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: Mission and Fulfillment
Question: What role do Spirituality or Religion play in the quest for fulfillment?
YouTube Video Title: Legacy of Wisdom – Stan Grof - Spirit & Religion
YouTube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyBykS1uSYQ
Length: 11:11
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.
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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: What role do Spirituality or Religion play in the quest for fulfillment?
Transcript (ENGLISH):
Interviewer:
Some people use words like spirituality or religion to describe it. What role do these things, or is
there another aspect since you come out of the psychology area as well, is there another way to
talk about this? Or is really as you go into this a matter of spirit or religion?
Stanislav Grof:
Well for me, spirituality and religion are two very different things. When we started I had the
good fate to be part of a small group that actually formulated the basic principles of
transpersonal psychology with Abe Maslow and Tony Sutich and Sonya Margulies and Jim
Fadiman and other people. So when we started transpersonal psychology, the idea is to bring
into a synthesis the best of spirituality and the best of science. That doesn’t mean that you can
integrate the dogmas of organized religions. That’s more interesting from the history of religion.
But you can be very spiritual and have no religion whatsoever. Or you can be very religious and
it’s very hard to find any spirituality in it. So for me spirituality is something that’s very personal.
It’s about my relationship to the cosmos, to the universe. Something that doesn’t require a
church, doesn’t require a temple, a synagogue. This is where your temple is your body or
nature. It’s also about discovering the divine within, discovering your own divinity and the
divinity of everything else. It’s universal. It’s all encompassing. It includes nature, it includes
other species and so on. Quite different from most of organized religions. What an organized
religion does, it usually starts from transpersonal experiences. All the founders, all the early
disciples, all the prophets, they actually have experiences of the transpersonal realms. But then
when religion becomes organized, it becomes something else. It frequently loses the
connection to the spiritual source. Then it becomes something that’s concerned about secular
things. You know about money, properties, hierarchies and so on. You can be very big in the
hierarchy of a religion without ever having any spiritual experiences.
So what spirituality really does, and you find it in the mystical branches of all religions – the
Christian mystics, the Sufis, the Hassidic Jews, and so on – but you have actual practice, when
you meditate and you spend time in prayers and fasting and stuff like that. And you have direct
experiences.
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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
Now when that is lost, when the religion becomes organized, then you have a system that sort
of unites people usually around certain kind of archetypal images – it’s Jesus and Mary or it’s
Mohammed and so on, or it’s Moses. And at the same time it sets that group against other
groups. So it divides the world rather than joining. “Religare” means to bring together, bind
together again that was separated. So you have then a situation where you are defined by your
religion. We are Christians and the rest of the world are pagans. And we have to convert them
or at worst eradicate them. Or we are the Muslims and you are infidels. Or we are Jews, you
are goyim.
And that is enough to kill. And not only that, but the divisions within a certain religion are
enough to kill. You have centuries of the bloodshed between the Catholics and the Protestants,
the Sunnis and the Shiites. So that’s not a religion that helps us very much in the world. We
need spirituality. We need spiritual systems that kind of bring in everybody. The great mystics
would not the distinction I’m a Christian mystic, I’m a Muslim mystic, and so on. Good Indian
gurus say there are all these great beings, you know - Moses and Krishna and Mohammed and
Jesus. So I think we need that kind of a spirituality in the world.
Interviewer:
More inclusive spirituality. More global concept.
Stanislav Grof:
And that’s interesting that what I call the holotropic states actually bring in this kind of a spiritual
all encompassing. And if it brings you Islamic images or Christian images and so on, it just sort
of deepens your faith but you see that’s one of ways that you can reach the Absolute. But your
connection with the source out of which all these forms come. And you don’t want to get stuck
with archetypal images. Joseph Campbell used to say “A useful deity is best to be transparent
for the transcendent. If you make it opaque you have idolatry.” It’s the archetype of images. So
something that points to the absolute, to the source out of which everything comes, but it would
be a mistake to make it opaque and sort of worship it because then you have problems with the
groups that sort of have a different path to the source.
Interviewer:
You seem to point to transcendental experience though as being a key aspect of this fulfillment
of a person.
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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
Stanislav Grof:
Well you can experience many stages towards the absolute. I mean you can have for example
a very animistic kind of an experience when you one with feel nature, you feel consciousness in
trees and in plants and in animals and feel sort of a kinship with other species. But that’s just
one step. Or you can explore the archetypal role and it’s certainly an important step on the way
to the absolute. But I don’t think that you will have a fully fulfilling experience until you transcend
any specific forms.
The kind of experience that I found myself and also many other people that I work with that
seems to bring that sense of fulfillment comes basically in two forms. One of them is in the form
of an extremely powerful sort of, words are not even appropriate for that source that feels like
light. But it’s much more than light. There’s a sense of all existence being present there.
There’s intelligence, there is infinite creativity which is in that. And then you have a sense that
that’s the source out of which everything comes. And then you look at how the creation
happens and why it happens and you get those kind of fundamental ontological, cosmological
questions. I collected these kinds of insights in a book called The Cosmic Game. You know,
hundreds and hundreds of people…. There’s another possibility when you can have a sense of
fulfillment. And that’s very, very interesting. That’s the experience of kind of super-cosmic,
meta-cosmic void; where there’s a sense of nothingness, but not being empty-headed. But
there’s a sense of pregnant nothingness where you have a sense that nothing is concretized,
nothing exists in a specific form. But the sense of potential for creating everything. There’s
some remote parallel to in physics they have the plenum , the big vacuum, the plenum and they
have all of existence there. It’s an incredible amount of energy and so on. So when you have
that experience there is also a sense of arriving, of suddenly having the answer out of which
existence emerges. The source. You have a sense of either not asking and having to ask any
questions or having the questions answered. And then from either of those types of
experiences then of course the task is to go back and assume you’re in current form, and live
whatever your role is in this particular life. But you have that sort of a meta framework, this
much larger understanding of what it is about and who you are.
Interviewer: It’s a great picture.
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