The Way of the Psychonaut Volume Two: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys by Stanislav Grof

Author:Stanislav Grof [Grof , Stanislav]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
Published: 2019-08-08T07:00:00+00:00

XIII

Psyche and Thanatos:

Psychospiritual Dimensions of Death and Dying

It would be hard to imagine a subject that is more universal and more personally relevant for every single human being than death and dying. Over the course of our lives, all of us will lose relatives, friends, teachers, acquaintances, and important public figures, and eventually face our own biological demise. In view of this, it is quite remarkable that until the late 1960s, the Western industrial civilization showed an almost complete lack of interest in the subject of death and dying.

This was true not only for the general population, but also for scientists and professionals involved in disciplines that should have been keenly interested in this subject, such as medicine, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and theology. The only plausible explanation for this situation is fear and a massive denial of death that exists in modern industrial civilization.

American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker showed in his book The Denial of Death that modern society is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against facing our mortality. He suggested that people are trying to overcome their fear of death by creating “immortality projects,” which make it possible for them to imagine that they become part of something larger than themselves, something that survives death. According to Becker, the clashes of the immortality projects of different people are responsible for most of the evil in the world—human conflicts, wars, bigotry, genocide, and racism (Becker 1973).

The disinterest of modern society in regard to death is even more striking when we compare it with the situation in ancient and pre-industrial cultures. Their attitude toward death and dying was diametrically different. Death played a central role in their cosmologies, philosophies, spiritual and ritual life, and mythologies, as well as in everyday life. The practical importance of this difference becomes obvious when we compare the situation of a person facing death in these two different historical and cultural environments.

An average person dying in one of the Western industrial societies has a pragmatic and materialistic worldview or is at least profoundly influenced by their exposure to it. According to mainstream academic Western science, the history of the universe is the history of developing matter. Life, consciousness, and intelligence are more or less accidental and insignificant side products of this development. They appeared on the scene after many billions of years of evolution of passive and inert matter in an infinitesimally small part of an immense universe. In a world where only what is material, tangible, and measurable is real, there is no place for spirituality of any kind.

Although religious activities are generally practiced, socially sanctioned, or even formally encouraged, from a strictly scientific point of view, any involvement with spirituality appears to be irrational and indicates emotional and intellectual immaturity, stemming from either a lack of education, superstition, or regression to primitive magical thinking. Direct experiences of spiritual realities are seen and diagnosed as manifestations of psychosis, a serious mental disease. Religion, bereft of its experiential component, has largely lost the connection to

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