It's been forty-five years since I had a chance to experiment with vision, to know that this world we think of as real and solid is but made up.
Stanislav Grof made up his mind about the same time. He started experimenting with LSD several years before. He also experienced a wide variety of other drugs --- peyote, MDA, "magic mushrooms," ketamine, and toad juice. What? "Smoking dried secretions [of certain toads] induces within seconds a psychedelic state that can be very psychologically challenging," he writes. "The Church of the Toad was created to use liquids of Bufo alvarius in religious services," he tells us. Seriously.
Grof is convinced that all of us have passed many other lives on earth and, possibly, lives in other worlds. He is a believer in Carl Jung's collective unconsciousness, anomalous phenomena, and out-of-body and near-death experiences. He has sought the crystal skull and has traveled widely to investigate so-called "primitive" beliefs, relics and magic. He seems to have undertaken every possible journey one can take by conventional and unconventional means to study and understand "cosmic consciousness."
Recently, Grof has communicated with hundreds of people who have returned to partake in their own births, and in one case, he reports a session of "primal therapy" where the patient "relived his conception:"
"To his surprise, Graham experienced in his session that being the sperm, he did not attack and penetrate the passive ovum, as it was at the time taught in medical schools, but that the ovum cooperated by sending out an extension of its cytoplasm and engulfing him."
Grof has visited Ayers Rock, the Cosmic Mountain, which pokes more than a thousand feet out of the red Australian desert. Grof (who had ingested "400 mcg of LSD" the night before) found himself with "the Great Mother Goddess in the form of a female kangaroo."
"Suddenly I realized that I had become a tiny kangaroo fetus in her womb, undergoing the process of birth."
It's not all fireworks out there (or inside our locked-up brains.) Grof reports that some of
his psychedelic journeys on ketamine --- used as an anesthetic by physicians --- were "absolutely trivial and outright boring." However during one, which he called his "IG Farben consciousness," he realized that petroleum was a "fat of biological origin that got mineralized; it meant that it had escaped the mandatory cycle of death and rebirth."
"However the element of death was not eliminated in this process, it was only delayed. The destructive plutonic potential of death continues to exist in petroleum in a latent form as a monstrous time bomb awaiting its opportunity to be released into the world."
During a journey on ketamine, Grof became "every Jew who had died in the Nazi gas chambers, every sprayed ant and cockroach, every fly caught in the sticky goo of the flytraps, and every plant dying under the influence of the herbicides. And beyond all that lurked the highly possible ominous future of all life on the planet --- death by industrial pollution.
This guy is a dynamo, and not half-cracked as some would want to believe. What makes his experiences so exciting is that he knows how to gather the words --- words of other worlds --- put them down on the page and make them ring true, or at least true for this reader. He is a worthy stylist of the unbelievable, which he mixes here with stories of his life: what it was like to grow up in Nazi and Communist controlled Czechoslovakia; how he escaped during Prague Spring (to not return for twenty years); how he was hired on in Baltimore at a government-sponsored institute to experiment with LSD; how, when she was in her seventies, he taught his mother breathing exercises --- and how she in turn, became an exponent of "holotropic breathwork," which she taught through the last years of her life.
It is a fascinating journey he takes us on, and it would be just too goofy if it weren't for the fact that Grof knows how to speak as if he, indeed, had through all these twists and turns of reality had somehow found, as the Chinese would have it, The Tao ... The Way.
Most of all, When the Impossible Happens is a book of hope. It so happens that the day I picked it up was a day in which I was ready to jump off the lanai. I woke up feeling peckish, my cat had just thrown up under my desk, I felt, as we all must feel, at times, useless, unwanted, unloved. In my own minor way, I was going through what Grof calls a "Spiritual Emergency." Grof's sense of hope (and sense of fun) helped get me through that day, my only regret was that there was no toad around to lick.
Each of the chapters in the book holds a surprise, making me realize --- again --- that the day-to-day set that you and I keep is limited and patterned. We protect ourselves from the new --- sometimes to the point of madness. The journeys that Judy and Wesley and I went on so many years ago told us of another world. According to Grof, there are others, dozens of others, for me, for all of us, to explore. If we so choose; if we so dare.
