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-As a filmmaker, I try to remain a neutral observer,
but what caused me to tell Stan Grof's story
and what I learned in the process made that impossible.
My name is Susan, and for most of my life,
I felt like I really didn't belong here,
like I was born on the wrong planet.
All I could think of was how to go back.
-[ Crying ]
-The magic that filled my dreams
would evaporate with the daylight.
For a while, ballet seemed like the place where I belonged,
but even that eventually changed.
Then in my early 20s, I tried LSD.
For the first time, I felt lovable.
Finally, I believed in myself, and everything changed.
But without a structure to ground me,
I made bad choices that harmed my body
and others that took years to undo.
And then I discovered shamanism and learned how to journey.
Up I went, past the clouds,
beyond the Earth's atmosphere,
until I was surrounded by darkness.
I met my teachers and felt that I had known them forever.
They healed me, helped me make sense of the world,
and could explain anything.
Once I even asked for a story, and they showed me one.
♪♪
I started to make changes that were difficult.
I traveled to France and fell in love.
But then we couldn't get pregnant,
and I learned that if I wanted a baby,
I'd have to tune back into Earth.
♪♪
-We got a lot of candy, and we got a...
-When I thought my kids were old enough,
I tried to reconnect.
There were insights, but no upward journey
to meet my teachers.
In the search for another way to reconnect with them,
I learned about Stan Grof.
-Consciousness is not something that emerges
as an accident after billions of years of evolution,
something that requires a central nervous system.
And I had an experience that just sort of changed my life
both professionally and personally.
People get tranquilizers and get hospitalized for experiences
that in other cultures would be considered extremely valuable.
-Stan Grof is known
as the pioneer of psychedelic psychotherapy.
Drawing from his own experiences
and from thousands of high-dose LSD sessions with is patients.
The insights he gained personally combined
with the experiences of his patients
expanded his understanding of the human psyche.
It stretched beyond the biographical information
that begins after we are born to memories
surrounding our time in the womb and during the birth process.
His expanded map even included the spiritual nature
of humanity,
recognizing past-life experiences
and dimensions of consciousness we share with all of creation.
Stan used these insights
to co-found Transpersonal Psychology
with Abraham Maslow,
and working with his wife, Christina,
organized international transpersonal conferences
around the world.
During much of this period,
Stan was also the scholar-in-residence
at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.
Spiritual masters and groundbreaking pioneers
representing a broad spectrum of disciplines
were frequent guests at the workshops
and month-long retreats he offered
during his 14 years there.
It was there that Stan and Christina
developed Holotropic Breathwork,
a breathing technique that could induce
powerful non-ordinary states of consciousness
similar to an LSD session.
I had to meet Stan.
On some deep level I knew
he could help me find my way back in.
When I learned he would be teaching a course,
I signed up immediately.
-I was so far talking about
non-ordinary states of consciousness,
but I have been all these 60 years now interested
in a very significant large subgroup
of these non-ordinary experiences
for which current psychology has no special name.
They're all put in the category
of altered states of consciousness.
What it suggests somehow is that there's a correct way
of experiencing ourselves in the world,
and that in these states, it's distorted.
We have to use this new psychology
if we want to use effectively Holotropic states.
You know, if you want to run psychedelic sessions
or do Holotropic Breathwork,
or if we want to work with people
who are in spiritual emergency.
-I had read about Stan's theories
on how our experiences in the womb
affected our unconscious,
but to hear him explain it gave me a whole new understanding.
-...that the experiences, if you regress to birth,
the experiences come in four patterns.
I call them perinatal matrices, basic perinatal matrices.
The first perinatal matrix relates to the situation
of the fetus still in the womb
before the onset of the delivery.
This could be pregnancy which is a result of planning,
of the parents' loving expectation.
The mother is physically healthy,
is in emotionally good condition.
Reliving of that kind of state
would be a very ecstatic experience.
Now, this doesn't necessarily happen.
There are pregnancy which are a result of rape,
of a one-night stand when both parents were drunk,
where the marriage was broken,
the mother is abused physically
and emotionally unhealthy.
The pregnancy could be so unwelcome
that there are attempts at abortion.
Another possibility, the mother is Rh negative,
the father is Rh positive,
so that from the beginning the fetus is being attacked,
immunologically treated as an invader.
Come nine months, plus/minus,
this is the onset of the delivery.
First hormonal changes which are then translated
into mechanical contractions of the uterus.
Each contraction compresses the arteries
and interrupts placentary circulation
between the mother and the child
which means no supply of oxygen, no nourishment coming in,
and there's no removal of metabolic products.
There's no resolution for it because the cervix is not open,
just contractions of the uterus in a closed system.
Now, with each contraction,
the cervix is being pulled over the head.
It's dilating.
When it reaches the necessary size,
then it's the transition to the third matrix.
The contractions continue with all the consequences,
but the cervix is now open,
so there is this laborious propulsions
through the birth canal.
Now there are tremendous pressures here.
Suffocation and the pain generate powerful energy
which has all the qualities of sexual energy.
Our first encounter with sexual energy,
we were inflicting pain on another organism.
Another organism was inflecting pain on us.
We couldn't breathe.
There were a lot of pressures and fear.
This kind of experience then can become
the basis of the development of various sexual dysfunctions,
deviations, aberrations, perversions.
Then we have the completion of the delivery,
headfirst or feetfirst, and then the umbilical cord is cut.
From then on the child exists
as an anatomically independent individual,
still biologically emotionally dependent, of course.
♪♪
-The matrices begin with unity,
transition to Hell with no escape,
then to purgatory with the end in sight
where you are the victim and the perpetrator and the observer,
and finally culminate in freedom
and a newfound sense of connection.
-Thank you very much for... -As Stan finished,
I remembered the rebirthing workshop
I'd taken at Rajneeshpuram back in the '80s.
I felt like I was dropping into a deep pit
that grew more painful as I descended.
Just when I thought I was going to die,
I burst through into an ocean of love and light.
♪♪
Joseph Campbell is best known for his work
in comparing mythologies and religions
from cultures around the world.
He met Stan in the late '60s
at a conference in New York City.
When Campbell heard Stan's theory
on the four perinatal matrices, he instantly solved a mystery
that had intrigued him for years.
He couldn't understand how cultures
from diverse geographical locations
could share the same death-rebirth themes.
He called it a monomyth.
But when he saw Stan's presentation,
he understand that these cultures
were reliving the experience of their own births.
The perinatal matrices,
especially the third moving into the fourth,
served as the threshold for the "Hero's Journey."
The rites of passage that these cultures developed
allowed their initiates
to access unconscious birth memories,
face their fear of death and finally free themselves
from a deep maternal dependency.
-Birth itself is not only a rite of passage,
but is perhaps the universal rite of passage
that we all go through.
Perhaps it's through that experience
that we come into the world knowing deeply that if we are
to succeed in the ongoing actualization of our potentials,
whatever they are as individuals throughout the life cycle
for however long we live, we will need to undergo
repeatedly similar rites of passage.
-Holotropic Breathwork is an experiential approach
to self-exploration,
to therapy which uses very, very simple means.
It uses faster breathing.
It uses a powerful, evocative music
and also some kind of bodywork when it's indicated.
-Each individual will choose a partner.
One of those people does the breathing,
and the other person sits with him or her,
and then they switch roles so that everybody gets a chance
to participate both as a breather
and as what we call a sitter.
-And we also combine with what we call Mandala drawings,
and after the session they try to communicated
what happened to them in a kind of graphic way.
-The second day of the conference was the breathwork.
I couldn't believe how anxious I felt.
♪♪
Towards the end of the three hours,
I sat up thinking that it was over.
It had been a pleasant experience,
and I tried to tell the facilitator that I was fine,
that she could take care of the next person,
but she wouldn't leave.
The minutes stretched on
when suddenly a wave of sadness rolled up from my belly,
and that's when I understood the meaning of Stan's phrase,
"As long as it takes."
Everyone deserves the time for the process to fully unfold.
♪♪
Later during the course,
Stan showed slides from his Tantra presentation.
It was the same theme that my teacher showed me
some 20 years earlier.
Suddenly I realized that on some deep level, I wasn't alone.
There was something universal about what I'd experienced,
and Stan held the wisdom I needed
to make sense of how it all fit together.
About nine months later,
I learned that Christina had died
and worried that Stan might follow her
if there wasn't something to keep him engaged.
When I learned about the conference honoring him,
I knew I had to go.
-Welcome to the Bay Area,
and as Rick Tarnas has been heard to say,
where new ideas meet the least resistance.
-For over a half-century, Stan Grof has fully engaged
and then participated
in the great transformation of world view
that is taking place in our era.
-He was my mentor, fellow explorer of new visions,
copresenter at many seminars,
and guide in experiential therapies.
-At 75 years ago, Stan and I were kind of conspiring
to attack the non-ordinary states of consciousness.
-When I finally overcame my qualms
and moved from semi-hard drugs to psychedelics
and started having LSD experiences,
which were the most amazing things I had ever had.
-It was a very different...
-Here were all these accomplished people,
and the one thing they had in common was an experience
of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
I had always imagined that people
who did psychedelics remained hippies for life.
And what about the mainstream news warnings
of irreparable damage from using LSD?
But the presenters were some of the most accomplished
and insightful people I'd ever heard.
Stan offered them a context
that they in turn expanded and shared.
-Stan developed these descriptions,
described exactly, I mean, in detail,
some of the most gruesome experiences
that I'd had that, you know, where I was, like,
in a Medieval torture chamber being beaten to death by guys
with enormous clubs to a bloody pulp,
and, like, I thought,
"Well, how does this relate to my Oedipus complex
or anything else for that matter?"
-For me personally and many who spoke
and many who are in this room,
just going near Stan changes your life.
-During the event, Christina was honored
for her contributions as well.
She introduced Stan to Muktananda,
contributed to the development of Holotropic Breathwork,
and together, they created an approach to spiritual emergence
when suppressed memories and emotions
spontaneously rise to the surface.
Their technique helped people
avoid hospitalization and misdiagnosis.
Christina also shared her struggle
with kundalini awakening and alcoholism,
which helped others find resolution
with their challenges,
and I could more than relate to her feelings of insecurity
around so many accomplished academics and professionals.
The next day was the workshop
designed to support the Grof Foundation.
I'll never forget how frightened I felt.
Here I was, an outsider, among people who knew Stan
and had been studying or working with him for years.
But I found my courage
and suggested that the best way to share Stan's research
about the healing power of non-ordinary states
of consciousness was to make a movie about him.
♪♪
-This is my favorite sculpture here.
Do you see that?
So it help you see, right, the helicopter.
You have a flight, and then you have a ship
and then wheels at the bottom.
So it's protection against any kind of transportation
that can be involved.
-As I set up my equipment for the first interview,
I couldn't help thinking, "Who was I to interview Stan?
♪♪
And yet I felt so open and clear-headed in his presence
as though I had access to information
that wasn't available to me on my own.
♪♪
What took me by surprise
was Stan's incredible kindness and generosity.
Almost immediately we dove into his past.
Stan grew up in Czechoslovakia
just before the outbreak of World War II.
His early childhood was relatively peaceful,
but the threat of a Nazi occupation became a reality
when the German army invaded in 1939.
Stan was 8 years old when Nazi soldiers invaded Prague
and forced Czech citizens to surrender.
For six years, Stan was exposed to their sadistic cruelty,
including the brutal retaliation after the assassination
of SS Officer Reinhard Heydrich,
Hitler's third in command.
Known as the architect of the Holocaust,
Heydrich had been sent to Prague
to wipe out defiance of German rule.
On May 27, 1942,
Heydrich was attacked by Czech resistance fighters
and died from his injuries a few days later.
The Nazi retaliation lasted more than three months.
The neighboring villages of the Lidice and Lezaky
were destroyed.
Most of the adult population was murdered,
while all but a few children disappeared.
Stan was 12 years old at the time
and remembers the continuous executions
leading up to the death of the resistance fighters
who had killed Heydrich.
It was a terrifying period for the entire country.
Thankfully when the war ended in 1945,
Czechoslovakia was restored to its pre-war boundaries
and enjoyed a peaceful existence.
But just three years later,
with the support of the Soviet Union,
the communists took over.
Two Czech national heroes died under suspicious circumstances,
and once again, a shadow spread over Czechoslovakia.
♪♪
Stan was 17 when he was accused of possessing a leaflet
encouraging people to challenge the Communist Party.
-After school, it was 1:00,
and a bell was ringing.
And I opened the door, and there were two men
in leather coats and just broke in.
And they just completely ransacked the apartment.
-Stan was arrested and held in prison for four months.
In fact, his experiences
with non-ordinary states of consciousness
happened during a two-week period
of disrupted sleep and interrogations.
-And basically we had to go through our biography,
the whole life from childhood,
and then we were sent back to the cell.
And we didn't know if they would come back in another 20 minutes,
or if we'll be able to sleep the rest of the night.
As I was talking about the childhood,
I started actually seeing the scenes from my childhood.
What was really interesting was,
in spite of the very, very difficult situation,
I started realizing
that there was something about it that I enjoyed.
-It's something of a miracle that he ever made it
into medical school after that,
but a two-month stint on a student brigade
was the first in a series of events that turned it around.
-Basically our task was to remove the rock
from one side to another so that there was a space for a highway,
and they really didn't have any other way
of finding out how we worked than by giving them
the count of the wheelbarrows that we sort of transferred,
so there was a possibility of cheating.
-Fellow classmates who had joined the Communist Party
despite their lack of commitment to party beliefs
tried to protect Stan
by giving him an award for his outstanding work
and exceptional relationship with the working class.
Stan was later assigned to a school filled with
students from laborer and farm-worker families.
As the school's director was recovering from a heart attack
when Stan was admitted, he failed to read Stan's file
and recommended him for a Presidential Gold Medal
for a his exceptional studies,
so when the medical school's admissions staff
read Stan's file,
they saw that he'd been acquitted for lack of evidence,
but that he'd also been honored as an outstanding laborer
and awarded a gold medal by President Gottwald.
And so Stan was admitted to medical school.
-But when I was a student working in psychiatry,
that was in the psychedelic clinic in Prague.
There was a lot of very drastic therapeutic methods
that were being used.
Then when I graduated,
I was working in a psychiatry hospital,
and as a newcomer, as a sort of freshly baked psychiatrist,
I had to get up early and give the electroshocks
and the insulin comas up to, like,
25 electroshocks and 15 insulin comas.
-From the late 1920s to the 1950s,
insulin comas were used to treat schizophrenia.
After an insulin injection, patients might perspire heavily.
Many salivated profusely,
and eventually they would contort in spasms.
Once a profound state of unconsciousness was reached,
a nasogastric tube was inserted,
bile was drawn to verify the correct placement of the tube,
and then a glucose solution was administered.
Archival films depict patients
waking to feel energetic and hungry.
The procedure had a mortality rate of 1 in a 100.
Stan induced 15 insulin comas a day.
Electroshock therapy began in the late 1930s
from the belief that artificially induced convulsions
could cure mental illness.
Electrodes were placed on a patient's temples
while an electric current passed through them.
The resulting convulsions were strong enough
to cause broken bones
if the patients weren't restrained.
Curare, derived from South American plants,
was later used to paralyze motor nerves
and lessen the convulsions.
Stan administered 25 electroshock convulsions daily.
Even psychoanalysis proved disappointing for Stan.
-I mean, I was in psychoanalysis for seven years,
and when in the fourth year
I started bringing in my dreams
images that were connected to the --
you know, this was considered to be,
you know, relatively successful psychoanalysis.
-Fortunately for Stan, Sandoz Laboratories
needed help exploring applications
for a new drug synthesized by Albert Hofmann,
lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.
The Swiss scientist was revisiting
his synthesis of the ergot fungus
when he accidentally intoxicated himself.
A drop of the clear solution touched his finger
and was absorbed into his system when he wiped his eye.
Intrigued by the unusual sensations,
Hofmann decided to try a tiny dose a few days later.
What followed was an endless bike ride home
and a call for a doctor
when Hofmann thought he might be dying.
Once the crisis passed,
Hofmann realized that his discovery
was in incredibly powerful psychotropic substance.
-And 1954, we got a sample of ampules of LSD.
They got an idea that it might be something interesting
for psychiatrists, psychologists,
and would we want to work with it?
So my preceptor did not have the time to spend
six to eight hours with people on LSD,
and so he used several of us as gophers.
We were sitting there and, you know,
taking care of the experimental subjects and keeping records.
But in that early stage, students were excluded,
so I had two years when I was listening
to these incredible stories
and not being able to have the experience.
So just about the first thing I did when I graduated,
you know, was to have this experience myself.
My teacher was specifically interested
in training the brainwaves,
which means exposing people to powerful stroboscopic light
of various frequencies and finding out
if you can influence the brainwaves
in the sub-occipital area.
So all of those of us who wanted to have a session,
we had to agree that we also
would be going through this experiment.
When my own experience was culminating,
a research assistant took me to a very little room,
and then she brought this gigantic strobe.
And in the next moment there was light like
I had never seen in my life.
My consciousness was catapulted out of my body.
I lost the research assistant.
I lost the clinic.
I lost Prague. I lost the planet.
And then I had the feeling that I was completely extinguished.
I ceased to exist in the form in which I knew myself,
and instead I had the feeling
that I somehow became all of existence.
I became nothing,
but by becoming nothing I became everything.
I was in the astronomical universe.
I was the universe.
And there were things happening for which
at the time I didn't even have a name,
but later I read about the Big Bang
and the black holes and white holes and wormholes,
just an amazing cosmic spectacle.
And then she turned it off.
My consciousness started shrinking again.
I became myself.
But there was a problem because I ended up finding the planet,
finding the clinic, finding my body,
but my consciousness was kind of floating around the body,
and I couldn't find ways of aligning those two.
At that point it was absolutely clear to me
that what they taught me at the university,
that consciousness is somehow created
by the activity of the neurons in the brain,
suddenly it seemed totally absurd.
It was clear to me
that consciousness is a cosmic phenomenon.
Could matter, bouncing off atoms or subatomic particles
create all that we see, including the beauty of nature,
the beauty of the universe,
the intelligence that you see in animals,
that you see in people,
is it really something that can create science and philosophy?
Then you see it's absurd.
There is a beauty and there is an intelligence
which cannot come out of matter.
♪♪
So then I came down from this session
with the fact that I was now stuck with psychiatry.
This is by far the most interesting thing I could do,
studying these non-ordinary states.
-At a complex of research institutes near Prague,
Stan was involved in laboratory testing of LSD
and other substances such as psilocybin and mescaline.
40 test subjects,
a mix of healthy individuals and psychiatric patients
would undergo hourly blood draws,
urine samples, and psychological and neurological
testing during their sessions all in the hope of identifying
the chemical source of mental illness.
-Well, the initial excitement was that LSD can produce
what we called experimental psychosis.
We can give it to "normal people."
We can do all kinds of tests before, during and after,
and we get an idea what's happening biochemically
when the psyche is so profoundly influenced.
And this was fascinating because we are talking about
in microscopic amounts,
you know, hundred millions of a gram
can change profoundly human consciousness
for six to eight hours.
If this is the case, mental diseases,
it would be aberrations of chemistry.
Now, if we could identify this chemical culprit,
we could also find some kind of neutralizing agent,
and this would have been, like,
test-tube solution of schizophrenia
and other psychosis.
This would be like Holy Grail of psychiatry.
-But during the testing, it became clear
that it was impossible to predict
the kind of experience subjects would have
regardless of what psychedelic they took.
In fact, the same subject
could have dramatically different experiences
while taking the same substance on different occasions.
-So this is not the way pharmacology works.
You have pretty good idea
what response you would get with antibiotics
or whatever substance we are talking about.
They are dealing with a catalyst
and that the content is not produced by the substance,
but it's released from the deep unconscious realms
that current psychiatry and psychology doesn't know about
because when it comes, they think it's pathological.
They don't see it as something
that's germane to the human psyche,
and then I started seeing it as a telescope or a microscope.
With telescope, we can see galaxies
that we cannot normally study.
With microscope, you discover micro world that is here,
but you are not aware of it unless we have the proper tool.
So then I took it from the laboratory
to a clinical practice
and started seeing it as something
that is going to deepen and intensify psychotherapy.
-During this period, Stan won a competition
with a paper he wrote about his realization.
The prize earned him the directorship
of the psychedelic program
at a newly built research center.
Just as in the laboratory testing,
subjects in the clinical tests
had a broad range of experiences,
including blissful and ecstatic ones
and even emotionally challenging experiences
were soothed as a session ended and memories
that had surfaced were resolved.
Stan even noted that the clinical sessions
seemed very similar to classic psychotherapy,
but over time, patterns emerged.
-The contents of the unconscious were not stored
in a form of kind of disconnected mosaic,
but they were forming certain dynamic constellations.
Certain issues were appearing on different levels
at different times of their biography,
and they were creating these dynamics packets
that were connected to the same type of emotions
or a physical feeling.
Let's say they would have a choking constellation.
They would be near drowning when they were 7,
then being choked by an older brother
repeatedly when they were 4, then whooping cough,
but then the deeper level was the choking at birth.
So I started talking about these constellations as COEX systems.
-In addition to the understanding of COEX systems,
Stan observed how the experiences of his clients
evolved dramatically during a series of sessions.
-Only the early sessions seemed to have the nature
of the experiences that I knew from psychoanalysis,
but then sooner or later,
even if we are using sort of just medium dosages,
people started talking about being in a place where they felt
their life was threatened, that they're going crazy,
they will never get out of that state.
They started having experiences of choking or nausea,
and then one after another, they told me that they believed
that what they are experiencing must be reliving of birth.
At a certain point, I decided to test this,
and I took 300 micrograms on my own at home.
Within an hour, I was in a very, very difficult place.
On the wall, I had paintings which I painted,
and there was one which was like a stylized dog with a soldier.
They started fighting, and then I had the feeling
that everything was kind of closing in,
and very quickly, I was in something
that I now called the second perinatal matrix.
It was, like, a space where it seemed absolutely hopeless,
very, very uncomfortable emotionally,
and then I started a pressure on my head.
I realized that I was somehow stuck in the birth canal,
and all my life appeared to be absolutely meaningless.
I started seeing the deep truths in existential philosophy --
you know, life is absurd.
We go from nowhere to nowhere.
We start life as infants in pain,
and this is how we are going to end,
but even if I knew that this was birth,
then somehow the thought came that this state would not end
unless I find meaning in life.
And then I said, "Well, it's knowledge,"
and I saw myself going to libraries,
devouring one book after another,
and then it took me to the end of my life
when I couldn't remember what I had for dinner,
let alone what I read in all those books.
And then I said, "Well, having children
gives meaning to your life," and then it was like,
"Well, you don't give meaning to your life
by creating creatures whose life is as meaningless as yours."
And then after some time,
it just sort of very, very rapidly opened up,
and suddenly I was in a very ecstatic state,
and I realized you cannot find meaning in life using reason.
This was a very important first experience
that suddenly showed me whole new potentials of psychedelics.
-Through his own experiences and those of his patients,
Stan learned that lower doses
brought up biographical information
while higher ones brought patients much farther.
He also noted that something fascinating was happening.
-When I was hitting some difficult places,
I had a parade of my patients,
and I suddenly understood where they were,
including the meaninglessness and even suicidal impulses.
Equipped with current psychiatry,
I just had no clue.
The only way was experiential learning.
You cannot learn that from books
what these patients are going through.
-Without the distraction of constant testing
and with higher doses of LSD,
Stan's clients were encouraged to go inward.
To Stan's surprise, they kept journeying back
to the perinatal realm.
-It's not easy to really question.
It was some of the really fundamental assumptions,
and I had very personal experience
that made it even worse.
I went as a second-year student
to a lecture of Professor Vilem Laufberger,
and I asked, "How far back does our memory go?
Can we, for example, relive our births?"
And he looked at me like I was a total asshole and said,
"Of course not. I mean, the cortex is not myelinized."
And then everybody was laughing, so I was pretty ashamed.
So I had that kind of additional memory,
like, this was really stupid to think
that you could relive your birth
even if it seems very convincing.
But then of course, if I saw it again and again,
and I had a few more experiences myself,
I realize that this edifice of psychiatry,
you know, that looks so respectable,
it's like a Colossus on clay feet.
-Stan described the scientific establishment's reluctance
to accept perinatal memories.
I remembered my 30 hours of labor
giving birth to my daughter Charlotte.
I eventually needed help pushing her out.
Maybe that's why she wouldn't go through those tunnels
at the play group.
-It's okay, honey. Go in the tube.
-I was so concerned that I took her to see an osteopath.
The doctor swore that she wasn't applying
any pressure to Charlotte's head.
Afterwards, Charlotte had no problem going to the tunnels.
When Charlotte was 20 months old,
we were attacked by two gunmen.
We were living in the suburbs outside of Paris,
and I was four months pregnant with my son, Oscar.
The first shot missed my head by about 12 inches,
and the remaining three shattered our bedroom windows.
We escaped unharmed, but for a month or so,
I'd wake up at night, reliving the experience
and imagining where I would hide.
Later, when Oscar was old enough to play hide and seek,
no one could find him.
-Oscar?
Oscar?
-It was clear to me now that my children's behavior...
-Oscar? -...had been influenced
either by what had happened while they were in the womb
or during their actual birth.
-[ Babbles ] Hide.
I'm trying to hide.
-How could scientists so easily
dismiss the reality of perinatal memories?
-I'm trying to hide.
-The usual view about the mind
is that the mind is confined to the head.
It's nothing but the activity of the brain.
For the materialists who represent the majority
of position within academic life and in science,
minds are what brains do,
and memories are stored material inside the brain.
It's all inside the brain.
I think that's an incredibly truncated and narrow view.
First of all,
I think we access our memories by morphic resonance.
They're not inside the brain.
And secondly, I think that our consciousness, our minds,
are not confined to the inside of our heads
but stretch out beyond and through fields.
We're all used to the idea of magnetic fields
being inside magnets and stretching beyond them
or the gravitational fields of the Earth
being inside the Earth and stretching out into space
invisibly or the fields of cellphones
being inside the cellphone
and stretching invisibly around it,
which is why they work.
All matter now has fields associated with it,
and of course the brain does.
It has electromagnetic fields
you can measure with an electroencephalograph.
But I think that the fields of the mind
are much more extensive,
and these extended fields of the mind
are a kind of morphic field,
so it's really a field theory of the mind.
-Now that I realized that we could hold memories
from our time in the womb,
I couldn't stop thinking about the influence
these unconscious memories might have on our lives.
One of Stan's clients showed
just how powerful these memories are.
-You know, the patient whom I call Peter
came with kind of a combination of obsession
and masochistic impulses and tremendous need
and wish to be locked in a cellar
and be exposed to some emotional and physical pains, tortures.
-Peter would search for these men in parks,
train stations, and other public places,
and on one occasion, he was struck on the head and robbed.
The last episode occurred when Peter was on a train
with a man who claimed to have the perfect cellar
to satisfy his obsession.
When the man got up to use the toilet,
Peter gave into his gnawing doubt and opened the man's bag.
Horrified by what he found,
Peter jumped from the moving train
and ended up in the hospital.
When psychiatric treatment failed to help him,
he was sent to Stan,
where he underwent a series of high-dose LSD sessions.
-A very, very interesting COEX system emerged
in a series of sessions.
The most superficial layers were actually the traumas
that he, himself, created.
Then as we continued,
another layer of the COEX system emerged,
which was from the Second World War
when he was taken to Nazi Germany,
and he was in a situation
where there was a great danger of bombardment.
Two of the SS Officers were using him
for their homosexual practices, initially under gunpoint.
And then it went to his childhood, when his father,
who was alcoholic, was very, very brutal
and used to beat him with a leather strap,
and his mother, who actually always wore black,
punished him repeatedly by locking him in a dark cellar
and leaving him without food.
So on that level, it seemed like it was a combined punishment
from the two parents that he was seeking.
Finally, it ended up in a situation
where he was stuck in the birth canal
and realized that was the template of the situation
that he was searching for,
but when he actually experienced that,
he got more than he bargained for.
-Because Stan had previously experienced
the kind of death-rebirth process Peter underwent,
he was not fearful for Peter's safety
and could allow the full process to unfold.
After that session, Peter was finally liberated
from his self-destructive impulses
and able to live a productive life.
Around the time Stan was working with Peter,
he traveled to Amsterdam for a conference on LSD psychotherapy.
-Pauline McCririck and Joyce Martin
were two psychoanalysts who were actually using LSD
and doing what they called fusion therapy.
Clients who were deprived in their childhood of being held
would lie with full-body contact,
and they had amazing results with this.
We were both in Amsterdam,
and so we decided to have a session.
As part of my last perinatal session,
I really got into this atmosphere
of bloody revolutions,
and in the middle of it, I really identified with Lenin.
I shared his passion against oppression,
and I realized that part of it was desire,
but a good part of it was the compression of the birth canal,
so this kind of atmosphere of revolutions
and struggling for birth come out completely fused,
and I realized that there's a relationship
between historical events like wars and revolutions
and what we carry in the perinatal level,
possibly even something that is a source
of that kind of violence.
But then the session ended, and I went through
the whole range of relationships with women,
the destructive feminine that comes in birth,
the adventure, the exciting, like a sexual partner,
and then I had the feeling of being an infant on her body.
The transition from the third matrix into the fourth
was like emerging sort of in fire.
There was, like, a goddess with dark complexion
and a peacock paradise or heaven,
so it was a very, very blissful experience.
She became, like, a great mother for me.
-Stan's session with Pauline in Amsterdam
revealed the archetypal nature of the birth experience,
during which the fetus
is exposed to a collective dimension
filled with powerful imagery and emotion,
but a newborn lacks the capacity
to make sense of what is witnessed,
and so these impressions remain in the unconscious,
influencing us in ways that we don't realize.
-One of the great contributions of Stan's work
is that he uncovered the deep structure,
the archetypal pattern, you might say,
of the life process as it is incarnated
and reincarnated in us as individuals.
-When Stan discovered the work of Lloyd Dumas
and the field of psychohistory,
he noted the parallels between the imagery
used to goad people to war and experiences
that he and his patients had during their sessions.
It became clear to Stan that these unconscious memories
of helplessness from the second matrix and anger
from the third were driving factors in the need for power.
This need for control was clearly evident in the book,
"A Sexual Profile of Men in Power,"
which detailed a 7-year study of call girls and madams
whose primary clients
were politicians and government officials.
The study find that over 50% of those men
regularly hired prostitutes, and more than half of them
demanded kinky or sadomasochistic sex
as a means of coping with the powerlessness
that they experienced in government.
-Nine months in the total dependence
of the maternal organism.
Then there is this incredible roller coaster of birth
that we are taken through
and then emerging with total dependence on the mother.
It leaves a very deep fear of the feminine in the male psyche,
and frequently clumsy effort to compensate for it --
not giving women the same rights,
not to treat them as equal citizens, and so on.
Women go through that also,
but because of their physiological function,
because of their anatomy, they are able to participate
directly in the process of creation.
The male participation is very marginal.
It can take, you know, a few minutes, and then it's over.
The way to resolve traumatic unconscious memory would be
if that material fully emerges into consciousness,
which will be therapeutic.
What can happen in everyday lives,
it comes close to the surface,
but the person does not realize what it is exactly,
but they feel the need to create a situation
that would involve those elements.
So for example, the transition from the third
to the fourth matrix frequently is experienced as fire.
I've worked with some people who were arsonists,
and they had this impulse.
They felt that something fantastic would happen
if they could experience a big fire.
When that happens, they watched it
and feel excitement for a while, but it is a real let down.
They expected something much more phenomenal,
but the drive can be strong enough
to drive them to do it again and again.
In a very similar way, the third matrix involves
a lot of sadomasochistic kind of experiences,
where you feel sexual arousal, and you feel confined,
and you feel sort of choked and so on.
It's a kind of unrecognized healing impulse,
but for it to be therapeutic,
it would have to involve introspection,
understanding what you are dealing with
and really be fully consciously in touch with that material.
-Nothing the conscious mind can think up
will ever satisfy the unconscious.
It has to originate from the unconscious to be cleared.
♪♪
After hearing so many of Stan's stories,
it was time for me to find out
what shadows were lurking in my unconscious.
Would they be as dark as what Stan had seen?
And if so, would I have the courage to confront them?
Rule number one, never do this alone.
The sitter is there to keep you safe,
ground you, and, more importantly, to hold the space
so that you can completely open to whatever comes.
As the LSD took effect,
there was a flood of geometric imagery.
Some people call it retinal discharge,
but now I think I was seeing fractals
or even the dimension that holds
the blueprints of the physical world.
♪♪
Soon, it transitioned into Christina,
and then, as though I was seeing through Christina's eyes,
it was Stan.
There was a sadness
as she realized that she was leaving him,
but then Stan transitioned into my father,
and Christina dissolved into me.
♪♪
The pain was so intense that I knew it couldn't just be mine.
I actually felt as though I was choking.
In that moment, I understood that
although I might have been triggered
by the pending death of my father,
I was also tapping into the collective sadness,
and what a depth of it there was --
addiction, drugs, alcohol, sex, compulsive behavior,
anything to dissolve back into the formless ocean of love
and avoid this unbearable sadness of separation.
♪♪
It took me two days to feel whole again.
If it hadn't been for my kids to think about
or the sitter to talk to,
I don't know if I would have come out of it.
But because I had grieved my dad's death before he died,
I was able to listen to his daydreams
during those last weeks of his life,
and when he finally slipped into a coma,
I knew how to help him detach from his body
so he wasn't afraid or in pain.
He lay like that for 28 hours, and then an hour
before my daughter's last ballet performance, he died.
I was filming while Charlotte danced
when suddenly I remembered that he had sat in that theater,
and I remembered exactly where he had sat.
The memory was so clear that I realized
that I was seeing through his eyes.
His spirit was there in the theater
to watch his granddaughter dance.
♪♪
After the performance, I went to help my mom.
When I had finally cleaned the space
so that she could remember him in better health, I went home.
A few hours later, I let the tears well up
and felt myself once again pulled out by my heart,
but because I knew that I could survive it,
I allowed the sadness to flow, and it felt amazing.
If I hadn't witnessed Stan's courage and trusted his example,
I doubt any of that would have happened.
He wasn't afraid to confront the darkness.
♪♪
In 1967, Stan was invited to continue his research
at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland,
but pushback against psychedelics was growing,
inflamed by flawed studies engineered to generate fear.
-We have children that are born without legs or arms.
The kind of thing we seen after thalidomide exposure.
-Even though the studies were eventually dismissed,
the culture was reeling from the impact of psychedelics.
As a result, the research program
at Johns Hopkins University was terminated.
Fortunately for Stan,
the program at Spring Grove Psychiatric Hospital
was still operational.
While there, he continued his research,
encountering even more intriguing patients.
-This was a patient who had some of
the most difficult pathology,
if you want to call it that way, that I have ever seen.
She was 4 years in prison, and while on parole,
she became a multiple drug addict.
She had very difficult episodes of depression,
so it was kind of a life decision,
and so we decided to take our chances.
So she had two very powerful sessions.
She was from a family where there was alcoholism,
there was abuse, there was incest.
And then in the third session,
suddenly she started crying,
she started screaming, and then vicious expression in her eyes,
incredible, incredibly sort of evil expression
and this very deep voice came and introduced itself,
himself, as the devil,
and then came this barrage of insults and threats.
There was information that the patient
as such could not have known.
I had a wonderful nurse that was Southern Baptist,
and she was shaking.
I thought she was getting a heart attack,
so I was watching the patient and the nurse.
At one point, I said,
"Well, this is obviously the Jungian archetype
that's manifesting here,
but maybe for that kind of archetype
the crucifix would be the best remedy."
As I was reacting emotionally, it was just becoming more real.
So I started meditating on light.
I knew that, you know, from my spiritual reading
that these creatures don't like light.
Suddenly stopped the way it started,
so everything relaxed.
Then as she was coming down,
we sort of started talking about it,
and I realized she remembered only what happened
before this episode and what happened after.
There's just total amnesia for this.
You know, I wondered if I should sort of bring that up
and talk about it and decided not to do it at all,
but she, herself, wonderful,
and then very shortly afterwards,
she left the hospital
and probably was a little lying on the questionnaire.
She got a job as a taxi driver.
-But despite the tremendous success of his work,
the program lost funding.
-We were finding it more and more difficult
to continue the research, and I had a lot of materials.
I really wanted a sabbatical, and do some writing,
and I got invitations from several publishers,
so I could take a year off.
And I went to a party in New York City,
and there was Michael Murphy there,
and he... the co-founder of Esalen.
-When I met Stan, first in '65, he was probably
the best-looking man in the human potential movement.
I mean, he was as good looking as Richard Burton.
-He said, "So, Stan, what are you doing these days?"
I said, "Well, I'm actually taking a year off
to write a book," and he said, "Why don't you come to Esalen?"
-It was my instinct as a director and producer
of this ongoing theater at Esalen,
he was perfect.
And of course we had been right in the middle
of a lot of experimentation with psychedelics,
and although psychedelics were not my ally,
Stan represented not only another doorway into this
but also sobriety.
I mean, he actually thought about it.
Tim pretended to think about it,
but he just proclaimed a vision of taking LSD every Sunday.
If it's good, just have more of it,
and we saw disaster after disaster during the '60s,
so Bob Schwartz gave us some money,
and Esalen provided a beautiful house,
and off we went.
And he became the leading force in our overall programming
for most of the years he was there.
-Besides our breath work workshops,
we offered then months-long workshops.
People were coming to Esalen from all over the world,
and they didn't want to take just one workshop.
So this gave me a chance to choose a topic
I was interested in and see who in the world
was doing some cutting-edge research
and invite those people, and then always finding,
like, 36 people who would want to do it with us.
-One popular program combined vipassana with breath work.
-I think of a time when we were holding
our large holotropic breath work and Buddhist practice retreats,
and there's a room full of some hundreds of people
doing the breath work after we had meditated,
going through these profound openings
with this music playing.
Some people are in heavenly states,
and some people feel like they're dying
and getting reborn, and some people have past life
experiences or turning into birds or animals,
and some people are having the reliving of their childhood,
every possible thing.
It's like being in Dante's inferno
and purgatorio and paradisio all at the same time,
and it's really quite marvelous because it's so well held
and tended by the facilitators,
and then when things get really dicey, they call Stan over.
So I remember one who was a multiple personality
who had different alters
that would show themselves at different points,
and one of them was really demonic,
and this whole demonic side started to come out, like,
"If you come near me, I will slash and kill you."
So the facilitators were a little bit nervous
because the voice and the aggression of this demon --
"You try to fix or help me, and I will get you,
and I will kill you and slash you."
It was not an easy person to be tending,
so they called Stan over
because it seemed like this demon wanted to eat everybody,
and Stan came over very calm and cool and sat down and said,
"Tell me more. You know, you're a demon.
You have some powers. What are those powers you have,
and who do you think you really are as a demon?
I mean, do you really know what your identity is?"
He didn't quite ask it in that way,
but he began to, like, look directly at the demon
and say, "You don't know really where
you come from, do you, who you are?
I'm very pleased to meet you, but you don't"...
And the demon started to get confused
and started to look around,
and it was, like, instead of being afraid of the demon,
Stan met this demonic energy
with a kind of curiosity and interest and fearlessness
that the demon that never met before,
and it started to kind of lose its way,
and then the whole thing morphed.
Magic happened when other people were frightened.
That kind of innocence that Stan has,
he's like this giant kid
wandering around saying, "Wow, look at that."
He has this tremendous appreciation for everything.
♪♪
-In 1974, Stan was about 43 years old,
and I was about 24 working at Esalen as a night guard
and then writing my dissertation,
you know, during the day,
and we got a call at about 4:00, 4:30 in the morning.
The night guard who was on that night said,
"We've got a crisis, and we need you guys here right away."
1:00 a.m. to 5:30 every morning,
we would let in people from outside of Esalen
to use the baths.
A young man had taken LSD with his girlfriend
and started to flip out at some point during the session,
became violently paranoid.
The girlfriend had escaped from the guy.
He had gone up the hill to their van.
All we knew was that he's got a knife,
he's naked,
he's psychotically paranoid and violent.
As we're approaching the van, I'm thinking to myself,
"Oh, this is great," just because I'm writing
a dissertation on LSD psychotherapy.
I'm now, you know, in a life-and-death situation.
-A victim of...
-So Stan opens the sliding van door,
and the bottle is thrown right by his head,
and then he goes in, picks up a blanket,
wraps it around the man, and puts him in a bear hug.
He says, "Okay. You've taken a very powerful psychoactive drug.
I want you to close your eyes and pay attention
to what's going on inside you."
♪♪
Within about 15 minutes,
the young man was laughing at himself
but at the same time embarrassed for what he had caused.
It was a real testament to Stan's personal courage,
but it also was an illustration of his whole philosophy
of trusting the psyche.
You know, the very first lecture that I ever heard
Stan give in March of 1974 at Esalen,
I asked him at the end,
"What do you do in the case of someone
who's in a really bad trip
where they're descending into an incessant loop
that they can't get out of,
and they feel like they're losing their sanity?"
and these things can have enduring effects, you know, too,
and he said with a kind of poetic conciseness
that I've never forgotten, he just said,
"Well, the full experience of an emotion
is the funeral pyre of the emotion,"
and he just pointed out that we have a tendency to,
of course, wall ourselves off from the pain,
the scary things in our psyche that are trying to emerge,
but he says, "That's actually the way
out of the pathology of the suffering."
So he was able to convey with that one sentence
the idea that bad trips and negative material,
which Tim Leary did not prepare the masses for,
were actually a royal road to transformative healing.
-I think it's essential when we discussed psychedelics
now to talk about the challenging experiences
and that it's not all easy.
MAPS does psychedelic harm reduction at Burning Man
and at festivals all over the world,
and one of our main principles is,
"Difficult is not the same as bad,"
and I think that's where with psychedelic therapy right now,
we prepare people in a much different way
and really talk about a lot of the kernels of wisdom
will come wrapped in these very difficult experiences.
-Stan recognized early on that existing schools of psychology
couldn't explain the profound experiences
and resulting transformations
that he and his patients underwent.
Even before moving to Esalen,
Stan worked with Abe Maslow and Tony Sutich to develop
transpersonal psychology,
which recognized the spiritual nature of humanity
and the importance of memories from our time
in the womb and beyond.
-We got to the point where we were very satisfied
with the kind of new psychology,
but we had no idea how we could possibly link
that gap between this kind of system that we created
and what we knew as the scientific psychology,
and that's where meeting Fritjof Capra
and reading his book, "The Tao of Physics,"
was extremely important for me.
Frances Vaughan invited him to Tiburon
to meet transpersonal psychologists,
and we really hit it off.
-We planned these seminars together,
which we called "Journeys Beyond Space and Time,"
and those were an inner journey of transpersonal experiences
and the outer journey of,
you know, physicists delving into matter
at the atomic and subatomic level.
-Fritjof would take the morning and tell people, you know,
how scientists, physicists now see the world of matter.
-I presented the perception of reality
where the solid objects of our everyday experience
dissolve into energy patterns
and where particles can travel backward and forward in time,
where these energy patterns, furthermore,
are intrinsically dynamic, the whole universe
being some sort of a cosmic dance of energy.
Stan was describing very similar experiences,
and as I did, he was comparing them
to the experience of mystics.
Now we had three perspectives --
the mystical experience,
the transpersonal experience, and the experience of physicists
in those subatomic paradigms.
-After lunch, when people came,
it was time for me to talk about my research.
It was pretty sober as compared to what Fritjof was describing,
and I was talking about something that happens
in some unusual states of consciousness
whereas Fritjof was redefining the material world
that we live in.
-One of the key insights from the new physics
is that reality has something of a holographic structure
or a fractal structure, and the simplest example of this
is a mathematical structure that we call the Mandelbrot set.
Now in science, this is called nested
sets of self-similar structures,
but I like to think that this is actually
a modern scientific discovery of an ancient
Hermetic principle of alchemy --
"As above, so below. As within, so without,"
that basically the microcosm replicates the macrocosm.
If we apply these ideas to spirituality,
what I would propose is that consciousness itself
has this same fractal structure,
which means that there is a self-similarity
at all levels of existence.
-Stan was one of the very first
to give this new conception of life
and this new perception of reality an emotional content,
an experiential content.
I think this is one of his many great contributions.
-So many new perspectives were introduced
during those workshops and month-long intensives.
Michael Harner, who Stan had met on his first trip
to the United States,
presented his work in Core Shamanic practices.
-It was 1965.
We met in the Esalen bathhouses, right?
-Yes. This was an interesting meeting.
We were both stark naked
when we first met. -Yeah.
Good way to start and had nothing to hide.
-Richard Tarnas, together with Stan,
developed archetypal astrology
as a means for gaining a deeper understanding of the forces
influencing individual and collective psyches.
-We noticed the phenomenology of the perinatal matrices
could have been passages from handbooks of astrology.
So that was mind-blowing
because I had no understanding of astrology
when I was doing it,
but then we found out something even more amazing
that actually people were having in their sessions the encounter
with elements of these matrices at the time
when they had these planets in some significant transit,
so it became, you know,
something that allowed prediction,
what kind of experiences people would have.
I had a chance to spend very informal time
with people who were the pioneers, you know --
Fritjof Capra, Rupert Sheldrake, Karl Pribram.
We had Huston Smith, Joseph Campbell.
No university had that kind of a staff,
so when I started
the International Transpersonal Association,
I could pick up the telephone and say,
"I want to do a conference in Bombay, in India,
and I can pay the round-trip ticket and feed you.
They will put you up, but I can't give any honoring.
Do you want to come?" and they all said, "Yes."
-Stan Grof wrote me a long handwritten letter
saying how much he liked my book.
He'd had a copy shipped,
and he invited me to speak at a conference
he was organizing in Bombay,
but I'd never been to California.
I'd never heard of things like the New Age Movement.
I'd never heard of Stan Grof.
I'd never heard of Esalen, and suddenly, in this hotel,
it was a kind of astonishing world of people
who were into consciousness research
talking about the Esalen Institute.
Stan was talking about his psychotropic breathing
and LSD research and so on.
I was amazed to find myself in an environment
where I could talk about the things
I was really most interested in,
where people were interested in finding out more,
a kind of fizz of excitement and discovery and new horizons.
-People were just very hungry to find an atmosphere
where they could connect with like-minded people.
They were not afraid of criticism
that would have any implications, you know,
for their reputation or their position.
So we really got the truth from people.
-...that there is a domain of potentiality
which is nonlocal, and therefore, it is oneness.
-The universe doesn't work on...
-Stan represents what has been sorely lacking,
which is the long through line of work over decades
because in this wild, meandering exploration
of the further reaches of human nature,
particularly in the '60s,
but even in the long sobering-up of the '70s,
he's been able to provide a huge body of empirical lore.
-It's fair to say, I think,
that I wouldn't be doing the research
that I'm doing had it not have been for reading
Stan's "Realms of the Human Unconscious."
-Yet despite the tremendous insights
shared during Stan's tenure at Esalen
and his continued exploration of the healing power
of nonordinary states of consciousness,
so little has changed.
-The work with holotropic states also provide very,
very interesting insight
into how we should approach the situation
that we have in the world where we are in global crisis,
in some sense, on the verge of possible extinction --
not just our species but taking a few species with us.
You know, changing this situation is not simple.
We cannot just to do kind of transpersonal,
spiritual sanitization of creation,
simply eliminate everything that we don't like
that we think is bad or evil.
-It was hard for me to hear what Stan was saying.
I'd always hoped that one could avoid darkness and pain.
I didn't want to believe that light and shadow
were equal parts of the whole.
Perhaps ayahuasca could help me make peace with that.
The problem with ayahuasca is that it can take
a long time to come on.
The mistake that I made was thinking I hadn't had enough.
♪♪
I really thought I was dying, but in my heart,
I knew that it was too late.
There was nothing to be done, so I purged and surrendered.
♪♪
It took me a while to realize that I was in another dimension
and that as long as I remained formless in it, I was fine.
If I tried to feel my body, I was instantly nauseous.
For 6 hours, I stayed in the quantum fields.
At times, it seemed I was watching reincarnation,
where a soul would merge with the possibility wave
and then tumble down into increasing density,
flipping like a coin between victim and perpetrator.
Pretty much every deep experience
I've had since has been uncomfortable in ways
I never could've imagined, but most often,
I end up in a place of great beauty and love
as though the ugliness had to be fully experienced
before I had access to the underlying joy.
When I look back at my archetypal astrology,
I see now that I've been through a series of deaths and rebirths.
What died was my limited sense of self.
Once that illusion slipped away,
I could feel my true nature as energy beyond the creative
and destructive cycles of the universe,
timeless and vast,
within a unity that might be forgotten but never lost.
-I think it's healthier to know
that the devil is something within our psyches
and within our souls as humans rather than some,
you know, object out there.
-I think people who are in touch
with the state of the world right now recognize
that we're basically all skating on thin ice.
There is a profound sense of uncertainty
and potentially looming danger of catastrophic proportions,
and it takes a lot of courage to face that.
We can't simply be sure we can be bringing
in some technological fix
or rational solution to this situation.
Uncertainty itself is a key part
of any initiatory transformation.
You can't have a pretend near-death experience
in order to have an effective transfiguration of how you live.
You need to really feel everything is at stake,
and you don't know the outcome,
and if we can have the courage to face that
and to go through this dark night of the soul,
in some sense, and to bring all our wits
and heart and imagination and bravery together
to engage this great threshold,
I think that's the key to our future.
-If anybody is paying attention,
they're traumatized in some way,
and psychedelics can help us deal with those fears
and still look positively at what we can do
to contribute to making it better,
so a lot of the astronauts who've looked back at the Earth
from space and realized that it's a single organism,
that there are no clear country boundaries,
that we're all in this together,
we're all part of this 14 billion years of evolution
have been spiritualized.
When people grasp the sense of the whole,
that has profound political implications,
and it's a lot cheaper to give somebody a psychedelic
than shoot them up to the Moon.
[ Chuckles ]
-The power of psychedelics to profoundly change
people is remarkable.
-The information that was delivered to me
in those experiences has pretty much formed
the rest of my life since then.
-The depression was gone, never came back.
I became a different person who was able to enjoy life,
learn how to laugh,
who was nicer to my children and my grandchildren.
The substance, which was a psychedelic, helped me so much
that I dedicated the rest of my life
to make it available to everyone who suffers.
-I now have completely, 180 degrees
modified my viewpoint to understand
that we are spiritual beings,
performing and acting and learning in physical bodies,
and it is through the power of some of the psychedelics
and through some of the ideas of Stan
and the people that he has brought together with him
that this new opening has happened in my life
as well as in the lives of thousands
and millions of people.
-And now, ever since that,
anytime when things like that happen --
Of course, they happen again and again --
I remember what Stan told me.
"You're ready. Face it. Your psyche will not give you
any task that you cannot tackle."
-Regardless of the method, it's the state
one finds themselves in that matters, awake and joyful
in the heartfelt knowledge of being part of something greater.
It's only fitting that Stan experienced his own rebirth
after Christina's passing.
For years, he had suffered from debilitating back pain
and nerve sensitivity in his legs,
but a higher-than-normal dose of medical marijuana
launched a process that freed him from that pain.
-I had the feeling that I was dying,
and I saw other people who died before me,
Angie Arrien and Christina,
Sasha Shulgin and Hans Ruedi Giger,
so I had the feeling this is, like, end of an era,
and I was joining, and then there was that sense like,
"No, you are not ready yet," and sort of, "You go back.
You know, you have more work to do,"
and I went for about a month
into a lot of nonordinary states of consciousness.
Spontaneous chanting was coming.
A significant part of it was about whales.
-During this period, Brigitte,
one of Stan's first students and dearly loved by him,
reached out.
-Hearing the first phone call where we reconnected,
she told me that she was about to go for a trip
where it was possible
to actually meet the whales and swim with the dolphins.
That was an amazing experience.
We first met when Brigitte came to a lecture of mine in Freiburg
after she had had a very difficult LSD experience,
and very shortly afterwards,
she participated in our first breathwork
and decided to come to Esalen, where she stayed for a year,
and she did several of the trainings
of holotropic breathwork, so I've always loved her.
She brought incredible spirit
into all the groups that she participated in,
and she was always a light of my life at a time when,
you know, I was committed to really not have any way
of sort of bringing the relationship farther,
and then the situation changed,
so we decided to join our lives together.
-...a toast to it's never too late.
-No.
-In everyone's life, it is just never too late.
-Whoo!
-I never expected the late years in my life
would be the happiest time of my life.
-I've just always loved him,
and I feel very blessed that we can be together.
It's a dream come true.
It's just this oneness that we share and the humor
and the way we see things,
the inner journeys that we share.
It's just wonderful to be married to Stan.
-And just as Stan and Brigitte's past circle
back to Esalen where they now teach together,
so has my journey returned me to a familiar sense of peace.
What began as a quest to reconnect with my teachers
has evolved into a deeper understanding
of what it is to be human.
I followed the path that Stan forged and explored the darkness
and the light, finding beauty in both.
-This is... -The tantric imagery
that drew me to Stan now
makes up a daily practice that not just maintains
but grows the sense of connection
I've found through my psychedelic work.
What I find amazing is the parallel
between what happens to one's brain on psychedelics
and what is experienced in tantric meditation.
♪♪
I learned so much from Stan.
The techniques he developed and the spiritual grounding
he provided for them
hold such promise for these challenging times.
May we follow his example
and begin our own journeys of discovery.
♪♪
-One really fundamental principle of shamanism
is that everyone is one and is alive and has spirit.
-It was indeed this other reality
that could be accessed in different ways,
and like Stan, I've come to that conclusion
that it's all too logical, really.
-The energies that people liberate in themselves
is just so beautiful to see.
I mean, we just live up to I don't know how little
of our potential in our normal, everyday life,
and so seeing people becoming alive, including myself,
and awakening is just beautiful.
-Bringing about any change in our way of being in the world
is having some access to these deep layers,
and one of the ways used by all traditions is sound.
-Those moments that may be so tragic or so joyful,
so ecstatic that reside in the collective,
maybe reside in the collective unconscious,
they live again through us in these nonordinary states,
and again, the practice of working with the transits,
of understanding them through an astrological lens,
can provide a map
to see each one of those experiences through history
and then how it comes to bear on our own personal experience.
-A new concept, a new paradigm from the ground up,
what the universe is, who we are, and where we are going is,
to me, the key questions, and they have...
Basically, it has to be an integral, integrative answer,
or if you don't find it, then it's your fault
because the universe doesn't work on little bits and pieces.
It works as a whole.
-It's not, like, a side effect of these drugs, you see?
Like, you say, "Well, they have these religious experiences"
because then you're...
The spiritual dimension is the core dimension.
It's the core dimension.
It's not an add-on that you can take or leave.
That changes everything.
-People who do some responsible,
systematic work with these powerful experiential methods,
from some intense spiritual practice to psychedelics,
they tend to develop independently a certain
kind of worldview that they share.
It's the Buckminster Fuller idea.
You know, we are on a spaceship.
We are all in it together,
and what some of us do will influence the others.
There's no way of isolating that.
I've seen that powerful transformation
happening in individuals.
Now, whether this is possible on a large scale
and whether we have enough time, that's a different story.
♪♪