mr peabody
Posts: 17 Joined: 17-Jun-2017 Last visit: 29-Aug-2017 Location: Frostbite Falls, MN
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 David: What’s the difference between a spiritual emergency and a psychotic episode?
Stan: After we had had extensive experience working with psychedelic therapy and with the Holotropic Breathwork, it became increasingly difficult to see many of the spontaneously occurring episodes of non-ordinary (holotropic) states as being pathological. They included the same elements as the psychedelic sessions and the sessions of Holotropic Breathwork – experiences of psychospiritual death and rebirth, past life experiences, archetypal experiences, and so on. And if they were properly understood and supported, they were actually healing and often led to a positive personality transformation.
So it became increasingly difficult to see as pathological experiences, which a sample of “normal” people in our workshops and training would have after forty-five minutes of faster breathing. Moreover, if these experiences could be healing and transformative when they are induced by faster breathing and music, or by miniscule dosages of LSD, why should they be considered pathological when they occur without any known causes? So we coined for these spontaneously occurring episodes the term “spiritual emergencies.” It is actually a play on words, because it shows the potential positive value of these experiences. They certainly are a nuisance in people’s lives and can produce a crisis, an “emergency,” but – if correctly understood and properly supported – they can also help these individuals to “emerge” to a whole other level of consciousness and of functioning.
Now, the question that you ask — the question concerning “differential diagnosis” — is difficult to answer for the following reasons: The concept of differential diagnosis comes from medicine, where it is possible to accurately diagnose diseases on the basis of what you find in the blood, in the urine, in the cerebral spinal fluid, on the X-rays, an so on. You can accurately establish the diagnosis, and if you make a mistake, another doctor can show you that you made a wrong diagnosis and – as a result – prescribed the wrong treatment. In psychiatry, this is possible only for those conditions that have an organic cause. There is a group of psychotic states, where this is the case – the so called “organic psychoses.” However, there exists a large group of conditions diagnosed as psychoses for which no biological causes have been found. These are called “functional” or “endogenous psychoses.”
Anybody familiar with medicine knows that this essentially means admission of ignorance wrapped in a fancy title (endogenous means “generated from within”). This is not a medical diagnosis backed by laboratory data. It is a situation characterized by unusual experiences and behaviors for which the current conceptual framework of psychiatry has no explanation. To make a differential diagnosis, we would first have to have a diagnosis established as rigorously as it is done in somatic medicine. Because that is not the case, we have to use a different approach. We can try to identify the criteria that would make the person experiencing a non-ordinary state of consciousness a good candidate for deep inner work. If they meet these criteria, we try to work with them psychologically to help them get through this experience, rather than indiscriminately suppressing their symptoms with psychopharmacological agents.
The first criterion there is the phenomenology of the individual’s condition. A positive indication is presence of elements that we see daily in participants in Holotropic Breathwork sessions or psychedelic sessions – reliving of traumatic memories from infancy or childhood, reliving of biological birth or episodes of prenatal existence, the experience of psychospiritual death and rebirth, past life experiences, visions of archetypal beings or visits to archetypal realms. Additional positive indications are experiences of oneness with other people, with nature, with the universe, with God.
The second important criterion is the person’s attitude. The individual in spiritual crisis has to have some sense of understanding that this is a process with which is happening internally. Very bad candidates for alternative psychological work are people who use a lot of projections, who deny that they have a problem and that they are dealing with an internal process. They are convinced that all their problems are caused by outside forces: it is the neighbor who is poisoning their soup and placing bugging devices in their house; it is the Ku Klux Klan trying to destroy them; it is a mad scientist attacking them by a diabolic machine, or the invading Martians. So there is a tendency to blame that condition on somebody or something outside of them and being unwilling to accept the possibility that there is something within their own psyche that they can work on. So, unless that attitude changes, it is very difficult to do this type of work.
David: Why do you think that the conditions surrounding one’s birth have such a lasting effect on one’s outlook toward life?
Stan: Birth is an extremely powerful, elemental event that for many children is a matter of life and death. This is especially true for those who were born severely asphyxiated – dead or half-dead – and had to be resuscitated. In any case, it is a major trauma that has a physical as well as an emotional dimension. The position of current psychiatry and psychology toward birth is unbelievable – contrary to elementary logic, we see a massive denial of the fact that birth is a major psychotrauma. The usual reason given for the fact that birth is psychologically irrelevant – inadequate myelinization of the newborn’s cortex – is hard to take seriously. It is in sharp contrast with data from both postnatal and prenatal life.
There exists general agreement among child psychiatrists that the experience of nursing is of paramount importance for the rest of the individual’s emotional life. Obstetricians and pediatricians even talk about the importance of “bonding” – the exchange of looks between the mother and the child immediately after the child is born – as the foundation of the future mother-child relationship. And extensive prenatal research of people like Alfred Tomatis has shown extreme sensitivity of the fetus already in the prenatal period. How should we reconcile this with the belief that the hours of life and death struggle in the birth canal are psychologically irrelevant?
It seems really bizarre that psychiatrists and psychologists believe that there is no consciousness in the child during the passage through the birth canal, but then suddenly appears as soon as the newborn emerges into the world. And the argument about the lack of myelinization of the newborn’s cortex violates elementary logic and doesn’t make any sense either. We know from biology that memory does not require a cerebral cortex, let alone a myelinized one. There are organisms that don’t have any cortex at all and they certainly can form memories. Several years ago, the Nobel Prize was given to Austrian-American researcher Eric Kandel for studying memory mechanisms in a sea slug called Aplysia. So it’s very difficult to imagine how people in the academic circle think, if they can accept that the sea slug can form memories but a newborn child, with an extremely highly developed nervous system and brain, would not be able to create a memory record of the hours spent in the birth canal.
David: What do you think of applying Konrad Lorenz’s notion of biological imprinting–as opposed to conditioning or learning–to the lasting psychological effect that psychedelic experiences often produce?
Stan: The term “imprinting” is most relevant here in relation to the very early situations in an organism’s development. As you know, ethologists have shown that the early experiences of life are extremely influential. For example, there is a period of about sixteen hours in the early life of ducklings when whatever moves around becomes for them the mother. So if you walk around in red rubber shoes, they ignore their mother and follow the shoes. Psychedelics can induce deep age regression to the early periods in one’s life and offer the opportunity for a corrective psychobiological experience. This new experience then seems to have the same powerful influence on the individual’s life as the natural imprinting.
I ultimately don’t believe that the memories we experience in psychedelic sessions are stored in the brain, certainly not all of them. I think that many of them obviously don’t have any material substrate in the conventional sense – ancestral, collective, phylogenetic, and karmic memories, archetypal matrices, etc. Recently, there has been much discussion about “memory without a material substrate” – for example, Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields or Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic field. So I don’t believe that what we experience is stored the brain. I believe that the brain is mediating consciousness, but does not generate it, and that it mediates memories, but does not store them.
David: Why do you think it is that the LSD experiences have such a lasting effect on people?
Stan: Isn’t that true about every powerful experience? The more powerful the experience is, the more of an effect it has. It is true even for experiences that we have forgotten, repressed, dissociated from consciousness. Everything that we experience in life is shaping us with a lasting effect. Some of these influences are more subtle, and some of them more dramatic, but certainly traumas that people experience in childhood can have tremendous impact. Events in human life can have everlasting impact of people.
David: What do you personally think happens to consciousness after death?
Stan: I have had experiences in my psychedelic sessions — quite a few of them – when I was sure I was in the same territory that we enter after death. In several of my sessions, I was absolutely certain that it had already happened and I was surprised when I came back, when I ended up in the situation where I took the substance. So the experience of being in a bardo in these experiences is extremely convincing. We now also have many clinical observations suggesting that consciousness can operate independently of the brain, the prime example being out-of-body experiences in near-death situations (NDEs).
Some out-of-body experiences can happen to people not only when they are in a state of cardiac death, but also when they are brain dead. Cardiologist Michael Sabom, described a patient he calls Pam, who had a major aneurysm on the basilar artery and had to undergo a risky operation. In order to operate on her, they had to basically freeze her brain to the point that she stopped producing brain waves. And, at the same time, she had one of the most powerful out-of-body experiences ever observed, with accurate perception of the environment; following her operation, she was able to give an accurate description of the operation and to draw the instruments they were using.
So what these observations suggest is that consciousness can operate independently of our body when we are alive, which makes it fairly plausible that something like that is possible after our body is dead. So both the experiential evidence from my own sessions and what you find in the thanatological literature, certainly suggest that survival of consciousness after death is a very real possibility.
David: What is your perspective on the concept of God?
Stan: When Jung was over eighty years old he had an interview with a BBC reporter. At one point this BBC reporter asked him “Dr. Jung, do you believe in God?” A smile appeared on Jung’s face and he said, “No, I don’t.” Any Jungians who are watching this tape cannot believe it: “What? Dr. Jung doesn’t believe in God?” Then, after a dramatic pause, Jung says: “I know. I had the experience of being grabbed by something that was by far more powerful than I could even imagine.” Like Jung, I had experiences – actually quite a few of them over the years – of what I would refer to as God.
I have experienced in my sessions many gods – archetypal figures of many forms from different cultures of the world. But when I refer to God, I am talking about an experience, which is beyond any forms. What I experienced as God is difficult to describe; as you know, the mystics often refer to their experiences as ineffable. It could be best described as an incredibly powerful source of light, with an intensity that I earlier couldn’t even have imagined. But, it doesn’t really do it justice to refer to it as light because it was much more than that. It seemed to contain all of existence in a completely abstract form and it transcended all imaginable polarities. There was a sense of infinite boundless creativity. There was a sense of personality and even a sense of humor (of a cosmic variety).
The experience of God seems to be under certain circumstance available to all human beings. If you haven’t had the experience, then there’s no point in talking about it. As long as people have to talk about believing in God or not believing in God or, for that matter, believing in past lives or not believing in past lives, it is irrelevant because they do not have anything to go by. Their opinion doesn’t have any real basis; it reflects the influences of their parents, their preacher, or something they have read. Once you had the experiences, you know that the experiences were real and very convincing.
David: What types of research and therapies do you foresee for psychedelics in the future?
Stan: I think that the most interesting area waiting to be explored is to use psychedelics for enhancing creativity, as we talked about it earlier. It is something that would facilitate completely new ways of looking at various areas and generate extraordinary new insights into the nature of reality. But I am afraid it will take some time before we see research of this kind. The most difficult challenge has always been to get permission to use psychedelics in populations where there is no serious clinical reason (e.g. terminal cancer, chronic alcoholism, etc.).
David: What are you currently working on?
Stan: Christina and I are writing a long overdue book on the theory and practice of Holotropic Breathwork. It will be a very comprehensive book, covering a wide range of topics from the history of the breathwork to the therapeutic use of breathwork sessions andits social implications. It will include the description how to prepare a session and how to run a session, as well as the complementary methods that you can use following the session. It discusses the therapeutic effects, the posibilities of developing a new worldview and new life strategies, as well as the possible importance of working with holotropic states as a means of alleviating the current global crisis.
David. Is there anything that we didn’t speak about that you would like to add?
Stan: One of the areas I am particularly interested in is the revolutionary development on various scientific disciplines and the emergence of the new paradigm. I firmly believe that we are rapidly moving toward a radically new world view and that transpersonal psychology and spirituality will be integral parts of it. A worldview that will synthesize the best of science and the best of spirituality and would demonstrate that there is really no incompatibility between science and spirituality, if both of them are properly understood. The other area that I am very deeply interested has to do with the phenomenal digital special effects, which are now available in the movie industry.
David: Are you still interested in making animated films?
Stan: It is ironic, isn’t it? As I look at it, my career has not changed as much as I initially thought when I became interested in psychiatric research. Psychedelic experiences with their rich imagery are not that far from animated movies. But I am not interested any more in making animated movies; what I am interested in is the spiritual potential of these new special effects. I believe that the special effects are so powerful these days that they could not only portray mystical experience, but they could actually induce them in people if they were properly constructed. If we could combine what we know about the inner logic of these experiences with these new special effects, the results could be truly extraordinary. Unfortunately, the new special effects are being used mostly for portraying destructive movies scenes.
Hollywood movies portray with formidable power scenes reflecting what I call BPM III – the violent and sexual imagery associated typically with the final stages of birth. The destructive scenes are so boringly stereotypical that they are almost exchangeable from movie to movie; only the danger takes different forms – alien invaders, natural disasters, dinosaurs or other monsters, demonic beings, and all kinds of dangerous villains threatening to destroy the planet. Most of these movies end up in a situation where the enemy is overcome and people celebrate the victory on a trashed, devastated planet. What is missing is the shift to BPM IV, lifting the experience to the transcendental level, to spiritual death/rebirth experience. I don’t know if you know that Christina and I were consultants on the movie called Brainstorm, which was an attempt to portray a transcendental experience.
David: I had read that, and found that very interesting, as Brainstorm is one of my favorite films. I thought that there were a lot of fascinating ideas in it.
Stan: That was an effort to bring to the screen the transcendental aspects of the death experience. Unfortunately, the special effects were very compromised, because of the tragic death of Natalie would shortly before the movie was finished. MGM didn’t want to put any more money into the movie; they believed that it was not viable, because there were three scenes of principal photography with Natalie that were still missing. Doug Trumbull convinced the MGM people that he could finish the movie. He did his best to put it together, but it didn’t really come out very well. If you watch the movie, it is not only the lack of the special effects, but there is a kind of a logical gap; you can tell that there is something missing. But I think that the topic of the movie is so interesting that it deserves a remake, as they are remaking all kinds of other movies. I think that this is one that deserves to be remade and done really well.
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