When the Impossible Happens

by Grof, Stanislav

  However, it soon became obvious that Hugo’s rigid ideas about the future of holophonic technology might represent a serious obstacle in its widespread use. He was determined to maintain full control of the way his invention would be used, by whom it would be used, and for what purpose. He wanted to be absolutely sure that no forms of abuse would occur. It was clear that this otherwise admirable position was not very realistic and that it would get in the way of his negotiations with companies interested in bringing holophonic sound to large audiences.

  Hugo’s concerns were greatly amplified when Marilyn Ferguson took him to the preview of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer science fiction movie Brainstorm, for which Christina and I served as consultants for special effects sequences. As described earlier in this book, Brainstorm is a story about two scientists, a computer wizard and a brilliant brain researcher, who developed a device capable of recording human experiences and allowing other people to share them. The helmet that made this possible could easily be seen as a much more complex and sophisticated version of Hugo’s own technology.

  In the Brainstorm movie, this phenomenal invention was very rapidly expropriated by the wrong people for commercial and military purposes. Watching the movie reinforced the already existing fears that Hugo had concerning the abuse of his revolutionary device. Whether or not Hugo’s rigid attitude was the main reason for it, his extraordinary device has not received the enthusiastic reception in the world that those of us who had participated in the Millbrae seminar expected and hoped for.

  GATEWAY TO THE ABSOLUTE: The Secret of the Toad of Light

  In the minds of most people, the original source of psychedelic substances is the vegetable kingdom. Since time immemorial, native cultures have used plants with powerful mind-altering properties, “flesh of the gods,” as the main vehicle for their ritual and spiritual life. Much has been written about soma, the legendary visionary plant of the Vedas, different varieties of cannabis, the pre-Columbian sacraments peyote and magic mushrooms (teonanacatl), the sacred shrub eboga used in rituals of African tribes, as well as the South American jungle brew yajé or ayahuasca, and many others.

  It is much less known that psychedelic compounds can also be found in the animal kingdom. In 1960, Joe Roberts, a photographer for National Geographic magazine, described an intense psychedelic experience with many elements of science fiction, following his ingestion of the meat of Kyphosus fuscus. This fish, found off Norfolk Island in the South Pacific, has a reputation among the natives for causing powerful and often nightmarish visions.

  The most remarkable contribution of the animal kingdom to the repertory of psychedelic users and spiritual seekers comes from the genus Bufo. The toad skin, which contains the psychoactive compound bufotenin, was a regular ingredient of the brews that the witches used in the Middle Ages for inducing the visions of the Sabbath. In the late 1960s, the psychedelic grapevine spread the news about a strange new way of achieving a psychedelic state—by licking the skin secretions of a giant Arizona desert toad, Bufo alvarius. This species can be found only in the Sonoran Desert, stretching over the southern half of Arizona and south to Sonora in Mexico.

  Being semiaquatic, these toads must remain in the vicinity of dependable water sources in order to survive. For this reason, their principle habitat is within the drainage of permanent rivers and streams of the Sonoran Desert. Their lifestyle is also supported by the fact that more than one thousand years ago, the Hohokam Indians began diverting water from the Gila River and created a complex system of canals to irrigate the and soil. But even all that would not be sufficient. Bufo alvarius features specialized glands, located particularly on the neck and the limbs. They produce a viscous milky-white secretion that protects them against the heat of the Arizona desert, as well as against enemies.

  This secretion contains a high concentration of 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), a compound with extraordinary psychedelic properties. This substance was first synthetized in the chemical laboratory in 1936, more than twenty years before modern Americans discovered its psychedelic effects. However, Native Americans had known the mind-altering effects of the secretions for centuries and had used them in their shamanic practices. It turned out that the same active principle is also responsible for the effects of psychedelic snuffs of plant origin, such as virola or epená, used by the Tukano, Waika, and Araraibo Indians in Brazil and Venezuela.

  The dry material produced by milking and vaporization of the skin secretions of Bufo alvarius by heat contains as much as 15 percent of the active principle. Smoking dried secretions induces within seconds a psychedelic state than can be very psychologically challenging because of the rapidity of its onset and the overwhelming intensity. Smoking or snorting of 5 to 15 milligrams of pure 5-MeO-DMT has similar effects. The discovery of the psychedelic effects of the secretions of Bufo alvarius by the psychedelic generation was a sensation. It inspired the founding of the Church of the Toad of Light, the members of which smoke this material in their ceremonies as a sacrament.

  I followed with great interest the reports on Bufo alvarius, as well as an other psychedelic species, Bufo marinus, which is indigenous in Florida. The latter figures prominently in the novels of Carl Hiassen, in which he describes an ex-governor who goes wild and lives in the Everglades licking these toads. Because of my belief that comparing the effects of various psychedelics is an issue of great theoretical importance, I was looking for an opportunity to try this new addition to the entheogenic pharmacopeia. I had had some previous experiences with related tryptamine derivatives—dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and diethyltryptamine (DET) from our early experiments in Prague, and dipropyltryptamine (DPT) from our studies at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center.

  I discovered to my dismay that I had missed the opportunity to experiment with Bufo alvarius during one of my earlier visits to Arizona. In the middle of July, in the desert near Tucson, I had experienced a torrential monsoon rain that temporarily transformed the sun-scorched land at the foothills of the Catalina mountain range near Mt. Lemmon into a river that was more than twenty feet wide and four feet deep. Within minutes, the desert floor was covered with thousands of giant toads, which emerged from their underground hideouts, rapidly paired up, and started copulating. Listening to their sonorous croaking filling the air, I was very impressed by this ecstatic celebration of life. However, not being well-versed in amphibian taxonomy, I was unaware that I was witnessing a group orgy of Bufo alvarius and did not get a chance to try their mysterious elixir.

  The opportunity to get an insight into the secret of the Toad of Light came when my friend Paul appeared at our door with an impressive supply of 5-MeO-DMT. This substance was not listed in Schedule I—a group of substances considered to have high abuse potential and no therapeutic value—and was readily available for chemists as a starting point for synthesis of other com pounds. My friend had already had earlier experiences with 5-MeO-DMT and offered to provide the necessary instructions and expert guidance.

  Under Paul’s supervision, I put a small amount of the white powder on a glass surface and worked on it for a while with a razor blade to make it as fine as possible. I then shaped the powder into two even piles and put the rest of the powder into a pipe filled with dried parsley. While Paul lit the pipe, I rolled a dollar bill into a narrow tube and snorted the two piles, each with a different nostril. When I finished, I took two or three deep drags from the pipe. Later, I estimated the combined dose of 5-MeO-DMT I had taken and realized that it was very high, probably about 25 milligrams.

  The beginning of the experience was very sudden and dramatic. I was hit by a cosmic thunderbolt of immense power that instantly shattered and dissolved my everyday reality. I lost all contact with the surrounding world, which completely disappeared as if by magic. In the past, whenever I had taken a high dose of psychedelics, I liked to lie down and make myself comfortable. This time, any such concerns were irrelevant because I lost awareness of my body, as well as of the environment. After the
session, I was told that after taking a couple of drags, I sat there for several minutes like a sculpture, holding the pipe near my mouth. Christina and Paul had to take the pipe from my hand and put my body into a reclining position on the couch.

  In all my previous sessions, I had always maintained basic orientation. I knew who I was, where I was, and why I was having unusual experiences. This time all this dissolved in a matter of seconds. The awareness of my everyday existence, my name, my whereabouts, and my life disappeared as if by magic. Stan Grof... California ... United States ... planet Earth ... these concepts faintly echoed for a few moments like dreamlike images on the far periphery of my consciousness and then faded away altogether. I tried hard to remind myself of the existence of the realities I used to know, but they suddenly did not make any sense.

  In all my previous psychedelic sessions there always had been some rich specific content. The experiences were related to my present lifetime—the story of my childhood, infancy, birth, and embryonal life—or to various themes from the transpersonal domain—my past life experiences, images from human history, archetypal visions of deities and demons, or visits to various mythological domains. This time, none of these dimensions even seemed to exist, let alone manifest. My only reality was a mass of radiant swirling energy of immense proportions that seemed to contain all existence in a condensed and entirely abstract form. I became Consciousness facing the Absolute.

  It had the brightness of myriad suns, yet it was not on the same continuum with any light I knew from everyday life. It seemed to be pure consciousness, intelligence, and creative energy transcending all polarities. It was infinite and finite, divine and demonic, terrifying and ecstatic, creative and destructive—all that and much more. I had no concept, no categories for what I was witnessing. I could not maintain a sense of separate existence in the face of such a force. My ordinary identity was shattered and dissolved; I became one with the Source. In retrospect, I believe I must have experienced the Dharmakaya, the Primary Clear Light, which according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol, appears at the moment of our death. It bore some resemblance to what I encountered in my first LSD session, but it was much more over whelming and completely extinguished any sense of my separate identity.

  My encounter with the Absolute lasted approximately twenty minutes of clock-time, as measured by external observers. As far as I was concerned, during the entire duration of my experience, time ceased to exist and lost any meaning whatsoever. After what seemed like eternity, concrete dreamlike images and concepts began to form in my experiential field. I started intuiting fleeting images of a cosmos with galaxies, stars, and planets. Later, I gradually visualized a solar system and within it the Earth, with large continents.

  Initially, these images were very distant and unreal, but as the experience continued, I started to feel that these realities might actually have objective existence. Gradually, this crystallized further into the images of the United States and California. The last to emerge was the sense of my everyday identity and awareness of my present life. At first, the contact with the ordinary reality was extremely faint. I recognized where I was and what the circumstances were. But I was sure that I had taken a dose that was excessive and that I was actually dying. For some time, I believed that I was experiencing the bardo, the intermediate state between my present life and my birth in the next incarnation, as it is described in the Tibetan texts.

  As I was regaining more solid contact with ordinary reality, I reached a point where I knew that I was coming down from a psychedelic session and that I would survive this experiment. I was lying there, still experiencing myself as dying, but now without the sense that my present life was threatened. My dying seemed to be related to scenes from my previous incarnations. I found myself in many dramatic situations happening in different parts of the world throughout centuries, all of them dangerous and painful. Various groups of muscles in my body were twitching and shaking, as my body was hurting and dying in these different contexts. However, as my karmic history was being played out in my body, I was in a state of profound bliss, completely detached from these dramas, which persisted even after all the specific content disappeared from my experience.

  When I worked at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, we used to have a term for the condition that many of our clients experienced for many days and sometimes weeks after a good and well-integrated psychedelic session. We called it “psychedelic afterglow.” My afterglow after this experience was unusually intense, profound, and long-lasting. I was able to work on the galleys of my book with extraordinary precision and capacity to concentrate. And yet, when I decided to take a break and closed my eyes, I was within seconds in a state of ecstatic rapture and experienced a sense of oneness with everything. My meditations were unusually deep, and they seemed to be the most natural state I could imagine.

  As time went by, everyday sober reality succeeded in regaining some of its ground and made this window to the Absolute more opaque. However, the session left me with deep respect and appreciation for the power of the tools used by shamans. I have often had to laugh at the arrogance of mainstream psychiatrists, who see shamanic techniques as products of primitive superstition and consider their own ploys, such as free associating on the couch or behaviorist deconditioning, to be superior and scientific approaches to the human psyche.

  Since this experience I also have new appreciation for the tenet of various esoteric systems that the most noble truth is often found in the most lowly. According to the alchemists, “the Stone is hiding in the filth and dung.” For me, it was the toad, an animal that is often seen as a symbol of ugliness, that showed me the shortest and fastest way to the Absolute. I am reminded of it every time I hear or read the famous passage from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

  Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,

  Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

  And this our life exempt from public haunt,

  Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

  Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

  I would not change it.

  MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS: Ketamine and the Reenchantment of the World

  In the fall of 1972 I was introduced to the strangest psychoactive substance I have ever experienced in the fifty years of my consciousness research. The effects of this compound are so extraordinary that they stand out even in the group of psychedelics, drugs for which the German pharmacologist Louis Lewin once coined the term fantastica. This substance was ketamine, also known by its trade names Ketalar, Ketajet, Ketanest, and Vetalar.

  The person who brought the remarkable psychoactive properties of ketamine to the attention of our staff at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center was Salvador Roquet, a controversial Mexican psychiatrist known for his wild experimentation with psychedelics. Salvador used to conduct sessions with large groups of people, to whom he administered a variety of psychoactive substances (LSD, psilocybin, peyote, Datura, and others) while exposing them to movies with shocking aggressive and sexual content. His intention was to induce in his clients profound experiences of ego death followed by psychospiritual rebirth. Salvador had also antagonized his colleagues in Mexico City by serving at a party in his house sandwiches laced (unbeknownst to his guests) with psychedelic mushrooms. The purpose of his visit in Baltimore was to participate in our LSD training program for professionals.

  Ketamine is a short-acting anaesthetic related to phencyclidine, an animal tranquilizer known as Sernyl or PCP. Ketamine was discovered by Cal Stevens of Wayne State University in 1961. For many years, it had the reputation of an unusually safe anaesthetic because it has minimal suppressive effects on circulation, breathing, and the cough reflex. It gained great popularity among the medical personnel as an anaesthetic that was heavily used on the battlefields of Vietnam. In later years, its use rapidly decreased, mostly because of bizarre psychological experiences, dubbed “emergency syndrome,” which patients reported upon aw
akening. Nowadays it is still used for short-term surgical procedures in many countries, primarily in children and old people, in whom the “emergency syndrome” seems to be less of a problem.

  Those members of our staff who had heard about ketamine before Salvador’s visit knew that it was a substance used by surgeons as a general anaesthetic and had heard about the “emergency syndrome” as an untoward complication of ketamine administration routinely treated by administration of tranquilizers. In his presentation for our staff, Salvador Roquet introduced an entirely new perspective; he explained that the “emergency syndrome” was not a side effect of ketamine, but part of its fascinating principal effect. Ketamine was a “dissociative anaesthetic,” and its mechanism of action was radically different from the rest of anaesthetics. The administration of this substance did not lead to loss of consciousness, but to separation of consciousness from the body.

  The reason the medical personnel could perform surgical interventions on the patients was not that the patients’ consciousness was extinguished, as is the case with conventional anaesthetics, but that it had left their bodies. They were experiencing fantastic voyages through a wide range of other realities—extra terrestrial civilizations and parallel universes, the astrophysical world and the micro-world, the animal, botanical, and mineral kingdoms, other countries and historical periods, and archetypal domains of various cultures. Salvador’s clients, who had not taken ketamine as an anaesthetic, but as a therapeutic agent and a vehicle for philosophical and spiritual quest, had profound mystical experiences, and many of them believed that they had encountered God. Some of them were also convinced that they had visited the bardo, the intermediate realm between incarnations, and claimed that they had lost fear of death.