Stanislav Grof Quotes

Patients reported that their psychedelic sessions were an invaluable experiential training for dying.

The study of consciousness that can extend beyond the body is extremely important for the issue of survival, since it is this part of human personality that would be likely to survive death.

Perinatal phenomena occur in four distinct experiential patterns, which I call the Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs). Each of the four matrices is closely related to one of the four consecutive periods of biological delivery. At each of these stages, the baby undergoes experiences that are characterized by specific emotions and physical feelings; each of these stages also seems to be associated with specific symbolic images. These come to represent highly individualized pyschospiritual blueprints that guide the way we experience our lives. They may be reflected in individual and social psychopathology or in religion, art, philosophy, politics, and other areas of life. And, or course, we can gain access to these psychospiritual blueprints through non-ordinary states of consciousness, which allow us to see the guiding forces of our lives much more clearly.

According to Freudian psychology, the ego is that part of us that allows us to correctly perceive external reality and function well in everyday life. People who have this concept of the ego frequently look upon the ego death as a frightening and tremendously negative event--as the loss of ability to operate in the world. However, what really dies in this process is that part of us that holds a basically paranoid view of ourselves and of the world around. Alan Watts called this aspect, which involves a sense of absolute separateness from everything else, "skin-encapsulated ego." It is made up of the internal perceptions of our lives that we learned during the struggle in the birth canal and during various painful encounters after birth.

If consciousness can function independently of the body during one's lifetime, it could be able to do the same after death.

As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions.

The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species.

[B]y banning psychedelic research we have not only given up the study of an interesting drug or group of substances, but also abandoned one of the most promising approaches to the understanding of the human mind and consciousness.

Our ability to leave our physical bodies and travel to other places has been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments by researchers with good academic credentials. These include Charles Tart at the University of California in Davis, and Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Reesearch Institute. Russell Targ's research of "remote viewing" involves two people. The "viewer" stays in a carefully controlled laboratory environment while a "beacon" person is located somewhere outside that vicinity. A computer then selects a location that is unknown to the viewer.
The beacon person is secretly notified where he or she is to go, based on the computer's random selection of a site. After the beacon person gets to the site, the viewer is asked to describe what the beacon person is seeing. The distance between the beacon person and the viewer appears to have no significant effect on the viewer's ability to accurately describe the site; the distance between them can be a few blocks or many thousand miles. In several successful attempts, a Soviet psychic not only accurately described the location of Targ's associate Keith Harary who acted as a beacon, he also described what Harary would see at the next computer-selected site--even before he got there or knew what he would see!

It is possible to transcend the usual limitations of the body, ego, space, and linear time.

A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know.

It is possible to see the intermediate state between lives as being in a way more important than incarnate existence.

Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness.

Philemon explained how Jung treated thoughts as though they were generated by himself, while for Philemon thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air. Jung concluded that Philemon taught him psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. This helped Jung to understand that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend.

In the kind of world we have today, transformation of humanity might well be our only real hope for survival.

Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.

Consciousness after death demonstrates the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body.

I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.

Experiences of BPM II are best characterized by the triad: fear of death, fear of never coming back, and fear of going crazy.

The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness.

The psyche of the individual is commensurate with the totality of creative energy. This requires a most radical revision of Western psychology.

Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality
itself.

Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness.

There are people who can start having very powerful experiences without taking psychedelics. It can happen against their will. This is a universal phenomenon.

The beliefs concerning reincarnation have great ethical impact on human life and our relationship to the world.

An important consequence of freeing oneself from the fear of death is a radical opening to spirituality of a universal and non-denominational type.

Western science is approaching a paradigm shift of unprecedented proportions, one that will change our concepts of reality and of human nature, bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and modern science, and reconcile the differences between Eastern spirituality and Western pragmatism.

When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.

I have to say I regretted giving up animated movies.

Many instances exist of small children who seem to remember and describe their previous life in another body, another place, and with other people. These memories emerge usually shortly after these children begin to talk.

The transpersonal experiences revealing the Earth as an intelligent, conscious entity are corroborated by scientific evidence. Gregory Bateson, who created a brilliant synthesis of cybernetics, information and systems theory, the theory of evolution, anthropology, and psychology came to the conclusion that it was logically inevitable to assume that mental processes occurred at all levels in any system or natural phenomenon of sufficient complexity. He believed that mental processes are present in cells, organs, tissues, organisms, animal and human groups, eco-systems, and even the earth and universe as a whole.

The key experiential approach I now use to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness and gain access to the unconscious and superconscious psyche is Holotropic Breathwork, which I have developed jointly with Christina over the last fifteen years. This seemingly simple process, combining breathing, evocative music and other forms of sound, body work, and artistic expression, has an extraordinary potential for opening the way for exploring the entire spectrum of the inner world.

Walt Disney was my great hero.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

According to materialistic science, any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of the genes.

The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual's way of being in the world.

The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies, various mystical traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal wisdom, as well as the widespread psychedelic experimentation during the stormy 1960s, made it absolutely clear that a comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to include observations from such areas as mystical states; cosmic consciousness; psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity; and religious, artistic, and scientific inspiration.

It is essential that we raise the image of sex, which is currently seen as a purely biological affair and often portrayed in its worst manifestations, to that of a spiritually based activity.

I believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in.

LSD is a unique and powerful tool for the exploration of the human mind and human nature. Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have not yet been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry. They also reveal new possibilities and mechanisms of therapeutic change and personality transformation.

Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.

The enemy is typically depicted as a dangerous octopus, a vicious dragon, a multiheaded hydra, a giant venomous tarantula, or an engulfing Leviathan. Other frequently used symbols include vicious predatory felines or birds, monstrous sharks, and ominous snakes, particularly vipers and boa constrictors. Scenes depicting strangulation or crushing, ominous whirlpools, and treacherous quicksands also abound in pictures from the time of wars, revolutions, and political crises. The juxtaposition of paintings from non-ordinary states of consciousness that depict perinatal experiences with the historical pictorial documentation collected by Lloyd de Mause and Sam Keen offer strong evidence for the perinatal roots of human violence.

Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth.

The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped.

This is an extraordinary book of unique psychological power. It reveals not only scholarship and sophistication of the author, but deep and intimate knowledge of the recesses of the human psyche. By masterful juxtaposition of evocative images, poetry, and selected quotes from scholars, Flesh and Blood seems to engage both the right and left hemispheres in an unprecedented dialogue. The result is a multi-dimensional, almost holographic picture of the primordial foundations of the human mind.

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

It became much more complicated politically to work with psychedelics because of the unsupervised experimentation with psychedelics, particularly among young people.

The motif of death plays an important role the human psyche in connection with archetypal and karmic material.

Dying people in pre-industrial cultures typically died in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe.

Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

Research challenges the materialistic understanding of death, according to which biological death represents the final end of existence and of all conscious activity.

A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm.

Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious.

He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.

The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death.