Stanislav Grof Quotes - Page 3

Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth.

The beliefs concerning reincarnation have great ethical impact on human life and our relationship to the world.

There are people who can start having very powerful experiences without taking psychedelics. It can happen against their will. This is a universal phenomenon.

It is possible to see the intermediate state between lives as being in a way more important than incarnate existence.

It became much more complicated politically to work with psychedelics because of the unsupervised experimentation with psychedelics, particularly among young people.

Patients reported that their psychedelic sessions were an invaluable experiential training for dying.

Individuals approaching death often experience encounters with their dead relatives, who seem to welcome them to the next world. These deathbed visions are authentic and convincing; they are often followed by a state of euphoria and seem to ease the transition.

Whether or not LSD research and therapy will return to society, the discoveries that psychedelics made possible have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the psyche, human nature, and the nature of reality.

According to materialistic science, any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of the genes.

The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped.

A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know.

Walt Disney was my great hero.

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.

I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.

I have taken part in ceremonies with North American and Mexican shamans, as well as Brazilian ceremonies.

The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death.

Research challenges the materialistic understanding of death, according to which biological death represents the final end of existence and of all conscious activity.

Dying people in pre-industrial cultures typically died in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe.

In some instances, the accuracy of past-life memories can be objectively verified, sometimes with remarkable detail.

I have to say I regretted giving up animated movies.

As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions.