Tim FerrissLessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond | Stan Grof | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
135 min read · 27,107 words- 0:00 – 4:02
Intro
- TFTim Ferriss
Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would seem an appropriate time. What if I give you an ultimatum? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. 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. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand, and you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip-hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers, and I tend to do on-demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over, but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. 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 incentivize 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, 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 of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com. That's O-N-E Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com, and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton 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. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which more than 2 million Americans have used to help start their businesses. Past guests even, such as, well, WordPress lead developer, CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, now valued at more than a billion dollars, have used LegalZoom to help with their business needs, specifically in his case to form his company. But LegalZoom isn't just for launching your business. Their services include everything from helping you to manage changing tax laws, reviewing contracts, creating NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, important stuff, handling lease agreements, and assisting with really any other legal challenge, hurdle, inconvenience that typically takes time and effort away from running your business. The best part is that you won't get charged by the hour because LegalZoom isn't a law firm, so they won't be running the clock up and spinning circles just to raise your bill. Instead, they just ask you to pay one low upfront price for whatever it is that you're looking to get a la carte style. So visit legalzoom.com and check out their business section
- 4:02 – 9:22
Who Stan Grof is and what this conversation will cover
- TFTim Ferriss
for all of their services. And if you want special savings, that's the terminology in the copy that they suggest. I don't know what the special savings is, folks, but it's titillating. If you want special savings, enter promo code Tim, T-I-M, at checkout, capital T, lowercase I-M. Again, take a peek, legalzoom.com and enter promo code Tim. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss 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 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 Grof, Stanislav is spelled S-T-A-N-I-S-L-A-V, is a psychiatrist with more than 60 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 Esalen Institute. In this very wide-ranging conversation, we cover a whole lot of things, including some stuff that he has not gone over previously. So among others, some of his main takeaways after supervising or guiding roughly 4,500 LSD sessions, that is LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions, the place and role of so-called wounded healers, limitations and uses of traditional psychoanalysis and talk therapy, similarities or some similarities between holotropic breathwork 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 [laughs] 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 Integral Studies in San Francisco, and conducts professional training programs in holotropic breathwork 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, ITA. His publications include more than one hundred and fifty articles in professional journals and books like Psychology of the Future, The Cosmic Game, 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/podcast. You can find him online at stanislavgrof.com. Now, 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 technical reasons, this is very, very helpful to me and my podcast team. It helps us to get hard-to-reach guests and do much more. It takes ten to thirty seconds. So all you have to do is search for The Tim Ferriss 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 Ferriss 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 enjoy it as much as I did, with the one and only Stan Grof. Stan, welcome to the show.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Thank you very much, uh, Tim. Thank you for having me.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's, it's such an honor.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
And before we start, I would like to thank you f- for everything you have been doing, uh, for raising consciousness on this planet. It's, uh, been amazing, and it's a great, uh, honor and pleasure for me to be on your show.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, thank you so much. I could not be more excited to be speaking with you right now, and we said hello via video just a few moments ago, and, uh, I certainly have only become more excited to have this conversation, uh, because of our, our introduction, Jack Kornfield, 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
- 9:22 – 14:34
Early exposure to LSD research in Prague (and how Grof got involved)
- TFTim Ferriss
this time, people would have already heard some of your biographical information that I would have read, but I suppose we should start maybe at the beginning and ask you how you first became interested in psychedelics.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, well, the situation was I became initially very excited about psychoanalysis, and, uh, as a result of it, I, uh, 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 Sandoz a supply of, um, ampoules of, of Delysid, of, of LSD, and it came with a letter, uh, talking about the history, about, uh, you know, the famous, uh, experience, self-experiment of, uh, Albert, uh, Hofmann 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, Docent Robicsek, who was, 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 gophers. We were sitting-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
... in these sessions, and we were keeping the records. So I actually started, uh, my exposure to LSD, uh, already 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. And by that 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
What application were you looking at initially? Uh, what was, uh, what was the, the structure or the application?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
You know, initially it was just, uh, just a kind of a... It was just a phenomenological, uh, uh, research. Just 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, and in our own sessions. So it was, it was quite an exciting adventure. Uh, I spent s- several years actually doing two sessions a day. I would get up early-
- TFTim Ferriss
Wow [laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
... I'd do a session and, uh, about, uh, uh, 2 o- 2:00, you know, I started another one, and I had a, a department w- where I had 18 beds, and, um, all the p- patients were getting LSD, so they were really, uh, familiar with the states, and all our nurses had training sessions. So by 2:00, I could pass the, the person who was coming down from an LSD session to this t- [laughs] 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, Hanscarl Leuner, he was actually leaving the pa- uh, the experimental subjects, uh, alone, and they just had a bell where they could, uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
... call the nurse when they were in trouble. But I was so excited about what was coming, and I, I realized this was, this is gonna change, uh, you know, uh, psychiatry, psychology.
- TFTim Ferriss
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 wanna talk about your first experience as well, but how many total sessions have you directly or indirectly been a part of or supervised-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, with, uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
... in your life, would you say?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
At, 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, Dr. Szára, Stephen Szára, and Dr. Berczi Hermann, they were the ones who actually developed the whole group of, uh, the, uh, tryptamine derivatives, DMT, DET, DPT.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Um, it ... I don't think they had at the time the methoxy-DMT, which seems to be the most, uh, most interesting one.
- TFTim Ferriss
Uh, a- and the, the initial feeling that you, that you had, or the, the initial, uh, I 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?
- 14:34 – 18:48
From “experimental psychosis” to a catalyst for exploring the psyche
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well, the initial was this, um, uh, you know, approach which could be, uh, called search for toxin X. Um, the way, um, LSD came to us was that it's a substance that can mimic somehow a psychosis. We call the initial sessions experimental psychosis. You know, it's called hallucinogens psychotomimetic. And so the excitement was that we have a model of something like schizophrenia or the, or the, um, 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. So, uh, give, uh, LSD, you know, to 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, patients. 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, [laughs] in, uh, psychiatry. And, uh, the initial research was we had a group of 40 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, uh, with our experimental subjects, and we were looking if these, uh, values of these s- psychological and, uh, and physiological biochemical tests would sort of converge with the values in schizophrenics. And then something amazing happened. Uh, I found that 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 certain setting, which we had.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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, you know, paranoid episodes or, or became hypomanic. And for some of them, uh, it was that they even under those circumstances, they got glimpses of ecstatic states that, uh, that were very mystical. And the same, uh, intra-individual variability. If, uh, we took the same, uh, substance at different times, uh, this phenomenology was completely different. And at that point I realized 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 a lot of them will be, uh, vomiting. If you give them a, a, a, a 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 realized people were not having LSD experiences. They were having experiences of themselves, but they were coming from depths that, uh, you know, psychoanalysis 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. And I started giving to, uh, uh, my patients, you know, in a psychotherapeutic context.
- 18:48 – 25:21
Grof’s first LSD session: EEG, strobe light, and a life-changing mystical experience
- TFTim Ferriss
When did you have your first personal experience?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
It was, uh, um-
- TFTim Ferriss
And, and how much, and how, what did you take, and how much did you take, if you recall?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, this was, uh, actually 100, 100, uh, micrograms. It was on the 13th of, uh, of, uh, uh, November, uh, 1956. So I was from f- '54, '56, I was sitting for people. Uh, but, uh, it was a little more complicated because my preceptor, uh, whom I mentioned earlier, he was very interested in, uh, electroencephalography. And, um, at the time when, uh, LSD came, he was the one who received it from Sandoz. So at the time when it came, he was interested in something that's called driving the brainwaves or, and, and training the brainwaves, which in-
- TFTim Ferriss
And this is using the EEG?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, well, it was exposing people to a very powerful stroboscopic light-
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, that's right
- SGDr. Stan Grof
... of different frequencies.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
And finding out if the brainwaves in the suboccipital area, which is the, the visual, uh, cortex, if the brainwaves would pick up that frequency. If you can drive the or train the, the brainwave. 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, uh, 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, uh, Dr. Robicsek's assistant came, and she said, "It's time to drive the brainwaves." So she took me to a little, um, room. Uh, I laid down. She pasted all these, uh, electrodes on my head, and then brought this gigantic strobe, put it above my head, and then turned this thing on. And in the next moment, there was light like I had never seen, I couldn't even imagine existed. [laughs] My only concept there was, uh, this is what it must have been like in Hiroshima, where the thing went off, you know?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, right. [laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, today, I think it was more like, uh, Dharmakaya, the, the primary clear light from Bardo Thodol, 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, [laughs] the research assistant, you know, I lost the, the clinic, I lost Prague, I lost the planet, and, uh, I had, uh, the feeling that I actually self-extinguished, uh, in, in the form that I knew myself, but also the sense that I somehow became, uh, everything there was. I became all of, uh, all of existence. Uh, and as you know, you must have heard it quite a few times that these s- states are considered ineffable. It, uh ... When you start, uh, trying to, to describe them, is you find out that we just simply don't have, uh, don't have language. Our language is d- developed, you know, to communicate about things from, from, uh, everyday life. And in my later experiments, some of the sophisticated, uh, patients actually tried, uh, to use, uh, language from 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, Savikalpa Samadhi, Kensho, uh, Satori, you know, using terms like Maya, and so on. Uh, because we simply don't have, uh, you know, technical terms for, for these states. So, uh, these experiences of mystical states are full of paradoxes. Paradoxically, it is one of the characteristics. So you can, uh, have the feeling that you became nothing, but by becoming nothing, you actually became, uh, all of, uh, existence. Uh, so I was in this incredible state, and then, um, 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 60, 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 sense of being everything, uh, of 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 Bang and the black holes and the wormholes. [laughs] And, uh, so this was something in that category, uh, 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, uh, body. Uh, but there was a major problem because [laughs] 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 were teaching at, uh, [laughs] universities about consciousness as a product of the brain simply was nonsense, that, uh, you know, consciousness was something, uh, cosmic, and that the brain somehow is a moderator for that, but it's not generated in, in our skull.
- TFTim Ferriss
C- could you like-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
And then finally, I managed to align that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
And, uh, I came down in an ec- very ecstatic state, very impressed what just happened. And, uh, 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 these, with these states. It just overshadowed psychoanalysis, like, uh, you know, [inhales] uh, I was not interested psychoanalysis anymore. I was interested in exploring the psyche using these states.
- 25:21 – 29:14
How Grof thinks about consciousness now (local vs transpersonal vs cosmic)
- TFTim Ferriss
S- so you, you've at this point dedicated more than six decades to studying non-ordinary states of consciousness, uh, which is, uh, 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, uh, I think, mediated or moderated by the brain, but not generated by it. Uh, uh, 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 that you'd like to describe?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Yeah. Well, you know, I'm, I'm very close now to, uh, Ervin Laszlo, who is this brilliant, uh, uh, systems, uh, theorist and, and, uh, philosopher 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, um, 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 being, um, becoming s- uh, members of a different species, you know, a- and not just animals, but also plants and so on. So he moves from that, from the consciousness being local to 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. Consciousness is simply, uh, s- a, a part of, integral part of, uh, existence. It cannot be reduced to, to anything as, let alone the neurons in the, uh, uh, in the brain. Uh, so this also supported now, of course, by many people from quantum relativistic physics. And, um, for example, Stuart Hameroff 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, uh, a property of the universe that can be traced back to, uh, the Big Bang in the form of proto-consciousness.
- TFTim Ferriss
[inhales] Th- there's, there's a term 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, to 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 are certain multiple Nobel Prizes associated with it, Kary Mullis, 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 y- what does holotropic refer to, a holotropic state of consciousness?
- 29:14 – 37:43
What “holotropic states” means—and where they show up across cultures
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Thank you. It's great, great question. Well, 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, uh, Charlie Tart, um, because it suggests somehow that there is a correct way of experiencing ourselves and the world, and that's somehow, uh, disturbed. You know, [laughs] I always have to think about veterinary medicine. We talk, uh, we had our dog altered. Uh, so I feel too much respect for these states to call them altered. And even the state non-ordinary is 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, doesn't damage us. Uh, they start seeing violence as an unacceptable way of, uh, of solving, uh, problems. You know, they have a sense of, uh, uh, being actually, uh, global citizens, uh, rather than being 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 that I coined because I realized that psychiatry does not have, uh, that kind of distinction. So I coined it myself. It's, uh, kind of a verbal hybrid. It's a neologism, as we call it, uh, that comes from, uh, the Greek language, where holos means whole, and trepo trepein means, uh, moving in the direction of something. I usually refer to the, the word heliotropism. Helios means sun, and heliotropism is, uh, the 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, uh, we're 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.
- SPSpeaker
Yes, please.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
So one category when you would, uh, find 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 traveling into the visionary experience of traveling into the universe, being, uh, uh, traveling into the, the, um, underworld first. Uh, they have the experience of being exposed to some, uh, uh, ordeals. Uh, they 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 call shamans the wounded healers, and they also learn how to heal. 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 unordinary 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 Gennep, 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, you know, sonic, uh, technology, drumming, uh, rat- rattling, and so on. Uh, physical pain, uh, stay in the desert, stay in the high mountains, uh, stay in a, a cave in the Arctic ice, and so on. And if you study these, the people experience psychospiritual death rebirths, very much like the shamans in their spontaneous, uh, initiatory journey. Now, the third important category, uh, were the ancient mysteries of, uh, death rebirths, 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, there were, there were Mesoamerican, uh, mysteries of Xbalba, 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, Theravada to, to Zen and, uh, Vajrayana Daoist exercises, uh, in the Christian tradition, uh, Hesychasm, the Jesus, uh, prayer, or the exercises of Ignatius, St. Ignatius of Loyola, uh, the various Kabbalistic, uh, Kabbalistic 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 experience. 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, mescaline from peyote. We have, uh, psilocin and psilocybin from the magic mushrooms of the, uh, the Mazatecs. We have now, um, uh, the, uh, ibogaine from, from iboga, from, from the African, uh, um, African, uh, bush and so on. And we also have now, uh, the tryptamine derivatives, uh, uh, DMT, uh, DPT, and then methoxy DMT. Those are, uh, active in ayahuasca and in the different snuffs from the Caribbean. Uh, and also from this, uh, toad that's now becoming very famous, the Bufo, Bufo alvarius. These are secretions from the parotid glands and from the skin of these toads. Very, very powerful, very important, uh, psychedelics.
- 37:43 – 44:42
5-MeO-DMT and the “toad”: short duration, intense experiences, and Grof’s strongest trip
- TFTim Ferriss
So let, let me pause for one second. I have many-- I'm not gonna lose track of the train, and I have, uh, a, a number of different questions. But since, since you brought it up, 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's, it could be or is important. And you mentioned methoxy DMT, uh, which, you know, in this case, uh, often referred to as 5-MeO-DMT. W-what are your thoughts on this particular, this particular compound? Uh, and, and why is it important, if it's important?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well, it, the thing is it has not really been explored scientifically, unlike psilocybin or, or LSD. 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 really, 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 traveled all over Europe and in United States visiting these groups that were using it, um, 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 a, in a way that, uh, could become a basis of, of scientific research. Now, what is fantastic there is, uh, that this substance creates a very short, uh, uh, you know, within an hour, which is within the time of one psycho-psychoanalytic session, you can, uh, experience significant, uh, transformation and even, even spiritual, uh, opening. Uh, and 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, Southwest that are actually using it as a sacrament. It's called, you know, Church of the Toad of, uh, Light. And I took, uh, fairly large doses, which is not, uh, which is more than it's usually used. Uh, this was 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, my, 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, um, I mean, s-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 incandescence that it had, but also a sense that this, there was in-incredible intelligence, creative intelligence. It was going beyond any, uh, dichotomies. I couldn't say if it was demonic or, or divine. Uh, you know, that was just off 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, [laughs] 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, uh, I was in an 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. It was, it 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 Esalen. We had a deck overlooking the ocean, and this was the time when I was handwriting my, my manuscripts and 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 would take a little break. Again, within seconds, I had the feeling of just oneness with 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 sort of the consciousness of the industrial civilization came back, you know, we had to do workshops, travel, you know. So I didn't stay in that state, but my meditations became much, much, 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 substance to try for practical reasons, because you will not find a psychiatrist like myself in the, you know, in the 60s and so on, sitting for six hours with their patients. But they could certainly do a one-hour session with the methoxy DMT. And I think significant therapy could be done, you know, within these very short terms. It's also, according to Ralph Metzner's observations, it's a substance where the experience ends very cleanly. There is no sort of lingering on. So there is a very powerful experience, but also a good closure. So anyway, so this is my experience with methoxy DMT. Now, of course, it's very, very popular. For example, we had the transpersonal conference in Prague, you know, and there were lectures about it. And of course, there were people who had access to the toad material, to the excretions or secretions of the glands. So it's becoming a very, very popular substance right now.
- 44:42 – 55:55
LSD as a microscope/telescope for psychiatry: mapping the psyche beyond talk therapy
- TFTim Ferriss
You mentioned therapy a few times in describing your experience with 5-MeO-DMT and the potential, say, within a one-hour window or something like that to provide therapy if someone were sitting for someone experiencing this. I want to tie that into a comment that you're very famous for having made, and I think it was in your first book in 1975, Realms of the Human Unconscious, in which you mentioned that LSD could become for psychiatry what the microscope was for biology and medicine and what the telescope is for astronomy. What I'm curious about is, I suppose, A, why 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 psychedelic compounds? Because it seems to me that 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. But I'd just love to hear you, I suppose, clarify what you mean by LSD becoming for psychiatry what 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.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Yeah, another wonderful question. So let me tell you what happened when I lost interest in this laboratory research and took it to the clinic. You mentioned in your interview with Michael Pollan, there are these two forms they've been using LSD and other psychedelics, the psycholytic and the psychedelic. The psychedelic is using large dosages, fully internalized with headphones, eye shades. And the method that was used mostly in Europe, but also by some American therapists, it's called psycholytic, which is sort of dissolving the psyche, dissolving the tensions, conflicts in the psyche and so on. From there, lysis means dissolution. And so I started it with using sort of medium dosages, maybe 150, maybe up to 200 at the beginning. And what happened was absolutely fascinating because I saw intensification of the symptoms that the patients were having. But then the process automatically took us to the different layers of traumatic experiences that were actually underlying that disorder. And layer after layer, then I came up with the concept of coex system, system of condensed experience, where each symptom had like a history, you know, has a series of layered experiences behind it. And so it was a process of exploring the different layers of the psyche. One of my patients called it onion peeling of the psyche. Another one called it chemoarchaeology. So you could really explore the different layers of the postnatal biographical level. This is what Freudian analysis is about. But the problem is it didn't stop there. Then each of those coex systems also had a contribution from the trauma of birth. So even if we're using these lower dosages, as we were going on, it took us to birth. And that point, suddenly people started experiencing Uh, that they are trapped, they're caught, uh, they are in a situation of no exit, uh, they have 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, including my own experiences, to realize there was a powerful record of biological birth 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, uh, 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 patient, my, my own records and, and, uh, people's, uh, s- 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 psy-- uh, for psychology, um, which would be, um, the result of the fact that we had absolutely new tool. Like a microscope opened up, you know, this whole underworld which we-- 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 depths 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
And, and do you find-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Now, when I finally got the map together ... Yeah, please.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, no, I was just going to say, uh, 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, uh, I don't want to interrupt your train of thought.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well, just, uh, 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, [chuckles] to a psychologist, psychiatrist 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 radically change, transform, uh, thinking in, in psychiatry. So this new, new map or map that I thought was new had the biographical level that it shared with, uh, with, uh, current psychiatry. But then I had to add the level which I call perinatal, which is related to birth. It's a record of birth. And then it opened up further into, uh, the level that I call, uh, transpersonal now. And, uh, there's a greater overlap with what Jung 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, you know, Sufism, and so on. And even the shamanic maps, there was a lot of overlapping with the, with the shamanic, uh, cartography. Uh, so I haven't forgotten your original question about psychoanalysis. Uh, 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 use just Freudian, Freudian psychoanalysis. Uh, s- uh, so it's not the, it's not the question of the, the technique. I think in my understanding, Freud was actually in, uh, 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, phobias? Why do we have, uh, obsessive compulsive neurosis? 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, uh, suicide is killing the introjected, uh, uh, bad breast of your mother, and so on. And then there was a tendency just to move away completely and not ask the questions about etiology. But 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, uh, convincing understanding. Why do we have, uh, depression, different forms of depression? Why, what, what does it mean when people want, uh, want, 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 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 new radically 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 transpersonal, 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 '60s, the, developed in, within humanistic, uh, humanistic psychology.
- 55:55 – 1:08:44
What experiential psychotherapy can look like: high-dose sessions and holotropic breathwork
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, but let's, let's go directly to that, and, uh, I, I certainly have ... We're gonna come back to When the Impossible Happens, we're gonna come back to many different pieces of your past experience and, and more recent projects. But this experiential psychotherapy i- in an, in an ideal world, based on all of your experience, what would that look like? What would the format look like?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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 use talking, uh, uh, helping them to, to integrate, helping them to, to understand. So there would be, you know, 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 experiences and, 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, transpersonal level. So, um, my late wife, Christina, and I developed, uh, what we call holotropic, uh, breathwork, where you use very s- simple means, which is, uh, faster breathing, uh, some powerful evocative, uh, music, a certain kind of, uh, body work. Uh, and then we also use, um, uh, art. We use mandala drawing and sharing groups. And people have ac- access to, uh, not just to the postnatal, uh, biographical level, but also to the perinatal and to the transpersonal level.
- TFTim Ferriss
It just sounds-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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.
- TFTim Ferriss
So I'm, I'm really glad you brought up holotropic breathwork, uh, which is, a- 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 breathwork. 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, how powerfully you can induce, uh, these, these non-ordinary states using breathwork, 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 at the time. So two, two questions to, to, uh, dig into both the, uh, I suppose psychedelic or entheogen-assisted and then the holotropic breathwork approach. What, what psychedelic materials in what dosages would you potentially be using, 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?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, 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 coex systems, and, and just discovery of, uh, the, uh, the dimensions, uh, that are on that expanded map being taken to, uh, to the perinatal level and then to the transpersonal level. Uh, I also have a lot of interesting, uh, observations. Uh, if you read, uh, 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, or they look around the, uh, the treatment room and sometimes they had the feeling that, uh, they are on the death row, sometimes cabin in the Pacific, uh, sometime, sometimes it was the bordello, and so on. So I did the, 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 Prague, I increased the dosages. I started using music and, uh, and the headphones, eye shades. And this is how we did the whole research, uh, at Spring Grove, the American research 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, uh, 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 jumps from, uh, uh, Golden Gate Bridge and, and, um, the Bay m- uh, you know, 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 fall from the railing to the surface of the water, and then maybe about eight minutes in cold water before they were rescued. Uh, 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 hap- happening in these high-dose sessions, but in a very condensed, very rapid, rapid way. So-
- TFTim Ferriss
By high dose-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
I would-
- TFTim Ferriss
What does that generally mean?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, say it once more.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, by high dose, how many micrograms would you generally be, be using?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, okay, I would probably use now 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 are- areas that they don't want to go into. So I consider the high dosages, if, if proper management, to be more effective therapeutically.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm. Great.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, so I would use-
- TFTim Ferriss
Thank you
- SGDr. Stan Grof
... now the smaller dosages if we continue the, uh, the s- 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 continue the 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, uh, in this, uh, later, uh, DSM, the Diagnostic and Statisti- 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 neo-Kraepelin, uh, approach. Uh, uh, Emil Kraepelin 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, this dementia praecox, 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 neo-Kraepelin. 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 we 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, uh, Psychoanalytic Theory of, uh, Neurosis. 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 postnatal level.
- TFTim Ferriss
Uh, in the-- By etiology, I think that was the word that I heard earlier, is that the exploration of the why we experience these things?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
The causes, yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
The causes.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
The causes. Why do we have that? You know, so Freud, Freud had the c- the concept of the development of the libido, the oral phase when, uh, these sensual feelings are associated with nursing, and this was the, the passive oral, and then the active oral when, uh, um, the, the infant starts biting his teeth and so on. And then it moved to the, uh, anal phase, uh, the time of toilet training, and then refined toilet training, which had to do with urination. That was the urethral, 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, on the clitoris in girls and the, the penis of the boys, and, uh, where you have the, uh, Oedipal, uh, complex and, you know, the castration complex and all those things. Uh, which was very, very interesting way of thinking, but it didn't go deep enough, so, uh, you, you ended up with very unconvincing interpretations. But, uh, now 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? Uh, why do we have depression, different types of depression, suicidal tendencies? You know, why do we have symptoms like a headache and, and many, 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 is just a 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 the, the simile or the metaphor. You would have to say what classical psychoanalysis discovered is just barely the surface. Uh, it's the part of the iceberg that's showing, uh, for psychoanalysts, and there is this en- enormous, uh, part of the psyche that remained hidden even for, for, uh, traditional psychoanalysis.
- TFTim Ferriss
S- so let me ask you this-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
So Joseph, Joseph Campbell, I just-- Let me just say-
- TFTim Ferriss
Sure
- SGDr. Stan Grof
... one sentence which I cannot resist. Joseph Campbell, you know, the wonderful, uh, mythologist with his incredible Irish humor, he put it differently. He said, "Freud was fishing while sitting on a whale."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- 1:08:44 – 1:18:06
Why some people heal and others just collect experiences: set/setting and ‘chemical mysticism’ debates
- TFTim Ferriss
Uh, the, the -- 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, j- 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, these deep psychedelic states. 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-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... 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?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well, and 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?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
That makes a big difference. I have seen people who have taken LSD a 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 f- funny faces, like 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, uh, let alone driving cars, what people have been doing and so on, uh, you know, or doing it in 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, you reduce the potential.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, so that's, that's important. Uh, so if you come, if you come with an intention, the self-exploration, healing. For me, for my first LSD session, it became a spiritual quest. But every, every one of my, uh, experiences, uh, I had about maybe, you know, a hundred forty high-dose psychedelic sessions over the years. It might seem like a lot, but it's expanded over, extended over a period of sixty, sixty years. So if you look at, at it that much, you know, it's not that much. Uh, so, uh, that is extremely, extremely important. What, what is your intention? Do you -- Is it serious intention for self-exploration, self-healing? Is it part of your spiritual quest, or are, are you doing it for, for kicks, you know, because it's sort of a, a, a funny, weird, uh, weird experience? Uh, there's also, uh, something that Huston 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 LSD sessions that people had mystical experiences, then this whole question of, uh, chemical mysticism came up. What, what is it? What are we watching? And there was one group of people who was, uh, were these sort of, uh, hardcore, uh, uh, materialistic scientists. He says, "Well, here you have it. What these, uh, mystics think are some kind of deep, uh, insights into ontology and cosmology is 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, "No, 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 sacred medicines," and so on. So they took basically the position that the shamans of, uh, um, native cultures took who were using psychedelic plants like, you know, tonana, cattle, you know, the flesh of the gods and so on. The, the plants either were deities or they had, uh, they 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 psychedelics 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, a guy called Zehr in, in, in, uh, a British, uh, uh, British, uh, uh, theologian and so on. Uh, so this really 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 been in, uh, around some of them when they had, uh, 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 makyo if you just talk your past life experiences. You're, 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 [laughs] not to pay attention to, to what is ... You just cut through it, you know, to a, uh, no mind place. And then this is the ... I'm back now to Houston Smith. Houston Smith had a ... He who unlike, uh, Meher Baba, uh, or Zehner, uh, 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- counseling 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 psy- uh, mystical experiences are phenomenologically indistinguishable. This was already shown in, uh, Pankey's, um, um, Good Friday experiment, uh, in the Marsh Chapel of the, uh, Boston University. Very famous experiment.
- TFTim Ferriss
The, the, the Good Friday experiment.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
That you, yeah, I know you talked about in your, uh, discussion with, uh, Michael Pollan and so on.
- TFTim Ferriss
With Michael. And ju- and just to define very quickly, I apologize, for people who are listening, phen- uh, phenomenol- phenomenological or phenomenology, that's the subjective reporting of experience.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Yeah, the subjective. If you look at the subjective experiences of, uh, people who had them through LSD or psilocybin, uh, and you compare it with, uh, what you, what you read about in spiritual literature. But, 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." Uh, a- 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 are drinking punch, and then, you know, this, uh, they ... Out of their gourds, 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. They would have difficulties, uh, to, to integrate it and become a kind of, uh, 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 hears that this could accelerate, uh, and he would do, um, the sessions, you know, in a proper set and setting, the context, um, so 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 really a powerful catalyst of, uh, spiritual journey. And I think that's the, that's the correct answer, you know?
- 1:18:06 – 1:25:17
Swami Muktananda, Kashmir Shaivism, and parallels to psychedelic cosmology
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm. See, you've mentioned, uh, uh, seekers and a number of names. A, a friend of mine recommended, I don't even know this name, and I'm, I may be a- ashamed that I don't, but, uh, recommended that I ask you about your experiences with Swami Muktananda. And I don't recognize that name, but, uh, I, 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.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Yes. Um, he, he became kind of quite important figure in, in our lives. Uh, I met him first about 1965 when he, uh, was on his second tour around the world. He was the head of the, of the Siddha Yoga, uh, movement. Um, the f- during the first, uh, trip around the world, he was actually accompanied by Ram Dass and by, um, uh, by Werner Erhard. And, uh, again, my, my, uh, late wife, uh, 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 Muktananda 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, uh, 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 w- was not sort of somebody who would be, you know, um, at the, the feet of somebody. 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 20 minutes, uh, waiting for, uh, for that darshan, and at that point she told me that he was a, a Shaivite. Um, which is a fol- 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 in sort of various ways. And, uh, this sort of changed my feeling about this, to be interested to find somebody. I knew that Shaivites are using, uh, all kinds of means, including bhang, uh, you know, hashish and so on, and, and, uh, um, uh, also, uh, datura. 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 was sitting there, you know, with a, a red ski cap, with dark glasses, holding a wand, a wand of, uh, peacock feathers scented with, uh, sandal oil. And, uh, has a, a what's called lungi, which is, looks like a night, night shirt. And he sort of, uh, beckoned me, you know, to come, uh, you sit here, to the chair just by him. And, uh, he turned my head and, uh, was sort of, took off his, uh, took 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, "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, describing my experiences with, uh, with Shiva and, uh, the fact that this was a very important figure. And the first thing that he says is, you know, uh, "I can tell you have seen Shiva." And so we had, we had this, um, uh, long interview where, um, I actually ask him about, uh, soma, which I was fascinated by. This is the, uh, this, uh, psychedelic plant that was used, uh, you know, in ancient India and was, uh, described in Rigveda. About a hundred, over hundred stanzas in Rigveda are dedicated to soma. It was a plant, and it was a, 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 that was a powerful psychedelic, but the, uh, the secret was lost. And so I asked him and he said, "Oh yeah, you know, w- 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, guest. 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 intens- intensives of Kash- on Kashmir Shaivism." Uh, which is, uh, this, 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 Srinagar, and he went there and, uh, exposed some, uh, uh, cover, uh, of, uh, vegetable cover, and there 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 on Kashmir Shaivism." He looked at me and says, "This will be very impor- 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, was, I had the feeling that he was stealing, uh, you know, sentences and, and paragraphs from, uh, uh, an article which I had, uh, written, I think 1969, which was called, uh, Psychedelic Ontology and Cosmology: Observations from LSD Sessions. So interesting question, what, you know, what is the common denominator between experiences that people have with LSD, 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, we were near to Muktananda. And then we actually did a large, uh, transpersonal conference, uh, in, uh, in, um, uh- Bombay or, or Mumbai. Um, this was 1982, which was on ancient wisdom and modern science, bringing together spiritual teachers and people from the new paradigm circles like Fritjof, Fritjof Capra and, uh, you know, others. So, uh, uh, that was our, that was our history.
- 1:25:17 – 1:55:14
‘When the Impossible Happens’: synchronicity and other paradigm-challenging stories
- TFTim Ferriss
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 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.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well, uh, Tim, what happened was that our house in Mill Valley burned down in, uh, in two thousand and 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, pretty intense, pretty rich. So the question was, you know, what do I select? And then I decided to select, uh, 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. And, uh, 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, Muktananda. So there are two chapters of it describing, uh, what happened between us and, and, uh, Muktananda.
- TFTim Ferriss
What is a synchronicity?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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, where, 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, has 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, what he showed up, that there are situations where, uh, there's a meaningful correlation or connection between something that's an intrapsychic event, like a, like a dream or a vision or a psychedelic experience, and something that happens in material univer-- uh, within the material universe or what we call so-called objective, uh, reality, consensus, uh, 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?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
So let me, let me just give you a couple of, uh, major examples from, from, from that book. Uh, I'm 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 Esalen and do workshop, and he went 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 sta-- 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?" 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, uh, 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 like, 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, 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, "And I was working on the chapter about Kalahari Bushmen," which is, uh, you know, Bushmen, you know, living in the, uh, Kalahari Desert. And he said that, uh, in their mythology, a major, uh, heroic figure is praying mantis. And so I-- my, uh, desk was covered with papers and pictures, uh, related to the mantis and, uh, uh, the Kalahari Bushmen. And there was Loren, uh, Eiseley's book about his childhood when he had a, a Bushman nanny. And, uh, he, uh, Loren, uh, Eiseley described how this nanny was-- seemed to be d- communicating with the, with the praying mantis, that they were having sort of con- conversations and Uh, you know, when, uh, the, with the movements, the, uh, the praying mantis seemed to be responding to him, uh, 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 14th floor of a high-rise building on Manhattan, there was a great specimen of a praying mantis, uh, sort of climbing up the, uh, the, uh, building and turned, uh, her, his head toward, uh, Joe." And [chuckles] he said, uh, uh, "I took a close look, and, uh, the way Le- Van der Post described it was true. It, uh ... There was something, uh, that made the pra- praying mantis look like a bushmen."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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 filled with thoughts about praying mantis and so on, and he had this irrational impulse to go and open the window that he never opened, and he looks out, and [laughs] you know, there is a, right there is a praying mantis and actually turns toward him and gives him a mean- what, what he felt was meaningful look. That's pretty mind-blowing synchronicity. So ch- you know, Jung hesitated 20 years before he presented it, 1951 in, uh, in one of the Eranos conferences, and it was presented together with a talk by Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of, of, of quantum physics, who was, uh, first, uh, um, Jung's patient and then a very close, very close, uh, friend. Uh, let me just quickly give you another example, which is the, the most, um, mind-blowing, uh, [laughs] synchronicity from, uh, my life.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yes, please.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
This happened during our first trip to China, where we were bringing transpersonal psychology and, uh, holotropic breathwork to China. And we did a, a workshop, a holotropic 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, um, "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 s- uh, stone should go to Dr. Grof." So she actually brought it. She was holding a beautiful, beautiful blue, uh, velvet, uh, bag and opened it, and it was a fossil, uh, nautilus. The ammonite, you know, which are the, that are the, um, ancestors of, of, uh, uh, the nautilus. Very, very beautiful fossil. Now, 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 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, transpersonal psychology, International Association of Transpersonal Psychology and a 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 stationery. It was on all the programs of, uh, transpersonal psychology. So, uh, you know, here we are bringing transpersonal psychology to China, and a great-grandmother, uh, shows up in the dream of a woman who actually was called Meng, which is the Chinese name for dream, and tells her to bring me this, uh, this fossil nautilus, you know, which was taken from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the, uh, of, uh, uh, the highest mountain i- in the world. Uh, according to the estimates, uh, uh, the Himalayas were born about, uh, about 50 million years ago during the collision of the, of the tectonic, uh, plates. So this was a f- you know, at least 50 million [laughs] years old, uh, uh, fossil nautilus, you know, symbol of the International Transpersonal Association.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
So of course, the Chinese press, you know, didn't describe how great the holotropic breathwork was, but they all focused on this incredible synchronicity, you know?
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Are there, are there any, uh, other, uh, stories or p- phenomena, experiences that are difficult to explain in that book or outside of Why the Impossible Happens that are related to, uh, psychedelic sessions?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well, there are, of course, experiences of the, um, uh, out of body experiences and near-death experiences, you know, where people who are in a state of, uh, uh, clinical death, cardiac death, or even a flat, uh, EEG, uh, have experiences. They might be watching the, the procedure from, uh, from the ceiling, uh- Uh, so that when they were brought back to consciousness, they are able to describe the, the procedure. There is one case where, where this was, uh, happening to a woman 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-encephalogram. And at the same time, this is the most detailed, uh, description of the, uh, of the surgical procedure that we have, where she was able to, to draw the i- 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 there's, uh, one of them is described, uh, in the book. Uh, uh, there is, um, 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. So-
- TFTim Ferriss
What, what would be an example of that?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
So there was one, uh, situation where we had a five-day, uh, um, workshop at Esalen, and a woman came who had, for the last two years, had had a, a very bad, uh, depression, which a psychiatrist would consider to be what's called, uh, endogenous, which of course doesn't mean anything. End- 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 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, two sessions, uh, with us, which we had in the five days, uh, at Esalen. 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 experienced some intensification of, uh, these, uh, feelings. So we, uh, asked her to lie down. We had a different, different, uh, program for that morning, you know, the con- conclusion of the five days, but it was clear that we had to do something. So she lied down in the, in the middle of the room, and, uh, we just told her just to go with the experiences. She, she didn't even do, uh, more breathing. And she again, uh, completed a little something about the, um, experience of, uh, birth, biological birth, and then went to, went into this very strange, uh, uh, series of, uh, movements where it was a lot like sort of, uh, uh, praying or worshiping something. She 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, uh, in lotus positions, um, you know, um, some of them crying for, for, uh, unknown reasons. And we had a, a Jewish, uh, psychoanalyst from, uh, Buenos Aires participating, uh, in this, uh, um, particular, uh, five-day workshop. 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 Ladino, which is a 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." He says-- We ask him, "What, what was she singing?" He said, "Well, 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, back. So the idea of, you know, healing [chuckles] uh, depression, pretty, pretty bad depression by singing a Sephardic prayer, it's, it's a pretty unusual sort of, uh, therapeutic, uh, uh, mechanism. So I-
- TFTim Ferriss
Is, what do you make, what, what do you make of that? Yeah, what do you, how do you explain that for yourself?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
I have, you know, we've, we've seen a lot of this kind of thing, the, that, uh, healing happens, powerful healing happens in the holotropic breathwork through mechanisms that we don't understand. Uh, I saw before, you know, working with people in, 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, and the, you know, the toilet training and Oedipus problems. Only the problems don't change very much. So you are think- 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 clue what, what is happening.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] And, and that particular experience with the Sephardic chanting, that was with, uh, that was following breathwork but not using any type of, uh, dosing of any type of material?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
No, no. No, we were- We were careful not to bring in people, not to bring anything into, uh, the, you know, the, uh, holotropic breathwork sessions, uh, because it's, the, uh, structure is completely different. The, the timing of the breathwork is different, about three hours, and the type of music that we use. So 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 and-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Sounds terrifying. Uh-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
It's just in, in matter of principle, you know?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Not only was it illegal, but it, it just does not, does not work well in the context that's, that's created for holotropic breathwork.
- TFTim Ferriss
If, if you had to an- answer the question, and, and there might not be an answer to this, or there might not be an affirmative answer, uh, and, uh, to the, the question that someone posed to me, which was they hadn't experienced holotropic breathwork, and they ask ... But they did have a lot of, uh, sort of research experiment, uh, experience with psychedelics, and they asked, "What psychedelic at what dose is most similar to, to the effects or the experience of holotropic breathwork?"
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, 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 not that common as, uh, it is in, in, uh, LSD or in mescaline, where you have, can have, you know, really fantastic fractal displays of, uh, of, uh, colorful images and so on. And, and the whole session could be, could be very, uh, very visual. In, uh, uh, the breathwork, it's more like in MDMA, where you have something that's, uh, almost like on, uh, um, the interface between vision and, uh, a vivid thought and so on.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
A- 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, uh, and this seems to be frequently reported with, say, ayahuasca or smoked-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Say, say it once more.
- 1:55:14 – 2:16:33
Spiritual emergency: reframing ‘psychosis’ and why suppression can block resolution
- TFTim Ferriss
Would ... You, you and your late wife, Christina, coined the term spiritual emergency. Uh, and, uh, she founded, I guess, in 1980, the Spiritual Emergence Network, SEN. Now, I'd love for you to explain what that means, but then also, uh- If you could als- if you could touch on h- the difference between, or differences if there are any, between spiritual emergencies that are naturally occurring, let's just say, or what people might s- view as, say, the onset of schizophrenia in the late 20s or something like that-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Yes
- TFTim Ferriss
... vers- versus those precipitated by psychedelics.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well, that concept came from, uh, you know, the work with psychedelics and with the, with the breathwork. You know, when you realize that, uh, uh, people in these situations would have experiences like of, uh, uh, death, rebirth, 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 n- if you have bad trip, there's no way, 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. When you give tranquilizers to people who are in a, on a bad trip, uh, and then keep them on maintenance dosages, this 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, uh... It's not, uh, it's not just that the, the drug created this horrible, horrible experience. So, so the way you do it, you have to tell people, you know, "You are in a s- 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 these, uh, bad trips. So I realized very early that when people had difficult experiences, the last thing I would do is to, to combine with, uh, tranquilizers, you know? And so I saw many of those situations where people experience 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, w- should we treat it 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, uh, 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, so, 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 or 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. These are stage that you can work with, the way, uh, you would work with people in a, in a psychedelic session.
- TFTim Ferriss
So, so that's a perfect segue. Let's take as a, as a hypothetical situation, uh, and, uh, an alternate world where the, uh, 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 a di- however it might be diagnosed currently. They're brought to the hospital. If a, if a practitioner, if a doctor or a psychologist had this larger map, what would the intervention or diagnostic process look like potentially?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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, differential diagnosis. If people have, uh, uh, you know, 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 a, uh, medical diagnosis. We, we can't, in the exception of the, uh, organic, uh, uh, psychosis, we cannot, um, 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, the urine where we can, you know, have a litmus paper, put it in the sample of urine, says it comes out, uh, uh, you know, green, it's, uh, schizophrenia.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
You basically, uh, diagnose these different psycho- so-called psychotic states by the fact that people have experiences, uh, and behaviors that current model cannot... But, but part of those, uh, uh, symptoms which are, which are used as being, uh, psych- Uh, important, you know, diagnostic, uh, tools for, for psychiatry could be, for example, people have the experience of, of death rebirth, a destruction of the world, recreation of the, of the world. They have experiences, uh, uh, that seem to be past life experiences. Uh, 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 Grofian-Jungian, uh, way. The, the, the psyche is infinitely larger than, than, uh, mainstream psychiatry e-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 because they were 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, it's a systematic exploration of the human psyche.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
These, uh, 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 are way ahead of us in terms of understanding of consciousness and the, and the psyche. And it's very, it's, you know, it's very humbling for somebody, uh, like myself having a, a, you know, professional training and being through a stage when I thought what the shamans are doing, these are the primitives in the jungle somewhere, you know, illiterate and so on. We have our scientific approach, which is behaviorism or, or psychoanalysis. Now this-- if you, if you have the experience of these tools that the shamans have available, you develop a lot of respect to that, I mean.
- TFTim Ferriss
So, so related to that, uh-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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-- 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
So for you personally, how has your experience of your inner world changed over the last, say, sixty years or after you had your first psychedelic experience? So you have that experience, and you go on to have-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well-
- TFTim Ferriss
... all these experiences. What, what does your inner-- your experience of your inner world look like? How has that changed?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well, I, uh, you know, I was an atheist. Uh, um, this goes back to, uh, a little scandal in our family. Uh, when my parents got, uh, uh, got-- fell, fell in love and wanted to get married, it was in a small Czech town. 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. Uh, my, um, mother's, uh, parents made a major donation to the church, and then suddenly they re-relaxed their standards, and they allowed that. And, uh, they had a business on the main street. And, uh, so when, when the m-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, that 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 a free hour where I would go for a walk or read a book, or 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 Paradies and Moral or something like this 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 believe-- sort of a Not believing, but a mystical, you know, mystical person. I differentiate quite a bit spirituality from religion. I never became religious in any way. I became very spiritual. And, uh, I realized the paradox, you know? It's, uh, [laughs] the divine sort of comes to me in, in experiment in a, in a Marxist, uh, country, you know, induced by this, uh, substance from a Swiss chemist.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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, f- there was, uh, years, 60 years, you know, that, uh, I have done that would not be in one way or another related to these holotropic states. That became what I said was my, my passion, my vocation, my, my profession.
- TFTim Ferriss
Is, i- 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-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
T-
- TFTim Ferriss
... un- unusual/remarkable? And does, does-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... does anything come to mind?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, I don't know. I have so many, so many of them. Uh, I think one of the wildest-
- TFTim Ferriss
You don't have to, you don't have to pick one, yeah. You could, you can choose more than one, too.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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 in, m- 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 Atman-Brahman, uh, experience. Uh, and, uh, I came m- back home, and, uh, in the mailbox was a positive response. I can, I can go to the United States. So within very short time, I packed. I ended up, you know, it's 40 pounds of my luggage. I, I took all my records with me, 25, 25 pounds and 15 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. We, you know, we, uh, qualified for that ourselves. And in that session, I suddenly 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. Uh, and I wanted to te- put it to a test. I said, "Can I, for example, get to Prague, into, into the, um, uh, apartment of my parents?" And so I imagined, you know, which direction was Prague and how far, and imagined myself sort of flying, uh, in that direction, and I was, uh, experience 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 a certain kind of distance that I have to 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, uh, or transistors and 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, you know, television set of my, of my parents. And I was thinking about it and, and I had to laugh 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 realized I, I'm not even bound by that. I'm, I'm in a, in a, uh, the world of spirit. I can just has to say, "Now I am there," and I am there. And then in that, 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 that apartment. 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 t- the six-hour difference, uh, uh, which I, I thought for, for a while, and I said, "Not, not a proof," you know? Um, uh, I, I knew it, that there 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 would say, "Something strange happened," you know. "We f- we found this, uh, p- 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 roulette with my, with my, uh, soul. That was, this was very dangerous. I mean, the feeling that, 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 this spiritual quest, uh, from that, uh, that period where you start playing with this mind over, you know, the CDs and so on. And, uh, I started seeing, uh, I started seeing images. What, what I could do if I really had the possibility, uh, I could go and, uh, eavesdrop on, 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 beat the casino and so on. And, uh, I realized there was a, 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'm in a world, sort of, uh, [laughs] you know, this kind of Wild Western. And I didn't, didn't want that proof that this is-- this was really possible. And I went, I lied down on a couch, uh, where actually, uh, uh, I was coming down from a session before going to, to Baltimore. And I was lying then, and then this horrible thought came to me, uh, maybe I never got to Baltimore. Uh, I am just, I 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 Zhuangzi 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 astral 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, experiment, you know, the proof, uh, astral projection. Uh, and, uh, but the fear and the metaphysical fear that I, I was really sort of, uh, you know, losing my soul in, in that should I start playing with these kinds of forces.
- TFTim Ferriss
That, 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 were back in the United States?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Oh, like, you know, that probably w- within eight hours or so I was-
- 2:16:33 – 2:27:46
If starting today: what Grof would research, and why paradigms limit discovery
- TFTim Ferriss
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 were a promising young scientist, you could research anything you wanted. Let's assume that all of 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?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well, you know, one, one of the problems with this, uh, renaissance, that a lot of this is hap- 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 [laughs] to, to the hospitals. Now it has to be used." And, uh, so, um, you know, those, uh, also this wonderful study at Johns Hopkins is just a more sophisticated and methodologically better, uh, you know, Walter Pahnke, 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, Doug Engelbart and, uh, and, uh, uh, even s- 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 were acid heads.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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. Uh, 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 there 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 he 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, 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, tied. So the examples, of course, I already mentioned the, the shift from, uh, the geocentric to the heliocentric system. There was, uh, one, uh, revolution in chemistry where they had phlogiston- ... chemistry where there was this royal substance of phlogiston. 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 phlogiston anymore. Now we laugh when we hear that. And then of course the, the first three decades in the 20th 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 it, couldn't accept at, 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 to what the physicists had to, uh, experience in the first th- three decades of the 20th century. And then in a sense, it can be seen 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 s- and psychologists.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm. Uh, and would your-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
So one, one more thing. One, one more thing that, uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
Of course
- SGDr. Stan Grof
... yeah, I had, uh, uh, so there is the, uh, the situation that Kuhn described, that during the time when you have, uh, the s- science dominated by a paradigm, uh, the scientists do what he called, uh, um, normal science, which is problem-solving within the context of given parameters. It's like playing chess. If you play chess, you have to follow the rules. You can't suddenly take an, an inconvenient, uh, figure and throw it out of the, uh, out of the chessboard, uh, you know. Uh, and then he describes, uh, what happens then when, when ob- uh, observations come that 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 realization there is a problem, and then the wilder theories come, and at first they are sort of rejected. 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, is the, not only, uh, the s- do the scientists believe in, in that, uh, paradigm, are, 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- this is called a confusion between the map and the territory. People like, uh, Arthur Korzybski, and then Gregory Bateson was very, very big about it. And, uh, Gregory was laughing about it. He says, "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."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
The relationship between a paradigm, you know, and, uh, the territory that he described is, uh, is, uh, very much like, uh, reading the menu.
- TFTim Ferriss
So I, I've, I've had this question I've wanted to ask this entire conversation since we first started ta- uh, speaking, and, uh, let me d- let me just get my facts straight before I ask it. Are you currently 87? Is that accurate? What is your current age?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, I just want ... Uh, 1st of July, I just was, uh, was, uh, 87.
- TFTim Ferriss
87. Well, happy belated birthday. And-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Thank you. Thank you very much
- TFTim Ferriss
... you are remarkably, uh, I mean, incredibly sharp, incredibly energetic. I mean, more so than some 20-somethings I know. What do you attribute that to? I mean, are, are ... and to what factors? I mean, are, are both, were both of your parents sharp their entire lives? Uh, I mean, I, I aspire ... Currently, I'm 40- I'm 41, and I would love to have half the energy that you do. [laughs] So, uh, w-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well-
- TFTim Ferriss
To, to what do you attribute that? It's, it's really, uh, just, I mean, mind-blowing to, to me. Uh, I'm, I'm so inspired, uh, just trying to absorb some of the-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh
- TFTim Ferriss
... enthusiasm [laughs] uh, and energy that you have, uh-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
No, uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
... in this ph- in this phone, in this phone call.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, I think, you know, p- part of it is that I'm really, really very, very 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 Hofmann, who, who was talking about the new Eleusis 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, the, the Eleusis, uh, uh, mysteries. Uh, you know, uh, you probably know this was done for 2,000 years in Eleusis. Uh, so they had to offer something pretty impressive to, to keep the attention of the ancient world. And, uh, the, uh, list of people who have been initiates in these mysteries, it reads like who is who in antiquity. I mean, it includes Plato, Aristotle. Uh, Cicero wrote about it, you know, M- Marcus Aurelius, Pindaros, and, um, all these people. Uh, so we All sort of say, you know, the Greeks are very talented, beautiful art, beautiful science, and, uh, great ideas. You know, the fact that, uh, you know, so many people every five years had, uh, some powerful experiences, uh, puts it into somewhat different, uh, perspective. And, uh, Albert Hofmann and, uh, Gordon Wasson, the one who brought the, the mushrooms from Mexico, from the Mazatec Indians, and Carl Ruck, a Greek scholar, they wrote the book, Road to Eleusis, when they found out that the key to these mysteries was kykeon, K-Y-K-E-O-N. And they, uh, uh, found out that this was a, um, psychedelic potion which was made of, uh, of ergot, very similar to LSD. So 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 Eleusis, uh, there was a, a guide, and there are the, the ruins of, uh, of the Telesterion, 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 were getting this, uh, this dose of this, uh... So, uh, you know, when I, when I read Plato now, I don't see him, like, pacing in the academy 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 ex- you can experience archetypes in a, in psychedelic sessions. So these are all, all, uh, the philosophy was inspired by, by psychedelic experiences.
- 2:27:46 – 2:50:57
What humanity needs most—and a peyote ‘lesson in forgiveness’ story to close
- TFTim Ferriss
What do you, what do you think humanity n- needs most right now, in, in your opinion? If that's big-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
What, what humanity?
- TFTim Ferriss
Big question. Yeah. What, what, what do you think humanity needs most right now?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
What we need?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. If there's any particular-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Well-
- TFTim Ferriss
... type of change or shift that you think I haven't mentioned
- SGDr. Stan Grof
You know, I think... Well, we, I think, you know, the, uh, the monistic materialistic paradigm, I think is d- really destroying this, uh, uh, this planet. And we have, uh, you know, we have lost experiential spirituality. The, the people have really the experience to have, uh, have, um, spiritual experiences which are non-denominational, which are, uh, non-chauvinistic, non-sectarian, which are universal, all-inclusive, all, uh, all, um, uh, embracing. So people who have these, these direct, uh, spiritual experiences, they, they don't, um, experience division in the world. You know, the, what happened with the, with the great organized religions is that they s- 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 which have, uh, taken sort of different archetypes and different, uh, different ways of worshiping. 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's go. Let's have sacred war against the infidels. You know, we are Jews, you are Goyim, and so on. And then you have even these kinds of divisions within the same religion. There's centuries of bloodshed between Protestants and, and Catholics, and you have the same with the Sunnis and, uh, the Shia. They, they killing each other, destroying their own temples. Now, these are not religions that will help us in this 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 realize we have to treat nature in a different way because we are so vitally embedded and, and, and, and entangled in, uh, in nature, that we would not use nature as commodity. You know, something that should serve us, uh, uh, and, uh, at the expense of, of, you know, destroying, destroying our, uh, environment. There's, uh, there'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, there should not be anything keeping the, uh, environment supporting, uh, life. No, no, you know, economic, uh, profit, no, no political, no, no military order. We should really realize that we are in the same boat. And, uh, you know, whoever is destroying the environment is, is, uh, destroying us.
- TFTim Ferriss
And there are many places people can find, of course, your writing and more about you, stanislavgrof.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/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, uh, to folks out there who are Wondering if there might be more to the story than just the purely material sort of hyper-rational 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, but I don't know-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Yeah. Let me do one that's kind of, I think is, you know, has a larger kind of importance than just mentioning one clinical story. And it's also a story from When the Impossible Happens, and it has to do with the experience that I had in a peyote ceremony. So when I came to the United States, you know, I heard about peyote and so on. I never had a chance being in Czechoslovakia, not having the possibility of traveling to have the peyote experience. So I was very, very interested in that. And we had this program for professionals, one of the programs at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. And one of the persons who came was Ken Godfrey, who was the psychiatrist at the VA Hospital in Topeka, Kansas. He was himself, you know, Native American, and his wife was Native American. And he was running a psychedelic program in Topeka. But he didn't have anybody to sit for him, so he came for his own session. And I sat in his three psychedelic sessions, so, you know, we became very, very close. And so when, after his last session, we were talking, I said, "Ken, is there any possibility you can get me into a Native American church ceremony?" And he said, "I will try." And then he called in a few days and say, you know, "I talked to the road chief, and you can come, and you can bring four of your friends." So anyway, we sort of got into the airplane and flew to Topeka and then drove into the middle of the, you know, Kansas prairie there. And there were these tepees, and this ceremony was being prepared. And we had to go through kind of a clearance. 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 how, you know, white people came, and they have taken their land. They have killed their buffalo. They have killed their warriors. They have raped their women and so on. And 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 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 were like pale faces, and that was it, you know. He's not going to have us in the sacred ceremony. And then he get under a 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 in the teepee. I was sitting across him. And then the buttons, peyote buttons were passed. And then it started coming on. And he sort of was really like radiating like a laser beam toward me. You know, the hatred was kind of, and everything was amplified, of course, by the peyote. And we were doing the rounds when you pass a staff and 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 to him, he would grab it and push it. He just would not participate. And so we were all these rounds, and we were going through the last round where everybody can say something. And Bob Leahy, who was another LSD therapist from Maryland working with us, Helen Bonney and her sister. Helen Bonney was our music therapist. And Walter Houston Clark was a very famous professor of religion. And so as we were doing the last round, Walter Houston Clark gave this, you know, almost like masochistic kind of a speech. He said, "How wonderful it was from your, you know, brothers and sisters to take us into the sacred ceremony after what we have done to you. We have killed your buffalo and your warriors and raped your women and taken your spirituality." And then somehow, I don't remember exactly the context, he mentioned me and said, "Especially Stan 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 and put his head into my lap. Sort of snot was, tears were running out of his eyes and, you know, snot out of his nose. 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 went back to his place, sit down, and then not talking, just sitting there. And there was like a lot of pressure, you know, psychological pressure, people wanting to know what was happening. And then he said, you know, "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 treated him as if he were an American, and I hated him through the whole ceremony. And it's just more than I can take, you know? And 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 Pilsen that destroyed the automobile factory there and damaged Pilsen. So he said, "He stayed home, but I went, and I killed his people. Our roles were reversed, and that's just too much for me." And then he got up, and he went to the four Americans there and embraced them, and he says, uh, "You are not my enemies. You are, you are my friends." He says, "We are all in the same boat. We, if we, if we hold the old grudges, uh, we, we all die. We have, we are all, you know, uh, 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, with each other and how to love each other." And then he ended, and he says, "Well, they believe in reincarnation." So he says, "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 that atmosphere of reconciliation was amazing. I actually told that story at, uh, at the end of, uh, the International Transpersonal Conference in Prague when I was bringing transpersonal psychology back to Prague because we had all these, 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 concentration camps. Then we had years of, uh, uh, communist, uh, regime, so nobody liked Russia. None, none of the people from the Eastern European [chuckles] countries liked either Russia or, or Germany. We had sort of German and Jews there. And, uh, uh, what was amazing that we did a large holotropic breathwork, uh, you know, done before the conference as a, as a 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 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.
- TFTim Ferriss
What a wonderful story.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
So, so anyway, that's my story.
- TFTim Ferriss
Thank you so much.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
I call it lesson, lesson in forgiveness.
- TFTim Ferriss
I think we could all use lessons in forgiveness, not only towards others, 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, I'm very, I'm very cautiously optimistic about this, this renaissance that we're witnessing, and hopefully 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 wanna 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?
- SGDr. Stan Grof
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, and 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, higher aspect of our, our personality. So, you know, part of the, part of the problem of the industrial civilization, we lost this, uh, this, uh, tradition, 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, uh, spiritual, uh, life. They were using it for a lot of, uh, practical things, for, as an inspiration for, for art, and so on. So, um, uh, I see this, uh, this tremen-tremendous renaissance that is happening now not just as correcting of these, uh, of these, you know, uh, really, uh, ter-terrible administrative, uh, legal mistakes that were done that stopped the research for forty years, a return to the research. Uh, I see it also as, uh, the, the possibility of the industrial civilization to join the rest of, uh, humanity that always was combining somehow the, these, uh, spiritual, inner spirit, spiritual experiences with whatever they were doing in the, in the external, uh, world.
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, thank you so much, Stan.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Uh, again, uh, Tim, thank you so much for everything you have been, you have been doing, and, uh, thank you for this, for this opportunity to, you know, share some of, uh, my life with, with your listeners-
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, it's-
- SGDr. Stan Grof
And with you
- TFTim Ferriss
... it's such a pleasure. And, uh, I, 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 [chuckles] 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/podcast. Uh, Stan, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it.
- SGDr. Stan Grof
Again, it's, uh, wonderful. It's great to have a, uh, uh, an interviewer, you know, who, who knows what we are talking about.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
It doesn't, doesn't always happen.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- SGDr. Stan Grof
This, this was one of the great ones. Thank you so much.
- TFTim Ferriss
Um, I really, really appreciate it. And to everybody listening, keep your mind open and l- look outside, but also look inside, as Stan mentioned. And until next time, thank you for listening. [upbeat music] 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 [chuckles] 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. 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Episode duration: 2:50:57
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Transcript of episode 3mdYUmvTeig
