When the Impossible Happens (27 page)

While he was aware of what was happening in the room and able to listen to Joan’s voice, his inner experience seemed to follow her suggestions. The initial darkness was replaced by brilliant light, and Ted was able to approach it and fuse with it. The feelings that accompanied his merging with the light were a sense of sacredness and deep inner peace. Yet, at the same time, he saw a movie on the ceiling, a vivid reenactment of all the bad things he had done in his life. He saw the faces of all the people whom he had killed in the war and all the youngsters he had beaten up as an adolescent hoodlum. He had to suffer the pain and agony of all the people whom he had hurt during his lifetime. While this was happening, he was aware of the presence of God, who was watching and judging this review of his life.

“I am glad I had the LSD trips with you guys,” he told us before we left. “What happened to me today took me to the same place as those trips. Thanks to you, I knew that territory. I would have been scared by what was happening, but knowing these states, I was not afraid at all.”

MESSAGES FROM THE ASTRAL REALM: The Story of Richard

One of the most interesting observations related to the problem of survival of consciousness after death that I remember comes from the LSD therapy of Richard, a young, severely depressed, and suicidal homosexual patient. He was the same individual whose “prenatal visit” to the annual village mart appears earlier in this book. In one of his LSD sessions, Richard had a very unusual experience involving a strange and uncanny astral realm. He suddenly found himself in a space that had an eerie luminescence and was filled with discarnate beings who were trying to communicate with him in a very urgent and demanding manner. He could not see or hear them, but he sensed their almost tangible presence and was receiving telepathic messages from them. I wrote down one of these messages, which was very specific and could be subjected to subsequent verification. One of the discarnate beings implored Richard to connect with the being’s parents in Kroměříž, a city in Moravia, and let them know that their son Ladislav was doing all right and was well taken care of. The message included the couple’s name and telephone number; this was information that was unknown to both Richard and me and had no relevance to either of us. This experience seemed to be an alien enclave in Richard’s experience, totally unrelated to his problems and the rest of his treatment. The whole thing was very puzzling and mysterious.

After the session, I decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues’ jokes had they found out. I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kroměříž, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: “Our son is not with us anymore; he passed away; we lost him three weeks ago.” One might argue that this was not really a proof that their deceased son had sent them a message from the Beyond, but the improbability that this was a meaningless coincidence is certainly staggering.

PROOF FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE BEYOND? The Story of Walter

Another equally extraordinary observation of this kind involved a close friend and colleague of mine, psychiatrist Walter N. Pahnke, who was a member of our psychedelic research team at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore. He was the initiator and principal moving force behind the LSD program for patients dying of cancer at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Catonsville. Walter had a deep interest in parapsychology, particularly in the problem of consciousness after death, and worked with many famous mediums and psychics, including our joint friend Eileen Garrett, founder of the Parapsychology Foundation

In summer 1971, Walter went with his wife, Eva, and three children to Maine for a vacation in their cabin on the shore of the Atlantic. Before leaving Baltimore, he had bought from a friend of his some scuba-diving gear and got some lessons in diving. One day, he went scuba diving all by himself and without a marker and did not return. An extensive and well-organized search failed to find his body or any part of his diving gear. Under these circumstances, Eva found it very difficult to accept and integrate his death. Her last memory was of Walter leaving the cabin, full of energy and in perfect health. It was hard for her to accept that he was not part of her life anymore, and she did not feel free to start a new chapter of her existence without a sense of closure of the preceding one.

Being a psychologist herself, she qualified for an LSD training session for mental health professionals offered through the program in our institute. She decided to have a psychedelic experience, hoping to get some more insight into her situation, and she asked me to be her sitter. Eva was a close and dear friend, and I accepted with pleasure. In the second half of the session, she had a very powerful vision of Walter and carried on a long and meaningful telepathic dialogue with him. He gave her specific instructions concerning each of their three children and released her to start a new life of her own, unencumbered and unrestricted by a sense of commitment to his memory. It was a profound and liberating experience.

Just as Eva was questioning whether the entire episode was a wishful fabrication of her own mind, Walter appeared once more for a brief period of time and asked Eva to return a book that he had borrowed from a friend of his. He then proceeded to give her the name of the friend, the name of the book, the room where it was, the shelf, and the sequential order of the book on this shelf. Curious and eager to verify this extraordinary message, we went to Eva’s house as soon as her session ended. Following the instructions, Eva was actually able to find and return the book, the existence of which she had had no previous knowledge.

Giving Eva this kind of specific confirmation of the authenticity of their communication was very much in Walter’s style. During his life, he had had extensive contact with psychics from different parts of the world and had been fascinated by the attempt of the famous magician Harry Houdini to prove the existence of the Beyond. I was personally present in a situation in which Walter was trying to arrange a similar experiment with Eileen Garrett, after she had told us that she was soon going to die.

“Eileen,” demanded Walter, “you have to promise me that, if you can, you will give me some clear sign that the Beyond really exists.” Eileen, known for her exquisite sense of humor, did not seem to take Walter’s request seriously. “Rest assured, Walter,” she responded, “you’re gonna get your proof. I’ll show up in your next LSD session and grab your dick with my cold, clammy hand!” Considering Walter’s preoccupation with proof, it seemed plausible that he would use this strategy to give more weight to his own posthumous communication.

CUT ROSES IN AUNT ANNE’S ROSE GARDEN: The Story of Kurt

The next example involves Kurt, one of the psychologists participating in our three-year professional training program in transpersonal psychology and Holotropic Breathwork. When Kurt enrolled in the training, he was by far the most scientifically minded and skeptical member of our training group. What he observed and experienced in the training had profound influence on the belief system he had inherited from his academic teachers. I described earlier Kurt’s birth experience associated with the scent of fresh leather. This episode undermined his conviction that consciousness and psychological life begins after we are born.

At the time he had the following experience, Kurt was facing another conceptual challenge, one that forced him to vastly expand his professional horizons. The problem he was struggling with was the nature of transpersonal experiences. Were they ontologically real phenomena, indicating the existence of normally invisible transcendental realms, or products of human imagination? In the course of the training, he had witnessed a wide variety of transpersonal experiences of his colleagues, but had not experienced any himself. He kept insisting that such experiences had to be products of the brain, as he had been taught in medical school.

Then, in one of his holotropic sessions, Kurt had an intense experience, followed by an unusual synchronicity, which convinced him that he needed to be more open-minded as far as the farther reaches of human consciousness were concerned. Toward the end of this session, he had a vivid experience of encountering his grandmother, who had been dead for many years. Kurt had been very close to her in his childhood and was deeply moved by the possibility that he might be really communicating with her again. In spite of his deep emotional involvement in the experience, he continued to maintain an attitude of professional skepticism about this encounter.

As he later explained to the group, he suspected that his mind might have easily created an imaginary encounter from his old memories because he had had many real interactions with his grandmother while she was still alive. But meeting his dead grandmother was so emotionally profound, heart-opening, and convincing that he simply could not dismiss it as a wishful fantasy. To ward the end of this encounter, he decided to ask his grandmother for proof that the experience was real and not just his imagination.

No sooner had he raised this telepathic question than he received the following message: “Go to Aunt Anne and look for cut roses.” Still skeptical, he decided on the following weekend, “just for the fun of it,” to visit his Aunt Anne’s home and see what would happen. To his astonishment, Kurt found upon his arrival his old aunt working in the garden. She was in her gardener’s outfit, holding pruning scissors in one hand and a rose in the other. The lawns and paths in the garden were covered with cut roses. The day of Kurt’s unplanned visit happened to be, unbeknownst to him, the one day of the entire year when his aunt decided to do some radical pruning of her roses.

Materialistic scientists reject and often ridicule the possibility of survival of consciousness after death simply because of the incompatibility of such a belief with their basic metaphysical assumptions about existence. Their position is not based on a scientific “proof” that continuation of existence after death in any form is impossible. As a matter of fact, their conclusions are made at the expense of ignoring a vast amount of observations, such as the above, for which the current paradigm lacks adequate explanation.

LUIZ GASPARETTO: Painters and Paintings from the Beyond

Although we had heard much about Brazil from our friends, nothing had prepared us for the cultural shock we experienced during our first visit to this extraordinary country. Because of our involvement in psychedelic research and transpersonal psychology, we were in daily contact with many people who, as individuals, were very open-minded and for whom spirituality was an important part of everyday life. However, it was clear that, in the larger context of Western industrial civilization, they certainly represented exceptions, islands in the ocean of a largely pragmatic culture.

Encounters with Brazilian people and discussions with them made us feel that we were on a different planet. The majority of Brazilians, including members of the upper class and the educated elite, seemed to accept the existence of realities that in Euro-American culture were relegated to the realm of infantile nonsense, fantasy, primitive superstition, or mental illness—discarnate entities, possession by spirits and benevolent or malevolent deities, spiritual healing, successful intervention by psychic surgeons, visitations by UFOs, and many others. All these phenomena appeared to be normal and integral parts of their world view, in many instances based on personal experiences, rather than unfounded beliefs and superstitions or sensational topics for cheap tabloids.

This seemed to be closely related to the fact that Brazilians had easy access to holotropic states of consciousness and thus many opportunities for direct experiences of the transpersonal domain. For many of them, this was made possible by ritual use of ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew that had been used for centuries as a sacrament and powerful medicine in the Amazonian region. It had been sanctioned by the Brazilian government and practiced by indigenous healers (ayahuasqueros) and by the members of the Santo Daime Church and by another major group called Uniao do Vegetal.

A significant part of the population was also involved in Afro-Brazilian syncretistic cults, such as umbanda, candomble, and macumba, combining elements from African tribal religions with Brazilian indigenous belief systems and Christianity. We became particularly interested in spiritism, a fascinating spiritual movement based on the work of nineteenth-century French educator and philosopher Allan Kardec. Spiritism is based on a belief that spirits of deceased people are able to communicate with humans and intervene in the material world through individuals with mediumistic abilities. The Spiritist Church had become well-known, particularly for the fact that it produced famous psychic surgeons, such as the Philippine Tony Agpaoa and Brazilian Ze Arrigó, the “Surgeon of the Rusty Knife.”

During our stay in São Paulo, we heard about Luiz Antonio Gasparetto, a psychologist and member of the Spiritist Church, who was using his mediumistic abilities in a very unique way. He was known for channeling the spirits of a wide range of famous dead painters and producing extraordinary paintings in a variety of styles. With the help of our Brazilian friends, we were able to get an appointment and visit Luiz in his house in the suburbs of São Paulo. Luiz was a tall, handsome man with dark hair and expressive eyes. He was dressed in casual slacks and a white shirt and was polite, warm, and amiable. Luiz looked more like a run-of-the-mill academician than an eccentric psychic with a wild reputation. Nothing in his appearance or in the interior of his house seemed to foreshadow what was coming, except a large number of shelves carrying giant stacks of paper. As we were about to find out, these shelves had been specially crafted to store his “paintings from the Beyond,” more than five thousand of them.

After offering us some tea, Luiz started sharing with us the extraordinary collection of his paintings. We were treated to an astonishing display of paintings in the style of great masters of all times and countries. They were not copies of the existing paintings, but new motifs rendered in easily recognizable styles of individual artists. There were Monet’s rich bouquets of flowers, Modigliani’s slim figures of young women, Toulouse-Lautrec’s dancers and other characters from Moulin Rouge, Henri Rousseau’s naive jungle scenes with wild animals, Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro portraits, Leonardo da Vinci’s androgynous faces, Picasso’s still life and figurative paintings, Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers, Frida Kahlo’s expressive compositions, and many others.