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Grof, Dr Stanislav - Ancestral memories
Identifier
011049
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Dr Grof experimented on both himself and a number of volunteers to try to unearth lost and buried Perceptions.
The subjects of these experiences often had the impression that they were seeing events that somehow relate to some part of their ‘development line’ or ancestral links. Grof also noted that they occasionally revealed information unknown to the subject and not accessible to him at the time of the session.
Let me go back to the diagram I produced in the section on perceptions that showed the ‘loom’. Our perception logs are interconnected by links that cross relate shared action and activity. If we were to view this as a scene from afar what would we see is a sort of loom or a web or a tangled set of threads upon a set of warps.
What we are doing when we access ancestral perceptions is allowing our composers to follow these links – in the diagram the red line may be the ancestral links, with each block of perception, some related activity, the perceptions connected because of the activities that relate to family and conception and so on. The type of activity is key here – it is the type of activity that can tell us what the type of link is. Thus any activity that relates to birth and death, for example, from our perceptions thus leads us to our ancestral links
A description of the experience
LSD Doorway to the Numinous – Professor Stanislav Grof
This category of transpersonal experiences is characterised by a strong sense of regression in historical time to periods preceding the subject’s conception and his embryological development.
The individual feels that his memory has transcended its usual limits and that he is in touch with information related to the life of his biological ancestors.
Sometimes such experiences are related to comparatively recent history and more immediate ancestors on the maternal or paternal side, such as parents or grandparents. In an extreme form, however, they can reach back many generations or even centuries.
In general, the content of these phenomena is always compatible with the individual’s racial background and cultural history. Thus a Jewish subject may experience episodes from tribal life in Israel during Biblical times and develop a deep bond with his historical, religious and cultural heritage.
A person of Scandinavian origin may witness various scenes from the adventurous explorations and conquests of the Vikings with a great vividness of specific detail in regard to garments, weapons, jewelry and naval technique. An African American may relive sequences from the life of his African ancestors…