i just returned from an inspirational day with psychiatrist / anthropologist / transformational synthesist Stan Grof at Spirit Rock. well, it wasn't exactly me and Stan alone, trashing theoretical, mainstream psychology over single malt Scotch before a roaring fire, our suede-patched blazers tossed into a pile his Russian wolfhound Vladimir used for a bed. 200 other seekers of insight joined us in a lecture entitled "The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death." Grof's clinical research on the nature of the human psyche has spanned nearly 50 years: from his beginnings as a Freud-o-philian psychiatrist in Prague; through his own gateway experiences with LSD in the late-1950s and its application to psychotherapy; his development (at Esalen) of a non-substance-based technology for inducing the healing power of non-ordinary states (Holotropic Breathwork), and setting up a training for breathwork facilitators.
What rang the bell of truth in me was something about how cautious i've been in most of my life, and how that stay-with-the-known strategy has largely kept me from taking the risks, and walking through the unknown's fire, that can forge and temper the Hero on his journey to full adult power and resiliency. Moving through the darkest part of the forest (see Joseph Campbell, who hung out with Grof at Esalen, not surprisingly), with vulnerability and even curiosity, dying to the old dynamics of parental protection and predictability: this is formalized, as Grof described yesterday, in rites of passage from world cultures in pre-industrialized times. What do we have here in the West? i learned to chant my haftorah in Hebrew at age 13 at Congregation Beth El in suburban Maryland; big fucking whoop!
How can i learn to go towards those experiences which seem dangerous, impossible, deadly: and tune my instrument in the process, as i learn to embody the imperatives of personal responsibility? most crucial experiences where we actually learn something bring on a whole load of pain; have you noticed?: the tragedies of romance, the loss of loved ones, the scaling of heights where the air -- and the veil between the worlds -- is as sheer as the eyelids that try to protect our vision from unwanted intrusions. and yet it is in these landscapes that we develop our heart and spirit muscles of flexibility and focus.
without prescribed ceremony to guide, i began to find my own, turning the eye inward towards places of somatic and psychic activation, movement, agitation. circles of like-minded souls, breathing, singing, moving together. ceremony where prayer for wisdom invokes teachers from all kingdoms, not just human. is it immortality i seek, or the experience of a more crucial and engaged life in this mortal form? supernatural mindscapes, or the unfiltered, everything goes (and comes, and goes) nakedness of presence?
