LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
Project Director:
Jay Goldfarb
Contact:
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax, Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Deborah Wolf
Wisdom Area: End of Life Preparations
Question: What is Conscious awareness, what is Wisdom?
YouTube Video Title: Legacy of Wisdom – Stan Grof – What is Wisdom?
YouTube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzEWWIH_cNA
Length: 3:11
Interviewee: Dr. STANISLAV GROF (www.stanislavgrof.com)
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 Breathworkand transpersonal psychology.
Currently, Dr. Grof is Professor of Psychology at theCalifornia Institute of Integral Studies(CIIS) in the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness in San Francisco, CA, and atWisdom Universityin 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.
In the United States, Dr. Grof served as Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD. He was also Scholar-in-Residence at Esalen Institute.
Question: What is Wisdom?
Transcript (ENGLISH):
Interviewer:
What is wisdom? If we’re living a life today and we want to be wise, what is wisdom? What is this thing we’re talking about, legacy of wisdom?
Stanislav Grof:
Okay. You see wisdom for me has nothing to do with how much you know about the material overall. In other words, how much you study, how many disciplines, chemistry, biology, physics, and so on. That’s knowledge. In German actually you would distinguish between verstand and vernunft. Vernunft is the more kind of metaphysical knowing. And in the Sanskrit you have the term Avidya, which is the ignorance, but again not not knowing mathematics. Ignorance is ignorance about the most fundamental things, which is who am I, what is our true nature, what is the nature of reality. And the remedy for that again is called prajna paramita, transcendental wisdom. So wisdom is really about having information about dimensions of reality that normally are invisible. They are not accessible to our senses. This is something that you cannot learn in your ordinary state of consciousness. You really have to go into what I call the holotropic state. And I don’t mean just breath work, but psychedelics or Shamanic techniques. There are many many spiritual practices. There are many ways you can experience it. But for me, wisdom is about this knowledge of dimensions that form and inform the material world but are not easily available while you’re in it, in the samsaric world. You have to go into a different state of consciousness to even realize that its there. or that it is a relevant part of life. You can live your life without ever touching that dimension until probably, until you’re dying.
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