When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  As a result, I was not able to visit my native country for more than twenty years. During this time, I could not maintain open contact with my friends and colleagues in Czechoslovakia. It would have been politically dangerous for them to exchange letters or telephone calls with me because my stay in the United States was considered illegal. Because of my long absence, I lost all my connections except for my close relatives, was not familiar with the new situation, and did not have any idea where to start.

  My mother met me at the Prague airport, and we took a taxi to her apartment. After we had spent some time together and caught up with each other, she left the apartment to visit a neighbor and run a few errands. Alone in the apartment, I sat down in an armchair, had a cup of tea, and reflected about my mission. I contemplated the situation for about ten minutes but was not getting very far. Suddenly, my train of thought was interrupted by a loud ringing of the doorbell. I answered the door and recognized Tomáš Dostál, a younger psychiatrist colleague of mine who, in the old days, used to be my close friend. Before my departure for the United States, we shared some explorations of non-ordinary states of consciousness by sitting for each other in our psychedelic sessions. Tomáš had heard from an acquaintance of his about my visit to Prague and came to welcome me.

  I found out to my astonishment that, just as Tomáš was leaving his apartment, his home telephone rang. It was Ivan Havel, a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence and the brother of the Czech president Václav Havel. He was also the leader of a group of progressive scientists that during the Communist era had held secret underground meetings exploring various new avenues in Western science. They were particularly interested in the new paradigm thinking, consciousness research, and transpersonal psychology. Ivan Havel and Tomáš had been classmates in the gymnasium (Czech equivalent of high school) and remained close friends ever since. Tomáš had been a frequent guest in the Havel household and also personally knew Ivan’s brother Václav.

  Ivan Havel’s group had heard about my work in the lecture of a friend of mine, Soviet dissident Vassily Nalimov. Vassily was a brilliant Russian scientist who had spent eighteen years in a Siberian labor camp. Christina and I had invited Vassily and his wife, Zhanna, as our guest to the ITA conference in Santa Rosa, California, and had become good friends with them. The title of one of Vassily’s books, Realms of the Unconscious, was very close to the title of my first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious. Vassily included in his book an extensive report about my psychedelic research, and he also discussed my work at length in his lecture for the Prague group.

  As a result of Vassily’s talk, the Prague group became interested in having me as a guest lecturer. Ivan Havel knew that Tomáš and I were old friends and called him to inquire whether he had my address or telephone number and would be able to mediate contact between the Prague group and me. To his surprise, Tomáš told him that I happened to be visiting Prague and that he was about to walk out of his apartment to pay me a visit. Such a very unlikely concatenation of events seemed to be enough of a sign that we were “surfing,” rather than “paddling against the stream.” Encouraged by this portentous development of events, Christina and I decided to go ahead with the project.

  This spectacular set of coincidences greatly facilitated my role as envoy for the ITA conference. It took me only ten minutes in unfamiliar circumstances to find the ideal contact and support for our future meeting—a group of highly competent academicians connected to the university system who were vitally interested in the subject of the planned conference. By the same token, I also found access to the head of the state, who happened to be an enlightened and deeply spiritually oriented politician open to the transpersonal perspective. The conference was held in 1993 in Prague’s Smetana Concert Hall and the Municipal House under the auspices of President Václav Havel.

  President Havel was an ideal guest of honor for an ITA conference. He was not a run-of-the-mill politician, but somebody who was much more frequently referred to as “statesman,” a head of state with a broad, spiritually based global vision. A well-known playwright, he did not become president as a result of years of struggle for political power, but was somebody who very reluctantly accepted the nomination, responding to an urgent plea of the Czech people. He practically went to the Prague Castle directly from the Communist prison. One of the first things he did after inauguration was to acknowledge His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the head of Tibet and invite him for a visit. He also made a serious attempt to stop all Czechoslovakian production of weapons. Wherever he went, he impressed his audiences by his eloquent call for spiritually based democracy and global solidarity.

  Unfortunately, the beginning of the ITA conference happened to coincide with a severe crisis threatening the future of Czechoslovakia. The eastern part of the country, Slovakia, had decided to split from the two western parts, Bohemia and Moravia. On the day the conference started, the Czechoslovakian government had an emergency meeting dealing with the crisis that lasted until three o’clock in the morning. President Havel, who was scheduled to introduce the conference and welcome the guests, was unable to come and had to send an envoy with a personal message instead. In spite of this complication, this conference, including for the first time our colleagues from Eastern Europe, proved to be very successful. It turned out to be one of the most frequently talked-about events in ITA’s history.

  Our disappointment at President Havel’s absence at the ITA conference was outweighed by our opportunity to spend some private time with him. During our next visit to Prague, he invited us for a personal audience in the Prague Castle. He expressed keen interest in transpersonal psychology, its history, and main representatives. The idea of achieving a synthesis of the modern scientific worldview and a spiritual vision of the world clearly fascinated him. He was particularly eager to discuss the implications of transpersonal thinking for politics and economy. For Christina and me, the two-and-a-half hours we spent in his presence have become an unforgettable experience.

  UNDER THE SPELL OF SATURN: The Death of My Mother

  The schedule for my lectures, workshops, and seminars in different parts of the world is typically arranged in cooperation with the individuals or institutions that host and organize these events. In most instances, I have very little to do with the choice of the themes, except for offering a list of possible titles of my presentations with brief abstracts. This was also the case when the schedule and itinerary for my European trip in the fall of 1992 was being created. I should mention that the schedule and itinerary for my lecture tours is usually done at least a year or a year-and-a-half before the actual journey.

  My European tour began with a six-day training module in Holotropic Breathwork and transpersonal psychology in Findhorn, Scotland. The topic for this module was suggested by Cary Sparks, the director of our Holotropic Breathwork training; it was “Death and Dying: Psychological, Philosophical, and Spiritual Perspectives.” The reason for this choice was primarily the fact that a module with this theme was on the list of optional modules for our training and had not been offered for some time.

  My plan was to do some sightseeing in England following this training module before going to Germany to conduct a weekend seminar in Munich. The German seminar was organized by Brigitte Ashauer, a dear friend and certified Holotropic Breathwork facilitator. She had chosen for it the title of my book The Human Encounter with Death, a subject that she was very interested in and one that she thought would also be interesting for German audiences.

  It just so happened that the European Association of Humanistic Psychology had planned its annual meeting for the week following my Munich seminar and its site was Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a city not far from Munich. The organizers found out that I would be in the area at the time of their meeting, and they asked me to come to Garmisch-Partenkirchen on the Monday following the Munich seminar and do a keynote lecture and a workshop at their conference. I agreed to come and asked them what topic they would like me to address.
“You have done psychedelic therapy with terminal cancer patients, and there will be many doctors among our participants. It would be great if you could focus on that subject,” was the answer.

  As the tour actually began, some unexpected developments profoundly changed my original plans. While at Findhorn, I received a phone call from Jill Purce, the editor of the Thames and Hudson Art and Imagination series of high-quality paperbacks with spiritual orientation. In earlier years, Christina and I had contributed a volume to this series entitled Beyond Death: The Gates of Consciousness. At the time, I was working on another volume for the same series, called Books of the Dead: Manuals for Living and Dying. It was a study of the ancient manuals on death and dying—the Tibetan Bardo Thödol, the Egyptian Pert Em Hru, the Aztec Codex Borgia, the Mayan Ceramic Codex, and the European Ars Moriendi. Jill told me on the phone that to meet the publishing deadline, it was essential to finish the work on the book within a few days. She urged me to give up my plans for sight seeing in England and come to London immediately, which I did.

  I spent the next five days in a small office in the Thames and Hudson headquarters in London, working from early morning until late at night on the spreads for my forthcoming book, arranging the pictures and the corresponding captions. All this time, I was surrounded by images of eschatological mythology—Tibetan wrathful deities, Egyptian guardians of the gates of the underworld, Mesoamerican death gods and chthonic menagerie, scenes of judgment of the dead, and angels and devils fighting for the souls of the deceased. I finished the work just in time to catch my plane to Germany.

  As a result of this unexpected change of plans, I spent practically without interruption almost two weeks fully immersed in the subject of death—six days of the training module in Findhorn, five days of working on the Books of the Dead in London, and two days of the German weekend seminar. When I finished the Munich seminar and was resting in bed in my hotel, ready for a good night’s sleep before my departure for the Garmisch-Partenkirchen conference, I received a shocking phone call that brought another unexpected element into my European trip.

  It was the secretary of my brother, Paul, calling from his office at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital in Canada; she had just received the news from Czechoslovakia that my mother had suddenly died in her apartment in Prague. This was completely unexpected because my mother enjoyed good health in spite of her advanced age of eighty-six years. As we found out later, she had conducted a Holotropic Breathwork session a week before she died, and at 11:30a.m. on the day of her death talked on the phone with two close friends, a husband and wife, and invited them for dessert after lunch. When they arrived two hours later, she was already dead.

  Paul’s secretary gave me a phone number for Paul, who was staying at the time in a hotel in Berlin. I had to decide whether or not I would go ahead with my speaking engagement in Garmisch-Partenkirchen; the organizers expected over 700 participants, and I had a significant role in the program. After some deliberation, Paul and I decided that I would meet my commitment, while Paul would make all the necessary arrangements for the funeral in Prague. In turn, I would stay in Prague and take care of everything that was necessary to do after the funeral. Paul had to leave almost immediately because he had important commitments in Canada.

  I gave my keynote and did the workshop on death and dying at the Garmisch-Partenkirchen conference. There was no late flight from Munich to Prague that evening, and I had to take an overnight train. I arrived in Prague in the morning, after spending the night in my roomette, and took a taxi to the funeral, where I had the last chance to see my mother before she was cremated. In the afternoon, we had a memorial service involving relatives, friends, and acquaintances, where we shared memories and told stories about my mother.

  On the following four days, I had, with great help from Christina, who in the meantime had arrived in Prague from California, the sad task of going through all of my mother’s belongings and deciding what to do with them. This was for me a time of deep reminiscing and mourning. Because of her war experience, my mother found it very difficult to dispose of things that had outlived their usefulness. Her apartment thus harbored a rich collection of clothes, hats, purses, jewelry, and other items from various periods of her life. Many of them had a distinct scent and were for me loaded with memories. Going through this stuff involved a lot of emotional letting go and felt like a major completion and the end of an era.

  When I later discussed with my brother, Paul, this extraordinary accumulation of synchronicities in my life, he added another interesting piece of information to this already rich mosaic. As I mentioned earlier, at the time of our mother’s death, I was in Munich and Paul was in Berlin. This was only the second time in twenty-five years that both of us were in Europe at the same time since the time of our emigration from Czechoslovakia. It turned out that on the day of mother’s death, he was presenting in Berlin the data of his research on mortality of manic-depressive patients, the work for which his group later received an award from the American Suicidology Society in New York City.

  It is interesting to look at the above concatenation of events from an astrological perspective. Astrologers would associate much of what I described earlier with the planetary archetype of Saturn, often called the Great Malefic. In its negative aspect, Saturn represents impermanence, aging, death, ending of things, loss, mourning, and depression. Mythologically, Saturn is a Roman deity often identified with the Greek Kronos, Father Time, and the Grim Reaper. Astrologers talk about archetypal cycles of Saturn that last twenty-eight to thirty years. This is the time that it takes Saturn to complete its orbit around the sun and return to the place where it was at the time of our birth. The times of Saturn returns are typically times of major endings and completions.

  I visited Prague twice before during my second Saturn return. The first time, my visit coincided with the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia (in 1918). The large pedestrian zone (Na příkopech), adjacent to the famous Wenceslas Square, was at that time lined with two rows of tall cylindrical pillars covered with enlarged newspaper clippings from various periods of Czechoslovakia’s history. They were arranged chronologically, so that walking by them and reading the texts, I was literally reviewing and reliving the most significant times of my life.

  The reason for my second visit, in June 1992, was the International Transpersonal Conference entitled “Science, Spirituality, and the Global Crisis: Toward a World with a Future,” of which Christina and I were the program coordinators. This was a major closure and completion for me. In the 1960s, I began my independent research with psychedelics in Prague, and now, thirty years later, I was bringing to Prague transpersonal psychology and Holotropic Breathwork, the fruits of many years of this work. The three weeks of immersion in death, from the beginning of the Findhorn training to the end of my stay in my mother’s apartment in Prague, seemed like an integral part of my second Saturn return and its completion.

  BLESSING OF THE GODS: Don José Matsuwa and the Huichol Rain Ceremony

  During the early years of our stay in Big Sur, California, we connected with Prem Das, a young American from San Jose, who stopped at Esalen to sell artifacts of Huichol Indians from north-central Mexico. They were all inspired by the Huichols’ psychedelic visions during peyote ceremonies and included exquisite yarn paintings depicting mythological motifs, carved wooden animals and gourds decorated with intricate bead designs, God’s eyes, and prayer arrows. He also brought richly embroidered shirts, pants, dresses, belts, and bracelets. At the time when Prem Das came to Esalen, he lived in Mexico, in a Huichol village near Tepic, the capital of the state Nayarit, and was apprenticing with Don José Matsuwa, an extraordinary centenarian shaman.

  As we found out, Prem Das had a very interesting spiritual history. When he was eleven years old, he participated in a research study conducted in the Laboratory of Hypnosis Research at Stanford University by Ernest R. Hilgard. Although Hilgard’s intention was simply to stu
dy hypnotizability in children, Prem Das had during one of the sessions a powerful mystical experience that awakened in him a deep interest in the spiritual quest. In his late teens, he traveled to India and studied Agni Yoga with Haridas Baba, a famous guru known among others for his vow of silence. It was Haridas Baba who gave him the name Prem Das.

  After his return to the United States, Prem Das traveled to Mexico, and during his visit to Tepic he saw a Huichol yarn painting depicting the journey of the shaman, or mara’akame, to the solar realm. The path of the shaman on the painting was punctuated by seven flowers and reminded Prem Das strongly of the yogic system of the chakras. Fascinated by what he saw, he decided to trace the painting to its source, convinced that the people who had made the painting had to have a belief system similar to Kundalini yoga. His quest took him to a Huichol village, where he discovered Don José and was accepted as his apprentice. The main spiritual vehicle of the Huichols and Don José’s principal teaching tool was ingestion of peyote, a psychedelic cactus with the botanical name Lophophora williamsii or Anhalonium lewinii.