VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 SPRING 2015

in different parts of the world with and without the ingestion of psychedelic plants, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and Psilocybe mushrooms. This has involved contact with various North American, Mexican, South American, and African shamans and healers. I have also had extensive contact with representatives of various spiritual disciplines, including Vipassana, Zen, and Vajrayana Buddhism, Siddha Yoga, Tantra, and the Christian Benedictine order. I have also closely followed the development of thanatology, the young discipline studying near-death experiences and the psychological and spiritual aspects of death and dying. In the late 1960s and early 1970s I participated in a large research project studying the effects of psychedelic therapy for individuals dying of cancer. I also have been privileged to know personally and experience some of the great psychics and parapsychologists of our era, pioneers of laboratory consciousness research, and therapists who had developed and practiced powerful forms of experiential therapy that induce holotropic states of consciousness. My initial encounter with holotropic states was very difficult and challenging, both intellectually and emotionally. In the early years of my laboratory and clinical psychedelic research, I was bombarded daily with experiences and observations, that my medical and psychiatric training had not prepared me for. As a matter of fact, I was experiencing and observing things that were considered impossible in the context of the scientific worldview I had obtained during my medical training. And yet, those supposedly impossible things were happening all the time. I have described these “anomalous phenomena” in my articles and books (Grof 2000, 2006). 5 Psychology of the future In the late 1990s, I received a phone call from Jane Bunker, my editor at State University New York (SUNY) Press, which had published many of my books. She asked me if I would consider writing a book that would summarize the observations from my research in one volume and would serve as an introduction to my already-published books. She also asked if I could specifically focus on all the experiences and observations from my research that current scientific theories could not explain and suggest the revisions in our thinking that would be necessary to account for these revolutionary findings. This was a tall order, but also a great opportunity. My 70th birthday was rapidly approaching and a new generation of facilitators was conducting our Holotropic Breathwork training all over the world. We needed a manual covering the material that was taught in our training modules. And here was an offer to provide it for us. The result of this exchange was a book with a deliberately provocative title: Psychology of the Future. The radical revisions in our understanding of consciousness and the human psyche in health and disease that I suggested in this work fall into the following categories: 1. The nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter; 2. New cartography of the human psyche; 8 (6) Stanislav Grof

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