Tags / 10 quotes from 2 sources
#transpersonal-consciousness
Erik Davis - On Psychedelics
Ketamine and the new neuro-reductionism
Rarely has the new neuro-reductionism been so naked in its repackaging of human experience. Nowhere in the research or the journalism does anyone suggest that heavily depressed people feel better because ketamine sends them on a first-person voyage through profound, sometimes…
Psychedelics as a paradox for materialists
Rarely has the new neuro-reductionism been so naked in its repackaging of human experience. Nowhere in the research or the journalism does anyone suggest that heavily depressed people feel better because ketamine sends them on a first-person voyage through profound, sometimes…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Grof's transpersonal realm
the transpersonal realm One of Grof’s most provocative findings was that birth and death appear to be deeply interrelated in the unconscious mind. Reliving their own birth, subject after subject believed they were in fact dying—dying for real—and, emerging from their ordeal…
LSD's power to terrify
The next morning I sat staring blankly at the trip journal. What on Earth had happened? Was that Grof’s “transpersonal realm”? If so, describing it as “multilayered and multidimensional” was putting it mildly. How did such an amalgam of diverse elements—astoundingly…
The perinatal crisis of ego death
For Grof insisted there was no way of stably accessing the transpersonal without living through the full implications of the perinatal—implications that climaxed in a convulsive death/rebirth crisis. And, frankly, I wasn’t sure how much I was up for this. I double-checked by…
Resistance on psychedelics
More generally, what I’d suggest was involved was . . . resistance. Resistance is an analytic concept you don’t hear much about in relation to psychedelic drugs, as though they were so potent that blocking them was out of the question. Such hasn’t been my experience. My first…
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…
Tuning in to one station loud and clear
For me personally, my experience of turning in to the passerby on the street initiated a cycle of boundary-loss experiences, marking a qualitative break with everything that had come before. My earlier trips seemed like fumbling with a radio dial and getting bursts of this or…
Osho's fourth body
Earlier we saw that Advaita Vedanta was putting down roots in the West and beginning to develop into a new nondualistic philosophy. This is the context in which I’d like—very briefly—to prospect a possible psychedelic/spiritual interface, particularly in terms of the two…
Where to find first-hand trip reports
The ’60s and ’70s high tide of firsthand reports is a thing of the past. Today the only popular compilation in print is Charles Hayes’ Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures (2000). Despite patchiness, the fifty accounts make gripping reading. While I was…