TEN
Diamond Luminosity
Sessions 44–69
How can something so crystal clear,
so devoid of earthly form,
evoke tears of homecoming?
SESSION 45
Light has always been recognized as a signature of the Divine. It is a universal constant in our spiritual traditions—a vast radiance fusing all knowledge, love, and power. Mystics attest to it; those who have nearly died attest to it. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that when our psychedelic journey takes us deep into the universe, the Light is waiting for us.
The following account comes from Walter Pahnke, a loved and respected figure in the early psychedelic community, most famous for conducting the Good Friday Experiment at Harvard University in 1962. What is particularly striking about this experience is that it took place during Pahnke’s first LSD session. It must have been an extraordinary day.
The most impressive and intense part of this experience was the WHITE LIGHT of absolute purity and cleanness. It was like a glowing and sparkling flame of incandescent whiteness and beauty, but not really a flame—more like a gleaming white hot ingot, yet much bigger and vaster than a mere ingot. The associated feelings were those of absolute AWE, REVERENCE, AND SACREDNESS. Just before this experience I had the feeling of going deep within myself to the Self stripped bare of all pretense and falseness. This was the point where a man could stand firm with absolute integrity—something more important than mere physical life. The white light experience was of supreme importance—absolutely self-validating and something worth staking your life on and putting your trust in. The white light itself was so penetrating and intense that it was not possible to look directly at it. It was not in the room with me, but we were both somewhere else—and my body was left far behind. (Quoted in Richards 2016, 74)
Like Pahnke, many journeyers have reported being flooded with a supernatural radiance after going through ego-death. As one moves into still deeper levels of transpersonal experience, one encounters fields nested within fields of light. Each step beyond matter, beyond the soul, beyond the collective psyche, and beyond archetypal reality takes us deeper into a living ecology of light. Eventually, one discovers that the entire universe floats in an Ocean of Radiance.
In my experience, there are many gradations of light. As one moves deeper into transcendence, the quality of light changes. It becomes clearer, more intense, and more luminous, calling for a new vocabulary of light. Light becomes LIGHT. Clarity becomes Hyper-Clarity. When I speak in this chapter of the Diamond Luminosity or the Diamond Light, I am not using a colorful metaphor to describe the light. I am attempting to describe a particular quality of light, a singularly intense dimension of light.
We have seen light show up in many sessions already. It appeared in the Cosmic Tree composed entirely of light and later in the Archetypal Meltdown, where I entered a “brilliant Clarity.” It surfaced in A Flash of “God” when everything dissolved “in a rainfall of brilliant, sparkling white light,” in Singing the Universe Away with its visions of “deep space filled with ethereal light,” and in Jesus’ Blood where “everything took on the inner radiance of that Eternal Light.” All these, it turns out, were precursors to the Diamond Luminosity that emerged in these next four years.
After the year of the Benediction of Blessings, I had no idea where the sessions would go next. I felt completely satisfied and richly rewarded for work already done. I had explored the universe, been taken deep into Oneness, and been drenched in cosmic love. What more could one ask for?
Given the deep peace of these blessings, I had expected that the ordeal of dying might stop now. After such deep transcendence of duality and immersion in universal love, I thought that surely the transition into transpersonal reality would stabilize and become easier. And it would have, I think, if I had stayed within the levels of reality I had been initiated into thus far. But for better or for worse, the method of exploration I had adopted was so powerful that it kept pushing me beyond my experiential edges. Without fully realizing the consequences of what I was doing, I kept stoking the fires of transformation and new vistas of reality kept opening to me. I did not appreciate then what I have come to understand now—that dying is part of an endless cycle of discovery and that it will keep returning again and again as long as one keeps challenging the limits of one’s experience. I had expected closure. What I received instead was the infinite depth of the Beloved.
The Diamond Light that exploded from my chest in session 38 was the forerunner of what emerged in full splendor now. After going through yet one more intense cycle of death and rebirth, I was taken into a brilliantly clear, supremely luminous radiance. Buddhism calls this radiance dharmakaya—the Clear Light of Absolute Reality.*60 I call it the domain of Diamond Luminosity. This Luminosity captivated me so completely that it extinguished any interest in continuing to explore the other levels of existence that had previously fascinated me. This was a different order of reality altogether. Its clarity was so overwhelming, its energy so pure that returning to it became my sole focus in future sessions.
Over the next four years and twenty-six sessions, the gates to this reality opened four times, and just four times. The names I gave these four sessions are:
S 45 The Death State
S 50 Diamond Luminosity
S 60 Universal Field of Light
S 66 Nature of Mind
This chapter tells the story of what happened in these four sessions. It is the story of entering the Diamond Light and of the intense purification that took place as this Diamond Light began to work its way more deeply into my physical being. The first two of these sessions focused on entering the Diamond Luminosity at successively deeper levels, the second two on absorbing the Diamond Luminosity into my mind and body. Into this narrative, I will weave two other pieces. The first is a set of new insights into the psychedelic process that emerged at this time. The second is the story of how I came to integrate Vajrayana Buddhist practice into my psychedelic practice and why.
Twenty-six sessions are a lot of sessions, double the number covered in any previous chapter and more than a third of the total sessions undertaken. Obviously, there was a great deal taking place in these sessions, far more than I can do justice to here. The Great Awakening session took place in the middle of this sequence, and there were a number of “teaching sessions” scattered throughout, but the most important dynamic of these four years was the rhythmic cycle of entering the Diamond Luminosity and the Diamond Luminosity entering me. These four days were the deepest, richest, and most precious gifts of my entire journey. They are the true diamonds from heaven. In order to concentrate on this core process, I’m going to trim away sessions that, while interesting in their own right, would take us away from this central narrative. Before I do, however, let me say this about them.
After subtracting the half dozen or so sessions that were spent digesting the Diamond Luminosity and Great Awakening sessions, the strongest pattern in the remaining sessions was a series of personal healings. Pains from my childhood were systematically brought forward and resolved in a decisive and efficient manner. At first I thought this was odd, coming after years of working at the collective level to heal the species-mind. I thought that personal healing would normally have taken place before collective healing, and it took me awhile to understand why things were unfolding in this reverse order. I did not get the sense that it was because I had simply jumped over these personal issues because of the high doses I was working with, though the work would surely have unfolded differently had I been working with lower doses. There was something different going on.
Eventually, I learned that this sequence of events was not accidental but part of a life script fashioned before I was born. I mention this because I think it may also be true for others who have incarnated at this demanding time in history. It was my personal wounding in life, modest though it was, that had allowed me to connect with the wounds of humanity in the ocean of suffering. My personal pain had anchored one side of an energetic bridge between my individual psyche and the collective psyche, a bridge that had allowed something operating through me to drain destructive energies out of the species-mind. Had my personal wounds been healed first, the anchor on my end would have been missing and the bridge to the collective psyche might not have been formed. This would have compromised the larger system’s ability to accomplish the intended collective healing. Now that my part in this collective healing was finished, it was as though the anchor of my personal pain was no longer needed and was now being pulled up by its roots.
I am not going to spend time on these personal healings beyond those included in the four sessions presented. It’s not that I am ashamed or embarrassed by my personal issues. There was no great trauma here, simply the wounds of growing up with parents of mixed capacities. I hold them back because in addition to honoring the privacy of the other parties involved, the details of my personal healing are not really important to the primary theme of this chapter and I don’t want them to become a distraction. Everyone has a personal story, everyone carries some personal pain, but as we will see, the details of our personal story fall away as almost irrelevant when one enters the Diamond Light.
One last point before we begin. It was during this late phase of the journey that I learned that there are many degrees of dying in a psychedelic session and that the deepest breakthroughs tend to follow the deepest deaths. With this discovery, death became my closest ally in the work. What had begun in the early sessions as confronting my shadow morphed into a discipline of actively embracing death in whatever form it presented itself. Far from being something to be feared, death became something I sought out, repeatedly plunging myself into its purifying fire. This is a strange thing to say, I know, but other psychedelic journeyers will understand. I was not a glutton for pain; rather, I was a glutton for what lies on the other side of pain.
What follows is a very intimate story, as all love stories are. Though it is my story, it is more than this. The Diamond Light is our common heritage. It is the reality we all come from and to which we all return. It is the Source of existence, the Intelligence of the universe, the Essential Nature of everything that exists. It is what we in essence are.
The breakthrough to the Diamond Luminosity in session 45 was preceded by a very intense purification process in session 44. Together these two sessions formed two halves of a single death-rebirth process, and so I will present them together.
Session 44—The Crystal of Death
After a long introduction that yielded many insights into various family relationships, the theme of fear returned from the previous session and began to unfold itself powerfully and tenaciously. I yielded and followed. So much fear. Where was it coming from? What lay behind it? Very few images came to give the fear any specific shape or form, and I had to work to keep myself open to it.
As things continued, I began to sense a fear of dying. I became people who were dying, and they were afraid of the pain, of the unknown, of separation from loved ones. Fear and death intertwined in countless variations. A small part of me recognized the symptoms of engaging a META-COEX system, sensed that this was part of some death-rebirth cycle, but soon all this was swallowed by death. Dying swallowed even fear. Everything was death. Death and dying. I was dying. The parameters of this dying exceeded anything I had previously known. How can dying reach such proportions?
Somewhere in here, I realized that there were many degrees of dying. I had died much already in the sessions. Now I was being invited to die even more. I could choose to die as much or as little as I wanted today.
I found myself suspended in a crystal of light. The bottom of the crystal was pointed and clear; the top was tinged with red and disappeared into radiating bands of shining light. My arms were stretched out from my body at 90 degrees in complete surrender, and I could choose how much I would die, how much I would allow myself to be dissolved into the light that was beaming through me. I could feel the extraordinary diversity of experience available to me as light. In the light, as light, infinite experience was possible. To surrender myself to this mode of experience would be to surrender all localized, individualized experience.
In this transfixed condition, I began to consciously choose death. I chose to open myself layer by layer to deeper currents of light. I could feel it reaching into me, changing me, transmuting me into something different. With my feet held firmly in the point of the crystal, my upper torso dissolved into pure light. I moved in light. I was light. It was joyous; a completely different world, a completely different reality. It was different from previous sessions. Though less saturated by ecstasy, it was more ethereal. Though I was less far out in the transpersonal universe, ego was more thoroughly erased.
After a relatively short time in this blissful reality, I was returned to the currents of fear. I can’t say what directed me back there or why. Fear was simply present again, so I dove into it seeking to get to its core. This time the fear was many times greater than before. It had many more layers to it, many more variations. Inwardly, I shuddered as wave after wave of fear coursed through me. Again I sought for explanations, but there were none. Fragments from my present life swirled in symphony with fragments from former lives and lives that seemed to come from the collective psyche.
From one perspective, I was melting a collective META-COEX of fear in the species-mind. From another perspective, I was engaged in shamanic combat with demons of fear, but what strange combat this was. Here one “conquers” by surrendering, by making oneself vulnerable to what surrounds you. I kept holding still and opening, taking into myself whatever presented itself in my experience, opening to wave after wave of fear, always searching for some sign of its origin but finding none.
Then something shifted. In the midst of the collective mayhem, a more personal theme arose. Fear merged with feelings of helplessness. Early infantile experiences of helplessness merged with memories of being a soldier dying alone on a battlefield after the battle had ended. A soldier’s dying gasp blended with an infant’s vulnerable cry. No comrades anywhere, no help. I was alone. Somewhere in history, aloneness, helplessness, and fear had fused in me. Now the pieces were finally coming out and separating.
I stayed with the experience of helplessness for a long time. It played and played for hours of clock time and centuries of session time. After giving up all hope of ever reaching the bottom of it, it finally and undramatically released me. Something had played itself out, and I was free. It was late in the session, and I was bone-weary tired. As I began to move about mentally, I found myself in a world shimmering around the edges with light, but I was too exhausted and it was too late in the day to do more than briefly touch this domain.
(One month later.)
Session 45—The Death State
Today is a day I have waited many years for. How can I express my gratitude to every person and circumstance that made today possible? How can I say thank you enough?
After a long period of opening, I found myself repeatedly saying, “I have earned the right to die.” Far from fearing death, I was seeking it out, demanding that death come to me. I was deflecting half-measures and insisting on my right to a complete and final death. I had done my work; I had earned the right to die, and I was calling on this right. My litany focused me, carrying me deeper and deeper to a point of complete concentration.
From this position of absolute focus, I began to die. Oh, what sweet death! I began to savor what was happening. What I had previously feared now opened as incredible sweetness. How wonderful to experience death! What a surprising reversal! Thank you, thank you.
Upon dying, I moved into an ecstatic mode of experience that was different from anything I have previously known; the entire flow of the experience was different. Light-filled, yes; a universe composed of nothing but light. But what stood out for me is something I have difficulty finding words for. It was as if I had moved inside the inner flow of God’s being, as if my life was now bending and flowing through a being of infinite dimensions. There was nothing amorphous or fuzzy about the experience; on the contrary, it was extraordinarily clear and precise. The boundaries of this clarity exceeded anything I had previously known.
The Life Circle
Apparently, one death was not enough to get the job done in my case. I found myself standing in the middle of a circle of spinning bands of colorful energy that held my entire life. All my time-moments were present in them. I fell into this circle, touching some part of my life, but as soon as I did, it “died out from under me” and I instantly found myself in the luminous death-state beyond individual identity. Then I would be returned to the center of the circle and the process would repeat itself, now falling in a different direction and touching a different area of my life. Over and over again, I went through this process of “dying in all directions,” driving home the point that there was nothing unfinished here. Wherever I turned, there was no resistance, only effortless death and incredible sweetness.
The Death State
The repetition kept expanding the scope of the transition, taking me deeper and deeper into ecstasy until eventually there was no center to return to, only the pure, seamless condition of the death state. What strange language to describe our true nature.
The Death State.
Incredibly clear.
Luminous beyond measure.
Incredible age.
A seamless intelligence running not above but inside existence.
Reaching out and moving into larger wholes of experience.
Ecologies of experience encompassing thousands, perhaps millions of beings.
Human-experience folded into Earth-experience.
Just touches, tastes.
Ecstatic reverence for the integrated movement of life throughout the universe.
For hours I was carried along the currents of this condition. About this state, one says either too little or too much. The price of saying nothing is to risk forgetting the subtler textures of the experience, yet to speak creates the illusion that words are adequate and they are not. Even after fifteen years, today was so unlike any previous mode of experience that language truly fails. Silent appreciation seems the best recourse, combined with ceaseless prayers of thanksgiving.
How can something so crystal clear,
so devoid of earthly form,
evoke tears of homecoming?
What are we that such imprisoned splendor,
once released, floods us with rivers of gratitude?
Whom shall we thank for what we are?
Where do I direct my deep appreciation?
There is no one place,
so I send my prayer into the seamless fabric of existence,
left and right, high and low,
in infinite dimensions all around.
My attempts to describe the experience keep breaking down,
and I end up repeating the same words over and over.
I was home
and free
and Light.
There is nothing more I can say.
The Hunger to Return
Once one has entered the Diamond Luminosity, the hunger to return to it is overwhelming. Nothing else feels worth pursuing. The joys that previous sessions had opened to me paled by comparison. How does one describe the freedom of becoming Light, of eclipsing so radically the limitations of space and time? The poetry of Rumi and Hafiz took on new significance for me, for I had become a hopeless lover of the divine condition.
The drama of the lover seeking his Beloved played itself out powerfully in the next session, which I called Stormy Mountain. In this session, I spent hours moving in and out of different states of awareness, but they didn’t go anywhere. There were mild episodes of toxic draining that did not build and fleeting experiences of unitive consciousness that kept dissolving into the flow. No decisive line of experience was opening, and I was getting increasingly frustrated. If serious cleansing was not emerging as a focus, why wasn’t the luminous death state showing itself? Though I had tried to surrender all expectations before the session, the truth was that I had a deep need to return to the Diamond Light.
In an attempt to trigger a way through this impasse, I asked that “Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares” be put on, the powerful music that had accompanied me into the death state in session 45 and had erased the physical universe in session 40. As soon as it came on, however, I was thrown into convulsions and vomited violently. The disparity in energy between where I had been with this music in those earlier sessions and where I was today was so great that it was more than my body could manage. Today I was locked in a cheap imitation of that beautiful ecstasy, imprisoned in a distant echo of its true splendor.
The pain and disappointment of being trapped in realities so far from my Beloved were terrible, but eventually I made peace with my condition.
After some time, I found myself standing on the side of a mountain. It was night; there was a storm beating down, a driving rain, but I was able to see the stars overhead. The music of the “Voix Bulgares” became my song to my Beloved. These women who had previously been the voice of God singing me into transcendence became my voice as I sang to my Beloved from outside the gates. I knew that my Beloved was present; I knew that it was my Essential Nature. I had known it once and would know it again. Though I was helplessly trapped on Earth, I sang to the heavens, knowing it could hear me.
I sang the love song of our past embrace.
I sang what we had done in promise of what we would do again.
I sang my eternal love and my promise to return.
As I sang song after song of the music that is now etched in my soul, the pain began to ease. Though I continued to be locked out of paradise, I eventually made peace with my situation. This brief interruption changed nothing. I would return. We would be one again. (S 46)
New Insights into the Psychedelic Process
After my first entry into the Diamond Luminosity, I repeatedly had the sense of “starting over again” in my sessions. The death state was not an end but a new beginning, and it would take time to adjust to this new reality. Not surprisingly, the next sessions were filled with episodes of intense purification and clearing old karmic patterns. As the work continued, a series of new insights into the psychedelic process emerged.
First, I began to get a clear sense that these luminous states of awareness were being fed to me slowly and in a controlled manner, almost like an IV drip. No matter how often I begged to be exploded into transcendence, some larger consciousness was deliberately not allowing this to happen. It took years before I understood what I think was behind this restraint.
An invisible presence seemed to be protecting my individuality even while repeatedly taking that individuality to its breaking point. Too much awareness too fast would overwhelm the center of integration required to grow an awareness that was building inside space-time. I slowly came to realize that something was intentionally guiding the integration of these extreme states of consciousness into my embodied awareness, even if the pace of that integration frustrated me terribly. The work was not simply about going out and experiencing new dimensions of spiritual reality but bringing that awareness back and stabilizing it here on Earth. A cognitively overwhelming rapture, though wonderful in the short term, would accomplish nothing productive in the long term. I was being fed these states as quickly as I could manage them, but managing them required more cleansing and more detoxification.
Second, I began to realize that my system was accumulating and storing energy across multiple sessions, even though these sessions were sometimes months apart. I had watched as each session began more or less where the previous session had stopped, so I knew that they were tightly interwoven thematically, but I had assumed that each session stood on its own feet energetically, that the energetic output of each session was separate and independent. Now I began to realize that there was an energetic momentum building across the sessions. My system was somehow storing energy activated in multiple sessions and then using that stored energy to generate these massive periodic breakthroughs. This was a sobering discovery as it changed my calculation of the true cost of each breakthrough. Each new initiation into a deeper level of reality was being underwritten not by hours but by months and even years of work.
And last, a shift took place in the structural flow of my experience in these sessions. In earlier sessions such as the Cosmic Tour or entering archetypal reality, my subjective experience had been one of expanding outward as I explored vast cosmological landscapes. Now in this series of sessions, the flow of experience was reversing itself. I repeatedly experienced myself being at the center of an enormous field of energy and light that I had gained access to through my work in the ocean of suffering, but now this field was being drawn back into me. When this happened, the energy would become extremely concentrated and explode me into an even brighter level of light. In my notes, I wrote:
I keep experiencing something like a reaching out and drawing in of this field, consolidating it, concentrating it, and stabilizing it within the center that “I” represent. Instead of being allowed to flow out into the myriad worlds that exist at this level, I am being concentrated and taken through some metamorphosis that is taking me into an entirely new level of reality. (S 48)
This was a new form of the death-rebirth process. Huge fields of experience from previous sessions were being concentrated in these exercises. It felt like all my previous psychedelic experiences were being consumed in them, taking me into a reality that was once again more “real” than these previous levels had been and that operated by different rules.
Eventually, the intelligence guiding my sessions took me back into the Diamond Luminosity in the 50th session. This was to be my deepest immersion into the Diamond Light of my entire journey. Because the cleansing portion of this session touches on my relationship with my father, I want to mention that the picture it gives of him is far from complete. I’ll say more about this after the session.
Session 50—Diamond Luminosity
As the session opened, I followed a thread of distress until it unfolded into an outpouring of helplessness. I began to relive old experiences of helplessness. I found myself in my childhood—living with parents who lacked a deep understanding of me, helpless before my father’s early death, helpless in a home missing sufficient nurturance.
I moved deeper into my experience of being a child in my father’s house. I felt into what our relationship had been and what it had not been, and a deep sadness moved through me. From my experience of being a father myself, I reviewed my dad’s life with me and was swept away by the tragedy of how little we had actually shared. I felt his presence in the background of my life as a powerful force that gave it structure and safety, that pushed me to work hard, to fulfill my responsibilities and accomplish great things. But it was also a powerful presence that I was careful not to anger. The most poignant part was discovering how restricted our contact had been, how few opportunities his natural way of being in the world had created for us to meet. He was so focused on his work and away from home so often. There was so much potential for us, but it ran through his fingers. I wept deeply, waves of sadness pushing up through me for what had not been. I then focused on my mom and a similar pattern presented itself—all the externals taken care of but my heart sealed away in a small chamber.
Together my parents had shaped my fundamental sense of who and what I was. From my mom, I relived over and over never feeling quite good enough. From my dad, I had internalized a subtle Depression Era worry about financial security and professional accomplishment. From both sides, I was never made to feel that I was fine, safe, and sufficient just as I am. My childhood played itself out in a hundred scenes, and underneath them all I felt my solitude. Even as a child, I was trying to make my way through life on my own. There was no real help from my family, no deep bonding with my brothers and sister. The greatest sadness of all was that I did not realize how distorted my isolation was. It was all I had known. I wept for all the years of unnecessary pain.
Deeper Prebirth Level
Beneath this there unfolded a deeper level that intermittently carried me into a strange and particularly intense domain. Here the theme of “no help” carried me back before my birth, into a world of expanded time and expanded associations, a much more saturated reality than my present life.
I experienced being a grown man dying in battle, a man trapped and beaten down by life, crying out for help and finding none. A very old pain, a great pain. “I could not save them. I could not stop the advance. . . . My men My people.” An overwhelming wave of invaders. Hopeless anguish at the injustice of it all. More than just a former life, it felt in places like a collective memory culled from many lives and compressed. It was very old, very layered, and very dense.
In this second reality, I was going through a meltdown around the theme of “no help.” I was “before God,” experiencing an absolute desperation one can only experience before one’s Creator. “Help me! Help me!” I moaned. To cry out for help here was to cry out from the center of my being. To be turned down here was to be turned down irrevocably and forever. I cried out before God and before all. I begged for help, but none came. Instead, this distinctive pain kept flowing out of me, like draining a lanced boil.
I moved back and forth between my childhood and this prebirth domain and then saw that my entire life as Chris Bache had been designed to crystallize these deeper poisons inside space-time. Back and forth, back and forth. The energy of the prebirth domain was many times greater than my current incarnation. Whenever I moved into that reality, my experience became much more intense and kaleidoscopic, a giant whirlpool spinning around me in perfectly balanced rotation.
At one point, I found myself reliving what felt like a very old choice repeated in many lifetimes. I was experiencing complete helplessness, vulnerability, and isolation, and I felt myself choose anger as a way of coping. I had responded to the injury of helplessness with anger. Back and forth I moved between the two as I explored anger’s safety and heat. Anger had given me strength; it had allowed me to move; it had held back the pain. Now these connections were being undone.
I began to sense that I was “consuming my incarnation” in this exercise. Spanning both present and past lifetimes, this meltdown seemed to be consuming the seeds of my present life. It felt like the deepest roots of my historical existence were being unearthed and dissolved. What had been done was now being undone; what I had been was being re-assimilated.
It felt as though my entire life had been voluntarily chosen rather than karmically necessitated. Could this be true? The wounding that I had received from my parents seemed to be part of a larger plan to anchor me in the collective psyche in a way that had fashioned me into a conduit for drawing specific poisons out of the species-mind. Now that this task was finished, the sessions were drawing up my incarnation by its roots and dissolving the personal pain that had sewn me into in these historical currents. If I had uprooted my personal pain before now, I could not have accomplished my life’s work. I did not know where this process was going or how it would end.
There was only the personal tragedy of my life unfolding in an endless spiral. I don’t know if it eventually exhausted itself or if there is still more pain to unearth. All I know is that after a very long time, I found myself in a different reality. There was no pronounced transition, no noticeable death or dying. I was completely exhausted from the pain, absolutely spent. The transition was gradual. Slowly, I began to realize that I was existing in a different reality.
Diamond Luminosity
I began to stir, and as I did, the slightest movement of my mind triggered waves of ecstasy. The Light I had entered in session 45 was back and with it the ecstasy and weightlessness of transcendence. I had repeatedly begged to be restored to this domain, but except for the briefest of tastes had been kept outside the gates. Now through some inscrutable design, I was carried back and deposited in this world.
The Light was not outside me or surrounding me or even concentrated as a flow inside me. Rather, I was completely dissolved into the Light. I was inside the Light and the Light was inside me; it was as though there were only the thinnest distinction between “me” and the Light. I had only the vaguest suggestion of boundaries. To the extent that I could see myself at all, I looked like sparkling diamond dust.
I began to uncurl myself slowly, like a freshly hatched butterfly stretching its wings, and my slightest movements sent waves of joy coursing through me. The ecstasy was almost more than I could manage. I dared not move quickly, for if I did the bliss overwhelmed me. As I realized what was happening, my heart began to sing, but ever so gently. Like a patient long ill climbing carefully out of his sickbed, I moved slowly and carefully into this world that was both familiar and new to me. I was back! Very slowly, I stretched myself into the Light.
At this point, words fail because the usual distinctions do not apply. The dualism between “me” and “the Light,” between agent and environment, no longer holds. If I say “I moved into the Light” or “The Light received me and drew me out,” this is true, but it masks the deeper experience. The deeper experience was unfolding myself into Myself, into my own reality.
I stretched myself out very slowly to explore the reaches of my new being, and it was all Light. The most difficult thing to describe is the extraordinary CLARITY.
I was Light.
This world was Light,
and Light knows no boundaries.
As my experience of being Light deepened, my boundaries expanded.
As I became larger, I also became clearer.
As the clarity deepened,
I was lifted beyond the patterns that make up my historical existence.
The desires that had formed the currents of my historical life
were taken back into their nuclear forms,
expressing themselves at these extraphysical levels.
Small historical concerns were exchanged for cosmic patterns
Such joy,
and the joy came not from the content of the experiences
but from the mode of consciousness itself.
CLARITY.
SHINING, LUMINOUS, TRANSPARENT CLARITY.
EXQUISITE JOY.
DIAMOND LUMINOSITY.
In and Out of Space-Time
In this diaphanous state of luminous peace, I found myself at one point being moved back toward my earthly identity. I felt my familiar world slowly congeal around me, phantasms of duality hiding the clarity of Oneness. Back and forth I moved, from Clarity into the conditions of historical existence and back again into Clarity. The world of form was congealing around me and then falling away repeatedly. I was being focused in and out of space-time.
I could not sustain the full Clarity of Diamond Luminosity inside the conditions of my historical existence for very long. I could hold it for a short while but then would get distracted by the seeming realities I was part of. Soon I had fallen overboard and was adrift in a sea of impressions. Then, just as I had adjusted to the “normal” conditions of my earthly life, the shapes would fall away and I would be restored by stages to my original, pristine condition. Such joy to be restored; such sadness to lose this Clarity.
Beyond the Diamond Luminosity
Of all the many wonderful experiences from today, there is one that stands out above all others, but I can only convey a small suggestion of its true dimensions.
It was late in the session. I was in a state of exceptional Clarity, floating tranquilly in a peace that lay far beyond historical existence. Suddenly, everything pivoted 90 degrees, and a huge gap opened to reveal entire worlds beyond the world I was in. Shining through them was the most sublime, exquisite LIGHT that was as far beyond the Diamond Light as the Diamond Light is beyond space-time. This ABSOLUTE LIGHT hit me like a bolt of lightning. It completely transfixed me and left me stunned in rapture. Such splendor! An exponential increase in clarity. I cannot describe the effect touching such HYPER-CLARITY had on me. In only seconds, it completely redefined my life’s agenda. The progressive realization is endless. Any cost, any cost!
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This last experience lasted only seconds, but it completely changed my understanding of existence. Now I understood that no matter how deeply I entered the Divine Cosmos, there would always be deeper dimensions still. There is no end to this journey. This represented such a profound shift in my thinking that it first jarred me to the bone and then relaxed me into infinite wonder.
Like many of us, I had always operated under the assumption that there was a final endpoint to this journey, an absolute destination that we could eventually reach. Some have spoken of Oneness with God or absorption into the Supracosmic Void as such an endpoint. I had tasted both, but in doing so I had learned that there are many permutations and degrees of Divine Oneness and even degrees of Formlessness, though it may sound like a contradiction in terms to say so. The continual unfolding of new experiential horizons in my sessions kept moving the goalposts back, but it had not dissolved my expectation that there was a final stopping point to this journey.
When the Diamond Luminosity first opened, it had carried such a powerful sense of completion and homecoming that I thought I had finally found what I was looking for. I could not imagine anything more fulfilling or complete than the Pure Light of Diamond Luminosity. And indeed, I did find my personal stopping point here. But at the very moment of reaching this pinnacle, this session showed me that there are dimensions of existence beyond even this. I saw that there are more dimensions of Light than I will ever be able to explore in this lifetime, even using this powerful method. There is simply not enough time, and I do not have enough strength to touch them all. We are truly children waking in the arms of an infinite cosmos.
And this is why I would be gentler with myself were I starting this journey over again. The goal of this work, I have learned, is not to achieve some final condition or reach the end of this infinity. I think the goal of deep work is to make ourselves transparent to this infinity, to let as much of it into our earthly lives as we can skillfully manage, and to be patient with the rest. For this, a gentler path works well. I have more respect now for the slow but steady pace of our self-evolution.
Let me add a note here about my father because I could not bear to send into the world such an incomplete portrait of the man I loved so deeply. When we engage a COEX system of painful memories in a session, it temporarily becomes our entire reality. In reliving what went wrong in a relationship, we temporarily lose touch with what went right until the catharsis has run its course and the pain has been re-assimilated. Then the whole picture comes back into view. As a result, what this session shows of my father is true, but it is an incomplete truth.
My dad was a robust and powerful man who loved his family deeply, and we felt his love. Born in Mississippi in 1916, he was a self-made man who lived the Horatio Alger myth. When he was eleven years old, his father died suddenly from pneumonia on the eve of the Great Depression, and his life became financially hard. After two years of high school, he went to work to help support his mother and sister, at one point selling candy bars to corner markets from the trunk of their car. He entered the Army Air Corps during World War II, flew bombers, and came back a major with the Distinguished Flying Cross and the respect and loyalty of his men. Despite never going to college, he became a high-ranking executive in the Army Corp of Engineers, where he was nationally recognized for his administrative expertise. My father designed and built our family home, choosing an African American for his head carpenter, which was an unusual thing to do in Mississippi in 1956. He loved the outdoors and seemed happiest there. My best memories of my dad are hunting and fishing with him. Yes, he had a temper, but his virtues far outweighed his shortcomings. What you see in this session is the ache of someone who wanted more of his father, not less. He died of congestive heart failure when he was fifty years old, two weeks before I entered college.
Vajrayana Buddhist Practice
We are now in the middle of this four-year period, with two sessions presented and two remaining. At this point, I want to step back and drop another layer into the story. I want to describe a change that took place in how I conducted my sessions during these four years. To describe this change and what it meant, I have to explain how entering these intense states of consciousness was affecting my body. This will involve taking a bit of a detour from the main story, but a detour that will deepen the plot.
On the morning of my first entry into the Diamond Luminosity, Carol offered to do a Tibetan practice for me that she had recently learned called Chöd. Chöd means “cutting.” It is a Vajrayana Buddhist practice for removing obstacles and cutting through ego. Its lineage traces back to Machig Labdrön, a revered female practitioner from eleventh-century Tibet. Carol had received the practice from her teacher, Lama Tsultrim Allione, who had received it from her teacher, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche. I quickly accepted her invitation because it felt timely. The previous session had finished well, and today felt like it would be a good day. So on this particular morning, we started the day with Carol doing Chöd over me for forty minutes, and then we began the session.
By this time, I was a seasoned journeyer. I knew how my system responded to LSD, and I had a solid sense of the size and shape of my psychedelic window. On this day, however, my window opened wider and stayed open longer than it ever had before. In my session notes, I wrote:
Today it was as though my surrounding field had been pulled back by an unseen force, as if it had been cleansed before I got there so that when I arrived my experience opened farther and stayed open longer than it normally does. There was a quantum jump in spaciousness and clarity, and though there have been quantum jumps before, this one felt different. It felt as though several layers of density had been cleared away for me. When I extended myself into this new surround, my experience met with less resistance. It flowed more smoothly, reached farther horizons, and stayed open longer. (S 45)
This change was so palpable that immediately after the session I decided to learn Chöd myself. Two months later, I received the practice from Lama Tsultrim, and it became a regular part of my spiritual practice. Since that day, I have never done a psychedelic session without doing Chöd first.
This is the beginning of a longer story of my following Carol into Vajrayana Buddhism and the many retreats we took together at Tara Mandala, a Buddhist retreat center in Colorado founded by Lama Tsultrim. Carol joined its board, and Tara Mandala became part of our family as we spent many summer retreats there. I had taught courses in Buddhism for years and knew its philosophy well, but this was practice not theory, so I learned the core practices of Vajrayana. After Chöd there were purification practices, deity practices, guru yoga practices, and contemplation practices. In short, I learned to pray in the language of the dakinis (female meditational deities). I learned to respect the concentrated power of mantras and to use creative visualization to open inner doors. With a sensitivity developed in my psychedelic sessions, I could feel the powerful fields that surrounded these ancient practices from countless Buddhists having done them through history.
So it was that during the last five years of my psychedelic journey, when the work was entering its most intense phase, I integrated Vajrayana practice into my psychedelic practice. I had always been a meditator, but this represented a more formal commitment to a specific lineage of dharma transmission. I was comfortable with most of Buddhist thought—not the patriarchy—and many of its teachings had been confirmed in my sessions. Vajrayana Buddhism is sometimes described as a synthesis of the sage tradition of Indian Buddhism and the shamanic Bon tradition indigenous to Tibet. Shamanism, therefore, is built into its very fabric. Perhaps this is why combining Vajrayana practice with my psychedelic practice always felt natural to me.
From session 45 on, I wove Vajrayana practice into my psychedelic practice. I also wove my psychedelic practice into my Vajrayana practice by drawing on my memories of transcendence to deepen various visualization and contemplation practices. It was always a two-way street for me, but here my focus is on what Vajrayana gave my psychedelic practice, and this story centers on energy. I have already described the energetic aspects of psychedelic work, how each deeper level of reality operates at a higher level of energy. Now I want to describe how immersing myself in these fields of energy was impacting me after each session.
My experience has been that once I make solid contact with a given level of transpersonal reality in a session, I continue to have a living connection with that reality even after the session ends. It is as though when a strong and stable window into the universe opens, after it closes a small filament continues to connect me to this level and a trickle of its energy flows into me through this filament. Just a trickle, but trickles add up. The more time I spend at a given level of reality, the stronger the filament becomes and the greater the trickle of energy.
As my practice deepened through the years and I made stable contact with more and more levels of spiritual reality, it felt like multiple strands of energy were formed, connecting me permanently to all these levels. Through these strands, different shades of energy flowed into my body and mind every day. During my years of active practice, this was a very tangible sensation. After stopping my sessions in 1999, this flow slowly subsided, but it has never stopped.
This energy nourished me spiritually and helped me grow into the being I was becoming, but it also became something of a problem. My sessions were so intense that eventually my system was having difficulty managing all this “extra” energy. In deep psychedelic sessions, you open yourself to enormous tidal waves of energy. They carry you into vast energetic landscapes that are fascinating to experience, but after the session ends it can leave your subtle energy system feeling stretched and achy. This short-term effect usually fades within a few days, but the longer and the more deeply you work with psychedelics, the more significant this trickle effect becomes. What do you do with all this energy that is continuously flowing into you in-between your sessions, that pulses in your heart and beams from your skull? Now that you are no longer in the visionary state and your system has shrunk back to its “normal” shape and size, how do you integrate the new energetic being you are slowly becoming?
I found that doing Chöd and other Vajrayana practices not only helped me enter and exit deep states of consciousness on the day of a session, they also helped me manage this flow of energy after a session by giving it a place to run. For years the pattern had been that this energy would build up inside my body, making me periodically very uncomfortable. There was the headache (an aching of the Ajna chakra or “third eye”) that lasted on and off for three years and the hearing hypersensitivity that for a time made me uncomfortable even being in the same room with a refrigerator compressor running. (Medical examinations found nothing wrong or out of the ordinary.) When I started doing the Vajrayana practices, these symptoms of energy overload subsided. These ancient rituals connected me to the universe in a way that allowed this energy to run more freely. They allowed my system to ventilate between sessions. Singing these prayers tuned my “body, speech, and mind” to the universe in a way that allowed the energy flowing inside me to merge with a greater surround. It was as if these practices gave me a way of communing with the universe that was midway between my earthly reality and my session reality. When I danced with the dakinis, I felt relaxed, cleansed, and exercised. My energy began to run cooler, and I was able to breathe more comfortably in my skin.
I understand the debate among Buddhist practitioners over psychedelics and the reservations some teachers have about them as agents of spiritual transformation.*61 And yet, personally, I never felt a contradiction between my Buddhist practice and my psychedelic practice. A difference in emphasis, method, and even goals, perhaps, but no contradiction in core values. I do not believe that the Buddhist prohibition against “taking drugs that cloud the mind” applies to psychedelic substances when they are used therapeutically, because in these circumstances they do not cloud the mind. Just the opposite, they hypersensitize the mind, and by skillfully focusing this hypersensitivity, we can bring the poisons and toxins of our mind to the surface and remove them. I think Chögyam Trungpa was correct when he described LSD as a kind of “super-samsara.” LSD amplifies the samsaric tendencies of our mind and invites a confrontation with these tendencies that, if handled well, supports the liberation of the mind. Though my psychedelic journey became a cosmological exploration that reached beyond liberation, it always felt congruent with liberation.
Though I did not pay it much attention at the time, it feels perhaps significant to me now that Vajrayana practice entered my life on the same day that the Diamond Luminosity opened for the first time. I don’t think that Chöd, or Buddhism for that matter, steered my experience in this direction. I think that the trajectory that took me into the Diamond Luminosity was established in the years that led up to this breakthrough. Even so, it was a blessing when these two came together in my life. Vajrayana practice worked well with my psychedelic practice, both in opening the psychedelic window and in reinforcing the result. Vajrayana means the “Diamond Way,” and it was in the sutras (scriptures) and termas (hidden teachings) of Tibet that I found the clearest exposition of the Diamond Luminosity I had entered. I know that light is discussed in many spiritual traditions, and I’m sure I could find parallels between my experience of this light and their teachings, but it was my karma to find what I needed in Vajrayana, and I am grateful to Carol for bringing me into this lineage.
The Pivot
After the 50th session, the sessions pivoted from taking me deeper into the Diamond Luminosity to integrating the Luminosity more deeply into my earthly being. This shift occurred not because I sought it but because something larger than me orchestrated it. I only figured out what was happening after the fact.
The theme of integrating the Light had never been entirely absent, of course. Though I had not recognized it at the time, the exercise of being focused in and out of space-time in the 50th session was a training exercise in integrating the Light. It was an early attempt to teach me how to sustain Diamond Consciousness inside the conditions of my physical existence. I failed terribly at it, but it was a start. The theme of integration had also shown up in a vivid way in the 47th session.
I was in a field of light familiar from previous sessions. The intense Tahitian singing was chopping up the light, breaking it into small pieces, like a chef chopping up vegetables. It was also chopping up the remaining fragments of my personality into a fine dust and mixing it with the brilliant white light in order to make my being more compatible with the light. Deep levels of my inner being were being reconfigured to better reflect within me the celestial realities I had previously explored “outside” me. (S 47)
After the encounter with the ABSOLUTE LIGHT in session 50, everything pivoted more strongly in the direction of integration. Instead of my being taken deeper into the Diamond Light, the Diamond Light began to crunch itself more deeply into my physical and psychological being. It felt like the Light was restructuring me at a physiological level, actually remaking my biology and my subtle energy system. This required more exercises of purification and more releasing of old patterns.
As we have seen, each breakthrough to a deeper level of reality shakes loose impurities from one’s system that must be removed if progress is to continue, and this is especially true for the Diamond Luminosity. After the 45th session, it had taken four sessions of intense purification before the doors to the Diamond Light opened again. Now the same pattern repeated itself. After the glorious 50th session, the opening line of the 51st session was, “Today was spent entirely in the mud.”
The personal healings that took place during this four-year period were part of this internalization process. If the Light is going to enter and stabilize inside our incarnate being, it must first heal that being. To become fully one with All That Is, we must become one with ourselves. The experience of cosmic Oneness forces to the surface all injuries to the self. Wherever we have been cramped or constricted by life in any of our incarnations, we are healed so that the Light can enter our hearts and minds more completely and flow more freely to the hearts and minds of those around us.
On a sidenote, one session from this period showed me that even hell itself serves the purpose of healing the Soul and reintegrating it into the Divine Light.
Heaven and Hell (S 57)
A bell tolling in the music became a death knell tolling my execution. The entire experience was crystal clear and matter-of-fact. I knew what was happening, and there was nothing I could do or wished to do to stop it. I watched with fascination as I was slowly and decisively executed. With each sounding of the bell, a huge scythe cut through my standing form, slicing so finely that my body parts were left standing. As the bell tolled, the scythe cut lower and lower, and my being was effortlessly cut to pieces. When it was over, I was completely dead, but now alive in a new way. I had entered extra-samsaric reality, far beyond cyclic existence. There, new vistas of understanding suddenly opened to me. Wherever I directed my thoughts, new panoramas of insight tumbled into my mind.
In one scenario, I came to understand heaven and hell in a new way. In a striking reversal of perspective, I saw that hell was not the opposite of heaven, as is usually taught, but the guardian companion of divine realization. I saw that in the afterlife, “hell” is actually a state of deep purification entered into only by those who are deeply committed to their spiritual development, for there are slower paths available for the less spiritually ambitious. The experience of hell is created when our flawed and imperfect personal history is brought into contact with our luminous Divine Nature and held there, allowing the power of our Divine Nature to purify and heal our historical limitations. In the afterlife, all suffering serves bliss. Only when hell’s work is finished can we possibly begin to appreciate its mercy.*62
The significance of this pivot toward integration was not clear to me when I was having these experiences. It was only later, when I was digesting my journey as a whole with the help of insights given me in my last two sessions, that I began to understand the significance of this shift. The many cleansings and healings that I underwent after the 45th and 50th sessions seemed to make possible a more embodied experience of Diamond Consciousness in the 60th and 66th sessions.
The 60th session began by deepening my healing with my father, which I’ve shortened here, and then took me into an experience of the Diamond Luminosity that was intimately woven into my earthly existence. Without anything being said, it was coaching me on how to absorb the Light into my everyday life.
Session 60—Universal Field of Light
In the beginning of the session, I could smell the odor of tobacco that surrounded my dad when I was young and could almost taste the distinctive flavor of his Southern brand of cigarettes, Picayune. I could feel the prickly bristles of his unshaven face when I hugged him. The tactile features of the experience were so detailed that they signaled a deep encounter with my dad. I was drawn into our history together and again experienced its limits and frustrations, continuing the insights of the 50th session. Though not as emotionally poignant as that session, the regression was deep and detailed.
This continued for a long time, physical sensations blending with emotional textures, drawing me into deeper and deeper levels of our relationship. Then, after a long time, everything suddenly changed. As has sometimes happened before, my personal drama did not yield gradually to another reality, but fell away all at once. Now, however, I caught the significance of the suddenness of this transition. It signified that the domain I was entering was not in any way an extension of or continuation of my earthly experience. I could not reach this new domain by refining, extending, or mending these other experiences. Instead, the whole of my historical existence fell away from me suddenly, as a single piece.
In this context, I saw clearly that the details of my particular history were not important. Everyone has a personal history, some more pleasant than others, some more problematic. But however complex our karmic history, however pleasant or unpleasant our life has been is irrelevant to the common fact that all forms of personal history lie on top of this deeper order of reality that was now breaking through. The irrelevance of the details of personal history was a startling realization. At this level, the details didn’t matter.
The Life Circle
When my relationship with my father fell away, I entered an expansive, ecstatic field of energy and Light. Just as in the 45th session, I found myself standing in the middle of a colorful spinning circle of holographic images that held the details of my entire life. Once again I fell into this circle, touching a part of my life, and as I did it “died out from under me,” leaving me in the luminous death state beyond individual identity. Then I would be returned to the center of the circle, my life would reconstitute itself around me, and the process would repeat itself, driving home the same lesson as before, that my death process was complete, that there was no area of my life holding on. Now, however, there was an additional message woven into this exercise, a new lesson added to what had been communicated before.
The repeated dissolving of my life into the Light was demonstrating to me that in this transition the outer form of one’s life remains intact, but inwardly the life being lived is the field of Light itself. The outer form of my life was becoming transparent to a different order of reality. Emptied of personal content, I became transparent to a fluid Light that permeates all reality. Once this lesson had been conveyed, I then entered and stayed in the luminous state for a long time, soaking in its spacious Clarity.
Displaced from the Present
After a period of time in this transcendental ecstasy, I was drawn back into the form of my everyday life, but now there was a thin film separating me from my experience. I had the distinct sensation of being “once removed” from the flow of my own experience, as though I was getting it all secondhand. I was slightly displaced from the present moment, getting all my experience just after the fact. My experience was also slightly out of focus; everything was slightly smeared spatially and temporally.
At first this subtle distortion was just irritating, but it became increasingly troublesome. No matter how hard I tried, I could not “get back into” my experience. I was being excluded from the full immediacy of my own life. It was as if I were a ghost unable to climb back into my life. Experiences that had previously been joyful were being spoiled by this slight displacement that took the edge off of life. I was trapped in a pervasive distortion that could not be solved by having one type of experience rather than another but only by shifting into a different mode of experience altogether.
Then suddenly, I broke through into an incredibly sharp, intense, and bright mode of experience. I was back inside Chris Bache’s immediate experience, but now in a much more intense and luminous form of that experience. I then realized that the displacement from immediacy I had been experiencing was in fact my normal way of existing in the world! The crystal-like clarity of the death state was illuminating a pervasive distortion inherent in my everyday consciousness. The concentrated immediacy of this laser-like clarity made my usual mode of experience intolerably dull. Ordinary mind is so diluted compared with this.
All my life I thought I had been conscious, but now I saw that I had been only half conscious, trapped in a permanent fuzzy haze, like a near-sighted man without glasses. The entire remainder of the session was spent in this state of Hyper-Clarity-Focused-in-the-Here-and Now. No transpersonal exotica, just hyper-luminosity focused in my immediate experience. This was embodied Diamond Consciousness.
Luminous Clarity
I was greatly relieved when I first made the transition back into the Luminous Clarity, and relief turned into gratitude when I realized that I was going to be allowed to stay in this condition. The gratitude deepened into ecstasy as minutes turned into hours and the state did not close.
Visually, the state of Hyper-Clarity registered as a clear field of Light extending about half an inch around my body. It was as though my body were glowing and this luminous sheath was a visible reflection of the ecstatic illumination I was experiencing within. Wherever I went (mentally), whatever I did, this diamond-like glow went with me.
Then occasionally, a much deeper experience of the Light opened. When this happened, I stepped beyond my individual field of illumination into a Universal Field of Light. To experience the first was wonderful, but to open to the second was my deepest dream come true. I moved back and forth between these two conditions several times, coming into the Universal Field from several different life situations, almost, it seemed, from several different lifetimes. From wherever I entered, what I entered was always the same—an exquisite, seamless Field of Light.
Soon thereafter some last membrane dissolved and I moved in, through, and as Light. The Light completely saturated my life. There were no limits to its expanse and no piece of life inside me or outside me it did not embrace. The experience was like being a fish swimming in the ocean, but here the ocean was an Ocean of Light. The Light penetrated every cell of my being and all the earthly forms around me. We all breathed this Light. We are this Light. All our experience is seamless Light. Joy of wonder. Constant prayers of thanksgiving and gratitude.
The sessions that followed this Light-soaked session continued to scour my insides. As the Light worked its way deeper into my earthly being, any behavior that was blocking its entrance was exposed and addressed. One session brought forward what is perhaps my deepest personal fear—the fear of being seen and found lacking. Someone looks at you, sees who and what you are, and is disappointed. You see it in their eyes and in their fallen face, and there is nothing you can do to change it. When this wound was taken back to its source and healed, the session shifted into an ecstatic experience of the perfection of Being in the midst of ever-incomplete Becoming. Another session mercilessly exposed the inconsistency of my working so hard to cultivate celestial purity inside my sessions while continuing to soil my consciousness by watching “bardo-television” in-between them. More work to do there. A third session pressed deeply into a lingering personal need I was holding around physical passion. It showed me that the radiant bliss of “immeasurable impartiality” lies beyond all self-reference and beyond all personal hopes and fears, including this one. Letting go of my fears had been easy enough, but surrendering this particular hope was poignantly difficult for me. The best I could do was turn it over to the infinite wisdom of my Beloved.
The Transparency of Embodied Presence
In the beginning of this book, I said that there were two basic trajectories in my psychedelic work. The first was spiritual awakening, and the second was cosmic exploration. While I never let go of personal liberation as my baseline objective, the work of collective liberation and the adventure of exploring the cosmos had come to dominate my sessions. Now in these late sessions, the arc of the work seemed to be curving back around to the original goal of spiritual awakening.
After all the adventures I had been on exploring different levels of reality, the sessions were now getting simpler and simpler. It was as if after dissolving into the deep structure of archetypal reality and the radical simplicity of primordial wholeness, there was nowhere else for me to go except where I already was. After taking me into the Diamond Luminosity and then showing me the infinite depth of the cosmos, the consciousness guiding my sessions now appeared to be bringing me back into my present life and something approximating classical spiritual realization. In one session, I wrote:
The sessions are getting harder to describe not because of their exotic qualities but because of their very mundaneness. In striking contrast to my earlier sessions, the frame of reference for my present experience is my immediate life. My personal life is being turned inside out and refashioned. Pieces of my past are being systematically brought forward and emptied, like taking bottles down from a shelf and pouring them out. Now, however, when each bottle is drained, I do not dissolve into the otherworldly diamond radiance of dharmakaya but into the mundane world of my historical existence rendered transparent in śūnyatā [emptiness]. The ecstasy of transcending space-time appears to be yielding to the transparency of embodied Presence inside space-time. Where is this process leading? (S 65)
Before presenting the last of the Diamond Luminosity sessions, let me give one example of this grounding-in-the-present that took place outside these four sessions. In this session, I was taken into a striking experience of emptiness inside my university classroom. It felt like the experience of śūnyatā was being driven into the very center of my life, planting itself where I spend so many hours every day.
Teaching without Selves Present (S 63)
My boundaries having been shattered in the cleansing portion of the session, my experience now poured beyond its customary edges and flowed into the people I saw around me (in my mind’s eye). What was striking was how concrete and “close at hand” the experience was. Everyone maintained their distinctive characteristics, and yet as we came into contact with each other, our minds flowed together as currents in the Ocean of Mind.
The people became my students in my current Buddhism class. At this point, my awareness was not tied to my personal body but ran unimpeded in and out of their lives and even included details of the history of the room we met in. The lively dance of blending then reached deeper to dissolve the last remnant of selfhood. The last vestige of I-ness dissolved into the sheer immediacy of living experience. Now I experienced the contact of minds in teaching as a process completely devoid of any selves whatsoever. There was no self in me teaching and no selves in the students learning. There was only the immediacy of the experience of contact, a pure stream of awareness that flowed unimpeded when we gathered.
Temporarily freed of the lazy habit of thinking in terms of selves, the sheer immediacy of awareness bored into me. Here again was both an insight driven home and a practice given me to anchor this insight in my daily life. The essence of this practice was this: to remember and make real to myself that there are no selves encountering each other in my classroom. The coming together of two streams of awareness creates a spark of experience that is a primary reality, not a secondary reality derived from selves. Repeatedly, it was emphasized: there is nothing other than the immediate flow of experience. The flow of “shared” experience possesses the same absolute reality as the flow of “private” experience.
For these brief hours, I understood what it means to be awake in the immediacy of present experience. This was worlds away from transpersonal exotica, from the ecstasy of archetypal reality or the diaphanous subtlety of the species-mind. It was stepping into an ever-disappearing present whose transparency melts the walls between hearts and opens experience to the creative influx of the universe.
I have used the language of Buddhism to frame the experience of Diamond Luminosity, and I will continue to do so for this last session as well. The term Buddhists use for the Pure Awareness that is one’s Essential Nature is “Nature of Mind,” what some religious traditions would call one’s Divine Nature.
Session 66—Nature of Mind
What happened in the first half of the session is something familiar to me by now but still hard to describe. The best description I can give of it is that I engage and cleanse my life. It feels as though I grab some aspect of my life and then wrestle with it. I don’t struggle against it but simply won’t let it go. I take a posture of focused surrender, allowing myself to experience whatever arises, and a discomfort begins to flow. It feels as though a thread is being pulled that unravels my person from inside out.
The process requires a great deal of concentration. Like riding a bucking horse, you can get thrown off, as I was several times today When I was thrown off, I landed in a condition of transpersonal spaciousness but without the Hyper-Clarity of Diamond Luminosity that means so much to me. I knew that I could only reach this clarity by returning to the peculiar field that has no name and no form other than being a current of psycho-physical discomfort. You do not want to go past this field; you want to stay in it until everything falls apart of its own accord and there is only Light. So I kept searching for inner discomfort, and whenever I found some, I stayed with it until it dissolved around me. An hour passed in this work, a very long hour.
My strongest sense from my recent sessions is that all psychedelic practice is in essence purification. Where one arrives at the end is exactly where one is at the beginning, but in the beginning the pristine nature of one’s Original Mind is obscured by distortions and distractions. At this point, the only thing that happens in a session that is of lasting value to me is removing these distortions, and thus I focus exclusively on the cleansing—staying with it as long as possible, returning to it as often as possible, and taking it as deeply as possible.
One with My Brothers
Eventually, I found myself being lifted beyond the cleansing to a point of reconciliation. I experienced community as I have not known it in this lifetime. At one point, I had the experience of being completely “one with my brothers,” triumphant together in some great undertaking. I have known personal victory before, but this was the victory of a community, an experience of complete solidarity with men. And it felt distinctly like reconciliation with men. Residual traces of feeling inferior to or excluded from the comradeship of men had been completely re-assimilated. I felt a wonderful feeling of prideful inclusion in the company of men—all of us skilled, accomplished, and serving the collective good.
The Future Human
These feelings of peace and harmony then jumped the banks of time, and for a few minutes I was lifted again into the broader arc of our evolutionary destiny. I felt the larger plan for humanity, beyond the coming darkness into the joy that follows. The entire context of human experience had shifted. In place of existential isolation, competition, and conflict, there was now a profound sense of inclusion and harmony. A psycho-social equality saturated everything. The magnitude of the shift is still difficult for me to fathom. A new order had truly emerged in creation.
The Nature of Mind
Then different music was put on, and I was surprised to find myself returning to the discomfort zone. I immediately pivoted and refocused on the task of purification. More cycles of intense cleansing came and went. Eventually, I began to experience the same “dislocation from experience” that I had experienced in Session 60. Today it was particularly acute. I was separated from my experience and unable to realign myself with the immediacy of present reality. No matter how hard I tried, I could not bring myself back into the present moment but remained stuck in the subtle echoes of my experience. I was deep in this process when the final breakthrough took place.
After many cycles of cleansing and struggle, my teacher, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, suddenly appeared.*63 I saw his face and felt his presence strongly. Then without anything being said, he introduced me to the Nature of Mind. Instantly and without transition of any kind, my mind opened into pure, boundless clarity. Absolutely without content, it was both the context and the content of all thoughts and sensations.
When my mind opened to itself, I was stunned. This was different from the ecstatic clarity of dharmakaya. This was clarity-in-the-body, absolutely contentless. It was the container of all experience. As the condition persisted, my shock turned to amazement and then to giddy joy. I felt various thoughts and sensations arise and disappear into the spacious clarity, not affecting it in the least. My mind began to move faster and to range more broadly, and the spacious clarity was not affected. This was the fundamental condition of my existence, the essence of my being. I was so grateful. Tears of joy. Tears of gratitude. Such blessing to discover this inside my very existence, like finding diamonds inside the pockets of old jeans.
I stayed in this condition for a long time. No matter how many twists and turns my mind took, it was impossible to step outside this condition. I felt the wild ecstatic joy of deliverance from partiality. In this breathtaking clarity was possible an exquisite intimacy with others, with myself, and with time, all three emerging at different points.
With others it was the intimacy that melted separation and spilled over into unspeakable care and compassion.
With myself it was the intimacy of resting in my own being.
With time it was the intimacy of living fully in the present moment, all future moments becoming simply repetitions of the invitation being extended in the present.
I cannot begin to describe my gratitude. Thank you. Thank you.