that their inhabitants conducted dances, similar to those still performed by some aboriginal cultures for the induction of holotropic states. Shamanism is not only ancient, it is also universal; it can be found in North and South America, in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Polynesia. The fact that so many different cultures throughout human history have found shamanic techniques useful and relevant suggests that they address the “primal mind” – a basic and primordial aspect of the human psyche that transcends race, culture, and time. All the cultures with the exception of the Western industrial civilization have held holotropic states in great esteem and spent much time and effort to develop various ways of inducing them. They used them to connect with their deities, other dimensions of reality, and with the forces of nature, for healing, for cultivation of extrasensory perception, and for artistic inspiration. For pre-industrial cultures, healing always involved holotropic states of consciousness – either for the client, for the healer, or for both of them at the same time. In many instances, a large group or even an entire tribe enters a non-ordinary state of consciousness together, as it is, for example, among the !Kung Bushmen in the African Kalahari Desert. Western psychiatry and psychology does not see holotropic states (with the exception of dreams that are not recurrent or frightening) as potential sources of healing or of valuable information about the human psyche, but basically as pathological phenomena. Traditional psychiatry tends to use indiscriminately pathological labels and suppressive medication whenever these states occur spontaneously. Michael Harner (1980), an anthropologist of good academic standing who underwent a shamanic initiation during his fieldwork in the Amazonian jungle and practices shamanism, suggests that Western psychiatry is seriously biased in at least two significant ways. It isethnocentric, which means that it considers its own view of the human psyche and of reality to be the only correct one and superior to all others. It is also cognicentric (a more accurate word might be pragmacentric), meaning that it takes into consideration only experiences and observations in the ordinary state of consciousness. Psychiatry’s disinterest in holotropic states and disregard for them has resulted in a culturally insensitive approach and a tendency to pathologize all activities that cannot be understood in its own narrow context. This includes the ritual and spiritual life of ancient and pre-industrial cultures and the entire spiritual history of humanity. 4 Implications of modern consciousness research for psychiatry If we subject to systematic scientific scrutiny the experiences and observations associated with holotropic states, it leads to a radical revision of our understanding of consciousness, the human psyche, and the nature of reality. The resulting revolution in our thinking resembles in its scope and depth the conceptual cataclysm that the physicists faced in the first three decades of the twentieth century, when they had to move from Newtonian to quantum-relativistic physics. In a sense, the new insights from consciousness research concerning the psyche represent a logical comple8 Stanislav Grof
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