#347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond

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Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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 uh we went deep, we went long, we went wide, it was everything I hoped it to be. Stanislav Grof M D. Otherwise known as Stan Groff.

Stanislav is spelled S-T-A-N-I-S-L-A-V is a psychiatrist with more than sixty 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 Eslin Institute. In this very wide ranging conversation we cover a whole lot of things, including some stuff that he is not gone over previously.

So among others, some of his main takeaways after supervising or guiding roughly forty five hundred L S D sessions. That is LSD assisted psychotherapy sessions. Yeah. The place and role of so called wounded healers. limitations and uses of traditional psychoanalysis and talk therapy. Similarities or some similarities between holotropic breath work and MDMA use, or the applications of MDMA. Stories of very odd synchronicities and the seemingly impossible. We get into some very

very uh 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 of Integral Studies in San Francisco and conducts professional training programs in holotropic breath work and transpersonal psychology. as well as gives lectures and seminars worldwide. He is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology as a field and the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association. IT. His publications include more than one hundred and fifty articles in professional journals and books like Psychology of the Future, The Cosmic Game, and the Up. 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 forward slash podcast. You can find him online at Stanislav Groff

Dot com. Yeah. One more thing before we get to the interview. And I'll try to keep this short. Please, please, please, if you're a listener of this podcast If you like what you hear.

I invite you and uh 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 technicals, this is very, very helpful to me and my podcast team. It helps us to get hard to reach guests and do much more. Takes 10 to 30 seconds. So all you have to do is search for the Tim Ferris show, you can misspell it, doesn't matter, 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 Ferris show, click on it and click subscribe. That's it. Super easy. If you can spare the ten to thirty 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 enjoyed as much as I did with The one and only Stan Groff. Stan, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Tim. Thank you for having me. And before we start to thank you. for everything you have been doing, uh for raising consciousness on this planet. It's has been amazing and it's a great uh 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 And uh I certainly have only become more excited to have this conversation

Uh because of our our introduction, Jack Cornfield, one of the sweetest humans I know. And uh I have many questions and many topics. Uh so thanks of course to Jack for making the introduction. And Uh by this time people would have already heard some of your bio

graphical information that I would have read. I suppose we should start maybe at the beginning. And Ask you how you first became interested in psychedelics.

Uh well the situation was I became initially very excited about psychoanalysis And uh as a result of it I uh w went to medical school and in my fourth year of uh of medical school, I was uh going to the psychiatric department already as a volunteer to get some you know, some uh sense for the for the discipline And uh This is where we got from sandos a supply

of um MPUs of of delicit of of LSD. And it came with a letter, uh talking about the history about uh you know the famous uh experien self experiment of uh Albert uh Hoffman and the bicycle ride and all that. And uh they were asking us if we uh would like to experiment with that substance and let them know if there was any legitimate uh use for it in uh psychiatry and uh uh psychology. And uh

My preceptor um Uh not Robic who is was very interested in LSD, but he didn't have time to sit uh you know for six or eight hours with his uh um patients uh with the the experimental subjects. So he was using uh several of us as uh kind of go first. We were sitting in these sessions and we were keeping the record. So I actually started uh my exposure to L S D uh already in nineteen fifty four. But uh unlike at Harvard, uh students were excluded, so I couldn't have my own session until I graduated from the medical school.

Yeah. And by the time, you know, my appetite was whetted, so I was sitting in these sessions of uh psychologists, psychiatrists, uh artists, uh And uh you know, hearing all these fantastic stories about the experiences that they had, but I had no really no access to it. Uh What application were you looking at initially? Uh what was uh what was the the structure of the thing. No initially it was just uh just a kind of a

It was just a phenomenological uh research, 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 uh 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, uh, you know, from session to session. I mean uh we didn't know where it would be going, you know, uh with our patients and and in our own sessions.

So it was quite an exciting adventure. Uh I spent s several years actually doing two sessions a day. I would get up early. Uh two o uh two o'clock, you know, I started another one. And I had a a department where I had eighteen beds.

And uh All the p patients were getting L S D so they were really uh familiar with the states and all our nurses had training sessions. So by two o'clock I could pass the the person who's coming down from an L S D session to This t team of uh nurses and and patients and I could start another one.

And uh 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 pa the experimental subjects uh alone and they just had a bell where they could uh call the nurse when they were in trouble. But I was so excited about what was coming on. I I realized this was uh this is gonna change uh, you know, the psychiatry, psychology. What what was it about those early experiences that led you to that conclusion that it would change psychiatry and psychology? And maybe just uh before we get to that, and 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. Uh with uh. At this point would be like uh uh four and a half thousand of uh, you know, uh LSD sessions, but uh I had also I was working with psilocybin also. We we were working uh for a while with the tryptamine derivatives, which actually came from Budapest from our neighbor. Mm-hmm. Uh Dr. Zara, Stephen Zara, and Doctor Bert Saramain, they were the ones who actually developed the whole group of uh the uh tryptamine derivatives, DMT, D E T, D P T.

Um it I don't think they had at the time the method D M T, which seems to be the the most uh most interesting one. I it and the the initial feeling that you that you had or the the initial

uh 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 uh uh you know approach which could be uh called search for toxin X. Um the way um L S D came to us was that is a substance that can mimic somehow psychosis.

We call the initial sessions experimental psychosis, you know, it's called allucinogens psychotometic. And so the excitement was that we have a model of something like schizophrenia or the or the uh other kinds of uh psychosis. And this made a possibility of creating a model, which is always great to have a model in in science. Yeah. So uh give uh LSD, you know, to uh quote unquote normal subjects.

And uh they would spend six to eight hours in a world that seemed to be like the world of uh Of our uh Patience. And so the initial my initial research actually was laboratory. I wrote one of the early papers on uh uh the role of uh serotonin in in uh

Psychiatry. And uh the initial research was we had a group of forty people, including ourselves, mostly professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, biologists and so on. And we had a protocol we would invite uh these people for a day. uh to uh the research institute. We would uh do really scientific work, you know Uh drawing uh

blood uh every hour on the hour, collecting samples of urine, doing psychological tests and uh And electrophysiological uh Investigations. And then we had one day when we brought uh Schizophrenic patients who were matched uh by age, by by gender, by uh IQ and so on. with our experimental subjects.

And we were looking if these uh values of these psychological and uh uh physiological biochemical tests will sort of converge with the values in schizophrenics. And then something amazing happened. Uh I found Th there was incredible I would say inter individual intra individual variability. So you give the same substance uh uh in the same dosage under the you know same circumstances under the same lousy set and setting which we had and each of those uh

People would have different s uh experiences. To the point that some of them called it like uh the the moments that they get between the tests it was like a self analysis, like a uh you know drug assisted uh psychotherapy. uh others uh were just uh unpleasant physical symptoms. Uh some of them uh

uh had to know paranoid episodes or or became hypomanic. And for some of them uh it was that they even under those circumstances that got glimpses of ecstatic states that uh that were very mystical. And the same uh intraindividual variability. If uh we took the same uh substance at different times, uh the phenomenology was completely different. And at that point I realised this was not

psychopharmacology. We were not doing pharmacology Because if you do pharmacology you have to have some idea what you are getting. You know, if you give people apomorphine, you you expect that lot of them will be uh vomiting if you give them uh uh uh hypnotic you expect them to to to sleep. Whereas here we had no idea what would happen. So I realized we were doing something much more interesting. We were we had a catalyst that was uh make made it possible to explore the depths of the human psyche. I realise that people were not having L S D experiences. They were having experiences of themselves.

But they were coming from depths that uh you know psychoanalysts didn't know anything about. And so at that point I just lost completely interest in the this laboratory approach and I took it to uh to clinical work uh and I started giving to uh m my patients, you know, in a psychotherapeutic context. When did you have your first personal experience? And how much and how and what did you take and how much did you take, if you recall?

Uh This was uh Actually hundred uh hundred uh micrograms. It was on the thirteenth of uh of uh Uh November. Nineteen fifty six.

So I was from f fifty four. Fifty six hours sitting for people. Yeah. Uh but uh it was a little more complicated because my preceptor, uh whom I mentioned earlier, he was very interested in uh uh electroencephalography.

And um at the time when uh LSD came Yeah. So at the time when it came he was interested in something that's called driving the brainwaves. Or and and training the brainwaves. This is using the EEG? Uh well it was exposing people to a very powerful stroposcopic light. Oh that's right frequencies. And finding out if the brainwaves in the sub occipital area, which is the the visual uh cortex, if the brainwaves will pick up that frequency. If you can drive the

Or trained the The brain wave. So uh the condition for for us having the session with him, we had to agree that we would have uh EEG, you know, before, during and after, and that we also will have our brainwaves driven. Uh In in all those sessions.

So what happened that uh you know, between the third and the fourth hour when the session uh usually culminated. Uh the uh Doctor Robicek'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 uh electrodes on 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.

concept there was uh this is what it must have been like in Hiroshima where the thing went off, you know. Uh Today I think it was more like the Dharmakaya the the primary clear light from Bardo Tudor from the Tibetan Book of the Dead that we see at the moment of our death. Uh but what happened is my consciousness was catapulted out of my body uh I lost uh the the research assistant, you know, I lost uh the clinic, I lost Prague, I lost the planet.

And uh I had uh the feeling that I actually extinguished. Uh in in the form that I knew. But also the sense that I somehow became uh everything there was. I became all of uh all of existence. Uh as you know, we must have heard it quite a few times that these

States are considered ineffable. It's uh when you start uh trying to to describe them, it's you find out that we just simply don't have uh don't have language. Our language is uh developed, you know, to communicate about things from from everyday life. And in my later experiments some of the sophisticated uh patients actually tried uh to use uh language from uh cultures that knew something about consciousness, like using you know, from from Hinduism, from uh uh you know uh Tibetan uh Buddhism, uh from Taoism. So they were talking about uh uh you know Nirvikalpa Samadhi, Samikalpa Samadhi, Kensho uh Satori, you know, using terms like Maya and so on. Uh because we simply don't have uh, you know, technic for For these states.

So uh these experiences of mystical states are full of paradoxes. Paradoxicality is one of the characteristics. So you can uh have the feeling that you Becoming nothing, you actually became uh of uh existence.

Uh so I was in this incredible state and then uh As she was continuing uh working with me, it was unfolding. She had a protocol, so she started from uh two hertz, which is you know, two frequencies uh per second, took it up to sixty. And then she kept it for a while in the alpha range, then the theta range, the delta range. And then she turned it off.

And while she was doing this at at a certain point I actually went from this Since of being everything, uh being uh in the universe, in the astronomical universe or or actually being the universe. uh there were things happening for which at the time I didn't have uh names But then later I read about uh

You know, the uh big bank and the black holes and the wormholes. And uh so this was something in that category that that was happening to me. I actually had the feeling again that I uh not was Not only in the universe, but that I I actually was the universe. And then uh you know, as uh she turned it off, uh then my world started shrinking again.

I found the planet, I found Prague, I zoomed in on my Body. But that was a major problem'cause my my consciousness was actually uh kind of uh uh circling around my body and I had difficulties aligning my consciousness with uh my body. So at that point it became clear to me that what uh Uh they had

teaching at the universities about consciousness as a product of the brain simply was nonsense. That does You know. consciousness of something uh cosmic and that the brain somehow is a moderator for that, but it's not generated in in our Skull.

Could you imagine it? I managed to align that and uh I came down in an a very ecstatic state. very impressed what just happened. And Yeah, right there I decided if I'm a psychiatrist, uh You know, this is by far the most interesting thing I can do working with with these with these states.

It's just overshadowed psychoanalysis, like uh You know Uh I was not interested psychoanalysis anymore. I was interested in exploring the psyche using these states. So you you you've at this point dedicated more than six decades

non-ordinary states of consciousness, uh, which is it I I think we'll probably talk about this, that is a a term or a phrase you prefer over altered states of consciousness. But uh you're you're alluding to perhaps a definition of consciousness or how you think about it now. How how do you think about Consciousness at this point. You said that uh it's I think mediated or moderated by the brain, but not generated by it.

Uh yeah. Based on these experiences, the experiences of Others you've supervised uh everything you've you've seen and experienced uh and studied up to this point. How do you think about consciousness now? Are there any other

aspects of it. Well you know I'm I'm very close now to uh Ervin Laszlow who is this brilliant uh systems uh theorist and and uh filosophers 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 that I think found some way of scientifically uh describing what is happening to us. And he has uh a book called Uh What Is Reality. Where he actually goes through these uh

uh different experiments that we have related to consciousness. And uh uh argues, you know, what what are the um uh observation that we have against the idea that uh that consciousness is local, that is inside of our brain. And he moves to the that

Consciousness is more transpersonal. that it uh in the non ordinary states you can have experiences of consciousness of other people, you can have experiences of uh of be um becoming s uh 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 uh consciousness being transpersonal. And then he brings even arguments against that and concludes that that consciousness is cosmic and you know that would be that would be my

present understanding the consciousness is simply uh uh a part of integral part of uh existence. It cannot be reduced to to anything else, let alone the neurons in the in the brain. Uh so it's also supported now, of course, by many people from quantum relativistic physics. And um For example, Stuart Hammerov initially thought that maybe it's the uh so called tubules in the mitochondria in the in the brain that might be the place where some quantum processes generate consciousness.

And then uh later he sort of Took it back and he says now Uh according to him, consciousness is simply a a property of the universe that can be traced back to uh the big bank in the form of proto consciousness.

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 Two jump into that because

Uh and also just as a side note for people listening who are wondering what the applications of Uh these These uh non ordinary states. Might be or how they've been utilized. There are many it it appears to me that there are many, many different ways to utilize this. There's certain multiple Nobel prizes associated with it, Carrie Mollis, Francis Crick, and the co-discovery of the double helix. And then there are of uh you know well known entrepreneurs and so on like Steve Jobs, but

refer to a holotopic state of consciousness. But I have so far been or we have been using the term non ordinary uh states of consciousness. Which is better that one what psychiatrists, British uh and American psychiatrists are doing, calling it altered state. You know, I really dislike uh that term, although it was coined by a good friend of mine, uh Charlie Tarrett. Uh, because it suggests somehow that there is a correct way of experiencing ourselves and the world.

Okay. And that's somehow uh disturbed. You know, I always have to think about veterinary medicine. We talk we had our dog altered, uh so I feel too much respect for these days to call them altered. And even the state non ordinary. It's really not uh accurate because there are many non ordinary states that uh

have not the properties that uh the holotropic states would would have. So I use the term uh holotropic for a special large subcategory of non ordinary states that have healing potential, therapeutic potential. that have, according to my experience, transformative potential that have uh what we call heuristic H E U R which means when you work with these states you run into a lot of paradigm breaking

uh observations that challenge the whole way of thinking, not just in psychiatry but in materialistic science. And then I believe they also have evolutionary in other words, they would I think they would If people would systematically use them, uh I I think we would almost become another Another species. You know, people uh work through a lot of aggression, it's replaced by compassion, they have the experience of uh tremendous uh ecological sensitivity, they they discover that we are deeply embedded in nature and that we cannot do anything to nature that uh

uh they start f seeing uh violence as an unacceptable way of uh of solving uh problems. You know, they have a sense of uh Um being actually uh global citizens uh rather than being uh Czechs or Russians or Americans. They start seeing themselves very much uh the way it happened to the astronauts who had the possibility of actually seeing the the planet uh from uh from uh the moon or from space.

Uh so um This is my term f uh that I coined because I realised uh psychiatry does not have uh that kind of distinction. So I coined it myself. It's uh It's a neologism, as we call it.

Uh that comes from uh the Greek language where holos means whole And trep or trepane means uh moving in the direction of something. I usually refer to uh the the word uh heliotropism. Helios means sun And heliotropism. Is uh the

a property of plants to always orient themselves towards the sun, always follow the The sun. So Uh 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 or we are using only small fraction of our experiential potential when we are in the ordinary states. So maybe I just give a few examples of of holotropic states so people have a sense what I'm talking about. One category when you would uh fine 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 uh traveling into the visionary experience of traveling into the universe being uh traveling into the the um Underworld first, uh uh they have the experience of being exposed to some uh uh ordeals uh the experience uh a lot of emotional physical pain and they experience annihilation.

And then uh experience of psychospiritual death rebirth that's followed by this journey into the supernal Realms. And in this uh initiatory journey they heal themselves typically uh anthropologists called shamans, the wounded healers. And they also learn how to yield

So when they then uh manage to come back and they ground the session, they use holotropic states in their healing. When they heal they either go into an unordering state or they induce them in their clients, or both shamans and clients get into this holotropic state. So that's a major category Uh the second one is what you see in uh so called uh rites of passage. This is the term that was coined by a Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Hennet.

That's G E N N E P who studied many native cultures and he found out that They all Um uh you know, at the time of important biological or social transitions, uh perform uh very powerful rituals

Uh When they also induce in these holotropic states in in different ways uh many of those cultures, uh even with psychedelic plants or psychedelic psychedelic uh materials, in some others using uh uh you know uh sonic uh technology, drumming, uh rattling and so on. uh physical pain, uh stay in the desert, stay in the high mountains, uh stay in a uh cave in the Arctic ice and so on.

And if you study these the people experience uh psychospiritual death rebirth, very much like the shamans in their spontaneous uh initiatory journey. Now the third important category. Uh the ancient mysteries of uh death rebirth, uh like the Eleusinian mysteries or the Isis Osiris mysteries in Egypt or the Sumerian uh mysteries of Inanna and uh Dumuzi. And also, you know, they were they were Mesoamerican uh

mysteries of Shibalba, the Mayan, and so on. Uh so um all these were inducing uh These holotropic states. For healing and uh transformation. And then also all the major religions developed what I call technologies of the sacred, you know, different forms of yoga

uh different schools of uh Buddhism from uh uh Theravada to to uh Zen and uh Vachrayana Daoist exercise is uh in the Christian tradition, uh Hesychasm, the Jesus uh prayer or the exercises of Ignatius Saint I Ignatius of Loyola. uh the various cabalistic uh cabalistic exercises.

So those were all um Um methods uh that were uh designed to to take people into these holotropic experiences. Uh for the purpose of of having a mystical experience, having a spiritual

And of course we have now modern uh technologies of the sacred to induce holotropic experiences. We have now uh pure alkaloids from from uh the psychedelic plants, you know we have uh Escaline from Peyote, we have uh Silocin and psilocybin from the magic mushrooms of the of the Mazatecs, we have now um Uh

the uh Ibogain from from Eboga from from the African uh um African um Bush and so on. And we also have now uh the tryptamine derivatives uh uh DMT, uh D P T and then methoxy DMT. Those are

uh active in ayahuasca and in the different snuffs from the Caribbean. Uh and also from this uh A toad that's now becoming very famous, the Bufo, Bufo Alvarius, these are secretions from the paratic glands and from the skin of these toads. Very, very powerful, very important uh psychedelics. track of the train and I have

Uh a a mutual friend of ours, different mutual friend, had had suggested I ask you about toad. And you just mentioned that uh it it could be or is important. And you mentioned Methoxy DMT uh which you know in this case f uh often referred to in f five M E O DMT. W what are your thoughts on This particular this particular compound uh and and why is it important, if it's important.

Well it The thing is it has not really been explored scientifically, unlike uh psilocybin or or uh L S D. But we have enormous amount of information from Um either semi legal or illegal, you know, underground uh experiments which were happening during those years when psychedelics uh uh were not very uh explored scientifically.

Uh but we have an an amazing book by uh Ralph Metzner, which is called The Toad and the Jaguar. uh Ralph who travelled all over Europe and in the United States visiting these groups that were using it uh you know, either using some legal uh loopholes or or uh you know, doing a kind of an underground uh research And he uh wrote this uh book where he where he collected that information

In it. In a way that uh could become a basis of of scientific research. Now what is fantastic there Yes, uh

that uh this substance creates a very short uh uh you know within an hour which is within the time of one psych psychoanalytic session, you can uh experience significant uh transformation, even even spiritual uh Opening. Uh the the substance is methoxy. uh DMT.

I have in my book uh When the Impossible Happens a chapter Uh which is called the uh the secret of the toad of light. There are churches in the American uh South West that are actually using it as a sacrament. It's called you know, church of the toad of uh light. And I took a fairly large doses which is not uh just more than is usually used.

Uh This was the my first time when we really didn't know I didn't know the dosing. And it was estimated twenty five milligrams. Today you would use like five or ten And uh

This was uh m my b by far the most powerful psychedelic experience I've ever had. And uh within seconds, you know, it took me uh out of my body. There were no there's nothing biographical, no no birth experiences, no nothing archetypal. I was just facing this uh incredible Yeah. Um

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 incandescent that it had, but also sense that this there was in incredible intelligence, creative intelligence was going beyond any uh dichotomies. I couldn't say if it was demonic or or uh divine Uh You know, there was just Of the scales that I had.

Um And then coming down. uh from that experience I actually uh had the feeling I was dying But the feeling that I was uh not from life into dying, but from a place beyond uh death. into a dying body.

And then after a while it became clear that uh this was not really dying, it was just the experience of dying. And for quite a while I was in a situation where I I was in a n absolutely blissful kind of state. And I was having visions of uh streams of my past life experiences where I had feeling of, you know, dying and being uh killed in different situations. Um My body was kind of acting out the the agony, there was was shaking, twitching, uh, by you know, psychologically, emotionally I was in in absolute bliss.

And then uh coming down for a week I was in a state in which I would like to live. Uh we were at the time uh uh living at Saland, we had a Yeah. And this was the time when I was handwriting my my manuscripts and the 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 will take a little break. I w again within seconds I had the feeling of just uh oneness with the the 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 uh sort of the uh consciousness of the industrial civilization came back, you know, had to uh do workshops, travel, uh you know uh So um I didn't stay in that

in that state, but uh uh my meditations became much, much, uh 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 uh Amazing substance to try. for practical reasons because you you will not find uh psychiatrists like myself uh in the um you know in the sixties and so on uh

Sitting for But they could certainly have a Uh do uh one hour um session with the Metok C D M T. And uh I think significant uh

therapy could be done, you know, within these very short Short terms. According to Ralph Metzner's observations, uh It's a

uh substance where the experience ends very cleanly the the it's 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 uh methodoxy DMT. No It's very, very popular.

For example we had the uh transpersonal conference in uh You know, and there were lectures about it, and of course there were there were people who had access to the to uh uh the toad material.

So it's becoming a very, very popular uh popular substance right now. therapy a few times in describing your experience with five MU DMT and the potential, say within a one hour window or something like that. uh to

uh provide. uh therapy if someone were sitting for someone experiencing this. Yeah. that 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. uh w in which you mentioned that L S D could become for psychiatry what the microscope was for biology and uh

In medicine Uh what I'm curious about is I suppose. A while you say that, but then B Is there still a place

For psychoanalysis, you know, traditional psychoanalysis or psychotherapy in combination With Some of these uh psychedelic

Compounds. Uh Because it it's it seems to me that the Um Perhaps.

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. Uh but I'd just I'd just love to hear you, I suppose, clarify What you mean by LSD becoming for psychiatry with 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. uh research and took it to the the clinic uh Uh we were

You mentioned in the uh in your interview with uh Michael Pollan there are these two forms uh they've been using uh 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 sheets. And uh the method that uh was uh used m mostly in Europe, but also by some American uh therapists it's called psycholytic, which is sort of dissolving the psyche, dissolving the Tensions, conflict in the psyche, and so on.

Uh from from general uh Lucy means dissolution. And so I started it with using sort of medium dosages, maybe you know, hundred fifty uh maybe up to up to two hundred at the beginning. And what happened was absolutely fascinating because uh I saw intensification of the symptoms that the patients were having, but then the process automatically took us to the different layers of uh traumatic experiences that were actually underlying that

Disorder. And uh layer after layer. Yeah, then I came up with the concept of uh coex system, system of content experience where each symptom had like a uh history, you know, as a uh Uh

uh series of uh layered uh experiences behind it. Uh And so it was uh Process of exploring the different layers of the psyche. Uh one of my patients called it uh onion peeling of the of uh the psyche, another one called it uh chemo archaeology.

So you could really uh explore the different layers of The postnatal biographical level. This is what what uh Freudian analysis is about. But the problem is it didn't stop there. Then each of those uh coexists also had a contribution from

The trauma of birth. There's so even if we're using these lower dosages. Uh as we were going on, it took us to birth. At that point suddenly people started experiencing uh Uh that they are trapped, they're caught.

uh they are in a situation of no exit, uh they had the feeling they're getting crazy, uh, you know, they are dying and so on. And um you know, my psychiatry and my uh my uh psycholytic training did not prepare me for that kind of thing. And it took a while, I including my own experiences, to realise there was a powerful record of biological

Burris. 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 uh was taking us to the sources of uh of uh these emotional and psychosomatic symptoms. It also created automatically a mapping of the psyche.

So um For a while I was uh just collecting these uh um reports from the based my my own records and and uh people's uh Uh um you know, descriptions of their sessions. And I was

Putting it on a map creating a what I thought was a new map for psych uh for psychology. Um Which would be um And the result of the fact that we had absolutely new tool

like a microscope opened up, you know, this whole underworld which we and or micro world which we didn't know existed and telescopes discovered new new galaxies that the astronomers didn't know. About so Uh you know, I felt we were discovering uh uh the depth of the uh of the psyche. So in that sense it was like a microscope or

a telescope, but it also was the self healing intelligence that that sort of uh uh emerged uh out of it. And do you find When I Finally.

Yeah. Please continue. I was just going to um Just going to ask about If there are adjunct therapies or things that you would add to the beginning the the pre psychedelic experience or post psychedelic experience, but I I don't want to interrupt your train of thought. Well just I just a couple of sentences. So the the new map which I created, which I thought was new

had the biographical level which it shared with psychoanalysis and current uh psychiatry because uh You know, however much Freud was criticized. psychiatry accepted his uh uh idea that the newborn is a tabula rasa, is a clean slate, that there's nothing of interest uh to psychologist psychiatrists that precedes birth.

And this was a major discovery. There is a powerful, powerful record of birth And uh When you become of uh aware of that fact, you have to uh radically change, transform uh thinking in in psychiatry. So this new new map or map that I thought was new. at the biographical level that it shared with the

with uh current psychiatry. But then I had to add the level which I call parinatal, which is related to birth, it's the record of birth. And then it opened up further into uh the level that I call uh Transversal now.

And there's a great overlap with what Jung uh 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 for not for

For centuries, but for millennia. I started seeing the connection to the great spiritual philosophies of the East, of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, th you know Yeah. And even the the shamanic maps. There was a lot of overlaping with the with the shamanic uh cartography. Uh

So I haven't forgotten your original question, but about psychoanalysis. Um Now the problem is that psychoanalysis has this very narrow map, limited to postnatal biography and to the individual unconscious, which is uh Just barely scratching the surface of what the psyche really is. So if you would

Uh Do psychoanalysis you would have to expand the conceptual framework very very radically, because otherwise if you would get to something like perinatal experiences or or transpersonal experiences, you would not have any map if you used just Freudian Freudian psychoanalysis. Uh

Uh so it's not the it's not the question of the the technique. I think In my understanding, Freud was actually in the right on the right track. He was asking questions like Why do we have uh um you know hysteria. Why do we have uh

uh phobia's why do we have uh obsessive compulsive neuroses 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

um sometimes uh seemed absurd, uh, you know, like uh Um suicide is killing the introjected uh um bad breast of your mother and so on. Yeah.

And then there was a tendency just to move away completely and not ask the questions about etiology. that Freud's genius was trying to understand, you know, why do we have uh certain kinds of symptoms. Why do we have anxiety? Why do we have uh depression? Why do we have uh suicidal tendencies and so on, and was looking for uh rational understanding for this. But he took it only Um

Not even halfway. Had he had access to the perinatal level, he would have gotten much more uh a convincing understanding. Why do we have uh depression, different forms of depression. Why? What what does it mean when people Uh won't uh

uh to kill themselves in a way that is non violent as compared to people who have the tendency uh to uh commit violence, suicide and so on. So if you expand the cartography and you you add the perinatal level and the transpersonal level, you can continue this uh psychoanalytic work actually. And get um you know, some r reasonable

quite convincing answers. 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 a new radical different uh approaches to psychotherapy, which would be would have to be experiential. If the roots of uh emotional problems are not just uh postnatal but also perinatal and trans personal. You cannot reach it by talking. You would have to actually uh use experiential

uh psychotherapy of the kind that started in the in the sixties. The developed i within humanistic uh humanistic psychology. Well let's let's go directly to that. And uh I've certainly have we're gonna come back to when the impossible happens we're gonna come back to many different

Past experience and And more recent projects. This experiential Psychotherapy.

In an 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 uh psychedelics. So one would be psychedelic assisted uh psychotherapy when uh You know, people would have sessions and then you would uh use talking uh uh helping them to to integrate, helping them to to understand.

So there would be, you know, uh focus on the on in the therapy would be on the experience but also Um it would be so uh 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 uh levels of experience. And so on. Uh but now we have powerful uh non drug experiences that can actually take you to those levels, to the perinatal level.

to the uh trans personal level. So um my late wife Christina and I developed uh what we call holotropic uh Breathwork. Where you used to be simple means which is uh faster breathing, uh some powerful

a certain kind of uh bodywork uh and then We also use um uh art, we use uh mandala drawing and sharing groups. And people have access to uh not just to the postnatal Uh

biographical level but also to the perinatal and to the transpersonal. level. Uh so there are you know, there are both pharmacological and non pharmacological ways of of uh Uh accessing these levels uh that have uh the deepest roots of uh emotional and psychosomatic problems.

So I'm I'm really glad you brought up. holotropic breath work, uh, which is as you mentioned, a non pharmacological Or non exogenous way of of inducing These

uh holotropic states uh which which I've I've experienced three times in different uh workshops. for holotropic breath work. And uh I I I I went into it, I'm not gonna lie to you, skeptical as someone with psychedelic experience that it could achieve anything comparable. And I was

really stunned uh by Just How? Uh Mm-hmm.

how powerfully you can induce uh these these non ordinary states using breath work 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 a at the time. So two two questions to to Uh

dig into both the I suppose psychedelic or theogenesist and then the holotropic breath work approach. What psychedelic materials In what dosages would you Potentially be using the U.S.

uh with what frequency. Would it be once a week, twice a week, would it be s determined? by the patient, would it be psycholytic dosing or would it be psychedelic dosing? How would you think about that piece of the puzzle? I wouldn't do psycholytic therapy, although I very much value uh the information that I got from it, you know, the self healing intelligence of the psyche, the coexistence and and just discovery. of uh the uh the dimensions uh that are on that expanded map being taken to uh

Yeah. Uh I also have a lot of interesting uh observations. Uh If you read the realms of the human unconscious, uh this a lot of it is about Um

Trying to understand how And why uh the world is changing under the influence of LSD or some other psychedelics. Uh I became fascinated, you know, the people saw me at different periods of their session as uh 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. Uh Oh they look around the uh the treatment room and sometimes they had the feeling that uh Yeah, on the death row, sometimes cabin in the Pacific, uh sometimes sometimes it was the bordello and so on. So I did uh the kind of Freudian work on it, trying to understand how it condensed, you know, different levels of the material. Uh so I got a good understanding of the dynamics of the postnatal

uh biography. But I also uh found out that it was not the most effective way of getting therapy. therapeutic results. So then uh already in Pra I increased the dosages. I started using music and uh and the headphones, I shades And this is how we did the whole research, uh

at Springgrove, the American researcher when I when I came to the United States. There you can very, very Powerful. Transformation you know within

within six, eight hours of the high dose. Uh but you don't have any idea. why that happened. You don't understand the the mechanism of the change. It resembles uh the material that John Rosen described. when he studied the uh experiences of people who did suicidal jobs from uh uh Golden Gate Bridge and and um

The babe uh Yeah. uh the Bay Bridge. He found that people who survived it, which is about one percent. They usually s survived it unscathed.

And they experienced powerful transformation. within the three seconds that it took f to get from the from the railing to the surface of the water, and then maybe But eight minutes in cold water before they were Rescued uh Um again, powerful, powerful changes that you know, you wouldn't achieve by years of psychoanalysis, but uh there was no understanding what what happened.

Uh now with this history of the psycholytic therapy I have now some idea about what is happening happening in these high dose sessions, but in a very condensed, very rapid rapid way. So by high dose. Uh say it once more. Oh by high dose, how many micrograms would you generally be using? Okay, I would probably use now uh dosages like uh you know, three hundred, uh or even four hundred, uh four hundred micrograms.

Which uh You know, might be in some instances not very frequently might be a challenge uh management of the of the session, but you generally get much More powerful 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 area areas that they don't want to go into. So

I consider the high dosages if if proper management to be more effective therapeutically. Mm-hmm. Uh so I would use now the smaller dosages if we continue the

uh the exploration of the psyche, you know, that's that's where lower dosages are certainly uh very useful. And I'm very sorry that this is not happening with uh with psychedelics in this new renaissance, with that we don't continued Freudian work where we are trying to to go to uh to find what the roots are, trying to understand the etiology Now in this in this uh later uh DSM, the the Diagnostic and Statistic Statistical Manual.

uh they moved completely from any question of etiology. You know, they now just uh describe the uh the symptoms. They use what they call neocrepelion uh approach. Uh Emil Krappelin was the uh the person who did the first diagnosis in uh in uh psychiatry at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Um

These uh dementia precox, which was the original name for schizophrenia and manic depressive disorder. Those were the the first two diagnoses in psychiatry. And what he did, he just simply described uh the symptoms that these patients have. And now the tendency in psychiatry is to go to the neocrepelion. Like in the DSM you don't ask the question, why do we have uh depression, why do we have suicidal tendencies, uh you know. Uh why do you have different psychosomatic disorders? It's just simply describing the the symptoms. And I think there is tremendous field of discovery which would be doing individual cases. Like

Initially in psychoanalysis you had uh I think about fifteen hundred psychoanalysts all over the world who were seeing their patients and they were They were describing what they observed and it was published in journals and so on Until they ended up with the psychoanalytic understanding of uh emotional and psychosomatic disorders.

You find in Otto Fenichel's book the psycholytic theory of uh Neuroses uh Um So we need we need to

continue that kind of work. This would be something for psychoanalysts to do, you know, to continue Freud's exploration of the psyche, trying to understand the psyche. understand why we have symptoms and syndromes. Uh but not keeping it just on the uh on the Um the post NATO level. By etiology, I think that was the word that I heard earlier, is that the exploration of the why we experience these causes. Why do we have that? So Freud Freud had the the concept of the development of the libido, the oral phase when uh the s sensual feelings are associated with nursing and uh the the passive oral and then the

active oral when uh um the the infant starts biting his the teeth and so on. And then it moved to the uh anal phase, uh the time to toilet training, and then refined toilet training which had to do with urination, that was the urethra. uh 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 the the penis of the boys and where you have the uh adible uh complex and you know the castration complex and all those things. Um Which was very, very interesting way of thinking, but it didn't go deep enough, so uh you you ended up with very unconvincing uh interpretation.

But uh I have tried uh in in my books to uh continue and see how you would understand uh in a much deeper way. Why do we have these things? Why do we have depression, different types of depression, suicidal tendencies? You know, why do we have symptoms like a headache and and many uh neurotic patients have problems breathing and so on. Where does that come from? Uh Why do we end up with psychosomatic pains for which there there is no uh organic uh 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 uh 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 have to change them the simile or the metaphor. You would have to say What classical psychoanalysis discovered

It's just barely the surface, uh is the part of the iceberg that's showing Uh for psychoanalysts. And there is this an enormous uh part of the psyche that remain hidden even for for uh traditional uh psychoanalysis. Joseph Campbell, you know the wonderful

uh mythologies that with this incredible Irish humor. He put it differently. He said Freud was fishing while sitting on a whale. Yeah.

Uh the the the y you've You have seen so many things, experienced so many things. uh let's just call it roughly four thousand five hundred 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 experienced incredible healing. That that seems to have a persistent effect.

after experiencing. Uh these deep psychedelic. State. I've also observed Uh

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 those two groups and how how can you increase the likelihood of Real

Healing. Real deep healing occurring. Well then extremely significant uh 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 L S D hundred times and they didn't discover that it had something to do with their own psyche. It was like going to the movies they kept their eyes open and you know things were floating around ch people were making funny faces, uh a curious kind of interesting experience, but they had no idea that the way they perceive the environment is actually a result of the projection from their own unconscious. So the m 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. Or doing it in the raves where uh

It's an open place where uh uh people don't know what they are taking and uh the police might they they know they do something f uh forbidden police might show up. This is the worst possible set and setting. So you increase tremendously the risk of uh these uh experiences and you reduce the reduce the potential. Mm-hmm. Uh so that's that's important. Uh So if you come if you come with an intention

self exploration ealing. for me, for my first L S D session, it became a spiritual quest. But every every one of my uh experiences. Uh I had about maybe

You know, a hundred forty. I those psychedelic sessions over the years. It might seem like a lot, but it's extended over extended over a period of sixty Sixty years. So if you look at at it that much Yeah, it's not that much.

Uh so uh That is extremely, extremely important. But what is your intention? Do you is this serious intention for self exploration, self eating? Is it part of your spiritual quest? Or are are you doing it for for kicks, you know, because it's sort of a uh w uh funny, weird uh weird experience. Uh there's also uh something that Houston Smith uh said, which was very interesting. Uh there was this whole discussion about

Instant on or chemical Uh Mysticism. When we saw in the early L S D sessions that people had mystical experiences, then this whole question of uh Chemical mysticism, Kramer. What what is it? What are we watching?

And there was one group of people who was uh But these sort of uh hardcore uh Uh materialistic scientists as well. Here you have it. Both the s mystic 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 uh mysticism, so much for spirituality, it's all chemistry. And there was another group that was saying uh

know what is happening. There is a very special group of uh chemicals that can induce uh mystical experiences. Those are sacred substances, those are sacraments, those are m sacred medicines and so on. So they took basically the position that the shamans of uh um native cultures took who were using the psychedelic plants, like your Townana cattle, you know, the flesh of the gods and so on. The the plants uh either were deities or they had uh they m mediated access to to deities. And uh Um

There was this uh uh position also, uh the third position Was um The mystical experiences induced by psychedists 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 of prayers, of meditation, or it has to come as a grace

There's no way you can take a pill and and experience God. So people like Meher Baba and so on, they're you know, very, very negative. uh guy called their in in uh a British uh um British uh

Um theologian and so on. Uh So this would put it sort of in the in uh the court uh of uh

spiritual teachers to say are these valuable or not? And there was Disagreement. All the Tibetans, for example, that I've known and and actually

being in uh Around some of them when they had uh 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. Uh on the other hand, Zen Buddhists uh usually had difficult experiences with psychedelics because you are not supposed to pay attention to what's happening. Uh it's called machio if you just uh your past life experiences you you're supposed to sit through it and cut into the uh no mind place. It's very difficult to have three hundred micrograms and not to pay attention to to what is you just cut through it, you know, to it uh no mind place. And then this is the I'm back now to Houston Smith. Houston Smith had a you who unlike uh Meher Baba uh den uh the had actually experiences uh

He came to us uh to um Uh Baltimore, you know, for a session we had the the possibility of giving sessions uh legally to uh people who were uh ministers, uh doing pastoral coun counselling and so on. Uh I actually was in in uh one of his uh one of his sessions. So he knew what he was talking about

And he said the Uh chemically induced s uh mystical experiences are phenomenologically indistinguishable. This was already shown in uh Panky's uh um Good Friday experiment, uh In the Marshall of the uh Boston University.

That you I know you talked about in your discussion with uh Michael Paul and just to define very quickly, I apologize for people who are listening, phen uh phenomenal phenomenological or phenomenology, that's the subjective reporting of experience. If you look at the subjective experiences of uh people who uh had them through L S D or psilocybin. uh and you compare it with uh what you 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 setting. He said if uh

Let's say you have a situation there is a party in Berkeley. Oh and the way it was done and there would be a fruit punch. And a joker comes with a handful of uh sugar cubes uh laced with uh LSD. People think they're drinking punch and then you know, this uh the 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, difficulties uh to to integrate it and become a kind of very likely alien enclave in their in their life. If it is somebody who is a spiritual seeker who reads literature, who is doing systematic Meditation and then now here's that This could accelerate and even do um the sessions, you know, in a proper set and setting, the context

Um uh in some kind of a reverential attitude and would do then afterwards, after the sessions some some reading and and continue working on it in in meditation. This could become a really a powerful catalyst of uh spiritual journey. And I think that's the that's the correct answer, you know. Mm-hmm. Seekers and a number of names.

A a friend of mine recommended I don't even know this name and I'm I'm maybe a a shame that I don't, but uh recommended that I ask you about your experiences With Swami Mukdananda. And I don't recognize that name, but I th I thought that this is as good a time as any to perhaps bring it up. Uh if if you if you

Can answer that. Yes. Um he became kind of quite important figure in in our lives. Uh

I met him first about nineteen sixty five when he Was on his second tour around the world. He was the head of the of the Sida Yoga uh movement. Um the f during the first uh trip around the world he was actually accompanied by Ramdas and by um

By Verner 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 a devotee of his. And so when we When we connected she wanted me to meet Muktaanda 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 uh the book When the Impossible Happens.

And it was uh very interesting. I was very reluctant, you know, to go. I was not a guru person, I would was not sort of somebody who'd be, you know, uh at the the feet of somebody Yeah. I s had the feeling that ultimately it was between me and the uh the cosmos and so on. Uh but uh we had about twenty minutes uh waiting for uh for the Darshan

And at that point she told me that he was a Uh Shave it. um she's a for you know a follower of Shiva. And I had some of my most powerful experiences in my sessions with the the archetype of of Shiva. Mm-hmm.

And uh Sister of Changed my feeling about this. Find somebody I knew that Shaivites are using uh all kinds of means, including Bang. uh you know, Hashish and so on and and uh Uh also uh Tura.

So they have It's a very highly experiential uh group. And so this changed suddenly my attitude to this uh to for this uh interview. And uh I walked in And he he

But sitting there, you know, with the uh red ski cap, with dark glasses, holding a wind of one of uh peacock feathers scented with uh sental oil. And uh has a what's called Lungi, which is looks like a night night shirt. And he sort of uh beckoned me, you know, to come and you sit here to chair just by him. And uh he turned my head.

And uh was sort of took off his uh took uh or or sort of shifted up his uh dark glasses, which he very uh 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 Yeah.

You're a man who has seen Shiva, he says, This is very good. And this just blew my mind. I just finished, you know, the uh describing my experiences with uh with Shiva. And the fact that this was a very important figure and the first thing that he says is you know, uh I can tell you I've seen Shiva. And so We had we had this uh long interview where um

I actually asked him about the Soma, which I was fascinated by. uh this uh psychedelic plan that was used to you know, in ancient India and was uh described in Rigveda but hundred over hundred stanzas in Rigveda are dedicated to Soma. It was a plant and it was a beverage that was uh produced and some of the descriptions show that those were those were powerful

Psychedelic, you know. half of us is on earth, half of us in heaven, we have taken Soma. Uh so we knew that there was a powerful psychedelic, but the uh the secret was lost. And so I asked him and he said, Oh yeah, well you know we On my birthday uh the uh Vedic priests come down to Ganeshpuri and they do a Soma ceremony and uh you can come as my gift uh guests, you know, uh I will introduce you.

And then he he died before we could actually Do it. So uh to make a long story short, then we were walking out of uh this uh his room And we're standing at the door and he looked at us and says, uh You come to uh

our intensives. We have two intensives of Kashm on Kashmir Shemism. Uh, which is uh um kind of a um Um uh Mahayana uh branch of of uh Buddhism uh that uh

started in Kashmir when in the eighth century uh Rishi had a vision of uh Some rocks near Srinagara. And he went there and uh exposed some uh Uh coverer.

Vegetable cover and they were Uh Inscriptions carved in the rock that became then the Shiva Sutras. This was like the Bible of of Kashmir Shaivism.

So he said, Come, this is not Kashmir Shaivism. He looked at me and says this will be very important very interesting for you. And so of course we did. And when I listened to uh the Swami who started describing what uh Kashmir Shaivism Uh I had the feeling that he was stealing uh you know, sentences and and paragraphs from uh an article which I had uh written I think

Nineteen sixty nine. Which was called uh psychedelic ontology and cosmology observations from LSD sessions. Yeah. So interesting question.

You know what It's the common denominator between experiences that people have with L S D this strange substance that Swiss chemists discovered in in Switzerland and something that was found written uh on the on the rock in Srinagar in the eighth century. And so then we we started sort of uh going to um uh these intensives whenever we were uh were need to

Mukhananda. And then we actually did a large uh transpersonal conference uh in uh In um Bombei or or Mumbai. Um

This was nineteen eighty two, which was on Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science bringing together spiritual teachers and people from the new paradigm circles like Fritch of Free Chapra and uh you know others. So uh

Uh that was our that was our history. Well we've mentioned we've mentioned the title, you know, When the Impossible Happens a few times. I figure we might as well jump into it and uh discuss Certainly. Perhaps the reasons for writing the book, but also some of the stories. I I 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, uh Tim, what happened to us that our house in the Mill Valley burned down.

In uh In two thousand one. And I lost my whole uh referential library. So it was difficult to write books like I used to, where you have to refer to people's work and and take passages of it and so on.

And so I decided to write a biography. But you know, my life has been pretty pr pretty intense, pretty rich. So the question was, you know, what do I select? And then I decided to select uh observations and experiences from my life. That uh current materialistic science would consider to be impossible.

This this is not not possible, uh, if the materialistic paradigm is is accurate. So I selected them. So it's a selected of selection of these stories. Yeah. And um about one third of this is uh dedicated to amazing synchronicities that I have uh experienced in my uh in my life. And some of the synchronicities were actually related to

uh Mukhtananda. So there are two chapters of it describing uh what happened between us and and uh Mukta Nanda. What is a synchronicity? Well, synchronicity is something that uh Carl Gustav Jung brought into the to the attention of uh Western scientists. after hesitating for twenty years, uh collecting for twenty years uh observations uh because you realize this is uh

um against this is undermining the cornerstone of materialistic science. But uh the basic principle is linear causality. you know, the what we experience is a chain of uh linear causality, everything that happens has a cause and has an uh as an effect.

And this works in Western materialistic science with the exception of uh the the cause of causes, you know, what what uh caused the beginning of the universe. There we Uh we don't go there very frequently because we don't have any any good answers for that. Uh Now but he showed up that there are

Where uh there's a meaningful correlation or connection between something that's an intra psychic event, like a like a dream. or a vision or a psychedelic experience and something that happens in material universe universe or what we call so called objective uh reality consensus uh

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 let me just give you a couple of um major examples from from from that book. Uh I am referring to the experience uh that I had with Joseph Campbell again, you know, great, great uh

Uh mythologist. greatest mythologist of the twentieth century probably of uh of all time. And he used to come uh regularly to Selen and do workshop and even to our workshop, months long workshops and so on. And we were doing some workshops with him. And in one of these uh

workshops he star he was talking about Jung. He was you know great supporter and and and uh very enthusiastic about uh about uh Jung. And he mentioned synchronicity. And somebody didn't understand it and said, Joe, could you explain what synchronicity is? Okay. And uh he first gave this official definition of Jung's you know, this is a a meaningful connection across time or space uh between an intrapsychic event and something that happened in the material world.

But he says, I will give you uh an example. He said, You know, we were living uh in uh downtown uh Manhattan on the the fourteenth floor of a high rise building And my office had Two sets of windows. One was overlooking Sixth Avenue, which was, you know, not nothing interesting that m like many streets in Manhattan

But the other set was overlooking uh the Hudson River. And that was a beautiful view. So these two uh windows were open all the time. The others we were open just for for cleaning. Nobody was bothered to open those windows. And uh then he said and uh At the time I was working on uh

the first volume of what was supposed to be uh world mythology. And it's called uh The way of the animal powers. And that first uh volume is about shamanic uh mythologies of the world.

And then Joe said that I was working On the chapter about Kalahari Bushman. It's just uh And Bushman, you know, living in the uh Kalahari desert. And he said that uh in their mythology a major uh

Heroic figure. is praying Mentis. And so I my uh desk was covered with papers and pictures uh related to the mentes and uh Um the Kalahari Bushman.

And there was Loren uh Van Der Post's uh book about his childhood when he had a a Bushman nanny. And uh sh he uh the Lauren uh Post described how this nanny was seemed to be d communicating with the with the praying mentees that uh they were having sort of c conversations and Uh when uh With the movements the uh the praying mentee seem to be responding to him. But to her.

And then said in the middle of this uh work I suddenly had this totally irrational impulse. To go and open one of the windows that we never open. And I stick stuck my uh head out and turn it uh automatically, uh To the side. And there on the fourteenth floor of a high rise building on Manhattan, there was a great specimen of a praying mantis.

sort of climbing up the uh the uh Building And turned uh her his Het, toert, uh, Joe. And

He said uh Uh I took a close look and uh The way Van Der Post described it was true. It uh there was something uh that made the pragmatist 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, uh in such a way that at the time when Joe's head was

And he had this irrational impulse to go and open the window that he never opened and he looks out and you know, there is a right there is a praying mente and actually turns toward him and gives him a me got what he felt was meaningful look. That's pretty mind blowing synchronicity. So Well, uh Jung hesitated twenty years before he presented it nineteen fifty one in uh

And it was presented Together with a talk by Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of uh of quantum physics, who was uh first uh uh Young's patient and then a very close, uh very close uh Friend.

Uh let me just uh quickly give you another example which is the the most um mind blowing uh synchronicity from uh My life Yes, please. This happened uh during our first trip to China where we were bringing trans personal psychology and uh holotropic breastwork to China.

And we Did a a workshop, a prototropic breathwork workshop in Jinan, which is the birthplace of uh of Confucius. And uh We were having dinner and one of the participants uh

Uh came. to me and said Stan I had an experience about you Uh in my dream last night. And uh Um I said uh

What was it? And uh She said uh It was my great grandmother. Who showed up?

And told me that we have an important stone. in our family for generations, and that stone should go to Dr. Groff. So she actually Brought it.

beautiful blue uh velvet uh bag and opened it and it was a fossil uh Notilus. The Ammonite, you know, which are the that are the um ancestors of of uh Uh the no tillers.

Very, very beautiful. Funciona. 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 m marine mollusk, you see, so it comes from the bottom of the ocean and it's some it got uh during the creation of Himalayas got to the top of uh Mount Everest.

Now what is interesting about this that um When uh I started uh trans personal psychology International Association of Transpersonal Psychology and the s series of international conferences, we were thinking what would be the proper logo for uh the International Transpersonal Association, and we came up with the with the chambered uh nautilus, you know, which is a beautiful piece of uh sacred geometry. So for decades we were using it on the stationary, it was on all the programs of uh trans personal psychology. So uh

You know, here we are bringing trans personal psychology to China. And uh Great grandmother. uh shows up in the dream of a woman who actually was called Meng, which is the Chinese name for dream. And tell her to bring me this uh this fossil

Nautilus, you know, which was taken uh from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the uh of the uh uh the highest mountain in in the world.

Uh according to the estimates, uh the the Himalayas were born about uh About fifty million years ago during the collision of the of the tectonic uh Plates. So this was a you know, at least fifty million years old uh

uh fossil nautilus, you know, symbol of the International Transpersonal Association. So of course the Chinese Press, you know, didn't describe how great that holotropic breath's work was, but they all focused on this incredible synchronicity, you know. Are there are there any uh other Uh

phenomena experiences that are difficult to explain In that book or outside of when the impossible happens that are related to Uh psychedelic sessions. Well, there are of course experiences of the um

uh out of body experiences in near death experiences, you know, where people who are in a state of uh Uh clinical death, cardiac death, or even a fled uh EEG uh have experiences. They might be watching the the procedure from from the ceiling uh

Uh so that when they uh brought back to consciousness, they are able to describe the the procedure. There's one case where uh this was uh happening to women who had to be frozen because they needed to get to the tumor at the base of the skull. And so she had flat uh electrocardiogram, flat uh electro uh encephalogram, and at the same time this is the most detailed uh description of the uh of the surgical procedure that we have.

When she was able to to draw the uh instruments uh that they were using and so on. So there are many, many of these and uh we had we had a couple of those experiences with our own uh cancer patients. So this uh one of them is described uh in the book. Uh Uh there is uh There is uh one chapter which I called uh unorthodox psychiatry where people experience healing in connection uh with experiences that uh you know wouldn't make any any sense to current psychiatrists.

What what would be an example of that? So There was one uh situation where we had a five day uh um w workshop at SLN. And a woman came who had for the last

Two years had had uh uh very bad uh depression which uh psychiatrist would consider to be what's called uh endogenous Which of course doesn't mean anything, and endogenous means uh generated from within

Um But the characteristic is that it's worse in the morning. So she got out of the bed and it took her like couple of hours before she managed to brush her teeth and and uh you know, uh get dressed properly and so on. So she had uh um At S Cl.

And uh you know, they were pretty powerful things from childhood and she was uh uh reliving her birth. But uh Friday in the morning, which was the last day she came And she uh um actually experience some intensification of of these um feelings.

So we uh Ask her to lie down. We had a different different uh program for that morning, you know, the conclusion of the five days. But it was clear that we had to do something. So she lay down in the in the middle of the room.

And uh We just told her just to go with the experiences. And she Again uh completed a little something about the um experience of uh the birth, biological births.

And then went went into this very strange uh uh series of uh movements where to look like sort of uh uh praying or worshipping something, you end up in a in a sitting position. And then this monotonous chant, repetitive chant came uh in a language that that we did not understand. And this was going 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, uh

Some of them crying for for uh unknown reasons. And we had a a Jewish uh psychoanalyst from uh Buenos Aires participating uh in the um Yeah.

And he came to us. And he said, This is fantastic. Do you understand what happened? We said no. Uh

He said she was she was uh chanting in perfect Sephardic language. the the Latino which is the medieval mixture of of uh Spanish and and Hebrew And it happened to be his hobby.

You know, he w he knew the Sephardic uh language. And we say, Wow, it's just We ask him what what was she singing? This was what she was uh 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 this Two years of the exogenous depression. We saw her then a couple of times at uh uh conferences and the depression never came back. So the idea of you know healing uh

singing a Sephardic prayer. It's it's a pretty unusual sort of uh therapeutic uh Uh mechanism. What do you make of that?

Yeah, what do you h how do you explain that for yourself? We've we've seen a lot of this kind of thing. The p that uh Healing happens, powerful healing happens in the holotropic breastwork through mechanisms that we don't understand. Uh Uh I saw before, you know, working with people who were in psychoanalysis so on the opposite that people uh 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 uh the you know the toilet training and early bus problems.

Only the problems don't change very much. So you are th you have the option either have uh uh very little result with uh what seems to be intellectual understanding or a result where you have no clu what what is happening. Yeah.

And and that particular experience with the Sephardic chanting, that was with Uh that was Following breath work. But not using any type of Uh dosing of any type of material.

No we were We were careful not to bring in people not to bring anything into uh the you know the uh orotropic breathwork sessions. Uh Because it's the the uh structure is completely different. The the timing of the breath work is different, about three hours and the type of music that we use uh so uh it would not be it would not be great uh set and setting. It's not it's not structured for a psychedelic experience.

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

Sounds terrifying. Uh it's just been matter of principle, you know. Mm-hmm. Well not only was it illegal, but it it just does not does not work well in a context that's that's created for holotropic breastwork. If if you had to I and answer the question and and there might not be

Yeah. To the the question that someone posed to me, which was they hadn't experienced holotropic breath work and they ask but they did have a lot of uh research experiment uh experience with psychedelics and they asked what's psychedelic at what dose is most similar to to the effects or the experience of holotropic breath work. Well it would be more uh something in the category of MDMA in that uh

The holotropic breathwork can create visions, you know, visual experiences, but it's not that common as uh It is in in uh L S D or in Mezcaline where you have can have you know In uh the breathwork it's more like in M DMA. Where you have

something that's uh almost like on uh uh the interface between vision and uh vivid thought and so on. Mm-hmm. Um And

If uh If we were to look at another Uh Subjective experience that's reported. uh with with decent regularity

With psychedelics. Uh specifically entity encounters. And this seems to be frequently reported with, say, ayahuasca or Smoke. Uh entity encounters, encountering entities that that well believes to be separate from themselves. Seems to be quite common with ayahuasca or smoke DMT, uh NN DMT specifically. I what is have you seen this in breath work uh and also

No. W do you make any ent 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 Uh.

a perceived encounter or something that exists independently. Uh. Uh well this you know, this was described of course with uh with uh uh Peote, the Mezcalito. And and also very common with ayahuasca. And then to Pachamama.

Right. The only time I had it was in an ayahuasca session. uh where there was a sense of Actually it's not true. I had it once in uh in an L S D early L S D session, uh where there was a presence, there was a Um

Energetic presence. I didn't see, you know, a figure. Uh but there was also communication which was uh Telepathic, which was without words. Uh this was uh uh very strange because uh this was at a time when

Uh we had closed boundaries. We we couldn't even uh initially travel to Russia, let alone to 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 Uh what would you like uh

uh your your life to be like. And I said, I would like to see the world. I would like to understand uh Psychosis. This was the place I was in. And I would like to have a job Uh that's not a kind of a nine to five job. I would like to have some kind of a freedom.

Yeah. And the answer was uh Okay, but your task is to bring spirituality to eastern Europe and to Russia. I said, No, I really did it. You said now I'm flipping out. I can't you know, I can't even to travel to to Poland, uh

And uh this is pr promising me, I can see the world, uh But then of course it It happened, you know, then uh uh It became very, very popular. Um In Russia and then

twenty five years ago bringing trans person psychology to to Czechoslovakia actually so So that was a fascinating synchronicity again. Uh then I had one uh In the ayahuasca session, but also this was a

This was a very uh uh intense. But But it was guiding my session, was was sort of telling me what I should look, look at how I should Handle it. Mm-hmm. And that's not something that you observe in in breath work very often.

No. Yeah. No. You know, I actually uh wrote initially I wrote that I consider psychedelics to be uh Non specific amplifiers. Yes. When I and uh It would have to be modified.

Actually all psychedelics uh can take you to the areas which I described in that cartography. You can experience something from from Uh child's uh sufficiently important emotionally, you can relive your birth, you can have prenatal experiences. Even this is uh

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 experiences, you can have archetypal experiences, you can it can take you to Yeah, 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.

uh, you know, let's we talk about more more visual, less visual and so on. More emphasis on on physical feelings, uh Or on the emotions. In certainly uh uh MDMA or some some of the other uh antiogens, they a shift that whole spectrum towards a positive. There are very few people who have bad trips or MDMA.

M DMA is very dangerous uh physiologically, but very very easy for most people to To handle psychologically, emotionally. Mm-hmm. Uh but then I

Discovered this uh Um This uh element in ayahuasca that there is very frequently uh the imagery of the Amazonian jungle Or the Anaconda Snake is coming, uh the kind of a

Road to root, you know, cleansing uh uh Jaguars images of Jaguars. So there is some kind of a Selectivity what from the collective unconscious is actually uh prevalent in in those uh sessions. Do you have any opinion or opinion of or experience with microdosing of different psychedelics.

Is that something you've administered to people or Uh I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. It's become a topic. Yeah. I had quite quite a few of like the twenty five micrograms, you know, for it. for hiking or swimming in the ocean or something. They're just enhancement of the of the um

Perceptual. experience of the world. Uh But I haven't experimented with the with the small I had uh lots of very interesting experiences, uh Uh inside of the sessions and then particularly.

Coming down from the sessions when I was in a kind of a state that would that you might be uh experiencing lower dosages. But it was at the end of a high dose session rather than uh an experience uh per se. What did you experience at the tail end of those sessions?

Uh what were they? What what were the what were those experiences at the tail end of those high dose sessions that uh That were interesting. Well there were you know all kinds of psychological insights. I mean a lot of the things that I've been writing about, you know were combinations of what I saw in the patients and then getting insights and understanding uh uh Even in the in the high dose uh as parts of the

Sessions. Existential despair feeling, you know, there's no meaning in life, absurdity of life and so on.

Which uh uh very frequently happens in uh during reliving of birth when you get to what I call the second uh perinatal matrix, which is the stage of birth where the uterus contract but there is uh no opening, the cervix is not open. So we have the feeling of of a total um you know existential Despair, total bummer, there's no no meaning, everything's absurd. Uh we go from nowhere to nowhere, uh uh we come to this world naked, crying in pain, uh you know without any possession and this is how we're gonna end, no matter what you do in your life or with your life. Those are really heavy kind of experiences. Uh so uh I had some of those experiences, uh

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 when I was bringing just my training as a psychiatrist and things that I've read. I realised I was sitting there listening to what they were saying. I had no clu what the what what they were talking about and but I got really full experiential understanding by finding those places in myself.

And this is also interesting about this this large Map. of the psyche, you know. that each of us has all those things. It's not a question of uh whether you are a psychiatry patient or no. If you go deep enough you

If if you 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 the nausea, the the the headaches, the the pains, the psychosomatic pains in the body. Uh you know, people frequently tell me they found Hitler. inside they found Stalin. I mean uh you you discover the shadow aspect. So

So the the human personality is a little different from what's described by mainstream uh psychiatry. You you and your late wife, Christina Uh and uh she founded, I guess in nineteen eighty, 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 s view as say the onset of schizophrenia in the late twenties or something like that. Yeah versus versus those precipitated by psychedelics.

Well that concept came from uh you know the work with psychedelics and with the with the breath work, you know, when you realize that uh Uh People in these situations would have experiences like of uh uh the death, rebirths, destruction of the world, recreation recreation uh of the world, you know, past life experiences and so on. And uh

I very early uh discovered that there was if you have bad trip There's no way uh no good way of t of uh terminating it. The worst thing that you can do is what's done routinely, which is come with tranquilizers. to people who are in a on a bad trip.

Uh and then keep them on maintenance dosages dispens Prevents any kind of resolution. If somebody has a bad trip, uh 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, for

It's not uh it's not just that the the drug created this horrible horrible experience. So uh so the way you do it you have to tell people you know that you are in a LSD session this is a time limited thing, I'm gonna be here. And then when something uh remains unresolved, we do some uh bodywork and some emotional work to uh bring it to a good closure, people can benefit from this uh So I realized very early that when people had difficult experiences, the last thing I would do is to to Combined with uh Tranquilizes.

You know. And so I saw many of the situations where people experienced what they would be hospitalized for in the psychedelic session, and if we stayed with it, it actually was a major healing, major uh transformation. So then the obvious answer was, you know. Should be

Treated differently. Just because it happened without Breathing or fast breathing or Because it happened without uh Psychedelics. No, we just uh

You know, apply it to that uh other category of spontaneously emerging experiences of this kind. Now what is necessary uh for having this kind of understanding, you have to have the large map.

The psyche is not just the postnatal biography and the Freudian um individual unconscious there is the record of uh these hours of birth of the of the anxiety of the of the you know the uh physical discomfort.

And uh Also the uh the emo amazing uh uh aggression, the fury that is generated in the fetus who cannot breathe and is uh is uh subjected to all those torsions and so on. Uh

If you have a 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 uh the collective unconscious as a regular kind of germane part of our unconscious, both the historical part of the collective unconscious and the the archetypal. So having visions of archetypal beings are being taken to archetypal domains like hell or paradise. Those are common experiences uh in uh in the breathwork or in psychedelic sessions. So

This just gives you an idea, this are stage that you can work with the way uh you would work with people in a in a psychedelic session. So so that's The perfect segue. Let's take as a as a hypothetical situation Uh and uh an alternate world where

The But psychologists and psychiatrists have accepted the collective unconscious and 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 uh di however it might be diagnosed currently.

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

So they would like something like that for spiritual emergency, which you cannot do because uh the y you know, psychosis is not this is not uh uh medical diagnosis. We we can't With the exception of the uh organic uh uh psychosis we cannot

Um uh really um 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 uh urine, where we can, you know, have a litmus paper, put it in the sample of urine since it comes out uh uh you know, green, it's uh schizophrenia. You basically uh diagnose these different psycho so called psychotic states by the fact that people have Experiences

Uh And behaviors. That current model can of but but uh symptoms which are which are used uh as being uh

Uh important, you know, diagnostic uh Tools for for Psychiatry could be, for example, people have the experience of of death rebirth, the destruction of the world, recreation of the of the world. They have experienced this uh

that seem to be uh past life experiences. So those are all absolutely normal uh um elements in uh the uh human unconscious, but other understood really in uh if you want in the Groffey and Jungian uh way, the the psyche is infinitely larger than than uh mainstream psychiatry uh ever uh considered. It's more like uh 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. focusing uh 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 uh procedures that you have to follow, certain forms of meditation. They would collect the uh descriptions of those experiences, uh dis discuss, uh write about it and so on.

So it's a p it's a systematic exploration of the human psyche. This uh Cultures were not interested in technology, so they are, you know, nowhere close to what we are in terms of the understanding of the material world. But they're way ahead of us in terms of understanding of consciousness and uh And the psyche. And it's very it's you know, it's very humbling for somebody uh like myself having a

Yeah, you know. Professional training and being through a stage when I thought what the shamans are doing, the primitives in the jungle somewhere, you know, illiterate and so on. We have our scientific approach, which is behaviorism or or psychoanalysis, not this If you 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. Uh. But the question is it's it has to be harnessed, you know, and that's not an easy easy task in uh the um Industrial civilization. You would have to change first you would have to

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 uh of of the planets. It took over a hundred years. And the the The uh 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 You know, why the earth cannot be uh uh round and rotate and uh and uh you know, around the sun and so on. So for you personally How has your experience of your inner world changed? over the last say sixty years a or after you had your first psychedelic experience.

So do you have that experience and you go on to have What what is your inner Your experience of your inner world look like? How's that change? Uh um This goes back to uh A little scandal in our family.

Uh when my parents got uh uh got f fell in love and wanted to get married. It was in a small checktown And my father's family was had no uh 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 uh definition. And this was created a lot of turmoil. It almost seemed like it would not happen.

until the solution came. My Um mother's uh parents made a major donation to the church. And then suddenly they r relaxed their standards and they allowed that. And uh they had a business on uh Main Street.

And uh so when when the m uh wedding happened they could roll out uh 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 uh our own decision when we come of age. So we actually had classes of religion, but for me it was always the free hour. I would go for a walk or read a book or or if 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 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 you can't get

uh you know more materialistic than that. So uh It was my first LSD 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. Uh you know, that was a much deeper understanding that uh that anything that uh that my uh formal training provided. So Uh so this the paradox uh which I was aware of it when I was coming down as a as a believer sort of a

not believing but a mystical, you know, mystical person. I differentiate quite a bit spirituality from religion. uh never became religious in any way. I became very spiritual. And uh I realize the paradox, you know, this uh the The divine sort of comes to me in and uh experiment in a in a Marxist uh

country, you know, induced by this uh substance from a Swiss chemist. Uh But uh I knew I I felt I was stuck in psychiatry and I was at that point Not very excited about psychiatry. Uh but I f I felt coming down from the session, I felt if I am psychiatrist this is by far the most

interesting thing I can study. So if you look at my professional career, there's nothing uh There was a Years, sixty years, you know. That uh

I have done that would not be in one way or another related to these holotropic states. That became a What I said was my my passion, my vocation, my My profession.

Is it is there any particular synchronicity or experience in any of the holotropic states that you've experienced yourself that that you find the hardest to explain or the most Uh un unusual slash remarkable. Does anything come to mind?

Uh I don't know. I have so many so many of them. Uh I think one of the things I've got to do. One of the wildest one was uh actually The first session that I had in When I came to Baltimore from Prague It was a process where it my uh request to for the scholarship was first turned down

And then uh Then uh I appealed and then uh I had a very powerful psychedelic session with a colleague of mine, a psychiatrist. And uh this was a major, major death rebirth opening and what I experienced like

you know, kind of Aatman Brahman uh experience. And uh I came back home And Uh in the mailbox was the positive response. I can I can go to the United States.

So within very short time I packed I ended up, you know, with forty pounds of my luggage and I took all my records with me, twenty five twenty five pounds, fifteen pounds of personal belonging and I was going to to Baltimore. And in Baltimore we had the permission to give uh sessions to professionals. And collecting the information from that. And so I had a session.

uh qualified for that ourselves. And in that session I sudden had the feeling. Uh that uh I was not bound by space and time, that I somehow could get to other places in the world if I decide to. I and I wanted to t put it to a test. I said, can I for example?

into into the uh Uh apartment of my parents. And so I imagine, you know, which direction was Prague and how far and imagine myself sort of flying uh in that direction. And I was uh experienced 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 uh certain kind of distance. That I have

overcome and uh just imagine that I am I'm in Prague. And what happened the next time I was suddenly trapped in some kind of very strange space where there were like uh Uh circuits on or transistors or stuff. Uh uh and I didn't know what was happening. And then I realized I was inside of the television.

of uh the uh the the the television set of my Of my parents. And I was thinking about it and I had to left because I was still holding on to

uh the next element of the materialistic world. The the only way you can really see what's happening in other places. You you need a television, you need you need a camera and a satellite, you see. So I realise I I'm not even bound by that. I'm I'm in a in a

uh the world of spirit. I can just have to say now I am there and I am there. And then in the at that point it turned 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 the six hour difference. Uh

Uh which uh I thought for a while and I said. Not not the proof, you know. Um Uh I I knew it that that was a difference that my mind could fabricate that. So how do I prove that this really happened?

And I said I would go and take a picture of the wall And then check with my parents and they will say something strange happened, you know, we f we found this uh painting on the uh you know on the floor and uh this Nail was still in the wall. And so I started walking to the and reaching for that. And then suddenly I had the feeling that I was gambling. I was I was playing uh

like a rulet with my with my uh soul. That was this was very dangerous, the feeling that we're going to be able to do uh I was getting sort of uh under the influence of some evil forces. And then I realized how much they warn you if you are on the s spiritual quest.

Uh from that uh that period where you start playing with this mind over, you know, the C Ds. And so on. And uh I started seeing uh I started seeing images what what I could do if I really have the

possibility. Uh I could go and uh eavesdrop and uh political uh meetings in the world, you know, uh I could get access to scientific secrets and so on. I could go to a casino, I could be the casino and so on. And uh I realized there was a th there was a real danger from the ego to to start playing with the 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 uh this would be possible because if I had the power then other people had the power and then uh the the doors don't protect me. I mean a world sort of uh you know this kind of a wild w Western and I didn't didn't want that proof that this is this was really Possible. And I went, I lie down on a couch uh were actually uh

Uh I was coming down from a session before going to Baltimore. And I was lying then. And then this horrible thought Uh maybe I never got to Baltimore.

N I am just uh fabricated that trip to to the United States in my LSD session. I'm now coming down uh from from that session I never left, you see. So I was like the trunks of in that situation, you know, am I a butterfly having the dream of being a human or a human having the

Um The feeling that I'm butterfly, uh So uh I was stuck in that place for a while where I was not sure whether I was uh having extra projection from Baltimore or whether I was uh I was coming down from that session. So that was the wildest one probably. And

Of course then coming back I was cursing myself, you know, what a wasted uh opportunity for a great uh experiments, you know, the proof uh as the projection uh and uh But the fear and the metaphysical fear that uh I was really sort of uh you know, losing my soul in in that if I start playing with these kinds of forces.

That uh last part of that experience in particular sounds terrible. The uh the laying down or terrifying, I should say, laying down on the 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 are back. In the United States. Oh like you know probably w w within eight hours or so I was uh it was uh absolutely clear, you know. Re back to calibration. Yeah, yeah.

If if you were starting your career, just just a few more questions. I I I've you've been so generous with your time, but if you were starting again right now And uh you are 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 would you want to do, or what type of research would you want to do? Well, you know, one one of the problems with this uh Renaissance that a lot of this is h uh repeating things uh which were already done. Like the cancer projects are great, but but uh we did it to the point when

that when we ask for more uh money for continuing the research, they say you have already proved it, now it has to go to the hospitals, now it has to be used. And uh Uh so uh you know those uh also this wonderful study Johns Hopkins is just a more sophisticated and methodologically better uh You know, Walter Panke uh experiment which had some

Flaws certainly. Uh 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. Uh as you know, we have indications that the whole development of computers was closely uh

Connected with uh Use of psychedelics. You know, people like uh Doc Engelbart and uh and uh uh even you know Steve jobs and all these people made it absolutely clear uh There was a statement that uh

Uh all the people. to one to men and a woman who developed virtual reality where acid heads. Yeah. So And this is now.

you know, understood there is a there is a possibility of sort of loosening somehow the The blocks that we have in problem solving because we are stuck with a paradigm. Yeah. You know, Thomas Kuhn wrote that fantastic book, The Structure of Uh

of uh 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 they were m you know, more and more accurate, uh hypotheses and theories created so that what we have now the understanding of the universe is the is the best understanding that has ever been in you know in any at any time in any society.

And it showed that it's a it's a joke that the development of science breaks into these uh distinct periods and each of them is governed by what he calls a paradigm, you know, a way of uh looking uh looking at the world, you know, certain basic metaphysical assumptions, uh uh beliefs, uh ways of uh what are relevant uh uh areas to research, uh how do you do research, how you evaluate it. This is all Paradigm.

uh died. So The examples of course I already mentioned the the shift from uh the geocentric to the heliocentric system. There was a one uh revolution in chemistry Where they had flogiston. uh chemistry where there was this royal substance uh

Flogistone and then when people like uh like uh Dalton or Lavoisier came with the idea of atoms, you know, uh uh people had problems because they didn't believe in uh in floggiston anymore. Now we laugh when you hear that. And then of course the the first three decades in the twentieth century the physicists had to go through this incredible uh conceptual

cataclysm moving from Newton first to the the theories of relativity and then to quantum physics that even Einstein who initiated or couldn't accept a 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

uh experience in the first three three decades of the twentieth century. And then in a sense it can be soon as being complementary to the changes that already happened in uh the understanding of matter you know the quantum physicists uh uh who are my friends had no no problems uh relating to uh my observation. It was mostly the resistance of psychiatrists and and psychologists.

Mm. So one more thing. Yeah, I and uh So there is the

Uh the situation that Kuhn described it uh during the time when you have Yeah. Yeah. uh the scientists do what he called uh Um

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 uh inconvenient uh figure and throw it out of the uh out of the chessboard, uh you know. Uh And then he describes the what happens and when when op uh observations come, the challenge the paradigm, how it's uh uh rejected initially, people are called crazy or it's called fraud or whatever. And then when it comes keeps coming, then finally it's realization there is a problem and then the wilder theories come and at first they are sort of reject it 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 uh what I would like to add was then uh Gregory Bateson uh added another thing, is this the Not only uh the do the scientists believe in in that uh paradigm and are committed to it, but they believe that it's an accurate and exhaustive description of reality per se.

Not a map. not the best way we can sort of currently organize the observation that we have. It is a definitive uh description of how things are. And uh this is a c uh this is called a confusion between the map and the territory. People like uh Arthur Korzipsky

And then Gregory Bateson was very, very big about it. And uh Gregory was laughing about it. He said if scientists make uh 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 uh the territory that he described is the is uh very much like uh reading the menu.

So I I've I've had this question I've wanted to ask this entire conversation since we first started t uh speaking. And uh let me j let me just get my facts straight before I ask it. Are you currently Eighty seven, is that accurate? What is your current age? Uh I just wanted first of July I just was uh was uh eighty seven. Eighty seven. Well happy belated birthday.

And you are remarkably Uh I mean d incredibly sharp, incredibly energetic, I mean more so than some twenty somethings I know. What do you attribute that to? I mean are 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 forty w I'm forty one and I would love to have half the energy that you do. So uh w to what do you attribute that? It's it's really

Uh just I mean mind blowing to m to me. Uh I'm I'd so Inspired uh just Trying to absorb some of the enthusiasm uh and energy that you have uh in this c in this phone in this phone call. I think you know. Part of it is that I'm really, really very, very uh deeply uh committed to this uh to this uh idea of uh these holotropic states to to b bring them into psychiatry, to bring them into society.

I had a lot of uh you know meetings with uh uh Albert Hoffman who who was talking about the new allowances 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 uh Greeks did the Eleuthis, uh Uh Mysteries uh You know, uh you probably know this was done for two thousand years in Alevsis, uh

So they had to offer something pretty impressive to to keep the attention of the ancient world. And uh the uh A list of people who have been initiates in these mistakes, it reads like who is who in antiquity. I mean it includes Plato, Aristotle, uh Cicero wrote about it, you know, uh Marcus Aurelius, Pinderos um uh all these people

Uh so we All sort of say you know the Greeks have very talented, beautiful art, beautiful science and uh great ideas. No the fact that uh You know so many people every five years at uh

some powerful experiences. uh puts it into some different uh Perspective. And uh Albert Hofman and uh Gordon Watson, the one who brought the the mushrooms from Mexico, from the Mazatec Indians.

And Carl Rauch, uh a Greek scholar. They wrote the book wrote to Alepsis when they found out that the key to these mysteries was K on K Y K E O N And they uh uh found out that this was a um psychedelic uh potion which was made of uh of aircut very similar to LSD, so

It you can imagine uh If so many people every five years in that small world had psychedelic experiences that it could have had some uh impact on the uh on the culture. You know, the last time when we were in uh in LFS uh there was a uh guide and there are the

The ruins of uh of the Telestrian, which is the the building where this was happening, and it's a gigantic building And I ask how many people were having these experiences here. At the time. He said.

at least, you know, in the in the last stage. Three thousand people. Every five years we're getting this uh this dose of this uh So uh when I when I read Plato now I don't see him like pacing in the academy and saying, Let me see how the world works. You know, we have not done this, but there's this level of the with the archetypes and so on. This is something that you can exp you can experience archetypes in a in psychedelic session. So these are all All uh the philosophy was inspired by

by psychedelic experiences. What do you what do you think humanity Needs Most

Right now. In in your opinion. If uh humanity big question. Yeah. What what what do you think humanity needs most right now? Yeah. What we need? Yeah.

If there's any particular type of change or shift that you haven't mentioned. Well we I think you know the uh the monistic materialisti paradigm I think is the really destroying this uh uh this planet and we have uh You know, we have lost experiential spirituality.

Yeah. that people have really the experience to have uh Have uh spiritual experiences which are non denominational, which are uh non chauvinistic, non sectarian, which are universal, all inclusive, all

uh all um uh embracing to people who have these these direct uh spiritual experiences they They don't uh experience division in the world. You know, the what happened with the with the great organized religions.

is that they they uh unite people who are willing to see it the same way and worship the same way. Uh but at the same time divide the world because they set it against another group, and the other thing that we're gonna uh taken sort of different archetypes and different uh different ways of worshipping. So then you have a situation where you know we are Christians. Uh you all other guys are pagans and there's we really have to convert you or there's really not a good place for you here. Or we are uh Muslims and you guys all are infidels. Let go let have sacred word

against the infidel, you know, we have Juice you are going, and so on. And then you have even these kinds of divisions within the same religion. Centuries of bloodshed between Protestants and um Catholics. And you have the same with the Sunnis and uh the Shi'i. The the

Killing each other, destroying their own. temples. Now these are not religions that will help us in the situation in the world. Uh But this is very different with the with spirituality which is really taking taking everything in and it changes changes you know consciousness in a way

that people embrace the uh the ecological movement they realise we have to treat nature in a different way because we are so vitally embedded and in and and entangled in in in nature. that we would not use nature as commodity, you know, something that should serve us uh uh and uh the expense of of you know, destroy destroying our uh environment.

This uh It's 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 it's it's uh so so suicidal, so self destructive to destroy the basis on which we depend as a You know, they should Not be anything keeping the uh

environment supporting uh life. no no you know economic uh profit, no no political, no no military or we should really realise that we are in the same boat. And uh you know, whoever is destroying the environment is is uh destroying us. And there are many places people can find, of course, your writing and more about you, stanislav grof.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 uh I certainly recommend that people

Check out your books, uh, including When the Impossible Happens. A friend of mine who's involved in scientific research recommended I read The Cosmic Game. And uh I'm wondering if before we wrap up, maybe could you share one more story Uh any story that that uh to Folks out there who are

wondering if there might be more to the story than just the The purely material. sort of a hyper rational, uh materialistic worldview. There might just be more to the story. I'm wondering if there's anything else that you can share. I remember the coming across the pig goddess story. I mean, there are so many to choose from uh but I I don't know. Uh Let me let me do one that's kind of I think is uh

It's also a story from when the impossible happens. And it has to do with the experience that I had in a peyota ceremony. So uh when I came to the United States, you know, I heard about uh Peyote and so on. I never had a chance being in

in uh Czechoslovakia not having the possibility of of travelling to have the peyot experience. So I was very very interested in that. And we had this uh program for professionals um one of the programs at uh the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center And uh the one of the persons who came was uh Ken Godfrey. who was the psychiatrist at the VA hospital in Topeka Kansas. He was himself uh

you know, native American and his wife was native American. And he was running a uh psychedelic program in in uh In Topeka. Uh but He didn't have anybody to sit for him, so he came for his own session and I sat in his three

psychedelic session, so you know, we became very, very Close. And so when uh after his last session we were talking, I said, Ken, is there any possibility you can get me into a native American church uh ceremony. And he says I will try.

And then he called in a few days and say, you know, I talked to uh the road chief uh and you can come and you can bring uh four of your friends. So anyway we sort of got into the airplane and and flew to Topica and then drove into to the middle of the uh you know, Kansas Prairie there And there were these teepees and uh this uh the ceremony was being prepared, and we had to go through kind of a clearance 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 uh how, you know, white people came and they have uh They have uh taken uh their land, they have uh killed their buffalo, they have killed their

warriors, they have raped uh their women and so on. And uh So there was a sort of almost like an encounter group and as we were going on, they were sort of finding out that we were okay and one after another that 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 had we were like pale faces and that was it, you know, it's not gonna have us. in the sacred ceremony. And then he get unto 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 uh in the T P I was sitting ac across him And then uh the the buttons, the buttons were were uh passed. And uh then it started coming on and uh he sort of was really like radiating like a a laser beam toward me, you know, the hatred was kind of and uh everything was am amplified of course by the by a pay or T.

And we were doing the rounds when you pass a staff and a 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

push it, he just would not participate. And so we will all these rounds that we were going through the last last round. Um where everybody can say something. And uh Bob Lehigh, who was a another L S D therapist from uh from Maryland working with us, Alan Bonnie

uh and her sister Helen Bonnie was our music therapist and Walter Houston Clark was a very famous uh professor of religion. And uh So as we were doing the last round, uh Walter Houston Clark uh gave this, you know, almost like mesochistic uh kind of a speech with how wonderful it was from your you know brothers to take us into the sacred ceremony after what we have done to you. We have uh killed your buffalo and your warriors and raped your women and taken your spirituality. And then somehow uh I don't remember exact exactly the context, he mentioned me and said, especially Sten 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, uh put put his uh head into my lap, uh sort of snot was tears were running out of his eyes and and you know, uh 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 uh Went back to his place, sit down and not not talking, just sitting there. And there was like a lot of lot of pressure, you know, psychological pressure, people people wanting to know what was happening.

And then he said, You know, I 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 uh as as if he were an American And I hated him through the whole Ceremony. And uh

It's just more more than I can uh I can take, you know, and uh Then was sitting there. And uh 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 uh the air raid on his city. There was five days before the end of the war, there was an American uh attack on Pilton that destroyed the automobile factory there and damaged building. So he stayed home. But I went and I killed these people. Our roles were reverse 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. We if we if we hold the old grudges. Uh We we all die.

We have we are all you know. Yeah. children of of uh Mother Earth and we have to we have to sort of uh Uh really sort of learn how to how to live with each other and how to love each other.

And then he ended in his Well, they believe in reincarnation, so well and for what I can say, when this was happening I might have been on the other side. And uh you know, we were still still under the influence of Peyote, so we were all crying and sort of embracing each other. And at the atmosphere of Reconciliation was amazing.

I actually told that uh story at the at the end of uh the international transpersonal conference in Prague when I was bringing trans personal psychology back to Prague. Because we had all these y 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 ended up in in concentration camps. Then we had

years of uh uh communist uh so nobody liked uh Russia. None none of the people from the Eastern European uh countries liked either Russia or Or Germany. We had sort of German and Jews there. And uh What was amazing that we did a large holotropic breastwork uh

you know that before the conference as a the pre conference workshop. And it was amazing how within Within two days, I mean some of these boundaries were were uh melting and you know, people embracing each other and uh sitting for each other and when people were owning their own uh emotional problems, they actually uh activated the best in in other people. And in spite of language difficulties and so on, there was really a change of the of the atmosphere uh from you know all these antagonisms that were certainly in the air at the beginning.

What a wonderful story. So anyway, that's my story. I call it less lesson in forgiveness. I think we could all use lessons in forgiveness not only

But Towards ourselves and uh I really want to express Gratitude. Uh and thanks. Certainly

Uh for the experiences that I've had, which have been informed by your writing and uh People who have uh indirectly or directly been trained by you in some respects.

And uh to thank you on behalf of no doubt many people who are listening who have had similar experiences. And uh you know very I'm very cautiously optimistic about this this renaissance that we're witnessing and hopefully uh we won't repeat some of the same mistakes that that appear to have been made. Uh but the social circumstances are so different and Uh I really appreciate you taking the time today. Uh I certainly hope this isn't our last conversation, uh but uh I I want to be respectful of your time and we've we've gone for quite quite a bit already today. Is there anything else that you would like to say uh to the people listening? Uh or ask of them before we before we end

This particular conversation. Well maybe repeat you know what Carl Gustav Jung said and that I would really certainly endorse That uh It's important that we live our life not just sort of by responding to what is happening outside of us, but spending some time in some kind of focused uh Self exploration and uh 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 you uh get Lessons from what he called the self, the higher I aspect of our our personality. So

You know, part of the part of the uh problem of the industrial civilization, we lost this uh This uh traditional uh of if you want of psychonautics. All the other groups of uh humanity way back probably into the Paleolithic they were they were using uh these holotropic states for healing, for uh you know, transformation for the main main uh vehicle for ritual spiritual

uh life. practical things, but as an inspiration for for art and so on. So um I see this uh this trem tremendous renaissance that is happening now, not just as correcting of these uh of this, you know, uh uh really uh

Okay. Terr terrible administrative uh legal mistakes that were done that stopped the research for forty years. Return to the research. Uh I see it also as uh T.

the possibility of the industrial civilization. to join the rest of uh humanity that always was combining somehow the the s uh spiritual inner spirit spiritual experiences with whatever they were doing in the in the external uh world. Well thank you so much, Stan. Um Again, uh Tim.

Thank you so much for everything you have been you have been doing and uh Thank you for this uh for this opportunity to you know, share some of uh my life uh with with your listeners. Oh. It's such a pleasure and uh I can only aspire to uh contribute in some small way. Uh And y

I'm excited to see uh what you do from this point forward and you seem to have as much energy as ever traveling around the world doing what you do. And um I hope we can have many, many more conversations and uh but but for today I wanna be Uh respectful of of your time since uh you do have so many things going on and I will

Certainly in the show notes to everybody listening, uh 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. Uh Stan, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it.

Again. Wonderful. It's great to have a a an interviewer, you know, who who knows what we are talking about. It doesn't 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. 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 before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share The coolest things I've found 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 uh 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 fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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T I M at checkout. Capital T lowercase IM. Again. Take a peek, legalzoom.com and enter promo code. Tim. 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. You can also do on demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute.

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They have Peloton an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities, so you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics. that you can use to track your performance over time. And that will help. I would say catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivise me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed. With

how motivating it was. and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing. uh which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So Check it out. Discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners to this podcast a limited time offer. Go to oneheloton.com. That's O-N-E.com. and enter the code TIMALLCAPS at checkout and get$100 off of accessories with your Polyton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home, anytime you want.

Check it out, go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started.

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