The Tim Ferriss Show - #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen a perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home.

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Starting point is 00:04:10 that's the terminology in the copy that they suggest. I don't know what the special savings is, folks, but it's titillating. If you want special savings, enter promo code TIM, T-I-M, at checkout. Capital T, lowercase I-M. Again, take a peek, LegalZoom.com, and enter promo code TIM. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job each episode to interview and deconstruct world-class performers and or people who are the best at what they do to tease out the life lessons, habits, tools, and so on that you can hopefully apply to your own lives. And this episode was such a treat for me. I had so much fun. And I was able to interview a living legend, someone I've wanted to interview on this podcast for many years, Stanislav Grof. And we went deep, we went long, we went wide. It was everything I hoped it to be. Stanislav Grof,

Starting point is 00:05:06 MD, otherwise known as Stan Grof, Stanislav is spelled S-T-A-N-I-S-L-A-V, is a psychiatrist with more than 60 years of experience in research of holotropic states of consciousness. And we'll define what that means in the interview. But suffice to say for now, it is a large and important subgroup of non-ordinary states that have healing, transformative, and evolutionary potential, and we will explore all of that. Previously, he was principal investigator in a psychedelic research program at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia, chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and scholar in residence at the Esalen Institute.

Starting point is 00:05:49 In this very wide-ranging conversation, we cover a whole lot of things, including some stuff that he has not gone over previously. So among others, some of his main takeaways after supervising or guiding roughly 4,500 LSD sessions, that is, LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions. The place and role of so-called wounded healers, limitations and uses of traditional psychoanalysis and talk therapy, similarities or some similarities between holotropic breathwork and MDMA use, or the applications of MDMA, stories of very odd synchronicities and the seemingly impossible.

Starting point is 00:06:27 We get into some very, very hard to explain reports and phenomena, to put it very, very lightly. Stan's strangest personal experiences on psychedelics and what Stan believes humanity most needs to overcome division and destruction. Currently, Stan is professor of psychology at CIIS, that's the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and conducts professional training programs in holotropic breathwork and transpersonal psychology, as well as gives lectures and seminars worldwide. He is one of the founders and chief

Starting point is 00:07:00 theoreticians of transpersonal psychology as a field, and the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association, ITA. His publications include more than 150 articles in professional journals and books like Psychology of the Future, The Cosmic Game, and Holotropic Breathwork, among many others. You can find him online, and I will link to this and everything in this episode in the show notes at tim.blog.com. You can find him online at stan I will link to this and everything in this episode in the show notes at tim.blog.com. You can find him online at stanislavgroff.com. Now, one more thing before we get to the interview, and I'll try to keep this short.

Starting point is 00:07:34 Please, please, please, if you're a listener of this podcast, if you like what you hear, I invite you and ask you, please, to subscribe to the podcast, And you will get notified whenever I release a new episode. For many reasons, and a lot of technical reasons, this is very, very helpful to me and my podcast team. It helps us to get hard-to-reach guests and do much more. It takes 10 to 30 seconds. So all you have to do is search for The Tim Ferriss Show. You can misspell it. It doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:08:01 In iTunes or on your phone, in the app you use, like Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, CastBox, whatever. When you see my face and the Tim Ferriss show, click on it and click subscribe. That's it. Super easy. If you can spare the 10 to 30 seconds, thank you for pausing this episode briefly to do that. It really helps us to do bigger and better things for you all. And with that said, please enjoy this interview. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did with the one and only Stan Grof. Stan, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Tim. Thank you for having me. It's such an honor.

Starting point is 00:08:40 And before we start, I would like to thank you for everything you have been doing for raising consciousness on this planet. It's been amazing, and it's a great honor and pleasure for me to be on your show. Oh, thank you so much. I could not be more excited to be speaking with you right now. And we said hello via video just a few moments ago. and I certainly have only become more excited to have this conversation because of our introduction, Jack Kornfield, one of the sweetest humans I know. And I have many questions and many topics, so thanks, of course, to Jack for making the introduction. And by this time, people would have already heard some of your biographical information that I would have read. But I suppose we should start maybe at the beginning and ask you how you first became interested in psychedelics.

Starting point is 00:09:40 Well, the situation was I became initially very excited about psychoanalysis. And as a result of it, I went to medical school. And in my fourth year of medical school, I was going to the psychiatric department already as a volunteer to get some, you know, some sense for the discipline. And this is where we got from Sandoz a supply of ampules of delizit, of LSD. And it came with a letter talking about the history, about, you know, the famous self-experiment of Albert Hoffman and the bicycle ride and all that. And they were asking us if we would like to experiment with that substance and let them know if there was any legitimate use for it in psychiatry and psychology. And my preceptor, Dr. Robicek, who was very interested in LSD,

Starting point is 00:10:46 but he didn't have time to sit for six or eight hours with his patients, with the experimental subjects. So he was using several of us as kind of gophers. We were sitting in these sessions and we

Starting point is 00:11:01 were keeping the records. So I actually started my exposure to LSD already in 1954. But unlike at Harvard, students were excluded. So I couldn't have my own session until I graduated from the medical school. And by that time, you know, my appetite was whetted, so I was sitting in these sessions of psychologists, psychiatrists, artists, and hearing all these fantastic stories about the experiences that they had, but I had really no access to it. What application were you looking at initially? What was the structure or the expectation? You know, initially it was just a kind of a, it was just a phenomenological research

Starting point is 00:11:48 that's giving it to different people and seeing what it does. You know, I don't know if you can imagine now when there are a lot of publications and, you know, other kinds of publicity, what it was like for us when this substance fell into our laps. We had absolutely no idea what it would do, you know, from session to session. I mean, we didn't know where it would be going, you know, with our patients and in our own sessions. So it was quite an exciting adventure. I spent several years actually doing two sessions a day. I would get up early, do a a session and about two o'clock you know i started

Starting point is 00:12:28 another one and i had a department where i had 18 beds and all the patients were getting lsd so they were really familiar with the states and all our nurses had training sessions so by two o'clock i could pass the the person i was coming down from an lsd session to this team of nurses and and patients and i could start another one and i was sitting in all of those sessions you know all the whole time unlike some other places where for example hans Karl Leuner, he was actually leaving the experimental subjects alone. And they just had a bell where they could call the nurse when they were in trouble. But I was so excited about what was coming. I realized this is going to change psychiatry, psychology.

Starting point is 00:13:22 What was it about those early experiences that led you to that conclusion, that it would change psychiatry and psychology? And maybe just before we get to that, and I want to talk about your first experience as well, but how many total sessions have you directly or indirectly been a part of or supervised in your life, would you say? At this point, it would be like four and a half thousand of LSD sessions, but I had also I was working with psilocybin also. We were working for a while

Starting point is 00:13:54 with the tryptamine derivatives, which actually came from Budapest, from our neighbor, Dr. Zara, Stephen Zara, and Dr. Bersermain. They were the ones who actually developed the whole group of the tryptamine derivatives, DMT, DET, DPT. I don't think they had at the time the methoxy-DMT,

Starting point is 00:14:14 which seems to be the most interesting one. And the initial feeling that you had, or the initial excitement that you felt, or the initial, I suppose, excitement that you felt, this could change psychology and psychiatry, why was that? What did you see that made you come to that conclusion? Well, the initial was this approach which could be called search for toxin X. The way LSD came to us was that it's a substance that can mimic somehow psychosis. We call the initial sessions experimental psychosis.

Starting point is 00:14:50 It was called hallucinogens, psychotomimetic. And so the excitement was that we have a model of something like schizophrenia or other kinds of psychosis. And this made a possibility of creating a model, which is always great to have a model in science. So give LSD to quote-unquote normal subjects, and they would spend six to eight hours in a world that seemed to be like the world of our patients.

Starting point is 00:15:24 And so my initial research actually was laboratory i wrote one of the early papers on the role of serotonin in in uh psychiatry and the initial research was we had a group of 40 people, including ourselves, mostly professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, biologists, and so on. And we had a protocol. We would invite these people for a day to the research institute. blood every hour on the hour, collecting samples of urine, doing psychological tests and electrophysiological investigations. And then we had one day when we brought schizophrenic patients who were matched by age, by gender, by

Starting point is 00:16:20 IQ and so on, with our experimental subjects and we were looking if these values of these psychological and physiological biochemical tests would sort of converge with the values in schizophrenics. And then something amazing happened. I found that there was incredible, I would say, inter-individual, intra-individual variability. So you give the same substance in the same dosage under the same circumstances, under the same lousy set and setting which we had, and each of those people would have different experiences to the point that some of them called it like the moments that they get between the tests. It was like a self-analysis, like a drug-assisted psychotherapy. Others were just unpleasant physical symptoms.

Starting point is 00:17:18 Some of them had paranoid episodes or became hypomanic. And for some of them, it was that even under those circumstances that got glimpses of ecstatic states that were very mystical. And the same intra-individual variability. If we took the same substance at different times, this phenomenology was completely different. And at that point, I realized this was not psychopharmacology. We were not doing pharmacology because if you do pharmacology, you have to have some idea what you are getting.

Starting point is 00:17:55 If you give people apomorphine, you expect that a lot of them will be vomiting. If you give them a hypnotic, you expect them to sleep. Whereas here we had no idea what would happen. So I realized we were doing something much more interesting. We had a catalyst

Starting point is 00:18:16 that made it possible to explore the depths of the human psyche. I realized people were not having LSD experiences. They were having experiences of themselves, but they were coming from depths that psychoanalysis didn't know anything about. And so at that point, I just lost completely interest in this laboratory approach, and I took it to clinical work. And I started giving to my patients, you know, in a psychotherapeutic

Starting point is 00:18:47 context. When did you have your first personal experience? It was... And what did you take and how much did you take, if you recall? This was actually 100 micrograms. It was on the 13th of November 1956. So I was from 54, 56 I was sitting for people. But it was a little more complicated because

Starting point is 00:19:16 my preceptor whom I mentioned earlier, he was very interested in electroencephalography. And at the time when LSD came, he was the one who received it from Sandoz. So at the time when it came, he was interested in something that's called driving the brain waves and training the brain waves. This is using EEG? Well, it was exposing people to a very powerful stroboscopic light. Oh, that's right. And finding out if the brainwaves in the suboccipital area, which is the visual cortex, if the brainwaves would pick up that frequency, if you can drive or train the brainwave. So the condition for us having the session with him, we had to agree that we would

Starting point is 00:20:07 have EEG, you know, before, during and after, and that we also will have our brainwaves driven in all those sessions. So what happened that, you know, between the third and the fourth hour when the session usually culminated uh the uh dr robichek's assistant came and she said it's time to drive the brain waves so she took me to a little um room uh i laid down she pasted all these electrodes on my head and then brought this gigantic straw put it above my head and then turn this thing on and in the next moment there was light like i had never seen i couldn't even imagine existed my only concept there was this is what it must have been like in hiroshima where the thing went off you know today i think it was more like uh dharmakaya the the primary clear light from bardot huddle from

Starting point is 00:21:09 the tibetan book of the dead that we see at the moment of our death but what happened is my consciousness was catapulted out of my body i lost the research assistant, you know, I lost the clinic, I lost Prague, I lost the planet, and I had the feeling that I actually felt extinguished in the form that I knew myself, but also the sense that I somehow became everything there was. I became all of existence. And as you know, you must have heard it quite a few times, that these states are considered ineffable. When you start trying to describe them, you find out that we just simply don't have language.

Starting point is 00:21:57 Our language is developed to communicate about things from everyday life. And in my later experiments, some of the sophisticated patients actually tried to use language from cultures that knew something about consciousness, like using, you know, from Hinduism, from, you know, Tibetan Buddhism, from Taoism. So they were talking about, you know, Nirvikalpa Samadhi, Samikalpa Sabadhi, Kensho, Satori, you know, using terms like Maya and so on, because we simply don't have, you know, technical terms for these states. So these experiences of mystical states are full of paradoxes.

Starting point is 00:22:42 Paradoxicality is one of the characteristics. So you can have the feeling that you became nothing, but by becoming nothing, you actually became of existence. So I was in this incredible state. And then as she was continuing working with me it was unfolding she had a protocol so she started from two hertz which is you know two frequencies uh per second took it up to 60 and then she kept it for a while in the alpha range and the theta range the delta range and then she turned it off and while she was doing this at a certain point I actually went from this sense of being everything, of being in the universe, in the astronomical universe, or actually being the universe. There were things happening for which at the time I didn't have names. But then later I read about, you know, the Big Bang and the black holes and the wormholes.

Starting point is 00:23:48 And so this was something in that category that was happening to me. I actually had the feeling again that I was not only in the universe, but that I actually was the universe. And then, you know, as she turned it off, then my world started shrinking again. I found the planet. I found Prang. I zoomed in on my body. But there was a major problem because my consciousness was actually kind of circling around my body. And I had difficulties aligning my consciousness with my body.

Starting point is 00:24:27 So at that point it became clear to me that what they were teaching at universities about consciousness as a product of the brain simply was nonsense. That consciousness was something cosmic and that the brain somehow is a moderator for that but it's not generated in in our skull could you and then finally i managed to align that and i came down in a very ecstatic state very impressed what just happened and right there i decided if i'm a psychiatrist you know this is by far the most interesting thing I can do working with these states. It's just overshadowed psychoanalysis. You know, I was not interested in psychoanalysis anymore.

Starting point is 00:25:17 I was interested in exploring the psyche using these states. states so you you've at this point dedicated more than six decades to studying non-ordinary states of consciousness uh which is i think we'll probably talk about this that is a term or a phrase you prefer over altered states of consciousness but you're you're alluding to perhaps a definition of consciousness or how you think about it now, how do you think about consciousness at this point? You said that it's, I think, mediated or moderated by the brain, but not generated by it. Based on these experiences, the experiences of others, you've supervised everything you've seen and experienced and studied up to this this point how do you think about consciousness now are there any other aspects of it yeah well you know i'm i'm very close now to ervin laszlo

Starting point is 00:26:13 who is this brilliant uh systems theorist and and philosophers of hungarian origin but living in pisa in in italy and he has a series of books where he is really addressing these problems. He's the only one that I think found some way of scientifically describing what is happening to us and he has a book called What is Reality where he actually goes through these different experiments that we have related to consciousness and argues, you know, what are the observations that we have against the idea that consciousness is local, that it's inside of our brain. And he moves to that consciousness is more transpersonal,

Starting point is 00:27:03 that in non-ordinary states you can have experiences of consciousness of other people you can have experiences of uh of being um becoming members of a different species you know and not just animals but also plants and so on so he moves from that from the consciousness being local to consciousness being transpersonal, and then he brings even arguments against that and concludes that consciousness is cosmic. And, you know, that would be my present understanding. Consciousness is simply an integral part of existence. It cannot be reduced to anything, let alone the neurons in the brain. So this also supported now, of course, by many people from quantum relativistic physics.

Starting point is 00:27:55 And, for example, Stuart Hameroff initially thought that maybe it's the so-called tubules in the mitochondria in the brain that might be the place where quantum processes generate consciousness. And then later he sort of took it back and he says now, according to him, consciousness is simply a property of the universe that can be traced back to the Big Bang in the form of proto-consciousness. There's a term that people often associate, of course, rightly with you in association with consciousness, and that is holotropic states of consciousness. And I'd love to jump into that because, and also just as a side note for people listening who are wondering what the applications of these non-ordinary states might be or how they've been utilized. It appears to me

Starting point is 00:28:55 that there are many, many different ways to utilize this. There are certain multiple Nobel Prizes associated with it, Carey Mollis, Francis Crick, and the co-discovery of the double helix. And then there are, you know, well-known entrepreneurs and so on, like Steve Jobs. But what does holotropic refer to, a holotropic state of consciousness? Thank you. It's a great, great question. Well, I have so far been, or we have been using the term non-ordinary states of consciousness, which is better than what psychiatrists, British and American psychiatrists are doing, calling it altered state. You know, I really dislike that term, although it was coined

Starting point is 00:29:31 by a good friend of mine, Charlie Tartt, because it suggests somehow that there is a correct way of experiencing ourselves and the world, and that's somehow disturbed. You know, I always have to think about veterinary medicine. We had our dog altered. So I feel too much respect for these states to call them altered. And even the state non-ordinary is really not accurate because there are many non-ordinary states that have not the properties that the holotropic states would have. So I use the term holotropic for a special large subcategory of non-ordinary states that have healing potential,

Starting point is 00:30:15 therapeutic potential, that have, according to my experience, transformative potential, that have what we call heuristic, H-E-U-R, which means when you work with these states, you run into a lot of paradigm-breaking observations that challenge the whole way of thinking, not just in psychiatry, but in heuristic science. And then I believe they also have evolutionary. In other words, I think if people would systematically use them, I think we would almost become another species. People work through a lot of aggression. It's replaced by compassion.

Starting point is 00:30:53 They have the experience of tremendous ecological sensitivity. They discover that we are deeply embedded in nature and that we cannot do anything to nature that doesn't damage us. They start seeing violence as an unacceptable way of solving problems. They have a sense of being actually global citizens rather than being Czechs or Russians or Americans. They start seeing themselves very much the way it happened to the astronauts who had the possibility of actually seeing the planet from the moon or from space. So this is my term that I coined because I realized that psychiatry does not have that kind of distinction.

Starting point is 00:31:48 So I coined it myself. It's a kind of a verbal hybrid. It's a neologism, as we call it, that comes from the Greek language, where holos means whole and trepo, trepene means moving in the direction of something. I usually refer to the word heliotropism helios means sun and heliotropism is the property of plants to always orient themselves towards the sun always follow the sun so literally this means moving toward wholeness you know when i when i use that term there's usually somebody who say uh what do you mean moving toward wholeness aren't we whole already the way we function in everyday life and i would have to say no on the basis of my experiences we have we're using only small fraction of our experiential potential when we are in the ordinary states.

Starting point is 00:32:46 So maybe I'll just give a few examples of holotropic states so people have a sense of what I'm talking about. Yes, please. So one category when you would find states that I call holotropic would be the initiatory crisis of shamans. You know, the career of most shamans begin by a spontaneous experience of traveling into and they experience annihilation and then experience of psycho-spiritual death rebirth that's followed by this journey into the supernal realms and in this initiatory journey they heal themselves typically anthropologists called shamans the wounded healers and they also learn how to heal. So when they then manage to come back and they ground the session, they use holotropic states in their healing.

Starting point is 00:33:53 When they heal, they either go into a non-ordinary state or they induce them in their clients, or both shamans and clients get into this holotropic state. So that's a major category. The second one is what you see in so-called rites of passage. This is the term that was coined by a Dutch anthropologist, Arnold van Hennep, that's G-E-N-N-E-P, who studied many native cultures, and he found out that they all uh you know at the time of important biological or social transitions uh perform very powerful rituals uh when they also induce in these holotropic states in in different ways many of those cultures even with psychedelic plants or psychedelic materials, in some others using sonic technology, drumming, rattling, and so on, physical pain, stay in the desert, stay in the high mountains, stay in a cave in the Arctic ice and so on.

Starting point is 00:35:09 And if you study these, the people experience psychospiritual death rebirths, very much like the shamans in their spontaneous initiatory journey. Now, the third important category are the ancient mysteries of death rebirths, like the Eleusinian mysteries or the Isis-Osiris mysteries in Egypt or the Sumerian mysteries of Inanna and Dumuzi. And also, you know, there were Mesoamerican mysteries of Shibalba, the Mayan, and so on. So all these were inducing these holotropic states for healing and transformation. And then also all the major religions developed what I call technologies of the sacred, you know, different forms of yoga, different schools of Buddhism from Theravada to Zen and Vajrayana Taoist exercises in the Christian tradition,

Starting point is 00:36:08 Hesychasm, the Jesus Prayer, or the exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the various Kabbalistic exercises. So those were all methods that were designed to take people into these holotropic experiences for the purpose of having a mystical experience, having a spiritual experience. And of course, we have now modern technologies of the sacred to induce holotropic experiences. We have now pure alkaloids from the psychedelic plants. You know, we have mescaline from peyote. We have psilocine and psilocybin from the magicoga from the African bush and so on. And we also have now the tryptamine derivatives DMT, DPT and then methoxy DMT.

Starting point is 00:37:21 Those are active in ayahuasca and in the different snuffs from the Caribbean. And also from this toad that's now becoming very famous, the bufoalvarius. These are secretions from the parotid glands and from the skin of these toads. Very, very powerful, very important psychedelics. So let me pause for one second. I have many, I'm not going to lose track of the train and I have a number of different questions, but since, since you brought it up, a mutual friend of ours, different mutual friend had suggested I ask you about Toad and you just mentioned that it could be or is important. And you mentioned methoxy-DMT, which in this case

Starting point is 00:38:09 often referred to as 5-MeO-DMT. What are your thoughts on this particular compound? And why is it important, if it's important? Well, the thing is, it has not really been explored scientifically, unlike psilocybin or LSD. But we have an enormous amount of information from either semi-legal or illegal, you know, underground experiments, which were happening during those years when psychedelics were not really explored scientifically. But we have an amazing book by Ralph Metzner, which is called The Toad and the Jaguar. Ralph traveled all over Europe and in the United States, visiting these groups that were using it, you know, either using some legal loopholes

Starting point is 00:39:04 or, you know, doing a kind of an underground research. And he wrote this book where he collected that information in a way that could become a basis of scientific research. Now, what is fantastic there is that this substance creates a very short, you know, within an hour, which is within the time of one psychoanalytic session, you can experience significant transformation and even spiritual opening. opening and the the substances methoxy dmt i have in my book when the impossible happens a chapter which is called the the secret of the toad of light there are churches in the american southwest that are actually using it as a sacrament called you know church of the toad of light and i took a fairly large doses which is not just more than it's usually used uh this was my first time when we really didn't know i didn't

Starting point is 00:40:15 know the dosing and it was estimated 25 milligrams today you would use like five or ten. And this was by far the most powerful psychedelic experience I've ever had. And within seconds, you know, it took me out of my body. There's nothing biographical, no birth experiences, nothing archetypal. I was just facing this incredible, I mean source of light you know for the for the lack of a better description it was like beyond anything i could imagine in terms of the the brilliance the incandescence that it had but also sense that this there was incredible intelligence creative intelligence was going beyond any dichotomies. I couldn't say if it was demonic or divine.

Starting point is 00:41:12 You know, there was just off the scales that I had. And then coming down from that experience, I actually had the feeling I was dying, but the feeling that I was not from life into dying, but from a place beyond death into a dying body. And then after a while, it became clear that this was not really dying. It was just the experience of dying. And for quite a while, I was in a situation where I was in an absolutely blissful kind of state and i was having visions of streams of my past life experiences where i had feeling of you know dying and being killed in different situations um my body was kind of acting out the the agony there was was shaking, twitching. Psychologically, emotionally, I was in absolute bliss.

Starting point is 00:42:09 And then coming down for a week, I was in a state in which I would like to live. We were at the time living at Esselen. We had a deck overlooking the ocean. And this was the time when I was handwriting my manuscripts and giving it to a secretary and then having to edit it. And I was, in that week, I was doing editing of my manuscript, which I could do perfectly, lying in the sun there. And then I felt I would take a little break. Again, within seconds, I had the feeling of just oneness

Starting point is 00:42:41 with the whole environment, oneness with the world. And then I would open my eyes and I could continue editing. But then, of course, you know, the sort of the consciousness of the industrial civilization came back, you know, to do workshops, travel, you know so i didn't stay in that in that state but my meditations became much much much deeper and it was not difficult to get into some version of that state you know just through meditation so i think this would be an amazing amazing substance to try for practical reasons because you you will not find a psychiatrist like myself in the um you know in the 60s and so on uh sitting for six hours with their patients but they could certainly do a one hour session with the Methoxy DMT.

Starting point is 00:43:50 And I think significant therapy could be done, you know, within these very short terms. It's also, according to Ralph Messner's observations, it's a substance where the experience ends very cleanly. There is no sort of lingering on. So there is a very powerful experience but also a good uh good uh closure so anyway so this is my experience with methoxy dmt now because it's very very popular for example we had the transpersonal conference in uh prague you know and there were lectures about it. And of course, there were people who had access to the toad material, to the excretions or

Starting point is 00:44:34 secretions of the glands. So it's becoming a very, very popular substance right now. You mentioned therapy a few times in describing your experience with 5-MeO-DMT and the potential, say, within a one-hour window or something like that to provide therapy if someone were sitting for someone experiencing this. I want to tie that into a comment that you're very famous for having made. I think it was in your first book in 1975, Realms of the Human Unconscious, in which you mentioned that LSD could then B, is there still a place for psychoanalysis, you know, traditional psychoanalysis or psychotherapy in combination with some of the value that people derive from these experiences or don't derive from these experiences is dependent quite a bit on what happens beforehand and what happens afterwards. But I'd just love to hear you, I suppose, clarify what you mean by LSD becoming for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and the telescope is for astronomy and then b if therapy still has a place in combination with these experiences yeah another wonderful question so let me tell you what happened when i lost interest in this laboratory

Starting point is 00:46:16 research and took it to the clinic uh we were you mentioned in the in your interview with michael pollan there are these two forms uh they've been using uh lsd and other psychedelics the psycholytic and the psychedelic the psychedelic is the you know using large dosages fully internalized with uh headphones eye shades and uh the method that was used mostly in Europe, but also by some American therapists, it's called psycholitic, which is sort of dissolving the psyche, dissolving the tensions, conflicts in the psyche and so on. Lysis means dissolution.

Starting point is 00:47:01 And so I started it with using sort of medium dosages maybe you know 150 maybe up to up to 200 at the beginning and what happened was absolutely fascinating because i saw intensification of the symptoms that the patients were having but then the process automatically took us to the different layers of traumatic experiences that were actually underlying that disorder. And layer after layer, then I came up with the concept of COEX system, system of condensed experience, where each symptom had like a history, you know, has a series of layered experiences behind it and so it was a process of exploring the different layers of the psyche one of my patients call it onion peeling of the of the psyche another one called it chemo archaeology so you could really explore the different layers

Starting point is 00:48:07 of the postnatal biographical level this is what what freudian analysis is about but the problem is didn't stop there then each of those co-existence also had a contribution from the trauma of birth. Even if we're using these lower dosages, as we were going on, it took us to birth. And that point, suddenly people started experiencing that they are trapped, they're caught, they are in a situation of no exit, they had the feeling they're getting crazy, you know, they are dying and so on and um you know my psychiatry and my uh my uh psychoanalytic training did not prepare me for that kind of thing and it took while including my own experiences to realize there was a powerful record of biological birth birth in there so um what we activated actually uh in the psyche was what i call now self-healing intelligence of the psyche you see the the process spontaneously was talking it was taking us to

Starting point is 00:49:16 the sources of of these emotional and psychosomatic symptoms. It also created automatically mapping of the psyche. So for a while I was just collecting these reports from the patients, my own records and people's descriptions of their sessions, and I was putting it on a map, creating what I thought was a new map for psychology, which would be the result of the fact that we had absolutely new tool, like a microscope opened up this whole underworld, or microworld, which we didn't know existed, and telescopes discovered new galaxies that the we didn't know existed and telescopes discovered new galaxies

Starting point is 00:50:06 that the astronomers didn't know about. So, you know, I felt we were discovering the depths of the psyche. So in that sense, it was like a microscope or a telescope. But it also was the self-healing intelligence that sort of emerged out of it. And do you find... Now, when I finally got the map together...

Starting point is 00:50:31 Oh, no, I was just going to say, please continue. I was just going to ask about if there are adjunct therapies or things that you would add to the pre-psychedelic experience or post-psychedelic experience, but I don't want to interrupt your train of thought. Well, just a couple of sentences. So the new map which I created, which I thought was new, had the biographical level which it shared with psychoanalysis and current psychiatry, because however much Freud was criticized, psychiatry accepted his idea that the newborn is a tabula rasa,

Starting point is 00:51:09 is a clean slate, that there's nothing of interest for psychology psychiatry that precedes birth. And this was a major discovery. There is a powerful, powerful record of birth. And when you become aware of that fact, you have to radically change, transform thinking in psychiatry. So this new map or map that I thought was new had the biographical level that it shared with current psychiatry,

Starting point is 00:51:39 but then I had to add the level which I call perinatal, which is related to birth, it's a record of birth and then it opened up further into uh the level that i call uh transpersonal now and there's a greater overlap with what jung described as the collective unconscious the historical and the the uh archetypal unconscious. But you see, when I had the map, I realized this was not a new map at all, actually a map that in different forms has been around not for centuries, but for millennia.

Starting point is 00:52:20 I started seeing the connection to the great spiritual philosophies of the East, of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, and so on, and even the shamanic maps. There was a lot of overlapping with the shamanic cartography. So I haven't forgotten your original question about psychoanalysis. Now the problem is that psychoanalysis has this very narrow map limited to postnatal biography into the individual unconscious which is uh just barely scratching the surface of what the psyche really is so if you would do psychoanalysis you would have to expand the conceptual framework very very radically because otherwise if you would get

Starting point is 00:53:06 to something like perinatal experiences or or transpersonal experiences you would not have any map if you use just freudian freudian psychoanalysis uh so it's not the it's not the question of the the technique i think in my understanding, Freud was actually on the right track. He was asking questions like, why do we have hysteria? Why do we have

Starting point is 00:53:35 phobias? Why do we have obsessive-compulsive neurosis? Why do we have perversions? And so on. He was tracing it back, but unfortunately his map was very superficial he did not have access to the uh to the perinatal level to the transpersonal level so he ended up with conclusions that then uh sometimes seemed absurd, you know, like suicide is killing the interjected bad breast of your mother and so on. And then there was a tendency just to move away completely and not ask the questions about etiology.

Starting point is 00:54:17 Freud's genius was trying to understand, you know, why do we have certain kinds of symptoms? Why do we have anxiety? Why do we have depression? Why do we have suicidal tendencies? And so on. And was looking for rational understanding for this. But he took it only not even halfway. Had he had access to the perinatal level, he would have gotten much more convincing understanding. Why do we have depression, different forms of depression? Why? What does it mean when people want to kill themselves in a way that is nonviolent as

Starting point is 00:54:57 compared to people who have the tendency to commit violence, suicide, and so on? So if you expand the cartography and you add the perinatal level and the transpersonal level, you can continue this psychoanalytic work, actually, and get some reasonable, quite convincing answers.

Starting point is 00:55:17 Why do we have certain kinds of symptoms? Why do they cluster in what we call syndromes and so on? And it also opens up new radically different uh approaches to psychotherapy which would be would have to be experiential if the roots of emotional problems are not just postnatal but also perinatal and transpersonal you cannot reach it by talking you would have to actually use experiential psychotherapy of the kind that started

Starting point is 00:55:48 in the 60s developed within humanistic psychology let's go directly to that we're going to come back to when the impossible happens we're going to come back to many different

Starting point is 00:56:04 pieces of your past experience and more recent projects. But this experiential psychotherapy in an ideal world based on all of your experience, what would that look like? What would the format look like? Well, we are talking about psychedelics. So one would be psychedelic-assisted psych would be so at the same time very much what it was for freud it would be exploration of the psyche getting to know the dimensions of the psyche the the different levels of experiences and so on but now we have powerful non-drug experiences that can actually take you to those levels to to the perinatal level, to the transpersonal level. So my late wife, Christina, and I developed

Starting point is 00:57:10 what we call holotropic breath work, where you use very simple means, which is faster breathing, some powerful evocative music, a certain kind of body work, and then we also use art we use mandala drawing and sharing groups and people have access to not just to the postnatal biographical level but also to the perinatal and to the transpersonal level. So there are both pharmacological and non-pharmacological ways of accessing these levels that have the deepest roots of emotional and psychosomatic problems.

Starting point is 00:57:59 So I'm really glad you brought up holotropic breathwork, which is, as you mentioned, a non-pharmacological or non-exogenous way of inducing these holotropic states, which I've experienced three times in different workshops for holotropic breathwork. And I went into it, I'm not going to lie to you, skeptical as someone with psychedelic experience that it could achieve anything comparable. And I was really stunned by just how powerfully you can induce these non-ordinary states using breathwork, uh, and what I observed in other people in the rooms as well, who many of, many of which were, were skeptical as I was at the time. So two, two questions to, to, uh, dig into both the, uh, I suppose psychedelic or in theogen assisted, and then the holotropic breathwork approach. What psychedelic materials in what dosages would you potentially be using with what frequency? Would it be once a week, twice a week? Would it be determined by the patient? Would it be psychedelic dosing or would it be psychedelic dosing?

Starting point is 00:59:18 How would you think about that piece of the puzzle? I wouldn't do psychedelic therapy, although I very much value the information that I got from it, you know, the self-healing intelligence of the psyche, the co-existence

Starting point is 00:59:32 and just discovery of the dimensions that are on that expanded map being taken to the perinatal level and then to the transpersonal level. I also have a lot of interesting observations. If you read the realms of the human unconscious,

Starting point is 00:59:53 a lot of it is about trying to understand how and why the world is changing under the influence of LSD or some other psychedelics. I became fascinated, you know, the people saw me at different periods of their session as different things. They saw me as a jaguar, they saw me as Hitler, they saw me as angel, they saw me as a supreme judge. Or they look around the treatment room and sometimes they had the feeling that they are on the death row, sometimes cabin in the Pacific, sometimes it was the feeling that they are on the death row sometimes cabin in the pacific sometimes sometimes it was the bordello and so on so i did the kind of freudian work on

Starting point is 01:00:32 it trying to understand how it condensed you know different levels of the material so i got a good understanding of the dynamics of the postnatal biography but i also found out that it was not the most effective way of getting therapy, therapeutic results. So then already in Prague, I increased the dosages. I started using music and the headphones, eye shades. And this is how we did the whole research at Spring Grove, the American research when I came to the United States. There you can very, very powerful transformation, you know, within six, eight hours of the high dose.

Starting point is 01:01:18 But you don't have any idea why that happened. You don't understand the mechanism of the change. It resembles the material that John Rosen described when he studied the experiences of people who did suicidal jumps from Golden Gate Bridge and the

Starting point is 01:01:37 Bay Bridge. He found that people who survived it, which is about 1%, they usually survived it unscathed and they experienced powerful transformation within the three seconds that it took to get from the fall from the railing to the surface of the water and then maybe about eight minutes in cold water before they were rescued. Again, powerful, powerful changes that you wouldn't achieve by years of psychoanalysis,

Starting point is 01:02:14 but there was no understanding what happened. Now, with this history of the psycholitic therapy, I have now some idea about what is happening in these high-dose sessions, but in a very condensed, very rapid way. By high-dose, what does that generally mean? Say it once more. By high-dose, how many micrograms would you generally be using? Okay, I would probably use now dosages like 300 or even 400 micrograms, which might be in some instances, not very frequently, might be a challenge management of the session, but you generally get much more powerful

Starting point is 01:02:56 transformation, also cleaner. Actually, if you use smaller dosages, there is a tendency sometimes to actually activate what happens and people have more of a chance to to resist it if there are areas that they don't want to go into so i consider the high dosages if it's proper management to be more effective therapeutically i would use now the smaller dosages if we continue the exploration of the psyche. That's where lower dosages are certainly very useful. And I'm very sorry that this is not happening with psychedelics in this new renaissance, that we don't continue the Freudian work where we are trying to go to find what the roots are,

Starting point is 01:03:43 trying to understand the etiology. Now, in this later DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, they moved completely from any question of etiology. You know, they now just describe the symptoms. They use what they call neocrepelian approach. Emil Krappelin was the person who did the first diagnosis in psychiatry at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. It's dementia precox, which was the original name for schizophrenia, and manic depressive

Starting point is 01:04:23 disorder. Those were the first two diagnoses in psychiatry. And what he did, he just simply described the symptoms that these patients have. And now the tendency in psychiatry is to go to the neocrepelian. Like in the DSM, you don't ask the question, why do we have depression? Why do we have suicidal tendencies? You know, why do we have different psychosomatic disorders. It's just simply describing the symptoms. And I think there is tremendous

Starting point is 01:04:51 field of discovery, which would be doing individual cases. Like initially in psychoanalysis, you had, I think, about 1,500 psychoanalysts all over the world who were seeing their patients and they were describing what they observed. And it was published in journals and so on until they ended up with the psychoanalytic understanding of emotional and psychosomatic disorders defined in Otto Fenichel's book, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. So we need to continue that kind of work.

Starting point is 01:05:29 This would be something for psychoanalysts to do, to continue Freud's exploration of the psyche, trying to understand the psyche, understand why we have symptoms and syndromes, but not keeping it just on the postnatal level. By etiology, I think that was the word that I heard earlier, is that the exploration of the why we experience these things? The causes, yes.

Starting point is 01:05:55 The causes. Why do we have that? So Freud had the concept of the development of the libido, the oral phase when the sensual feelings are associated with nursing, and the passive oral, and then the active oral when the infant starts biting his teeth and so on. And then it moved to the anal phase, the time of toilet training, and then refined toilet training which had to do with urination that was the urethral stage and then he talked about the phallic stage which was the stage where the focus is on the on the genitals on the and the clitoris in girls and

Starting point is 01:06:37 the penis of the boys and where you have the oedipal uh complex and complex and the castration complex and all those things, which was a very, very interesting way of thinking, but it didn't go deep enough. So you ended up with very unconvincing interpretations. But I have tried in my books to continue and see how you would understand in a much deeper way, why do we have these things? Why do we have depression, different types of depression, suicidal tendencies?

Starting point is 01:07:13 You know, why do we have symptoms like a headache and many neurotic patients have problems breathing and so on? Where does that come from why do we end up with psychosomatic pains for which there is no organic finding so if you expand the cartography you can really get a much fuller understanding you know freud at a certain point when he discovered the individual unconscious he compared the psyche to an iceberg he said what we thought the psyche was it's just a surface like the part of the iceberg that's showing above the surface and psychoanalysis shows you uh also the submerged uh part of the iceberg now if you now bring psychedelics you

Starting point is 01:08:00 have to change them the simile or the metaphor You would have to say what classical psychoanalysis discovered, it's just barely the surface. It's the part of the iceberg that's showing for psychoanalysts. And there is this enormous part of the psyche that remained hidden even for traditional psychoanalysis. So let me ask you this. Joseph Campbell, let me just say one sentence, which I cannot resist.

Starting point is 01:08:29 Joseph Campbell, you know, the wonderful mythologist with his incredible Irish humor, he put it differently. He said Freud was fishing while sitting on a whale. uh the the you've you have seen so many things experienced so many things uh let's just call it roughly 4 500 different sessions you've thought of all these different modalities uh looking at my very very limited personal experience and what i've observed in other people. I've, I've certainly seen, as you have some incredible examples of transformation, people who have, uh, seemingly resolved, uh, chronic depression or, uh, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, uh, and, and

Starting point is 01:09:21 experienced incredible healing that, that seems to have a persistent effect after experiencing these deep psychedelic states. I've also observed not a small number of people who collect interesting drug experiences or psychedelic experiences, but don't seem to experience or resolve any deeper healing. What do you think separates those two groups, and how can you increase the likelihood of real deep healing occurring? Well, extremely significant is the concept of set and setting. That means who gives it to whom uh under what circumstances for what purpose you know that makes a big difference i have seen people who have taken lsd 100 times and they didn't discover that it had something to do with their own psyche it was like

Starting point is 01:10:16 going to the movies they kept their eyes open and you know things were floating around people were making funny faces like a curious kind of interesting experience. But they had no idea that the way they perceived the environment is actually a result of the projection from their own unconscious. So one major difference is do you keep your eyes open and walk around, let alone driving cars, what people have been doing and so on, you know, or doing it in raves where it's an open place where people don't know what they are taking and the police might they they know they do something forbidden police might show this is the worst possible set and setting so you increase tremendously the risk of these experiences and you reduce the potential. So that's important.

Starting point is 01:11:14 So if you come with an intention, self-exploration, healing, for me, for my first LSD session, it became a spiritual quest. Every one of my experiences, I had about maybe 140 high-dose psychedelic sessions over the years. It might seem like a lot, but it's extended to a period of 60 years. So if you look at it that much, it's not that much. So that is extremely, extremely important. What is your intention? Is this serious intention or self-exploration, self-healing? Is it part of your spiritual quest?

Starting point is 01:11:52 Or are you doing it for kicks, you know, because it's sort of a funny, weird experience? There's also something that Houston Smith said, which was very interesting. There was this whole discussion about instant or chemical mysticism. When we saw in the early LSD sessions that people had mystical experiences, then this whole question of chemical mysticism came up. What is it? what are we watching and there was one group of people who was uh where these sort of hardcore uh uh materialistic scientists he says well here you have it what this mystics thing are some kind of deep uh insights into ontology and cosmology it's nothing else but uh aberrations of body chemistry so so much for mysticism, so much for spirituality.

Starting point is 01:12:46 It's all chemistry. And there was another group that was saying, no, what is happening? There is a very special group of chemicals that can induce mystical experiences. Those are sacred substances. Those are sacraments. Those are sacred medicines and so on. So they took basically the position that the shamans of native cultures took who were using psychedelic plants like the onanacatl, you know, the flesh of the gods and so on.

Starting point is 01:13:16 The plants either were deities or they mediated access to deities. And there was this position also, the third position was the mystical experiences induced by psychedelics are phenomenologically indistinguishable from those that are described in spiritual literature, but they don't have the same value to have really valuable mystical experience. It has to be a result of prayers, of meditation, or it has to come as a grace. There's no way you can take a pill and experience God. So people like Meher Baba and so on, you know, very, very negative. A guy called Zare, a British theologian and so on. So this really put it sort of in the court of spiritual teachers to say, are these valuable

Starting point is 01:14:20 or not? And there was disagreement all the tibetans for example that i have known and actually been in uh around some of them when they had sessions they all valued it very much as something that that is uh accelerating your spiritual spiritual uh development but just caution that this is very this is very powerful that this has to be done very very uh carefully on the other hand zen buddhists usually had difficult experiences with psychedelics because you are not supposed to pay attention to what's happening it's called makio if you just talk your past life, you're supposed to sit through it and cut into the no-mind place.

Starting point is 01:15:07 It's very difficult to have 300 micrograms and not to pay attention to what is, you just cut through it, you know, to a no-mind place. And then this is, I'm back now to Houston Smith. Houston Smith had a, unlike Meherher baba uh alzheimer had actually experiences uh he came to us uh to um baltimore you know for a session we had the possibility of giving sessions legally to uh people who were uh ministers doing pastoral account counseling and so on uh i actually was in in one was in one of his sessions. So he knew what he was talking about, and he said the chemically induced mystical experiences

Starting point is 01:15:55 are phenomenologically indistinguishable. This was already shown in Pankey's Good Friday experiment in the Marsh Chapel of the Boston University, a very famous experiment. The Good Friday experiment. That I know you talked about in your discussion with Michael Pollan and so on. And just to define very quickly, I apologize for people who are listening, phenomenological or phenomenology, that's the subjective reporting of experience. If you look at the subjective experiences of people who had them through LSD or psilocybin, and you compare it with what you read about in spiritual literature. So that's phenomenologically indistinguishable. But he said, but the value would be very different depending on the set and the

Starting point is 01:16:47 setting he said if let's say you have a situation there is a party in berkeley and the way it was done and there would be a fruit punch and a joker comes with a handful of sugar cubes laced with lsd people think they are drinking punch and then you know this they out of their gourds and there's nobody who's holding the kite string and so on even under these lousy circumstances sometimes it can happen that people would have mystical experiences but it would be completely out of context they would not know what to do with difficulties to to integrate it and become a kind of very likely alien enclave in their life. accelerate and he would do the sessions, you know, in a proper set and setting, the context in some kind of a reverential attitude and would do then afterwards, after the sessions,

Starting point is 01:17:54 some reading and continue working on it in meditation. This could become really a powerful catalyst of spiritual journey. And I think that's the correct answer. So you've mentioned seekers and a number of names. A friend of mine recommended, I don't even know this name, and I'm maybe ashamed that I don't, but recommended that I ask you about your experiences with Swami Muktananda. And I don't recognize that name, but I thought that this is as good a time as any to perhaps bring it up, if you can answer that. Yes, he became kind of quite an important figure in our lives.

Starting point is 01:18:41 I met him first about 1965, when he was on his second tour around the world. He was the head of the Siddha Yoga movement. During the first trip around the world, he was actually accompanied by Ram Dass and by Werner Erhard and uh again my my uh late wife Christina she came to one of his early sessions he came to Honolulu and she became a devotee of his and so when we when we connected she wanted me to meet Muktananda and arrange this uh this darshan with him in in oakland and um i described this experience and some later experience again in a couple of chapters in the book when the impossible happens and it was very interesting i was very reluctant you know to go i was not a guru person i was not sort of somebody who would be, you know, at the feet of somebody.

Starting point is 01:19:46 I had the feeling that ultimately it was between me and the cosmos and so on. But we had about 20 minutes waiting for that darshan. And at that point, she told me that he was a Shaivite. This is a follower of shiva and i had some of my most powerful experiences in my sessions with the the archetype of shiva in sort of various ways and uh this sort of changed my feeling about this to be interested find somebody i knew that shivites are using all kinds of means including bang uhang, you know, Hashish and so on, and also Datura. So they have a very highly experiential group.

Starting point is 01:20:36 And so this changed suddenly my attitude for this interview and uh i walked in and he he was sitting there you know with a red ski cap with dark glasses holding a wand a wand of peacock feathers scented with the central oil and uh as i have told lungi which just looked like a night night shirt and he sort of uh beckoned me you know to come you sit here to the chair just by him and uh he turned my head and uh was sort of took off his uh took or sort of shifted up his dark glasses which he very seldom did and he sort of looked into my eyes like he was an ophthalmologist, you know. And the first thing that he said is, you're a man who has seen Shiva. He says, this is very good.

Starting point is 01:21:33 And this just blew my mind. I just finished, you know, describing my experiences with Shiva and the fact that this was a very important figure. And the first thing that he says, you know, I can tell you have seen Shiva. And so we had this long interview where I actually asked him about Soma, which I was fascinated by. This is the psychedelic plan that was used, you know, in ancient India and was described in Rig Veda, but

Starting point is 01:22:05 hundred over hundred stanzas in Rig Veda are dedicated to Soma. It was a plant and it was a beverage that was produced and some of the descriptions show that those were powerful psychedelic, you know, half of us is on earth, half of us in heaven, we have taken Soma. So we knew that there was a powerful psychedelic, but the secret was lost. And so I asked him, I said, oh, yeah, you know, on my birthday, the Vedic priests come down to Ganesh Puri and they do a Soma ceremony and you can come as my guests, you know, I will introduce you. And then he died before we could actually do it.

Starting point is 01:22:51 So to make a long story short, then we were walking out of his room and we're standing at the door and he looked at us and says, you come to our intensives. We have two intensives on Kashmir Shaivism, which is kind of a Mahayana branch of Buddhism that started in Kashmir in the 8th century. Rishi had a vision of some rocks near Srinagar, and he went there and exposed some cover, vegetable cover, and there were inscriptions carved in the rock that became then the Shiva Sutras.

Starting point is 01:23:42 This was like the Bible of Kashmir Shaivism. So he said, come, this is on Kashmir Shaivism. He looked at me and says, this will be very interesting for you. And so, of course, we did. And when I listened to the Swami who started describing what Kashmir Shaivism was, I had the feeling that he was stealing sentences and paragraphs from an article which I had written, I think, 1969, which was called Psychedelic Ontology and Cosmology Observations from LSD Sessions.

Starting point is 01:24:19 So, interesting question. What is the common denominator between experiences that people have with LSD, this strange substance that Swiss chemists discovered in Switzerland, and something that was found written on the rock in Srinagar in the 8th century? And so then we started sort of going to these intensives whenever we were we were near to muktananda and then we actually did a large transpersonal conference in in bombay or mumbai this was 1982 which was on ancient wisdom and modern science, bringing together spiritual teachers and people from the new paradigm circles like Fritjof Capra and others.

Starting point is 01:25:13 So that was our history. Well, we've mentioned the title, When the Impossible Happens, a few times. I figure we might as well jump into it and discuss certainly perhaps the reasons for writing the book, but also some of the stories. I would imagine, well, I would love to hear some of the stories, and I would imagine people listening would love to hear some of the stories as well. Well, Tim, what happened to us that our house in Mill Valley burned down in 2001, and I lost my whole referential library. So it was difficult to write books like I used to, where you have to refer to people's

Starting point is 01:25:54 work and take passages of it and so on. And so I decided to write a biography. But, you know, my life has been pretty intense, pretty rich. So the question was, you know, what do I select? But my life has been pretty intense, pretty rich. So the question was, what do I select? And then I decided to select observations and experiences from my life that current meteoristic science would consider to be impossible. This is not possible if the meteoristic paradigm is accurate. So I selected them.

Starting point is 01:26:27 So it's a selection of these stories. And about one-third of this is dedicated to amazing synchronicities that I have experienced in my life. And some of the synchronicities were actually related to Muktananda. So there are two chapters of it describing what happened between us and Muktananda. So there are two chapters of it describing what happened between us and Muktananda. What is a synchronicity? Well, synchronicity is something that Carl Gustav Jung brought into the attention of Western scientists

Starting point is 01:27:00 after hesitating for 20 years, collecting for 20 years observations because you realize this is against this is undermining the cornerstone of materialistic science where the basic principle is linear causality you know the what we experience is a chain of linear causality everything that happens as a cause and has an effect. And this works in Western materialistic science with the exception of the cause of causes. You know, what caused the beginning of the universe?

Starting point is 01:27:35 We don't go there very frequently because we don't have any good answers for that. Now, what he showed up, that there are situations where there's a meaningful correlation or connection between something that's an intra-psychic event, like a dream or a vision

Starting point is 01:27:56 or a psychedelic experience, and something that happens in the material universe or what we call so-called objective reality, consensus reality. Now, this should not be happening. I mean, our psyche should be reflecting the material universe which is out there. It should not get into a kind of playful interaction with it, okay? So let me just give you a couple of major examples from that book.

Starting point is 01:28:25 I am referring to the experience that I had with Joseph Campbell again, you know, great, great mythologist, greatest mythologist of the 20th century probably of all time. And he used to come regularly to Esalen and do workshop and he went to our workshop, months long workshops and so on. And we were doing some workshops with him. And in one of these workshops, he was talking about Jung. He was, you know, great supporter and very enthusiastic about Jung. And he mentioned synchronicity

Starting point is 01:29:01 and somebody didn't understand it and said, Joe, could you explain what synchronicity is? And he first gave this official definition of Jung's, you know, this is a meaningful connection across time or space between an intrapsychic event and something that happened in the material world. But he says, I will give you an example. He said, you know, we were living in downtown Manhattan on the 14th floor of a high-rise building, and my office had two sets of windows. One was overlooking 6th Avenue, which was, you know, nothing interesting,

Starting point is 01:29:41 like many streets in Manhattan. But the other set was overlooking the Hudson River, and that was a beautiful view. So these two windows were open all the time. The others were open just for cleaning. Nobody was bothered to open those windows. And then he said, at the time I was working on the first volume of what was supposed to be world mythology.

Starting point is 01:30:08 And it's called The Way of the Animal Powers. And that first volume is about shamanic mythologies of the world. And then Joe said, and I was working on the chapter about Kalahari Bushmen. This is Bushmen, you know, living in the Kalahari desert. And he said that in their mythology, a major heroic figure is praying mantis. And so my desk was covered with papers and pictures related to the mantis and the Kalahari Bushmen.

Starting point is 01:30:44 And there was Loren van der Post's book about his childhood to the mantis and the Kalahari Bushmen. And there was Loren van der Post's book about his childhood when he had a Bushmen nanny. And Loren van der Post described how this nanny seemed to be communicating with the praying mantis, that they were having sort of conversations and uh you know when the with the movements the uh the praying mantis seemed to be responding to him but to her and then said in the middle of this work i suddenly had this totally irrational impulse to go and open one of the windows that we never open and i stuck my head head out and turned it automatically to the side. And there on the 14th floor of a high-rise building on Manhattan,

Starting point is 01:31:33 there was a great specimen of a praying mantis sort of climbing up the building and turned her, his head toward joe and he said uh i took a close look and uh the way vander post described it was true it uh there was something that made the praying mantis look like a bushman so anyway so that's the that's his story so you know it's possible to imagine that somehow praying mantis got into manhattan somebody has it as a pet or whatever and it you know it got to that place so but that it in itself is not very uh probable happening but the fact that it's happened you know in such a way that at the time when joe's head was filled with thoughts about praying mantis and so on and he had this irrational impulse to go and open the window that he never

Starting point is 01:32:32 opened and he looks out and you know there is right there is a praying mantis and actually turns toward him and gives him a me got what he felt was meaningful look. That's pretty mind-blowing synchronicity. So, you know, Jung hesitated 20 years before he presented it, 1951, in one of the Eranos conferences, and it was presented together with a talk by Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics, who was first Jung's patient and then a very close friend. Let me just quickly give you another example, which is the most mind-blowing synchronicity from my life.

Starting point is 01:33:21 Yes, please. This happened during our first trip to china where we were bringing transpersonal psychology and holotropic breathwork to china and we did a workshop holotropic breathwork workshop in jinan which is the birthplace of of confucius and we were having dinner and one of the participants came to me and said, Stan, I had an experience about you in my dream last night. And I said, what was it? And she said, it was my great-grandmother who showed up and told me

Starting point is 01:34:07 that we have an important stone in our family for generations, and that stone should go to Dr. Groff. So she actually brought it. She was holding a beautiful, beautiful blue velvet bag and opened it, and it was a fossil Nautilus, the ammonite, you know, which are the ancestors of the Nautilus. Very, very beautiful fossil.

Starting point is 01:34:39 Now, the interesting thing was that it was picked up at the top of Mount Everest. I didn't know at that time that it's possible that this is a marine mollusk, you see. So it comes from the bottom of the ocean and it got, during the creation of Transpersonal Psychology, International Association of Transpersonal Psychology, and a series of international conferences, we were thinking what would be the proper logo for the International Transpersonal Association. And we came up with the chambered Nautilus, you know, which is a beautiful piece of sacred geometry. So for decades, we were using it on the stationary. It was on all the programs of transpersonal psychology. So, you know, here we are bringing transpersonal psychology to China.

Starting point is 01:35:39 And a great-grandmother shows up in the dream of a woman who actually was called Meng, which is the Chinese name for dream, and tells her to bring me this fossil Nautilus, which was taken from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the highest mountain in the world. According to the estimates, the Himalayas were born about 50 million years ago during the collision of the tectonic plates. So this was, you know, at least 50 million years old, fossil nautilus, you know, symbol of the International Transpersonal Association. So, of course, theilus, you know, symbol of the International Transpersonal Association. So, of course, the Chinese press, you know, didn't describe how great the holotropic breathwork was, but they all focused on this incredible synchronicity, you know.

Starting point is 01:36:37 Are there any other stories or phenomena, experiences that are difficult to explain in that book or outside of When the Impossible Happens that are related to psychedelic sessions? Well, there are, of course, experiences of the out-of-body experiences in near-death experiences, you know, where people who are in a state of clinical death, cardiac death, or even a flat EEG have experiences. They might be watching the procedure from the ceiling so that when they were brought back to consciousness, they are able to describe the procedure. There's one case where this was happening to a woman who had to be frozen because they needed to get to the tumor at the base of the skull. And so she had flat electrocardiogram, flat encephalogram. And at the same time, this is the most detailed description of the surgical procedure that we have.

Starting point is 01:37:45 She was able to draw the instruments that they were using and so on. So there are many, many of these, and we had a couple of those experiences with our own cancer patients. So one of them is described in the book. There is one chapter which I called unorthodox psychiatry, where people experience healing in connection with experiences that, you know, wouldn't make any sense to current psychiatrists. What would be an example of that? So, there was one situation where we had a five-day workshop at SLN, and a woman came who had for the last two years had had a very bad depression, which psychiatrists would consider to be what's called endogenous,

Starting point is 01:38:39 which of course doesn't mean anything. Endogenous means generated from within. But the characteristic is that it's worse in the morning so she got out of the bed and it took her like a couple hours before she managed to brush her teeth and and uh you know uh get dressed properly and so on so she had two sessions with us, which we had in the five days at Esalen. And, you know, they were pretty powerful things from childhood. And she was reliving her birth. But Friday in the morning, which was the last day she came, and she actually experienced some intensification of these feelings. So we asked her to lie down.

Starting point is 01:39:32 We had a different program for that morning, you know, the conclusion of the five days. But it was clear that we had to do something. So she lied down in the middle of the room. And we just told her just to go with the experience. She didn't even do more breathing. And she, again, completed a little something about the experience of birth, biological birth, and then went into this very strange series of movements where it looked like sort of a praying or worshiping something.

Starting point is 01:40:10 You end up in a sitting position. And then this monotonous chant, repetitive chant came in a language that we did not understand. And this was going for quite a while. And then it ended and she laid back and she was just for quite a while and then it ended and she uh laid back and she was just completely blissed out you know in a in an ecstatic state uh the group was reacting in a strange way people were ending up in their lotus positions um you know some of them crying for unknown reasons. And we had a Jewish psychoanalyst from Buenos Aires participating in this five-day workshop.

Starting point is 01:40:58 And he came to us and he said, this is fantastic. Do you understand what happened? We said, this is fantastic. Do you understand what happened? We said, no. He said she was chanting in perfect Sephardic language, the Ladino, which is the medieval mixture of Spanish and Hebrew. And it happened to be his hobby. You know, he knew the Sephardic language. And we say, wow. says we asked him what was she

Starting point is 01:41:28 singing this what she was singing I am suffering and I will always suffer I am crying and I will always cry I am praying and I will always pray now this episode finished these two years of the exogenous depression. We saw her then a couple of times at conferences, and the depression never came back. So, the idea of healing depression, pretty bad depression, by singing a Sephardic prayer, it's a pretty unusual sort of therapeutic mechanism. What do you make of that? How do you explain that for yourself? We've seen a lot of this kind of thing, that healing happens, powerful healing happens in the holotropic breathwork

Starting point is 01:42:22 through mechanisms that we don't understand. I saw before, you know, working with people who were in psychoanalysis and so on, the opposite. That people, after years of psychoanalysis, they got to the point where they can give you lectures. Why they have the problems. How is it related to early cannibalism and the toilet training and Oedipus problems. Only the problems don't change very much. So you have the option either have very little result with what seems to be intellectual

Starting point is 01:42:58 understanding or a result where you have no clue what what's happening and and that particular experience with the sephardic chanting that was with uh that was following breath work but not using any type of dosing of any type of material no we were we were careful not to bring people not to bring anything into the holotropic breathwork sessions because the structure is completely different. The timing of the breathwork is different. It's about three hours and the type of music that we use. So it would not be great set and setting. It's not structured for a psychedelic experience.

Starting point is 01:43:49 And actually this would, you know, disturb. We had one situation actually where somebody who had a black belt took it going into our workshop at SLN without telling us. And ended up, you ended up in a pretty aggressive situation and it just really disturbed the whole session. We had a hard time sort of bringing him

Starting point is 01:44:17 down. Sounds terrifying. It's just been a matter of principle. Not only was it illegal but it it just does not does not work well in the context that's that's created for holotropic breathwork if if you had to answer the question and there might not be an answer to this or there might not be an affirmative answer and to the question that someone posed to me, which was they hadn't experienced holotropic breathwork, but they did have a lot of research

Starting point is 01:44:52 experience with psychedelics. And they asked, what psychedelic at what dose is most similar to the effects or the experience of holotropic breathwork? Well, it would be more something in the category of MDMA in that the holotropic breathwork can create visions, you know, visual experiences, but it's not that common as it is in LSD or in mescaline where you can have, you know, really fantastic fractal displays of colorful images and so on. And the whole session could be very visual. The breathwork is more like an MDMA where you have something that's almost like on the interface

Starting point is 01:45:41 between vision and a vivid thought and so on. And if we were to look at another subjective experience that's reported with decent regularity with psychedelics, specifically entity encounters, and this seems to be frequently reported with, say, ayahuasca or smoke. Say it once more. Entity encounters, encountering entities that one believes to be separate from themselves, seems to be quite common with ayahuasca or smoke DMT, NNDMT specifically. What is, have you seen this in breath work? And also do you make any attempt to interpret what these things mean, or is it really left to the person experiencing it to integrate it or to heal through such a perceived encounter or something that exists

Starting point is 01:46:43 independently? Well, this, you know, this was described, of course, with peyote, mescalito. Right, mescalito. And also very common with ayahuasca, pachamama, the mother, you know, mother, and so on. The only time I had it was in an ayahuasca session where there was a sense of, actually, it's not true. I had it once in an early LSD session where there was a presence,

Starting point is 01:47:16 there was an energetic presence. I didn't see a figure, but there was also communication which was telepathic, which was without words. This was very strange because this was at a time when we had closed boundaries. We couldn't even initially travel to Russia, let alone to the West. And there was this kind of entity appearing in my LSD session. It was like a genie almost, like asking, you know,

Starting point is 01:47:49 what would you like your life to be like? And I said, I would like to see the world. I would like to understand psychosis. This was the place I was in. And I would like to have a job that's not kind of a 9-to-5 job. I would like to have some kind of a freedom. And the answer was, okay, but your task is to bring spirituality to Eastern Europe and to Russia. I said, no, I really did it.

Starting point is 01:48:19 You said, no, I'm flipping out. I can't even travel to Poland. And this is promising me I can see the world. But then, of course, it happened. Then developing transpersonal psychology, it became very, very popular in Russia. And then 25 years ago, bringing transpersonal psychology to Czechoslovakia, actually. So that was a fascinating synchronicity again. Then I had one in the ayahuasca session, where also this was a very intense,

Starting point is 01:49:03 but it was guiding my session, was sort of telling me what I should look at, how I should handle it. And that's not something that you observe in breathwork very often. No. Yeah. No. You know, I actually wrote, initially I wrote that I consider psychedelics to be non-specific amplifiers.

Starting point is 01:49:25 Yes. And it would have to be modified. Actually, all psychedelics can take you to the areas which I described in that cartography. You can experience something from a child sufficiently emotionally. You can relive your birth. You can have prenatal experiences even this is a i almost hesitate to say that reliving your uh conception you know identifying with the on a cellular level with the sperm and the and the ovum uh you can have past life

Starting point is 01:49:59 experiences you can have archetypal experiences you can can take you to the collective unconscious and so on. So the cartography applies to all of them, but there is a different style in which it's coming. You know, let's talk about more visual, less visual and so on, more emphasis on physical feelings or on the emotions. In certainly MDMA or some of the other entheogens, they shift that whole spectrum towards the positive. There are very few people who have bad trips or MDMA. MDMA is very dangerous physiologically, but very easy for most people to handle psychologically, emotionally.

Starting point is 01:50:46 But then I discovered this element in ayahuasca that there is very frequently the imagery of the Amazonian jungle or the anaconda snake is coming, the kind of a roto-roto, you know, cleansing, jaguars, images of jaguars. So there is some kind of a selectivity, what from the collective unconscious is actually prevalent in those sessions. Do you have any opinion of or experience with microdosing of different psychedelics is that something you've administered to people or i'd love to hear your thoughts on it it's become a topic yeah i had had quite quite a few of like the 25 micrograms you know for for hiking or swimming in the ocean or something that just enhancement of the perceptual experience of the world. But I haven't experimented with the small.

Starting point is 01:51:53 I had lots of very interesting experiences inside of the sessions and then particularly coming down from the sessions when I was in a kind of a state that you might be experiencing lower dosages. But it was at the end of a high-dose session rather than an experience per se. What did you experience at the tail end of those sessions? What were they? Yeah, what were those experiences at the tail end of those high-dose sessions that were interesting? Well, there were all kinds of psychological insights. I mean, a lot of the things that I've been writing about were combinations of what I saw in the patients and then getting insights and understanding, even in the high dose parts of the sessions, when I hit some

Starting point is 01:52:49 difficult places, like, for example, existential despair feeling, you know, there's no meaning in life, absurdity of life, and so on, which very frequently happens during reliving of birth when you get to what I call the second perinatal matrix, which is the stage of birth where the uterus contracts, but there is no opening. The cervix is not open. So you have the feeling of total existential despair, total bummer. There's no meaning. Everything's absurd.

Starting point is 01:53:22 We go from nowhere to nowhere. We come to this world naked, crying in pain, you know, without any possession. And this is how we're going to end, no matter what you do in your life or with your life. Those are really heavy kind of experiences. so i had some of those experiences when either there is a suicidal impulse or even suicide even suicide would not be solution of trying to get out of that state and so when i was hitting some of these places in my own sessions uh i would have like a parade of my patients where i would suddenly say oh this is where he was or this is where she was. When I was bringing just my training as a psychiatrist and things that I've read, I realized I was sitting there listening to what they were saying. I had no clue what they were talking about. But I got really full experiential understanding by finding those places in myself. And this is also interesting about this large map of the psyche,

Starting point is 01:54:28 that each of us has all those things. It's not a question of whether you are a psychiatric patient or not. If you go deep enough, you find all those elements within yourself. If you are dealing, you are processing the hours in the birth canal, you find the whole psychopathology there, all the emotional problems, all the psychosomatic symptoms, the choking, the nausea, the headaches, the pains, the psychosomatic pains in the body. You know, people frequently tell me they found Hitler inside. They found Stalin. I mean, you discover the shadow aspect. So the human personality is a little different from what's described by mainstream psychiatry.

Starting point is 01:55:15 You and your late wife, Christina, coined the term spiritual emergency. And she founded, I guess, in 1980, the spiritual emergence network, S E N. Now I'd love for you to explain what that means, but then also, uh, if you could also, if you could touch on the difference between or differences, if there are any between spiritual emergencies that are naturally occurring, let's just say, or, but people might view as say the onset of schizophrenia in the late 20s or something like that, versus those precipitated by psychedelics?

Starting point is 01:55:52 Well, that concept came from the work with psychedelics and with the breath work. When you realize that people in these situations would have experiences like of death, rebirth, destruction of the world, recreation of the world, past life experiences and so on. And I very early discovered that if you have bad trip, there's no good way of terminating it. The worst thing that you can do is what's done routinely which is come with tranquilizers when you give tranquilizers to people who are in a on a bad trip and then keep

Starting point is 01:56:34 them on maintenance dosages this prevents any kind of resolution if somebody has a bad trip that means that they are dealing with a difficult aspect of their unconscious. And when it's coming up, it's coming up for healing. It's not just that the drug created this horrible, horrible experience. So the way you do it, you have to tell people, you know, you are in a LSD session, this is a time-limited thing, I'm going to be here. And then when something remains unresolved, we do some body work and some emotional work to bring it to a good closure. People can benefit from these bad trips. So I realized very early that when people had difficult experiences, the last thing I would do is to combine with tranquilizers, you know. And so I saw many of the situations where people experienced

Starting point is 01:57:27 what they would be hospitalized for in the psychedelic session. And if we stayed with it, it actually was a major healing, major transformation. So then the obvious answer was, you know, should we treat it differently just because it happened without breathing or fast breathing or because it happened without psychedelics? No, we just apply it to the other category of spontaneously emerging experiences of this kind. Now, what is necessary for having this kind of understanding? You have to have the large map.

Starting point is 01:58:06 The psyche is not just the postnat is generated in the fetus who cannot breathe and is subjected to all those torsions and so on. So if you have a map that includes that, and if you have the map that includes the collective unconscious, which psychiatry has not accepted, the Jungian idea that we have also the collective unconscious as a regular kind of germane part of our unconscious,

Starting point is 01:58:56 both the historical part of the collective unconscious and the archetypal. So having visions of archetypal beings or being taken to archetypal domains like, having visions of archetypal beings or being taken to archetypal domains like hell or paradise, those are common experiences in the breathwork or in psychedelic sessions. So, this just gives you an idea, this is a stage that you can work with the way you would work with people in a psychedelic session. So that's a perfect segue.

Starting point is 01:59:26 Let's take as a hypothetical situation and an alternate world where the psychologists and psychiatrists have accepted the collective unconscious and have this larger map. Someone is brought to a hospital by their family because they seem to be having what the family believes to be a psychotic break, whether it's schizophrenic or however it might be diagnosed currently. They're brought to the hospital.

Starting point is 01:59:59 If a practitioner, if a doctor or psychologist had this larger map, what would the intervention or diagnostic process look like, potentially? Well, people usually ask me, when I say the concept spiritual emergency, if there are any professional psychiatrists, psychologists, they say, can you give me differential diagnosis? You see, this is what we did in somatic medicine. Differential diagnosis diagnosis people have uh you know infection you want to find out which infection what is the differential diagnosis what is the differential diagnosis between different kinds of diabetes and so on

Starting point is 02:00:36 so they would like something like that for spiritual emergency which you cannot do because, you know, psychosis is not, this is not a medical diagnosis. We can't, in the exception of the organic psychosis, we cannot really make the diagnosis. We don't have any findings in the cerebrospinal liquid. We don't have any findings in the blood we don't have any finding in urine where we can you know have a litmus paper put it in the sample of urine since it comes out you know green it's schizophrenia right you basically diagnose these different psychotic so-called psychotic states by the fact that people have experiences and behaviors that current model cannot. But part of those symptoms which are used as being important diagnostic tools for psychiatry could be, for example, people have the experience of death, rebirth, destruction of the world, recreation of the world.

Starting point is 02:01:47 They have experiences that seem to be past life experiences. So those are all absolutely normal elements in the human unconscious, but understood really in, if you want in the groffian jungian uh way the the psyche is infinitely larger than than mainstream psychiatry ever considered it's more like the description that you find in the great spiritual philosophies of the east in hinduism buddhism taoism they have the they have the real maps of the psyche because they were focusing, you know, for centuries on systematic exploration of the psyche in a very similar way in which we do science. You know, people, they were describing certain procedures that you have to follow, certain forms of meditation. They would collect the descriptions of those experiences, discuss, write about it, and so on.

Starting point is 02:02:51 So it's a systematic exploration of the human psyche. These cultures were not interested in technology, so they are nowhere close to what we are in terms of the understanding of the material world, but they are way ahead of us in terms of understanding of consciousness and the psyche. And it's very humbling for somebody like myself having professional training and being through a stage when I thought what the shamans are doing, these are the primitives in the jungle somewhere, you know, illiterate and so on.

Starting point is 02:03:26 We have our scientific approach, which is behaviorism or psychoanalysis. If you have the experience of these tools that the shamans have available, you develop a lot of respect to that. So related to that... But the question is, it has to be harnessed you know and that's not an easy easy task in the industrial civilization you would have to change first you would have to

Starting point is 02:03:54 change the the paradigm which is a difficult thing you probably know that the the shift uh from the geocentric system to the heliocentric system after copernicus uh you know published this uh about the revolutions of the planets it took over 100 years and the the uh resistance it was not just the church this was the resistance was coming also from from the universities where there are all kinds of arguments why the Earth cannot be around and rotate and around the sun and so on. For you personally, how has your experience of your inner world changed over the last say 60 years or after you had your first psychedelic experience so you have that experience and you go on to have all these experiences what what is your inner your experience of your inner world look like how's that you know i was an

Starting point is 02:04:58 atheist uh um this goes back to a little scandal in our family. When my parents fell in love and wanted to get married, it was in a small check down. And my father's family had no religious affiliation. And my mother's family was strictly Catholic. And so the church refused to marry them because my father was a pagan by their definition. And this created a lot of turmoil. It almost seemed like it would not happen until the solution came. My mother's parents made a major donation to the church. And then suddenly they relaxed their standards and they allowed that and they had a business

Starting point is 02:05:47 on the main street and so when when the wedding happened they could roll out carpets across the street stop the traffic and to take the carpets to the to the altar so the guests could go from the altar all the way to the house and have a banquet there. And my parents got so upset by this that they decided not to commit me or my brother to any religion. We should make our own decision when we come of age. So we actually had classes of religion, but for me it was always a free hour. I would go for a walk or read a book book or if they were sort of playing soccer somewhere i would join them you know being glad that i had this extra time but also i was a very curious

Starting point is 02:06:31 creature i was i was also missing this was called uh i think paradisian morale or something like these were the classes and they were they were being taught something that i was missing so i was kind of a little ambivalent about it. But then from this kind of background, I went to medical school at a time when in the Marxist regime we were controlled by the Soviet Union. So we really got the pure materialistic doctrine. You can't get more materialistic than that. So it was my first Ld session that just changed that and uh you know i was one kind of person in the morning and another person walked out of there uh in the evening i was really basically open to the to the mystical world i saw that you know that was a much deeper understanding that that anything that that my formal training

Starting point is 02:07:27 provided so uh so this the paradox which i was aware of it when i was coming down as a as a belief sort of a not believing but a mystical you know mystical person i differentiate quite a bit spirituality from religion i've never became religious in any way. I became very spiritual. And I realized the paradox, you know. The divine sort of comes to me in an experiment in a Marxist country, you know, induced by this substance from a Swiss chemist. But I knew, I felt I was stuck in psychiatry, and I was at that point not very excited about psychiatry.

Starting point is 02:08:11 But I felt, coming down from that session, I felt if I am a psychiatrist, this is by far the most interesting thing I can study. So if you look at my professional career, there's nothing, there was years, 60 years, you know, that I have done that would not be in one way or another related to these holotropic states. That became what I said was my passion, my vocation, my profession. Is there any particular synchronicity or experience in any of the holotropic states that you've experienced yourself that you find the hardest to explain or the most unusual

Starting point is 02:08:59 slash remarkable? Does anything come to mind? I don't know. I have so many, so many of them. You don't have to pick one. You can choose more than one, too. One of the wildest ones was actually the first session that I had when I came to Baltimore from Prague.

Starting point is 02:09:20 It was a process where my request for the scholarship was first turned down, and then I appealed, and then I had a very powerful psychedelic session with a colleague of mine, a psychiatrist, and this was a major, major death-rebirth opening, and what I experienced, like, you know, kind of Atman Brahman experience. And I came back home and in the mailbox was a positive response. I can go to the United States. So within very short time, I packed.

Starting point is 02:09:59 I ended up, you know, 40 pounds of my luggage. I took all my records with me, 25 pounds, 15 pounds of personal belonging, and I was going to Baltimore. And in Baltimore, we had the permission to give sessions to professionals and collecting the information from that. And so I had a session. We qualified for that ourselves. And in that session, I suddenly had the feeling that I was not bound by space and time, that I somehow could get to other places in the world if I decide to. And I wanted to put it to a test. I said, can I, for example, get to Prague into the apartment of my parents?

Starting point is 02:10:49 And so I imagined, you know, which direction was Prague and how far, and imagined myself sort of flying in that direction. And I was experiencing a flight, but I was not getting anywhere. So I felt there was a problem there. And I was thinking about it and then i realized that i was uh limited by this by the concept this the coordinate spatial temporal coordinate that i believe that prague is in this direction uh you know and a certain kind of distance that i have to overcome and uh just imagine that I'm in Prague.

Starting point is 02:11:27 And what happened the next time, I was suddenly trapped in some kind of very strange space where there were like circuits or transistors and stuff. And I didn't know what was happening. And then I realized I was inside of the television, of the television set of my parents. And I was thinking about it, and I had to laugh because I was still holding on to the next element of the materialistic world. The only way you can really see what's happening in other places, you need a television you need you need a camera and a satellite you see so i realized i'm not even bound by that i'm i'm in a in a uh the world of spirit i can just has to say now i am there and i am there and then in that at that point it turned

Starting point is 02:12:20 kind of inside out and i was walking i i felt straight i i didn't feel i didn't feel i was in a session and i was walking in the department i i heard my parents uh breathing and i went to the to uh the window and uh there there on the corner was a clock and it was showing the six hour difference which I thought for a while and I said not the proof I knew that there was a difference my mind could fabricate that so how do I prove that this really happened

Starting point is 02:12:58 and I said I would go and take a picture of the wall and then check with my parents. And they would say something strange happened. You know, we found this painting on the floor and this nail was still in the wall. And so I started walking to the end and reaching for that. And then suddenly I had the feeling that I was gambling. I was playing like a roulette with my soul. This was very dangerous, the feeling that I was gambling, I was playing like a roulette with my soul. This was very dangerous, the feeling that I was getting sort of under the influence of some evil forces.

Starting point is 02:13:35 And then I realized how much they warn you if you are on the spiritual quest from that period where you start playing with this mind over the CDs and so on. And I started seeing images, what I could do if I really had that possibility. I could go and eavesdrop on political meetings in the world. I could get access to scientific secrets and so on i could go to a casino i could beat the casino and so on and uh i realized there was a there was a real danger from the ego to to start playing with the possibility of having this power so i finally sort of didn't have the courage to do that and also didn't want to be in a world where this

Starting point is 02:14:26 would be possible because if i had the power then other people had the power and then the doors don't protect me i'm in a world sort of uh you know this kind of wild western and i didn't didn't want that proof that this is this was really possible and i went i lied down on a couch uh where actually uh i was coming down from a session before going to to baltimore and i was lying then and then this horrible thought came to me uh maybe i never got to baltimore i am just i fabricated that trip to the United States in my LSD session. I'm now coming down from that session. I never left, you see. So I was like the trunks in that situation, you know, am I a butterfly having the dream of being a human or a human having the feeling that I'm butterfly? So I was stuck in that place for a while

Starting point is 02:15:27 where I was not sure whether I was having astral projection from Baltimore or whether I was coming down from that session. So that was the wildest one, probably. And, of course, then coming back, I was cursing myself. What a wasted opportunity for a great experiment, you know, to prove astral projection. But the fear and the metaphysical fear that I was really sort of, you know, losing my soul in that I start playing with these kinds of forces.

Starting point is 02:15:58 That last part of that experience in particular sounds terrible. The laying down, or terrifying, I should say, laying down on the couch in Prague and wondering, like you said, if the entire trip to the United States had been a fabrication. When you came out of that experience, how quickly did it take or how long did it take for you to realize that, in fact, you were back in the united states oh like you know that probably within eight hours or so i was uh it was absolutely clear you know re back to calibration yeah yeah yeah if if you were starting your career just just a few more questions i i've you've been so generous with your time but if you were starting again right now and you were a promising young scientist you could research anything you wanted let's assume that all these compounds are legal uh what would you focus on what type of studies

Starting point is 02:16:54 would you want to do or what type of research would you want to do well you know what one of the problems with this uh renaissance that a lot of it is repeating things which were already done. Like the cancer projects are great, but we did it to the point that when we asked for more money for continuing the research, they said, you have already proved it, now it has to go to the hospitals, now it has to be used and uh so uh you know those also this wonderful study at johns hopkins is just a more sophisticated and methodologically better uh you know walter pankey experiment which had some flaws certainly but i would love to see this now going to the uh research of creativity to bring people um you know biologists quantum relativistic physicists and see what they can do. As you know, we have indications that the whole development of computers was closely connected with use of psychedelics.

Starting point is 02:17:59 You know, people like Doug Engelbart and even, you know, Steve Jobs and all these people made it absolutely clear. There was a statement that all the people, to men we have in problem solving because we are stuck with a paradigm. Thomas Kuhn wrote that fantastic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing that the history of science is not a linear development where we started from not knowing anything and then each generation added a little of the observations and there were more and more accurate hypotheses and theories created so that what we have now, the understanding of the universe, is the best understanding that has ever been at any time in any at any time in any society and he showed that

Starting point is 02:19:06 it's it's a joke that the development of science breaks into these distinct periods and each of them is governed by what he calls a paradigm you know a way of looking looking at the world you know certain basic metaphysical assumptions beliefs ways of what are relevant areas to research, how do you do research, how you evaluate it. This is all paradigm-tied. So the examples, of course, I already mentioned the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric system there was a one uh revolution in chemistry where they had phlogiston chemistry where there was this royal substance of phlogiston and then when people like uh like dalton or lavoisier came with the idea of atoms you know uh

Starting point is 02:20:02 people had problems because they didn't believe in in phlogiston anymore now we laugh when you hear that and then of course the the first three decades in the 20th century the physicists had to go through this incredible conceptual cataclysm moving from newton first to the theories of relativity and then to quantum physics that even einstein who initiated or couldn't accept until his death so this is this is the question of paradigm so i believe that we are now in the period of paradigm shift uh in relation to consciousness and the human psyche that's comparable in nature and scope to what the physicists had to experience in the first three decades of the 20th century and then in a sense

Starting point is 02:20:53 it can be seen as being complementary to the changes that already happened in the understanding of matter you know the quantum physicists who are my friends had no problems relating to my observation. It was mostly the resistance of psychiatrists and psychologists. One more thing.

Starting point is 02:21:19 Of course. So there is the situation that Kuhn described, that during the time when you have the science dominated by a paradigm, the scientists do what he called normal science, which is problem solving within the context of a given parameters. It's like playing chess. If you play chess, you have to follow the rules you can't suddenly take an inconvenient figure and throw it out of the out of the chessboard you know and then he describes what happens and when when observations come that challenge the paradigm how it's rejected initially people are called crazy or it's called fraud or whatever.

Starting point is 02:22:07 And then when it keeps coming, then finally realization there is a problem. And then the wilder theories come and at first they are sort of rejected. And then after a while, the new paradigm emerges and is accepted by the scientific community. And then history is rewritten because now you have new heroes people who already saw it you know centuries ago the way we see it now but what i would like to add was then gregory bateson added another thing is the not only the do the scientists believe in in that paradigm are committed to it, but they believe that it's an accurate and exhaustive description of reality per se,

Starting point is 02:22:50 not a map, not the best way we can sort of currently organize the observation that we have. It is a definitive description of how things are. And this is called a confusion between the map and the territory people like uh arthur korzybski and then gregory bateson was very very big about it and gregory was laughing about it he said if scientists make errors like that it can happen that one day they come uh to the restaurant and they eat the menu instead of the dinner the relationship between a paradigm you know and the territory that it described is the is very much like reading the menu

Starting point is 02:23:32 so i i've i've had this question i wanted to ask this entire conversation since we first started speaking and uh let me let me just get my facts straight before i ask it are you currently 87 is that accurate what is your current age i just won in the first of july i just was uh was uh 87 87 well happy belated birthday and thank you thank you very much you are remarkably uh i mean incredibly sharp incredibly energetic i mean more so than some 20 somethings I know. What do you attribute that to? I mean, are, and to what factors? I mean, are you, are both, were both of your parents sharp their entire lives? Uh, I mean, I, I aspire currently I'm 40, I'm 41 and I would love to have half the energy that you do.

Starting point is 02:24:22 So to what do you attribute that? It's really just, I mean, mind-blowing to me. I'm so inspired just trying to absorb some of the enthusiasm and energy that you have in this phone call. I think, you know, part of it is that I'm really, really very, very deeply committed to this idea of these holotropic states, to bring them into psychiatry, to bring them into society. I had a lot of, you know, meetings with Albert Hoffman, who was talking about new Eleusis,

Starting point is 02:25:05 to create a situation where these are integrated into social fabric. They are socially sanctioned, that we can sort of use it the way ancient Greeks, the Eleusis mysteries. You probably know this was done for 2,000 years in Eleusis. So they had to offer something pretty impressive to keep the attention of the ancient world. And the list of people who have been initiates in these mysteries, it reads like who is who in antiquity. I mean, it includes Plato, Aristotle, Cicero wrote about it, you know, Marcus Aurelius, Pindaros, all these people. So we all sort of say, you know, the Greeks are very talented, beautiful art, beautiful science and great ideas. So many people every five years had some powerful experiences.

Starting point is 02:26:06 Puts it into somewhat different perspective. And Albert Hoffman and Gordon Watson, the one who brought the mushrooms from Mexico, from the Mazatec Indians, and Karl Rugg, a Greek scholar, they wrote the book wrote to ellipsis when they found out that the key to this mysterious was kike on k-y-k-e-o-n and they found out that this was a psychedelic potion which was made of of ergot very similar to lsd so you can imagine if so many people every five years in that small world had psychedelic experiences, that it could have had some impact on the culture. You know, the last time when we were in Elefsis, there was a guide and there are the ruins of the Telestrion, which is the building where this was happening. And it's a gigantic building. And I asked how many people were having these experiences here at the time.

Starting point is 02:27:12 He said, at least, you know, in the last stage, 3,000 people every five years were getting this dose of this. So, when I read Plato now, I don't see him like pacing in the academy saying, let me see how the world works. You know, we have not done this, but there's this level of the archetypes and so on. This is something that you can experience archetypes in psychedelic sessions. So these are all, the philosophy was inspired by psychedelic experiences. What do you think humanity needs most right now, in your opinion?

Starting point is 02:27:55 What humanity? Big question. Yeah, what do you think humanity needs most right now? What we need? Yeah. If there's any particular type of change or shift that you haven't mentioned. Well, I think, you know, the monistic materialistic paradigm, I think, is really destroying this planet. And we have, you know, we have lost experiential spirituality, that people have really the have these direct spiritual experiences,

Starting point is 02:28:53 they don't experience division in the world. You know, what happened with the great organized religions is that they unite people who are willing to see it the same way and worship the same way, but at the same time divide the world because they set it against another group which has taken sort of different archetypes and different ways of worshiping. So then you have a situation where, you know, we are Christians. You, all other guys are pagans and we really have to convert you or there's really not a good place for you here

Starting point is 02:29:25 or we are uh muslims and you guys all are infidels let go let have sacred war against the infidels you know we have jews you are going and so on and then you have even these kinds of divisions within the same religion there's centuries of bloodshed between protestants and catholics and you have the same with the sunnis and the shiite they killing each other destroying their own temples now these are not religions that will help us in the situation in the world but this is very different with the spirituality which is really taking everything in. And it changes consciousness in a way that people embrace the ecological movement. They realize we have to treat nature in a different way because we are so vitally embedded and entangled in nature

Starting point is 02:30:22 that we would not use nature as commodity you know something that should serve us and the expense of of you know destroying destroying our environment this this you know nothing that's more important for us we are biological creatures we we need air we need water and we need clean soil where we are growing our food. It's so suicidal, so self-destructive to destroy the basis on which we depend. There should not be anything keeping the environment supporting life. No economic profit, no political, no military. We should really realize that we are in the same boat. And whoever is destroying the environment is destroying us.

Starting point is 02:31:16 And there are many places people can find, of course, your writing and more about you, stanislawgroff.com. I'll link to all of this in the show notes for people, so they'll be able to find that at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And I certainly recommend that people check out your books, including When the Impossible Happens. A friend of mine who's involved in scientific research recommended I read The Cosmic Game. And I'm wondering if before we wrap up, maybe could you share one more story, any story to folks out there who are wondering if there might be more to the story than just the purely material, sort of hyper-rational, materialistic worldview. There might just be more to the story. I'm wondering if there's anything else that you can share. I remember coming across the pig goddess story. I mean, there are so many to choose from, but I don't know. Yeah. Let me do one that's kind of, I think, has a larger kind of importance than just

Starting point is 02:32:19 mentioning one clinical story. It's also a story from when the impossible happens and it has to do with the experience that i had in a peyote ceremony so when i came to the united states you know i heard about peyote and so on i never had a chance being in in czechoslovakia not having the possibility of traveling to have the peyote experience so I was very very interested in that and we had this program for professionals one of the programs at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and the one of the persons who came was Ken Godfrey who was the psychiatrist at the VA hospital in Topeka, Kansas. He was himself Native American, and his wife was Native American, and he was running a psychedelic program in Topeka.

Starting point is 02:33:16 But he didn't have anybody to sit for him, so he came for his own session, and I sat in his three psychedelic sessions, so, you know, we became very, very close. And so when, after his last session, we were talking, I said, Ken, is there any possibility you can get me into a Native American church ceremony? And he said, I will try. And then he called in a few days and say, you know talked to the road chief and you can come and you can bring four of your friends so anyway we sort of got into the airplane and and flew to topeka and then drove into the middle of the you know kansas prairie there and there were these teepees and this the ceremony was being prepared and we had to go through kind of a clearance

Starting point is 02:34:05 that they wanted to find out what kind of people we were. We had to tell them about ourselves. And we got just a lot of aggressive comments from them about how white people came and they have taken their land. They have killed their buffalo. They have killed their warriors. They have raped their women and so on. And so there was almost like an encounter group.

Starting point is 02:34:31 And as we were going on, they were sort of finding out that we were okay. And one after another said that we can participate. And at the end, there was just one very sort of dark, sullen man who wouldn't have any of us. We were like pale faces. And that was it, you know you know he's not gonna have us in the sacred ceremony and then he get onto a lot of peer pressure it was time to start and people say come on you know let it go and so he did say yes but it was really no and i was in the teepee I was sitting across him, and then the peyote buttons were passed, and then it started coming on. And he sort of was really like radiating like a laser beam toward me. You know, the hatred was kind of, and everything was amplified, of course, by the peyote.

Starting point is 02:35:22 And we were doing the rounds when you pass a staff and a drum and every time you get it you can say something you can sing a song or invite people to do something or make a confession or whatever but you can also pass and every time it came to him he would grab it and push it he just would not participate and so we were all these rounds and we were going through the last last round um where everybody can say something and uh bob lehigh who was a another lsd therapist from from maryland working with us helen bonnie uh and her sister helen bonnie was our music therapist and walter houston cl's a very famous professor of religion. And so as we were doing the last round,

Starting point is 02:36:12 Walter Houston Clark gave this, you know, almost like masochistic kind of a speech. He said, how wonderful it was from your, you know, brothers and sisters to take us into the sacred ceremony after what we have done to you. We have killed your buffalo and your warriors and raped your women and taken your spirituality. And then somehow, I don't remember exactly the context, he mentioned me and said, especially Stan here, who is so far from his native Czechoslovakia. And suddenly when he mentioned that, it was like a lightning hit this guy and he started shaking he got up he threw himself into my lap and put put his head into my lap

Starting point is 02:36:51 sort of snot was tears were running out of his eyes and and you know snot out of his nose it it became like one of our workshops doing sort of close work with people and everybody was watching nobody knew what was happening and this was happening for a while and then he got up and went back to his place sit down and then not not talking just sitting there and there was like a lot of a lot of pressure you know psychological pressure people people wanting to know what was happening and then he said, you know, I have to say something horrible. I Thought you were all Americans I didn't know Stan was from Czechoslovakia You know, the Czechs are not known as your archetypal Raiders of the Wild West exactly. So his I I treated him

Starting point is 02:37:42 as if we were an American and I hated him through the whole ceremony. And it's just more than I can take, you know. And then was sitting there, and it was clear that something more was coming. And then he said, but it's worse than that. During the Second World War, I was drafted in the American Air Force, and I was personally present in the air raid on his city. There was five days before the end of the war, there was an American attack on Pilsen that destroyed the automobile factory there and damaged Pilsen.

Starting point is 02:38:21 So he stayed home, but I went and i killed his people our roles were reversed and that's just too much for me and then he got up and he went to the four americans there and embraced them he says uh you are not my enemies you are you are my friend he says we are all in the same boat we if we if we hold the old grudges uh we we all die we have we are all in the same boat. If we hold the old grudges, we all die. We are all children of Mother Earth, and we have to sort of really sort of learn how to live with each other and how to love each other. And then he ended and he says, well, they believe in reincarnation, so for what I can say, when this was happening, I might have been on the other side.

Starting point is 02:39:14 And we were still under the influence of peyote, so we were all crying and sort of embracing each other. And that atmosphere of reconciliation was amazing i actually told that story at the at the end of the international transpersonal conference in prague when i was bringing transpersonal psychology back to prague because we had all these you know european nations that had all kinds of grudges and really didn't like each other. Like we were occupied by Nazi Germany for six years, you know, a lot of people killed,

Starting point is 02:39:52 ended up in concentration camps. Then we had years of communist regime, so nobody liked Russia. None of the people from the Eastern European countries liked either Russia or Germany. We had sort of German and Jews there. And what was amazing that we did a large holotropic breast work, you know, before the conference, as a pre-conference workshop. And it was amazing how within two days, I mean, some of these boundaries were melting and, you know, people embracing each other and sitting for each other. And when people were owning their own emotional problems, they actually activated the best in other people. difficulties and so on, there was really a change of the atmosphere from all these antagonisms

Starting point is 02:40:48 that were certainly in the air at the beginning. What a wonderful story. So anyway, that's my story. Thank you so much. I call it Lesson in Forgiveness. I think we could all use Lessons in Forgiveness, not only towards others, but towards ourselves. And I really want to express gratitude and thanks, certainly, for the experiences that I've had, which have been informed by your writing and people who have indirectly or directly been trained by you,

Starting point is 02:41:23 in some respects. And to thank you on behalf of, no doubt, many people who are listening who have had similar experiences. And I'm very cautiously optimistic about this renaissance that we're witnessing. And hopefully we won't repeat some of the same mistakes that appear to have been made. But the social circumstances are so different. And I really appreciate you taking the time today. I certainly hope this isn't our last conversation, but I want to be respectful of your time.

Starting point is 02:41:56 And we've gone for quite a bit already today. Is there anything else that you would like to say to the people listening or ask of them before we end this particular conversation? sort of by responding to what is happening outside of us, but spending some time in some kind of focused self-exploration that can lead to inner transformation. So we live our life as a synthesis of what we see outside and what comes from within. He would say you get lessons from what he called the self, the higher aspect of our personality. So part of the problem of the industrial civilization, we lost this tradition of, if

Starting point is 02:42:53 you want, of psychonautics. All the other groups of humanity way back probably into the Paleolithic, they were using these holotropic states for healing, for transformation, the main vehicle for ritual, spiritual life. They were using it for a lot of 40 years, returned to the research. I see it also as the possibility of the industrial civilization to join the rest of humanity that always was combining somehow the inner spiritual experiences with whatever they were doing in the external world. Well, thank you so much, Stan. Again, Tim, thank you so much for everything you have been doing, and

Starting point is 02:44:10 thank you for this opportunity to share some of my life with your listeners and with you. It's such a pleasure, and I can only aspire to contribute in some small way. And I'm excited to see what you do from this point forward.

Starting point is 02:44:33 And you seem to have as much energy as ever traveling around the world doing what you do. And I hope we can have many, many more conversations. But for today, I want to be respectful of your time, since you do have so many things going on. And I will certainly, in the show notes to everybody listening, link to everything we've discussed, all of the books, the different websites, foundations, and so on. And you can find all those at tim.blog forward slash podcast. Stan, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. Again, it's wonderful. It's great to have an interviewer, you know,

Starting point is 02:45:15 who knows what we are talking about. It doesn't always happen. This was one of the great ones. Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. And to everybody listening, keep your mind open and look outside, but also look inside, as Stan mentioned. And until next time, thank you for listening.

Starting point is 02:45:36 Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found

Starting point is 02:45:57 or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and

Starting point is 02:46:31 just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which more than 2 million Americans have used to help start their businesses. Past guests even, such as, well, WordPress lead developer, CEO of Automatic, Matt Mullenweg, now valued at more than a billion dollars, have used LegalZoom to help with their business needs, specifically in his case, to form his company. But LegalZoom isn't just for launching your business. Their services include everything from helping you to manage changing tax laws, reviewing contracts, creating NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, important stuff, handling lease agreements,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond

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