Sharon Moriarty 2007-11-29
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Grof throws it all at you in this delightful little book on consciousness and transpersonal psychology, which is also an easy read. He discusses and elaborates on many topics that are of interest in exploring paradigm shifting views on the nature of consciousness and existence and so migrating us out of the straight jacket of materialistic monism and Freudian psychology, that have so dominated western thinking.
Topics reviewed include Holotropic breathwork, Crop Circles, Siddha Yoga, LSD and Ketamine Based therapy sessions, past life regression therapy, Synchronicities, Shamanic Influences, Primal Therapy, ESP, Remote viewing, Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM), Astrological Archetypes etc. and it is mostly through direct experiential based vignetttes garnered from the authors 50 years in the field.
The Holotropic breathwork itself seems like a variant on Osho's dynamic kundalini pranayama, and active meditations that is combined with music. Knowing from my own experience the relationship between breathing rhythm and the quality and one's conscious state and moods, ( a fact that is also known for millennia from the teachings of Siddhas such as Thirumoolar), it is highly likely that it can be used to raise deep unconscious and traumatic states so that they can be therapeutically resolved. Just like people remember things based on a trigger from the time the memory was implanted, each traumatic event in a person past life or past lives will have its own characteristic breathing rhythm and going into this upsetting breathing rhythm can be used as a trigger to raise it once again. Unfortunately, in this book Grof does not go into too much detail on how the mechanics of this breathwork but does describe some stories of those who were able to use successfully to heal themselves from trauma or phobias developed in the birth canal and in past lives.
The LSD experiences he describes paint reality in the same words as those of the yogic Siddhas, namely that the real world a highly expansive interconnected infinite and spaceless intelligence capable of manifold manifestations and meanings. That it is never separate from the experiencer but a is a vast phenomenal game of play of the cosmic consciousness. That the apparent separation and sedimentations of objects arises out of conditioning and dullness and lack of flexibility in the conscious apparatus. That LSD can be used to alleviate this dullness and conditioning temporarily and so dehypnotize one from the dream of separation and limitations. That the experiences induced by it are not neurochemical artifacts, symptoms of a toxic psychosis as mainstream psychologists called it, but genuine manifestations of the human psyche itself. Personally, I use yoga, pranayama and meditation to achieve the same results.
On one occasion, in an LSD session, and OBE the author takes a trip to his mother's house and the experience is so real, that he believes like in the dream of Chuang Tzu that it is his life in America that is a dream. He considers taking back a picture from the house to proof to himself that the nature of the world is entirely dream but is fearful that he may find out something he doesn't want to know and messing with powers beyond his conscious abilities to assimilate. He should have took the picture, and then he would have known that all is dream. Also, there are no powers to be fearful off because there are no devilish mystic archetypes or black forces beyond your own mind. Unpowered by your mind, they dissolve into nothingness.
In another experience, he describes a ketamine session in which he experiences identification with petroleum as an evil metaphysical archetypal entity and later he says "I became every jew in the nazi gas chambers, every sprayed ant and cockroach, every fly caught in the sticky goo of the fly-traps". I think the author needs to make a clearer distinction here, that he did not become these things, in his Ketamine session, he has just achieved a clear and noise free perspective as one gets in the Eka Grata state of consciousness. You can experience things close up and real, to the exclusion of all else. However, you are still only experiencing it from the outside and so seeing only surfaces and heightened sensory perceptions and thought superimpositions based on your understandings and unconscious reservoir of experiences- you are not experiencing it from within as it is in the field of the one-consciousness. This is a qualitatively different experience.
In another session, he experiences himself becoming a towel at a neighboring swimming pool in Esalen, and seeing all those at the pool and watching all that was going on. This is a remote viewing experiencing and he says later those at the pool validated what he saw and experienced and he takes this as indicative of proof that he did astrally project and have an OBE.
However, I feel the author may need to take the quantum leap in consciousness into better understanding himself on this one and in so doing transmigrating his current conscious onthological vision.
Consciousness does not go out and astrally project or have OBEs etc. It is always stationary, what changes is that different perspectives and views are brought into the field of consciousness as the objects of consciousness. I feel the author still things that consciousness (transpersonal or to alternative) exists in the field of the world and travels around it freely - he needs to make the radical revision that the world exists only in his field of consciousness. A Course in Miracles says this very succinctly in the line "Ideas leave not their Source" . Remote viewing works because all mind is joined and this mind is spaceless, - moreover there are no objects and no world apart from mind - they represent just projections of thoughts. It is this that makes it possible to experience things in remote corner of the world from your own living room. The Zen folk say this also very clearly when they say "No Vehicle - is the Great Vehicle of Zen" and the Buddha is one who travels all day without traveling anywhere at all.
In this case, he simply brought the experience of the being a towel at the swimming pool and his friends there into his field of consciousness. It is a conscious substitution interposing one thought stream with another and not a going out of mind. Their words and actions just represent his own ideas projected out of his mind - afterwards they have to validate what he saw because there is no "they" and no out-there - just his own mind validating his own thoughts and conscious experience at a later time.
Anyway, thought the book was a thought provoking read but good conceptual content and is open to later validation by each reader by their own direct experiences. It represents new life and oxygen and a major revision to the stuffy, reactionary, conditioned and positively Victorian and Pavlovian thought systems underscored by current psychological modalites that depend heavily on neuroleptic bombardment, Freudian psychology and rigid DSM IV diagnoses.
