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: Something Special
Question: Do you have anything you want to say about LSD and how useful that is
or isn’t in today’s world?
YouTube Video Title: Legacy of Wisdom – Stan Grof – LSD
YouTube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6Lp93YGnXY
Length: 5:11
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: Do you have anything you want to say about LSD and how useful that is
or isn’t in today’s world?
Transcript (ENGLISH):
Interviewer:
Do you have anything you want to say about that and how useful that is or isn’t in today’s world?
Stansilav Grof:
I think it’s extremely important for our culture, because we are so entangled in the material world
and the material pursuit. And all the information we’re getting is that we can resolve the
problems of life by what we are doing in our everyday life. To get the right job, to have enough
money, and so on, and position. None of those things have really anything to do with the inner
peace or happiness. All that is kind of in the job.
So when Ram Dass met Karoli Baba and spent some time in the Himalayas, he was asking
about LSD. And he said “Well, LSD is the form of avatar that was necessary for the western
world because you are so much involved in material things so it had come for you in the form of
material. But I would say also in addition with the power that the material has. I don’t think that
I would ever really have taken spirituality seriously.
I grew up in a family where my parents decided about me and my brother not to get involved in
any religion because there was this big big thing about religion when they were getting married.
They were getting married in this small small Czech town. They fell in love and wanted to get
married, but my father was from a family that didn’t have any church affiliation, and my mother’s
family was from a strictly Catholic family, and the church refused to marry them because my
father was a pagan.
And so it seemed like they wouldn’t be able to get married because of this until my grandparents
made a major financial contribution to the church and then the marriage could happen and they
had a house on Main Street right across from the church. So the dream of the family came
through, they put rolled carpets across the street and the guests could go right from the altar to
the house. They stopped traffic. And my parents were so upset about it. They said we don’t
want you to get involved in any religion. You make your own decision. And then from this kind
of background I went to medical school at a time when we had a Marxist regime. So you really
get a pure materialistic doctrine.
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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
So without the psychedelic experience I would never have taken spirituality seriously. Now I
don’t think I would have sit down and meditate, there’s so many more interesting things to do.
So I needed something really that critical. And many people that I have met in the transpersonal
circles and even around (Swami) Muktananda said I would have never got involved in Siddha
Yoga without my psychedelic experience. Now I am really big in meditation and what’s
happening here, but I would have never taken it seriously, would have never discovered it.
Interviewer:
So you see the holotropic breath work that you’ve developed as sort of an ersatz, a substitute
for that experience where you draw through the condition.
Stansilav Grof:
Yeah. Which strangely might have happened historically. There’s a good chance that the
source of the Hindu religion was Soma which was probably brought through the Aryans into
India. And then the yoga sort of developed as an alternative to something that originally was
experienced through botanical kind of chemical means.
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