Observations placeholder
Grof, Dr Stanislav - Diving to the Underworld
Identifier
010886
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
LSD Doorway to the Numinous – Professor Stanislav Grof
When contact was re-established, she was able to describe her experience in retrospect.
“After we crossed the threshold of life and death, I found myself in an uncanny and frightening world. It was filled with fluorescent ether of a strangely macabre nature. There was no way of assessing whether the space involved was finite or infinite.
An endless number of souls of deceased human beings were suspended in the luminescent ether; in an atmosphere of peculiar distress and disquieting excitement, they were sending me nonverbal messages through some unidentifiable extrasensory channels. They appeared unusually demanding and it seemed as if they needed something from me.
In general, the atmosphere reminded me of the descriptions of the underworld that I had read in Greek literature. But the objectivity and reality of the situation was beyond my imagination – it provoked a state of sheer and utter metaphysical horror that I cannot even start describing…..
I was not able to communicate with you (the therapist) at all, and it seemed pointless anyway. I was sure that you knew as little about this uncanny world as I did, and you could not, therefore, be of any help. It was by far the most frightening experience of my life; in none of my previous LSD sessions did I encounter anything that would come close to it