- Stanislav Grof, MD, PHD, is a psychiatrist with expenence over 30 years of research on states non-ordinary consciousness induced by psychedelic substances and various non-drug techniques. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he made his scientific studies, an MD degree at the School of Medicine, Charles University and a PHD degree in the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. His early research on the clinical use psychedelic drug were carried out at the Research Institute of Prague, where he was principal investigator of a program on the heuristic and therapeutic potential of LSD and other psychedelic substances. In 1967, he was invited as a member and clinical research by the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. After two years he decided to stay in America and continue his research as Chief of Psychiatric Research in Maryland and assistant professor in psychiatry at the Henry Phillips Clinic at Johns Hopkins. In 1973 he was invited by the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he lived until 1987 as a resident school writing, giving seminars and courses, and developed with his wife Christina, the Holotropic Breathwork, an innovative form of experiential psychiatry. Member of the Board of Directors of the Institute.
- For now lives in Mill Valley, CA, conducting workshops for professionals in Holotropic breath work and transpersonal psychology (Grof Transpersonal Training) and gives courses and seminars throughout the world. It is one of the founders and leaders of transpersonal psychology theory and founding President of the International Transpersonal Association. In this function has organized international conferences in the United States, India and Australia . I
now treat the issue of relations between spirituality and religion. I consider it extremely important that the difference between the two is very clear, before proceeding to consider the connections between science and spirituality, and that science and religion can never be synthesized, but it is indeed very easy to synthesize science with spirituality. Do not get confused and think that the fact that modern research on states of consciousness and transpersonal psychology re-discovered spirituality constitutes an endorsement of conventional religion, was rather just a re-discovery of spiritual experiences, such as experience of death / rebirth, past lives union with the universe, identification with certain animals. We will have seen during the demonstration Holotropic breathing that preceded this conference, the type of experience they had some of the participants, identification with nature, animals and others.
These experiences often bring with them new information on the subject of dealing: one can have a transpersonal experience with a lion, and as a result lions learn about much more than we would learn watching a movie or reading a book about lions. 0 we have an experience "out of body" in which we travel and see what is happening in other room in this building, or something happens 200 miles away, ie it is valid and legitimate experiences that can bring with them a large amount of information about the universe, which is beyond the purely intellectual and must in this sense, be taken seriously.
However, this type of transpersonal experience often occurs in areas of religious mystics, or monastic orders, whose members practice such as meditation, but do not have to do whatsoever with the Vatican, with hierarchies, with priests are valid experiences very personal and individual, which are perfectly compatible with science, as try to show later. Not to be confused with dogmatism, fundamentalism, and ritual of conventional churches, which are alien to spirituality as well as science. But from the point of view of psychology tranpersonal can see how there and distortion occurs: the home of almost all religions, lay spiritual experiences of the founders, saints, or prophets, who are the original source of that religion But later, when there is an established church, a series of other factors that cause a loss of connection to the original inspiration.
Continue reading ...
Steindl-Rast, who spoke earlier and compares this with the volcano: the original spiritual inspiration is the hot volcanic magma, where everything is alive removed, while the conventional church is, is the crust of lava cooled, that once was something, but is now a very different thing. This is how conventional churches encourage marriage among those who are its members, but also promote divisions in the world, among his parishioners and those who are not, Christians and pagans, Hindus and Muslims, leading to religious wars and other conflicts similar.
Each of the established churches have mystical branches: Christian mystics, the Sufi in Islam, Kabbalah and Hasidism in Judaism, and practitioners in these industries seeking direct experience of divinity, using techniques such as meditation, dancing, breathing, that lead them to experience the divine reality. This is what focuses the transpersonal psychology, which is not interested in religion, or things like the Crusades or the Inquisition, more related to issues of handling, control and power, of interest to historians, who have nothing to do with spirituality. It is even possible to imagine a church that has nothing to do with spirituality, is that constitute an active barrier against true spirituality. Carl Gustav Jung wrote that the function of most of the established churches is to protect the public from direct experience with God.
A friend of mine, Walter Houston Clark, well known professor who has written a text on the psychology of religion, after 20 years of teaching the subject, finally had a mystical experience, and could understand what it is that over who has been writing for many years.
could compare what happens in conventional churches with a vaccine, one goes to church on Sunday and get a vaccine to protect against experience real. You go with your children on Sunday at the church and spirituality can be filled with false condemning their neighbors who have not gone.
Spirituality requires direct experience of the divine dimension. And there are two main types of spiritual experiences: the first is immanent spirituality, that is, where everything appears normal, trees, people, sky, flowers, chairs around it appear as such, but in a sense, everything appears profoundly changed, as if the edges are melted, everything appears intensely alive, everything is integrated in a single field of vision, and creative energy, and even the most banal is divine creation, creation of an intelligence cosmic, but nothing is added and nothing is transformed except our own perception of it. A comparison would be to be looking at a television screen in black and white, and in which colors appear suddenly.
The second is the transcendent spirituality, which appear radically different, such as a vision of the Virgin Mary, or Kali, or paradise, or is a divine light, as often happens in cases near death . These are the two types of mystical experiences that interest us.
The "opening" spiritual come in two classes. One is, for example, in cases of depression, frustration and discouragement, a state of crisis where we see no way out and we are on the verge of suicide, when something happens suddenly, and transcend the crisis, as a kind of ego death. There is another possibility where, for example, we floating on a raft on the Colorado River, seeing the beautiful rock formations in the Grand Canyon and, suddenly, we can not tell where the pond ends and where does the self, we can not separate the rocks or the sky, and have a sense of universality and unity with everything around us. This can happen to artists in the scene, people listening to music, or visitors to places like the Taj Mahal, etc.
These are the experiences that Maslow called "Peak experiences" and they have much to do with addiction and cure of addiction, alcoholics and addicts for many, it can occur in unexpected places. Bill Wilson was in the hospital amid a severe crisis and this is the description of what happened:
"Now, I had nothing before him that was not death or madness, this was the end, the point where he would take the final step, the total darkness was threatening him, and in desperation and helplessness, cried, would do anything, anything, to save me! had reached a state of total surrender, and said: If they there is a god, that is left show! And then Bill himself describes: Suddenly my room was invaded by an incredibly intense light, while I was filled with an indescribable ecstasy, I was situated on top of a mountain where the wind was blowing air but not the spirit which introduced through me in great gusts and a thought came to me incontrovertible: You're a free man! I felt a feeling of great peace and I was intensely aware of the present moment, that I had formed a sea of \u200b\u200bpure spirit. He was lying on the banks of a new world, and for the first time I felt that belonged to him. I knew I could love and be loved. "
After this point, never again to drink alcohol.
This is an example of the emphasis that Alcoholics Anonymous movement was originally on direct experience. Then came what William James called the "educational change", referring to the change less dramatically and more slowly through everyday practices.
To summarize, the urge towards spiritual transcendence is a very important trend in human beings, something like the desire for sex, but much deeper and more fundamental, and, somehow, addiction has a lot to do with this trend, as if it were a distorted manifestation, unrecognizable of this fundamental trend. Many participants in our programs Holotropic breathing after experiencing this kind of spiritual experience, say that that was precisely what they were like, no alcohol or heroin, which involve a caricature with reduced clarity or intellect, but precisely this type of spiritual experience that brings feelings of peace, richness of cosmic insights, clarity and serenity.
We are now entering the last part of my presentation, to be brief, but would require almost an entire conference, as I did recently in Bombay, namely, the convergence between science and spirituality. My own book on this entitled "Beyond the Brain." So Western science, mechanistic, materialistic, unable to distinguish between spirituality and religion. The great spiritual philosophies such as Yoga, Tibetan Vajrayana, Taoism, and Sufism, all would be treated like a string of folk superstitions or fundamentalist nonsense, unable to discern that this is something quite different. Similarly, even in psychiatry, traditional science can not distinguish between mysticism and psychosis, so any direct experience of the spiritual dimension is seen as something abnormal, like a psychosis typically be treated with medication. Has written a series of articles and work on what should be the correct diagnosis psychopathology of individuals such as Jesus, Mohammed or Maharsi, or Aurobindo is anthropological literature on the imbalances and what to do with the shamans, if they are traveling psychotic or schizophrenic, or hysterical, or epileptic. Frank Alexander, an eminent psychoanalyst, has described meditation as an artificial form of catatonia, as if one ought not think unless you have a pathological temper. So spirituality, from the perspective of traditional Western science, would be a case of poor education, poor information, inability to understand the material world in which there is no room for the spirit, something to do with superstition, and if it occurs in people of high intellectual level, would be considered a disease, something not resolved at an early age that is still pending, so I think God a relationship with our father defective blood. And a direct spiritual experience, would be interpreted as a severe disease.
This type of approach has big problems because, first, it ignores the observation and personal experience in transpersonal situations. If using this approach, we must affirm that this type of transpersonal experiences simply do not exist in our universe. This happens frequently in the case of the experiences out-of-body, where there is ample evidence of people who are, for example, near death, lying with closed eyes, while a medical team tries to save or revive them and then their consciousness is separated, and the person sees his own body from a distance, perhaps from near the ceiling, or can see things happening in another room or 200 miles away, and then, when raised, returned to the body awareness and the person can tell what he saw. There are even documented cases of people who could see those scenes and events, full-color optically, being medically blind, and when they returned or resurrected returned to their original state of blindness. This is certainly a challenge to the conventional scientific wisdom. Anyone who has been trained in a Newtonian Cartesian course deny that this type of experience may exist in this universe. Think that there must have been some mistake. There is a need to deny its existence by the subliminal fear that if one believes in them, all the conventional system in which we would collapse. It is better to ignore and, with it, ignoring the role of consciousness in relation to the matter. Very few are willing to face these questions.
So the only way they can deal with this situation simply delete the entire field of transpersonal experiences as an object worthy of study. The mere assertion that modern Western science does matter is that the only reality in the universe is inherently impossible to prove. Most important in western science is that facts can be demonstrated and replicated, and this hypothesis can not be proved, no matter the form, and remains a metaphysical statement. Transpersonal experiences instead left to intuit that there is a spiritual reality and in no case imply that there is only material.
Another problem with this approach is that it is unlawful extrapolation of physics to psychology, starting with a Newtonian universe of physical requirements which are then fit to psychologists, dictating what they can see or not see, do or not do, say or not say. This is not acceptable in conventional science, where facts must be observed and taking data, and then propose a hypothesis to explain the observations, but which also can not make predictions about something that has not been observed.
An additional problem associated with this way of thinking is that it creates confusion between the map and territory. Korzybski escr IBIO extensively on this, and Gregory Bateson with his type logic. The latter explained that the theory científica es como un mapa, y la realidad descrita es como el territorio, y estas dos cosas no deben ser confundidas. Bateson decía que si los científicos continúan cometiendo el error de confundirlas, llegará un momento en que al entrar en un restaurante, se comerán el menú en vez de la comida.
Quiero mencionar una cosa más, como Wilber decía, que si parece existir un conflicto entre ciencia y espiritualidad, debe tratarse de falsa ciencia o falsa espiritualidad; que si ambas son legítimas, no existe conflicto.
Y para terminar, algo muy prometedor e interesante es que en una serie de recientes descubrimientos en una variedad de disciplinas que representan un nuevo panorama, es decir un new paradigm, it appears perfectly compatible with transpersonal psychology. The latter is incompatible with a Cartesian-Newtonian view, but more and more compatible with the new science is discovering. Only mention some cases: modern physics teaches us the general unity of the universe, where consciousness has a different role than we thought, much closer to that described by the great mystics, in biology with Rupert Sheldrake and his idea of \u200b\u200bthe fields morphogenetic, Western science has never adequately dealt with the idea of \u200b\u200bform, order and norm. This means that the world is beginning to be seen as an incredible work of art, Thus, with respect, which can not be explained only in materialistic terms. As an analogy, it would be impossible to describe the Mona Lisa as a pure chemical composition of elements: it would lose the real meaning of this painting as a work of art. Bateson, meanwhile, drew the attention to this in a paper entitled "Cybernetics of the Self ', a theory of alcoholism, describing the death of the ego as the beginning of the cure.
The new paradigm describes everything in the universe as a product of a cosmic intelligence, elanima Mundi, a higher power, which can be conceived in terms of modern science. Returning to my passion, I think if you have this new scientific approach in psychiatry and therapy, we can achieve great advances in the treatment of addictions, in the treatment of persons experiencing psycho-spiritual crisis, and finally the resolution of the global crisis.
