When the Impossible Happens (21 page)

Marianne was referred to a Stolen Generations’ counselor and found the work with him extraordinarily helpful and transformative. In June 2003, a representative of Link Up, an organization responsible for reuniting indigenous families from the Stolen Generations, flew with her to Sydney for a three-day reunion with her grandmother and uncle, Robbie. Words could never adequately ex press the emotion Marianne experienced as she walked into her grandmother’s house. Her grandmother took her in her arms, cried, and turning to her son she said: “At last our baby is home.” Marianne found out that when the Salvation Army had made contact with her grandmother years ago she had just suffered a stroke. As she recovered, she did not remember this episode and did not know where Marianne was and how to make contact with her. A deeply spiritual per son, she had prayed daily for Marianne to find her way back.

Marianne’s birth mother has limited contact with her family, and she still refuses to acknowledge her daughter. But the pain of that rejection is healing with the combined acceptance and love of Marianne’s grandmother and uncle, Robbie, who wrote in a recent letter: “I was trying to think of why you have made such a difference in our lives. Then it hit me that you completed our family, when you arrived at your Grandma’s door. It was as if finally the circle was closed. We love you dearly.” Marianne’s heroine’s journey came to an end, and she was finally able to find her home.

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

In the fourth example, the portrayed situations reach far back in history, to the beginning of the seventeenth century. This case also illustrates extremely well the conceptual challenges associated with the verification of the information involved. The protagonist in this story is Renata, a former client of mine, who came into treatment because of her cancer phobia, which was complicating her life. In her LSD therapy, she relived various traumatic experiences from her childhood and repeatedly dealt with the memory of her birth. In the advanced stage of her self-exploration, the nature of her sessions suddenly changed dramatically. What happened was very unusual and unprecedented.

Four of her LSD sessions brought up almost exclusively material from a specific historical period. She experienced a number of episodes that took place in Prague in the seventeenth century, which was a crucial period in Czech history. After the disastrous battle of White Mountain in 1621, which marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, the country ceased to exist as an independent kingdom and came under the hegemony of the Hapsburg dynasty. In an effort to destroy the feelings of national pride and to defeat the forces of resistance, the Hapsburgs sent out mercenaries to capture the country’s most powerful noblemen. Twenty-seven prominent aristocrats were arrested and beheaded in a public execution on a scaffold erected in the Old Town Square in Prague.

During her historical sessions, Renata had an unusual variety of images and insights concerning the architecture of the experienced period and typical garments and costumes, as well as weapons and various utensils used in everyday life. She was also able to describe many of the complicated relationships existing at that time between the royal family and the vassals. Renata had never specifically studied this period of Czech history, nor was she interested in it. I had to go to the library and do historical research in order to confirm that the information Renata reported was accurate.

Many of Renata’s experiences were related to various periods in the life of a young nobleman, one of the twenty-seven aristocrats beheaded by the Hapsburgs. In a dramatic sequence, she finally relived with powerful emotions and in considerable detail the actual events of the execution, including this nobleman’s terminal anguish and agony. On many occasions, Renata experienced full identification with this individual. She was not able to figure out how these historical sequences were related to her present life, why they emerged in her therapy, and what they meant. After much reflection, Renata finally concluded that she must have relived events from the life of one of her ancestors. All this happened at an early stage of my psychedelic explorations, and I, admittedly, was not quite intellectually ready for this interpretation.

Trying to reach some understanding, I chose two different approaches. On one hand, I spent a considerable amount of time in an effort to verify the specific historical information involved and was increasingly impressed by its accuracy. On the other hand, I tried to use the Freudian method of free associations, treating Renata’s story as if it were a dream. I hoped that I would be able to decipher it as a symbolic disguise for some childhood experiences or problems in her present life. No matter how hard I tried, the experiential sequences did not make much sense from a psychoanalytic point of view. When Renata’s LSD experiences moved into new areas, I finally gave up, stopped thinking about this peculiar incident, and focused on other more recent and immediate conceptual challenges.

Two years later, when I was already in the United States, I received a long letter from Renata with the following unusual introduction: “Dear Dr. Grof, you will probably think that I am absolutely insane when I share with you the results of my recent private search.” In the text that followed, Renata de scribed how she happened to meet her father, whom she had not seen since her parents’ divorce, when she was three years old. After a short discussion, her father invited her to have dinner with him, his second wife, and their children. After dinner, he told her that he wanted to share with her something that she might find interesting.

In World War II, the Nazis issued an order requesting all families in the occupied territories to present to German authorities their pedigrees demonstrating the absence of anyone of Jewish origin for the last five generations. This was a very serious issue because failure to prove the “purity” of the family lineage had catastrophic consequences for its members. While conducting this mandatory genealogical research, Renata’s father became fascinated by this procedure. After he had completed the required five-generation pedigree for the authorities, he continued this quest because of his private interest.

He was able to trace back the history of his family more than three centuries, thanks to the meticulously kept archives of the European parish houses that had preserved birth records of all the people born in their district for untold generations. He was now able to show Renata the fruit of many years of his investigation, a carefully designed, complex pedigree of their family, indicating that they were descendants of one of the noblemen executed after the battle of White Mountain in the Old Town Square in Prague.

Renata was astonished by this unexpected confirmation of the information she had obtained in her LSD sessions. Having described this extraordinary episode, she expressed her firm belief that “highly emotionally charged memories could be imprinted in the genetic code and transmitted through centuries to future generations.” Renata’s letter ended with a triumphant “I told you so.” She felt that this new, unexpected information provided by her father confirmed what she had suspected all along on the basis of the convincing nature of her experiences—that she had encountered an authentic ancestral memory. As I mentioned earlier, this was a conclusion I was at the time reluctant to accept.

After my initial astonishment concerning this most unusual coincidence, I discovered a rather serious logical inconsistency in Renata’s account. One of the experiences she had had in her historical LSD sessions involved the execution of the young nobleman, including all the emotions associated with it. In the seventeenth century, long before the revolutionary breakthroughs of modern medicine, a dead person was not able to procreate. Death would have destroyed all material channels through which any information about the life of the deceased could be transmitted to posterity.

As a result of this realization, the situation got even more complicated than it was before—“the plot got thicker.” On the one hand, Renata’s experience received a powerful independent validation from her father’s genealogical research. On the other, there was no material substrate to account for the storage, transmission, and retrieval of the information involved. However, before we discard the information contained in Renata’s story as supportive evidence for the authenticity of ancestral memories, several facts deserve serious consideration.

None of the remaining Czech patients, who had a total of over two thou sand sessions, had ever even mentioned this historical period. In Renata’s case, four consecutive LSD sessions contained, almost exclusively, historical sequences from this time. And the possibility that the convergence of Renata’s inner quest and her father’s genealogical research was a meaningless coincidence is so astronomical that it is difficult to take this alternative seriously. We are left with an extraordinary observation for which the current materialistic paradigm has no explanation. It is an example of the observations from modern consciousness research that have recently received the name “anomalous phenomena.”

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

Among the most interesting phenomena I have encountered in my research of holotropic states of consciousness have been without any doubt past-life experiences. They occurred with extraordinary frequency in psychedelic sessions of my clients, in sessions of Holotropic Breathwork, and in the course of spontaneous psychospiritual crises (“spiritual emergencies”) of the people we have worked with. This happened in spite of the fact that I initially did not take the idea of reincarnation and karma seriously and saw it as a product of wishful fantasy of people who could not accept the grim reality of impermanence and death. In addition, these experiences were contrary to the beliefs of the culture I grew up in because the concept of reincarnation is rejected both by mainstream science and by the theologians of our dominant religion. It is one of the rare issues about which materialistic science and Christianity are in agreement.

For many people, the first encounter with past-life experiences happened at the time when they were reliving their birth; for others these episodes emerged independently. These experiences typically took the individuals involved to some emotionally highly charged situations that were taking place in various countries of the world and different historical periods, both recent and re mote. The content of these experiences usually came as a complete surprise, and yet, they were accompanied with a strange feeling of déjà vu or déjà vecu: “This is not the first time this is happening to me; I have been here before. I experienced this in one of my previous lives.” There also typically was a deep connection between the protagonists and events in these experiences and the individuals’ present lives.

I soon became aware of the fact that past-life experiences had many characteristics that made it difficult to dismiss them as childish fantasies. They occurred on the same continuum with accurate memories from adolescence, childhood, infancy, birth, and intrauterine existence, phenomena that could often be reliably verified. They were also often intimately connected with the individuals’ emotional and psychosomatic symptoms and with important issues and circumstances in their present lives. When karmic sequences emerged fully into consciousness, they frequently brought illuminating insights into various previously incomprehensible and puzzling aspects of everyday existence of the people involved.

This included a wide variety of psychological problems and interpersonal issues for which traditional schools of psychotherapy failed to provide adequate explanation. I also witnessed repeatedly that past-life experiences led not only to intellectual understanding, but also alleviation or complete disappearance of various difficult emotional and psychosomatic symptoms, as well as resolution of conflicts in relationships with other people. In addition, like the earlier mentioned ancestral, racial, and collective memories, past-life experiences often provided accurate insights into the time and culture involved. In many instances, the nature and quality of this information made it unlikely that these people could have acquired it through the conventional channels.

What follows are several examples of these fascinating experiences that either contained specific information that could later be verified or were associated with remarkable synchronicities. With the exception of the story of Karl, they describe experiences and events related to karma and reincarnation involving me and Christina. They helped me to appreciate the experiential power and convincing nature of these phenomena.

THE SIEGE OF DÚN AN ÓIR: The Story of Karl

As impressive and convincing as the features of past-life experiences might be, the dream of every researcher in this area is to find cases in which some important aspects of these experiences can be verified by independent historical research. For me such a dream came true when Christina and I met Karl and had the privilege to facilitate his process of deep self-exploration and healing. Karl enrolled in one of our Esalen monthlong seminars after he had done some inner work in a renegade primal therapy group in Canada. It was one of the groups of people who had left the The Primal Institute in Los Angeles after serious disagreements with Arthur Janov. In the course of primal therapy, these people started having various forms of transpersonal experiences, such as archetypal visions, identification with various animals, and past-life memories. Janov, who had no understanding of the transpersonal domain of the unconscious, was violently opposed to any thing related to spirituality and interpreted these experiences as a “cop-out from primal pain.” Many people who valued the technique of primal therapy, but could not stand the straitjacket of Janov’s conceptual prejudice, left his institute and formed their own groups.

Karl had begun his self-exploration as a member of such a group. After some time, his inner process reached the perinatal level. As he was reliving various aspects of his biological birth, he started experiencing fragments of dramatic scenes that seemed to be happening in another century and in a foreign country. They involved powerful emotions and physical feelings and seemed to have deep and intimate connection with his life; yet none of them made any sense in terms of his present biography. He had visions of tunnels, underground storage spaces, military barracks, thick walls, and ramparts, which all seemed to be parts of a fortress situated on a rock overlooking an ocean shore. This was interspersed with images of soldiers in a variety of situations. He felt puzzled because the soldiers seemed to be Spanish, but the scenery looked more like Scotland or Ireland.