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LSD Doorway to the Numinous – Professor Stanislav Grof

This category is characterised by a further spatial expansion of consciousness; instead of identifying with individual persons, the subject manifests collective awareness of an entire group of people.

The factor uniting and characterising the members of such a group can be their race, nationality, cultural heritage, religion, profession, shared ideology, or destiny.

In this way, a subject can experience the role of the Jews persecuted through the centuries, the Christians tortured and sacrificed by the Romans, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, or the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.  One can feel the quality of the religious zeal of all the Muslims during their pilgrimage to Mecca, the devotion of the Hindus at the time of worship by the Ganges River, or the fanaticism of extremist religious sects, such as the Flagellants, the Snake Handlers, or the Russian Skopzy.

In an LSD session, it is possible to experience the totality of suffering of all the soldiers who have ever died on battlefield since the beginning of history, the revolutionary fervour of all the Communists of the world obsessed by the idea of overthrowing the capitalist regimes, or the tenderness of all mothers loving their children and feeling concerned about their well-being.

In these experiences, one can identify with whole social classes or castes, or the population of an entire country; in an extreme form of group identification, the subject can experience his consciousness expanding to encompass every member of the human race – indeed all of humanity.