Christopher Bache, who taught philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University and wrote an account of two decades of high-dose LSD work, presents at a multi-speaker event on consciousness and regenerative society. He describes 73 sessions at 500 to 600 micrograms, following a protocol adapted from Stanislav Grof's psychedelic therapy, and a sequence of death and rebirth passages through personal, collective, archetypal and causal levels toward what he calls the diamond luminosity. He gives most of his time to two episodes: an encounter with what he names the ocean of suffering, and what he calls the birth of the future human. Because this is a panel, a later speaker reframes the material through Jean Gebser's structures of consciousness and the end of the mental-rational age.
Guest: Christopher Bache
In brief
- Bache says he ran 73 LSD sessions at 500 to 600 micrograms over twenty years using an isolated Grof-style protocol, and states plainly that he would not do it that way again and does not recommend it.
- Bache argues that sustained high-dose work reveals levels of reality beyond ordinary sensory experience, each reached by passing through a form of death and rebirth rather than by a single ego death.
- Bache reports that two years spent in what he calls the ocean of suffering shattered his assumption that he was working on himself, and convinced him something was using his sessions to drain trauma from the collective human psyche.
- Bache holds that there is no private self, and that deep non-ordinary states affect one's immediate relationships and the species as a whole, not only the individual.
- A second speaker presents Jean Gebser, who lived as a European refugee through the first half of the twentieth century, as the thinker who best names the present civilizational juncture.
- That speaker argues Gebser's sequence of archaic, magic, mythic, mental and integral structures shows a civilization collapsing and opening at the same time, with Cartesian subject-object thinking among what is dying.
Full text
Hi everybody. It's nice to see your faces. Nice to see the meet the clan who is interested in the things that the presenters are interested in. Uh I've short introduction. I've made my living as a university professor in Ohio. Uh I taught in the department of philosophy and religious studies at Young Sound State. I taught in religious studies, Eastern religion, psychology of mysticism, comparative spirituality, Eastern thought. But what brings me here today is not that work but is my work with psychedelics which basically I did for 20 years while I was an academic but I wasn't really allowed to speak about those things in the academic environment and it was only after I retired that I was able to write a book that I'd like to speak from today.
Now let me see if I can get this working correctly. This is a book that I published at the end of last year. It's the book I'd like to speak from today. It tells the story of where I went over 20 years of working with LSD. I followed a protocol established by Stan Grath working in psychedelic therapy which is totally isolated the conventional sort of therapeutic environment totally isolated working with headphones and eye shades and music and all those traditional trappings except that I worked with very high doses. I did 73 sessions over 20 years working with between 500 and 600 micrograms. I don't recommend this protocol.
I wouldn't do it the same way if I were starting over again, but that's what I did. And this is the story. When someone asks me what's it like taking that doses of LSD that's high, I say it's it's like being in the middle of a nuclear explosion. It just completely shatters all the dimensions of your mind and the boundaries of consciousness. And if you keep this up for long periods of time, it reveals levels of reality that lie beyond time space reality. It is like this nuclear explosion which as it pushes higher into the atmosphere. It takes levels of the atmosphere that are invisible and makes them visible.
When you work systematically with psychedelics, whether it's in indigenous context or in contemporary contexts, you basically go through a process that reveals levels of existence that lie beyond your ordinary sensory experience. Very briefly in the book, I tell the story of the levels of consciousness that I went through in this process, going through a series of death and rebirth experiences. A series that took place at first the personal level of mind where one is dealing with personal issues eventually going through ego death and then at the collective level of mind where you're engaging deep structures within the collective psyche. Third, the archetypal dimension of mind going beyond time space reality entering into being dissolved into some of the archetypal structures that underly physical existence. Fourth, going into causal level reality, causal oneness.
And finally entering for me entering into what I call the diamond luminosity. What Buddhism calls uh dharmicaya are the abs the clear light of absolute reality. Making a transition from one level to another involves going through a series of deaths and rebirth. It's not simply ego death. It's going through a a a death that takes place at the collective level. deaths that take place at the archetypal level and so on and so so forth entering into deeper intimacy with the universe. Now that's all the slides I wanted to share. Let me see if I can get out of that. All right. Such a long journey, so many years, so many levels of consciousness, it's impossible for me to summarize them very succinctly.
But for today's presentation, I simply wanted to focus on two aspects of this story which I think are relevant to this discussion of the relationship between consciousness and the exploration of consciousness and building the regenerative society. The first issue has to do with something that happened in the collective level of mind and the second has to do with what I call the birth of the future human. After I had gone through ego death, after I had worked for a couple of years and had gone through a number of different ego death experiences, I entered a domain that involved large quantities of vast territories of collective suffering. A domain that I call the ocean of suffering. It eventually expanded over two years to encompass hundreds of thousands of beings of persons and thousands of years of time.
And this was confusing to me at first because I did this work like many people working with psychedelics thinking that I was doing this work for my personal benefit that I was doing it um to heal myself to enlighten myself to accelerate my own spiritual development. But it was always kind of self or self-referencing. What I found was that this ocean of suffering went on for so long and it was so challenging and involved so many thousands of people that eventually it shattered the very model that I had brought to working with psychedelics. And I abandoned what I would call the individual model of transformation and I adopted a collective model of transformation. That is I believe that what I was doing when I entered into the ocean of suffering was actually being used or facilitating a healing that was not focused in my personal life or my personal soul even but it was focused on the collective psyche of humanity.
that something was using my sessions to drain toxins that live in the human psyche that are the residue of unresolved trauma from thousands and thousands of years of war uh and the terrible things that we've done to each other through history. Eventually um this work culminated in an orgy of cleansing and purification and healing and I was jettisoned from there on into archetypal reality and I never returned into the ocean of suffering. My point from this to keep it very short. My point is everything we do when we are working in deep states of consciousness not only affects our personal being but it affects the beings of those around us. It affects those who are immediately around us in our system of social relationships.
Some of my work affected my students for example without them knowing what I was doing. But it also reaches deeper than that. It reaches deep into the fiber of the collective psyche of humanity. And I think when we work in deep non-ordinary states, we are if we choose to do it, if we choose to allow this to happen or if it is our karma for this to happen, we go through processes. We do things which allow us to facilitate a direct um healing a direct transformation of our species as a whole of our deep family. There is no private self in the world. We are part of a species.
Our species is part of the ecosystem of earth and earth is part of the galaxy and so on and so forth. And when we do this work conscientiously, we are given opportunities to bring about a transformation which I think extends far beyond our personal life and far beyond our moment in time. Now perhaps because of this very strong collective orientation in my work uh something else began to happen over the course of the 20 years that I was doing this work. I began to experience a series of visions about the human trajectory of evolution, about where evolution was taking humanity, where we were, what was happening in the larger scheme of things. I entered repeatedly a state of consciousness that I would describe as deep time.
Deep time is not eternity. It isn't timelessness. It's a it's a condition of time in which you can experience hundreds of years or even thousands and tens of thousands of years in a very compressed time frame sometimes as a simultaneous now. I entered into deep time slowly personally with my own personal deep time and then I entered from there into collective deep time in which I was given teachings about where humanity was in its evolution and what was happening and where we were going. There is a chapter in the book called the birth of the future human and the focus of these visions was that humanity was coming into a a culmination point.
They were coming we were coming into a before and after point a turning point a critical transformation that involved the entire human family. What was emphasized was that the creative intelligence of the universe was not simply trying to awaken individuals. It's almost as if the age of individual enlightenment was over. But the creative intelligence was actually trying to awaken the entire human species and that we were poised on the cusp of a profound transformation of the human condition. a a transformation that would change not only our economy and our ecological values and our social orientation. It would reach so deep that it would actually change the bedrock of the human psyche.
It would change the fundamental archetypal blueprint of the human psyche. That that in my understanding is that is our hour of history. That is what's happening. That is what we are entering. The visions that I had for this, I did this work between 1979 and 1999. So when I when this was taking place, this is 30 to 25 years ago in which I was experiencing these things. And in one critical series of sessions, I was taken deep into humanity's future and I experienced the death and rebirth of humanity. All mystics tell us we we learn from the mystical traditions that before great awakening there takes place a great death.
Before the awakening of mystical oneness we experience the dark night of the soul. Humanity as a whole was entering the dark night of the soul of its soul which is a time of intense purification a contration with our historical karma with the limitations that we have created and lived with in in history. And in this series of sessions I went deep into the future and I experienced the complete collapse of civilization as we know it. just a profound implosion that seemed to be driven by an ecological crisis, but an ecological crisis that was so deep that it triggered a global systems disintegration uh at our collective level. And just at the depth of this death process when it looked like it was going to be an extinction event, I experienced that the worst of the problem.
It was like a storm passing over a hurricane passing over a Pacific island. The storm passed and the survivors began to get up and pick themselves up and began to begin a new. And when they began to knew they were different human beings, that a transformation took place in the depth of this death and rebirth process in which we let go fundamental beliefs and values and patterns of our past. And we engage the future as different human beings with an expanded heart, a profound innate sense of the oneness of existence and our oneness with other human beings. A profound a deeper transparency to the mind of the universe as a whole.
This truly was a before and after point in time. It took me literally years to recover from the tremendous time expansion and this encounter with this in at the one hand awesome and at the other hand very challenging and very difficult confrontation with the human story or extension of the human story. But this has been the reality that I've lived with ever since. It's been the reality that I understand what is taking place in history today. It's been the reality that basically is my background to confronting the COVID 19 crisis, the pandemic, which I see as simply just an overture to a much series of of punctuated historical crises that lie ahead for us in the 21st century.
And I think there is a correlation between what's happening in the outer world and what's happening in the inner world. that as the at the outer world as we are trying to become one planet an integrated planet with an integrated citizenry and a healthy planet that external drive to oneness is being mirrored in an internal drive to oneness which involves I think an integration of the soul into time space reality and by the soul I mean the consciousness that holds all the experiences of all of our former lives. I think basically our consciousness of all of our former lives is coming together and fusing. And when they fuse, it creates a higher form of consciousness which really I think is the new platform of humanity in future time. Now I'm think I'm probably close to the end of my time.
I know I've thrown a lot of large ideas out there, so I'll just stop there and um see where we take this. Christopher, that was wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing. Yeah, I really love your work and I love your your vision and um it's kind of um yeah, I mean extraordinary uh to talk with somebody who has, you know, explored the sort of depth dimensions of the LSD space, you know, perhaps as as much as anybody alive right now. Um, I'm kind of curious what what's your perspective on LSD? I mean, do do you have any perspective on what it is in in this in this exploration?
Is it itself a um, you know, is there an entities attached to it? Is is it a being? Is it is it just a chemical catalyst? Is it here accidentally? Is there some kind of intentionality to it? Well, given the synchronicity of the birth of the atomic bomb and the birth of LSD in the same decade, I don't think it's an accident that it's here. I understand it to be an amplifier and a catalyst of consciousness. Similar to S is psilocybin and Iasa and DMT and 5met each of these are fundamental catalyst of consciousness. Each of them have their own distinctive characteristics. One of the things I think which is different about LSD is it's relatively new and therefore it humanity doesn't have a lot of history with it.
I my sense is that when we do Iwasa and when we do psilocybin we don't only experience the physiological absorption of this chemical into our biophysiology but we also engage the fields which have been fields of consciousness which have been created by all the beings who have worked with this substance through through time. So because we've been using psilocybin for thousands of years and we've been using iawasa for thousands of years, there are very strong feels associated with these substances that we encounter when we use these substances. LSD is a relatively young uh substance and therefore I experience it being unusually clean in this respect. I did not experience much of a cultural overlay, much of an historical overlay. It seems to be particularly clean and I experience it as and remember I was working at high levels higher levels than I recommend 500 to 600 micrograms.
It has a tendency to drive to the high ceiling of high cosmological ceiling. Psilocybin is much more body grounded. It the states of consciousness that awakens are much more kind of closer to where we live in our body. LSD isn't necessarily so. So at lower doses, yes, but in higher doses, it tends to dry drive high into the cosmology. I'm also kind of curious. I think you you seem like you have a bit of a Buddhist orientation also. Am I correct in that? That's true. Yeah. You mentioned reincarnation in past lives. I'm kind of curious if you have a um insight into what that means. I mean, I got very excited by EMTT Kwami's book.
I think it was called the self-aware universe. Kosami is a quantum physicist who was um I believe working at Institute of Noetic Sciences. He and he began to look at how um quantum physics action at a distance could kind of provide a um you know at least you know starting point for scientific hypothesis around how there might be kind of an aggregate kind of a quantum aggregate of uh you know feeling willing thinking that somehow continues connected you know after after the physical death and kind of seeks to reagregate to continue some process towards maybe the ultimate goal you know, unification or realization or enlightenment. I I don't know if you had any any thoughts in those regards regards. I I do.
Reincarnation is a fundamental part of my worldview. The first book I wrote is a book on reincarnation life cycles and it discusses the empirical evidence. As a philosopher, I believe that the phys the evidence, the scientific evidence for reincarnation now is overwhelming. We have extraordinary number of cases. Ian Stevenson's work with young children at the University of Virginia basically established the empirical database uh for justifying a belief in reincarnation. Now that doesn't mean we understand the physics of it. There's so much we still don't understand about it. But a fundamental principle that I take away from Stevenson's work and all the work done by past life therapist u in the psycho psychotherrapeutic community is that nature retains its learning.
Nature holds on to its learning. My understanding is that reincarnation is the higher octave of evolution. So in evolution, we find that nature folds forward the learning of groups. In reincarnation, nature has found a way of folding forward in time the learning of individuals. Now I think eventually lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, we're learning more. We're we're we're becoming more. We're acquiring more skills. We're activating more potentials that are latent within our structure. Sooner or later, sooner or later, I believe all of our reincarnational history becomes integrated into a higher order of intelligence. I've experienced this in my sessions where all of my former lives came together and they came together and they fused.
And when they fused, there was an enormous explosion of of energy of diamond light broke out of my chest and it shot me into a state of consciousness in which I was an individual, but I was an individual beyond any frame of reference I had previously known. Uh we had a question from um Diana. Uh she's curious to know your thoughts and experience on people getting to these places of insight, integration, and deep time without the use of mindaltering drugs or plant medicines. Absolutely. I've had many people write me since this book has been published and they say, "I understand what you're talking about. I've had experiences similar to what you're describing, but I've never done psychedelics.
I'm a lifelong meditator. I've had these experiences under medit with meditation." And I think that's absolutely true. If LSD is an amplifier of consciousness, it is consciousness that does the work. And there are many ways of intensifying and amplifying consciousness. We know many of the forms. LSD or psychedelics is simply another form, another key to working with consciousness, but it's consciousness that does the work. Yeah. And what kind of uh since you've had these insights into kind of the future, although didn't didn't exactly seem like you had an exact time frame, but I remember in uh Dark Knight, Early Dawn, you kind of said it was going to be a very compressed period uh when civilization began to crack apart and these kind of um emergent new properties of the new human, you know, kind of began to integrate together.
Um you know, what what you know, well, maybe that's not that's what I remember, but you tell me if I'm wrong. Uh but then also I'm curious like you know how would you ground that into like practical advice for people in this time? Is there you know you know is doing these psychedelic explorations a form a way to prepare oneself for for what's coming? Uh you know is there a way we can minimize the destructive uh impacts of what's coming? Uh because it definitely feels like there's a bit of a of a destructive uh express train heading our way right now. there is it's kind of a kie destroyer in order to make room for the new.
I think there are many things we can do. I I think basically collectively we're facing our collective shadow and that collective shadow is a shadow that all of us have personally had a hand in creating in the sense that we have lived through history and therefore we have been part of our history and this this kind of confrontation with the collector's shadow is part of our common work. Now I think one of the ways in which we can consciously participate in this process is first by understanding what's taking place. And you're right, I wasn't given any specific details of date. I wasn't given any details of exactly how, when, and where this was going to take place.
I was given experiences of this of this meltdown not as an individual would experience but but literally as the human species as a whole would experience it. And I think the one of the key things we can do is basically take responsible for responsibility for our own shadow to do whatever psychotherrapeutic work, psychedelic work, meditational work, spiritual work to basically help us confront the con the the shadow dimensions of our own being in order to dissolve those and let light in where previously darkness had reigned. But then at another level, we can collectively participate and help others in confronting the shadow of our culture, the shadow of history. That's the kind of political action side, the social action side. Beautiful, Christopher.
I love it. I think that it would be great to have David Luke come on and speak for a bit and then maybe have a little bit of a dialogue uh after. So David, if you are there, if you want to jump in. Yeah, sure. Hi. Can you hear me? Okay. Yep. Oh, great. Yeah, good to be here. Thanks for inviting me along. Good to see everybody. Thanks for that, Chris. Fantastic as ever to hear you talk. Uh, so I'll just give you a little bit of background about me. And, um, I'm going to give you kind of pricey of what I've been doing for the last few decades or what the insights I've I've kind of come to.
So, I'm a psychologist. uh by training primarily parasychologist, transpersonal psychologist and um my kind of big umbrella area of of of interest is kind of altered states of consciousness and anomalous or transpersonal experiences. Uh so I've done a lot of research on all kinds of altered states. I do a lot of research specifically with psychedelics. Uh I do a lot of research when I'm I'm not on psychedelics as well, but it's not as much fun. uh and so I'm going to give you kind of a bit of an overview of some of the insights I've had that come from the research but also my own particular journey as well.
So insights that are coming from the research and what the journey involves uh and what it leads to. You could pretty much sum up the kind of the where we are currently with our kind of intellectual quest by suggesting that psychedelics and altered states in general because I think all al states have a have a kind of continuity with with psychedelic experiences just perhaps the volumes turned up more with psychedelic experiences is they increase connectivity and they increase connectivity across the whole kind of spectrum of of experience from the biological through the psychological the sociological the eological ical and even into the cosmological or spiritual realms perhaps. Uh so on a biological level we know from research at Imperial College for instance they increase connectivity within different brain regions. So areas of your brain which don't normally communicate with each other suddenly become very communicative. They have hyperconnectivity and on a kind of cognitive level this explains things like synthesia, divergent thinking and increased creativity, cognitive flexibility and and so on.
On a psychological level, they connect us with ourselves. So they give us access to our unconscious material. Uh tap straight into that your shadow as Chris said, your personal history, your past traumas and so on. And hopefully through a kind of assistance or through being guided through that journey, you can come to some kind of resolution of your prior traumas. I just found a brilliant quote by Gaba Mate about half an hour ago which says every human being has a true genuine authentic self and the trauma is the disconnection from it and the healing is the reconnection with it and uh we know that this results in a kind of enhanced mood well-being and enhanced mindfulness from a psych psychological scientific perspective on a sociological level uh psychedelics and old states can help us connect increase our connection to each other.
They can increase our openness to experience, our willingness to engage with, you know, culture and art and different perspectives. They increase our empathy. They increase compassion. And this can lead to an increase in pro-social behavior uh and enhanced value orientations. uh this is where my own particular area of research has been kind of deep diving more recently is into the ecological perspective on that level and that we find that these states of consciousness can increase our connection to nature which I think is kind of pretty vital right now. Uh so we have an increase in eco-consciousness or biophilia interspecies communications or interspecies connections also increase and this has a conccomant knock-on effect of uh increases in ecologically orientated behavior.
Uh so from a big survey I conducted, we found that of the people who taken psychedelics, they said their psychedelic experiences in the majority had made them change their diet, become more raw, more vegan, more local, uh more ve vegetarian. Uh it also increased in the majority of the sample the amount of gardening they do, which is a massive take-home news headline there. Psychedelics increase gardening. This is big news, everybody. Um and they can also increase people's ecological activism and even people change their career as a result of their uh psychedelic experiences. And then so we go beyond the environment and the ecosystem and the biosphere into the cosmological levels as well.
We find that people have a a greater sense of connection to the universe, God, uh the other, whatever it might be, uh into the realms of transpersonal and mystical experiences which have the knock-on effect of helping people reduce their fear of da death, enhancing spirituality, enhancing their sense of purpose and meaning, uh uh increasing self-trcendence. And we find in the clinical research with psychedelics that those people uh who have had a mystical experience by the kind of standard psychological measures uh are the ones that have the best clinical outcomes in terms of dealing with addictions uh fighting depression, anxiety or even end of life fears. So all of that is encapsulated within this kind of notion of of course we need the appropriate set setting and substance and the preparation and integration to bookend it. So there's some kind of insights about where we are with the research currently insights directly from the journey. Uh I think I'm going to give over a few points here.
One of which is I think the the psychonautore and scientist John Lily best encapsulated this for me and that is that he had this famous dictim which is in the province of the mind what one believes to be true is either true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally i. e through science and experientially so through personal endeavor and when these are found they just turn out to be more beliefs to be transcended in the problems of the mind there are no limits he did add on a little addendum to that however after a few near-death experiences pushing his physical body to the limits and he said however in the problems of the body there are certain limits not to be transcended but in the problems to the mind is limitless so this kind of gives off two other kind of interesting points and avenues is that what the first one is that beliefs are our reality. Our reality is only constrained by our beliefs. Uh but there's a danger in that as well because they can our beliefs can also be prisons.
Our our convictions can make us convicts. Um, and we know that because of all the kind of psychological rabbit holes we can fall down, such as confirmation bias, whereby our beliefs prescribe the kind of things and information that we're willing to accept or even look for in the first place, and we just end up bootstrapping our own dogmas and belief systems. Um and we see this kind of kind of transposed into into science and the endeavor of of the research of consciousness where you know the the kind of the academy and the scientific endeavor is pretty much constrained by its a priory dogmatic kind of um reliance on materialist reductionism. this kind of neuror reductionist perspective on on physicalism and this view that the human organism and consciousness itself is is merely just a mechanistic process and that consciousness and and life is is kind of devoid of any kind of real sentience or or life for that matter. So and how that translates is this these kind of limiting beliefs therefore constrain the kind of questions that scientists even ask in the first place.
So they only ask questions which tend to support these kind of prior dogmatic belief systems about the material nature of the universe and therefore you know fields of research like transpersonal psychology and parasychology don't receive any funding and so we we we don't just kind of get a big enough voice in the kind of dominant paradigm and worldview. So I'm basically making an argument for agnosticism and plurality plurality that we should have a you know we should be open to many many worldviews and perspectives and and and try not to believe anything particularly you know just to just beware be wary of beliefs in general and that's kind of quite useful in this era of apparent fake news um you know post-truth era I mean I think we've always been in a post-truth era since you know the dawn of communication uh because we in nature that nature is constantly using deception for its own particular survival. So, you know, there's never been such a thing as real news, right? Or true news. But I think it's good to to kind of take an agnostic position and a plurality and and not get too hooked on any particular belief system.
The other dictim I think that comes out of John Lily's famous uh sentence is that the mind is infinite. Okay. So I mean and we can see that as apparent from uh you know evidence from genius, inspiration, creativity along with the findings of things like parasychology which show that you know it by the empirical evidence standards of today there is I think there's very we can talk to Dean Raiden about this. there's a very little room to to to consider that the evidence is not substantial enough to posit the idea that we can transcend time and space and access any point of time and space with our mind. Um, and I think Chris would probably back that up with his various LSD sessions.
And I think the research and theory in physics is beginning to look more like parasychology all the time. uh there's an increasing conceptual confluence of both the fundamental quantities and forces of physics with consciousness. You know, time is now considered to be somewhat time subjective human experience of time is is considered to be illusurary and things like precognition become more and more possible all the time. And then finally my final point is then everything is connected. Um that's one thing of parasychology and psychedelics and transpersonal psychology has shown us that everything is connected. We can transcend time and space. We know that from the evidence from precognition telepathy uh clairvoyance synchronicities and so on.
Although that is circumscribed by point two, you know that's circumscribed by our beliefs and the limitations of our beliefs. And as a result of that, we should act with openness, uh, transparency in everything that we do, with compassion and with a spirit of reciprocity, uh, and so that we kind of start to move away from all kinds of isms, including the ones that aren't given much uh, air time these days. You know, things like ethnosentricism, but also species centricism, stepping outside the box of thinking we're at the top of the of the food chain, and even cognentricism. So that is the view that you know only one state of consciousness is valued in our current society. I think we need to be more pluralistic and value everything from dreams to meditation to psychedelics and so on.
And that takes us back to the beginning is that these old states of consciousness can help us move towards increased connectivity. So that's it. David, that was awesome. Thank you so much. And yeah, the work you're doing is tremendous. Um yeah, I guess I'm I'm curious a little bit about uh you know what what you what you wrote about in the book about extraordinary experiences kind of like you know the psychic and the paranormal um experiences that are so common uh in psychedelic states and what that kind of reveals about um consciousness uh in in your perspective. Yeah, I I think I think it it poses an enormous question mark against the idea that you know brain or that consciousness is confined to the brain, right?
I mean, we already have kind of 135 years of evidence from parasychology that, you know, psychic abilities and the transcendence of time and space have some really good evidence to back it up. It's not an everyday experience, but it happens to enough people enough times and under control laboratory situations that we can say, okay, there's this ability to transcend time and space. And psychedelics pretty much just turn up the volume on that. You know, people have way more of these psychic experiences, paranormal like experiences, transpersonal experiences with psychedelics. Uh, and I believe, you know, a good proportion of those are probably very genuine. Some of them may be a bit delusional, but some of them may be very genuine.
And I think the evidence is is moving towards that. Um there hasn't been enough research done on that. But we have you know thousands of years of shamanic practice using psychedelics and other states of consciousness which is is for that very purpose. And I think we need to spend more time listening and communicating with indigenous peoples who have this animistic shamanistic world view and what can be learned from that. So I think we come to this point where you know the cork is out of the genie bottle. Now uh the academy is once more exploring psychedelics in in a kind of serious way. We can't deny that people are having a large amount of these transpersonal and even parasychological paranormal like experiences and we should openly investigate them in with an open mind at face value rather than just trying to explain them away.
Um I guess uh what my understanding is that psychic and paranormal effects are extremely difficult to study under normal traditional research methods. I've heard for instance that um even when an effect seems to be demonstrated uh at first with repeat experiments it seems that the correlation goes down it's almost like um the secret you know there's a secret that tries to protect itself or that doesn't want to make itself known to humanity at this point. Well, you can ask Dean more about that. Uh, I think, uh, there is a sense in which a lot of the parasychology experiments aren't immediately repeatable, but when you stack them together with meta analyses, you do find this kind of highly significant data set. When you take all the research that's been done, you add it all together and these results are kind of highly compelling.
Uh, there is a sense in which some of the effects do reduce over time, but they hit a plateau, you know. So like the Gansfield studies have have remained at a kind of 35% kind of 32% above Jan's you know uh figure beyond this kind of initial decline. So overall when you stack the data the effects are actually there but in a way um it's very hard to learn much about them largely due to the complexity I think of the factors involved. you know, we're dealing with with kind of turning a mirror on consciousness itself and it becomes a very slippery endeavor. Um, it's like uh we the some of the major problems are we don't know where the psychic abilities are coming from theoretically because it could always just be that the the experimental themselves are exerting their their psychic abilities, their pre-cognition, whatever it is to try and get the results they need.
And so all I think we need to take that very seriously because it applies to the whole scientific endeavor like for instance you know um the Higs Bos and the discovery of the the the CERN particle accelerator the way that experiment's set up it's it's kind of completely uh indistinguishable really in in effect and size from the global consciousness project right you have lots and lots of people all seemingly coming together in a kind of concerted uh focused consciousness trying to affect this kind of random number generator in a global consciousness project and you get these hugely super significant figures right uh whereas in the Higs boson experiments you've got all these physicists coming together spending millions of pounds or dollars even you know building this kind of mass particle accelerator to try and find something which they think exists and all you get is a probabilistic outcome right that it exists and it and it's no more significant than the global consciousness project. Um, so I'm not sure where I was going with that, but I leave that point there. Uh, what about, um, you know, you were talking about kind of the positive ecological and psychological effects of psychedelics. Then we have you know I mean it's almost becomes you know c certain ways of discussing psychedelics have now kind of you know forged these kind of like tracks in the collective psyche like you know DMT you know like if you smoke an NDMT or have a direct experience of it the experience is so incredibly alien um that um yeah how do you how do you know what what do you think about that? Do you think there's any evidence that suggests many people talk about having a sense of there being entities or you know other dimensional realities?
I mean is it just the uh the wiring of the brain being you know totally re re reconnected or a switchboard shifted or is you know is there any evidence that there might be some some other you know sort of hyperdimensional reality that we that we connect to in these states? Well, I think that the question of DMT is is super interesting and that one in particular because it's the one most reliable at giving people encounter experiences with with some kind of sentient entity which they believe most of the time to be some kind of real encounter. um there hasn't been enough research done on it like I say for for all the the reasons pointed out before that you know the scientific endeavor only looks to kind of bootstrap its own belief systems by researching things it can explain with neuroscience right uh so you know there hasn't been much virtually any research looking into the nature of these DMT entities most of the the data is coming from psychonauts and and we see there are certain commonalities you know certain people tend to encounter you know like the elves for for one are quite common or these kind of totally dispassionate beings which are kind of doing some kind of neuroanatomy experiments on people and extracting their emotions. That seems to be a pretty common meme as well. Uh but we can't ever really separate out the cultural influences, you know, in in in kind of examining this this huge data of phenomenology.
But I think there are commonalities and I think they need to be explored really in in a more kind of concerted way. And what I will say is, you know, some data that came out of Johns Hopkins this year, last year showed that of people having entity encounter experiences with with DMT of those who were atheists prior to their experience, less than half of them were still atheists after their experience. So that, you know, they're they're deeply profoundly worldchanging experiences which tend to lead people to believe that there is some kind of genuine other there. Uh, and it's, you know, it's it's going to be a tricky kind of sticky wrestling match with science to try and kind of bring out any kind of empirical validity on on the ontology of these beings, I think. But it's worth the wrestle.
David, I know in the uh book on extraordinary experience, you were also talking about how you can envision there being in the future some type of research uh institute uh into into consciousness itself. Uh I mean that's something that really fascinates me and I think maybe with everything that's happening and the sense of also the ecological kind of doomcloud up ahead, you know, maybe it's time to accelerate um that, you know, and actually bring that into manifestation. How would you how would you construct such a thing? Do you think it's it's possible that we we could you know have our kind of Hogwarts for you know consciousness you know deep diving you know what what would that consist of what type of you know research would you want to see done yeah I think that totally can and thanks for that question Daniel and I think you know we have to bring together all the kind of perspectives on it you know so it can't just be a purely kind science medical model endeavor I think we need psychiatrists and psychotherapists and psychopharmarmacologists for what we can learn about, you know, the brain and all that kind of part of the jigsaw puzzle. Uh, but we also need to bring people from kind of wisdom traditions in as well.
So, you know, kind of people from cultures like the Woli, you know, have had thousands of years of shimanic practice with with substances like pyote and and kind of really bring these together in one kind of melting pot. Uh, and also kind of wisdom traditions, you know, from from the east as well. Um, so I think that's what it'd have to look like and and I think moving forward like you know if psilocybin and other substances are going to get licensed pretty much soon for for treatment uh for depression and so on and so forth. We're going to need people who are more savvy with the kind of transpersonal kind of experiences that end of the spectrum. And I don't just mean mystical experiences, but I mean experiences of telepathy, entity encounters, out of body experiences, all these kind of things.
People are going to uh have to have some kind of better understanding of of these experiences. And I don't think we can leave that to psychiatrists and neuroscientists really to kind of just deal with, you know, and I think people like shamans uh or Tibetan Buddhist monks and people like that need, we all need to sit around the table together. So we need a kind of a completely multinational multid-disiplinary kind of center where we can all share ideas and exchange. Um I was hoping I I I hoping he'll still pop up but one of one of the people I'd invited to speak today and who was on a roster is Sergio Mana uh who is a noal shaman. I don't know if you know his work at all.
He he works in the dream you know kind of the dream uh kind of practices of the Aztecs and he wrote a book called the age of the six son where he kind of you know because I'd written the book on 2012 and then you know people were like oh the world didn't end in 2012 and I was like well I never said it was going to end in 2012 you know but we're clearly in some type of shift u you know Sergio Mana's perspective and obviously this is not a scientifically verifiable idea is that we are in a transition from the fifth son to the sixth sun which in the you know Mesoamerican cosmology is a shift from a son of light to a son of darkness. Uh the sun of light for them is a period of fascination with material technology, rationality, science, logic. As you move into the sun of darkness, it becomes more of a psyche becomes more predominant. The dream world becomes more predominant. Reality becomes more like a waking dream.
and and I and I feel that I find this a very fascinating notion. Um I'm kind of curious how it resonates with you. I also kind of um in a way correlate it with the um accelerating or you know kind of popularity of psychedelics uh and a sense that many more people are kind of opening these doorways in different ways right now and and maybe that's somehow having a um a kind of um effect you know on the collective psyche that's um happening in a way that you know is unpredictable. I I don't know what your thoughts on that. I just thought and maybe Christopher has some ideas on that too.
Yeah, I'll just jump in. But I would say yeah, I mean for sure this kind of revival of uh psychedelic interest is is going to have an effect on on the collective consciousness certainly in the in the west where it seems to be happening first and foremost. But uh and I think I think it can only be a good thing if if we reconnect with this kind of more dreamy associative kind of region of our brain get into the mythological and the unconscious kind of side of things. you know, as Ian Mc Gill has has kind of very neatly kind of described in his book um the master of his explain Ian Mc Gillchrist's idea for those who don't know it. So, you know, the idea of well, he kind of takes a kind of more poetic than literal stance, but also backed up with some science on the nature of the left brain and the right brain.
the left brain being the kind of the literal logical linear linguistic kind of approach to reality and experience and and the right brain being more of this kind of dreamlike associative mythological um uh uh you know endeavor right so and that that we've confused the master with the emissery right that the emissery is the left brain the bit that does all the communicating the mouth you know uh the language and uh we've got to the point where the emissery the the left brain thinks it's the master. You know, we we are kind of so heavily skewed towards this kind of logical linear linguistic mode of of being in the in the developed world that we've completely ignored the the the dream time, the imagination, the associative thinking, the mythological uh to our to our peril, right? You know, it's like kind of our intelligence has outstripped our wisdom in in many ways. And this is kind of bringing us to this kind of cataclysmic point, right? This kind of moment of crisis.
Uh and so we can it it would really help us I think to flip that back over and get these two things in balance and I think yeah I think psychedelics have a have a big role to play in that and I think also the internet and things like that. Uh the dangers with the internet though it's uh you can think of it as kind of like the new sphere and it's kind of like a a kind of technological bootstrapping for our own kind of clairvoyant telepathic abilities right you know we can fake it till we make it with with kind of telecommunications and the internet and then we'll probably come to realize that we can do all that anyway uh hopefully but meanwhile we're kind of sifting through an ocean of of of detritus of misinformation. I'll let Chris jump in. Yeah, I think the analogy that I use for this in Dark Night early dawn is the analogy of the daytime sky and the nighttime sky. We are like a culture that basically had a rule that we have to be behind closed doors by the time the sun goes down and we're not allowed to get out until the sun is up.
So our entire known world is from the nearby close at hand brilliantly illuminated sun soaked world. But think if we were a culture like this, we've missed the night sky. We just don't see the far away the the greater context. And so we don't have we can't answer questions of cosmology. We can't answer questions of origin because these are the types of questions that require the depth which are available only in the deepest levels of consciousness where we can actually experience the consciousness of the universe which we have come to which we are appreciating in the physical world. But everything which is physical has a conscious dimension to it.
And so I think that this balancing out, seeing the nighttime sky of consciousness really will have a huge impact on a rebalancing of our of our worldview. David, I'm curious also what kind of uh from your research, you know, what would you offer people in terms of uh you know, kind of practical advice? I mean uh do you think it's um kind of the right time for people to explore these um alternative dimensions of consciousness through enthogens? Do you think there are dangers in them? Um I I guess another another question for you which could be part of the same question is is there a um do you do you also recognize a dark side uh for both of you actually in in psychedelic exploration?
Um you know is Yeah. So so be curious to hear what you say. But I'd say, you know, I think it's down to the individual to determine whether it's it's right for them. I don't necessarily think psychedelics are for for everybody. I think they can help a lot of people uh in in lots of different ways and but they're not necessarily suited to everybody. Um and you know, I could talk more about that, but I think there are many ways to get there. They can be a kind of good door opener. You know, they kind of just smash the door right off it hinges and show you the other side.
Or you could just kind of open it a bit more gingerely perhaps by getting into your dreams or lucid dreaming, meditation, uh yoga practice, whatever it might be. So there are other there other techniques to get you there as well which may be a bit more controlled. But you know in this fast-paced 21st century existence, a lot of people have got themselves into a very sticky rut for all kinds of reasons, urbanization, 21st century living, etc. I think they can be a a a good fasttrack door opener for many people. Um but is there a dark side? I think potentially that there can be uh not just in how these things are are distributed or experienced but in terms of the experience I think that's where you're getting to uh Daniel in terms of the experiences that people have or more about the kind of community around the use of psychedelics.
are the experiences that people have and even if you know they can have negative negative you know positive effects on people's character but are there cases where they start to have a very negative effect also? Yeah, I mean I I certainly can do and it's it's not all light and I think you know I think you maybe have to look at it as more of a process. I mean certainly from the clinical work that's been done you know very few people a lot of people may have challenging experiences which you know they're very difficult for them but they usually pass through them and those are the ones that typically give like a lot of insight that people feel they grow more from even though it wasn't particularly pleasant and a very few people have you know kind of somewhat in the region of traumatic experiences and and regret doing doing it in the first place. So maybe either they're shouldn't be taking psychedelics or psychedelics are not necessary for them or they started a process which which kind of a process which which threw up too much stuff for them to be able to immediately deal with. Uh I haven't really got a clear answer for that but um you know that there can be heavy dark experiences with psychedelics when you go into the shadow when you turn up the volume on the mirror you're not necessarily always going to like what you see in there.
So uh yeah and also the problems of spiritual bypass and potential narcissism and things like that which which kind of may arise as part of the journey but this is a part of any kind of like journey of personal or spiritual development and not just with psychedelics I would say. I'll hand it over to Chris. I completely agree with you that's uh David that's there are dark experiences that surface in these states and therefore you have to be well prepared. You have to fasten your seatelt. You have to choose a very careful location. Work with all all the safety precautions. My experience has been that uh all these dark experiences are some form of purification and clarification.
And in my experiences, I found that the deepest breakthroughs into ecstatic knowledge, ecstatic knowing and visionary knowing came after the deepest purification dark experiences. So that in my work I actually uh created the conditions that would facilitate the deepest and darkest encounters not because I was a fond of suffering but because I was fond of what took place on the other side what lay on the other side of that suffering but to do that it's really important to take psychedelics in a very very carefully structured setting not in a recreational setting not casually with a lot of forethought and a lot of discipline, preparation, not only going into the session, but coming out of the session for the integration process, for the retention process, for the encoding, and eventually um the debrief after your session is over. And a good thorough debrief is actually a very good way to prevent problems that emerge in your subsequent sessions. So, it's very important. Uh I guess Christopher or actually for both of you a question for you is you know what are what are things people can do um to prepare how what's the best way to prepare yourself for a psychedelic experience?
I mean how how do you approach these uh these sessions uh you know for yourself? Well in the southwestern and in in the hope Indians they have a ka right it's a hole in the ground with a a circle in the top and you climb down with a ladder and then they pull up the ladder and you're a completely isolated environment for the duration of the entire experience. And and I always think of my work with psychedelics. I'm in a ka. I'm in a place that's completely isolated, protected. I'm with someone who's going to take care of my body. I I'm not in a talking relationship.
I'm in an highly internal engaged relationship. I want to have clean contact. So I want to eliminate all outside influences. Now, it's wonderful sometimes to take psychedelics and go into nature, and that's a wonderful experience. But when you're going deep into this this in facing the personal and collective and historical shadow that work is best done I think in in isolation. I do a lot of spiritual practice before and after a session. I take care of my body. I make sure my body is well tuned and and relaxed and and aligned before going into a session because when you're running in psychedelics, fairly high dose psychedelics, your body is processing enormous quantities of energy.
It's very, very demanding on your subtle energy system. And if you haven't been taking care of your subtle energy system well before your session, you're going to have more complications arising. So, a lot of care for my body, a lot of care for my subtle energy system, a lot of spiritual practice beforehand, and then a very careful and sustained debrief after afterwards. That's my approach. And David, uh, yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on the your level of experience, the context, what you hope to get from the experience. So, um, but always, you know, if you're inexperienced, do your homework. Make sure you know what it is you're taking.
All the kind of basics, you know, dosage, substance, purity, where it come from, do you trust the source, set and setting, you know, where you are psychologically, physically with it, preparation, and then integration afterwards as as Chris pointed out, but it needn't necessarily always be a 600 m deep dive in Chris's process, which is which is brilliant. uh but you know it could be for instance we've experimented with 100 m low doses uh with top level scientists for creative insight uh creative problem solving on technical problems and now you know this seems to be this is a completely different agenda to a kind of completely deep philosophical spiritual journey uh and that kind of produced really good results. So it all really depends on the context of use but but you make sure you pay attention to the context your intentions setting and substance preparation and integration. David I know that uh England particularly the Imperial College is now kind of the center in a sense of the sort of cutting edge of psychedelic um kind of research. I wonder if you could tell people uh kind of what's going on there now.
What what's what's active and and what what types of discoveries are are being made. Uh so I'm kind of loosely affiliated to Imperial College, the psycho research center there. There haven't been too much going on recently because of lockdown. I think they're beginning to resume kind of recruitment of uh of participants for various studies, but some of it is clinical. So they've been looking at kind of psilocybin for depression as part of a kind of uh a kind of global endeavor to help get psilocybin kind of licensed as as medicicament for treating depression. but also most of their focus is on the kind of neuroscientific the neuroscychopharmacological research.
So how do these substances work in the brain and more importantly what does it tell us about the nature of consciousness from what we can discover about how these uh substances work in the brain. So some of the projects have been you know they've done lots of neuroiming of MDMA, psilocybin, LSD and dimethylryptamine. uh I'm working collaborating on the DMT study. Uh we're looking to do kind of slow infusion. So taking people into kind of uh highdose breakthrough experiences over extended periods of time and both exploring the neuroscience connected to that but also the kind of the experience as well. So uh what comes out of those experiences and one of the things as a parasychologist I'm looking to do with them there is explore uh kind of shared visionary experiences for instance can we get two people on DMT at the same time in a kind of prolonged state um in kind of side by side but separated in different kind of rooms you know so doing it at the same time and and kind of look at their brain activity see if there's any kind of correlation which we wouldn't expect from if they did it at different times but also in the kind of experiences that people have.
Is there some corollery of the experience that two people may have at the same time uh when with with the intention of having a shared journey? I mean that takes us into kind of some pretty far out transpersonal realms. But uh yeah, that's just a kind of a tip of the iceberg of the stuff that's going on there. They're doing a lot of really great research and survey work too and working with retreat centers and all sorts. Um, I'm tempted to ask both of you just, it may sound like a funny question, but it's always on one's mind. Uh, from your different personal psychedelic explorations, how do you what what's your philosophy on what like the purpose of life is and the purpose of argument experience?
No small question. Chris, you want to go first? Goodness, that's that is a large one. Uh, hey, listen. The universe has been unfolding for 13.7 or so billion years. We don't see any evidence that it's going to be stopping for another 13.7 year billion years. So I think all of our attempts to say what the purpose of life is will always be inadequate given the enormity of the actual project of life. What we can see, what we can project, what we can extrapolate about the purpose may carry us a certain distance but it won't take us through the entire process. So to me uh central is learning u loving deeply experiencing opening um learning and exploring and developing uh expanding our capacities um exploring to me exploring is really important.
Um the purpose one time I within a deep encounter with this creative intelligence this nameless faceless intelligence that I was engaging and uh the topic of what the purpose of existence is what is it all and I was popping in and out between non-being or the pure void and suddenly being and and by popping back and forth between being the universe and non-being the primal void out of which the universe sprang. It really generated a question. What is the purpose of being? What is the purpose of existence? And this consciousness said to me, have we not learned anything? And it just shattered me. I just broke down and wept because and it just seemed like it was all about learning.
I don't think there's an idea often that this consciousness is trying to learn something about itself. I I don't think so so much that that doesn't persuade me. But that learning is central to the entire project. Seems to be really important. Okay, David, what you got for us? Not that much. I mean, I guess the thing is we are we are on a quest for meaning, right? You know, what is the meaning of the nature of the universe? It's like, well, that's a human endeavor to to establish meaning. You know, I'm not sure all species necessarily try and try and find the meaning, right? But we are kind of lost in a way as well.
You know where we are. It's like uh I think our our loss of meaning in a kind of materialist reductionist universe has has kind of led us into all kinds of difficult places. So I think the quest for meaning in itself is is a worthwhile endeavor. But ultimately it may be not say meaningless but pointless because it might be just about the being as Chris said that is kind of really the important thing. Um, but I'm a bit confused. Um, what do you think, Angel? Um, that's a good question. I mean, um, I think, yeah, learning, creativity, uh, expression, play. Uh, I don't think there's a necessity to it.
And I do think, you know, meaning itself is is a human created term. um you know dreaming, experiencing, creating, discovering, uh loving, you know, maybe multiple purposes. Um we had a few questions about the value of micro doing uh and I was curious if you had a perspective on on do you see that as a as a really helpful tool for people at this point in time? Uh I guess that might be for me because Chris seems to be bit more in the macro dosing camp I would say. the other end of the spectrum. Um I think micro doing may have potential. I don't think we have enough data yet.
I mean certainly there's a lot of kind of uh uncontrolled data, you know, like kind of from nonplacebo randomized control studies from the scientific perspective saying that people feel like it's really beneficial for all kinds of things for depression, insight, creativity, uh all of that kind of stuff. uh there's very little research to say those experiences or that kind of outcome may be genuine. We don't know, right? It could be one massive placebo effect, but hey, if people think it's beneficial, then then that's might be good enough. Um I mean, again, most of my research I I focus more on low to high macro doing, right?
So I think there's potentially a room for for micro doing um there's some potentially dangers in it and and I think and that is it's just the kind of co-opting of of psychedelics as as just kind of mere psycho vitamins when they can do so much more right uh uh fortunately from what I can gather from the the research is a lot most people who micro dose it invariably end up accidentally macro dosing at some point and uh usually get a surprise And that might be beneficial. Yeah, I leave that one in your hands, David, because I personally don't have a lot of experience with micro doing because when I have tried micro doing uh with LSD, it was after years and years of working at these very high dose levels. But basically, I found now that I I really don't like LSD in my body. I it's like I drove it so hard with these massive doses for so many years that my body developed kind of an allergy to it and so it's just not good for me to use now and I haven't used it for years. So I don't have much experience on micro doing.
I read the literature and like you there's a lot of anecdotal positive literature uh but there isn't as much scientific good solid literature on micro doing. I'm sure it's coming along. Uh and like you I also think of that that's a good phrase uh uh what was it? Psychedelic sort of psycho micro pill vitamin pill. Uh it can do so much more. Yeah. Very cool. Later on in uh this uh session we're going to have a presentation from my friend Andrew Kamargo who's been working very heavily with Santo Da and the Iawaska tradition for many many years. Uh, but I thought first actually if he if he's up for it.
Oh, has he disappeared on me? Um, I was going to see if if uh Jeremy Johnson wanted to give us a little bit of insight into the integral model. Um, but he may have flown the coupe for a second. Hey, Daniel. Ah, there you are, Jeremy. Okay, great. You want to jump in and give us a 10-minute kind of overview of Ger's integral consciousness model? Sure. Sure. Um, this is Jeremy. Yes. Yeah. Thank you, Daniel. Um, and, uh, just been really enjoying today's presentations already. Um, so some of you may already be familiar with integral theory. I know Rory has mentioned spiral dynamics a number of times in the context of like extinction, rebellion, and so on.
But um I think when we're talking about the history of consciousness, I think a lot of this stuff can be very abstract and very detached and we look at our own history, our own living history from the distance of books, right? Um so when it comes to Gene Ger's work uh he's sort of these foundational thinkers of integral theory and Ken Wilbur but GPS is very very different from Wilbur in the sense that he's not a developmentalist per se and if anyone has engaged with his his uh writing on the topic his writing is deeply phenomenological in that it's always um encouraging us to explore and inquire our own experience of consciousness. We've been talking about the left and the right brain with Mc Gillchrist and in many ways um GPS's work is a kind of if you want to jump in and begin to explore the left and the right brain in your own phenomenology then he's sort of a good guide book towards that. Now a little bit of background with me. I'm an integral scholar and researcher.
I've been working with the Gene GPS society for uh the past 10 years or so. uh planning to get my Ph D work um hopefully things go well at uh CIS as well. So it's good to see uh Christopher here um in the PCC program. So yeah, GPS presents us with uh a phenomenology of consciousness very carefully looking at um basically a kind of a a an archaeology of meaning making looking at particular works of art, forms of literature, the evolution of language and etmology. um the meaning of certain words and how even in our language, right? Even in our language has a kind of um uh how how to put it uh a processual movement from what we're talking about sort of nighttime or sidereal dimensions of consciousness into the waking.
And he very carefully constructs a kind of descriptive process in which human consciousness has moved from these sidereal nighttime magic and mythical forms or structures into uh waking appalonic discerning ratiooriented as he says um uh sort of the secular age so to speak. But there are gains and losses in this, right? And I think having a more nuanced and nonlinear approach to this that is also encouraging it encouraging us to explore these modes of consciousness in ourselves can really help us um make these things concrete rather than abstract and really kind of come become to live the magic and the mythic again rather than to merely acknowledge them, right? to live in some capacity or have some contact with uh these earlier modes of consciousness. So for GPSer the the challenge in our time is not so much to move to a next level as to uh presentiate and to open up the wealth and the history of our consciousness.
um different modes of time, cyclical forms of time and participatory cosmologies bringing into contact that with the more rational and scientific and secular modes of thinking. And for GPS, the the requirement for that isn't just to bring those modes of consciousness back, but to sort of facilitate and enable an aquamus and open enough um what he calls it is a the principle of diaphanity. uh a clear enough conscious to allow those different modes and structures to presentiate themselves in us. And as a kind of a too long didn't read uh uh um micro dose of GPS, the idea for integral consciousness is an intensification of clarity and the capacity to bring forth different modes of being in the world and being in time including linear time, timelessness, uh rhythmic time, right? uh cyclical cosmologies etc.
Bringing all of those things forward in the human being to bring them forward at will as if we were a kind of mercurial being that was both a living past and also interestingly enough his theory of time we've been talking a little bit about tempor um transcending time and space. His theory of integral consciousness to me is very futuristic in a certain way because it's talking about a way of being in the present in which the poetics of the present um is able to be both in the deep past and in the future. The future is latent in the present as a tangible experience and there's a poetics of presence that we can engage in that allows that to kind of come forward. Yeah, somebody's mentioning ancient future. This is what I'm writing about in my next book called Fragments of an Integral Futurism.
Uh very much this idea that a lot of the future looks a lot like the past. And in some ways, a poetic statement of this because it's this is too short of a presentation to really get into the theoretical details, but a poetic statement of this would be when we do an ancestor work, right? When we are able to listen to the dead within us, this is not an abstract thing. when we are at our altars and we are working with our ancestors they are present. Gapser was very sensitive to that. Um and I think his phenomenology of this integral future is the capacity to listen to the unborn as well somehow that the the the long dead and the not yet born are present in us and not as just a conceptual statement but as a living communion.
Right? How can we live like this in the present? And also how can we embrace a sense of the present in which past, present and future intermingle with one another? And by doing so, obviously, you know, I think that would be a wonderful tool to to or or mode of being an ontology to have right now, right? Where the past, present, and future are collapsing into one another, right? um just in terms of climate change and the modes of thinking that ecological thought require of us. It's an intensification of temporics and I could get into all this other stuff but I think that's Daniel I think I I summed it up.
That was wonderful. Uh and uh we have uh Joti is is is is coming on in a minute because she only has a bit of time today. But I did want to quickly talk about the structures of consciousness that Keepser mentions which I also talked about in my book 2012 the return of Kelqu. He he has this idea that there are these I guess he identifies four structures of consciousness and he talks about how each one reaches a crisis in in which the only way forward is to go through a kind of mutation or transmutational break into a new structure of consciousness. I believe he talks about the the aboriginal, the archaic, uh the tribal or and the mental rational.
And he kind of would say that we are at the at the end of this mental rational structure. Yes. With this particular way of conceiving time and space and that we've reached a point where the only way forward requires a kind of mutational break into a new form of consciousness. Maybe you want to um you know kind of just just delve into that for for a few minutes if you can. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Um so yes the context in which I read GPS about a decade ago was he sets up his book and again I was interested in integral theory etc and interested in cultural evolution but his whole the whole premise and thesis of that book and his work is that the 20th century and the 21st century he was a mid-century thinker he was born in 1905 he died 1973 um is that we are at a civilizational juncture point there is tremendous destabilization and restructuration He lived through obviously the first half of the 20th century seeing that firsthand.
Um he was a European refugee fleeing from one country to another during that time. But he posits this as the end of what he calls the mental rational or perspectable age and the opening up of the this integral uh structure of consciousness. And he basically said well hey look I'm in the middle of a transformation. um there's new arts, there's new sciences, there's breakdowns of different modes of being in the world, right? There's a civilizational collapse happening. At the same time, there's a civilizational opening. So, Ger is a very key thinker in this regard in that he both lived through and was deeply sensitive and articulate of exactly in my opinion um some of the deep themes that we're learning to let go of in terms of the mental world, right?
perspective world, the modes of time, the relationship between subject and object and cartesianism is very much related to the mental rational. So again, like if if you want to really cohhere the the culture that in some sense we are being we are helping to die, right? We are help we're assisting in its death process. I think Epser is very helpful here in that he was a poet and so he really makes this something that we can phenomenologically explore in ourselves in terms of our own embodiment in relation to time and space. Um, but yes, there's there's a general overall structure just really quick. Archaic, magic, mythic, mental, integral.
Um, and each of these go through these leaps. And I can go into this in some Let's maybe come back to that later. Um, and go into that because it's a really great framing also for thinking about some of the subjects that Christopher and David were speaking about.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.