PROLOGUE: Discovering Cosmic Consciousness My First LSD Session
Excerpt-Stanislav Grof MD PhD- When the Impossible Happens
The experience I am about to relate was without any doubt the single most important and influential experience of my entire life. Although it lasted only a few hours—and its most significant part only about ten minutes—it sent me professionally on a radically different course than the one for which I had been trained and prepared. It set for me a trajectory that I have been following with great passion and determination until this very day. It also instigated in me a process of profound personal transformation and spiritual awakening. Today, almost fifty years later, I look at this experience as an initiation similar to that offered to the participants in ancient mysteries.
This story will take us back to the end of my medical studies and beginnings of my professional career as a psychiatrist. In the mid-1950s, the psychiatric department of the School of Medicine of Charles University in Prague, where I had worked as a student volunteer since the fourth year of my medical studies, conducted research with Melleril. This was one of the early tranquilizers, produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. My preceptor had a good working relationship with Sandoz and received from time to time complimentary samples of their products. As part of this cooperation, he received for testing a supply of diethylamide of lysergic acid, or LSD-25, a then—new experimental substance with extraordinary psychoactive properties.