critically challenging data is accused of being a bad scientist, a fraud, or a mentally deranged person. This is an approach that characterizes pseudoscience or scientistic fundamentalism and has very little to do with genuine science. There exist many historical examples of such an approach: people who refused to look into Galileo Galilei’s telescope, because they “knew” there could not possibly be craters on the moon; those who fought against the atomic theory of chemistry and defended the concept of a non-existing royal substance called flogiston; those who called Einstein a psychotic when he proposed his special theory of relativity, and many others. The second reaction to these challenging new observations is characteristic of true science. It is excitement about the occurrence of anomalies and intense research interest in them combined with healthy critical skepticism. Major scientific progress has always occurred when the leading paradigm was unable to account for some significant findings and its adequacy was seriously questioned. In the history of science, paradigms come, dominate the field for some time, and then are replaced by new ones (Kuhn 1962). If instead of doubting, rejecting, and ridiculing the new observations from consciousness research, we would accept their challenge, conduct our own study, and subject them to rigorous scrutiny, we might be able move psychiatry and psychology to a new level. It is hard to imagine that Western academic circles will continue indefinitely ignoring, censoring, and misinterpreting all the extraordinary evidence that has in the past been amassed in the study of various forms of holotropic states of consciousness. Sooner or later, they will have to face the challenge of the new data and accept their far-reaching theoretical and practical implications. I firmly believe that in not too distant future the old materialistic world view will be replaced by a new comprehensive vision of reality, which will integrate modern science with spirituality and Western pragmatism with ancient wisdom. I have no doubt that it will include as an important element the new revolutionary understanding of consciousness, human nature, and the nature of reality that has emerged from the study of holotropic states. References Alexander, Franz. 1931. “Buddhist Training As Artificial Catatonia.” Psychoanalytic Review 18: 129–145. Campbell, Joseph. 1956. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Meridian Books. Grof, Christine and Stanislav Grof. 1990. The Stormy Search for the Self. Los Angeles: Tarcher. Grof, Stanislav. 1975. Realms of the Human Unconscious. New York: Viking Press. Grof, Stanislav. 1985. Beyond the Brain. Albany: SUNY. Grof, Stanislav. 1988. The Adventure of Self-Discovery. Albany: SUNY. Grof, Christine and Stanislav Grof, eds. 1989. Spiritual Emergency. Los Angeles: Tarcher. Grof, Stanislav. 1992. The Holotropic Mind. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Spirituality Studies 2 (1) Spring 2016 35
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