When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  The term “spiritual emergency” describes the problematic nature of these states, but, at the same time, alludes to their positive potential. It is a play on words suggesting a crisis, but—because of its Latin root emergere (to emerge)—also an opportunity to rise to a higher level of psychological functioning and spiritual awareness. We often refer in this context to the Chinese pictogram for “crisis,” which illustrates the basic idea of spiritual emergency. This character is composed of two images, one of which represents “danger” and the other “opportunity.” We described and discussed this concept in our books The Stormy Search for the Self and Spiritual Emergency (Grof and Grof 1989, 1991).

  The nature and the healing potential of psychospiritual crises can be demonstrated with the following story of Karen, with whom we had the chance to work at Esalen. I will use here a slightly modified description of our work with Karen that Christina wrote for our joint book on spiritual emergency. Karen was a graceful young woman in her late twenties, blonde and lithe, who exuded a soft, dreamy beauty. Externally, Karen seemed rather shy and quiet, but she was very bright and physically active. She had had an unusually difficult childhood. Her mother committed suicide when she was three years old, and Karen was alone with her at home when it happened. She then grew up with her alcoholic father and his physically and emotionally abusive second wife. Having left home in her late teens, she lived through episodes of depression and struggled periodically with compulsive eating.

  She traveled, studied, and fell in love with jazz dancing, becoming an accomplished dancer and occasional teacher of dance. She liked to sing and developed a professional competence as a skilled massage practitioner. Karen settled in the country, where she met and began living with Peter, a gentle and caring man. Although they remained unmarried, they had a three-year-old daughter, Erin, to whom they were both devoted.

  Karen’s story represents the most dramatic end of the continuum between a gradual, gentle spiritual emergence and the extreme crisis of spiritual emergency. Even so, many of the issues surrounding her experience apply to anyone undergoing a transformational process. Karen’s crisis contained all the elements of a true spiritual emergency. It lasted three and a half weeks and completely interrupted her ordinary functioning. The experiences were so intense that she needed twenty-four-hour care. After she had been in her spiritual emergency for a few days, some of her friends, who knew of our interest in this area, asked us to become involved in her care. We saw her almost every day during the last two and a half weeks of her episode.

  As is the case with many spiritual emergencies, the onset of Karen’s crisis was rapid and unexpected, and Karen became so absorbed in it and over whelmed by her experiences that she could not take care of herself or Erin, who stayed with her father. Karen’s friends from Esalen, where she lived, decided that instead of hospitalizing her, they would take turns caring for her twenty-four hours a day. Karen was moved from her house to a special room in the community. Her friends then set up a “sitters’ service”: two people at a time signed up for two- to three-hour shifts throughout each twenty-four period. A notebook was placed just outside the door so that sitters could sign in and out and write down their impressions of Karen’s condition. They kept records of what she had said or done, what liquids or food she had consumed, and what kinds of behavior the next couple should expect.

  On the first day of her episode, Karen noticed that her vision was suddenly clearer, not as “soft and fuzzy” as it usually was. She heard women’s voices telling her that she was entering into a benign and important experience. For many days, tremendous heat radiated throughout her body, and she saw visions of fire and fields of red, at times feeling herself consumed by flames. To quench the extreme thirst, which she felt was brought about by the burning feelings, she drank great quantities of water. She seemed to be carried through her episode by an enormous energy that poured through her, taking her to many levels of her unconscious and to the memories, emotions, and physical sensations stored there. In deep age regression, she relived many traumas from her early life, such as her mother’s suicide and subsequent physical abuse from her stepmother. Once, a childhood memory of being beaten with a belt suddenly shifted, and she felt herself to be a suffering black African, being repeatedly brutally whipped on a crowded slave ship.

  She struggled through the physical and emotional pain of her own biological birth and repeatedly relived the delivery of her daughter. She experienced death many times and in many forms; her preoccupation with dying caused her sitters to become concerned about the possibility of a suicide attempt. However, such an occurrence was unlikely, because of the safety of her environment and the close scrutiny of the helpers. Everyone involved kept a particularly close watch on her, staying with her constantly and encouraging her to keep the experiences internalized rather than acting them out.

  Periodically, Karen felt that she was in connection with her dead mother, as well as with a friend who had died in an accident just a year before. She said she missed them and yearned to join them. At other times, she had visions of dying people or felt that she herself was dying. We explained to her that it was possible to experience death symbolically without actually dying physically. Such an experience is typically followed by an experience of psychospiritual rebirth. We then asked her to keep her eyes closed and encouraged her to fully experience these sequences of dying inwardly and to express the difficult emotions involved. She complied and, in a short time, she moved past the intense confrontation with death to other experiences.

  For a couple of days, Karen was swept by sequences involving elements of evil. At times she felt as though she were an ancient witch, participating in magic sacrificial rituals. At other times, she sensed that there was a terrible monster within her. As the diabolical beast expressed its demonic energies, she flooded the room with angry expletives and rolled on the floor, making ferocious faces. Her sitters, realizing that the outpouring was not directed at them, protected her from self-injury and encouraged full, safe expression of these impulses.

  Sometimes her experience centered on sexuality. After reliving some traumatic memories from her own sexual history, she felt a strong source of energy in her pelvis. She had always regarded sexuality as a lowly instinctual drive that we share with animals. In one of her profound spiritual experiences during this episode, she had the insight that is part of some esoteric traditions, particularly Tantra: the sexual impulse is not simply a biological drive, but an expression of a divine spiritual force. She felt that she was the first woman to have been granted such an awareness, and she expressed a new reverence for her mystical role as a life-giving mother.

  During another experience, Karen felt united with the Earth and its people, both of which she feared were about to be destroyed. She envisioned that the planet and its population were heading toward annihilation and was putting forth clear and sophisticated insights about the world situation. She saw images of Soviet and American leaders with their fingers “on the button,” and offered accurate and often humorous comments about international politics.

  For several days, Karen tapped directly into a powerful stream of creativity and kept expressing many of her experiences in the form of improvised songs. It was remarkable to witness her performance. As soon as an inner theme would surface into her awareness, she would either make up a song about it or recall an appropriate one from memory, lustily singing herself through that phase of her process. The speed and artistic quality of this process were astonishing.

  Karen was also extremely psychic, highly sensitive, and acutely attuned to the world around her. She was able to “see through” everyone around her, often anticipating the comments and actions of her helpers. Much to the discomfort of those involved, Karen commented very frankly about any interpersonal games that she saw being played and immediately confronted anyone who was too controlling or rigid, refusing to cooperate with them. At one point, two people coming to take a shift talked about Karen on the way to her roo
m. When they entered, Karen seemed to know what they had said and joined their conversation as if she had been part of it from the very beginning.

  After about two weeks, some of the difficult, painful states started to subside and Karen received increasingly benevolent, light-filled experiences, feeling more and more connected with a divine source. She saw within herself a sacred jewel, a radiant pearl that she felt symbolized her true center, and she spent a lot of time tenderly speaking to it and nurturing it. Karen also received instructions from an inner source about how to love and care for herself, and she felt the emotional wounds that she had carried in her heart and body being healed. She said she had passed through a “second birth” and summed up her feelings in the sentence: “I am opening to life, to love, light, and self.”

  As Karen began to emerge from her experience, she was less and less absorbed by her inner world and more interested in her daughter and the other people around her. She began to eat and sleep more regularly and was increasingly able to care for some of her daily needs. She wanted to finish her experience and return to her home. It became clear to her that the people around her were also ready for the episode to end. Karen and her helpers reached the agreement that she would move from her special room to her home and resume the responsibilities of daily care for herself and her daughter.

  We have had a chance to talk to Karen on a number of occasions since her episode and were very pleased to see that many positive changes that had taken place in her during her episode have persisted. Her mood was greatly improved, and she was much more self-assured and outgoing. Her increased self confidence made it possible for her to use her beautiful voice and perform as a singer in public events. Her experiences, which could have lead to psychiatric hospitalization, a stigmatizing diagnostic label, and years of tranquilizing medication, thus turned out to be a profoundly healing and transformative experience.

  WHEN HEARING VOICES Is NOT SCHIZOPHRENIA: The Story of Eva

  In the late 1960s, my brother, Paul, and his then wife, Eva, who are both psychiatrists, emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Canada. They settled down in Hamilton, Ontario, and started working at the psychiatric department of McMasters University. To obtain Canadian medical licenses, they had to pass the required examinations. Because they both also had to work in the psychiatric hospital to support themselves financially, they had to study in the evenings and on weekends, often until the small hours, to prepare for these exams.

  Many weeks of intense stress and very little sleep seemed to take their toll on Eva. One day, while working very late at night, she started hearing a human voice. Hearing voices means very bad news for a psychiatrist because this symptom immediately brings the threatening prospect of serious mental illness, more specifically paranoid schizophrenia. After overcoming her initial fears, Eva realized that the voice did not speak in Czech, her native language, or in English, the language she spoke fluently and could understand, but in a foreign tongue unknown to her. This is not typically the case in schizophrenia, where the voices convey specific understandable messages to the patients, usually giving them orders, threatening them, or humiliating them.

  Although Eva did not understand what the voice was saying and was not able to identify the language it was using, it clearly sounded like a structured language and not just inarticulate gibberish. Because she had a strong feeling that what was coming was a meaningful communication, she decided to write down the messages and seek consultation with some linguists. Czech, unlike English, is a phonetic language, which makes it possible to write down phonetically any words that one hears and reproduce them later with great accuracy.

  By a fortunate synchronicity, Paul had at that time met Asaf, a Croatian physician who had recently come to Canada and turned out to be an extraordinary man. Among other things, he had a photographic memory, was a Sufi sheik, and was able to teach in several languages. Eva decided on an impulse to share with Asaf what was happening to her and read him a few passages from her notebook. Asaf was astounded because Eva’s reproduction of the voice she was hearing was accurate enough for him to understand her. The messages were in ancient Arabic, and it was an esoteric Sufi text of his order that was part of a secret oral tradition.

  Having recognized this, he immediately accepted Eva as his student. Several months later, he sent her to Yugoslavia to spend three weeks in one of the centers of his order to undergo special training. The Yugoslavian Sufi teachers then sent her farther, to the headquarters of their order in Konya, Turkey, and arranged a visit with the head of the order, Sheik Dede Lorejn. Eva traveled to Turkey all by herself, and the exact time of her arrival was not announced to the Konya Sufis. As she traveled by bus to Konya on the last leg of her journey, she noticed a stately old man with a gray beard who boarded the bus at the same time with her. He had a beautiful, expressive face and serene eyes; during the drive, which lasted several hours, Eva became increasingly fascinated by him. As they arrived in Konya, he left the bus at the same station as Eva and disappeared in the crowd.

  Eva found the Sufi headquarters, and when she announced her arrival, she was given the time for the audience with the sheik. The long-awaited time came and she knocked on the door of the sheik’s quarters. She was astounded when she realized that Sheik Dede, who answered the door, was the old man from the bus, whose striking presence had captivated her for several hours on her journey to Konya. It was an extraordinary coincidence that the sheik happened to travel on the same bus with Eva because nobody in the order knew the exact time of her arrival. The next surprise came when the sheik told her that he had been waiting for her for many years. He told her that he had known she would come long before her inner voice had brought her to the Sufi teacher in Toronto. Eva has not shared with us the details of her visit with the sheik and the exact content of their interactions because these were supposed to remain secret. At the end of Eva’s stay in Konya, the sheik taught her Sufi spiritual exercises, which, after her return to Canada, she used very successfully with her patients.

  In the early 1970s, I had another experience that profoundly changed my attitude toward the phenomenon of “hearing voices,” which according to my psychiatric training was a symptom of serious mental illness. I was conducting a workshop at the Westerbeck Ranch in Sonoma, California, a beautiful human potential center, one of many such centers inspired by the Esalen Institute. During the lunch break, Pat Westerbeck, the owner of the ranch and our host, introduced me to Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford, two psychologists from New York City who happened to be visiting her at the time. Helen was a clinical and research psychologist and tenured associate professor of medical psychology at Columbia University in New York City. Bill was a tenured professor of medical psychology at the medical center where they both worked and the head of Helen’s department.

  During our joint lunch, Helen shared with me her fascinating story. At a time of great emotional stress and interpersonal tensions between her and Bill, she started experiencing highly symbolic dreams and images and what she referred to as “the Voice.” It seemed to be giving her a rapid inner dictation, not in words but by some form of telepathic transmission. To Helen’s great surprise and consternation, the Voice introduced himself as Jesus. Helen, who was Jewish, an atheistic scientist, psychologist, and educator working in a highly prestigious academic setting, was initially horrified, suspecting like Eva that this was the onset of a psychotic break. But then she noticed that the Voice was accurately quoting long passages from the Bible, which she had not read, and was making very specific linguistic references to errors that had been made in various translations of these passages. And she was also able to verify the accuracy of this information.

  At Bill’s suggestion and encouragement, Helen started recording all the communications in her notebook, jotting them down in shorthand; the next day she read her notes to Bill, and he typed them. As she pointed out to me, the writing was never automatic; she could interrupt it at any time and pick it up again later. As she decided to emba
rk on this giant project, Helen surprised herself by beginning her writing with the sentence: “This is a course in miracles.” She felt that this was a special assignment that she had “somewhere, sometime, somehow, agreed to complete.”

  After lunch, Helen showed me the result of this collaborative venture with Bill, a thick manuscript entitled A Course in Miracles. She shared with me a major dilemma she was experiencing: she felt a strong urge to publish her manuscript and share it with the public. However, she was afraid that she would be considered crazy and that it would destroy her academic reputation. After lunch, she asked me if I would give her an hour with the participants of my group and let her share her story with them. “People who come to your workshops are more open-minded than most, and I would like to give it a try. It would be an important test for me,” she explained her request.

  I wholeheartedly agreed, and the response of the group (as well as my own) was so enthusiastic and encouraging that it seemed to tip the balance of Helen’s decision-making process, and she left the ranch determined to take a chance and come out of the closet with her remarkable opus. When A Course in Miracles was published, it quickly became a bestseller and a sensation not only among transpersonal psychologists, but also for the general public. It was soon followed by the Workbook for Students, a volume consisting of 365 lessons, each offering an exercise for one day of the year, and the Manual for Teachers. This three-volume set has now been translated into more than thirty languages and sold a million and a half copies.