I’m 61 and used psilocybin (in the personal circle of your diagram) through micro and several macro doses and for about 5 years in order continue healing from significant and harsh childhood trauma (aged 0-17). It was the most powerful tool of all I had amassed throughout my life and it helped me greatly to see so much more clearly. I was also able to withdraw from 30 years of SSRIs through my psilocybin use and that I know now stunted my growth as a human.
I am a spiritual person, practice a faith, and have a deep prayer practice that has also brought me much clarity, hope, comfort.
Excellent article and interview also very synchronistic as I happened to be exploring some of Tim Freke's material on YouTube yesterday around the nihilism of certain non duality teachings (I've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable and disturbed by much of it myself). I noticed your recent interview which is what led me to Tim in the first place and decided to rewatch. I then explored his What is Life podcast and out of the dozens of episodes guess which guest interview I chose to watch from 5 years ago!!!! I was already familiar with Chris and he is someone who struck me as having immense integrity, depth and love so was intrigued to hear their conversation. I very much appreciate your posts and restacks Tom, keep up the great work.
Suddenly my sight became impossibly sharp. Colors, shades, and textures were vividly distinct; looking at my hands, I could see every pore at the base of each hair follicle. Dust floated in the air with crystalline precision. I could count the leaves on a tree. After about ten minutes the clarity vanished, and my vision returned to normal. That was the moment I understood I had been seeing through the eyes of the Future Human; a glimpse of how our physical and perceptual capacities are being refined and brought forward by the universe.
I had this experience in the one time I took LSD 25 years ago. I went from a bad reaction in a nightclub out into the world at 5am in Sydney sunlight and I swear I could see and feel the sap running through the leaves in the trees and blood pumping through people, and every glint on the harbour took my breathe away. I can still feel in those moments all these years later 😳
I always wonder about past-life claims… how can anyone know the “past life” they see is theirs?
Nothing personal actually carries forward. The ego changes from year to year in this life — why would it persist across lifetimes?
The only thing that ever feels the same from birth until now is the inner, immutable awareness — the part you can feel in the chest, the still presence that never changes.
But that piece is identical in everyone.
So if anything “continues,” it’s not personal. It doesn’t belong to a story or identity.
Which means any “past life” you see could just as easily be someone else’s — because nothing in that life is you. The ego doesn’t survive, memories don’t survive, personality doesn’t survive.
If reincarnation were real, the only thing that would go forward is the same universal awareness everyone shares… which makes past-life trauma or personal reincarnation logically impossible.
From my own experience with awareness, nothing about personal reincarnation fits the actual mechanics of how the self dissolves.
I’m not exactly sure what that means. It sounds poetic, but it doesn’t land in my body as something real.
For me, what actually happened wasn’t porosity — it was that the boundary between ‘me’ and everything else dissolved. And once that dissolves, the idea of a personal past life becomes impossible, because there’s no personal container left to carry anything forward.
I don’t know what everyone else is searching for, but if the goal is peace in the mind and body, I’ve found you can’t get there through thinking alone. The feeling component is essential.
I wrote a quick overview of the structure I discovered through direct experience. It’s raw, not polished, and my model keeps updating — but it might clarify where I’m coming from:
Sounds good. I have to add a bunch of recent revelations and experiences when I get home from traveling next week. Let me know where to send it once I get it updated.
- I like that you approach the subject with some acknowledgment that there’s no objective way to judge the claims
- but you also do tend to write in a non-skeptical way the farther you go about those claims. That’s probably good practically (it would be annoying to disclaim every other sentence that “we don’t know if this is true”), but I’m always cautious of new-agey bs like crystal healing that just gets passed on without any challenge
- speaking of new ageyness, I do think the subject itself is intriguing. Can we learn more about ourselves or reality by altering our consciousness? I believe so, and from personal experience, it can be helpful to get the mind “unrestrained” in one form or another from the way it’s narrowly bound day-to-day. It seems the brain created a consciousness which, perhaps by definition, means it can handle any arbitrary concept, but then evolution limited that mind to the task at hand: gathering berries and whatnot. But when you remove one guardrail or another you open a floodgate to some aberrant form of experience or another, and these experiences are good even if they simply help the perceiver to understand what the limits were in the first place, though often they also can lead to some understanding that’s perhaps only achieved (or, more easily achieved) by unconstraining the mind in this way
- which brings me to the list of the states of mind somewhere down the article. I don’t believe, personally, that there is some kind of actual external reality that you can access via psychedelics. However, it is possible that any unconstrained mind, anywhere in the universe, may - because of the aforementioned “definition of consciousness” idea - always perceive the same underlying deep truth, like a kind of universal language of consciousness, the same way that the truth of mathematics is available to all intelligences everywhere.
- it’s in that light that I think he really seems well suited to the task, and that undertaking the mission which he did (being a “psychonaut” of his caliber) is a great service to us. Because he was able to not be terrified to the point that he lost his mind or could not cope with the traumas which I do believe anyone - any mind - would face when taking the training wheels off of one’s consciousness in this way. Most people trip balls and it alters them forever. This guy went back and mapped it and worked through it
- what he found (in those levels of consciousness I mentioned) reminded me of how I, in my small way, have talked about how easy it is for people to experience some trauma - or, ironically, a traumatic reaction or thought within oneself - and then become so distressed that they can’t move on. It seems like this is the most common state - mind frightened of itself. But I’ve talked about how we can also develop strategies and understanding that let us face those difficult, sometimes dark corners of experience, and I feel that each time I have emerged stronger and more capable of facing the next challenges ahead. And his levels reflect this to a great degree to me, which makes me believe strongly in him and his experience of them. I know how hard it can be to face and push through and adapt and make peace with these experiences, and he did this, spent years at those “levels”, and must have been so deliberate about actively controlling his fear and confusion and letting those feelings pass through him and I can only imagine the impossible challenge of that. That makes me so grateful to be able to learn from what he saw on his journey through the underworld, and his states of consciousness must bear great truth
- finally (for now), the fact that he identified the “diamond mind” as being the same as some Buddhist meditation plane, is intriguing. How similar are these, really? If they are the “same”, how did the Buddhists get there? Were they taking psychedelics? I’ve never heard that. Can you achieve this through meditation and practice alone? That would be wild. Even if only the same if taking some artistic license, it’s still kinda amazing
One thing I always think when considering the concept of reincarnation is the explosion of the earths population - these can’t all be reincarnations as there weren’t enough people before?
Hi Tom, I'm delighted to run across this piece today as it dovetails with longings for a more luminous and buoyant perspective as I muddle along in my own writing process. I feel a pang of envy for men like Chris who have had the courage and wherewithal to make this kind of exploration, and the sense of inner authority to put it out into the world. They're exploring inner life and subjective experience with a certain amount of impunity, going boldly where some scientific angels fear to tread. Some of us have also been paddling along in private life, expanding our mystical experience by fractal increments day by day. For example, I know beyond any doubt that the trillions of living cells that make up my body do so willingly, by choice. They choose to belong to the intelligent biological system maintained by the Me of me, who chose this life, this puzzle I'm working, this voice writing now. And as I write, I sense the presence of other selves, ranged across the associative web in my extraconscious mind, who participate in this conversation with you, and the You of you, as we make contact right now. Your Readers, my Readers, and various other Selves are interested in these conversations, this collaboration, curious to find out what happens next... Thanks for opening this leading edge!
Thanks so much Alden. I myself was pretty gratified when Chris said his advice to listeners was simply to read (not, for example, smoke DMT). It just reinforces that you can take this slowly, and let the universe reveal its mysteries to you. I do wrestle with my fear of direct eperience, but also am holding that fear, I hope, with curiosity. With love, TM
Oh yeah. No socks knocked off, please. I like the idea that Small is Big, that we can allow and enjoy the fractal version of the expansive experience that can be most easily integrated. Which then bumps up the longing, as does reading along these lines. I find the longing helps tune one's inner compass, as does the enjoyment. I'm going to putter around in your archive to see what else you're reading... Thanks!
Bravo! Great article. Bache didn’t achieve enlightenment by microdosing LSD 73 times. He overdosed 73 times and broke the threshold of the finite mind, realizing fully the nature of the Diamond Mind. 💎
The most interesting part to me is the claim that the "medium matters", and that these states can generate a kind of perceptual authority that’s hard to translate into ordinary language without either flattening it or over symbolizing it. That translation gap feels like where a lot of misunderstanding enters.
I had all of these same experiences using ketamine. I, unlike this man, did not see the necessity to reinvent the wheel, instead I took it back to the source. The sources are the yogic sciences and Trika Shaivism. His model with the 5 circles is the same as the 5 sheaths known as the koshas.
All of what he describes is truth and it is nice to see another psychonaut who has similar experiences in the astral realm and beyond.
I was also fortunately graced by Maa Kundalini who healed my body, mind, and soul.
If anyone has the read Carl Jung's Red Book you would get a great description, through the combination of his imagination and knowledge of mythology and folklore, of his descent into the underworld and ascent to the finer dimensions of reality through myth telling.
His psychological framework again mirrors concepts in Shaivism. The balancing of the anima and animus on the way to individuation is the same as reuniting Shakti with Shiva through the ascent of Kundalini energy through the psychic centers (chakras). When I started my process my goal was to achieve this balance, using the half male (right side is Shiva), half female (left side is Parvati) as my deity of worship. This form is known as Ardhanarishvara.
I chuckle every time I read these proclamations from psychedelic taking westerners that mirror Tantric principals that were described 1,000s of years ago. Why does no one ever go back to the source? Is it ego to want to create something to put their name on or just ignorance of the ancient wisdom? I'd hate to attribute malice to something that is an oversight.
He was a professor of religious studies, and very often relates back his direct experience to religious frameworks. I don’t really understand why that would annoy you in anyway, I feel in fact that it would reinforce the idea that your framework was more robust. It’s one thing having someone talk about a tradition this detailed and profound, and it’s another thing having a single living person that claims to have experienced it in precision and detail.
It isn't annoying, I laugh when I recognize it. It just seems like some white people need to hear it from a white person. Not a judgement, just an observation.
I'll have to dive into some of his work to see if he takes it back to its origin or if he, like many others, go to 2-3,000 years ago and stops.
I do get aggravated when westerners only go back as far as the Bible and Jesus, like it is the be all end all of spiritual instruction (not saying that is what he is doing). This is where I get a bit bothered by the lack of research and appropriate attribution. Though I suppose it shouldn't bother m me. It is the Universe revealing itself to someone who can convey the revelations to others.
Probably a projection on my part as I feel I should be sharing my experiences in some way and haven't really done so as of yet. I kind of don't see the purpose I guess when there are folks already out there sharing similar experiences.
I’m 61 and used psilocybin (in the personal circle of your diagram) through micro and several macro doses and for about 5 years in order continue healing from significant and harsh childhood trauma (aged 0-17). It was the most powerful tool of all I had amassed throughout my life and it helped me greatly to see so much more clearly. I was also able to withdraw from 30 years of SSRIs through my psilocybin use and that I know now stunted my growth as a human.
I am a spiritual person, practice a faith, and have a deep prayer practice that has also brought me much clarity, hope, comfort.
Thanks for sharing: I am so glad that was the experience you’ve had.
Mushrooms saved my life! A lifetime struggle with depression and alcoholism left me, I have been able to change my thinking and enjoy my life.
Wonderful to hear that Dave
Excellent article and interview also very synchronistic as I happened to be exploring some of Tim Freke's material on YouTube yesterday around the nihilism of certain non duality teachings (I've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable and disturbed by much of it myself). I noticed your recent interview which is what led me to Tim in the first place and decided to rewatch. I then explored his What is Life podcast and out of the dozens of episodes guess which guest interview I chose to watch from 5 years ago!!!! I was already familiar with Chris and he is someone who struck me as having immense integrity, depth and love so was intrigued to hear their conversation. I very much appreciate your posts and restacks Tom, keep up the great work.
Wait did Tim interview Chris?! It’s amazing how many people he has met.
Yes indeed he has, it was an enjoyable conversation.
Suddenly my sight became impossibly sharp. Colors, shades, and textures were vividly distinct; looking at my hands, I could see every pore at the base of each hair follicle. Dust floated in the air with crystalline precision. I could count the leaves on a tree. After about ten minutes the clarity vanished, and my vision returned to normal. That was the moment I understood I had been seeing through the eyes of the Future Human; a glimpse of how our physical and perceptual capacities are being refined and brought forward by the universe.
I had this experience in the one time I took LSD 25 years ago. I went from a bad reaction in a nightclub out into the world at 5am in Sydney sunlight and I swear I could see and feel the sap running through the leaves in the trees and blood pumping through people, and every glint on the harbour took my breathe away. I can still feel in those moments all these years later 😳
I always wonder about past-life claims… how can anyone know the “past life” they see is theirs?
Nothing personal actually carries forward. The ego changes from year to year in this life — why would it persist across lifetimes?
The only thing that ever feels the same from birth until now is the inner, immutable awareness — the part you can feel in the chest, the still presence that never changes.
But that piece is identical in everyone.
So if anything “continues,” it’s not personal. It doesn’t belong to a story or identity.
Which means any “past life” you see could just as easily be someone else’s — because nothing in that life is you. The ego doesn’t survive, memories don’t survive, personality doesn’t survive.
If reincarnation were real, the only thing that would go forward is the same universal awareness everyone shares… which makes past-life trauma or personal reincarnation logically impossible.
From my own experience with awareness, nothing about personal reincarnation fits the actual mechanics of how the self dissolves.
It’s a great point and one I think about a lot. You might just be super porous to the collective.
“Super porous to the collective”
I’m not exactly sure what that means. It sounds poetic, but it doesn’t land in my body as something real.
For me, what actually happened wasn’t porosity — it was that the boundary between ‘me’ and everything else dissolved. And once that dissolves, the idea of a personal past life becomes impossible, because there’s no personal container left to carry anything forward.
I don’t know what everyone else is searching for, but if the goal is peace in the mind and body, I’ve found you can’t get there through thinking alone. The feeling component is essential.
I wrote a quick overview of the structure I discovered through direct experience. It’s raw, not polished, and my model keeps updating — but it might clarify where I’m coming from:
https://open.substack.com/pub/lanafly/p/awareness-body-and-mind-the-mechanism
Sounds good. I have to add a bunch of recent revelations and experiences when I get home from traveling next week. Let me know where to send it once I get it updated.
A few thoughts here (I’m still reading):
- I like that you approach the subject with some acknowledgment that there’s no objective way to judge the claims
- but you also do tend to write in a non-skeptical way the farther you go about those claims. That’s probably good practically (it would be annoying to disclaim every other sentence that “we don’t know if this is true”), but I’m always cautious of new-agey bs like crystal healing that just gets passed on without any challenge
- speaking of new ageyness, I do think the subject itself is intriguing. Can we learn more about ourselves or reality by altering our consciousness? I believe so, and from personal experience, it can be helpful to get the mind “unrestrained” in one form or another from the way it’s narrowly bound day-to-day. It seems the brain created a consciousness which, perhaps by definition, means it can handle any arbitrary concept, but then evolution limited that mind to the task at hand: gathering berries and whatnot. But when you remove one guardrail or another you open a floodgate to some aberrant form of experience or another, and these experiences are good even if they simply help the perceiver to understand what the limits were in the first place, though often they also can lead to some understanding that’s perhaps only achieved (or, more easily achieved) by unconstraining the mind in this way
- which brings me to the list of the states of mind somewhere down the article. I don’t believe, personally, that there is some kind of actual external reality that you can access via psychedelics. However, it is possible that any unconstrained mind, anywhere in the universe, may - because of the aforementioned “definition of consciousness” idea - always perceive the same underlying deep truth, like a kind of universal language of consciousness, the same way that the truth of mathematics is available to all intelligences everywhere.
- it’s in that light that I think he really seems well suited to the task, and that undertaking the mission which he did (being a “psychonaut” of his caliber) is a great service to us. Because he was able to not be terrified to the point that he lost his mind or could not cope with the traumas which I do believe anyone - any mind - would face when taking the training wheels off of one’s consciousness in this way. Most people trip balls and it alters them forever. This guy went back and mapped it and worked through it
- what he found (in those levels of consciousness I mentioned) reminded me of how I, in my small way, have talked about how easy it is for people to experience some trauma - or, ironically, a traumatic reaction or thought within oneself - and then become so distressed that they can’t move on. It seems like this is the most common state - mind frightened of itself. But I’ve talked about how we can also develop strategies and understanding that let us face those difficult, sometimes dark corners of experience, and I feel that each time I have emerged stronger and more capable of facing the next challenges ahead. And his levels reflect this to a great degree to me, which makes me believe strongly in him and his experience of them. I know how hard it can be to face and push through and adapt and make peace with these experiences, and he did this, spent years at those “levels”, and must have been so deliberate about actively controlling his fear and confusion and letting those feelings pass through him and I can only imagine the impossible challenge of that. That makes me so grateful to be able to learn from what he saw on his journey through the underworld, and his states of consciousness must bear great truth
- finally (for now), the fact that he identified the “diamond mind” as being the same as some Buddhist meditation plane, is intriguing. How similar are these, really? If they are the “same”, how did the Buddhists get there? Were they taking psychedelics? I’ve never heard that. Can you achieve this through meditation and practice alone? That would be wild. Even if only the same if taking some artistic license, it’s still kinda amazing
He said it at the beginning of his book, but a little dose maybe more powerful than higher dose. I strongly believe so
One thing I always think when considering the concept of reincarnation is the explosion of the earths population - these can’t all be reincarnations as there weren’t enough people before?
Well: is the earth a closed system or does it allow souls from other places?
Hi Tom, I'm delighted to run across this piece today as it dovetails with longings for a more luminous and buoyant perspective as I muddle along in my own writing process. I feel a pang of envy for men like Chris who have had the courage and wherewithal to make this kind of exploration, and the sense of inner authority to put it out into the world. They're exploring inner life and subjective experience with a certain amount of impunity, going boldly where some scientific angels fear to tread. Some of us have also been paddling along in private life, expanding our mystical experience by fractal increments day by day. For example, I know beyond any doubt that the trillions of living cells that make up my body do so willingly, by choice. They choose to belong to the intelligent biological system maintained by the Me of me, who chose this life, this puzzle I'm working, this voice writing now. And as I write, I sense the presence of other selves, ranged across the associative web in my extraconscious mind, who participate in this conversation with you, and the You of you, as we make contact right now. Your Readers, my Readers, and various other Selves are interested in these conversations, this collaboration, curious to find out what happens next... Thanks for opening this leading edge!
Thanks so much Alden. I myself was pretty gratified when Chris said his advice to listeners was simply to read (not, for example, smoke DMT). It just reinforces that you can take this slowly, and let the universe reveal its mysteries to you. I do wrestle with my fear of direct eperience, but also am holding that fear, I hope, with curiosity. With love, TM
Oh yeah. No socks knocked off, please. I like the idea that Small is Big, that we can allow and enjoy the fractal version of the expansive experience that can be most easily integrated. Which then bumps up the longing, as does reading along these lines. I find the longing helps tune one's inner compass, as does the enjoyment. I'm going to putter around in your archive to see what else you're reading... Thanks!
I read this excellent article while listening to Aes Dana Radio on Spotify. It was the perfect backdrop. Thanks for posting.
Thanks for reading!
Sensational. Truly. Thank you.
Thank you, he’s SO SPECIAL
And, both of you asked such good questions.
Devin is a legend
Indeed. Honestly the most profound interview you've done to date. His luminous wisdom blew me away.
Bravo! Great article. Bache didn’t achieve enlightenment by microdosing LSD 73 times. He overdosed 73 times and broke the threshold of the finite mind, realizing fully the nature of the Diamond Mind. 💎
For me it actually was about getting somewhere … not outward, but inward.
And surprisingly, it wasn’t complicated.
All I had to do was let myself feel compassion in my body… right there in the chest.
That became like a car that took me straight to the deepest center of awareness.
And the more I stayed there, the more everything unnecessary just fell away.
Peace wasn’t something I reached by exploring layers… it was something that opened when I dissolved.
Enjoyed the experience of reading this. More please!
The most interesting part to me is the claim that the "medium matters", and that these states can generate a kind of perceptual authority that’s hard to translate into ordinary language without either flattening it or over symbolizing it. That translation gap feels like where a lot of misunderstanding enters.
I had all of these same experiences using ketamine. I, unlike this man, did not see the necessity to reinvent the wheel, instead I took it back to the source. The sources are the yogic sciences and Trika Shaivism. His model with the 5 circles is the same as the 5 sheaths known as the koshas.
All of what he describes is truth and it is nice to see another psychonaut who has similar experiences in the astral realm and beyond.
I was also fortunately graced by Maa Kundalini who healed my body, mind, and soul.
If anyone has the read Carl Jung's Red Book you would get a great description, through the combination of his imagination and knowledge of mythology and folklore, of his descent into the underworld and ascent to the finer dimensions of reality through myth telling.
His psychological framework again mirrors concepts in Shaivism. The balancing of the anima and animus on the way to individuation is the same as reuniting Shakti with Shiva through the ascent of Kundalini energy through the psychic centers (chakras). When I started my process my goal was to achieve this balance, using the half male (right side is Shiva), half female (left side is Parvati) as my deity of worship. This form is known as Ardhanarishvara.
I chuckle every time I read these proclamations from psychedelic taking westerners that mirror Tantric principals that were described 1,000s of years ago. Why does no one ever go back to the source? Is it ego to want to create something to put their name on or just ignorance of the ancient wisdom? I'd hate to attribute malice to something that is an oversight.
He was a professor of religious studies, and very often relates back his direct experience to religious frameworks. I don’t really understand why that would annoy you in anyway, I feel in fact that it would reinforce the idea that your framework was more robust. It’s one thing having someone talk about a tradition this detailed and profound, and it’s another thing having a single living person that claims to have experienced it in precision and detail.
It isn't annoying, I laugh when I recognize it. It just seems like some white people need to hear it from a white person. Not a judgement, just an observation.
I'll have to dive into some of his work to see if he takes it back to its origin or if he, like many others, go to 2-3,000 years ago and stops.
I do get aggravated when westerners only go back as far as the Bible and Jesus, like it is the be all end all of spiritual instruction (not saying that is what he is doing). This is where I get a bit bothered by the lack of research and appropriate attribution. Though I suppose it shouldn't bother m me. It is the Universe revealing itself to someone who can convey the revelations to others.
Probably a projection on my part as I feel I should be sharing my experiences in some way and haven't really done so as of yet. I kind of don't see the purpose I guess when there are folks already out there sharing similar experiences.
I’d be really excited to read what you want to share