My “ego” receded to almost nothing

October 28, 2015

No plant has ever truly scared the hell out of me or made me feel fully reborn since I first tried cannabis, over nine years ago. Until I found salvia Divinorum, the Diviner’s Mint.

I first tried salvia divinorum over five years ago, when my father gave me a gift of some finely ground salvia leaves, along with some cannabis. I smoked the two herbs together, the cannabis smooth yet intense as always, the salvia new, seemingly milder than the cannabis. I was enjoying the contrast between the tastes of the two smokes, trying them alone, and in mixture. I liked the salvia. At this small dose it produced a lovely, dreamy feeling of excitement and anticipation, with a slight physical lethargy. About a year later, had a hit off a pipe packed with some salvia 10x concentrate—I got one or two good hits off the bowl. The world seemed to subtly stretch out, to become almost flattened—Weird cartoonlike imagery flowed through my brain. We tripped during a thunderstorm-induced power-outage, and with nothing really to look at but a flickering candle, I closed my eyes and thought about other dimensions, time stretching out to where a minute felt like an hour. The smoke shop in my town recently put up a poster in their window. “Purple Sticky Salvia.” I remembered liking the effects, and couldn’t understand why I’d ignored it for five years. I read about it some more online, and thought it might be exactly what I was looking for.

I rolled two joints, using equal parts crumbled cannabis buds and half of my gram of salvia leaf 20x concentrate… I was still halfway through my second puff when I realized my vision was dissolving. I tried to snuff the joint but the ashtray melted, I became the joint, I was lying in the ashtray, which was like a plant, everything seemed plantlike in structure, myself, the bed, the ashtray, the joint, all morphosizing and merging into oneanother like a Dali phantasm, and I was sweating like I was in a steam-room… I tried to snuff out the joint, thinking “I guess that was enough” when the joint scorched my finger and I panicked—I could FEEL the adrenaline flood into my brain, instantly restoring focus—”Stuff won’t fucking go out!” I whisper-yelled, grinding the joint furiously into my pipe’s bowl—The physical sensation of gravity became intense, like I was an enormous metal statue, and I laughed out loud… My laughter increased when I jumped up off the bed and went toward the window and my vision and entire AWARENESS seemed to become STUCK on the bed, a stretching ectoplasmic tentacle slowly sucking back toward my physical body. The formerly jesting, conversational voices on the radio sounded like they were on trial for their very sanity.

I smoked my second cannabis/salvia-20x reefer in the middle of the night, again alone—The sweat absolutely sponged out of me almost immediately, and I got the fear that I’d “Licked the brightest beam in the rainbow” (the quite possible idea that this must be the strongest hallucinogen in nature, but warped by this new, plant-like consciousness… I wondered why nobody had warned me… The heat was getting to me, and my knitted shirt felt harsh on my sweating skin. The simple act of yanking this rather heavy shirt and my jeans off was accompanied by the most bizarre biofeedback-type sensations, like looping coils of electric metal wire twisting and contracting in black space (my eyeball vision had faded again to near zero), filling my mind’s eye, which now morphosized into an inner view of my brain, resembling the inside of a mouth, and the sensation of LICKING the hollow, palate-like pink structures as I used the various nodules of my lizard brain to move my “robot” limbs and trunk around… Hysterical amusement filled me at these new, strange sensations… Then intense lethargy flooded my brain, my “ego” receded to nearly nothing, and I could suddenly sense the complete isolation of my laughter, of my entire EXISTENCE, here in this tiny room, surrounded by the infinite blackness of the cosmic void—Suddenly all I had in the world was this angelic electric lamp, and this squawking, unintelligible radio, as my companions—Aside from these, I was alone, and I felt a creeping fear set in, but this faded away as the amnesiac lethargy increased to near immobility, and I sank to the bed like I’d been darted… I could almost feel my awareness seem to rise out of my immobilized body, which seemed weightless, and yet felt like it weighed a thousand tons, sinking into the bedsprings.

Just smoked salvia again, and it completely unzipped my head—It really does seem twice as intense with each successive trip—Like climbing an immense staircase—I can’t believe I actually was worried the hamburger and cigarette I’d had earlier might “block the high”—HA!—I doubt if even a shot of thorazine could block that rush of intensity… I had the TV on, and I wanted music, but the only thing playing was “All Right Now” by Free—Not one of my favorite songs, but better than infomercials, so I left in on—I packed my one-hitter and blasted a hit… My vision faded as simultaneously every perception was literally bent, starting at the edges, under the force of some new, internal gravity—I became intensely paranoid about the pipe somehow starting a fire, though it was completely cashed, striving to set it in a ceramic bowl on the coffee table even as my vision warped and faded and twisted into strands of melting, bending rubber—It felt like some intensely powerful force was literally gripping the edges of my total perceptive reality, attempting to rip the the lid off my mind, or as if my mind was being peeled, and divided like an orange, and then actually turned inside out—My visual cortex was continuing to divide into millions of these weird strands, like concentric stripes, which warped at the edges and became warped by a vast sucking sideways gravity—The intense gravity was accompanied by a deep electric feeling in my body—But now sudden confusion annihilated everything—I had no idea what I was doing—All subjective reality fled, and I was left completely at the herb’s mercy… Intense waves of fear took hold of my psyche—I felt I’d made some gross error—Somebody should’ve warned me about this—I actually could not remember that I’d smoked salvia before—For all I knew in those moments, I’d never even heard of it before today—I wondered why my father had never warned me of this stuff (I had a weird, completely false notion that I’d “discovered” the plant in my parents’s bedroom, and partaken of it like some Forbidden Fruit I was still too young to handle properly), though in reality the first time I smoked it (nonconcentrated leaves) was with my dad (he’d said he hardly felt anything; I’d experienced only a mild, stony buzz)—But this was an entirely new experience, blowing away even my intense trip a few days ago—Basically, it temporarily annihilated my normal sense of self—I had no conception in these initial minutes that this plant was totally safe, or that the effects were temporary—I feared it had actually warped my psyche irreversibly—My mind searched in vain for some explanation as to what might be happening to me—This must be the plant’s defense mechanism—Again I almost panicked: Why hadn’t my mom and dad warned me about this?—Again I seemed to appreciate whilst under this trance that I’d “licked the yellow band of the rainbow”, and that this was simply too much for my awareness… Surely I must be dying… I felt like I’d already died and was entering the Dreaming for good—I realized this had to be a dream, and yet I knew I was awake—That left only one option—The real world, the world I lived in and knew and loved ans hated and cursed every day, was some kind of weird dream, not really “real” at all—A completely directed, construced plastic dream set up for me by God and my father and mother, a collossal illusion I’d been obliviously wrapped up in for as long as I could remember at the moment (in a state of partial amnesia, as I later realized), a safe, comfortable illusion, which I feared was now finally, irreversibly dissolving… I stared at the TV, unable to accept this information coming fro my own, seemingly logical awareness… “All Right Now” seemed to be endlessly repeating the chorus, with an ever increasing sense of hilarious, ecstatic intensity—And I had the unmistakeable impression the singer was talking to ME, trying to tell me I was all right, and yet at the same time laughing at my weakness of mind—I couldn’t for the life of me understand how to interpret the way I was feeling—Everything had this striped, banded appearance, as if the world were made of flattened tubes stuck together at the edges—I had the sense I’d eaten the “forbidden fruit”—Panic, confusion, and awe were rushing down on me in vast tidal waves as the chorus continued ad nauseum—The video was full of flat tube shapes, and this proved that everything, even what was on TV, was now specially directed at me, and me alone—I changed the channel with the now immensely magical-seeming remote control—But everything image the huge flat screen displayed contained those flat tube shapes, and I didn’t want to see any more of those—”Give me something without those fucking tubes!” I nearly shouted, bursting out laughing as our cat Magic suddenly looked up, startled from her nap—She was looking at me as if I’d lost my mind (which I temporarily had)… I now came back to sanity enough to know I was hallucinating, and that my perceptions were being warped by the salvinorin—Every TV channel was talking specifically to me, telling me things I didn’t want to hear and couldn’t understand—Every random phrase held an obvious, specific meaning, directed at me alone—This had to be a fucking dream—Suddenly I couldn’t take it, and bolted for the front door, mild dizziness and the “salvia gravity” making it quite an effort—Standing up was difficult, so I sank to the floor—Our porch is seven steps up off the ground, with no roof—The noon summer sun was beating down with blinding intensity, but filtered through tall pine trees—I tried to say something like “what the fucking shit is this?” but my mouth just produced twisted meaningless mumblings—But I could hear the panic in my own voice—I gave up trying to stand and lay on the bare pine board, rolling from side to side—This went on for only a few moments, I think—I stood up again, now drenched in sweat, and went back inside—The song was unbelievably still going, and the chorus was ecstatically exclaiming how awesome this trip was—I finally had to agree, feeling utterly crazy still but now starting to enjoy the ride—My mouth was filling with cactus-juice-tasting saliva, which I swallowed, thinking this might be my body’s effort to flush the drug out of my system—Then the next video came on—”A Touch of Grey” by the Grateful Dead—I knew they were telling me I’d get through this, I’d would survive, but the fear was intense—”It’s a lesson”, Jerry intoned, and I began to sing along—Harmonizing seemed to be a bit more challenging, and a much more awesome ability as well. Strangely, this entire song seemed to pass by in a matter of thirty seconds or a minute—The intensity was leveling off some now, and my comfortable, familiar surroundings began to seem safe and normal again, though waves of awe-struck, weird thoughts continued spilling through my brain—I suddenly realized that my entire “self” was merely an idea—A safe, comfortable idea of mine, a feeling, and that whenever this familiar comfort zone was removed, I become afraid—I realized how alien the concept of right and left must be to plants, which radiate outward from a central point—This plant is immensely enlightening, taking one to realms entirely beyond our mortal understanding—I can’t wait to go back—It’s a different journey every time—I can’t wait to go there again, though….

I just re-booted my psyche once again with salvia divinorum and cannabis indica this morning. Holy fucking blazes, the voice of God speaks through this plant—It’s overwhelming, yet enlightening. Once the fear wears off, you retain the insights learned by literally dreaming while awake… It’s still echoing through my mind… This time, I smoked two hits of the salvia 20x concentrated leaves, this time mixed with cannabis. I can’t believe those idiots laughing at salvia—it must be like a mental safety net that I don’t have—What I get on the stuff is cosmic DNA-level revelations straight from the voice of God. Now, I’m not a christian, but I’ve always believed in God—I just logically, rationally saw that the universe (and especially animals) could in no way have “just formed” by some cosmic accident—any more than dropping infinite marbles on a typewriter could ever conceivably write the Oxford English Dictionary “by chance”—it could never happen—and yet when my thought patterns first BENT, then MELTED into one another like dripping paint and I could actually now HEAR this voice, a voice one normally only silently feels as a logical push, not only HEAR but FEEL it and SEE it, broadcasting into my left brain from on high like a six billion jiggawatt radio tower, pinning me to the ground, now literally shaking with death fear, it made me feel completely INSANE!!!—The voice spoke absolute truths about existence and love and light and gravity and death and sin—I begged to be released fro the grip of this vast boiling machine that was now my brain—the rising morning sunlight filtering in through the window actually seemed like thin orange paint—wretched satanic thoughts (“it’s all meaningless,” etc.) were also beaming in, much weaker, from the right, and below, but attempting to imitate the style god was using. The difference between the two voices was obvious, however (I’ve always been good with voices—I can always tell when a famous actor does a commercial voiceover)… but once the paralyzing fear passes, you’re left with all the insights learned—though in the depths of the trip I had a terrible fear that to do so would entirely destroy my mind—that if I remembered these revelations after the drug wore off, I’d never be able to return to “normal life”… Suddenly I couldn’t take it—I was in a blind panic—I needed escape—I had a vision of happy mindless people dissolving these thoughts with alcoholic liquor—I ran to the fridge and opened it, with a vague intention of getting a beer—But I saw the red and white Reddi Whip can and grabbed it instead—I huffed a huge blast of the nitrous oxide, holding it in as long as I could with my heart going ten billion miles per second—I wanted sedation—Oblivion, God, please—But the gas now seemed to do practically nothing, just barely taking the heaviest edge off this intense mindfuck… Now, in the clear light of sanity, I feel these same insights are extremely beneficial… I recommend it, but only if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to have your ego and the outer layers of you psyche go dead asleep while the plant brain at the core hooks up straight into DNA/plant/eve type consciousness and beyond—So there is no single, specific “trip” or “effect” of a psychedelic substance such as salvia… As Aldous Huxley said, when the doors of perception are opened, one is put in direct contact with the subconscious… salvia can shred your psyche on a mental cheese grater at 1,000 miles per hour and toss it out the window—You can be reduced to Primal Man, the revelations of the Apocrypha can crack down on your head…I just happen to enjoy those kinds of sensations, but that’s because (at least some of the time) I was a fucking LUNATIC as early as nine years old—Schizophrenic, obsessive, compulsive, paranoid, delusional, hypochondriac, semiautistic, and just plain CRAZY…. So a little psychic cheese-grater action is just perfect for me, if you know what I’m saying—I needed it.

I smoked a good dose of the Mix (cannabis and salvia) and walked down the hall. The house morphosized into the Ark as I retrieved my can of Mountain Dew from the spot on the bookshelf where I’d left it in another world… I went out onto the ancient wooden porch, into the blinding midday light of the Garden of Eden—Crows squawking in the towering pine trees announced my exit from the ark—But I was not “me” anymore at all—I was inside a plant—I tall, old tree which can move itself slowly about on it roots, my trunk draped in tattered denim… I was very old in this trip, a very old tree indeed—I’d been here since the dawn of time (1997), and even witnessed the construction of the ark, even longer epochs ago yet… But the sun was pouring into me, rejuvenating me with its intense energy—The plants sitting in their pots spoke to me, told me they were going to show me how it’s done… And seemingly without the slightest sense of free-will (though I was doing exactly what I’d planned), I slowly sat down on the wooden bench beside the orange tomato plant, symmetrically kicked off the ancient leather sandles, and fully BECAME a plant in the sun there, the croaking crow now seeming to perch on my achingly distant right shoulder…

The idea of the psychedelic molecule salvinorin as some kind of defense mechanism the species produces, a means of confusing, and scaring away anything which might try eating it, was in the forefront of my mind as I blasted a hit sitting in front of the TV. This of course is the type of idea which the persecutors of psychedelic drugs would instinctively cling to, and I pushed it out of my mind. But it seems whatever is in your subconscious, whether bleeding in from the conscious or unconscious, influences the hallucinations salvia produces. As I was engrossed in this consideration my vision was gone entirely, replaced by a strange gambling wheel of the mind, a full mind-screen image of a warlike whirling mushroom-headed plant goddess in the style of Aztec reliefs, doing a shamanic dance and spinning like the Tasmanian Devil at 100 miles per second—Spinning me around with her, disorienting me… Odd thoughts concerning my family, even other people, as “the tribe” were my only “conscious” thoughts save this crazy sensation of spinning out of control. then a feeling like I’d mocked the plant, thinking of it like some “devil weed” of crazy party “shocker” gimmick—A joy buzzer of the mind or something—And the plant was warning me once again not to trifle with what I now knew I could barely understand. Successive hits warped and blasted my vision into another bas-relief-type image-field of pure silver-bronze metallic light—Once again the world was the Garden, a primeval realm where God was VERY near—Again my self-awareness shrinks to that of a tribal unit—But I’m proudly (brandishingly) conscious of myself as a “soldier” of God at leisure in the SCHOOL of the MIND. Suddenly I got the idea to try playing my drums whilst flying on salvia—An awe-inspiring experience… I realized the two perceptions salvia warps the most are gravity and time—Also the two primary concerns of drummers. As I knew they would feel especially enormous, I selected the biggest drum sticks I own (Vic Firth American Classic Metal), took a huge salvia hit and held it… I was amazed at the wash of guilt-type feelings I experienced before slamming the sticks down and obliterating all thought in a world of pure gravitational pulse. I felt embarrassed to be doing something which OTHERS might hear—But I also KNEW music to be sacred, like the salvia herself, from God and sacred, and FOR God.

I smoked several hits, mixed with cannabis (the OTHER branch of the tree of knowledge), stood up, dancing like a geek to Beck’s song “Hotwax”—feeling like a strangely devilish robotic child, then walked around the room, feeling my terminator body’s long femur bones working like stilts then my brain flooded with pure opioid lethargic amnesia—I completely lost track of who I was, whilst a jangle of atypical word-thought forms yammered through my brain, my consciousness became confused as to who had said each previous thought, thinking “That wasn’t me, who said that?… he said that,” and unfolding in my mind I saw myself from across the room, morphosizing younger in a kind a corridor… all could think was “who is he?”… I was wearing a striped green shirt, and my hair was long—But only after the tranquilizing amnesia faded did I remember who “I” was—whilst under the salvia’s spell I’d had no idea who I was, and thought of the man across the room as a “Mexican” who was standing in a room I was nostalgic about because some groovy parties had gone down their with my “chorifros” (my band, now ancient, nameless… (That odd word, “chorifros” from the weird Beck lyrics, the chorus singing in Spanish, “Yo soy un disco quebrado, yo tengo chicle’n mi cerebro!” bleeding right into my thoughts)—Each successive word-thought was dismissed as being “not mine”, but someone else’s—then I’d create another word thought, and it would crystalize into the words of someone else, as I looked at my physical self in this picassoesque mind-mirror. I looked at my drums and they seemed like relics of times past—Everything was a vast storeroom in the Garden, and I was in its farthest, most desolate corner, where the most archaic creations of all time reposed… I shunted my metal-poles and cloth “self” to the window and leaned on my elbow, gazing out, stunned and transfixed by my complete uselessness and the unsung periphery of my existence—I was an object like a curtain hanging here at the window’s side, my entire useless weight propped against this plywood wall—Outside, the after-the-rain dimness was like a child’s storybook forest, sectioned into an insectvision grid by the windowscreen, which loomed an inch from my eyeballs. Then I saw the rabbit. The rabbit was mottled whitish greyish brown—tiny, and poised to spring away. But it was looking right at ME, sniffing the air (I can still see those bifurcated pink nostrils pulsing with breath) and this rabbit was “THE RABBIT”. It had that kind of power, the clarity of a revelation. I stared at it, awestruck, until my mind slowly bled back into reality, and I thought of the white rabbit from Lewis Carroll, and Jefferson Airplane… That must’ve been what I’d meant when I thought of it as “The Rabbit”—I seriously had to stare at this rabbit for what felt like twenty minutes, basking in is supple, childlike beauty—It kept a wary eye on me as it nibbled from the tuft of grass beneath my window… I had to stare at the creature until I felt satisfied it was indeed REAL… Then the amnesiac vision i’d had of myself from across the room, wearing the striped green shirt—NOW I could remember that it was me—And in the dream I’d been growing YOUNGER, which brought about changes in my facial form, not necessarily for the better or worse—I just CHANGED subtly over time (backward time) and my mind flooded with horror at the thought of people moving through time, leaving these old versions of themselves in these memory storage worlds (“stranded in infinity rooms”, another apt lyric by Beck—”The People’s Pimp” was a biography of Beck which I saw in Atomic Comics in a dream of Phoenix I had about 9 years ago)—A wave of sadness actually juiced diamondlike tears out of my eyes, as I realized that in this amnesiac state, wherein I’d had absolutely NO IDEA of WHO I WAS, and yet I was LOOKING at myself—or a version of myself that lives in my imagination based on who I might be in the mind’s-eyes of thousands of eyes and minds I’ve seen seeing me and thought of thinking of me, and ideas of who I used to be, and who I might be in the future—In this state of WHO AM I ??? —Of complete existential confusion, I saw myself, and I wanted to BE that “Mexican boy” (everyone IS a child on this stuff), I wanted to be alive, to have a self, and I fully SAW (can still see) how we wish for a future, every day, and God gives it to us—One creates a person, a self, in one’s imagination, whom one wants to become, and we’re given that gift, to make it REAL…

Tried reading whilst tripping on salvia, but it was fucking IMPOSSIBLE—I literally was only capable of either staring at single words, in a kind of existential bewilderment (what in creation does “THAN” mean, exactly?—It’s like you’re Clinton all the sudden). And when I’d try to normally scan the text like usual, my eyeballs actually tried to LICK the sceen!!!—WHAT IN THE FUCK???—this sensations was a bit rough, like rubber erasers squeaking against the glowing glass, which seemed to be beaming straight from GOD. I’d try to lick these black angular lines of text (salvia trip reports on Erowid Psychoactive Vaults), and my tongue moved in unison with my eyeballs—This was the peak of the amnesiac freakout part of the trip… the entire concept of reading was as alien as..well, as alien as ANYTHING “normal” you try doing on salvia… Later, when I was back to normal, I tried reading the same page again, and realized that whilst tripping, I’d been seeing the screen in negative—That is, the yellowish green text on the black background had been hallucinogenically flipped, so that I actually SAW black text, on a background of greenish-yellow hue… Weird Stuff…

Began thinking about the dream world whilst tripping, and I experienced an odd fear, as if to think consciously about dreams were the deadliest taboo, and might destroy me. Awe filled me as I realized my dream self IS my doppelganger—My spiritual, Siamese twin—With a life every bit as complex and rich as the waking one, though possibly smaller (lighter), or on a faster time track. I had a vision of my two selves, joined at the back, the “waking me” pink, the “dream me” black, their legs entwining infinitely like Plastic Man and stretching off into their dual time tracks which coiled and wove into the vast mirroring dimensional worlds.

I work at night, and I live close enough to walk. I decided just as I was grabbing my keys and a flashlight to smoke a small hit of salvia. My memory-brain faded as I quickly stashed my extract and walked out into the wild dark dreaming night. My heels clanged like bowlegged pistons as I moved my body down the driveway, the intense rush making my peripheral vision vibrate. The flashlight’s ectoplasmic beam slid down the road like a blue ghost tentacle, and I dazzled myself for minutes on end projecting huge rippling psychedelic shadows of my striding legs on the grey asphalt—The flamelike shadows danced along with me as I walked half a mile in what seemed like half a minute… By the time I got to work, I was pleasantly buzzed, and feeling quite a stony dreamlike feeling, gravity seemingly twice as powerful as normal.

I had just a sprinkle of the 20x concentrate left, so I held it in extra long—Soon my peripheral vision began to pulse and spin, and the intense electric rush metalized my entire world. A thick, heavy, translucent purple liquid flooded down from above into the room, flowing through me and warping my consciousness. I flicked my eyeballs about rapidly whilst staring at my globe and clock and some stacks of CDs, and the objects in view stuck to my viewscreen and stretched like chewing gum, snapping back into place, unable to keep up with the rapidly shifting focal point. I closed my eyes and my vision was replaced by an infinite black void, in all objects (my body included) were represented by simmering neon lines of energy. I was like a glowing skeleton, in a box-grid room. I leaned back on one elbow, and a sensation began like my body being sliced apart at the shoulder, by an electric knife which tingled intensely but produced no pain, moving through my flesh like a hot knife moving through butter.

I was in a horrible, awful mood, and I decided a hit of salvia might put me on another mental track—And whatever it might do (the effect is startlingly different with each experience), it couldn’t make me feel any worse than I already did. So I sat on my bed and blasted a hit, held it in quite a while. I felt my thought patterns melt and wash away under a leviathan tide of primeval ectopasmic ether. I lay back and looked up at the ceiling, and was shocked to see that my sense of direction had been flipped, so that I now felt myself to be in the southwest corner of the house, rather than the northeast corner—And from the opposite corner, along the ceiling flowed an intense spiritual force which made me shake with fear. A heavy, existential rush shook my psyche and blurred my peripheral vision. When I could sit up again, I felt like I was in Ancient Greece—Atlantis, or Mount Olympos itself. Every object I fixed my gaze upon SANK into my visual aspect, and the longer I looked the deeper it sank, or the more heavily my psychic hook hung upon the object, the original association linking to infinite branches. Again I realize this is the way I always think, but it seems so unbelievably delicious! I look at the electric lamp and my mind automatically reflects Promethean concepts—Fire, torch, candle, gaslights, neon, Franklin, electricity, Edison, human invention in general. I shifted my vision to the globe and my mind reflected the world, models, maps, planets—Each varicolored country is like a different flavor of icing on this global cake. Yes, the whole world is like a delicious, ancient cake, and to look upon something is to TASTE it and EAT of it with your mind, to sink your mental teeth into it.

I was staring at the TV, already flying, when I hit a second dose. Heavy lethargy froze me like a statue, and I lost access to my knowledge of my own and all other’s personal histories and identities—I felt like I’d been stung by some giant paralyzingly venomous hornet. An instinctive voice again frantically reminded me to not forget the awful weirdness of this drug, to warn the others of the “tribe”, as an ultrasonic vibratory energy began to vibrate my mind, coming up seemingly through the “floor” under my brain in the right side of my head. These few minutes felt like an eternity. It was pleasurable yet almost unbearably intense, like a chainsaw inside my sensory consciousness.

I was dreading 24 hours in jail the next day. I smoked two big hits rapidly and my facial image in my mind’s eye became a mask of iron cables which I used to produce “expressions”, the meanings of which were vague and entirely abstract. The cables which connected to two my broken, eroded front teeth I perceived to be rusty. This mask was all I was, all I could see, and I felt imprisoned. But I have true sight! I protested, and immediately my vision shifted to the cold flat view out of a cyclopean eye which clicked into place on a revolving disk-shaped part of my “head”—I viewed the frozen physical objects before me with dead indifference, and this “true sight” seemed only another hideous prison. I felt a wave of claustrophobic panic—But I can breathe cool fresh air! I protested, and my awareness seemed to be “swallowed” downward, and now I became nothing but a single dry, wheezing nostril, sucking hot, stale air endlessly, meaninglessly, into the cavern-like depths of a dry and parched esophagus—But see, I can swallow too! I said, and peristaltically gulping down a tickle of salvia-flavored saliva with my dry, smoked-out throat became the only function of my existence… The salvia was showing me what true imprisonment would be like—To be locked into a single sense organ, trapped, with no free will… When memory came flooding back in, the measly stretch of jail time no longer seemed the awful dread thing it had before. Thank you, salvia.

First salvia trip after the jail “trip” (jail being probably the exact opposite of a psychedelic experience). I felt hot and tropical on this warm, late summer afternoon. I ghosted a nice dose of 20x. It felt like a reptile’s long, cold-blooded tongue awoke and curled open, unfurling in my brain, licking its way downward as my mind shifted to a more primitive, ancient perspective.

Smoked a hit and held it a long time. An enormous slab of ectoplasmic gel began passing over me, first coating my right side with its warm, sticky surface, surrounding and enveloping me, slowly passing through the space I occupied, like warm butter melting over me, and moving along to the left…

I decided to smoke a hit before I went out in the sun. Electric ancient alien Ark-plant consciousness leaped into me, gazing about in ecstatic astral-projection jet-lag… The front porch was covered in softly shifting pine tree shadows, so I ran through the house and out the back door. I thought I could feel the presence shrink back in fear of the yellow dazzling direct sunlight, and as I pulled off my sweatshirt I thought I could feel the salvia force leap from me to the shirt—I feared setting it down would entirely disconnect me from the force, so I held the shirt to me, telling the Plant not to fear the direct sun—I felt it must be my eyes, the intensity of the light perceived, which frightened her, and I explained that she was protected inside me, as she’d been protected by her plant body, and that I knew not to look directly at the sun—I demonstrated how I squinted my eyes shut as I turned my face toward the sun…

I was watching some show about gigantic mining vehicles, when I smoked a 20x hit. I tapped my ash and looked up at the TV screen, and was startled to see tiny people standing under tires two-stories high—Just then I felt the salvia hit—The massive equipment entered my total field of perception, and I could now literally FEEL the juddering, spinning machines like metal blades through my mental ectoplasm, shaking my brain violently (yet pleasurably) until I as hypnotized into a momentary dream vision of my father’s top dresser drawer in our old house, illuminated by surreal blue moonlight, the open amber wood drawer which I again felt I’d snuck into while he was away, and taken some LSD tabs, and was now moving through the night house hysterically overwhelmed by this tremendous vibrating electric energy… The dream state burst and all my thoughts melted together and twisted upward in a red carnival-striped cone-shaped tentacle which then fell like liquid and splashed me back into being on the couch. My vision fazed back into brightly colored view, the spectacle of my bent-legged reclining form enshrouded in its clothing of dead organic matter, like a living mummy shaman, ghosting metamorphically in and out of existence like smoke—My bones and the lacquered boards of the sofa’s armrests ling up perfectly in geometric parallels, a microcosmic conglomeration of organic and inert matter, a sentient antique object cloned from infinite past incarnation—One of the present branchlike extensions of the sentient, fermenting universe. I wanted to take a photograph of every object I perceived, so unbelievable was the beauty of a glass, the potted spider plants, the Navajo rug nailed to the wall.

I had two hits left. The first one baked my room into a strange pawn-shop storage closet, where I sat on my hammock-like bed, staring at the reddish board walls and assembled musical instruments, and everything now had a nubbly, crusty, corncob-like texture. I felt like I’d been sitting here a long time, maybe forever. The second hit was a bit bigger, and being my last (for now), I held it extra long. Now a silhouette-like ghostly alien figure came down from on high, taking the exact grass-green color of my new shirt. Its head entered mine like a sold entering a liquid, intense pressure “pushing” my awareness, mashing it into the “floor” of my mind. I was leaning on my left elbow, and as I closed my eyes, I could “see” my physical form as a spike (my left arm) supporting an ectoplasmic blob of dark purple energy, hanging over the edge of the bed, ready to “spill” over onto the floor…

Next time I went to the smoke shop, the clerk told me they were all out of the salvia 20x. “All we got’s the 40.” I felt an apprehensive tingle of excitement as I spent the extra seven dollars and walked out with my new 40x salvia. All day I carried the little purple container around with me, smoking cannabis bud, preparing myself for what I knew (but could never have imagined) was going to be a mind-shattering trip. I turned on the TV and saw that Barack Obama was delivering a weighty speech. Behind him were draped many Star Spangled Banners. I packed a hit a took the plunge. I expected the salvia would make Obama’s speech entirely incomprehensible, but once more I was taken to a place where God was the plant and the plant was talking through the TV—Everything a vast conspiracy—Everything President Obama (he was already president in this trip, though it was still September) was saying was directed specifically at ME—He’d say something about what the country needed to do, some goal, and it was as if God was ordering me to accomplish these goals. Now I became aware of this alien silhouette invading and possessing my body, orgasmic and exhilarated, laughing at my foolishness. I was completely immobilized, staring at the TV between lively potted plants. I experimentally tried turning my head, and I could feel a struggle within, like I was being held frozen by some unimaginable internal grip—I could almost hear my brain squeaking against the inside of my skull as I strained to turn my head just an inch to the left. I was in a panic someone would walk into the room and see me in this tranquilized, overexposed state, and they’d instantly see that I was “inside-out”—Then a paranoiac fantasy overcame me that this was test set up by my family, some deal with God, and I’d just passed or failed, and as soon as anyone came forth they would be revealing their implicitness in this conspiracy. Slowly this idea, at first shockingly convincing, faded to unbelievability as the salvia trip leveled off to it usual heavy, pleasantly stoned state.

This was my most intensely awesome and terrifying experience on salvia yet. Again only a single hit of the 40x was used. I was dreading a court date the next day, feeling rather like a condemned man. I put the album Hemispheres by Rush on the stereo—The opening track is 18 minutes—The song tells the epic story of the ancient battle for Man’s heart and mind between Apollo and Dionysus. I might’ve “ghosted” it a bit too long as I reclined on my bed, propped on my right elbow, staring through the digital clock and butterscotch-colored blanket in my field of vision. The feeling started off familiar, my peripheral vision bubbling in concentric wavelike patterns—Then this sensation increased and I woke up in a dream—The “roof” was torn off my psychic house and the Creator of the Universe was somewhere above. I realized perhaps for the first time the reality of out mortal, temporal existence. But the paranoiac dream impressed up my mind with utmost belief that I was in reality in a coma in the “real” world, and my family were endeavoring to wake me up—I’d been living in a dream for some unknown stretch of time, and salvia was the magical “key” my psyche had sought to wake me out of this “dream”—I desperately did NOT want this to be the truth, and I begged God to let me keep “dreaming”, and to let me forget this “reality”—Now the plant interrupted my begging and said that everyone in the “house” who didn’t smoke salvia RIGHT NOW was going to die. I knew I’d have to wake everyone up (in this dream I was the only one “awake”) and I knew they’d be angry and confused, but I’d have to convince them to smoke the sacrament—We were leaving the earth—But the word “house” might’ve referred to my bedroom, and since I was the only one in the room, I became gripped with death fear—I didn’t know how much time I had—I grabbed the bowl and smoked the single hit of green plant material. This action seemed to be done almost against my will, by a supervising, emotionless part of my physical consciousness. Slowly the dream faded back to sensible awareness—Nobody was “dying”, nobody was going anywhere, nobody was in a coma. Then I realized the plant matter which the plant-voice had “ordered” me to smoke was not salvia, but cannabis. In the amnesiac depths of the trip I could not distinguish between the two plants—They were both simply The Plant, the Tree of Knowledge. It was another twelve hours or so before I’d completely come back to normal thought forms, and realized how completely the plant had tricked me, using my own thoughts, ideas, fears and imagination to form possibly the most terrifying mental situation imaginable. When I smoked that hit, I fully believed were I not to, I would literally “wake up” in some other place, in another body, in a world in which this one was only a dream.

My next trip with the 40x wasn’t as intense (which was exactly what I wanted), as I only held the two small hits in a few seconds instead of “ghosting” a big one. I was a bit cold when I smoked the first hit. Lovely warmth flushed into me, and I struggled numbly to remove my striped sweatshirt. I lay back and enjoyed the intense rush of energy. After about ten minutes I lit another. It began with a rush of heat and electric energy which reminded me of the excitement of dangerous things, or an intense rush of emotion—Electric orgasmic vibrations pulsed through my body. I saw a perfect classic arch-shaped door in my mind, and now hundreds upon thousands of pink rubbery arches (the doors of perception?) were expanding upwards and looping over my body. I almost seemed to take an interdimensional tumble forward through these arches, looping back on myself like a snake eating its tail.

I believe this natural medicine, salvinorin, wakes up the dream brain, the psychedelic brain—The seat of the soul, of imagination, and of real emotion—As distinguished from ideas, thoughts, memories—The seat of true FEELING… Many of my trips, at the tranquilized, amnesiac peak, evoke the feeling of preparing oneself to enter the water I used to experience as a small child—Sometimes I’ll get the impulse to take my clothes off, in preparation for entering this new medium. I can see/hear/feel my cells bracing themselves excitedly for the sudden shock—”We’re going swimming”… I think this “reverse tolerance” stuff is bullshit, though—you can become accustomed to the effects—plus, as the plant reveals the comically absurd notions hidden in your subconcious mind (such as subliminal religious programming), if you keep the lessons learned in focus the next time you smoke, the plant won’t be able to “trick” you the same way again. Basically it’s sort of a “sinister exagerator”, amplifying your thoughts and sensory impulses—Gravity will feel like “super” gravity—Light is more intense—You become conscious of things you normally filter out of your conscious thoughts…

When the doors of perception are opened, we are put in direct contact with the subconscious mind. The capacity to dream while awake, or hallucinate, is a regular part of our consciousness, especially as children—As we grow up, this psychedelic brain, concerned with new states of being and awareness, seems to sleep more and more, usually awakening only to dream, or in states of extreme shock. The reason dreams and hallucinogenic drugs always remind us of oneanother is that they’re both psychedelic—Which simply means anything that alters, breaks up, shifts, filters, shapes, interrupts, or influences perspectives of consciousness…

This stuff is awesome—I think the illuminati must’ve known about this stuff—They knew about LSD long before the public. They knew it could happen eventually, but they thought their neverending line of crazy clown chemicals like PCP and MDMA, which mimicked (but never fully induced) the psychedelic states brought on by substances like salvia, cannabis, ergot, psilocybin and mescalin, could divert this discovery, but it was impossible. Anybody who’s felt the world-bending force of salvia knows this. They even saw the pattern of “illegalization” creating a wave of mass interest in every psychoactive substance, and so they kept salvia legal, and this actually worked for about thirty or forty years—salvia divinorum was ignored by the masses. But now the word is out. Now they’re caught—They can’t make it illegal, because it will bring about that mass interest they fear, and thanks to the internet the word is OUT, and people are using it, and I believe that those who use it, especially combined with its yin/yang twin sister cannabis, will unlock all the doors of perception, and this movement will make the “LSD revolution” of 1967 look like just another whacked-out highschool fashion trip. after some rmore research, I now think LSD is an inferior, semi-artificial immitaion of cannabis indica and salvia divinorum, which actually was used by our evil-ass govt. to demonize and derail the cannabis and salvia movements (natural and necessary stages in man’s evolution)…and that ergot shit they got to juice it from contains some deadly-ass poisons as well…I don’t know, you look at some of these guys who might’ve overdid it, like Dr. Hunter S.Thompson (at the end) and Ozzy Osbourne, all fried-looking and shit, they definately seem a bit messed up—CORRODED is the word that comes to mind…

If there is one truth in the ancient scriptures of Israel, it is the story of Eve, and how she ate of the tree of knowledge, and gave of it to Adam, and how they both then KNEW… Knew what? The only way to know is to eat, and know for yourself. I disagree with the way certain christians think God actually “WROTE” THE BIBLE HIMSELF—like he zapped the words right into the authors’s minds word for word—Obviously the exact words, besides being translations of translations, contain many flat-out hallucinations—talking mules, burning bushes, walking on water—all that nonsense is just fairy tales for kids—The Bible was certainly written by very spiritually enlightened people (shamans), but their world view was a bit distorted by ignorance-take Noah’s ark for example—-Noah certainly built a boat, there was a flood, but it was not the whole WORLD which flooded, just THEIR part of the world—a tiny patch of land in what is now Israel—and so these “darwinist” jerkoffs will always try to make God and the Bible indistinguishable—as if no other culture than Israel’s ever discovered the concept…christians really are mired in a “special people” mentality—God’s “chosen ones” just as bad as the jews, muslims, etc—plants like salvia divinorum and cannabis indica can greatly help to tear down this wall in people’s brains dividing god from science—God IS science. This system which exists, this trillionfold complex LANGUAGE which encodes and actually BUILDS these fleshly vegetable bodies out of mere elements—this technology is far far far more complex even than an Apple Computer—and a computer didn’t come into existence by some “cosmic accident” or by any “slow accretive chemical process” but was DESIGNED and DESIGNED by thousands of persons over hundreds of years—So must also DNA-based animal/vegetable technology have been the product of design. And in no way does DNA technology’s ability to adapt and EVOLVE “disprove” the fact that for such a complex mechanism as DNA intelligence to exist requires another, greater intelligence to CREATE it—DNA technology could not have “come into existence by accident” anymore than a rain of marbles falling on a typewriter could create a dictionary by accident—It could never happen. Not in a million years. CHAOS comes from ORDER, not the other way around. The physical world could not exist without the world of the mind.

I used to hallucinate at night, when I was around two to four years old—Lying in bed in the grainy semidarkness, I’d see dozens of candies drifting across the ceiling, moving from toe to head, varied and delicious-looking treats wrapped in particoloried cellophane… I believe this capacity to hallucinate, or to see what you’re wishing to see, or to see your own body (the classic “out of body experience”) from a secondary perspective, which you really always hold in a certain part of your visual brain (the “mind’s eye”), are a regular part of our consciousness, especially as children—As we grow up, this psychedelic brain, the “amygdala”, concerned with new states of being and awareness (“we’re going SWIMMING”) seems to sleep more and more, usually awakening only to dream (astral projection), or coming suddenly to attention when something terrifying or shocking juices adrenaline into your blood… Adrenaline, as I’ve said, also awakens this amygdala, possibly even more suddenly than salvinorin, but it also puts the hippocampus into full “fight-or-flight” mode, wherin one is prepared for a sort of cataclysmic horror… People describing a shocking, traumatic event often say things such as “it felt just like a dream” or “I thought I was dreaming”… salvia puts you right in this place, and this can induce a fearful reaction. Then what you have is a salvia/adrenaline trip, which is quite different from salvia trips where the journeyors are calm, at peace with their surroundings, and fully prepared for this shocking “deja-vu” type sensation as the psychedelic brain is suddenly awakened—The feeling that this must be a dream.

by Paul