nant paradigm. Typically, their ideas were initially dismissed as products of ignorance, poor judgment, bad science, fraud, or even insanity. I am now in the ninth decade of my life, a time when researchers often try to review their professional career and outline the conclusions they have reached. More than half a century of research of holotropic states – my own, as well as that of many of my transpersonally-oriented colleagues – has amassed so much supportive evidence for a radically new understanding of consciousness and of the human psyche that I have decided to describe this new vision in its entirety, fully aware of its controversial nature. The fact that the new findings challenge the most fundamental metaphysical assumptions of materialistic science should not be a sufficient reason for rejecting them. Whether this new vision will ultimately be refuted or accepted should be determined by unbiased future research of holotropic states. 5.1 The nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter According to the current scientific worldview, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of material processes; it allegedly emerges out of the complexity of the neurophysiological processes in the brain. This thesis is presented with great authority as an obvious fact that has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. But on closer inspection, we discover that it is a basic metaphysical assumption that is not supported by facts and actually contradicts the findings of modern consciousness research. We have ample clinical and experimental evidence showing deep correlations between the anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry of the brain, on the one hand, and states of consciousness, on the other. However, none of these findings proves unequivocally that consciousness is actually generated by the brain. Even sophisticated theories based on advanced research of the brain – such as Stuart Hameroff’s suggestion that the solution of the problem of consciousness might lie in understanding the quantum process in the microtubules of brain cells on the molecular and supramolecular level (Hameroff 1987) – falls painfully short of bridging the formidable gap between matter and consciousness and illuminating how material processes could generate consciousness. The origin of consciousness from matter is simply taken for granted as an obvious and self-evident fact, based on the metaphysical assumption of the primacy of matter in the universe. In fact, in the entire history of science, nobody has ever offered a plausible explanation for how consciousness could be generated by material processes, or even suggested a viable approach to the problem. Consider, for example, the book by Francis Crick The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Crick 1994); the book’s jacket carried a very exciting promise: “Nobel Prize-winning Scientist Explains Consciousness”. Crick’s “astonishing hypothesis” was succinctly stated at the beginning of his book: ”You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve 10 (8) Stanislav Grof
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