The agony and the ecstasy: through hell to get to heaven on a life-changing LSD odyssey

‘With each round of death and rebirth, I was being plunged deeper into the furnace of creation.’

Christopher Bache, a professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, Ohio, where he taught for 33 years, made himself a ‘living experiment’ with 73 high-dose LSD sessions over a 20-year period to explore the nature of mind, immersing himself in a psychedelic saga kept secret from his students and academic colleagues.

Now, with great candour and lucidity, in LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven (Park Street Press, US $19.99 / UK £15.50, November 2019), Bache describes vividly his life-changing odyssey, from 1979–99, which he says took him beyond self-transformation to foresee the collective transformation of the human race.

Systematically, session by session, he recounts his journey along a ‘spiral of death and rebirth’, from individual consciousness to collective consciousness and the creative intelligence of the universe, to recognition of ‘divine oneness’ and encounters with a ‘Diamond Luminosity’ beyond cyclic existence.