DOSE:

6 leaves

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(leaves)

BODY WEIGHT:

220 lb

Setting: Alone on back deck on a warm summer evening with a pleasant breeze, wife works for the next 4 hours, son sleeping peacefully. Life is good. No worries. My mindset is that of openness--I've read dozens of reports but am convinced this is going to be some colorful frolicking through the psychedelic amusement park...

Nay nay.

Background: I am a surgeon, and have to pass every substance abuse test on a regular basis. My blood has to be squeaky clean. Even though Salvia is legal, I feel compelled to hide it and have it delivered in plain packaging, anything with 'entheobotanicals' or 'shaman' will raise eyebrows, especially with my wife--the pharmacist (drips with irony). So, for the last two weeks, I've been shuffling my goods (a sampler of various smokables) from place to place. Finally, I have the right time.

I engaged the earbuds with some limbik frequencies: a very chilled ambient electronica. Cleared my mind of all the noise--one of the reasons I wanted this experience is so the dogs in my head would quit barking. The sun was setting, and a fiery blaze of orange played well with the detailed cirrus clouds in the west. I thought this scenery would be foundational and enriching in my experience. That fire in the sky seemed to descend directly into the bowl of my grandfatherly tobacco pipe.

T: 0:00:00

I used a big MAPP gas torch used for brazing copper. It's flame is extraordinarily hot. The 2 leaves in my 1/5th full pipe turned into a gas which was immediately and deeply inhaled. I re-packed a readied ball of 2 small leaves. Rinse and repeat. I turned my fingertip into ash on the third toke, but really did not notice. In retrospect, don't use a full size torch. Ever. That scalpel is going to feel funny on Monday.

T: 0:00:50

I started to feel effects after the second hit, mostly that of oxygen deprivation and my lungs burning with smoke and unwanted CO2 from my body. Cloud of blue smoke. Panted 5 times. Hit number 3. All feelings of respiratory imbalance are gone. I notice my peripheral vision is receding. Then the beautiful scenery bathing my body with its yellows and reds implodes on itself, as if it were a thin veil sucked within itself to reveal a dark and evil twilight. What did I do?

T: 0:02:00

I am suddenly without body. I feel as though I am united with my adirondak chair, weathering days, years, centuries, in this cursed blackness. Before me, the center of all thought, the core of the universe, the actual event of creation is now, GOD's hurling the baseball of matter that banged into the universe, the smattering of galaxies that makes up our existence. The true TIME EQUALS ZERO. This was but a flash--then the twilight instilled a deep paranoia. I wish I could say 'what did I do?' but there is no 'I'. Nor is there 'do'. 'Did' would imply time, which was not. 'What' stands for action or material, both of which were unthinkable and silly in the existence at the center. This emptyness deconstructed, that is collapsed, as though torched by my MAPP gas flame and degrading into a distinctly 2-D dollhouse...

YOU WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO SEE THAT.

I was being chased by a feminine body, and her wrath was unlike any I've endured. The sinking feeling of disappointing someone you love, the pit of despair in my stomach, the sadness of losing a friend. Depression. I was a base and wretched creature. She gave chase through various distorted familiar settings. Each time, I had my stash of herbs, and was hiding it. She would mock me for my weakness. I would stumble through one setting, and seconds later, the twilight envelope would close around me and I would fall hard through a false floor, into another paranoid setting. I would be discovered by her, chastised, and too dumb to say anything back. My shame of Salvia was taken as infidelity by her. It was like Dante's Inferno: falling through the various levels of hell, each one worse than the last. The trip definitley had a directionality to it: Steep. Painful. Inescapable. Significant.

T: 0:03:30

Somnambulism: sleepwalking

At no point was I conscious of my surroundings. I finally quit my descent and found myself (physically, in our mere three dimensional world) nowhere near my staring point. I had locked myself outside--my only route back in was through the front door, which was quite a ways away. Also, my basement door doesn't have a door knob.

T: 0:08:00

I somehow made this circuitous journey to my basement, where I awoke a sweaty, shaking, and mindfucked mess. I still wore the yoke of salvia's weighty haze. Stumbled upstairs, perplexed by how I penetrated the missing door knob, and crumpled back into the chair on the deck. I took the torch and decimated the remaining bit of herb on a concrete slab in offering to the experience--mostly out of residual paranoia of being caught, but also out of reverence of her sheer power. I felt a fog of altered perception, like that of mild nitrous oxide, for approx. 30 min.

Integration with this side of the veil:

It seems that S. divinorum will show me what I must see. 'After you eat that cookie, you'll feel right as rain', or something like that. I've never felt nothingness, absence of being, soul-less, separation, exposed. When I witnessed the creation event, I was outside of it. I wanted to be inside, but inside was a mere ruse, a cursed existence, a joke. Once grounded in 'reality', my feet grew roots deep into the natural world. Salvia wasn't saying that all in this world is hollow and fruitless, but that I must be true to self. My 24 hour afterglow points toward an organic, allbeit difficult, experience that gave me a vector for being.

I'll be delving into Salvia after I euthanize the dogs in my head, er, 'take them to the farm'. That was my error--I must purify my mind to use substances, not use substances to purify my mind. I was given a teaser: experiencing nilhi, but punished for not being truly ready.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 64423
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 18, 2010	Views: 4,323
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Salvia divinorum (44) : General (1), Entities / Beings (37), Relationships (44), Difficult Experiences (5), Alone (16)