Archetypal reality

Very briefly, in the book, I describe the levels of consciousness I went through in this process: a series of death and rebirth experiences, starting with the personal level of mind, going through ego death, then reaching the collective level of mind, engaging deep structures within the collective psyche. Third, the archetypal dimension of...

That’s not a silly question at all. The phrase "Diamond Luminosity" points to states of consciousness I entered in the last five years of my work. I'd gone through the perinatal process, solid ego death, into the ocean of suffering, and into archetypal reality. In the last five years, I was catapulted into a...

I want to inject a cautionary note. I'm happy we're spending time writing books on integration because breaking out with these chemicals can transcend our time space suit easily. But to do it in a valuable way, bringing back something we can keep is the harder part. The first step of integration is to...

Yeah, first, Stephen, thank you, buddy, for that very nice and warm introduction. I really appreciate our friendship, and I appreciate what you're doing with the conference, and Marc, you too. This is a great conference. It's my favorite psychedelic conference to participate in, and I always find it such a rich setting and...

When the Ocean of Suffering came to a culmination in the 24th session, healing the collective wound, there was sort of an orgy of feeding on the pain. And it reached a culmination, and I was spun into a level of reality that I came to understand as archetypal reality. And I discussed this...

Let's hold the second part of that question about how psychedelics might help us on a better path forward, and let me address the first part. This was one of the biggest surprises of my work. First, I had to let go of framing my work as personal journey, personal transformation, personal healing, personal...

The most terrifying part in the beginning was it just wasn't my reality. It was a reality, but it wasn't my reality, and I couldn't get out of it. I was trapped within a feminine mode of experience that just wasn't me. There was nothing inherently frightening about it. Then when I let go...

Because that was the experience. One encounters light, often in deep spiritual experiences, near-death experiences, and psychedelic experiences. When you go through a death-rebirth process, often you have the sensation of being flooded with light, encountering light. It's almost universal in spiritual traditions. I had experienced light in many forms and many times in...

Because that was the experience. One encounters light often in deep spiritual experiences, near-death experiences, or psychedelic experiences. When you go through a Death-Rebirth process, you often have the sensation of being flooded with light, and it’s almost universal in spiritual traditions. I had encountered light many times in my practice, but when I...

It took me a while to figure it out after my work ended in '99, when plotting the larger trajectory for the book. I differentiated five levels of consciousness that seemed operational. The first is at the level of personal mind, going beyond personal time-space identity, culminating in what we call ego death. The...

Well, after two years of working in what I came to call the ocean of suffering and experiencing the blessings of insights that were also coming in a chapter I called the initiation into the universe, where I was given these teachings of cosmology 101, the suffering kind of reached a culmination. It's hard...

As one delves deeper into collective mind, archetypal reality, and spiritual reality, I had the advantage of a PhD in philosophy of religion and familiarity with spiritual traditions. I'd studied spiritual practices and the maps of various spiritual worlds, providing reference points for comparing my psychedelic experiences with other spiritual seekers using meditation, yoga,...

My sense of reality changed repeatedly at different levels. When processing all the experiences and trying to organize them to share with others, I differentiated five levels: personal mind, collective mind, archetypal mind, causal oneness, and diamond luminosity. The jump from personal consciousness into collective reality was significant—seeing how reality is organized at a...

Yes, absolutely. And again, I wish I had your degrees. The universe could have taught me so much more. But when I entered into archetypal reality, I said I died as a human being, as my species identity. From that point on in the journey, my sessions basically took me outside of the operational...

Eventually, I came to believe there are multiple modalities of time operating within the universe. Later, as I went deeper into archetypal reality, I experienced larger swaths of time than just my personal life. First, it was about 100 years, then whole time or Deep Time came in terms of 100,000-year increments, maybe larger...

The patient had expanded to my entire species in some way. When I resumed, the ecstatic sessions entered initiatory experiences: cosmology 101, teaching how the universe is structured. This culminated in archetypal mind or greater real in the chapter, the greater real, describing archetypal reality. These were vast, living, dynamic processes, aligning with Plato’s...

It is, it's a fair representation, and it's a description which fits better, in some ways, the early stages of the work, where you are still kind of working at insights which help you understand your individual way of being in the world. I describe my work fundamentally as a work in cosmological exploration,...

It is. I want to tag two items there. The first one, again, it all depends on how you meet this super samsara. Samsara is very addictive. It's very distracting, it's very alluring. And if you increase your sensitivity to samsara, it can take you on a journey that will just distract you and...

Well, we're going to start with the first module. There's seven modules. The first module is going to be on methodology. I'm going to lay out the method, answer people's questions, address their misgivings about psychedelics, explain what psychedelics do and don't do, and specifically address the particular protocol I used because it was...

The next level of work for me involved an encounter that took place at the archetypal level of consciousness in the chapter "The Greater Real of Archetypal Reality." So much that I could say here—trying to keep it short so we can go into the questions and answers soon. I found that basically, I...

After that, I was spun into archetypal reality and vast territories in the collective unconscious. I learned how our species lives as a single integrated entity, with each of us being a fractal embodiment of that being. Eventually, this led me into causal level reality, where the universe pulsed as a single entity, dissolving...

A lot of work at the medical level, at the therapeutic level, really focuses on ego dissolution, transcending the limitations of your physical body, entering into a deeper communion, into mystical experiences. What I found was when you—and I did this work—it wasn't just one cycle of death-rebirth. Now, in this image, the drop...

I also experienced my life as a completed whole and was taken back to the universe's beginnings, receiving teachings about humanity's evolutionary trajectory. Eventually, the suffering ended, and I encountered archetypal reality—more real than time and space. I spent a year and a half exploring this realm, learning the collective psyche's workings and how...

The level of archetypal mind is described in the chapter "The Greater Real of Archetypal Reality," engaging archetypal forces responsible for creating time and space, bringing forth forms that emerge. At the level of causal oneness, the universe is experienced as a single, organic whole, transcending differentiation. The story of Diamond Luminosity is told...

Yeah, I had to think a lot about how to present the different types of suffering and the different types of challenges that I faced on the journey because, and in fact, it was my greatest concern in beginning to share the story of my journey with the world, with others, because I did...

Yeah, well, in certain specific experiences, the breadth is a metaphor that describes the ways in which we connect with humanity, we connect with other persons, we connect with nature. We can enter into states of consciousness that are extremely wide, so to speak. Depth is something different. Depth is entering into contact with...

Audience: ** Yeah, we have all sorts of ideas and stories we tell ourselves about what this totality consciousness is and isn't and what it can know and can't know. And I think a lot of that is just cultural scripting. It's our best guess. It's our best cultural guess, and our best cultural...

I adopted the vocabulary Stan Grof developed: psychic levels, subtle levels, and causal levels. Consciousness differentiates psychic low and high, subtle low and high, causal low and high. Those are approximations, as the universe has many hundreds of levels. I didn't have a vested interest in a particular model, but looking back at the...

That's a tough question because each state builds upon earlier stages. One barometer would be time. I had a consistent set of experiences where I experienced my life's totality from beginning to end in an immediate now. I had insights into my old age, experiencing the distilled essence of my entire life boiled down...

Yeah, you know, we have all sorts of ideas and stories we tell ourselves about what this totality consciousness is and isn't, and what it can know and can't know. I think a lot of that is just cultural scripting. It's our best guess. Our best cultural guess, and our best cultural guess is...

Let me take you through a list of the chapters of "LSD and the Mind of the Universe": a methodology chapter, then the content: "Crossing the Boundary of Birth and Death," "The Ocean of Suffering," "Deep Time in the Soul," "Initiation into the Universe," "The Greater Real of Archetypal Reality," "A Benediction of Blessings,"...

Let me back up a little bit to give context, and then you bring me back. If I don't get back to it, bring me back to this—the birth of the future human. I found that when I was working with these very high levels of LSD—and again, this is a protocol that I...

And in that controlled setting, of course, the most important thing is you have to ask yourself at the beginning of every session, "Are you ready to die? Are you ready to give it all up?" Because you confront, you go through many, many deaths in this process. You don't die physically, but you...

Now, I'd like to shift to the book and show you the relationship between these stages and the chapters of the book. For the death of self, there is the chapter "Crossing the Boundary of Birth and Death." Then, exploring collective mind, there are chapters on "The Ocean of Suffering," "Deep Time in the...

As I said, the first two years culminated in ego death. The next two years took me into what I call the ocean of suffering. It took me deep into the collective psyche of our species. Eventually, I came to understand that what was happening in these sessions was not aimed at my personal...

And then in the second phase, I went through a series of initiations in which I was taken deep into the mind of the universe and just given a series of teachings and given a series of experiences, it basically grounded me in a larger cosmological vision of reality. After about two years of...

To draw only one circle is to oversimplify. Sometimes these indicate numbers of sessions entering deeper and deeper into causal reality. There are cycles within cycles within cycles. So you could mark all of these as one cycle. But in fact, there were cycles within cycles as the journey continues. The easiest way now...

It's both. There's a lot of discussion about psychedelics and enlightenment—do they lead to enlightenment? These adventures weren't aimed at enlightenment. Initially, I was interested in enlightenment, thinking sessions could accelerate the process. But it shifted after my first ego death. Instead of personal transformation, the story opened into one of deep collective transformation....

Over the next six years and 35 sessions, a third phase opened in the work in which I was propelled through a series of Death-Rebirth experiences that drew me ever more deeply into the divine. I was spun into the radiance of what the Buddhists call sambhogakaya, and what I came to call the...

Yeah. You know, this is hard to do without sounding like a madman. That's the challenge of even trying to speak about psychedelic experiences because it expands the frame of a conversation exponentially. Unless you're willing to enter into that conversation, it's just... Since I live at a university, I know how easy it...