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  When the Impossible Happens

  Adventures in Non-Ordinary Realities

  Stanislav Grof M.D., Ph.D.

  Table of Contents

  PRAISE FOR WHEN THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS

  ALSO BY STANISLAV GROF

  PREFACE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE: Discovering Cosmic Consciousness My First LSD Session

  PART 1:THE MYSTERY OF SYNCHRONICITY: Twilight of the Clockwork Universe

  THE WAY OF THE ANIMAL POWERS: Praying Mantis in Manhattan

  THE DYING QUEEN: When Dreams Foretell What Comes by Day

  THE RAINBOW BRIDGE OF THE GODS: In the Realm of the Nordic Sagas

  THE PLAY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Swami Muktananda and Siddha Yoga

  THE GURU IN THE LIFE OF HIS DEVOTEES: Is the Siddha Yogi a Cosmic Puppeteer?

  DANCE OF THE WHITE SWAN: Underworld Journey in the Salish Spirit Canoe

  THE MAKING OF RAINSTORM: Our Hollywood Adventure

  THE WATERCOURSE WAY: Meetings with President Václav Havel

  UNDER THE SPELL OF SATURN: The Death of My Mother

  BLESSING OF THE GODS: Don José Matsuwa and the Huichol Rain Ceremony

  SRI YANTRA IN THE OREGON DESERT: UFO Visit or a Spectacular Hoax?

  A LESSON IN FORGIVENESS: Peyote Ceremony with Potawatomi Indians

  PART 2:TRAILING CLOUDS OF GLORY: Remembering Birth and Prenatal Life

  THE CHALLENGES OF NOON DELIVERY: The Story of Leni

  THE SCENT OF FRESH LEATHER: The Story of Kurt

  THE VISION OF THE OLD OAK TREE: The Story of Anne-Marie

  PRENATAL VISIT TO THE ANNUAL VILLAGE MART: The Story of Richard

  WINNING THE SPERM RACE: Experiencing the Cellular Level of Consciousness

  PART 3:REVISITING HISTORY: Farther Reaches of Human Memory

  EPISODE FROM THE RUSSO-FINNISH WAR: The Story of Inga

  THE LITTLE GIRL WITH WHITE PINAFORES: The Story of Nadja

  RETRIEVING MEMORIES OF THE STOLEN GENERATIONS: The Story of Marianne

  ANCESTRAL MEMORY OR PAST-LIFE EXPERIENCE? The Story of Renata

  PART 4:HAVE WE LIVED BEFORE? Reincarnation and the Akashic Record

  THE SIEGE OF DÚN AN ÓIR: The Story of Karl

  THE KARMIC TRIANGLE: Time Travel to Ancient Egypt

  IN THE CATACOMBS OF PECHORSKAYA LAVRA: Past Life in Czarist Russia

  WHEN SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES CAN BE DANGEROUS: Revisiting the Salem Witch-Hunt

  PART 5:ESP AND BEYOND: Exploring the World of the Paranormal

  SEEING WITHOUT THE EYES (MINDSIGHT): The Story of Ted

  MESSAGES FROM THE ASTRAL REALM: The Story of Richard

  PROOF FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE BEYOND? The Story of Walter

  CUT ROSES IN AUNT ANNE’S ROSE GARDEN: The Story of Kurt

  LUIZ GASPARETTO: Painters and Paintings from the Beyond

  A PARTY FOR EXU: Interview with the Orixás

  THE TABOO AGAINST KNOWING THAT WE ARE CLAIRVOYANT: Sessions with Ann Armstrong

  ANTS OF THE GREAT MOTHER GODDESS: A Visit to Palenque

  ULURU AND ALCHERINGA: An Adventure in Dreamtime

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

  CHANNELING THE AVATAR: My Mother, Sai Baba, and Holotropic Breathwork

  WHEN ALL IS ONE, THERE IS NO PROBLEM: Feats of the Korean Sword Master

  STRANGE LEGACY OF THE ANCIENT MAYA: Mystery of the Crystal Skull

  THE WONDERS OF SYNESTHESIA: Hugo Zucarelli and the Holophonic Sound

  GATEWAY TO THE ABSOLUTE: The Secret of the Toad of Light

  MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS: Ketamine and the Reenchantment of the World

  ON THE INCA TRAIL: Discovering the Secret of Trephination

  UFOS IN THE AMAZON: Alien Encounter of the Third Kind

  PART 6:UNORTHODOX PSYCHIATRY: Surprising Alternatives to Traditional Treatment

  THE PAIN THAT SURVIVED THREE CENTURIES: The Story of Norbert

  THE MALEKULAN PIG GODDESS: The Story of Otto

  INTERVIEW WITH THE DEVIL: The Story of Flora

  EMBODYING THE DAPHNE ARCHETYPE: The Story of Martha

  HEALING DEPRESSION BY A SEPHARDIC PRAYER: The Story of Gladys

  THE STORMY SEARCH FOR THE SELF: The Story of Karen

  WHEN HEARING VOICES Is NOT SCHIZOPHRENIA: The Story of Eva

  PSYCHIATRIC HERESY THAT BROUGHT FRUIT: The Story of Milada

  THE MAGIC OF SANDPLAY: When a Kitten Can Be Therapist

  PART 7:TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND MAINSTREAM SCIENCE

  WHEN SCIENCE BECOMES SCIENTISM: Carl Sagan and His Demon-Haunted World

  JOURNEY TO THE EAST: Bringing LSD to the Soviet Union

  PSYCHE AND COSMOS: What the Planets Can Reveal about Consciousness

  EPILOGUE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT SOUNDS TRUE

  BACK COVER MATERIAL

  PRAISE FOR WHEN THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS

  “This book is extremely intriguing in that it shows how a strong scientific mind confronts things which science cannot explain.”

  —RAM DASS

  Author of Be Here Now

  “This account of a remarkable life spent searching for new frontiers of consciousness is fascinating.”

  —ODE MAGAZINE

  “What all these [Grof’s] books have in common is the courage to speak in a forthright manner about experiences that are often judged as dysfunctional when expressed in general conversation.”

  —WISDOM: PUGET SOUND EDITION

  “Grof is one of the great explorers of this century. In this book, he has given us a collection of stories that, like those of Marco Polo, are so outside most of our experience that at first one tends to doubt their reality. However, if you are able to stay open, you see how profound, valid, and important these stories are and how much they extend our understanding of our own and humanity’s possibilities.”

  —JAMES FADIMAN, PH.D.

  Institute of Transpersonal Psychology

  “Far from the neurochemical artifacts and symptoms of toxic psychoses that main stream psychiatry would assert, Grof provides a compelling alternative approach to understanding and responding to such perturbations of inner experience ... In his most recent book [When the Impossible Happens], he has mapped a course for a new and more conscious field of psychiatry, one that honors the sacred plants and alkaloids passed down from ancient shamanic practitioners and discovered in modern laboratories.”

  —SHIFT: AT THE FRONTIERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  The Institute of Noetic Sciences

  “In the late eighteenth century the Australian platypus was an impossibility. The scientific community refused to consider this paradigm-breaking mammal—venomous, egg-laying, and duck-billed—as anything but a hoax. Two hundred years later we still refuse to accept that ‘the impossible’ does happen. Stanislav Grof challenges this narrow minded refusal by half a century of courageously unbiased research of non-ordinary reality in the depth of the human psyche.”

  —BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST, OSB

  “In this remarkable book, Stanislav Grof reflects upon half a century of research and experience in the realm of non-ordinary realities. The quality and quantity of these incidents place the ball squarely in the court of conventional science and psychotherapy, challenging their perspectives on personal identity, psychosis, and the very nature of reality. Some readers will dismiss When the Impossible Happens as the ravings of a deluded eccentric; for others, the book will be a life-changing experience.”

  —STANLEY KRIPPNER, PH.D.

  Coeditor, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence
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  “Acclaimed academics ... especially the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof author of numerous books on non-ordinary states of consciousness including his latest, When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-Ordinary Realities, go to extreme lengths to assure their unconventional research will stand up to scientific scrutiny ... When the Impossible Happens is sheer entertainment of the voyeuristic type ... That he is one of the foremost practitioners of LSD therapy adds greatly to his story.”

  —WWW.FOREWORDMAGAZINE.COM

  “Stan Grof’s new book, When the Impossible Happens, has become an instant transpersonal classic.”

  —PARADIGM BUSTERS

  “Dr. Grof is one of the great explorers of the human condition, and in this book you take the journey with him.”

  —WES NISKER

  Author of The Essential Crazy Wisdom

  “Dr. Stanislav Grof’s extraordinary life stories are indeed adventures of the Heroic Journey. I have had the privilege of participating in a number of these seemingly impossible happenings; they have all been life transforming. With great admiration and respect for Dr. Grof’s lifelong, dedicated work in transpersonal research, reading this book is such a pleasureable ‘wu wei’ joyride along the ‘Watercourse Way’ of the Great Tao.”

  —CHUNGLIANG AL HUANG

  Founder-president, Living Tao Foundation

  “When the Impossible Happens offers benefit for oneself and for everyone around one, for it spreads among us the ‘holotropic consciousness’ that makes the impossible happen.”

  —ERVIN LASZLO, PH.D.

  “This book presents his [Grof’s] mesmerizing firsthand account of over 50 years of inquiry into waters uncharted by classical psychology, an odyssey that will leave readers questioning the very fabric of our existence ... This is an incredible opportunity to journey beyond ordinary consciousness, is guaranteed to shake the foundations of what we assume to be reality, and is sure to offer a new vision of our human potential.”

  —ARIZONA NETWORKING NEWS

  “Stanislav Grof is a pioneer in the field of the inner exploration of consciousness.”

  —LOTUS GUIDE

  “Stan Grof is one of the world’s foremost researchers of the further reaches of the human mind. His understandings, which have helped so many, now become even more accessible and fascinating as he shares a multitude of powerful personal experiences, his adventures in non-ordinary reality.”

  —CHARLES T. TART, PH.D.

  Author of Altered States of Consciousness

  “Stan Grof’s mastery is to braid the wisdom found in the world’s spiritual traditions with scientific research. His own accounts of non-ordinary realities are validating, insightful reminders of how prevalent and important these realities are to our own spiritual development and creative contributions to the world.”

  —ANGELES ARRIEN, PH.D.

  Cultural anthropologist and author of The Four-Fold Way and The Second Half of Life

  “Stanislav Grof is a pioneering psychiatrist, world-renowned for his immense contributions to the field of psychotherapy (through methods involving LSD, as well as Holotropic Breathwork) and also to an expanded scientific paradigm that takes the spiritual or transpersonal dimensions of existence seriously. I believe this book will be recognized as a watershed work in the transition to a new cosmology for our time.”

  —RALPH METZNER, PH.D.

  Professor of Psychology, author of The Unfolding Self and The Well of Remembrance

  “Stanislav Grof challenges mainstream science and current views of reality with marvelous and exciting personal stories from a life of exploration at the frontiers of consciousness.”

  —MICHAEL HARNER

  Author of The Way of the Shaman

  ALSO BY STANISLAV GROF

  Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research

  The Human Encounter with Death

  LSD Psychotherapy

  Beyond Death: Gates of Consciousness

  Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science

  Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy

  The Adventure of Self-Discovery

  Human Survival and Consciousness Evolution

  Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis

  The Stormy Search for the Self: A Guide to Personal Growth Through Transformational Crises

  The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives

  Books of the Dead: Manuals for Living and Dying

  The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness

  The Transpersonal Vision: The Healing Potential of Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness

  The Consciousness Revolution: A Transatlantic Dialogue

  Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

  The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death

  Call of the Jaguar

  TO CHRISTINA—my wife, lover, best friend, co-worker, and fellow seeker—who shared with me many of the adventures in non-ordinary realities described in this book and saw the impossible happen.

  PREFACE

  Almost half a century ago, a powerful experience lasting only several hours of clock-time profoundly changed my personal and professional life. As a young psychiatric resident, only a few months after my graduation from medical school, I volunteered for an experiment with LSD, a substance with remarkable psychoactive properties that had been discovered by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basel.

  This session, particularly its culmination period during which I had an overwhelming and indescribable experience of cosmic consciousness, awakened in me an intense, lifelong interest in non-ordinary states of consciousness. Since that time, most of my clinical and research activities have consisted of systematic exploration of the therapeutic, transformative, and evolutionary potential of these states. The five decades that I have dedicated to consciousness research have been for me an extraordinary adventure of discovery and self-discovery.

  I spent approximately half of this time conducting therapy with psychedelic substances, first in Czechoslovakia at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague and then in the United States at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, where I participated in the last surviving American psychedelic research program. Since 1975, my wife, Christina, and I have worked with Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful method of therapy and self-exploration that we jointly developed at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Over the years, we have also supported many people undergoing spontaneous episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness—psychospiritual crises, or “spiritual emergencies,” as Christina and I call them.

  The common denominator of these three situations is that they involve non-ordinary states of consciousness or, more specifically, an important sub-category of them that I call “holotropic.” This composite word literally means “oriented toward wholeness” or “moving in the direction of wholeness” (from the Greek holos, whole, and trepein, moving toward or in the direction of something). This term suggests that in our everyday state of consciousness we identify with only a small fraction of who we really are. The best way of explaining what holotropic means is to refer to the Hindu distinction between namarupa (the name and shape that we have in our everyday existence) and Atman-Brahman (our deepest identity, which is commensurate with the cosmic creative principle). In holotropic states of consciousness, we can transcend the narrow boundaries of the body ego and reclaim our full identity. We can experientially identify with anything that is part of creation and even with the creative principle itself.

  Holotropic experiences play an important role in shamanic initiatory crises, healing ceremonies of native cultures, aboriginal rites of passage, and systematic spiritual practice, such as various forms of yoga, Buddhist or Taoist meditation, Sufi dhikrs, Kabbalistic exercises, or the Christian Jesus Prayer (hesychasm). They have also been
described in the literature on the ancient mysteries of death and rebirth conducted in the Mediterranean area and other parts of the world in the names of Inanna and Tammuz, Isis and Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, Wotan, and many other deities. In everyday life, holotropic experiences can occur in near-death situations or spontaneously, without any obvious trigger. They can also be induced by powerful forms of experiential therapy developed in the second half of the twentieth century.

  In psychedelic therapy, holotropic states are brought about by administration of mind-altering substances, such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and tryptamine or amphetamine derivatives. In Holotropic Breathwork, consciousness is changed by a combination of faster breathing, evocative music, and energy-releasing bodywork. In spiritual emergencies, holotropic states occur spontaneously, in the middle of everyday life, and their cause is usually unknown. If they are correctly understood and supported, holotropic states have an extraordinary healing, transformative, and even evolutionary potential.

  In addition, I have been peripherally involved in many disciplines that are, more or less directly, related to holotropic states of consciousness. I have spent much time exchanging information with anthropologists and have participated in sacred ceremonies of native cultures in different parts of the world with and without the ingestion of psychedelic plants, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and magic mushrooms. This involved contact with various North American, Mexican, South American, and African shamans and healers. I have also had extensive contact with representatives of various spiritual disciplines, including Vipassana, Zen, and Vajrayana Buddhism, Siddha Yoga, Tantra, and the Christian Benedictine Order.