When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  I have had the privilege to know Albert personally and meet him on various occasions. Over the years, I have developed great affection and deep admiration for him, not only as an outstanding scientist, but also as an extraordinary human being. After more than a century of a full, blessed, and productive life, he radiates amazing vitality, curiosity, and love for all creation. A few months ago, when he spent a day with the group of our trainees in Gruyeres, Switzerland, we all felt that we were not listening to a scientific lecture, but had a darshan with a spiritual teacher. We had no doubt that Albert had joined the group of great scientists—like Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton—whose rigorous pursuit of their discipline brought recognition of the miraculous divine order underlying the world of matter and the natural phenomena. He will remain a model and shining example for me for the rest of my life.

  My list of acknowledgements would not be complete without expressing my profound gratitude to Christina, my wife, lover, best friend, co-worker, and fellow seeker, for all the inspiration I have received from her over the years and for everything she has contributed to my life and to our joint projects. Among others, she founded the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN), has made unique contributions to the understanding of the relationship between addiction, attachment, and the spiritual quest, and has codeveloped with me Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful form of therapy and self-exploration. The breathwork workshops and training we have jointly conducted all over the world have been the source of extraordinary observations that provided the material for many of the stories in this book. Christina played an important role in many of these stories and was present “when the impossible happened.” I am aware that writing this book and many others before often encroached on our private life. I would like to use this opportunity to thank Christina for her patience and understanding and extend to her my apologies.

  My special thanks go to two people who have played an important role in the publication of this book. Tami Simon, whom I admire and appreciate very much, has created single-handedly Sounds True, an audio, video, book, and music publishing company, which has grown from one person working in a single room to an organization that has its own state-of-the-art facilities and employs over fifty people. Sounds True recordings have made it possible for hundreds of thousands of listeners to get acquainted with the ideas of spiritual teachers and pioneers of new paradigm science, alternative healing, consciousness research, and transpersonal psychology. I appreciate very much that Tami decided to include the present work in her new publishing project. I am also grateful to Alice Feinstein for the expertise and enthusiasm with which she edited the manuscript and for her advice and suggestions that I have found very helpful in finding the most appropriate format for sharing my stories with the readers.

  PROLOGUE: Discovering Cosmic Consciousness My First LSD Session

  The experience I am about to relate was without any doubt the single most important and influential experience of my entire life. Although it lasted only a few hours—and its most significant part only about ten minutes—it sent me professionally on a radically different course than the one for which I had been trained and prepared. It set for me a trajectory that I have been following with great passion and determination until this very day. It also instigated in me a process of profound personal transformation and spiritual awakening. Today, almost fifty years later, I look at this experience as an initiation similar to that offered to the participants in ancient mysteries.

  This story will take us back to the end of my medical studies and beginnings of my professional career as a psychiatrist. In the mid-1950s, the psychiatric department of the School of Medicine of Charles University in Prague, where I had worked as a student volunteer since the fourth year of my medical studies, conducted research with Melleril. This was one of the early tranquilizers, produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. My preceptor had a good working relationship with Sandoz and received from time to time complimentary samples of their products. As part of this cooperation, he received for testing a supply of diethylamide of lysergic acid, or LSD-25, a then—new experimental substance with extraordinary psychoactive properties.

  The astonishing effects of this compound on the human psyche had been discovered in April 1943 by the leading chemist at Sandoz, Dr. Albert Hofmann, who accidentally intoxicated himself when he was synthesizing it in his lab. When it happened, he was forced to interrupt his work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon, because he felt remarkable restlessness and dizziness. This developed into a dreamlike state with a stream of fantastic images and a kaleidoscopic play of colors that lasted approximately two hours.

  Three days later, Dr. Hofmann decided to take a measured dose of LSD to confirm his suspicion that his abnormal mental state was due to intoxication by LSD-25. Although this was a reasonable assumption, he could not imagine how the drug would have gotten into his system. In this planned self-experiment, he ingested 250 micrograms or gammas (millionths of a gram) of LSD which, “being a conservative man,” he considered to be a “miniscule dose.” This assessment was based on the fact that ergot alkaloids are usually taken in milligram dosages. He had no way of knowing that he ingested a sub stance of unprecedented efficacy, the most powerful psychoactive drug ever discovered. In clinical work conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, the dose Albert Hofmann had taken was considered a high dose, requiring hours of preparation, supervision by two guides, overnight stay in the treatment center, and subsequent follow-up interviews.

  Because many of the stories in this book describe events associated with LSD, I will give here a brief description of this historical experiment. Within an hour after ingesting 250 micrograms of LSD-25, Albert Hofmann was unable to work and asked his assistant to accompany him home. Because of war restrictions imposed on the use of automobiles, a car was not available, and they had to use bicycles. Hofmann’s account of what it was like to cycle through the streets of Basel under the influence of a high dose of LSD has since become legendary. After arriving home, he felt possessed by demonic forces that had taken control of his mind and body and was afraid that he was going insane. His friendly neighbor, who brought him some milk, had the appearance of a dangerous witch and seemed to be hexing him. His physical distress was so extreme that he was sure he was dying, and he asked his assistant to call a doctor.

  By the time the doctor arrived on the scene, the peak of the crisis had already passed, and Hofmann’s condition had radically changed. He was not dying any longer. He had experienced his own birth and felt reborn, revitalized, and rejuvenated. On the day after the LSD experiment, he was in excellent physical and mental condition. He wrote a report about his extraordinary experience to his boss, Dr. Arthur Stoll. It just happened that Dr. Stoll’s son Werner A. Stoll was a psychiatrist practicing in Zurich and was very interested in exploring the effects of LSD in a clinical trial. His pioneering report about the effects of LSD-25 in a group of “normal volunteers” and psychiatric patients was published in 1947 and became overnight a sensation in the scientific world.

  Werner Stoll’s early LSD study showed that minuscule dosages of this extraordinary substance—in the order of millionths of a gram—were able to profoundly change the consciousness of his experimental subjects for a period of six to ten hours. Sandoz representatives now made samples of LSD available to researchers and therapists all over the world and requested feedback about its effects and its potential. They wanted to know if there was legitimate use for this substance in psychology and psychiatry. Dr. Stoll’s pilot study suggested some interesting similarities between the LSD experience and the symptomatology of naturally occurring psychoses. It seemed, therefore, that the study of such “experimental psychoses” could provide interesting insights into the causes of naturally occurring psychotic states, particularly schizophrenia, the most enigmatic of psychiatric disorders.

  The insert from Sandoz accompanying the sample of LSD also contained a little note that profoundly changed my perso
nal and professional life. It suggested that this substance could be used as a revolutionary, unconventional teaching tool for mental health professionals working with psychotic patients. The possibility of experiencing a reversible “experimental psychosis” seemed to provide a unique opportunity for psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, social workers, and students of psychiatry to gain intimate personal knowledge of the inner world of their clients and make it possible to understand them better, to be able to communicate with them more effectively, and as a result, to treat them more successfully.

  I was extremely excited about such an extraordinary training opportunity and asked my preceptor, Dr. George Roubíček, for an LSD session. Unfortunately, the staff of the psychiatric clinic decided that, for a variety of reasons, students would not be accepted as volunteers. However, Dr. Roubíček was too busy to spend hours at a time in the LSD sessions of his experimental subjects and needed help. There were no objections to my supervising psychedelic sessions of others and keeping the records of their experiences. I thus had sat in on the LSD sessions of many Czech psychiatrists and psychologists, prominent artists, and other interested people before I myself was qualified as an experimental subject. By the time I graduated from the medical school and qualified for a session, my appetite had been repeatedly whetted by fantastic accounts of the experiences of others that I had witnessed.

  In the fall of 1956, after my graduation from medical school, I was finally able to have my own session. Dr. Roubíček’s area of special interest was research of the electric activity of the brain. One of the conditions for participating in the LSD study was to agree to have an EEG recording taken before, during, and after the session. In addition, at the time of my session, he was particularly fascinated by what was called “driving” or “entraining” the brain waves. This involved exposure to various frequencies of flashing stroboscopic light and finding out to what extent the brain waves in the suboccipital area of the brain could be “entrained,” that is, forced to pickup the incoming frequency. Eager to have the LSD experience, I readily agreed to have my EEG taken and my brain waves “driven.” My brother, Paul, who was a medical student at that time and was deeply interested in psychiatry, agreed to supervise my session.

  I started feeling the effects of LSD about forty-five minutes after ingestion. At first, it was the feeling of slight malaise, lightheadedness, and nausea. Then these symptoms disappeared and were replaced by a fantastic display of incredibly colorful abstract and geometrical visions unfolding in rapid kaleidoscopic sequences. Some of them resembled exquisite stained glass windows in medieval Gothic cathedrals, others arabesques from Moslem mosques. To describe the exquisite nature of these visions, I made references to Sheherezade and A Thousand and One Nights and to the stunning beauty of Alhambra and Xanadu. At the time, these were the only associations I was able to make. Today, I believe that my psyche somehow managed to produce a wild array of fractal images, similar to graphic representations of nonlinear equations that can be produced by modern computers.

  As the session continued, my experience moved through and beyond this realm of exquisite aesthetic rapture and changed into an encounter and confrontation with my unconscious psyche. It is difficult to find words for the intoxicating fugue of emotions, visions, and illuminating insights into my life and existence in general that became available to me on this level of my psyche. It was so profound and shattering that it instantly overshadowed my previous interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. I could not believe how much I learned in those few hours. The breathtaking aesthetic feast and the rich plethora of psychological insights would have been sufficient, in and of themselves, to make my first encounter with LSD a truly memorable experience.

  However, there was another aspect of my session that surpassed everything else that happened. Between the third and fourth hours of my session, Dr. Roubíček’s research assistant appeared and announced that it was time for the EEG experiment. She took me to a small cabin, carefully pasted electrodes all over my scalp, and asked me to lie down and close my eyes. Then she placed a giant stroboscopic light above my head and turned it on. At this time, the effects of the drug were culminating, and that immensely enhanced the impact of the strobe.

  I was hit by a vision of light of incredible radiance and supernatural beauty. It made me think of the accounts of mystical experiences I had read about in spiritual literatures, in which the visions of divine light were compared with the incandescence of “millions of suns.” It crossed my mind that this was what it must have been like at the epicenter of the atomic explosions in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Today, I think it was more like Dharmakaya, or the Primary Clear Light, the luminosity of indescribable brilliance that, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol), appears to us at the moment of our death.

  I felt that a divine thunderbolt had catapulted my conscious self out of my body. I lost my awareness of the research assistant, the laboratory, the psychiatric clinic, Prague, and then the planet. My consciousness expanded at an inconceivable speed and reached cosmic dimensions. There were no more boundaries or difference between me and the universe. The research assistant carefully followed the protocol. She gradually shifted the frequency of the strobe from two to sixty hertz and back again, and then put it for a short time in the middle of the alpha band, theta band, and finally the delta band. While this was happening, I found myself at the center of a cosmic drama of unimaginable dimensions.

  In the astronomy literature that I later discovered and read over the years, I found names for some of the fantastic experiences that I underwent during those extraordinary ten minutes of clock time—Big Bang, passage through black and white holes, identification with exploding supernova and collapsing stars, and other strange phenomena. Although I had no adequate words for what had happened to me, there was no doubt in my mind that my experience was very close to those I knew from the great mystical scriptures of the world. Even though my psyche was deeply affected by the effects of LSD, I was able to see the irony and paradox of the situation. The Divine manifested and took over in the middle of a serious scientific experiment, involving a substance produced in the test tube of a twentieth-century chemist, and conducted in a psychiatric clinic of a country that was dominated by the Soviet Union and had a Marxist regime.

  This day marked the beginning of my radical departure from traditional thinking in psychiatry and from the monistic materialism of Western science. I emerged from this experience touched to the core and immensely impressed by its power. Not believing at that time, as I do today, that the potential for a mystical experience is the natural birthright of all human beings, I attributed everything to the effect of LSD. I felt strongly that the study of non-ordinary states of consciousness, in general, and those induced by psychedelics, in particular, was by far the most interesting area of psychiatry I could imagine. I realized that, under the proper circumstances, psychedelic experiences—to a much greater degree than dreams, which play such a crucial role in psychoanalysis—are truly, using Freud’s words, a “royal road into the unconscious.” And right there and then, I decided to dedicate my life to the study of non-ordinary states of consciousness.

  PART 1: THE MYSTERY OF SYNCHRONICITY: Twilight of the Clockwork Universe

  Many of us have experienced instances in our lives when the seemingly logical and predictable fabric of everyday reality, woven from complex chains of causes and effects, seems to tear apart, and we experience stunning and highly implausible coincidences. During episodes of holotropic states of consciousness—holotropic meaning “moving toward wholeness”—these violations of linear causality can occur so frequently that they raise serious questions about the worldview with which we have all grown up. Since this extraordinary phenomenon plays an important role in many stories described in this book, I will briefly discuss its relevance for the understanding of the nature of reality, consciousness, and the human psyche.

  The scientist who brought the problem of meaningful coincide
nces defying rational explanation to the attention of academic circles was the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung. Aware of the fact that unswerving belief in rigid determinism represented the cornerstone of the Western scientific worldview, he hesitated for more than twenty years before making his discovery public. Expecting strong disbelief and harsh criticism from his colleagues, he wanted to be sure that he could back his heretic claims with hundreds of examples. He finally described his groundbreaking observations in his famous essay entitled “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” (Jung 1960).

  Jung began his essay with examples of extraordinary coincidences occurring sometimes in everyday life. He acknowledged the Austrian Lamarckian biologist Paul Kammerer, whose tragic life was popularized in Arthur Koestler’s book The Case of the Midwife Toad (Koestler, 1971), as one of the first people to be interested in this phenomenon and its scientific implications. One of the remarkable coincidences Kammerer had reported involved a situation wherein one day his streetcar ticket bore the same number as the theater ticket he bought immediately afterward. In addition, later that evening, the same sequence of digits was given to him as a telephone number for which he had asked.

  In the same work, Jung also related the amusing story told by the famous French astronomer Flammarion about a certain Monsieur Deschamps and a special kind of plum pudding. As a boy, Deschamps was given a piece of this rare pudding by a Monsieur de Fontgibu. For the ten years that followed, he had no opportunity to taste this delicacy until he saw the same pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant. He asked the waiter for a serving, but it turned out that the last piece of the pudding had already been ordered and eaten by Monsieur de Fontgibu, who just happened to be in the same restaurant at that time.