In the middle of my session I suddenly had a vision of a dark rock of irregular shape that looked like a giant meteorite and seemed extremely ancient. The sky opened up, and a lightning bolt of immense intensity hit its surface and started to burn into it some mysterious, arcane symbols. Once these strange hieroglyphs were carved into the surface of the rock, they continued to burn and emit blinding incandescent light. Although I was unable to decipher the hieroglyphs and read them, I sensed that they were sacred, and I could somehow understand the message they were conveying. They revealed to me that I had had a long series of lives preceding this one and that, according to the law of karma, I was responsible for my actions in these lives, although I could not remember them.
At first, I tried to refuse responsibility for things of which I did not have any memory, but was not able to resist the enormous psychological pressure forcing me to surrender and comply. Finally, I had to accept what clearly was an ancient universal law against which there was no recourse. Once I yielded, I found myself holding Monica in my arms, just as I remembered holding her on the previous weekend. We were floating in air in an archetypal pit of immense size, slowly descending in an extended spiral. I felt instinctively that this was the Abyss of Ages and that we were traveling back in time.
The descent took an eternity, and it seemed it would never end. Finally, we reached the bottom of the pit. Monica disappeared from my arms, and I found myself walking in a hall of an ancient Egyptian palace, dressed in ornate clothes. All around me on the walls were beautiful bas-reliefs accompanied by carved hieroglyphs. I could understand their meaning as clearly as I would understand the message of the posters pasted on a Baltimore billboard. On the other side of the large hall, I saw a figure who was slowly approaching me. I understood intuitively that I was the son of an aristocratic Egyptian family and that the man approaching me was my brother in that lifetime.
As the figure came closer, I recognized that it was Wolfgang. He stopped about ten feet from me and looked at me with immense hatred. I realized that in this Egyptian incarnation Wolfgang, Monica, and I were siblings. I was the firstborn and, as such, I had married Monica and received many other privileges that came with that status. Wolfgang felt cheated and experienced agonizing jealousy and strong hatred toward me. I saw clearly that this was the basis of a destructive karmic pattern that then repeated itself in many variations throughout ages.
I stood in the hall facing Wolfgang and feeling his deep hatred toward me. In an attempt to resolve this painful situation, I tried to send him a telepathic message. It was something like this: “I don’t know in what form I am here or how I got here. I am a time traveler from the twentieth century, where I took a powerful mind-altering drug. I am very unhappy about the tension that exists between us, and I want to do anything to resolve it.” I stretched my arms into a very open position and communicated to him in the same way: “Here I am, this is all I have! Please, do anything you need to do to liberate us from this bondage, to set both of us free!”
Wolfgang seemed very excited about my offer and accepted it. His hatred seemed to take the form of two intense rays of energy resembling powerful laser beams that burned my body and caused me extreme pain. After what seemed an extremely long time of excruciating torture, the beams gradually lost their power and eventually completely faded. Wolfgang and the hall disappeared, and I found myself holding Monica again in my arms, feeling that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
We ascended through the same Abyss of Ages, this time moving forward in time. The walls of this archetypal pit were opening into scenes from different historical periods showing Monica, Wolfgang, and me in many previous lifetimes. All of them depicted difficult and destructive triangular situations in which we seriously hurt each other. It seemed that a strong wind, a “karmic hurricane,” was blowing through centuries, dissipating the suffering involved in these situations and releasing the three of us from a fatal, painful bondage. When this sequence ended and I returned fully into the present, I was in a state of indescribable bliss and ecstatic rapture. I felt that, even if I would not achieve anything else for the rest of my days, my life had been productive and successful. In the state I was in, resolution and release from one powerful karmic pattern seemed a sufficient accomplishment for one lifetime!
Monica’s presence in my experience was so intense that I was convinced she had to feel the impact of what was happening with me. When we saw each other the following week, I decided to find out what she had experienced on the afternoon when I had the session. At first, I deliberately did not tell her anything about my session, trying to avoid any possibility of suggestion. I simply asked her what she did between 4:00 and 4:30 on the day I was experiencing the Egyptian karmic sequence in my LSD session.
“Strange that you should ask,” she answered. “It was probably the worst time of my entire life!” She then proceeded to describe a dramatic showdown she had had with her superior that ended by her storming out of the office. She was sure she had lost her job, felt desperate, and ended up in a nearby bar drinking heavily. At one point, the door of the bar opened up, and a man walked in. Monica recognized Robert, a man with whom she had had a sexual relationship at the time she met me. Robert was very rich and gave her many expensive gifts, including a new car and a horse.
Unbeknownst to me, Monica had continued the relationship with Robert after we started dating, not being able to make a choice between the two of us. When she now saw Robert entering the bar, she walked to him and wanted to give him a hug and a kiss. Robert made an evasive maneuver and shook her hand instead. Monica noticed that he was accompanied by an elegant woman. Clearly uncomfortable, Robert introduced her to Monica; it happened to be his wife. For Monica this was a shock because during their entire relationship Robert had claimed that he was single.
At this point, Monica felt that the ground disappeared from under her feet. She left the bar and ran to the parking lot to her Mustang, the car that Robert had given her. She got in and, drunk and in heavy rain, she raced down the beltway, reaching speeds of over ninety miles an hour. Too much had happened that day, and nothing seemed to matter any more; she was determined to end it all. It turned out that exactly at the time when I reached the resolution of the karmic pattern in my LSD session, an image of me emerged in Monica’s mind. She started thinking about me and about our relationship. Realizing that she still had somebody in her life she could rely on, she calmed down. She slowed down the car, drove it off the beltway, and parked it at the curbside. When she sobered up to the point that she could drive safely, she returned home and went to bed.
The day after this discussion with Monica, I received a phone call from Wolfgang, who asked for an appointment with me. This was an absolutely unexpected and surprising development because Wolfgang had never called me before, let alone asked for a meeting. When he arrived, he told me that he came to see me about a very intimate and embarrassing matter. It was a problem that is called in psychoanalysis the prostitute-Madonna complex. He had had a number of casual and superficial sexual relationships in his life, including many one-night stands, and never had had any problems developing and maintaining erection. Now he felt that he had found the woman of his dreams and, for the first time in his life, was deeply in love. However, he was unable to have sex with her and experienced repeated, painful failures.
Wolfgang was desperate and afraid that he would lose this relationship unless he did something about his impotence. He told me that he was too embarrassed to talk about his problem with a stranger. He thought about discussing the issue with me, but had rejected the idea because of his strong negative feelings toward me. But then his attitude toward me suddenly changed radically. His hatred dissolved as if by magic, and he decided to call me and seek help. When I asked him when this had happened, I found out that it exactly coincided with the time when I had completed the reliving of the Egyptian sequence.
A few weeks later, I retrieved the missing piece of the Egyptian story.
I did a hypnotic session with my friend Pauline McCririck, a psychoanalyst from London. As soon as I entered the trance, I found myself lying in the sand of a hot, sun-scorched desert. I felt agonizing pain in my belly, and my entire body was in spasms. I knew I had been poisoned and was going to die. I realized from the context that the only people who could have poisoned me had to be my sister and her lover. According to the Egyptian law, she had to marry me as her oldest brother, but her affection belonged to another man.
He was a very handsome, athletic man, by profession a caretaker of wild animals in the royal palace. He thus belonged to a different social class, and his relationship with my sister was illicit according to the ancient Egyptian law. I had found out about their affair and had attempted to interfere with their relationship. This did not leave them any other alternative than to assassinate me. At one point, I had a vision of my sister’s Egyptian lover and recognized that he was in the present lifetime Seymour, Monica’s ex-lover. It seemed to make a lot of sense because Seymour was extremely athletic and spent several hours a day weight-lifting and bench-pressing. With his enormous hypertrophic muscles, he looked more like a professional body builder than a psychologist.
As I was dying in extreme pain, the realization that I had been betrayed and poisoned brought with it blind, consuming anger. I died alone in the desert with my entire being filled with hatred. The reliving of this situation brought a very interesting insight. I seemed to remember that in my Egyptian lifetime, I was actively involved in the mysteries of Isis and Osiris and knew their secrets. I felt that the poison and the hatred toward my sister and her lover intoxicated my mind and obscured everything else, including my esoteric knowledge. This made it impossible for me to take advantage of the secret teachings at the time of my death. For the same reason, my connection with this arcane knowledge was brutally severed.
I suddenly saw that much of my present life had been dedicated to an unrelenting search for these lost teachings. I remembered how excited I had been every time I had come across some information that was directly or indirectly related to this area—any information about Egyptian culture and history, any reference to ancient mysteries, and any allusion to mystical experiences and esoteric knowledge. This quest culminated when I discovered LSD and had my first experience of cosmic consciousness. In the light of this insight, my work with psychedelics revolving around psychospiritual death and rebirth seemed to be a rediscovery and modern reformulation of the processes involved in the ancient mysteries.
In a subsequent meditation, I was unexpectedly flooded with a fugue of images representing highlights of my experiences with Monica and Wolfgang, some of them from real life, others from my sessions. The intensity and speed of this review rapidly increased until it reached an explosive climax. It felt as if a giant bubble had burst and my head was suddenly clear. In an instant, I felt a deep sense of resolution and peace. I knew that the karmic pattern was now fully resolved. Monica and I remained friends for the rest of my stay in Baltimore. The tension and chaos disappeared from our interactions, and neither of us felt any compulsion to continue an intimate relationship. We both understood that we were not meant to be partners in our present lifetime.
IN THE CATACOMBS OF PECHORSKAYA LAVRA: Past Life in Czarist Russia
Since my early childhood, as far as my memory goes, I have been fascinated by foreign countries, their geography, people, and culture. A deep craving to travel abroad and explore the world has always been an essential part of my personality. But in my young years, it seemed that I was born at the wrong time and in the wrong place to harbor such a passion. The German occupation of Czechoslovakia from 1939 to 1945 and the specter of Nazism that it brought along rendered a severe blow to my childhood dreams of worldwide travel. After the defeat of Germany by the Allies, our country enjoyed a short period of liberty, including the freedom of movement for its citizens. In the summer of 1947, my brother and I were able to spend five weeks in the small fishing village of Trpanj, on the Peljesac Peninsula in Yugoslavia.
The beauty of the Adriatic coast and the adjacent mountain range made a deep impression on me and whetted my appetite for more extensive travels in the future. However, my enthusiasm and my hope were short-lived. The Communist takeover in February 1948, which put Czechoslovakia under political control of the Soviet Union, once again sealed the borders of our country. In the following decade, the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union were gradually opened for travel but, for many years, the Soviet Union itself remained closed for Czech tourists.
In 1959, I had the opportunity to spend my summer vacation in Romania, most of this time in Mamaia. This international resort, the largest one on the Black Sea, was famous for its wide beaches of extremely fine sand extending over more than five miles, low precipitation, cloudless sky, and pleasant temperature of the ocean water. Taking advantage of these ideal conditions, I was spending many hours every day on the beach. Here I met a Russian epidemiologist, docent at the University of Kiev, who was vacationing in Mamaia with his family. They drove from Kiev to Mamaia in their new Moskvitch, the reward for many years of waiting and even more years of a Spartan lifestyle and painstaking saving.
In our discussions, it soon became clear that my new friends hated the Soviet regime as much as I did. Our daily contact on the beach was for me an opportunity to practice my Russian and to get some inside information about life in the Soviet Union. We covered a very broad range of topics, but one of them made a particularly profound impression on me. Talking about Kiev’s historical sites, my Russian friends mentioned Pechorskaya Lavra, a Russian Orthodox monastery situated inside a large mountain. This monastery consisted of an intricate system of catacombs and grottoes that turned the mountain’s interior into a complex underground labyrinth resembling a giant Swiss cheese. The corridors were lined with open coffins containing the bodies of all the monks who had lived there over the centuries. Constant draft and favorable climactic condition preserved them for posterity by causing dry mummification.
Pechorskaya Lavra was originally part of a large religious complex that also included Uspensky Sobor, a magnificent Russian Orthodox temple, a candle producing factory, an enterprise for large-scale production of icons, and other constituents. My friends told me that the Russian Bolsheviks, carrying a determined crusade against religion, considered by the Marxists “opium of the masses,” were well aware of the significance this spiritual center had for the Ukrainian people. However, they refrained from brutal interventions against the monks and nuns and reluctantly opted for tolerance because they were afraid of a popular uprising.
The relationship between the Ukrainian people and the Soviet government was extremely tense from the very beginning. Since 1922, when Ukraine was annexed by the Soviet Union, the rebellion against Russian dominion left over from the Czarist times was further fueled by Soviet atrocities, including two manmade famines, the second instigated by Joseph Stalin and his henchman Lazar Kaganovich. The main goal of these artificial famines, resulting in the deaths of many millions of people, was to break the spirit of the Ukrainian farmers and to force them into collectivization, as well as to stifle the renaissance of Ukrainian culture.
The story of Pechorskaya Lavra fascinated me. As I was listening to my friends talking about it, I sensed waves of chill running up my spine, and my heart was beating faster. My reaction surprised me and baffled me; it was very unusual and atypical for me. It was clear to me that there had to be some deep, unconscious reason for the intensity of my emotions, and I started feeling a strong desire to visit Pechorskaya Lavra to find out what was behind it. Two years later, when the Soviet Union opened up for Czech visitors, I took part in one of the first tourist tours to Russia that included Kiev, Leningrad, and Moscow. In all the places that we visited, we were rigorously supervised by official Soviet Intourist guides and were ordered to stay in the group under all circumstances. Independent, individual sightseeing was strictly prohibited, and violations of the rules would have had seri
ous political consequences.
The most important reason I had chosen this trip was to visit Kiev and see Pechorskaya Lavra. I was very disappointed to find out that this important historical site was not included in the itinerary of our Soviet trip. When I asked about it, the official answer was that Uspensky Sobor was destroyed by the Germans during World War II and there was nothing interesting to see there. I had heard a different story from my Russian friends in Mamaia. They claimed that the Uspensky Temple was filled with explosives by the Soviets before they withdrew from Kiev and that these were detonated by them after the Germans took over Kiev. The Soviets thus killed two birds with one stone: they destroyed the spiritual symbol of the Ukraine and turned the anger of the Ukrainians against the Germans.
But what happened to Uspensky Sobor was not very relevant for me and my personal quest. My primary interest was in Pechorskaya Lavra and its catacombs. And from what I knew, Pechorskaya Lavra was still there; it had survived unscathed the Soviet rule, as well as the German invasion. Soon after our train arrived in Kiev, I started feeling very restless. My passion ate desire to visit the mysterious underground cemetery turned into an irresistible obsession. This was again something very exceptional and uncharacteristic for me. I was known as a rational person who steered through life with a relatively even keel and without significant emotional upheavals.
Taking considerable political risk, I finally decided to split from the group and visit Pechorskaya Lavra on my own. Because I spoke at that time fluent Russian, I was able to get a cab and direct it to the monastery. I got inside and walked through the maze of catacombs lined by the mummies of all the monks who had lived and died there in all the centuries of the monastery’s existence. Their skinny hands covered with brown parchment skin were joined as if in the last prayer. At times, the corridors would open into little caves decorated with powerful icons and lit with candles. Through clouds of heavy smoke of fragrant incense, I could see groups of monks with long beards involved in monotonous singing; they all seemed to be in deep trance and their chant sounded otherworldly and haunting.
When the Impossible Happens Page 18
