When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  In 1964, Zdeněk Dytrych, my co-worker, and I were invited to spend six weeks in the Soviet Union as exchange visitors to study Soviet research of neuroses and psychotherapy. Soviet psychiatry was at the time dominated by Communist ideology, and the only acceptable theory of neuroses was based on I.P. Pavlov’s experiments in dogs. Treatment was limited to administration of a bromine-caffeine mixture, sleep therapy, hypnosis, and tranquillizers. Depth psychotherapy of the kind we were researching and interested in was practically nonexistent in the Soviet Union.

  It was not easy to design an itinerary for our trip that would be interesting and educational. However, we found out that there was a group in the Bekhterev Psychoneurological Institute in Leningrad that was conducting under the leadership of Professor Myasischev its own variety of dynamic psychotherapy, and we included in our travel plan four weeks in this facility. After all, Leningrad was a beautiful city, and the Hermitage, with its incredible art collection, was a sufficient reason to visit! We also incorporated into our itinerary a stop in Suchumi, Georgia, to spend some time in the large monkey farm on the Black Sea that was conducting research in experimental neuroses of the Hamadryas baboons. And in view of the political situation, it was absolutely mandatory to pay a visit to the utterly uninteresting facility of academician Andrei Snezhnevsky, head of the Moscow Institute of Psychiatry of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Medical Sciences and chief ideologist of Soviet psychiatry.

  Going to the Soviet Union, we decided to take with us 300 ampoules of LSD-25, each containing 100 micrograms of the substance. It was a product of the Czechoslovakian pharmaceutical industry, listed in the official pharmacopoeia jointly with respectable drugs, such as tetracycline antibiotics, insulin, and aspirin. This was the time before the Harvard scandal stigmatized this substance, and there was nothing illegal about what we were doing. During the first staff meeting we attended at the Bekhterev Institute, we gave a report about our work with psychedelics and offered to conduct LSD sessions with any interested members of the staff.

  The team of the Department for the Study of Neuroses, headed by Dr. Straumit, was conducting a superficial form of dynamic psychotherapy. Although the psychologists and psychiatrists of the department, particularly the young ones, were interested in psychoanalysis, they had to keep this very private. Freud’s books were forbidden in the Soviet Union because his model of the psyche portrayed humans as dominated by egotistic base instincts and thus incapable of creating the ideal Communist society of the future. It also denigrated the proletarian revolutionaries by attributing their fervor to overthrow the ruling class to unresolved Oedipal issues. The Bekhterev group had to be very careful not to be accused of succumbing to this heresy.

  The members of the therapeutic team were very excited by the opportunity to undertake a journey into the deep recesses of their psyches in a way that did not carry the stigma of Freudianism. My colleague and I were spending our time in Leningrad attending and observing the individual or group sessions of the therapists of the Bekhterev Institute, conducting LSD sessions with the staff members of the institute, and visiting the famous Hermitage Museum. During my stay, I gave a lecture on LSD psychotherapy in the auditorium of the Bekhterev Institute that was open to the public. In those years, I spoke fluent Russian, which made my talk accessible to a large audience without the need for translation.

  At the time, there was no clinical research with psychedelics anywhere in the Soviet Union. There were some projects of basic laboratory research, one of them actually at the Bekhterev Institute. Biochemist Lapin was studying the effects of psilocybin, an LSD-like substance, on the vessels in the rabbit’s ear. And there were some rumors that mescaline and LSD were being used by the KGB for interrogation and brainwashing. Russian people, deprived of information about the world at large by their strict censorship, were eager to get information about anything coming from the outside. The interest was enormous, and I spoke to a packed auditorium.

  On the day of my lecture, I conducted an LSD session with Dr. Straumit, the head of the department. He insisted that he wanted to be part of my presentation and share at the end of my talk his experience with the audience. My lecture was scheduled early in the afternoon; Dr. Straumit had a very deep and meaningful experience, and when he gave his account of it he was still in what we call “psychedelic afterglow.” His articulate presentation made a great impression on the audience, and the event was a definite success.

  Thanks to the timing of our visit to Russia, we were able to witness as a fringe benefit a very interesting political-scientific development. During our stay in Leningrad, a rumor spread about the 1958 historic “Operation Sunshine,” during which the American submarine Nautilus traveling under the Arctic ice accomplished the first crossing of the North Pole by a ship. In 1959, in the middle of the cold war, French journalists splashed a sensational story that Nautilus, cut off from the conventional means of electronic communication by a thick layer of polar ice, was able to successfully exchange telepathic messages with its base.

  Shortly before our arrival in Leningrad, academician Leonid Vasilyev, an internationally recognized physiologist and holder of the Lenin Prize, mentioned this American success at a conference of Soviet scientists commemorating the discovery of radio. He predicted that the harnessing of the energy underlying ESP would be equivalent to the discovery of atomic energy. Vasilyev’s comment generated great excitement and attracted attention not only among professionals, but also in the military circles.

  The Soviet government was alarmed by the possibility that the United States might be gaining military advantage. Within a year following his lecture, Vasilyev was heading a special laboratory for parapsychology at the University of Leningrad. This launched the golden era of Soviet parapsychological research, conducted under the aegis of the Soviet military and the Soviet secret police and supported by an annual budget estimated at about twenty million rubles. This was at the time equivalent to a little more than the same amount in U.S. dollars. However, this development benefited also American parapsychologists, because Soviet focus on parapsychology made this field important for national security and thus deserving the support of the U.S. government.

  During the four weeks of our stay in Leningrad, the deep personal sharing around the psychedelic sessions of the staff and parties enlivened by Starka, or Starinnaya vodka, prepared according to an old Czarist recipe, created between us bonds of deep friendship. When we were leaving to continue our trip to Moscow and Suchumi, we left a substantial number of the remaining LSD ampoules with our Leningrad colleagues so that they could continue their inner explorations. After a visit to Moscow, certainly more interesting culturally than professionally, and a lovely visit in the subtropical coast of Georgia, we returned to Prague.

  This experience had an interesting sequel three years later, when I began my fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, where I taught students psychotherapy, had regular Wednesday seminars with lectures by visiting teachers. One of these guests was Dr. Isidor Zifferstein, an American psychiatrist born in Byelorus. Taking advantage of the fact that he spoke fluent Russian, he was paying regular annual visits to the Bekhterev Institute and participated, as we had, in their individual and group therapy sessions. Because the Bekhterev Institute was the only place in the Soviet Union that had a school of psychotherapy with a definable therapeutic approach, Dr. Zifferstein soon became an official U.S. expert on Soviet psychotherapy. He traveled around the country, giving lectures and writing articles on this subject.

  His visit to Henry Phipps Clinic was one of the stops on his lecture tour. After describing as usual the work of the Leningrad school of Professor Myasischev, Dr. Zifferstein shared with us an observation that he found very puzzling. He had been visiting the Bekhterev Institute annually for a number of years, he said. But during his last visit he found a situation that was new and surprising. The intellectual atmosphere in the institute had radically changed. During his past visits, most
of his discussions with staff had revolved around Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, a Russian Nobel-prize winning physiologist and citizen of Leningrad. The therapists had tried to justify their theoretical concepts and therapeutic strategies by references to Pavlov’s work.

  To Zifferstein’s surprise, during his last visits, that was not the case. All the young psychologists and psychiatrists kept talking about Oriental philosophy, various schools of yoga, and Zen Buddhism. They were mentioning books like Aldous Huxley’s novels Brave New World and Island, and Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East. This was a long time before “perestroika” and “glasnost.” Knowing that pointing out the possible connection between the psychedelic sessions of the staff and the change of their interests could have had unpleasant consequences for them, I refrained from suggesting a plausible explanation for Dr. Zifferstein’s mysterious observation.

  For me, this was just another proof for what I have seen repeatedly in my own work: intelligent psychiatrists and psychologists with good academic credentials, who have the opportunity to experience holotropic states find the materialistic scientific worldview inadequate to explain these states, and they open up to spiritual philosophies of the East and to mystical traditions of the world as a more appropriate alternative.

  PSYCHE AND COSMOS: What the Planets Can Reveal about Consciousness

  One of the greatest surprises I have experienced during the fifty years I have been involved in consciousness research was the discovery of the predictive power of astrology. Working with holotropic states of consciousness and experiencing them personally tends to undermine one’s materialistic worldview and creates more openness to various esoteric teachings. However, my skepticism concerning astrology was very strong and persistent and survived many years of my consciousness research. The idea that stars could have anything to do with states of consciousness, let alone events in the world, seemed absurd and preposterous long after I had opened up to the Eastern spiritual philosophies, acupuncture, and the I Ching.

  My journey of discovering astrology extended over many years. My first encounter with it happened in 1966 during my guest appearance on a Czechoslovakian TV program, when I was invited by a talk-show host to discuss the psychedelic research project that I was heading at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague. The same program featured a Slovak colleague, psychiatrist Eugene Jonas. Eugene was deeply interested in astrology, which he had studied for over twenty-five years, including its Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Indian versions. Because of the Marxist censorship, he was not using the term astrology and referred to his work as study of “cosmobiological influences.”

  In the TV program, in which both of us participated, he discussed his research on cosmobiological influences on female reproductive functions. Using clues that he found in an ancient book of Vedic astrology, he was trying to predict the sex of the fetus and to explain the occasional failure of the Ogino-Knauss rhythm method of contraception. In a research project, conducted in cooperation with the universities in Bratislava and Heidelberg, he had been able to correctly predict the gender of the fetus from the horoscope of conception in seventeen consecutive cases. The statistical significance of these findings was enormous. It is important to emphasize that this was many years before gender assessment of the fetus became possible thanks to the development of ultrasound analysis.

  Eugene and I had a chance to chat in the meeting room before the show and, after a brief discussion about our respective research projects, we decided to have dinner on the way home from the TV station. While we were eating, Eugene shared with me his enthusiasm and passion concerning astrology and was trying to convince me that natal and transit astrology could be an extremely useful tool in our psychedelic research. At a later date, he was actually able to give me some interesting feedback about several of my LSD patients, based solely on their natal charts and current transits. I found it very interesting, but my skepticism about astrology, reflecting my scientific training, was too strong to allow me to pursue Eugene’s suggestion and get involved in serious study of this discipline.

  This episode, although not convincing enough to turn me into an astrology aficionado, planted a seed in me that had to wait many years to sprout. In 1973, after seven years of conducting psychedelic research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, I was offered the position of Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur and moved to California. Several months later, I connected with Richard Tarnas, a Harvard student who came to Esalen to write his dissertation on LSD psychotherapy. He had heard about my research and came to ask me to be on his dissertation committee. The only place available at Esalen at that time was a little studio in the basement of the house in which we lived. Rick moved in, and our initial working relationship quickly developed into close friendship.

  And this began the next chapter of my interest in astrology. At Esalen, Rick and I met Arne Trettevik, a man whose life was completely dedicated to astrology. He walked around with the American Ephemeris book, which he consulted on a daily or even hourly basis, monitoring the correlations between planetary transits and the events in his life. Arne’s strategy was different from Eugene’s; instead of just sharing with us his observations, he taught us how to calculate transits and discussed with us the principal characteristics of the planetary archetypes so that we could verify for ourselves the basic tenets of astrology.

  Arne’s strategy worked, and both Rick and I emerged from this initial experience convinced about the value of astrology. Rick’s interest in astrology was deep enough to turn into his lifetime passion and vocation. I continued my research in non-ordinary states of consciousness, but now with astrology as an important tool and an integral part of the study. Over the years, Rick and I have functioned as a team, complementing each other. My function has been to collect interesting clinical observations from psychedelic sessions, Holotropic Breathwork workshops and training, mystical experiences, spiritual emergencies, and psychotic breaks. Rick, using his astrological expertise and extraordinary knowledge of cultural history, has been studying the astrological correlations involved.

  Working this way, we have amassed over the years convincing evidence that quite specifically supports important basic assumptions of astrology. This material has revealed the existence of systematic correlations between the nature and content of holotropic states of consciousness and planetary transits of the individuals involved. The first indication that there might be some extraordinary connection between astrology and my research of holotropic states was the realization that my description of the phenomenology of the four basic perinatal matrices (BPMs), experiential patterns associated with the stages of biological birth, showed astonishing similarity to the four archetypes that astrologers link to the four outer planets of the solar system. My description of the BPMs was based on clinical observations made quite independently many years before I knew anything about astrology.

  The positive aspect of the first perinatal matrix (BPM I)—the reliving of episodes of undisturbed intrauterine existence, as well as the concomitant experiences of dissolution of boundaries, oceanic ecstasy, cosmic feelings of unity, transcendence of time and space, and awareness of the mystical dimensions of reality—is unmistakably reflective of the archetype that astrologers link to Neptune. The same is true for the negative aspect of BPM I, associated with regressive experiences of prenatal disturbances. Here the dissolution of boundaries is not mystical but psychotic in nature; it leads to confusion, delusional thinking, a sense of chemical poisoning, and paranoid perceptions of reality. This matrix also has a psychodynamic connection with alcoholic or narcotic intoxication and addiction. All these are qualities that astrologers describe as the shadow side of the Neptune archetype.

  Prominent features of BPM II—related to the “no exit” stage of birth, during which the uterus contracts and the cervix is still closed—are preoccupation with aging and death, difficult ordeal and hard labor, depression, oppression, constriction, and starvation.
This matrix also brings feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and guilt. It is associated with skepticism and a profoundly pessimistic view of existence, a shattering crisis of meaning, inability to enjoy anything, and loss of any connection with the divine dimension of reality. In astrology, all these qualities are attributes of the negative side of the Saturn archetype.

  The precise astrological correspondence with the experiential aspects of BPM III is particularly extraordinary and surprising because this matrix represents an unusual combination of elements characteristic of the final stage of biological birth. Here belong unrelenting thrust of an elemental driving force, clash of titanic energies, Dionysian ecstasy, birth, sex, death, rebirth, elimination, and scatology. We can further mention the experiences of life and death relevance and the motifs of volcanic eruptions, purifying fire, and of the underworld—urban, criminal, psychological, sexual, and mythological. Astrologically, all these are attributes of the archetype of Pluto.

  And finally, the phenomenology of BPM IV—the experience of emerging from the birth canal—is closely related to the archetype of Uranus. This is the only planet the archetypal meaning of which considerably deviates from the nature of its mythological namesake. As Rick has convincingly shown in an essay specifically dedicated to this subject, the archetype associated with Uranus actually exactly reflects the basic characteristics of the Greek mythological hero Prometheus (Tarnas 1995). It is characterized by such features as unexpected resolution of a difficult situation, breaking and transcending boundaries, brilliantly illuminating insights, Promethean epiphany, sudden rising to a new level of awareness and consciousness, liberation, and freedom from previous constrictions.