When the Impossible Happens (16 page)

When I later thought about the native belief in such ceremonial magic, I had to admit that the positive result of the rain ceremonies should not surprise us. The people in native cultures might not be technologically advanced, but they are not stupid. It is hard to imagine that they would continue venerating shamans who would conduct one ceremony after another without being able to show any results. For the tradition of rainmaking ceremonies to continue, they have to be successful in a significant number of cases. That does not mean that the relationship has to be causal in the sense that the shaman is actually making the rain. We have seen in other stories in this book the significant role that, on occasion, the principle of synchronicity plays in the universal scheme of things.

SRI YANTRA IN THE OREGON DESERT: UFO Visit or a Spectacular Hoax?

In 1989, Christina and I organized a conference of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) in Eugene, Oregon, entitled Mystical Quest, Attachment, and Addiction. As it turned out, this event became a focus of some interesting synchronistic happenings. At the time of this conference, I was deeply immersed in the study of UFO sightings and of experiences of alien encounters and abductions. My interest in this subject was prompted by my observations of UFO abduction experiences in psychedelic sessions of my clients, in sessions of Holotropic Breathwork of participants in our workshops and training, and during spiritual emergencies of the people I worked with. My personal encounter with what seemed to be alien intelligence during a ketamine session in Rio de Janeiro contributed to my interest in this area.

Since Kenneth Arnold’s first sighting of disk-shaped “unidentified flying objects” in 1947 near Mt. Rainier in Washington, the UFOs and various forms of encounters with and abduction by alien visitors have belonged to the most enigmatic and controversial phenomena of modern times. As a result of my personal observations and study of UFO literature, I realized very quickly that the attitude of mainstream scientists toward this phenomenon was simplistic and inadequate. Like experienced UFO researchers, such as Jacques Vallée and Allen Hynek, I came to the conclusion that we are dealing here with observations that represent true “anomalies” and seriously challenge our established concepts of reality.

I became convinced that the two alternative explanations offered by materialistic science—hallucinations of psychotic individuals and misperception and misinterpretation of some natural or human-made objects—were painfully inadequate efforts to capture the nature of these enigmatic experiences. I also felt that it was very unlikely that we were dealing with actual visits of physical extraterrestrial beings. We have enough information about the planets of our solar system from unmanned probes to know that they are unlikely habitats for such visitors. And the next possible point of origin of such interstellar journeys would be Proxima Centauri, separated from us by 4.2 light-years. Spacecraft from such destinations would have to travel at a speed approaching or exceeding the velocity of light or use interdimensional travel through hyperspace.

I concluded that the UFO experiences were phenomena
sui generis,
anomalous events that represented a radical challenge to mainstream scientific paradigms and required a radically different explanation. I read with great interest C.G. Jung’s book
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
(Jung 1964). In it Jung reviewed accounts of UFO-like visions re ported throughout human history and suggested that these experiences were manifestations that had their origin in the imaginal world of the collective unconscious. According to him, they were thus neither hallucinations nor perceptions of material reality, but belonged to the twilight zone between consciousness and the world of matter. Jung thus relegated the UFO phenomena into the realm of consciousness research and transpersonal psychology. I found his argument very convincing and saw it as a justification of my own interest in this area.

We had scheduled our training for facilitators of Holotropic Breathwork in such a way that it immediately preceded the Eugene conference. Because the training took place at Hollyhock Farm on Cortez Island in the Vancouver Bay, I was able to incorporate both destinations into one airplane itinerary. The chain of synchronicities started when I was flying from San Francisco to Seattle on the way to Cortez Island. I was reading Whitley Strieber’s book
Communion
(Strieber 1987), describing his experiences of encounters with extraterrestrial beings. One of the four-hundred-some pages of this paperback, located in the middle of the book, gave general information about UFOs; the rest was about Strieber’s personal experiences.

Just as I was reading the sentence describing the first sighting of UFOs by Kenneth Arnold near Mt. Rainier, I heard the captain’s voice, bringing to our attention that the majestic snowcapped mountain on our right was Mt. Rainier. I found the timing quite impressive, considering that Mt. Rainier was mentioned just once in the entire book. We landed in Seattle, and a taxi took me to the harbor, where I boarded a small seaplane for a spectacular flight over the hundreds of little islands of the Vancouver Bay to Cortez Island. The first person I saw when I arrived at Hollyhock Farm was John Mack, a well-known Harvard psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was participating in our training.

“Stan, I have to talk to you,” was the first thing John said after we greeted each other. “You were absolutely right. I have been looking into the UFO abduction experiences, and it’s fascinating stuff!” John was referring to a discussion we had had earlier that year at Pocket Ranch in Geyserville, California, about a paper by Keith Thompson entitled “Angels, Aliens, and Archetypes,” which Christina and I decided to include in our book
Spiritual Emergency.
In this paper, Keith compared the situation of the UFO abductees to that of the initiates in aboriginal rites of passage.

At the time of our discussion at Pocket Ranch, John was very skeptical, and I tried to convince him that the UFO phenomenon represented a serious challenge to the existing paradigm in psychiatry and that it deserved serious investigation. Hearing John’s comment, I was very curious about what had transpired in the meantime that forced him to change his attitude. We sat down by the ocean, and he described to me that Blanche, one of his fellow trainees, had taken him to see her New York friend Bud Hopkins, a dedicated UFO researcher. John, a rigorous but honest and open-minded scientist, was very impressed by the evidence Bud presented to him.

Bud had reports from many hundreds of abductees from different parts of the world, most of whom had no contact with each other. Some of them were from remote parts of the world and involved people who were illiterate. And yet, there was great similarity between the narratives of the abductees, often involving details such as the mechanics of the abductions, specific physical features of the aliens and spacecraft, mysterious symbols decorating the walls of the extraterrestrial spaceships, and the nature of the procedures to which the abductees were exposed. John, inspired by this visit, started his own independent research and was becoming increasingly impressed and fascinated by what he was finding.

I should mention here that in the following years John published his findings in the books
Abductions
(Mack 1994) and
Passport to the Universe
(Mack 1999). His research got extensive coverage in the press and gained John appearances on all the major American TV talk shows. The resulting controversy almost cost John his tenure at Harvard, and the legal procedure involved consumed a significant part of his advance royalties. After winning the lawsuit with Harvard, John started PEERS, an organization for the study of “anomalous phenomena,” observations challenging the current scientific paradigm. In September 2004, John’s life was terminated by a tragic accident; during his visit to a London conference he was killed by a drunken truck driver while crossing a street.

In our Hollyhock training, the discussions about alien abductions soon spread among the participants and continued for the rest of our stay in Cortez Island. This situation culminated when Anne and Jim Armstrong, our guest faculty for this training module, arrived on the scene. Anne was known for her capacity to channel psychic information on any particular topic, whether it involved people’s personal lives, cultural phenomena, human history, or scientific problems. Under the circumstances, the group made a unanimous decision to ask Anne for a reading on the UFO phenomenon. In a reading that lasted over an hour, Anne was able to offer an interesting perspective and many unique insights concerning flying saucers, extraterrestrials, and alien abductions.

When the training ended, Christina and I flew to Seattle to launch the ITA conference. On the second day of the meeting, the
Oregon Herald
published an astonishing report about a discovery an airplane pilot had made in the Oregon desert. Flying across this vast plain, he had noticed a remarkable design carved in the desert floor. It turned out to be a perfectly executed Sri Yantra, the most sacred symbol of Tantra, one of the most ancient Indian spiritual traditions. The image was gigantic, covering an area the size of four football fields!

Yantra
is a Sanskrit word that means “aid” or “tool.” Yantras are abstract diagrams, images of various deities composed entirely of primal geometric forms—points, lines, circles, triangles, squares, and stylized lotus blossoms. These forms are juxtaposed, intersected, combined, and harmonically arranged. According to Tantraraja Tantra, there are 960 yantras, each representing a different deity or a specific aspect thereof. Sri Yantra, the most ancient and celebrated of these yantras, is composed of nine intersecting triangles, four oriented upward, five downward. It represents the union of Shiva and Shakti, the cosmic field in creation, and different stages of Shakti’s descent into manifestation.

In the middle of the intersecting triangles is
mahabindu,
a point representing simultaneously the source of creation and the transcendence of all polarities and final integration at the end of the spiritual journey. The intersecting triangles are surrounded by concentric circles decorated with stylized lotus petals. The outer layer of this intricate diagram is a square with
T
-shaped gates on each of its sides. This elaborate and complex spiritual symbol was executed in the Oregon desert with mathematical precision and on a colossal scale. The furrows forming it were exactly four inches deep and absolutely even throughout the diagram.

When people responding to the pilot’s report arrived on the scene, they were astonished when they discovered that the desert surface all around the design was absolutely pristine and intact. There were no imprints of tires or footprints leading to it. The writer of the newspaper article concluded after doing some research that to replicate this work on the same scale and with the same precision would cost about $100,000. The origin and purpose of this remarkable project was a mystery and, to my knowledge, has remained so until this very day. The article mentioned the obvious parallel to the crop circles appearing mysteriously in the fields of various parts of Europe and added that the prevailing popular belief was that the Sri Yantra in the Oregon desert was the work of extraterrestrial visitors.

This was the culmination of a series of instances in my life involving UFOs and aliens. However, for Christina and myself, this event had also an interesting personal dimension. During our darshans with Swami Muktananda, he often referred to us mischievously in a tongue-in-cheek fashion as Shiva and Shakti. And just at the time when the two of us launched a large international conference, a sacred symbol representing Shiva and Shakti manifested in a nearby desert. While we ourselves tended to interpret similar happenings in terms of Jung’s concept of synchronicity, there were people in the Siddha Yoga movement who liked to see Baba as a cosmic puppeteer. They believed that he consciously and deliberately staged auspicious events in the lives of his devotees. A few of them who participated in the conference saw the manifestation of Sri Yantra in the desert as Baba’s work. They came to us individually to share their belief that it was without any doubt an expression of his blessing for the conference.

A LESSON IN FORGIVENESS: Peyote Ceremony with Potawatomi Indians

As a psychiatrist dealing on a daily basis with emotional problems that plague human life, I became keenly aware of various destructive and self-destructive patterns that are being passed like a curse from one generation to another throughout history. The traumas that the parents experience during their own development in the family of origin leave them emotionally wounded and unable to function adequately in the role of husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers. As a result, they inflict emotional wounds on their off spring. To break this vicious circle is one of the major challenges of modern psychology and psychiatry.

A similar pattern of a higher order operates on the collective level and poisons relations between entire countries and nations. Unbridled violence and insatiable greed, two dangerous flaws of human nature, have in the past engendered innumerable bloody wars and revolutions and created immense suffering. The memory of the pain and injustice inflicted by various historical enemies survives in the collective consciousness of nations for centuries and colors their present attitudes and relations with each other. Unresolved and unforgiven harms and injuries keep breeding new violence.

In the unfolding of human history, the roles of various nations and their relationships keep constantly changing in a rather capricious way. On the surface, alliances and internecine encounters come and go, but the memories of the deep wounds and the resulting prejudices remain. During World War II, Germany, Japan, and Italy, the “Axis powers,” were enemies of the United States, while the Soviet Union was an important ally. After the war, the political landscape changed dramatically. Japan and Italy became friendly countries and the Soviet Union an archenemy. The situation with Germany was more complicated; West Germany now was an ally and East Germany became a member of the hostile camp.