DOSE:

2 hits

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

I had my first salvia experience recently. According to the individual who introduced me to it, I 'broke through'. This person had made the salvia extract himself, and I traded him two doses of mimosa hostilis for it so that money would not be involved and possibly pollute the trip. My mindset going into it was a familiar mix of excitement and nervousness, the way I always feel before I take a hallucinogen I've never had. I also viewed salvia as a sentience necessary to respect - now I know that salvia is one the most potent symbolic avatars of the paradox of existence. Going into it, I consciously resisted expecting anything about what the experience would be like. From reading the reports, I knew there was no way I could prepare my mind aside from being respectful and not resisting the experience. Now I know how true this is.

I had not slept the night before. I also had been taking Adderall up until about nine hours before the salvia. As I suspected, the amphetamines had no perceivable effect upon my experience. I was at my girlfriend's house (whom I have dated for about a year) and was sitting on the floor directly in front of her, but not facing her. Tool's Lateralus was playing, due to the desire of another friend who was there to have it on while he was tripping. The only person experienced with salvia, A, suggested turning the music off. He was absolutely correct, because the beats had a disturbing way of stretching certain parts of the trip indefinably.

I took the salvia at about 11 or 11:30 PM. The out of body portion of the experience lasted about 3-4 minutes. For about five minutes following the end of my out of body experience, reality appeared to ripple, at first very strongly, but less as time went on. I reached baseline at about midnight, though my mind was still glowing from the experience.

According to A, the salvia was 5 or 6x. I took a hit from the bowl, filling my lungs as much as possible, holding the flame of the butane lighter directly on the leaf. I held it in for probably around 20 or 30 seconds. Right before I took the second and final hit (which I barely remember doing) I said 'I can already feel it', tripping harder than I ever have before, and this is before the trip truly began. Note, I have taken ayahuasca 5 times, mushrooms 6 times, acid twice, and have had overwhelmingly powerful trips before. I call the salvia experience a trip, but this is an erroneous way to refer to it.

I fell out of this body/mind. I no longer perceived myself as being human, because I was not. The chronology in which this happened is difficult to reconstruct because the moment I was separated from my body/mind I was outside the boundaries of subjective 'human' time.

The 'first' thing that happened was an indescribably potent pull. I remember being scared, but I realized this was because of my body/mind's natural fear of being forgotten, or at least distanced in terms of meaningfulness to the soul-consciousness. I made the decision to let go on the basis that any resistance would only make it worse. I was pummeled with sensory input that was completely foreign, having no relation whatsoever to the construction of reality as I previously knew it. And at the same time, I 'remembered' things. It felt like waking from a non-lucid dream in which I had assumed a role. This life, everything I have experienced, shrunk to the size of an atom or a cell within my body. And every human, every living thing, every moment of this reality was part of me, 'remembered' by me. Most of these memories have faded from my limited mind, but I experienced lifetimes of random, seemingly uneventful, but hauntingly beautiful moments.

What came with this was a complete absence of time. The realization that all moments and events were at once part of me negated the existence of time. At least, as I had previously understood it. In my 'remembered' reality, time was a tool. There was a powerful force that seemingly used time as a weapon against me, because then I started to die. All moments of this reality are meaningful, and I felt these moments dissolve under the pressure of this other force. I remember that it felt like an eternity. My fright was the compounded fear of all reality dissolving into nothingness. There was a force performing this action, something far more powerful than the combined energy of this atomic-based existence. This force intentionally did not let me see it. Not with my human eyes, I mean, but the alien perceptions of super-consciousness. I felt like I was being chastisted, in a sense, because I committed some sort of faux paus by waking up from human reality. But at the same time, it also felt like I was being taught many things and given many gifts, and the penance for receiving them was to spend an eternity slowly dying and helpless.

The last part of my trip was the most mind-blowing because it was really the first part of the trip, I just hadn't realized it within this body/mind until the trip was almost over. This occurred directly following my re-awakenment into a more complex reality construct. Immediately a voice speaks, reverberating within the top half of my perceived existential boundaries. 'What did you do? WHAT did you do?' Within the context of my re-awakenment, this question meant: 'You do not understand at all what you have subjected yourself to?'. It was a warning as well, because I suddenly comprehended that the building block of reality is the paradox. The Creator created itself before it existed. But how is that possible? At what point did existence just 'pop' out of nothingness? And then my awareness exploded as the answer was shown to me. There was never a beginning. There will never be an end. The past and the future DO NOT EXIST. A paradox never dies because it is never born and thus our perception of time is the re-shuffling of these existential building blocks within the 'body' of the Creator. It is the same patterning over and over, compounding always into new realms of complexity.

As I am writing this, I remember that I was able to comprehend fully the nature of a paradox, but I also realize that I cannot remember it fully because I am not comprehending a paradox right now. Doing so is impossible within the boundaries of a human mind. One must drift away from being human in order to understand. In retrospect, attempting to apply adjectives such as good, bad or fun to the experience seems completely absurd to me. At least with an out of body experience, because the things I felt are beyond the adjectives of human language. So when people ask me if I liked the overall experience, I say it was too frightening to be good and too wondrous to be bad.

An interesting side effect of the trip was being able to multi-task for about one or two hours following. I noticed I could do this when I was listening to a friend of mine tell me a story. I was paying attention to what he was saying, but there was another train of thought that could not be ignored, the constant influx of epiphanies and insights resulting from my out of body experience with eternity. The moment I realized I was paying full attention to two different trains of thought, I looked down at my hands and realized I had been rolling a cigarette. And then it occurred to me that the part of myself realizing I was multitasking was in fact another train of thought. This was the first time I've ever been able to engage in more than one train of thought at a time. I am planning to again subject myself to the salvia experience. Next time I do it I will be surrounded by trees and sunlight instead of inside a human structure. I feel this will add a more powerful yet benign aspect to the trip.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 41680
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 20, 2007	Views: 14,569
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Mystical Experiences (9), Entities / Beings (37), First Times (2)