When the Impossible Happens (22 page)

This was the time when Karl came to our Esalen workshop and shifted from primal therapy to Holotropic Breathwork. As the process continued, the scenes were becoming more dramatic and involved; many of them represented fierce combat and bloody slaughter. Although surrounded by soldiers, Karl experienced himself as a priest and at one point had a very moving vision that involved a Bible and a cross. At this point, he saw a seal ring on his hand and could clearly recognize the initials that it bore.

Being a talented artist, he decided to document this strange process, although he did not understand it at the time. He produced a series of drawings and very powerful and impulsive finger paintings. Some of these depicted different parts of the fortress, others scenes of slaughter, and a few of them Karl’s own experiences, including being gored by a sword of a British soldier, thrown over the ramparts of the fortress, and dying on the shore. Among these pictures was a drawing of his hand with the seal ring engraved with the initials of the priest’s name.

As he was recovering bits and pieces of this story, Karl was finding more and more meaningful connections between various aspects of its plot and his present life. He started suspecting that the drama of the Spanish priest in the remote past might be the source of many of his own emotional and psycho somatic symptoms, as well as interpersonal problems. A turning point came when Karl suddenly decided on impulse to spend his holiday in Ireland. After his return, when he was looking at the slides he had shot on Ireland’s western coast, he realized that he had taken eleven consecutive pictures of exactly the same scenery. This surprised him because he did not remember having done it, and the view he had chosen did not seem particularly interesting.

Being a pragmatic man, he took a very rational and analytic approach to this quizzical situation. He looked at the map and reconstructed where he stood at the time and in which direction he was shooting. He discovered that the place that attracted his attention was the ruin of an old fortress called Dún an Óir, or Forte de Oro (Golden Fortress). From the distance he was shooting, it was barely visible with the naked eye, and he had to look hard to find it in the slide. Suspecting a connection between his strange behavior and his experiences from primal therapy and Holotropic Breathwork, Karl decided to study the history of Dún an Óir, looking for any possible clues.

He discovered, to his enormous surprise, that in 1580, a small invasion force of Spanish soldiers landed in the nearby Smerwick Harbor to assist the Irish in the Desmond Rebellion. After being joined by some Irish soldiers they numbered about 600. They managed to garrison themselves within the defenses of the fort at Dún an Óir, before they were surrounded and besieged by a larger English force commanded by Lord Grey. Walter Raleigh, who accompanied Lord Grey, played the role of mediator in this conflict and negotiated with the Spaniards. He promised them free egress from the fortress if they opened the gate and surrendered to the British. The Spaniards agreed to accept this condition and surrendered, but the British did not hold their promise. Once inside the fortress, they slaughtered mercilessly all the Spaniards and threw their bodies over the ramparts into the ocean and on the beach.

In spite of this absolutely astonishing confirmation of the story that he laboriously reconstructed in his inner exploration, Karl was not satisfied. He continued his library research until he discovered a special document about the battle of Dún an Óir. There he found that a priest accompanied the Spanish soldiers and was killed together with them. The initials of the name of the priest were identical to those that Karl had seen in his vision of the seal ring and had depicted in one of his drawings.

THE KARMIC TRIANGLE: Time Travel to Ancient Egypt

In 1967, at the time of my immigration to the United States, I was struggling with the problem of past incarnation experiences. I had witnessed them repeatedly in my clients and was impressed and puzzled by the amount and quality of information that was revealed when they surfaced into consciousness. This information involved social structure, ritual and spiritual life, as well as costumes, weapons, and battle strategies of the cultures and historical periods that formed the context of these experiences. The knowledge that these karmic episodes provided by far transcended the intellectual level and educational background of my clients.

I was also deeply impressed by the connections between certain important aspects of these karmic experiences and my clients’ everyday lives—their emotional and psychosomatic problems, difficulties in interpersonal relationships, strange and unexplainable idiosyncrasies or attractions, and reactions to certain people and situations. Even more remarkable was the therapeutic impact that such karmic experiences had when they were fully relived and integrated.

In spite of all this impressive evidence, I found it impossible to accept that we were dealing here with an authentic phenomenon. The conceptual barrier involved was of a qualitatively different level than the one that stood in the way of accepting the capacity of the brain of the newborn to register the ordeal of birth. After all, the brain of the newborn, myelinized or not, is a very complex material system. But the possibility of retrieving memories of entire scenes from times preceding conception, often by centuries, seemed simply too preposterous.

If we subscribe to the materialistic worldview of Western science, ancestral and racial memories would have to be transmitted by the sperm and the ovum, the only material connection we have to events preceding our conception. The carrier of this information would have to be the chromosomes and, more specifically, the DNA. And in the case of past-life memories even this faint material bridge to the past is missing because they cross not only ancestral, but often even racial, hereditary lines. For example, it is not uncommon for Caucasians to have past-life experiences as black Africans, native Americans, or Asians, and vice versa.

It took some powerful personal experiences for me to change my attitude toward past-life memories. This area opened up for me experientially in an LSD session that I had shortly after my arrival in the United States. What happened in this session and around it convinced me that past-life experiences represented authentic phenomena and could not be dismissed as derivatives of events in our everyday life. This extraordinary experience was associated, among others, with remarkable synchronicities that involved other people, who were not present in my session and were not aware that I was having one.

My immigration to the United States, in March 1967, brought about radical changes in my personal, professional, political, and cultural environment. I arrived in Baltimore with some fifty pounds of my personal belongings. Over half of the total content of my luggage was the documentation of my psychedelic research in Prague, and the rest was clothing and some other personal items. This was all that was left of my old life in Europe. It was the end of one large chapter of my life and a new beginning on many different levels. While I thoroughly enjoyed the dedicated and enthusiastic team of my professional colleagues at Spring Grove, the undreamed—of freedom of expression, and all the novel things I was discovering in the world around me, I did not have much success in creating a satisfactory personal life.

All the women in my social environment who were of appropriate age for me and shared my interests seemed to be married or otherwise committed. It was a frustrating situation for me because I was in a stage of my life when I was experiencing a strong need for partnership and felt ready for commitment. My friends and colleagues at Spring Grove seemed to be even more concerned about this situation than I was myself and exerted great effort to remedy it. They searched for potential partners for me and kept inviting them for various social occasions. This resulted in a few frustrating and somewhat awkward situations, but did not bear any fruit. And then this situation suddenly took an unexpected and very radical turn.

A difficult relationship of a fellow therapist, Seymour, had abruptly ended, and my friends invited his ex-girlfriend, Monica, and me for dinner. When Monica and I first met, I immediately felt a strong attraction to her and had a sense of instant deep connection. It did not take very long, and I was deeply in love with her. She was of European origin like me, single, beautiful, and bright. Her unusual charm, wit, and facility with words made her quickly the center of attention at every party she attended. I felt rapidly drawn into the relationship and was unable to be objective and realistic about it.

I did not see any problem in the fact that Monica was considerably younger than I. I also chose to ignore the stories about her extremely traumatic childhood and tumultuous interpersonal history, which I would have normally seen as serious warning signs. I was somehow able to reassure myself that all these were insignificant details, nothing that we would not be able to work through and overcome. Had I been able to be more objective and analytic under the circumstances, I would have recognized that I had met what C.G. Jung called an
anima figure.
Monica and I started dating and had a passionate and unusually stormy relationship.

Monica’s moods and behavior seemed to change from one day to another, or even from hour to hour. Waves of intense affection toward me alternated with episodes of aloofness, evasiveness, and withdrawal. The situation seemed to be further complicated by two unusual circumstances. Since my arrival in Baltimore, I lived in a small studio apartment that had been previously rented by Monica’s ex-boyfriend, Seymour. When I moved in, I even bought all of Seymour’s old furniture and his TV set. Monica used to visit him in this apartment when they were dating and was now coming to exactly the same setting to see a different man. In addition, Monica’s brother Wolfgang hated me from the very first time we had met. He and Monica had an unusually intense relationship that seemed to have distinct incestuous features. Wolfgang was violently opposed to my relationship with Monica and treated me like a rival.

I was very committed and determined to make the relationship work, but nothing I was able to do had any influence on the crazy-making roller-coaster ride we seemed to be taking together. I felt like I was alternately exposed to hot and cold showers. I found it very frustrating but, at the same time, my attraction to Monica had a strange magnetic quality, and I was unable to terminate this confusing and unfulfilling relationship.

I desperately needed some insight into the baffling dynamic in which I was caught. As I mentioned earlier, Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, where I worked at the time, had a program offering mental health professionals the opportunity to have up to three high-dose psychedelic sessions for training purposes, and the members of our therapeutic team were eligible for this program. As the difficulties in my relationship with Monica were reaching their peak, I decided to apply for an LSD session to reach some clarity in this confusing situation.

In the middle of my session I suddenly had a vision of a dark rock of irregular shape that looked like a giant meteorite and seemed extremely ancient. The sky opened up, and a lightning bolt of immense intensity hit its surface and started to burn into it some mysterious, arcane symbols. Once these strange hieroglyphs were carved into the surface of the rock, they continued to burn and emit blinding incandescent light. Although I was unable to decipher the hieroglyphs and read them, I sensed that they were sacred, and I could somehow understand the message they were conveying. They revealed to me that I had had a long series of lives preceding this one and that, according to the law of karma, I was responsible for my actions in these lives, although I could not remember them.

At first, I tried to refuse responsibility for things of which I did not have any memory, but was not able to resist the enormous psychological pressure forcing me to surrender and comply. Finally, I had to accept what clearly was an ancient universal law against which there was no recourse. Once I yielded, I found myself holding Monica in my arms, just as I remembered holding her on the previous weekend. We were floating in air in an archetypal pit of immense size, slowly descending in an extended spiral. I felt instinctively that this was the Abyss of Ages and that we were traveling back in time.

The descent took an eternity, and it seemed it would never end. Finally, we reached the bottom of the pit. Monica disappeared from my arms, and I found myself walking in a hall of an ancient Egyptian palace, dressed in ornate clothes. All around me on the walls were beautiful bas-reliefs accompanied by carved hieroglyphs. I could understand their meaning as clearly as I would understand the message of the posters pasted on a Baltimore billboard. On the other side of the large hall, I saw a figure who was slowly approaching me. I understood intuitively that I was the son of an aristocratic Egyptian family and that the man approaching me was my brother in that lifetime.

As the figure came closer, I recognized that it was Wolfgang. He stopped about ten feet from me and looked at me with immense hatred. I realized that in this Egyptian incarnation Wolfgang, Monica, and I were siblings. I was the firstborn and, as such, I had married Monica and received many other privileges that came with that status. Wolfgang felt cheated and experienced agonizing jealousy and strong hatred toward me. I saw clearly that this was the basis of a destructive karmic pattern that then repeated itself in many variations throughout ages.

I stood in the hall facing Wolfgang and feeling his deep hatred toward me. In an attempt to resolve this painful situation, I tried to send him a telepathic message. It was something like this: “I don’t know in what form I am here or how I got here. I am a time traveler from the twentieth century, where I took a powerful mind-altering drug. I am very unhappy about the tension that exists between us, and I want to do anything to resolve it.” I stretched my arms into a very open position and communicated to him in the same way: “Here I am, this is all I have! Please, do anything you need to do to liberate us from this bondage, to set both of us free!”