The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 41 of 125
The perinatal crisis of ego death
For Grof insisted there was no way of stably accessing the transpersonal without living through the full implications of the perinatal—implications that climaxed in a convulsive death/rebirth crisis. And, frankly, I wasn’t sure how much I was up for this. I double-checked by reading another of his early books, LSD Psychotherapy, which is very much the professional, hands-on manual; and, spelled out in greater clinical detail, the final paroxysms of the perinatal make chilling reading. In a section titled “Critical Situations in LSD Sessions,” he wrote: For some it can contain certain physical conditions, such as a high degree of suffocation, agonizing physical pain, blacking out, or violent seizure-like activity. Others have to face a situation which is psychologically utterly unacceptable to them, and surrender to it. The most frequent of these are vomiting, losing control of the bladder or bowels; sexually unacceptable behavior; confusion and disorientation; making various inhuman sounds, and humiliation or loss of prestige. A very difficult and important experience that occurs in the context of the ego death is the expectation of a catastrophe of enormous dimensions. Subjects face agonizing tension increasing to fantastic proportions and develop a conviction that they will explode and the entire world will be destroyed.1