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

“It didn't go deep enough, so you ended up with very unconvincing interpretations. But I have tried in my books to continue and see how you would understand in a much deeper way why do we have these things, why do we have depression, different types of depression, suicidal tendencies? Why do we have symptoms like a headache and many neurotic patients have problems breathing and so on? Where does that come from? Why do we end up with psychosomatic pains for which there is no organic 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.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The causes. Why do we have that? So Freud had the concept of the development of the libido, the oral phase when the sensual feelings are associated with nursing and the passive oral and then the active oral when the infant starts biting his teeth and so on. And then it moved to the anal phase, the timetable of toilet training, and then refined toilet training which had to do with urination that was the urethra stage and then he talked about the phallic stage which was the stage where the focus is on the genitals and the glitteris in girls and the penis of the boys and where you have the edible complex and the castration complex and all those things which was very very interesting way of thinking but”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“until they ended up with the psychoanalytic understanding of emotional and psychosomatic disorders you find in Otto Fenneckel's book the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis so we need to continue that kind of work this would be something for psychoanalysts to do to continue Freud's exploration of the psyche trying to understand the psyche understand why we have symptoms and syndromes but not keeping it just on the postnatal level”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“20th century dementia precox, which was the original name for schizophrenia and manic depressive disorder. Those were the first two diagnoses in psychiatry. And what he did, he just simply described the symptoms that these patients have. And now the tendency in psychiatry is to go to the neocrapellian, like in the DSM you don't ask the question, why do we have depression? Why do we have suicidal tendencies? Why do we have different psychosomatic disorders? It's just simply describing the symptoms. And I think there is tremendous field of discovery which would be doing individual cases, like initially in psychoanalysis you had, I think about 1,500 psychoanalysts all over the world who were seeing their patients and they were describing what they observed. And it was published in journals 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
“I would use now the smaller dosages if we continue the exploration of the psyche. That's where lower dosages are certainly very useful. And I'm very sorry that this is not happening with psychedelics in this new Renaissance, that we don't continue the Freudian where we are trying to go to find what the roots are, trying to understand the etiology. Now in this later DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual they moved completely from any question of etiology. They use what they call neocrepellion approachin was the person who did the first diagnosis in psychiatry at the turn of the 19th century.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I would probably use now dosages like 300 or even 400 micrograms, which might be in some instances not very frequently might be a challenge management 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 resist it if there are areas that they don't want to go into. So I consider the high dosages, if it's proper management to be more effective therapeutically.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suicidal jumps from Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge, he found that people who survived it, which is about 1%, they usually survived it unscathed and they experienced powerful transformation within the three seconds that it took to get from the railing to the surface of the water. And then maybe about eight minutes in cold water before they were rescued. Again, powerful, powerful changes that you wouldn't achieve by years of psychoanalysis, but there was no understanding what happened. Now, with this history of the psycholytic therapy, I have now some idea about what happening in these high-dose sessions, but in a very condensed, very rapid way.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They look around the treatment room, and sometimes the feeling that they are on the death row, sometimes cabin in the Pacific, sometimes it was Bordello and so on. So, I got a good understanding of the dynamics of the postnatal biography, but I also found out that it was not the most effective way of getting therapy results. So then already in Prague, I increased the dosages, I started using music and the headphones, eye shades. And this is how we did the whole research at Spring Grove, the American research when I came to the United States. There you can very, very powerful transformation within six, eight hours of the high dose. But you don't have any idea why that happened. You don't understand the mechanism of the change. It resembles the material that John Rosen described when he studied the experiences of people who did”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't do psychic therapy, although I very much value the information that I got from it, you know, the self-healing intelligence of the psyche, the coexist systems, and just discovery of the dimensions that are on that expanded map being taken to the perinatal level and then to the transpersonal level. I also have a lot of interesting observations. If you reads of the human unconscious, a lot of it is about trying to understand how and why the world is changing under the influence of LSD or some other psychedelics. I became fascinated, you know, the people saw me at different periods of their session as 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.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simple means which is faster breathing, some powerful evocative music, a certain kind of bodywork, and then we also use art, we use mandala drawing and sharing groups. And people have access to not just to the postnatal biographical level, but also to the perinatal and to the transpersonal level. So there are both pharmacological and non-pharmacological ways of accessing these levels that have the deepest roots of emotional and psychosomatic problems.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are talking about psychedelics. So one would be psychedelic assisted psychotherapy when people would have sessions and then you would use talking, helping them to integrate, helping them to understand. So there would be focus in the therapy would be on the experience, but also it would be 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 different levels of experiences and so on. So my late wife, Christina, and I developed what we call holotropic breathwork where you use very”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Level and the transpersonal level, you can continue this psychoanalytic work actually and get 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 a new radically different approach to psychotherapy, which would have to be experiential if the roots of emotional problems are not just postnatal but also perinatal and transpersonal you cannot reach it by talking you would have to actually use experiential psychotherapy of the kind that started in the 60s developed within humanistic humanistic psychology”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To move away completely and not ask the questions about etiology. Freud's genius was trying to understand why do we have certain kinds of symptoms? Why do we have anxiety? Why do we have depression? Why do we have suicidal tendencies and so on and was looking for rational understanding for this? But he took it only not even halfway. Had he had access to the perinatal level, he would have gotten much more convincing understanding. Why do we have depression, different forms of depression? What does it mean when people want to kill themselves in a way that is non-violent as compared to people who have the tendency to commit violence suicide and so on? So if you expand the cartography and you add the perinatal”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, the problem is that psychoanalysis has this very narrow map limited to postnatal biography and to the individual unconscious, which is just barely scratching the surface of what the psyche really is. So if you would do psychoanalysis, So it's not the question of the technique. I think in my understanding, Freud was actually on the right track. He was asking questions like, why do we have hysteria? Why do we have phobias? Why do we have 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 perinatal level, to the transpersonal level. So he ended up with conclusions that then sometimes seemed absurd, you know, like suicide is killing the interjected bad breast of your mother and so on. And then there was a tendency just”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Related to birth, it's a record of birth, and then it opened up further into the level that I call transpersonal now. And there's a greater overlap with what Jung described as the collective unconscious, the historical and the 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 not for centuries, but for millennia. I started seeing the connection to the great spiritual philosophies of the East, of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, and so on. And even the shamanic maps, there was a lot of overlapping with the shamanic cartography. So, I haven't forgotten your original question, but psychoanalysis,”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, just a couple of sentences. So the new map which I created, which I thought was new, had the biographical level, which it shared with psychoanalysis and current psychiatry because however much Freud was criticized, the psychiatry accepted his idea that the newborn is a tabula raza, is a clean slate. There's nothing of interest for psychologists, psychiatrists that precedes Beres. And this was a major discovery. There is a powerful, powerful record of birth. And when you become aware of that fact, you have to radically change, transform thinking in psychiatry. So this new map or map that I thought was new had the biographical level that it shared with current psychiatry. But then I had to add the level which I called perinatal, which is”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Putting it on a map, creating what I thought was a new map for psychology, which would be the result of the fact that we had absolutely new tool like microscope opened up this whole underworld, or micro world which we didn't know existed and telescopes discovered new galaxies that the astronomers didn't know about. I felt we were discovering the depth of the psyche. So in that sense, it was like a microscope or a telescope, but it also was the self-healing intelligence that sort of emerged out of it.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My 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 what we activated actually in the psyche was what I call now self-healing intelligence of the psyche. You see, the process spontaneously was taking us to the sources of these emotional and psychosomatic symptoms. It also created automatically a mapping of the psyche. So for a while I was just collecting these reports from the patient, my own records and people's descriptions of their sessions.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exploring the different layers of the psyche. One of my patients call it union 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 didn't stop there. Then each of those coexistence also had a contribution from the trauma of birth. 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 that they are trapped, they are caught, they are in a situation of no exit. They had the feeling they're getting crazy. They are dying and so on. And my psychiatry and my”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From Lisis 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 a layer after layer, then I came up with the concept of coexistence, system of condensed experience, where each symptom had like a history, has a series of layered experiences behind it. And so it was a process of”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Polland, 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.”
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 this is my experience with methoxyDMT. 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.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 60s and so on sitting for six hours with their patients. But they could certainly do a one-hour session with the Methox CDMT. And I think significant therapy could be done within these very short terms. It's also, according to Ralph Metzner's observations, it's a substance where the experience ends very clearly. There is no sort of linearing on. So there is a very powerful experience, but also a good closure.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this was the time when I was handwriting 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, the consciousness of the industrial civilization came back. We had to do workshops, travel. So I didn't stay in that state, but my meditations became much, much deeper. And it was not difficult to get into some version of the”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Life into dying, but from a place beyond death into dying body. And then after a while it became clear that this was not really dying. It was just the experience of dying. And for quite a while, I was in a situation where I was in an absolutely blissful kind of state. And I was having visions of streams of my past life experiences where I had feeling of dying and being killed in different situations. My body was kind of acting out in agony that was shaking, twitching by psychologically, emotionally I was in absolute bliss. And then coming down for a week, I was in a state in which I would like to live. We were at the time living at SLN. We had a deck overlooking the ocean.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And within seconds, you know, it took me out of my body. There was nothing biographical, no birth experiences, no, nothing archetypal. I was just facing this incredible source of light for the lack of a better description. It was like beyond anything I could imagine in terms of the brilliance, the incandescence that it had, but also sense that there was incredible intelligence, creative intelligence was going beyond any dichotomies, I couldn't say, for demonic or divine. There was just off the scales that I had. And then coming down from that experience, I actually had the feeling I was dying, but the feeling that I was not for”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Become a basis of scientific research. Now, what is fantastic there is that this substance creates a very short, within an hour, which is within the time of one psychoanalytic session, you can experience significant transformation, even spiritual opening. The substance is methoxy, DMT. I have in my book When the Impossible Happens, a chapter which is called The Secret of the Toad of Lightes in the American Southwest that are actually using it as a sacrament, church of the toad of light. It's more than is usually used. First time when we really didn't know, I didn't know the dosing. And it was estimated 25 milligrams. Today you would use like 5 or 10. And this was by far the most powerful psychiatric experience I've ever had.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the thing is, it has not really been explored scientifically, unlike psilocybin or LSD. But we have enormous amount of information from either semi-legal or illegal underground experiments, which were happening during those years when psychedelics were not really explored scientifically. But we have an amazing book by Ralph Metzner, which is called The Toad and the Jaguar. Ralph traveled all over Europe and in the United States visiting these groups that were using it, either using some legal loopholes or doing a kind of an underground research. And he wrote this book where he collected that information in a way that could”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experience having a spiritual experience. And of course we have now modern technologies of the sacred to induce holotropic experiences. We have now pure alkaloids from the psychedelic plants. We have escalene from Peote. We have silocene and psilocybine from the magic mushrooms of the Mazatex. We have now the Ibogain from Eboga from the African bush and so on. And we also have now the tryptomine derivatives DMT DPT and then methoxy DMT. Those are active in ayahuasca and in the different snuffs from the Caribbean. And also from this toad that's now becoming very famous, Bufor Alvarius, these are secretions from the parotid glands and from the skin of these toads. Very, very powerful, very important psychedelics.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So all these were inducing this holotropic states for healing and transformation. And then also all the major religions developed what I call technologies of the sacred, you know, different forms of yoga, different schools of Buddhism from Theravada to Zen and Vajrayana Taoist exercises in the Christian tradition, Hesychasm, the Jesus Prayer, or the exercises of Ignatius, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the various Kabbalistic exercises. So those were all methods that were designed to take people into this holotropic experiences for the purpose of having a”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Psychedelic plans or psychedelic materialists in some others using sonic technology, drumming, rattling and so on, physical pain, stay in the desert, stay in the high mountains, stay in 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 initiatory journey. Now the third important category, the ancient mysteries of death rebirth, like the Eleusinian mysteries or the Isis, Osiris mysteries in Egypt or the Sumerian mysteries of Inanna and Dumuzi. And also they were Mesoamerican mysteries of Shibalba, the Mayan, 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
“Managed to come back and they ground the session, they use holotropic states in their healing. When they heal, they either go into an unordinist state or they induce them in their clients or both shamans and clients get into this holotropic state. So that's a major category. The second one is what you see in so-called rites of passage. This is the term that was coined by Dutch anthropologists Arnold von Henneb that's G-E-N-E-P, who studied many native cultures and he found out that they all at the time of important biological or social transitions perform very powerful rituals when they also induce these holotropic states in different ways. Many of those cultures even with”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one category when you would 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 underworld first. They have the experience of being exposed to some ordeals. experience a lot of emotional physical pain and they experience annihilation and then experience of psychospiritual death rebirth that's followed by this journey into the supernal realms and in this initiatory journey they heal themselves typically anthropologists called shamans the wounded healers and they also learn how to heal so when they then”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 are using only a small fraction of our experiential potential when we are in the ordinary states. So maybe I just give a few examples of holotropic states so people have a sense what I'm talking about.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The moon are from space. So this is my term that I coined because I realize psychiatry does not have that kind of distinction. So I coined it myself. It's kind of a verbal hybrid. It's a neologism, as we call it, that comes from the Greek language, where holos means whole and trepotrapan means moving in the direction of something. I usually refer to the word heliotropism. Helios means sun and heliotropism is the property of plants to always orient themselves towards the sun, always follow the sun. So literally this means moving toward wholeness. You know, when I used that term, there's usually somebody who say, what do you mean move?”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 what we call heuristic H-E-U-R, which means when you work with these states, you run into a lot of paradigm breaking.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. It's a great, great question. Well, I have so far been, or we have been using the term non-ordinary states of consciousness, which is better than what psychiatrists, British and American psychiatrists are doing, calling it altered state. I really dislike that term, although it was coined by a good friend of mine, Charlie Tart, because it suggests somehow that there is a correct way of experiencing ourselves and the world. And that somehow disturbed. You know, I always have to think about veterinary medicine. We had our dog altered. So I feel too much respect for these days to call them altered. And even the state non-ordinary is really not accurate because there are many non-ordinary states that have not the properties that the holotropic states would have. So I use that term holotropic.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quantum relativistic physics. For example, Stuart Hammerov initially thought that maybe it's the so-called tubules in the mitochondria in the brain that might be the place where quantum processes generate consciousness. And then later he sort of took it back and he says now, according to him, consciousness is simply a property of the universe that can be traced back to the big bank in the form of proto-consciousness.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he moves to that consciousness is more transpersonal that in the non-ordinary states you can have experiences of consciousness of other people. You can have experiences of becoming members of a different species. And not just animals, but also plants and so on. So he moves from that consciousness being local to consciousness being transpersonal. And then he brings even arguments against that and concludes that consciousness is cosmic. And that would be my present understanding. Consciousness is simply a part of, integral part of existence. It cannot be reduced to anything as let alone the neurons in the brain.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you'd like to describe? Well, you know, I'm very close now to Irvin Laszlo, who is this brilliant systems theorist and philosophers of Hungarian origin, but living in Pisa in Italy. And he has a series of books where he isn't really addressing these problems. He's the only one that I think found some way of scientifically describing what is happening to us. And he has a book called What Is Reality, where he actually goes through these different experiments that we have related to consciousness and argues, you know, what are the observations that we have against the idea that consciousness is local, that is inside of our brain.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right there, I decided if I'm a psychiatrist, this is by far the most interesting thing I can do working with these states. It just overshadowed psychoanalysis, like, you know, I was not interested, psychoanalysis anymore. I was interested in exploring the psyche using these states.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have names, but then later I read about the Big Bang and the black holes and the wormholes. And so this was something in that category that was happening to me. I actually had the feeling again that I was not only in the universe, but I actually was the universe. And then as she turned it off, then my world started shrinking again. I found the planet, I found Prague, I zoomed in on my body. But there was a major problem because my consciousness was actually kind of circling around my body and I had difficulties aligning my consciousness with my body. So at that point it became clear to me that what they were teaching it Universities about consciousness as a product of the brain simply was nonsense. Consciousness was something cosmic and that the brain somehow is a moderator for that, but it's not generated in our skull.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“characteristics so you can have the feeling that you became nothing but by becoming nothing you actually became of existence so I was in this incredible state and then as she was continuing working with me it was unfolding she had a protocol so she started from two hertz which is you know two frequencies per second took it up to 60 and then she kept it for a while in the alpha range and the theta range the delta range and then she turned it off and why she was doing this at a certain point i actually went from this sense of being everything of being in the universe in the astronomical universe or actually being the universe there were things happening for which at the time i didn't”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you start trying to describe them, you find out that we just simply don't have language. Our language is developed to communicate about things from everyday life. And in my later experiments, some of the sophisticated patients actually tried to use language from cultures that knew something about consciousness, like using Hinduism, from Tibetan Buddhism, from Taoism. So they were talking about Nirvi Kalpa Samad, Histami Kalpa Samadhi, Kensho, Satori, using terms like Maya and so on, because we simply don't have technical terms for these states. So these experiences of mystical states are full of paradoxes. Paradoxically, it is one of the...”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only concept there was this is what it must have been like in Hiroshima where the thing went off. Today I think it was more like Dharmakayade, the primary clear light from Bardo Toddle from the Tibetan Book of the Dead that we see at the moment of our death. But what happened is my consciousness was catapulted out of my body. I lost the research assistant. I lost Prague. I lost the planet. And I had the feeling that I actually extinguished in the form that I knew myself. But also the sense that I somehow became everything there was. I became all of existence. As you know, you must have heard it quite a few times that these states are considered ineffable.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or train the brainwave. So the condition for us having the session with him, we had to agree that we would have EEG before, during and after, and that we also will have our brainwaves driven in all those sessions. So what happened that between the third and the fourth hour when the session usually culminated, Dr. Robicek's assistant came and she said it's time to drive the brain waves. So she took me to a little room. I laid down, she pasted all these 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.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was exposing people to a very powerful stroposcopic light and finding out if the brainwaves in the suboccipital area, which is the visual cortex, if the brain waves will pick up that frequency, if you can drive the...”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was actually 100 micrograms. It was on the 13th of November 1956. So I was from 56 I was sitting for people. But it was a little more complicated because my preceptor, whom I mentioned earlier, he was very interested in electroencephalography. And at the time when LSD came, he was the one who received it from Sandos. So at the time when it came, he was interested in something that's called driving the brain waves and training the brainwaves, which means”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because if you do pharmacology, you have to have some idea what you are getting. If you give people apomorphine, you expect that a lot of them will be vomiting, if you give them a hypnotic, you expect them to sleep. Whereas here we had no idea what would happen. So I realized we were doing something much more interesting. We had a catalyst that 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 psychoanalysis didn't know anything about. And so at that point, I just lost completely interest in this laboratory approach. And I took it to clinical work. And I started giving to my patients. In a psychotherapeutic context”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And each of those people would have different experiences to the point that some of them called it like the moments that they get between the tests. It was like self-analysis, like drug assisted psychotherapy, others were just unpleasant physical symptoms. Some of them had paranoid episodes or became hypomanic. And for some of them, it was that they even under those circumstances that got glimpses of ecstatic states that were very mystical. And the same intra-individual variability, if we took the same substance at different times, this phenomenology was completely different. And at that point, I realized this was not psychopharmacology. We were not doing pharmacology.”
2018-11-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT