When the Impossible Happens (2 page)

—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.

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.