When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  Although I felt somewhat tired after the long drive through the desert, I decided to use this unique opportunity and embark on an inner journey. Christina, who at that time was wide open and had had many spontaneous experiences as a result of her Kundalini awakening, decided not to join me in this adventure. She offered that I wake her up if I needed somebody to “hold my kite string,” as we called it. I took 400 micrograms of LSD and made myself comfortable on my motel bed.

  After I engaged in about forty-five minutes of quiet meditation, the sub stance started to take effect, and my state of consciousness underwent very rapid and profound changes. I felt that my experience had transported me rapidly to Dreamtime and to the beginning of the world. I had some passing knowledge of Australian mythology, but what I witnessed by far surpassed anything I have ever read or heard about. And yet, I somehow did not have any doubt that my experience of this mythic domain of the Aborigines was absolutely authentic.

  I saw the surface of the Earth, flat, nondescript, and featureless, and witnessed the arrival of mythic figures of many different forms. They chanted some mysterious songs, and as they were doing that, they seemed to give shapes to the landscape, bringing into existence rocks, mountains, canyons, and waterholes. Some of them had human forms, others the shape of snakes or other animals. Among them were several giant anthropomorphic figures that particularly attracted my attention. I had never heard before that giants were part of the mythology of the Aborigines.

  Initially, I just played the role of an observer witnessing this fantastic display of Dreamtime scenes. Suddenly, this situation changed; the inhabitants of the Dreamtime world now turned against me as an unwelcome intruder, threatening to destroy me and demanding that I reveal the motivation of my daring trespassing. I tried to explain that I was coming with much respect and humility, that my intentions were friendly, and that my only motive was search for knowledge. I underwent what seemed to be rigorous psychological and spiritual scrutiny by these mythic beings and was finally granted permission to visit their domain. The condition was to fully submit to its rules.

  Having overcome this difficult impasse, I was able to continue unimpeded my journey through the Great Dreaming (or Dreamtime). In front of my eyes, the majestic mass of Uluru emerged out of the primordial abyss existing some where beyond space and time as we know it. It was not an inorganic geological mass, as it appears to be in our world, but a giant crouching creature, a terrifying monstrous reptile. I heard deafening thunder as it opened its massive jaws and could see the inside of its maw. It was filled with what seemed like whirling volcanic magma, which occasionally spewed out in monumental discharges.

  But describing the inside of the creature’s maw as volcanic magma captured only the surface appearance of this mysterious substance. Like hot lava it seemed to have the potential to destroy or create, but on a much deeper level and a much larger scale. It seemed to be the archetypal essence that underlies volcanic activity. Like the Greek primordial matter, hyle, or the prima materia of the alchemists, it seemed to be the universal principle of creation and destruction. It was the essence of existence, from which forms emerge and into which they return. I watched this awesome spectacle and felt that I was witnessing the ultimate mystery of the cosmos.

  Before I could fully recover from this shattering encounter with the primordial Uluru reptile of creation and destruction, I was confronted with another giant figure. It was the Great Mother Goddess in the form of a female kangaroo. Suddenly, I realized that I had become a tiny kangaroo fetus in her womb, undergoing the process of birth. The passage through the birth canal was easy as compared with my human birth, which I had experienced in my previous psychedelic sessions.

  What was an exceedingly challenging ordeal, a true rite of passage, was the following climb to her pouch and the struggle to reach her nourishing teats. This journey was so demanding that I felt several times I would not be able to finish it and would die on the way. But, finally, I was able to reach my goal, and the nourishing milk pouring generously from the nipple of the Great Mother Kangaroo tasted like ambrosia; it made me forget the hardships of the tedious journey. The ecstatic union with the Kangaroo Goddess was the last major experience of my session.

  The dawn was breaking, and Christina woke up, curious about my adventures on the night journey. I briefly shared with her some of the highlights of my experience, and we decided to climb Ayers Rock to watch the sunrise and enjoy the view of the surrounding desert from the top. The ascent was rather steep, and in many places we needed to use the chains provided for the visitors. As we were about one-third of the way to the top, the weather changed rapidly, and we were repeatedly hit by powerful gusts of wind.

  Christina suddenly sensed that she had encountered an impenetrable force field that prevented her from continuing her climb. It was as if invisible hands were pushing her off the rock. She decided to yield to this pressure, return to the base, and wait for me there. I had not yet completely returned to my ordinary state of consciousness and felt a strong determination to continue to climb and reach the summit. As I was fighting the onslaughts of the wind, I was receiving inner messages from an unknown source telling me that among the Aborigines climbing the rock was a special privilege, but that I had gained the right to do it by undergoing the rite of passage the preceding night.

  The view of the vast desert painted red-orange by the rising sun was spectacular. Several tourists reached the top after me; they took pictures of each other, involved in a loud conversation. Among them was a woman in a T-shirt that carried a proud inscription: “I climbed Ayers Rock.” I did not stay very long and started my descent, seeking reunion with Christina and quiet time for reflection. I found her in a small cave, deeply immersed in meditation.

  She told me that being in a very open and receptive state of mind she was having powerful experiences of her own, hearing ritual music and chanting. Wondering if what she was hearing was a corroboree, a ceremony of Aboriginal people, she tried to go where the sound seemed to be coming from to check it out. But there were no Aboriginal people around. She showed me specific places that she was convinced were ceremonial grounds. Later we found out in the motel that since Uluru had become a tourist place, no Aboriginal ceremonies were taking place there. This situation lasted until October 1985, when the title to the land around Uluru was passed to the Aborigines.

  It turned out that when Christina was waiting for me, she had also had some interesting insights concerning her experience during the climb. “I understand why I could not climb the rock,” she explained. “For the Aborigines, this was a place of male initiation, where women were not allowed. At one point, I got a very clear message: ‘You are a woman; you should not be here.’” We decided to spend the rest of the day driving around the rock and exploring its environment, with the help of a guidebook that we purchased in the motel. We embarked on our journey, making frequent stops to admire the exquisite work of nature.

  It was easy to understand why Uluru had engaged so powerfully and deeply the imagination of the Aborigines. The surface of the giant rock was heavily weathered and broken into a rich array of bizarre cliffs and deep caves. The whimsy of weather had shaped the surface layer of the malleable sandstone into myriad fantastic formations. Our guidebook provided a detailed description of the most important patterns in the rock’s surface and the Aboriginal myths associated with them. In these stories, each of the distinct combinations of forms was accounted for and explained by an event in Dreamtime that had created it. We were astonished, because the little booklet confirmed much of the information that we obtained through our inner experiences during the preceding night and in the early morning.

  We found out that tribal people of the area, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, also known as Anangu, pictured Uluru as a gigantic primordial reptile, which was the principle of creation and destruction. Among the figures featured in the Dreaming were giants over nine feet tall, just as I saw them in my session. Climbing Uluru was an annual r
itual event allowed only to two selected members of the tribe and represented special honor. One of the caves we saw during our circling around the rock was an initiation cave for rites of passage and carried the name Kangaroo Pouch. The booklet also confirmed all of Christina’s insights. The places where she heard music and chanting were ceremonial grounds, where sacred rituals used to be conducted. She also correctly identified the ceremonial sites where male initiations took place and women were not allowed.

  I thought about the visiting buses full of tourists, who see Uluru as nothing more than a sightseeing attraction and see climbing to its top as a physical exercise. And particularly about the young woman with the triumphant inscription on her T-shirt, whom I met at the top of Uluru. For her, it did not seem particularly difficult to accomplish what Christina found impossible to do. She could move around with utter insensitivity for the ancient taboos. It was not the wind or lack of physical stamina or prowess that prevented Christina, with her body seasoned by years of hatha yoga, from continuing the climb, but something else, much more mysterious and profound.

  Apparently, the non-ordinary state of consciousness Christina was in, which enhanced her psychic abilities and gave her access to remarkable in sights about the sacred sites, also made her susceptible to the taboos that were mandatory for native people. It was obvious that the industrial civilization had dulled the intuitive faculties of its members, made them oblivious of the hidden dimensions of reality, and immunized them against the numinous aspects of existence. Entering non-ordinary states spontaneously or with the use of some form of mind-altering technology lifts this veil and opens us up to ordinarily invisible and inaudible realities.

  For our return to Alice Springs, we decided to use a different route and spend the night in one of the ranches in the desert. When we were leaving Uluru, Christina was still deeply immersed in her experience. We expected that the influence this powerful place had on her would subside as our distance from it grew. But that is not what happened. The image of the orange rock in the rear window of our car was getting smaller and smaller and finally disappeared. But that did not seem to have any noticeable effect on Christina’s condition.

  The spell Uluru had on Christina was finally broken when we arrived at Collin Springs, a small oasis in the desert, where we stopped to buy some cold drinks and snacks. Walking around the grounds, we discovered that the owner of the place had a small collection of birds. Most of them were confined to a large cage, but several peacocks were allowed to move freely on the premises. Christina was astonished and excited to see them. Not only was it extremely unlikely to find peacocks in the middle of the Australian desert, but peacocks had a great symbolic significance for her spiritual journey.

  In the past, visions of peacocks had formed an important part of the most profound and meaningful experiences she had had in her inner process, and peacock symbolism repeatedly appeared in her paintings. In addition, the peacock was a very important symbol in Siddha Yoga, Christina’s primary spiritual discipline. Her teacher, Swami Muktananda, had often used a wand of peacock feathers scented with sandalwood oil to give shaktipat, to awaken the spiritual energy in his disciples.

  She decided to buy some bread and feed it to the peacocks. As she was offering the bread to the birds in a conscious and meditative way, she felt that she was connecting in a powerful way to her own spiritual tradition: to her teacher, to Siddha Yoga, to India, and to everything that this represented for her. At the same time, this process seemed to have brought her into her ordinary state of consciousness and completed her experiential journey into the world of the Aborigines.

  We spent the night in a hospitable ranch in the desert that offered its guests a warm swimming pool and a barbeque dinner. I discovered to my great delight that among the items offered for dinner were grilled witchetty grubs, a delicacy of the Australian Aborigines that I had been very curious and eager to try. This was the finale of my journey into Dreamtime, much less dramatic and spiritual than Christina’s closure with the peacock ritual. The next day, we returned to Alice Springs and reconnected with the “Big World,” as we jokingly referred to modern technological society at the time of our inner explorations.

  TEMPTATIONS OF A NON-LOCAL UNIVERSE: Failed Experiment in Astral Projection

  One of the most extraordinary adventures in consciousness that I have personally encountered during the fifty years of my inner exploration was a powerful experience of what the spiritual literature refers to as astral projection. It occurred in a high-dose psychedelic session that I had in 1967 in the Research Unit of Spring Grove State Hospital, which later moved to the new Maryland Psychiatric Research Center built on the same premises in Baltimore. As I have mentioned, one of the research programs conducted there allowed psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals to have up to three high-dose psychedelic sessions for training purposes. Shortly after I arrived in the United States and joined the staff, I decided to take advantage of this unique opportunity.

  The studies conducted at Spring Grove were using an approach called psychedelic therapy. It involved administration of large doses of LSD (400 to 600 micrograms), and the sessions were strictly internalized by the use of eyeshades and headphones. An alternative method called psycholytic, used primarily by European therapists, involved an entire series of sessions with lower dosages of psychedelics. The experimental subjects were during their sessions under the constant supervision of a male-female dyad of therapist and nurse. Several hours of preparation allowed, among other things, to create a strong bond and a good working relationship between the client and the guides. My guides for the session were psychologist Sandy Unger, the person who conceived and designed the Spring Grove studies, and Nancy Jewell, a middle-aged nurse with a Southern Baptist background and a warm, maternal presence.

  The LSD used in this session came from Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, and the dose was 400 micrograms. It was a very powerful experience, as I expected; the dose of 400 micrograms was in the range for which psychedelic therapists very appropriately used the term “single overwhelming dose.” However, nothing that happened during the first few hours was significantly different from what I had experienced in my previous sessions in Prague. And then, sometime in the second half of my session, I found myself in a very strange and unusual state of mind. It was a feeling of serenity, bliss, and naive simplicity, mixed with awe in regard to the mystery of existence. I sensed that what I was experiencing was similar to what the early Christians must have experienced.

  It was a world where miracles were possible, acceptable, and even plausible. In this state of mind, I started to think about the nature and origin of time and space and the enigmas and paradoxes associated with them, such as the mysteries of eternity and infinity. I had to laugh that I had ever believed that linear time and three-dimensional space were absolute and mandatory dimensions of reality. It appeared to me rather obvious that there were no limits whatsoever in the realm of spirit and that time and space were arbitrary constructs of the psyche.

  I suddenly realized that I did not have to be bound by the limitations of time and space and could travel in the space-time continuum quite freely and without any restrictions. This feeling was so convincing and overwhelming that I wanted to test it by an experiment. I decided to see if I could travel to my parents’ apartment in Prague, which was many thousand miles away. After determining the direction and considering the distance, I imagined myself flying through space to the place of my destination. I had the experience of moving through space at an enormous speed, but, to my disappointment, I was not getting anywhere.

  I could not understand why the experiment did not work because my feeling that such space travel should be possible was very convincing. All of a sudden, I realized that I was still under the influence of my old concepts of time and space. I continued to think in terms of directions and distances and approached the task accordingly. It occurred to me that the proper approach would be to make myse
lf believe that the place of my session was actually identical with the place of my destination. I said to myself: “This is not Baltimore; this is Prague. Right here and now, I am in my parents’ apartment in Prague.”

  When I approached the task in this way, I experienced peculiar and bizarre sensations. I found myself in a strange, rather congested place full of electric circuits, tubes, wires, resistors, and condensers. After a short period of confusion, I realized that my consciousness was trapped in a television set located in the corner of the room in my parents’ apartment. I was trying, somehow, to use the speakers for hearing and the tube for seeing. After a while, I had to laugh because I realized that this experience was a symbolic spoof ridiculing the fact that I was still imprisoned by my previous beliefs concerning space, time, and matter.

  The only way of experiencing what was happening in distant locations that I could conceive of and intellectually accept was by means of television technology. Such a transmission, of course, would be restricted by the velocity of the electromagnetic waves involved. But human thought and consciousness were not limited even by the speed of light. At the moment when I realized and firmly believed that my consciousness could transcend any limitations what so ever, the experience changed dramatically. The television set turned inside out like a three-dimensional Möbius strip, and I found myself walking in my parents’ Prague apartment.