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Summary:
Feelings of oneness with other people, nature, and the universe. Encounters with extraterrestrials, deities, and demons. Out-of-body experiences and past-life memories. Science casts a skeptical eye. But Dr. Stanislav Grof?the psychiatric researcher who co-founded transpersonal psychology?believes otherwise. When the Impossible Happens presents Dr. Grof 's mesmerizing firsthand account of over 50 years of inquiry into waters uncharted by classical psychology, one that will leave readers questioning the very fabric of our existence. From his first LSD session that gave him a glimpse of cosmic consciousness to his latest work with Holotropic Breathwork, When the Impossible Happens will amaze readers with vivid explorations of topics such as: ? ?Temptations of a Non-Local Universe??experiments in astral projection ? ?Praying Mantis in Manhattan? and other tales of synchronicity ? ?Trailing Clouds of Glory??remembering birth and prenatal life ? ?Dying and Beyond??survival of consciousness after death Here is an incredible opportunity to journey beyond ordinary consciousness?guaranteed to shake the foundations of what we assume to be reality?and sure to offer a new vision of our human potential, as we contemplate When the Impossible Happens.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
No science here
Customer Rating:
The fact that Mr Grof is a psychiatrist allowed him to disguise his postmodernistic attitudes, penchant for hallucinogens, and New Age beliefs as an investigator's research. This book contains the pseudo-scientific memories of a bon vivant who filters observations through an overinflated ego clad in unfounded compliance to Eastern religious dogmas, and a subjective, gullible, hedonistic worldview. How can a follower of the hysterical, follower-abusing guru Swami Muktananda claim to be a scientist is beyond my understanding.
If you look for true research into the spiritual sphere, look somewhere else.
one of the best books i have ever read
Customer Rating:
wow, if at least 10th of these storied is true, then the impossible does really happen :)
Just When You Think You Know What Reality Is...
Customer Rating:
Stan Grof started out volunteering for LSD studies in psychiatry. He has probably taken a wider variety of naturally occurring mind-altering drugs than most freshman college students. He and his wife also developed holotropic breathwork to allow access to non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Some of the stories are his and some are their patients in the breathwork. What he has learned from these unconventional personal experiences is off the charts. The book covers a diverse set of extraordinary events in our physical reality from synchronicity to reincarnation to ESP. Truly a cosmic experience.
Space is NOT the final frontier!
Customer Rating:
Sorry Captain Kirk.
Space is limited to the known universe which, vast as it is, pales in comparison to the unknown universes that exist just behind the shadows of our consciousness.
Like millions, I too have enjoyed the fabulous imaginary worlds, incredible futures and technological wizardry that bubble up from the minds of great science fiction writers.
Then I began to read about a part of each of us that we know relatively little about: our consciousness. What we know about consciousness comes from the very limited vantage point of our waking state, and a bit more from our dreams. This experience fools us into believing that this reality is all there is.
Western Science reinforces this idea since it is grounded in a philosophical worldview spread by a distinctly un-spiritual Christian mindset that sees true mystical experiences as the domain of only saints and psychotics.
But in 1943, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann gave to the world a molecule that could allow anyone to experience conscious states far beyond our survival-mode highly-filtered reality.
This molecule, of course, was LSD and before the United States government rushed to judgement and declared all psychedelic substances as wholly unbeneficial for human research, amazing results were being published in the literature about the effectiveness of psychedelics in psychotherapy, in drug and alcohol addiction, in easing the fear of death in terminal patients and in non medical areas as creativity, problem solving and other intellectual and artistic endeavors.
One of the original researchers in the area of psychedelics was psychiatrist Stanislav Grof who added enormously to our knowledge of the mind and expanded greatly on both Freud and Jung in their understanding of how the mind works.
Realizing that much of what was being discovered regarding the psychedelic states of consciousness had been explored for thousands of years in Eastern philosophies as well as indigenous shamanism, he developed his Holotropic Breathwork technique to achieve these same states of consciousness after psychedelics were banned around the world in 1970.
His astounding findings over the past fifty years using both psychedelics and Holotropic Breathwork is the subject of this book and for me goes far beyond the imaginary worlds of science fiction into realms of reality that offer glimpses of not only our consciousness before and after our material deaths, but even the ability to experience the consciousness of any material entity; organic or inorganic.
Dr. Grof's work has given Western man something those in the East have known for millennia; that this span of time we call "our life" is simply a tiny momentary escape from the unlimited pool of consciousness that makes up the ALL of a Creative Consciousness.
The only downside to reading this book is that I fear I can never read science fiction again without feeling that no matter how creative and exciting the book is, it can't begin to compare with what exists just beyond the limits of our physical universe through our own consciousness.
And important stepping stone to a new Universal Vision
Customer Rating:
Grof throws it all at you in this delightful little book on consciousness and transpersonal psychology, which is also an easy read. He discusses and elaborates on many topics that are of interest in exploring paradigm shifting views on the nature of consciousness and existence and so migrating us out of the straight jacket of materialistic monism and Freudian psychology, that have so dominated western thinking.
Topics reviewed include Holotropic breathwork, Crop Circles, Siddha Yoga, LSD and Ketamine Based therapy sessions, past life regression therapy, Synchronicities, Shamanic Influences, Primal Therapy, ESP, Remote viewing, Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM), Astrological Archetypes etc. and it is mostly through direct experiential based vignetttes garnered from the authors 50 years in the field.
The Holotropic breathwork itself seems like a variant on Osho's dynamic kundalini pranayama, and active meditations that is combined with music. Knowing from my own experience the relationship between breathing rhythm and the quality and one's conscious state and moods, ( a fact that is also known for millennia from the teachings of Siddhas such as Thirumoolar), it is highly likely that it can be used to raise deep unconscious and traumatic states so that they can be therapeutically resolved. Just like people remember things based on a trigger from the time the memory was implanted, each traumatic event in a person past life or past lives will have its own characteristic breathing rhythm and going into this upsetting breathing rhythm can be used as a trigger to raise it once again. Unfortunately, in this book Grof does not go into too much detail on how the mechanics of this breathwork but does describe some stories of those who were able to use successfully to heal themselves from trauma or phobias developed in the birth canal and in past lives.
The LSD experiences he describes paint reality in the same words as those of the yogic Siddhas, namely that the real world a highly expansive interconnected infinite and spaceless intelligence capable of manifold manifestations and meanings. That it is never separate from the experiencer but a is a vast phenomenal game of play of the cosmic consciousness. That the apparent separation and sedimentations of objects arises out of conditioning and dullness and lack of flexibility in the conscious apparatus. That LSD can be used to alleviate this dullness and conditioning temporarily and so dehypnotize one from the dream of separation and limitations. That the experiences induced by it are not neurochemical artifacts, symptoms of a toxic psychosis as mainstream psychologists called it, but genuine manifestations of the human psyche itself. Personally, I use yoga, pranayama and meditation to achieve the same results.
On one occasion, in an LSD session, and OBE the author takes a trip to his mother's house and the experience is so real, that he believes like in the dream of Chuang Tzu that it is his life in America that is a dream. He considers taking back a picture from the house to proof to himself that the nature of the world is entirely dream but is fearful that he may find out something he doesn't want to know and messing with powers beyond his conscious abilities to assimilate. He should have took the picture, and then he would have known that all is dream. Also, there are no powers to be fearful off because there are no devilish mystic archetypes or black forces beyond your own mind. Unpowered by your mind, they dissolve into nothingness.
In another experience, he describes a ketamine session in which he experiences identification with petroleum as an evil metaphysical archetypal entity and later he says "I became every jew in the nazi gas chambers, every sprayed ant and cockroach, every fly caught in the sticky goo of the fly-traps". I think the author needs to make a clearer distinction here, that he did not become these things, in his Ketamine session, he has just achieved a clear and noise free perspective as one gets in the Eka Grata state of consciousness. You can experience things close up and real, to the exclusion of all else. However, you are still only experiencing it from the outside and so seeing only surfaces and heightened sensory perceptions and thought superimpositions based on your understandings and unconscious reservoir of experiences- you are not experiencing it from within as it is in the field of the one-consciousness. This is a qualitatively different experience.
In another session, he experiences himself becoming a towel at a neighboring swimming pool in Esalen, and seeing all those at the pool and watching all that was going on. This is a remote viewing experiencing and he says later those at the pool validated what he saw and experienced and he takes this as indicative of proof that he did astrally project and have an OBE.
However, I feel the author may need to take the quantum leap in consciousness into better understanding himself on this one and in so doing transmigrating his current conscious onthological vision.
Consciousness does not go out and astrally project or have OBEs etc. It is always stationary, what changes is that different perspectives and views are brought into the field of consciousness as the objects of consciousness. I feel the author still things that consciousness (transpersonal or to alternative) exists in the field of the world and travels around it freely - he needs to make the radical revision that the world exists only in his field of consciousness. A Course in Miracles says this very succinctly in the line "Ideas leave not their Source" . Remote viewing works because all mind is joined and this mind is spaceless, - moreover there are no objects and no world apart from mind - they represent just projections of thoughts. It is this that makes it possible to experience things in remote corner of the world from your own living room. The Zen folk say this also very clearly when they say "No Vehicle - is the Great Vehicle of Zen" and the Buddha is one who travels all day without traveling anywhere at all.
In this case, he simply brought the experience of the being a towel at the swimming pool and his friends there into his field of consciousness. It is a conscious substitution interposing one thought stream with another and not a going out of mind. Their words and actions just represent his own ideas projected out of his mind - afterwards they have to validate what he saw because there is no "they" and no out-there - just his own mind validating his own thoughts and conscious experience at a later time.
Anyway, thought the book was a thought provoking read but good conceptual content and is open to later validation by each reader by their own direct experiences. It represents new life and oxygen and a major revision to the stuffy, reactionary, conditioned and positively Victorian and Pavlovian thought systems underscored by current psychological modalites that depend heavily on neuroleptic bombardment, Freudian psychology and rigid DSM IV diagnoses.
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