When the Impossible Happens

 Last month, Daz reviewed a book by Stanislav Grof, When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-Ordinary Reality. I went over to Amazon, read the free excerpt of the book, bought it and have been reading it on the treadmill at the gym.

Part I is about synchronicity and what’s particularly intriguing about this part – and the entire book – is that Grof – like Carl Jung, like Bernard Beitman, is a psychiatrist. A shrink. A physician who studies the human psyche. Whenever shrinks write about synchronicity, I feel that the entire concept is somehow bolstered. These people, after all, are the ones who help to define the medical paradigm about what’s normal – and what isn’t.

When Grof worked at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, his personal friend, mythologist and author Joseph Campbell, was a speaker at one of the institute’s many workshops. On one particular occasion, Campbell was talking about his favorite subject – Carl Jung’s contributions to the understanding of mythology and psychology. He made a brief reference to synchronicity and one of the participants, who wasn’t familiar with the term, interrupted and asked Campbell to explain what synchronicity was.

As Grof writes,  Campbell gave a practical example. But instead of retelling Jung’s scarab story he gave an example from his own life  – about a preying mantis that appeared outside his 14^th story New York apartment while he was writing about African Bushmen. Campbell wrote that the creature’s face looked like that of a Bushman. This is the first time I have run across this synchro told by someone who actually heard Campbell tell it.

The book is filled with stories like this – first-hand accounts of Grof’s friendships with people like Campbell, Michael Harner (the most famous western shaman) and British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Campbell officiated at Grof’s wedding in Iceland, an event reconstructed from an ancient Viking wedding ritual that hadn’t been performed in Iceland since the Christians had arrived – i.e. , deeply archetypal and filled with synchros.

“The Icelandic adventure was a fascinating experience of archetypal energies breaking into everyday life and creating astonishing synchronicities,” Grof wrote. “However, it taught me an important lesson. I learned not to trust unconditionally the seductive power of such experiences and the enchantment and ego inflation that they engender. The ecstatic feelings associated with emergence of archetypal forces do not guarantee a positive outcome.”

That marriage, in fact, didn’t work out.  We’ve probably all had synchros like this – where all the signs look so promising, but whatever it is doesn’t work out the way we thought it would.

Grof also has a fascinating story about working as a special consultant on the science fiction film Brainstorm, starring Natalie Woods and Christopher Walken.  I remember seeing it in 1983.  The movie is about a pair of scientists who develop a helmet that can record and transmit human experiences. When the scientist played by Louise Fletcher suffers a heart attack and knows she’s dying, she dons the helmet so that her death experience will be recorded. 

Grof and his wife at the time, Christina, spent time on the set with Natalie and her husband, Robert Wagner, and talked about the yacht that Natalie and her husband owned.  It turned out that they knew many of the friends of Christina’s stepfather, who was also a sailor. The discussion of the yacht, Grof writes, “in retrospect, seems uncanny and foreboding in view of the tragic events that followed.” Not long afterward, Natalie, her husband, and Christopher Walken were sailing on the yacht, apparently had too much to drink, and at one point Natalie left them alone, boarded a dingy and tries to reach nearby Catalina Island. She never made it.

The book is an intriguing journey through synchronicity, memories of prenatal life, past lives, the paranormal, shamanism, encounters, and tapping into the collective unconscious. It’s like an old friend with whom you sit at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and telling tales.