Stan Grof Holotropic
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Traditional psychiatry uses the term "altered states of consciousness"
but people who have done significant reaearch in consciousness
they prefer the term "non-ordinary states of consciousness"
but even that is very broad, because there are many non-ordinary states of consciousness
that are not healing, that are not transformative, not evolutionary,
that are not interesting from the heuristic point of view
so when I found out that we really don't have a special term for
states that have these positive properties
like the experiences of the shamans, the native cultures, the initiates in the mysteries
the yogis, the buddhist, the christian mystics, the sufis, the kabbalists and so on
I decided to coin one myself and I started calling them "holotropic"
where holos means whole, in greek
and tropic is derived from trepein, which means moving towards
so it means literally "moving toward wholeness"
like in the term heliotropism, heliosis, sun
and heliotropism is the property of the flower to always follow the sun
move towards the sun
now, this implies something that surprises some people in our culture
which is that we are not somehow whole the way we experience ourselves
in our everyday consciousness, that we identify just with a fraction of who we really are
and I use the kind of hindu shorthand to explain this
the hindus talk about the fact that we are not namarupa, we are not name and shape
that our deepest identity is atman/brahman, it's really with the creative principle in the universe
and they actually offer specific methods, and if you follow those disciplines
you get experiential validation of that, you can experience yourself as anything between the
body-ego, your everyday identity and identification with the divine
and anything that's between
anything that's part of the creation, you can identify with experientially
so the term holotropic means moving toward wholeness
and during some of these states the movement toward wholeness is through small steps
sometimes it's a major jump
but there is an inherent potential in these states for us to reclaim our cosmic status
give the psyche a cosmic status