Entity encounters

I'll be teaching soon in the Polaris program, discussing integration. While we have models for personal unconscious and spiritual integration, when transcending time, integrating those experiences becomes challenging. How do we integrate the infinite as time-space beings? We may need to rethink much of what we've learned about integration.

How do you connect with that? How do you change your life for such experiences or feel properly aligned with fellow human beings on this journey? That's basic spirituality 101. Anything favoring yourself over others, stop doing that. Everything hurting others, stop doing that. Every time you injure with speech, stop. Slow down the...

After undergoing ego death and working for years through various experiences, I entered a domain involving vast territories of collective suffering. I call this the Ocean of Suffering. It eventually expanded to encompass hundreds of thousands of beings and thousands of years of time. Initially confusing, because I, like many, thought psychedelics were a...

Well, I'm not a psychologist, so take what I say about derealization with a grain of salt. I understand it to be a psychological condition where you feel yourself dissolving or not grounded in your conventional identity. It's often associated with psychopathology because if it becomes endemic, it undermines your capacity to function within...

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...

In all the years when I was doing this work, and all the work I did, I never encountered a being, a divine being that said, "I'm God. You know, this is what I am." It wasn't like that. It was like I would go deeper into a level of consciousness, and I would...

The most significant aspect of my first session was entering a phase where I couldn't remember who or what I was, no longer recalling my identity, not even if I was a man or woman. It was a complete interruption of self-knowledge—frightening but ultimately helpful, teaching me that control is pointless in this work....

That's actually a good place to wrap up some of the discussion because it's relevant to where we might go. I stopped for two reasons. I stopped first because my physical system—my subtle energy system, my prana or qi energy system—was running so hot after all these years of practice that it was producing...

But there's a deeper point here. To accuse someone of bad research is one thing; to prove that research invalid is quite another. If you go through Edward's arguments very carefully, you see there's a deeper logic operating in his work. He says reincarnation would represent a crucifixion of our understanding, by which he...

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.

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...

We don't know all the answers to those questions. We don't really know how reincarnation works or the physics behind it. Even if we have evidence that reincarnation is a fact of nature, we don't know its precise nature—how it goes, how it works. It seems the universe is a learning system, and reincarnation...

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...

Again, it's a person who has written such an extraordinary series of books. When I was trying to understand, as I say in my notes here, when I was trying to understand why my psychedelic purification healing experiences had expanded so exponentially to include hundreds of thousands of human beings, the whole breadth of...

We don't really know how reincarnation works. We don't know the physics of reincarnation. Even if we have evidence that reincarnation is a fact of nature, we don't know the nature of it, how it goes, how it works. But it seems to be that the universe is a learning system, and reincarnation is...

If you want to allow your consciousness to expand into the broader dimensions, the deeper dimensions of consciousness, you must surrender the narrow bandwidth of your individual body, mind, and ego. This happens slowly or fast, convulsively or smoothly, but that identity that we hold has to be shattered, has to be destroyed. When...

If you continue and press to the limits of your time and space identity, going through the transformation we call ego death, you begin to open to spiritual reality, farther removed from personal history. That's when experiences begin to overlap and converge. Spiritual reality isn't something you just enter and take from; it's interactive....

Dan, that really was beautiful. That was beautifully summarized. I just really love the unfolding of layers and layers of your research, the way you harness many people's research and bring that into focus. I'm sitting here, without any of the scientific background, in total agreement with what you're saying. Just being over and...

It's a gateway. You know, we have to let go of being small in order to enter into being large. It's not always easy to let go of being small, but it's not just letting go of your personal identity. In therapy, we often focus on ego death, and many of the mystical traditions...

It's a prana. We have to let go of being small to enter into being large, and it's not always easy to let go of being small. It's not just letting go of your personal identity. In therapy, we often focus on ego death, and many mystical traditions focus on ego death, but I...

Well, I want to be careful. I don't want to overgeneralize the insights or truths that emerge in a psychedelic session and apply them to circumstances in our everyday life. We'd have to make necessary adjustments to it. In a psychedelic session, when we hyper amplify consciousness, consciousness begins to clean itself. It begins...

We can't solve the problems we're facing at the level of ego. So we either grow up or we go extinct. Growing up, I think, involves the maturation of the soul, the transition from ego identity to soul identity. The soul lives in the world differently than the ego. It has an awareness of...

When one works with very high doses of LSD, one goes through a series of death-rebirth experiences. In this image, the drop at the center underneath the line represents our egoic consciousness, our private consciousness. Everything above the line represents spiritual reality. Transpersonal consciousness, the first death-rebirth experience, takes place at the interface of...

What does it take to be a good person today? I think it takes a willingness, a commitment, to serving a collective good, a good that's not private, that opens up to future generations and people and species unlike us—an honest confrontation with what is, to bring about a better life for other beings....

From a reincarnational perspective, the beings entering this crisis aren't 100-year-old beings but ancient souls with much history. Collectively, we've been growing, but our collective maturation is egoic, rooted in individual consciousness. The world collapsing around us was built by ego, which is beautiful but fundamentally cut off from life's deeper fabric and interconnectedness....

Yeah. And in that context, I want to put on the table one fundamental axiom of my thought. I know Duane shares this axiom, and I suspect everyone in this group does too: the concept of reincarnation. My first book was on reincarnation, starting with the empirical evidence, which I believe is overwhelming. I...

I was first trained as a historian, then in the philosophy of religion. I spent years studying great thinkers in history in these fields, so I had a sense of great beings who contributed to the tapestry of learning that I inherited. This session was about liberating me from responsibility to the intellectual lineages...

It took about two years, or ten sessions, to go through the perinatal level of consciousness. I relived my birth, faced existential crises, and experienced ego death, moving into more expansive awareness beyond personal identity. As I went deeper, I encountered challenges in vast territories of pain and suffering—like Dante's Inferno, except worse.

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...

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...

Which was okay as long as we were thinking that time and space had only been around for a few thousand years. But now that we understand we're talking billions and billions of years of evolution of time and space, it doesn't seem to be a very satisfying account to say that after all...

I don't have any visionary experience of how long or the details; I wasn't given that kind of detail. So for that, I have to go to the experts like everybody else. I have to go to the scientists who are really plotting the escalating climate crisis that we are entering, and the social...

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...

I think it is possible to say. I think Stan Grof's work allows us to say it, where he's dealing with integrating the experiences of thousands of people. I'm only talking about integrating my experiences, but my experiences fit comfortably within the larger matrix Grof's work has explored. It's a complicated answer because, on...

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...

Coming off the mountain after my work, I realized I had unwittingly created an imbalance. I thought I could integrate each session and carry those blessings. I leaned so heavily into transcendence, losing my foothold in immanence. I knew from experience the universe was the body of the divine, but couldn't hold that awareness...

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...

Your understanding aligns broadly. In one facet, ego diminishes as transformations enlarge identities, yielding profound insights, while deeper cosmic ontology reflects leela — an evolving elucidation permitting universe's reinvigorated narrative reintegration. Identity's enduring refrain sustains cosmic participation — the split embedded, cosmic play maintained through rebirth — consciousness engaging perpetually anew, embodying transcendental iteration’s...

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...