Spirituality and Science: Why Direct Experience Changes Everything
by Stanislav Grof
Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist with more than 30 years of research into non-ordinary states of consciousness induced by psychedelic substances and various drug-free techniques. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he also did his scientific training: an M.D. at the Charles University School of Medicine and a Ph.D. at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. His first research on the clinical use of psychedelic drugs was carried out at the Prague Psychiatric Research Institute, where he was principal investigator of a program on the heuristic and therapeutic potential of LSD and other psychedelic substances. In 1967 he was invited as a research and clinical fellow by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. After two years he decided to stay in the United States and continue his research as Chief of Psychiatric Research in Maryland and as an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Henry Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins University. In 1973 he was invited by the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he lived until 1987 as a scholar in residence, writing, giving seminars and courses, and developing, with his wife Christina, Holotropic Breathwork, an innovative form of experiential psychiatry. He was a member of the Institute’s Board of Trustees.
For now he lives in Mill Valley, CA, leading practical seminars for professionals in holotropic breathwork and transpersonal psychology (Grof Transpersonal Training) and giving courses and seminars around the world. He is one of the founders and leading theorists of transpersonal psychology and the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association. Through this association he has organized international conferences in the United States, India, and Australia.
I would now like to take up the relationship between spirituality and religion. I consider it extremely important that the difference between the two be made quite clear before we go on to consider the connections between science and spirituality, since science and religion can never be synthesized, but it is in fact very easy to synthesize science with spirituality. We should not be confused into thinking that the rediscovery of spirituality by modern consciousness research and transpersonal psychology amounts to an endorsement of conventional religion; it was rather just a rediscovery of spiritual experiences, such as the experience of dying and being reborn, of past lives, of union with the universe, of identification with certain animals. We will already have seen, in the holotropic breathwork demonstration that preceded this talk, the kind of experience some of the participants had, of identification with nature, with animals, and so on.
These experiences often bring with them new information about the subject they involve: one can have a transpersonal experience of a lion and, as a result, learn about lions far more than one would by watching a film or reading a book about lions. Or we can have an “out-of-body” experience in which we travel and see what is happening in another room of this building, or something happening 200 miles away; that is, these are valid and legitimate experiences that can carry a great volume of information about the universe, beyond the purely intellectual, and in this sense they must be taken seriously.
Now, this kind of transpersonal experience often occurs in mystical religious settings, or in monastic orders whose members practice, for example, meditation, but it has nothing at all to do with the Vatican, with hierarchies, with priests; these are valid, very personal and individual experiences that are perfectly compatible with science, as I will try to show later on. They should not be confused with the dogmatism, fundamentalism, and ritual of conventional churches, which are as foreign to spirituality as they are to science. But from the point of view of transpersonal psychology one can see how the distortion exists and comes about: at the cradle of almost every religion lie the spiritual experiences of its founders, saints, or prophets, which are the original source of that religion, but later, when an established church arises, a series of other factors appears that produce a loss of connection with the original inspiration.
Steindl-Rast, whom I mentioned earlier, compares this to a volcano: the original spiritual inspiration is the burning volcanic magma, where everything is alive and in motion, while the conventional church that follows is the crust of lava, by now cold, which was once something but is now something very different. This is how conventional churches foster unity among their members, but also foster divisions in the world, between their congregations and those who do not belong: Christians and pagans, Hindus and Muslims, which leads to religious wars and similar conflicts.
Each of the established churches has mystical branches: the Christian mystics, the Sufis within Islam, the Kabbalah and Hasidism within Judaism, and in these branches practitioners seek direct experience of the divine, using techniques such as meditation, dance, or breathing that lead them to experience divine reality. This is what transpersonal psychology focuses on. It is not interested in religion, nor in things like the Crusades or the Inquisition, which have more to do with manipulation, control, and power, of interest to historians but having nothing to do with spirituality. One can even imagine a church that has nothing to do with spirituality; indeed, one that is an active obstacle to true spirituality. Carl Gustav Jung wrote that the function of most established churches is to protect the public from a direct experience of God.
A friend of mine, Walter Houston Clark, a well-known professor who wrote a text on the psychology of religion, after 20 years of teaching the subject finally had a mystical experience and could understand what he had been writing about for so many years.
One could compare what goes on in conventional churches to a vaccine: you go to church on Sunday and receive a vaccination to protect you from the real experience. You go with your children on Sunday and can fill yourself with false spirituality by condemning your neighbors who did not go.
Spirituality requires direct experience of the divine dimension. And there are two major types of spiritual experience. The first is immanent spirituality, in which everything looks normal—the trees, the people, the sky, the flowers, the chairs around us—but in a certain sense everything appears profoundly transformed, as if the edges were melting; everything appears intensely alive, everything is integrated into a single field of vision and creative energy, and even the most banal thing is divine creation, the creation of a cosmic intelligence, yet nothing is added and nothing is transformed except our own perception of it. A comparison would be watching a black-and-white television screen on which colors suddenly appear.
The second is transcendent spirituality, in which something radically different appears, such as a vision of the Virgin Mary, of Kali, or of the earthly paradise, or a divine light is seen, as often happens in near-death cases. These are the two kinds of mystical experience that concern us.
Spiritual “openings” come in two kinds. One occurs, for example, in cases of depression, frustration, and discouragement: a state of crisis in which we see no way out and are on the verge of suicide, when something suddenly happens and we rise through the crisis as a kind of death of the ego. There is another possibility, where, for example, we are floating on a raft down the Colorado River, watching the beautiful rock formations in the Grand Canyon, and suddenly we cannot tell where the raft ends and where we begin, we cannot separate ourselves from the rocks or the sky, and we have a feeling of universality and union with everything around us. This can happen to artists on stage, to people listening to music, or to visitors to places like the Taj Mahal, and so on.
These are the experiences Maslow called “peak experiences,” and they have a great deal to do with addiction and with the cure of addiction, since for many alcoholics and addicts they can occur in the most unlikely places. Bill Wilson was in the hospital in the middle of a severe crisis, and this is the description of what happened:
“Now, he had nothing before him but death or madness; this was the end, the point where he was going to take the final leap. The threatening darkness was total to him, and in his despair and helplessness he cried out: ‘I would do anything, anything at all, to save myself!’ He had reached a state of total surrender, and exclaimed: ‘If there is a God, let him show himself!’ And Bill himself then describes: ‘Suddenly my room was flooded with an incredibly intense light, while I was filled with an indescribable ecstasy. I found myself on the summit of a mountain where a wind was blowing, not of air but of spirit, which passed through me in great gusts, and an incontrovertible thought came to me: you are a free man! A feeling of great peace swept over me and I felt intensely aware of the present moment, which seemed to me made up of a sea of pure spirit. I was lying on the shores of a new world and, for the first time, I felt that I belonged to it. I knew that I could love and be loved.’” After this point, he never drank alcohol again.
This is an example of the emphasis the Alcoholics Anonymous movement originally placed on direct experience. Afterward came what William James called the “educational variety,” referring to change produced less dramatically and more slowly through everyday practices.
To sum up: the longing for spiritual transcendence is a very important tendency in human beings, something like the desire for sex, but far deeper and more fundamental; and, in some way, addiction has a lot to do with this tendency, as if it were a distorted and unrecognizable manifestation of that fundamental drive. Many participants in our holotropic breathwork programs, after having this kind of spiritual experience, say that this was precisely what they were looking for, not alcohol or heroin—which amount to a kind of caricature with diminished clarity or intellect—but precisely this kind of spiritual experience, which brings feelings of peace, a wealth of cosmic perceptions, clarity, and serenity.
We now come to the last part of my presentation, which will be brief even though it would require almost an entire lecture, as I recently gave in Bombay: the convergence between science and spirituality. My own book on this is titled Beyond the Brain. Western science, mechanistic and materialist, does not know how to tell spirituality from religion. The great spiritual philosophies, such as Yoga, Tibetan Vajrayana, Taoism, or Sufism, would all be treated as a string of folk superstitions or fundamentalist nonsense, with no ability to discern that this is something very different. Likewise, even in psychiatry, traditional science cannot tell mysticism from psychosis, so any direct experience of the spiritual dimension is seen as something pathological, as a psychosis, to be treated typically with medication. A series of articles and papers has been written on what the correct psychopathological diagnosis should be for individuals such as Jesus, Muhammad, Ramana Maharshi, or Aurobindo—there are anthropological publications on what to make of shamans, whether they are walking psychotics, schizophrenics, hysterics, or epileptics. Franz Alexander, an eminent psychoanalyst, described meditation as an artificial form of catatonia, as if one should not meditate unless one has a pathological temperament. So spirituality, from the point of view of traditional Western science, would be considered a case of poor education, poor information, and an inability to understand the material world, in which there is no room for spirit, something related to superstition; and if it occurs in people of high intellectual level, it would be considered a pathology, something unresolved in early childhood that has been left pending—so that thinking about God would indicate a defective relationship with one’s own father. And a direct spiritual experience would be interpreted as severe pathology.
This kind of approach presents major problems because, in the first place, observation and personal experience in transpersonal situations are ignored. If this approach is used, we must claim that this kind of transpersonal experience simply does not exist in our universe. This happens often in the case of out-of-body experiences, where there is ample evidence of people who are, for example, near death, lying with their eyes closed while a medical team tries to save or resuscitate them, and then their consciousness separates: the person sees their own body from a certain distance, perhaps from near the ceiling, or can see things happening in another room or 200 miles away, and later, when they are resuscitated, the consciousness returns to the body and the person can recount what they saw. There are even documented cases of people who were able to see those scenes or events—optically, in full color—while being medically blind, and who, when they returned to life, went back to their original blindness. This of course represents a challenge to conventional scientific wisdom. Anyone trained in a Cartesian-Newtonian system will naturally deny that this kind of experience can exist in this kind of universe. They will think there must have been some mistake. There is a great need to deny their existence out of the subliminal fear that, if one believes in them, the whole conventional system we believe in would come crashing down. It is preferable to ignore them and, along with that, to ignore the role of consciousness in relation to matter. Very few are willing to face these questions.
So the only way they have of dealing with this situation is simply to eliminate the entire field of transpersonal experiences as a worthy object of study. The mere claim of modern Western science that matter is the only reality in the universe is in itself impossible to prove. What matters most in Western science is that facts can be demonstrated and replicated, and this hypothesis cannot be demonstrated in any way, so it remains a mere metaphysical assertion. Transpersonal experiences, by contrast, suggest that there is a spiritual reality and in no way imply that only the material exists.
Another problem with this approach is that it makes an illicit extrapolation from physics to psychology, beginning with a universe of Newtonian physical precepts that is then imposed on psychologists, dictating what they may or may not observe, see or not see, say or not say. This is not acceptable in conventional science, where one must observe facts and take data and then propose a hypothesis that explains the observations, but where likewise one cannot make predictions about something that has not yet been observed.
An additional problem with this way of thinking is that it creates a confusion between the map and the territory. Korzybski wrote extensively on this, as did Gregory Bateson with his logical typing. Bateson explained that scientific theory is like a map and the reality described is like the territory, and these two things must not be confused. Bateson said that if scientists keep making the mistake of confusing them, there will come a time when, on entering a restaurant, they will eat the menu instead of the meal.
I want to mention one more thing: as Wilber used to say, if there seems to be a conflict between science and spirituality, it must be a case of false science or false spirituality; if both are legitimate, there is no conflict.
And to finish, something very promising and interesting: in a series of recent discoveries in various disciplines that represent a new panorama—a new paradigm—this appears perfectly compatible with transpersonal psychology. The latter is incompatible with a Cartesian-Newtonian view, but increasingly compatible with what science is newly discovering. I will mention only a few cases: modern physics teaches the general unity of the universe, in which consciousness has a different role from the one we thought, much closer to the one the great mystics have described; in biology, Rupert Sheldrake and his idea of morphic fields; Western science has never dealt adequately with the idea of form, order, and norm. The world begins to be seen as an incredible work of art—with form, with meaning—that cannot be explained in materialist terms alone. As an analogy, it would be impossible to describe the Mona Lisa as a pure chemical composition of elements: that would mean losing the real meaning of that painting as a work of art. Bateson, for his part, addressed this especially in a paper titled “Cybernetics of the Self,” a theory of alcoholism, where he describes the death of the ego as the beginning of the cure.
The new paradigm describes everything that exists in the universe as the product of a cosmic intelligence—the anima mundi, a higher power—that can be conceived in terms of modern science. Returning to my passion, I believe that if we bring this new scientific conception to psychiatry and to therapy, we can make great advances in the treatment of addiction, in the treatment of people going through psychospiritual crises, and, finally, in resolving the global crisis.
Eleventh International Transpersonal Conference: “Spiritual Search, Dependencies, and Addictions.” Eugene, Oregon, September 1990. Part two.
