First time
A true out-of-body experience
by Joshua
So, one day, in mid-semester, I was busy on a group project in one of the upper-classmen dormitory computer labs, when some fraternity brothers of mine, who lived in the building, invited me up to chill for a while, since I wasn’t doing anything at the moment. I thought they were just smoking cannabis, as I am a fairly experienced user of that, and would expect to go no further, but one of them instead asked me if I wanted to smoke some salvia. I had no idea what this was, and had never even heard of it. I admit I should’ve done my research before tying it, but there was no time for research because the person had bought it as an expensive treat for those of us who like to experiment and it was going fast. It was 160X purity, and I had never done it before. The room was best described, in terms of lighting, as dimmed and I had at least 3 people around me while I sat on a couch, a fan by my side and a window behind me. I smoked it out of a bong, and very little of it. I held my breath and counted to 10 like they had told me to, but I only got to 9.
I can’t say I remember all of it or at least all of it in order, but it was a mind-changing experience through perspective. At one moment I thought I was in paper-mario and the next I had shards of my skin being blown off my arm by the fan sitting next to me. Although I was only tripping for a total 4 minutes, I remember looking out the window and being sucked out of it, as half my body got ripped off and I looked back at my fraternity brothers and the lower half of my body as I was forcibly sucked out of the window by some intangible force. In addition, before this I remember looking at one person in the room who was cooking a meal on a frying pan, and although he wasn’t acting unintelligent and his behavior was technically logical and nothing was wrong, something about him and everyone else in the room seemed barbaric and inhuman, as if they were all of pure animal essence and they possessed no civil or “human” contribution for the world around them. By the near-end of the trip I thought I was dead or dying and felt extremely depressed as I thought about all the barbaric people I had to leave behind in the living world, while I had to go into a new dimension. I understood later that this “new” dimension was something we all visit many times every day without realizing it, and that the plant only intensified the analysis of this daily trip we make. Physics no longer meant anything to me, and the world was both penetrable and impermeable. It was like floating in a giant bowl of jello, except the bowl was ever-expanding or non-existent, and no matter what, something was sticking to you or becoming you or vice versa. I think the best way to describe the positive perception it gave me was having both a telescope and a microscope and being able to go well beyond modern advances in terms of magnification, color sensory and indication of texture. It was so beyond that human civilization will probably never reach it, unless the entire human population did salvia.
If I were to describe this to a pious God-fearing Christian, then I would have to say, it was like holding a piece of paper or a card where on one side of the paper you saw heaven, but if flipped over on the other side, you saw hell. Absolutely, one of the fastest transitions between good and bad in a materialist world, and an even faster realization that good and bad are the same things weaved or pasted together and therefore, cease to exist independently.
It was a true out-of-body experience and a heavy emphasis on the human illusion and dillusion that we actually think that we are special and that we are unique to the world, but are simply just instinctive beings who, like some other species, believe their ways and their infrastructure to be divine. In short, this meant we are all fools and our egos are much too large for our brains.
Afterwards, I slowly lifted myself up and went back downstairs to finish my project without a peep.
It is going to be a while before I try it again.