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

“Where that concept came from the work with psychedelics and with the breathwork, when you realized that people in these situations would have experiences like of death rebirth, destruction of the world, recreation of the world, past life experiences and so on. I very early discovered that if you have bad trip, there's no way, no good way of 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 on a bad trip and then keep them on maintenance dosages, this prevents any kind of resolution. If somebody has a bad trip, 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.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I got really full experiential understanding by finding those places in myself. And this is also interesting about this large map of the psyche that each of us has all those things. It's not a question of whether you are a psychiatric patient or no. If you go deep enough, you find all those elements within yourself. If you are dealing, you are processing the hours in the birth canal, you find the whole psychopathology there, all the emotional problems, all the psychosomatic symptoms, the choking, the nausea, the headaches, the pains, the psychosomatic pains in the body. People frequently tell me they found Hitler inside, they found Stalin. You discover the shadow aspect. So the human personality is a little different from what's described by mainstream psychiatry.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We come to this world naked crying in pain without any possession and this is how we are going to end no matter what you do in your life or with your life. Those are really heavy kind of experiences. So I had some of those experiences when either there is a suicidal impulse or even suicide would not be solution of trying to get out of that state. And so when I was hitting some of these places in my own sessions, I would have like a parade of my patients where I would suddenly say, oh, this is where he was or this is where she was. When I was bringing just my training as a psychiatrist and things that I've read, I realized I was sitting there listening to what they were saying. I had no clue what they were talking about.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All kinds of psychological insights. I mean, a lot of the things that I've been writing about were combinations of what I saw in the patients and then getting insights and understanding, even in the high dose parts of the sessions, when I hit some difficult places like, for example, existential despair feeling, you know, there's no meaning in life, absurdity of life and so on, which”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had quite a few of the 25 micrograms for hiking or swimming in the ocean or something. The just enhancement of the perceptual experience of the world. But I haven't experimented with I had lots of very interesting experiences inside of the sessions and then particularly coming down from the sessions when I was in a kind of a state that you might experience on lower dosages. But it was at the end of a high dose session rather than an experience per se.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or on the emotions in certain MDMA or some of the other antiogens, they shifted whole spectrum towards the positive. There are very few people who have bad trips or MDMA. MDMA is very dangerous physiologically, but very easy for most people to handle psychologically, emotionally. But then I discovered this. This element in ayahuasca that there is very frequently the imagery of the Amazonian jungle or the Anaconda snake is coming, the kind of a rotor rooter cleansing jaguar, images of jaguar. So there is some kind of selectivity from the collectif unconscious is actually prevalent in those sessions.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it would have to be modified. Actually, all psychedelics can take you to the areas which I described in that cartography. You can experience something from child's sufficiently important emotionally. You can relieve your birth, you can have prenatal experiences. Even this is, I almost hesitate to say that reliving your conception, identifying on a cellular level with the sperm and the ovum, you can have past life experiences, you can have archetypal experiences, it can take you to the collective unconscious and so on. The cartography applies to all of them, but there is a different style in which it's coming. You know, let's talk about more visual, less visual, and so on, more emphasis on physical feelings.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would like to have some kind of freedom. And the answer was okay, but your task is to bring spirituality to Eastern Europe and to Russia. I said, now I really did it. You said, now I'm flipping out. I can't even travel to Poland. And this is promising me, I can see the world. But then, of course, it happened. Developing transpersonal psychology, it became very, very popular in Russia. And then 25 years ago bringing transperson psychology to Czechoslovakia, actually. So that was a fascinating synchronicity again. in the ayahuasca session where also this was a this was a very intense but it was guiding my session was sort of telling me what i should look like how i should handle it”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also very common with ayahuasca, pachamamama. Mother and so on. The only time I had it was in an ayahuasca session where there was a sense of, actually it's not true. I had it once in... In an early LSD session where there was a presence, there was an energetic presence I didn't see a figure, but there was also communication which was telepathic, which was without words. This was very strange because this was at the time when we had close boundaries we couldn't even initially travel to Russia, let alone to the West. And there was this kind of entity appearing in my LSD session. It was like a genie almost, like asking, you know, what would you like your life to be like? And I said, I would like to see the world. I would like to understand psychosis. This was the place I was in. And I would like to have a job that's not a kind of a 9 to 4.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it would be more something in the category of MDMA in that. The holotropic breath can create visions, visual experiences, but it's not that common as it is in LSD or in mescaline where you can have this fantastic fractal displays of colorful images and so on. And the whole session could be very... The interface between vision and vivid thought 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 has just been a matter of principle Not only was it illegal, but it just does not work well in a context that's created for monotropic breastwork.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Type of material. No, we were careful not to bring anything into the holotropic breathwork sessions because the structure is completely different. The timing of the breathwork is different. It's about three hours and the type of music that we use. It would not be great set and setting it's not structured for a psychedelic experience. And actually this would disturb. We had one situation actually where somebody who had a black belt took it going into our workshop at SLN without telling us and ended up in a pretty aggressive situation. And it just really disturbed the whole session. hard time sort of bringing him down.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Explain that for yourself. We've seen a lot of this kind of thing that healing happens, powerful healing happens in the holotropic breastwork through mechanisms that we don't understand. I saw before working with people who were in psychoanalysis, so on, the opposite, that people 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 the toilet training and oedipus problems, only the problems don't change very much. So you have the option either have very little result with what seems to be intellectual understanding or a result where you have no clue what's happening.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He said she was chanting in perfect Sephardic language, the Ladino, which is a medieval mixture of Spanish and Hebrew. And it happened to be his hobby. He knew the Sephardic language. And we say, wow, we ask him, what was she singing? This is what she was 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 conferences and the depression never came back. So the idea of healing depression, pretty bad depression by singing a Sephardic prayer. It's a pretty unusual sort of therapeutic mechanism.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Praying or worshiping something, you end up in a sitting position. And then this monotonous chant, repetitive chant came in a language that we did not understand. And this was going for quite a while, and then it ended and she laid back and she was just completely blissed out in an ecstatic state. The group was reacting in a strange way. People were ending up in a lotus positions. Some of them crying for unknown reasons. And we had a Jewish psychoanalyst from Buenos Aires participating in this five-day workshop. And he came to us and he said, this is fantastic. Do you understand? What happened? We said no.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“reliving her birth. But Friday in the morning, which was the last day she came, and she actually experienced some intensification of these feelings. So we ask to lie down. We had a different program for that morning, the conclusion of the five days, but it was clear that we had to do something. So she lied down in the middle of the room. We just told her just to go with the experiences. She didn't even do more breathing. And she again completed a little something about the experience of birth, biological birth, and then went into this very strange series of movements, which looked like sort of a”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What would be an example of that? So there was one situation where we had a five-day workshop at SLN and a woman came who had for the last two years had had a very bad depression which psychiatrists would consider to be what's called endogenous, which of course doesn't mean anything. generated from within But the characteristic is that it's worse in the morning. So she got out of the bed and it took her like a couple hours before she managed to brush her teeth and get dressed properly and so on. So she had two sessions with us which we had in the five days at SLN and they were pretty powerful things from childhood and she was”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is one chapter which I called unorthodox psychiatry where people experience healing in connection with experiences that wouldn't make any sense to current psychiatrists.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there are, of course, experiences of the out-of-body experiences in near-death experiences, you know, where people who are in a state of clinical death, cardiac death, or even flat EEG have experiences. They might be watching the procedure from the ceiling so that when they brought back to consciousness, they are able to describe the procedure. There is one case where this was 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 fled electrocardiogram. And at the same time, this is the most detailed description of the surgical procedure that we have, where she was able to draw the instruments. That they were using, and so on. So there are many, many of these and we had a couple of those experiences with our own cancer patients. So one of them is this.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“According to the estimates, the Himalayas were born about 50 million years ago during the collision of the tectonic plates. So this was at least 50 million years old fossil nautilus symbol of the international transpersonal association. So of course the Chinese press didn't describe how great the holotropic breadth work was, but they all focused on this incredible synchronicity.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“international conferences, we were thinking what would be the proper logo for the international transpersonal association. And we came up with the chambered nautilus, which is a beautiful piece of sacred geometry. So for decades, we were using it on the stationery, which was on all the programs of transpersonal psychology. So here we are bringing transpersonal psychology to China. great grandmother 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 fossil nautilus, which was taken from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the highest mountain in the world.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She said it was my great grandmother who showed up and told me that we have an important stone in our family for generations and that stone should go to Dr. Groff. So she actually brought it. She was holding a beautiful, beautiful blue velvet bag and opened it and it was a fossil nautilus, the ammonite, you know, which are the ancestors of 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 got during the creation of Himalayas, got to the top of Mount Everest. Now, what is interesting about this that when I started transpersonal psychology, International Association of Transpersonal Psychology and a series of”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Jung hesitated 20 years before he presented it in 1951 in one of the Aranos conferences. And it was presented together with a talk by Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics, who was the first young patient and then very close friend. Let me just quickly give you another example, which is the most mind-blowing synchronicity from my life. This happened during our first trip to China where we were bringing trans personal psychology and holotropic breastwork to China. And we did a workshop, a holotropic breastwork workshop in Jinan, which is the birthplace of Confucius. And we were having dinner and one of the participants came to me and said, Stan, I had an experience about you in my dream last night. And I said, what was it?”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, anyway, so that's historic. So, you know, it's possible to imagine that somehow praying mentis got into Manhattan. Somebody has it as a pet or whatever, and it got to that place. But that in itself is not very probable happening. But the fact that it's happened in such a way that at the time when Joe's head was filled with thoughts about praying mentis and so on, and he had this irrational impulse to go and open the window that he never opened and he looks out and there is right there is a praying mentis and actually turns toward him and gives him a me got what he felt was meaningful look that's pretty mind blowing synchronicity”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then sat in the middle of this work, I suddenly had this totally irrational impulse to go and open one of the windows that we never open. And I stuck my head out and turned automatically to the side. And there on the 14th floor of high-rise building on Manhattan, there was a great specimen of a praying mentis sort of climbing up the building and turned his head toward Joe and he said, I took a close look and the way Vender Post described it was true. There was something that made the pregnantist look like a bushman.”
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 said, at the time I was working on the first volume of what was supposed to be world mythology. And it's called The Way of the Animal Powers. And that first volume is about shamanic mythologies of the world. And then Joe said, and I was working on the chapter about Kalahari Bushman, you know, living in the Kalahari desert. And he said, in their mythology, a major... And so my desk was covered with papers and pictures related to the mentis and the Kalahari bushmen. And there was Lauren van der Post's book about his childhood when he had a bushman Nanny. And Lauren van der Pose described how this nanny seemed to be communicating with the praying mentists, that they were having sort of conversations. with the movements, the praying mentis seemed to be responding to him, to her.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he first gave this official definition of Jung's, you know, this is a meaningful connection across time or space between an intrapsychic event and something that happened in the material world. But he says, I will give you an example. He said, you know, we were living in downtown Manhattan on the 14th floor of a high-rise building. And my office had two sets of windows. One was overlooking Sixth Avenue, which was nothing interesting like many streets in Manhattan. But the other set was overlooking the Hudson River. And that was a beautiful view. So these two windows were open all the time. The others were open just for cleaning. Nobody was bothered to open those windows.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Major examples from that book. I am referring to the experience that I had with Joseph Campbell again, great, great mythologist, greatest mythologist of the 20th century probably of all time. And he used to come regularly to Esselen and do workshop and even to our workshop, months-long workshops and so on. And we were doing some workshops with him. And in one of these workshops, he was talking about Jung. He was a great supporter and very enthusiastic about Jung. And he mentioned synchronicity. And somebody didn't understand it and said, Joe, could you explain what synchronicity is?”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this works in Western Metrics Science with the exception of the cause of causes, what caused the beginning of the universe. We don't go there very frequently because we don't have any good answers for that. Now, what he showed up, that there are situations where there's a meaningful correlation or connection between something that's an intra-psychic event, like a dream or a vision or a psychedelic experience, and something that happens in material universe or what we call so-called objective reality consensus 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. So let me just give you a couple of...”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, synchronicity is something that Carl Gustav Jung brought into the attention of Western scientists after hesitating for 20 years, collecting for 20 years observations, because he realized this is undermining the cornerstone of materialistic science, where the basic principle is linear causality, what we experience is a chain of linear causality. Everything that happens has a cause and has an effect.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“synchronicities that I have experienced in my life. And some of the synchronicities were actually related to Muktananda. So there are two chapters of it describing what happened between us and Muktananda.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Team, what happened to us that our house in Mill Valley burned down in 2001 and I lost my whole referential library. So it was difficult to write books like I used to where you have to refer to people's work and take passages of it and so on. And so I decided to write a biography. But my life has been pretty intense, pretty rich. So the question was, you know, what do I select? And then I decided to select observations and experiences from my life that current materialistic science would be impossible. This is not possible if the materialistic paradigm is accurate. So I selected them. So it's a selected selection of these stories. And about one-third of this is dedicated to”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the interesting question, what is the common denominator between experiences that people have with LSD, this strange substance that Swiss chemists discovered in Switzerland, and something that was found written on the rock in Srinagar in the 8th century? And so then we started sort of going to these intensives whenever we were needed to Muktananda. And then we actually did a large transpersonal conference in Bombay or Mumbai. This was 1982, which was on ancient wisdom and modern science, bringing together spiritual teachers and people from the new paradigm circles like Fridge of Capra and others. So that was our history.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is kind of a Mahayana branch of Buddhism that started in Kashmir in the 8th century had a vision of some rocks near Srinagar, and he went there and exposed some cover of vegetable cover and there were inscriptions carved in the rock that became then the Shiva Sutras. This was like the Bible of Kashmir Shaivism. So he said, come, this is not Kashmir Shaivism. He looked at me and says, this will be very important, very interesting for you. And so, of course we did. And when I listened to the Swami who started describing what Kashmir Shaivism was, I had the feeling that he was stealing, you know, Sentences and paragraphs from an article which I had written, I think, 1969, which was called Psychedic Ontology and Cosmology Observations from LSD Sessions.”
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 had this long interview where I actually asked him about Soma, which I was fascinated by. This is the psychedelic plan that was used in ancient India and was described in Rigveda, but over hundred stanzas in Rigveda are dedicated to Soma. It was a plant and there was a beverage that was produced and some of the descriptions show that those were powerful psychedelic. Half of us is on earth, half of us in heaven, we have taken Soma. So we knew that there was a powerful psychedelic, but the secret was lost. And so I asked him and he said, oh yeah, you know, on my birthday, the Vedic priests come down to Ganesh Puri and they do a Soma ceremony. Can come as my guests. I will introduce you. And then he died before we could actually do it So to make a long story short, then we were walking out of his room and standing at the door and”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 describing my experiences with Shiva and the fact that this was a very important figure. And the first thing that he says, you know, I can tell you I've seen Shiva.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a very highly experiential group. And so this changed suddenly my attitude to this interview. And I walked in and he was sitting there, you know, with a red ski cap, with dark glasses, holding a wand of peacock feathers, sent it with sentil oil, as it was called Lungi, which looked like a night shirt. And he sort of beckoned me to come, you sit here, shared just by him. And he turned my head and was sort of took off or sort of shifted up his dark glasses, which he very seldom did. And he looked into my eyes like he was an ophthalmologist, you know. And the first thing...”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was very interesting. I was very reluctant to go. I was not a guru person. I was not sort of somebody who would be the feet of somebody. I had the feeling that ultimately it was between me and the cosmos and so on. But we had about 20 minutes waiting for that darshan. And at that point she told me that he was a Shaivite. She's a follower of Shiva. And I had some of my most powerful experiences in my sessions with the archetype of Shiva in sort of various ways. And this sort of changed my feeling about this to be interesting to find somebody. I knew that Shivites are using all kinds of means, including Bang, you know, Hashish and so on. And also Datura.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it became kind of quite important figure in our lives. I met him first about 1965 when he was on his second tour around the world. He was the head of the Siddha Yoga movement during the first trip around the world he was actually accompanied by Ramdas and by Werner Earhart. And again, my late wife Christina came to one of his early sessions, he came to Onolu and she became a devotee of his. And so when we connected, she wanted me to meet Muktananda and arrange this darshan with him in Oakland. And I described this experience and some later experience again in a couple of chapters in the book When the Impossible Happens.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Completely out of context. They would not know what to do. Difficulties to integrate it and become a kind of very likely alien enclave 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 and he would do the sessions in a proper set and setting the context in some kind of a reverential attitude and would do then afterwards after the sessions some reading and continue working on it in meditation, this could become really a powerful catalyst of spiritual journey. And I think that's the correct answer.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you look at the subjective experiences of people who had them through LSD or psilocybine, and you compare it with what you read about in spiritual literature. So that's phenomenologically indistinguishable. But he said, but the value would be very different depending on the sentence and setting. He said if Let's say you have a situation there is a party in Berkeley and the way it was done and there would be a fruit punch and a joker comes with a handful of sugar cubes laced with LSD. People think they are drinking punch and 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”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then this is, I'm back now to Euston Smith. Euston Smith, unlike Meher Baba, Alzainer, had actually experiences. He came to And he said the chemically induced mystical expenses are phenomenologically indistinguishable. This was already shown in Panky's Good Friday experiment in the Marsh Chapel, the Bosnian University. Very famous experiment.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this will put it sort of in the court of spiritual teachers to say, are these valuable or not? And there was disagreement. All the Tibetans, for example, that I have known and actually been around some of them when they had sessions, they all valued it very much as something that is accelerating your spiritual development, but just caution that this is very powerful, that this has to be done very, very carefully. On the other hand, Zen Buddhists usually had difficult experiences with psychedelics because you are not supposed to pay attention to what's happening. It's called Makio. It's just your past life experiences, you're supposed to sit through it and cut into no mind place. Very difficult to have 300 micrograms and not to pay attention to what is, you just cut through it, to no mind place.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or it has to come as a grace. There's no way you can take a pill and experience God. So people like Mehar Baba and so on, they know very, very negative guy called Zer in a British theologian 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
“Chemicals that can induce 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 native cultures took who were using psychedelic plants like Teonana cattle, you know, the flesh of the gods and so on, the plants either were deities or they mediated access to deities. There was this position also, the third position was 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 prayers, of meditation.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something that Euston Smith said, which was very interesting. There was this whole discussion about incent or chemical mysticism when we saw in the early LSD sessions that people had mystical experiences. Then this whole question of chemical mysticism, what is it? What are we watching? And there was one group of people who was the sort of hardcore materialistic scientist. He says, well, here you have it. What is the mystics thing are some kind of deep insights into ontology and cosmology? It's nothing else but aberrations of body chemistry. So so much for mysticism, so much for spirituality. It's all chemistry. And there was another group that was saying, no, what is happening? There is a very special group of chemistry.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Forbidden police made sure this is the worst possible set and setting. So you increase tremendously the risk of these experiences and you reduce the potential. So that's important. So if you come with an intention, the self-exploration healing, for me, for my first LSD session, it became a spiritual quest. Every one of my experiences I had about maybe 140 IDOs psychedelic sessions over the years, it might seem like a lot, but it's extended over a period of 60 years. So if you look at it that much, it's not that much. So that is extremely important. What is your intention? Is this serious intention or self-exploration, self-healing? Is it part of your spiritual quest? Or are you doing it for kicks? Because it's sort of funny, weird experience. There's also...”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, then an extremely significant is the concept of set and setting. That means who gives it to whom under what circumstances for what purpose. That makes a big difference. I have seen people who have taken LSD 100 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 things were floating around. People were making funny faces. Like a curious kind of interesting experience, but they had no idea that the way they perceived the environment is actually a result of the projection from their own unconscious. So the one major difference is, do you keep your eyes open and walk around, let alone driving cars, what people have been doing and so on, or doing it in raves where it's an open place where people don't know what they are taking and the police, they know they do something.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Joseph Campbell, let me just one sentence which I cannot resist. Joseph Campbell, you know, the wonderful mythologist with this incredible Irish humor, he put it differently. He said Freud was fishing while sitting on a whale.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Psyche was, it's just surface, like the part of the iceberg that's showing above the surface. And psychoanalysis shows you also the submerged part of the iceberg. Now, if you now bring psychedelics For psychoanalysts, and there is this enormous part of the psyche that remained hidden even for traditional psychoanalysis.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT