Stanislav Grof, MD on Transpersonal Psychology and the Meaning of Psychedelic Experience

Dr. Grof, a psychiatrist, transpersonal theorist and noted researcher of psychedelic experience, first encountered LSD as a young doctor working in Prague when the Sandoz company asked him to see if the compound had any psychiatric utility. Personal and research experience with LSD and its effects (including visual hallucinations, pre-natal and transpersonal memory and expansive, disembodied consciousness) profoundly changed his worldview away from the mainstream mechanistic view to a vision of the universe as essentially conscious. He began to recognize the reality of perinatal and prenatal memories and the transpersonal/archetypal realm (as first identified by Jung). He researched the use of psychedelic drugs as therapeutic tools and yielded positive results with reports of long lasting pain remission across varied populations. Later, when psychedelic research became outlawed, he developed alternative techniques for accessing transpersonal experiences including holotropic breathwork. In his understanding, the transpersonal is not a fantasy brought on by a feverish mind but rather a reality which is normally not accessible to ordinary consciousness due to defensive mechanisms which can be bypassed in a variety of ways including but not limited to the use of psychedelics. He believes that naturally occuring forms of transpersonal experience, including some aspects of psychosis, are not pathological but rather represent the emergence of the transpersonal into the realm of the ordinary.