The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 27 of 125
Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrices
At the time I didn’t know what to make of any of this—and all I am doing at the moment is to give a quick synopsis of what I read. For the really important bit came next. Grof suggested that these primal experiences, our very first taste of sentient life in the world, were of an intensity that nothing in our subsequent life could rival, and as such they formed existential cores around which all subsequent experience tended to congregate and classify itself. In fact, or so it struck me, he was proposing a new body of archetypes, although, perhaps because of the overriding Jungian associations, he did not want to use the term. Instead he called them Basic Perinatal Matrices, abbreviated (mercifully, I remember thinking at the time) to BPM. Thus mystical experiences, experiences of cosmic unity, were referred to as BPM 1; classic bad trips were BPM 2; experiences of heroic effort in life-threatening circumstances were BPM 3; while those of spiritual rebirth were BPM 4.