the method of holotropic breathwork, which opens the access to the perinatal and transpersonal realms for anybody who is interested in personal verification of the above observations. Comparable information focusing specifically on psychedelic sessions can be found in my book LSD Psychotherapy that has now been available for many years in a new edition (Grof 1994). The existence and nature of transpersonal experiences violates some of the most basic assumptions of mechanistic science. They imply such seemingly absurd notions as relativity and arbitrary nature of all physical boundaries, non-local connections in the universe, communication through unknown means and channels, memory without a material substrate, non-linearity of time, or consciousness associated with all living organisms, and even inorganic matter. Many transpersonal experiences involve events from the microcosm and the macrocosm, realms that cannot normally be reached by unaided human senses, or from historical periods that precede the origin of the solar system, formation of planet earth, appearance of living organisms, development of the nervous system, and emergence of homo sapiens. The research of holotropic states thus reveals an astonishing paradox concerning the nature of human beings. It clearly shows that, in a mysterious and yet unexplained way, each of us harbors the information about the entire universe and all of existence, has potential experiential access to all of its parts, and in a sense is the whole cosmic network, as much as he or she is just an infinitesimal part of it, a separate and insignificant biological entity. The new cartography reflects this fact and portrays the individual human psyche as being essentially commensurate with the entire cosmos and the totality of existence. As absurd and implausible as this idea might seem to a traditionally trained scientist and to our commonsense, it can be relatively easily reconciled with new revolutionary developments in various scientific disciplines usually referred to as the new or emerging paradigm. I firmly believe that the expanded cartography, which I have outlined above, is of critical importance for any serious approach to such phenomena as shamanism, rites of passage, mysticism, religion, mythology, parapsychology, near-death experiences, and psychedelic states. This newmodel of the psyche is not just a matter of academic interest. As I will try to show in the remaining pages of this article, it has deep and revolutionary implications for the understanding of emotional and psychosomatic disorders and offers new and revolutionary therapeutic possibilities. 6 The nature and architecture of emotional and psychosomatic disorders Traditional psychiatry uses the medical model and the disease concept not only for disorders of a clearly organic nature, but also for emotional and psychosomatic disorders for which no biological cause has been found. Psychiatrists use quite loosely the term “mental disease” and try to assign various emotional disorders to specific diagnostic categories comparable to those of somatic medicine. Generally, the time of the onset of symptoms is seen as 28 Stanislav Grof
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