Only the most ignorant of commentators could describe any aspect of his work as "bad". His work is not ideological, or even philosophical, in nature. It is existential. He instructs in the use of a technique, and does not even suggest much theory, to participants. My impression is that Zosimos has had very little exposure to the material associated with LSD Psychotherapy, and has virtually no experience with holotropic breathwork. If this is true, then he can only derive the authority of his opinion from reading, and listening to lecturers. He is the classic case of a paradigm bound individual making no effort whatsoever to wrestle with information and facts that cannot be accounted for by his model of reality. Its sad, really. Grof offers some of the most exciting insights to be found anywhere--but you have to be willing to keep an open mind if you have no experience with either LSD in a therapeutic context, or holotropic breathwork, or a close encounter with death.
Initially, Grof investigated the clinical uses of the hallucinogen LSD at the Psychiatric Research Institute in his native Prague, Czechoslovakia. It quickly became clear that serial LSD sessions were able to expedite the psychothereapeutic process and shorten the time necessary for the treatment of many disorders.
But LSD opened up much more than just issues involving their illnesses and included experiences of reliving what it was like to be in the womb, explore what it was like ot be other living things and even other objects, able to tap into the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors, accessing racial and collective memories in past history, and occassionally related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein, they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences, traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality.
Perhaps Grof's most remarkable discovery is that the same phenomena reported by individuals who have taken LSD can also be experienced without resorting to drugs of any kind. Grof and his wife, Christina, developed a simple, nondrug technique for inducing these nonordinary states of consciousness. They call their technique "holotropic therapy" and use only rapid and controlled breathing, evocative music, and massage and body work, to induce altered states of consciousness. Grof describes his current work and gives a detailed account of his methods in this book.