Holotropic Breathwork and Pharmaceutical Psychedelics
By Lenny Gibson, PhD
The effect of psychedelic substances blurs the line between mind and body that Descartes set out very clearly three and a half centuries ago. Descartes’s separation of mind and body created awareness that medieval scholastic ignorance overlooked the importance of human intelligence, because the scholastics preoccupied themselves with divine intelligence. However, Descartes’s focus on cognition as the central human characteristic ignored the wholeness of human experience and thereby creates a new ignorance that has become problematic now after those same three and a half centuries.
The clarification Descartes made established a foundation for modernity by allowing study of matter and mind separately, but now we have run out the string to the time when the separation has been upset by psychedelic experience. Science originally benefitted from thinking that matter could explain mind and other human abilities. It invented chemistry as one means of explanation, but the scientific advance of chemistry led to the discovery of LSD, whose psychotropic effect ironically blurs the clear line Descartes drew between mind and body.
The discovery of the psychotropic effect of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943 came three hundred years after radical Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht, and Descartes was obliged to flee to the Hague.1 That did not diminish his philosophy and his scientific importance, which only began to weaken when the chemical aspect of physiology became known in the late19th century.
At the beginning of the 19th century, physics claimed the body (matter) domain, and mind stayed with philosophy. The development of physiology over the course of the century progressively eroded the clear line Descartes had drawn. Concomitantly, religious revival and the advance of science impacted faith, and the advance in technology “completely changed the conditions of human life.” (Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925, p. 95) By the last part of the century, William James, started teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard, moved to the philosophy department, then created and taught in the psychology department and finally moved back to philosophy. (Robinson, 1995). He wanted to keep psychology and philosophy together by rejecting materialism and maintaining that human will is not reducible to physical processes.
Hofmann’s discovery, which brings together the science of chemistry and physiology, bodes the possibility of bridging departments of psychology and philosophy and reviving philosophy’s fade in the U. S. academic world. Stanislav Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork emerged as a late consequence of his psychedelic research. It ironically offers the possibility of psychedelic research that avoids legal constraints on the use of psychedelic substances. It also offers a convenient method that will further investigation of the classic philosophical question of mysticism. Holotropic Breathwork will complement psychedelically fostered experience when legal sanctions on psychedelics become less restrictive.
Stanislav Grof undertook some of the earliest professional LSD research. When this research was subsequently shut down by legal sanctions, he and his wife Christina created Holotropic Breathwork as a method to elicit psychedelic experience without substances. They created the method partly using known psychological principles, but serendipity2 played a significant role as well (personal communication).
This essay highlights LSD and Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms as extremely unique pharmaceuticals. LSD is chemically synthesized; psychedelic mushrooms occur naturally. LSD is unique historically and in the power of its effect. It was not discovered by purpose, and its effects have been difficult to describe explicitly. The use of psilocybe mexicana by indigenous South Americans happened before recorded history. North Americans only discovered it in the 1950s. The discovery of indigenous similarly psychedelic use of peyote cactus use happened in 1893, also before recorded history. It was discovered by James Mooney, researcher from the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution. He was the first white man to attend a peyote ceremony. His information, however, did not proliferate on the scale that followed the discovery of LSD.
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