Revolucion De La Conciencia

The Consciousness Revolution:
New Perspectives in Psychiatry, Psychology, and Psychotherapy
Stanislav Grof, M.D.

6. The Role of Spirituality in Human Life

The leading philosophy of Westernscience has been monistic materialism.
Various scientific disciplines have described the history of the universe as history of developing matter and accept as real only what can be measured andweighed. Life, consciousness, and intelligence are seen as more or less accidental side-products of material processes. Physicists, biologists, and chemists recognize the existence of dimensions of realitythat are not accessible to our senses, but only those that are physical in nature and can be revealed and explored with the use of various extensions of our senses, such as microscopes, telescopes, andspecially designed recording devices, or laboratory experiments.

In a universe understood this way, there is no place for spirituality of any kind. The existence of God, the idea that there areinvisible dimensions of reality inhabited by nonmaterial beings, the possibility of survival of consciousness after death, and the concept of reincarnation and karma have been relegated to fairy talesand handbooks of psychiatry. From a psychiatric perspective to take such things seriously means to be ignorant, unfamiliar with the discoveries of science, superstitious, and subject to primitivemagical thinking. If the belief in God or Goddess occurs in intelligent persons, it is seen as an indication that they have not come to terms with infantile
images of their parents as omnipotent beingsthey had created in their infancy and childhood. And direct experiences of spiritual realities are considered manifestations of serious mental diseases – psychoses.

The study of holotropic states hasthrown new light on the problem of spirituality and religion. The key to this new understanding is the discovery that in these states it is possible to encounter a rich array of experiences which...