Stan Grof: Journey into the Holodeck of the Unconscious.


By Diego Pignatelli diego_pignatelli@libero.it


When Anthony Sutich and Abraham Maslow initated the field of Transpersonal Psychology, it was the intention to create a space in which the great, unknown or dimly glimpsed potential inherent to human beings would be given a space to unfold. The pioneering discoveries of Stanislav Grof would cause a revolutionary change in the field of consciousness studies, by moving towards a holographic paradigm of mind. This was initiatally catylised by LSD. The emergence of psychedelics was a a decisive turning point for the understanding of holographic consciousness, the witness, the explorer and the traveller of the unexplored territories of the psyche. Freud provided the first definition of metapsychology in 1896. This psychology had to go beyond the frontal, "conscious" sphere by dealing with the unconsciousness. Jung extended this work through an appreciation of the profound and collective depths of the unconscious, as a repository of transpersonal archetypes. Stanislav Grof included and transcended the technique of psychotherapy: he is the natural pioneers along the path of this discipline, extending Freud and Jungs work. The journey towards the unconscious. Grofs "back door" to spirit (as defined by Ken Wilber) is a door that opens onto the phyletic corridor of human hope. The collective unconscious is the archetypal substratum that Jung theorised about... beneath the layers of human day-to-day experience, resonating with a mysterious, magical, and in Jungs words "numinous" quality. Stanislav Grof, like his predecessors and Jung, heads for this archetypal corridor, whose various rooms, to use an image from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, are holo-decks or three-dimensional holographic fields. They are parallel realities of holograms in the psychic corridors of the collective consciousess. Grofs BPM or "birth perinatal matrices" describe the the great cosmic womb of undifferentiated, amniotic, foetal experience, the various matrices of claustrophobic places that imprint upon the emotional conditions of later life... where the foetus undergoes the crushing and claustrophobic rigors of birth. In BPM IV, the final matrix, the birth canal leading to actual birth, the foetus suffering ends in a transition from crushing suffocation to liberation in the light. The hellish experience of a manic, borderline neurotic state swiftly expands into spiritual ecstasy where the life-death interface unhooks itself from its infernal BPM state and moves to the three-dimensional holo-deck. By unhooking oneself, through rebirth and reliving these early birth traumas, a person can move from being under the unconscious influence of catastrophic visions and scatological hells with no seeming escape, to expanded states of freedom and liberation. Stanislav Grof called this process Holotropic: a movement towards a whole. The existential field of one is the universal sphere of Everything. By losing the sense of self, man regresses into cosmic states of being and identifies himself with all things vegetable, mineral and biological. Heavenly paradises and angelic visions are accessible in these dimensions as well as universal archetypes such as the great goddess mother Kali. Holotropic experience is a journey beyond the usual confines, beyond the limits of the mind. Stan Grof is the precursor of a pioneering adventure of transpersonal explorations of mans unconscious, and from within unconsciousness, to the whole cosmic experience. Grof has understood birth as the door between personal and transpersonal, heaven and hell, with rebirthing acting as an interface to the matrices.By using rapid breathing, holotropic practices and evocative music one breaks away from ordinary experience and travels in a transpersonal experience where beyond for the death-rebirth event is a holistic cosmos; a whole field of all events. The journey towards the unconscious is a conscious morphogenetic map of infinite holographic probabilities. If objective reality is nothing more than a hologram, a fragment of reality, the remains of the hologram will be latent and hidden. That is why it is necessary to bring back the experiences which are concealed behind the objective universe. This is where they lie dormant and we need to bring them back to the whole. Only through immersion in the state of consciousness can we explore this whole in its parts and as a result find the whole pattern in a holographic process. Non ordinary states of consciousness are prerequisites for investigation of the transpersonal dimension which spans the Alpha and Omega of human experience. Stanislav Grof visualises birth as the transpersonal threshold, as a bridge to the unconscious... leading to a journey into a cave of monsters and demonic presences and finally coming out into the realm of transpersonal experience. The condensed COEX experiences (constellations of experience) and the Birth perinatal matrixes are indispensable stages for the great return and for transpersonal individuation. These enable us to access the Sacred and a journey into the holoraphic mind, the transpersonal unconscious, which has all possibility to become the transpersonal conscious.


Diego Pignatelli.

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