With the new strategies, we can do much more than remove the symptoms or reach the goal of psychoanalysis-as defined by Freud in his famous statement : "to change the extreme suffering of the neurotic to the ordinary misery of everyday life." That certainly is not a very ambitious plan, particularly if you consider the amount of time, money, and energy that it takes to undergo psychoanalysis. However, to achieve positive mental health -- increase of zest, joi de vivre, vitality, creativity -- requires to open up to the spiritual dimension of existence. Abraham Maslow conducted extensive research in many hundreds of people who had had spontaneous mystical experiences, or "peak experiences" as he called them. He showed that they were conducive to self-actualization and self-realization and much higher levels of development and functioning than those that conventional psychology talks about.

This brings us to your third point, the problem of spirituality and mystical experiences. This is an issue, which represents the core difference between traditional psychiatry and transpersonal psychology. Mainstream psychiatry is based upon the Cartesian-Newtonian materialistic world view which maintains that the history of the universe is basically the history of developing matter. The only thing that really exists is matter and life, consciousness, and intelligence are its accidental and insignificant side-products.In this kind of a world view, there is no place for spirituality. To be spiritual means to be uneducated, unacquainted with modern scientific discoveries about the nature of the Universe. It means to be involved in superstition, in primitive, or magical thinking. Traditional psychoanalysis explains spirituality as a regression, as a fixation on the infantile stage -a step backwards in development rather than a step forward. In this context, the concept of God is interpreted as projection of your infantile image of your father to the sky. Interest in religious ritual is seen as analogous to obsessive-compulsive behavior of a neurotic and explained as a regression to the anal stage of libidinal development.

DiCarlo: So it is a sort of reductionism, taking what lies beyond our current models of how things work and reducing them to the existing framework and what we already know?

Grof: Yes. And here lies the fundamental difference between traditional psychiatry and transpersonal psychology which considers spirituality to be an intrinsic dimension of the human psyche and a critical factor in the universal scheme of things. This conclusion is not some kind of irrational belief or a speculative metaphysical assumption. It is based on systematic study of non-ordinary states of consciousness in which we can have direct experiences of the spiritual dimensions. These experiences fall into two distinct categories. In the first one are experiences of the Immanent Divine; they involve direct perception of unity underlying the world of separation and a realization that what we experience as material reality is actually manifestation of creative cosmic energy. The second category includes experiences of the Transcendental Divine; here we perceive dimensions of reality that are normally hidden to our senses, such as visions of deities, or archetypal figures as C.G. Jung would call them, and of various mythological domains.

DiCarlo: Could you give me some other examples of the categories of transpersonal experiences that have been described by the thousands of people you have studied over the years that would tend to shatter the assumptions of materialistic science and the traditional world view?