Ocean of Suffering

Well, the first book I wrote as an academic was Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life. I was interested in reincarnation early in my career. I encountered Ian Stevenson's research at the University of Virginia. Around the same time, I encountered Stan Grof's research in his book, Realms of the Human Unconscious. I...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

That was my sense of it too, that I was engaging in a long and sustained conversation, communion, initiation, with a larger consciousness. The size and scale of this consciousness kept deepening and changing as my work continued. I always felt myself engaging in intelligence. This was most dramatic, perhaps, this continuity across time....

Yeah, that was my sense of it too, that I was engaging in a long and sustained conversation, communion, initiation, with a larger consciousness. The size and scale of this consciousness kept deepening and changing as my work continued. I always felt myself engaging an intelligence. This continuity across time was dramatic perhaps. I...

This was my 19th session. By then, I was 3-4 years into the work. I had experienced ego death and entered what's described as the Ocean of Suffering, navigating the collective psyche's most torturous memories. As a grace or gift for volunteering to heal some aspect of the collective psyche, the universe gave me...

Well, this is not so much coming down the mountain, but still climbing the mountain. It started when I was in the end stages of the Ocean of Suffering work. When I was in the chapter "The Initiation of the Universe," I started being given visionary initiations into the human story and the stages...

When I first began to enter the ocean of suffering, after ego death, and went into episodes of collective anguish, each session seemed divided into two halves. There was a purification half followed by an ecstatic half. You go through the purification, and if you submit to it, it crescendos and breaks through, spinning...

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...

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...

After about two and a half years, having gone through what Stan calls the perinatal process, reliving birth, confronting death fears, facing existential crises, shattering egoic reality, I thought the ordeal was done. Not so. Everything intensified all over again, suffering got worse for two more years, expanding into larger levels, 1000s, 100,000s of...

Stan Grof’s guidance was instrumental. Trusting the process was key. Many times, experiences were inscrutable, yet surrender led to a transformation — a Death-Rebirth cycle, purification leading into descriptions that allowed integration of insights, resulting in balance between purification and ecstatic experiences. Initially, confronting the ocean of suffering was a challenge, but it became...

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...

Let's back up and put this into context. In a therapeutic modality with psychedelics, your system becomes hyper-conscious. When this happens, the system spontaneously cleanses itself, bringing forward parts of your past difficult to deal with—the pain, fears, and such. By confronting these heroically, you resolve things unresolved before, allowing a tremendous relaxation in...

Now, just a quick side comment: in my 20-year journey, I worked for four years, I stopped for six years for reasons given in the book, and then I resumed for a very intense ten years. This is where my journey stopped after four years, and then I took a six-year hiatus. When I...

Yes, very much. You know reincarnation, you have to live with it for a long time and then bring the questions that people are asking into that reincarnation paradigm and sit with it for a long time to get intimations of the depth the way it recontextualizes and gives a new context for the...

Okay, collective mind. There are three chapters that have to do with the collective mind: The Ocean of Suffering—sort of the challenging, purifying part of working with the species mind. Deep Time and the Soul is an initiation into the universe. I'm going to come back to these in a minute. Archetypal mind, there...

After ego death, expecting to have finished shadow work, I entered what I call the Ocean of Suffering, experiencing vast collective suffering systematically for two years. It felt like I was encountering aspects of the collective human psyche, draining pain from an unconscious repository of our species. Not just personal transformation, but working on...

At the level of species mind, there are three chapters in the book pertaining to this work: "The Ocean of Suffering," "Deep Time and the Soul," and "Initiation into the Universe." I'm skipping some chapters that cover methodology and typical session days, but these focus on visionary experiences' content.

Yeah, I had to think a lot about how to present the different types of suffering and the different types of challenges that I faced on the journey because, and in fact, it was my greatest concern in beginning to share the story of my journey with the world, with others, because I did...

Yeah, it is hard to read. I had to really give some careful thought to how much to expose that because I know it's challenging for readers to go into that material. Just to finish that other topic—even once I let go of that personal model, I found that I developed a taste for...

I'm touched, honestly. I mean, I think it's so interesting and also so helpful to us at this particular time. There's a lot in there that can guide us into the future. I appreciate that the book is filled with pain, suffering, and ecstasy beyond ecstasy. What I would like to do today is,...

As I looked back, these circles oversimplify, of course. These represent a number of sessions, and the circles within circles mark a deepening of causal level reality. When I looked over all my psychedelic work, I identified five fundamental death-rebirth processes or levels of consciousness. These are: the death of self, meaning the death...

Let me back up a little bit to give context, and then you bring me back. If I don't get back to it, bring me back to this—the birth of the future human. I found that when I was working with these very high levels of LSD—and again, this is a protocol that I...

Yes, to all of those things. I'm a professor who prefers organized discussion, starting at the beginning and moving phase by phase. Jumping to conclusions might seem ungrounded, psychedelic. That's not my experience. Methodologically, here's how I understand it: In hyper states, courageously confronting emerging experiences, you go through death-rebirth processes. My sessions over...

Now, I'd like to shift to the book and show you the relationship between these stages and the chapters of the book. For the death of self, there is the chapter "Crossing the Boundary of Birth and Death." Then, exploring collective mind, there are chapters on "The Ocean of Suffering," "Deep Time in the...

The universe nurtures us as individuals and as a species. When in consciousness communing with the species, having dissolved personal boundaries, it's clear this nurturing power cares for species' well-being. Moving beyond ego death into collective consciousness, I understood the species remembers all experiences. Addressing personal shadows is an analogy for collective healing. Social...

In the cleansing portion of the next two years, I went into an ocean of suffering, just vast. You know, I'm jumping into the details too quickly. Let me back up a bit.

And in my experience, there are two phases of every session. There's a cleansing phase, which lasts usually a couple of hours, and then there's an ecstatic phase. So if you enter into the cleansing phase and let it take you wherever it wants to take you, you reach. It reaches a peak. You...

To draw only one circle is to oversimplify. Sometimes these indicate numbers of sessions entering deeper and deeper into causal reality. There are cycles within cycles within cycles. So you could mark all of these as one cycle. But in fact, there were cycles within cycles as the journey continues. The easiest way now...

It's both. There's a lot of discussion about psychedelics and enlightenment—do they lead to enlightenment? These adventures weren't aimed at enlightenment. Initially, I was interested in enlightenment, thinking sessions could accelerate the process. But it shifted after my first ego death. Instead of personal transformation, the story opened into one of deep collective transformation....

Immediately after this, a new cycle began, in which I was repeatedly immersed in experiences of collective anguish that dwarfed these early sessions and shattered all my previous frames of reference. In this second phase, I entered an ocean of suffering that expanded session by session until it eventually encompassed the entire history of...

Is Robert here yet? He's coming. Here he is. Among his many illustrious publications, one of the ones that you may not come across too often is his beautiful introduction, his prologue, preface to The Living Classroom, which is a great honor. And he really made me look pretty good, very good. It was...

Well, that is a big question, isn't it? That's a huge question, and it has absorbed a lot of my time. In non-ordinary states of consciousness, it's been one of the recurring themes. Because what happens when your individual bubble of consciousness dissolves, when the drop opens, you fall into the divine at different...

I think, yes, the relationship of individual consciousness and collective consciousness, particularly in this evolutionary pivot that we are making, is really the dominant theme of my second book, Dark Night, Early Dawn, where I'm talking about the dark night of the soul and the dawn of the rebirth consciousness. But here the emphasis...