When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  The skull was surrounded by an aura of mystery and inspired many speculations as to its origin, age, the way it was created, and its remarkable effects on the human psyche. During the 1970s, it attracted the attention of many scientists, journalists, and other writers. Having heard the rumors about the effects of the Mitchell-Hedges skull, I was very interested in experiencing and studying its effects. I found out that the skull’s custodian and curator was Frank Dorland, who lived on Panoramic Highway in Mill Valley, California. I visited him and spent several hours listening to his stories about the skull.

  Dorland was obsessed with the crystal skull; he had studied it for about five years, spending every waking hour of his life with it. He concluded that the technical problems associated with the production of this object were so formidable that it should not really exist. Quartz crystal is an extremely hard substance. It rates at a hardness factor of 7 on the 10-point Mobs’ scale, only 3 points from the diamond, and it cannot be scratched by a knife. Dorland studied its absolutely smooth surface with a binocular microscope and was not able to detect traces of any tools. Any chiseling would have left scratches on the surface and would have without any doubt cracked the stone, particularly because the skull was carved against the grain of the stone.

  The Mayans did not know either the carborundum or the grinding wheel. To do the job manually with sand and water would have taken generations. Dorland toyed with the idea that the Mayans might have employed some kind of paste made according to a secret recipe handed down from ancient times, but nothing of that kind is known at present. He discovered that high temperatures, such as those created by an oxygen acetylene burner, can melt crystal, but it was not very likely that the Mayans had at their disposal this kind of modern technology. But even if they had, this would not be an adequate explanation for the origin of the skull.

  Dorland showed me a report that contained a detailed account of the examinations conducted at the Hewlett-Packard crystal laboratories in Santa Clara, California. The experts of the institute came to the conclusion that no known modern technologies could accomplish the task of creating an exact replica of the human skull from one piece of quartz crystal. They even refused Dorland’s offer of half a million dollars to replicate the skull. Quartz, with its many impurities and even little pockets of water in its inner structure, was too difficult a material with which to work.

  After years of unsuccessful attempts to find the explanation for the skull’s origins, Dorland came up with increasingly fantastic theories. He came to the conclusion that it was created by an advanced civilization, by some beings with powerful minds and superior intelligence. He thought that the skull might be a device that made it possible to communicate across space-time or from parallel universes. He even suspected that the creators of the skull might still have the capacity to observe us through the skull’s eyes and to exert influence on us. But he was not certain whether these influences were coming from other planets, from other dimensions, or even from other times—the past or perhaps the future.

  Over the years, Dorland himself had many strange experiences with the skull and eventually found them too “overpowering” and “uncanny.” He told me about the last one, which had occurred just several weeks before our meeting. He woke up in the middle of the night, hearing strange noises coming from the ground floor of his house. He went to check what was happening and was petrified by what he encountered. Looking downstairs from the staircase into the living room, he saw a large body of a jaguar jumping around and wreaking havoc in his house. He ran back to his bedroom, locked himself in, and spent the rest of the night in metaphysical horror. In the morning, he found the living room in disarray, with many pieces of furniture knocked over.

  Dorland never figured out what had happened that night. But, in any case, this was the “last straw,” as far as he was concerned. After some painful deliberation, he decided to return the artifact to Ms. Mitchell-Hedges. If I wanted to see it, I had to go to Kitchener in Ontario, Canada, where Ms. Mitchell-Hedges had lived since the death of her foster-father. Fascinated by Frank Dorland’s story, during my next visit to Canada my brother, Paul, and I decided to call Ms. Mitchell-Hedges and ask if we could see her. To our great surprise, we found her in a motel that she had bought after her adoptive father’s death and that she had run ever since.

  This was a very unusual thing for her to do, considering the fact that she had inherited fabulous wealth from Lord Mitchell-Hedges, who was a very rich British aristocrat. She explained to us that this was her way to commemorate the death of her “father.” When he had adopted her, she was a ten-year-old hungry and homeless orphan, living in that part of Canada. After his death, she wanted to provide shelter and food for other people in the way her father had provided for her.

  During our visit, we sat in the motel office, which certainly was quite extraordinary in and of itself. Among the unique art objects decorating it were a large silver pitcher that once belonged to King Ludwig of Bavaria and an ornate beveled mirror that used to be Queen Marie Antoinette’s. Ms. Mitchell-Hedges brought out a large collection of newspaper clippings, describing the adventures that she and her adoptive father had experienced in different parts of the world—sailing to different exotic places, hunting sharks and catching other large fish, shooting tigers, living with South American Indians, and excavating pre-Hispanic sites.

  The most interesting of these newspaper reports covered the excavations of Lubaantun, the City of the Fallen Stones, which Lord Mitchell-Hedges discovered in the jungles of British Honduras (Belize) during his search for Atlantis. It was there where the crystal skull mysteriously surfaced. On her seventeenth birthday, Anna reportedly found it buried in the ancient ruins. As we were listening, Anna went through the newspaper clippings, one by one, telling us all the fascinating stories that were behind them.

  It was clear that these newspaper stories and Anna’s memories associated with them were now the main focus of her life. She never married, probably because of her strong Electra complex, because no man could possibly live up to the image of her extraordinary “father,” who over the years grew to a mythic figure. Spending the afternoon with Anna Mitchell-Hedges in her Kitchener motel was a fascinating experience but, unfortunately, we did not get to see the skull. It was not in Kitchener any longer.

  We found out that, a short time before our visit, Anna had donated the skull to the Museum of the American Indian in New York City. She concluded that the artifact was too powerful to be in the possession of any private individual and that it should have an impersonal owner. When we tried to get a more specific explanation, she brushed us off and did not want to talk about it. Shortly after our visit with Anna, my lecture schedule took me to New York City. One of the first things I did after my arrival was to take a taxi to the Museum of the American Indian, eager to finish my quest.

  There I finally was able to see the Mitchell-Hedges skull, the mysterious artifact I had been stalking for so long. It was placed in a vitrine, the glass panels of which reflected light and the surrounding objects, preventing a clear view. In addition, the museum was a popular place, and the scores of visitors milling around represented a serious distraction. All in all, these certainly were not ideal conditions for focused scrying. I decided to visit Dr. Frederick Dockstader, the world’s foremost authority on American Indian art and curator of the museum, and ask him for permission to spend a night in the museum, alone and in quiet meditation, with the skull taken out of the vitrine.

  Unfortunately, Dr. Dockstader did not have much understanding for my unorthodox quest. He did not respond to my credentials as psychiatrist and consciousness researcher and insisted that I had to abide by the museum rules, like everybody else. Dr. Dockstader’s resolute refusal effectively ended my pursuit of the crystal skull. Many years later, I sublimated my frustration by channeling some of my interest in the crystal skull into my fledgling science fiction novel entitled Call of the Jaguar.

  THE WONDERS OF SYNESTHESIA: Hugo Zucarelli
and the Holophonic Sound

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I had the privilege to be part of a small group of people who formulated the basic principles of transpersonal psychology. Abraham Maslow called this new discipline the Fourth Force, because it historically followed behaviorism, Freudian analysis, and humanistic psychology. It was an attempt to create a vastly expanded model of the human psyche by bringing in observations from modern consciousness research and from the great spiritual traditions of the world. By recognizing spirituality as a legitimate and critical dimension of human nature, the new psychology corrected serious omissions and misconceptions perpetuated by academic circles.

  Transpersonal psychology was culturally sensitive in that it treated with respect ritual and spiritual traditions of ancient and native cultures, as well as various esoteric systems and mystical schools of thought. The theoretical revisions that it introduced into psychology reflected also the revolutionary observations and paradigmatic challenges from psychedelic research, anthropology, experiential psychotherapies, meditation studies, and other areas of research exploring holotropic states of consciousness.

  One of the major challenges in the early stages of the fledgling discipline was the fact that its basic tenets were incompatible with mainstream scientific thinking, which was dominated by the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm and philosophically anchored in monistic materialism. It thus was very vulnerable to accusations of being unscientific, irrational, and even “flaky.” Convinced about the legitimacy of their endeavors, pioneers of transpersonal psychology therefore followed with great interest revolutionary advances in other scientific disciplines, seeking support for their vision and developments that would help them to close this conceptual gap.

  None of the developments in new paradigm science attracted more attention for its potential to provide solid scientific basis for transpersonal psychology than the discovery of principles operating in optical holography and their applications in various fields. More specifically, it was Karl Pribram’s holographic model of the brain and David Bohm’s theory of holomovement. These two systems of thought threw new light on mystical experiences and many transpersonal phenomena by revealing a previously unknown and in conceivable paradoxical relationship between the part and the whole.

  At the time of great enthusiasm concerning holographic thinking, Marilyn Ferguson, author of the bestseller The Aquarian Conspiracy, published in her Brain/Mind Bulletin a report about a sensational addition to the holographic paradigm, the discovery of holophonic sound technology by Argentinean Italian inventor Hugo Zucarelli. Excited by Hugo’s work, Marilyn invited him to the United States, making it possible for those of us who were interested to spend a weekend with him in an estate in Millbrae, near San Francisco. This seminar attracted many prominent representatives of the transpersonal field and turned out to be an extraordinary experience.

  Hugo began the seminar by sharing with us a memory of an incident from his early life that inspired the discovery of holophonic sound. He traced his interest in acoustic perception to an event when, as a little boy, he was almost killed by a truck. At the time of this incident, he was sitting on the side of a road with his back turned to the oncoming vehicle. The driver diverted the truck to the shoulder of the road to avoid collision with another car. Hugo was able to save his life by a last-moment impulsive evasive movement.

  Following this event, he often thought about it and wondered how he was able to accurately localize the sound of the approaching truck and respond to it by an appropriate lifesaving maneuver. This led to Hugo’s fascination with the mechanism that different species use to localize sound. By careful study and analysis, he came to the conclusion that the existing theories of hearing are not able to account for certain important characteristics of human acoustic perception and the ability to accurately localize sounds.

  He noticed that the crocodile, an animal that lacks a flexible, mobile neck, has to turn the upper part of its body to localize where various sounds are coming from. Birds have to rotate their heads to accomplish the same task. Mammals use for this purpose their ability to change the configuration of their ears. But humans can accurately localize the source of incoming sounds without moving their heads or changing the shape of the earlobes (a feat that most of us cannot even do). Moreover, they can accurately localize sound even if they have just monaural hearing.

  All this suggested to Hugo that current theories that tried to explain stereophonic hearing and capacity to locate sounds by comparing the input from the right and left ear were inaccurate. He concluded that to account for all the extraordinary characteristics of acoustic perception, it was necessary to assume that the human ear was not only a receiver, but also a transmitter, and that it used holographic principles to localize sounds. According to him, individuals suffering from tinnitus—pathological ringing in the ears—actually hear the sound emitted by their ears. Carefully avoiding any technical details that would give away the secret of his discovery, Hugo explained that he had developed the technology of the holophonic sound by simply replicating this mechanism.

  The critical part of Hugo’s mysterious technology was a facsimile of a human head, to which the inventor affectionately referred as Ringo. It harbored the recording devices, which were built into it in the areas corresponding to ears. Ringo was permanently cloaked in a bag of thick, dark fabric that protected it from the eyes of curious and frustrated audiences. A cable emerging from Ringo was connected to a box with ten outlets for headphones. After this brief introduction, Hugo proceeded to the actual demonstration. Ten of us at a time were able to put on the headphones and listen to Hugo’s experimental tape of holophonic recordings.

  We could not believe what we were experiencing. Hugo’s recording had an uncanny capacity to reproduce acoustic qualities of a large spectrum of sounds with such vividness, accuracy, and precision of localization that it was virtually impossible without constant visual control to distinguish the perception of recorded phenomena from actual events in the three-dimensional world. A typical example of it was the sound of an oncoming truck, echoing Hugo’s childhood experience. When we listened to it with our eyes closed, our bodies instinctively rolled to the side to avoid the impact.

  But that was not the whole story. To our surprise, listening to Hugo’s holophonic recordings tended to engage other senses and produced a rich panoply of synesthesias. Synesthesia is a condition in which one type of sensory stimulation creates perception in another sense. The most common form of synesthesia is called “colored hearing,” in which a person experiences a visual sensation when receiving an auditory signal. However, synesthesias can involve any other sensory area. Hugo’s experimental tape not only involved all the senses, but it did it in a way that conveyed information about other aspects of the situation that produced the sound.

  Thus the sound of scissors simulating a haircut conveyed a realistic sense of one’s hair being cut, the hum of an electric hair dryer produced sensations of the stream of hot air blowing through one’s hair, and listening to a sound of a match striking a matchbox transmitted the vision of its flame and a distinct smell of burning sulfur. Similarly, the sensual voice of a woman whispering into one’s ear made one feel her warm breath. Needless to say, we were very impressed by what we had experienced.

  In the discussion following the demonstration, several people who had had previous experience with holophonic sound shared with other participants an even more interesting example of the potential of this technology, indicating that it was capable of transmitting not only experiences of other senses, but also emotions, including mystical feelings. They described an experiment in which a group of them had taken a psychoactive amphetamine derivative, the entheogen MDMA, known to the young generation as Ecstasy or Adam, gathered in a circle, and collectively chanted the Indian mantra “Om.” They claimed that people who listened to the holophonic recording of this event experienced entheogenic effects of this substance, such as visions of numinous light and feelings of cosmic
unity.

  As the lively discussion continued, the excitement in the group was rapidly growing. Some people pointed out that the extraordinary effects of holophonic technology seemed to throw new light on the important role of sound in various spiritual traditions and esoteric schools. They referred to the mystical and magical properties that the Hebrews and ancient Egyptians ascribed to the sounds of their alphabets, to the relationship between the acoustic frequencies or seed syllables and the chakras in Kundalini yoga or nadayoga, the crucial importance of sound in Tantric science, art, and ritual, and even the cosmogonic power that Indian mythology attributes to the om sound.

  Others discussed the important theoretical and practical implications that the discovery of holophonic sound might have for the technology of virtual reality, for physiology and pathology of hearing, for psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, for film, television, and other forms of entertainment. And all of us were excited about it as the latest addition of another piece to the expanding mosaic of the new paradigm in science, providing conceptual support for transpersonal psychology.