Rational Mysticism by John Horgan

Author:John Horgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

Reincarnation and Astrology

I’m not sure exactly when I realized just how, well, paranormal Grof’s vision of reality is. Perhaps it was when we discussed his belief that our births have long-lasting effects on our psyches. Ordinarily, Grof said, we repress all memories of our birth, because “it is so painful we just don’t want to deal with it.” The psychoanalyst Otto Rank proposed a similar theory in the 1920s but did not produce much evidence to support it, and most neuroscientists now believe that the fetal and newborn brain cannot record lasting memories. But Grof claimed that Rank’s theory has been amply corroborated by the perinatal visions of people in his LSD and holotropic breathwork sessions. These visions are not hallucinations but memories, Grof said.

He told me about an Austrian-born psychologist who was initially skeptical of the birth trauma theory but changed his mind after a holotropic session. The psychologist had had a powerful vision of his own birth, accompanied by a strong smell of leather. Afterward he called his mother, and without mentioning his session he asked her about his birth. She told him that she had been working in a shop that made lederhosen; her labor had come on so rapidly that she gave birth right there in the shop.

Grof asserted that during psychedelic and holotropic sessions we can recall not only our births but also our past lives. During his own LSD trips, he relived his previous incarnations with a clarity and richness of detail that could not possibly have been due solely to his imagination. “You can find yourself in another century, another culture, identified with another person,” he said. “It goes way beyond anything that you knew intellectually.”

Often these experiences of past lives provide insights into your current life. You may find that you have chronic pain in your shoulder because you were shot there when you were a soldier during the Civil War. Your asthma may be linked to your death from smoke inhalation in a previous life. You may realize that your troubled relationship with someone in this life reflects a conflict between your previous incarnations. These insights can have enormous therapeutic potential. “You suddenly have understanding why you have problems with this person, and why you have particular kinds of problems. Then you complete that experience and you have a sense of clearing. Then if you look, you can find out that at exactly the same time, something happened to the other person, and that person’s point of view has also changed.”

These are “facts,” Grof assured me. “If somebody can explain it within a materialistic worldview, I will be the first one to be excited about it. But I haven’t been able to do that.” The only way to explain these facts, Grof said, is with a new scientific paradigm, which accepts that consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon of the brain but can exist as an independent entity.

Grof derided the “ultramaterialists” who cling to the belief that the mind can be understood in purely physiological terms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.