When the Impossible Happens (24 page)

But what happened to Uspensky Sobor was not very relevant for me and my personal quest. My primary interest was in Pechorskaya Lavra and its catacombs. And from what I knew, Pechorskaya Lavra was still there; it had survived unscathed the Soviet rule, as well as the German invasion. Soon after our train arrived in Kiev, I started feeling very restless. My passion ate desire to visit the mysterious underground cemetery turned into an irresistible obsession. This was again something very exceptional and uncharacteristic for me. I was known as a rational person who steered through life with a relatively even keel and without significant emotional upheavals.

Taking considerable political risk, I finally decided to split from the group and visit Pechorskaya Lavra on my own. Because I spoke at that time fluent Russian, I was able to get a cab and direct it to the monastery. I got inside and walked through the maze of catacombs lined by the mummies of all the monks who had lived and died there in all the centuries of the monastery’s existence. Their skinny hands covered with brown parchment skin were joined as if in the last prayer. At times, the corridors would open into little caves decorated with powerful icons and lit with candles. Through clouds of heavy smoke of fragrant incense, I could see groups of monks with long beards involved in monotonous singing; they all seemed to be in deep trance and their chant sounded otherworldly and haunting.

I realized I was in a very unusual state of consciousness myself. I felt that I knew the place intimately, and walking through the complex dark catacombs, I could anticipate what was coming next. The sense of déjà vu and déjà vecu was overwhelming. At one point I saw one of the mummies whose hands were in a strange position and were not joined in prayer. I felt a wave of emotions that seemed to be coming from the depth of my being; I had never experienced anything even remotely similar. I ended my excursion and, very moved, I left the place in a hurry. There was no doubt in my mind that I was running away from the risk of an even more profound and disorganizing reaction. It was clear to me that my illicit visit to Pechorskaya Lavra and the adverse circumstances did not provide the ideal set and setting for deep psychological processing of my experience.

I returned to my hotel strangely dissatisfied and with a distinct sense that my visit was an incomplete Gestalt. On the other hand, I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that the Intourist guides had not noticed my absence, which was a small miracle in itself. I spent the New Year in Moscow enjoying the cultural treasures of this city, and following the old advice “when in Rome, do as the Romans do,” I imbibed impressive doses of excellent Starka, vodka made according to an old Czarist recipe. I had no more extraordinary experiences comparable to those in Pechorskaya Lavra. My most remarkable adventure in consciousness during the rest of my stay was a visit to Moscow’s famous attraction—a complex of open-air swimming pools where one could swim in hot water and dive into it from the top of towers enveloped in freezing cold reaching 30 degrees below zero Celsius.

After my return from Russia, I kept replaying and reviewing the Kiev episode in my memory, trying to understand the strange emotions that it evoked in me. However, my preoccupation with this peculiar intermezzo in my life did not last very long. I became deeply immersed in my LSD research at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, running two psychedelic sessions a day and trying to make sense of what I was finding. I was encountering so many challenging and paradigm-breaking experiences and observations every day that it was easy to forget my Russian adventure. However, the story had an unexpected continuation many years later, after I had left Czechoslovakia and was working at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore.

The director of the center, Dr. Albert Kurland, invited for a four-week visit Joan Grant and Dennys Kelsey, a European couple known for their interesting use of hypnotic therapy. Joan was a French woman who had an extraordinary ability to put herself into an autohypnotic trance and experience episodes from other times and countries that had the quality of past-life memories. She had published a number of books based on her reconstructions of entire lifetimes, such as
The Winged Pharaoh, Life
As
Carola,
and
So Moses Was Born.
Dennys was a British psychiatrist, trained as a hypnotist. In their work together, Dennys asked hypnotized clients to go as far as they had to go to find the source of the problems they brought into therapy. Joan had an extraordinary ability to tune into the experiences of the clients and help them to resolve their problems. Frequently, the source of the clients’ emotional and psychosomatic symptoms appeared to be in past-life episodes. The Kelseys therefore chose for their joint publication, in which they described their work, the title
Many Lifetimes
(Grant and Kelsey 1967).

During the time the Kelseys stayed at the center, all the staff members had the opportunity to experience their work in personal sessions. The problem I wanted to work on was a conflict between sensuality and spirituality I experienced at that time. Generally, I was excited about life and was able to enjoy with great zest the various pleasures that human existence has to offer. However, occasionally, I had a strong impulse to withdraw from the world, find a remote ashram, and dedicate my life entirely to spiritual practice. Dennys hypnotized me and asked me to go back in time to find where this problem started.

As soon as I entered the hypnotic trance, I experienced myself as a young Russian boy standing in a large garden and looking at a palatial house. I knew that I was in Russia and was the son of an aristocratic family. I heard Joan’s voice coming as if from a great distance. In a gentle but assertive tone of voice, she kept repeating the sentence: “Look at the balcony!” I did what she was asking me to do, without wondering how she knew that I was looking at a house and that this house had a balcony. I took a close look at the balcony and noticed an old woman with crippled and contorted fingers sitting in a rocking chair. I knew instinctively that it was my grandmother and felt a strong wave of love and compassion for her.

Then the scene changed, and I found myself walking on a road in a nearby village. I remembered that I had come here on numerous occasions. The simple but colorful peasant world of the muzhiks represented for me an exciting escape from the rigid and boring life of my family. The roads of the village were covered with mud and puddles, and the smell of dung permeated the air. The houses were covered with ruffled thatched roofs, and people walked around dressed in dirty rags, but the place was pulsing with life.

I walked into a dark and primitive workshop of a blacksmith. He stood there in front of a glowing furnace, a giant and muscular man, half-naked and covered with curly black hair. With powerful blows of a heavy hammer, he was molding a red-hot piece of iron lying on the anvil. I suddenly remembered the scene from the first act of Wagner’s
Siegfried,
where Siegfried forges Nothung, the broken sword given by Wotan to his father, Sigmund. Watching this scene and listening to the powerful music, in which Wagner masterfully imitated all the sounds associated with forging, had always had a strong impact on me. It made my right eye burn, twitch uncontrollably, and overflow with tears. All of a sudden, the same thing happened to me, only incomparably stronger. I felt a sharp pain in my right eye, the right side of my face went into a spasm, and a stream of tears poured down my cheek.

Unlike on previous occasions, this time I understood where my reaction was coming from. As I stared at the blacksmith, transfixed with fascination, a piece of hot iron hit my face and eye and caused severe burns. Some emotionally very painful scenes followed. I relived my mother’s horror when she saw my face, burnt beyond recognition, and her subsequent withdrawal and avoidance. I felt again the agony I had experienced as a ghastly, disfigured youngster during the years of puberty, tortured by unfulfilled sexual longing and hurt by repeated rejections. I saw that after realizing there was no place for me in the secular world, I escaped in utter despair and despondence into monastic life. Replacing the shame and humiliation of forced celibacy with the false pride of renunciation, I was ordained as a monk in Pechorskaya Lavra.

As I was consciously connecting with the memory of my life in this monastery, my hands went into a severe spasm. I realized that, during the decades spent in the darkness of the catacombs, my fingers on both hands had become severely disfigured. Was it arthritis caused by unfavorable living conditions or a hysterical reaction of a neurotic, reflecting profound dissatisfaction with life? Is it possible that I used as a model for this psychosomatic symptom the organic disease afflicting the hands of my beloved grandmother?

The last scene of my hypnotic regression involved my death. It ended a life that was full of misery and could have been experienced as liberation, as release from the prison of an irreparably damaged body. But an unexpected complication interfered with my capacity to find peace and reconciliation in my final hour. In Pechorskaya Lavra, it was customary to place the bodies of the deceased in open coffins lining the walls of the catacombs and join their hands in a praying position. It was a symbolic expression of a successful closure of a well-lived life dedicated to God.

But my crippled hands, transformed by some pathological process into ugly deformed claws, could not be linked together in a symbolic blessing gesture indicating successful closure of my monastic life. I started to cry, overwhelmed by a mixture of anger, grief, and self-pity. I hated the life in the monastery and envied the fortunate people with intact, beautiful bodies enjoying the world outside. My stay there was not the result of free choice; I withdrew from the world, running away from shame, rejection, and humiliation. And the inability to find a formal closure on what already was a life of indescribable misery was more than I could take. I was sobbing uncontrollably, my entire body was shaking, and tears were pouring from my eyes.

At this point, Joan intervened with incredible intuition. She started to massage my spastic and contorted hands with great gentleness and tenderness. When they finally relaxed, she brought them together in a praying gesture and held them in this position with her own cupped hands. I felt that I was rapidly reaching closure and reconciliation on my unhappy life spent in Pechorskaya Lavra. Enormous amounts of negative emotions that had accumulated in my psyche and body during many decades of existence as an involuntary monk were now on their way out. They were gradually replaced by feelings of deep relaxation, inner peace, bliss, and love. There was no doubt in my mind that what I just had experienced was profoundly healing. My subsequent life has confirmed this intuition. Since the session with the Kelseys, I have never felt any conflict between spirituality and the ability to enjoy what life has to offer—nature, work, food, sex, and many other things that “flesh is heir to.”

I ended the session with a convincing feeling that I had reached a closure in this matter. However, several years later certain elements of this story surprisingly resurfaced in my life in the middle of a monthlong workshop Christina and I were conducting at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Dick Price, the co founder of Esalen and one of the early students of Fritz Perls, was invited to our workshop as guest faculty and was conducting a Gestalt session with Caroline, a young woman participating in the work shop. Before the onset of the session, Caroline described the unexplainable attraction she felt to Russia, her people and culture. She was learning Russian and liked to sing Russian songs.

The problem she brought into the session was the deleterious effect that the eleven years she had spent in a Catholic monastery had had on her sexual life, her vitality, and joie de vivre. As she was expressing with increasing intensity the enormous anger and grief she was feeling about the wasted years of her youth, I sensed more and more emotional resonance with her story. I immediately realized that this had something to do with the similarity between the story of her life and my past life experience in Russia. But the intensity of my response surprised me. My right eye started to burn, my right eyelid was uncontrollably twitching, and streams of tears were pouring down my face.

As I was watching Caroline through the veil of my tears, her face kept changing, until she looked like my mother from the Russian incarnation. I suddenly found myself back in the situation when I was brought home after the injury in the workshop of the blacksmith, and my mother was confronted with my disfiguration. Caroline was clearly processing emotions from her own current life, but in my perception she was part of my past life. She was my mother, heartbroken by what happened to me. The session ended, and I got up, deeply emotionally touched by what just had happened. Still a little shaken and puzzled, I walked to the door on the way to lunch; I opened it and froze in astonishment.

I was looking at an incredibly disfigured face of a young woman who was trying to enter the room just as I was leaving it. I was still so identified with my Russian past life that, for a moment, I felt I was looking into a mirror. It turned out that the visitor, who arrived at the scene with such astonishing timing, was Caroline’s friend Victoria. She had read about the Maryland program of psychedelic therapy for cancer patients and had come to explore the possibility of having an LSD session. I sat down with her, and she shared with me her incredible story.

She was born as an identical twin, but her twin sister died shortly after delivery. Her parents later found to their great dismay that the hospital switched by mistake the labels and that the surviving girl carried the name of her dead sister. When she was four years old, Victoria fell out of the rear window of a moving car and came close to death. Shortly after recovery from this injury, she started showing symptoms of a very rare form of skin cancer. During the years that followed, the disease kept progressing, and she had multiple plastic surgeries, which transformed her complexion into a motley of deep scars and patches of skin grafts.