Richard Tarnas: On Psychedelic Initiation in Postmodern Culture

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Richard Tarnas: Thank you. So, my subject tonight is psychedelic initiation in our contemporary culture. I seem to specialize on subjects that are, have been taboo in the mainstream world over the last few decades, but are starting to be less so. 

I'd like to first, tonight, take a step back and look at a kind of wide angle lens view of our historical situation within which the earlier psychedelic awakening of the 1950s and 60s took place in the modern West. And then followed by the current psychedelic renaissance, as it's often called, a renaissance in research and therapeutic possibilities and also societal attitude. 

And then I'd like to bring into view how both C.G. Jung and Stan Grof played pivotal roles in this history and in Grof's case effectively bridged these two stages of psychedelic therapy and research, one in the 20th century and one in the 21st. And thank goodness he's still with us, living in Germany now, 94 years old, still very lucid, have weekly conversations with him that are always very, very interesting going over our lifetime's work together and continuing evolution of them. 

So my specific focus is going to be on the impact of psychedelics within those societies that were shaped by modern, what's sometimes called today North Atlantic civilization here in the U.S. and Canada, most of Europe, and especially in the universities and the major urban centers. And then spreading out from there. 

That said, I want to emphasize that these topics that we're addressing this evening would, of course, look very different from the perspective of, say, a Mazatec curandera like Maria Sabina in Mexico or an Ayahuasca-inspired society in Peru. Or Brazil or a peyote-inspired society among the indigenous Southern Plains tribes in North America. 

What I hope to bring out today specifically is that the civilization of Western modernity, both countless individuals but also the society as a whole, has experienced the widespread use of psychedelics in a completely different way than does an indigenous society with the use that, in which, the use of indigenous societies that have had rituals and social structures fully integrated over many centuries with the use of sacred vision plants and psychoactive medicines. 

The word impact to describe the effect of psychedelics on modern culture helps point to the, that kind of destabilizing as well as illuminating and transformative power of the psychedelic experience that exploded into the collective psyche over half a century ago. 

Now, speaking of this cultural explosion, let me mention right now I had been planning to take two minutes here for a musical invocation, as it were, to help bring home this cultural event that we're talking about, in its felt experience, what we philosophers call the phenomenological quality of what I'm speaking of. So I was going to play for you White Rabbit, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane's very brief two and a half minute, quite dramatic, truly iconic song of psychedelic initiation from 1967. 

But the problem is that YouTube, as extraordinary a public forum and resource as it is, it hasn't quite matured to the recognition that there's something called academic fair use, which allows scholars to share and speak about works of art, not to make money off them or just from showing it or, but rather to study it, to contextualize it, to interpret it, to understand it, to have it illuminate the subject under discussion. So, because YouTube has this kind of automatic shutdown reaction when it senses that there's copyrighted material, and without any knowledge of academic fair use, they could just possibly quite abruptly have shut down the lecture just as we're starting it, with me playing that song. 

So that's why I asked some of you to, you might want to just go on to YouTube where you can just see it, you know, either before the lecture or if you happen to see that note or afterwards, and just type in, official video of White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane, and it'll pop right up and you'll have it, or you can use Spotify or Apple Music. But most of you probably know the song already quite well, and some of you may have freshly listened to it as public programs suggested. And if you happen to be watching this as a podcast recording later, not in this live stream, then of course you can also just stop for a moment and listen to the song. 

But returning now to our regular programming. As many of you know, that song was listened to by tens of millions of people, young people especially, over and over again during the later 1960s. And you could say that that song both reflected the interior state of the collective psyche at that time, and it also influenced the collective psyche. 

That’s what great art does, I mean it is an expression of the zeitgeist that comes out of the collective psyche at that moment, but it also articulates it in such a way that enacts it, and with artistic power in such a way that it actually kind of feedback loops into the collective psyche and the zeitgeist with its own particular inflections. 

And musically, that kind of bolero power and depth, the deep bass notes, the authoritative voice of Grace Slick, who wrote the song, the sense she gives of, of her being invited, almost commanded by her powerful voice, to undertake a potentially disorienting dissent in order to expand one's mind. The song has a kind of very special power with, and Grace Slick was almost like this high priestess beckoning a generation to the underworld. 

So I wanted to recall that song here partly because the music brings us immediately into an experiential level which music can do much more than words alone are able to. Music can call forth a somatic response that's kinesthetic and that's emotional and imaginative and kind of directly archetypal. Music reaches deeper into our evolutionary psyche than complex verbal language can do on its own, no matter how eloquent or articulate we know language can be. 

What I especially wanted to call attention to, why that song, more vividly than many other examples of so-called psychedelic music or acid rock, which could often be rather formless and chaotic and loudly dissonant. White Rabbit captures the gravitas, the absolute seriousness and intense focus of the psychedelic entrance into the unknown. And it combines this with the archetypal trickster, that kind of destabilizing surprise element when the ground of reality collapses beneath one's feet. 

This song's been many times called a masterpiece for good reason. It's literate, it's witty, radical, but it's also disciplined and tight and rebellious and irreverent and hip and countercultural. It's both intelligent and mysterious and it achieves a kind of ritual high drama through that solemn Bolero crescendo right to the climax. And it's all expressed through Lewis Carroll's imaginative, his symbolic universe with animal guides and trickster figures and astonishing reality shifts. 

The last thing I'll say about it is, she wrote that song at her cheap upright piano when she was just 26 right here in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, north of San Francisco, and right after she'd experienced a long overnight LSD journey. And she once said that, for her, the words at the end, that proclamation, remember what the Dormouse said, feed your head, feed your head, was not only about taking psychedelics, what she had in mind was it's also about reading, reading many books, paying attention, expanding your mind. That's what for her the song was all about, following the passion of your curiosity beyond your present horizon, beyond what the mainstream society or your parents might be dictating, but instead pursuing the adventure of the unknown, taking the risk, even when that brings about a collapse of one's previous reality structures. 

So, a good word to describe both the psychedelic experience and that song's call is that it interpolates us. I love that word interpolate. It refers to something that that interrupts and challenges and reorients us. It's a word that's used in the field of moral philosophy, as by Charles Taylor, for example, when he discusses how our high values and moral sources not only command our admiration, but they challenge us in our inner life to live up to them. And in so doing, they can reshape our very identity. 

It's the perfect word for the, what I'm trying to describe here, because its etymology and meaning points to psychedelics capacity to interrupt and challenge us in our ordinary life and in our ordinary worldview. It can challenge not only our sense of reality, but our sense of who we are. It connotes something that fundamentally changes us and can reconstitute our entire identity. And not just once, but over and over again. Every journey is a new descent into the unknown with uncertain consequences. 

I remember Stan Grof saying more than once, and as have I, you know, never underestimate prior to your entrance into a new journey, what can happen. Because it's beyond what our expectations will be. It makes demands on us. It undermines our naive confidence that we know what's happening. That's very much what initiation is all about. And an essential stage of it is that undermining of our naive confidence that we know what's happening. Like Dylan's, there's something happening here and you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones? 

So the psychedelic experience, it presses us towards transformation and it undermines our past uncertainties and it expands our vision. It evolves us. It disciplines us. It can both disempower and then empower us on an entirely new level. 

I have a good friend, very intelligent, very experienced, who when I invited him, over 25 years ago, I think, I had invited him to join an ayahuasca circle that I was part of and partially organizing. And he said to me, sure, he'd like to check out ayahuasca, as he put it. The next morning after the ceremony and during the group sharing, he described getting his derriere kicked in a most emphatic way. And as he said, with a kind of chastened look on his face, well, you don't just check out ayahuasca. 

Now this is all very close to what C.G. Jung, how he described the workings of the unconscious and its power and the deep psyche, and especially of encounters with the numinous and with what he called the God image in us. Like for Jung, God was what, he uses words like, it's what trips us up. It calls us up short as we pursue our business as usual strategies with our executive ego function. You know, it's like when the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go. 

It's, yeah, as with Alice in Wonderland, it's both a fall and a call. And it's a fall in multiple ways, as in strawberry fields, let me take you down. Because the relevant vector of psychedelic experience is depth, moving deep below the surface. It could be the deep psyche, deep space, deep time, deep, the deep inner world, the depths of the underworld, deep shit, deep mysteries all intertwined. But the vector is depth. And from there it may achieve undreamt of heights. 

That's why I love this passage from the 20th century Polish writer, Bruno Schulz, who writes, So it comes to pass that when we pursue an inquiry beyond a certain depth, we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life. The floorboards of the soul to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry firmament. 

It's a great image. The floorboards of the soul to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry element, the starry firmament. Brian Swimme reminds us of how when we are looking up at the night sky, the starry firmament, we need to keep in mind that we're on a spherical earth. And there's not really any up or down. In fact, in some sense, we're looking down at that starry firmament. And it's only our gravitational attachment to the earth that is keeping us from falling down into the starry firmament. So it's a great image from Bruno Schulz, a very special writer, sometimes compared to Kafka. He was from Poland rather than Czechoslovakia. 

So it was more than 50 years ago, just before I moved to Esalen Institute to work on my doctoral dissertation and to meet Stan Grof, that my doctoral advisor, who was Thomas Hanna, also was a founder of somatics, which is taught here at CIIS, he urged me on the basis of my previous education and continuing interest, he urged me to devote my dissertation not to the subject that I was planning on, which was basically a kind of, I wanted to write a, I, the, about the evolution of the idea and experience of archetypes from Plato and Aristotle to Jung and Steiner. 

But instead, Tom Hanna said, I think you should write a handbook of LSD therapy. That was in 1973. I ended up doing that, wrote the dissertation was done in 76, three years later. But this is 73. And Tom Hanna told me that at that time, that despite the recently instituted legal prohibitions and alarmist rhetoric by various political figures and others, the fact was that after 20 years of research and clinical experience with psychedelics in a therapeutic context, there was a broad consensus of knowledgeable psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists who were fully convinced that the future of psychotherapy would be greatly enhanced by psychedelic therapy and that it would, it represented a powerful tool that could really reshape that future.

But the reality in the larger society was very different, as we all know. Why is the big question. And that remarkable warm-hearted discoverer of LSD, Albert Hoffman, gave us a clue.

It was in 1984, at Esalen, it was during the later, later part of the years that Stan Grof and I lived and worked at Esalen. Esalen held a conference on psychedelics that brought together many of the key pioneers. Albert Hoffman flew in from Switzerland, Sasha Shulgin, the alchemist who discovered the healing potential of MDMA or ecstasy. He was there. Stan Grof, of course, was there. Leo Zeff, that kindly and wise psychiatrist who trained a whole generation of underground psychedelic therapists, was there. Also, I remember Fritjof Capra came. The young Terrence McKenna and Cat Harrison, they were there. And even the younger, the even younger Rick Doblin, who was still early in his quest that has proved so fruitful through his MAPS initiative, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

And it was during that week that Albert Hoffman said something really deeply perceptive and really illuminating about LSD, which he called his problem child with a mixture of affection and distress. He called it his enfant problematique. What Albert Hoffman said that day was that he believed that the widespread crisis that the popular use of LSD had catalyzed in the 1960s and after was the direct result of the fact that our modern civilization did not possess adequate sacred ritual structures or containers for the use of such powerful psychoactive medicines.

So it caused an explosion individually and societally. Our civilization was simply not ready. It did not know how to handle the experiences or how to integrate them into the larger society. They couldn't assimilate the LSD experience into the worldview that structured and limited the modern engagement with the complexity of reality. And of course, Albert Hoffman was right. We entirely lacked adequate sacred ritual structures, traditions, that could have provided the necessary matrix for its integration into our spiritual, moral, social, political life.

Now, that said, one can still see why someone like Tim Leary, who is truly a pied piper, as many called him at the time, one can see why Leary, among others, with his particular background and his particular psychological makeup and his historical cultural setting, why he may have felt inspired to experiment with LSD first out of curiosity and then as a protest against the narrow minded constraints of the straight lace society that he had been living in America in the 1950s and early 60s. And then to decide to basically unleash the unconstrained use of LSD during the 1960s with its intense, the 60s intense social upheaval, war, injustice, the defiance of authority and so forth.

I mean, in person, Tim Leary was a really amiable and even considerate person whom I liked very much. He was a kind of charismatic trickster. I remember not long after he was released from prison by then Governor Jerry Brown in his first term, back in the 70s, I invited Leary to give a Wednesday night lecture at Esalen in the large meeting room there called Huxley, right by the lodge. And I have to say, I mean, Tim put on a absolutely first rate stand up comic performance that left everyone entertained and delighted and illuminated in his own way.

But that reminds me of that time, the 70s, when Jerry Brown was governor, he used to, back then he and Linda Ronstadt, they would come down to Esalen to consult with his mentor, Gregory Bateson, who was living at Esalen then and Fritz's. And yeah, it was just a different era. And it's what, and Jimmy Carter was president.

And for all of you who would like a brief comic relief from our present national nightmare, check out the wonderful Saturday Night Live video from that time with Dan Ackroyd as Jimmy Carter and Bill Murray as Walter Cronkite, showing basically Jimmy Carter responding in the moment live, calmly, but in a well informed way to this call in from a young man who's freaking out alone at home on a bad acid trip. And he's telling the president and Walter Cronkite they're in the White House on this call. And he says that he's afraid to leave his apartment. He can't wear any clothes. The ceiling is dripping.

And Jimmy Carter stops Walter Cronkite from hanging up and instead says, he asked the caller a couple of questions and then says, OK, Peter, now listen, you've taken some orange sunshine. Remember, you're a part of the universe. You're going to be OK. Do you have any Allman Brothers there at home? It was obviously a different time.

But getting back to Larry, Tim probably underestimated how much his own, I think, psychological needs and somewhat messianic ego may have played a role in catalyzing some of the untoward events that ensued in the country and elsewhere. And like some other psychedelic pioneers, I think of John Lilly, for example, and his use and abuse of ketamine. Larry's example and Lilly's there, they represent something of a warning and a lesson that the use of these substances need to be approached with awareness of shadow as well as light, their pitfalls as well as promise, both of which can be exponentially magnified in the psychedelic state.

But getting back to the big picture, Albert Hoffman's insight about the lack of sacred ritual structures in modern civilization reflects a larger truth about 20th century modern societies, which have lived not only without such transformational rituals, but without the felt experience of a spiritual cosmos that would make such rituals meaningful in the first place.

Pre-modern societies, pre-modern European societies as well as worldwide, all of these lived within an enchanted cosmos. This basic experience, the participación mystique within an anima mundi, an ensouled world, it was inflected in various diverse ways, culture by culture, and era by era. But they all held the universally shared conviction that the world was intimately informed by spiritual dimensions of reality. And rituals, shamanic ceremonies, rites of passage, ancient mystery religions, initiatory rituals of all kinds, indigenous ceremonies of wide variety.

All these are playing two roles with respect to a spiritually permeated universe. On the one hand, such rituals are grounded in and they depend for their existence on the felt reality of the ensouled universe. The rituals would never have arisen and would make no sense if everyone had been living in a disenchanted world that has been fully emptied of any intrinsic purposes and meanings. Totally devoid of spiritual powers and transformational mysteries. Lacking an ensouled cosmos, the rituals would be nothing more than performative. They'd just be mere ritualism.

On the other hand, and here's the rub, it is precisely such rituals that can initiate and allow access to these deeper and higher dimensions of being. They evoke them, they call them into being, it's a participatory constellating of levels of reality that are not otherwise close to our ordinary consciousness. They catalyze transformational experiences that give people a direct awareness of the fact that there is more going on in reality than meets the conventional eye. There's more things in heaven and earth that are dreamt of than our philosophy. They open a larger world and a larger identity.

These rituals participate, participatively enact and evoke into being the realities that otherwise remain invisible and, invisible to our ordinary modern perception. They can, they can constellate a larger worldview, which in turn allows for a continuing participation and dialogue with that ensouled universe, even when the, when the, when the ritual is over.

But the, being born into a new identity also involves necessarily dying to an old identity and the birth into a new reality takes place on the ashes of the old one. And such a dying and a birth are often very dramatic events. They can be both terrifying and exalting. And they need adequate vessels, safe containers. They need wise guides, spiritual midwives, sacred structures, like kind of cultural religious morphic fields that have evolved over centuries.

Indigenous societies for millennia have evolved and maintained such ritual fields to, that permit this dramatic entering of, of liminal space that can mediate such profound transformations, but modern civilization was utterly unprepared for something as powerful and challenging to ordinary ego consciousness as LSD.

And yet, you can totally see why the countless thousands of often young modern psychedelic experimenters then and since were drawn to this experience. Come hell or high water, often both. In a sense, we could, you could say that they lived within a pathologically dysfunctional civilization, with a mode of life insanely separated from the natural world that gave them birth. And with a worldview that's essentially diluted into holding that human beings are the only source of consciousness and meaning in the known universe.

A civilization that is now, that's hyper militarized, atomistic and fragmented, predatory, relentlessly extractive, projecting shadow like crazy onto enemies, both domestic and foreign, and susceptible to apocalyptic destruction at any moment. I mean, you could say that, that the huge counterculture of the 60s and beyond was, and is, in some ways, essentially engaged in a massive civilization, a civilizational act of self medicating. Except that the medicine was sacred medicine and psychoactively powerful and potentially dangerous in unprepared hands and uncontained circumstances.

In such a civilization, there was no venerated tradition, there's no class of wise elders and guides that were widely recognized and available to the, the entire society. And there was no publicly affirmed spiritual cosmos, within which such a ritual would even make sense. Yet, of course, initiations still happened. We find, we find…

First for about 20 years within certain parts of the medical and and therapeutic establishment from the early 1950s to the early 70s in Europe, and the UK, the US, Canada, and then more massively and often spontaneously out in, out in the field, the meadows and the forest, the college dorms and the concert venues from Woodstock to the Monterey Pop Festival to the, the great, Grateful Dead tours across the world, starting particularly in the, in the mid 80s onwards, in the case of the dead.

This huge stadium rituals of, of their, their, their music and the, and the community that clustered around the dead and their music in some sense, created that ritual structure. I think it was Peter Sawyer, one of my students about 25 years ago at CIIS, wrote a great dissertation on that topic.

And the effects of the larger society, on, the effects of this widespread use of psychedelics, even after it became illegal, but even, but also beforehand. The effects of psychedelics on the larger society were tremendous. It deeply influenced the music, the films, the theater, literature and the arts, popular fashion, clothes, ways of speaking, the modes of life, social mores, the sense of humor was affected.

Terrence McKenna pointed that out quite rightly, was, was very much amped up, another level of sophistication and reflexivity came into, into the humor then. More complex symbolic insight and epistemological insight, even though people wouldn't necessarily use that word. The heightened ecological awareness that spread through the, the, the country and the world at that point. The return to nature and the organic food movement. The imagining of a world without hostile borders. We all inherited these many shifts whenever we were born.

By the way, I've often felt, you know, I was born in 1950. But I have, and sort of lived through this period that we're talking about, but I've often felt during the 30 plus years that I was teaching that, I found that, among my students that were born after the 60s they often seem to me to have lived as if they themselves had lived through the 60s and that, that what was resolved and living in that era was, was in some sense foundational for them and was living in them. And also what was left unresolved back then, is, was unresolved for them too and and had to be dealt with. And we, we today have to deal with it.

But, as we know, back then, the reigning political legal medical hierarchy became punitively antagonistic about LSD for complicated reasons and psychedelics generally, and the casualties of, of countless trippers unprepared for the power and challenges of the psychedelic experience were very real.

So, for, at all levels of the larger society, compared with indigenous societies, modern civilization did not have initiated adults running the show. So you have a kind of, you basically have uninitiated adolescents with a very sort of shallow timeframe, running the show, and a collective psychology that's uninitiated, that is focused on the short term, and the bottom line. It's endlessly extractive. It's greedy. In massive denial, with catastrophic consequences for, for the planetary biosphere, let alone the civilization.

And yet here is one of the great paradoxes of our time in which this collective crisis, including the sense of like a kind of encounter with mortality on a planetary scale, and a profound uncertainty about the future. These are classic initiatory features. And in some way, the collective crisis today may also be constellating a radical transformation. This is something that I've addressed actually in quite a few other lectures, including for this forum, which I have often come here in February and speak to. So I've addressed that quite a bit and I won't focus on that here.

I want to now focus on how Jung's work and Gross's work relate to what I've been describing and to the psychedelic experience and our more skillful employment of that. Because in our, the situation we've lived in over the decades, when you have a disenchanted universe and an utter absence of initiatory ritual practices, these two voids, they reinforce each other and combine to create a kind of initiatory social and cosmic pressure cooker, a no exit situation in Jean-Paul Sartre's terms, or what Stan Grof would call a perinatal crisis.

And that is indeed what we're seeing is happening on the collective level. Large forces are at work. We're in a kairos moment. And as Jung says, in this kairos moment, there's a changing of the gods happening there, the fundamental principles and symbols. And this change is not the result of conscious human intention. Something much larger and deeper is at work. But the individual and, as I call them, heroic communities and the collective human being can play a role in how we navigate this tremendous threshold.

Okay, now bringing in Jung. We can see with the psychedelic experience how much Jung's great kind of personal, transpersonal descent and transformation that he went through in that 1913 to about, let's say 1920 period, how this comes in. Basically, Jung's Red Book descent that took place in Zurich in those years. And then Stan Grof's own personal, transpersonal descent and transformation during the 50s and 60s in Prague.

Now, the therapeutic potential of LSD was of course only gradually recognized during the first two decades after Albert Hoffman's discovery in 1943. I mean, the discovery of its psychedelic properties. He just synthesized it in 38, had the famous bicycle ride and encounter with the experience itself in 43. But it was over the next 15 years or so that there was a gradual recognition of this, as of, that there could be therapeutic potential.

At first it was just much more of a kind of psychopharmacological interest. What happens when people take it. Then there was the psychotomimetic paradigm where it was seen as LSD could be very useful if we give this to psychiatrists in training so that they have a sense for what the psychotic state is, in a temporary way. But then gradually the therapeutic potential started coming out primarily with a psychodynamic and psychoanalytic orientation.

Jung himself was not part of that evolution in the research of psychedelic therapy. In fact, LSD was really only getting started in this sense during the last decade of his life. But he did know about mescaline. There's even some serious young scholars who believe that he might have experimented with mescaline once. There's no definite proof, but some feel that there's indications that that might have happened.

In any case, he strongly expressed concerns about using mescaline because, well, he felt that this artificial as it were, he wasn't thinking in terms of the shamanic cultures and indigenous rituals and so forth. He was thinking of modern Westerners and he was thinking about himself and what his unexpected forceful encounter with his own deep psyche as the unconscious flooded into his awareness in the years leading up to, well, in the year leading up to World War I, and then all during the war. So, so intense during that period, he wasn't certain he could retain his sanity. He felt genuine peril at times, along with the treasures. And all this was being activated without drugs. And so he had a real concern about others doing this.

Now we have to keep in mind, Jung had a, he seems to have had a very porous psyche. He was porous in the sense that he could easily move from the individual unconscious to the collective unconscious or collective psychic experience. And that was, that was what totally threw him as it started coming in in 1913 with his visions of what was about to happen in World War I. But of course, at that point, he had no idea exactly what would take place. But he was, his psyche was porous also with respect to other dimensions, spirits, ghosts, synchronistic intimations that his easy access to the mythic, the intensity of his dreams and visions. His skillful capacity for active imagination.

And note that the latter, which was his particular kind of contribution to a sort of ritual and descent into the unconscious after you've had a dream or a vision or whatever. The act of imagination gave him a degree of agency that was important, it was a co-creative thing between his own agency and the agency or autonomy of these, what he would call, the contents of his unconscious or these powerful figures in his deep psyche.

But therapists generally who were using psychedelics, including some Jungian analysts, they recognized the ways that Jung's ideas and discoveries really shone a light on the psychedelic experience beyond what he would personally have been articulating. Ronald Sandison, for example, in the UK, was an important early Jungian analyst using LSD back in the 1950s and 60s.

There's so many ways in which Jung shines a light on the psychedelic experience, I mean, he just, the reality of there being a deep psyche, a deep unconscious beyond just the personal unconscious of Freud and the repressed instincts and traumatic material. A deep unconscious, a collective archetypal unconscious that was a source of wisdom and mystery, not just problematic traumatic material and suppressed instincts. And it was very cross-cultural in scope, this deep psyche.

And Jung's recognition of the fundamental power and presence of archetypes, his observation of synchronicities, his interest in the esoteric, many esoteric traditions that psychedelic explorers often are drawn to themselves. He had that already. The importance of the re-enchantment of the world, recognizing it, the importance of initiation, his grasp of the importance of the spiritual dimension of human life and of nature, of the natural world and of the cosmos itself, of life as a spiritual journey. He's got all that and his understanding of the birth archetype and the death rebirth process.

But Jung had a healthy respect for these dangers of facing the overpowering energies of the unconscious and he didn't recommend that people take it up for the reasons that I, some of the reasons that I've mentioned there, as well as others. Scott Hill, our own, you know, an alumnus from our philosophy, cosmology and consciousness program, wrote an excellent book on this based on his dissertation that he did with us, right on this topic. And it's called Confrontation with the Unconscious. Excellent book. And it's been widely discussed in the Jungian community. He's been invited to Jungian centers, including our San Francisco Jung Institute. It's had a real influence.

So Jung's psychology was probably the most important existing mid-20th century psychology capable of engaging many of the results of LSD experiences. He didn't get some things. None of us get everything, but he didn't get some things though. For example, he generally didn't recognize the significance of past life experiences, which come up very frequently with psychedelic as well as holotropic breathwork experiences.

Also, while he understood the symbolic archetypal death rebirth experience in a very potent way, just symbolic doesn't mean abstract, conceptual, it can, a powerful symbol like an archetype can, that it opens up to completely, it's, as Jung said, it's the most powerful thing that he knows as it in a possession state by an archetypal complex or power. But he didn't understand how tied the death rebirth mystery and experience was with biological birth itself, and that many people could experience, relive their own birth from multiple ways, even becoming their own mother, giving birth and so forth. So that was down the line. He didn't recognize that.

So, beyond Jung, in terms of a fully worked out synthesis of psychedelics, particularly LSD, with the depth psychology tradition in an effective psychotherapeutic clinical modality, it was Stanislav Grof, the Czech-American psychiatrist, who brought both a depth psychology perspective and forged a clinical approach that was specifically shaped by the use of LSD with thousands of patients. And patients suffering from a variety of neurotic and psychotic conditions, but also subjects, healthy subjects that were volunteering to take the substance. And this was over a 15 year period, first in Prague, and then in Maryland, before he came to Esalen, same time I did, back in 73, 74.

As Albert Hoffman often put it, if he, Albert, was the father of LSD, then Stan Grof was the godfather, which I think is a very inspired way of putting it.

Now, I want to, let me, let me bring up a diagram here. So this diagram is something that basically, I constructed over years with Stan in the years after my dissertation, but as we started co-teaching together in, first at Esalen and then, but then in many other places, including in the philosophy, cosmology and consciousness program. And we would hand draw these things, I would usually, not being a great artist, that would be a kind of rough thing, but a few years ago, we asked Darren Deer to, PCC alum, who's got great gifts in this direction, and he took our drawings and made them into this.

Now this is basically a diagram that helps to show the big picture. You've got the ordinary ego consciousness up here at the top, and then the depth dimension, as I say, and what Stan was using low doses, low to medium doses in Prague. And so in the most of the years in Prague, he, I think, serendipitously, because this was a very helpful way of basically doing the onion peeling of the unconscious in stages, is that by using low to medium doses with patients, often on every other 11, every 11 days, they would have a session, with him, and in a basically a psychoanalytic framework, often speaking with Stan, but also, you know, attending to their visions, the distortions, the images, the memories coming up, etc. And sharing them.

And this happened, I think, in the later 50s, but particularly in the 60s, and he was doing like two sessions a day, starting one early in the morning with a nurse, they had a clinic, everybody is staying right there so that everything's kind of nicely contextualized there, safe container. And then midway through the day, when one person's kind of starting to come down, he would start another one. So he just built up a tremendous database of understanding, as well as doing his own sessions.

And he, what he found was that in the early sessions, people seem to tap, well, the earliest experiences tend to be, you know, more the usual psychedelic images, abstract, arabesques, and the like, patterns, colors, etc. But then, as soon as the emotional field starts getting more intense, there can be an upwelling of material from the recent past that often has an emotional and emotionally potent quality, often problematic things that have happened, recent experiences like a loss of a relation…, the ending of a relationship or something like that, or a divorce or something like that.

But then he found that as people kept taking these session after session, there was a gradual deepening of, into their earlier memories in a way very much like the history of psychoanalysis after Freud going deeper and deeper, you know, from recent repressed material to like the Oedipus and electro complexes of that period, and then the earlier periods of psychosexual development, the early nursing experiences and so forth. All of which could more or less be, excuse me, understood in largely psychoanalytic terms, you know, including object relations theory, Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Wilhelm Reich, Abraham, etc.

But then at a certain level of deep experience, people started both seeming like getting quite a bit more intense, difficult emotions and then could encounter both what felt like their own mortality, like facing death in different ways, and reliving their birth. So going back all the way, and that's what these perinatal matrices are.

And so very quickly, these are connected here like these yellow circles, because these are coax systems that is they are like all the times that one might have experienced say abandonment, a romantic failure, a divorce, but then maybe, perhaps one of one's parents died or left the family at very young age, or some deep sense of abandonment. While over here, there could be a very positive experiences of feeling loved in a happy relationship, friends, family, etc. Early childhood experiences of great nourishment.

And then all of these seem to connect with these four perinatal matrices that are often, especially back in the 60s seem to be connected to the fetal biological experience of birth and they still can quite vividly biological experiences of birth, can be intermixed with these powerful emotions, metaphysical things like the state of being in the full throes of the birth contractions, there's no way out, the cervix is closed, one's in helpless pain, one doesn't understand what's happening, you're being expelled by the only universe that you've known that has been so all nourishing, etc. There's no exit, etc. It's like a hell state.

Or then there could be like a purgatorial state where the cervix opens and there's great powerful movements, but it's in a struggle, a struggle to like the oxygen alone, but also the extraordinary contractions of the uterus and then the narrowness of the birth canal that Homo sapiens leaves us with, our evolution, and then the sudden birth of, and… into a new realm that one had no idea was out there and then experiencing the reunion with the mother, the matrix, that which one had thought one had lost and a real potential for moving on into a, a very well nourished childhood.

But also there are infancies in childhoods that are not nourishing. There's births that can be extremely traumatic for various reasons. And those have to be worked through painstakingly and painfully, etc.

But on the other side of this threshold of the kind of death rebirth process, which can sometimes often take place without fetal elements coming in, biological birth, but still have all the ingredients of an initial state of unity that is suddenly a sudden division is brought in, a sense of a fall, and then often a mistake that one has done. That I must be at fault, intense feelings of guilt and suffering, not but suffering without knowing of any meaning, which is the worst kind.

And then there can be the sense that it's going somewhere, there's light at the end of the tunnel. It's suffering, it's intense, but it's going somewhere, it's meaningful. As Nietzsche and others have said, one can go through any, if you know the meaning, the why, then you can go through any what.

And then the breakthrough, which can take this form of a spiritual rebirth, of just a sudden release of the weight, the fear of death that had been invisibly constraining our vision, all sorts of emotional constraints that kept us from being an intimate relationship with others can be healed in certain ways, and one can open up and see the world anew, etc. I mean, that's the ideal death rebirth initiatory experience, and it can take many, many different forms.

And then on the other side of that is that it seemed to open up the transpersonal unconscious so that with further sessions, you get, it could be past live memories that seem to actually feed into how the birth went and one's personal life postnatally. And also there could be collective, historical memories, our familial, ancestral history, and all those experiences, those are in us. We may work out through something that happened to our grandmother when she was five years old, that is living in us and that, and in some sense she's almost present as we're going through and integrating that. We all celebrate together, together, so to speak, and phylogenetic memories connecting to other forms of nature, mythological experiences, archetypal, etc.

And I'll just mention one quick other thing, and that is to bring in the quite surprising development that happened for us, Stan and me, starting in 1976, was the recognition that people's experiences, you know, they've done so much research in the psychedelic clinics over the decades of trying to find out if there's any psychological tests that would help them understand what, how a person might react to these powerful medicines because the same dose, the same setting and everything of the same drug could have such radically different results for different people, or for the same person at different times.

And basically the last thing that we, the last new paradigm kind of thing that we would have thought would be relevant, we're studying, it turned out that astrology, particularly the archetypal astrology that Jung himself had helped forge, he was deeply involved in those studies for some 40 years. And Dane Rudhyar was of course the person who brought that fully into the larger astrological community, and then many archetypal astrologers are now practicing today, including what the philosophy, cosmology and consciousness program, that's been a kind of central part of it over the last 30 plus years.

So this diagram shows how, in a way it's like what, that Bruno Schulz quote about, you penetrate to the depths of the floorboards of the soul, and they suddenly fan open and reveal the starry firmament, you know, those are the images, those are the symbolic, the glyphs of the planets and the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, each of which seems to be connected in some extraordinary synchronistic cosmic correspondence, as above so below.

And the birth chart, where those planets are at the time and place of a person's birth gives us a lot of indications as to the particular archetypal dynamics, this is something Jung saw, the particular archetypal dynamics that that person has throughout their life as they, as they're working through the great gifts and potential as well as challenges of that, of the particular alignments that reflect particular archetypal combinations and dynamics and complexes and so forth, this lifetime.

That's why Jung was using astrology for most of his, he said, in the early 50s, he said to a friend of the family, psychiatrist that I met in Switzerland once, that he was using it with all of his patients by that time. And so, and then transit astrology is like the great additional gift that helps you see like what planets, that is what archetypal energies are activated at what time, in what combinations and for how long, etc. That gave us, really illuminated our understanding of the major qualities, themes, experiences that that people were having.

I think the key thing to see about Stan's contribution to why he's been so pivotal and regarded by many of the current leading psychedelic therapists and researchers as being kind of the, you know, the, the, the Dean of this discipline. The great, in a sense, the wise man archetype is very strong, strongly constellated. He's a kind of high priest of the death rebirth mystery in, some say, sense, but I want to tell you, like what I think made this possible, because Stan's I, he came in with a certain openness of approach.

He, instead of coming in with, he was trained as a psychoanalyst, and he had a very, you know Freudian and mainstream medical upbringing, but he brought a particular attitude towards the psyche that shaped both, his therapeutic methods and the map of the psyche that he calls his cartography of the psyche that emerged. That attitude was one of deep respect for and, and radical openness to the mystery and seemingly infinite depths and plenitude of the psyche. He had a trust in the unconscious, and this allowed him to be more of a, of a midwife, a psycho spiritual somatic like midwife, than a controlling obstetrician in the birth and rebirth process of the people he was sitting with.

This openness and flexibility in turn brought forth a kind of clinically, a kind of trans theoretical range of experience that was reflected in his psychological theory. So he brings in Jung, he brings in Otto Rank, who was the first to really see that birth could play a, an enormous role, though Rank's understanding was more on just the birth trauma at the final separation from the mother, not realizing that so much of the powerful trauma actually was in the prior to birth and that the birth itself is a great, is a moment of both collapse of the old structures but sudden expansion of horizons and epiphany, illumination, reunion with the beloved.

And then, Stan, here's the second thing is that Stan combined this openness with a courageous willingness to, to explore and help others explore an astonishing range of non ordinary states of consciousness. His trust in the ultimate, the inner healer, as you call it, the self regulating and healing capacities in every individual psyche, it encouraged him to use these powerful, non specific catalysts of the unconscious, to raise the energetic level of that the unconscious material to overcome the repressive lock of the ego on the energies which keeps them frozen in the armored body and psyche.

So this helped him really overcome any kind of dogmatic attachment to particular theoretical assumptions, and it opened up the therapist and the subject or patient to the unpredictable spontaneity of the psyche's natural unfolding or its eruption from the depths. Because our theoretical assumptions can often serve as a egoic defense that stops the healing process from happening.

So, what he found was that, that these powerful substances like LSD mescaline, psilocybin, ayahuasca, peyote and so forth. There's a range of other... These resulted in what turned out to be a kind of major archaeological uncovering of the psyche. Its many levels and its complexity, its unending complexity, its unending depths. There's no, there's no… It's infinite. There's no, there's no limits to what's in there. We will never map out the whole thing.

And Stan recognized the parallels of his kind of clinical research with the much more ancient practices of shamanism and the indigenous use of vision plants and, and rites of passage and the initiations of the mystery religions. And that's, he came to those in humility, not with the know-it-all of the psychiatrist, the modern psychiatrist who thinks like, oh, that's like an ambulatory schizophrenic kind of response.

That trust in the unconscious, I just want to say, one of the first things that when I first talked to Stan about how, I'd done some work in the Haight-Ashbury drug clinic before I went to Esalen. The very difficult "bummers" as they used to be called or bad trips that people can have, and often blamed on bad acid when in fact, this was just the range of possibilities that, I mean, there are, there was undoubtedly bad acid or bad drugs still to this day that circulate for all sorts of malefic reasons. But a lot of times it's perfectly pure acid that was catalyzing experiences that, that were not pleasant, that were very uncomfortably destabilizing. And that would then be blamed, Oh, my God, somebody gave me some bad acid. And that's not necessarily what was happening.

And this trust in whatever comes up, surrendering to both the light and the shadow, the dark painful material as well as the great illuminations and new freedoms and happy thrills of the experience. And that allowed Stan to, I mean, he had to go through it himself and he had to sit through people in the early years not knowing how it's going to come out but then seeing the results.

And so when I asked him about this kind of experience and how to respond, he said, words I'll never forget. He just said the full experience of a negative emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion, especially if it's experienced in the right set and setting, you know, and with a wise, well informed guide and someone sitting, etc.

But basically, it liberates the kind of infinite pool of whatever it is, panic, guilt, sense of cosmic abandonment and aloneness, loneliness. It, it, you connect to that archetypal field, which is infinite because, as being archetypal and, and it, you become a conduit, it floods into your consciousness and then it releases out your body through tremors or through, could be vomiting, it could be screaming, it could be just in, in a twinkling of an eye without necessarily any huge somatic ab reaction, but that trust, that, that to let that in and let it flow through one with the, the understanding that there is an inner healer at work.

And it's when you don't have that, you might be out in the street and having these, you know, fearful experiences coming and then every car that's going by, every person you're walking next to becomes like, oh the siren, oh my god, the cops are coming, I'm going to go to jail forever. That person, look how they, they didn't look at me but I know that they are thinking about how they can kill me as soon as I'm passing, that kind of ideation, you know, you're, you don't have any, you got to close your eyes, because otherwise you're just projecting out this unconscious material and constellating a crisis and then you get frozen in it because you're not in a process with, with a, in a therapeutic context and, or a spiritually transformational one, and instead, you know, you might be brought to the ER and given some kind of anti psychotic drug and, and it, and it freezes the process and creates flashbacks because the unconscious material hasn't had a chance to be released and so forth.

So Stan really provide, provided for the whole discipline and what I feel is a much more adequate approach to such a powerful catalyst of the psyche, especially for a culture, and this is my main point tonight, that it becomes so unfamiliar with the depths. And even to the point that this was called the unconscious that needed to be discovered, instead of the anima mundi, the soul of the world that we're always participating in.

Well, I think we have gone past our time, but I hope we've covered, I mean, we covered a lot tonight. It's been a kind of two hour Niagara Falls of me speaking here, that I hope some of it has been helpful for you. And I'm privileged to have you listen to me tonight. And I hope that some of what I have said will be useful to you. And even just in the, maybe in the back of your mind, provide a kind of larger deeper frame of reference to help us all go through and help yourself go through the inevitable challenges that lie in front of us as individuals, as well as the human and earth community.

Thank you very much for being with me and go in peace. Bye bye.

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