The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 114 of 125
BPM 4 was Flower Power
Describing BPM 4, the climactic moment of the baby’s delivery, Grof lists some of the salient features of reliving this matrix. [The subject] is struck by visions of blinding white or golden light and has feelings of enormous decompression and expansion of space. . . . The general atmosphere is that of liberation, redemption, salvation, love, and forgiveness. The individual feels cleansed and purged. . . . The individual tuned in to this experiential realm usually discovers in himself genuinely positive values, such as a sense of justice, appreciation of beauty, feelings of love, self-respect, and respect for others. These values, as well as motivations to pursue them and act in accordance with them, seem to be, on this level, an intrinsic part of the human personality. Basic Perinatal Matrix 4 is the matrix of spiritual rebirth. Its typical themes run through all religious conversions, from Road-to-Damascus-type theophanies to the quietism of many ordinary people’s nature mysticism. As an erstwhile hippie, I had been especially dumb, for that evening should have thrown a flood of light on my own generation’s experience with LSD. The passage continued: Symbolism characteristic of BPM 4 selectively displays situations . . . such as spring landscapes with melting snow or ice . . . luscious meadows and idyllic pastures in springtime . . . trees covered with fresh buds and blossoms.1 What Grof was describing was Flower Power! My first response to this was equally discreditable. I was pissed off that it had taken me some fifty trips to arrive at the point many of my contemporaries had reached on their first excursion. Swanning around in their party gear to the Grateful Dead, and regarding “bad trips” incredulously . . . as from the worldview of BPM 4 you would be bound to do.