DOSE:

repeated

Salvia divinorum

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

I have journeyed into the worlds of salvia divinorum (the divine sage) and our good friend dimethyltryptamine on numerous occasions and have always been drawn back for further explorations. At times my mind begs the question, is it worth the attempt to describe the rapture and sheer transcendence of these substances in words or is it in vain, must these realms must be experienced personally to be at all understood? I feel my experience can only provide a roadmap to aid in making the transcendent a less confusing and potentially overwhelming space for anyone else out there who is interested in such hyperspatial pursuits. That being said, allow me in this piece to present a composite of my encounters with the salvia goddess, and I will leave the DMT retrospective for another time.

I feel that salvia divinorum, in its most potent forms (40x and liquid salvia extract), has informed much of my life and world as a whole and specifically my attitudes regarding magick and non-physical entities. In my early period of usage (circa junior year of high school), I began encountering the “ecology of souls” that McKenna has described in his works. Once I had broken through, I encountered an infinitely teeming void, its liquid corridors seemingly crawling with super-conscious beings. Whether one labels them gods, aliens, self-transforming machine elves, or even garden variety machine elves is of no consequence to the fact of their felt and immediately present existence.

These realms are co-present with our own mundane reality but that they are not experienced because human evolution at this stage primarily locks us into the 3-D world of trees, cars, houses, oceans, paved wastelands, “physical” people and the like. All that salvia (or anything else) provides is a key to unlock the “doors of perception” (Huxley’s terms) and gain a more fully realized version of the complex spiritual reality I find myself living in (or choose to ignore as the case may be). The argument that these hyperspatial entities are figments of the human imagination is trivial, as the same argument can be made for ‘real’ people in the ‘real’ world (solipsism). I give as much respect to my experience of dream and faerie realities as I do to my waking and working life, and hold all as equally sacred and equally mundane as anything else.

The entities I encounter in this dimension are buzzing with energy, sometimes frantic, they are the very architects of the grosser levels of my existence. These are the gods who create and destroy universes in the blink of an eye, and guide us in the ongoing procession of states of awareness of the Self. They operate not as individual consciousness, but as group-mind, in unified collectives with a shared intentionality that represents our potential as humans and from which we have much to learn.

In McKenna’s words, this experience is “…a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.” What I often describe in elf or alien imagery can be compared to Hindu motifs in the words of Joseph Campbell: “The Earth is the energy of which the god is a personification and of which matter is a concretization… Vishnu sleeps on the cosmic serpent, that cosmic serpent floats on the cosmic sea, and Vishnu in that sleep dreams the dream that is the universe, the lotus of a universe. On the lotus sits a Brahma, and every time Brahma opens his eyes, A world-age comes into being, governed by an Indra. He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes, another world-age. He closes his eyes. This goes on for 360 divine years, eyes opening and closing, and then the lotus dissolves, and it goes back, another lotus, another Brahma, opening, closing… consider the galaxies, the infinitudes of space, each with its lotus, its Brahma - eyes opening, eyes closing.”

This is the experience of the eternal, psychedelic theater upon which the dance of creation itself is choreographed. There is also the feeling of being a much smaller aspect of a larger organism or being, of being a cell in the brain of a god who is imagining the lucid dream we call the world, and seeing the disconnect between my individualistic perception of daily living and the larger truth that the planet and cosmos itself is a unified being with specified ‘organs’ all serving the higher good.

I have been in certain rooms under the influence of the salvia goddess where I was not able to shield my immediate self from more hostile or disconnected forces. For instance, in the presence of those who carry a shadow with them, or are plagued by negative thought forms or ego trips (myself included at times), the openness that salvia brings on can tear at the fabric of my psyche. I have felt planes of two dimensional ‘glass’ intersecting at odd angles my entire being, splicing my body into disconnected pieces that had trouble communicating with each other, afraid my heart would stop beating if I did not consciously cause it to do so. It is all too common to resist this higher interconnected reality and be torn apart as a result. Resistance only feeds the fear, and I learned how to guide the process and attract only those energies that are in my best interest and the interest of the world.

I have had some of the most rapturous salvia experiences in the woods by the house I grew up in, and natural settings give me new admiration for the glory and diverse manifestation of the divine in nature. I have been able to guide the experience to absolute blissful laughter and a sense of ‘sharing a joke with the world’ as Jefferson Airplane put it.

The power of these experiences is very real, it is a depth of thought and the creation of new thought forms which informs my daily life with compassion and appreciation for the depth in the smallest details of living.

Exp Year: 2002-2006	ExpID: 57359
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 27, 2007	Views: 6,690
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Glowing Experiences (4), Mystical Experiences (9), Entities / Beings (37), Retrospective / Summary (11), Not Applicable (38)