When the Impossible Happens (30 page)

First, I remembered several of my trips to Europe during which I visited quaint little German towns with cobblestone streets and picturesque houses decorated with paintings, woodcarvings, and flower boxes. From there, my chain of thoughts took me to my medical studies, to the various institutes that I had visited as a student for lectures or practice. It started as a general overview, but then it very quickly focused with extraordinary intensity on my memories related to anatomy and physiology of malignant tumors. Following this, my association shifted to my work with terminal cancer patients at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and stayed there for a while. And then, without any warning or transition, a memory of a joke I had heard recently suddenly popped up in my mind and made me laugh. The joke went like this:

An adventurous tourist visiting North Africa called on an Arab merchant to buy a camel. His intention was to cross the Sahara desert, and he made it clear to the merchant that he needed a really good camel, one that would last a long time without water. The Arab brought what he claimed was his toughest and most reliable camel, and the man paid for the animal the requested handsome sum of money. He then embarked without delay on his desert adventure. To his unpleasant surprise, after a few days, the camel became increasingly weak and started to slow down. Although he had used all the water planned for the trip, he seemed to be completely dehydrated and was panting, his dry tongue stretched out of his mouth. A couple of days later, he refused to continue and collapsed in the desert.

They would have both died had it not been for a caravan with a sufficient supply of water, traveling in the opposite direction that saved their lives. After returning from his ill-fated desert crossing, the infuriated man went back to the Arab merchant and demanded the return of his money. “What kind of camel did you give me?” he raged. “After a few days in the desert, he collapsed and would not continue; I almost lost my life out there!”

“I don’t understand it,” the Arab merchant said, shaking his head. “Did you brick him?” “What do you mean, brick him?” asked the unfortunate traveler, completely confused. “I’ll show you,” said the merchant and led the camel to a well. As the camel started to drink, the Arab approached him with a large brick in each of his hands and patiently waited. Just as the camel finished drinking, he smashed the animal’s testicles with the bricks. The camel let out an ungodly scream, sucking in an additional couple of gallons of water.

It is not easy to convey the punch line of this joke in writing. To deliver the story correctly, the narrator has actually to make the sound the camel made when his testicles were being smashed. The stream of air that is forcefully sucked in while making this sound makes it very explicit what volume was added to the camel’s water supply by “bricking” him. The camel joke was my last association in the psychometric exercise. It reverberated in my head for a few minutes after the experiment ended.

Under Anne and Jim’s guidance, we then identified the owners of our objects and started the group sharing. I could not believe how many of my free associations were direct hits, particularly because I had never thought of myself as being psychic. I approached the psychic game with healthy skepticism, doubting that anything relevant would come out of it. However, I was wrong! It turned out that the owner of the pendant I used in this psychometric exercise was Myra, a woman from Germany, who grew up in a little town that looked just like I had imagined it. She was a medical doctor who recently had become interested in alternative approaches and started attending “new age” workshops and seminars.

The camel joke turned out to be an incredibly accurate psychic hit, although the information came in such a funny disguise. Actually, the situation to which this association alluded was even more outrageous and hilarious than the joke. The pendant was the emblem of the Center for the Whole Person, a group involved in deep self-exploration based on a modified and widely expanded form of primal therapy. Myra had participated in a weekend workshop led by Bill Swartley, one of the group leaders of this organization; this workshop was a nude marathon that took place near Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Nude marathon was a radical form of therapy developed in the 1960s by Californian psychologist Paul Bindrim. It combined nudity, sleep deprivation, and fasting with experiential group work in a swimming pool that was body temperature. The pool was about five feet deep, of the same depth in all its parts. At the beginning of this marathon, Bill Swartley showed the participants the pendant symbolizing his center and told them that it would be awarded at the end of the workshop to the person who during that weekend did the most outrageous thing. Not knowing how adventurous and daring Myra could be, Bill had no idea what he was setting himself up for.

One of the exercises used in the nude marathon to evoke powerful emotional reactions was exposing floating nude bodies of participants to close-up inspection by their peers. The group members, standing in the pool, created two lines facing each other. Then, beginning at one end, one body after another was floated belly-up through this challenging gauntlet. Those who completed the journey extended the line on the other end. In this situation, the genitals of both sexes and the breasts of the women were exposed to the eyes of all the other group members. For many people, this ruthless invasion of privacy was an emotional trigger of extraordinary power.

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 another 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.