I was inspired to post this after reading AdrenalinX's `three egos' trip report on Salvia...
Part I: Meeting Sally & Breaking my Bong Virginity.
Date: 12/27/01
Substance: Salvia 5x
Set/Setting: Excited, a bit nervous;
Sandra’s Apartment.
I had been reading up on Salvia for some time, and I was quite surprised to learn one evening at Sandra's apartment that she had tried it. The last time she had done it, apparently, she had freaked. She felt as if she was partially slipping out of body and was afraid she’d stop breathing and die.
To me, this sounded exactly like the prelude to my non-drug-induced OBEs. The extreme alteration of consciousness she went on to describe and the depth of her dissociation from her body and mundane reality seemed all-too-familiar to me. Within minutes of discovering (to her absolute surprise) that I'd not only read about it but was intensely interested in trying it, she called up Billy. He was the guy I’d initially heard about Salvia from (and who would later introduce me to this interesting website called `bluelight' on the net). Within forty-five minutes he came over with the last he had of his batch and was generous enough to let me give it a whirl.
Billy had with him a bong and a small blow-torch. I’d never smoked out of a bong before, but I’d already read that it was the best method. He explained how the bong worked: inhale slowly, and then, once he pulls out the funnel with the rare Mexican mint in it, that I should inhale sharply. I inhaled slowly, but he said to do it harder - once it started bubbling, I knew I was on the right track.
I don’t think I got a good hit, but it was my fault; I’m not too experienced in this area. I hacked and gagged, so I know I got some. I leaned back and waited. Nothing seemed to happen. I was rather disappointed, and sorry that he’d let me have the last of his batch only for it not to take affect. He seemed a bit disappointed as well, but he said not to worry about it.
I drifted from conversation and sunk back into the couch, staring at the unfinished 3-D puzzle Sandra had sprawled out over her coffee table. It was then that I noticed something was happening.
I felt more stoned than anything - but the kind of stoned I used to experience before pot started affecting me negatively. There was something else to the high as well, which was hard to nail down. It was almost as if something was underneath all of this -- something very mysterious that I couldn’t put my finger on. I felt on the verge of something. I was extremely tired and worn; very pleasantly numb. Something in me pushed the urge to sleep and dream; to close my eyes and slip away. I closed my eyes and I was out like a light. When I awoke in the morning, I felt very good, very refreshed, but very eerie as well.
I was certain that I’d had strange dreams I couldn’t remember.
Part II: Mind A & Mind B.
Date: 1/24/02
Substance: 10x
Set/Setting: still excited, still a bit nervous;
still at Sandra’s apartment.
It wasn’t until almost a month later that I tried it again. Sandra and I sat down in her dimly-lit apartment alone with the Salvia she’d ordered online for her and I. I’d paid her twenty dollars for half of it. We were both each other’s sitters. We were afraid that if one of us took the Salvia, we might not be awake too long to watch over the other one, since it tends to knock us both out pretty good afterward. She went first, since she was more familiar with the Salvia-induced state then I was -- not to mention the fact that drugs seem to hit me harder and longer than most other people. We didn’t have a water bong or a blow torch, only a small bowl, two lighters and a micro-cassette recorder.
We turned on the recorder and she lit up. She hit it twice, and was about to go for a third, then hesitated and decided against it. It was probably for the better - Sally had certainly taken hold. Her trip lasted about seven minutes. What she experienced after two hits seemed to amaze her. She smiled broadly this time, laughing, commenting on how amazing it was, and how she could “not explain this high.” She did suddenly understand why I described the out-of-body experience as if one were underwater, however. After the affects had simmered down on her, I gave it a whirl.
I was a bit tired, but very excited and curious. That fact, mixed with some mild anxiety, kept my mind acute. Hesitantly (a trademark) I took a pretty good hit (for me), but I certainly didn’t hold it in for 20 to 30 seconds as suggested. She was telling me to hold it, and I was trying. Then she said to exhale to let it out slowly - just as I coughed and a cloud of smoke erupted out of my mouth and nose. I took another hit, but did even worse with this one. I choked and coughed and gagged as I often do with Mary Jane, and thought I might vomit if I didn’t get a drink of the water not half a foot away on the coffee table and calm down. I thought I’d been a moron and screwed up again. I thought I’d get nothing out of it. I was ready to get pissed at this point.
Shortly after I brought back up my head from coughing, I heard voices in the hallway. Sandra got up and headed cautiously towards the door. We’d heard kids in the hallway before, and I gathered it was probably them.
It was around that time that I’d reached out for the glass of water on the coffee table in front of me. It was then that something suddenly went a bit “off.”
It seemed as though I'd fallen into a gap or a breach in consciousness, though I can’t be sure. Regardless, there was a profound alteration. My mind had slipped into an odd mode, though I didn’t even recognize it as odd at first.
The first strange thing I noticed was that it was as if I were reflecting back on that very moment from some undefined point in the future. I didn’t visualize the future or any other place at all, but I was simply looking back on the present moment as if it were a clouded memory.
It also seemed as if as I thought about things, the outside world got “cut off” or “paused” and I became completely drawn into in whatever I was thinking about. Even stranger, it was all wordless thoughts and memories. My vision also seemed a bit “sunken”, as if I were glimpsing it from a bit more of distance than I would normally.
I suddenly realized that it must be working to some degree.
I was then forced to consider the possibility that I’d hallucinated the sound I thought had come from the hallway. The more I thought about it, the present moment didn’t seem all that authentic, either. The whole scene had a sort of artificiality to it and got the sense that all of this may not really be happening.
Perhaps I had hallucinated the sound. But if so, why would Sandra be at the door? If I had hallucinated the sound and Sandra was at the door, thought I, perhaps Sandra wasn’t really at the door at all. Even as I called her name and told her I thought Sally was working, I wasn’t entirely sure if I was talking to her or envisioning all of this. As I saw her approaching me from the door, I even chanced a glance at the sofa to see if she was, in “reality”, still sitting rather than actually being at the door.
I know she began saying something to me just after that, but I don’t remember what she was saying, if I could even comprehend it at the time. I somehow managed to communicate to her that something was happening and told her that, contrary to what I'd said before, I didn't want to try and explain the experience to her and the recorder.
She asked me how I felt, and I admitted to feeling a bit of paranoia, but nowhere near as bad as I had on Mary. As I was explaining this to her and focusing on the idea of being paranoid, I felt the paranoia creeping and growing. I immediately realized that by speaking about the paranoia I was focusing on it, and the drug was amplifying it. “But I don’t want to talk about that right now,” I said, and as soon as I stopped focusing on it, the feeling went away and the comfort returned.
I told her that I just wanted to lean back and close my eyes a bit, and she understood. For most of the experience I laid back and with my eyes closed, only occasionally opening them to look around the room or utter something to Sandra.
The affects of the drug were strange, and not at all what I'd read about or expected. None the less, they were absolutely fascinating. Although I didn’t slip into another reality completely as I had hoped, I’d definitely slipped into another mental construct. It was my way of conceiving things that had altered, rather than my perception of them.
When writing about it the following day, I struggled to find a way to describe exactly what it was I was experiencing. The best way I've been able to describe it was that Sally had given me the ability to enter another `mind' of mine. These two minds, the one Sally had allowed me entrance to and the one I usually function within the bounds of, are of entirely different natures.
There was the “normal” Mind-A, belonging to mundane reality, which was quite “fucked up” from the herb and utterly confused - though quite interested - in the experience. The state of Mind-A being “fucked up” had allowed my consciousness entrance into the “other” Mind – Mind-B.
Mind-B seemed to be a mental context for an entirely different reality; a totally different web-work of ideas, values, definitions, and concepts that were applied to and used to interpret an entirely different mode of perception. Though I wasn’t in the mode of perception or `reality' to which Mind-B belonged, the state of conscious Salvia put me in approximated that mode of perception.
Imagination was much more vivid and effective in this Mind-B state of consciousness. I got visuals as I do when sober, but I was more entranced by them (again, more an alteration in the reactive or interpretive than in the perceptual) and more focused on them. I got one visual of a log going through a tubular slide, but cut half-way. It reached a dead end and was about to tumble off into nowhere when the light imagery ended. I also got some flashing, translucent, fractal-like patterns of leaves, but they were very light patterns. Still absolutely beautiful, though.
The ideas I got and the ways in which I put concepts together were radically different in Mind B. They were wholly visual, like smooth, flowing, wordless thought. I considered that this may be one reason why Mind-B thoughts are so difficult to communicate through language and why Mind-A has a hard time processing the data from Mind-B (since Mind-A has been taught since youth to “think” within the confines of the English language). Analogy and metaphor serves as a much better means for Mind-A to conceive of what Mind-B is experiencing, and a much more effective and complete way to communicate to anyone on the outside the nature of this state. Still sort of “pointing at the moon,” though.
I immediately noticed that I sank deep and stayed longer in Mind-B when I closed my eyes. I figured this was probably due to the fact that since my awareness was, upon closing my eyes, wholly concentrated on the subjective it could carry out abstract concepts natural to Mind-B in total freedom. If I were to open my eyes, Mind A - which was much more oriented to the physical world -- would have a greater chance of being “triggered” by the surrounding objective stimuli.
Somewhere in the fretting to-and-fro between the Minds the mysterious feeling I'd felt on my first experience with Salvia began to make more sense. At a certain point Mind A reactivated. I then “woke up” in Mind-A and realized that none of this made any sense at all, and that Mind-B was delusional. Then Mind B reactivated. I would "wake up" in Mind-B and realize that all of this made perfect sense, and that it was Mind A that hadn’t a damn clue as to how to properly interpret reality. Switching from one to the other had likeness to the sensation of coming out of a dream.
My awareness was shifting between these two different Minds, both of which were in some sense (though, perhaps quite literally, entirely different “senses”) familiar to me. It was a constant oscillation; an amazing ability to switch back and fourth between them and their respective systems of interpretations and means of comprehension.
Sandra was tired, and as intrigued as I was, I admitted to her I was tired as well. We both lie down to see if we might go to sleep. I just sat there and enjoyed the experience, trying out some meditative exercises that I’ve been practicing for the last several years.
Part III: The Higher Mind & the Cosmic Joke.
Date: 1/31/01
Substance: 10x
Set/setting: curious; Sandra's apartment.
For most of the experience I was, as I put it in my journal notes, `pleasantly out of whack’. I noticed gaps in awareness of the sensory field. I’d just `slip out’ for long periods of time. Things seemed to quickly pause and then fade out. I’d be lost in wordless thought for awhile, entirely enveloped in it, and then things would again swiftly pause and I’d rise back into awareness of my sensory field.
I identified three separate perspectives on reality that I had during the experience, rather than the two I identified last time. The first one is Mind A, which analyzes, judges and conceptualizes about the experience, even while in the fucked-up state. The second is Mind B, which deeply associates or “sinks into” the experience - you can really “go into” things and conceptualize them with wordless, abstract thought associations. I can kind of shift between the two Minds for awhile. If I let go in the wonder of it all, I begin to feel as if I’m riding the space between them. That’s when I seem to `rise' and hit Mind C, the new perspective and mode of apprehension I experienced this time around.
Mind-C is like the balance between the two other ones - it’s in-between, above, beyond and in a strange way contains both. It’s a detached perspective, perceiving each as if they are (and their respective perspectives are) a joke. Mind-A and Mind-B and their interpretations, their perceptions -- all of this, everything, is a joke from Mind-C perspective. It’s as if there truly is nothing to worry about, because nothing is real save for the Self. Life is something much, much less than real. One gets the sense from that vantage point that life is truly but a dream.
Reflecting on this `third mind’, it was the sense of unreality that comes to be so hard to fathom and therefore nearly impossible to describe. The Big Question hits you like lightning and demands to be satisfied with some honest contemplation. Rather than masturbating your mind with the Question like some hobby, asking that Question now becomes very serious, very curious, very imperative, very honest, sincere, and one might even say plaguing. It feels that way, I think, because in that Mind-C state of mind it becomes clear to you that all of what you considered real about the world and yourself, even the most fundamental things and the ideas you hinge to them, are seemingly revealed to be an illusion. You stop yourself and honestly ask yourself: is any of this real? Is reality just some fucked up dream? If so, who’s the dreamer – who’s the dream? Save for your Mind-C perspective, all else seems like a game, an illusion - the great Cosmic Joke. Your delusion that things could have possibly be otherwise is the ultimate punch line.
For a moment, though you can’t be entirely certain, you almost think you hear the universe laugh back at you.
Part I: Meeting Sally & Breaking my Bong Virginity.
Date: 12/27/01
Substance: Salvia 5x
Set/Setting: Excited, a bit nervous;
Sandra’s Apartment.
I had been reading up on Salvia for some time, and I was quite surprised to learn one evening at Sandra's apartment that she had tried it. The last time she had done it, apparently, she had freaked. She felt as if she was partially slipping out of body and was afraid she’d stop breathing and die.
To me, this sounded exactly like the prelude to my non-drug-induced OBEs. The extreme alteration of consciousness she went on to describe and the depth of her dissociation from her body and mundane reality seemed all-too-familiar to me. Within minutes of discovering (to her absolute surprise) that I'd not only read about it but was intensely interested in trying it, she called up Billy. He was the guy I’d initially heard about Salvia from (and who would later introduce me to this interesting website called `bluelight' on the net). Within forty-five minutes he came over with the last he had of his batch and was generous enough to let me give it a whirl.
Billy had with him a bong and a small blow-torch. I’d never smoked out of a bong before, but I’d already read that it was the best method. He explained how the bong worked: inhale slowly, and then, once he pulls out the funnel with the rare Mexican mint in it, that I should inhale sharply. I inhaled slowly, but he said to do it harder - once it started bubbling, I knew I was on the right track.
I don’t think I got a good hit, but it was my fault; I’m not too experienced in this area. I hacked and gagged, so I know I got some. I leaned back and waited. Nothing seemed to happen. I was rather disappointed, and sorry that he’d let me have the last of his batch only for it not to take affect. He seemed a bit disappointed as well, but he said not to worry about it.
I drifted from conversation and sunk back into the couch, staring at the unfinished 3-D puzzle Sandra had sprawled out over her coffee table. It was then that I noticed something was happening.
I felt more stoned than anything - but the kind of stoned I used to experience before pot started affecting me negatively. There was something else to the high as well, which was hard to nail down. It was almost as if something was underneath all of this -- something very mysterious that I couldn’t put my finger on. I felt on the verge of something. I was extremely tired and worn; very pleasantly numb. Something in me pushed the urge to sleep and dream; to close my eyes and slip away. I closed my eyes and I was out like a light. When I awoke in the morning, I felt very good, very refreshed, but very eerie as well.
I was certain that I’d had strange dreams I couldn’t remember.
Part II: Mind A & Mind B.
Date: 1/24/02
Substance: 10x
Set/Setting: still excited, still a bit nervous;
still at Sandra’s apartment.
It wasn’t until almost a month later that I tried it again. Sandra and I sat down in her dimly-lit apartment alone with the Salvia she’d ordered online for her and I. I’d paid her twenty dollars for half of it. We were both each other’s sitters. We were afraid that if one of us took the Salvia, we might not be awake too long to watch over the other one, since it tends to knock us both out pretty good afterward. She went first, since she was more familiar with the Salvia-induced state then I was -- not to mention the fact that drugs seem to hit me harder and longer than most other people. We didn’t have a water bong or a blow torch, only a small bowl, two lighters and a micro-cassette recorder.
We turned on the recorder and she lit up. She hit it twice, and was about to go for a third, then hesitated and decided against it. It was probably for the better - Sally had certainly taken hold. Her trip lasted about seven minutes. What she experienced after two hits seemed to amaze her. She smiled broadly this time, laughing, commenting on how amazing it was, and how she could “not explain this high.” She did suddenly understand why I described the out-of-body experience as if one were underwater, however. After the affects had simmered down on her, I gave it a whirl.
I was a bit tired, but very excited and curious. That fact, mixed with some mild anxiety, kept my mind acute. Hesitantly (a trademark) I took a pretty good hit (for me), but I certainly didn’t hold it in for 20 to 30 seconds as suggested. She was telling me to hold it, and I was trying. Then she said to exhale to let it out slowly - just as I coughed and a cloud of smoke erupted out of my mouth and nose. I took another hit, but did even worse with this one. I choked and coughed and gagged as I often do with Mary Jane, and thought I might vomit if I didn’t get a drink of the water not half a foot away on the coffee table and calm down. I thought I’d been a moron and screwed up again. I thought I’d get nothing out of it. I was ready to get pissed at this point.
Shortly after I brought back up my head from coughing, I heard voices in the hallway. Sandra got up and headed cautiously towards the door. We’d heard kids in the hallway before, and I gathered it was probably them.
It was around that time that I’d reached out for the glass of water on the coffee table in front of me. It was then that something suddenly went a bit “off.”
It seemed as though I'd fallen into a gap or a breach in consciousness, though I can’t be sure. Regardless, there was a profound alteration. My mind had slipped into an odd mode, though I didn’t even recognize it as odd at first.
The first strange thing I noticed was that it was as if I were reflecting back on that very moment from some undefined point in the future. I didn’t visualize the future or any other place at all, but I was simply looking back on the present moment as if it were a clouded memory.
It also seemed as if as I thought about things, the outside world got “cut off” or “paused” and I became completely drawn into in whatever I was thinking about. Even stranger, it was all wordless thoughts and memories. My vision also seemed a bit “sunken”, as if I were glimpsing it from a bit more of distance than I would normally.
I suddenly realized that it must be working to some degree.
I was then forced to consider the possibility that I’d hallucinated the sound I thought had come from the hallway. The more I thought about it, the present moment didn’t seem all that authentic, either. The whole scene had a sort of artificiality to it and got the sense that all of this may not really be happening.
Perhaps I had hallucinated the sound. But if so, why would Sandra be at the door? If I had hallucinated the sound and Sandra was at the door, thought I, perhaps Sandra wasn’t really at the door at all. Even as I called her name and told her I thought Sally was working, I wasn’t entirely sure if I was talking to her or envisioning all of this. As I saw her approaching me from the door, I even chanced a glance at the sofa to see if she was, in “reality”, still sitting rather than actually being at the door.
I know she began saying something to me just after that, but I don’t remember what she was saying, if I could even comprehend it at the time. I somehow managed to communicate to her that something was happening and told her that, contrary to what I'd said before, I didn't want to try and explain the experience to her and the recorder.
She asked me how I felt, and I admitted to feeling a bit of paranoia, but nowhere near as bad as I had on Mary. As I was explaining this to her and focusing on the idea of being paranoid, I felt the paranoia creeping and growing. I immediately realized that by speaking about the paranoia I was focusing on it, and the drug was amplifying it. “But I don’t want to talk about that right now,” I said, and as soon as I stopped focusing on it, the feeling went away and the comfort returned.
I told her that I just wanted to lean back and close my eyes a bit, and she understood. For most of the experience I laid back and with my eyes closed, only occasionally opening them to look around the room or utter something to Sandra.
The affects of the drug were strange, and not at all what I'd read about or expected. None the less, they were absolutely fascinating. Although I didn’t slip into another reality completely as I had hoped, I’d definitely slipped into another mental construct. It was my way of conceiving things that had altered, rather than my perception of them.
When writing about it the following day, I struggled to find a way to describe exactly what it was I was experiencing. The best way I've been able to describe it was that Sally had given me the ability to enter another `mind' of mine. These two minds, the one Sally had allowed me entrance to and the one I usually function within the bounds of, are of entirely different natures.
There was the “normal” Mind-A, belonging to mundane reality, which was quite “fucked up” from the herb and utterly confused - though quite interested - in the experience. The state of Mind-A being “fucked up” had allowed my consciousness entrance into the “other” Mind – Mind-B.
Mind-B seemed to be a mental context for an entirely different reality; a totally different web-work of ideas, values, definitions, and concepts that were applied to and used to interpret an entirely different mode of perception. Though I wasn’t in the mode of perception or `reality' to which Mind-B belonged, the state of conscious Salvia put me in approximated that mode of perception.
Imagination was much more vivid and effective in this Mind-B state of consciousness. I got visuals as I do when sober, but I was more entranced by them (again, more an alteration in the reactive or interpretive than in the perceptual) and more focused on them. I got one visual of a log going through a tubular slide, but cut half-way. It reached a dead end and was about to tumble off into nowhere when the light imagery ended. I also got some flashing, translucent, fractal-like patterns of leaves, but they were very light patterns. Still absolutely beautiful, though.
The ideas I got and the ways in which I put concepts together were radically different in Mind B. They were wholly visual, like smooth, flowing, wordless thought. I considered that this may be one reason why Mind-B thoughts are so difficult to communicate through language and why Mind-A has a hard time processing the data from Mind-B (since Mind-A has been taught since youth to “think” within the confines of the English language). Analogy and metaphor serves as a much better means for Mind-A to conceive of what Mind-B is experiencing, and a much more effective and complete way to communicate to anyone on the outside the nature of this state. Still sort of “pointing at the moon,” though.
I immediately noticed that I sank deep and stayed longer in Mind-B when I closed my eyes. I figured this was probably due to the fact that since my awareness was, upon closing my eyes, wholly concentrated on the subjective it could carry out abstract concepts natural to Mind-B in total freedom. If I were to open my eyes, Mind A - which was much more oriented to the physical world -- would have a greater chance of being “triggered” by the surrounding objective stimuli.
Somewhere in the fretting to-and-fro between the Minds the mysterious feeling I'd felt on my first experience with Salvia began to make more sense. At a certain point Mind A reactivated. I then “woke up” in Mind-A and realized that none of this made any sense at all, and that Mind-B was delusional. Then Mind B reactivated. I would "wake up" in Mind-B and realize that all of this made perfect sense, and that it was Mind A that hadn’t a damn clue as to how to properly interpret reality. Switching from one to the other had likeness to the sensation of coming out of a dream.
My awareness was shifting between these two different Minds, both of which were in some sense (though, perhaps quite literally, entirely different “senses”) familiar to me. It was a constant oscillation; an amazing ability to switch back and fourth between them and their respective systems of interpretations and means of comprehension.
Sandra was tired, and as intrigued as I was, I admitted to her I was tired as well. We both lie down to see if we might go to sleep. I just sat there and enjoyed the experience, trying out some meditative exercises that I’ve been practicing for the last several years.
Part III: The Higher Mind & the Cosmic Joke.
Date: 1/31/01
Substance: 10x
Set/setting: curious; Sandra's apartment.
For most of the experience I was, as I put it in my journal notes, `pleasantly out of whack’. I noticed gaps in awareness of the sensory field. I’d just `slip out’ for long periods of time. Things seemed to quickly pause and then fade out. I’d be lost in wordless thought for awhile, entirely enveloped in it, and then things would again swiftly pause and I’d rise back into awareness of my sensory field.
I identified three separate perspectives on reality that I had during the experience, rather than the two I identified last time. The first one is Mind A, which analyzes, judges and conceptualizes about the experience, even while in the fucked-up state. The second is Mind B, which deeply associates or “sinks into” the experience - you can really “go into” things and conceptualize them with wordless, abstract thought associations. I can kind of shift between the two Minds for awhile. If I let go in the wonder of it all, I begin to feel as if I’m riding the space between them. That’s when I seem to `rise' and hit Mind C, the new perspective and mode of apprehension I experienced this time around.
Mind-C is like the balance between the two other ones - it’s in-between, above, beyond and in a strange way contains both. It’s a detached perspective, perceiving each as if they are (and their respective perspectives are) a joke. Mind-A and Mind-B and their interpretations, their perceptions -- all of this, everything, is a joke from Mind-C perspective. It’s as if there truly is nothing to worry about, because nothing is real save for the Self. Life is something much, much less than real. One gets the sense from that vantage point that life is truly but a dream.
Reflecting on this `third mind’, it was the sense of unreality that comes to be so hard to fathom and therefore nearly impossible to describe. The Big Question hits you like lightning and demands to be satisfied with some honest contemplation. Rather than masturbating your mind with the Question like some hobby, asking that Question now becomes very serious, very curious, very imperative, very honest, sincere, and one might even say plaguing. It feels that way, I think, because in that Mind-C state of mind it becomes clear to you that all of what you considered real about the world and yourself, even the most fundamental things and the ideas you hinge to them, are seemingly revealed to be an illusion. You stop yourself and honestly ask yourself: is any of this real? Is reality just some fucked up dream? If so, who’s the dreamer – who’s the dream? Save for your Mind-C perspective, all else seems like a game, an illusion - the great Cosmic Joke. Your delusion that things could have possibly be otherwise is the ultimate punch line.
For a moment, though you can’t be entirely certain, you almost think you hear the universe laugh back at you.
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