Millions of people around the world have had psychospiritual breakthroughs involving their actual physical birth and spiritual rebirth while undergoing a long deep breathing session or while on a psychedelic drug. Dr. Stanislav Grof has made a record of thousands of such experiences since 1954, and he came up with a paradigm in which the experiences fit.
This is the second of two dialogues that I imagine between my lead / narrating character, Dylan Steffan, now 35, and Dr. Grof. This fictional conversation is the best I can get at how Grof around the year 1974 would have introduced an eagerly curious psychiatry student to the subject of the four perinatal matrices.
Grof and Dr. Arthur Janov are the only two major psychiatric thinkers who came to believe their patients who relived memories from infancy, birth, and in utero. Janov rejected the range of human spiritual experiences. Grof welcomed them, and found that ego and spiritual rebirth often accompany the reliving of our actual experiences before, during, and after birth.
All my best,
Mike
Baltimore
April 1974
As I wrap up my second year of psychiatry school at Johns Hopkins, I’m back in his office with Dr. Stanislav Grof.
“So I understand the psychodynamic dimension of consciousness well,” I assert. “Tell me more about the perinatal dimension.”
“Where to begin?” Grof asks himself. “A perinatal experience can go on for hours in a psychedelic session.” I raise my eyebrows but I’m not too surprised, given my Primal Therapy experiences. “This is the Rankian level of the unconscious. Otto Rank –”
“—Otto Rank?”
“Yes.”
“My uncle and aunt, Riis and Carmen Evans, are Rankians,” I tell him. “They both went through therapy with Doctor Rank in 1928. Aunt Carmen was a Rankian therapist, primarily in Wyoming, from the late 1920s into the 1950s.”
“Fascinating,” says Grof, “and rare. Rankians were and are rare. Rank provided a conceptual framework in his 1927 book The Trauma of Birth that I find useful. In my approach, I delineate four Basic Perinatal Matrixes. What a COEX system is at the psychodynamic level a perinatal matrix is at the perinatal level.”
“Got it. So these experiences can last for hours?”
“Yes. Patients go through the postures and movements of a fetus passing through the stages of birth. We see facial contortions, tremors, twitches, shaking, twisting movements, discharges of tension, a pale or purple face, a fast pulse, sweating, nausea, and oscillating respiration or a gasping for breath.”
“And there are four phases.”
“Yes,” Grof responds. “The first perinatal matrix – Matrix One – is primal union with one’s mother. In a good womb experience, there is a sense of security and protection and a satisfaction of all needs. A good womb experience is blissful, tranquil, peaceful, and serene.”
“And most people have a good womb experience?”
“Yes. And a good womb experience sets up a COEX system into which memories and feelings go throughout our life. Times when our needs are satisfied. When we are free of pain or unpleasantness. When we are relaxed, secure, and filled with positive emotions. Happy times in infancy and childhood. Harmonious family times. Carefree and enjoyable games and other playtimes with our peers.
“Later on, in youth and adulthood, this COEX system involves encounters in satisfying or gratifying relationships, encounters with natural beauty – think of bathing in a warm lake – and encounters with beautiful paintings, sculptures, and jewelry and other artifacts as well as beautiful castles, palaces, churches, and temples. Good music, good dancing. All these are positive Matrix One experiences.”
“Sounds wonderful,” I say.
“However,” Grof says, “a bad womb experience involves disease, noise, chronic anxiety and tension and stress, cruel treatment of the mother, or cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs. These things cause distress. In a sense, a bad womb experience is a form of pollution in Matrix One.”
“The second perinatal matrix – Matrix Two – is the no-exit experience. Matrix Two occurs while the mother’s uterine system is closed – so there’s no way out – but chemicals cause the fetus discomfort and the mechanical pressures are disturbing.”
“The contractions,” I say.
“Yes,” Grof replies. “The fetus’s world is ending. The fetus faces a vital threat, an emergency – an unbearable claustrophobic hell – and thinks the pain and suffering will never end. That the pain will last forever. It’s like being encaged and tortured physically and psychologically.”
“Good grief. Who knew it was that bad?”
“The Matrix Two experience becomes the core to the COEX system for storing memories and feelings for all life situations that seem hopeless. When an overwhelming destructive force endangers someone who is helpless. Certain diseases, bad accidents, surgeries, imprisonments, harsh interrogations, long-term hunger or thirst, suffocation, an avalanche, a collapsed house, a near-drowning, abandonment, emotional deprivation, rejection, constricting family situations, threatening events, oppression.”
“Profound,” I respond.
“The third perinatal matrix – Matrix Three – involves the propulsion through the birth canal. The contractions continue but the cervix is open and there is now a way out. Nonetheless, Matrix Three is an enormous, titanic struggle. The fetus suffers crushing mechanical pressures and frequently a high degree of suffocation. It’s catastrophic. It’s really an encounter with death. And yet at the same time, usually alternating with that agonizing suffering, there is the wild, ecstatic rapture of being born.”
“Wow!”
Grof smiles. “So Matrix Three connects via a COEX system with later experiences in life of both agonizing suffering and wild, ecstatic rapture.”
I nod. “And then we make it out.”
Grof nods. “The fourth perinatal matrix – Matrix Four – is leaving the womb. There is sudden relief. There is relaxation. Everything now depends on the quality of mothering and other caregiving.
“In a good newborn experience, a COEX system is set up that will associate natural beauty with safety, fertility, and generosity. Think of birds hatching from their eggs, animals feeding their young.”
“Well, honestly,” I say, “this is fairly easy to understand, the way you’ve just laid it out.”
“Let’s meet again next week and explore these experiences on a spiritual level,” Grof says. “And the spiritual experiences of death and rebirth usually accompany the matrices of struggle and birth. This makes perinatal experiences much richer than what I just described.”
“Interesting,” I say. “Look forward to it.”
A week later Dr. Grof continues.
“A positive state of Matrix One is an oceanic state of consciousness – a blissful, tension-free, ecstatic sense of cosmic unity. People under the influence of a positive Matrix One experience feel that they are in touch with pure being and with infinity – in a way that is timeless in the present moment, beyond rational analysis, mysterious, and ineffable. And that this state is the essence of being and existence, and that the insights revealed in it are of fundamental and universal significance – that all this is more real than one’s usual perceptions and concepts.”
“This is how the hippies drive regular folks up a wall,” I counter. “’Oh, the whole thing’s been revealed to me. It’s more real than real, it’s pure being, so essential, but I can’t explain it cause it’s so mysterious and so ineffable.’”
Grof thinks for a moment. “Matrix One makes people think the world is a friendlier place than it is. But it’s a state of appreciating sunrises and sunsets, flora and fauna, blue skies and star-filled skies, oceans and rivers and waterfalls, and luscious tropical islands and flourishing forests.
I tilt my head, take this in.
“And Matrix Two?”
“Matrix Two is a state of hopelessness. One is aware of only the bad and evil aspects of existence. A person can’t find or appreciate anything good in the entire world. Human life seems bereft of meaning, and any search for meaning seems futile. Everything seems monstrous or absurd. Matrix Two is a state of existential alienation. The apocalypse is at hand. The mind tends to focus on terror, torture, oppressed victims, war, epidemics, accidents, and natural disasters as well as the senile and the dying and the insane.”
“Dreadful,” I say. “But I know people who are stuck there.”
“And Matrix Three?”
“Matrix Three involves powerful currents of energy streaming through the whole body,” Grof tells me. “And cataclysmic forces like storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, other storms, meteors, and comets.”
“Makes sense.”
“Matrix Four must be the best – the ideal state.”
“Yes,” Grof replies. “In Matrix Four, we feel clean, purged, liberated, redeemed. Our senses are open, receptive, and fresh. We appreciate natural and artistic beauty and we listen to music in whole new ways. We experience serenity and joy.”
“Nice.”
“We encounter light – usually white or clear or golden light, or a rainbow or intricate patterns of light and color like peacock feathers – that is of a radiant and supernatural quality. For most people, this light is perceived to be from a Divine Source. We affirm the positive forces in the universe and we perceive that we are an integral part of Creation. We reunite the core of our being with the Divine, and the Godhead is usually perceived as a Divine Sun.”
“That’s the ultimate,” I say.
“We love our fellow human beings, we appreciate friendships and warm human relationships, we respect ourselves and respect others, and we have a sense of both service and justice. We are motivated to pursue our values as an intrinsic dimension of our personality and as a logical and integral dimension of a universal order. Money, status, prestige, and power strike us as absurd things to obsess over. We see our daily task as sacred and we live each day in freedom, fullness, and joy.”
“Good lord,” I say, “how incredible! That’s the ideal life – that’s the end-goal. That’s the whole reason for doing psychedelics.”
“There are other ways besides psychedelics,” Grof tells me. “Reichian experiences, Gestalt experiences, sacred initiation rites from cultures around the world – like fasting or trance dancing.”
“That’s good. Psychedelics are risky. I want to be able to encourage everyone to pursue this quality of consciousness and life. But you mentioned the Divine. This only works for theists?”
“No,” says Grof. “Materialists, positivists, skeptics, cynics, agnostics, and atheists – all confront the spiritual dimension during their psychedelic sessions and all become interested in the spiritual search.”
“Remarkable.”
“The spiritual experiences often do not fit into the religion in which one was raised. And the spiritual wisdom varies across a wide range of faiths and paths. But psychedelics cause people to look into the universal scheme of things, the spiritual dimension, and to develop insights they find convincing.”
“Excellent.”
“Matrix Four is like resting on the summit after successfully ascending up a steep high mountain. It’s like a rainbow after a storm, a peaceful atmosphere after a tempest, and trees covered with fresh buds and blossoms and an idyllic springtime landscape of luscious meadows and pastures after a challenging winter.”
“I think I understand the perinatal dimension of consciousness. What more could we ask for?”
“Oh, there’s more, my friend,” Grof responds. “The third level is the transpersonal level. More on that next year.”
As Grof and I depart, I think about all this in a state of amazement.