This week I go back to last week and talk about my breathwork session, stroboscopic light and Stan's first LSD trip, the book The Tell and discussion of certification for facilitators in the Ethical Trip. Here are some screenshots/links/quotes in order of mention throughout the episode:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8248711/
https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN82430224
Grof’s first LSD trip, from The Way of the Psychonaut (2021):
“I was at that point becoming disillusioned by psychoanalysis, realizing the amount of time and money it required and how unimpressive the results were. I was extremely excited about such an extraordinary training opportunity and asked Dr. Roubíček if I could have an LSD session. Unfortunately, the staff of the psychiatric clinic decided that, for a variety of reasons, students would not be accepted as volunteers. Dr. Roubíček was very interested in the new substance, but too busy to spend hours at a time in the LSD sessions of his experimental subjects. He needed help, and there were no objections against me supervising the psychedelic sessions of others and keeping records of their experiences.
I thus had sat in the LSD sessions of many Czech psychiatrists and psychologists, prominent artists, and other interested persons before I myself qualified as an experimental subject. By the time I graduated from the medical school and was myself eligible for a session, my appetite had been repeatedly whetted by fantastic accounts of the experiences of others that I had witnessed. In the fall of 1956, after my graduation from the medical school, I was finally able to have my own LSD session.
Dr. Roubíček’s area of special interest was research of the electrical activity of the brain. One of the conditions for participating in the LSD study was to agree to have an EEG recording taken before, during, and after the session. In addition, at the time of my session, he was particularly fascinated by what was called “driving” or “entraining” the brain waves. This involved exposure to various frequencies of a strong flashing stroboscopic light and finding out to what extent the brain waves in the suboccipital area of the brain (the optical cortex) could be “entrained,” that is, forced to pick up the incoming frequency. Eager to have the LSD experience, I readily agreed to have my EEG taken and my brain waves “driven.”
My brother Paul, who was at that time a medical student and was also deeply interested in psychiatry, agreed to supervise my session. I started feeling the effects of LSD about forty-five minutes after the ingestion. At first, there was a feeling of slight malaise, lightheadedness, and nausea. Then these symptoms disappeared and were replaced by a fantastic display of incredibly colorful abstract and geometrical visions unfolding in rapid kaleidoscopic sequences. Some of them “resembled exquisite stained glass windows in medieval Gothic cathedrals, others arabesques from Muslim mosques. To describe the exquisite nature of these visions, I made references to Sheherezade and A Thousand and One Nights and to the stunning beauty of Alhambra and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fantastic description of Kubla Khan’s legendary Xanadu.
At the time, these were the only associations I was able to make. Today, I believe that my psyche somehow managed to produce a wild array of fractal images, similar to the graphic representations of nonlinear equations that can be created by modern computers. As the session continued, my experience moved through and beyond this realm of exquisite aesthetic rapture and changed into an encounter and confrontation with my unconscious psyche. It is difficult to find words for the intoxicating fugue of emotions, visions, and illuminating insights into my life, and existence in general, that became available to me on this level of my psyche. It was so profound and shattering that it instantly overshadowed my previous interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. I could not believe how much I learned in those few hours.
The breathtaking aesthetic feast and the rich plethora of psychological insights would have been sufficient in and of themselves to make my first encounter with LSD a truly memorable experience. However, all that paled in comparison with what was yet to come. Between the third and fourth hour of my session, when the effect of the LSD was culminating, Dr. Roubiček’s research assistant appeared and announced that it was time for the EEG experiment. She took me to a small room, carefully pasted electrodes on my scalp, and asked me to lie down and close my eyes. She then placed a giant stroboscopic light above my head and turned it on.
The effects of the LSD immensely amplified the impact of the strobe and I was hit by a vision of light of incredible radiance and supernatural beauty. It made me think of the accounts of mystical experiences I had read about in spiritual literatures, in which the visions of divine light were compared with the incandescence of “millions of suns.” It crossed my mind that this was what it must have been like at the epicenter of the atomic explosions in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Today, I think it “it was more like Dharmakaya, or the Primary Clear Light, the luminosity of indescribable brilliance that, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bardo Thödol, appears to us at the moment of our death.
I felt that a divine thunderbolt had catapulted my conscious self out of my body. I lost my awareness of the research assistant, the laboratory, the psychiatric clinic, Prague, and then the planet. My consciousness expanded at an inconceivable speed and reached cosmic dimensions. I lost the connection with my everyday identity. There were no more boundaries or difference between me and the universe. I felt that my old personality was extinguished and that I ceased to exist. And I felt that by becoming nothing, I became everything.
The research assistant carefully followed her protocol for the experiment. She gradually shifted the frequency of the strobe from two to sixty hertz (frequencies per second) and back again, and then put it for a short time to the middle of the alpha band, theta band, and finally the delta band. While this was happening, I found myself at the center of a cosmic drama of unimaginable dimensions. In the astronomical literature that I read over the following years, I found names for some of the phenomena that seemed like what I experienced during those extraordinary ten minutes—the Big Bang, passage through black holes, white holes, and wormholes, as well as exploding supernovas and collapsing stars.”
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-025-01274-2
https://theethicaltrip.beehiiv.com/p/the-phantom-certification-893e0d3f2407a534
