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Teachings in the Afterlife
Salvia divinorum (10x extract)
Citation:   Burnsy. "Teachings in the Afterlife: An Experience with Salvia divinorum (10x extract) (exp38234)". Erowid.org. Mar 12, 2007. erowid.org/exp/38234

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
2 hits smoked Salvia divinorum (extract - 10x)
  T+ 0:30 2 hits smoked Salvia divinorum (extract - 10x)
  T+ 1:00 2 hits smoked Salvia divinorum (extract - 10x)
BODY WEIGHT: 155 lb
Let me just start by saying to whoever reads this that the following description may seem extremely fucked up in some parts, so just be warned. This is my experience with smoking Salvia Divinorum or Diviners Sage. I'm guessing the name ‘Diviner’s Sage’ basically means the Sage of those who become divine, which is a totally perfect description of it’s effects. This is my experience.

A friend of mine purchased some Salvia 10x extract from a trustworthy source and after reading a lot about its effects, he decided that we should try it. We were up at his cottage and decided at first to take it slow and just try very small hits off a joint of it. We rolled the Salvia dube and sparked it up. Upon taking a few small hauls I almost immediately noticed a pronounced but not overwhelming effect.

It was instantly energizing and was so cool that I sprang to my feet and almost wanted to start dancing. Everything in my body felt like it was sort of a swirling liquid and visually everything seemed to be sort of liquefying. Physically I felt like I was floating in waves of liquid. Yes this drug has a distinct physical/body sensation to it. The important thing to note here is that I was 100% aware of what was going on, at that small dose there was no psychological or emotional effect at all, it was basically just like being dizzy, where I could totally recognize what was happening to me. I was also laughing out loud because something about it was extremely funny. The effects lasted about two minutes then smoothly wore off. Overall I would describe the experience as the feeling of being on a gentle roller coaster.

Anyway after that we knew we had to delve deeper, so we took a package of the Salvia, a bong and a couple glasses of water next door to the spare cottage for further smoking. The spare cottage was super cool because it was basically a run down old shack on their lot that had been there since they bought the property and was ready for demolition. It had no insulation, no electricity, a really cool all wood interior with a high cathedral ceiling and lots of cracks where shafts of sunlight were cutting through the dusty air. Outside was a beautiful day and you could hear everything crystal clear through the wooden walls: tons of birds singing, dragonflies buzzing, squirrels etc. We were literally bathed in the sounds of nature. A perfect time and place for sweet hallucinogens.

I loaded up the bong with a small pinch. Took a couple of somewhat cautious hauls, held it in and laid back in the lawn chair while my friend respectfully stayed quiet as I tripped. By the time my back hit the chair I was already in the influence of a completely different gravitational system. I felt ultra heavy and somehow weightless and liquefied all at the same time. I was laughing a lot but was still totally aware of what was going on and where I was. Somehow I could tell that I was on the brink of something spectacular but just wasn’t there yet. It was as if a portal had been opened to a new realm that was beckoning me, but I wasn’t yet able to go all the way in. There was somehow a very fun and circus like vibe to this realm and I could tell that there was nothing to be afraid of and that I wanted to visit this other place.

As the laughter and effects subsided I was sitting up in my chair and enthusiastically telling Greg that he had to try this and that he had to “go there, man”. He did his initial cautious bong hits, sat back, started laughing and I’m sure had a similar experience to me. He came out of it a couple minutes later saying that we had to do more and go further, just the same as I felt. I was already totally blown away by how amazing this ultra cool substance was and we had not even scratched the surface yet.

It was my turn again. I loaded a healthy sized pinch into the bong and took two very large, deep hauls, holding them in almost as long as I could. I finally exhaled and as I was leaning back in the chair I started laughing hysterically. I remember blurting out through the uncontrollable laughter: “off to Smurf Village!”

When my back hit the chair the only term I could use to describe the next sensation is that I was steamrolled. I was absolutely fucking steamrolled! It was like something way bigger than me and weighing hundreds of tons, started at my feet and rolled up over my entire body, transforming me as it went. It was completely painless, but as it rolled over me it somehow pushed me or extruded me into a completely different realm. I was no longer in our current realm and I no longer even remembered that our realm had ever existed. I was now living a completely different life in a completely different place and reality with it's own unique history, details and context. It was exactly like being in a dream but about a hundred times more vivid and amazing.

The last things I remember of our reality as I was slipping away is that I was laying back with both hands behind my head, and I was starting to say “Oh my God, I can’t believe that it can - ” Then GONE into a totally different dimension. I went into the trip of a lifetime. My arms expanded outward into infinity and became the petals of an amazingly complex flower of some sort. I had actually become the flower and could comprehend all of the trillions of facets and details that made up the flowers’ pattern.

A moment later I changed shape once again. The petals transformed into wings and I became an unbelievably complex, multi-dimensional butterfly. The wings seemed to span out into infinity with these amazing electric-kaleidoscopic color patterns. I wasn’t exactly seeing all this visually but it was like I was seeing it through totally new senses that I never had before.

Again my being expanded outward and transformed. My wings spread out and became the surface of a lake. I actually became the lake, where my face was the surface of the water looking up at the sunny sky, and my arms, stretched outward, were the distant bays and the surrounding hills and forest. I actually was the land itself. Also, I wasn’t just any land, but a specific lake and hills at my cottage where I’ve spent many a day.

Now this next part is extremely hard to explain, but I then (somehow) became my own fathers’ soul or spirit. I was actually aware that somehow I had become my fathers’ soul, and was reliving the same experience that his soul had after death. The really weird thing is that I was also still the lake and landscape: I was simultaneously the landscape at our cottage and my own fathers’ spirit infused into one another looking up at the sky, and beyond towards heaven.

I gradually became more aware of the fact that there was a heaven up there and that I was looking towards it. While looking upwards I began to ascend up out of the lake as my fathers spirit, leaving the lake and hills behind me, and began traveling upwards through the sky towards what I knew was heaven. The realization struck me at that moment that I was reliving his exact experience of the ascent to heaven in the after life.

As I rose through the brilliant sky, I transformed again into the amazing infinitely large kaleidoscopic butterfly. The patterns of its wings were so detailed and complex that not even the most powerful supercomputers could generate them. The patterns were also extremely beautiful and harmonious. Anyway as I became this butterfly, I stopped being my fathers soul. That part of the “dream” was left behind and I moved on to a new stage where I was myself ascending towards heaven. When I arrived into heaven I was greeted by some sort of ‘entities’, which immediately took me to meet god.

God did not have a physical appearance but was more a radiant presence that greeted me. As I stood before him I was in awe but wasn’t too scared. It was time for god to pass judgment on my life to see if I was bound for heaven or not. During the judgment my entire life was streaming before my eyes, and I had the sense that everyone was seeing this stream of images. Thousands of overlapping questions were passing through me and some how directing or manipulating the images in this stream.

I suddenly became aware that I had physically transformed once again. Oddly enough my body had become a garden hose wound up onto one of those things you wind a hose onto for storage. The hose (my body) was wound on as tight as it could go to the point that it wouldn’t wind on any further. Someone was grasping the handle that winds and was forcing it further, stretching me on the spool as they pushed. I could feel the tension through my body as I stretched, and knew that somehow this was the climax of gods judgment. Somehow this wasn’t a scary or uncomfortable experience, it just seemed like a normal part of the ‘dream’.

Then the judgment was over and I guess I passed because then I was lead to a part of heaven that looked exactly like a neighborhood of houses and I somehow knew that this was my place in heaven where I would stay. The weird thing is that I wasn’t a person inhabiting a house but I actually transformed into a house and occupied a spot in the neighborhood. The other houses had faces and we could talk amongst ourselves across the streets and blocks of the neighborhood. I found the other houses really friendly and open. I was feeling happy about the idea of spending forever here with these ‘people’.

It was weird, we were just a large cluster of houses with faces chatting with each other. They all seemed somehow wise and were filling me in on the fundamental truths about the universe and the way things really are. I don’t remember any of their insights now, but I remember that it was very moving to have these truths revealed to me. But then I guess the trip started to wear off because I started drifting away from them as if I was on a conveyor belt or as if I was drifting through the air. I knew I was leaving them and I was sort of grief stricken because I felt like I would miss them.

I felt like I wanted to take that realm back with me and I yelled out to them that I was going to tell other people about this realm. They all simultaneously burst into laughter as if to say “silly child, you can’t tell anyone about us”. I was quickly getting pulled back into reality at this point and there was a brief moment where both realms (the one from my trip and reality with Greg sitting in the next chair) were visible to me, the houses were to my left as if I was seeing them through a closing portal and Greg was to my right. For a brief second I somehow thought Greg would be able to glimpse into this portal and see the other realm, so I started trying to say to Greg to look and check this out before it disappears, but I’m sure I must have sounded very confused and full of nonsense to him.

Then I was fully back in reality and all traces of the trip were gone. I was feeling completely blown away by what I just experienced and I was sort of blurting out “oh my god, I don’t even know where to start, you cannot even believe what I just experienced....oh my god...” For the first few seconds I really felt like I wanted Greg to understand what I had just been through, but my head started to clear itself and everything came back to normal. I just lied in the chair quietly for a while, getting readjusted to things and telling Greg that he absolutely had to smoke and have a trip.

Greg did smoke and from all accounts his experience sounds every bit as phenomenal and mind blowing as mine, but completely different. He did meet other ‘people’ in some sort of other ‘realm’, and it all seemed very real and amazing to him but the context and storyline were completely different. In retrospect I think what diviner’s sage basically does is take whatever’s in your sub-conscience and makes it seem real like a sort of dream-state. Of course this is just speculation on my part, I only 'believe' this because while I am not personally religious, I did grow up in a Christian family, went to Sunday school as a child and grew up believing in heaven and God. I've always struggled with religion so I think those themes are fairly prominent in the back of my mind, and so provided a wealth of psychological material for my trip to stem from.

The other interesting thing is that my father had died just about half a year before that so it was of course still in my thoughts. When he died we spread his ashes over the lake at our cottage, the exact lake I ‘dreamed’ I had become and then transformed into his spirit. It’s pretty clear that it had an influence on my trip.

The really striking thing here is just how real and convincing the trip seemed. For months after the experience Greg and myself were convinced that it was not just an illusion but that the drug had really opened up other facets to reality that are actually there but we just aren't gifted with the senses needed to perceive them. We were sure that Salvia had momentarily given us new senses to see deeper into reality and that what it was showing us was true.

I'm not completely sure I still believe this now, but I carried that conviction with me for a long time. I really can’t explain how it works and I don’t really understand the trip I had but I do know that it was damn cool, super fun and there was nothing unpleasant about it. Even the after effects were nice, no headache or hang over. I felt really mellow and sort of happy for the rest of the day. No doubt I want to try this again someday.

Exp Year: 2001ExpID: 38234
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 12, 2007Views: 33,419
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Salvia divinorum (44) : First Times (2), Glowing Experiences (4), Mystical Experiences (9), Families (41), Entities / Beings (37), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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