| Home Forums Library Media Gallery Glossary Links |
 |
April 23, 2005
Alternative Cosmologies and Altered States
by Stanislav Grof
Noetic Sciences Review, Winter 1994, pages 21-29
From a talk given at the Institute of Noetic Sciences conference "The Sacred Source: Life, Death, and the Survival of Consciousness", Chicago, Illinois, July 15-17, 1994.
Editor’s Note:
In Western societies, the dominant paradigm presents a cosmology in which humans, as biological matter, live and die in a universe governed by the laws of physics. In this worldview, there is no room for the possibility of life after death, and different states of consciousness have significance only as pathological deviations from that worldview.
In sharp contrast, the cosmologies of other cultures—ancient and contemporary pre-industrial—have taken for granted the existence of an afterlife. For them, dying is a meaningful part of life, and death is a journey for which the individual can and should prepare. To aid in this, many cultures throughout history have developed experiential "technologies"—techniques and practices intended to train initiates in the art and science of dying and postmortem survival. These experiential "technologies" invariably involve training in altered or non-ordinary states of consciousness throughout the individual’s lifetime.
This fundamental difference between Western and pre-industrial cosmologies and their respective end-of-life technologies has profound consequences for how societies view living, dying, death, and non-ordinary states of consciousness. In this article, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof explores some of the key elements in pre-industrial cosmologies and their emphasis on transformative "technologies" for training in altered states throughout the individual’s lifetime.
In general, the conditions of life existing in modern technologized countries do not offer much ideological or psychological support for people who are facing death. This contrasts very sharply with the situation encountered by those dying in one of the ancient and pre-industrial societies. Their cosmologies, philosophies, mythologies, as well as spiritual and ritual life, contain a clear message that death is not the absolute and irrevocable end of everything, that life or existence continues in some form after biological demise.
To read the rest of this article, click here.