When the Impossible Happens (45 page)

In the final phase of treatment, a most unusual phenomenon occurred during one of Milada’s sessions. This time, the LSD had a paradoxical effect; instead of inducing holotropic experiences, it brought her back to normal. As soon as it took effect, she started addressing me in a formal way appropriate at that time in Czechoslovakia for a doctor-patient relationship. She distanced herself from her psychotic world and offered interesting psychological insights about it. However, when the effect of the drug started to wear off, the symptoms of transference psychosis returned.

In the following session, she experienced for several hours profound ecstatic feelings, with the sense of cosmic unity as the prevailing pattern. They were associated with a sense of being the Divine Child in the womb of the Great Mother Goddess. To my surprise, she emerged from this session without the previous psychotic and neurotic symptoms and with a completely restructured personality. According to her own description, she was now able to experience herself and the world in a way completely different than ever before. She had zest for life, a new appreciation of nature and art, a totally transformed attitude toward her children, and the ability to give up her previous unrealistic ambitions and fantasies. She was able to resume her job and perform it adequately, obtain a divorce from her husband, and live independently while taking care of her two children.

Many years later, after the liberation of Czechoslovakia, I was able to see her during my visits and find out that this remarkable improvement was lasting. Milada was able to cope with emotional crises in the lives of her two children, who were both severely affected by their parents’ stormy marriage. She did not even experience an emotional breakdown or require hospitalization at the time when her daughter committed suicide by throwing herself under a train. Although she was experiencing deep grief and struggled with feelings of guilt about her daughter’s death, she was able to function in everyday life.

After the liberation of Eastern European countries, when our training in Holotropic Breathwork and transpersonal psychology extended to that part of the world, Milada enrolled in it and became an enthusiastic facilitator. The highly controversial and heretic therapeutic strategy thus produced one of the most dramatic improvements I have ever experienced during the fifty-some years of my psychiatric practice.

THE MAGIC OF SANDPLAY: When a Kitten Can Be Therapist

We have seen repeatedly that the use of therapeutic methods inducing holotropic states of consciousness, such as psychedelic therapy or Holotropic Breathwork, tends to greatly increase the incidence of synchronicities. Synchronicities are also extremely frequent in the work with people undergoing spiritual emergencies. Initially, I thought that this reflected a special relationship between synchronicity and holotropic states of consciousness, but with time I came to the conclusion that it was associated with the transpersonal set and setting rather then a special state of consciousness.

We have often observed in our workshops that extraordinary synchronicities occurred before the Holotropic Breathwork sessions started, when participants were choosing their partners, or even on their way to the workshop. We have also witnessed an unusually high incidence of synchronicities in association with sandplay, an extraordinary therapeutic technique developed by our dear friend, the late Dora Kalff. Christina and I had frequent contact with Dora because we used to stay as guests in her beautiful old house in Zollikon, near Zurich, practically every time we visited Switzerland. We both had a chance to experience sandplay under her guidance, using her extraordinary collection of sandplay paraphernalia.

As Dora told us, it was C.G. Jung himself who had given her the idea for the sandplay. Dora was married to a Dutch baron who was much older than she, and lived with him in Holland. After the death of her husband, she returned with her children to Switzerland, desperately looking for a new perspective and orientation in her life. It just so happened that she liked to visit with her children a small village, which also was the favorite vacation place for Jung and his relatives. Dora and Jung met there, and she shared with him that she was looking for a vocation for herself. And Jung responded by suggesting that she might enjoy experimenting with therapeutic use of sandplay and gave her the basic instructions for how to do it.

The technique of sandplay is very simple. It uses a box of prescribed size (about two feet by two-and-a-half feet), partially filled with clean sand, and a large collection of objects displayed on shelves. These include human figures of different races and professions, animals, trees, and characteristic dwellings from various countries, natural objects, such as stones or shells, and mythological characters and symbols. The task of the client is to shape the surface of the sand and create a scene with the use of any figures and objects they choose. The sandplay does not use a standard set of items; each therapist creates his or her own collection. Dora had an extraordinary assembly of objects and figures from all over the world.

Christina and I fell in love with this technique after we had experienced its power, and we incorporated it into our monthlong workshops at Esalen. One room in the Big House, where our workshops were held, was regularly designated as a sandplay room. The sandplay toys came partially from our own personal collection, partially from the traveling kits of our guest faculty. Besides rare guest appearances of Dora herself and her son Martin, the resident sandplay therapist for the monthlongs was Jungian psychologist and Dora’s senior student, Cecil Burney.

One of the most remarkable and hilarious synchronicities we have observed in connection with the sandplay happened during a monthlong in which Mary, one of the participants, was “pushing the buttons” of all the participants. She was almost manic and talked incessantly, extolling her marriage, her intimate life, and the sexual prowess of her seventy-year-old husband. She had “the most incredible orgasms, fantastic breathwork experiences, the greatest mandalas,” and so on. When Emmett Miller, a hypnotist who came to the group as guest faculty, asked participants to introduce themselves with an appropriate movement or gesture, she went outside, ran into the room through an open door, made a wild pirouette screaming her name, and then ran out through the door in the opposite wall.

It was all too obvious to everybody in the group that her inflated panegyrics were desperate attempts to cover up a very different reality. When it was her time to do the sandplay, she created a complex ornate scene representing her idealized life and romanticized marriage. She was very excited by her creation and went to find Cecil, Christina, me, and Al Drucker, an Esalen rolfer and acupuncturist, to show us her unparalleled creation. When she got us all together, she insisted that we had to go and see the “fantastic sandplay” she had made. She practically dragged us to the Big House and up the stairs to the sandplay room.

When we arrived, she was in for a major shock. On her way out of the room, she had left the door open and, during her absence, a kitten walked inside and used the sandbox as his kitty litter. He jumped up into the box, knocked over some of the key figures, and left a big turd in the part of the sandplay that represented the biggest distortion of reality. Seeing what happened, Mary was devastated and heartbroken. We left, and she stayed alone with her ruined sandplay scene. She had to take out the turd and the sand that was defiled and wash some of the figures. As she was doing it, she thought a lot about what had just happened. In the process, she removed some of the figures and replaced others. The result was a very different sandplay, much more realistic and honest than the first one.

Several months later, during a dinner at the ITA conference in Phillip Island, Australia, we were talking about synchronicities. On this occasion, Cecil Burney related this sandplay story in front of anthropologist Michael Harner, who was known for his incisive humor and his ability to respond very quickly to social situations. Michael and Cecil often got involved in verbal fencing. “What it tells me, Cecil,” Michael charged without losing a second, “is that cat is a better therapist than you are.”

PART 7: TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND MAINSTREAM SCIENCE

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

The challenging observations from consciousness research amassed in the second half of the twentieth century and the basic tenets of transpersonal psychology encountered incredulity and strong intellectual resistance in academic circles. Transpersonal psychology, as it was born in the late 1960s, was culturally sensitive and treated the ritual and spiritual traditions of ancient and native cultures with the respect they deserve in view of the findings of modern consciousness research. It also embraced and integrated a wide range of anomalous phenomena, paradigm-breaking observations that academic science has been unable to account for. However, although comprehensive and well substantiated in and of itself, the new field represented such a radical departure from academic thinking in professional circles that it could not be reconciled with either traditional psychology and psychiatry or with the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of Western science.

As a result of this, transpersonal psychology was extremely vulnerable to accusations of being irrational, unscientific, and even “flaky,” particularly by scientists who were not aware of the vast body of observations and data on which the new movement was based. These critics also ignored the fact that many of the pioneers of this revolutionary movement had impressive academic credentials. These pioneers generated and embraced the transpersonal vision of the human psyche not because they were ignorant of the fundamental assumptions of traditional science, but because they found the old conceptual frameworks seriously inadequate in accounting for their experiences and observations. Much of the resistance came from representatives of the academic community, who saw the current scientific worldvew as an accurate and definitive description of reality and clung to it with stubborn determination, impervious to any evidence countering it.

The nature and intensity of some of the mainstream scientists’ reaction to any form of spirituality, in general, and to transpersonal psychology, in particular, seems to mirror the fanaticism of religious fundamentalists. Their attitude lacks solid scientific grounding, ignores or distorts all existing evidence, and is impervious to facts of observation and logical arguments. Closer scrutiny reveals that what they present as an image of reality that has been scientifically proven beyond any reasonable doubt is a colossus on clay feet supported by a host of a priori metaphysical assumptions.

One of the most salient examples of this category of scientists was Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University in New York City. An outstanding representative of his field, he achieved worldwide acclaim by his participation as experimenter in most of the unmanned planetary probe missions, by founding the project SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and creating the highly acclaimed TV series
Cosmos.
He also designed, jointly, with Frank Drake, the gold plaque with the message of Earthlings for extraterrestrial civilizations carried by Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to leave the solar system. Shortly before Sagan’s death, of myelodysplasia, his science fiction novel
Contact
inspired a widely acclaimed movie with the same name.

However, instead of enjoying his professional success and reputation in the area of his expertise, Carl Sagan embarked for unknown reasons with unusual emotional charge and determination on a crusade against everything he considered irrational, unscientific, and occult. He assumed a highly authoritative position of an arbiter and judge of observations reported by a variety of experts from several other disciplines, including parapsychology, thanatology, psychedelic research, anthropology, and comparative religion.

To accomplish his goal of sanitizing the culture from the pollution by occultism and superstition, Carl Sagan became one of the founding members of an organization called CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), associated himself with the journal entitled
The Skeptical Inquirer,
and employed the services of magician James Randi to help him prove that all claims of the paranormal were fraudulent. The epitome of his efforts was his book of passionate philippics against the dangers of irrationality,
The Demon-Haunted World
(Sagan 1997).

My first contact with Carl was through an enthusiastic letter I received from him shortly after the publication of my book
Realms of the Human Unconscious
(Grof 1975). In this book, I described that my patients undergoing LSD psychotherapy often experienced deep regression, in which they relived with intense emotions and physical feelings the memory of their biological birth. I was able to distinguish four experiential patterns that were associated with this process, reflecting the consecutive stages of childbirth, and referred to them as basic perinatal matrices (BPMs).

BPM I is related to prenatal existence in an advanced stage of pregnancy before the onset of delivery. BPM II reflects the experience of claustrophobic terror and hopelessness experienced by the fetus during the stage of childbirth when the uterus is contracting, but the cervix is not yet open. BPM III is associated with the difficult passage through the birth canal that begins after the cervix is sufficiently dilated. And, finally, BPM IV reproduces the experience of the moment of birth and the immediately following period of reconnection with the mother. Full conscious reliving of birth is then experienced as psychospiritual death and rebirth.

Carl was particularly fascinated by my description of the fourth perinatal matrix, which typically involves visions of brilliant light and of various archetypal figures appearing in this light. In his opinion, expressed in an article published in 1979 in the
Atlantic Monthly
magazine (Sagan 1979a), this observation rendered a mortal blow to the claims of the mystics, who often report visions of divine light and of celestial beings. He concluded that what mystics consider to be supernatural light and angelic beings is actually the infantile memory of emerging into the light of the operation room and seeing cloaked obstetricians and nurses. The misperception of this situation as numinous is thus a result of the immature eyesight and cognition of the newborn.