Free When the Impossible Happens by Stanislav Grof Page A

a personal audience, or darshan, with her spiritual teacher. As I found out later, she was uncertain whether Swami Muktanada would approve of our relationship and wanted to find out. I could certainly understand her concerns. Being a “transcendental hedonist,” as I often jokingly referred to myself, I did not exactly meet the conventional Indian criteria for an austere spiritual seeker. I was not a vegetarian, enjoyed sex, and was known for my work with LSD and other psychedelic substances.

    I had heard about Swami Muktananda before I met Christina, and had the chance to leaf through a manuscript of his autobiography, entitled Guru, later to become The Play of Consciousness. I was not particularly eager to drive to Oakland to meet him because I had somewhat mixed feelings about him. Two of my friends had converted to Siddha Yoga and were showing what I saw as an uncritical passionate devotion to Muktananda. They were certainly not the best advertisements for Muktananda and the influence he had on his followers. Their behavior drastically changed following their attendance of a Muktananda weekend intensive and created much commotion at Esalen. Instead of covering the topic they had promised in the Esalen catalog, they brought into their workshops little drums and cymbals and tried to engage the participants in chanting “Shree Guru Gita,” “Om Namah Shivaya,” and other Hindu devotional chants.

    Devotional yoga had never been my favorite spiritual practice. According to the ancient Indian tradition, people with different personalities need and seek different types of yoga. While Christina’s preference was without any doubt bhakti yoga, an approach emphasizing devotion to the guru, I felt great affinity to jñana yoga, a spiritual strategy that pushes the intellect to its utmost limits, where it has to surrender. I also resonated very much with raja yoga, a system that focuses on psychological experiment and a direct experience of the divine. I could easily accept karma yoga, the yoga of service accumulating karmic merits, but bhakti yoga was low on my scale of values.

    But because I am very curious by nature, my reservations about devotional practice did not override my interest in meeting a Siddha Yoga guru with Muktananda’s reputation. And I knew that this darshan was very important for Christina. As we were driving toward the Bay Area, Christina kept telling me some remarkable stories about her spiritual teacher, as a preparation for our meeting. We overestimated the time it would take us to drive from Big Sur to Oakland because this was not our usual route, and arrived at the ashram about twenty minutes before our scheduled meeting.

    While we were sitting in the car waiting for the darshan, we continued our discussion about Swami Muktananda. At one point, Christina mentioned that he was a Shaivite, which means a follower of Shiva. This captured my attention and increased my interest in meeting him. I knew that among the methods the Shaivites were using to get into non-ordinary states of consciousness was ingestion of bhang and datura seeds. And I considered Shiva to be my most important personal archetype because the two most powerful and meaningful experiences I have ever had in my psychedelic sessions involved this Indian deity. As we were waiting, I described these two experiences at some length to Christina.

    My first encounter with Shiva occurred in one of my early LSD sessions, when I was still in Prague. I spent the first four hours of this session in the birth canal, reliving the trauma of my birth. As I was emerging from the birth canal, all battered, covered with blood, and tasting vaginal secretions, I had a terrifying vision of the Hindu goddess Kali and experienced a complete unconditional surrender to the power of the feminine principle in the universe. At that moment, I saw a gigantic figure of Bhairava, Shiva in his Destroyer aspect, towering above me. I felt crushed by his foot and smeared