When the Impossible Happens Read online

  Another area that has received much of my attention has been thanatology, the young discipline studying near-death experiences and the psychological and spiritual aspects of death and dying. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I participated in a large research project studying the effects of psychedelic therapy in individuals dying of cancer. I should also add that I have had the privilege of personal acquaintance and experience with some of the great psychics and parapsychologists of our era, pioneers of laboratory consciousness research, and therapists who developed and practiced powerful forms of experiential therapy that induce holotropic states of consciousness.

  My initial encounter with holotropic states was very difficult and intellectually, as well as emotionally, challenging. In the early years of my laboratory and clinical research with psychedelics, I was bombarded daily with experiences and observations for which my medical and psychiatric training had not prepared me. As a matter of fact, I was experiencing and seeing things that, in the context of the scientific worldview I was brought up with, were considered impossible and were not supposed to happen. And yet, those obviously impossible things were happening all the time.

  After I had overcome my initial conceptual shock, incredulity concerning my observations, and doubts about my own sanity, I began to realize that the problem might not be in my capacity to observe or in my critical judgment, but in the limitations of current psychological and psychiatric theories and of the monistic, materialistic paradigm of Western science. Naturally, it was not easy for me to come to this realization, because I had to struggle with the awe and respect a medical student or a beginning psychiatrist feels toward the academic establishment, scientific authorities, and impressive credentials and titles.

  My initial suspicion about the inadequacy of academic theories concerning consciousness and the human psyche gradually turned into certainty, nourished and reinforced by thousands of clinical observations. Eventually, I reached a point where I had no more doubts that the data from the research of holotropic states represent a critical conceptual challenge for the scientific paradigm that currently dominates psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and I expressed this opinion in a series of professional books. I came to the conclusion that thinking in these disciplines requires a radical revision that in its nature and scope would resemble the conceptual cataclysm that Newtonian physicists had to face in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

  The observations challenging the worldview, which I imbibed from the culture I grew up in and inherited from my academic teachers, came from many different areas and sources. Most of this information was drawn from extraordinary experiences reported by my clients undergoing psychedelic therapy, participants in our Holotropic Breathwork workshops and training, and people undergoing spiritual emergency. A critical factor in the transformation of my worldview were the holotropic experiences of various kinds that I experienced myself and those that my wife, Christina, shared with me.

  However, not all of the evidence involved in the profound change of my worldview was directly related to special states of consciousness. Over the years, many extraordinary things happened in our everyday life that have significantly contributed to this transformation. These included remarkable encounters and experiences with shamans of different cultures, renowned spiritual teachers and psychics, as well as many astonishing coincidences and synchronicities. The common denominator of all these events was the fact that they should not have happened if the universe were the way traditional science portrays it—a strictly deterministic material system governed by chains of causes and effects. This is what inspired the title of this book.

  When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-Ordinary Realities is a collection of stories describing various events in my professional and personal life that forced me to abandon my skeptical and materialistic scientific perspective on life and embrace the Eastern spiritual philosophies and mystical teachings of the world. They also generated in me great respect for the ritual and spiritual life and for the healing traditions of native cultures that Western science dismisses as products of primitive superstition. I am aware of the fact that reading these stories will not convey the full power of the actual real-life experiences that they describe. However, I hope that in their totality they will give the reader a taste of the reenchantment of the universe that they brought into my own life.

  The first part of the book consists of stories that involve what C.G. Jung described as synchronicity—highly implausible coincidences that cannot be explained by the principle of linear causality, the principle that is the cornerstone of Western scientific thinking. By showing that the world of matter can enter into playful interaction with the human psyche, the existence of synchronicities undermines the very foundations of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm and of the monistic materialistic worldview. It abolishes the basic metaphysical assumptions held by the Western academic community that consciousness and matter are two separate entities, that matter is primary and consciousness its epiphenomenon, and that the events in the world are governed exclusively by chains of causes and effects.

  Parts 2, 3, and 4 of the book feature stories that challenge the current scientific understanding of the nature of memory and its limits. Mainstream psychiatrists and neurophysiologists assume that the brain of the newborn is not mature enough to record the memory of hours of stressful and painful experiences during biological birth. The work with holotropic states of consciousness clearly demonstrates that each of us carries in the unconscious psyche not only the memory of our delivery and the trauma associated with it, but also memories of our prenatal life and early embryonal existence, our conception, and of the lives of our human and animal ancestors.

  It is not very plausible that our entire biological history could be stored in the DNA and that, under special circumstances, this record could be translated into a vivid experience. However, the above memories—embryonal, ancestral, racial, and phylogenetic—at least come from situations for which it is possible to imagine material substrate capable of carrying information. Many experiences in holotropic states present an even more formidable conceptual problem because they suggest the existence of memory without any material substrate whatsoever.

  Here belong, for example, experiential sequences portraying events from human history stored in the archives of the collective unconscious as envisioned by C.G. Jung, past-life memories, and experiential identification with the members of other species. All these experiences clearly transcend ancestral, racial, and biological lines of any kind, and it is impossible to imagine any physical medium in which they could be recorded. They seem to be stored in fields that are currently unknown to science or embedded in the field of consciousness itself.

  The fifth part of the book consists of stories illustrating phenomena traditionally studied by parapsychologists—telepathy and clairvoyance, psychometry, experiences of astral realms, communication with discarnate entities and spirit guides, encounters with archetypal beings, channeling, mind-over-matter phenomena (siddhis), and out-of-body experiences during which disembodied consciousness accurately perceives immediate or remote environments. Unbiased study of these extraordinary experiences and events suggests that materialistic science has been premature in ridiculing this entire realm and the researchers who study it. These observations reveal the existence of “anomalous phenomena” that might in the future lead to a radical revision of the scientific worldview and its basic metaphysical assumptions.

  A special section in the book (Part 6) is dedicated to stories describing observations that challenge the most fundamental assumptions of mainstream psychiatrists concerning the nature of psychotic episodes, currently considered manifestations of serious mental diseases. It also includes accounts of surprising positive results of highly unorthodox and controversial approaches to treatment. An example of such psychiatric “heresy” is seeing episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness as crises of spiritual opening (“spiritual emergencies”), rathe
r than as psychotic episodes. Another example is approaching symptoms as expressing a self-healing attempt of the psyche and working with them. The most radical and unusual situations described in this section of the book involve the use of psychedelics to activate, rather than suppress, psychotic symptoms, dramatic improvements achieved by a method resembling exorcism, and therapeutic breakthroughs featuring psychodynamic mechanisms that would not make any sense to traditional psychiatrists.

  Part 7 of the book focuses on the attitude of traditional scientists toward the paradigm-breaking observations generated by consciousness research and transpersonal psychology. The first story is an extreme but typical example of resistance to the new data found in many members of the academic community. It involves a brilliant, world-renowned scientist who defends his intellectual convictions with such stubbornness and determination that it matches the position of a religious fundamentalist. The second story illustrates what happens when traditionally trained professionals with a materialistic orientation have the opportunity to experience holotropic states of consciousness. The third one describes how my own determined resistance to astrology, a discipline mocked and ridiculed by “serious” scientists, had to succumb to the influx of convincing observations.

  This book is a very personal statement, revealing many intimate details of my private and professional life. Most clinicians and researchers would hesitate to disclose so much subjective information because of their concern that this would damage their scientific reputation. The reason that I share with so much honesty the trials and tribulations of my personal quest is that I want this information to ease the struggle and quandary of people involved in serious self-exploration and help them avoid the mistakes and pitfalls that are integral parts of any venture into new, unexplored territories.

  I hope that open-minded readers will see the personal stories that I share in these memoirs of my unconventional quest as a testimony to the passion with which I have pursued the search for knowledge and wisdom hidden in the deep recesses of the human psyche. If this book provides useful information and assistance for even a small fraction of the thousands of people experiencing holotropic states of consciousness and exploring non-ordinary realities, my sacrifice of personal privacy has not been in vain.

  Stanislav Grof M.D., Ph.D.

  Mill Valley, California

  August 2005

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is a rich tapestry of extraordinary adventures in my inner world and everyday reality that I have experienced in the course of five decades of research into non-ordinary states of consciousness induced by psychedelic substances, by various nondrug methods, and those occur ring spontaneously in the middle of everyday life. This quest has taken me to realms and dimensions of reality my culture and my professional colleagues were telling me did not exist, except in the minds of severely disturbed psychiatric patients. It took years of intellectual struggle before I reached certainty that the normally invisible beings I was encountering and the domains I was visiting in my inner journeys had objective existence in the collective unconscious and lent themselves to consensual validation. In most cases, such validation required individuals who had the opportunity to experience personally these realities in non-ordinary states of consciousness.

  This challenging journey of discovery and self-discovery would have been incomparably more difficult had I undertaken it alone. It has been extremely helpful and validating to meet open-minded individuals who shared the new understanding of consciousness, reality, and the human psyche that was emerging from the study of non-ordinary states or who were open to it. I am extremely grateful for the encouragement and support I have received from like-minded colleagues, who have independently confirmed, on the basis of their own research and personal experiences, various aspects of the new understanding of reality emerging from my work. Over the years, the number of such individuals kept increasing, and at present there are too many to acknowledge all of them individually by name. I will mention only a few, whose support was particularly important and meaningful.

  Immediately after my arrival in the United States, it was Joel Elkes, head of the psychiatric department at Johns Hopkins University, who had invited me to this country as Experimental and Research Fellow and later offered me the position of assistant professor of psychiatry. A brilliant scientist with impeccable academic credentials, Joel was very open-minded and showed keen interest in the new vision of the human psyche and of reality emerging from psychedelic research. His intellectual and administrative support was invaluable for our team at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Catonsville, Maryland, conducting in the late 1960s and early 1970s the last surviving psychedelic research in the United States. It is difficult to find appropriate words for the gratitude I feel to Albert Kurland, director of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and the members of our research team, particularly Sandy Unger, the late Walter Pahnke, Charles Savage, Bill Richards and his late wife, Ilse, Bob and Karen Leihy, Sidney Wolf, Rich Yensen, the late Franco di Leo, and Nancy Jewel, who received me with open hearts into their professional and personal lives; their families became for me my second home.

  I am extremely grateful to Michael Murphy, who invited me as Scholar-in-Residence to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, a unique center for exploration of the human potential that he had founded jointly with Dick Price. My stay at Esalen between 1973 and 1987 was for me an exceptionally validating and affirming experience. Thanks to the extraordinarily rich program of workshops offered by the institute, I had the opportunity to meet personally most of the pioneers of new paradigm science, founders of various schools of experiential psychotherapy, and prominent spiritual figures, who came to Esalen as visiting teachers. My wife, Christina, and I conducted thirty monthlong workshops at Esalen, which gave us the opportunity to invite these remarkable people as guest faculty, get acquainted with their teachings, and establish friendships with them. Esalen also provided for us an ideal setting for developing Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful experiential method of self-exploration and therapy.

  The bonds we formed at Esalen with visiting teachers made it possible for Christina and me to launch a series of large transpersonal conferences held in different parts of the world—North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The stellar cast of these meetings and their rich interdisciplinary program provided further validation for the new emerging vision of reality and understanding of the psyche, consciousness, and human nature. It was particularly encouraging that many presenters at these conferences sharing this new perspective had solid educational backgrounds, extraordinary intelligence, and impressive academic credentials.

  My special thanks go to a circle of our close friends and fellow seekers in the Bay Area that has been meeting regularly since we moved from Big Sur to Mill Valley—Angeles Arrien, Michael and Sandra Harner, Jack and Liana Kornfield, Bokara Legendre, Ram Dass, Frances Vaughan, and Roger Walsh. Our joint dinners, meditation groups, and exchange of information about various subjects have been for me a treasure trove of new ideas, inspiration, useful suggestions, and critical comments but, above all, provided powerful support and validation based on our general consensus about the basic tenets of the transpersonal vision and the spiritual worldview. Rick Tarnas, another close friend, brilliant astrologer, and archetypal psychologist, has helped me enormously in our countless discussions and courses and workshops we have co-led over the years to appreciate and embrace astrology, a discipline that—more than any other—stretched my conceptual boundaries and expanded my intellectual horizons. Independently, I have also received much inspiration, validation, and support from Ervin Laszlo and Ralph Metzner.

  I am deeply grateful to Michael Marcus, Janet Zand, John Buchanan, Bokara Legendre, and Betsy Gordon for their friendship and generous support they have granted our work over the years. My brother, Paul, psychiatrist specializing in research of affective disorders, represents a unique combination of excellent probing intellect, scien
tific passion, and extraordinary generosity. He has been my intimate friend, confidant, enthusiastic fan, and honest and sincere critic. Special thanks go to Tav and Cary Sparks, our dear friends and co-workers for more than two decades. They both have played a pivotal role in our lives as codirectors of Grof Transpersonal Training (GTT) and as cocoordinators of workshops and international transpersonal conferences we have organized in many different parts of the world. Tav has been for years my travel companion and coleader, and Cary has been the soul of all our joint projects. My special thanks go to Marianne Wobcke for allowing me to include in this book the extraordinary story of her personal quest.

  The normally invisible non-ordinary dimensions of reality would have remained hidden for me without the epoch-making discovery and life’s work of Albert Hofmann, who gave the world extraordinary tools for exploring the human psyche—LSD, psilocybine, psilocine, and monoethylamid of lysergic acid. I would like to use this opportunity to express my profound gratitude to him for everything that his discoveries brought into my personal and professional life and the lives of countless others who used his gift responsibly and with the respect that this extraordinary tool deserves.