THE HOLOTROPIC MIND
The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives
Stanislav Grof, M.D.
with Hal Zina Bennett, Ph.D.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I: Challenging the Newtonian Universe
Breakthroughs to New Dimensions of Consciousness
Part II: The Perinatal Matrices—Influences That Shape Human Consciousness from Prenatal Life Through Birth Wholeness and the Amniotic Universe—BPM I
Expulsion from Paradise—BPM II
The Death-Rebirth Struggle—BPM III
The Death and Rebirth Experience—BPM IV
Part III: The Transpersonal Paradigm
An Overview of the Transpersonal Paradigm
Journeys Beyond Physical Boundaries
Across the Borders of Time
Beyond a Shared Reality
Experiences of a Psychoid Nature
Part IV: Implications for a New Psychology of Being
New Perspectives on Reality and Human Nature
Notes
Recommended Reading
Other Books by Stanislav Grof
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is based on experiences, observations, and insights from thirtyfive years of systematic exploration of the value of non-ordinary states of consciousness. During this time, I have received invaluable help and support from many people who have played important roles in my personal and professional life. I would like to use this opportunity to briefly acknowledge at least a few of them.
Joseph Campbell, who was for many years my dear friend as well as an important teacher, taught me much about the relevance of mythology for psychology, religion, and human life in general. His brilliant intellect, encyclopedic memory, and amazing capacity for creative synthesis brought unusual clarity into many areas that had been in the past misunderstood and confused by traditional science, religion, and philosophy.
Gregory Bateson, a "generalist" whose inquisitive mind explored many disciplines in search of knowledge, was the most original thinker I have known. I had the privilege of almost daily contact with him during the last two and a half years of his life when we both were Scholars-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. By his incisive critique of the errors and inadequacies of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, he helped me to trust my own findings, which were often in conflict with mainstream psychiatry and traditional Western science.
I have received inestimable additional encouragement and support of a similar kind from several of my physicist friends who have done important pioneering work exploring the philosophical implications of quantum-relativistic physics and who have made significant contributions to the new worldview emerging in Western science. I am particularly grateful for my long friendship and cooperation with Fritjof Capra, and I appreciate deeply what I have learned from Fred Wolf, Nick Herbert, David Peat, Saul-Paul Siraque, and others.
One of the most significant intellectual events of my life was the discovery of holography and of the holonomic thinking in science, which provided a conceptual framework for a variety of otherwise incomprehensible and puzzling findings of modern consciousness research. Here I feel deeply indebted to the genius of Denis Gabor for the discovery of the principles of optical holography, to David Bohm for his holographic model of the universe and the theory of holomovement, and to Karl Pribram for his holographic model of the brain.
I remember with great affection two dear friends, Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, the founders of humanistic psychology. They invited me in the late 1960s to participate in brainstorming sessions that gave birth to transpersonal psychology. The development of this new discipline, which brings together the ancient wisdom of the great spiritual systems of the world and the pragmatism of Western science, has become the passion of my life.
The work in the challenging and controversial field of transpersonal psychology and consciousness research would not have been possible without emotional and intellectual support of like-minded individuals. I have been extremely fortunate to have as my close personal friends many of the pioneers of the new thinking in psychology. These very special people have been for many years a source of encouragement and inspiration to me, to my wife, Christina, and to each other. My special thanks for this crucial role in our lives goes to Angeles Arrien, Michael and Sandy Harner, Jack and Liana Kornfield, John Perry, Ram Dass, June Singer, Rick and Heather Tarnas, Frances Vaughan, and Roger Walsh.
I reserve my deepest appreciation for the members of my immediate family to whom I have dedicated this book. My mother, Maria, and my brother, Paul, who is himself a psychiatrist and shares many of my interests, have been all through my life sources of great emotional and moral support. My wife, Christina, has been for the last sixteen years my most intimate friend, colleague, and fellow seeker. As we have shared many highs and lows of our joint life, I have learned to admire very much the courage and integrity she has shown during her stormy personal journey. Being an integral part of it has taught me many extraordinary and invaluable lessons that only life can provide.
In closing I would like to thank Harper San Francisco Publishers and particularly my editor Mark Salzwedel for making the publication of this book possible. Last, but not least, I feel deep gratitude to Hal Zina Bennett, who has brought to this project a rare combination of talents, including the writing skills and imagination of an accomplished author and an unusual understanding of non-ordinary states of consciousness. He helped me greatly to describe the findings of my research in simple and easily understandable language, making the information available to a
broad spectrum of readers. Thanks to Hal's unusual personal qualities, sharing the work on this project—a task that had its challenges and problems—has been very rewarding and brought us closer together.
Those whose contributions to this book were critical and essential have to remain anonymous. I feel great appreciation for thousands of people in Europe, North and South America, Australia, and Asia—clients, trainees, friends, and participants in workshops and various research projects—who have with extraordinary courage explored the depths and heights of their psyches and shared with me the results of their unconventional quest: without them this book could not have been written.
Stanislav Grof, M.D. Mill Valley, August 1991
I. CHALLENGING THE NEWTONIAN UNIVERSE
"The subject matter…is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are."
—Wallace Stevens
1. BREAKTHROUGHS TO NEW DIMENSIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
"There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul."
—Victor Hugo, "Fantine," Le Misèrables
Within the past three decades, modern science has presented us with new challenges and new discoveries that suggest human capabilities quite beyond anything we previously even imagined. In response to these challenges and discoveries, the collective efforts of researchers from every profession and discipline are providing us with a completely new picture of human existence, and most particularly of the nature of human consciousness.
Just as the world of Copernicus's time was turned upside down by his discovery that our Earth was not the center of the universe, so our newest revelations, from researchers all over the world, are forcing us to take a closer look at who we are physically, mentally, and spiritually. We are seeing the emergence of a new image of the psyche, and with it an extraordinary worldview that combines breakthroughs at the cutting edge
of science with the wisdom of the most ancient societies. As a result of the advances that are coming forth we are having to reassess literally all our viewpoints, just as with the response to Copernicus's discoveries nearly five hundred years ago.
The Universe as a Machine: Newton and Western Science
At the core of this dramatic shift in thought that has occurred in the course of the twentieth century is a complete overhaul of our understanding of the physical world. Prior to Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics we held a firm conviction that the universe was composed of solid matter. We believed that the basic building blocks of this material universe were atoms, which we perceived as compact and indestructible. The atoms existed in three-dimensional space and their movements followed certain fixed laws. Accordingly, matter evolved in an orderly way, moving from the past, through the present, into the future. Within this secure, deterministic viewpoint we saw the universe as a gigantic machine, and we were confident the day would come when we would discover all the rules governing this machine, so that we could accurately reconstruct everything that had happened in the past and predict everything that would happen in the future. Once we had discovered the rules, we would have mastery over all we beheld. Some even dreamed that we would one day be able to produce life by mixing appropriate chemicals in a test tube.
Within this image of the universe developed by Newtonian science, life, consciousness, human beings, and creative intelligence were seen as accidental by-products that evolved from a dazzling array of matter. As complex and fascinating as we might be, we humans were nevertheless seen as being essentially material objects—little more than highly developed animals or biological thinking machines. Our boundaries were defined by the surface of our skin, and consciousness was seen as nothing more than the product of that thinking organ known as the brain. Everything we thought and felt and knew was based on information that we collected with the aid of our sensory organs. Following the logic of this materialistic model, human consciousness, intelligence, ethics, art, religion, and science itself were seen as by-products of material processes that occur within the brain.
The belief that consciousness and all that it has produced had its origins in the brain was not, of course, entirely arbitrary. Countless clinical and experimental observations indicate close connections between consciousness and certain neurophysiological and pathological conditions such as infections, traumas, intoxications, tumors, or strokes. Clearly, these are typically associated with dramatic changes in consciousness. In the case of localized tumors of the brain, the impairment of function—loss of speech, loss of motor control, and so on—can be used to help us diagnose exactly where the brain damage has occurred.
These observations prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that our mental functions are linked to biological processes in our brains. However, this does not necessarily mean that consciousness originates in or is produced by our brains. This conclusion made by Western science is a metaphysical assumption rather than a scientific fact, and it is certainly possible to come up with other interpretations of the same data. To draw an analogy: A good television repair person can look at the particular distortion of the picture or sound of a television set and tell us exactly what is wrong with it and which parts must be replaced to make the set work properly again. No one would see this as proof that the set itself was responsible for the programs we see when we turn it on. Yet, this is precisely the kind of argument mechanistic science offers for "proof" that consciousness is produced by the brain.
Traditional science holds the belief that organic matter and life grew from the chemical ooze of the primeval ocean solely through the random interactions of atoms and molecules. Similarly, it is argued that matter was organized into living cells, and cells into complex multicellular organisms with central nervous systems, solely by accident and "natural selection." And somehow, along with these explanations, the assumption that consciousness is a by-product of material processes occurring in the brain has become one of the most important metaphysical tenets of the Western worldview.
As modern science discovers the profound interactions between creative intelligence and all levels of reality, this simplistic image of the universe becomes increasingly untenable. The probability that human consciousness and our infinitely complex universe could have come into existence through the random interactions of inert matter has aptly been compared to that of a tornado blowing through a junkyard and accidentally assembling a 747 jumbo jet.
Up to now, Newtonian science has been responsible for creating a very limited view of human beings and their potentials. For over two hundred years the Newtonian perspective has dictated the criteria for what is an acceptable or unacceptable experience of reality. Accordingly, a "normally functioning" person is one who is capable of accurately mirroring back the objective external world that Newtonian science describes. Within that perspective, our mental functions are limited to taking in information from our sensory organs, storing it in our "mental computer banks," and then perhaps recombining sensory data to create something new. Any significant departure from this perception of "objective reality"—actually consensus reality or what the general population believes to be true—would have to be dismissed as the product of an overactive imagination or a mental disorder.
Modern consciousness research indicates an urgent need to drastically revise and expand this limited view of the nature and dimensions of the human psyche. The main objective of this book is to explore these new observations and the radically different view of our lives that they imply. It is important to point out that even though these new findings are incompatible with traditional Newtonian science, they are fully congruent with revolutionary developments in modern physics and other scientific disciplines. All of these new insights are profoundly transforming the Newtonian worldview that we once took so much for granted. There is emerging an exciting new vision of the cosmos and human nature that has far-reaching implications for our lives on an individual as well as collective scale.
Consciousness and Cosmos: Science Discovers Mind in Nature
As modern physicists refined their explorations of the very small and the very large—the subatomic realms of the microworld and the astrophysical realms of the macroworld—they soon realized that some of the basic Newtonian principles had serious limits and flaws. In the mid-twentieth century, the atoms that Newtonian physics once defined as the indestructible, most elementary building blocks of the material world were found to be made of even smaller and more elementary parts—protons, neutrons, and electrons. Later research detected literally hundreds of subatomic particles.
The newly discovered subatomic particles exhibited strange behavior that challenged Newtonian principles. In some experiments they behaved as if they were material entities; in other experiments they appeared to have wavelike properties. This became known as the "wave-particle paradox." On a subatomic level, our old definitions of matter were replaced by statistical probabilities that described its "tendency to exist," and ultimately the old definitions of matter disappeared into what the physicists call "dynamic vacuum." The exploration of the microworld soon revealed that the universe of everyday life, which appears to us to be composed of solid, discrete objects, is actually a complex web of unified events and relationships. Within this new context, consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality itself.
The scientists' explorations of the astrophysical realm is responsible for equally startling revelations. In Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, space is not three-dimensional, time is not linear, and space and time are not separate entities. Rather, they are integrated into a four-dimensional continuum known as "space-time." Within this perspective of the universe, what we once perceived as the boundaries between objects and the distinctions between matter and empty space are now replaced by something new. Instead of there being discrete objects and empty spaces between them the entire universe is s
een as one continuous field of varying density. In modern physics matter becomes interchangeable with energy. Within this new worldview, consciousness is seen as an integral part of the universal fabric, certainly not limited to the activities contained inside our skulls. As British astronomer James Jeans said some sixty years ago, the universe of the modern physicist looks far more like a great thought than like a giant super-machine.
So we now have a universe that is an infinitely complex system of vibratory phenomena rather than an agglomerate of Newtonian objects. These vibratory systems have properties and possibilities undreamed of in Newtonian science. One of the most interesting of these is described in terms of holography.
Holography and the Implicate Order
Holography is a photographic process that uses laser-coherent light of the same wave-length to produce three-dimensional images in space. A hologram—which might be compared to a photographic slide from which we project a picture—is a record of an interference pattern of two halves of a laser beam. After a beam of light is split by a partially silvered mirror, half of it (called the reference beam) is directed to the emulsion of the hologram; the other half (called the working beam) is reflected to the film from the object being photographed. Information from these two beams, required for reproducing a three-dimensional image, is "enfolded" in the hologram in such a way that it is distributed throughout. As a result, when the hologram is illuminated by the laser, the complete three-dimensional image can be "unfolded" from any fraction of the hologram. We can cut the hologram into many pieces and each part will still be capable of reproducing an image of the whole.
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