When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  My second encounter with Shiva happened many years later, during my vision quest in the Ventana wilderness in Big Sur. In an overnight LSD session that took place near a waterfall in a redwood dell, I had the vision of a giant archetypal river, representing time and the impermanence of all creation. It flowed back into what appeared to be the source of all existence—an immense ball of radiating energy that was conscious, possessed infinite intelligence, and was simultaneously creative and destructive. I heard a compelling sound and knew instantly that it was dambaru, the drum of Shiva Bhairava, the Destroyer, commanding all creation to return where it came from.

  The history of the universe and of the Earth was passing in front of my eyes. As if in an incredibly sped-up movie, I saw the birth, development, and death of galaxies and stars. I observed the beginning, evolution, and extinction of species and witnessed cultures and dynasties originating, flourishing, and facing destruction. The most memorable sequence of this session was a procession of dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes entering after millions of years of existence the River of Time and disappearing in it. Permeating this amazing scenery like a magnificent cosmic hologram was a giant figure of Shiva Nataraja, Lord of the Cosmic Dance, performing his dance of the universe. After sunrise, when my attention turned from my inner world to the incredible beauty of nature around me, I heard for many hours in my ears the enticing and irresistible chant “Om, hare Om, hare Om, Shri Om,” which I had heard throughout this unforgettable experience as a leitmotif of the River of Time.

  I finished telling Christina about these two experiences, which had transformed my life, just when it was time for our darshan. As we entered the room and saw Swami Muktananda, I was struck by his extraordinary appearance. He wore a thick red ski cap, large dark glasses, and the lunghi, an orange robe. In his right hand he held a wand of peacock feathers, which—as I found out later—was heavily scented with fragrant sandalwood essence. Hitting people with peacock feathers over the head was one of Swami Muktananda’s principal tools for imparting the shaktipat.

  Baba, as his followers fondly called him, invited me to sit down next to him and turned his head toward me. He then took off his dark glasses, something he very rarely did, and he started to inspect my face from a short distance. I saw in a close-up his widely dilated pupils, which seemed to be floating freely on his eyeballs; this was something I was used to seeing in my clients who had taken large doses of LSD. He focused his sight on my eyes and examined them with the thoroughness of an ophthalmologist. As if summarizing his professional observations, he suddenly uttered a phrase that sent chills up my spine: “I can tell you are a man who has seen Shiva.”

  I was astonished by this extraordinary synchronicity. Muktananda’s statement came only a few minutes after I had finished telling Christina about my experiences of Shiva and their importance for my life. It was absolutely impossible for Muktananda to have any knowledge of this fact had he relied on ordinary information channels. It was also hard to imagine that this was only a meaningless coincidence. The probability of something as specific as this being a result of chance was so low that it could be practically excluded. I could see only two possible explanations for what had just happened. Swami Muktananda had to have paranormal access to information about facts in the surrounding world or be part of a field that fostered meaningful synchronicities in the Jungian sense.

  My curiosity concerning Muktananda and interest in spending some time with him increased considerably after what had just happened. Our exchange following this dramatic opening seemed at first anticlimactic, although the topic of our discussion was quite interesting for me from a professional point of view. Muktananda knew that I had worked with LSD and initiated a discussion about the use of psychoactive substances in spiritual practice. He expressed his belief that the experiences induced by them were closely related to those sought in Siddha Yoga.

  “I understand you have been working with LSD,” he said through his interpreter, Malti, a young Indian woman whom he many years later appointed as his successor under the name Swami Chitvilasananda. “We do something very similar here. But the difference is that, in Siddha Yoga, we teach people not only to get high, but to stay high,” he stated with confidence. “With LSD you can have great experiences, but then you come down. There are many serious spiritual seekers in India, Brahmans and yogis, who use sacred plants in their spiritual practice,” Swami Muktananda continued, “but they know how to do it properly.”

  He then talked about the need for a respectful ritual approach to cultivation, preparation, and smoking or ingesting of Indian hemp (Cannabis indica) in the form of bhang, ganja, or charas and criticized the casual and irreverent use of marijuana and hashish by the young generation in the West. “The yogis grow and harvest the plant very consciously and with great devotion,” he said. “They first soak it in water for fourteen days to get rid of all the toxic ingredients and then dry it. They put it in a chilam (a special pipe) and smoke it. And then they lie naked in the snow and ice of the Himalayas in ecstasy.” Talking about smoking the chilam and the ecstatic rapture of the yogis, Baba acted out the appropriate facial expressions, movements, and postures as if remembering what it was like.

  In the course of our discussion, I asked Baba about soma, the sacred potion of ancient India that is mentioned more than a thousand times in the Rig Veda and that clearly played a critical role in the Vedic religion. This sacrament was prepared from a plant of the same name, the identity of which got lost over the centuries. I found the reports about soma fascinating and hoped that Swami Muktananda might know something that would lead to its botanical identification and, ultimately, to the isolation of its active principle. Discovering the secret of soma was at the time the dream of many of us who were involved in psychedelic research.

  Talking about soma, Muktananda dismissed the theory expounded by mycologist Gordon Wasson that this plant was Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric mushroom. He assured me that soma was not a mushroom, but a “creeper.” This seemed to make sense and did not particularly surprise me because another important item in the psychedelic pharmacopoeia, the famous Mesoamerican sacrament ololiuqui, was a preparation containing the seeds of morning glory (Ipomoea violacea), which would qualify as a creeper plant because it grows with the help of tendrils.

  But what followed came as a great surprise to me. Baba not only knew what soma was, but he assured me that it was still being used in India to this very day. As a mater of fact, he claimed that he was in regular contact with Vedic priests who were using it in their rituals. And, according to Baba, some of these priests actually came every year down from the mountains to Ganeshpuri, a little village south of Bombay that hosted his ashram, to celebrate his birthday. On this occasion, they regularly conducted soma ceremonies. At the end of our discussion, Baba extended his invitation to Christina and me to visit his ashram at the time of his birthday and promised to make arrangements for us to participate in this ancient ritual.

  By and large, it seemed that the darshan would have the form of a quasi-professional exchange of information about “technologies of the sacred.” But then the situation took a sudden, unexpected turn. Without any preparation or warning, Muktananda brusquely reached for a pink can of Almond Rocca that was displayed on a small table on his side. There were always many sweets around the ashram because Baba made it clear that Shakti, the divine feminine energy, had a great affinity for sweets. Amrit, the ashram’s well-stocked cafeteria, abounded in the most incredible confections of all kinds. Muktananda now fished out of the can two pieces of this candy, skillfully unwrapped them, and stuffed them into my mouth while simultaneously slapping me quite strongly on both of my cheeks, hitting me on the forehead, and kicking me on my shins.

  Then he stood up, making it clear that the darshan was coming to an end. At the door, as we were on the way out, he looked at Christina and me and said: “We’ll have two weekend intensives on Kashmir Shaivism; I invite you both as my guests.” Before I left the room, he gav
e me a meaningful look and said: “It will be very interesting for you.” At that time, I did not know any thing about Kashmir Shaivism; I could only infer from the name that it had something to do with Shiva and with Kashmir. We thanked Muktananda, said good-bye, and walked out of the darshan room into the spacious meditation hall of the ashram.

  Outside the darshan room was a large crowd of people, waiting for us to come out. Most of them seemed to be people who had been brought to Siddha Yoga by their psychedelic experiences. They suspected that my discussion with Muktananda would include psychedelics and wanted to know if he had said anything about this subject. I had to walk through a gauntlet of these people showering me with questions, such as: “What did you talk about? Did Baba say anything about acid? Did Baba think psychedelics were okay?”

  I did not feel the least inclination to socialize. I was aware of some strange sensations in my body and felt that something was churning inside my head. I apologized, disentangled myself from the crowd, and walked into the farthest area of the meditation hall. There I sat down in a cross-legged position, with my back pressed into the corner, and with my eyes closed. I felt this would be the best way to get a better insight into what was happening to me.

  Siddha yogis have the reputation of being able to awaken the inner psychic energy by shaktipat, and I knew that what Muktananda had done with me belonged to this category. However, I did not expect any significant reaction because I did not consider myself particularly suggestible. I did not think, at that time, that anything short of a potent psychoactive drug would significantly change my consciousness. And I knew from literature and from my experience with Christina that a typical response to shaktipat involved kriyas—intense emotions, involuntary sounds, and dramatic motor responses. My own reaction took me by surprise.

  Seconds after closing my eyes, I found myself in a state of complete nothingness and emptiness, in a void that had cosmic dimensions. One way of describing my condition would be to say that it felt like being suspended in interstellar space, somewhere midway between the Earth and Alpha Centauri. However, this would pertain only to a very superficial aspect of this experience and would not capture the sense of profound peace and tranquility of this condition and the extraordinary metaphysical insights associated with it. I felt that I was in a state that transcended all polarities and that I had a total understanding of existence. It seemed that this cosmic vacuum somehow held the secret of being and creation. When I opened my eyes again, I found out that more than an hour had elapsed since the darshan had ended.

  We gladly accepted Baba’s invitation for the weekend intensives on Kashmir Shaivism, Christina because of her devotion to the guru and myself because of the curiosity aroused by the peculiar synchronicity and my unusual experience. The first intensive turned out to be another surprising and very interesting experience. It started with an introductory lecture on Kashmir Shaivism, delivered by Swami Tejo, a member of the Muktananda staff. As the swami began talking, I found myself increasingly baffled and slightly paranoid. He seemed to be reading passages from an article that I had written and published several years earlier in one of the last issues of a short-lived, obscure periodical, Journal for the Study of Consciousness. The similarity was astonishing, down to specific images and metaphors.

  In the late 1960s, when I was still working at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, I decided to write a paper describing the ontological and cosmological insights that become available in non-ordinary states of consciousness. It was based on observations from over five thousand psychedelic sessions that my colleagues and I had conducted in Prague and in Baltimore. I extracted those parts of our clients’ reports where they tackled some fundamental problems of existence—the nature of reality, mystery of the cosmic creative principle, the process of creation of the universe, the relationship between humans and the divine, the role of evil in the universal fabric, reincarnation and karma, the enigma of time and space, and the like.

  I found to my surprise that the individual metaphysical insights of my clients were strikingly similar from person to person and that they constituted various partial aspects of one overarching cosmic vision. This extraordinary perspective on the cosmos and human existence that emerged from this analysis was radically different from the one formulated by Newtonian-Cartesian materialistic science. However, it bore striking similarity to various spiritual systems to which Aldous Huxley referred to as perennial philosophy.

  Many aspects of this vision also showed impressive convergence with the worldview of quantum-relativistic physics and other revolutionary advances in modern science, usually described as the “new” or “emerging” paradigm. The article discussing my findings, entitled “LSD and the Cosmic Game: Outline of Psychedelic Cosmology and Ontology,” had been published in 1972, three years before the Oakland intensive took place. Twenty-six years later, this article became the basis for my book The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness.

  And, in his introductory talk in the Oakland intensive, Swami Tejo seemed to shamelessly plagiarize my ideas. It took me a while before I realized that what he was describing was actually Kashmir Shaivism and not passages from my paper. This was truly astonishing because more than a millennium and thousands of miles separated the origins of this spiritual philosophy and the insights of my clients. The beginnings of Kashmir Shaivism can be traced back to the eighth century A.D., when a Kashmiri sage had a vision that directed him to a specific location outside of Shrinagar, the country’s capital. There he found sacred inscriptions carved in the rock that later became Shiva Sutras, the principal sacred text of Kashmir Shaivism. Nobody knows who their author was or how long they had been there before their discovery.

  It was difficult to believe that the experiences of twentieth-century subjects, central Europeans of Slavic or Jewish origin, Caucasian Americans, and African Americans, who had ingested LSD-25, could bear such a deep resemblance to passages from ancient Kashmiri texts. What was the relationship between the effects of a semisynthetic psychoactive substance, discovered by a strange serendipity by a Swiss chemist, and philosophical insights described in the scriptures of an ancient spiritual discipline? And what was the explanation for the fact that they were not erratic and delirious products of the individual psyches, but took the form of a shared, internally consistent, well-integrated, and comprehensive cosmic vision?

  It took me some time to find the solution to this puzzle, but once I had it, the answer seemed quite obvious. LSD was not a pharmacological agent generating exotic experiences by its interaction with the neurophysiological processes in the brain. This remarkable substance was clearly an unspecific catalyst of the deep dynamics of the human psyche. The experiences induced by it were not neurochemical artifacts, symptoms of a toxic psychosis as mainstream psychiatrists called it, but genuine manifestations of the human psyche itself. These experiences could then naturally be triggered by many other approaches, including various “technologies of the sacred,” developed by Eastern spiritual disciplines.

  Our friendship with Swami Muktananda continued until his death seven years later and formed an important part of our life. Christina and I had many additional personal darshans with him and attended a number of Siddha Yoga meditations and weekend intensives in different parts of the world. During these years, I also had ample opportunity to compare spontaneous experiences of people who had received shaktipat with those that were induced by psychedelics, and could confirm their remarkable similarity.

  Shortly after my first meeting with Baba, Christina and I developed Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful nonpharmacological method of self-exploration and therapy. With this approach, non-ordinary states of consciousness are induced by very simple and natural means—faster breathing, evocative music, and release of blocked energies by a certain form of bodywork. The experiences triggered by this approach can be very powerful, and they resemble both the states induced by psychedelics and those de scribed in Kashmir Shaivism. They thus rep
resent an additional proof that the phenomena induced by LSD and other similar substances are not chemical artifacts, but genuine expressions of the human psyche.

  Our relationship with Swami Muktananda deepened and intensified in the last years of his life. During a darshan following the conference of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) in Danvers, Massachusetts, he suggested that we hold one of the future ITA meetings in India, and he offered us his personal support, as well as the help of his staff and of the Ganeshpuri ashram. The conference was held in the Oberoi Hotel in Bombay in February 1982, several months before Baba’s death. It was called Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science and provided a forum for exchange between new paradigm scientists and spiritual teachers.

  The program had a stellar cast; it featured brain researcher Karl Pribram, physicist Fritjof Capra, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, family therapist Virginia Satir, neurophysiologists Elmer and Alyce Green, child development expert Joseph Chilton Pearce, and many other scientists. The spiritual world was represented by Swami Muktananda, Mother Teresa, Parsee high priest Dastoor Minocheer Homji, Turkish Sufi Sheik Muzafer Ozak Al-Jerrahi, Taoist Master Chungliang Al Huang, Aurobindo scholar Karan Singh, Benedictine monk Father Bede Griffith, and rabbis Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Shlomo Carlebach. Among the highlights of the cultural program was an evening of Hassidic dances, sufi zikr of the Halveti Jerrahi dervishes, musician Paul Horn, and Alarmel Valli, the rising star of Indian classical dance. The meeting was a thundering success in spite of the absence of the Dalai Lama, who could not deliver his opening address because he fell ill on his way from Dharamsala to Bombay, and of the Karmapa, who had died a few months before the conference and was not able to close the conference with the promised Black Crown ceremony.