When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  Christina had had the usual course of the ketamine experience and after a discussion during which we shared our experiences, she fell asleep. I was lying in my bed in agony, unable to sleep, experiencing every headache that anybody had in the entire history of humanity. For the following day, we had planned a trip to Machu Picchu, the famous ancient fortress city of the Incas. When it was time for our early breakfast, we got dressed and walked down to the dining room. I felt nauseated, and every step down the stairs felt like another blow of the high priest’s chisel. I watched Christina eat her breakfast, unable to ingest anything myself.

  My agony continued during the train ride to Machu Picchu. The workers who welded the rails had not done a great job, and every time the wheels crossed the place where they were joined, it felt like another blow of the chisel. It seemed that my rite of passage was still going on and that it would never end. Then suddenly, about halfway to Machu Picchu, the pain stopped, and I went into a state of ecstasy. We reached the train station, and a small van took us to the entrance of the ruins after having negotiated the access road with many switchbacks.

  It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the sightseeing in the ancient city high in the Andes was an unforgettable experience. I had a strong sense of belonging to the place, as if I had actually once lived there. After lunch, we roamed around in the ruins and then decided to climb Huayna Picchu, which means in Quechua “young mountain,” the steep peak overlooking the historical site. The climb was steep and long, but it rewarded us with a fantastic view of the ruins of Machu Picchu, the “old Mountain.” Until this day, the visit to this magic place, following my experience of the trephination ritual, remains one of the most powerful memories of my entire life.

  UFOS IN THE AMAZON: Alien Encounter of the Third Kind

  Shortly after our arrival in Rio de Janeiro on the way to the Fourth International Transpersonal Conference in Belo Horizonte, we found out that in Brazil, like in many other Third World countries, ketamine was not a controlled substance and could be freely purchased over the counter. Because we had earlier discovered that ketamine was an effective means of combating jetlag, we decided to start our first Brazilian trip with a ketamine session in our Rio hotel. For me, most of this experience was a very powerful encounter with what seemed to be extraterrestrial intelligence.

  Shortly after the administration of ketamine, I had a very strange sense that the substance had changed my brain in such a way that it was able to communicate with extraterrestrial beings. This feeling culminated in an experience that was reminiscent of teleportation used by the crew of the Enterprise, a spacecraft featured in the American science fiction TV series Star Trek. I had a sense of completely disintegrating to a molecular level and reintegrating on an alien spaceship. The environment looked like a futuristic high-tech laboratory full of intricate de vices, the nature and function of which were completely mysterious to me.

  My head was enclosed in a large helmet connected by color-coded cables to a machine that looked like a giant computer. I had a sense that an enormous amount of information was transmitted from my brain and body to the machine and that I was being examined and studied. Then the process seemed to have reversed itself, and the machine was communicating to me. I started having a series of fantastic experiences, the nature of which is completely beyond description. The best I could understand what was happening to me was that it was a lesson in higher-dimensional seeing and thinking. It was a way of teaching me that the universe has many more dimensions than we think and that without this knowledge any attempt to comprehend existence is futile.

  Another series of images portrayed the life on this planet and the detrimental effect industrialization and scientific discoveries have on it. Rapid visual sequences showed me what our planet used to be and what it was becoming as a result of human violence and greed combined with rapid technological progress. I could clearly see the destructive and self-destructive trajectory of this development ending in annihilation of the human species and much of life. Witnessing this apocalyptic show, I was trying to figure out if this was a serious warning of what would come if we do not change or if I was seeing the future. My “alien abduction” differed from the traditional descriptions in that I was communicating exclusively with the world of technology. There were no extraterrestrial beings of any kind, humanoid, insectoid, or otherwise.

  When this lesson ended, I experienced again the sense of complete molecular dissolution and materialized on another spacecraft, this time a much smaller one strongly resembling a flying saucer. I was sitting near a window and saw that we were flying by the ocean. I recognized Rio de Janeiro and was able to deduce that we were moving north, following the coast of Brazil. Although we were traveling quite fast, I noticed some characteristic landmarks on the coastline. The spacecraft sped up even more and, in what seemed like a short time, it reached a river delta, an estuary of a large river, and turned inland, flying up the stream.

  We flew over enormous stretches of jungle, and I realized that the giant river had to be the Amazon. Then the spacecraft reached what seemed to be its destination and stopped its flight, hovering a few yards over the ground. Looking from the window, I noticed a small village hidden in the jungle—several huts with roofs covered with palm leaves. Amidst the huts was an open space decorated with giant idols bearing superficial resemblance to the Indian sculptures of the American Northwest. Their entire surface was covered with small tiles, which formed intricate mosaic patterns. I vividly remember to this day the colors of the mosaic pieces—combinations of light blue, yellow, and white.

  This was where the experience ended. I had again the sense that my body had dissolved and materialized, this time in my hotel in Rio, where I had started my ketamine session. The experience was quite interesting, in and of itself, particularly because it was the only experience involving alien intelligence I had ever had in all my psychedelic sessions. However, it gained special significance because of the synchronicities associated with it. In the morning following the session, Christina and I rented a car and decided to explore the environment of Rio de Janeiro. Without a special intention to validate my session, we decided to drive north, following the ocean. I was astounded when I encountered characteristic landmarks on the coast be cause of the strong and convincing déjà vu experience that they elicited in me. They were exactly the same landmarks I had observed during my UFO ride the previous night.

  After a few days in Rio, we flew to Belo Horizonte to participate in the International Transpersonal Conference organized by French-Brazilian psychologist Pierre Weil. At the conference we reconnected with an old friend of ours, Leo Matos. Originally from Belo Horizonte, where he was born, he now lived in Scandinavia, where he had organized several workshops for us. During a discussion we had with him, he told us to our great surprise about a retired colonel of the Brazilian army living about twenty miles from Brazilia. According to Leo, this colonel had close contact with a tribe in the Amazon that was regularly visited by aliens in flying saucers and he was offering bus rides for guaranteed UFO sightings.

  Had it been another country, we would not have paid much attention to such information. However, Brazil seems to be in a category of its own as far as paranormal happenings are concerned. I had heard enough from reliable friends, such as Stanley Krippner and Walter Pahnke, about Brazilian psychic surgeons, miraculous healing, mediums, materializations, and dematerializations to suspend my disbelief. Unfortunately, our schedule was very tight, and there was no way we could have extended our stay and followed this clue. In any case, I found the connection between my ketamine experience, the déjà vu feelings, and Leo’s story to be quite unusual and impressive.

  PART 6: UNORTHODOX PSYCHIATRY: Surprising Alternatives to Traditional Treatment

  The observations from the research of holotropic states of consciousness brought many extraordinary insights concerning the dimensions of the human psyche and the nature and architecture of emotional and psychosomatic disorders. They also opened
surprising new perspectives for the treatment of these conditions by revealing therapeutic mechanisms previously unknown to the psychiatric profession.

  The model of the psyche currently used in clinical and academic psychiatry is limited to postnatal biography and the Freudian individual unconscious. As suggested by Freud, the newborn is considered a tabula rasa, a clean slate, and our personality is shaped by the dynamics in the nuclear family and by emotionally relevant incidents during the first years of life. From this perspective, the events preceding birth, including the birth process itself, are psychologically irrelevant. Disorders for which no organic causes have been found in brain anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry are seen as results of psychotraumatic experiences in infancy, childhood, and later life. It is generally accepted that psychogenic disorders have their beginning at different stages of postnatal history and that their nature and depth reflect the time during which the original psychotraumas occurred.

  Conventional therapeutic interventions in psychogenic, emotional, and psychosomatic disorders fall into two broad categories—“covering” and “un covering” strategies of treatment. Covering therapy, currently dominating outpatient practice and institutional treatment, uses a rich array of psychopharmacological agents to suppress symptoms. It can bring subjective relief to patients without dealing with the underlying causes of the disorders they suffer from. Uncovering therapy uses various psychotherapeutic techniques to get to the roots of the problems. Its goal is not only to alleviate the symptoms, but also to address the factors underlying them and to facilitate positive changes in the personality structure. Unfortunately, the current model of the psyche offers only a limited range of therapeutic mechanisms, such as remembering forgotten and repressed traumatic events or reconstructing them from free associations and dreams, intellectual and emotional insights, analysis of transference, and corrective experience in interpersonal relationships.

  As we saw earlier, the study of holotropic states has vastly expanded the cartography of the psyche by adding two new domains—perinatal and transpersonal. It has also shown that psychopathological symptoms and syndromes of psychogenic origin cannot be adequately explained by traumatic events in postnatal biography. Observations from deep experiential psychotherapy have revealed that these conditions have a multilevel dynamic structure, which regularly includes significant elements from the perinatal and transpersonal domains of the psyche.

  This discovery explains why verbal, biographically oriented approaches have been generally very disappointing as tools for dealing with serious clinical problems. Because of their conceptual and technical limitations, these methods are unable to reach the deeper roots of the conditions they are at tempting to heal. In and of itself, the discovery of the depth of the problems psychiatry and psychotherapy have to deal with would be a very discouraging finding. Fortunately, the work with holotropic states does more than just reveal that emotional and psychosomatic disorders have significant perinatal and transpersonal components. It also provides access to new, highly effective therapeutic mechanisms operating on these deep levels of the psyche that often bring dramatic healing and positive personality transformation.

  In this section, I will give a few examples of situations where remarkable therapeutic effects were achieved by mechanisms operating on the perinatal and transpersonal level of the psyche. We will see that sometimes healing might require reliving birth and powerful past-life memories, encounter with an archetypal being from a culture completely unknown to the client, or emergence and full manifestation of an archetypal figure, including a demonic one. It can even involve such highly improbable therapeutic mechanisms as experiential identification with a tree or chanting of a Sephardic prayer. The most interesting and theoretically, as well as practically, important observation from the work with holotropic states is that perinatal and transpersonal experiences have powerful healing potential even if they occur in the context of episodes that contemporary psychiatry sees as manifestations of serious mental diseases—psychoses.

  On the basis of our experience with such conditions, Christina and I suggested that many spontaneous episodes of holotropic states, currently diagnosed as psychoses and treated by suppressive medication, are actually psychospiritual crises, or spiritual emergencies. There exists ample evidence that—correctly understood and properly supported—these episodes can result in healing, positive personality transformation, and spiritual opening (Grof and Grof 1989, 1991). Jungian psychologist John Weir Perry described many successfully treated cases of this kind in a series of his books (Perry 1974, 1976).

  Included in this section are the stories of two women whose symptoms would be considered by a traditional psychiatrist to be indications of mental disease. And yet, putting such diagnostic labels on them would have been wrong. Another case history incorporated in this part of the book describes a therapeutic approach that is highly unconventional. It shows that using psychedelic therapy to accelerate the psychodynamic processes underlying psychotic symptoms can bring therapeutic results that are far superior to tranquilizing medication. This section of the book closes on a light note with a humorous story showing that, on occasion, a fortuitous synchronicity can bring unexpected therapeutic results.

  THE PAIN THAT SURVIVED THREE CENTURIES: The Story of Norbert

  The following story involves Norbert, a fifty-one-year-old psychologist and minister who participated in one of our five-day workshops at the Esalen Institute. His case can be used as a typical example of what I call a system of condensed experiences (COEX system), a multilayer constellation of traumatic memories from different levels of the unconscious—biographical, perinatal, and transpersonal—that underlies emotional and psychosomatic symptoms. Norbert’s story also illustrates the therapeutic potential associated with reliving and integration of the trauma of birth and of past-life memories.

  During the group introduction preceding the first session of Holotropic Breathwork, Norbert complained about severe chronic pain in his left shoulder and pectoral muscle that caused him great suffering and made his life miserable. Repeated medical examinations, including x-rays, had not detected any organic basis for his problem, and all therapeutic attempts had remained unsuccessful. Serial Prokain injections had brought only brief, transient relief for the duration of the pharmacological effect of the drug.

  At the beginning of the session of Holotropic Breathwork, Norbert made an impulsive attempt to leave the room because he could not tolerate the music, which he felt was “killing” him. It took great effort to persuade him to stay with the process and to explore the reasons for his discomfort. He finally agreed, and for almost three hours he experienced severe pains in his breast and shoulder that intensified to the point of becoming unbearable. He struggled violently as if his life were seriously threatened, choked and coughed, and let out a variety of loud screams. Following this stormy episode, he quieted down and was relaxed and peaceful. With great surprise, he realized that the experience had released the tension in his shoulder and muscles, and that he was completely free of pain.

  Retrospectively, Norbert reported that there were three different layers in his experience, all of them related to the pain in his shoulder and associated with choking. On the most superficial level he relived a frightening situation from his childhood in which he almost lost his life. When he was about seven years old, he and his friends were digging a tunnel on a sandy ocean beach. When the tunnel was finished, Norbert crawled inside to explore it. As the other children jumped around, the tunnel collapsed and buried him alive. He almost choked to death before he was rescued by the adults who rushed to the scene responding to the children’s distress calls.

  When the breathwork experience deepened, Norbert relived a violent and frightening episode that took him back to the memory of his biological birth. His delivery was very difficult because his shoulder had been stuck for an extended period of time behind the pubic bone of his mother. This episode shared with the previous one the combination of choki
ng and severe pain in the shoulder.

  In the last part of the session, the experience changed dramatically. Norbert started seeing military uniforms and horses and recognized that he was involved in a fierce battle. He was even able to identify it as one of the battles in Cromwell’s England. At one point, he felt a sharp pain and realized that his shoulder had been pierced by a lance. He fell off his horse and experienced himself as being trampled by the horses running over his body and crushing his chest. His broken rib cage caused him agonizing pain, and he was choking on blood, which was filling his lungs.

  After a period of extreme suffering, Norbert’s consciousness separated from his dying body, soared high above the battlefield, and observed the scene from a bird’s eye view. Following the death of the severely wound ed soldier, whom he recognized as himself in a previous incarnation, his consciousness returned to the present and reconnected with his body, which was now pain-free for the first time after many years of agony. The relief from pain brought about by these experiences turned out to be permanent. Christina and I formed a friendship with Norbert and his wife, and continued seeing them after the workshop ended. It has now been over twenty years since this memorable session, and the symptoms have not returned.