First time
She will be waiting when I die
by Kurt
Last night I tried smoking salvia extract for the first time. It was COMPLETELY different from when I, for 30 min chewed (and accidently swallowed) a huge quid of dried leaves about 8 years ago.
Just to give you an idea, I like to consider myself as someone who can handle my shit. I smoke far more than anyone I've met in my 27 years of this thing we/I call "LIFE". I've done it all as far as hallucinigens go as well, but this was NO JOKE!
Me and a group of my friends were up in Maine at my buddies cabin. We had been drinking and smoking heavily all weekend long, and we were doing more of that around a camp fire when one friend pulled out some Salvia extract. I packed it into a pipe and took a rip. Not a huge one, but a good healthy rip. I enjoyed the taste.. very "Earthy". I looked at the guy who brought it and asked "should I take another?" and as he told me to just sit back and enjoy the ride, I literally saw him, the roaring fire, and the rest of my friends fade into the distance, as if I was falling down a deep dark well or rabbit hole. At first I liked the feeling, knowing that it was going to be a quick trip.
Then I heard Her...
A booming woman's voice was all I was aware of. It wasn't particularly loud or harsh, but it was all i was aware of. At this point I was still aware of my body, but it felt different, as if it was just some husk that was holding the REAL me in. It became instantly know that time was an illusuion, and so was what I once called "life". This was the only real. The female voice presented me with a Morpheus-esq question... "Do you want to stay here...glued to this reaity, or do you want to see how deep this rabbit hole really goes." I was afraid, but for some reason or other I became aware of something I had heard in an audio book of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" about leaving the comfortable glow of life, and going toward to harsh penetrating light that I could now see in the distance, whic lead to something of an afterlife. As soon as my thought went towards reaching the penetrating light, there was a massive shift.
My entire life began flashing before my eyes... visions of friends wavered before me, but they all spoke in accordance to what I was seeing, almost like they were just proving to me that they were projections of my own mind... or alternate mirrors of myself, that I had created as a safety-net to avoid the terrors of passing on to the next phase of consciousness. It's very difficult to describe what happened over the next few minutes... but it was chaos.
The fabrics of reality, or what i once thought of as reality were now all melting away in a mocking manner... and I had the sense that I had been duped for my entire "life", that at any time I could have chosen to leave the prison of my body, but that I had to experince the utter destruction of my reality as I knew it before I could pass on to what came next...including the ripping apart of my own physical body. All of sudden I was aware that i was looking at the gates of death, and that if I wanted to pass on, I would have to allow a raging fire to overtake me and consume my flesh. To give you an idea of what I was "seeing" at that point, try to picture an Alex Grey painting, with a thousand infinate eyes blazing with fire floating in the halls of a timeless void (yikes!) All the while I was still hearing the womans voice. She was trying to guide me closer to the flames, and assured me that it would all end soon, and that in order to become something greater, I had to overcome fear of pain and death by feeling the most intense pain possible, but was promised that it would be quick. I accepted. Scared shitless, I watched as the flames drew closer and hotter. Eventually all I could see was flame. The heat was unbearable...I had never felt such pain before.
Then shit got strange (as if this wasn't enough).
I was again aware that the entire world was an illusion projected by my soul, and that I was clinging to it because I was not ready to give up the sensations of physical pleasure... the smoke, the beer, and the bj i had recieved earlier from my girlfriend all flashed in front of me as examples, and they were then consumed by the flames, all the while still being comforted by the womans voice. It would all end soon. Because I had lived such a pleasure seeking lifestyle during my "test" or "life" I would not be allowed to pass on to the next level, but I would wink out of existance and at least be no more. I became aware that the hairs on my head were memories, And that as I lost memories, the hair grew. I wondered why I could not have realized that earlier in life. That was a fleeting thought, and it was just swirled into the chaos around me.
I was suddenly aware that everything around me.. and all my memories were being consumed by the flame, or "stolen" by the womanly voice... I couldn't tell. At this point I had reached the flaming gate of death. My friends who were with me somewhere back in that old and projected reality were now being sucked into the fire within the vision, as was the sky, memories of my family..everything. I was literally ceasing to exist. My whole life had all been one big joke, all building up to this moment. It had all been a test and I had failed and now it was too late to change anything. I fucked up and now I had to become nothing. The woman's voice became incresingly mocking... and i remember hearing her say how I had so much potential, but had walked away from "saving the world" in exchange for endless physical pleasure. I had a clear vision of my penis... and a female holding it, but it was a mockery. I never in my life had ever felt so ashamed and foolish. It seemed so obvious...that if i had only paid better attention I would have "got it" and been allowed to evolve, but it was too late for that.
I was in the fire. It was slowly climbing up my arms and would soon consume everything I ever knew to be real. The pain was unbearable, but I knew i had to endure it... it was too late to go back. There was nothing to even go back to because it was never there to begin with. The voice repeated "life" in a mocking manner over and over again and all the faces of the people who were with me in reality were there in the fire, melting into each other. They had flames shooting out of their infinate eyes, and when they would speak flames spouted from their many mouths. It was horrific, yet somehow familiar too. I felt like I had seen it before.
Then there was another shift in perception.
I was all at once aware that I had taken a drug and sat back in my chair by the fire, and that a friend of mine had come outside with a steak knife to carve a stick into a point for roasting marshmellows. He was drunk and had tripped on a stump near my chair and had fallen onto me, accidently plunging the full length of the blade into my chest. I could feel it... not really pain, but an intense pressure of the knife being lodged in me. I knew i was dying, and that was why I was at the gates of death. It was just a concidence that I had been on drugs when it had happened. I was sad because I knew I would never see my family again, or my girlfriend of 6 years who had been in the cabin when I smoked the salvia. Again my life was flashing before me... certain things rang out clearly for some reason. The number 9, the full name of my older brother...it didn't make sense. All I knew was that this was it. I was dying and I was going to hell or I was going to cease to be. I remember thinking "death isn't at all what i thought it would be like...or is it?" Then the female voice spoke loud and clear again... "If this is not what you want, you can go back. You will not pass away... but you will have missed your chance". By now the fire was going into my mouth and going down my throat in a similar way that the metallic fluid overtook Neo in the first Matrix film after swallowing the red pill. I spoke to the voice, telling her I was sorry to fail, but that I wasn't ready to leave yet, and I asked what I had to do, if possible, to not die. She told me that there was a way to go back...that i would occupy a similar vessel or body, but that it would be on another plane of reality...that my first body was now dead from the knife, and that that reality would continue on without me. I was being offered a second chance of sorts and was aware that I had to do things differently from now on. She told me "you have to shake off the flames before they consume you completely...hurry!" so I started to shake my hands violently. Then she told me to scream to remove the flames from my throat, so I did. Quietly at first, then she screamed "LOUDER! FASTER! AS LOUD AS YOU CAN! GET IT ALL OUT!!!!!" so I began screaming and flailing like I never had before. Flames were flying off me and there was a flame geyser spouting from my mouth. It felt AMAZING!
What happened next was insane, and I really consider it a holy moment. In my frenzied screaming fit, i became aware of a warm soft light somewhere behind me. My fear started to melt away because of this new pure presence. I felt a warm gentle hand on the back of my neck and instantly the flames and screaming were gone. I asked the voice "who is that touching me...is that You?" I felt so safe and overcome with love that I wanted to cry. The voice firmly, but without malice said "She is your angel. She has been with you for some time now, but you are about to lose her." A hand extended towards me and touched my forehead, and I then saw the face of my girlfriend looking down at me, and she looked more beautiful than ever before. For the last time the voice spoke to me and said "she loves you so much, and you can only offer her contempt in return. She can save you if you let her...don't be afraid to love her. You have never loved anyone as you should. Keep her close always. Next time you die, and if you are ready...I will be waiting."
I could now see people looking down at me and I was thinking " please leave the knife in me" because i didn't want to spill my guts... I was sure an ambulance was on the way, and that I would live on. Now I was waivering from being back in a reality about to die, and a reality where i was underneath a great pressure that covered my body, but felt the assuring voices of friends in the distance, and I could feel my girlfriend holding my hand.
Then the shifting of realities started to fade in favor of the reality of the friend's voices and girlfriend holding my hand, but i couldn't grasp what the pressure was. At this point I knew there was no knife lodged in my chest, at least not in this new reality. The pressure was my girlfriend, who was sitting on my lap and laying back on me. I was able to talk at this point, and started to tell people about everything I saw. I was convinced hours had passed, but they told me I was tripping for less than 5 minutes.
I'm still not sure I didn't die due to a knife in another alternate reality, but either way, I'm here now, and I have never felt such intense love for anything else in my whole life. I was never really a faithful boyfriend physically or emotionaly, but something inside me beyond my control has shifted. I'm not taking any chances... Lady Salvia showed me the reality that death could occur at any moment, and that one needs to live life, illusionary or not, to the fullest.
Almost done, I promise....
My friends told me that I was slumped back in my chair for most of the time i was out, but that my eyes were fully open and looking from person to person, when all of a sudden I had leaned forward violently, leaning dangerously close to the campfire and began feverishly shaking my hands, and then released the most animalistic PRIMAL scream that any of them had ever heard...that I sounded like an angry, dying gorilla. My girlfriend heard the screams from inside the cabin and came rushing out, and the very instant she touched me I completely relaxed and went limp. I had grabbed her hand and then pulled her on top of me and would not let her get up... and eventually came back down to Earth.
I'm not sure if I'll do this again. I can't possibly see what else I would learn from it. Maybe if I were to sit with Shamans and experience it with them, but for now I'm workng on being a better, unselfish boyfriend, a better friend, and one who embraces all that this short (and possibly self projected) life has to offer.