When the Impossible Happens (39 page)

After our arrival in Cuzco, we took ketamine in the evening in our hotel. As soon as the substance started to take effect, I found myself surrounded by four muscular Inca warrior-priests in their ritual attire. They had elaborate headdresses and tunics made of colorful plumage. Their ears and bodies were adorned with heavy gold jewelry. I felt the iron grip of their hands on my wrists and ankles. Then a particularly richly decorated man, who looked like a high priest, approached me with a hammer and chisel and started relentlessly pounding on my skull.

It took a while before I realized what was happening to me. During our stay in Lima, we had visited the anthropological museum and seen a large number of trephinated skulls. The texture of the bone surrounding the wounds indicated that the individual survived the procedure. The captions accompanying them explained that these trephinations showed the medical skills of the ancient Incas. They were most likely surgical interventions removing tumors or some other pathological conditions. I remembered the strange and unexplainable discomfort I had felt looking at these perforated craniums.

Now I was experientially identifying in the most realistic and convincing way with an individual being subjected to this procedure. Although I felt drugged in a way that was different from the effect of ketamine, which was very likely some kind of premedication used in the ritual, the intensity of pain involved was beyond anything I could have even imagined before it actually happened to me. However, in spite of the agony I was in, I was flooded with some extraordinary insights illuminating the nature of the procedure to which I was subjected.

This was not a surgical intervention, but a rite of passage, similar to various indigenous rituals in other cultures involving excruciating pain, such as the Lakota Sioux Sun Dance or the subincision of the Australian Aborigenes. Part of it was clearly an ordeal testing the power of one’s mind over the world of matter. The initiate had to demonstrate his capacity to endure extreme physical suffering and remain unperturbed. But the main purpose of the trephination was to remove the obstacle between one’s brain and the Sun God, the ultimate deity of the Incas, so that his energy could enter the initiate’s inner being.

I had to think about a young man whom I had met during my visit in an Amsterdam antique store. He told me about a Dutch man by the name of Dr. Bart Hughes, who in 1962 started a movement based on the belief that self-trephination can facilitate higher states of consciousness by increasing the blood circulation in the brain, and performed the operation on himself using an electric drill. The young man followed his example and claimed he was very impressed by the results. Several years ago, during our visit in England, Christina and I had a chance to spend some time with Lord James Neidpath and his wife, Lady Amanda Neidpath, both of whom underwent trephination for the same reason. We had a long discussion in which they extolled the positive effects that this procedure had had on their consciousness.

As soon as I understood the nature of the procedure I was subjected to, I tried very hard to assume the stoic state of mind expected from the initiates. But it was a very difficult task because the torture was intolerable. I called on my intellect for help; I realized that the effect of ketamine was approximately fifty minutes to an hour, so that my agony was time-limited. Once in a while, I looked at my watch, checking the time, but the little hand barely seemed to move. Finally, after what seemed like eternity, an hour had elapsed since the administration of ketamine. But to my utter consternation, that did not end my suffering. The pharmacological effect of the drug subsided, but the excruciating pain remained.

Christina had had the usual course of the ketamine experience and after a discussion during which we shared our experiences, she fell asleep. I was lying in my bed in agony, unable to sleep, experiencing every headache that anybody had in the entire history of humanity. For the following day, we had planned a trip to Machu Picchu, the famous ancient fortress city of the Incas. When it was time for our early breakfast, we got dressed and walked down to the dining room. I felt nauseated, and every step down the stairs felt like another blow of the high priest’s chisel. I watched Christina eat her breakfast, unable to ingest anything myself.

My agony continued during the train ride to Machu Picchu. The workers who welded the rails had not done a great job, and every time the wheels crossed the place where they were joined, it felt like another blow of the chisel. It seemed that my rite of passage was still going on and that it would never end. Then suddenly, about halfway to Machu Picchu, the pain stopped, and I went into a state of ecstasy. We reached the train station, and a small van took us to the entrance of the ruins after having negotiated the access road with many switchbacks.

It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the sightseeing in the ancient city high in the Andes was an unforgettable experience. I had a strong sense of belonging to the place, as if I had actually once lived there. After lunch, we roamed around in the ruins and then decided to climb Huayna Picchu, which means in Quechua “young mountain,” the steep peak overlooking the historical site. The climb was steep and long, but it rewarded us with a fantastic view of the ruins of Machu Picchu, the “old Mountain.” Until this day, the visit to this magic place, following my experience of the trephination ritual, remains one of the most powerful memories of my entire life.

UFOS IN THE AMAZON: Alien Encounter of the Third Kind

Shortly after our arrival in Rio de Janeiro on the way to the Fourth International Transpersonal Conference in Belo Horizonte, we found out that in Brazil, like in many other Third World countries, ketamine was not a controlled substance and could be freely purchased over the counter. Because we had earlier discovered that ketamine was an effective means of combating jetlag, we decided to start our first Brazilian trip with a ketamine session in our Rio hotel. For me, most of this experience was a very powerful encounter with what seemed to be extraterrestrial intelligence.

Shortly after the administration of ketamine, I had a very strange sense that the substance had changed my brain in such a way that it was able to communicate with extraterrestrial beings. This feeling culminated in an experience that was reminiscent of teleportation used by the crew of the Enterprise, a spacecraft featured in the American science fiction TV series
Star Trek.
I had a sense of completely disintegrating to a molecular level and reintegrating on an alien spaceship. The environment looked like a futuristic high-tech laboratory full of intricate de vices, the nature and function of which were completely mysterious to me.

My head was enclosed in a large helmet connected by color-coded cables to a machine that looked like a giant computer. I had a sense that an enormous amount of information was transmitted from my brain and body to the machine and that I was being examined and studied. Then the process seemed to have reversed itself, and the machine was communicating to me. I started having a series of fantastic experiences, the nature of which is completely beyond description. The best I could understand what was happening to me was that it was a lesson in higher-dimensional seeing and thinking. It was a way of teaching me that the universe has many more dimensions than we think and that without this knowledge any attempt to comprehend existence is futile.

Another series of images portrayed the life on this planet and the detrimental effect industrialization and scientific discoveries have on it. Rapid visual sequences showed me what our planet used to be and what it was becoming as a result of human violence and greed combined with rapid technological progress. I could clearly see the destructive and self-destructive trajectory of this development ending in annihilation of the human species and much of life. Witnessing this apocalyptic show, I was trying to figure out if this was a serious warning of what would come if we do not change or if I was seeing the future. My “alien abduction” differed from the traditional descriptions in that I was communicating exclusively with the world of technology. There were no extraterrestrial beings of any kind, humanoid, insectoid, or otherwise.

When this lesson ended, I experienced again the sense of complete molecular dissolution and materialized on another spacecraft, this time a much smaller one strongly resembling a flying saucer. I was sitting near a window and saw that we were flying by the ocean. I recognized Rio de Janeiro and was able to deduce that we were moving north, following the coast of Brazil. Although we were traveling quite fast, I noticed some characteristic landmarks on the coastline. The spacecraft sped up even more and, in what seemed like a short time, it reached a river delta, an estuary of a large river, and turned inland, flying up the stream.

We flew over enormous stretches of jungle, and I realized that the giant river had to be the Amazon. Then the spacecraft reached what seemed to be its destination and stopped its flight, hovering a few yards over the ground. Looking from the window, I noticed a small village hidden in the jungle—several huts with roofs covered with palm leaves. Amidst the huts was an open space decorated with giant idols bearing superficial resemblance to the Indian sculptures of the American Northwest. Their entire surface was covered with small tiles, which formed intricate mosaic patterns. I vividly remember to this day the colors of the mosaic pieces—combinations of light blue, yellow, and white.

This was where the experience ended. I had again the sense that my body had dissolved and materialized, this time in my hotel in Rio, where I had started my ketamine session. The experience was quite interesting, in and of itself, particularly because it was the only experience involving alien intelligence I had ever had in all my psychedelic sessions. However, it gained special significance because of the synchronicities associated with it. In the morning following the session, Christina and I rented a car and decided to explore the environment of Rio de Janeiro. Without a special intention to validate my session, we decided to drive north, following the ocean. I was astounded when I encountered characteristic landmarks on the coast be cause of the strong and convincing déjà vu experience that they elicited in me. They were exactly the same landmarks I had observed during my UFO ride the previous night.

After a few days in Rio, we flew to Belo Horizonte to participate in the International Transpersonal Conference organized by French-Brazilian psychologist Pierre Weil. At the conference we reconnected with an old friend of ours, Leo Matos. Originally from Belo Horizonte, where he was born, he now lived in Scandinavia, where he had organized several workshops for us. During a discussion we had with him, he told us to our great surprise about a retired colonel of the Brazilian army living about twenty miles from Brazilia. According to Leo, this colonel had close contact with a tribe in the Amazon that was regularly visited by aliens in flying saucers and he was offering bus rides for guaranteed UFO sightings.

Had it been another country, we would not have paid much attention to such information. However, Brazil seems to be in a category of its own as far as paranormal happenings are concerned. I had heard enough from reliable friends, such as Stanley Krippner and Walter Pahnke, about Brazilian psychic surgeons, miraculous healing, mediums, materializations, and dematerializations to suspend my disbelief. Unfortunately, our schedule was very tight, and there was no way we could have extended our stay and followed this clue. In any case, I found the connection between my ketamine experience, the déjà vu feelings, and Leo’s story to be quite unusual and impressive.

PART 6: UNORTHODOX PSYCHIATRY: Surprising Alternatives to Traditional Treatment

The observations from the research of holotropic states of consciousness brought many extraordinary insights concerning the dimensions of the human psyche and the nature and architecture of emotional and psychosomatic disorders. They also opened surprising new perspectives for the treatment of these conditions by revealing therapeutic mechanisms previously unknown to the psychiatric profession.

The model of the psyche currently used in clinical and academic psychiatry is limited to postnatal biography and the Freudian individual unconscious. As suggested by Freud, the newborn is considered a
tabula rasa,
a clean slate, and our personality is shaped by the dynamics in the nuclear family and by emotionally relevant incidents during the first years of life. From this perspective, the events preceding birth, including the birth process itself, are psychologically irrelevant. Disorders for which no organic causes have been found in brain anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry are seen as results of psychotraumatic experiences in infancy, childhood, and later life. It is generally accepted that psychogenic disorders have their beginning at different stages of postnatal history and that their nature and depth reflect the time during which the original psychotraumas occurred.

Conventional therapeutic interventions in psychogenic, emotional, and psychosomatic disorders fall into two broad categories—“covering” and “un covering” strategies of treatment.
Covering therapy,
currently dominating outpatient practice and institutional treatment, uses a rich array of psychopharmacological agents to suppress symptoms. It can bring subjective relief to patients without dealing with the underlying causes of the disorders they suffer from.
Uncovering therapy
uses various psychotherapeutic techniques to get to the roots of the problems. Its goal is not only to alleviate the symptoms, but also to address the factors underlying them and to facilitate positive changes in the personality structure. Unfortunately, the current model of the psyche offers only a limited range of therapeutic mechanisms, such as remembering forgotten and repressed traumatic events or reconstructing them from free associations and dreams, intellectual and emotional insights, analysis of transference, and corrective experience in interpersonal relationships.