A must watch video featuring Stanislav Grof, a true pioneer in the field of
psychedelics. Some excerpts below.
'My personal belief is that psychedelics used responsibly under supervision
would be a major tool of transformation. If you do it responsibly and you
offer yourself loving support, so that you build it into the setting, then
it's a powerful tool and really changing people in a predictable way, which
is lowering levels of aggression, increasing tolerance, increasing
compassion, and what also develops somehow quite spontaneously is tremendous
ecological awareness. You don't have to teach people ecology and they
experience their fundamental oneness with everything. They realise that
whatever we are doing to the environment we are doing to ourselves.'
'They open up dimensions of reality which are auto genetically real, or some
interesting radically different perspective on every day reality. This is
not a philosophical speculation, this is something that can be pragmatically
tested, and in a non-ordinary states you can have the experience of your
boundaries melting and your consciousness expanding, but it encompasses much
larger units becoming - becoming other people experiencing group
consciousness, experiencing identification with various animal species,
identification with archetypal beings, visits to archetypal domains and so
on.'
'And there is also a very significant experience, in which you can have a
sense of becoming the divine, becoming the creative principles. There are
extremes; on one side you can have ecstatic rapture, a state of peace, of
bliss that passes all understanding - celestial, paradisial kind of states.
On the other side there could be hellish states, there could be abysmal
despair, there could be tremendous anxiety, there could be profound feelings
of guilt - there could be anything in between.'
But at the beginning of the cradle of all major religions were visionary
experiences of the prophets, saints, of the founders of the religion and
also of the early disciples…religion began from visionary experiences. Now
when it becomes an organised religion it becomes a whole other story. Very
frequently the religion loses the connection to the spiritual source and
becomes involved in politics and secular things, concerned about controlling
people, possessions, hierarchies and so on. There is a major difference
between spirituality, which is a direct experience of these normally
invisible dimensions of reality, it's a very private thing. It’s between me
and the universe, based on personal experience. And then there is religion,
not everything that is religious is spiritual and not everything that is
spiritual is religious.'
