When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  Another interesting event I would like to describe happened two years later. I have already mentioned earlier, describing our last meeting with Baba, that he had given us each a beautiful dark amethyst and suggested that we have them made into rings and wear them all the time. We later found out that the choice of the stones might have had a deeper meaning. Since antiquity, amethysts have had the reputation to protect the owner against intoxication, as indicated by their Greek name. “Methystos” means intoxicated and a- is alpha privativum, expressing negation. This seemed to make sense in view of my work with psychedelics and Christina’s problems with alcohol.

  Shortly after our return from India, a series of natural disasters devastated the Big Sur coast. A catastrophic fire that had destroyed 160,000 acres of the Ventana wilderness stripped the coastal mountain range of all vegetation for about twenty miles, from the Hermitage of the Immaculate Heart almost to Ventana Inn. The following onslaught of torrential rainstorms on the unprotected mountain slopes resulted in massive landslides. Highway 1, the stunning scenic road connecting the Esalen Institute with Monterey and its airport, was blocked for a number of weeks. All the Esalen workshops, including ours, had to be canceled.

  This had serious financial repercussions for Esalen, but particularly for us. We lived at that time on a very limited budget, and loss of income from several workshops was very painful. It was not a very good time to follow Baba’s suggestion and have our amethysts set in gold and made into rings. I, being the more rational member of our marital dyad, would have postponed the project, but Christina felt strongly that we should go ahead. During our next shopping trip to Carmel, which with the detour caused by the landslides now took seven hours instead of the usual two, we stopped at the jeweler’s shop and ordered our rings.

  Two weeks later, when we were leaving for France, our first stop on a European workshop tour, we picked up our rings on the way to the airport. Our first workshop in Paris was a Holotropic Breathwork weekend with about thirty participants. As we were going around the circle introducing ourselves, one of the group members, Simone, presented as her main complaint severe chronic pain in her belly, which seriously interfered with her everyday life. She described that repeated examinations had failed to detect any medical reason for this difficulty. Since the problem seemed to be psychosomatic, she hoped to use the breathwork to get some insight into its causes.

  Eager to begin her explorations, she asked her breathing partner if she could go first. Her process was very intense, with much crying and physical struggle. About an hour into the session, she started to make loud sounds and asked for me. She shared with me that her belly pain was greatly intensified and asked me if I could do something about it. Our usual approach to such situations was to intensify the pain by external pressure and encourage the person to find a way to express his or her feelings. I asked Simone to tense up her belly and applied pressure on the center of the painful area, using my right hand on which I had the amethyst ring. I then encouraged her to express fully with sounds and physical movements her emotional reaction to this intervention.

  Simone pushed against me with her tensed-up belly, and her face was showing more and more strain. She was holding her breath, and her face was turning purple. Suddenly, there was a bloodcurdling scream like I had never heard before in my life. Simone started to breathe normally, went into a deep relaxation, and a blissful smile appeared on her face. A little later, she told me that she felt completely pain free for the first time in years. In the evening, when the group got together for sharing, she described what had happened during her session.

  At the beginning of her experience, she relived several memories from her postnatal life that involved pain in the belly, including repeated sexual abuse by a relative. Then the experience deepened and took her to the memory of her biological birth. As she was reliving her difficult passage through the birth canal, she discovered that part of her abdominal pain was related to the agonizing discomfort she had experienced as a fetus struggling to be born. As her session continued, Simone started envisioning scenes from human history that involved violence and sexual abuse. This was the time when she decided to call me, because her pain kept increasing and was rapidly reaching the limit of her tolerance.

  “It was incredible when you put pressure on my belly,” she recounted later in the sharing group. “The pain was increasing every moment and became absolutely unbearable. But I wouldn’t let go and was determined to stay with it. At one point, the pain was not just mine; it was all of humanity that was suffering! And then everything exploded into deep-blue light, which was indescribably beautiful. And in that light appeared the image of that Indian guru, whose posters are all over Paris. He had dark glasses and a red woolen cap and was holding a bunch of peacock feathers.”

  A couple of weeks before our arrival in Paris, Swami Muktananda’s successor, the young Nityananda, had visited the city and held a weekend intensive. The posters, which one could still see on many walls and pillars all over the city, featured him with his teacher. Christina reached into her wallet, took out a picture of Swami Muktananda she happened to have, and showed it to Simone with a questioning look. “Yeah, that’s the one; a funny guy!” she con firmed and then she added: “But my experience also had something to do with your amethyst ring. The blue light seemed to come right out of that ring!”

  It was interesting that Simone associated her healing experience not only with the amethyst ring and with Swami Muktananda, from whom it came, but also with blue color. As I mentioned earlier, visions of Blue Light and Blue Person play an important role in Siddha Yoga and are considered to be very auspicious. Simone connected with me several years later in another French workshop and gave me a follow-up; she told me that since our Paris workshop her pain had not returned.

  The number of synchronicities we have experienced ourselves and observed in Baba’s followers was truly astonishing. He appeared in his followers’ dreams, meditations, and psychedelic sessions, and these visionary visitations seemed to be closely linked to events in these people’s everyday lives. Many of his followers concluded from these astonishing coincidences that Baba was aware of everything that was happening in their lives and was actually actively arranging all these situations for their spiritual benefit. This gave him a superhuman stature of a cosmic puppeteer, supervising the lives of tens of thousands of his followers and students and pulling the strings behind the scenes of material reality.

  I was fascinated by this phenomenon and, at one point, I asked Swami Ama, who had been with Baba for more than twenty-five years, to find out from Baba how he himself saw this situation. She agreed and subsequently told me that Baba laughed at this grandiose fantasy of his followers. He explained to her that during the forty-some years of his pilgrimage in India and rigorous spiritual search, he had had many experiences in higher, normally hidden dimensions of existence. Because of that, he had become part of these domains and of the mechanisms through which they influence everyday reality.

  He also told Ama that if he needed, he was able to focus his mind in meditation to different areas and get the necessary information, which is something that many good psychics can do. But, more than anything else, his arduous spiritual quest brought him to a sharper focus on the here and now and appreciation of simple things in everyday life. For example, he told Ama, he loved to cook. And while he was focusing with single-pointed consciousness on all the colors, textures, smells, and tastes of the food he was preparing, thousands of his followers were experiencing him as the conscious and active architect of their lives. He was very amused by the idea that he would monitor the lives of thousands of his devotees and orchestrate for them custom-made astonishing synchronicities and spiritually meaningful events. “That would be too much work; I like my life simple,” he said with a mischievous smile.

  DANCE OF THE WHITE SWAN: Underworld Journey in the Salish Spirit Canoe

  Isolated synchronicities are extremely frequent in the lives of people experiencing s
pontaneous or induced holotropic states of consciousness; however, it is not uncommon for them to appear in impressive series or clusters. Over the years, we have observed and personally experienced many aggregate synchronicities in connection with psychedelic therapy, Holotropic Breathwork sessions, and episodes of psychospiritual crises. The events described in this story happened during one of our monthlong seminars at Esalen, at a time when Christina was experiencing her spiritual emergency.

  Christina’s spontaneous experiences were very rich and combined elements from various levels of the personal and collective unconscious. In some of them, she regressed to various painful memories from her childhood and infancy; others involved reliving of the trauma of her biological birth. She also encountered powerful experiential sequences that appeared to be memories of her past lives in Russia, Germany, and seventeenth-century North America. On occasion, she also had visions of various archetypal figures and animals. Particularly significant among them were peacocks and white swans, the birds associated with Siddha Yoga and with Christina’s spiritual teacher, Swami Muktananda. One day during the mentioned monthlong seminar, Christina had particularly intense and significant visions involving a white swan.

  Our guest faculty for the following day was Michael Harner, a well-known anthropologist and dear friend. Michael belonged to a group often referred to as “visionary anthropologists.” In contrast to traditional mainstream anthropologists, Michael and his colleagues, such as Barbara Meyerhoff, Peter Furst, Dick Katz, Christian Raetsch, and Carlos Castaneda, did not do their anthropological fieldwork as detached academic observers. They actively participated in the ceremonies of the cultures they studied, whether these involved mind-altering substances, such as peyote, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and datura, or all-night trance dance and other nonpharmacological “technologies of the sacred.”

  Michael’s discovery of the way of the shamans and their incredible inner world work began in 1960, when the American Museum of Natural History invited him to make a yearlong expedition to the Peruvian Amazon to study the culture of the Conibo Indians of the Ucayali River region. His informants told him that if he really wished to learn, he had to take the shaman’s sacred drink. Following their advice, he ingested ayahuasca, a brew containing a decoction of the jungle liana Banisteriopsis caapi and the cawa plant, which the Indians called “soul vine” or “little death.” He had an indescribable visionary journey through ordinarily invisible dimensions of existence, during which he experienced his own death and obtained extraordinary insights and revelations about the nature of reality.

  When he later found that a Conibo elder, a master shaman, was quite familiar with everything he himself had seen and that his ayahuasca experience also paralleled certain passages from the book of Revelation, Michael became convinced that there was indeed a hidden world to be explored. He decided to learn everything that he could about shamanism. Three years later, Michael returned to South America to do field work with the Jivaro, an Ecuadorian tribe that Michael had lived with and studied in 1956 and 1957. Here he experienced another important initiatory experience, which was basic to his discovery of the way of the shaman. Akachu, a famous Jivaro shaman, and his son-in-law took him to a sacred waterfall deep in the Amazonian jungle and gave him a drink of maikua, juice of a Brugmansia species of Datura, a plant with powerful psychoactive properties.

  As a result of these and other experiences, Michael—an anthropologist with good academic credentials—became an accomplished practitioner and teacher of shamanism. He also started with his wife, Sandra, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, an institution dedicated to teaching shamanic methods to interested students and to offering shamanic workshops for the public. Michael had written a book entitled The Way of the Shaman, in which he gathered together various methods of shamanic work from all over the world and adapted them for use in experiential workshops and in shamanic training of Westerners.

  During our Esalen monthlong workshop, Michael led us in a healing journey, using the method of the spirit canoe practiced by the Salish Indian tribe in the American Northwest. He began the session by beating his drum and invited participants to move and dance until they felt identification with a specific animal. It did not take long, and people were crouching, crawling on all fours, and jumping around, simulating all kinds of climbing, digging, clawing, swimming, and flying movements. The main room in Esalen’s Big House was filled with various recognizable and unrecognizable voices of animals and birds. When everybody made the connection with a specific animal, Michael asked the group members to sit down on the floor in a spindlelike formation, creating an imaginary “spirit canoe.” He then asked if there was a person who needed healing, and Christina volunteered. Michael stepped into the “boat” holding his drum, beckoned Christina to join him, and instructed her to lie down.

  With the scene for the healing voyage all set, Michael asked us to imagine that we were an animal crew undertaking a journey into the underworld to retrieve Christina’s spirit animal. The specific target that Michael chose for this imaginary expedition was the system of interconnected underground caverns filled with hot water that is believed to stretch under much of California. The entry into it was easy to find because this system feeds the Esalen hot springs. As the captain of this spirit boat, Michael explained, he would indicate the pace of the paddling by the beat of his drum. During the journey, he would look for spirit animals. When a particular power animal appeared three times, this would be the sign that he found the one he was looking for. At that point, he would seize it and would signal to the crew of the boat by rapid beat of the drum that it was time for a hasty return.

  We had done the Salish spirit canoe with Michael several times before. The first time we did it, we did not go into it with great expectations. The whole thing sounded like innocent fun—a great idea for children’s play, but a somewhat silly activity for mature adults. But the very first thing that happened made us change our mind. In that group was a young woman who behaved in a way that had antagonized the entire group. She was very unhappy about it because the same thing had happened earlier in her life in just about every group she had ever been part of, and she decided to volunteer for a healing journey.

  As the imaginary boat was traveling through the “underworld,” she had a very violent reaction, just at the moment when Michael identified and seized her spirit animal. She suddenly sat up and, as Michael was giving the signal for return by rapid beats of his drum, she went through several spastic episodes of projectile vomiting. As she was throwing up, she lifted the front part of her skirt, trying to contain what was coming out, and completely filled it with her vomit. This episode, lasting not more than twenty-five minutes, had a profound effect on her personality. The change in her behavior was so dramatic that before the month ended, she became one of the most loved and popular people in the group. This episode and similar ones later on made us approach this process with respect.

  Michael began drumming, and the journey into the underworld started. We all paddled and made sounds of the animals with which we had identified. Christina went into intense convulsions that were shaking her entire body. This, in and of itself, was not unusual because she was in the middle of Kundalini awakening, during which experiences of powerful energy tremors are very common. After about ten minutes, Michael greatly accelerated the rhythm of his drumming, letting us know that he had succeeded in finding Christina’s spirit animal. Everybody began paddling in a fast rhythm, imagining rapid return to the Middle World.

  Michael stopped drumming, indicating that the journey had ended. He put down the drum, pressed his mouth on Christina’s sternum, and blew with all the force he could muster, making a loud sound. He then whispered into her ear: “Your spirit animal is a white swan.” Following this, he asked her to perform in front of the group a dance, expressing her swan energy. It is important to mention that Michael had no prior knowledge of the content of Christina’s inner process and of the fact that this bird had figured importa
ntly in her life. He also had no idea that the swan had been for her a very important personal symbol.

  The story continued the next morning, when Christina and I walked to our mailbox on Highway 1 to get our daily mail. Christina received a letter from a person who had attended a workshop we had given several months earlier. Inside was a photograph of Christina’s spiritual teacher, Swami Muktananda, which this person thought she might like to have. It showed him sitting with a mischievous expression on a garden swing, near a large flowerpot shaped like a white swan. The index finger of his left hand was pointing at the swan; the tips of his right thumb and index finger were joined, forming the universal sign indicating bull’s eye hit and excitement about what had happened.

  Although there were no causal connections between Christina’s inner experiences, Michael’s choice of the white swan as her power animal, and Muktananda’s photograph, they clearly formed a meaningful psychological pattern, meeting the criteria for synchronicity, or “acausal connecting principle,” as defined by C.G. Jung.

  THE MAKING OF RAINSTORM: Our Hollywood Adventure

  In 1981, Christina and I were approached by Doug Trumbull, a special-effects wizard, who cooperated with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey and created the special effects for the movies The Andromeda Strain, Silent Running, Blade Runner, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Doug was about to direct a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer science fiction movie, Brainstorm. The movie’s fascinating plot featured a duo of scientists, computer genius Michael Brace and brilliant brain researcher Lillian Reynolds, who jointly developed a helmet that could record and transmit human experiences.