DOSE: T+ 0:00	1 hit	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
T+ 2:30	2 hits	smoked	Salvia divinorum	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

125 lb

First, let me just say that last night, salvia took me on a ride unlike anything else I've ever experienced. I would say that I am fairly/moderately experienced with psychoactive drugs, having tripped out on many occasions, and I had done my fair share of reading up on this magical plant. But none of that experience prepared me for what magical salvia had in store.

I had tried salvia several times beforehand without breaking through past the 'subtle' or 'altered' states of Daniel Siebert's S-A-L-V-I-A scale (although a couple of those would make interesting experience reports by themselves), and I had an extra hit of LSD I had obtained from a psytrance party a while ago. Seeing as how the LSD supply was running quite low at the time, I had made up my mind to use this one last hit (at least for a while) to its greatest advantage. And since the only other combination I had tried with LSD was smoking some cannabis, I was more than willing to try out its synergistic effects when put in combination with salvia.

For a while before all this, I had been feeling pretty loaded down, what with school and all, maybe on the verge of depression… actually, more like confusion - confusion with who I am, what I'm doing, where I am going, where my talents and interests lie, how I'm connecting with the rest of the world, fear that the world going completely mad, etc etc etc… Normally anybody would say that that is not exactly the most optimal condition to be meddling around with hallucinogens, but I felt as if the green goddess had something to say to me that I had been missing on my earlier attempts at communicating with her.

And so at 5:45 I dropped the acid. I was used to doing at least two hits at a time, so I felt that I was re-entering familiar territory, and I was quite comfortable with myself. I meditated some, listened to some music, waiting for the peak to come. About two hours later, I jotted down some notes: 'definitely feeling real connection w/ the godhead/oneness - all is one.' A feeling came over me of deep connection with the oneness and primeness of the world, and the direction that my life was headed towards, I had to change. I mentioned to my roommate that I would try to smoke some salvia, and since he wanted to see me when I did, I waited another half hour for him to finish up his work-out. In the meantime, I packed my glass pipe about halfway full with the remainder of my dried salvia leaves and played around with Photoshop till he came back.

So 2.5 hours into the trip, I readied myself and sat down on the floor to smoke. I blew my first try by accidentally exhaling pretty deeply through the pipe, blowing little specks of salvia everywhere - confusion of confusions! I packed the bowl again, and took my first hit, long and slow. I held it in for as long as I could, and as soon as I exhaled, the trip definitely got at lot more intense. Just as I was about to go for the second hit, I saw a huge moving wall with all sorts of crawling vibrant Mayan glyphs morphing into each other, and I was zooming right along it, like I was in a big courtyard of some kind in a huge palace in the middle of the jungle. I shook my head out and went for the second hit…

And as soon as I exhaled, BOOM! I felt as if I was being pulled backwards through a tunnel, into and becoming a part of the drawer I was leaning on, but not. I felt the 'reality' in which I had been living, with all its certainties and ingrained habits and daily minutiae, become stretched into a two-dimensional membrane…either that or I was propelled into another one - either way, the end result was the same - I slipped out of this reality, and somehow rolled over into a new one, seeing myself inhabiting a different me in a different 'reality'. Its excruciatingly hard to explain. At this point, the notes I was taking became quite irrelevant, being as they were stuck in the old 3-dimensional view of the world. After a while, I rolled back over, wallah - visual perspective shifts, and I'm in a new realm. If felt like I was lost inside a never-ending MC Escher print. Except I wasn't just one of the people in it. Parts of me would merge with random objects in the room, and there would be a smooth transition from it to the rest of my body. Weird. At some point, I climbed up onto my bed (I am on the top bunk of a rather tall bunk bed… once again not the greatest of ideas, but oh well… :) ) The process of trading inhabitancies went on and on and on.

This whole time, I felt as if I were in danger of vacating my body for good and moving on to what some would call 'the afterlife,' but somehow there was tiny portion of myself that reminded me of the responsibilities and all that I had back in the 'normal' life, and so I clung onto this whirling merry-go-round of shifting realities for a bit longer. There was definitely and element of fear attached. I distinctly heard a voice from outside of myself say to me internally that I really had no reason to want to go on anyway, and that she was showing me all these realities in order to prove to me that anything I wanted was within my grasp. I just had to stand up and all-out go for it, and not be washed away in all the surface details that I saw floating on top of the water of reality. Thus was my first meeting with the herbaceous spirit within saliva, the green goddess.

I will have to check with my roommate when he wakes up what this all looked like from the outside, but I recall somehow managing to a) climb up my bed, b) be in the bathroom, and c) be back up my bed. I asked him after I had come down most of the way back to LSD level what he saw, and he said that he didn't even notice me getting down, going to the bathroom, and coming back, so that made me wonder if I had suddenly rolled into an existence of me in the bathroom, and then rolled back to my room… but then I vaguely remember some kind of journey there, in a sort of jerky fast-motion action, as if were stuck in an old Lumiere film. All this attests to the fact that you really do need a sitter when doing this stuff.

So after what seemed like an eternity, I gradually felt things becoming more and more concrete - it was getting harder and harder to switch realities, the acceleration was slowing down some - bits and pieces of my grounded self started coming back to me. I could visualize a big patchwork quilt made of the different 'me's', the different possibilities of what I could be that I was travelling through, and this quilt becoming thinner and thinner, the pattern more scrunched up as I was gradually brought back to just one. Actually, I was scrambling to find some sort of semblance to attachment one, any one of my existences, only to make this crazy thing stop, and eventually, I was able to catch the very last one and hold on. Had I not been able to, I felt as if I would have just floated in The Void for a very, very long time…

I found myself suddenly being brought back up through another tunnel, and finding that I was once again more or less in control of my body. By that time, about 5 hours had passed since I first dropped, judging by the clock. But even that much calculation took a tremendous effort. I tried to explain the experience to my roommate, but it was damn near impossible. So he just played some music for me before he had to run off for a bus to the anti-war protest in DC. As I rounded the corner to the 'sensual' stage of the LSD trip (the second 6-hour section), I suddenly found myself with the urge to go outside and curl up next to a tree, but being as I am in the middle of the city, and given the state I was in, I decided it would be best for me to stay inside. I was feeling pretty tired physically and mentalo-emotionally, so I crawled back to up to bed and tried to figure out what it all meant.

That was by far the highest I have ever gone. What Terence McKenna said about the experience being worth nothing without taking 'heroic doses' suddenly makes so much more sense. All in all, I know reached at least the 'immaterial' level of salvia, and possibly even the border between it and the 'amnesic' level, although if that happened I wouldn't be able to remember it. I will have to talk to my roommate to verify all this. This experience was perhaps one of the most terrifying things I've ever done, being as it was such an existential confrontation with The Void and infinity, but altogether I believe the lessons I brought back from the experience have made it all worth the while. It has given me a new outlook on life. And as corny as that sounds, I now feel totally invigorated, ready to take on life because it has lost so much of the heavy-handed relevance I was giving it beforehand. I've read some things about how salvia has helped out in cases of depression, and I think it is totally true. Or maybe that's just the afterglow speaking. We'll see. In the terms of my trip, I guess I exchanged one instance of 'me' for another one, seeing as how I just barely managed to ride it back out.

As for the trip itself, I don't think I will be doing the LSD-salvia combination again for a good long time, but I will definitely be giving the salvia goddess plenty of calls in the near imaginable future.

Thank you, salvia.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 18445
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 3, 2005	Views: 33,512
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Salvia divinorum (44), LSD (2) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Entities / Beings (37), Mystical Experiences (9)