Science & Tech Quote by Stanislav Grof

Grof is smuggling a spiritual anthropology into the language of hard science, and he does it with a careful bit of rhetorical judo. By invoking "the new formula in physics", he borrows the prestige of quantum-era weirdness to legitimize a psychological claim: that humans can be read in two registers at once. "Newtonian objects" signals the familiar story of bodies as machines - measurable, predictable, clinically manageable. Then he pivots to "infinite fields of consciousness", a phrase that refuses measurement altogether and frames the mind as something expansive, possibly nonlocal, and not confined to the skull. The point isn't physics; it's permission.

The subtext is a critique of reductionism dressed up as a scientific update. Grof wants the listener to feel that materialist psychology is outdated, like insisting on clocks after relativity. Calling the two aspects "complementary" echoes Bohr's complementarity: not a mushy compromise, but a claim that contradiction is built into accurate description. You can talk about the human as a thing and as a field; trying to force one model to swallow the other impoverishes what can be said, and what can be healed.

Context matters: Grof's career sits at the fault line between mainstream psychiatry and transpersonal psychology, shaped by psychedelic psychotherapy and altered-state research. This line is aimed at a culture newly fluent in quantum metaphors and hungry for scientific-sounding language that sanctifies interior experience. It works because it offers a double victory: keeping the authority of science while enlarging the map to include awe, mysticism, and the unruly data of consciousness.