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Stanislav Grof Joan Halifax – The Human Encounter with Death 258 pagesAmazon review:”In THE HUMAN ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH, Stanislav Grof, M.D. and Joan Halifax tell how psychedelic therapy can be used to help people with terminal illness. One way the dying are helped by psychedelic therapy is in accepting their impending death. After a psychedelic-induced transcendent spiritual experience, a person can see their death not just as an ending, but also as a great adventure into the unknown. As a result, patients often have a new zest for life, and savor each moment more deeply, after a good therapy session. Another effect of psychedelic therapy, and one which surprised me, was the temporary reduction in pain-perception that many people experience after a therapy session. And this type of therapy also typically improves relations between the dying person and their family–a valuable asset since their remaining time together is probably limited to several months at most. (Incidentally, on rare occasions, in terminal cancer patients who have been undergoing psychedelic therapy, a spontaneous remission has occurred–but it happens too seldom to be in itself a reason for undergoing psychedelic therapy.) In summary, as the authors say, “It is hard to imagine a more useful way to combine medicine, psychology, and religion than psychedelic therapy with dying individuals” (from chapter two).”Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Human-Encounter-Death-Stanislav-Grof/d…Backcover:Stanislav Grof, M.D., and Joan Halifax, Ph.D., have a unique authority and competence in the interpretation of the human encounter with death. Theirs is an extraordinary range of experience, in clinical research with psychedelic substances, in cross-cultural and medical anthropology, and in the analysis of Oriental and archaic literatures. Their pioneering work with psychedelics administered to individuals dying of cancer opened domains of experience that proved to be nearly identical to those already mapped in the “Books of the Dead,” those mystical visionary accounts of the posthumous journeys of the soul.The Grof/Halifax book and these ancient resources both show the imminent experience of death as a continuation of what had been the hidden aspect of the experience of life. —Joseph CampbellThe authors have assisted persons dying of cancer in transcending the anxiety and anger around their personal fate. Using psychedelics, they have guided the patients to death-rebirth experiences that resemble transformation rites practiced in a variety of cultures. Physician and medical anthropologist join here in recreating an old art—the art of dying. —June SingerThe Human Encounter With Death is the latest of many recent publications in the newly evolving field of thanatology. It is, however, a quite different kind of book—one that belongs in every library of anyone who seriously tries to understand the phenomenon we call death. —from the Foreword by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross