sastrous battle of White Mountain in 1621, which marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, the country ceased to exist as an independent kingdom and came under the hegemony of the Habsburg dynasty that lasted 300 years. In an effort to destroy the feelings of national pride and defeat the forces of resistance, the Habsburgs sent out mercenaries to capture the country’s most prominent noblemen. Twentyseven outstanding members of the nobility were arrested and beheaded in a public execution on scaffolding erected on the Old Town Square in Prague. During her historical sessions, Renata had an unusual variety of images and insights concerning the architecture of the experienced period and typical garments and costumes, as well as weapons and various utensils used in everyday life. She was also able to describe many of the complicated relationships existing at that time between the royal family and the vassals. Renata had never specifically studied this period, and I had to consult special books in order to confirm the reported information. Many of her experiences were related to various periods in the life of a young nobleman, one of the twenty-seven members of the aristocracy beheaded by the Habsburgs. In a dramatic sequence, Renata finally relived with powerful emotions and in considerable detail the actual events of the execution, including this nobleman’s intense anguish and agony. In all these scenes, Renata experienced full identification with this individual. She was not quite clear how these historical sequences were related to her present personality and what they meant. She finally concluded that these experiences must have been relivings of events from the life of one of her ancestors, although this was against her personal beliefs and philosophy. Being a close witness of this emotional drama, I shared Renata’s bewilderment and confusion. Trying to decipher this enigma, I chose two different approaches. On the one hand, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to verify the historical information involved and was increasingly impressed by its accuracy. On the other hand, I tried to apply the psychoanalytic approach to the content of Renata’s stories hoping that I would be able to understand them in psychodynamic terms as a symbolic disguise for her childhood experiences or elements of her present life situation. No matter how hard I tried, the experiential sequences did not make any sense from this point of view. I finally gave up on this problem when Renata’s LSD experiences moved into new areas. Focusing on other more immediate tasks, I stopped thinking about this peculiar incident. Two years later, when I was already in the United States, I received a long letter from Renata with the following unusual introduction: “Dear Dr. Grof, you will probably think that I am absolutely insane when I share with you the results of my recent private search.” In the text that followed, Renata described how she had happened to meet her father, whom she had not seen since her parents’ divorce when she was three years old. After a short discussion, her father invited her to have dinner with him, his second wife, and their children. After dinner, he told her that he wanted to show her the results of his favorite hobby, which she might find interesting. During World War II, the Nazis issued a special order that every family in the occupied countries had to present to the German authorities its pedigree demonstrating the absence of persons of Jewish origin for the last five generations. Working on the family genealogy because of existential 22 (20) Stanislav Grof
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