Transcendence

I think we are going through something like that. You know what happens when people have a near-fatal accident. We know that when they're in it, their mind speeds up. They become able to do physical things they would never have dreamed they could do. If they're falling off a mountain, they can take...

Caution—you can go deeper in the universe, and it's wise for you to go. You can go. You can have too much God. That seems like an oxymoron, right? Because it's always better to have more of God. But at least in this method, which gives us temporary access and then brings us back,...

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 hard in the beginning but becomes easier with intellectual and experiential practice. Intellectually understanding reincarnation aligns many things that didn't make sense before. Experientially accessing past life stories reinforces this understanding, leading to acceptance of a transcendent dimension to identity. Eventually, it becomes hard to think smaller, taking only this as your identity.

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 states of consciousness I touched for hours are usually learned from contemplative mystics who abide in these realities. This practice isn't about abiding; it's temporary access, temporary immersion. I don't want to confuse temporary immersion with the abiding immersion of the great ones who live in these realities. This is temporary, intense purification,...

Well, I want to be careful here. I think what happens in a therapeutic, spiritually focused psychedelic session is that you speed up what is happening in life at a slower pace in a natural process. So reincarnation, as I understand it, we are growing, evolving. We die, we return to soul consciousness. We're...

It is challenging. Yet, there are mitigating processes. The deeper your experience of life's intelligence, the joy of creative intelligence manifesting existence, the more you see the universe as the body of the Divine, the body of God. The universe is a manifestation of intelligence, a profound intelligence. Once you touch that intelligence, it...

That is a potential that may be actualized over our evolutionary trajectory. However, my focus is different. We've been historically oriented towards transcendence for 5000 years, experiencing the mother universe through meditation or psychedelics. This leads to valuing transcendence over immanence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, with science showing how old and big...

I want to be careful and remind us that a finite mind does its best to give cognitive structure to transcendent experiences. So what I'm about to describe is, just as you summarized it, a splitting of the Divine Principle into two halves: a male half that stays outside of time and space in...

There were other reasons too—I was energetically running too hot, needing to let my system recalibrate. Still, the primary reason was heartache. I thought I could stop and continue being nourished by the treasures given to me. And while true, a deep sadness emerged over the years—a loneliness with the Divine. So profound, I...

At a very deep level, my essence is the same as that of mosquitoes, ants, leaves, everything on the planet. When I enter a transcendental state, dropping into selflessness or shunyata, I experience the world as one. As the shamans would shout, all my relations—all other levels of reality, all other beings are my...

Integrating these experiences has not always been easy. I've used a strict therapeutic protocol for clean contact and integration. You have to record, remember, ponder, and give artistic representation to them to hold onto those experiences. However, I went so deep on my journey that managing the ecstasy became more challenging than the pain....

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...

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...

Yeah, maybe as a footnote to my earlier comment to bridge into this new wing: I think Sri Aurobindo's critique of Buddhism is correct in criticizing Buddhism for not sufficiently confronting the fact of existence—the extraordinary power and majesty of existence. In rejecting anything static and form-based, in its agnosticism and anti-theism, Aurobindo says...

Yes, every step was met. There was an intelligence that orchestrated and met me, directing, understanding, carrying me through phases that earlier seemed ungraspable. It's challenging — even disorienting at times — but systematic acclimation leads to sustained, conscious engagement within dimensions previously insurmountable. I learned true transcendence integrates experiences back into our reality,...

Okay? Looks like it's just as a winner. Okay. This is my psychedelic lineage. My psychedelic lineage basically grounds in the work of Stanislav Grof. When I was 29 years old, fresh out of graduate school, just beginning my academic career in Ohio, I met Stan Grof's work, Realms of the Human Unconscious, and...

A significant part is experiencing ego death, where your physical personality dissolves, leading to awakening inside a spiritual reality. Continuing this process takes you deeper through Transpersonal consciousness levels as Stan identified: psychic, subtle, and causal. For terminally ill cancer patients, a high-dose strategy was developed (300 to 500 micrograms) aiming not for therapy...

Yes, it can. And certainly, once these experiences become part of our cultural story, they are subject to all the distortions that culture can bring, so they can be subject to the distortions of historically limited perspectives, to patriarchy, to all sorts of cultural constrictions. But I had the advantage of teaching world religions,...

Yeah, basically working the way I did, I found that my sessions had two phases. Though, at the beginning of every phase, there was some type of intense cleansing or purification process. If I surrendered to that completely, it would eventually hit a peak threshold, and then there would be some type of death-rebirth...

I've died many times. The early work at Spring Grove aimed to give a foretaste of death. Shamans know this territory. It's natural and comforting. Coming back is sometimes challenging. The hardest chapter to write was the last, about coming off the mountain, entering a deep existential loneliness. I integrated sessions carefully but integrating...

I've died many times in my journeys. The early work at Spring Grove was meant to give people a foretaste of what's beyond. Shamans are familiar with this. The hardest chapter to write was "Coming off the Mountain," about deep existential loneliness after stopping my sessions. I thought I'd integrate my sessions well, but...

It is. But as you repeat it, you get used to it. The total fear that grips you at first changes to a more informed quality of fear. Eventually, death becomes your best friend. The deepest ecstatic experiences follow the deepest death experiences. Once you understand that, you seek it out, creating conditions in...

The first two sessions took me deeper into diamond luminosity, peaking in the 50th session. The second two, sessions 60 and 66, saw diamond luminosity crunching deeper into my system, physically and psychologically. Talking about these sessions draws me into them due to their power, but time is short, so we'll continue, and I’ll...

Oneness came earlier than diamond Luminosity. This is hard to put succinctly. I did four years of work, stopped for six years, then resumed for an intense ten years. Though spread over twenty years, it was fourteen years of intense work. Midway through the second ten-year period, after ego death, the ocean of suffering,...

From these experiences, I learned the work's purpose isn’t mere transcendence—it's not about disembodied transcendence but integrating spiritual reality into physical existence, transforming our lives into a balance between spiritual understanding and temporal reality.

When I stopped, I faced profound sadness. It’s a balance of transcendence and immanence. I pushed into transcendence, losing balance in immanence. Regrounding took years, committing to the here and now. Transcendence is good but too much can unmoor you. Enlightenment requires balancing the here and now's sacredness with transcendence's blessings.

The metric was 500 to 600 micrograms, which is kind of a maximum high dose. Stan's work differentiates between psychedelic or low dose therapy averaging about 200 micrograms up to 300; psychedelic therapy is high dose between 300 and 500, more typically 300 to 500. But in the early work he did at Spring...

I realized it wasn't good to live waiting to die, to return to the beloved. I made an effort to ground myself back into historical existence, into time and space. I had to rebalance Transcendence and immanence, having lost my footing in the immanent divine. It took about ten years to be comfortable in...

Yeah, that was after I stopped the journey. Yes, so I have to fill in a little bit of a blank, and then I can say what happened after the journey. In the book Diamonds from Heaven, I tell the story of ego death, moving into the ocean of suffering, and then moving into...

I'll share some research. A guy studied near-death episodes of people who attempted suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. He found that survivors went into ecstatic transcendence—totality of consciousness—and none tried to commit suicide again because they learned the soul is not killed when you kill the body. Suicide does not solve...

Yes, on a collective level. The future human is such an extraordinarily beautiful being. When I focus my mind on it, even now, it brings me to tears because it's a humanity healed of its divisive history. It's a humanity with all its wounds resolved. It's a humanity with its heart completely open at...