ing paradigm. As Ken Wilber has noted, there cannot possibly be a conflict between genuine science and authentic religion. If there seems to be a conflict, we are very likely dealing with “bogus science” and “bogus religion”, where either side has a serious misunderstanding of the other’s position and very likely represents a false or fake version of its own discipline (Wilber 1982). 10 The nature of reality As we have seen, the observations from the research of holotropic states represent a serious challenge to contemporary psychiatry and psychology and require a drastic revision of our thinking in these fields. However, many of them are of such a fundamental nature that they transcend the narrow frame of these disciplines and challenge the most basic metaphysical assumptions of Western science and its Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm. They seriously undermine the belief that consciousness is a product of neurophysiological processes in the brains and thus an epiphenomenon of matter; they strongly suggest that it is a primary attribute of all existence. The scope of this article does not allow me to offer a comprehensive discussion of this important subject and illustrate it by clinical examples. I have done it in my books Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychology (Grof 1985) and The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (Grof 1998) and can thus refer the interested readers to these publications. I will mention here as pars pro toto a set of astonishing observations from thanatology, a relatively young science studying death and dying; most readers will probably be familiar with these paradigm-breaking findings. It has now been established beyond any reasonable doubt that consciousness of individuals experiencing clinical death or involved in near-death situations can detach from their bodies and is able to perceive the environment without the mediation of senses. It is capable to observe from the ceiling the resuscitation procedures performed on the body in the operation room, watch from the bird’s eye view the site of the accident, or perceive events in adjacent rooms and various remote locations (Moody 1975, Ring 1982, Sabom 1982). This occurs even in people who are congenitally blind for organic reasons. When their consciousness leaves their bodies, they are not only able to see, but what they see at this time can be later verified by individuals with intact vision. Ring and Cooper, who conducted extensive studies of such individuals call such experiences “veridical” and refer to the capacity of disembodied consciousness to see the environment as “mindsight” (Ring and Cooper 1999). When confronted with the challenging observations frommodern consciousness research, we have only two choices. The first one is to reject the new observations simply because they are incompatible with the traditional scientific belief system. This involves a presumptuous assumption that we already know what the universe is like and can tell with certainty what is possible and what is not possible. With this kind of approach, there cannot be any great surprises, but there is also very little real progress. In this context, everybody who brings 34 Stanislav Grof
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