Buddhism

But my experience is that the diamond soul is born in history, the future human is born, and that future human is magnificently beautiful, just beautiful beyond description. And we see glimpses of it in the Great. We see it in Christ, and we see it in the great Buddhas and the prophets of...

My heart goes out to those suffering that level of pain. I know people in that much pain, and inevitably, when we try to understand what's going on, we project from our circumstances. If we see our planet controlled by dark forces, that might be a projection of one's psychological experience into metaphysical parameters....

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...

What if we go deeper? What if we use our psychedelic protocols to go deeper into the ocean of consciousness and begin to get into the area of spiritual awakening? I'm thinking, for example, of the dialogue between the Zen Buddhist and the psychedelic community that was published years ago, Zig Zag Zen. Are...

Okay, well, there are several things rolled into your observations, and all good. They're all good observations. So some process comments: First, I think integration is very important. We're finding we have the technology, the chemical technology, to trigger very deep states of consciousness, but these states of consciousness may have very little lasting...

Good point. When you adopt a reincarnational worldview, the concept of identity shifts and expands. The soul reflects different histories and individuates qualities, but its essence is the same as the divine essence. Shifting into a reincarnation worldview recontextualizes our identity within the soul's identity, which holds the meta-consciousness across all our lifetimes.

I think our spiritual traditions have been giving us insights into what's emerging. The great saints and sages responsible for establishing the religions of the Axial Age drew humanity because we could feel a deep resonance with them. They were archetypal prototypes of what we were becoming, inviting us to become what they had...

Well, I had the benefit of being a professor of religious studies, so I spent much of my professional life teaching courses in comparative mysticism, in Buddhism, and introductory courses in Eastern and Western traditions. I got to study a lot of the masters and learn their stories. They were always my guideposts. The...

Thank you, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you tonight. Since my understanding is that psychedelics is not a frequent topic in the San Diego Integral community, in talking with Kathy, Tom, and people on your board, we decided that we would begin with a short breakout before I talk, just to...

Robert Monroe has been a real companion to me on the journey through his works. This book came out when I was on my first sabbatical, and I was writing Lifecycles. This book came out, and I immediately made a reservation to go and do a week's training program at the Monroe Institute because...

Well, I had the benefit of being a professor of religious studies, and so I spent a lot of my life, my professional life, teaching courses in comparative mysticism, Buddhism, and introductory courses in Eastern and Western traditions. I got to study many masters and learn their stories. They were always my guideposts. The...

History expresses collective transformation through individual transformation. Going deeper, I experienced the universe's pulse as a single living organism. When you dissolve into that oneness, the Buddhists call it Nirvana or Śūnyatā—the self pops, and life breathes as one. Everywhere you touch it, the world is intelligent. At the end of my journey, in...

I often wish I had a Ph.D. in physics or astronomy to better understand many of the things I was shown and taken into, but it was just an educated layman's dissolving into the field of consciousness. Within fields of consciousness and acquiring insights or being given teachings about how those fields self-organize, how...

Well, the classic understanding of the Bardo, I think, was affirmed in my sessions. There are many, many layers of spiritual reality. When we return to that layer, it reflects our spiritual development or maturity, and it's a social domain. There are other beings there—not only other incarnate beings or discarnate beings, but also...

Well, the classic understanding of the Bardo, I think, was affirmed in my sessions. There are many, many layers of spiritual reality, and when we die, we return to that layer that reflects our spiritual development or maturity. It's a social domain with other beings, not only other discarnate beings but also guardians and...

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...

Integration is a strange term. I'm glad the psychedelic community is paying more attention to it because it's critical. But there are dimensions and aspects it doesn't cover. Living our visions is hard because it commits you to constantly being aware of how we're not living them. If we live around people who are...

It's a pleasure to be here, Bas and everyone. Thanks for the invitation. My voice is rough due to a cold, but this material is too important to pass up, especially an opportunity to talk with Duane, a friend for over 25 years. Our research and writing brought us together; now it's a deep,...

And I think we see this in the lives of the great mystics, the lives of the great spiritual teachers. They are living an absolutely grounded physical life, and yet they are also living a profoundly spiritual life simultaneously. From that perspective, Buddhists say nirvana is Samsara. Samsara, the world of form, and Nirvana,...

What happened on this journey was that I went through not just one death, not just ego death, but multiple layers of reality, entering deeper and deeper levels of consciousness. Accessing these deeper levels required going through a series of deaths—dying at one level of consciousness to enter a deeper level, mastering it, then...

Well, that path I call cosmological exploration, and it's a path which clearly overlaps with the healing capacity of psychedelics and the spiritual awakening capacity, but it's different. I think spiritual awakening invites us to clean our consciousness and system in a way that allows us to abide more comfortably and consistently in a...

After going through yet one more intense cycle of death and rebirth, I was spun into a brilliantly clear radiance that Buddhism calls Dharmakāya. I came to call it the domain of Diamond Luminosity. I had known light many times before, but this was an exceptionally pure light. This domain captivated me so completely...

I began my life seeking to be a Catholic priest. I was in the seminary in high school for three years and got a degree in theology from Notre Dame. I began in a very conventional way. By the time I finished graduate school, because of all my education, I became an atheistically inclined...

My visions did not give me any details about how or when this would take place, except that we were entering a profound global systems crisis that was being triggered by a series of ecological crises around the planet, and this was of a scale and magnitude that was historically unprecedented. I was also...

Sure, it actually started in the very first session. My very first session, I hit an experience where I could not remember anything about myself. I could not remember who I was, what I was; I couldn't remember what I did for a living. I could not remember whether I was a man or...

You're asking a lot, because the universe is so vast, and the mind of the universe has so many layers to it, which are all complexly interwoven. It's all alive, and it's all intelligent. Everywhere we dig into the universe, we discover aliveness and intelligence. We can't dig in anywhere and not encounter this...

I think that's fair. And, you know, basically, I think that's a good description. The subtle body is very actively involved in the psychedelic process when you open up into deeper states of consciousness. I learned that deeper states of consciousness are higher levels of energy, and so it places enormous demands on your...

When Buddhism teaches śūnyatā and no-self, it defines a self-experience cut off from others and the universe. When that self dies, we experience individuality porous to others, living in compassion, in communion with layers of consciousness. An individual within a boundaryless condition.

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...

There are many blessings in this work—insight, transformation, opening—but I use "diamonds from heaven" more specifically. After 15 years and moving through ego deaths and deeper realities, I was catapulted into a dimension of pure, crystalline light. I had experienced light before, but this was diamond consciousness—an ultra-clear quality not metaphorical. Over the last...

Now, I saw myself, at the time, simply doing an extended course of psychedelic therapy. But when I got to the end of my journey, and I was looking back, I realized that this was more than simply psychedelic therapy, that I was encountering phenomena and dealing with challenges that were not being addressed...

For the last five years, I entered a domain I called the Diamond Luminosity, an extremely pure form of consciousness that Buddhism refers to as the Dharmakāya, the clear light of absolute reality. The last five years of sessions were filled with a lot of purification and healing work.

In the Buddhist tradition, spiritual friends, those committed to awakening, make it easier to face shortcomings. We don't walk around in that state, but we practice and practice. Then maybe 10 years later, we're in it a little more, practice more. And if we ever think we're really there, our children remind us we're...

Forgiveness of ourselves and others, but also restitution. There's nothing we've done that we can't repair or make better because we have time and opportunity. We can change our past by changing our present, by moving forward. We can make restitution and bring healing where we brought injury before. We have many questions stacking...

It's a pleasure to be here, and I've enjoyed our conversations prior to this, which our present dialog grew out of. I am a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, retired from Youngstown State University. In the course of my teaching, I've taught courses on world religions and Eastern religions, Transpersonal psychology of religion,...

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...

Our history is creating this phase of reincarnation coming to fruition. We can glimpse the future by looking at the great beings of our past—the saints, prophets, and incarnations like Christ and the Buddhas. These beings are prototypes, leading us toward a higher existence. I think we are becoming a species of Christ, Buddhas,...

Yes, but the notion that locks eternity as a metaphysical principle comes from the mistaken view that we live only once and there's no chance to correct our path. Fortunately, when deeply explored, neither past-life therapists nor Buddhists find eternal damnation. We're accountable for our actions but learn from them, enabling us to come...

That's a big topic. Okay, I'm happy to touch on it. Again, it was one of the deep surprises of my journey because I'd never imagined something like this would become part of it. I was thinking in terms of the conventional descriptions of enlightenment you find in spiritual or mystical traditions. But systematically,...