Realms of the Human Unconscious Quotes

“...I began to experience a distinct feeling of malaise. The sickness enveloping me was at first very subtle. Mild feelings of nausea and tension were making themselves manifest. Soon the nausea and tension were intensified to a point where every cell seemed to be involved. It is difficult indeed to describe this experience: it was so all-encompassing. The slightly humorous description of every cell in my body being drilled by a dentist begins to convey the atmosphere of impending disaster, emergency and excruciating pain that for me seemed to last for eternity.

Although I saw no images, I began to think of Petronius, Seneca, Sartre and other philosophers who deemed suicide the only meaningful death. I had the fantasy of lying in a bath of warm water and my life's blood flowing out from my veins. In fact, I am quite convinced that had I the means at that time, I would have killed myself. I was totally submerged in a situation from which there would be no escape except through death. And like life, the absurdity of it all, the exhaustion of carrying my pain-filled body through days, years, decades, a lifetime, seemed insane to me. Why did I have to be involved in something so utterly futile and painful as living, only to meet my death in agony?

This state persisted for hours. I thought I would never leave that place, yet even though there was an element of strangeness about this state of consciousness, I recognized it as something familiar. It was a state that I had experienced before in various forms; in fact, it seemed to be the underlying matrix which has influenced my world view and my mode of existence. To live it so intensely, if only for a few hours, in the form of an amplifed hell from which there was no escape was an important lesson.

I knew during the latter part of this experience that I no longer wanted to dwell on the suffering aspects of mankind, but did I have any choice in this matter? I felt that I would do anything to escape, but was there any way of escaping? I suddenly realized that on some level, I did not have any choice in this situation. I was being propelled through intimate, cellular suffering, and it was being done to me; I could not turn it on or off. I thought about karma here and started trying to puzzle out what in my past was responsible for leading me to such a monstrous place. But no amount of analysis yielded up any answers. I fell trapped in a maze from which there was no egress. I was stuck and that was my fate, to be someplace that was not the creation of living but being caught on the wheel of suffering. I loathed my fixation on suffering, but the more I could not accept my fate, the more difficult it became for me. It was as though I was a prisoner in a concentration camp and the harder I tried to get out the more I would be beaten, the more I struggled to free myself the tighter the bonds would become. And yet, I knew somewhere deep inside that I had to fight, that I had to escape, and that I would, but how?”
― Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research

“As unpredictable as the content of the LSD reaction is its intensity; the individual responses to the same dosage level vary considerably. My experience indicates that the degree of sensitivity or resistance to LSD depends on complicated psychological factors rather than on variables of a constitutional, biological, or metabolic nature. Subjects who in everyday life have the need to maintain full self-control and have difficulties in relaxing and “letting go” can sometimes resist relatively high dosages of LSD (300 to 500 micrograms) and show no detectable changes. Occasionally, a person can resist a considerable dose of LSD if he has set this as a personal task for himself for any reason. He may decide to do this to defy the therapist and compete with him, to demonstrate his “strength” to himself and to others, to endure more than his fellow patients, or for many other reasons. Usually, however, more relevant unconscious motives can be found underlying such superficial rationalizations. Another cause for a high resistance to the effect of the drug may be insufficient preparation, instruction, and reassurance of the subject, a lack of his full agreement and cooperation, or absence of basic trust in the therapeutic relationship. In this case, the LSD reaction sometimes does not take its full course until the motives of resistance are analyzed and understood. Occasional sudden sobering, which can occur at any period of the session and on any dosage level, can be understood as a sudden mobilization of defenses against the emergence of unpleasant traumatic material. Among psychiatric patients, severe obsessive-compulsive neurotics are particularly resistant to the effect of LSD. It has been a common observation in my research that such patients can resist dosages of more than 500 micrograms of LSD and show only slight signs of physical or psychological distress. In extreme cases, it can take several dozen high-dose LSD sessions before the psychological resistances of these individuals are reduced to the point that they start having episodes of regression to childhood and become aware of the unconscious material that has to be worked through.”
― Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research