Quotes By Stanislav Grof

Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness.

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.

The beliefs concerning reincarnation have great ethical impact on human life and our relationship to the world.

It became much more complicated politically to work with psychedelics because of the unsupervised experimentation with psychedelics, particularly among young people.

Walt Disney was my great hero.

According to materialistic science, any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of the genes.

Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

The study of consciousness that can extend beyond the body is extremely important for the issue of survival, since it is this part of human personality that would be likely to survive death.

If consciousness can function independently of the body during one's lifetime, it could be able to do the same after death.

The psyche of the individual is commensurate with the totality of creative energy. This requires a most radical revision of Western psychology.

Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth.

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.

Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior.

The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped.

The human psyche shows that each individual is an extension of all of existence.

I believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in.

At a time when unbridled greed, malignant aggression, and existence of weapons of mass destruction threatens the survival of humanity, we should seriously consider any avenue that offers some hope.

The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death.

In the kind of world we have today, transformation of humanity might well be our only real hope for survival.

Individuals approaching death often experience encounters with their dead relatives, who seem to welcome them to the next world. These deathbed visions are authentic and convincing; they are often followed by a state of euphoria and seem to ease the transition.

When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.

For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life.

Research challenges the materialistic understanding of death, according to which biological death represents the final end of existence and of all conscious activity.

A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm.

Many instances exist of small children who seem to remember and describe their previous life in another body, another place, and with other people. These memories emerge usually shortly after these children begin to talk.

I have to say I regretted giving up animated movies.

A text of Tibetan Buddhism describes the time of death as a unique opportunity for spiritual liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth and a period that determines our next incarnation.

The knowledge of the realm of death makes it possible for the shaman to move freely back and forth and mediate these journeys for other people.