The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 66 of 125
Grof's dual unity
THE NEXT MORNING I opened my copy of Realms of the Human Unconscious, laughing aloud at myself as I did so. Really, this is getting to be too much, I thought, thumbing through the pages . . . but there it was! Dual unity, Grof calls such moments, and they figure largely among the transpersonal phenomena that compose the final category of psychedelic experience. The subject experiences various degrees of loosening and losing of his ego boundaries and merging with another person into a state of unity and oneness. In spite of feeling totally fused with the interpersonal partner, the individual always retains simultaneously the awareness of his own identity. In LSD sessions, this state of dual unity can be experienced with the therapist, sitter, family members, or other participating persons.1 The concluding chapters of Realms are the truly mind-blowing ones. For Grof, while transpersonal phenomena can appear sporadically in early sessions, they only begin to occur regularly in the measure that the death/rebirth crisis is lived through. What is the “transpersonal”? Perhaps the term boundary loss is more graphic. In The Doors of Perception, Huxley quoted the English philosopher C. D. Broad, and so powerful is the passage I’d like to repeat it here. The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. Over the top as this is sounds, psychedelic experience does appear to bear out its possibility. Something resembling…