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Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
Transpersonal Psychotherapy.
Boorstein, Seymour. (Editor). (1980).
Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books.
ISBN: 0-8314-0060-9
Description: First edition,
first printing, vi + 409 pages.
Contents: Acknowledgments,
introduction, 26 chapters divided into 5 parts: I. The Dimensions
of Transpersonal Psychotherapy, II. Transpersonal Currents in
Some Major Western Therapies, III. Western Psychotherapy and Eastern
Traditions, IV. Innovative Techniques in Transpersonal Psychotherapy,
V. Transpersonal Implications of the Birth and Death Experiences,
bibliography, contributors, index.
Contributors: Kenneth
J. Appel, Harold H. Bloomfield, Seymour
Boorstein, Patricia
Carrington, Olaf Gary Deatherage,
Norman
S. Don, John
B. Enright, Lester
G. Fehmi, Charles
A. Garfield,
Stanislav Grof, Jock
McKeen, Stephen
Schoen, Justin
Simon, Montague
Ullman, James G. Frances
E. Vaughan, Roger N. Bennet
R. Wong, Richard Yensen.
Excerpt(s): This book
is a beginning attempt to breach the wall between the psychotherapeutic
and the sacred. In its pages some of the most respected pioneers
meet to give their vision of the synergistic potential of these
two powerful traditions. (dust jacket)
If we accept the basic premise that psychedelic
drugs make it possible to study the content and dynamics of the
unconscious in areas and levels of the human personality that
are difficult to reach with less powerful techniques, the heuristic
value of these substances becomes immediately obvious. This capacity
of psychedelic drugs to exteriorize otherwise invisible phenomena
and processes and make them the subject of scientific investigation
gives these substances an unusual potential as research tools
for exploration of the human mind. It does not seem inappropriate
to compare their potential significance for psychiatry and psychology
to that of the microscope for medicine or of the telescope for
astronomy. This concept also can explain the unprecedented controversy
about the value of psychedelics and their beneficial or destructive
potential. Since they are unspecific amplifiers and catalysts
of all potentialities intrinsic to human nature, their value and
the outcome of experimentation depend on the human use of these
compounds.
After this introduction we can try to explore what
the work with LSD and other psychedelics teaches us about the
human mind. The content of LSD sessions usually represents a multidimensional
and multilevel dynamic continuum of mutually overlapping phenomena.
Although they involve a certain degree of artificiality and oversimplification,
the following four major types, or levels, of LSD experiences
can be delineated for the purpose of our discussion: abstract
and aesthetic experiences; psychodynamic experiences; perinatal
experiences; and transpersonal experiences. (Chapter 24, Theoretical
and Empirical Basis of Transpersonal Psychotherapy, Stanislav
Grof, page 343)
This compilation by Thomas B. Roberts & Paula Jo Hruby, © 1995-2003 CSP
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