Grof: Traditional psychology and psychiatry have a model of the psyche that is limited to the body, more specifically the brain, which is seen as the source of consciousness, and to post-natal biography, that means to the history of the individual after he or she was born. It tries to explain all psychological processes in terms of the events which took place in infancy and in childhood. In addition, we also have the Freudian individual unconscious, which is basically a derivative of our life experiences. It is a kind of "psychological junkyard" that harbors various unacceptable tendencies that have been repressed.

The model of the psyche that has emerged from modern consciousness research and from transpersonal psychology is incomparably larger and more encompassing. It has additional domains that are extremely important from the theoretical, as well as practical, point of view. For example, the cartography of the unconscious that I have suggested on the basis of my studies of non-ordinary states has, beside the biographical level, two vast additional domains, which I call perinatal and transpersonal. The perinatal level has as its core the record of traumatic experiences associated with biological birth. The memories of the emotions and physical feelings that we experienced during our delivery are often represented here in photographical detail. However, the perinatal level also functions as a kind of gateway into the next domain of the psyche, the transpersonal.

For example, people who relive different stages of birth, often experience simultaneously elements of what C.G. Jung called the "collective unconscious"; this can be either its historical or mythological aspects. Thus people who re-experience the stage of birth where they were stuck in the womb before the cervix opened, might identify with different people throughout history who were in a prison, or who were abused and tortured, such as the victims of the Inquisition and people who were in Nazi concentration camps. Similarly, the reliving of the desperate struggle to free oneself from the clutches of the birth canal after the cervix dilated can be associated with images of revolutions and with experiential identification with freedom fighters of all ages.

These experiences of one's birth can also open into archetypal visions of the collective unconscious. People who feel stuck in the womb can experience themselves as being in hell, with actual experiences of the demonic figures or of infernal landscapes as we know them from mythology and from religious art. Similarly, individuals who re-experience the difficult propulsion through the birth canal at the stage of birth when the cervix is open often describe archetypal visions of various deities who represent death and re-birth such as Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Persephone, and Dionysus. They might also have the visions of crucifixion or actually experience death and resurrection in full identification with Jesus Christ.

Beside the perinatal level, we have another vast transbiographical domain, the transpersonal level. As I have described earlier, some people can first get in touch with the transpersonal realm in connection with the death-rebirth process; however, others experience it independently in a pure form. The spectrum of transpersonal experiences is extremely rich. Beside the already mentioned elements of the historical and mythological collective unconscious, it is possible to experience convinced identification with various animals, plants, and other aspects of nature and of the cosmos. A particularly important type of transpersonal experiences are karmic or "past-life" memories. These experiences can suddenly catapult us into another century, another country, and another culture. They are extremely vivid, intense, and convincing and are typically accompanied with a sense of personal remembering ("what I am experiencing now is not happening to me for the first time, I once actually was this person living in that historical period"). In many instances people are able to bring from these experiences astonishing and accurate new information about the times and cultures which they had visited. We have also observed that past life experiences have an amazing therapeutic potential.