Stan Grof Holotropic

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