When the Impossible Happens (29 page)

We had some previous intellectual knowledge about umbanda from the lectures of Stanley Krippner, a famous American parapsychologist with strong anthropological interests, who had come several times as guest faculty to our monthlong seminars at Esalen. We also had had a chance to experience the umbanda ritual personally for the first time during our visit to Belo Horizonte about ten days earlier. That experience had given us an interesting insight into the complexity of the Brazilian academic world.

When we expressed at the ITA conference our interest to attend an umbanda ritual, our Brazilian host, a psychologist who taught at the department of psychology of the university in Belo Horizonte, at first tried to dissuade us from participating. He took a very professional stance and told us that umbanda was based on superstition of simpleminded people and that there was nothing of interest there for educated professionals. When we insisted, it turned out that his cousin was in charge of the local umbanda group and that it was very easy for us to obtain the permission to attend.

The house in which the ritual took place had two stories and a cellar. The second floor represented heaven; it was all painted in bright white and pink colors and was adorned with large roses and garlands of flowers made of plaster and heavily gilded. The basement portrayed hell and was aesthetically the polar opposite of the former. Its walls were painted black and dark red, and the floor was covered with offerings for the dark deities, consisting of cigarette butts and bottles of aquavit, a very strong alcoholic beverage. The ground floor, which was the setting for the ritual, was richly decorated with potted trees and bushes and ponds of water.

The impression that this somewhat corny interior decoration made on us dissipated when the ritual started. The chanting and drumming was very powerful, and many people soon started falling into trance. We could see many emotional and physical abreactions and had no doubts that this process was authentic and had strong healing potential. As a matter of fact, much of what we saw reminded us of the processes we had seen over the years in psychedelic sessions and in Holotropic Breathwork.

The next day, we told our host how impressed we were by our experience in the umbanda ceremony. When he heard it, the truth slowly started to come out. He shared with us that, on the basis of his personal experience, he was personally convinced about the value of the umbanda rituals and their healing potential. If somebody in his family had emotional or psychosomatic problems, he would not recommend a Freudian analyst or a behaviorist, but send them to an umbanda cabildo to be treated. He even mentioned a situation when his family secretly smuggled an umbanda healer into the hospital room to conduct a private ritual with one of its members.

Our experience in Belo Horizonte had whetted our appetites, and we accepted with pleasure Sergio’s invitation to attend another umbanda ritual. Late in the afternoon, we got into his car and drove from the downtown area to the suburbs. The place was on the outskirts of the city, and it took us a long time to reach our destination. When we arrived at the site where the ritual took place, we were surprised by what we found. While the ritual in Belo Horizonte was conducted in an upper-class setting, the scene here was on the other side of the spectrum.

We first walked into a dark garage lit by colorful Christmas lights, suspended on long lines crisscrossing the ceiling. Near one of the walls was a three-tiered altar covered with little plaster figures representing the orixás, matched with their Christian counterparts, effigies of Catholic saints. We recognized Xango, the deity of aggression and sex, paired with St. George, and Iemanja, the goddess of the ocean, sharing space with Virgin Mary. We also knew from the past Caboclo, the dark-skinned man in a loincloth, wearing a feather headdress and wielding bows and arrows, and Preto Velho, the stooped, old black man sitting on a little stool with a pipe in his mouth.

Sergio then showed us two iron figures, red and black, with horns and prominent sexual features, representing a female and a male devil. He also pointed out Pomba Gira, a deity in the form of a sexy woman in a low-cut dress, laughing derisively and looking like a prostitute. He then took us to a large adjacent area, the “embodying room,” the site of the ritual, which was just about to begin. We were introduced there to an old witchy-looking woman with one eye and disheveled hair who was in the role of Mãe de Santos, “mother of the saints,” and was clearly in charge of the ceremony.

As we witnessed her killing a black chicken and smearing various objects with its blood, Sergio explained to us that this was
ebo
or
despacho,
ceremonial offering. This ceremony would be different from the one we attended in Belo Horizonte because this one was held on Bara’s Day, or St. Anthony’s Day, and it was a party in honor of Exu. Sergio told us that Exu is an irresponsible, mischievous trickster who causes trouble and thrives on confusion. Some see him as a bridge between humans and orixás, others as a dark force of nature comparable with the Christian devil.

Once the drumming and chanting started, the Filhos and Filhas de Santos began to dance and fall into trance. Several assistants watched the floor, and when they recognized grimaces, gestures, and behaviors characterizing specific orixás, they dressed the people embodying them into appropriate costumes.

Two of the women stood out by their provocative, lewd conduct; Sergio told us that they seemed to be impersonating Pomba Gira. Very proper and re served before the trance, they were now lifting their skirts high exposing their underwear, shouting obscenities, and approaching men with obscene gestures symbolizing intercourse. We watched as each of them downed three large bottles of aquavit, a strong distillate with about 45 percent alcohol, without showing any signs of motor instability.

The scene was wild, and the atmosphere dense and somewhat bizarre. However, Christina and I were able to watch it with the detachment of anthropologists doing fieldwork and with relative equanimity. But this changed when the witchy Mãe de Santos approached us with a meaningful grin and asked us if we wanted a
consulta.
This is a name used in umbanda for an interview with the spirits, during which the medium channels the messages and advice of the orixás to participants. We agreed to “talk to the spirits,” seeing it as an opportunity for an interesting experience. It turned out that we were completely unprepared for what was about to happen.

The old crone led us to one of the women who were acting out sexually and had consumed huge quantities of aquavit. She pushed us both from behind until we stood very close to the medium. The woman’s face was contorted into a strange grimace, and she was chewing and smoking a large cigar. “So you want to talk with the spirits?” she asked us with a derisive grin. Without waiting for an answer, she reached unabashedly under Christina’s waist, touching and squeezing her underbelly. “Female problems, heh?” she cackled. “Pains and bleeding. And a lot of energy!” Sergio translated for us her comments, given in Portuguese.

“You are sad, very sad and upset,” she continued with a voice that sounded like croaking. “It’s hard to be separated from your two children, isn’t it? To have them so far, on an island?” We were astounded; Christina was at the height of her Kundalini awakening, characterized by strong energies. The process was at this point focusing on her belly and was causing a lot of gynecological problems for which there was no medical basis. She had also recently lost physical custody of her children, who were now living in Hawaii with their father. This was for Christina a cause of constant irritation and depression.

The woman’s eyes then turned to me, and she looked at me with an expression and gesture that was somewhere between mocking and teasing: “Having a good time in Brazil, aren’t you? Loving Brazilian food and all those great spices, heh? Just don’t worry about finances; that would spoil the fun for you! Don’t be afraid; you will not lose money on this trip!” That was another direct hit. My love for food is one of my great weaknesses, as Christina and all my friends know. When I come to a country I do not know, I cannot wait to explore its cuisine. We had just been to Bahia, where I had fallen in love with the extraordinary mixture of African and Brazilian spices. And after the cancellation of our workshop in Rio, thoughts about our financial situation certainly had been in the back of my mind much of the time.

This was astonishing because our only link with this umbanda community was Sergio, and he did not possess any of the information that the woman in trance was channeling. The discovery that the mediums had such extraordinary clairvoyant or telepathic abilities and how transparent we were to them certainly changed our feelings about the ritual and our attitude toward it. We suddenly had much more respect for what was happening there, and the situation started looking much more authentic and serious. Being in an unfamiliar suburban part of Rio, in the grotesque setting of the party for Exu, and surrounded by people who had such paranormal abilities, triggered in us even a few waves of paranoia.

The reassurance concerning the financial outcome of our trip to Brazil, which I received from the woman channeling Pomba Gira, turned out to be correct. In spite of the setback with the canceled workshop in Rio de Janeiro, we managed to come out even. At the end of our journey, we found out that our expenses and earnings were almost exactly the same.

THE TABOO AGAINST KNOWING THAT WE ARE CLAIRVOYANT: Sessions with Ann Armstrong

During the years I worked at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, my friendship with Walter Pahnke brought into my life many great psychics of our time, among them Eileen Garrett, Hugh and Charles Cayce, Joan Grant, and others. During our fourteen-year stay at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Christina and I had many additional opportunities to meet individuals with extraordinary psychic abilities, such as Luiz Gasparetto, Uri Geller, Helen Palmer, Keith Harrary, and Jack Schwartz.

However, it was our long-standing friendship with Anne Armstrong that provided for us the most convincing and consistent evidence about the possibility of paranormal access to information about other people and the world. Anne’s extraordinary psychic gifts opened up in the course of her “spiritual emergency,” which lasted twenty years. The process of her inner development began when she and her husband, Jim, started experimenting with hypnosis in an attempt to cure Anne’s agonizing migraine headaches.

Their therapeutic experiment succeeded when they were able to trace Anne’s headaches to a past-life memory of being an athlete associated with the Roman Colosseum who had been subjected to severe torture because his captors wanted to extort from him some important secret information. To the great surprise of both of them, the perpetrator in this karmic memory turned out to be Jim himself. The marriage of the Armstrongs survived this revelation, and the two of them embarked on a journey of shared spiritual discovery. After years of inner struggle, Anne developed into a remarkably reliable and well-grounded practicing psychic.

Anne and Jim came regularly as guest faculty to our monthlong workshops, usually during the last week. Before they joined the group, the members of the group had spent together on average ten hours a day, during which they shared a variety of in-depth explorations, including regular sessions of Holotropic Breathwork. Anne appeared in the group without knowing anybody except Christina and me. And yet, she instantly gained access to all kinds of intimate information about the group members that was new to all of us. Her specialty was exploration and elucidation of interpersonal relationships. All she needed to know for her readings were the names of the people involved. She could even give very accurate and reliable readings on the telephone.

Besides giving surprisingly revealing and accurate individual readings for different members of the group, she also took participants, with Jim’s assistance, through a series of exercises, teaching them to discover, own, and cultivate their own psychic abilities. The Armstrongs’ favorite exercise was the “group scan,” which combined both of these processes. Little pieces of paper with the names of the participants were folded and deposited into a hat. A designated group member then blindly drew out of the hat the name of the person who would receive the group reading. That person would then present the problem about which he or she needed psychic information.

The instruction for the group members was to suspend any doubts about their own psychic abilities and write down everything that came to their mind, without the slightest reservation and without any censorship. After the participants shared their insights into the presented problem, Anne did her own psychic reading, so that we all could compare our insights with hers. The last stage of the process was the feedback of the target people concerning what they considered hits and misses of the reading.

Anne’s readings were consistently correct and often truly remarkable. But it was extraordinary how accurate were many of the images and insights of various group members who had never thought of themselves as having any psychic abilities. One of the major difficulties was to clearly interpret the emerging images and associations, something that Anne was doing with incredible ease. I will illustrate this problem by one of my own attempts at psychometry under Anne and Jim’s guidance.

In this particular exercise, half of the group sat down along one wall of the room and the other along the opposite wall. We were instructed to secretly bring into this session an object that, unbeknownst to other people in the group, had emotional significance for us. Jim then gave each half of the group a large shopping bag and asked us to furtively deposit our objects into it. He then switched the bags, and each of us had to pull out an object belonging to somebody from the opposite side. The instruction was to hold this object in one’s hand and do a psychometric reading—to write down all associations and images that would emerge in this process.

The object I drew out of the bag was a metal pendant, a little more than an inch in diameter. It had the shape of a circle that contained a stylized human figure with outstretched arms and legs, like the famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci. Following Anne’s instructions, I held it in my left hand, focused my attention on it, and let my mind wander the way I used to do in my Freudian training analysis. I then wrote down with my right hand all my free associations to it, as they were emerging. I was surprised by the ease with which they came and by their richness.