Stanislav Grof - without exaggeration, Freud of the XXI century. A living classic. Some even believe that Grof is the founder of a new religion that allows its followers to avoid physical death.
In fact, everything is not so fantastic: it just gives people the opportunity to remember the circumstances of their birth. And he sees in this the future of psychiatry, and more broadly, of the spiritual evolution of mankind in general, which, in his opinion, has now reached a dead end.
He still personally gives trainings all over the world (he recently completed such a training in Moscow - "The Adventure of Discovering Oneself") and teaches at the California Institute for Integral Research. He looks much younger than his 78 years old. During the sessions of the so-called "holotropic breathing" Grof was "reborn" more than four thousand times. This is the number of sessions that the pioneering psychiatrist has conducted in his more than 45 years of practice. Thousands of times he returned to the consciousness of a newborn - maybe that's why he looks so young?
Grof has written more than ten scientific and educational books, created a successfully functioning International transpersonal organization, trained over one hundred thousand certified teachers … His trainings were attended by millions of people around the world. The holder of the highest scientific degrees and prestigious awards, Grof is, in addition, a very wealthy man. It would seem that you can already "retire" and rest on your laurels! But no.
One of Grof's books is called Furious Search for Oneself (1990): here, it seems, what he realizes by his example - "eternal battle" with the shadow, the search for perfection. But if you look at it, in Grof's system the notorious "frantic search for oneself" is a problem facing only spiritually fragmented individuals, and then only until they are cured. In the course of practice, it turns into another task facing mentally healthy people - the super task of expanding consciousness, spiritual evolution.
And the first stage in this struggle, which Grof, with his characteristic optimism called "adventure", should be overcoming the invisible "last border" - the human barrier, behind which lie mysterious areas about which little can be told in words, except that " there are tigers”, as in the famous story by R. Bradbury.
As Grof notes, following his own "journeys" into the unconscious (or, more precisely, "superconscious") and observing thousands of "journeys" undertaken by his patients, three states allow to go beyond this limit: taking LSD (which is an illegal drug), the method of holotropic breathing proposed by Grof and the psychospiritual crisis, or “spiritual exacerbation”. Common to these three situations, as Grof writes in the foreword to the book Call of the Jaguar (2001), is that they cause unusual states of consciousness, including the subtype of them, which he calls "holotropic" ii, that is, transcendental, in contrast to ordinary experience, which he calls "hylotropic," that is, earthly.
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Grof notes in Call of the Jaguar that in psychedelic therapy (currently banned, but formerly legal in Grof's young years), such conditions were caused by the use of psychoactive drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, tryptamine, amphetamine derivatives (DMT, ecstasy and etc.). In the method of holotropic breathing, developed by Grof and his wife Christina in 1975, a combination of so-called connected breathing (when there is no pause between inhalation and exhalation, exhalation and inhalation) and trance-inducing music (often ethnic, tribal: African drums, Tibetan trumpets, etc.); sometimes work with the body is additionally applied. In the case of "spiritual flare-ups," holotropic states occur spontaneously, Grof notes, and their causes are usually unknown. In this way,the third method is uncontrolled, the first is illegal: only holotropic breathing remains.
Grof has been doing his research for over forty-five years. He began with experiments with LSD. After the discovery of the psychotropic properties of the drug in 1943, it was assumed for some time that it caused symptoms similar to schizophrenia (and therefore was recommended for admission to psychotherapists), but this hypothesis was subsequently refuted. After the prohibition of this drug in the United States in the late 1960s, Grof began to use the method of special holotropic breathing in his research, in which he actively used the experience gained during experiments with psychoactive drugs (including precautions).
Perhaps the prototype of the specific breathing used in the holotropic method was the rapid breathing of Grof's patients under LSD - in the case when the problem that emerged from the depths of the subconscious could not be immediately worked out, integrated into a healthy psyche. Such breathing helped them stay in an expanded state of consciousness and discharge the psychological material that manifested itself in the form of unpleasant symptoms. This is how the "bad trip" became a method of psychotherapy.
Grof never spoke of this, but the natural implication of his medical practice would be to assume - just speculate - that Grof himself may have been under the influence of LSD when he invented his holotropic method. In a similar way, for example, the 1962 Nobel laureate Francis Crick discovered the famous double helix of the molecular structure of DNA under the influence of LSD. Anyway, Grof's experiments with LSD date back to the period when the drug was completely legal.
Research in the field of psychedelic therapy and personal experience of holotropic breathing allowed Grof to make the discovery that there is no blind wall beyond the "last boundary" of human consciousness - the consciousness of the embryo (as a materialist might suggest, based on the assumption that human life is limited by the interval between conception and death). Behind this "wall", as Grof found out, there is also life, or rather, many forms of life.
There are "superhuman" worlds where time and space, the limitations of the memory of the brain and, in general, the current human birth cease to be constraining factors. Namely, they cease to restrain what always lives inside us and conducts its “frantic search” both before and after our physical death. In some philosophical and religious systems this “something” is called “soul”, “consciousness”, “true self”.
But even this, empirical, accessible to everyone, proof of the existence of the notorious "life after death", the most amazing thing in Grof's experiments. The main thing is that from the height of the spiritual, superhuman consciousness it becomes obvious: the boundaries of the human and those psychological barriers that cause various pathological effects that prevent a person from becoming himself, and then go further, rise above himself - these boundaries are not created by a whim of fate and are fed by no one something by an evil will, and by the person himself - more precisely, by his false, limited self-identification.
That is, it turns out that we ourselves - with all our strength - keep our "doors of perception" locked, not allowing true health, prosperity and freedom to enter them. As G. Gurdjieff said to his disciples, as K. Castaneda wrote in his books - and as Grof proves with his medical practice - a person spends very significant forces on maintaining his mental barriers (much more than he can afford!). And these forces can be used much more efficiently and profitably. For example, these forces, with which a person keeps his "doors of perception" locked, could help him in the journey behind these doors, and therefore allow him to become a happy and spiritually developed person. And even more than that - to step further, beyond the human boundaries, which we, it turns out, have established for ourselves. Ultimately, Grof “frantically searches” for the superman - and encourages each of us to join in this search.
In fact, Grof during his long life created a whole new direction of not just psychoanalysis, but total superhumanistic psychocorrection, which can be useful not only for mentally ill people, but for everyone and everyone. From Stan's point of view, it would not hurt all of us to "heal" according to his method - after all, we must admit, even the healthiest people in terms of the level of consciousness are far from the ideals that spiritually developed personalities, teachers of humanity, and enlightened mystics demonstrate. Stan Grof is not a mystic, he just sets the bar higher, much higher than they usually do in psychotherapy.
He draws our attention to the tragic gap between what mankind aspired to and the posthuman, mechanistic society to which it has now come. Grof, himself a professional physician, doctor of medicine, psychiatrist with fifty years of experience who grew up in the school of traditional psychoanalysis, notes that modern science is sinning with one-sidedness, bordering on blindness. Traditional medicine stubbornly turns a blind eye to the fact that the problem of a person's mental health is organically linked to the problem of his spiritual development, even more, it actually opposes these processes.
Anything that goes beyond the traditional perception of the world, limited by a very narrow framework, is labeled "abnormality". In one of his interviews, Grof notes: from the point of view of modern medicine, it turns out that if we discard rituals, leaving only specific behavior and unusual states of consciousness, then any religion and spirituality in general is a pure pathology, a form of mental disorder. Buddhist meditation, from the point of view of a psychiatrist, is catatonia, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was a schizophrenic, St. John the Baptist was a degenerate, and Gautama Buddha - since he was, so to speak, capable of adequate behavior - at least stood on the verge of insanity …
One of the problems of modern medicine, according to Grof, is that it tends to consider any altered states of consciousness that arise under certain circumstances in perfectly healthy people as pathological manifestations or even one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. In fact, medicine is now powerless to distinguish a prophetic vision (examples of which are offered to us by the scriptures of different peoples of the world: the Bible, the Koran, Torah, Bhagavad-Gita, etc.) from a painful schizophrenic delusion, a narcotic trance from a religious trance. Where, then, is the borderline of the "normal" drawn? And the next question from here: where in general to draw the border of the "real", what is the reality in general, in which we live? And who are we really, what can and cannot be done by the so-called "man"?
Grof began his medical career with traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, but soon in the course of his practice he realized the one-sidedness of the traditional approach: after all, the Freudian is forced to reduce everything to sexual desire, libido, allegedly the main driving force of a person. But the most important thing that did not suit Grof was that the method of verbal-oriented "speaking" on a leather couch itself, although, if successful, leads to an accurate diagnosis and identification of the event that caused the pathology, is not always effective for actually getting rid of the patient from the oppression of this events and pathological symptoms proper.
Gradually, Stan came to understand that it is not just a formal remembering, but a direct experience anew of these key eventsiii - including the most traumatic event in any person's life - his own birth! - is much better able to help both in curing an illness and expanding consciousness.
It should be noted right away that modern medicine does not confirm the fact that a person can remember his own birth, and even more so intrauterine experience. In fact, on the contrary, there is evidence that the human brain is not able to remember anything that happened to the body up to two years. However, the experience of Grof and millions of people using Holotropic Breathwork suggests otherwise. To understand “how deep the rabbit hole” Grof pointed out, it should be noted that the experience of people in Holotropic Breathwork sessions is not limited to perinatal (experienced at the moment of birth) or even prenatal (embryonic, intrauterine) experiences.
It includes extremely vivid and unusual experiences, experiences that, before the invention of this technique, were available only to advanced mystics and saints of various denominations, as well as people who took LSD. In particular, this is the activation of the chakras, experiences of past incarnations, foresight, clairvoyance and clairaudience, identification with other persons, with animals, plants, objects and even all creations at once (Mother Nature), the entire planet Earth, moreover, the experience of encounters with superhuman and spiritual, divine, as well as alien beings, beings from other universes …
All this may sound like fantasy or, again, the delirium of a madman or a drug addict. Indeed, unlike prenatal and perinatal memories, which in a number of cases were actually confirmed, it is not possible to refute or confirm such experiences. Just as, say, it is impossible to find out whether the Catholic saint, the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius de Loyola, in his meditations comprehended the torment of the cross of Christ! Science, as mentioned above, in such cases simply cannot fix the fundamental difference between “true” and “false”.
As one of the researchers (and followers) of Grof, Vladimir Maikov, notes in his article "The World of Stanislav Grof", the same law of uncertainty relations that the outstanding German physicist W. Heisenberg discovered in the quantum world is applicable to the world of psychology, the world of human souls: the more accurately we try to determine the coordinates of the event, the more uncertain our knowledge of what actually happened becomes.
Moreover, physics has now come to understand that at the most microscopic level it is impossible to conduct research without making changes in the properties of the material. If, for example, an ingot of gold can be measured as much as one wants without prejudice to the "test subject", then, say, one quark of gold will inevitably undergo significant changes. In addition, microscopic particles, constituent parts of matter, are more of a process, a wave than a material particle … The same is with deep studies of the human psyche - with a sufficiently deep immersion in this issue, a person seems to cease to be a person, but appears as a kind of evolute of consciousness taken in a certain approximation, and only in this approximation is he a man.
For example, someone begins to practice holotropic breathing in order to get rid of psychological trauma or to overcome a life crisis. Finally, he sees and, with a clarity that exceeds that available in ordinary life, experiences, say, his own birth, that is, as if reborn. Having experienced and integrated (that is, dissolving) this trauma, he goes deeper and deeper, revealing other - perinatal - trauma. Experiences, integrates them too. The possibilities of “remembering” in this particular body are, as it were, exhausted; psychological trauma, it would seem, too.
But then strange things begin to happen: a person immerses himself in experiences outside the body, outside this life, experiences other incarnations, experiences of planetary, non-human consciousness, finally, the experience of the birth of the Universe, then … He opens up an infinity of perspective - which actually existed always and everywhere. In fact, everything that made him a person disappears, V. Maikov concludes, noting the paradox: often Grof's patients experienced complete mental healing only after experiencing these "transcendent", out-of-body and extraterrestrial experiences …
In general, it turns out that the whole trick is in what we identify with - the key point, by the way, in Yoga. It is curious in this regard that Grof's wife Christina, who is the co-author of Holotropic Breathwork and Grof's last books, was a disciple of Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa, the leader of the siddha yoga tradition, until his death (departure to mahasamadhi) in 1982.
But let us return from the scientifically incontestable phenomena of the holotropic method and yoga, which may seem to some to be a fantasy, to the reality of Grof's medical practice. The fact remains that in the course of Holotropic Breathwork sessions, hundreds of thousands of people have found healing for their mental ailments and emotional problems.
And Stan Grof - perhaps the greatest "psychonaut" on the planet - does not slow down the pace of his research and psychotherapeutic work, which is essentially a "frantic search" for the superhuman: the eternal search for the Divine. As the notorious Heisenberg used to say, "the first sip from a glass of natural science is taken by an atheist, but God is waiting at the bottom of the glass." After all, the truth is somewhere out there, at the bottom of the rabbit hole.