Medicine and the Mysteries of the Mind

It’s a profound distance from the grim mental hospital in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, where Dr. Olga Kharitidi was a staff psychiatrist, to the elegant Santa Monica hotel lobby where she now faces her first author interview. Settling down at a window table, Kharitidi pulls her book out of a satchel. She received the publication copy just this morning and examines it with discernible amazement.

Advance reviews suggest that “Entering the Circle: Ancient Secrets of Siberian Shamanism Discovered by a Russian Psychiatrist” (Harper San Francisco), may prove as revelatory to readers at the end of the millennium as anthropologist Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan” was to readers in the late ‘60s. Kharitidi’s book launched a bidding war for foreign rights, and film rights have already been optioned by producer Robert Watts’ North Tower Films (“Meetings with Remarkable Men”). And all this before U.S. publication, at the end of this month, and from a medical doctor who never dreamed she would write a book.

For all her accomplishments, Kharitidi, 33, is quite young, with luminous blue-green eyes and a ready smile. This morning, wearing a fitted black leather jack and jeans, she looks both svelte and comfortable. “When people meet me they are surprised, because they expect to see some old Siberian woman wearing a fur hat,” she says almost apologetically.

Kharitidi was born in Novosibirsk, where both her parents were doctors and medicine was “the family business.” Her great-grandfather, a physician, served in the Czar’s army in World War I, but had the audacity to write a report on the appalling medical conditions the soldiers endured. For that, he was sent to Siberia. His son, Kharitidi’s grandfather, was also a physician. He wrote a report about the inhumane conditions suffered by workers at the factory where he worked. For that, he was dispatched to the Gulag for 20 years.

She grew up a member of the Soviet elite, with access to a fine education. At an early age, however, she became aware of the existence of what she terms a “spiritual underground.”

Two businessmen shouting into their cellular phones at the adjacent table momentarily capture Kharitidi’s attention. She turns back, speaking thoughtfully: “In Russia life was so difficult. Some people emigrated to another country and some people did what we called ‘inner emigration.’ You were forced to live in your inner life, to create some kind of community with close friends, to have some kind of reality that was beautiful because the rest of what was around was disgusting in many ways.

“You were forced to go inside, to study books, to look for knowledge from other people, from other times. In America, it’s so easy just to fall into living life and to be consumed by all these external pleasures. When I meet people here who are making the effort to live a spiritual life, I know what it costs them to stay with their inner truths and not to be hypnotized by all these attractions.”

Kharitidi’s commitment to her profession sustained her as she struggled with abysmal conditions at the Siberian hospital. Drunken orderlies abused the inmates, sustenance was thin gruel and, possibly the most egregious offense, psychiatry was abused.

“Sluggish schizophrenia” was used to justify incarceration of political dissidents, “metaphysical intoxication” for anyone indiscreet enough to be caught reading a Bible or a book about Sufism. “It was a very big challenge,” she says, “to see all these young lives ruined in front of you and not be able to do much of anything.”

Kharitidi’s autobiography / adventure begins in 1989 when, on an impulse, she decided to accompany one of her psychotic patients to his home village in the isolated Altai Mountains. In Altai, she meets Umai, an old healer, or shaman, who initiates her into a miraculous and terrifying world where only a small fraction of events can be explained by reason. After her encounters with Umai, Kharitidi’s views of science, medicine and time, her entire life, were changed forever. The tone of the book is calm, intimate and straightforward. “It was like I was telling this story to some of my patients, who were very dear to me,” she says.

In traditional Siberian shamanism, a world view thought to date back to our Upper Paleolithic ancestors, the shaman is the guardian of the psychic and physical equilibrium of his (or her) tribe. By means of rituals, which use dance, chanting and sometimes potent drugs, the shaman enters a trance state during which his soul is thought to travel to the spirit world. There the shaman finds the powers necessary to heal an ailing individual or a troubled community. The shamans used to drink tea from hallucinogenic mushrooms to facilitate their ecstatic visions, then drink their even more toxic urine.

Shamans sometimes enter into acute psychotic states in their trances, she explains, but their biggest power is that they manage to come back, and they are taught how to handle that transition. It is this ability--to cross back and forth at will between perceptual borders--that she believes has significance for the rest of us. “The philosopher Karl Jaspers, also a psychiatrist, said once that there’s no real difference between the normal state and the pathological state. Just a difference of degrees. I believe we could learn to shift our attention to these states, to learn to do it without the expense of being sick.”

Asked if she considers herself a shaman, Kharitidi answers emphatically no. “I wouldn’t dream of being a shaman,” she says, “It’s not a pleasant life. I believe it’s a fate. In Siberia, it’s a life of complete service to the community.” As part of Stalin’s attempt to create “the new Soviet man,” all shamans were relegated to prison camps where they suffered and died alongside some of Russia’s brightest scientific and political thinkers.

Between 1990 and 1994, when she emigrated to the United States, Kharitidi crisscrossed Central Asia searching out and studying with the handful of shamans who had survived Stalin’s terror. When she returned from her travels to the hospital in Novosibirsk, she refined the healing ceremonies the shamans used to draw out the illnesses afflicting their patients. “I learned what the shamans meant when they said that each disease had its own spirit,” she says. She began to apply these techniques in her clinical practice. To avoid controversy, she referred to these unorthodox rituals, some involving trance and chanting, as experimental techniques. She was amazed by the startling, positive changes evoked in her patients.

“I saw how easily the concepts incorporated and even developed some of the most modern theories dealing with the structure of the human psyche,” she explains.

“The main part was a shifting of my perspective, of how I looked at the psychic structure of my patients, of myself, of people around me. Because the idea which I had before, it didn’t work well for me, something was missing from that picture. And that ‘something’ is missing now from the whole scientific world view.”

After settling with her lawyer husband and young daughter in Albuquerque, N.M., in 1994, Kharitidi began teaching workshops for psychotherapists. She shared many of her stories with them and they advised her to write them down. “I never wanted to be a writer, or thought about writing a book,” she says. “My ambition was always to be in private practice with my own psychiatric clinic.”

Until her official book tour begins in a few weeks, she’s house hunting in the L.A. area. “From the moment I drove into Los Angeles, I had a feeling this will be special city in my life,” she confides. She’s also spending time reviewing organic chemistry for her medical board exams. “I don’t believe we can teach people real spiritual knowledge like you teach science in the university,” she says, “but you can provoke the circumstances, the environment for people to start learning about themselves.”