Stanislav Grof quotes:

A text of Tibetan Buddhism describes the time of death as a unique opportunity for spiritual liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth and a period that determines our next incarnation.

I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.

Unlike scientism, science in the true sense of the word is open to unbiased investigation of any existing phenomena.

Individuals approaching death often experience encounters with their dead relatives, who seem to welcome them to the next world. These deathbed visions are authentic and convincing; they are often followed by a state of euphoria and seem to ease the transition.

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.

Dying people in pre-industrial cultures typically died in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe.

Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.

Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.

The beliefs concerning reincarnation have great ethical impact on human life and our relationship to the world.

Walt Disney was my great hero.

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.

The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual's way of being in the world.

Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs.

The knowledge of the realm of death makes it possible for the shaman to move freely back and forth and mediate these journeys for other people.

According to materialistic science, any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of the genes.

The study of consciousness that can extend beyond the body is extremely important for the issue of survival, since it is this part of human personality that would be likely to survive death.

An important consequence of freeing oneself from the fear of death is a radical opening to spirituality of a universal and non-denominational type.

The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death.

I have to say I regretted giving up animated movies.

Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior.

Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious.

For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life.

Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness.

In the kind of world we have today, transformation of humanity might well be our only real hope for survival.

A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know.

The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped.

Consciousness after death demonstrates the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body.

There are people who can start having very powerful experiences without taking psychedelics. It can happen against their will. This is a universal phenomenon.

Research challenges the materialistic understanding of death, according to which biological death represents the final end of existence and of all conscious activity.

If consciousness can function independently of the body during one's lifetime, it could be able to do the same after death.

In some instances, the accuracy of past-life memories can be objectively verified, sometimes with remarkable detail.

Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

The motif of death plays an important role the human psyche in connection with archetypal and karmic material.

As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions.

Many instances exist of small children who seem to remember and describe their previous life in another body, another place, and with other people. These memories emerge usually shortly after these children begin to talk.

Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth.

Western science is approaching a paradigm shift of unprecedented proportions, one that will change our concepts of reality and of human nature, bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and modern science, and reconcile the differences between Eastern spirituality and Western pragmatism.

LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry.

Spiritual intelligence is the capacity to conduct our life in such a way that it reflects deep philosophical and metaphysical understanding of reality and of ourselves discovered through personal experience during systematic spiritual pursuit.

A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm.

It is possible to transcend the usual limitations of the body, ego, space, and linear time.

Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality itself.

It is possible to spend one's entire lifetime without ever experiencing the mystical realms or even without being aware of their existence.

The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness.

When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.

This sense of perfection has a built-in contradiction, one that Ram Dass once captured very succinctly by a statement he had heard from his Himalayan guru: "The world is absolutely perfect, including your own dissatisfaction with it, and everything you are trying to do to change it.

The psyche of the individual is commensurate with the totality of creative energy. This requires a most radical revision of Western psychology.

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

In an effort to find an explanation, he or she might attribute the ominous feelings to poisons, electromagnetic radiation, evil forces, secret organizations, or even extraterrestrial influences. The spontaneous emergence of memories involving intrauterine disturbances or of the onset of the delivery from the womb, seems to be among important causes of paranoid states.

The experiences of BPM I typically have strong mystical overtones; they feel sacred or holy. More precise, perhaps, would be the term numinous, which C.G. Jung used to avoid religious jargon. When we have experiences of this kind, we feel that we have encountered dimnensions of reality that belong to a superior order.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

It became much more complicated politically to work with psychedelics because of the unsupervised experimentation with psychedelics, particularly among young people.

I believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in.

At a time when unbridled greed, malignant aggression, and existence of weapons of mass destruction threatens the survival of humanity, we should seriously consider any avenue that offers some hope.

The human psyche shows that each individual is an extension of all of existence.

It is possible to see the intermediate state between lives as being in a way more important than incarnate existence.

Patients reported that their psychedelic sessions were an invaluable experiential training for dying.

[B]y banning psychedelic research we have not only given up the study of an interesting drug or group of substances, but also abandoned one of the most promising approaches to the understanding of the human mind and consciousness.

He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.

I believe that used responsibly and in a mature way, the entheogens mediate access to the numinous dimensions of existence, have a great healing and transformative potential, and represent a very important tool for spiritual development.

I have taken part in ceremonies with North American and Mexican shamans, as well as Brazilian ceremonies.

It is essential that we raise the image of sex, which is currently seen as a purely biological affair and often portrayed in its worst manifestations, to that of a spiritually based activity.

LSD is a unique and powerful tool for the exploration of the human mind and human nature. Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have not yet been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry. They also reveal new possibilities and mechanisms of therapeutic change and personality transformation.

LSD was not a pharmacological agent generating exotic experiences by its interaction with the neurophysiological processes in the brain. This remarkable substance was clearly an unspecific catalyst of the deep dynamics of the human psyche. The experiences induced by it were not neurochemical artifacts, symptoms of a toxic psychosis as mainstream psychiatrists called it, but genuine manifestations of the human psyche itself.

Philemon explained how Jung treated thoughts as though they were generated by himself, while for Philemon thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air. Jung concluded that Philemon taught him psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. This helped Jung to understand that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend.

Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness.

The function of the brain is to reduce all the available information and lock us into a limited experience of the world. LSD frees us from this restriction and opens us to a much larger experience.

The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species.

These substances function as unspecific amplifiers that increase the energetic niveau in the psyche and make the deep unconscious dynamics available for conscious processing. This unique property of psychedelics makes it possible to study psychological undercurrents that govern our experiences and behaviors to a depth that cannot be matched by any other methods and tools available in modern mainstream science. In emotional and psychosomatic disorders, for positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.

This is an extraordinary book of unique psychological power. It reveals not only scholarship and sophistication of the author, but deep and intimate knowledge of the recesses of the human psyche. By masterful juxtaposition of evocative images, poetry, and selected quotes from scholars, Flesh and Blood seems to engage both the right and left hemispheres in an unprecedented dialogue. The result is a multi-dimensional, almost holographic picture of the primordial foundations of the human mind.

We are not just highly evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields of consciousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter, and linear causality.

We have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimension in the psyche. It's a legitimate dimension in the universal scheme of things. It doesn't mean that you are superstitious, that you are in to magical, primitive thinking, if you take spirituality seriously.

Whether or not LSD research and therapy will return to society, the discoveries that psychedelics made possible have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the psyche, human nature, and the nature of reality.