Text
Speaker turns have stable anchors such as #turn-001.
Interviewer
A guy I was speaking to at an integration circle mentioned he had a mystical experience where he encountered none other than Ganesh, the elephant god of Hinduism. After your journeys, how would you reflect on the meaning of encountering, say, a particular form of a deity or something like that?
Chris Bache
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 the experience with the qualities of the deities we may have been exposed to intellectually. Sometimes, we encounter deities that are not part of our personal lineage and may not even have been something we knew about. It comes completely out of left field, yet it bears the cultural form of a deity like Ganesh, Jesus, Mary, or the Prophet Muhammad.
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 in their scripture and depicted in culture through art and statues, this creates a structure in the collective psyche. I don't minimize these forms; I think they're extraordinarily powerful, including secular thought forms like greed, power, and anger, which are also very potent in our system.
When we encounter a deity in a particular form, we are either experiencing a spiritual principle beyond form, wearing the form of this collective garment, or experiencing the garment itself. Either way, the collective psyche is implicated; it's part of our experience, which is perfectly normal and good. At the same time, it is possible to go beyond all collective thought forms and human history in one's experience. As we do, those forms tend to fade away.
There's a lot of discussion about entities, especially with DMT and its derivatives, which often expose people to entities. I'm not suggesting these entities aren't real or don't exist, but to me, personally—and acknowledging my limitations—those entities reflect different levels of reality. As you go deeper, the granular quality of many individual beings tends to yield to levels of reality that are less granular, with fewer individual beings, opening into vast tracts of consciousness less individual and entity-like. At least, that's my experience.
Interviewer
That definitely seems to resonate regarding the levels. After seeing where you go in those levels, it makes more sense that at some point, even those dissolve and become something different.