DOSE:

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

12-29-09 - 1:00 am

Where to begin? Today has been a success of epic proportions. I couldn’t name a single thing that went wrong or ended up negatively. First off, I was with my two friends, who, since we haven’t done anything illegal, amoral, embarrassing, regrettable, or to cause a desire for anonymity, I will divulge their names as being Bean and Minkis, or so they are called. We have played in a band sporadically for a few years, and this being our first opportunity in a long time to get together and play music, we gathered around Bean’s drumset in the kitchen and plugged in our amps. I play the guitar and Minkis plays bass. After jamming for a few hours with breaks in between we ordered pizza, and then recorded our latest efforts as one song. Once this was done, we went to the living room to watch Naked Lunch, which I had seen twice, but neither of them had seen it before. This movie set the stage for the most awesomely boundary-dissolving night of my life. Of course the music we played was also very boundary dissolving, by nature of the fact that we had to work together and practically read eachother’s thoughts in order to get anything done, but we weren’t fully aware of this fact because it was so natural for us.

Almost halfway through the movie Minkis started smoking some 20X salvia, but he wasn’t holding it in for long enough so he didn’t start tripping. He had never successfully tripped on salvia before. He handed the pipe to me, and I very cautiously took a tiny rip from the pipe, exhaling the smoke more quickly than I usually do. I handed the pipe to Bean who took an enormous hit, by the end of which, both of us had started tripping extremely hard, and I started to get that feeling that “it’s the same again, just like every time I smoke salvia, it just keeps getting more and more familiar, etc.” I reached over to grab a didgeridoo so that I could have a constant sound to focus on, but movement was causing me a lot of distress and it seemed like I wasn’t really going anywhere. When I sat back down on the couch between the two of them, Bean started saying “Ow! Ouch!” and so on as if he was in pain. He wasn’t but this was when we both started saying we were tripping extremely hard. We babbled on for a while, each not really paying much attention to what the other was saying until finally we locked onto the same wavelength and started repeating the same thing.

What caused this was my realization that after having sat back down, I began looking back and forth between the two of them, to try and find out what was going on. This confused me to the point where I felt like my consciousness was overlapping into both of theirs, and I was experiencing sensations felt by both of them at that moment. This was a vague feeling (meaning I didn’t specifically feel like I was seeing directly out of either of their eyes, or listening through their ears,) but it was a direct result of my own loss of ego, in ways that showed me the infinite number of similarities between all three of us and the common unconscious language we shared with our speech and bodies.

This came at the same time that my sense of hearing intensified, and my other senses, primarily vision, began to blend into it. At this point I was subject to the maddening experience of the repeating reality, which was made up of the common language we all held in common, repeating in fractal loops over and over again, and although it changed each time, all of the smaller pieces contained a full reflection of the whole and all possibilities endlessly permuting with eachother. Although this usually entails an endlessly repeating nonsense word or alien alphabet comprising all of my reality, this time it stayed in the realm of intelligible language and bodily movements.

It stopped when I said, “We’re all the same person!” I said it with the utmost conviction, because I was convinced this was the key to every salvia trip anyone ever had, and this was precisely what was happening to at least Bean and I. He agreed with me, and repeated the same phrase, and after a few times, I was free from the loop with a newfound knowledge I will take with me for the rest of my life. Bean, having inhaled far more than I did, was still tripping for a minute or two after I was done, but I was astounded by this ego-melting experience and so was Bean. We were both convinced that we had “broken salvia,” that we had solved the mystery of every trip ever had by anyone. That if you smoked salvia with another person in close visual proximity with you, and you became confused or fearful, thinking that you had heard the one single word or phrase spoken by all humans in all of history, the apex of this fractal repeating unconscious monologue, the reason was because you felt yourself dissolving into any and all conscious beings that are inhabiting the same space at the same time, and this may include feeling as if you have become all of those people, or that you were filtering sensations through any and all of the sensory apparatus of those people.

(Continued the following day)

When I say, “you felt yourself dissolving into any and all conscious beings that are inhabiting the same space at the same time” it has only become a recent theme that this happens only with people, because I have only ever experienced dissolving into the consciousnesses of other people. I have never tripped salvia while in the presence of an animal, to my knowledge, but at one point I smoked it in the woods with a friend and felt like the ground was an extension of my body and mind, and that I was simply in amnesia about this fact. I found it funny and began to laugh. This was after I looked up at the trees, and upon noticing the overwhelming multitude of branches above my head, began to laugh hysterically and uncontrollably.

As soon as I started tripping there was no longer any time. The movie stopped altogether and I was now stuck in an overwhelming reality that was crushingly familiar. No matter how unique this room was or the lighting in it or the people I was with, it all became a transfigured cartoon compared to ordinary reality, and was destroying my ability to think. Eventually this became so intense that the only way I could think was to identify myself as being one with the two people I was with. I realized that if you smoke salvia with someone else, all it ever ends up doing is dissolving the boundaries between you, and if you take enough, you will begin to see that the boundaries between all of you and the entire human race, or your family trees, are also dissolving into an egoless, unconscious entity that comprised all of your conscious reality.

This entity behaved like an enormous gear. I was stationed on the edge and my ego was but one single tooth on this gear. Minkis, sitting to my right, was the tooth which came before me in the gear’s rotation, and Bean on my left, came after me in the rotation. Who or whatever came to the left of Minkis was before all of us and who or whatever came to the right of Bean was after all of us. For a while I was stuck in the looping, selfless, mechanized but oscillating out of control rotation of the gear. This state of mind has presented itself to me several times, with salvia, LSD, and psilocybin, but nothing apart from salvia has made it so intense. However all movement propagated by the gear’s teeth was performed by language of some kind, and it formed a song which repeated every time one tooth on the gear lined up with where the previous tooth was when the song started. Although there were tiny discrepancies between each repetition, it all seemed to be within the constraints of flawless repetition without artistic license. The languages used by this communication are a combination of regular speech (however regular it may seem) and body language. It may be possible that salvia allows for a wider bandwidth of information to flow into the mind, and if so some light frequencies may take on sonic characteristics, as well as lower frequency vibrations like bodily movement or the earth itself. This accounts for the perceived notion that everything experienced is creating some sort of sound.

When I say “the one single word or phrase spoken by all humans in all of history, the apex of this fractal repeating unconscious monologue” I’m talking about a common theme between my two strongest salvia trips, my very first, and this one. This most recent one allowed me to more fully understand what really happened in the first one. Though the first time it was more intense, and so alien I believed that I was completely alone due to my inability to recognize my friend’s face as being human, I believe the insights I gained through this experience led me to the conclusions that what I am about to explain are some general rules for high dose salvia trips.

My first salvia trip included being in a repeating reality in which a visual cue was taken to the extreme and formed a fractal, looping song created by all sensory stimuli being perceived as sound. It was a repeating alien alphabet: Albanixyuwaryunay. I’ve experienced this many times, even while listening to music, and the effect is always the same. It’s a different word/phrase each time but seems flawlessly familiar and always begins with the letter A. This time was not as intense, it didn’t jumble the letters or the meanings of the letters or their sounds. My confusion was however fractal up until the point where I was able to pick apart the meaning hidden inside the message I was receiving.

(Continued on New Year’s Day, 8 minutes to 1am.)
My second trip in 3 days.

I placed my pipe’s carrying pouch in front of the clock on the dashboard of the car. I was listening to Animal Collective’s Spirit They’re Gone... and I sprinkled a pinch of 20X salvia into my pipe’s bowl somewhere around midnight. I was aware that at whatever moment I engaged infinity, that moment would take some portion of my identity away with it when I resurfaced. I wanted this moment to be timeless and relaxed. No counting down, no anticipation. I had left my phone back at my house and driven down the street to get a view of the river covered in ice and snow, and the blue moon peaking out through the clouds, fog and light drizzle.

I lit a stick of meditation incense and when I was ready, I put the pipe up to my mouth and lit the bowl. Instantaneously I felt all of my movement begin to crescendo and I realized again that it was the same. I don’t remember much from that first inhalation, because it was over quickly and I used it more to gauge my later doses. I finished off that bowl in one draw, and got a little higher this time. I felt my identity melting and saw spots of color dancing behind my eyelids. After leaving my eyes closed for a while, I started flickering my eyelids lightly, to eventually allow my eyeballs to relax more in their sockets (something I figured out at one point or another when I was tripping, it feels good if you do it at whatever speed feels natural and relaxing, and is good to do this while performing other simple actions such as rotating the meditation balls or overtone singing. I started overtone singing to keep my breath steady and started to lose my ego ever so slightly. Throughout this first bowl I was using a hand exercising toy and rotating meditation balls to allow my restlessness to flow smoothly. Again, there were not so many memorable realizations from this one, so I let myself return to baseline before loading a slightly larger dose

As I relaxed to take on this bowl, I focused on the fact that Bean, Minkis, and I are all the same person, and that Minkis was smoking the same salvia at the same time as I was, as perhaps, was KuCHiRIkaTo from the Neurosoup forum. I steadied my breath and inhaled the smoke. It was very strange upon exhaling, and so similar to the beginning of every salvia trip, the feeling of exquisite moisture in the mouth and in the sweat all over my body, as if it had always been there and I had just now become aware of it. Uncomfortably aware. I spoke a different syllable of the mantra Aum Mani Padme Hum with each exhalation as I steadied my mind, focusing on the emotion I was trying to grasp. Meditation, Patience, Discipline, I repeated Ma for a while to myself and eventually began bringing out the overtones. Ma. Patience. Ma. Ma. Wisdom, Generosity, Diligence.

With each syllable I felt like I was speaking on behalf of the entire human race. I was using these sounds to communicate with my environment from somewhere within a place deeper than myself. Fractals engulfed my moment-to-moment experience and I lost track of the CD for some time. I closed my eyes and at first began to flicker my eyelids, but my eyes were too restless, and because of this they forced the eyelids to flicker more erratically than normal, which was unpleasant and too familiar for me to bear. Because I had just done that on my last inhalation, it was more intense this time because it had an extra dimension of habit added to it. Habitual actions on salvia can lead to disaster. I must always concentrate on the differences between each action and its significance to the person performing it, whether it seems to be you at the time or not.

I hummed my mantras, and began to overtone sing. Each syllable, each pitch, was a complete artifact of the human experience. I felt myself elongating sideways as if I was part of a long tube of people on the edge of momentary existence, but I could not tell if there were other identities there with me. I called out to Minkis, but there was no reply. This whole time my eyes were closed, and there were brilliant landscapes forming behind my eyelids, very similar to DMT. This was the most intense CEV hallucination I’ve had on salvia, where I was fully conscious of the fact that my eyes were in fact closed. I saw my own trains of thought forming like branches of trees and pulling away from me as if I were falling toward the trunk. There were patches of dark and light and were arranged such that each branch had a shadow and a highlight amidst the otherwise uniform field of multicolored noise like a comic book halftone print. I realized again that the source of any and all of my confusion was due to the fact that I was no longer just a single person, I was becoming the grinding edge of humanity itself.

I also became aware that everything I have ever done was now permanently a part of me, and I behind my eyelids I could see images of the video game I had been playing for about an hour prior to smoking, in crystal clear detail. After finishing off the remains of the bowl, I got just a little higher, and waited a while listening to the music (it had only been about 5 tracks since I began smoking) and watching the rain fall on my windshield. I put on my gloves, hat, and scarf and got out of the car, walked over to the edge of the river and began overtone singing very quietly to myself. I was still obviously tripping, but the worst was long over. I saw brief undulations in my visual field and began thinking of various different ways in which to interpret the dimly lit abstract landscape before me, with stripes of deep blue-white, fuzzy grey-black, and many bluish shades in between. The snow on the ice of the river seemed to be concave at one glance, and slowly morphed into a convex, while the surrounding images flickered in and out of normal perception, occasionally resembling things far more complex than merely ice and snow. I stayed out there for about 15 minutes until I got cold, and decided it was alright to drive home and begin writing.

This experience gave me the insight that one of the most common and earliest realizations on salvia is that whatever is currently being thought is shared by all of humanity in that very instant. It allowed me to see that I had experienced it before with salvia and will allow me to realize it more quickly when it happens again. Trains of thought on salvia are like channels of quickly running water, with many often running together as one. It’s through this method that thoughts widen and expand beyond ordinary egoic thought. Even if you take a mental step back quickly enough to literally see your many trains of thought forming chaotically at the same time, that realization will bring them all in resonance with one another. This taught me not to be afraid of salvia, but to treat it with the utmost respect. The realizations I gain through using it are too invaluable to use it as a friend or ally. It is a teacher and it is always many steps ahead of me. I was afraid for a long time that tripping salvia might cause my heart to beat erratically, like acid has done. But salvia is gentle if used in the correct mindset. Taking salvia as a holy sacrament and savoring every aspect of it is the only way I have ever been able to steer the experience more toward an extremely positive, relaxing rival to DMT.

Finished 6am 1-1-10

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 83073
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 21
Published: Nov 8, 2012	Views: 5,204
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Multi-Day Experience (13), Glowing Experiences (4), Retrospective / Summary (11), First Times (2)