Tags / 12 quotes from 3 sources
#birth
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Big brains, narrow hips and the birth of parenting
But why does it take so much time and effort? Blame our big, fat, gold-plated, nothing-else-like-it brains. We evolved to have larger brains with higher IQs, which allowed us to move from leopard food to Masters of the Universe in 10 million very short years. We gained big…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Grof's transpersonal realm
the transpersonal realm One of Grof’s most provocative findings was that birth and death appear to be deeply interrelated in the unconscious mind. Reliving their own birth, subject after subject believed they were in fact dying—dying for real—and, emerging from their ordeal…
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…
The order in which the matrices appear
In his experience of hands-on LSD psychotherapy, Grof said, if an individual’s memories of pleasure or pain were traced back through his or her life, they would betray increasingly clear features of their origin in the perinatal realm. Consciously reexperiencing the core…
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…
Somatic symptoms take center stage
Seemingly I was involved in a new cycle of trips. They weren’t like any previous ones: first and foremost because each one was the same, something that had never happened before. There was no beauty . . . no terror . . . no madcap humor. All that remained from earlier sessions…
Perinatal means every shock to the body
Belatedly, I saw the full extent of what Grof had meant by “perinatal” experience: not just what I, and I suspect many other people who read his early books, tend to reduce exclusively to the birth trauma, but all the other shocks inflicted upon and recorded by the physical…
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…
Eleusis and Plato's Forms
Did Eleusis birth the basic concepts of Western and Near Eastern metaphysics—the “Forms,” the “Ideas,” the “Archetypes”? The concept of another world, prior to, more pristine than this, from which we journey forth and to which we return in a richer, more highly evolved form?…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
A human body is like a whirlpool
our bodily cells, and their smallest components, appear and disappear much as light-waves vibrate and as people go from birth to death. A human body is like a whirlpool; there seems to be a constant form, called the whirlpool, but it functions for the very reason (that no water…
Is birth the cause of death?
Moreover, as the egg/chicken relation suggests, not all the features of a total situation have to appear at the same time. The existence of a man implies parents, even though they may be long since dead, and the birth of an organism implies its death. Wouldn’t it be as…
Wanting to be admired for trivial tricks
it will often happen that when you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, “Now isn’t that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. OK, so I’m beautiful, but I got my body from my parents and it was just luck. I prefer to be admired for myself, not my…