When the Impossible Happens (33 page)

I lay down on the couch in the corner of the living room to reflect on my experience. I realized that it was the same couch on which I had spent my last psychedelic session before my departure to the United States. Shortly before that session, my request for permission to travel to the United States on a fellowship had been turned down by Czech authorities. My last session in Prague had happened at a time when I was waiting for the response to my appeal. Thinking about it, I suddenly felt a wave of overwhelming anxiety.

An alarming idea emerged in my mind with unusual force and persuasiveness: maybe I had never left Czechoslovakia and was now coming back from the psychedelic session in Prague. Maybe the positive response to my appeal, my journey to the United States, joining the team in Baltimore, and having a psychedelic session there was just a visionary journey, an illusory product of strong wishful thinking. I was trapped in an insidious loop, a spatiotemporal vicious circle, unable to determine my real historical and geographic coordinates.

For a long time, I felt suspended between two realities, both of which were equally convincing. I could not tell whether I was experiencing an astral projection to Prague from my session in Baltimore or coming down from a session in Prague in which I had experienced a trip to the United States. I had to think about the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, who awoke from a dream in which he was a butterfly. For some time, he was unable to decide whether he was a human who just had a dream of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was a human.

I felt that I needed much more convincing proof of whether what I was experiencing was “objectively real” in the usual sense. I finally decided to perform a test—to take a picture from the wall and later check in the correspondence with my parents if something unusual had happened at that time in their apartment. I reached for the picture, but before I was able to touch the frame, I was overcome by an increasingly alarming feeling that it was an extremely risky and dangerous undertaking. I suddenly felt under the attack of evil forces and perilous black magic. It seemed to me that what I was about to do was a hazardous gamble in which the price was my soul.

I paused and made a desperate effort to understand what was happening. Images of the world’s most famous casinos were flashing in front of my eyes—Monte Carlo, Lido in Venice, Las Vegas, Reno. I saw roulette balls spiraling at intoxicating speeds, the levers of the slot machines frantically moving up and down, and dice rolling on the green surface of the tables during a game of craps. Groups of gamblers were feverishly passing around cards, playing baccarat, and watching the flickering lights of the keno panels. I felt the tempting lure of riches, luxury, and unlimited possibilities that money can provide.

This was followed by visions portraying meetings of secret organizations that run human history from behind the scenes, international summits of heads of states, encounters of powerful politicians with representatives of multination al companies, interiors of military headquarters, and think tanks of topnotch scientists. This time it was the lure of power, rather than riches, but equally seductive and intoxicating. The story of Faust, the seeker who traded his soul for unlimited possibilities, came to my mind and began haunting me.

I was desperately trying to understand why the possibility of transcending the limitations of time and space appeared to me to be so abysmally dangerous. Suddenly, I could see my predicament with unusual clarity. The images were showing me that I had not yet overcome my egocentrism and was not able to resist the temptation of money and power. The danger of the situation was associated with my temptation to use paranormal faculties for personal goals, to abuse the potential that I was discovering.

If I could conquer the limitations imposed on us by time and space, I would gain an unlimited supply of money, together with everything that money can buy. All I would have to do was to go to the nearest casino, stock market, or lottery office. Unlimited means would become available to me, and my world would turn into a cornucopia. If I could have mastery over time and space, no secrets would exist for me. I would be able to eavesdrop on summit meetings of political leaders and have access to top-secret discoveries. This would open undreamed—of possibilities for directing the course of events in the world.

I remembered passages from different spiritual books warning against toying with supernatural powers before we overcome the limitations of our egos and reach spiritual maturity. They suddenly appeared eminently clear and understandable. But my fear of ethical repercussions for my spiritual impurity was just part of the picture. I realized that I was also extremely ambivalent in regard to the outcome of my test. On the one hand, it seemed extremely enticing to be able to liberate myself from the slavery of time and space. On the other hand, it was obvious that a positive outcome of this experiment would have far-reaching and serious consequences. It clearly was much more than an isolated experiment revealing the arbitrary nature of space and time.

If I could get confirmation that it was possible to manipulate the physical environment at a distance of several thousand miles, my entire universe would collapse as a result of this one experiment. The world as I had known it would not exist any more. I would lose all the maps I relied on and with which I felt comfortable. I would find myself in a state of utter metaphysical confusion. I would not know who, where, and when I was and would be lost in a totally new, frightening reality, the laws of which would be alien and unfamiliar to me. If I had these powers, there would likely be many others who would have them, too. I would have no privacy anywhere, and doors and walls would not protect me anymore. My new world would be full of potential dangers of unforeseeable kind and unimaginable proportions.

I was not able to carry through with the experiment and decided to leave the question of the objectivity and reality of the experience unresolved. This made it possible for me to toy with the idea that I had actually been able to transcend time and space. At the same time, it left open the possibility of seeing the en tire episode as a fantasy journey caused by a powerful psychedelic substance. Objective verification of the fact that reality as I knew it was an illusion was more terrifying than I could tolerate under the circumstances.

The moment I gave up on the experiment, I found myself back in the room in Baltimore where I took the substance. Within a few hours, I gradually re turned into ordinary consciousness and the familiar “objective reality” of the material world. I had no more doubts that my journey to the United States had actually happened and that I was in Baltimore. I never forgave myself for having wasted such a unique and fantastic opportunity of subjecting the phenomenon of astral projection to experimental scrutiny. However, the memory of the metaphysical terror involved in this test makes me doubt that I would be more courageous if I were given a similar chance in the future.

Ancient Indian teachings see the experience of the phenomenal worlds as
lila,
or divine play, created by Absolute Consciousness, or Brahman. They see our perception of the material world as a cosmic illusion, or
maya.
In the twentieth century, quantum-relativistic physics brought important supportive evidence for this view of reality. My experience of astral projection to Prague taught me how deeply we are imbedded in our belief in an objectively existing and predictable material world and how strong the emotional investment and commitment we have in maintaining this illusion. A sudden collapse of our understanding of the nature of reality and violation of Alan Watts’s “taboo against knowing who we are” can be associated with indescribable metaphysical terror and panic.

CHANNELING THE AVATAR: My Mother, Sai Baba, and Holotropic Breathwork

In the late 1960s, Czechoslovakia was experiencing a wave of liberalization that culminated in 1968 in the famous “Prague Spring.” This movement preceded by two decades Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika” and “glasnost,” similar developments in Russia that eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Czech political leaders were involved in an unprecedented experiment aimed at creating what they called “socialism with a human face.” In 1967, my brother, Paul, and I were able to leave Czechoslovakia and find new lives on the North American continent, Paul in Canada and I in the United States.

On August 21 of the following year, the hopes of Czech and Slovak people for freedom and democracy were brutally squashed by the Soviet military invasion. What had begun for us as a legal visit changed into emigration that was considered illegal by Czech authorities. As a result, Paul and I could not travel freely between Czechoslovakia and the United States or Canada. However, we stayed in regular contact with our parents by frequent correspondence and occasional meetings outside of Czechoslovakia.

Both our parents were retired and as such were allowed to travel abroad. The Communist regime was not interested in keeping in the country people who were not productive and contributing members of the society. As a matter of fact, they encouraged emigration for this category of its citizens because this would have meant confiscation of their apartments, a rare commodity in the Communist world, and discontinuation of their pensions and other social benefits. Our parents were thus able to visit Paul and me in America and meet with us during our visits to Western Europe.

While my parents were able to get the permission to travel, it was impossible for them to buy any hard currency. During their stay abroad, they were thus entirely dependent on our financial support. This was very easy for Paul and me, but presented an emotional conflict for my mother. She was an extremely generous person who found it much easier to give to others than to receive. As a result, she always felt great need to reciprocate by contributing in some significant way to our lives. This character trait of my mother plays an important role in the story I am about to tell.

In 1973, when I moved to Big Sur, California, the Esalen Institute provided for me a charming house on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in exchange for leading a certain number of workshops. When Christina began living and working with me, we were able to turn a patch of land separating our house from the ocean into a lovely vegetable garden. It took a lot of hard labor be cause the land was overgrown with wild chaparral, thistles, gorse, plants with prickly burs, and the infamous poison oak. Our gardening represented a constant battle, with nature trying to invade and reclaim this land.

When my mother arrived in Big Sur for her first solo visit after the death of my father, she quickly discovered that some serious gardening work had to be done in our little plantation on the Pacific. Without consulting us, she threw herself into the project, determined to free our garden and its immediate environment from everything that appeared to be useless weeds. All of us living in Big Sur were well acquainted with poison oak, a botanical men ace that has the potential to turn life in paradise into living hell. Many of us learned about the ravages of poison oak the hard way—by painful exposure at the time of our ignorance. My mother was a newcomer and lacked the necessary knowledge.

After exposure to the resin on the leaves and branches of poison oak, most people develop extensive skin eruptions and leaking blisters that cause agonizing itching. It takes usually three to four weeks for the condition to subside. In more serious cases, the reaction is very severe and systemic, rather than local; inhalation of smoke from burning branches of poison oaks has the potential to cause pulmonary edema. Old-timers keeping alive the oral tradition of Big Sur lore pass on a horror story about two naive and unsuspecting East Coast tourists, a father and his son, who during their California tour ran out of toilet paper and made an attempt to replace it with leaves of poison oak.

My mother suffered from various allergies, and her response to the expo sure to poison oak was horrendous. Her entire body was covered with red eruptions and leaking blisters; the itching caused her unimaginable torment. Several days after the exposure, her physical condition seemed to be critical and resulted in an intense visionary state. In the middle of the night, she experienced the visit of her dead relatives—her parents and her brother. She also envisioned my dead father, who had arrived in an old-fashioned
fiacre, a
carriage drawn by two horses, which was popular as a means of transportation in European cities before the advent of taxis. He wore a tuxedo and a cylinder hat and tried to persuade her to join him on the other side.

I sat at my mother’s bedside for many hours and became increasingly concerned. Having done extensive work with terminal cancer patients and being familiar with thanatological literature, I recognized the similarity between my mother’s visions and the experiences of the “welcoming committee” known from bedside observations of dying people. I happened to have several ampoules of cortisone, an effective remedy for poison oak, and decided to give it to her intramuscularly as a last resort before undertaking the fifty-mile trip to Carmel Hospital, the nearest medical facility.

Within an hour, my mother’s condition improved as if by magic. She regained physical strength and her mind cleared. As the day was breaking, she decided to step out of the house on our large deck to watch the sunrise over the Ventana wilderness and observe the Pacific Ocean. She was ecstatic, and her eyes were radiant. “Stan, you live in an incredible place!” she said enthusiastically. “The air is so clear here, and all the colors are radiant! Have you ever noticed the sparkles in the branches of these pine trees? And look at the reflections of light on the waves!” There was no doubt she was experiencing what I had witnessed many hundreds of times in my work with psychedelics and, more recently, with Holotropic Breathwork—a profound psychospiritual rebirth!

The following day, my mother described in some detail the experiences she had had during the night when her condition reached a critical point and those following the injection of cortisone. Shortly after I gave her the shot, she had a powerful vision of an Indian saint, appearing in blinding radiant light. His rich, bushy hair and long red robe helped her to identify him as Satya Sai Baba. He reached inside her body and performed miraculous healing. There was no doubt in her mind that his intervention was a critical turning point in her physical and emotional condition; she was convinced that it was Sai Baba rather than the cortisone that brought her back from the threshold of death.