Stanislav Grof Quotes

There are people who can start having very powerful experiences without taking psychedelics. It can happen against their will. This is a universal phenomenon.

We have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimension in the psyche. It's a legitimate dimension in the universal scheme of things. It doesn't mean that you are superstitious, that you are in to magical, primitive thinking, if you take spirituality seriously.

I believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in.

Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior.

A text of Tibetan Buddhism describes the time of death as a unique opportunity for spiritual liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth and a period that determines our next incarnation.

Walt Disney was my great hero.

Philemon explained how Jung treated thoughts as though they were generated by himself, while for Philemon thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air. Jung concluded that Philemon taught him psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. This helped Jung to understand that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend.

Dying people in pre-industrial cultures typically died in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe.

I believe that used responsibly and in a mature way, the entheogens mediate access to the numinous dimensions of existence, have a great healing and transformative potential, and represent a very important tool for spiritual development.

The human psyche shows that each individual is an extension of all of existence.

Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality itself.

Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

It became much more complicated politically to work with psychedelics because of the unsupervised experimentation with psychedelics, particularly among young people.

I have to say I regretted giving up animated movies.

We are not just highly evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields of consciousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter, and linear causality.

The function of the brain is to reduce all the available information and lock us into a limited experience of the world. LSD frees us from this restriction and opens us to a much larger experience.

A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know.

The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual's way of being in the world.

The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness.

Research challenges the materialistic understanding of death, according to which biological death represents the final end of existence and of all conscious activity.

An important consequence of freeing oneself from the fear of death is a radical opening to spirituality of a universal and non-denominational type.

The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death.

It is essential that we raise the image of sex, which is currently seen as a purely biological affair and often portrayed in its worst manifestations, to that of a spiritually based activity.

It is possible to see the intermediate state between lives as being in a way more important than incarnate existence.

Unlike scientism, science in the true sense of the word is open to unbiased investigation of any existing phenomena.

This sense of perfection has a built-in contradiction, one that Ram Dass once captured very succinctly by a statement he had heard from his Himalayan guru: "The world is absolutely perfect, including your own dissatisfaction with it, and everything you are trying to do to change it.

Many instances exist of small children who seem to remember and describe their previous life in another body, another place, and with other people. These memories emerge usually shortly after these children begin to talk.

LSD was not a pharmacological agent generating exotic experiences by its interaction with the neurophysiological processes in the brain. This remarkable substance was clearly an unspecific catalyst of the deep dynamics of the human psyche. The experiences induced by it were not neurochemical artifacts, symptoms of a toxic psychosis as mainstream psychiatrists called it, but genuine manifestations of the human psyche itself.

Individuals approaching death often experience encounters with their dead relatives, who seem to welcome them to the next world. These deathbed visions are authentic and convincing; they are often followed by a state of euphoria and seem to ease the transition.

Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth.

LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry.

I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.

It is possible to spend one's entire lifetime without ever experiencing the mystical realms or even without being aware of their existence.

The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species.

The psyche of the individual is commensurate with the totality of creative energy. This requires a most radical revision of Western psychology.

Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious.

These substances function as unspecific amplifiers that increase the energetic niveau in the psyche and make the deep unconscious dynamics available for conscious processing. This unique property of psychedelics makes it possible to study psychological undercurrents that govern our experiences and behaviors to a depth that cannot be matched by any other methods and tools available in modern mainstream science. In emotional and psychosomatic disorders, for positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.

A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm.

Patients reported that their psychedelic sessions were an invaluable experiential training for dying.

The motif of death plays an important role the human psyche in connection with archetypal and karmic material.

The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped.

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.

Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.

Western science is approaching a paradigm shift of unprecedented proportions, one that will change our concepts of reality and of human nature, bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and modern science, and reconcile the differences between Eastern spirituality and Western pragmatism.

In the kind of world we have today, transformation of humanity might well be our only real hope for survival.

At a time when unbridled greed, malignant aggression, and existence of weapons of mass destruction threatens the survival of humanity, we should seriously consider any avenue that offers some hope.