D. Rigas 2005-10-25
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
What does holotropic mean? The dictionary does not define the term, and neither does the author, although he has developed an entire psychiatric treatment and trademarked it as the "Holotropic Breathwork." If we compare it to the meaning of "allotropic" we can deduce that it should mean "of one form." But with one form with what? After reading the book I am guessing that it refers to the universe. Our mind is one with it. Purely a guess; the author does not tell us.
Stanislav Grof was born in in 1931 in Czechoslovakia, where he received an MD in 1956, and PhD in 1967. It appears that he spent his time between the two degrees doing research in LSD-induced psychic states, often using himself as the subject. But when he came to the US in 1967, LSD use became prohibited, and so he eventually continued his work in "Transpersonal Psychology" (defined as a study of non-ordinary states of consciousness) with techniques that involved controlled breathing in a controlled setting. If nothing else, the reader of this book can get an idea of what a psychedelic trip feels like.
The book consists of two parts, framed between what could be called an introductory and a concluding chapter. In the introduction he mentions how some avant-garde physicists have introduced theories that connect together everything in the universe into one mathematical or even conscious entity: Talbot's holographic universe, Bohm's implicate order, Sheldrake's morphic resonance, and finally Jung's (an avant-garde psychiatrist in his day) collective unconscious. He then takes off into his favorite subject, LSD-induced regression into early childhood states and the birth process.
The next four chapters are allocated to studies of regression into the womb and birth experience, which he considers as the most important factors that are unconsciously affecting our adult feelings and actions. Even if you strongly disagree with what he is saying, try not to throw the book in garbage at this point. The following five chapters deal with wider transpersonal expansions of one's consciousness. Although he starts by discussing how under regression he was able to remember his existence as the spermatozoon that caused his own conception, and how others regressed to previous lives, or even plants and inanimate objects, most of the information here comes from published work by others. A lot of it is interesting, and a sufficient reason to have kept reading the book to this point. There is a good discussion of Carl Jung and his myth and archetype ideas, a brief discussion of synchronicity, and an excellent listing of many inventions and ideas that originated in people's minds as complete, inspired insights.
In the concluding chapter, he ignores the contents of the preceding five chapters, returns to his favorite subject of birth trauma, and generalizes it as the cause of all problems that have plagued mankind through its existence.
Obviously, this book is directed to the open-minded reader. Personally I disagree with the author's conclusions. I think all the data he presented could have been explained better if he followed through with Jung's and others' ideas of a universal subconscious rather than his own birth trauma theories.
The writer is the author of "Christianity without Fairy Tales: When Science and Religion Merge."
