When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  Prem Das described to us the tragic situation of the Huichol Indians. These people, descendents of the Aztecs, lived in small communities scattered through the canyons and valleys of the rugged mountains of the Sierra Madre in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit. They lived off the land, cultivating corn, beans, and chili peppers on the steep mountain slopes. The Huichols were representatives and guardians of an old pre-Hispanic tradition of their remote past, which they had been trying to preserve and protect against various external onslaughts. They called themselves Wixalika, or Healers, and believed that conducting proper ceremonies was essential in order to heal the Earth and keep nature in balance. The Huichols had successfully withstood the invasion of the Spanish conquistadores and now they were trying to keep their culture alive in spite of the ever-increasing encroachment of their Mexican neighbors.

  In the 1970s, the Mexican government, determined to integrate all indigenous peoples into mainstream society, opened schools, clinics, and agricultural stations to introduce the Huichols to the new ways. Since that time, airstrips had brought small planes carrying tourists and government officials into the most remote areas of the Sierra. Ranchers coveted the high, grassy plateaus on which the Huichols lived and tried to appropriate them as new grazing lands for their increasingly large cattle herds. Christian missionaries and religious zealots had made numerous efforts to convert the “pagans.” The young Huichol generation was exposed to the temptations of the consumer society, with its television, transistor radios, motorcycles, and alcoholic beverages.

  Modernization of the Mexican society also seriously interfered with a critical element of Huichol ritual life. The Huichols had traditionally obtained their main sacrament peyote in an annual pilgrimage to Wirikuta, or the Land of Flowers, their spiritual home located at the western edge of the Catorce mountain range. This three-hundred-mile journey used to be made on foot, and the first-timers had to walk it blindfolded. According to a millennia-old story, Wirikuta was the land where the Huichols were created and where their ancestors witnessed from Cerro Quemado, the Burnt Hill, the birth of the sun; this was also where the first deer hunt took place.

  The Huichols believed that peyote grew in the footprints of the Deer Spirit Kauyumare and they obtained the sacred cactus by imitating a deer hunt. During the pilgrimage to Wirikuta, they ingested peyote ritually and they collected a sufficient supply to last them for the entire year. Private ownership of land and a system of fences now compromised the numinosity of this event by forcing them to use trucks and the highway system for this journey.

  The last onslaught of the industrial civilization had been detrimental for the village where Prem Das lived. Since time immemorial, the staples of the Huichols had been corn and beans, a combination that constituted a perfectly balanced diet. To increase the production of corn, the Mexican government introduced into Huichol land herbicides that made the land incapable of growing any crops other than corn and forced the Huichols to buy beans on the market. When the price of beans suddenly tripled, this staple became unavailable to them. The undernourished Huichol children were now showing a variety of health problems related to this deficiency.

  Having heard this, we decided to help the Huichols to survive and to pre serve their culture and their spiritual life. With Prem Das’s help, we established a connection with Huichol shamans and their artists, a liaison that turned out to be mutually beneficial. Prem Das regularly brought from Mexico his teacher, Don José, and other shamans as guest faculty in our monthlong seminars. They regularly carried with them large amounts of stunning Huichol artifacts, which were articles highly valued by the Esalen community, by workshop participants, and by visiting guests. This exchange represented extraordinary enrichment of our program and generated enough money to provide the necessary supply of beans for the Huichol village.

  For us, the greatest benefit of this enterprise was the opportunity to meet Don José, a venerated Huichol shaman or mara’akame, and to spend some time with him. During his visits to Big Sur, Don José regularly stayed as a guest in our house. He was one of the most extraordinary spiritual teachers and human beings we have ever met. Don José was more than one hundred years old at the time we first met him. He had only one arm, having lost the other one as a young boy in a fishing accident. A machete injury had cost him the loss of two fingers on his remaining hand. And yet, he personally harvested every year five tons of corn and believed that the best guarantee for good health and longevity is to produce sufficient amounts of sweat every day. His vitality was astonishing; he walked up and down the mountains with such a speed that Prem Das, a young and athletic man in his late twenties, could hardly keep up with him. Despite his age, he showed active interest in sex and repeatedly made advances to women in our groups.

  The all-night ceremonies with Don José were truly unforgettable events. He attended them wearing a large hat and his Huichol costume, both richly embroidered and decorated with intricate geometric designs and sacred symbols of his tribe—Deer Spirit Kauyumari; Great-grandfather Fire Tatewari; peyote cactus Hikuri; the double-headed eagle, representing the shaman capable of seeing in all directions; and many others. Don José always ingested before the ceremony a large bud of peyote cactus that helped him to transcend the limits of ordinary sense perception and to “see with the mind’s eye and the heart of the Great Spirit the interconnectedness of all things, seen and unseen.”

  In spite of the impressive amount of peyote he had ingested, Don José performed all the ritual activities and healing interventions with impeccable precision, holding his prayer arrow with eagle and turkey feathers in his three remaining fingers and carrying for hours a sweet and haunting sacred chant. Prem Das accompanied him either with rhythmic compelling beats of his drum or playing a handmade wooden string instrument. The group joined in by adding the energetic sounds of Huichol rattles made of gourds and dry beans. Don José had an inimitable capacity to balance the sacred and the earthy. While the drumming and chanting was happening, he was very serious and created a solemn and numinous atmosphere in the room, but, during the breaks, his very mischievous trickster side took over. He laughed out loud and exchanged with Prem Das hilarious and often dirty jokes.

  The most extraordinary and memorable ceremony we have experienced with Don José took place in the Big House at Esalen in the late 1970s, in the middle of a catastrophic California drought that lasted several years. During this entire time, the water shortage was critical. The agriculture in California was seriously threatened, and people living in expensive houses were unable to flush their toilets and wash their dishes. As the ceremony was beginning, one of the participants jokingly suggested: “Don José, there is a terrible drought in California; maybe we should make a rain ceremony.” Everybody in the group took it as a joke, except for Don José. After a short period of deliberation and to everybody’s surprise, he agreed.

  For those of us who did not understand Don José’s chanting in the Huichol language, the ceremony seemed to resemble others we had done in the past. There was continuous drumming, chanting, and music all through the night, with the exception of a few breaks. In the middle of the ceremony, Prem Das led the group in the Huichol Deer Dance, during which we moved around the room in a stylized way combining forward steps with rotations of our bodies along the vertical axis. At dawn, Don José took out of his medicine bag a large abalone shell and a rabbit’s tail and invited us to go with him down to the ocean to receive limpieza, or purification, and give offerings to the ocean as a thanksgiving for a good ceremony.

  We walked out of the Big House to the cypress-covered cliffs of the stunning Big Sur coast, still experiencing the “afterglow” of the ceremony. The view of the Pacific Ocean in the morning light was breathtaking and overwhelming. As the entire group stood there motionless, staring at this spectacular panorama, somebody noticed that it had started to drizzle. “In credible unbelievable ... fantastic...” were people’s comments about what in the middle of a disastrous drought seemed like a mir
acle. But Don José remained calm. “It is kupuri, the blessing of the gods,” he said. “It always happens; it means we did a good ceremony.”

  As we walked down the stone steps to the ocean, the drizzling rapidly turned to a shower. Don José reached the ocean shore and stood on a flat rock, about ten feet above the water line. He placed his offering on the surface of the rock near his feet and started to chant. The ocean was very calm that day, but, after a few minutes of his prayer, as we all watched in astonishment, a single giant wave formed on its surface and moved rapidly toward the rock on which Don José stood. This massive body of water reached the rock with tremendous force, but it formed at its end a spiral crest that gently swept the offerings from the rock without spraying Don José’s feet. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that the extraordinary mara’akame had interacted with the ocean as a living being and that it responded to him by receiving his offerings.

  Don José filled his abalone shell with ocean water and, dipping his rabbit tail into it, blessed and purified one group member after another as we were standing there in a line. By that time, it was literally pouring, and we were all soaking wet, receiving limpieza of another kind. When we climbed back up the hill, we all danced in the rain on the lawn in front of the Big House around a beautiful eucalyptus tree, some people after taking off all their clothes. This might seem somewhat unusual behavior to an average American, but in Esalen, known for its cult of bodywork and integrated bathing, it seemed quite natural. We were astonished by what we just had experienced, and the mood in the group was ecstatic.

  When we later related this experience to Joseph Campbell, he shared with us a similar story from his own life. Several years earlier, he had been invited as a guest to a rain ceremony on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Like our own ceremony, it took place during a severe drought. When they arrived at the ritual site and the ceremony began, the sky was blue and there was not a single cloud in sight. Joseph confessed that he felt very amused by the vain effort of the Navajo shaman, who carried on with great determination what seemed like a silly and foolish activity. Seemingly ignorant of all the odds he was against and with everybody watching, he kept chanting and beating his drum. But then dark clouds started to gather on the horizon, and they traveled rapidly in their direction. And, before the ceremony was over, they all were soaking wet.

  When I later thought about the native belief in such ceremonial magic, I had to admit that the positive result of the rain ceremonies should not surprise us. The people in native cultures might not be technologically advanced, but they are not stupid. It is hard to imagine that they would continue venerating shamans who would conduct one ceremony after another without being able to show any results. For the tradition of rainmaking ceremonies to continue, they have to be successful in a significant number of cases. That does not mean that the relationship has to be causal in the sense that the shaman is actually making the rain. We have seen in other stories in this book the significant role that, on occasion, the principle of synchronicity plays in the universal scheme of things.

  SRI YANTRA IN THE OREGON DESERT: UFO Visit or a Spectacular Hoax?

  In 1989, Christina and I organized a conference of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) in Eugene, Oregon, entitled Mystical Quest, Attachment, and Addiction. As it turned out, this event became a focus of some interesting synchronistic happenings. At the time of this conference, I was deeply immersed in the study of UFO sightings and of experiences of alien encounters and abductions. My interest in this subject was prompted by my observations of UFO abduction experiences in psychedelic sessions of my clients, in sessions of Holotropic Breathwork of participants in our workshops and training, and during spiritual emergencies of the people I worked with. My personal encounter with what seemed to be alien intelligence during a ketamine session in Rio de Janeiro contributed to my interest in this area.

  Since Kenneth Arnold’s first sighting of disk-shaped “unidentified flying objects” in 1947 near Mt. Rainier in Washington, the UFOs and various forms of encounters with and abduction by alien visitors have belonged to the most enigmatic and controversial phenomena of modern times. As a result of my personal observations and study of UFO literature, I realized very quickly that the attitude of mainstream scientists toward this phenomenon was simplistic and inadequate. Like experienced UFO researchers, such as Jacques Vallée and Allen Hynek, I came to the conclusion that we are dealing here with observations that represent true “anomalies” and seriously challenge our established concepts of reality.

  I became convinced that the two alternative explanations offered by materialistic science—hallucinations of psychotic individuals and misperception and misinterpretation of some natural or human-made objects—were painfully inadequate efforts to capture the nature of these enigmatic experiences. I also felt that it was very unlikely that we were dealing with actual visits of physical extraterrestrial beings. We have enough information about the planets of our solar system from unmanned probes to know that they are unlikely habitats for such visitors. And the next possible point of origin of such interstellar journeys would be Proxima Centauri, separated from us by 4.2 light-years. Spacecraft from such destinations would have to travel at a speed approaching or exceeding the velocity of light or use interdimensional travel through hyperspace.

  I concluded that the UFO experiences were phenomena sui generis, anomalous events that represented a radical challenge to mainstream scientific paradigms and required a radically different explanation. I read with great interest C.G. Jung’s book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Jung 1964). In it Jung reviewed accounts of UFO-like visions re ported throughout human history and suggested that these experiences were manifestations that had their origin in the imaginal world of the collective unconscious. According to him, they were thus neither hallucinations nor perceptions of material reality, but belonged to the twilight zone between consciousness and the world of matter. Jung thus relegated the UFO phenomena into the realm of consciousness research and transpersonal psychology. I found his argument very convincing and saw it as a justification of my own interest in this area.

  We had scheduled our training for facilitators of Holotropic Breathwork in such a way that it immediately preceded the Eugene conference. Because the training took place at Hollyhock Farm on Cortez Island in the Vancouver Bay, I was able to incorporate both destinations into one airplane itinerary. The chain of synchronicities started when I was flying from San Francisco to Seattle on the way to Cortez Island. I was reading Whitley Strieber’s book Communion (Strieber 1987), describing his experiences of encounters with extraterrestrial beings. One of the four-hundred-some pages of this paperback, located in the middle of the book, gave general information about UFOs; the rest was about Strieber’s personal experiences.

  Just as I was reading the sentence describing the first sighting of UFOs by Kenneth Arnold near Mt. Rainier, I heard the captain’s voice, bringing to our attention that the majestic snowcapped mountain on our right was Mt. Rainier. I found the timing quite impressive, considering that Mt. Rainier was mentioned just once in the entire book. We landed in Seattle, and a taxi took me to the harbor, where I boarded a small seaplane for a spectacular flight over the hundreds of little islands of the Vancouver Bay to Cortez Island. The first person I saw when I arrived at Hollyhock Farm was John Mack, a well-known Harvard psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was participating in our training.

  “Stan, I have to talk to you,” was the first thing John said after we greeted each other. “You were absolutely right. I have been looking into the UFO abduction experiences, and it’s fascinating stuff!” John was referring to a discussion we had had earlier that year at Pocket Ranch in Geyserville, California, about a paper by Keith Thompson entitled “Angels, Aliens, and Archetypes,” which Christina and I decided to include in our book Spiritual Emergency. In this paper, Keith compared the situation of the UFO abductees to that of the initiates in aboriginal rites of pass
age.

  At the time of our discussion at Pocket Ranch, John was very skeptical, and I tried to convince him that the UFO phenomenon represented a serious challenge to the existing paradigm in psychiatry and that it deserved serious investigation. Hearing John’s comment, I was very curious about what had transpired in the meantime that forced him to change his attitude. We sat down by the ocean, and he described to me that Blanche, one of his fellow trainees, had taken him to see her New York friend Bud Hopkins, a dedicated UFO researcher. John, a rigorous but honest and open-minded scientist, was very impressed by the evidence Bud presented to him.

  Bud had reports from many hundreds of abductees from different parts of the world, most of whom had no contact with each other. Some of them were from remote parts of the world and involved people who were illiterate. And yet, there was great similarity between the narratives of the abductees, often involving details such as the mechanics of the abductions, specific physical features of the aliens and spacecraft, mysterious symbols decorating the walls of the extraterrestrial spaceships, and the nature of the procedures to which the abductees were exposed. John, inspired by this visit, started his own independent research and was becoming increasingly impressed and fascinated by what he was finding.

  I should mention here that in the following years John published his findings in the books Abductions (Mack 1994) and Passport to the Universe (Mack 1999). His research got extensive coverage in the press and gained John appearances on all the major American TV talk shows. The resulting controversy almost cost John his tenure at Harvard, and the legal procedure involved consumed a significant part of his advance royalties. After winning the lawsuit with Harvard, John started PEERS, an organization for the study of “anomalous phenomena,” observations challenging the current scientific paradigm. In September 2004, John’s life was terminated by a tragic accident; during his visit to a London conference he was killed by a drunken truck driver while crossing a street.