The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 17 of 125
Rereading Grof on the unconscious
What made me sit down and reread Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious at precisely this point? I just don’t know. Several times in the following narrative there are going to be examples of events I can understand only as direct intervention of the unconscious in my daily life, and perhaps this was the first of them. I had read the book several years before, on the insistence of a friend who swore it was one of the few masterpieces of contemporary psychology and philosophy; and having read it, I could only agree with him. On that first reading the introductory chapters seemed to be in agreement with what little I could remember of Masters and Houston’s Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. Grof’s argument, like theirs, was based on a fourfold classification of LSD’s effects . . . though Grof spoke of “realms” rather than stages or levels.