When the Impossible Happens (12 page)

DANCE OF THE WHITE SWAN: Underworld Journey in the Salish Spirit Canoe

Isolated synchronicities are extremely frequent in the lives of people experiencing spontaneous or induced holotropic states of consciousness; however, it is not uncommon for them to appear in impressive series or clusters. Over the years, we have observed and personally experienced many aggregate synchronicities in connection with psychedelic therapy, Holotropic Breathwork sessions, and episodes of psychospiritual crises. The events described in this story happened during one of our monthlong seminars at Esalen, at a time when Christina was experiencing her spiritual emergency.

Christina’s spontaneous experiences were very rich and combined elements from various levels of the personal and collective unconscious. In some of them, she regressed to various painful memories from her childhood and infancy; others involved reliving of the trauma of her biological birth. She also encountered powerful experiential sequences that appeared to be memories of her past lives in Russia, Germany, and seventeenth-century North America. On occasion, she also had visions of various archetypal figures and animals. Particularly significant among them were peacocks and white swans, the birds associated with Siddha Yoga and with Christina’s spiritual teacher, Swami Muktananda. One day during the mentioned monthlong seminar, Christina had particularly intense and significant visions involving a white swan.

Our guest faculty for the following day was Michael Harner, a well-known anthropologist and dear friend. Michael belonged to a group often referred to as “visionary anthropologists.” In contrast to traditional mainstream anthropologists, Michael and his colleagues, such as Barbara Meyerhoff, Peter Furst, Dick Katz, Christian Raetsch, and Carlos Castaneda, did not do their anthropological fieldwork as detached academic observers. They actively participated in the ceremonies of the cultures they studied, whether these involved mind-altering substances, such as peyote, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and datura, or all-night trance dance and other nonpharmacological “technologies of the sacred.”

Michael’s discovery of the way of the shamans and their incredible inner world work began in 1960, when the American Museum of Natural History invited him to make a yearlong expedition to the Peruvian Amazon to study the culture of the Conibo Indians of the Ucayali River region. His informants told him that if he really wished to learn, he had to take the shaman’s sacred drink. Following their advice, he ingested ayahuasca, a brew containing a decoction of the jungle liana
Banisteriopsis caapi
and the cawa plant, which the Indians called “soul vine” or “little death.” He had an indescribable visionary journey through ordinarily invisible dimensions of existence, during which he experienced his own death and obtained extraordinary insights and revelations about the nature of reality.

When he later found that a Conibo elder, a master shaman, was quite familiar with everything he himself had seen and that his ayahuasca experience also paralleled certain passages from the book of Revelation, Michael became convinced that there was indeed a hidden world to be explored. He decided to learn everything that he could about shamanism. Three years later, Michael returned to South America to do field work with the Jivaro, an Ecuadorian tribe that Michael had lived with and studied in 1956 and 1957. Here he experienced another important initiatory experience, which was basic to his discovery of the way of the shaman. Akachu, a famous Jivaro shaman, and his son-in-law took him to a sacred waterfall deep in the Amazonian jungle and gave him a drink of maikua, juice of a Brugmansia species of Datura, a plant with powerful psychoactive properties.

As a result of these and other experiences, Michael—an anthropologist with good academic credentials—became an accomplished practitioner and teacher of shamanism. He also started with his wife, Sandra, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, an institution dedicated to teaching shamanic methods to interested students and to offering shamanic workshops for the public. Michael had written a book entitled
The Way of the Shaman,
in which he gathered together various methods of shamanic work from all over the world and adapted them for use in experiential workshops and in shamanic training of Westerners.

During our Esalen monthlong workshop, Michael led us in a healing journey, using the method of the spirit canoe practiced by the Salish Indian tribe in the American Northwest. He began the session by beating his drum and invited participants to move and dance until they felt identification with a specific animal. It did not take long, and people were crouching, crawling on all fours, and jumping around, simulating all kinds of climbing, digging, clawing, swimming, and flying movements. The main room in Esalen’s Big House was filled with various recognizable and unrecognizable voices of animals and birds. When everybody made the connection with a specific animal, Michael asked the group members to sit down on the floor in a spindlelike formation, creating an imaginary “spirit canoe.” He then asked if there was a person who needed healing, and Christina volunteered. Michael stepped into the “boat” holding his drum, beckoned Christina to join him, and instructed her to lie down.

With the scene for the healing voyage all set, Michael asked us to imagine that we were an animal crew undertaking a journey into the underworld to retrieve Christina’s spirit animal. The specific target that Michael chose for this imaginary expedition was the system of interconnected underground caverns filled with hot water that is believed to stretch under much of California. The entry into it was easy to find because this system feeds the Esalen hot springs. As the captain of this spirit boat, Michael explained, he would indicate the pace of the paddling by the beat of his drum. During the journey, he would look for spirit animals. When a particular power animal appeared three times, this would be the sign that he found the one he was looking for. At that point, he would seize it and would signal to the crew of the boat by rapid beat of the drum that it was time for a hasty return.

We had done the Salish spirit canoe with Michael several times before. The first time we did it, we did not go into it with great expectations. The whole thing sounded like innocent fun—a great idea for children’s play, but a somewhat silly activity for mature adults. But the very first thing that happened made us change our mind. In that group was a young woman who behaved in a way that had antagonized the entire group. She was very unhappy about it because the same thing had happened earlier in her life in just about every group she had ever been part of, and she decided to volunteer for a healing journey.

As the imaginary boat was traveling through the “underworld,” she had a very violent reaction, just at the moment when Michael identified and seized her spirit animal. She suddenly sat up and, as Michael was giving the signal for return by rapid beats of his drum, she went through several spastic episodes of projectile vomiting. As she was throwing up, she lifted the front part of her skirt, trying to contain what was coming out, and completely filled it with her vomit. This episode, lasting not more than twenty-five minutes, had a profound effect on her personality. The change in her behavior was so dramatic that before the month ended, she became one of the most loved and popular people in the group. This episode and similar ones later on made us approach this process with respect.

Michael began drumming, and the journey into the underworld started. We all paddled and made sounds of the animals with which we had identified. Christina went into intense convulsions that were shaking her entire body. This, in and of itself, was not unusual because she was in the middle of Kundalini awakening, during which experiences of powerful energy tremors are very common. After about ten minutes, Michael greatly accelerated the rhythm of his drumming, letting us know that he had succeeded in finding Christina’s spirit animal. Everybody began paddling in a fast rhythm, imagining rapid return to the Middle World.

Michael stopped drumming, indicating that the journey had ended. He put down the drum, pressed his mouth on Christina’s sternum, and blew with all the force he could muster, making a loud sound. He then whispered into her ear: “Your spirit animal is a white swan.” Following this, he asked her to perform in front of the group a dance, expressing her swan energy. It is important to mention that Michael had no prior knowledge of the content of Christina’s inner process and of the fact that this bird had figured importantly in her life. He also had no idea that the swan had been for her a very important personal symbol.

The story continued the next morning, when Christina and I walked to our mailbox on Highway 1 to get our daily mail. Christina received a letter from a person who had attended a workshop we had given several months earlier. Inside was a photograph of Christina’s spiritual teacher, Swami Muktananda, which this person thought she might like to have. It showed him sitting with a mischievous expression on a garden swing, near a large flowerpot shaped like a white swan. The index finger of his left hand was pointing at the swan; the tips of his right thumb and index finger were joined, forming the universal sign indicating bull’s eye hit and excitement about what had happened.

Although there were no causal connections between Christina’s inner experiences, Michael’s choice of the white swan as her power animal, and Muktananda’s photograph, they clearly formed a meaningful psychological pattern, meeting the criteria for synchronicity, or “acausal connecting principle,” as defined by C.G. Jung.

THE MAKING OF RAINSTORM: Our Hollywood Adventure

In 1981, Christina and I were approached by Doug Trumbull, a special-effects wizard, who cooperated with Stanley Kubrick on
2001: A Space Odyssey
and created the special effects for the movies
The Andromeda Strain, Silent Running, Blade Runner,
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Doug was about to direct a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer science fiction movie,
Brainstorm.
The movie’s fascinating plot featured a duo of scientists, computer genius Michael Brace and brilliant brain researcher Lillian Reynolds, who jointly developed a helmet that could record and transmit human experiences.

This device made it possible to tap into the psyche of other people and to record and play back what they saw, felt, and thought. While Michael Brace used the invention to heal his relationship with his estranged wife, Karen, and become once again close to her, other people in the research complex tried to use it for more questionable purposes, exploiting its sexual, commercial, and military potential. The plot took an interesting twist when the hardworking, chain-smoking, and coffee-drinking Lillian experienced a heart attack while working late at night in the laboratory. A curious scientist to the very end, she decided to record the event and managed to put on the helmet and start the machine shortly before her death.

The rest of the plot revolved around the fact that the machine recorded a death experience. Doug’s intention was to portray this experience in a way that would use not only the best special effects available at the time, but also scientific information about death and dying amassed by modern consciousness research. He had heard that we had created a slide show portraying a death-rebirth experience called
The Inner Journey,
based on observations from clinical research of psychedelic therapy. He contacted us and asked that we join his team as special consultants for visionary experiences portrayed in the movie. We were very excited because
Brainstorm
had a fascinating subject and a stellar cast. It featured, among others, Natalie Wood, Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher, and Cliff Robertson. Its producer was John Foreman, known for such movies as
The First Great Train Robbery
and
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The invitation gave us a chance to spend some time in Hollywood and witness the process of moviemaking.

The actors and the crew attended a special slide-illustrated presentation, which I gave for them on the new cartography of the psyche that had emerged from my study of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Most of the images in the slide show depicted experiences from psychedelic therapy, but a few of them came from Holotropic Breathwork sessions of participants in our training and workshops. When Doug Trumbull and John Foreman heard that we had developed a nondrug technique capable of inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness, they asked us if we could make that experience available for their team. Because the central topic of
Brainstorm
was the experience of a non-ordinary state of consciousness, this was a unique opportunity for everybody involved in the production of the movie to get a better understanding of the subject.

Fifteen members of the
Brainstorm
team joined our five-day workshop at Esalen and participated in the Holotropic Breathwork sessions. It was an interesting experience for Natalie to get to know Esalen personally because several years earlier she had starred in making the movie
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,
a spoof on Esalen and similar human—potential centers. The Esalen experience certainly lived up to her expectations; when she was the sitter in one of the breathwork sessions, a Mexican work scholar (an Esalen participant who works at the Institute in exchange for attending workshops) breathing near her, stripped naked and stayed that way for the rest of the session. It was not a particularly conspicuous event at Esalen, known for integrated nude bathing in its famous hot springs and in its open swimming pool, but it represented a somewhat unusual experience for our Hollywood friends.

One day, when I sat at lunch with Natalie, I had a chance to find out that she was not a novice as far as non-ordinary states of consciousness were concerned. At one point, she asked me out of the blue: “Stan, are you familiar with a drug called Ketalar?” Ketalar, or ketamine, is a powerful anaesthetic with effects that are quite different from the other substances used to induce anesthesia. It is referred to as a “dissociative anaesthetic,” because the patients to whom it is administered do not lose consciousness, but their consciousness detaches from their body to such a degree that they are not aware of what is happening to it. While they are being operated on, they experience fantastic adventures in other domains of reality. They become other people, various other lifeforms, and even inorganic objects, encounter various archetypal figures and discarnate beings, relive past life memories, visit other universes, and have profound mystical experiences.