When the Impossible Happens (41 page)

By the middle of the week, Joseph usually got tired of the Esalen menu, which he called “rabbit food,” and was ready for a good steak and Glenlivet whiskey, which he loved. Christina and I invited him regularly to our house for a homemade dinner, catering to his culinary preferences. Over the years, we had many fascinating discussions during which I shared with him observations of various obscure archetypal experiences of participants in our Holotropic Breathwork workshops. In most instances, Joseph had no difficulties identifying various esoteric mythological themes and symbolism that I was not able to recognize and understand.

During one of these discussions, I remembered the above episode from Otto’s session and shared it with him. “How fascinating,” said Joseph without any hesitation. “It was clearly the Cosmic Mother Night of Death, the Devouring Mother Goddess of the Malekulans in New Guinea.” He then continued to tell me that this deity had the form of a frightening female figure with distinct pig features. According to the Malekulan tradition, she sat at the entrance into the underworld and guarded an intricate sacred labyrinthine design. The Malekulans believed they would encounter this deity during the journey of the Dead.

The Malekulans had an elaborate system of rituals that involved breeding and sacrificing pigs. This complex ritual activity was aimed at overcoming the dependency on their human mothers and eventually on the Devouring Mother Goddess. The Malekulans spent during their lifetime an enormous amount of time practicing the art of labyrinth drawing because its mastery was considered essential for a successful journey to the Beyond. The Pig Goddess would not grant the permission to enter the Beyond to anybody who was not able to perfectly reproduce the requested design. Joseph, with his astonishing lexical knowledge of mythology, was thus able to solve this challenging puzzle, which I had encountered during my research in Prague.

The remaining question, which even Joseph was not able to answer, was why this particular mythological motif was so intimately connected with Otto’s tedious emotional symptoms and why Otto had to encounter this Malekulan deity as part of his therapy. However, in the most general sense, the task of mastering problems associated with the posthumous journey of the soul certainly made good sense for somebody whose main symptom was thanatophobia, pathological fear of death.

INTERVIEW WITH THE DEVIL: The Story of Flora

I have already mentioned that experiences of holotropic states of consciousness can mediate access to normally hidden numinous dimensions of reality in the form of archetypal divine beings, celestial realms, and paradisean visions. However, they also frequently reveal the shadow side of the universe, manifesting as dark energies or evil beings of extraordinary power and as frightening chthonic and hellish realms.

Experiences of encounters with various wrathful deities and demonic forces are very common in individuals who have taken psychedelics, participate in sessions of Holotropic Breathwork, or are undergoing spiritual emergency. Careful examination shows that evil entities manifesting in these states are closely connected with extremely difficult and painful traumatic experiences in the present or past life of the individual, such as anoxia at birth or pre natal distress, near drowning, life-threatening events, or physical and sexual abuse. On the collective level, evil archetypal beings and motifs seem to be the moving forces behind wars, bloody revolutions, genocide, and other forms of tragedies and atrocities.

The amount of pain that human beings have inflicted on each other and experienced in the course of their history is truly overwhelming. However, the shadow side of existence is not limited to human society; it is inextricably woven into the fabric of life in general. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Dutch microbiologist and the inventor of the microscope, summed it up in one sentence: “Life lives on life—it is cruel, but it is God’s will.” Living organisms can survive only at the expense of other living organisms. The English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson called nature “red in tooth and claw.” The ability to embrace the totality of existence with full awareness and acceptance of the nature and depth of its dark side is one of the most difficult challenges of the spiritual journey.

In many instances, inner experiences of encounter with evil are accompanied by various manifestations that can be perceived by external observers. They involve strange grimacing, evil expression in the eyes, spastic contractions of various parts of the body, change of voice, projectile vomiting, and many others. In a therapeutic context, such episodes can have remarkable healing and transformative effect. I have had many encounters with various forms and degrees of demonic phenomena in the course of my professional life, but none of them was as dramatic and extreme as my experience with Flora, a patient I treated with psychedelic therapy at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore in the late 1960s.

For better understanding of what happened, I have to say a few words about the larger context of this extraordinary episode. Our research center was a brand-new, four-story building with state-of-the-art laboratories and treatment rooms, situated on the premises of Spring Grove State Hospital. However, it did not have any hospital beds, and the patients participating in our research were housed in the wards of the state hospital. The relationship between the staffs of the two institutions was distant and somewhat uneasy because the hospital personnel looked at us as more fortunate cousins. It came, therefore, as a surprise when Dr. Charles Savage, director of clinical services, and I were one day invited to a staff meeting at the Spring Grove State Hospital.

As the staff meeting unfolded, we began to understand how this had come about. One of the Spring Grove psychiatrists was presenting the case of Flora, a twenty-eight-year-old single patient who had been hospitalized for more than ten months in a locked ward. All available therapy, including tranquilizers, antidepressants, psychotherapy, and occupational therapy, had been tried but failed. Flora was facing transfer to the chronic ward, which meant spending the rest of her life among chronic psychotics and geriatric patients.

Flora had one of the most complicated and difficult combinations of symptoms and problems I have ever encountered in my psychiatric practice. When she was sixteen years old, she was a member of a gang that conducted an armed robbery and killed a night watchman. As driver of the getaway car, Flora spent four years in the penitentiary and was then placed on parole for the rest of her sentence. During the stormy years that followed, she became an alcoholic and multiple-drug addict. She was addicted to heroin and used high doses of psychostimulants and barbiturates. Her severe depressions were associated with violent suicidal tendencies; she frequently had impulses to drive her car over a cliff or collide head-on with another automobile.

She also suffered from hysterical vomiting, which often occurred in situations where she became emotionally excited. Probably the most agonizing of her complaints was a painful facial cramp,
tic douloureux,
for which a Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon had suggested a brain operation consisting of severing intracranially her trigeminal nerve. Flora was a lesbian and had never had heterosexual intercourse in her life. She had a severe psychological conflict and guilt about her sexual orientation and on occasion contemplated suicide, “to end it all.” To further complicate the situation, she was court-committed because she had severely wounded her girlfriend and roommate while trying to clean a gun under the influence of heroin.

At the end of the Spring Grove case conference, Flora’s attending psychiatrist asked Dr. Savage and me if we would accept her into our program of LSD psychotherapy. We found this to be an extremely difficult decision, not only because of the seriousness and complexity of her psychiatric problems, but also because of the national hysteria in regard to LSD that raged in the country at the time. In addition, our protocol dictated by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) limited the number of LSD sessions we could ad minister to our patients to three. And this was naturally a great disadvantage, particularly in such a difficult case.

Flora already had a criminal record, access to weapons, violent fantasies and impulses, and severe suicidal tendencies. We were well aware that the atmosphere regarding psychedelics was such that if we gave her LSD, whatever would happen after that point would automatically be blamed on the drug and our treatment, without regard to her past history. On the other hand, everything else had been tried without success, and Flora was facing a lifetime in a chronic ward. After some deliberation, we decided to take a chance and accept her into the LSD program, feeling that her desperate situation justified the risk.

Flora’s first two high-dose LSD sessions were not much different from many others I had run in the past. She had to confront a number of situations from her stormy childhood, including alcoholism, violence, and incest in her family of origin. Her birth was very difficult, and she repeatedly relived sequences of her struggle in the birth canal. She was able to connect her violent suicidal tendencies and painful facial cramps to certain aspects of the birth trauma, and to discharge large amounts of intense emotions and physical tensions. In spite of it, the therapeutic gains of all these efforts seemed to be minimal.

In her third LSD session, nothing extraordinary happened during the first two hours; her experiences were similar to those of the previous two sessions. And then the session suddenly took an unexpected turn. Flora started to cry and complained that the painful cramps in her face were becoming unbearable. Before my eyes, the facial spasms were grotesquely accentuated, and her face froze into what can best be described as a mask of evil.

She started talking in a deep, male voice, and everything about her was so different that I could not see much similarity between her present appearance and her former looks. Her eyes had an expression of indescribable malice reminiscent of the last scene of the movie
Rosemary’s Baby,
which showed a close-up of the infant conceived by the devil. Her hands, which were now spastic and looked like claws, completed the picture. Then the energy that took control over her body and voice assumed a personified form and introduced itself as the Devil.

“He” turned directly to me, ordering me to stay away from Flora and give up any attempts to help her. He asserted that she belonged to him and threatened that he would punish anybody who would dare to invade his territory. What followed was a barrage of explicit blackmail, a series of intimidations describing what would happen to me, my colleagues, and to our program if I would not obey. It is difficult to describe the uncanny atmosphere that this scene evoked; one could actually feel the tangible presence of evil in the room.

The power of the blackmail was further increased by the fact that it involved certain concrete information to which the patient in her everyday life could not possibly have access. Some of it involved me personally, but much of it referred to my Spring Grove colleagues. When I later shared with them what transpired, they were astonished, because there was no conventional way through which I or the patient could have obtained such knowledge of those specific aspects of their private lives.

Although I had occasionally seen various demonic manifestations in LSD sessions before, they had never been so extreme, realistic, and convincing. I found myself under considerable emotional stress and experienced fear that had metaphysical dimensions. I was struggling, on the one hand, with my anxiety and, on the other, with a tendency to enter into an active psychic combat with the evil presence. I found myself thinking fast, trying to choose the best strategy for the situation. At one point, I caught myself seriously considering that we should have a crucifix in our therapeutic armamentarium. My rationalization for this idea was that what we were witnessing was manifestation of a Jungian archetype and that in this situation the cross would be the appropriate archetypal remedy.

It soon became clear to me that my emotions, whether it was fear or aggression, were making it more believable to me that I was dealing with a powerful metaphysical entity. I could not help thinking of scenes from an episode of
Star Trek.
The episode featured an alien intruder on starship Enterprise that fed on the crew’s emotions. The creature was finally overcome when the starship physician, Dr. McCoy, administered tranquilizers to the entire crew. I realized that it was essential for me to remain calm and centered, no matter what I was witnessing.

I decided to put myself into a meditative mood and visualize a capsule of white light enveloping both of us. One thing I remembered from spiritual literature about evil entities was that they do not like light. While meditating on light, I held Flora’s cramped hand, focused on her disfigured face, and tried to imagine her in the form in which I had known her before. The situation lasted over two hours of clock-time; in terms of subjective time-sense these were the longest two hours I have ever experienced outside of my own psychedelic sessions.

After this time, Flora’s hands relaxed, and her face returned to its usual form. These changes were as abrupt as the onset of this peculiar condition. I soon discovered that she did not remember anything that had happened during the preceding two hours. Later, in her write-up, she described the first hours of the session and continued with the period following the “possession state.” I seriously questioned if I should discuss with her the events that had occurred during the time covered by her amnesia, and decided against it. She was radiant and felt wonderful. There did not seem to be any reason to intro duce such a macabre theme into her conscious mind.

To my great surprise, this session resulted in an astonishing therapeutic breakthrough. Flora lost her suicidal tendencies and developed a new appreciation for life. She gave up alcohol, heroin, and barbiturates and started zealously attending the meetings of a small religious group in Catonsville. For most of the time she did not have any facial cramps; the energy underlying them seemed to have exhausted itself in the “mask of evil” that she had maintained for two hours. This made it possible to cancel the neurosurgery suggested by the Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon. The occasional recurrence of the pain was of negligible intensity and did not even require medication.