DOSE:

oral

Mushrooms

(fresh)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

I had been in a depressed state for several weeks. I could not come to terms with being me, could not look in the mirror without cringing. I hated myself, my life, I was miserable and had no hope of it ever getting better. Life was excrutiatingly difficult to live. I felt completely joyless, and frankly the prospect of having to live another 60 odd years (I am 23) terrified me.

Then one day I simply wanted to experience something other than this destructive mood. I went down to my local headshop and bought some magic mushrooms (you can buy them fresh in the UK legally). Whilst I was there, I looked over and noticed a bag of SALVIA DIVINORUM. I had heard about it, so I decided I would give it a go. I bought the mushrooms and the salvia and went home. I took a few mushrooms right away, and within a few hours, I was to experience salvia for the first time....

...I was in the house alone, tripping slightly under the effect of the mushrooms. My housemate came home and saw I was a little out of it. He immediately rolled himself some spliffs then came to my room to get high. He started talking to me, telling me how it had been so long since I had done anything, and that I had been in a shitty mood for too long. I agreed (my mind more open now) and I told him there was something I wanted to try. I took out the salvia and asked him to wait whilst I did it. He agreed and watched whilst I took a big hit (about one bucket) of it in a bong then sat back as the effects were about to take hold:

At first, after holding in the smoke for about 30 seconds, I just breathed out and felt a little stoned. There was a sensation of pressure around me, and then I kind of felt like I was being smeared sideways. I lay down, and suddenly the effects hit me very strongly. I was lying on a Persian carpet, and I had very strong sensations of merging with it. It is hard to explain, but I felt as if I was being pulled apart by very harsh waves that were cutting through my being. I no longer had a normal body, but instead had a sliced-up consciousness that felt both confused and fearful. As the effects came on even stronger, I started to lose my thoughts and my sense of where I was. This is where the experience went beyond intense. The feelig of being cut up got very strong. I began to feel quite scared, as if my molecules were being violently torn apart. It was a very physical sensation, not just a mental one. I cant stress enough how real it felt, like I was actually physically being rearranged, and disassembled.

Then, after about a minute, I lost all sensation of having a body or mind. Whereas a few moments ago I felt like I was being cut apart, I now felt that all my molecules had somehow been spread evenly over infinite space. Strangely, if I opened my eyes, I could vaguely recognise that I was in a room, but somehow I was seeing through the illusion of my room actually being real. My eyes saw the room, but my being felt as if it was touching all corners of the universe. This created the strange effect in my mind that my room was in fact the size of the universe. So I closed my eyes again. What I was feeling was far too profound to describe in words (of course). Whilst it may sound ridiculous now to say that I felt I was touching the edges of space, at the time it was a very real and very powerful experience.

The thing about writing something like this, or reading it for that matter, is that your mind cannot grasp what is being described. I am writing this now by accessing a memory of what happened. The memory is only a faded representation of the reality of the experience. Right now I feel normal and safe at my computer, but whilst it was happening, I was HERE and it was happening NOW. I was not HAVING an experience, I actually WAS the experience.

Anyway, just after the peak of the trip, my whole world was filled with shapes and patterns that seemed to streak through the sky of my mind like organic life. The images were both frightening and amazing. Frightening because they moved with such power, and amazing because of their infinite complexity and organisation within seemingly structured arrangements. I could only describe it as like looking at a sky filled with crawling colourful bugs, all crawling and moving along lines that were laid out by some higher intelligence. Each of them giving me the same strang feeling of being harshly cut and torn apart, as if the sky was my body, and I was somehow inside my own body, watching everything move through it.

Then, as I slowly began to come down and 'reform' and reassimilate, my thoughts returned. They circled around my head as thoughts like 'Holy shit' or 'Oh my god' and the usual dumbfounded stuff like that. Also, and this is interesting, I felt as if I was wrapped in vines and leaves. My body still had not returned fully, but I definately felt like I was surrounded by plant vibrations.

Now for the really important part. I felt as if I was being told - by this plant that had me in its grips - to be grateful for my life. It had just shown me how intense and profound my existence was. My petty worries and pathetic state of mind recently had not been respecting my life. I had been wasting my time by sulking and dwelling on problems. I still felt that life was hard, but I felt that the plant was showing me that if I accessed this hardness, and saw through it, my perceptions could open up onto the mystery of life. RESPECT is the main thing I took away from this experience. Respect for the unimaginable power from which my life emerges.

As a nice final touch, when I looked over at my friend (who was wide-eyed, watching me in this strange state) a swarm of silver fish swam past me, like a wall of subtle light - the last fading images of an intense dream, washing through my room. I waited for the fish to pass and disappear, then immediately started to talk to my friend about what I had just experienced.

After the experince, my mood changed completely. I realised that there is so much more to life than I can normally perceive wth my standard senses. I have always known and kinda felt there is more to life, but it took an experience like this to really turn what were just concepts, into known reality that I had experienced first-hand.

Salvia, in my opinion, was not pleasurable in the way weed or ecstacy or coke might be. I could not do this at a party. If there was pleasure in the salvia, it was too intense to be seen as ordinary pleasure. Instead, salvia is more of an intense ride. Something that you should respect. To end with a bad metaphor: Other party drugs like weed etc. are kinda like donkeys at a fair, You can ride them and have fun and get a little out of it. Some donkeys are nasty and some are strong, some will even give you a fairly rough ride. BUT SALVIA is no donkey. Think of it more like a dragon that is tied to a black tree round the back of the fairground where the kids arent allowed to go. Not something you should climb on half-heartedly.

Peace....

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 33014
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 23, 2004	Views: 96,027
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Mushrooms (39), Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), General (1)