Lecture Transcript: Stanislav Grof and the Levels of LSD Experience Now let me turn from this to a contemporary

psychologist who seems to me to be t he one of whom you will be hearing not very long from now. This is the man, Stan islav Grof, who has been treating deep psychosis and so forth with LSD treatment s for something like fifteen years. He is at the Maryland Institute of Psychiatr ic Research, which is one of the two places in this country that is allowed to a dminister LSD. It's done very, very carefully with controlled doses and by people who know what is going to happen, and in a controlled environment. And as a resu lt of all this, he has been able to discover levels of people's fantasizing. And what these levels represent are levels of expanding consciousness. The first effect, as everyone who has ever taken these things will tell you, is an astoni shing sense of presence: objects begin to shine, to be fascinatingthings that you took for granted. There is a story I've heard of four bridge players who were made to promise before they received a shot that they would play a game of bridge after they received itthese are bridge fiends, they've never done anything else in their life but play bridge. [laughter] All rightthey were given a slight dose just to kick them up a little bit, and the cards were dealt out, and when they opened the cards they sat there, fascinated . They didn't play bridge. This is what is known as aesthetic arrest. [laughter] T hey were held. And what it represents, if nothing else, is a new activation of c onsciousness. We live with things thinking only of their useseven our friends. But the experien ce of regarding somebodyI've had this happen with students, this stupid thing sitti ng in front of me week after week, and then one day my mind blanks out, and I su ddenly see, Why this is a presence, this is a miracle! It doesn't matter: as a stu dent, nothing; as a human being, nothing very beautiful eitherjust a mug there. B ut, oh, my heavens, what a miracle! Well, you don't need LSD to have that happen. So the first level of activation is this of aesthetic arrest. This is what happe ned to Dante when he beheld Beatrice. Here was an object that normally would hav e been one to evoke erotic relationship. It wasn't what happened. He saw a miracle . This is what happened to Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, when he saw the girl in the streamsuddenly a miracle of what somethin g is. This is seeing the person as though it were a dream. And when we are in lo ve with somebody we say, You're my dream, or You're a dream walking, or something like t hisyou know, you get poetic as well as we can, and try to go past the rational re alm. You might say, Darling, you're like a rose. And then the next time a new inspir ation comes, You're a swan. And she being what she is, a stupid little thing, Well, make up your mind, which is it? And this is a girl with no possibility for a religious life. [laughter] The next level of experience is one of psychological agony. This is the level of a Freudian analysis. When the consciousness expanding begins to bump up against all the taboos that have been built into you, and there is this agony of guilt and nauseahorrible experiences before you break through that. This is the reliving of your personal unconsciousness: the reliving of your pers onal agony, your personal taboos, your personal experiencesthis is what is regurg itated, sort to say, in a Freudian analysis.

Then there comes another level in these experiences, and it's a level of re-experi encing your birth, because you did have an experience thereyou did indeed. Mother did too, but you're the more important one right now. And Grof has found four stages in the birth experience, which have been relived by his patients. And he has checked and checked and checked on this, so this is no nonsense. He calls these the basal birth modelsbasic prenatal models. The first is that of the fetus in the womb. There is no sense of I or not-I; the re is just a being. There is no subject and object. This is the experience most like that of the mystic quenching the dew drop to the sea: Neither I nor thee; we are both gone. The second stage is when the uterus begins to vibrate and the pains of the mothe r begin. There is no way out. Suddenly there is ego in trouble. The first experi ence we have of ourselves is of ourselves in trouble. And this can last quite aw hile, and there is considerable terror. And if the person finishes in that conditionlet's say if the drug wears off and tha t's the condition the person comes out of it inthe person is in danger of a suicide . It will be a quiet suicide, pills or drowning or cutting the wrists or somethi ng like that. It is the experience of the existentialist: life is nothing but pa inbirth is pain, death is pain, nothing but pain between. La vie est dr. The third stage is when the cervix opens and the birth begins, and this is a tre mendous exercise. There is a collaboration between the mother and the child in a certain extent; there is a sense of something doinggetting somewhere. And it is violent, it's uglythere are foul odors and experiences. This is the level of the sadomasochistic attitude. And if the person comes out i n this state, the person is in danger of blowing things up, of blowing himself u phe is a dangerous person. The fourth state is that of birth itself. Suddenly light, and suddenly an object : motherthe first divinity, and the only divinity finally, really. I mean this da ddy thing is a joke compared with mother. [laughter] He's no good there. These four states are states that underlie whole life moods; they also underlie different mythologies. Now, here is the interesting thing: people in the states two and threethese are t he ones of pain, anguish, violencetheir fantasies are almost exclusively those of the Judeo-Christian traditioncrucifixions, an angry god, a punishing god, tortur es, hells, all kinds of violence. And just you read the Old Testament with that in mind and you'll see it's a pretty g ood showthe tension between God and man, who are not the same. God made man to be his servant. You have disobeyed, you deserve punishment. All you deserve is reb uke. But when they get to either stage one or four, the images are of the Orient. The peace of nirvana in the womb; the bliss of relationship to the mother goddess. In the East, the whole universethe sphere of the universeis the womb of the goddes s. And the deities and all names and forms are within her bounds; the gods are h er children. This is a primary mythology. This is the mythology from which all our mythologie s come. But when the Hebrews came into the world of the goddess, in the second m

illennium B.C., they took the myths of the goddess and converted them into myths of the god. They didthis is a historical fact. And all of these father images ju st don't quite convince who wants Abraham bosom. [laughter[ Whoever heard of a man giving birth to a woman. That serpent in the gardenhe knew where he was. He was an old, old deity: Ningishzidah, who was the consort of th e goddess, and Eve was that consort. The serpent and Eve make a better pair than Eve and Adam. [laughter] The serpent and Eve were at the tree of bliss. Adam an d Eve are out there in the rough, having a tough time. So that's what comes when t he goddess goes in the wrong direction. But this finding of Grof's I think is fascinating. And what you will find from it is that the religion that you were taught committed you to a certain attitude to ward life. You think it's tough because your religion's imagery says it's tough. Or yo u find it blissful, and something you can rest on. Finally, after this stage of experiences which we have all had, the person has g one past his personal life into the life of transpersonal experiences, one comes to suddenly a stage of understanding it all. You can't talk about; it's just the ra pture of seeingknowing what it is all about, and that it is good and that it is g reat and for all the pains and all that, nevertheless it is as it is. And it is a marvel. And the pains and the pleasures are not the ends you live for, but jus t the rapture of this beholding. They come to this. And finally there is one stage still further beyond this one of symbolic rapture , is that of a kind of metaphysical sense that you have struck the ground, and y ou have found the root of being. These are experiences people have had and they correspond to those of waking con sciousness, the stages of mythic dream, and the deep sleep and the rapture beyon d it.