When the Impossible Happens Read Online Free PDF

general that became available to me on this level of my psyche. It was so profound and shattering that it instantly overshadowed my previous interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. I could not believe how much I learned in those few hours. The breathtaking aesthetic feast and the rich plethora of psychological insights would have been sufficient, in and of themselves, to make my first encounter with LSD a truly memorable experience.

    However, there was another aspect of my session that surpassed everything else that happened. Between the third and fourth hours of my session, Dr. Roubíček’s research assistant appeared and announced that it was time for the EEG experiment. She took me to a small cabin, carefully pasted electrodes all over my scalp, and asked me to lie down and close my eyes. Then she placed a giant stroboscopic light above my head and turned it on. At this time, the effects of the drug were culminating, and that immensely enhanced the impact of the strobe.

    I was hit by a vision of light of incredible radiance and supernatural beauty. It made me think of the accounts of mystical experiences I had read about in spiritual literatures, in which the visions of divine light were compared with the incandescence of “millions of suns.” It crossed my mind that this was what it must have been like at the epicenter of the atomic explosions in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Today, I think it was more like Dharmakaya, or the Primary Clear Light, the luminosity of indescribable brilliance that, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol), appears to us at the moment of our death.

    I felt that a divine thunderbolt had catapulted my conscious self out of my body. I lost my awareness of the research assistant, the laboratory, the psychiatric clinic, Prague, and then the planet. My consciousness expanded at an inconceivable speed and reached cosmic dimensions. There were no more boundaries or difference between me and the universe. The research assistant carefully followed the protocol. She gradually shifted the frequency of the strobe from two to sixty hertz and back again, and then put it for a short time in the middle of the alpha band, theta band, and finally the delta band. While this was happening, I found myself at the center of a cosmic drama of unimaginable dimensions.

    In the astronomy literature that I later discovered and read over the years, I found names for some of the fantastic experiences that I underwent during those extraordinary ten minutes of clock time—Big Bang, passage through black and white holes, identification with exploding supernova and collapsing stars, and other strange phenomena. Although I had no adequate words for what had happened to me, there was no doubt in my mind that my experience was very close to those I knew from the great mystical scriptures of the world. Even though my psyche was deeply affected by the effects of LSD, I was able to see the irony and paradox of the situation. The Divine manifested and took over in the middle of a serious scientific experiment, involving a substance produced in the test tube of a twentieth-century chemist, and conducted in a psychiatric clinic of a country that was dominated by the Soviet Union and had a Marxist regime.

    This day marked the beginning of my radical departure from traditional thinking in psychiatry and from the monistic materialism of Western science. I emerged from this experience touched to the core and immensely impressed by its power. Not believing at that time, as I do today, that the potential for a mystical experience is the natural birthright of all human beings, I attributed everything to the effect of LSD. I felt strongly that the study of non-ordinary states of consciousness, in general, and those induced by psychedelics, in particular, was by far the most interesting area of psychiatry I could imagine. I realized that, under the proper circumstances, psychedelic experiences—to a much greater degree than