Non-ordinary states

What an honor to be here with you today to celebrate Bicycle Day—an opportunity for the psychedelic community to come together, to see each other, reunite, and make plans for the future. Now, I know what you're probably thinking. You look at me and think, "He doesn't look like he's done a whole lot...

Well, I love teaching. I love working with the students. I just really love being in the classroom. And I knew that if I began to speak openly about psychedelics in the 70s, 80s, 90s even, I very likely would lose my position at the university, and so I could not speak openly about...

We can learn to enter these states more skillfully. Some people have a natural aptitude, but whatever the starting point, practice and careful integration matter. After accessing non-ordinary states, careful debriefing and recording are crucial. Integration and processing set the baseline for future sessions. My work involved maintaining stable variables over 20 years—same setting,...

I'm an unusual person in that I've been a university professor all my life, a professor of religious studies, teaching in a small state college in Northeast Ohio. And I've also done one of the longest regimens of high-dose LSD work that I'm aware of in the background. I couldn't talk about it until...

You know, getting out of my body is never an aptitude that I seem to have developed. When I was there, I had definitely non-ordinary states of consciousness, expansive, diffuse and spacious states of consciousness where I was able to make contact, for example, with people who had died and were in the Bardo,...

I'm sure we can learn to enter these states more skillfully. Some have a natural aptitude, but we can practice these states, enter carefully, process, and debrief carefully. It establishes the baseline for future non-ordinary states. Integration and careful debriefing, recording your session, processing it, and sitting with the content really matter. In my...

I'm great. Welcome, everybody. It's a real honor to be here with you today.

I was first trained as a historian, then in the philosophy of religion. I spent years studying great thinkers in history in these fields, so I had a sense of great beings who contributed to the tapestry of learning that I inherited. This session was about liberating me from responsibility to the intellectual lineages...

It all began right after I finished graduate school in 1978. I started my career as a professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, and I read Stan Grof's first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, and I knew immediately that this was critically important work to my discipline, which was...

Thank you, Luke, it's good to be here with you. Awesome.

Thank you, David. Let me shift into screen sharing, if I can do this correctly. Good. Okay. Well, thank you, David, and thank you, everybody. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here with you tonight, and I really look forward to sharing with you the experiences that I'm reporting in this book,...

I followed the same protocol rigorously: lying down with eye shades, with a sitter, using the same substance, the same dose, the same set and setting, the same sitter, the same recording process, even the same location. All these variables can influence one's experiences in non-ordinary states, so it was a stable position to...

Well, I know it's a radical book, and I think we are at a pivot point in history, and I think that psychedelics represent a major transition point, a true historical before-and-after point with respect to philosophy, not just psychology. It generates not only a new therapeutic protocol for healing the personal psyche, but...

Over and over again, I was shown these visions that this is what's happening. Nature is taking us through this. We are going through a tremendous pressure cooker. We're going through a transformation that will result in the birth, not simply of a higher civilization or a more ecologically in tune economy, but literally...

I'm glad to be here.

Thank you, Donna, my pleasure, and thank you everyone for spending part of your Sunday with me. It's a pleasure to be here, a pleasure to talk about these things, and I'm really looking forward to our discussion that follows my comments here. So let me first shift us into share screen so I...

That's my articulation based on James' work. You go into temporary Non-ordinary states, record them as clearly and precisely as possible, and retain the experiences. This retention completes the circle of learning, laying a strong foundation for the next set of experiences. Writing at the edge of my ability was an important part of...

I completely share what you're saying, because I do carry unusual knowledge, as you do. At the beginning of our series, we talked about the evidence for reincarnation, and I was in my professorial mode, intellectually digesting this evidence. In the second conversation, there was a blending of that type of knowledge and the...

My pleasure, Luisa. It's nice to be with you.

It was quite an adventure, quite a long and interesting journey.

If you're going to be a psychedelic therapist, understanding different levels of consciousness is crucial. A therapist can work effectively at early levels without deep familiarity with all levels, but if guiding clients into deep Non-ordinary states, one must be personally familiar with those states. Being the stabilizing factor when someone is terrified of...

We don't fully understand how entering extreme non-ordinary states of consciousness impacts our incarnation. Whether gentle states, psychedelic states, or staying close to unearth pain, we have medical models to understand. If we experience life continuity and cosmic intelligence, spiritual models can help. Going very deep into the universe, beyond space and time, and...

I tried to do this work as systematically and rigorously as I can. As a philosopher, I made it a priority to make a complete and phenomenologically accurate record of my sessions within 24 hours, then studied the sessions and the dynamics arcing across sessions and comparing my experiences to those of other psychedelic...

Well, I was actually a professor of religious studies, and I taught in a Philosophy and Religious Studies program at the university, which is part of the Ohio State system, up in the northeast corner of the state. I'm really excited about the conference. I'm very pleased that the book is actually being released...

This is an important point: as you go deeper into the universe, every deeper level of reality functions at a higher level of energy. This is well recognized in the deep mystical traditions—a deeper level of consciousness is a higher level of energy. To have a stable experience at that deeper level of consciousness,...

I understand the logic, though I hope children never experience the extremes encountered in psychedelics. Children may be more receptive to subtle dimensions, which get conditioned out over time. Death expands consciousness, incarnation contracts it. I study various non-ordinary states; they suggest incarnating contracts consciousness, a natural effect rather than conditioning children incorrectly. Understanding...

When one does this work, one goes through many cycles, many iterations of death and rebirth, not just ego death. The first circle, everything below the cross line, takes place below time and space reality. That bottom line kind of represents ego. The first death-rebirth cycle, which I've marked with the astrological glyphs, in...

Well, that is a big question, isn't it? That's a huge question, and it has absorbed a lot of my time. In non-ordinary states of consciousness, it's been one of the recurring themes. Because what happens when your individual bubble of consciousness dissolves, when the drop opens, you fall into the divine at different...

Stan's been a huge influence on my life. I encountered his work, his books, a series of books when I first came out of graduate school in 1978. His work, along with Ian Stevenson, the scholar on reincarnation, particularly changed the trajectory of my personal and professional life. Stan is a psychiatrist and the...