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Excerpt from "The Holotropic Mind" |
by Stanislav Grof, M.D.
During this phase of the experiment, I was hit by a radiance that
seemed comparable to the light at the epicenter of an atomic
explosion, or possibly the supernatural light described in Eastern
scriptures that appears at the moment of death. This thunderbolt of
light catapulted me from my body. I lost all awareness of the research
assistant, the laboratory, and any detail of my life as a doctor in
Prague.
There was no doubt in my mind that was I was experiencing was very
close to experiences of “cosmic consciousness” I had read about in the
great mystical scriptures of the world. In psychiatric handbooks, such
states were defined as manifestations of severe pathology. In the
midst of it I knew that the experience was not the result of a
psychosis brought on by the substance, but a glimpse into a world
beyond ordinary reality.
The Divine had manifested itself and had taken over my life in a
modern laboratory in the middle of a serious scientific experiment in
a Communist country with a substance produced in the test tube of a
20th century chemist!
During the early period of my research, I found my worldview
undermined by daily exposure to experiences that could not be
explained in terms of my old belief system. My clients experienced
psychological death and rebirth, feelings of oneness with all
humanity, nature, and the cosmos. Some reported “past-life”
experiences whose historical accuracy could later be confirmed.
When the process moved beyond the biographical material from infancy
and childhood and the experiences began to reveal the greater depths
of the human psyche, with all its mystical overtones, the therapeutic
results exceeded anything I had previously known. Symptoms that had
resisted months or even years of other treatment often vanished after
patients had these experiences of psychological death and rebirth,
feelings of cosmic unity, archetypal visions, and sequences of what
clients described as past-life memories.
I now firmly believe that consciousness is more than an accidental
by-product of neurophysiological and biochemical processes taking
place in the human brain. I see consciousness and the human psyche as
expressions and reflections of a cosmic intelligence that permeates
the entire universe and all of its existence. We are not just highly
evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls;
we are also fields of consciousness without limits, transcending time,
space, matter, and linear causality.
As a result of observing literally thousands of people experiencing
non-ordinary states of consciousness, I am now convinced that our
individual consciousnesses connect us not only with our immediate
environment and with various periods of our own past, but also with
events that are far beyond the reach of our physical senses, extending
into other historical times, into nature, and into the cosmos. I can
no longer deny the evidence that we have the capacity to relive the
emotions and physical sensations we had during our passage through the
birth canal and that we can re-experience episodes that took place
when we were fetuses in our mothers’ wombs. In non-ordinary states of
consciousness, our psyches can reproduce these situations in vivid
detail. |
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