An Arena Of Dialogue Between Myself And A Larger Consciousness
“I discovered, much to my surprise, that the experiential field within the circle was responsive to my thoughts. When I first discovered this, I had the ecstatic sensation of confronting an enormous Intelligence that included and surrounded my own. ‘That’s right,’ it communicated to me. ‘That’s exactly what is happening.’”
Dr. Christopher Bache is one of the great cosmic explorers of our time. I was fascinated and touched upon encountering his books. A few years ago I spoke with a leading psychiatrist at one of the top teaching hospitals in New York City. He told me that he was also enamoured with Bache’s writing and considered Bache’s book LSD and the Mind of the Universe to have the qualities of a holy text. The psychiatrist also shared with me that two of the world’s leading trauma therapists contacted Bache on reading the book and made a trip to visit his home in North Carolina in order to receive his wisdom.
Bache was kind enough to speak with me in a Zoom call and I will always feel that he is a true servant to his fellow humans. There is also a relevance to ally work – as touched on in the excerpt below – in how some of Bache’s encounters with the deepest dimensions of consciousness and being are marked by the intimacy of dialogue between the experiencer and a vaster Intelligence.
Here is a selection from Bache’s earlier book Dark Night, Early Dawn published by State University of New York Press in 2000. If you’re interested to read Bache yourself, I would highly recommend starting with LSD and the Mind of the Universe – which also includes an account of the experience described below.
Session 19
After a long time, darker experiences began to emerge, but I was able to remain physically open and let them come, not resisting. Again there was the suffering that I cannot put into words. It is a frenzied, chaotic, physical, psychological anguish. At several places I found myself wondering what all this pain was about. I was open and letting it come through me, but where was it coming from? I could not tell, but it broadened and deepened for a long time.
My consciousness was expanding and opening to more and more suffering. Eventually I had the sense that my being stretched from horizon to horizon as I experienced a suffering that involved tens of thousands of people. Because I had gone into this state more slowly than in the previous session, however, it was not as confusing as before. Eventually through the field of suffering I caught a glimpse of something behind it, something enormous and familiar from the previous session. Then the field of suffering closed back in on me. I reached more deeply into it and eventually broke through again to this larger dimension.
Early on I had the experience of the dissolution of boundaries. I was experiencing the physical world, and everywhere boundaries were melting away. Discrete “objects” were shown to be but different nuances of a single energy. “No boundaries. No boundaries anywhere.” There was not even a real boundary separating the physical and nonphysical dimensions of existence, and I experienced the worlds of matter and spirit as a seamless whole. It was all one massive Energy, one Being.
In most of my sessions I have simply been carried along from one transpersonal experience to another. Only once before have I had the experience of being able to consciously engage and direct my experience. Now it was happening again. A circle opened around me and created a space that became an arena of dialogue between myself and a larger Consciousness. I discovered, much to my surprise, that the experiential field within the circle was responsive to my thoughts. When I first discovered this, I had the ecstatic sensation of confronting an enormous Intelligence that included and surrounded my own. “That's right,” it communicated to me. “That's exactly what is happening.”
I began to ask it questions and it answered by orchestrating my experience in the circle. It was an extremely subtle process and the line between “my” consciousness and this larger Consciousness was invisible to me. At times my reactions to what was being shown me interacted with the content of the answer to distort or sidetrack the lesson being given. I learned that I could stop these unwanted deviations by taking control of my thoughts. I could “clear the board” by stopping my reactions and waiting for the space I was in to clear. Once my mind was still, the lesson would continue.
After some intervening experiences, I was brought to an encounter with a unified energy field underlying all physical existence. I was confronting an enormous field of blindingly bright, incredibly intense energy. Though the energy was not difficult to look at, experiencing it was extremely intense and carried with it a sense of ultimate encounter. This energy was the single energy that comprised all existence. All things that existed were but varied aspects of its comprehensive existence. I had encountered this energy in previous sessions, but never as completely and consummately as today.
The experience then changed into an extremely powerful and moving experience of the COSMIC TREE. The energy became a massive tree of radiant energy suspended in space. Larger than the largest galaxy, it was comprised entirely of light. The core of the tree was lost to the brilliant display but limbs and leaves were visible around its edges. I experienced myself as one of its leaves. The lives of my family and close friends were leaves clustered near me on a small branch. All of our distinguishing characteristics, what made us the individuals we were, appeared from this perspective to be quite minor, almost arbitrary variations of this fundamental energy.
I was taken around the tree and shown how easy it was to move from one person's experience to another and indeed it was ridiculously easy. Different lives around the globe were simply different experiences the tree was having. Choice governed all experience. Different beings who were all part of Being Itself had simply chosen these manifold experiences.
At this point I WAS THE TREE. Not that I was having the full range of its experience, but I knew myself to be this single, encompassing Consciousness. I knew that Its identity was my true identity. Though I had taken monism to heart years before, I was now actually experiencing the seamless flow of consciousness into crystallizations of embodiment. I was actually experiencing how consciousness manifests itself in separate forms while remaining unified. “So that's how it works,” I said to myself. I knew then that there was fundamentally only One Consciousness in the universe. From this perspective my individual identity and everyone else's appeared temporary and almost trivial. To experience my true Identity filled me with a profound sense of numinous encounter. “So this is what I am.” The freedom was sheer bliss.
As I left the experience of the Cosmic Tree, the sensation of intense energy subsided and I felt myself to be once again in conscious communication with this vast, surrounding Consciousness. My experiential field was extremely clear.
For the next several hours, this Consciousness took me on an extraordinary tour of the universe. It was as though It wanted to show me Its work. It appeared to be the Creator of our physical universe. It would “take me somewhere” or open me to some experience and I would come to understand some aspect of the working of the universe.
Over and over again I was overwhelmed at the magnitude, the subtlety, and the intelligence of what I was witnessing. “That's incredible.” “I'm beginning to understand.” The beauty of the design was such that I was repeatedly left breathless by what I was seeing. Sometimes I was so staggered that I would stop and It had to come back for me. “Keep up. Keep up,” It said, taking delight in my awe. Sometimes I was not sure what I was seeing and It would do something and it was as if everything became larger and I would suddenly understand. Then It would take me on to something else.
This tour was the most extraordinary journey of my life. The vistas of intelligent design repeatedly swept me into cognitive ecstasy. The irony, however, is that except for the small pieces I shall describe below, I am unable to recreate the details of what I was seeing. I simply can't yet fit the understandings I had into my ordinary, smaller mind. This does not lead me to question or doubt my experience. Even though I have lost large sections of the experience, I retain an unshakable epistemological certainty that this knowing was of a higher order than any knowing I am capable of in my ordinary consciousness.
At one point I was taken through a complex labyrinth of churning forces until I emerged above the turbulence into a wonderfully spacious and calm experiential field. I was told that we had come through the emotions of human experience. They had a restless, gnawing quality to them and comprised such a mass of tangled energy that I was not surprised that they could blot out this subtler experience of peace and tranquility.
My elevation into the field I was now in had the subjective quality of remembering, as did all my experiences on the tour: I was reawakening to levels of reality that I had previously known but forgotten. Over and over again I was reawakening to a level of experience left behind long ago. Remembering, remembering. It was not about dying at all but waking up and remembering. I was then lifted into another “higher” or “larger” experiential field and then another. With each transition I entered a new level of quiet and bliss-filled peace. It was as though an amnesia lasting billions of years was being lifted from me layer by layer: The more I remembered, the larger I became. Wave after wave of awakening was pushing back the edges of my being. To remember more was to become more.
Finally I was lifted into a particularly spacious and peaceful dimension. As I remembered this dimension I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of homecoming and felt fully the tragedy of having forgotten this dimension for so long. I cannot describe how poignant this was. Being fully restored to this dimension would be worth any cost. I asked what had happened and It explained that we had left time. Then It said, “We never intended so many to get caught in time.” It felt like time was simply one of the many creative experiments of the multidimensional universe I was being shown.
Though these experiences were extraordinary in their own right, the most poignant aspect of today's session was not the discovered dimensions of the universe themselves but what my seeing and understanding them meant to the Consciousness I was with. It seemed to be so pleased to have someone to show Its work to. I felt that It had been waiting for billions of years for embodied consciousness to evolve to the point where we could at long last begin to see, understand, and appreciate what had been accomplished. I felt the loneliness of this Intelligence having created such a masterpiece and having no one to appreciate Its work, and I wept. I wept for its isolation and in awe of the profound love which had accepted this isolation as part of a larger plan. Behind creation lies a LOVE of extraordinary proportions, and all of existence is an expression of this love. The intelligence of the universe's design is equally matched by the depth of love that inspired it.
Somewhere in here I realized that I was not going to be able to take back with me the knowledge I had gathered on this journey. The Intelligence I was with also knew this, making our few hours of contact all the more precious to It. There was nothing I was going to be able to do with this knowledge except experience it now. My greatest service was simply to appreciate what I was seeing. It seemed extremely important to mirror existence back to its Creator in loving appreciation. To see, to understand, and to appreciate.