Psychology of The Future (Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research)

More than forty years ago, a powerful experience lasting only several hours of clock-time profoundly changed my personal and professional life. As a young psychiatric resident, only a few months after my graduation from medical school, I volunteered for an experiment with LSD, a substance with remarkable psychoactive properties that had been discovered by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in the Sandoz pharmaceutical laboratories in Basel.

This session, particularly its culmination period during which I had an overwhelming and indescribable experience of cosmic consciousness. awakened in me an intense lifelong interest in nonordinary states of con sciousness. Since that time, most of my clinical and research activities have consisted of systematic exploration of the therapeutic, transformative, and evolutionary potential of these states. The four decades that I have dedi cated to consciousness research have been for me an extraordinary adven ture of discovery and self-discovery.

I spent approximately half of this time conducting therapy with psy chedelic substances, first in Czechoslovakia in the Psychiatric Research In stitute in Prague and then in the United States, at the Maryland Psychiat ric Research Center in Baltimore, where I participated in the last surviving American psychedelic research program. Since 1975, I have worked with holotropic breathwork, a powerful method of therapy and self-exploration that I have developed jointly with my wife Christina. Over the years. I have also supported many people undergoing psychospiritual crises, or "spiritual emergencies" as Christina and I call them.

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