Key words Transpersonal psychology, consciousness, consciousness research, death 1 Introduction It would be hard to imagine a subject that is more universal and more personally relevant for every single individual than death and dying. In the course of our life, we all will lose acquaintances, friends, and relatives and eventually face our own biological demise. In view of this fact, it is quite amazing that until the late 1960s, the Western industrial civilization showed an almost complete lack of interest in the subject of death and dying. This was true not only for the general population, but included also scientists and professionals involved in disciplines that should be interested in this subject, such as medicine, psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology. The only plausible explanation for this situation is massive denial of death and psychological repression of this entire area. This disinterest is even more striking, when we compare this situation with the ancient and pre-industrial cultures and realize that their attitude to death and dying was diametrically different. Death played an extremely critical and central role in their cosmologies, philosophies, spiritual and ritual life, and mythologies, as well as everyday life. The practical importance of this difference becomes obvious when we compare the situation of a person facing death in these two historical and cultural environments. A person dying in one of the Western industrial societies typically has a pragmatic and materialistic worldview or is at least very profoundly influenced by the exposure to it. According tomainstream academic Western science, the history of the universe is the history of developingmatter. Life, consciousness, and intelligence are more or less accidental and insignificant side products of this development. They appeared on the scene after many billions of years of evolution of passive and inert matter in a trivially small part of an immense universe. In a world where only what is material, tangible, and measurable is real, there is no place for spirituality of any kind. Although religious activities are generally permitted, or even formally encouraged, from a strictly scientific point of view any involvement in spirituality appears to be and is interpreted as an irrational activity indicating emotional and intellectual immaturity – lack of education, primitive superstition, and regression to magical and infantile thinking. Direct experiences of spiritual realities are seen as manifestations of a serious mental disease, psychosis. Religion, bereft of its experiential component has largely lost the connection to its deep spiritual source and as a result of it has become empty, meaningless, and increasingly irrelevant in our life. In this form, it cannot compete with the persuasiveness of materialistic science backed up by its technological triumphs. Under these circumstances, religion has ceased to be a vital force during our life, as well as at the time of dying and death. Its references to life after death, the posthumous adventures of the soul, and the abodes of 4 (2) Stanislav Grof
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