When the Impossible Happens (44 page)

Eva found the Sufi headquarters, and when she announced her arrival, she was given the time for the audience with the sheik. The long-awaited time came and she knocked on the door of the sheik’s quarters. She was astounded when she realized that Sheik Dede, who answered the door, was the old man from the bus, whose striking presence had captivated her for several hours on her journey to Konya. It was an extraordinary coincidence that the sheik happened to travel on the same bus with Eva because nobody in the order knew the exact time of her arrival. The next surprise came when the sheik told her that he had been waiting for her for many years. He told her that he had known she would come long before her inner voice had brought her to the Sufi teacher in Toronto. Eva has not shared with us the details of her visit with the sheik and the exact content of their interactions because these were supposed to remain secret. At the end of Eva’s stay in Konya, the sheik taught her Sufi spiritual exercises, which, after her return to Canada, she used very successfully with her patients.

In the early 1970s, I had another experience that profoundly changed my attitude toward the phenomenon of “hearing voices,” which according to my psychiatric training was a symptom of serious mental illness. I was conducting a workshop at the Westerbeck Ranch in Sonoma, California, a beautiful human potential center, one of many such centers inspired by the Esalen Institute. During the lunch break, Pat Westerbeck, the owner of the ranch and our host, introduced me to Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford, two psychologists from New York City who happened to be visiting her at the time. Helen was a clinical and research psychologist and tenured associate professor of medical psychology at Columbia University in New York City. Bill was a tenured professor of medical psychology at the medical center where they both worked and the head of Helen’s department.

During our joint lunch, Helen shared with me her fascinating story. At a time of great emotional stress and interpersonal tensions between her and Bill, she started experiencing highly symbolic dreams and images and what she referred to as “the Voice.” It seemed to be giving her a rapid inner dictation, not in words but by some form of telepathic transmission. To Helen’s great surprise and consternation, the Voice introduced himself as Jesus. Helen, who was Jewish, an atheistic scientist, psychologist, and educator working in a highly prestigious academic setting, was initially horrified, suspecting like Eva that this was the onset of a psychotic break. But then she noticed that the Voice was accurately quoting long passages from the Bible, which she had not read, and was making very specific linguistic references to errors that had been made in various translations of these passages. And she was also able to verify the accuracy of this information.

At Bill’s suggestion and encouragement, Helen started recording all the communications in her notebook, jotting them down in shorthand; the next day she read her notes to Bill, and he typed them. As she pointed out to me, the writing was never automatic; she could interrupt it at any time and pick it up again later. As she decided to embark on this giant project, Helen surprised herself by beginning her writing with the sentence: “This is a course in miracles.” She felt that this was a special assignment that she had “somewhere, sometime, somehow, agreed to complete.”

After lunch, Helen showed me the result of this collaborative venture with Bill, a thick manuscript entitled A
Course in Miracles.
She shared with me a major dilemma she was experiencing: she felt a strong urge to publish her manuscript and share it with the public. However, she was afraid that she would be considered crazy and that it would destroy her academic reputation. After lunch, she asked me if I would give her an hour with the participants of my group and let her share her story with them. “People who come to your workshops are more open-minded than most, and I would like to give it a try. It would be an important test for me,” she explained her request.

I wholeheartedly agreed, and the response of the group (as well as my own) was so enthusiastic and encouraging that it seemed to tip the balance of Helen’s decision-making process, and she left the ranch determined to take a chance and come out of the closet with her remarkable opus. When
A Course in Miracles
was published, it quickly became a bestseller and a sensation not only among transpersonal psychologists, but also for the general public. It was soon followed by the
Workbook for Students,
a volume consisting of 365 lessons, each offering an exercise for one day of the year, and the
Manual for Teachers.
This three-volume set has now been translated into more than thirty languages and sold a million and a half copies.

PSYCHIATRIC HERESY THAT BROUGHT FRUIT: The Story of Milada

I have described earlier, in the Preface and in the introduction to the story of Karen, our concept of “spiritual emergency.” This new approach to spontaneous episodes of holotropic states of consciousness replaces indiscriminate pharmacological suppression of symptoms with psychological support and encouragement to “go through the process.” This therapeutic strategy does not have to be limited to conditions with strong spiritual emphasis. We have been able to extend it to many individuals whose non-ordinary experiences did not include manifest spiritual elements.

The extreme heresy I have committed in the course of my professional career took this strategy even a step further. During my work at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, I used in several patients with the diagnosis of psychosis a strategy diametrically opposite to the conventional suppressive therapy with tranquilizers. I employed a series of LSD sessions to activate and deepen the process, utilize its intrinsic healing potential, and bring it to a positive resolution. An example of this approach is the following story of Milada.

Milada was a thirty-eight-year-old psychologist who for many years before starting LSD treatment had suffered from a complicated neurotic disorder, involving a variety of obsessive-compulsive, organ-neurotic, and hysterical conversion symptoms. She had started long-term psychoanalytic therapy with the nestor of Czech psychoanalysis, seeing him three times a week for fifty-five minutes at a time. In the fifth month of her analysis, she had to be hospitalized because she developed acute psychotic symptoms.

An important part of her clinical symptomatology was an erotomanic delusional system. Milada fell deeply in love with the chief of her department and felt irresistible affection and sexual attraction toward him. She was convinced that this was not a one-sided affair and that he shared her passion. According to her, this strong erotic and spiritual communion existing between them could not be expressed overtly and had to be experienced intrapsychically, beyond the facade of their rather formal social interaction. She felt that her boss, who was married and had children, could not express his feelings openly, at least initially.

Several weeks later, she started hallucinating the voice of her imaginary lover. In these hallucinations, she heard him describe in detail his passionate feelings for her, promise a beautiful shared life in the future, and give her advice and even specific suggestions. During the evening and night hours, Milada experienced powerful sexual sensations, which she interpreted as intercourse at a distance, magically performed by her secret lover. Although in actual sexual situations with her own husband she had never been able to reach an orgasm, during these episodes she experienced orgiastic feelings of cosmic proportions.

Gradually, the nature of the communications changed. Her boss now conveyed to her that divorces had been arranged for both of them and that they now would be able to live together. Milada’s hospitalization became unavoidable when she started acting under the influence of her delusions and hallucinations. One day in the morning, she left her husband and made an attempt to move into her employer’s apartment with her children and several suitcases. She actually got into a fierce physical fight with her boss’s wife, who refused to let her in. After many months of unsuccessful treatment with a variety of tranquilizers and antidepressants, as well as individual and group psychotherapy, she began an experimental program of therapy with serial LSD sessions.

After twelve LSD sessions with medium dosages, her psychotic symptoms completely disappeared, and Milada developed full insight into her irrational behavior in the past. She now interpreted her erotomanic delusion concerning her boss as transference of her feelings for her father, who was very cold and whom she never had been able to reach. In a series of subsequent sessions, she worked on a variety of complicated neurotic and psychosomatic problems.

While reliving various traumatic memories from different periods of her life, she was able to trace many of her present problems to their emotional sources in her unhappy infancy and childhood. She also spent much time on her complicated marital situation. Her husband was insensitive, cruel, and emotionally, as well as physically, abusive. He was an ardent member of the Communist Party, completely immersed in the pursuit of his political career, and provided no emotional support for her. In addition, both of their children were showing signs of serious emotional disturbances that required professional assistance.

Then the LSD sessions moved into the perinatal realm, and Milada was reliving various aspects of her difficult biological birth. She experienced a rich spectrum of experiences characteristic of the death-rebirth process. The emotions and physical sensations associated with the reliving of her difficult birth, during which her twin brother had died, were so abysmal that she referred to these sessions as a “psychological Hiroshima.” When she finally completed the birth process and experienced the final ego death, I expected a marked improvement, as was the case in most neurotic patients.

However, to my great surprise I witnessed instead a sudden and complete reappearance of the original psychotic symptomatology, which Milada had not shown for many months. The only difference was that this time I replaced her boss in the role of the main target of all erotomanic fantasies and experiences. In the process of LSD psychotherapy, Milada had developed a transference psychosis. She now believed that she was under my hypnotic influence and felt in constant rapport with me, in the LSD sessions, as well as during the free intervals between them. She experienced a mutual exchange of thoughts and even verbal communication between us.

It was interesting that in some of these hallucinated interviews we “continued psychotherapy.” At one point, I spent a week in Amsterdam, Holland, attending a conference on LSD psychotherapy. During that time, Milada, who was hospitalized in the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, continued having her imagined psychotherapeutic sessions with me. We “discussed” various aspects of her life, and she carried out activities suggested by my illusory voice. This involved several hours of bathing and physical training every day and practicing feminine crafts, such as knitting and embroidery.

Eventually, I told her in these hallucinated conversations that I had decided to drop the therapeutic game and to become her lover and husband. I encouraged her not to address me as “Dr. Grof,” but as “Stanya” (an affectionate form of my first name), and to employ the informal grammatical version of the second person used among relatives, close friends, and lovers. In Czech, as in many other languages, the difference between an intimate and more formal relationship finds its expression in the language used (as in the French to versus vous, German du versus Sie, or Spanish to versus Usted).

I also gave Milada the permission to use my last name instead of her husband’s name. I repeatedly assured her of my love, told her that her divorce had already been arranged, and asked her to move with her children into my apartment. Among other things, Milada was now referring to “hypnogamic sessions” that she was getting from me in the evening and night hours. She interpreted the sexual sensations and hallucinations of intercourse she had at this time as arranged lessons in enjoying sex that I had decided to give her in order to accelerate her therapy. From the context of her LSD sessions, it became clear that, on the deepest level, Milada’s wishful magical thinking was a transference phenomenon reflecting her early symbiotic relationship with her mother.

At one point, Milada spent many hours a day assuming bizarre postures, sometimes lying on the bed, other times standing. Once the nurses told me that they found her standing for a long time on the tips of her toes with her arms stretched forward and clasped together. When they asked her what she was doing, she brushed them away, saying: “Leave me alone, I am embracing him (meaning me).” Inevitably, I became a target of the nurses’ jokes; they teased me by pointing out that Milada had my size down and was holding her arms at just the right distance from the floor.

Externally, Milada’s postures resembled those I used to see in the chronic ward in catatonic schizophrenics, who manifested the symptom called “waxy flexibility”
(flexibilitas cerea).
Like Milada, they maintained for long periods of time strange and often bizarre postures. However, Milada’s “catatonia” differed significantly from the stupor of schizophrenic patients in one significant way: it was always possible to reach her verbally and bring her out of these positions just by addressing her and engaging her in interaction. She would then resume a normal posture and be able to carry on a reasonable conversation.

She also understood what she was doing and offered for it a fascinating explanation. She shared with us that, at this time, her emotional and psychosomatic condition was critically dependent on the position of her body. In some postures, she experienced ecstatic bliss, oceanic feelings, and a sense of cosmic unity. In others, she felt deep depression, nausea, and metaphysical anxiety. She felt that this repeated the situation in her prenatal life, when she had to compete with her twin brother for their mother’s womb.

On the basis of previous experiences with other clients, I continued with regular weekly administrations of LSD, despite Milada’s persisting psychotic symptoms. These sessions consisted almost entirely of negative experiences of a transpersonal nature. There was an important emphasis on reliving unpleasant intrauterine memories, which she related to the emotional stresses and illnesses of her mother during pregnancy, various embryonal crises, and the mechanical discomfort of having to share the uterus with her twin brother. This was accompanied by challenging karmic sequences and archetypal experiences of a demonic nature.