STANISLAV GROF
KEYNOTE CONTRIBUTION
Making Spiritual Experiences Acceptable and Legal
Spiritual Experiences are often „outlawed“ in our modern Western culture, because we lack the experience, understanding and background to properly hold them. This becomes especially obvious in times of spiritual crisis. The Spiritual Emergency Network (ISEN) is a collaborative platform that assists networks around the world that offer compassionate support to those who understand their experiences to be a spiritual crisis, rather than a mental illness.
Bio
Stan Grof, M.D., Ph.D. is a psychiatrist with more than fifty years experience researching the healing and transformative potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness. His groundbreaking theories influenced the integration of Western science with his brilliant mapping of the transpersonal dimension.
On October 5, 2007 Dr. Grof received the prestigious VISION 97 award granted by the Foundation of Dagmar and Vaclav Havel in Prague. He is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of Transpersonal Psychology and received an Honorary Award for major contributions to and development of the field of Transpersonal Psychology from the Association for Transpersonal Psychology in 1993. Dr. Grof is also the founding President of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) and was its President for many years.
He has organized large international conferences throughout the world and continues to lecture and teach professional training programs inHolotropic Breathwork and transpersonal psychology. Currently, Dr. Grof is Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness in San Francisco, CA, and at Wisdom University in Oakland, CA.
Dr. Grof was born in 1931 in Prague where he received an M.D. from Charles University and a Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine) from the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences. Between 1960 and 1967, he was Principal Investigator in a psychedelic research program at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
