case for the kinds of courses I was teaching, which were Introduction to World Religions, Religion and the Earth, Psychology of Religion, Transpersonal Studies, and Buddhism. It was not the content of the course that seemed to be driving these effects but something deeper. What was triggering these effects was not what I was doing but what I had become through my psychedelic practice. Because of this work, my core energy was changing. A field of energy moving through me or around me was growing stronger, causing a spontaneous energetic resonance to spring up between me and my students underneath the exchange of ideas in the classroom.
Some of my students also started having unusually deep experiences of some of the concepts I was presenting in class. As I was simply going about my work describing the perennial truths of the world’s religions, some students began to have powerful spiritual openings around these truths, such as impermanence, interdependence, oneness, no-self, and the divine within. Insights long dormant in their unconscious suddenly sprang to life. Symptoms of chakra opening and kundalini arousal began to manifest in the room. Students felt their energy spontaneously shifting to higher centers of awareness, though they often did not have the vocabulary to describe it this way. It was as though they were being activated by more than just the verbal presentation of ideas, as though they were being touched by the actual experience of these realities that now lived in me to some degree because of my psychedelic practice.
As my students came to me with these reports and I saw how deeply they were being affected by this mysterious alchemy that had opened between us, I was more than a little shaken myself. Neither of us had solicited this connection, yet here it was. Did I need to protect them from what was happening? Obviously, this was not what they had signed up for when they signed up for my course, not consciously anyway. How does one ensure informed consent when the dynamics are so involuntary? Those who don’t know me may suspect that these things were happening because I had crossed the line between education and persuasion, but I assure you that this is not the case, and my department chair will back me up on this. It was not a misplaced missionary zeal that was triggering these events but something much more subtle and difficult to comprehend.
These synchronicities and activations became such a prominent part of my experience in the classroom that I was forced to pay them close attention. I began to track what was happening in my classes and to watch for signs of student activation. The only control I had over the situation was to shut down access to this inner information, but I could not do this without cutting myself off from my own creativity. I was still pondering these things in late 1994 when one session suddenly illumined everything that had been taking place in my classes over the past ten years. In one swift download, this single session (S 49) reframed my entire understanding of teaching by showing me how the connective tissue of consciousness works in group settings. Years of observations came together in a moment of stunning clarity and insight that illumined everything I have been describing here and more.
The experiences my students were having were demonstrating a simple truth about consciousness, namely, that consciousness is an open field and within this field, states of consciousness are contagious. My personal efforts to realize deeper states of awareness had changed something in me that caused my person to begin functioning as a kind of lightning rod, triggering sparks of a similar awakening among those around me who were receptive to this influence. This was due not to any calculated effort on my part but simply to the seamless and coherent nature of consciousness itself. Like ripples spreading across water, this is an utterly natural effect. When one person begins to throw off layers of their psychological conditioning and awaken to clearer, more expansive states of awareness, surrounding people will necessarily be affected. Our spiritual ecology simply does not permit private awakening. The ecology of consciousness is an inherently collective ecology.
Session 49 also showed me a second principle at work in my classroom. It showed me that fields of consciousness emerge in groups that reflect the intention and activity of that group. The better focused the group’s intention and the longer such activity goes on, the stronger these fields will become. Doctors working with patients activate healing fields; coaches activate human performance fields. Because I was an educator, the fields that were emerging in my classroom were learning fields, fields that reflected the cumulative efforts of hundreds of students studying the same ideas with me semester after semester. As these learning fields grew stronger through the years, they began to accelerate and deepen the learning of students. My students were being activated not just by resonance to my individual energy but also by the contagious energy of these course fields that were growing stronger by year.
With this download, I entered a new pedagogical reality. I stopped teaching within an “atomistic” psychological paradigm that sees only separate minds operating in the classroom and began teaching within a “quantum” paradigm that honors the innate connectivity of consciousness and the existence of localized fields of learning. To teach in a world where minds are separate at one level and entangled at another calls for a new pedagogy, a truly integral pedagogy that places new demands on the instructor and opens new possibilities for accelerated learning. After experimenting and developing this new pedagogy for a number of years, I wrote The Living Classroom, filled with personal examples, scientific research, and practical advice for educators. For me, the most beautiful parts of this book are the personal stories written by the students themselves, which make up the last third of the book.*56
It’s important to emphasize that what I’m describing here has nothing inherently to do with psychedelics. The Living Classroom does not even mention psychedelics. My psychedelic practice was simply the trigger that exposed and activated these natural dynamics of consciousness in my particular setting. I believe that any spiritual practice that has the capacity to reach deeply into the collective psyche will activate these same responses in people around us. Indeed, the distributed impact of one’s spiritual practice has long been recognized in our contemplative traditions. The only thing that is novel here is its unexpected appearance in the secular classroom.
That said, the experiences my students were having demonstrate that it is not just we who are touched by our psychedelic practice but potentially anyone in our social network, especially when we are centered in our work in the world. This is due simply to the nature of consciousness itself. To fully integrate our psychedelic experiences, therefore, we must support those around us who are being indirectly activated by our work. I don’t think we need to be afraid of the rings of influence that spread out around us from this work. We need to be careful, of course, and to act responsibly and compassionately at all times, but I think we can trust that we are where we are supposed to be, doing what we are supposed to be doing, and so are they.
3. The Birth of the Diamond Soul
Session 38 was a structurally complex and deeply moving session for me. I kept returning to it through the years, reading it again and again, intuitively sensing its importance and trying to absorb the experiences it unleashed in me. I had published Lifecycles several years before and so was familiar with the ins and outs of reincarnation theory and the logistics of soul development. I had done some past-life therapy myself and had a working knowledge of a number of my former lives. This session went further, however. It took me into what happens when the long course of reincarnation comes to fruition and showed me what the purpose of the entire exercise is.
As a student of religion, I have read many attempts to say what the purpose of reincarnation is, but unfortunately I find that they seldom satisfy. The visions are often too small and the horizons too near. They may capture some aspect of the journey but fail to do justice to other aspects and thus end up underestimating the journey as a whole. Even when the vision includes enlightenment, this by itself does not explain the full arc of human development, especially when we are told that as soon as we have realized this goal, the “plan” is for us to leave the physical universe behind. After 5.8 million years of walking upright, 2.5 million years of using tools, 200,000 years of thinking with our larger brain, and 5,000 years of writing, as soon as we have developed sufficient mental focus to follow awareness beneath our personal consciousness and discover the deeper consciousness in which we are one with all existence, then we can leave physical reality behind? That’s what it’s all been about? Though I understand the noble intent of this view, I don’t believe it is an adequate vision of life.
The vision of reincarnation that emerged in the 38th session is different from the classical Eastern view. The setting for this teaching was carefully constructed. The first cycle of death and rebirth had brought me into a paradise so unspeakably beautiful that it instantly extinguished all my leftover earthly desires. This was a richer heaven than any I had ever imagined. If I had to speculate, I would guess that I had entered what Buddhists call a “deity realm,” a level of postmortem existence at the outer edges of the bardo. I cannot imagine anything less doing justice to the ecstasy I felt there. I would have been completely happy to stay where I was, but this was to be a teaching session. After a short period of time in this paradise, I was taken even deeper into spiritual reality, “beyond the bardo echoes of physical existence.” From this position outside samsara (cyclic existence), in the still and quiet of transcendence, the teaching described in the account unfolded.
In earlier sessions, I had been taken beyond linear time and given an experience of my present life as a completed whole. Now eleven years later, I was taken into a deeper condition in which all my earthly lives were rewound one by one, like winding kite string around a spool, until I exploded in a burst of light, fusing all the strands into one and giving birth to what I have come to call the Diamond Soul. It was both me and more than I have ever been. Composed of many lifetimes, it was more than the sum of all their years. In coming together, a burst of energy was generated that fused all these centuries of experience into a single being. I was an individual but an individual beyond any frame of reference I had previously known. I was “a defined speck of infinitely dense, infinitely transparent Diamond Light.”
Our mystical traditions tell us that we are made of the stuff of God, that Atman is Brahman, and my sessions affirm this truth. But something special happens to this Atman-essence inside the incubator of the physical universe beyond just waking up to itself. In repeatedly entering and leaving physical reality, in the firing and cooling of awareness, in the constant folding and refolding of human experience, something new is being forged—not simply adding new layers one by one but eventually fusing all these layers into a new form of life. Our Essential Nature not changed but actualized into a higher expression.
In chapter 1, I criticized the up-and-out cosmologies of the religions of the Axial Age, which place the final goal of life in some off-planet heavenly paradise. Among these traditions, the Asian religions have taught that reincarnation culminates in a spiritual awakening that frees us from the cycle of rebirth and physical existence. In Hinduism, this awakening is called moksha, “escape,” for through it one escapes samsara and returns to Brahman. In Buddhism, nirvana (enlightenment with a body) is followed at death by the higher state of parinirvana (final enlightenment without a body). Even the Bodhisattvas who commit themselves out of compassion to returning to Earth after their enlightenment are ultimately seeking to liberate all sentient beings into parinirvana, thus emptying the planet.
When I wrote Lifecycles, I was still under the influence of these cosmologies, and therefore the story of reincarnation I told there culminated in transcendence. I now see it as incomplete for this very reason. To take the story only to transcendence is to stop midway on the circle. Lifecycles captures the truth of karma and rebirth, which is no small thing, but it misses the larger picture. I did not see then what has become glaringly obvious to me now, that all up-and-out cosmologies fail to grasp the true purpose of physical existence and therefore misconceive what the goal of reincarnation truly is. The physical universe is not a punishment or trap into which we have fallen and from which we must be saved. It is not a spiritual wasteland we should escape from as quickly as possible. The purpose of rebirth is not to spiritually awaken and then leave the universe. The purpose is to awaken and become a conscious player in its continuing growth and transformation.
Session 38 does not say this explicitly, but because of experiences I will share in the next chapter, I am convinced that the birth of the Diamond Soul is not an event that marks our graduation from the physical universe but an evolutionary transition taking place inside the physical universe. Furthermore, it is a transformation of not just individuals but ultimately of our entire species. Through all the millennia that we have been taking on and working with this human form, growing its extraordinary capacities, nature has been bringing humanity toward this evolutionary crescendo. The powers of creativity that terra-formed this planet, that brought forth life here and then self-aware life, is now in the process of taking our reincarnating species across a new threshold. In giving birth to the Diamond Soul, nature is not abandoning our planet; it is beginning a new chapter in its long evolutionary story. What is the purpose of reincarnation? The purpose, I think, is to awaken and create heaven on Earth. “The entire exercise of reincarnation had been about . . . learning how to control the powers of creativity that were my innate nature. We were, in effect, learning how to be gods, learning how to create.” (S 38)
As we begin to grasp the true scale of nature’s intent, we must revise many of our previous assumptions about reincarnation. In the classic up-and-out model of rebirth, for example, it is often said that it is a “law” of reincarnation that we are not allowed to remember our former lives when we are born. This amnesia is essential because if we were able to remember our former lives, it would overwhelm our earthly identity. Our present life would become unmanageable if we remembered everything we had ever been and done in our previous lifetimes. Numerous Hollywood movies have played with this theme. But this way of thinking is too small and fails to grasp the fact that reincarnation is an evolutionary driver whose effects accumulate not only in spiritual reality but inside space-time as well.
Rather than see this amnesia as a permanent feature of the human condition, I think we should see it as a temporary pattern that characterizes a certain stage of human evolution, admittedly a long stage but ultimately a stage. As we continue to grow and evolve through an openended number of lifetimes, this pattern is subject to change. It may be natural given our present level of psycho-spiritual development to forget our deeper history at birth and remember it only when we die, but this does not mean it must always be so. In fact, given the relentless accumulation of capacities that reincarnation empowers, I think it is inevitable that sooner or later this memory boundary will be breached. This does not necessarily mean remembering all the details of our former lives—what need do we have of old addresses?—and it certainly doesn’t mean struggling under the burden of identity overload. It means bringing the core learning of all those lifetimes into a coherent and integrated synthesis.
Michael Newton and other past-life therapists have provided evidence that this integrated synthesis of all our lives already exists in the bardo, for it is the identity his clients assume when they relive going through their death in a previous life. As the rhythm of rebirth continues without pause millennium after millennium, it would seem to be only a matter of time before this larger consciousness will awaken inside our life on Earth. Perhaps slowly in small increments, perhaps suddenly in large jumps, our felt sense of identity will inevitably shift from ego to Soul. I believe that the awakening of the Diamond Soul on Earth is the natural and inevitable consequence of the relentless cycle of rebirth as we integrate more and more experience in the vessel of our precious human body. Sooner or later, the constant cycling back and forth between spirit and matter will take us across this threshold, and the Soul will ignite on Earth. It took thousands of centuries to form this Soul; embodying it may happen much more quickly.
On a personal note, the fact that I experienced the birth of my Diamond Soul inside session 38 does not mean that my Soul is now fully and permanently awake in my daily life. I wish it were, but it isn’t. This raises a larger question about the psychedelic process, namely: What is the value of having visionary experiences in which one may touch a reality that is true but that one cannot keep on returning to ordinary consciousness? One may keep it in the sense of remembering it, but one cannot keep it in the sense of fully actualizing it here and now in one’s present life. What is the value of true but temporary knowledge?
I have asked myself this question many times over the years, responding differently at different stages of my journey, sometimes cursing the day I started this work but more often on my knees in gratitude. It is a pressing question, especially if one works with high doses of a powerful psychedelic like LSD, for this protocol unleashes more extreme experiences than when lower doses or milder psychedelics are used. For the time being, let me say just this.
I believe that what I experienced in session 38 was the true birth of my integrated Soul, however incompletely actualized this consciousness may be in my present life. The paradox is that something can be fully actualized in the psychedelic state and at the same time be incompletely realized inside the demanding conditions of space-time. Indeed, navigating these different levels of actualization is a tricky part of working with these states. (If I could, I would underline this sentence several times.) It’s all too easy to get carried away and think that more has been permanently accomplished in these hours than actually has been. But if we stay grounded in the reality of our incompleteness, a deeper dialectic begins to unfold.
The birth of my Diamond Soul in session 38 gave me a foretaste of what I am in the process of becoming, and I believe this foretaste is helping me realize this destiny in my life. If held properly, these experiences begin to function as “strange attractors,” pulling us toward our future through the increased awareness they bring. We may not be able to fully actualize these experiences immediately after a session has ended, but they bend the trajectory of our lives. In showing us what we are becoming, they help us become that very thing.
I may not be able to hold Diamond Soul consciousness as an abiding awareness every hour of every day, but there are moments—moments when it is as though the swirl of history stops, and I feel myself standing eternal upon the Earth. In these moments, I know I have breathed this air before and will breathe it again after this body falls, and in this knowing, time seems to pause. It is as though the centuries already lived congeal and my eyes become suddenly ancient, liberated from the specifics of him or her. I am suddenly here in a new way, grounded in an awareness that is personal but unlocked, ancient repetition culminating in stunning freshness. With this comes an exquisite intimacy with life, a Oneness that dissolves all boundaries, and in this wholeness there is peace, joy, and fascination.
In the final analysis, I think that whether we remain inside the physical universe after waking up spiritually or leave it behind are not mutually exclusive options but simultaneous possibilities. If we were to achieve enlightenment and leave space-time for one hundred thousand years and then return, we would find the universe continuing to patiently grow her children through the steady and relentless accumulation of experience in rebirth. If we leave again, this time for a million years, upon our return we would find the same thing—Nature growing humanity into ever richer forms. In such a universe, how could life not eventually produce fully awakened Souls on Earth? Not just a few here and there, but everyone everywhere. An entire species that through its hard labor has given birth to its next self-expression—a fully conscious Soul, green to its roots, feet firmly planted on the Earth but now transparent to the Creative Intelligence that everywhere presses in upon it. This is the vision of history I now turn to explore.