Stanislav Grof is one of the world's foremost researchers of non-ordinary states of consciousness. He is one of the founders of transpersonal psychology. Dr. Grof is the author of numerous books, and his latest, "When the Impossible Happens", presents a firsthand account of inquiry into such topics as survival of consciousness after death, synchronicities, reincarnation, and remembering birth and prenatal life. Dr. Grof lives in Mill Valley, California, and is a professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Here he speaks briefly with Janice & Dennis Hughes about reincarnation.
Q: You write a lot about reincarnation in your current book.
Grof: Yes, I have a significant chapter in the book entitled "Have We Lived Before?" This is something that came up a lot when we worked with psychedelics. It's a very common, very important category of human experiences.
Q: Do you think past life memories are a result of people having actually lived previous lives or could they relate to tapping into the collective consciousness?
Grof: Past life memories are experiences that often happened in other centuries and frequently in other countries that we know nothing about. And so in that sense, it comes from the collective unconscious. But does this prove that we have lived before as a separate unit of consciousness? I would have to say no. It's a very good hypothesis that explains certain observations, but it is still a hypothesis, and there's always more than one to explain the facts. In the history of humanity, there have been incorrect hypotheses to explain observations, such as Aristotle who believed that the earth was the center of the universe.
Reincarnation is our hypothesis to explain the characteristics of past life experiences that have been verified as fact, with clear information about certain cultures and historical periods. And these experiences also seem to be connected to various forms of emotional and psychosomatic disorders. Those are all facts that anybody who is open-minded and interested can verify by their own research. But that's not necessarily proof that we have lived before. Even in India, the cradle of ideas about reincarnation and karma, this would be considered a very low-level, popular explanation of these kinds of experiences. The high level spiritual teachings of India will tell you that there's only one entity that ever incarnates, which is Brahma. The whole universe is just one being that assumes these different roles--the split units of Brahma take on autonomous identities. So the experience of being separate is an illusion; we are all manifestations of the same being.
Past life experiences are among the most common phenomena in non-ordinary states of consciousness. They have occurred with extraordinary frequency in psychedelic sessions of my clients, and in the course of spontaneous psychospiritual crises (“spiritual emergencies”) of the people we have worked with. This happened in spite of the fact that I initially did not take the idea of reincarnation and karma seriously and saw it as a product of wishful fantasy of people who could not accept the grim reality of impermanence and death. In addition, these experiences were contrary to the beliefs of the culture I grew up in, since the concept of reincarnation is rejected both by mainstream science and by the theologians of our dominant religion. It is one of the rare issues about which materialistic science and Christianity are in agreement.
These karmic sequences typically took the individuals involved to some emotionally highly charged situations that were taking place in various countries of the world and different historical periods, both recent and remote. The content of these experiences usually came as a complete surprise and, yet, they were accompanied with a strange feeling of déjà vu. There also typically was a deep connection between the protagonists and events in these experiences and the individuals’ present lives.
I soon became aware of the fact that past life experiences had many characteristics that made it difficult to dismiss them as childish fantasies. They occurred on the same continuum with accurate memories from adolescence, childhood, infancy, birth, and intrauterine existence, phenomena that could often be reliably verified. They were also often intimately connected with the individuals’ emotional and psychosomatic symptoms and with important issues and circumstances in their present life. When karmic sequences emerged fully into consciousness, they frequently brought illuminating insights into various previously incomprehensible and puzzling aspects of everyday existence of the persons involved.
This included a wide variety of psychological problems and interpersonal issues for which traditional schools of psychotherapy failed to provide adequate explanation. I also witnessed repeatedly that past life experiences led not only to intellectual understanding, but also alleviation or complete disappearance of various difficult emotional and psychosomatic symptoms, as well as resolution of conflicts in relationships with other people. In addition, like the earlier mentioned ancestral, racial, and collective memories, past life experiences often provided accurate insights into the time and culture involved. In many instances the nature and quality of this information made it unlikely that these people could have acquired it through the conventional channels.