LSD & concentration camp experiences

[Doug Millison]

http://www.primalspirit.com/Grof_PlanetarySurvival_art.htm
Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution:
Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed
by Stanislav Grof, M.D.

excerpt:

" The observations from modern consciousness research also throw some 
important light on the psychology of concentration camps. Over a 
number of years, Professor Bastians in Leyden, Holland, has been 
conducting LSD therapy for people suffering from the 
concentration-camp syndrome, which is a condition that develops in 
former inmates of these camps many years after the incarceration. 
Bastians has also worked with former kapos on their issues of guilt. 
An artistic description of this work can be found in the book 
Shivitti written by a former inmate, Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (1989), who 
underwent a series of therapeutic sessions with Bastians.

"Bastians (1955) himself wrote a paper describing his work, titled 
"Man in the Concentration Camp and the Concentration Camp in Man." 
There he pointed out, without specifying it, that the concentration 
camps are a projection of a certain domain which exists in the human 
unconscious: "Before there was a man in the concentration camp, there 
was a concentration camp in man" (Bastians, 1955). Study of the 
nonordinary states of consciousness made it possible to identify the 
realm of the psyche Bastians was talking about. Closer examination of 
the general and specific conditions in the Nazi concentration camps 
reveals that they are a diabolical and realistic enactment of the 
nightmarish atmosphere that characterizes the reliving of biological 
birth.

"The barbed-wire barriers, high-voltage fences, watch towers with 
submachine guns, mine fields, and packs of trained dogs certainly 
created a hellish and almost archetypal image of an utterly hopeless 
and oppressive no-exit situation which is so characteristic of the 
first clinical stage of birth (BPM II). At the same time, the 
elements of violence, bestiality, scatology, and sexual abuse of 
women and men-including rape and sadistic practices-all belong to the 
phenomenology of the second stage (BPM III), familiar to people who 
have relived their birth.

"The sexual abuse existed on a random individual level, as well as in 
the "houses of dolls," which were institutions providing 
"entertainment" for the officers. The only escape out of this hell 
was death-by hunger, disease, or suffocation in the gas chambers and 
the fire of the crematoria. The books by Ka-Tzetnik 135633, House of 
Dolls (1955) and Sunrise Over Hell (1977), offer a shattering 
description of the life in concentration camps. The SS officers 
directed special bestiality against pregnant women. The irrational 
nature of the camps is best shown in the scatological 
dimension-throwing eating bowls into the latrines and asking for 
retrieval, and forcing the inmates to urinate into each other's 
mouths were practices that besides their bestiality bring the danger 
of epidemics (in Buchenwald in one month, twenty-seven inmates 
drowned in feces).

"The intensity, depth, driving quality, and convincing nature of all 
the emotions and sensations involved in these experiences suggest 
that they are not individually fabricated from such sources as 
adventure books, movies, and TV shows; but that they originate in the 
collective unconscious. It certainly seems that when, in our inner 
exploration, we reach the memory of the trauma of birth, this seems 
to open the gates into the collective unconscious and mediates access 
to experiences of people who once were in a similar predicament. It 
is not hard to imagine that the perinatal level of our unconscious, 
which "knows" so intimately the history of human violence, is 
actually partially responsible for wars, revolutions, and similar 
atrocities. If this is true, it should be possible to reduce the 
amount of malignant aggression by a change in birth practices. "


........Something to think about while reading about Brigadier 
Pudding and Katje, perhaps, and the rest of GR's S&M.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>