"It is possible to see the intermediate state between lives as being in a way more important than incarnate existence"
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Grof is smuggling a quiet revolution into a blandly metaphysical sentence: he’s demoting ordinary life from the starring role. In mainstream psychology, “incarnate existence” is the whole stage; everything else is fantasy, defense, or symptom. Grof flips that hierarchy. The “intermediate state between lives” isn’t just an exotic add-on to therapy, it’s positioned as the more consequential zone where meaning gets assigned, wounds get organized, and identity gets edited.
The phrasing matters. “It is possible to see” is a clinical hedge that keeps the claim from sounding like a sermon. He’s not asking you to believe; he’s asking you to grant a framework. That’s a classic Grof move in transpersonal psychology: treat spiritual cosmologies as experiential data, not dogma. By calling it an “intermediate state,” he borrows the cool, almost bureaucratic language of a process model. It reads less like reincarnation propaganda and more like a map of the psyche with an extra room.
The subtext is also a critique of modern materialism’s prestige. If the between-life state is “more important,” then the usual metrics of success, productivity, and even biography start to look like surface noise. What becomes primary is transformation: what gets integrated, what gets released, what pattern repeats. Contextually, Grof’s work with LSD psychotherapy and later holotropic breathwork primed him to take reports of ego dissolution, perinatal memory, and “past-life” imagery seriously as psychologically potent, whether or not they’re literally true. The intent isn’t to win a metaphysical argument; it’s to justify a therapeutic attention shift toward experiences that conventional psychology tends to dismiss, even when they reorganize a person’s life.
The phrasing matters. “It is possible to see” is a clinical hedge that keeps the claim from sounding like a sermon. He’s not asking you to believe; he’s asking you to grant a framework. That’s a classic Grof move in transpersonal psychology: treat spiritual cosmologies as experiential data, not dogma. By calling it an “intermediate state,” he borrows the cool, almost bureaucratic language of a process model. It reads less like reincarnation propaganda and more like a map of the psyche with an extra room.
The subtext is also a critique of modern materialism’s prestige. If the between-life state is “more important,” then the usual metrics of success, productivity, and even biography start to look like surface noise. What becomes primary is transformation: what gets integrated, what gets released, what pattern repeats. Contextually, Grof’s work with LSD psychotherapy and later holotropic breathwork primed him to take reports of ego dissolution, perinatal memory, and “past-life” imagery seriously as psychologically potent, whether or not they’re literally true. The intent isn’t to win a metaphysical argument; it’s to justify a therapeutic attention shift toward experiences that conventional psychology tends to dismiss, even when they reorganize a person’s life.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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