Psyche Unbound

This volume is a series of essays honouring the 90^th birthday and life work of Stanislav Grof. They make a good case for including Stan in the lineage of path-breaking figures like Freud, Jung and Maslow given the range and depth of his work that has exerted a huge influence on transpersonal psychology in developing ‘a new, expansive cartography of the mind that welcomes spiritual experience with openness, rigour, and reverence.’ The contents are divided into three sections: early witnesses and allies, including Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith; psychotherapy and consciousness research; and comparative and theoretical studies. Together, these twenty-two essays illuminate the significance of Stan’s work (his lecture at the inaugural Beyond the Brain conference in Cambridge in 1995 is still used in Alef Trust MSc presentations, and indeed the very title of the conference comes from one of his books).

The editors provide some essential biographical background, where we learn that his mother was a classical pianist and painter, and that he was imprisoned for several months in 1949 at the age 17 for possessing a leaflet calling for democratic elections. His initial involvement with LSD research was serendipitous, but his work led him to ‘recognise LSD as serving a role in consciousness research comparable to that of the microscope in biology and medicine or the telescope in astronomy.’ He also encountered an innate healing intelligence and developed a profound understanding of the powerful archetypes involved in the birth process in terms of Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs), as explained by a number of contributors.

Campbell and Smith were early enthusiasts for Stan’s work, realising how it developed Huxley’s idea of Mind at Large on an empirical basis, providing a big picture metaphysics missing from modern philosophy, which has led to a sense of existential vacuum. Rather than humans ‘as social animals governed by blind and irrational instinctual forces’, he found that ‘man in his innermost nature appears then as a being that is fundamentally in harmony with his environment and is governed by intrinsic high and universal values.’ (p. 41) I need hardly stress how important such insights are for our time and our engagement with the polarities and depth of life. As Rick Tarnas and others propose, this involves encounters with cosmic, archetypal and planetary forces – Stan’s month-long seminars at Esalen became legendary meeting places, as described by Fritjof Capra and others. Rick and Stan worked closely at Esalen, and came to realise the significance of a further dimension – planetary correlations with extraordinary states of consciousness and their correlations with different phases of BPMs and ‘systems of condensed experience’ (p. 101) This leads to an expanded cartography of the psyche ‘allowing us to connect the symbolic language of the psyche with the symbolic language of the cosmos.’ (p. 116)

The second section contains essays on transcendent sexual experience, transformative rituals, the use of breathwork in integrated treatment of mood disorders, and even in social transformation involving social, cultural, and political leaders. In this respect, Will Keepin reports that holotropic breathwork reconnects people to their higher purpose, vision, creativity and goals while awakening a deeper awareness and clearing out emotional baggage; it also opens up other ways of knowing and shifts values towards ‘more compassionate, humanitarian perspectives.’ This is consistent with Chris Bache suggesting in a recent webinar that world leaders should undergo an LSD retreat as fast track way of transforming their consciousness… Chris himself contributes some important reflections on death and rebirth in his own profound experience of LSD therapy and cycles of purification.

The third section features a number of contextual comparisons, including with William James, CG Jung and, perhaps less immediately apparent, AN Whitehead, whose process philosophy and panexperientialism turns out to be a good matching cosmological framework – both men probed the limits of modern materialistic thought within an evolutionary philosophy. It is intriguing to find comparisons between Stan’s perinatal matrices and the Samkhya Gunas as well as reflections on Sartre’s encounter with mescaline. Jorge Ferrer brings us back to metaphysical questions with his essay on a participatory perspective challenging the perennial framework that prioritises the status of the non-duality. This is still an area of major debate, although Jorge makes a good case for his own view and the importance of cultural embeddedness in terms of what we actually enact: ultimates differ according to traditions, although I did wonder if Jorge is privileging the immanent over the transcendent, when both are essential. I myself sympathise with Stan’s contention that divine consciousness ‘is identical in essence to human individual consciousness’ if we can come to this (gnostic) realisation, although without discounting the different ways in which the ultimate mystery can be disclosed. All in all, this is a landmark volume pointing towards the evolutionary imperative embodied in the psychospiritual process of birth, death, and transformation.