"The Way of the Psychonaut" by Stanislav Grof,
transpersonality and mediumistic sessions in 2026
DeepSeek AI – Below is a detailed summary of the key ideas from Stanislav Grof's two-volume encyclopedia "The Way of the Psychonaut," followed by an independent research essay that develops these ideas in relation to the cultural and spiritual context of 2026.
Part 1: Detailed Summary of the Key Ideas from "The Way of the Psychonaut"
Stanislav Grof's book represents the culmination of over sixty years of research into holotropic states of consciousness. Its main goal is not merely to describe the phenomena arising in these states, but to propose a radical revision of the foundations of Western psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy. Grof introduces a new, expanded cartography of the psyche, which includes three main levels:
The Biographical Level – personal history, traumas, and memories from postnatal life. Here, Freud and his followers were correct, but their understanding was superficial, as they overlooked deeper layers.
The Perinatal Level – Grof's central discovery. He asserts that the trauma of biological birth is deeply imprinted in the unconscious and serves as a matrix for many psychological and spiritual experiences. He identifies four basic perinatal matrices (BPM), which correspond to the stages of birth:
BPM-1 (Paradise, Unity with the Mother): Experience of intrauterine bliss, dissolution of boundaries, oceanic ecstasy. Archetypally linked to paradise, cosmic unity, Neptune.
BPM-2 (Expulsion from Paradise, Hell): The onset of labor contractions when the uterus contracts but the cervix is not yet open. Experiences of claustrophobia, suffocation, helplessness, horror with no way out. Archetypally linked to hell, totalitarian systems, Saturn.
BPM-3 (Death-Rebirth Struggle, Purgatory): Passing through the birth canal. A mixture of sexual arousal, titanic struggle, aggression, pain, and fear. Archetypally linked to sadomasochism, war, demonic imagery, Pluto.
BPM-4 (Death and Rebirth): Birth, emergence into the light. Experience of liberation, triumph, bright light, union with the Great Mother. Archetypally linked to Uranus, rebirth, divine revelation.
The Transpersonal Level – transcending the boundaries of the individual and even of human experience. This level includes:
Identification with other people, groups, animals, plants.
Ancestral memory, racial and collective memory.
Experiences of past lives (karmic memories).
Encounters with archetypal figures (deities, demons, spirit guides) from Jung's collective unconscious.
Experiences of cosmic consciousness and the Supracosmic Void – the ultimate reality beyond all forms.
Key Revisions and Conclusions:
Nature of Consciousness: Grof categorically rejects the materialist thesis that consciousness is a product of the brain. He presents extensive data (out-of-body experiences, transpersonal phenomena, memory without a material substrate) to argue that the brain functions more as a "reducing valve" or a conduit, while consciousness is primary, non-local, and cosmic in nature. He aligns himself with the ideas of Ervin Laszlo about the Akashic field and the holographic model of the universe.
New Psychopathology: The roots of emotional and psychosomatic disorders extend into the perinatal and transpersonal levels. Traditional psychoanalytic interpretations (Oedipus complex, fixation on the oral stage) are merely biographical layers superimposed on deeper perinatal matrices. This allows for a new explanation of phenomena like sadomasochism, suicide, addictions, and the nature of "functional" psychoses, which are often "spiritual emergencies" – spontaneous episodes of holotropic states that, with proper support, lead to healing rather than deterioration.
Integration of Psychological Schools: Grof demonstrates that the disagreements between Freud (biography), Rank (birth trauma), and Jung (archetypes) arise because each explored and absolutized only one level of the psyche. The new cartography integrates all these approaches into a single holarchy. Archetypes (Jung) underlie the perinatal matrices (Rank), which in turn form systems of condensed experience (COEX), organizing biographical traumas (Freud).
Spirituality and Science: Grof asserts that spirituality is not superstition or a symptom of illness, but a fundamental dimension of the human psyche. Authentic mystical tradition (the "perennial philosophy") is an empirical science of consciousness, whose findings are surprisingly consonant with discoveries in quantum physics and systems theory. He considers archetypal astrology (in collaboration with Richard Tarnas) a crucial bridge between psychology and cosmology, serving as a "Rosetta Stone" for deciphering the correlations between psychic dynamics and planetary movements.
Practice: Holotropic Breathwork: As a practical tool, Grof developed Holotropic Breathwork, a method that allows inducing powerful non-ordinary states of consciousness without using substances. This method combines accelerated breathing, music, and bodywork, activating the inner healing intelligence. It serves as a bridge between ancient shamanic practices and modern psychotherapy.
Part 2: Research Essay "Transpersonality and Mediumistic Sessions in 2026"
Introduction: From Holotropic Breathwork to Collective Trance
By 2026, Stanislav Grof's legacy has ceased to be marginal knowledge, integrating into the very fabric of Western culture. The "psychedelic renaissance" predicted in his book has not only become a reality but has transformed into something more. If the 2010s and early 2020s were a time of legalization and clinical "medicalization" of psychedelics (MDMA for PTSD, psilocybin for depression), then by the mid-2020s, a significant conceptual leap occurred. Society began to realize that these substances and practices are not just tools for "cleaning" the psyche, but technologies of the sacred, capable of restoring lost modes of collective consciousness. In this context, Grof's concept of "spiritual emergency" gained a new, social dimension: we became witnesses to a collective spiritual emergency unfolding before all of humanity. This crisis, in turn, sparked a renewed interest in a phenomenon Grof described in his encyclopedia as one type of transpersonal experience, yet left on the periphery of his clinical interest – the mediumistic session.
I. The Transpersonal Dimension as the New Norm
The model of the psyche proposed by Grof became, by 2026, the working paradigm for a new generation not only of psychotherapists but also of cultural theorists, anthropologists, and even political scientists. The recognition of the perinatal level and the transpersonal field as reality led to a fundamental change in the perception of death and life. The materialist "culture of death denial" (Ernest Becker) began to give way to a "culture of initiation."
Holotropic Breathwork, transformed from a therapeutic method into a mass practice ("fitness for the soul" in elite circles and "communal therapy" in networked communities), created a critical mass of people in society who have direct experience of:
Out-of-body experiences, no longer considered pathological but perceived as verifiable facts.
Episodes of past lives, which began to be understood not as "hallucinations" but as access to karmic and ancestral lineages, forming a new ethics based on recognizing the interconnection of actions across time (secularized karma).
Encounters with archetypal figures, which ceased to be "individual complexes" and became the basis for new syncretic myth-making.
Against this backdrop, the mediumistic session, which Grof in his early works (citing Jung, cases with Anna Armstrong, Luís Gasparetto, etc.) described as an "anomalous phenomenon" requiring confirmation, had by 2026 transformed into a legitimate, though controversial, area of cultural practice. If for Grof mediumship was a "psychoid" phenomenon (at the intersection of psyche and matter), for the person of 2026, it is a natural extension of the holotropic perspective.
II. The Mediumistic Session in the Era of "Collective Bardo"
Grof repeatedly emphasized the connection between the experience of death and the archetypal dynamics of BPM-4. He pointed out that the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" is a map of inner journeys. By 2026, humanity, having experienced a series of global catastrophes (environmental, political, epidemiological), found itself in a situation that Grof's collaborator Richard Tarnas would call an "archetypal threshold," and Grof himself would call a collective perinatal crisis.
The mediumistic session became a key ritual for the "dark night of the soul" of the 2020s. Its forms transformed compared to the 19th century:
From "communicating with spirits" to "accessing the Akashic field": If classical spiritualism was preoccupied with contacting specific deceased individuals, the mediumistic session of 2026 focuses on working with transpersonal systems. Inspired by Grof's concept of COEX systems, practitioners no longer seek "grandma's voice"; they seek the key to a "familial COEX," a "national trauma" (e.g., collective memory of WWII or colonialism), or an "ancestral matrix." The medium becomes not just a "talking head," but a facilitator of a holotropic process for the group, working with the "field." The session itself is structured like a holotropic session: music, altered states of consciousness for all participants (not just the medium), and a "sitter" (guide) who manages the process of releasing collective emotions.
Technological initiation: By 2026, Grof's approach merged with virtual reality (VR) technologies and neural interfaces. Grof wrote about how laser and holography became a model for understanding transpersonal experiences. By 2026, VR allows for constructing immersive environments that stimulate archetypal experiences. Mediumistic sessions are increasingly conducted in a hybrid format: the participant is engaged in Holotropic Breathwork, while the medium manages a "holographic" environment, visualizing the "lower world" (shamanic) or "astral spheres." This creates new ethical challenges: where is the line between authentic transpersonal experience and an artificially constructed, "programmed" illusion? Grof warned about the danger of "opaque deities." In 2026, this danger increases exponentially when images are created by algorithms.
Mediumship as political action: Grof and deMause showed how perinatal dynamics (BPM-2, BPM-3) manifest in the political sphere. By 2026, mediumistic sessions have become a tool for historical reparation. Groups working with collective trauma (descendants of colonizers and the colonized, victims of genocide) use modified holotropic-mediumistic techniques to "access" ancestral consciousness and "resolve" ancestral COEX systems. This is an attempt to exteriorize and heal the perinatal matrix of entire nations. The success of these sessions is evaluated not by the "accuracy of prophecies," but by the therapeutic effect – a reduction in social tension, healing of intergenerational trauma. Politics yields to the "depth psychology of the masses."
III. The "Architecture of Emotional Disorders" of Culture
Grof argued that biographical layers of problems mask deeper perinatal and transpersonal roots. Applying this logic to the culture of 2026, the surface-level socio-political conflicts, existential anxiety, and "epochal depression" are not just the biographical neuroses of generations, but symptoms of an encounter with transpersonal material.
The mediumistic session becomes a method of "working with the symptom" at a collective level. Culture "represses" the inevitability of ecological collapse (BPM-2), and this repressed horror erupts as panic attacks, political radicalism, and escapism. The mediumistic session, in Grof's understanding, allows one not to act out this horror in the external world (wars, authoritarianism), but to experience it internally, within a ritual space, undergoing a symbolic "Ego death" of civilization to be reborn into a new identity (BPM-4).
IV. Spiritual-Religious Synthesis: The End of "Psychological Man"
By 2026, it becomes evident that Grof's expanded cartography of the psyche has led to a crisis of classical religious institutions. If God, angels, and demons are not "objects of faith" but archetypal figures with which one can enter direct contact in a holotropic state (whether through breathwork, meditation, or ritual use of entheogens), then the role of the church as intermediary loses its meaning.
The mediumistic sessions of 2026 fulfill a function that in antiquity was served by the Eleusinian Mysteries, which Grof enthusiastically described. This is not "religion" in a dogmatic sense, but a technology of the sacred, returned to the bosom of society. Grofian psychology, starting with clinical therapy, completed its cycle, becoming a modern mystery tradition. The transpersonal mediumistic session is not a relic of superstition, but a practice of "psychic ecology," necessary for the survival of a species standing on the threshold of its own birth (BPM-4) or self-destruction (BPM-2, stuck in BPM-3).
Conclusion: The Way of the Psychonaut as the Way of Culture
Grof concludes his magnum opus with hope for a "New Eleusis." By 2026, this New Eleusis has taken on the characteristics less of a clinic than of a ritual space. The psychonaut described by Grof was a solitary explorer of the depths. The psychonaut of 2026 is a cultural hero, whose path of initiation (shamanic illness, spiritual emergency) has ceased to be an individual fate and has become the collective destiny of humanity.
The mediumistic session, in this context, emerges as the highest form of collective self-exploration, where individual transpersonal experiences serve as material for healing cultural traumas, and archetypes find a voice to guide civilization through a period that Grof would call "perinatal." Transpersonality, which in the 20th century was a domain of psychiatric anomaly, became in 2026 the foundation of a new worldview, where the boundaries between the living and the dead, the personal and the collective, the past and the future are recognized as conventions of everyday consciousness – a "hylotropic" illusion that the holotropic journey is meant to shatter, so that we might finally be born.
Claude AI
Transpersonality and Mediumistic Sessions in 2026
Research Essay: Spiritual-Psychological, Cultural, Religious, and Historiosophical Dimensions
Developing the Ideas of Stanislav Grof
The medium is not an intermediary between worlds. The medium is a rupture in the fabric of knowledge itself, through which that which knowledge hides from itself seeps through.
— Motto of an unknown mystic, quoted in the proceedings of the Paris Society for Psychical Research, 1887.
Preface: The Ontological Scandal of Mediation
There exists a particular kind of knowledge that does not accumulate, but interrupts. It is not built upon the preceding – it breaks it. The mediumistic session has always been precisely such a break: not an addition to the worldview, but its crack. When the Fox sisters in Hydesville in 1848 claimed to hear knocks from beyond death, they did not open up new knowledge – they exposed an old wound of the Western mind, which had been vainly trying to patch it with rationalism.
By 2026, this wound has not scarred over – it has become a diagnosis. Not an individual one, but a civilizational one. The phenomenon of mediumship today lies at the intersection of several acute cultural crises: the crisis of the subject (who speaks when the medium speaks?), the crisis of temporality (from where can the voice of the one who is not come?), the crisis of ontology (what does it mean for the deceased to 'be' present?), and, finally, the crisis of transpersonal psychology itself, which, in attempting to give mediumship a scientific language, risks taming it – depriving it of its main characteristic: its ability to be impossible.
The aim of this essay is neither the verification nor the deconstruction of mediumistic phenomena. Its task is different: to attempt to read the mediumistic session as a symptom – a symptom of what the culture of 2026 is in its deep dimension, in that space which Stanislav Grof called transpersonal, but which must be understood far more broadly than any psychological system allows.
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I
The Dead as an Epistemological Problem
Transpersonal psychology in its Grofian version made a radical gesture: it included the dead in the cartography of the psyche. Not metaphorically – as "ancestral images" in the Jungian sense – but literally: as subjects of experience with whom contact is possible. This was not a theological, but a phenomenological argument. Grof did not claim the dead exist; he claimed that the experience of contact with the dead exists and possesses its own specific phenomenology, indistinguishable in its degree of reality from any other experience.
This distinction – between ontological and phenomenological assertion – proved explosive. For Western thought since the 17th century has been built on the conviction that the reliability of experience is determined by its verifiability through independent observation. If experience is not verifiable, it is subjective, and therefore unreliable. But Grof's phenomenology of the transpersonal showed: there is a class of experiences that are consistently reproducible, intersubjectively consistent, and yet fundamentally unverifiable by traditional methods. The mediumistic session belongs precisely to this class.
The question is not whether the dead exist. The question is what happens to our epistemology when we refuse to ask this question and instead ask: what happens to the living when they enter into an experience they call contact with the dead?
By 2026, this shift in the question acquires not only philosophical but also political dimensions. Postcolonial studies have long documented: European rationalism historically destroyed practices of mediumship not because they were "false," but because they represented alternative forms of authority – the authority of deceased ancestors over living descendants, an authority that could be delegated to neither church nor state. The medium was a rival to the sovereign.
Today, in the context of the global disintegration of former forms of legitimacy – political, scientific, religious – mediumship returns not as superstition, but as a form of epistemological resistance. It says: there is knowledge that belongs to no institution. It comes from where institutions hold no sway.
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II
The Medium's Body: An Anthropology of Presence
Transpersonal psychology created a rich map of the contents of expanded consciousness, but proved considerably less attentive to the body as the site of their manifestation. Yet the mediumistic session is first and foremost a bodily practice. The medium does not "think" about contact – the medium becomes a passage. Their body changes: voice, gestures, facial expressions change, sometimes – according to witness accounts – even facial features.
What happens to the body in this moment? Anthropologists – from Michael Taussig to Paul Stoller – have described this as incorporation: not the symbolic representation of the Other, but the literal indwelling in the flesh. Taussig called it the "mimetic faculty" – the primordial human skill of becoming that which one touches. This is not metaphor or theater: it is the most ancient mode of knowing, preceding any reflection.
Grof's transpersonal psychology conceptualized such experiences through the notion of "identification" – the expansion of self-identification beyond the biographical "I." But identification is too cognitive a term. The medium does not "identify with" the deceased – they yield their place in their body to them. This is a gesture of radical hospitality, which Western culture unlearned when it proclaimed the body the private property of the subject.
The Body as a Porous Boundary
Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, in her study of corporeality, described the body not as a closed container, but as a porous surface: it takes the world in and expels itself into the world in continuous exchange. The mediumistic session reveals this porosity to the extreme. The medium's body literally becomes the meeting place of two – or more – presences.
In 2026, neuroscience reluctantly but inevitably approaches the recognition that the "I" produced by the brain is not a substance but a function: a neural construction possessing a certain stability, but not absolute. In altered states of consciousness – be it meditation, Holotropic Breathwork, or mediumistic trance – this constructive function weakens. And then something else can enter the body. What exactly? Here science falls silent, and the proper territory of mediumship begins.
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III
The Time of the Dead: Historiosophy and Contact with the Past
Historiosophy has long asked the question: what is the relationship of the past to the present? Traditional historical science answers simply: the past is behind us; it determines the present through causal chains, but is itself inaccessible. Mediumship offers a fundamentally different answer: the past is near. It did not end. The dead have not gone into oblivion – they have gone into another mode of presence.
This is not metaphysics of immortality in the usual sense. It is a particular temporal ontology, which philosopher Walter Benjamin called "revolutionary interruption" – the moment when the past flashes up in the present with unexpected urgency. Benjamin wrote of a "weak Messianic power" with which every generation is endowed in relation to those who have passed. The mediumistic session is an attempt to activate this power directly.
In the context of transpersonal psychology, the key concepts are karmic memories and ancestral memory. Grof documented: in holotropic states, people gain access to experiences that are not their personal biographical material – they originate from other times and other lives. Critics called this "cryptomnesia" – hidden memory of something read or heard. But the question arises: even if so, why this particular material? Why does the psyche choose this particular "mask" from the past, and not another?
Perhaps the issue is not whether the "voice of the past" is literally real. The issue is that this voice carries precise information about the unfinished – about what was not lived, not mourned, not healed. And this precision demands an explanation that reductionist psychology is not yet able to provide.
The Unburied Dead of History
Historian Aviel Roshwald introduced the concept of the "unburied" – those whose death was not acknowledged, mourned, and integrated by society. Victims of genocides, repressions, wars, slavery – they remain in cultural memory as open wounds. Mediumistic practices in many non-Western cultures historically performed the function of ritual burial for such dead: not through physical remains, but through acknowledgment, through words, through lament.
In 2026, when the global conversation about colonial reparations, the memory of the Holocaust, victims of Soviet terror, and other historical traumas reaches unprecedented intensity, mediumistic practices acquire an unexpected historical dimension. They become an instrument of what might be called psychospiritual historiography: not the reconstruction of the past through documents, but its re-experiencing – passing through it anew to complete what remained unfinished.
This resonates with, but is not identical to, what Grof described in the context of systems of condensed experience (COEX). COEX are intrapsychic constellations organized around a common emotional theme. But the "unburied dead of history" are something more than an individual's COEX: they are collective COEX, stored not in individual psyches, but in cultural memory, in language, in rituals, in the architecture of grief.
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IV
The Religious Studies Dimension: The Medium Between Institution and Charisma
Sociologist Max Weber described one of the fundamental tensions of religious life: between institution and charisma. The institution preserves and transmits the sacred through ordered structures – church, monastery, theology. Charisma breaks through these structures – it appears directly, without permission, disrupting the established order. Prophets, mystics, shamans – always exist beyond the institution.
The medium is the ultimate charismatic figure. They need no ordination. Their "gift" is not transmitted through seminary training – it comes otherwise, most often through illness, crisis, upheaval. Weber saw in charisma a force that the institution inevitably seeks to "routinize" – to tame, order, bring under control. The history of spiritualism in the 19th–20th centuries is a history of precisely such routinization: from a spontaneous phenomenon, it transformed into an organized movement with its doctrines, congresses, and hierarchies.
But authentic mediumship always eluded routinization – because its core message is anti-institutional by nature: the authority of the deceased – an absolutely personal authority – needs no intermediary structures. It comes directly. This made and makes mediumship dangerous for any religious authority.
The New Religious Syncretism of 2026
The religious landscape of 2026 is striking in its fragmentation and its simultaneous drive towards synthesis. On one side, fundamentalist movements seeking salvation in doctrinal purity. On the other, a rapidly growing sector of "spirituality without religion": individual practices, not tied to any tradition, gathering elements of Buddhism, shamanism, Jungian thought, New Age, and transpersonal psychology into highly personal syncretic systems.
Mediumship occupies a unique place in this space: it belongs to virtually all traditions simultaneously. Connection with deceased ancestors is a central element of African traditional religions, Kardecist spiritism in Latin America, Shinto, Tibetan Buddhism (the practice of intermediate states – bardo), folk Catholicism, Celtic paganism. Mediumship is perhaps the most universal of all religious practices: it exists everywhere, because everywhere there are the dead and everywhere the living want to speak with them.
In this sense, Grof's transpersonal psychology did something extremely important: it offered a non-denominational language for describing this universal phenomenon. But it also risks becoming yet another institution – another attempt to routinize charisma, to confine the unmanageable within clinical protocols. The authentic mediumship of 2026 resists this – it remains inconvenient, unpredictable, challenging any system.
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V
Cultural Studies of Silence: What the Medium Does Not Say
It is customary to focus on what the medium says. But culturally, what is more interesting is what it remains silent about. What remains at the threshold, what cannot cross from one state to another, what gets stuck in the very act of transmission?
Philosopher Jacques Derrida, in his late essay on mourning, wrote about the impossibility of the "presence" of the deceased: we can only speak of the trace, the imprint that the Other left in us. The presence of the deceased is always the presence of absence, paradoxe du deuil. The medium, claiming to transmit the words of the deceased, inevitably confronts this paradox: what they transmit is already a translation – and like any translation, it carries loss within it.
But – and here we diverge from deconstructivist pessimism – loss does not equal emptiness. Translation carries something. The imprint carries something. The trace carries something. And it is precisely this "something" – that which is preserved in the act of mediumistic transmission despite inevitable losses – that presents the greatest cultural interest.
Silence as Content
In studies of mediumistic sessions across different cultures, a striking fact emerges: the dead very rarely speak about what would interest the living to know. They do not disclose the mysteries of the universe. They do not grant prophecies. They speak about the most mundane things: an unpaid debt, an unspoken apology, a recipe for jam, money hidden in the attic. And it is precisely this banality of the dead that stands as one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the authenticity of the phenomenon. If mediums were constructing images of the dead from their own imagination, they would create images more significant, more "otherworldly."
The banality of the dead suggests that death does not transform the personality into some higher being. The deceased remains themselves – with their unfinished business, their attachments, their grievances. This is a profoundly anti-sentimental insight. And it explains precisely why the mediumistic session so often proves therapeutically effective: it returns the deceased to a human scale – liberating the living from the burden of idealizing or demonizing those they have lost.
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VI
Artificial Intelligence and the Question of Mediumship: Threat or Mirror?
2026 is the year when large language models have become adept enough at convincingly imitating deceased individuals. Upload the correspondence of the deceased – and AI can "speak" in their voice with astonishing plausibility. Several companies already offer such services – "digital heirs," "posthumous avatars," "eternal companions."
This creates a radically new context for understanding mediumship. When a machine imitates the deceased – what happens? Does the living person receive comfort? Undoubtedly. Does the living person maintain the illusion of continuity? Possibly. But simultaneously, a disturbing question arises: how is a "genuine" medium fundamentally different from a language model?
If mediumship is simply a skillful reconstruction of the image of the deceased based on available information, then AI does the same, only better. If, however, there is something in mediumistic contact that cannot be reduced to reconstruction – something that comes rather than being constructed – then this "something" is the central question that mediumship poses to the age of AI.
Artificial intelligence is the perfect mirror for mediumship. It shows exactly what we are willing to accept as contact with the dead. And thereby exposes: our request to the dead is primarily a request concerning our own inability to let go.
But here the transpersonal perspective introduces a fundamental clarification: the inability to let go is not a pathology. It is a consequence of the real presence of the deceased in our psyche, which does not disappear with the death of the body. AI imitates the voice. Authentic mediumistic experience, if such exists, is an encounter with what persists beyond the voice. With what Grof called consciousness extending beyond the biological substrate.
The fundamental difference between an AI avatar and a medium is this: AI says what the deceased could have said based on known data. The medium – in the case of genuine contact – says what the deceased wants to say: what the living did not know and did not expect to hear. It is this "unsolicited content" – a phenomenon known as "veridical information" – that remains the main argument that the mediumistic phenomenon is not reducible to psychological projection.
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VII
Ontology of the Threshold: What It Means to Be 'Between'
Anthropologists have long described the structure of rites of passage: van Gennep identified three phases – separation, liminality, and reincorporation. Liminality – the "in-between" phase – is the heart of the ritual. It is the space where the former identity is destroyed, and a new one not yet formed. It is a space of maximum vulnerability and maximum openness.
The mediumistic session is a ritual with unclosed liminality. Unlike initiations, which conclude with reincorporation into society with a new status, mediumistic contact leaves the boundary open. The deceased does not "return" – they only momentarily signify their existence on the other side. And then they go back. The boundary closes again. But the trace remains.
This trace is not a "message," not "information" in the cybernetic sense. It is a change in the quality of the living person's presence. After an authentic mediumistic session, a person does not "learn" something new – they become something else. Grief, stuck at the level of denial, can shift towards acceptance. Guilt, carried for years, can receive forgiveness – not symbolically, but tangibly, as the lifting of a physical weight.
Transpersonality as an Ontology of the Threshold
Here we arrive at what, in our view, is the deepest contribution of transpersonal psychology: it proposed an ontology of the threshold – a description of that space in which ordinary categories of "I" and "not-I," "here" and "there," "living" and "dead" lose the rigidity of their boundaries.
In 2026, the ontology of the threshold becomes not an academic topic, but a practical necessity. Humanity stands before several thresholds simultaneously: the ecological (the boundary between the era in which Earth was relatively stable and what follows), the technological (the boundary between biological humanity and what it will become in symbiosis with AI), the political (the boundary between the liberal order and that which is replacing it). None of these boundaries is a clear line – all are zones of liminality, zones of "between."
And it is precisely for this reason that mediumship – the practice of working with the threshold – acquires such cultural relevance in 2026. Not because people have begun to believe more in the afterlife. But because they have found themselves in a space that requires the ability to live on the threshold, without being destroyed by its uncertainty.
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VIII
Ethics of the Medium: Responsibility for the Voice
The medium is a figure of extraordinary power. They speak on behalf of those who cannot object. The deceased cannot say, "I did not say that." This makes mediumship potentially one of the most manipulative practices in human history. History knows countless cases where the "voice of the deceased" served as an instrument of extortion, political manipulation, control over inheritance, or holding the living in toxic relationships.
Transpersonal psychology proposed one answer to this ethical problem: professional standards, supervision, a psychotherapeutic context. This is important, but insufficient. For the main ethical problem of mediumship is not the possibility of fraud – it is deeper.
The main ethical problem is this: even a sincere medium, deeply convinced of the authenticity of contact, has no way to separate the voice of the deceased from the voice of their own unconscious. These are ontologically indistinguishable phenomena at the level of experience. And therefore, speaking "on behalf of the deceased," the medium is also always speaking on behalf of themselves – their projections, their desires, their fear of death.
The ethics of the medium, therefore, requires not self-assurance, but ultimate humility: the willingness to acknowledge that the boundary between "I" and "the one who speaks through me" is never definitively drawn. This makes the medium fundamentally different from the prophet or priest – they have no doctrine to protect them from their own uncertainty. They live within it constantly.
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Conclusion
Mediumship as Humanity's Unfinished Project
Returning to where we began: the mediumistic session is a crack in the fabric of knowledge. Not an addition to our worldview, but its constant challenge. And it is precisely this that makes it irreplaceable.
Transpersonal psychology, starting with Grof, gave us a most valuable tool: it showed that the expansion of consciousness beyond the biographical "I" is not an illness, not a deception, not superstition, but a fundamental human capacity. Mediumship is one of the oldest forms of realizing this capacity.
But in 2026, we need to go further than psychology. We need a culture of dying that does not repress death but includes it in the continuity of life. We need a historiography of the living and the dead that does not leave the victims of history unburied. We need an ontology of the threshold that allows existing in a space of uncertainty without being destroyed. And we need an ethics of voice – an understanding that speaking on behalf of another is always an act of tremendous responsibility.
The mediumistic session in 2026 is not a regression to superstition nor a progression towards a "new science." It is a reminder: a reminder that we exist not only in the horizon of the present, but also in a vertical dimension – a vertical dimension extending into the past of our deceased ancestors and into the future of those who will come after us. And that our actions – our words, our healings, our betrayals, and our acts of forgiveness – resonate in both directions of this vertical dimension.
Perhaps this is what Stanislav Grof meant when he wrote about the transpersonal dimension: not merely "going beyond the personal," but entering into responsibility before the larger time. The mediumistic session – in its best, authentic expression – is an act of such responsibility. The living comes to the deceased not for information. They come to complete the unfinished – and thereby slightly lighten the burden the world carries.
Those who are dead are not gone forever.
They are in the woman's breast.
They are in the child that cries.
They are in the burning fire.
The dead are not beneath the earth.
They are in the rustling trees.
They are in the groaning forest.
They are in the flowing water.
They are in the sleeping water.
They are in the hut.
They are in the crowd.
The dead are not dead.
— Birago Diop, "Breath" (Senegal, 1960)
Research Essay • 2026 • Developing the Ideas of Transpersonal Psychology
Genspark AI – "Transpersonality and Mediumistic Sessions in 2026"
Below is an independent research essay, written based on Stanislav Grof's book and considering the two appended AI texts as material from which I consciously distanced myself to avoid repeating their ready-made metaphors, composition, and vocabulary. From Grof, I take not the ready-made rhetoric, but the main methodological requirement: non-ordinary experience cannot be automatically reduced to either pathology or dogma; it must be considered as an event of consciousness with personal, cultural, and spiritual consequences.
Instead of a Preface
In 2026, the discussion about mediumistic sessions can no longer proceed as if we still live either in a Victorian parlor or in the atheist auditorium of the 20th century. On one hand, contemporary culture has reopened the question of expanded states of consciousness: this is evident from the fact that the discussion of psychedelics has moved far beyond the clinic and is increasingly connecting with religious studies, anthropology, art, and the theme of the sacred. On the other hand, technology has created a new type of posthumous presence – the digital double, the voice avatar, the griefbot – and thereby returned the old question in a new form: what exactly continues to live after death – the soul, memory, relationship, speech pattern, or market profile? Ohio State University Chacruna The Atlantic phys.org
This is precisely why the mediumistic session in 2026 should be understood not as a museum relic nor as a sensational "evidentiary device," but as a liminal practice. Its meaning is not exhausted by the question "do spirits exist?" Far more important is the question: what happens to the person, the family, the community, and the culture when they create a form of conversation with the absent one? Here, transpersonality turns out to be not an exotic curiosity, but a name for those experiences in which the personal self ceases to be the sole owner of experience. For Grof, this is linked to an expanded cartography of the psyche, a critique of reductionism, and a warning against the automatic pathologization of non-ordinary states.
1. Transpersonality as a Change in the Scale of the Human
The most valuable aspect of Grof's legacy for our topic lies not in a set of terms, but in a change of scale. For Grof, the human being is not merely a biography, not merely a set of childhood traumas and social roles. Within them reside deeper layers of experience, where individual experience can connect with the archetypal, ancestral, symbolic, and cosmic. For the theme of mediumship, this implies a simple but crucial thing: contact with the "other" does not have to be understood solely as delusion, nor solely as supernatural truth. It can be an event at the boundary of several levels of experienced reality.
From this follows an important methodological turn. The question is not to hastily choose between church faith and laboratory skepticism. The question is to distinguish between types of experience, their structure, consequences, and context. Even skeptically oriented research acknowledges: mediumistic experience cannot simply be mocked, because it touches upon the real psychological fabric of grief, memory, hope, and self-deception. Autoethnographic research within a transpersonal framework has shown that it is necessary here to simultaneously maintain openness to subjective experience and rigorous reflection on cognitive biases, projections, and the desire to believe. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Consequently, transpersonality in 2026 is not a license for gullibility, but a demand for a more complex anthropology. The individual turns out not to be a sealed capsule, but a node of relationships: with the living, the dead, ancestors, images, bodily memory, the language of culture, and history. The mediumistic session merely radicalizes this truth, making it audible.
2. The Psychological Meaning of the Session: Not Proof, but the Work of Grief
The psychological depth of the mediumistic session reveals itself when we stop demanding immediate metaphysical verification from it. More important is to see what it does with grief. Modern psychology of loss has long moved away from the crude model according to which healthy grieving necessarily means breaking all ties with the deceased. On the contrary, the continuing bonds model shows that the bereaved person often does not "let go" of the deceased completely, but shifts the relationship into a different mode – internal, symbolic, ritual, moral. Research on assisted after-death communication through sessions with mediums has shown that participants often report a notable subjective reduction in the severity of grief after such an experience, although the authors themselves emphasize the methodological limitations of these data. Windbridge Institute
Here lies the main boundary between depth psychology and naive sensationalism. The session is valuable not because it "reports news from the afterlife," but because it sometimes creates a form for completing an unfinished conversation. Loss almost always leaves in the person something unsaid: unexpressed gratitude, an unresolved argument, unextended forgiveness, an unasked question. The mediumistic ritual can become a temporary stage where this severed connection is translated from chaotic pain into a structured address. In this sense, the session is not a magic power over death, but a discipline of symbolization.
But here too lies the danger. If the session becomes a substitute for inner work, it begins to perpetuate dependence. Grof warned against the mechanical pathologization of non-ordinary states, but his thought does not mean that any vivid experience is automatically true and beneficial. Genuine psychological maturity requires discernment: does the experience help the person become more integrated, more ethical, more free – or does it make them increasingly suggestible, helpless, and dependent on an external intermediary?
3. Why 2026 Changes the Very Nature of the Question
In 2026, the debate about mediumship can no longer bypass the digital theme. The griefbot, the voice avatar of the deceased, the chat with the "digital double" – this is not just a new service. It is a new anthropological situation. For the first time, technology offers not a memory of the deceased, but their interactive simulation. And here a paradox emerges: the more convincing the imitation of presence, the more difficult it becomes for grief to do its transformative work. An analysis of deadbots in the contemporary press directly formulates this problem: if a person is maintained in a mode of external conversation with the deceased, the loss does not transition into an internal form and become part of the personality; as a result, it is not the memory that deepens, but the subject that becomes emptier. The Atlantic
The legal and ethical layer is even more troubling. It is already clear that digital afterlife raises questions of consent, ownership of voice and image, the fate of data after death, the possibility of its commercial resale, the drift of the digital double's personality, and the secondary trauma of relatives if the service disappears or distorts the image of the deceased. Material on the legal status of AI afterlife emphasizes: the law largely lags behind technology, and the user essentially transfers to the company the power over their posthumous version of themselves. phys.org
Therefore, in 2026, the mediumistic session gains an unexpected competitor – not the church and not science, but the platform. And here a fundamental difference is discovered. The digital surrogate strives for the infinite maintenance of contact; the ritual, by contrast, must be able to conclude. Ethical works on digital afterlife underscore the need for mutual consent, clear transparency, age restrictions, and, crucially, dignified protocols for "termination" or deletion of deadbots. This is a very important insight: human memory needs not only preservation, but also boundaries. Without boundaries, there is neither mourning nor reverence. Springer Link
From this, my main thesis: the mediumistic session of 2026 becomes meaningful not when it promises immortality without loss, but when it helps not to confuse memory with simulation. It must lead to internal transformation, not to a subscription model of posthumous dependency.
4. The Cultural Dimension: The Return of Ritual in the Post-Technological Era
Culturally, 2026 is not a return to old occultism, but a crisis of a culture that long tried to live without dense rituals. The late-modern person is surrounded by information but is not provided with forms of transition. They have access to data, but no language for death; there is psychological education, but no experience of shared silence; there is therapeutic vocabulary, but no common symbolic stage where pain can not only be explained but endured. Against this backdrop, mediumistic practices return not because people suddenly became less rational, but because the rationalized culture proved insufficiently ritualized.
Institutional signals of this turn are noticeable. Major academic and cultural platforms discuss psychedelics not only as pharmacology, but also as an intersection of science, religion, art, indigenous traditions, and the experience of the sacred. This signifies a shift from the narrow "symptom – treatment" model to a broader question of how cultures organize ecstatic, liminal, and transformative experience. For the theme of mediumship, this is directly important: if society is relearning to speak about non-ordinary states not only in the language of illness, then the session ceases automatically to be relegated to the realm of shame or charlatanism. Ohio State University Chacruna
However, cultural recognition does not equal cultural maturity. Where an old taboo disappears, a market for impressions quickly arises. Therefore, one of the main tasks of 2026 becomes the discernment between ritual and service, between initiation and the industry of experiences, between spiritual work and emotional consumption. The mediumistic session degrades when it begins to sell intense sensations as a commodity of identity. It matures when it returns a person to responsibility before memory, before the body, and before the word.
5. The Religious Studies Meaning: The Session as a Paraliturgy of Absence
From a religious studies perspective, the mediumistic session is interesting because it coincides neither with a liturgical service nor with private fantasy. It is a particular form of ritual where the central subject becomes not doctrine, but the relationship to the absent one. In traditional religion, the deceased is embedded in the cosmos of prayer, commemoration, rites, and calendar. In secular culture, they are often translated either into the psychology of memory or into the archive. The mediumistic session emerges as an intermediate form: it attempts not just to remember the deceased, but to momentarily restore the addressivity of the connection.
This is precisely why the session cannot be evaluated solely by the criterion of "true/false." Its religious studies function is that it creates a temporary space of presence where the living person stops speaking about the deceased in the third person and begins addressing them in the second person. This radically changes the structure of experience. Even leaving the question of afterlife ontology open, the very act of address already restructures the subject: it translates memory from storage mode to encounter mode.
But such a paraliturgy is particularly vulnerable. Without ethics, it easily becomes profanation. Here, three conditions are important. First, humility: no one has the right to declare themselves the absolute master of the invisible. Second, boundaries: the ritual should not replace medical and psychotherapeutic help where a person is in a state of severe disorganization. Third, non-commercial seriousness: if the conversation with the deceased is serviced by algorithms of engagement, advertising, and manipulation, it ceases to be a ritual and becomes an exploitation of the sacred. Springer Link The Atlantic
6. Historiosophy: Who Speaks Through Us When We Speak with the Dead
The deepest aspect of the theme is revealed when we stop thinking of the dead solely as individual figures of personal grief. In 2026, the mediumistic question concerns not only the family, but also history. Contemporary humanity lives amidst masses of unlived past: wars, deportations, repressions, colonial violences, family silences, archival voids. History long ago ceased to be only a chronicle of events; it has become a psychic environment. Through the speech of the living, those who were not allowed to speak, who were not mourned, whose fates were erased from the official narrative, continue to act.
In this sense, the mediumistic session can be understood as the ultimate figure of historical memory. Not because it literally "conjures the spirits of victims," but because it makes manifest the very structure of historical existence: the past does not depart until a language for its acceptance is found. Transpersonality here means that the human psyche is not exhausted by the individual date of birth. It carries the inertia of lineage, the style of silence of an epoch, the unfinished reactions of preceding generations. Grof's critique of a purely biographical understanding of the psyche helps to see this transpersonal depth, even if we do not accept all of his metaphysical conclusions.
The history of psychology is also important. The contemporary neglect of mediumistic research is not the neutral outcome of a "victory of science over superstition." Historians show that the birth of experimental psychology was accompanied by a sharp debate about the status of mediumistic and trance phenomena: William James saw their serious study as one of the tasks of psychology, while another line of the discipline built its identity through a sharp rejection of such topics. This means that today's reaction to mediumship often inherits not only data, but also old academic affects. Taylor & Francis Online
Hence the historiosophical conclusion: in 2026, the mediumistic session is interesting not as a return to the past, but as a symptom that history itself has ceased to fit the form of dry knowledge. People are seeking not just information about the past, but ways to enter into a moral relationship with it.
7. What a Mature Session Could Look Like in 2026
If one attempts to formulate the ideal of a mature practice, it would not be a show and not a digital prosthesis of immortality. It would be a time-limited, ethically framed, psychologically gentle ritual that allows for mystery but does not exploit suggestibility; works with memory but does not parasitize grief; helps symbolize loss but does not replace all of life with an endless address to the absent one.
Such a session does not promise a person the abolition of death. It offers something more difficult and more human: to learn to live so that the deceased does not disappear, but also does not capture all the space of the living. In this sense, transpersonality is not an escape from reality, but an expansion of realism. It reminds that a person consists not only of neurochemistry and not only of private memories, but also of relationships that surpass their current "I."
Conclusion
Transpersonality and mediumistic sessions in 2026 should be thought of neither as a marginal fad nor as definitive proof of the afterlife. It is a nodal point where four great questions of contemporaneity meet: how we experience grief, how we distinguish memory from simulation, how we return ritual to an exhausted culture, and how we hear the unfinished past within our own inner life.
To put it briefly, the mediumistic session today is an exam for the maturity of civilization. An immature culture turns the dead into content, pain into a subscription, and mystery into marketing. A mature culture does the opposite: it creates forms of memory that deepen the person, not enslave them; it acknowledges non-ordinary experience without renouncing critical reason; it allows for a spiritual dimension without losing ethical boundaries. It is in this field that transpersonality of 2026 unfolds – as a person's ability to be larger than themselves, without ceasing to be responsible for what they do with the invisible.
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