Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience Read Free Page B

communist Czechoslovakia, Grof had read Freud, and been deeply impressed by the clarity of the style, and Freud’s ability to ‘decode the obscure language of the unconscious mind’. Grof decided to become a psychologist, and went to medical school. He later trained in psychoanalysis under the president of the Czech Psychoanalytic Association. But, when it actually came to applying Freud’s ideas to real people, he became thoroughly frustrated. They either didn’t seem to work, or, if they worked, took a very long time. Freud himself had often spent years over a case, with minimal success.
    One day, a package arrived from the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basle. It was a new drug called LSD, and the Sandoz Laboratories were sending it to psychologists all over the world and asking them to test it.
    Grof himself tried it, and it changed his life. ‘I was treated to a fantastic display of colourful visions, some abstract and geometrical, others filled with symbolic meaning. I felt an array of emotions of an intensity I had never dreamed possible’.
    And when lights were flashed in his eyes,
    I was hit by a radiance that seemed comparable to the light at the epicentre of an atomic explosion . . . This thunderbolt of light catapulted me from my body . . . My consciousness seemed to explode into cosmic dimensions.
    I found myself thrust into the middle of a cosmic drama that previously had been far beyond even my wildest imaginings. I experienced the Big Bang, raced through black holes and white holes in the universe, my consciousness becoming what could have been exploding supernovas, pulsars, quasars, and other cosmic events.
    (The Holotropic Mind, 1993)
    What impressed him so much was the sense of the reality of what he was seeing. Like Aldous Huxley, and so many others who have experimented with ‘psychedelics’, he felt that this was far more than a mere drug trip.
    Shaken to the core by what he recognised as a ‘mystical’ experience, Grof realised that ‘this drug could heal the gap between the theoretical brilliance of psychoanalysis and its lack of effectiveness as a therapeutic tool’. People suffering from mental illness are trapped in a kind of subjective hell; Grof saw that LSD might be used to restore contact with reality—not just ordinary ‘objective reality’, but a far wider reality.
    He began a research programme, administering doses of LSD to patients. The effect of small doses, he found, was to bring back all kinds of childhood memories—just as in orthodox Freudianism. But larger doses brought on mystical experiences that sounded like those described in the classic texts of Eastern mysticism—even though few of the patients knew anything about Eastern philosophy. It looked as if the LSD had established communication with the Jungian collective unconscious.
    In due course, Grof moved to America, continued his experiments with LSD and other forms of ‘consciousness expansion’ (such as hyperventilation), and became known as one of the minds at the ‘cutting edge’ of a new psychology.
    Stan Grof is a huge man, with mild brown eyes, and a manner so serene and gentle that it is impossible to imagine him losing his temper. When I went across to say hello on that first morning, he introduced me to the man he was talking to, Prof. John Mack of Harvard. In fact, I already knew John—I had met him at some conference such as this, and had told him then how much I admired his biography of Lawrence of Arabia, which seemed to me the best book on Lawrence ever written. I had just reread it, in preparation for a television programme on Lawrence that I was scripting. Now we exchanged a few polite words, and I left them to their interrupted conversation.
    In fact, I saw very little of John Mack during the next few days; conferences of this sort demand a high level of social interaction with people who have paid for tickets. We occasionally nodded to each other in the distance or passed the salt