Customer Reviews

The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration (SUNY Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)

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I have to respond to Zosimos review below. The therapeutic technique Grof has been using since the 70's, is not original to him. It is derived from the tradition of Kundalini yoga, and his observations from research conducted both at the Prague Psychiatric Research Center, and Spring Grove Hospital, in Spring Grove, MD. His sessions with "holotropic breathwork" is very similar to "gestalt psychotherapy", involving elements of Reichian body work, combined witht he Kundalini technique of rapid breathing. The theoretical aspects of his research, conducted in the 60's with the hallucinogen LSD, was a reasonable attempt to model a framework to account for the clinical observations that he and his staff has made during their extensive research. This theoretical framework has been "born out" in his clinical work with "holotropic breathwork" involving, at this point, over 35,000 participants.

Only the most ignorant of commentators could describe any aspect of his work as "bad". His work is not ideological, or even philosophical, in nature. It is existential. He instructs in the use of a technique, and does not even suggest much theory, to participants. My impression is that Zosimos has had very little exposure to the material associated with LSD Psychotherapy, and has virtually no experience with holotropic breathwork. If this is true, then he can only derive the authority of his opinion from reading, and listening to lecturers. He is the classic case of a paradigm bound individual making no effort whatsoever to wrestle with information and facts that cannot be accounted for by his model of reality. Its sad, really. Grof offers some of the most exciting insights to be found anywhere--but you have to be willing to keep an open mind if you have no experience with either LSD in a therapeutic context, or holotropic breathwork, or a close encounter with death.

In THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY, Stanislav Grof, M.D., tells how group hyperventilation is a "powerful and effective method of stress reduction and leads to emotional and psychosomatic healing" (p. 176).

The typical hyperventilation session begins with physical and emotional tensions surfacing. Continued fast, deep breathing brings intensification of physical and emotional pain until the suffering reaches a climax, followed by sudden release, with subsequent deep relaxation and even bliss. During the termination phase, any residual tensions can be released by massage of the painful area. In addition, when a breather seems helpless and vulnerable, and is clearly regressed to early childhood--perhaps even curled into a fetal position--then supportive mother-like physical contact such as rocking and cuddling can have "truly remarkable" (p. 226) therapeutic results, especially in persons with an emotionally deprived childhood.

In early breathing sessions, most people dramatically relive their birth. Later sessions bring transpersonal experiences such as reliving fetal traumas, and feeling healing streams of Kundalini-like energy flowing through one's body; in everyday life, synchronicities often become more common. There is a definite trend over many breathing sessions from difficult, negative episodes to more positive, healing experiences.

Besides describing the technique of group hyperventilation therapy in detail, the book outlines the healing mechanisms involved. The therapeutic value of reliving childhood traumas, of the death-rebirth process, and of transpersonal experiences, are all explained.

The excerpts from breathwork sessions bring the text to life. For example, one woman's experience: "I stayed with my fear and my tantrum....I resumed the deep breathing....I pushed and strained and yelled. Images of struggling to get out of the womb, out of the crib, out of my confining life situation came to me. After maybe twenty minutes, I was quiet again....I...thanked them for helping me find God again....I had never felt so connected, after feeling so alone in my life" (p. 215).

The two dozen or so illustrations from breathing sessions also round out the picture of what this form of therapy is actually like. For example, one painting is of a person lying staked to the ground while overhead a beautiful swanlike bird takes flight, with the sun shining on the horizon in the background; the caption reads, " a powerful death-rebirth eperience".

For those who wish to try hyperventilation on their own, I recommend patience and persistence; I succeeded only after a couple of dozen tries over a period of several weeks (I simply had not been breathing fast and deep enough). One way I can tell when it's working is I get a buzzing/vibrating sensation in my head after I've been hyperventilating for a couple of minutes. Pursing one's lips into a tiny opening, as if whistling, may be more effective at moving a large volume of air in and out of the lungs more quickly (rather than holding one's mouth wide open). Also, alternating a period of hyperventilation with a period of holding one's breath works well for me (Grof mentions this technique).

I have used hyperventilating alone by myself to reduce stress, as well as to resolve several severe panic attacks over a period of several months about two years ago.

It is worth noting that while hyperventilating alone by oneself does have some therapeutic effects, hyperventilating with a group is "much more powerful" due to the "catalytic energy field" (p. 199) that develops. I tried hyperventilating in a group only once (transportation and cost limited my access to the nearest group), and it was with a non-certified facilitator. While it definitely was more powerful than alone, my experience was a mixed one, and I recommend a Grof-certified "holotropic breathwork" facilitator for best results.

Two other books I recommend: Stanislav Grof's masterpeice BEYOND THE BRAIN; BIRTH, DEATH, AND TRANSCENDENCE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY, presenting the author's radical new view of the human psyche, its disorders, and its potential for growth, based on his seventeen years as a pioneering LSD psychotherapist; and Sandra Ingerman's SOUL RETRIEVAL: MENDING THE FRAGMENTED SELF, a modern shamanic view of finding one's lost "inner child" soul parts, which has helped me understand my own returning-inner-child dreams, and begin to welcome my lost sub-personalities (which split off due to childhood traumas) home again.

Stanislav Grof is the foremost researcher in this field. His book is a gem of fact and detail. In the Preface, Dr Grof states, "I live mostly inside my head which explains why I'm always behind in the rent." This is true for most of us and this book explains why this is so. I particularly enjoyed the chapter titled 'Who Am I, Who Are You and Why Is My Short-Term Memory So Lousy?' This is not a book for the amateur... it is scientifically sound but at times esoteric. Nonetheless, it is enlightening and compulsive.

Stanislav Grof, having researched the human psyche for 20 years with various psychedelic substances has now for the past 30 years been using Holotropic Breathing to bring about the same experiences in his patients. Grof uses these experiences to create his model of the human psyche. This model also deals with space/time and the paranormal showing that Grof is by far, the world's premier inner explorer.

Holotropic Breathwork, which is more or less Hyperventilating while listening to certain music in a safe environment, brings the subconscious to such a place where it will bring up the issues you need to deal with, even if you never knew they existed, without any outside help.

This book not only explains Grof's model of the Human Psyche, but also shows the reader what goes on in and how to go about Holotropic Breathing.

For those of you on a Holistic Journey or someone interested in the human Psyche, then this is definitely a must read book.

Stanislav Grof was chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. After more than thirty years of studying nonordinary states of consciousness, Grof has concluded that the avenues of exploration available to our psyches via holographic interconnectedness are more than vast; they are virtuallly endless.

Initially, Grof investigated the clinical uses of the hallucinogen LSD at the Psychiatric Research Institute in his native Prague, Czechoslovakia. It quickly became clear that serial LSD sessions were able to expedite the psychothereapeutic process and shorten the time necessary for the treatment of many disorders.

But LSD opened up much more than just issues involving their illnesses and included experiences of reliving what it was like to be in the womb, explore what it was like ot be other living things and even other objects, able to tap into the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors, accessing racial and collective memories in past history, and occassionally related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein, they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences, traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality.

Perhaps Grof's most remarkable discovery is that the same phenomena reported by individuals who have taken LSD can also be experienced without resorting to drugs of any kind. Grof and his wife, Christina, developed a simple, nondrug technique for inducing these nonordinary states of consciousness. They call their technique "holotropic therapy" and use only rapid and controlled breathing, evocative music, and massage and body work, to induce altered states of consciousness. Grof describes his current work and gives a detailed account of his methods in this book.

Grof covers his holotropic breathing therapy primarily and LSD therapy secondarily in this book.

Holotropic breathing is done by hyperventilating and then holding the breath while evocative instrumental music plays. This process brings emotions and visions up in the mind of the participant. An example of such music would be Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings. People have reported experiencing just about anything extraordinary in such sessions.

Grof focuses a lot on how people often relive stages of their birth in such sessions. There are four stages in conception through birth and a breather can feel blissful in one stage and terrified and hopeless in the next. Our births have a profound effect on us psychologically throughout lives. For instance, grim existential philosophers such as Sartre seem to be influenced mostly by the hopeless "no exit" stage of birth in which life is seen as a meaningless theatre of the absurd or a living hell. Reliving birth experiences with such breathing techniques helps us release psychic disturbances and unease. We seem to live between the trauma of birth and the fear of death.

Other things people experience in such sessions is being one with the universe, feeling all the pain and suffering in the world, taking psychic trips through sewage systems as bacteria, being a plant or animal, reliving past lives, being a tyrant such as Hitler or Stalin, being a torturer or his victim, being a pimp or a prostitute, being a mother or father, being Mother Earth or Nature, being in a mythological world, being a revolutionary, being a machine, being a substance such as oil, or being on a spaceship with alien beings. These "trips" seem to be a way of connecting to everything in creation. One realizes that all is one and interconnected.

Grof writes in a serious academic style perhaps to impress his peers, but he does give us interesting stories about different trips that have occurred in therapy sessions. The example of being oil had a profound effect on the person's view of the environment. He came away from the session feeling that oil was evil and connected to rapacious greed. He concluded we should use solar power for energy. Another interesting story is one in which the patient who took LSD thought she was the devil and her face changed accordingly. Grof mentions it as his most bizarre or scary session. After this session, the patient had much improved psychological health and was able to live beyond the confines of the psychiatric ward. A person doing a session can come away with interesting insights about how certain things work as a natural or chemical process in the universe, if they experience being a part of nature or the universe. People can also come up with historical details about a past life that they did not know before.

The book covers the question about what consciousness might be. Are we merely physical bodies or are we spirits living in physical bodies? Grof argues against the Newtonian and Cartesian view of the world that reduces everything down to what can be measured and says that science must come up with an explanation that would include non-ordinary states of consciousness. They should not be dismissed or ignored. He thinks that life and the world is what the Hindus call "lila" or the divine play in which everyone and everything take on their different roles. The universe experiences itself through us. It forgets itself to do the play and then remembers itself as divine to return to its enlightened state. The material world is an illusion of consensus reality.

Grof has a more positive view of psychological problems than other psychologists. He views them as opportunities for personal growth. He thinks that people with psychological problems should not be considered crazy; they should be allowed to live through their "spiritual emergency" so that can go through an ego death to rebirthed with a higher consciousness.

Synopsis:

This book is composed of two distinct parts, which are actually identified in the subtitle. The first of the two is a long litany of Grof's explanation of dimensions of consciousness. Within this portion of the book Grof identifies various perspectives and interpretations of psychological gestalts, experiences of mystical states, psychedelic states and correlation of his perinatal matrices. Here there is a strong influence of Jungian philosophy and the emergence of various elements of Humanistic psychology. In the second part of the book Grof enters the stage of giving an overview of his holotropic theory and transitions into the important implications of this therapy along with aspects of psychedelic experience. While partitioned, relevant continuity does exist between the two.

The Objective Perspective:

Grof's material is not for everyone, especially the laypeople. Had I not been a psychology major and a frequent reader of philosophy, mythology and familiar with indigenous tribal and Eastern cultures I would have been emphatically lost. The material on the dimensions of consciousness is complex and intrinsically connected with various archetypes of mythology. The references that are made throughout this material are something, I think, is of integral importance for actually comprehending the information. So unless you have some background in mythology, psychology and indigenous tribal and Eastern cultures then I do not recommend this book because it delves into advanced psychology and integrates references that will just become perpetually obfuscating.

Each of the dimensions of consciousness that Grof discusses actually deserves a complete volume for itself. This portion of the book is probably the most contentious when it comes to relation to the academic and scientific fields. A brief overview of each is just not adequate for instigating legitimate interest into these levels of consciousness. While I disagree with Grof on some of his interpretations, there are some instances where his position is not clearly distinguished from a psychoanalytic interpretation or a literal belief in the result.

On page 284, the last sentence of the first paragraph Grof asserts quite erroneously that he has proven the thesis of his book "that there is no basic difference between psychedelic experiences and nonordinary states of consciousness induced by other techniques." This is superficial. You cannot hyperventilate and experience "basically" the same experience that you do with psilocybin; you cannot experience "basically" the experience with LSD that you do with dimethyltryptamine; all of these states are distinct in their own regard and affluent in profundity and alien nature to any other experience. I am not defaming non-psychedelic mystical states by any means, or am I elevating psychedelic experiences as more hierarchical, but they are separate from each other.

The Subjective Perspective:

I applaud Grof for his very professional, scientific (for what science will accept) and scholarly approach to the realms of altered states; he adds class to the endeavor of self-exploration. He has given a new perspective of mystical experiences over all. These experiences are essential in expanding our knowledge of the depths and dimensions of the human psyche. The brain as a cellular structure may be subject to the laws of physics, but the manifestation of the Mind is independent of physics and linear-narrow-fundamentalistic-science which attempts to negate anything it cannot readily explain, ironically trouncing the scientific method and process, which essentially is Positivism in its prime. The nature of Mind transcends all of this myopia.

As a true "medicine-man" of society he is concerned with the therapeutic potential of interpreting mystical states as opposed to completely dismissing them based on mechanistic science. He asserts that the dimensions of consciousness are a "fascinating phenomena...that should be systematically studied...[, and] [t]o discard...these experiences and the conceptual challenges associated with them just because they do not fit the current paradigms in science certainly is not the best example of a scientific approach" (108). I admire Grof for going against the grain of his field and trekking into the taboo and unconventional, that is the way we elicit Novelty. It is far too easy to "go with the flow," but it takes true devotion to break beyond the borders of acceptance, which often makes one the mockery of a particular field.

Grof admonishes against frivolous and unstructured self-exploration with psychedelics, which I concur. Entheogens are a very precarious, but profound, experience. They are not for everyone, and I never advocate anyone to take them, because those who can actually trek those realms and return without psychosis is very limited. On this issue I agree with Timothy Leary, there is only about ten percent of the population that is truly mature enough, intellectual enough and psychologically sound enough to experiment with these substances. Recreational use is precipitous and reckless abandon to those of us that utilize these in a ritualistic and scientific exploratory method of understanding the depths of consciousness to gain novel insights into ontological and philosophical paradigms. This literary work is essential for all credible psychonauts that fit the previously described candidate.

Having come into reference to Timothy Leary, Grof is definitely distinguished from Leary; and Terence McKenna for that matter. Each of these three men have exclusive and venerable properties about them, and other aspects one would like to discard, albeit, each has their distinct territory. While I originally came into the entheogenic revolution by way of Martin Ball I then followed up references in his book to Terence McKenna's philosophy. I later progressed to Leary, and now to Grof; Grof is more scientifically sophisticated with his approach, almost to a fault. Leary is my immanent mentor of all; our ideals for culture, society and philosophy are identical, which I acquired and refined prior to even having knowledge of him. The only difference is that his tool of choice was LSD. His philosophy is astounding and his affinity with Socrates and evolving culture through NOVEL philosophy is commensurate to my own. In the beginning, as a psychologist, he started in the way of scientific interest but Harvard abrogated those studies and subsequently did not offer another contract to Leary. The most unfortunate thing Leary did for the movement was bring too much attention to it, and to fundamentalists back then, which were in all facets of society, he was the "devil," so they mounted an Inquisition on the Mind and initiated the ominous drug war. (After all it was the drugs that made woman want to work and have rights, blacks to want to have rights, and the college students to protest the war and oppose a draft.) McKenna has his exclusive realm in the nature of reviving botanical shamanism into the contemporary culture, along with various cultural and philosophic imports intermingled with theories of alien worlds, new dimensions and novelty. Grof has utilized his interest in these substances to reorient certain rigid conventions in psychology and psychotherapy, which illuminates his scientific approach by and through experimentation. All of the three stands alone, but their unity is that they realized the profundity and novel insights that are to be garnered from this realm of the taboo.

In closing, the brain is a mysterious quantum tool that has an obvious affinity and, possibly, an evolutionary precursor with entheogenic properties that manifested its neurochemistry. Negating this undermines the complexity of the mind-brain paradigm and, in the words of Grof: "The future task for serious research remains unbiased scientific scrutiny of the mostly anecdotal claims and modern reformulation of the underlying theories" (149). - D.R.Thomas

D. R. Thomas submits that without some background in psychology, philosophy, mythology, and indigenous tribal and Eastern cultures, laypeople should pass on this book because references of integral importance throughout the material will lie outside their realm of comprehension.

But I'd like to offer a tangential perspective.

I was confused - even a bit lost, one could say - BEFORE tackling this material, as presumptuous as it was for a factory worker with a high school education to pick up a book of this caliber. Despite my lack of education and unfamiliarity with the above-mentioned disciplines, the first-hand accounts of the experiences of others that contributed to Grof's work shed light on my own, and put into context a lifetime of phenomenon for which I hadn't any point of reference for comparison until I found this book.

I see no compelling need for the average person to grasp every implication and complexity of Grof's ontological perspective and scientific framework to benefit from the revelations of his work. A firm recognition of and healthy respect for the sacred spiritual medicinal powers inherent in the psychedelic journey is the single most relevant understanding one can take away from this book.

I had my first acid trip the night of my fifteenth birthday. LSD was regularly available in the late Seventies in the Jersey suburb where I grew up. Following every Dead show in the metropolitan area, my high school would be flush with various forms: blotter, windowpane, microdot. And occasionally liquid dispensed from Visine bottles. By thirty I'd had about 600 experiences with acid, mescaline, peyote, datura, and mushrooms.

The experiences of my friends were pretty consistent, and were usually confined to a landscape of familiar hallucinatons: "trails" that followed physical movements, the sensation that walls were "breathing," the sudden "melting" of objects in the room, colorful "auras" around light fixtures, etc., which induced a lot of giggling and the occasional fit of hysterical laughter.

In contrast, my altered states were inexplicable, otherworldly, more resembling religious experiences than a recreational high. How the drugs affected me this way, or why I seemed to be the only one, I didn't understand. I had no exposure to any tradition growing up, which only made the spiritual aspects all the more perplexing. My folks went to great lengths to shield my siblings and me from religious influences, teaching us only to love our neighbors as ourselves and treat others the way we want to be treated. Anything more, they demanded, was useless and destructive crap.

When I was seventeen, a friend and I took several hits of LSD one night at his house, which he had to himself for the weekend. We listened to music, smoked weed, and engaged in discussions that in the moment seemed to us to be pretty deep and philosophical. Several hours into our trip I was siezed by a clairvoyant sensation that some calamitous tragedy was occurring. Within a minute or two I sank into an abyss of overwhelming sadness and grief. If it hadn't been 3:00 in the morning, I would have called home to see if everyone was okay. My friend became conjoined empathically with my distress, and together we shifted into a state of collective bereavement. He got up and put "Funeral for a Friend" by Elton John on the stereo, and together we sat and cried through the entire song. Within the hour my girlfriend called to tell me that two of my close friends had been killed on impact when the one lost control of his car, which wrapped around a tree. The accident happened at 3:00 am.

From then on I was convinced that psychedelics imbued me with certain powers of perception, potentialities beyond the scope of recreational use that opened me to deeper spiritual dimensions of reality. Embracing the mysterious and otherworldly qualitites of altered states as genuine authentic spiritual experiences had residual effects that lingered over into ordinary consciousness. I became more intuitive, more perceptive, more creative, more sensitive, more in touch with the feelings of others in my everyday life. And more likely to stumble into solutions for life's bigger challenges. Thankfully I stumbled across Grof's book. Otherwise the path I was heading down might have led to some egocentric foible or pathological megalomania. "The Adventure of Self-Discovery" informed me that the profound encounters I'd had were not unique to me at all. Parallels between my own and the experiences Dr. Grof included in his book were so striking, it blew me away. Part of me felt like I just discovered there really was a Never Never Land. And that hundreds or thousands of others had been travelling back and forth between the same mythic realms I was exploring for twenty years. I found a kind of validation in that which was deeply gratifying.

But at the same time I felt foolish and embarrassed. All the birth and death and rebirth and communion with natural and supernatural forces that had convinced me I was some kind of mystic or seer were categorically common universal experiences. My encounters with astral projection, reciprocal interactions with elemental forces, identifying with Christ (at times the Devil) and other historical figures, my journeys into celestial realms and excursions through hell, encounters with light beings and demonic entities, becoming consciously embedded in exanimate objects, seeing Apocalyptic visions of battles on horseback, rivers of blood, and terrifying earthquakes under a falling sky, seeing my reflection in a summer night's moon, having vivid recollections of other lives that oscillated between genders and stretched across the ages, being struck by a radiant beam of unearthly light that entered and coursed through my entire body and set every nerve-ending ablaze, being raptured into states of all-knowing consciousness and bliss, confronting terrifying creatures lurking in the wings - all these adventures of self-discovery - proved to be archetypal and not at all personal. Not only was I not special, I was painfully typical. In fact the only "me" in all the phenomenology was an illusory self. In the numinous amalgamation, I was only the dross.

Nonetheless, humble pie - despite how bitter - can leave a sweet aftertaste when it's just what the doctor ordered.

Let me iterate that the superiority of Mr. Thomas' mind isn't lost on me. I know who I am - a Regular Joe of modest intellectual capacity - and I'm comfortable with that. But I think sometimes people can be a little too smart, that lofty intelligence can cloud thinking when opining over certain particulars.

Mr. Thomas writes: "Grof admonishes against frivolous and unstructured self-exploration with psychedelics, which I concur. Entheogens are a very precarious, but profound, experience. They are not for everyone, and I never advocate anyone to take them, because those who can actually trek those realms and return without psychosis is very limited. On this issue I agree with Timothy Leary, there is only about ten percent of the population that is truly mature enough, intellectual enough and psychologically sound enough to experiment with these substances. Recreational use is precipitous and reckless abandon to those of us that utilize these in a ritualistic and scientific exploratory method of understanding the depths of consciousness to gain novel insights into ontological and philosophical paradigms. This literary work is essential for all credible psychonauts that fit the previously described candidate. "

Sounds persnickety to me. What could be more fastidious than intellectual elites discouraging the common man from partaking in the very potions that have elevated their own consciousness, especially if they suspect the human brain might be both equipped with and partially manifested by an entheogenic predisposition?

The idea that Leary concluded most of the population was unfit for experimenting is hard to swallow. Huxley felt psychedelics should to be limited to a select few. But Leary wanted everyone to trip, an ambitious vision that dragged him through a world of troubles for much of his life. I just can't fathom that he'd have had such a turn around of opinion. When the rave scene gained traction in the Bay area and he saw the mass of kids in Upper Haight during April 1992 gathered to turn on, tune in, and share"the vibe" of Peace, Love, Unity and Respect while trance-dancing themselves into a single mind, he was overcome with optimism for the future evolution of consciousness. If he really believed that only a small portion of people are cut out for it, he wouldn't have been so ecstatic over the thousands of kids tripping and rolling around him that night.

I also disagree with the notion that the attention he attracted brought misfortune to anyone other than himself. It's well documented in history that the widespread use of psychedelic drugs (mainly LSD) in the Sixties facilitated the rise of the counterculture and the philosophy of challenging authority that erupted into a populism that forged the nexus of alliance between various efforts reaching toward an equity of justice and rights, and the end of conscription and an unjust war. No name is more closely associated with promoting that widespread use of LSD than Timothy Leary.

Maybe some academicians would have preferred if the Fifties remained the dictator of American values, if it meant they could pursue their pharmacological applications and expound upon their elaborate models and theories without government intervention. But I would sacrifice their discipline for the greater good any day. Leary was a heavyweight champion of the world, largely responsible for the progress of us all.

According to Mr. Thomas, "The Adventure of Self-Discovery" is an essential literary work. It gives a new perspective of mystical experiences which are essential in expanding the depths and dimensions of the psyche. Yet it's not recommendable for most of us because it's beyond our comprehension. Furthermore, it's inadvisable to embark on the adventures upon which the book is founded because most of us are not mature enough, smart enough, and sane enough to handle the terrain.

If exploring consciousness was too complicated to read about and too special to participate in, it wouldn't be all that important. Elitism - in principle and practice - sucks a lot of air, and is nothing more than ignorant banality in fancy clothing. Begrudging the average schmuck one's blessing for making a risk/benefit assessment to experiement with his own psyche comes across as exclusionary. It also flies in the face of history. When the widespread recreational use of psychedelics became a national pastime over 40 years ago, it resulted in unprecedented personal and social transformation. Archaeological evidence of psychoactive plant use dates back ten thousand years. And historical evidence of the cultural use of psychedelics dates back five millennia. I'd venture to say that prehistoric societies found advantages in these agents without the benefit of any highfalutin scientific ontological or philosophical paradigms.

Psychonauts are not born, they're self-made. Not with degrees or honors or scholastic achievement. But by jumping off the edge of reality and learning to fly.

Stanislav Grof (born 1931) is a psychiatrist from Czechoslovakia and one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, who is known for his early studies of LSD as well as his more recent studies of "Holotropic Breathwork". He has also written books such as The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives, Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transendence in Psychotherapy (Suny Series in Transpersonal & Humanistic Psychology), Holotropic Breathwork: A New Approach to Self-Exploration and Therapy (Suny Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology), Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research (Suny Series, Transpersonal & Humanistic Psychology), etc.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1988 book, "The present book differs from my previous writings in many important aspects. Although it contains many references to psychedelic research and descriptions of psychedelic states, its main emphasis is on simple, nonpharmacological techniques of self-exploration that are easily available to the general public... I would like this book to be an easily readable guide for self-exploration and effective psychotherapy and do not want to burden it by lengthy excursions into related problem areas to justify certain statements or to make them more believable. The ultimate 'proof' for the readers will have to be personal experience."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"Clinical work with LSD... (is) probably the most promising avenue of research of the human psyche and nature." (Pg. xii)
"Current neurophysiology denies the possibility of birth memories... However, the existence of authentic perinatal experiences cannot be denied." (Pg. 8)
"(Bruce Lamb's Wizard of the upper Amazon: The story of Manuel Cordova-Rios) bears some similarity to Carlos Castaneda's series describing his apprenticeship with the Mexican Yaqui sorcerer, Don Juan." (Pg. 53)
"I would like to emphasize that I do not consider this phenomenon (past-life experiences) ... to be necessarily a proof that we have lived before. However, I feel very strongly that this phenomenon cannot be adequately explained by mechanistic science and represents a serious conceptual challenge to the existing paradigms in psychiatry and Western science in general." (Pg. 90)
"In my experience, the danger of such indoctrination is minimal. I saw repeatedly in the early years of my psychedelic research that my patients moved spontaneously and without any programming into the perinatal and transpersonal realms---long before I developed the cartography of the unconscious that we now discuss before psychedelic or holotropic sessions." (Pg. 200)
"Whatever happens in the future with psychedelic therapy per se, it is difficult to ignore the fact that similar challenging observations do not require strange and exotic drugs, but can be triggered by such simple means as breathing and sound. It should only be a matter of time until this fact is acknowledged, and the consequences will revolutionize psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy." (Pg. 292)

A book to read and re-read for me plus a validation of what I have felt since childhood. Any one who wants to know themselves and others and looking for soul searching truth would benefit from reading this and other works by Grof and authors in his bibliography. Plus, a look at quantum physics, as well, for more light reading. (A joke of course)