Grof's research suggests that profound healing happens automatically when people enter certain non-ordinary states of consciousness that are intrinsic to their own being. The process usually begins with a working through of emotionally charged memories from the lifetime. Eventually it deepens into a confrontation with biological birth and the inevitability of death, sequences that are intermixed with historical, karmic, and archetypal themes. Finally the process opens out into ecstatic transpersonal and spiritual realms, beyond the boundaries of individual consciousness. This book is full of fascinating case histories of people who have had the courage to look beneath the surface of everyday reality. Some of the accounts of healing and personal evolution described here will move and inspire you.

Self-exploration of this type is truly a kind of final frontier. Grof makes a solid case for the reintroduction of healing practises that use non-ordinary states of consciousness, techniques that have been used in non-industrial cultures for thousands of years. The documented effects of these suggest a potential for healing and transformation "undreamed of" in traditional psychotherapy.

There are many "books of the dead," probably the most famous being the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol, or "liberation by hearing") and the Egyptian Book of the Dead (a collection of papyri based on a body of literature called "Pert em hru, or "coming forth in the light.") There are others as well, less known, from other cultures including the European Christian culture of the middle ages.

Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist and self-described former disciple of Freud, has written this book about the underlying doctrines and experiences which probably served as the impetus for such eschatological literature.

I met Stan Grof at a seminar at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, California, in the 'seventies. He is a polished, impressive, baritone speaker with a slight European accent who presents as a serious, knowledgeable scholar. I think I still have tapes of his presentation.

Grof said, at the seminar, that he was originally--in Czechoslovakia where he originated--a dyed-in-the-wool
Freudian, until he began to perceive difficulties with that approach. He grew from there. He was one of the original medical investigators to use d-lysergic acid diethylamide in serious psychiatric research, from which he derived some astonishing results.

Grof was formerly Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is no lightweight airhead, but rather is a highly qualified, credentialed and credible researcher. This and his other books are well worth your time, if you have the necessary vocabulary and the scientific background to benefit from them.

In this book he examines such influences as perinatal experience and reports of out-of-body experiences as evidence, as well as his own research using subjects under the influence of psychedelics and advanced non-drug methods to arrive at his conclusions. His conclusions? That these ancient texts were not fanciful mythology or historical curiosities, but practical guides for situations we might well encounter sometime in our own future.

Interesting reading. I recommend the book to you.

Joseph H. Pierre,

author of The Road to Damascus and other books

The author has found that internalization of psychedelic therapy sessions--by lying down, wearing eyeshades, and listening to music throughout the session--is essential in order to gain the therapeutic benefit that comes from fully experiencing whatever emotions, fantasies, and psychosomatic symptoms the unconscious mind presents.

If low doses are used, the first few therapy sessions are usually a reliving of childhood traumas. Later sessons are a dramatic reliving of one's birth, and a shattering confrontation with death. After many such death-rebirth sessions, one typically experiences the final ego death, a profound psychospiritual annihilation, followed by visions of blinding white supernatural light with feelings of ecstasy and rebirth. All subsequent sessions are transpersonal, such as reliving fetal traumas, episodes of contact with deceased loved ones, and mystical/peak experiences of the divine.

Although the bulk of the book deals with emotionally troubled persons, there is still a significant amount of information on using LSD therapy with normal, healthy people for personal growth, as well as a section about helping the terminally ill with ppsychedelic therapy.

The several dozen color illustrations, including some new to this edition, are mostly of scenes from people's LSD therapy sessions, and help bring the book to life.

(Incidentally, it seems fitting that the new publisher of LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY is MAPS, since it is from their bulletin that I learned of a meditation-enhancing herb (legal, relatively safe) which may be also useful for psychotherapy, following Grof's guidelines.)

Please note that the small size of the type and the sometimes long convoluted sentence structure may require strong motivation for a reader to plow through the entire book.

Other books I recommend: BEYOND THE BRAIN: BIRTH, DEATH, AND TRANSCENDENCE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY, Grof's masterpiece distilling what he has learned about the human psyche from his years as an LSD psychotherapist; REALMS OF THE HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS: OBSERVATIONS FROM LSD RESEARCH, telling of his early low-dose LSD method, may be of interest to psychoanalytically-inclined readers of the Freudian persuasion; THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY describes the group hyperventilation therapy Grof developed with his wife Christina, which has therapeutic results similar to LSD therapy, and may be used by itself, or as a complement to psychedelic therapy; BEYOND DEATH, a visual feast of world artwork on the theme of biological death and the soul's afterlife, as well as psychospiritual death-rebirth such as occurs in psychedelic therapy; Meduna's CARBON-DIOXIDE THERAPY (revised edition) describes a method possibly of interest to the adventurous psychiatrist, which may have results comparable to LSD therapy; and Sandra Ingerman's SOULD RETRIEVAL: MENDING THE FRAGMENTED SELF, about welcoming home the "inner-child" self which many of us lost early in life due to trauma, and may now return as we each grow and heal towards wholeness.

This book is iconoclastic--all great breakthroughs in understanding are. Dr. Grof formulated his methods based on thousands of hours of first-hand clinical experience. He valiantly tries to dispel the sensationalism and misinformation about LSD, pointing out that the drug merely amplifies pre-existing mental processes, in much the same way that a microscope or telescope affords heightened glimpses of phenomena. Indeed LSD, he has said, responsibly administered in clinical settings, could be for the sciences of mind what the telescope is for astronomy, or the microscope for medicine and biology. The power and effectiveness of LSD-assisted therapy are unprecedented, yet the research is sadly truncated and unjustifiably ignored.

I wish this book were obsolete. Dr. Grof no doubt expected the process he pioneered to be developed further. Had responsible LSD research been allowed to continue through the present day, its methods and effectiveness might now be in advance of even those outlined herein. The occasional therapeutic failure, honestly referred to in the book, might be a success story today.

One would think that Dr. Grof's positing of experiential matrices, birth and pre-birth memories, and transpersonal aspects of reality would be a source of excitement to those with a genuine scientific spirit. LSD, however, is a topic that typically elicits hallmarks of non-critical thought from otherwise critical thinkers--distortion, hysteria, irrelevance, ridicule, and a reluctance to pursue inquiries that might overturn our most cherished assumptions. Our rational culture, it seems, is not so rational after all.

So LSD research gathers dust. Could this be partly because it might lead us back to a conception of the ultimate nature of reality that Western science for 400 years has been trying to eradicate?

The uphill battle for mainstream acceptance that Dr. Grof's research has faced is also partly due to our culture's stigmatizing of the therapeutic process itself. We value introspection lightly, and tend to characterize the need or desire for psychotherapy as evidence of weakness--something for people who are unable to work out their problems on their own.

However, what if our culture extolled the undertaking of the inner journey as highly as it does the quest for external and material achievement? People every day attempt to exorcise their demons--unsuccessfully--by building businesses or climbing mountains. If embarking on the process of inner healing and transformation that LSD-assisted therapy can facilitate were widely encouraged, our culture would be quite different--more joyous, more peaceful, perhaps even more scientific, and less abusive of the planet and each other.

If one wishes to learn to swim, at some point he has to stop reading books containing mathematical descriptions of human buoyancy and biomechanics in water. Ultimately he must take the plunge. Criticism of Dr. Grof's work rarely if ever comes from those who undertake the inner journey for themselves. No refutation of his "expanded cartography of the psyche" and speculations about the nature of reality is possible without incorporating the experiential aspect of the process. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this groundbreaking book.

I have found the pictures inspiring, and the text informative, as over the past fifteen years I've journeyed on my own path (involving safe, legal psychedelic therapy complemented with hyperventilation therapy and other techniques to grow psychospiritually). The paintings in the pages of this book have repeatedly brought me reassurance that the hellish nightmares as well as blissful heavens of my own life are all actually universal, natural experiences that every person may pass through, if not in this life on earth, then in the next.

I highly recommend this gem of a book with its artistic treasures (and complementary text), both for enhancement of one's life now, and preparation and reassurance for the journey that lies at the end of this life.

Other books I enjoy are Stanislav Grof's masterwork BEYOND THE BRAIN: BIRTH, DEATH, AND TRANSENDENCE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY, the author's conclusions and insights on how birth affects a person throughout their life and how to heal, based on his seventeen years as a pioneering LSD psychotherapist; Sandra Ingerman's SOUL RETRIEVAL: MENDING THE FRAGMENTED SELF, a modern shamanic view of reclaiming one's lost "inner-child" self; Betty Eadie's near-death bestseller EMBRACED BY THE LIGHT; and STORMY SEARCH FOR THE SELF by Christina and Stanislav Grof, telling of her kundlini/alcoholism crisis, and how similar psychospiritual crises can be initiated by UFO/ET encounters, mystical or near-death experiences, awakening of psychic powers or channeling or spirit guides, shamanic "illness," and other events, all unsought and spontaneous--and all often mis-diagnosed as psychosis...yet all can be worked through to positive resolution and a new spiritual-psychological awakening.

One way the dying are helped by psychedelic therapy is in accepting their impending death. After a psychedelic-induced transcendent spiritual experience, a person can see their death not just as an ending, but also as a great adventure into the unknown. As a result, patients often have a new zest for life, and savor each moment more deeply, after a good therapy session.

Another effect of psychedelic therapy, and one which surprised me, was the temporary reduction in pain-perception that many people experience after a therapy session.

And this type of therapy also typically improves relations between the dying person and their family--a valuable asset since their remaining time together is probably limited to several months at most. (Incidentally, on rare occasions, in terminal cancer patients who have been undergoing psychedelic therapy, a spontaneous remission has occurred--but it happens too seldom to be in itself a reason for undergoing psychedelic therapy.)

In summary, as the authors say, "It is hard to imagine a more useful way to combine medicine, psychology, and religion than psychedelic therapy with dying individuals" (from chapter two).

For those who wish to preview an excerpt of the book, chapter two is available on the web, simply by using any search engine and typing in a search for, "The History of Psychedelic Therapy with the Dying," the chapter's title.

For therapists considering administering psychedelic therapy to terminally ill people, I also recommend the following four books, all by Stanislav Grof: REALMS OF THE HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS: OBSERVATIONS FROM LSD RESEARCH (1975), about the author's early low-dose therapy method, which is largely psychodynamic (inducing a reliving of childhod memories); LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY (1980, 2001) which provides complete instructions for conducting psychedelic therapy; BEYOND THE BRAIN: BIRTH, DEATH, AND TRANSCENDENCE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY (1986), Grof's new view of the psyche, derived from his nearly two decades as a pioneering LSD psychotherapist; and BEYOND DEATH: THE GATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS (1991; coauthored by Christina Grof), a collection of worldwide artwork, with accompanying text, on the theme of the soul's journey in the afterlife.

This last volume should be useful not only to therapists, but also to the terminally ill persons who are undergoing psychedelic therapy. And the guidelines in LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY (as well as REALMS OF THE HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS) should be useful for conducting psychotherapy using the fully legal, ancient psychoactive herb Salvia divinorum (which has long been used for healing and divination by the Aboriginal tribe where the plant grows naturally in the mountains of Mexico). This is because the herb has effects in therapy--death-rebirth sequences, reliving childhood memories, and transcendent spiritual mystical or "peak" experiences--which seem to me practically indistinguishable from, and essentially the same as, what Grof describes for LSD-induced therapy.

Finally, while not specifically about end-of-life issues, the following are two books I especially like and so recommend in general for anyone interested in psychospiritual growth and healing. EMBRACED BY THE LIGHT is Betty Eadie's inspirational account of her profound near-death experience. And Sandra Ingerman's SOUL RETRIEVAL: MENDING THE FRAGMENTED SELF... is a modern shaman's story of how she helps people find their lost "inner child" soul parts--which have split-off due to childhood trauma--and begin to welcome these subpersonalities back home again.

Since this book focuses on the low-dose LSD psychotherapy (which developed in Europe during the 1960s), and low-dose LSD therapy more consistently brings up childhood traumas than does higher-doses, it may be of special interest to Freudian psychoanalysts and psychodynamic-minded psychiatrists who want to be guided gradually from their current understanding to a more comprehensive view of the unconscious mind. It may also be of particular interst to anyone involved in low-dose or low-medium dose psychedelic therapy, since it is Grof's only book about low-dose therapy. (Grof's later book LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY focuses more on the medium-high dose therapy he eventually developed.)

I recommend this book to you if you are a student of the human psyche willing to enlarge your understanding of the human unconscious, if you can get a copy of the original hardcover edition to read. (The first paperback edition may also be fine although I have not seen it.) However, the 1994 Souvenir Press edition which I now own has dark, rough paper and smaller print than the highly readable hardcover edition in which I originally read this book...so if you have strong eyesight and a determined motivation you may plow through the 1994 Souviner softcover edition but otherwise I advise seeking out a copy of the hardcover.

Other books by Grof which I like: LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY, guidelines for therapists administering the medium-high dose psychedelic therapy which Grof eventually developed out of his early low/medium dose method; BEYOND THE BRAIN: BIRTH, DEATH, AND TRANSCENDENCE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY, a distillation of the author's new views based on his LSD research (this is his masterpiece, a summary of his life's work, and my favorite of all his books which I've read except PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FUTURE which I have yet to read); and THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY, describing Grof's group huperventilation therapy, which has therapeutic results similar to LSD therapy; I also enjoyed Sandra Ingerman's SOUL RETRIEVAL, about welcoming home one's lost "inner-child" self.