Death and rebirth

So how long will this take? How fast can it happen? I don't know. And when I've seen it, when I've experienced it in my sessions, it didn't come with dates, and it didn't come with a brochure detailing how it's going to take place. But I know in my bones that it's happening,...

I'd love to. One surprise in my psychedelic work was how much of it wasn't about personal transformation—it was about the collective. My love for myself expanded to embrace love for my people, my planet, and all beings on the planet—not just me personally. As it deepened, I began to be initiated into visions...

Very briefly, in the book, I describe the levels of consciousness I went through in this process: a series of death and rebirth experiences, starting with the personal level of mind, going through ego death, then reaching the collective level of mind, engaging deep structures within the collective psyche. Third, the archetypal dimension of...

Michael Pollan’s important book, he took psychedelics a handful of times. It creates short-sighted expectations of what a psychedelic journey can be. In a long journey, you go through cycles of death and rebirth, going deeper into the universe as deeply as your medicine and capacity allow. Your protocol must hold you in a...

That's a hard question. Influential books were written after limited psychedelic experiences—Aldous Huxley with one mescaline experience, Huston Smith after six LSD sessions. Michael Pollan's important book came after a handful of experiences. The challenge for me is conveying a 20-year journey, with so many consciousness layers opening. It's not about opening 73 times...

No, you understood. You got it correctly. It's kind of jumping ahead to the story. Let me back up and work to that point. Okay, if you work, and I think in order to extract the maximal psychological, psycho-spiritual and philosophical value of these experiences, it's very important to create a container, what I...

At least, what came through in my work and what many affirm is that it's about incarnating deeper, not just patching up history, but incarnating the power of spirit into our bodies and relationships. It's about giving birth to this deeper consciousness inside our incarnations. We're bringing forth the soul consciousness in the body,...

Yeah, first, Stephen, thank you, buddy, for that very nice and warm introduction. I really appreciate our friendship, and I appreciate what you're doing with the conference, and Marc, you too. This is a great conference. It's my favorite psychedelic conference to participate in, and I always find it such a rich setting and...

Well, first, let me describe the protocol. Everything I did was within a strict therapeutic protocol. I followed Stan's protocols from his book, LSD Psychotherapy, so traditional—lying down, eye shades, earphones, listening to very carefully choreographed music to guide the session. I was always in private, always protected, always with a sitter who was...

Well, I'm always hesitant to jump into this, because my experiences are based upon shamanic, rigorous use of LSD. And when everyone hears LSD, they think of the '60s, they think hallucinations. This is very far from that. This is really within a therapeutic tradition. It's within the Stan Grof tradition. It's the systematic...

Okay, so I just say 73 high-dose sessions. And I did this in a very rigorous fashion, following Stan's protocol. In my case, I used the same protocol, same set and setting, same substance, same dose level, same sitter, same recording process, and same location. I tried to standardize all the variables as much...

Well, first, let me describe the protocol. Everything I did was within a strict therapeutic protocol. I followed Stan's protocols from his book, LSD Psychotherapy: traditional, lying down, eye shades, earphones, listening to very carefully choreographed music to guide the session. I was always in private, always protected, always with a sitter—who was my...

Jumping many years ahead in my work, I summarized my experiences of our time in history, what's happening underneath the surface, where we're going, in a chapter called The Birth of the Future Human. There I was given a number of visions over many years of humanity coming to a turning point, humanity coming...

Well, for about the first two and a half years, it followed very much the material that Stan Grof had been tracking. My first two and a half years of work were very much perinatal in nature, going through the death-rebirth process, re-experiencing one's birth, experiencing a profound confrontation with death and the meaninglessness...

Well, for about the first two and a half years, it followed very much the material that Stan Grof had been tracking. My first two and a half years of work were very much perinatal in nature, going through the Death-Rebirth process, really experiencing one's birth, confronting death and the meaninglessness of existence. But...

Well, there are many levels of answers to that, but basically, if we want to move into deeper intimacy with the consciousness of the universe, we're moving into states of consciousness which are large, which are vast, and operate at a much higher frequency, much higher energy level. Our egoic consciousness, the consciousness which...

Violence may not be the right word, but in the early stages, powerful kriyas occur—tremendous physical and emotional detoxification, leaving you in convulsions, bouncing on a mattress, releasing physical and emotional stress. There's a certain "violence" in dying, but the deepest breakthroughs follow the deepest purifications, and the deepest deaths yield the deepest ecstatic...

When one works with very high doses of LSD, one goes through a series of death-rebirth experiences. In this image, the drop at the center underneath the line represents our egoic consciousness, our private consciousness. Everything above the line represents spiritual reality. Transpersonal consciousness, the first death-rebirth experience, takes place at the interface of...

Humanity must heal to make the evolutionary pivot from an adolescent stage to a mature stage of soul development. Healing is the first step to establishing a new foundation, a new platform where we can then take in more light and wisdom from the universe. As we heal, we take in more. Initially, breaking...

Part of my experience is rooted in the classic teaching in some Eastern traditions that the essence of the individual is the same as the essence of the totality—that Atman is Brahman, that our nature is the nature of the Divine, which is the nature of reality itself. It's not accurate to think of...

What happened on this journey was that I went through not just one death, not just ego death, but multiple layers of reality, entering deeper and deeper levels of consciousness. Accessing these deeper levels required going through a series of deaths—dying at one level of consciousness to enter a deeper level, mastering it, then...

We've touched on archetypal reality. After about a year and a half there, I went through another death-rebirth process, entering a year of powerful experiences grouped under “causal oneness.” Our initial experiences in spiritual reality are highly conditioned by time-space experience, often as separate entities. As consciousness enlarges, these entities become species or earth...

After going through yet one more intense cycle of death and rebirth, I was spun into a brilliantly clear radiance that Buddhism calls Dharmakāya. I came to call it the domain of Diamond Luminosity. I had known light many times before, but this was an exceptionally pure light. This domain captivated me so completely...

At the core of these experiences was the realization that all this suffering was coming to a crescendo in history, where we would pivot into a higher order of psycho-spiritual realization. Eventually, I cataloged these visions in my book, referring to them as the visions of awakening, six core visions. The creative intelligence wasn't...

In psychedelic work, you go through a death-rebirth process. The horizontal line represents the line between physical matter and spiritual reality, or ordinary consciousness and Transpersonal consciousness. The open line represents the vast expanse of non-ordinary states of consciousness, and the drop at the bottom represents our individual egoic awareness. The first circle, the...

In that context, my experience has been consistent over years of psychedelic experience and visionary experience—many years of saying humanity is coming to a turning point. We're coming to a before and after. We're coming into a dawn of something fantastic—a genuine spiritual awakening. Everything our spiritual traditions have described for the individual—guess what?...

Yes, going through a Death-Rebirth cycle always involves surrender to the unknown. There were places in advanced stages where I truly feared for my sanity, knowing I was going beyond my capability to maintain sanity, like going over a waterfall. But once through, waking up as a new kind of being, experiencing the universe...

Stan Grof’s guidance was instrumental. Trusting the process was key. Many times, experiences were inscrutable, yet surrender led to a transformation — a Death-Rebirth cycle, purification leading into descriptions that allowed integration of insights, resulting in balance between purification and ecstatic experiences. Initially, confronting the ocean of suffering was a challenge, but it became...

Well, you're breaking up a little bit, but I'm going to assume that I can just go ahead and talk now. You know, I spent, after doing this deep LSD journey for 20 years, I spent another 20 years thinking about my experiences, digesting them, processing them, and eventually writing down the story of...

Wouldn't that have been interesting? I did have an opportunity to do some teaching at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, but this came rather late in my series. Basically, I did my work between 1979 and 1999, when I was between 30 and 50 years old,...

Now I found that there was a continuity between my sessions, that one session tended to end and the next one would start exactly where the previous one had ended, more or less, with some varying degrees of overlap. In that process, I found that I went through not one, but a series of...

This was a great surprise in my work. I began thinking about individual transformation, but after about four years, I began receiving visions concerning humanity's collective transformation. Consistently, these visions indicated a coming point in history of decisive transformation and evolutionary jump in consciousness—times of great blessing, great grace, illumination, and healing. Although it...

Well, I'm glad you brought in Easter, because it is Good Friday, and this is a special weekend in the Christian calendar. I know that you and I have both been touched by Christianity, by its teaching, and by people who have been steeped in Christian teaching. We have been Christians and we have...

A lot of work at the medical level, at the therapeutic level, really focuses on ego dissolution, transcending the limitations of your physical body, entering into a deeper communion, into mystical experiences. What I found was when you—and I did this work—it wasn't just one cycle of death-rebirth. Now, in this image, the drop...

Yeah, you described the in-breaking of the vision and being drawn into the deep experience of revelation. Deep visions can't fit into small containers. When nature or the divine invites us into a deeper experience, it has to purify us, and you describe that contracting process. It's our past, everything about us keeping us...

Well, physically, I'm fine. It's actually a very beneficial process because in this work, when the body begins—basically LSD is an amplifier of consciousness. It hyper-stimulates, hyper-amplifies consciousness. Our conventional understanding of psychedelics is quite wrong. We're coming into a new era of psychedelic research, and the public is being educated to a deeper...

When you amplify consciousness and focus contemplatively, your mind may use this to cleanse itself, confronting shadow elements—worry, fear, terror—from childhood to infancy and even back to the womb. If you persist, as with low-dose therapy (50 to 150 or 200 micrograms), you reach the perinatal level of consciousness, confronting universal fears: death, meaninglessness,...

When you work in a sustained fashion with such powerful psychedelics, you go through not one death and rebirth, but a series of deaths and rebirths. In this image, the drop below the line represents our time-space identity, our egoic identity. The first turning of the circle represents the process of ego death—the first...

Yes, yes. We all kind of suffer from the carryover of our culture's experience with psychedelics in the 1960s and all the negative press that psychedelics generated, or were generated around psychedelics, when the true story is really very different. Psychedelics in general, and LSD in particular, function as non-specific amplifiers and catalysts of...

Yeah, basically working the way I did, I found that my sessions had two phases. Though, at the beginning of every phase, there was some type of intense cleansing or purification process. If I surrendered to that completely, it would eventually hit a peak threshold, and then there would be some type of death-rebirth...