Grof Promulgation Matrices I
Your favourite psychedelic theorist's favourite psychedelic theorists.
Note: This post contains references to sexual violence, the recovery of repressed memories, themes from New Religious Movements and cult-like dynamics in therapeutic settings.
If you are concerned about a therapist or cult-like dynamics, you can find more resources on therapy harm here and on spirituality and healing cults here.
In my post, “From the Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM) to the Grof Promulgation Matrices (GPM)”, I described how I took inspiration from Grof’s map of psychopathologies — the Basic Perinatal Matrices. Grof theorises that part of the ‘root cause’ of various psychopathologies is unresolved/stuck energies from different stages of biological birth. Stuck energies can be resolved by accessing the memories of our biological birth through special non-ordinary states of consciousness. We are able to access those memories because, according to Grof and others, consciousness is not just a product of our physical brain. Consciousness is beyond the individual brain — it is transpersonal.
Grof provides the following map of the transpersonal psyche. This diagram is in a few of his books and frequently comes up in talks:
For my own mapping project, I started looking at the patterns across Grof supporters and how his theories are disseminated.
I call this the Grof Promulgation Matrices with the following four stages or groups:
GPM I: Primal Union - Esalen contemporaries and metaphysically aligned thought leaders
-Belief that they have discovered the Truth about the nature of consciousness and reality, and how we know it
-Belief that Grof empirically validated this new metaphysical and epistemological orientation, demonstrating its truth and confirming that it should be used in clinical practice
-Holotropic Breathwork not important/ignored by many in GPM I.
-People in GPM I can be found in the acknowledgments in Grof’s books and chapter authors of Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honour of Stanislav Grof
GPM II: Cosmic Engulfment - Holotropic Breathwork Facilitators
-Belief in Grof’s specific, unique theories, e.g. BPM, COEX system, Holotropic Breathwork
-Missionary zeal, extensive participation/certification in Holotropic Breathwork workshops and/or closely related communities (e.g. DreamShadow, CIIS)
GPM III: Death-Rebirth Discourse - Strategic Legitimisers
-Clinicians/researchers/public people who cite Grof’s work as legitimate research/science
-Maintain plausible deniability by keeping a distance from engaging with Grof directly, but will uncritically work with people in GPM II and accept their clinical judgement/experience as valid
-Serve as a bridge between Grof's true believers and the mainstream
GPM IV: Unconscious Grofians - Detached Disseminators
-Clinicians/researchers/public people repeating Grofian ideas unknowingly e.g. medical professionals endorsing "inner healing intelligence" without knowing who Grof is
-Generic acceptance of broad/watered-down Grofian ideas and broader metaphysics
I’ll be focusing on GPM I for the rest of this post
GPM I - Esalen contemporaries and metaphysically aligned thought leaders
“This matrix is related to the intrauterine existence before the onset of the delivery. The experiential world of this period can be referred to as the “amniotic universe.” When we identify with the fetus in the womb, we do not have the awareness of boundaries and do not differentiate between the inner and the outer. This is reflected in the nature of the experiences associated with reliving the memory of the prenatal state. During episodes of undisturbed embryonic existence, we typically have experiences of vast regions with no boundaries or limits—interstellar space, galaxies, or the entire cosmos. A related experience is floating in the sea, identifying with various aquatic animals, such as fish, jellyfish, dolphins, or whales, or even becoming the ocean. This seems to reflect the fact that the fetus is essentially an aquatic creature” - Stanislav Grof, The Way of the Psychonaut Volume One: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys
As I started to think about mapping Grof supporters, I realised that many of the core people around Grof are ‘thought leaders’ themselves. The shared thread between people in GPM I isn’t as much about Grof, as it is about the broader metaphysics.
The following beliefs characterise GPM I:
The unconscious includes not just repressed memories, but archetypes, past lives, ancestral experiences, and even mythological or cosmic material (e.g. alien encounters, planetary consciousness).
Experiences in altered states are Real encounters with other levels of being — not simply metaphorical or psychological phenomena.
Inner experience in special non-ordinary states of consciousness (e.g psilocybin, MDMA or breathwork) is a valid form of acquiring knowledge because these states grant access to Truth not normally available in normal/other states of consciousness.
The theorists and leaders situated within GPM I are both participants in, and authors of, a constructed metaphysical cosmos — the “amniotic universe.” Their bonds are sustained by shared metaphysical commitments. There isn’t much critical debate between them because the details of the theories matter much less than the overarching worldview they create. Instead of debate, they mutually reference and support each other (mostly, not always).
What is crucial to recognise, however, is that the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of Grofian theory are not original to Grof or to any of the other GPM I figures.
The worldview of GPM I draws heavily from pre-existing religious, esoteric, and spiritual traditions, e.g. Jungian archetypal theory, Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, New Age syncretism, etc. etc….
Grof summarises and reframes these ideas within a quasi-scientific/therapeutic discourse. The result is a system that borrows metaphysical depth from spiritual traditions but claims epistemic legitimacy through psychological authority, creating the illusion of empirical insight while resisting falsifiability.
The hybridisation is also not unique to Grof or anyone in GPM I. Similar metaphysical-epistemological hybrids include things like theosophy (Helena Blavatsky), anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner), Ken Wilber’s integral theory, and depth psychology more generally.
In all of these orientations, epistemology is experiential and intuitive (see: MDMA-AT as facilitated communication for the "inner healing intelligence") and metaphysics is holistic, symbolic, and purpose-driven. Psychological distress is not a disorder — it’s a misalignment with a deeper truth.
GPM I isn’t about Holotropic Breathwork. In fact, it’s the opposite — people in GPM I typically don’t participate in Holotropic Breathwork workshops. They are primarily people who are leading their own workshops.
What unifies them is the shared belief in the metaphysics of Grof.
By using Grof as empirical evidence for these ideas being science rather than a spiritual belief system, the community of GPM I effectively bypass the scrutiny applied to religion, metaphysics, and pseudoscience and instead creates what can become clinical insight.
When people defend Grof, I think what they’re often really defending is the broader belief system that values altered states, inner experience, and spiritual insight as legitimate ways of knowing — i.e. GPM I. In doing so, they often say that we should embrace “other ways of knowing.”
I agree that we should embrace other ways of knowing.
However, the position of GPM I isn’t actually one that embraces other ways of knowing — they believe they are right. It’s just like how some progressive Christians might claim to be open to all faiths, but still hold a quiet conviction that they know the deepest truth.
It’s a mask of soft universalism where other belief systems are tolerated, even celebrated, but only insofar as they’re seen as partial reflections of the metaphysical system already endorsed.
It’s the same logic that allowed a practising Muslim to tell me they could date me because I’m a Jew — better to be part of the Abrahamic tradition than nothing at all. (We stayed just friends.)
In The Way of the Psychonaut, Grof summarises some of his influences and how they legitimise his own views:
“I would like to express my gratitude to several of my friends and colleagues who have provided great intellectual inspiration and creatively expanded and complemented my work, introducing it to new areas. Fritjof Capra’s criticism of monistic materialism and the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm in his book The Tao of Physics provided inspiration on how to connect transpersonal psychology to the hard sciences. It became clear that the connection had to be made to quantum-relativistic physics and modern advances in science rather than to seventeenth-century materialistic philosophy and an outdated paradigm.
Another major support for transpersonal psychology and the findings of modern consciousness research was Karl Pribram’s holographic model of the brain and David Bohm’s theory of holomovement... Rupert Sheldrake’s revolutionary book The New Science of Life brought strong criticism of the monistic, materialistic philosophy which underlies the natural sciences. His concept of morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields was a welcome contribution to the understanding of transpersonal experiences by replacing the requirement of a material substrate for memory with immaterial fields that are carriers of memory.
The research of Rick Tarnas, close friend and brilliant historian, philosopher and astrologer, has connected my findings with archetypal astrology. This unlikely and controversial alliance brought a surprising breakthrough. After forty years of fascinating cooperation with Rick, exploring extraordinary correlations between planetary transits and timing and archetypal content of non-ordinary states of consciousness, I refer to archetypal astrology as the “Rosetta Stone of consciousness research.” I believe that a combination of work with non-ordinary states of consciousness and archetypal astrology as a guide for this work is the most promising strategy for the psychiatry of the future.
Ervin Laszlo, the world’s foremost systems theorist, provided in his connectivity hypothesis and his concept of the Akashic holofield a plausible explanation for a variety of anomalous phenomena, observations, and par adigmatic challenges occurring in psychedelic therapy, in sessions of Ho lotropic Breathwork, and during spontaneous episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness (“spiritual emergencies”). Laszlo’s brilliant map of reality based on theories and findings on the cutting edge of several scientific disciplines offers an elegant solution for these dilemmas and paradoxes. It makes the seemingly absurd findings believable and scientifically acceptable.”
Grof also succinctly states the position of GPM I in the following from The Holotropic Mind. Here, he scolds the fact that Western science makes a metaphysical assumption:
“In the case of localized tumors of the brain, the impairment of function—loss of speech, loss of motor control, and so on—can be used to help us diagnose exactly where the brain damage has occurred. These observations prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that our mental functions are linked to biological processes in our brains.
However, this does not necessarily mean that consciousness originates in or is produced by our brains. This conclusion made by Western science is a metaphysical assumption rather than a scientific fact, and it is certainly possible to come up with other interpretations of the same data” - The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives, Stanislav Grof, M.D. with Hal Zina Bennett, Ph.D.
I’m fine with this logic. Yes, all of Western science is based on a metaphysical assumption. But Grof’s answer to this is to replace one metaphysical assumption with another.
I saw the same pattern of argument play out on LinkedIn recently. Rachel Yehuda posted about a study looking at cognitive-behavioural therapy in conjunction with psychedelics. “Here we go again. Another theoretical article proposing to integrate psychedelics with CBT”, she wrote. Yehuda goes on to say that we shouldn’t assume that just because CBT is established in “conventional” therapy, that it is an appropriate paradigm for psychedelic therapy. She went on to call for “epistemic humility” to avoid making assumptions about the theoretical framework for the therapy.
This response captured some of what I was thinking:
In response, Yehuda says we should be epistemically open when “a new paradigm emerges”. (FYI: I would put Yehuda in GPM III, not I).
It’s good to see Yehuda considering the response.
I have to wonder: what exactly is the new paradigm here? What I see is only a reversion to a totalising spiritual belief that can be interpreted as saying: you’re a sheep, beholden to the cosmic forces of the archetypal universe that can only really be changed by the leaders.
It seems that people believe that Grof represents epistemic openness, but his work actually reflects an epistemic rigidity — the holotropic universe is correct and the materialist orientation is wrong and represents a lesser evolution of humanity.
In the article “Carl Jung, Stanislav Grof, and New Age Medical Mysticism”, E. Patrick Curry summarises Grof’s belief about the therapeutic mechanism of action in therapy with non-ordinary states of consciousness: changing someone’s entire belief system about the nature of reality.
"Grof represents the apex of New Age Jungianism—a parapsychological experimenter willing to use extreme methods to “transform” subjects into spiritual beings like himself… He gives credit to Freud, Rank, Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard. He describes how these phenomena — especially what Grof calls his theory of the Holotropic Universe — can be explained by the New Physics. Grof claims that his 'altered states' therapy can radically alter the belief structure of his patients away from a standard scientific worldview.
He states: 'After the individual has been confronted with a considerable sample of transpersonal experiences, the Newtonian-Cartesian world view becomes untenable as a serious philosophical concept. . . . At this point, the mystical alternatives appear to be much more appropriate and reasonable” (Grof S. Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy) Thus, Grof’s psychotherapy is used to undermine a patient’s belief in the modernist view of science. The achievement of a mystical worldview is Stanislav Grof’s measure of mental health".
The mechanism of action is shifting to the worldview of those in GPM I.
Coincidentally enough, this is also what Robin Carhart-Harris sees as the likely mechanism of action from his empirical work. In a recent interview, Carhart-Harris says:
“You have to alter consciousness, really, to see how deep consciousness can be, or perhaps better said, how deep the psyche is. And that’s one of the amazing things that causes people to say 'that was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life'. There lies the secret sauce of psychedelic therapy. It’s a biological action, but also a psychological one. It’s opening up the psyche so that you can see more of it. And what we’re seeing more and more now is that probably, probably the most important component to the therapeutic action is psychological insight. Is the epistemic nature of the change or the transformation".
These are a common set of beliefs that I see in GPM I:
i) The world is in crisis. If we want to survive, we require a major revolution in thinking.
ii) Thinking is consciousness, and consciousness is not simply a product of the brain. We are all deeply interconnected, animated by transpersonal energies, archetypes, and a collective unconscious that transcends the individual psyche.
iii) Stan Grof discovered empirical evidence for consciousness existing beyond the material brain. He found that special non-ordinary states of consciousness allowed many people to access their perinatal memories, including reliving their biological birth. By corroborating these accounts with hospital records and family, Grof was able to verify that they were accurate memories. This proves consciousness exists beyond myelinated sheaths on neuronal axons, i.e. beyond the physical infrastructure of the brain.
iv) To avert planetary collapse and achieve collective healing, a critical mass of people (with a focus on 'leaders’) must engage in deep inner work with non-ordinary states of consciousness in order to shift the entire direction of humanity and open the world to this expanded metaphysical paradigm.
v) Thinking that consciousness is an individual product of the material brain is a less evolved understanding for ‘normal people’. As long as we’re stuck in the materialist paradigm, the world will never be able to undergo the radical transformation needed to spiritualise humanity and save the planet.
Bob Jesse uses the same logic in his 2013 talk for MAPS about the Johns Hopkins psilocybin research. Jesse lays out the framework of a religion and why we shouldn’t resist embracing psychedelics as inducing religious experiences.
“Imagine in your adult life you've not tasted non-duality before and you have a dualistic worldview, a mechanical materialistic worldview, kind of haven't really thought about that. Maybe even your science training has drilled it out of you.
And then you have this eye opening experience. Is it fair to say you've probably either learned something or at least gotten a new perspective on Ultimate Reality? Well if so A New Perspective on Ultimate Reality is the first little bit of Doctrine.
'Wow things are more connected than I thought they were' that's a Doctrine. Something you now think is true about the world, that's one of the pillars of religion.
So once you have this Doctrine, 'wow I now feel believe have experienced that things are more connected than I used to think', maybe that calls for you to live your life a little differently, make different decisions about your yourself, and your livelihood, and your relationships, and your health and whatnot. Well decisions about what to do and what not to do there's the seed of Ethics"
Jesse is describing the quintessential ‘white-guy-does-psychedelics-and-discovers-empathy-for-the-first-time’ experience. There is an entire genre of TikTok commentary dedicated to this.
This part from Jesse really helped me see more clearly how this is about a universal religion.
Through the framework of religion, Jesse also describes other characteristics of GPM I theorists, like the disinterest in converting or ‘proselytising’. It is akin to how Bob Jesse describes the positive characteristics of religiously orientated groups, like alcoholics anonymous:
“They've decided to grow through attraction rather than promotion. I love that phrase too, attraction not promotion. What does that have: the effect of it has the effect of saying, we're not proselytising. If we are attractive to you, you will come to us. So they're not really competing — they've taken themselves out of competition for membership”.
Growth (then, change) through attraction is a core value of the “inner healing intelligence” and Holotropic Breathwork: no one is being forced to do anything.
But this isn’t about an earnest acceptance of epistemological plurality. It really just means that if it’s not for you, you’re just not spiritually evolved enough. You don’t have much access to your perinatal memories because you’re blocked and not open enough. They are quiet about this, though. It’s not an explicit hatred or rejection — it’s quiet disinterest.
(This is what helps to justify the religious leaders’ experiment — I’ll get into that more in the next post, going into more detail on people in GPM I.)
In Bob Jesse’s 2013 talk for MAPS, Bob Jesse goes on to talk about the Quakers and how they exemplify the virtues of a non-creedal religion. He highlights the great features of what a universal religion could look like, even suggesting that, because they have (apparently) experienced basic empathy, Quakers don’t have a problem with “sexual scandals”.
“Let's take another example: the Quakers also known as the religious Society of Friends. One reason in casual conversations that I have with people where they say they don't like religion is because they think that being a part of a religion means you have to believe something, and you may show up in a building where you're required to say words out loud about what you believe and what happens if you don't believe exactly that thing that thing you're basically forced to perjure yourself. But it's not true that religions need to be creedal.
The Quakers are a non-creedal religion— you can come believing anything or nothing. They do hold, as a loosely held concept of the of organisation, that there's something of God, whatever that means to you and everyone. They make decisions by a process they call Unity—I like the word Concord. They are very heavily engaged in social justice.
Remember those three dots, mystical experience gives Doctrine, then ethics. Like if you've had an experience of a Beyond, there's stuff you feel compelled to do in the world out of compassion because nothing is separate from you. So there's something that actually most would agree is a religion: it's a received tradition it's been around a long time many many generations and it's got a lot of these desirable qualities.
And when's the last time you've ever heard of a sexual scandal involving a Quaker clerk [audience laughs]. Let me know if you do."
I’m not sure what “scandal” means in this quote—he could mean ‘affairs’ between adults. Often, though, ‘sexual scandal’ is an euphemism for abuse.
A Google search of “sexual abuse Quakers” pulls up multiple survivor groups and discussions of this issue. It’s really a stunningly naive suggestion, and the audience's rather hearty laughter is equally bizarre.
People in GPM I
⚠️ A Note: This is not a “name-and-shame” list, nor any sort of accusation of misconduct. I am mapping a network of shared beliefs and influence. This includes people whose ideas, practices, or affiliations reflect or promote Grofian thought, whether explicitly or implicitly.
I am not claiming that any of these individuals (including Grof) are bad actors, or that their beliefs are necessarily harmful, unethical, or incorrect.
Nothing here should be read as a personal attack or allegation — this is a “map” offered as a good-faith contribution to psychedelic discourse and grounded in public-facing sources.
Influences
Alfred Adler
Sandor Ferenczi
Sigmund Freud
Carl Gustav Jung
Otto Rank
Wilhelm Reich
Esalen + JHU + Etc. Contemporaries
Angeles Arrien
Christopher Bache
John Buchanan
Joseph Campbell
Fritjof Capra
Deepak Chopra
Franco di Leo
Jim Fadiman
Jorge N. Ferrer
Arlene Fox
Peter Gasser
H.R. Giger
Alex Gray
Christina Grof
Paul Grof
Charles Grob
Roland Griffith
Joan Halifax
Sandra Harner
L. Ron Hubbard
William Keepin
Sean Kelly
Jack Kornfield
Stanley Krippner
Gregg Lahood
Ervin Laszlo
Timothy Leary
John Lilly
David Lorimer
David Lukoff
Robert McDermott
Dennis Mckenna
Ralph Metzner
Michael Murphy
Humphrey Osmond
Walter Pahnke
Janis Phelps
Dick Price
Karl Pribram
Thomas Purton
Thomas J. Riedlinger
Ida Rolf
Salvador Roquet
Peter Russel
Carmen Scheifele-Giger
Karan Singh
Huston Smith
Myron stolaroff
Tony Sutich
Brian Swimme
Richard Tarnas
Miles Vich
Cassandra Vieten
Jenny Wade
Roger Walsh
Gordon Wasson
Phil Wolfson
Richard Yensen
Neo-Grofian - Holotropic Breathwork focused
Renn Butler
Rick Doblin
Elizabeth Gibson
Lenny Gibson
Brigitte Grof
Annie Mithoefer
Michael Mithoefer
Marcela Ot'alora
Bruce Poulter
Eduardo Schenberg
Carey Sparks
Tav Sparks
Kylea Taylor
Neo-Grofian - no HB
Robin Carhart-Harris
Tim Ferris (some HB)
John Mac
Gabor Mate
Aubrey Marcus
Bessel van der Kolk
I based most of GPM I on people I found referenced in the acknowledgements sections of Grof’s books, and those who wrote chapters for Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honour of Stanislav Grof.
I also included everyone on the Grof Legacy Training advisory board. I see them all as fitting GPM I since they are directly involved in steering and directing the Grof legacy. I think it is fair to say, they share an overarching metaphysical alignment with Grof’s theories on consciousness, the psyche and the nature of psychopathologies.
Some of the Board of Editors for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology could be considered GPM I, though not all (see the i-v characteristics — they don’t all fit for everyone here).
In the next post, I’ll go into more depth about some of these figures.