When the Impossible Happens (25 page)

Victoria had a very strange theory concerning the nature of her mysterious affliction. She believed that in her near-death experience she connected with the beyond and assumed the identity of her dead twin sister, whose name she carried. This then found its expression in the progressive deterioration and de composition of her body. She identified strongly with the ostracized Phantom of the Opera, suffered from deep depression, and was seriously considering suicide as a way out of her misery. None of the approaches she had tried so far had any favorable effect on her emotional condition. When she read about the power of psychedelic therapy, she decided to give it a try.

Christina and I agreed to be her guides in a high-dose LSD session. It was a very profound and meaningful experience for all of us. Victoria’s experience covered a very broad range; she dealt with the pain and grief of her tragic predicament, revisited her childhood accident, and connected with the trauma of her birth and death of her twin sister. But she did not dwell very long on any of these themes and spent a large part of her session in a state of bliss and cosmic unity. This experience was so profound and extraordinary that she felt reconciled with the tragic course of her present life and with God.

During the time when she experienced this ecstatic rapture, she seemed to be surrounded by a halo of radiant energy. Although Christina and I were sitting close to her, we were unable to see her scars. Her face appeared to be absolutely smooth and beautiful. This was clearly on our part what we used to call “contact high” and, several hours later, our perception returned to normal. However, Victoria retained much of the new emotional attitude to life she had achieved in the session. For me, seeing Victoria’s face healed and beautiful was the final closure on my Russian past-life adventure.

Although more than quarter of a century has elapsed since our session with Victoria, I have not encountered anything that would add another piece to this karmic jigsaw puzzle. On and off, I have returned in my mind to this extraordinary adventure, trying to understand the exact relationships between the past and present protagonists of this story. While the connection between my present identity and the unhappy monk seems pretty straightforward, the relationship between Victoria and the disfigured monk, Caroline and my Russian mother, the present me and Victoria, Victoria and Caroline, as well as the role of Christina in the story are more obscure and enigmatic.

Although my experiences described in this story, interwoven with extraordinary synchronicities, revealed the intricate invisible fabric underlying our everyday reality, enough of the deep dynamic remained hidden to protect the mysterious nature of the laws operating in the world of karma.

WHEN SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES CAN BE DANGEROUS: Revisiting the Salem Witch-Hunt

In 1976, Christina and I lived for several months in the Round House at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. It was a small, charming structure located by the creek dividing the Esalen property into two parts. The creek’s busy waters rushed down from the mountain ridge and formed a large waterfall just before joining the Pacific Ocean. In front of this house was an opening in the ground spewing hot mineral waters into a little private pool. According to the local lore, the Esalen hot springs had their origin in an interconnected system of volcanic underground caverns that spread under much of California.

The rushing of the creek and the roaring of the waterfall represented a very powerful sensory input. However, even more impressive was the psychic power of this place. Over the years, we had invited to our Esalen workshops as guest faculty many people with extraordinary psychic abilities—clairvoyants, shamans from various parts of the world, members of the Spiritist Church, Indian yogis, and Tibetan masters. They all seemed to concur that the area around the Round House was a “power spot,” a place endowed with extraordinary spiritual energy. Those trying to find some scientific explanation for the impact it had on people attributed it to a high concentration of negative ions due to the proximity to the ocean, the crashing waters of the waterfall, and to the presence of giant redwoods lining the creek on both sides.

In any case, whatever the reason for it, living in the Round House had a very powerful psychological impact on both of us. It was unusually easy to go into a meditative state; I found myself often slipping into a trance in which I forgot our geographic and historical coordinates and felt that our little eyrie was situated somewhere in an archetypal domain beyond time and space. Christina, who was at that time undergoing her spiritual emergency, experienced there an extraordinary intensification of her inner process. One weekend, her experiences reached such intensity that they resembled a psychedelic session.

After a period of intense anxiety and uncomfortable physical feelings, she had a powerful experience of what she felt was a memory from one of her past lives. She became an adolescent girl living in New England’s Salem who had episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Her fundamentalist Christian neighbors interpreted these episodes in their bigoted craze as possession by the devil. This brought an accusation of witchcraft; she was tried by two judges, dressed in ceremonial robes, and sentenced to death by drowning.

The past-life memory culminated in an experience of execution by drowning. Christina found herself being carried to a pond, tied to a board, and submerged, head first, under water. She managed to notice that the pond was surrounded by birch trees. As she was reliving her death by drowning, she was screaming, choking, and bringing out a lot of mucus, both from her mouth and nose. The amount of nasal secretions that she produced was extraordinary. That day, I was wearing a flannel shirt, and when Christina’s experience ended, its front was completely impregnated by dried mucus.

While living in Hawaii, Christina had suffered from severe allergies and sinusitis. She had many medical examinations, tests, and treatments, including a series of injections for desensitization. Her doctors, frustrated by the failure of all therapeutic efforts, finally suggested a surgical procedure, involving scraping and cleaning the sinus cavities. Christina decided to refuse such a radical procedure and accepted her predicament. She discovered to her great surprise that, following the episode in which she relived the Salem trial and death, her sinus problems disappeared.

Fortunately, by this time, my belief in what I once had held as a “scientific worldview” that had been rigorously proven beyond any reasonable doubt was al ready seriously undermined by many similar observations. Without it, this episode would have left me in a serious intellectual crisis. There was certainly an element of cosmic humor in the fact that Christina’s difficulties, which had resisted the concerted efforts of scientific experts, were resolved by reliving a karmic episode involving ignorance, religious fanaticism, and false accusation of witchcraft.

This episode had a very interesting sequel many years later, when Christina and I visited Boston to conduct a Holotropic Breathwork workshop. The workshop ended in the evening, and our flight back to San Francisco was not until late afternoon the next day. We thus had a good part of a day for sight seeing. We decided to call Marilyn Hershenson, a psychologist and dear friend of ours, who had been a member of Swami Muktananda’s inner circle. We became very close in the early 1980s, when she coordinated with us a large international transpersonal conference in Bombay. Marilyn was very excited and offered that she would spend the day with us and drive us around.

When we discussed what would be a good place for lunch, Marilyn suggested her favorite restaurant, situated on the ocean near Salem. As we approached it, we found out that its name was Hawthorne Inn. This immediately brought to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne, his
Scarlet Letter,
and the topic of witchcraft. As we were having lunch, Christina recounted for Marilyn the story of her past-life memory involving Salem witch trials. Marilyn was astounded because she had relived a similar episode of her own in one of her meditations in the Siddha Yoga ashram.

Because we were only several miles from Salem, it suddenly seemed very appropriate to visit this town between lunch and our departure for California. As we were entering Salem, Christina asked Marilyn if there was a pond in Salem. Marilyn, who had spent her entire childhood in Salem, decisively denied it. But then she suddenly took a wrong turn, which was surprising because she knew the town well. This unplanned detour unexpectedly brought us to a pond on the shore of the ocean. It seemed like it was originally a bay that was separated from the body of water by an old stone dam.

Christina got out of the car, as if in a haze. She was looking around and seemed disappointed. “I don’t see any birch trees,” she said and started walking around the pond. “Where are you going?” we asked her. “There have to be some here,” she said and continued walking. We parked the car and followed her. Finally, on the other side of the pond, Christina discovered a birch tree; its trunk was broken, and its crown was submerged in water. “You see, they were here,” she said. “This must be the last one.”

We returned to the car and decided to visit the courthouse where the trials had been held. On the way there, Christina told Marilyn that she recognized in the two judges in her past-life experience her ex-husband and father in her present life. “But there was only one judge at the trial,” Marilyn objected.
“There were two judges!”
Christina said assertively. When we came to the courthouse, we found out it was closed. But by the front door was a large tablet, describing the trials. It confirmed Christina’s experience that there were two judges involved in the Salem trials.

Before we returned to the car, I bought in a gift shop a little illustrated booklet on Salem that included the story of the witchcraft trials. As Marilyn was driving us to the airport, I was reading aloud selected passages from this booklet. We found out that the girls who were accused of witchcraft had spent much time with the slave servant Tituba, who was accused of being the link to the devil. Tituba was an Indian from an Arawak village in South America, where she was captured as a child, taken to Barbados as a captive, and sold into slavery. We concluded that Tituba was probably teaching them some shamanic techniques that were misunderstood and misinterpreted by ignorant neighbors as work of the devil.

The most interesting information I found in the guidebook was that Old Salem, where many of the historical events had happened, was currently called Danvers. That came as a shock to us. Danvers was the place where in 1978 we held a large conference of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA). It was a conference in which we presented for the first time our concept of “spiritual emergency,” implying that many episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness that mainstream psychiatrists diagnose as psychoses and often treat with drastic methods, such as insulin coma and electroshock, are actually psychospiritual crises.

In our lecture in Danvers, we suggested that properly understood and supported, these crises of spiritual opening can actually be healing, transformative, and even evolutionary. We gave the talk in a hall from which one could see, on the other side of the valley, an old-time psychiatric hospital that had one of the worst reputations in the country. They were still using shock methods, which bore great similarity to the practices of the Inquisition and similar witch hunts. We were stunned by this incredible synchronicity. Of all the possible locations, we presented our modern plea for a radical change of attitude toward non-ordinary states of consciousness in a place that, unbeknownst to Christina, was the site of her past-life memory. And her suffering and death in this karmic episode were caused by misunderstanding and misinterpretation of non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Immersed in this drama, we arrived at the airport at the last minute. We ran to the gate, and the door of the airplane closed behind us as soon as we were inside. We sank into our seats, fastened the seatbelts, and started to discuss and process the extraordinary events of the day. As soon as we were in the air, the stewardess from the first class appeared in the economy class, carrying a tray with glasses of white and red wine.

I could not believe my eyes. She had very dark skin, and all around her head was a large corona of long unkempt dreadlocks sticking in all directions. I could not believe that she had passed the scrutiny of her superiors, who are usually meticulous about their personnel’s appearance. “Here is Tituba, your Barbados maid,” I jokingly said to Christina. The hostess approached us and gave Christina a very long and meaningful look. “We have some wine left over from the first class,” she said. “Would you like some?” And pausing a little, she added with a very serious tone in her voice, as if her question was one of great importance: “Would you like
white
or red?”

We each took a glass of wine and were pondering on yet another strange synchronicity. The stewardess appeared again, this time carrying a tray with carnations. She smiled at us and asked: “We have also some flowers left. Would you like some?” And, presenting the tray to Christina, she asked with the same serious tone of voice: “Would you like
a red
one, or a
white
one?” Christina hesitated for a while and then she chose the white one. Later, she told me that, in the context of everything that had happened that day, this simple choice seemed to be loaded with great karmic significance. Choosing the white carnation seemed like a successful closure of this dramatic episode of her life.

The existence of past-life experiences with all their remarkable characteristics is an unquestionable fact that can be verified by any serious researcher who is sufficiently open-minded and interested to check the evidence. It is also clear that there is no plausible explanation for these phenomena within the conceptual framework of mainstream psychiatry and psychology. While all these impressive facts do not necessarily constitute a definitive “proof” that we survive death and reincarnate as the same separate unit of consciousness, or the same individual soul, they represent a formidable conceptual challenge for traditional science, and they have a paradigm-breaking potential. Having observed hundreds of past-life experiences and experienced many of them myself, I have to agree with Chris Bache that “the evidence in this area is so rich and extraordinary that scientists who do not think the problem of reincarnation deserves serious study are either uninformed or boneheaded” (Bache 1988).