Integration

First, I had a couple of strategic advantages. I held a PhD in philosophy, religious studies, and philosophy of religion, allowing me to study theology, mysticism, and mystical traditions—both Eastern and Western. I taught courses in comparative mysticism, spending a lot of time with great masters. Psychedelic and contemplative experiences are different genres. Psychedelic...

I'd love to. One surprise in my psychedelic work was how much of it wasn't about personal transformation—it was about the collective. My love for myself expanded to embrace love for my people, my planet, and all beings on the planet—not just me personally. As it deepened, I began to be initiated into visions...

The visions took place between 1979 and 1999, experiencing the death and rebirth of humanity. As mystics teach, before a Great Awakening, a great death—the dark night of the soul—occurs. Humanity is entering this dark night, confronting historical karma. In these sessions, I witnessed the collapse of civilization, seemingly driven by an ecological crisis...

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...

What I'd like to do is talk about my work and some of the potentials that lie untapped so far in the current psychedelic renaissance. The current psychedelic renaissance is focused primarily on healing. That's how we're getting psychedelics back into the academic discussion, back into the intellectual discussion, and back into the mainstream:...

Yes, the first step of integration was to create an accurate phenomenological description of what happened in my sessions. Integration is the foundation for future sessions; if you don't integrate them thoroughly, you're less likely to have as deep an experience next time.

Yeah. And then I spent another 20 years digesting those experiences, writing about them, integrating them, trying to integrate them, and wrote two books based on those experiences. One of them is Dark Night, Early Dawn, which came out in 2000, and probably the more important one for a wide audience, is LSD and...

This vision moved me to tears. It pictures a humanity healed of all history's wounds, with open, compassionate hearts like the saints. A humanity in deep communion with the universe's creative intelligence, living intentional lives of integration of spirit and matter.

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

But coming out of it, we are not simply creating a new society or a better society, a new economy, or a new ecology. We are actually giving birth to a new form of the human species. The fundamental architecture of the collective psyche is pivoting, and as it pivots, we are giving birth...

The final chapter concerns the last year of work, where I was given one last vision of the future—my deepest experience of the future human. But the sessions wrapped up with goodbye sessions. I didn't choose to end them; the universe did. Coming off the mountain tells some highlights of what it was like...

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

Just as we have a center of integration that integrates all of our experiences from this lifetime—though we're not quite sure how to describe that or what it is, we know what it feels like—the soul is a center of integration that integrates all of our experiences from all of our lifetimes and our...

The cosmology that emerged for me was different. It was transcendence in service of incarnation, in service of deeper integration, allowing the universe's energy to live in the historical body. It also provided insights into where evolution is taking the human family. Initially, I thought it was personal transformation, but I realized it was...

Well, I was hoping you were going to start with Dan first.

No, I haven't. When I concluded my sessions, my meditation revealed it would take 20 years to integrate 20 years of my journey. By the end, writing "LSD and the Mind of the Universe" suggested that was an optimistic estimate. It may take many lifetimes to integrate all I've been given.

No, I haven't. When I finished my sessions and began the digesting process, the universe said to me, "20 years in, 20 years out." I thought it would take 20 years to assimilate 20 years of my journey. As I neared the end, writing "Diamonds from Heaven," I realized that was optimistic. I think...

All the things you mentioned are really good, which are basically using all our talent, whatever our particular talents are, to reach out, grab, hold on, talk about them, write about them, create music about them, draw them, and most of all, follow the teachings we're given. In our psychedelic sessions, we are given...

We go up on the mountain, see some things, receive blessings, and then come down, returning to work on Monday morning. It means constantly engaging, being aware of how you engage, checking yourself, recommitting to doing a better job, over and over. Much of it for me was in my work as a teacher....

First, Marc, I want to affirm everything that Steven and Belinda have said. One of the advantages of going last is I get to play off what's already been said, and I certainly agree. We are living in a different time in history; we're experiencing a collective migration and integration at a deep level....

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.

After I finished my sessions, Spirit said to me in my meditation, "20 years in, 20 years out." I took that to mean it would take me 20 years to fully assimilate and integrate 20 years of my sessions. As it turned out, LSD and the Mind of the Universe, or as I call...

I'll make a suggestion, but again, I'm not a clinician. I've chosen not to work with other people but to be a solitary explorer, pushing my system to map dimensions I entered into. That doesn't give me much experience working with others to answer your question. For spiritual awakening, I would recommend very low...

The final vision, to bring the journey to a close, just touching it very briefly. Actually, the three sessions that I discuss in this chapter, the final vision, was one of the most intense sessions that I went through anywhere on my journey. In it, the universe put me through a strip down that...

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...

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...

I understand, and you're certainly right that doing this type of work does carry certain risks and has to be approached cautiously and with careful support structures in place and careful self-monitoring and so on and so forth. I don't think, and I do understand the relationship between psychosis and transcendence, and I think...

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...

It is a fast track, except it's a fast track that doesn't allow any bypassing. The fact that it's a fast track means it's a more intensely concentrated track. Purification, which in the conventional spiritual path would be drawn out over years, can take place within days, and as any woman who's given birth...

If you do this repetitively, over and over, the experiences that you have and you integrate, internalize, and go through the various purification processes, it changes your consciousness. Therefore, the consciousness that you take into the next encounter is a different consciousness that catalyzes a deeper set of experiences from the infinite potential of...

But the more you experience this condition and back, the more you realize you're waking up to your own nature. Your nature and the universal nature are the same; this expanse is both within and around you. The challenge is stabilizing those insights and bringing them into daily experience. This is a challenge of...

When we experience realities that are beyond us, or dimensions of consciousness that are beyond our own, and when we're tapping into those qualities like infinite compassion, infinite intelligence, and infinite creativity, these are qualities we tend to associate historically with various deities. It's not surprising that our mind would couple the phenomenology of...

Understanding and integration took decades, and the writing spanned five years. My earlier inclination was to delay publishing until posthumously, but the urgency of our times dictated otherwise. There’s a significant collective transformation occurring, and it's crucial to contribute what I have learned.

Over and over again, I was shown these visions that this is what's happening. Nature is taking us through this. We are going through a tremendous pressure cooker. We're going through a transformation that will result in the birth, not simply of a higher civilization or a more ecologically in tune economy, but literally...

The 11th chapter, Final Vision, is the last year of my work, which included one particularly intense session—the most radical strip down I had gone through in any of my sessions, taking me far into the future and giving me experiences of our universe that seemed to be the capstone of everything that had...

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...

Yes, that's—well, we go up on the mountain, we see some things, maybe receive some blessings, then come down to work on Monday. It's a matter of engaging, being aware, checking yourself, recommitting, over and over. Much of it for me was in teaching—enjoying it, wanting to do better, but catching myself, coming back,...

Well, let me toss a couple of these questions here. One of them, I thought, stood out to me. Why do we forget our past lives in the first place? And a variation on that question: if we are all eternal, immortal, and infinite, what is the point of reincarnation in a different physical...

You cannot understand what's happening in the pain part of a session until you have moved on. Transformation is often understood only from a higher state of consciousness. It's crucial to follow this process through because it takes you from suffering to resolution and peace. You internalize the cycle, which prevents the suffering from...