Stanislav Grof

The Grateful Dead, I’m afraid, did not ever have a significant impact on my life in that respect, but I respect it. I was just out of graduate school, given the opportunity for a high-quality classical Ivy League education. I was a pre-confirmed atheistically inclined agnostic when I finished my degree in religious studies...

Well, the first book I wrote as an academic was Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life. I was interested in reincarnation early in my career. I encountered Ian Stevenson's research at the University of Virginia. Around the same time, I encountered Stan Grof's research in his book, Realms of the Human Unconscious. I...

This book tells the story of where I went over 20 years of working with LSD. I followed a protocol established by Stan Grof, working in psychedelic therapy, which involved a completely isolated environment. I used headphones, eyeshades, and music, and worked with very high doses. I had 73 sessions over 20 years, working...

Well, I'm actually the last person you would have thought from the beginning of my life to end up writing a book on describing what happens on the long series of high-dose LSD sessions. I was raised in the Deep South, in Mississippi. I was a seminarian in the early days, studying to be...

My psychedelic journey began 45 years ago when I was a brand new academic, freshly minted out of graduate school, beginning my academic work. I was pretty much an atheistically inclined agnostic at the time—that's what seven years of graduate school in religious studies made me. Then I met Stan Grof's work. I met...

Well, as you know, there is a worldwide renaissance of research taking place in psychedelics. At the forefront of that research is the focus on therapeutic healing. That's what's bringing psychedelics back into the intellectual and clinical community—the capability of these amplifying substances to bring forward the personal unconscious and unearth its wounds. They...

Sure. I can give you a kind of a quick overview. I began my psychedelic work when I was just hired as a university professor in Northeast Ohio, and I began this work as a pretty well-educated, dedicated agnostic with strong atheistic inclinations. That's where all the years of graduate school had brought me....

Yep.

Well, I'm a retired professor of Religious Studies. I've made my living teaching in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, which is a state university in Northeast Ohio. So, what brings me to this program, I guess, is the book I published three years ago called LSD and the...

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...

Thank you, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you tonight. Since my understanding is that psychedelics is not a frequent topic in the San Diego Integral community, in talking with Kathy, Tom, and people on your board, we decided that we would begin with a short breakout before I talk, just to...

I am. I think Stan's work is critically important to the emerging paradigm in transpersonal psychology. I came upon this book right after I was out of graduate school, just beginning my teaching career, just beginning to look around for where to take my research next. I came upon this first book by Stan...

Well, I'm a retired professor of religious studies. I've made my living teaching in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, which is a state university in Northeast Ohio. What brings me to this program, I guess, is the book I published three years ago called LSD and the Mind...

Well, what we all share in the animistic community is the belief that nature is infused with consciousness, is fused with mind and soul. And of course, now we know how vast the physical universe is, and the question becomes: How large is the mind of the universe? How deep is it? I was...

Well, Stan was very clear in his early books and in LSD Psychotherapy, published in 1980, the protocol differences between psycholytic and low-dose therapy versus psychedelic high-dose therapy. Psycholytic running doses anywhere from 50 to 150 micrograms and high-dose psychedelic therapy between 350 to 500. At that time, high-dose psychedelic therapy was being used...

Well, Stan was very clear in his early books and in LSD Psychotherapy, which was published in 1980, about the protocol differences between psychedelic and low-dose therapy versus psychedelic high-dose therapy. Psychelytic therapy runs doses anywhere from 50 to 150 micrograms, and high-dose psychedelic therapy ranges from 350 to 500. At that time, high-dose...

Well, I had just finished graduate school. I got my PhD from Brown University in philosophy of religion. I had published my dissertation in a series of articles and was looking for where to take my work next. At that point in my life, I met the work of Ian Stevenson in reincarnation research...

Well, I have to go back to 1978 when I had just started my university position at YSU. That first year, I encountered the work of Ian Stevenson, whose research on reincarnation turned my worldview upside down. I also encountered the work of Stanislav Grof, who turned me upside down even more because he...

But if we continue this process, if we press deeper and deeper into spiritual reality, we go through more deaths, more cycles of death and rebirth at the psychic, subtle, and causal levels of consciousness. To use terms that Stan [ed. note: Stanislav Grof] uses. Now, I have no vested interest in a particular...

Personally, when I was a brand-new professor, I read Stan Grof's work and saw my vocation. Although psychedelics had been made illegal by 1970, I developed a sideline to my academic career using a psychedelic protocol I inherited from Grof. After a few sessions, I chose to work with very high doses of LSD....

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...

Well, I was just out of graduate school back in 1978, and I read Stan Grof's first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, published in '76. Immediately, I recognized the significance of Stan's work for my discipline, which is philosophy of religion. I'm not a psychologist or a therapist. I've never been particularly interested...

So let's begin. My psychedelic lineage is rooted in the work of Stanislav Grof. I was a brand new faculty member in 1978 when I first read his book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, and my life pivoted. That was followed quickly by his book LSD Psychotherapy in 1980 in which he laid out...

Basically, I made my living as a university professor at a modest university in Northeast Ohio. I'm a professor of religious studies. I have a degree in theology from Notre Dame and New Testament criticism in Cambridge, and a PhD in Philosophy of Religion from Brown—so very classically educated. I was raised in the...

Well, thank you very much, Heather, and thank you, everybody, for inviting me here and letting me spend this time with you. Let's get into it. We have this topic we're looking at today, the birth of the future human—it’s a huge topic, so we'll have to trim it a little and shape it,...

Share in the animistic community is the belief that nature is infused with consciousness, fused with mind and soul. And, of course, now we know how vast the physical universe is, and the question becomes, how large is the mind of the universe? How deep is it? So, I was just out of graduate...

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...

After I finished my dissertation, I realized that future important contributions to my field, philosophy of religion, would come from experiential rather than purely intellectual inquiries. Upon reading Stan Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious, I became convinced that LSD and psychedelics could safely explore consciousness, far beyond one's personal unconscious. Before too long,...

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...

LSD, yeah, quite unexpectedly. I mean, I was raised in the Deep South, in Mississippi. You know, I got a degree in theology from Notre Dame. I mean, I'm the last person you would expect to have written a book on LSD research, and especially a psychedelic autobiography. The background is I had just...

All right. What I'd like to do today is simply take you into some of the highlights. It's kind of a highlight reel of my book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe. As Donna mentioned, I've written four books, but all of them come out of my psychedelic work, and this book summarizes...

I worked for four years, stopped for six, then worked for ten more years, averaging about five sessions a year. The high dose allowed me to push through personal boundaries into what Stanislav Grof calls the perinatal level of consciousness—early experiences like birth and death experiences, as well as existential crises. Then I went...

He's written about, oh, I think close to a dozen now, but the first one was called 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. To me, it was a life pivot because reincarnation was never discussed in my graduate education. It was never discussed in Western religions or in the scientific tradition that had wiped the...

Okay? Looks like it's just as a winner. Okay. This is my psychedelic lineage. My psychedelic lineage basically grounds in the work of Stanislav Grof. When I was 29 years old, fresh out of graduate school, just beginning my academic career in Ohio, I met Stan Grof's work, Realms of the Human Unconscious, and...

Well, I was trained as a philosopher of religion, and right as I was beginning my career at Youngstown State University, I met the work of Stanislav Grof, the foremost authority on integrating psychedelics into psychotherapy. I read his book, "Realms of the Human Unconscious," which had just been published. This was a long...

Yeah, I'd be glad to. I came out of graduate school in 1978. I was trained as a philosopher of religion. I was raised in the Deep South and got my PhD from Brown University. I had finished my dissertation, published part of it, and was looking for where to take my research next....

So the visions I'm sharing today come from my work, Diamonds from Heaven, or LSD and the Mind of the Universe. My psychedelic lineage is squarely in the tradition of Stan Grof. His early writing, his books published in '76 and '80, provided the foundation for my work and determined the methodology I used...

Well, I'm the last person you would expect to have written this book. I was raised in the Deep South, grew up in Mississippi. I studied theology at the University of Notre Dame. I was actually in the seminary for three years in high school and one year in college. I did my master's...

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

What happened was, fresh out of graduate school, 29 years old, in the middle of my Saturn return. Didn't know that yet at the time, had finished my dissertation. Was looking for where to take my research. I was a brand-new professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University, and I read Stanislav Grof's...