LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Director:
Jay Goldfarb
Contact: wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Deborah Wolf
Wisdom Area: End of Life Preparations
Question: How can we work with those around us in this dying process?
YouTube Video Title: Legacy of Wisdom – Stan Grof – Dealing with those around
us.
YouTube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmNf57veL7o
Length: 6:53
Interviewee: Dr. STANISLAV GROF (www.stanislavgrof.com)
Stan Grof, M.D., Ph.D. is a psychiatrist with more than fifty years
experience researching the healing and transformative potential of
non-ordinary states of consciousness. His groundbreaking theories
influenced the integration of Western science with his brilliant mapping of the
transpersonal dimension. On October 5, 2007 Dr. Grof received the
prestigious VISION 97 award granted by the Foundation of Dagmar and
Vaclav Havel in Prague.
He is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of Transpersonal Psychology
and received an Honorary Award for major contributions to and development of the field of
Transpersonal Psychology from the Association for Transpersonal Psychology in 1993.
Dr. Grof is also the founding President of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) and was
its President for many years. He has organized large international conferences throughout the world
and continues to lecture and teach professional training programs in Holotropic Breathwork and
transpersonal psychology.
Currently, Dr. Grof is Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in
the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness in San Francisco, CA, and at Wisdom
University in Oakland, CA. Dr. Grof was born in 1931 in Prague where he received an M.D. from
Charles University and a Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine) from the Czechoslovakian
Academy of Sciences. Between 1960 and 1967, he was Principal Investigator in a psychedelic
research program at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
In the United States, Dr. Grof served as Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric
Research Center and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine in Baltimore, MD. He was also Scholar-in-Residence at Esalen Institute.
-1-
LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Director:
Jay Goldfarb
Contact: wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Deborah Wolf
Question: How can we work with those around us in this dying process?
Transcript (ENGLISH):
Interviewer:
Do you have any recommendations for dealing with your family members? How you can help
them to help you or support you in your process?
Stanislav Grof:
I mean discussion can certainly, if you are able to bring it to the open and discuss it that could
take you a little in the direction. If it’s something like children and so on who are in a stage
where they can do some inner work, that would certainly help. Psychedelics are not very
practical these days, but certainly there are very powerful experiential techniques where people
can look at some of their own issues and to the extent to which they would solve it for
themselves they would probably be in a much better position to approach the loss of people who
are close. We have heard a number of times, we have a training for people, for practitioners of
holotropic breath work where people have quite a few experiences as part of the training. And
we have heard repeatedly how it helped them to be with their dying themselves parents, just to
be there and sitting and not trying to do, just sort of honor the process which is unfolding, which
you have to do in psychedelic sessions and which you have to do in holotropic breath work. So
that certainly would be one of the ways of helping the situation. There’s something closely
related to this that in Tibet part of the training of the monks is also spending some times sitting
with people who are dying which in itself can help your own spirituality.
Interviewer:
Is there a way to use technology and media to help families that are supporting people who are
going through this?
Stanislav Grof:
Well I think that would be, and again in my experience there are limits to what you can do with
words as compared to what you can do when people have personal experiences. Including
religion, I don’t feel, I don’t sort of trust very much religion that’s communicated in words. You
go and listen to somebody sort of giving a speech or reading something from a sacred text as
compared to creating context for people to have their personal experience and giving them
support. And we are unfortunately in a situation where if in today’s church someone would have
a powerful spiritual experience which can be quite active, your average priest would probably
-2-
LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Director:
Jay Goldfarb
Contact: wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Deborah Wolf
call the ambulance and think that this kind of thing doesn’t belong in church. That they should
see a psychiatrist. I don’t know if you have seen the movie Brother Sun Sister Moon, when
Saint Francis of Assisi has this powerful spiritual experience in the church and what happens.
Stanislav Grof:
Now you see what would happen, certainly you could do programs that would help but there
would be limits to it. But where the media could really help is just to promote this whole
transpersonal movement somehow. Unfortunately, if they call some kind of, the authorities who
hold the chairs in universities they would say “Oh transpersonal stuff. Bullshit. Irrational,
unscientific, and so on”. So to the extent to which the judgment rests on people who are I
traditional kind of mainstream psychology, psychiatry, this is not very likely to happen.
Interviewer:
I had a conversation with Father Keating about stopping time. That in the process of mediation
or contemplative prayer or any technique you use when you come to this point, you come to
what you described earlier as this empty place that’s pregnant. As if you could do anything in
that particular point. You feel connected but it’s empty. Is this the kind of thing that in the
process toward the end that you could try to communicate with other people. Obviously it’s
experiential, but if you’re being called by something would that kind of talk be helpful to the
family members? Quiet, let’s just listen together. You know, things of that nature.
Stanislav Grof:
You could try, you can certainly try. Again, it seems like it could be a very easy thing to do
because it’s emptiness but it’s actually one of the most profound, if not the most profound
experience. It’s not easily available. It’s not just emptying your mind that you might try to do in
Vipassana. It’s a kind of experience of it’s own kind that I would have some questions whether
you can have people get into that empty place.
Stanislav Grof:
We had a very large study over two hundred people dying of cancer, terminal cancer patients,
when I was at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and it’s about one third of the book
which I wrote called The Ultimate Journey, the whole study is described there. And Laura
Huxley allowed me to use as an appendix an episode from her book called The Timeless
Moment which describes the death of Huxley under LSD and so on. So we had this large study
where we saw the impact of these experiences, that they can have on the fear of death and so
on.
-3-