Almost half a century ago, a powerful experience lasting only several hours of clock-time profoundly changed my personal and professional life. As a young psychiatric resident, only a few months after my graduation from medical school, I volunteered for an experiment with LSD, a substance with remarkable psychoactive properties that had been discovered by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basel.

This session, particularly its culmination period during which I had an overwhelming and indescribable experience of cosmic consciousness, awakened in me intense lifelong interest in non-ordinary states of consciousness. Since that time, most of my clinical and research activities have consisted of systematic exploration of the therapeutic, transformative, and evolutionary potential of these states. The five decades that I have dedicated to consciousness research have been for me an extraordinary adventure of discovery and self-discovery.

I spent approximately half of this time conducting therapy with psychedelic substances, first in Czechoslovakia in the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague and then in the United States, at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, where I participated in the last surviving American psychedelic research program. Since 1975, my wife Christina and I have worked with holotropic breathwork, a powerful method of therapy and self-exploration that we jointly developed at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Holotropic breathwork induces profound change in consciousness with a combination of very simple non-drug means – faster breathing, evocative music, and a special form of bodywork. Over the years, Christina and I have also supported many people undergoing spontaneous episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness –psychospiritual crises or “spiritual emergencies,” as we call them.

In addition, I have been peripherally involved in many disciplines related to non-ordinary states of consciousness. I have spent much time exchanging information with anthropologists and have participated in sacred ceremonies of native cultures in different parts of the world with and without the ingestion of psychedelic plants, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and magic mushrooms. This involved contact with various North American, Mexican, South American, and African shamans and healers. I have also had extensive contact with representatives of various spiritual disciplines, including Vipassana, Zen, and Vajrayana Buddhism, Siddha Yoga, Tantra, and the Christian Benedictine order.

Another area that has received much of my attention has been thanatology, the young discipline studying near-death experiences and the psychological and spiritual aspects of death and dying. In the late 1960s and early 1970s I participated in a large research project studying the effects of psychedelic therapy in individuals dying of cancer. I should also add that I have had the privilege of personal acquaintance and experience with some of the great psychics and parapsychologists of our era, pioneers of laboratory consciousness research, and therapists who developed and practiced powerful forms of experiential therapy that induce non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Conducting this research, I was daily bombarded with experiences and observations, for which my medical and psychiatric training had not prepared me. As a matter of fact, I was experiencing and seeing things that, in the context of the scientific worldview I was brought up with, were considered impossible and were not supposed to happen. And yet, those obviously impossible things were happening all the time. Eventually, I reached a point where I became convinced that the data from the research of non-ordinary states represent a critical conceptual challenge for the scientific paradigm that currently dominates psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. I expressed this opinion in a series of professional books, such as Beyond the Brain, Adventure of Self-Discovery, The Cosmic Game, and Psychology of the Future. I came to the conclusion that thinking in these disciplines requires a radical revision that in its nature and scope would resemble the conceptual cataclysm that Newtonian physicists had to face in the first three decades of the twentieth century.  

The observations challenging the worldview, which I imbibed from the culture I grew up in and inherited from my academic teachers, came from many different areas and sources. Most of this information was drawn from extraordinary experiences reported by my clients receiving psychedelic therapy, participants in our holotropic breathwork workshops and training, and people undergoing spiritual emergency. A critical factor in the transformation of my worldview were non-ordinary states of various kinds that I experienced myself and those that my wife Christina shared with me.

However, not all of the evidence involved in the profound change of my worldview was directly related to special states of consciousness. Over the years, many extraordinary things happened in our everyday life, which have significantly contributed to this transformation. The common denominator of all these events was the fact that they should not have happened if the universe were the way traditional science portrays it – a strictly deterministic material system governed by chains of causes and effects. This is what inspired the title of this book.

When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-Ordinary Realities is a collection of stories describing various events in my professional and personal life that forced me to abandon my skeptical and materialistic scientific perspective on life and embrace the Eastern spiritual philosophies and mystical teachings of the world. They also generated in me great respect for the ritual and spiritual life and for the healing traditions of native cultures that Western science dismisses as products of primitive superstition.

The stories in the book fall into several categories. The first of these features episodes involving a remarkable phenomenon of great theoretical significance, which C. G. Jung described as synchronicity. He used this term forhighly implausible coincidences linking intrapsychic experiences with events in the material world. The fact that the world of matter can enter into playful interaction with the human psyche undermines the very foundations of the Cartesian Newtonian paradigm and of the monistic materialistic worldview.  The existence of synchronicities violate the principle of linear causality, the cornerstone of Western scientific thinking. It abolishes the basic metaphysical assumptions held by the Western academic community that consciousness and matter are two separate entities, that matter is primary and consciousness its epiphenomenon, and that the events in the world are governed exclusively by chains of causes and effects.

The stories in the second category challenge the current scientific understanding of the nature of memory and its limits. They show that each of us carries in the unconscious psyche not only the memory of his or her birth and the trauma associated with it, but also memories of our prenatal life and early embryonal existence, our conception, and of the lives of our human and animal ancestors. Some of the stories in this category present an even more formidable conceptual problem, since they suggest the existence of memory without any material substrate whatsoever. They describe experiential sequences portraying events from human history stored in the archives of the collective unconscious as envisioned by C. G. Jung, past life memories, and experiential identification with the members of other species.

The third category of stories focuses on phenomena traditionally studied by parapsychologists -- telepathy and clairvoyance, psychometry, experiences of astral realms, communication with discarnate entities and spirit guides, encounters with archetypal beings, channeling, mind-over matter phenomena (siddhis), and out-of-body experiences during which disembodied consciousness accurately perceives immediate or remote environments. Like synchronicities, these observations reveal the existence of “anomalous phenomena” that might in the future lead to a radical revision of the scientific worldview and its basic metaphysical assumptions.

The last category comprises stories that challenge the most fundamental assumptions of mainstream psychiatrists concerning the nature of psychotic episodes, currently considered manifestations of serious mental diseases. These accounts suggest that many episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness are crises of spiritual opening (“spiritual emergencies”), rather than psychotic episodes and that they have a great healing and transformative potential. This section also includes accounts of surprising positive results of highly unorthodox and controversial approaches to treatment. They describe therapeutic breakthroughs featuring psychodynamic mechanisms that would not make any sense to traditional psychiatrists.

This book is a very personal statement, revealing many intimate details of my private and professional life. Most clinicians and researchers would hesitate to disclose so much subjective information because of their concern that this would damage their scientific reputation. The reason that I share with so much honesty the trials and tribulations of my personal quest is that I want this information to ease the struggle and quandary of people involved in serious self-exploration and help them avoid the mistakes and pitfalls that are integral parts of any venture into new unexplored territories.

I hope that open-minded readers will see the personal stories that I share in these memoirs of my unconventional quest as a testimony to the passion with which I have pursued the search for knowledge and wisdom hidden in the deep recesses of the human psyche. If this book provides useful information and assistance for even a small fraction of the thousands of people experiencing non-ordinary states of consciousness and exploring non-ordinary realities, my sacrifice of personal privacy has not been in vain.

All Rights reserved to Stanislav Grof.