Collective consciousness

I can't say any one particular period or one particular time because of how recursive the experience is across time for me. Working in this very intense fashion over 20 years, there were so many levels of consciousness that I broke through, or that the universe took me through, that I can't point to...

Thank you, Emmy. It's wonderful to be in conversation with you.

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...

Well, I'm actually the last person you would have thought from the beginning of my life to end up writing a book on describing what happens on the long series of high-dose LSD sessions. I was raised in the Deep South, in Mississippi. I was a seminarian in the early days, studying to be...

At the end of my journey, working up my notes, I identified five levels I worked on: personal mind, the level of collective mind, archetypal mind (in a Platonic sense, not Jungian), and beyond to causal reality, where oneness permeates everything. Beyond causal reality, the last five years were exploring what I call Diamond...

Thank you, Emmy, it's a pleasure to be here.

No, you understood. You got it correctly. It's kind of jumping ahead to the story. Let me back up and work to that point. Okay, if you work, and I think in order to extract the maximal psychological, psycho-spiritual and philosophical value of these experiences, it's very important to create a container, what I...

When I began my psychedelic work, I thought it was about personal transformation, personal enlightenment, if I got lucky. But then, of course, what happened is that I dissolved. The method I was using was so powerful, it dissolved me so deeply into collective consciousness and the collective species mind again and again that...

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...

Any work with psychedelics, especially with higher doses in a therapeutic protocol, can be challenging and calls for good psychological screening to ensure you have a psyche ready to engage these deep levels. Some people should never go near psychedelics, others should work very gently or not at all. I happen to have a...

And eventually you come out with a certain understanding, at least, of the large structure, the nature of reality. We're not simply creating a new society or a better society or a new economy or a new ecology. We are actually giving birth to a new form of the human species. I never expected...

Okay, so I just say 73 high-dose sessions. And I did this in a very rigorous fashion, following Stan's protocol. In my case, I used the same protocol, same set and setting, same substance, same dose level, same sitter, same recording process, and same location. I tried to standardize all the variables as much...

And another major takeaway is an understanding of where we are in history, where humanity is. Here, so many visionary experiences reveal that humanity is coming to a turning point, a bifurcation point—a radical deconstruction followed by a reconstruction at a higher organizational level. After hundreds of thousands of years of reincarnation, where we...

Well, any work with psychedelics, especially with higher doses in a therapeutic protocol, can be challenging. It requires good psychological screening to ensure your psyche is ready. Some people should never go near psychedelics, and some should work gently, if at all. I have a constitution that can flow into expansive states and smoothly...

My transition from an ego death process, which is very personal, related to what came over the next two years. It was a series of excruciatingly difficult, horrendous waves of vast landscapes of human suffering, war, violence, just unimaginable suffering. It was transitioned by an experience called the killing of the children. I just...

It's not just individual awakening; it's collective. We're all giving birth to the Diamond Soul. The species can't afford to live fragmented anymore. An ego-built world serves some, not others. When the soul wakes to its profound compassion, we live differently. I see this period as tumultuous, a birth process—the death of ego culture,...

It's one of the reasons I'm so comfortable with what you're saying, Dan, because it's coherent with my experience in the classroom—this growing understanding of the porosity of mind, the field nature of our individual and collective consciousness. When individuals come together and focus their intention, they create a field. Classes develop fields over...

Well, for about the first two and a half years, it followed very much the material that Stan Grof had been tracking. My first two and a half years of work were very much perinatal in nature, going through the death-rebirth process, re-experiencing one's birth, experiencing a profound confrontation with death and the meaninglessness...

Well, for about the first two and a half years, it followed very much the material that Stan Grof had been tracking. My first two and a half years of work were very much perinatal in nature, going through the Death-Rebirth process, really experiencing one's birth, confronting death and the meaninglessness of existence. But...

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,...

Thank you, Aviv, it's a real pleasure to be here with you today.

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...

Let me qualify by saying I don't consider my experiences to be normative in any generalizable way. There are so many medicines, ways of using them, and personalities engaging this infinite consciousness. It's foolish to think any one person's experience is a map for others. I'm interested in others' experiences non-judgmentally. When we work...

My understanding is that the Diamond Luminosity is an extra-Samsaric reality that lies outside the Bardo, outside of Samsara, outside all the cycles of physical reality, and the Bardo realities of psychic reality. It is the pure light from which the universe arises and returns. It is Dharmakāya, the clear light of absolute reality....

What I found in my psychedelic work when I began to open up into the collective psyche, and deep within the collective fields of consciousness, is that in addition to this individual story, there was a collective story that the entire human species, in some fundamental ways, operates as a single organism. There is...

This culminated in another death-rebirth process leading into causal oneness, described in Benediction of Blessings, giving a year of oneness, non-dual consciousness, dissolving into the metacosmic void, cosmic love. Truly satisfying existentially. Then, the last five years entered diamond luminosity in the chapter the diamond luminosity—well beyond collective psyche and even oneness, into a...

The nature of my experiences—if there is any... well, the nature of my experience is that starting around 1992 or 1993, I started having consistent visions coming in by surprise. Just as I had not anticipated the possibility of doing any type of therapeutic work and healing some aspect of the collective psyche, I...

I think when we die, everything we've learned and all the good we've done, as well as our mistakes, goes with us. Our learning is retained within the collective psyche of our species. All of our experiences are preserved by the individual consciousness, which continues its learning once it leaves time and space. But...

Most of the Eastern religions basically say, yes, you grow, you activate the chakras, you bring higher and higher levels of consciousness online. But when your consciousness opens up to divine essence, when it opens up to the you that is more real than any of your individual, private incarnational selves—the divine you, the...

From my experience, the consciousness, which I felt was always guiding my sessions, was always invisible to me, but was always felt. It didn't adopt concrete form, or very seldom adopted concrete form, because the form would change as the experiences deepened. You know, that formless quality is, I think, something innate to the...

Well, I know it's a radical book, and I think we are at a pivot point in history, and I think that psychedelics represent a major transition point, a true historical before-and-after point with respect to philosophy, not just psychology. It generates not only a new therapeutic protocol for healing the personal psyche, but...

My understanding is that when engaging entities or forms recognizable in our historical traditions, we're interacting with a collective thought form or a spiritual being wearing the garment of a collective thought form. By "collective thought form," I mean that if millions of devotees meditate, pray, and offer devotions to a deity form identified...

Initially, I worried these experiences implied ego inflation, but they instead pointed toward the complexity of subject-participation — entering vast pre-existing consciousness fields. In this deeper context, my personal existence felt secondary; experiences actively unfolded cosmic reality. The axial role wasn't mine but consciousness's; in its grandeur, I was merely the observer. This shifting...

Well, you know, as I've written about in my book LSD and the Mind of the Universe, there's a chapter on the birth of the future human, where I summarize all the visions that I was given through many years of doing the deep psychedelic work that I did. And I don't know whether...

I think so. I think that while there is a growing appreciation, awareness, and thirst for spiritual truth and encounter, it's not necessarily expressing itself as an increase in religiosity or religious participation. Personally, I think what's happening is that the religions that exist today have largely done the bulk of the work they...

Thank you, Donna, my pleasure, and thank you everyone for spending part of your Sunday with me. It's a pleasure to be here, a pleasure to talk about these things, and I'm really looking forward to our discussion that follows my comments here. So let me first shift us into share screen so I...

Following that, there was a more intense purification process I call the dark night of the soul. The work pivoted clearly away from personal transformation and entered into the collective psyche, focusing on the transformation of the species mind itself.

You're certainly right. In my local community, we're not suffering much, and I'm retired, I haven't lost my job, I know where my next meal is coming from. A lot of people don't have those certainties. If we just expand the horizon to include the hundreds of thousands of people who are ecological migrants...

I want to say upfront that I'm not sure that what I did was wise, honestly. I mean that I pushed myself extremely hard on this journey—harder than was probably good for me. But I've come through it intact, reasonably so, and I'm really looking forward to sharing with you where this journey took...

Yeah, you described the in-breaking of the vision and being drawn into the deep experience of revelation. Deep visions can't fit into small containers. When nature or the divine invites us into a deeper experience, it has to purify us, and you describe that contracting process. It's our past, everything about us keeping us...