I grew up in Czechoslovakia and came from an upper-middle class family, at least in central European terms. My mother came from an affluent family, and my father was a self-made man. At the time when the Communists came, he was the vice president of a large pharmaceutical company, and lived in circles where family stability was expected. The family was extremely important, and it was certainly expected to have children. It was considered a failure not to. Then powerful social-political factors came that had a very disruptive influence. First six years of the Nazi occupation and three years of relative freedom, and then the Communist era which was really hostile to the social strata that I came from. People who had any social position or possessions and the intelligentsia were considered class enemies.

Another important thing is that this system started controlling people people's private lives. For example, it was extremely difficult to choose where you were going to go after you finished your studies. I studied medicine, and when one finished the school of medicine, one got the demand of a hospital anywhere in the country. There was simply an assignment. It was like being drafted. You could not choose where you wanted to go or what you wanted to do. I got married very shortly before finishing medicine. My wife and I were assigned to two completely different places. She stayed on and taught anatomy in Prague, and I was assigned to a place that was 2 1/2 hours travel distance away. I could only come to Prague on the weekends and sometimes in the middle of the week. Finally I made it back to Prague so we were in one place, but then the question was finding an apartment. An apartment was not something you could just get; it was not available. So we ended up living with my parents. At that time I also felt very strongly that I did not want to stay in Czechoslovakia, and dissolved the marriage that was childrenless. Where I was psychologically, children were not even a question under those circumstances.

Then I came to the United States. For a while, I did not find anybody I would like to found a family with. I just had some relationships, and then I finally got married to Joan. At that time I was really ready to have a family, but we could not. We were not using any contraception, but it just did not happen. Then a situation developed between us that I was glad we did not have children. When I finally found Christina, she was in a situation where she already had children. She felt she was done with that. I very much wanted to have children, and it just did not happen. But I was able to develop a very good relationship with her children. She was separated and the children were assigned to her husband in a court decision, but they spent vacations with us. Recently they started coming for more and more time. One is already in college, and the other enters college next year. I have no difficulties relating to them. I feel that they are my children. We have had wonderful times, doing treasure hunts and playing. Sarah spent a whole year with us once.

When I moved from Czechoslovakia, I got beyond the point where I expected something from children. I became much more aware of the fact that children are not really your own. You do not use them for any purpose simply of your own. You become a channel for life to come in through. I felt Christina and I were capable of providing a very rich environment for a child in terms of resources, in terms of access to different sources of knowledge and access to different parts of the world. My idea was to observe to which of those opportunities the child would resonate, and then let them grow. I love to watch the development. I have been very involved in dealing with childhood because of my work with breathing, the regressive work going back to childhood. So I spend a lot of time in reconstructive work about childhood. I feel a tremendous respect for and interest in personal development. And I love the physical contact, the cuddling. When we go somewhere I always end up with children. It is very interesting for me to somehow introduce children to new areas. To stimulate their fantasy and imaginations, treasure hunts for example. I really regress and it gives me an opportunity to connect with my own childhood. I do not expect anything from them, but there is sort of a vicarious experience of my inner child in that kind of situation.

Love and warmth comes through for me with so many people. It is like I have many children. There are probably three areas where this aspect of my life is expressing itself. One is directly with Christina's children. Another is in the process work where people are regressed, dealing with childhood issues. I actually enter the role of parent in that situation. And the third one is more abstract, sublimated, and creative. It is my writing and painting which are children of a different kind. I am aware that when I am writing or creating something it is coming from the same source, addressing the same needs. There are two parental aspects of creativity. One is the direct expression which is like generating children, and the other is the educational part of it, being a means through which you offer information or guidance to whoever can use it.

It might be helpful to people for me to speak about my process of going from desiring a child of my own to finding satisfaction in this larger sphere. I think a lot of the frustration of not having children is that people do not connect with their own inner child. For many people having children allows them to connect with their inner child. However, people who get involved with some kind of really deep kind of self- exploration, whether it is meditation or experiential psychotherapy or some other means, go back to childhood and experience completion of the situations they have not emotionally digested. They connect with the positive aspects of the childhood, the childlike element, in relation to the world. It is important to have a childlike element. To the extent you have this, you will miss less having children. Certainly for me, my own creativity has been some kind of surrogate for having children.

Another important thing for me in coming to terms with this was to look at the situation in the world. The last thing we need in the world in an indiscriminate increase of numbers of people. That makes childless-ness somehow much more acceptable for me. Also there is the fact that children are offered these days a pretty uncertain future. A lot of the children particularly in the teenage group are going through a deep existential crisis. I have seen studies about it. They do not see future. They do not expect to have a chance to grow up. So I would like to see the world to look somewhat different before I would feel comfortable bringing new people into it. I would rather focus on changing it.

I have become really interested in the developments of artificial creation of life, test tube babies, the efforts put into preserving embryos that are not viable, and some of the really strange developments in these areas. It is possible technically these days to keep an embryo alive from fertilized egg through any stage of pregnancy. The absurdity of it and the incredible financial means that go into it. Christina's cousin who is in obstetritics tells us that it costs about $100,000 to care for one of these immature fetuses for one month.

Because it can be done, it is being done. There is a lot of distorted personal motivation going on, people who want fame or dissertations. Also there is pressure from childless people who are willing to use any means possible to have a child. If you bring into it the kind of insights you are getting in consciousness research, you see there is consciousness in the fetus. What happens in those early stages has tremendous impact on future development. When we create people this way, we are creating a distorted human situation in the world. For $1.00 a day you could keep alive a healthy Indian child, and putting $100,000 into a fetus is absurd. There is something really wrong about the way we are thinking.

There are a lot of things we can do for children without having them. But they would not be your personal children. People are starting to have some transpersonal awareness. First there is the Kahil Gibran who has the insight that children are not your children anyway. They come through you, but they are not your children, and in another sense, other people's children are your children. So that whole issue of personally having or not having your own children becomes somehow diluted through these transpersonal insights. Then there would not be so many people wanting to have children of their own by any technical means, including test tube babies. The question with all these techniques is, where do we draw the line? The first thing is that when a technique can be done, it very likely will be done, but then you have lawyers who want to make money, and issues related to malpractice insurance. After a while, when it can be done, it has to be done. If a doctor will not save life when it is possible, it might be a malpractice issue.

When I was in medical school, I did a few abortions because that was part of the training. Today I can understand the people who are doing it, but I would not like to be in that role. I have a very similar attitude with the test tube baby work. I understand how it can happen. I do not neces-sarily blame people who are doing it, but I would not like to be in a role where I had to make those kinds of decisions.

Caesarean birth, while it is a technique, is very different because of the element of saving life. You are clearly saving the mother and not really hurting anybody, because that baby would have a trauma of a different kind going through vaginal birth, so it is just a situation that is happening already. Whereas in a test tube baby you are initiating something that would not happen already. I read of situations in Australia where they had fetuses on ice, and one of them took, really a weird Frankenstein type of situation. Researchers are looking at just one aspect of it, the biological, but ignoring something that we already know, that they are also shaping the emotional life of the child. They do not take into consideration the dimension of human consciousness.

It seems to me bizarre to exert all this effort in creating life, just focusing on technical wizardry that does not have much deeper meaning, while we have a world situation that is life-endangering.

So many of the destructive things in the world come from an ego position, people not having a sufficiently broad perspective. It is important for each of us to develop such a strategy that we somehow work more on ourselves than on the world. So that something deep inside ourselves is ahead of our external actions instead of assuming that we are already perfect as we are and from that place trying to change the world. Because the deeper you go, the more general and broader the wisdom you can tap.

2004 Update: Stan requested we add the following:

Sixteenth International Transpersonal Conference: Mythic Imagination and Modern Society: The Re-Enchantment of the World

Riviera Resort in Palm Springs, CA, June 13-18, 2004 (June 12-20 with pre- and post-conferences).

Program Coordinators: Stanislav and Christina Grof

We will explore how the new understanding of the nature and function of myth revealed by the work of C. G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, and others has revolutionized thinking in many areas of modern life ­ psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, biology, anthropology, philosophy, theology, history, economy, and politics.

These pioneers have shown that myths are not fictitious products of human fantasy, but reflections of archetypes, primordial cosmic organizing principles that form and inform the dynamics of the psyche, events and movements in human history, and evolutionary processes in nature.

In view of these findings, it is important that we identify the mythic motifs and forces underlying the current global crisis that threatens survival of the human species. It is equally important to search for a new myth that would inspire peaceful coexistence, tolerance, cooperation, and synergy of various human groups, as well as reverence for life and respect for ecological imperatives.

The Sixteenth International Transpersonal Conference will focus on the importance of myth in human history and modern society. Like previous ITA events, the format of this meeting will combine lectures, experiential sessions, rituals, music, dance, and visual arts. The conference program will include celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joseph Campbell, the greatest mythologist of the twentieth century.

For more information: Visit our website at: www.itaconferences.org Call us at: (415) 575-6115

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