WESTERN
Atheism in Psychology
psychoanalyst Stanislav Grof on true spirituality & atheism
Stanislav Grof is chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center,
assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,
and scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute (1986).
Helena Norberg-Hodge has been working for the past 11 years in Ladakh (Little Tibet), introducing
Green or new paradigm ideas and technologies as alternatives to conventional
development. For six months of every year she lectures in Europe and
America.
- Stanislav Grof:
- ... I think the only possibility is to have a myth,
but in combination with a technology of transformation that provides experiential
validation. Otherwise the movement uses the power of the transcendental impulse
but translates it into an atheistic program of bloody revolution or
something similar, and it does not work in that form. We could have a myth that
would include the importance of finding ourselves and supplement the activities
of everyday life with some kind of determined inner quest.
- Helena Norberg-Hodge:
- ... I want to understand better what you
were saying about spiritual experience. You were talking about perinatal
spiritual experiences. Is that correct? And then you made a reference to atheism;
you said atheists are working on a very narrow part of their being. Where
do you think spiritual experience begins?
- Stanislav Grof:
- True spirituality begins on the perinatal level.
If you deal with religion on the biographical level, it is not genuine
spirituality. It is what your parents told you, what you read, what you heard the
minister talk about in church. To me that does not have very much to do with
spirituality. ...
When you work through the perinatal area you are in the
transpersonal realm and then beyond that point all your experiences in a
nonordinary state of consciousness will be transcendental or transpersonal.
When somebody is atheistic, this means that that person has not done enough
in-depth self-exploration. He or she is operating primarily in the ordinary
state of consciousness limited to a worldview based exclusively on observations
of consensus reality. That person does not have any experiential reason to be
spiritual. .. .
"Over three decades of systematic studies of the human consciousness have led me
to conclusions that many traditional psychiatrists and psychologists might find
implausible if not downright incredible. I now firmly believe that consciousness
is more than and accidental by-product of the neurophysiological and biochemical
processes taking place in the human brain. I see consciousness and the human
psyche as expressions and reflections of a cosmic intelligence that permeates the
entire universe and all of existence. We are not just highly evolved animals with
biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields of
consiousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter and linear
causality.
Having started this research as a convinced materialist and atheist, I had to
open myself to the fact that the spiritual dimension is a key factor in the human
psyche and in the universal scheme of things. I feel strongly that becoming
aware of this dimension of our lives and cultivation it is an essential and
desirable part of our existence; it might even be a critical factor for our
survival on the planet."
Stanislav Grof, interview with Helena Norberg-Hodge, "New paradigm thinking in
the life sciences"
"Psychology and consciousness research," in ReVision, the journal of
consciousness and change,
vol. 9, no. 1, summer/fall 1986 56-7
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