Tags / 16 quotes from 1 source
#unconscious
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Four levels of the psychedelic experience
Masters and Houston start by asking the basic question facing anyone who becomes involved with LSD—how can individual trips differ so wildly from one person to the next?—and drawing on several years of research, they speak of “four levels of the drug experience hypothesized as…
Rereading Grof on the unconscious
What made me sit down and reread Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious at precisely this point? I just don’t know. Several times in the following narrative there are going to be examples of events I can understand only as direct intervention of the unconscious in my…
Blindfold, earphones and the psychedelic language
I tripped in the bedroom again, and again had a wonderful afternoon, which I spent in almost exactly the same way—the most intense part of the trip with the blindfold and earphones, then the bath, then the walk on the Heath. In fact, from the first my tripping tended to…
Serial sessions unfold deeper layers
By the second or third trip, however, specific themes were beginning to stand out and evolve—and the serial approach began to make self-evident sense. I had marked a passage from Realms of the Human Unconscious where Grof discusses this development of material from one session…
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…
Uncovering a buried sense of worthlessness
The session in which my personal story was to explode started in the same way as the others. Perhaps it was worse. Again I was twisting on the bed with the pressure building, until I thought I was going to burst. Never before had I seen nightmarish visions inside my head, but…
Resistance on psychedelics
More generally, what I’d suggest was involved was . . . resistance. Resistance is an analytic concept you don’t hear much about in relation to psychedelic drugs, as though they were so potent that blocking them was out of the question. Such hasn’t been my experience. My first…
Acid as an intelligent entity
No doubt it was reprehensibly primitive thinking, but I was beginning to find it difficult not to see acid as something akin to an intelligent entity, capable of autonomous action. Jung’s concept of “the Self ” was as close to making this intellectually acceptable as I could…
The death instinct and the Nirvana Principle
I leaned back against the tree and tried to relax. Let go, I told myself. Let go, and let it take you where it wants . . . the trouble was, I liked the look of where it wanted to take me less and less. There was growing pressure on my chest, and I was finding it hard to…
Provocative and integrative halves of a trip
During that summer in the glade I read Christopher Bache’s Dark Night, Early Dawn, which had just come out and remains the outstanding attempt to get LSD studies on the road again. For a large part of his self-experimentation Bache had a series of horrendous trips. At the most…
A childhood illness as root trauma
The CD played out, so it must have been the best part of an hour—then abruptly several disparate pieces of information jigsawed themselves together. Suddenly I knew that I had been very seriously ill as a young child when I was living at Windle Hey. Perhaps it was bronchitis…
Acid doubles back to dig out trauma
Yet again I was amazed at the drug’s flexibility. All last summer I had been going deeper and deeper into boundary- and ego-loss states, and when finally I panicked at the depth to which surrender was being demanded, the acid had doubled back on itself to concentrate…
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…
Why some trips are good and others bad
Mulling it over afterward, however, I saw that it did allow me to reframe the question of why some people had “good” and others “bad” trips. All along Grof had maintained that the typical order in which the matrices tend to manifest is BPM 2, BPM 3, BPM 4 . . . and only then…