When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  To our astonishment, the double rainbow appeared and disappeared three times. In the mood we were in, it was difficult not to interpret this magnificent display as a very auspicious sign. This incredible celestial spectacle would have been enough, in and of itself, to impart to the wedding an air of numinosity. But it also involved some extraordinary synchronicities. We found out that the name of the place, Bifrost, meant in the old Icelandic language the “Rainbow Bridge of the Gods” and, in the ancient Viking wedding ritual we were performing, the rainbow was the symbol for the joining of Father Sky and Mother Earth. It was easy to infer that this event had some deeper cosmic significance.

  In addition, for me the rainbow had a profound personal significance and was connected with another interesting synchronicity. During my first year in the United States, I invited my parents to join me, and we spent two months traveling around the country, combining visits to prominent representatives of psychedelic and consciousness research with sightseeing and camping in national parks and other places of natural beauty. Eager to see everything there was to see, we covered more than 17,000 miles in eight weeks.

  Needless to say, our ambitious itinerary included the spectacular American Southwest. One day, late in the afternoon of a very hot day, as we were crossing the New Mexico desert on our way to Santa Fe, it started to rain. It was a very welcome change after many hours of scorching heat. The sun was setting, gracing the sky behind us with a rich panoply of beautiful colors. All of a sudden, a magnificent full rainbow appeared in the sky in front of us. The highway was absolutely straight, like an arrow shot from our car toward the horizon, crossing it precisely at the rainbow’s right radix. I instinctively stepped on the gas pedal, eager to come as close as possible before the rainbow would disappear.

  The rainbow remained in the sky, and it grew bigger and brighter as we approached. It stayed in place until our car drove directly into its radix. At that moment, it was as if we had passed through a gateway into another reality. We were suddenly in a realm of indescribable beauty, with gossamer veils of rainbow colors dancing and swirling around us, exploding into myriad shining little diamonds. I stopped the car, and the three of us sat there astonished, admiring this incredible spectacle. For me this event triggered the most powerful ecstatic experience I have ever had in my life without the help of any mind-altering substances or devices. It lasted the rest of the evening, and even next morning I could feel its afterglow.

  After a good night’s sleep, we decided to visit the Museum of Navajo Art in Santa Fe. Its main hall was a large round structure resembling a kiva, ceremonial chamber of American Pueblo Indians. The most conspicuous piece of decoration in it was a large and very thin stylized female figure, whose body consisted of parallel longitudinal stripes. It stretched in a U shape all around the entire hall, with the exception of the entrance, which was flanked by her head on one side and a short skirt and legs on the other. The native guide explained to us that this was the Rainbow Maiden, a very popular Navajo deity. She played a crucial role in Navajo mythology, which reflected the importance of rain in this and region. The guide shared with us the Navajo belief that if the Rainbow Maiden liked some people, she would envelop, embrace, and kiss them. This would result in an experience of ecstatic rapture that these individuals remember their entire lives. He essentially described what had happened to me on our way to Santa Fe; this auspicious experience has remained vivid in my memory until this very day.

  The set and setting for the Bifrost wedding ceremony could not have been more magnificent. We got married at three o’clock in the morning in an old volcanic crater at the time when the rising sun reappeared in the sky after disappearing for only an hour behind the horizon. Joseph Campbell was the surrogate father who brought Joan to the improvised altar, and the joiner and officiator was Huston Smith. Walter Houston Clark offered as benediction Sarah’s pledge from the Old Testament: “I will go where you go and your people will be my people.” After exchanging rings of a Viking design and sealing the union with a kiss, we ran through a gauntlet of our friends, who were holding branches with green foliage and looked like Macduff’s army from Macbeth, carrying Birnam woods to Dunsinane castle.

  We got only about an hour’s sleep because the group had to leave early for a long hike to one of Iceland’s spectacular glaciers. I woke up after an hour of dozing off, ready to embark on the trip. As soon as I opened my eyes, I sensed that something was terribly wrong. All the thrill and ecstatic feelings of the preceding day were gone; I felt sober and somber. The wave of excitement we had experienced the last few days suddenly felt illusory and deceptive. And what was worse, marrying Joan suddenly seemed like a serious error.

  Our final destination was a primitive lodge on one of Iceland’s largest glaciers that had a communal dormitory and one single room. The group unanimously decided that this precious commodity would serve as the bridal chamber, where Joan and I would spend the next night. I managed to keep my concerns to myself, and things continued to look wonderful on the outside. The group was still feeling the emotional echoes of the Viking nuptial ritual, and the spellbinding Icelandic scenery was truly extraordinary. After a glorious day in the mountains and a night stay in the lodge, we returned to Bifrost for the closing ceremony of the conference.

  The Icelandic meeting, the first of a series of international transpersonal conferences, was an unforgettable event for all of us who shared in it, and our wedding was without any doubt its highlight. However, once we returned to the United States, my dismal premonitions began to materialize. Various problems Joan and I encountered shortly after our return started to take a toll on our relationship.

  On the way back from Iceland, we stopped in Miami, where Joan introduced me to her parents, John and Eunice. They had no idea that Joan had plans to be married until she broke the news about our Icelandic wedding in a telephone call. I clearly did not meet the standards of the nouveau riche world of their Miami island house. However, they reluctantly accepted me, probably because, knowing Joan’s rebellious spirit, they expected worse. The first three sentences Joan’s father, John, asked after she told him she was married were: “Is he black? Is he a Communist? Does he have a beard?” And he felt somewhat reassured when the answers to all three of those questions were negative.

  Joan left her job with the anthropological department of the University of Miami and moved to my apartment in Baltimore. She made several unsuccessful attempts to get a teaching or research position at the Johns Hopkins University and at the University of Maryland. The loss of her academic identity seemed to take a big toll on her emotional condition. I offered her to join me in our project of psychedelic therapy with terminal cancer patients. She enjoyed being a cotherapist in LSD and DPT (dipropyltryptamine) sessions, but had to do it gratis, because there was no salaried position available at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. A trip to Japan intended as a honeymoon further increased the tension between us.

  Fortunately, I was offered an advance royalty from Viking Press to write two books on LSD. At a party in Leni and Bob Schwartz’s house in New York City, we ran into an old friend of mine, Michael Murphy, the cofounder of the Esalen Institute. After a brief discussion, Michael invited us to move to Big Sur as Esalen’s guests and offered me the position of Scholar-in-Residence. A vacation in Austria and Italy and the move to Esalen temporarily took some of the pressure from our relationship and brought a momentary relief. However, it did not last very long; the differences between us continued to grow, and our relationship rapidly deteriorated. For some time, we tried to stay together, mostly because we did not want to disappoint the group of our Bifrost friends, who had created and experienced our beautiful wedding ceremony, and particularly Joe Campbell. Joe criticized, in his lectures, modern marriage for lacking a solid mythological grounding and offered a glowing description of our wedding as a model of a mythologically informed marriage that would last forever. When our marriage finally fell apart, and it was clear that divorce was inevitabl
e, dealing with Joe’s disappointment was one of the most difficult parts of the process.

  The Icelandic adventure was a fascinating experience of archetypal energies breaking into everyday life and creating astonishing synchronicities. However, it taught me an important lesson. I learned not to trust unconditionally the seductive power of such experiences and the enchantment and ego inflation that they engender. The ecstatic feelings associated with emergence of archetypal forces do not guarantee a positive outcome. It is essential to refrain from acting out while we are under their spell and not to make any important decisions until we have again both feet on the ground.

  THE PLAY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Swami Muktananda and Siddha Yoga

  Over the years, my wife, Christina, and I have observed in our work and personally experienced many remarkable synchronicities. Sometimes these were isolated occurrences; other times they came in entire chains and aggregates. However, there was a period of eight years in our lives when we had the opportunity to encounter and observe synchronicities on a mass scale. This was the time of our close relationship with Swami Muktananda, Indian spiritual teacher and head of the ancient Siddha Yoga lineage. In 1975, when Christina and I met in Big Sur, California, and started working and living together, Christina was Swami Muktananda’s student and ardent follower. She had met him when he had stopped in Honolulu during his first world tour, accompanied by Ram Dass, famous Harvard psychology professor and psychedelic researcher turned spiritual seeker and teacher.

  Christina was at that time experiencing a powerful awakening of Kundalini, which had started during the delivery of her first child, Nathaniel, and had been further intensified and deepened by the delivery of her daughter, Sarah, two years later. According to the yogic tradition, Kundalini, also called the Serpent Power, is the generative cosmic energy, feminine in nature, which is responsible for the creation of the universe. It has its representation in the subtle or energy body, a field that pervades and permeates, as well as surrounds, the human physical body. In its latent form, it resides in the sacral area, at the base of the spine. The name Kundalini means literally “the coiled one,” and it is usually depicted as a snake twisted three and half times around the lingam, symbol of the male generative power. This dormant energy can become activated by meditation, specific exercises, the intervention of an experienced spiritual teacher (guru), or for unknown reasons.

  The activated Kundalini, called shakti, rises through the nadis, channels or conduits in the subtle body. As it ascends, it clears old traumatic imprints and opens the centers of psychic and spiritual energy, called chakras. Awakening of Kundalini is thus conducive to healing, spiritual opening, and positive personality transformation. This process, although highly valued and considered beneficial in the yogic tradition, is not without dangers and requires expert guidance by a guru whose Kundalini is fully awakened and stabilized. The most dramatic signs of Kundalini awakening are physical and psychological manifestations called kriyas. The kriyas involve intense sensations of energy and heat streaming up the spine, which can be associated with violent shaking, spasms, and twisting movements.

  Powerful waves of seemingly unmotivated emotions, such as anxiety, anger, sadness, or joy and ecstatic rapture, can surface and temporarily dominate the psyche. This can be accompanied by visions of brilliant light or various archetypal beings and a variety of internally perceived sounds. Many people involved in this process also often have powerful experiences of what seem to be memories from past lives. Involuntary and often uncontrollable behaviors complete the picture: speaking in tongues, chanting unknown songs or sacred invocations (mantras), assuming yogic postures (asanas) and gestures (mudras), and making a variety of animal sounds and movements.

  Swami Muktananda had the reputation of being a perfected master, an accomplished Kundalini yogi, capable of awakening spiritual energy in his disciples. Christina heard about his visit to Hawaii from her friends and decided to attend an “intensive,” as Muktananda called weekend retreats he was offering. During one of the meditations in this retreat, Christina received from him shaktipat, which is the Sanskrit name for transfer of spiritual energy from the guru, mediated by a touch, a look, or even a thought. For Christina, this powerful energy transfer occurred when Muktananda looked at her and their eyes met. At this point, she experienced a penetrating lightning bolt radiating from the guru’s eyes and hitting her between her eyes in the area where the spiritual traditions place the “third eye.” This triggered intense kriyas, waves of overwhelming emotions and shaking.

  The experience with Muktananda greatly intensified Christina’s process of Kundalini awakening, which had already been well underway before she met him. This was the beginning of her important relationship with this remarkable Siddha yogi, which lasted until 1982, when he died at the age of seventy-four. After the weekend retreat, Christina offered as a meeting place for Muktananda’s devotees her small apartment in Honolulu, where she lived after her divorce with her children, Than and Sarah. Muktananda accepted her offer, visited her apartment, and blessed it as a Siddha Yoga meditation center. After leaving Hawaii, Christina tried to use any opportunity to reconnect with her teacher.

  Shortly after Christina and I started living together at Esalen, Swami Muktananda came to the Bay Area to spend several months in his ashram in Oakland, near San Francisco. Oakland is only about a three-hours’ drive from Big Sur, where we lived, and Christina used this occasion to arrange for the two of us a personal audience, or darshan, with her spiritual teacher. As I found out later, she was uncertain whether Swami Muktanada would approve of our relationship and wanted to find out. I could certainly understand her concerns. Being a “transcendental hedonist,” as I often jokingly referred to myself, I did not exactly meet the conventional Indian criteria for an austere spiritual seeker. I was not a vegetarian, enjoyed sex, and was known for my work with LSD and other psychedelic substances.

  I had heard about Swami Muktananda before I met Christina, and had the chance to leaf through a manuscript of his autobiography, entitled Guru, later to become The Play of Consciousness. I was not particularly eager to drive to Oakland to meet him because I had somewhat mixed feelings about him. Two of my friends had converted to Siddha Yoga and were showing what I saw as an uncritical passionate devotion to Muktananda. They were certainly not the best advertisements for Muktananda and the influence he had on his followers. Their behavior drastically changed following their attendance of a Muktananda weekend intensive and created much commotion at Esalen. Instead of covering the topic they had promised in the Esalen catalog, they brought into their workshops little drums and cymbals and tried to engage the participants in chanting “Shree Guru Gita,” “Om Namah Shivaya,” and other Hindu devotional chants.

  Devotional yoga had never been my favorite spiritual practice. According to the ancient Indian tradition, people with different personalities need and seek different types of yoga. While Christina’s preference was without any doubt bhakti yoga, an approach emphasizing devotion to the guru, I felt great affinity to jñana yoga, a spiritual strategy that pushes the intellect to its utmost limits, where it has to surrender. I also resonated very much with raja yoga, a system that focuses on psychological experiment and a direct experience of the divine. I could easily accept karma yoga, the yoga of service accumulating karmic merits, but bhakti yoga was low on my scale of values.

  But because I am very curious by nature, my reservations about devotional practice did not override my interest in meeting a Siddha Yoga guru with Muktananda’s reputation. And I knew that this darshan was very important for Christina. As we were driving toward the Bay Area, Christina kept telling me some remarkable stories about her spiritual teacher, as a preparation for our meeting. We overestimated the time it would take us to drive from Big Sur to Oakland because this was not our usual route, and arrived at the ashram about twenty minutes before our scheduled meeting.

  While we were sitting in the car waiting for the darshan, we continued our discussion abo
ut Swami Muktananda. At one point, Christina mentioned that he was a Shaivite, which means a follower of Shiva. This captured my attention and increased my interest in meeting him. I knew that among the methods the Shaivites were using to get into non-ordinary states of consciousness was ingestion of bhang and datura seeds. And I considered Shiva to be my most important personal archetype because the two most powerful and meaningful experiences I have ever had in my psychedelic sessions involved this Indian deity. As we were waiting, I described these two experiences at some length to Christina.

  My first encounter with Shiva occurred in one of my early LSD sessions, when I was still in Prague. I spent the first four hours of this session in the birth canal, reliving the trauma of my birth. As I was emerging from the birth canal, all battered, covered with blood, and tasting vaginal secretions, I had a terrifying vision of the Hindu goddess Kali and experienced a complete unconditional surrender to the power of the feminine principle in the universe. At that moment, I saw a gigantic figure of Bhairava, Shiva in his Destroyer aspect, towering above me. I felt crushed by his foot and smeared like a piece of excrement on what seemed to be the deepest bottom of the universe. It was a complete annihilation of what I then considered to be my identity, a shattering death of my body and ego. But having become nothing, I became everything. I had a sense of dissolving in a source of light of indescribable intensity and exquisite beauty. I realized that I was experiencing what had been called in the ancient Indian scriptures the union of Atman and Brahman.