Diamond Luminosity

One period of the work when we were experiencing, I think it was the Neptune-Uranus conjunction, squaring my lunar nodes if you're into astrology. It was a square all year long. That particular year, which I think was around 1993-94, just opened a new level, but that wasn't the last level. That was just...

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...

I categorized five broad stages: personal mind, collective mind (humanity's psyche), archetypal mind (Platonic rather than Jungian archetypes, outside time/space/collective psyche), causal realms (oneness as the dominant reality), and further into diamond luminosity—clear, illuminating experiences toward the end. Sessions follow a sequential journey through these realms.

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...

It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

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...

The full intensity of communion with the light of existence? No, I've not found other ways. I've committed to my physical existence and learning to love the divine manifest in my everyday life. I love this world and do my spiritual practice, but in terms of accessing those same dimensions of diamond luminosity, I've...

It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Most Eastern religions suggest activating higher consciousness brings enlightenment and escape from Earth. It's an "up and out" cosmology. But midway on my journey, my former lives fused into a Diamond Luminosity—a being with a hundred thousand years of history awakened. It's a different kind of being than an egoic one, with deeper relational...

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...

This is one area where our work is complementary. You are a deeply committed, lifelong social activist, understanding social transformation beyond me. You understand the roots holding us back and see opportunities for deep social change at a collective, tangible level. My work has been more internally focused. Let me speak to the inside...

Well, what I share with you now doesn't come from an intellectual basis or books I've read. I wish I could give documentation that academics love to cite, but I have to speak to you out of my spiritual and psychedelic experiences. Over the course of this long journey, I was plunged into a...

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...

And all of a sudden, my visual field pivoted 90 degrees, and I saw reality far, far in the distance. Again, it looked kind of like galaxies. And out of that reality, a beam of light came and hit me, and it absolutely shattered me. It was a more powerful light than even the...

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...

It is, and it's a kind of a modified Vajrayana, because I was doing intense Vajrayana practice for a number of years and have modified it from my own psychedelic experiences. I've come to understand that it's not that I've realized the states I encountered in my deep psychedelic work, but I have an...

When I crunched all my experiences, I distinguished five fundamental levels or categories of consciousness: the personal mind, the species mind, the archetypal mind, causal oneness, and diamond luminosity. Let me quickly place the book chapters in context. There's a chapter on crossing the boundaries of death, telling the story of crossing what Stan...

Okay, you bet that's a good place to start. In my understanding, in my experience, psychedelics in general, and in particular LSD, which was my primary medicine in this journey, is an amplifier of consciousness. When consciousness is amplified, signals which are quiet become large, become loud, and you have the sensation of becoming...

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...

You're hitting really important topics.

When the Diamond Luminosity opened, 15 years into the work, and I entered this hyper-clear, unbelievably clear level of awareness, in the next four years, in 26 sessions, I only touched this reality four times. Lots of purification, lots of cleansing. The second time I touched it was the 50th session, and I was...

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...

When I was looking back over the whole of my journey and trying to create the structure for the telling of the story, I identified five core levels of consciousness or core cycles of death and rebirth that I went through: one having to do at the level of personal mind, personal consciousness; the...

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.

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...

It became too difficult to return. I spent my last years in communion with what I call Diamond Luminosity, repeatedly dissolved into the clear light of absolute reality—Dharmakāya. These were temporary states and, although deeply satisfying, leaving them became a heartache. It was essential to integrate and digest these experiences into the rest of...

Another death-rebirth process led to causal oneness, experiencing the universe as a singularity, breathing as one, living within it, like experiencing a forest's collective life. After a year, another death and rebirth took me to a clearer, hyper-clear domain of light, the diamond luminosity, an absolute ecstatic reality I reached only four times in...

However, we're not talking about nuclear bombs here. We're talking about entering the mind of the universe, the great expanse of consciousness. How do we describe this consciousness? Some might describe it as God or the divine, but I would prefer to call it the mind of the universe, the mind of the cosmos....

Everybody has different measures of tolerance and different circumstances. I don't think it's wise to push, even though I did this as responsibly as I could, taking very good care of my body throughout and between sessions. I was doing about five sessions a year. I worked for four years, stopped for six years,...

Hmm. Let me just kind of lay out some of the sequences, the categories. When I got to the end of the journey, well, I went through what I experienced as a series of punctuated death and rebirth experiences. I would break into a new level of consciousness. I would then stabilize at that...

So this was a major change in my thinking. It took place in the 50th session. My background is, I did four years of work. I stopped for six years, and then I did 10 years of work, so 14 years of active work over 20 years. When I was entering into the last...

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...

I adopted the vocabulary from Stan Grof's work: psychic, subtle, and causal levels of consciousness. The universe is incredibly deep, and these are approximations. My experiences included ego death at the personal mind level, collective mind at the subtle level, archetypal mind at the high subtle, and causal mind, leading to diamond luminosity.

I've had many experiences that make sense in terms of the Eastern concept of the Bardo or multiple levels of reality one enters at death. The basic idea is you don't go to a place but to a complex domain with many layers. The level you go to reflects your present spiritual development and...

So, this was a major change in my thinking. It took place in the 50th session. So, my background is I did four years of work, I stopped for six years, and then I did ten years of work. So, 14 years of active work over 20 years. But when I was entering into...