When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  I woke up from this dream early in the morning in a state of great uneasiness and apprehension. I had a strong feeling that this dream had something to do with Pauline’s session that I was about to run, and I experienced great reluctance to go ahead with it. This was something very unusual for me; I had never experienced anything like it before. The uneasiness I was sensing sharply contrasted with the enthusiasm I had usually felt about forthcoming psychedelic sessions. I lay in bed, reflecting on the dream, and trying to understand the uncanny feelings I was experiencing. As the morning broke and sunshine entered the bedroom, this strange state of mind gradually dissipated. I became more grounded and regained my usual confidence vis-á-vis the psychedelic session I was about to run.

  During the first few hours of Pauline’s session nothing extraordinary happened. By this I mean nothing that I had not seen before and that would make this session stand out in any particular way. Naturally, having taken a high dose of LSD, Pauline had very powerful experiences. Some of them were memories of emotionally charged episodes from her childhood and infancy, others involved reliving of her difficult birth, and a few were transpersonal elements from the collective unconscious. We were about five hours into the session when Pauline encountered a memory from her childhood involving a royal parade. At one point, she started singing the British anthem: “God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen, god save the Queen....”

  As she was singing, she suddenly became very alarmed. “My God, Stan, I am singing ‘God save the Queen.’ When I was a child, we had a king, not a queen; why am I singing ‘God save the Queen’?” Then all her facial muscles suddenly contracted, giving her an expression of great agony, one that bore uncanny similarity to the face of the dying queen that I distinctly remembered from my dream. “Stan, this is not about my childhood anymore,” she continued obviously distressed, in great panic, and heavily gasping for air. “I am the Queen, and I am dying.” By that time, I had seen enough people in psychedelic sessions experience their death, and I was not particularly alarmed and concerned about Pauline’s physical condition. However, I was astounded to see her enacting my dream from the preceding night and embodying with great accuracy the dying Queen who so prominently featured in it.

  Pauline’s session had a happy ending; her experience of death in identification with the old Queen was followed by an experience of rebirth and a “psychedelic afterglow” lasting several days. She felt that her experience was drawn from the collective unconscious or possibly from her own karmic record. She connected it with her lifelong fascination with royalty and her tendency to wear expensive and extravagant dresses and jewelry. I have not been able to find an explanation for why I had this astonishing precognitive dream. From time to time, I recall this extraordinary synchronicity, trying to understand its origin and meaning. I wonder if this strange bond between us was related to the psychedelic sessions I had with Pauline, during which I experienced symbiotic fusion with her as a fetus in a good womb and an infant on a good breast.

  (1) An infant and a toddler have strong primitive needs for instinctual satisfaction and security that pediatricians and child psychiatrists call anaclitic (from the Greek anaklinein, meaning to cling or lean upon). These involve the need to be held, caressed, comforted, played with, and be the center of the caregivers’ attention. If these needs are not met, it has serious consequences for the future of the individual. back

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

  Profound and auspicious synchronicities can initiate and accompany a powerful spiritual awakening; however, they are not without pitfalls. They can convey a convincing sense that we not only are embedded in a larger ground of cosmic meaning and purpose but also in some sense a focus or center of it. However, the overwhelming feeling of numinousness that is often associated with these synchronicities can be deceptive and should not be naively trusted and acted upon. As we will see in the following story, even the most glorious synchronicities do not guarantee a positive outcome of the situation of which they are part.

  The events I will describe here happened about four years after my arrival in the United States, a time when I was looking for a life partner, with unsolicited assistance of my well-meaning, concerned friends. At the end of 1971, I received a call from Leni and Bob Schwartz, who belonged to the closest circle of my friends. Their house in lower Manhattan, testimony to Leni’s impeccable taste, was a favorite hangout of many cultural figures of the time, from Joseph Campbell to Betty Friedan. Leni and Bob were both on the phone at the same time and, with great excitement, they alternated in describing their recent discovery: “We’ve just met somebody really special. She lives in Miami, and her name is Joan Halifax. She is an anthropologist, and she’s beautiful and brilliant. She has done fieldwork with the Dogon in Sub-Saharan Africa, and she studies Santeria and other Caribbean religions. You’ll have so much in common! You’ll love her.”

  I wrote down Joan’s name and telephone number and thanked Bob and Leni for their effort. But after one tumultuous relationship (see section entitled “THE KARMIC TRIANGLE”), I was not ready to throw myself headfirst into another relationship. Occasionally, I let my fantasy wander to Joan, trying to imagine what our meeting would look like and toying with the idea of calling her. Finally, after several months, I decided to give it a try. I was about to attend the Annual Conference of the American Psychiatric Association in Dallas, Texas, to present the results of our research of LSD psychotherapy with terminal cancer patients. The conference ended on Friday, and it would have been easy for me to make a side trip and spend the weekend in Miami on the way back to Baltimore.

  I dialed Joan’s number, and when she picked up the phone, I introduced myself and said: “I’m Stan Grof from Baltimore. Our joint friends, Bob and Leni Schwartz, keep telling me that the two of us should meet. Is that something you would be interested in? I could come to Miami next weekend. Any chance we could get together?”

  “I’m sorry,” was Joan’s response. “I won’t be here. I’ll be in Dallas. Next week I am going to the APA meeting to give a paper on my work with Santeria.”

  “That’s very interesting,” I said, marveling at the coincidence. “I will be in Dallas, too, going to the same meeting. I wanted to stop in Miami on the way back. Which hotel are you staying in?”

  Things were rapidly getting denser. “In the Baker Hotel,” was Joan’s answer. Of all the hotels in Dallas, this was the one for which I had made my reservation. It turned out that I had actually booked the room, that was directly under Joan’s, one floor lower. Because we were staying in the same hotel, we decided that after our arrival we would connect with each other by telephone. When I arrived in the hotel, the meetings had already started. Joan was not in her room, and she had not left me a message. I decided to go to the meetings and find her. The program had many parallel tracks, eight if I remember correctly, and the meetings were held in several hotels. I looked at the program, trying to guess to which lecture Joan would go. I was using as a clue the fact that she was an anthropologist and also Leni and Bob’s assurance that Joan and I had similar interests. After some deliberation, I chose a movie that was shown in a large auditorium of one of the conference hotels.

  When I entered the hall, the lights were already out and they were showing the movie. I looked around and sat down in a nearby seat that was free. As I was watching the movie, my attention was repeatedly drawn to a woman who was sitting in the row in front of me, about three seats to my left. I actually started seeing something like a light aura around her head. After a while, she started turning her head in my direction, which was very unusual because she had to do it at a fairly large angle for our eyes to meet. This went on for quite a while and, by the time the movie ended, both of us felt so much certainty, that we simply went over to each other and confirmed our suspicions by introducing ourselves. Another extraordinary coincidence was thus added to those that preceded our arrival in Dallas.

  Our Chinese d
inner, an assortment of northern Chinese dishes, probably of average quality, seemed very special. We talked nonstop about our various interests, discovering that Leni and Bob were right; we really had much in common. At the end of the dinner, the waiter brought us the obligatory fortune cookies, something that we usually would not have taken very seriously. But in the context of all the unusual synchronicities that had happened already, the messages seemed absolutely right on and they sounded like an ancient I Ching reading. My cookie said: “Your heart was hers from the moment you met,” and hers revealed: “After long waiting, your dream is finally coming true!” Needless to say, we decided not to go back to our respective homes but to spend the weekend together in Dallas.

  After this auspicious beginning, our relationship moved very fast. The weekend following our encounter in Dallas, I flew to Miami to spend several days with Joan. The following weekend, Joan came to see me in Baltimore, and we had a wonderful time together. The two visits further deepened our relationship. By the end of the weekend, we felt so close that we wanted to continue seeing each other as much as possible, and the idea of separation was quite painful. However, my forthcoming schedule presented a serious problem in this regard. I was to go for about ten days to Iceland to attend the First International Transpersonal Conference.

  To my great surprise and delight, Joan made a sudden decision to take a leave of absence and join me on my trip. We met at Kennedy Airport in New York and boarded Loftleidir, the Icelandic airline, for a flight to Reykjavik. In those days, I conducted many workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and in various other parts of the United States. On many occasions, this involved taking the “red eye express,” as I called the overnight flights back to Baltimore. A friend of mine gave me for these occasions a special kind of candy that he personally prepared. It seemed to be a perfect solution for the lack of comfort and sleep that these flights entailed. I was later able to obtain from him the recipe for this culinary panacea for jetlag and other forms of discomfort associated with long travel.

  My friend’s candy looked and tasted like a Middle Eastern dessert from A Thousand and One Nights. It was a mixture of cut-up nuts, dates, dried figs, and raisins rolled into little balls about the size of a large walnut. The most important ingredient in the mixture was “bhang ghee,” melted butter containing an extract of sinsemilla, dried leaves, and blossoms of hemp native in Big Sur. Embarking on long night flights, I would swallow this before boarding the airplane. By the time it started taking effect, I had a greatly enhanced sense of taste and voracious appetite, which turned the airplane dinner into a gourmet feast. Following the dinner, I put on my eyeshades and listened to music until I fell asleep. I woke up relaxed and refreshed after a good night’s sleep, usually just at the time when they were serving breakfast.

  Joan and I each took two of these magic balls to ease our night flight to Reykjavik. When we landed, we were in a euphoric state of consciousness, one that was known among therapists as “the psychedelic afterglow,” and we seemed to have remained in this special state of mind for many of the following days of our stay in Iceland. We rented a Land Rover for the three days before the conference started and decided to explore the island. The Icelandic scenery is incredible—majestic snow-capped mountains, volcanic craters, sparkling glaciers, luscious meadows and pastures, pristine rivers, and giant waterfalls. Everything seemed ancient—beginning and end of the world coming together.

  We found an idyllic place, a lodge in the mountains with several A—frame cottages scattered in a fairy-tale-like landscape, quite far apart from each other and from the lodge, each with a private little geyser and pool. We were several hours’ drive north of Reykjavik, in a region that lies far beyond the polar circle. It was the end of May, and the magic of the white nights, enhanced by the “psychedelic afterglow,” was an unforgettable experience. We now felt even closer than we had before, and we started toying with the idea of taking advantage of the beautiful Icelandic natural setting and getting married here before our return home.

  The romantic time in our little eyrie came to an end, and we drove to Bifrost, the site of the First International Transpersonal Conference, to join the other seventy participants. The Bifrost conference center, located in a stunningly beautiful volcanic landscape, had a central lodge, residential units, and a large sauna, built of natural wood. The conference brought together a group of very special people, including Joseph Campbell with his wife, Jean Erdman, philosopher and religious scholar Huston Smith, professor of religion Walter Houston Clark, and the Icelandic mythologist Einar Pâlsson. Among the participants were my brother, Paul, with his wife, Eva, and our joint friend Leni Schwartz, who had brought Joan and me together.

  It is well-known that the population of the areas that lie beyond the polar circle has a strikingly large incidence of psychic phenomena. We could certainly confirm that during our stay in Iceland. We met many people who were precognitive, telepathic, and clairvoyant, and others who had reputations as healers, were successful dowsers, or saw elves and fairies. Various ESP phenomena were also rampant among the participants of our Bifrost group. This Icelandic experience helped me understand a book I had always loved, the Gösta Berling Saga by Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. I had always been deeply moved by the intriguing way this author was able to merge everyday life and the mythic realm into an inextricable amalgam.

  After our arrival in the Bifrost lodge, we sat down with Leni Schwartz to have a cup of tea. We decided to tell her that we were toying with the idea of getting married in Iceland. But we barely had a chance to tell her that we had some interesting news for her. “I know what you want to tell me; you would like to get married here,” she said, and her face lit up. She was so convinced about the correctness of her guess that she got up and walked away without waiting for our confirmation. We found out later that she immediately broke the news to the rest of the group. Everybody got excited about the prospect of a nuptial ritual, and collective preparations for the ceremony started almost immediately.

  Einar Pâlsson, an Icelandic mythologist who for the previous twenty years had studied Nordic mythology, came to the conference specifically to meet his hero, Joseph Campbell. The two became engaged in an ongoing series of profound discussions. Joseph, who had incredible encyclopedic knowledge of world mythology, was teaching Einar new things about the symbolic significance of some geographical locations in Iceland and the magic meaning of numbers involved. When the two of them heard about the planned wedding, they decided to provide a solid mythological foundation for our joining.

  They reconstructed an ancient Viking wedding ritual that had not been performed in Iceland since the Christians had arrived. The joining of the bride groom and the bride reflected hierosgamos, the sacred union of Father Sky and Mother Earth, and the symbol of this union was the rainbow. The conference was organized by an Icelandic couple, Geir and Ingrid Vilhjamsson. Ingrid’s father was the mayor of Reykjavik, and her mother had an old Icelandic costume. They brought it from Reykjavik as a wedding dress for Joan, and it fit as if it had been custom-made for her. The wedding outfit we had chosen for me was a beautiful hand-knitted Icelandic sweater.

  In the free time between the sessions of the conference, all the participants were involved in making costumes and masks for the wedding ritual, and some of them worked on the menu for the banquet. Joe Campbell’s wife, jean, an accomplished dancer and Broadway choreographer, choreographed the wedding ceremony and began rehearsing it with the group. Although neither Joan nor I had explicitly told anybody—except each other—that we wanted to get married, the preparations were in full gear.

  The wedding began in the afternoon with a purification ceremony in the sauna, performed separately according to the Icelandic tradition for the bride and the bridegroom. Then the women in the group combed Joan’s hair and dressed her up, singing songs and preparing her for the experience of the wedding night. Led by Ingrid, they tried to detach from
their modern minds and emulate the discussion that might have occurred on this occasion in the old times. I met with the male part of the group to celebrate the end of my bachelorhood. We drank mead, sang appropriate songs, and told many jokes. Trying to tune in to the Viking mentality, my friends offered me their support and encouragement for what was lying ahead of me.

  Following our sauna experience, we all gathered in the dining hall for a festive dinner. The exquisite menu featured many gifts of the Earth and a se lection of freshwater fish and assorted seafood. The colors, tastes, and textures of the food, good wine, and the eerie light of the white night conspired in creating a magical atmosphere. After dinner, as we were dancing, somebody looked out the window and noticed that it had started to drizzle and that a giant, unbelievably rich full double rainbow was gracing the sky. Everybody walked out into the rain and continued to dance on the wet lawn.

  While the dancing inside was jubilant and Dionysian, the rhythm of the movements now became leisurely and flowing, as if slowed by the command of an invisible conductor. People were moving in a tai chi manner, some individually, others in pairs or small groups. Somebody intuitively changed the music inside the dining hall; it was now meditative and timeless, perfectly matching the rhythm of the dance. Illuminated by the magic light of the white night and against the backdrop of the double rainbow, the scene looked otherworldly, surreal, like a Fellini movie.