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LSD Doorway to the Numinous – Professor Stanislav Grof

The experiental extensions of consciousness in LSD sessions are not limited to the world of biology; they can include macroscopic and microscopic phenomena of inorganic nature.  Subjects have repeatedly reported that they experienced consciousness of the ocean, characterised by its timelessness, fluidity, all encompassing and soothing quality and paradoxical combination of immutability and dynamic change. 

On other occasions, they have identified with what they felt to be consciousness of fire, with its endless versatility, impermanence, propensity to create and destroy forms, and purifying potential.

Rather common is a subjective awareness of the forces unleashed in natural catastrophes; the destructive as well as the creative, mountain forming aspects of volcanic eruptions; the dynamic tension and moving masses involved in earthquakes; and the power of air currents in windstorms are just a few salient examples….

Some subjects volunteered the insight that the Himalayas from the Hindu point of view, the granite sculptures of the Egyptians, or the Pre-Columbian golden statues did not really represent metaphors for deities or images thereof; they actually were the deities.  It was the unchangeable, perennial and undifferentiated consciousness of these materials that was worshipped because it differed so dramatically from the highly versatile, specifically focusing and turbulent states of consciousness characterised by human beings.

In the light of such phenomenological realms, LSD subjects often consider the possibility that consciousness is a basic phenomenon related to the organisation of energy, and that is exists throughout the universe; in this context, human consciousness appears to be only one of its many varieties and outgrowths.