When the Impossible Happens (46 page)

Carl’s interpretation of perinatal visions taken from my book was in sharp conflict with my own description of this phenomenon. After having observed literally hundreds of experiences of psychospiritual death and rebirth, I realized that the reliving of birth functions as a gateway to the Jungian collective unconscious and that the archetypal visions that accompany it are ontologically real and cannot be derived from our experiences of the material world. This is an issue of great theoretical relevance in view of Carl’s provocative statement about the nature of reality that opened
Cosmos,
his magnum opus: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be” (Sagan 1983).

Carl later repeated his argument in his book
Broca’s Brain
(Sagan 1979b), in which he dedicated to this issue an entire chapter entitled “The Amniotic Universe.” He certainly had the right to draw his own conclusions from my observations. However, disregarding my own interpretation and hallowing me as a debunker of mysticism was another matter. In doing this, he also discounted the fact that the entire second half of
Realms of the Human Unconscious,
the book he was referring to, was dedicated to a detailed description of spiritual experiences with many clinical examples. The material in it was actually one of the sources of transpersonal psychology, a discipline seeking a synthesis of genuine spirituality and science.

As transpersonal psychology, with its efforts to legitimize spirituality, continued to grow and gain more ground in the academe, it became a major irritation for Carl and the CSICOP group. Carl finally asked me, as a surviving member of the small group of professionals who had founded transpersonal psychology, to meet with him in a session of open confrontation and discuss theoretical issues related to this discipline. I accepted his invitation and met him in his hotel room in Boston. Other participants in this meeting included my wife, Christina, Carl’s wife, Ann Druyan, and Harvard psychiatrist and researcher John Mack, our mutual friend.

Carl started the session by reminding me of my responsibility as a professional trained in medicine and psychology to be careful what information I release to the public because the words of educated people with academic titles are taken more seriously by lay audiences. He emphasized that it was essential for scientists to offer seasoned and unadulterated scientific truth to those who are unable to make their own independent judgment. He then began citing a series of instances in which people were deceived by various hoaxes, scams, and frauds. He brought up the case of the German horse named “smart Hans” (“der kluge Hans”), which, according to the claims of his owner, was able to perform mathematical computations; a fraud involving a figure excavated in Italy that allegedly was a petrified giant; and a few other instances. At this point, I interrupted Carl and told him I felt that what he was describing had no relevance for the subject we were supposed to discuss.

“What do
you
think is relevant for our discussion?” he asked.

“It is the problem of the ontological status of transpersonal experiences,” I answered, “such as experiential identification with other people and other life forms, veridical out-of-body experiences, visions of archetypal beings and realms, or ancestral, racial, karmic, and phylogenetic memories. Are they hallucinations and fantasies without any basis in reality or instances of authentic connection with dimensions of reality and sources of relevant information that are normally inaccessible for our consciousness?”

“Give me examples!” he urged me, appearing puzzled and confused.

I described several instances in which individuals in non-ordinary states of consciousness identified experientially with various aspects of the material world or experienced the historical and archetypal domains of the collective unconscious and were able to gain access to information that was clearly far beyond what they had acquired through the conventional channels in their present life time. Three of these examples involved experiential identification with animals (eagle, whale, and lion), two of them historical events (see the stories of Renata and Karl), and one the obscure archetypal vision of the Terrible Mother Goddess of the Malekulans in New Guinea (see the story of Otto).

Listening to my stories, Carl regained his composure and assumed an authoritative teaching role. “Oh, this is what you are talking about? Well, that’s easy to explain; not a big mystery there,” he said. “American children watch television on average about six hours a day. They see a lot of various programs, including those that contain scientific information, such as Nova or the Discovery Channel. They forget much of it, but their brains, being the miraculous organs they are, record it all. In non-ordinary states of consciousness, then, this information is used to generate what appears to be new relevant information. But, as you know, there is no way we can access information that did not enter our brain through the senses. If such information emerges, they must have received it somewhere at some time during this life.”

I felt frustrated. Carl was using here the old dictum of British empiricist philosophers that had become a popular tenet of monistic materialistic science:
“Nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu”
(Nothing is in the intellect that prior to that was not in the sensory organs). If my subjects’ experiences contained some seemingly new information, they must have acquired it sometime, somewhere, somehow during this lifetime through sensory input. This should be clear to anybody who has studied natural sciences; how could any educated person see it differently?

Feeling that we were facing a blind alley, I resorted to thanatology, a discipline studying death and dying. In the last few decades, researchers in this field had accumulated some fascinating observations concerning out-of-body experiences in near-death situations. Unlike many other transpersonal phenomena, these experiences are easily subjected to objective verification. Since this material had been widely publicized in best-selling books, television talk shows, and even a number of Hollywood movies, I expected that it would not be difficult to make my point.

I referred to a number of thanatological studies that had independently con firmed that during out-of-body experiences in near-death situations, disembodied consciousness is capable of perceiving the immediate environment, as well as various remote locations, without the mediation of senses. In a fascinating study described in Ken Ring’s book entitled
Mindsight
(Ring and Cooper 1999), the capacity of disembodied consciousness to perceive the environment appeared even in people who had been congenitally blind for organic reasons. They were not only able to see for the first time in their lives, but what they saw could be consensually validated. In Ken’s terminology, they had “veridical out-of-body experiences.”

In this context, I also quoted an example from the book
Recollections of Death,
written by Michael Sabom, a cardiosurgeon who had studied near-death experiences of his patients (Sabom 1982). I told Carl that one of Michael Sabom’s patients was able to describe in detail the procedure of his resuscitation following cardiac arrest during an operation. He reported that his disembodied consciousness first watched the procedure from a place near the ceiling. Later, it became interested in the procedure and floated down to a position where it could observe from close up the gauges on the equipment. During the interview following successful resuscitation, the patient was able to reconstruct to Michael Sabom’s surprise the entire procedure, including the movements of the little hands on the measuring devices in correlation with the interventions of the surgical team.

Having described this case to Carl, I asked him how he would explain this event in the context of the worldview to which he subscribed. He paused for a while, and then he said assertively: “This, of course, did not happen!”

I shook my head incredulously, not believing what I just had heard. “What do you mean, this did not happen? Cardiosurgeon Michael Sabom reported this in his book based on the research he had conducted with his patients. What is your explanation for what I just have described to you? What do you think all this is about?” I asked. This time the pause was even longer; Carl was clearly thinking very hard, struggling to find the answer. “I’ll tell you,” he finally broke the long silence. “There are many cardiosurgeons in the world. Nobody would have known the guy. So he made up a wild story to attract attention to himself. It’s a PR trick!”

I was shocked. Carl’s last words seriously undermined the respect I had had for him. I realized that his worldview was not scientific, but scientistic. It had the form of an unshatterable dogma that was impervious to evidence. It was also clear to me that our discussion had reached an insurmountable impasse. I saw that Carl was willing to question the integrity and sanity of his scientific colleagues before considering that his belief system might require revision or modification to fit the new data. He was so convinced that he knew what the universe was like and what could not happen in it that he did not feel the slightest inclination to examine the challenging data.

My experience with Carl’s determination to preserve his scientific beliefs was later further confirmed by a scandal involving CSICOP and the so called “Mars effect.” In their studies, originally designed to debunk astrology, French statisticians Michel and Louise Gauquelin demonstrated that in the birth chart of prominent athletes Mars appeared with statistically significant frequency in the ascendent or zenith (Gauquelin 1973). To their surprise, their study thus supported rather than refuted astrological prediction. The statistical probability that this could have happened by chance was one in five million. In later years, the Gauquelins tested astrological predictions involving five planets and eleven professions and found significant results; their data were later replicated independently by other researchers.

After the results of the Gauquelin study had been published, three CSI COP members, Paul Kurtz, George Abell, and Marvin Zelen, incensed by this report, got involved in the controversy, first by a critical response and later by their own study. After a number of heated exchanges, rather than admitting that they essentially confirmed the Gauquelin results, they resorted to conscious falsification of their own data. This fraud was exposed in an article entitled “Starbaby” by Dennis Rawlins, cofounder of CSICOP and a member of its ruling executive council (Rawlins 1981). When Rawlins realized that the organization was committed to perpetuating its ideological position and not to discovering the truth, he concluded that honesty was more important than an indiscriminate witch-hunt against the paranormal.

In 1984, when I was invited to lecture at the World Congress of Astrology in Luzern about my research related to the psychological importance of the trauma of birth and about the Basic Perinatal Matrices, the program actually featured Michel Gauquelin as one of the presenters. It also included another convert to astrology, Hans Eysenck, the famous fierce critic of Freudian psychoanalysis.

JOURNEY TO THE EAST: Bringing LSD to the Soviet Union

Between 1960 and 1967, I worked in the Department for the Study of Interpersonal Relations at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague. For all these years, my primary responsibility was research of the therapeutic and heuristic potential of psychedelic substances. Besides Switzerland, Czechoslovakia was at the time the only country that officially produced pharmacologically pure LSD. As principal investigator of the psychedelic research program, I had unlimited access to the substance.

In 1964, Zdeněk Dytrych, my co-worker, and I were invited to spend six weeks in the Soviet Union as exchange visitors to study Soviet research of neuroses and psychotherapy. Soviet psychiatry was at the time dominated by Communist ideology, and the only acceptable theory of neuroses was based on I.P. Pavlov’s experiments in dogs. Treatment was limited to administration of a bromine-caffeine mixture, sleep therapy, hypnosis, and tranquillizers. Depth psychotherapy of the kind we were researching and interested in was practically nonexistent in the Soviet Union.

It was not easy to design an itinerary for our trip that would be interesting and educational. However, we found out that there was a group in the Bekhterev Psychoneurological Institute in Leningrad that was conducting under the leadership of Professor Myasischev its own variety of dynamic psychotherapy, and we included in our travel plan four weeks in this facility. After all, Leningrad was a beautiful city, and the Hermitage, with its incredible art collection, was a sufficient reason to visit! We also incorporated into our itinerary a stop in Suchumi, Georgia, to spend some time in the large monkey farm on the Black Sea that was conducting research in experimental neuroses of the Hamadryas baboons. And in view of the political situation, it was absolutely mandatory to pay a visit to the utterly uninteresting facility of academician Andrei Snezhnevsky, head of the Moscow Institute of Psychiatry of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Medical Sciences and chief ideologist of Soviet psychiatry.

Going to the Soviet Union, we decided to take with us 300 ampoules of LSD-25, each containing 100 micrograms of the substance. It was a product of the Czechoslovakian pharmaceutical industry, listed in the official pharmacopoeia jointly with respectable drugs, such as tetracycline antibiotics, insulin, and aspirin. This was the time before the Harvard scandal stigmatized this substance, and there was nothing illegal about what we were doing. During the first staff meeting we attended at the Bekhterev Institute, we gave a report about our work with psychedelics and offered to conduct LSD sessions with any interested members of the staff.

The team of the Department for the Study of Neuroses, headed by Dr. Straumit, was conducting a superficial form of dynamic psychotherapy. Although the psychologists and psychiatrists of the department, particularly the young ones, were interested in psychoanalysis, they had to keep this very private. Freud’s books were forbidden in the Soviet Union because his model of the psyche portrayed humans as dominated by egotistic base instincts and thus incapable of creating the ideal Communist society of the future. It also denigrated the proletarian revolutionaries by attributing their fervor to overthrow the ruling class to unresolved Oedipal issues. The Bekhterev group had to be very careful not to be accused of succumbing to this heresy.