According to Grof, psychedelic substances can be properly understood as non-specific amplifiers of psychological processes. They actively complete chemical and neural circuits in the brain that are usually interrupted—filling in the antenna, so that emotional material which is normally inaccessible can now flood into consciousness. Thus the content

Whether the catalyst was Holotropic Breathwork, a psychoactive substance, or a spontaneous eruption of unconscious contents during a psychospiritual crisis, archetypal astrology provides, in Grof's words, “the only system that can successfully predict both the content and timing of experiences encountered in non-ordinary states of consciousness in

Perhaps the most concise way to describe this emerging paradigm in science is the realization that consciousness, rather than being an accidental by-product of neurophysiological and biochemical processes in the brain, is an integral component of the universe itself.

Individuals engaged in deep self-exploration under the influence of BPM IV experience a cluster of themes centered around breakthrough and transcendence. The volcanic arousal and suffering of the previous stage of BPM III eventually reach the extreme limit, then culminate in a sense of total failure on every imaginable level—physically,

People's birth charts record the “cosmic state” of the archetypes at the moment of their birth, reflecting patterns of experience that will unfold and express themselves in many different forms throughout their lifetimes.

Whether the ingestion of a psychedelic substance ultimately becomes a positive or a negative experience depends on several major factors. The most important of these is the level of trust between journeyers and the people around them—their friends, guides, and sitters.

Journeyers experience feelings of overwhelming scandal, disaster, betrayal, and judgment, and simultaneously, a strange sense of identifying with the perpetrating forces. They may become absolutely convinced that their process has, once and for all, gone over the line—imagining that their session is destroying the whole world or even the entire

Grof's expanded cartography of psyche not only integrates the entire range of biographical, perinatal, and transpersonal domains that routinely emerge in deep self-exploration, but shows how they are connected. Most importantly, his clinical research confirms that there is a finite amount of negative material in the individual psyche.

Of course, what usually happens is that the intense perinatal emotions that would ideally be faced in a condensed form during a single holotropic session will, in everyday life, be spread out and experienced in a diluted way over the course of weeks, months, or years. Instead of experiencing the BPM II feelings of compression, entrapment, and