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Why do people do Salvia if its so spooky?

the salvia "hole" is not nice. The difference between Salvia and pretty much any other psychedelic or dissasociative drug is once u'r there you have no idea salvia did this to you. any other drug you can say to yourself "it's OK it's just the drug" Scary stuff. Spooky is a perfect word for it!
 
Some people are scared shitless of roller coasters, but still ride them. It's scary as hell, but afterwards you're glad you did it. (Although you can gain a lot more insight from Salvia than roller coasters -- a main reason a lot of people do it.)
 
Salvia for me is like a book. It is a tool I use to gain informations. I can ask it anything. But, it is very frightening to me. I have always loved strange things and "dark" things. i've done many psychedelics in many strange and possibly frightening circumstances. When I was a kid I was watching horror movies and reading horror books. I have always loved the strange and unusual, what others call frightening, gross, or ugly. Whatever is most outside of what is the normal, well-trod pathways of behavior and language (thought and speech) patterns, that is what I love. And I like learning, especially arcane or esoteric informations. Psychedelics and Salvia in particular give me knowledge that everyone would be interested in, because it is completely important and relevant to our lives, but no one knows about it.

So I was naturally drawn to Salvia for the same reason I was drawn to psychedelics in general: curiosity. But I will honestly tell you guys that Salvia is much, much stranger than I can even begin to comprehend. As a lover of the weird, Salvia makes me feel like a wine connoisseur who asked for a glass of wine, and instead of a glass he was thrown into a swimming pool full of wine.

I never thought I would say this about anything, but Salvia is too weird. Just to clarify what I mean, I believe Salvia to be leaps and bounds weirder than mushrooms, which is the second weirdest thing I know. This doesn't mean I won't continue to use it. But it does mean that Salvia requires me to radically alter my world-views and models of understanding the universe. But that is what learning is all about, right? But like with Salvia's weirdness, the force of Salvia's educational properties makes it just a little too much for me to be comfortable with.

But I am trying not to let this deter my use. I am trying to manifest the willpower to keep using it, as I have been off and on since we first crossed paths 5 years ago. I expect this to happen in the next week or two. I will tell you folks that nothing terrifies me like the idea of taking a big Salvia hit.

To try and describe what is so strange and frightening about my Salvia experiences.... the best way I can put it is it's very, very surprising. And it is quite literally a transmission of information, like reading a book. So imagine if you were just sitting there and all of a sudden completely mindblowing information was just showing up in your head. Things that totally change your understanding of reality, yourself, god, etc. all the fundamental things. It is impossible to say "I don't believe that". You are confronted with reality. I think the best short summation of what Salvia does is it makes you hyperaware. You know that idea about psychedelics that you shouldn't take them if you are in denial about something, or intentionally trying not to think about some specific thing, because the psychedelic will force you to face it? Salvia is like that, but not just for things you are in denial about, for EVERYTHING! I found out from Salvia that my mind has the appearance of being very complicated, but within the realm of comprehension--but that in reality, the amount of complexity in my body(/brain/mind/whatever) dwarfs the amount the complexity in my body that I currently understand by an unimaginable margin.

Which reminds me, I personally do not believe in any gods or faeries or ghosts or plant spirits. Salvia is about your own body. I can't emphasize that enough. The plant is just a plant, there are a million plants like it. Mint and sage are common plant families. There is no being that exists in the plant, because, as Shulgin said in PIHKAL about his first mescaline experience, there is no information in the drug molecule. All the molecules are identical in a pile of Salvinorin A or mescaline or LSD, therefore they have no information value, therefore there is no being in the plant, and if there somehow were, he could not teach me anything. The drugs are merely catalysts. Salvinorin A acts as a catalyst for absolutely astonishing processes that, for reasons which completely baffle me, my body has been programmed to carry out. I think it's very important to not have a mystical attitude about the plant (or drug as the case may be). This awe and wonder must be directed where it belongs, at your own body--that miraculous organic supercomputer you're occupying, not to be confused with your own self. The drugs are our catalysts, our keys, and they must be respected, even treasured, but remember that a key is useless without the whole framework consisting of door, doorknob, door frame, wall, lock, hinges, etc.

I want to say, although I don't believe it is a spirit of the plant, I have met a nonhuman, english-speaking being after smoking Salvia. I don't know what the story is with this being. I have a tendency, which I think has to do with my indoctrination and brainwashing by society and culture in my childhood, to say if my body is generating something or something is coming out of my body, to say that thing is not real. The word real is very poorly defined. In fact all of consciousness is generated by the advanced biological computer of your brain. So whether you're awake or dreaming or talking to a hyperintelligent pandimensional deity, I put these things all in the same ontological category, they are all just experiences. Is there really a being? Who knows. All I know is this being has offered me the same evidence for its existence as any human I know, namely I saw it and communicated with it. So I am proceeding on the hypothesis that it is as real as anything else I can repeatably experience. So I guess I could be specific and say feeding the curiosity, love of learning, and the thrill of being a true trailblazer/pathfinder/explorer, is stuff like knowing there's actually a godlike being out there with near infinite knowledge, that it is trying to share it with us. I mean that fact is going to completely change society when it gets out. And it's pretty damn cool to be able to say to those people, 5,000 or 10,000 or a million years in the future, whenever we start paying attention to the psychedelics, guess what I lived in the stone age when psychedelics were illegal and we could barely get to our own moon, and the Salvia being and I were friends. NASA does all these absurd (though I can respect their intention) ways of trying to contact nonhuman language-users like the SETI project, and here anyone can converse with an alien intelligence any time they want in the comfort of their own home, an alien a million times more strange and more intelligent than anything we can imagine in science fiction. Those are reasons why I like it despite the spookiness.

I also want to say that I love Salvia and I trust it. Salvia has helped me and made my life better more than anything else with the possible exception of mushrooms. I have and continue to reap real benefits from my Salvia use. Think about that, and think about how reluctant and scared I am anyway. That is how unsettling it can be. But I think if you go into the experience with respect and an open mind (preferably an extremely open one), and you start with lower doses and work your way up to get comfortable, it's really not any harder than any other psychedelic to use. I attribute all the bad experiences to people taking too high doses because 1 it's legal so they think it's not powerful 2 this whole breaking through idea where people think you either need to take a huge dose and go into the stratosphere or else you didn't "break through" and the whole experience was worthless. The truth is Salvia has a gradually increasing dose-response curve like any other drug. On Erowid all the disaster Salvia reports are from people who took too high a dose.

Sorry this is so long. I spend a lot of time thinking about Salvia.
 
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I wholly disagree.

While it is difficult to remain tethered to your "Id" while under her influence, if it is something you can manage, then(Depending on how much you have smoked. Less = More) the epiphanies will begin to come at you and with them, the knowledge of where you are and how you got there.

I remember the first time I smoke Sal... I broke through immediately and was extremely disoriented and confused. Next time, weeks later, I smoke far less (20x) and still broke through, just didn't crash through like a drunken idiot driving through the mall at midnight.

Salvia is NOT a recreational drug and is DEFINITIVELY NOT for everyone.
It does have some qualities that require careful thought before hand.

I use it more for divining answers. And used right and respected, she will talk to you. If she thinks you will understand. Otherwise, it's just a sick carnival ride that won't let you off until she's ready. No matter how much you scream.

DT

Techno Notice said:
the salvia "hole" is not nice. The difference between Salvia and pretty much any other psychedelic or dissasociative drug is once u'r there you have no idea salvia did this to you. any other drug you can say to yourself "it's OK it's just the drug" Scary stuff. Spooky is a perfect word for it!
 
Hmm, thuis drug sounds scary, I might give it a miss

Tempting though, a bit like a forbidden fruit
 
To all--

Though i have long been a reader of the content of these boards, never have I felt it to be necessary, or prudent, to insert my own opinion into the content of one of your threads. However, upon reading the entire proceedings of the above discussion, I feel that, at last, I might finally interject some information of some potential import.
Please understand that I am what some might consider an habitual and/or abusive user of the chemicals psychedelic. Additionally, I am frequently an abuser (addict) of such chemicals as provide simply the euphoric stimulation of the physical corpus (i.e. heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, et al). I would consider my drug of choice (if one must so declare) to be n,n-dimethyltryptamine (by all of its methods of ingestion, oral, smoked, injected, etc.), and as a very close second (but for completely different reasons) i must choose Ketamine. I am a regular imbiber of mescaline, LSD, psilocin, LSA, phencyclidine, dextromethorphan, and many, many others. I only state this so that you may rest assured that I am not one who is prone to exaggeration as relates to the effects of any given substance.
Therefore, having so declared, I can with some degree of relative certainty state that the active constituent of the Salvia Divinorum plant (being Salvinorin-A) is in no way, shape, or form related subjectively to any of the above listed intoxicants. It matters not whatsoever how much acid and/or 'shrooms you have previously done. Nothing will prepare you for the momentary, yet eternal, state induced by the extracts of this most rare and invaluable vegetable soul.
To state that Salvia may, at her own discretion, come upon you in the most terrifying and perfectly sanity obliterating means of manifestation, is an understatement of the most grotesque order. Before you smoke that extract, that leaf, you must be quite sure that you are ready to face a fear and a horror that is without equal in all the realms of all the psychedelic, and otherwise, experiences. But yes, there is a payoff. If you are one such as who can integrate cohesively such profound and truly existential fear, then you shall reside amongst the very few living, human souls who do truly comprehend the nature of their own consciousness and its relation to the horrible abyss of its reality, the truth about the nature of the mind, and its all too finite extensions. But, is this really something that you truly wish to know? Is this something you can live with once you can no more deny the simple outright in-your-face fact of it? Please ask yourself these questions now, because once you know, there can never be, ever again, the blissful unknowing.
For this reason, amongst so many others, I cannot recommend to the novice psychonaut those adventures in the realms that this drug offers. Perhaps for those who have exhausted all the knowledges that they are innately given to, maybe they can find some sort of solace in this insanity unspeakable. I guess I laugh at those who laugh at this; those who cannot and/or will not see her dark side. I guess most readers will laugh at my proclivity to dwell upon the most extreme of examples. But please, if you will but one thing remember: hers is not for the faint of heart -- for the gods' sake grow some mushrooms, eat some cacti.

with love,
--j.q.
 
salvia is the one thing I wish I could get rid of as far as experience goes, I still get flash backs from it. realy, I just dont know what to do with it.

or maybe I need to use it more and become more familiar with its effects and understand why it effects me the way it does.
 
As Jquinn stated above, this Herb is not even remotely for the wary. And I have had an EXTENSIVE history with hallucinogens. And Salvia is the only thing I have found that gave me what I was searching for. The first time i used it, and broke through, I wasn't even faintly aware of how UNready I was for the depths I was ripped into.

But like I said earlier, once I attempted it with a lower dosage, I was able to ascertain my lack of Id, Ego, Whatever.

There are many truths that you can attain with this magical herb. But understand that once your eyes are pried open to thoses truths, you can never close them again.

um... Yup.


DT
 
Actually though... The hardest thing to deal with on Salvia, Is reintegrating into my body once more. Especially when you realize that that repeatative thing that is driving you nuts while you're in that time dialated space, is your body breathing.

DT
 
^ I have to say, that it a revelation I have not experienced with Salvia, although it is perhaps the best teacher of how Time is but a product of Ego that I have so far experienced :|

Threads such as these leave me with very mixed emotions - in that, while I am aware of the ferosciousness Salvia can exhibit I have never experienced the fear and terror some here have, even though it's been damned scary at times, yet the accuracy with which others describe the experience and so readily confess their fear does make me very wary of trying it again - and, in my experience, wariness is something to be very careful of carrying into any psycho-nautic voyaging 8(

Could I possibly ask, what are these terrors others have experienced - I know such things are incredibly difficult to describe or assess - but could it be that I've already met as bad ~ or been so lucky as to have avoided them until now? :\
 
Fishface said:
^ I have to say, that it a revelation I have not experienced with Salvia, although it is perhaps the best teacher of how Time is but a product of Ego that I have so far experienced :|

Threads such as these leave me with very mixed emotions - in that, while I am aware of the ferosciousness Salvia can exhibit I have never experienced the fear and terror some here have, even though it's been damned scary at times, yet the accuracy with which others describe the experience and so readily confess their fear does make me very wary of trying it again - and, in my experience, wariness is something to be very careful of carrying into any psycho-nautic voyaging 8(

Could I possibly ask, what are these terrors others have experienced - I know such things are incredibly difficult to describe or assess - but could it be that I've already met as bad ~ or been so lucky as to have avoided them until now? :\
completey rip from everything I knew/know and thrown into nothing but false memories of a life I may have never lived befor. also I find the experience to actualybe kinda painful on my body, that feeling of being riped backwards REALY DOES FEEL LIKE YOUR BEING RIPPED FROM REALITY.
 
seafoodcannibal said:
i love it, but it's not worth the money for the length of time it lasts :(


Some would agree with you, but different people take salvia looking for different things. Alot of people take it for the experience and the insight whilst alot of other people buy it thinking it will be a fun drug to do with mates, it can be at non breakthrough experiences.

As far as I'm concerned it lasts plenty of time. The actual out of this world bit may not last long but I love the after effects which last almost an hour for me if I take salvia on its own.

My favourite way to take it is with cannabis and on the tail end of a HBWR or MGs experience. They seem to potentiate each other and allow me more intense visuals when not in 'salvia world'.
 
Granted...
Physically, it only lasts 5-10 mins with a... roughly 30-60 minute afterglow but, With the time dialation I have experienced within her clutches, I swear it has lasted lifetimes....
 
Elinisti said:
Using ketamine and Salvia is great in small doses for long (hours long) monologues with your self and your mind. But you need to find the right dose.

With large doses + some strong dissocative everything gets amazing and no body load or anxiety etc. Everything feels like it should be and you just flow away. But you won't go into the fucked up salvia land but more like into the borders of it . The experience lasts for a much longer time.

My limited experiences with disassociatives and salvia agree with this entirely. Disassociatives even help with getting in the mood to go and do it in the first place. The feeling of becoming another entity, or living a different life is reduced for me with the combinations, while the ability to detachedly observe and enjoy the state is greatly enhanced (so there's some give and take). Without the fugue and identity substitution salvia becomes much warmer and more classically psychedelic. K or DXM really file down the salvia monsters' electric teeth as well; it feels like they're gumming your soul instead of sinking their teeth into it. Kinda tickles.
 
Youkai said:
completey rip from everything I knew/know and thrown into nothing but false memories of a life I may have never lived befor. also I find the experience to actualybe kinda painful on my body, that feeling of being riped backwards REALY DOES FEEL LIKE YOUR BEING RIPPED FROM REALITY.
Hmm - sounds kinda mild compared to some of my experiences with it :\ 8( ;) %)

Perhaps it's because I don't find it physically threatening that I've been OK with the rest of the madness!

(And, yeah, I get the being ripped backwards feeling too)
 
One thing to remember with repeatative experiences is... you made the decision to throw yourself back into the maelstrom. Every time I do it, I will admit to some trepidation. It is a wild ride. But if you can find the balance between too little and too much, the ride can be very productive.
 
psood0nym said:
Disassociatives even help with getting in the mood to go and do it in the first place. ... Without the fugue and identity substitution salvia becomes much warmer and more classically psychedelic. K or DXM really file down the salvia monsters' electric teeth as well; it feels like they're gumming your soul instead of sinking their teeth into it.

Quoted for truth, at least in my experience. Consuming Salvia within the context of a highly dissociated state will, at least for individuals such as myself, vastly diminish the physical discomfort as well as virtually eliminate the mental terror. What remains is a profoundly insightful and truly psychedelic mind-state. This has actually been the initiator of one of the only two undoubtedly +4 experiences I have ever encountered in my lifetime (DXM + Salvia). This experience is mostly inwardly directed. It may often result in profound revelations as to the mechanics of one's conscious, and at times unconscious, mind. While it may at other times evoke blissful, sweetly soft, nostalgic reverberations upon experiences of memories, once lost, then unforgotten.
Not everyone will achieve such a result with this combination. I actually believe that the precise combination of traits required to experience something genuinely useful resulting from this mix may be, in fact, quite rare. In other words: YMMV. You may find this combo to be an absolute hell. If anyone should ever attempt this, please try to be prepared to potentially face the undiluted essence of all nightmares, in the event that things should work out differently than was the case for myself.

[edit: I would like to also state that, these days, I pretty much only consume Salvia Divinorum in the context of a pre-existing dissociative state. I truly do find that this transforms the Salvia experience from one one which is often traumatic and difficult to integrate into one which is quite lovely and deeply insightful. But, once again, YMMV.]
 
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christofor said:
I've had bad experiences with salvia... where they did absolutely nothing but give me some muscle weakness and a strong body high. This happens every time i try it, no matter what the potency, or how much of it i use.


x2 spend over 150 dollars on the crap already... but i dont even get the body high just some muscle weakness and get alittle tired from all the smoking i smoked a whole gram by myself of 40x and crap.
 
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