Happy Birthday Stan Grof!
A tip of the hat to psychiatry: Humphry Osmond and Stanislav Grof. 6/24/2024
I’ve decided that it would be a fun project to post birthday wishes to philosophers and psychologists who’ve most influenced my own thoughts. As birthdays arrive or approach, I’ll post short essays. That said, I want to begin here—in this blog—by shouting out to Humphry Osmond and Stan Grof, both born on July 1st, Osmond in 1917 and Grof, in 1931. And why should we care them, you may ask? I’ll share just a bit.
Osmond was born in Surrey, England, but for many years worked in Saskatchewan, Canada, at the Weyburn Mental Hospital. In the early 1950s, he was conducting the potential therapeutic value of mescaline for his psychiatric patients. During that research, his session reports sometimes included experiences that sounded as though they were religious or mystical, though patients weren’t in any way prompted to have such experiences and Osmond knew very little about such things. Osmond became curious about what an expert on mystical-type experiences might have to say, so he reached out to Aldous Huxley, who had, in 1945, written an anthology of mysticism titled The Perennial Philosophy. Huxley in turn was aware of Osmond’s work and, after reviewing the session reports sent to him by Osmond, responded that he might be able to better judge the nature of these experiences if he tried the drug himself.
On May the 4th, 1953, Huxley, with Osmond in attendance, took four tenths of a gram of mescaline and had, for the first time in his life, what he interpreted to be a full-on mystical experience. Huxley’s musings that day on mescaline were recorded by tape recorder, and he shared several times that day, “This is how one ought to see, how things really are.” The next winter, he added, in his book about that experience, The Doors of Perception, “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the first morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” Furthermore, Huxley felt he broken through that day to what he termed the “unitive knowledge,” the ontic sense that he had become one with all reality.
Huxley’s endorsement of the mescaline’s ability to generate a genuine mystical state—a state of super-sanity rather than insanity—led him and Osmond to discuss the drug as something other than a “hallucinogen” (the common term used for the substance at that time), given that Huxley had had no hallucinations at all. Together they arrived at the term psychedelic, meaning “mind opening” or “mind revealing,” the term we use today. Soon they were also arguing in print that other such drugs, including psilocybin and LSD, also sometimes create experiences that mimic mystical experiences more often than psychosis. Several philosophers and psychologists—including Stan Grof— jumped on this new view of the substances as a breakthrough in how they should be considered, offering fresh therapeutic possibilities.
Today, during the current “psychedelic renaissance,” Osmond’s contribution cannot be over-emphasized. He and Huxley triggered the entire first wave of enthusiasm for psychedelics that became the platform for the present wave. And on a personal note, it was by reading The Doors of Perception in 1970 that I decided to try both mescaline and LSD, experiences that have influenced my life and work ever since. Moving along,
Stanislav Grof was born in Prague, but came to the U.S. in 1967 to continue his research on the psychological effects of LSD. In 1969, he was appointed the Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and altogether during his career sat and observed more than 5,000 test subjects experiencing the drug—more than any other researcher in history, then or now.
Grof began his career as a Freudian psychologist, but his experiences with patients on LSD convinced him that Jung’s view of the psyche, including that it has elements which transcend the individual mind, was more accurate. Eventually, Grof crafted a theory of the psyche (see for instance his book The Holotropic Mind) that included not only Jung’s idea of a “collective unconscious” but a deeper transpersonal level that registers as oneness with universal consciousness—which was Huxley’s experience also. During the 1970s, while living at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Grof explored a range of techniques beyond LSD for opening the mind to these deeper levels. His view has been that neuroses and psychoses may be triggered by a frustrated desire to access these deeper transpersonal aspects of the psyche. We long for self-actualization but too often we don’t know how to go about affecting that upgrade in consciousness, so we flounder in life, seeking transcendence in ways that are not always healthy. In short, Grof hoped to find and/or craft techniques for healthy self-actualization.
Stan, whom I know from time spent together at Esalen in 2012 and at the Science and Nonduality conference in 2014, is a brilliant communicator, and his book The Cosmic Game had an enormous influence on me when it came out in 1998. I had been following his career since 1975, when he published Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, and I can’t recommend his work enough. Today, Grof and his wife Brigette continue to teach his technique of “holotropic breath work” as a less problematic—and legal—method of awakening to the transpersonal elements of the unconscious.
Osmond and Grof are true pioneers, not only in the study of psychedelic substances but in the development of transpersonal psychology and the study of mystical-type experiences.
