Stanislav Grof - The Way of the Psychonaut Volume One: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys

The Way of the Psychonaut

Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys

Volume One

100% of the profits from the sale of this book will be used to fund psychedelic and medical marijuana research and education. This MAPS-published book was made possible by the generous support of Dr. Bronners.

The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys Volume One

ISBN-13: 978-0-9982765-9-5
ISBN-10: 0-9982765-9-6
Copyright 2019 by Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means electronic or mechanical except as expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing by the publisher. Requests for such permission shall be addressed to:
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

P.O. Box 8423, Santa Cruz, CA 95061
Phone: 831.429.6362, Fax 831.429.6370
Email:

Book and cover design: Sarah Jordan
Cover image: Brigitte Grof
Printed in the United States of America by McNaughton & Gunn, Saline, MI

About the cover image: Shiva Nataraja appeared in my most important psychedelic sessions and I consider it to be my own personal Archetype. I also had many extraordinary experiences with Swami Muktananda around Shiva, described in When the Impossible Happens. This special image of Shiva was taken in my house in Big Sur by Brigitte, at the time when I lived for fourteen years at Esalen, a very important period in my life.Stanislav Grof

Dedication

For Brigitte,

love of my life and my other half, who has brought light,

shakti, inspiration, enthusiasm, and unconditional love into my world, wonderful wife and ideal companion on inner and outer journeyswith deep gratitude and admiration for who you are and what you stand for.

Foreword
by Richard Tarnas, Ph.D.

We all sense today that humanity and the Earth community have reached a tremendous crossroads, and the stakes can hardly be overstatedecological, spiritual, psychological, social, political. Pervading our era is an atmosphere of crisis, of radical transformation, perhaps a moment for the changing of the gods, as C. G. Jung put it near the end of his life. The fundamental principles and symbols that have governed our civilization are undergoing a profound revisioning.

In this process, humanity seems to be going through a dramatic deconstruction of its old identity and world view, a kind of symbolic dying and transformation that may be necessary to avoid more literal forms of dying and destruction. Because world views create worlds, and world views are shaped by our individual and collective psyches, our collective future depends on the willingness of enough individuals and communities to undergo that depth of transformation and awakening that can support our civilizations re-entry into the larger community of being from which modern Homo sapiens has imagined itself to be fundamentally separate.

There is probably no one alive today who possesses as broad and profound a practical knowledge of the processes of deep psychological transformation and non-ordinary states of consciousness as does Stanislav Grof. For over sixty years, Grof has courageously worked with thousands of individuals as they explored their inner depths in the service of healing, spiritual awakening, liberating their minds and souls, and opening their doors of perception. The present work summarizes this extraordinary lifetime of experience and accumulated knowledge of a domain that most psychology and psychotherapy today has barely allowed itself to recognize, let alone explore and adequately understand.

Grofs expanded cartography of the psyche, based on six decades of clinical experience and thousands of session reports, brought forth a new and much deeper understanding of the etiology of emotional and psychosomatic disorders. By introducing such concepts as COEX systems, Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs), and the contents of the transpersonal domain of the unconscious, Grof was able to connect and integrate the ideas of Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, as well as Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, and Melanie Klein, among others, into a comprehensive understanding of the human psyche.

On the one hand, Grofs careful analysis of different levels of the psyche and their role in the etiology of emotional disorders made it possible to see the correctness of Freuds basic intuition of the ways that unconscious memories of early life experiences and traumas shape the growing psyche. However, Grofs research also demonstrated that Freuds interpretations were compromised by his superficial model of the psyche limited to postnatal biography and the individual unconscious. By recognizing the psychotraumatic impact of physical injuries, diseases, biological birth, and a wide range of transpersonal influences (ancestral, collective, racial, karmic, phylogenetic, and archetypal), Grof was able to provide much more plausible, clinically grounded explanations for many pathological symptoms and syndromes.