The late Christina Grof describes her own struggle to overcome alcoholism and suggests that the impulse that leads to addictive behavior stems from our yearning for spiritual union. Crises of spiritual opening, she says, may often look like episodes of acute psychosis and are often difficult and even painful. Unlike psychosis, however, such crises can [...]

Rick describes several ways to attain peak experiences and how to get into the zone by choice, not chance. He shares positive experiences of professional athletes who use meditation and energetic practices to enhance their performance with supporting research.

Rick explains how every healing tradition in the world includes some form of energy medicine, except Western medicine. Although, he is seeing evidence of this changing with a large grassroots effort and research. He describes the energy medicine methods that he has found to be most effective for alleviating pain, including treating phantom limb pain, [...]

Important breakthroughs in the field of neuroimmunology suggest that the human nervous system and immune system are intimately linked. The late Brendan O’Regan (d. 1992), former vice-president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, notes the shift of emphasis in healing research from documenting the role of mind in healing to searching for an understanding of [...]

Here he focuses on the long history, within western science, of researchers exploring the effects and effectiveness of different drugs through self-experimentation.

Our normal waking state of consciousness can be likened to being “asleep” in comparison to other states of awareness we might attain. In this intriguing discussion, psychologist Charles Tart, PhD, author of Altered States of Consciousness and Waking Up, suggests that we can begin to “wake up” by allowing our awareness to become conscious of itself. This [...]

The native shaman learns to interact with the spirits of the underworld and the higher worlds in order to intercede in behalf of humans in the “middle world.” Michael Harner, Ph.D., has authored The Jivaro, Hallucinogens and Shamanism and The Way of the Shaman. He is currently actively involved in training westerners throughout the world to become shamanic [...]