When the Impossible Happens (8 page)

On the way back from Iceland, we stopped in Miami, where Joan introduced me to her parents, John and Eunice. They had no idea that Joan had plans to be married until she broke the news about our Icelandic wedding in a telephone call. I clearly did not meet the standards of the nouveau riche world of their Miami island house. However, they reluctantly accepted me, probably because, knowing Joan’s rebellious spirit, they expected worse. The first three sentences Joan’s father, John, asked after she told him she was married were: “Is he black? Is he a Communist? Does he have a beard?” And he felt somewhat reassured when the answers to all three of those questions were negative.

Joan left her job with the anthropological department of the University of Miami and moved to my apartment in Baltimore. She made several unsuccessful attempts to get a teaching or research position at the Johns Hopkins University and at the University of Maryland. The loss of her academic identity seemed to take a big toll on her emotional condition. I offered her to join me in our project of psychedelic therapy with terminal cancer patients. She enjoyed being a cotherapist in LSD and DPT (dipropyltryptamine) sessions, but had to do it gratis, because there was no salaried position available at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. A trip to Japan intended as a honeymoon further increased the tension between us.

Fortunately, I was offered an advance royalty from Viking Press to write two books on LSD. At a party in Leni and Bob Schwartz’s house in New York City, we ran into an old friend of mine, Michael Murphy, the cofounder of the Esalen Institute. After a brief discussion, Michael invited us to move to Big Sur as Esalen’s guests and offered me the position of Scholar-in-Residence. A vacation in Austria and Italy and the move to Esalen temporarily took some of the pressure from our relationship and brought a momentary relief. However, it did not last very long; the differences between us continued to grow, and our relationship rapidly deteriorated. For some time, we tried to stay together, mostly because we did not want to disappoint the group of our Bifrost friends, who had created and experienced our beautiful wedding ceremony, and particularly Joe Campbell. Joe criticized, in his lectures, modern marriage for lacking a solid mythological grounding and offered a glowing description of our wedding as a model of a mythologically informed marriage that would last forever. When our marriage finally fell apart, and it was clear that divorce was inevitable, dealing with Joe’s disappointment was one of the most difficult parts of the process.

The Icelandic adventure was a fascinating experience of archetypal energies breaking into everyday life and creating astonishing synchronicities. However, it taught me an important lesson. I learned not to trust unconditionally the seductive power of such experiences and the enchantment and ego inflation that they engender. The ecstatic feelings associated with emergence of archetypal forces do not guarantee a positive outcome. It is essential to refrain from acting out while we are under their spell and not to make any important decisions until we have again both feet on the ground.

THE PLAY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Swami Muktananda and Siddha Yoga

Over the years, my wife, Christina, and I have observed in our work and personally experienced many remarkable synchronicities. Sometimes these were isolated occurrences; other times they came in entire chains and aggregates. However, there was a period of eight years in our lives when we had the opportunity to encounter and observe synchronicities on a mass scale. This was the time of our close relationship with Swami Muktananda, Indian spiritual teacher and head of the ancient Siddha Yoga lineage. In 1975, when Christina and I met in Big Sur, California, and started working and living together, Christina was Swami Muktananda’s student and ardent follower. She had met him when he had stopped in Honolulu during his first world tour, accompanied by Ram Dass, famous Harvard psychology professor and psychedelic researcher turned spiritual seeker and teacher.

Christina was at that time experiencing a powerful awakening of Kundalini, which had started during the delivery of her first child, Nathaniel, and had been further intensified and deepened by the delivery of her daughter, Sarah, two years later. According to the yogic tradition, Kundalini, also called the Serpent Power, is the generative cosmic energy, feminine in nature, which is responsible for the creation of the universe. It has its representation in the subtle or energy body, a field that pervades and permeates, as well as surrounds, the human physical body. In its latent form, it resides in the sacral area, at the base of the spine. The name Kundalini means literally “the coiled one,” and it is usually depicted as a snake twisted three and half times around the lingam, symbol of the male generative power. This dormant energy can become activated by meditation, specific exercises, the intervention of an experienced spiritual teacher (guru), or for unknown reasons.

The activated Kundalini, called
shakti,
rises through the
nadis,
channels or conduits in the subtle body. As it ascends, it clears old traumatic imprints and opens the centers of psychic and spiritual energy, called
chakras.
Awakening of Kundalini is thus conducive to healing, spiritual opening, and positive personality transformation. This process, although highly valued and considered beneficial in the yogic tradition, is not without dangers and requires expert guidance by a guru whose Kundalini is fully awakened and stabilized. The most dramatic signs of Kundalini awakening are physical and psychological manifestations called
kriyas.
The kriyas involve intense sensations of energy and heat streaming up the spine, which can be associated with violent shaking, spasms, and twisting movements.

Powerful waves of seemingly unmotivated emotions, such as anxiety, anger, sadness, or joy and ecstatic rapture, can surface and temporarily dominate the psyche. This can be accompanied by visions of brilliant light or various archetypal beings and a variety of internally perceived sounds. Many people involved in this process also often have powerful experiences of what seem to be memories from past lives. Involuntary and often uncontrollable behaviors complete the picture: speaking in tongues, chanting unknown songs or sacred invocations
(mantras),
assuming yogic postures
(asanas)
and gestures
(mudras),
and making a variety of animal sounds and movements.

Swami Muktananda had the reputation of being a perfected master, an accomplished Kundalini yogi, capable of awakening spiritual energy in his disciples. Christina heard about his visit to Hawaii from her friends and decided to attend an “intensive,” as Muktananda called weekend retreats he was offering. During one of the meditations in this retreat, Christina received from him
shaktipat,
which is the Sanskrit name for transfer of spiritual energy from the guru, mediated by a touch, a look, or even a thought. For Christina, this powerful energy transfer occurred when Muktananda looked at her and their eyes met. At this point, she experienced a penetrating lightning bolt radiating from the guru’s eyes and hitting her between her eyes in the area where the spiritual traditions place the “third eye.” This triggered intense
kriyas,
waves of overwhelming emotions and shaking.

The experience with Muktananda greatly intensified Christina’s process of Kundalini awakening, which had already been well underway before she met him. This was the beginning of her important relationship with this remarkable Siddha yogi, which lasted until 1982, when he died at the age of seventy-four. After the weekend retreat, Christina offered as a meeting place for Muktananda’s devotees her small apartment in Honolulu, where she lived after her divorce with her children, Than and Sarah. Muktananda accepted her offer, visited her apartment, and blessed it as a Siddha Yoga meditation center. After leaving Hawaii, Christina tried to use any opportunity to reconnect with her teacher.

Shortly after Christina and I started living together at Esalen, Swami Muktananda came to the Bay Area to spend several months in his ashram in Oakland, near San Francisco. Oakland is only about a three-hours’ drive from Big Sur, where we lived, and Christina used this occasion to arrange for the two of us a personal audience, or
darshan,
with her spiritual teacher. As I found out later, she was uncertain whether Swami Muktanada would approve of our relationship and wanted to find out. I could certainly understand her concerns. Being a “transcendental hedonist,” as I often jokingly referred to myself, I did not exactly meet the conventional Indian criteria for an austere spiritual seeker. I was not a vegetarian, enjoyed sex, and was known for my work with LSD and other psychedelic substances.

I had heard about Swami Muktananda before I met Christina, and had the chance to leaf through a manuscript of his autobiography, entitled
Guru, later
to become
The Play of Consciousness.
I was not particularly eager to drive to Oakland to meet him because I had somewhat mixed feelings about him. Two of my friends had converted to Siddha Yoga and were showing what I saw as an uncritical passionate devotion to Muktananda. They were certainly not the best advertisements for Muktananda and the influence he had on his followers. Their behavior drastically changed following their attendance of a Muktananda weekend intensive and created much commotion at Esalen. Instead of covering the topic they had promised in the Esalen catalog, they brought into their workshops little drums and cymbals and tried to engage the participants in chanting “Shree Guru Gita,” “Om Namah Shivaya,” and other Hindu devotional chants.

Devotional yoga had never been my favorite spiritual practice. According to the ancient Indian tradition, people with different personalities need and seek different types of yoga. While Christina’s preference was without any doubt bhakti yoga, an approach emphasizing devotion to the guru, I felt great affinity to jñana yoga, a spiritual strategy that pushes the intellect to its utmost limits, where it has to surrender. I also resonated very much with raja yoga, a system that focuses on psychological experiment and a direct experience of the divine. I could easily accept karma yoga, the yoga of service accumulating karmic merits, but bhakti yoga was low on my scale of values.

But because I am very curious by nature, my reservations about devotional practice did not override my interest in meeting a Siddha Yoga guru with Muktananda’s reputation. And I knew that this darshan was very important for Christina. As we were driving toward the Bay Area, Christina kept telling me some remarkable stories about her spiritual teacher, as a preparation for our meeting. We overestimated the time it would take us to drive from Big Sur to Oakland because this was not our usual route, and arrived at the ashram about twenty minutes before our scheduled meeting.

While we were sitting in the car waiting for the darshan, we continued our discussion about Swami Muktananda. At one point, Christina mentioned that he was a Shaivite, which means a follower of Shiva. This captured my attention and increased my interest in meeting him. I knew that among the methods the Shaivites were using to get into non-ordinary states of consciousness was ingestion of bhang and datura seeds. And I considered Shiva to be my most important personal archetype because the two most powerful and meaningful experiences I have ever had in my psychedelic sessions involved this Indian deity. As we were waiting, I described these two experiences at some length to Christina.

My first encounter with Shiva occurred in one of my early LSD sessions, when I was still in Prague. I spent the first four hours of this session in the birth canal, reliving the trauma of my birth. As I was emerging from the birth canal, all battered, covered with blood, and tasting vaginal secretions, I had a terrifying vision of the Hindu goddess Kali and experienced a complete unconditional surrender to the power of the feminine principle in the universe. At that moment, I saw a gigantic figure of Bhairava, Shiva in his Destroyer aspect, towering above me. I felt crushed by his foot and smeared like a piece of excrement on what seemed to be the deepest bottom of the universe. It was a complete annihilation of what I then considered to be my identity, a shattering death of my body and ego. But having become nothing, I became everything. I had a sense of dissolving in a source of light of indescribable intensity and exquisite beauty. I realized that I was experiencing what had been called in the ancient Indian scriptures the union of Atman and Brahman.

My second encounter with Shiva happened many years later, during my vision quest in the Ventana wilderness in Big Sur. In an overnight LSD session that took place near a waterfall in a redwood dell, I had the vision of a giant archetypal river, representing time and the impermanence of all creation. It flowed back into what appeared to be the source of all existence—an immense ball of radiating energy that was conscious, possessed infinite intelligence, and was simultaneously creative and destructive. I heard a compelling sound and knew instantly that it was dambaru, the drum of Shiva Bhairava, the Destroyer, commanding all creation to return where it came from.

The history of the universe and of the Earth was passing in front of my eyes. As if in an incredibly sped-up movie, I saw the birth, development, and death of galaxies and stars. I observed the beginning, evolution, and extinction of species and witnessed cultures and dynasties originating, flourishing, and facing destruction. The most memorable sequence of this session was a procession of dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes entering after millions of years of existence the River of Time and disappearing in it. Permeating this amazing scenery like a magnificent cosmic hologram was a giant figure of Shiva Nataraja, Lord of the Cosmic Dance, performing his dance of the universe. After sunrise, when my attention turned from my inner world to the incredible beauty of nature around me, I heard for many hours in my ears the enticing and irresistible chant “Om, hare Om, hare Om, Shri Om,” which I had heard throughout this unforgettable experience as a leitmotif of the River of Time.