It was quite common that some of the participants could not stand this situation and emotionally fell apart, or “went into process,” as it was called. At this point, the rest of the group surrounded this person and supported him or her in working through whatever came up for them. When the process was finished, the lines were recreated and the floating of the nude bodies continued. The egalitarian role of the leader was reflected not only by his sharing the nudity, but also by his participating in this exercise. When the group floated Bill Swartley, Myra saw her opportunity to win the prize of the weekend. She threw herself toward Bill Swartley and attacked with her teeth his scrotum and his testicles. Naturally, she became the uncontested winner of the pendant.
During the group scan, many of us came up with associations that were clearly related to the personalities and the lives of the owners of the objects. The main difference between us and Anne in this regard was not only that her imagination was richer than ours, she was also able to decipher her own images and associations and translate them into clear and cohesive readings, which we were not able to do.
Although most of my associations turned out to be astonishing hits once the owner of the pendant was identified and I received her feedback, I would not have been able to decipher my imagery by myself and come up with a concrete, specific, and unambiguous reading. Surprisingly, my psychometric reading had one important part, the relevance of which was not immediately obvious. The memories of my medical studies and my later professional work focusing strongly on situations involving cancer were more than just allusions to Myra’s medical profession. Several months after our Esalen monthlong, Myra was diagnosed with cancer, and eventually succumbed to this disease.
ANTS OF THE GREAT MOTHER GODDESS: A Visit to Palenque
The next story shows that transpersonal experiences in holotropic states of consciousness can provide “paranormal” access to new information about archetypal and historical spheres of the collective unconscious. In many instances, it is possible to verify the accuracy of the information about deities and mythological domains of other cultures, as well as various periods of human history, obtained in this way. It does not seem to matter whether or not these mythologies, cultures, or historical facts were previously known to the subject. These observations parallel and confirm C.G. Jung’s discovery that, besides the Freudian individual unconscious, the psyche of each of us also has access to the collective unconscious, which harbors the records of the history and mythological heritage of humanity.
The events described here happened at the end of November 1971, when my brother, Paul, and I attended the Fifth World Congress of Psychiatry in Mexico City. Paul, a psychiatrist like myself, worked at the time at the Psychiatric Hospital of McMasters University in Hamilton, Ontario, and I lived and worked in Baltimore. The congress offered us a welcome opportunity for a reunion. We decided to use the time after the conference for a joint trip to the Yucatán Peninsula to explore the ruins of the ancient Mayan cities.
When the Congress ended, we rented a car and after a long drive reached Mérida, the capital of Yucatán. Using our hotel in Mérida as a base, we explored the surrounding ruins—Chichen Itza, Dzibilchaltun, Uxmal, and Tulum. In the middle of intense sightseeing, I developed flu symptoms and a very sore throat. I could not give up seeing the monuments of the ancient Mayans, a culture that since my adolescent years had been for me a subject of very intense interest. The high fever and large quantities of daiquiri I drank to combat my pharyngitis and laryngitis added a very interesting dimension to my experience. I got in touch with a few past-life memories and had some very interesting intuitive insights about the places we visited.
In spite of the fact that I was able to rest only at nighttime, I managed to reach a reasonable degree of recovery before our return to Mexico City. On the way back, we decided to stop in Villa Hermosa and visit Palenque, one of the most remarkable Mayan ruins. Although my physical condition was not quite back to normal, I decided against my better judgment to take some methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA), a psychedelic, or entheogen, closely related to Ecstasy. My original plan was to take the substance in Chichen Itza, but I was not able to because I felt too sick. Doing a session in this extraordinary location was part of my exploration of the cultural effect of psychedelics. I knew from my previous experiences that these substances were able to provide extraordinarily deep insights into the archetypal dynamics of sacred places.
Although I was aware of the importance of safe set and setting for psychedelic experiences, this was an opportunity I did not want to miss. On the basis of my previous sessions with MDA, I felt confident that I could handle its effects in a public place without attracting too much attention. I covered my eyes with dark glasses so that the other visitors could not see my dilated pupils and took 125 milligrams of the substance. Whether it was my incomplete convalescence, the power of the place, or particularly powerful astrological transits, the effects of the MDA were incomparably more powerful than at any time in the past.
The onset of the experience was extraordinarily sudden and dramatic. I found it increasingly difficult to relate to the ruins surrounding me simply as an admiring visitor. I felt waves of deep anxiety permeating my whole being and an almost metaphysical sense of oppression. My perceptual field was becoming darker and darker, and I started noticing that the objects around me were endowed with awesome energy and had begun to undulate in a most ominous fashion.
I realized that Palenque was a place where thousands of human sacrifices had taken place and felt that all the suffering of ages somehow still hung around as a heavy cloud. I sensed the presence of wrathful Mayan deities and their thirst for blood. They obviously craved more sacrifice and seemed to assume that I would be their next sacrificial victim. As convincing as this feeling was, I had enough critical insight to realize that this was an inner symbolic experience and that my life was not really in danger.
I closed my eyes to find out what was happening inside my psyche. All of a sudden, it seemed that history came alive; I saw Palenque not as ruins, but as a thriving sacred city at the height of its glory. I witnessed a sacrificial ritual in incredible detail; however, I was not simply an observer, but also the sacrificial victims. This was immediately followed by another similar scene, and yet another. As I was getting extraordinary insights into pre-Columbian religion and the role that sacrifice played in this system, my individual boundaries seemed to have completely disappeared, and I felt increasingly connected to all those who had died in Palenque over the centuries to such an extent that I became them.
I experienced myself as an immense pool of emotions they had felt; it contained a whole spectrum of feelings—regret over the loss of young life, anxious anticipation, and strange ambivalence toward their executioners, but also peculiar surrender to their fate and even excitement and curious expectation about what was going to come. I had a strong sense that the preparation for the ritual involved the administration of some mind-altering drugs that raised the experience to another level.
I was fascinated by the dimensions of the experience and by the richness of insights that it entailed. I climbed the hill and lay down by the Temple of the Sun to be able to concentrate better on what was happening. The scenes of the past kept bombarding my consciousness with extraordinary force. My fascination was rapidly being replaced by deep metaphysical fear. A message seemed to come loud and clear: “You are not here as a tourist eavesdropping on history, but as a sacrificial victim, like all the others who were sacrificed in the past. You will not leave here alive.” I felt the overpowering presence of the deities demanding sacrifice, and even the walls of the buildings seemed to be thirsting for more blood—my own.
I had experienced altered states of consciousness before in my psychedelic sessions and knew that the worst fears in these experiences do not reflect objectively existing danger and usually dissipate as soon as consciousness returns to normal. As convincing as the experience was, I wanted to believe that it was “just anoth
er one of those.” But the feelings of impending doom became increasingly real. I opened my eyes and a feeling of bloodcurdling panic took over my entire being. My body was covered with giant ants, and my skin was erupting into hundreds of red bumps. This was not just in my mind; this was really happening.
I realized that this unexpected complication provided an element that was previously missing to make my fears absolutely convincing. Earlier I had doubted that MDA alone could kill me, but now I was not sure what large amounts of the toxin of hundreds of giant Mexican ants could do to someone whose sympathetic nervous system was strongly activated by MDA, an amphetamine derivative. The ants brought an unknown into the equation—the chemical ingredients of their toxin and its interaction with the substance I had taken. I decided to run, to escape from the ruins, remove myself from the influence of the deities. However, time seemed to have slowed down almost to the point of stopping, and my whole body felt enormously heavy, as if it were made of lead.
I desperately tried to run as fast as I could, but it seemed that I was progressing as if in a slow-motion movie. I felt as if I were caught in a tractor beam; the deities and the walls of the ruins had a firm grip on me and were holding me under their spell. As this was happening, images of the entire history of Palenque were still flashing through my mind. I could see the parking lot full of cars separated from the ruins by a heavy chain. There was the predictable rational world of my everyday reality. I set my mind on the task of getting there, feeling that this would somehow save my life. At the time, I saw the chain as a boundary where the influence of the magic world of ancient gods ended. Has not our modern world conquered and discredited the empires based on beliefs in such mythical realities?
My expectation turned out to be correct. After what seemed like eternity and with enormous effort, I reached the parking lot. At that moment, it was as if a heavy weight—physical, psychological, and spiritual—was lifted off my being. I felt light, ecstatic, reborn and pulsing with exuberant life energy. My senses felt cleansed and wide open; the glorious sunset during my return trip from Palenque, the dinner in a small restaurant in Villa Hermosa, watching the pulse of life in the streets, and tasting of fruit juices in the local jugerías were truly ecstatic experiences.
However, I spent much of the night taking cold showers to alleviate the pain and burning sensations from all the ant bites. As the effects of MDA withered away, hundreds of itching bumps covering my entire body became my dominant reality. Several years later, a German friend of mine, Christian Raetsch, a famous anthropologist and ethnobotanist, who had studied extensively MesoAmerican cultures and actually lived for a long time with the Lacandon Mayas, told me during his visit to Esalen that ants played an important role in Mayan mythology and were deeply connected with the Earth goddess and with the death-rebirth process.
ULURU AND ALCHERINGA: An Adventure in Dreamtime
This story describes some extraordinary adventures in non-ordinary realities that Christina and I had during our visit to Australia, more specifically to central Australia and its spectacular Ayers Rock, or Uluru. What makes this experience particularly interesting is that we were able to find independent verification for the new information about the archetypal and ritual world of the Aborigines that we obtained in our respective holotropic states—me in a psychedelic session and Christina in her spontaneous experiences, which were part of her spiritual emergency.
Australia has many features that make it unique and remarkable—its isolated location in the Southern Hemisphere, the vastness of its central desert, the picturesque giant Ayers rock in the middle of the continent, and, particularly, its fauna, which has no parallels in the world—the marsupial kangaroo, wombat, and Tasmanian devil, and the monotreme duck—billed platypus and echidna. But for anthropologists, psychologists, and consciousness researchers, the most intriguing aspect of this continent is its original inhabitants, the Australian Aborigines.
This remarkable group of hunters and gatherers has been in Australia for at least fifty thousand years and has essentially coevolved with the changing continent. The Aborigines adapted to the harsh Australian environment by living in seminomadic groups in conditions externally not very different from the Stone Age. And yet, their inner life has been extraordinarily rich. They have a fascinating ritual and spiritual life and complex mythology closely related to the land in which they live. Researchers who have lived with the Aborigines and studied them report that these people spend much time in a remarkable state of consciousness called alcheringa (Dreamtime).
We have read and heard many stories about the remarkable psychic abilities of the Aborigines. These accounts described that they were able to communicate with each other without the aid of any physical means, such as messengers, sounds, or smoke signals; they could accurately transmit thoughts, feelings, and ideas to friends and relatives who were hundreds of miles away. The intuitive connection the Aborigines had with nature was equally remarkable. They knew, for example, that a small local rain, a rare and precious occurrence in the desert, would fall several miles away, and would run there with impeccable timing to intercept it. According to some other stories, they have been able to reconstruct crimes, identify and track down criminals, and locate strayed cattle and lost valuables. They also had incredible ability to see and identify small objects at great distances.
These reports together with our knowledge of the mythology, paintings, and music of this extraordinary group of people generated in us great interest in getting to know them better. Our first opportunity came when we were invited by our friends Alf and Muriel Foote to conduct a Holotropic Breathwork workshop in their center in Blackwood, near Melbourne. Another reason for our meeting was to prepare ground for a conference of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) in Phillip Island, near the Australian coast.
During our stay in Blackwood, we started exploring with our friends the possibility of spending some time with the Aborigines and meeting their elders. This turned out to be a much more difficult problem than we expected. We found out that they were not a homogeneous group; several hundred thousand surviving Aborigines spoke among them more than two hundred languages. In addition, they were divided into a number of so called “skin groups,” each with its own mythology, rituals, and strict rules for intermarriage. It was generally not easy to find “cultural brokers,” who mediate the contact with the various Aboriginal groups, and the few that we found out about were very protective of them, because of some bad experience in the past, and very cautious about foreigners whom they did not know.
While still in California, we had decided to include central Australia in our trip and visit Ayer’s Rock, a unique geological formation in the middle of the continent that the Aborigenes call Uluru and consider their “Cosmic Mountain.” Because all our attempts to find useful contacts had failed, we had to undertake this trip on our own. As it turned out, our encounter with the Aboriginal culture took a different form than we expected. It happened through powerful inner experiences rather than external contacts.
We flew from Melbourne to Alice Springs, and instead of using a small plane for a flight to Ayers Rock, we decided to rent a car. We wanted to get an intimate feeling for the awesome red desert covering most of Australia. The distance between Alice Springs and Uluru was almost three hundred miles, and the drive in scorching heat lasted many hours. The Aborigines are able to perceive many interesting nuances in the desert territory and have various mythological stories attached to them. In addition, they believe that every meaningful activity or process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, in the same way that plants leave an image of themselves as seeds. The shape of the landscape thus carries and reflects vibrations, which echo the events that created them, as well as footprints of the mythological beings that were instrumental in this process. This energy pattern, guruwari, or seed power, is an integral part of the terrain and lends it profound metaphysical meaning.
To us, as Wes
tern observers, the scenery seemed beautiful and awesome, but monotonous. On occasion, we noticed along the road bleached skeletons of dingoes, camels, and other animals. A welcome distraction on our long journey was an encounter with a perentie, a giant monitor lizard (Varanus giganteus) basking in the sun a few yards from the road. We later discovered that the meat of this animal was considered a delicacy by the Aborigines.
Ayers Rock, or Uluru, is the world’s largest monolith, roughly oval in shape. It is a spectacular sandstone formation with the circumference of almost six miles, towering a thousand feet above hundreds of miles of red desert. It is thought to be the tip of a mountain that extends miles below the surface. When we finally arrived there exhausted after many hours of driving through the desert, we discovered to our delight a small motel, located only about 200 yards from the majestic monolith. We checked in and decided to go for a walk and get the first impression of the environment.
The sun was setting, and we walked far into the desert to get a good view of the rock. When we reached a sufficient distance from the motel, the panorama of Uluru with its reddish-orange sharply contrasting with the dark blue sky was absolutely magnificent. This wonder of nature was known to shine with its full breathtaking beauty at sunrise and sunset. The motel, located in such an auspicious place, seemed like a perfect setting for a psychedelic experience. I had with me some LSD, a leftover from my research in Czechoslovakia, where I had been principal investigator in a program of psychedelic therapy and had unlimited access to the substance.
When the Impossible Happens Page 24
