Everyone should listen to this--reshape your world

Narrated with the gentle voice of Grof himself. This presentation is DENSE with research, materials, and ideas abut non-ordinary states. Grof presents the perinatal matrices, details shamanic and psychedelic imports to culture, shares his research in psychedelic therapies including LSD and Holotropic Breathwork, examines spirituality v religion, and poses and explores many hypotheses of the nature of the existence of human consciousness. A must-listen for those interested in non-ordindary states of consciousness, shamanic cultures, and the history of human relationship to psychedelic substances.

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14 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Starts slow, but finishes strong.

This book was highly recommended. I couldn't see why after the first few chapters, and I stopped listening for a couple months. I finally came back to it and was rewarded with a good finish. The first part was slow, but it sets the framework by which the rest of the book is constructed. All in all, it was an interesting book, and am glad I finished it.

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12 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Outstanding program!

This audiobook/program by Stanislav Grof presents a compelling alternative to the current Cartesian-Newtonian world view offered to and adopted by most western societies. It gives new meaning to the term "time-tested" in the context of the study of social "technologies" which evolved over the last 5000 years, and were forgotten, suppressed or replaced by modern science and materialistic paradigms. He exposes the fallacy of thinking about hard science and spirituality as conflicting disciplines. It is particularly interesting to hear this from a man of science who grew up and was educated in the rational, materialistic system of thought.

Intellectually, it begs us to at least consider the idea of a cosmic existence beyond our rational ,ego-centric being, but even more interesting are the practical implications. How we view ourselves, and the life strategies we adopt, consciously or not; shape most of our existence in this world. Dr. Grof presents a practical method to improve the voyage, through a process of self-discovery.

A fascinating account of the evolution of depth psychology, social pathology and the path to profound evolutionary change in the human psyche.

Highly recommended.

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Phenomenal Overview of Work

Would you consider the audio edition of The Transpersonal Vision to be better than the print version?

No Comment - haven't read

Any additional comments?

Great overview of Stansilav Grof's body of work and key concepts. This is an audio recording of him in a lecture setting.

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6 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Get ready to get you head wide open !

If you could sum up The Transpersonal Vision in three words, what would they be?

Revolutionary, necessary, Genius

What did you like best about this story?

This summed up my learning of the last 10 years and set me up for new challenges.

Any additional comments?

This book is a most for any mental health professional or person in the spiritual path. very reveling! Thanks doctor Grof!

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Less Breathwork, Please, More Psychedelic Therapy

Having been tantalizingly introduced to the subject of shamanic therapy by Aldous Huxley, James Fadman, Tom Shroder, Rick Strassman, and above all Terence McKenna, I was prepared to hear a rousing defense of psychedelics from the apparent grandfather of this entire movement and a call to action on behalf of the millions of unnecessarily suffering human beings who could find relief and psychological insight through the guided use of LSD and the other persecuted shamanic medicines of the world. And in fact the first few hours of Grof's insights provided rousing affirmations of my faith in these long-suppressed cures, suppressed by scientific hubris and a governmental war on drugs, which is actually a crackdown on religion, insofar as it bans ancient, natural substances that have been used in spiritual contexts for thousands of years. As Terence McKenna puts it, the idea of an "illegal plant" would have been incomprehensible to preliterate shamanic societies that valued their connection with the planet.

At about the five-hour mark, however, the discussion veered into the topic of holotropic breathing, a procedure whereby Grof contends that patients (or clients) can gain the benefits of psychedelic therapies without using drugs or plants.

This kind of bothered me. As a long-time "client" of the mental health system in America, (indeed a 40-year veteran of the same), I have practiced breathing cures (and many other related fads) until I was blue in the face! And yet here I am, still with the same basic depression that I had four decades ago! I ask myself: How much proof does Grof need to know that this new holotropic therapy, for most people at least, is of modest help at best compared to LSD (psilocybin, mescaline, etc.) -- and yet Grof really does seem to equate his results with those experienced through the use of LSD -- which, if true, only tells me that LSD and psychedelics aren't necessarily as helpful as I thought!

What excited me about Grof was that he had been perhaps the first person to "see through" the psychotherapy of his time and discover that it was simply ineffective, that for all the hoopla, time, and money, folks just were not getting cured "at the end of the day," or even offered real lasting relief, except perhaps of the soporific, drowsy sort afforded by addictive barbiturates and SSRIs.

I therefore saw this plug for holotropic breathing as a step backward by Grof, a relinquishing of his insistence on real, undeniable, dramatic results in favor of a semi-effective, partially useful fad -- a move made necessary, perhaps, on a professional basis given the near outlawing of LSD research, but a step backward all the same into the proffering of "just another therapy." Grof, to me, was no longer sounding like the great innovator in therapy but rather just another purveyor of half-baked cures. To be sure, he cited impressive-sounding results, but no more impressive than one might hear from any cure-monger who gets a one-hour special on PBS to describe their solution to dieting, anxiety or depression.

I know that breathing techniques have an ancient lineage, but we must distinguish between what breathing techniques have done and could theoretically do and what they actually do achieve for the average American patient like myself, at least when unaccompanied by psychedelics.

Being convinced that true help is out there in the form of plants that exist on our planet and have been used for millennia, I am not in the mood to hear of another breathing exercise. Indeed, every time I hear of a new cure a la holotropic breathing, I'm reminded of the following lines from Shelley in "A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", for I consider such nostrums, compared to the guided therapeutic use of psychedelics, to be but...


Frail spells whose utter'd charm

might not avail to sever,

From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance and mutability.



Of course, psychedelics don't do away with "doubt, chance and mutability," but they do allow many people to "take them onboard" and accept them as an integral part of life, to exam their life critically and live more fully, while recognizing themselves as a true part of nature, something that our smart-phones are trying their best to make us forget, as a proliferating number of apps run interference between human beings and their first-hand experience of the world.

So this is why I am disappointed in these lectures: As a long-time victim of the ineffective status quo in treatment brought about by the war on drugs, I feel that it's time for a full-court press for the legalization of psychedelics in a therapeutic setting. This is not the time for suggesting that a few incredibly simple breathing exercises could work just as well. Not only is that not true based on my lengthy personal experience, but it gives comfort to the enemy of shamanic substances, who could easily use this alleged sufficiency of breathing exercises to justify a continuation of the ban on psychedelic therapy.

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table of contents

very valuable, hard to navigate. it'd be useful to include a pdf. table of content.

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spend the credit!

great! so interesting! about to re listen after I type this! certainly ..... sounds true!

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Engrossing.

An exquisitely narrated adventure through Dr. Grof's career researching non ordinary states of consciousness and how their benefit can reach across not only psychosomatic disorders but the advancement of humanity through transpersonal work in the individual. A bit "clinical" at times, but I found the mentioned case studies fascinating and relevant to the material at hand, blending the psychological, spiritual, and the mystic nicely. Truly a wonderful listen for anyone working to advance their consciousness.

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Very powerful book, completely appropriate

Very powerful book, encompassing such diverse topics as entheogenics, psychotherapy and spirituality and weaving it into a coherent modality called transpersonal therapy. I strongly recommend it for anyone seeking answers in this world gone mad!

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