YouSaid · the spoken record

Stan Grof

lines on the record: 159
first: 2018-11-20
most recent: 2018-11-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Again, wonderful. It's great to have an interviewer who knows what we are talking about. Doesn't always happen. This was one of the great ones. Thank you”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, Tim, thank you so much for everything you have been doing. And thank you for this opportunity to share some of my life with your listeners.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transformation for the main vehicle for ritual, spiritual life. They were using it for a lot of practical things as an inspiration for art and so on. So I see this tremendous renaissance that is happening now, not just as correcting of this really terrible administrative legal mistakes that were done that stopped the research for 40 years, return to the research. I see it also as the possibility of the industrial civilization to join the rest of humanity that always was combining somehow the spiritual, inner spirit, spiritual experiences with whatever they were doing in the External world.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, maybe repeat what Carl Gustav Jung said and that I would really certainly endorse, that 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 self-exploration. 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. You would say you get lessons from what he called the self, the higher aspect of our personality. So, you know, part of the problem of the industrial civilization, we lost this tradition of, if you want to psychonautics, all the other groups of humanity way back probably into the paleolithic, they were using these holotropic states for healing, for”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was amazing that we did a large holotropic breath work before the conference as a pre-conference workshop? And it was amazing how within two days, I mean, some of these boundaries were melting and people embracing each other and sitting for each other. And when people were owning their own emotional problems, they actually activated the best in other people. And in spite of language difficulties and so on, there was really a change of the atmosphere from all these antagonisms that were certainly in the air at the beginning.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we are 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 the end of the International Transpersonal Conference in Prague when I was bringing transpersonal psychology back to Prague because we had all these 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. A lot of people killed ended up in concentration camps. Then we had years of communist regime. So nobody liked Russia. None of the people from the Eastern European countries liked either Russia or Germany. We had sort of German and Jews there.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are not my enemies. You are my friend. He says, we are all in the same boat. If we hold the old grudges, we all die. We are all children of mother earth and we have to sort of Really sort of learn how to live with each other and how to love each other. And then he ended in his, well, they believe in reincarnation. Well, for what I can say, when this was happening, I might have been on the other side.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 than what's sitting there. And 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 the air rate on his city. That was five days before the end of the war. There was an American attack on Pilsen that destroyed the automobile factory there and damaged Pilsen. 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. He says,”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he started shaking. He got up. He threw himself into my lap, put his head into my lap. Tears were running out of his eyes. And 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 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 I treated...”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then somehow, I don't remember exactly the context he mentioned to 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,”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we went all these rounds and we were going through the last round where everybody can say something. And Bob Leh, who was another LSD therapist from Maryland working with us, Helen Bonnie and her sister. Helen Bonnie 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 almost like masochistic kind of a speech which said, how wonderful it was from your brothers and sisters to take us into this 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.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then he got into 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 TP, I was sitting across him. And then the buttons, peote buttons were passed. And then he 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 piote. 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. Push it, and he just would not participate.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, anyway, we sort of got into the airplane and flew to Topeka and then drove into the middle of the Kansas prairie there. And there were these tepees and the ceremony was being prepared. And we had to go through kind of a clearance that they wanted to find out what kind of people. We had to tell them about ourselves. And we got just a lot of aggressive comments from them about how 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. So it was 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.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so 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 said, you know, I talked to the road chief and you can come and you can bring four of your friends.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I came to the United States, I heard about Peyote and so on. I never had a chance being in Czechoslovakia and 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 Ken Gottfried, who was the psychiatrist at the VA hospital in Topeka, Kansas. He was himself 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 history, psychedelic session. So, you know, we became very, very close.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me do one that kind of has a larger kind of importance than just mentioning one clinical story. 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.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ecological movement, they realize we have to treat nature in a different way because we are so vitally embedded and entangled in nature that we would not use nature as commodity, something that should serve us and the expense of Nothing that's more important for us. We are biological creatures. We need air. We need water. And we need clean soil where we are growing our food. It's so suicidal, so self-destructive to destroy the basis on which we depend. There should not be anything keeping the environment supporting life. No, no economic profit, no political, no military ardor. We should really realize that we are in the same boat. And whoever is destroying the environment is destroying us.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are Christians. You all other guys are pagans. And we really have to convert you or there's really not a good place for you here. Or we are Muslims and you guys all are infidels. Let go, let's have sacred word against the infidels. Jews, you are Goem and so on. And then you have even these kinds of divisions within the same religion. centuries of bloodshed between Protestants and Catholics and you have the same with the Sunnis and the Shiite. They're killing each other, destroying their own temples. Now, these are not religions that will help us in the situation in the world. But this is very different with spirituality which is really taking everything in and it changes consciousness in a way that people embrace.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the monistic materialistic paradigm, I think, is really destroying this planet. Know, we have lost experiential spirituality that people have really the experience or have spiritual experiences which are non-denominational, which are non-chauvinistic, non-sectarian, which are universal, all inclusive, all embracing. So people who have these direct spiritual experiences, they don't experience division in the world. What happened with the great organized religions is that they unite people who are willing to see it the same way and worship the same way, but at the same time divide the world because they set it against another group which have taken sort of different archetypes and different ways of worshiping. So then you have a situation where”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last time when we were in LFSIS, there was a guide and there are the ruins of the Telestrion, which is 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 in the last stage, 3,000 people every five years were getting this dose of this. When I read Plato, now I don't see him pacing in the academy and saying, let me see how the world works. We have not this, but there's this level of the archetypes and so on. This is something that you can experience archetypes in psychedelic sessions. So these are all the philosophy was inspired by psychedelic experiences.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a psychedelic potion which was made of ergot, very similar to LSD. So you can imagine so many people every five years in that small world had psychedelic experiences that it could have had some impact on the culture.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It reads like who is who in antiquity. I mean, it includes Plato, Aristotle, Cicero wrote about it. You know, Marcus Aurelius Pindaros and all these people. So we all sort of say, you know, the Greeks are very talented, beautiful art, beautiful science and great ideas. The fact that so many people every five years had some powerful experiences puts it into somewhat different perspective. And Albert Hoffmann and Gordon Wasson, the one who brought the mushrooms from Mexico, from the Mazotech Indians, and Carl Ragg, a Greek scholar, they wrote the book, wrote to Alepsis when they found out that the key to this mystery was KKON, K-Y-K-E-O-N. And they found out that this”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think part of it is that I'm really, really very, very deeply committed to this idea of this holotropic states to bring them into psychiatry, to bring them into society. I had a lot of meetings with Albert Hoffmann who was talking about new allusis 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 Greeks allow these mysteries. You probably know this was done for 2000 years in Aleus. So they had to offer something pretty impressive to keep the attention of the ancient world. And the list of people who have been initiates in this mystery.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is called a confusion between the map and the territory. People like Arthur Korzipsky and then Gregory Bateson was very, very big about it. And Gregory was laughing about it. He said, if scientists make errors like that, it can happen that one day they come to the restaurant and they eat a menu instead of the dinner. Relationship between a paradigm and the territory that he described is very much like reading the menu.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 centuries ago, the way we see it now. But what I would like to add was that Gregory Bateson added another thing not only do the scientists believe in that paradigm or 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 description of how”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one more thing, one more thing. So there is the situation that Kuhn described, that during the time when you have the science dominated by a paradigm, the scientists do what he called normal science, which is problem solving within the context of a given parameters. It's like playing chess. If you play chess, you have to follow the rules. You can't suddenly take an inconvenient figure and throw it out of the chessboard. And then he describes what happens and when observations come that challenge the paradigm, how it's 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 the first they are sort of rejected and after a while.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first three decades in the 20th century, the physicists had to go through this incredible conceptual cataclysm moving from Newton first to the theories of relativity and then to quantum physics that even Einstein, who initiated or couldn't accept until his death. So, this is the question of paradigm. So, I believe that we are now in the period of paradigm shift in relation to consciousness and the human psyche that's comparable in nature and scope to what the physicists had to experience in the first 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 the understanding of matter. The quantum physicists who are my friends said, no, no problems relating to my observation. It was mostly the resistance of psychiatrists and psychologists.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The paradigm, a way of looking, looking at the world, certain basic metaphysical assumptions, beliefs, ways of what are relevant areas to research, how do you do research, how you evaluate it. This is all paradigm tied. The examples, of course, I already mentioned the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric system. There was one revolution in chemistry where they had phlogiston chemistry where there was this royal substance phlogistone. And then when people like Dalton or Lavoisier came with the idea of atoms, people had problems because they didn't believe in Flogiston anymore. Now we laugh when you hear that. And then, of course,”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is now understood. There is a possibility of sort of losing somehow the blocks that we have in problem solving because we are stuck with a paradigm that Thomas Kuhn wrote that fantastic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing that the history of science is not a linear development where we started from not knowing anything and then each generation added a little of the observations and they were more and more accurate hypotheses and theories created so that what we have now the understanding of the universe is the best understanding that has ever been at any time in any society and it showed that it's a joke that the development of science breaks into these distinct periods and each of them is governed by what he calls”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Computers was closely connected with use of psychedelics, you know, people like Doc Engelbart and even Steve Jobs and all these people made it absolutely clear. There was a statement that all the people to men and a woman who developed virtual reality where acid hats.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, one of the problems with this renaissance that a lot of is repeating things which were already done, like the cancer projects are great, but we did it to the point when that when we ask for more money for continuing the research, they say, you have already proved it, now it has to go to the hospitals, now it has to be used. Also this wonderful study at Johns Hopkins is just a more sophisticated and methodologically better Walter Panky experiment, which had some flaws, certainly. But I would love to see this now going to the research of creativity to bring people, biologists, quantum relativistic physicists, and see what they can do. As you know, we have indications that the whole development of”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was lying then, and then this horrible thought came to me, maybe I never got to Baltimore. fabricated that trip to the United States in my LSD session. I'm now coming down from that session. I never left, you see. So I was like the Chuang Tsu in that situation. Am I a butterfly having the dream of being a human or a human having the feeling that I'm butterfly? So I was stuck in that place for a while where I was not sure whether I was having But the fear and the metaphysical fear that I was really sort of losing my soul in that should I start playing with these kinds of forces.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started seeing images. What I could do if I really have that possibility, I could go and eavesdrop and political meetings in the world, you know, I could get access to scientific secrets and so on. I could go to a casino. I could be the casino and so on. And I realized there was a real danger from the ego to start playing with 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 this would be possible because if I had the power, then other people had the power and then the doors don't protect me in a world sort of this kind of a wild western. And I didn't want that proof that this was really possible. And I went, I lied down on a couch. We're actually, I was coming down from a session before going to Baltimore.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I thought for a while and I said, not approve. I knew it that there was a difference, 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 what my parents said. They would say, something strange happened, you know, we found this painting on the floor and this nail was still in the wall. And so I started walking and reaching for that. And then suddenly I had the feeling that I was gambling. I was playing like a roulette with my soul. This was very dangerous, the feeling that I was getting sort of under the influence of some evil forces. And then I realized how much they warn you if you are under spiritual quest from that period where you start playing with this mind over the CDs and so on. And I started seeing”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was thinking about it. I had to laugh because I was still holding on to the next element of the materialistic world. The only way you can really see what's happening in other places. You need a television. You need a camera and a satellite, you see. So I realized I'm not even bound by that. The world of spirit, I can just have to say, now I am there and I am there. At that point, it turned kind of inside out and I was walking. I felt straight. I didn't feel I was in a session. And I was walking in that apartment. I heard my parents breathing. And I went to the window. And there on the corner was a clock. And it was showing the six-hour difference.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was thinking about it, and then I realized that I was limited by this, by the concept, the coordinate spatial, temporal coordinate that I believe that Prague is in this direction and certain kind of distance that I have to overcome and just imagine that 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 circuits or transistors or stuff and I didn't know what was happening and then I realized I was inside of the television of the television set of my parents”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Channels and collecting the information from that. And so I had a session, we qualified for that ourselves. And in that session, I suddenly had the feeling that I was not bound by space and time, that I somehow could get to other places in the world if I decided to. And I wanted to put it to a test. I said, can I, for example, get to Prague? Apartment of my parents. And so I imagine which direction was Prague and imagine myself sort of flying in that direction and I experience of flight, but I was not getting anywhere. So I felt there was a problem there.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the wildest ones was actually the first session that I had when I came to Baltimore from Prague. It was a process where my request for the scholarship was first turned down and then I appealed and then I had a very powerful psychedelic session with a colleague of mine psychiatrist and this was a major, major death rebirth opening and what I experienced like kind of Atman, Brahman experience. And I came back home and in the mailbox was a positive response. I can go to the United States. So within very short time I packed I ended up 40 pounds of my luggage. I took all my records with me 25 pounds, 15 pounds of personal belonging and I was going to Baltimore and in Baltimore we had the permission to give sessions to professionals.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I realized the paradox. The divine sort of comes to me in an experiment in a Marxist country induced by this. But I knew I felt I was stuck in psychiatry and I was at that point not very excited about psychiatry. But I felt coming down from that 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 years, 60 years I have done that would not be in one way or another related to these holotropic states. That became what I said was my passion, my vocation, my profession.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of background I went to medical school at the time when a Marxist regime we were controlled by the Soviet Union so we really got the pure materialistic doctrine you can't you can't get you know more materialistic than that so it was my first LSD session that just changed that and you know I was one kind of person in the morning and another person walked out of there in the evening I was really basically open to the mystical world I saw that that was a much deeper understanding that anything that my formal training provided so So the paradox, which I was aware of when I was coming down as a belief, sort of a, not believing, but a mystical, you know, mystical person, I differentiate quite a bit spirituality from religion. I never became a religious in any way. I became very spiritual.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The wedding happened, they could roll out carpets across the street, stop the traffic and take the carpets to the altar so the guests could go from the altar all the way to the house and have a banquet there. And my parents got so upset by this that they decided not to commit me or my brother to any religion. We should make our own decision when we come of age. So we actually had classes of religion, but for me it was always the free hour. I would go for a walk or read a book or they were sort of playing soccer somewhere, I would join them. Being glad that I had this extra time. But also I was a very curious creature. I was also missing. This was called, I think, paradisian morale or something, at least where the classes, and they were being taught something that I was missing. So I was kind of a little ambivalent about it. But then from this...”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was an atheist. This goes back to a little scandal in our family. When my parents fell in love and wanted to get married, it was in a small check town. And my father's family had no 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 definition. And this was created a lot of turmoil. It almost seemed like it would not happen until the solution came. My mother's parents made a major donation to the church and they allowed that. And they had a business on Main Street. And so when”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The question is it has to be harnessed, and that's not an easy task in the industrial civilization You would have to change first, you would have to change the paradigm, which is a difficult thing You probably know that the shift from the geocentric system to the heliocentric system after Copernicus published about the revolutions of the planet, it took over 100 years. It was not just the church. The resistance was coming also from the universities where there are all kinds of arguments why the earth cannot be around and rotate and around the sun and so on.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cultures were not interested in technology, so they are 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 psyche. And it's very humbling for somebody like myself having a professional training and being through a stage when I thought what the shamans are doing, those are the primitives in the jungle somewhere, you know, illiterate and so on. We have our scientific approach, which is behaviorism or psychoanalysis. If you have the experience of these tools that the shamans have available, you develop a lot of respect to that.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then mainstream psychiatry ever considered. It's more like the description that you find in the great spiritual philosophies of the East, in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. They have the real maps of the psyche because they were focusing for centuries on systematic exploration of the psyche in a very similar way in which we do science. They were describing certain procedures that you have to follow certain forms of meditation. They would collect the descriptions of those experiences, discuss, write about it and so on. So it's a systematic exploration of the human psyche.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You basically diagnose these different psycho psychotic states by the fact that people have experiences and behaviors that current model cannot, but part of those symptoms which are used as being important diagnostic tools for psychiatry could be, for example, people have the experience of death rebirth, destruction of the world, recreation of the world. They have experiences that seem to be a past life experiences. So those are all absolutely normal elements in the human unconscious, but understood really, if you want, in the Grofian Jungian way, the psyche is infinitely larger than...”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, people usually ask me when I say the concept spiritual emergency, if there are any professionals, psychiatrists, psychologists, they say, can you give me differential diagnosis? This is what we did in somatic medicine, differential diagnosis. People have infection you want to find out which... So they would like something like that for spiritual emergency, which you cannot do because psychosis is not, this is not a medical diagnosis. We can't, with the exception of the organic psychosis, we cannot really 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 urine where we can have a litmus paper put it in the sample of urine since it comes out green. It's schizophrenia.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, 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 the collective unconscious as a regular kind of germane part of our unconscious, both the historical part of the collective unconscious and the archetypal. So having visions of archetypal beings are being taken to archetypal domains like hell or paradise, those are common experiences in the breathwork or in psychedelic sessions. So this just gives you an idea, these are stage that you can work with the way you would work with people in a psychedelic session.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just because it happened without breathing or fast breathing or because it happened without psychedelics, no, we just apply it to that other category of spontaneously emerging experiences of this kind. Now, what is necessary for having this kind of understanding, you have to have the large map. The psyche is not just the postnatal biography and the Freudian individual unconscious. There is the record of these hours of birth, of the anxiety of the physical discomfort and also the amazing aggression, the fury that is generated in the fetus who cannot breathe and is subjected to all those distortions and so on.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not just that the drug created this horrible experience. So the way you do it, you have to tell people that you are in LSD session, this is a time limited thing I'm going to be here. And then when something remains unresolved, we do some bodywork and some emotional work to bring it to a good closure. People can benefit from these bad trips. So I realized very early that when people had difficult experiences, the last thing I would do is to combine with tranquilizers. 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 transformation. So then the obvious answer was, you know, should we treat it differently?”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT