When the Impossible Happens (28 page)

Occasionally, these paintings did not reflect the fully developed mature style of these deceased masters, for which they were well known, but various earlier periods of their artistic evolution. Later, when we got to know Luiz well and had many opportunities to witness his work, we had to consult in some instances specific monographs featuring collected works of the painters whom Luiz claimed to channel to verify that he actually captured accurately their early styles.

As we were treated to this astonishing array of remarkable creations, Luiz shared with us some stories about his life and work. He had been gifted with psychic abilities since he was a child. The Gasparetto lineage was famous in Brazil for paranormal abilities, which apparently ran in the family. Luiz’s mother was also a psychic, expressing her talent through automatic drawing. She taught him a lot and helped him to develop his own talent. Luiz’s experiences with discarnate artists started when he was thirteen years old. They kept appearing to him on a regular basis, teaching him about the existence of the astral realm and about the meaning of life. Some of them were very famous, and he knew them and their art. Others were completely unknown to him, and he had to verify their authenticity by searching in art history books.

The spirits of dead masters told him that they wanted to show their work all over again and convey the message that they still existed. Another reason for their contact with Luiz was to give people a tangible proof of the existence of the Beyond. They revealed to him that they had planned this since before he was born. Luiz never knew who was going to come and what they were going to do. He could not simply choose to paint on his own; without the assistance of discarnate painters, he was not able to perform at all. When the spirits were present, he could feel all they felt and could see the world through their eyes. He compared the experience to an orgasm. His experience with the masters had changed his own way of seeing the world; it had opened his eyes to its magic beauty.

We were very impressed by Luiz and his art and decided to invite him as guest faculty in our forthcoming monthlong seminar. It was part of a series of experimental educational programs that we conducted twice a year at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where we lived. These events gave us the opportunity to choose a topic that we were interested in and invite as guest faculty individuals who were prominent representatives of their field and had a special relation to the theme of the workshop.

The invited guests covered a wide range from scientists, such as Fritjof Capra, Karl Pribram, and Gregory Bateson, to Tibetan lamas, Indian spiritual teachers, Native American and Mexican shamans, and Christian mystics. The spectrum of topics was equally broad. The monthlongs focused on such themes as Buddhism and Western Psychology, Schizophrenia and the Visionary Mind, Maps of Consciousness, Aboriginal Healing and Modern Medicine, Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science, Higher Creativity, and Frontiers of Science.

The topic of the forthcoming seminar was Energy: Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual. In the brief description of it that had appeared in the Esalen catalog, we promised to explore theoretically and experientially these different forms of energy and how to work with them. Luiz was clearly an ideal guest teacher for this program. Our budget allowed us to offer him a honorarium that would just about cover his traveling expense, and he was excited about this prospect of a visit to California.

Our monthlong seminars took place in the Big House, on a beautiful cypress-covered cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and separated by a creek from the rest of the property. Esalen Institute took its name from an Indian tribe that lived in Big Sur before the arrival of European colonizers. The Indians considered the land around the hot springs to be sacred healing and burial grounds. When the foundations for the Big House were being laid, the workers found many skeletons of the Esalen Indians lying in fetal position and facing west. Two additional burial sites were discovered on the property at different times, arranged in a triangle with this one.

Our first direct encounter with Luiz’s psychic abilities occurred immediately after his arrival at the Big House. He moved around the house and its immediate environment as if he were looking for something. We did not know what was happening and asked him what he was doing. “Do you know that many Indians lived and died here?” he said. “This place is full of Indian spirits; I can feel them all around me.” This was quite remarkable because Luiz did not have any previous knowledge of the history of Esalen.

During the month that he spent with us, he conducted healing sessions with participants of the workshop that brought much additional evidence for his unusual paranormal talents. However, our most extraordinary experience with Luiz was a performance that he did at Huxley, which is the large meeting room adjacent to the Esalen lodge on the main part of the property. Although it was part of our seminar, we opened it for the Esalen community. We placed a table and two chairs in the middle of the room, one for Luiz and the other for Christina, whose task it was to hand Luiz sheets of paper. During the performance, all lights were turned off, except a lamp with a red bulb on the table that Luiz was using.

On his way to Big Sur, Luiz had stopped in Los Angeles in the house of a good friend of mine, psychologist and parapsychological researcher Thelma Moss. During Luiz’s performance for a close circle of her friends, lights went off for some time in the entire block. To their astonishment, the guests (and Luiz himself) discovered that this had in no way interfered with his performance. He continued to paint, correctly choosing the colors, and produced during the dark period several beautiful paintings.

Performance in total darkness would have been a very impressive experiment, but it would have prevented the viewers from observing the process. We decided to choose red light as a compromise because it allowed people to observe Luiz, but effectively blocked his ability to distinguish colors. Luiz requested that we play Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
throughout the entire session because he found this music particularly inspiring for his work. Within a few minutes after the music had begun, Luiz’s head and body went through a few jolts; he seemed to have entered a trance. At the same time, Christina, who sat close to him, started to feel enormous heat radiating from his hands; this then continued during the entire session.

Luiz started to paint and, with astonishing speed, he kept producing one remarkable painting after another, each in the style of a different famous painter—van Gogh, Picasso, Gauguin, Rembrandt, Monet, and many others. He was using both of his hands, at times painting two pictures simultaneously, one with each hand. Much of the time, he was not looking at the paper at all; he kept closing his eyes and bending his head backwards or to the side. He actually painted a Manet portrait upside down, under the table, and with his right foot, without looking at all. Luiz’s stunning performance lasted a little over an hour. When he stopped painting, the floor around him was covered with large paintings, twenty-six of them altogether. In spite of the red light in the room, all the paintings were painted in appropriate colors.

People in the room started to move, eager to come closer and inspect the paintings. However, it was obvious that for Luiz the process was not yet completed. He sat for a while in quiet meditation and then he announced: “There is a spirit here who calls himself Fritz Perls; he wants to have his portrait painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.” He then produced a painting of the legendary South African therapist and founder of Gestalt practice, who had spent the last years of his life at Esalen. It was not only a very accurate portrait of Fritz, but it bore all the unmistakable characteristics of Toulouse-Lautrec’s style.

Luiz finished the painting, but gave no indication that the performance was over. After a brief moment of reflection, he said: “There is another spirit here; her name is Ida Rolf. She would also like to have her portrait made, not the way she looked before she died, but when she was forty years old.” Ida Rolf was another Esalen legend and idol. A German physicist, she had developed a famous technique of bodywork that carried her name. She had lived for many years in an Esalen house, about one-and-a-half miles from the main premises, which became our residence after Ida had left Esalen.

The portrait of Fritz showed him as people remembered him or knew him from his photographs. The portrait of Ida that Luiz painted was artistically very interesting and showed a middle-aged female figure, but there was no way of assessing the accuracy of the portrait. Nobody in the Esalen community had any idea what Ida Rolf had looked like at the age of forty because by the time she had arrived at Esalen from Germany, she was already old. Dick Price, the cofounder of Esalen, was fascinated by Luiz’s performance, but particularly by his portraits of the two people from the Esalen history Luiz did not know. Subsequently, Dick spent much time and effort to obtain from Germany Ida’s photograph from the time she was forty. When the photograph finally arrived, the extraordinary resemblance between her “portrait from the Beyond” and her actual middle-age appearance became very convincing evidence of Luiz’s extraordinary psychic gifts.

A PARTY FOR EXU: Interview with the Orixás

The next story describes another extraordinary experience that Christina and I had during our first visit to Brazil. During the years when we lived at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, our financial means were very limited. It was due partly to significant losses both of us had suffered during our respective divorces, partly to the fact that we had deliberately chosen what Duane Elgin called “voluntary simplicity.” We had opted for simple life in the beautiful setting of the Big Sur coast rather than a more lucrative lifestyle that would have required moving to the city.

In exchange for a certain number of workshops, Esalen provided for us a house situated on a steep cliff on the Pacific coast, with a spectacular 200-degree view of the ocean. We were thus able to live in close contact with spectacular wildlife, watching the play of sea otters, sea lions, and dolphins. We could see seagulls, cormorants, pelicans, and other sea birds flying through the air and floating in the ocean in the fields of giant kelp. Twice a year, for several weeks, gray whales were passing by on their way between Alaska and Baja California, and, on rare occasions, the appearance of killer whales further enriched this already extraordinary zoological display. Big Sur was also an important stop on the route of another group of indefatigable migrants—the beautiful Monarch butterflies.

The shadow side of this life in paradise was that it did not offer much opportunity to earn money. Esalen Institute provided food and lodging for us, but the income from workshops that we conducted in addition to those that paid for our house was meager. The workshop leaders received twenty percent of the fees Esalen collected from the participants in their workshops, which was by far the worst deal we have encountered anywhere in the world. There were many reasons why the guest teachers were willing to come and work under these conditions.

The Big Sur coast is without any doubt one of the most beautiful scenic areas in the world. The strip of land on which the Esalen Institute is built was considered sacred by the Esalen Indians, whose name it carries, and is undeniably a “power spot.” In addition, Esalen is the legendary “Mecca of the human potential movement,” world-known as an exciting human laboratory and a place of cutting-edge thinking, associated with the names of such pioneers as Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Abraham Maslow, Gregory Bateson, Fritz Perls, Moshe Feldenkreis, and Ida Rolf.

For the reasons mentioned, we had to seek additional sources of income outside of Esalen, in other parts of the United States and abroad. We tried to arrange our trips in such a way that we would at least cover our expenses and come out even. This was also the situation during our first visit to Brazil, where we traveled to attend the Fourth International Transpersonal Conference in Belo Horizonte. We had arranged several lectures and a couple of workshops in different parts of Brazil expecting to make enough money to pay for our trip.

But we ran into an unexpected complication. Unbeknownst to us, our workshop in Rio coincided with a soccer match between Brazil and Peru that was part of the World Cup competition. And, as we found out, trying to compete with a soccer match in South America would mean having the chance of a snowball in hell. We ended up with five participants for a Holotropic Breath work weekend, which was a small miracle considering the circumstances, but was not enough to go ahead with the workshop. We had to apologize to the small group of people gathered for the event and cancel the workshop with the painful awareness that it meant incurring significant financial loss.

We suddenly had a lot of time for sightseeing in Rio or some other alternative program. One of the people who came for the workshop was Sergio, a young Brazilian psychologist. We started talking, and he told us that he was conducting research on the Brazilian umbanda, a very popular syncretistic Afro-Brazilian cult that combines elements of traditional African tribal religions, Roman Catholicism, and indigenous Indian cultures of Brazil. He was using in his study a Jungian perspective, trying to describe the archetypal dynamics manifesting in the rituals. When he saw our interest in this subject, he invited us to accompany him to an evening umbanda ceremony.

Umbanda originated in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s and since then has spread vigorously throughout Brazil. The umbanda communities are guided by
Pais de Santos
(“fathers of the saints”) or
Mães de Santos
(“mothers of the saints”), who oversee
Filhos and Filhas de Santos
(“sons and daughters of the saints”). These are mediums consecrated to specific deities of West African origin, or
orixás,
such as Xango, Oxum, and Iemanja. Rituals are performed in special centers, called
terreiros
or
tendas.
They involve singing and chanting in Yoruba, accompanied with beating of drums, or
atabaques,
in different rhythms for each orixá. The mediums fall into trance and embody their respective deities.