No I have never benzyme, but now you made me aware of them. Which makes hypoglycemia even more difficult to occur!! Nice point!!

A drug has the same action (almost) everytime to (almost) everyone. This is not false. Generalizing that to the entire human race is not a fallacy. Making a point like that out of a personal experience of a specific substance is a fallacy. Someone can take aspirin to stop his headache and die. This doesn't make aspirin's action in the body unknown nor does it make aspirin a poison. Science is statistical. A vastly lot more people will get high from opioids rather than uncomfortable. Even the vast majority of side-effects of drugs and the percentage of people having them are studied and well known before a medicine goes into circulation.



Just a minute, is the headache kicking in on the 12th hour??


Good point

As for placebo, a placebo effect works on a percentage of people. Not everybody. Unless he was such a good trickster. I understand what you say about the whole orchestration of his sessions and you have a good point here and very well said. But you also say that you went through this yourself, you were able to create these experiences and only after a point it stopped fitting your experiences. Which makes me think that you got through lots of pain, you got rid of alot of "blocks" through this work (as he claims it happens), the doors opened for you, and after that, you made the realization that it could have happened without it and that the unconscious doesn't necessarily has to be painful?

And neurosis and childhood trauma may not link, but childhood trauma exists, unconscious memories exist and that early childhood experience creates aspects of our personality - experience of the world is something that I havent studied but just makes sense to me.

As for Leary and the Psychedelic Experience, there is not one thing in this book that is not in Grofs observations as well. The only difference is that Leary aims directly on a very big dose in order to induce transcendence by preparing the person for that. Grof covers this method as well. He also says that the mistake of alot of therapists was that they were focusing their patient on biographical material and when something belonging to the transpersonal realm was entering the experiential field were trying to reject it. He recognized trends but he also mentions that these under no circumstances could be used as definite rules for the exact course and predictability of a session and that an open mind is essential.

Everything is an orchistration. The Ayahuasca traditions with all its terminology is an orchistration. Grof is an orchistration. A raver taking LSD and dancing in the fields is an orchistration. But before you are able to make your own orchestra, you gotta start by learning a few things about musical instruments. And Grof is a good starting point IMO even if it just gives opportunity for the unconscious to bring forth new arrangements and behaviors. I do not doubt that you are far more experienced than me on the psychedelic experience. Initially when I was very young and was started reading and taking small doses of LSD, I really really wanted to experience transcendence and all the paradisial states mentioned in the books. On the other hand, big doses never worked for me. And through time I became interested of bringing something back of the experience. Of transforming self. It didn't really matter to go for a trip if after a week it felt like I never did. And Learys advice, just use your imagination doesn't work for everybody. Because he also said that you have to learn how to use your mind. It is easy for a person who has learned that to go to people who want to learn as well and say "ohh just use ur mind, It's simple". A guru in india will say "All is God, you just have to realize it"...oh really?? That was a really helpful statement!!

If from your own path you have something else to propose that will allow me to reach my goal without going through the process of rearranging my unconscious mind, you are more than welcome. If there is somebody else that provides a better orchestra and is more objective and gives a better method please tell me.

Okay, how about a few fundamental drugs, like lactose, insulin and testosterone. We actually have wildly varied actions in individuals for each of these substances.

Even more fascinating, and extremely pertinent, is the research into the role of social expectations on the effects of alcohol. Your claims just don't hold up to scrutiny.



The headaches I referred to as occurring about half the time begin with a pressure about 6 hours in and usually peak around 8 hours.


If this were true about placebo, then movies wouldn't be near as popular as they are, even novels have been show to readily cause different states of physiological arousal. Also, I can promise you that Grof's therapy did not work on everybody, and we don't even have any data on how many it helped in contrast to a similar population just given LSD in a supportive environment.

It seems to me that you're thinking about this in terms of discrete nodes, instead of networks of meaning. The therapeutic frame does not begin with any particular patient or Grof himself. They arise within a social system of understandings, both his expectations and those of his patients have been primed by the dispersion of psychoanalytic concepts through culture. I'm not critiquing Grof when I say this, but it's the same reason that cult leaders adopt symbols that are already familiar to the populace, they provide points of cognitive engagement that can create very powerful experiences when coupled with altered states.



It didn't just stop, I went into the process to see if I could simulate the experience of perinatal matrixes and was able to several times. It was just curiosity, and once I had satisfied that, I moved on to other projects that I found more interesting. I don't believe that I got rid of a lot of "blocks," and there certainly wasn't any significant resolution that led to me deciding to move on.


So, large dose is not the primary, or even a particularly interesting difference between Grof and Leary's thought. Alpert/Leary/Metzner wrote an outline of how to create a particular experience that they found fascinating. The weren't saying that these Bardos objectively exist, but that there's value in creating the experience of them. This is the same reason that Leary later wrote Psychedelic Prayers, an outline of how to create a very different experience, that he considered Taoist in nature. They're not the same experience under different names. Grof, in contrast, is saying that these are fundamental psychic territories and carries out a Procrustean project of fitting every altered state experience into his map.


I'm sorry that you thought I was criticizing your explorations of these territories. My objections were only to what I perceive as a very poor fit, explaining the very common LSD headache with Grof's psychedelic model. It sounds like you're having much more success using your imagination to create these experiences than you think. These are very interesting territories to explore, and I have certainly gotten a lot out of it myself. In these areas, I believe that looking for an objective method is fundamentally askew and limiting. My biggest criticism of Grof is the conservative image of psychological health and humanness he puts forth (at least in the early books, I haven't read any of his recent work).

I personally find that drinking fruit juice also increases the psychedelic effects of most entheogens. I mentioned it somewhere in some thread, but it was (rightfully) disputed whether this was an objective observation.

Somehow though, i´m not surprised to read this.

Ragabr I must say that when I started reading your last post I took a breath in and I don't remember taking it out until I finished

You really got me thinking into stuff. I read your post a couple of times more because there are still gaps in my understanding of your views.



I cannot comment on lactose, but insulin and testosterone are not "any" molecules. They are involved in very complex biochemical systems. Taking these 2 molecules as an example of varied actions and trying to generalize that chemicals have varied actions is risky . What about caffeine?? How people react on this chemical?? My guess (it's a guess ) is pretty much the same. What about most of the pharmaceuticals sold in drugstores?? They have been studied extensively and there is a mechanism of action in the body. That is why they can sell them with such a great certainty. Of course there will be exceptions and people that will react differently. It can be seen under the title "side-effects". They can also be classified as "rare" or "very rare". And there can also be an explanation on a molecular level as to why these people react the way they do.

As for the social expectation on the effects of alcohol, you just reminded me an article I read once about a guy who thought of re-examining the fact that opiates are addictive. He made the hypothesis that mice held in a cage and becoming addicted to heroin don't have a reason to quit. So he designed a super-lux A class cage with everything a mouse could wish for as a life, and he noticed that already addicted mice slowly lost their addiction and desire to get opioids although they had free access to it. Unfortunately, although published, his work never received attention for an unknown reason.



Yes please!! help me connect them



1) How can I learn how to use language like you do??

2) What you are saying makes great sense and is really interesting but there is something that doesn't quite fit. Did the chicken make the egg or the egg the chicken?? Grof himself has said numerous times that he was trained as a psychoanalyst by concepts and methods taught to him by mainstream psychiatry. So we assume that he was filling the minds of his patients-clients-friends with the concepts of the unconscious, with childhood memories and all the relevant stuff and as you say, pre-programming their expectations. Good. He continues by saying that soon he had to get rid of that model, because that model was far too limited to account for the experiences of the people. Nobody had programmed them to have these experiences. This new "map" was constructed "from" the experiences. So what happens here is quite the opposite than what you are proposing.

The experiences created the necessity for the construction of the perinatal model which I now read to pre-program myself for these experiences. What am I missing??



It is a very big difference indeed. It had me thinking about it alot. Grof has very little to say about the high dose LSD sessions. He says though that on a high dose, people tend to experience all elements of the perinatal realm in one sessions, before the ego death comes, and childhood memories are there in the very beginning or the end of the trip. He also says that therapeutically, both processes bring about the same result because it is transcendence what cleans everything away. But apart from that, there is nothing in the "Psychedelic Experience" experiential territory that is not included in the transpersonal map of Grof.

Another very interesting observation he makes is that after the final ego-death and when the perinatal material has all been worked through, all the subsequent sessions are of a transpersonal nature. Even if the dose is medium. He argues that this is not the case on a high dose experience. If the person reaches transcendence forced through by the drug, doesn't mean that his subsequent sessions will lack the perinatal elements. I always thought
though that there is a catch here. By his way, the person reaches transcendence in let's say 40 sessions. What if someone undertakes 40 high dose LSD sessions?? What is the comparison that can be made here??



I never thought of that. The whole thing is to try to understand your views on a model that seems logical and well established. But not by the grounds of the phrase "on my experience". And I have seen again someone saying that Grof is not their cup of tea but without giving any further details.There are people who take LSD to see the walls breathing and giggle with their friends. Not that there is anything bad with it, I 've done it also. But obviously Grof wouldn't ring a bell to them. And you have managed to get me thinking alot. I personally do not even care at all about these territories. If they do not exist this is far better for me. Do you think I want to get through pain?? Physical or mental?? Of course not. I started reading and pursuing the psychedelic experience driven by desire to have a first hand experience of oneness, spiritual ecstacy, and God. Things that were and are unknown to me. When I started reading I couldn't believe that there are things like that under my nose. After so many years still I haven't had the honor to experience them yet. I was led to Grof by a series of events happening to me.

First time I read Grof was many years ago. I found him a very interesting read. Inside his book he mentions that two of his patients were unexpectedly cured of a condition called pseudomyopia after they reached the ego-death. Well, I have pseudomyopia as well so I found it really interesting. Later on in time, I wanted to have the experience myself. But most of all I lacked an experienced person to act as a sitter. And while I could find plenty to trip together on a Saturday night, it was much more difficult to get an inexperienced person prepared enough to facilitate a high dose LSD session with all the complications that might arise. This led me to leave my country for the first time, alone, in a young age, and go to the UK where I found a 3 day Ayahuasca workshop with only a few people knowing what I was really going to do to the UK. As you can imagine, the Ayahuasca was very strong but I never broke through. I was "holding" to reality with all the powers I had. I felt that if I let go, I am going to explode into something that is sooo grand that I had a great uncertainty of my ability to come back. And the setting was far from ideal. After that though, my desire for the experience grew bigger. Back to the UK for studies this time. DMT was my next destination. If I could smoke a breakthrough dose, in my mind, I would eliminate the need of a sitter. I thought that 5 minutes could be walked through like that and that could be used to eliminate my fears for a longer lasting trip with Ayahuasca. DMT worked wonders. It has given me the most amazing experiences. But there was a huge problem. My lungs were awfully sensitive and any attempts to deposit more than 10 mgs on my lungs were a failure. And I have tried all methods. Is just my lungs not cooperating with me Trip to the Amazon, same thing. Back in the UK and I got LSD. Enough to work with. And because of my circumstances and of my solitary experimentation, I said to go slowly and build up the dose slowly. When I reached a certain point, something bizzare happened. I started having flu symptoms. Like real flu symptoms. Feeling shivery, blocked nose etc. When this happened to me I thought that I was so unlucky that it was a real flu hitting me while coming up on acid. After a few hours, there were no flu symptoms whatsoever. Next time, same thing. Very bizzare. So I opened Grof again to see if I can find something useful. And I found. First I experienced, and then I read it. Of course I had read it years ago but in that book there are sooo many details that the last thing I would remember would be the flu symptoms. Since then I have some progress but I have doubled the dose and I am not far away from where I started. Sometimes I have questioned myself why am I doing that. With Grof's method I am not gonna get rid of the ego-death fear. I would have to go through it no matter what. Maybe I am just winning time or finding a side-way to ease my resistance. Sometimes I think that too much reading and increasing the dose little by little, has done more bad than good for me. So when I said that if you have something else to propose to do it, I meant it. I am not holding Grof as THE gospel, it is just the only gospel I have found that stands for the sub-breakthrough doses and makes perfect sense for a very popular model of the psyche of the 21st cetury.


Ufff I finished it...difficult stuff to write on forums eh?? I am reading for years but I rarely write!!

I've tried writing up a clear response several times over these past weeks, and haven't liked any of them, so I'm just going to type for it.

My larger problem with Grof's project begins with my understanding of his overall conclusion. His cosmology reads like if one really believed in German idealism and then took LSD. The ideal of Man he presents is essentially that of secular humanism, with a transpersonal finish. All of this gets wrapped up into a referent bereft of meaning, "the becoming whole" of his "holotropic." In such a system, any diversity is necessarily shallow, postulating that evolution is a homogenizing force, drawing all unto the One, instead of one of indiscriminate creativity.

We can also look critically at Grof's claims of how he came to the conclusions regarding the perinatal realm. He says that he was forced to them by the presentations of novel material arising within the LSD sessions, with no previous prompting. Yet, birth trauma interpretations were over two decades old at the point his LSD work began. Extremely similar material to that he was addressing was investigated even earlier than that, in Jung's work. There is no way that he wasn't familiar with either of these modes of thought, though he does frame it that way.

The problem of evidence becomes huge at the point Grof begins to embrace therapeutic material as evidence for past lives. Previous to this, he had removed any criteria for whether material arising in the LSD sessions should be interpreted or taken literally, like the bad taste in the mouth you mention, beyond the intuition of the therapist. Now all grounding has been lost and anything to arise at all can fit into the construct.

Be back with more later...

This is funny!! Two days ago I came across some writings of Sidney Cohen and he really reminded me of you, both on what he thinks about LSD and of the way he is expressing himself. I will take this opportunity to include some of his opinions about LSD in this conversation and try to find a link between Grof, LSD and the aspect of therapy.

From the little bits and pieces I had the chance to read, Cohen seems to believe that the expectation of the person taking LSD is one of the most crucial factors determining the experience. I tried to find out what he believes about using LSD for therapy. His view is that LSD by itself cannot heal somebody. Even if the person experiences eternal bliss and infinite timeless ecstasy and comes back feeling enlightened, through time, old habits and thought patterns created through years of conditioning will re-establish themselves. He believes that therapy can come only through hard work of the person wanting to be healed. As for using LSD in combination with a therapist, he mentions that the model of the psyche used to explain the roots and causes of someone's problems will definitely colour the experience but this is irrelevant. The skills of the therapist are more important than his view of the psyche, and the same is true for psychotherapy without the LSD. He believes that in order for LSD psychotherapy to be effective, 3 things are necessary. Trust between the patient and the therapist, willingness of the person to work hard, and constant encouragement of the therapist to let go into difficult experiences arising under the influence of LSD.

The difficult experience and its healing potential is very much mentioned in other cultures using psychedelic substances for healing purposes. I am not a specialist on the subject but I have read many times about the shaman who has to go first through a series of experiences involving enormous amounts of suffering, experience of death in a very realistic way and finally rebirth. Many many accounts of people using Ayahuasca both in ceremonies with a shaman or alone in their houses support the idea that a difficult experience and a successful acceptance of it while into the experience can bring about big healing and transformation. The suffering that never ends, often presented as hell itself which terminates with the acceptance of the person that he will stay there forever or the conviction that somebody is really dying are themes not only mentioned by Grof.

I am sure that Grof knew the theories of the birth trauma as you said. But I am also sure that he knew Cohen views on LSD. As a matter of fact, if you read carefully, you will realize that they do not differ alot. Grof believes that LSD is a non-specific mental amplifier. He believes that it "can" be used for therapy only under certain circumstances. The persons approach to it and his expectation is very important. He also believes that the only role of the therapist is to act as a trusted link to reality and as someone who must constantly encourage the person to give into the difficult experiences that arise. Now his perinatal system of classifying his observations is also criticized by himself. In one of his books I have come across him saying that this is not something to be taken as a fact. It is just a useful model that could be put up front in order to fill a gap of understanding of the emergence of these experiences. Here a note has to be made in order to make things more clear. It is not what he knew about birth trauma theories but what his patients knew. He says many times that everybody had to deal with the emotional and philosophical aspects of these experiences but not everybody had the physical realistic reliving of birth or elements of it. It was the latter people that inspired him to make the link. Also I want to make a comment about the past life issue. He has said that whenever he had the chance he tried to validate claims of his patients and he had some success on that. I personally do not believe in past lifes. But no matter if these experiences are true or just an imagination, he concludes that according to his observations they have a tremendous therapeutic potential. I do not really know what does he mean by that. I do not know the standards of a healthy person. I can only imagine a person in 2 different points in time. All external variables in the person's life are the same. If the person can subjectively feel better after an experience and this feeling persists and is not just an afterglow, then I assume that this is called healing.

As for his humanistic approach on the subject, you are very right. You couldn't say things better. But this is not what Grof believes. This is what many people believe. Isn't LSD a substance that can bring about an experience of pure infinite love, compassion and identification with all life, human or not? Is it not truth that it can bring a change in values? That can make somebody more aware and less material-money oriented? Create a feeling of caring about the common good? Equality of people, peace and collaboration instead of competition? I mean sure, LSD can do so many different stuff. But it can also do that under certain circumstances.
And the way I am starting to see it now is that as you said before, the Tibetan book of the dead provides an experience and maybe a purpose, the psychedelic prayers provide a totally different experience and maybe a different purpose and Grof's model provides another type of experience with a different purpose. But I also believe that someone can have an experience written in any of these books without ever have read these books. He can later read it and say...oh yeah I've been here myself. Maybe you went through Grof's experiences and you didn't feel any healing because maybe you did not have anything to heal yourself. Do not get me wrong, many of the things you say about Grof have a basis and I agree myself. I just don't think that he thinks he has the only explanation on the LSD phenomenon. Maybe he proposes another manual that creates a set in a person's brain that with the help of LSD can lead to such experiences that facilitate healing. And maybe he is aware of this as well. And maybe I chose this manual because I am interested in healing. If I was an explorer I might choose Mckenna and if I was a yogi or a mystic I might choose Leary.

And speaking about healing, what is your personal opinion on healing and LSD? Do you think that it can precipitate a permanent change in the sense of self and the world? Is the peak experience enough to do this? Also can psilocybin be used for healing purposes? Is it as neutral as LSD in terms of auto-suggestion or it has more of a personality??

I think sometimes when I get a headache from LSD it's not LSD. With the real tasteless kind the comedown is still pleasant, no headaches and no side effects other than just being tired from the duration.
You might get a tired headache, and make sure you eat enough and drink enough, but the only time I've had a headache from LSD it was 5meo or some RC.

Oh, fantastic response, and it brings us around to the other side I wanted to touch on.

I had never heard of Cohen before, so now I'll have to try to find that work.

So the way you characterize Grof's position here, I would be inclined to accept it with qualifications. I seem to remember him being more assured in the universality of his work, but that could just be my own youthful indiscretions. One central disagreement would be where you say "that everybody had to deal with the emotional and philosophical aspects of these experiences but not everybody had the physical realistic reliving of birth or elements of it." That's an embedding of his ideal image of man in the process, or to put it another way asserting a correct therapeutic outcome, instead of allowing for a multitude of outcomes. There are other successful treatment modalities that don't depend on a personal archaeological project or cathartic emotional expression.


The distinction I'm going to make may sound pedantic, but I think it's important to avoid a violence done by the therapist's ideals. Most of us are familiar with arguments that complaints which possess a strong socially generated component, like depression and ADHD, are medicalized so that they can be treated with drugs. In the same way, I believe that Grof and other "holistic"-oriented thinkers would rob us of such "imbalanced" individuals like Virginia Woolfe or Beethoven, while claiming that they could share even more of themselves if freed of self-destructive tensions.

Issues such as these leave me highly suspicious of medical language, like "healing." We have a fair understanding of what makes a healthy body. Historically, our understandings of healthy minds have been tied up in ideology and generally refer to standards with naive models of social interaction and production, familial relations, etc.

I think LSD can make very powerful changes in our ways of thinking and feeling. I doubt that a single peak experience will create a permanent change. I've seen too many people swear up and down that their lives have been altered forever, only to be caught in the same problems a week later. If you look at the life-change protocols for addiction treatment with iboga, I think one can get a view of the areas that can most benefit addressing when making personal changes. Not that you should necessarily entirely upset your life to deal with a depression, but maybe changing your regular hangouts would be the appropriate scale.

The recent depression and death-anxiety studies with psilocybin demonstrate it can be a very powerful tool. The easiest way to use psychedelics for self-change, I think, come from an ability to cognitively reframe, whether it be current circumstances, or past "traumatic" events. On a deeper level, and much more difficult to work with, is releasing stores of affect held in the body, which inhibit our own spontaneity.

(What follows is completely personal opinion and to be taken with handfuls of salt)
Without a certain ego-stability, and psychic space (for lack of a better term) these release of affect can overwhelm the individual, creating further constriction. These aren't always traumas, often their the organic locus of what Freud considered the fundamental drives, which the ego learned to repress as it could not sustain itself within an experience of their full conscious manifestation. This begins to get into Shadow work, like in Jung and Psychosynthesis.

Then there's Tim Leary's work on reimprinting using psychedelics. This I find fascinating, but it's so rare for people to intentionally create a reimprinting space that I can't speak to it one way or another. There's also the suggestion that even Dr. Leary kept so many of his fundamental traits, even when highly problematic for him, that perhaps psychedelics aren't as good at changing early imprints as he liked to suggest.