i chewed on some fresh leaves mazatec style last night and had a very pleasant experience.
Previously, I was a little wary of the Divinoriarater after rather disrespectfully jumping in at the deep end with smoked 15x extract... "ooh, legal weed, yeah gimme the high strength" blah blah blah.
So I bought a plant deciding that that would be a better way to start a relationship with this powerful lady. Since then I have meditated with her moderately often(though still a little too irregularly), but have always been a little too scared to dive into another breakthrough experience. Last night I finally got around to re-experiencing her, and yeah, as I said before, much nicer, and way less intense than smoking the extract. I chose an evening where I knew I would be free from distractions and chose about 6 or 7 fairly large leaves, and still rather scared, I only ate about half of the massive quid that they made, which was a fairly big mouthful, which I chewed slowly, and kept in my mouth for about half an hour (though really I had no idea).
It was more like ketamine, and less like nitrous on the dissociative scale (i.e. came in waves, rather than 1 big hit), and definitely more personal than those 2. I felt able to look at my normally ego dominated life with amused detachment, and was equally amused that my life could easily just be a story being told around a campfire. I felt very comfortable with her, and also with the concept of death and returning to my roots. The effects lasted for quite a while (proably an hour and a half, peaking at around 30 mins) and the feeling of salviatiated detachment was something I had to focus on (ie i could proably have got up and functioned semi normally in the normal world).
Overall I found the experience to be very beneficial. I plan on meditating sober a bit more, now that I know a little more about her and what she has shown me about the world, before I am ready for her again in a larger dose.
I posted this here becuase I hope to convince some people that there is some middle ground between the full blown crack style mentalist dissociation and not getting any effects at all. It was not something I was entirely convinced by, but I was proved wrong, and learnt some good things with a smiling face the whole time.
mark.